Love and Death on Long Island Read online

  The reproach was no less clumsily phrased and philistine than the preceding flattery had been, but to an extent that the editor could not realise I was stung by the words ‘ivory tower’. I had, as I have already intimated, neither regret nor nostalgia for the great humming world of business and letters and the wheels and deals by which it turns. Yet, equally so, I had travelled more in that world, further afield, too, than my detractors suspected, and the notion that I lived in an ivory tower struck me as most offensive and unjust. A few months back, when that American academic had brought out his paper on the first person singular that was so famously missing in my work, it distressed me more than I cared to admit (for I myself had remained unaware of such a compulsion). It incited me to wonder whether, on an incomparably more exalted plane, the artist in me did not resemble the sort of poor devil obliged to consult his doctor on the matter of a sordid physical affliction and to pretend shamefacedly to speak on behalf of some imaginary third party; to wonder, indeed, whether I might not accurately ascribe to pride, and to pride alone, the fact that I had sought so airless and inaccessible a path to self-fruition.

  Immediately cutting through the editor’s incoherent prattle with a weary ‘Oh very well, yes’, I stated that I would agree to be interviewed, but for no longer than an hour and at the hour of my choice – in my own house -on the following Sunday afternoon. This last proviso represented my sole remaining concession to a quite undiminished hostility towards the magazine and all its works. By fixing on a Sunday, for me a day that dawned no differently from any other, it had been my puerile intention simply to blight the weekend of some as yet unsuspecting journalist.

  During the next three days – the conversation had taken place on a Thursday – I found my attention obstinately, distractingly, straying to the interview (the first I had ever submitted to in my career) and what my expectations of it ought reasonably to be. Would my interviewer, whose name had meant nothing to me, be just as unsavoury an individual as his superior? Would he even have read the book? Or, on the contrary, would he turn out to be surprisingly intelligent and well informed, as somewhere in my mind, with an obscure stirring of premature and rather paradoxical resentment, I started to think might be the case? In fact I prepared myself for wellnigh every eventuality save the one which did come to pass. The journalist stood me up.

  At the exact hour of the appointment, three o’clock, I was in my study, sitting at a spacious writing desk by the half-open window and irritably scanning the Telegraph, over the top of whose pages I would glance up at the square marble-framed dial of the clock on the mantelpiece. A half-hour later, now positively quaking with fury (more especially as, it being a Sunday, I could not even ring up the editor to announce that such professional irresponsibility had forced me to call the interview off), I found I was unable to remain calm for more than ten or twenty seconds at a time. Then, when yet another three-quarters of an hour had elapsed (for I was still rational enough to allow for an initial misunderstanding in the hour arranged for the interview), and my wrath was fuelled by the now completely irrational conviction that the abortive rendezvous had been a trick deliberately perpetrated on me by the magazine’s features editor, that I in short had been the wrongfooted one, I brusquely cast aside the newspaper I held in my hand, left the study, gathered up an overcoat and woollen scarf and, stepping into the cheerless damp air of a Sunday afternoon in early autumn, began that agitated and directionless stroll that would ultimately lead me, almost as though my very willpower had been paralysed, to no. 43A Fitzjohn’s Avenue.

  Nearby, a church bell had just chimed five times, and in the distance there was a wheezing, faint and ethereal, of what sounded like bagpipes. Having had my fill of the lonely palm tree, I was only now made aware that my own solitude was less absolute than I had supposed. There was no more traffic than before along the roadway itself. But a little further down the street, on the pavement opposite, a man in a drab fawn raincoat stood talking into a cellular telephone, quite alone and unabashed, as though he were enclosed by the traditional glass-walled booth. On my own side of the street, a young couple, most likely out on a routine, time-honoured Sunday afternoon walk, idly advanced towards me. They were preceded by a child, a three- or four-year-old of, from where I was standing, indeterminate gender, secured to its mother by a miniature lead and harness that fitted across its body. Just as I happened to look up in their direction the scampering child took a tumble and fell down hard on the pavement. For a moment or two, in anguish, it examined the two little scraped palms of its upturned hands; and at that stage of the crisis there still seemed a chance of warding off the cloudburst. Even so far away, however, I could already see the little one’s innocent brow darken (as though the message that it had been hurt was at last reaching its brain) and its features suddenly crumple up. The tap had been opened, the squall could not now be long delayed and it wanted only that strange, childlike stay of execution, that instant of poised and expectant suspension, tempting one to conjecture that a child’s tears must first travel along a tiny pipeline, for a loud howl to burst forth from the depths of its being.

  Now the palm tree, now this infant’s fall, the course of which I had tracked with a dry, detached sort of interest: I decided it was time to resume my walk and, if possible, to start getting some enjoyment out of it. I passed the young couple as the child was being comforted, her two palms (I could now observe that it was a little girl) being kissed in turn by her father, and I permitted myself a sympathetic smile and attempted a slightly self-conscious tut-tutting noise with my tongue. I also passed, without manifesting any especial curiosity, the man in the fawn raincoat who was still speaking into his queerly shaped telephone on the other side of the street. I passed others out strolling, more and more of them, for Fitzjohn’s Avenue had meanwhile changed its name and become less residential, less conspicuously the reserve of a solid middle class. I noticed newsagents and launderettes and Chinese restaurants, and stopped to peer with lazy inquisitiveness into the window of a lone bookshop, which had been given over exclusively to devotional tracts by some rather dubious Indian and Tibetan mystics. And all the while, gnawing away at my peace of mind, there was the interview and the journalist who had failed to appear and the realisation that if I had always refused interviews in the past – over the years there had come odd, irregular requests – it was with the intention, one day, of granting The Interview, the ‘unique, exclusive interview’, as I fancied the journal in question would announce it, in which, lofty yet unpres-umptuous, remote yet with a sly, sideways candour, eloquent yet never less than approachably human, I would finally, at a period when my reputation had nothing more either to gain or lose, unburden myself of the secrets of my productive energy. Instead of which, here I was, tramping the streets like a jilted lover!

  Walking on thus – not at a heightened pace, as it may deceptively have seemed to me, but at the same speed as before, it being those now more numerous pedestrians crossing my path who left me with the impression of moving appreciably more briskly, the way a motionless train will be endowed with illusory movement by an adjacent one slowly edging out of the station – I found myself at a forked intersection and began to wonder whether I should think of retracing my steps or go on until I had outgrown my childish ill humour. But the decision was almost immediately made for me. As I stood irresolutely rooted to the spot it started to rain. A minute or so later the gutters were running freely, raindrops were skittering off the pavement at my feet and my fellow strollers had drawn mackintoshes up over their heads and were scrambling for cover.

  It so happened that I was standing in front of a cinema. It was one of those vast lumpen pleasure palaces, now somewhat the worse for wear, peeling and unappealing, as you might say, that had been erected in the earliest postwar years to satisfy the cravings of a populace starved of myth and glamour, of fantasy and wit, and only waiting to capitulate to the easy, whorish and irresistible charms of that oblong swathe of alternative reality, the so-called silve
r screen. How many simple hearts had once quickened at the prospect of its scarlet-and-gold jewel box of an auditorium, its every single nook and cranny an encrustation of gaudy decorative frostwork, bas-reliefs and arabesques, Little Egypt friezes and Chinatown chinoiserie? And wouldn’t those same hearts beat faster still at the instant the lights dimmed, the ruched curtains parted and the entire auditorium, orchestra stalls and balconies alike, gazed as raptly into the screen as a crescent of doting relatives into a newborn’s cot? Isn’t it Goethe who writes somewhere of the city of Rome as being inhabited by two distinct but harmoniously reconciled citizenries: the Roman people itself but also that noble minority of classical statues alongside which it unheedingly goes about its business? In England’s cities, too, generation upon generation lived alongside their own ‘ennobling’ statuary – the statuary, here, of a world of screen-shadows – to whose fulgent and ingratiating presence they were long in unrepentant thrall. Alas, though, whatever used to be their cheap grandeur, these statues are now almost as ancient and superannuated as Goethe’s; and the museums in which they were housed, like this cinema halfway between Hampstead and St. John’s Wood, with its streaky, slablike concrete walls and scratched, discoloured paint, its forlornness of urban disuse and disrepair, only testify to their irreversible fall from grace.

  For me, in any case, the massive overhang of its broad marquee provided merely a roof under which, uncramped, I could shelter for a minute or two, this picture palace’s foyer having been designed in full and confident expectation of the kind of milling, good-natured throng that had long since abandoned it. As the rain was beginning now to beat down so heavily that the pavement looked as though it were receiving so many stabbing pains to the chest, I quickly stepped underneath and, shaking out the collar of my overcoat in the orthodox style, morosely stared at the streaming thoroughfare in front of me.

  I had never partaken of the joyous simplicity of filmgoing – in fact, improbable as it must sound, I had been to the cinema not more than a dozen times in my life, in the most diverse and unpromising circumstances. I could remember seeing, for example, in the slightly bibulous company of two Cambridge acquaintances, a bad, recklessly abbreviated Hamlet with Olivier; and once with my wife, on a shopping excursion to the West End, an idiotic Hollywood comedy, which someone or other had recommended, about a lascivious Californian hairdresser, a sort of odious ambulant phallus, in the throes of self-revelation. It was after that film that I vowed I would never visit a cinema again, and I never did. Nor had any film producer ever made enquiries as to the possibility of adapting one of my novels. If one had so enquired, then, founding my judgment upon that Hamlet and that hairdresser and upon not much else, I should have had the extreme pleasure, once more, of saying no.

  Saying no, I thought, that has always been my forte, and no wonder, given that the stupidity of the world is rivalled only by its ugliness. And just at that moment I fancy a rather ugly, sarcastic little grin disfigured the lower half of my face as it suddenly struck me that this matter of the interview with which I was so preoccupied was after all by no means ended; that the unaccountable failure of my interviewer to make an appearance could hardly by itself close the chapter; and that, when the features editor of that deplorable self-styled ‘magazine for men’ telephoned me, as surely he would, to apologise for having inconvenienced me unnecessarily, and also no doubt to propose setting an alternative date, then, released as I would be from the need to respect any of the professional or even the simple human courtesies, I would seize the opportunity of letting him know precisely what I thought of him.

  So delightful was the prospect of revenge that for the first time since walking out that day, and despite an awareness that my heart was beating a trifle too fast, I felt relatively at peace with myself. I drew a cigarette from my battered silver case and lit it. It was raining quite as violently as ever. Unless a cab were to chance to pass, an unlikely eventuality, I could not think of going home as yet. I blew the cigarette smoke out through my nostrils, tilting my head backwards as I tend to do, in an exquisitely refined parody of equine breathing or snorting. At the half-dozen others who like me had taken cover under the cinema’s marquee, and were now huddled together in a semi-circle as though feeling that circumstances had obliged them to introduce themselves, I extended a brief, unobservant and unrequited glance and almost at once gazed away again. Then my eyes rested at last, merely for want of anything more stimulating to turn to, on the central buttress of the marquee, a sturdy four-square column that also served, by means of a display cabinet of seven or eight still photographs, to advertise the current programme.

  The film was evidently a period piece, a prettified evocation, from the costumes shown in the stills, of that Edwardian era that constitutes one of the supreme pathetico-nostalgic Arcadias of the popular English imagination. In the first photograph to catch my attention a virginal young woman in a white dress and holding a white parasol was to be seen, escorted by a shirt-sleeved youth, wading through a meadow knee-high in unkempt, reedlike grasses and flowers. In another the same young woman, in more sombre clothes, was striking a fugitive attitude amid the statuary of what was unmistakably the piazza Signoria in Florence. A third represented a group of people of various ages in the shady and over-furnished interior of what I already knew or half-knew, by some form of intimate conviction, to be a Florentine boarding house, a pensione.

  I had of course not seen the film. I recognised none of the actors. Yet somewhere inside my head, as a shivering thing unexplained by my intellect but quite real to my senses, I felt obscurely familiar with these characters and the settings in which they moved. Before even I read the film’s title, inscribed as it was on a white underline bordering each of the stills, I knew that it was an adaptation of a novel by Forster, one far from being my own personal favourite but of which I had spoken at length to the ageing author himself, who had befriended me at Cambridge and whose protégé to a certain extent I had become. (I say to a certain extent, for it was a privilege I only gradually discovered I had been sharing with other young undergraduates of similar promise.)

  I bent over to look more attentively at the stills. The film appeared surprisingly faithful to at least the textures and trappings of the book upon which it was based: scene after scene, character after character, I contrived to identify without any great problem and indeed with something very nearly approaching a pleasurable frisson.

  The rain, driven off course by a high, blustery wind, so that I had to withdraw ever further into the foyer, showed no sign of letting up. Slate-blue in the gathering dusk, the street presented a singularly uninviting perspective. It occurred to me that, even if I did succeed in returning home without getting soaked through, though God knew how, what awaited me there was a miserable supper of cold cuts, by now probably curling at the edges, which my housekeeper (who didn’t ‘do’ for me on a Sunday) would have left sandwiched between a couple of plates on my kitchen table. And so it was that, feeling just a trifle light-headed, rather like a schoolboy playing truant, I decided to go in and watch the film. I would see this adaptation of my mentor’s novel, I would fairly cheerfully relax a lifetime vow, then treat myself, une fois n’est pas coutume, to dinner in a small French restaurant in Hampstead where my wife and I had oftentimes eaten together. Now that the whole mortifying business was being miraculously transformed into an amusing self-indulgence, I little cared whether the performance was halfway through or nearly at an end; however, it so fell out that it was timed to start in just under ten minutes.

  When I entered the cinema, my heart sinking a little at the foyer’s tawdry appointments, its smoky, wing-shaped light fittings and its carpeting so threadbare that the company logo which had been woven into it would have been legible only to those who knew exactly what they were looking at, it took me a while to locate the box office, which also served as a refreshment stand and was stocked with every type of confectionery, with popcorn machines and a soft-drink dispenser giving off a glow of such l
ustrous intensity as only chemistry has the secret. The cashier, a tiny, fat Filipina with a delicate bone structure, whose open palm was already thrust at me before I had time enough to reach for my wallet, took the crumpled note I handed her, drew forth a ticket, tore it in half, handed one half back to me and rammed some change home into my own outstretched palm, all in a single arc of unblinking indolence. I stared at her for a moment but at first said nothing. Then, when I began to ask, ‘Where …?’, she cocked her plump little head in the very vaguest of directions – the auditorium was somewhere behind me, was all I could gather – and turned at once to whatever it was under the counter, a book, a magazine, possibly a half-knitted jumper, that the banal routine of selling a ticket had come to interrupt.

  There were three doors on the far side of the foyer; they were unmarked, yet they also appeared to be signalling ‘Keep Out’. So, instead, I climbed a wide central stairway which led to a gallery lined with signed portraits of waxily personable male film stars – the signature had been scrawled on each of these portraits at such an angle it seemed as though the signatory were wearing it on his lapel like a sprig of lily of the valley. To the right, ahead of me, I noticed a pair of swing doors; when I opened these and passed through a small, interlinking antechamber bounded by yet more swing doors on the other side, I found myself inside the auditorium.