Love and Death on Long Island Read online

  Sex is destiny, is written – an injunction, a commandment, a ukase, to which no resistance, with which no compromise, has ever been possible. I had no great fears on that account.

  Yet, far from expelling it from my system, I continued to be assailed by my strange and bothersome distraction, assailed as by a memory – a trivial memory, in truth, chafingly inconsequential, but lodged as naggingly in my mind as in the crevice of a tooth. By very definition, said Chesterton, our memories are of what we have forgotten. Perhaps, I said to myself one evening while taking a turn around the Heath, an excursion that would unfailingly calm jangled nerves and alleviate the burden of solitude, since I was all too ready to be deluded into believing that the loneliness I felt there, and especially at night, was a condition of the Heath, not of myself – perhaps if I no longer needed to remember, did not increasingly have to struggle to remember, the young actor’s face, it would cease to be a memory, it would become as familiar to me as – and then I discovered to my astonishment that, my few Cambridge acquaintances aside, I could not think of a single other face in the world, or in that part of the world which constituted my world, that was not also merely a memory now, ever more fallible and dim.

  It was on that day that I made my decision. As with a nettle I would firmly and ruthlessly grasp the flower. I would go watch the film once more (even in my innermost thoughts, even mutely, I would not enunciate its title) and exorcise this odd little demon of mine. It was absurd, it was demeaning, but it had to be done.

  When back home, and even before removing my overcoat and scarf, I went to my study. There I unscrewed the cap of my silver fountain pen and in the margin of the top page of my manuscript of notes, annotations and cross-references wrote a few scrawled words relating this new development in my own life, possibly with the intention of appropriating it for my book. But after a moment of introspection, judging that the contrivance, as I saw it, simply would not do for my protagonist (it was less his deafness than the idea that he would address the reader in the first person that troubled me), I drew a neat line through the marginalia, rescrewed on the cap of my pen, laid it down on the blotting pad at an angle exactly parallel to the pad on the desk and to the desk in the room and, ideally, to the room in the world, then left my study again, undressed and went to bed.

  Next day I returned to the cinema at the foot of Fitzjohn’s Avenue. As on that first Sunday, it was the latter half of the afternoon, but uppermost in my mind was neither the time of day nor the cinema’s own timetable. It scarcely mattered to me whether my ticket would be purchased just as the film was due to start or else as it was already unfolding. All I wished was for the puzzle to be solved, seen to, done with.

  What I had not calculated on, and learned only when standing beneath the overhang of the cinema’s marquee, was that the film itself was no longer playing there. (Ironically, the photos of the Forster adaptation were still on display inside their oblong glass cabinet, but this time I barely glanced at them.)

  I was nonplussed, made conscious as so often in the past, in very different situations, that the exhaustive precautionism of my working mannerisms had somehow never succeeded in influencing the fecklessness with which I engaged with the outside world. Just for example, it had taken me years after my wife’s death, quite literally years, to assimilate the humble axiom that, to toast a slice of bread for myself alone of a morning, it made better sense to use the oven’s single instead of double grill; years, too, to locate a shortcut from home on to the Heath that was very much quieter and more leafily rustic than the macadamised and car-infested route I had long been accustomed to frequent. And now I had, in the manner of the High Court judge who had asked ‘What, pray, is a Beatle?’ and to whom a hostile critic had many years before compared me, failed to realise that, obviously, in the way of such things, the cinema would meanwhile have changed its programme.

  Was I then to turn back? To forget the rather foolish and humiliating purpose to my jaunt? That, I knew, I had come too far to do. And it suddenly occurred to me that there existed precisely a magazine whose function it was to help its readers locate a particular play, film or concert. My essay on angelism had been reviewed in it and I had been forwarded the piece by the cuttings agency to which my publisher subscribed. As I recall, it had been a very unfavourable review, vituperatively so, its author compounding his incapacity to follow the book’s argument by an outstandingly insulting conceit: the culminating sentence, a direct quote from my text, was left half-completed and allowed to trail off in suspension points and a row of unequivocal little Vs. Remembering how old and ridiculous and terrifyingly unfluent that review had made me feel, hardly daring to speculate on what course I might have embarked upon, I crossed the street to a small newsagent’s shop and bought my very first copy of Time Out.

  To begin with, I proved to be inadequate to this as to most other of those trifling challenges that the rest of the world seems to take in its stride. Standing in the open, hampered by a breeze tugging at the hem of my overcoat, protecting as I would a flame the fluttering pages of the magazine that were being flicked on faster than I could turn them, I was at once disconcerted by erratically captioned rubrics and headings and sub-headings and it was quite by chance that I hit upon a page on which the films of the week were listed alphabetically alongside the cinemas screening them. I let my finger slide down this list until it stopped on the film in question. Its title was punctuated by a colon, on the far side of which was the single word: Hammersmith.

  I took my glasses off, from one ear at a time, as gingerly as a hiker on a country lane unravelling a strand of wool from the barbed-wire fencing in which his pullover has become snarled, and with the tips of my thumb and forefinger gently started to massage a sore and reddened hollow on either side of my nose. The street was deserted, save in the distance for the just audible hum of an approaching car. Replacing my glasses as carefully as I had removed them, I calmly raised my eyes and saw, before I saw the vehicle itself, the bright orange glow, fierce in the fading daylight, of an unoccupied taxi. Without further vacillation, indeed without reflection of any sort at all, I flagged it down. When the cabdriver looked out at me enquiringly, I heard myself say – heard, rather, my voice say – ‘Hammersmith. The Odeon cinema.’

  The experience of viewing the film again was a most curious one, satisfying inside the cinema itself but far from conclusive as soon as I was back outside, standing on one of those anonymous streets where of late, as I was forced to acknowledge, ‘wryly’, I suppose the word has to be, I had been spending so unconscionably much of my time.

  During the whole eccentric expedition, which was how I affected to regard my little outing, I miscalculated only twice.

  The first occasion was actually purchasing the ticket. I had alighted from my cab to discover that the Hammersmith Odeon had no fewer than four separate auditoriums, which seemed to confront the potential customer like a multiple-choice question in an examination paper. That fact in itself posing no problem for me now, I immediately ascertained to which of the four I myself was bound; and, assuming a lopsided stance of tolerant impatience and negligently tapping my gloves on the knuckles of one hand, I asked for a single ticket for no. 3. The cashier, however, a slim, youthful, efficient fellow to whom a trim and dapper moustache lent an air of effete manliness (if such an oxymoronic condition is imaginable), made me name the film after all, despite having been given exactly the information he required, and, flushing pinkly, I had to stammer out the terrible title.

  The second occasion concerned my wish to learn the actor’s name. As chance would have it, the film had less than a half-hour to run when I took my seat in the small, steeply raked and claustrophobic auditorium. But it was only after having endured an unbroken chain of trailers and commercials, as well as the cinema’s curtains being opened and closed and reopened and then reclosed with such inane regularity that I started to wonder whether the manager of the establishment were gripped by a horror of unveiling the white screen in
its, to be sure, not quite pristine nudity, as though for him it represented the cinema’s linen, its undies, its unmentionables, it was only after all of that and after the film had begun again that I realised that what I should have done was study its final cast roster or whatever it’s called and that I would have to sit through it once more to the very end.

  On reflection, though, the trip more than repaid the trouble it had put me to. The film itself had certainly not improved with age, and my tolerance for Cory and his motorcyclist chums reached a new low ebb. But I learned my favourite’s name, a nicer one, I concluded, than I had any reason to predict in the circumstances: Ronnie Bostock. Ronnie Bostock. ‘Ronnie’ I had scant enthusiasm for, although, goodness knows, it could have been much worse; but the sound of ‘Bostock’ had about it an agreeably brittle, altogether un-Californian hint of Boston and New England, of which I had heard good and bracing things considering.

  Ronnie Bostock. Was I, I mused, the only person capable of responding to such uncommon physical comeliness? Was I alone in tracing beneath the conventional surface a timeless and universal ideal, an almost supernatural radiance of pure heart, of innocent spirit and of the sun-inflamed flesh which expressed and enveloped it? Whatever dour puritanical vigilance I would once have sought to exert upon my emotions I now readily relaxed; the darkness of the auditorium, licensing me to watch without being watched, see without being seen, made my bored and restless eyes more lawless and brazen; and it was in a blissful mood of rapt and meditative tenderness – tenderness, yes – that I gave myself up, as I had never dared before to do, to a fantasy of pure contemplation. This bronzed boy looked as though he must smell of freshly baked bread. When he moved it was with the virile light-footedness with which one might imagine a statue to move. Ought I to confess that his smile, only his smile in close-up, with those two protruding upper teeth leaving a faint serration along the ripe redness of the lower lip, fairly enraptured me? The way, too, as tennis players do, he would wipe off the perspiration from his brow with the side of his upper arm and the inside cup of his elbow was delightful to watch. Never, I felt, could there have been such a sublime fluke of nature, and I thought again of the unequal distribution of beauty.

  Although the boy had a relatively minor role in the film, one pretty much on the periphery of its narrative (if that is the word for so ragbag a miscellany of gross and near-scatological vignettes of student mores on the campus of a preposterously implausible American college), he made appearances in two or three scenes following that to which my eye had first been alerted. But also, as it transpired, in a scene just preceding the entry of the motorcyclists and obscurely familiar to me as something I had had partial glimpses of while settling into my seat. It depicted some sort of impromptu beach party got up by a dozen or so young people of both genders, their half-clothed bodies lent a patina of late afternoon warmth by premonitions of nightfall, by the shivers and shimmers of a Californian sunset whose sickly yellowish light would turn nearly to purple in its shadow pools.

  Ronnie Bostock was prominently featured in it. He shifted in and out of focus, sidling dreamily along the beach, knee-kicking a football in the air, performing hand-stands, shimmying with his slender, almost invisible hips to raucous music from a massive transistor radio set which lay half-buried in the sand like a buccaneer’s treasure chest. He would follow the margin of the shoreline barefoot, the diminutive shoreline of his own feet overrun by the foam of incoming breakers as it seeped between his toes. His slim, tanned legs were left uncovered above the knee by a pair of sawn-off, tight-fitting denim jeans. Over his torso, which one guessed to be smooth and firm, neither bony nor too muscular, he had on a sleeveless white cotton singlet on which were stencilled the words ‘My parents went to N.Y. and all they brought me back was this lousy teeshirt’, a joke of sorts which, if not much more ingenious than most of those in the film, did contrive to tease a smile out of me.

  Later it was that scene that I would turn over and over in my mind, trying to analyse why it had had such an impact upon me. In my tiny kitchen, whose single window overlooked a narrow, patchy lawn that I made sure was tended in my absence (mutedly as it would penetrate the cosseted fastness of my study, the dull whine of the gardener’s mower had ended by proving fatal to my concentration), I sat sipping coffee, now idly daydreaming, now reflecting on the bizarre little situation I seemed to have got myself into, a situation that I was singularly ill-equipped to deal with. And I remembered something that had happened to me a long time before. As a writer, I have never pandered to the cult of the metaphor. I pride myself, even so, that I possess a flair for the detection of what might be called the ‘potential metaphor’ – which is to say, the metaphor in embryo, that for which no referent as yet exists. I have, for example, been frequently struck by the fact of retailers continuing to stabilise the prices of their goods just below the round figures towards which they are so patently straining: a tape-recorder at £39.95, a secondhand motor car at £4999. I find it hard to imagine a customer naive enough to be duped by so elementary a form of manipulation. But it has struck me, too, that such an ineffectual yet no doubt universal practice ought usefully to function as the metaphor of some more consequential abuse of society, even if I have still to discover what that might be. And, sitting thus in the kitchen, I recalled how, when my first novel was being typeset – and this at a period when I was relatively young and wholly without reputation – there had been one section of the printed text on which a long diagonal crack had opened up, a track of white, produced by the fortuitous disposition of words, or rather of the spaces between the words, which zigzagged down the middle of the page and, once remarked, drew the eye inexorably towards it. Typesetters traditionally hate these cracks and insist that they be taken out, the simplest solution being to ask the usually compliant author to remove or add a word or two, most congenially an adjective or adverb. But, inexperienced as I was, I had stood my ground, would not have harmed a comma; so that the typesetters, to their annoyance as also to that of my publisher, who reckoned he was doing me a favour by publishing the book at all, were finally obliged to readjust the pagination. If it were known, however, it was with a faint pang of remorse that I felt the disappearance of that fissure in my text, that white interstice of meaning, that involuntary calligram of negativity, that tiny San Andreas Fault upon which, unbeknown to me (for it was, of course, quite invisible in the manuscript), my narrative had been erected; and I felt too, most powerfully, that therein lurked a metaphor still in quest of its subject.

  Perhaps, it now occurred to me, I had discovered a subject for it at last, in these features which limned themselves so imperiously in the interstices, in the negative space, as it were, of my own psyche; and with dawning self-realisation it also occurred to me that, like the arrogant and insufferable young genius I had been, I did not want to be cured, or not yet at least, and that I would suffer the disappearance of this nearly imperceptible crack in my being with an ache of nostalgia and no little regret.

  The following morning I rose unaccustomedly late after a dream-filled night. But although I went immediately to my study, and by ten o’clock had already sifted through the leaves of notes for Adagio and made a series of minor annotations in the margin, I remained moody and abstract. Later, I was astonished to learn for how long I had allowed this debilitating state of affairs to run on; it was just after eleven when next I glanced down at the top page of my manuscript to realise that absolutely nothing had been contributed to it in over an hour. With an affected sigh of resignation I let my fountain pen slide along the blotting pad, opened one of the little desk drawers and drew out a leather address book on which, in the upper left-hand corner, my initials were embossed. For a few minutes longer I sat there, address book in hand, and turned its pages one by one, at a pace leisurely enough for me to scan each of them thoroughly. From time to time, too, I would take up my pen again and score through some name or other.

  Then, just as the marble-framed clock behind me beg
an softly to chime the half-hour, I stopped flicking through the pages to look long and hard at one in particular. I put the address book down and stood up; frowning, I studied the dial of the clock. Then I sat down again, stared at the open address book, lifted the telephone receiver and dialled a number.

  I had not for years had any communication with Rafferty, save once, fifteen months back, when I had received an invitation to a cocktail party fêting his appointment as arts editor of a newly and, as it then appeared, rather rashly launched Sunday newspaper, an invitation concerning which I had not even seen fit to convey my regrets. This Rafferty, at the time when our lives had intersected, just once, briefly and without sequel, when my four novels were being republished in a collected edition, had written a lengthy and extravagantly laudatory essay on them in the Times Literary Supplement that I had publicly judged ‘not stupid’, by the faintness of which praise I had had absolutely no intention to damn. In fact, uniquely in my relationship with my reviewers, I had dispatched a discreetly phrased note of appreciation which was reciprocated by a far wordier and more effusive reply; and we had had lunch together, an unsettling experience for both of us and an experiment neither had ever sought to repeat. But if until the present Monday morning, and without having harboured towards my erstwhile champion the slightest hostility, I had lost contact with him, I had also for no very explainable purpose taken note of his new office number.