Fictional Lives (7 page)

The phone call that Fraser made that evening towards the end of March was, therefore, the phone call not only of a friend, but also of an already established envoy; of a minister, so to speak, of foreign affairs; and it changed everything because after the man had mentioned that he was going to be in England for a month, and after he had asked if he might come and stay in the country for a long weekend, he said that his next trip was to be Alaska and the Aleutian Islands—but that he was going via San Francisco….

And the second he heard this Andrew knew he had found the solution to his problem.

‘Would you,’ he said, without the slightest hesitation, ‘do me a favour when you’re in San Francisco?’

‘Course I would,’ came the reply—as nearly without hesitation as Fraser could manage. ‘What is it?’

‘Well you see,’ Andrew said; and went on to tell his fellow writer about the affair he had been having by post, and to ask him if he would mind calling Lucinda, meeting her, and then sending the most complete report possible about the girl. ‘You can give her,’ he added, ‘the most complete report possible about me, too.’

‘I shall do both, willingly,’ Fraser said; and then changed the subject by asking Andrew when it would be convenient for him to come to the cottage. ‘Shan’t be alone, of course,’ he clipped. ‘Chinese girl.’

‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’ Andrew—who didn’t want the subject changed just yet—insisted.

‘Mind? Course I don’t. Be delighted to. Glad you asked me.’

‘I’m,’ Andrew said, ‘glad you’re going.’

And so he was—for he could think of no one whose report he would sooner have had, or whose report he would sooner have trusted—and so he remained for the next few days. He was more than glad; he was overjoyed, and came to think of Fraser’s intervention as little short of divine. But after those few days had passed, and the weekend of Fraser’s visit approached, doubts entered his mind; and his joy became shadowed by fear.

The doubts and fears were not occasioned by any sudden lack of faith in Fraser’s report on Lucinda; that he knew would be honest, and absolutely reliable. They were rather occasioned by a sudden lack of faith in Fraser himself—and even a certain lack of faith in Lucinda. The latter he was, after he had thought about it for a while, almost able to dismiss—after all, how could he, or why should he, have faith in someone he didn’t know—but the lack of faith in Fraser was a more serious concern; and one that grew more profound the more he thought about it.

What if, Andrew couldn’t help asking himself, Lucinda
is
the rare creature I imagine her to be? What if she is a person of true beauty; a person of total integrity? Of course it was extremely unlikely; total integrity in this world was, for all practical purposes, impossible; and anyone possessing it would be more than rare; they would indeed be ideal. But just suppose for a moment—she
were
?
Mightn’t Fraser, who was searching the world for such a person, fall in love with her
himself? Or better, mustn’t Fraser, given his character, fall in love with her himself? Yes, Andrew answered himself miserably; he must. And maybe Lucinda, when she met him….

People who knew Fraser only slightly, or not at all—those who thought him typically British, and were fooled by his irony—claimed to find the effect he had on women incomprehensible. ‘How could anyone,’ Andrew had often been asked, ‘fall in love with such an absurdity? He’s a throwback; he’s a caricature; he is the most negative, sexless man on the face of this earth.’ But Andrew, who had more than once seen Fraser’s first meeting with a woman he had subsequently become involved with, believed he understood perfectly. For one thing, when Fraser was attracted to someone he immediately, if without being conscious of it, revealed that his British veneer was but the thinnest of disguises, and wasn’t at all to be taken seriously; for another he gave the impression—the correct impression—that just as he could immerse himself in and become a foreign country, so he could, and was more than willing to, immerse himself in and become a ‘foreign’ person (which complete abdication was unnerving; if only because it denoted a courage that was appalling); and for yet another he gave the (again correct?) impression that beneath his thin disguise there was not really a person at all, but simply a void; a black hole of terrifying proportions.

Once Andrew had tried to explain the matter to some wondering woman. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘if Fraser didn’t give himself away, he would be sucked down and disappear into his own darkness. By becoming someone else he manages to save himself—at least for as long as the affair lasts. Unfortunately none of the women who have accepted him completely have ever managed to save themselves.’

Some—and how terrifyingly similar, Andrew reflected now, their fates sounded to those of Lucinda’s two lovers—had taken to drink; some had joined strange cults. Several, he knew, had
had total breakdowns; several more had killed themselves….

‘Only then, when they have been destroyed, when a sacrifice, if you like, has been made to the pit, does Fraser re-emerge; and start to look again for the woman who will be able to accept him, yet have the strength not to fall into the darkness. Or better perhaps, for the woman who will make him accept himself; and by doing so, give
him
the strength to resist that fall.’

As he had tried to uproot the obsession that Lucinda had become, so now Andrew tried to uproot his doubts and fears regarding Fraser. But just as he had failed with the one, so he failed with the other; and by the Friday when Fraser was due to arrive at the cottage, doubts and fears had turned to panic; and a near certainty that what he had foreseen would happen.

The most ridiculous, yet disturbing aspect of the matter was that while now he had come to the conclusion that Fraser was the last person on earth he should send on this mission, he was still certain—more than ever certain—that Fraser was the only person on earth he could send. Because the man was going to San Francisco anyway, which seemed as if destiny had singled him out for the task. Because Fraser
was
his oldest and closest friend (it had been Fraser who had introduced him to Jill; Fraser the person he had called when Jill had been killed), and in such circumstances one could only rely on the oldest and closest of friends. And because there was the indisputable fact that if Lucinda were the ideal creature for whom he had been searching, Fraser alone would be sure to recognize her.

Yet though he knew he could ask no one else, as Andrew bumped, blushed and blundered through the weekend—he was continually dropping things, knocking things over, saying things he didn’t mean to say, and generally giving even more of an impression of a red and gauche (if good-natured) schoolboy than he normally did—his panic grew to such an extent that he was more than once tempted to tell Fraser that everything was off,
that he had changed his mind, that Lucinda had gone away, that—that Fraser wasn’t to go to see her. (Apart from anything else, he couldn’t help thinking, surely Lucinda, if she had a grain of sense, would prefer the dark demonic travel writer, with his core of blackness, to a clumsy, maladroit forty-five-year-old adolescent….)

Fraser realized that Andrew was disturbed about something, and he might have guessed about what (for having remarked, with a smile, the evening of his arrival, ‘I hope I don’t find your beloved Californian too attractive’—and having noted the manic laughter with which his words were greeted—he was very careful thereafter to mention Lucinda, and his
forthcoming
examination of her, only with the greatest seriousness); but since the novelist didn’t mention his fears to him, he pretended to take the blushes and clumsiness as signs only of love. ‘I never believed I would see the day,’ he said gravely, ‘that Andrew Stairs sighed for a foreigner.’

If
only,
Andrew thought, he had the courage to go to America himself. But he didn’t; and if he had managed to force himself into going, he would have been so nervous—nervous of the country, nervous of the continent, nervous of just being abroad, alone—that even if Lucinda had been more wonderful that he dreamed he wouldn’t have been able to see that wonder, and would have lost her forever. No—he
couldn’t
go abroad until after he had found his travelling companion; and the only way to find her was to put his trust in Fraser.

But—Oh God, he thought for the hundredth time. Oh God. Just suppose….

His panic reached a climax on the Monday morning, as his guests were preparing to leave; when Fraser, taking him aside for a moment, asked him what he thought of the Chinese girl (whom Andrew, so distraught had he been, and so preoccupied with Fraser, had hardly been aware of), told him that he himself didn’t think too much of her (she was sweet enough;
but she only hovered and never—wisely, Andrew felt—landed), and confessed that he was going through a particularly bad time at the moment. (He was more and more often tempted, he said, simply to curl up in a corner somewhere and fall asleep, forever. He also, at times, came near to hating Andrew, so much did he envy him his cottage, his peace, his
acceptance
of himself.) But after he had listened to this cry of despair, after he had tried, as best he could, to reassure Fraser that he would eventually find what he was looking for, and when he still, in spite of the near hysteria that that cry and its implications had induced in him, hadn’t countermanded his orders regarding Lucinda, Andrew realized that the worst was over; and that from now on, though his fears would remain with him, he could only sit back, wait, and leave matters in the hands of the gods.

In fact he left them so very much in their hands over the following weeks that it wasn’t till two days before Fraser’s departure for the States, when the man called to say goodbye, that it occurred to Andrew he hadn’t written to Lucinda to warn her of his friend’s arrival. (That he hadn’t written at all for months, nor heard from her—and that she might now have forgotten him, be in love with someone else, or have left Berkeley—didn’t seem to him to be causes for concern. For aside from the fact that they hadn’t broken with each other—and that, therefore, their mutual silence, long though it had been, couldn’t be viewed as other than a pause in the dialogue, a moment for gathering breath before the great, the conclusive statement was made—the affair had assumed in his mind such mythic proportions that it would have been unworthy to admit the possibility of her doing anything so mundane as forget him, move house, or fall for some bearded, bespectacled philosophy graduate.) He debated with himself then whether to phone her, cable her, or send a note by special delivery. He was tempted to do the first, because he would have liked to have
heard her voice. But eventually—after he’d realized that if he did phone he might be too tongue-tied to speak, and thought that a telegram would be too cryptic—he settled for the special delivery; hoping that it would arrive in time, and that Fraser wouldn’t get in touch with her his very first day in San Francisco.

Having done it—and being at last so resigned he felt becalmed; a powerless ship waiting for the wind to arise—he placed himself once again in the hands of the gods; and, once again, waited.

He was not, however, to wait for very much longer. Only one more week.

The first letter was from Lucinda; a brief scrawl which read ‘You might have warned me!’ Whether the girl meant that she hadn’t received his note, or that she should have been warned as to Fraser’s character, Andrew wasn’t certain.

The second letter, which arrived the day after, was also from Lucinda; and at least cleared up the above point. ‘Have returned from mailing my protest to find your special delivery. So you did warn me. Anyway, your friend Fraser (first name? Last name? I asked him, but he wasn’t forthcoming) called me yesterday afternoon, and in the evening we had dinner together. I guess you want a report on me! (Though we spent most of the time talking about you.) My first impression of him was that he was some sort of joke. My second that he was one of the strangest people I have ever met. By the time the evening ended—rather drunkenly on my part, and even more so on his, I suspect (though it’s difficult to tell)—he had made me feel very uncomfortable indeed. I got home with the sensation—and it wasn’t just the drink, I’m sure—that I had spent four hours peering down some really terrifyingly deep well. Or down the shaft of some mine whose ore is too dreadful to be extracted. And whereas I usually have a very good head for heights—for depths?—last night I suffered from vertigo.
He said he is going to be around for a few days more before moving north, and we both muttered something polite about getting together again. But while he may be an old friend of yours, and while he certainly is interesting, I sort of hope we don’t. I mean I’m always grateful for a good meal, and I was curious to hear what he said about you. Only—I don’t like to be uncomfortable, even less, I’ve discovered, do I like to suffer from vertigo, and I have the probably ridiculous feeling that to see too much of Mr Fraser is to lay oneself open to the risk of contamination. Though perhaps it isn’t so ridiculous, because he said himself, during dinner, when we were talking about you, that you wear England about you like a lead shield, and that is one of the reasons why you can be friends. Which—at least now, in the sober (hungover) light of morning—seems a pretty odd thing to say, unless he does think of himself as emitting some kind of harmful rays. Anyway, if we do meet again, I shall go well protected; and shan’t go too near the edge of that mine-shaft.

‘One more thing. Fraser or no Fraser, I’m glad there is some link between us now, apart from our letters. I’ve often thought, over the past few months, that the forging of such a link was the next and necessary step if we were, eventually, to be—what? Joined …? I would have attempted the task myself if I had known some ambassador I could trust to represent me. But unfortunately I didn’t. Or don’t. You, Andrew dear, are lucky.’

Andrew stared at this last sentence for a long time; then told himself that that remained to be seen.

As it still remained to be seen when Fraser’s first letter arrived. For though the man gave no suggestion he might be seeing Lucinda again, and though (or just because) his first (and for Fraser generally sufficient) impression of the girl was everything that could have been wished for (‘She is, superficially, good-humoured, unpretentious, intelligent, and astonishingly
conscious
;
beneath the surface she struck me as being
not merely fine but truly—the only word for it—magnificent’), Andrew couldn’t help thinking that he wouldn’t be entirely happy, or entirely sure he
was
lucky to have an ambassador such as Fraser, until he heard that the traveller had left San Francisco, and gone north.