Outside of a Dog (31 page)

‘I don’t want to sell anything of Giles’s’, she said. ‘I want to keep it all with me.’

I wanted to keep it with me too, but quite understood, and demurred with something approaching good grace. But I still miss my
Spycatcher
. I would like to have it with me, indeed have it
mounted on a plinth on my desk, as John Donne had his human skull, a bibliographic memento mori. I like the thought that it would puzzle others to see such an indifferent book so curiously
elevated, but I would know what it signified. You don’t have to read a book to be changed by it.

18

I don’t know what it is teenagers do in their bedrooms that requires they be in there so frequently, and I’m not sure I want to know. Especially these days, when a
typical teenage bedroom is like an electronic warehouse, with computers with wi-fi and broadband, the latest mobile phones, television, camcorders, whizzo speakers and all sorts of gadgets I
can’t understand. Becoming instantly intimate with strangers in chat rooms, transmitting images of themselves over MySpace and YouTube –
Broadcast Yourself!
Be a Celebrity!
– why do they feel so comfortable, so secure, in this electronic environment? Why can’t they just go upstairs and spritz over their books like we did?

It was bad enough twenty years ago, when Anna had access to none of the above, yet was still largely absent from ongoing family life, doing something or other in her bedroom. Talking on the
phone incessantly, trying on skirts to see which was shortest, and blouses to confirm which could be seen through most comprehensively. But Barbara and I knew what she was mostly doing up there,
and that was reading. We’d find her propped up in bed at any time of day or night, a paperback in her hands. We felt relieved, and proud of her: she read voraciously, at almost a book a day
pace, so there was no need to worry about her time being used unproductively. This was reprehensibly naive of us, and dated from that period in which I felt that reading was, in some simple way,
good for you.

Within a couple of years, I began my becoming less intelligent period, reading a thriller a day, and immediately passing them on to Anna. It was immense fun reading together, and discussing our
favourites – Carl Hiaasen, Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, Harlan Coben, Lawrence Block, James Harvey – at least when we could remember them. We ingested books together like sharing
meals, and remembered as little about most of them as of last Thursday’s breakfast. Cereal? Bacon and eggs? What does it matter?

I had purchased a flat in Primrose Hill in 1986, and opened it as an office for my new rare books business. I’d spend three nights a week there, and return home for long weekends, which
was both a sensible business plan and a necessary marital one, because it was yet another period in which Barbara and I found each other’s constant presence abrading. I purchased the flat
entirely on my own, using money from my father’s legacy – she never even came down to look at it – as a bolt hole into which I could escape for half the week. It initiated a
period of great happiness and excitement for me, in my London incarnation, with the tricky marital negotiations of the weekends small price to pay, amply compensated by the chance to see the
children. Bertie, then aged seven, didn’t like the look or smell of it.

‘Are you and mum separated?’ he asked me, when it became clear that I was going to be away half the time.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I prevaricated. ‘Separations are for people who only have one house. We have two, and we use them both. And I need to be in London for my business,
don’t I?’

He was smart enough to see through this, and continued to seek reassurance.

‘Look, dad,’ he said, ‘I’m a simple boy and I like a simple answer. Are you separated or not?’

‘Not.’

He looked relieved, though not entirely satisfied. The ‘simple boy’ persona was, already, one of his life strategies. Of natively cheerful disposition, his way of dealing with
discord was largely to deny it, which worked pretty well for him most of the time. Relentlessly positive in his selection of memories – an admirable quality – his account of his
childhood has managed to blank out many of the problems of his parents’ marriage. If he was later to pay some price for this psychic vigilance, in occasional sleeplessness and need to recheck
that the doors are locked, it seemed, on the whole, rather a good deal.

Anna took the opposite position. When I got home from London on Thursday evenings she wouldn’t talk to me, stayed in her room reading a book, her head turned away when I went upstairs to
say hello. Reading was what she did when she was particularly angry; it is no wonder that she soon became addicted to thrillers and tales of serial killing.

She was often, sadly, a better reader of the state of our marriage, of how dangerously the tensions had risen, how fragile the emotional situation was, than Barbara and I were, and she had
assumed from an early age the anxious role of watchdog and peace-maker. She knew what my regular absences meant: that Barbara and I were estranged, and that I had abandoned
her
. She glowered
with that ingrowing rage that children who are powerless to halt the inevitable frequently feel, as their lives slowly morph into undesirable new forms.

On a Friday morning she still hadn’t entirely forgiven me, but she was genuinely glad that I was home, and we would meet over the neutral ground of the kitchen table before she went to
school. I’d give her a huge hug, and she would respond tentatively at first, firming up the pressure as the seconds went by. It was an immense relief to me each time, and heartbreaking.

‘I’m glad to be home, chicken,’ I’d say. She loved being called ‘chicken’, a nickname that dated back to her infancy, when I made up stories of a family of
chicken-midgets who lived in my beard. She was one of them, and was happy psychically to remain so in some small part of herself. It was a process fraught with regressive possibility, which made it
necessary that she develop at some point a strong alter ego to counterbalance this ongoing childhood persona.

I don’t think it was on my recommendation that Anna first read Thomas Harris’s
The Silence of the Lambs
, which was published in 1989. It wasn’t the sort of thriller I
much like. I think I read it at her suggestion, rather than she on mine. I hope this is right, because I would feel guilty having introduced her to such contagious material. There was my little
chicken, filling her head with horrible images. Not like those from normal thrillers, which are usually sanitized by genre, for
The Silence of the Lambs
insistently reinforces and recommends
its grisly core images of cannibalism, kidnapping and murder, gloats over them. Assuming one is susceptible, how is one to get that out of one’s head?

The novel is based on an absurd premise, which sadly never quite becomes laughable – a serial killer is kidnapping fat girls to harvest them for their hides, which he wears as special
party outfits – and features the chillingly memorable Hannibal Lecter, incarcerated for multiple murders and acts of cannibalism, restrained in his cell, masked, and kept at more than
arm’s length by his warders, who fear for their lives if he gets his teeth on them. Dr Lecter, ironically and alas, is psychiatry’s most brilliant interpreter of the fantasies and
procedures of serial killers of the most pathological sort. So it is to him that the FBI turns when they are stumped by the murders of one ‘Buffalo Bill’, as the newspapers have
christened him, whose victims have begun to show up as eviscerated corpses in a series of watery sites. Surely, reasons Jack Crawford, Section Chief of the FBI’s Behavioural Science unit
(that deals with serial killers), Dr Lecter might have some insight into the crimes which the Bureau’s vaunted VICAP profiling system is not helping to explain? But it’s a remote
possibility – even if he does know something, Lecter is unlikely to do more than play with his interrogators – and Crawford, whose adored wife Bella is dying of cancer, has neither the
time nor the energy to pursue the lead. He sends Clarice Starling instead.

It is a sign of how little hope he has invested in the line of thought. Though she (like Anna) has degrees in criminology and psychology, as well as having worked in a mental health centre,
Starling is only a first-year Quantico trainee, and palpably no match for Lecter. Nobody is. Crawford sends her anyway, prompted by an unspoken desire to test her and to further her career, and on
a hunch that Lecter might speak to an attractive (and naive) young woman more openly than he would to a more seasoned operative. Anyway, there’s nothing to be lost, and Starling is keen.

The book then plays itself out predictably. Starling and Lecter form an odd mutual attachment, more murders take place, Lecter offers some ambiguous clues, and then escapes from gaol, Starling
ends up in deathly battle with the killer, almost loses her life, but emerges, heroic and triumphant, having rescued the most recent hostage on the very morning on which she was to be flayed.
Recovering from her ordeal, she receives a letter from Dr Lecter, predicting that this will be the first of many such experiences for her: ‘Because it’s the plight that drives you,
seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.’

Identification with the victim is the key: the heroine is saving herself, and will need continually to do so. You can see how a girl might be moved by such an image. Anna was not then, never has
been, an extroverted person. She has a bruised tender heart, conducts her meditations inwardly, comes slowly and undemonstratively to her conclusions. So it was quite impossible to assess or to
measure the effect that the figure of Clarice Starling was having on her inner world. (A starling was a curiously appropriate bird, having Anna’s own dark plumage and relative shortness of
stature.) She contracted Clarice Starling much more violently than I had, at the same age, caught Holden Caulfield. But in Anna’s case, aside from acknowledging that she thought both the book
and film of
The Silence of the Lambs
‘pretty good’, one had no idea what subtle transformation she was undergoing inwardly.

She didn’t either. Just as a tourist returning from an obscure land may contract a disease but not have the first outbreak for a number of years, so too Anna was unaware of harbouring a
dangerous virus, caught like some sort of avian flu. There were occasional clues, but too easily misinterpreted. A few years after first reading
The Silence of the Lambs
, when she had
started at York University, she went to Paris with her boyfriend (later her estimable and loving husband) Steve Broome, and he bought her a baseball cap as a souvenir. It wasn’t very Gallic.
It was a simple French blue, to be sure, but it bore the white letters FBI on the front. She wore it like a uniform, proudly and incessantly. We all thought it was cute, this pretty, slight-figured
girl in her FBI hat. We didn’t know she was serious.

Like me, and pretty much like my father, she’d gone to read English and philosophy at university, though she individuated herself a little, in family terms, by dropping the English within
a few weeks.

‘I don’t understand the questions they keep asking,’ she said of her professors, ‘much less what would count as an answer to them.’ She felt happier with the hard
edges of philosophy, which was less vague, less personal, based on argument rather than opinion. In those days Arts professors announced that their subjects should be pursued for ‘their own
sakes’, though what English or philosophy were, such that they had a sake, was never divulged. Anna certainly didn’t want to teach – she was too diffident even to lead a seminar
when requested to by her teachers – so I assumed she was simply educating herself, developing the tenor of her rather sharp analytical mind, and that vocational yearnings were not part of her
short-term thinking.

It came as some surprise, then, towards the end of her final year, when she announced she was applying to do post-graduate work at Cambridge in criminology.

‘Why would you want to do that?’ I asked incredulously, unaware of her identification with Agent Starling.

‘So that I can apply to Quantico, and train as a profiler.’

‘To the FBI? Like your hat?’

‘That’s where they do it.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘I could qualify. I’m an American citizen.’

I paused, to give this my full attention, and to take it seriously. We were about to define a turning point in her life. I thought for a while. She waited patiently.

‘What’re you, crazy?’

The next thing I knew, of course, was that I was helping her to fill out the application. We read the course description with care, and I was relieved to learn that what most criminologists did
was to study the effects of street lighting on urban crime, to tabulate
this
, and provide a statistical model for
that
. Anna sneered. A criminologist studies crime, right? And the
biggest and worst crime is murder, and the king of murderers is the serial killer, right? With this regal if peculiar line of thought, she began composing an essay describing her macabre interests,
to accompany her application. Great! Given that ninety-five per cent of candidates for the course were rejected, Anna was positioning herself nicely for a quick dismissal, after which she could
pick from some sensible options, like buying shoes for Harvey Nichols (she’s addicted to shoes) or becoming an editor at a nice publishing house that does thrillers.