The Birth of Love (9 page)

‘It will be interesting to see what the response of the
reading public is. Whether they buy this book, simply to see what the problem was.’

‘I hope they do,’ said Alice Mortimer. ‘That would annoy a few people.’

‘I don’t think it’s fair to blame the religious in this. Not one of them has voiced any objections to Lamott’s book. This is not a question of religious extremists versus liberal democracy,’ said Sally.

‘… It is the suicide of liberal democracy. It’s self-annihilation by degrees …’

‘Like lemmings, we jump,’ said Arthur Grey. ‘We jump before we are pushed. There is no one around, even, but just in case someone appears, someone who might – or might not – push us – we jump.’

‘They are not liberal, in the true sense,’ said Alice Mortimer. ‘They are double agents, working to smash the edifice from within.’

‘Well, you don’t hear swathes of the religious denouncing the whole thing.’

‘That’s not true, some of them have.’

‘Not enough of them,’ said Roger Annais.

Their voices merged, as Michael sweated and twisted his fork in his hand. They said, ‘Naturally … One need hardly say … Of course …’ All that he did not understand was clear to them. They nodded at each other, ate with gusto, splashed wine into their glasses. They clashed vividly, or concurred suddenly – everything was emphatic, determined. Then it was as if they suddenly remembered they must include him, and so they issued a general murmur, ‘… but however … Let us not … We oughtn’t …’ Alice Mortimer nodded her auburn curls towards him. ‘… Now,
The Moon
…’ she began to say.

And he nodded back at her.

‘Yes, I wanted to ask you about your title,’ she said, with a wave of her silver arms. ‘Odd title, I thought, considering the subject of your story. And then I wondered, is it
la lune
ne garde aucune rancune
, the all-forgiving moon? Or Diana and the hunt? What did you mean by it, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘I don’t mind at all,’ said Michael. In the silence that settled around him, he fumbled with his words. ‘I meant … well, something about madness of course, and then … something about … unknown mystery, something which is intuited but not … precisely … something which can’t show itself …’

‘Who intuits it?’ said Roger Annais.

‘I hoped that might remain … a little ambiguous …’ said Michael. They paused and nodded, as if to encourage him. Then Arthur Grey was saying, ‘I thought it was a most interesting book, but there was something I wanted to ask you about. This poor man Semmelweis – who I confess I had never heard of before – is opposed to one sort of dogmatism – the adamant beliefs of the doctors around him, their particular theories about childbed fever. This dogmatism is ruinous, we are made to see. But then he develops his own opinions, and though they are right, it turns out later, he is relentless in his arguments, dogmatic himself, one might say. He insults his opponents, bombards them with invective, and won’t submit to the rules of scientific experiment. Essentially he is as dogmatic as his foes, is he not?’

Michael lifted his head. They were waiting, expecting him to answer. Yes, he wanted to say. It is not coherent.
Naturally when I began, I hoped my book would be lucid and true, and yet as I wrote it – even as I wrote it – I sensed it was spiralling out of my control. And then I thought perhaps it did not matter, that – like everything else I wrote – it would not be read, nothing would come of it. He wanted to say this; he wondered briefly about saying it, but then he wasn’t sure how it would sound to them, so he wiped his hands and said, ‘It is true that Semmelweis is very angry … Perhaps this anger loses him the argument … But somehow, to me, I think … Well, I think there is – surely there must be – a difference between the lone figure … and the many. The one and the confident many. Perhaps the many are so confident – dogmatic – only because they are among the many. Not because they have thought really – truly thought – about what they say. The solitary man must either say nothing … or shout to be heard …’

Michael took a gulp of wine, pushed his greying hair from his temple. There was a lingering pause, while they hesitated, not wanting to curtail him. And he tried to fill it, but something – his shyness, native anxiety, or Sally would have told him it was stress – he didn’t know what it was, but something mangled his words. They waited, while he said, ‘Really … that was … I think that was what I meant …,’ and then they resumed.

‘I felt Semmelweis was an anti-hero,’ said Alice Mortimer, briskly, as if trying to show him how easy it was, just to talk, to speak and be understood. ‘There is a distance between us and him. I felt he was essentially unknowable, as a man.’ That set Michael trembling again, because he
thought they might want him to answer, and he wiped his palms together, but Roger Annais was saying something about a fatal flaw. ‘… Something quite classical about his downfall. Perhaps that’s what you mean, Alice; he isn’t a modern character, as we now understand characterisation. He’s too archetypal. But, I should really let Michael reply …’

He was sweating though the room was cool, full of manufactured cold air. Like the other men, he had taken off his jacket, and undone his tie. As if they were saying, now we are among friends, that was what he thought it meant, all their loosened collars, their jackets slung over the backs of their chairs. With the trousers of his suit wrinkled, a smart suit he had been forced to borrow, never having had much need for one before, Michael saw their faces blurring and re-forming, and he tried to say, ‘I rather enjoy … hearing all of your opinions … For a long time I lacked readers …’ He wiped his temple again, and because he was floundering, Sally stepped in.

‘Michael is very tired. He has been working on this book for many years. He is a little overwhelmed, I believe.’

They nodded and murmured back at her. And Michael breathed more easily, because Sally had granted him a respite. So he slouched a little in his seat, and took another slug of wine.

He only had tenuous impressions, warped by his nerves. Peter Kennedy, head of Giraffe Books, the imprint which had finally published him, was leaning towards him – they were all leaning towards him. He was embarrassed to dis
cover that they were trying to encourage him. So he leaned forward politely because Peter Kennedy was saying, ‘I’d like to propose a toast anyway. To
The Moon
.’

Michael tried to smile, and while Peter added a few more words of praise he pushed his grey hair back, and fiddled with his cuffs, and there was a general murmur as they all lifted their glasses. And Sally said, ‘I am just so glad you decided to publish it, Peter.’

Under the table, Michael wiped his palms together. The talk continued; he was glad when the debate surged around him. And while they talked, he saw the room was filled with soft afternoon light; furtively he watched Roger Annais marking his words with a beat beat of his hands and Arthur Grey nodding twice in return, and there was someone else saying, ‘I’m writing to
The Times
about Lamott today; anyone want to sign it?’

Yes, they said. ‘Email me the letter when you’ve drafted it,’ said one, and another said, ‘Don’t you want to wait, to see if there is any more fuss?’

‘No, I think I’d like to speak now. I know my opinion already.’

‘One can only hope it will strike a general chord.’ Roger Annais marked his words with a beat beat of his hands and Michael caught Arthur Grey staring towards him – their eyes met, and Arthur Grey half-smiled, half-nodded, then looked away.

One can only hope, thought Michael. For them, there was an intellectual point to be made, a debate for the letters pages. Beyond him, a controversy raged, something he
did not understand. More important than his book, something which reverberated widely. For him, there was the business of the reviews-this sense of judgement, of a public reckoning – perhaps this was why his hand kept trembling when he lifted his glass, why he was drinking such a steady stream of wine. And Sally was pressing his arm, to let him know she was there. ‘It’s hard, the first book,’ he had heard her saying earlier, to a friend of hers. Into her mobile, she had said, ‘Especially at his age.’

There were reasons why you became a writer. Diffidence, a fear of social events. An affinity for solitude. Perhaps even misanthropy. You had to like sitting alone in a room. You had to be able to conjure your best thoughts and phrases alone. It seemed to Michael that some people were writers because they wrote better than they talked. He talked very badly, and had never – until now – been asked about his books. He had hardly been called upon to justify or explain them. He had not minded this much; he thought such explanations would be redundant anyway. How could you express something more plainly in a hasty phrase than in a meticulously worked sentence? Surely you were more likely to traduce yourself, to expose all the inner contradictions of your crafted prose? Yet recently they had been asking him to parse his phrases. They had been saying, ‘When you wrote … what did you mean?’ ‘When you said this … what did this mean?’ Sometimes he tried to explain that it was not him, it was a narrator. ‘But you wrote the narrator,’ they said, which was true enough. ‘But I am not the narrator.’ ‘But what did you mean when you made him say …?’ ‘Can you be more plain?’ they asked, but he wasn’t sure he could.
He had become a writer so he could avoid his kind, so he could evade the false intimacy of the office and days spent in the company of others. He had been a solitary child; his own mother had told him so. ‘People need you more than you need them,’ she once said. In youth he suffered through a few office jobs; he shuffled papers and was ignored by his colleagues – he had been too quiet to interest them, so they left him alone. He dragged himself through these jobs and then he spent years as a language teacher. I am, you are, he is. We are, they are. John likes to go to the cinema. Do you like to go to the cinema? Then he got a job teaching creative writing at Hendon College of Further Education, when he simply wanted to be alone with the thoughts in his head. He wanted to live within these thoughts; they were compelling enough to him. If he could have made a living from writing, he would perhaps have never left his room. He might have been a true recluse, his desk turned away from the window, oblivious to everything except the page. His pen moving through space. The hours moving onwards.

‘Sally tells me you have spent years writing?’ Arthur Grey was asking, as if he had read Michael’s mind. It was a benevolent enquiry, he heard the kindness in the man’s voice, and so he said, ‘Yes, most of my life …’

‘You were struggling? I mean … to earn money?’

‘I did odd jobs … But it was not … very elegant …’

‘Michael has been rather ill,’ said Sally, protectively. ‘He wore himself down writing and – now – worrying.’

‘It is the uncertainty,’ said Michael. ‘The sense that one’s words … are not one’s own; that they might mean
in ways one … didn’t expect … It was not my intention … all of this …’

‘Of course it wasn’t. Art was your intention,’ said Arthur Grey. ‘But I interrupted you, you were saying …’

‘I was trying to write about conviction …’ – and the table nodded – ‘… about those who propose something that is not generally thought, and how they are dealt with. About those who are convinced of what they say, to the point that they continue to speak, even when everyone has turned away. And I felt that … all things being unknowable, all real things, all real mysteries, then … well, who can stand, really, and say, “I know; I understand”? I wanted to write … something about this … impulse … to tell others what is true …’

Their polite silence made things worse, kept surging into the cracks in his sentences.

‘I wanted to ask why some people are raised … aloft, and others cast down … into darkness,’ he said.

They nodded back at him.

He wanted to tell them that he couldn’t remember precisely what he had been thinking of at the time. That it was a long time ago, a few years, that he started thinking about this book. He could not quite remember what it was, the original spark, the kernel he had begun with. He had been interested, for a long time before he even began his book, in the history of medicine, and then he read about Ignaz Semmelweis, this man who had driven himself mad. He was gripped by the story of Semmelweis, that was sure enough. So he started writing about Semmelweis, perhaps he intended to write only about him, but then other
strands emerged. The whole thing took months, then years. His narrator rattled on – he supposed it was himself, some aspect of himself – so he set this man rattling on, and the whole story became – or to him it seemed this way – a metaphor, for any system of belief. It might be Christianity or it might be evolution, or the idea that humours governed the body. While he was writing, it occurred to him that there had been a time when medicine was founded on entirely different principles, then accepted as persuasive – the beneficial properties of leeches, or the uses of phrenology. And people had been convinced of these ideas. And there had been a time when mainstream science assumed that continental drift was impossible, and Wegener was branded eccentric. History was littered with such characters, proposing theories that offended the norms of their profession, finding themselves ostracised. And he thought the same was true of religions, in the end, that each new religion set itself up against others that had gone before, that the history of mankind was littered with discarded gods and goddesses. Something about Semmelweis’s frantic talk of mothers, his obsessive devotions, made him think of all the crones and goddesses who had been worshipped for thousands of years and then shoved aside. Artemis, Isis, Ishtar, Ashtoreth, Brigid, Cybele: their temples burned, left in ruins, their powers spent. And there was something else he didn’t even manage to formulate entirely, something which lurked beneath, but he wrote because it was a habit and he couldn’t stop himself, and he wanted to be published because he was vain – perhaps that was it, he simply wanted to be able to look at his published books, feel the glossy covers.
He wanted to tell them all – Arthur Grey and Alice Mortimer and Roger Annais – that he only meant – his narrator only meant – that much had been forgotten, much remained obscure and perhaps unknowable. That it was madness to presume to know. Even to speak – to write – was perhaps madness, and he hardly expected anyone to agree with anything he wrote. Even as he drove words onto the page, he assumed his opinions were his own small maniacal perceptions, and he didn’t think they would necessarily chime with anyone else’s. Because of this, he felt quite alone.