Zoo Time (22 page)

I don’t doubt that had I listened harder I’d have realised they were fighting over specific men, with whom, in Vanessa’s view, Poppy had exceeded the propriety expected of the mother of a woman who was acting the slut herself.

Or maybe I listened just hard enough, knew exactly what was going on and liked it, because the wild-cat atmosphere made me feel bohemian, a writer of the pulsating night-time city living in a whorehouse at last. Even if we were only in Barnes.

To this degree, at least, their interruptions, though unlooked-for, were inspirational. I lost an hour to their technicolour commotions but wrote a week at full pelt on the strength of them.

If Vanessa were sleeping with the croupier, or indeed anybody else, her mother’s always travelling up to Manchester with her had to be explained. Vanessa didn’t need a chaperone, and I very much doubted they were enjoying him in tandem or by turn. For all their apparent freedom from convention, they were not liberated enough for that. So did Poppy just hang around in the foyers of hotels? And if that were all, why didn’t she stay behind some days and share the solitude of the house with me?

How she managed to make me feel we were on the brink of having an affair all those years before we got to Monkey Mia without ever saying or doing anything that couldn’t have been reported to Vanessa or the local vicar, I am unable to explain. Either she had a genius for innuendo in which nothing was really innuendoed, or drinkies got her into trouble which she was only by the skin of her teeth, or by the strength of her innate sexual refinement, able to get out of. To the third option, which was that I imagined the whole thing, I give a degree of credence – a feverish imagination being necessary to the business I am in – but only a degree. I didn’t imagine the countless occasions on which she brushed against me when we passed drunkenly on the stairs or in the hall and she would pretend that the static we gave off kept us in the same magnetic field a fraction of a second longer than in truth it did; or the pressure on my shoulder of her breasts (which started so much higher up her chest than other women’s) which was like being poked by a pillow; or the looks of fearful knowingness we exchanged some nights as though we stood on the rim of an active volcano; or the degree of domestic undress she permitted to become habitual between us, until Vanessa put a stop to it; or the unsubtlety of her flirting with my fellow writers when we threw a publication party, which I was able to explain to myself only as a plain manifestation of how badly she needed to flirt with me.

In this latter, she was no different from her daughter who found all social get-togethers of more than a dozen people of mixed gender sexually deranging, but a party thrown to celebrate the publication of a work of mine a provocation to vengeful licentiousness that threatened our marriage. She would rub herself up against the most junior editors; she would whisper hotly in the ear of journalists who were there only to interview me; on one occasion she even sat on poor Merton’s knee, causing him to turn the colour of the hair she had given him to nibble. But it was when I caught her in a huddle in the garden with a bald writer of novels about the joys and sorrows of single fatherhood that I read her the riot act.

‘Not Andy Weedon,’ I said. ‘I draw the line at Andy Weedon.’

‘Because he’s big in Canada.’

Andy Weedon’s
Can I Have the Bottle, Daddy?
had just won the Prix Pierre Trudeau.

‘That’s below the belt, Vanessa.’

But she had a point.

It was one of my beefs with my agent that I wasn’t big in Canada, where a number of writers I affected to admire had been born and where I thought they ought in consequence to affect to admire me. I understood that novels about single fatherhood did well in Canada because Canadian women were so bored with their husbands that the majority of them ran off sooner or later with an American or an Inuit. But that didn’t make me feel any better.

‘Come clean,’ Vanessa said. ‘Canada is a bleeding sore with you.’

‘I am not so petty, Vee.’

‘You? Not petty? Next you’ll tell me you don’t admire the feeling way he writes about children.’

‘I admire his way with children as much as you do, Vee,’ I said. I didn’t add, ‘You unnatural bitch!’

There was something else I didn’t add. I didn’t add, though it was the truth, that I couldn’t bear her kissing him because he wore inanition white T-shirts, like the one made famous in the film
Trainspotting
, and hugged himself in the way Ewan McGregor had, as though whatever he was on had made him shiver. ‘If you’re so cold, wear something more substantial than that fucking T-shirt,’ I wanted to tell him. ‘And when you’re at a party of mine, show some respect and wear a jacket. You’re not in fucking Leith.’

A further and, if anything, still stronger reason I couldn’t bear to see her kissing him was that he was bald with the baldness of a man who had gone bald before he was twenty. You can always tell. Something indurated about the scalp. Like ground that has long gone unwatered. This wasn’t a prejudice against baldness, or even premature baldness, in itself. It was a prejudice against men who had no natural vitality kissing my wife.

Later on at the same party I saw him doing it with Poppy. Not kissing exactly – to my knowledge, Poppy had never quite kissed anybody between Washington and Monkey Mia – but engaging her in a prematurely bald man’s idea of intimate relations, holding her in heartfelt conversation about how hard it is for a single father to keep abreast of what’s new in vinyl records, absorbing her attention, in short, bleeding her vitality in order to keep himself alive.

Ought I to have given him his marching orders? Beat it, baldy! Go suck the life out of some other writer’s women.

It was my launch party, after all.

The trouble was, I wanted him to stay. Though in his fiction his broken reeds of men were invariably widowed or otherwise wifeless, in actuality he had a perfectly good wife of his own – Lucia, a Spanish or South American woman, as succulent as a wine gum. And while Andy was sucking the life out of mine, I was sucking – or at least trying to suck – the wine out of his.

Nothing serious – I didn’t want to lure her away, which I suspect I could have done easily enough by presenting her with a locket containing a single one of my hairs. I simply enjoyed making small Judaeo-Protestant Wilmslow inroads into her Catholicism.

‘This party,’ she said, looking around her, perhaps catching sight of Vanessa sitting on Merton’s knee, ‘reminds me of a scene in one of your novels.’

‘I have never put you into one of my novels,’ I said.

‘Thank God for that,’ she laughed.

‘You would illuminate any such scene,’ I said.

She flushed. Close up I could see she had a darkly downy upper lip – a feature of Spanish women which I happened to love. So in what other regard, or in what other place, I secretly wondered, did she exhibit more of the signs of robust life than her husband?

‘And here was me thinking you made it up,’ she said.

‘Oh, come on, this is hardly the
Satyricon
.’

It must have been at this point that she noticed Andy breathing up Poppy’s nostrils. ‘Well, that depends what you’re used to,’ she said.

‘You will have to come to our parties more often,’ I said, tossing first one sumptuous lock of hair, and then a second, out of my eyes. And left it at that.

It’s a rule of the profession that novelists do not sleep with one another’s wives or husbands. The reason being that you don’t give a rival novelist the material for a book.

If they want to write about sexual jealousy it isn’t going to be thanks to anything you’ve done.

And what about a fellow novelist who is not a rival?

The question is too simplistic to deserve an answer. There is no such thing as a fellow novelist who is not a rival.

There is a small-pond theory of why writers are an envious breed. So many fishermen, so few fish. But I doubt writers would be any different were the pond the size of Lake Superior. They simply obey the inverse human-kindness law that governs the practice of high-mindedness: the more apparently disinterested, exalted and ‘creative’ the profession, the less human kindness its members show to one another.

I first set my foot on this extending ladder of illiberality when I left Wilmslow for the University of the Fenlands School of Literature and Creative Writing, Thetford Campus, swapping the small provincial world of ladies’ fashion for the open expanses of the mind they called humanities. Without doubt, people in Wilmslow, and further afield even than that, had been jealous of Wilhelmina’s success. Owners of boutiques nothing like as well regarded as ours would spread unpleasant rumours about us, steal our ideas or try to block our supply chain, one of them, as I recall, going so far as to attempt to bribe Dolce and Gabbana not to let us stock their garments, and when that didn’t work actually resorting to arson. It was to my mother’s credit that when she opened up in the morning and found thirty spent matches on the carpet she didn’t call the police. Anyone who thought to put her out of business with a box of Swan Vestas, she stood on the step of the shop and declaimed, presented no serious danger to her, to her family, or to the success of Wilhelmina’s. But despite such sporadic outbreaks of warfare, a spirit of communal interest and mirth bound the shopkeepers of Wilmslow. We would meet at the bar of the Swan to share the day’s travails; we’d swap notes on well-known local nuisances and time-wasters, or exchange stories about new arrivals in the area – Vanessa and Poppy, for example, aroused intense curiosity – and when a coachload of French schoolboys turned up in Wilmslow for no other reason than to strip our shelves, we were on the phone to one another issuing detailed descriptions of the
petits salauds
before they’d got away with more than a bar of chocolate and copy of the
Wilmslow Recorder
, which was free anyway. Then I went to East Anglia and encountered the savage mutual mistrust of scholars. And a few years after that I entered the begrudging, disconfederate world of writing, where every sentence I wrote was as a blade to the heart of every other writer, and where – just to be clear about this – every sentence they wrote was as a blade to the heart of me.

It was Vanessa, to her credit, who first dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s in the matter of novelists not sleeping with one another’s spouses for fear of giving them material for a book.

It was after our disagreement about Andy Weedon. ‘Christ, I’ve just worked it out,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t care less about me giving Andy Weedon a fuck qua fuck, what you don’t want is him putting me in one of his novels.’

‘He wouldn’t know what to do with you in one of his novels. He doesn’t do living women.’

‘And you don’t want him to start doing them now?’

‘If he wants to do one let him do his own.’

‘That Spanish piece?’

‘She isn’t a
piece
.’

‘Oh Christ, don’t try that on me.’

‘I happen to like her, that’s all. She’s got a moustache.’

‘Oh yes, the moustache. The Jewess look. I always forget you have a weakness for that.’

I bridled at Jewess. I’m not sure why.

‘I don’t have a weakness, Vee,’ I said. ‘I just happen to like her.’

‘I noticed.’

‘There is nothing wrong in liking someone.’

‘No, there isn’t. Unless it’s me liking Andy Weedon. So I can assume, can I, that she’ll be turning up in your next book?’

‘Why would you assume that?’

‘From the intensity of your research into her personality and opinions.’

‘I was being hostly.’

‘I’d say you were being competitive.’

‘With Andy Weedon? Don’t make me laugh. If I wanted to be competitive with Andy Weedon I’d show him my eyelash.’

‘Competitive with
me
.’

‘You’re different.’

‘How am I different?’

I wanted to say
You’re not a rival novelist
, but I knew where that would lead. So instead I just declared my innocence of any predatory intention towards Lucia Weedon. ‘You don’t sleep with a fellow novelist’s wife,’ I said.

‘In case your own wife sleeps with the fellow novelist?’

‘That’s not the motive, but you’re right, that’s not done either.’

‘Such sexual high-mindedness all of the sudden. What’s the real reason, Guido?’

‘Let’s just say it’s not my job to research his novels for him.’

Vanessa stared at me. ‘What are you saying?’

‘He doesn’t light my fires, I don’t light his.’

Vanessa stared at me some more. ‘Are you telling me,’ she said, ‘that you’d rather miss out on a fuck with a woman with a moustache than give her husband something to write about?’

‘Something like that. Though now you lay out so clearly what I’m sacrificing –’

‘That’s sick, Guido. That’s the sickest thing I’ve heard. You’re a fucking weirdo.’

‘How can my being virtuous make me a weirdo?’