Zoo Time (33 page)

I glowered. They glowered back. Fun? They’d show me fun!

The other panellist was a woman with grey hair tied in a pigtail like a very ancient little girl. She had three silver rings in each nostril and two more in each ear. Her voice was high and fluting, as though not her own. Had a child possessed her? I wondered. She put up a placatory hand as if to calm a mob. I don’t know why I say ‘as if ’. They
were
a mob and she
was
attempting to placate them. ‘I’m Sally Comfort,’ she said, though she’d already been introduced.

Everybody applauded her for the second time. I clapped for a second time too. So this was Sally Comfort! Another response was available to me: so who the fuck is Sally Comfort?

But that she was a god among the mortals of children’s literature there was no mistaking.

‘I think I understand what Mr Ableman’s getting at,’ she went on, smiling at me in a way that would have made me run for the safety of my mummy’s skirts had I been a child (and had my mummy not been a whore who wore no skirts). ‘I think he’s trying to tell us – and I for one don’t mind listening, for I am a great admirer of his work, yes, I am – that children must not be written down to. I’m sure I don’t need to remind him that John Stuart Mill suffered a nervous breakdown as a young man, which perhaps should make us think again about the style of education he received, but that doesn’t detract from the essential point I think Mr Ableman is making, which is that we sometimes ask too little of our children’s intelligences and imaginations.’

‘Hear hear!’ I said, pleased with myself for not rising to the nervous-breakdown bait and saying ‘For all you know, half your children will be gibbering wrecks at the same age. And they won’t have the advantage of a decent education and an acquaintance with the poetry of Wordsworth to help them out of it.’ Instead I applauded Sally Comfort with my fingertips, like a pantomime Chinaman shooing away a mouse.

I imagined blowing in her ear and thanking her for being nice to me.

‘Well, certainly no one,’ chimed in the chairman, a cheerful drunken-looking man with capacious eye pouches, ‘would accuse either of our guest speakers today of asking too little of our children’s intelligences or imaginations.’

More applause. Though not, this time, from me.

‘Fetch, Fetch,’ I thought.

Heston inclined his heavy, handsome head. Sally smiled and rearranged the rings in her nostrils.

I imagined blowing up her nose.

There was then a moment of silence in which it became clear that I was expected to pick up Sally Comfort’s thread and run somewhere with it. Wychwood-Over-Shipton, I was thinking, sneaking a look at my watch.

It would have helped had I known anything about the books Heston Duffy and Sally Comfort had written, but once you’ve decided there is a virtue in arguing out of ignorance you have to stick with it.

‘I guess the question has to be asked,’ I began, digging deep into the manual of writerly bluff, ‘whether quite so many wizards, daemons and other mythical creatures with pseudo-Icelandic names are necessary to stimulate the imaginations of the young. Are we not, when it comes to children –’ though how the fuck I knew, would have been a fair response – ‘too quick to assume that imagination equals fantasy, that –’

‘Not in my case,’ Heston interrupted. ‘My hero Jacko is no wizard. He is an ordinary boy born in Sussex who becomes a soldier of fortune fighting in many of the world’s most terrible war zones. There is nothing fantastical –’

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘You say he is a
boy
soldier of fortune. How old is he exactly?’

‘Well, he ages from book to book. But he is nine when he first bears arms.’

‘Nine? Doesn’t that make him a fantasy figure?’

Heston looked as though he couldn’t decide between flattening me and weeping again. ‘There are parts of the world where children even younger than that are conscripted.’

‘Yes, I know that. But Jacko is a soldier of fortune born in Sussex, you say, where as far as I know they don’t have conscription. If this isn’t fantasy, it is surely the wildest fancy.’

‘Not a word anyone would use of your novels, Sally,’ the drunken-faced chairman said.

‘No, indeed. The book I am working on now, for example, is the last in what I call my Chlamydia Series –’ she laughed – ‘in which teenage girls are taught the dangers of casual sex. It’s a matter of great concern to me that so many girls think sex is safe so long as they don’t go the whole way, if they stop at oral sex, for example.’

She nodded her head as she spoke, as though in complete, if surprised, agreement with herself.

‘That sounds more like a medical treatise than a novel,’ I said.

She laughed again, this time at a higher register than I’d suspected the human voice capable of reaching. ‘The last thing I aim to be is didactic,’ she fluted. ‘Ask the children who devour my books.’

I wanted to ask whether devouring her books might not carry as many dangers for a young girl as devouring semen, but decided against.

‘The important thing,’ Heston said, returning to himself, ‘is not where your story is set. It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether it’s in a mixed comprehensive in Banbury or on a battlefield in Bosnia. What matters is that children are able to recognise themselves.’

‘
Identify
, you mean,’ I put in.

You don’t bring irony – even steamroller irony – to a symposium on the role of children’s literature. You bring innocence or you’re a dead man.

‘Yes,’ Heston agreed. ‘Learn to see themselves in foreign situations.’

‘Or to see themselves differently in only too familiar ones,’ Sally added.

‘But isn’t the whole point of reading,’ I asked, ‘to take you far away from what you know about yourself already, to send the mind out on a wonderful journey of discovery? Shouldn’t a child’s imagination be fed by all that’s alien to it?’

(Maternal spit-roasting in Wilmslow, for instance.)

‘Fantasy, you mean,’ Heston said, laughing horribly. ‘The very quality you decry.’

‘I think he has you there,’ the author of
Fetch, Fetch
said.

And that’s when you know you definitely are a dead man – when someone says ‘he has you there’, no matter that the little bastard doesn’t have you here, there or anywhere else.

The audience applauded his knockout blow and threw their heads back with spiteful laughter, showing me their scarlet throats. Another enemy of the child sent packing with a bloody nose. Had I rolled off the platform they’d have gathered round and kicked my brains out.

And left them for Fetch to fetch.

33

Read Me, Read Me, Fuck Me, Fuck Me

‘So
you’re
Poppy Eisenhower,’ Francis said, taking her hand.

‘What’s with the
so
?’ Vanessa asked.

What’s with the
you’re
? I wondered.

They kissed. Francis and Vanessa, I mean. They had always got along well. For Francis, Vanessa was a means of relating to me without the strain of having to relate to me, and for Vanessa, Francis was the opportunity to do something similar. They gave each other a holiday from the person without whom they would not have known, or had any need to know, each other. They flirted, is another way of describing the manner in which they got along. So Vanessa could, without intending much by it, charge Francis with taking too great an interest in her mother. But I was still alarmed. I didn’t want Francis, in his excitement, to show how much he knew.

‘
So
as in
so
why haven’t I met her before,’ Francis said.

‘Because I want to keep you to myself,’ Vanessa said.

The women joined us at our table.

‘I promise you I had no idea you were going to be here,’ Vanessa hissed at me. She felt that finding me here put her in the wrong, and so blamed me for it.

I told her it was all right. We had finished talking business. And it was nice to see her out with her mother for the first time in many months. Indeed, nice to see her mother after such a long sequestration in the country.

Poppy greeted me with just sufficient affability not to arouse suspicion. Francis’s company appeared to intoxicate her, which reminded Vanessa, lowering her voice – ‘No,
Maman
, you promised, remember. Not at lunchtime.’

‘Oh!’ Poppy waved her daughter’s fussiness away and accepted Francis’s suggestion of a mojito.

They’d been out shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch together.

‘Buying T-shirts or ogling young men with bare chests?’ I asked.

Francis didn’t pick up the allusion. ‘It’s a shop at the Royal Academy end of Savile Row,’ I informed him, pointing to the soft-porn carrier bags the women had pushed under the table. ‘It’s for tourists, the gullible, and women of a certain age willing to queue for hours to get a look at pretty boys with their tops off.’

Jeffrey, I was thinking.

‘Sounds good to me,’ Francis laughed.

‘What’s this “women of a certain age”?’ Poppy wanted to know.

‘Don’t rise to him,
Maman
,’ Vanessa said. ‘He’s just jealous.’

‘Of pretty boys with hairless chests?’

Jeffrey.

‘Of the business they do. There were no queues outside Wilhelmina’s that I remember.’

I saw a queue. Where? In my mind’s eye, Horatio. In my mind’s eye I saw my wife and her mother queuing to be let into Jeffrey’s attentions.

Francis wanted to see what they’d bought. There followed some horseplay with leggings and skimpy knit tanks and camis, Francis saying, now to my wife, now to her mother, that he wouldn’t mind seeing her in
that
.

‘Hold that one up to yourself. God, yes, I can see why you bought it. Now you, Poppy.’

I eyed the three of them narrowly. Francis beside himself. Vanessa holding up a striped Henley top to go with a little floral skirt. Poppy a rose-covered sundress with cross-back straps, dancing her shoulders behind it like a girl.

Were the two women capable of wooing a man so to speak in tandem? Were they able to flirt as a team? Foolish question. Capability didn’t enter into it. Flirting as a team was what they did. It was their thing. It was, now I came to think of it, what they’d done in the course of wooing me.

A dreadful thought descended on me: what if I was the only man out there who
hadn’t
enjoyed them in concert?

‘So how do you spend your days?’ Francis asked, looking Poppy in the eye.

I was interested to hear the answer. My mother-in-law had not returned to the bosom of her loving family as she’d originally promised she would. She had stayed in Shipton-under-Wychwood. She came up to see Vanessa frequently, so that they could go shopping or to a concert on each other’s arm, and Vanessa regularly visited her, or
said
she visited her, but our hot little unspoken pact of togetherness was broken. I saw her rarely, and on my own had seen her only on two further occasions after the day of the murderous symposium on children’s literature – one comment-worthy, one not.

How did she spend her days? ‘Oh, doing this and that,’ she answered, already halfway to being drunk.

‘
This
being?’

‘Gardening.’

‘And
that
being?’

‘More gardening.’

‘No cello?’

I glared at Francis.

Poppy glared at me.

Vanessa glared at Poppy.

Francis smiled at us all.

‘Music’s fucked,’ I said.

‘How do you reckon that is?’ Francis wanted to know.

‘He thinks everything’s fucked,’ Vanessa said.

I mouthed the words ‘You included and I know by whom’ at her.

I saw Poppy trying to lip-read. ‘And you,’ I’d have added had I dared.

‘He thinks everything’s fucked,’ Vanessa went on, ‘because the world suits him that way. A fucked world explains Guido to Guido.’

‘Who’s Guido?’ Francis asked.

‘It’s my wife’s pet name for me,’ I told him.

‘That’s nice. Do you have a pet name for her?’

‘Two-timing bitch of a whore,’ I said. But the words came out as ‘Vee’.

‘And you?’ he asked, turning to Poppy.

‘Do I have a pet name for my son-in-law?’

‘No, do they have a pet name for you?’

‘Popsicle.’

Vanessa and I had never been more together. ‘We do
not
call you that.’

‘My second husband called me Popsicle.’

‘Mr Eisenhower?’