too late. Because that’s normal too, a child’s fear that his parents will murder him. And if they didn’t, someone else would. Hitler maybe. Or some terrible maniac hiding out in my clothes cupboard. Or lying under my bed with a bayonet. Right through the mattress. Oh God. It was so terrible. And so real. I could almost feel the cold, steely tip coming through the sheet. But I never told anyone. Never.’
‘I wonder if children are that stoic today? Not to tell anyone their worse fears.’
‘Mine are pretty brave. I can’t tell if they’re bluffing or not, though. Weren’t you ever afraid like that, Judith?’
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I was a real coward. But it’s funny looking back. Do you know what it was that frightened me most about childhood?’
‘What?’
‘That it would never end.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was frightened, but it wasn’t so much the shadows in the cupboard that scared me. It was the terrible, terrible suffocating sameness of it all. It’s true. I remember lying in bed trembling, but what I heard was the awful and relentless monotony. The furnace switching off and on in the basement. Amos and Andy. Or the kettle steaming in the kitchen. Even the sound of my parents turning the pages of the newspaper in the living room while we were supposed to be going to sleep. My mother’s little cough, so genteel. The flush of the toilet through the wall before they went to bed. And other things. The way my mother always hung the pillowcases on the clothesline with the open end up, leaving just a little gap so the air could blow inside them. With a clothes peg in her mouth when she did it, always the same. It frightened me.’
‘I always thought there was something to be said for stability in childhood.’
‘I suppose there is,’ I agreed. ‘But I always hoped, or rather I think I actually knew, that there was another world out there and that someday I would walk away and live in it. But the long, long childhood nearly unhinged me. Take the floor tiles in our kitchen at home. I can tell you exactly the pattern of our floor in Scarborough, and it was a complicated pattern too. Blue squares with a yellow fleck, alternating in diagonal stair-steps with yellow squares with brown flecks. And I can tell you exactly the type of flowers on my bedspread when I was six and exactly what my dotted swiss curtains looked like when I was twelve. And the royal blue velvet tiebacks. It was so vivid, so present. That’s what I was afraid of. All those details. And their claim on me.’
‘And when you finally did get away from it into the other life, Judith – was it all you thought it would be?’ She was driving carefully, concentrating on the road which was getting slippery under the new snow.
I tried to shape an answer, a real answer, but I couldn’t. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said with a hint of dismissal. ‘The trouble is that when you’re a child you can sense something beyond the details. Or at least you hope there’s something.’
‘And now?’ she prompted me.
‘And now,’ I said, ‘I hardly ever think about the kind of life I want to live.’
‘Why not?’
‘I suppose I’m just too preoccupied with living it. Much less introspective. And one thing about writing biography is that you tend to focus less on your own life. But I think of Richard and Meredith sometimes, and wonder if they’re taking it all in.’
‘The pattern on the kitchen floor?’
‘Yes. All of it. And I wonder if they’re waiting for it to be over.’
‘Maybe it’s all a big gyp,’ Nancy said. ‘Maybe the whole thing is a big gyp the way Simone de Beauvoir says at the end of her autobiography. Life is a gyp.’
I nodded. It was warm in the car and I felt agreeable and sleepy. My legs and back ached pleasantly, and I thought that the snow blowing across the highway looked lovely in the last of the afternoon light. The motor hummed and the windshield wipers made gay little grabs at the snow.
‘It can’t all be a gyp,’ I told her. ‘It’s too big. It can’t be.’
And we left it at that.
‘Judith.’ Martin called to me one evening after dinner. ‘Come quick. See who’s being interviewed on television.’
I dropped the saucepan I was scraping and peeled off my rubber gloves. Probably Eric Kierans, I thought. He is my favourite politician with his sluggish good sense so exquisitely smothered in rare and perfect modesty. Or it might be Malcolm Muggeridge who, nimble-tongued, year after year, poured out a black oil stream of delicious hauteur.
But it was neither; it was Furlong Eberhardt being interviewed about his new book.
I sank down on the sofa between Martin and Meredith and stared at Furlong. We were tuned to a local channel, and this was a relaxed and informal chat. The young woman who was interviewing him was elegantly low-key in a soft shirtdress and possessed of a chuckly throatiness such as I had always desired for myself.
‘Mr Eberhardt–’ she began.
‘My friends always call me by my first name,’ he beamed at her, but she scurried past him with her next question.
‘Perhaps you could tell our viewers who haven’t yet read Graven Images a little about how you came upon the idea for it.’
Furlong leaned back, his face open with amusement, and spread his arms hopelessly. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that’s a perfectly impossible question to ask a writer. How and where he gets his ideas.’
Smiling even harder than before, she refused to be put down. ‘Of course, I know every writer has his own private source of imagination, but Graven Images, of all your books, tells such an extraordinary story that we thought you might want to tell us a little about how the idea for the book came to you.’
Furlong laughed. He drew back his head and laughed aloud, though not without kindness.
The interviewer waited patiently, leaning forward slightly, her hands in a hard knot.
‘All I can tell you,’ he said, composing himself and assuming his academic posture, ‘is that a writer’s sources are never simple. Always composite. The idea for Graven Images came to me in pieces. True, I may have had one generous burst of inspiration, for which I can only thank whichever deity it is who presides over creative imagination. But the rest came with less ease, torn daily out of the flesh as it were.’
‘I see,’ the interviewer said somewhat coldly, for plainly she felt he was toying with her. ‘But Mr Eberhardt, this new novel seems to have an increased vigour. A new immediacy.’ She had recaptured her lead and was pinning him down.
Furlong turned directly into the camera and was caught in a flattering close-up, the model of furrowed thoughtfulness. ‘You may be right,’ he nodded in response. ‘You just may be right. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t have thought I was exactly washed up as a writer before Graven Images.’
‘If I may quote one of the critics, Mr Eberhardt –’
‘Furlong. Please,’ he pleaded.
‘Furlong.
