does it really matter? The fact is I have nothing to lose. The awful truth is I have nothing.
1st September, London.
So back to the beginning and my first meeting with her, the upstairs sitting-room at the Royal College and Edwina Frye the last of the short-listed candidates. I can still feel the pleasure of that hour, my anxiety over the biography briefly forgotten. And I was anxious. A biography of my life and the life barely half over, with no guarantee that my work would proceed from the promise it displayed to the eminence to which I aspired. I’d expressed my doubts to the College members, but they’d brushed them aside. They knew where I was going and wanted to go with me. Still I remained unconvinced. I was a gastroenterologist, a bowel specialist, surely people would prefer to read about a brain surgeon or an eye man. But that was the point, my colleagues said. With the dramatic increase in the incidence of bowel disease it was important to break down old taboos, and the best way to do it, so they believed, was to use the human interest angle. Cynthia was thrilled, my mother saw it as incontrovertible proof of a future Nobel Prize, while I, and I’m not a superstitious man, believed a mid-life biography to be courting fate. In the end, it was not vanity that decided me, although that wasn’t irrelevant, I thought I knew where I was going too, but would never be so foolish as to reject the company of my colleagues.
Still I was uneasy. Many people have ended their lives in shameful obscurity after displaying early promise. Surely it was wiser, I said to Edwina when I knew her better, for a biography to be delayed until death has rounded off a life, when there can be no doubt that the whole life is worth documenting. Look at Linus Pauling, I remember saying, a marvellous mind warped by the sunny promises of vitamin C. And the thalidomide man, McBride, brilliant to begin with and later charged with fraud. And Harry Bailey, championed for his deep-sleep therapy only to be disgraced when he was not much older than I. She said my focus was wrong, that the problem lay less with early promise than a long life. A premature death works wonders for fame, she said. Look at the romantic poets — Keats, Shelley, Byron, all dead in their prime, and who knows if they would have gone the same way as Wordsworth or Coleridge.
Which way was that? I asked.
She curled her lip and eyed the ground. Down, she said, definitely down. And then — I remember every touch of hers — she reached out and took my hand: That won’t happen to you, Alexander.
So sympathetic, so seductive, yet she probably already despised me.
On that Saturday when first we met, I’d spent the afternoon interviewing the short-listed candidates. All were experienced biographers, all would have done a creditable job. So, why did I select Edwina? She was young but not so young, her past work was impressive, she’d never experienced any bowel problems, and she was stunning to look at. These were my reasons and I’m not ashamed of them. We’d be spending a lot of time together and I didn’t want to be saddled with a biographer with a batch of medical complaints, nor could I see any reason to choose someone ugly if there was an attractive alternative.
I had moved to the small upstairs sitting-room for her interview, a favourite of mine at the College. Rich and leathery, comfortable and established, it represented everything my own background lacked yet seemed entirely appropriate for the man I hoped I had become. I sat in one of the wing-back chairs, while she occupied a smaller, straight-backed seat. I remember she looked down on me, but I felt calm and in control so it didn’t matter. Although I recall being briefly fazed by one of her early comments. She looked around at the wood panelling, the heavy-framed portraits, the dark leather, the magnificent carpet. Such a masculine space, she said, and I was immediately on the alert. The last thing I wanted was a ball-breaking feminist writing my life. Then I decided that given her appearance, if she were a feminist it was of the benign kind, and I knew I could cope with that.
She was dressed in black and white — short skirt, fitted blouse, cropped jacket. Fashionable clothes with a whiff of raunchiness. She wore bright lipstick, which I like in a woman, but otherwise no make-up. The face and the wild red hair were gorgeous. So, too, the body, large-breasted and all curves, and so luxurious compared with the thin, muscular figures favoured by most of the women I knew. I’ve never been particularly attracted to redheads nor large blowzy women, but when Edwina entered the room she struck me as quintessentially feminine.
That first interview was the only occasion in the whole of our acquaintance when our roles were reversed. Not that I didn’t encourage her in the following months to talk about herself, but she remained very guarded about her own life while she blasted her way through mine. On that first day, she answered my questions with an openness and a professionalism that impressed me. She described herself as a factual biographer, one who left the conjecture to others. Being a factual man myself, this appealed to me. I asked if she had a special interest in medicine. Her response was delightfully blunt. Her last subject, she said, required a knowledge of alternative religion, the one before steel, and the one before that retailing. For you, she said, I’ll hone up on the bowel.
I wanted no complications. It was to be my life in the firing line, my life as fodder for dinner party gossip and dissection at medical meetings, my life squeezed by fresh-skinned ambitious fingers and poked by older more envious ones. Would anyone be interested in the truth? Would anyone judge me on my merits? Or would my colleagues simply peer at me through the pall of their own failed ambitions and use the biography to settle old disappointments? I worried, too, about those closest to me, Cynthia, the girls, my mother. Edwina’s practical approach was reassuring. I offered her the job on the spot, and within forty-eight hours she had accepted.
There were no other stirrings at our first meeting, I’d remember if there were. Memory, so careless with pleasure, has an affinity for pain. Not physical pain, any doctor can testify to that, but psychological discomfort. Any man who has lived life to the full knows what I mean. In twenty-five years of marriage I’ve not been entirely faithful. I’ve been faithful to the marriage, but not always to Cynthia. Nothing too significant nor long-lasting, but other women I’ve enjoyed and at times been reluctant to leave. The pleasure of these affairs is now vague, but the acrimonious leave-takings are etched in memory. And no, there was never any guilt, my marriage was solid and I’m sure Cynthia suspected nothing.
Although I’m not so sure now. I used to be certain of everything, but Edwina changed that. Perhaps Cynthia did know about the other women and hid her distress, perhaps she knew and didn’t care, perhaps she had indiscretions of her own. The man who said knowledge is power must have lived in an ivory tower with only books and the sound of his own voice for company. Knowledge is torment. Before Edwina, I knew enough to lead a satisfying and successful life; after her, I know too much for satisfaction and too little for wisdom.
I hate this confusion. My days are clogged with it and my nights are cluttered with her. Flashes of Edwina standing, seated, arguing, gesticulating, wet with sex, high on power. And a recurring image: a stream of mercury in a blackened landscape, a mysterious silver dream, hypnotic and compelling, which cannot be grasped. And I know it’s deadly. Even while I stretch out my arms and plunge my fingers into the stream, I know it is deadly.
I curse the day she entered my life. I want my old life back. I want Cynthia, I want my daughters, I want my work, I want to be happy.
What claim do you have on happiness? Edwina once asked.
The same as the next person, I wanted to reply. But by then I’d seen the stream of mercury and kept my thoughts to myself.
So what was the pleasure with her? Running on empty as I was, I never stopped to think. You are driven, on edge, you have to keep going. But I’ve stopped now, and the questions, the blame too, are relentless. They’re kicking the man when he’s down, they’re mocking the man weakened by conscience. I told you so, I told you so, but you wouldn’t listen — a cruel voice and it never stops, and the fact that it’s mine just makes it worse.
