of darkness together, as Jimmie sometimes expressed it, they actually lived apart. Whatever the merits of this arrangement, at times like the present he was more strongly aware of its drawbacks. He doubted if Louise ever felt like that. When the subject of literal cohabitation came up, which it seldom did now, she was liable to say something like she wanted to keep her independence. He had given up wondering what she meant by that and had never asked her how many other chaps she was keeping her independence from.
This apparent tolerance testified not to self-confidence but to unwillingness to imperil their present arrangement, which at times unlike the present suited him well enough. He asked himself occasionally whether he was suited to live with any woman at all. He had so lived in the past, up to and including the point of being married for nearly six years, not counting the interval between his wife’s departure and their divorce. She had departed with a man who worked in a government office on something to do with pensions and who, according to report, was three or four inches shorter and substantially younger than he. These factors had not enhanced Gordon’s self-esteem. His wife had once accused him of not knowing how to help a woman to feel pleased with life or even how to have a good time himself, and quite often and more succinctly of being hopeless. Perhaps he just had a low sex-drive. It was true, to be sure, that he thought or at any rate talked about sex less than his mates seemed to.
An internal twinge smartly followed by an eructation reminded him of the unpleasant wine he had earlier drunk and so of its provider. Someone had told him that Jimmie Fane was one of the most money-conscious buggers in London, but had not reckoned on a demonstration of this quality at his own table. Gordon wished more than ever that he had managed to get a glimpse of the label on that bottle of red. Moving now towards the corner where he kept his typewriter, he thought of what Jimmie’s wife had intimated about the financial dangers of taking him out to lunch, but then she had probably been talking for effect, to impress him with how wild and free and not to be thought of as stuffy and middle-aged she was. However, discussing Jimmie with her was bound to have its points of interest.
Now, by the window that overlooked the gloomy suburban park, he put a sheet of inferior paper into his typewriter and got to work on roughing out his curriculum vie-tee for Jimmie. Experience led him to resist the impulse to get it over in one go and try for a fair copy straight off. Wincing with boredom, then, and x-ing out every other phrase, he set down the facts of his London birth, his sound but beyond all question non-posh schooling, his minimally creditable, non-Oxbridge college course and ‘good’ final grading. None of this, he felt, would impress or even interest any sentient being but it had to be there in its entirety. Couple of years’ drudgery as sub-editor on Barnsley Echo or equivalent before lucky breakthrough to features desk, with special reference to culture, on London daily. Slow and limited ascent to books section on Sunday newspaper. Principal articles. Contributions to publications, to collections. First man to land on Mars 1995, on Titan 1996. The last entry would not survive retyping, but had been necessary to set down in order to ward off terminal coma. Something did that job, anyway, though far from having shown the least sign of private amusement he looked a little guilty at sinking into facetiousness, and hastily x-ed out the offending space fiction with the shift-key down.
Soon he was retyping. A word-processor would have been quicker and the result perhaps more imposing, but Gordon had not got one of his own. Too expensive, he would say, and he had a sort of access to a machine in the office provided he had a good enough story and could persuade the editor’s secretary to let him use it. And this time there was the consideration that Jimmie would probably have learnt to tell apart a processor print-out and something run up on the old steam typewriter and, needless to say, would not have approved of anything in the former category. At the moment it was very likely not needful to say that he would have had no corresponding bias in favour of the latter. Having biases in favour of things, Gordon already suspected, was not something Jimmie was noted for, a trying characteristic in a biographee.
Challenged by somebody like Louise, Gordon would probably have stuck to self-interest, enlightened where possible, as by far his leading motive in writing about Jimmie. But in his mind he would freely admit that he hoped the result would do something more than advance his own career. He had not lied when he said earlier that he had recently reread The Escaped Prisoner, at least on the understanding that by ‘reread’ was meant something like ‘read through to the end with some respect having several years ago looked at the thing and found it intolerably complacent.’ The fuller text captured a youthful observation that the book was silent on critical issues like racial equality and equal rights for women. Well, that was roughly how he saw the matter in retrospect.
His transcription done, Gordon read through the page he had filled, trying to see what was there as a record of events and actions as well as a mere piece of typing with possible errors. Quite soon he stopped reading it and just checked it for literals. As a narrative of the better part of a lifetime it was undeniably thin, lacking in uplift. He now saw without difficulty that his original instinct had been right, and his personal history would not have been improved by including in it mention of the novel of his that had been rejected by fourteen publishers, even less of its successor that remained in rough draft if anywhere outside the mind of God. After some attempted clairvoyance, he pencilled a few words across the top of the sheet and got it ready for the post.
Having done so he felt committed to something, small as it might have been, and about time too.
The day came when Gordon was to take Jimmie Fane out to lunch. The morning of it he filled in at the offices of the Sunday newspaper he worked for. These had once been majestically sited in the area of Fleet Street, but rising costs had compelled a series of moves into humbler quarters, ending for the moment in a dockland semi-wilderness. The building was reachable, or nearly, by a water-bus service that was slow and uncomfortable but at least different from that of the ordinary land bus with its route through miles of houses in silent-screen disrepair apparently occupied by remnants of a dwarfish aboriginal race. Both alternatives had the quality of always seeming a little worse to experience than to remember. This time it was the water-bus that Gordon swore he would never use again. The weather was wet and he had to plod across a kind of mudflat between disembarking and reaching shelter.
‘Nice of you to condescend to drop in on us,’ said the books editor. Originally he had not much wanted to be books editor, but the then editorial editor, the Editor in fact, had not wanted him to be anything else. ‘We appreciate immeasurably being spared some of your attention.’ This man was now nearing sixty and called Desmond O’Leary, though he gave no other sign whatever of having to do with Ireland or any of its inhabitants, past and present. ‘Everybody here understands that you have weightier calls on your time.’ Whatever his origins, O’Leary looked like a kind of bird or lizard above the neck, having no hair at all to be seen on his head, though he was very ready with the assurance that he was like an ape everywhere else. ‘All that we lesser mortals would beg from you in the foreseeable future is a thousand words on this latest piece of New England farmhouse guff, a round-up of female black American guff with some latitude as to space and, let’s see, no, yes, whither the docudrama as seen on TV and film and what, if anything, is literary truth.’ O’Leary laid bare and lit a smallish cigar of rectangular cross-section.’ Actually all I need from you more or less straight away is your next column piece and a word with Harry about our coverage of the Codex Prize. It looks like Latin America’s turn this time round, much to my personal mortification. How did your lunch with JRP Fane go?’
‘It’s today.’
‘Look, Gordon, when it comes to picking up the bill, mind you don’t –’
‘It’s come to that already and I’m picking it up. He virtually made it a condition of coming out at all.’
‘Oh did he? Clearly his hand has lost none of its cunning. Aristocratic sort of old
