Fictional Lives Read online

  *

  A month later Tina Courtland received a letter from her publisher.

  She had driven into the village herself one morning—Maisie, whose task and pleasure it normally was to buy the paper, had a headache—and decided, once there, to pass by the post office, to see if there was any mail. She hadn’t really been expecting any—she never did—and was surprised therefore when the plain pleasant girl behind the counter handed her an envelope with her name on. She was even more surprised when, having thanked the girl, she went out into the street, and started reading:

  Dear Tina,

  It has been a long time. I hope you and Maisie are well. Here things are very much as usual. I am writing because I have a proposal to put to you.

  I expect you have heard that Joseph Brandon was killed in a car crash a few weeks ago. Naturally we were all very shocked, and literary considerations aside, it was a great personal loss to me.

  Anyway, I have decided—both because we were his publishers for the last twenty-five years, and because it is needed—to commission a biography of him. I have discussed the matter with Margaret, his widow—she has all his personal papers, along with a number of unpublished stories etc.—and she is all in favour, on one condition.

  Now Tina, I know you have written nothing for the last eight years, and swore, when you left London, that you would never write anything again. I am hoping to persuade you to change your mind. Because Margaret Brandon was quite categorical in stating that you were the only person she would trust to undertake the job, and said that Joe himself had often told her that if anything happened to him, if you weren’t around—or weren’t willing—to ‘do’ him, then no one else was to, and his papers were to be destroyed.

  Of course I realize you only met Brandon once, and could not consider yourself a friend, or even an acquaintance. And you have apparently never met Margaret. But I cannot forget that he was the only colleague of yours you had any respect for, that you did write some remarkable pieces on him in the past for the New York Review and the TLS, and that you both, to a remarkable degree, had similar backgrounds. Both expatriate Americans, both raised as Catholics, and both from the South. (Yet neither of you ‘Southern’ or ‘Catholic’ writers.) Added to which—as must be obvious—you were the only fellow writer whom Brandon himself admired; and indeed only three months ago he asked me if I had heard from you, and said that your stopping writing had always seemed a tragedy to him.

  So—what do you think? I realize that if you accept this commission it will involve your coming to London, and possibly returning to the States; neither of which is likely to please you. Nevertheless, I would beg you to give the matter your most serious consideration. For (apart from the fact that Margaret seems quite serious in her intention to destroy the papers if you don’t accept) I am convinced that only you could do full justice to Joe Brandon—and even more convinced that only you, while doing full justice to him, could write a book that is, if you’ll excuse the expression, a work of art in its own right.

  I look forward to hearing from you. My best regards to Maisie and yourself, As ever, Christopher.

  Tina’s first reaction, once she had finished this—and once she had recovered from her surprise—was, of course, to dismiss the idea as preposterous, and forget all about it. She write a biography indeed! Her second reaction however—that came to her as she strode through the narrow streets back to the car—was that she should discuss the matter with Maisie. For while she was naturally tempted to act on impulse, and justify that impulse later, Maisie was not only far more cautious, but also, she had come to believe over the last eight years, of rather sounder judgement than herself.

  Not, in this case, that she doubted what her friend would say.

  *

  She was wrong though. Maisie, that evening, advised acceptance.

  ‘It’ll do you good to get away,’ she said. ‘You’ve been cooped up here too long.’

  They were sitting in their small book-lined living room; and Tina felt tears come into her eyes.

  ‘I can’t possibly leave,’ she protested. ‘Apart from anything else, who would take care of everything?’

  ‘Who do you think?’ Maisie smiled. ‘I’m quite capable, you know.’

  ‘Yes, of course I know. Only—’

  Only she didn’t like to admit it. One of the understandings of their life together was that she, so tall and square, with her crop of blonde hair, was the strong one, the one who looked after the physical side of things; while quiet, pale, sandy-coloured Maisie, who was ten years her senior, who didn’t like to go out in the summer because of the insects, and who spent most of her life behind netting, was good only for buying newspapers, doing accounts, and—at a pinch—feeding cats and dogs. This did overlook the fact that Maisie had spent twenty years of her life working as a doctor in the slums of Bombay, whereas until they had moved here Tina Courtland had never done anything more practical than buy cut flowers and lift a pen to paper. But somehow—

  ‘And it’s not as if we don’t have help here, or that you’d be away for long. You’d only have to go to London for a couple of months probably. Talk to the wife and friends, make copies of any letters or papers you think are relevant. Then you can come back here and work in peace.’

  ‘But I don’t want to work. I’ve said all I have to say, between us we’re all right for money, and anyway, I don’t like London.’

  ‘You do. You’ve just convinced yourself you don’t. Besides,’ Maisie added, ‘you should do it because you envied Brandon.’

  ‘I did not.’

  Maisie smiled, and picked up the book she’d been reading.

  ‘I didn’t, really,’ Tina insisted. And she hadn’t, she told herself. She had simply believed that he was the one man who seemed capable of writing something that wasn’t totally false, that wasn’t totally compromised, and had thought that if her belief were correct—if someone, anyone could write a book that wasn’t untrue—then it might have been possible for her to continue writing. But she had also thought that her belief probably wasn’t correct; just that she was incapable of detecting the fundamental dishonesty of Brandon’s work.

  ‘Well anyway,’ Maisie murmured after a while, ‘I still think you should do it. I mean I know it’ll be difficult for you. But if the man did trouble you, you should try to find out why. Even if he’s dead now.’ She looked up. ‘You never know, you might suddenly find you want to write another novel yourself.’

  ‘Never,’ Tina said firmly, getting to her feet. But she sounded firmer than she felt. For she had to admit that, as so often, Maisie did have a point. Brandon had troubled her; and if she could only find that dishonesty in him she was sure must exist, there would be no danger that, in another five or ten years, she would repent of her decision to have abandoned her career. While if she didn’t find it, or didn’t even look for it, though she had felt so triumphant when she had heard the news of his death, that danger would always exist.

  It would be appalling, she thought, as she went over to the window and gazed, through the June evening, over her fruit trees and vines, if she ever did come to repent of all this; repent of her having more or less forced Maisie to give up her job; repent of their having moved to Italy (that also had been her idea); repent of their not having stayed on in London, she locked up in her study, and Maisie working at the hospital, doing her research into tropical medicine.

  ‘But how,’ she asked plaintively—and it was to be her last word on the subject that evening—‘will I be able to face it?’

  ‘Oh Tina,’ Maisie laughed quietly from her book, ‘I told you. You don’t dislike the outside world as much as you’ve convinced yourself you do. And you’re just as capable of facing life in London as I am of watering the plants, cooking, and making sure Giovanni does whatever it is he does. After all,’ she concluded, ‘you faced it for long enough, and you were quite successful at it.’

  *

  Yes, Tina thought, six weeks later in England: tha
t was so. But it was in the past. Whereas today, sitting in the office Christopher had put at her disposal, looking down at Long Acre, and watching the cars and people move along the street, she really wasn’t sure if she could face it any longer. It was all so ugly, so squalid, so tedious…. Not that she had anything against London in particular; in fact it had always been her favourite city, as far as cities went. But to think that this was reckoned one of the centres of civilization! Oh certainly the majority of those people walking down there did the best they could, and she didn’t for a minute imagine she was in any way superior to them. After all—as Maisie had said—she herself, until eight years ago, had been one of them, and had been hailed as a success by them, and by the city—the world—in which they lived. As, on their terms, she had been. But—what terms! She had only done it, she thought, in order to be able to dismiss success; to be able to know, having tasted the fruit, that she didn’t like its flavour. And now, now that she did know, to have come back! To have abandoned her refuge up on that Italian hill. To have returned to face not just the fact that, however loathe she was to admit it, her being there depended on all this being here, but also, and worse, the fact that ugly, squalid and tedious though she did find it, it was undoubtedly far better, in terms of justice and freedom and health, than it had ever been. She had been mad!

  But it was all, she allowed herself to whisper, as she continued to gaze from the window, the fault of men….

  She hated men with a passion that she knew was unreasonable—for apart from anything else she was doubtful that if women ruled and always had ruled the world, things would be so very different—and with a passion that she generally tried to keep in check. But at times—and this was one of them—she had, if she weren’t to explode, to indulge herself. And so, for the next fifteen minutes now, she allowed herself to be swept away by her feelings of revulsion. Her revulsion for the way men looked, her revulsion for the way men smelled, her revulsion for the attitudes of men, and above all, her revulsion for the world that they had made. Because it was all very well to tell herself that women might not have done a better job, but the point was they had never had a chance to. And who knows if she might not be wrong. If, if women had made the rules, this whole planet might not have been an infinitely kinder, fairer, and more beautiful place….

  At the end of fifteen minutes, however, her fever started to abate; and after another five minutes she even went so far as to dwell on the possibility that this flare-up of her condition had been caused not by any sudden realization of how much she despised men and the world that they had made (after all, she had known that for forty years), but, at this particular moment, by the sudden realization that so far she had found nothing, absolutely nothing, to hold against Joseph Brandon.

  She had been here for a week, and had already spoken, in interviews that had been arranged for her by Christopher, to most of Brandon’s friends and colleagues in London. She had read through as many letters, both from him and to him, as she and Christopher had been able to lay their hands on. She had read two early unpublished novels, and four short stories, that Margaret Brandon had sent round. And she had read the proofs of a book of memoirs about growing up in the South that Brandon had finished shortly before his death. (A book that, taken in conjunction with her memories of growing up in the South, she had decided made it unnecessary for her to return to Alabama.) Yet from all this material there had, so far, emerged only the portrait of a man that matched in almost every detail the image she had formed of him when she had met him that one time years and years ago—on his very first day in London, in fact.

  The image of a large, bear-like, good-humoured man, unpretentious, extraordinarily intelligent, and radiating what she could only think of as an overwhelming integrity. A man whose love of life was all the more genuine for his being aware of the horrors of life.

  Yet there had to be some detail she had overlooked. There had to be, she told herself as she sat there at her desk. Because if it were possible to continue living in this world (and, incidentally, writing books) without being dishonest, she might indeed repent of her decision to retire.

  Oh, she thought, she should have trusted her instinct when she had received Christopher’s letter. She should have dismissed the idea as preposterous, never have mentioned the matter to Maisie, and clung to her belief that she just wasn’t capable of seeing through Joseph Brandon. For really if she didn’t manage to see through him now, knock him, as it were, down, there would be no alternative for her but to return to the world, and to resume her career. And she didn’t want to. She was happy in Italy, growing her vegetables and making her own wine. She was happy up there on her hill with Maisie, and—but was Maisie happy, she suddenly wondered. Gould Maisie have persuaded her to do this book because she hoped it would cause them to return to London? Did she miss the city and the theatres, the music and their friends? No, she told herself. No, it wasn’t possible, and of course Maisie was happy. If she hadn’t been she would have said so. Maisie was not one to suffer in silence. No—she had simply believed, as she had said, that it would be good for her friend to get away, for her to write one more book to make sure she didn’t regret her having given up everything, and for her to lay, once and for all, the ghost of Joseph Brandon; that ghost who threatened to drag her back into the world.

  What Maisie hadn’t presumably foreseen was that that ghost could not be laid; and that it would go on beckoning and beckoning, whispering ‘there is a way’, until Tina Courtland followed….

  Still, she told herself finally, she did have one more chance. She hadn’t, yet, met Margaret Brandon—who had been away in the country since she had arrived, and with whom she had an appointment tomorrow morning. Perhaps Margaret Brandon would tell her something she hadn’t known; tell her that thing she wanted to know. Perhaps Margaret Brandon would provide her with the means to exorcise her devil….

  *

  What kind of means she wasn’t certain, and really, when she went to Chester Street at eleven o’clock next day, she held no great hopes that this last and most important interview would help her any more than the others had. But a minute after she had been let into the house, and was talking to the woman, her spirits started to rise at last. Not because she believed, having met her, that Mrs Brandon would tell her anything she didn’t already know, but because she immediately felt that the woman herself might be the clue she had been searching for.

  She was all wrong. Wrong, according to Tina, in a general way, and wrong, especially, as the wife of Joseph Brandon. She didn’t fit into the portrait, as it had been painted so far, in any way. Tina had heard that she had been a dancer before she had married the writer, and was the daughter of an English father, who had been a diplomat, and an Austrian mother. She had been expecting someone bright, practical, perhaps not too intelligent, with a few rather carelessly worn remnants of a former prettiness. What she was confronted with was a bleak, freezingly beautiful woman in her late forties, who seemed to have just stepped out of the pages of some fashion magazine. She had blonde hair that was cut with elaborate simplicity. She had a face that was as stretched and painted as a canvas. She had a body that was slim as a seventeen-year-old girl’s. And she wore a beige silk dress, beige high-heeled shoes, and a single gold chain around her neck that were almost parodies of elegance. As a dummy she would have been wonderful; as a person she was terrifying. There was nothing natural about her; nothing. Not the way she spoke—in a low, soft, expressionless voice—not the way she moved—as if performing in a drawing-room comedy—not even the way she looked; with eyes that, instead of noting, with amusement or disdain, the contrast between herself and the tall, broad-shouldered, blue-trousered and blue-shirted woman facing her, gazed emptily into space. She was the sort of woman whom Tina always wanted to grab and shake until she fell to bits; or whom she wanted to grab and kiss, until the man-made façade collapsed, and revealed a woman who, precisely because she was so man-made, was in the most profound despair, and was only long
ing to be released from the hell in which she lived. But though, once or twice, when she had been younger, she had done just this (and on one occasion actually had released, as she liked to think, the woman within) now she was too old or too tired to contemplate such a move. And so, having taken note of her desire, she simply concentrated on the task in hand; which was first to try to understand how, knowing what she knew of him, and of his work, a man like Joseph Brandon could have married a creature like this; and second, to try to see the way she could use Margaret Brandon as a pin with which to bore through the castle wall of her late husband’s impregnability.

  She concentrated for an hour, which was as long as the interview lasted. She concentrated while Margaret Brandon offered her coffee, while Margaret Brandon, in her expressionless voice, said all the things that everyone else had said about Joseph Brandon—that he was a man of great integrity and good humour, that he was a man who believed (though he never said so as such; he disliked making grand statements) that art alone could tell the truth about the world, could reconcile man to the miseries of existence, and reveal to man the wonders of existence, and that he was a man who believed that the great, the only important thing was to live—and she concentrated while Margaret Brandon took her to the study where her husband had worked, and showed her round the house. (Which, so shocked had Tina been before, she had hardly noticed till now; but which, when she did take it in, shocked her almost as much as its mistress, to which it was, in its way, similar. A beige, beautifully furnished, very elegant and utterly lifeless place that wouldn’t do at all as a background to the image she had already formed of Joseph Brandon). But concentrate though she did, feel steadily more certain though she did that Mrs Brandon was the proof of something rotten in the writer, and feel correspondingly ever more relieved that she had at last found some proof, by the time she left the house she had still neither understood, nor seen in what way she could make use of her finding.