Fictional Lives Read online

  This mixture of distrust and fascination coloured not only the way he thought; it had also given shape to his career. (And thereby had become, to a large degree, the central feature of his existence.)

  He was a writer. He was successful. He was happy to be both a writer and successful, and his stories were always, essentially, the same. (Partly because having found a recipe that was popular he saw no reason to change the dish he served; and partly because however many times he did serve it, and regardless of the fact that it was popular, he still liked it himself.) They were always set in the English countryside, were always peopled by characters who were products of that countryside—who had, after generations, come to resemble the fields and hills that surrounded them, the trees that protected them, the winds that blew upon them—and always, in one way or another, described how these characters were affected—invariably disastrously—by the arrival in their midst of a foreigner. (Only once had there been a ‘happy ending’, but it hadn’t really been convincing, and the book had been the least successful, in critical and popular opinion alike, of all his works.) They were, in short, gentle rustic tragedies; and they pretended to be nothing more.

  Yet though he was happy with his career, and with his life as a writer, he wasn’t entirely satisfied by either. Two things in particular troubled him.

  The first—and less serious—source of dissatisfaction was the fact that his books were sometimes accused of encouraging racial prejudice; or prejudice of all kinds. It was a charge he refuted utterly—he believed he helped to explain the causes of prejudice; a necessary pre-requisite if it were to be stamped out—but it did, nevertheless, hurt.

  The second thing that troubled him was, however, a graver concern; and it was that he had never, not even for a day trip to Calais, been abroad. And while he longed to—to see the vile portrait first hand, to experience the sensation of being a foreigner himself, and to push back the boundaries of his consciousness (and thereby give his work a greater scope?)—he was afraid. He didn’t, ridiculous though he knew it was, dare to leave his beloved island. Not, at any rate, alone. And so far he had never met anyone with whom he could have travelled who would have been both protective, but would also have stood aside and allowed him to feel the full heat of the flames upon his face. What he wanted was a Virgil who would lead him through Hell—but a Virgil who would only hold his hand, and not try to stand between the fires of Hell and the vision of Andrew Stairs. Someone, in other words, who would not interpret, explain, or otherwise attempt to be a medium.

  His wife, in the fifteen years of their marriage, had often volunteered to be such a guide, and tried to convince him that she could give him both support and freedom. But he had always had to refuse. For so similar were they in outlook he wouldn’t have been able to help seeing things through her eyes most of the time. Furthermore, though she went abroad herself occasionally and always returned unscathed, he didn’t want her to be exposed to any danger; as, he was sure, she would have been exposed if she had gone with him. Because once in a while she might have seen things through his eyes; and seen, in spite of her previous travels, what she had never seen before. Seen, that is, too much.

  His being so troubled, his longing so much to go abroad, and his searching, if only in the back of his mind, for some ideal travelling companion, were probably the reasons why, having opened that letter with its foreign—US—stamp, and having read it two or three times, he did something he had seldom done before to a ‘fan’ letter coming, as they sometimes came, from overseas. Which was reply to it.

  Though possibly it wasn’t for any of the above reasons that he took this unusual step, but just because it arrived on a bright sunny morning which happened to be the fourth of May; which also happened to be the second anniversary of Jill’s death. (She had been killed in a road accident; in a head-on collision with another car; driven, ironically, by another writer. A man whom Andrew detested. An American….) And thinking of her—and being charmed by the tone of his unknown correspondent; who was, he gathered, a twenty-three-year-old girl who had just graduated from Berkeley—he realized how very much he still missed his wife, how lonely he was, and how he should try, now, to put aside his mourning and form some new relationship.

  Not that he imagined for a moment—even if his motives for replying were that he was lonely, and that to continue mourning Jill was not only fruitless but wrong—that Lucinda Grey, as the Californian girl signed herself, would be the person with whom he would form a relationship. The idea of marrying or having any sort of rapport with a foreigner was inconceivable to him. How could creatures who were nurtured in different soils, and shaped by different winds, ever really have anything in common apart, perhaps, from a mutual dislike of their native soils and winds? They couldn’t; and dislike of one’s own land, of one’s own self (for to him the person was the country) was not a satisfactory basis for a relationship. One might just as well expect a cat to mate with a dog. Oh certainly they were both animals, both needed food and drink, both needed shelter and protection from the elements. But apart from that there was, frankly, nothing. (He would admit that there were exceptions to this general rule; but very few. Far fewer than most people would have claimed.)

  I am merely, he told himself, as he wrote his own letter, being polite. Responding to kindness with kindness. And accepting the notion that I must start being more sociable, meeting new people, putting out, however tentatively, feelers.

  He could tell himself what he liked; and did. Nevertheless, rendered defenceless by his very inability to imagine that Lucinda Grey could ever be anything other than unknown, and by his very conviction that feelers should be extended only in one’s own country, by September of that year the unthinkable had happened. Andrew Stairs had fallen in love.

  It was, he thought, as he stood in the small flat he had taken as a pied-à-terre in London (taken, two months before, ostensibly as part of his campaign to be more sociable, but actually because he had started to realize, alone in his cottage in Sussex, the danger he was in; and had thought London might save him from it) more than unthinkable. It was insane. He couldn’t be in love. Not with someone he had never met. Not with someone who hadn’t been born and bred in England. He couldn’t be.

  But he was.

  He wasn’t sure, even now, what had caused the collapse.

  That first letter had been charming, and inriguing; there had been a lightness about it, a lack of earnestness, and a pleasant touch of irony that would have been remarkable coming from a fifty-year-old. Coming as it did from a twenty-three-year-old, it was so remarkable that it bordered on—but did not cross the border of—archness. However, it had been nothing more than remarkable, and in the past he had, once or twice, received other remarkable letters; to which he had also replied. But that had been the end of the matter; and he hadn’t come even to like his correspondents, let alone to love them.

  He supposed the trouble had started with the second letter; that had been written and sent before his reply to the first had been received. Because whereas the first, while telling him very little of the writer, had been filled mainly with gentle, generally complimentary remarks about his books—together with one or two less complimentary remarks on his apparent racism—the second had hardly mentioned his work, and had been filled with casual chatter about the character and the day to day life of Lucinda Grey; as if Andrew Stairs were an old friend, and would be interested in such things. The wonder was—he was. He couldn’t help himself. Once more it was probably the tone of the piece more than the actual words which caught him. But he found himself fascinated by Lucinda’s passing comments on some new film she had seen, on the number of times she washed her hair, on the temporary work she was doing in a hospital while trying to decide what to do with her recently received degree in modern languages; and rivetted by the story of her family. Her mother, she said, had been a poor, sad, alcoholic little woman of Scottish descent, who had worked all her life as a waitress, and who had once—her brief moment o
f glory?—had an affair, or anyway gone to bed with, a wealthy, childless businessman. A baby—Lucinda herself—had been born as a result of this affair, and the businessman had set up a trust fund for the education of his daughter. Shortly after he had done so, he had had a stroke, and died; leaving the remainder of his money to some distant cousin. The result was that Lucinda had been educated at some of the most expensive if not the best schools in the States, had been, nevertheless, penniless throughout her youth, and had been given a rare insight into the worlds of the almost entirely dispossessed, and of the almost entirely possessing.

  Andrew didn’t necessarily believe this tale—it sounded to him a little too much like a fantasy; though whether of a rich girl or a poor girl he wasn’t certain—but he was enthralled nevertheless; and moved to write again himself. If only, he told himself, to comment on the parallels that Lucinda chose to see between his books and her own life. ‘I used to feel,’ she wrote, ‘that I was one of your “foreigners”; only doubly so. I was a foreigner in the moneyed world of my school-fellows, and came to hate their arrogance, their smugness, and above all their, in general, strange lack of vitality (as if they lived both figuratively and literally off the blood of others, were therefore both more dependent on others and more frightened of others than those others were on them and of them, and thought their best defence against such dependence and fear was an almost total retreat into passivity and the most rigid conformity); and I was a foreigner in the poor and mostly uneducated world of my mother and her few friends, and came to hate their submissiveness, their, deep-down, approval of the way things were and of their own misery, and above all their lack of rage. (If not against the world, at least against themselves.) What was more, what is more, again like one of your foreigners, whenever anyone “loved” me—my mother, two (so far) men—or even became friendly with me, I tended to confuse them, and bring disasters on them. (My mother virtually killed herself with drink; towards the end—she died five years ago—I’m convinced she realized why I used to get mad at her, wanted, or maybe tried to feel the rage I wished she would feel, but by then no longer had the strength; and the two men both destroyed themselves within a year of our meeting. One became a heroin addict; the other burned himself alive. They were both, before the relationship started, on the surface at least self-confident, intelligent boys of “good” families. My fault? No, theirs obviously; a part of them was already searching for foreignness. They found it in me; but they couldn’t cope with it when they did find it.)

  ‘Maybe I’m romanticising, trying to make myself more interesting than I am. If that is the case you can put it down to youth, or inexperience, or—whatever you like!’

  A passage from the third letter read: ‘You said you have never been abroad, want to, but are frightened. Maybe you should come to the States. I’ll be your guide!’

  From the fourth letter: ‘I’m tall and blond, since you ask; but I’m not going to send you a photograph. You can imagine me as you please, if you please.’

  From the fifth: ‘I’ve never felt that foreign countries are corrupt and barbarous. Though to be honest, in strictly political terms, in 96 per cent of cases I guess I do. Even your old island, with its monarchy, the empty, pompous (somehow lying) voices of your politicians and so-called upper classes, and the grey dispiriting lack of joy I’ve found in most Englishmen and women I’ve met, strikes me, who’s never been there!, as being in, and being, a pretty sorry state. (Notwithstanding the fact that we’re no slouches here when it comes to corruption and barbarity.) What I have felt, however, is that foreign countries are like different, so far unexplored, and possibly inaccessible areas of my self. My conscious self—my conscious reality, let’s say—is American. But behind that there are whole other continents, climates, mountains, deserts—whole other realities—that affect my conscious self, have gone to make up my conscious self (as if America were merely a crust that had formed on the surface of a pool), and are all part of my total being.

  ‘What I have also felt—and feel today more strongly than ever—is a great desire to visit, in my lifetime, as many of those other continents and climates as I can. Oh God, Andrew, you must think I am crazy—but I want to travel, travel, travel!’

  To this Andrew replied: ‘No, I don’t think you are crazy, but I do think you are wrong. I’ll agree that England is my conscious reality, as America is yours. But beyond that I won’t go. For I believe that outside of England everything is a dream; or must be considered, for the sake of order and sanity, a dream. (Just as a Frenchman must consider everything outside France a dream; and an Italian etc, etc.) One has to live in one’s own reality, and not be tempted by dreams. Or to use your image, one has to stay in the crust that has formed one, and which one helps to form. Because pools (and concepts such as “total beings”) are too vast, too deep; they are disturbed by treacherous currents; and one can drown in them.

  ‘Having said which—of course I am tempted by dreams, I should like to swim—and maybe, one day, I will take you up on your offer of showing me round the States.’

  It was soon after he had written this that Andrew became aware of the danger he was in; and abruptly leaving the cottage where he had lived uninterruptedly for the last seventeen years, took the furnished flat in London.

  Lucinda, in her next letter, wrote: ‘Seriously, why don’t you come?’ She also wrote, ‘Do you realize we have a rather strange relationship? I feel I know you better than anyone I have ever met in my life.’

  A month later: ‘I know this sounds stupid, but—I think I am in love with you.’

  For three weeks Andrew didn’t reply. Then, on the morning of 23 September, he could contain himself no longer; and in a state of excitement sent a telegram which read: ‘I think I am with you too.’

  But it wasn’t till that afternoon, as he stood in his flat in Queensgate, looking out of the window at the pale autumnal sky, that he told himself—having calmed down now—that what he had said in his telegram was true….

  He spent the next month attempting to find some solution to his problem. That there was a solution he didn’t doubt. There had to be. He might be in love with this mysterious Californian; she might be in love with him. But nothing could come of such a love. For if it did, it would involve one or other of them leaving their own country, and settling abroad. Which was out of the question for him; and which he could neither approve of for her, nor wish upon anyone he loved. So—

  At the end of October he wrote: ‘You realize our correspondence must come to an end; that the situation is impossible.’

  Lucinda’s reply was: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no reason for our correspondence to end. I don’t see why we can’t have an affair by mail.’

  ‘Because sooner or later we shall be tempted to meet—or rather will succumb to the temptation to meet.’

  ‘Well? It might be a good thing. We might hate each other if we actually met. And if you really are afraid of coming here, I can always come to England.’

  ‘You can’t. Because then you would be a foreigner.’

  ‘I was only proposing to visit you. Not move in, sight unseen. However, if everything were okay when we met, and if you really couldn’t face the idea of living with a foreigner (I wouldn’t mind living anywhere if I loved someone, I think), we could spend six months here, six months there. That way we would both be at home for half the year, and the other half would have to be the price to be paid for—well, happiness, or whatever you like to call it.’

  ‘I think it would be too high a price. It would ruin both of us.’

  ‘Oh Andrew—do you really think we are so very awful here?’

  ‘No, of course I don’t. But as I think I’ve said before, aside from the moral (and therefore, ultimately, physical?) danger of living abroad, of trying to live with, through one’s “total being” (sorry to keep throwing that phrase in your face; but by total being what I think you mean is the whole world, and the whole world is too big, at least for me; I can only co
pe with that little segment of it that is called England), I have always considered that one’s own country is like one’s own body. (Is one’s own body.) And if this is so, one must not only respect all parts of that body, and try to prevent any one part of it from dictating to, controlling, or abusing the other parts (for if you don’t those other parts will become infected and diseased, and will eventually destroy you), but one must also, I believe (though Christians may not approve, and I may sound unfortunately like some self-help manual), if one is ever to care for something and someone else—or even live in peace with something or someone eke—first care for, and live in peace with, one’s own body. What you are proposing is that we should both desert our own bodies for six months of the year. Which is treason. I can understand how people wish to desert their own bodies for a couple of weeks a year. But for six months? No, no, and no again! In more practical terms, I couldn’t bear to miss a spring here. Or a summer or an autumn. Or a winter. To see how the trees change colour, the birds migrate, the flowers bud, bloom, fade, die—and then bud again. To see how people change from day to day, how their expressions, their moods, their clothes alter with the weather, to see how they cope with crises, with national disasters, or national triumphs—with personal tragedies and personal joys. And above all I couldn’t bear to think that I wasn’t attempting, every single day of my life, and in my tiny, insignificant way—either by writing something, talking to a friend, merely giving someone a direction in the street—to make myself, though it may sound revoltingly priggish, better. And by making myself better, making my country better. Improving, if you like, if but minutely, the reality in which I live. There! I’ve never said so much to anyone, and I blush to so expose myself. But that is, essentially, what I believe, what I work for, what I want. And I could not, or cannot, consider renouncing any of it. It would, again, not be like renouncing my life—it would be renouncing my life.’