Fictional Lives Read online

  Andrew thought of Fraser, waiting in San Francisco. Of his oldest and closest friend. He felt sick. ‘If you do go back you won’t fall. You’ll save him. He’ll be able to cling to you, and you’ll be able to hold him. You’re the first person who ever could. You’d be happy together.’

  Lucinda gave what sounded like a brief, sad laugh.

  She said: ‘Do you think it’s possible to love two people?’

  ‘Yes—and no. Not really. Not—’

  ‘No, nor do I. But—I do love you. And I could love him.’

  After a moment Andrew whispered, his eyes still closed, ‘It’s a form of blackmail.’

  ‘No it’s not. If I did go back it wouldn’t be because I wanted to save his life. It would be because I wanted to love him, and to live with him, and be happy with him.’

  ‘If I asked you to go, if I—sent you back—would you go? If I told you I didn’t love you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe, if I believed you. But—I don’t know.’

  ‘I wouldn’t die if you left me. I would be unhappy—desperate—whatever—for a year. Two years. Five years. I would regret your going always. But I wouldn’t kill myself. I couldn’t. I love life too much. I love England too much.’ He paused. ‘I want to travel too much.’

  ‘I know.’

  Another minute of silence, then: ‘Why did you come? You didn’t know me. Our love was just a fantasy. A story we’d both made up. Why didn’t you just stay, and write me that you weren’t coming. You owed me nothing. You had a chance of certain happiness, and you threw it over for—a doubtful dream.’

  ‘The dream’s come true.’

  ‘Has it?’ Andrew murmured miserably, and opened his eyes.

  Eyes which Lucinda must have sensed were open; for she raised her head, and met them.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it has.’ She turned and looked across the low-beamed, Indian-carpeted room, which was bright and hazy with the late afternoon sun. ‘Do you really want to know why I came? Because if I had stayed with Fraser we would have settled down in some small house together—near here probably—which we would never have left again, and all my energy would have gone on trying to hold Fraser up.’

  ‘But if you were happy?’

  Lucinda sighed. ‘Oh happiness, love,’ she said wearily. ‘I wanted to travel, like you. That’s why I came.’ She gave a tiny, rueful smile; the smile she had given when they had first seen each other, at the airport. ‘I always used to tell myself when I was small that I was hungry for life.’ She shrugged, and looked once more at Andrew. ‘I think maybe I’m greedy.’

  She waited, then, for him to speak; when he didn’t she continued so softly he could hardly hear her. ‘So are you. That’s why you won’t send me away. Though you’d like to, and think you ought to. But you won’t. You want the whole world. So you can know. So you can tell the whole truth. So you can write better stories, and feel you’re doing your bit for humanity—striking a blow for life. And you will write better stories. And Fraser,’ she concluded, ‘will die.’

  She was no longer beautiful, Andrew thought; she was, as Fraser had said in his letter, magnificent. She was also, he thought—as Fraser perhaps had meant—terrible. She was as terrible, in her way, as he was….

  They sat staring across the table for almost five minutes, without saying another word. At the end of that time they stood up, and put their arms around each other.

  ‘I’ll write the letter for you if you like,’ Andrew whispered.

  Lucinda drew back for a second, as if she wanted to study him, and see for the last time something she would never see again. Then she held him more tightly than ever; and said ‘Yes, and I’ll sign it.’

  *

  Two weeks later, feeling slightly apprehensive, they left London for New York; the first step of a journey that was to take them, they had decided, round the world. They had also decided to leave sooner than originally planned, in order to be out of the country before any news from California could arrive. Either from Fraser, telling them he was going north, and sending them his blessing; or from a paper, telling them—something else….

  Yet though they were slightly apprehensive about this trip they had embarked on, there was, attendant upon their departure, a sense of anticlimax. As if they both knew that they were bound for disappointment; or as if the whole undertaking were somehow superfluous.

  Which, Andrew supposed, as he watched England disappear beneath the clouds, it was. For even if, as he prayed, the news from California were not bad, he couldn’t help feeling that he and Lucinda had already travelled far enough; and certainly much farther than any plane could take them.

  The Modern Master

  FROM THE NOVEMBER afternoon outside, he turned to a final contemplation of his life.

  He started—reading between the lines, and making a summary in his head—at the beginning.

  Walter Drake was born in a big old house in the south of England, the youngest child of a fifty-five-year-old banker father, and of a perpetually hurried, perpetually hurrying forty-five-year-old mother. He was, as his parents told him jokingly when he was small, and accusingly as he grew bigger, a mistake. The youngest of his four brothers and sisters was seventeen years older than him.

  Some people accept their mistakes; Mr and Mrs Drake could not. They tried; but for the father the unexpected son was an item on the balance-sheet that didn’t and couldn’t be made to tally; for the hurrying mother he was an obstacle placed in her path; and she tripped. They did their best for him, naturally, and brought him up to have a great respect—too great a respect—for the traditional virtues; God, the monarchy, and the City. But they never felt, nor could make him feel, that he was a natural member of the family. While, therefore, his brothers and sisters were large, loud, hearty creatures, given unreflectingly to tweeds, jolly laughter, and sports of various kinds, he became a grave quiet boy, with the manners of an old man, and a fondness for books about happy children.

  He wasn’t, however, an unhappy child himself. First, because from the earliest age he somehow understood and sympathized with his parents’ feelings towards him; once, on his sixth birthday, he actually apologized to them for the inconvenience his coming had caused. (His father said ‘Good heavens, it wasn’t your fault’; his mother, wearily, ‘That’s all right, dear.’) Second because he liked his parents; they were both, in the final analysis, good-natured; and if they didn’t precisely mean well, they did well enough. And third, and most important, he was happy because while he felt something of an outcast in his own family, and perhaps neither loved nor was loved by his mother or father, he did love, and believed he was loved by, nature. He had a passion for trees and birds, for clouds and hills, that gave him a sense of security, a sense of mutual belonging, that was so intense he never confessed it to anyone, for fear of being told he was silly, or presumptuous. He would spend hours at a time gazing at a single branch, learning its form, taking in its texture, and feeling that as he was part of it, so it was part of him. He would lie on his back in the grass, looking up at the sky, and could be white and billowing, grey and threatening, or just clear and bright and blue, at will. He could fly with swallows, croak with frogs, run through fields with rabbits. What was more, swallows, frogs and rabbits could become, if they wished, a solemn, fair-haired little English boy.

  The only part of nature he had difficulty identifying with was the human race.

  Inevitably, perhaps, given his background, the excessive conservatism that was drummed into him as a child—all that was old, and fixed, was good—or the fact that he did feel closer to nature than to his parents, he lost, at a comparatively early age, that respect for authority which had been so pronounced till then. The version of reality which those closest had imposed upon him was ultimately too far removed from his own young view of things.

  The actual occasion for this loss of faith was—he was always, in later years, to be sure—a fairly trivial incident that occurred when he was eleven; though it didn�
�t seem trivial at the time.

  He was lying in bed in the dormitory of the school to which his parents had sent him, waiting for the headmaster to pass, as he did every night, and wish him, and the three other boys in the room, a good night. This particular evening, however, when the tall, red-cheeked, beak-nosed man opened the door, he didn’t say what he normally said, or do what he normally did. Instead, he came into the large chilly dormitory, sat down on the edge of Walter’s bed, and murmured, obscurely, ‘Well, Drake, what do you have to say for yourself?’

  Walter, who had nothing to say for himself, blushed, and felt the beginnings of panic.

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘I saw you, you know.’

  Saw him do what? Talking to a flower? Becoming a squirrel? Doing something else he shouldn’t have done? Walter didn’t know; and unable to reply, blushed deeper.

  ‘You’ve started young, I must say.’

  Walter looked round the room, at the other boys. They seemed as uncomprehending, and apprehensive, as he was.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he managed to stammer.

  The headmaster leaned forward. He had thick black hair in his nostrils and ears; and his cheeks were purple, not red.

  ‘No? Well, what were you doing in the garden this afternoon?’

  That was it then. It was a sin to love nature as he did.

  ‘Nothing, sir,’ he whispered, as tears came into his eyes.

  ‘Nothing? You were doing nothing, with my daughter? But I saw you.’

  With the man’s daughter. Ah, Walter thought…. The tall thin woman lived near his eldest brother. She had been visiting her father for the day. She had seen Walter, and having met him a couple of times when he was staying with his brother, had stopped him to ask how he was.

  ‘I—’

  ‘You what? You were making proposals to her, I’ll be bound.’

  Walter shivered. He didn’t know what all this was about; but he did know that the headmaster’s breath smelled stale, and that his teeth were stained.

  ‘What sort of proposals?’

  ‘Ah, you tell me.’

  ‘I—I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, think,’ the man suddenly roared. ‘What sort of proposals do boys generally make to girls?’

  Walter’s panic became terror; he started to cry openly. Apart from anything else, the headmaster’s daughter wasn’t a girl, and hadn’t been one for years. She was a thin, nervous woman….

  ‘I don’t know,’ he repeated.

  ‘You don’t know! He doesn’t know!’ (This to the other boys.) ‘Don’t talk nonsense. Of course you know. I expect you made some filthy suggestions.’

  Walter pressed back against his pillow, and started shaking his head from side to side. This was a nightmare he was having.

  ‘You probably told her you wanted to feel inside her blouse.’

  Stop it, the boy wanted to shout. But he just shook his head harder, and felt the tears now spout from his eyes.

  ‘You probably told her you wanted to put your hand up her skirt.’

  Stop it—

  ‘Or you wanted to go into the bushes with her—’

  Stop it—

  ‘Kiss her—’

  Stop it—

  ‘Take your trousers down—’

  Stop it—

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  Stop it—

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  Stop it—

  ‘Answer me!’

  ‘No,’ Walter screeched, his voice high and hysterical. ‘No,’ he sobbed. ‘Stop it stop it stop it.’

  ‘Stop it? Stop it? Who do you think you’re talking to?’

  But Walter could say no more; and shaking, out of control, feeling he were being sucked down into a loathsome bog, he simply waited for some blow to fall on him; some physical attack from this purple-faced madman with his stinking breath.

  No blow fell however. For the headmaster suddenly looked around the room, made a strange, choking sound, gave a stranger smile, and, standing up, said hoarsely to the other boys ‘Well, he didn’t take it too badly, did he?’

  Walter’s school-fellows stared.

  The man looked back at Walter. ‘I was only teasing, you know. I wanted to see if you could take a joke. A chap’s got to be able to take a joke, you know.’

  Walter didn’t speak. He couldn’t have if he’d wanted to, and he didn’t want to. It had all been a joke….

  Except it hadn’t been, and the boy continued to cry for another half hour; long after the headmaster had said good-night, and had turned out the light.

  When he stopped crying he told himself that he would never trust that man again. Furthermore, he came to think over the next year or two, since headmasters were in league with fathers, politicians, judges and bishops—were part of a brotherhood that decided what was true; a brotherhood of the old, and so-called wise—he would never trust any of them again. Neither them, nor their truths.

  He didn’t; and as a result it was perhaps even more inevitable that sooner or later (it happened in fact when he was sixteen) he should go all the way, and lose his faith in the ultimate fount of truth: God. Though this final loss of faith was not occasioned by any particular incident; merely by his inability, when he had thought about it long and hard, and when he had looked at the world about him, to see any evidence whatsoever for the existence of a deity.

  ‘Even if there were proof,’ he told a friend, ‘I wouldn’t want anything to do with Him.’

  Yet if the taking of the step was undramatic, the results of it, for a while, were less so. For Walter had been brought up to believe that the entire structure of civilization was built upon the foundation of God. To have questioned that structure—and, by now, found it wanting—was one thing; but to see the foundation disappear as well was almost too much. It made the boy feel shattered; feel that the earth had slipped away beneath his feet; that he were falling into space.

  For four years he reeled through life, trying to find something to hold on to. Finding nothing—though devoting all his energy to the search—he led, at least outwardly, the same existence he would have led if he had lost nothing. That is, he finished school, went up to Oxford, and spent most of his free time taking walks in the country, and studying wildlife.

  At the end of four years, however, he pulled himself together, and lost his fear of falling. Or rather, he stopped falling; and saw that essentially his loss of faith was irrelevant. For aside from the fact, of which he became fairly certain, that civilizations would have grown and developed even without gods, he realized that if he had lost his faith in the accepted, the authorized version of reality—in the stories that men invented to make the world bearable (and, incidentally, to bolster the authority of fathers, headmasters, and politicians)—he had in no way lost his faith in the reality of the natural world. Indeed, he reasoned, that was the only reality; and men’s actions could only be explained in terms of it.

  Having pulled himself together, he began to wonder what he was going to do with his future.

  It took him several more years to find an answer to this question; and during these years he abruptly left Oxford (deciding that it was merely a pulpit from which the brotherhood he more and more rejected preached), travelled as widely as he could, and supported himself by doing a variety of jobs.

  Then, at the age of twenty-six, he was ready.

  Since people liked fictions, he would, he told himself, become a novelist. He would write books that, hopefully, challenged the very notion of fiction; of what was true, and what was not. Books that suggested, if only by implication, that were people to question their own reality, they would be less likely to become victims of their own, or other people’s, dreams. And—most optimistically—books that proclaimed that if only people would see themselves as an integral part of a vast whole—of the natural world—without in any way being special, or particular, they would not only be happier, but would also make that world a finer place to live in. (Why people
saw themselves as somehow set above and apart from the natural world, and why they had invented gods, was, he maintained, because man alone of all animals was conscious of his own death; and was afraid of it. It was that fear which caused him to seek the eternal, the immutable; it was that fear which caused him to retreat into greed and cruelty, egoism and falsity; and it was that fear which, by making him embrace the dead and cold, did set him apart from the natural world.)

  Having made his decision, and having only added, to himself, that all mankind, and each individual, could be divided into wiseman and fool—the wiseman being he who did view himself as merely a part of the whole, who realized that any hurt he did to his fellow man, or to the world around him, was a hurt to himself, and who chose, consciously, his own reality; the fool being he who thought man entire in himself, who believed that he had to dominate the world, his fellows and himself, and who led, as it were, the life that others had written for him—he got down to work, and embarked upon his career.

  That it was the right career he felt certain after he had finished his first book. For he sensed that by writing it, by—as he perceived it—denying himself, and offering himself as an instrument upon which the world could play (his beliefs being just the strings of that instrument), he had managed at last to become one not only with trees and animals, but also with his fellow men. He was no longer the youngest son, the mistake; he was indeed a part of the whole.

  Over the next twenty years he devoted his life to his work, turning out a novel a year, and—in his constant striving to become ever more integrated, in his constant desire to reject, as far as he could, the illusions which destroyed other men (to reject, in other words, the part of himself that was a fool)—attempted to eliminate everything that was not work, or work connected, from his daily routine. He had to make compromises of course—for instance, he distrusted possessions, and thought the longing for possessions foolish; yet knowing he needed peace and security in order to write well, he accepted the small legacy his father left him, and bought a house, set in a large overgrown garden, in West London—but at least when he did so he was aware they were compromises; and worked all the harder afterwards to compensate for them.