PRUNELLA LAING
Wasn’t it Virginia Woolf who said there’s nothing quite so pleasing as a successful party? Someone like her anyway. The marquees were down by ten, the caterers had cleared up in the wee small hours and the lorry’s just come to take away the Portaloos – didn’t seem much demand for them, I must say. I picked some roses, put them in a vase and took them into Brodie’s study. He was on the phone: I heard him say, yes, thank you so much, goodbye and he put the phone down rather quickly. Who was that, I asked? Lizz Sundry saying thank you for a lovely party, he said, nice enough person but she does go on a bit. I put the flowers on his desk. He took my hand and said thank you for everything, darling, he kissed my fingers and said let’s go off for a few days, let’s go somewhere mad – Cape Town, Buenos Aires, Hawaii – get away from horrible old England. I didn’t know what to say and I think he was a bit hurt that I didn’t respond with wild enthusiasm immediately. It was an odd moment, not really like Brodie at all. I walked out into the garden and wandered around. I looked at the bruised, flattened grass where the marquees had been, the cigarette ends in the borders, the deep holes made by the stanchions of the Portaloos, and the mess where someone had clearly fallen into my choisya bush. But it was a wonderful party and everything would have been perfect apart from Hugh Seeger. Not a nice man, I think. Brodie was pleased, that’s the main thing.
TIM SUNDRY
Lizz didn’t surface until lunch: eyes like cherries and her face both puffy and slumped with misery. We sat in the kitchen over beer and bread and cheese like a couple in a Sickert painting steeped in our boredom and resentment. Then I told her: I don’t know what he did to you but, if it’s any consolation, I knocked Hugh Seeger flat on his arse. Cleaned his clock. Bunch of fives. Punched his lights out. I showed her the cut on my knuckle, now rather angry and inflamed. She stared at me: why would you hit Hugh? Because you told me he had hurt you in some way, for God’s sake – grabbed you, made a pass at you, tried to ravish you. I didn’t say any such thing, you insane lunatic, she said. I kept calm, did not point out the redundant adjective, took a sip of my beer. I repeated our exchange of the night before word for word, as we had stood by the rhododendrons. You were weeping, distraught, I said, I asked you what had happened to you, who had done this to you and you said ‘Hugh.’ The look of utter incredulity and then disgust that crossed her face was rather disturbing. She stood up and walked to the kitchen door. What’s wrong, I asked, a bit too plaintively. ‘No I didn’t. I said “You.” ’ she spoke both emphatically and softly, ‘You, you, you.’ Then she left. Ah. Right. A blunder – a simple error. Who was it who said: ‘Disillusion is mankind’s natural and happiest state’? I heard her crying in the bedroom as I came into the study to write this down. Now I’ve just heard the front door slam.
Part II
* * *
The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth
One …
Bethany can’t take much more of Bob Dylan. Her boyfriend, Sholto, listens endlessly to Dylan tracks while simultaneously watching twenty-four-hour rolling news – Sky News or CNN or BBC News 24 – with the sound turned completely down. He flicks between these silent channels looking for footage of unspooling news events. He seems to have every track Dylan ever released, and bootleg also, tracks that he plays at just-above-tolerable volume – the music score to his mute images of large and small wars, sporting triumphs or humiliations, press conferences, celebrity appearances and natural disaster after natural disaster. He claims it is an endlessly variable, unique, 365-day movie, a new art form that he has invented, available to anyone with a source of music and a television. The contrast between random image and random Bob Dylan is completely mind-blowing, he says, interminably stimulating, tragic or uplifting, funny or surreal, 24/7, as long as there is documentary footage and Dylan’s accompanying soundtrack: all you need are these free images, free music and a vaguely attentive brain.
A little goes a long way, Bethany thinks, as she pulls on her coat and leaves the reverberating flat – Sholto is watching scenes of cows in a blizzard in the north of England to the sounds of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. It’s cold outside and a thin sleety rain is falling. She walks fast to her usual sushi bar in Meard Street and orders the scallop sushi and the tuna sashimi and a glass of Thames water. She eats sushi all year round, even in winter: no cholesterol in rice and the otherworldly, spooky taste of raw fish somehow kills the urge for anything else.
There is a young English girl wearing a kind of black forage cap working with the other Japanese chefs in the luminous steel kitchen. She is severe and unsmiling with dense, dark eyebrows. Suddenly, Bethany sees her future: she too will become a sushi chef and prepare beautiful, clean, healthy food and open a sushi bar in London.
After her lunch as she leaves the restaurant she sees the English girl-chef on a cigarette break huddling out of the drizzle in the meagre shelter of the back door. Bethany takes out a cigarette and asks her for a light. They smoke and talk. How long does it take to become a sushi chef? There’s a two-year apprenticeship, the girl-with-the-eyebrows says.
‘Cool,’ Bethany says. ‘Do you have to go to Japan?’
‘If you’re serious about it.’
Even better, Bethany thinks, pondering her new life in Tokyo. It would be warm in Tokyo, wouldn’t it?, she considers, liking the idea of some city-warmth.
‘What exactly do you have to do?’ she asks.
‘Well,’ the girl-chef says, ‘for the first two years all you do is watch.’
‘Watch?’
‘Yes, you simply stand and watch a sushi master at work and then, after two years of watching, they give you a knife and let you begin to cut fish.’
Bethany goes back to the flat.
‘Bloody freezing outside,’ she calls, noticing that Sholto has moved off the sofa on to the floor. He’s watching images of Bangladeshi air-force personnel pushing sacks of rice out of a hovering helicopter to swarming flood victims below. He doesn’t reply. Bob Dylan is singing ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’.
Two …
Bethany crosses Piccadilly and enters the park, sensing the palpable chest-filling inhalation of pleasure that she always experiences as she leaves the noisy and noisome city behind and confronts the neat, contained, leafy landscape in front of her, the clipped, undulating grass and the great shifting masses of the crowded plane trees stretching all the way up to Hyde Park Corner. She walks down towards the ‘bullring’ trying to resist the temptation of smoking her one lunchtime cigarette immediately. Work then reward, she says to herself. Stick then carrot.
The bullring is a wide circle of tarmac at the east end of the park with a lamp post in the middle and four equidistant benches on the rim facing inward, as if marking the quadrants on a compass. She was sitting on the north-west bench with Sholto when he told her their relationship was over and that he was going travelling – to Namibia, to Laos and Alaska, he said – alone. She stands by the lamp post now, feeling the Sholto vibrations in the bullring very strongly today – sometimes they’re good; sometimes they’re overwhelming and make her cry. She selects the south-west bench and takes her notebook out of her bag.
When Bethany dropped out of college (English and American Literature) and then failed to find a place at drama school (there were six annoyingly unsuccessful auditions) she decided that there was nothing for it but to become a novelist instead. She realized that she’d need a job to subsidize her novel-writing and reluctantly asked her mother to help. Bethany knows her mother can achieve almost anything she’s asked – given a little time. Consequently, Bethany now works in a small narrow shop in the Royal Arcade called Pergamena that sells antique pens and parchment paper. The shop’s owner (who has some mysterious connection with Bethany’s mother), Mrs Donatella Brazzi, pops in from time to time and spends many hours on the phone in the tiny back office talking loudly to her family in Italy. Sometimes three days can go by without a single customer crossing the threshold. Still, Bethany reasons, sh
e is earning money and she has plenty of time to think about her novel.
Bethany writes her novel in the park during her one-hour lunch break – weather permitting – as she finds being outdoors more inspiring and of course the memory of her and Sholto’s last, anguished exchange makes the bullring one of the special places in her personal geography, a trig point on her autobiographical map. Green Park will resonate for her all her life, she realizes, even when she’s an old lady she will think of this park, the bullring’s wide circle of tarmac with its central lamp post and that innocuous wooden bench in a unique, unforgettable way.
Bethany smokes her lunchtime cigarette – early, guiltily – waiting for inspiration. The day is sunny and breezy with a few chunky white clouds passing swiftly overhead. She sees that the old man is at his bench as usual, in his beret and tweed coat, his notebook open on his knee, his head cocked as if he’s scenting the air itself. Hardly a day goes by without her seeing this old man. One rain-lashed Saturday, as she was hurrying to a coffee shop, splashing through puddles, she spotted him from Piccadilly, sitting in the bullring with an umbrella above his head.
She opens her notebook, pausing at the title page: ‘QUEEN OF A SMALL COUNTRY – a novel by Bethany Mellmoth’. She always relishes the frisson these simple words give her. It makes everything seem real, a wish fulfilled.
Meredith Crowe is the central character in Queen of a Small Country. She is approximately Bethany’s age and the novel charts the minor nervous breakdown she is experiencing following her break-up with her boyfriend – Mungo, Cosmo, Aldo (the name keeps changing). Aldo and Meredith separated, with acrimony and tears on both sides, in Green Park one evening, Aldo confessing he was returning to a former love, a childhood sweetheart.
In her misery Meredith haunts the park, finding it impossible to stay away and – to console herself – in her imagination she transforms the place into a small central London kingdom of which she is the benign ruler. Meredith knows every feature of her realm’s few acres, knows its highways and monuments (the war memorials, the decorative fountain), its two wooden snack bars, its leafy avenues, its gentle hills and dales, its various portals (grand or merely practical) and its small well-tended copses. The park attendants, in their olive and Lincoln green livery, are her loyal retainers. She happily tolerates and licenses the safe passage of foreigners, as they wander to and fro across her territory, opening her borders at 5 a.m. and closing them firmly at midnight. She bows her head in quiet acknowledgement as the Scarab Sweepers rasp by, their revolving brushes dutifully scouring her roadways, and she wonders if, one day, her neighbour, the other queen of a larger country, in her palace across Constitution Hill, will come and pay her a visit.
Bethany is pleased with the start she has made to her novel: the scene is set – the park and its dream-life in Queen Meredith’s head are well established, precisely recorded – and the context for Meredith’s delusions and burgeoning emotional crisis is clear … She’s just not sure what exactly is going to happen next.
The next Monday Bethany takes her seat on the Sholto bench and opens her novel. It’s warm: a hot, still day. Tourists and office workers are spread out on the grass, prone and supine, sunbathing, reading, picnicking. She hears the regular flat thump of drums as the soldiers march up The Mall towards the palace for the changing of the guard. Perhaps Meredith should meet a soldier, she wonders, and take him for a lost prince …
She notices that the old man is not in his usual seat but she almost immediately spots him in the grove – a circle of a dozen or so ancient plane trees planted opposite the bullring across the main thoroughfare that runs down the east side of the park. He is standing in the central clearing looking intently up at the leaves as if he’s seen something trapped there. He makes a note.
‘Could I trouble you for a light?’
Bethany looks up, momentarily lost in her plot. Meredith Crowe has just spotted Aldo in a group of tourists, has run up to him, slapped his face and caused shock and offence to a perfect stranger.
The old man stands there, an unlit cigarette in a stubby holder between his thin fingers. Bethany fishes in her bag and hands him a book of matches.
‘May I?’ he says, sitting down, lighting his cigarette and taking a theatrical puff and, as he exhales, flexing his arm, holding his cigarette holder away from him and then studying intently the way his exhaled smoke is dispersed by the slight breeze. He takes out his notebook and jots something down. He has a seamed, gaunt face and his white hair is long at the back, resting on his collar.
‘I notice you’re always writing,’ he says and Bethany tells him about her novel.
‘How extraordinary,’ he says. ‘I’m a novelist as well. Yves Hill.’ He holds out his hand ‘Y, V, E, S – French. Yves.’
They shake hands – his grip is firm – and Bethany introduces herself, intrigued to meet another writer for the first time in her life.
‘What novels have you written?’ she asks.
‘Oh, a good few,’ he says. He mentions some names: ‘The Parsley Tree, Oblong, A Voice Crying, The Astonished Soul, Trembling Needle …’ He tails off. ‘Almost impossible to find these days. All out of print. You’d need to go to one of the better antiquarian booksellers.’ He looks at her with sympathy. ‘It’s a difficult trade, being a novelist, making a modest living. Very much the long haul.’
Now that she and Yves Hill have introduced themselves they often smoke a cigarette and chat for a while at the end of Bethany’s lunch break. Yves Hill smokes a pungent French cigarette called Gitanes. Beneath his overcoat he wears a suit and a shirt and tie. The suits are shiny with use and sport many small, neat repairs. One day he asks her how old she thinks he is.
Bethany looks at him. ‘I don’t know. Sixty?’
‘I’m eighty-seven,’ he says with a discreetly triumphant smile.
‘You don’t look eighty-seven,’ she says. Spontaneously, she tells him about Sholto and their break-up, and why she comes to the park to write.
‘Let me give you some advice,’ Yves Hill says. ‘I’ve been married four times and have had many, let’s say, amorous liaisons. When a lover or a wife leaves me I concentrate on a habit they had that I found tiresome. Sadness and self-pity are soon replaced with relief.’
Bethany thinks about Sholto and his many annoying habits. She chooses the fact that he watched television all day with the sound off and music playing as perhaps the most irritating. But then she also found the way he was constantly fiddling with his thick hair – raking it with his fingers, pushing it about to form clumps and tufts, dragging it here and there – was almost intolerable. He whistled, also: she can’t abide people who whistle.
Bethany finds that this self-generated, virtual irritation with Sholto is working. Even though she hasn’t seen him for weeks she realizes she’s increasingly annoyed with him, like a persistent itch that no amount of scratching can dispel. The unfortunate literary side-effect is that Meredith Crowe is also ceasing to pine for Aldo and, without that narrative motor, Queen of a Small Country is not going smoothly any more. She asks Yves Hill what she should do.
‘Something totally surprising and unforeseen,’ Yves Hill says, confidently, at once. ‘That’s what I did when I ran out of steam or ideas. Something out of the blue.’ He thinks for a while. ‘Queen Meredith gets run over by a Scarab Sweeper and has a leg amputated … Or a plane crashes in the park – dozens killed and mutilated.’ He smiles. ‘You’ll find you’ll be off and running again, no trouble at all.’
She considers this, somewhat sceptically, and to change the subject asks Yves Hill if he is writing a novel.
‘No, no,’ he says. ‘It’s a work of non-fiction. A little monograph, you might say. It’ll be my last book but I suspect it will make my name.’
Bethany lies alone in her bed in her flat at night trying to convince herself that she’s glad Sholto has gone, that she’s thankful the caper and flicker of light from the permanently-on mute television is no longer visible in t
he gap beneath the door that leads to the sitting room. Yves Hill asked her why Sholto had decided on Namibia as his destination and she had told him that it was as a result of watching the silent images of a documentary on Namibia that Sholto had seen on television while simultaneously listening to The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. ‘A very bad lie,’ Yves Hill had said, sternly. ‘I’ll wager he’s not yet left the country.’ This idea both upsets and angers Bethany: the thought that Sholto could still be in the country, still in England, pretending to be abroad … She tries to move her mind away from this topic, thinking of something surprising that could happen to Meredith Crowe, something to kick-start her novel, stalled for more than a week now on page 43.
The next day the newspapers announce a bona-fide heatwave. London swelters, London melts. In Green Park the lunchtime tourists and sunbathers seem stupefied by the sheer weight of the heat, flattened and immobile. Bethany and Yves Hill sit on their bench smoking.