Six weeks later I went to pick up Louis from one of his guitar lessons (hey: what happened to those guitar lessons?) and we looked into a newsagent’s for a comic or a football magazine. The Daily Express had Delilah and me on its front page. I don’t often use the adverb wryly but that is how he said it:
— More bad publicity, Daddy?
— I don’t know. Maybe not.
Without acknowledgement I quoted his grandfather at him: on the correspondences between cruelty and sentimentality.
— They’ve only got two ways to go, I said. And I think they’ll be playing this one as a heartwarmer.
— Jesus. Still.
— I know.
Delilah was in a safe place, or at least a distant one, and would be away for three months. But then the Express sent their journalist after her — to Quito, Ecuador. Delilah cooperated (it was our policy, formulated by Patrick, to cooperate), and the subsequent article wore an indulgent smile. All the coverage was like that: it beamed fondly on us. No doubt it was Delilah’s youth — her manifest innocence and vulnerability — that softened the mood. I was very glad that they hadn’t tried to hurt her. But I sat through it all in the way that one tolerates (counting one’s immediate blessings) the tearful interlude of a notoriously violent drunk. Our story did the rounds of the dailies and was picked up for more thoughtful treatment at the weekend. Then came another revelation.
In his essay on The Old Curiosity Shop G. K. Chesterton talks about the kind of criticism or commentary that makes a writer ‘jump out of his boots’. Such an occurrence is vanishingly rare. Nine out of ten writers, I imagine, get through life without once experiencing it. But it does happen, and it happened to me. In the Sunday Observer the novelist Maureen Freely staged a straightforward retrospective of my fiction and noted the punctual arrival — just in time for my third novel, Success (1978) — of a stream of lost or wandering daughters and putative or fugitive fathers, and that these figures recurred, with variations, in every subsequent book. There was nothing I could do about this diagnosis. It chimed with something Patrick had said during our first talk on the telephone: ‘I expect it’s been in the back of your mind.’ Yes, exactly: in the back of my mind. Your writing comes from the back of your mind, where thoughts are unformulated and anxiety is silent. That’s where it comes from: silent anxiety. I felt there was something almost embarrassing about the neatness and obviousness of the Freely interpretation. But it also sharply consoled me, because it meant that I had been with Delilah in spirit far more than I knew.
The interpretation is incomplete. There is at least one other eidolon, one other wraith idealised and feared for. A yard from my right shoulder stands the transparent picture-frame containing the two photographs, back to back (how did they get in there together?), of Delilah Seale (two years old, in the print dress and sandals) and Lucy Partington, bespectacled, school-uniformed, sitting in a curtained booth … There is a third presence, a third absence: Delilah’s mother, Lamorna, who hanged herself in 1978.
I find I have written a great deal about and around suicide. Suicide, the most sombre of all subjects — the saddest story. It awakens terror and pity in me, yet it compels me, it compels my writing hand. Perhaps because what I do all day and what they do, the suicides, in an instant, are so close to being antithetical. Chesterton (again) said that suicide was a heavier undertaking than murder. The murderer kills just one person. The suicide kills everybody. And what other submerged memory had me going downstairs, yesterday, to look for a certain novel that after thirteen pages confronted me with
I saw now … how conventional were my former ideas on presuicidal preoccupations; a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s watch, since, together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny.*
‘All the postmen’: that is genius. I feel a strong and constant resistance to the harshness of Chesterton’s great formulation. Nabokov, moral but not moralistic, is more painfully persuasive. He shows, too, in this short novel, that the writer is the opposite of the suicide, constantly applauding life and, furthermore, creating it, assigning breath and pulse to ‘a nonexistent progeny’. Suicide is omnicide. But it’s not in me to pass any judgement on it. It escapes morality. Throughout history suicide has been arduously detaching itself from human censure: the curses and penalties, the rock-heaped graves in unsanctified ground, the defiled cadavers. Why drive a stake through their hearts when, as Joyce knew, their hearts have been broken already?
In the novel Night Train I had my woman narrator make the following observation: ‘It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don’t think that’s true — unless it isn’t true either that the Devil is a gentleman.’ But the Devil is not a gentleman. The gentle do come to grief. And when Satan, in Paradise Lost, sets out from Pandemonium (abode of all demons), this was his mission: ‘To waste His whole creation’,
to confound the race
Of mankind in one root, and earth with hell
To mingle and involve …
Suicides, too, are worldkillers; they are, in that critical moment, everyman and everywoman. But no blame attaches. If what she was suffering had been endurable, then she would have endured.
Delilah was a two-year-old standing on the stairs. Her older brother Orlando, who led the way, could see the hanging body. And it was Patrick who had to go in and ‘take her down’. That void world up there is, of course, the central fact behind Delilah’s origin and evolution, and not the little mystery of the lost-found father, which is good, good, only good. No mother, but more than one father, now — and much else. It does go on. When the revelation came Delilah forfeited technical consanguinity with her half-brother and half-sister. But there were two more, a half-brother and another half-brother, waiting, like a team, just as they wait for the sound of the buzzer and then run upstairs to let her in.
— What do you think, Mum? I said, as she snatched the photograph from my hand.
— … Definitely.
— What should I do?
— Nothing. Don’t do anything, dear.
I had always wanted a girl and suddenly there she was, in the Rembrandt, like a mirror. For seventeen years I had been worrying about her, in the back of my mind. Time, thus affronted (I thought), would give us work to do; but it hasn’t been like that. Love flowed (and was soon declared). And now she and I can say the words in unison: why would it not?
* J. D. Salinger is the obvious example. Only one journalist ever went in there and she took years to come out. Gore Vidal told me in 1975 that he’d heard it was ‘very cold’ where Salinger lives: an extraordinarily delicate suggestion that the great man seeks warmth in alcohol. Still, you can only love a writer who has a character say ‘Jeat jet?’ when asking another if he has dined. These literary spectres are not always as impalpable as they seem. Salman Rushdie has been to a baseball game with Don DeLillo. And Ian McEwan, for a time, used to have lunch with Thomas Pynchon.
* And soon enough I would be sitting in my flat patiently and sincerely saying ‘Fuck off’ every twenty seconds while a woman in a brown mackintosh went on ringing the doorbell.
* The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov (1930, 1965). I hadn’t looked at it in fifteen years.
2: One Little More Hug
Onset
So before I lost a father, I did find a child …
It began with the news of a fall. I wasn’t alarmed when I heard about it, for the simple reason that Kingsley fell over all the time. Falling over (as I used to say to him) was all he ever did. There were the slow and majestic subsidences, such as the one I had tried to stage-manage in the middle of the Edgware Road (see following). And there were other types of trips, tumbles and purlers, usually performed in his rooms a
t home and monitored by my mother and stepfather in the garden flat below. To hear my mother tell it, some of these collapses sounded like a chest-of-drawers jettisoned from an aeroplane. ‘Absolutely deafening. But you’re not supposed to mention it. It happens so often that we don’t even go up. Unless he’s wedged. Then he bangs on the floor and I send Ali.’ So there was nothing alarming about the news of the fall: nothing alarming per se.*
Still, when I heard about it I was visited not by a premonition but by something anterior to that: a coloration, a change in the light. My father had fallen over, on a stone stairway, in South Wales, Swansea, where he still betook himself for a few weeks every August, rather grimly, and visibly conscious of his own fortitude. He was solidly attached to the friends who put him up there (the Thomases, the Rushes), and he liked all the talking and the drinking,* but by now he was no longer a creature of annual habits; his habits had become daily, hourly, and he feared all disruption. When he went to Wales, we were to understand, he was bowing to family pressure to give Hilly a break which, in his view, she did not need. There was one thing he admitted he really enjoyed: the minibus tours. The minibus tours began in the mid-1980s. In the Memoirs there is a photograph of KA and the gang outside the Plough Inn in a Carmarthenshire village. And on the next page, at some other valley hamlet, we see him cooperatively kneeling on the ground with his head and hands in the stocks; thoroughly inauthentically, the words YE OLDE VILLAGE IDIOT are painted on to the upper arm of the contraption, and Kingsley’s face is obligingly (and brilliantly) abject and benighted. He was slightly bashful, with me, about the minibus tours: motorised pubcrawls, in effect, but with places to be visited and undulating Wales to be driven through. It wasn’t the pubcrawl aspect that left him uneasy. It was the other stuff, which made him feel like Daddy B. (a great and voluble expert on Wales, as he knew). When he talked about how much he liked the minibus tours his manner suggested that I wasn’t wrong to be skeptical about them. But I wasn’t skeptical about them. I was enjoying the animation in him … I still don’t know if the fall took place on one of the minibus tours. I do know it happened after lunch. ‘He bumped his head,’ my mother told me. He hit his head.
I said that Kingsley annually betook himself to Swansea but the reflexive verb is misleading as well as archaic (or arch.).* He never in his life travelled alone without dread. Even in his twenties he needed escort. To have a child, an infant, with him (I am thinking of a particularly triumphant letter in the Letters, recounting a brief but successful train ride with my one-year-old brother) — this could shame him into courage. I also remember the times he was helped into my room at night after attacks of depersonalisation; I also remember the family visit to the scenic roof of the Empire State Building, in 1959, when he said that it was only the presence of his children that stopped him from screaming … Sally it was, these days, who took him west past Offa’s Dyke and then, after a cup of tea in the station cafeteria, reboarded the train to Paddington. Three weeks later she would go up and bring him back again. But this year his return journey was unscheduled and had the air of an emergency. I know more about it now than I did then, how he slipped backwards on the steps, how his head met concrete — how he began to feel as bad as he had ever felt. I was relieved and grateful to learn that there was a friend on hand to drive my father back to London. The friend was Kingsley’s biographer.†
It was late August and the family was reconverging. I heard the news on the day that Kingsley was expected back in town, where he would be admitted to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in the Fulham Road. My mother, exhaustively familiar with her ex-husband’s scrapes and scares, was non-alarmist and formulaic: Kingsley had had ‘another fall’, was ‘shaken up’, would be ‘under observation’. With what now seems like farcical indecorum I had arranged to play snooker that night. I called my friend and put him on hold, and began trying the hospital. Around seven I got through.
— Dad.
And I cannot for the life of me remember the two words he said in reply — except that there was something wrong with them. If you want to remember the neologisms of a child you have to write them down immediately: they are alphabet soup, and defy memory just as they defy meaning. My father sounded as if he was making a somnolent attempt at a quite ordinary greeting, ‘It’s you’, perhaps, or ‘There you are’. What did he say? ‘That’s you’? ‘You’re there’?
— I’ll come over.
And he went on, entirely recognisably,
— No. I’d rather save you up for tomorrow, if you know what I mean.
— You’re sure.
— I’m sure.
So I went out and played snooker among all the other etiolated slouchers and anaemic sidlers at the Portobello Health and Fitness Club, under the Westway. I visualised the biographer, earlier that day, speeding eastwards down the M4 in an anonymous but highly evolved machine. This was a job I might have been expected to do myself. The gratitude I felt was qualified by guilt, partly inapposite, as it turned out, because the biographer had gone to Wales not to fetch Kingsley but to visit him: he was already there. To put it another way, I was pleased that I hadn’t had to drive to Wales. In my other health and fitness club, Paddington Sports, there is a great man called Ray Gibbs who, when once glancingly challenged about his fitness, climbed from his chair and ran to Wales. Ray is sixty. As my body played snooker that night, as my body tensed and crouched and executed, and did all this not very well, significantly worse than usual, my body kept thinking: I could have done that. I could have driven to Wales. What was it my father said? ‘There you are.’ Or: ‘It’s you.’ It sounded like the answer to that question about love in The Anti-Death League. 1994 and 1995 had not gone out of their way to persuade me that I was immune to disaster; and no one is spared the main events. Stealing over me now, working its way through my body, I felt a presentiment, not about love, but about its opposite. Was it now? Was it him?
During the summer I had several times imagined the first meeting of Kingsley and Delilah. She was still in South America, going up and down it, with others, in a trucksized people-carrier. That would give them something to talk about: minibus tours. I knew that introducing Delilah to my mother would be a breeze, and a warm and gentle one; but my father wasn’t quite so reliable.* I did feel sure that he would like her laugh, her laughter, its breathiness and drive. And this would be an important thing. He would want to hear more of that laughter. He would exert himself to excite it.
In the aftermath of one of his earlier falls or motor mishaps (they were often accompanied by the suspicion of an infarction, a thrombus: a minor stroke), my father had gone temporarily insane. He wrote about it, with all the freshness and detail of returned perspicuity, in a great little thing called ‘A Peep Round the Twist’ (which concludes the prose matter in the Memoirs). Illusions, delusions,† willed hallucinations, imagined psychokinetic powers. He was in hospital — in hospital already, so to speak, with his broken leg; and he seemed more or less all right in the head when we visited him. But there was a difference. He told me about the voices:
— A little girl called me an old fascist.
— But she didn’t really.
—… No.
— It’s like Pinfold.* How does it go? ‘Of course you know he’s homosexual. Jews always are.’
Kingsley frowned vigilantly. We talked on. Another visitor appeared, evidently an ex-student of Kingsley’s, who had read about the accident in the newspapers. There was something unreassuring about this new arrival (was he drunk?), and it didn’t seem strange — only strangely candid — when Kingsley asked him, mildly enough, if he wouldn’t mind going away. And he did. My father and I talked on. He seemed all right in the head, but there was a difference. I finally identified it, and it frightened me.
Now I think of Stanley, which he was working on at the time, and the thrilling disquisition on madness by the old psychiatrist, Nash, which concludes: ‘The rewards for being sane may not be very many but knowing what’s funny is
one of them. And that’s an end of the matter.’
Down the Fulham Road
Specialising as they do in arrivals and departures, hospitals invite comparison with airports. But the Chelsea and Westminster seemed to be taking it too far. The ground floor was a mall of outlets, concessions — of opportunistic commerce. You looked around for Duty Free … Saturday morning. Saturday morning comes after Friday night and this hospital did what hospitals do, so somewhere, presumably, there were waiting-rooms and dressing-stations for the axe-in-the-head fraternity — not to mention the proliferating wards for the elderly; but you saw absolutely none of this, no Coach, no Steerage. Kingsley was up in the private wing, Club World, waiting at the other end of the elevator.
If my father had been playing the adverb game (to borrow another line from Stanley), then the adverb in question would have been ‘normally’. He received and returned my kiss normally, he sipped his juice or soda normally, he steered his way through the Daily Telegraph normally. He said little, but said it with clarity. And he said he wanted to go home … Philip was there: we exchanged a look that went back to childhood, to infancy — a wary flinch that said, half-comically, ‘Now what?’ Sally was there too. She was on the phone, summoning a prawn cocktail from room service. So that’s where we were: in one of the better rooms of the airport hotel. Only the bathroom, with its metal handholds, its rubber mats with their squidlike suction-cups, disclosed the luggage of incapacity. One by one (life must go on) the Amis children descended in turn to the sulphurous pit of the Smoking Room and sat beside a trembling spectre in a dressing-gown buckled up with gratitude over his crafty burn …
A doctor came, enormously tall and further elongated by his pinstriped suit, and as suave as a Mayfair estate-agent. Doctors. Who are these doctors?* This particular doctor said that Sir Kingsley had been ‘shaken up’ and ‘needed rest’. My father fidgeted more concertedly than hitherto until the doctor left the room. Then the afternoon, like a five-hour flight delay, sprawled out in front of us.