According to Mark

  And so, deftly and efficiently, Diana whipped the car through labyrinthine one-way systems, cheated death on motorways and planned the redecoration of the kitchen, her autumn wardrobe and Mark’s rehabilitation.

  Carrie had never felt like this before in her life. When she woke up in the mornings, in the cheap hotel room with windows opened to the clamour of the early traffic, she was confronted each time anew with this huge sense of well-being. She was not conscious of having been especially discontented, or indeed at all discontented before: it was simply that she seemed suddenly to have been granted an extra dimension of existence. As though you had been sickly, without knowing it, and all at once discovered perfect health. She was waking up very early, partly because if feeling thus it was a pity to waste a moment of it. On one of these occasions she lay reading Emma and reached at last the point at which the outcome of everything became apparent: ‘It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself.’ She read the passage several times: of course, how stupid Emma had been despite thinking herself so clever, and how nicely you had been led astray yourself, not spotting until now how it would all work out. Perhaps most people did.

  She continued, with satisfaction, to read. And as she did so, at a different level, somewhere below or behind the words that passed before her eyes, recognitions occurred. Arrows darted. With such accuracy, indeed, that she blushed, all alone there five floors up and in a foreign land; she went on reading, sternly.

  ‘Incidentally,’ said Nick. ‘Why on earth were you buying Jane Austen in Paris?’

  They were in the Jardins du Luxembourg. There were children and dogs and flowers hideously trapped in symmetrical beds; even these last could not much subdue the incandescence of Carrie’s mood.

  She hesitated. ‘It’s all rather complicated. I’d lost, you see, two other copies.’

  ‘One,’ said Nick, ‘would be carelessness. Two sounds obsessive. Explain yourself.’

  And so she did. From the beginning, more or less. Mark. Her grandfather. Mark’s book. Hermione. Diana. The drive south with Mark. The time at Sarlat. Leaving out … well, leaving out one or two things. Leaving out is not lying.

  ‘Then why did you ditch them like that?’ enquired Nick, eventually. ‘These Lammings.’

  ‘I … well, I thought maybe they’d be better without me … And I sort of wanted to get away by myself.’

  ‘Ah. And do you often do that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good,’ said Nick. There was a pause. ‘This Mark fellow. What’s he like?’

  Carrie hesitated. ‘He’s very nice.’

  He scrutinised her. She gazed back: those very bright eyes; the way his hair grew; that face, known now eight days and for ever. ‘That won’t do,’ he said. ‘That’s the most meaningless way there is to describe a person. Do you like him?’

  And oh, she thought, why is he interested? What’s it matter to him? But it does, oh it does. She sat in exultation – oh shameful exultation – amid the blazing pens of geraniums and petunias.

  ‘We’re coming back tomorrow,’ she said to Bill.

  ‘We?’

  ‘I mean I. Not we, of course. I. Me.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bill.

  ‘So I’ll be at Dean Close by … well, in the evening.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘So … Well, I’ll see you then.’

  ‘So you keep saying,’ said Bill.

  A long time ago, in fact, Carrie had been given to reading. It was in the year or two after that kindly and observant actor friend of Hermione’s had spotted her educational deficiencies and taken the trouble to teach her how it was done. She had been amazed: first at this revelation of ingenuities quite unsuspected, and secondly at what was exposed. Stories. Worlds apart. Other private landscapes in which to hide. The only trouble was how to get hold of these things. The books she saw in shops were in Spanish or Italian or French. Hermione did not have many books because she did not have many possessions; the point, after all, of leading a fascinating travelling life was that one wasn’t tied down by boring things like houses and furniture. Consequently Carrie found herself partial to reading but without, for the most part, the means to satisfy the taste. From time to time, though, some thumbed and battered book would fall into her hands and the contents of several had lain in her head ever since. There was Tales from Ancient Greece which particularly appealed to her because of the way in which people kept changing into something else: bulls or swans or trees. She would have very much liked to change into a tree herself and indeed selected various specimens against which she would lean hopefully for hours: a certain tamarisk somewhere near Antibes, a pine in Corfu, an immense protective ilex in Tuscany. Subsequently, she read and reread a tattered collection of fairy tales for the same reason; but now this universal tendency to metamorphosis seemed to her to indicate something else, a worrying instability to things, a subtle threat that what should be relied on might very well be snatched from you. Words might become pearls or toads; gold might become dead leaves; men were frogs or beasts and pumpkins were coaches. Don’t count on anything, these stories seemed to say, nothing is what you think.

  And it was this that came into her head, like an old dark superstition, as she left Paris with Nick and travelled first by train to the coast and thence in the ferry back to the shores of England. She leaned on the rails of the ship, with him beside her, and looked at the gulls hanging at eye-level and the green milky foam-marbled sea beneath and felt as though he might well vanish now or turn into a deck-chair or crumble into a flapping newspaper. Perhaps she had made him up anyway. When he went off to buy coffee and was gone for what seemed far too long, she became panic-stricken and sat there with her heart thumping and her eyes wild. When he came back, grumbling about the queue and bearing two paper cups of luke-warm coffee, she couldn’t believe in him. She had to keep glancing at him to reassure herself.

  But when they reached Dover he was still there. He looked the same and he sounded the same. He did not evaporate when exposed to English air, nor did he turn into a frog or a cat or a German hitchhiker in the train. They sat side by side and the predictable fields and hills and towns rolled past and gave way at last to suburban London and the Thames and the busy echoing vaults of Victoria, and he was still there. If she had been dreaming for the last week, then either she had not woken up yet or she was not going to wake up. At least not just yet.

  13

  Mark and Diana, at about the same time, also crossed the Channel. Mark, on the ferry, thought not of fairy tales but of himself and of Gilbert Strong. He felt himself to be in the condition of some chronic invalid; he husbanded his energies, moved more slowly, acquired a slight stoop. Ensconced by Diana in a deck-chair at the rear of the ship, he watched the coast of France melt into the sea and remembered a photograph of Strong that he had found in an envelope in the trunk at Dean Close. The photograph showed Strong, sometime in the twenties, similarly installed on what looked like the deck of a cruise ship, but tightly shrouded in a plaid rug and flanked by other shrouded figures, as though all of them were convalescents laid out to take the sun. The face of the woman beside Strong was so extinguished by her hat as to make her unrecognisable; it might be Violet, or Stella Bruce, or someone entirely different. There was nothing invalidish, though, about Strong. He stared robustly at the camera, pipe clamped at one side of his mouth and a panama hat on his head at a slightly rakish angle. A book was spreadeagled on his lap; Mark had used a magnifying glass to try to make out the title, unsuccessfully. There was nothing on the photograph to indicate when or where it had been taken; it would remain yet another silence.

  Or perhaps the moment was irrelevant. The moment; the voyage; the companion; the book, even. Extraneous matter, to be rejected as, according to Strong, the novelist rejects everything that has no bearing on the action of the novel. Strong himself would have disputed this: the biographer pursues truth – lies and silences for him are areas of failure.
There is no extraneous matter.

  At this point Mark abandoned Strong to his rug and his book and his woman and allowed Carrie to surface; it was as though he bit on an aching tooth. Diana, beside him, was reading the Guardian; she seemed absorbed but Mark was aware of an occasional inspecting sideways glance. He was under observation; in intensive care, perhaps. He found this mildly comforting. In his reduced condition, there was something to be said for being looked after.

  ‘You’d have made a good nurse, you know.’

  Diana lowered the paper and looked at him sharply. ‘Whatever makes you say that?’

  He shrugged. ‘It just occurred to me.’

  ‘Are you feeling seasick?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Well, you look peaky,’ said Diana. It seemed quite on the cards that she might announce he would have to take a tonic. Instead she added, more gently, ‘Cheer up. We’ll be home by dinner time.’

  He realised that he could no longer remember at all clearly what life had been like before he knew his wife. How had it been to go to bed and wake up alone? To arrange for days in which there was no one to be considered but himself? He could remember meeting her, and the onset of passion and all that. What was gone was any recollection of her absence. Of pre-Diana. All of which had nothing to do with love or guilt but was simply a condition of existence.

  France had now vanished. Seagulls and cardboard cartons bobbed in the wake of the ferry. Posses of French schoolchildren roamed the decks, shrieking. I have absolutely nothing to look forward to, he thought, no day is better than another day. Self-pity was laced with vigorous self-disgust. Work, he thought, is what I need, months of unrelenting work.

  Strong, Mark thought, would have relished this whole situation: meddling in and manipulating the lives of others even from beyond the grave.

  ‘Yes,’ Diana said to Suzanne. ‘We had a marvellous time. Perfect weather. Some lovely little places we’d never seen before. Gorgeous food. Well, no … the Hermione woman was a bit tiresome but we didn’t stay there all that long in the end. Oh, Mark loved it, yes – it does him good to get away. The girl? No, she decided to come back on her own. Just as well, really, Mark had rather a lot of her one way and another, and she’s not entirely, well, our sort of person. Pleasant enough, of course, but … oh, a bit fey. So it’s back to work all round now. Mark’s only too happy. His desk is what he really likes.’

  ‘France?’ said Mark, to the woman acquaintance who shared his trade. ‘Oh, France was all right, I suppose. Contaminated in various ways but putting up some sort of fight. They still have a few natural resources to call their own. Material? No, material was somewhat thin on the ground. Fictitious, mainly – not but what that hasn’t a certain interest in itself. You’ll know what I mean. Do you still insist on my man’s carnal weekend in Aberystwyth? Incidentally I came across a letter from your lady at Dean Close – I’ll send you a xerox. It’s remarkably dull – about some book Strong lent her and the unseasonal weather. Writing? Good grief, no – I’m a long way from writing the thing yet. The man is still a number of assorted pieces. The life … well, the life is several different lives, according to who is doing the talking. But you know all about that …’

  He did not go down to Dean Close. There was quite enough to do sorting and collating material he already had – the stuff in the trunks could wait for a while. He needed at this stage, he decided, to take stock, to see what he had and what he yet needed. Accordingly, he sat day by day at his desk, assessing and allocating. He found it difficult to concentrate. He anticipated nervously the eventual inevitable meeting with Carrie. Diana continued to treat him with brisk and affectionate consideration. When she was at the gallery she would telephone once a day; there were appetising lunch snacks left for him in the fridge. She bought theatre tickets and invited friends to dinner. He found himself dependent on her.

  He began to plan the book. His attitude towards Strong had undergone many changes, he realised. Initially respectful, anxious and faintly propitiating, it had entered a familiar, companionable and critical phase and had progressed from there through every degree of cynicism, admiration, distaste, irritation and reconciliation. It was, when you stopped to think about it, disconcertingly like the progress of relationships with the living. Plenty of love affairs, come to that, run along these lines.

  But now something new had entered the field: a rising tide of suspicion. He became daily more convinced that Strong was holding out on him. The more he examined and reflected upon the evidence – especially the Dean Close papers – the more he was persuaded that the cunning old so-and-so had been manipulating him right from the start, providing precisely what it suited him to provide and making away with anything at odds with his own preferred version. A much subtler process than the Hardy system of dictating your account of things to someone else and much more difficult for the biographer to rumble. Widely practised though, no doubt.

  For instance … Nowhere was there so much as a passing reference to this fellow Hugo Flack; no way at all of confirming or refuting Stella Bruce’s tale of Strong’s purchase of his Caucasus travel notes. No letter, no mention anywhere. Strong’s diary for the relevant period survived – the Red Notebooks series at Dean Close. The Red Notebooks were silent about the Caucasus, but this might not be significant. Strong had made a practice of leaving large gaps in his diaries, ignoring several months at a time, and often used separate books for material of a particular kind, like travel notes. That the diary made no reference to the Caucasus neither supported nor disposed of Stella’s story. Equally, there was nothing to relate in any way whatsoever with Edward Curwen’s allegations that Strong had tried to bully him into retiring from the TLS row about the Disraeli book. Mark had traced the two friends of Strong’s at the Cambridge college in question and written to their relatives enquiring about possible Strong correspondence: none survived.

  But, over and beyond these specific items, he found himself increasingly suspicious of the very nature of what was left. The shortage of letters from Strong, for instance, as opposed to letters received by him. Of his correspondence with Violet, for instance, only her letters remained – and an oddly random selection of those. None, for instance, telling him what a wretch he was – which, according to some accounts of the marriage, there ought to be. Susan’s letters existed, but none of Strong’s to her. Why? Because some of them didn’t suit the Strong version of things as to be presented ultimately to the public? A man like Strong would have been highly unwilling to hand himself over lock, stock and barrel to anyone, let alone some prying stranger. Mark Lamming.

  Mark, increasingly obsessed by the idea, vented all this upon Diana. ‘He must have been perfectly systematic. Either all along or at some point quite late. Selecting and destroying. There were some things he simply didn’t want me to see or know about.’

  ‘Not you specifically.’

  He barely heard this. ‘Which means that I have got to work with this always in mind. That the silences may be points where he is trying to outwit me. Equally, at other points he may be trying to lead me astray.’

  ‘Darling,’ said Diana, ‘the man’s dead. Not is – was. And he didn’t know you from Adam. If he was doing that sort of thing it was aimed at the world in general, not you specially.’

  She was looking at him with concern. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mark testily. ‘I know all that. Sorry,’ he added after a moment. ‘I didn’t mean to be cross.’

  Diana laid a hand on his knee. Mark, in confusion of spirit, thought yet again that she was really being quite extraordinarily nice these days. When she would be fully entitled to be the very opposite. He couldn’t explain what he meant about Strong and resolved not to bring the matter up again.

  Diana, gently withdrawing her hand after a moment, decided to have a quiet word with Suzanne’s sister about this therapist.

  A week after this Mark went down to Dean Close. He did so on the spur of the moment, deciding when he woke that morning that it had t
o be done and could be staved off no longer and that there was stuff he needed to look at. He telephoned and got Bill. So far as Bill was concerned it was fine for him to come down. Suit yourself. Everything ticking over here as usual. See you later then, mate.

  Diana raised no objection. Neither did she offer to come too. She said, ‘I suppose you’ll stay the night.’ Mark replied that he supposed he would.

  When he arrived there was no sign of Carrie. He went through to the kitchen and put on the table Carrie’s grip that she had left in the car at Sarlat and, on top of it, the French copy of Emma. Then he climbed to the attic and immersed himself in selecting the bundles of letters and notebooks he wanted to work on next. He had decided to take them away with him. At lunch-time he came down to the kitchen and found Carrie there. Alone. She jumped to her feet, went bright pink and embarked on an incoherent sequence of apology.

  He looked at her: at the ginger curls and her wrists which he had always especially cherished and her mouth. He tested himself. And yes, it was profoundly painful. There she was, and there, also, she would no longer be. Untouchable and unreachable. Exactly as one’s rational self had known all along she would have to be. He wasn’t, after all, the kind of man who went in for this sort of thing.

  Carrie had stopped gabbling explanations. She said, simply, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right. It was probably the most sensible thing to do.’

  ‘Was Diana very cross?’

  ‘Yes and no. She’s not throwing me out, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Carrie, ‘I meant cross about me going off, not about you and me, um …’

  ‘Going to bed together?’ said Mark remorselessly.