According to Mark

  ‘Would you like to see the house now?’ said Carrie.

  ‘I’m longing to.’

  He had considered, several times, coming down unheralded on one of the Wednesday openings but something, an inborn sense of occasion perhaps, had restrained him: he had wanted to see the house and the granddaughter all at once, and alone. He was not, after all, some passing literary dabbler. He was the biographer.

  They went through a green baize door and into, immediately, the 1930s. There were cracking parquet floors and carpets with lozenge and diamond patterns and Knole settees and many small wobbly tables and glass-fronted bookcases. It must at the time have been a fairly chic set-up. Mark, recognising the hand of Susan, the energetic and sociable former mistress Strong had married in 1939 after the death of his wife Violet, toured the rooms with fascination, almost forgetting Carrie, who trailed behind him. Strong’s study, however, wonderfully intact, was stuck firmly at about 1918. There were a couple of big leather chairs and a fire-place with a brass fender and a huge and frayed Turkish carpet. Mark, more filled with emotion than he would have expected, stood in the middle of it, looking at the desk. He said, ‘He wrote the whole of Disraeli in here. And most of the Peacock and Thackeray books. And of course the essays which are what I suppose I most admire.’ He moved closer to the desk. ‘Even the blotting-paper … Goodness. Yes, that’s his writing all right – I’d know it anywhere.’

  ‘The people from the Society come and sort of go over everything,’ said Carrie. ‘I don’t really come through all that often. Bill’s mum sometimes stays in the guest room upstairs because there isn’t anywhere through in our bit.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mark. He touched the inkstand with the tip of a finger. ‘Disraeli, of course, isn’t to everyone’s taste, nowadays. There’s rather a turn against that kind of biographical writing, but I’m intending to argue a strong case for it. Get it more widely read again, for a start. What’s your feeling about Disraeli?’

  Carrie gazed at him. ‘Actually, I haven’t ever quite finished it.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mark again. Silence fell. A different clock ticked; a more sombre and portentous clock.

  ‘I s’pose it takes ages to write a book?’ said Carrie politely. ‘I mean, it’ll take you ages to write this one.’

  Mark, briefly, outlined his intended schedule.

  ‘Goodness,’ said Carrie. ‘Gardening’s much easier. At least you know exactly what there is to do every year and then you just get on and do it.’

  They continued to stand there in the middle of Strong’s study. Dirt from Carrie’s boots had made a trail across the carpet, which she appeared not to have noticed. There was a provoking passivity about her; the next move, Mark felt, was always up to him. This was inducing a kind of conversational hysteria on his part. The more Carrie expectantly stood, the more he uttered.

  ‘Let me make one thing clear,’ he said. ‘I’m not the Did-Byron-sleep-with-his-sister school of biographer. Don’t think that.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Carrie. ‘I see,’ and then, after a moment, ‘Did he? Sorry – I s’pose that’s irritating. I just wondered.’

  ‘Opinions differ,’ said Mark crisply. ‘The point is, so far as I’m concerned the life is relevant only in so far as it illuminates the work.’

  ‘Grandfather seems to have slept with dozens of people,’ said Carrie. ‘Is that going to be relevant?’

  He laughed, and then realised that she had not been trying to be funny. ‘It’s something I’m thinking about.’

  ‘I expect you’d like to see the bedrooms,’ said Carrie. It was clear that she was being purely logical, rather than arch. They climbed the stairs. Here, again, little had been touched. Susan Strong had died three years before her husband, although considerably younger. Her bedroom bloomed still with chintz; Strong’s, next door, was mahogany and linoleum, with some of his clothes still hanging in the wardrobe, just as, in the hall, a hairy tweed hat hung on the hatstand. ‘The people who come on Wednesdays like it,’ said Carrie.

  On the landing she paused. ‘What you were saying just now – you really have to read everything he wrote?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘Everything.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Carrie. ‘Then I s’pose you really ought to look at the stuff up in the attic.’

  He stared at her. ‘Stuff?’

  ‘Letters and things.’

  ‘I didn’t know there were any letters here.’

  ‘Oh yes. Two trunks.’

  He swallowed. ‘No one ever told me.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Carrie. ‘Didn’t they? I expect they forgot. I almost had. I know Mr Crampton had a look at them two or three years ago and he thought perhaps they ought to go to that place where the other ones are and I said I’d rather we left them here.’

  Nigel Crampton, President of the Strong Society and aged eighty-seven, rose before Mark’s eyes, going on and on interminably about his own easily forgettable and largely forgotten oeuvre, going on in fact about anything and everything, in letters and over the phone, till, well, till frankly one had learned to run a mile. Unfortunately, it now seemed.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘I’d better have a look.’

  The attic was full of the kind of thing that attics harbour: a trestle table with a shattered leg, bundles of magazines, old table lamps, a gas mask, a paraffin stove, a wicker chair. And two large cabin trunks with frayed labels saying ‘P & O’, ‘Not Wanted on Voyage’ and so forth.

  Carrie opened the lid of one of these. Mark bent over it. Within was a soup of documents, all jumbled together: wads of manuscripts, exercise books, batches of letters bound with tape. He lifted some of these out at random; they were all addressed to Strong – he recognised the handwriting of various friends and associates. There was a huge bundle from his publisher. No wonder the stuff in the Bodleian had seemed curiously deficient. He delved among the manuscripts; there was what appeared to be an early draft of part of Disraeli, and a whole lot of lecture notes, and something he couldn’t identify that seemed to be an abandoned novel. All this went right down to the bottom of the trunk.

  Carrie said, ‘Shall I open the other one?’

  He nodded.

  And there was the same kind of thing over again. More letters. More manuscripts. A stack of books, annotated in Strong’s handwriting.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Carrie. ‘I’d forgotten there was so much.’

  Mark stared at the trunks. Thoughts and emotions hurtled through him in confusing succession: excitement and horror and curiosity and an awful weariness and a whole series of realisations that begat other realisations. That the book would not be finished according to his schedule. That hence he was in for what Diana called a cash-flow problem. That he would be in breach of contract; that his publishers would probably be reasonable about that; that the book would be much longer than he thought; that it would be better; that he felt exhausted already.

  Carrie picked up a bundle of letters and put it down again. ‘Will you need to look at all this?’

  ‘Yes. All of it.’ After a moment he went on, ‘Has anyone else?’

  ‘Only Mr Crampton really.’

  ‘Why did you want to keep it all here?’

  Carrie fidgeted uncomfortably. ‘I’m not sure, really. I thought I might read some of it sometime. I don’t expect I ever would have really. And Mr Crampton kept coming and fussing around when I was busy. I wanted to get rid of him really.’

  ‘That I can understand. No one else, then?’

  Carrie reflected. ‘There was someone else like you, ages ago. Another person who wanted to write a book about him. He hadn’t quite decided whether to or not. An American. He looked for a bit.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  Carrie shrugged. ‘He never came back. I think he was sort of put off.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mark grimly. ‘That too I can understand. Up to a point.’

  They closed the trunks and descended the ladder that led to the hatch in the attic floor. Carrie went
first. Mark, looking down at the top of her head, was filled with what seemed to him the most extraordinary desire to reach out and touch it; there it was, with grains of dust spinning around it in the shaft of sunshine that came down through a skylight, and the sight of it unsteadied him. He felt as though he were a different person from the one who had risen from his bed that morning; it was as though, in the interim, he had received violent news of some kind, but he could not, at this moment, tell if it was good or bad.

  ‘Well, what’s she like, then?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What on earth does that mean?’

  ‘Fine. Very helpful.’

  ‘Aren’t you alone?’ said Diana. ‘Is she in the room?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, yes, I’m alone. They’re outside.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Her and um, the chap who’s her partner.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Diana.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ snapped Mark.

  There was a fractional pause. ‘Well,’ said Diana. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. What are you going to do about pyjamas and toothbrush, then?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought.’ Although, in that very instant, the rather fearful notion struck him that, given the state of things at Dean Close, there might well be a pair of Strong’s around somewhere. No, that would never do.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Go through this stuff. Get an idea of just what there is.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Eat, I suppose. Converse a bit.’

  ‘Is she,’ enquired Diana, ‘a mine of information?’

  ‘Hard to say. At this stage. Could be, in time. A pleasant enough girl, anyway.’

  ‘Well, darling, I’ll say goodnight, then.’

  ‘Goodnight, darling.’

  He lay, not in Strong’s bed, but in the one in the guest room across the landing, which was none too comfortable and furnished with sheets of quite stunning coldness. Carrie must have made it up at some point. Probably after supper when he had sat at the kitchen table with another mug of that vile Nescafé, talking to Bill. It had been a strained conversation, even for Mark who considered himself perhaps a little better than most at finding points of contact with a wide variety of people. It was necessary, in his trade. Bill, though, had a quality of amused tolerance that was distinctly off-putting; he waited for you to say something and then when you had said it made you feel inappropriate in some way. Too much enquiry about the business of running a Garden Centre began to seem patronising; too frequent mentions of Strong were somehow pretentious. And yet he was patently an amiable fellow. Trained, evidently, at some horticultural college, like Carrie; good at his job, hard-working, short on intellectual interests but with that capacity to make others feel insufferably highbrow. Mark had floundered eventually into a description of a television situation comedy he had happened to watch, to which Bill listened with tolerant attention. When Mark finished he said kindly, ‘We don’t watch the box here. Haven’t got one, in fact.’ He began to roll a cigarette. Carrie came back into the room and Mark said he would go up to the attic if that was all right and continue looking through the trunks. When he came down at half-past ten Bill was nowhere to be seen and Carrie was doing things to the Rayburn. Where they both slept, and under what arrangement, was unclear. Mark had thanked Carrie again for her offer to put him up for the night, rather too fulsomely, it now seemed to him, and gone alone through the green baize door into the empty house, which smelt of damp and books published before 1930.

  After an hour he was still not asleep. Anticipating this, he had brought down a pile of Strong’s notebooks from the attic; they contained, he had recognised, a lot of draft material for the ‘Essay on Fiction’. He switched on the bedside lamp (of which the bulb was not strong enough) and opened the top one. Strong’s loopy handwriting, faded to a delicate fawn, flickered across the page. ‘The novelist has an infinity of choices,’ Mark read. ‘He chooses what is to happen, to whom it happens, and in what way he will relate what happens. The picture he constructs is complete in its own terms. When he says “This is the story and the whole story” we must accept it. Perhaps novelists are the only people who do tell the truth.’

  2

  ‘And there won’t,’ said Diana, ‘be any men from Sotheby’s this time.’

  Mark sat up in bed, reached for his glasses, and looked at her. ‘What are men from Sotheby’s to me?’

  ‘Last time we had a private view you had a row with one.’

  ‘I remember having an amiable disagreement with a chap from the Tate wearing, I recall, a pink shirt. He thought Augustus John as good a painter as his sister, which of course is nonsense.’

  ‘Whistler,’ said Diana. ‘And Sotheby’s, not the Tate. But never mind. Anyway, you’re coming?’

  ‘I’m looking forward to it. And which of us is right we shall never know, there being no arbitrator. A problem I come up against a lot.’

  ‘As it happens I’ve got an excellent memory.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about you,’ said Mark mildly. ‘I was thinking about the book. Balancing what one person says against what another says.’

  He was not, in fact, looking forward to this private view and would have conveniently forgotten it if not thus outmanoeuvred at a moment neatly selected to be not so far away that he could plead subsequent forgetfulness nor so close that he could say he couldn’t get there in time.

  ‘You can come straight there from the library.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So I can.’

  Diana worked in an art gallery. The gallery sold prints and lithographs and a chaste selection of pottery, jewellery and glass. It had exhibitions which changed every two months or so. Diana, in imitation of her employer, Mrs Handley-Cox, had perfected a manner which made it clear that one was not in trade but a patron of the arts. She seldom addressed or, apparently, noticed people who wandered into the showroom; if they wanted to ask a price or to buy something, they were obliged to interrupt her in some task to do with catalogues or lists, so that they felt importunate. On the other hand, those who lingered too long (sheltering from the rain) or looked scruffy rather than interestingly eccentric (poor, in other words) were made to feel unwelcome by means of a skilful blend of cool glances and murmured ‘excuse me’s’ as she crossed their paths carrying a picture or step-ladder. Suzanne Handley-Cox, fiftyish and of lacquered appearance, remained for the most part in her office where she intimidated young artists.

  Diana got out of bed and went through into the bathroom, from whence came brisk sounds of washing. The door was open and Mark could see from time to time the flash of a neat pale limb or the back of her small cropped head. ‘… tie, not shirt,’ she said, over the noise of a running tap.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It was his tie that was pink, not his shirt.’

  Diana went through life in a state of furious alertness. It seemed to her that she had been cursed with some diseased enhancement of the senses. Everything clamoured equally for her attention: the clothing of people who sat opposite her in the tube, the text of newspapers, every word spoken to her by everyone with whom she was in contact. It was not so much a question of being interested as being seized. She would recount overheard conversations to Mark, who would say, ‘Why did you listen?’ She could explain only that she was compelled to. She commanded great deposits of useless information; she would have been unbeatable in those television games in which people compete with one another to answer obscure questions. She never forgot a name or a face; an exasperating accomplishment since the names and faces concerned had usually all too evidently forgotten hers. She knew the telephone numbers of most of her friends off by heart; she could recite verse learned as a schoolgirl. Her claim, hence, to have a good memory would seem to have some justification.

  In fact, the totally unselective nature of Diana’s attention was indeed, as she sensed, a disability and would have made it impossible for her to have a career that was in any way exacting. The ga
llery, which demanded rather less by way of application than, say, the hosiery counter of a busy department store, was ideal. Mark, continuing to lie in bed, abandoned with irritation a train of thought about Strong’s fiction essay, for which he had set aside this uncluttered and often rather productive before breakfast period, and thought of his wife instead, which he had not intended to do until later. He thought about the gallery, and her role there; he was aware that this was convenient and why, though Suzanne Handley-Cox, each time he was obliged to consort with her, aroused in him a suppressed fury that was like a sudden onset of fever. Diana’s hyperconscious condition was apparent to him, though mysterious since it was in such colossal contrast to his own tendency towards almost exclusive concentration on one thing. It was this capacity that enabled him to chop his time up into systematic thinking bouts, an invaluable ability. Diana, who was incapable of mislaying a glove or forgetting the date, called him absent-minded. Stupid, when she was in a bad temper. Which, of course, she knew quite well he was not. She was herself, Mark considered, well above average intelligence but without powers of elimination she was unable to concentrate this intelligence. She must, he sometimes reflected, have been an unmanageable girl.