“Richard Campbell . . .” Benjamin recalled, aloud, as he approached the water’s edge and achieved a satisfying score of twelve with his first stone. “He’s probably been in and out of counselling a dozen times by now.” He turned to Sophie, who was hunched up against the autumn wind in a full-length scarlet overcoat, a blue cashmere scarf wrapped around her throat. “You know what—I reckon you’ll turn out to be the writer in the family. I’ve never known someone with such an interest in stories. You have . . .” (he skimmed again) “. . . a very advanced sense of narrative.”
Sophie laughed. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“I meant it as a compliment, actually.”
“And coming from you, Benjamin, I’m sure it is.” She took a stone from his outstretched palm and attempted to skim it. It sank promptly into the water with a resounding slap. “Anyway, it’s not true. I’m just interested in people, that’s all. Who isn’t?”
“No—it’s more than that. I mean, how long did you spend reading those log-books last night? We couldn’t tear you away from them.”
Benjamin, Lois and Sophie were staying with his parents for a week at a fifteenth-century castle a few miles east of Dorchester, rented out by the Landmark Trust. On arrival they had found in a drawer, among the old jigsaw puzzles, packs of cards and tourist leaflets, four substantial log-books, running to several hundred pages each, bound in green vellum, recording the experiences of every visitor to the castle for the last twenty years. The people who had stayed here seemed to conform, on the whole, to a very particular type: conservative in their values, intellectual even in their leisure pursuits.
Sophie had picked up the log books out of nothing more than passing curiosity, but had soon started to find them fascinating, as social documents if nothing else.
“If I ever do become a therapist,” she said, “I’m going to use that stuff as source material. What you’ve got there is a record of decades of systematic abuse. Powerless children subjected to the whims of parents who won’t let them do anything for a whole week except . . . make tapestries and sing madrigals. I mean, can you imagine? Or that one who says that he got his eight-year-old son to dress up in Tudor costume and spend four days trying to learn how to play ‘Greensleeves’ on the sackbut. What do you think he’s going to be like when he grows up? Whatever happened to Game Boys and Playstations? Don’t any of these people do anything normal, like watch television or go to McDonald’s?”
“What about that couple—the one you read out to me last night?”
“The bondage guy? The one who complained that there wasn’t a proper dungeon, and left the address of a place in Weymouth that sold chain mail and branding irons?”
“And his wife sounded so sweet. She put all those pressed flowers into the log-book, and wrote that little poem: ‘Sonnet to the Castle.’ The one with twenty-three lines.”
“It takes all sorts, Benjamin. All human life is in those books.”
“I bloody hope not. God help us if that’s true.”
He waited for a lull between two of the foaming breakers, then skimmed the last of the stones across the water; after which they walked on, westwards, away from the café and the car park, in the direction of the crumbling, striated cliff face. Walking erratically, buffeted by the occasional wind, stumbling on the uneven shingle, they sometimes fell against each other, and it would have felt natural to Benjamin, at those moments, to take Sophie in his arms and clasp her in a hug. A neutral, avuncular hug, would that be? Could he trust himself to keep it that way? He had to keep reminding himself that his niece—who seemed like a full-grown and very sophisticated woman, to him—was still in her last year at school. This was her half-term holiday. He must remember these facts. And remember, too, that Sophie and Lois would be leaving, driving back up to York on Friday, in two days’ time. In the meantime, he should just try to savour the luxury—the fleeting luxury—of her company. That was the important thing. To savor the moment.
The castle they had rented for the week was dominated by a cavernous sitting room, which never seemed to get properly light or warm. Here Benjamin’s father Colin would pass much of the day reading newspapers or playing Scrabble or Monopoly with Lois, while Sheila would busy herself in the kitchen, washing up, boiling the kettle, making tea, preparing meals, and generally allowing the time to pass exactly as she had allowed it to pass for the last fifty years. Sometimes they would go out for a walk, get extremely cold, and come back again; then they would stoke up the fire, drink tea, get extremely hot, and go out for another walk. It often seemed to Benjamin that his parents had purposely devised a life for themselves which involved nothing more dramatic than regular changes in body temperature.
Of the six bedrooms, two had already been colonized by Benjamin himself: one for sleeping in, and one to accommodate his papers and his recording equipment. His parents had merely stared, incredulous, when he arrived on the Monday afternoon with a car filled to the roof with cardboard boxes and instrument cases. He had brought with him an Apple iBook, a sixteen-track Yamaha digital mixing desk, two microphones, accoustic and electric guitars and four separate Midi keyboards and control devices. “I thought you were writing a book,” Colin had said. “What else do you need, apart from a pen and some paper?” Benjamin had answered, “It’s a bit more complicated than that, Dad,” but didn’t bother to explain any further. He had given up trying to make them understand.
Late in the afternoon after their walk on the beach, Sophie came up to his workroom, sat down on the bed, and announced: “I’m halfway through the second log-book. I can’t take any more at the moment. Those people are doing my head in.”
“Hold on a sec,” Benjamin said. He was clicking repeatedly on his mouse, his eyes fixed on the sequencing software on his monitor. “There’s a funny little ‘pop’ sound on this flute sample. I’m just trying to find it and get rid of it.” He scrolled along the screen a few more times, then sat back with a sigh. “Ah well. It can wait.”
“So,” Sophie began, “are you going to tell me what you’re up to in here? Rather like Grandad, I was under the impression that you were working on a book.”
“It is a book,” said Benjamin. “Look—there it is if you don’t believe me.”
He pointed to a corner of the room, where two large cardboard boxes overflowed with manuscript. Sophie squatted down beside them and, seeking and obtaining permission from his eyes, she picked up a bundle of papers and began to glance through them.
“There must be about ten thousand pages here altogether,” she said, wonderingly.
“Well, that’s because I’ve kept all the drafts,” said Benjamin. “Though it is going to be pretty long. Also, all my source material’s there—stuff I wrote when I was a student, diaries from the last few years. Even some of the things I wrote at school.”
“So it’s about you, is it, this book? It’s a kind of autobiography.”
“No, not really. At least I hope not.”
“Then—” (she laughed) “—I mean, this is a really stupid question—you must hate it when people ask you this—but what is it about?”
Normally, Benjamin did hate it when people asked him this question. (Not that many people asked it any more.) But for some reason, he was quite happy to attempt an explanation for Sophie.
“Well . . .” he said, “well, it’s called Unrest, and it’s about some of the political events from the last thirty years or so, and how they relate to . . . events in my own life, I suppose.”
Sophie nodded, uncertainly.
“It’s easier to talk about the form, in a way. I mean, what I’m trying to achieve, formally—this sounds very ambitious, I know—crazy, really—is a new way of combining text—printed text—with the spoken word. It’s a novel with music, you see.”
“How’s that going to work?” Sophie asked.
“Well, in addition to this,” Benjamin said, flicking through the pages of the manuscript, “there’s going to be a CD-ROM. And some passages
you have to read on the screen; on your computer. The text scrolls down at intervals that I’ve programmed myself—sometimes it’s normal reading speed, sometimes there’ll only be one or two words on the screen at a time—and certain passages of text trigger bits of music, which will also play on the computer.”
“Which you’ve written yourself?”
“That’s right.” Unnerved by her silence, by the solemnity with which she was staring at him, he said: “It sounds mad, doesn’t it? I know it does. Maybe it is mad. Maybe I’m mad.”
“No, no, not at all. It sounds absolutely fascinating. It’s just hard to get any sense of it, without . . . reading some of it, I suppose.”
“I’m not ready to show it to anyone yet,” said Benjamin, reaching out instinctively, self-protectively for the fragment of manuscript, which she handed to him.
“No. I can believe that.”
But she looked so disappointed; and Benjamin could not bear to disappoint her. It was years since anyone had shown such interest in him. He felt hugely grateful and indebted to her, and knew that he would have to repay her somehow.
“You can hear some of the music, if you like,” he said, tentatively.
“Really? I’d love to.”
“OK, then.”
With a few clicks he had brought up a folder of .wav files. He scrolled through the titles, highlighted one and double-clicked. He turned up the volume on the computer’s speaker system, then sat back in his chair, arms folded, tense. He remembered the time he had played Cicely some of his music and all she had noticed was that you could hear a cat on the tape, miaowing in the background.
But Sophie was a better listener. “This is lovely,” she said, after a minute or two. The music was complex and repetitive, owing something to systems music, but with more chord changes. There was no melodic line: fragments of melody peeped out occasionally, on guitar or sampled strings or wood-winds, before submerging themselves again, absorbed into the densely contrapuntal texture. These undeveloped tunes were modal, like extracts from half-remembered folk songs. Harmonically, there was an emphasis on minor sevenths and ninths, giving the piece a melancholy undertow; but at the same time, an underlying pattern of ascending chords suggested optimism, a hopeful eye fixed on to the distant future.
After a while Sophie said: “It sounds a little bit like the record you gave Mum all those years ago.”
“Hatfield and the North, you mean? Yes, it probably does. Not the most up-to-date musical genre I could have chosen to imitate, really.”
“No, but it works. It works for you. It sounds sort of . . . sad and cheerful at the same time.” Then a new melodic idea was introduced, and she said: “Now I recognize that. You’ve stolen a famous song there, haven’t you?”
“It’s Cole Porter, ‘I Get A Kick Out Of You.’” Turning the volume down slightly, he explained: “This is meant to go with a passage about the Birmingham pub bombings. I don’t know if your mum ever told you, but . . . this was the tune that was playing. When the bomb went off.”
“No,” said Sophie, looking down. “No, she never told me that.”
“For years she couldn’t bear to hear it. It used to completely freak her out. She’s probably over that now.” Benjamin reached for the mouse and switched the music off. “Well, that’s probably enough to give you an idea.”
He knelt down by the boxes of manuscript, and tidied the papers away. While his back was turned, Sophie said: “It’s going to be fantastic, Ben. I know it is. It’ll blow people away. I’m just worried that it’s so . . . big. Are you ever going to finish it?”
“I don’t know. I thought that when I moved into my own place there wouldn’t be so many distractions. But all I seem to do now is mess around on the internet and watch TV. And in the summer I finally left my job, but that hasn’t helped, either. It just seems to have taken all the structure out of my life.”
“Can you carry on much longer, with no money coming in?”
“A few more months.”
“You must finish it. How long have you been doing this, now? You must.”
“What if nobody wants to publish it?” Benjamin said, flopping back into his chair. “Anyway, should I be sending it to a publisher, or to a record company? Is anyone going to be interested? Does anyone want to know? I’m a middle-aged, middle-class, white, public-school-, Oxbridge-educated male. Isn’t the world sick of hearing from people like me now? Haven’t we had our say? Isn’t it about time we shut up and moved over and made way for somebody else? Am I kidding myself that I’m doing something important? Am I not just raking over the embers of my little life and trying to blow it up into something significant by sticking a whole lot of politics in there as well? And what about September the eleventh? How do I find room for that kind of stuff in there? I didn’t write a word for months after it happened, or after the Americans went into Afghanistan. Suddenly everything I was doing seemed even smaller, even less important. And now it looks like we’ll be going into Iraq soon. The thing is . . .” (he leaned forward, his hands clasping and unclasping) “. . . I’ve got to try and remember. I’ve got to try and remember how I felt about this when I first started it. Recapture some of that energy. I had so much conviction then, so much self-belief. I thought that I was putting together words and music—literature and history, the personal and the political—in ways that no one had thought of before. I felt like a pioneer.”
“That’s what you are,” said Sophie; and he could tell that she meant it. “A pioneer. Remember that, Benjamin. It doesn’t need to make you pompous, or up yourself. It’s just the truth. Nobody else has done anything like this.”
“Yes. You’re right,” he said, when her words had sunk in. “I’m not going to lose faith in it. I’m not getting clapped out. The work’s only getting slower and harder because it’s getting better. I know more, and I understand more. Even what’s happened between me and Emily is something I can learn from. Everything—everything that happens to me is going to feed into this book and make it richer and stronger. It’s good that it’s taken me so long. I’m ready to finish it now. I’m not callow any more. I’m mature. I’m in my prime.”
He might have said more in this vein; but just then, there was a knock on the door. It was his mother, carrying a tea towel over her arm and wearing an expression of mingled reproof and solicitude.
“You haven’t eaten for ages, have you?” she said to her son. “Come on downstairs—I’ve made you a boiled egg and some Marmite soldiers.”
Benjamin’s eyes met Sophie’s briefly. She smiled at him, a secret smile. His heart melted.
He lay awake, at two o’clock in the morning. Outside, the wind howled, and the castle’s walls and flagstones did nothing but reflect the cold back at him, but still Benjamin felt sweaty and feverish. His pubic hair, through which his hand roamed restlessly, was moist. He had an erection which seemed to have nothing to do with desire, and everything to do with habit, of the most dismal and wearying sort. The prospect of masturbating—even though it was probably his only chance of getting to sleep—seemed impossibly bleak. His eyes were wide open. He picked up the mobile phone from his bedside table, turned on the backlight and learned that it was now 2:04. He groaned, and switched on the radio. It was the second movement of Bruckner’s fourth symphony: his least favourite movement from his least favourite work by his least favorite composer. He switched the radio off again. In the next bedroom, he could hear his father coughing. His mother got up to fetch a glass of water from the adjacent bathroom. There were fragments of conversation. Lois was asleep, in a far-off wing of the castle. Sophie, so far as he knew, was still in the sitting room, in her pyjamas and dressing gown, freshly bathed, reading the third of the log-books by the light of a standard lamp, the fire having dwindled to a mound of flickering ashes. Benjamin had left her to it, feeling tired, and imagining, for once, that he might be able to get off to sleep quite easily, but no . . . It was the same old story. He still couldn’t get used to sleeping alone.
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He closed his eyes, screwed them tight shut, clenched his fist into a ball, and tried to summon up some plausible fantasy to get himself started. In desperation, he pictured the new anchorwoman on the BBC Six O’Clock News, and began to prepare himself for the labour involved in bringing himself to climax, but then became distracted by the image of those thousands of joyless sperm about to be left stranded on the bedsheets, expiring, gasping for breath, their destinies unfulfilled. Where had that mental picture come from, for Christ’s sake? What did it matter anyway? Millions of the poor little sods had spent their energies on futile encounters with his wife’s eggs in the last twenty years, and in the end they had fuck all to show for it. He was hopeless, in that respect. He had failed, failed. The bedsheet was the best place for them. It was the only destiny they deserved.
In any case, five minutes of mechanical exercise got him nowhere. He was about to give it up as a lost cause and turn the radio on again, when he heard footsteps on the stone staircase outside his bedroom.
Then there was a voice outside his door.
“Benjamin?” It was Sophie. “Are you awake?”
“Yes,” he called, turning over on to his side. “Come on in.”
The handle was turned and Sophie stood framed in the doorway. She was still wearing her dressing gown, and carrying one of the log-books under her arm. She came inside and sat down on the bed beside him. She was breathing fast and heavily, either with excitement, or with the exertion of running up the stairs, or both.
Benjamin switched on his bedside light.
“What is it?”
“Your friend Sean,” Sophie panted. “Sean Harding. He had a pen-name, didn’t he?”
“What?” said Benjamin, rubbing his eyes now, trying to adjust to this sudden change of direction.
“Was it Pusey-Hamilton?” Sophie asked. “Sir Arthur Pusey-Hamilton?”
“That’s right,” Benjamin said. “He used to write these mad articles for The Bill Board. That was the name he used.”