My Other Life

"I cannot abide that question and I never answer it," she said, and frowned at my feet.

  She had been talking about feet in general, but her manner indicated that she was talking specifically about my feet.

  It was a winter night near Christmas; the fog and sea mist lay thick against the coast; I was a perfect stranger. If Lucy had warmed to me, welcomed me, or showed any concern, I would have been very direct. I would have divulged my name, and then I would have left. If she had been hostile, I would have done the same, but for another reason. Yet she was indifferent to me. And because I was certain that I wasn't going to tell her my name—it would have been embarrassing otherwise—I asked about this writer she loved reading. What was he like?

  By way of an answer she said, "There was once a very mysterious writer called B. Traven."

  She put it in the most condescending way. She was giving me information again: I was the simple-minded hiker and she the omnivorous reader.

  "No one knew who Traven really was," she said. "You've probably seen the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He wrote that book and a number of other books. No one could put his hand on his heart and say that he had ever met Traven. Traven had gone to great lengths to protect his identity."

  "That's very interesting. I think I saw that movie on TV"

  "I knew who Traven was," she said, ignoring what I had said. "I had read his books. And from internal evidence I knew what Traven looked like, where he came from, what he ate, how he dressed, his opinions, all his habits." She looked closely at me. "I knew the color of his eyes. Writing reveals everything."

  She smiled in satisfaction, and then blinked at me, perhaps wondering whether I could understand the complex implications of this unique insight.

  "And I was right," she said. "A few years ago, a book came out about Traven. It was all there, everything I had deduced. His eyes were Prussian blue."

  "And so you've figured out this other fellow."

  "Paul Theroux, yes. Every bit of it."

  "He's very hunky, very sexy, very—"

  "You're mocking me," she said angrily.

  Of course I was—out of nervousness, out of panic. But I was mocking myself much more. I wanted badly to interrupt her.

  "I think of him as tall and rather shy. Very gentle and"—she smiled and looked away—"very funny. Not a joke teller, but sort of endlessly amusing in a droll sort of way. And a little frustrated. Why would anyone spend all that time traveling if he was contented?"

  "As a hiker I can tell you that travelers tend to be optimists."

  "You can be frustrated and still be optimistic," she said.

  True. She had me there.

  "And I know there's something wrong in his marriage," she said.

  My indignation took hold of me. I said sharply, "You know that?"

  "Yes. Writing gives everything away," she said. "He might be unaware of it, though." She was not looking at me, but rather was studying the American writer's many books, the row of them on the third shelf. "I'd so like to meet him."

  I had hold of my beard again, this time to keep my hand from trembling. I said, "Sure, but what then?"

  With defiance she said, "I think we'd have a smashing time. I think I could make him very happy."

  Then she glanced again at my feet, my wet socks, and looked at me with pure hatred. Her eyes were large and deep brown, and because they were turned against me they were cold and bright with ferocity. They said: Get out of my house.

  I wanted to go. I walked to the door. Lucy stepped out of my way, as though giving a leper a wide berth. She moved slowly; she was thoughtful. She began speaking, not to me but to the room, as though continuing a thought that had begun in her head.

  "But of course I'll never meet him. I'll never go to California, or see Africa. I won't go to medical school. I'll never learn to play tennis or ride a horse. Bridge will go on being a mystery to me. The Queen won't come to my wedding, and even if I do marry, he'll be more a companion than a lover, and I'll never have children. I won't get an award at the Woman of the Year lunch. I'll never have a computer or a motorbike or a Rolls-Royce. I doubt that I'll ever learn to speak another language. I won't discover or explore anything. Nothing will be named after me."

  Now she looked at me. I had put my boots on. I could not have told her my name now for anything. Her words came from something much deeper than a mood; they were based on utter conviction, the most severe variety of the pessimistic English belief Nothing great or good will ever happen to me, and in her the fatalism amounted almost to paralysis.

  She sounded sad. It seemed to me now that it would only make her sadder if I told her who I really was. Perhaps I could have, earlier this evening, but it was too late now. I was sorry, because she obviously did not like me very much, and I still found her attractive.

  "On the other hand, nothing awful will come my way," she said. "I've survived a few calamities and came away relatively unscathed. There won't be any disasters. I don't know why I'm telling you this, but I know I'll live. Like this. I'm quite happy, actually."

  "You've been very kind to me."

  "No, I haven't," she said, and laughed carelessly, with a little crazy shriek in her laugh. "I've tormented and disappointed you." And she handed me my knapsack. "But you know nothing at all about me."

  There was an unpleasant thought showing in her face, and her eyes were demented for a second as she turned away from me.

  I wanted to tell her my name then, but after all that time and all this talk, would she had believed me? Whether she did or not I could not win, and what I told her would seem like mockery.

  "You had better go." She spoke it like a warning.

  Into the darkness. The sea fog blinded and soaked me. I crept slowly down the soft, sinking path, and loud waves broke near me under the cliff. I was not able to draw an easy breath until I was back in the dim lamplight and the homely stink of the coal smoke in the road at Blackby Hole.

  The Crossed Keys was shut, but I raised the landlord by rapping on the door. Aye, he said, he had a room—five pounds, in advance. He promised me a good breakfast, which would be served by his missus in the lounge bar in the morning. Nay, it wasn't far to Saltburn, and dead easy, he said, to find a rail connection to London.

  "I'm sorry to get here so late," I said.

  "We're used to being knocked up at all hours, being on the coastal path," he said, leading me up the narrow stairs. "All sorts of hikers come through." By then we were under the light in the upstairs hallway. He looked at my face with sudden scrutiny, as though he saw something wrong.

  "I know you," he said in a puzzled voice.

  Was he too a reader?

  "I was here earlier, having a drink."

  "Aye," he said. But he did not smile, nor say anything familiar. "When that woman was in the bar. Gives me the creeps, she does. That queer one."

  "Everything you say about her is gossip," Lucy Haven had said of Mrs. Pickering. But the landlord was still frowning at me.

  "That killed her lover," he said.

  "Yes," I said, and felt that I was in the know. "Poor old Mrs. Pickering with the dog."

  "Mrs. Pickering never hurt a soul! Nay, I mean that witch of a woman, Lucy Haven. Ah, you're a stranger—what do you know? Lucy Haven killed her fiancé. This was years ago. She was declared mental, and she got off. She claimed the bloke was a beast and she used a billhook on him while the balance of her mind was disturbed."

  He shoved the door open, clicked on the light, and showed me into my tiny room.

  "Round the twist—aye, pull the other one, my lord!"

  I tried to interrupt him as he talked and punched the mattress and pointed to the towel and soap. But I had no question to ask. I merely wanted him to stop talking, because I was afraid to hear any more.

  "Lucy Haven!" he said, and drew the curtains. "Aye, but there was another lover. No one knew the bloke. He disappeared. Could have drowned him. No one missed him." The landlord nodded slowly and let this sink in. "She's
never hurt me—she don't like me—but she's death on men she loves."

  And then, in his friendly northern way, out of the side of his mouth, he urged me to sleep well.

  NINE

  A Part in a Movie

  I NEEDED INTERRUPTIONS in London because I worked alone, haunting the house all day, growing ghostlier as I wrote, and a phone call was the proof I needed that I existed. I was especially glad when the phone rang that October afternoon; I had just finished another page of my China book and I felt it was going a bit too well. A book stuck badly was a misery, but if writing came easy I suspected it of being oversimple and second rate. (This opening, for example—the previous three sentences—has taken me two days to work out, about ten false starts.)

  There was no voice on the line, just a ping, a pause, the gasp of exhalation you get when you open a coffee can, and the sense of a hollow tube rather than a wire to my ear. I became alert, knowing it was a transadantic call.

  "Hi, Paul. Guess who?"

  I hated that. Boldly identifying my voice, this woman demanded I do the same, as though testing my friendship. I guessed right—Ariel Draper.

  "Where are you? Don't make me guess."

  "Los Angeles."

  There was warmth in the city name, and sunlight too. Midafternoon here was dawn there, but it was more than just a matter of light. A call from the United States was to me like a beckoning signal from a distant glowing planet.

  "I'm doing another picture with Peter. We were talking about you yesterday."

  "How is he?"

  "Great. He said to say hi. But the producer's English. Ask an American what time it is and he'll tell you how to make a clock.' He said that to me yesterday. I know you're working on a book, because you always are. What's this one about?"

  "China."

  "I love it."

  "Except it's not done."

  "How's it going?"

  "Slowly." Never tell the truth about what you are writing and it remains yours. "It's a travel book, so at least I know how it ends."

  "I've got a terrific story for you."

  People always offer stories to a writer, as though handing yarn to a knitter. The stories I got were sometimes better, but more often worse, than the people believed. There was always an important question that the storyteller could not answer. At their best they were colorful and neat, like urban legends, rather than the ragged, maddening episodes that possessed my imagination, which I recognized as life.

  One, told to me by a Dutchman over dinner, took place in Eindhoven, this man's hometown. After the Second World War had ended, each Saturday night an old couple, whose son had been captured by the Germans, waited at the Eindhoven railway station for him to return. It was always on Saturdays that the trains brought the prisoners of war home from the German camps. In the first year after the war many of these Dutch soldiers got off the train to meet their joyous relatives, and then there were fewer, and at last in the 1950s, none.

  But still the old couple went to the station every Saturday, and they waited for the train from Germany, and when the passengers had all filed past them and the station was empty, the old couple went home. They persisted in this same way for years, because they had no news, and they wanted to be at the station for their son, if he was still alive. It was a ritual—and what began as a rehearsal for a homecoming turned into a vigil.

  "I used to see them watching the passengers' faces, looking for their son," the Dutchman told me. "Even when they were ill, they waited at the station."

  He went silent, remembering the old couple at the empty station and how they had always gone home alone.

  "It might sound terrible to say," he concluded, "but I was relieved when they died. It was agony to see them there week after week."

  That was one I liked— I was relieved when they died —because they had been waiting and rehearsing, preparing for an event that never happened. Yes, it was a good story, but how could I make more of it, or connect it to anything that I might write?

  Ariel's stories were always good, but unusable.

  "I just finished casting a film about necrophilia," she had told me once. "I know it sounds gross, but it's being done in the best possible taste. Stop laughing. Anyway, I found this wonderful young actress, who is just so good at playing dead in the sex scenes. The other day during one of these scenes a fly landed on her eye and she didn't blink. That is acting."

  Ariel's phone calls from California delighted me, as though I were getting news from the real world.

  "Tell me."

  "Better still, I'll send it to you," she said. "It's not really a story. It's a script."

  "You want some script advice?"

  "No. I want you to read it and see if you're interested in acting in Peter's new movie."

  "Are you joking, Ariel?"

  "Absolutely not. It's not a big part, but you'd be perfect."

  "I've never acted in a movie."

  "No problem."

  "Ariel, don't send me the script. I could never be in a movie."

  "Why not?"

  "I'm not an actor. I don't know the first thing about it."

  "That's what directors are for."

  "I don't want to learn. I'm a writer."

  "The guy's a writer," she said. "That's the whole point."

  "I can't do it." I looked at my watch. "I have to get back to work."

  There was a bit more, just pleasantries, and then I hung up.

  My China notebook lay open beside my pad, a page about early summer in Guangdong Province: the heat, the rain, the bamboo thickets, the screech of cicadas. It was in my head: I could feel it and see it, but I could not get it onto the page.

  I wrote no more that day. I tried, I doodled, I manipulated a sentence, but nothing would come. The unexpected struggle, without a result, left me tired and irritable.

  The next day I made a start, a few words, but could not move further. I abandoned it and went for a walk. My normal time-killing hike took me down the hill to the river, across the bridge, and either east to the Tate Gallery, to look at pictures, or straight ahead, up Beaufort Street, to the ABC Cinema on Fulham Road. I walked towards the river in a cold drizzle, but at the bridge it turned to heavier rain and began smashing at the trees and tearing the withered leaves from the boughs. I boarded a 49 bus and stayed on as far as the ABC.

  An afternoon movie was harmless enough, but it remained for me a guilty pleasure. Once I had seen Ringo Starr there alone—sunglasses, beard, collar up—buying a ticket. I stood behind him, knowing we were doing the same thing. What was he hiding from?

  The movie today was On Suspicion, a low-budget English film about the visit of a team of American cops to Scodand Yard. The cast was impressive: I recognized many of them as actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company. But try as they might, English actors could not do American accents. They sounded so hollow and posturing, and attempting American snarls, they came off sounding like Irish rustics. It destroyed all credibility. You simply did not believe a thing a person said if you kept noticing his accent. The paradox was that it had to be transparent, not there, in order to be something.

  After the movie I went to the Pan bookshop nearby, bought a copy of the novel On Suspicion, and read it on the bus and saw how believable the plot was. I took a professional interest in the way the book had been adapted.

  Back home at my desk, among my China papers and yesterday's false starts, I thought of one of the actors who had played an informer. He had one line. It was "They're all the same. Rats." He was American. Throughout the action you remembered that word, "Rats." The set of his jaw, the push of his vindictive lips. He was not incidental; it was an important element. It was inspired casting. I liked him, and I found myself thinking: I can do that.

  But it was wrong to think about it. I was a writer. An actor—a performer—was the opposite of a writer. Any writer who tried this was doomed. Sam Shepard was a less interesting writer after you saw his face all over the screen. How could you take the
writer Harold Pinter seriously after you saw Harold Pinter the actor hamming it up. Jerzy Kosinski had appeared in Reds. Kosinski had committed suicide.

  I could not work the following day. Though Alison called from work about a BBC party we had been invited to, I said nothing to her about this offer of a part in a movie. It was another of my secrets, but not a very big one, because my mind was made up. I looked at my China notebooks, grew tired in anticipation, and told myself I was uninspired. I needed an idea—a thought, a phrase, a word, anything. I decided to take the day off and go to Cambridge, to see Chinese paintings depicting foreigners in the Fitzwilliam Museum, for my China book. What did we look like to the Chinese? Even if I did not find the big-nosed, red-haired foreign devils, it was worth the trip from Liverpool Street. Solitary train journeys, even short ones, calmed me and gave me ideas.

  And I looked up Anton. We met at a pub near his college, Clare. When he asked me how my China book was coming along, I found myself telling him about the movie offer rather than about the book. Was I thinking that someone his age—twenty—seemed to be closer to a knowledge and experience of the public taste, particularly where movies were concerned?

  Anton said, "That is so cool. I wish someone would ask me to be in a movie."

  "Would you say yes?"

  "Not half!"

  Then he got embarrassed in advance for me—for himself.

  "But you're not going to do it, are you?"

  I stuck out my jaw and pouted. '"Go ahead, make my day.'"

  He frowned, shook his head, and glanced around to see whether anyone had heard me, then leaned over to me and said, "You're not acting. You're indicating."

  It was the unexpected word "indicating" that made me pause.

  "Pretending. Going through the motions," he said, and tapped his chest. "It's not in here."

  "Don't worry, I hate acting," I said. "I hate watching people do it. I don't want to observe it. It's embarrassing."

  "There's such a thing as great acting, though."

  "I hate great acting more than any other kind of acting. 'My kingdom for a horse.' I'd rather watch amateurs or improvisers—those Mike Leigh people."