‘I’d like that very much.’
‘Maurice is a compulsive reader,’ said Dash, coming over to join them, standing to the boy’s right, so close to him, in fact, that Gore realized he was making a declaration of ownership. He returned to the table, irritated that his friend was so possessive of a prize that, like the work of a mediocre painter, might look good on an initial viewing but would eventually reveal itself to be holding little of substance beneath the brushstrokes.
‘Well, what else is there to do?’ asked Gore. ‘Although I must admit there are times when I think that I should only read the work of dead writers. I’m not sure that the living have very much to say any more.’
‘I can’t agree with that,’ said Maurice defiantly, strolling away from Dash and taking a seat opposite Gore. ‘I find that it’s only bitter and disappointed old men who say such things. They want to believe that literature will come to an end when they’re six feet underground.’
‘Charming,’ said Gore, impressed by how the boy held his ground. So many others just gave in instantly, frightened of incurring his tongue. ‘You’ve only been here a few minutes and you’re already insulting me.’
‘I didn’t mean you, of course,’ said Maurice, flushing a little, and Gore realized that, yes, it was possible to discomfit the boy. It didn’t take very much work at all, in fact. ‘It’s just that, when you’re a young writer, it can be hard for one to be taken seriously.’
‘It’s the same for old writers,’ said Gore with a shrug. ‘They think I’ve already said everything I have to say because I’m too old. If only we could all remain middle-aged for ever, then they would carve our every sentence into stone.’
‘I don’t want to wait that long, Gore,’ said Maurice, who, Gore noted, had not been invited to use his given name but was apparently not planning to stand on ceremony.
‘Come with me, Mr Swift,’ said Gore, smiling, and then, perhaps aware that his own teeth did not equal the dazzling brilliance of his young companion’s, stopped. He pointed towards the staircase that led into the villa proper. ‘Let me show you my library. Dash, you stay down here and relax, I insist upon it. Your face is quite flushed and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be calling any ambulances to collect you later.’
Upstairs, Gore led the way through the large, airy rooms into the one he had designated for his books and Maurice entered, looking around with appreciable awe as he moved towards the stacks.
‘It’s like a church,’ he whispered.
‘A cathedral,’ said Gore, who took great pleasure in showing his collection to true aesthetes, and whatever else he might be, it seemed clear from the look on Maurice’s face that he was a believer, a young man who felt more comfortable around books than people.
‘I could live here,’ said Maurice.
‘I’d have to charge you rent.’
‘Oh, you never know,’ replied the boy, turning around and smiling at him. ‘Maybe you’d just take pity on me and make me your ward.’
‘We’re not living in a Victorian novel,’ said Gore. Was it any wonder that Dash was completely under his spell? He had an answer for everything and was willing to flirt to assert his dominance.
‘You know, the last person to set foot in here was Henry Kissinger,’ said Gore, recovering himself slightly as the boy turned away to scan the shelves, hands held behind his back as if he didn’t want to leave finger-marks on anything. His lips moved a little as he read the names of the authors and titles under his breath. ‘He visited just a few weeks ago and stayed the night. I found him in here at five o’clock in the morning, reading Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire. He’d still be here right now if his Secret Service detail hadn’t insisted that it was time to go.’
The boy turned around and smiled but remained silent, his expression asking, Are you trying to impress me with such shameless name-dropping? Gore could name-drop all night, after all, if he had to. He’d known everyone worth knowing and still did. Even now he was almost sixty-five, people came to La Rondinaia on pilgrimages. Politicians, actors, musicians, film-makers, novelists. The Jameses and the Forsters, he called them. The former being his American visitors, the latter being his English. They all romanticized Italy and moved in circles wealthy enough that they could ignore the squalor. They loved the Amalfi Coast for its privacy and it went without saying that they all adored, and feared, Gore.
‘I have something over here that might interest you,’ he said, reminded now by these thoughts of a particular treasure and strolling over to a wall where two piles of books were separated by a small Picasso that took pride of place in the centre. It took him only a moment to find the one he wanted. ‘It’s a first edition. You’ve probably read it.’
‘Maurice,’ said Maurice, flipping it from front cover to back and running his finger along the lettering before opening it to the frontispiece. ‘Yes, I’ve read it. I love Forster. It’s signed and dedicated to you,’ he added, a look of wonderment spreading across his face now as he looked up. ‘You met him, then?’
‘Several times,’ replied Gore, retrieving both the book and his authority as he opened the volume at a random page, reading aloud the first lines upon which his eyes fell: ‘With the crudity of youth he drew his mother apart and said that he should always respect her religious prejudices and those of the girls, but that his own conscience permitted him to attend church no longer. She said it was a great misfortune. Mothers,’ he added. ‘My own mother, Nina, started off as an actress, you know. But then she forswore that career to become an alcoholic, a slut and a certifiable lunatic. I don’t know why she couldn’t have done both. Historically, the two careers have not proved mutually exclusive.’
‘You’ve said that before, haven’t you?’ asked Maurice, smiling. ‘It sounds rehearsed.’
‘No,’ said Gore, shocked by such a brazen remark. Who on earth did this boy think he was?
‘What was he like, anyway?’ asked Maurice.
‘What was who like?’
‘Forster.’
Gore hesitated before answering. He felt a sudden desire to anger-fuck the boy, then toss him over the cliffs into the sea below, to watch as his body bounced off the rocks and his bones smashed into a thousand pieces. ‘Prissy,’ he said finally, somehow managing to quell his growing temper and sense of discombobulation. ‘Mannered. Officious. If the gods had descended from Mount Olympus and used a pitiless blend of blood, bone and skin to craft a creature best suited for spending its days cloistered behind the walls of King’s College, Cambridge, then that creature would surely have gone by the name of Morgan. He could barely function in the real world. I daresay he started to tremble and perspire whenever he popped down to his local supermarket to buy toilet paper. Actually, it’s rather hard to imagine Morgan using toilet paper, isn’t it? One rather suspects that he was too prudish to engage in such a human act as excretion. Where’s Morgan? Oh, he went off to take his morning shit. No, I can’t imagine it at all. Anyway.’
He looked over at Maurice, hoping for a laugh, but the boy simply nodded, which irritated him. He’d thought all of that was rather good and deserved a little more appreciation. It was good form, after all, to laugh at the jokes of one’s betters. The Queen’s eldest boy, that otter-like cuckold breathlessly longing for his own ascension, had come to dinner one evening the previous year and Gore had laughed at all his jokes, despite the fact that the man was about as humorous as a member of the Sonderkommando. He’d barely eaten, he remembered that about him too, pushing a very good piece of fish around his plate as if he were searching for a piece of broccoli under which to hide it.
‘I don’t suppose your parents named you for him, did they?’ he asked, returning the book to its allotted place on the shelf.
‘No,’ replied Maurice, shaking his head. ‘No, they weren’t readers. I doubt they’d ever even heard of Forster.’
‘That’s a Yorkshire tone to your voice, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘But you’re trying to shake it off by doing a poor im
pression of an announcer from the BBC World Service.’
‘I’m not trying to shake anything off,’ said Maurice. ‘But yes, I’m from Harrogate. Although I’ve spoken this way since I was a child.’
‘You’ve wanted it that long, then?’ said Gore quietly, and the question might have been a rhetorical one.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I wonder what else I can show you that you might appreciate.’
He turned and walked around the library, looking for something appropriately impressive. ‘What were you reading on your journey here, by the way?’ he asked.
‘Dash’s new novel. He gave it to me when we met at Heathrow. I already had something in my bag that I’d been looking forward to but I had to set it aside.’
‘How incredibly crass. Do you mean to tell me that you sat on a flight next to each other – I’m assuming you sat next to each other – and were forced to read his book while he watched you turn the pages? And then on the train from Rome too?’
‘Yes,’ said Maurice.
‘Pathetic behaviour,’ said Gore dismissively. ‘It reminds me of an occasion when I agreed to meet another novelist for dinner in Cologne, a mediocre hack if I’m honest. He deliberately kept me waiting in the lobby of his hotel, possibly to assert some sort of dominance over me, and when he finally deigned to appear he was carrying a book with him, one of his own, and he claimed he’d been re-reading it on the flight. What an ass, I thought. Still, I suppose someone had to read the damned thing. It’s not as if the general public took to it.’
He waited for Maurice to ask who the novelist had been and, when the question didn’t arrive, he felt a mixture of disappointment and frustration.
‘What did you think of it, anyway?’ he asked. ‘Dash’s book, I mean.’
‘It’s not one of his better ones,’ replied Maurice quickly. ‘I still have three hundred pages to go too. I’d give up if it weren’t for the fact that he’ll want a full report later.’
Gore smiled and tapped his finger on the desk. Interesting, he thought. How easily the boy mocks his benefactor.
‘I should have asked,’ he said. ‘What was the book you were intending to read?’
‘Myra Breckinridge,’ said Maurice, and Gore couldn’t help himself. He burst out laughing.
‘Oh, my dear boy,’ he said. ‘You are good at this, aren’t you? I can see you’re going to be a tremendous success.’
Over dinner, the discussion turned to Maurice’s novel. Gore had avoided making any direct reference to it all afternoon but Howard, who had returned home in disarray, having had his wallet stolen in a café before unsuccessfully chasing the thief through the streets of Ravello, asked when it would be published.
‘Oh, but it’s already out,’ said Dash, delighted that the conversation was turning to his protégé at last, which was far more appealing to him than the lecture on the Emperor Galba that Gore had been delivering for almost forty minutes. ‘The British edition, that is. And some of the European ones. But the Americans don’t publish until September. That’s where you come in, Gore.’
‘Me?’ asked Gore, lifting a prawn from his plate and shelling it in a trio of expert movements before dipping the crustacean in Cassiopeia’s excellent chilli dressing and popping it into his mouth. There were hundreds of reasons for spending the autumn of one’s life on the Amalfi Coast but the quality of the seafood was near the top of that list. ‘What have I got to do with anything?’
‘We thought you might offer an endorsement. You don’t mind our asking, do you?’
‘We being …?’
‘Maurice and I.’
‘Dash, please,’ said Maurice, doing his best to look uncomfortable but proving himself an imperfect actor.
‘Is that what you hoped for, Maurice?’ asked Gore, turning to the boy and looking him directly in the eye. ‘Did you hope that I might endorse your novel?’
‘Actually, I’d prefer if you didn’t,’ he replied.
‘Maurice!’ cried Dash, appalled.
‘Really?’ said Gore, equally surprised by this remark. ‘May I ask why?’
‘Because I wouldn’t want you to think that’s the only reason I came here tonight. When Dash suggested you might host us for dinner, I knew I would cancel anything on my calendar in order to attend. I’ve been an admirer of yours for many years and the opportunity to meet you in person was one that was too good to pass up. But I wouldn’t want you to think that I came here only to exploit your good nature.’
Gore couldn’t help but laugh at the suggestion. Many outrageous things had been said about him over the years, after all, thousands of unkind comments from the likes of Truman, Harper, Norman, Buckley, Tricky Dick, Updike and all the rest of them, but no one had ever had the bad manners to accuse him of having a good nature. He glanced towards Howard, who was smiling too as he poured more wine.
‘So how about I say that, even if you were to offer an endorsement, I would reject it,’ continued Maurice.
‘If your editor could hear you now, he’d put a gag across your mouth.’
‘Of course, should you find the time to read my novel, I’d be very interested to know what you make of it. In a private capacity, of course. Man to man.’
Gore sipped his drink and, for once, felt stuck for words. Exactly what game was the boy playing? It was difficult to decipher. Was he serious when he said that he would turn down a quote from him if one was offered and, if so, was that an insult or a compliment? Perhaps, he thought, his name no longer held enough weight to warrant a sentence or two across the dust jacket of a debut novel. If that was the case, then it might be time to leave Italy and return to public life. Or did the boy not want the patronage of a man Gore’s age, preferring the support of younger, more fashionable writers? A weight of sorrow fell upon him and, as he reached for another prawn, he changed his mind and dropped it back into the bowl with its fellows, his appetite destroyed.
‘What’s your novel about, anyway?’ asked Howard, sitting back in his chair and looking at Maurice with an expression that suggested he would have no objection to the boy slowly removing his clothes as he answered.
‘It’s about Erich Ackermann,’ said Dash, leaning forward enthusiastically, his face lighting up with the enthusiasm of a fat man at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
‘Who’s Erich Ackermann?’
‘Dread,’ said Gore. ‘You’ve read it.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes, you admired it.’
‘All right.’ Howard considered this for a moment. ‘He wasn’t the fellow we met at that festival in Jaipur, was he? With the moustache and the pipe? The one who kept bursting into song at inappropriate moments?’
‘No, that was Günter Grass.’
‘Oh yes. I liked him.’
Gore raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t wild about Howard liking other writers, particularly eminent ones. Although he didn’t much care for him liking younger writers either, those whose eminence was only imminent.
‘Actually, it’s not about Erich Ackermann,’ interrupted Maurice, a note of irritation in his voice. ‘Seriously, Dash, I wish you’d stop saying that. It’s a novel, after all. A work of fiction. Not a biography.’
‘You’ve written a novel that features Erich Ackermann as a character?’ asked Howard.
‘I suppose that’s a reasonable way of putting it, yes.’
‘And does he mind?’
‘He hasn’t said one way or the other.’
‘Did you have to ask his permission?’
‘No.’
‘Isn’t there some sort of moral conflict there then?’ asked Howard.
‘None whatsoever,’ said Dash. ‘There can be no discussion of morality when it comes to art. A writer must tell the story that captures his soul. Gore’s written about Aaron Burr, after all. And Lincoln. And the Emperor Julian.’
‘Yes, but they’re all long dead. Ackermann is still alive, isn’t he?’
‘He teaches in Cambridge
,’ said Gore. ‘Just like Morgan did back in the day.’
‘Not any more,’ said Maurice. ‘He left. Before they could dismiss him.’
‘Oh, I hadn’t heard. Driven out, no doubt, by the forces of the politically correct and the righteously indignant. Poor Erich.’
‘He lives in Berlin now.’
‘Back where his story began.’
‘Poor Erich?’ repeated Dash, leaning forward on the table. ‘Gore, did you just say, Poor Erich? Haven’t you kept up with the news? Don’t you know what he did?’
‘I’ve read a few things,’ replied Gore dismissively. ‘Some columns in the papers, and I glanced at a typically fatuous essay that Wolfe wrote for the New York Review of Books. And as far as I can tell, half the world’s novelists have chimed in with their opinions, which has provided each one with their intended few minutes of publicity. How competitive everyone is in expressing their outrage! As far as I can tell, Bellow is the only one who’s said anything sensible on the subject.’
‘Why, what did he say?’ asked Maurice. ‘I haven’t heard.’
‘That he didn’t give a flying fuck what Ackermann did when he was a boy. All he was interested in was the man’s books.’
‘So much for solidarity,’ said Dash, disgusted.
‘Solidarity among whom?’ asked Gore. ‘Jews? Jewish writers? Old men? With whom is he supposed to share this unanimity of spirit? The fact is that we all have skeletons in our closets, histories of which we would prefer the world to remain ignorant. You should know some of the things that I did as a boy. Or that Howard did. And I daresay you were no saint either, Dash.’
‘No, but I never sent a family of Jews to the gas chambers.’
‘But it’s a matter of perspective, surely,’ said Gore calmly, picking at his food again. In debate, his appetite had returned. ‘Had you, Howard or I been nineteen years old and living in Herr Hitler’s Germany, where the boys gathered to march their marches and salute their salutes, filing through the streets in their handsome Hugo Boss uniforms, their hair reeking of pomade beneath striking caps, their bodies crackling like wet firewood under the weight of their exploding hormones, wouldn’t we have signed up for the Hitlerjugend too, before graduating to the Wehrmacht? I was born in West Point, for heaven’s sake. I was a military brat. It’s all just a circumstance of birth, isn’t it? Ackermann was doing his duty by his country. Should we criticize him for that? Why, even young Maurice here might have betrayed his friends had he been alive at that time.’