A Ladder to the Sky

  ‘It was when you wrote the first drafts of The Breach and The Broken Ones.’

  I lifted my drink, swallowed almost a third of a pint in one go, then set it back on the table.

  ‘You really are very diligent, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘I feel I may have underestimated you, Theo. And did you find anything good in there? Something that you think I should have published but didn’t?’

  He took a second notepad from his satchel, a much larger one, and flicked through it, stopping at a particular page and reading it for a long time before speaking.

  ‘There was a story by a woman named Marianne Jilson,’ he said finally. ‘Called “When the Bough Broke”.’

  ‘Awful title,’ I said.

  ‘True,’ replied Theo. ‘And the story wasn’t much better, to be honest. Well, the writing wasn’t, anyway. Although the plot was sort of interesting.’

  ‘I don’t remember it.’

  ‘It was about five brothers living in America in the 1930s, working on their parents’ farm. Four join the army but one is left behind because he has flat feet and they won’t take him.’

  ‘Flat feet,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ve never really understood what that means, have you?’

  ‘The story is built around how difficult he finds it, being the only young man in town when everyone else has gone away to fight. He feels emasculated, of course.’

  ‘I see,’ I said quietly.

  ‘And then there was another story, by Ho Kitson. A Chinese-American writer, if I remember correctly from the accompanying letter.’

  ‘And what did he or she write?’

  ‘He. A story called “A Statement of Intent”.’

  ‘Better title.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad.’

  ‘And Ho Kitson’s story was about a girl who has abandoned her baby in a railway carriage in California, just as it’s about to set off for a cross-country journey.’

  I nodded but said nothing.

  ‘You can see where I’m going on this, I presume?’ he asked after a lengthy pause.

  ‘The Breach,’ I said.

  ‘The Breach,’ he agreed. ‘The opening chapter of that novel sees a young woman leaving her unwanted baby in a railway carriage. Another woman boards shortly after, discovers the baby and, being unable to have a child herself, steals him. No one ever knows. She just takes him home and she and her husband raise him as their own. And when the boy turns eighteen, the Vietnam War breaks out and almost all the sons of the families in town go to fight, but when he goes for his medical test—’

  ‘You don’t need to recount my own novel to me, Theo,’ I said, growing annoyed now by his impertinence. ‘I wrote it. I think I remember what it was about.’

  ‘And then there’s The Broken Ones,’ he continued, looking down at his notes again. ‘Do I need to go on?’

  ‘Well, you’re obviously enjoying yourself,’ I said with a shrug. ‘So why not?’

  ‘Steven Conway. A story called “The Wedding Anniversary”. A husband and wife visit Paris to celebrate twenty years together and, while there, she has a brief affair. And then Anna Smith. A story called “Tuesday”. A comic story about life on a university campus where a professor is trying and failing to seduce his students. And if we look at the plot of The Broken Ones—’

  ‘All right, Daniel, for fuck’s sake,’ I said, raising my voice.

  ‘Theo,’ he said calmly.

  ‘Just tell me what your fucking point is.’

  He looked at me with a certain contempt in his eyes and laughed. ‘It’s not obvious?’

  ‘Not to me,’ I said.

  ‘The ideas. They weren’t yours.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Maurice, I’m not trying to be obtuse—’

  ‘Then you’re failing. Tell me this, Theo. Those four stories you read. Were they any good?’

  He considered this for a moment and shrugged. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘I mean, they had some good ideas, story-wise, but the writing was weak and the characters were never fully developed.’

  ‘And if you had been the editor of Storī at the time, would you have published them?’

  ‘No. Definitely not.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘Your novels – those two novels – they weren’t your ideas. They’re a blend of other people’s stories.’

  I smiled. Other People’s Stories. My new book. My unfinished book. The book that Daniel, the little snoop, had discovered and got so worked up over.

  ‘But their stories weren’t any good,’ I protested. ‘And my novels, the two that we’re talking about, were both very well received.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Look, Theo. I’m a writer. And what’s the most irritating question that a writer can be asked?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you write by hand or on a computer?’

  ‘No, it’s Where do you get your ideas? And the answer is that no one knows where they come from and nobody should know. They evolve in thin air, they float down from some mysterious heaven and we reach out to grab one, to grasp it in our imagination, and to make it our own. One writer might overhear a conversation in a café and a whole novel will build from that moment. Another might see an article in a newspaper and a plot will suggest itself immediately. Another might hear about an unpleasant incident that happened to a friend of a friend at a supermarket. So I took ideas from badly written stories that had been sent to me – unsolicited, I might add – and turned them into something that was not only publishable but sold very well. What’s the problem with that?’

  ‘When you express it like that, nothing,’ said Theo, looking utterly frustrated by my reply. ‘But don’t you think—’

  ‘I think what I just said, that’s what I think. Are you trying to suggest that no one has ever written a novel about an abandoned child before? For God’s sake, Daniel, how does the story of Moses begin? The Pharaoh has condemned all male Hebrew children to death and Jochebed places the baby in an ark, where’s he discovered by Bithiah. Are you saying that Ho Kitson stole her idea from the Bible? And, what, a college professor who seduces his students? You’ve read Updike, I presume? Mailer? Roth?’

  ‘But it’s not the same!’ he insisted, shaking his head, clearly discombobulated now. ‘You’re trying to justify your actions and—’

  ‘I’m not trying to justify anything. And if you have an accusation to make, Theo, then perhaps you should just make it. If not, perhaps you should stop fishing for scandal and focus on the work itself. Be a literary biographer, as you say you want to be, and not a tabloid journalist.’

  He hesitated and, finally, shook his head. ‘I just think it’s a little strange that—’

  ‘My boy, you’re going to write an extraordinary thesis,’ I said. ‘I have to compliment you. The level of research you’re undertaking is exemplary. I presume you’ve talked to your father about this. He’s still interested in developing this book, I mean? A book about me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Theo, looking down at the table and tapping it with his fingers. The wind had truly been taken out of his sails and I couldn’t help but feel a little amused. The poor boy looked crestfallen. He’d thought he was doing a Woodward and Bernstein on me but the truth was, he was very new to this game and I’d been playing it for a long time. It was hardly a contest of equals.

  ‘Are you all right, Theo?’ I asked, reaching forward and taking his hand in mine. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, you look a little shaken.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘I should probably go. I have some work I need to do.’

  ‘All right,’ I replied. ‘But what a great afternoon! If you ask me, I think it’s very impressive the lengths you’re going to in order to write a strong thesis. It’s obvious that you’re going to be a great success one day, I’m certain of it. No one’s secrets will be safe from you. Are you sure you wouldn’t like another drink before you go?’ I asked, reaching into my pocke
t and removing my wallet. ‘I feel quite thirsty and I’m so enjoying talking to you.’

  6. The Cross Keys, Covent Garden

  Sometimes you just know that you’ve made a mistake. I had put my faith in Theo, had thought that he would be the one to reintroduce me to the literary world, but after our last encounter it began to dawn on me that I had chosen the wrong person. He was hard-working, certainly, an admirable trait in one so young, but simply too naïve. He’d done his research but had utterly failed to understand the value of the information he’d discovered. He’d allowed me to dismiss his concerns and even to make him feel foolish for voicing them at all. Had I been in his place, I would have tightened the screw and made me reveal all, but the poor boy just didn’t have the killer instinct. I realized, to my disappointment, that it was time to let him go, just as I’d let Erich go, just as I’d let Dash go, and just as I’d let Edith fall. They’d each served a purpose and, while Theo ultimately hadn’t proved as useful to me as I had hoped, at least he’d inspired me to get back to writing and to put the events of the past few years behind me. It was time to stop drinking and begin a novel. If he had done nothing else for me, he had done that.

  When I woke that morning, I reached for my phone, intending to text him to say that I would not be available for any further interviews but, just as I lifted it, a message arrived from him, asking whether we could meet later that afternoon in the Cross Keys. I thought, why not? It would be kinder, after all, to tell him face to face that our acquaintance had come to an end and that he would have to finish his thesis without me, than to do so over something so impersonal as a text. And so I replied in the affirmative, saying that I’d meet him there at three o’clock. I hoped there wouldn’t be a scene. I’ve always hated scenes.

  It would have been Daniel’s birthday that day and I spent most of the morning, and my journey to Covent Garden, thinking about him. His loss lay heavily on me but, just as I was discarding Theo, it was time to discard him too. I couldn’t write if I felt guilt. The truth was, I had been wrong all those years when I imagined that I would like to be a father. Perhaps it was the idea rather than the reality that appealed to me most for, in the end, much like my marriage to Edith, the experience hadn’t moved me as much as I had expected it to. Certainly, I had formed an attachment to the boy and would have preferred him still to be with me, but a life alone, where I was in control of my own movements and decisions, was my natural state.

  Other People’s Stories had begun as a rough idea one evening when I was feeling a little dejected from having discovered nothing interesting in the recent pile of Storī submissions. It had been almost a year since I’d found anything that I could adapt as my own and so I had started to think about my own life and how I had turned an unpromising beginning into a triumphant career. There were the people who really mattered – my parents, Erich, Dash, Edith and Daniel – and it was true that each had contributed something to my success. I started to make a few rough notes. I thought back over my own actions since I’d first left Yorkshire for the Savoy Hotel in West Berlin and realized the story I was searching for had been there all along.

  It wasn’t another person’s story at all.

  It was my own.

  Not that I intended to write a memoir. Certainly not. Fiction was my métier and fiction was my comforting home. Also, it wasn’t as if I could ever write a truthful autobiography. I would be vilified instantly and, one would assume, arrested. No, I couldn’t do anything as theatrical as that, but what I could do was write a novel. All I’d ever needed was a story and, once I had that, I still believed that I was one of the best in the game.

  And so I did what I had been doing all my life: I started to write.

  I began with a boy growing up in Yorkshire who wanted to make something of himself. I kept separate files, taking the truth and recreating it exactly as I remembered it. I began with my friendship with Henry Rowe, that early conquest of mine and the first person who had made me understand the powerful draw of my beauty. It hadn’t worked out, of course, and I’d never managed to finish the story I was writing, but I’d been young at the time and I wasn’t going to reproach myself for that. I’d still been learning, after all, and Henry had proved an excellent place to start.

  Then there was Erich. And Dash. And Edith. All good stories to tell. To make it easier for myself, my first draft was written exactly as I remembered things, using their real names and using my own. The plan was to write about a person with absolutely no conscience, someone who would use anyone to get ahead, an operator on the very highest level. And then, when my first draft was written, I would get down to the real work. Change the names, of course, and draw much wider distinctions between myself and the characters’ real-life counterparts. Also, I had decided that my protagonist would not be an aspiring writer but an actor. Erich and Dash would be great men of the theatre, Edith an ingénue. I had a lovely idea for a section where I and my Dash recreations would spend a night at the home of Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright, where Olivier, wily old fox that he was, would be the only person who had ever seen through me. I was certain that Gore would appreciate the comparison with perhaps the most handsome and talented actor ever to appear on screen. I had written several drafts of that section and it was my favourite by far because I’d always thought that, if Gore had simply taken the time to get to know me, then we might have got along. It was a shame, I thought, that he was no longer alive to read it.

  That day had also been a Saturday, and Daniel had been in a grouchy mood all morning, which I put down to the fact that he was thirteen and was entering puberty. He’d been quite annoying of late and I was starting to dread the two or three years that lay ahead.

  I’d gone out that afternoon to the Storī offices to catch up on some work and then, not relishing the idea of returning home to a moody teenager, had gone to the Angelika for a screening of Midnight in Paris. It had left me in a good mood, and when I got off the subway on my way home, I stopped at a local take-away and picked up some food. His favourite restaurant, I might add, not mine.

  When I returned home, however, I was surprised to realize that the apartment was empty. It was designed in such a way that Daniel’s bedroom was at one end, near the front door, while mine, and my office, was at the other, the two wings separated by a communal living space and kitchen. I opened the door to his room, but he wasn’t there and, as he wasn’t lying on the sofa reading or watching television, I assumed that he’d gone out. Perhaps one of his friends had called around and they’d gone to the movies or to wherever boys his age went when there were no adults around to tell them no. I generally didn’t ask too many questions. Daniel, after all, was quite responsible and, because of that, I was content to allow him his freedom.

  It was only after I put the food in the refrigerator for reheating later and returned to the living room that I heard noises coming from the other end of the apartment. Daniel rarely went down there so I was immediately surprised and a little anxious. I walked down the corridor, opened the door to my office and, to my surprise, discovered my son sitting at my computer. I don’t think I’d ever seen him there before, as he knew that he was expressly forbidden from using it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  He didn’t reply, nor did he turn around. His attention was entirely fixed on the screen before him and only when I repeated my question did he slowly turn to look at me. His expression was one I had never seen on his face before, a mixture of disillusionment, fear and hatred.

  ‘I’ve told you before, Daniel,’ I said, slightly disconcerted by this, and I could hear in my voice that I did not sound as stern as I had hoped. ‘My office is out of bounds at all times and no exceptions. You have your own computer. Use it.’

  ‘It’s broken,’ he said, and his tone was rather flat, as if he could barely bring himself to respond to me. ‘I dropped it earlier and it’s not working.’

  ‘Then we’ll get it fixed,’ I said. ‘Or we can get you a new one on Mo
nday. But don’t use mine, all right? That’s my work computer. I don’t like people messing with it.’

  He stared at me for a long time and, despite the fact that he was only thirteen, I couldn’t help but feel that I was the child in this situation.

  ‘Was Edith my mother?’ he asked finally, and I hesitated, like a chess player calculating a few steps ahead, wondering how he would respond to any reply of mine, and what I would say to him then, and how he would react to that. I turned my attention to the screen before him. A Word document was open but I couldn’t make out which one.

  ‘Where did you hear that name?’ I asked, and it crossed my mind that I had never talked to him about my marriage. There seemed no reason to, after all, for Edith was already dead before I even met the Italian chambermaid. All Daniel had ever known was he and I, and there had seemed little point in dragging up the past.

  ‘I read your book,’ he said. ‘The first section, anyway. Everything you’ve written about your life.’

  His voice came in quick gasps; he was obviously upset, and he reached for the Ventolin inhaler on the desk before him and took a quick puff to decongest his lungs.

  ‘Edith wasn’t your mother,’ I said.

  ‘But you were married to her. It says so here.’ He pointed in the direction of the open file.

  ‘She was my wife, yes, but she wasn’t your mother. She died a few years before you were born. She had nothing to do with you at all.’

  ‘It says here that you killed her,’ he said, his voice filling with emotion, tears starting to fall down his face, and he took another quick puff from his inhaler. His words were coming in staccato rhythm, the syllables broken up between gasps.

  ‘It’s just a novel, Daniel,’ I said, moving towards him. ‘It’s not the truth. You know the difference between fiction and real life, right?’

  ‘But you use your name,’ he insisted, raising his voice now. ‘It’s all Maurice this and Maurice that. And you talk about Two Germans. And I looked up Edith Camberley on the Internet and it says that she wrote a book too. And this Erich person,’ he continued. ‘I read that file too. And another man.’ He swallowed, looking half embarrassed and half horrified. ‘Did you have sex with men? Are you gay?’