She lowered her whisper down more and looked cautiously across to her daughter, leaning slightly in to me. ‘Don’t tell, but I’m Virgo. I can’t ask anyone else, Douglas. I can’t ask my pal Abingdon, or she would tease me. Why does Lou call this my venereal disease picture? He won’t tell me. I think I look nice.’

  ‘You look very nice. Crabs.’

  ‘Crabs? Why crabs? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Never you mind. You look alluring.’

  ‘Alluring?’ she pronounced slowly.

  ‘Where is that beach? Seychelles, Caribbean?’

  ‘Noooo.’ She did that low chuckle which must have come from her mother; it was too old for her. ‘That’s Dittisham. In Dorset, I think. The photographer had a nightmare getting all the little tied-up boats out of shot. There’s actually one boat hidden behind me. The crabs aren’t real. They’re plastic. From Pinewood film studios. Oh my God. I couldn’t sit on a beach with no clothes on and real crabs running all around me. Oh my God, no. Though I wasn’t really without clothes. I’d bikini bottoms on after all. You just can’t see them. That was for the signs of the zodiac calendar series. I couldn’t be in this year’s series cause I was huge, expecting Lily.’

  I nodded.

  Still we whispered, so we both heard the mighty procession of Llewellyn coming along the hallway. We were helplessly trapped, at the bottom of the bed, before that glamour photograph of Aoife – naked. I suddenly felt the image should – as on the altarpiece of Grünewald’s terrifying Mocking of Christ – have shutters that we could just snap shut. It would have been madness to lurch aside and examine a gold lamé scarf that hung from the clothes rack, though this is what I felt I should do.

  The door swung soundlessly with Llewellyn’s heavy clench, his other fist formed around the bottle of vodka. He immediately evaluated our position. ‘I am but a pair of ragged claws scuttling up a nurse’s hairy arse.’ He didn’t whisper.

  ‘Lou,’ she said. ‘Was a pretty nurse bandaging you then?’

  ‘Hyperborean with a moustache.’

  I chuckled but glanced at Lily in a presumptuous way – as if I were the responsible male there, concerned for the babe’s rest; yet the baby did not stir.

  ‘Stunning photographs,’ I continued to whisper.

  Llewellyn put his free palm straight out and touched Aoife’s leather buttock. ‘A fine figure of an innocent, spirited away to Acton in the Sky by the Dark Lord.’ He pointed at the shot of her on the beach. ‘This is her first communion. Canvey Island in December. With some of the local lads.’

  She leaned to him, laughing, one palm gently going against his chest and remaining there. ‘You are my Dark Lord.’

  ‘I am.’

  I said, a little louder, ‘I’m about to conduct a Protestant rite upon your beautiful daughter.’

  Llewellyn, standing entwined with Aoife, put on a brilliant expression, eyes popping open wider, the mouth elongating down into a pale, stretched mask.

  ‘On you go. She won’t wake,’ Aoife said.

  I reached carefully in towards Lily, I ever-so-gently touched her minute palm with the cold edge of vulgar coin and I pulled it back.

  ‘What’s the meaning of this blasphemy?’

  ‘It’s nice, Lou. It’s a custom of up in Scotland, so she’s never without money to buy food.’

  ‘She can feed us, then. And she’s out of here at sixteen. Look here, look here, boyo.’ He nodded and stepped away from Aoife, who trailed an arm after him, but as he was excited she allowed him to go. Llewellyn crossed to the bed and I followed him those few steps.

  I was now able to identify which side of the bed Llewellyn slept on. Against the inner wall was an assembled, rickety bookcase you could reach out to from the bed. The two supporting pillars to the rough, paint-spattered cross planks were towers of hardcover and paperback books that could presumably never – or only rarely – be removed for consultation. I soon deduced the demarcation of the books. The supporting pillars were built exclusively of contemporary English fiction. The cross planks shelved accessible volumes of reference books and many, many works in the European languages: grammars, dictionaries, primers and some novels, even folded newspapers in French and Italian. I could make out plain-covered Pleiades editions in French, apostrophe-spattered titles in Italian, black gothic German script and the cracked, fat, wide spine of a Castilian Don Quixote published from Barcelona. On the very top shelf was the long duck-egg-green slab of spines to many Penguin Modern Classics. My nosey face confidently gravitated there. I’d spotted Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side, and was about to sound off about it but Llewellyn lowered himself slowly to sit on the bed and he patted the space next to him. I obediently sat and faced the small wall of books. The bed was very soft.

  He shook his head. ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seems all of my library. Especially unprofitable.’

  ‘Know the feeling.’

  ‘Commiserate together.’ He passed the vodka bottle.

  I knew I couldn’t drink vodka straight so I just held it and he didn’t seem to notice.

  We sat side by side with our knees out in front of us.

  I bent my head sideways and read the book-spine titles of one supporting column: Francis King, Burgess’s Malayan novels, Robert Nye, Alice Thomas Ellis, all of Richard Hughes, H.D.’s Bid Me to Live, Julian Rathbone’s Joseph, Calder Willingham’s Eternal Fire, Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long, Blair’s biography of Beckett with the slim Calder volumes, Jim Phelan’s Wagon-Wheels, London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins. I touched a spine carefully with a finger. ‘A Month in the Country. Carr is a very interesting guy too.’

  ‘He’s quite good,’ he snapped grudgingly with a frosty tone.

  Lawrence Durrell’s Constance or Solitary Practices was there. I tapped the spine. ‘Did you read Durrell’s book about Rhodes? Sort of ravishing. Wish I had a spirit rich enough to respond to the world like that, to write it so fully.’

  ‘You sound like a Christmas Eve with the Salvation Army, Major Barbara.’ But after a silence he added, ‘The hippies used to read The Alexandria Quartet but now us younger folk suddenly don’t. He’ll come back into fashion. Whatever that amounts to.’

  ‘You have a lot of foreign editions here.’

  ‘I try to read ’em all, boyo. Frankly, reckon I could do much better myself. How are your languages?’

  ‘Terrible. Absolutely terrible; I managed to pass O-grade Gaelic but don’t understand a single word any more.’

  ‘You are a disgrace,’ he told me in a perfectly serious tone and nodded his head.

  From over to my right came Aoife’s voice. ‘Lou speaks French and Italian and Spanish and German and he can read all others.’

  ‘Not all. And my German is very bad. It’s horrible.’

  ‘You’re a linguist. A sotted polyglot. You should go to University College. You wouldn’t screw it up,’ I said.

  ‘Ha. I can’t afford that, boyo. We’ve a daughter to provide for. Or the publishers of London do.’

  I had slightly shifted to look across at Aoife. I found I had to turn from one of them to the other and then back again, both to give them my attention and to appear polite. I had thought she’d previously left the bedroom but she was folding an orange blanket several times. She walked out and I heard her movements in some next-door room which I hadn’t yet seen. A noise began like hollow metal tent rods contacting and being assembled.

  Llewellyn lifted down one of a two-volume Oxford English Dictionary. It was an old edition. He opened it and turned through the thin, brittle-sounding pages. I noticed, in bright-coloured ink, several words highlighted, almost on every page. I frowned at an indicated word: patibulary.

  ‘Look at this.’ His eyebrows crept up. ‘Look at all the words I’ve marked.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Great words. The words I’m going to use in my novel.’

  ‘What’s your novel going to be about?’

  He turned to me. ‘I don’t have the slightest notion, boyo, but I know what words I’m going to use.’ He snapped the dictionary shut. He didn’t seem to have noticed I hadn’t taken a sip of the vodka and he retrieved the quarter bottle from me, wrenching it away. I started to accept he was very drunk and couldn’t hold his liquor. Yet they must have pumped a fair few painkillers into him at the hospital.

  ‘Cunningham.’ He placed a chummy hand on my shoulder and we slightly bounced up and down on the bed. ‘The fuckers will not resent your work. They will not resent your style, they won’t even resent the fact you didn’t go to Oxford and rotten Cambridge. Do you know what they will resent? Do you actually know?’

  ‘Who do you mean?’

  His head batted forward, almost touching the books. ‘These old fuckers.’

  ‘These writers?’

  ‘You know what they will all resent?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your youth. It’s our fucking youth they hate, boyo. They might be stuck in Hampstead with a bank balance but their youth is all spent.’

  ‘In his defence, I don’t think J. L. Carr is at all wealthy,’ I tried to point out. ‘Jim Phelan certainly not. They don’t live in Hampstead.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, boyo. The fact is, the bastards have made it. They’ve bloody made it and we haven’t. They’ve jumped the wall. For God’s sake don’t be fooled by fame and reputations, Cunningham; they blind taste and the senses. I am not being told any of these buggers are worth a thing just because they are known names. It’s a ticker-tape of bloody names and if you come along, you lengthen the roll call. They’ll take it out on us. On you.’ He nodded with certainty.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Simple psychology. It’s just psychology.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Always remember that. Till you’re bloody forty, then you can forget it, cause you’ve either failed or you’ll be one of them old self-satisfied fuckers anyway. You must know what that old biddy says in Mortimer’s Charade?’ He turned round quickly to stare at me.

  I mumbled, ‘No. I haven’t read it.’

  He shook his head slowly, like a doctor delivering the worst news. ‘You haven’t read it?’ And he quoted, ‘“The entertainment world is all a sort of dream. You only wake up when you fail, or when you succeed.”’

  There was silence. I nodded.

  ‘That novel’s here. Somewhere. Brilliant book and you haven’t bloody read it.’ Llewellyn shook his head again. ‘That was his first novel. Only twenty-five bloody years old. Dazzling. He declined immediately.’ Llewellyn’s head went forward. I shot out my hand and grabbed his shoulder. I thought he’d conked out, but instead, slightly stooped forward, keeping his torso straightened, his arm reached in under the bed and, ignoring my hand – which I quickly whipped back – he retrieved a glossy, red-covered book. He rose again and dropped it into my lap. The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook 1983. ‘This is your bedtime reading. Every night. Publishers. Agents. Film companies. Contractual blabber. The borderlines where the truth of commerce overtakes and the lies of art are left behind.’

  ‘I’ll take a dander at it.’

  ‘Right. I’m shagged out. Off to bed with you. What will we start on tomorrow? Movie script or a novel?’

  ‘Uhm. I’m not sure that I would know how to write a movie script.’

  ‘Oh but we shall, boyo, and make one million dollars. However, just to warm up, we’ll bash out a novel each to start with. After a few bloody pints, of course.’

  He lay back on the pillows, eyes closed, and he tried to swing his legs up onto the bed but of course they softly impacted against my resting knees and he murmured something derogatory, then, ‘You lunatic.’

  I suddenly had to slide down the bed towards its end and stand up as his legs – brogues still on – craned over and settled upon the crocheted cover atop the candlewick bedspread. He seemed asleep immediately. I noted the vodka bottle had been dexterously positioned on a shelf in what looked like a previously established niche.

  I took a last look at Aoife’s photos then smiled at baby Lily. The child seemed able to sleep through any intellectual commotion around her. I left their bedroom carrying The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook in one hand.

  Aoife sat in the living room upon that sofa, stained with Llewellyn’s blood, her unreadable face smiling ahead. Lalique eyes so still, it seemed wrongful to stir them into any action at all.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘I think Llewellyn— Lou’s fast asleep. He must be exhausted.’ I was standing at the doorway, one hand holding that book, proselytising on a threshold. Through the wide windows ahead we both silently looked at the great city spreading to the south; the lights seemed more numerous than ever and all were gently and unstably agitating together in the cool night air.

  She stood. ‘I’ve made your bed. I really have made it because it’s a camp bed you build up. Afraid you can only have blankets on it to keep warm with. No spare sheets. There’s no heater through there either,’ she stated in that neutral, slightly nasal tone she had.

  ‘Oh, but that’s just fine.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You’re tall like us; when I used it for a few nights before we got the bed delivered, my toes stuck out the end.’ She added with definite clarification, ‘Lou was on the sofa.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’ll need to borrow sheets off Granny Smith.’

  ‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance.’

  She lowered her head briefly and walked past me, off down the corridor. ‘But you’re not.’ Presuming I was expected to, I followed cautiously, fearful she might abruptly turn right into the bathroom.

  Above the door at the end of the corridor was a small interior window for light distribution. It had been broken, so there was a ragged glass edge to a missing chunk in the pane.

  We were both standing in a small, L-shaped room. The canvas camp bed lay along most of the floor. Near the window – curtainless, of course – were modern weight-lifting barbells with some small, three-kilo discs on the ends. There was an elderly record player and a small accumulation of long-playing records leaning against the skirting board.

  ‘This is a great little den. Does Lou really lift weights?’

  ‘No, he’s not allowed. I do. Just for muscle tone. I’m a weakling.’

  ‘You lift them?’

  ‘I have to get back in shape after Lily.’

  I nodded slowly. ‘This is all dead kind of you, Aoife.’

  She put her face quickly to mine, our cheeks just touched and she made one kiss sound with her lips. Her cheek was surprisingly cold before she took it away. ‘It’ll be lovely with someone else here. It’s been hard for Lou with Lily coming and no job. He loves to talk about books and languages. I’m silly for him about that stuff.’

  ‘Not at all. You’re both very kind and generous. Lily is beautiful too.’

  She smiled.

  ‘Thank you for taking care of Lou and bringing back the lovely food and the wine. Good night.’

  ‘Good night. And good night to Llewellyn. Lou.’

  When I pulled my left sock off and sniffed, it smelled so bad it gave me an immediate headache. It was so long since my shirt had been washed it didn’t even smell like me any more.

  When I lay in darkness on the slightly unstable camp bed, stretched out coffin-straight, I held my breath to listen for sounds through the dwelling but there were none.

  Although it was long after the last underground services had ceased, some kind of train movements still went on far below. I saw the silent blitz of incendiaries flash and signify softly upwards.

  Part Two

  5

  The acoustics always seemed highlighted, localised, when I came out of London underground stations as my constrained senses reached and focused. Rising away from the atmospheres of humid incubation, we three came out of High Street Kensington station. The squeaking wheel of a taxi sounded especially brilliant.

  A guy in a leather biker jacket was shuffling a yellow plastic bucket with coins in the bottom and a SUPPORT THE MINERS strip of paper Sellotaped around it. Bold for Kensington. I automatically grabbed from my pocket, sifted the coppers, dropped them in the bucket and trotted away. The guy said, ‘Cheers, mate,’ behind me.

  Lou watched me carefully. ‘Yes. This isn’t a social call. It’s a sociological call.’

  On the High Street we’d stepped left, towards the Commonwealth Institute. Aoife walked snugly between Lou and me as we each linked with one of her arms. She moved jauntily in the middle and turned her head towards one or other of us – as we were each addressed or as we each spoke.

  I took a foolish pride in walking with Aoife between us. You saw men, late from the office or fresh from the pub, look at her – wearing that dress and those boots and with make-up on. Women also glanced. All Lou had done was put his trilby hat on his head with his usual macintosh, but somehow he looked timeless.

  Aoife said, ‘You’ll still have a good time.’ Then, ‘I need to phone to put my mind at rest.’

  ‘Cunningham and I are incapable of having a good time at something like this.’

  She turned her face to me. Her face with dark lipstick. I found it hard to take my eyes away from her. ‘Is that true, Douglas?’

  I said, ‘Fashion makes me uncomfortable. It can be a tyranny in the other arts so I reckon fashion can be a tyranny in fashion. In theory. Perhaps not in practice.’