“I see you’ve got the phrase ‘dizzy orbs’ on the next page,” Benson remarked, looking up from his reading.

  Carter made some reply, rendered indistinct by the fact that he was wiping his nose as he spoke.

  “What did you say?” Not for the first time Benson wondered why Carter kept on coming to see him. Authorial vanity presumably. It was an outing for him too, of course. More to the point, he thought suddenly, why do I go on? Hogan due tomorrow, and after him Anthea Best-Cummings in her black leathers, smelling of machine oil from her powerful motorbike, laden with poems full of expletives and references to menstruation. It wasn’t the money even when he could get it. It’s because I daren’t move. He noticed that Carter was smiling. “I didn’t quite catch that,” he said.

  “Transferred epithet,” Carter said. “Albert felt himself getting dizzy at the sight of them. It’s called a transferred epithet.”

  His smile was triumphant and shy. He was back at school, in the rare position of being able to tell teacher something. Benson felt a sudden rush of affection and a sort of sorrow for Carter, for his heavy shoulders and rough face, the incongruous flamboyance of his clothes, the hopeless ineptness of his prose, above all for his entrapment, in the evening of his days, in these treacherous marshes of fiction. “The sooner it is brought back home to roost the better,” he said. “You’ve been coming to see me for about a year now, haven’t you, Harold?”

  “Fourteen months.”

  “And your novel – you had been working on that for some years previously, hadn’t you?”

  “I commenced it eight years ago. After my wife passed away. I had to do something. I’m well into it now, of course.”

  “You are, yes. Well, I’ll tell you my opinion. I think the book is hanging fire at the moment. Worse than that, it is stagnating. You have got into the marshlands. Now there is one clear and obvious way to take it forward. Albert and Sheila must be precipitated into something. And as far as I can see there are only two choices open: either they must tear themselves apart for ever or they must get much more serious on the sofa.” He paused, then said, “Not to put too fine a point on it, these two must finish things or they must fuck.”

  “They can’t, not just at present.” Carter spoke in a tone of calm authority.

  “Why can’t they?”

  “Albert respects her too much, for one thing. Besides, he is lacking in confidence. She has been married before and he is afraid of not coming up to scratch. Also, he feels unworthy of her. But he is very good with his hands and he hopes she will be touched by these odd jobs about the house he is doing for her. Like a knight of old, that is his way of serving her. She has been married to this bastard of a husband, she has been badly hurt and feels that she can never trust a man again. She cannot give of herself. What she is doing is protecting herself all the time but Albert doesn’t understand this and it makes him feel more unworthy than ever.” He brooded for some moments. Then he said, “It is what you might call an impasse.”

  “But why all the groping on the sofa?”

  “I thought you would have tumbled to that,” Carter said, with some return of the triumphant look. “It is symbolical. Albert is groping for his identity. This is a quest novel, really. Sheila is questing for her self-respect after this disastrous marriage. She is trying to keep her options open.”

  “And her legs closed. I see, yes.” Benson was dismayed slightly to have been caught out at this symbolic level – one on which he himself habitually moved. “Well, I am looking forward to the next chapter,” he said.

  It was the signal for departure. Carter began gathering his papers together. “Relationships can be complicated,” he said, on what sounded like a confessional note.

  “They can, yes.” Benson watched Albert and Sheila being shuffled together and stowed away in the bag Carter now used for the purpose. This was capacious and poison green in colour like the grass that grows over bogland. Carter always brought the whole manuscript in case there was dispute or some need to refer back. In the course of time, like some prodigious cuckoo, it had outgrown the briefcase which had been its previous home.

  “I’m getting into it now,” he said on his way to the door. “I am getting inside the characters.”

  “You must know Albert pretty well by this time.”

  It was now that Carter came out with the remark that made him a sort of forerunner, part of Athena’s weft, though Benson did not realise this at the time. “Yes indeed,” he said, with the pleasurable alertness of an author discussing his work, “but it is Sheila mainly. I am getting close to Sheila, very close. Between you and me,” he said, standing on the top step, glancing in the direction of Hardman Street, where double-deckers were passing, “these days sometimes I feel I am Sheila.”

  Lingering there, holding his virulent bag, he seemed disposed to further, deeper confidences, as if his enlargement into the street had dispelled some reticence. Benson, however, felt he had heard enough. “I don’t like to seem pressing, Harold, you know that, but you owe me now for three consultations and I—”

  At these words purpose and motion returned to Carter. “It’s all in hand,” he said briskly. “I’ll be in touch.” With that he was down the steps and away.

  Benson went slowly back through the office into his sitting room, where silence awaited him like a deputation. He settled into an armchair and looked around him, allowing the last echoes of Carter’s passage to die away. The room was shabby; the walls needed painting and the plaster moulding was chipped and discoloured; but the proportions pleased and soothed him, the high ceiling, the tall sash windows, the arched recesses with the stucco rosettes picked out in white and blue. He had taken down and placed under the bed a large picture of playful kittens and another of Flemish peasants misbehaving at a wedding feast, and this had left the walls bare. A white owl had gone frantic with fear in this bare room and stunned itself …

  As he sat there he fell into that state of mind familiar to sleepless people, a sort of wondering, half-apprehensive reverie. Not difficult to believe, no. That panic of the bird found the right setting here, amidst these rational proportions. Elegance, restraint, the virtues of the period. Founded on fear strong enough to burst the heart. That fear the black people must have felt, taken from their forest homes, thrust into the open, exposed to the wide sky, the terrible surf. The terrible surf. He had read the phrase somewhere and it haunted him. Fear and fever-stench, the stinking hold of the ship, misery so great, so prolonged, that the timbers must have groaned with it, the rigging shrieked. Far-fetched? These elegant houses built in the 1780s, at the height of that fear and fever, heyday of Liverpool’s Atlantic trade.

  He looked at the things in the room, and experienced again the sensation of shipwreck, as if he had been washed ashore and beached here, amidst other random offerings of the tides, a litter of chairs and sideboard and table and rug, fixed there, immovable, as if half-sunk in sand. Here and there were personal possessions, the few things he had salvaged: a carved and painted chess set bought for a song in Spain; a silver-plated tea-caddy that had belonged to his mother; shelves of books, his own work among them. In pride of place, on the mantelpiece, was the much-treasured, slightly lopsided bowl made by his daughter in some remote school pottery class – she was in her thirties now, married, living in Plymouth; he did not see her very often and he never spoke of his miseries to her because love made him reticent – he confided only in strangers.

  Also on view, neatly stacked, were the products of his industry, the notebooks, scrapbooks, the files. The sight of this accumulation depressed him. Since Carter had first dawned on his sight, bearing Albert and Sheila in the shiny black briefcase that had then been their home, he had done absolutely nothing of significance. He had not stood still exactly; there had been movement, but all of it downward: he drank more, slept less, was closer to mania. Other than that, what was there? Occasional lectures; a few articles and reviews ground out with loathing and pain; some readings to literary groups – very numerous these on Merseyside, would-be writers sprouting vigorously amidst the decline of practically everything else. Like apple trees, he thought vaguely – he had read somewhere that dying apple trees have a season of abundant blossoming.

  The readings, in particular, had been an ordeal. He had given them up long ago. To recollect them now made him wince and exclaim aloud. He had heard his voice grow ever more hollow and unreal as he read extracts from his work, feelings, landscapes, conversations, remoter than those in dreams. How distant now the excitement that had possessed him. How he craved for that unrest again. He had lived on here in Greville Street, while craving turned to sickness, while the city wasted with him, or so it seemed: with his invincible passion for image, Benson saw his own plight as emblematic of this stricken place, with its traditional occupations eroded or gone, its growing host of unemployed, its boarded shops and decaying buildings, its miles of disused warehouses and docks.

  And all the while, perversely, his affection for the beleaguered city grew. He could hardly have found a place that suited him better. He thought it beautiful. He loved the light that lay over it, the sense of luminous distances. He was moved by the endurance of the people, the warmth of the manners, the spirit of desperate comedy that informed everything, perennial optimism in which there was always a knowledge of defeat, joy clashing with distrust to make all occasions seem improvised, all plans provisional. He had been nowhere else where imagination so infused the life of every day – they were all fictioneers in this city. He was drawn to the ramshackle, myth-laden present of the place as he was to its violent and tragic past. He had no thoughts of leaving.

  Meanwhile Carter in page after page of spidery writing had pursued his saga of desire, partial undress and postponed consummation among the working folk of Liverpool. He had abandoned realism long ago – Sheila’s underwear was expensive and titillating beyond the dreams of whoredom. Compensation, after his wife’s death, for all the years of her flannel bloomers? Grief can take strange forms. Is he, through Sheila, keeping his wife alive? Mildred, her name. Idea for a novel there. A character, losing his wife late in life, tries to preserve her in memory by writing the story of their life together. In the process he gets snared between reality and illusion. Is this what she was truly like? What did it really mean, the way she looked that day, the thing she said? Things have to be reinterpreted, disturbing facts emerge …

  Yes. But in that case, if it were to preserve Mildred, Carter would want his book to go on for ever, or at least until he died himself. Is that why Sheila and Albert can never consummate their love? The true consummation is death. And Sheila’s panties, etc., all that frippery and froth, cami-knickery and gorgeous gussetry, simply the plumes and panoply of death, the pastels all one metaphoric sable. Eros and Thanatos inextricably embraced. Idea for a novel there …

  7

  In the watches of the night Albert and Sheila returned to him in strange bemonstered versions, Sir Reginald and Lady Margaret, laughing madly, rode deeper and deeper into the wildwood. His idea for the novel soon lost its élan, sooner even than usual, slipping down into the dark and fetid pit where the botched, unfinished shapes of his imagination stirred and crawled and coupled with the blurred shapes of memory to breed a new race of monsters.

  In light, uneasy sleep he saw black people dancing on the deck of a ship to a slow and melancholy African rhythm of drums and tambourines, their forms distorted and rippled as if by waves of heat. They stooped, uncurled themselves, reached up with their arms. The dream was soundless but he saw the fingers on the drums, sensed from the wavering movements of the dancers the insistent pulse of the music. They were dressed in what he knew to be calico, but the colours were red and blue. They made shifting patterns against the pale glow of the sky.

  The lines of dancers parted ceremoniously to show Sheila in a cream-coloured suit, black stockings, high-heeled shoes and a perm exactly like Jennifer Colomb’s. She was reclining on a chaise-longue in the pose of Madame Récamier. Albert was there too in the guise of a yokel, in huge poison-green wellingtons and a cap from under which wisps of hair escaped in a sweaty, bucolic fashion. He saw now that they were in a classical portico which was flooded with water – Sheila’s chaise-longue was floating. He waded towards Albert and they engaged in a protracted dumb show of mutual courtesies as to who was going to undress Sheila. In the end Benson found himself doing it. The jacket of Sheila’s suit now resembled the tunic of a guardsman buttoned right up to the neck but he did not bother to undo it. With an exciting singleness of purpose he directed all his efforts towards her lower half. He lifted up her skirt, revealing the long legs in their black silk stockings. Already, however, as he tugged at the sumptuous knickers – scarlet, trimmed with black lace – he had a sense of something terribly wrong. There is always a price-tag, ancestral voices said, and then they were in a dark, cluttered place and he saw that Sheila did not have a vagina at all but a cock and balls of impressive proportions and when he looked at her face it was big-chinned Carter in a wild, yellow wig, looking triumphant and sly as he did when he felt he had scored a point.

  The shock of this discovery, like a change in pressure, sent Benson rising helplessly towards the surface of consciousness through shoals of flickering images. Waking was accompanied by acute anxiety. That triumphant smile of the hermaphrodite, was it telling him something? His prose bedevils my days, by night he poisons my dreams. And he owes me for three sessions.

  It was pitch dark in his room. He saw from the luminous dial of his alarm clock that it was twenty past three. He was wide awake now and knew from experience he was unlikely to sleep again. He switched on the bedside lamp, got out of bed and padded through to the living room. Gomer Williams’s book on the Liverpool privateers was in its place on the shelf. The passage about dancing was near the beginning. How long since he had read it? A month at least – the dream had been slow to ferment. Benson put on his glasses and after a minute or two found the passage.

  When feeding time was over, the slaves were compelled to jump in their chains, to their own music and that of the cat-o’-nine-tails and this, by those in the trade, was euphemistically called ‘dancing’. Those with swollen or diseased limbs were not exempted from taking part in this joyous pastime tho’ the shackles often pulled the skin off their legs. The songs they sang on these occasions were songs of sorrow and sadness – simple ditties of their own wretched estate and of the dear land and home and friends they were never more to see. During the night they were often heard to make a howling, melancholy noise, caused by their dreaming of their former happiness and liberty, only to find themselves on waking, in the loathsome hold of a slave ship.

  No mention of finger drums or tambourines or calico; and nothing in his dream about shackles. How had he got from there to Albert and Sheila? Water must be the connection, he thought, water and cargoes: from ocean to flooded portico, from sailing ship to chaise-longue …

  He was beginning to feel cold. His scrapbooks were before him, stacked at the side of the bookcase. He picked one out at random and returned to bed with it. By the light of his bedside lamp he read: A man confessed to strangling his wife and cutting her up with an axe more than twenty years ago after the discovery of a human skull in May, a jury was told yesterday. But the skull dated from 410 A.D. A picture of the bald, disconsolate strangler, unlucky enough to have a Roman woman’s skull in his garden as well as his wife’s. A picture of President Carter with a blind smile on his face, surrounded by bulky, unsmiling security men, like an ecstatic lunatic under strong guard. His vast fortune all but spent, Edward James, the eccentric exile, is putting his collection of surrealist and other art up for auction so that he can continue building his ‘Garden of Eden’, a mouldering array of fantasy architecture in the Central Mexican jungle. Picture of white-bearded James with a parrot on his shoulder. Demoniac forces of violence and evil have been let loose in Britain since the war, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, warned last night. The head of England’s legal system dismissed the idea that unemployment or poverty have caused the new wave of violence, robbery and rape.

  Loose English that, Benson thought bemusedly. From the head of England’s legal system. The senile sage was pictured in legal drag – gown and wig – disagreeably evoking the recent dream. Sri Lankan army personnel are extracting the eyes of Tamils killed in clashes with troops and sending them to eye banks for export, a Tamil group said yesterday. No picture of eyeless Tamils. Picture of Deborah Lester-George, a model, at an auction of theatrical ephemera in Shaftesbury with a rubber skeleton that fetched thirty-five pounds. Deborah and the skeleton smiling at each other. She has a hand over his crotch.

  What are the roots that cling? Benson asked himself, turning over the pages. Or is it clutch? His depression grew as daylight began to seep into his room. COPYCAT DEATH OF A SOAP OPERA FAN. FIREMEN SNARE YOUNG CROCODILE IN PARIS SEWERS. MAN SHARES BED WITH GIRL’S CORPSE.

  What could have led him to select these things, cut them out, paste them in, compile these dossiers of absurdity and misery and crime? Somewhere in this sickening welter there must be a thread, a pattern of meaning. He strove to retrace his intentions, the purposes of the man who had wielded the scissors. But it was hopeless. Faces and print in the lamp light, the girl with acid-scarred face, Mrs Thatcher in beaky profile, blindly smiling Carter, corpses and rubble in Beirut – the cumulative effect was silence. Blight of silence lay over faces and words, over all the pages of his industry. And somewhere behind the silence something worse waited …

  Unable to bear it any longer, Benson scrambled out of bed and went to make himself some coffee. Then, though it was still early, he decided to do his exercises. These he had taken up since his block, with the idea of fending off death through enhanced bodily vigour until he could somehow get going again. He always observed a strict, obsessive sequence, increasing in violence, feeling his heart labour, watching his effortful face and pale, flailing limbs in the wardrobe mirror.