‘I haven’t seen her since, and we never write. I did my time at Bristol, and worked as a private teacher. Then I got the bright idea of doing some postgraduate work on the modern English novel, though whether I’ll ever get beyond Gilbert Blaskin I don’t know, because I’ve fallen in love with him. Not that that’s rare, because I fall in love rather easily. Don’t ask why. I miss my real parents still, and because I didn’t get that jealous and possessive love from my second parents, I’m still looking for it. But what you look for you never get — or so I’m beginning to think, and the idea frightens me a bit. But I can’t help looking. It’s a sort of heartless search that’s been built into my nature. I fall in love because I want something, not because I have something to give, and that’s what men see, and what puts them off when they’ve finally got to the end of me in bed.’
‘You shouldn’t worry about anything,’ I said. ‘Everybody gets what they want. I’m convinced of it — even though I might not.’
‘I don’t want pity,’ she said, a wonderful smile which showed that she was no cynic about her life, though she’d try to convince everybody that she was.
‘You’ll get no pity from me,’ I told her. ‘I only feel sorry for people who haven’t got enough to eat, or who’ve got an incurable sickness.’
‘How right you are,’ she said. ‘I wish people often said that sort of thing to me.’
I felt good at hearing this. ‘It’s true,’ I went on, ‘the body has to be seen to first. If that goes, there’s nothing left. If you’re fed and healthy you’ve always got a chance of getting through somehow.’
‘It’s easy to say that,’ she said, ‘but you’re right. I know you are.’
‘Forgive my big mouth,’ I said. ‘I’m worse than Gilbert in my own narrow way. But I know that what I say is true.’
‘Keep on saying it,’ she said, ‘so that I’ll believe it. Sometimes I feel like walking off the edge of the world because everybody I meet agrees with me when I say things are terrible, and I can’t see what the point of life is.’
I got up to boil water for coffee. ‘If I ever write a book I’ll call it How to Stop Worrying — and Drop Dead!’
She squeezed my hand affectionately, as if it were real love she felt: ‘Gilbert doesn’t know I love him. I’d never tell him. As soon as you tell someone you love them, they can then do their worst to you.’
‘But if you don’t tell them, they may never know.’
‘Maybe he’ll find out,’ she said, hopefully. ‘I’ve given lots of signs. Things can’t be worse than they are now, but it’s when I think that things might start to get better that I get frightened, because that’s when the worst really happens.’
She had me sweating at these twistings and turnings, burning through my flimsy front of simplicity and common-sense, so that I started to imagine that whatever she said was right, ‘I mistrust myself and my emotions all the time,’ she went on. ‘but only so that I might be able to get to know myself, not in order to destroy myself — which seems to be where it’s heading me.’
‘It’s a way of destroying others,’ I told her, a bit too strongly. She lifted my hand to her mouth, and I thought I was all set for a tender kiss. Her eyes closed, as if what I said was a revelation to her instead of the deadly insult she took it to be. Her small sharp teeth ground into the gristle of my wrist.
‘You bastard!’ I shouted, never having called anyone else such a thing in my life before, shooting back from the bloody witch. ‘What was that for?’ I had to move because the pain was killing me, so I walked over to the stove, but the kettle wasn’t yet boiling.
‘You deserved it,’ she said, beginning to smile. ‘I never wanted to destroy anybody. People can only destroy themselves.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ I said, thinking about revenge. ‘Coffee?’
‘Please, love.’
‘Do you often bite people, or is it just when you’re hungry, like?’
‘Oh, stop it, can’t you?’
‘Drink this, then, you bitch.’
Gilbert came in, slumped down in such a way that I knew the play had been no good. ‘The kitchen sink,’ he said. ‘A slice of life. Full of dirty dishes. They didn’t even throw them at each other. Very good dialogue, though. All talk.’
Pearl put a hand on his shoulder and let him sip her coffee. ‘Do you want something to eat?’
‘Had supper,’ he said, ‘with the man who wrote the play. He thinks my novels are trash, and I drink his plays are bunk, so we drowned our mutual comradeship in wine. I was going to show a bit of solidarity by saying we were both writers after all, but he started talking about decorating the house he’d just bought, and wondering which was the best car to buy.’
‘But you’ve got these things already,’ Pearl reminded him, unnecessarily, I thought.
‘So’s he. But he wants more and more. But God forgive me, he’d be all right if only he’d write a play with a happy ending, and leave me to write my tragic novels. Still, I can’t expect to corner the market forever. I’m so incriminatingly selfish. What have you two been doing in my absence? Fornicating on my best bed?’
‘Wandered like a ghost around Victoria Station for a couple of hours, then walked up West.’
‘I see she’s bitten you,’ he laughed. ‘Somebody ought to punch some sense into her, the bloody vampire. Or am I talking to the woman you love?’
‘Bollocks,’ I said.
‘Like that, is it? Never mind. I had a letter today to say that an admirer of mine had produced my fourth novel in an edition of illuminated braille, so that it would be seen as a beautiful object while being read. Can you imagine that? But then somebody told the visionary who’d done it that the blind couldn’t see, so he shot himself in despair. I sympathize with him because he was trying to light up the darkness of the world, and though he was foolhardy and mad, as it turned out, it was a commendable thing to do. Light up your hearts! That’s what I’m for, to persuade people against their better instincts that life is worth living. Do not despair, says Gilbert Blaskin. He’ll do that for you. Gilbert will lighten the loads of all of you. But who, dear God, is going to lighten his load? Life falls twice as heavily on him ladies and gentlemen, but he’s not supposed to notice it because he’s helping you not to notice yours. The trumpets shall sound, but Gilbert will never be able to unload his load, caught as he is in the desert between Pimlico and Earl’s Court.
‘I saw my wife at the theatre with a gaggle of friends. I never left her, but caused her to leave me. I wanted to leave her for years but couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I made her life such a misery that she was forced to clear out to stop herself going mad or getting strangled. I wanted to get rid of her so as to have a free hand with my girlfriend whom I intended to marry. But as soon as my wife left me I lost all enthusiasm for my girlfriend. Don’t ask me why. The bullets of introspection don’t go that far. Maybe they do in the characters I conjure up, but not in me. So I broke things up with my girlfriend, and asked my wife to come back. But she laughed at me and wouldn’t, having discovered that she’d wanted to leave me for years, but hadn’t been able to do it till I’d forced her to. And now I’m here in these rooms of memory which even my delectable and scorching Pearl can’t rub out. And if she can’t, there’s no one else who can. The trouble is I’m not even in love with my wife, and if she came back I’d only get rid of her again after a month — no, a week. By God, Michael, life’s not easy. If you think it is just jump in the toilet and pull the chain after yourself. They say the sewers in New York are full of alligators because people have flushed them down there when they no longer want to keep them as pets. I think God or some swine has flushed a few into me to keep me lively and kicking. I’ll pop somebody into my mouth one day armed with a quick-firing double-barrelled rifle to hunt those alligators out, even though I die over it.’