She’d received our encomia with a little frown — our approval appeared to perplex her. Her uncertainty only made us praise her more. We embarked on a sustained group effort to rid Guinevere of self-doubt, overturning every rock and stone in a bid to hit on something that might bolster her confidence. Even Glynn joined in. ‘The electricity of poetic detail,’ he murmured, without specifying which detail he had in mind. Any of them, all of them. Each one packed a voltage.
But nothing we said communicated our enthusiasm, and it began sounding as hollow to us as it patently did to Guinevere. We stepped up our efforts, but that ship was going down. Water was gushing in faster than we could bail it out. In the midst of our fervour — the five of us baying encouragement from the stands as if she were the horse we’d bet our life savings on — I experienced a moment of detachment. I looked at that lovely girl, her calm face silhouetted against the steely November sky, the praise showering down, staring at the stack of A4 pages in front of her as if it were the murder confession we were forcing her to sign, and I had never imagined that another human being could seem so remote. Remote from me, remote from herself.
Antonia, of all people, told me in the pub after that workshop that she had felt exactly the same. How can anyone feel exactly the same? I wanted to shout at her. It was the most inane thing I’d ever heard in my life, although I knew Antonia was only trying to be empathetic, or human, or something. She could not recall the specific trigger in Guinevere’s reading, just the sudden onslaught in its aftermath of a sense of isolation so profound it had made her want to weep. Uncanny, how Guinevere had managed to summon into the room precisely the condition of alienation she’d been seeking to describe. It had pulled up a seat alongside us at the workshop table, where it had remained, slumped and odious, for the duration of the class, demonstrating the terrible irony that if you write well about something bad, you’ll never have any readers. Where did that leave us? With very few options. Very few options indeed.
The shadow of the leg of Glynn’s desk was rapidly fading from the floor. It could have been my own reflection I was watching disappear, the impact this dwindling had on me. A black cloud was occluding the watery sun. Glynn’s office darkened with remarkable speed, as if a whale were swallowing us whole. I looked at the Professor with appeal and saw the same appeal in him.
‘Dropping out?’ he prompted me. ‘Why?’
I shrugged. ‘Because I feel so …’
The only adjective that sprang to mind was ‘wobbly’. How could I produce the likes of ‘wobbly’ in front of the likes of Glynn? Words were at least as clunky as Glynn’s collection of trophies, his bulky lumps of metal and stone which in no way communicated the literary achievements they’d been designed to represent. I didn’t finish my sentence, merely shrugged again. Really, the intensity of the moods that used to sweep over me then.
The stoical nod with which Glynn received this information, or lack of it, indicated that nothing I could say would surprise the man. He had seen it all before. Emotions that were new and raw to me had been endured by him years ago, in another life that was over now, and all he could do was nod with a recognition that was in itself a comfort. He stood up and went to his bookcase, his repository of infinite riches, his windbreak, and selected a thick red leather tome. The Collected Works of William Blake, his favourite British poet. The Devil’s Party, Glynn’s sixth novel, was loosely based on Blake’s life. Parallels between the two men were not difficult to discern.
I watched as Glynn took down two more volumes of Romantic poetry and retrieved a metal hip flask from its hiding place at the back of the bookcase. He produced two teacups from his drawer and poured a generous measure of whiskey into each. He handed one cup to me and raised the other. ‘So explosive, MI5 monitors the distillery,’ he joked, but neither of us laughed. We sat in silence in Glynn’s trophy room while the world outside darkened around us, and the whiskey warmed the world within us. Lights in the offices across the way came on one by one. Glynn poured himself another drop.
‘You remind me of myself,’ he finally commented. The compassion with which he offered this was almost paternal in quality. ‘I won’t lie to you,’ he added, ‘it’s a difficult path we’ve chosen.’ We. It didn’t matter that everything recently written about Glynn read like a death notice. He kept writing writers’ novels, that was the problem. Readers’ novels were what was wanted. His career had been deemed moribund by those in the know, but still, I’d have done anything to join him.
‘You wouldn’t be feeling any better now?’ he wondered when my cup was empty.
‘I would,’ I told him. It was the truth.
‘Good man, good man.’
He returned the two teacups to the drawer and slotted the hip flask back in behind Blake, Byron and Shelley. I stood up, and he saw me to the door. Tacked to his message board was another pale-blue note. Glynn smiled weakly as he unpinned it. I lowered my eyes in embarrassment.
He gripped my shoulder. ‘Look after yourself, Declan.’ I didn’t know what to say. He retreated to his den with the note. An image of a lily stem, of all things, flashed into my mind, a freshly cut lily stem with three closed buds that I had once contemplated in a glass vase. The buds would open because they didn’t understand that their life supply had been severed, that they were already dead. I gazed at Glynn’s stooped shoulders as his door swung shut and thought of that stem, think of it still, think of him still, think of us all still, flowering regardless.
PART II Hilary Term, January
13 I don’t like Mondays
The morning of the sixth of January found me sitting bolt upright at my desk in the flat on Mountjoy Square. I hadn’t spoken in five days. A month had passed since the last workshop. My pens and paper were laid out in front of me, but I wasn’t writing: I was listening. Several odd things had occurred in rapid succession. First, the animal cries. A dog started yelping at its upper register, its agony piercing the thin blue sky. It was coming from the back lane. Somewhere below, not far from where I sat, a bloody scene was unfolding. That I could not see it only made it worse. I would have given anything to make it stop.
And then, abruptly, the yelping did stop. The silence which ensued was more ominous still. I sat rooted to the seat.
Next came the rhythmic thumping in the sky, as if the wings of a huge bird were beating the air. It came from all directions at once, growing louder and closer. It took a long time for the helicopter to appear. That’s when I clapped eyes on the gull. I hadn’t seen it alight. A massive creature, big as a fox, but brazen, territorial, almost pugilistic in its assertion of its dominion, mounted on the spine of a roof. It had its eye on me, its glassy, lemony eye. It did not have to turn its head to regard me.
A shaft of low light illuminated the gull as purple storm clouds bore down on the winter sun. You could wait all year for such light and still not find it. I tried to take it in as best I was able. The gull was smooth, sculptural, declaratory, and showed no fear at all, just a — what could you call it? — a knowingness, as if it wasn’t a bird in that round earless skull, exactly. No, not the consciousness of a bird in there, exactly.
The first plump raindrops slashed across the windowpane. A flash of sheet lightning, followed by a rumble of thunder. Something was expanding within me. I put down my pen. The gull was ululating by then, a wild, maniacal sound. A torrential downpour drowned him out. Then the doorbell rang. The doorbell, in that weather. I could hardly believe it.