Still brooding now, I phoned Fiona and asked, ‘Do you remember Phillip knocking me down a few times? Did he hurt me?’
‘I hope so,’ she said.
‘If I’d been a woman in a violent relationship you’d have wanted to make a revolution.’
‘You’re so serious now — someone said to me the other day that you even have gravitas! It’s easy to forget what a flirty and naughty thing you could be,’ was all she said. ‘I’ve been going through my photographs. How young and attractive we were. Why don’t you take me for lunch? You know the new places, don’t you?’
She was the wrong person to ask. Perhaps I would have to visit Phillip. While I vacillated, studying my diaries and making these notes, a niece of his called to say he’d died.
I had been keen to take a boat across that lake, but now, at the funeral hour, I strolled around my old neighbourhood.
The last time I saw Phillip I had invited him to my new loft in a converted industrial building, the first of many places I would buy. I’d got it fresh from a developer, it was more or less empty and at night I liked strolling up and down the wide spaces listening to music, books in piles on the floor, and, from the jacuzzi, looking at the distracting view of the new London skyline of cranes and unfinished buildings. Having decided to acquire an indulgence, I’d begun to collect rock posters, and they, along with a sexy poster for the French production of my play, leaned against the wall. My movie would soon play at festivals before opening all over, which was how I got to buy the flat.
I’d gone to the market in the morning, and made Phillip lunch. I bought new tumblers, plates and napkins, and set them out on my new glass-topped table from the Conran shop. But he wouldn’t even sit down, he was in a hurry, he seemed embarrassed, as if he’d get into trouble for being here, though his wife had gone. He was still going to leave the country, and was in the middle of packing.
‘If you had any balls you’d have a lot of fun here,’ he said. ‘But you’re afraid of women, aren’t you? Of your feeling for them.’
‘Yes.’
‘Still, you’ve been a fortunate little shit.’
I agreed. ‘All this for almost nothing. I should have made less of myself, I know.’ I had been unbuttoning the front of my shirt. Now I tried to take his hand, attempting to stir some sentimentality in him. ‘Why do you have to go? Why can’t we eat and then lie on the bed and watch telly all afternoon?’
‘We never did that.’
‘It was almost all we did.’
He reached for my hand and I thought he was going to kiss my fingers. Instead he grabbed at me and twisted my arm, giving me no choice but to turn as he inched it up my back. Had I teased him too much? I had offered him a glass of wine, saying, ‘This is to celebrate you becoming Doctor Phillip at last,’ perhaps with a little sarcasm, but also with pleasure and pride in his effort.
He continued to bend my arm until I was forced to my knees. From this position I attempted to turn and attack him; however, he pushed me to the ground and I fell awkwardly. When I tried to get up I found my right arm had become useless.
We agreed we had to call an ambulance. Phillip and I sat in casualty for four hours, until a doctor returned my arm to its socket. For a week I walked round with my arm in a sling. The next time I went swimming it popped out again and I had to be carried out of the pool. It was permanently weakened, I was told.
For a while I had to type left-handed. That can’t have been the only reason my next play closed quickly, as did its follow-up. The cruelty and delight which accompanied these failures in the press wasn’t something I needed to experience again. I rented my flat and moved to Los Angeles, writing several unmade American movies, one involving a chipmunk. My agent commented, ‘Your screenwriting reputation will increase until you actually have a movie made. If it tanks, you can kiss your backside, as well as your American career, goodbye.’
At that I came home. It was easy to fail, I found, and for a couple of months I felt I’d been thrown out of my bed and onto the street in the middle of the night. But it didn’t get in my way. I succeeded at property. With the aid of my wife, who was an estate agent in an office around the corner when I met her, but a ‘property investor’ a moment later — and despite the vicissitudes of the capitalism whose end my pals and I had wished for — we kept moving house and buying flats, which we either rented or sold. Within five years I had achieved easily my father’s ambition, never to have to do another honest day’s work.
I’d never been particularly compelled by money before, and I’d never met anyone whose ambition was only to accumulate wealth. While a teenager I had imagined that being an artist was the most desirable occupation there could be. I found, though, that for a while money and its gathering was as interesting as anything else, until I stopped noticing that I had it. Showing off embarrassed me, and on those occasions when I was forced to see what a struggle life is for most people, the wealth we had skimmed from the world began to curdle, and the temptation to become a human rights activist was almost overwhelming.
Because there was a necessity for a considerable amount of socialising with the most materialistic people on earth, and I am, I’ve been told, something of a weak-willed if not masochistic man, I saw that it was simpler for me to co-operate rather than whine. My wife liked everything about property — views, gardens, locations, carpets, lampshades. To her it was like collecting art, except that she was a kind of artist too, remoulding everything she bought and not encouraging dissent. I enjoyed her passion and, later, her devotion, concentration and absence. For the conventional amount of time, almost five years, I liked almost everything about her.
We seemed to acquire houses wherever they built them, particularly in the South of France and Italy, staying there with the children and their friends and parents. There were outings, barbecues, dinners and all manner of parties and jubilation, including visits to water parks, with nothing much for me to do except talk.
After a time I found myself taken aback and most likely depressed by the inevitable decline into coolness which appeared to accompany most marriages, requiring acceptance, secrecy or insurgency. What had once satisfied was gone; how then should you live?
Being heroic, I came more or less to allow the situation, having considered bolting. I had little inclination to rebel. I admired subversion in others, but it would seem unnatural to me not to live with my children, visiting them from time to time like a kindly preoccupied uncle. My ambition has gone into the four of them. When I wonder now what I’ve done, I can only say I’ve been with the kids, eating, talking, arguing, going to the movies, listening to music, drifting around the streets, playing tennis; that’s where years of my time went, and you can’t measure, count or discount it.
Naturally the ironies of the period could be a torment. How could I be unaware that we now lived in a rabidly sexual time? My life had spanned what was known as the sexual revolution: from repression to — unrepression, until we reached the prohibition of shame, the prohibition of prohibition. And there was I, in an age of sexual envy, only a curious onlooker. What a beautiful rack it was. I’d say that after fifty, you have to be cunning about your pleasures if you’re to have any, and why would you want to?
I saw it was the women in Tolstoy, Zola, Colette and Jean Rhys that I had liked when I could be bothered to read, as a teenager, a way of being close, but not too close, to women. Why not make a vocation of it? I allowed myself to become fond of the wives of rich peripatetic businessmen, of which there always seemed to be a multitude nearby. Restless and bewildered, they had everything but a man to be curious about them, and to tease them with possibility. The modern illusion that women can have ‘everything’ is a monumentally misleading platitude, leading to despair if you ask me. As is the idea that love is sufficient for a marriage. It is institutions, not affection, which tie people together in the long run.