But the changes don’t seem to help. After a week, Dan reinstates the much-missed glass of rosso and puts up with the uncomfortable ride. He lets the technicians deal with nuts and bolts, and works instead on some calculations in six-dimensional phase space, and his strategy for changing Nat’s mind about having a baby.
She described Chris as a dead end. She won’t settle for another dead end in her life — she’ll come round.
At the age of thirty, James F. Saunders has discovered the art of sexting. Brenda is less enthusiastic and often sends dismissive replies like, Glad to hear it, thinking of u too, sleep well xxx, but once in a while she humours him with a single explicit response (his persistent follow-ups are patiently ignored). One favourite, which he saved in his phone’s tiny memory, was: wetter than a scottish summer right now, got all 4 fingers in there but its not the same. ps. ur a writer, dont get rsi xx
When he’s not risking RSI — so much for the sublimation of desire — James is making progress on the novel. He thinks constantly of the great writers who have trodden this love-path before him. Sappho, by all accounts. Catullus, Ovid, Chaucer. The fair youth and dark lady. The Metaphysicals, Emily B., Tolstoy. La Moustache had a few fine moments in his fleuveroo but got hung up on jealousy — universality lost. The Exile, faithful married man branded a perv the world over, made heroic attempts culminating in Molly’s heavenly rant. Colonial love-merchants like E. M., Larry Durrell and the bondage queen. And of course, the Americans: Miller, Mailer (those two sound the same here in the north-east), the Bellower, the Upstart. A parade of masters, but they all missed the mark. Thank god.
Yes, James shares Montaigne’s tendency to write — or at least think — like a dictionary of quotations. Adrift in a sea of these prophets’ words. The essayist notes wistfully that Epicurus did not introduce a single quotation into any of the three hundred volumes he left behind him. Bully for the old glutton. In 300 B.C. you could read everything there was in a couple of weeks — Homer and whatnot — and then forget about it. Twenty-three centuries later, the human race is drowning in its written excreta. But this time, somehow, James must build an outcrop of words he can claim as his own.
If he sexts Brenda on her lunchbreak, will she respond?
Unlikely. Brenda is running. While her brother hits the Mayfair treadmill, and again ogles, and again contemplates his oblique reflection, Brenda jogs up to the unmarked deer path that does a lap of Ben Tee, just below the snowline. Four hilly miles is just right to sharpen the dinner appetite, and with Brenda’s job no shower is required — a quick vest-and-sock change in the van will suffice.
She jogs lightly over the rough, wet ground. Above her, a dozen deer hinds race a cloud-shadow across the mountainside. The low sun lights up a puddled morass in dazzling monochrome, and later, as she ducks and blinks in a gloomy stand of spruce, a single, soft beam drapes itself over a bough.
Brenda was six years old when she challenged her grandfather, Old Vickers, to chase her round the bandstand in the local park. He was a big, red-faced man, like her father, and he worshipped her. ‘Alright, Brennie,’ he gasped after a token lap. ‘That’s enough for Grandad.’
‘But I’m only a little girl,’ she complained, ‘and you’re a man. You have to run faster than that.’ She pulled him by the hand, broke away with a mocking laugh, and when she next looked back he was staggering, his mouth gaping in a kind of yawn and his arm flopping about. Then he fell over.
She ran to him, asked him what the matter was. But he just stared up at her, looking sad and strange. She shouted for help but nobody was near enough. She didn’t want to leave him, but when she sat on the ground and said she’d look after him, he pushed her away and seemed to be angry with her. She kept begging him to say something, but he didn’t. Not a word. It was a long time until a passer-by saw them and called an ambulance, and Old Vickers died a few hours later.
In a shocked stupor of guilt, Brenda told the paramedic, ‘We were walking and he just fell over. We were walking really slowly. He just yawned and fell over.’ This was the version of events that the Vickers family first heard, and Brenda has never corrected it.
She feels her ankle begin to turn on a loose rock, and catches it just in time. The deer, traumatised survivors of a recent cull, have completed a lap of the mountain too.
James F. Saunders does not write to a weekly schedule or observe weekends; all days begin alike. Some few turn into good writing days, the others bad. Saturday opens promisingly: the indignant sea tosses spray against his window, dawn hardly bothers to break, and James, having taken nothing stronger than an instant coffee, is having visions. Creative visions. More specifically, he’s losing the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Was Gaddafi really real? With those sunglasses, that curling lip? Or was he just another fictional bad guy like Sauron, the Kaiser and Darth Vader? Was James’ aborted English degree a very disappointing novel? His keyboard rattles.
‘Oi, James!’
The deus ex machina. Is that you, Samuel Beckett? Or is it Dmitri Karamazov? Not Mephisto, surely — that would be hackneyed.
‘James, are you up there? Is he up there, Mrs Peacock? James, want to earn a few more quid?’
At the mention of money, reality and fiction begin to disengage. Earn a few quid. Yes. Need to do that. James opens the creaking casement and a gust of salty air rolls in, banishing Muammar and Mephisto from the room.
‘Hello! Rob? Sure. How long for?’
The deal is made swiftly. Once upstairs, James’ charge, a boy named Hugo, follows his every move with huge, tragic eyes.
‘So. What shall we do? Would you like to look in the rock pools? The tide’s dropped.’
Hugo looks disappointed. ‘Actually, I’ve done that several times before,’ he says in a tiny voice, his enunciation much better than his father’s. Then he adds, respectfully, ‘Though it is very interesting.’
‘The museum?’ The disappointed expression remains; it is a very small museum. ‘How about exploring the secret passages in the village? Have you done that? Have you seen where the smugglers hid their cargo?’
A complicated frown spreads like a vine across Hugo’s enormous forehead. His head is far too big for his body, and not quite the right shape.
‘Actually, I don’t think so,’ he replies, carefully.
‘Get your coat on, then. And take some paper so we can draw a map. If we don’t draw a map, we’ll get lost and starve to death.’
James glances back ruefully at the laptop as they leave. Cyril Connolly, the failed writer’s writer, asserted that the only treatment for a writer’s envy of successful and distracted peers is to write. ‘By working,’ goes the line that old Cyril relegated to a footnote, but that jingles so often in James’ head, ‘you are doing what they would most envy you.’ By working — writing — not by babysitting creepy children.
But maybe there’s some material here. Hugo, aged six, is the son of Rob, who rents the adjoining house in the heart of Merryman’s Bay. This house, originally intended by Rob as a base for family fun, became instead the venue for his extramarital assignations with Trudy, a work associate. He has now separated from his wife and lives with Trudy semi-legitimately in Leeds, but the crooked little house, with its bouncy bed and naughty associations, apparently remains useful for rekindling the flames. Rob has his son every other weekend, but makes liberal use of the childcare services of his mother — who lives further up the coast and can often be persuaded to take the boy overnight — as well as various cash-strapped locals.