And still more—After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
4
Freddy at school was an out-and-out weirdo. An insolently effortless top-setter, a heavy smoker, a purveyor of particularly extreme pornography—those tattered scraps of flesh-toned images—he was, with his halo of frizzy hair and plump putto’s face, a frightening outsider to many of the others. To many of the teachers too. A hand up in the middle of the French lesson. Mr Ellis is the terrified herbivore at the front near the whiteboard. ‘Sir?’ ‘Yes, Munt?’ (With a weak smile.) ‘Does wanking make you weak, sir?’ Little explosions of laughter from all over the room. Ellis obviously mortified, lady-faced, fully unable to deal with the situation. Does wanking make you weak, sir? Ostensibly—and this was very much the tone in which it was asked—it was an innocent appeal for information from an older, more experienced man. That, however, would be to miss the merciless overtone, enormously present that morning in the language school—You, Mr Ellis, does wanking make you weak? Is it wanking that makes you so weak, sir? Are you so weak, sir, because of all the wanking you do?
James was there for that incident, quietly reading a newspaper at a sunny desk near the windows. He was in the top set in French, and only in French. His father lived in France and he spent four months of the year there.
Mr Ellis might have stammered something.
More probably he just froze for a few seconds, and then with unseeing eyes kept murmuring the prepared text of the lesson as if nothing had happened.
Freddy was neither popular nor unpopular. For one thing, he didn’t do sport, which in itself placed him so far out of the mainstream as to be practically invisible. (James did do sport. He was in the second XV, which had a certain slackerish cachet, and was one of the stars of the hockey first XI, and on the tennis team too.) As for Freddy, he had once fannied about with the other anaemic four-eyed specimens on their twig-like legs, milky white thighs signally failing to fill shorts—and there was absolutely nothing to be said, in terms of social status, for the fourth XI, the fifth XV. They were for malcos and flids. They were for spastics. The slackerish cachet, such as it was, ended with the second team.
Freddy’s liberation from sport was the piano. While this was not particularly helpful for his image either, it was infinitely preferable to stumbling around in the mud on that polder of playing fields west of Hammersmith with someone like Mr Ellis timidly peeping the whistle on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons. (The staff room had its own sports hierarchy, which, while it exerted itself more subtly in social terms, more or less exactly mirrored that of the pupils.) So, the piano. The long, polished Steinway in the main hall of the music school. Mr Harris, the head of music, said Freddy was a ‘wunderkind’, and finally he persuaded the other Mr Harris—this one was head of sport, a far more exalted figure, a figure of papal mystique—to let Freddy off sport totally and permanently, so long as he instead spent the time practising the piano. This indulgence—which was unprecedented—massively enhanced Freddy’s status as a louchely unusual outsider. Indeed, with no further involvement in sport, he no longer seemed to be fully or properly part of the school. He spent most of his time in the music school—it looked like a small rococo theatre in an isolated part of the grounds—playing the piano and smoking. Mr Harris let him smoke in the music school; it was his own little kingdom, where all sorts of strange practices obtained. For instance, Freddy was on first-name terms with him—‘Morning, Mike’—as he was with most of the other tweed jackets and bluestockings of the music staff. At the age of fourteen, he took Grade Eight, and started to work his way through the semi-professional qualifications that followed it. The life of a professional musician—even some sort of star—seemed there for the taking.
The September of his final year. Mid-morning in the music school. Miserable autumn weather. (There is a pail out in the middle of the parquet, slowly filling from a weeping fissure in the moulding overhead.) The multicoloured application forms for the Royal College of Music are there on the table, waiting to be filled in—and in Mike’s opinion the application is no more than a formality. Freddy is of a much higher standard than is necessary to win a place most years…
When Freddy interrupts to say that he has no intention of applying to the Royal College, Mike looks as if he has just been told his Yorkshire terrier, Lulu, has died in a lawnmowing accident.
‘Why?’ he says finally.
Freddy says that as a professional pianist—and he seems to have no doubt that that is what he would be if he persevered with the piano—he would simply be performing the work of other men. They were the artists. The musicians were mere performers. Monkeys…
Anticipating Mike’s next point with a lifted finger, he says that it just isn’t possible to write music now. Not serious music. Serious music was fucked. (He did use the word ‘fucked’.) No serious music of any value was being written. As a medium it was quite possibly finished. He did not intend to waste his time on it. (Thus, incidentally, he flushed Mike’s life’s work—numerous suites and sonatas, one of which, the ‘West London Sonata’, had had an outing at the Norwich Music Festival—down the toilet of history.) No, what Freddy intended to do, he told the now misty-eyed Mike, was write. He would be a novelist, and he would start by taking an English degree at Oxford.
When he had said his piece, he lit a Gauloise filterless. He waved out the match and placed it neatly on the unused application forms. He looked up at the ornate plafond.
Though he would never admit it, he has, in the years since, spent much time pondering that miserable morning in the music school.
He went to Oxford, but there was no degree. He was sent down in his second year for doing no—no—work.
Through an intricate mechanism of interlocking nepotisms, he eventually found himself working first as a stringer and then as a staffer on a Fleet Street newspaper. These were the John Major years. He managed to spin out a decade or so of journalism— he was supremely plausible when he wanted to be—all the time incubating his masterpiece; wallowing in the tired sleaze of the times, and always planning to start it soon. In truth he started it on numerous occasions. Secretly, cigarette in mouth, he would type a few pages of a Sunday morning, and then, with a sneer on his face, scrumple them up and throw them away. They were never good enough to justify that morning in the music school. They were never anywhere near good enough. The futile, putrid soap opera of Tory politics circa 1995 was what he was in fact writing about. Malicious diary stuff mostly. For a while in the mid-Nineties he was a well-known quidnunc schmoozing the Commons bars.
Towards the end of the decade things started to go wrong. He was drinking too much. Of course, he had always been drinking too much from a medical standpoint; now he was drinking too much even to hold down his job as a political hack and diarist, with its semi-nocturnal hours and intense professional interest in watering holes. Stories went unfiled. He missed important things. (Was not answering his phone, for instance, on the afternoon of 11 September, 2001—he was passed out on the sofa.) There was an AIDS scare. In the office for a while, the story was, erroneously as it turned out, that Freddy was HIV positive. Still, his hair and teeth were starting to fall out, and he couldn’t afford a proper dentist. (Someone said that ended his dreams of television-pundit stardom. Freddy said, ‘What about John fucking Sergeant?’) And his old school-friend James, for a year or so, looked likely to find himself quite high up the Sunday Times Rich List. That didn’t help Freddy’s mood in the late Nineties. He had always looked down on James slightly—an unusually subtle jock perhaps, but fundamentally a philistine—and he found it hard to stomach the fact that, in the eyes of the world, he might ultimately prove more successful than him. Much more successful. Freddy was freelancing now, living hand to mouth—or mouth to hand—off his ability to winkle information out of people in pubs. The first New Labour landslide hadn’t helped. The immense shuffling of seats it entailed—the sudden and violent swings of status—were mirrored in the world of journalism. And to the extent that he was in with anybody, Freddy was mostly in with Tories. He had of course tried, too late—his self-interest was by then painfully transparent—to start making friends with some Labour people, but his main sources were still Tories, and no one was very interested in what they said or thought any more. Loose ends from schooldays—he hadn’t even tried to start his magnum opus for several years. Nor, for several years, did he see James. He was just unable to stomach the success of Interspex. When he saw in the papers that it had failed, he was pleased.