Walter looked as though he wanted to smile but thought it might ruin everything. 'I wasn't aware they ever met.'
'They didn't,' I said. 'Not exactly. But Sophie's obsessed with the idea of him. She thinks he's the perfect man. Was the perfect man.'
Walter threw back his head and roared with laughter so uninhibited it almost fooled me into believing it was spontaneous.
'What's so funny?'
'The perfect man? What a joke. I knew the guy.'
'You did?' Of course Walter must have known Robert Jamieson, I thought. Why hadn't I realized that before?
'A first-class fuck-up,' said Walter. 'Miserable, misanthropic, misogynistic: our man was all the misses. Failed as a writer, failed as a lover, failed as a human being. Suicide was the only thing he ever got right, and even then he messed up on the timing.' His face took on an oddly tragic cast. 'Most of the time he just wallowed in misery, waiting to be rescued, hoping for some stupid little woman to come along and sort him out.'
Disconcerted by his vindictive tone, I said that I thought wanting to be rescued was more of a feminine trait.
Walter hoisted an eyebrow. 'You reckon? In my experience it's the other way round. Only women are willing to be sacrificed to someone else's needs at the cost of their own. They sit and watch as their souls are sucked out of their orifices.'
'You don't have a very high opinion of women,' I said, feeling a little upset, though I couldn't say exactly why.
Walter suddenly switched on his strange humourless grin. 'But I love you all. You girls are endlessly fascinating creatures. Men, by comparison, are… predictable.'
'Men lie,' I said, staring into the bottom of my empty wineglass and feeling tearful.
'Of course they do,' said Walter.
'All men lie,' I said, thinking of Miles.
Walter was still wearing his grin. 'Like I said, they're predictable.'
I was predictable, as well. I couldn't resist purloining another of Robert Jamieson's letters. I told myself sternly that this would be the last time, that I wasn't going to do it again, I would leave this fantasizing about dead people to Sophie and from now on would dutifully leave Robert's mail to be collected and forwarded by Marsha.
But before that, I wanted just one more peek into the life and times of the 'first-class fuck-up'.
Walter Cheeseman had certainly been merciless in his appraisal of the late Mr Jamieson's character. So much so that I wondered if Walter had a hidden agenda of his own. Was there a hint of jealousy there, perhaps? Did Walter suspect that Robert Jamieson had succeeded in being the subversive, controversial, original artist that Walter, with his cheap porno slasher movies, knew he could never be?
Perhaps suicide had been a final act of defiance in a subversive, controversial, original life. Better to die than to compromise one's ideals.
This one was on headed notepaper.
DEFOREST PUBLISHING
A Division of Arbooks International
Dear Mr Jamieson,
Thank you for submitting your novel to us. I am afraid we do not consider Ways of Killing Women suitable for publication at this present time and it is therefore being returned to you under separate cover.
While the novel is well-written, we feel that readers may find the subject matter distasteful, if not offensive. If you are thinking of submitting it to other publishing houses and are hoping for a more favourable reception, may I suggest you tone down or even cut some of the more extreme passages, in particular the episode with the vacuum cleaner on pages 39 to 48, the trip to Llandudno on pages 84 to 87, the poisonous snake and the sanitary tampon, pages 108 to 123, the liquidizer incident on page 161, and just about everything on pages 179 to 232.
Should you decide to revise these sections and make them more accessible to a general readership, we would be delighted to take another look. I hope you do not find these comments too discouraging, as there is no question that you have talent; unfortunately we feel it is currently being misdirected.
Yours sincerely,
Madeleine Curran
(Senior Editor)
P.S. I should inform you that several of the girls on our staff found themselves unable to progress beyond page 17. In fact, two of them confessed that your writing made them physically ill. Can this really be the sort of effect you intended?
The letter was dated August the fourteenth, but someone had corrected the year by hand and the numerals were no longer legible. I wondered if it had taken Madeleine Curran all this time to read Robert's novel, or whether she'd written her rejection letter ages ago and it had somehow been caught up in a backlog of paperwork and only just come to light.
To me, Ways of Killing Women sounded nothing short of a masterpiece, a bestseller at the very least; Madeleine Curran just hadn't understood it. I wondered if there were any copies still in circulation. If so, perhaps I could resubmit one of them for publication somewhere else. Perhaps Robert's posthumous literary reputation lay in my hands.
Perhaps that was why I couldn't stop thinking about him.
I kept a careful watch on the mail for the next couple of the weeks, in the hope of intercepting the manuscript Madeleine Curran had said she was returning, but nothing of that sort turned up.
Try as I might, I couldn't make any more headway with Walter. I'd nuzzled up to him on the way home from the Crow Bar, but although he'd neither cringed nor pushed me away, he hadn't responded with the sort of enthusiasm I might have hoped for.
But, as the summer slipped away, I grew accustomed to having him around. He was a useful companion — amusing, informative, passably debonair — and his presence seemed to have put a stop to that tiresome but mercifully short-lived Scott-of-the-Antarctic syndrome in which everyone kept imagining they'd seen someone standing just behind me.
But then, one Friday morning, these halcyon days came to an end. There was a buzz on my entryphone.
The bell part of it worked, but the intercom facility was broken, so I had to nip down to see who it was. I rounded the last bend in the stairs to find Walter standing below me in the hall, surrounded by suitcases. His chin was covered with a light golden fuzz that indicated he hadn't bothered to shave. As I drew nearer my nostrils were greeted by the sharp tang of his body odour. Grooming had obviously not been high on his list of priorities that morning.
'I'm off,' he said, momentarily pushing his sunglasses up in order to rub his eyelids. It was only the third or fourth time I'd seen his eyes; the irises were a surprisingly pale grey, and the sockets were smudged with fatigue. I wondered if he'd only just developed a slight twitch in the nerves of his jaw, or whether it had always been there and I hadn't noticed.
'I don't blame you,' I said. 'I'm going back to Hackney for the weekend. Anything to avoid the Carnival.'
'No,' said Walter. 'I mean I'm really off.'
'But I thought…'
'I told you I never stay long. I've already stayed longer than I should.'
'But I don't want you to go.'
Walter's face clouded over. 'Bad dreams,' he said. 'Real stinkers. And they've been getting worse. Always do, this time of year. Especially now, this stage of the cycle.'
Even his fake smile let him down; he tried to turn it on, but ended up looking like a man in pain.
'What cycle?'