‘And was he right?’
I shrugged. ‘He wasn’t entirely wrong. But that was Gore. You couldn’t make a fool of him. Only a fool, in fact, would have tried.’
‘And you did all this consciously?’
‘Yes. What can I say? I was ambitious. I still am.’
He hesitated for a moment. ‘That’s quite an admission,’ he said.
‘It is,’ I said, feigning surprise. ‘Oh, I’m not sure it amounts to very much. Although, are you aware that Dash committed suicide?’
‘No.’
‘Well, he did. Years later, mind you, but not long after he’d run into me again at the Hay Festival. The poor man looked as depressed as ever, and I suppose seeing me again after all that time re-lit the flames that he’d tried so hard to extinguish and he decided to end it all. He contacted me after our brief encounter, you see, and begged me to come back to him. He said that he’d never stopped loving me and that he would do anything if I would simply return. I just laughed, told him I wasn’t even slightly interested. I was seeing Edith at the time, anyway, the woman who would become my wife. I told him I could scarcely imagine anything more tedious than returning to a life with him in New York and he shouldn’t bother me again. Later that evening, he hanged himself in the apartment we’d once shared in Manhattan. I suppose, in some ways, I have his death on my conscience.’
‘I see,’ said Theo, thinking about this. I could see his eyes moving back and forth as he wondered how best to use this in his thesis. He waited a long time before speaking again and I determined not to break the silence. ‘Well, you can’t blame yourself for what he chose to do,’ he said eventually, a certain hesitation in his tone. ‘I’m sure you didn’t intentionally hurt him.’
‘Are you?’ I asked, smiling.
‘Well, you didn’t, did you?’
I was still smiling. It was decent of him to think that. Time to pull back a little. I didn’t want to make myself out to be too much of a monster. ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I was young, that’s all. And we all take a little help where we can get it when we’re that age. But still, if I could go back in time, perhaps I would have acted a little more kindly towards him.’
‘Towards all of us,’ said Daniel, who had returned to the table now and was once again sitting in Theo’s place. He stared at me before attempting to take a deep breath and failing badly, the sound of congested lungs pouring from his mouth like a cry from a banshee.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Theo. It took only a blink of my eyes for reality to return.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, stepping away from the table carefully. ‘I just need the bathroom, that’s all. I’ll be back in a moment.’
When I returned, he was still scribbling in his notepad and I ordered some more drinks, placing them on the table, but didn’t speak until he’d finished writing.
‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ he said at last, looking up at me, ‘but if you’d like to talk about your son, then I’d be happy to listen. I don’t know if you have anyone in particular who you can discuss him with.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, surprised that he was even interested in a dead child. I had expected that he’d want some information about Dash and whether I treated anyone else with such heartlessness. ‘And perhaps I will at some point. I so rarely do, you see. But not today, I think. I’d need to compose my thoughts. Tomorrow, maybe? I don’t know what you’re doing around two o’clock?’
4. The Lamb and Flag, Rose Street
‘You know, Charles Dickens used to drink here,’ I said the following afternoon as we sat in the window of the Lamb and Flag pub on Rose Street, the rain pouring down outside on another wet London day. ‘And out there,’ I added, pointing to the alleyway beyond, ‘is where the Poet Laureate John Dryden was almost beaten to death by thugs in the service of the Earl of Rochester.’
‘What had he done to deserve that?’ asked Theo, looking out on to the street as if some of the blood might still be visible on the cobblestones. He had arrived wearing a shirt and tie rather than his usual T-shirt and hoodie and looked very smart; when I asked him why such formality, he told me that he’d had a meeting that morning with his thesis adviser and liked to dress more professionally whenever they met, which I thought a rather quaint tradition. I couldn’t remember my son ever wearing a tie in his life, though, so I asked Theo to take it off, which he did without complaint, unbuttoning the top of his shirt as he did so, which set me more at ease. Daniel had always preferred open-necked shirts.
‘It’s hard to know,’ I told him with a shrug. ‘They’d been friends once, of course. Dryden dedicated one of his plays to Rochester, who had something of a hand in the writing of it, and maybe the Earl felt he didn’t get enough credit for his work. Marriage à la Mode, if memory serves. But then you know writers. They can be merciless in how they use each other to get to the top. I’m surprised more of them don’t kill each other, to be honest.’
‘You say “them”,’ said Theo with a half-smile. ‘Not “us”?’
‘All right, us,’ I replied, correcting myself. ‘I’m surprised more of us don’t kill each other. For such an artistic field, there’s an awful lot of people who desperately want to beat someone else and be seen as the very best. Succeeding on one’s own terms just isn’t enough.’
‘Whenever a friend succeeds,’ said Theo, ‘a little something in me dies. That was Truman Capote, wasn’t it?’
‘No, that was Gore,’ I said, recalling the plaintive eyes that had looked up at me from beneath the sheets in the early hours of the morning at the Swallow’s Nest, La Rondinaia, when I had stood before him and removed my robe, preparing to make my greatest conquest yet. But he had simply shaken his head, perhaps in regret that he was longer capable of playing the game, and rolled over on his side, falling back asleep. It had been disappointing, of course, and not a little humiliating, but I’d rather admired him for his resolve.