I think I really will ask her to find Mrs Gray for me. Why not?
We went downstairs and I escorted her to the front door. Lydia was nowhere to be seen now. Billie’s car is an ancient and badly rusted Deux Chevaux. When she had clambered in behind the wheel she leaned out again to inform me, seemingly as an afterthought, that there is to be a read-through of the script, in London, early next week. All the cast will be there, the director, of course, and the scriptwriter. The latter’s name is Jaybee, something like that—I have become slightly deaf and it distresses me to have to keep on asking people to repeat what they have said.
Billie drove off in swirling billows of dark-brown exhaust smoke. I stood looking after her until she was gone from the square. I was puzzled and at a loss, and prey to a faint but definite unease. Was it by some sorcery she had got me to speak of Cass, or was I only waiting for the chance? And if this is the sort of person I shall be dealing with in the coming months, what have I let myself in for?
I have spent the afternoon perusing, I think that is the word, The Invention of the Past, the big biography of Axel Vander. The prose style was what struck me first and most forcefully—indeed, it nearly knocked me over. Is it an affectation, or a stance deliberately taken? Is it a general and sustained irony? Rhetorical in the extreme, dramatically elaborated, wholly unnatural, synthetic and clotted, it is a style such as might be forged—le mot juste!—by a minor court official at Byzantium, say, a former slave whose master had generously allowed him the freedom of his extensive and eclectic library, a freedom the poor fellow all too eagerly availed himself of. Our author—the tone is catching—our author is widely but unsystematically read, and uses the rich tidbits that he gathered from all those books to cover up for the lack of an education—little Latin, less Greek, ha ha—although the effect is quite the opposite, for in every gorgeous image and convoluted metaphor, every instance of cod learning and mock scholarship, he unmistakably shows himself up for the avid autodidact he indubitably is. Behind the gloss, the studied elegance, the dandified swagger, this is a man racked by fears, anxieties, sour resentments, yet possessed too of an occasional mordant wit and an eye for what one might call the under-belly of beauty. No wonder he was drawn to Axel Vander for a subject.
This Vander, I may say, was an exceedingly strange bird. For a start, it seems he was not Axel Vander at all. The real Vander, a native of Antwerp, died mysteriously some time in the early years of the war—there were rumours, widespread though hardly plausible, that despite his hair-raisingly reactionary politics he took part in the Resistance—and this other, counterfeit, one, who has no recorded history, simply assumed his name and slipped adroitly into his place. The false Vander carried on the genuine one’s career as a journalist and critic, fled Europe for America, married, and settled in California, in the pleasant-sounding town of Arcady, and taught for many years at the university there; the wife died—it appears she was prematurely senile and Vander may in fact have murdered her—and shortly afterwards Vander abandoned his work and moved to Turin, where he was to die himself a year or two later. These are the facts, garnered from the helpful Chronology our author supplies after the Preface, and which he would be scandalised to see me present in such an unadorned and unfiddled-with fashion. The books that Vander wrote in his American years, in particular the collection of essays hermetically entitled The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity, won him a large if contested reputation as an iconoclast and an intellectual sceptic. ‘A strain of nastiness runs throughout the work,’ his disenchanted biographer writes, with a palpably curled lip, ‘and all too often his tone is that of a crabbed and venomous spinster, the kind of person who confiscates footballs that small boys accidentally kick into her garden and spends her evenings writing poison-pen letters on perfumed note-paper to her neighbours in the village.’ You see what I mean about the style.
And this Vander is the character I have to play. Dear me.
Yet in a way I can see why someone thought there is material for a movie here. Vander’s story weaves a certain mephitic spell. Perhaps I am overly suggestible, but as I sat reading in the old green armchair where lately Billie Stryker had perched and panted, the feeling came over me of being surreptitiously seized on and deftly taken hold of. The October sky in the slanted window above me had a floating of copper clouds, and the light in the room was a pale dense gas, and the silence too was dense, as if my ears had been stopped up as in an aeroplane, and I seemed to see the shadowy first and valid Axel Vander faltering and falling without a sound and his usurper stepping seamlessly into his place and walking on, into the future, and overtaking me, who will presently in turn become a sort of him, another insubstantial link in the chain of impersonation and deceit.
I shall go out for a walk; perhaps it will restore me to myself.
I like to walk. Or better say, I walk, and leave it at that. It is an old habit, acquired in the early months of grieving after Cass died. There is something in the rhythm and the aimlessness of being out for a stroll that I find soothing. My profession, from which I thought I had retired until Marcy Meriwether summoned me back to the footlights, or the arc-lights, or whatever they are called, has always allowed me the freedom of the daytime hours. There is a certain tepid satisfaction to be had in being abroad and at one’s leisure while other folk are penned indoors at work. The streets at mid-morning or in the early afternoon have an air of definite yet unfulfilled purpose, as if something important had forgotten to happen in them. The halt and the lame come out by day to air themselves, the old, too, and the no longer employed, wiling away the empty hours, nursing their losses, probably, as I do. They have a watchful and a slightly guilty manner; perhaps they fear being challenged for their idleness. It must be hard to get used to there being nothing urgent that needs to be done, as I am bound to find out when those arc-lights are extinguished for the last time and the set is struck. Theirs I imagine is a world without impetus. I see them envying the busyness of others, eyeing resentfully the lucky postman on his round, the housewives with their shopping baskets, the white-coated men in vans delivering necessary things. They are the unintended idlers, the ones astray, the at-a-loss ones.
I observe the tramps, too, that is another old pastime of mine. It is not what it used to be. Over the years the tramp, your true tramp, has been diminishing steadily in quality and quantity. Indeed, I am not sure that one can any more speak of tramps as such, in the old, classic sense. No one nowadays rambles the roads, or carries a bundle on a stick or sports a coloured neckerchief, or ties his trouser legs below the knees with twine, or collects cigarette butts from the gutter to keep in a tin. The wandering ones are all drunks, now, or on drugs, and care nothing for the traditional ways of the road. The addicts in particular are a new breed, always in a hurry, always on a mission, trotting unswervingly along crowded pavements or weaving heedless through the traffic, lean as prairie dogs, with scrawny behinds and flat feet, the young men dead-eyed and scratchily light of voice, their women staggering behind them clutching stricken-eyed papooses and incoherently screaming.