‘One,’ I said. ‘What I’d like all of you to do now is to give me whatever you’ve brought with you so I can start reading. If you haven’t brought anything you should write whatever you can for me to look at tomorrow. Don’t demand too much of yourself — heavy expectations tend to be self-defeating.’
Those who had manuscripts passed them along to me while the others scratched their heads, looked around, and slowly put pen to paper. Constanze’s was the last of the mss. It was a single sheet of blue A4 copy paper, somewhat crumpled. On it was printed a single line: ‘“That’s what uncles do,” he said.’
‘Uncle Teddy?’ I said as various of the group turned to look at me.
Constanze nodded. I put the page into a folder and picked up a thick wodge of paper from the dead-serious girl whose name was Clara Petersen. Low Pressure Love was the title. ‘It rained whenever we met’. was the first line. ‘Listen to this,’ I said to the group, and I read them the line. ‘That right away pulls me in,’ I said, ‘because it rings true: there are times like that and there are lives like that. I want to read on and find out who the narrator is and what’s coming next. I already care about the narrator and I want to get into the action. If your story doesn’t engage the reader and make him or her want to know more you haven’t got a story. It doesn’t have to be a person that the reader is drawn in by: Bleak House opens with “implacable November weather”, with mud and smoke and fog and you want to go where the weather is taking you because the writer has made you care by putting you into a place and an atmosphere of impending excitement.’
Some people nodded, others took notes, others did both. I refrained from launching into the first page of Moby Dick although damp drizzly Novembers are a regular feature of my internal climate and I asked Clara to read the whole first page of her ms to the group. It was a good Page One and I made good comments after the reading. The whole novella, which I read later, was excellent. Clara had talent and the necessary strength of character for the long haul and I told her I’d do my best to put her in touch with an agent. She was quite a good-looking girl too, very intense with her dark hair worn long and a Wuthering Heights air about her which would do nicely in jacket photos and book promotion. I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to live with her and I was glad I didn’t. But now I’m going to leave Clara and the rest of the group in order to report my conversation with Constanze about Uncle Teddy. After supper I found her waiting for me. The summer evening was mild and the sound of the sea had a confidential air. Secrets! it whispered in the hissing of the waves on the strand, Secrets! I hold them, I keep them. There was a little thin sickle moon hanging in the clear sky. Lights glimmered all over Diamond Heart and a murmur of voices rose up with the smell of cannabis and the sound of an accordion and someone singing, in Russian, the song in which the English refrain begins with ‘Those were the days, my friend …’ We passed the Xanadu dome where the drinkers mostly stood outside and made pub noises.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
‘Kirsty’s Knowe,’ said Constanze. ‘I like to go there to be quiet.’ She took me to a grassy hill overlooking the sea where the susurrus of the waves made a whispering stillness that seemed to wait for something.
‘What’s it waiting for?’ I asked her.
‘Ah!’ she said, ‘you feel it too. This place is haunted. There was a Kirsty who hanged herself when her lover abandoned her. Kirsty’s Fetch, her ghost is called, and men who see it are fated to be drowned. And they say if you go to the Deil’s Hurdies you can hear the voices of the dead.’
‘I don’t see Kirsty’s Fetch so far,’ I said.
‘I don’t think you’re destined to drown.’
‘Are you going to write about Uncle Teddy?’
‘I don’t want to but that line jumped on to the paper and it’s pulling me after it.’
‘All of us have the ghosts of ourselves inside us,’ I said. She turned to me and her five foot ten seemed smaller and unsure. Mostly she looked like a confident winner but now she was touchingly vulnerable — I wanted to cuddle her but it would have been a wrong move and unwanted as well. Moshe Leib’s words recurred to me. ‘There’s a sorrow in you,’ I said, ‘just as there is in all of us. This sorrow clothes itself in various memories. I find it’s best to let the thing get on to the paper. You can always tear it up later if you want to.’
Looking out into the sea-dark she said, ‘He used to take me on his lap. Once, when I was ten, he put his hand …’
‘Stop!’ I said. ‘Don’t talk it out — get it down on paper and maybe it’ll lead to something further.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll start tonight then because ideas are coming to me right now. See you tomorrow.’
When we parted I watched her walk away and Moshe Leib’s words about the burden of one’s sorrow came to mind again. There’s a lot of it about, I thought. Barbara’s face came to me then, with her look of unknowing that was so characteristic of her. Perhaps it mirrored the look on my face? It’s very difficult to know anything, really, and here I was teaching people as if I knew something they didn’t. I was experienced in some ways — I was like a tracker who always found the turds of his prey but never caught the animal he was after. I stopped in at the Xanadu and ordered a large Glenfiddich.
One of the men in my group came up to me and nodded. I didn’t remember his name. ‘Geoff Wiggins,’ he said. ‘I’d like to write but I can’t think of anything to write about.’
‘Write about that then,’ I said. ‘If you do it carefully and honestly something will come to you.’
‘Does that always work for you?’ he said.
‘Sure it does. What comes to me is crap a lot of the time but that’s how it is.’
‘I guess if you were more successful you wouldn’t need to teach courses like this.’
‘And if you were capable of sitting at a desk alone you wouldn’t need to take courses like this,’ I said.
We both smiled hard at each other and he walked away.
Hoping I wouldn’t see any more familiar faces I had a look around me. Diamond Heart, definitely not a retreat, was a cruising ground offering interesting people of all sexual persuasions, most of them with a look of easy availability. It was rather like an auction where you had to be careful not to scratch your nose. It was the kind of scene I used to enjoy but now I found the whole thing dissolving into visual noise like a computer picture infected with a virus.
I had manuscripts to read but I put it off yet awhile. I finished my drink, went outside and walked back to Kirsty’s Knowe. I sat down on the still-warm grass, closed my eyes and listened to the sea. The warm summer air seemed a medium of transmission and Barbara’s face came to me then. I’d never been able to recall it accurately before but here it was utterly clear and real. I didn’t think any words, just looked at her face while the sea whispered me its secrets. At the beginning of these pages I’ve given my first impression of her that Saturday night at St James’s Clerkenwell. I described her as having a long oval face, a sullen mouth, and an up-yours expression. But attractive, I said: a face that pulled the eye. A shapely face that followed up the shapeliness of her legs and referred itself to the hidden sensuality of her body. As I looked at her now her face asserted its Strozzi attributes: the sombre eyes; the small mouth with its full underlip; the round chin that completed the juiciness of the mouth and led the eye down to the full breasts. Now my Barbara had become Barbara Strozzi and now the face flickered between the two of them, proclaiming the mystery of itself and the unknowability of Woman and sorrow. Tears rolled down my face; almost I could believe in God, or at least a demiurge. My empty hands moved as if kneading the dust of stars into wet clay. I looked up at the sky wondering what effect Mercury and Venus, all unseen, might be having on me.