‘Yes… Anyway, of course, the point was he never had a father, he was a bastard,’ she said in her candid old-fashioned way. ‘His mother had been in a factory in the war, and got pregnant by someone there. There was some story about her being ill, as well, I can’t quite recall. That may have been true, of course, but one started to treat anything he said with a degree of suspicion.’
Rob glanced again at the porter, whose stare seemed simultaneously offended and indifferent. He himself didn’t see this as quite such a point against Bryant as Jennifer seemed to – in fact it made him if anything more intriguing and sympathetic. ‘So you said he used to be a bank-clerk?’ (He had the examples of T. S. Eliot and P. G. Wodehouse at the ready.)
‘Used, yes, in my uncle’s bank. No, the rather awful thing was, my uncle had to fire him: I believe he was jolly lucky it didn’t go to court.’ They went out and down the steps into the waiting chill of Pall Mall, car headlights, briefly stalled, advancing on them with the bright impersonal rush of the London night. ‘Some sort of fiddle. He was quite clever – he is clever, Paul Bryant, in his odd way – and I think it was difficult to prove, but Uncle Leslie had no doubt about it, and Paul himself somehow wasn’t surprised, from what I gathered, to be thrown out of the bank. I was doing my doctorate then, and he sent me a card, right out of the blue, to say he was leaving the world of banking to pursue a career as a writer.’
Rob said, vaguely humorously, looking around, ‘To spend more time with his family.’
‘Well, to spend more time with my family, as it turned out,’ said Jennifer.
‘And the rest is biography,’ said Rob with a wise grin, as the cab he had waved at came to a halt and he opened the door for her.
2
What Rob thought of as Raymond’s was properly Chadwick’s, Antiques and Second-Hand, though it had started out, a century ago, as the best dress-shop in Harrow. In the floor of the set-back doorway the words ‘MADAME CLAIRE’ could still be read in the dulled mosaic, circling the barely legible ‘MODES’. Now the two broad display windows, where headless Edwardian mannequins had once been stationed (hats shown on separate stands, like cakes), were barricaded with old furniture, the rough deal backs of wardrobes, tables stacked on tables, among which an individual item, a plaster bust of Beethoven or a real glass cake-stand, was sometimes artlessly exhibited to the public. Rob had never set eyes on Hector Chadwick himself – it was always Raymond he saw, if he was in the area, or if Raymond let him know he had something for him. The old Harrow houses yielded treasures, now and then, among the van-loads of almost unsaleable books that found their way into the shop and then on, into junk shops and musty charity stores all over North London.
Rob shoved open the door, and a leisurely bell rang, and then rang again, in a part of the shop that was out of view. The showroom, as Raymond called it, was partitioned by ramparts of furniture into gloomy alleys, and it was hard to tell if there was anyone else in it. Not much natural light got through, and lamps that were notionally for sale glowed here and there on desks and sideboards. The feeling of secrecy and safety was shadowed by a childish sense of unease. At the back was a wall of books Rob had sometimes looked over, torn wrappers, dun-coloured cloth, obscure possibilities, the wary flicker of excitement snuffed out, as often as not, in the odour of dust and disuse. The smell of the books was like a drug, a promise of pleasure shot through with a kind of foreknown regret. In dreams he clambered or floated up bookshelves like these, where indefinably significant copies of editions that never existed hid among themselves in shy dull colours, old greens and ochres and faded yellows. Undeveloped prototypes for books, the novel by Woolf of which only one copy was printed, the unknown Compton-Burnett with its ever-mutating title, Helpers and Hinderers, A House and Its Horse, Friend and Fraud. He worked his way round – ‘Raymond?’
‘Hey, Rob?’ There was the clatter of his keyboard. ‘With you in a sec.’ Raymond and his computer lived together in intense co-dependency, as if they shared a brain, his arcane undiscriminating memory backed up on the machine and perpetually enlarged by it. Raymond himself was vast, in a cheerfully challenging way. What his life was like beyond the confines of the shop Rob had no idea. ‘Just uploaded a new thing for you.’
‘Oh yeah…?’
‘You’re going to like this one.’
‘Mm, I wonder.’
At the side of the shop, a chaotic cubicle made a kind of office. Rob grinned in over the heaped papers and coiling dusty cables at Raymond’s round face gleaming in the light from the screen; he bounced slightly on his office chair as he nodded. His reddish beard, grown long and wild like a martyr’s, spread out over his T-shirt, half-covering the slogan for his website, ‘Poets Alive! Houndvoice.com’, above an implausibly cheerful picture of W. B. Yeats. He looked up and nodded. ‘I’ve just done Tennyson – want to see?’
On Houndvoice Raymond posted eerie little videos of long-dead poets reading, authentic sound recordings emerging from the mouths of digitally animated photographs. It was clear from the Comments that some viewers thought they were really seeing Alfred Noyes read ‘The Highwayman’, while even those who weren’t taken in were apparently impressed by the fish-like gaping of the poet’s lips and the rhythmical flicker of his eyebrows.
‘Yeah, I guess…’ said Rob, coming round as Raymond pushed back his chair. ‘They’re a bit spooky, aren’t they.’
‘Yeah?’ said Raymond, clearly pleased. ‘Yeah, I suppose people might be a bit spooked by them.’
Rob didn’t think the films were remotely convincing, but in a way this made them more disturbing. The dummylike dropping of the jaw, the cheesy melting and setting of the features, were like the evidence of other impostures – the doctored photos of early séances, more creepy and depressing to Rob than the thought of real communication with the dead. Rob met up with his dead friends in witty and poignant dreams, where they didn’t look at all like these bundles of mouthing matter. ‘Here we go,’ said Raymond, maximizing the player and whacking up the volume. Lord Tennyson’s notable head and shoulders filled the screen – hollow-cheeked, high-domed, hair tangled and greasy, the straggly dark beard with a lot of grey in it. The beard, at least, was a blessing, as it completely covered the poet’s mouth, preventing any ghoulish working of the lips. Raymond clicked the Play button and against a rainstorm of hissing and the galloping thump of the cylinder the determined quavering voice of the great poet began its familiar rush through ‘Come Into the Garden, Maud’. Rob had always thought the recording uncanny in itself – the effect whenever he’d heard it before was comic and touching and awe-inspiring by turns. He saw Raymond was watching him watch the video, and he smiled thinly, as if only just reserving judgement. The bard’s beard quivered like a beast in a hedge, as the famous face made repetitive mincing and chewing movements. Rob felt the peculiar look in the older Tennyson’s eyes, the air of almost belligerent anxiety, appealing to him critically and directly through the shame that was being inflicted on his lower features. Then it came to its abrupt end, and Raymond’s copyright line – not in the recording or the image, but in the puppet-show he’d made with them – appeared across Tennyson’s frozen face.
‘Almost incredible,’ Rob said, ‘listening to a man read a poem he wrote a hundred and fifty years ago.’
‘Ah – yes,’ said Raymond, seeing this rather skirted the issue.
Rob stood back. ‘I suppose that’s the earliest you can go, isn’t it,’ with a quick grasp for reassurance. ‘That must be the earliest recording of a poet.’
‘Well, strictly speaking,’ said Raymond, ‘though of course you can fake the voices, if you want to,’ peeping at Rob with that strange look, in a middle-aged man, of a teenager trying his luck.