There was a shocked silence. At least, Joan was visibly shocked, and Phoebe was certainly silent. As for myself, I had heard too many speeches like this in my student days to be much put out by it.
‘Who would they be, then?’ I asked.
‘Well, for instance …’
Graham mentioned a name, and I smiled: a pleased, private little smile, because it was exactly the name I had been expecting. The ball was very much back in my court now, for this was the same writer whose latest work had fallen into my hands for review. And yes, I had found the word. The word which I had known was out there, all along, just waiting to be matched to its subject.
This was a writer, I should explain, some ten years older than myself, whose three slender novels had been ludicrously overpraised in the national press. Because he made his characters talk in crudely notated dialects and live in conditions of unconvincing squalor, he was hailed as a social realist; because he sometimes played elementary tricks with narrative, in feeble imitation of Sterne and Diderot, he was hailed as an experimental pioneer; and because he made a regular habit of writing letters to the newspapers, criticizing government policy in terms which had always struck me as suggesting a rather timid Leftism, he was hailed as a political radical. More annoying than any of this, however, was his reputation for humour. He had been repeatedly credited with a playful irony, a satiric lightness of touch, which seemed to me to be entirely lacking from his work, characterized as it was by lumbering sarcasm and the occasional abject attempt to jog the reader’s elbow with well-signposted jokes. It was this aspect of his style for which I had reserved my final scorn. ‘It has become a matter of routine,’ I had written, ‘to praise Mr —— for his deft combination of wit and political commitment; and even to suggest that here, at last, we have a moral ironist worthy of these ruthless times. We stand badly in need of novels, after all, which show an understanding of the ideological hijack which has taken place so recently in this country, which can see its consequences in human terms and show that the appropriate response lies not merely in sorrow and anger but in mad, incredulous laughter. For many people, it seems, it is only a matter of time before------writes just such a noveclass="underline" but this reader remains unconvinced. Whatever his other qualifications for the task, I suspect, finally, that he lacks the necessary –’
And this was where my invention had failed me for so long. What was it that he lacked, exactly? The word that I was looking for had something to do with style, something to do with tone. It wasn’t that he lacked compassion, or intelligence, or technique, or ambition: what he lacked was … it was an instinct, somehow, for putting these things together, but in a nimble, a fleet-footed way. It was a sort of daring, but there also had to be an element of diffidence, because this quality, whatever it was, would only appear truly natural and spontaneous if it was entirely without self-regard. The word was there, and I was only inches away from it. He lacked the necessary brilliance, the necessary bravado, the necessary …
… brio.
Yes, that was it. Brio. Precisely. It seemed so obvious, already, that I couldn’t understand why it had taken me so long to get there. At once an almost mystical sense of its rightness flooded over me: not only was I sure that it put a perfect end to the review, but I also knew, as if by some telepathic process, that it described the single quality which he, in his most secret heart of hearts, would yearn to be credited with. I had invaded, penetrated, wormed my way inside him: when the review appeared, on Friday morning, I would wound him; wound him deeply. I had a vision of hallucinogenic intensity, born half from imagination and half from the distant memory of a nameless, black and white, probably American film: a man in a busy, windswept city in the early morning, buying a newspaper from a street-corner vendor, taking it to a coffee bar and thumbing impatiently to a particular page; devouring a sandwich at the counter, and then the movement of his jaws getting slower and slower as he reads, until he screws the newspaper up in disgust, throws it into a bin and storms out of the bar, the anger and disappointment drawn lividly on his face. I knew – as soon as I’d thought of the word, I knew it for a certainty – that this was the scene, in exaggerated form, which would be played out on Friday morning, when he went out to buy the newspaper, or picked it up off his doormat, or as soon as his agent telephoned him with news of my crushing performance. It shames me, now, to think how happy the knowledge made me; or rather, to think how ready I was to mistake for happiness the poisoned stream of satisfaction which welled up inside me.
All I said to Graham was: ‘I thought it might be him.’
‘Not your cup of tea, I suppose,’ he said; and managed to make even this sound like another in my litany of inadequacies.
‘He has his moments,’ I conceded, and then added casually: ‘I’ve just reviewed his latest, in fact.’ I turned to Joan. ‘That phone call I had to make just before dinner. I was dictating it to one of the copy-takers.’
Joan blushed with pride, and said to her lodgers: ‘Just think – someone makes a phone call from my little sitting room, the words travel all the way down the lines to London, and a few days later, it’s in all the papers.’
‘The wonders of modern science,’ said Graham, and began stacking the plates.
∗
The next day, a wet and misty Wednesday, was not a great success. I decided to take Joan up on her invitation and accompany her on some of her visits, but it was a dispiriting experience. The bulk of her work appeared to involve turning up uninvited at family homes in order to conduct furtive interviews with the children while their parents stared on balefully, or beat ungracious retreats to the kitchen to make cups of tea which never got drunk. At first I actually went with her to sit in on these encounters, but my presence was so obviously unwelcome that I gave up on that after the first couple of visits and spent the rest of the day sitting in Joan’s car, reading through the pile of old magazines and newspapers which cluttered her back seat and waiting tiredly for her to emerge from the doorway of some council house or tower block.
For lunch we went to a pub in the centre of town. Joan had a vegetable pasty and I had steak and kidney pie, which caused her to tut reprovingly. That evening, it was Graham’s turn to cook. The dish he prepared for us may or may not have had a name: it seemed to consist mainly of lentils and walnuts burned down to a black crust, scraped off the bottom of a large saucepan, and served with a dollop of wholemeal pasta ribbons which had the texture of rubber bands. We ate, for the most part, in absorbed silence.
‘You ought to show Michael some of your work, tomorrow,’ said Joan to Graham at one point. ‘He might have some interesting comments to make.’
‘I should like that,’ I said.
∗
Graham sat me down on his bed and switched on the large, unwieldy television which dominated one corner of his bedroom. It took nearly a minute to warm up.
‘1970s vintage,’ he explained. ‘Pretty much on its last legs.’
Yesterday’s mist had cleared and the morning was turning out bright but muggy. Not that much of the sunshine would come our way: Graham’s room was permanently in shadow, with a tiny, lace-curtained window which looked out over Joan’s back yard and the back yards of other houses in the next street. We were alone in the house, it was half past ten and we were both on to our second cups of strong, sugary tea.
‘Have you got one of these yourself?’ Graham asked, kneeling down to slot a VHS tape into the video machine.
‘Can’t afford it on what I earn,’ I said. ‘I’m waiting for the prices to come down. They say they’re going to tumble.’
‘You don’t think I own this, do you? Nobody’s buying the things – you do it on the rental. Ten quid a month is all this costs me, down at Rumbelows.’