The Back of His Head Read online

  Ah, Raymond, Raymond, Raymond—where are you? No idle question, this: it comes up every time I find myself alone at the Residence—which happens more and more often lately, I’ve found, given that the other Trust members increasingly make this or that last-minute excuse to avoid turning up for touring parties and for the board meetings we’re supposed to have here on the first Tuesday of each month, not to mention the occasional working-bee that I call. More often than not it turns out I’m the only one prepared to attend the former, and end up spending a solitary evening at home after all. Sometimes there are no apologies whatever and I find myself coming down to the Residence to find it looming above me closed and dark, and with absolutely no idea whether the others will eventually turn up or not.

  Whenever that happens, there is the eerie business of feeling my way up the steps, and to the front door and, after the work of finding the lock with the nose of the key, pushing inside, lighting the place room by room and then turning back through the bright house and sitting and waiting at the oak dining table—Patience on a monument smiling at Grief, as Raymond would have said—until it becomes obvious that no one has remembered: or that indeed they’ve remembered all right but simply can’t be bothered.

  Or worse, in the case of the appalling phrase Semple used when I made an acid phone call to him on one of these occasions and discovered him involved yet again with some silly little tart in his bed. Urgent Business Elsewhere, he said, with the woman’s giggles in the background. Well, I told him what I thought of indulging in that kind of business when he ought to have been at the Trust meeting, and that’s when he said the phrase in question. For Raymond’s sake, I said to him—come on! Can’t be arsed, he told me back. You can’t be what—? I said, unable to believe my very ears.

  Now, here I am yet again with a deserted building to confront and the prospect of yet another wasted evening to be spent inside it. And, always on these occasions, that question—where are you, Raymond?—and the strange sense, whenever I’m standing at the top of the front steps with the wind blowing in my hair and my key tapping blindly against the plate of the lock in the darkness, that Raymond is inside the house, that when the door finally opens and I click the stiff brass light switch just inside and to the right—lo!—he’ll be sitting there like Jeremy Bentham in his stall at University College, staring back at me, waxen of head and tissue preserved!

  Sometimes when this fancy takes me Raymond is as I first met him, barely forty and ruddy with health, his look sardonic, his purpose, as always, impossible to pin down. At other times, it’s as if he’s in his last months and crouched atop the elevator platform in his fauteuil roulant, as he used to call his wheelchair, his head and his hand going tick-tick-tick as was often the case in the final days. Once, as I fumbled the key at the front door lock, I was sure I could hear the buzz of the wheelchair elevator inside as it made its climb to the main floor, ready to greet me. With what?—would he be there at last on its platform, when I got the door open, would he be crouched there and waiting in his wheelchair?

  And, of course, he wasn’t, and hasn’t been, and never is, and part of me knows he never will: but the feel of him is here, always, the feel of his colossal, overwhelming presence is everywhere as I push into the house and its darkness, banishing the world of enchantments with each click of successive brass light switches: till I reach the Art Moderne plastic switchplate of the Blue Room at last and expose for myself the final disappointment: that, once more, I have driven him before me and away.

  He is nowhere. He is somewhere. He is everywhere.

  I have paused, here, to take in again the pastness of the past, but now I turn back to the actuality of the dining room and the business of setting the papers before each place at the table. Order, gentlemen, please: ladies, too, Marjorie will always say indignantly, whenever she can be—well, whenever she can be arsed to be there, I suppose, to use Semple’s hideous phrase. At which objection he, Semple, always laughs like a hebephrenic: if, that is, he can be arsed to be present as well. Then, at some point, he will call someone or other a tit, and Marjorie will bristle and say, well, there’s nothing wrong with hers, and Semple will say once again that the word has nothing to do with breasts but comes from a Middle English word that means small and insignificant, and Julian will add, irrelevantly, that birds has derived by metathesis from brids—women, and hence brides—and Semple will say, There y’go, Marge, you’re a bride not a broad! And another monthly meeting of the Raymond Lawrence Literary Trust will have begun. Order, order please, gentlemen; we have business to do—ladies, too, of course, of course. Ladies a plate.

  And indeed we do have business to do tonight, as you can see on the agenda that I place around the table. Item 1 involves money, an ongoing discussion past which, frequently, we fail to move in two or three hours. Item 2, related, involves the upkeep of the Residence and its surrounds, always a concern. Item 3, which I think I’ll move up to Item 1 in view of my latest discovery, refers to theft by visitors and an update, which I think will impress my fellow members, of my attempts to track down recent thefts.

  Now, though, it seems someone is actually turning up at the Residence: a soft clump of a car door down on the drive and—yes, up the steps and through the door the first Trustee struggles, carrying her past around her in the clutch of bags and reticules that weigh her shoulders, wrists and hands: Marjorie Swindells, dabbing a hankie at what seems to be a perpetual slight cold (Semple assures me she’s a secret Catholic, since, according to him, Catholics always have colds).

  A loud parp at her nose, and then:

  ‘Hello, Peter,’ she says to me in her defeated, resigned, slightly creaky private-girls’-school voice, and down the bags go, one by one, slumped on floor and chair and tabletop, and away goes the hankie in a quick tuck at her wrist. She straightens: ‘Well, what’s the problem?’ she asks.

  ‘I’ll tell you when the others get here.’ I prefer all the Trust to be present when it’s serious business. ‘But it is important.’

  Now her face comes into the not-unsubtle light I have arranged over the table and I can marvel once again at the workmanship of it, her phiz I mean, the craquelure of tiny lines that comb her brow and upper lip, the cockling of her cheeks. In that process, even her ear lobes have developed sudden, abrupt little folds, as if beginning to close in on themselves, as if starting the business of rolling her up like an ancient canvas that is to be put away once more to allow a real, a still-youthful Marjorie to go on living and sinning. Or, possibly, to reveal no one at all: one never knows.

  All nonsense, of course: here she still is, after all, caught in the unforgiving present like the rest of us, just come from the ladies seminary at which she plies her trade as a teacher of art history, drama and creative writing. Whatever that is, Raymond always used to say whenever the topic came up. Teach writing? he’d say. What d’you fucking mean, teach it? They don’t teach you how to shit, do they? Well, actually, they do, Raymond dear, Marjorie always used to tell him whenever he got to this point. They do but you’ll have forgotten. You can’t just let fly, you know, you’ve got to learn to aim at the pot. Fuck the pot, he’d always tell her. The pot’s the problem—

  Why is she here; I mean, why is Marjorie Swindells part of the Raymond Lawrence Literary Trust? (In fact she’s not here at the moment, having just slipped off to spend a penny, as she puts it, tinkling distantly on his big old porcelain throne: whose craquelure, it must be said, rivals hers). You may take your choice of answers to the question of why she is a Trustee: (a) there was a long period many years ago when Raymond frequently took her to his bed—yes, that bed, the one in the front bedroom—and had sport with her: (b) she has a genuine literary achievement in her own right, a big, sad, first-and-only novel called Unravel Me, about (wait for it) a young woman who gets tangled up with a famous male artist. It is some years gone now, and nothing has come since—certainly nothing to rival the éclat of its Moment and the rather more than fifteen minutes of fame that followe
d.

  I read it straight away, naturally—everyone did—and was dismayed, horrified, to see how good it was. I listened to the interviews that followed and marvelled—again, everyone did—at the disparity between the virtues of the novel and the cuckoo qualities of the person who had apparently written it. How did it happen, whence did it come, had it been written by someone else?—by Raymond himself, as part of some obligation about which we knew not, or as a joke whose punchline he would reveal in due course?

  Time passed, though, and it became clear that there was no such course: and Raymond insisted, all the while, that he had nothing to do with any of the book, neither its composition by sleight-of-hand nor as the original of its Magus-like antagonist, Begg (this despite the generosity with which Marjorie described certain parts of that character in certain parts of her text).

  Now, though, the slam of a car door, a call from outside, hulloo—and it is Robert Semple’s turn to arrive: gracious me! Here he is after all, swarming up the concrete steps to the front door, here’s his ugly-handsome face beneath the curve of his silliest affectation, a wide-brimmed brown fedora he almost never removes: and here is his tender, stepping, haemorrhoidal gait.

  He stops dramatically a pace or two into the room and spreads his palms, his eyebrows raised: what’s up?

  ‘The paua shell ashtray’s gone. Stolen.’

  ‘My God—!’ His hand slaps his brow, his head goes back. ‘Raymond’s ashtray!’ He holds the pose, eyes shut tight.

  Exasperating, of course, infuriating—really, I sometimes wonder about his commitment to the Trust. But there’s no changing things: his name is on the Trust document, Robert William Davidson Semple, along with those of Julian Howard Yuile and Ursula Marjorie Swindells. And, of course, along with mine, as Principal Trustee: Peter Edward Orr. I could easily do without any of them, to tell the truth (though perhaps Julian least, since he is harmless and has his uses), so that I might run the Trust myself. Semple in particular is a trial, in ways you’ve probably begun to pick up already. His poetry you’ll have already judged for yourself, I imagine, if you’re familiar with it. His other attributes—well, I’ll let you judge those for yourself, too, as they unfold themselves.

  His connection with the Master?—as in my own case, from an early age, though not quite as early as mine: slightly post-pubescent rather than slightly pre-, and (I’m aware) with the same questions eventually raised as in mine: I mean questions to do with the price paid later in life for things gained earlier on. These are evident, one might say, in his behaviour, Semple’s I mean, most obviously in his frenzied rutting, of course, and also—but here comes Julian now, our fourth Trustee, pushing in through the doorway as if conjured by my naming him a moment ago: and here is Semple, turning to him and seizing his shoulder:

  ‘Come and see the missing ashtray!’ He points wildly towards Raymond’s bedroom.

  Julian is mystified. He looks across at me.

  ‘The paua ashtray is gone,’ I tell him.

  ‘Shit—really? That was authentic—’

  ‘Authentic!’ Semple, bursting into florid, contemptuous, simulated laughter.

  ‘Well, it is,’ Julian said. ‘You could see his actual ash in it.’

  ‘Excuse me, it’s not his ash? It’s just his cigar ash? Where he stubbed his cigars out?’

  ‘No, but not everything in the Residence is, you know—’ Julian looks around. He gestures at a bookcase. ‘One or two of those books aren’t his, some of them are second-hand—there’s other bits and pieces we’ve replaced when things go missing.’

  ‘Exactly, right, and the ashtray’s the same, it’s just a paua shell he picked up off some beach somewhere—’

  ‘Yes, but I know what Peter’s thinking.’ Julian flicks a look at me and away. ‘We should value everything—you know, everything he touched.’

  ‘Christ!’ Semple turns away dramatically. ‘“Is He present in the wafer?”’ He really is getting angry now, and the theatrics are holding things in rather than the reverse. ‘I thought they sorted this shit out five hundred years ago—’

  ‘Hey, steady on.’ Julian is a Christian, of the garden-God variety: Semple likes to goad him. Where’s Marjorie got to?—we need her here, to play her customary role of scapegoat and victim: then the Raymond Thomas Lawrence Memorial Trust really will be in its full dysfunction. But Julian is on song tonight, it seems, and holds his own as the argument with Semple develops. It’s an old issue, after all, the nature of the Residence and how properly to remember the Master, and during the last five years we’ve all heard one another’s opinions on the matter.

  By and large, on this issue, Julian and I are Catholics, if you see what I mean, and the other two are Protestants—in other words, two of the Trust feel that the old man is all around us, in everything, still alive, imperishable, and two of them feel—well, that he isn’t, that everything we have accumulated in this hundred-year-old villa on a lower spur of Cashmere Hill simply represents the life of the great artist who lived here for forty years and wrote many volumes of fiction long and short. Which view (I hear Julian now, arguing once more against this) runs quite contrary, surely, to what the Master himself wrote about most often: I mean the power of art to take us beyond mere nostalgia, as I’ve said, to the very past itself—

  And what has Semple to say, once Julian has finished his defence of the Master’s presence in the ashtray?

  He pauses. Then: ‘Don’t call him the Master, Jules, old boy, it’s bad enough Norman here calling him that.’

  He means me, he is referring to Norman Bates, and I’ll leave the rest to you—and, anyway, here comes Marjorie at last, back from her feminine devoirs in the bathroom, the strap of her principal handbag over her arm and her makeup evidently brighter.

  Semple is upon her straight away, eyebrows up and brow glistening and furrowed. ‘Have you heard the news?’ he demands. ‘The paua shell ashtray’s gone! It’s on the black market, selling for millions—’

  She looks across at me. ‘You’ve dragged us across town for that? I thought we’d at least had a fire somewhere.’

  ‘Marjorie.’ Semple takes her fingertips as if wanting to dance. ‘Now you’re here we can vote. “The Master” or just plain “Mister”—?’

  ‘Oh, not that again.’ She pulls away. ‘You know I think it’s pretentious. So does Jules.’ She’s into her bags again.

  ‘Yes, but he’s started to use it. Julian here. He’s caught it off Norman.’

  ‘God, Peter, he was just a man. Raymond. Just a man.’

  ‘A great man.’

  ‘A great arsehole, come on, you know that—’

  ‘I’m aware of your views and you’re entitled to them.’ I’ve long ago learned to keep my temper on this topic, but it isn’t easy, it isn’t easy. ‘In my opinion and that of many others, he was a great man and a great writer. The proof is on the wall in there—’ I’m pointing towards the Blue Room.

  ‘God, if you knew him the way I knew him—that body!’

  ‘I remind you who I am.’

  ‘Yes, but you didn’t bonk him—or did you? Did you—?’

  ‘Yes, Marge, we all know you had in him in your boodoyer!’ This is Semple, of course: he loves this sort of thing. Julian leans against the molten walnut of the buffet, arms folded, waiting as Semple and Marjorie begin to argue yet again (‘Don’t call me Marge’, etc.). If only they were better writers. If only they were better people!

  Was it Raymond’s last great trick—I’ve often wondered this—to appoint three absolute nonentities to his literary trust to take care of his reputation after his death: was this his last great joke? Did he think I was a nonentity, too, was he saying that, we were all nonentities to him? I asked someone this, once, a theatrical friend of my uncle called Basil Bush, and the man gave me a very untheatrical answer. No, it wasn’t because you’re a nonentity, the man told me. It’s because you’re so bloody difficult. Like father like son. I’m not his actual son, I reminded him. No, but ne
arly, the man said. And it shows, because you’re both complete and utter pricks. He doesn’t want anyone getting near the truth about him, he said, and he knows you won’t let them.

  The old fellow looked at me hard when he said this. He knows you’re as mad as he is, he said. Madder. He knows you’ve got his DNA.

  And I wondered, how much of the story, the full story, did he know?

  Now, at last, the September meeting of the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Trust, properly notified and quorate: Hon. Chairman Mr P. Orr, Hon. Secretary Ms M. Swindells, Hon. Treasurer Mr J. Yuile, Order please—

  ‘Oh, shit, is there a meeting now?’ Marjorie has just noticed the papers set out before each chair at the dining table. ‘You just said it was an emergency.’

  ‘That’s the emergency, having a meeting!’ Semple. ‘Once a month, Marge, thought you’d remember once a month!’

  For twenty seconds, the usual rattle of ill-tempered gunfire. Order, order—

  We get through the prefatory nonsense—is it your wish—those for—AYE (Semple always very loud at this point, sometimes sustaining the note like a choirboy) those against, CARRIED.

  There are no matters arising but under chairman’s business I am able to report the ongoing sale of unauthorised Raymond Thomas Lawrence memorabilia online—cheap bric-a-brac, more a hangover from the time of the award of the Prize than a real and ongoing threat, but crass and irritating all the same: for example, a line in garden gnomes made to look like the Master—the Master sitting fishing, the Master as Rodin’s Thinker, even (most lamentable of all) the Master as the Manneken-Pis. Appalling, upsetting, infuriating: but, according to our legal advisors, untouchable, since we’d lose more if we sued, apparently, than we might gain. And, as I said, this particular phenomenon does seem rather to be fading out.