Early Novels and Short Fiction

General Foreword

Early Novels and Short Fiction is not quite an accurate title, collectively. Among the earliest of my travels into fiction is Penumbra, a collection of short stories originally having as centrepiece the four related narratives now comprising Entry Without Visas – viz., ‘Michael Grading’, ‘The House of Folly’, ‘Two Dissidents’, and ‘Homeward Angel’. Entry Without Visas is in itself the first of three novellas under the collective title The Border and Back, which became the obvious transition once I had decided to probe further into the dilemmas of Michael Grading. That exercise didn’t turn out to be a novel, though Call Bridgland Jolley was the first extended piece of fiction I was prepared to put my name to, i.e. not consign to the bin, the one marked ‘Rejects’, of which as apprentice I generated many. Now comes the ripple in what has so far been an actual chronology, given that Humber, the centre in the trio of novellas making up The Border and Back, belongs with my most recent, much later fiction. It is the only anomaly, retrospectively, and is placed where it is as fits the overall structure.

Revisions to that initial quartet – ‘Michael Grading’, ‘The House of Folly’, ‘Two Dissidents’, and ‘Homeward Angel’ – which at the time of writing I felt nationally conscious of and referred to them collectively as the Michael of England stories, place the action much later than the date of original composition, which would have been mid to late 1970s, the Wilson-Callaghan era, and the Winter of Discontent. For example, we know from ‘Homeward Angel’ that Michael’s return home is in the same week that Dali died (Salvador Dali, 11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989). I nowadays take the view that overall it has worked to my advantage that throughout my twenties and early thirties I was unable to find a publisher for any of my work. I suffered also from too much hope placed in a manual I always had in reach, an up-to-date writers’ handbook, though eventually I came to see as lies and propaganda the assertion, somewhere in its opening pages, that publishers are always on the lookout for new talent. Novelists I read, trumpeted by the literati as the best of our contemporaries, all seemed to me to have the same deficiency – a rush to publication, no doubt under commercial imperatives, before having properly self-edited, or taken the time to notice that the texts they were putting out fell below the standards a cabal of tame reviewers always claimed for them. My own editing process, precisely because as a writer I am not commercially blessed, or outspoken and controversial, or prone to stand up for minority interests, has extended over decades. I am in good company. Beethoven tinkered with his symphonies, long after they had been premiered and published.

There have been other shocks too, and one of such huge magnitude no end of editing will lessen its blow. There is a cruel symmetry to it, when one tiny detail that has survived all subsequent revisions is the ‘Mark of Jack’ acrostic in the fourth section of the Michael Grading story. The first seven of those letters were the keys my two-year-old son Jack randomly pressed on the keyboard when, sitting on my knee, he came to help me as I worked away at the word processor, in a 1989 revision. Of importance to that Grading story is Michael’s contemplation of suicide, not something I knew too much about at the time of writing. That poor victim Michael hears of ‘who one early morning drove in a salty drizzle thirty miles to the coast, and high above Hastings attached a hose to the exhaust pipe’, and fed it in through a window, was an actual person, one an acquaintance had told me about. Then, decades later, in 2018, when Jack had been married not quite two years, his wife Holly took her own life – a horrible tragedy in itself, and one directing me, as all-unseeing author, to the full scale of ignorance with which I had ‘dealt’ with the subject of suicide. It has made me think poets and writers of fiction don’t really ‘deal’ with anything. They just ramble. And certainly in Grading’s case his contemplation of that act is bookish, is merely theoretical (while in ‘Triones’, in seventh place in Penumbra, it’s a taunt, to get its author attention, and in tenth place, in ‘The Incredible Domenico’, it’s merely an element of plotting). And there’s a kind of symmetry, as well, when Grading has not fully understood that his endless searching, pointed up in both Entry Without Visas and Call Bridgland Jolley, is a search for meaning (which his inventor in his youth sought in vain for also). That probably explains his flirtation with religion, with monastic retreat, and with the politics of East and West.

As I have said, my original plan for the four Michael of England stories was as centrepiece to a wider collection, Penumbra (still unpublished other than here, in book form at least). I sent it around in the early ’80s, when publishers still had readers. An enthusiastic response from one of Penguin’s, whose name I can’t remember, though it might have been Victoria (the postcard she wrote I no longer possess), nevertheless advised I’d get nowhere without an agent. She, she said, had no power of influence over inhouse editorial decisions, which made me wonder what she was doing there and why anyone should bother employing her.

Cropping up in both outer novellas – Entry Without Visas and Call Bridgland Jolley – is the poet Humber, a post-war professional man of letters, of a kind I always found puzzling. I never quite clicked with the Beat generation, even though I have always considered writing should in some way be subversive, and hadn’t got much sympathy for what appeared at the other extreme, men and women writing books who seemed better suited to banking or accountancy, poets fussing over the choice of metrical arrangement and reducing their means of communication to graceless analytics. In my mind Humber belongs with the latter, troubled as he is not just by his personal identity. He also bears the weight of his daily occupation. In a way he stands trial for it in Call Bridgland Jolley, that first extended work of fiction that didn’t join others in the bin (there is one other that didn’t go in the bin, and instead has gone missing, and will be an embarrassment if it ever turns up). The trial that takes place in Call Bridgland Jolley owes only the idea to Kafka, going off in another direction completely. I admit the thing goes on a bit, with its narrator endlessly re-stamping seemingly trivial details. In my defence, that’s only the template by which is posed the question is his merely an exercise in rhetoric, or is his constant probing, his personal revelation of himself, key to the minute examination of a disintegrating elite. Or are the two things synonymous?

By day six of the trial his ceaseless pedantry has made him unwell. ‘I am ill. I turn to a thick brown phial I picked up in the dispensary, drops for my ear, and a pipette…,’ and later admits to having no grasp on events surrounding him: ‘To be honest I am losing my grip….’ As fiction Call Bridgland Jolley belongs with the uncategorised – a literary curiosity somewhere on the intersection of Tristram Shandy and Ulysses. It comes a bit late now as a millennial novel, whose opening draft was the best part of a quarter of a century before that alarm went off (when everyone was writing millennial novels). Only now, some twenty-something years past that demarcation, am I prepared to let it go, and let it be read. And I know of at least one person who will not judge it harshly, so I ask him to please forgive my tardiness.

Three of the four Michael of England stories have previously been published, ‘Michael Grading’ in Valparaiso Fiction Review (May 2013), ‘The House of Folly’ in Thrice Fiction (August 2018), and ‘Two Dissidents’ in The Four Quarters Magazine (August 2013). An early version of ‘Michael Grading’ won a Bridport prize (1989, contest judge Alexis Lykiard). Call Bridgland Jolley I have previously published as a stand-alone, as an ebook. Three other stories from Penumbra have been published as follows: ‘The Seven-O-One’ under the title ‘Hollamby’s Dilemma’ in Volume magazine, issue 6, summer 2009; ‘The Evangelising Power of War’, under the title ‘Combat’, in CultureCult Magazine, October 2017, which still alarms me in its laying bare of the kind of psyche a modern Western education spawns, and which I am still not comfortable publishing; and ‘Noose’, in the Galway Review, May 2016.

Bim Shay I only loosely categorise as a detective novel. The several strands of the story are narrated by Adrian Fixt. Fixt works for a mysterious and little-known civil service quango called the Department, which was brought into being in a reactive age of Toryism (the book was written at the height of Thatcherism, or courtesy the US in the era of Reaganomics). The Department’s sole function is to protect and uphold the virtues of capitalism. Its officers work closely with all police forces throughout the UK, and take an interest in any case where successful exponents of the free-market payola system suffer criminal harm.

Fixt is based in West London. He is called to the ‘Solomon case’, when Solomon, a leader in the pharmaceuticals industry, is murdered. Fixt’s investigations lead him to the London home of an American adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The home does not appear to be lived in, but is used as a clearing house in the illegal trafficking of Class A drugs. Exposure of these facts is likely to cause a scandal at the highest levels of government, and so, according to a Home Office interdict, Fixt is removed from the case. When he continues to investigate in his own time, the full weight of the Department is borne down on him.

Woven throughout is a parallel plot involving the Daniel Byrne Society, an organisation dedicated to the encouragement of writing, fiction and non-fiction, on crime and criminal matters. As an occasional reviewer of crime fiction, Fixt is a member of this society. The Byrne Society’s figurehead, and a committee member, is Bim Shay, a celebrated poet and leading industrialist, at a point in his career where research is under way for the writing of his biography. On the eve of an annual prize-giving, the society’s three main committee members ask Fixt to investigate, discreetly, the embezzlement of a part of the prize money. At first he refuses, but the more he finds himself outlawed by the Department the more he finds himself at a loose end, and so does investigate. This leads him to some surprising discoveries about Bim Shay, while at the same time he solves the mystery of Solomon, and makes a pretty good guess as to the facts surrounding the Chancellor’s American adviser. Bim Shay I am more inclined to view as my London novel, where I lived and worked from 1979 to 1991. It marks the end of that period, a book I was finishing off when as a family we moved to the South Hams.

Electric Letters Z, when I published it in 1998, proved to be a tortuous, agonised plaint at the state of modern publishing. I had written it out of frustration, at not being able to find a mainstream publisher. It has at its centre Alistair Wye, the narrator, a man of exaggerated refinement, or as he sees it rarefied aesthetic. He occupies the slave position in a master-slave relationship, using his ‘aesthetic’ in his rebellion against his master. His barrage is constant. The ‘master’, Marshall Zob, is a self-styled latter-day Dickens and champion of the oppressed. Zob in reality is a mediocrity, who through powerful social connections and a dubious agenting system has established himself, as a novelist, as the ‘best of his generation’. He is all too willing to supply, to the mass audience he courts, a lowbrow confection of street tales in the form of novels adding up to no more than film treatments. His analysis doesn’t exceed a sanified conceptualisation of street life, useful to him in the personal advancement of status and career. His dead mentor, Glaze, is a mere buffo, a pedantic, ill-educated headmaster-type, the dottore of comedic street theatre, and the butt of zanni jokes. All else in the book is the jangle of the English middle-class as it bolsters and prettifies itself. The plot revolves round Wye’s research into Zob’s archive of computer discs, emails and faxes, and his own diary entries recording his reactions to life in proximity of one of the nation’s bookish heavyweights. One can’t say that the long shadow of Protestantism hasn’t tainted the way certain Englishmen view the world.

The book’s first draft dates to 1994, and I would like to think that in it I anticipated, by well over a decade, Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, a sculpture produced in 2007, its structure the platinum cast of an eighteenth-century human skull, encrusted with over 8,000 diamonds. My predictive, counter-contribution to such speculative commercialism is courtesy my invented character Newsome Barringer, whose Golgotha 2000 like Hirst’s piece is a human skull, but unlike it is not a memento mori but, in my narrator’s dismissal of it, a reminder of human folly: ‘The phoney Barringer finds me magnanimous, with no words at all for his stunted cave work – those rudimentary acts of discourse – and best left to the weekend’s mindless supplements.’

Ironically the book was picked up by a London agent and shown to half a dozen editors, one of whom awarded it a ‘near miss’. I can understand. The book was convoluted, so much so that some years later I made a better fist of it and republished under the title Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize? Again, irony is not lost on me when under that title the book went on to win the 2015 Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction. With what to me are its early problems fully exorcised, I have returned to the original title for the latest revision offered here. As one reviewer has said, writing for Book Viral, Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize? or as I prefer it Electric Letters Z, is ‘Deliciously wicked and extraordinarily funny…satirical eloquence at its best….’

Caliban’s Machine is the only novel for which I have carried out formal research. I wanted to know what an arts college was and how it worked, and so enrolled for a course in Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts, in 1996, an institution that no longer exists. I found it hard to connect with most of the teaching staff, who were not sympathetic to ‘performance writing’ as novel. At such a distance of time, I can now view that as unimportant. The novel is a memoir written from the point of view of George du Plé, a young English poet whose background is blue collar halfway to middle-class. He has got himself involved with an English family of entrenched pedigree and tradition, surname Little. There are two daughters and a son. Alice Little is the eldest, and is the daughter from her mother’s first marriage, marriage dissolved. Alex is her half-sister, and is the daughter of her mother’s second marriage, marriage dissolved. Roddy is their brother, and the youngest, fruit of his mother’s current marriage. So, all three siblings, Alice, Alex, Roddy, have the same mother, different fathers. The two sisters’ step-father, or Roddy’s biological father, runs an academic press, the Tralatition Press, and because of that specialism cannot help George du Plé into publishing his poetry. However, given that George is showing too much interest in step-daughter Alex, he arranges for his removal to an avant-garde arts faculty in New York, the Donns Watson. This leaves Alex free to marry the family’s preferred candidate, John Royce, who becomes du Plé’s editor and annotator when du Plé writes letters home intended for Alex, which somehow fall into Royce’s hands. It is these letters that form an exiled poet’s memoir – a memoir of lovelorn, artistic despair. Unforeseen by anyone, a third voice is added to that of memoirist and commentator – Jack d’Ursag’s. Jack d’Ursag works for the same independent press that publishes Peter Cowlam’s books, CentreHouse Press, and adds his perspective on that press’s behalf.

—Peter Cowlam, South Hams, February 2020; Brislington Village, March 2022

PENUMBRA

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

Back to the Old Regime

The exaggerated importance I placed on my secret cipher precipitated these events, but how could I have known? After my travels abroad, and my uneasy back-door re-entry into the country (under an assumed name, with forged papers, and with the remains of my wealth, rifled from foreign accounts), I was bound to over-react.

I must accept, of course, this ruinous locality, where fearing for my life I felt that little bit safer, as most people did, in the disintegrating city. Our direction now was fixed in humiliated marble, soiled and worn. What was broken off at the shoulder had once resolved itself in a hand that pointed. But not anymore. What few critics remained, a handful of political commentators, had retreated in the dark.

I look through the dirty brown panes most mornings, and wonder. What used to thrive down there in a more colourful world has been reduced to mean imitations of purposeful human life. The square is a pocket handkerchief of muddy green, quartered by flagstones. It is fenced – at night it is padlocked, when the benches double as beds. The high terraces all round have crumbled in the salty winds. Paint peels from the windows, and brickwork everywhere stands to be repointed. The chimneys lean to front or back, geriatric.

Moments of introspection are no less bleak. If I turn my back on the roofs outside, and on the strip of lead suspended above them – the city sky – then all I see is faded wallpaper, the last vestige of prosperity. On the bare boards, my footsteps echo. The naked bulb above dangles on twisted threads. The hullabaloo from neighbours in adjoining rooms on the lower floors in the end drives me to the streets, often on windy nights, where the only welcome is a basement bar. There, I turn it all over, again and again.

I don’t say I regretted I was never asked to participate fully in the Federation’s aims, though it is a lasting disappointment that exactly why a secret organisation should approach me at all was never explained. Now in the cold winds of change, it’s unlikely it ever will be. I cannot alter the circumstances of my life, yet I remain loyal to the little I know of what the members worked for – fought for even. I am prepared to stand up, at the risk of being identified, and speak out. These stark rooms, the cheerless square, the decaying city, my own nation in the grip of directionless rulers and unscrupulous landlords – what can I really lose?

❦

Defamation was subtle, was not prohibitive. Information was hard to come by, and street declamation belonged to the half-educated, with protest chants nothing but useless rage at what was inevitable. I am still amazed at the sinister ease with which, nevertheless, the official view absorbed itself into the everyday, and how scant was resistance to its forms of indoctrination.

Less subtle was the appearance of a go-between, as I tried to concentrate, uneasily in my chair. Every so often I paused to wipe the windowpane, now almost permanently moist with condensation. I had no other reason than to keep a lookout on the streets outside. I was slow to put aside the tatty paperback I had somehow acquired, its condition dog-eared, even when that presence below was furtive and suspicious. His coat collar was upturned, and a tartan scarf was wrapped tightly round the lower half of his face. He picked his way over the frosty flags and sat briefly on a bench.

When I looked up again, an infant in a room downstairs wailed for attention, and I tossed my book aside. My wrapped-up stranger was scanning the terraces at street-level, and where it existed noted the ornate numbering. When I stood he stood. Urban decay had not yet eroded the curly black 28 on my communal door. He fixed me unemotionally for a moment or two, then turned away quickly. I waited while he strutted out across the slabs, through the barbed gate, and away under the arch.

I checked, and was out of cigarettes. On the next landing I was still struggling with my coat. In the shadows I failed to see until it spoke the bewildered presence leaning on the rail and gazing into the depths of the stairwell. He shuffled disconsolately. As I rounded him, he kicked open the door to his side. A sheath of light half illumined his features. He was squat and pale, with a two-day stubble on his face, had bleary, crusted eyes, and his hair was in spikes and quiffs.

He shuffled off the rail, only to shift his weight and support himself on the other elbow. He rubbed an exploratory palm over his sandpapery chin. I buttoned up my coat and continued to the foot of the stairs, the throaty, insistent din rising again and ringing in that dark heaven above me. I bought cigarettes and a paper, and this was the headline: ‘Federation uncovered, three arrested’.

❦

That cipher now began to worry me more than ever, even if almost useless without the key, supposing its decryption hadn’t been attempted, or fallen into enemy hands. How could I protect the Federation’s only two members I have known?

I remembered calling up to their room one glowing afternoon, down from the lawn where tea things were being laid out. The late sun had formed a reddish half-halo on the tips of the distant pines – my shadow with its arms akimbo long to the house, the house with its flame of cotoneaster creeping up the walls.

‘Take a break,’ I said.

These ghosts considered easy propositions like this always arduously, but on this occasion took to the open air, where for a short half-hour we watched that semi-nimbus go through its modulations – red, orange, pink – in the arc of the western sky.

I asked how their work was going, meaning in a specific sense, to which Hughes offered as reply something only vague and general. Already, Federation members had achieved a firm footing in important institutions and organisations: in schools and universities; in major libraries; in most areas of public entertainment; in all grades and most branches of the civil service; in a few selected boardrooms – and unions. Even in both Houses at Westminster.

I noticed too, at other times, how his eyes darted under narrowing lids, while his fingers drummed nervously on the table top, or plucked his little pointed beard. I scarcely expected his next request – i.e., that he wished to ‘requisition’ my house.

‘To what end, why?’ I asked, sensing some secret knowledge was about to be revealed.

The level-headed Denham intervened (as he knew he must). There was, he said, only one political aim, in whose service my resources would be placed. That was to soften, in so far as it was possible, the powerful forces against them.

Denham, heavy framed, ponderous, hauled himself in one awkward motion from his garden chair. He tried but failed to catch his colleague’s eye, and instead carefully, thoughtfully, paced the full spiral in one of the paths – a whimsical, outdoor decoration, beginning lawn-centre, and having as destination the pond with reeds and rockery. When, in the coming twilight, Denham paused at the water’s edge, he glanced back, but just too late. Hughes had already outlined his plan. He wanted to make my house a lodge, a sanctum.

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘but what would go on here? And would it enable me to enter the Federation?’

❦

That definition from Hughes must remain, since I was offered no other. I can describe a secret society – or nothing – whose ceremony I am able to relate only his notions of. In the enveloping dusk, he told me this: that the initiate, when called from the darkness, is stripped to the waist and stands before the inner council, alone on a marble floor of chequerboard design. Various objects are introduced, and like chess pieces arranged on the squares. Where the black queen would go is the carved ivory knob of an antique walking stick (said once to belong to the criminologist Daniel Byrne). On close inspection it looks like a gargoyle – thin, wedge-like heads and faces bunched together in a globe. Its purpose is to guard against harmful presences, both tangible and of an ‘immaterial’ world. Only then can other objects be placed, examples being a stone, a censer, a quill – also a vignette of the initiate’s wife, if married.

The game, if that’s the construction to put on it, is at an advanced state when there are no other pieces than these. The initiate has to say what each symbol suggests to him, then rearrange them. The council studied each new orientation and interpreted the altered relationships, and this was all the evidence they’d need. On the basis of what was left on the marble, the new recruit was either cast back into the darkness (often his own position among the emblems prompted this), or he was taken in and set an appropriate task. I took the opportunity once to quiz Denham on this, while he and I were alone. We strode through the hilly chestnut woods on a hot Sunday, to the cool, airy parish church where motets, madrigals, or sometimes masses were played. As, mechanically, he planted his light, sturdy brogues in the dust, I mentioned my earlier conversation with Hughes. Not surprisingly Denham denied there were rituals. He even dismissed everything that Hughes had said as puerile nonsense. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the last thing I want you to believe is that the Federation is steeped in Druid mysticism. It is entirely modern in its thought and concepts. Selection is made according to character, ability, and political leanings.’

Those days are gone. The great social cataclysm that swept everything away – my friends, my way of life, my business, my house – saw the latter confiscated. In the subsequent reallocation of wealth it was earmarked – and remains so – for one of the nation’s dignitaries whose name I shall never know. (I am well aware, now, just as our impoverished masses are, who try to make sense of our lives, exactly what this ‘reallocation’ was.) I have reason to doubt that any such transfer will happen. I still observe the waste, with the plot and its building in lingering deterioration. The harsh winters clump by, while our sleepy bureaucrats still have their lists to process, and someone to ‘allocate’ my property to.

If I sought, in that political upheaval, the relative sanctuary of something like the Federation, then what is there now? The official newspaper rounded on any last bastion of common sense – or ‘illegal enclave’, especially if ‘all-male’ (which I knew wasn’t true of the Federation) – and called for a purge. It was a propaganda lie, and that so-called important work, vital to national security, was no more than a witch hunt. But I am implicated, for on a cool twilit evening, when both my friends were on the train back to the city, I couldn’t bear the intrigue anymore. In the dusty shadows, going over papers in his study, I marked his spiky, neurotic handwriting, then took a copy of that cipher Hughes had invented. I sealed it in an envelope, and hid it. I have a secret room for private things, and had to hope it was still there, assuming it had meaning.

❦

Suffocating fumes filled the carriage as the engine ploughed through the countryside, the shorn hedges and wasted fields slipping by laboriously. There was a twinkling frost. Unthinkingly I bruised my hand on the cold metal of the frame as I forced the window. A howling, freezing charge of air threw me back on the seat, whose punctured upholstery disgorged its dirty clouds of cotton wool. I drew my coat closer to the warmth of my body – as it turned out, prematurely. For the third time that day my papers were checked. This had happened already on first boarding the train, when the officer barring my way stared at my photo protractedly, her hard thin lips twitching restlessly. Grudgingly I answered her questions, and was forced to agree I’d report to her station at five. Then half an hour ago a soldier in green, with a peaked flat hat and features hard to discern behind her dark glasses, went through the whole charade again – but now a shade more menacing, prodding my arm with the tip of her machine gun. An odd journey to make, she said, as if, the train lurching along a corridor of high walls and lean-tos, there were anything here to keep me.

‘Just a day out,’ I said.

‘Huh!’ She prodded me again. Her cruel features dissolved in a rapturous, toothy grin, as she chuckled, though without much gusto. Now, another just like her stood before me, the sugar-coated chequerboard of fields and hedges reflected in the black depth of her lenses. I unbuttoned the top of my coat again and pulled out those few soiled papers. These she inspected with a snort, then strutted off to the next carriage. Again I wrapped up, and pressed to the window looked out on a bright bare sun in the winter trees, and the frosted fields rushing by.

Once, out there, in a pub garden, I caught my breath, ignoring Denham for the moment. I couldn’t help but watch the crimson summer sun sliding down behind a row of poplars, the last warm rays lighting the sky in a wash of streaky magenta. Dusk soon followed, and brought with it the drone of a car straining round a hill, getting nearer, stuttering through the gears. I said: ‘A far cry from the city.’

He said: ‘A pleasant change. I’m glad we came.’

‘But don’t you find it a deceptive sort of quiet? Sometimes the unease is palpable, even out here. My publican doesn’t smile anymore.’

He touched his cheek then crossed his lips with one of those long, chubby forefingers. I leaned back from the table, away from the dying shade of its parasol. I lit a cigarette. He told me I should be more cautious.

‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked.

‘Look – one of the reasons I came was Hughes. He needs time to reassess, to think.’

‘I see he’s on a knife edge.’

‘Yes. You should try and remember that.’

He quaffed the last of his beer, and I too emptied my glass. Nothing more was said as we ambled home in the twilight. What, I now thought, if Hughes was neurotic, and that cipher was merely delusion?

The familiar oak – hanging, ornamental gas lamps – the station sign, swinging, squeaking in the breeze – all slid by as the train juddered to a halt. The ticket collector remained at his sentry post, his flask visible, his handgun not, and appeared to take in nothing (did he catch a glimpse, of me, the exiled local, an entrepreneur, stepping from an empty carriage?). I wanted to avoid any further inspection of my papers. All were forgeries, and I couldn’t be sure of fooling these jumped-up, uniformed thugs forever. Therefore, where the platform sloped away, I crossed over into a potato field, and with my coat tails flying bounded over the hard, frozen clods.

The first disappointment, not really a shock, was this: the cut lawns, the clipped edges, the precise borders in symmetry under the hedges, the careful arrangement of shrubs and trees – had all run riot. The yellow path had disappeared, and the pond was rancid.

Acts of vandalism – all for the new order – included the destruction of coloured lights (nailed hardboard now spanned the window frames), a huge northerly chasm in the wall surrounding the plot (it gave military vehicles easy access), and the razing of a summerhouse, whose rubble littered its former site. I was less disheartened to see, when I forced the lobby door and looked around inside, some enterprising person had removed the furnishings, for there was no evidence of their destruction. Also, my secret room hadn’t been discovered. It was still carpeted – the bureau was there un-tampered with – the chair and a low floral sofa were as I’d left them – a few reference books remained intact, and here were my decanter and brandy glass.

I scrabbled around in the disorderly drawers and plucked out at random a jar full of coppers (too bulky for the pockets of well-cut suits), a flat security key to the machine room of my old office in town (all networked computers are now centrally controlled by government), a goose feather (my house was never, I repeat never, a lodge – this was childhood memorabilia), cigarette papers, a pocket calculator, which unusually converted binary to octal and vice versa (useful when calculating hardware physical device numbers), and a brown, sealed envelope. This, feverishly, I tore open, and in a fit of relief tossed aside as I slipped out its all-important document (I had made it all-important). It was the cipher, of course, in my own hand – as unintelligible now as the day I had copied it out.

❦

Another, long, buff envelope, awaiting on the grating back in that smashed-up metropolis, seemed innocent enough, until I picked it up and studied the inscription. My name was typed in fading uppercase – which wasn’t the name my papers bore. The letter was bland and unsensational – and was printed, curiously, in the same fading uppercase, the H, L, and R in particular faint in their impression. (As I read, I worried about the cipher.) It was my instruction to see a woman called Clarke, at ten that evening – a car would call for me at nine. I gazed up into that voluminous black hell – the stairwell – and decided not to go up to my rooms. Instead I crossed two shapeless suburbs, and came at last to the hollowed stones and ancient steps of a library, where I strode across the marble directly into the reference section. Here I pulled down a single, redolent tome – a capitalised EDWA/EXTRACT in gold tooling in the leather of its spine – and deposited under ETHICS my secret, madman’s ravings. Then I returned, and at nine loitered in the dark, in a doorway on the neighbouring, west flank of the square. The car, sleek and hearse-like, pulled up mysteriously at a few minutes after nine, and that same go-between with the long coat and tartan scarf stepped out. He checked his watch. He looked up at my unlighted rooms. He drummed his gloved fingers irritably on the shiny bonnet of his car. I lit a cigarette and left the match burning. As he turned he momentarily caught the eddying puffs of smoke, and behind them my shifting, ghoulish face.

‘I decided to wait out here,’ I said, stepping from under the storm porch, and tossing down the match. He darted in and opened the passenger door.

‘Get in, Hiller….’

As soon as I’d eased into the passenger seat he put his foot down hard and motored under the arch. I quizzed, but couldn’t draw him into conversation – his orders were to drive. In the city the lights were dim. In the shadows fights had broken out. Soon, the curfew. Then out, where I lost my bearings, into streets with burnt-out looted shops, a warren of warehouses, an oily wharf – it only wanted a fog to descend.

‘Okay, Hiller, out! Follow the blind man….’

I stepped out in a muddy pool. The car purred away over the cobbles. A blind man tapping a cane materialised beside me.

‘This way,’ he said, and led me through the labyrinthine ruins to Clarke, I presumed, the bull-headed, the monster behind all this. I was bundled into a rear office by two more in city blue, where the blinds were drawn and a harsh yellow globe shone in my face. I blinked, strained, adjusted – could make out the presence, the bullish silhouette, Clarke at her work, sitting behind her desk. There was a scrape (it set my teeth on edge). A shadowy hand rummaged in a drawer, there was a pause while papers were sifted, then a photo was tossed down on the desk into the edge of that glaring yellow light. In low, relaxed, gravelly tones, the presence spoke—

‘Recognise this man?’ Here was Denham, in shiny monochrome.

‘No,’ I said. Another photo came skimming out of the dark, and the same unruffled voice—

‘Him, then?’

‘No. Sorry.’ I didn’t recognise Hughes either.

‘Shame. This mean much to you?’ Now, a typed folio, another reproduction. It read—

On tired grey, the fourth will remember. I shall be grieving the cynic’s passing, or whatever. You review my rudimentary codes. In this climate, only the thermals and vectors.

I would be indebted to a lackey, who has no tact, is rebellious. If only you could, coin three neologisms in the sun. For a stairwell, read cerebration. On tired grey, there I relapse. A new light, severance. Jake, don’t be exhumed!

We stare by gone pm. We lace the pre-prandials.

Stalin Tunnel.

Exit 39hiveclive.

It was the cipher, and I said ‘No – it looks like gibberish.’ The dark presence brought her fist or palm down heavily on the desk, sending assorted objects jumping and clattering back, but the voice was still calm—

‘You lie.’

‘Look, what do you want?’

‘I want you to join the Federation.’

‘Impossible!’

‘Huh, I don’t think so. WPC Blades was expecting to see you at five this afternoon.’

‘Sorry, it slipped my mind.’

‘That’s not all. You’ve brought money into the country illegally. Your papers are forged. You’re Hiller, this Hiller!’ Another photo – a long-range shot – of Hiller, Denham, Hughes, drinking tea on a summer afternoon.

‘Okay, so you know who I am.’

‘You any idea what I could do to you? Don’t make this difficult. Sign here….’

Now, out of the dark pool, an official, crested document, and a ballpoint. I read—

I, Officer Hiller, do solemnly undertake these duties, namely: To assist wherever possible in the elimination of extreme and dissident elements. To aid government in its foremost political aims: to close and police all borders; to establish the one-party State; to repatriate all non-Anglo Saxon types; to funnel endemic religions, both sacred and secular, into the one-party faith, and dissolve all others. To make all discourse the one true discourse. I, Officer Hiller, do solemnly swear….

I took up the ballpoint – the light was in my eyes – the presence calmly insisted. I hesitated…the pen was poised…and I….

Meakin

It was conceivable that the presence of Margo Quine would, in only a few days, cement his momentous decision, but before too much emphasis was placed on that event, the weary monographer dismissed it altogether. Of much more interest – in a mysterious, in a curious way – was Meakin’s recent correspondence with George Kembal, whose smug, theatrical mask was known to millions nationally, and was pinned on an ebullient personality. Just what was his interest in a disillusioned academic? Kembal wouldn’t know the professor’s state of mind, particularly when, in reply to his probes, he never offered more than he had to, and rarely expressed a personal view. Now though he was being asked for a view. A request, definitely, threaded the bombastic loops in Kembal’s newly minted note, the latest in a chain, in peril of dissolution in the steam of Meakin’s bathroom.

‘Huh! What do I think of Izzy Glicksteen?’

A flick of his hairy wrist launched that folded notepaper into short, crazy spirals through the agitated steam, but it fell woefully short of its destination – a daylight crack in the door – and plopped down among the fog of things on the cork floor: digital scales; a wicker bin, partially filled with bits of speckled tissue; blunt, disposable razors; a long-lost sliver of soap, dried out and wafer-thin at its tips.

Professor Meakin fished about between his legs and caught, swirling around, his favourite green flannel, then broke the surface of his bathwater. He wrung it out and applied its warm dampness to his face. His buttocks tautened for the moment he slid down the enamel, his hirsute torso sinking beneath the bubbles, under the bobbing luffa, under a hideous plastic frog. He stretched out an ankle heavily and searched for the hot tap with a fleshy big toe, and improvised a finger grip, though after a few spluttering warm dribbles the hot water soon ran cold. Instead, the exploratory toe hooked up the plug on its chain.

Just then the phone rang, and the surfacing whale of Professor Meakin assumed its correct Homo sapiens deliberation, the back foot following the front over the rim and onto those absorbent tiles. He slung on a towelling robe. We may follow the plash of his footsteps before they dry, through the door, across the hall, into the study, and glance at the broad shrugging shoulders, the receiver pressed to his ear, and take down one or two snatches of conversation: Tuesday at four – that could be difficult – Monday would be better…. What’s that? He’s out till then? Oh, what about later, Wednesday say…? Off to America! Lord! Back when…? Mm…. Yes, yes, of course. Tuesday at four – or could he make it five…? Splendid! Tuesday at five – I shall be out of London, you see….

He slammed down the receiver without much ceremony and thought he saw the swish of someone’s disappearing coattail when he turned for the door, but knowing that to be impossible returned to the bathroom. Here with a palm to the mirror he produced in the smears and sluices something like a reflection, and pressing up to it smoothed back the sodden quiffs of his hair. Then he got down low, and flailed around in the metropolitan smog for Kembal’s latest communication. All he could find was that bit of pre-war soap.

❦

A dry and fully clothed Professor Meakin, despite his altitude above the courtyard, heard the persistent scrabbles below. Moreover, the rosy helper, doing dishes in a rear kitchen opposite his own, saw only a sedulous middle-aged man in profile at his balcony. He’d found the note, and easing up the sheet of blotting paper that smothered it took in the resultant mirror writing. Its schoolboy blobs hadn’t concealed the truth: where Kembal had previously asked for samples of his work on Mahler, now he demanded his view of Izzy Glicksteen – a composer, conductor, or what? Well, perhaps the chirpy George Kembal enjoyed these practical jokes, dispatching Meakin to his Grove’s fruitlessly. Could this have been the response to a review of a recent ‘Titan’ he’d sent to Kembal’s office? Your lesser author hesitates at further defamation, so, when the conductor’s silhouette stood on the podium, arms spread, baton maniacally raised, an unnamed orchestra launched itself Hollywood-style, its clarinet fanfares evocative of a teenage poltergeist. Meakin stuck with it, an eccentric reading, only for so long. He passed over the second movement, and in a late, redrafted paragraph wondered which of his readers had already guessed the moment he’d stormed from the auditorium. Meakin much preferred a heavyweight bout on a pub TV. One other writer summarised the whole (‘Titan’ that was, not the fight), as a thing charged and overwhelmed with emotional energy. But anyway. This is all beside the point.

The erubescent old char was now transfixed with a soapy little brush in one hand and a wet greasy dish in the other, and saw through all that rising steam a Professor Meakin unable to discern either her sex or her startled eyes. The scrabbling had brought him to his window, but that was an insufficient vantage. He went further, ushering in that brisk autumn air and stepping out among the dormant pots and tubs of his balcony. Scanning revealed not much more.

A dried patch of oil on the ornamental brick roughly coincided with the courtyard’s southwest focus. The season had left the barbecue, no more than a built-in gridiron, with damp coals and solidified ashes. There was a triangular carousel of washing lines, folded and sheathed for the coming winter. There was, however, no explanation at all for the scrabbling.

Of course, there was one other perspective. What he heard, that char across the courtyard couldn’t, yet her toils were unforgettably brightened when a funny academic type, whose over-large hands had tightened on the rail, bent slowly over the edge, searching. A squirrel, whose latest scramble for the wall ended in a higher assault of the pebble-dash, for the moment had failed in its aim. The hanging assortment of nuts on the balcony below Meakin’s remained intact for the birds. The busy dishwasher found time in her day for a long, hearty chuckle, while Meakin, infuriated, returned to his apartment, scratching his head.

❦

Kembal said that he wouldn’t, then that he would, then at last that he couldn’t meet Professor Meakin at the station, but advised that a long walk to the hotel meant a taxi would be better if his bag was heavy – ‘Meet you in the bar for lunch.’ The professor wasn’t over-generous with the tip (since that ‘Titan’ review, not too much extra-curricular work had come his way), but the glass doors opened obligingly when he tramped for the foyer. The driver smirked when Meakin’s gaberdine ballooned at the waist, a charge of warm, hospitable air coming up through a grating. He collected his key and an unexpected note at the desk, where the attendant’s green livery no longer matched the walls, which had been repapered.

Meakin’s was room 47, in the colder rear, to which he ascended in a padded lift, observing at every vertical plane another facet of himself, softened in the mirrors. Schmaltzy music accompanied: a piano, a drum, a thrumming bass.

His room overlooked the docks. He stood at the window with his note, and saw down below a laborious crane, dark and skeletal against the autumn sun, lifting its cargo hold to quay. In the distance an orange light nictitated urgently, the point where Meakin, fingering his envelope, foresaw the need for thicker fabric in the curtains. Farther out to sea, in the margin otherwise one with the leaden wash of the Channel, a few points of white or silver pierced the gathering mist. A manikin, a uniformed officer, strode across the wet asphalt and spoke. A bending stevedore released his grip on a rope, and standing, rubbing his awkward hands on his vest, revealed a red and green blur, a sword, or a heart, or a mermaid printed on his biceps. He shook his head, his arms akimbo, and smiled, the sun in his curly hair.

Meakin tore open the envelope and removed the note, and recognised immediately Kembal’s over-elaborate hand, its swirling signature, and a postscript.

Professor,

So glad you made it. I always fancy an early lunch on these occasions – the bar at noon, say? Nothing too strenuous to start, perhaps a quick run through the schedule. You might even wish to toss in a few ideas. I’m open. I thought we could meet again at teatime – they do particularly good Black Forest gateau at my hotel. You know, rough out a few notes. Regards,

then, under the faultless typing, the pompous flourish, and below that, in a different shade of blue—

PS There’s someone I’d like you to meet tonight, she’s arriving later, unfortunately. Margo Quine, I believe you know her. Doubtless you’re better placed than I to appreciate the very valuable contribution this literary lady will offer. Look forward to lunch. GK.

It wasn’t what Meakin wanted to hear, but then the whole thing was becoming a fiasco anyway.

❦

In the same green livery the barman – a mere boy to Meakin – was new to the job – stuttering, nervous, clumsy. He had already soaked one frilly white coaster, and now, spilling the professor’s pint again, whipped that away and tried to insert another. Failure. Attempts to mop up more pools of froth on the bar were no more assured, though Professor Meakin managed a smile, suspending his depleted jug mid-air. He scanned the full length of the mirror, through or above the inverted rank of spirits (no sign of Kembal yet), but returned his gaze to the boy’s reflected occiput. The boy spoke, but Meakin wasn’t paying attention. Instead he scrutinised the motif, a pink rosette, woven into the breast pocket of the boy’s hotel jacket. (From Meakin’s later observations red petals fringed with gold denoted management, while ushers or porters, sullen and long-faced, were granted black cockades.) The boy repeated himself, and the professor, noting a new coaster, at last saw the absurdity of his pose. He put down his drink. Then with a new influx into the bar, the boy switched on more of that groaning Muzak.

Kembal strode in – neat, trim, bouffant – and unknown to his millions, short. Meakin introduced himself and offered a drink. Kembal pre-empted that and ordered a carbonated water – very specific about the splash of ice, the slice of lemon. He paid with a flourish. He wanted to get down to business straightaway, though Meakin paused. ‘Just who is this Glicksteen?’ he asked.

George Kembal spread his arms and showed his palms and shirt cuffs. A craggy dimple in an upper chin formed with the elastic strain of his smile. ‘You’ve never heard of Izzy Glicksteen!’ (that voluble exclamation so ungracious in a man whose material for magazine broadcasts had ranged from Homer to Warhol). He explained. Some recent and very loud plaudits had arrived belatedly, and Glicksteen, late director of B movie, film noir classics, was now considered a genius of that particular genre. Sadly Hollywood, and more spectacularly America, had judged him otherwise, and the gritty realist, who brought to a starry-eyed audience the unglamorous truth of narcotics and prostitution, was made a pariah. That wasn’t all. His politics and the McCarthy era spelled his professional ruin. However, no one had reckoned on his strength of purpose, and miraculously, in the cutting rooms of Europe, a sprawling masterpiece slowly emerged – an autobiography, the tragic middle life of Izzy Glicksteen.

The studious Professor Meakin, so precise and careful in his interests, waited till the beaming, diminutive George Kembal reached for his drink, to partake, no, but act as centrifuge on its ice and lemon.

‘A familiar tale,’ said Meakin, ‘but I still don’t see what you want of me.’

‘Ah,’ said Kembal. ‘Should have explained. Need a Mahler man. I don’t know why, but Glicksteen’s bio-pic featured all the symphonies somewhere or other. No original music was scored.’

Meakin resisted – ‘You don’t know Mahler!’ – though said he would help where he could. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘I can’t make tea this afternoon, and may be late back tonight.’

❦

This week, the nautical image, and Harry Clance, who’d consulted his almanac, and had his cards read, had searched his extensive wardrobes with more zest than usual. Beware death by drowning. No hint of his tabloid mysticism must ever reach the board, however, and on this, October’s first Tuesday, the regular pinstripe sufficed as always. When he delivered his coup, the populist newspaper had already been tucked away in a top drawer. What replaced it in his smart executive case were some of those intolerable highbrows, all with their impossible crosswords.

His remarkable lightness of mood wasn’t due merely to the glorious autumn sunshine, bewitching in its auburn showers. When the minutes of the board were gone through, and the unresolved question of Professor Meakin was raised again, Harry gently tapped the glass of his watch and smiled.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I can say I am ninety-five per cent sure our learned friend will be joining us.’

That twentieth, less certain part remained to be coaxed, and the professor, amazed at Harry’s cream slacks, tailed him through a chintzy lift and corridors. In the vacant boardroom the pads and water jugs had been whisked away. Low lights were already on, and the blinds were drawn against the dusk of afternoon. Harry swung open the door, and in his friendly usher’s pose showed off the shiny brass buttons, with anchors in relief, stitched in a double row to his jacket.

Professor Meakin stepped in, taming his curiosity: that trip to America was a vacation, clearly, and in lingering holiday mood Harry Clance just couldn’t bring himself to wear a suit.

‘Do, do sit down,’ said Harry, pulling out the chairman’s seat. He smoothed away a speck or two of dandruff and replanted the chair in front of a TV screen. This was Harry’s pièce de résistance, the propaganda video, so adroitly slotted in by him, and switched on remotely as he departed backwards – almost bowing. When the door fastened the yawning professor had long ago formed his preconceptions, and those happy glowing cherubs, those vacuous sales associates with sporty cars and dazzling autobiographies, kept him entertained for forty minutes or so, though the accompanying music was no great improvement on the hotel’s.

❦

The doyenne of pseudo-science had persisted all these years with a model terminology, and had denied on many triumphant occasions that the theorist’s vocabulary only obscured already tedious hypotheses. She was down from Olympus briefly now, and while the professor picked up a second note at the desk, she explained to Kembal that her own researches pre-empted Meakin’s in one important respect. Kembal repressed a yawn and considered the rising blobs of gas in a perfect gin and tonic. For Margo, fortuitous distractions like these confirmed her presence – in practically any society – as demanding pause for thought in everyone around. Emphatic portents evolved with the sudden tautness of her oranged lips, and to Meakin – whose gloomy realisation rested in the remote possibility of passing the cocktail lounge without being seen – that smile of unassailable conviction was sharply contradicted by the merry glaze of her contact lenses. Over a dry Martini, she delivered herself with usual authority, with Mahler’s predilection for boys her newest revelation.

Meakin shuddered at the prospect of renewed acquaintance, and recalled his first meeting with Margo, when one of those varsity mags sought a new editor, and put her at the head of its shortlist. Other contenders gradually fell away, and for her first official assignment she proclaimed the brightness of a new intellectual age. That fruitless retrospection, all that preoccupation with the labours and achievements of the past, could now be swept aside, making way for something more socially meaningful. Of course Meakin, with those studied views of his, those dignified articles, was among the first of the casualties (some fifteen years later, that was a matter of indifference). What palled was the problem of immediate escape, where his only solution was in feigning a migraine. So resigned, he stepped into the broad space between the door jambs, where on the evening’s happy hour one of those liveried boys had bunched the concertina doors. A radiant red – a mysterious midnight blue – an emerald green – were reflected off a glitter ball above – though why a polychrome halo hovered over the plain Margo Quine he couldn’t begin to guess. Fatefully she spotted him, and averted her gaze, but the slight snarl of an upper lip – a nasty orange gash – unexpectedly brought him a smile, for its exact synchronisation with a recorded round of applause – not, as it happened, for him. In the precious hush that followed, a piped cabaret pianist, no doubt wearing a sickly smile, embarked on more of that schmaltz.

Kembal, glad of this new diversion, got up and dusted down his tuxedo, wanting to shake hands. ‘At last, at last – now why don’t you and Margo get together over her very interesting ideas!’

Meakin turned his coat collar down. ‘Not tonight, I’m afraid. Headache. Been a bad day. See you tomorrow at eight, if you haven’t changed the plan….’

Kembal hadn’t, and watched, with his hands in his trouser pockets, while Meakin trudged to his room. There, snorting, looking out over the dark Channel, at its changing points of light, he mixed a cocktail and phoned downstairs for some cherries.

❦

Here was a new phenomenon, so hard to acknowledge, though happy good fortune made him the first, solitary witness. Kembal had followed a long, unwinding bend, ignoring his strange apprehension as only a faint, incipient thing. That was a wrong decision, for when the rising phobia insisted on life, it did so insidiously. So much was threatened – his usual equanimity couldn’t be depended on – therefore potent remedies had to be tried. And wasn’t this an uncomfortable truth, when he found himself shambling, when he couldn’t stop watching his feet – and worse, when he suddenly tired of all the responsibilities? Wasn’t that boorish professor to blame?

The banners, the diplomatic flags, then the glassy edifice of Meakin’s hotel peeped out from behind a yew, while the bouncy gait that had marked George Kembal’s odyssey – a long life’s journey to the start of this broad turn – had deserted him. The sun in the morning mist smiled brightly for a moment or two, then slumbered again in its swirls of cotton wool.

It was almost eight. When Kembal reached him, Meakin had been hanging on impatiently in the foyer. He bustled out with his heavy case and grunted at the vacant taxi stand. Then he struck out past the yew for the bend, where Kembal, moving quickly for a little man, was able to flank him. He cleared his throat.

‘I don’t mean to press. The programme goes out at Christmas. Does this, er, commission – I mean does it interest you at all?’

Meakin shuffled, interrupting that rhythmic stride, and swung the case in a half-ellipse, round and in front of his knees to the unworked arm. A watery mist rolled in off the sea and left its moist deposits in his hair, and in damp little streaks on the flesh of his face.

‘You see, Margo’s unearthed some surprising facts on Glicksteen, but I need a Mahler man – or you.’

A following breeze lifted the shaggy fringe of Meakin’s hair. He turned up his collar. ‘Margo’s always unearthing surprising facts – that’s been her dubious trade from the first.’

The pale sun over the sea wouldn’t ever get out today, and in the thickening mist Kembal turned up his collar. ‘I can’t comment on that, of course. I’m pleased with her work on this project.’

Meakin slowed up. His turn for the seafront was here, or no, just there, ahead, but had disappeared in the drizzle. Kembal tried another approach. A miner’s boy who got to Oxford, his first appreciation of Meakin’s work was through his early iconoclasm, and a series of essays, where