Tales of Persuasion Page 18

  The boy had asthma. He could never be more than ten feet away from his inhaler, and never was. It was agreed between them that Sam would only ever smoke outside the house, not more than five a day, and not smoke at all within three hours of seeing the boy, in case of fumes on his clothes.

  Not one of those barmen had ever given any sign of recognizing him, not because he was famous, of course, but he was surely their most regular customer; only one had ever engaged him in conversation in order to remark that he, too, could take to writing to, what, write a novel, the things he’d seen. And that had been one of the few who was English, rather than from Eastern Europe. As it happened, he had not lasted long.

  In the new and unfamiliar opulence of Clapham Old Town, Sam investigated his circumstances. It might be the Success that had stopped his ability to write – Sam had read Freud, and knew all about that danger. Or it might be a single change in his habits. Guiltily, he left his pristine notebook where it lay and, one afternoon, went out to a pub on Clapham High Street. It had no distinction whatsoever; it was one of a chain. Perhaps once it had had an English name, unchanged for decades, but what had once been a Queen’s Head was now a Monkey and Merkin. It felt like a return. Sam sat in the front of the quiet pub. A cricket match played on the suspended forty-inch television, the upper registers of the commentator’s tessitura getting a real work-out; the two barmen wiped glasses and gossiped; a pensioner in a frayed grey coat systematically drained three pints of yellow beer, staring at the charity muggers in the dirty spring sunshine outside. By his third half, Sam was considering the specific verbal terms in which Eve might leave her lover, Simon, the father of her two-year-old, Hettie, and thereby kick off his novel with a scene like a hook in a chorus. And the next day he returned to the quiet little pub with a notebook, two pens, a packet of Marlboro Lights, and from two to four, wrote solidly. The cigarettes and the half-pints of beer festooned his undisturbedly creative afternoon like bunting. ‘Going well?’ Helena said.

  ‘Yes,’ Sam said. ‘I had quite a good day, actually.’

  The fourth novel came out, and was a great success, though not, this time, a Success. Meersbrook and Edgeworth had sucked their teeth at the notion of a party to launch his previous books, but this time they shelled out for a Regency members’ club in Fitzrovia, with canapés on silvered plates, each thumbnail nibble recapitulating quite substantial dinners in miniature, moving serenely through the crowd, like destroyers on the high-held hands of dazzlingly shirted waiters. Standing at the front door with a dozen other smokers, Sam greeted two Nobel Prize winners, half a dozen beautifully sustained actresses, and three bold-haired rock stars he had never even heard of, but who made quite a stir in the party’s outer depths. He felt blessed, and Peter, in his white fedora, showed off horribly. Only at one point did his composure falter, as Helena, towards the end, joined him. In a bronze cloud of Mitsouko and a black pleated Issey Miyake gown, her confidence was high. ‘It’s a nice house,’ she observed to a group of agent, publisher and two journalists. ‘We had the room at the top gutted and reshaped for a study for Sam. God knows why. He writes in the pub in the afternoon just as he always used to.’ There was a ripple of laughter.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew,’ Sam said stupidly.

  ‘Of course I know,’ Helena said. ‘It’s the talk of the school gate – Sam Clark, who writes in the window of the Monkey and whatever it’s called. What is it called?’

  ‘Merkin,’ Sam said.

  ‘What?’ his editor said.

  ‘The Monkey and Merkin,’ Sam said.

  ‘How very peculiar,’ his agent said, attempting to laugh.

  ‘It’s the most awful dump,’ Helena said.

  It was two months after that that Sam went into his pub and set himself up, as usual, at a quiet corner table, well away from the front window. The Polish barman was frowning over a red-top paper; there was nobody else in at all. It was two o’clock on a Monday. Sam collected a half of Staropramen from the bar, took it to his table, opened his notebook and cracked his knuckles. There was something missing on the table, and Sam looked at the tables around him. He went back to the bar.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. The barman looked over his paper. ‘Could I have an ashtray?’

  ‘An ashtray?’ the barman said.

  ‘Yes,’ Sam said, enunciating more clearly. ‘An ashtray.’

  ‘There’s no smoking permitted in here,’ the barman said. ‘Haven’t you heard? The smoking ban started on Saturday. There’s no smoking in pubs any more. The government here has banned it.’

  ‘There’s no one else in here,’ Sam said. He never read a newspaper beyond reviews and interviews, never watched the television news, hardly ever listened to topical conversation, even. ‘I’ll stop if anyone comes in and objects.’

  ‘You must be joking with me,’ the barman said. ‘The landlord could lose his licence for allowing that. And I am working here, and I do not smoke. I welcome that I do not now suffer from passive smoking in my job.’

  Sam was not an I-know-my-rights type of smoker, but he thought of pointing out that when the barman had taken the job, he must have known he would have to work around smokers. If he had objected so much in the first place, he should have taken a job in Woolworths.

  ‘There is a table outside, on the pavement, where you are welcome to smoke,’ the barman said. But Sam had not got to the point where he could write a novel on the street, as Helena’s acquaintances wandered by, taking an interest. He envisaged the passers-by of Clapham peering over his shoulder at his forming paragraphs, as holidaymakers always peered at the work of plein-air watercolourists before a view. He went back to his table.

  The novel had been left in the middle of a sentence. Sam completed that sentence, took a sip of beer, and wrote another sentence. In fifteen minutes, he had written a paragraph. His pen somehow drifted up to his mouth; he set it down, and after five minutes, he saw that he was drumming on the cigarette box with the cigarette lighter. He wrote the words ‘Quite suddenly’, and then stopped. Quite suddenly what? They could do anything. They could do nothing. When he left the pub an hour later, the words were still there, their sentence uncompleted.

  He tried everything: he tried leaving the pub to have a cigarette, coming back refreshed with nicotine, but it wasn’t the same. The key point was to smoke while looking at the paragraphs you’d just written, in contemplation, so he took the book outside with him. ‘Hello, Sam,’ some unplaceable woman said, going past with a quizzical look and a bag from the butcher’s; he must look pretty odd, balancing his own work on one forearm and using the other hand to smoke.

  ‘I can see you’re a creature of habit,’ his friend and near-neighbour Anish said. He wrote think-pieces for the Watchman of varying quality, under a ten-year-old photograph of his phizzog, as he put it; he was one of those people who never quite knew whether the readers recognized his name or did not, and it showed. Helena called him the Fifth Columnist, since four more eminent names always preceded his views and sometimes pre-empted them, more informedly. He had heard it and was delighted; Sam wondered whether he caught Helena’s acid implication of the unnecessary, the suggestion that he would be the first to be sacked when the paper started to make its next round of cuts.

  ‘Well, I am,’ Sam said. They were driving to the theatre; Anish was reviewing a new Chekhov at the National for a critics’ programme on Radio 4, and Sam could be, Anish said, his date. ‘Most writers are, I think. You need to be comfortable with your little routines.’

  ‘We all know your little routines,’ Anish said. ‘They’re famous.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Absolutely. When we play poker—’

  ‘I always lose.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Anish said. ‘But do you know why you always lose? Whenever you’ve got a hand you’re not bluffing over, you always – I mean always – take a sip of whisky. When you’re trying to bluff, you always go quite unnaturally still. You might as well have a neon sign over you
r head.’

  ‘I had no idea,’ Sam said, aghast.

  ‘And when you lie – I mean, that time two years ago when you were having an affair with—’

  ‘Please, not that,’ Sam said. ‘Don’t start telling me what a middle-aged novelist does when he’s sneaking around after publicity girls. I don’t think I could bear that much information. I’m self-conscious enough as it is.’

  ‘It’s rather charming,’ Anish said. ‘That thing you do. It really is.’

  For three weeks, Sam wrote nothing; he sat in his study all morning and read Martin Chuzzlewit, and went out for a walk on the Common and down the high street, manfully boycotting the Monkey and Merkin. One day, he needed to pick up a prescription for Peter’s asthma, and went down the side-street towards the doctor’s surgery. On his way back, he took an indirect route, through post-war estates and little knotted alleyways. He thought of himself as having a good sense of direction, but was soon lost. He turned a corner, and there, wedged between two rows of three-million-dollar terraced houses, was an old pub. It was called the Duke of Clarence; its sign, an incredible likeness of an ermined fool, painted by someone’s cousin’s best mate fifty years ago for thirty shillings, was gnawed about the edges by wind and rain. The windows had not been painted in an age; the net curtains were yellow and a single azalea in the window near death; outside, a propped-up blackboard promised Dart’s, TV, Home Cooked-Food.

  A fat man in a bulging Aran cardigan outside observed Sam suspiciously. He took out a cigarette, and lit it – London’s pubs were now sentried by such smokers, like guardsmen at the Palace. Then, incredibly, without putting it out, he turned and went back into the pub.

  Sam crossed the road, entranced, and followed him in. There was a faint aroma of last-night’s fags, overlaid with this lunchtime’s fags, exactly as pubs had smelt until two weeks ago. The man was behind the bar, as Sam had foreseen, puffing away. There was nobody else in the pub. Sam ordered a drink – a pint of inelegant international lager. He would not ask, but he placed his Marlboros and his cheap plastic lighter on the table in front of him. And in a few minutes the landlord, hardly seeming to take any notice of him, called out, ‘You can smoke if you want to. I don’t give a rat’s arse.’ Sam took out a cigarette, lit it with trembling hands, and drank a great big consoling cloud. Soon he would know exactly what was going to happen in his book, what was going to happen all of a sudden.

  Ted had done everything you could imagine. He’d never got on, in a manner of speaking, with school. His old man had lived, still did, off the Abbeville Road, the other side of the Common. You wouldn’t believe what houses were fetching there nowadays. It made you laugh. He’d always lived in London – no, come to think of it, he’d had that stretch in Devon with his ex-wife. He’d prefer not to think of it. How had he met her? That took him back. Him, he was forty-eight, and who was asking? Well, the truth was that in the, what, 1970s, you went onto the assembly line at one of those factories in Wandsworth or you went into the Armed Forces. (The Armed Forces: Ted, despite his frayed appearance and frayed-edge pub, spoke the words with something approaching reverence.) His elder sister had gone to work for Bedwynne’s in Wandsworth: they’d made metal pushcars for children. If you worked for Bedwynne‘s, you were known as a dirty Arab – Bedwynne, Bedouin, you see? All gone now. Nothing but New York Style Loft Apartments where people used to make things that might have been a bit of use to someone. But Ted, he had gone into the Armed Forces – into the Royal Engineers. Went all over the world. Northern Ireland, mostly, though.

  Met his wife there, didn’t he? Girl called Sue. Gym instructor in the army. Tough girl – could shin up a rope like a monkey. Thought that was a recommendation at the time – big, beefy girl. His old dad’s eyes were out on stalks when he took her home that first Christmas. Then they married and he looked at her one day and he couldn’t remember why he’d married Desperate Dan. Her family, her mum and dad, two brothers, cousins, aunts, the lot, they called her Crusher. They all lived in the same valley in Devon. Sheep farmers, her dad had a pub. Like something off a biscuit tin, with roses round the front door. They’d got her number, though, calling her Crusher. She’d crushed him, in the end, too. First off, when Ted met her – gym instructor in the army, hair like Tom Cruise playing a Marine, biceps like grapefruit – naturally anyone would have thought she was a Lezzer. He’d taken his fair share of stick over Big Gym Sue from the NCOs. Then he’d married her and they’d stopped it, the frolicsome banter. But then they’d started it again and, to cut a long story short, they were right: she was a minge-jockey. Lives in Bideford, these days, with a pre-operative FTM transsexual called Ken, used to be Wendy, makes goat’s cheese, he wouldn’t be surprised. FTM? Female-to-male. You get to pick up the jargon, the technical information in the old Lesbian game. They’d met in that same valley in Devon, or Devonshire, whichever you like to call it, Sue and Ken, used to be Wendy, pair of great big buggers, like lumberjacks. Nobody’s fault, just a bit of wrong wiring somewhere.

  Sam listened over a series of afternoons between two and four, and three pints of an industrially bland lager – his consumption was upgraded with the transfer to the Duke of Clarence. He didn’t think he could actually say the words ‘A half, please,’ to Ted. For two days, Ted had let him be, watching him with a benevolent air, as Sam wrote in his turquoise notebook with his Pentel pen, taking a break every so often for a sip, every other paragraph for a cigarette and a judicious going-over. On the third day – there never seemed to be anyone in the pub in the afternoon – Ted greeted him and introduced himself, after a lengthy and involved and head-shaking and actually rather one-sided conversation about a government minister’s emerging financial disgrace. Ted had never heard of Sam – it took a direct question for him to find out that he was a writer at all. But once the information had lodged in Ted’s brain (it took him two successive afternoons of the same run of questions to remember it), it led unstoppably to the traditional observation ‘If I had the time, I could write a novel, the things I’ve seen.’

  It was hard for Sam to understand it. No one could be less prepossessing than Ted. He wore the same thing, day after day, and his hair never seemed to be washed, falling in a solid shining cowlick across a grey-white forehead. From him, and from the members of his family who very occasionally dropped in, leaving a teenage son to play the one-armed bandit or some bags of shopping, a marshy odour arose. He and his pub had no charm, good looks, money, good taste, likeability or a toilet you could venture into with confidence. And yet he had something. He had ignored the smoking ban. So Sam listened to his stories with absorption and pleasure.

  After the first week or so, Sam had hardly pretended to open his notebook and begin to write. He had just turned up, bought a beer, lit up and waited on the bar stool for Ted to start his telling. On the bar, like a token of what they had in common, was the notebook, which remained unopened. But Sam didn’t feel that writing had, once again, been taken away from him in yet another pub. Rather, he had plugged into a purer, more wonderful source of narrative than any he had ever known, and the day would come, soon, when it was up to him to start writing again. He could feel his batteries recharging as he listened. And one day, Ted told him about his neighbour in Devon.

  ‘His mum and dad had died when he was nineteen, on the roads. Those old Devon farmers, they go out of a night, get pissed, get in the car, drive back thinking nothing of it. They don’t think of drink-driving like normal people. Met another pissed Devon farmer coming down a narrow lane at forty miles an hour. Ka-boom. Green lanes of England. Left this poor bloke with a farm and two hundred acres, a farmhouse, a great big barn, a dairy herd and not much idea what to do with any of it. He was twenty years older than Crusher. That had all happened years before, before she was born or before I ever came to the valley.

  ‘When the pair of us got out of the army, we didn’t have anywhere to go or any idea of what to do. So we went back to live with her old man in his pub. I’d help him to run
it, she’d get a job teaching PE in Exeter or somewhere. That’s how I got to know this bloke. He was fifty and he looked seventy. The dairy herd had long gone, and the two hundred acres, sold. God knows what he was living on.

  ‘Some alcoholics drink in the pub, and some of them drink at home where no one can see them. He was a home drinker. You’d have thought he’d know better than to drink at all, with his parents and that, but he knew just about enough to drive out sober and drive back sober, but with four bottles of white wine on the back seat. Every day, that was. Crusher’s dad’s pub was only a mile from his farmhouse, on the sunny side of the valley. The next place was fifteen miles away, in Bideford. He wouldn’t have trusted himself to drive that distance back without a stop in a lay-by. We knew to a bottle how much he drank, and how much he spent on it. Would have been about twenty-five quid a day, quite a lot then, four bottles. As I say, in this business you get to know the types of alcoholic.’

  Sam looked at the inch and a half of whisky in Ted’s hand, clearly not the first of the day at half past two. Ted raised it to him, laughed, drank it in one. Sam smiled. In a moment Ted went to the back of the bar. Sam lit a cigarette and smoked it in a calm, leisurely way, and in five minutes extinguished it. He picked up his pen. He began to write.

  ‘You don’t write short stories,’ Helena said, five months later.