Mantissa Read online

  “I like the soft turf. The only thing is, I thought…”

  “Yes?”

  “You did say something about slow and gentle arousal.”

  She gives him a touchingly delicate and hurt look, and speaks in a lower voice, her eyes down.

  “I’m female, Miles. I can’t help being a tissue of contradictions.”

  “Of course. Forgive me.”

  “I mean, obviously you’d have to prepare for this moment of sexual violence. You might for instance show me as I undress before you come, a moment when I might look at myself naked in some mirror and secretly wonder whether poetry is enough.”

  “I’ll certainly bear that in mind.”

  “You could even show me sadly taking down my copy of Nicholas Chorier from my bookshelves.”

  “Nicholas who?”

  “Possibly I’m being a tiny bit recherchée. The passage I had in mind was the deuxième dialogue. Tribadicon, as he rather coarsely entitled it. Lyons, sixteen fifty-eight.” She gives him a little inquiring shake of her head. “No?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry. I somehow assumed you would have all the pornographic classics by heart.”

  “Might I ask how, in your few pages of existence, you happen to –”

  “Oh Miles!” She gives a hurried smile down. “Really. I thought we were speaking outside the illusions of text.” She looks up again. “I mean, take just that one time when, as Dr. Delfie, I asked you why you didn’t just get off the bed and leave the room. In reality you took six weeks before you could find an answer. I had to do something while I waited. I felt that at the very least I should familiarize myself with the kind of book evidently dearest to your heart.” She adds, “As your employee. So to speak.”

  “That was very conscientious of you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “To wade through all that appalling filth.”

  “Miles, I couldn’t face life if I wasn’t conscientious about my work. I’m afraid it’s my nature. I can’t help it. I’m an overachiever.”

  He watches her. She is looking down at the bed again, as if embarrassed to have to expound herself so seriously.

  “We left ourselves in the rain in the garden. What next?”

  “I think it might turn out that I’d been dying for you to do something like that for chapters on end, but of course I was far too complex emotionally to realize it. I’m weeping for joy really. At last I know orgasm.”

  “In the rain?”

  “If you don’t think it’s de trop. Moonlight, if you prefer.”

  He sits back a little.

  “And one ends on that?”

  She peers gravely at him through the owlish glasses.

  “Miles, one can hardly end a contemporary novel on the implication that mere fucking solves anything.”

  “Of course not.”

  She smooths the robe again. “Actually I see that scene as the finale of the first part of a trilogy.”

  “Stupid of me not to guess.”

  She picks at a loose thread in the robe toweling.

  “In the second part of which I think I’d probably become a total victim of my hitherto repressed sensuality. A Messalina de nos jours, as it were. I know you could do this middle section in your sleep.”

  “I must have misunderstood. Weren’t all the boring bed scenes to go into the Alice-in-Wonderland preamble?”

  “I sincerely hope these wouldn’t be boring. Of course I get no pleasure from it all. I’m only doing it out of despair.”

  “Despair of what?”

  She looks at him over her glasses. “I’m supposed to be a twentieth-century woman, Miles. By definition I’m in despair.”

  “And what becomes of my character?”

  She takes another cigarette from the box.

  “You’d become terribly jealous, you’d start drinking, your business would go to pot. In the end you’d have to live on my immoral earnings. You’d become haggard, bearded, a broken shell of the…” she pauses to light her cigarette “… successful banana importer you once were.”

  “I was once what!”

  She blows a plume of smoke.

  “It has a number of advantages.”

  “I have no ambition whatever to be a banana importer.”

  “I think you might be a touch colorless without a slightly exotic background. As a matter of fact I see our very first meeting in the real world taking place in one of your East End ripening sheds. Our oblique and tentative dialogue counterpointed by those vistas of thousands of detumescent vegetable penises.”

  “I’m not sure I’d know how to write that.”

  “I’d hate to lose it.” She pauses. “It feels right.”

  “It feels right?”

  “Feeling right is terribly important to me, Miles.” She gives him the hurt ghost of a prim smile. “I’d rather hoped you’d realized that by now.”

  He takes a slight breath. “And the third part of this trilogy?”

  “I was going to be more specific about one or two scenes in the second. When the unnatural female animal in me takes over. There was one with two Dutch car salesmen and a lecturer in Erse that I –”

  “I think I’d prefer a general synopsis. For now.”

  “All right. Well.” She cocks the wrist of the hand holding the cigarette. “I’m sure you’ve noticed a missing element in the first two parts. No?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Religion.”

  “Religion?”

  “I think I should become a nun. There could be scenes at the Vatican. They always sell well.”

  He stares at the old rose carpet beneath the bed.

  “I thought we were a fiercely fastidious Cambridge graduate in English.”

  “That’s where the pathos would be. When someone who has sat at the feet of the Leavises and Dr. Steiner is brutally raped by –”

  “And you do seem awfully hooked on brutality, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  She lowers her glasses again and looks at him over them.

  “I understood it was generally agreed that any accurate mimesis of contemporary reality must reflect symbolically the brutality of class relations in a bourgeois-dominated society.”

  “When you put it like that. And who…?”

  “Twenty-four young black Marxist guerrillas in my African mission-house. There’d be a place for your character. He could come to Rome for the beatification ceremony. With his new lover.”

  “I thought I loved you.”

  She exhales smoke.

  “Obviously not after I took my vows. It wouldn’t be vraisemblable.”

  “And where does this other woman come from?”

  “I wasn’t talking about a woman, Miles.”

  “You mean…?”

  “After the shock of losing me to God, I think your true sexual nature might very plausibly declare itself.”

  “But –”

  “Quite apart from the fact, which I’m sure you know, that gay readers now constitute thirteen point eight percent of all English-speaking fiction buyers. Not that that would influence you. But it is a point.”

  She goes back to picking at the loose thread.

  “But why on earth should a homosexual want to go to your beatification ceremony?”

  “Because you can’t forget me. Besides, I expect you and your hair-dressing friend would love the high camp of it all. The incense and vestments. Actually it might be rather nice if we ended with your confusing my face – after I’m dead, of course – with that of a statue of the Virgin Mary in your own local church.”

  “I’m a Catholic too, now?”

  “From the first. I forgot to tell you.” She looks up at him. “You must have one character. And a sense of sin. They’re twenty-eight point three percent.”

  “Catholics?”

  She nods. “And I have an interesting idea for a very last scene. I see you secretly placing a little hand of unripe bananas at the foot of my statue �
�� or her statue. I think it might be particularly meaningful to end on that.”

  “What the devil’s it supposed to mean?”

  She has a demurely patronizing smile.

  “Don’t worry. I think your more discriminating readers would grasp the symbolism.”

  “Isn’t a bunch of vegetable penises a bit blasphemous, in the circumstances?”

  “Not if you offered them on your knees, with tears in your eyes.”

  “You don’t think I might have dropped one banana at the top of the steep flight of steps leading up to this church?”

  “Why?”

  “When I come out after the ex voto bit I could slip on it.”

  She looks at him for a moment, then down. There is a silence. Then she speaks in a small, hurt voice.

  “I was only trying to help.”

  “I didn’t mean anything funny. Naturally I’d break my spine on the way down.”

  “I was simply trying to find the sort of general framework that might give scope to your talents. As I understand them.” She shrugs, eyes still down, and stubs out her cigarette. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t really care.”

  He goes and sits on the side of the bed, turned towards her.

  “I can see it has all sorts of possibilities.”

  “You don’t sound very convinced.”

  “Seriously. It’s amazing how you open up a whole new world in a few broad brushstrokes.”

  She gives him a hesitant, doubting look, then lowers her head again.

  “I think you think it’s just silly.”

  “Not at all. Very instructive. I feel I know you ten times better now.”

  “It was only a brief outline.”

  “They’re often the most revealing.”

  She gives him another look through the huge blue-smoked lenses.

  “I know you could do it, Miles. If you really tried.”

  “One or two minor points still puzzle me slightly. May I…?”

  “Please.”

  “For instance, why twenty-four black guerrillas?”

  “It seems the right sort of number. Not that I’m an expert, naturally. You’d have to research that.”

  “It’s also the number of letters in the Greek alphabet.”

  “Is it? I’d forgotten.” He stares at her. She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t quite see the relevance.”

  “Perhaps there isn’t any.”

  “I don’t see how there could be. Frankly.”

  “And have you by any chance thought of a name for this emotionally very complex female character of yours?”

  She reaches out and touches his wrist. “I’m so glad you mentioned that. I don’t want you to feel I’m rejecting all your ideas. Actually, Erato might be just the thing. It’s unusual. I think we should retain that.”

  “You don’t think it’s pretty farfetched? Naming a contemporary character after a very obscure minor divinity, who never existed in the first place?”

  “I think it’s rather charmingly enigmatic.”

  “But surely it would appeal only to the point zero zero one percent of our hopeful readership who have even heard her name, let alone know who she was – or rather, wasn’t?”

  “Every little bit counts, Miles.”

  He leans across her, supporting himself on an arm, bringing their faces much closer. His eyes are reflected in the smoke-blue lenses. She draws back, hitching the robe higher.

  “I have one final question.”

  “Yes?”

  “How long is it since your impudent little Greek bottom was last tanned?”

  “Miles!”

  “Erato.”

  “I thought we were getting on so well.”

  “You were getting on so well.”

  He removes her glasses, and stares at her. The face looks strangely young now, without the glasses; not a day over twenty, and as innocent as something half that age. She lowers her eyes, then murmurs, “You wouldn’t dare. I’d never forgive you.”

  “Just try me. Just inspire me with one more helpful literary suggestion.”

  She hitches her robe up again, and looks sideways and downwards.

  “I’m sure she’d have thought of something better. If she did exist.”

  “And don’t you dare start that again.” He forces her face up and around, so that she has to look him in the eyes. “And don’t give me that butter-wouldn’t-melt look over your ineffably classical nose.”

  “Miles, you’re hurting me.”

  “Good. Now listen. You may be a goddess of a very inferior and fifth-rate kind. You may be quite a good-looking goddess as goddesses go. Or go-go. You are also your father’s child. In plain language, a by-blow of the randiest old goat in all theology. There is not the tiniest shred of modesty in your entire makeup. Your mind is indistinguishable from that of a nineteen twenties vamp. My true error is not to have got you up as Theda Bara.” He shifts the angle of the face a little. “Or Dietrich in The Blue Angel.”

  “Miles, please… I don’t know what’s come over you.”

  “Your astounding chutzpah has come over me.” He taps the classical nose. “I know your game. You are simply trying to spin out an erotic situation beyond all the bounds of artistic decency.”

  “Miles, you’re beginning to frighten me.”

  “What you’d really like is for me to tear away that robe and leap on top of you again. If you had the strength I bet you’d leap on top of me instead.”

  “Now you’re being horrid.”

  “And the only reason you are not over my knees and getting the belting of your life is that I know you’d like nothing better.”

  “That’s a beastly thing to say.”

  He taps her nose again. “The game’s up, my girl. You’ve played it once too often.”

  He leans away, then flicks a thumb and finger imperiously at the chair beside the bed. As instantly as before a lightweight summer suit on a hanger appears on it; a shirt, tie, socks, underclothes; a pair of shoes between its front legs. He stands.

  “I’m going to get dressed now. And you’re going to listen.” He dons the shirt, then turns to look at her as he buttons it. “You needn’t think I don’t know what’s behind all this. It’s pure pique on your side. You can’t bear to see me come up with a good idea of my own. And what your exceedingly feeble imitation of a bookish young woman failed totally to hide is your astounding ignorance of what contemporary literature is about. I bet you haven’t even cottoned on to what these grey quilted walls really stand for.” He pauses in the buttoning and looks at her. She shakes her head. “I knew you hadn’t. Grey walls, grey cells. Grey matter?” He taps the side of his head. “Does the drachma begin to drop?”

  “It’s all… taking place inside your brain?”

  “Brilliant.”

  She looks around the walls, up at the domed ceiling, then back at him. “I never realized.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” He stoops to pull on his underpants. “The amnesia?”

  “I… I thought it was just a way of…”

  “Of what?”

  “Giving yourself an excuse to write a bit of soft –”

  “And we see ourselves as a graduate in English. Jesus.” He turns and takes the trousers from the hanger. “You’ll be telling me next you’ve never even heard of Todorov.”

  “Of who?”

  “You haven’t, have you?”

  “I’m afraid not, Miles. I’m sorry.”

  He faces her again, holding the trousers out. “How can one possibly discuss theory with you when you haven’t even read the basic texts?”

  “Tell me.”

  He pulls the trousers on. “Well… in simple layman’s language, the whole delicate symbolism of the amnesia derived from the ambiguous nature, in both its hypostatic and epiphanic facies, of the diegetic processus. Especially in terms of the anagnorisis.” He begins tucking in his shirt. “Thus Dr. Delfie.”

  “Dr. Delfie?”

  “
Obviously.”

  “Obviously what, Miles?”

  “The futility of trying to deal with it causally.”

  “I thought she was trying to deal with it sexually.”

  He looks up impatiently from tucking in the shirt.

  “The sex was just a metaphor, for heaven’s sake. There has to be some kind of objective correlative for the hermeneutical side of it. Even a child could see that.”

  “Yes, Miles.”

  He does up the zipper. “It’s too late now.” He sits down and begins to pull on his socks.

  “I honestly didn’t realize.”

  “Of course not. There was an absolutely first-class final couple of pages to come. Two of the best I’d have ever written. If you hadn’t blundered in like a bloody elephant.”

  “Miles, I’m not even nine stone.”

  He glances up, with a humorlessly long-suffering grimace. “Look, my love, your body’s all right. It’s just your mind. It’s at least three hundred years out of date.”

  “There’s no need to be so angry about it.”

  “I’m not angry. I’m just pointing out one or two things for your own good.”

  “Everyone’s so dreadfully serious these days.”

  He wags a finger, and the sock the other fingers are holding, at her. “I’m glad you brought that up. That’s another thing. There may be a place for humor in ordinary life, but there is none whatever for it in serious modern fiction. I don’t mind wasting an occasional hour strictly in private with you exchanging the kind of badinage you seem so fond of. But if I ever let that sort of thing creep into my published texts, my reputation would turn to ashes overnight.” She sits with her eyes cast down under this tirade. He bends to put on his sock, and goes on slightly less harshly. “It’s a question of priorities. I know you were brought up as a pagan, and you can’t help that. Nor I suppose can you help being landed with a much more profound and difficult field for inspiration than you ever bargained for, though I’m bound to say I think it was a grave mistake picking on someone whose only previous experience was with love ditties. The obvious candidate for the modern novel was your sister Melpomene. I can’t think why she wasn’t chosen. But that’s spilt milk.”