All That I Am (12 page)

‘What’s going on here, then?’

‘Trying to get my best feelings into my work.’

He laughs through his nose.

‘Actually, it’s true. I’m trying to write about Dora.’

He looks up. ‘Brave Dora,’ he says. He always liked her, and she him. ‘You haven’t written about her?’

‘I didn’t want to use her.’

This is a conversation we’ve had before–about the temptation of art, like fire, to use people as fuel.

‘Yes. Quite.’

I am so relieved to be understood that the words tumble out. ‘But now I have nothing. Not her,’ there’s a thickness in my throat, ‘and no portrait either.’

The waiter interrupts with a trolley, on which a large silver tureen stands, a basket of white and brown rolls, butter in curls, and two bowls. They must have assumed I was ordering for Clara too. As the young man, a neat blond fellow of about nineteen, busies himself setting the table, Wystan tucks a large napkin into his collar, which I know for a fact will mysteriously fail to prevent stains from blossoming down his front. The waiter starts to ladle the chowder and Wystan smiles, confident that the world–so thoughtful of it, really–has anticipated him. Then he reaches into his pocket for his billfold and tips the man generously.

‘Thank you, sir,’ the waiter says with a small nod, and then he turns. Wystan’s pale eyes follow the boy till he’s gone.

‘This country,’ he raises his eyebrows and cracks open a roll with his fingers, ‘is going to be good for me. I can feel it. And not just that.’ He tosses his head towards the door.

I place both wrists on the table. ‘I’m going back to Europe.’

Wystan puts the bread down.

‘I am useless here. No one is listening. Europe will fall.’

He nods, slowly. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I can’t do the speeches any more. I simply don’t believe that man’s better nature can win. Our liberal scruples make us blind–the fascists are too seductive, and too strong.’

‘What will you do here?’ I don’t know why I ask; I know what he will do. He will write poems that will be read in two hundred years, he will fall in love, he will come out the other side.

‘Write,’ he says, as if it were a small thing. ‘While you go back into the fray. As usual.’

I know that he considers me, despite the underside he is aware of, a brave man. This is more a testament to his kindness than his judgement, but it means I can tell him anything.

‘It’s a strange pathology, don’t you think,’ I say, ‘to want to be something other than what you are?’

Wystan leans forward, places a hand on mine. He has seen my need and he will never shame me for showing it to him. ‘It’s the same old thing, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘All that we are not stares back at all that we are.’

He picks up his spoon and smiles as if to say
Guten Appetit
. But sees I am stricken by what he has said. ‘Not to look at that too closely, old fellow,’ he adds. ‘Do what you have to. And do not discount it.’ He shakes his head a little, lowering his spoon into the soup. ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’

After he leaves, the happiness of his company persists in the room. I lay my head over the chair back and close my eyes again.

I am slouching, head back on the leather car seat. Dora and I are in a cathedral of trees; from each side of the road poplars arch above us to touch. The dapples of light they admit rush over the bonnet and the windscreen and over our bodies, so we can feel our speed. Dora drives; I never learnt. Her arms are bare but she wears cream kid gloves that fasten across the back of her wrists, and she talks and talks, eyes ahead as the ribbon of road flattens under the car. She is counting votes for something–her politics were much more practical than mine–but I have stopped listening. The wind plays with her hair.

Yesterday afternoon we signed in as man and wife at the Schloss Eckberg in Dresden. As her hand moved across the register I reached into her hair, casually as I could, and removed some grass stalks. Smiling mildly all the while to the concierge. By Dresden on the banks of the Elbe the reeds grow to chest height. Dora had dragged me off the path and deep into them, laughing and pushing me down till the world was a patch of sky in a blurring green frame. In the morning she had three cups of coffee and toyed with her egg before she could smoke, this woman who was all appetite.

I have never felt so wanted. I reach across to hold her neck in my hand.

‘You hungry?’ she interrupts her stream of talk. ‘They packed us some food.’

There’s a basket at my feet under the dash. In it I find a magnificent pear. When she bites, the juice drips down.

‘Damn,’ she laughs. I grab my handkerchief and start dabbing in her lap and she shoots me a look, swiping her chin with the back of one leathered hand. The other hand then slipping on the wheel and the wheel spinning through it, the pear airborne past my nose and the car screeching, failing to match the turn in the road. Her feet pump the pedal but it’s no use and we go, slower than is possible, to the end, which comes in a metal scream against one of the poplars.

Steam hisses from the bonnet. Dora pulls herself back from the steering wheel and sees that I am all right. A man runs towards us who turns out to be the town policeman. After he checks that we are unharmed, he shakes his head, looking up and down the empty road on this blue-sky day and wondering aloud how such a thing could happen.

‘Officer,’ Dora offers, as if in full and final explanation, ‘I was eating a pear.’

I’ve left a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the other side of the room. I move to it and put it to my lips. Clara is back, sitting quietly. She doesn’t swivel her head to look at me, or ask a prompting question; she lets the spell persist. As I exhale, my eyes caress the tousled crown of her dark head and it feels like old times.

She picks up her pencil and pad. I am emptying myself out in pieces here. Then trying to see what shape they make when put back together.

‘Ready?’ I ask.

She nods.

When Dora came to work for me she graduated from secretary to sounding-board to collaborator, and then, during the split from her husband Walter, lover. The two of them had had an amicable, even comradely marriage, the freedoms of which had, on his side, simply involved too many other people. Dora vowed never to marry again, as if somehow it had been the institution of marriage, rather than the infidelity–to which she also had a right–that had caused her pain.

Dora had a sense of purpose so profound that when I was with her it was impossible to feel lost. Her presence reduced my demons to pathetic things, impractical and bad company, which would go away if I ignored them and focused instead on the task at hand: the book or play, the speech or cause or trip. She would say, ‘It’s not about you, remember, it’s about the work.’ Dora thought I clung to my self-doubt, my edge-of-despair insights, as if they were the outward signs of deep artistic integrity–confidence and equanimity, after all, not being characteristics of genius. It stung a little, but I was grateful to be saved by her. At least half of what we call hope, I believe, is simply the sense that something can be done.

Once, on the beach at Rügen, we lay on our sides in sand so pure it squeaked. Dora had found a beautiful white stone, large as a dog’s head. She closed her eyes and moved her hands over it, as over a crystal ball, mimicking to perfection the deadpan voice of a medium. ‘Your fears for your sanity, kind sir, are grossly exaggerated…’ I lay back laughing, watching her through my lashes.

Mostly I could tell when an episode was coming. I would find myself alone, reading and rereading a paragraph that no longer made sense, even though I had written it the day before. Each subordinate clause felt too heavy, literally, to move or change. But impossible–wrong!–to leave where it lay. As long as this page was stuck, so too was all other life. Making a phone call was too much effort, the company of others futile. When imagination fails, one is caught in a solecism as big as the world: the universe is reduced to a reflection of ourselves from which we cannot escape, narrow and already known. The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance.

When I sensed an attack coming on I would seek Dora out. In the company of someone so honest, so intelligent and so practical, doubt felt unworthy. She had her own demons to control, like the morphine she’d used since the abortion, but she always seemed stronger than me. If I left it too late and the inertia got me, I would be too ashamed to find her. I would put the word out I was abroad and spend the days–sometimes weeks–of the black time in my flat, mostly in bed. Waiting without hope for hope to come back in its own goddamn time.

Once, she did catch me like this. She had been in Britain for a week, attending a Trades Union Congress at Weymouth. By the time she got back I wasn’t answering the phone, or the door. She let herself in.

‘Are you unwell?’ she called. I heard her shoes slap down in the entry. She padded down the hall into my bedroom and stood in the doorway.

‘Your cardigan is inside out.’

‘Thanks.’ She started to take it off. It was soft grey marl, with buttons made from the insides of shells. ‘You all right?’ she asked again. She picked up a ball of paper that had landed in my sock drawer.

I hadn’t shaved in a few days. The bed–a teak four-poster from the Spice Islands that my mother hadn’t been able to sell in her furniture shop–had become my ark. Beyond it was chaos. On every horizontal surface were coffee cups and bowls with food caked on them and fork handles sticking out. I’d been eating mostly pork and lentils from tins; the room was muggy with it. Screwed-up pieces of paper lay all over the floor; a pile of fragmented thoughts sat on the bedside table, scribbled things that withered to banalities in the light of day. Next to me was a large green glass ashtray, full.

‘Been living it up, I see.’ She smiled, leant over and kissed my forehead. Then she sat down on the bed. Though she dealt with my demons by trivialising them, she never pretended the work was easy.

‘I’m a little tired.’

‘Been working late?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Too busy exhausting myself. By not sleeping.’

She laughed, and threw the paper ball into the wastepaper basket. ‘Bullseye.’

Dora lit a cigarette and told me about an extraordinary Englishman she’d met, Fenner Brockway, who was a friend of Jawaharlal Nehru’s. ‘The very best kind of Englishman,’ she said, ‘one who appears to take it all lightly, so he can debate in a civilised manner–not like the screaming matches at our congresses. But underneath, there’s a real passion for justice.’

‘Probably for you too.’ I looked at her sideways.

‘Probably,’ she said, exhaling a stream of smoke. It was a condition of seeing Dora that it was not exclusive, that she was ‘free’. I was, of course, ‘free’ too.

I don’t know, now, how much freedom the heart can bear. The heart, too, likes containment.

She kissed me again. ‘If I get dressed properly, will you? We can just do corrections, if nothing else.’

Clara puts her pencil down. What can it be like for her to sit there while I relate my love for her predecessor? Her legs are crossed, she runs her thumb across the spiral binding of her steno pad. When she looks up her pupils readjust from the page to me, the irises kaleidoscoping green and golden-brown. Her mouth is slightly open. It is a look that says, I see now where you are going. And it says–or so I believe–I am with you.

‘Sometimes…’ Her voice is caught, she clears her throat. ‘…just to do corrections is the perfect response.’ Clara takes a deep breath. ‘We should probably finish up the correspondence today. Starting with the letter to Mrs Roosevelt?’

I am writing to thank the First Lady for hosting a fundraiser for the starving children of Spain, and to insist that despite Spain having fallen now to the fascists, the funds still be handed over. Franco might use the money to buy guns, but he might, just might, use it to feed people.

Three months ago I was high. When I arrived here this room was filled with reporters, flowers, press photographers snapping on their knees. Telegrams came and went. An earnest post-graduate student would pipe up with a long question whenever he could get one in; someone took a pillowcase off the bed for me to autograph. I ordered room service for everyone, Christiane sighing as she signed for it. At that time I could do anything, I could do everything, and all at once. With the First Lady I raised a million dollars.

But I come with a switch. I sent them all away. Now it’s just me, and Clara.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘let’s start with that one.’

RUTH

I remember that grey marl cardigan of hers. Strange, isn’t it, what adheres to the flypaper mind?

Much later I heard about it, but I never saw Toller depressed. The couple of times I went to his flat to collect her, he was talking as fast as you could listen, ideas spilling from him more rapidly than he–or Dora–could get them down. He buzzed about the tiny room like Superman in a trap, lighting cigarettes and putting them down, forgetting and lighting new ones. He’d set four, sometimes five, plumes of smoke going and keep moving between the ashtrays. He once told Dora he’d written
Masses and Man
in three days and nights, right through without sleeping. He wasn’t boasting, she said. He was baffled.

It is true that she loved Fenner Brockway. In those days we believed in freedoms of every kind. So many boys had died in the war that we knew life was short, and cheap. There was no point not loving when the occasion arose. Those hippies of the ’60s and ’70s seemed so tame and vain to me, so derivative. They marched for peace but had never really known war; they confused the freedom simply to have sex with the freedom for one’s sex not to matter. Dora thought sex should be something freely given, not part of a brideprice in a transaction for a woman. She was living for now.

But Dora was never confused about Toller. When he left my studio after I took his portrait that day, she placed a jazz record she’d brought on the gramophone and wound the handle. She swung me around and around till we were laughing and dizzy. Her eyes shone. ‘That self-conscious, lung-afflicted fellow,’ she said, ‘is the grandest man I will ever know.’