Thin-Ice Skater Read online

  5.It’s not only writers but celebrities from every walk of life who come to the door at my brother’s invitation: academics who have made a splash, psychologists with social theories, politicians, actors, actresses, musicians, artists, poets.

  6.In the basement are the professional couple who specialise in looking after my brother’s needs yet whom my brother dislikes to see inside the house whenever the two of us are together: ‘I have never enjoyed the privilege of using servants, even when Martha was around.’ It must be something basic: the Hodges (meanwhile) rarely, in my experience, if ever, take offence.

  7.Paranoia.

  8.My brother can’t be certain that schizophrenia is not infectious.

  MEMO TWELVE (12)

  1.3.71, 8:19 p.m.

  1.The school is the only reason for our living in this neighbourhood.

  2.Dover’s Academy was founded by a gentleman of that name after the Second World War (when my brother was on his way to Hollywood). It occupies a large Edwardian house not fifteen minutes’ walk from here.

  3.Its fees are astronomical, being, as it is, the alternative to a state school where the fees are non-existent: what can they teach at Dover’s that they can’t teach anywhere else?

  4.The absence of material ambition, the taking of drugs, the promulgation of ideas which would only be licensed by the most extreme political party, the high incidence of neurosis, psychosis, halitosis, erythema, intertrigo and seborrhoea are some of the more prevalent features of the place.

  5.Mrs Dover, the founder’s widow – altogether more formidable than the deceased himself – has bright pink cheeks, light blue eyes, a triple chin, blonde hair and weighs, by my estimation, well in excess of two hundred and twenty (220) pounds.

  6.I like her.

  7.In some respects I love her.

  8.‘Do not take my kindliness for granted,’ her look suggests.

  9.She is the only woman I know who is not in any way attracted to my brother.

  10.At the back of the school, overlooking the garden which has been turned into a tarmac yard, is Mrs Dover’s office. It is cluttered with books and smells of dust and of the cumulative scents of the secretary and the typist who – the latter – comes in from time to time.

  11.It’s here that Mrs Dover has, on occasion, upbraided me for ‘not smiling when I know you can’, and, on one occasion, for ‘not being as happy as only you know how’.

  12.I have not smiled for as long as I remember.

  13.‘You Americans,’ she says, ‘are all the same.’

  MEMO THIRTEEN (13)

  1.3.71, 9:10 a.m.

  1.I must be mad.

  MEMO FOURTEEN (14)

  13.3.71, 1:13 a.m.

  1.My brother is worried. He is busy with a film and is constantly in and out of the house, coming back, if I am there, to stand at the door and ask, ‘Are you okay, Richard?’

  2.If I say, from my bed, ‘I’m fine,’ he comes in another step and asks, ‘How are you making out at Dover’s?’

  3.He uses three epithets to refer to me directly. The formal ‘Richard’ is used to indicate that we are two entities apart, like an artist – wondering whether his picture requires another dab – might, palette in one hand, brush in the other, step back for a broader look. ‘Rickie’ he uses as a sign of our confederacy, our capacity to be joined in a common venture, a call he might make (less and less often now) from the foot of the stairs when he is going out and thinks it might be a good idea for me to go with him. ‘Rick’ is intimate, a call from over his shoulder, his mind invariably on other things – like someone calling from a dream, the sound instinctive, if not unconscious.

  4.I often wonder why he has me with him.

  MEMO FIFTEEN (15)

  17.3.71, 2:10 a.m.

  1.My brother is an empiricist.

  2.He picks up these phrases from other people.

  3.He seldom reads a book: thirteen (13) of his films have been made from ‘bestsellers’ he’s never read.

  4.All he reads are synopses. It involves him reading the first few pages and the last of any project, asking, ‘Anything go on in the middle?’ and giving it the thumbs up or down. How he acquired this skill I’ve no idea.

  5.He never goes to the movies. Some of the films he’s made I’m convinced he’s never seen. He is superficial.

  6.He is superficial like the whole of his generation are superficial. Maybe the war killed something off. Maybe the war was the killing off and, for their parents, the war before that (1914–1918) the killing off of something else. Maybe all this shooting at things with cameras is the killing off in progress. How can I explain that to a man (or Mrs Dover) who talks of ‘creativity’ and ‘genius’ and, God help us, ‘art’?

  7.He is always buying pictures. He is eclectic. He knows where to look. Or, rather, who to have look for him. This is the principle of his working life. Some people have it. Most don’t. Me not at all. Everything he receives is secondhand. One painter with an international reputation remarked to me on one occasion how my brother bought a picture of his for three hundred pounds, when the painter was a student (‘a lot of money: one year’s income, so to speak’), and sold it six years later when the painter, a prodigal talent, had become established, for fifty-two thousand dollars. ‘I got nothing out of that transaction,’ he said. ‘Someone not a thousand miles from here is making a hell of a lot of money off my back.’

  8.My brother will sit at a restaurant table and lay out half a million bucks while he asks the waiter for another drink.

  9.How can he not be superficial when he has all that shit inside?

  MEMO SIXTEEN (16)

  1.4.71, Midnight

  1.My brother is a skater.

  2.He cuts fine figures.

  3.I stand on the bank and admire his skill. ‘A man who doesn’t initiate is no man at all,’ he often tells me. ‘That’s what life,’ he says, ‘is all about.’

  ‘Maybe I’m initiating by standing still,’ I tell him.

  ‘Standing still is passivity,’ he says. ‘It takes nothing to stand still. We stand still when we’re born and we stand still when we die.’

  ‘Maybe it takes more courage to stand still when everyone’s on the move,’ I tell him.

  MEMO SEVENTEEN (17)

  2.4.71, 1:13 a.m.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever told you about Ian,’ my brother says.

  ‘You mean how he died at the age of seven, the product of your marriage to your first wife who subsequently married a doctor who was hauled up in court for indecent behaviour with one of his patients and who later emigrated to Canada and from whom you’ve never heard again, your marriage having broken up as a result of Ian’s death?’

  He allows the facetiousness to drain away as he might something unpleasant in the john.

  ‘Ian was a gifted child,’ he finally declares. ‘I’d do anything to have that boy back. Anything,’ he tells me.

  I am lying on my bed (I don’t sleep well at night). My brother, having just come in the house, is standing in the doorway of my room. Moments before, not for the first time, he has informed me, ‘This is a phase you’re going through. You’ll have to choose. From now on we’re looking for commitment, Rickie.’

  ‘By “we”, you mean,’ I ask him, ‘you and Martha?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve mentioned how Ian died.’

  ‘You sat up two whole nights,’ I tell him.

  ‘It was meningitis. His mother went to pieces. I resisted. I guess the effect is still with me. It affects the way I respond to you. Whenever you feel I’m being rough and the sort of brother you wouldn’t like, maybe you’ll remember.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Look around you.’

  ‘Right.’

  Maybe he means I shouldn’t look too far. Maybe he means I shouldn’t look at all.

  ‘This is a society we live in of people who are lying down. We live in a lying-down situation, Rick. The people in this country no longer resist.’

 
; ‘I thought you donated funds to the Labour Party,’ I tell him.

  ‘The Labour Party in this country is symptomatic of the lack of backbone. It’s a panacea put on a gaping wound. A wound of indifference.’

  ‘Why do you give them money?’ I ask.

  ‘Our father was a socialist.’

  ‘I thought he was a bankrupt.’

  ‘He was in textiles. He went bankrupt after the war. What has that got to do with it?’ he says.

  ‘Maybe he went bankrupt because of his ideals,’ I tell him.

  ‘He went bankrupt because he stayed in this fucking country, Rick,’ he says.

  ‘You’ve come back to it,’ I tell him.

  ‘Sure I’ve come back. Do you think I was glad to come back? I came back because of Martha. As soon as she is better I aim to leave. This country is a mausoleum.’

  ‘You give money in memory of our father?’ I ask, intrigued by this idea.

  ‘I give money because you do what the natives do. It pays to donate to the Labour Party. Not for what it gives me but because without that I’d have no hope at all. I couldn’t otherwise bear to stay in this place another fucking minute.’

  He adds, ‘When Ian died I thought for a time I wouldn’t recover. Not from his death – he was a beautiful child and so gifted it makes me weep to think of it – but that I wouldn’t regain my faith.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘In fucking life!’ he tells me. ‘I sometimes wonder how you see me, Rick.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I know you love me. We love one another.’ (Mention ‘love’ and the bullshit never stops.) ‘In many senses, we’re all each other has got.’

  ‘And Martha.’

  ‘And Martha.’

  Of Martha, however, he’s not too sure (those telephone calls from Hertfordshire when she comes on the line, invariably enquiring about the latest ‘clue’).

  ‘I wonder if you recognise what I’ve been through,’ he says.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘There is a purpose to what I do.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Ian was the trigger. I wanted to prove there is another dimension to suffering. That the destruction of something that was wholesome and good wasn’t the whole of what life’s about.’

  So he went to Hollywood, became an actor, met Miss Geraldine O’Neill and ruined her life.

  ‘What I do is an act of faith.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I don’t go in for this secularised theology which says it’s circumstances alone that count.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Free will is still an ingredient in my book, Rick. A painful ingredient. But also a beautiful ingredient of what experience is all about.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Don’t allow yourself to think that what you see around you is everything that’s happening. That’s arrogance. That’s blindness. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’d describe that as stupidity, Richard.’

  ‘Right.’

  He gestures round: bare walls (where’s my personality, my persona, my imprint on the place in which I live, not least that part of it exclusively my own?): a bookcase, table, bed: fuck all.

  ‘Maybe you preferred it in Curzon Street?’

  ‘In a service flat?’

  ‘How about Mount Street?’

  ‘I hated it. Particularly all that panelling. It reminded me of a mortician’s.’

  He is about to ask about Berkeley Square, where we scarcely stayed a minute (Martha, on a ‘home’ inspection visit, screaming in every room) or the house in Beaconsfield (‘All those trees,’ I’d told him, ‘are going to drive me fucking mad,’ invoking Martha’s detectival preoccupations), or maybe about the episode in Dumfries in Scotland, staying at the castle of a friend – a former friend – of Martha’s. Or about the house in Putney, not to mention those we looked at and never went back to: a couple of thousand of those at least.

  ‘That man telling us, the day we first visited it, how his wife went crazy in the kitchen.’

  ‘It was in the bathroom.’

  ‘I thought it was the kitchen.’ (I hate to get things wrong.)

  ‘The bathroom.’

  He waits.

  ‘Maybe it’s the school,’ he says.

  ‘I like the school.’

  ‘How about the teachers?’

  ‘They’re fine.’

  ‘Mrs Dover?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘Perfect?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Some notable people have lived here in the past.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘The district.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Freud. Marx. Keats.’ He gestures beyond the confines of the room. ‘Coleridge.’

  He’s been reading the plaques on the buildings – or has had Gavin do it for him.

  ‘Where did you hear all that?’

  ‘I read it in a guide.’

  ‘A guide?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He looks at me with a smile.

  ‘You read a guide?’ The first book he concedes he’s read.

  ‘I read a guide to the neighbourhood. I wanted to be sure, when we moved here, it would be the sort of place you’d like.’

  ‘You went to a lot of trouble,’ I tell him.

  ‘Why not? I get worried about you. I wake at night and think, “What am I doing for my youngest brother?”’

  He is thinking, ‘I come up to his room and find him in bed at four (4) p.m., and he has nothing to contribute to anything. Least of all a conversation.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the gap.’

  ‘Gap?’

  ‘Between the generations.’

  ‘It could be.’

  ‘We have more in common than you realise.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A similarity of feeling.’ He gestures round – exclusive of everything, the gesture, but the building. ‘The same sort of humour.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘We don’t take any bullshit.’

  ‘You work in it all the time.’

  ‘Sure I work in it.’ He laughs.

  He waits for me to laugh. (Catch him laughing on his own!)

  ‘A good job one of us works in something, Rick.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I was a pain in the ass when I was young.’

  ‘You were?’

  ‘Boy! Was I a pain in the ass!’ He is about to add, ‘To our father,’ but since being a pain in the arse (as it then would be) to our father who went bankrupt in the textile trade and donated funds to the Labour Party is no great shakes in anybody’s book, he adds, ‘I don’t think you see me as a brother.’

  ‘I do.’

  His look is peculiarly (uncharacteristically) intense.

  ‘Somebody who cares about you, Rick.’

  He adds, ‘Martha cares about you, only she is in no position to show it at present.’

  He thinks about all the other people who care about me and says, ‘I, too, would like some help.’

  ‘I do help, Gerry.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He waits for instances of the help I’ve given him to materialise but after an interval of several seconds that feel like hours declares, ‘If I could see something positive that you were working towards, that would reassure me.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Even your friends are ass bound. I’ve never seen so many bums glued to so many fucking floors.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Maybe you feel science and technology have reached as far as these things can. That even fantasy has reached its limits.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  I move over on the bed.

  ‘The only thoughts that come to an ass-bound thinker are thoughts that keep his ass to the ground. Maybe when you can enlighten me about all these remarkable thoughts you have maybe you’ll come downstairs and tell me.’

  ‘Sure.’


  ‘How would I have been,’ he says, ‘if I’d given in to our father’s failure and decided our future was bound up with our past? Like Jimmy, who’s done nothing to redeem himself.’

  ‘Who’s Jimmy?’

  ‘Jimmy is our fucking brother. The one,’ he goes on, ‘we never mention.’

  ‘Is it,’ I ask, curious about Jimmy, ‘a matter of redemption?’

  ‘It’s a matter of justification,’ he says. ‘You have the means to take a step forward that I never had. I would have given my right arm to be an artist. I started off with nothing. Now look where I am.’

  He doesn’t wait for me to look too long: he closes the door and is gone.

  A door is shut in the room below.

  Moments later – a prevalent sound – the jocular tone of his voice on the phone.

  MEMO EIGHTEEN (18)

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling?’ I ask her.

  Mrs Dover stands up behind her desk.

  ‘Not at all,’ she says.

  ‘My brother suggested I might see you.’

  ‘Glad you followed his advice,’ she says.

  She eases her bulk to the centre of the floor.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ she asks.

  She indicates a chair in front of her desk.

  ‘How is your brother?’ she adds.

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘How is his lovely wife?’

  ‘She’s making progress.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  Behind her a window looks out to the back of the school.

  ‘This,’ she says, ‘is a distinguished neighbourhood. Freud lived here in exile. Marx, and many more.’

  A photograph of Mr Dover stands on the mantelpiece above what would have been a fireplace when the house was someone’s home: adjacent to it is one of Mrs Dover – I wouldn’t have recognised the sylph-like figure were it not that, on a previous occasion, she has pointed it out – in a mortarboard and academic gown.

  ‘Keats lived here,’ she adds, ‘and not far from this building he wrote his famous ode. But this, of course, I don’t have to tell you.’