Nicholas Royle - First Novel

I looked at her quizzically.

‘I can taste it.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A few of the lads were going out. Someone’s birthday.’

Veronica smiled and I leaned in to wipe some food away from Jonathan’s chin. I saw the tiny round scar at the corner of his eye, caused by his sister having accidentally caught him with a pencil. At least, we hoped it was accidental.

Although I stayed in the kitchen and helped clean up and then cooked our food, I felt as if I wasn’t there, as if I had already moved out into some miserable bedsit where I would barely have enough shelf space for my copies of my own book, which had been published to widespread apathy the year before, never mind my library. I knew what I had to do. I just didn’t know if I could do it.

At the weekend, I told Veronica a despicable lie and took a train from Waterloo to Feltham. I walked the short distance from the station to the address Susan Ashton had given me, my stomach churning not so much with butterflies as with unknown lacy-winged insects, patent-leather beetles and hairy moths like winged cigars.

We had sex in her bed with sunlight slanting in through the slats of the silver venetian blind. I could hear the planes coming in to land a mile or so to the north, but the noise was too faint. It lacked detail, character, specificity. The deep bass rumble of a 747 was inaudible at that distance. I couldn’t feel the vibration in my bones. In purely mechanical terms it was good sex, but the tenderness was simulated. We didn’t talk, or if we did what we said meant nothing, like the sex. Susan Ashton was beautiful, but the connection between us was an illusion, an accident of time and place. The artificiality of the previous weekend. The car park. The expensive leather seats of her Golf GTI. The planes. Most of the time it seemed to me that she was switched off. Now and then she would flicker into life and you’d see it in her eyes and you’d want her, or you’d want some small part of her. You didn’t really want her and she didn’t really want you.

Nevertheless.

‘That was nice,’ I said.

‘Very nice,’ she agreed.

‘Of course, it must never happen again,’ I said.

‘Of course not.’

But I meant it this time.

I took the train back to Waterloo and switched to the Tube. When I got home, Veronica and the children were out. I filled a bucket with warm soapy water and cleaned the bathroom. I scrubbed the surfaces until they shone. I went through the kitchen cupboards and threw out everything that was past its sell-by date. I ran out to the shops and bought new stuff. I filled the fruit bowl and arranged some flowers in a vase. I didn’t question whether Veronica would see through all of this. I just did it. By mid-afternoon I had finished and was beginning to get a bit twitchy. No note had been left. We didn’t generally do much on a Saturday, just tended to hang around the house. I had thought the only place they were likely to be was the park, but not for this long. By the end of the afternoon I was checking in Veronica’s wardrobe and in the kids’ drawers to see if there were any unexplained gaps. I sat in my tiny box-room study. I switched the computer on and switched it off again. I sat on my swivel chair and spun around. The dummies made the room seem even smaller than it was. I had a full-size female dummy and two child-size mannequins that I’d picked up from second-hand shops on the Holloway Road. Veronica didn’t mind them, she said, as long as they stayed in my room.

They weren’t going anywhere.

‘You’re not going anywhere, are you?’ I said, my voice loud in the empty house.

I looked at the bookcase. At the end of one shelf at eye level was a row of orange spines with black lettering. Bigger than A-format, slightly larger even than B-format, but not quite C. A somewhat awkward size, in other words. My novel, published the year before. Out of print, forgotten by the few people who had bought it and read it or been sent a review copy and never opened it. I took one out from the row, held it up to my nose and flicked through the pages. It had never had a smell, so I don’t know why I expected it to have acquired one over time. I looked at the publisher’s name at the bottom of the spine. A one-man operation whom few people had ever heard of publishing a book no one wanted to read. That was fair enough. If a book was rejected by all the publishers in town, that was generally thought to be a sign that it was either no good or it could not be imagined that anyone would want to read it. Or not enough people, anyway. Smaller publishers existed for the more marginal stuff and somehow they survived on subsidies or by having the odd surprise success. Most of these, too, had rejected my novel. I didn’t blame them for it. I was grateful to the publisher who had taken it on. He’d done a couple of books before. He was smaller than the small presses. He would not have been expecting to have the odd surprise success.

I’d been toying with ideas, writing experimental passages, when I’d met Veronica. Meeting her had seemed to galvanise me and I’d written the book in a couple of years, in snatched moments, late at night, early in the morning, finishing it when the twins were about a year old. Veronica wasn’t sure about it. It was macabre, she said, as if that were a criticism, which I guessed it was if you didn’t like the macabre. I understood why she didn’t really like it a great deal, and I didn’t pretend it was just because she was a lawyer and didn’t read a lot of fiction. She thought it was all a bit close, uncomfortably so. The female character in the book could be her, she said. The children could be ours. It wasn’t, and they weren’t, but I understood the objection.

When I’d started sending it out, the reactions of publishers had shown a degree of consistency. It was overwritten, it was too weird, it was unlikely to gain a mass audience.

I heard the door and quickly slid the book back into the row of identical volumes, aware that in my haste I had caught the bottom corner and it would now be folded over.

Veronica seemed happy and the children were excitable. They had been to a museum and had ice creams and come back on the Tube. I thanked Veronica and she smiled her acknowledgement.

‘I’m knackered,’ she said before collapsing like a rag doll on to the settee and making the children explode into fits of giggles.

‘Do you know what time it is, children?’ I asked in my giant’s voice.

They looked at me wide-eyed and waited.

‘BATH TIME,’ I roared and ran to scoop them up, one under each arm as usual.

There were more giggles as they fought to escape and I heard Veronica faintly saying, ‘It’ll end in tears,’ as I headed for the stairs with the children.

They eventually quietened down enough to be sat in the bath and given a good clean. Downstairs I heard Veronica opening a bottle of wine and then the clink of glass. As I played with the children, a number of thoughts drifted through my mind. This was what I treasured. Again it was a cliché, but a good cliché. This was what was important to me, not a fling with a colleague. I wondered vaguely if I would be saying the same thing if the sex the second time, in Susan Ashton’s bedroom in Feltham, had been as good as the first time, in her car at Hatton Cross Underground station car park. But this wasn’t a helpful thought. I was glad the second time had not been as good. It had helped me realise sooner rather than later that I was making a colossal mistake.

Ray’s day in court finally came. From the moment he heard his name called in that great dark echoing chamber of a courthouse he felt as if he was outside himself watching the proceedings. He heard his own voice answer the questions that were put to him, whether they came from the prosecuting or the defending barrister, truthfully. His answers betrayed no suggestion of bias or preference. Here was a man, they seemed to say, who was present when the event took place and who has come here today to tell us, in his own words, what happened. He neither invented nor embellished. He offered not his impression of events, but his record of what took place. Where any gap in the narrative existed he did not try to fill it with conjecture or fantasy.