Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Dark,’ Paul says, his eyes still locked on the painting.

‘Well, that depends on how you look at it. You can transform it, you see. That’s the point of art, as he saw it.’

‘Isn’t art about making your mark?’

‘In a sense. But art is something you give away, that’s the difference. Instead of grabbing up bits of reality for oneself. He became very interested in the tribal cultures of the Pacific — his wife was an anthropologist, he used to travel around Polynesia with her. Anyway, he was very taken with these cycles of exchange they have, whereby objects are passed back and forth through generations, and nothing belongs to anyone in perpetuity. Or rather, that there is no “one” for things to belong to. He used to say that in that part of the world, you wrote your address backwards, that is, first you wrote the country, then your town, then your street, and only lastly your name. Which, when you think about it, makes much more sense. And art for him was an attempt to write his address backwards, so to speak.’

‘It’s so dark, though,’ Paul says, his eyes still locked on the painting.

‘Yes, the problem was those very cultures were in danger of being wiped out by all the others busy making their mark.’

‘Climate change?’

‘Travelling around the Pacific, they could already see it happening. That had a powerful effect on him. Not just the threat of floods and cataclysm and so on, but the fact that no one in the First World wanted to know. And then when his wife died, that seemed to compound everything. This was painted only a few months before his suicide.’

I hadn’t known this; I think of Ish and her islanders, and looking at the painting I feel a chill, as if behind the impenetrable black veil I can see drowned faces buried under relentless waves.

‘Crispin can’t stand it,’ O’Hara says, returning his gaze to the painting. ‘He says it’s depressing. And what it’s done to the insurance is just shocking — they’re insisting now we install some sort of ghastly alarm system, it’ll be like living in a bank vault. But looking at it makes me feel rather hopeful. There’s a sort of comfort in the thought of us all swimming around in this void together. The notion that our borders are porous makes me feel oddly complete. Like love, I suppose, isn’t it? It’s when you forget yourself that you’re most who you are. And conversely, as Texier said, there’s nothing so selfish as the urge to escape ourselves. Crispin can’t stand it when I quote him either,’ he concludes apologetically. And then, as a voice calls from elsewhere in the house, ‘Dessert!’ he says. ‘Come.’

Back in the dining room, the conversation has turned to the banking crisis.

‘Oh Lord, not again,’ O’Hara says.

‘When you cook the dinner, you can choose the topics,’ Crispin tells him primly.

‘That Miles O’Connor is the worst of the lot,’ Mary Cutlass says with an access of anger. ‘I don’t understand how he hasn’t been driven from the city.’

‘Oh, Miles isn’t so bad,’ Crispin says, as he portions out cake. ‘He helped us out of a hole when all the other banks were being beastly. Who is it you work for again?’ He directs this last question at me.

‘BOT,’ I tell him. ‘Or Agron Torabundo, as it is now.’

He is impressed. ‘Ever since old Blankly took over, you boys have been raking it in. Funny, he always struck me as a bit of a maverick. It just goes to show, I suppose.’ He digs into his dessert. ‘And now you’ve got this hedge fund — what’s the chap’s name again?’

‘Howie,’ I say. ‘Howard Hogan.’

‘This thing’s only been going a few weeks,’ Crispin informs the table. ‘But it’s taken off like a rocket. I wish I knew how he does it.’ He returns to me. ‘I’ve tried to work out his system, but I can’t make head or tail of it.’

‘Non-linear maths,’ I say, then confess, ‘I don’t understand it either. There’s a Russian.’

Mary Cutlass, who has been looking increasingly baffled by this conversation, breaks in. ‘What I would like to know is, when are our writers going to address the banking crisis?’

‘I do address it in my new book,’ William tells her. ‘Whacker’s elderly grandmother has her apple cart repossessed by the bank. Of course, those people don’t have a clue how to run an apple cart.’

‘I mean the whole thing. What it’s done to society and so on. There must be a great novel to be written about that.’

‘The banking crisis is unrepresentable,’ Banerjee says severely. ‘These people are not even human.’

‘Guilty as charged,’ Crispin says with a sigh.

‘They’ve done some terrible things,’ Victoria Galahad intervenes. ‘Still, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to go around calling them inhuman.’

‘It is their own doing,’ Banerjee insists. ‘Worse, their vacuous thinking has spread out of the world of finance like an epidemic. Now, people are barely capable of sustaining a genuine emotion, or communicating anything more complex than pictures of cats. Cat pictures and pornography, that is what we have now instead of art. Excuse me.’

With that he gets up and leaves the room.

‘Probably gone to hang himself,’ Crispin says once the door closes.

‘Is he always like that?’ William inquires.

‘Oh, he’s probably just a bit tired, that’s all,’ Robert Dodson says vaguely. ‘Misses his wife.’

Ariel begins to cough, as if her cake has gone down the wrong way. But she quickly recovers, and — perhaps taking advantage of Banerjee’s absence — inclines herself over the table towards Paul, rather like a flower bowing under the weight of a raindrop. ‘I meant to tell you earlier,’ she confides. ‘I adored For Love of a Clown .’

Paul, who since our conversation in the dining room has been subdued, starts up, blinking in surprise. ‘Eh?’ he says.

‘Your novel,’ Ariel, who evidently is used to conversing with writers, explains.

‘Oh — what, really?’

‘I reread it recently,’ she elaborates — she speaks in a soft low voice that makes everything she says sound like a confession of love. ‘That line about how we’re all clowns in love’s circus — tumbling through sawdust in clothes that don’t fit us, waiting for the day we can wipe off our false smiles … gosh, just so perfect.’

‘Thank you,’ Paul says, seeming to expand before my very eyes. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Are you working on something new?’ she asks. ‘I know you said you’d started a business, but there is a new book on the way, isn’t there? I’ve been waiting such a long time.’

‘Hmm,’ Paul says, staring into her eyes, which are almost indecently huge and open, like lilies in bloom — petals spread, pollen-flecked pistils exposed to the elements. ‘Well, I have been tinkering with something, on and off.’

‘Oh!’ Ariel applauds softly.

‘Really?’ Robert Dodson has been listening in. ‘A novel?’

Paul looks back and forth, from his former editor to his former editor’s sublime assistant: in this instance, at least, beauty defeats truth. ‘Yes,’ he says.

‘Can you tell us what it’s about?’ Ariel asks.

‘Hmm, I’d prefer not to go into it at this stage …’

‘Just give us an idea,’ Dodson encourages.

‘What’s this?’ William inquires.

‘Paul’s telling us about his novel.’

‘Oh, a new one?’

‘A word,’ Dodson says. ‘The bare bones.’

Victoria Galahad, Mary Cutlass and the others are all craned forward on their elbows, as though to catch the words as soon as they appear. Paul looks increasingly panic-stricken. ‘It’s about, ah … it’s about, ah …’