THE THUNDERBOLT
As a love-token to my readers here are the first few pages of my new novel which is published on Feb 1
DAY ONE
Kerpow!
Funny - unless it’s ominous - she had put that very word down on a Scrabble board only a day or two or before. Jubilant, the k scoring triple. Her opponent - the man she had known for over twenty years, slept with for five, no longer slept with with for however many more that left, and now played Scrabble with instead - contested the spelling. Kapow, yes. Kerpow, no. They fought over it. Have it your way, she said in the end. Which meant she had to remove a garment.
What? They were still up to those tricks? No, no, truly they weren’t. Idly, because they’d found themselves at home together for the first time in months and opened an expensive bottle of wine, they dared each other, laughing, in honour of the good old days.
She’d raised herself from the chair, not looking at him. Was this how they used to do it? Christ! - playing strip Scrabble at forty-seven. Later, she remembered she was forty-eight.
And now, kerpow!
How she kept her balance she didn’t know.
It could only have been that she’d had just enough warning, a shapeless presentiment, as she stood ringing the bell, in that atom of time that prepares the mind for irrecoverable shock.
He had opened the door to her. The Wunderkind - all right, the Once-Wunderkind - himself. That she hadn’t expected. As a rule, for appointments with men who win prizes, she would be met by an assistant, secretary, housekeeper, wife. She had even heard tell of a liveried butler. Write a successful musical and there was no limit to what you had to have. But men who wrote musicals were of no interest to her. It was words or nothing. Otherwise, these exploratory meetings were much of a muchness. ‘Good morning. You must be So-and-So. I’ll tell His Wordship OBE, FRSL you’re here.’ A short wait, time for her to check how she looked in the hall mirror if there was one, clear her throat and decide whether to tuck her blue A4 notebook under her arm to show she was in control or hold it loosely to show she had a devil-may-care spirit. Then up silent carpeted stairs - hush, thoughts germinating - through palisades of family portraits, carefully disarranged playscripts, programmes and original lithographs of Sara Bernhardt as Cleopatra - and into the engine room of genius where she would find X at his desk, head down, so absorbed he didn’t hear her announced. So why not today? Why, today, had the man she had come to see acted as amanuensis to himself? Later, wanting to make it all miraculously synchronous, he would tell her it was because he too must have had an inkling of what was about to befall him.
She shook her head. Inkling indeed. He understood very little, if he could use a tepid term like that, to describe the tremor that had rocked her body.
It was neither welcome nor expected. She was too busy to be looking for adventure. There were dozens of those blue A4 notebooks on her shelves, bursting with research notes, scripts and schedules, records of programmes she’d made, outlines of programmes she still hoped to make. If there was to be a man again after Hal he would have to come to her. She wouldn’t squander her life waiting for him to put in an appearance or wondering if he’d be worth it when he did. She’d know.
And when the Wunderkind opened his door to her she knew to a certainty.
Knew what?
Just knew.
Kerpow!
A single blast of him was all it took.
He stood on the doorstep, just about smiling, and appraised her incrementally. He couldn’t help himself. What men did. He didn’t need telling that a woman was more than a piece of fruit that came apart in segments. Miss Gore, Head of English, had taken the class through the sins of masculinist evaluation practised by every poet since Catullus. ‘Two hundred years to adore each breast, for heaven’s sake!’
‘But “thirty thousand to the rest,” Miss,’ he’d put in, mistakenly assuming that she didn’t think two hundred years anything like enough.
‘The rest?’ What had he said wrong? He coloured. ‘Is that all a woman is to you, Quaid, two breasts and the rest?’
‘No, Miss.’
‘So do you have an alternative computation?’
‘Not off-hand, Miss.’
The class snorted. He would remember for ever the heat of his embarrassment - a fiery furnace of confusion and shame, fuelled by a woman’s snort of derision.
All right, all right. He would try to avoid such mistakes in the future. But have a heart, teacher. Centuries of errancy couldn’t be remedied all at once and in his single person, no matter how ready he was to forswear the cultural history of being a man. Just give me a little more time, Miss Gore. I don’t know how much more. But measuring years as the poet measured, say thirty thousand.
Today he’d call her out as a bully. Don’t tell me what I’m allowed to look at and like!
Oh, and by the way - two hundred years of adoration is a hyperbolic fucking joke.
Edina Gore. Bright red lips, big eyes swimming behind fishbowl spectacles, arms crossed on her chest, now like a nun’s, now like a wrestler’s. All this time later he can recall the distaste he felt for those arms which seemed to be extruded from her breasts like sausage-meat. Though now he knows he shouldn’t. Distaste was worse than the wrong sort of desire. Like a woman’s arms too much and you were sunk. Like them too little and you were sunk a second time. What was he supposed to do - keep his eyes off a woman’s body altogether?
Yes.
And do what?
Look at something else.
It was unfair. He respected women. Revered them, in the abstract, to the point of madness. Woman! My God! Would he ever attain to one? Would he ever have one to call his own - no, no, no, no, no, not his own as in his property, but his as in to have and to hold.
My own to love and cherish, Miss Gore.
Here was the ironic thing - in picking on him, Miss Gore had picked on probably the least sexually experienced boy in the class. He’d read a lot of poems, that was all. He could talk a good love lyric. But of real breasts (and don’t even talk about the rest) he would leave school knowing nothing. But for the surly complaisance of a prostitute he would have gone to university knowing nothing too.
Now that he is older, Miss Gore would be within her rights to think of him as a lost cause after all, entirely unimproved the moment he comes face to face with an unknown woman, picking her off part by part. Today’s woman being no exception. There the hair, blowing in the wind like Mary’s of Peter, Paul And; there the mouth, stern and narrowed so as to give nothing away, but he knows what to look for and sees the blood pulsing under the pale lips; there the breasts (move on, move on); and there the legs, muscular, like a dancer’s or a gymnast’s. She catches his eyes flick down to her legs and wonders why she’d chosen to wear a skirt instead of her usual trousers. Mistake or not?
A purely professional question.
His eyes ascended again, noting that her nails were painted as blazingly red as Edina’s Gore’s lips, and that she left her hand in his a little longer than was customary, as though to be sure he felt the firmness of her grasp and, just possibly, the weight of a gold ring she wore, he couldn’t quite tell on which finger. And then, despite her apparent assurance, there was the startled look with which she greeted him, as though she’d known him all her life and not expected him, of all people, to open the door to her, unless he was so unlike anyone she’d ever met before she feared they wouldn’t speak each other’s language. This was difficult to describe or explain.
Vanity took him some of the way. Why wouldn’t a woman have been startled by his appearance? He was tall. His nostrils flared like a flamenco dancer’s. He had louche, lazy eyes and hair that a journalist had described as enraged. He had a broken nose from the only fight he’d ever fought and his cheek was interestingly scarred as a consequence of a firework he lit for his step-daughter’s birthday going off prematurely. ‘Mummy, quick, step-daddy’s face is on fire’ - a phrase enshrined in family history. All in all, as another journalist had written, he resembled a pirate with a degree in Fine Art.
Plus - he was full of plusses - he was an arts-page celebrity. Or at least had been an arts-page celebrity, no longer on the front page but in the paper somewhere if you took the trouble to look for him. Scraps of high if misremembered accomplishment still clung to him like flies on fly-paper. People remembered a play of his they’d been to years ago. Not its title or what it was about exactly, but the interviews he gave, the buzz, the queues, the cost of the programme. Others, who had no idea what a Starred First was somehow knew Oxford had awarded him one at the age of only twenty.
No longer being front-page worked for him in the perverse way of celebrity. It made him more attractive. Allowed him to be irascible and rebellious, unkempt, contemptuous of those still scrabbling to be known. He was to fame what torn jeans were to fashion.
This is not to blow his trumpet for him. It is simply to explain why a woman, unimproved by the warnings of a Mr Gore to keep her eyes to herself, might have breathed a little harder when he opened his door. Or looked twice at him in the street.
But there was something more he couldn’t account for and that had to do with her not him. Something to do with her capacity to register. He loved the eyes of women on him. In their reflection he saw a version of who he was that beat the version he had started to carry around in his head. But in this woman’s eyes he saw a man he feared he might never be able to live up to.
Startled by her startlement, he was unable to think of anything to say. He should have welcome-kissed her on the doorstep. Not unlike the hero of his early show-off play, Don Juan in Oxford, who believed he could tell everything he was ever going to feel about a woman from a single kiss, Quaid believed a single kiss would reveal everything a woman would ever feel about him.
DAY TWO
She hasn’t slept. She often doesn’t when her head is full of a new programme. She will get up in the middle of the night, pad softly to her study so as to cause no disturbance, and start making notes. But this time she lies for hours in bed before deciding it is distasteful, not to say disloyal - marginally disloyal - to have such thoughts in such a place with a man she respects - respects, notice - beside her. So she goes down to the kitchen to make tea, tea being the most calming substance she knows, and relives the encounter.
It isn’t only that she can see him. She can smell him. In the past she has left men whose smell she can’t abide. When things go wrong between a man and a woman, she believes, the first sign of it is the smell. You needn’t especially have loved the smell at first. You might simply not have noticed it. But then you do and that’s that. An affair going off stinks to high heaven. What’s new to her is noticing and liking the smell of a man at the outset.
At the outset! This is why she hasn’t slept. She has let futurity in. At the very least she has opened the window to it.
On the strength of what? A smell she cannot describe. An aureole of zesty hair. A dry, sarcastic mouth. Maybe kind, maybe not, half-closed eyes. A rugby-player’s shoulders. And a foreknowledge of his wordsmithery - not to be confused with any inkling - that was so heated with anticipation that she marvelled at the way he spoke before he had a chance to say three words. She laughs at herself. He says ‘Come in,’ and her heart stops beating. How will she be when he makes his first speech explaining why, though he is flattered by her offer, and not withstanding the radio talks he’s given, he is not a media personality, and certainly not a television presenter, it being a matter of artistic faith to him to have no presence beyond his work, to make no utterances that are not the utterances of art, for it is only art that speaks the words he wishes to be known by, in short to respect the Sibylline silence of creation, which he is confident that she, as an intelligent and well-read woman, with surely have listened to with awe herself in those moments when what’s visionary and half-glimpsed asserts its ancient primacy over the gross actuality of a liquid-crystal display . . .?
How will she be? Well, she now knows the answer to that. Somewhat insulted. ‘Gross actuality’ is not, a fair description of what she does. No matter. She will deal with that. She will make space for the Sibylline silences of a man unable to stop talking. Thereafter, ask her how she is and she will close her eyes. Unslept, is how she is….
She drives a fast car not because speed excites her but because she can afford a fast car and has no children to ferry to school, so she might as well. More than that, she has always claimed for herself the freedom and esteem men enjoy, and a fast car that people gawp at in the street is one way of accessing those advantages. Comme des garçons. Otherwise, she affects an indifference to what she drives and pretends she doesn’t remember the make. ‘I think it’s Italian.’ She might want the freedom of being a man, but she also wants freedom from the objects that captivate men’s minds.
Driving to work, tired and preoccupied, she passes an accident. It looks serious. More than one police-car, more than one ambulance. Normally the sirens would make her heart race and she would come off the main road as soon as she could. At the very least slow down. Today the flashing lights don’t touch her. She is somewhere else. Has steel entered her soul…..
She is wearing a black suit with a faint stripe and not-too-high black patent shoes. More daggers than rapiers. On the way out of the Series Commisioner’s office, her head down, her narrow face harbouring shadows, she passes a senior producer who once propositioned her at a Corporation party. He has been awkward with her since, though she has never held a proposition against any man. He takes her in at a glance and suppresses a shudder. He’s amazed he ever had the courage to try it on. She looks like an assassin, he thinks…
If you are in the vicinity come and here me talk about What Will Survive Of Us on Feb 28 - see below
An Evening with Howard Jacobson◆
We welcome esteemed writer and Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson as our first Book Club guest of 2024. Howard will be showcasing his new novel, What Will Survive of Us, and will be interviewed about his latest work, inspirations, and writing processes by our fantastic host for the evening, Joe Haddow.
What Will Survive of Us is an original homage to love in later life and a provocative look at infidelity, desire, and what is left when we strip away every layer.
There will be an opportunity for an audience Q&A and copies of the book will be available to buy and have signed by Howard on the night.
Joe Haddow returns as our fantastic Book Club host for the evening. Joe is an author and broadcaster; he runs the Radio 2 Book Club, chairs literary events across the country and is the host of the popular Book Off! Podcast.
Early arrival is recommended. Pre-drinks and refreshments will be available to purchase on the night from 7pm. No pre-reading is required – just book your ticket and come along.
Ticket price: £15.00
Wed 28 Feb
2024
St Helen’s School ◆ 7:00pm St Helen's School
Eastbury Road, Northwood, HA6 3AS
01923 843270
Books are available for purchase on the night, in association with Chorleywood Bookshop.Get In Touch
St Helen's School
Eastbury Road, Northwood, HA6 3AS
01923 843270
When this happens, it is indeed KERPOW! I look forward to reading the whole book. Great writing.
Marvelous writing and superb wit. Bravo!