Kill Your Darlings Read online

  Sometimes the result is occasionally no more than a higher form of gibberish – often a confession or outburst of domestically-directed anger too intimate for the public gaze – but quite often a paragraph of such natural grace and unforced clarity bursts forth, a gift of encouragement from the Muse, that you will be able to incorporate it later into a work in progress. Several of the more striking passages in this work, for instance, have emerged during these free-association sessions.

  Put aside a notebook for your writing workouts. Relax and stretch the sinews of your talent with no thought for the race ahead. If your daily exercise has quality, that is simply a bonus; it is the activity, not the result, that is important.

  * * *

  7

  Three days a week, Miguela, a timid Venezualan with no recognizable English would keep the dream house clean, avoiding Doug’s room and my own eyrie as if they were no-go areas run by bandits in an otherwise orderly country. On Wednesdays the garden was tended by Ned, a stooped, defeated former lawyer who, after some horrific mid-life freak-out, now lived a tranquil, and probably tranquillized, life as a handyman. Occasionally, I would hear my wife communicating in schoolgirl Spanish with Miguela or in New-Age gobbledegook with Ned but neither servant seemed to acknowledge my role in the household: when, blearily patrolling the house during a creative break, I encountered one of them, I would be granted no more than a cursory simper or a dazed nod. It was as if I were the visitor, they were part of a private security force keeping Marigold’s fiefdom in order.

  I was doing a lot of patrolling these days. My wife was having an affair. I felt more marginal than ever. On those rare occasions when, apart from Doug in his pulsating lair, the house was empty, I would attempt to confirm my suspicions, delving in the backs of underwear drawers for notes or cards, checking the contents of waste-paper baskets for a tell-tale hotel receipt, but the flawlessly designed police state that was our house admitted no sign of moral untidiness. The key evidence, of course, would be contained in Marigold’s diary or in itemized telephone bills or in our various bank statements but all such documents she kept at her office. At times like this, I regretted my decision (taken shortly after Martin had revealed in an interview that he was physically unable to open a brown envelope) to cede to my wife control of all financial matters concerning house, family and civilian life.

  My wife was having an affair. But the search for proof was not only pointless; it was humiliating. It scoured the soul. Soon, I elected to accept her ever more frequent absences, to abjure the husband’s natural right to ask snippy, resentful questions, catch the sinner in a lie, play the age-old guilt game. Writers should not have to endure such things. I took to mooning about the house like one whose hurt was beyond words.

  But there was no escaping the fact. My wife was having an affair. The evidence was there before me. She kept adultery time, becoming unavailable during weekday afternoons, attending mysterious meetings beyond the reach of telephones in the early evenings, a routine which suggested that her lover was as married as she was – more, probably. For some reason, I imagined him as being slightly younger than her, one of those smooth, well-maintained designer types who work out and wear expensive after-shave lotion. I imagined them lying in bed, after sex, in some hotel or flat across London. He would talk about his young children. She would refer to the grumpy, scuffed writer she had left at home. A mood, somewhere between regret and self-congratulation, would hang in the air over their naked bodies. It was so sad, this life of theirs (hands would roam, bodies would stir), yet they would have this moment, they would have each other.

  My wife was having an affair. When she was with me, she seemed happier, more at ease with herself. She cooked meals and hummed as she went about the domestic chores which she had once loathed. Sometimes an insulting, knowing smile would play upon her lips. She would indulge me, ask about my work, feigning interest in the erotic habits of Marcel Proust or the number of great writers who had married prostitutes or whatever arcane statistic I had discovered that day for The Book of Literary Lists. Physically she seemed changed, energized. Even her hair had taken on a new life, losing its pre-menopausal dryness and acquiring a heartbreaking natural bounce and sheen which, in my agony, I assumed was the result of some intimate organic process – a regular infusion of health-giving liquid, supplied by her lover, a general gingering up of the hormones.

  My wife was having an affair. She was getting it. She was getting it regular.

  Not that we were able to discuss any of this. For some time, we had, like many couples locked together in a long-term relationship, lived in a state of armed neutrality. The smallest hand-grenade from me could so easily provoke an exaggerated nuclear response. Territories left ignored for years might be overrun, frontiers could be shifted. Lethal weapons of marital destruction might be deployed. Once that first unprovoked act of aggression had taken place, there was no knowing where it would all end. Marigold had the weaponry. She had the fire-power to destroy me.

  Some seven or eight years after we had married, between those two great landmarks, the publication of Forever Young and the birth of my son, I had an affair with a junior publicist at my publishers. Since she is now a senior marketing executive, married with a string of children, I shall call her ‘Sarah’. It was at the time when I was the young novelist of the moment, invited around the country. Sarah was my minder, charged with arranging my routine, buying my train tickets, booking me in to hotels, ensuring that the many and various foul-ups which can occur on an author tour were kept to a minimum. Thrown together, travelling the country, book celebrity and the attractive younger woman in nurturing, wifely role: no doubt it happens all the time.

  My only surprise and disappointment was that Sarah held out until the Excelsior, Lincoln, by which time I was in a state of near combustion – the combination of interviews, public attention and the caring, almost ever-present attentions of my publicist having (any author will confirm this) a powerful eroticizing effect. Even if Sarah had been a dumpy, doe-eyed little nobody, I would have wanted her; the fact that she was slim, with showy long blonde hair, that she had read all the right books and made no secret of her independence made her irresistible. Every night our dinner-time conversations were less to do with the world of books and more with our private lives: my marital frustrations (cue the clouded, distant, tragic look of the misunderstood male artist), her restless search for a man worthy of her. Soon there were late-night drinks, silences heavy with the great unasked question, a certain amount of lengthy leave-taking outside hotel bedroom doors. Until the Excelsior, Lincoln.

  Poor innocent fool that I was, I believed my nights ‘on the road’ with Sarah had some sort of significance. I took her excessive competence in bed – almost nurse-like in its brisk, open efficiency – as a reflection of her feelings for me. The marked diminution in her daily attention to my authorly needs (insisting that I carry my own train tickets and the like) I read as a mark of the new relaxed intimacy that had developed between us. Too late I understood the nature of the romantic search to which she had so plaintively referred in our pre-coital candlelit moments, naïvely misreading the various hints she left me.

  One morning, we were lying in bed together, enjoying a few quiet moments before setting off for a mid-morning local radio interview. She was reading the proof of a new novelist she would be promoting later in the year, while I caught up with Martin’s ambition novel. I remarked, with casual joviality, that the book was crucially misnamed that a more accurate title would be Failure. ‘You should have seen the first draft,’ Sarah casually remarked, without looking up.

  ‘You read an earlier draft?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘What – the editor showed you?’

  She smiled significantly.

  ‘Martin showed you?’ I may have allowed the incredulity in my voice to show. ‘I mean, I didn’t even know you knew Martin.’

  ‘Oh, I know him.’ She glanced up briefly. ‘In fact, we had a bit of a thi
ng for a while.’

  ‘A thing? You had a thing for Martin?’

  ‘A thing with Martin. I was sure I had mentioned that.’

  ‘No. I think I would have remembered.’

  It was at a point in my career when I was still interested in the work of the small man, before his achievements, his precious success, had begun to irritate me. We were part of the same élite, covering the same general territory. In spite of his apparent arrogance and coolness, I felt that we were attuned to one another, writer to writer. I am man enough to admit that, at that particular moment in my career, I found a certain piquancy in sharing a bed with a woman who had once shared a bed with Martin.

  In a spirit of good humour, I asked Sarah whether her former lover’s erotic habits were like his prose – the hectic, self-absorbed preening, the stuttering, tough-guy swagger, the effortful cleverness that went round and round in circles before finally disappearing up itself. My curiosity may have seemed inappropriately eager because at this point Sarah laid down her book, and with much swishing of the famous mane, walked across the room (she must have been about three inches taller than Martin, incidentally), put on her silk dressing-gown and sat down on a chair on the far side of the room, looking somewhat affronted.

  ‘Let me get this straight. Are you seriously asking me what Martin Amis was like in bed?’

  ‘Of course not, don’t be disgusting. But as a writer, I – Well, come to think of it, yes, I am.’

  ‘Have you any idea how creepy that is?’

  ‘As a writer –’ I spoke with cool authority, hoping vainly to remind her that, even in these moments of relative intimacy, I was the author, she was the facilitator of interviews. ‘As a writer, I happen to take an interest in human behaviour. What would be prurience for ordinary people is the bread and butter of my artistic existence. There is, actually, a direct connection between male desire and the act of creation – what William Gass once described as “the blood-congested genital drive which energizes every great style”.’

  Sarah sat in her chair, tucking her legs up under her as if to deny me even the sight of a bare ankle. ‘In my experience, the blood-congested genital drive of writers is remarkably similar to that of any other man.’

  ‘In your experience? Since when were you the big expert on the writing life?’

  ‘We’ll be late for the interview.’ She stood up and walked briskly to the en suite bathroom, closing the door behind her.

  There were two more days of my tour, one more night, during which we made love in a perfunctory fashion that was almost marital. Sarah resisted my suggestion that I should spend a night at her flat in Fulham before I returned home.

  Years later, at this painful moment when Marigold seemed to have joined the adultery merry-go-round, I suppose I can admit that I had been hoping for an arrangement with Sarah – nothing long-term or involving emotional commitment, but a mutually advantageous liaison. I was successful, she was pretty, we were both moving in the same world. Lunches, I thought. The occasional afternoon in a flat which I imagined as small, tidy, book-lined with crisp clean sheets on the bed, family photographs on the mantelpiece, a battered teddy-bear on a corner seat. But, after our return, she became evasive, failed to return my calls, avoided accompanying me on the few signings and talks that still remained for me, sending a plump, owlish assistant in her place. When, finally, I cornered her at a literary gathering and muttered something sensitively ambiguous about our unfinished business, she smiled coldly.

  ‘Darling, it was nice, our thing. But it was just one of those … adventures that happen.’

  ‘Adventures?’

  ‘Look, to tell the truth, I’ve become a bit involved, OK? It was all great fun but … let’s just leave it, shall we?’ She squeezed my arm and walked away through a throng of guests.

  Today, I can tell them a mile off, the Sarahs de nos jours – the looks, the sparkling, ambitious eyes that fasten on their prey, the brittle, apparently brilliant conversation propelled by casual reference to the books, the films, the people of the moment. Theirs is a trainspotting approach to seduction: motivated by nothing as crude as snobbery or social climbing, they are excited by success and by writing. They sense that proximity, (extreme proximity) to a man who, at that moment, is culturally fashionable will do them good. Somehow, during those nights when they are together (always more than a crude and vulgar one-night stand but invariably less than a month), the distinction of their lover will rub off on them. Together, they will meet other revered literary figures, their liaison flattering each of them in different but entirely satisfactory ways. He will gain credibility and the sense that he is behaving badly in the time-honoured manner of authors. She will gather opinion, phrases, anecdotes, contacts that will serve her well, both socially and professionally, long after the affair has run its course.

  A bit of a thing for a while. Sarah’s description for whatever acts of sleaziness had once briefly occurred between her and Martin was characteristic: not exactly name-dropping but a casual establishment of erotic credentials. Now I can see that, for those few days, my promise and reputation were being confirmed – Sarah’s instinct in matters of literary fashion was sharp enough to be almost a defining act of credibility. If she slept with you, your career was in good shape. One day, in bed or at dinner with someone else, your name might come up in conversation. Didn’t you know? (The tone would be neither boastful nor particularly tender.) We had a bit of a thing for a while.

  All would have been fine were it not for my inclusion, two years after our little adventure, on the list of the Best of Young British Novelists, beside the names of Martin and other ageing literary youngsters. That momentary revival in my public visibility prompted my former paramour to mention my name, in the context of the thing we once had, rather too often. The adultery grapevine, a highly effective communication network among young professional women, ensured that Marigold, by then a successful young designer, heard of the affair.

  There have been others since then, more serious relationships in which love (a dirty word in adultery circles) was even mentioned, but Sarah has come to represent something lost in our marriage. A bond which neither of Marigold nor I knew existed snapped, never to be repaired. From then on, we lived in a world of half-truths and compromise. This was the common state of the long-term married, I had once believed. It was the normal, controlled misbehaviour of contemporary man and woman. I was wrong. Eventually it was no longer background; it permeated everything. We had lost something precious. I had thrown it away.

  After Sarah, infidelity became a habit – a sort of escape, a way of reassuring myself that I was not yet finished. And because my marriage had survived that first post-affair hurricane, I came to believe that it would survive others; maybe, in some admittedly cynical and superficial way, minor and regular acts of betrayal helped to keep it alive.

  What I thought was an escape from unhappiness turned out to be an essential part of it. All affairs, I discovered, are marked from their first night with a sense of the disappointment that lies ahead, like a black cross on a condemned tree. The one thing which propels normal, legitimate love is denied them: hope. However good and true and different it may be, it will eventually be just another affair. Only the manner and timing of its end are uncertain. So each new adventure provided its own version of essentially the same story: the fake excitement of secrecy, the sense of putting one over the rest of the world, of stealing love and pleasure out of the normal framework of time and situation. But the unhappiness was there, from the first glance. From the passing flights of fancy, like my brief fling with Anna Matthew of Mind and Body, to the semi-serious two-year affair with the wife of a BBC producer that, a year or so after its demise, was to provide rich comic material for my campus novel Adultery in Hampstead. Wives, authors, publicists, arts journalists, really quite a considerable number of my students, even some girls who had nothing whatsoever to do with writing: however cool and contemporary the arrangement, however sincere the
vows of non-involvement, the choice was a limited one: cynical-unhappy, with its casual, well-organized exchange of sexual release, or romantic-unhappy, a fairy-story from the Land of If-Only in which no one ever lived happily ever after.

  What were they for? All those words and promises, those dinners in deserted Italian restaurants which only survive as regular safe houses for the adultery community, those glasses of wine beside the bed, those glances at bedside alarm clocks, that careful washing away of traces in endless bathrooms, that awkward dressing in the middle of the night, those farewells – sad, loving, matter-of-fact, angry, some to a figure in a dressing-gown on a doorstep, some to a bed, some to a back – those endless arrangements and dates and times and furtive calls. What was the point of them all?

  They were not for sex, that was for sure. The heat that had existed between Marigold and me was never discovered with her substitutes and understudies. Although my lovers were usually in their twenties or early thirties, it was not their youth that I craved. As it happens, I have always preferred the older body – the warm paperiness of the skin, the various smiles and swells of the flesh which give it character. Frequently, as an affair wore on, I found myself fantasizing about my wife in order to stoke up enthusiasm for my lover, which I dare say is unusual. No, the problem, had more to do with experience. Women of my age, I discovered after a couple of unhappy experiments, knew too much. They had heard all the lines. Cynicism was in their soul. There was something in their laughter – fruity and amused – which I found off-putting. For them, it was all some sort of game, and where was the fun in that?

  Looking back now, I think that adultery was a form of fiction. With every new affair (the term’s inadequate, being both too romantic and too seedy, but it’s truer than ‘relationship’), a new narrative developed, a new voice, a new hero. That was perhaps the excitement. Meeting, sex, and then, suddenly, somewhere around chapter two or three, it was just as they say in the best writing circles – the characters took over. They started to go their own way, individual yet symbiotic, mysteriously and subtly different every time.