Chatterton Page 13

  ‘It’s Chatterton in middle age.’

  She took another spoonful of gin, trying to remember something of her conversation with Sarah Tilt. There was a line about a bough, or a branch, being cut… ‘But wasn’t he the boy who committed suicide?’

  ‘That’s just the point. He didn’t kill himself. He carried on writing in other poets’ names.’

  ‘You mean, he was a plagiarist?’ A change had come over Harriet’s face, and she turned away for a moment. ‘This medicine is bitter,’ she said to the alcove. But, when she turned back to face Charles, she took the portrait from him and scrutinised it. ‘He looks like Matthew Arnold,’ she said. ‘Not my cup of tea at all.’ She put the painting down. ‘Did they catch him?’ Charles was obviously puzzled by her question. ‘Did they expose him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know. The guardians of the town, of course.’ It was an odd phrase, and Harriet had crossed her fingers behind her back as she said it.

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that. He wasn’t doing anything wrong –’

  ‘I know!’ she said loudly.

  ‘– and in any case he confessed everything. You see, this is really what I wanted to show you.’ And he handed her the photocopies of the manuscripts which he had discovered in Bristol.

  She held them out at arm’s length. ‘They look,’ she said slowly, ‘as if they were written in the year dot.’

  For a moment Charles had an image of a blank television screen. ‘He wrote them about 1810.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, very seriously, ‘that’s before my time.’

  He ignored this. ‘I was hoping to find a publisher quite quickly.’ Oh God, another book, was Harriet’s first thought as Charles continued. ‘It will destroy all the academic theories. They were all completely wrong.’

  ‘Really? That is good news.’ Harriet had always been angered by the marginal attention which academic critics paid to her; in fact, she considered anyone teaching at a university to be a personal enemy. ‘Let them eat cake,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you mean humble pie?’

  She waved the empty glass at Charles. ‘What do they know of Harriet Scrope who only Harriet Scrope know? I mean cake. Now tell me the story again.’ And so Charles explained once more the history of Thomas Chatterton and his forgeries. In her excitement, Harriet put her hands between her thighs and squeezed them – with such vigour, in fact, that when Charles came to the end of his narrative they emerged bloodless and shrunken.

  ‘… I’ll be rolling in clover,’ Charles was saying.

  ‘Who’s Clover?’

  ‘– that is, if I can publish them.’

  She got up with a shriek. ‘Of course we can publish them! They’ll never be able to ignore us now!’ Charles was not quite sure what she meant by ‘us’ and then she added, almost as an afterthought, ‘Why don’t you leave all the papers with me, Charles? I’m very good with old things.’ Charles was about to turn down her generous offer, but in any case the momentary look of alarm on his face was enough to warn Harriet that she had said too much. ‘Silly me,’ she added. ‘We can talk about the trivial details later.’ She smiled reassuringly at him as she changed the subject. ‘Don’t you think, dear,’ she went on, ‘that we ought to have a session on my book now? It will cheer us both up.’

  Charles had forgotten that he was supposed to be helping Harriet with her memoirs, but now he assumed a look of pleasurable anticipation. That would be very nice,’ he said. He was still wondering what Harriet had meant by ‘us’.

  She walked into her study, which was on the opposite side of the hallway, and after a few moments called out, ‘Perhaps Mother is another Chatterton! Perhaps I go back thousands of years!’ She returned as suddenly as she had left, carrying in front of her a pile of typewritten pages which she dumped on Charles’s lap with a look of distaste. ‘That silly bitch typed them out but –’ and here she imitated her previous assistant’s high quavering voice – ‘it seemed to her, actually, that she didn’t know what to do with them. As it were.’ And all the time she spoke she was looking at the bag filled with the Chatterton manuscripts.

  Charles began leafing through the papers she had given him. On some of them there were paragraphs or sentences, while on others only certain names and dates had been typed. ‘You should keep it as it is,’ he said. ‘It could be a poem.’

  ‘But I don’t want to write a poem. I want to write a book.’

  Charles put his head to one side and smiled at her. ‘What’s the difference, really?’

  She stared at him for a moment. ‘You ought to know.’ Instantly she regretted her tone and added, sweetly, ‘You ought to know what I mean. You’ve managed to do both, haven’t you?’

  ‘What was it Montaigne said, I no more make the book than the book makes me?’

  ‘What a lovely thought, Charles.’ She paused, uncertain how to go on. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’

  ‘Not me, Montaigne.’

  ‘Well, who’s counting?’ She glanced down at the Chatterton manuscripts again and, as she stood over Charles, tried surreptitiously to move them towards her with her foot. But the bag fell over and Harriet said, quickly and loudly, ‘Now go on. Ask me something about the notes I dictated to the silly little bitch. Oh look, your bag has fallen over. You should take more care of it. Let me pick it up and put it somewhere safe.’

  ‘It’s fine, Harriet. It’s quite safe here.’ He beamed up at her and she turned away, scowling, to find a chair.

  ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Ask me a question.’

  Charles extracted a page of the typewritten notes and read out, in an uncertain voice, ‘1943. The Collage. John Davenport. T.S. Eliot. The Hotel Russell.’

  ‘I was drunk every day then, and twice on Thursdays.’ She was delighted by her memory of this, although in fact it was only a line from one of her novels.

  ‘Who was Davenport?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Some nobody, probably.’ She was beginning to feel the panic again – the panic which was aroused whenever she was questioned about the past. ‘Now Eliot was a sweetie. He published my first two novels.’ She was trying hard to remain calm. ‘Not that he knew anything about fiction, of course. Are you taking this down, dear?’ Charles had been doodling on the paper – dead faces, with no eyes – but now he began to write as she talked. ‘It was Djuna Barnes who recommended me. She was a dreadful woman, really.’ Harriet sighed. ‘She was a lesbo, you know. And an American.’ She shook herself, as if her old-fashioned Chanel dress had suddenly grown too tight for her. ‘She tried to tongue me once. I don’t mind a few kisses and cuddles from my own sex – you know Sarah Tilt, don’t you? – but I draw the line at tongue. It’s the roughness I can’t stand. It makes me vomit.’

  Charles wrote down ‘tongue’ and then stopped. ‘Do you want me to mention this?’

  ‘Well, I hope she’s dead by now.’ Harriet had another moment of anxiety. ‘She is dead, isn’t she?’

  ‘I’ll look her up.’

  ‘That’s where you’ll come in so handy, Charles. Looking things up.’ She yawned, and hastily tried to cover her mouth. ‘And then Eliot took me to the Hotel Russell. But only for tea, you know.’ She closed her eyes and her fingers quivered slightly on her lap; it was her customary way of conceiving her fiction. ‘Not that I wasn’t a very beautiful young woman. Oh yes. People used to stare at me in the street.’ She opened her eyes suddenly, and looked at him. They would come from miles around just to see my legs.’ Charles was astonished by this, and she laughed. ‘Don’t worry, dear. Mother’s only joking. She never was an oil-painting.’ Then she sighed. ‘But Eliot took me under his wing.’

  Charles stopped writing for a moment, and looked up at her. ‘Why should the aged eagle?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a quotation from Eliot.’

  ‘It sounded like Shakespeare to me.’

  ‘It was Eliot.’

  ‘Well, you know these writers. They’ll steal any…’ And her voic
e trailed off as she looked down at her trembling hands.

  ‘Anything, that’s right.’ He leant back in his chair, and smiled benevolently in her general direction. ‘It’s called the anxiety of influence.’

  ‘Is it?’ She seemed consoled by the phrase. That’s right. Anxiety.’

  ‘Of influence.’

  ‘And of course it must be true of novelists, too.’ She paused, and licked her lips. ‘No doubt,’ she went on, ‘there are resemblances between my books and those of other writers.’

  ‘You mean like Harrison Bentley?’ Charles only just remembered Philip’s remark of the previous evening, and now brought it out triumphantly as an indication of his wide reading.

  ‘What was that?’ The colour had gone from Harriet’s face, and Charles could see the grains of rose powder on her cheeks. She seemed to have some difficulty in speaking. ‘I don’t, you know. Is it?’ She got up from her chair. ‘I’ve lost something,’ she said and hurried from the room. She ran upstairs and went straight into her bedroom, stopping before the full-length mirror on her wardrobe. ‘Mother’s in trouble,’ she said to her reflection. ‘Mother’s in big trouble.’ Then she unzipped her red dress, flung it onto the bed with a cry of derision, and took out from the wardrobe an old brown skirt and sweater which she hastily put on. ‘You’re adorable,’ she said. ‘But now you must think. Think!’ She went out to the top of the stairs and called down to Charles, ‘I’ll be a few minutes!’ Then she added, ‘Female problems!’ But Charles did not hear this. He was gazing out of the window, the papers falling from his hands, his attention as wide and as blank as the sky to which he longed to flee.

  Harriet sat on the edge of the bed, watching the creases in her leather shoes as she curled and uncurled her toes, wondering how it was that Charles had found the connection between her work and that of Harrison Bentley: this was the discovery which she had always feared, this was the revelation which she had suppressed but which had provoked so much anxiety in her. It was inconceivable that Charles had learnt this for himself, he was far too lazy. Someone must have alerted him… perhaps there was an article about her in the Times Literary Supplement… perhaps she was about to be exposed. She kicked the wardrobe door shut with her foot, and in its mirror the room swung violently around her.

  This is what had happened: her first novel had enjoyed a modest success when it was published in the early Fifties. It was the work of a stylist, and had been praised by other stylists; kind words from Djuna Barnes and Henry Green were printed on the back of the American edition. It had taken Harriet six years to complete (while working as a secretary for a small literary magazine) since she wrote very slowly, sometimes composing no more than a sentence or even a phrase each day. She told herself that words were ‘sacred’, however, gradually forming their own associations and gathering in their own clusters of significant sound; when they were ready, they informed Harriet of their presence and she was content to transcribe them. As far as she was concerned, that was all. The only continuity which her novel possessed lay somewhere within the workings of her own consciousness.

  And so after the first novel she could see no further ahead: she had brought her consciousness ‘up to date’, as she put it, and she was not at all sure that she could expect any more progress from it. The words had vanished just as mysteriously as they had once arrived. Her friends and colleagues expected another novel from her, she knew, but the prospect of writing it bewildered her: she could not find within herself any strong connection with the world, and so she could find no method of describing it. Even when she did manage to write something, her inspiration seemed random and inconsequential; she would have an ‘idea’ when shopping, or when sitting on a bus, but then it became clear to her that if she had not needed to shop that day, or travel in that particular direction, the idea or phrase would never have emerged. This made her work seem frail, even worthless. And, really, she had nothing whatever to write about.

  It was then that the notion of adapting a plot from some other source occurred to her. For two weeks she read all of the most interesting stories in the newspapers, but she found anything even remotely connected with actual life baffling. She even tried following people in the street, to see where they went and whom they met, but one unpleasant scene (when an old man had rounded on her and called her a ‘tart’) convinced her that this was not wise. Then one late afternoon in May, bored by herself and by her failure, she walked into a second-hand bookshop off Chancery Lane. Normally such places depressed her since she could easily imagine her own work lying forgotten on their shelves, but now she found a strange comfort in the rows of dusty books which surrounded her. She picked out at random The Last Testament by Harrison Bentley and, even as she began to read it, she realised that here was the answer to her problem. Since she believed that plots themselves were of little consequence, why should she not take this one and use it as a plain, admittedly inferior, vessel for her own style? So she bought the old novel, and set to work. And, with the story of The Last Testament to support her, she found that the words came more easily than before. Where phrases and even syllables had once emerged as fragments of a larger structure which she could neither see nor understand, now she could make her own connections; she went on from sentence to sentence, as if she were carrying a lamp and moving from room to room in a large mansion. And she looked about her with wonder, sensing her ability to describe what she was seeing now for the first time.

  This second novel, A Finer Art, was also a success; once again she was praised for her style (the Manchester Guardian called her a ‘lepidopterist of language’) and the fact that the plot of the novel was described only in the vaguest terms encouraged her to use another Harrison Bentley narrative for her next book. But her confidence had increased with her ability, and in The Whipping Post she adapted only the beginning of his Stage Fire. She altered the characters, changed their relationships, and, by the end, only the barest outline of Bentley’s initial situation remained in place (of course, this was all Philip Slack had understood from the précis which he had read in the damp basement of the public library). The experience of employing a plot, even though it was the invention of some other writer, had liberated her imagination; and, from that time forward, all her novels were her own work. But in recent years even this originality had begun to bore her. Once she had derived enormous pleasure from seeing her characters move and develop through time, but the spectacle no longer charmed her. She recalled with pleasure only the writing of her earliest novel, with all its obliquities and discordancies; and, for the first time, she began to admire her own nervousness and isolation during that period. She had allowed the language to carry her forward; she had not tried to direct it. She had been a serious writer then, a proper writer: she had not known what she was trying to say.

  It was this new sense of her own life which had intensified her anxiety about the use of Harrison Bentley’s novels. She had forgotten the early episode – at least, she had dismissed it as of no particular account – but, when she began to contemplate the writing of her memoirs, this act of plagiarism acquired a prominence which she had not since been able to challenge. She could see no way around it. She could not bring herself to admit the borrowing, and this mainly for reasons of pride; but, even if she did not herself confess to it, the plagiarism might in any case be discovered and an unwarranted suspicion cast over the rest of her work – even over her first novel. Anxious reflection had so nourished the problem that it seemed to encompass the whole of her past. There was no escape from it. So now she sat upon the edge of the bed, her hand clasped to her forehead as the wardrobe door slammed shut.

  But it was with a noble calmness that she eventually descended the stairs. ‘Mother’s back!’ she shouted when she was half way down. ‘She was straining her greens/ she added, rather grandly, as she entered the room.

  Charles did not know this phrase. ‘For dinner?’

  She was so intent on what she was about to say that she answered quite factual
ly. ‘No, not for dinner. I’m thinking of spaghetti tonight.’ Roused from his daydream by her voice, Charles started making random pencil marks on the side of the pages she had given him. She watched him with apparent fascination and then asked, very sweetly, ‘What were you saying about Harrison Bentley?’ She scratched her arm viciously and then left her hand poised in mid-air as Charles continued to be preoccupied with her notes.

  ‘Oh. Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing!’

  Something in her voice made Charles look up, and he noticed how her left eyelid was trembling. ‘I just meant…’ He hesitated. ‘I just didn’t think that it was very important.’

  ‘No, you’re right. It isn’t important.’ She put her hand up to her trembling eye, and Charles tried not to laugh as the remaining eye stared calmly at him. Slowly she pulled her hand down across her face, the eyelid peaceful now, and then wagged her finger at him. ‘You’ve been a naughty boy, you know. You’ve found Mother out. Bentley did influence me once, but that was a long time ago.’ She spoke without thought since these were words she had rehearsed many times before. ‘In any case novelists don’t work in a vacuum. We use many stories. But it’s not where they come from, it’s what we do with them. I’ve found lots of material elsewhere but no one –’ and here her voice rose slightly – ‘no one has ever accused me of plagiarism!’

  ‘No. That’s right.’ He did not quite know what to say. That’s why it wasn’t important. I didn’t accuse you.’

  Charles’s benign reaction was unexpected, and at once his unconcern began to remove her own fears. The telephone rang, but she ignored it for a few moments as she stared at him in relief. ‘You mean, it doesn’t matter? You haven’t read about me anywhere?’

  ‘Of course not. Why should it matter? Everyone does it.’

  Her telephone answering machine had already whirred into action. ‘This is Harriet Scrope. I am not here –’ In her profound and sudden relief Harriet dashed to the telephone, switched off the recording and shrieked, ‘It’s me! It’s Harriet Scrope in the flesh!’ It was Sarah Tilt. ‘Oh darling, I was just talking about you!’ She winked at Charles and, putting her hand over the mouthpiece, whispered, ‘One of my happier white lies.’ She turned her attention back to Sarah’s voice. ‘Don’t tell me now, darling. If you’re just around the corner, come over. Charles is here. He’s dying to meet you.’ There was a pause. ‘Charles Wychwood. The poet.’ She put down the receiver.