Stories: All-New Tales

I was sad. “It’s too late, Jenny.” Those stories were over.

I went up to Windermere, phoned Rex and Chick, but Chick was frosty. Did I know I had almost broken them up? I apologized. I said how much I regretted what had happened. Rex, just as distant and haughty, put the phone down on me. I saw them in Kendal once or twice and in Grasmere. They wouldn’t speak to me. Once, over his shoulder, Rex gave me the most peculiar leer. Did he wish we were still deceiving Chick? It made me shudder. Was something wrong with him?

Of course I longed to be back with Helena but she’d settled down with a jolly Scottish chef and was doing her best work. Why would she want to change that?

Even though our pillow talk inspired a couple of shorts, I really hated having been part of Jenny’s daisy chain. Some of those people I never wanted to see again, others I needed distance from; I wasn’t ready to see Charlie Ratz or Jonny Fowler yet. Pete was still missing in France, presumed dead. I gave up any interest in Mysterious, which was now doing fine without me, bought a house near Ingleton, West Yorks, and settled in first with Emma MacEwan, who couldn’t stand the rain and cold, and then started seeing a local woman who disapproved of central heating. I desperately hoped to restore my friendship with Rex, even after I met Lucinda, to this day the love of my life. Lu found my obsession weird, I know, until she eventually met Rex in Leeds, at a Ted Hughes literary weekend we’d all been invited to. Lu’s teenage daughter loved Rex’s work and wanted him to autograph her books. She was too shy to ask him, so Lucy, her fair hair flying and blue eyes blazing, marched up to the table where he was sitting and said: “I gather you’re Mike’s old friend. Well, I’m his new wife and this is my daughter, who’s read most of your work and loves it. I think it’s pretty good, too. So what about some autographs and while you’re at it why don’t you two shake hands?” And, that being just one of her powers, we did.

Later at the bar Rex told me Chick blamed me for the infamous “seduction.” At that idea we continued to laugh for the rest of the day, until the next, when Chick turned up, glaring when he saw us, and Lucinda, nearly six feet herself, took him in hand as well. “It’s all over,” she said. “If you’re going to blame anyone, blame that poor, barmy bitch Jenny. She got you all involved in her folly and now look at you.” And when Chick grumbled that Rex was still seeing Jenny, which surprised me, Lu said: “Well, she’s poison as far as I can tell, and he doesn’t need her now he has Mike back.” Chick teared up then. He told her I was the best friend Rex had ever had but I had betrayed them both. Which again I admitted. And the following weekend Lu and I went up and stayed with them. On our way home she said: “You two could make Jeremiah roll about on the floor laughing himself sick.”

I didn’t know why Rex went on seeing Jenny, unless he simply enjoyed wounding Chick. He still had that cruel streak in him. Chick and I talked about it. Chick thought it had to be directed at him, too. He guessed Jenny was a substitute for me, especially when Rex dropped Jenny so soon after we were reconciled. She still phoned him.

I saw Jenny myself a few times after that. She seemed more her old self in some ways. She’d had twins and was living with her mother in Worthing, on the Sussex coast. She had the washed-out look of so many single mothers, said she was happy, if poor, and even suggested my “sexual conservatism” had dulled me down. Next time I bumped into her in Kensington High Street she was again pale, overpainted, dyed up. She looked as if all the vitality had been sucked from her. I thought she was doing junk. Her eyes were back to blank. Was she living in London? Did she have someone? She laughed and looked even more devitalized. “None of your business,” she said. I couldn’t argue with that.

Of course, I was curious to know what she and Rex had been up to. I guessed she hadn’t accepted that he’d dropped her. At a party in Brighton a year or two later she looked worse than ever, clinging to Rupert Herbert, one of those new Low Tories on the Spectator. More makeup, too blond and getting through a packet of Gauloises a minute. I did really feel sorry for her. Then Rex turned up and snubbed her so royally he pissed me off, so I made a point of going over to talk to her but she snubbed me in turn. Lucinda came over and murmured “poor bitch” and meant it. Between us the Mysterious crew had ruined a nice, unimaginative girl, she thought. Not entirely fair. You could hear Jenny over the general buzz talking about some famous film producer she’d lived with. He’d been the one who bought The Vices of Tom from Rex and then turned it into that pot of toss. “The bastard…,” she was saying. You could guess the rest. Maybe Lu was right.

For the next ten years or so life settled into routines nobody felt like messing with though Rex grew increasingly unreasoning in his arguments with editors, then publishers, then agents until almost nobody would work with him. His books didn’t sell enough for any editor to bother keeping him sweet. He took offence easily and frequently and, through his vengeful verse, publicly. Chick said he could no longer manage him. I would have thought this a good thing. I believed Chick’s natural leanings towards convention and literary respectability pushed Rex away from his saving self-mocking vulgarity. Balzac and Vautrin were less his models than Proust or Albertine. His work seemed to apologise for itself. He lost his popular touch without gaining critical prestige. Only Mary Stone went on making money for them. His short stories came out less frequently, but he kept his habit of phoning and often reading the whole thing to you. And he still enjoyed inventing a story when he got your answering machine. “Oh, I know what you’re doing. You’ve met that good-looking farmer again and gone badger watching with him.” Usually the time would be up before he could complete his fantasy. His new novels tended to peter out after a few chapters. I’d get frustrated and consider continuing them for him. They were wonderful ideas. Occasionally they would reemerge when a way of telling them occurred to him. His aptitude for ironic narrative verse never left him. I’d labour for hours to get anything close to what usually took him minutes. Chick helped him develop his taste for classical music, which is how he came to write his three operas, one of which he based on Kersh’s The Brazen Bull and another on Balzac’s Illusions Perdue but he became snobbish about popular music or he’d have written some great lyrics. I used a few of his verses in my own music stuff. I inserted another into one of my hack thrillers, its redeeming feature. His only opera to reach the stage was a version of Firbank’s Cardinal Pirelli. Rex delighted in upsetting Catholics, although his attacks meant little to most of us.