Love You Madly

ALEX GEORGE

LOVE YOU MADLY

For Hallam

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Keep Reading

About the Author

Author’s Note

Praise

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

I gaze at the solitary stalagmite of calcified chewing gum six inches in front of my face and wonder whether this was such a good idea.

The column of gum sprouts incongruously out of the carpet, a tiny grey phallus. Nearby lie two chocolate-covered raisins, an old Fruit Pastille, and a sprinkling of spilled popcorn. The carpet rubs against my cheek as I contemplate this eclectic menu.

When the lights finally go down, I gingerly pull myself up from my hiding place on the floor, and sink silently into my seat. A stark, sombre chord echoes through the cinema, and the dirty wooden sign materialises on the screen, barely legible in the half-light: No Trespassing. The ghostly silhouette of Xanadu emerges from the fog as the music rises to a strident crescendo. Then those famous lips fill the screen and whisper their anguished elegy to a lost childhood. Rosebud.

As the film’s opening images crash on to the screen, instead of the usual shiver of delightful anticipation, I feel nothing but cold, gnawing anxiety.

Upturned empty seats stretch out on either side of me, easy escape routes in both directions. The auditorium is almost deserted. I watch the solitary figure ten rows ahead of me. My wife’s arm stretches into the carton between her knees as she rhythmically shovels handfuls of yellow popcorn into her mouth. I gaze at her flickering silhouette.

What is she doing here?

I was introduced to the delights of Citizen Kane on my first date with Anna, while we were still at university. She didn’t suspect then that we would eventually marry and do all that happy-ever-after stuff. (Me, I knew. I’d already known for months.) Anna was a big film buff back then, and she told me, half serious, that she couldn’t go out with anyone who didn’t love Orson Welles. I nervously confessed that I’d never seen any of his films. Shocked, she insisted on taking me to see Citizen Kane, which was showing in a small repertory cinema in north Oxford. I agreed, blinking in disbelief: this girl had even spared me the anguish of asking her out, that ritual dance with the spectre of impending humiliation.

After the film, I lavished extravagant praise on its radical camera angles, the playful chronology, the myriad techniques which Welles had borrowed from his earlier experiments in radio. This spontaneous and instinctive criticism was delivered in a breathless, hurried monologue, and poached verbatim from a film guide that I had anxiously studied that afternoon in Blackwells. It didn’t fool Anna for a moment, of course, but something about the nervy chutzpah of my performance persuaded her to accept my dry-mouthed invitation to dinner later that week.

Once she had decided that I was going to be worth the effort, Anna launched me on a crash-course in film history. She dragged me to countless screenings of old films, all fabulously obscure and exotically subtitled. I went along in a haze of ecstatic bewilderment. We could have been watching paint dry, for all I cared; I just wanted to be with her.

Still, I paid attention. After a few months, I was able to spot abstruse cinematic references at fifty paces, with one eye on the screen and one hand down Anna’s knickers. I could distinguish Kurosawa from Kubrick, Peckinpah from Polanski. But I still loved Citizen Kane the most. Its story of a vain, lonely man in search of love pinned me back in my seat every time. And, of course, it was the flame that first welded our lives together.

I watch Anna as she impassively guzzles popcorn, her face tilted towards the screen like a flower to the sun. By now I thought I would be shadowing her through the infernal misery of an Oxford Street Saturday afternoon. But when she left the flat, rather than turning towards the Tube station, she strode purposefully in the direction of Haverstock Hill. She arrived in front of the cinema exactly ten minutes before the film was due to begin, and stepped inside without a moment’s hesitation. It was all too neat to be a coincidence, too convenient to be excused as a sudden change of plan. Besides, Anna is hardly the impulsive type. Which means that her story about the shopping trip was a considered, deliberate lie.

Suspicion and fear cloud my thoughts.

This was a mistake. I should not be here. Forgive me my trespass.

But what’s done is done: the past slams shut behind us.

After an hour I slip quietly out of the cinema. As I walk back towards Camden in the winter sunshine, I try and assimilate what I have seen. Questions ricochet around my head. Why is Anna not shopping? What possible reason could she have to lie to me?

Back in the flat, my worries continue to smash into each other, causing a multiple pile-up at the front of my brain. I collapse on to the sofa, thinking black thoughts.

Today, of all days.

Anna arrives home at half past six. She kisses me on the cheek, and lights a cigarette.

I have changed into my smartest suit. Two days of carefully-monitored stubble lurks on my chin, roguishly subversive. Anna takes a step backwards and gazes at me critically, before letting out a low whistle of appreciation.

‘Phwoar, bloody hell,’ she squawks in her best Cockney.

‘How was the shopping?’ I ask stiffly.

There is a terrible pause as Anna crosses the sitting room. She calmly flicks her ash into the ashtray on the window sill and turns back towards me. ‘Awful,’ she says.

I stare at her. ‘Awful? Awful how?’

Anna shrugs. ‘Couldn’t find anything I liked. That’s all.’ She gestures around her. ‘Hence the lack of bulging bags.’ She exhales a thin column of smoke, not looking at me.

There is no mention of Citizen Kane, no last-gasp confession. My wife is lying to me. ‘Oh,’ I say, stunned. ‘I’m sorry.’

She waves a dismissive hand. ‘It happens. No disaster. But I’m afraid I’ll have to wear something old tonight.’

‘You’ll look wonderful anyway,’ I reply, meaning it.

Anna smiles and kisses me on the cheek. ‘Ah, Matthew, always the gallant husband. Bless you.’ She grinds her cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘Are you looking forward to the party?’

I was, I want to say.

‘Yes, I think so. I’m a bit nervous.’

‘Don’t be. You deserve to enjoy it. It’s not every day you get to celebrate the publication of your first book.’

I look at her, my heart cracking. ‘I suppose not.’

‘So what have you been up to this afternoon?’ asks Anna as she walks into the bedroom, pulling off her top as she goes.

‘Oh.’ I stare at the floor. ‘Nothing much.’

She takes a dress out of the wardrobe and holds it up to her body. ‘What do you think? Will this do? Suitably literary for you?’

I look at my wife with anxious longing. ‘It’s perfect.’

Anna grins, pleased. She puts the dress on the bed and sits down at her dressing table in her underwear, as unselfconscious as a child. She leans towards the mirror, scrutinising her face. I always enjoy watching Anna put on her make-up. She becomes wholly engrossed in these minute manoeuvres – an eyelash curled, a lip discreetly contoured. There is a touching innocence to these focused moments. As she prepares her mask, her defences momentarily come down.

I am still paralysed by Anna’s deception. ‘Where did you go on your shopping expedition, then?’ I ask.

‘Oxford Street, mainly,’ she murmurs through one side of her mouth. ‘The shops were full of terribly dull autumn stuff. And unbelievable crowds. Truly staggering, the number of people. Very few of whom were English.’ She rummages in her make-up tray and extracts a small but lethal-looking multi-pronged device. ‘I had to give directions to a Japanese couple who were looking for the South Bank Centre. Christ knows how they got quite so lost.’ I stare at her. She’s even gone to the trouble of inventing a small story for added effect. This embellishment, this arch adornment of the lie, torments me. God, I think, it’s so easy for her. She lies so well.

Anna swivels to face me and pouts. ‘What do you think?’ she asks. ‘Am I gorgeous?’

Is she gorgeous? Anna still renders me speechless on occasion. Gorgeous doesn’t do her justice. She’s exquisite. She’s stunning. Thirteen years in, she still makes my heart do back flips.

‘You’ll do,’ I say.

She smiles. ‘Actually,’ she announces, ‘I have a special treat for you.’ She leans forward and pulls open the top drawer of her dresser. ‘Look what I’ve got.’ Between her thumb and forefinger she is brandishing a fat, tightly wrapped joint, crowned by a deft twist of Rizla paper. She waves the cigarette at me. ‘Shall we?’

Anna seems utterly unencumbered by her lies. Well, fine. If it’s not going to bother her, I won’t let it bother me. Not tonight, at any rate. I try a small grin. ‘Why not?’

I follow her out of the bedroom.

Tonight is the launch party to celebrate the publication of my novel, Licked.

I have sweated blood over that book. It has taken me three and a half years to write. Licked is part paean, part eulogy, part threnody. It celebrates and mourns the passing of youth’s innocence. It unsparingly charts the descent into the emotional detritus of tarnished middle-age. Using as a central leitmotif my own schoolboy experiences of stamp collecting, the novel’s principal character, Ivo, chooses to retreat into the rarefied, musty world of philately rather than confront the harsh brutalities of life. His stamps, which he cares for like precious, exotic butterflies, are a wonderfully profound metaphor for love. Or, rather, Love. They are beyond price, yet worthless; beautiful, yet useless. The book is funny, sad, gentle, acerbic, enriching, and devastating.

Now, after years of wandering through bookshops, glancing longingly at what I have come to regard as my bit of shelf space between Nancy Mitford and Iris Murdoch, Licked is about to be published. It has taken me, in total, twelve years and five unpublished novels, but I am finally going to be able to call myself a writer. Henceforth I shall be Matthew Moore, purveyor of literary pearls.

I have dreamt of tonight’s party, my introduction to London’s literary scene, on every day of those last twelve years. Those dreams have sustained me as I ploughed my lonely furrow through the dark times, when I was annihilated by creative exhaustion, when the well of inspiration ran dry. This evening represents the triumphant culmination of all of those years of solitary work, the apotheosis of more than a decade of determined grind.

So why did Anna have to start lying to me today?

Twenty minutes later, the doorbell rings. I open the door and Sean, my literary agent, sweeps into the flat, waving a bottle of champagne at me as he goes.

‘So,’ he shouts as he walks past me into the kitchen, ‘the big day has finally dawned.’ He puts the bottle of champagne down on the table. ‘I thought we should start the evening off with a bang. Begin as you mean to go on. Get off on the right foot. It’s time for you to turn over a new leaf, Matthew. This is the beginning of a new dawn for you. All your Christmases have come at once.’ Sean turns to look at me with a messianic intensity. ‘It’s time for you to step up to the plate, walk into the spotlight, knock their socks off. Are you ready to be the toast of the town?’

I lean against the kitchen wall, dazed by the linguistic roadkill that Sean employs instead of conversation. I can feel my spirit being crushed beneath the weight of all those mangled metaphors. ‘Hi, Sean,’ I say.

Sean flaps a flamboyant hand at me in greeting and carries on. ‘Are you ready to take the bull by the horns, Matthew? Prepared to grasp the thistle in both hands? Are you set to take the plunge?’ He looks around him. ‘Where are your glasses?’

‘I’ll get them for you.’ I open a cupboard and pull out three champagne flutes.

Anna walks into the kitchen. ‘Hi, Sean,’ she says.

‘Hello, gorgeous,’ says Sean. ‘You look like a million dollars.’ There is a brief pause as Sean opens the champagne and pours us each a glass. ‘A toast, then,’ he says solemnly. He raises his glass towards me. ‘To Matthew, and his exciting career. Here’s to literary superstardom. And, of course, to Licked itself – the steamiest, sexiest novel about stamp collecting ever written. Cheers.’

We drink. I let the bubbles pop against the back of my throat. ‘Thanks, Sean,’ I say.

Sean tilts his head to one side and gazes at me. ‘I mean it,’ he says. ‘Soon everyone will be talking about you. The word will spread like wildfire. Your ears will be burning.’ He smiles as he drinks his champagne. ‘Everyone will want a piece of you. They’ll be after you ten to the dozen, as quick as a flash, faster than the speed of light.’

‘Well, I hope so,’ I say. Sean is one of the most successful literary agents in the country. His client list reads like a Who’s Who of famous and successful authors. I’ve never been quite sure why he agreed to represent me. Perhaps I am a speculative play for future greatness. Perhaps I am a tax loss. I haven’t dared to ask.

Our earlier joint was, in retrospect, a mistake. It has relaxed Anna: she giggles as she chases it down with champagne. I, on the other hand, have become edgy. The fringes of my consciousness have become tinged with a hyper-real buzz. I know the relentless nudge of paranoia is not far behind.

Fired up by Sean’s infectious enthusiasm, my excitement at the approaching party grows. I know that I’m fortunate to be having a launch party at all. Neville Spencer, my publisher, doesn’t believe in them. Launch parties, he told me, are despicable, shallow affairs, an endless self-congratulatory gravy train of free booze and cliquey back-slapping. Exactly, I replied, that’s why I want one. After hours of squabbling, Neville finally conceded, with considerable bad grace, and promised to look after everything. I just have to turn up. The venue he has chosen is in Shoreditch (sufficiently modish, I feel), and is called Il Cavallo Bianco, which sounds perfect. As I quaff the champagne, I wonder who has been invited. Industry big-shots, journalists, perhaps a celebrity or two. I have been practising my lines, trying to perfect the sort of self-deprecating modesty that every author on the verge of greatness should aspire to.

Anna looks perfect in her dress, a dramatic, dark red thing, very Daphne du Maurier. She is wearing a shawl over her shoulders to protect against the November chill. We quickly finish the bottle of champagne and go outside to look for a taxi. Half an hour later, we arrive at the address Neville has given me.

‘Some mistake, surely,’ says Sean.

I check my piece of paper with the address on it. ‘This is right, I’m sure.’

We are standing in front of a dirty, modern pub, within gobbing distance of the concrete outposts of a vast, graffiti-strewn housing estate. A streak of neon flickers in the grimy window and tattered pennants hang limply over the door. A blackboard on the pavement announces ‘EXOTIC DANCEING LUNCHTIMES’.

‘What did Neville say the name of the place was?’ asks Anna.

‘Il Cavallo Bianco.’ I look around me. ‘It must be near here somewhere.’

Anna nudges me in the ribs. ‘This is it,’ she says. She points to the mock gold letters on the pub’s frontage. ‘The White Horse,’ she says. ‘Or Il Cavallo Bianco, if you happen to be Italian.’

‘Oh, bollocks,’ I mutter.

‘I think Neville’s been having a little joke with you,’ observes Anna.

There is a pause. ‘Well,’ I say, gesturing towards the front door. ‘Shall we?’

Inside the pub, Neville and his wife Patricia are standing by the bar, drinking half pints of lager. Together, they make a peculiar sight. Patricia is extremely tall. Neville, on the other hand, is very short.

Fed up with the crass commercialism of the British publishing industry, six years ago Neville Spencer established his own publishing house, Wellington Press – named in honour of the Iron Duke’s famous riposte to a blackmailer to publish and be damned. Coincidentally, Wellington’s exhortation is also a cogent description of Neville’s business practice. Everybody hates him. He is fractious, aggressive, and truculent. His antagonistic, curve ball approach to the business of selling books has publishing wallahs throughout London shuddering over their gins and tonics.

Neville, though, is unique in the publishing industry, because he’s actually interested in books. Sales figures and business plans, by contrast, are anathema to him. The suggestion that one should even try and make money out of selling books produces torrents of foul-mouthed invective. Over the years Neville has developed his own skewed criteria for measuring success. He is, basically, an incorrigible snob. He believes that there is an inverse correlation between a book’s popularity and its artistic significance. For him, obscurity is the thing. He relishes the esoteric, he celebrates the arcane. He wallows exultantly in the failure of his books to sell a single copy.

Of course, I relish the fact that I’m being published by a small, cutting-edge publishing house. It gives me instant cachet, immediate, ready-to-wear literary spurs. But there are times when I wish that Wellington Press wasn’t quite so cutting edge. It would be nice, for example, if Neville was at least on nodding terms with the concept of a marketing budget. As it is, his idiosyncratic approach doesn’t help me earn much of a living. There would be no chance of earning out my advance if it wasn’t so very, very small.

Neville and Patricia appear to be the only people in the pub. Quite how Neville has managed to find such an unprepossessing place for a party is beyond me. It has all the cosy warmth and charm of a vandalised Portakabin. The room is harshly lit by naked bulbs dangling from the puke-coloured ceiling. In one corner is a small raised platform with coloured lights dotted around its periphery, presumably the venue for the lunchtime strippers. Two battered speakers are bracketed high up on the wall; cobwebs dangle from them like discarded underwear. Immediately in front of the stage is a carpet of cigarette ends, a legacy from this afternoon’s crowd. It seems that the punters like to get up close for a good view.

We approach the bar. ‘Hi, Neville,’ I say. ‘Il Cavallo Bianco, eh? Very funny.’

Neville smiles thinly. ‘Yes, well. You have to let me have my little laugh.’

‘Indeed,’ I say, wondering why Neville’s little laughs always have to be at my expense. ‘So, what, have you booked this place out for the evening?’

‘You’re joking,’ he says. ‘No need. It’s always empty. Even on a Saturday.’

‘Ah.’ My spirits sink a little lower. I turn to survey the rest of the pub, and see that in fact we are not quite alone. In one corner, two skinheads are slumped over a table. A scrawny dog lies asleep on the floor next to them. ‘Clever old you,’ I say.

‘You know Patricia, don’t you?’ says Neville.

Indeed I do.

Patricia Spencer is the reason why Neville can afford to indulge in his financially suicidal publishing venture. She is one of the bestselling novelists in the country, and vastly rich. Under the sobriquet of Candida Divine, she churns out nineteenth-century sagas of deprived childhoods in Northern industrial towns. Her novels all have the same poor-girl-conquers-impossible-odds-to-fulfil-her-hitherto-mocked-childhood-ambition-and-then-finds-True-Love-only-to-have-it-cruelly-snatched-away-two-chapters-from-the-end plot. Her stories have an astronomically high mortality rate: the characters are ruthlessly killed off to boost the Kleenex count. It’s drivel. And what the millions of readers who avidly devour her books don’t know is that Candida Divine, whose ear for regional accents has been heralded as ‘ringingly authentic’ by the Daily Telegraph, arrived in Britain from Jamaica when she was five years old.

Patricia Spencer makes Grace Jones look like an under-nourished pussycat. She towers over most men, myself included. Her pneumatic body is all sleek muscles and well-toned limbs. She has a long, swan-like neck. Her head is shaven. She has big white teeth, which she flashes occasionally from within her large, luxurious brown lips. She possesses an untouchable, ineffable elegance, and moves with impossible grace.

She’s the most terrifying woman I’ve ever met.

Obviously, I fancy the pants off her.

‘Hi, Patricia,’ I say, standing on tiptoe to kiss her cheek. She has an exotic, feral scent. I inhale deeply while I’m up there.

‘Matt. And Anna. How nice.’ Patricia looks down at us and smiles. I stand there and grin stupidly.

Sean walks up to Neville and pumps his hand with gusto. Neville’s distaste is obvious to everyone, except Sean. In Neville’s opinion, agents are the equivalent of amoeba in the literary food chain. Parasitic amoeba, at that. Not that Sean is at the bottom of the food chain, though. No: that place is reserved for me. As an author, I’m little more than a necessary inconvenience to the whole process of publishing books, an unavoidable irritant, like the maiden aunt who must be invited to family get-togethers but who always drinks too much sherry and ends up complaining about her haemorrhoids. That’s me. I am that pissed, pile-plagued spinster.

‘I suppose you all want a drink,’ says Neville sourly.

‘That would be great,’ I say. Anna and Sean nod.

‘Well, there’s the bar,’ replies Neville, pointing.

‘Right,’ I laugh.

I wait.

‘I’ll have a pint, if you’re buying,’ says Neville.

With a disbelieving sigh, I extract my wallet. As I distribute the drinks a few minutes later, I ask, ‘So Neville, who else is coming to this bash, then? Journalists? Booksellers? Any celebs?’

Neville snorts. ‘Do me a fucking favour,’ he says. ‘That lot? Parasites.’

‘Who have you invited?’ asks Sean.

‘Well, all of you, obviously.’ Neville calmly takes a sip of his drink.

‘That’s it?’ I say, dismayed.

‘That’s it.’

‘Oh.’ I pause. ‘Did you bring some books along?’

Neville looks at me oddly. ‘Now why would I want to do that?’

I hesitate. ‘It’s just that, I don’t know, a book launch without any actual books seems a bit peculiar.’

‘Well, I’m very sorry, Matthew,’ says Neville sardonically. ‘No books.’

There is an awkward pause.

‘This is certainly less run-of-the-mill than most book launches I’ve been to,’ remarks Sean doubtfully. ‘I love it, though. It’s gritty. It’s real. It has a certain je ne sais quoi.’

‘It’s a disaster, is what it is,’ I retort.

‘A working launch,’ suggests Anna.

‘Ha ha,’ I say, unamused.

‘We’re all out to launch,’ says Anna.

‘All right, sweetheart,’ I say.

Anna points at Patricia, then at herself. ‘We’re ladies who launch.’

Now Sean decides to join in.

‘There’s no such thing as a free launch,’ he says, looking very pleased with himself.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ I mutter.

‘Anyway, cheers,’ says Neville ill-naturedly. ‘Here’s to Licked.’