Love You Madly

The irony is that now I sometimes think that I would love an ordinary, boring job again. All this freedom is getting me down. Hours, days, and weeks stretch ahead of me, oppressive in their emptiness. The ordered structure of a nine-to-five existence would give me a solid framework for my life, a means of regulating the chaos. I would dearly love to be told where to put my pencil-sharpener; I yearn for a militantly officious boss. As it is, the only taskmaster I have is me, and I am a workshy dilettante at the best of times. I have the worst of both worlds. I don’t get any work done, and have nobody but myself to blame.

Another long day looms.

I go into the sitting room, and turn on the record player. The needle lands softly on the rotating vinyl, and after a moment –

Bam! The pitch-perfect trumpets punch out the jumped-up tune, the saxophones gliding smoothly beneath them. This is ‘Cotton Tail’, ladies and gentlemen, performed by the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the greatest jazz band in the world. Here comes the warm tenor sax of Ben Webster, rocking gently through his solo, prancing over the band’s tightly syncopated chords. Duke’s piano gets a few rollicking bars, and then the seamless sax section takes up the charge, followed by the swinging trumpets, spiralling ever higher.

I shut my eyes. This is the spiritual equivalent of brushing my teeth. The music leaves my soul refreshed and protected against decay. I sit on the floor, next to the speakers, and wallow in the rich symphony of jazzed horn lines which spill into the room.

Edward Kennedy Ellington, the Duke, that grand old aristocrat of jazz, was one of the music’s true pioneers. From his beginnings as a dapper and debonair band leader in 1920s Harlem, he became the friend of royalty and presidents, loved and admired the world over. He toured tirelessly throughout his career, spreading his own brand of syncopated happiness, dazzling audiences everywhere with his exciting rhythms, his unforgettable tunes, and his suave showmanship. He loved us madly – and his gift to the world was his music. Now jazz, of course, is meant to be the quintessence of cool. It’s about tortured genius, complex chord structures, jarring time-signatures. It’s about squalling saxophone solos, smoky subterranean joints, and sultry, mysterious women. Duke was as hip as they came, but this isn’t just music to smoke to. It’s music to dance to, as well. I have pulled Anna around this room many times, laughing and twirling to the band’s upbeat tempos.

As the music plays on, I survey the spines of my record collection. I own yards of Ellington records, neatly arranged on their shelves. I have LPs, EPs, battered 78s, reissues, and foreign imports, from the pristine and unplayed to the almost unplayable. I love them all dearly. They are the proud result of fifteen years’ trawling through the dusty racks of second-hand record shops, hours spent hunched over acres of old cardboard. I still spend days arranging and rearranging my records. I love the endless cycle of processing and regulation: marshalling my Duke Ellington collection allows me to impose my own brand of order in at least one small corner of this otherwise uncontrollable world.

I own almost every note that Duke ever recorded, but there’s one performance that I still dream about. Here’s the story. Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s enigmatic collaborator and co-songwriter, dies on 31 May 1967 – finally claimed by cancer. Duke is devastated. He’s lost his crutch, his right-hand man, his creative pivot. Three months after his death, the Ellington Orchestra assembles in RCA Victor Studio ‘A’ in Manhattan to record a tribute album of Strayhorn compositions. At the end of the second day of the session, while the rest of the band are packing up and getting ready to go home, Duke sits at the piano and, unaccompanied, plays a tender Strayhorn tune, ‘Lotus Blossom’. It is Duke’s personal tribute to a man he loved deeply.

That much we all know. It’s after this that the myth begins:

As the studio empties, Duke remains at the piano, staring at the keys, alone with his memories. He’s an old man, now. Still dapper, still elegant, but tired after a lifetime of hard graft and sacrifice. Ellington turns and faces his loss – and starts to play the blues. Tune after tune, the piano cries a sad song of loss and heartache. The wistful, tender lyricism of this final, intimate salute is unbearably poignant. He plays seven or eight laments, quietly closes the piano lid, and shuffles home.

Unknown to Duke, one man has remained in the engineering booth throughout, and has quietly switched on the tape to capture the impromptu performance. The engineer, a young Italian called Alessandro Ponti, has a string of gambling debts to his name that he is unable to pay. He spirits away the illicit tape, his eye on a quick profit and an end to his financial troubles. Some test acetate pressings are produced before Ponti loses his nerve and decides to destroy the master tape. But by that time the acetate pressings are already in circulation, and they are still out there somewhere.

That, at any rate, is the story.

Since then, the fate of those lost recordings has inspired decades of obsessive speculation and wishful rumours. For Ellington enthusiasts, those acetate pressings are our Loch Ness Monster, our Holy Grail. Nobody even knows if they really exist or not. I still cannot resist scouring the second-hand record racks in the hope that one of the pressings will magically appear at my fingertips.

I climb into the shower, whistling a medley of Ellington tunes. A few minutes later, as I am drying myself (by way of indolent rub, rather than the efficient, chafingly vigorous towel-work that Anna favours) I notice three virgin rolls of lavender loo paper in the wicker basket next to the toilet. This is what Anna calls ‘nearly out’? I cannot think of any disaster – global, domestic, or intestinal – that could possibly put our present reserves of toilet paper under immediate threat, but Anna suffers from that exclusively female psychosis whereby she gets twitchy if we have less than a quarter of a mile of readily available bog roll.

By the time I have washed and dressed, it is almost ten o’clock. With a knot in my stomach, I put on my coat and walk to our local bookshop.

As I stand in the doorway of the shop, I take a couple of deep breaths. I want to be poised, calm, so that I will remember this moment. I’ve been into this bookshop hundreds of times, but this morning is different. Licked is officially published today. My role has changed. I’m no longer just another browser. From now on I shall be part of the stock. I shall be a commodity. I shall be a browsee.

Inside, there are only one or two customers nosing about. Behind the main desk stand two scruffy individuals in shapeless jumpers. I wander up to the New Releases table. Licked isn’t there. I inspect the Bestsellers table. Finally I walk over to my bit of shelf between Nancy and Iris. Then I go over to the desk.

‘Do you have a novel by Matthew Moore?’ I ask. ‘It’s called Licked.’

One of the assistants pulls a face. ‘Matthew Moore? Doesn’t ring a bell.’

I smile thinly at him. ‘I think it’s quite new.’

The man turns to his colleague. ‘Declan. You ever heard of a Matthew Moore?’

The other man wrinkles his nose. ‘Nah.’

I put my hands deep in my pockets. ‘Could you check?’

‘Hold on.’ The first assistant taps at the computer keyboard on the desk, and peers at the screen. ‘Let me see. Here we are. Moore, M. Licked. Wellington Press.’

‘That’s it,’ I say eagerly.

‘It’s actually published today,’ the man tells me.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Right.’

There is a pause.

‘So have you got any?’ I ask.

‘No.’

‘Oh.’ Deflation beckons. ‘Have you got some on order?’

The man peers at his screen again. ‘No.’

‘Are you going to order some?’

‘No.’

I think. ‘Can I order one?’

‘I suppose so,’ says the man reluctantly.

‘Right,’ I say. ‘I’ll do that, then.’

‘Who are Wellington Press, anyway?’ asks the man. ‘I’ve never heard of them.’

‘Me neither,’ agrees Declan, yawning.

Neville, I reflect ruefully, would be delighted.

‘It’s just that I heard that this book was absolutely brilliant,’ I say.

The first man looks doubtful. ‘What’s your name?’ he asks.

I stare at him, dumbstruck. I can’t admit who I really am. It would be too embarrassing. And lying would be too desperate, too sad. ‘Look, don’t worry,’ I mumble. ‘I’ll see if I can find it somewhere else.’

The assistant shrugs. ‘Suit yourself,’ he says.

I walk away from the till with the saunter of a man without a care in the world, the saunter of someone who isn’t bothered whether this stupid bookshop has any copies of Licked by Moore, M., or not. I stroll nonchalantly back towards the front of the shop, whistling to myself, until I stop short, the tune dying on my lips.

In front of me is not a stack, not a pile, but rather a mountain of books. They have been built up in a pyramid, about six feet high and four or five feet across at the base. The book which has been used to construct this monstrous edifice is called Virgin on Mergin’, the latest effort by another of Sean’s clients, Bernadette Brannigan. This is the most recent novel in her long-running Virgin series, which began with the now infamous pile of tripe, Virgin on the Ridiculous. I pick up a book and read the blurb on the back cover. Virgin on Mergin’ tells the story of the gormless heroine, Poppy Flipflop, and her attempts to find a husband. To my disbelief there are quotes from several literary luminaries on the back cover. Julian Barnes describes the book as ‘Devastatingly Original’. A. S. Byatt calls Brannigan ‘the most astute chronicler of female social angst since Jane Austen’. I am convinced that these encomiums have been fabricated without the knowledge or consent of their alleged authors. As if A. S. Byatt would ever dream of reading such dross.

The book is atrociously written, with pedestrian jokes, terrible puns, mildly raunchy sex scenes, and painfully obvious payoffs. It is undemanding pap. It is, frankly, shit. I know, because I’ve read it. Actually, I’ve read all of Bernadette Brannigan’s books, and they’re all exactly the same. That, of course, is why she is the most popular writer in Britain.

I stomp home, utterly deflated.

After the anticlimax of my trip to the bookshop, a cloud of gloom settles over me. I lie on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes the flat feels like a prison. We live in Camden, in a small street off Kentish Town Road. It’s as good a place as any to live in London, except perhaps on weekends, when millions of bargain-hunters invade the area in search of tatty afghan coats and PVC boots at the weekend markets. Our one-bedroom flat is in the basement of a converted terraced house. There’s a small garden, conveniently swathed in concrete. I live here; this is my home; but my name isn’t on the property deeds. We were advised that it might be best if the mortgage were taken out solely in Anna’s name. Building society managers, we were told, were a conservative lot. They might be reluctant to lend money to a writer with no meaningful income. Solicitors were a much safer bet. I was, in other words, a liability.

So, here I am, in my home which is not actually mine. I feel remote, deracinated. It is hard for me to share Anna’s enthusiasm for the place. When we venture out to the antique stalls of Camden Lock, she leads the charge. I do my best to muster some interest, trying to make an emotional investment, if not a financial one.

I clamber off the sofa and find Anna’s recording of the Ravel piano trio. I prise open the case. The compact disc, catching the winter sunlight and rainbowing promises into the room, glints like the polished blade of a killer’s knife. I put it into the machine and press play.

I listen as the violin paints its simple melody, elegant arcs of beauty hanging in the air. The cello weeps a rich, mournful echo. Each day I listen to this music, secretly, on my own. I have been beguiled, seduced. But even as I am hypnotised by the piece’s sorrowful beauty, a small voice in the back of my mind is whispering: what happened to those cheeky chappies in Westlife? Where is Anna’s Backstreet Boys CD now?

When the fourth movement of the piece draws to its electrifying conclusion, I stand up and open my saxophone case. I need to chase away the ghost of Ravel’s music, which lingers long after the notes themselves have died. I have a Weltklang tenor saxophone, a 1950s model. The bell of the horn is chipped in a hundred places. The bottom keys were broken off long ago when Ron accidentally trod on them after a gig, but I don’t mind. It’s mine, and I love it.

I begin my daily practice by playing some arpeggios in diminished fourths. Some I knock off easily; others I struggle with, going over them again and again, until I am satisfied or too bored to carry on. Gradually my mood lifts, as I concentrate on the patterns of notes. Gavin has written some new music for the rehearsal tomorrow. The tune is called ‘Urban Machinations – the Plight of the Zeitgeist’. I play it through a few times. It’s a gentle waltz, really quite pretty.

The tune reminds me of another waltz, the old Rodgers and Hammerstein tune ‘My Favourite Things’ – not the saccharine-heavy rendition by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, but John Coltrane’s interpretation, tinged with eastern mysticism and steeped in lyrical beauty. I have the music somewhere. I put down my saxophone and go into our bedroom. There I open one of the cupboards, humming quietly, looking for my folder of sheet music.

As I search, I find an old diving mask and snorkel gathering dust in a cardboard box. I pull them out and examine them. I remember these. When I was a young boy I wanted to be a scuba diver. Every night I took this mask and snorkel into the bath, and spent hours lying face down in the water, my face just submerged, staring at the plug. In my head I was exploring ship wrecks, inspecting coral, swimming through schools of exotic fish. In the end, though, my asthma thwarted me. I was told that I would never be able to dive with an aqualung, as my lungs weren’t strong enough. The mask, and my dreams, were abandoned.

I replace the mask and snorkel in the box and continue my search. When I find the folder of music, I take it back into the sitting room and spend an hour flicking through the yellowing sheets, playing old tunes.

My practice finished, I can procrastinate no longer. Cautiously I slide into the chair in front of my typewriter. (Proper writers use typewriters, by the way. No word processors for us. The soundtrack of creative genius is the clatter-clatter of crashing keys, not the soulless hum of the laptop.) I stare at my Olivetti for ten minutes, and then with my right index finger I wipe a layer of dust off the space key.

For this is my terrible secret: I am suffering from writer’s block – a heavy-duty, career-crippling dose of it, as unmoveable as the Alps. It weighs me down like an unforgiving yoke, pulverising my spirit. The longer I sit in front of my typewriter, the harder it is to begin. I am caught in a hellish downward spiral of petrified inactivity.

To complicate matters further, I have been less than forthright with Anna about my problem. She believes that my next novel is nearing completion. In fact, so far I have written only one sentence.

Here it is:

The moustachioed peasant rested his not inconsiderable weight on the swarthily crooked ash walking stick that he carried with him everywhere he went – Illic had never seen him without it somewhere on his corpulent body – and gazed up towards the towering clouds that were amassing ominously overhead in the sky above the terrain upon which they stood, side by side, and emitted a raspy breath before intoning in that authoritative voice that the boy loved and admired almost as much as the old man himself, ‘All I am saying, Illic my boy, is that we should give peace a chance.’

I’ve spent hundreds of hours crafting and reworking this, but it’s still very much a work in progress. For example, I’m having second thoughts about the ‘swarthily crooked’ walking stick. The image is almost too rich, too complex. I read my solitary sentence again. Is it, I wonder, too demanding, too majestic, for an opening paragraph?

This will be a rites-of-passage novel which uses, as a structural device, song titles of the Plastic Ono Band to establish the chronology of the narrative. It’s all rather complicated, and is lodged firmly in my head. The difficulty is getting it from my head on to a sheet of paper. At the moment it refuses to budge. Instead it just sits there, driving me mad with frustration and guilt.

After a few minutes I abandon my typewriter and prowl around the flat. A sea of champagne corks floats in a bowl on the coffee table. I pick up a cork and examine it. Around its neck Anna has written in black biro, ‘A’s BIRTHDAY. M, A, THERESA + AL’. This is one of Anna’s intransigent habits: every time we drink champagne, she keeps the cork and inscribes on it the details of the event and who was there to help us drink it. This bowl is an alcoholic documentary of our time together. If I delve deeply enough, I will find corks commemorating our engagement, the flat purchase, Anna’s qualification as a solicitor. These corks have always bewildered me. I have never been able to invest inanimate objects with particular emotive significance, but Anna loves to rummage through the bowl, sighing with memories. Her birthday was five months ago; I remember nothing about it. I certainly don’t remember drinking champagne with my sister-in-law Theresa and her idiotic husband Alistair. This bowl, so full of memories for Anna, is quite empty for me.

I walk into the bedroom and start sifting through the laundry basket. It’s Monday, so it’s whites. As I work, I ponder the fate of my novel. Given Neville’s aversion to advertising or marketing, perhaps it’s not surprising that the staff in the bookshop hadn’t heard of me. I put down the bundle of dirty clothes on the bed and open the top drawer of Anna’s dresser. I am confronted by her collection of exotic silk underwear. Beneath these alluring items lie prosaic white cotton stand-bys, and one or two more elaborate pieces, frilly things with lace panels and interesting quick-release gussets. I begin to dig, but I am not looking for saucy lingerie: this is where Anna hid the joint that we smoked on Saturday evening, before the launch party. I am hoping that she had more than one stashed away: I am suddenly craving a calming hit of marijuana. I’m not in the habit of smoking pot in the middle of the day, but after my book’s abject non-appearance in the bookshop, I need cheering up.

As I delve, my fingers fall on something alien amongst the smooth silk. I pull out a small, sky blue bag. On the front are printed the words ‘TIFFANY & CO’ in black type. Curious, I open the bag and tip out its contents. On to my open palm fall two silver cufflinks. Their design is simple: heavily-wrought silver knots are connected by a gleaming argent arc. They are elegant, unfussy, and beautiful.

I sit down on the bed, my search for drugs forgotten.

After half an hour I carefully put the Tiffany bag back where I found it.

They were unquestionably men’s cufflinks. But they couldn’t be for me. Anna knows I’d never wear them; I own one shirt and one tie which I put on, grudgingly, once a year, for the mandatory appearance at church with Anna’s family on Christmas Day.

But if they’re not for me, then who are they for?

And why has Anna gone to the effort of hiding them?

Suddenly the flat seems unbearably small. The walls close in around me. My discovery of the cufflinks brings all my worries about Anna back, redoubled. Claustrophobia crowds in. Pulling on my coat, I hurry out of the flat. Drawing in cold lungfuls of icy November air, I walk quickly through Camden, hoping to escape my anxieties. The streets are quiet, unrecognisable from the edgy chaos of the weekend and its quick, carnival atmosphere.

I turn left past Chalk Farm station and walk over the bridge which spans the railway lines, towards Primrose Hill. On Regents Park Road, the atmosphere of domestic refinement is in stark contrast to the litter-strewn sprawl of Camden High Street. Leaves dance in the quiet road. I step through the gate at the bottom of Primrose Hill. In the distance two figures, their collars turned up against the wind, walk their dogs. I begin to climb the steep path up the hill. At the summit, the wind whistles past my ears. I almost feel as if I’ve escaped London’s grimy clutches. I look southwards across Regent’s Park and towards the grey, silent city beyond.

What is happening with Anna?

I allow the wind to sweep through me, clearing my head. Up here I am free, shucked from my life. Finally I walk back down the hill, through the long grass towards the swooping aviary of London Zoo. At Prince Albert Road I turn left and trudge back towards Camden, my mind a grateful blank. On the way home I go into the supermarket. After finding everything I need for supper, I wander over to the Household Goods aisle for a spot of thoroughly modern angst.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when the grim realisation dawns that the party is over – that it’s finally time to grow up. This usually happens when people take out their first mortgage, make their first pension contribution, or change their first nappy. Of course, I haven’t done any of those things. For me, the death knell of my carefree youth, the herald of sombre responsibility, was when I started having to buy lavender toilet paper.

Until our bathroom was redecorated I never worried about what colour of loo roll I pulled off the shelf; I chose whatever pastel hue took my fancy. But all that has changed now. Now it’s any colour I like, as long as it’s lavender. Lavender, Anna tells me firmly, is the only colour that works. I have reservations about this rigidly monochromatic approach. Does it really matter whether we use colour coordinated paper? Would it really spoil the overall aesthetic effect if we had Buttercup Yellow, just for once? It’s a bathroom, after all, not an art gallery. But Anna is unmoveable on this issue. Lavender it must be. I pull a pack of four rolls off the shelf and deposit them in my basket with a heavy heart.

I walk home with my shopping. Tonight, as usual, I will be cooking chicken. I am great at chicken. I am a maître de poulet, a fowl supremo. I can grill it, roast it, poach it, steam it, pan-fry it, blanche it, deep-fry it, curry it, stew it, parboil it, barbecue it, griddle it, marinade it, or stuff it. Unfortunately, it’s the only thing I can cook. Tonight, I am preparing pan-fried chicken breasts in a cream, garlic and cider sauce. I put the shopping away and consult the recipe book, even though I won’t be cooking for hours yet.

Lunch is baked beans on toast, and then I settle down in front of the television for my usual afternoon diet of wooden game-shows and repeats of old soap operas on UK Gold. My brain goes numb, which is how I like it nowadays. I resolutely ignore my typewriter on the table behind me. It sits in silent reproach as I stare, eyes glazed, at the television screen. My fingers never stray far from the remote control, as I flash across the networks, praising the day they laid the cable in our street. I try and follow six or seven programmes simultaneously, in an attempt to distract my brain from Anna and the cufflinks hidden in her underwear drawer. It doesn’t work. I cannot get the sight of the heavy lumps of silver out of my mind.

After all the recent changes in Anna’s behaviour, especially after her furtive trip to the cinema, I no longer know what to think.

By the early evening news, I have wound myself into a tight ball of anxiety. I realise that I am going to have to ask Anna about the cufflinks if I am to avoid the descent into fretful madness. I run through various possible opening gambits, trying to decide how to broach the subject. I need something nonchalant, urbane, and relaxed. Every formulation I concoct is nervy, self-pitying, and paranoid.