‘Maurice, I’m so sorry,’ she replied, lowering her voice. ‘I had no idea.’
‘And now you do.’
‘It’s a bit like Kramer vs Kramer, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘How so?’
‘You know, when Meryl Streep walks out on Dustin Hoffman and he doesn’t know how to cope at first with the little boy. He can barely even cook dinner. But then they form a connection that’s been missing since he was born and, when Meryl comes back, Dustin doesn’t want to give the child up and they have the most frightful rows.’
Maurice stared at her, wondering how someone so stupid could have publishers begging for her work. ‘As I said, my wife died,’ he said quietly. ‘So I don’t think she’s going to show up demanding custodial rights any time soon.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ said Henrietta, who didn’t look entirely convinced that this would be the case. ‘Oh, by the way, I meant to tell you. I sold that story.’
‘Which story?’
‘The one you rejected.’
‘I didn’t reject it, Henrietta,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I simply passed on it for now as I didn’t think it was a good fit for our next issue.’
‘That sounds a lot like semantics to me, which is unworthy of you. You hated it. Just be honest and tell the truth.’
The same thing, thought Maurice.
‘All right, fine,’ he said, throwing his hands in the air. ‘You’re right. I hated it.’
Henrietta sat back in her chair in shock, as if he’d just pulled a gun on her or told her that he’d impregnated her mother. ‘That’s a little rude, isn’t it?’ she asked.
‘Well, you’re so insistent on the point that it seems easier to agree with you than anything else.’
‘So you didn’t hate it, then?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, smiling a little. ‘What do you think?’
She stared at him, looking as if she was torn between annoyance and laughter, but finally gave in to the latter, slapping his knee sharply.
‘You shouldn’t hit people,’ said Daniel, sitting up straight.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘Don’t hit people!’ he insisted, and Henrietta looked from father to son in bewilderment.
‘She didn’t mean anything by it,’ said Maurice, looking at the boy. ‘But he’s right, Henrietta, you shouldn’t hit people. It’s not nice. How would you like it if I hit you?’
The smile faded from her face now. There was nothing in his tone to suggest that he was joking. She waited for him to smile and to say that he was only teasing her and, when he didn’t, when his face remained as still as a block of stone, she shuddered a little and placed both hands on the table, pushing herself into an upright position as if she were morbidly obese and needed assistance.
‘I’d better go,’ she said.
‘Actually,’ said Maurice, reaching into his bag and removing a small camera that he always kept there, ‘before you do, could you do me a favour? I don’t have many pictures of Daniel and me together. Would you take one for me?’
Henrietta seemed slightly bored by the request but took the camera as Maurice put an arm around his son, who was still focussed entirely on eating his ice-cream. Just as she asked them to smile, Maurice tapped the boy on the head lightly so his nose dipped into the tip of the cone, covering it with vanilla, and both father and son burst out laughing.
‘Thanks,’ he said when Henrietta handed the camera back, and she kissed him briefly on the cheek before continuing on her way.
‘I didn’t like her,’ said Daniel when she had gone, and Maurice shrugged.
‘I don’t like her very much either,’ he said. ‘What do you want to do now, anyway? We could go to see a movie, if you like?’
‘Let’s just go home,’ said Daniel, shaking his head. ‘I want to read my new book.’
‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ said Maurice, standing up and taking his son by the hand as they left the park behind. ‘I have twenty short stories waiting for me and I’d better make a start on them if I’m going to figure out what my next novel will be about.’
PART III
OTHER PEOPLE’S STORIES
‘Drunkenness is temporary suicide.’
– Bertrand Russell
1. The Crown, Brewer Street
Although I never exchanged so much as a hello with any of them, I recognized most of the drinkers in the Crown by sight and, over the years, assigned each one a name. Sitting at the end of the bar, endlessly playing games on his iPad, was Spencer Tracy, so called because of an uncanny resemblance he held to the actor. At a table by the window sat Professor Plum, a tall, elderly man in a purple turtleneck who drank pints of cider and worked his way through a succession of newspapers, shaking his head and muttering obscenities under his breath. Mrs Thatcher sat at the table closest to the toilets and appeared to have a bladder condition because she was in and out of the Ladies every twenty minutes. True, she didn’t look anything like the former prime minister, but her name was Maggie – I’d heard the barman call her that – and somehow that transformed itself into Mrs T in my head. She nursed her drinks and generally kept herself to herself although occasionally she showed up with a bespectacled, balding man – Denis, to me – and smooched with him shamelessly. It was a repulsive thing to witness.
There were others, of course, a few regulars and plenty of passing trade. Occasional stagehands from the nearby theatres and a small crew of four or five from a local bookshop. Once in a while I saw a young boy, probably a student, nursing a pint for about two hours while reading one of the Great Works of Literature. I’d seen him make his way through Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment. Cheap paperback editions, usually. A few months earlier, I’d watched as he turned the opening pages of A Sentimental Education, reading from a Penguin Classic for which I’d written the introduction, and he flipped past those six or seven pages without reading a word. I felt offended at first – that introduction had been one of the last things I’d published – but then remembered that I never read introductions either, so I could hardly blame him for ignoring it.
I wondered if any of the patrons of the Crown noticed me too and, if they did, whether they wondered who I was or what had brought me there. I’d had a fantasy for a long time that one of them might ask and I had my answer ready for such a moment, eleven simple words that summed up my past, present and what I believed would be my future:
I used to be a writer but now I’m a drunk.
It might seem embarrassing to make such an admission but there was just no getting around the facts. I didn’t consider myself an alcoholic, although a doctor would probably have disputed this. If I was, however, then I was a functioning alcoholic, which is surely the best kind to be. When I first returned to London four years ago and checked in to the hotel I was staying at until I found a more permanent residence, I couldn’t think of any constructive way to spend the afternoon and so wandered down to the bar, where I got completely pissed, and somehow, I seemed to have stayed that way ever since.