Dear Mr Swift [it began],
Forgive this unsolicited letter but I write to you as a great fan of your novels. I remember reading Two Germans when I was a boy and it sparked an interest in the war that remains with me to this day. I don’t believe that a novel set during those years has ever moved me quite as much as yours did. The Tribesman, The Breach and The Broken Ones are among my favourite works of contemporary literature but I’m a particular fan of The Treehouse, which, for me, is an underrated classic. I’m currently a student at the University of London, where I’m in my final year of study in the English department, and I hope to make your work the subject of my final thesis, although I have ambitions towards ultimately developing that thesis into a book. For me, you are the finest British writer of your generation. If you’ll forgive the flattery, the range of your work is so extraordinary that somehow it seems astonishing to me that it could all have come from the same mind. That’s your genius, I think. Surprising the reader with each new novel.
I wondered whether I might meet you at some point and learn a little more about your work and your life, in order to better inform my thesis. It’s important to me that I write something honest and singular, as my ultimate ambition is to be a literary biographer and this will be my first effort to forge a path towards that career. My father, an editor at Random House, has been very encouraging in this respect. （I’m not a fiction writer, you’ll be pleased to know, and have no ambitions whatsoever in that direction!） Anyway, I assume that you’re working on a new novel and have very little free time but I would appreciate if you could spare a little for me one day. It would mean an awful lot.
Yours sincerely,
Theo Field
After reading the letter I reached for my pint and noticed that my hand was trembling a little, so I returned the glass to the table and closed my eyes for a moment while breathing slowly and carefully through my nose, using a technique that I’d been taught which often helped at moments like this. I could sense Daniel near me at that moment, could almost feel his hand in mine, his voice whispering in my ear in that accusatory way he developed towards the end. He was telling me to throw the letter away and leave the boy alone, that he was just an innocent student trying to get a start in the world, and I knew that I needed to step away if I were to block him out. And so I made my way into the Gents, where I stood before the sink, my eyes shut, my hands pressed against the cool white porcelain, and waited a minute or two before throwing water on my face and staring at my reflection in the mirror, uncertain whether I even recognized myself any more.
I rarely bothered looking in mirrors at home but there, in that narrow bathroom with its dull neon light flickering, I could see how altered my appearance had become in recent years. All my life I had been handsome. I took no particular pride in the fact, but a fact it was nevertheless, and one that I’d been aware of since the age of thirteen or fourteen. Both women and men had been attracted to me since I was very young and I understood the power that I held over them, a power that had always been very easy to exploit. Several had fallen in love with me. One had married me.
I had long since come to understand, however, that I was different from other men in that I had no particular desire for the bodies of others and that whatever instinct guided people towards the bedroom was somehow lost on me. Whether or not this has been a blessing or a curse is hard to know but I suspect it’s the former. I’ve seen so many people’s lives destroyed by failed love affairs or unrequited passions that I’ve always felt rather fortunate to remain essentially disinterested. Why would anyone want to be part of such calamitous drama, after all? It had been years since I’d enjoyed a romantic encounter or even desired one. During my time in New York, there had been plenty of people who’d expressed an interest, but I’d taken none of them up on their offers.
Staring at my reflection now, however, I wondered whether I would ever have the opportunity to turn someone’s advances down again. My hair was turning grey and my blue eyes, which had once shone so bright, had grown dull. Worst of all, however, was my skin, which appeared grey and was tinged with red capillaries, probably from the excess of alcohol. I glanced down at my hands, which had spent so much of their lives typing away at a keyboard before me. My recollection of them was as smooth collaborators with just the hint of a blue vein running from the wrist to the middle finger, but now, the skin was tight and my fingers appeared bony, the nails pockmarked, with large semicircles spreading outwards from the cuticles, like slowly exploding planets. I was growing old, it was clear, and not gracefully.
There was only so long that I could stay and observe the ruins and eventually I turned my attention away, washed my hands and made my way back outside to my seat, re-reading Theo Field’s letter, several times in fact. Outside the flattery and the oleaginous remarks, there remained the central idea that he wanted to write about me. Only a thesis, yes, but he mentioned that he had ambitions towards literary biography and, indeed, towards publishing a book. And that delicious morsel he had thrown in, mentioning that his father worked at Random House! Of course, the na?f had wanted to impress me with his credentials, and it had worked, for I could surely use his family connections to my advantage in due course. A critical study would undoubtedly revive my drooping reputation and perhaps there would be something in the boy and his questions that would reignite my creative spark. And then a novel. The path back to glory was so wonderfully simple.
After Daniel’s death, there had, quite naturally, been an out-pouring of sympathy towards me within the publishing industry, but it hadn’t provoked quite the interest in my work that I had hoped. It was something that my editor had the gall to bring up when he rejected the book I wrote immediately after the accident.
‘Considering everything that you’ve been through, Maurice,’ he told me that day as we sat in his office, ‘there’s nothing I’d like more than to publish a new novel by you. And certainly, from a publicity standpoint – well, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way but there is an enormous amount of goodwill out there towards you and the media would fall over itself to interview you. But it has to be with the right book and this … well, I hate to say it but this just isn’t it. It’s well written, of course, but the story …’
I could feel the fury building inside me as I recalled that afternoon, the suppression of my pitiless ambition, and returned to Theo’s letter one final time, smiling to myself as I read it.
I opened my laptop and began to type, taking great care with my reply. Indeed, it could be said that I worked harder on this one sentence than I had on anything in years, both in terms of the words that I used and the words that I didn’t.
Dear Theo [ I wrote],
I would be happy to meet you on Tuesday 8 May at 3 p.m. in the Queen’s Head, Denman Street.
Yours,
Maurice Swift
As I went to bed that night, I tried not to think about my aspiring biographer or my lost son, but they both lingered in my thoughts, two sides of a single coin that could be thrown in the air and land on either side, and I found my emotions torn between excitement and grief, that terrible agony within my soul that lingered regardless of whether I was awake or asleep, sober or drunk, writing or not writing. And thinking of Daniel, I asked myself whether he would approve of what I was about to do but insisted to myself that he would, despite his irritating and adolescent belief in moral absolutes. For he had loved me and I had been a good if imperfect father, almost to the end. What else would he want for me than that I be happy? Otherwise, what had it all been for?