The room was bright and airy, however, with two tall sash windows dominating the two exterior walls, one looking out to the back lawn, the other on to the side path of the house. The two interior walls were decorated in floral wallpaper, punctuated here and there with Disney posters, Duran Duran wall charts and Michael Jackson album covers.
It was the only room in the house with a sturdy brass lock on the door, and I insisted that this was the only room in which I would be able to write. Alice was at first reluctant, but I persuaded her that we could fit out a room upstairs for Eugene – in what would have been her old bedroom (we had moved into her parents’ bedroom). One day, when she and Eugene went out for the afternoon, I stripped the room bare, gutting it, and dragged all the detritus on to a bonfire at the end of the garden. The fuss that ensued was unwarranted, in my opinion. Eugene was most upset about the damn chair. As if the house were not full of chairs, all of them better than that particular specimen. He sobbed like a baby, and I realized quickly that I could not live with this kind of disturbance.
I redecorated the room to my own taste. A gentleman’s room, with teak panelling and bookcases lining the interior walls, and heavy velvet curtains framing the windows. I had the long-disused fireplace opened up, and I placed my antique mahogany partner’s desk at an angle facing the two windows. At an auction, I later purchased a leather upholstered library chair, a standard lamp to be placed behind my chair, and also a desk lamp with a green glass shade. Subtle lighting is very important. From a company in the UK, I purchased a leather-bound desk blotter, and, from a vintage bookseller, a few select first editions with which to fill my bookcases. Within a few short weeks, the room looked like a writer’s room, and indeed, on the few occasions when I have granted interviews at home, the interrogator has in every instance remarked on how atmospheric the room is, exactly how they imagined the study of an award-winning author. As if, just by getting the look right, the words would flow.
Alice knew that I must not be disturbed. It pleases me that she thought my genius required isolation and silence. I used it to good effect when that little moron Eugene wanted to know what was in the green wooden box. Alice never showed much curiosity, but Eugene would not give up. He was obsessed by it. On the few occasions that I allowed Eugene and Alice into the room, he would waddle over to the bookcase and look up to the top shelf, where I had placed it.
‘What’s in the box, Oliver? What’s in the box? Is there a monster in the box, Oliver? What’s in the box?’
‘Nothing,’ I would insist, ‘just boring birth certificates, passports and insurance documents. Nothing to interest you.’
‘Show me! Show me! I want to see what’s in the box! Show me what’s in the box!’, stamping his foot for emphasis, and I would call Alice and complain that he was disturbing me, and demand that she remove him from my presence. He would often hover outside the door, waiting for me to come out, and as soon as I opened it, he would dart in on top of me. ‘What’s in the box, Oliver?’
Eventually I informed Alice that I could no longer write while Eugene lived under our roof. She agreed finally to his moving out when I found an obliging care home willing to take him. It was not cheap, a fact that Alice seemed not to appreciate. She accused me of ‘hating’ him. She overestimated my feelings for her brother: I simply did not want him around.
Alice continued to whinge for years, used to bring him out to the house at Christmas time for the first couple of years, but every single time it reopened the arguments and I felt it was in everybody’s best interests just to put a stop to it. The last Christmas that he came, I got him alone in the kitchen and told him a very special story in words that he could understand, and made it very clear that he would be unwise ever to visit again. Afterwards, he just walked up and down the hall with his coat on, backwards and forwards, muttering to himself. Alice was beside herself with worry and kept asking him what was wrong, but thankfully he had understood my little story and kept his stupid drooling mouth shut. Then he started to cry, and Alice took him back to the home. Later, when I pointed out the wisdom of my decision not to accommodate an overgrown baby who was clearly disturbed, she walked out of the house and didn’t come back for three days. Her first act of rebellion. I knew she would be back though. I never doubted it. She loved me too much. I never had to see the buffoon again, though Alice persisted in visiting him.
Once Eugene was out of the way, I settled down into a routine, although in 1993 this was disturbed by Moya, who had moved in next door. She and her dull husband befriended us straight away. I flatter myself that Moya was impressed by my celebrity. She was apparently something of a celebrity herself, having appeared in a television soap opera, but I had no idea who she was.
From very early on she flirted openly. There I would be at my desk in my study on a winter afternoon, painstakingly parsing every sentence, honing it to perfection. I would look up momentarily and Moya would be out in her garden, putting washing on the line, wearing nothing but a pink diaphanous gown and a pair of high heels. She must have been frozen. She would catch me looking, and scurry inside, feigning embarrassment, but Moya is a truly awful actress and it was painfully obvious that she intended to seduce me. I’m not terribly surprised. Her husband was such a nondescript nonentity that I cannot think of a single interesting thing he ever said or did. Occasionally I would see him in the garden, gardening.
In the summer months, Moya made an almighty display of herself, sunbathing nude on an extended sunlounger positioned perfectly to face my rear window. The view was rather nice, I admit it.
When we began our affair, she would write messages on large pieces of paper for me, and hold them up to her side window for me to see in a kind of semaphoric billet-doux. I was rather touched at the time. It seemed very sweet. We even managed to continue our arrangement while working abroad, most notably in New York, when she was to be in the Broadway version of Solarand. That ended in a huge bloody mess when Moya was fired and then almost caught me in the arms of the cute little actress who replaced her. You would swear that Moya was the wronged wife the way she went on about it, but I managed to talk her down and, after a while, we resumed our liaison.
Towards the end, the whole affair became stale and I redecorated the study again, reappointing the furniture so that my desk faced away from the windows. She was not happy about that. But I had my wife to consider, and I did not want Alice to be unnecessarily hurt.