Water was still dripping down the back of my neck from the hair Dale had dried carefully the day before. My clothes were damp and my feet moved in water that had pooled in my shoes. The light on the stage had a blinding effect; beyond it I could just make out the oval shapes of the audience’s faces, weaving and nodding like things growing in a field. I said that I had brought something to read aloud, and out of the corner of my eye saw the Chair make a gesture of encouragement. I took the papers out of my bag and unfolded them. My hands shook with cold holding them. There was the sound of the audience settling into its seats. I read aloud what I had written. When I had finished I folded the papers and put them back in my bag, while the audience applauded. The Chair uncrossed his legs and sat up straight. I felt his brown eyes, opaque as two brown buttons, glancing frequently at me. People were already standing up and edging their way along the rows, anxious to be home. The rain had started to drum again on the top of the marquee. The Chair said that he was sorry there wasn’t time for questions, because of the late start. There was more, half-hearted applause and then the lights came back on.
We returned to the green room, this time along the covered walkway. Julian and Louis walked ahead. The Chair walked behind with me. I wondered what he felt about his own part in what had just occurred, but he only remarked that it was a nuisance the marquee had been so cold – they hadn’t managed to warm it up in time after the electrical failure. He imagined there would be some complaints, given the average age of the audience. Sometimes, he went on, he wondered what the audience got out of these events. He had chaired a few and seen all sorts of extraordinary things: people fast asleep in the front row, blatantly snoring; people sitting chatting while the authors were talking on stage; people knitting or doing crosswords, and on one occasion someone even reading a book. The festival offered such a large discount for multiple ticket purchases that people tended to buy the whole lot – half the time, he wasn’t sure they knew who it was they were coming to see. One author, a World War Two historian – he mentioned a familiar name – had given up on trying to talk about his book and instead had started singing old songs from the Blitz, encouraging the audience – most of whom remembered all the words – to join in. They’d had a marvellous sing-song in the tent apparently, with the rain coming down outside.
I said I wasn’t sure it mattered whether the audience knew who we were. It was good, in a way, to be reminded of the fundamental anonymity of the writing process, the fact that each reader came to your book a stranger who had to be persuaded to stay. But it always surprised me, I said, that writers didn’t feel more fear of the physical exposure such events entailed, given that writing and reading were non-physical transactions and might almost be said to represent a mutual escape from the actual body – in fact some writers, like Julian, seemed positively to enjoy it. The Chair glanced at me with his furtive eyes.
But you don’t, he said.
In the green room the flax-haired boy was waiting at the table we had sat at earlier. When he saw us approaching he pulled out the chair next to him, clearly intending me to sit on it. He introduced himself – his name was Oliver – and said that he had spent nearly the whole event watching us sitting there in our wet clothes and thinking about the issue of humiliation, the humiliation that was involved in maintaining the pretence of normality. It had astonished him that no one had objected to being asked to perform under those circumstances.
‘Even Louis,’ he said, ‘with all his so-called honesty.’
I said that Louis’s honesty, as I understood it, was of the kind that feared public scenes of precisely that nature. He had made his cowardice and deceptiveness quite clear: however cynically, his susceptibility to humiliation was a kind of open secret.
Oliver glanced meaningfully at the Chair, who was standing at the bar ordering drinks.
‘He should have done something,’ he said. ‘It was his fault.’
He had to admit, Oliver went on, that he hadn’t actually paid attention to most of what was being said: he had been to so many of these events, and Julian and Louis always said exactly the same things. Because they’re professionals, obviously, he added. Julian had been very kind to him. He was staying with him at the moment, in London, while he looked for somewhere to live.
I asked where he had been before and he said in Paris. He had lived with a man there but the relationship had ended. He had very much played the housewife in that relationship, and so when Marc had called things off he found himself with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
I said it was an unusual way for someone his age – which could only have been twenty-three or twenty-four – to describe himself.
Oliver smiled somewhat forlornly. It had struck him, he said, while we were talking on stage, how stupid it was that form should be viewed as the writer’s – or any artist’s – dominating characteristic. Subject was surely a more accurate basis for affinity. When I think about it like that, he said, the idea of finding a job becomes much less frightening. Julian says I just need to find something I enjoy – it doesn’t much matter what it is.
Before his three years in Paris he had spent a year backpacking around Europe. Before that, he had been at school. The backpacking trip was meant to be a prelude to university but on his way home through Paris he had met Marc instead. Increasingly, he said now, he thought about that trip, which he forgot the instant he was with Marc and never really thought about again. It was perhaps because he was now effectively homeless that it had started to come back to him, the way sometimes you only remember something when you find yourself once more in that same position, as if part of yourself had been left there. He’d started to remember the hostels he’d stayed in, the dormitories where he’d slept among boys and girls his own age from all over the world, the cheap cafés and markets they frequented, the hectic intersections of bus and train stations and even the journeys themselves, the long, slow transitions from one culture and climate to another: all of it was returning to him, in finer and finer detail.
He remembered being on the beach in Nice one night with a big group of people he’d just met: they were all drinking and talking; someone was playing a guitar. The sea shone silently in the darkness while behind them the night-time city madly buzzed with noise and light. He had felt both atomised and on the brink of discovery; both disappointed by what the world had revealed to him and in new, faltering correspondence with some of its elements. But what he had felt most of all, that night, was the incoherence of what he was doing: everywhere he had been in Europe, he had found not the intact civilisation he had imagined but instead a ragged collection of confused people adrift in an unfamiliar place. Nothing had seemed quite real, in the sense that he had come to know reality: yet he experienced the failure as his own, for he had been brought up in a stable, prosperous home where expectations – material, cultural, social – had been high. And particularly that night in Nice, this fragmented picture, of young lost people clinging to one another for safety, of the mute beautiful sea that refused to tell its secret, of the city sealed in its own frenzy, was not one that he recognised.
It was here, he went on, in Nice, that someone had lent him a copy of Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, and its brutal aestheticism had deepened his confusion even more.