The Name on the Door is Not Mine Read online

  In the section on the arts and culture he read that Patrick Modiano, France’s new Nobel laureate, was unknown and unread in his own country. Was this true? Surely no longer. The bookshops now were full of his work, displayed with their red banners announcing a Nobel Prize-winner. Louise, who had read most of them, thought the award spoke for intelligibility against the old Nouvelle Vague novelists and their apologists. Enough of Claude Simon (who had received France’s last Nobel for Literature). Enough of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Roland Barthes, and long live the clarity, limpidity, transparency for which French literature had always been celebrated. Louise saw it as an indirect vote for her hero, Flaubert, whom these ‘New Wave’ novelists and critics had disparaged.

  Max moved on to the ‘economy and enterprise’ pages, where a philosopher, Pierre Zaoui, drew subtle distinctions not only between a crisis and a catastrophe in the money world but between two kinds of catastrophe—the 1929 jumping-out-of-windows kind in which even wealthy families lost everything, and the less serious kind in which life went on for the rich, whose loss was a reduction of their wealth, not an end to it. In support of all this, Machiavelli was quoted, and also Nietzsche. This piece, it seemed to Max, was not so much high finance as highbrow finance, a kind of brain-straining and heartless entertainment: ‘Money’ for Le Mondeans.

  The wind was really blowing now, even here in the shelter of the courtyard, making it difficult to keep the paper together, and Max moved indoors. He should be thinking about the Habilitation jury he was to be part of at the Sorbonne, and the presentation on the subject of British Commonwealth poetry by the candidate they were to examine; but, standing at the window again, he allowed his mind to drift back to the comfort of that long-ago November when his epiphany on a bridge over the Seine had made him feel for a moment that he had become a Parisian, a true flâneur, and that his times of trouble were over. It was the mood in which he had written that long-ago poem Helen White had discovered in an old literary journal, and which had brought her to his office door to tell him how marvellous it was, how magical and mysterious, urging him to become the poet he had once been, and write more. Where was she now? There had been that day with her, and its strange ending of massage and pasta in her little apartment in the rue Parrot. Recently she had written him a small note in somewhat crazed handwriting, telling him she had shifted to be nearer the university and giving him her new address in the rue Mouffetard—a message to which, warned off by Louise, he had not responded. But he thought of her.

  IV

  HELEN TOOK THE METRO from Cardinal Lemoine to Sèvres Babylone, changed and took the line north towards Porte de la Chapelle, changed at Saint-Lazare, and went two stops to the place de Clichy. She had been reading a novel by Georges Perec about a young man, a student in Paris, who decides to drop out of everything—the university, exams, friends, ambition, work, play—in effect to go to sleep, to stop living. It fascinated her because it was the reverse of what Gurdjieff advocated—that you must work hard, making a continuous effort to be awake, to be aware of every passing moment, and thus to create a soul. It was the story of willed depression—the deliberate welcoming of what sometimes enveloped her even while she tried to fight it off. It was an account, a fiction, of a young man working not to create a soul but to be rid of one.

  In the end he fails to achieve what he’s aiming for, the ultimate indifference. His project has been a kind of egotism, a wish to be special, especially blighted, cursed, cast out, reviled. He is none of these things, and he tells himself, at last, to stop talking to himself like a man in a dream. ‘You are not the nameless master of the world, the one on whom history has lost its grip, the one who no longer feels the rain falling.’

  The book ends with this awakening, which comes to him on a rainy day in the place de Clichy, and that was why Helen, with what she recognised was a dogged literalness, was going there today, when the rain was falling.

  She stood on a corner in the rain, enjoying the sound of its myriad small feet on her umbrella, its coldness when it found its way on to her right arm, and the feeling that now and then it was putting fine jewels in her hair, while she tried to think herself into the state of mind of Perec’s student, coming back into the world after a long self-imposed absence: waking to the discomforts and pleasures of existence, as if for a long moment they had gone away.

  And what came to her first, sharp and clear, at this moment at the busy intersection of avenue de Clichy and boulevard des Batignolles, was the fantasy that she might be pregnant, and that she did not know for sure whether she would want it to be the Professor’s child or Hugo’s. The idea of the pregnancy did not distress her, but she was bothered by the question, which of them, Max or Hugo, should it belong to: either or neither—or both? She could not think of an answer to this; but she knew she could think of ways of writing about it in the book she was calling (though she had now left that address) A small apartment in the rue Parrot.

  And now the rain fell less like a fine mist, more heavy and persistent, the cars splashed through puddles, the air grew colder, and she went back down into the Metro, to its warm dry air, and the smell of rubber on metal that always reminded her of the excitement of being in Paris for the first time.

  ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’

  THE LORIKEETS ON THE RAIL wake me. I’m aware of them before I wake properly. They begin quietly as if they’re making small talk and waiting patiently. I suppose they get noisier as they become hungry and quarrelsome, but it’s hard not to believe they’re slowly lifting the decibel level in order to get me up.

  I roll out on to the carpet. That’s a start. I’m grateful to the lorikeets. I don’t like to sleep late, but when I’m alone …

  And that hits me hard this morning. Consciousness—coming to it. Memory. She. They. I don’t want to think about it. The purpose is what counts. Give it a capital. The Purpose. It consists of piles of typed sheets on the big table, scribbled all over with corrections and tidied on either side of the portable. Drafts. Redrafts and revisions. Everyone used to tell me I ought to buy a word processor. Now no one tells me that, or anything. I see no one. I came here to be alone. I have the lorikeets.

  I go to the balcony. They shift to left and right along the rail, making room for me. I think I can distinguish the boss pair—the couple who claim proprietary rights. The rest vary in number—anything from three to ten. This morning there are six altogether. Five. Seven.

  Down there, eight floors down, is a school. The early arrivers are there, running about in plastic raincoats, in and out of the shelter, with little bags on their backs. I don’t want to think about them either. What is a passable way of saying that ‘something tears at your heartstrings’?

  Beyond the school are Simmons Point, Mort Bay, Ballast Point, Long Nose Point. Across the water a huge tanker has been tucked into Gore Cove. It seems to fill it. It must have been brought in during the night, or in the early hours of the morning.

  I go through to the kitchen and do bread and honey for the lorikeets. They like brown sugar too, but Mrs Shrimpton, the old lady I met at the bus stop, told me if I filled them up every day on that stuff I might ruin their health. I thought at first it was only like giving them nectar. But watching them take it from the rail I noticed their short stubby tongues. They’re not equipped for getting into flowers. I don’t know about these things—I’m an amateur—but I want to treat them right. They’re my companions—they and the magpies that come to the balcony at the front. The old lady said they needed seed as well as sugar, so I devised the bread and honey diet. They like it. They stand on one leg, hold the piece in one claw and nibble at it. Sometimes one holds a piece while another nibbles. If you reach out to touch them they don’t fly away in fright. They give you a hefty peck. Bugger off, I’m eating. No gratitude to the provider. But they will climb on to my open hand and eat off my palm. It’s a nice feeling. And they’re beautiful. Those extravagant colours—blue and green and orange and gold. On w
hich drunken day of the Creation were they so splashed and daubed?

  I came here to work. To work and to forget. To work is to forget—etc. Bullshit—but partly true. I’m writing a novel which is set partly in Auckland and partly in Los Angeles. For reasons which are not clear to me (and that may be a way of saying for no reason at all except the wish itself) I felt I had to write it in some place which was neither. Neither Los Angeles nor Auckland. So I came here. I live with these birds in the foreground, and long views (two directions) of Sydney Harbour and the Sydney skyline, while in my head I fight my daily battles, live and die and rise again, in Auckland and LA. They have become places of the mind. That’s how it has to be.

  Everyone is tired, I am told, of the novel about the novelist writing the novel. Was it invented by the French Existentialists? I think I read somewhere that it was. (But what about Laurence Sterne and the Sentimental Journey?) In any case, I’m not tired of it. I’ve written one and would write another if I thought it safe. Since it’s not safe, I’m defusing that impulse with these notes. The novel is about Auckland and Los Angeles. It is not about the writer in Sydney who is writing it. These pages are about him.

  His name is Simon Dexter. He is forty years old. Forty-two. He has brown hair and good teeth except for one that was punched out in a game of rugby. In its place is a tooth on a bridge. He is the father of two, a boy and a girl. No more about that. The Purpose (it has to be said again) is all that matters. Everything else (and I mean everything—the world and all its wonders) is either irrelevant or it’s material for fiction. There must be no third parties. No life but this one—the life that goes down on the page.

  My breakfast is muesli and fruit followed by bacon on toast. And coffee. As I get older the start of the day gets more miraculous. It’s as if I wake young again. It doesn’t last, but there’s that hour, or those few hours, when everything is jumping out of its skin. And because the brightness fades from the air, because it’s not normal, it seems more marvellous than it did when one wasn’t aware there was another, duller, more ordinary world underneath. And here I wake not only to the lorikeets and the bays I see looking west from my bedroom, but also to this view I have in front of me as I sit on a stool at the kitchen bench-table, spooning my muesli blindly because my eyes are taken up with this eastern down-harbour dazzle, the grand ugliness of the coathanger, the skyward mock-Manhattan off to the right of the picture, the ferries coming and going, the water-taxis, the orange-topped police launch, the black-and-white tugboats, the latest container ship in from Montevideo or Liverpool or the Gulf tying up across the water at Pyrmont. And just beyond the downward curve of the Bridge, one fin, two if I stand, of the Opera House.

  I have the sliding glass doors open to the balcony at the front. From out there comes a whirl of wing and the strange pedestrian sound of my two magpies as they flat-foot up and down the rail or around the rim of the iron table. I take them cheese and some small pieces of meat. (Again I’ve been advised by Mrs Shrimpton.) They eat while I watch from an armchair, finishing my coffee and glancing (trying not to let my interest be roused by anything) at the front page of the morning paper. Unlike the lorikeets, the magpies are silent before they’ve been fed. It’s only when they’ve finished that they do me a few cadenzas. It’s my favourite bird-call. I close my eyes and see the green and brown river-flats of the Manawatu, which must have been where I first heard it; or the veranda of a hotel in a small northern New South Wales town. A fanning of feathers again and they’re gone. I feel I’ve been thanked. Even rewarded.

  This morning I’ve promised to call on Clarry. Clarry Shrimpton. He’s the husband of the old lady I met at the bus stop. They live down near the ferry wharf in one of those typical terrace houses that have an upstairs veranda with an ornate iron railing. Like a lot of those houses, theirs has been spoiled by having the upstairs veranda built in. But it’s unusual in that the railings remain, giving a strange baroque texture to the front face of the house.

  I have mixed feelings about these visits. I’m not sure how I got myself committed to them, or why I haven’t found an excuse to stop. I don’t like them and yet I’m glad of them. Maybe in a way I do like them, but my expectation that I won’t makes me feel as if they’re an imposition. The fact is, Clarry is ill—very ill. There’s been talk of chemotherapy. He says he won’t have it—it makes your hair fall out. ‘What hair?’ she asks, and they change the subject.

  Clarry has a single bed in the veranda room from which he can look out and down the street to the wharf. He keeps a watch by his bed—his wrist is too thin to wear it any more—and checks the ferries against a timetable. This morning he looks worse—thinner, his skin a strange brown colour—but he’s sitting up, in good spirits. He has some money and some bets he wants me to place for him at the TAB.

  They’ve had news their daughter in England is coming home. ‘About time,’ Clarry says. ‘I dunno how she can stand them.’

  ‘Them’ is the Poms. Clarry hates Poms. But he hates Americans more. He hasn’t anything good to say about New Zealanders either (‘present company excepted, of course’). They come over here and live on the dole. Bondi’s full of them. Bludgers. New Zealanders are like West Australians, Tasmanians and Queenslanders—bloody hicks.

  On my last visit, when Clarry was complaining about the Chinese taking over everything (he’d looked out and seen a Chinese bus driver down by the wharf), I asked him whether there was any national group he admired. He said the Krauts had made bloody fine enemies. You could shoot a Kraut with respect.

  Today he reminds me of the fireworks. He doesn’t ask directly. He just says his daughter might be out in time to see them. I tell him again he’s welcome to come and watch from my apartment. I don’t see how it will be possible unless he improves—and I dread the thought of it—but I’ve said he can come, and I’ll stick to that.

  THE FIRST TIME I MET Mrs Shrimpton (she hasn’t invited me to call her Zoe) it was raining. I hadn’t been long in Balmain and I’d always taken the ferry into town. But now a ferry had just left, it was wet, and I was wondering whether it might be quicker to take a bus. There was one standing down by the wharf. Its door was closed and the driver was sitting inside smoking. I tapped on the doors. He pressed a button and they opened. I asked whether this bus went into town. ‘Ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Over there’—pointing to the other side of the street. And the doors whanged together, almost trapping me by the nose.

  ‘They won’t let you in until it’s time.’ That was Mrs Shrimpton. She was standing well back from the bus doors as if to signal she knew the rules. Rain was falling steadily. She had a bent black umbrella and she wore a raincoat. Also a piece of plastic tied over her hat, which was a kind of skewered beret in blue.

  ‘It’s terrible weather,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it can happen in this country too,’ she said. She’d picked I was a stranger. ‘It has to rain, doesn’t it. Where would we be without water? So long as you’ve got a roof over your head you’ve got nothing to complain about.’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s what I say,’ she added.

  I don’t recall exactly how it was I allowed myself to be drawn into conversation with this person I might, in a more confident and happy state of mind, have dismissed as a piece of living history best forgotten. Somehow we got on to the subject of my bird visitors. She gave me advice about feeding them. From that (by now the bus had unclenched its doors and we were riding together into town) we moved to a discussion of the apartment I referred to as mine but which has really been lent to me by a couple who are travelling abroad. It was probably then the first hint was dropped about Clarry and the fireworks. She told me her husband had missed the tall ships. She explained it was the Bicentennial year (I knew) and that a re-enactment of the First Fleet had sailed into the harbour (I knew that too). But there were also the tall ships. They had come from all over the world as a tribute to Australia. Clarry Shrimpton had been too ill to walk up to one of the headlands or c
oves for a good look. She was hoping someone might offer a pozzy from which he could get a look at the fireworks that were scheduled for next month on the harbour. He’d read about them in the paper. He wanted to see the fireworks very much. Clarry Shrimpton loved fireworks.

  IT IS INDEED THE Bicentennial year. You might think that’s a good time to be in Sydney. For many people—especially Australians—no doubt it is. But for a writer trying to keep himself alive and well in two cities-of-the-mind called Auckland and Los Angeles, the Bicentennial is just a distraction. A nuisance. It’s also (why not be honest?) a thundering bore. I’ve never known a country so bloated with self-regard.

  The couple who own my apartment—old friends from long ago when I lived and worked in New South Wales—were here for the Australia Day celebrations and then left on their travels. They send me postcards. They like Singapore. It’s clean, the shopping is wonderful. They’re impressed by the Moscow Underground. They think it superior even to the Paris Metro. They find Dublin dirty (the Liffey, they tell me, is brown) but they love the Irish countryside and the western coast. But of course nothing matches dear old Sydney.

  I become a misanthrope. The sheer effort of keeping my thoughts away from what I left behind (an average broken marriage) induces a kind of arthritis of the mind. Only there are those early hours of the day when I feel myself to be open and available to the world and so I’m able to work. After that the doors close. By evening there’s only TV and alcohol to ward off despair.

  What I find hardest to take is the school down there, eight floors down, as darkness closes in. Most of the mothers or fathers have come for their kids, but there are a few left with a distracted and irritable minder. The children play more frantically. I try to ignore them. Even from so far below I hear the voices coming up. I hear the minder shouting, ‘Come down off that roof.’ I go to the west balcony and look down. There they are, the last few, in their bright clothes, their bags on their backs, ready to go—running in and out of the lights, shouting in that hectic way kids do when they’re at the end of a long day and anxious.