A Week in December, Page 3

  At Gloucester Road, Hassan stepped off the train and went up into the street. Batteries and disposable cameras were easy and cheap enough to find; the only thing he was having trouble with was hydrogen peroxide. But he had a plan for that.

  In a first-floor flat of what had once been a railway worker’s cottage in Clapham, Hassan’s face in a photograph was being stared at by a young woman called Shahla Hajiani.

  Shahla’s father, an Iranian businessman, had bought the one-bedroom flat as an investment, and, rather than have the trouble of letting it out, permitted his daughter to live there for nothing. Shahla, who had previously lived in Hackney with three fellow postgraduates, wasn’t sure she liked it. She sometimes felt lonely, particularly on a Sunday.

  ‘Oh, you silly boy,’ she said out loud as she put down the picture of Hassan. It was just a snap taken at a friend’s graduation party, but it showed him laughing, before he had become religious. Shahla herself was an atheist, having followed neither her mother’s Anglo-Judaism nor her father’s selective version of Islam.

  The French professor had persuaded her to take a second degree after her success in the first, and now she saw a pathway into the academic world beginning to open up before her feet. She had agreed to do a PhD on the poetry of the surrealist Paul Éluard, but felt wary of the idea of teaching and of institutions that would naturally follow. She liked parties too much; she liked travelling and big cities, and her fortunate knack with literature could also be a snare, she thought.

  She had met Hassan when he was a dedicated left-winger at student rallies, and she had at once been drawn to his passion and his soft manner. Behind his rhetorical certainties, she saw someone who had at some stage in his life been wounded. It puzzled and intrigued her, while the way he would let no one come too close to him suggested to Shahla a degree of fear. Yet up to a certain line – an invisible but passionately defended boundary – he was irresistible. His large hands with their thin, hair-covered wrists, his humorous, deep voice, his eyes so candid and willing to engage until the moment they took fright ... She saw all these things in the photograph, and she sighed, a broken exhalation, as she replaced it in a drawer and went to make her duty Sunday phone call to her mother.

  At six o’clock Ralph Tranter was gathering his armful of Sunday papers from the Iraqi newsagent, his pulse rate elevated by the weight of newsprint as well as by the thought of what it might contain. He lived with a cat called Septimus Harding in a flat in Ferrers End, a suburb that straddled the North Circular. Traffic hurried through it on its way to places of importance – Tottenham, Edmonton, Harringay – or north to the open spaces beyond the crawl of blackened bridge, gridlock and speed camera. Tranter’s road was called Mafeking Street and was occupied mostly by Kurds. A trip to the newsagent, Tranter told people, was like a walk through the history of the late twentieth century: here was the fallout of wars hot and cold; here was the collateral displacement of free markets and porous frontiers.

  He had had a slow start to Sunday, finishing a book before going out late for the papers. His route to the high street took him through three near-identical roads of modest houses built for another London, a place long gone. He sometimes tried to picture those first tenants: manual workers who commuted to the smog-producing factories of Bermondsey or Poplar, then returned at night to their modest white enclave; but it was hard to imagine them now in these car-lined streets: that homogeneity was not in nature any more.

  R. Tranter was always known by his first initial only, though very old friends might call him ‘Ralph’. Work colleagues and acquaintances called him ‘RT’. It had started when he submitted some reviews on spec to a small magazine, Outpost, soon after he had left Oxford. Finding themselves short of material at the last minute, they had printed one, but he had signed it only ‘R. Tranter’ and they had not been able to reach him by phone to find out what his first name was. When, a month later, a second magazine, Actium, rang to say they were also using an article by him and asked how he would like to be billed, he opted for reasons of continuity and superstition to go with ‘R. Tranter’. He had never liked his first name anyway, and it had been the subject of a lifelong confusion as to whether it rhymed with ‘Alf’ or ‘safe’.

  He occupied the first floor of a two-storey building, and, although the house was a sooty brick nonentity, one of a row that varied only in external paint colour and size of TV aerial dish, his rooms were painted a pleasant magnolia and had simple furniture from a Finnish brownsite warehouse. To this clean modern look, the odd mahogany gateleg table or 1950s standard lamp from various second-hand shops had added, he felt, an original note.

  Tranter logged on to the e-mail at his white PC. There was the usual Sunday horoscope from Stargazer. ‘Hi, Bruno Banks! A good week awaits you. Venus is in the ascendant, which means you are going to get lucky in love! Professional openings are abundant. Use your fabled charm to make the most of them. Have a good one, Bruno Banks! With best wishes from All the Team at Stargazer.’ Tranter envied Bruno his auspicious life. Unfortunately, Bruno was a fictional character Tranter had invented for a novel he’d abandoned two years earlier. As inspiration waned, he had looked to the Internet for help and hoped that signing up to a horoscope as Bruno Banks would give him ideas. It hadn’t. Eventually, Tranter e-mailed Stargazer to tell them Bruno had died, been hit by a meteor, had met an unexpected – an unforetold – end, but to no avail: the predictions kept on coming.

  The sitting room was entirely lined with bookshelves that Tranter had made himself, sawing up furlongs of dusty MDF, wearing a face mask from the hardware shop on Green Lanes, then propping lengths of undercoated shelf on the sport and finance sections of spread-out newspapers. His woodwork had won steady praise in his schooldays, more than thirty years before, and, when the shelves had been painted white and fitted to the wall, they were able to support, without sagging, Tranter’s 2,000 piece library, ranged in alphabetical order from Achebe, Chinua to Zweig, Stefan. He sometimes regretted all the books he’d sold on to Bellswift, the sullen second-hand dealer in Lamb’s Conduit Street, but he knew that it was the half price he got for them that enabled him to continue to live in Europe’s most expensive city, albeit in Mafeking Street.

  There was no television in the sitting room, merely a glass-topped coffee table with back numbers of the weekly papers, and a couple of armchairs upholstered in navy blue. One of these was usually occupied by the slothful Septimus, named after a character in The Warden, Tranter’s favourite Trollope novel. The cat added a touch of warmth to a room that might otherwise have been intimidating in its single-mindedness: the size of Tranter’s library meant there was no space on the walls for pictures or posters. The closest he had come to ornament was a wooden bust of G. K. Chesterton from a shop in Sicilian Avenue, which sat between the end of the Us (Upward, Edward) and the beginning of the Vs (van Vechten, Carl).

  In November, Tranter had invited Patrick Warrender, the literary editor who gave him his staple work as a reviewer, to come and have dinner. He had also invited a married couple he had known since Oxford and a woman novelist of his own age, who made her living by broadcasting in a vein both maternal and minatory that was favoured by the radio, where she described Moby-Dick as ‘boysy’ and Anna Karenina as ‘badly written’. Patrick was gay, so there had been no need to find more women, and the conversation had continued successfully till one o’clock.

  Tranter had written two reviews in the armful of Sunday papers he brought back from the newsagent. One of them had suffered the usual trimming, with some of his better thrusts cut back or modified; the other was untouched – usually a sign that Patrick Warrender, late back from lunch at his gentlemen’s club, had miscalculated the space and so had been obliged to let Tranter run on to his full extent. In any event, both were satisfactory. Tranter felt he had not only explained why the books were flawed, but had also managed to demonstrate that both writers were, in some essential way, fraudulent.

  He went through to the small kitche
n that overlooked the backyards of the terrace. A woman in Muslim headgear (what was the word for it? Hijab? Burkha?) was hanging washing on a line. Were they allowed to do that? he wondered. At some level, Tranter was confused between Muslim women in traditional dress and nuns. Was either group, for instance, allowed to ride a bicycle or play ping-pong? Would that be blasphemous, or merely comic?

  In the next garden, the Bosnian war criminal was stripping down his motorbike, while from beyond him came the shrieking voices of the fast-breeding Catholic Polish family, as four boys attempted a football game on the tiny lawn.

  Tranter took a mug of tea back to the sitting room and opened the third newspaper on his pile. He threw the sport and City sections into the recycling basket and turned to the book review pages. A history of the ballpoint pen was well received by a young novelist, who described Biro’s invention as ‘iconic’, and made reference to Roland Barthes and Eric Cantona. A life of Dora Carrington was given a guarded welcome by a biographer of Roger Fry. ‘Not vintage, but quaffable’ was the verdict of the paper’s diarist on a guide to New World wines, while the MP for a market town in Derbyshire dismissed the memoirs of an American Secretary of State as ‘Pooterish’.

  None of this stuff interested Tranter. His years in the business had trained him to go straight to the fiction pages, which he read with the eye of a fund manager scanning market prices. The difference was that Tranter had no investment and no favourite; he didn’t want to see a modest growth, still less a boom. He was interested only in bad reviews. Crash was what he wanted: crash and burn – failure, slump, embarrassment. He liked it when acerbic youngsters teased established writers and he relished it when old pipe-suckers slapped down a lively newcomer. His own speciality was the fa cetious, come-off-it review which invited the reader to share his opinion that the writer’s career had been a sustained con trick at the expense of the gullible book-buyer. He dismissed equally the offerings of famous old men, heavy with honours, and those of photogenic young women. While he averted his eyes from other people’s praise, he was generous in his enjoyment of like-minded reviews. Sometimes, he sent postcards in his precise ballpoint handwriting: ‘I thought you got the new —— exactly right. RT.’

  Literary setbacks came in many shapes, and Tranter relished all of them: he was a connoisseur of disappointment, a voluptuary of disgrace. Alone among European reviewers, a young RT had found the agreed masterpiece of a Latin American novelist to be a ‘disappointment ... tricked out with the sad old tropes of magic realism ... meretricious’. Of all the ways of failing as a novelist the one that Tranter relished most was the mid-career slide, because it freed him, retrospectively, from years of anguish. Foreign grandees were simple coconuts in Tranter’s shy; firing off a bucketful of balls was second nature, routine stuff, and he doubted that it did much good in the face of universal fawning. But reading praise for the work of a British contemporary gave him a stomach pain as fierce as the cramps of gastroenteritis. Over the years he’d had to develop strategies for dealing with it, and the simplest was to write an anonymous review of his own at the back end of The Toad, a monthly magazine that was edited by an old Oxford contemporary. Here Tranter could place a powerful antidote to compliments that had appeared elsewhere. The savvy readers of The Toad were told that such praise had been offered in bad faith – by old Etonians, by former lovers of the author or by ‘poor saps’ who were the victims of fashion. The truth was that the novel was full of ‘reach-me-down platitudes’ and wasn’t worth the time of unillusioned Toad-readers. Sometimes Tranter had already reviewed the book under his own name in a newspaper, where, for plausibility’s sake, he’d been obliged to mute his criticisms or leaven them with guarded praise; and then his anonymous Toad piece acted as a bracing corrective, even to himself.

  Money was tight chez Tranter. Two book reviews a week generated £450, and a monthly Toad piece was worth a further £300. With other oddments, he had brought his year’s income up to roughly £30,000, he thought. Then, eighteen months earlier, he had had a piece of luck. He received a letter from the headmaster of a famous private school near London, making him an offer. Although the pupils regularly came near the top of the national league of exam results, most taking home a full house of A-stars and As, they had little idea of spelling or grammar, and neither had their teachers. The headmaster of the school had been sent a letter by an elderly parent, educated back in the 1950s, lamenting what he called the ‘basic errors of literacy’ in his child’s end-of-term report and suggesting that for £25,000 a year he was entitled to a teacher who knew the difference between ‘I’ and ‘me’ or ‘bought’ and ‘brought’.

  The headmaster called a meeting of the staff, who shrugged. It wasn’t their fault. Most of them had been educated by teachers who believed that spelling was at best a ‘fetish’ and, more probably, just a way of trying to keep poor children out of university. Such things had long since been discounted by public examiners and it was far too late now, as the head of History put it, to ‘reinvent the wheel’. And anyway, no one had ever complained about the teachers’ literacy before.

  One of the French staff, however, was married to a man in management consultancy who’d been at Oxford with Tranter and had kept vaguely in touch. She thought Tranter might be of an age and background still to have access to such arcana and she promised to dig out his address for the Head.

  Tranter was intrigued to receive an approach from such a famous school and went in to see them, as requested. He crossed the cobbles that ringed the grassy quadrangle and thought how very different they were from the tarmac apron of his own old school. He went beneath a stone arch in which pupils had carved their names (Wm Standforth 1822) and into another, smaller courtyard, ivied with age and bogus distinction.

  ‘Very kind of you to come,’ said the Head, a tall, dynamic man with bushy black hair. ‘It’s a slightly embarrassing request, really. I do personally recall the rudiments of spelling. Bit of a tyrant about it in fact. It’s just that I don’t have time to go through every single report and change “Johnny appears disinterested” to “Johnny appears uninterested” and so on. The current headmaster’s life is largely one of conferences and administration, making speeches, marketing and so on.’ He coughed self-deprecatingly. ‘I can’t pretend it’s creative work we’re offering you, Mr Tranter, but we’d pay you decently.’

  Tranter smiled. ‘People’d be really surprised, wouldn’t they, that you of all schools ... I mean—’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said the Head hurriedly. ‘Top ten of the league table and all that. But I also know for a fact that other illustrious schools do the same thing. No names, no pack drill. And obviously this must remain entirely between ourselves. It would be most damaging if it were to leak out into any ... In any way.’

  Tranter thought of The Toad, and smiled again. ‘Well,’ he said in the higher, slightly reedy tone his voice took on when he was intrigued, ‘we could certainly give it a go and see how it works out.’

  The business part of the deal was quickly done. Drafts of all the reports were to be sent to Tranter on CD. He was not to change them or rewrite in any way, merely to correct the worst errors of grammar and syntax and all those of spelling. The school had 620 pupils, each of whom had roughly ten reports, most of them only a few lines. Tranter calculated that at the rate of three reports per minute, the whole task would take about thirty-five hours – or a working week. Based on annual earnings, his average pay per week was roughly £600, but this work would be more intensive. He had planned to ask for double, say £1,200 a term, or even £4,000 a year, but the headmaster’s opening offer was £5,000 plus expenses and any secretarial help he wanted, so no bargaining was necessary.

  Tranter’s own writing style had long ago been sold over to journalism, with its ‘iconic images’ and ‘cur’s cojones’, but he was just old enough to have been taught how to spell at school, had read thousands of good books and had once had the principle of hanging participles unforgettably explained to hi
m by Patrick Warrender. He was up to the task. Five terms into the new regime, the headmaster was thrilled by the results. The complaining parent wrote a conciliatory letter, admitting the improvements, and the Head granted Tranter a £1,000 bonus. His nickname in the common room was Harry Patch, after the last surviving Tommy of the Great War. ‘I’ve been Patched up,’ said the head of Geography, reading his corrected comments on-screen. ‘Me too,’ said History.

  This success as rewrite man made Tranter see that there was still money in literacy. In fact, it was a simple demonstration of supply and demand. While graduates with first-class degrees from the best universities couldn’t spell or compose an e-mail that made sense, the companies that employed them still had to write letters, put out documents and deal with law firms, banks and public companies. The counterparty didn’t expect elegance, but needed at least to be able to understand what was on offer.

  As someone educated at a grammar school before the towel was thrown in, Tranter had an asset: literacy. He could sell it. Then, a year after he began work with the school, he received an invitation to ‘moderate’ the book-club discussions of a group of posh housewives in North Park. He could hardly believe his luck. Most of the women had university degrees in arts subjects, but they had no basic understanding of how a book worked. Even the vocabulary that Tranter had been taught at the age of sixteen was mysterious to them; they didn’t know the difference between ‘style’ and ‘tone’, for instance. He was able to make £100 a time without exerting himself, as well as putting away a very good dinner and a bottle of wine. All the women were on diets, so Tranter was able to tuck in at will to a variety of dishes purchased at astonishing expense from local delicatessens and traiteurs. They also paid his Tube fares. After he had made a few observations about the book in question, they generally cut him out of the loop. What they wanted to talk about was whether the incidents in the book were ‘based on’ events in the author’s own life and to what extent his version of them tallied with their own experience of such things. Tranter tried to suggest that there were more fruitful ways of approaching a novel, a work of invention that aspired, albeit pathetically, to be a work of ‘art’; but although they listened patiently, they seemed not to believe him.