I get the impression that many people believe writers write about themselves. I cannot say whether this is true or not. All I can say is my novels are not about me! Why should anyone be interested in the author? However, I can say that I use some of my personal experiences in my books if I think the experience fits. One such experience occurred in 1996 when my (then) future wife and I were walking the Southwest Coastal path. We were somewhere in Devon when we came across a very pink guest house and decided to stay the night there. Years later, I used our experiences and my conversation with the owner when writing a chapter of The Poor Singer of an Empty Day. Of course, I was unable to remember the exact words I exchanged with this wonderful husband and wife team but the gist of our conversation is spot on. In the novel, my protagonist, Julian, is standing in the entrance hall when he hears a voice.
"Can we help you?”
He blinked, readjusted to his surroundings and looked around. It was a woman’s voice, a mildly suspicious voice carrying a mid-Atlantic accent.
“Are you looking for something?”
He wondered how long she had been standing there. She had, perhaps, been watching and evaluating him from behind her desk. When he turned to face her, she had stepped away from the desk and stood in the middle of the hallway on strong and purposeful calves. Her face was heavily painted with rouge; and her eyes, black with mascara, produced a repulsive effect as though she were cross-eyed. She waved Julian to the desk and suggested that if he was looking for a room he might like to fill out the register. Her tone implied that if he was not looking for a room, he should leave immediately.
And so Julian was confronted with more fact and fiction. Name, address, passport number, contact telephone number and other information which says nothing and which guarantees anonymity. While the ink flowed from the nib and formed letters on the paper in front of him, it finally sunk in that he was homeless. Via Vittorio Veneto, Verona, Italy, was disassociated from him. He no longer lived there. It was one thing to know this. It was another to give the place as a false address and say the street name as he had said it out loud to the police sergeant. But for Julian, the last straw was putting his lies down on a piece of paper as a permanent, written record.
The landlady glanced at what he had written, and when she opened her mouth to smile, he was struck by her eyes. Seeing everything or nothing, they stared at him as if from some deep and dreamless sleep. He felt naked before her. She had seen through his permanent written lies, had probably seen that he was of no fixed abode and feeling vaguely criminal. But all she said was, “Do follow me up the stairs,” and he walked after her in the sweet perfume-cloud she left in her wake.
All the rooms in the guesthouse had pink doors, and they had names like Balmoral and John Brown. She ushered him into the Empress of India suite. It smelled of roses and was, she assured him, the only room they had left. She glanced at his box of diaries and, treating him to another smile, she said:
“I expect you’ll want to fetch your suitcases.”
“I don’t have any suitcases,” he said. “My car’s been broken into.”
Before his words were out, he wanted to kick himself. He was sure that in her eyes, any brush with the underworld would have left its stain on him. He was right. The corners of her mouth drooped, and she eyed the diaries with increasing suspicion.
“A flying visit then,” she said. Her front teeth were covered in a film of saliva-diluted lipstick. This imperfection made her somehow more human. Julian smiled sweetly.
“Been abroad?” she asked.
He glanced at the floor in a way that suggested he might have lost something.
“Actually we live in Italy.”
Earlier that day, he had used the word “separated” for the first time. He was still coming to terms with the sense of dirtiness and failure that accompanied the word. He longed to be associated with something acceptable and respectable.
“My wife and me I mean.”
“And you’re on your way to visit friends?”
“That’s right.”
Feeling slightly sick, Julian saw how easy it was to allow one lie to lead to another. In what way, he wondered, could the word “friend” be applied to people he had not contacted for twenty-seven years? Essentially, he had disappeared as completely as Kathy had done, and his life had no relevance for those he had left behind. And yet, he had been expecting England and its people to be unchanged and waiting for him. He had only to pick them up again, like photographs, and animate them. The truth was out. There were no more relationships, no more friendships. All that remained were shared memories of the same photograph.
“How long do you intend to stay?” she asked.
“Five days.”
“Five days?” she said, the corners of her mouth drooping still further. “In Dover? Most of our clients are only passing through.”
The word “clients” touched a nerve. Julian replied quickly:
“Isn’t that the essence of life? Only passing through? The ghosts that crowd upon life’s empty day.”
He felt sicker as he rolled out this quotation. The words had appeared involuntarily on his lips. He was now getting flustered.
“I mean, aren’t we all here one day and gone the next?”
And perhaps here again, he thought, like Kathy. He had been hoping that if he forgot about her then so would everyone else. Close your eyes, go to Italy, and she would vanish. He shuffled uncomfortably. With tiredness weighing heavily on his eyelids, he was unable to prevent the idea of a young man from appearing. It was the young man the police were still looking for, and he walked into Julian’s head and stood there daring anyone to challenge his presence. He knew this young man had every right to visit. He was, after all, a reflection of himself at eighteen, the photograph he had left behind.
“We only have vacancies for one night,” the lady said firmly.
The corners of her mouth collapsed completely, and her lips fused together. She looked at Julian from head to toe, and leaned her head at an angle as if to assess him. He could only guess at what she saw. A strange and wretched man with criminal associations, his youth passed away, his mind addled with tiredness, creeping through the streets of Dover to look for a bed for the night. He hated the woman, but was consoled by the idea that had he told her the truth, that the middle-aged man in front of her was homeless and still wanted by police, she would never have allowed him to stay in the Empress of India suite.
“I’m leaving in the morning,” he said.
“And you have to vacate the room by ten o’clock.”
“I’ll be away after breakfast.”
He discovered that he was still unsure as to his next move. His older self advocated going back to the police station and telling them his version of events. But if he did that, he thought, he would never find McKnight, never put Kathy’s soul to rest. What was more, Julian’s younger self, so recently revived, recoiled at the idea of a confession to the authorities. He was ignorant of the law, but it was not unreasonable to suppose that they could put a person in prison for withholding vital information. He did not even know how vital that information was, and he never would know unless he found out why Kathy was in the news again. He stilled his mind with the notion that these problems were hypothetical anyway, that he had made his decision.
“Actually, I shall be going back to Italy in a few days,” he said.
“Breakfast is at seven thirty, and don’t forget to read the fire-notice on the back of the door.”
She swivelled on her high heels and clattered down the stairs. As she dived into the hallway, Julian heard a man’s voice.
“Full English or Continental?”
The voice was youthful; its power suggesting a man in his prime, but it did not correspond to the sad and old appearance of the man himself. Julian thought he recognised the face that looked at him expectantly from the downstairs hallway, but recollection came with a touch of sadness. He had seen this man’s younger self in Royal Navy uniform. The vitality that he had noticed in the photo above the phone had been snatched away, bore witness to the failure of the attempt to master time with the push of a button. This man now had the shadow of death on his face. Julian nodded towards the photo on the dark, corner wall and said:
“Did you serve on that ship?”
The naval man immediately threw back his shoulders and clicked his heels.
“Twenty years in the service,” he said.
Julian thought the man wanted to say more, but the woman put a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t forget,” she said, “to tell the gentleman about the window in his room.”
The ex-sailor looked at Julian helplessly like a man drowning. The woman continued, her voice singing, the vowels drawling.
“And don’t forget to tell him this is a non-smoking house.”
“I don’t smoke actually,” Julian said from the top of the stairs.
“And don’t forget to tell him we don’t allow guests.”
She brushed past, swept into another room and closed the door a little more forcefully than was necessary. The word “management” was clearly visible on the woodwork. The seaman looked up and, raising his eyebrows, he shrugged and said:
“You heard the captain.”
Julian disappeared into the Empress of India Suite and showered in a dribble of lukewarm water. Emerging from the tiny cubicle, he felt something was not as it should be. Initially he thought it was the unaccustomed softness of carpet underfoot that was wrong, but it was the absence of a clothes basket that troubled him. He found himself stranded in the middle of the room and wondering what to do with his soiled clothes. He was used to putting them in their basket at home. But the word “their” was no longer appropriate. Their car, their house, their balcony and their life had ceased to be. It was only a week ago, but that life had ceased to exist as irrevocably and as completely as Kathy.
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