Nye’; or, ‘Young Woodward, I presume? Iran and Persia are the same fucking place.’) It is surprisingly easy to destroy a young man’s sense of himself.
When Lucien finally got a job after university as a gossip reporter for a midmarket newspaper, he did not even try to persuade his father that this was a respectable way of earning a living. The old man nourished his disappointment for years, missing no opportunity of praising his son’s award-winning contemporaries, and asking awkward questions about the sources of his minor scoops.
Early on in his career, Robson had given a leg-up to Ken Cooper, now the editor of the National Courier, and they had remained drinking friends ever since, having lunch together every few months. Once they had been three, but the intense, wiry-haired young politician who had been such brilliant company, and who had kept them gasping and spluttering with laughter for years, had drifted away, too busy and too ambitious for alcoholic afternoons. Having kept his head down during the Blair, Brown and Cameron years, neither journalist was surprised when he rose, comparatively late in life, to become party leader and then prime minister.
With Ken and Robson left by themselves, their lunches became almost silent affairs, but somehow they survived Ken’s continued success in the glittery, shallow, modern newspaper world. From opposite ends of the political spectrum, the two friends had agreed an armistice in which the only fit subject of conversation was the catastrophic decline of the country. Their habitual game was to try to identify fresh signs of this, and to probe their origins.
After twenty minutes of gloomy silence, Ken would say, ‘Inappropriate.’
With any luck, Robson would show sufficient interest for Ken to continue.
‘Our forefathers talked about human evil. You and I … well, we’d say that something – I don’t know, child abuse, or trying to strangle your wife in public – was wicked. These days, it’s just fucking inappropriate. That’s the worst fucking word they’ve got.’ (They was code for everyone under fifty.)
Robson would continue to slurp his soup, and Ken to smash his salad to pieces. Eventually one of them would say, ‘Butchers.’
And so it would go on. Sometimes a gambit wouldn’t work. ‘Velcro. Bloody Velcro,’ Robson might say, but Ken would only look up blankly and shrug. Another thirty minutes or so of friendly, despairing silence was then guaranteed.
On only one subject would Robson frown and show displeasure.
‘That boy of yours isn’t completely stupid, you know,’ Ken might say. ‘Brought in a decent little story last week …’
Lucien had been hired by the Courier’s deputy editor, but Robson refused to believe it wasn’t patronage, and never forgave Ken for his supposed weakness.
But Ken was right: Lucien McBryde really wasn’t completely stupid. And so he had fluttered, broken-winged, from perch to perch, eventually making enough money at the Courier to be able to enjoy himself, and to dress well, while never hanging on to it long enough to own property, or any of the other appurtenances of serious, grown-up life.
Lucien was not on the run from his father. That level of exertion would have appalled him. He was, rather, on a gentle jog from adult responsibility, and as he continued up St James’s Street he flattered himself that, in that respect at least, he had been doing rather well. But then he had tripped over Jen Lewis, and had fallen, hurtling head-down, parachute-free, in love.
On the face of it – and hers was an ivory, oval face, offset by a sensual, challenging mouth – Jennifer Lewis’s background could hardly have been more different. She had been brought up by a strict aunt in an old Devon rectory, and had attended the Royal Girls’ Academy outside Exeter. There she had appeared gloriously normal. But Jennifer’s cross, the painful burden chafing her slim shoulders, had always been her mother. Myfanwy Davies-Jones, a Welsh poetess and novelist with a cloud of yellow hair and a scarlet reputation, had arrived in the King’s Road in July 1963, not quite straight from her pit-village school, and had thrown herself headfirst into West London society during the most exhilarating and self-indulgent years those dirty terraced streets and dusty parks had enjoyed since the Second World War.
She attracted the rich and the dangerous – men such as Lord Croaker, the asset-stripper and zoo-owner; and the right-wing journalist and politician Sir Rufus Panzer. Way back, Panzer had been a communist, even volunteering as a machine-gunner in a red corps during the Spanish Civil War. In his sixties he had been a lean and extreme supporter of the rising Tory right, though he was later rejected by Margaret Thatcher: ‘Brilliant man, but a little too much gleam in the eye.’
After half a dozen relationships with such wild characters, diluted by the occasional artiste, Myfanwy’s first novel was acclaimed as the satirical roman à clef swinging London had been waiting for. Sidetracked from her new celebrity by a doe-eyed performance poet from Liverpool, she gave birth to a son, quickly palmed off to a couple who for some reason wished to adopt him. She would have preferred an abortion, she frankly admitted to her friends, but had been too disorganised, lazy, and perhaps frightened, to go through with it.
The hospital long remembered Myfanwy Lewis – for this episode she had chosen to revert temporarily to her real name, rather than the one by which she was known to her public. Its nurses had never before had to deal with a strong aroma of marijuana smoke in the maternity wing, let alone a constant stream of arguing and backslapping visitors in leather jackets and kaftans who stayed late into the night playing Joan Baez songs. Myfanwy had treated the birth pains and what they brought forth as a baffling surprise, unpleasant enough at the time, but soon afterwards useful material for one of her most successful books.
Then, many years later, when Myfanwy was on the very brink of the menopause, she had swanned back to the hospital, still striking, still attended by adoring young men, hugely pregnant and hugely irritated at this second unexpected turn of events. Thus arrived the small and cross Zuleika Maria-Guadeloupe Attracta Gonne Lewis.
In later years, the unwanted Jen – as she preferred to be called – had never thrown her mother’s evident lack of interest, or even maternal instinct, back at her. It would have been as futile as complaining to a bird about its song. As a baby, as a toddler, and as a striking, solemn-faced young girl, she had been passed from friend to relative to acquaintance. ‘Who’s on Jenny Wren duty tonight?’ literary editors would ask publishers’ secretaries. Jen remembered only a haze of kindly, feckless faces, wooden floors and Turkish carpets in colourfully furnished flats and houses across West London. From time to time Mother would appear briefly, brandish her like a prize at a party or barbecue, then disappear again, after flinging her a bouquet of incomprehensibly flowery language and a warm, nauseatingly perfumed farewell embrace. Jen still recalled the moist, sickly, lipsticked mouth and the wet, lolling tongue, imbued with tobacco and wine, with a shudder.
In many other families, both Jen and her mother would have got over all this, and thrived. Jen would have turned her early years into a funny late-night story for the benefit of boyfriends, and become increasingly admiring of her mother’s genuine, exotic literary gift, and even her famous face, like that of a fine-boned elf in a wig, which had popped up so often, sketched or photographed, on the covers of extinct magazines and Sunday Times colour supplements. Myfanwy, meanwhile, would have come to appreciate her daughter’s precocious intelligence and her looks, which echoed her own, and woven her childish triumphs, pearls of wisdom and delightful mistakes into brittle newspaper columns. Eventually, the two would have become friends.
It never happened like that. Jennifer was, at least, spared those newspaper columns. She had the wrong temperament to understand her mother. Temperament is fate, and Jen was temperamentally literal rather than literary, almost male in her self-absorbed preference for order and systems. She hated sloppiness, and the slopping around of personal secrets. And when she eventually read her mother’s novels – Seven Sermons for Secular Sinners, or Leprosy and the Ladies’ Room –