Fascination by William Boyd

Author:William Boyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group UK
Published: 2004-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

I waited in all day for something I’d ordered from Exchange & Mart – possibly the most wonderful publication in the world – and was not disappointed when it arrived. What I’d ordered was a chair, a simple wooden chair, that can be easily transformed by the application of a few levers and bolts into either a work-table (for joinery or that sort of thing) or a step-ladder. I can spend a day leafing through Exchange & Mart and not notice time passing: the bargains, the enticing gadgets are extraordinary. I’ve ordered a dozen nylon astro-turf doormats that I intend to lay from the front door to the kitchen – the route where there is most traffic of feet. Then a perplexing phone call in the evening from a man with an Irish brogue telling me that Maria had to have another operation and that they were hoping for the best. ‘And to whom am I talking?’ I inquired. ‘Are you Mr O’Rourke?’ No, he replied, he was Maria’s fiancé, Desmond.

I heard a tapping at my window this morning (I am on the third floor) and pulled back the curtains to be dazzled by an oblique winter sun. A bird, a blackbird, was pecking at the glass. I shooed it away. I realize now that it is the utter inadequacy of human contacts that makes us turn to art. I know why I became a novelist: only in fiction is everything about other people explained. Only in our fictions is everything sure and certain.

‘He could sometimes be seen walking in Hyde Park. A tall man in his seventies, a little portly. His hair, quite grey, was thinning and as he was self-conscious about his baldness he often wore a hat, an increasingly unfashionable accessory in this day and age. He had known considerable success as a novelist in the 1920s and ’30s but his reputation had declined. All his books were out of print but he managed to live comfortably enough on a small, carefully managed legacy that his mother, a Russian aristocrat, had left him on her death. He was regarded by those who encountered him as difficult and stand-offish, or else eccentric and scatterbrained. In actual fact he looked on the world and its denizens with a curious and not unkind eye. Most things he saw amused him.’

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