My Name is Legion by A. N. Wilson

Author:A. N. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-FIVE

‘I just can’t believe you wrote this.’

The Daily Legion was folded open on the upended barrel which served as a table at Bin Ends. A long pale finger pointed accusingly at the leader page. The headline was HANS BUSCH – YOUR POTTY OR ARE WE?! The ‘stand first’ was ‘With tongue firmly in cheek, top Legion writer L. P. Watson asks whether controversial modern artist Hans Busch’s latest work The Thinker – a Perspex toilet – is really worth the £1.3 million paid this week by an anonymous collector.’

The sheepish author slumped on his wobbly chair. He was neither especially proud, nor especially ashamed of the article.

‘Darling,’ he sighed, ‘I don’t know what you are making such a fuss about.’

‘Don’t call me darling.’

‘But you are my darling …’

‘It is so patronizing – we are trying to have a serious conversation.’

‘The article is meant to be funny – obviously it fails, unless it’s your sense of humour that has mysteriously failed.’

There was silence, time enough for him to wonder for the first time in his life whether this intense and beautiful person in fact had ever, in the eight years, on and off, they had known one another, shown the smallest sign of possessing a sense of humour.

‘Lionel, have you forgotten what I am supposed to be?’

L. P. Watson paused and looked at the impassioned, pale face of Rachel Pearl. He was used to being screamed at by his wife because of what he wrote in the Legion; his mistress had normally registered her disapprovals and disagreements by silence.

‘And the pay-offline … it is just, so predictable. Frankly, Lionel, it’s not worthy – even of you.’

‘Ouch.’

It was eleven thirty in the morning. The features conference had just ended, when Rachel had sent him an urgent e-mail message to say that they must talk. He, as it happened, had much more serious news to impart. His wife had told him that she wanted a divorce. This devastating news made his why-oh-why on the subject of Hans Busch’s Perspex lavatory seem a bit trivial; and Rachel’s anger about his article seemed, in the circumstances, schoolgirlish.

‘It was not Oscar Wilde, it was Ruskin who said that Whistler, not Turner, was throwing a paint pot in the face of the British public.’

‘Does it matter?’ he sighed.

‘Surely accuracy matters.’ She prodded the paper furiously. ‘You said it was Oscar Wilde …’

‘Yes, yes.’

She read it back to him:

‘It was Oscar Wilde long ago who accused Turner of throwing a pot of paint in the face of the British public. Hans Busch is throwing a pot of something else – the pot which those of us who are older remember keeping under our beds.

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