Success by Martin Amis

Author:Martin Amis [Amis, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780307777805
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-15T13:00:00+00:00

In my view, of course, the whole idea of Ursula coming down to London like this was an utterly preposterous one, and I think Mama should have sat on Mr Dick in no uncertain manner when he first hatched his frisky little scheme. One way or another, though, a large part of life at Rivers Court has involved remoulding, intercepting or sometimes just ‘going along with’ my father’s banal whims simply in order to get things done. The family needs a holiday and we all decide on Greece: a book or pamphlet on this clime is left by his bed and the next morning he is loudly making reservations into a brandished telephone. He suddenly gets a passion for woodwork and handicraft: instead of allowing the French furniture to be cannibalized, we have him help with the retimbering of our scheduled barn, where he harmlessly makes a fool of himself among the stooped village carpenters. And so when he claimed that he’d need a secretary for this absurd book of his — I think the project has already been abandoned — it seemed cleverly opportunist at the time to offer Ursula herself as his future clerical auxiliary. At least she would gain some sort of qualification, which as we all know ‘helps’ these days, and at least the plan put paid to the intolerable notion of having some overpaid frump sitting about the place all day with nothing to do. The old boy was as easy to talk round as ever, and in fact Ursula was a good deal less keen on the idea than he was by the time she was dispatched to the Great Wen. That was six months ago …

During the semi-delirious phase of my illness I dreamed of her almost constantly, hurtful and saddening dreams that left me with a sense of irretrievable loss, as if something had gone wrong with the world while I slept which could never be put right again. Occasionally I would wake during her actual visits to my flat (she has her own key, the darling), and I would be unable to tell if she was really there and talk nonsensically — the words all in the letter A of dreams — until she hurried to my side. One morning last week, the sight of my suffering distressed her so much that she melted into tears; I held her painful, shuddering body in my great arms as her bones contracted into exhaustion and as I watched the clever new dreams marshal themselves once more on the white ceiling.

I can’t bear to dream of her small and unprotected evenings over there by the river, that lonely district of tall, set-back houses and the treacly nocturnal glaze under which the Thames seeps, that beetling drainpipe-splinted hostel, past whose yellowish windows flit the wraiths of pale factotums, dust-whorled typists and submarine stenographers. She is too small for any of that, the labelled refrigerator trays, the rooms containing three asymmetrical beds (it always looks wrong, like a ward), the scattered underthings and rubbled make-up, the pungent, towny bickering of it all.

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