Justin Glatt. Remember him? Probably not, but, for a while, he was a name, not mega, as they say, but respected, admired, talked about. I knew him – well enough, at least, to dislike him, in spite of which he confided in me, bought me lunches and dinners on his then generous expense account. I never had nor will have that kind of money; nobody with the word ‘thinker’ attached to their name can expect to eat ox tongue at Quo Vadis or Devon- shire chicken at the Ivy, and I was known as, among one or two other things, a thinker. Not Glatt though, he was a doer. He consumed the thought of others solely as a fuel to keep him doing. He always placed a notebook – Moleskine – and a pen – Montblanc – beside his plate. The first time he did this I was outraged. It seemed sordid, as if he had spat on the tablecloth or blown his nose on a napkin, but I said nothing. On all subsequent occasions, I was resigned and still said nothing. He would lay down his knife to make notes as I spoke. This made me pause to examine what I had just said, leaving me, usually, puzzled at why that in particular had been of such sig- nificance. The puzzle was always solved when my idea appeared, mutilated but still recognisable, in the midst of one of those big Sunday newspaper interviews with his shocking monochrome by-line picture, a lean face with pursed lips and staring eyes surmounted – or, rather, subverted – by the high, blond hair of some Forties matinee idol.
‘You are my oracle!’ he would cry as he noted down some especially in- cisive summary of an aspect of contemporary thought widely considered trivial until two Sundays later when its hitherto undiscovered importance became apparent to all. I was not, I should say, lest I be blamed for every- thing, his only oracle. I knew of at least eight others and suspected there could be ten or more. They were academics mainly, scattered across the disciplines – sociology, philosophy, anthropology, physics, psychology, computer science and even mathematics. He didn’t buy them all meals, most he just phoned – he called them the phoners and the privileged few the eaters. I was fed because I could skate happily across all subjects. The ice, I admit, was often thin, but then Glatt only needed headlines or references he could slip into questions, just enough to suggest he had plumbed an entire frozen lake, an abyss of vast reading, deep research.
I marvelled at his efficiency, his assiduity. Newspapers being what they are, he could have done without all of us, but he really needed not to seem shallow. In the midst of some precarious slither across quantum computing or behavioural psychology, I would often pause and ask, ‘Do you really need all this?’ He always answered that he wanted everything and more. He needed to stay ahead of the game and not just for the interviews; he had to be the smartest guy in the room, any room. He was in a tricky business, callow contenders were streaming off the campuses and, sooner or later, one would work out how to do what he did but better, faster, younger. Or they would be good on YouTube, a medium he was just old enough to regard with mistrust as representing a future that cared nothing for his labours. In general, he had a morbid fear of the young that I found ridiculous. I found it impossible to imagine any of them, neurotically distracted as they were, competing with his furious single-mindedness. His ephebiphobia was, I thought, a sign that he was not the modern man he appeared to be, but, rather, a relic of an age when jobs, even his absurd job, were done properly. There was, however, his passionate neutrality. He had no agenda, no urge to advocate or persuade. He believed in nothing but the abstractions and conventions of his calling. This arbitrary faith in mere process was, per- haps, his most contemporary attribute and his greatest weakness.
He was in his early forties, he had two children and a design-conscious wife – small, dark, bright-eyed, watchful, Indian – in a heavily mortgaged house in Chiswick, not on the river but close. Being the biggest and best in- terviewer in the business, he could, to a limited extent, dictate terms, even to the nervous panjandrums of the declining newspaper industry. But the numbers only just added up. Apart from anything else, the children were at private schools and that, combined with the wife and the mortgage, meant that his expenses were his only real wriggle room when it came to dispos- able income. There was, somewhere, a lump sum, the proceeds of the sale of the wife’s small design business, abandoned when she was poleaxed by the birth of their first – she had rejected Glatt’s entreaties that she keep go- ing with the aid of a nanny – but it was more a lump than a sum, something immoveable, untouchable. Oh yes, she was now working again, but only part-time in a vintage shop – it brought in pennies, but she was, she said, fulfilled. As a further distraction, she had insisted Justin join her in learning the tango, a dance that had become a craze among the over-active affluent of West London. To Justin it was just another process and he became a pro- digious Tangoist, all sharpness and chin-junting grandeur.
Whether he was fulfilled or not was another matter. I often wondered about his sexuality, thinking, probably unfairly, that an obsessive wife with two children could not provide all he needed. Perhaps he was gay, many people seem to be gay or near-gay these days. Or it didn’t matter, in which case it wasn’t even a question worth asking, though Glatt did ask it, suspiciously often, outing, as a result, a male tennis player and a female TV anchor. On the whole, however, I thought sex didn’t come into it. At our lunches and dinners, waitresses would rush up to him, swaying their hips and saying, ‘I LOVED your piece on …’ They could never remember the victim, only the by-line and that shocking picture. He would respond, deploying the script of flirting but not, somehow, the manner. At once, the girl would notice this lack, this absence, this, as it were, abstinence. Most would keep swaying, though deflated, until it all became too much and they would sullenly return to serving the ox tongue done just so.
At our meetings he was ironic, confident, fully in control; this is what he did, he met people and recorded their words – the Moleskine and Mont- blanc for me and my kind, digital recorders for the victims. I wondered at the perfection of his manner. Say what you like about Glatt – and many terrible things have been said – he looked the part. He had a tailor, not a grand one, a humble one, Jewish of course, located in a shop with a Re- gency bow window round the corner from them in Chiswick. Stein was good. Justin’s suits were tight enough to be fashionable but not so tight as to be ridiculous and they gave his slim but awkward figure a fine, angular clarity from which his large head emerged in triumph. Just seeing him eat lunch was like watching him tango. The suits also made some sense of his high, blond hair, flat at the sides. The colour was natural but dyed around the edges I suspected. Then there were his tight, usually pursed lips, his long nose and his huge, interrogator’s eyes – grey and flat, they denied the offer of anything other than his ruthlessly instrumentalised curiosity. Never mind, his victims bought the whole package and always spilled the beans. He was, like a shark, functionally perfect, beyond the need for evolutionary change. Or sometimes, oddly, he made me think of Fonzie in that American TV show Happy Days. He too had high hair and, when he looked in the mirror, comb in hand, he always decided nothing need be done, any further intervention would be folly. But, always, he looked again.
His band of thinkers – oracles – were his other tailors. We too made him look the part. I did it for the meals, why the phoners did it I don’t know, he didn’t even credit them. One, a biologist named Timmins, shrugged when I asked him why he took the calls.
‘I don’t get many interesting phone calls in my line of work and it’s pleas- ant to explain my stuff from first principles, good exercise. Anyway, we’re always told to be “media friendly” and, credit or not, doing a favour for someone like Glatt must pay off in the end, mustn’t it?’
Do I sound as though, deep down, I liked this man? Possibly, at times, I did. I shared with Timmins that sense of not getting many interesting phone calls and Glatt was never less than interesting. He was, for me, a voyager from a foreign land, a land where the apparent world was enough and its mastery the supreme prize. Of course, part of the appearance, the mastery, was to use the so-called wisdom of the inhabitants of the non-apparent world – the thinkers – but as no more than a rhetorical gesture or as el- ementary hygiene.
‘Glatt uses intellectuals like Kleenex,’ said one phoner.
What was that to me? I – and, I believe, they – had no proof that we weren’t Kleenex or little Jewish tailors in Chiswick, mere conveniences to the gypsies, aristocrats and pirates of Apparentland. We had only faith, or stupid- ity, or our minds, like our backs, were bent by the burden of tradition. No, wait, there was something else. Glatt was, you see, an interviewer, he asked questions to elicit answers, a process that, in itself, advertised, even if only metaphorically, the existence of something beneath the apparent. I had questions to ask too, they just weren’t like Glatt’s and they didn’t have answers, not, at least, in this world.
Then, one Sunday, it all fell apart. Much later at lunch, not at the Ivy, not at Quo Vadis, not in Soho nor Mayfair nor Chelsea nor Notting Hill, he told me the whole story, but, of course, like you, like everybody, I already knew most of it.
****
I remember, he said, the moment with awful, polychromatic clarity. I was wearing baggy turquoise swimming trunks and lying on an orange towel cast over an old green plastic lounger. There were two other loungers, simi- larly old, similarly green. The patio was paved with pale brown square stones, the gaps filled by small round dark grey stones wedged upright. Little lizards dived into the various interstices when humans emerged from the house. There were purple, yellow and white flowers – I never knew any of their names, though I did occasionally text a floral picture with a question mark to a botanist I know. There were three trees, an assortment of terracotta planters and climbers covering the old walls. Beyond my feet there was a gap in these walls leading to the small pool, a twinkling rhom- boid of a deeper turquoise than my trunks. Beyond the pool two white walls – one rough, one smooth – met and, above them a pantile roof sloped away to another white wall ending with ridge tiles and another roof. The whole confection supported a chimney, a satellite dish and a TV aerial with overtones of Picasso – two open metal lips and a jutting, spiked, scream- ing tongue. Children’s voices bounced loudly off the surrounding maze of white walls. My laptop and phone were on one of the neighbouring loung- ers. Flies buzzed and, on top of the wall to my left a black, brown and white cat stretched and yawned. It was a Sunday.
I was spending a week with the family in a mountain top pueblo blanco in southern Spain. These interludes had a settled routine. I did little, need- ing, it was agreed, rest, while Gita embarked on frenzied projects with the children involving churches, museums, perilous mountainside drives. The children were still a few years away from teenage scepticism and scorn and happily took her enthusiasms at face value. She always returned thrilled, full of stories of comic characters, unexpected food and funny things the children had said. I never inspired such excitement and I suspected her in- sistence that I ‘needed my rest’ was caused less by a concern for my health than by a determination that I did not intrude upon her outings. I would have stolen all her stories.
I did not mind, our marriage had reached the stage where certain avoid- ances were necessary and acceptable. We had opened a space in which we were allowed to dislike each other and from which we could report back as if all was well, which, in a sense, it was. Besides, there was no doubt that I ‘needed my rest’. I was increasingly enervated by the rituals of work. The setting up, the researching and the journeys – short or long – had all become more burdensome. And then there were the encounters with the victims. I had always suffered from mild suicidal feelings for about an hour before these staged meetings, a dim awareness that I would rather throw myself under a train than go through with it. Latterly, however, the feelings had become intense, agonising, and were now combined with a deep loathing for the victims even I before I had met them. This all dissipated the moment we did meet as some reflex, perhaps professionalism, took over, but I still had to survive that agonising hour. Of course, I didn’t tell anybody about this; in my business one needed to appear ‘clinical’ at all times. Indeed, ‘clinical’ was the word most often applied to me as well as to footballers.
In Spain, therefore, I was expected, in the name of ‘rest’, to ignore my phone and laptop entirely. Some days I succeeded and by midday on this Sunday – 11am in London – I had not looked at either. The phone had even been forbidden to vibrate. Gita had taken the children to Ronda. They had been before but the self-destructive thrill of the drop into the gorge – the El Tajo Canyon – in the midst of the town, the sickly, seductive pull of all that depth, never faded. ‘Don’t take them there after puberty,’ I had told Gita; teenagers, in my mind, were never far from suicide. Throughout my own pubescence, I was accompanied, as if by a friend, by an infinitely ingenious spectre who daily devised ever more subtle and elegant methods of flinging myself into oblivion. I assumed – hoped – my children were not to be so warped. For now at least, they were life-lovers – or, perhaps, they simply had not yet distinguished life from anything else – and they would be gone for hours. My mind had lapsed into an emptiness through which drifted possibilities of a book, a coffee, a swim, even a walk round the village. Not included in this list was electronic contact so the phone and laptop lay untouched. Not that I expected much on a Sunday morning. I had a big interview in the paper – with an old and mystifyingly fêted writer named Alexander Aldred – that was hardly controversial. Reactions, good or bad, usually took a day or two, but, somehow, an unease had crept stealthily into my vacancy.
The Aldred encounter, I now admitted to myself, had not been routine, not all of the pre-interview dread had drained from me as we shook hands. Perhaps it was the house – a tall, gloomy Victorian terrace, its ground floor bay window concealed by thick bushes and stunted trees, – or the area – a wealthy, Bohemian, but deeply unfashionable part of north west London. Everything suggested darkness and, indeed, when Aldred answered the door, the hallway seemed, at first, pitch black, but for a distant, silvery- grey, rectangular glow from a window. This silhouetted half of Aldred’s head and one shoulder; I could see nothing of his features.
I started to introduce myself but he was already waving me past him into the narrow hall, which, I now saw, was hung with dozens of small, framed, black and white photographs, apparently, judging by the sharkish charac- ters and the strip show signs in the background, taken in Soho in the Fifties. There was a dark, unventilated smell, possibly of stale tobacco.
‘Left, left,’ he said, his voice a loud groan. I turned into a slightly brighter room. Every wall was covered up to the ceiling with bookshelves. There were two sofas and an armchair, all dust laden and faded, a glass coffee
table with a black steel frame from the Eighties, a complicated system of spotlights, a painting of, I guessed, a younger Aldred on a poorly stretched and now crumpled canvas and a girl standing to attention offering me her hand to shake.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I’ll be gone in a moment. I just wanted to be here at this meeting of two greats. It’s me, Sophie.’
The last words were spoken uncertainly as she registered my blank expres- sion, but, with a mighty mnemonic effort, I realised that was the name of the publicity girl from the publishers and, with an uneasy but professional smile, I took her chilly, pale, wavering hand.
‘Sophie, sorry, it was a bit dark in the hallway….’ Aldred lumbered in.
‘Oh, Sophie, this is… this is…’
‘Justin, I know.’
She smiled at me and rolled her eyes, attempting to enlist me in an ageist conspiracy. I smiled back without quite accepting the invitation. Her evi- dent beauty, I noted, was undermined by certain hardness around the eyes and mouth. She wore a small, beige jacket over a very short, white dress. The heels were very high and there was a long gold necklace. She was, I guessed, going on to a party afterwards – ‘6-8pm, drinks’ as the emails always put it, coldly managing expectations.
They amazed me these girls, he said, these eager fixers. Publishers seemed to have a limitless supply. I could see what the publishers wanted from them – short dresses etc. But what did they want from this pecu- liar industry? Sophie probably had a media or English degree and, when asked, would softly announce that she ‘loved’ words and ‘adored’ this or that author. Perhaps she wrote poetry or, more likely, there was a novel on the go. It would never be finished. There was a high turnover of such girls. They just thought publishing was a more glamorous occupa- tion than it actually was and left, disappointed and impoverished though perhaps with a man fractionally more interesting than the average. Sophie was not quite there yet.
‘I just know,’ she said, ‘this is going to be a very special interview. So exciting. I’m amazed you two have never met.’
Aldred, now seated in one of the armchairs, smiled.
‘Well, now we have,’ he said.
‘Indeed,’ I said, ‘it’s a great honour, I’ve wanted to get to know you ever since Antiphon.’
It was his first novel. I hadn’t read it, of course, but I’d read enough about it the day before to bluff my way through. It had come out twenty years ago – Aldred was a late starter. Several critics detected overtones of Saul Bellow, just as, with his next, Charcoal, they noticed the influence of W. G. Sebald. My Other, his third, involved Kafka, Nabokov and Borges and was said to be his masterpiece – ‘the climactic realisation of the doppelgänger theme in European literature’. Prizes came his way, he was thought to be a Nobel possible, but, at the highest levels, his ascent was hampered by a certain imprecision. Who was he, exactly? What could possibly be said in the Stockholm citation? Every book was utterly different, not just in style but in sensibility, and every book seemed to be in thrall to another writer, even his one foray into non-fiction – the essay collection, ‘Absences’ – was said to evoke Beckett or was it Benjamin?
‘A man so various,’ said one sceptical critic, quoting Dryden, ‘that he seemed to be not one, but all mankind’s epitome.’ Another called him the Vicar of Bray of English letters.
There was no real spite to all this. Almost everybody thought he was a great 124
writer. My Other – about a man who met his double and proceeded to take over his life – routinely appeared in lists of greatest ever novels. His latest, the reason for our meeting, was called The Last Book and was garlanded with pre-publication praise from half a dozen of the leading literary names of the day. It actually was to be Aldred’s last book, though the book of the title was an apocalyptic text by an unknown author found, deeply encoded, in the memory of a super-computer in New Mexico. In spite of its 800 pages, this I had read, detecting, along the way, overtones of Cormac Mc- Carthy and John Williams. It was, I could see, brilliant but not in any way that I cared about.
Sophie, wishing to demonstrate that she was savouring the sanctity of this encounter, was reluctant to leave. She knelt by Aldred solicitously, one hand on his knee, and asked if he needed anything; then, having established that, from her at least, he did not, she stood by me, her hand on my arm.
‘This is so exciting!’ she said, handing me her card, ‘I will always remem- ber this moment.’ Aldred caught my eye and grinned.
Finally she left and I sat down in the other armchair, having placed my two recorders on a small table, a copy of The Last Book and my notebook on my lap. I make notes as my victims speak, not, as they probably think, of what they are saying but of visual details – hair colour, an undone button, a curious two-dimensional metal cat by the fireplace, a tapping finger, a stray nasal or aural hair and, very occasionally, of a theme I must broach, a ques- tion I must ask. At once, I was noting down the way that Aldred re-ordered his crumpled clothes – capacious beige trousers with thick turn-ups, brown, check shirt, woollen waistcoat – and sank deeper into his chair. He folded his arms, defensively I thought, possibly defiantly.
‘Gloomily,’ he said, ‘the journalist confronts transparent man in a trans- lated world. Wallace Stevens. Good eh? Now what do you want from me?’
‘Your childhood….’
‘Not, not that, you know all that stuff, what’s the point?’
I did know all that stuff but I always liked to begin on well-trodden terri- tory. I noticed he was staring up at a bookshelf as if he had never seen its contents before, his mind was wandering already.
‘All right this book…’
His heavy head swung round.
‘Ah that’s better. Did you like it?’
‘Very much.’
‘Well what else were you going to say?’
‘What’s it about? I mean did the computer write the book?’
He sighed and sank even deeper into the chair and formed a steeple with this fingers, his elbows resting on the battered chair arms.
‘I don’t know. But let me tell you something. When I was very small, just after the war, I saw a picture in some magazine. It showed a man and a woman – Americans they would have been – in a room with a lot of ma- chinery. It was one machine, in fact, the first proper computer.’
‘ENIAC?’ I suggested smartly, one of my worthy oracles had recently edu- cated me in the history of computing.
‘Exactly, smart boy. I stared at that picture every day, no idea why. Boys do that don’t they? There were very bright bits and very dark bits – contrasty – and it didn’t look real, as if it was on another planet or something. The people were working on the machine but I had this feeling – ‘uncanny’ is the word – that they were more like servants and the machine was their master. I felt they were concerned not for its continued functioning but for
its well-being. This made me feel frightened and sick and I had to force myself to stop looking at the picture. Then, a few years ago, I had a dream and I saw that picture again. So that’s why I wrote this book. There, never told anybody that before, not even that blonde frail.’
He flicked his extravagantly ragged eyebrows in the direction of the door though which Sophie had just left.
‘But…’
That one word was not enough to exasperate him and he stared once again at a bookshelf. He turned back and spoke very slowly.
‘You see I thought there were three people in that room, the man, the wom- an and the machine or something inside it. “Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together.”’
I smiled indulgently, pretending to understand what he was getting at but thinking really it was the usual age-related cognitive impairment – a condi- tion I treasured from one of the oracles. I was going to use his quotations from the poets but, in the end, I didn’t; they made me feel I was, perhaps, interviewing a man who had lost his mind.
Detecting the indulgence of my smile, he stared at me over the rims of his glasses. The room suddenly seemed to darken and I had to resist an urge to look behind me. He kept staring and I became aware that his eyes were shining; at last a single tear escaped to navigate, appallingly slowly, the dark folds of his cheek. I was revolted. He had become merely another old man. I shuddered at the thought of his folds and creases, the random lobes and flaps of flesh beneath his clothes. I thought of his genitals, his arse and I thought of the first time I had noticed stippling on Gita’s thighs as she stood naked, searching for something in a drawer. The moment of being desirable is so brief…. I made notes without taking my eyes off his.
‘Oh, never mind, where were we? Yes, since you ask, this is my last book.
No ifs, ands or buts, Alexander Aldred will not commit another word to paper, screen or any other medium, physical or virtual. So this, for you, is the big one, the last interview about the last book.’
He relaxed, the air lightened and, after a few more awkward moments in which I fought off the urge to rush out and vomit in the gutter, I slipped easily into my routine of following my victim’s leads and seizing opportunities to distract him into the themes and quotes I needed. The best possible outcome was that the interview should end with the victim thinking he had been talking uninterruptedly. An apology afterwards for ‘going on a bit’ was always a gratifying moment of triumph. For about forty minutes, this programme unfolded and then, for no obvious reason, there was a pause we both noticed, a silence in which the air thickened and the noises from the street grew louder. The old man’s heavy face slumped into absence then boredom, then irritation and, finally, suddenly, into a certain slyness, signalled by a slight upward movement of the eyelids.
‘You a drinking man?’ he said, his gaze suddenly attentive to my reactions. There were no clocks in the room and he had not looked at his watch, but it was, as I now confirmed for himself, exactly 5.30, the time, in his day, that pubs would have opened.
‘I suppose I am,’ I replied.
Two large whiskies and a good half hour of increasingly revealing record- ings later, I left that dark house in that dark street feeling, as I always did after interviews, vindicated, justified and free. I transcribed the recording and wrote the piece over the next couple of days and, a few days after that, we left for Spain. And so I found myself, on that Sunday, lying on that or- ange towel on that green plastic lounger.
At 12.27 I succumbed to the electronics. I was throwing myself into a gorge as deep as that which bisects Ronda but as, for a few seconds, I was blindly falling I did not see the uprushing rocks for what they were. I picked up my phone. Its screen was alive with messages, the most
recent one of which read, ‘Sorry about that, Sophie xxx.’
****
In a shabby Chiswick wine bar, Justin told me all this not long after the story broke. He had neither written nor interviewed in those few weeks, but he looked and sounded no more than slightly anguished, the ironic distance of his manner was intact. I assumed he was recuperating and left it at that.
I heard nothing more until, a year later, Gita called and asked me if I’d go and see him. He was living in a ‘studio’ in Hanwell, drinking heavily, he would no longer talk to her and she thought he might kill himself. She spoke briskly, delivering information and concealing alarm; if, indeed, she felt any. The few sentences she spoke sounded written, pared down, edited. I felt I was talking to a computer help desk in Bangalore – what did she know of me and I of her? Did she just want this off her desk or did she fear she would break down in tears? I could not read her.
I agreed, of course, out of curiosity and, I suppose, some concern. The story – Glattgate the smarter papers called it – was confidently presented as if it made sense even though it made none. His utter destruction, for that is what it had clearly come to, had been avoidable. A little crisis management here, a touch of damage limitation there and he would have survived, not merely unscathed but, in all likelihood, stronger than ever. He would cer- tainly have a story to tell and, in a certain sense, his initial error represented a rather brilliant commentary on the role of the contemporary interviewer. It was, after all, the ultimate interview; he had interrogated a man who did not exist.
Alexander Aldred had died suddenly two days before the interview. The family, in collusion with the publishers, made no announcement. Instead, they asked a friend – Bill Tizzard – to stand in for the author just for the purposes of Glatt’s interview. Many years before, Aldred had met Tizzard in a pub and, jocularly at first, told everybody he was his double, his dop- pelgänger. He was, quite openly, reliving the plot of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Despair and rehearsing that of his own My Other except that Tizzard was a clever, cultivated, richly retired man, a computer scientist with a prodigious memory, who, at Aldred’s bidding, had absorbed the entire oeuvre. He did this so thoroughly that, after a while, he could be presented in public as Aldred. He signed books, he spoke of his inspiration, and answered detailed questions about where and how he wrote – questions only ever asked of novelists and poets.
The strange thing was he did not actually look very much like Aldred. The Sunday paper that first broke the story on the same day the interview ap- peared made much of this – carrying photos of Aldred and Tizzard side by side – and, indeed, the resemblance was not even close. Coincidentally, a few weeks before I had read of some research at Berkeley which had shown that we are inclined to see different faces as the same when we expect them to be – this is why we happily accept stunt doubles for the actors they replace.
‘This “perceptual pull” is actually,’ ran the report, ‘a survival mechanism, giving us a sense of stability, familiarity and continuity in what would otherwise be a visually chaotic world, researchers point out.’
I sent the story to Glatt with a note. I adopted a light, storm-in-a-teacup tone.
‘Error,’ I wrote in the accompany note, ‘you will be pleased to hear, is an adaptation to ward off chaos.’
I also reminded him that the great journalist and spiritualist W. T. Stead had, in later life, made a good living out of interviewing the distinguished dead. He responded by inviting me to that shabby wine bar to tell me his version of events.
I thought nothing of this until, a few days later, the tabloids scented more blood. They had run the story of the interview with a dead man, of course, but now the dogs returned to their vomit with renewed appetites. They had evidently hired some pale, ill-nourished internet types to run passages from Glatt’s articles through Google. They found irrefutable evidence of
plagiarism – whole paragraphs were taken, minimally altered, from the works of others. The papers found this shocking; I did not. Glatt had of- ten plagiarised me and his other oracles. Once in a while he would give credit – though never to me, I was a difficult figure to explain in a couple of words. Never mind, it was a deal; as Timmins had observed, interesting phone calls were scarce and academics were required to be media friendly. Besides, what was journalism if not a massive act of plagiarism? They pla- giarised thought in the academy and life in the streets or the battlefields. So what? He had not, at least, plagiarised other journalists, a crime our media types had decided was second only to paedophilia as a gross insult directed at the values of the commonality.
I simply did not see imminent destruction in all this. He could have apol- ogised for the plagiarism and, perhaps, submitted himself to a refresher course in journalistic ethics or taken himself off to some showy religious retreat, an ashram perhaps. A little penance and all manner of things would be well.
He chose to do nothing. After the flurry of publicity about ‘gullible’, ‘copy- cat’, ‘hack-rat’ Glatt and after all the earnest, high-minded columns, he vanished from the public gaze and, I confess, from mine. I had, as I say, not liked the man and my only real interest was in his peculiar calling – the smart, informed interviewer who, it was believed, would deliver some whole person to us on Sundays, a person placed, located, defined and, I often thought, laid out like a corpse. It had all been so strange that my cu- riosity overcame my dislike, but, if he was no longer that exotic creature, then what was there in him for me? If he had lapsed into ordinariness, then I would simply dislike him tout court and, if he was in crisis, I knew from past experience that I would be of little use.
A suicidal crisis, however, demanded objective concern and, of course, re- established my curiosity. How low could he have sunk? Had he stared into the abyss and found it was staring back? I had no choice, I rang the number Gita had given me.
‘Justin?’
The phone had been picked up but there was no response.
‘It’s me.’
‘Oh, right, hello. What do you want?’
‘Gita asked me to call you. She’s worried.’
He laughed, a high-pitched ululation I had not heard from him before. ‘She wanted me to talk to you.’
‘Okay,’ he said abruptly, ‘tomorrow, lunch at …’
He rapidly reeled off the name and address of an Indian restaurant. After several attempts, I got the details down and then, without a further word, he hung up.
The restaurant was in a row of shops I now thought of as ‘Old London’ – two betting shops, kebab house, laundrette, dry cleaners offering executive shirt service, hairdresser and nail bar, estate agent, small Tesco, cafe, pub and solicitor’s office – in spite of the fact that such collections of shopfronts could only have been around for a few decades. It was a consoling, familiar array, cheap, grubby and ill-designed like ordinary life. This, I felt, was where most people lived and most people were just that, the majority, the primary mass of feeling, sentiment, suffering. This very massness made them the uninterviewable unless a pollster happened upon them or they witnessed some cataclysm and, even then, they were being offered, not as celebrities but as Unremarkables, our native version of the Indian Untouch- ables, people to be avoided for fear of contagion. So had Glatt simply sunk into the quotidian? Had he taken his place among the Unremarkables? Why not? He was a human like any other and that was its own form of consolation, a quiet smothering by the requirements of survival and functional conviviality.
He was the lone customer in the restaurant, sitting at a table covered by a faded pink cloth – is any colour more pathetic or disgusting than pink when faded or soiled? – protected by a stippled white paper cover which he had already stained with yellow drops from his large bottle of Cobra beer and rust-red smears from the lime pickle he was absently but hungrily loading on to shards of poppadums which he broke violently from a stack of six. A single waiter in white shirt and black bow tie was polishing glasses behind the counter at the far end of the room. The bleakness of this scene was relieved by an orange carpet, lurid red flock wallpaper above a dado rail and electric green paint beneath. Framed photographs of elderly, bearded Indian men surrounded the usual black and white shot of the Taj Mahal. On the counter there was a large ceramic sculpture of the elephant god Ganesh. I was staring at this when Glatt looked up. He glanced round to determine the object of my attention.
‘What do you think they mean by that?’ he said loudly, ‘That India is a rich, colourful and exotic holiday destination? Or does it say, “We are not like you, not like you at all? We have elephants for gods, you do not have gods, you do not even have elephants.’”
I looked uneasily at the waiter but he had paid no attention. I realised Glatt must be a tolerated regular, a local ‘character’ whose behaviour may be of- fensive but who was, nonetheless, comfortably eccentric.
‘Sit down, sit down. I’ve fixed the food. I can’t stand all that fussing over menus, not any more. They only do a few decent things here and I’ve or- dered them all. And it’s so cheap! Gita gave me her lump sum to get me out of the house, but it wasn’t much as lump sums go and I’m not earning anything. The estate agent next door offered me a job …’
The waiter set a bottle of Cobra and a glass before me, studying my face closely as he did so.
‘What’s your first question? You are allowed two. I know what they will be. You can, in silence, study my wrecked features first if you like and be shocked by the evidence of my decline.’
In truth, he looked fine. The sharpness of his suit had survived intact but for a few creases, his shirt was white and ironed thanks to, I guessed, the ex- ecutive service of that dry cleaners. The hair was no longer high, however, it was smeared flat and now clearly greying. The features had changed, not so much from decay – it had only been a year after all – as from some inner loss. It was hard to define, but his face looked, somehow, pressed inwards, as if the world had finally breached his defences. He stared back at me – his eyes still grey, still flat, still offering nothing but cold curios- ity – and I stared back in silence. Minutes passed, the food arrived, huge amounts – stainless steel bowls and platters placed on heated metal trays, bread, rice, more lime pickle. And still we stared until, finally, I asked my first question.
‘Why did the family and the publishers do it?’
‘Ha! I knew that would be your first, that touch of the inexplicable, the discontinuous, unnoticed by the red tops and the heavies and even unno- ticed by you the last time round. Simple. Aldred hated me and everything he thought I represented – as if I represent anything! – and had always said if ever an interview came up, they should wheel out Tizzard. He died sud- denly but they naturally assumed the wish should survive his demise. Why he hated me is unclear but I would guess it was just general loathing of the pervasive shallowness of our times, the usual senile whining. It hardly mat- ters, people hate people like me, especially, as I learned, people in my own trade. The family went to a lot of trouble. That thing about him noticing it was exactly 5.30 – Tizzard had a phone in his pocket set to vibrate at that time just so he could give me that line about pub opening times. Brilliant. You only have one more question and I know what that one will be.’
I had started eating tentatively. Glatt was devouring everything and order- ing a second and then a third beer.
‘You know the funny thing is,’ he said before I could reply, ‘my Indian wife never cooked Indian food and would never go to Indian restaurants. She hated the whole thing…,’ he waved his arms to signify the whole room, ‘…. I think she was ashamed. Pity really, I remember thinking when we married that I could get lots of Indian food. I love the stuff. You can just eat it all, you don’t have to cut off fat or anything. And, anyway, Hanwell, what’s not to love?’
I was about to ask him why they separated but realised that question would be answered by another, the one he expected.
‘Do YOU like Indian food?’ he continued, ‘Come to that, what DO you like, you miserable bastard? Come on, you fucker, what floats your pathetic little boat?’
A couple – elderly, retired I guessed – had occupied a nearby table. They looked upset by Glatt’s outburst. I was not upset. He was well into his third large bottle of Cobra and, I suspected, had been drinking earlier. It did not matter. Nothing – nothing here, nothing in this place, nothing at this time – mattered.
‘Okay last question. Why did you give up? Why not survive? You were never seriously damaged. Why toss away your marriage and your children? You were the victim of a cheap stunt and the plagiarism stuff was nonsense – all your people were at it. Journalism IS plagiarism. You know that better than anybody.’
He slumped suddenly as if I had shot him. Life drained from his body. He stopped eating and, his fork poised, he stared at the runnels and granules, the brown and yellow chaos on his plate. The old couple were watching us furtively, the waiter had paused in the polishing of a white wine glass, fearing, perhaps, violence. Glatt closed his eyes and his large head dipped forward as if he were about to collapse into his food, the fork dropped from his hand with a clatter. He began to murmur, inaudibly at first.
‘… because,’ I finally heard, ‘I could not know anything any more. They could all be impostors, frauds, cheats, traps set just for me. What was I sup- posed to do, ask every victim for photographic ID? I thought I could see things clearly… I KNEW I could. But then I couldn’t and, if I couldn’t do that, I might as well be here, among the people, the masses, the ordinaries, the people who don’t get interviewed….’
He had been the master of the apparent world but the Apparentland was now out of control, exacting vengeance. I stared at him, the tip of his nose now an inch or so from the pool of rice and sauce. Of course, he had to leave his wife, not liking each other was manageable, not recognising each other was intolerable.
‘Oh fuck this!’
Justin picked up his plate and threw it at the elderly couple, narrowly miss- ing but spattering them with food, before stalking out of the restaurant. A few weeks later I noticed a story about a man who had travelled to Ronda from London and flung himself into the El Tajo Canyon, falling 100 metres to his death. I imagined Glatt, tangoing in the warm, lively Andalucian air on the way down, his flying feet seeking the floor. It was not, of course, Justin Glatt. He lacked the necessary self– belief and, when all is said and done, Hanwell was as nice a place as any to end up.