Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by James Wood

Dedication

Title Page

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Copyright

About the Author

James Wood was born in 1965. He has received acclaim as one of the most prominent critics of his generation. From 1991 to 1995 he was the Chief Literary Critic of the Guardian, in London, and since then has been a Senior Editor at The New Republic, in Washington D.C. His reviews and essays appear regularly in that magazine, in the New Yorker, and in the London Review of Books. A collection of essays, The Broken Estate, appeared in 1999, and another, The Irresponsible Self, in 2004.

About the Book

Thomas Bunting, charming, chaotic, and deeply untruthful, is in despair. His marriage is disintegrating, and his academic career is in ruins: instead of completing his philosophy PhD, he is secretly writing what he hopes will be his masterwork, a vast atheistic project he has privately entitled ‘The Book Against God’. But when his father is suddenly taken ill Thomas returns home, to the tiny village in the north of England where his father still works as a parish priest. Thomas hopes that he may finally be able to communicate honestly with his father, a brilliant and formidable Christian example, and sort out his wayward life. But Thomas is a chronic liar, as well as an atheist, and he finds, instead, that once at home he only falls back into the disastrous and evasive patterns of his childhood years.

ALSO BY JAMES WOOD

The Broken Estate: Essays on

Literature and Belief

The Irresponsible Self:

On Laughter and the Novel

For my parents, and for C.D.M.

For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,
and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.

Hebrews, 12:6

ONE

I DENIED MY father three times, twice before he died, once afterwards.

The obituaries editor of The Times was responsible for my first denial. That was almost two years ago. I was still living with my wife, Jane Sheridan, but we were constantly arguing. At University College, where I was teaching philosophy, I had become one of those figures whom students romanticise and sometimes even pity. I didn’t have the proper qualifications, and the classes I gave were printed on the curriculum brochure – grudgingly I felt – in a different coloured ink from the main lectures. Insultingly, the university paid me by the hour! The faculty was beginning to look at me as if I were dead, the students as if I were somewhat grotesquely alive, but it amounted to the same thing.

We were in debt, and my childhood friend Max Thurlow offered to help. He is now a successful, what you might call intellectually deluxe, columnist at The Times – the type who mentions Tacitus or Mill every other week – and knew that the newspaper prepared its major obituaries in advance of the subjects’ deaths, and that most of them were written by freelance contributors. So Max proposed my name to the appropriate editor, Ralph Hegley, and said that I could write obituaries of philosophers and intellectuals. And Hegley asked to have lunch with me. We met at a restaurant in Covent Garden – expensive Italian, snowy tablecloths, steam-room hush, Pompeian ruins of cheese on a silent trolley – and sat at a window table. On the street, where the cars were parked in convoy, a traffic warden was going from car to car, pen in hand, like the waiters inside the restaurant soliciting orders. Hegley had a huge head, was middle-aged, sickly lugubrious, pale. He was dressed in a double-breasted suit as thick as a straitjacket, and a rich silk tie plaited in a fat junction. But he wore oddly childish shoes – they seemed as soft and rubbery as slippers. ‘I have bad feet,’ he explained, when he caught me looking down.

‘I’ll order for you if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘There are certain dos and dont’s at this restaurant. It takes years to acquaint yourself with this little civilisation.’ As he said this, he looked around with a strange contempt on his face.

Hegley explained that freelancers wrote advance obituaries of selected ‘candidates’. He was especially interested in philosophers who were known to be unwell, or rapidly declining with age. He became impatient, and irritably coaxed the keys in his trouser pocket as he put names to me.

‘How’s Althusser? He’s the killer, right? Maybe his number’s up now. And that other chap in Paris, the Romanian, Cioran. I hear he’s not too well, it’s the Romanian genes. Any Americans? We tend to miss ’em, then we have to do a rush job once they’ve gone. I don’t like rush jobs. That is for other papers, all right? Oh, and we need someone to update our Popper piece; pep it up a bit. I’ve heard he’s a wee bit poorly.’

Catching on, and knowing nothing about the apparently welcome illnesses of various world-philosophers, I invented several ailments.

‘I’m told,’ I said, ‘by various colleagues at UCL, that Gadamer is not very well.’

‘Jolly good. Add him to the list.’ As usual when lying, I felt warm, lightheaded.

‘And Derrida has never had tremendously good health. That’s well known.’

‘Is it? Right, let’s snatch him before he … self-deconstructs – isn’t that his word?’

I left lunch with four commissions – Cioran, Popper, Derrida and Gadamer – each paying £200.

But I never wrote one of those obituaries. Other things got in the way. Look, I have been trying to finish my Ph.D. thesis for seven years, and I seem to have a distaste for finishing things. Recently, I have been neglecting the Ph.D. for a private project which I call the ‘Book Against God’ (I think of it, now, as the BAG). In it I copy out apposite religious and anti-religious quotations, and develop arguments of my own about theological and philosophical matters. It has swelled to four large notebooks. It has really become my life’s work, as far as I am concerned. And whenever I was about to begin one of those damned obituaries, I found myself drawn to some crucial novelty in my BAG, and the day would disappear into theology and anti-theology.

Eventually Hegley got tired of waiting, sent me an irritable letter. It had been three months, he complained, and he had received nothing. Should he still consider me the writer of the proposed obituaries? I don’t cope well with pressure. I was keen to stay on Hegley’s order form, and suddenly I realised that the most decisive way both to explain my tardiness and to appeal for sympathy would be to tell him that I had been lately dealing with my own, rather more proximate obituary: I told Hegley that my father had died a month ago, and that I had not had an ungrieving minute to deal with the work in hand. Hegley wrote back with his condolences. Of course I should take as much time as I wanted.

This worked so well that I told a similar lie a month later, after I received a letter from the Inland Revenue about outstanding taxes payable on various part-time jobs I had had over the years. Usually I ignore these kinds of communications, but this one had an imperious glower and for some reason my name was printed in bold capitals: THOMAS BUNTING. I opened it to find myself summoned to attend a ‘hearing’ in Wembley. There I would be ‘assessed’ by government auditors. If there were any extenuating circumstances, any good reason for the tardiness of my payments, I should explain myself in writing, and at the hearing this letter would be read out in my defence.

That was how I found myself three weeks later sitting at an unnatural table – that caramel-municipal sheen found in so many offices – opposite four men in suits, one of whom was reading out my letter. It explained that due to the recent death of my father, and the heavy business related to the tidying up of his estate, I had fallen behind in the paying of my taxes. I was truly sorry to have found myself in this position but the last three months had been a period of grief and shock as well as distraction, and might I presume on the leniency and compassion (this word underlined) of the assessors to grant me another six months to get my taxes in order? This was read out in a flat, bored voice so that, if one closed one’s eyes, one would swear that the reader – a terribly thin man – was simultaneously doing something else. I kept my eyes down, and strove to appear slumped in grief.

The stay of execution was granted. Of course, my father was alive then. I had calculated that an extreme measure would work. I would not have written those letters had I known that my father would be dead within a year of my writing them.

But we can’t schedule the consequences of our lies.

The third of these ‘denials’ took place after my father’s death, and was not a lie, but by then it felt like one. When I recently told Jimmy Madeiros, the manager of the Underground Porter-Packer division at Harrods, where I worked this summer, that my father had just died, and that therefore I couldn’t continue with the job, I was telling the truth. But it seemed like a lie because I saw at once that he didn’t really believe me. So I felt cheated. When I’m not lying I think I should almost get credit for it; it is like that wise saying in the Talmud – ‘the thief who lacks an opportunity to steal feels like an honest man.’

TWO

IT IS SEPTEMBER now, 12 September, 1991, to be exact, four months since my father died; and it is longer since things began to sour between Jane and me. And now – what a mess I’m in, really. I’m reminded of my old history teacher in Durham, Mr Duffy. One day he came into the classroom and upturned the wastepaper basket on the table. Then he took off his gown, pleated in the corners like a napkin, and threw it on to the pile of papers and dust. He walked over to the timid little boy whose parents were divorcing and took the contents of his desk and added them to the pile of rubbish. Then, standing behind the table and putting one leg before the other, he declaimed: ‘In 1381, England was in a mess!’ All these years later, I know what he meant.

At the moment I’m living in an unpleasant little room, a bed-sit I suppose, in Swiss Cottage, in a 1930s building on the Finchley Road pounded by traffic. I moved here in May, just after my father’s funeral, and after my estranged wife put me ‘on probation’. At the service, with Father’s body barely cold, Jane told me that she would have me back only if I could prove to her that I was no longer a liar, an operation which, I see now, has more than a touch about it of the famous Cretan paradox. In four months nothing has happened yet on that front, so here I am on the Finchley Road, alone. The landlord asks for the rent in cash every Saturday morning. My bed is next to the bathroom door, which can’t close all the way, and I hear the lavatory dribbling day and night. It makes me think of a little boy with an eternally running nose. I am on the first floor, above a karate studio, of all things. During the day, yelps of triumph and pain can be heard. I miss the flat Jane and I lived in when we were together. It was in the hilly area of Islington, on the top floor of a gabled Victorian house. From the high window you could see a piece of the policeman’s helmet of St Paul’s dome, and further on a glimpse of Parliament, and its loyal river, obeying the crowded banks, selflessly flowing. At dusk, holding a drink by the window and feeling luxurious and waiting for Jane to return from work, I loved to see the city streetlights going on all over town in amber hesitations.

Jane was always frustrated by my extravagance and by my inability to earn any money. I don’t blame her for getting angry. What did her husband amount to? I was barely tolerated at UCL; I moped and bunted (yes, I invented the word) about the house all day in a dirty paisley dressing-gown (but made of very good silk); and instead of finishing my Ph.D., I fiddled in ecstasies – and they are ecstasies – with my BAG. Jane teaches the piano at Trinity College of Music, and she used to get occasional lump sums when she played recitals. I had my shillings from UCL; in those days, they still felt like employing me. But London, and my expensive ways, swallowed everything we earned. I can’t help blaming my late father, Peter Bunting, for my extravagant tastes. In 1959, Father, who had been teaching theology at Durham University, resigned his job and became a priest. He was bored with teaching and keen to have a parish. He took command of a little church in the village of Sundershall, about ten miles west of the town. No doubt he reckoned that the difference between a university lecturer’s salary and a vicar’s stipend was small enough that no sudden impoverishment would consume his family. But my parents’ finances were sickly; in my memory Father seems to be continually driving into Durham to meet ‘the bank manager’, to arrange for ‘another lease of life’. Though my parents weren’t ascetic, indeed quite worldly by instinct, our life was materially thin. All our textures were strained through the sieve of their finances.

That necessary rationing has produced extravagant tastes in me, and an avoidance of the ordinary wherever possible. For instance, I never blow my nose into a handkerchief, because the nasal trumpeting has always sounded plebeian to me. (I clean my nose quietly and secretly.) I like beautiful objects, rich foods, rare atmospheres. It sometimes seems to me that I’m on a quest to naturalise and enhance all the materials and substances with which I grew up: where my parents had a reproduction of a Russian icon, I yearn for the real thing; where they wore nylon, I will wear cotton; their wool must become my cashmere, and their méthode champenoise only ever my Veuve Clicquot. The upright piano must become a grand. The secularist, as I certainly consider myself, has a duty to be worldly, to take the pagan waters at spas of his own choosing. Don’t I have Nietzsche, one of my favourite philosophers, to support me? And Camus, the Algerian bather-seducer. Now, it’s true that in my present circumstances – all day that blasted traffic races past my window, up the awful Finchley Road – I do not have much opportunity for extravagance; I have very little income, and whatever I earn (or am given) I have to send off to Philip Zealy, a crook and usurer in Durham. Zealy has taken nearly all the money I earned this summer at Harrods. But my day will come.

Anyway, to return to our marriage. My lavish habits, not to mention the requests of the Inland Revenue, had indebted us pretty badly, and this was one of the reasons for the frequent arguments that Jane and I had. We had decided to try to have a child (or rather, Jane had made the decision), and this momentous choice had made her even less tolerant of my lies. ‘Our child cannot have an untruthful father, Tom. What example would that be?’ Well, I dislike my lies, too. Morality aside, lies add to the general confusion of my life, a confusion I sincerely want to reduce. Quite often, I might be happily minding my own business, and then suddenly a mental irritation reaches me, and I remember some little deceit I have committed, and I realise that I still have to extricate myself from the confusion it has left in its wake. This happens less now, because I see so few people in my present life; but when Jane and I were still living together my lies were always getting in the way of harmonious relations. I might, for instance, have declined a supper invitation with the Impeys by quickly inventing a prior engagement with the Davidsons; but then the Impeys happened to know the Davidsons, and might discover my untruth; so, as an alibi – and this happened on one occasion – I had then to phone the Davidsons and fix up supper for the same night on which I had originally declined to see the Impeys.

Not long after the incident with the Inland Revenue, Jane and I quarrelled about a foolish situation. Catrine Hillier, apparently one of Jane’s ‘enemies’ – in our four years together I never properly ascertained who was an enemy and who an ally, since there were weekly demotions and promotions – phoned to ask us to a small drinks party two weeks hence. Jane was out at Trinity; I was in the middle of writing a long entry in my BAG about Kierkegaard. I was fathoms deep in his repulsive brand of Christian masochism, wrestling with assertions such as this: ‘Did Job win his case? Yes, eternally, for the fact that he lost his case before God.’ No one else in the world resists these vile paradoxes! The task has fallen to me alone to fight the Danish knight of faith, and I was knee-deep in the necessary struggle when Catrine rang. Caught off-guard, and not forthright enough to refuse, I said that we would go, making a mental note to phone her nearer the time with an invented excuse. Then I went back to the BAG, and didn’t look up from it until mid-afternoon. When I came up for air, I noticed with dismay that the flat was untidy, that chores Jane had asked me to do – to vacuum the carpets and wash the breakfast dishes – were mysteriously untouched. I couldn’t really face domestic work, so I went into town to get a book and also bought, on impulse, a rather pretty necklace for my beloved, who loves jewels of all kinds.

Jane returned late that evening, with her usual emphatic bang of the front door, and the sound I knew well, of her music case – with a loose metal buckle that rings – being stored away in the front-hall cupboard. Vivid with the city world she had come from, and carrying a little urban ghost of cold air behind her, she entered our warm sitting-room. She was wearing a short brown leather skirt (my suggestion) and a white silk blouse. Looking at her, I thought that her male piano students were very lucky, and had probably never had it so good.

I was excited about the necklace, but before presenting it I told her that Catrine and Danny Hillier had invited us to drinks and that I had mistakenly agreed to the invitation.

‘All right, Tommy, I know we’ve agreed that there won’t be any more lying.’ She reached forward, gently subtracted my cigarette from my hand, took a drag herself, smiled, and shone her very dark eyes at me. She kissed me, and then nipped out the cigarette. ‘Sorry,’ she said, as I watched the pinched foam filter in the ashtray, ‘I can’t stand it in the house in the evening. Now, although we’ve agreed, you’re now going to have to pull out one of your lies again to get us out of Catrine and Danny’s party. I can’t possibly go!’

‘Tell me again why Catrine is now in the enemy camp?’ I asked, amused. ‘And do you want a drink?’ I asked, noticing Jane’s eye on my large Scotch and soda. ‘Alcohol is permitted, I assume?’

‘Well it’s perfectly clear,’ she replied, rather haughtily, and with great emphasis, as if I were testing her.

‘Yes, my love, but not to me,’ I said.

‘Catrine has been horribly mean to Roger about his choir. She said hurtful things about their last concert.’

‘I see.’

‘You’re teasing me.’

‘Well, because you move your friends –’

‘They’re your friends, too –’

‘– You move your friends from one camp to the other for only two reasons: it’s either something murkily musical, or something elusively ethical. In Catrine you’ve managed to fuse the reasons into one.’ I could hear my voice sounding like my father’s – clever, too buoyant.

‘Tom, not everything can be put into words, something that probably comes as a shock to the Bunting family. I don’t like her at the moment and that is that. We can’t possibly go to Catrine’s. So pull one of your stunts for me, will you, darling?’ She wandered into the kitchen, and I suddenly remembered that I had neglected the domestic chores.

‘Oh, darling, it is a bit grim to come home and find the place a complete tip. Didn’t I ask you to do the dishes?’

‘Yes you did, and I forgot, and I’m sorry, but I had to be out this afternoon, in town, where I bought … this!’ I handed her the plush little box. She tilted open the flimsy sprung lid.

‘You bribe me, you bribe me … Oh it’s beautiful! Tommy, you’re so extravagant, and I have far too many lovely things, most of them from you.’

I murmured to Jane, in the interest of truthfulness, that it was largely her money.

‘You’re not supposed to say that, you silly thing.’

A good liar needs strength: strong nerves, strong ethics (precisely so as to be able to keep the lie separate in his soul from the truth) and above all a very strong memory. I have the nerves, the ethics, but unfortunately I am forgetful and disorganised. I promised to do something about the Hilliers’ invitation, and then forgot about it, and suddenly it was the day of the party, and Jane saw the time and name written on our kitchen calendar (written by her, of course).

‘What did you do about that in the end?’ she asked me.

‘Ah. Nothing … as yet. But – but’ – I held my hand up to calm her down – ‘we can still cancel.’

‘Of course we can’t. It would be awfully rude. You did nothing at all?’

‘Yes, I suppose it would seem rude,’ I muttered to myself.

‘Tom, I asked you to do this. Two weeks ago. I asked you. I have to do everything in this house.’

‘I have a plan,’ I said.

‘Oh dear,’ said Jane, not – I think – without some fondness.

‘Look, tonight we won’t even try to attend the party, and if the phone goes we won’t answer. But tomorrow night let’s go to Clapham and appear at Catrine and Danny’s at exactly the time that they want us there tonight.’

‘That’s utterly silly.’

‘No it isn’t. It merely looks as if we got the date wrong by a single day. An easy error. Now, in the best possible world, Danny and Catrine will be out and we can leave a note; but if they are in they will forgive us for our honest mistake, offer us a drink that politeness dictates we refuse, and then we are on our way into the night. I know, we can have dinner round the corner in Wandsworth in that new restaurant that was just in the Standard.’

‘We can’t do that. I asked you to lie on behalf of me, not to lie with me at your side. I couldn’t do it. And I asked you to lie before the event – not after it! No no no, I refuse to go along with this, this silliness. Oh dear, this teaches me a lesson.’

‘What lesson?’

‘You know what I mean,’ she said ominously. Then she lightened, and I thought we might be through the worst of it. ‘And who’s paying for supper, Croesus?’

I struggled to get Jane to accept this plan. She would not. We went to the party, and she got gloomy again, and was cross with me all evening for not having the courage to have declined the invitation when I first received it. Of course, we had a perfectly pleasant time at the Hilliers’, a fact which Jane refused to accept.

THREE

TEN YEARS AGO at University College, when I was a student there, Professor Syme called me ‘the Great Pretender’. What did he mean by that? I think I was a pretty good philosophy student at London – rather idle, very plausible for sure, picking at odd tufts of learning. Asked to read Plato, I would spend instead a few days with Plotinus. That’s my way of doing things. It was not deception so much as a disdain for the bridle. I liked to be free. I like to be free! Syme predicted that I would win top marks or fail badly in my finals exams. I won top marks, and then had the pleasure of frustrating expectations by not staying on to do a doctorate.

But once out of university I was afflicted by a real eagerness to study. I sat at home reading and reading. Well, not at home, actually, but at Uncle Karl’s house in Chelsea. And Karl is not my real uncle either, but was my father’s best friend, a refugee from Germany who came as a mere boy to England in 1939, and met Father in the early 1950s, when Karl became a student at Durham University. Father took the young Karl under his wing. Later, Karl made money, a lot of it, in the 1960s and 1970s, as an art-dealer. He has a house in a street behind Sloane Square. After university, I lived with Karl for three happy and decidedly childlike years, in an enormous bedroom whose walls were covered with outrageous contemporary paintings. It was an easy existence, during which I sat and read a great deal, spoiled only by the odd necessary job when money ran out and by the unannounced entrance of uniformed delivery-men, who came to take one ugly painting off the wall and replace it with another. But there was a quality of desperation in the way I consumed books at Uncle Karl’s, beginning each in the hope that this was the one which would tell me how to live, how to think; as soon as I realised that it would not, my reading of it began to slow, precisely as if my heartbeat were slowing from its initial race. More often than not, I put it aside.

Eventually, partly at the urging of my parents, I decided to go back to university and begin a Ph.D. dissertation. I worked quite hard at first; but then I lost interest and hope, and in the last two years the BAG has become more important to me. The problem is that I started reading books that were utterly beyond the scope of my academic work – the early Church Fathers, the Psalms (again and again), certain Buddhist and Islamic texts. And then I couldn’t stop reading these ‘irrelevant’ books.

It was while I was most blocked on the Ph.D. that I met Jane, five years ago now, and began to develop some of my bad habits – the irresponsibility, the lying when it was not necessary, not replying to bills, and so on. I was twenty-six, she was six years older. I won’t deny that I’m irresponsible – though not actually as irresponsible as I probably seem. For instance, while we were married Jane and I always argued a great deal about my failure to pay bills on time, and yet they were always paid in the end. In my teens I read somewhere that Erik Satie never opened any bills. Now I am cowardly, so I was unable to go as far as Satie. But I thought that a little of the Satie style would be a good thing. Again, I can’t entirely divorce this quality of my temperament from my secularism. If one believes that one has only seventy years or so on this earth and no afterlife, one cannot spend one’s time observing all the proprieties and rules. My God, if I were scrupulous about paying bills, balancing my cheque book, cleaning the lavatory, answering letters and telephone messages, changing my clothes, bathing and the rest, I would spend my entire life rolling the rock of diligence up a hill of someone else’s making.

No, life is always a struggle for freedom. Whenever I sign a cheque for some idiot company or other, I feel a little like a man in an electric chair or in a hospital bed, streaming with wires and connections and linkages. All these smothering tentacles: the gas company, the electric people, the landlord, the taxman, the credit-card officials, all of these needy babies pressing down on me and demanding that I turn my life into one long liegedom. So I leave bills unopened, and it gives me a small thrill to come upon them on the kitchen table, and to know that although inside the envelopes lie all these hysterical flashing demands, from the outside they are as calm as chess players. Then, having done nothing, I watch the second wave, the repeat requests, arrive a couple of weeks later, and enjoy placing the second wave on top of the first wave of bills on the table. Once I have resisted this, I am primed for the third wave, exactly ten days later. These requests are not from the original companies but from collection agencies – the bailiffs – and come in special envelopes. This is the moment at which I sign my cheque like a good little bourgeois, and enclose it with a pugilistic note, a bit of a challenge: ‘P.S. Since I have finally paid up, you can call off your thugs.’

Obviously, this is less of a problem than it was, because I have fewer bills to pay in the Finchley Road bed-sit. But it was always coming between me and Jane when we were together. The Ph.D. is clearly to blame. It forced me into an unnatural and weak position with my wife. Her husband had no income, no power and no status. All he did was sit at home trying to finish the unfinishable. The more I look at it, the more I see the Ph.D. as the reason for everything bad in my life.

Often, I think, Jane enjoyed my spirit of rebellion – though she has never been a secularist like me – and used to laugh with me at some of the scrapes we got into. That’s what has made understanding her so difficult: for the first two years of our marriage she seemed to cherish my irresponsibility. She herself is exceedingly law-abiding. So I think she enjoyed living with me, with this younger man who was obviously a creative and blithely lawless presence. I think she almost encouraged me not to pay bills, and so on. I have a memory of her standing at the doorway and laughing wildly while I answered one of those telemarketing calls on the phone. ‘Am I speaking to Mr Bunting?’ She knew what I would always say in response to that question: ‘I’m afraid you’re not. I am house-sitting for Mr Bunting, and he’s in Hong Kong for a month. Perhaps you’ll call back when he returns?’

It’s true that Jane began to get angrier with me about my financial irresponsibility. Last year, about six months before my father had his first heart attack, we argued about my credit-card payments. Someone from Visa had started phoning me. Day after day the phone went, and it was always the same man. So on the fourth or fifth day I performed a trick I had used before, and which Jane had previously enjoyed. As soon as I heard him speak, I said, ‘Hello?’ He replied, ‘Yes, hello, is that Mr Bunting?’ And again, with more puzzlement, I said, ‘Hello?’ as if I couldn’t hear anyone on the line. And again, he said ‘Hello, Mr Bunting.’ Then, for verisimilitude, I kept the receiver near my mouth, and shouted to Jane, ‘Jane, what is wrong with this bloody phone, I can’t hear a thing. Someone has phoned and I can’t make out a word he is saying! This is the third time today. We have to get it fixed.’ And then I put the phone down. Jane, of course, came to me and asked what was wrong with the phone. I told her that I had simply been using my old trick to get someone who was ‘after me’ off my back. But Jane reminded me that we were married, and that if someone was after me then that person was also after her, and that if we ever had a child that person would also be after our child. That was what being a family was. Her sarcasm was rising like flood-water. To calm her, I explained that it was nothing more serious than the Visa people chasing a late payment.

‘But you told me that you had paid the bill,’ said Jane.

‘Did I? I find that extremely unlikely.’

‘You looked into my eyes last week and told me that you had paid the bill and posted it in … I think you said in Gower Street.’

‘Ah, no no, it wasn’t the Visa bill I was referring to. No.’

‘What was it?’

‘Another bill.’

‘The lie you are telling me to cover up the first lie is more repellent to me than the original one. Just so you know.’ Jane seemed almost to be shivering with disgust.

Now, there are liars who will tell you that they were pleased to be forced to confession, that as soon as they began to tell the truth it bubbled up wantonly from their mouths. I am not one of those liars. Caught, I tell another lie to hide the first. I surrender a lie with great unwillingness and feel instantly nostalgic, once it has gone, for the old comfort it offered me. But I also know the value of a tactical surrender.

‘OK, I hadn’t paid the Visa bill.’

‘And you lied to me when you said that you had.’

‘No, I don’t think I did lie. I’m sure I imagined when I spoke to you that I had indeed paid and posted the bill.’

‘Oh, Tommy.’ Jane looked at me with amazement. ‘Tell the truth! Don’t you understand that I care much more about your lying to me than about your lying to the credit card company?’

What surprised me was not Jane’s anger but her distress. And frankly, although practically I understand the distinction between lying to one’s wife and lying to a corporation, philosophically the difference seems slight. Surely both lies were so tiny, so opportunistic, that they hardly merited examination, let alone rebuke? The problem is that Jane has no sense of proportion. It’s a curious aspect of lying – looking at the phenomenon philosophically – that for most people the size of a lie has no relation to its perceived potency. People like Jane cannot distinguish between small lies and large lies; for them, the act of lying is always itself an enormity, and comes in only one size. God did the same in Eden. After all, Adam’s sin was actually very small, but God inflated its consequences ridiculously. Jane treats every lie as if it were asparagus, which, whether I eat one spear or ten, makes my urine smell with exactly the same pungency.

FOUR

IT WAS MY friend Roger Trelawnay who introduced me to Jane. Roger runs an early-music choir. He is eager and gentle, a happy schoolboy. He speaks very fast; his upper front teeth are slightly twisted. They look as if they are trying to escape from his mouth under the pressure of such fast speech and have got caught up in themselves in the process. I can’t always understand Roger because he treats the music world as if it were school, handing out nicknames and judgments to players and conductors. ‘This one is conducted by Hitler!’ he says eagerly, as he puts on a record for me to listen to. He has a set of wholly musical assumptions, most of which are nonsensical to me: ‘It’s all in D major, which is really boring.’ Or: ‘B minor is the key of suicide.’ So I tend to listen to about half of what Roger says. But I heard him talk about Jane Sheridan, one of his ‘music friends’, and finally he dragged me to hear her give a little concert in Bloomsbury. I was unwilling to go because I almost always dislike Roger’s music friends. ‘You won’t be disappointed, Tom,’ he said, ‘she’s a marvellous pianist, and also quite dishy, way beyond my league.’

I thought that Jane was not very attractive as she came on to the stage; she was heavily involved in one of those large, parachute-like concert dresses made of puffy blue raw silk, the kind that only female musicians wear. As she passed the piano, she patted its black hood – which was raised as if to catch the sun – bowed, sat on the red, buttoned-leather seat, scratched her cheek and began a quiet piece, which I didn’t know. Her neck and back were thin, her hair was gripped in a severe pony-tail. The short sleeves of her bunched and hilly dress throttled her thin upper arms, whose white skin caught the light as she lifted her hands – lifted them gently, in paddling movements, as if trying to calm the piano. Her face was lovely; I could see that, and I was beginning to find rather an erotic contrast between the angular arms and wrists, probably as thin as they had been when she was a teenager, and the more rounded, certainly adult deposit on which she sat. As she concentrated, the tip of her tongue emerged like a middle lip. She sat as if at a loom, calmly weaving and shuttling. By the end of the concert, I wanted to meet her. I was tremendously attracted by the sight of this woman so completely at work, so much the mistress of her instrument.

Roger and I approached her as she stood by the piano after the concert, talking to a plump man in a light-brown leather coat, with white creases in it like the striations of fat in a piece of meat, whom Jane later identified as the organist of St James’s, Piccadilly, ‘where Stokowski was once the organist’. (I made myself look as if I knew who the hell Stokowski was.)

‘Well, what did you think?’ she asked Roger, in a flash of that difficult pride I would come to know so well.

‘Super,’ said Roger. ‘Beethoven a bit fast.’

‘Yep, I need fingers like a millipede’s legs to do bits of 109 anyway,’ she said with great briskness. ‘God, those trills!’ I was surprised by this firm easiness, because I would’ve been irritated had Roger criticised me in that way.

There was a silence. Roger, who can be socially incompetent, had not introduced me.

‘I thought the concert was brilliant, beautiful,’ I offered. The last adjective made me awkward. I think of myself as moderately attractive, neither handsome nor ugly. Epicurus speaks of katastema, the stable condition of the flesh, and argues that the achievement of this constitutes the highest joy. My looks, neither striking nor quite dismissible, had enabled such stability, since they protected me from extremes of emotion: I had tended neither to be rejected by women nor to be jumped on by them. And in parallel, my emotions towards women had tended away from extremity. But about Jane I felt extreme, quite quickly. Jane’s eyes had a quality which immediately made me anxious. She turned amazing, dark eyes on me. Such thick long lashes! I had seen her only in profile, and was shocked.

‘I’m Thomas Bunting, by the way.’

‘Oh yes, I’ve heard all about you,’ she said.

I think I was immediately attracted to Jane. To begin with, she has those remarkable eyes, densely dark. So intense are they that if I look only at them, she seems to be always angry with me. The rest of her face is almost tyrannised into blandness by them: for a long time I found that I could not recall any aspect of her face other than those black concentrations. She has a habit of pushing her chin out, as if catching something with her teeth. Her hair is very dark, fiercely commanded into a pony-tail, which hangs quiveringly, like the needle of a delicate instrument designed to monitor her moods. I got to know this shaking sleek pony-tail very well indeed, because Jane has many moods, and there is no way to predict when or why she will laugh (at which point her pony-tail, laughter’s tassel, swings and rocks) or become angry (the pony-tail, now pride’s brush, stiff and unmoving, as she tilts her head to the left, and closes her eyes in fury). Her nose is quite long – something suggestive of erotic prolongation in a long nose, I think – and her neck is long, too. At its base is a teaspoon declivity. There are freckles on her collarbones: eager touchmarks, sexual dapple. Her accent is very proper.

Roger proposed a drink somewhere.

‘Not in this … party dress,’ Jane said firmly. ‘I feel ten years old in this thing, and as if the clown were about to turn up and keep us happy. Give me a moment.’

She disappeared to change. The only sounds were the distant London traffic, and the wet collapse of a cleaner’s mop on the floor of the now empty hall. Five minutes later, Jane appeared from a heavy side-door twice her height, and came towards us. I was astounded by the transformation. The ugly concert dress had compiled a superfluous commentary of silk around her, and obscured the truth. But in tight-fitting black jeans and a white blouse with oversize buttons she was closely revealed – slim, tall, elegant. She had exchanged her pony-tail for a brilliant crimson hairband that glowed as if painted there. I noticed a tiny hesitation of the left foot. Not quite a limp. At the piano she had been utterly graceful. Away from it, she was a little physically awkward, with this tiny hesitation in her step. In my infatuation, I thought this was beautiful, as if the piano were calling her back to her proper place.

We went round the corner to a pub on the Tottenham Court Road. It was almost empty. In a wooden corner, a young man was duelling with a bleating machine; he stood with his legs apart like a belligerent midshipman and said ‘Fffuck!’ every so often. The barman vaguely wiped the table before we sat down with our drinks. My hands shook as I held my glass.