What You Didn't Miss Read online

  3 p.m. Aargh. Dozens of reviews in Guardian, Observer etc. saying book is dismal, unfunny stereotyping of Singleton women, is this what feminism fought for etc.

  Later . . .

  9st 0, good reviews 0, sales of book 200,000.

  Hah! You see what one can do when one is empowered new person? Feel v. sorry for bitter, twisted critics who clearly cannot write books themselves. Think will just have little glass of wine and cigarette . . . [continues indefinitely].

  THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY

  PHILIP HENSHER

  It was 1974 in Sheffield and the Fothergills were having a party. The guests ate Coronation Chicken, hula hoops, Black Forest Gateau, potatoes wrapped in foil with cocktail sticks spiked with cheese and pineapple, Jaffa cakes, pots of Ski yoghurt and . . . [continues for several pages].

  ‘Hello, how do you do?’ Graham Fothergill, dressed in a blue suit with moderately flared trousers and wearing a pair of those platform shoes that were so fashionable at the time, remarked to the neighbour standing nearest to him. ‘I work in insurance.’ ‘Do you?’ the man wondered. ‘That’s terribly interesting. I’m at the Gas Board. I was just admiring your wallpaper.’ ‘Were you?’ Graham said. ‘That’s very kind of you. We quite like it too.’

  Ten feet away Evadne Fothergill was talking to Mrs D’Ulle, her friend from two doors down. ‘What a nice party,’ Mrs D’Ulle said, ‘really festive.’ ‘I’m glad so many people have come,’ Mrs Fothergill told her, ‘it being the middle of August.’ ‘Yes, a good many people do go on holiday then, don’t they?’ Mrs D’Ulle observed. ‘We’re going to Jersey.’ ‘Are you? How interesting. We’re going to Dorset. Isn’t the price of everything terrible these days?’ ‘Yes isn’t it? Do you think Mr Heath will win the election or Mr Wilson?’

  Fourteen-year-old Millicent Fothergill, lurking by the sofa, thought to herself: I hate them all. I’d much sooner be upstairs reading Jackie magazine, trying on my starter bra and listening to my Osmonds records. One day I’ll write a novel and put them all in it and get my own back, and then they’ll all be sorry, eh up, reet mardy crowd that they are [other picturesque examples of local idiom follow].

  ‘. . . Yes, there are new people moving in at Number 21,’ she heard Mrs Crasher saying. ‘The Teigh-Deheighams, I think they’re called. At least, that’s what my friend Mrs Crackanthorpe said when we were last walking our King Charleses together.’ ‘Do have some more wine,’ Graham told her, proffering the bottle of Mateus Rosé in its wheaty cradle. ‘There’s red or white.’ ‘Red or white,’ Mrs Crasher remarked. ‘I can see you’re coming up in the world. Just the kind of man who’ll be shopping at the new Sainsbury’s when it opens.’

  ‘Is it time for the miners’ strike yet?’ the man who had admired the wallpaper asked. ‘No,’ Graham told him sadly. ‘I’m afraid that’s not due for another two hundred pages . . .’ [continues endlessly . . .].

  KING OF THE BADGERS

  PHILIP HENSHER

  In recent years the little North Devon town of Ditchwater had been left, if not to its own desires, then certainly to its own devices. Successive waves of incomers – tourists, the benignly retired, the reclusively artistic – had come, looked, stayed, gone or inconclusively hovered. Its high street, built in the first flush of Victorian municipal certainty, but now less commercially adroit, had been colonised by artefact-sellers, by a good but not excellent patisserie, a vendor of Sri Lankan batik work, its stock replenished by twice-yearly jaunts to Trincomalee, by choice herbal emporia . . . [continues for several pages]. But now there had come to its placid and largely unprofaned streets a writer, who taught part-time at the local university, and here had he set a novel, which began with the abduction of a neglected proletarian child from the altogether ghastly council estate on the town’s less civilised margin.

  Like the surface of a stagnant pool driven into unthought-of patterns by the rain, like moor-hens chivvied out of dense undergrowth by a questing fox, like an ant-horde prised from beneath its hill by inopportunely administered hot water, the guests began to arrive at Cyril and Evangeline Deadleigh-Dulles’ house-warming party. ‘How very nice to see you,’ Evangeline found herself saying to a polite woman named Mrs Snoring, ‘and have you lived here long?’ ‘I think we’ve been here six years,’ said Mrs Snoring with the ruminative imprecision she brought to all Ditchwater conversations. ‘Or possibly seven. I say, these fairy-cakes are not to be trifled with, are they?’ ‘No indeed,’ Cyril countered. ‘Almost as good as the ones we used to buy in Budleigh Salterton. But really, isn’t it dreadful about the little girl going missing?’ ‘Terrible,’ said Silas Baugh, who had just come in to the room and stood wiping his feet with impressive rectitude on the mat. ‘Absolutely terrible. But do you know they have some new P. D. Jameses in the second-hand shop? Tell me, who is the young man with the lipstick and the Bermuda shorts. Is he a friend of yours?’ ‘Oh I think he’s strayed in from another party,’ Evangeline found herself saying. ‘These social juxtapositions are so amusing, aren’t they?’ ‘Yes they are,’ Mrs Snoring tremulously interjected. ‘But where on earth did you buy your antimacassars?’

  Two doors down at Bijou Cottage, Butch and Esmé were preparing for the descent of a tribe of their gentleman friends. Though they imagined that their drawing-room was no more outrageously cluttered than anyone else’s, they had, of course, cleared away one or two things: the Ming vases acquired by Esmé’s great-great-great uncle in the sack of Peking, Frith’s ‘Visit to the Fruit Market at Rouen, September 1869’, a number of examples of particularly good Breton ware bought on an autumnal excursion to Quimper . . . [continues]. Condoms, dildos and jars of Vaseline lay in the Hagi tea-bowls in which Butch usually displayed a rather enticing pot-pourri of his own devising. ‘Do you suppose,’ Butch now remarked, ‘that Tinky and Winky will bring that amusing friend of theirs with the enormous todger?’ ‘Well if they do,’ Esmé said, turning over an Ezra Pound first edition with a delicately poised finger-tip, ‘I jolly well want first go of him. You can wait your turn like any other ageing old uncircumcised queen.’ ‘Oh, Es,’ Butch said. ‘Shall we listen to some Rimsky? And isn’t it a shame about that little girl?’ ‘Yes it is, isn’t it. Do you think they’ll want these roulades for dessert, or what about that marvellous cheese that Quentin brought back from St Jean de Pied Port?’

  ‘Terribly exhausting, isn’t it, the gay life?’ Esmé remarked eight hours later, as the last of their guests had debouched into the pallid, unremarkable dawn and the scent of poppers rose on the fetid, smoke-crazed air. ‘So much worse, of course, when you don’t know what kind of novel you’re in. I mean, is this a study of provincial English life built on a unifying transgressive event? Or just the modern gay lifestyle all over again?’ ‘I say, Es,’ Butch remarked, the cocaine dribbling out of his nostrils like vagrant cotton wool, ‘let’s give all this up, shall we, and get married? No more orgies at the Bat Cave or chatting up waiters, just good old monogamy.’ ‘Yes, let’s,’ Esmé said. ‘And there’s a nice leg of lamb in the fridge, too.’

  They found the little girl somewhere in the end. But she doesn’t have much to do with this story.

  THE STRANGER’S CHILD

  ALAN HOLLINGHURST

  After dinner they sat in the drawing-room, beneath a haze of fine writing. It was the summer of 1913, and all the integuments of their particular literary tomb were in place: the references to Lytton Strachey’s Landmarks in French Literature; the snatches from popular songs of the day; the hints of impending conflict. Nothing in the way of establishing detail had been omitted.

  Leaning over discreetly to observe George’s nice young aristocratic friend, the lordly toss and thrust of whose pole her brother had so admired when he first saw him punting on the Cam, she saw, to her immense satisfaction, that Cecil was staring back at her.

  ‘I say, Daffers old girl,’ he murmured. ‘These jolly old social gatherings give me the blinking pip. But I’ve written you a bally verse or two. See what you think.’<
br />
  With trembling hands, she arranged the scrap of paper on her lap.

  The book left out beneath the trees

  Is whipt by an ancestral breeze

  Here wends another minstrel strummer

  To hymn that prelapsarian summer

  Stands the church clock at ten to four?

  Yea, we have passed this way before.

  More eager hands to work the bellows

  Of a fire last lit by Julian Fellowes . . .

  ‘Oh, Cecil,’ she whispered moistly, ‘it’s too, too divine.’

  Upstairs in the guest bedroom, parlour-maid and pantry-boy exchanged glances over the stained and reeking sheets.

  ‘What them two young gentlemen have been up to, I hardly care to think,’ Veronica declared. ‘Nocturnal missions ain’t the half of it.’

  ‘That Mr Cecil pinched my cheek and told me I were a lovely lad,’ Jonah admitted.

  ‘Nay, that malarkey ain’t for the likes of us,’ Veronica chided him. ‘Comic relief. That’s what we’re here for. That and the unobtrusive illustration of the social inequalities of a bygone age.’

  As Cecil dived deep into the hidden pool, lost and secret amid the dappled woods, George watched the polished alabaster of his torso merge into the water’s green occlusion. Then, as his friend rose, all naked and marmoreal, to the bank, he said:

  ‘Isn’t this the moment for me to take you back to the house, get out my, er, membrum virile and shag you senseless over the back of a Louis XVI escritoire?’

  ‘Actually, no. Apparently we’re going for the Downton Abbey market this time, so discreet fumbling in the hammock is all you’re allowed.’

  ‘But Cess, Mr Hollinghurst is famous for his depictions of uninhibited gay sex.’

  ‘I know, but he’s fifty-seven now, and one has to calm down sometime. Besides, I think he wants the critics to acclaim his fully fledged maturity.’

  ‘Not even surreptitious oral congress in a private box at L’après-midi d’un faune? I’ve got a handkerchief.’

  ‘No! Look ducky, you’re becoming as overwrought as Mr Hollinghurst’s style. Never mind, we can still have impossibly artificial conversations about art and literature. That’s before I die, of course, and get turned into Rupert Brooke, while Daphne marries my brother.’ The water dripped like melted butter from his snow-white thighs, his arms sunburnt and sinewy, calves darkly hairy . . . [continues]. ‘Now, shall we go and listen to Traviata?’

  ‘Oh, Cess . . . let’s!’

  ABOUT A BOY

  NICK HORNBY

  Will Goodbloke sat in the cafe on Upper Street – they’d just come back from a browse in Retro-Vinyl and he was still upset about missing that La’s album – drinking cappuccino out of a styrofoam cup. He wondered about styrofoam. Was it a sort of plastic that they boiled up in vats, or just a kind of waterproof cardboard? It was funny there was never anything about it on TV, he thought. Angie looked up from telling him about her ex’s psoriasis and said:

  ‘You’re very quiet.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Any special reason?’

  Right. Will knew she wanted to talk to him in that way women sometimes did, while you wanted to watch a crap Steve Martin film or eat barley sugars.

  ‘Umm . . . It’s just that I never get any proper dialogue.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘Well, we’re in a Nick Hornby novel aren’t we? It’s just’ – he knitted his brows together thoughtfully so she could see he really meant it – ‘your everyday banalities. I mean, the things people say, you know.’

  She smiled at him in that smiley way. ‘That’s right. But redeemed by the sincerity of the way we say them, I suppose.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s like our, well, thought processes too. The way we just, you know, think the mundane things people think, about oh, I don’t know, guys and sex. And sex and guys. Oh and kids of course.’

  God, Will thought. He’d seen that coming. The conversations at the Sad Thirtysomething Bachelors Support Group in Tufnell Park had certainly sharpened him up.

  ‘Do you mind?’ she asked. “About the kids, I mean?’

  ‘No,’ he said, thinking regretfully about that La’s album and wondering if you could get it by mail-order. ‘Fucking A really. Do you mind if I cry a bit though?’

  ‘I’ve got a handkerchief somewhere.’

  He knew then, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the reviews were going to be OK.

  SOMETHING TO TELL YOU

  HANIF KUREISHI

  Oh maan, did I ever tell you about the Seventies? Well, there was this chick called Ajita and we used to go over to her auntie’s place in Hounslow and take off all our clothes and lie in the back garden and I’d run my moist, jungly tongue along her sweating . . . [continues for several pages]. Only then she went away and it ruined my life. Really, it did. But anyway, about the Seventies. I mean, politics was really right-on in the Seventies. I was living in this squat in Hammersmith, Shepherd’s Bush, somewhere, with these Maoists and Trotskyists and radical types and sometimes we’d go on protest marches and jeer at the pigs, though of course this didn’t get in the way of all those crazy times I spent with Ajita round at her dad’s house, with the smell of the Vesta beef curries rising from the kitchen, and the way she’d lie there in her auntie’s garden and sweetly bid me to explore . . . [continues for several more pages].

  Didn’t Nietzsche or someone say that ‘sexual passion is the most perfect manifestation of the will to live’? I mean, how cool is that? Of course, all this time I was worrying about my career, I mean whether I should be a writer or a theatre director or a rock singer, or simply hang out with women . . . And then of course there was the music. I mean, music was great in the Seventies. There were punks and Goths and hippy flotsam. Maybe there weren’t Goths yet, I can’t remember, but anyway the music was great. In fact it was almost as good as the drugs which Valentin and the Wolfman and all those brave, estimable people I knew used to score for me in the King’s Road after we’d been shop lifting and pissing on the pavement and doing all those things that crazy young cats used to do in the Seventies. Not that the capacity for happiness hadn’t left me, you understand, for my life was essentially an exhausted, ground-down, sempiternal twilight. Oh yes it was.

  And now I’m a psychoanalyst, which is still pretty cool, don’t you think, what with all the sexy stuff my clients tell me, and my friend Henry the director and my mad sister Miriam in her crazy house up West. And Rafi my son, well he keeps me in touch with what young people are thinking and saying, yo bruv sho enuff he do. Which makes me wonder, when he gets to sex, how will he want it? Will he want to be spanked while being fellated by a negro transvestite? I did a murder once, you know, no really I did.

  Publisher’s Note: Messrs Faber would like to apologise for the fact that, while advertised as a novel, Something to Tell You is, like everything else Mr Kureishi has written merely a projection of his own life, opinions and sexual obsessions. But what can you do?

  SOLAR

  IAN MCEWAN

  He belonged to that class of novelist – vaguely unprepossessing, earnest, left-liberal, often sexually obsessed – who were unaccountably attractive to the editor of the Guardian Saturday Review and the judges of literary prizes. But the Ian McEwan of this time was a man of deeply depressed sensibilities, chthonic, limitrophic, and prone to use words whose meanings many of his readers would find themselves forced to look up in dictionaries. He did not know how to write a novel that did not depend for its effects on vast amounts of background research, or wholly implausible moments of lurid drama, and the discovery produced in himself, among an array of contending emotions, intense moments of shame and longing.

  Apparently there was a certain kind of novelist – in furtive, emulative moments he had read about them in the pages of high-brow literary reviews – who was able to write convincing panoramas of the world which he and his fellow-citizens might be thought to inhabit: authentic, untrammelled,
indisputably his own man (he had been a feminist once, and the phrase still filled him with disquiet). But he himself was reduced to writing immensely stagy productions set on the day of the anti-Iraq war protest march, in which brain surgeons exchanged dialogue filched out of medical textbooks, or laboured accounts of the sexual incompatibility of honeymooning couples on the south coast.

  What did Ian do to quench this unyielding desire to be echt, to be original, to write the kind of book that would not have the knowing young critics roll their eyes with boredom? Did he write a novel about one or two ordinary people living more or less believable lives far beyond the glare of the media or the international body politic? No, he decided to write a novel about climate change featuring a much-married Nobel Prize winner whose best days are behind him. He knew, as he set about the task, that he should not have done it. At the same time the lure was irresistible. Waterstone’s, he believed, would make it their book of the month. He would be able to reuse all the material brought back from the trip to the Arctic Circle in 2005, and with luck no one would remember that an account of this voyage had already appeared in the Guardian. He would employ that puzzling, ineluctable garnish so tantalisingly absent from his work – humour. And he would be able to read a great many books – already the prospect brought a bulge to his gleaming, Gollum-like eyes – about Einstein and string theory.

  But there was one thing, he told himself, as the novel took shape beneath his fond yet exacting gaze, as he despatched countless emails to members of the scientific community at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Centre for Quantum Computation at the University of Cambridge, and tried to think of some jokes – jokes, alas, were really not his thing. He would not put in one of those jaw-dropping coincidental tragedies that upstart reviewers were sometimes prone to mock. But then, unaccountably, unforeseeably, as his hero walked into the room where the research assistant who had been sleeping with his wife sat on the sofa, an unconquerable urge took hold of him and, with a swift, unregretful stroke of the pen, he had the man lose his footing on the carpet and smash open his skull on the table-edge. When Ian had committed this act he sat for a moment before the laptop, broken, disillusioned, almost weeping at his lack of self-control.