The Silkworm

34

“Love is a mirage,” said Michael Fancourt on the television screen. “A mirage, a chimera, a delusion.”

Robin was sitting between Matthew and her mother on the faded, sagging sofa. The chocolate Labrador lay on the floor in front of the fire, his tail thumping lazily on the rug in his sleep. Robin felt drowsy after two nights of very little sleep and days of unexpected stresses and emotion, but she was trying hard to concentrate on Michael Fancourt. Beside her Mrs. Ellacott, who had expressed the optimistic hope that Fancourt might let drop some bons mots that would help with her essay on Webster, had a notebook and pen on her lap.

“Surely,” began the interviewer, but Fancourt talked over him.

“We don’t love each other; we love the idea we have of each other. Very few humans understand this or can bear to contemplate it. They have blind faith in their own powers of creation. All love, ultimately, is self-love.”

Mr. Ellacott was asleep, his head back in the armchair closest to the fire and the dog. Gently he snored, with his spectacles halfway down his nose. All three of Robin’s brothers had slid discreetly from the house. It was Saturday night and their mates were waiting in the Bay Horse on the square. Jon had come home from university for the funeral but did not feel he owed it to his sister’s fiancé to forgo a few pints of Black Sheep with his brothers, sitting at the dimpled copper tables by the open fire.

Robin suspected that Matthew had wanted to join them but that he had felt it would be unseemly. Now he was stuck watching a literary program he would never have tolerated at home. He would have turned over without asking her, taking it for granted that she could not possibly be interested in what this sour-looking, sententious man was saying. It was not easy to like Michael Fancourt, thought Robin. The curve of both his lip and his eyebrows implied an ingrained sense of superiority. The presenter, who was well known, seemed a little nervous.

“And that is the theme of your new—?”

“One of the themes, yes. Rather than castigating himself for his foolishness when the hero realizes that he has simply imagined his wife into being, he seeks to punish the flesh-and-blood woman whom he believes has duped him. His desire for revenge drives the plot.”

“Aha,” said Robin’s mother softly, picking up her pen.

“Many of us—most, perhaps,” said the interviewer, “consider love a purifying ideal, a source of selflessness rather than—”

“A self-justifying lie,” said Fancourt. “We are mammals who need sex, need companionship, who seek the protective enclave of the family for reasons of survival and reproduction. We select a so-called loved one for the most primitive reasons—my hero’s preference for a pear-shaped woman is self-explanatory, I think. The loved one laughs or smells like the parent who gave one youthful succor and all else is projected, all else is invented—”

“Friendship—” began the interviewer a little desperately.

“If I could have brought myself to have sex with any of my male friends, I would have had a happier and more productive life,” said Fancourt. “Unfortunately, I’m programmed to desire the female form, however fruitlessly. And so I tell myself that one woman is more fascinating, more attuned to my needs and desires, than another. I am a complex, highly evolved and imaginative creature who feels compelled to justify a choice made on the crudest grounds. This is the truth that we’ve buried under a thousand years of courtly bullshit.”

Robin wondered what on earth Fancourt’s wife (for she seemed to remember that he was married) would make of this interview. Beside her, Mrs. Ellacott had written a few words on her notepad.

“He’s not talking about revenge,” Robin muttered.

Her mother showed her the notepad. She had written: What a shit he is. Robin giggled.

Beside her, Matthew leaned over to the Daily Express that Jonathan had left abandoned on a chair. He turned past the front three pages, where Strike’s name appeared several times in the text alongside Owen Quine’s, and began to read a piece on how a high street chain of stores had banned Cliff Richard’s Christmas songs.

“You’ve been criticized,” said the interviewer bravely, “for your depiction of women, most particularly—”

“I can hear the critics’ cockroach-like scurrying for their pens as we speak,” said Fancourt, his lip curling in what passed for a smile. “I can think of little that interests me less than what critics say about me or my work.”

Matthew turned a page of the paper. Robin glanced sideways at a picture of an overturned tanker, an upside-down Honda Civic and a mangled Mercedes.

“That’s the crash we were nearly in!”

“What?” said Matthew.

She had said it without thinking. Robin’s brain froze.

“That happened on the M4,” Matthew said, half laughing at her for thinking she could have been involved, that she could not recognize a motorway when she saw one.

“Oh—oh yes,” said Robin, pretending to peer more closely at the text beneath the picture.

But he was frowning now, catching up.

“Were you nearly in a car crash yesterday?”

He was speaking quietly, trying not to disturb Mrs. Ellacott, who was following Fancourt’s interview. Hesitation was fatal. Choose.

“Yes, I was. I didn’t want to worry you.”

He stared at her. On Robin’s other side she could feel her mother making more notes.

“This one?” he said, pointing at the picture, and she nodded. “Why were you on the M4?”

“I had to drive Cormoran to an interview.”

“I’m thinking of women,” said the interviewer, “your views on women—”

“Where the hell was the interview?”

“Devon,” said Robin.

“Devon?”

“He’s buggered his leg again. He couldn’t have got there by himself.”

“You drove him to Devon?”

“Yes, Matt, I drove him to—”

“So that’s why you didn’t come up yesterday? So you could—”

“Matt, of course not.”

He flung down the paper, pulled himself up and strode from the room.

Robin felt sick. She looked around at the door, which he had not slammed, but closed firmly enough to make her father stir and mutter in his sleep and the Labrador wake up.

“Leave him,” advised her mother, her eyes still on the screen.

Robin swung round, desperate.

“Cormoran had to get to Devon and he couldn’t drive with only one leg—”

“There’s no need to defend yourself to me,” said Mrs. Ellacott.

“But now he thinks I lied about not being able to get home yesterday.”

“Did you?” her mother asked, her eyes still fixed beadily upon Michael Fancourt. “Get down, Rowntree, I can’t see over you.”

“Well, I could’ve come if I’d got a first-class ticket,” Robin admitted as the Labrador yawned, stretched and resettled himself on the hearthrug. “But I’d already paid for the sleeper.”

“Matt’s always going on about how much more money you would have made if you’d taken that HR job,” said her mother, her eyes on the TV screen. “I’d have thought he’d appreciate you saving the pennies. Now shush, I want to hear about revenge.”

The interviewer was trying to formulate a question.

“But where women are concerned, you haven’t always—contemporary mores, so-called political correctness—I’m thinking particularly of your assertion that female writers—”

“This again?” said Fancourt, slapping his knees with his hands (the interviewer perceptibly jumped). “I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature. I don’t retract a word. That is a fact.”

Robin was twisting her engagement ring on her finger, torn between her desire to follow Matt and persuade him she had done nothing wrong and anger that any such persuasion should be required. The demands of his job came first, always; she had never known him to apologize for late hours, for jobs that took him to the far side of London and brought him home at eight o’clock at night…

“I was going to say,” the interviewer hurried on, with an ingratiating smile, “that this book might give those critics pause. I thought the central female character was treated with great understanding, with real empathy. Of course”—he glanced down at his notes and up again; Robin could feel his nerves—“parallels are bound to be drawn—in dealing with the suicide of a young woman, I expect you’re braced—you must be expecting—”

“That stupid people will assume that I have written an autobiographical account of my first wife’s suicide?”

“Well, it’s bound to be seen as—it’s bound to raise questions—”

“Then let me say this,” said Fancourt, and paused.

They were sitting in front of a long window looking out onto a sunny, windswept lawn. Robin wondered fleetingly when the program had been filmed—before the snows had come, clearly—but Matthew dominated her thoughts. She ought to go and find him, yet somehow she remained on the sofa.

“When Eff—Ellie died,” began Fancourt, “when she died—”

The close-up felt painfully intrusive. The tiny lines at the corners of his eyes deepened as he closed them; a square hand flew to conceal his face.

Michael Fancourt appeared to be crying.

“So much for love being a mirage and a chimera,” sighed Mrs. Ellacott as she tossed down her pen. “This is no good. I wanted blood and guts, Michael. Blood and guts.”

Unable to stand inaction any longer, Robin got up and headed for the sitting-room door. These were not normal circumstances. Matthew’s mother had been buried that day. It behooved her to apologize, to make amends.