Love You Madly. Alex George

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СКАЧАТЬ put their house in Potters Bar on the market and had decided to move to Australia. I wasn’t given a penny of their new-found fortune. It was explained to me that nowadays one and a half million pounds wasn’t really that much, and that they couldn’t afford to start giving handouts to all and sundry. I pointed out that, as their only child, it was arguably disingenuous to describe me as ‘all and sundry’, but my complaints fell on determinedly deaf ears.

      My parents’ new ambition is to annexe the world through their camera lens. They spend more time travelling than they do in their brand-new, architect-designed beach house just outside Perth. The only place they refuse to visit is England – too boring, apparently, my continued presence here notwithstanding. Whatever happened to growing old gracefully? They really shouldn’t be having so much fun at their age, especially not as they’re whittling away my inheritance in the process.

      At least Mum and Dad have acknowledged that my novel has been published, which is more than can be said for my parents-in-law. There is nothing that Anna’s father likes to do more than enumerate, at length, my many failings – particularly when I am within earshot. My greatest transgression is that I do not have a Proper Job. A Proper Job, in this context, is one that commands a basic annual salary in the middling six-figure range (that’s excluding twice-yearly bonuses large enough to buy a Porsche or two) and requires a wardrobe full of pinstripe suits. My father-in-law thinks I’m little more than a parasite, greedily feeding off the fruits of his daughter’s industry. He obviously has no idea how much effort goes into writing a novel. I had rather hoped that the publication of Licked would allay his misgivings, but both he and Anna’s obnoxious mother have ignored it completely. There have been no polite enquiries, no words of congratulations, nothing but the icy silence of sour indifference.

      Sometimes, I have to admit, I share Anna’s parents’ loathing of my job. There are occasions when I wish I had become an accountant instead, but my fate was writ large in the constellations, indelibly inscribed in the heavens by a celestial hand greater than my own. Ultimately, I was powerless to resist the sweet song of my Muse. I was put on this earth to write; and so write I must.

      I began making up stories as a child. I would slave over these heavily derivative tales (one was called, ‘The Tiger, the Wizard, and the Chest of Drawers’) and would then solemnly recite them in front of my parents, who always applauded kindly (and doubtless with relief) when I finished. And this was the key: I loved being the centre of attention. That clapping was for me. The hubristic lure of approbation was what got me in the end. I was powerless to resist my all-consuming egotism.

      But it’s not all my fault. I also blame Ernest Hemingway. It was reading A Moveable Feast, his account of his life in Paris during the twenties, that made me think that being a writer would be an enjoyable way to earn a living. Hemingway, the lying bastard, made the writer’s existence sound too alluring to resist. He cavorted around Paris with his glamorous chums, knocking out literary masterpieces in between drinking binges in the glittering bars of the Left Bank. I was captivated by his stories of ordering oysters and a bottle of white wine to celebrate the completion of a story. I wanted a slice of that carefree, bohemian existence.

      (I did get a job, once. It was after my third unpublished effort, Peeling the Grape, had been met with the by then familiar chorus of indifference and hostility from thirty-five of the country’s largest publishers. Crushed, I decided to give my self-esteem a break and resolved to abandon fiction completely. I had done my best; it was time to submit to the inevitable. Literature’s loss was to be the advertising industry’s gain. I sent my rather sparse CV – embellished with one or two half-truths and three or four outright whoppers – to a few advertising agencies. To my surprise, I managed to blag my way into a copywriting job in a small agency in Fitzrovia. It wasn’t nearly as glamorous as I had anticipated; there was none of the coke-snorting excess amongst the creatives that I had always imagined. Instead people nervously sat at their desks, desperately trying to think of ways to persuade people to buy things that they didn’t want. The atmosphere of paranoid terror quickly seeped into me by some sort of awful corporate osmosis. I began to lie awake at night, terrified that my creative juices would abandon me. In fact, released from the demanding, unforgiving shackles of writing fiction, my creativity blossomed. It was just a pity that the narrow-minded account executives couldn’t see past the ends of their noses, which were buried in the lucrative feeding trough of bland conventionality. They weren’t interested in my radical ideas. Personally, I thought that my use of some of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, cleverly altered to praise a diabolical brand of versatile low-fat cream cheese (‘How do I eat thee? Let me count the ways’, etc.), was breathtakingly innovative. When I refused to come up with alternative ideas, they sacked me on the spot. I went back to my typewriter, weeping with relief. The experiment had lasted three and a half weeks.)

      The irony is that now I sometimes think that I would love an ordinary, boring job again. All this freedom is getting me down. Hours, days, and weeks stretch ahead of me, oppressive in their emptiness. The ordered structure of a nine-to-five existence would give me a solid framework for my life, a means of regulating the chaos. I would dearly love to be told where to put my pencil-sharpener; I yearn for a militantly officious boss. As it is, the only taskmaster I have is me, and I am a workshy dilettante at the best of times. I have the worst of both worlds. I don’t get any work done, and have nobody but myself to blame.

      Another long day looms.

      I go into the sitting room, and turn on the record player. The needle lands softly on the rotating vinyl, and after a moment –

      Bam! The pitch-perfect trumpets punch out the jumped-up tune, the saxophones gliding smoothly beneath them. This is ‘Cotton Tail’, ladies and gentlemen, performed by the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the greatest jazz band in the world. Here comes the warm tenor sax of Ben Webster, rocking gently through his solo, prancing over the band’s tightly syncopated chords. Duke’s piano gets a few rollicking bars, and then the seamless sax section takes up the charge, followed by the swinging trumpets, spiralling ever higher.

      I shut my eyes. This is the spiritual equivalent of brushing my teeth. The music leaves my soul refreshed and protected against decay. I sit on the floor, next to the speakers, and wallow in the rich symphony of jazzed horn lines which spill into the room.

      Edward Kennedy Ellington, the Duke, that grand old aristocrat of jazz, was one of the music’s true pioneers. From his beginnings as a dapper and debonair band leader in 1920s Harlem, he became the friend of royalty and presidents, loved and admired the world over. He toured tirelessly throughout his career, spreading his own brand of syncopated happiness, dazzling audiences everywhere with his exciting rhythms, his unforgettable tunes, and his suave showmanship. He loved us madly – and his gift to the world was his music. Now jazz, of course, is meant to be the quintessence of cool. It’s about tortured genius, complex chord structures, jarring time-signatures. It’s about squalling saxophone solos, smoky subterranean joints, and sultry, mysterious women. Duke was as hip as they came, but this isn’t just music to smoke to. It’s music to dance to, as well. I have pulled Anna around this room many times, laughing and twirling to the band’s upbeat tempos.

      As the music plays on, I survey the spines of my record collection. I own yards of Ellington records, neatly arranged on their shelves. I have LPs, EPs, battered 78s, reissues, and foreign imports, from the pristine and unplayed to the almost unplayable. I love them all dearly. They are the proud result of fifteen years’ trawling through the dusty racks of second-hand record shops, hours spent hunched over acres of old cardboard. I still spend days arranging and rearranging my records. I love the endless cycle of processing and regulation: marshalling my Duke Ellington collection allows me to impose my own brand of order in at least one small corner of this otherwise uncontrollable world.

      I own almost every note that Duke ever recorded, but there’s one performance that I still dream about. Here’s the story. Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s enigmatic collaborator and СКАЧАТЬ