To Indigo by Tanith Lee (read along books txt) 📕

door” by hard graft in the softest of professions. I lived slowly and prudently, with little occasional and mundane treats, like the very glass-full on the table in front of me, Wincott’s. My life was a glass of bitter.

There was only one thing I could cite – even if that too involved my trade. It was the sole manuscript I had never even submitted to an agent or editor. The untitled, unfinished book had begun life in paper form, but had currently lain in the files of my computer for six years. Untitled was not a work of suspense or detective fiction. It was a strange thing, perhaps even a sort of fantasy, set in an (also untitled) European country during the eighteenth century. The literary style of the book was also fairly unlike the normally carefully-clipped and controlled prose of everything else I typed in there. And it had a structure that was, perhaps, experimental. It involved no plotting whatsoever, dissimilar to every other novel I’d penned, typed, or ultimately tapped out on the keyboard. And of course, like anything never planned, unplotted, unresolved, meandering and ‘free’, it frequently stuck. I had begun Untitled in 1975, when I was in my twenties. Thereafter, section by section it flowed and stuck, and unglued and went on, until the next inevitable block. Printed up so far, it ran to 318 close pages, but aside from the revisions I sometimes visited on it, it had by now been stalled fairly conclusively since the turn of the century.

Now it came floating up as it were out of the beer glass. Untitled was, for all its failings and inertia, the one interesting book I had ever attempted. In fact the only book that flew in the face of everything else of any kind I had had to do and done.

Did I say what it was about? If only loosely, it concerned a crazed and murderous young poet, son of a once-wealthy mercantile family, a drug-taker and visionary with black curling hair and wide wild eyes. Aside from his genius, he took anything he wanted, but generally it was given him, and the silver salver his far from mundane treats were served on, was often also awash with blood.

Just as I glanced up from the beer, the pub door opened in a sudden sun flash. Two silhouetted figures walked in, two men. One was a suited business type with expensive shoes. The other was the black-haired poet from Untitled.

Obviously he wasn’t anything of the sort, the young man now leaning against the bar. Actual characters do not, as in one or two peculiar romances they may, leap from the page to take on sentient life.

The resemblance, however, especially as I had just then been thinking of it, was remarkable.

Realistically I’ve sometimes wondered since, if I hadn’t been thinking of Untitled, would I even have noticed him particularly? Maybe on the train going back I might have thought of it: Oh, that fellow in the pub. He was rather like Vilmos… wasn’t he.

Under these circumstances I was inevitably intrigued.

I stared a moment, checked myself, and started to scrutinise him more cautiously.

He was definitely quite a handsome specimen. As, naturally, was Untitled’s Vilmos. Lynda, with her prissy taste, wouldn’t have liked him, I don’t think she would. After all she made do with me and my little way for two whole years. Maureen though, I’m fairly sure, would have appreciated the man in the pub. She too spent time with me, but I had been a lot younger then, and her husband was also very good-looking in his youth.

This young man was himself about thirty-six or seven. Not so young really. And Vilmos – about thirty-five where I’d left him last, wallowing in a brothel on some shadowy cobbled side street of an arched and aching city. Here then, Vilmos abruptly aged by the next unwritten chapter.

He took no notice of anything around him that I could see. He spoke to the Suit-and-Shoes in a muted angry monologue, pausing only to listen to the Suit’s own brief comments, here and there inserted, during which Vilmos – I might as well call him that for the moment – seemed both strung-up and contemptuous. The Suit drank a glass of red wine. It was a nice colour, like the bottle Harris had got with the steak. Vilmos drank a double vodka or gin without mixer, knocked it back and stood waiting for a refill. Which was duly purchased.

Already this, his demeanour, seemed aptly reminiscent of what Vilmos’s might have been in some comparable situation. But what situation was it? Suit-and-Shoes looked composed, almost non-committal. There were a lot of early evening drinkers already in the pub, and more streaming in. I couldn’t make out even a single word. Probably twenty years ago I would have. Then other barflies grouped between me and the two men and I couldn’t see them well either. Vilmos wore a black shirt and black jeans. They were neither expensive nor tat. He was wearing brown boots that looked as if they had helped him scale the sides of rough chalky buildings.

I took a few more gulps of beer.

It was nearly five-thirty, the middle of what we used to call the Rush Hour. As a rule I avoided travelling this late, or caught the seven-thirty train, which missed the worst of it. I’d dawdled. As if – I was meant to see this man, to be inspired, Untitled rejuvenated.

I’d use this scene in the next chapter. Find a good if bizarre explanation for it, the Suit man a creditor or lover, even a sibling. To work on the book tonight could ease the dull feeling of threat that had somehow fastened on me with Harris’s words Dad’s dead.

All at once the crowd round the bar was parting, like clothes in a big wardrobe, as some Narnian-like beast came shouldering forth. It wasn’t Aslan.

“Yes?” he said, standing over my table.

My scrutiny, as I’ve noted here,