They are back in the room at the top of 17 Grange Road.
The same low ceiling. The same English cold that creeps up on you. The same ancient leaky windows and tired radiators.
The Boy becomes immediately excited. He liked this room.
The Man reminds him that three people once slept here.
Mother, Brother and Boy.
Compressed together under blankets near the wall like Victorian servants awaiting instructions from a family that no longer exists downstairs.
The Boy shrugs.
At the time this had seemed entirely normal.
But children are idiots. We all know that. The red Hamley’s bag remains by the door. The Boy immediately goes to inspect it.
The Man had remembered this as an enormous piece of luggage. It is now revealed to have the approximate carrying capacity of a football kit bag.
The Boy opens it.
Inside there are swimming goggles, a football shirt, a sandwich wrapped in paper and apparently dating from the late 1970s, and an Aston Villa notebook, Andy Gray on its claret and blue front cover.
The Man asks why there are swimming goggles.
The Boy looks surprised.
In case.
The Man accepts this.
Packing resumes, but the journey in the end turns out not to require departure.
The Boy had imagined departure as Airports, trains, a woman arriving late. A final look backwards. Somebody saying take care. Instead the Man wakes up in the same room and realises with slight disappointment that all new lives begin exactly where the old ones ended, among cables, receipts, books and half-charged devices.
There is a suitcase open on the bed.
The boy’s red Hamley’s bag remains by the door.
The Man does not remove it. He has learned not to argue directly with the Boy because the Boy scares him a bit and, more importantly, occasionally turns out to be right.
The Editor arrives carrying lists. He has become practical in middle age. He wants passports, chargers, medicines, insurance documents, clean socks and a proper publishing strategy. He points out that one cannot launch a project, finish a manuscript, start a conversation business and become emotionally mature simultaneously. He proposes sequencing. The Man ignores him because the Editor’s great weakness is mistaking caution for wisdom.
Lacan appears carrying three books and no clothes. And a pack of Gitanes and a lighter.
The Man immediately removes the books.
Lacan looks offended. “What if the journey requires explanation?”
The Man says perhaps it will.
Lacan brightens.
The Man quietly places the books on the shelf.
“They are too heavy. Literally. They’ll take us over the 20 kilos,” the Man explains.
Lacan says something about desire not disappearing simply because one leaves the house.
The Man agrees, but the books stay on the shelf.
He packs a football instead. The football is one of the few things in the house that never lied to him. And it’s lighter and deflatable too. “Space management,” the Man says.
The Night Manager looking remarkably similar to his dad appears briefly.
Nobody had invited him.
He stands in the doorway with a clipboard that appears blank.
He says quietly that check-out is at eleven.
He points at the sandwich. Questionable choice, he says.
He notices the project notes.
Out of the Loop.
He likes the title.
He starts talking.
The Man listens automatically and then stops.
The Night Manager always appeared to listen brilliantly but rarely heard anything but himself.
The new journey cannot work like that, the Man thinks.
The Boy starts putting more things in the suitcase. Photographs of three women he loves, a stone from somewhere, a peacock feather, this manuscript.
The Editor is removing most of it. The Man stops him. “Leave some,” he says. “We are not becoming monks.”
M appears and immediately leaves because she is not coming along. Or if she decides to come, it will be as a real person, not as a character in a book.
“Frankly, I would like to go with someone who wants to go with me,” the Man sighs.
The Man closes the case. Not everything fits.
Chapter 30 THE PUBLISHER
“Denouewot?” the Boy starts.
“The end. Fin,” the Man explains. “Tying up the loose strings. Miss Marple.”
There are too many endings. Too many fins.
This becomes the problem.
Not that the book lacks conclusion, but that it possesses them in industrial quantities, stacked like unsold self-help titles in the discount section of a provincial airport bookshop.
There is the ending in which M is finally released with dignity and tenderness and everybody involved becomes larger, sadder and morally improved by the experience.
There is the ending in which the Man finally understands depression properly and names it so accurately that naming itself becomes cure.
There is the ending in which Poland is decoded at last, assembled into coherence: Catholic and secular, warm and cruel, western and eastern, tragic and faintly ridiculous, a place forever renovating itself while leaving the same wiring underneath the floors.
There is the ending in which the grandmother appears by the lake and inherited grief is finally mourned correctly and laid to rest with literary grace.
There is the ending in which the lesson is ethical. Be decent. Stop demanding salvation from other people. Accept limitation. Buy vegetables.
There is the ending in which all the Lacanian machinery finally clicks into place with satisfying French precision and the reader closes the book feeling intellectually rearranged.
There is the ending in which melancholy is accepted. The ending in which melancholy is defeated.
The ending in which the Man leaves Poland forever. The ending in which he realises Poland was never the problem.
The Author writes all of them. Then rewrites them. Then rearranges them in different orders.
The last line goes first to M, then to the Boy, then to Dr K, then to Warsaw itself, then briefly to a toad.
The Man sits now.
The Boy watches him carefully.
“You’re doing it again.”
“No I’m not.”
“You are. You’re trying to build an ending clever enough to stop you feeling sad.”
The Editor nods.
“Correct. Classic late-stage Harperism. Very dangerous. This is how we ended up with the forty-page chapter about borders, mothers and football.”
“It was good.”
“It was three chapters,” says the Editor. “One of them was narrated by a frog.”
The Man ignores him.
Outside, Warsaw continues. A tram grinds around the corner.
Near the bench a squirrel is attempting to carry something physically impossible up a tree.
The Man looks at the pages.
He understands now that the danger is no longer obsession.
The danger is continuation. Continuation as identity.
The endless refining of pain into voice.
The Boy has begun drawing little coffins in the margin of the manuscript.
Then the Publisher enters.
Not dramatically.
Not through a door exactly.
He has been nearby for years waiting for exhaustion to do its work.
The Man sees immediately that the Publisher is himself, though older somehow, cleaner around the edges, less interested in emotion, wearing the expression of someone who has dealt professionally with writers and trusts none of them.
He picks up the manuscript.
The room stiffens.
The Author immediately begins speaking too much. “Of course this version is provisional because the issue becomes whether the ending itself reproduces the…”
The Publisher raises one hand.
He turns a few pages.
Another few.
A long sigh.
“The jokes stay,” he says.
“Good.”
“The lake stays.”
“Obviously.”
“The ducks stay.”
“Essential.”
“The forty-page section where you attempt to explain desire through NATO expansion…”
The room becomes tense.
“…goes.”
The Author looks genuinely wounded. “That’s the spine of the book.”
“No,” says the Publisher. “That’s Stockholm syndrome.”
The Boy laughs so hard he nearly falls off the chair.
The Publisher keeps reading.
Occasionally he makes small noises of irritation.
Finally he places the manuscript down. “There are three different endings.”
“Yes,” says the Author defensively. “Polyphonic closure.”
“No,” says the Publisher. “Indecision.”
The room quietens.
The Publisher looks directly at the Man now, not the Author, not the Boy, not the Editor.
“You thought if you found the correct ending,” he says, “the life producing the book might finally become acceptable to you.”
The Man says nothing.
“Worse,” says the Publisher. “You thought it might make you acceptable to somebody else.”
Silence again.
Outside, one of the gigantic little girls from the playground is now screaming at a pigeon with absolute fury.
The Publisher continues.
“The book does not save the marriage.”
No answer.
“It does not get the woman.”
No answer.
“It does not explain Poland.”
The Author tries to interrupt.
The Publisher ignores him.
“It does not heal childhood. It does not resurrect the dead.”
The Editor writes that down. Possible essay?
The Publisher notices this.
“No,” he says.
The Editor crosses it out reluctantly.
The Man looks down at the pages.
His pages.
Though not entirely his anymore.
Made from everyone: loved, misread, desired, used, feared, fictionalised, remembered incorrectly.
Then, unexpectedly, he softens slightly.
Not much. But enough.
“The work worked,” he says.
The Man looks up.
“What?”
“The machinery weakened.”
The Publisher taps the final page.
“You stopped writing entirely toward the beloved.”
The Boy lowers his eyes.
“You stopped turning every sentence into emotional bait.”
The Author winces.
The Editor coughs.
“Though obviously traces remain.”
The Publisher closes the manuscript.
“That’s enough now.”
The Man feels something inside him resist immediately.
More edits. More refinements. More endings. Another explanatory section. Perhaps one final walk around the lake.
The Publisher sees the entire impulse forming before it fully exists.
“No,” he says.
“There are unresolved things.”
“There always will be.”
“The structure could still be tighter.”
“So could your face,” the Boy says.
The Publisher stands.
For a moment the Man panics slightly, as if something enormous is about to leave the room forever.
“What happens now?” asks the Boy quietly.
The Publisher looks at the pages.
Then at the Man.
“Now,” he says, “you publish and be damned.”
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