The Face That Must Die Read Free Page B

point out that it didn’t even look much like Wag, but soon gave up.
    Jenny and I had a belated honeymoon in the Lake District in the summer of the following year. I think it was actually on the first day we were away that my father fell (or, according to my mother, was pushed) downstairs at the fireplace manufacturers where he now worked as a clerk, having retired from the police. My mother called me long distance to demand I go back to see him in hospital, but I told her she had to be kidding. Even when we returned to Liverpool a week later, I let a couple of days pass before I made myself go, and then I couldn’t find the hospital; my mother had told me it was behind a department store when in fact it was several streets away from the front of the store. I wandered about until visiting time was over. I wasn’t trying very hard to find the hospital.
    I did find it the next day, and my father. He looked old and feeble and unfamiliar; he wore bandages on his skull and a tube up his penis. Only his blurred murmur, which he must have been unable to control, seemed familiar from all those overheard arguments. I couldn’t touch him or understand what he was saying, only feel repelled by my mother’s belated concern for him. I left as soon as I could, and a few days later he died.
    I attended his funeral in the pouring rain. His sister peered into the open grave and cried “Where’s mother?” Subsequently my mother claimed that policemen at the inquest had told her they weren’t satisfied that my father had died of natural causes, but I heard no more of this.
    The sense of relief I’d felt on leaving home didn’t last long, for my wife and my mother disliked each other profoundly. The spectacle of their mutual politeness made me increasingly tense, not least because I felt as if I were somehow in the middle of all this. Besides, her front room seemed unbearably small to me with both of them in it. On the other hand, my mother disliked visiting us when she would have to take a taxi home, for she suspected the drivers of wanting to rape her. Soon I was finding excuses to visit my mother by myself, but this only made her even more suspicious of my wife. She frequently accused me of discussing her with Jenny, though I wasn’t; over the years she’d managed to inhibit me against discussing her with anyone.
    Perhaps all this had something to do with how I was developing. I’d grown very much like Peter in the present novel. I deleted chapter XX from the first edition but now, for the sake of autobiographical honesty, I’ve put it back in. That was how I was when I wrote “I Am It And It Is I” (a title which Lovecraftians may recognise). It was to be one of a collection of tales called Marihuana Marvels , a project which, thank heaven, got no further. All the same, I find I quite like the story, one of my funnier pieces, and I’m glad to see it into print at last as a complement to the novel.
    Eventually I roused myself from my apathy. Jenny and I bought a house and I went back into production. I was in libraries now, but growing frustrated. In 1973 I went after jobs in journalism and in the Civil Service but, luckily, was unsuccessful. Instead I went full-time as a writer and began to live on the edge of my nerves. I’d had a couple of curious mental experiences when I was younger — I’d spent most of my eighteenth year unable to perform the mechanical task of reading, spending so long on each phrase that I lost the sense of the context (though I had this trouble only with fiction), and I think it was earlier in my teens when I was intrigued to notice that the pattern on the seat opposite me in a railway carriage had turned into lines of print in an unknown language — but being compelled to write, even if by the pressure of untold stories rather than the need to make a living, feels much crazier. My story “The Change” pretty well conveys how I often felt until I learned to relax, largely by being aware that