After Darke

by Rick Gekoski

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Released from prison after serving his sentence for the assisted death of his wife, his health failing and his chronic impatience exacerbated, Dr James Darke self-isolates. But on his return he understands that he is now a displaced person, lost in a new world for which his education and inclinations have not prepared him.

Irascible, misanthropic, intensely bookish, fastidious in his tastes and rich enough to indulge them, Darke is a happy shut-in, busily writing oppositional pamphlets and composing a literary hoax. But his daughter and the Bulgarian housekeeper she hired to look after him have other ideas.

After Darke is a moving, witty reflection on grief, ageing and love in all its forms, and James Darke is one of the most memorable, exasperating yet loveable characters of contemporary fiction.

Release date: July 7, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 85000

Sample

‘Dr Darke! Good to see you again, sir!’

I do not know his name, this casual retainer, just his agency. I call him Driver. Scarcely aged in the intervening years, he was standing to the side of the black Mercedes 500, his suit no worse for wear than he was, thinned slightly perhaps, creased but not careworn. He wore a peaked cap over his peaky face, which gave him the appropriate status, as so many of his clients might have wished. I didn’t care, the only thing I had always required of him was that he be silent. I had made this request when first we met, and he acceded immediately, though whether this was done gracefully I would not venture to say. I’m not interested.

Aware of taking some slight risk even with his formal salutation, to which I did not respond, he opened the door to let me in. Putting my slight bag of possessions beside me, I sank into the wonderful soft leather, one of the very many simple luxuries that I had done without, while spending my allotted time at Her Majesty’s pleasure doing without. Without privacy or provision, or anything to please eye or ear. I could go on and on, but soon won’t.

There’d been no cinematic gate-clanking as I was released. Led through a series of gravy-grease corridors and poached linoleum floors to a side exit, I was then left to make my way to the front. I hadn’t walked that far in years, and had to stop regularly to put my hands on my knees to catch my breath. My surprising early release was due to a fortunate coincidence of bad luck: a viral outbreak in the prison, plus my deteriorating health were deemed sufficient to secure an early ticket of leave from the nitwits and jobsworths who decide such things. I was deemed no threat to the community. That was right. Nor was I likely to re-offend. That was wrong. What was it called? The long walk to freedom? It didn’t feel much different, prison isn’t something you can just walk out of, or away from. Not a place, a state of mind.

The light was fading, the streets emptied of persons, a few cars straggled by. In front of the prison were neither journalists nor gawpers, though some might have been expected, but there was more pressing news than my slinking back into the world, my sentence served, my debt to society fully paid. Neither was there my daughter, nor grandson, nor friends, if I still had any. Just Driver and his car, better even than I could have hoped. It was of course raining, and cold. I had no overcoat, just the creased and faded black linen suit with which I first entered these premises, and which now hangs from me as if cut for another man, as indeed it was. I was shivering, but warmed up as we drove away. I didn’t need to look back. I knew what I was leaving, though unaware that what I was leaving cannot be left.

I must have fallen asleep in the fug, my head cradled, snuffling the rich oily leather, for I was awoken sharply by the whoosh of a bus, the stop and start that told me we were now in London. Befuddled, I sat up and looked out the front window. I could see, of all edifices, only the ground floor, since the car’s visor blocked my view. I can imagine Driver calling out the names of the invisible sights to a carful of Japanese businessmen, football players or Israeli diplomats: Buckingham Palace, gentlemen, on the left. Marble Arch! St Paul’s Cathedral! I am unused to movement on such a scale, at such a pace, have resided in a plodding world, looking neither left nor right, for neither offers anything more congenial than the soiled surfaces beneath my feet. Like the damned I did not meet eyes, eyes were best left to themselves.

I peered out the tiny window of my cell, seeing truncated portions, half a tree, an expanse of tarmac with a few cars on it, people disappearing off to the sides. I was more interested in the cars than the people, though both were soiled and ordinary, and bruised one’s spirit. A few hunched and battered wives, some equally damaged Fords and rusty formerly white vans.

Everything in prison, at least at first, set off a countervailing memory:

My hands shake, my eyes wouldn’t pass an O-Level test. My beloved Jaguar 3.8 is languishing elegantly in storage, its crackled leather and unsullied British racing green an unavailable delight, ah, the pleasureful effort of piloting it through traffic, it takes some doing, having no power steering. I couldn’t hoick it about any more, not strong enough. I will instruct my garage to sell it.

Suzy said I preferred driving it to driving her, which was true much of the time, until it was true all of it. She refused to drive it herself, would barely get in, scorned it as the choice of elderly white-haired gentlemen wearing suits. She preferred the self-definition of her red Mini, which I equally contemptuously regarded as fit only for It-girls in miniskirts. I could barely bend and shuffle into its tiny space. We didn’t go out much, and when we did, compromised and used a car service.

We slowed down, the car alit smoothly outside my house. A newly installed light burnished the ebony of its entrance. I had my key ready to hand. Driver opened the car door, and stood to the side deferentially.

‘Good luck, sir.’

The hallway lights have been left on, the windows reveal lamps and the shadowy presence of my possessions, my former home, my home once again. In my absence it had been tenanted by Lucy and her children, and turned into offices for her Foundation! I have no idea why I agreed to this, indeed have no memory of having done so. Lucy has been instructed to remove all traces of their tenure. Rudy slept in Suzy’s former study, and I have a horror of opening the door and seeing childish stuff blu-tacked to the wall: Sheffield United FC scarves, school photographs, posters of rockers and rollers. As for Amelie’s four-year-old residue, I cannot bear to think of it.

I want my house exactly as I left it. Once it was mine and Suzy’s, now it is mine alone. I stand in the warm hallway hoping that her presence will mote the air. Her voice no longer calls to me, nor can I summon it, as so often I tried in those first searing months in prison. Why have you abandoned me, I would cry, why, when I most need you? But if Suzy was most assuredly not there – she loathed ugly places and people – might I find her, something of her, an echo or fugitive message, find her now if only I attended sufficiently? I was listening intently, as if she might whisper her presence.

Standing in the hallway, I put my small bag on the floor, and peered about myopically as nothing came into focus, the pattern of the Hamadan runner at my feet seemed unable to keep still, as if some ghostly hand were shaking it gently. Inert and lost, I was unable to summon so much as a plod. I had naively presumed that my coming home would be both literal and metaphoric, that the rightness, the inevitability, of the place, my place, would be immediate and enthralling. After some discussion, let me call it, Lucy had acceded to my desire to make this transition on my own. In any case, as things worked out, she was not allowed either to pick me up or to accompany me home. Or to visit.

I was shaken by the discontinuities. The feeling of my returned shoes – my lovely Ducker’s brogues, an unaccustomed weight – against the carpet, the tight enclosure of walls and ceiling, the importuning blues of the signed Matisse prints on the walls, so inappropriate in their Georgian situation. Suzy bought them one afternoon at a West End gallery, carted them home in a taxi, and by the time I arrived at the end of the school day, she had removed my Piranesis from their place in the hallway, banged in a couple of nails, and hung their replacements.

‘Darling, look!’ she’d said. ‘Aren’t they wonderful! They brighten up the hallway. They’re so welcoming!’ She’d always hated the Piranesis, which she found dour and class-bound: ‘You only find them in upper-middle-class houses where the people have no idea about art!’ Apparently I was one such. I have good taste, if conventional. You need conventions to decide what is worth valuing, and what is not, to supply context and comparators, to avoid the lure of the merely original. Suzy, on the other hand, approached every work of art anew: it did not matter who it was by or what the subject, the only question was whether it had ‘quality’, a term that she was aggressively unwilling either to define or to defend. ‘You get it, or you don’t: you need to have seen a lot of art, and to have an open mind and spirit!’ In my experience, openness of mind and (whatever this signifies) spirit often lead to no good. The old roads lead to the safest and best destinations. Suzy teased me. Good taste is what the upwardly mobile cultivate. It signifies. But if you’re already up, you don’t think about it at all, it’s vulgar.

Some years later, exactly to spite me, she’d bought a dreadful picture, of which she was apparently a ‘studio co-creator’ by one Rimington, S., a graduate of our school, who became one of the stars of the YBA movement. She hung it in her study, and when she died it was the first item on my clear-out pile. It did very well at Sotheby’s, which certainly did not confirm that her judgement about its ‘quality’ was correct.

The air in the hallway was odourless, save for a faint whiff of perfumed polishes, and my nose twitched missing the usual offences of acrid cleaning materials, cooking oil, poor tobacco, human sweat and farts. And despair, that has a smell too. It was the first time in these years that I had been alone in a quiet space, sufficient at first to still my heart, then to set it beating frantically. I managed to get my breathing under control, swayed and righted myself. I opened the door into the drawing room, and made timid entrance, seeking anxiously to locate not the comfort of the old but the intrusion of the new: something discordant, unexpected, other. It looked safe: my armchair was in its proper place, almost to the inch, the Indian cushions were plumped on the sofa, the corners of the carpet aligned, no dust appeared on surfaces or edges of the frames of my Samuel Palmers, the lamp was carefully centred on the Pembroke table, its shade perfectly aligned, seam to the rear. What alarmed me, though, was the noxious smell of lilies, a vase filled with vulgar pink blooms perched on the side table. Underneath it was an envelope, with ‘Dad’ written on the front. I left it there, and retreated from the smell and memories. Suzy liked lilies, especially after she died.

The kitchen, too, was an almost exact replica: when she moved in, Lucy – at my suggestion – had taken myriad phone-photographs of the contents of every room, and had forensically replicated their former incarnations. Gazing round carefully, though, it looked as if the walls had been repainted, none of the former streaks and blemishes could be located. The colour almost matched, though it was tonally inferior to the subtle Farrow & Ball original, too matt, rather vulgar really. I suppressed a moment of indignation, for what had I to indignate about? I was fortunate to be so well served, was I not?

When Lucy and her children moved in, the first thing she did, telling me only afterwards, was to reinstall the letterbox that I had removed when I reformatted the door after Suzy’s death, when I wished to be left alone, entirely alone: no post, no doorbell, no phone or email, no comings and no goings. This might have been regarded as good preparation for the more severe incarceration to come, but it was not. The movement from locked in to locked up to (now) locked down was not seamless: each of the stages of my journey was separate, and led neither to nor from the other, though there’s no denying that I’ve chosen to spend a lot of time behind closed doors. That’s what doors are for.

The fridge was adequately stocked for the coming days, with a couple of bottles of Ferret Pouilly-Fuissé, and a variety of treats from Selfridges’ Food Hall: Jersey milk and cream, Greek organic yoghurt, country pâtés and fish paste, mature brie and cheddar, Normandy butter, jams, preserves and pickles, smoked trout and oysters, prosciutto and salami. In the freezer were some fillets of beef and chicken breasts, and the vegetable drawers revealed cos lettuce and cucumber, new potatoes, courgettes and aubergines, apples and pears. And tomatoes, which should never go in the fridge, I’d told Lucy this far too many times, but her ex, Sam, always insisted that his be served cold, which is to say tasteless, which he is.

In the bread bin were a small baguette and a seeded sourdough loaf, and the cupboards revealed a range of tinned goods, dry biscuits, and jars of white asparagus. A carved wooden bowl filled with dainty fair-trade bananas and lustrous purple Buffalo grapes, the size of marbles, sat on the sideboard like a work of art. Braque perhaps. The grapes emanated, I was touched that Lucy should have remembered, from the Japanese counter at Harrods. I was once addicted to them, in small quantities; you do not stuff these into your mouth willynilly, like something from Waitrose’s fruit counters, these were, each one, a perfect and intense experience. I rarely ate more than four or five, often with a sliver of Montgomery’s Cheddar.

I picked one up, and rolled it very gently on my fingertips, put it between my lips and slowly into my mouth, interrogating the sensation of skin against skin, bit gently and almost gasped as the initial spray of sweetness was released, after which the tip of my tongue felt assaulted and singed by acidity. I found it hard to accommodate the empty fold of tannic grape skin, and spat it out into the garbage bin, but the taste in my mouth lingered, curiously unfounded and disagreeable.

I was touched, and appalled, that Lucy should have provided so copiously. Of course she had no idea how the mere sight of the foodstuffs would make my stomach, which had over the last four years no exposure to such riches, turn over, put its legs up and roil. It’s worth mixing metaphors sometimes to convey extra shock.

In prison I’d eaten enough, just, to keep myself out of trouble, and alive.

I sit in the dining room morning noon night, to consume my statutory £1.87-a-day of nourishment. Breakfast I limit to thin porridge and toast with yellow goo. Occasionally there will be apples (soft) or bananas (brown). Perhaps some slices of ham at lunch. I cut the fat off, and if there’s some meat left, pink or brown, it makes my teeth tingle in rebellion and my gorge rise.

I have passed beyond hunger, like Gandhi into a spiritual fast, lightheaded and righteous. I fart and my heart flutters unbearably. Yesterday I sat amongst my fellows, trying to ingest a few bites of ‘chicken supreme’ (we get other food with pseudo-bistro names, like ‘lasagne bake’) and grey vegetables boiled within an inch of their former lives. I eat in very small bites, each an effort, it takes time, and courage.

I sliced a piece of sourdough, considered and quickly rejected butter, and sat at the kitchen table to eat it slowly. Though my wonderful Gaggia gleamed on the kitchen bench, and a bag of my bespoke beans from H. R. Higgins sat beside it, I resisted their call. There will be time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and coffee. Night had drawn in, the window showed the black of night, shimmering like a Mark Rothko.

I tried to remember his room at the Tate Modern, but nothing emerged, everything is lost. It was now time, in the natural course of things, for a drink. A glass of that white wine, a whisky perhaps. Glenmorangie in its crystal glass, tiny amount of mineral water, no ice. My stomach delivered an immediate rejection. I left the kitchen and turned to go upstairs, increasingly certain of what I would not find there.

Lucy needed the house restored to full receptivity, of mail and persons, because for the more than three years it was to serve as the home of the Suzy Moulton Foundation, the charity that she had created to honour her mother’s memory, defend and celebrate her father’s character, and to advance the cause of assisted dying. For the first year the Foundation, like most such, had been tied together by a variety of shoestrings, but as occasionally happens in the crimped charity world, it got lucky. On his death my friend Philip Massingham, co-member of our Poetry Group of Grievers, left the Foundation what the newspapers called ‘a significant sum’, because unbeknownst to us all he was a rich man, and a charitable one. Lucy’s project was one of many that benefited from his largesse. Further bequests from other supporters followed, and within a year or two the SMF had two full-time employees, one of African descent and the other of indeterminate sexuality, as well, of course, as the pro bono legal services of her new partner Jonathan.

Presumably the upstairs rooms had been reformatted into offices and meeting rooms. I trudged up fearfully with my bag of scant possessions, though what I had discovered so far confirmed Lucy’s powers of recreating the past, like some domestic Marcel Proust. Given her general slovenliness and pedestrian taste, I wondered if she’d had the advantage of someone else’s eyes, opinions, and hard work.

My study is the most important room, where my all too occasional moments of peace were generated. Though my Dickens first editions had long been transformed by Sotheby’s into a trust fund for dear Rudy, the bookshelves were as I had arranged them. Alphabetical order was hardly disturbed, though one of my J. G. Farrell first editions had migrated into the William Goldings. I put it back. Next to my computer on the desk was a new small upright machine with a screen, and a holograph note beside it, which I did not read.

I needed first to unpack my few bits, of which only one mattered, the thick scraggy notebook that I had kept in prison. I sat down in my armchair, and took it from the bag. The pages were yellowed, the covers grimy and soiled by grease-fingering. It had a lot of entries in the first year, fewer as time went by. I cradled the notebook as if it could settle me and provide some peace, if only in remembering the exacting past.

I’m able to write in this little notebook to make my occasional observations, but I cringe at the very thought of being recurrently obliged to write a letter to Lucy, or to Rudy . . . and then to Philip, Miles, Dorothea, George, various acquaintances and old boys, all those moved by my plight, who would like to join me in spirit, if not in prison.

We are forbidden access to computers, so I cannot reply with generic emails. ‘Thank you so much for being in touch, please do not do so again.’ This injunction against computers seems unnecessarily punitive, though I can quite understand why we are not allowed access to the Internet, lest the clever amongst us look up recipes for making an incendiary device out of stale white bread, gruel and farts.

I could barely make out my words, not because of their grimy veneer, but because my handwriting, once italic and gracious, had shrunk, and deteriorated so comprehensively. Whole sentences in my minuscule script were often incomprehensible, and I have had to guess in transcribing them. I felt this loss of my formerly elegant hand most keenly, and at first ascribed it to inferior conditions, instruments, and paper. But the real cause was an emerging tremor in my right hand, which I can no longer hold horizontally without it beginning its palsied shakes.

Yet another case of the Oscars. He put this harrowing gaol-house malady poignantly: ‘My writing has gone to bits – like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.’ A promising phrase! I’m good at titles: A Nerve in Pain: The Incarceration and Tragic Decline of Oscar Wilde, a Monograph by Dr James Darke. It could go in the back of my desk drawer, unfinished like my former project, Scalded and Boiled: The Indignations of Charles Dickens.

I know enough about myself, by now, to recognise lack and incapacity where they are evident and long-standing. I am not a writer, and my post-Oxbridge attempt at a study of a major author was dilettantish in the extreme, my incapacity to write or to finish it a testimony to the discrimination of my unconscious. The only exception to this was my composition of a new ending for Gulliver’s Travels, which I wrote for Rudy when he was eight, and which, I very much hope, gave him both pleasure and the capacity to deal with my prolonged absence from his life.

I had promised myself that I would destroy the execrable testimony of my prison diary, but did not, and though I am once again tempted, it seems I cannot. Can one destroy a diary without injuring oneself in the process? Philip Larkin couldn’t, he had to die first and get someone else to do it for him. Someone who had to promise not to read it. It was a bit naughty, diaries are like that. My fellow inmates were constantly curious about what was in mine, though the few of them sufficiently literate to read could hardly have deciphered my handwriting.

Perusing the various entries makes me feel more at home, if I might put it that way, and I can feel the sensory underload of prison life re-entering my mind and body. Sitting in this room, with its foreign and unwonted order and gentility, I feel myself coming alive only in the memory of things past, which I thought could not pass soon enough, and I am unmanned by the process.

Might returning to my desk, and to this, my true and ongoing journal, might that put things right? Lucy left my computer ready to go. It’s a relief now to be able to type these entries, however many errors I make. Who cares? Though I wonder, as ever, why I bother? What did that snitbag Woolf, herself a mean diarist, say about her compulsive inward stocktaking? ‘Do I ever write, even here, for my own eye? If not, for whose eye?’ My own answers: ‘No, not for mine. And no, not for yours.’ Then what for? The desire to make this journal grew out of my failure to live a life, and the least I can do is record the process.

These passages are not the story of my life, they are my life, my life’s work, disordered, unruly, suffused with loss, unsolaced, unbalanced, lost in wordiness, lost. Rather fun, I suppose, if you like this sort of thing. I don’t, not just now, I lack the requisite ease, the contemplative reflexes of a recorder of life’s minutiae, I return to my old computer and writerly activity out of a sense of . . . what? Duty? Nonsense. Habit? Not at all, if it were I would break it. Nothing as grand as any obligation other than the most pedestrian: I write not to record the times, but to fill them. And when, eventually, they are done, I will be. Or perhaps it is merely the other way round?

It’s only just past eight, time enough to read, perhaps turn to Radio 3 on the wireless, consider a draught of Armagnac, smoke a cigar. My cherrywood humidor from Fox of St James was in its accustomed place on the small Georgian table next to me. I opened the lid to discover a selection of Montecristos, from the welcoming petit Number Fours to the tor. . .