The Palm House

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘We all did.’

He continued:

‘He was very pleased with this place. Couldn’t wait to bring me. The first time, I remember, he said, “Of course, two hundred years ago, we’d have been sharing this snug with a certain literary personage.” Oh yes, I said. “With a certain Johnson!” he said. With Samuel Johnson? I said. “Doctor Johnson to you,” says Barry, “Doctor Johnson to you, eh!” – you know, pointing at me.’

‘And then what? Drifted apart?’

‘Yes, I’d say. Well, Barry didn’t stick with one thing for long.’

‘Bit of a Mr Toad?’

‘Yes. That’s well put. There was a lot of restless energy there, with Barry. I’m not sure it mattered what it was discharged on. The next thing was, he was playing the agent provocateur.’

‘At school?’

‘Yes, at school. He got into communism. Poetry fell to politics. Or to politicking. Suddenly he was waving Mao’s Little Red Book around. He came in with stacks of them, from some shop in King’s Cross. “Hope everyone’s read this, eh?” Few weeks later, he joined the NF! I remember him chuckling away about having gone out with them at the weekend. You know, for a bit of football-adjacent thuggery.’

‘Oh Lord.’

‘Whether he was actually putting the boot into people . . . I can’t see that, somehow. But I’m afraid he did like bovver. Or being around bovver. And the drugs, too, of course. Amphetamines. So that was a different scene again. As I say, the what of it wasn’t really the point. I remember him in the debating society, later. He was incredibly good at that. All the gestures, too. Very committed!’

‘Like Mussolini?’

‘I was going to say Oswald Mosley.’

‘Yikes.’

‘Mm.’

‘Was he gay?’

‘Was Barry gay? No.’

‘OK.’

‘Well, look, who knows. He gave every appearance of not being gay, if that means anything. There was that same element of performance, with women, that’s true. But that was just him.’

‘We were sitting up there one day,’ Putnam said, again nodding at the bar. ‘When he leant over and said, “You like girls, Ed, eh?” I said, Well, yes. “Got a couple of girls coming over on Saturday. Fancy joining, eh?” Christ, he had a dreadful laugh,’ Putnam said. ‘This low chuckle. Something between a chuckle and a leer. It sounded all wrong.’

‘But you went.’

‘Yes, I went. To Wood Green, which is about as far as you can get from Kew. I must have set off about 5pm, in my Saturday night gear.’

‘Which was?’

‘Oh, white Levi’s. Paisley shirt. Splash of Paco Rabanne. I remember this big old house. No parents in sight. He had a sister, I think. No sign of her either. Just Barry. Also wearing a very loud shirt, as I remember.’

‘He had invited some girls?’

‘He had. Well, women, really. Sort of shop-girl types. Maybe nineteen, or twenty. I stood up when he showed them in. I was polite even then. But they both just glared at me. I mean, who knows what they thought was going on. I remember them sitting there, handbags on their laps, while Barry got busy at his dad’s drinks cabinet. “Cocktail, ladies?”, “Top-up, old boy?” I did try to make conversation. But they were quite hostile. My one, quote-unquote, was mute. Barry’s one was just the opposite – full of pert remarks. “Trying to get us drunk, are you?”, “Wouldn’t you like to know”, “Didn’t your mother teach you not to stare?” Barry seemed to love all that. He was chuckling away. The whole thing was insane. It was like we’d been given four different scripts.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well, nothing happened, for about half an hour. Then Barry said he had something to show his one upstairs. I don’t know if I was expected to pounce then, on the other one.’

‘Were you still being polite?’

‘No, no. I’d given that up. We both sat in blessed silence and I thought about something else. I did what my father used to do, and made a sort of visor for my eyes, with my hands. I had my own thoughts.’

‘Until?’

‘Well, five minutes later, there was a tumble of footsteps, the door opened, and there was Barry’s date. “Come on, Sheila, we’re going.”’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Yes. So they’re off. And out in the hall I find Barry swaggering down the stairs.’

‘Still chuckling?’

‘I’m sure he was. But what I remember is the look on his face. This truly appalling expression. A sort of bashful, butter-wouldn’t-melt smirk. “Can’t win ’em all, eh?”’

‘Did he say that?’

‘Well, words to that effect. “Misjudged that one, old boy, eh?”’

‘And that was that.’

‘That was the end of that soirée, yes. I don’t know what I’d imagined. But at the time, well, one was open to life. You sort of said yes to whatever came up.’

‘Or you did.’

‘Or I did. Yes. That’s true.’

‘Is your school still there?’ I said.

‘It is. I get a newsletter now and then.’

‘Was it very rough?’

‘Christ, yes. And not just the kids. It was a shock, at first.’

‘Poor little Putnam.’

‘Well, yes,’ Putnam said, with a blink; he would allow that.

‘But I had to make a go of it,’ he said. ‘And actually, in a way, I liked it. It was so different. It made me feel grown-up. You know, grit. Grime. Walking up Stamford Street with lorries thundering by. The buildings were black. I remember these soot-furred fanlights. From a century of cargo steamers and packet boats. Factories . . .’

‘And what about here?’

‘Well, there was none of that,’ Putnam said, indicating the Wagamama opposite, ‘and it was pre-Globe, of course.’

‘And post-Globe,’ I said; I couldn’t stop myself.

‘Yes, yes, OK,’ said Putnam.

‘A lot of these streets had been flattened,’ he said.

‘Into the past,’ I said.

‘Mm,’ said Putnam.

‘We off?’ he said.

We were, down breezy Clink Street, past Pickford’s Wharf, with a new tincture in the air now. The streets felt like a shadowy set.

‘You do know,’ Putnam said, ‘that the original Globe was further back from the river.’

‘I’m sure I did,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid I was being facetious. I’m sorry.’

‘Mm,’ said Putnam. ‘Well, that’s your choice.’

‘I’m not sure it is, you know. But I take your point. I don’t like it, believe me. I’d like to squeeze it out of myself, drop by drop . . .’

We walked down Cathedral Street, then Tooley Street, and there was Putnam’s office. You could see in from the corner, just about: strip lights, the back of a computer screen. I could see Putnam’s bookshelves and one corner of his corkboard, covered with postcards he’d pinned there.

‘Coast clear?’ he said.

When I’d first sat down at the pub, I’d noticed that Putnam’s eczema was back. I felt bold enough now to nod at the crusted plaques on his hands and wrists.

‘That looks sore,’ I said.

‘Mm,’ he said, frowning.

He stretched his fingers out.

‘Is quite sore,’ he said.

He turned his hands over and looked down at the palms, which were also encrusted, and split.

‘Christ,’ I said. ‘Ouch.’

I stepped back and again looked up at the office window.

‘He really is the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t he?’ I said.

‘Taking,’ Putnam said, and he gave me a meaning look as he said it.

‘He’s got nothing to give,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘You think he’s got something to give, do you?’ Putnam said, unpleasantly.

‘It was just a figure of speech,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I was being . . .’

‘Facetious, yes. OK,’ he said.

As he took out his key card he said,

‘This junction was bombed.’

‘Right here?’

‘Mm. Where you are, more or less. Yes, you’d have been done for,’ he said.

‘September nineteen forty,’ said Putnam. ‘I had a photo by my desk for years. Stunning picture. Just a section of wall still standing. There,’ he indicated, ‘in a sea of rubble and scorched timber. This black wall. And then this pilaster rising up. Like a cross on an altar. A sort of abstract cross. A modernist cross. Fulgent dust cloud above. Chap on a ladder. Another chap with his hands on his hips. Both in, you know, steel helmets . . . Now, where did that go?’ he said, as the door buzzed behind him. ‘I’m going to look for that . . .’ he said.

2.

PUTNAM WAS LEAVING Sequence. Next week he would clear his desk.

He’d given his notice back in July. I remember a bright, damp morning, an early screening at Stephen Street. We were waiting outside, both perched on the edge of a flower planter with our coffees, when Geoff Pitt ambled over, bun in hand.

‘I hear you’re off, Ed?’ he said.

‘Good morning, Geoff,’ Putnam said. ‘What are you asking me?’

‘From Sequence. You’re leaving Sequence.’

‘Ah. Yes. I am.’

‘My goodness!’

‘News travels fast,’ said Putnam.

‘Well, everyone’s shocked,’ said Geoff.

‘I think you’re overstating that,’ said Putnam.

‘Not at all . . .’

‘Which is so unlike you,’ said Putnam.

‘Not at all, Ed. People are shocked. It’s like the ravens leaving the Tower. Don’t you think?’ he said, looking at me.

‘You’re not the first person to say that,’ I said.

‘No, I bet. How long has it been?’

‘Oh, just twenty-five years,’ said Putnam.

‘Gosh. You don’t look old enough!’

‘What can I say?’ said Putnam.

‘He started young,’ I said.

‘So what year was that? Is this the nineties?’

‘Nineteen ninety-two.’

‘Ninety-two. My goodness.’

Here I folded up the paper bag my flapjack had come in, sealed it in my empty coffee cup, and looked around for a bin.

‘I bet you weren’t born,’ said Geoff.

‘Oh, I was born all right,’ I said. ‘But thank you for the compliment.’

‘Nineteen ninety-two,’ Geoff said. ‘I remember you then. Angry young man.’

‘I was not angry. Honestly, where do you get this stuff?’

‘OK, intense. You were intense. Now, Ed, you were intense.’

‘I was serious,’ said Putnam.

Geoff seemed reluctant to let this point go. But I watched him manage it, while he chewed the last of his bun.

‘And – your decision?’ he said, finally.

‘Absolutely my decision. Yes. I mean . . .’

‘I always say they’ll have to carry me out feet-first!’ Geoff said.

At this I saw Putnam suppress some real annoyance, at the suggestion of two parallel or equivalent careers. Geoff Pitt didn’t work anywhere. He’d never had a job. He had been, for years, an indiscriminate freelancer. He’d written for the Camden New Journal, for Time Out, briefly, then for various other free sheets; lately, I understood he had his own website, but before Putnam could say, ‘Feet-first from where, Geoff?’, we were called. A young woman checked our names on her iPad and Putnam and I followed Geoff and the others inside, down into the blessed dark.

I next saw Putnam at the Sequence summer contributors’ drinks, which were held, as usual, in their office. In the past, George would hand out the wine at the door. Now there was a new editor – not in attendance – so Putnam and Vik were manning the wine table. Vik passed me my glass of white; Putnam, I saw, was off finding a chair for one of the older contributors – setting her up where she could still be in the swim. This was a woman I knew he found quite hard work; she took his edits to her essays icily and in person, too, would treat his good manners and consideration as something to be tolerated. I could tell he was suffering, as he crouched, smiling, by her chair.

‘That’ll be me one day,’ I said, when he came back over.

‘Yes. Well. You might try to avoid that,’ he said.

‘She’s a very brilliant writer,’ he said, ‘and a royal pain in the arse.’

Putnam spent most of the night by the snack table (his desk), talking about pieces. As word spread that he was leaving, people wanted to know about that, too. He seemed relaxed enough, talking about it. He’d been there a long time, he said, and there were other things he wanted to do.

I was grazing on the last of the crisps when Max came over. She was another veteran Sequencer. She’d been at UCL with George.

‘What the hell?’ she said. ‘Edmund, it can’t be true!’

‘News travels fast,’ said Putnam.

With Max, though, he couldn’t quite stick to his script. After topping up their wine with the bottle he kept behind him, he said that one thing he was looking forward to not doing was having to deal with, listen to, or look at his esteemed editor any more.

‘Ah,’ she said. She knew that there had been something going on at Sequence; everyone did, but still – to leave?

‘Goodness, Edmund,’ she said. ‘That bad?’

Putnam didn’t answer; he shook his head. A native discretion reasserted itself.

‘Listen, it’s time,’ he said. ‘Long past time, probably.’

Max allowed this, although Putnam, at forty-nine, was hardly a candidate for retirement. Nor did she ask if he had anything else lined up. That struck me as a rather ominous bit of tact, but I suppose there was really no right thing to say. Instead, Max offered that, yes, when she’d left teaching she’d felt the same.

‘I think you know, don’t you?’ she said. ‘When you need to just pack up and move on.’

Putnam, in his turn, allowed this. Doggedly sanguine, he added that his father had died too, of course, this year, so he had ‘some cash’ as he put it.

Max’s expression of sympathy at the first bit of news was quickly and properly dismissed, again with a sort of modest flinch.

‘Listen, he’d been very ill,’ Putnam said. ‘He was really fed up. Life was not going to get better,’ he said.

‘Anyway, like I say, it’s time . . .’ he said.

*

The new editor went by Shove. His given name was Simon – Simon Halfpenny – but as he told each member of staff at Sequence – and some of them he had to tell more than once – no one called him Simon. It was Shove. Yes, Shove.

He was thirty-ish. He had been managing editor of a sports title. The board had moved him across.

At his first editorial meeting, Shove – I’ll use ‘Shove’ – said that what he’d like to do was to turn Sequence into the New Yorker. ‘A sort of London version of the New Yorker,’ he explained.

Putnam, drawing certain conclusions about this man’s familiarity with either magazine, stopped him there. He did have to stop him there, he said, to explain that that was quite a long way from what they did at Sequence, from what they had been doing for more than fifty years now. Sequence had its remit, he said, and a loyal – and sizeable – readership who valued it for what it was.

‘Yeah,’ said Shove. ‘That’s great, of course we want to bring them along if we can.’

‘Well, they’re already with us,’ said Putnam. ‘That’s the point I’m making. And forgive me, but people who want to read the New Yorker can read the New Yorker, can’t they? It exists. Unless you want us to start doing a London “What’s on” guide. Is that what you mean? Or cartoons? Forgive me; I feel I can’t have understood you. Do you want restaurant reviews in Sequence? New sushi spots?’

Here Vik spoke up, to ask if Shove had seen a certain piece in the latest issue. By Caitlin Ross. Did he know her work? Vik thought this piece really showed Sequence at its best: serious, learned, sharp.

‘That’s great!’ said Shove. ‘As long as it’s not boring. That’s our motto now.’

‘Sure,’ said Putnam. ‘But that rather depends on what you find boring, doesn’t it?’

‘I’m not sure anyone’s ever accused us of being boring,’ said Vik.

‘That’s great,’ said Shove. ‘We don’t want them to.’

‘But they haven’t,’ said Vik.

‘Well, exactly. There we are. We’re on the same page.’

He called Putnam ‘Ed’; Katherine ‘Kath’; he called Vik ‘the Prof’. When Vik grew a beard he shouted, ‘Great beard, Prof!’ ‘Has everyone seen the Prof’s beard?’ ‘Hey, are you a hipster now?’ he shouted. ‘Hey, Prof, do you have a beard regime?’ he shouted. ‘Do you use beard oil?’

I heard this from everyone I knew in that office: Shove did not stop bellowing. About the news, about celebrities; he’d shout about exchanges he was following on Twitter. He could not be quiet. He could not sit still. In fact he would literally travel around the room on his chair, propelling himself from desk to desk, as if the room were a screen and he himself a restive cursor.

I’d written just three pieces for Sequence, but I often joined the staff drinks, back then. Since the mid-sixties they’d been held on Fridays, in the back room of the Crown, behind Snowsfields. There was a loose group of people who used to drop in, often people like me, who needed a bit of society. There had been periods when I was there every week, and months, too, years, when I forgot it was happening.

I went down a month after Shove’s dramatic appointment; took my glass of wine through, raised my hand hello, pulled up a stool.

‘I feel I’m in a defensive crouch,’ Putnam was saying. ‘I’m not used to that.’

‘I feel menaced,’ he said, ‘from the moment I get in.’

‘I just tune it out,’ Vik said. ‘I’m confident I’m not missing anything. Like when there’s a nutter on the tube,’ he said.

‘Do you go to your happy place?’ said Katherine.

‘That’s a way to put it,’ said Vik.

‘I should try that,’ said Putnam.

‘I know where you’d go,’ said Katherine.

‘And you’d be right,’ said Putnam. ‘The Sequence office, any time up to January 2017.’

‘Oh, Edmund!’ she said.

‘What black serendipity,’ said Putnam, ‘George dying when he did. The rest of the world exists for people like Shove. God knows. It really does. Thick-skinned philistine like him; he could thrive anywhere. Yet we’re being asked to accommodate him. Sequence, of all places. George’s Sequence . . .’

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘My round, I believe . . .’

One of Shove’s editorials had begun, ‘What is it about dogs?’ Another, ‘April is the cruellest month, as the poet T. S. Eliot once famously wrote.’

‘Am I reading the New Yorker?’ Vik had said, looking up from that one, while Putnam, after another long night in the hospital with his father, said he’d thought he was hallucinating.

I didn’t take Putnam seriously when he started to talk about going part-time.

Playing along, I said, ‘What will you do on your free days?’

‘Sleep,’ he said, with a rather desperate smile.

‘Read some novels,’ he said, smiling again, at me, and stretching his arms out in front of him.

He meant it, though. By July he’d had enough. He emailed Shove, to arrange a meeting. Shove did not reply. Putnam tried again the next day. Shove shouted back, across the office, ‘We’ll talk, Ed, yeah?’

Now Putnam wrote another email, then he put on his jacket and he left the office: down two flights of stairs, out into the warm afternoon.

‘I walked over to Waterloo,’ he told me, ‘and I looked at the departure board. But I wasn’t going to flee to Gravesend.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I bought a foul cup of coffee. Didn’t want it. So in the end I just went back,’ he said. ‘I sat down again and finished a few edits. Came home.’

‘The office is where I go,’ he said.

Putnam had bought his flat, in Bermondsey, so that he could walk in to work. He liked to see the river every day. He often went in on the weekends.

‘What did you write?’ I said. ‘Was it a real bridge-burner?’

‘Of course not. Christ, no. It was two lines. I just said there were other things I wanted to do. Which is not untrue, by the way.’

‘OK. Well, you haven’t signed anything, so don’t panic. You’ve got the weekend. Can you try and get some sleep?’

‘All I want to do is sleep,’ Putnam said.

‘I feel extremely light-headed,’ he said.

It was six weeks since his father’s funeral. We’d spent the last couple of Saturdays down at the house, in Kew. Together we’d filled bin bags with old clothes and towels and bedding. We’d moved furniture outside for the BHF to collect.

His father, Martin, had died of pancreatic cancer, just nine months after he was diagnosed. For years, too, he’d had a vascular disease. He’d suffered.

Putnam had had the house fitted out to help him. There were grab rails on the walls: in the hallway and going up the stairs. They made me think of a ship, or a submarine.

3.

I WALKED BACK to Cannon Street. I thought about Putnam un-pinning his postcards, and of the dark square below his window where the bomb had fallen.

A year ago it would have been London Bridge. Now I rattled west on the District line. The tone of the train surged and slackened. The lights faltered. At Blackfriars the woman sitting next to me got off and left a Standard on her seat. The front page showed a prodigious cloud, menacing the Shard. Inside there was a double-page spread of photos: a jaundiced City square, a blood-red sun; the dome of St Paul’s, sporting a new henna tint.

When I got in I made some toast, and ran a bath. I put the plate of toast on a stool by the tub, with a towel to dry my hands, and with the latest Sequence, which Putnam had brought along to our drinks for me. I munched, I read; I wasn’t washing my hair.

There were still good pieces in every issue, plenty to read, but there was a reliable quotient of dreck now: inane analysis, underthought and oversold. Stuff you might read anywhere; in a weekend newspaper supplement.

Shove had been commissioning some real old hacks, too. That was an audacious stunt, to him. These writers would creep onto the pages of Sequence with a sort of grotesque mock reverence. There was one in this issue. His strained, put-on prose put me in mind of a tiptoeing cartoon burglar.

How long could that last? Who was it for?

*

On the morning after Putnam sent his resignation email I had called to see how he was. I’d asked him again if he couldn’t stick it out until the – to me – inevitable fall of Shove.

‘You could say you were overwhelmed by grief,’ I said.

‘Oh, charming,’ he said.

‘Or blame a liquid lunch,’ I said. ‘I just mean some kind of fig leaf.’

‘It is quite sinister, your facility with lying,’ Putnam said. ‘It just comes to you, doesn’t it? Cheap deception. Almost for the sake of it.’

‘He won’t be there for ever. You want to be, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Or do you?’

‘Oh, he’s not going anywhere,’ Putnam said. ‘He’s just getting started.’

‘He’s just warming up,’ he said.

‘You think I should stick around and take it? Is that the idea?’

‘Oh, please. Putnam. No. I just mean do what Vik is doing. Or don’t.’

‘Oh, Vik. Vik has his eye on the main chance, that’s all.’

‘He’s doing his job! Come on. This Shove character is no nemesis, is he? He’s just some wanker. He’s a non-entity.’

‘Wankers do a lot of damage,’ Putnam said.

‘Non-entities do a hell of a lot of damage,’ he said.

‘Look around,’ he said. ‘Watch the news. Any non-entities there? Hm?’

‘Do you know who was a non-entity?’ Putnam said. ‘Famously so. Starter for ten?’

‘It was a word, Putnam. You know what I mean. I take your point though.’

‘And they’re interchangeable, are they?’ Putnam said. ‘This word, that word, doesn’t matter. You should write for Shove,’ he said.

‘Yes, yes,’ I said, ‘OK. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to upset you.’

I’d known Putnam since I was at UCL. I met him and Katherine at a careers fair. They were talking on a panel. Seeing the event listed had sent me to the library to look out Sequence magazine, which I hadn’t heard of before. I spent an afternoon reading back issues. Putnam and Katherine took a few of us out afterwards and bought us lunch in the Pizza Express in Soho. It was a bright, wet day. I remember Putnam enjoying himself, herding us through town. He gave everyone his card at the end of the meal: Deputy Editor.