Returning from Falmouth, and reading Nicholas Royle’s recently published novel Regicide. Flashing along the luminous Exe estuary, and thinking about Alain Robbe-Grillet’s elusive first novel Un Regicide, which haunts Royle’s book, and seems to be pre-haunting The Affirmation. There are no copies of the English translation of Un Regicide available to order, anywhere, and I’m wondering if I can manage it in the original. Thoughts of the Robbe-Grillet lead me inevitably to Nabokov, Pale Fire, false kings, dead kings, check mate, shah mat. The whole of Regicide is like a chess game, and anyone who knows me knows how mad I am for chess in novels.
Through Wiltshire, and I move on to Peter Stamm’s envy-making, perfect, diamond-bright stories. Thinking sleepily of how damned brilliant he is. My head rests against the window, and suddenly we’re making an unscheduled stop at Reading West. Vast ambush of memory as timelines overlap. It has been twenty-six years now since I lived here, and still only yesterday. On through Reading. The gasworks rear up on my right, bringing back Regicide and that great little passage near the end about Jaz’s photos of the gasometers.
A very dear friend of mine lived out her childhood in the shadow of the Reading gasworks. She and her friends used an abandoned Hillman Minx as a hideout, and dared each other to climb the ladders running vertiginously up the sides of the huge gas tanks. I can never see a gasworks without remembering William Sansom‘s brilliant little story ‘The Vertical Ladder.’ Sansom is one of the unsung heroes of the English Uncanny. I first read ‘The Vertical Ladder’ when I was fourteen (in one of the Pan Books of Horror, of all places), not knowing a thing about it and forgetting the name of the author almost at once. The story haunted me for years but no one had heard of it or could tell me who had written it – except, finally, Chris, who in another of those weird juxtapositions of fate has been a Sansom fan for years.
Steaming in towards Paddington, the sparse trees a raddled grid against a blazing orange sunset. London envelops me. Half an hour later on Villiers Street I snatch some food and some London air before heading south.
I’ve been awake since five. I want to read more of the Stamm, but I’m too tired. When I wake up the train has reached Battle.
Home.