White’s Novel

By Peter Bourne

White's tale is about most of us: we come and go from the world without really, at any stage, trying to affect or change it, despite dreaming of what we would do if we had the chance. White has that chance. White's Novel is about what happens as a result of him taking that chance. And, in the end, is he really so very different than the rest of us? He thinks he is!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645366959

Peter Bourne

He is 71 years old, has lived on 3 continents: Europe, Africa and Asia, has been a teacher, chocolate salesman, small business man and ambulance person. He has written eight novels, only one of which, until 'White's Novel', has been published, several plays (until now all unproduced) and a lot of poetry. He paints (abstract, landscapes & collage compositions) and occasionally sells, has three children, four grandchildren, been married once and now lives with his long term partner, Caroline, and has for the last twenty years, in South London.

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Stuff

About the Author

Peter Bourne has lived for the past decade in South London, where he writes and paints. His first published novel, The Deserter, was set in Israeli-occupied Palestine in the early years of this century.

Dedication

To all of those who have not worked hard enough at achieving – and now regret it.

Copyright Information ©

Peter Bourne (2020)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Ordering Information:

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Bourne, Peter

White’s Novel

ISBN 9781643781198 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781643781204 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781645366959 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020902758

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published (2020)

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 28th Floor

New York, NY 10005

USA

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1 – All Sorts of Stuff

It was mid to late September, yet the sunlight that year, on those days when the sky was clear, that customarily flooded White’s south-facing front yard with a fading, hazy warmth, was still surprisingly bright and hot most mornings. As a consequence, White would often doze as much as he wrote, as he sat at his glass-topped writing table.

On that particular morning, though still not quite ten o’clock, his head had drooped already, his hand had flopped, and his pencil, just recently pilfered from a local hotel’s lobby, had rolled perilously close to falling off the table’s edge and down on to the slabs that he told friends, who occasionally called by, had been laid by his boys for his birthday, not long after he had moved into the house in North Street.

What a fab sentence. Like a snake. Seventy-six words! I must read it again. Read it again and…savor it…!

On that particular morning, though still not quite ten o’clock, his head had drooped already, his hand had flopped and his pencil, just recently pilfered from a local hotel’s lobby, had rolled perilously close to falling off the table’s edge and down on to the slabs that he told friends, who occasionally called by, had been laid by his boys for his birthday, not long after he had moved into the house in North Street.

Ah, what a sentence!

For a good twenty minutes, his body sat crumpled and slumped. He then jerked awake, annoyed with himself for dozing off. Shaking his head, he began to write again.

"I must try and write more slowly and more cautiously. I don’t want to make careless, unnecessary mistakes. I don’t want to see, over the next weekend, too many of Di’s corrections. What a nice little number it is for her: every Friday. Friday after Friday after Friday. Sometimes, I have written barely anything for her to work on.

‘Anything for me to transcribe into WORD this week, Mr. Whitehead?’

She makes it sound as if she’s translating precious texts from Ancient Greek. Quite right too. What I write may not turn out to be precious to anyone else, but it’s very precious to me.

Yet even after one of those quite frequent, barren weeks, I still pay her a day’s money just for coming in, don’t I? I never put her off. Here’s hoping that by treating her so fairly, she’ll have been, all this while, developing some sort of loyalty towards me, which might, in turn, cause her to overlook some of the racier material that appears here and there in what she copies and corrects for me each week; in this stuff I’m writing.

I quite like Diana Fielding, but she can be very tiresome. When she’s in full swing, she doesn’t only change the odd word here and there, correct spelling, or divide the text into more logical paragraphs, but she sometimes changes whole phrases. She really has got a bit of a nerve. I haven’t yet caught her out in changing a whole sentence but I wouldn’t put it past her. I’d never admit it to her but occasionally, some of her changes are better than what I’ve come up with. And I do leave those in, don’t I? I am not proud. Well, I am. Most people are, to some extent, about something or other, aren’t they? Even if it’s only about their profile from the left. But I’ve had no illusions about the extent of my literary abilities. So any help I can get…and from wherever it comes…I’ll take it! Needs must."

That morning, White was a bit stuck about what to write. It happened. From time to time. He told himself that was why he was always dropping off: because he was stuck. Nevertheless, he was still slightly alarmed that he was dropping off quite as often as he was.

Lots of ways to escape reality, to escape defeat, to escape from apprehension. Sleep’s always been the easiest route for me. Especially from apprehension, to escape from fear, fear of inadequacy, or just simple fear, because I’m frightened or scared of something or, more often than not, in my case, someone.

White tapped his pencil to a vaguely military rhythm on the table top.

"So, what was it I wanted to write about this morning? Something to do with…I can’t remember… What was it now? What was it I wrote about yesterday? I can’t remember that either. Getting old is such a drag. Short-term memory loss and all that. It’s not a myth. It seems to me we don’t have to be that old either. My short-term memory started getting patchy in my early forties. Even then, I had started to have to search sometimes for the odd word over four syllables. Annie used to say I was imagining it, that I was as obsessed about age and declining powers as I was about size. In relation to the size, I do have understandable reasons to be concerned. No one could possibly quarrel with that. The forties do seem though a shade early – for a diminishing mind. They do say though, don’t they, that complex mathematical questions can’t be solved after twenty-eight? How very, very depressing that is!

Perhaps it’ll remind me about what I want to write about today, if I take a look at what I wrote about yesterday. OK then. Read through what I wrote yesterday. Let’s do that. It’s a plan, if nothing else.

‘That it was a baby’s head, was not immediately clear to me.’

Ah! It was about the kids. That’s right. I remember now. I was writing about the kids. But what was it about the kids? Was it all to be about them? Or was it to be about me too, as well as them. If people are going to read this, they should know something about me as well. At the very least, they should know I’m not completely barking.

‘That it was a baby’s head, was not immediately clear to me.’ Though, when it finally broke clear of Annie, I realized immediately that what I had been looking at was the top of a head, just as the midwife had been telling me. The top of the head of my first child, hair matted and sticky. Lots and lots of hair, not bald like the other new babies in the hospital nursery: thick hair, with a tight whorl at the crown, and sleek sideburns, right from the off, like some nightclub singer about to croon.

I was waiting to gather the child up as it emerged. The cord was cut by the midwife and the tiny creature, my first child, was suddenly in my two hands: slowly and carefully hugged to my chest.

‘Is it a boy?’

And this, from the woman who had said, throughout her pregnancy, she didn’t care. Coming from a family of three sisters, she cared very much. It is Mrs. White.

‘Can I have him?’

‘Of course, you can, love. You’ll have to let him go, Mr. White. Thank you!’

Midwives are always so bossy. I had to give him up before I was ready.

‘Our name’s Whitehead. It’s my name that’s White,’ I growled at her.

She wasn’t listening to me, didn’t hear a word: too busy wiping my son’s hair clean, quiffing and arranging it, before she handed him over to Annie."

No, growled? Not right. Murmured? Don’t much like that either. Why not just, said? Let’s see if Diana comes up with anything better.

He underlined growled and put a question mark.

David peed right across the delivery room, just as she took him from me and just before she dumped him in Annie’s arms. In protest, I’ve no doubt, at being taken away from his father and being given to his mother so abruptly and too soon. There were a couple of student nurses in the delivery room. They giggled in delight as they dodged his arched stream.

"Why do you women get such excitement out of catching sight of any male member doing what it’s supposed to do, however far away it may be from being mature enough to be of any possible interest to them. Envy? A woman urinating is such a non-event in comparison to a man.

I smoked in those days, so I probably went outside for a cigarette. The excluding, self-important woman’s world that always surrounds pregnancy and small babies, I’ve always found very irksome."

"The message I sent to our friends and relatives the next day was,

‘Now, we two are three.’

Not if the baby was a boy or girl, or how much it weighed. Or whether it had ten fingers and ten toes. Not the usual thing. I’ve always tried most of my life to be unusual. Never had much of a flair for it though. Never, in the end, really had the nerve. Never prepared to face others’ recriminations if it all went wrong.

Or was it?

‘Now we, too, are free?’

Did I write that instead? Or did I write both, one to one set of people and one to the other? Or were they what I thought I might send but, in the end, didn’t? Much more likely!

If I did write the one about being free, it seems I was deluding myself even then. I’ve never ever really set myself free. Could have. Had the chances, the opportunities to. Always, in the end, too scared to, too apprehensive about what going solo might actually mean, not enough self-confidence, too frightened to go crutchless in the world. If it all goes terribly wrong, it’s consoling to have someone else to blame. What isn’t very consoling, is when that someone thinks it’s actually all your fault that it’s all out turned badly. And they recriminate. That can be really very tedious.

As frightening as it is going solo, it is, in the end, the only way to be properly free. Doing something simply because you want to, when you want to, with reference to no one before and answerable to no one afterwards. No one at all.

Trouble is, if you act openly, then you still risk comment or censure from onlookers, whether everything goes alright or it goes awry. People love to gossip and find fault if they can. Acting in secret is the answer of course, to avoid the tedium of both, approbation and opprobrium.

Or in plain sight.

In secret or in plain sight, you just have to avoid being found out. That’s the point.

And that inevitably needs some degree of planning. Spontaneity is always risky, appealing as it is to hear about in others. Most people, in the end, are too timid to improvise, live by the seat of their pants. They don’t want much praise either, even if they succeed. Most people are quite embarrassed by praise, by being forced to stand out from the crowd and they certainly don’t want to have to shoulder blame if they fail or if everything’s gone wrong.

Doesn’t seem very free though, does it – having to make a plan? It doesn’t because it’s not. True freedom of action involves thinking to hell with the consequences. And that’s why I’ve never been free. Too worried about consequences, the possibility of recrimination or censure, blame, or shame.

What am I talking about?

I’m just going round and round in circles. The result of an undisciplined mind, I’m afraid. Didn’t have the advantage of a good classical education, that’s my problem. I was beginning to sound a bit like someone out of ’60s Paris. No worse for that. From here, the world then somehow seemed a better place than now.

And when it’s done, whatever it is, and you haven’t been found out, it is then so hard to keep stum, especially if you really totally and completely bring whatever it is off, or, even better, bring it off more than once. I know I’d want some credit, some sort of recognition, wouldn’t everyone? Credit? Recognition? They are somehow different from praise, aren’t they? Praise should be avoided at all costs.

Why is it so difficult to do something for its own sake: to be satisfied with yourself within yourself? Altruism, if that what it is, is a rare virtue. I’m not sure I have it. The only model for a really good life, some would say.

Enough said? Enough said. I don’t know how to put it all any better. So enough said.

How I miss a smoke still. A long, slow, deep drag is very useful on occasions like this. Smoking goes hand in hand with rumination. Rumination is a much-undervalued activity these days. We’re always being exhorted to be so active."

"How long has it been? Ten, twelve years? And has it made me any healthier? I’ve always been pretty healthy. And I am now, still. Not bad for my age, seeing as I’m careering towards fifty.

‘You don’t look a day over forty.’

So I’m always being told.

I feel like I am as old as I am some days, and then feel like I’m nowhere near fifty on others. And I never resorted to jogging. Always preferred to read a book or fiddle around in the reserve store at work! Good health? It’s all in the Southern Irish bog genes that