7

from: nicholas_slopen@hotmail.com

to: hg@insideoutrecords.com

subject: Emergency

date: May 5 2009 16.43 BST

Dear Hunter,

Something’s come up and I need to speak to you ASAP. Can you call?

from: hg@insideoutrecords.com

to: nicholas_slopen@hotmail.com

subject: re: Emergency

date: May 5 2009 16.50 BST

Hi Nick,

Phone coverage very patchy here. What up? Sinan emailed to say you loved the material, best, H

from: nicholas_slopen@hotmail.com

to: hg@insideoutrecords.com

subject: re: re: Emergency

date: May 5 2009 23.45 BST

Well, yes, I told Sinan exactly what I felt – which is that I spent the most extraordinary hour of my life examining the letters. There is stuff there that could blow a hole through our current ideas about Johnson: new letters, an essay in manuscript that is completely new, a diary that Johnson kept during a prolonged bout of mental illness, as well as the material we’d seen the transcripts of. It’s fair to say that any Johnson scholar would give their right arm for this stuff. I’ve been waiting my whole life to discover something like this. And you know what? I’m still waiting.

I’m sorry to have to say this, but it’s my belief that your friend Sinan is a party to fraud.

I feel very far out of my comfort zone with this. I think we should call the police.

Nicholas

8

Sarah. My firstborn. My sacrifice. You were conceived in love. I was twenty-four years old when I held you for the first time, and by the standards of the middle classes in our era, a child myself.

You were prematurely wise and verbal. No blessing, I can assure you. When you were barely four, you looked at me one bedtime and asked, ‘Dad, am I just a body?’ I fobbed you off with equivocations: ‘… some people believe.’ Now, finally, I am in a position to answer properly: not even that much. I am a living refutation of Descartes. I am a codable sequence of proteins. I am a mind’s shadow. Someone is building God in a dark cup.

Once your mother was pregnant, there was really no alternative to marriage. Her parents had fled the Iranian revolution and considered themselves very westernised, but a termination was out of the question. The truth is, we never considered it. I felt blessed by you. And lucky to be with your mother. My sentimentality now sounds so conventional. All fathers feel this. As though we’ve been coded for the Procedure. Malevin’s dad was right. What we think of as unique in us is infinitesimal. We can be coded in a few days. That’s the madness of this. Instead of propelling our tiny differences into an infinitely extended future in carcass after carcass – and please, Hunter, could we discuss the ethics of that? – oughn’t we to celebrate our sameness, our commonalities? The truth is we are virtually identical. We are interchangeable. That is the true beauty of humanity: ant beauty, not peacock beauty. We persuade ourselves that we are unique, but the typologist of human experience would have his work done in an afternoon. Every father weeps at his daughter’s wedding, knowing that the tiny sugar plum he held at her birth is being entrusted to another man. Though, come to think of it, Bahman was dry-eyed at ours. Always the slow-burning disapproval. Even my editorship of the letters failed to impress him. He said it was a political decision to award it to someone so young, adding belittlingly that it was the unflashy kind of scholarship that gets you nowhere nowadays.

It was Bahman’s sloe gin that I got drunk on on the night I sent that email to Hunter. I didn’t drink much ordinarily – a lot less than my nominally Muslim father-in-law – but those letters had lit a fire in my heart that could only be doused with alcohol. I turned a sticky shot-glass of the sloe gin in my fingers and held it up to my desk-lamp. It was an inky purple colour and smelled like cough medicine. Away from the cone of light that shone on my desk, the room shaded into a sloe-coloured darkness. The house was so quiet that I became aware of the breath sighing through my nostrils. It sounded like a prelude to weeping.

I’m sorry … I had written, but for whom was I sorry? For Hunter? For my children, whose private education would not now be paid for by a ground-breaking reassessment of Johnson that I would not now write based on the new material that didn’t actually exist? For Leonora, whom I seemed doomed to encumber forever with my miasma of failure and gloom? For myself, most fundamentally. That old dream of beauty had flared up again. For those first seconds, those yellowing pages had been gold leaves in a pharaoh’s tomb, feathers on a new genus of bird, golden sand on an undiscovered shore, as if – I rubbed my eyes and poured another glass of sticky gin – as if I lived to be redeemed by a fistful of two-hundred-year-old letters.

Fifteen minutes after I had sent the email, the phone in my study rang.

‘Nicholas, it’s me.’

If I had been sober enough to notice at the time, I might have found it faintly sinister that Hunter had been able to get hold of a phone number which only a handful of people ever used and which, moreover, was unlisted. As it was, my overriding emotion was one of relief.

‘I’m slightly alarmed by the tone of your email,’ Hunter went on. In spite of his profession, Hunter has no actual musical talent that I’m aware of, but he has a gravelly ex-smoker’s voice which he can modulate like a cello; now he played its warm brown tones to evoke the reassuring hug of a big brother. ‘I know Sinan very well and I can tell you, Nicholas, he’s absolutely on the level.’

‘I’m glad you say that, Hunter, but there’s something odd going on. He’s sitting on a big stash of forged material. Most of it’s on wove paper. He’s using these pointless gloves. I don’t like it one bit.’ Somewhere inside me, a sober Nicholas listened aghast to the drunken, nasal sound of my own voice. I struggled to order my thoughts and vainly took swipes at them: Telauga, the house, cherrywood cabinets, Bykov, the missing letter; but I sensed I was thrashing at the point I wanted to make, and only burying it deeper.

‘Listen,’ said Hunter, ‘I finished my business ahead of schedule. I think the best thing is if we meet tomorrow. Get some sleep. Don’t do anything hasty. And let’s put our heads together on this over lunch. I’ll meet you at the Wolseley at one.’

*

The next day, like a pair of boxers who are unwilling to engage in the unpleasant business of trading blows, Hunter and I spent the first fifteen minutes of our lunch circling each other. He asked about my trench mouth and I explained the condition owed its ghastly name to its frequent occurrence in soldiers in the First World War. It was also known as Vincent’s disease, I said, and was caused by an overgrowth of certain bacteria that are normally present in the mouth but which in large quantities cause tiny ulcers to appear all over the soft tissue of the gums and tongue. The upside, I told him, was that I’d lost half a stone because I hadn’t been able to eat solid food.

‘The upside to any illness’, said Hunter, ‘is that you feel close to it.’