by James Meek
‘I like bards.’
‘The priest, on the other hand, isn’t there to tell stories, and he’s no good at jokes. He’s trying to sell you ideas. The way the priest sees it, truth is more important than happiness, the past and future is more important than the present, and big ideas are more important than you or me or next Monday. People take the priest seriously, but find it hard to concentrate on what he’s saying. He’s rude and awkward in company and can only cope with intense, long drawn-out, painful personal relationships. He’s more comfortable addressing a million people than ten but he doesn’t often get the chance.’
‘That’s you, is it?’
‘The sad thing is, most priests are longing to be bards, and most bards really want to be treated as priests.’
‘You’re not telling me this story very well. Maybe you’ve had too much champagne.’
‘Maybe.’ It was his third glass. ‘Let me think about it a little more.’ He was finding it difficult to concentrate. He wanted to put words to the events of the night before and put the words into the head of a stranger he would never see again, to bury the story, not to spread it. He was trying to make the story clean and spare and confined, but each moment and each character opened up into a forking path through time and space into other stories, and each path led to another fork, and though he would always find his way back, there were so many forks. On the way in his head from a dinner party in Camden to the dawn of literacy in Roman Britain he’d passed M’Gurgan, a memory of the man when they were seventeen. M’Gurgan standing at the bus stop talking to a girl, talking in her ear softly, insistently, incessantly, while she stared directly ahead, not moving. She’d looked sad, proud and hurt. Kellas hadn’t heard about her and saw the two of them had already been through a small life together. M’Gurgan could have been telling her why he loved her, why he didn’t love her, why she should leave, why she should stay, why he was going to Oxford, why she should have an abortion, why she should keep the baby, or why Pound was better than Eliot. Kellas never asked him because he didn’t want to harm his wonder at the way M’Gurgan talked and talked, and the girl listened, when Kellas couldn’t talk to the girl he thought he loved. He wrote her letters.
5
Kellas was half an hour late for dinner at the Cunnerys’, and five minutes’ walk away, when Margot phoned. He was carrying an expensive bottle of Bordeaux from a shop in Paris. Margot told him that they’d invited Melissa.
‘We blanked,’ said Margot. ‘I’m so sorry. I called you to – I’m in the street. She’s here already. We forgot the two of you had a history. We can’t ask her to leave. She knows you’re coming and she doesn’t seem to mind. She smiled when I told her. I’m not an expert Melissologist so I don’t know what kind of a smile it was. Anyway I wanted to warn you and give you a chance to pull out. But we really want you to come, of course. It’s your call.’
Kellas asked if Melissa had come alone. She had. Kellas gripped the bottle in its plastic bag by the neck and walked down the Cunnerys’ street. The night spat rain. The houses in the street lacked curtains. The people who lived here did not mind passers-by looking into their kitchens and sitting rooms, which were light and dressed in wood and primary colours, with pianos, bookshelves and paintings.
The Cunnerys had the whole of a Georgian four-storey terraced house, with the front door reached up a short flight of steps. That floor was mostly taken up by an open plan living room running the length of the house, with a window at one end looking onto the street and a window at the other onto the garden. The kitchen and the dining table, and the door to the garden, were below in the basement.
When Kellas arrived he kissed Margot on both cheeks, gave her the wine and hung his coat on the line of hooks on the wall inside the door. He should have brought flowers. Margot wore a close-fitting dress of sheeny material, with a pattern of pink, cerise, brown and white squares. She had dark skin and didn’t need the make-up she was wearing. A smell of roasting meat came from downstairs and small within it was Margot’s fussy perfume. Although she was entirely English there was a stillness, a languor and a grace about her that made her seem as if she had grown up strolling along the boulevards of a country with warm nights.
‘Nice dress,’ said Kellas. ‘Is it silk?’
‘Yes, it is. And look at you in your handsome suit. We’re all dressed up, aren’t we? And there are only going to be eight people. Are you sure you’re going to be OK about this? I am so sorry, it was stupid of us.’
Margot was wiser than her husband, more knowledgeable about the social human and more kind. She lacked Cunnery’s political instinct and his ego. Sometimes, while her husband was talking, she had the eyes of a witness. She was loyal and faithful, as he was to her. Yet she was like one of those trusted counsellors of the powerful who succeed in making supplicants forget that they are not on the same side. People who wanted something from Cunnery would seek Margot out with the intention of sending Cunnery a message, and, finding her so sympathetic, would start telling her what it was about her husband that they didn’t like. They couldn’t stop themselves, even though they knew Margot would tell Cunnery everything. Perhaps that was why such people so often got what they wanted, that it satisfied Cunnery to hear so clearly the specifics of other people’s dislike. And perhaps their real intention was not so much to receive Cunnery’s patronage as to have him listen to them. The sentence Margot heard most often was: ‘Why doesn’t Liam like me?’
Kellas was doing it. He couldn’t stop himself. He and Margot were keeping their voices low in the hall. ‘To tell you the truth, I was surprised to be invited,’ he said. ‘I don’t know Liam all that well.’
Margot looked at him for a moment with widened eyes. She shook her head, took his hand and led him into the living room, saying: ‘Now you’re being silly.’
As Margot opened the door into the living room, somebody began to play the piano. The music stopped, went back to the beginning and started again. At the far end of the room, side-on to the door, the Cunnerys’ daughter Tara sat next to Melissa on the piano stool. Tara was playing. Melissa had her hands pressed between her legs and was watching Tara’s fingers on the keys. She looked up at Kellas as he came in and bent her head over the keyboard again, whispering to Tara. Sophie and Pat M’Gurgan were sitting together on a sofa near the empty fireplace, watching the recital. They were leaning forward, slowly turning the stems of their wineglasses in their hands, their mouths stretched out in similar desperate smiles.
Cunnery was standing next to a side table with drinks bottles on it. He turned and moved towards Kellas and shook his hand. His face reminded Kellas of the mask of Greek comedy, the pallor and the demonic smile, and inside the mask, the glint of real eyes. Cunnery offered Kellas a drink in the sort of hushed murmur ushers use for latecomers. Kellas took a full glass of red wine from him. Tara was not to be stopped, although she did keep stopping. Melissa was twenty-five years older than the girl, yet the two of them looked like sisters. Kellas’s eyes strayed from the piano. He saw a copy of The Book of Form on a low table near the M’Gurgans. The red and green of it. Even the cover was a work made with craft and soul. Above the fireplace was a bust of Lenin. M’Gurgan had acquired it on a trip to Hungary in 1981, when he was a student at Oxford. Two years later, when he and Cunnery graduated, they won grants from the East German government to work in theatres in East Berlin for a year. M’Gurgan went; at the last minute, Cunnery changed his mind and went to New York instead. He’d explained to M’Gurgan in M’Gurgan’s digs, with a strong smell coming off him as his donkey jacket dried by the two-bar electric fire, that socialism, however compromised, was secure in East Germany for at least two generations.The furrow in his forehead had deepened as he reached his conclusion. New York was where all the lines of force intersected – class, capitalism, race, art. He’d stood up, taken the bust of Lenin, and said to M’Gurgan: ‘I’m taking this with me.’ M’Gurgan didn’t stop him. After nine months in East Germany, M’Gurgan felt dif
ferently about Lenin and didn’t want it back. Cunnery had spent a year in New York, writing for radical weeklies, dancing and living off party food, before heading to Nicaragua to write despatches for Left Side
. Tara ended her performance with an athletic discord, using all ten fingers and thumbs to cover twelve keys. Everyone applauded, including Tara, who clapped her hands over her head, like a substituted footballer saluting the fans. Pat and Sophie got up and hugged Kellas.
‘That was good, wasn’t it?’ said Sophie. ‘What was it?’
‘I think it was Mozart,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘Either that or Van Halen.’
The doorbell went. Cunnery left to answer it and Melissa came over with Tara. Margot introduced the girl to Kellas and they shook hands.
‘It was Nick Cave,’ said Tara to M’Gurgan.
‘Of course it was,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘I loved it.’
Margot set a CD going quietly in the stereo, The Charlatans, and took Tara off to bed. Kellas and Melissa were left looking at each other.
In winter she was dressed for summer, in a white dress with a loose roll collar. She was tanned. She was stroking her neck with her right hand. Her hand was not free for shaking his. Kellas’s eyes went to her fingers for a second, rubbing the tendons across her throat. The last time they’d been in bed together they’d been without a condom and he had come on her, at her urging, and it had landed there, across her neck. Now he was forbidden to kiss her. He felt he had treated her badly and that if he had treated her worse they might still be together.
‘You look well. As if you’ve been on holiday,’ said Kellas. Gold shone from her ears between the dark brown coils of hair. She lifted up her other hand. More gold.
‘Seychelles with my fiancé,’ she said. ‘Separate chalets. No nookie till the nuptials and then flat-out for kids. I’m going to have five.’
‘I know,’ said Kellas. ‘I saw what you wrote. That’s the thing about having a columnist for an ex. I can read your mind.’ On the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Express had given Melissa a double-page spread to announce her babymaking resolution. She compared the aircraft suicide crews to activists who campaigned against restrictions on abortion. ‘Let those of us who do not want to see Britain turned into an Islamic terror state remember this,’ she had written. ‘Like the IRA of old, the Islamic terrorists have two strategies to overwhelm us – the Kalashnikov and the cradle. Whether they bomb us into submission, or outbreed us, the result will be the same. As a woman, a patriot, and a Christian, I know where my duty lies. I shall, I hope, be a mother not just for myself, my husband and my children, but for Britain.’
‘He used to claim he never read the papers,’ said Melissa to the M’Gurgans. ‘That’s the trouble with journalists, he used to say, they spend all their time reading each other.’
‘Are you in love with him?’ said Kellas. ‘This man, the fiancé.’
‘Love. Oh, Adam.’ Melissa put her hand on his arm. ‘You’re just not qualified to use the word, my dear.’
‘Don’t call me “my dear”. I’m older than you. Not as old as your new squeeze. What is he, fifty-five?’
‘He’s forty-nine,’ said Melissa. ‘It’s going to be a terrible problem getting you an invitation for the wedding. The château can only take two hundred. Anyway, Pat, I wanted to say, your book is fantastic.’ She took him by the wrist and faced Kellas. ‘This is a man who’s qualified to talk about love. This is a man who knows life. A poet and a husband and a father.’
‘Thanks,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘Did you like the scene with the crows?’
‘It was brilliant. Do you get jealous of him, Adam? None of your books has been as successful as Pat’s, has it? You haven’t published anything for ages.’
‘Adam’s last was a great novel,’ said Pat. ‘It’s not our job to shift units.’
‘I got as far as the fourth page, I remember,’ said Melissa. ‘Still, keep trying, eh?’
‘I’m glad you care,’ said Kellas.
‘That’s why he reads my column! He wants to see if he gets a mention. Adam, you weren’t that important.’
‘I’m sure I saw a bowl of crisps around here earlier,’ said M’Gurgan.
Margot put her head around the door. Tara was calling for Melissa. She left to read Tara a story.
‘Permission to use the word “bitch”,’ said M’Gurgan.
‘Granted,’ said Sophie. ‘What’s Tara’s bedtime story, Dangerous Liaisons?’
‘I read your book twice,’ said Kellas, ‘and I don’t remember any crow scene.’
‘She hasn’t read it.’
Cunnery came in with Joe Betchcott and Lucy Flagg. Lucy was a 26-year-old nuclear physicist who earned a high salary at Goldman Sachs casting a net made of numbers over the dark waters of the financial markets. When her computers hauled the net in, it was filled with profits from the deeps. Nobody else could understand where they came from, but the money was as real as any other kind. She had smooth white skin, short black hair, a black dress and glasses with black oblong frames. The only thing about her that wasn’t black or white was her scarlet lips and her blue eyes. In the shaking of the hands Kellas heard himself saying to Lucy, whom he’d only met once before, that she looked sexy. Everyone was surprised. They all felt it and they all hid it. Lucy smiled a pinched little smile and frowned and Cunnery laughed and Sophie said quietly ‘Adam’, and that was all. But everybody’s ears went back and the hairs on their necks rose. Kellas was surprised that he had said the words aloud. It was like finding that the rock between you and the lava below was infinitely thinner than you had thought, inches thin. A delicate crust was all that lay between him and uncontrollable activities incompatible with peace. The room configured and Kellas sat on a sofa with Sophie at the other end and Lucy between them.
‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ said Kellas. ‘Although it is true.’
Lucy drank a sip of white wine in a way that he saw her mouth was dry and he was making her nervous. ‘It’s good to hear what people are thinking,’ she said.
‘Not always,’ said Sophie. ‘There are too many people who can’t tell the difference between thoughts and hormones. Adam.’
Kellas looked across at Sophie. She was looking at him. She’d been watching him while she talked to Lucy, while Kellas was regarding Lucy’s body, for what he’d thought was a moment, but became more than one.
‘You must be so happy about your husband’s book,’ said Lucy to Sophie. Kellas got up and went over to Betchcott, who was standing by himself at the drinks table while M’Gurgan wrote a dedication in the Cunnerys’ copy of his book. Betchcott was a photographer doing a series for Cunnery, snatching pictures of the world’s paparazzi while they went about their work. He dressed as if he believed he was a younger, fitter man, in a tight black sweater that clung to his sagging torso. He wore Ray-Bans and had eczema. He was always moving, making jerky little movements of his head, shifting from foot to foot, swinging his body from side to side, like a bird waiting for grain to fall. He had no gum, but his jaw worked as if he did. Kellas asked if the paparazzi minded having their pictures taken.
‘Fucking love it,’ said Betchcott. ‘Had to get Mel Bouzad to stop winking at me the other day on Sunset when was staking Russell Crowe. Take the piss about the money but don’t like it when I get the stars on my side. Leicester Square, couple of weeks ago, big premiere, guy comes up to me: ‘Jennifer wants to help you show what these monkeys look like from her side.’ Next thing know, I’m in J-Lo’s limo shooting across her tits at the goatfuck on the window,screaming and the flashing and fifty grand’s worth of Nikon banging on the glass, and she’s just sitting there in her diamonds, smiling. Went for a drink and she said to drop in on her in LA but I’ve been so fucking busy, know.’
Kellas was listening and watching Lucy while Betchcott talked. She wasn’t wearing jewellery. Her hands rested on her knees. She had black tights and she was nodding and smiling at what Sophie told her.
‘Are you…
are you and Lucy seeing each other?’ said Kellas.
Betchcott puffed and clicked denial. He looked over his shoulder and shifted his weight and looked into his drink. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend. Lucy’s this incredibly obedient, willing thing. She’ll do anything. She’ll suck your cock, if you ask her. She’s pathetic. It’s embarrassing.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I’ll show you.’ Betchcott turned round and began snapping his fingers at Lucy. ‘Hey. C’mon. C’mere a sec.’
Lucy got up quickly and came over. She left her wineglass on the floor, she looked up into Betchcott’s face. ‘Mmm?’ she said.
‘Tell Adam what you said last night.’ Lucy looked confused, glanced at Adam. ‘You know what I mean.’ Lucy was about to speak when Sophie came over with Lucy’s glass. Lucy took it and held it with both hands, looking down into it. Then she put one of her hands around Betchcott’s arm and moved closer to him. Her way of moving altered. Her eyes became bigger and her shoulders hunched slightly. Betchcott started to talk again, looking at Kellas and Sophie as if Lucy wasn’t there, and after a few moments he shook his arm and Lucy let her hand fall by her side.