Memory and Straw

by Memory

  We supported the Yankees. My favourite players back then were Thurman Munson and, after Thurman died in that air crash, Rick Cerone. Dad would always say that baseball had nothing on cricket, and later on when they sent Aoife and I over to England for our education I discovered how right he was. Watching the Yankees amidst all that noise was terrific, but those late summer afternoons sitting at Lord’s and Trent Bridge listening to the sound of willow on leather was even finer. Beer in, the sun overhead, white figures moving like little birds on the green. I think the best I ever saw was Viv Richards’ century against India at the Oval in 1983. It was like watching a majestic eagle swooping down on to its prey and veering off into the unknown.

  Mom travelled a lot with the New York Philharmonic and took me with her when she could. Which, even with Analena to attend to me, was not that often, because increasingly she spent half the year on tour overseas. Twice, Analena took me to Cuba where I met her large extended family, who all seemed to sing and play music.

  My memories are of banjos and guitars and dancing in the heat in the backyard of her Granma’s. It was life eternal. Her uncle had a bright blue and yellow parrot which constantly whistled ‘La Bayamesa’ and who would only stop if someone else whistled ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. We took it in turns to do that so as to shut him up, and whenever I hear either anthem on the telly I’m back in that mad, golden moment.

  When I was twelve my parents must have come to some kind of post-marital agreement, because Aoife and I were sent off to England, to live with our grandparents, Magnus and Rachel, in Berkshire. We thought it was wonderful. We arrived on the Saturday and Granma and Grampa took us to church the next morning.

  I can still remember how amazing it was for me to hear the great big cathedral organ filling the church with noise and then all of us standing up and singing in unison ‘And did those feet in ancient times, walk upon England’s mountains green?’ It was as if the church building itself – the wooden rafters and the stained-glass windows and the stone pillars and the pews – were singing along with the congregation. And everything was green, and even now England to me is such a green and pleasant land despite the dissolution that has happened. It was the first time that I’d ever been in church, because my parents had no religion. And I remember after that first service standing out on the green cathedral lawn and looking up into the skies, where a flock of geese in the shape of a cross passed over the church. I have yearned for the safety of liturgy ever since.

  Grampa enrolled us at the local independent school, and I recall as if it were yesterday the day he drove me there in his old Bentley.

  ‘Lord Berkshire left it to me in his will,’ he said. ‘It’s a lovely car, isn’t it, Gav?’

  And it was. Gorgeous red leather seats and this beautiful wooden dashboard with all these glorious dials. It even had a radio which was perpetually stationed to Radio 4 and when I recollect these days now the strongest memory is of driving that day through the leafy lanes and listening to The Archers. I could hardly make out what they were saying because their accents were so different and strong, but they moved with a measure of peace, and even then, at age twelve, I thought the sound of their voices was more important than anything they said. They made clear English shapes, like the sound that Grampa’s crystal glass made when he clinked it with his pipe after dinner.

  The school itself was fine, and I know now that so many folk scoff at it and consider that the pupils who were there were all posh and privileged. Maybe they were. But we were just children, doing what we could. My overall recollection is that few, if any, of us were consciously aware of advantage. We took it all for granted.

  We had no idea that others didn’t run under the same sun, for it surely shone everywhere. The perfectly manicured grounds were ours to use, and my clearest recollection of the place is lying on the grass towards the end of Lent Half cramming for the coming exams. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. It was the time we were all in love with Annie Lennox.

  It seems strange to me now that I actually specialised in the sciences, for I loved History and English and Art. But precision is attractive. I may have yearned for that finality because my parents were absent so often. So Freud claims. That we take the road we least like, as revenge. I remember once dating a girl not because I fancied her but because her best friend for whom I had the real hots rejected me.

  Not that I despised science in any way. I loved the fantastic theories as well as the experimental practices. What was there not to love about Cosmology and Astronomy and Astrophysics, speculating on the origins and the evolutions of things? What was there not to love about dissecting a frog to see how the veins feed that little pumping heart, to see at close quarters how the tongue works, and the way in which the length of the frog’s tongue has evolved, giving it a capacity to catch flies at what must – from the fly’s viewpoint – seem a safe distance? You learn that distance itself never makes you totally safe.

  And I had memories. Of a weekend in the Catskills with Dad when we collected a whole heap of pans and bits of iron and wire from down by the stream and we made a bike together. It hurtled perfectly downhill, the two of us clinging to each other for dear life as steam poured from the boiled kettle that was supposed to turn the wheels. Science could be great impractical fun. I still dream of building a machine-free anti-gravity bike that will transport me through the air.

  For a while in Upper Fifth and Sixth I veered between going on to study Biology or Medicine, but then towards the end of Michaelmas in Upper Fifth I became fascinated by the verbal truth of Mathematics and truly discovered the beauty of numbers and the fascination of problem-solving in algebra and geometry. I now know that the challenge was as much aesthetic as scientific, but then it was purely arithmetic in the sense that all these symbols were like a gigantic puzzle which somehow, somewhere, eventually all added up. Could I really have believed that at one time? That two and two make four, and not three or five, as Smith claimed? Great God, grant that twice two be not four.

  At the time I became absorbed by it, I gave little or no thought to any of the philosophical issues hiding behind the numbers. Which may go part of the way to explaining why I became a banker when I graduated from Oxford. Banking then wasn’t considered toxic and poisonous, but a noble enough profession. Which it was, with some branch managers still around who carried pocket watches and gold chains and a conscience, like Arthurian knights caught in the trenches.

  Grampa Magnus had just retired from estate work when I arrived from New York City to stay with him and Granma. To me, aged twelve, he seemed to be beyond age. Grampa Magnus was very tall and had soft white hair, while Granma Rachel was smaller with genetically dark hair. I now apologise in retrospect to their departed spirits for being an arrogant child, a young Yankee who thought he knew it all. Forgive me, my dear, dead darlings.

  Granma took me through to the cosy room at the back.

  ‘You’ll sleep here, Gavin,’ she said to me. ‘It’s yours and nobody else’s. Your private estate. Your castle. Your kingdom.’

  My cabin, I thought.

  She tended to speak in trinities.

  Grampa then took me out for a walk around the place. ‘To get your bearings,’ he said to me, and led me quickly up the hill at the back of the house. ‘It’s called Paddock’s Hill. Must have been toads here at one time.’

  He raised his right hand and pointed.

  ‘See that hilltop? That’s North.’

  He turned a quarter.

  ‘That church-steeple. East.’

  Another quarter.

  ‘The windmill down there. South.’

  And another turn.

  ‘And that river over there is West. Try it yourself.’

  And I faced towards the hilltop, stretched out my hand and said ‘North.’

  Did a quarter-turn, pointed towards the church-steeple and declared ‘East.’

  Another quarter-turn, pointed to the windmill an
d said ‘South,’ and a final turn, stretching my hand out towards the far distant river, ‘West.’

  ‘That’, said Grampa, ‘Is all you need to know!’

  But he was smiling and I knew fine that he was really saying the opposite. That these directions were the least things I needed to know. The circle was both bigger and smaller than I imagined.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to me, and led me down the hill past the stream and over stiles towards the fields where the ponies were grazing. He whistled and a dappled grey pony came trotting over. He lifted me up on to the pony and asked me to hold on to the mane. He whispered into the pony’s ear and off it trotted at a gentle pace round the edge of the field, stopping at every corner to look back at Grampa as if to ask for further instructions. Grampa whistled and the pony trotted on. He whistled again and the pony came to a halt. Within the hour I was riding him bareback as if we’d been born together to do this for the whole of our lives. It sort of perfectly sums up my relationship with my grandfather: he gave me a sense of direction, but the ride was mine.

  I only knew them for eleven years, and it was only in retrospect that these years bore fruit. I was going to say made sense, but that would be untrue, for the eleven years I spent with them were full of sense. Aoife left for New York at the end of year five and later enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design before moving to Mexico, where she met Raul. She constantly phones me, concerned about how I am.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say to her. ‘I’m fine. Just fine.’

  She knows full well I’m not telling her the truth.

  Above all else, Grampa Magnus and Granma Rachel were practical people. Grampa taught me how to ride horses, how to saw wood, how to catch trout, how to plant turnips and swedes and potatoes and radishes and onions, how to nurture rose bushes, how to view and manage the land – whether that land was a small square patch in the corner of the garden or a thousand acres or even a whole country.

  They gave me a corner of their garden to nurture. Grampa showed me how to cultivate vegetables and herbs, and how to grow roses and azaleas and primroses.

  ‘To sow an acre,’ he’d say, ‘is to reap a nation. Nature is the great economist.’

  He had a hand-built log cabin down by the river where he did his carpentry work. Small water troughs and benches and stiles and other practical farm stuff. Also things that were purely aesthetic. He taught me how to use the lathe and once I made a model of the Queen Mary which I painted green and red and endlessly sailed down the stream, steering the ship with a long stick through the tall reeds. My favourite voyage was sailing her from New York to Singapore via the Cape. In the mornings, when the carpentry shop filled with sunshine, you could watch the sawdust dancing in the air. On Saturdays, Grampa would permit himself a strong coffee and sit on the bench with his legs dangling like a child, watching me with a smile as I jumped about trying to catch the dust with a sudden clap of my hands.

  Granma taught me how to bake, cook, sow, and budget. Saturday afternoons we’d go into town together and wander around the market. Not really to buy anything, though she did have a sweet tooth and found it impossible to pass some of the food stalls without picking up some savoury croissants for the two of us, or one of those special cinnamon cakes that old Mrs Dowe always sold at her table. She loved auctions and would take me to the weekly one at Jowles’s where all kinds of wondrous knick-knacks and unknown rubbish and treasures were scattered all over the place on benches and shelves and tables and floors. Granma had a particular fondness for cutlery, and would spend hours raking through knives and forks and spoons and old ladles to finally emerge triumphant with a wooden spatula made in Lithuania.

  ‘Look at that beautiful carving,’ she’d say, her thumb caressing the fading image of a troika rushing through the forest snow.

  Grampa and Granma were both canny, to use that great old Scots word, which basically means to live within your means knowing that the future is uncertain. And yet I failed to apply that gospel. After school, I chose to go to Oxford and study Mathematics. These were the heady days when, in the wake of proving the Epsilon Conjecture, everyone was hell-bent on working out Fermat’s Last Theorem. But by the time that particular problem was solved, I was on Wall Street. We sold dreams and made our fortunes. Folk sometimes wonder, and ask me if the Stock Market is any different from betting on the horses. It is. It’s like being at the dogs. Those poor thin greyhounds, starved and drugged to make a paltry profit for their owners and a few coins for the gamblers who brave the snowy nights at empty racecourses.

  New York in those days was fairyland. We all linked arms that snowy night we sang the song at Times Square as the Christmas bells rang out. I was merely a low caste priest of this new religion, though I realise that all movements depend upon silent operatives. Instead of black clerical suits and collars we all wore bright clothing and could be seen at twilight making music and singing and dancing until our heads were light and airy, just like the cook in Grampa’s story who was as happy as the goldfinch in the glade. Many of us became genderless, for it was best not to have anything settled, but for all to be in flux. We moved in subterranean quarters, to the beat of ecstatic hip-hop which kept us flying for days on end.

  I drifted into it. Graduated from Oxford (Mathematics, 1st Class), went down to the City, started as a good old-fashioned junior banker with Lloyds. Of course it was neither good nor old-fashioned. Nor was it really banking, if you define banking as looking after someone’s money. Our job was to make as much profit as possible out of our customers’ resources and needs. Selling insurance and mortgage and investment schemes. All those gullible people who believed our words. As Grampa said later, who really wants to confess in the middle of summer that a harsh winter is coming? We’re not all Joseph. Instead, we surrendered to doom, which seemed at the time like triumph.

  After a year in the City, I was transferred over to Wall Street as a reward. It was like getting to play in the MLB with the Yankees. Even then I was conscious of the price I needed to pay – turning a blind eye to this, a deaf ear to that. Better men than I had traded their conscience for silver. I was no Judas. Hadn’t Galileo and Da Vinci hired themselves out to the military to teach them the art of fortification? All men need to live.

  12

  MY BOSS WAS Charlie Holroyd, who believed in investment as a fundamental article of faith. He’d sit in the window looking over to Staten Island.

  ‘We’re the engine of democracy,’ he said. ‘This great nation built on self-reliance, forging our own future, no matter the cost or consequence. Following in the footsteps of Daniel Boone in the land of the free. How else do we prevent poverty except by the creation of wealth? Some of it will drip down, like dewdrops of fat from the roast. As long as we avoid the twin evils of isolationism and patriotism. Remain global.’

  He would point to Latin America.

  ‘Revolutions will cease when folk have money. Then they’ll have too much to lose.’

  ‘Their chains?’

  He laughed.

  ‘Gav. At the moment they have nothing to lose. Look at China. Russia. Guatemala. Serbia. Croatia. Bosnia. Cuba. Economic development is always the road to democracy.’

  And then I laughed.

  ‘Really Mr Holroyd? Democracy receding by the day. The medium is the massage. And the Middle East?’ I asked him. ‘All that oil – all that ‘economic development’? Oligarchs and executioners at every corner?’

  ‘Don’t pitch stereotypes at me,’ he said. ‘Even the USA has its false apostles. Once these people begin to value mobile phones like the rest of us, everything else will follow.’

  I saw Mom and Dad again, though I didn’t spend that much time with them. Both had new partners, and had their own lives to live, so I suppose Wall Street itself became my surrogate family. It’s all very well, in the perfect light of hindsight, to call it a dysfunctional family, but we were really only following trends. Wasn’t everything a trend? America itself: the Pilgrim Fathers who followed their hea
rts to this New Jerusalem. Grampa once said to me, ‘It’s a pity you lot don’t have a Statue of Responsibility instead of Liberty.’

  ‘Have you forgotten,’ I said to him, ‘that this beautiful continent was built on these very pillars? The Protestant work ethic. Individual freedom and responsibility.’

  ‘Gone with the wind,’ he said.

  But I wasn’t dishonest. That is, if dishonesty has to do with being deliberately deceptive. I too believed in making money. Not for its own sake but for the simple reason that without money we’d all descend into poverty and chaos. But I didn’t love it, and all things that are not done in love are dishonest.

  It had its advantages. A beautiful warehouse flat on the Upper East Side with a view over the river from the bedroom window and our own company doctor. I volunteered on Saturday mornings at the homeless centre where poor wretches were kept going by the weekly contributions from our company. I befriended Gianluca who always sang ‘God Bless America’ before and after every grateful meal.

  There are as many New Yorks as there are mountains. We rented a basement in Brooklyn where a bunch of us made music. Lou, Adriana, Serge, Lucie and I loved Cage’s music and combined that with a rediscovered disco beat which became hugely popular at the weekends. And we formed a Bridges Running Club. If you managed to run across the Brooklyn Bridge in less than five minutes you earned the right to a free bagel every morning. I never qualified.

  The sexy bit, though, was Artificial Intelligence. I knew some folk who worked there. It wasn’t where the money was, but it was where the future lay. If you could separate money from the future. While Wall Street satisfied the present, these guys forged a future filled with limitless risks and possibilities. They could create a lover in their own image and likeness: any androgynous being you liked, from Athena to a slave.