He pulls on his running shorts. His legs are still good, although the knee joints seem to have become pronounced and knobbly, like the head of a shillelagh, which is made with a natural joint in a straight piece of wood, maybe hazel. (You learn all kinds of things when you are a cub reporter.) He puts on his new tracksuit, blue with two white stripes down the legs, conscious that Lucy said it is a style favoured by Romanians. But then he has nothing against Romanians. He seldom uses the neglected Jaguar; he runs to the gym, which is about half a mile away in an industrial building that reminds him of Global. It’s subsidised by the local council. Once he belonged to an expensive gym staffed by smiling young men and women in polo-shirts, decorated with the logo of a palm tree. Through plate glass he could see a room full of elaborate equipment, designed to tweak and titivate every cranny of the subsiding body. There were machines that allowed women to exercise their inner thighs, presumably for greater sexual heft. The members all appeared to belong to that strangely joyless community of international finance. After the first two weeks he never went there again.
This place, where disadvantaged youths are employed, often with disastrous results, suits his mood and his circumstances as a man reduced yet in some ways resting more easily on the earth’s crust. The pavements are wet and encumbered. The earth beneath is compacted by millennia of use. He trots on happily, adding his weight to the process, weaving between the wage slaves near the tube station, and then on through the market, which offers knock-off DVDs, spices, nuts, designer jeans at suspiciously low prices, unfamiliar brands of trainers, razors and individual tubes of toothpaste. Shawled Somali women with small watchful children are shopping cautiously. He remembers doing a story on the humiliation suffered by asylum seekers who had to shop with vouchers rather than money. Oh God, all the stories, all the causes, all the synthetic outrage. At Global, outrage was never quite genuine, but easily assumed.
When Lucy asked whether we have a self, he could have said no, only postures. Gorillas being killed for bush meat, one of his most famous stories, produced more emails than his story of child soldiers conscripted after their parents had had their arms cut off with pangas. A town full of the mutilated; young women with stumps instead of hands and feet, trying to find food or stir millet porridge. It was the worst thing he had ever seen, a suggestion of what might be buried in the human heart. Television has no time for the problem of evil. Sometimes he felt like a Jew who had to live in a world not of his making, and yet he was complicit and that was in part because of his eagerness to be at the heart of things. Although the heart of things, as it turned out, is a subjective concept.
Soon after Nancy was diagnosed, he was summoned to a meeting. It was suggested to him that he have a makeover: for a few weeks he had his hair teased upwards at the front so that he looked startled rather than youthful and branché, the intended effect. One day he asked Marie in make-up to go back to the old style and she said, ‘I didn’t want to say anything, but I didn’t like it, David, it wasn’t you. You looked like you had your finger in the socket or something.’
She was saying that he looked ridiculous. He decided that day, using the excuse of Nancy’s illness, to hand in his notice, and six months later, less than a year before Nancy died, Ted drove him home for the last time. His choked farewell words, as he stopped outside No. 9, were, ‘They don’t make ’em like you no more, governor.’
Cor blimey, strike a light, Ted, me old china, you’re as good as gold, ain’tcher?
Ted had to take the bus home, as Global had given David the Jaguar. He saw then, as he had really always known, that twenty-four-hour television news is a greedy business, anxious, unreliable, prey to cultish beliefs and blinded by self-importance, which it mistakes for public service.
He’s breathing evenly when he arrives at the gym.
‘Hello, Dave, concession, innit?’
‘That’s me,’ he says. ‘I like the ring, Ash.’
Ashley has a new ring in his eyebrow: David is not being ironic. His eye is attuned to street fashion, he thinks. After all, fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know what you are, as Quentin Crisp said. And who knows what they are? Not me.
‘Thanks, mate. Here we go.’
The concessionary rate is less than the price of a cappuccino. Since he and Ted were parted, he has travelled free on buses and the underground, too. His mother was always complaining about the cost of things and the need to save and he finds himself hearing her words and honouring her memory by taking all the freebies available to him. As he starts on the rowing machine, he has an aberrant thought: I am where I belong in this simple democracy – T.E. Lawrence, joining the Air Force. He decides after ten minutes, perhaps over-oxygenated, that he will see Sylvie. At the book club he will be able to assess the human and sexual possibilities in safety. When he’s in full flow, his mind seems to free itself and alight where it wants to.
Now, as he has done so often since Nancy died, he thinks of Jenni. Back in England, he and Jenni continued their relationship. He had an acting agent, thanks to Burton, and had his first small acting job before going back to Oxford. But his sex life had taken on a different quality. What had been joyous and innocent became in England furtive: Jenni had a boyfriend she had forgotten to mention in Rome and he felt a retrospective gloom, as though the innocence and happiness of Rome had been a deliberate deception. He found himself going over those few weeks in minute detail, to see what he had missed or, worse, in what ways he was deceived. Their lovemaking, he felt, had become sullied: something rotten had entered it. He couldn’t put it out of his mind and he also felt he was in competition with the unknown Garry, an assistant director working at Pinewood on some soon-to-be-forgotten epic, involving togas. Jenni was freelancing on commercials, so there were opportunities to continue their now furtive lovemaking. One weekend, desperate to re-create the happiness of Rome, he asked her to come down to Chichester where he was rehearsing, to spend a few nights on his uncle’s boat, moored out in the harbour. The plan was to sleep on the boat and use the dinghy, with Seagull engine, to go to beaches and pubs round about. She could only get away for one night so they set off early on a Friday. And in the boat, an old teak – or perhaps mahogany – sloop, he felt impelled to discuss honestly the subject that was on his mind.
‘Jenni, I know you don’t want to talk about Garry, but why didn’t you tell me early on?’
‘I didn’t want to spoil it.’
They are lying on the deck, drinking Mateus Rosé, and eating beans and sausages warmed up in the galley on the little stove, which is mounted on a gimbal.
‘You didn’t want to spoil it? When was the right moment to spoil it?’
‘I wasn’t thinking ahead. I just got deeper and deeper in and put off telling you.’
‘And now you and this Garry are back together?’
She doesn’t answer directly.
‘Why are you always trying to analyse everything? Here I am.’
‘I didn’t realise it was my fault. Sorry.’
It’s doomed. Once that note of injured self-righteousness enters a relationship, it’s all over. Around them other boats are just beginning to tug on the moorings as the tide turns; soon they are all swinging round, with their bows upriver and their dinghies streaming out behind. He knows nothing about boats. People who understand boats – or horses – are in possession of arcane knowledge which warms and comforts them: my boat, my horse – they confer a kind of hieratic status. His uncle is an ex-naval man who was at Normandy and Okinawa, a generous man who in small ways expresses his kinship with the sea. The sea and ships and this boat – this creaking creation of wood and brass and rope – are his spiritual world.
Jenni wants to go to the pub. Understandably she doesn’t want to be subjected to an inquisition. She is a free spirit. She says the Mateus is piss, nothing like Frascati.
‘Can’t you just enjoy this for a bit?’
‘I am enjoying it, but I would like to go to the pub.’
&n
bsp; ‘OK, but it closes in an hour.’
He is not an expert with the Seagull motor or the dinghy, which has no lights for the return journey, but they launch off. The water is running strongly now, out towards the open sea, and the engine seems pathetically underpowered, but they make it to the jetty outside the Walrus and the Carpenter by heading way upstream, and he and Jenni enter the heavily scented fog of the pub. The air contains particles of human life in suspension, something Jenni apparently craves after being closeted with him.
On the way home, drunk, he sinks the dinghy by standing up too quickly when they strike a buoy and the propeller becomes caught up in a line. In a moment the dinghy has gone. Jenni goes under. The water is icy. He swims after her and finds her arm, and pulls her to the surface. She clamps her arms around his neck.
‘I can’t swim,’ she says.
In her embrace he is sinking.
‘Let go, for Chrissakes. Let go. I’ll hold you up.’
But she won’t let go. He tries to push her off. She’s panic-stricken, and holds more tightly. Now they are both panicking. They go under and he kicks hard to get them to the surface. He hits her in the face, something he has read in a manual: knock the other person unconscious when that person has his or her arms around your neck, preventing you from saving his or her life. But it’s not that easy to knock him/her unconscious when that person has his/her arms around your neck like a boxer in a clinch. He takes a deep breath and they sink. Eventually she lets go.
He moves from the rowing machine to the cross-trainer. He has never told Nancy or anybody else the truth about how Jenni died. He simply told the police that she was drunk and fell out of the dinghy when it hit something and was swept away in the dark. It turned out that it was a spring tide, which added credence to his story. He managed to seize a mooring and climb on to the deck of another boat. Jenni’s bruised body was found on a sandbank at the mouth of Chichester Harbour, near Selsey, and his youth and his foolish hopes of divinity through acting were over. He told his agent he was not suited to acting. He had been shown the wonders of the earth in Rome and he had overreached himself. When he had finished university he started in Fleet Street on the paper where his father had been a sub for thirty-five years. He told nobody in the office that Burton had offered to help him with his acting career and found him an agent. He was already making a small reputation for himself as an actor.
Since Nancy died, he has found himself thinking of the moment when he took a deep breath, sank down into the freezing torrent, prised Jenni’s arms from his neck and gratefully let her float away. He has no memories of her face, but he can remember the force that the certainty of death gave her. Her boyfriend Garry, described, to David’s surprise, as her fiancé at the inquest, gave evidence – ‘I last saw Miss Cole at three-thirty. I thought she was going away on a location shoot’ – and then he sat very quietly, perhaps humiliated, too. Her parents did not speak to him, for which David was grateful. These days bereaved families issue statements, proclaiming that the victim was caring and life-enhancing. In those days, death was a reproach to all concerned.
Garry went on to direct some episodes of Z Cars and Dixon of Dock Green. On the few occasions when David saw his credits on screen, he felt the sea water closing and Jenni’s insistent arms around his neck.
8
Ed finds that he is summoned by Robin. Robin observes old-fashioned protocols. He sends messages through his Mandy, handwritten with his antique pen. He has leather-bound folders for his correspondence, so that he signs letters presented to him by Mandy as if he is an ambassador signing a treaty. He favours small Wedgwood coffee cups, decorated with those awful washed-out blue flowers. The legal life has given him a regard for the quaintly florid and the hand-tooled. Ed wonders how he and his father could possibly have been friends, but he knows they go way back to National Service. One of Robin’s men shot a Greek in Cyprus, and it was covered up. But Dad has sworn him to silence.
Alice is away at a wedding in Scotland until Monday. She is chief bridesmaid. The office seems to have been drained without her vibrant presence; motes of legal dust hang in the air, still, undisturbed, Dickensian. Ed hasn’t been to see his favourite client, Mr Fineman, and his avid Eastern European assistant. Instead he sent Alice to prepare the brief on the grounds that it would be good practice for her, and of course provide him with an opportunity to closet himself with her, their knees touching, in the conference room, and to take an outing to Middle Temple to see the barrister. Only once in the past week has he been able to meet her in Stoke Newington; he was very nervous, not fully reconciled to his new entitlement, at least not before he had shared a bottle of Rickety Bridge with her. She was so eager she didn’t undress fully and this sexual directness excites him, but also causes him to speculate unhealthily about how someone so young gained this degree of expertise. She has absolutely no inhibition, and urged him to come on her breasts after she had come twice. She held her smallish breasts together invitingly, something like a sundae, and watched his cock curiously from her vantage point a few inches away. The knowledge of her cheerful abandon makes her neat appearance in the office deliberately provocative. Now that she is in Scotland he can see more clearly, and the prospect is disturbing. But he has told himself that his sexual prowess is being enhanced, and this will in turn help in the baby-making department. In psychology it’s called transference, he thinks. Not that there is anything wrong with his sperm count, of course.
Robin says that he wants an update on the Fineman affair. He is concerned that they should be going to the High Court with something so frivolous. He is sitting in his swivel chair behind the vast desk; as he leans back to pronounce, the bottom buttons of his Turnbull & Asser shirt are subjected to pressure.
Ed reassures him that it is never going to court. The Council will buckle.
‘Are you spending too much time on it?’
‘Alice is handling the detail. It’s good experience.’
‘I’ve never believed in using trainees just as slaves. Delegation, while not always easy, is important.’
‘I agree.’
‘How’s she doing?’
‘She’s doing well. Fineman is a tricky devil, slightly crazy, but he likes her.’
‘Can he pay if it all goes tits up?’
‘He’s already paid into escrow.’
‘Well done. How’s Rosalie?’
‘Rosalie? Oh she’s good.’
‘Lovely girl.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Look after her.’
‘I will.’
‘Oh Ed, I’m thinking of asking her to decorate and equip the flat I have bought. She has such amazing taste. Do you think she would do it? I’ll pay her, of course.’
‘I’m sure she would. Perhaps you should ask her yourself. She wouldn’t want me to be the messenger.’
‘If you think it’s a good idea, I will.’
Ed looks at his watch, as if to suggest a uxorious intimacy with Rosalie’s every movement. ‘She’ll be home by now.’
‘Just one thing before you go, Ed: Alice seems rather keen on you. Don’t let it get out of hand, will you? Office relationships are not a good idea.’
‘There’s no suggestion of that, I hope, but it is true that we do get on well.’
‘Sitting where I am, metaphorically, one gets a sense of how things are and I think she may be a little too keen. I’ve put her on the child-support case, if that’s OK with you. Colin is on holiday.’
‘Absolutely fine.’
‘Good. How’s your father?’
‘He’s slightly worrying. He wears elephant-hair bracelets and spends hours in the gym.’
‘He’s not ill? He looked, frankly, gaunt when I saw him last.’
He says ‘gaunt’ with a certain distaste, as though a man at ease with the world should be plump and sleek. Like him, in fact.
‘He’s fine, I think. Although he denies it, Dad is missing Mum.’
‘I am sure he is.
We all are.’
Is Robin missing his wife, who defected with a large chunk of his money, which is the reason he has had to sell the house? Now Robin wants to be closeted with Rosalie, looking at fabric swatches and paint samples and even going on outings to select taps and soap holders and large showerheads. Robin wants to infiltrate his life and, by making him a partner, he has made his first incursion. Perhaps he has heard some of the baby-making rumours. Perhaps he thinks he could do better.
Back in his office – he now has one of his own – Ed accesses the Fineman papers. Fineman now wants to go to the European Court, encouraged by Alice. This way lies madness and bankruptcy. After a while he walks out to the square, shaded by untidy plane trees, and buys a sandwich. He rings Alice, but her phone is on message and he doesn’t want to leave a message about Robin’s hints. He wants to talk to her, to assure himself that the risks he has been taking are worth something. He wants her to say that she loves him. Without that, the fevered sex and the casual lying are harmful to his soul, to his true self, which is consequently in jeopardy. I am selling myself for the careless Alice.
Other people, carefree people, are grouped on the grass. They eat sandwiches and wraps and bags of crisps and they laugh with their colleagues and friends, sometimes friends on the end of phones. These friends are hilarious. Squirrels and pigeons wait for handouts. A tramp, a little beacon of Dickensian despair and grime in this upbeat, besuited crowd, is drinking strong cider from a prone position on a bench. He is partly covered by a once-pink duvet. God knows what his sputum contains: he coughs with the consumptive resonances of the workhouse, so that around him there is a distinct cordon sanitaire.
Plane trees are always dropping something or other – surplus twigs, bits of bark and rough Christmas-bauble seeds – and in addition the leaves are now beginning to loosen their hold and fall in melancholy spirals to the ground, although it is still hot and sunny. Ed feels autumnal himself. He has only had sex with Alice twice, but he has been sexually active at home, half believing that there must be some biological imperative at work. He and Rosalie don’t discuss cycles in detail any longer, yet they both know that this is her most fertile time and they must get on with it. When they are making love, he is aware that they have a consciousness about the act, which is quite different from the insane lust that seizes him when he is with Alice. The truth is there is something grim about sex with Rosalie, lovely as she is naked on the bed, with those long dancer’s legs, firmly muscled, and the slim hips, which he loves. Even now, deep in his human essences, he knows that Rosalie is his ideal woman. Their sex is dutiful but he feels obliged to be even-handed and feigns the same intensity. He sometimes thinks of Alice’s legs parting, and this, he knows, is the worst kind of betrayal.
To Heaven by Water Page 10