‘I can’t believe you remember much,’ said Cornelia to Alexander. ‘You must have been so small.’
‘Not much,’ he agreed. ‘Some pictures. A train. Bits and pieces.’
‘It was winter?’ she asked, turning back to the picture of the Festival site.
‘No. It was summer. It looks like winter there, but it was summer.’
‘English summer,’ added Roderick.
Cornelia leafed back and forth through the magazine, but nothing detained her attention, and then Big Ben struck. ‘I must go,’ she said, passing the magazine back to Roderick. ‘My film is beginning soon,’ she explained.
‘La Strada?’ asked Roderick. ‘You’re going to La Strada?’
‘No,’ said Cornelia, ‘Batman.’
‘Batman? Remarkable. So am I,’ he exclaimed, clapping a hand to his brow.
‘I think you are not.’
‘I think you are correct,’ said Roderick, cartoonishly slumping his shoulders in defeat.
Cornelia looked at him quizzically for a moment and then laughed so loudly it was as though she had just understood a complicated joke, and Roderick stared at her as though her laughter were an unsuspected skill.
‘I shall leave you,’ said Alexander, raising his hands towards their shoulders, simultaneously, in a stalled embrace. Panic passed across Roderick’s eyes, and Cornelia produced a smile that was like a quotation of her workaday smile at the library counter.
‘See you soon,’ said Roderick.
Alexander crossed Hungerford Bridge, heading for the Coliseum, where he would meet another group, perhaps without Roderick, and he would recount the history of the building and tell them about the party of theatregoers who in 1918 saw a friend taking his seat at precisely the moment he was killed in France. At the Theatre Royal they would stand under the colonnades where his mother sang to him and the two girls were repelled by the face of Sidney Dixon, and he would retell Roderick’s tales about the Man in Grey, who appeared in the Upper Circle before the premieres of Oklahoma! and South Pacific and The King and I and My Fair Lady, wearing a tricorne hat, a riding cloak and a sword. They would pass Covent Garden tube station, where Jack Hayden, a ticket inspector, saw the ghost of William Terriss, the manager of the Adelphi theatre, more than forty times, half a century after the embittered Richard Prince stabbed Terriss to death. At the Haymarket he would recite the story of John Buckstone, manager of that theatre until 1879, who in 1949 was perhaps seen by Donald Sinden, who saw a man in Ralph Richardson’s dressing room and said goodnight to him, thinking it was Richardson, before realising that Richardson was still on the stage. In the middle of the bridge Alexander stopped and, having checked that nobody was near, called ‘Goodnight Ralph,’ under his breath. He could not see Roderick or Cornelia by the bookstalls. ‘Goodnight Ralph,’ he repeated, with a more cheerful inflection.
49. 5 November
Half a dozen years later, Alexander would find that this year had left fewer traces than many of the years of his childhood, but he would remember one afternoon in May, soon after Roderick had started his new job and moved to Lewes with Cornelia.
He was standing alongside Sam in the foundations of the conservatory. Sitting on a sack of sand, Sam raised the binoculars he had stolen on the day they were demobbed, and surveyed the school playing field, where a charity fête was being held. ‘Wife located,’ he reported. ‘Range one hundred and fifty yards. Has engaged the enemy.’ He pointed towards the tennis courts, where Liz and Mrs Stannard, their new neighbour, were talking beside a stall of cakes. ‘Subject of incontinent dog yet to be broached, I’d guess,’ said Sam, and he turned at the hip to scan the area between the courts and the school buildings. ‘Aha,’ he murmured, in the voice of an upper-class officer discovering something of interest in the terrain, then took a drag of his cigarette. The binoculars were directed at a table where a woman in jeans and a rugby shirt was distributing beakers of orange squash to a team of children. ‘Sylvia Quinlan,’ said Sam, with an appreciative smile. ‘Lives down the road. Recent arrival,’ he added, and put the cigarette to his lips again.
‘Yes, Sam. You’ve mentioned her before,’ said Alexander.
‘School secretary. Divorced a couple of years back. No children.’
‘Yes, Sam. You told me before.’
‘Forty-three, forty-four, thereabouts. A youthful forty-four.’
‘Yes, Sam. You’ve told me.’
‘Nice woman.’
‘Yes.’
‘Very nice woman indeed,’ said Sam, passing the binoculars.
‘I’m sure she is,’ said Alexander, looking at Sylvia Quinlan. Most of her face was obscured by her bobbed auburn hair.
‘Attractive, don’t you think?’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Alexander. He lowered the binoculars, but Sam tipped them back, like a drunkard encouraging a companion to drink. Obediently he observed Sylvia Quinlan’s pleasant smile, her attractive profile, her suntanned skin. ‘Seems most congenial,’ he commented.
Crushing the cigarette with a heel, Sam snatched the binoculars. ‘Al, are you going to carry that bloody torch for ever?’ he demanded. ‘Life goes on, mate.’
‘Indeed it does,’ Alexander replied.
‘I mean, time is passing.’
‘I’m not carrying a torch, Sam.’
‘Could have fooled me.’
‘I’m just not on the look-out, that’s all.’
Sam trained the binoculars on Sylvia Quinlan again. ‘Have to do it for you, you cussed bugger. Fetch us a beer.’
When the conservatory was completed, Sam and Liz invited some friends for drinks one evening. Helping Liz in the kitchen, Alexander heard Matthew Stimpson arrive, and a couple of other guests a few minutes later. Sam had put the portable TV beside the draining board, so he could keep up with events at the Olympics as he ferried things from the kitchen to the garden. Alexander stopped for a moment to watch a heat of the men’s two hundred metres, and as the runners crossed the line Sam appeared in the doorway, with Sylvia Quinlan. ‘That wasn’t a race,’ Sam declared. ‘That was chemical warfare.’ He scooped a couple of dishes from the table. ‘Al, this is Sylvia, who works at the school, the one out the back. Sylvia, this is Alexander, my longest surviving friend.’ Sam nudged Liz towards the door and the two of them stepped out, leaving Sylvia, who looked at Alexander as though they were in a lift that had come to a halt between floors.
‘You enjoy the athletics?’ asked Sylvia, attending to the strap of her watch.
‘I do,’ he replied. ‘Do you?’
‘Not really. The Americans always win, don’t they?’
‘The sprints, usually.’
‘Makes it dull, I think,’ said Sylvia. ‘They should handicap them, like horses. Put weights on their backs.’ She looked at the plates that were left on the table and then she smiled, as if they reminded her of something amusing. ‘You’ve known Sam how long?’ she asked.
‘More than thirty years,’ he replied, returning to the sink.
She looked at him as though she were working out the consequences of what he had told her. Her fingernails stroked the skin of her throat.
‘How about you?’
‘About two weeks,’ she said, and she smiled again, in the same way. ‘I’ve known Liz longer.’
‘Oh,’ said Alexander. ‘How long?’
‘About two and a half weeks.’ Her gaze moved to the closed door and her eyes narrowed with suspicion. ‘He’s matchmaking, isn’t he?’
‘I’m sure he is.’
For a few seconds more she stroked her throat, and then she took a tumbler from the table and filled it at the tap. ‘I’ve half a mind to be annoyed,’ she said. ‘How about you?’
They went to see a film in Lewisham. That was soon after Hurricane Andrew had struck Florida, as he would remember, because she made some remark about her brother, whose name was Andrew and who had lived in Miami for a while. One evening she was meeting some former colleagues up in the West End, and
she and Alexander went to the cinema at Marble Arch in the afternoon. A couple of weeks later they had a meal at an Italian restaurant in Frith Street, an evening of which he would recall nothing more vividly than her spoon going round and round the cup for a very long time, like a ball in a roulette wheel, as she stirred the sugar in her coffee. This must have been in late October, he would deduce, because he told her about Roderick and Cornelia and that he was going down to Lewes for the fireworks on 5 November. She said she had heard about the Lewes bonfires and would like to see them, but the following day she phoned him at the shop. ‘It’s not a good idea, is it?’ she said. ‘We don’t really have anything to say to each other, do we?’ she explained, before he could agree with her.
He had planned to stay with Roderick and Cornelia on the night of the fifth, and to visit Jane and Philip the next day, but then Jane said they were coming out to Lewes, and he arranged to meet them on the Cliffe bridge. The parades had already commenced by the time they arrived. Alexander introduced the two couples to each other, but so many people were crowded near them it was impossible to be heard without shouting. In single file they walked up the hill towards the war memorial, where Roderick, pointing back towards the hill that rose behind the bridge, tried to tell Philip and Jane the story of the Lewes avalanche. It was the worst avalanche ever to occur in England, he told them. ‘Later, big boy,’ said Cornelia, hunching her shoulders against the crush. Behind her, a gigantic papier-mâché head lurched up the slope. They carried on, walking in step with a brass band and half a dozen men in Viking costume, one of whom, Alexander realised, was the inspector who had checked his ticket at the station. The procession led them to a field where there was a bonfire so large they had to screen their faces from its heat, though they were fifty feet from the flames. Fireworks louder than mortars exploded from the far edge of the field and lit the chalk cliff with a continuous blossoming of immense, star-white chrysanthemums. ‘What a waste,’ groaned Philip. He counted in time to a succession of salvoes: ‘Fifty quid; one hundred; one hundred and fifty; two hundred.’ Alexander, looking away from the lights in the sky, met the gaze of Jane, who mimicked his elated face then smiled as she shook her head, as though she found him incorrigible.
There was almost no conversation between the four of them, and they would never be together again. When the display was over, Alexander accompanied Jane and Philip back to the station, then wandered up the High Street alone. He would remember the oily air, and the bottles and scorched rags and half-burned lengths of timber in the road, and the tiny green flare that dribbled over the rooftops from someone’s back garden, and the canopy of smoke above the church at the top of the rise, like the graveyard fog in an old horror film. And he would remember the young couple who trudged towards him up the centre of a steep street, passing a bottle of cider back and forth. He watched them turn out of the street, each leaning on the other, and when they had gone, he would remember, the sound of breathing came out of the darkness at the end of the unlit driveway by which he was standing, and he stared into the darkness and saw a stable door.
50. Irene
Alexander closed the car door softly and looked down the brick-paved road. It was a Saturday afternoon, but in the cul-de-sac where his mother lived it was a perpetual Sunday. The loudest sound was the low-pitched creaking of the entrance billboard, on which an elderly couple with marble-white teeth smiled in the doorway of their ideal home. Every window in the cul-de-sac was closed, and nothing moved in any of them. The woman who lived in the house on the corner was raking leaves away from the tall yellow asters on the edge of the lawn. Cakes of broken asphalt were heaped in the gutter, left there by the contractors who were laying gas pipes under the pavement. The asphalt gleamed like licorice, and a cat lay curled at the feet of the pot-bellied plaster nymph that stood on the little rise of grass by the parking bay. Trying to cast off his torpor, he waited for a minute, watching the flecks of rain gather on the windscreen, and then he went inside.
Mrs Bingham, wearing a camelhair coat and a bonnet that looked like a fawn carnation, was leaving his mother’s flat. ‘It’s your son, Irene,’ she called into the hallway, from which a smell of hand-lotion and vegetable soup escaped. She gave Alexander a flinching smile. ‘She’s got a job for you,’ she said. ‘You’re in the nick of time.’
Alexander’s mother stood by the living room window, on a sheet of thick translucent plastic, glaring at a brown velour armchair. ‘Alexander,’ she greeted him, as though he were the building’s janitor, ‘will you look at this thing?’ She let him kiss her cheek before continuing her complaint. ‘What’s the point of it, if it weighs half a ton? How’s an old biddy like me supposed to move it?’
‘I’ll move it for you,’ said Alexander. ‘Where do you want it?’
‘Look,’ she said, and with her stick she stabbed a corner of the seat. Making a faint hiss, the cushion rose gradually, tipping forward as it rose. ‘Helps you get up, you see? Gives you a lift. But the wheels are stiff and it’s too heavy.’
‘Leave it to me, Mother.’
‘Ethel helped me get the wrapping off, and that nearly killed us.’
‘Where would you like it to go?’
She leaned on her stick with both hands and surveyed the room, as if considering the problem for the first time. ‘I think I like it where it is,’ she decided. ‘It’s everything else that’s wrong now. Can’t see the TV from here, but if you move the TV the stereo will have to go there and if that goes there we’ll have to move that table.’
‘Not an insuperable problem,’ Alexander assured her, putting a hand on her back. He could feel the ridge of her shoulderblade through her cardigan.
‘I should have kept the old chair,’ she argued with herself. ‘Never used it, but at least it didn’t take over the place. Don’t know what I was thinking of.’
‘We’ll sort it out. You park yourself on your throne and I’ll bring you a cup of tea. Half an hour and we’ll be done.’
‘If I drink any more tea I’ll drown.’
‘Well, I’ll make myself one, and then you can direct operations.’
‘Never known anyone drink tea like Ethel. Must have tea in her veins, that woman.’ She whacked the plastic sheet with her stick as Alexander went towards the kitchen door. ‘Can you get rid of this rubbish first?’ she asked.
He rolled up the sheet and took it down to the bins, where bundles of undelivered phone directories were piled against the wall. A curtain trembled in the window with the team of china shire horses on its sill. Like a pre-echo on a record, he heard himself ask the question he asked his mother when he returned: ‘So how was your week, Mother?’
She replied, as she did so often: ‘It passed.’
‘No incidents?’
‘Sam dropped by. Is that an incident?’
‘That’s nice of him,’ said Alexander, hauling the coffee table out of the place where the stereo was to go.
‘His daughter’s having a baby, he said.’
‘He told me. Good news.’
‘Is it?’
‘Of course it is.’
‘I suppose so. I never met the girl.’
‘It’s good news,’ said Alexander.
For a while she watched him, and then she remarked, with a sadness that did not seem genuine: ‘Odd the way it turns out.’
‘What’s odd?’ asked Alexander, though he knew what she would say.
‘There’s you a bachelor and there’s Sam a grandfather,’ she replied.
‘That’s the way it is, all right,’ said Alexander. Lying on his back, he glanced at his mother through the loops of wiring. She was looking at the ceiling, as though someone had asked for her opinion of the colour it had been painted. ‘Been out since I saw you?’ he asked.
‘Bridge club outing on Tuesday,’ she said.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Went to see a show, eight of us. Up in town.’
‘Well, that’s an incident. What was it?’
‘Phan
tom of the Opera.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘And how was it?’
‘Ghastly,’ she said, in a voice replete with tedium. ‘Wouldn’t have got away with it in my time.’
‘This is your time, Mother.’
‘It was rubbish, anyway.’
‘No good tunes?’
‘None. Singers who couldn’t act to save their lives. Couldn’t sing, come to that. I could do better, even now. The chandelier was the best thing in it. Thirty pounds each the tickets cost us.’
‘That’s a lot.’
‘Robbery. And everybody loved it. Even Ethel. Terrible.’
‘They don’t all have your ear, Mother.’
‘A killjoy, I am. That’s what Violet Kennedy called me. Violet Kennedy, of all people. The grumpiest old bat you ever met.’
‘Violet always makes me think of that misprint Dad found in the paper: “The mayoress was prevented with a bouquet by her sister, Violent.” Remember that?’
‘Because we’re all decrepit they think we should agree about everything. As if you all think the same the minute you get a pension. People you’d have had nothing in common with forty years ago. All we have in common is that we’re still alive.’
‘Where would you like this?’ he asked, touching the tall, narrow table on which her photographs were arrayed. ‘I’ll have to put a speaker here, otherwise they won’t be far enough apart. You won’t get the stereo effect.’
‘Yes, Alexander, I understand. It’s the arms and legs that have gone, not the brain. Not entirely.’ She inspected the room in which she lived, and it seemed as if nothing in the new arrangement was to her liking. ‘Put it there,’ she instructed him, with an imprecise wave of her stick. ‘Somewhere there,’ she said, and she closed her eyes and settled back in her chair. A rueful half-smile appeared briefly. ‘I’m sorry, Alexander,’ she said, without opening her eyes. ‘An afternoon with Ethel tires me out. She’s a good soul, but I have to do all the talking. Leaves me like a flag with no wind in it. She doesn’t have much to say. But she’s a good soul. Like you,’ she said, in a voice that declined into a tone of affection overlaid by disappointment with her own life and with his, a disappointment that would prevail, he knew, as their conversation wandered across the subjects across which it always wandered. It was a pity that nothing came of Jane, she might remark, or a pity that Megan turned out the way she did. It was a shame he had never found someone. He could have had his pick, with his looks, if he’d only made an effort. Nothing ever happened to the widow and her bachelor son. They were just waiting, she would say, and he would not contradict her, though it was not true. ‘But what about you, Alexander?’ she asked. ‘What’s new with you? Any excitement?’
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