He replaced the receiver and sat down on the bed, head still ringing, heart still longing for Hélène to answer. And somewhere inside the longing, he knew, was a yearning to find something in himself that had been lost along the way. The word ‘wholesomeness’ came out of nowhere and he immediately began pouring hot scorn on the thought, free-associating to ‘wholemeal’ and finding himself humming the New World Symphony that had been the brilliant choice of soundtrack for that Hovis ad, Collett Dickenson Pearce’s great sepia-style nostalgia commercial.
He reached for the phone and called the Tudor again, even though no time at all had elapsed. Would his divorce make any difference? Probably not.
‘Thank you for inviting an ordinary health worker to this meeting of distinguished international … ’
Standing before the mirror in a tiny room on the 24th floor of the Tudor Hotel, Hélène told herself that nervousness would evaporate once she got going. She had more or less memorized the speech but now she was here in New York, just a few blocks from where it would have to be delivered, her confidence was faltering. She took a deep breath and looked up into the mirror. ‘I’d like to take you back for a moment to a children’s ward about twelve hours from where we are meeting today …’
What was wrong with her? Why was her stomach knotted, her heart in her throat? Why this blood-buzzing anxiety, this vague sense of dread about nothing and everything? Could it just be jet lag?
She dropped the speech on the bureau and sat down on the single bed that occupied almost half the room. After a minute with her eyes closed, she picked up the note that had been handed to her with her key. It was typical of Michael to have left it, and to have thought to let her know how he planned to introduce her to the meeting. The handwriting was steady, consistent: You may not agree. It’s possible that some of you may be offended. But those who deal hands-on, day-in, day-out, with the real issues facing this meeting have a right to be heard. And we, all of us, have a need to listen. This was followed by a paragraph about her medical qualifications, her years of service in some of the most challenging places on earth, the cadres of health workers she had trained, the protocols she had developed and tested, her role in containing the Ebola outbreak four years earlier, the range of her experience across the whole gamut of primary-health-care challenges. Reading it through again, she was almost convinced of her right to address such a meeting. But she knew that all her qualifications would count for very little once she had delivered her message: the callousness of bureaucratic inertia; the wholesale misallocation of funds; the graft and corruption that sapped grand plans; the swallowing-up of health resources by high-tech hospitals for the few at the expense of even the most basic care for the many; the sheer scale of unnecessary illness and death, suffering and loss that continued year after year.
She looked away from the mirror. It would be all right. She had only to think of the children’s ward she had left behind for the nervousness to give way to anger. And, if she was going to tell it like it is, then she would also have something to say about the rich countries whose so-called aid was often little more than an export subsidy for all the wrong technologies. And while she was at it – the pharmaceutical companies who encouraged and profited from the whole corrupt and corrupting process.
She stood and crossed the room to stand by the grimy, double-glazed window looking out over the East River to the great sprawl of Queens. In all her view, no leaf or blade of grass existed except by permission of the concrete. It was tempting to think that the contrast was enough to destabilize anyone. But the truth stared back at her: no matter how much her surroundings changed, her inner environment never seemed to vary: always the same mirror of self-observance and criticism, the same doubts and fears, the same seething shames and resolves. It wasn’t Fabrice that was stopping her from going either forward or back. It was too many thoughts; too little spontaneity; too much terrified attachment to her own precious equilibrium.
She resigned herself to a new wave of tiredness and lay down on the bed, turning her thoughts to the weekend and her resolve to be kinder to Toby. She had been way too hard on him in Oxford, mostly for reasons to do with the past. How naïve she had been then. And it was surely in proportion to her naïvety that she had been so crushed. For years she had believed she would never recover the personal confidence that had been lost in those innocent days. And it meant that Toby had never quite faded into the past in the way that others had. A part of her could never quite let go of him, and could never quite forgive him either. Was this why she was so afraid to put her equilibrium at any risk? Sleep was closing in. She would forget the past for this weekend. Enjoy his company. Even perhaps a little mild flirtation. It would do no harm. These days she was well in control.
She was awakened by the phone ringing alarmingly on the bedside table. Who knew she was at the Tudor? She decided not to answer.
On that same Thursday afternoon, Stephen Walsh left the New School for Social Research with his mind in turmoil. Myron Lee and the Head of Eastern European Studies had been polite, welcoming even. But they had seemed not to realize why he was there. Unwilling to appear a supplicant, he had mentioned the shock caused in Oxford by his resignation and twice indicated his marked preference for a less tradition-bound intellectual environment. But no encouraging noises had been made. Would he like tea?
Finally he had been forced into saying that, despite a plethora of other offers, he would be open to suggestions from somewhere with a strong progressive tradition. He had even made reference to the New School’s origins as a sanctuary for radical European intellectuals and, in what he had thought of as a light touch, had added ‘though of course fleeing Oxford is not quite the same thing as fleeing Nazi Germany’. Eventually Myron had rather brusquely announced that unfortunately there were no vacant posts at the New School, and that none seemed likely to arise in the light of the current economic crisis which, as they were sure he would know, had brought New York City itself to the brink of bankruptcy.
He crossed Washington Square, striding purposefully though he had nowhere to go, stopping here and there to read the blue-and-white plaques marking the dwelling places of the famous. At least in Oxford, heading up The Broad or The High, he could count on a good many people knowing who he was.
Back at the Chelsea Hotel the concierge had virtually thrown his room key across the counter and his inquiry about messages had been answered with a terse ‘No’, as if checking for messages once a day were too much trouble. The elevator cage took an age to ascend, iron bones and joints clanking as it progressed insecurely towards the fourth floor of an establishment that had been a home-from-home for so many misfits over the years; the stairs worn by the feet of Kerouac, the handrail that had steadied the progress of Ginsberg.
He lay on the bed, staring up at the high ceiling and forcing himself to admit the unwelcome callers that had long been waiting in the anteroom of his thoughts. It wasn’t just the New School. His letters to friends and colleagues and other scholars in his field, casually mentioning his availability, had produced nothing. And the written applications he had made to Brown and Cornell had not even proceeded as far as an interview. After nearly a month, his only live lead was a letter from a former PhD student encouraging him to apply for a professorship at a university he had never heard of somewhere in the Mid-West. He jumped as the radiator gave one of its occasional chilly shudders. He would leave in a day or so, find himself somewhere less depressing. He closed his eyes. Maybe he was just taking time to get used to the idea that he no longer needed employment. Why not award himself a sabbatical for as long as he liked? Write ‘To Hell and Back – the Soviet Union 1945-1955’. He opened his eyes as a faint scratching sound caused him to sit up and examine the pillowcase.
Sinking back again, he wondered whether the others would have already arrived. He had always felt rather sorry for those who had donned the blinkers of compromise, seeing his own vantage point as essentially superior. But here he was lying on his bed and wondering what to do
with the rest of his day. The rest of his life. Even the idea of the sabbatical didn’t quite cut it, unable to protect him from the fear of being squeezed out of life’s sandwich. Perhaps it was envy of their engagement, their sense of purpose, the specificity of their concerns. To feel even the slightest envy for Seema was especially shocking. After all, professorships in America were a dime a dozen.
The man had been meticulous in recording not only the names and duties of his slaves but even the details of the food, clothing and bedding provided for each of them. Seema made another note and looked up from the facsimile of Jefferson’s farm book, eyes travelling over the rows of desks, rows of books, rows of journals in their sloping racks, rows of glass and steel floors, rows of windows rising from the great space below. Was this to be it for the next however many years? Living in these rows, depth of field limited to the fifteen inches between her eyes and the page, all imagination confined to the past?
Her work was in one way similar to Hélène’s, though the comparison was more troubling than comforting. Both of them were insisting on the individuality of all the victims of racism and injustice who were usually spoken of en masse. People with too many noughts on the end, as Hélène had put it. The millions of slaves transported, the millions who had died on the Middle Passage, the millions sold into the New World. The difference was that Hélène was focused on individuals who were alive today, victims of a wrong that could still be righted, while she was reading a facsimile of a two-hundred-year-old book in an attempt somehow to revive the individuality of the dead. With a sudden flurry of activity, she packed up her papers, resolving to walk the streets all afternoon if necessary but not to return to her apartment until she had decided what to do about the presence in New York of Michael Lowell.
Turning into La Guardia Place she welcomed the knife edge of cold on her face, glad of its clean call to the senses. She did not need to stop anywhere for coffee. She did not need to put on gloves or scarf. She did not need to look at her watch or think about what to buy for dinner. She needed to think. Why hadn’t he phoned? He had been in New York for two days, nearer three. Hélène had already had lunch with him. Clearly he wasn’t interested. Why hadn’t she written him in advance? She turned left on Bleecker, pulling her coat collar across her mouth, using her own breath to warm her lips. Hélène had also mentioned that he had put up at the Doral Inn on Lexington, though she had also said something about a side trip to Washington. Should she call him there? Invite him for a drink? Otherwise she would be facing another weekend of … of what? Of nothing. Of the tense limbo-land of a relationship that might be nothing and might be everything without any way of knowing which.
She stopped at a payphone on the corner of Canal Street and Lafayette.
Michael was writing up his notes in a room on the 18th floor of the Doral Inn when the bedside phone rang. The first day of the meeting had come to an end and his own contribution had, he knew, been well below par. For once, he had been unable to maintain focus, get a sense of the meeting’s political contours, sort out what was being said from what was meant. The truth was that he had been following the proceedings with only a fraction of his attention, the rest of him back in Washington, thinking of Paul and teasing out every last nuance of the conversation in a freezing Lafayette Park.
The phone continued to ring. He hesitated. One of the participants at the meeting, a Chilean paediatrician, was lobbying for a job at the WHO and had murmured something about a pre-dinner drink. He decided not to answer.
13 | Flies on a summer day
The East Side institution known as Billy’s Bar on First Avenue at 52nd Street was not yet crowded when Toby Jenks pushed through the door in the early evening of Friday, January 30th, 1981, and took a stool at one end of the bar.
He looked around with satisfaction. The place had remained aloof from Manhattan’s fashionable rush towards stripped pine and exposed brick walls. In fact it was exactly as he remembered it: the same soft gaslight falling on gleaming copper pipes; the same brass, six-handled beer pump; the same red-check tablecloths and waiters in their faded maroon jackets – real waiters who had been there for years and took a pride in the job, unlike those twenty-somethings on the West Side who couldn’t wait to let you know they were really resting between parts. And there, at the end of the bar, the same substantial figure of Billy Jr, still operating the antique till, ‘playing the piano’ as he called it, in his unflappable, ‘the-world-may-change’ way.
Toby took a swallow of Scotch from the dimpled glass and the satisfaction deepened. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, like that first cold scorch of a good Scotch at the back of the throat. Even the second sip wasn’t quite as good. Why couldn’t every experience be as good as the first time? He had arrived a half-hour early, planning on putting down a foundation layer before the others arrived, but had scarcely finished his first when he felt the rush of cold air and looked up to see Hélène coming through the door.
After an embrace and a kiss on the cheek, he helped her up to the adjacent barstool and raised an eyebrow to the bartender.
‘Mineral water, please.’ Hélène tried not to sound prim.
Toby thought he might just as well get another in at the same time.
She looked around appreciatively. ‘Nice old place.’
‘Been here forever. Started off serving ale to coal carriers right after the Civil War.’
‘Not too many coal carriers in tonight.’
Toby looked around, as if checking out Hélène’s observation. ‘Glad you’re a bit early, Hel. Been calling you at the Tudor, as a matter of fact.’
‘My, I am in demand tonight. Apparently Stephen called as well.’ Toby frowned and stared at his drink.
Hélène put her head on one side to look at him. ‘Don’t like Stephen much, do we, Toby?’
Toby sighed. ‘Got tickets on himself is the problem. Thought I’d given him the flick when I left college. Fella keeps popping up like a prick at a pyjama party.’
‘Well, I think you might be being just a little bit hard on him. He’s got his beliefs, and after all Marxism—’
‘It’s not a belief, Hel. It’s a pose. Christ, he’s the only member of the proletariat who can trace his ancestry back to Norman the Conqueror.’
‘Don’t you mean William the Conqueror?’
‘Not in his case, no.
‘I guess advertising and Marxism don’t rub along together so well.’
‘Main difference is, your Marxists don’t know how to get the working classes to behave.’
‘And he can’t help his background any more than anyone else. And it would have been a lot easier for him to do what was expected of him, take his place in the County set or whatever they call it over there.’
‘Yeah, well – he needs to get his ass on a new donkey.’
‘At least he’s got convictions.’
For a moment Toby looked hurt, but then his expression went into the whimsical ‘quote mode’ she remembered well. ‘Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.’
‘Who was that?
‘Can’t remember.’
‘Liar.’ Hélène sighed a smile and looked up at him with an expression that he feared might be fondness. ‘Do you still write poetry, Toby?’
‘Wrote a good jingle the other week.’
‘Seriously, do you write anything?
‘Christ, no.’
‘Why not?’
‘Muse done a runner, sweetheart. Somewhere in Africa, I think.’
The look turned reproachful. He raised both hands an inch or two from the bar in apology. ‘Anyway, no muse is good news. Dreadful old doggerel. Juvenilia minor I think you might say, if you were being kind.’
‘You make it sound like some sort of virus.’
‘It was. Is. Still got it, you know. The virus. Never really went away. Just, you know, dormant for a bit.’
She made another face,
then softened. ‘Your poetry was lovely, Toby.’
He turned his mouth down in dismissal. She leaned forward to meet his eyes. ‘It was lovely to me.’
Billy Jr had levered himself from the tall chair behind the till and was lumbering down to refill Toby’s glass. Hélène picked up her mineral water, the mood broken. ‘So when did you get in?’
‘This afternoon. Still feel like I’m flying.’
‘You do know that liquor’s dehydrating on top of flying?’
‘Yeah, well, I drank a lot of water on the plane. Still taste it, as a matter of fact.’
‘Good. But you should drink water now as well.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘Of course I am. Rehydrate yourself. Your body’s eighty per cent water.’
Toby looked doubtfully at his glass. ‘People are always telling me that, but I’ve never really been convinced. I mean your head’s not eighty per cent water, is it?
‘Toby, on average your body tissue is eighty per cent water.’
‘Well, I figure if it’s that high already, why nudge it up any further? I mean, you don’t want to suddenly find yourself in a pool on the floor.’ He looked down from the bar stool to the floorboards as if this might be a serious possibility.
‘Do you at least drink a glass of water every morning?’
‘Christ, no! Bad enough getting out of bed as it is.’
‘You don’t feel good in the mornings?’
‘Does anybody?’
Hélène raised her eyebrows patiently. ‘Exercise?’
‘Been known to do a few jumping jacks every now and again. Got up to five once.’
She shook her head, smiling.
‘Tell me honestly, Toby, do you drink too much?’
‘When I’ve got time.’
‘Doctor’s orders, Toby. No more than two or three drinks a day, with some days off every week. You should listen to your body.’
The Kennedy Moment Page 10