'Rodolfo. What's he done?'
'When Mimi's ill, he doesn't want to know. He tells his friends she's fickle, that she's having an affair. Which she isn't. When he finds out she's actually dying, he's all over her.'
'It's just a story.'
I stopped. 'Yes, and you learn more from stories than you ever will from an encyclopaedia.'
'You should write that down.'
'No, you should,' I said and he laughed.
'You are so smart…'
I waved that away.
'Rodolfo dresses like a poet, but he's got the heart of a hedge fund manager. We never see him finish a piece of work. His best friend pawns his winter coat for food when Mimi's dying, Musetta sells her gold earrings to buy medicine. La bohème isn't a love story, it's a warning. What Puccini's saying is fall for a poet and he'll rip open your chest and eat your heart.'
'You really saw all that?'
'He didn't spend however long he spent writing the opera without thinking about the characters and what he wanted to say through them. That's what drove him to get up every morning.'
'Is that what drives you to get up in the morning?'
'No, it's the alarm on your phone.'
He laughed. He kissed me. People streamed around us like we were a rock in a river and we carried on, keeping pace with the crowds on Long Acre, girls in big shoes and bare shoulders, men with knotted scarves. Motionless cranes loomed over the new buildings going up on every free space, and I thought one day London will look like New York and will lose what makes it London.
We headed towards Shaftesbury Avenue and turned into Old Compton Street. The snow in the air melted as it fell, sheening every surface. People spilled out of restaurants and theatres. I stopped at a shop with magazines and porn videos in the window.
'That's where I bought my mask, downstairs,' I said.
'You don't need it anymore.'
'I thought it rather turned you on?'
'It does, but you don't need it.'
Had I ever really needed it? What had I been hiding from if it wasn't myself? I caught the slight change in my voice as I looked back at him.
'How did you manage to get the tickets?'
He was about to answer, then stopped himself. His eyes glowed in the red neon from the shop sign.
'Katie, where do you think I got them?'
'I don't know.' My shoulders went up. 'Last minute, great seats. I suppose you must know someone.'
'Someone like who?'
'I don't know?'
'It's over. Dead. Buried. Relationships don't last in my world. People spend too much time apart. It takes over your life.'
I bit my lips. 'I'm such an idiot.'
'Very smart most of the time, very stupid some of the time, and rather beautiful all of the time.' He didn't smile. He shook his head. 'Jamie Doyle, you met him at the office. Poor bugger got the tickets for his wife, for their wedding anniversary, then she walked out. He was on a plane to Nigeria yesterday. He wouldn't even let me pay for them.'
'That's so generous.'
'He's going up to the border with Cameroon, where Boko Haram's operating. There's poverty and conflict…'
'People are killing each other?'
He thought for a moment. He knew what I was asking. Tom now seemed to know far more about me than I knew about myself.
'We're safe. Someone gets shot or slashed by a machete and we stitch them back together again, doesn't matter what God they believe in. You work in these places and your priorities change. Opera tickets are just…opera tickets.'
'Okay, tomorrow I'll work on my shoes.' I kissed his cheek. 'Come on, let's go and eat something. I know the perfect place.'
'One of your old hangouts?'
'That would be telling.'
My tummy was in tangles. I picked at a salad, abandoned my New Year Resolution and drank too much. Just one glass usually means two. Two always turns to three. Time was going faster. We made love slower, as if it would trick the inevitable. But making love has its own rhythm and time never cared about anyone. I wanted more of him, all of him, and it was like trying to hold on to that nice dream at the moment of waking. Marie-France was a flash of paranoia, a photograph in my head deleted from his phone.
He left early for the office: emergency meetings, recruitment, fund raising, and what it conjured up for me was a misty portrait of King Canute setting up his throne on the beach and daring the waves to defy him. The tide was rising with the flotsam of disaster and I couldn't help agreeing with Ray Fowles: everything was fucked.
I made a pot of Starbucks and went back to our warm sheets with a mug of coffee and my laptop. Taking Lizzie's advice, as I secretly do, I wrote a blog on Rodolfo's shallow love in La bohème and posted it on my website the way Bradley had shown me. I sent an update to my little band of subscribers, and checked back at Google Analytics every five minutes to count the hits. In the UK, a million people were using food banks, the Tamil orphans were growing older, and I felt an absurd stab of pleasure when the first comment appeared on my blog from a furious poet defending poets.
I clicked on Facebook; 53 messages. A man in New Delhi had invited me to be his friend. BarbaraLoveAuthor from Alberta wanted me to review the first part of her trilogy 'set in the black heart of the Athabasca tar sands.' There was a photograph of Matt falling out of a taxi at a stag night in Budapest and baby pictures of babies who appeared so alike they may all have been the same baby old Bashers were sharing. Facebook creates a universe where past and present connect as if our lives are an unending wall of mirrors in which we see limitless, indiscriminate reflections, a cello in the arms of an anonymous girl, Hemingway standing with a typewriter on a high shelf, a face that looked familiar illustrating a post about striking teachers.
When I made the image bigger, I recognized Bridget McKinley, another girl from school, and it struck me how fresh and young she looked with disorderly hair and a tee-shirt with the slogan Free Schools Are Not Free. She had a defiant expression as she stared at the camera and brown eyes in a face I recalled being thin and formless but had grown sculpted and intense. I had gone out of my way to be friendly with Bridget, I made an effort to like everyone so everyone would like me. But she was one of those girls who continually seemed as if she disapproved of something and, rationally or otherwise, I had the feeling that what she disapproved of was me.
While the other girls were checking to see if their breasts had grown bigger and nattering about boys, Bridget had become a vegetarian and joined Greenpeace. That year when we started our A-levels, in 2002, she became an object of envy and suspicion when she sneaked out of the back gate, got the train to London and joined the march against the War on Iraq. War was a good time for the church, it provided a reminder of its purpose, and a Bishop came one Sunday to preach a sermon on the bombing of Baghdad as 'a necessary evil.' I stared at the shapely carved thighs of Saint Sebastian and Bella sat at my side behind a pillar reading Vogue.
We were only allowed out of school for three hours on Saturday afternoons. One time, I walked back from Broadstairs with Bridget when I had just bought a new pair of shoes, which I promptly showed her.
'How many pairs of shoes do you have now, Kate?' she asked.
'Not many. Not more than twenty.'
'If you have more than two pairs of shoes it means someone else is going barefoot.'
I put the shoes back in the bag. 'That's not true,' I said.
'It's not a mathematical equation. It's true as a concept.'
'So, how many pairs of shoes do you have?'
'Far too many,' she replied.
'Well, then…'
'The thing is to realise it, to think about it. We're lucky. Most people in the world are the opposite.'
'We can't help that. We haven't done anything…'
'No, we haven't. But that doesn't mean we can't.'
'I don't see how my shoes are going to make any difference.'
'It's like I said, Kate, it's just a concept, an i
dea.'
'I think you're just trying to be different.'
'Is that really what you think?'
'Yes, it is,' I said, but deep down I didn't think that at all.
I don't recall that we spoke again, but I always tuned in when she was talking to someone else. Bridget studied law. She now worked for the teacher's union, and her face in the photo that morning had a similar look to those friends with babies, the contentment that comes, I imagine, when you have chosen your path and are happy to be following it.
I quit Facebook and opened the closet. I was relieved when I counted my shoes that there were less than 100 pairs. I lined them up like aircraft in three squadrons, ready for combat. The kamikazes in the vanguard were ready for the Oxfam shop. In the second chevron were the old favourites with heels worn down in the cause, their future in the balance. In the rear, with medal ribbons and fancy tooling, the Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks went back in the velvet bags and boxes they had come in.
There, Bridget, are you happy now?
My phone buzzed with a text. A double xx. Two kisses. No message. I flicked through my clothes, it was easier now the closet was half empty. I chose with more care than usual, usual in those last few days, hung the outfit in a suit bag and went to the gym. I sprinted on the walker, swam in the pool, showered and brushed my hair under the dryer. It was a white underwear day. I zipped myself into the fitted green dress that matched my eyes, a green satin jacket embroidered with silver dragons and spiky green heels that had survived the clear out. I read the Guardian, phone at my aside. It was something I'd sworn I would never do: hang around waiting for a man. But this was different. It felt different. It felt acceptable.
Another message came just before midday and I rushed out to search for a taxi. The winter sun over the New Year had gone. The sky was pale with rain not falling but in the air like mist. Christmas trees, like a felled forest, littered the street with an air of spent good will. He was leaving in a couple of days and it wasn't enough time to look back to see where we had come from or forward to where we were going. It was like a piece of music ended half way through. A taxi did a U-turn. The wind whipped my hair about my face and I bundled into the pack as if escaping from something.
Tom was waiting outside his office.
'The Hurlingham Club, please,' I said to the driver as we settled into the back.
'Now it's my turn to be inspected,' he said. 'You look great.'
'It's not for you' I replied. 'Don't take any notice if Mother's rude, she says things to sound fascinating.'
'Perhaps she is.'
'To herself she is.'
'You've already made her sound interesting and I haven't even met her.'
I glanced out the window. It had started to rain, a kept promise.
'I hate this weather,' I said.
We were holding hands and I couldn't work out how this had happened. Had I reached for his hand? Or had he reached for my hand? Or had our hands reached for each other?
'How's your finger?' he asked; I had stopped binding it in tape.
'Better,' I said.
The traffic parted. The taxi whizzed along the Fulham Road.
Daddy had booked a table for four. Matt would join us if he could for coffee; people with little to do are always busy. His rowing obsession had turned to music, but his band never moved beyond the local pubs in Canterbury, where he'd quit uni in the second year. He now mixed cocktails in a hotel and was taking acting classes.
The taxi slowed as we entered open gates watched over by two men in uniform. The road narrowed through bare wintry trees clutching handfuls of frost and The Hurlingham rose up like a colonial outpost on the banks of the Thames. Everything was clipped, neat, painted, the open patio facing the lawns with an air of waiting for spring when the daffodils edged the path and waiters in white jackets curved among tables pinned with umbrellas.
The bar was full, glittery with the lights over the optics, the burnished brass and wood, strident with the sound of laughter. It crossed my mind that I'd got the day wrong when I didn't immediately see my parents. Then I spotted Father where I should have looked to begin with. He was in the corner hunched over a book, frameless round glasses perched on the end of his nose, the gin and tonic at his side like an ironic gesture. He stood as we approached his table.
'Katie, darling,' he said, kissing my cheek before turning and stretching out his hand. 'You must be Tom. I am so pleased to meet you.'
'Mr Boyd, my pleasure,' Tom said as they shook hands.
'Edward, please. Or just Ed,' Daddy added, not that I had ever heard anyone call him Ed.
'Where's Mother?' I asked him.
'Tennis tournament, doubles, a big match. She'll be here in a moment.'
I looked at the cover of the book Daddy had closed with a bookmark, it was Zoo Time, by Howard Jacobson.
'Any good?' I asked.
'Quite funny,' he replied. 'It's about a novelist who hates being a novelist and feels the need to explain himself when he starts writing a new book.'
'I rather know how he feels.'
'It is the burden of talent,' he said diplomatically, but then, he would. He stood back, holding my two hands. 'Christmas has just flown by. I've seen nothing of you.'
'It's his fault,' I said, glancing at Tom. 'He's so demanding.'
'It's true,' Tom said.
'Well, you're looking very well on it.'
The things people say. We all smiled. The two men were sizing each other up, as men do, as women do. It struck me how similar they were, the same height with the same inquisitive eyes in narrow faces, soberly dressed. Daddy was in pale tawny corduroys, a blazer with brass buttons, a shirt with a faint check and a knitted-wool tie, holiday clothes. Tom was in a tweed jacket from the same storage case as his fisherman sweater, chosen, I assumed, for the occasion. I looked from one to the other and felt as content as the prisoner in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, when he finds an extra potato.
We ordered drinks, sparkling water for me. Tom had a beer. English people don't talk until they have a drink in front of them, and it usually takes more than one before they find anything to say. Traffic: dismal; weather, yes, dismal.
A man with a red face in salmon trousers and a striped shirt bellowed with laughter. I glanced towards the bar. He was standing with a man in a kilt who I recognized as the MC at the tartan ball, his appearance like a loose thread in the fabric of New Year.
Daddy was swishing the ice about his glass. He took a sip from his drink and turned to Tom.
'Katie tells me you're working in Sri Lanka,' he said.
'Yes, with the Tamils. I sort of run an orphanage.'
'Bad business, the war. Things improving, I trust?'
'Slowly. If we could get our hands on more money we could do so much more, and much more quickly.'
'That's the problem. The same small group of people always seem to get their hands on everything and they won't let go,' Daddy said as if the thought had just occurred to him.
'The same here, wouldn't you say, in this country?'
'Absolutely. That's what I meant.'
They paused, two swimmers who have finished the first length of the pool and take a breath before setting out again.
'Then it's the system that's wrong,' said Tom. 'That's what needs to change.'
'Those in charge are extremely dexterous. When they recognize that there is a demand for change, they make small concessions, a few pennies off the price of a pint, an addition to the minimum wage.' My father shrugged as if he had said too much, but went on, talking as a hungry man eats. 'Power becomes entrenched. We can see that clearly in the developing world, but it's really no different here. We are just much cleverer at hiding it.'
Tom smiled at me across the table. 'That's what I was saying to Katie. We put bribes in brown envelopes to get people to do things they shouldn't do. In Sri Lanka, you bribe people to do things they are being paid to do.'
'Making the most of situations for yourself
is human nature. It's how we survive. Helping a friend or a relative to get a job or a home or a chance isn't nepotism, it's normal. What isn't normal, or at least it wasn't until recently, is politicians colluding with corporations and milking the system for all it's worth.'
'But how do they get away with it?'
'Successive governments over thirty years have arranged the tax and welfare system in a way that divides the pie to the advantage of the rich. Remember trickle-down economics? It was quite brilliant and totally false. As they say in the Mafia, the money always flows up. I have benefited myself with my own modest investments.'
'Katie said you're with the Foreign Office?' Tom said.
'Ah, you have spotted the hypocrisy. Yes, indeed.' Father removed his glasses, polished them and put them back on again as if they were a mask, a disguise. 'I thought I could do something useful, but I'm just an extraneous cog in that machine of entrenchment.'
'A double-agent,' I said flippantly, and immediately wished I hadn't.
We attended to our drinks. We had become reflective, serious, and I realised how rare that was, how men instinctively find things that matter to talk about and how, in the presence of women, they yield to froth, to gossip.
'That was silly. I didn't mean that,' I said, and my father took my hand across the table.
'Not at all, darling. I was being far too solemn for lunchtime.'
'Stop being the diplomat, Daddy. I was just thinking, there is so much trivia in our lives it's like a fog, we can't see through it.'
'Trivia?' Tom said.
'Yes. Celebrity gossip. Football. Erotic novels…'
'Come, come, I must object on that last point. Erotica is the oil of revolution,' Daddy said and our brief laughter came to an end as Mother strode across the bar in a yellow dress like a memory of summer.
'Everyone laughing. You must be drunk. How marvellous.'
The men leapt up, Father slightly bent, Mother studying Tom as if he were bric-a-brac, or livestock.
'This is Tom,' I said and Mother nodded.
'I'm glad you told me, I thought you may have picked up another stray on your way here.' We laughed politely. 'I understand you're a doctor?'
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