by David Szalay
Two hours later they were still in London, stuck in traffic not far from Shooter’s Hill.
‘Where we going?’ Alison said—she had expected Heathrow and Zanzibar.
‘Dover.’
She laughed. ‘We going to drive to Zanzibar then?’
To drive to Zanzibar in an old brown Rolls—as an idea, it was not without style. However, Freddy said, ‘I thought we’d… spend a few days in Paris first.’
‘Oh. Alright.’
She lit her tenth cigarette of the journey with the car’s chunky cigar lighter. They were both smoking. Smoke poured from the lowered windows. Inasmuch as he had had any sort of plan, it had probably been to spend a few days somewhere—a hotel somewhere. Yes, perhaps Paris. As they finally merged onto the motorway and picked up speed, however, he found that spending a few days with Alison was the last thing he wanted to do. He was already sick of her. She was talking quite a lot now and he wished she would just shut the fuck up. When he put on Radio 3 and found, to his joy—it was exactly what he wanted—Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, she listened with a frown for a minute or two. Then she said, ‘Do we need to listen to this? It’s really depressing.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We do.’
In his peripheral vision he could see her fat knees, her stomach straining in her short skirt… She was wearing a short skirt, sheer tights, tall leather boots. Proper mutton-dressed-as-lamb stuff. Freddy was never embarrassed. Nevertheless, he wasn’t particularly looking forward to stepping out with her.
Dover ferry port on an overcast Saturday afternoon in March. As someone once said—Sad like work. The indifferent sea. The stony embrace of the breakwater.
Jouncing on its sluttish suspension the old Rolls freewheeled down the slope, and squeaked to a stop in front of the P & O ticket office. It was while he was in there that Freddy settled on what to do.
With seagull outriders the ugly ship moved slowly away from the pieces of off-white cliff. They spent the two-hour voyage entirely in the on-board pub, the screwed-to-the-floor table pitching and tossing. Somewhere a huge engine was thrumming. It elicited a steady tinkling from the bar. Outside the salt-blurred windows drizzle slicked the green iron decks. The question of who was going to drive when they made landfall in France, since they were now both totally pissed, was not asked. For Freddy it was not pertinent. As the ship entered Calais harbour, he said he had to visit the Gents. And he did visit the Gents—the doors of the stalls swinging and slamming—then he made his way quietly to the foot passengers’ disembarkation point, disembarked, walked to the station and took a train to Paris. He hadn’t had any luggage anyway. He had nothing except his passport and a scrumpled, folded envelope with £10,000 in it—the proceeds of the ‘touch’. He spent the last of it a week or so later on a first-class Eurostar ticket, and a taxi from Waterloo to Cheyne Walk.
He knew that Alison would be there. He knew that she would have had to account for her absence that Saturday. He expected her to have done so without involving him in the story. He expected, essentially, everything to be okay. What he did not know—though he should probably have thought of this—was that the ferrymen had not allowed Alison, who was hardly able to stand up, who was tearful and incoherent, to drive the Rolls off the ship. One of them had parked it on the quayside tarmac for her, warned her in pidgin English not to try to drive anywhere that day herself, and left her there in the whipping salt-spray. She would have phoned Anselm straight away, except for one thing. This Freddy did not know about, and had no way of knowing about. Sentimentally, unsoberly, she had left a note for her husband saying that she and Freddy were going to start a new life in another part of the world, and that she was sorry, and that she would always think of him with love, and that she thanked him for everything he had done for her, and that she was sorry, and… Please please forgive me, Alison.
She spent most of Saturday night sobbing in a hotel in Calais, and very early the next morning took a ferry to Dover and thence, at the wheel of the unwieldy Rolls, made her mascara-smudged way to London. There she had a tearful, hour-long negotiation through the intercom before Anselm finally let her into the house. Once inside, she threw herself on his mercy. Speaking through steady tears, she said that yes, something had indeed once passed between Freddy and herself. (Anselm lowered his face.) She said that Freddy was obsessed with her, that he had forced her to write that terrible note and more or less kidnapped her. How he had forced her to write the note she did not say, nor did Anselm ask. He had no interest in picking holes in her story. He sighed, very tight-throated. Then, sensing that he wanted more, she told him that Freddy was not a Russian prince or princeling or anything like that. He was just an out-of-work journalist. This Freddy had told her only a few weeks before—and he wished he hadn’t as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He had told her out of vanity, of course. Vanity. As he well knew, it was his worst weakness.
When he turned up at the house that dreary Wednesday afternoon and found the locks changed, he immediately feared the worst.
‘Yes?’ crackled Anselm’s voice, suspicious over the intercom.
‘Hi. Anselm. It’s me.’
A long, fizzing silence. ‘What do you want?’
‘What do I want?’ Freddy said with a laugh. ‘I live here, don’t I?’
‘No. You don’t.’
Something was obviously very wrong.
Finally he managed to persuade Anselm to let him into the house—he had his own hour-long negotiation through the intercom—saying that he would be able to ‘explain everything’. Though it was far from obvious to him how he would do this as, warily saying, ‘Anselm?’ he mounted the spongy stairs.
He found him in the first-floor drawing room. No lights on. A deathly atmosphere. And worryingly, he was holding an iron poker.
‘You lied to me, Fréderic,’ Anselm said.
Freddy’s intention was of course to deny everything, and the first thing he said was—‘What are you talking about?’
‘You aren’t Russian.’ The only sound was a trickle of plaster dust falling from the ceiling. ‘Your father’s a British diplomat. And his father was a policeman in Swansea.’
That was a shock. Freddy had not expected Anselm ever to find that out. There were two obvious options—deny that his father was Oliver Munt of the FO or…
‘Yes, but my mother—’
‘Your mother’s from St Albans,’ Anselm said, in a strange voice, somehow monotone and sing-song at the same time. He had evidently done his homework—there might even have been a private detective involved, for all Freddy knew—and faced with this he suddenly felt very tired, too tired to pretend. Too tired even to explain. And what was there to explain? It was all fairly obvious. ‘Who told you?’ he said. ‘Alison?’ Perhaps it was a mistake to have left her in Calais. In Calais of all places… Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned in Calais. Though she didn’t know any of the details about his parents—just that he wasn’t a Russian prince.
And then there was another shock.
‘I know that you… you once slept with her,’ Anselm said, hanging his head and looking at the floor. He made a strange little expectorant noise. ‘She told me.’
Now this was very strange. Why on earth had she done that? It just didn’t make sense.
‘I thought you were my friend, Fréderic.’
For a long time Freddy just stood there. Then he shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said.
‘Please just leave.’
‘Anselm…’
The poker twitched.
‘My things?’
Still staring at the floor, Anselm nodded.
Freddy went upstairs and put his things into the khaki haversack. They fitted quite easily—he had few possessions. He wondered whether to try to speak to Alison on his way out; he was puzzled as to why she had told Anselm everything. There must be something he didn’t know about. Some factor
he wasn’t taking into account.
He descended the stairs, with their steep mahogany handrail; the series of landings whose scurfy sash windows were filled with mature trees.
On his way out, he looked into the first-floor drawing room. Anselm was nowhere to be seen. The whole house, in fact, was eerily silent.
Outside in the twilight he shifted the haversack onto his shoulder and walked to the tube station. He had just enough money for the ticket to Russell Square.
*
While Freddy, haversack on shoulder, was taking his place in the ululating lift at Russell Square station, James was sprawled unsuspectingly on the sofa in Mecklenburgh Street wondering whether to nip out to the Four Vintners on Gray’s Inn Road for a half-litre of Jack Daniel’s or dark rum. Sitting forward, he stared for a few more seconds at the TV. All-weather racing from Wolverhampton, seedily floodlit. Encased in puffa jackets, the pundits held their microphones in numb hands, exhaling mist into the frore Midlands night. Without switching them off—merely silencing them—he jacketed and scarfed himself, leashed Hugo and went out into the street upstairs.
In spite of the many messages he had left since Sunday, he had still heard nothing from Katherine—a silence that seemed increasingly meaningful—and he was miserable. He had spent the day drifting through London like a wind-blown plastic bag. He had a solitary lunch at one of the Bangladeshi places on Brick Lane—one of the unpretentious ones up near the Bethnal Green Road end. Plastic cups, Formica table-tops. The sound of traffic from the door. When he had eaten, he wandered up to Victoria Park—vacant in the spring sunshine—and from there walked along the towpath. He passed the flat where he had once lived, on the other side of the black, sun-struck water. It was strange to see it now, someone else’s home. There was some unfamiliar outdoor furniture on the terrace—and how strong, as he stood there, was the sense of being shut out of the past! The sense of the evanescence of things, experience, time—no solider than the jellying light on the undersides of the bridges. The sense of time slipping very slowly away.
From the start, it seemed to him now, he had not felt enough. At the important moments, there was just an insufficiency of feeling. When she told him that Fraser had been in touch with her. When she told him, two weeks later, that she wanted to see Fraser. And when she said to him, in the half-light the next morning, ‘What do you think I should do?’ It was not that he thought he had failed, on those occasions and others, to express what he felt. He had just not seemed to feel enough when feeling was most needed. It troubled him, this sense that it was a failure of feeling, and not a failure of expression. A man unable to express his feelings. That was magazine normality, nothing to worry about. A man unable to feel his feelings. Well, that did sound worse.
He thought of the night they spent in that hotel in Cambridge, of how he had said, as they lay there next to each other, ‘I think I’m in love with you.’ She sighed as if she wished he hadn’t said it, and several seconds elapsed, each worse than the last. It was a moment when he wished she was more able to pretend, when he wished she was not so painfully honest, so subject to the tyranny of the truth. She said straight out that she was not in love with him, and suddenly he felt very unsure of everything. What had he meant when he said, ‘I think I’m in love with you’? He did not seem to know. Had it been somehow speculative then? Had he just been seeing how it sounded? And then, while he was still wondering what he had meant, she said, ‘This isn’t what I expected.’ This presumably being the fact that he was in love with her. Or thought he was. Or said he was. Or said he thought he was.
In the morning they went to see her alma mater; she persuaded the porter to let them into the wide quad. When they had done that, they went for a walk. Something had stirred up the weather overnight. The tall trees were swaying. They walked up into a small wood, still in the browns and greys of its winterwear, loudly inhaling the wind on its hill.
There are memories that make his heart yurr-yurr like an engine struggling to start. Their setting is uniformly wintry. A few London afternoons of wintry exiguity. Thinking of them, he wondered why they had not been enough, why they had taken him only as far as that hedged, faint-hearted statement in the old-fashioned hotel in Cambridge, with its squeaky floorboards and its tired dried flowers. Something had failed. That was how he felt. Something had failed in him. (It was quite frightening.) The engine of his heart.
He used to eye the men fishing from the towpath with scepticism when he jogged past them. He never saw them enjoy so much as a twitch on their lines. They just perched on stools, and inspected their seething maggot jars. Were there any fish in that oily water? That was what he had always wondered, as he pounded the path with sweat-fogged eyes.
He took the tube home and tried to interest himself in the televised horse racing. There was a meeting at Taunton, and the last there was quickly followed by the first at Wolverhampton. He had by then been sprawled on the sofa for several hours winning and losing pennies, and was wondering whether to nip out to the Four Vintners—a dusty cage of booze on a bald corner—for a half-litre of Jack Daniel’s or dark rum.
He was starting down the metal steps with the blue plastic off-licence bag when he noticed there was someone in the unlit area. It was not Katherine, as for a fraction of a second he wildly hoped. It was Freddy. And ominously, he seemed to have luggage with him.
‘Freddy,’ James said, unleashing Hugo and following him down the steps. ‘What’s up?’ Freddy was looking suspiciously at the inquisitive St Bernard. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem.’
‘What?’
‘I need to stay for a day or two.’
James stopped on the penultimate step. ‘Why?’
‘Anselm kicked me out.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well…’ James sighed helplessly. ‘Haven’t you got anywhere else to stay?’
‘No.’
‘What about your parents’ flat?’ James knew that Freddy’s parents had a small flat in Bayswater.
‘Tenants in it.’
Freddy’s father was in the final posting of his career—Her Majesty’s ambassador to Surinam. The previous year a sympathetic superior had taken pity on him and, knowing how important it was to him—as it was to all of them—had looked around the world to see if there was a suitable ambassadorship opening up. Thus he was sent to Paramaribo for twenty months, and would sign off as an His Excellency, which was the only thing, in professional terms, that he had ever wanted. That and the K. Sir Oliver and Lady Munt.
Still standing in the freezing area, their son was now explaining to James that he couldn’t stay in a hotel because he didn’t have any money.
‘What about the money from the touch?’ James said sternly.
Freddy was disinclined to say that he had spent the money from the touch on world-renowned hotels and Michelin-starred meals and €1,000-a-night escorts in Paris. Which was what he had spent it on. And yes, it had been foolish to spend it all. He had not intended to. The fact was, there was one particular €1,000-a-night escort, an American—her work name was Lauren—and he had become… possibly slightly obsessed with her? She had had €4,000 of his money anyway. She was tall and sandy-haired, with freckles on her nose. Twentyish. After the second night he had wondered whether she would see him… He forgets how he put it exactly. Essentially he was asking for a freebie. He had made what he knew very well was the innocent’s mistake of thinking she liked him just because she seemed to when he was paying her €1,000 a night. She handled the situation with typical tact. She said she would love to, but she had a fiancé. ‘A fiancé?’ Freddy said, with mild incredulity. ‘M-hm.’ ‘Does he live in Paris?’ ‘M-hm.’ ‘Is he French?’ ‘He’s French.’ ‘Does he know what you do?’ She fudged on that. However, in her mind it seemed quite simple—if she had sex with someone else without being paid for it (even if she took less than her us
ual fee), she was being unfaithful to him. Though Freddy tried to shift her from this position, she was sweetly immovable. So finally he paid her another €1,000 and they went to eat. Later, in his splendid suite at the Georges Cinq, he said, ‘So you’re not being unfaithful now?’ The question was slightly unfair, in that she was unable to speak—her mouth was full—but she shook her head.
She was there when he fell asleep, never when he woke. She always managed to slip out without waking him, and he never saw her in the frailer morning light.
Of course, it had been his intention to save something, to leave himself a small emergency fund. Then on his final night in Paris he had found himself scraping together his last €1,000 and dialling her familiar number. Yes, he was possibly slightly obsessed with her. He was still thinking about her now.
He told James he had paid the money to Anselm.
‘And he still threw you out?’
‘I owed him much more than that.’
‘So he took ten grand from you, and then threw you out?’
‘Yes.’
James sighed, for about the tenth time, and shook his head.
Freddy laughed and said, ‘Look, can I at least come inside? I’m fucking freezing.’
So they went in.
It was warmish in the living-room, where the electric fire was on. ‘What have you got there?’ Freddy said, unwinding his scarf. ‘Jack Daniel’s?’ He had dumped the haversack in the hall. ‘Yes, please.’