by David Abbott
Henry looks around the room. It’s true—apart from an elderly couple dining with a middle-aged woman, presumably their daughter, the oldies have gone home and the crowd is quite young. The place feels intimate, the lighting soft, the once-white tablecloths laundered to a low-wattage gray. A tropical fish tank acts as a room divider, screening the diners from the reception area by the front door. Henry tells the story of a client who installed a £40,000 aquarium in his corporate lair. It took up the whole of one wall facing the client’s desk. The office joke was that the fish found it relaxing watching the boss work.
The story reminds Jack of Terry Cartwright, the owner of a recording studio in New York. He, too, had fish tanks around the place.
“Terry was a big guy, must have been three hundred pounds easy—a fabulous eater, who lunched at the same place downtown every day. He had this nickname, ‘Terry Two Cabs.’ Everyone called him that, not to his face, mind you. The story goes that his secretary had once sent a cab to pick him up from the restaurant at the usual time of half past two. At three, the restaurant had rung her asking if she could send another cab. They said Terry had eaten the first one.”
Henry learned that Jack had been an actor in New York.
“My career wasn’t distinguished, but it was consistent. When I wasn’t waiting table, I was waiting around.”
Henry had smiled.
“And then I lucked into doing some voice-overs—that’s how I met Terry. I was good at it. I could do accents and read fast. Pretty soon, I stopped going to auditions and just did radio commercials and voice-overs for television ads. It was well paid, but essentially a foolish business. If you’ve got any brains you can only do it for so long. Maybe that’s why I lasted twenty years.”
Henry had always thought it strange that America, such a bold and swaggering presence on the world stage, liked its humor to be self-deprecating. Over the years he had run into countless Americans who had belittled themselves to raise a smile. It was often disarming, though he had soon discovered that it was not always a guarantee of humility.
“I know a little about it,” Henry said. “I feel sorry for the people who do it. It seems to me they usually get thirty seconds of time to accommodate fifty seconds of script.”
“Yes, that, and more. I’ve got some outtakes of a session Orson Welles did for Findus Foods. I’ll play it to you sometime. Orson hated doing it. Me, I just took the money. Lots of it. When I came down here, I didn’t need to work. I planned to be a tennis bum, but I got bored, so I bought a place where I could wait table again. How crazy is that?”
Nessa relaxes. She has eaten very little, but if the men notice they say nothing. The talk has been light, the subtext of the evening ignored. As Jack and Nessa confer about a dessert wine, Henry sees a slight commotion at the table of the elderly parents and daughter. The father is getting up, the women holding out restraining rather than helpful hands. The man persists, though he has trouble straightening his legs once he has hooked them from under the table. Once upright, however, he has no trouble walking. He is wearing a pale green corduroy suit, unique in this room of short-sleeve shirts and chinos. It gives him an academic air, an impression that is heightened when he speaks. He has stopped at the table next to Henry’s, where two couples have been enjoying a boisterous evening as three bottles of red wine have followed two rounds of predinner cocktails.
“Would you mind keeping the noise down, please. We’re finding it difficult to hear ourselves think.”
On his way back to his wife and daughter, the man smiles at Henry as though Henry had been complicit in the complaint. There is a lull. The offending diners are stunned into silence, but only momentarily. One of the women says loudly, “Well at least we’re not all half dead.”
“Speak for yourself,” Nessa says.
21
“I’ve got something to show you.”
Eileen fished in her bag and brought out an envelope from Boots.
“I haven’t had a chance to look at them myself yet.”
Colin watched her carefully lift the flap of the envelope and take out the wallet of photographs.
He was sitting there fully dressed. As soon as the doctor came round and gave the okay, he would be free to go. He had been in hospital for five days, longer than anyone expected. He had reacted badly to the anesthetic. Blood pressure too low, or something. His arm was now in plaster from below his elbow to his fingertips. The blokes in the ward had wanted to scrawl a few greetings on his cast, but he had told them to forget it. If he had to wear the bloody thing, the plainer the better.
Eileen showed him the photographs, holding them up like the “show-and-tell” cards her mum had used with her little brother when he was behind with his reading.
“Next.”
They were all of him.
“Next.”
She must have taken the pictures the first night he was in hospital—while he was lying there, drugged up and well out of it. Given that the prints were from Boots, the quality was not bad.
“Just keep them coming, will you?”
She had used the anglepoise reading lamp on the bedside table as a light source and the screen around the bed to bounce the light back onto his face. Quite arty-farty. For one close-up she must have had the camera down by his chin, pointing up. His swollen black eye looked like a blue hill, the stitches on his eyebrow showed up as stunted trees against the skyline. She was a quick learner. The swelling had gone down a bit since then and the stitches were coming out in two days.
She was looking pleased with herself. “Not a pretty boy, then?”
“Yeah, you didn’t have to take a whole roll to prove that.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I think you should stay your side of the camera, that’s what I think.”
He could tell she had used his Leica. It was the first camera he had ever owned; stolen it from the glove box of an Alfa when he was twelve. Normally he would have passed it on, but there was something about the way the camera felt in his hands, and he had decided to keep it. For weeks he went around with the unloaded camera clicking at this and that. The shutter action was so quiet it was like a spy camera. It went on from there; even when the thieving and temper landed him in various correction centers, he went on snapping.
Now he had three cameras—the Leica, a Nikon, and a Polaroid for the bedroom. He vowed he would never go digital.
He had met Eileen when he was doing an evening a week at the local camera club. Glamor shots. Most of the losers who turned up were pathetic—just there to poke their lenses into places they had no hope of poking their dicks. For him it was about money. Eileen had been booked as a model. She wanted to be the next Sam Fox, but she was better than that. Not as big, but better.
They had a drink after the session and he had offered to give her some help. In a month, she had moved in and they had been putting a portfolio together ever since. She was a natural, not one dodgy part on her body. Usually there was something to hide; if they had a great backside the face would make you throw up. Very few had a full deck. She would not let him do porn on a proper camera. It was fine on the Polaroid for them, but not for the book. He could wait. For the time being there would be money enough in the Page Three shots. Anyhow, the Polaroids had come in handy to wind up that freak in Chelsea. He had got that right. When he had looked in the window he had seen the paintings on the wall. The man obviously liked naked.
22
Whenever Henry was away, Mrs. Abraham found time to do a few little extras. Henry was a tidy man, but inevitably he left his mark on the house. There were splashes on bathroom mirrors, smudges on doors and cupboards from hands blackened by newsprint. In the kitchen she found smears of shoe polish on the floor and in the hall there were always kick-marks on the skirting board under the mirror. Mrs. Abraham noted the signs of Henry’s occupancy with a cold eye and cleaned up behind him. By the time she left the house at 1:00, only the clothes in the wardrobes would say that this was a
house where a man lived alone.
When he traveled she did the things she could not manage in a normal week: shampooing the carpet, washing the paintwork, getting the curtains to the cleaners, or most fiddly of all, dusting the books. That Henry never noticed these ministrations did not discourage her. The enemy was dirt. It was her own private war.
With the books, she did a shelf at a time, starting with the top shelf and working down. It was obvious that Henry did not arrange his books logically or by category. Nevertheless, she imagined that he had a system and it was not for her to question why a gardening book by a Russell Page should be next to a memoir of a life in the theater by a Peter Brook. She took great pains to ensure that each and every book went back to its pre-allotted space. In point of fact, Henry did have a system, based on the height of the book and the color of the book jacket’s spine. He avoided color clashes and blocks of a particular color and tried to space taller books at intervals across a shelf so there was a uniform look. If the spine proved too vibrant to fit in, he would simply throw away its dust jacket. He was slightly ashamed of this system and knew that the disposal of the jackets was financial folly.
Mrs. Abraham was at the top of the stepladder when the Polaroids slipped out of the book. As fate would have it, like toast, all three photographs fell butter side down. She came down the ladder still clutching the host volume of poetry and expected she would be retrieving some misplaced pictures of a young Tom or of a smiling Nessa.
She turned over the two close-ups first—so the final picture came as something of a relief. She realized that she had thought the close-ups were of Nessa. It was not that Mrs. Abraham was particularly shocked. Sex was sex and bodies were bodies and she had done enough laundry in this house to know that it had never been a convent. But for all that, she did not have Nessa down as someone who would open her legs for a camera, at least not with a straight face, so to speak. So who was this girl? Did Henry know her?
She had sometimes wondered what Mr. Cage had been doing for sex since the divorce. Whatever it was, he had not been doing it at home. For a year or two, she had come in on a Monday morning alert for a whiff of perfume in the air, for evidence in the bed or bathroom, but there had been nothing. No contraceptives in the cabinet, no sweet messages on the answering machine, no letters of endearment in the toast rack. She was beginning to doubt that he was actually alive down there.
She took the photographs and the book to the chair by the window and sat down. This needed thinking through. Her first instinct was to put the photographs back in the book, no one any the wiser. But what if Henry had kept the photographs at a particular page in the book? She fanned the pages to check that there were no others tucked in somewhere and noticed handwriting on the title page. She knew at a glance that it was not Henry’s.
First U.S. Edition. £40.
Of course! The book was secondhand! That was the answer. Mr. Cage had probably shoved it straight up on to the shelf, unread. He could not possibly read all the books he ordered. He had only been away a week and already there was a stack of catalogs waiting for him on the kitchen table. Content now, she took the Polaroids into the kitchen and put them in the bin. On Thursday they would be in a landfill. No need to torment him with what he could not have.
She returned to her work and dusted her way down the shelves. She was thorough and had a respect for books. If it was a gardening book or something on architecture she would occasionally pause to look at some of the pictures. It took her two hours to do the books in the front room. She decided she would tackle the library tomorrow.
At ten past one she left. She was running a little later than usual, but there was no rush, her afternoon job did not start until 2:00. She locked the three locks on the front door, the top one so high she had to stand on tiptoes.
When she turned round a young couple were standing by the gate admiring the garden. The woman was taking photographs.
“Does look nice, doesn’t it? You should see it in the summer.” No need to mention that the garden did not belong to her.
“Not long to wait, then.”
The young man seemed affable and opened the gate for her, slightly awkwardly for one of his arms was in plaster.
“We always stop and look at this garden.”
“Yes, it’s lovely.”
The woman had lowered the camera. A pleasant voice and Mrs. Abraham smiled. It took her a moment to realize that she had seen this woman before. But this was the first time with clothes on.
“Oh, I’ll forget my head one of these days. I’ve left my purse inside.” She hurried back along the path.
In the kitchen, she retrieved the photographs from the dustbin and got the steps out again to put them back in the book. If they were in the wrong place, so what? Mr. Cage would be too embarrassed to mention it.
23
That evening, Jack had arranged a poker game with his tennis pals and had cried off the dancing at the Ritz-Carlton. The previous week they had gone as a threesome. On that occasion, apart from two visits to the bathroom, Henry had sat in his chair, social enough, but not dancing. There had been a period in the sixties when the easy rhythms of the twist had got him onto the floor, but when Chubby Checker had checked out, so had Henry.
Now, without Jack, he was not sure of his role.
“Don’t worry, Henry, we don’t have to dance. Though it wouldn’t harm you to walk me round, just once. Nobody will be looking at your feet. Indeed, I rather hope that everyone will be looking at me.”
Nessa sat on the edge of her chair. She had done something to her hair. It was pulled back so that her face, no longer framed by a dark bob, appeared less pallid. She was wearing green silk, the color of moss kept short of daylight. The gown was high on the neck, long in the sleeve, and when she walked the full skirt caressed the ground. She had bought the dress the day before on Worth Avenue and the effort had sent her early to her bed. But the dress was a triumph. Hidden in its silken folds she felt whole again, even glamorous. She gazed at the dancers, longing for Henry to take her arm.
He watched her and misread the brightness of her eyes. She had always looked tenderly on public displays of affection and he knew that the couples on the floor would delight her. Henry saw only elderly people dancing, but she would see enduring love, the survival of romance. He knew he had the power to make her happy. He knew she wanted a public confirmation of their togetherness, partners in more than a dance. All he had to do was hold her hand and walk forty steps onto the dance floor and then take another hundred while he was there. What was so big deal about that? Why did he hesitate? He saw her knee lift and fall under the silk of her gown, her tapping foot betraying her eagerness to dance. Even now, at the fifty-fifth minute of the eleventh hour, he held back. Why? It was cruel and stupid. When this dance was over, he would ask her for the next.
“I got cleaned out, so I came over. My God, Nessa—you look wonderful, that is some frock!”
Jack did not sit down but hovered, waiting for the music to stop. When it did, he offered Nessa his hand.
As she stood, she looked at Henry.
“I’ll get some more wine,” he said as they walked off.
24
Jack drives a 1962 Impala station wagon, sprung like a bed and as wide as a dinghy. At a pinch the two bench seats can take eight people and there’s still an acre of space for stuff in the back. He had bought the car when he first came down to Florida. He had chosen it not for its utility, but as a symbol. Confirmation that he no longer wanted a slot in the fast lane. The BMWs he had once owned he now derided. “I’m out of the race,” he said. As the years went by, it became clear to his friends that he had not left the race; he had simply redefined it.
Now he drove doggedly in the center lane, no more a speedster, but a self-appointed arbiter of vehicular character. Anything post-1970 had little chance of earning his approval. He reserved his most withering scorn for minivans.
“You get a lot of seats and no luggage space, or a lot
of space and no seats. Some deal! This beauty gave you both—still does.”
They were driving to Miami airport to pick up Tom, Jane, and Hal and one hour into the trip Henry had realized there was no need to reply.
On cue, a Chrysler minivan drew up alongside in the outside lane, its headlights flashing at a slow-moving Ford in front.
“See what I mean? It’s just a van in Sunday clothes. Slap a sign on the side and it could be full of dry cleaning or copper tubing. Whatever happened to style?”
As the slab-sided Chrysler cut into the middle lane, Jack was glad of the opportunity to press the chrome bar on the steering wheel and send out a reproachful bleat.
“I love that sound,” he said. He pushed the bar again, unconcerned that the mellow note fell on deaf ears. The Chrysler had already lurched back into the fast lane and was moving on.
“You want to hear that Orson Welles tape?”
“Fine.”
“You know the setup? Orson is in the sound booth and the film is on a loop coming over on a monitor so he can sync the words. He can see the sound engineer through the window and they can talk to each other over the intercom. There are a couple of agency guys in there with the engineer and they kind of direct the thing.”
Jack pushes the button and Henry feels a rush of pleasure as the rich tones of Citizen Kane and Harry Lime reach out to the furthest corners of the Impala.
ORSON WELLES: “We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire where Mrs. Buckley lives. Every July, peas grow there”—do you really mean that?
AGENCY PRODUCER: Yeah, so in other words, I—I’d start half a second later …
ORSON WELLES: Don’t you think you really want to say “July” over the snow? Isn’t that the fun of it?