by Adam Thorpe
‘Everything’s fine,’ Jack said, sensing a sob rise in his chest.
He could so easily break into pieces. He bit his lip until it hurt. The room, the ward next door, the corridors, the whole place, smelt of the body turned inside out. All those tubes and pipes and wires. Like the Pompidou Centre. He and Milly had visited the Pompidou Centre very soon after they’d met. He’d once had an early, strident composition of his performed there in a festival, before a vast flickering bank of televisions each showing a motorcycle accident in a race, the rider crawling away with flames on his back like the plates on a stegosaurus. Over and over again.
‘I’m very glad,’ said his mother, unable to see him cover his face with his hands. ‘She isn’t only what I call well bred, but kind and thoughtful with it.’
TEN
He thought that Milly would get over it, would come round to forgiving him, to acknowledging that what they’d had together for so many years was worth salvaging. He had no idea whether Marjorie and Richard had been told, but he guessed they must have been. They would try to talk her round to forgiveness, surely. They were not stick-in-the-muds. The du Crane history was full of illegitimacies and sexual scandal.
It was Monday again, at last, and still preternaturally warm, if threatening to be wet. He was on his way to Kensington Gardens via Hampstead and the awkward journey allowed him to think. He’d left himself an extra hour; he could do with a stroll, on his own, before meeting up with Kaja and Jaan. Afterwards, he would stay the weekend in Hampstead, in his own house. He had not been thrown out, not yet. He wondered what the legal position would be if Milly decided to chuck him, to enforce her threat about him leaving her.
He had decided to thrash a lot of this out with Kaja, to let her know exactly what was going on. If she were to fling her arms around him and say, ‘Then come and please live with Jaan and me for ever, my darling Jack,’ he knew what he would do. He would be resolute. He would say: ‘Let’s play it by ear.’
He could (he realised, as the Tube carriage swayed and rattled) shift the four bombs on baroque timps to sound after the cymbal crash, bringing in the choir’s intoning underneath. For the voices, he was borrowing from Shostakovich’s ‘Tayniye znaki’, or ‘Secret Signs’, one of his Seven Romances on Poems of Aleksandr Blok, Op. 127 – an allusive, personal reference that would be lost to most of the audience, even in the Purcell Room, but which had helped him find a way through, musically as well as emotionally. On the day of the bombs, at the moment they had gone off, he had been listening to that very work on CD. The score scribbled itself in front of his eyes, the woman opposite deep in Il Codice Da Vinci and unaware of what the staring was all about.
Jack realised that he had never read to his son. He didn’t even know which books his son was reading. Kaja was no doubt seeing to the cultural and literary side of things. Jack felt like an appendage, uninvolved. Milly had told him recently that the second most used word in the English language was ‘Coca-Cola’.
‘It ought to be love’, she’d said. ‘Or care.’
‘As in I don’t care,’ Jack had quipped.
They’d wondered what it would have been in prehistoric times, and thought seriously about it and then had a laugh.
He missed her, badly. He missed her strength, her keeping him and the world in order, her failure to do so. He was going to the park via Hampstead in order to fetch the cricket set. It would have been odd to have taken a toy cricket set down to Hayes, it would have needed explaining, but now he regretted not doing so, wasting time as he was on the Northern Line.
Maybe Mill was right, he thought – seeing his reflection in the carriage’s tunnel-barrelled glass: he did need a haircut. A complete revamp. A change of style. Dimmed flatteringly in reflection, his face seemed about the same as when he would look at himself in the school bus decades ago. Where had he got, since then? Anywhere at all? Could he ever find an instrumental equivalent for this awful, disembowelling sound of a Tube train’s interior at full whining pelt? Cage would have used a tape, Cardew would have said it was enough to hear the real thing, but those times were over. The bombings piece was not a narrative, it was a meditation, a memorial. It was vertical, not horizontal. It must be chiselled out by his own despair: and thinking this, the score in front of his eyes immediately vanished, as if someone had rolled it up. He was not in despair, that’s why. He was just… what was the word … dispassionate? The high white clouds passed over Middlesex, humming over his life, and then they were around him, part of him, and he was looking down on his own life. It had always been like that. He was going to explain all this to Milly. And to Kaja. Perhaps he already had done. So he would re-explain it.
The Italian woman looked up, her eyes so glazed she didn’t smile back at him. Someone further along was testing the ring tones on their mobile. It kept trilling something very similar to James Last’s Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, slithering into Jack’s head and staying there all day.
On opening his front door (was it still his? Had it ever been his?) he stepped on a letter that Marita hadn’t put into the wicker tray. That meant she’d not been in since this morning. Marita would have appreciated having the house to herself for a week. The scent of cigarettes, rather sweet – maybe of joints – lingered in the back sitting room. Marita had found a Greek boyfriend who smoked dope as others drank tea. Milly thought he was disastrous, but as Jack had told her, she was not their ward and he was very rich. A used coffee mug sat on the mat in front of the fireplace, with a teaspoon stuck inside it.
The house felt strange, like a new edition of an old familiar book. He had an hour to play with before setting off for the park. He went upstairs and retrieved the junior cricket set from where he’d put it, under the couch in his study. He was looking forward to the expression on Jaan’s shy face, the dimpled smile on seeing the cricket set, the realisation that it was his to keep.
The letter he’d stepped on was addressed to Mr Jack Middleton, in rounded handwriting rather like Milly’s, but smaller. He opened it, sitting in the plant-fugged garden room with the doors wide open to the unseasonal sultriness, the junior cricket set leaning next to him. This is what the letter said.
Dearest Jack,
By the time you get this I will be returned to Estonia with Jaan. In fact, I will be in Haaremaa. This is where I want to bring up our son. My old friend I told about, called Toomas, the really fine carpenter, will be waiting for us.
Why am I doing this?
Because I know you will be only the weekend father, come and go when you wish, playing cricket or football once a week, keeping your wife happy – as I can understand. Maybe it’s my fault that I can’t support this. Jack, you are very English, very polite, taking what you want. Also, Jaan is not happy in London. Me neither. He is bullied and teased for his foot, and the air is bad for him. I am often taken for something I am not, because I am from the Baltic States and so-called blonde. I wanted you to see your son and then maybe … So I feel I have done OK by my duty.
Sorry about this. When Jaan wants to, he will know who his father really is. Right now it’s Toomas, who he loves from a baby. For the present he will learn viola with a friend on the island, a retired professional musician, a bit old-fashioned from Soviet orchestra days but she is a honey. For three years or about that, it’s OK. Then maybe we’ll go to Tallinn on the coach once a fortnight. I will be working on the Haaremaa Radio, studying too. You soon can listen to the station on Internet.
Jack, I will send you photos of Jaan sometimes, if you would like that. This is the best way. To say goodbye is not possible.
‘Which is the true key of the sky?’ That’s Jaan Kaplinski. I thought of you as a kid, looking and hearing the clouds in Heayes, when I read that. And there’s Akhmatova: ‘Secret is the source of the light.’
With love always,
Kaja
‘But my wife isn’t happy!’ he heard his mind shouting. He looked at the junior cricket set in its clear plastic case like a stocking. He stared at
it for a long time. He let the letter fall from his hand. On an ashtray next to his chair, under a succulent with scarlet tips on its leaves, lay the remains of three joints. He felt he could die like this, just let himself go, in a fatal trance until decomposition set in. Flies crawling over his face. But Marita would find him in time.
He experienced the weight of his mother’s head brace, the sensation of its screws in his skull bone. He was sure she was not going to die today or tomorrow or even next week, whatever the doctor said. She was Jaan’s granny. She was Jack’s mum. Donald was Jaan’s gramp. Donald was Jack’s dad. It was all very clear.
And he was Jaan’s dad. He wanted to teach him a bit of cricket. To take him to the Toy Museum in Bethnal Green, which apparently was about to close for a year. All very simple and clear. But he was nailed to the chair. The plants breathing all around him, withdrawing the air, pumping out new gases. The big limewood table that had cost a fortune, that had been scarred by life in the past, by past lives. A job to get it in.
He felt Jaan’s absence in his chest. A great hole torn out of his chest. He felt afloat, floating, but shipped by this feeling he had in his chest. It was sending him under. Of course he would not have timps for the bombs! The explosion would start at the beginning and finish at the end. It was a millisecond extended into twenty minutes. It would be a cello in second position in C and over it would be the most terrible tearing of woodwind and boy trebles and soft Arabic percussion. He heard it all as he stared at the junior cricket set, its pale wood blackening and whitening alternately as his eyes played tricks, fatigued by the fixity – and by seeing the score penned carefully and clearly in ink, the ink gleaming like brain fluid on the unrolling sheets in his head.
In one sense, Kaja’s letter made everything easier. In another, it made everything harder. This created cross-currents, of the rip-tide type, in Jack. He phoned Wadhampton Hall that evening and got a rather diffident Richard.
‘Ah yes, Jack. I’m sure you want to speak to Millicent.’
Millicent?
‘If I can.’
‘I’ll go and see.’
Jack felt like a vague, unwanted boyfriend, not a son-in-law. Richard was away at least ten minutes. Now and again Jack tried to call out into the phone. He imagined Richard wandering over the vast house, popping out into the grounds, slow and a little lame these days. He thought he could hear the rooks, the occasional far-off strike of mallet on fence post, the sighs of the freshness of the country air.
Eventually, there were hollow footsteps and a clumsy crackling and Richard came back on the phone.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Richard. Any luck?’
He’d got very nervous, as a jejune boyfriend might have done.
‘No luck, sorry.’
‘She’s gone out?’
‘Ah, well, I think she’s not quite ready.’
‘Ready?’
‘To talk. You know.’
Richard was treating him as a bomb-disposal expert would treat a bomb.
‘Can you tell her that they’ve gone, Richard? I mean, for ever?’
‘Who’s gone?’
‘What’s she told you?’
‘Oh, that you’ve been having a spot of bother between you. I believe a nipper’s involved. Not Millicent’s.’
‘Right. Just tell her they’ve gone back. For good.’
‘Wilco.’
Jack thought he could hear someone talking urgently in the background. He didn’t think it was Milly.
‘And how’s your mother?’ asked Richard, as if – rather unconvincingly – he’d just thought of it himself.
‘Pretty bad,’ said Jack.
‘Oh dear,’ said Richard, equally unconvincingly. ‘So sorry to hear it.’
Richard must have told Milly, in the end, because she came back the next day. Jack had spent the interim contemplating the darkness. That is, he had seriously weighed the possibility of death being a better option for him than life, as if he was choosing between two savings deposits. He felt the hospital had infiltrated his blood, his bones, his heart. It was tough watching his mother suffer, his father hope, while life went on in its random, violent, spurious way. On an impulse he’d looked in Mill’s wardrobe and noticed that the little tub of their dead child’s ashes had gone. She might have asked, he thought. If only people would ask. It had been labelled Max Middleton. But he couldn’t blame her.
But he could blame Kaja. He would write to her once he’d got over his anger. She was unstable, he’d decided. No, she’d wanted to punish him. And she’d succeeded. He was really cross.
To see or talk to an old friend – Nick Bradford, say, or ‘Breakdown’ Barnaby (Howard was still in Sicily) – felt like a betrayal of his instinctive need to be alone. This made it all the weirder, then, that he ended up the next evening drinking champagne in Edward Cochrane’s garden.
Right at the wrong moment, just when he was at his lowest, sitting in the twilight in his own garden, the front doorbell had rung. He had this wild notion that it might be Kaja.
Instead, it was Edward Cochrane.
‘How-de-do!’
‘I’m busy, Edward.’
‘We’re two of a pair, and don’t deny it.’
Jack had forgotten about Edward’s father committing suicide. Now, seeing the man’s puppyish, sallow face, its pug nose peeled by the sun, he remembered it.
‘Not necessarily. It’s not like that.’
‘My advice is, keep yourself busy. Get a job. Helping old ladies, serving in Oxfam, whatever.’
‘I have got a bloody job, Edward. And I have been helping old ladies. My mum, anyway.’
Edward cocked his head to one side. ‘I mean, involving other people. Not so much wanking time.’
‘Thanks for the hot tip, mate.’
He started to close the door, but Edward held it open with a firm hand.
‘Fancy a barbie? Just the two of us moping, muzzling some champers?’
‘A barbie? It’s the fag end of October in England.’
‘It’s Australia. Hottest recorded. Noticed? They’re sunbathing in Yorkshire.’
‘I don’t, not really.’
‘It’s all ready to go. Stop you topping yourself. Prime cuts. Only bought them this arvo. Fresh as daisies. Marshmallows for afters.’
Jack felt hungry, suddenly. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast – the hospital lunch had been curry again, curried eggs, mingling with the bleach smell; it had put him off food for several hours.
So it was that he found himself in Edward’s tidy garden, full of water features, swirls of brick paving and tasteful classical statues, slipping into the sweet inebria of a Bollinger. He turned down his host’s offer to put on the Rolling Stones as background ambience.
‘Milly told me the gist,’ Edward explained, breezily. He was clearly delighted by their troubles. ‘Corker and son.’
‘Why the hell did she tell you? That’s really annoying.’
‘I admit I probed. Mill and Lilian were great buddies, you know.’
‘You weren’t.’
‘No, but I have a way with women.’
‘Not with my wife, I hope.’
Edward laughed, prodding the glowing coals on the fancy brick-built barbecue, his thighs emerging enormous from his jungle shorts. Leaves fell from the trees and flared into fire. ‘Alas, no. Way above my game. She wanted me to keep an eye on the house. Neighbourhood watch. Very distraught, she was, underneath. For God’s sake, you’re even barmier than I thought. Fancy going off with a Baltic bimbo when you had free official access to Milly du Crane.’
‘She wasn’t a bimbo, but I agree with you.’
A sudden lurch of loss hit him through the fume of bubbly. He watched Edward coax the charcoal, trying to imagine him as a boy. It wasn’t difficult. He was stunted, in some way. It explained a lot about him. The darkness was settling thickly now – or would have done, if the garden hadn’t been lit like a runway by three outside halogen spots. Edward squirt
ed barbecue fluid on the coals and they leapt up, charring the thick slabs of meat.
‘Watch you don’t squirt the food,’ said Jack.
‘Trust me, my man. This is bachelor country. We have to stick together. Whoosh! Fangyew, lads, fangyew.’
Jack heard the phone ringing faintly from his own house next door. He’d left the French windows wide open, which was probably unwise. Maybe it was the hospital, or his dad. Or Milly. Or even Kaja. He’d have to get a mobile. The last thing in the world he wanted was a barbecue with Edward Cochrane, and yet that’s exactly what he was doing. Edward’s house looked very smart after the revamp. Its owner didn’t, or not in shorts. He filled his glass again. He needed to spoil himself. He wished he’d brought along a pullie. The day fooled you into thinking it was southern, when it was northern and already autumn.
‘That thing about your father.’
‘That thing.’
‘Are you angry with him for doing it?’
‘Probably,’ said Edward. ‘He was a vicar, so I joined the army.’
‘Did you?’
‘Seven years. Northern Ireland was a gas.’
He was turning over the meat. Jack tried to imagine him in uniform, stalking the Falls Road, helmeted, sticking out of an armoured car like a jack-in-the-box. People were always so much more than the coffin you made for them.
‘So you got back at him.’
‘Absolutely. Slapped him in the face.’
‘He was a vicar, and yet he committed suicide.’
‘He was a vicar, so he committed suicide. Actually, he lost his faith. Careless, huh? He was something in the C. of E. admin line, in the end. Awful to my mum. Chain-smoker, but never touched a drop. Very selfish man.’
As if, Jack thought, Edward was not. But he had invited him round. A gesture of neighbourly sympathy. Or had Milly asked him to keep an eye on her husband as well as the house?
They were well into the marshmallows when, like a nightmare or a dream, Jack heard Milly calling him through the French windows the other side of the fence, beyond the trees and thick shrubs. Her voice sounded quavery, as if afraid of what she might find. He didn’t usually leave the house with the French windows open, but he’d reckoned that as he was only just next door …