In the car, I turn to Robin and apologize again. He tries to smile, but a wince appears instead.
‘That’s a nasty cut,’ the doctor says in Casualty.
‘A wardrobe did it,’ Robin says.
Possibly because of her height – she is almost five eleven – Hanne tends to double over when amused or entertained, her knee bent, one foot lifting off the ground, and this is what she does when she emerges from Arrivals and sees me waiting at the barrier. Not for the first time, she reminds me, incongruously, of old-time comedians, the kind who slap their thighs after telling a joke. We kiss, then I stand back and admire the metallic silver suitcase she has brought with her.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It’s for you.’
Back at the house on Summerdown Road, she hands me the keys. I unfasten the locks and lift the lid. Inside, washed and folded, are all the clothes I left in West Berlin. There is my fifties’ tropical-print shirt, the one with the label that says Reminiscence, and there are my black trousers, which I tore when I climbed into an abandoned S-bahn station in December. My first thought, which is quite involuntary, takes me by surprise: She knows I’m not coming back.
‘I was thinking you will need your clothes,’ she tells me simply. ‘I was ironing them.’
‘Hanne, that’s so kind.’
‘Yes –’ and she is smiling now – ‘I did it.’
I look at the neat piles of clothes and think of Leni, the daughter Hanne and I sometimes imagine we might have. The name, which rhymes with ‘rainy’, comes from Heinrich Böll’s novel, Group Portrait with Lady, but whereas Böll’s Leni is a well-preserved blonde of forty-eight, I see ours as a long-legged six-year-old with wavy light brown hair. In 1978 I went out with a Welsh girl who got pregnant. She didn’t feel we should have the baby, and I agreed with her. We had only been together for a few months. We didn’t know what the future held. We were still so young. Leni has never existed except as an idea, yet somehow she has always seemed more real to me than the child who was conceived and then aborted, the child who was never named. As I stare down into the suitcase, though, I see the likelihood of Leni’s existence evaporate, silently but irrevocably, like a soap bubble exploding. Everything is disappearing, even things that never had the time to materialize. I feel such a keen sense of loss that I have to turn away. I don’t want Hanne to ask me what is wrong.
I don’t want to have to explain.
During Hanne’s week in Eastbourne, Bill and Jenny Martin invite us over for a drink. When we leave our house one Friday evening at a quarter to seven, Ralph and Vivian join us. Vivian seems to be getting on with Hanne, and this one simple fact has been enough to turn us back into a group. It’s dark out. The wind makes the trees roar, and the air smells earthy yet metallic, like the sharp end of a spade.
‘Who are the Martins?’ Hanne wonders as we cross the road.
‘They’re good people,’ I say. ‘They’re friends.’
‘Bill’s in eggs,’ Robin says.
Hanne looks puzzled.
I explain that Bill works for a company of egg brokers. If anyone ever asks him what he does, he always says the same thing: I’m in eggs.
‘He has chickens?’ Hanne says.
We’re still laughing when one of the Martins’ daughters, Belinda, answers the door.
‘You lot are in a good mood,’ she says drily.
We follow her into the front room, which is so much more comfortable than ours. Armchairs, a sofa. Lamps with shades in warm colours like butterscotch and terracotta. Bill turns from the fireplace. His black hair is neatly parted, and he is wearing a dark blue blazer and grey trousers. As always, he seems effortlessly genial and debonair.
‘Nice to see you, Rupert. Gin-and-tonic?’
‘I’m on the wagon, I’m afraid.’
To keep him from probing any further, I introduce him to Hanne. When he discovers that she is German, he is curious to know how we met. It happened the previous summer, I tell him, in Positano. I walked into a restaurant where Hanne and a girlfriend of hers were having dinner. I was sitting two tables away, but we kept catching each other’s eye. When my first course arrived, I held up a spear of asparagus to show her what I had ordered. It promptly wilted in my hand. Neither of us could keep a straight face after that. Later, Hanne’s friend invited me to join them at their table.
‘It sort of went from there,’ I say.
‘I bet it did,’ Bill says.
Jenny appears in the living-room doorway. She doesn’t suppose anyone has made her a drink. As Bill reaches for the gin, she turns to Robin. ‘We heard you the other night.’
On the night Hanne arrived, I persuaded Robin to get out his twelve-string guitar and sing. With hindsight, he thinks he might have got a bit carried away.
‘We thought it was splendid,’ Jenny says.
Robin grins. ‘I can’t imagine anyone else round here saying that.’
‘Well, they’re a bunch of fucking killjoys, aren’t they?’
That’s Jenny all over: generous but forthright, and with a wonderfully deadpan delivery. Despite Bill’s suave demeanour, she seems older than him somehow, more worldly-wise – though I have the feeling this is a quality she has always had, even as a child.
Bill mentions a woman on Old Camp Road whose garden stands at right angles to ours. She has an outdoor swimming-pool, he says. Do we know her, by any chance? We shake our heads. She’s not very happy, he goes on. Apparently, someone in the vicinity’s been having fires. Flames in excess of twenty feet high have been reported. Little flakes of hot ash have floated on to the woman’s property, burning holes in the tarpaulin that covers her pool.
‘The thing is,’ Robin says, ‘a helicopter crashed in our back garden.’
‘I see.’ Bill calmly finishes his drink. ‘Well, that explains the little flakes of ash.’
The woman knocked on his door, he tells us, wanting him to sign a petition in favour of banning fires.
‘And did you?’ Robin asks.
‘Certainly not,’ Bill says. ‘I don’t approve of petitions.’
Later, the conversation turns to food.
‘What are you eating?’ Jenny asks. ‘Are you eating?’
‘Curry mostly,’ Robin says.
‘And Weetabix,’ I say.
I tell Jenny that we have become addicted to buying in bulk. We do all our shopping in Macro, a wholesale place behind the station. Jenny says she’s heard of it.
‘Everything’s much bigger than in real life,’ Robin says.
‘The milk comes in gallons,’ I say.
‘You get about two thousand tea bags, all in the same box,’ Robin says.
I’m nodding. ‘It’s like they invented it for giants.’
Jenny shakes her head in despair.
Over by the fireplace, Hanne is talking about her job in the rehab unit – I hear the words ‘Ernst’ and ‘bastard’ – and Bill puts a hand on her forearm to show her that he sympathizes.
‘I think Bill was rather taken with you,’ I tell Hanne as we walk back over the road.
‘What is taken?’
‘He liked you.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘He is a nice man. And she.’
No sex, the doctor told me, peering at me sternly, not until I have completed my course of antibiotics, but I am sharing a single bed with Hanne, and it’s proving something of a torture. On our fourth night, as we lie side by side in the half-dark, Hanne asks if I’m awake. I say I am.
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ she says, ‘we can try with coats …’
‘Coats?’ I seem to glimpse Dad’s sheepskin hanging on a hook by the front door.
‘Yes. Coats.’
I watch as her eyes travel down the bed, then up again.
‘Oh, coats.’ I start laughing.
The following day, I drive down to Boots the chemist. As I approach the display of condoms, it’s all I can do not to pretend to be German. ‘Please,’ I very nearly say, in an accent resembling Hanne’s, ‘but do
you have some coats?’
Not long after Hanne leaves, Dan invites me to come and stay. Dan used to be my art director, but he is now running the creative department of an agency in Newcastle, and he has bought a house outside the city, in a place called Stanley. I can have a room of my own to work in, he says. I can write all day if I want. No one will disturb me.
One April morning, Jenny Martin gives me a lift to the bus station. She asks after Hanne, as I suspected she might, and I remember Bill taking me aside on the night we went round for drinks. I’d hold on to her if I were you.
On the bus, I start a letter to Hanne. I want her to know what the Martins have been saying – it will cheer her up – but as I put pen to paper I am aware that other people’s opinions will have little bearing on what happens between us. In the photos Robin took during Hanne’s stay, we look playful and disingenuous, and there is nothing to suggest that our relationship is foundering, yet whenever I speak to her on the phone, or write to her, I seem unable to make any promises. All I feel sure of is my own uncertainty. And then I think of Tina by the fir tree in her black sweater, Tina with her troubled eyes and shoulder-length blonde hair …
The coach turns along the promenade. It’s early, not even nine o’clock, and the light has a rare, scoured clarity. Low tide, rock pools. People throwing balls for dogs. The sea sprawls in the distance, tough and faintly rumpled, like a bolt of dark blue leather. I used Hanne’s time in Eastbourne as an excuse to visit places I hadn’t visited in years – Michelham Priory, the Long Man of Wilmington, Ashdown Forest. I wanted her to realize how significant they were, and how precious – this was, after all, the map of my childhood – but I was also showing her what I’d grown out of, and what I was now being forced, once again, to experience. It was all so familiar to me, so deeply ingrained, that I found it hard to imagine what it must be like to be seeing it for the first time. We walked the length of the seafront, passing the white hotels, the bandstand, the Carpet Gardens with their elaborate, geometric beds of flowers. I took pictures of her on the pier, storm clouds stacked behind her as she leaned against the railings. She wore a pale green top and brown leather trousers, and her lipstick was a glossy burgundy, like fallen rhododendron petals. She thought it was a nice town, she said as I put my camera away. It was bürgerlich. The word had become something of a joke between us: Hanne claimed I disapproved of her for being too interested in material things – for being too bürgerlich. ‘Yes –’ and she glanced back along the promenade, chin tilting defiantly – ‘I like it.’ When she looked at me again, she saw that I was laughing. ‘You bastard.’ She aimed a punch at my left shoulder. ‘Why are you laughing?’ But she was laughing too.
When I arrive in Newcastle, Dan picks me up in a silver Ford. As we drive out of the city, over one of its many bridges, we reminisce about my leaving party in 1982, and how Dan wheeled me out of the building in the supermarket trolley I’d been using instead of a chair, and how, later that evening, a six-foot-seven Irish copywriter tried to join me in the trolley, and it capsized, and I woke up the next morning with bruises all down the left side of my body.
In half an hour, we are pulling up outside Dan’s new house in Stanley. With its high ceilings and its tiled hall, it ought to belong to someone middle-aged and respectable – a pillar of the community – but Dan is even younger than I am. Downstairs is a wood-panelled library with a full-size snooker table. Upstairs is a bathroom with an antique claw-foot bath. He has a sixties’ Land Rover. He has two Dobermanns. I tell him I’m impressed, which is true, but my initial reaction is one of lightness: compared to Dan, I have so little. At the same time, I am being confronted by the kind of life that I have turned my back on. I don’t feel envious so much as left behind, and a sense of panic stirs in me, faint but determined scratchings, like rain on a window.
Dan’s wife, Brenda, says I can work in the room above the kitchen, and I start the following day, using a machine Dan has borrowed from his agency. I am writing about an eccentric village police force, and my sentences have been infiltrated by a humour that is both anarchic and surreal. I find this surprising at first, but then I remember the salacious constables who lurk in the bushes at the bottom of my auntie’s garden with their dog-eared copies of the Sun and their binoculars. Once, at lunchtime, Brenda says she heard me chuckling as she ironed in the next room – laughing at your own jokes, as she puts it. But the book is beginning to thicken, take on a form, like beaten cream.
It’s dark by the time Dan comes home, and we walk the dogs on the playing fields below the house. Most evenings, a raw wind is blowing, and the air smells of mud and coal and roots, as if it has more to do with the ground than the sky. Stanley has a long history as a mining town, Dan tells me, though many of the collieries have been closed down. Thatcher, I say. He nods grimly. We watch the dogs as they tear over the grass in exaggerated curves and loops, stopping to sniff at molehills or cock their legs against a goalpost. Dan says he’s happy to have moved back up north. He sounds a little as though he’s trying to convince himself: if he repeats the words often enough, they will end up being true. He asks what I will do next. Am I going back to Germany? I tell him I don’t know. I want to write, but I can do that anywhere. My life is the opposite of his: shapeless as water, it can flow in any one of a hundred different directions.
‘Has it been difficult?’ he asks.
He is referring to Dad’s death, a subject we have hardly mentioned.
‘Really difficult,’ I say. ‘But the good side of it is I’m free – and there will be some money …’
Dan says I should come and live in Stanley. My resources will go much further. The house, the cars, the wine – he couldn’t afford this quality of life down south.
I stare off into the dark, damp sky.
‘At least think about it,’ he says. ‘You could stay with us while you sort yourself out.’
I thank him, then point at the two dogs, who are racing across a football pitch. ‘Look at them. They’re going mad.’
Dan nods. ‘It’s their favourite time of day.’
I return from the north-east with a new version of my novel under way. Determined to keep going, I lift the cover off my precious Olympia portable, only to discover that the keys are all bunched up and bent out of shape, like so many crossed fingers. The entire mechanism is jammed. Two months have passed since I flew to England, and it’s almost certainly too late to contact British Airways and demand compensation. How can I prove the damage happened in transit? Furious at myself for having trusted that stewardess, I carry the typewriter downstairs and hurl it on to the heap of scrap metal near the garage. With a mocking twang, it lands among the spokes of a buckled bicycle wheel. Luckily, I have a back-up. An old office Olympia, it is uglier, and far more cumbersome, but it will have to do. With Robin’s help, I haul Dad’s teaching table up to my bedroom and set it down in front of the window that overlooks the garden, then I place the Olympia on a folded towel so as to muffle the thumping of its keys.
I decide to work at night, partly for the romance of it – William Faulkner is supposed to have written one of my favourite books, As I Lay Dying, between the hours of midnight and four a.m. – and partly to avoid interruptions. Every evening I make sure that I am sitting at my table by eleven. Propped against the window is a window frame I found on Hydra in 1977, the wood painted a chalky, dusty pale blue, a colour you almost never see in England. It reminds me of the time I got up early and crossed the high spine of the island, a thin brown path twisting before me like a trail of gunpowder, the air seasoned with wild sage and tingling with goat bells. Just me under the sky, and no one else about. Then a view down into a rocky bay, and a sudden feeling of slippage, as if a vessel from the long-distant past might slide out of the mist that rested on the sea, as if, merely by walking, I had unravelled time. A kind of spell about that morning: nothing happened, yet everything seemed possible.
What I need to do more than anything, I realize, is to put in the hours. Whil
e in Berlin, I read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne. ‘It seems to me,’ he wrote in a letter dated 24 June 1907, ‘that the ultimate intuitions and insights will only approach one who lives in his work and remains there.’ I love his use of the word ‘approach’: it’s as if intuitions and insights are wild beasts that don’t show themselves unless the writer, like a hunter, stays upwind and motionless. Writing is about patience, cunning. Stamina.
As I toil over my sentences, the house falls quiet behind me. Robin climbs the stairs with his jug of water and his latest book. He reads on into the small hours; if I go down to the kitchen to make coffee, there is often still a bar of light under his door. Sometimes the baby wakes. I hear Vivian and Ralph murmuring. Her voice, then his. A key grates in the lock, the door clicks open. Feet pad across the landing. There is a silence, followed by the throaty flushing of the lavatory. A gargle as the cistern starts to fill again. More footsteps, another click. The key turns back the other way. In the corner of my room the dark air stirs, then settles. My eyes lower to the sheet of paper in the typewriter.
Remain there.
At six, I switch my desk lamp off. The garden surfaces. I stand and stretch. The grass is grey, no detail visible as yet. Dew makes the garage roof tiles gleam.
Later, I lie back between the sheets. I hear a creak on the stairs, and then the scrape of a chair leg on the kitchen floor, and then I drift away.
The Sauce is Nice
At the end of 2005, I drove down to Uncle Frank and Auntie Miriam’s with my wife, Kate, and my daughter, Evie. For the past twenty years, Frank had been the only member of our family Ralph had been prepared to deal with. I had called Frank recently and asked about my brother, as Beth had urged me to, and he had told me that he had spent a day with Ralph and Vivian before they left for China, and that he had taken some photos. China? I said. He’s got a new job, Frank said, in Shanghai. I asked if he would show me the pictures. It had been so long since I’d seen Ralph; I didn’t know what he looked like any more. Such a bloody shame, Frank said.
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