by D. J. Taylor
Usually Jamie and Hugo discussed academic preferment, an extraordinary kind of three-dimensional chess, in which every move seemed to be cancelled out by developments on another plane. Just now, though, they were talking about what sounded like medieval kingship. Claire was pretty sure that she heard the words ‘Plantagenet paradigm’. For a moment or so the half-chapter she had read in the tent at Christchurch, about sweet Izzy the public relations executive, her two-timing boyfriend and their too-small house in Wandsworth – not unlike her own too-small house in Wandsworth if it came to that – burned trails of shame through her memory, only for the sight of Hugo, gesturing lavishly with a fork to clinch some point or other, to make her feel better. ‘Of course,’ Hugo was saying, ‘those Chairs at the new universities are a dollar a dozen, but I don’t… it doesn’t…’ Jamie, though paler than ever, was vigorously nodding his head. Fifteen years ago, as ageing postgraduates, they had collaborated on an article about the Viking cult of the Spread Eagle for the English Historical Review: yellowing off-prints of this work occasionally surfaced amidst the debris of the study.
Outside, rain was falling against the plate-glass window in tiny, pointillist swirls, like the ornamentation in a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley. ‘Mummy,’ Lucy demanded out of the blue. ‘Are we going home today?’ ‘No darling, tomorrow. But you can go in the swimming pool if you like.’ The children in her book, she now realised, bore no relation to her own: had she wanted to convey their complex idiosyncrasies into print she could not have done so. Did Hugo and Jamie feel the same about the no less flesh and blood Norsemen who had tugged their victims’ ribs out of their chests on spear-points? It was hard to tell. Above her head, the conversation had become general. ‘That’s right,’ Anna was saying, in the languid tones that meant she was seriously cross. ‘Building right over the back of the meadow by the side of the college sports ground, I mean. And it’s not as if…’ Tom, meanwhile, was doodling with a biro on one of the paper napkins: ominous tessellations and triangles, punctuated every so often with a sightless face. By degrees, and after some spirited querying, by Anna, of the bill they debouched into the street. Here the rain had stopped; on the far side a man in a pair of red-checked trousers, a tourist escaped from one of the coach parties, was taking down an umbrella stamped with the legend Dominus Illuminata Mea. It was then that ‘it’, whatever it was – and afterwards Claire was unable to log the precise clash of temperaments that had caused it – happened, that Tom, who had been balancing on the foot-high wall demarcating the margin of a car park, pirouetted there suddenly for a moment and then crashed down into a heap, banging his jaw on the tarmac and bleeding copiously over Anna’s white shirt-front as she scooped him up. ‘Oh Tom, poor Tom,’ Claire said, pulling tissues out of her bag and dabbing at the blood beneath the grave stares of the children. ‘I’m sorry,’ Hugo said, directing his words to a piece of masonry far above his head. ‘I just can’t put up with this… With all this…’ He made a vague gesture with his hand, that somehow encompassed the rain, the silent, bleeding child and, Claire felt, the rest of them as they stood embarrassedly on the street corner. ‘Look,’ Hugo said to Anna. ‘You’ll just have to take him home. I can’t…’ They watched him plod slowly away in the direction of the University Parks, bandaging his head with a long scarf as he went, not looking back.
Later, as the dusk fell across North Oxford, they returned to the Holiday Inn. The Asian taxi-drivers had disappeared. In their place a brood of dropsical women with suitcases talked melancholically into mobile phones. ‘These aren’t… they’re not… Hugo’s best years, you know,’ Jamie said by way of explanation, as they eased open the door of the family suite. ‘I mean, you should have known him when…’ He stopped and began to press his finger-tips tentatively against his forehead. Together they began the ritual search for the packets of aspirin and ibuprofen hoarded against such emergencies. ‘Are you OK?’ Claire asked. ‘I’ll be all right,’ Jamie said gloomily, ‘as long as I can lie perfectly still.’ They left him supine on the bed and went down to the swimming pool and drank mugs of hot chocolate in a deserted canteen that looked out onto a yard filled with lines of green refuse bins. Dominus Illuminata Mea, Claire thought. Later still, when the children were asleep, she came down to the pool again, empty now in the flaring after-hours light, and swam on unappeasably, in a succession of brisk, purposeful lengths, her mind bent for some reason which she could not fathom on the memory of Hugo’s squat, receding figure, the tide of bungalows reaching out to embrace the college sports ground in their bland, domesticating arc.
—2005
Charcoal
As he came back through the French windows he could see the three of them perched on the bench at the end of the tiny lawn. Hemmed in on three sides – the gardens came tightly packed in this part of Putney – they looked oddly detached, unworried by the badly stacked barbecue a few feet away, which was diffusing gusts of pearlgrey smoke, or the juddering music centre beyond the fence.
He stood looking at them irresolutely for a moment – Lucy sat a little to one side, the others were bent towards each other like conspiring sisters – and then straightened up, guiding himself and the tray through the obstacle course of protruding doorstep, scattered paperbacks, a rickety sun-lounger with a frayed canopy. The mild, but sharply accented, voices came drifting into earshot.
‘But of course Toby was always a flake… Didn’t Emma used to say that was the second most important thing you had to remember about him?’
‘What was the first thing?’
‘Darling, it’s not really a fit subject for the back garden.’
He moved slowly across the patch of uncut, emerald-shaded grass into the shadow thrown by the garden’s solitary ash tree. Three months into knowing Lucy, a month into being elevated to the status of Lucy’s ‘partner’ (forty-two seemed a bit old for being described as somebody’s boyfriend) his antennae were finely tuned to this kind of conversational shorthand.
He had a feeling that ‘flake’ meant something different from the usages of his own late twenties. Like ‘smart’, ‘solid’ and ‘clever’, ‘flake’ was a word that Lucy could coat with layers of an irony he’d not yet been able to penetrate.
There was an upturned flagstone next to the bench, where somebody had left a packet of Silk Cut and a paperback called Bitchpack Confidential. He lowered the tray gingerly on to the rough surface and stood up, leaning one arm on the dolls’-house-sized garden shed, shading his eyes against the strong Easter Bank Holiday sun.
Seeing him for the first time, the girls looked up.
‘Well done that man,’ Serena said.
There was no point in denying that Serena made him uncomfortable. Not only was she younger than the others – twenty-six, maybe, or twenty-seven – but she reminded him of Naomi, his ex-wife. A much younger Naomi, that ghost from his early London days, sunbathing on the roof of the Clerkenwell flat or watching Live Aid on TV, dressed only in a pair of tracksuit bottoms, before the Nineties nonsense had gathered them up and defiled the memory of it all.
Curiously enough, he still had Naomi’s last letter – two years old now, predating the final ransom demand from the lawyers – in his jacket pocket back upstairs, a disintegrating talisman of past time, never to be surrendered.
He stood there a bit awkwardly, feigning an interest in the grill, until he noticed that Lucy was patting the unoccupied nine inches of bench between her and Charlotte.
Lowering himself warily into it, he caught Lucy’s eye. It was the usual glance, one he remembered from the small hours: friendly, complicit, meaning; so far as he could deduce, Don’t worry about my friends, or All this is incidental to us. Like ‘smart’, ‘solid’ and ‘clever’, you could never be quite sure that your interpretation was the correct one, that some important part of the linguistic equation hadn’t escaped you.
‘Oh no!’ Lucy said suddenly. ‘Bugger and damnation.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Left my sungl
asses inside somewhere.’
That was another thing about this tribe of twenty-somethings, he reflected – their habit of framing momentary irritations in the language of cataclysm. Really serious things, on the other hand, featured high up on the roster of evasion and concealment: ‘rather an upset’ (a written-off car); ‘a little problem at home’ (somebody’s mother’s cancer).
‘I’ll get them,’ he announced.
‘There’s really no need,’ Lucy said.
‘And the other thing about Toby,’ Serena volunteered breathlessly, ‘was that you never knew whether to take all that stuff about his parents abusing him as a child seriously or not.’
Back inside the house he made his way stealthily along the cramped corridor that ran from the kitchen to the sitting-room. Here it was unexpectedly cool, and the Sunday papers lay strewn across the sofa. He flipped one or two of the sheets over – there was nothing there except the keys to Lucy’s BMW – then began to riffle through the pile of oddments on the mantelpiece.
Long experience had told him that mantelpieces – this was a jumbo-sized version running beneath a Claude-style landscape of rolling woods and hillside bowers – were an infallible guide to personality. This one harboured several invitations couched in varying degrees of formality: Brigadier and Mrs Tom Slater-Sutherland request the pleasure… The partners of Ernst & Young… Come to Emma’s 30th… a picture of Lucy in a swimsuit standing uncomfortably close to a square-jawed man with wavy hair and a superior smile whose identity hadn’t yet been divulged to him, and a letter from Lucy’s mother folded inside a cutting from Gloucestershire Homes and Gardens.
In the end he found the sunglasses on the hall table, half hidden under a pile of letters addressed to Mr Gavin Henderson, Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, ‘downsized’ from the premises – this was Lucy’s joke – some months before.
There was something unsettling him, he realised as he padded back along the corridor with the sunglasses curled up in his outstretched hand like an outsize beetle, something that had nothing to do with Gavin Henderson, the supercilious hunk on the beach, or the tiredness produced by yesterday afternoon’s case work and having to drive the children back to Reading in the evening, something from long ago that was trying to force its way out.
There were more photographs clustered on the pin-board above the telephone table: Lucy in a ballgown, at some awayday organised by her law firm, with her parents – gnarled but county-ish – outside an ivy-clad Cotswold pub. Her skin, he noticed, was extraordinary – unworn, the colour of mother-of-pearl, as if the whole of her upper body had just been released from some protective shell. Slightly to his surprise he found himself quivering with what was, presumably, however middle-aged and worn-down, desire. Lucy was twenty-nine.
In the kitchen Serena stood briskly unpacking chicken drumsticks from a series of Tupperware boxes. Feeling a sudden need to ingratiate himself with her, he reached into the fridge and started pulling out the lettuces and tomatoes he’d bought last night on the way back from Reading.
‘Actually,’ Serena said, ‘I was going to leave them for a bit later on. If you don’t mind.’ She was a tall, bony girl with piles of corn-coloured hair who worked in a shop that sold Art Deco furniture. Still trying to fasten on to the memory that had risen above the sight of Gavin Henderson’s unclaimed post, he collected up the salad and put it back. Outside, he could see Lucy crouched over the grill with a handful of firelighters, shooing the smoke away with her fingers.
‘You know,’ Serena said with the same brisk efficiency, ‘I think it’s perfectly brilliant of Lu to have discovered you. Where did she say the two of you got together?’
For some reason, the thought of having to explain the complex chain of coincidence that had brought the legal firm where he worked and the legal firm where Lucy worked into temporary proximity was too exhausting to be borne. ‘It was a work thing,’ he temporised.
‘Oh, a work thing,’ said Serena. ‘I know all about work things. Now, these need to go out there.’
He went back across the grass, jokily bearing the plate of chicken drumsticks on one hand like a waiter. Nudged into being by the picture above the mantelpiece, the memory was taking concrete shape now: dense banks of trees moving into the distance, crumbling stone, Naomi running in front of him on the path. He’d tried to get together with Naomi again a year ago, but it hadn’t worked. It was too late now. Lucy was still bending over the grill, plump knees drawn up under her chin.
‘I can’t get the wretched thing to work. It just gushes smoke.’
‘You’ve overloaded it. Look. Take some of the charcoal out and let the air circulate.’
‘Bugger and damnation! It’s gone all over my shorts.’
Scooping up some half-charred firelighters with a garden trowel, then repositioning the metal grill on its plinths, as Lucy dabbed at her knees with a paper napkin, he considered this unexpected vista of past time: Naomi’s face, the trees running on into the horizon. From nowhere, half a dozen other images from that day in Ireland fell smartly into place: driving along the wide, open highway from Dublin to Cork; granite poking up through the green hills. Something else struck him and he said: ‘I meant to tell you. I talked to Paul and he said we can have the cottage next weekend.’
‘It sounds nice.’
There were other people arriving now, and he watched them lounging forward over the lawn. The men, who had names like Danny and Ben, he assumed were younger versions of himself: junior managers in accountancy firms, apprentice lawyers. They hunkered down on the grass, cradling glasses of wine in their hands, or went into the kitchen and twitted Serena about the food.
The chicken flared beneath his hand. He thought about next weekend and what sort of a time he could expect. Lucy’s sunglasses lay on the bench beside him. Charlotte looked up from a conversation she was having with one of the apprentice lawyers. ‘Oh poor you,’ she said. ‘You seem to be doing all the work.’
It was two o’clock now. He wondered what the children were doing, and whether he oughtn’t to be spending Easter with them rather than in a suburban garden with a horde of people he hardly knew. Without warning, the name of the place where they’d had the picnic and Naomi had danced ahead of him down the forest path stole into his head: Loftholdingswood. It had always struck him as a beautiful name. Twelve years later it seemed more beautiful still.
Lucy had disappeared back inside the house. As he badly wanted a drink and there was none to hand he supposed he had better follow her. Serena passed him on the patio. ‘Sterling work,’ she said. Did it sound patronising? He couldn’t tell. The kitchen was full of Dannys and Bens. Professionally, he had evolved a technique for dealing with men a decade and more younger than himself: man-to-man, while encouraging an awareness of responsibilities on both sides. The Dannys and Bens were affable. They said things like, ‘Absolutely right’, and, ‘Where’s bloody Nigel got to, then?’
Back in the garden Lucy and Serena were deep in conversation again on the bench. He saw that the grill had nearly extinguished itself: smoke rose vertically into the dead air. Grinning at the memory of the woods, Naomi’s rapt, unfallen smile, he moved towards it, hearing the voices drift back on the air.
‘A bit… long in the tooth.’
‘Honestly, Lu.’
‘Of course, he’s very attentive. But it takes simply ages to do anything, where it matters. I mean… You just have to lie there and think of England.’
‘God, all this smoke.’
He bent over the grill and studiously, almost reverently, began to rake the charcoal back and forth, waiting confidently for the pale streaks of heat – like memory, he thought – to take root and flicker. In a bit he would go home and phone the children. It was their voices, he realised suddenly, that he wanted to hear.
—2002
To Brooklyn Bridge
He came by so early that the sun had climbed only half-way to its accustomed place above the slatted roofs of Mr O’Hagan’s building on the far s
ide of the street, and her mother, her voice detached and ghost-ridden behind the bedroom door, said nervously, ‘Who’s that, Ruthie, calling at this hour?’ and she paused in the brushing of her hair before the big oval mirror that hung in the sitting room and replied, ‘Now mother, you know that it’s only Huey,’ punctuating the words with strokes of the brush, and then looked curiously into the mirror as the last echoes of the three smart raps at the door faded into nothing, as if she had never seen herself before and wondered who in all of Chicago the pale-faced girl in the floral print dress could be. There was warm, molten light pouring in through the street window, making the room look dusty and confined, and as she went to the door her eye fell on such things as old newspapers, a handbill for the state agricultural fair, a card that a girl who shared her workbench at Lonigan’s had given her, all of them irradiated by the light and somehow magical and aglow.
When she opened the door he was standing a little way back on the landing at what her mother would have called ‘a respectful distance’, and she smiled and said: ‘You must have gotten up really early to be here by now.’ ‘That’s right,’ he said gravely – he was always grave when he saw her – ‘I guess it was six o’clock or so. It’s pretty interesting around then, you know,’ he went on hurriedly, as if this getting up early were a mark of light-mindedness, ‘I mean, there are fellows in suits waiting for the streetcars and you wonder where it is they’re going.’ ‘I suppose there are all kinds of things people have to do,’ she said. ‘That’s right,’ he said, and then, tired of all this abstract talk, ‘How are you, Ruthie?’ ‘I’m very well,’ she said. ‘I almost didn’t get the day off, but then Mr Lonigan remembered he owed me for that Saturday I had to go in back in the fall so I guess everything worked out.’ ‘I guess it did,’ he said. He was wearing the blue-and-white striped jacket and the flat straw boater that made him look like just a little like one of the soda-jerks at the fountain in Pennsylvania Square, and he had a brown paper parcel in his left hand that contained his bathing things. Back in the apartment she could hear her mother moving round the kitchen, the noise of a kettle being filled, the thump of a cat being evicted from a chair. Somewhere in the distance a door slammed shut.