by D. J. Taylor
‘Oh it wasn’t for that. Karl’s never liked him since he used to go out with Julia at Cambridge …’
‘Gracious,’ said Candia. ‘What a lot of people you seem to know.’
Fortunately this turned out to be an overture to Alexandra, and they had a companionable little gossip themselves about two or three mutual acquaintances dredged out of the world of print journalism and the TV fringes. Here Candia, whom direct questioning revealed as a researcher on Newsnight, proved so frighteningly knowledgeable that Alexandra felt rather non-plussed, like a veteran coach offering a work-out to some promising club athlete only to find herself unceremoniously steamrollered into the track. Lounging back in her chair again, as the figures crossed and recrossed on the fizzing screen, she felt suddenly chastened by the picture of herself that this conversation had thrown up, a kind of sadness in which, she realised, Douglas, Alain and the consciousness of past time each played their part. If, as occasionally happened, anyone asked Alexandra what she had been like at nineteen, she invariably smiled and offered only that ‘I was very naive’, something that Douglas – who had been the chief beneficiary of that naivety – always affected to find funny. In fact, Alexandra secretly thought she rather liked the nineteen-year-old she imagined herself to have been: innocuous, kind-hearted, docile. It pained her to think that she might be turning into one of those bright, brittle thirty-year-olds she had once regarded with such awe.
And contempt, of course. Something had happened onscreen, some player had keeled over or something, and Douglas was softly murmuring ‘Bastard, bastard’ under his breath. Alexandra couldn’t tell whether he wanted this to be taken seriously, or whether it was part of the web of male complicity he and Alain were spinning over the evening.
‘Butcher,’ said Alain, with immense gravity, ‘is amazing.’
‘Totally amazing.’
‘To take all that punishment and then just … get up.’
‘Did you see him that time on the touchline after they’d carried him off? Before he had the stitches?’
They were a bit like an alternative comedy routine, Alexandra thought – not exactly funny, but encouraging the audience to despise their lack of self-awareness. For a moment, as the white phantoms surged back and forth over the green turf, she thought hard, very hard and seriously, about why she liked Douglas and decided – rather forlornly, for she had hoped that there might be other things that would leap out and surprise her – that it was to do with this lack of self-awareness. Somehow a Douglas who knew about his shortcomings and discussed them in the avid, guiltless way that people did on American talk shows would have been intolerable. In some ways, she decided, it was his ignorance of what he was that gave him charm.
It was nearly half-time. Alain and Candia were having a whispered conversation at the far end of the sofa. Talking to Alain, Alexandra saw, Candia’s face grew animated in a way she had not previously noticed. Not certain whether she wanted more coffee or whether the proximity of other people was becoming irksome, she wandered slowly into the kitchen and sat down on one of the tall stools by the table. Here it was cooler and the light glinted off the surfaces to produce a sub-aqueous effect. Outside the first faint traces of dusk were falling over the garden and the fruit trees were gathered up in shadow. In the distance the sun burned off the hedgerows, and she stared out of the kitchen door into this curious, limpid world of shade and silence, motionless except for the birds noisily displacing each other from a rectangular table on the lawn. There was a disturbance behind her and Douglas came into the room carrying a beer glass.
‘There’s drink in the fridge if you want it.’
‘No thanks.’
‘They’re doing really well, you know. I mean, they could score if they go on like this.’
‘That’s good then.’
Atmospheric subtleties had a habit of passing Douglas by. She had a memory of climbing with him up Siguraya Rock in Sri Lanka. Emerging onto the flat table of the summit, Alexandra had gasped at the tides of jungle – and at that height they seemed like a vast, undulating ocean – that spread out across the horizon. Douglas, arriving a few minutes later, the sweat coursing in rivulets over his forehead, had simply stared blankly around him: non-committal, faintly bewildered. Now, three years later in Essex, he rummaged in the fridge for a can of beer, straightened up and stood uncertainly looking at her.
‘We could come and live somewhere like this,’ he said. ‘If you wanted to.’
‘I thought you said you had to be in London for your work. I thought editors preferred sending the bikes to Highgate.’
‘I don’t know. We’ve been there eight years.’
‘Jesus,’ Alexandra said. ‘Six months after we get a mortgage on a sodding flat, and you’re talking about moving out of London.’
‘I could write that book about Maclaren-Ross.’
‘Yes,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘You could write that book about Maclaren-Ross. And I suppose when he hears about it the old bastard in Sussex who’s sitting on the papers will give them to you out of sheer generosity.’
Douglas shrugged. He was, Alexandra knew, quite impervious to this kind of reasoning. Arguments in the flat at Highgate – which she suspected even now that they couldn’t really afford – generally consisted of Alexandra shouting and Douglas shrugging, opening a can of beer, staring at her in a belligerent, slightly puzzled manner, rather, she thought, in the way he had examined the Sri Lankan jungle.
He looked at his watch. ‘Second half,’ he said. ‘See you.’
Back in the sitting room the teams were out on the pitch again. Candia had stopped even pretending to take an interest and was reading a copy of Possession. Suddenly Alexandra heard Douglas say, ‘Good God, it’s Tom!’
‘What is?’
There was a copy of Time Out balanced on the lip of a magazine rack. Douglas seized it and threw it on the floor beneath the TV. ‘That is. That’s Tom.’
Looking at the upturned face, with its flat, regular features and garnish of fashionably short hair, Alexandra remembered being somewhere in Oxford, some party full of the dreadful people you saw at parties of that kind, people who acted in plays or worked on the magazines. People like her, she reflected uncomfortably.
‘I thought you knew about Tom,’ Alain said.
‘I heard he was in films or something, but…’
‘Oh, he’s made it big all right.’
There was a roar from the screen. Alexandra watched the ball ballooning high off an outstretched leg and career into the net as a back-pedalling goalkeeper tried hopelessly to retrieve it.
‘Fuck,’ Douglas said. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ She knew, though, that half of him wasn’t thinking about the football, was still, in fact, considering the question of Tom and Hollywood and a contract worth – Alexandra could dimly remember a story in the Standard now she thought about it – worth however many millions of dollars it was.
‘That was some deflection,’ Alain said authoritatively. ‘Came off Parker.’
‘What a wanker that bloke was,’ Douglas said. ‘I mean, do you remember him in tutorials? It was a miracle he ever got there in the first place. And then in finals – you’re not going to believe this, Alex – we came out of the Political Thought paper, someone asked him about one of the set books, and it turned out he hadn’t read Leviathan. Didn’t even know what it was.’
‘He used to go out with that Westmacott girl, didn’t he?’ Alexandra asked.
Douglas was doing fairly well, she thought, to pass all this off as amused exasperation or exasperated amusement. Watching him as he looked at Alain, who stared back rather worriedly, she could see he was making a conspicuous effort to control himself.
‘A date with Helen Westmacott? They used to call her ex-boyfriends the potholing and mountaineering club.’
‘Don’t think me rude or anything,’ said Candia from the sofa, ‘but will you stop going on about Tom. Only he happens to be rather a friend of mine.’
�
��A friend of yours?’
‘That’s right. A friend of mine. So will you please stop going on about him?’
‘Candy…’ Alain began.
‘Hey,’ Douglas said. Alexandra still couldn’t tell whether he was seriously angry, or still humorously exasperated. ‘I grew up with Tom Newsome. And I think I can say whether he’s a wanker or not.’
‘I think growing up’s putting it a bit charitably, don’t you?’ Candia said. ‘Look, let’s put it another way. Will you please stop laying down the law on things you know hardly anything about? We had Mrs Thatcher at supper. Now it’s Tom Newsome. I suppose after this stupid football match it’ll be government fiscal policy or something.’
There was another bellow from the screen. ‘Lineker,’ Alain said anxiously. ‘Equaliser.’
Alexandra stared wonderingly around the room: at Douglas, who was silently opening and closing his mouth; Alain, half turned to the TV screen; Candia, who had gone white in the face and was drumming her fingers against the cover of her book. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have to excuse me.’
They watched her go. On the screen the white figures danced, re-grouped, broke apart.
‘Ex-boyfriend,’ Alain said. ‘Sorry. Should have told you.’
‘Even so.’
‘Even so. Exactly.’
‘One all,’ Alain said after a while. ‘Anything could happen.’
Much later – at one or two in the morning – they went to bed in a high, oak-panelled room looking out over the inky lawn. ‘I’m so disappointed,’ Douglas kept saying, as he tossed his clothes item by item onto the bedside table. ‘Bloody Pearce, just hacking it like that. I mean, what do we pay them for?’ Looking at him as he lurked at the foot of the bed, ribcage gleaming in the sharp light, shirt tugged over his head, Alexandra thought that he wasn’t in the least moved. Something else struck her about the low, sluggish rhythm of the day and she said:
‘Why didn’t you tell me Macmillans had turned your book down?’
He blinked for a second, weighing up his response. ‘Because it doesn’t matter. Someone else will take it. It just doesn’t matter.’
It would always be like this, Alexandra supposed: her watching him summon the strength to cast off these rebuffs, forever standing there flushed, irritated but finally invulnerable. She twisted slightly in the bed as he slumped down beside her, thinking for some reason of Gary Nichols’ farmboy grin, her nineteen-year-old self stepping timorously through the college quadrangles. ‘I’m so disappointed,’ Douglas muttered again into the pillow at her side.
‘So am I,’ she said.
—1998
Rainy Season
‘And then there’s that occluded front heading in from Finisterre,’ the man from the Meteorological Office finished up. ‘Should reach the Dorset coast in the morning.’
‘That’s good to know,’ Alex said. He had made a resolution quite early on in the job not to be intimidated by jargon. ‘What effect will that have?’
‘Same as usual, I should think.’ Alex admired the man from the Meteorological Office’s expertise, but he could sometimes be worryingly non-committal. ‘Nothing you could lay a bet on.’
Beyond the window the sky was darkening over, bringing a faint, depressive chill to the rows of computer screens and the knot of crop-haired girls busy at the photocopier. Putting down the phone, Alex wrote rain in the South? on a yellow Post-it note stamped with the TV company’s logo, which somebody had once said reminded them of an SS officer’s shoulder-flash. He was a youngish man with a prematurely bald head and a pink-and-white complexion who had read several books by Richard Dawkins and believed fervently in the eventual triumph of scientific rationalism. Until that time came he was researching for the lunchtime show. Sometimes these were the best jobs in television. But not always. As he put down the phone Belvedere, who was the programme’s economic correspondent and could occasionally be seen in the newspaper room reading the business page of the Daily Mail, stopped at his desk and said: ‘Did you see Eurydice’s live report on the north-east hurricane?’ ‘No. What happened?’ ‘Knocked down by a freak wave on Scarborough front. You never saw anything like it.’ ‘That’s bad,’ Alex said. He supposed that some deep-seated melancholic flaw in his temperament had brought him to the weather bureau. His dreams were always of surging black clouds, beach-huts smashed to matchwood by triumphant surf, interminable molten rain. One of the crophaired girls bent to retrieve a packet of paper-clips, and the movement of her wrist reminded him of Erica who, he realised with a spasm of unease, he had forgotten to phone.
Shortly afterwards Mr Stafford called a meeting in his office and they all crowded in: Leanne who did the lighting; Agnetha, who replied to readers’ emails about what their barometers were saying; and the girl whose name no-one could remember who sometimes burst into tears in the wash-room. Alex sat in the rickety chair by the filing cabinet, inconspicuous, but difficult wholly to ignore. That was the way. Mr Stafford was an animated man in his forties who was thought to have ambitions to direct a game show. Just now he was working in current affairs and liked interfering with the autocue ten minutes before transmission. He said: ‘I know you think I don’t take any interest in the weather. But I do. I expect some of you saw the latest set of figures. Let me tell you they make pretty grim reading. I’m afraid Euridyce wants to go back to children’s television. She says it’s safer. Does anyone have anything to say?’
‘I don’t know if you saw,’ Alex volunteered, with practised diffidence, ‘but we had a new graphic last week. That rolling thunderbolt with the black border. It was rather good, I thought.’
‘Yes, I did notice it. It didn’t do anything for me. In fact, I saw something very similar on Channel Four only the other day.’ Alex remembered that Mr Stafford, unlike most members of his profession, watched television in the evening. There was no accounting for taste. Outside the rain rattled ominously on the window. He wondered if Erica had got anything for supper, and whether she expected him to deal with the leaking radiator in the bedroom. You could never tell with Erica.
Mr Stafford was still talking about the figures. Alex thought about the million absconding viewers who switched off after the news. He imagined them priming kettles, buttering toast, tearing the rings from cans of beer, anything to avoid their responsibilities. Mr Stafford said: ‘I think we’re all agreed then that it’s a question of viewer identification. I can’t say I’d have chosen Natalia Spendlove myself, but the people upstairs seem to like her and apparently she’s at a loose end since that cookery show got taken off the air.’ Alex tried to remember whether Natalia Spendlove was the one who had been in the papers founding the animal sanctuary in Morocco or the one who had ended the career of a parliamentary under-secretary. Sometimes it was hard to keep up. ‘Any comments?’ Mr Stafford asked. He had bumpy, luminous skin that looked as if it had been grafted from an expensive handbag. ‘Isn’t she a bit odd?’ Alex wondered. ‘Odd?’ Mr Stafford turned the word over on his tongue. ‘I suppose you might call her odd. Doesn’t she belong to some weird religion or something?’ But all religions were weird, Alex thought, trapped for a moment in the meeting’s death-throes, the people caught half-in and half-out of their seats, the light bouncing off the protrusions of Mr Stafford’s face, the girl who sometimes burst into tears in the wash-room drifting brokenly towards the doorway. Science; foresight; the rational interpretation of verifiable fact: that was what would save us.
Back at his desk a new tranche of data had appeared on the screen, and he silently appraised it, relishing its calm exactitude, its spatial distinctions. In Uttoxeter it was raining. Fog, coalescing over the East Anglian coast, was moving in towards Great Yarmouth, Cromer and King’s Lynn. Heavy showers tracked across the Medway. People too, he thought, had this susceptibility to analysis, this potential for enslavement to the grand laws of pattern and design. All that was needed was confidence in one’s judgment. As the lunch-hour passed, waiting for Erica’s 1.30 phone
call, he read The God Delusion with what he hoped was an appropriately serious expression. ‘I won’t be back until late,’ Erica said, ringing at 2.15, ‘but if you get home by six it would be a big help as the man’s coming to see about the radiator.’ ‘I thought I was going to fix the radiator,’ Alex said. ‘Did I? I must have forgotten. Bye, darling.’ Putting down the phone, Alex found himself obscurely irritated, as if twenty square miles of storm cloud heading north across Lincolnshire had suddenly changed course and gone off to inundate the Midland plain. Belvedere, ambling past the desk with a copy of Tax Tips for the Over Sixty-Fives in the nicotine-stained fingers of his left hand, whistled sharply and said: ‘Natalia Spendlove, eh?’ ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Alex wondered. It was not that he wanted to fix the radiator, he decided, merely that he required certainty in his life. ‘Oh come on,’ Belvedere said. The shrug of his shoulders implied war, famine, pestilence, cataracts descending out of an azure sky. Suddenly Alex wanted solidarity, something to set against the vagaries of a capricious world. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘Interview some bleeding cabinet minister about the budget,’ Belvedere said. He went off briskly down the corridor, the noise of his footfalls moving in counterpoint to the tap of the rain on the glass.
Slowly – infinitely slowly – the remainder of the week passed. There was no sign of the radiator repair man and Alex did the job himself: a bucket full of treacly water, weighed down with sediment, sat on the kitchen floor in tribute. Rain fell in the Peak District, the Scottish Borders and the Brecon Beacons, and Belvedere was reprimanded by his editor for not having heard of the International Monetary Fund. The vague thought of trouble that Alex now detected in his life – an ominous foreshadowing, a presentiment of doom – was compounded by the arrival of Natalia Spendlove. He had supposed that Ms Spendlove – such was the immemorial habit of weather presenters – would have bountiful, wheaten hair, white, even teeth and be dressed in something by Nicole Farhi or Paul Smith. Instead, bidden to the hospitality room where she sat awaiting her induction, he found a small, sullen girl with a dyed black buzz-cut wearing a white boiler-suit with odd floral attachments that made her look rather like a Morris-dancer. ‘Might as well be banging a couple of staves together on Chiswick Green,’ he complained to Erica, during one of the discussions they were having – he in his flat, she on a mobile somewhere in Kensington High Street – about where they might go on holiday. ‘Shall I book the tickets, then, for Andalusia?’ ‘Spain’s rather hot,’ Erica objected. ‘You said you liked it last year when you went to Oporto.’ ‘A girl likes a change sometimes,’ Erica said, her voice suddenly overwhelmed by the snarl of traffic.