by D. J. Taylor
In the end Mr Stafford vetoed Natalia’s boiler-suit, and they compromised on a business outfit in white pin-stripe. The problem about the job he did, Alex thought as she laboured over the screenful of new computer graphics that Mr Stafford wanted for Natalia’s inaugural spot, was that it furnished an endless series of metaphors for the rest of your life. You saw your relationships in terms of warm fronts and suspect cloud-gatherings, your past as a chain of isobars rising and falling on the grid. Wondering, in spite of himself, how he and Erica shaped up on the meteorological chart, he decided that after a period of occasional showers and the odd thunderstorm they were moving forward to a more settled climate. The computer graphics glared back at him from the screen – flaring sun-bursts, grey chevrons cunningly engineered to give an impression of continuous deluge. He rang Erica at the flat, where she had professed to be working that afternoon, but there was no answer. The long-range forecast said that there were thunderstorms across Newfoundland, Greenland and the western Atlantic, and he logged the data happily on his chart. Those Newfoundlanders and Greenlanders would just have to look out for themselves. ‘Here,’ Belvedere said, walking past. ‘Guess what I saw that Natalia Spendlove reading in the foyer just now?’ ‘I really have no idea,’ Alex said. He had begun to wonder whether Belvedere was a serious person. ‘Book of Exodus,’ Belvedere said.
On the day of Natalia Spendlove’s debut there were gales across north-west England and the Marches. ‘Force nine in Llanfair Talhaiarn,’ the man from the Meteorological Office said cheerfully. ‘You might want to issue some kind of alert.’ ‘I thought you said it was going to be mild for the time of the year?’ Alex queried, remembering a conversation from the previous day. ‘Did I? Well, it’s very variable. Strong winds and an area of high pressure. Difficult to predict.’ Alex could see the email that had come that morning winking from the screen. He was taking her for granted, Erica wrote. She would send a bike round tomorrow for the keys. Here were other things that were variable, beyond the weather. He wrote a little précis of the man from the Meteorological Office’s remarks and circulated them to the department. Everywhere he looked, he thought, the fixed, immovable pillars of his life were crumbling into dust.
‘I really don’t see that there’s anything for me to apologise for,’ Mr Stafford said, when they assembled next morning. ‘In fact there was some very positive viewer reaction. One can’t expect everyone to appreciate this sort of thing instantly.’ He did not look as if he had slept, and the skin of his face was shinier than ever. Presently the telephone rang and they all filed out while he decided whether to answer it. ‘The best bit,’ Belvedere said, as they loitered by the coffee machine in the mournful forenoon, ‘was when she started shouting about plagues of locusts.’ ‘And Noah,’ Alex said, judiciously. ‘The bit about Noah was good.’ ‘They’ve already fixed Stafford’s replacement,’ Belvedere went on. He was smiling because he had just been promoted to full business editor. ‘That old chap from the gardening spot.’ Later, staring at his computer screen, Alex remembered the shrewd, maniacal look on Natalia’s face as she had pronounced her incantations. Somewhere along the way he had lost his faith, he told himself, that austere, modernist belief in order, destiny, the consolations of a rational life. There was a storm heading in across the Suffolk coast, and he thought about the people in the Southwold beach-huts, hunkered down beneath the spirals of vibrating air, felt, for the first time, a twinge of rapt, vicarious terror.
—2008
Passage Migrants
Come mid-August the light in Sheringham began to change. In the past it had hung in duck-egg blues and greys over the warm summer sand. Now it had turned gun-metal: cloudy even when there was no cloud. Morris watched it again that morning as he stood in the big, untidy room that looked out on to the beach, pulling a hand uncertainly over the three days of stubble on his chin. On the couch, a yard or two distant from the high windows, snug under blankets and Morris’s old parka jacket, the girl from the Marine Ballroom slept soundly on, orange hair thrown back over a makeshift pillow of supermarket bags.
It was about half-past eight. Outside there were terns massed on the sandbar: two hundred of them at least, Morris calculated. Further out, beyond the upturned boats and the wreck of a giant sandcastle built three days before, gulls skirmished over the breakers. Once, at dusk on a day such as this, Morris had seen what he assumed was a purple heron rooting through driftwood in the shallows, but for some reason the hastily palmed camera had realised only vague shapes of grey and cobalt, the bird itself gathered up and lost in shadow. Thinking of the heron made him remember the figure on the couch. Morris hadn’t meant to come home with the girl from the Marine Ballroom. To find her there eight hours later, pinched face white against the black cushions, was to register a troubling shift in routine, like setting out along the coast path on the cliff to find it strewn with granite blocks from the sea defences.
Traipsing along the sea front on his way to get a paper – the door slammed sharply behind him by way of a hint – Morris watched the tern armies huddled against the breeze. In an hour or so they would head north to the flats at Cley or Brancaster. He walked back the way he had come, noting other routines that were undisturbed: fishermen hauling crab boats over the shale; an ice-cream van being restocked from a delivery truck; dog-walkers silhouetted against the shoreline. Back at the flat he found the girl from the Marine Ballroom sitting at the big deal table wearing one of his old tee-shirts and eating slices of unbuttered toast.
This bread must be a week old,’ she said. ‘Look, it’s got green bits growing out of it.’
Her hair was redder then he’d thought, Morris realised: a kind of scarlet orange with magenta tints. Seeing it bobbing above the table-top nonplussed him. It was outside his range. There was a rucksack he hadn’t noticed yet, half-open on the floor and spilling books and tissues out over the sandy hardboard.
‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ the girl went on. ‘Apart from the cafeteria.’
Morris reckoned she must be a year or two younger than himself: twenty-two maybe, or twenty-three. He lingered for a moment by the window, gently lashing the sill with the furled copy of the Cromer Mercury, meditating another hint.
‘Where are you staying?’
‘The Beeches. Out on the Holt Road. I don’t suppose you know how to get there?’
Morris nodded. Everyone in Sheringham knew about The Beeches. On Friday nights Range Rovers drove out from Norwich, Cambridge – even as far as London – dropping off gangs of moneyed teenagers at the gate. Two years ago there had been a scandal when a girl drowned in the swimming pool. Still rapping the sill with the newspaper, he gave directions. Beyond the window the sky threatened rain.
‘I’ve to go to work,’ he said, casting out the final hint.
‘That’s OK. I’ll let myself out.’
Morris left her there among the mouldy bread-crusts, the stacked crockery and the copies of Norfolk Bird Club Bulletin. Looking up at the window a moment or two later, as the flock of terns swept northward over his head, he could see her moving beyond the glass: a ball of orange flame bleeding into the nondescript greys and fawns behind. Down at the marina they were gearing up for the late-summer rush. Mr Silverton thought the season would last another fortnight. Then the schools would go back and the trippers start to disappear. Morris sold ice- cream, mended a catch that had come off one of the fun-pool cubicles and retrieved a Walkman that someone had dropped into the deep end. At the midmorning break he and Doug, the other assistant, sat and smoked cigarettes on upturned crates in the yard, hunched against the tubs of chlorine and the rusty generator spares, while Mr Silverton came down from the upstairs office and took a turn at the front desk. Outside fine rain fell against the Perspex dividing wall and they could see the shapes of the holidaymakers clustered against the big overhanging sign that said SHERINGHAM’S NEWEST INDOOR AQUATIC EXPERIENCE.
Curiously, the girl – her name was Alice, he now remembered – was there again at l
unchtime. From his eyrie above the soft drinks dispenser, where the wiring had begun to come away from the wall, he noticed her turning over the rubbish in the bargain swimwear trays that Mr Silverton bought in job lots on the back of Norwich market: nonchalantly, but with an undisguised sense of purpose. When she saw him she came over and stood by the dispenser, waiting for him to descend.
‘Does it always rain like this? In this part of the world, I mean.’
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Doug regarding him sardonically from the desk. ‘Pretty much.’
‘Do you get a lunch break?’
‘It’s another half an hour.’
Waiting in the foyer while he sold tickets to a cub pack superintended by two mountainous Akelas, she looked oddly out of place, Morris thought, like one of the birds you saw at the big reserves further up the coast: blown off course, not sure what the food was like or whether the natives were friendly. They had a ploughman’s in one of the pubs along the front, in a small room hemmed in by fishing nets and ancient lobster shells. Alice was a student, taking a year out between degrees. Mostly she lived at her parents’ house in London, but there was talk of Edinburgh, Exeter, places even further flung. There were other people from The Beeches in the pub: two girls in striped men’s shirts and sunglasses and a boy carrying a copy of A History of Western Philosophy. At intervals their mobile phones went off, and they fished unselfconsciously in bags and pockets to answer them. Bored with the conversation, Morris stared out over the beach and its flotsam: marauding bands of children, an old man in an antique bathing dress tottering gamely towards the sea. ‘There’s a party on Wednesday at the house,’ Alice said, when he got up to go. Why don’t you come along?’ ‘I’ll do that,’ Morris said. Wednesday was the day he worked late.
Back at the marina he found Mr Silverton cross-legged on the floor beside the ice-cream cabinet, surrounded by a pile of melting choc-ices and sky-ray lollies, trying to mend an electrical fault. He was a plumpish, middle-aged man with thick, brindled hair like a badger, whom Morris and Doug had christened ‘The Fatman’. ‘There’s a bloke in the foyer wants to know about a party booking for the Bank Holiday,’ he said, without looking up. ‘You’d better go and talk to him.’ Heading off to reception, Morris found that Alice’s pale parched face, the flock of terns on the beach, had mysteriously coalesced in his head, so much so as to displace the other things that burned there.
The afternoon wore on. Mr Silverton finished repairing the ice-cream cabinet and went off to do errands in town.
‘What happens here in winter?’ Morris wondered over their tea-break.
Doug, who lived down the coast at Cromer, nodded at the imputation of local expertise. ‘You ever been here in November Morrie boy? Half the shops shut down. Fatman takes six weeks in Torremolinos. Day a week maintenance for the likes of us, if we’re lucky.’
Though we would never dream of interfering, Morris’s sister Julie had written a couple of days before from her house in Slough, Gary and I feel it is time you faced up to your responsibilities. It all depended on what your responsibilities were, Morris thought. He had a memory of walking through the front door in Slough a year before and Gary instantly asking him to wipe his feet. There was a fifty pence piece lying on the scuffed lino beneath the reception desk, and he picked it up and put it in the till.
‘Soft bugger, you are,’ Doug said, without malice. Outside an ice-cream van’s klaxon rose like an air-raid warning over the silent streets.
Late summer came. Waking up in the flat, Morris could feel the time slipping away, like sand from the high dunes falling out of his hands, down to the distant beach. Alice had left a paperback novel behind her on the couch: puzzling, unrecognisable spoor, about a group of girls sharing a flat in Bayswater. Morris examined it a couple of times before he handed it back. There was nothing in it that he could fasten on, still less any clue to Alice. In the evenings they went exploring the empty Norfolk back-lanes to Holt, Happisburgh and Burnham Market. Here there were unexpected surprises: two blind men playing chess in a cafe near Wells; an artist in a graveyard near Gresham busily transforming the church into a terrifying surrealist skyscraper; an older world, turned in on itself, inviolate. Julie wrote again, gossip and warnings jumbled together. The children were doing well at school. His mother was ill. There was a bed for him whenever he wanted it. On the Bank Holiday it rained for seven hours. Mr Silverton sat at the reception desk ostentatiously leafing his way through travel agents’ brochures. Doug had disappeared, gone off to Norwich or working at Yarmouth funfair: nobody quite knew. Julie’s letters lay face-up on the deal table, covered with beer can ring-pulls and postcards of Sheringham seafront. ‘Do you ever write back?’ Alice wondered, putting a pack of groceries down on the floor. She had taken to buying him things, Morris registered: bags of sugar; men’s magazines; Mars bars. There was a soft, proprietorial air to the way she moved round the flat. ‘What are you doing at the weekend?’ he asked, on a whim. ‘Nothing.’ ‘There’s somewhere we could go,’ he explained. ‘Somewhere I haven’t shown you.’ ‘OK,’ Alice said. ‘I like surprises.’ Morris could see that she was intrigued, that it was the right thing to have done.
‘Next week,’ Alice said, as they sped out on the coast road that Sunday, ‘I shall have to be getting back. Really and truly.’ Morris nodded, hoping that this would absolve him from speech. There were teal flying alongside the car, a long line of them heading north to the Wash. The sanctuary at Titchwell was just as he remembered it: a pinewood shop selling bird books and pairs of binoculars, elderly men in waders and soft felt hats drinking coffee out of thermos flasks in the yard. On the sheet of card tacked to the wall there were details of the passage migrants: stone curlews, avocets, an osprey that had flown in that morning with a Swedish ring tag round one of its claws. Later they wandered off along the path to the sea, past the twitchers’ hides and the observation points. The light had gone grey again, Morris saw, turning the sky the colour of the filing cabinets in Mr Silverton’s office.
What was that?’ Alice wondered, tugging suddenly at his sleeve. Morris felt rather than saw the blur of movement at his feet – like a brightly coloured paper bag, he thought later, lofted skywards by the wind. Watching it come to rest, a dozen yards down the path, orange crest bobbing above the dark wings, he felt a surge of exhilaration. ‘It’s a hoopoe,’ he said. ‘Look! I never saw one before.’ There was a file of middle-aged women in mackintoshes coming along the path towards them. Boxed in, the hoopoe took flight again, westward over the salt marshes. Morris watched it go. Not long after it began to rain again and they retired to the car. ‘That festival I was telling you about in Devon,’ Alice said briskly. ‘Once I’ve parked my stuff in town I’m off down there. You ought to come.’
Morris stared through the streaming window as the birdwatchers’ cars manoeuvred through the mud. The hoopoe would be somewhere over the north sea now, far away from the cam-corders and the binocular arcs, out where he couldn’t follow. ‘Sorry,’ he said, seeing the beach in winter, snow on the breakers, blanketing the rock pools in soft white fur. ‘Things to do.’
—2001
Birthday Lunch
The Terrapin Club was finally run to earth in the northernmost quadrant of Covent Garden, stuck between a unisex hairdresser and a shop that sold filing cabinets. Even then there was a difficulty, as the staircases ran both up and down, with only a Post-it-note-sized notice stamped TERRAPIN CLUB: MEMBERS ONLY to show the way. In the dining room a waiter in a white coat stood polishing a tray of tumblers, and a radio played Mantovani’s ‘The Song from the Moulin Rouge’. Mr Brancaster sat at the far end, fat white hand curved solicitously around a wineglass. When he saw Patrick he raised his forefinger up to the level of his temple and gave a mock-salute.
‘You’re three minutes late,’ he said, ‘so I took the liberty of ordering a drink.’ Mr Brancaster was a stickler for seemly cliché. He was the kind of man who partook of spirituous refreshment and availed himself of
public transport. At some point in the past he had enjoyed marital relations, and Patrick was there to prove it.
‘Meeting with a client,’ Patrick told him, stowing his briefcase beneath the table. ‘Couldn’t get away.’
‘It matters not,’ Mr Brancaster said, loftily. He had never taken any interest in his children’s jobs. Chartered accountancy; estate management; rat-catching: it was all the same to him. Snapping his fingers, with a noise that broke the room’s silence as effectively as a dropped brick or a banshee’s wail, he exclaimed: ‘Waiter! Garçon! Jugend! Another glass of the wine that maketh glad the heart of man, if you please.’
It seemed that the waiter was used to Mr Brancaster’s foibles. He brought a glass of wine on a brass salver, so tiny that it might have been an ashtray, and then went back to burnishing his tumblers. There was still no one else in the room.
‘Who are the Terrapins?’ Patrick asked, taking a sip of the wine and regretting the partners’ dining room in Eastcheap. He had a vision of a shoal of miniature tortoises quietly manoeuvring their way up the rickety staircase. ‘Do they ever show themselves?’