by Glen Duncan
‘You people, now, are uniquely placed, you realize that, don’t you?’
‘Us people?’
‘Anglos. There’s going to be a great temptation to forget everything we’ve…What I mean is you’ve got a choice.’ Everything we’ve taught you, he’d been going to say. Ross’s scalp prickled. ‘You can lower your standards,’ Hoggarth continued, ‘become more like the natives, you know what I’m talking about…Or you can honour your heritage.’
Ross was thinking of a story his Aunt Eliza used to tell, about how, when she was a girl, a young British subaltern had taken her to a dance at his club. He’d only been in the country a month. She was fair-skinned, grey-eyed; he’d assumed she was English. After about twenty minutes, he was called aside by an elderly man, spoken to quietly. He came to me blushing like I don’t know what, Eliza used to say. Didn’t know how to tell it to my face. He tried, poor bugger, Madam, Miss, terribly sorry ur ah oo, pulling all the faces…So I said let me say it for you: You had no idea I had a touch of the tar brush but now that pompous old twit has put you in the picture you’d better take me home. My God you should have seen the looks. So I said, Thank you very much but if I’m not good enough to dance with I’m not good enough to walk home with, either. And I turned on my heel and walked out of there. She told it beautifully, with relish for the moral disgust and a shameless delight in her own heroism. And you never saw him again? Ross’s sisters would want to know. Never, Eliza would say, her mouth snapping shut with mean finality, though according to Beatrice, who in sorority as in everything was viciously competitive, she did see him again, and not just for a walk home.
‘Now, I’m not going to make a criminal case out of it,’ Hoggarth said, ‘because I believe that deep down you’re an honourable man and it’s not going to do anyone any good if you get sent to jail. But we are going to have to accept that you can’t just walk away from what is in fact criminal activity without being made to bear some consequences.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Ross asked the grain.
Hoggarth closed his eyes again. The weight of relished responsibility. Suddenly he leaned forward. ‘Monroe, we need honourable men in this country. You know yourself the Indians can’t be relied on for anything. Not caring, it’s in their damned blood. Continent of Circe and all that, it’s no joke. There’s no unity–never was until we came and made a country out of it–and where there’s no unity there’s no order. Do you have any idea the sort of mess the railways are going to be in if the whole lot’s left to the Indians?’
Ross remained silent.
‘Do you know a George Skinner?’ Hoggarth said.
Hearing the name Ross realized he’d been waiting for it. He looked up at Hoggarth. No point in denying it. Any number of people could have seen them together. ‘Yes, I know him.’
Hoggarth leaned back in his chair, studied Ross for a moment. You know what I want. Yes I do. ‘The point is,’ Hoggarth said, swivelling away slightly and looking at the floor, ‘we know he’s involved.’
Ross said nothing.
‘The authorities have had their eye on him for quite some time.’
‘If you know he’s involved, why are you asking me about it?’
‘Don’t be obtuse, Monroe. Knowing he’s involved is one thing, proving it is another. We need a testimony.’
The last of his tension left Ross in a soft electrical shiver. It passed from him and his muscles and bones were at ease. The mathematics of this don’t change. He thought of himself and Skinner in the room at the Ambassador, laughing because there was such a need to say something and simultaneously no need to say anything. Remembering, it was a struggle not to laugh now, Hoggarth’s comfortable confidence.
‘I know Mr Skinner,’ Ross said. ‘But not well. We met several years ago, during the Independence riots, as a matter of fact, from which both of us were hospitalized. We swapped addresses, and when he came to Bhusawal recently he looked me up. We’ve had a few drinks together. That’s all. He has, as far as I know, absolutely nothing to do with any of this.’
‘Monroe,’ Hoggarth said, ‘you’re not being sensible.’
Ross, now experiencing a peculiar heat of anger and euphoria (laughter bubbled up, his effort to keep it down sent up more bubbles; the deliciousness of knowing that sooner or later he’d give in to it), got to his feet.
‘Sit down, there’s a good chap,’ Hoggarth said.
‘That’s all I’ve got to say,’ Ross said. He turned his back on the superintendent and headed towards the door.
‘I haven’t finished with you, Monroe.’
‘But I’ve finished with you,’ Ross said, without turning around.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
revisions
(London, 2004)
What do you do? You laugh. The moment expands fantastically, and in the seconds of fresh space it creates you realize how long it’s been since you last tasted innocent joy. Admittedly the expansion’s brief, a heartbeat or two, then no matter joy’s purity the regular shit collapses back in and what was a giant space shrinks, has to truck with the rest of your life’s unspectacular moments. Scarlet and I stopped, opened our mouths, let the shock of surprise expand, then, laughing, slowly came towards each other and with only the very slightest hesitation embraced, loosely then tightly, me still holding in one hand the plastic bottle of sparkling water, her in one hand a woollen coat.
Oh my God.
Holy fucking shit.
Oh. My. God.
Then more laughing, but without innocence, extra-sensory tentacles (mine) already reaching out and probing the invisible lifeshape: alone? married? still loves—
She had, I thought, grown very slightly. She’d felt ribby in the embrace, a nervous, wiry strength in the shoulders that hadn’t been there before. No fat, no grey, no yawning pores, no loose skin; only the faintest fine lines at the eye and mouth corners. Her face if anything looked thinner, hollower-cheeked. It was worked for. The tension said exercise, the skin and hair healthy eating. I couldn’t imagine her smoking a cigarette.
‘What…? Jesus.’ One had to keep aborting and starting again. ‘First, what’s the—Do you have to be somewhere straight away, right now?’ We had, not quite able to let go of each other, gracelessly got out of the throng. I’d nearly fallen over her suitcase but we were too busy laughing at the other thing–us, here, now, seventeen years–to laugh at that.
‘No I’m just…I’m on my own time. Who are you waiting for?’
The only immediate place was a Costa Coffee with a dried-blood colour scheme, but I had to get her sitting down, still, able to answer questions. Our eyes kept meeting and igniting, then flicking away, saying wait, wait, calm down.
I got us coffees, pointlessly.
‘Okay. First: how long are you here for?’ I said.
‘As long as I want. Well, no. I’m on holiday for three months.’
‘Three months?’
She laughed. I saw the inside of her mouth; tongue and teeth and palate all seventeen years older. Bizarrely, I thought of the thousands of times she must have brushed her teeth since I last saw her. ‘It’s a long story,’ she said. ‘Oh my God. You.’
We must have looked insufferably pleased with ourselves, even for Arrivals, laughing and grinning and shaking our heads. Around us the maroon café was a mess of uncleared tables and spilled drinks and piled-up luggage. There was her face, the eyes darkly added-to, God only knew by what. The years were on her in the thinnest transluscent layers.
‘What are we going to do?’ I said. The situation was defeating us. The unbearable roller-coaster brink moment held, indefinitely. ‘I mean are you—Do you have any time?’
‘Yes. I mean, I’m in London for a couple of weeks.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Honestly, I’m on holiday. This is…What about you?’
‘I’m here. I live here–still in London, I mean.’
It was going to be like this, dead-ending with the small things becaus
e of the big things.
‘Do you live in New York?’
‘Yes, but that’s a long story, too.’
‘I can’t believe it. I truly cannot believe it.’
‘Neither can I. I was thinking about you on the plane.’
My face emptied of tension. ‘Were you?’
She laughed, nodded–but there was a surge or flaring-up of her life I saw her suppress. Things to hide, apparently. I thought: She wants to get away and think about this before going any further. I had the same feeling, that if we were going to meet I didn’t want it to be like this, as if a rogue spark had got into the fireworks box and now they were all going off willy-nilly.
But she was thinking about me on the plane. She had said that.
‘Who are you meeting?’ she said. ‘Don’t you need to…?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not here to meet anyone. I’ll tell you about it later.’ I paused, but there was no objection. There was going to be a later.
We were left with the absurd business of getting the Heathrow Express into London together, me taking charge of her suitcase and sorting out the tickets as if I had been there to meet her. Sharing the train would be a deflation but there was no obvious way to avoid it since she was going to her hotel and I was…Well, wherever I was going I wasn’t hanging around Arrivals any more. She was tired from the flight. I hadn’t shaved for two days (it only very belatedly struck me how much like shit I looked next to her) and after the adrenal interview with Reece needed a shower. We had to pass from the miracle to killing three minutes on the platform. I said, It’s so much better with this express now and she said, I know the last fucking thing you want after a flight is the Tube.
‘There are too many things,’ she said. We’d taken the seats facing each other with the little table between. ‘I don’t know where to start. Whereabouts in London are you?’
‘Balham. Teaching in Wimbledon. Don’t laugh. You?’
‘Well, until last month I ran a talent agency. Don’t laugh.’
Intuitive agreement to stick to the safer material but with whether we liked it or not (I liked it) surges if we looked at each other too long. After five minutes of false starts and incredulous silences we hit on the subject of my family with relief. ‘Melissa and Ted are still together on the farm, all the boys are grown–Ben’s got two boys of his own. Maudy got divorced from Chris ten years back, she’s with this other guy now, living together. You should see Elspeth. Jesus.’ My navel-pierced niece had been a toddler when Scarlet and I broke up.
‘And your mum and dad?’
Tentative, they might be dead.
‘They’re fine. Usual aches and pains. My mum gets dizzy spells now and again. They’re not as…You know. They’ve slowed down a lot over the last few years.’ I looked out of the window, thinking of Pasha saying, ‘I’ve got my feet on Thursday.’ The last time I was up there I opened the bathroom cabinet for a cotton bud and realized its contents were without exception medicinal.
‘I’ve wanted to write to them so many times,’ Scarlet said, but that brought too much with it, made her look out of the window. ‘This is weird,’ she said. ‘Holy Mother of God.’
‘It’d be lovely to see you, you know, while you’re here. I mean if you’re not…if you want to.’
She leaned back in her seat and looked at me. Suddenly we’d run out of it, whatever it was.
‘Are you married?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Partner? Kids or anything.’
‘No. What about you?’
‘No.’
I’d assumed she’d want a night to slough the jetlag but when we pulled into Paddington she said, ‘This might sound crazy, but do you want to meet this evening?’ The station clock said a quarter to four. She looked smaller standing facing me on the platform. Her hair was a way I’d never seen it, straight, shoulder-length, a plump dark shiny curtain with sharp, as they said in America, bangs that swung at her jawline. Her eyes said the surreality of the flight’s bent time and annihilated distance was at work: extraordinary things happening? Fine. I wondered if she needed to do this, deal with me (whatever dealing with me would mean) in the altered state, was counting on its momentum to carry her through. Carry her through what? The way she’d said, ‘This might sound crazy, but do you want to meet this evening?’ had made it sound as if an existing plan was being altered ad hoc. She gave me the address and number of the hotel (the Grafton, High Street Kensington–we both laughed, her not quite looking at me) and I wheeled her case all the way to the cab. ‘I’ll see you at nine, then,’ she said, and laughing again (different laughter, conceding delayed shock, awkwardness, proximal complications) we chastely kissed each other on the cheek. I waved her off as the cab pulled away.
There, when the taxi had disappeared entirely from view, was London. With Scarlet in it again. This had been the way of it for hundreds of years, the city going dead and coming alive as love entered and withdrew. Tiring and exhilarating to consider. A nimble journey home I made, smiling at strangers, buying an Evening Standard, skipping down the escalators, my London legitimacy restored after all these fraudulent years.
‘Okay,’ Janet Marsh’s message said when I got home. ‘How about Wednesday afternoon? I’ll be there myself from three onwards. He doesn’t know what you can possibly want to talk to him for but anyway, you can come and…you know. Whatever. The address is 46B Fox Road, Shepherd’s Bush. It’s off the Uxbridge Road after the Hammersmith and City Tube, going, what?…west. I’ll see you there if I don’t hear otherwise. By-eee.’
I was soaking in the tub when Vince got home at six. He had to go and pee in the back garden.
‘You’re never seeing her again, are you?’ he said, putting his head round my bedroom door. He meant, Janet, whom he’s started referring to as the Porcine Richwoman. ‘Is she paying you?’
‘You’re not going to fucking believe what happened to me today.’
I realized, saying it, that I’d forgotten the incident with the police. I told him about Scarlet. I couldn’t be bothered telling him about the police now.
‘You’re joking,’ he said.
‘I’m not joking.’
‘What, she was just there?’
‘She was just there. There’s been a lot of weird shit happening in my life recently.’
‘Christ, it’s destiny.’
‘That’s what my dad would say. He’s coming to stay next week, by the way, so try not to be too gay, will you?’
‘Oh God, great. What if I want to bring someone back?’
‘Bring them back, it’s fine, this is your home. Just don’t bark while having homosexual sex, okay? Just, if you can, refrain from neighing.’
I joined him in the kitchen, where he sat with his feet up, drinking a glass of wine and smoking a joint. He took in my sartorial efforts. I’d polished my shoes and ironed a shirt and found it incredible the difference such things made. ‘Look at you all ponced up.’
‘Yeah, well, you haven’t seen her. I felt like bloody Oliver Reed at the airport. I used a whole load of your cosmetics, by the way.’
‘I can see that. You look practically newborn. Have a stiffener before you go.’
While I poured he reached into his satchel and pulled out a sheaf of bulldog-clipped papers, slid them over to me. ‘Downloaded it. There’s a copy for you.’
‘What is it?’
‘A collection of quotes from various people, mainly in the US administration and the British government. These are all things that people have actually said. I mean they’re in print. It’s mind-boggling, you know?’ Tilted up into a question because the grass was working. I looked at the first page:
‘Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties’–President George W. Bush.
‘Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are the facts’–Colin Powell to the UN.
‘With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot
of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them’–Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Sassaman.
‘It is really wild driving round here, I mean the poverty, and you see there is no money, it is disastrous financially and there is a leadership vacuum, pretty much like California’–Arnold Schwarzenegger to US troops in Baghdad.
I laughed, as was expected of me. ‘Yeah, well, I’ll have a look at it later.’
‘What am I going to do when you kick me out, by the way?’ Vince said.
‘What?’
‘To move your half-caste tart in. It’ll be like Paki-Frankenstein and Bride of Paki-Frankenstein.’
‘We’ll adopt you.’
‘And what is the Porcine Richwoman going to say?’
‘That’s nothing. I’m going. Don’t wait up.’
‘Take these and read them on the Tube.’
I waved the papers away. ‘I can’t I can’t I’ve got to prepare myself.’
The Grafton, I’d guess, is about two-fifty a night. Forty rooms, understated contemporary designer furnishings, pleased with itself. The desk duo was a pretty white-bloused spectacled girl with dark blonde hair side-parted and scraped back from a shiny, bulbous forehead, and a black-suited possible queen who looked like Tony Curtis. Tenderness flowed out of me to them. ‘I’m here to see Scarlet Reynolds.’ How many years since I’d said her name aloud? Ten? Fifteen? Tony (I forgave him the riff-raff here smile) dialled and waited, just long enough for my armpits to start up, looked at me and began to say he was sorry sir but there was no reply from—when Scarlet said, ‘Oi, mister,’ from the doorway behind me.