by Tanith Lee
It was then that the woman rushed into the lobby from the street.
She was about forty, quite smart in a dry sort of way, with short thick well-cut hair. But she flew in and then halted, and like one entering in a Greek tragedy, she wore a mask of tears.
We all stared at her a second. Then most of us looked away. The English are famed for their insularity, and constipation of the emotions. Even those Brits of mixed blood and origin seem now to end up in this frame of mind, or heart. One sees displays of violence more often, of sexual passion more often too. But frank human kindness – that thing called empathy – is rare.
He’d turned his head.
In a fleeting gesture he touched my arm with his hand. “Just a sec, Roy.” And he rose and went straight to her and stood there, and I heard him ask in a low, gentle voice, “What is it? Can I help?”
She started crying violently and noisily at once.
He put his arm around her, and drew her over to another group of empty chairs, the whole distance of the lobby from everyone, including me.
Now was my chance to split and run. I couldn’t take it. I was riveted. I sat there, reticence gone, and gaped at them.
She sobbed, he held her in his arm, bending forward to hear her muffled words, listening intently.
Then he let go, touched her arm rather as he had touched mine, and came back over to where I sat.
“Roy, be a gent. Can you get her a brandy?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Tell you soon. Brandy first. Thanks, Roy.”
Like the slave of chance which that moment I was, up I got, walked back in the bar and ordered it. Everyone in there was by now looking round too, and much less cautiously, the smoked glass screens giving them cover.
The waiter said to me, “What’s up, sir?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your friend, he’s helping her?”
“Yes, apparently.” No point in stressing he wasn’t any friend of mine.
I paid for the brandy rather than put it on the tab.
Going out I started to walk across and Sej came up to me and took it from me with a grateful nod, and bore it to the weeping woman.
She tipped back her head and swallowed the brandy whole.
Her eyes were inflamed, and if her mascara hadn’t run she had somehow smeared it even so.
She spoke to him. He nodded.
Then he came over to me again and undid his bag, and pulled out a shirt. It was dark blue in colour. “That should be OK,” he said. Holding it he went directly out of the hotel doors and vanished along the street.
I sat back and watched the woman surreptitiously. In fact she was even a little older than I’d first thought, and her clothes were good, but not quite as good as in my initial impression. She sat motionless, head up. She stared through us all, through walls, through time and space. I have seen the look before with certain people. The look of sudden vital loss.
When Sej came back in he carried his shirt carefully now, wrapped around something. There was blood seeping through.
For a somersaulting instant I thought of a dead baby. But no, it wasn’t that. From one end a pathetic white tail hung out. A dog.
He too noticed the tail in that moment and deftly obscured it in a fold of the shirt.
Standing by her, he spoke. Now I heard the words.
“The taxi’s outside. He’s OK. Shouldn’t you call your husband?”
I heard her say drearily, “He won’t care.”
“There must be someone,” he said.
“Oh.” She gazed up at him with the sadness of the only half-alive. “Must there?”
“Then can I…?”
“No. No, you’ve been much too kind. And – please thank your friend for the drink. I should – I have to pay…”
“Hush, dear,” he said.
Something caught inside me. My father had sometimes said that to my mother, gently in that way, if she was distressed. Hush, dear. It’ll be all right. Lies, of course. But the human tenderness. Hush, dear. Hush.
Sej guided her out and both of them now disappeared. Beyond my line of sight he must have handed her the butcher’s bundle, and put her in the cab.
When he came back in he was chalk white.
Unlike the old, who can look so young, almost childlike, in certain situations of stress, the young have a way of looking abruptly aged. You see it in the faces of children from famine zones or bombed out villages on the TV news. I don’t know why this is. Sixty looks six, and six – a hundred.
“Sorry, Roy,” he said, and slumped into his former chair. “Some shit ran over her dog. Just out there. At least it must have been quick. He didn’t stop, naturally. Poor little cow.”
“You’d better drink something.”
“No, actually. I feel a bit sick again. I had to – pick it up.”
“I’ll fetch some water.”
I marched back into the bar and got him one of those small bottles of still water that are now so popular. When I came out he had gone, his bag too. He was nowhere to be seen.
I stood in the foyer, staring round for him. Searching anxiously, confused and made uneasy by the absence of my enemy.
ELEVEN
One can make small excuse for some things one does. And yet perhaps all such things are in some way recognizable by the rest of us. And if not, then they may come to be. And if never, possibly they should.
When Joseph returned from the lavatories, which lie off the foyer of the Belmont and are, like the entire hotel, mirrored and gilded, urinals white as the brand new false teeth of my parents’ era, he was still gaunt and pale.
He sat down once more opposite to me.
“Really sorry, Roy. I had to throw up again.”
My fault? Apparently not.
“I’ve always been squeamish,” he said.
“You didn’t seem to be.”
“Well, you kind of put that on hold, don’t you, when you have to.”
I struggled not to say it, but I had to. “You dealt with all that very well.”
“I tried. I was lucky with the cabdriver. Good man. He said he’d lost his own dog. He said drunks get in the cab and puke everywhere, so he had plastic bags… I saw to that. She couldn’t. Poor little thing,” he said, as if she were his younger sister. “Her husband must be a twat. But she got herself together. They went off with the dog on her lap. She said she’d bury him in a big pot, grow a plant. They don’t have a garden, just this rich apartment in Hampstead. I think she said Hampstead.”
He looked drained. He let his head sink back on the chair.
“Roy, I’m really sorry, now I do need a drink and then I need some food. Crazy I know if I was sick, but that’s gone and I feel hollow. As I said, I’m glad to pay, but it has to be in the next ten minutes or I’m going to drop. I could do with your company too.”
Stiffly I said, “All right. Take this water. What drink do you want?”
“Tea, please,” he said. “Black, no milk, no sugar, no lemon.”
That would have to be the restaurant. The bar ran to coffee only.
On his left hand there was a little bright smear of blood. It was on the palm, which must have been pressed to the body of the dog – washing his hands must have cleared the rest. I hoped he wouldn’t see it.
I wondered what I was doing. I should have made myself scarce long before. But I hadn’t, had I?
We went into the restaurant and ordered tea for Joseph who was Sej, and a glass of red for me. Then we had lunch.
He perked up bit by bit.
He thanked me several times.
What did we talk about? Not much. The food, London, nothing. We ate, I a little, all the while watching him. He ate a lot. And at the end he paid, and left them a lavish tip, thanking the waiter with an odd, sophisticated joy, as if he had consumed a slice of heaven on a plate.
At the Belmont, just before you reach the lifts on the ground floor, there is a big blue function room, which that day
stood wide open.
A few chairs and long tables were left about, the latter decorated with water glasses. But the dais from which, I suppose, the officers of various businesses address their captive, pre-empted staff, stood vacant, and the mikes turned off. To the left was positioned a piano, a baby grande, black and polished, its lid for some reason upraised.
I saw it because he had gone back that way when he went to the Gents again, and returning, told me.
Why this time had I waited for him? But then, why had I stayed and waited earlier?
Without ducking all responsibility, partly I blame my father. He had so often told me I must try to see the ‘Other person’s side’. Plus I had been heavily indoctrinated in ideas of polite behaviour. Of course this is absurd, for many of us, especially from my own and prior generations, have been and were so instructed, and often with physical beatings to augment the process. My father was not a brutal man, but he had his standards and his eye could turn very cold. “I’m a bit disappointed in you, Roy.” The whole structure rested on a quasi-Christian ethic, despite the fact my father was strictly agnostic. It was not to be what one wanted oneself, but what would be “fair” to others. As a kid I had absorbed this and sometimes sobbed in combined frustration and shame – at not being understood, at the fear that I had been understood too well and found unpleasantly wanting. Countless other people, as I began to say before, in the rambling way by which I’m allowing this narrative to proceed, were lessoned similarly. But later they rebelled, emerging radiantly assured and unappeasing. Not apparently Roy Phipps.
Only in my novels have I played with the matches and the fire of injustice and utter barefaced self-obsession. And there too, in the end, a penalty is normally exacted.
All this divertissement has been solely to say that, confronted by Joseph’s continued urbanity, he had bought lunch, assisted a distraught woman even though it had made him ill, I couldn’t bring myself simply to run away.
I would, of course. But first civilities, the acknowledgement of his rights, must be attended to.
And therefore I’d waited once more in the foyer, and then hearing of the open room with the piano, I rose from the chair and followed him to see.
Once I was at the doorway, Joseph went straight to the piano. He dragged out a chair and sat down. “Too high,” he remarked, perhaps to me, or to the hotel in general. And then he put his hands on the keys.
“I’ll play you a tune,” he said, like my Maureen, all those years ago. And beauty had spread like butterfly wings from her fingers.
And with him?
He launched at once into a piece of Scott Joplin, the by now most well known one. It came out perfect, yet – flighty. Flighty. It had wings.
Once or twice, as he played, he glanced up and back at me. He didn’t smile now, he grinned. He looked happy. He looked – at home.
After this prelude he shot immediately into one of the etudes of Chopin. My father had played this. Joseph Traskul clearly demonstrated that “play” was not what one did with it. Filigreed streams dashed sparkling and hopeless to a bottomless sea. A few dark chords barred their way, but died.
Behind me a woman murmured, “My.”
The Americans had come, drawn by the sounds, which obviously were not the everyday musak of the hotel.
They stood, seemingly awestruck, then – passing me without a look – went into the room and sat down on some of the chairs.
Joseph played.
From Chopin he passed to Beethoven, and the character of the music changed – gorgeous despair to thundering rage. I believe it was the Appassionata. The room rang with the notes but more than that, with the power of the composition.
Maureen had played so very well.
But Joseph played as if each note sped new-born from his brain.
Now and then I’ve been to concerts. I had heard this kind of quality, ability and fire before.
Never like this.
Other people kept arriving. They passed by me as if I were some doorman, some of them even smiling or nodding at me as if I held the way for them.
In the end there must have been over fifty people sitting in the room, either on the chairs or tables, or the blue carpet.
If there was a pause, they applauded. But by now his face had set in a kind of visor of intention. He played on and on, one astonishing rendering leaping at once into another, Scott Joplin to Chopin to Beethoven to Rachmaninov to Prokofiev to Gershwin.
Certainly some of the staff of the hotel had come in. The manager had apparently come down, or so I was informed, to the doors. He had meant to put a stop to this, the piano was valuable, not there for idle tinkerings. But he too had stayed a while to listen, and gone away uncomplaining.
Joseph finished with a sudden little syncopated piece of jazz, the kind he’d spoken of. I didn’t know it, but I hardly know everything and that type of music, while I like it, I don’t know very well. Yet I had a feeling this one was really his own.
Lightly tapping in the last note, he sat back.
He sat there with his back to us, hands down at his sides.
The room erupted, naturally. They cheered.
At first he seemed to take no notice. He seemed nearly in a trance. Then he lifted his head, stood up and, walking round the chair, bowed to them theatrically, but grinning again.
When some of them approached, crowding round, asking him who he was, where he played, he was all graceful good humour. He just, he told them, tuned pianos. And now he was handing out those cards of his. He got plenty of potential customers. The air bubbled with praise.
Finally he extricated himself and came across to me at the door.
“Well, Dad. Made you proud of me for a minute, didn’t I?”
“You’re a wonderful and versatile pianist. But I’m not your father.”
The grin was gone. The smile was there instead.
He lifted his eyebrows. “Sure about that, are you?”
Lynda had had a ‘scare’, what she called a scare, which was her supposing herself pregnant by me. After we’d married, for indeed we did marry and are still married, since neither of us so far has found the need to apply for a divorce, she had another scare. This will indicate, accurately enough, that neither of us wanted children, or at least I did not. Perhaps she only wished not to have any by me. Both scares anyway came to nothing, or so she informed me. After all, I’d always gathered she was on the Pill.
We were together approximately two years. When she left, which was not because of her having fallen for anyone else, only because she had the chance of living with an aunt of hers near Manchester who had some money, which – as Lynda pointed out – we did not – it could just have been possible she was, unbeknownst to either of us – pregnant. Or should I say, really scared. Her leaving me occurred in 1977. I’d been more relieved than regretful. The washing-machine went on washing my shirts, and I could cook in fact rather better than Lynda. As for sex, now and then there had been someone after she went. Not very often. I’m not attractive to the opposite sex, and I don’t expect to be.
However. If Joseph were about the age I’d eventually thought him, lying there on my kitchen floor, twenty-eight-seven – he could maybe have been mine, mine and Lynda’s.
Except surely she would have let me know. Not from any sense of my fatherly rights, but to get some extra financial support. At the very least, to blame me. Or did the aunt take care of everything? There was less stigma by then in having a baby without an adjacent man. Besides, we were still married. In the aunt’s eyes, it would be respectable. And if the old woman liked children, perhaps this seemed a good arrangement, leaving me out of it, all the better.
But then again, could this – creature, this demon, who was physically so unlike either Lynda or myself, this pianistic genius – be the product of our midnight fumblings?
“Are you saying,” I said, “you’re my son?
“Am I? Do you think I am, Roy?”
We had gone out of the hotel and w
ere walking together along Lang Passage, up to the Gardens. When he saw them he said, “There’s a park near my place. Huge trees and rhododendrons.”
“I didn’t ask you about the park, Sej. I asked if you genuinely believe you’re my son.”
We stood by the low railing and looked into the Gardens. The trees were leafing early, the sun out and shining on them. A small bird was drinking from the drinking fountain drips.
“You tell me,” he said presently. “Could I be?”
“I doubt it.”
“But you doubt everything, don’t you, Roy?”
I said levelly, “It’s often the best way to doubt.”
“Innocent until proven guilty. Guilty until proven innocent. Stupid until proven clever. Purple till proven blue.”
“What are you saying?”
“Nothing much. Just passing the time. That bird on the fountain is a wren. You don’t often catch sight of them in inner London. Or I don’t. Did you know, they have pelicans in Hyde Park. That took me by surprise. Great big bills and red legs. What’s the time, by the way?”
What to do? I glanced at my watch. “Getting on for four-thirty.”
“Shit,” he said. “I have to be somewhere.”
“Tuning a piano?”
“Not this time. Sorry, Roy, I have to get going.”
“Really.”
He turned and laughed at me, then he put his arms round me and hugged me, giving me also the obligatory masculine clap-on-the-back.
“I’ll see you, Roy…” he said. “Daddy,” he added, like a mischievous child that knows you love it and, though disapproving, won’t really mind you just heard it use the F word.
Then he turned, vaulted the railing, his bag bouncing on his shoulder, and broke into a run, vanishing though the Gardens in the direction of Langham Place and Oxford Street. And I stood there, mind depleted of all coherent thought, staring after him, staring after everything.