London Fields (28 page)

'Dork.'
'Very good,
darling. Excellent. Now what do you call this? Where the tree used to be. Like in our garden. Where they've chopped it down.'

'Dump.'

'Marmaduke, you're a genius. What's that? . . . A tree. What's that? . . . Grass. Don't do that, darling.
Ow.
Wait, look! Animals. Animals. What's that?'

'Jeep.'

'Yes, sheep. Very good. What's that?'

'Zion.'

'Lion. Lllion. Lllion. Very good. And what's this squidgy thing here?'

'Nail.'

'Snail. Excellent! Aha. Here's your favourite. Here's the best animal of them all. No wait, darling. Hey! One more. You like this one. What is it? What is it?'

' . . . Gunk!'

'Yes! And what does it do? What does it do that no other animal can? What does it do?’

'. . . Dink!'

'
Very
good.
You know, sometimes you can be the most adorable man-cub.'

As Guy bent forward to give a farewell kiss to the increasingly restless child — Marmaduke caught him with the reverse headbutt. It was probably at least semi-accidental, though Marmaduke did do a lot of laughing and pointing. In any event the combined movement resulted in a fairly serious impact. Anyone who has ever marched into a lamppost, or into a fellow pedestrian, knows that 3 m.p.h. is quite dangerous enough for human beings, never mind 186,000 miles per second. He was still spitting doubtfully into a paper tissue when, about fifteen minutes later, there was a knock and the door opened.

'Doris,' said Guy.

'Guy,' said Doris.

Guy flinched a little at the familiarity — or one of his genes did. A recent recruit, Doris was a portly blonde of thirty or forty, with mutinous legs. She was already a martyr to the Clinches' stairs.

'There's someone at the door for you.'

'Oh? Who is it?'

'Don't know. Says it's urgent. It's a
man.'

Guy wondered what to do. Hope was playing at the Vanderbilt with Dink Heckler and wouldn't be back till just after seven. There was something of a nanny famine at present; even Terry had succumbed to the pressure, gratefully accepting some post at a prison gymnasium. And he couldn't ask Doris, who would in any case certainly refuse. Alone with Doris, within range of Doris, Marmaduke spent every moment trying to kick her swollen shins or jeeringly punching her breasts.

'Bring him up. Sorry, Doris. Show him up. Thank you.'

In due course Keith sailed into the room
—
in his sailor trousers with their spinnaker flares. His hair was flattened by the rain, and the soaked tabloid hung from his armpit, like an extra limb of little utility. He gave a confidential nod and said,

'Audi.'

Guy thought for a moment and said, 'Howdy.'

'Saab Turbo,' Keith went on. 'Fuel injection. Listen, mate . . .' Keith glanced over his shoulder and then at Marmaduke, who peered up with interest from the remains of his toy castle. 'Listen. I popped round there with some stuff and — Nicola. Between you and me, pal, it don't look too shrewd.’

Guy stared at him with earnest incomprehension.

'I mean, you seen them marks on her wrist.'

'No?'

'The left wrist. Little white scars. You know. Tried it once. Might try it again.'

'Christ.'

'Says to me: "Don't fix that. Don't fix this. No point. What's the point. Why bother. What's the point. No point." All this. Face like a — she's really down. Emotionally withdrawn. Showing suicidal tendencies innit. I'm just worried she's gone do itself an injury.'

'You really think?'

With a craven expression on his face Keith said, 'Go round and see her, mate. She's been very good to me, she has. You know: a really nice lady. And if she . . . I'd never . . .'

'Yes of
course.'
Guy's pupils moved around in thought and then he said, 'Keith, I couldn't possibly ask you to watch the child for twenty minutes, could I?'

'Course you can. Glad to. Oh uh . . .' And again he peered up at Guy needfully. 'Use your phone?'

'Yes of course. Down one floor and the second door on your left.'

'Kath might be preparing my evening meal.'

When Keith returned — after a long and taxing interval — Guy himself went and burst into the master bedroom to pick up his keys and his money. Driving a hand through his hair, he noticed the heavy indentation of Keith's buttocks on his wife's side of the bed. He felt something had to be done about that. Hurriedly he pummelled the duvet with his fists.

One more visit to the nursery: Keith was down on his haunches, his hands raised, snorting and sniffing
—
softly sparring with Marmaduke, who looked well pleased with his new friend.

'You
are
good, Keith,' said Guy.

'Yeah cheers,' said Keith.

Intense but more or less disinterested concern prevailed until he rang her doorbell: after he heard the sound of her voice (its soft moan of assent or surrender or defeat), he felt nothing more than the simple tug of beauty. '6: SIX', said the oblong sticker next to her button. Such prodigal symmetry. Even her telephone number was somehow minutely glamorous, with the curves of its eights and zeros, like an erotic cipher. With mighty bounds he scaled the stairs.

Guy expected — or wouldn't have been surprised — to find her on a creaking stool with a noose round her neck, or lying on the sofa with a mother-of-pearl derringer in her ear. . . In reality he found her standing over her desk, and leaning on it capably with her small fists, and for some reason staying that way for a couple of beats after he had chased his chariot heart into the low sitting-room. (The sitting-room meant nothing to him: it was just the place where certain things could happen.) Then she turned.

'You shouldn't have come,' she said warmly. 'But I must admit I'm terribly pleased to see you.'

Guy knew that he would never forget the varieties of light in her face, the prismy clarity of the eyes, the smile with all its revelatory whiteness of tooth — and those tear tracks, their solid shine, like solder, on her cheekbones. When women cry (what was that line in
Pygmalion?),
the hay fever russet is part of the pathos and the whole snotty helplessness, but with her, with her
—

'Just an hour ago,' she said, and smiled down at her desk, 'I got the most wonderful news.'

'That's wonderful,' he said, quite unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice. Don't tell me she's crying for
joy.
How woodenly, now, those wonderfuls echoed in the low room.

An envelope was held up towards him. Airmail: the striped red-and-blue trim.

Nicola said, They're alive. Enola is alive. And — and Little Boy. They're still in transit somewhere between Sisophon and Chanthaburi. But everything is clear now. Completely clear.'

Guy shrugged one shoulder and said, 'Fantastic.'

She came forward and bent over the table for her cigarette lighter. With mournful disquiet Guy saw her breasts through the open neck of black bodice. He looked away, and felt relief when she straightened up and the material tautened. So brown! So close together!

'I fly to Seoul tonight.'

It was fatherly, the whole thing was fatherly — even the way he took her wrist like that was fatherly, fatherly. She was unwilling but after a while consented to sit beside him and hear what he had to say. He said that in his view she wasn't allowing herself to face the truth of what was really happening — in Cambodia. He was gentle, yet firm. There was, he felt confident, nothing lingering in the way he smoothed and patted her hand: a reflex of protective suasion. Guy took stern pleasure in the doubts he saw gathering in her open face. Nicola was nodding, and biting her lip, and leaning forwards at a penitent angle. The neck of her bodice was so disposed that he might have availed himself of her inattention; but he became absorbed, rather, in the solicitous caresses with which he now favoured her hair, her neck, her throat. So brown. So close together. After a silence she said,

'Then I'll have to do the other thing.'

He said quickly, 'The underground railway?'

She looked up at him with no expression on her face. '. . . Yes.'

'It's unreliable. A real gamble.'

'Oh. I know.'

'And a lot of money.'

'How much, do you think?' He named a sum and then Nicola added grimly, 'Yes, that's more or less the figure I've heard mentioned. By my contact in . . .Tunisia. ' She opened her eyes to their full extent, saying, 'Well it's perfectly simple. I'll sell my flat. The lease isn't all that long but it will probably realize almost that amount. I'll find a room somewhere. And then there's one's jewellery and clothes and so on. That fridge is nearly brand-new.'

'Surely there's no need for all that. Surely.'

'You're right. It won't be enough. Still. There are things a woman . . .' She paused, and said with slow intentness,' A woman can do certain things.'

'
Surely.
I won't hear of it.'

Nicola smiled at him wisely. 'Oh no. I see your scheme. Guy, that would be completely out of the question.' She placed a consoling hand on his thigh and turned to look towards the window. 'I'm sorry, my dear one. No no. I couldn't possibly let you lend me so much money.'

It was seven o'clock when Guy got back to the house of cards, where love sent him bounding up the stairs again.

Unbelievably, Marmaduke was sitting motionless on Keith's lap, his stocky form partly obscured by the upraised tabloid — and by a hip-high shelf of cigarette smoke. Guy hoped it didn't seem too pointed or censorious, the way he strode in there and hurled both windows open to the rain. Claiming that Marmaduke had been as good as gold, Keith left promptly, and with a willing anonymity, a few minutes before Hope returned with Dink. This gave Guy time to air the room (he waved a towel about while Marmaduke gnawed at his calves) and to rootle out the six or seven dog-ends which Keith had crushed into an aperture of some mangled toy. Then the house of cards reshuffled.

Hope came up and Guy went down, taking Marmaduke, at Hope's impatient request. Lizzyboo was in the kitchen. And so was Dink Heckler. The South African number seven sat at the table in his fuming tenniswear; as usual, he was passing the time in calm inspection of various portions of his arms and legs; perhaps (Guy speculated) it was their incredible hairiness that held his attention. As he warmed the yelling Marmaduke's half-hourly bottle Guy could hear more yelling upstairs, a reckless exchange of voices that rose to the abrupt climax of the slammed front door. Then Hope skipped down the stairs, resplendent from her tennis, and from her latest domestic achievement: sacking Doris.

'She stole my earrings. They were right there on the dresser,' said Hope.

'Gumbag,' said Marmaduke.

'Can I get a shower?' said Dink.

'Which ones?' said Guy.

'They're worthless. Or I'd have strip-searched her,' said Hope.

'Gumbag,' said Marmaduke.

'You hear that? That's Doris. She's been teaching him new swearwords,' said Hope.

'Auntie wants a hug.
Ow
,'
said Lizzyboo.

'Could I get that shower?' said Dink.

'Isn't it amazing, the way he always gets you bang on the nipple? I mean, what's the point of anyone if they're so fat they can't even
walk
,'
said Hope.

'Guzzball,' said Marmaduke.

'Listen to him. I mean his chest! I knew it: Doris has been smoking in the nursery. He'll have to be nebulized,' said Hope.

'Intal or Ventolin?" said Guy.

'I'll help hold him down,' said Lizzyboo.

'No way,' said Marmaduke.

'Can I get that shower?' said Dink.

There was a big mirror in the kitchen, and a big kitchen in the mirror, and Guy kept glancing secretively at himself, a singular figure in this busy world of glass. Figures swept to and fro on its surface; Dink Heckler, with his one hopelessly repeated question, was the room's only pocket of rest. Guy explored his lips with a slow tongue: he now barely noticed the swelling where Marmaduke had butted him. That night, he decided, he would forbear to clean his teeth. The meeting of mouths (I'm in it now), the way their faces seemed to stall and then lock into the same force field. Some people think that just because one works in the City there are these huge chunks of money lying around. He had felt no reading on his personal tiltmeter and yet their mouths were definitely homing. Of course, she's completely innocent, completely green, about money, as about everything else. Her eyes were closing with the slightest of tremors. Bonds would be best: might take a day or three. And there was a flicker too in the lips somewhere. Talk to Richard in the morning. When it happened he could sense the tongue behind the teeth, stirring or cowering like a wounded bird.

Hope said suddenly, 'Look at the anorexic.'

Guy laughed. He found he was piling food into his mouth: a lump of cheese, a slice of ham, a halved tomato. 'I know. I've only just realized,' he said, and laughed
again,
bending his knees to lick the gob of mayo dangling from his little finger, 'that I'm absolutely starving.'

'Could I get that shower?' said Dink.

'It's blood,' said Lizzyboo.

'There's blood on his hair. Guy! There's blood on his hair!' said Hope.

'Don't worry,' said Guy. 'It's only mine.'

Outside, the rain stopped falling. Over the gardens and the mansion-block rooftops, over the window boxes and TV aerials, over Nicola's skylight and Keith's dark tower (looming like a calipered leg dropped from heaven), the air gave an exhausted and chastened sigh. For a few seconds every protuberance of sill and eave steadily shed water like drooling teeth. There followed a chemical murmur from both street and soil as the ground added up the final millimetres of what it was being asked to absorb. Then a sodden hum of silence.

Two days ago I changed Marmaduke's diaper. It was right up there with my very Worst Experiences. I'm still not over it.

I guess it had to happen. There are nanny-lulls, still centres in the hurricane of nannies. I am always hanging around over there. I am always hanging around where people are hanging around, or going where they're going, eager to waste time at
their speed.
In the end Lizzyboo helped me get him under the shower. Then we mopped the nursery wall. And the ceiling. I'm still not over it.

Marmaduke possesses his mother with a biblical totality, and he is always goosing Melba and frenching Phoenix (and watch him splash his way through the au pairs); but Lizzyboo is his sexual obsession. He shimmies up against her shins and drools into her cleavage. He won't have a bath unless she's there to watch. He is forever ramming his hand — or his head — up her skirt.

Of course, and embarrassingly, Lizzyboo is becoming more and more certain that she needn't fear any such nonsense from me. No, in my condition I'm not about to get fresh. She sometimes gives me a puzzled but interrogatory look — the eyes seem to cringe — while Marmaduke is scouring her ear with his tongue. Or trying to force her hand down the front of his diaper. Being human, she is starting to wonder what is wrong with her. I could tell her I'm gay or religious, or just frightened of catching some fatal disease. I suppose I really shouldn't continue to trifle with her affections. Especially now that I don't need to.

I have Thrufaxed all twelve chapters off to Hornig Ultrason, where, it seems, my stock is already rising high. You can tell by the way everyone speaks to you. Unless I am mistaken, even the computerized voice of the reception bank betrays a secret liking for me. 'One momint. I have Missy Harter for you,' said Janit Slotnick, in the tone of somebody preparing a three-year-old for a particularly winsome treat. 'Oh, and have you heard the news that's causing such excitemint here?' I was already romping and tumbling in the zeros of a paperback or book-club deal when Janit said: 'She's pregnint!' But I never did get through to Missy Harter.
The
computer screwed up and twenty minutes later Janit called and said that Missy would soon get back to me, which she hasn't.

On impulse I said, 'Janit? Say spearmint.' 'Spearmint.' 'Now say peppermint.' 'Peppermint.' "Thank you, Janit.' 'Sir.'

Incarnacion wraps up or abandons a long anecdote about her adventures in the supermarket (a story from which she emerges with obscure credit) to inform me that Mark Asprey has phoned while I've been out — while I've been out avoiding Incarnacion.

Mr Asprey, relates Incarnacion, is endearingly keen to pay a flying visit to London. Of course, at a single snap of his fingers, he can put up at a top hotel, or find a bed with any number of heartsick glamour queens — but Mr Asprey would find it far more agreeable to stay right here, in the place he calls home, and where, in addition, Incarnacion can bring all her powers to bear on the promotion of his comfort. She is altogether sympathetic to this sentimental yearning of Mark Asprey's. In fact I get thirty-five minutes on the primacy of home, with its familiar surroundings and other pluses.

Incarnacion herself suggests that I could conveniently return to New York. For her, the symmetry of such an arrangement is not without its appeal.

I don't say anything. I don't even say anything about the difficulties of non-supersonic East-West transatlantic air travel, in case I get an hour on, say, the inadvisability of central thermonuclear war. I just nod and shrug, confident that in the very nature of things she must eventually shut up or go away.

Last night I attended a dinner party at Lansdowne Crescent. Also present were Lizzyboo and Dink. The main guests were not distinguished; they were just born rich. Three brothers, Jasper, Harry and Scargill, three joke representatives of the English gentry (down from Yorkshire, near Guy's dad's place, for an agribusiness conference), together with their speechless wives. The boys from Bingley — and they
were
boys: time-fattened, time-coarsened, but boys, just boys — did a lot of shouting at first and then fell silent over their plates: devout and sweaty eaters. Dink kept looking at Hope with a bored scowl in which some other message was impatiently enciphered; Guy hardly said a word. There wasn't any competition or, for that matter, any choice: I was the life of the party. And I have so little to spare.

It broke up just after eleven, when Marmaduke's hollerings and thunderings could no longer be ignored or even talked through. I saw the pummelled au pair trying to free his hands from the banisters. Guy and Hope looked as though they would be gone some time.

Exhaustedly I stood with Lizzyboo on the stoop and watched the four cars steal off into the hot night. She turned to me with her arms folded. I was afraid. She did that thing with the lowered head and the childishly questioning fingers on my shirtbuttons, giving her somewhere to look while she asked me why I didn't like her. I was afraid. I was afraid of something like this. What was the nature of this fear of mine? Like the weight of a million adulteries, complications, untruths, chances for betrayal. Also the inexplicable sense that I had already loved her or liked her or felt male pride in her, long ago, and kissed her breasts and held the pressure of her legs on my back already, many times, until what love there was all ran out, and I didn't want to do it, ever again. I wished I had a little certificate or badge I could produce, saying that I didn't have to do it, ever
again
.
I was afraid of her body and its vigour, of her flesh, of her life. I was afraid it might hurt me. I was afraid it might break me.

'I like you very much.' All I saw was the perfect evenness of her parting as she said,

'Do you? Do you want to come to my room for a little while?'

'I uh, believe not.'

'Why? Is there something wrong with me?'

Actually the nails on her big toes are beginning to lose symmetry, she has a steep-sided mole on the back of her neck, and generally her skin (when compared to someone like Kim Talent) is definitely showing signs of wear, of time, of death. But I said, 'You're beautiful, Lizzyboo. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. The thing is, I'm in love with someone else.’

Then I went over to Nicola's for an update. I'm not in love with Nicola. Something intertwines us, but it isn't love. With Nicola it's more like the other thing.

Missy Harter comes through on the line to say that she has a check on her desk — enough to front me for another few months: enough. I said, 'Thank God. You must have cut some corners. I take it this call is not being monitored?' 'Right. It's a virgin.' 'Good. Any other news?' 'On what you call the world situation? Why yes. Next week: breakout.' 'Surely you mean breakdown.' 'Breakout. Frank renegation.' 'But that's terrible.' 'Not so. The reason: if we don't, they will. Goodbye now.' 'Wait! . . . Any other news?' 'Yes. I have news for you. I'm expecting a baby.'

'And I have news for you. It's mine.'

'Bull
shit,'
she said.

'I knew it. It is!'

'Bull
shit
.'

'That last time. On the Cape.'

'Please let's not do this. I was drunk.'

'Yeah, and I bet you were drunk in the morning too. That's when it happened. In the morning. I felt a pop. I even heard it. A distinct pop.'

'Bull
shit.
I'll
end this now. I'm ending this.'

'Don't hang up! I'm coming back. Now.'

'Back? To America?' She laughed sadly. 'Haven't you heard? There's no way in.'

It is with great, with ineffable — it is with the heaviest ambivalence that I
—

I don't want to go. I don't want to go. I'm not in good enough shape to take on America. I'm not up to America. I want to stay here, and see how it all turns out, and write it down. I don't want to go. But I'm going. Not even I could live with myself if I stayed. Besides, there is a sky up there that looks like a beach and I mean with white sand and blue ocean and helixed volleyballs and cumulus
putti
exploding out of the surf. Good for flying. Maybe good for love.

So I'm sitting here now with my bag packed and waiting for a car that doesn't show. I just called the minicab people again (their proud slogan: YOU DRINK, WE DRIVE). A taped message, followed by three Engelbert Humperdinck numbers, followed by the slurred evasions of a guy who speaks no English. Hard to believe that in this hovel of stop-gap there yet abides a smouldering genius who knows the way to Heathrow Airport. Still, no doubt someone or other will make some kind of attempt to get here in the end.

The sky is telling me that I might just get away with it. Oh hey nonny nonny, or however it goes. Having failed in art and love, having lost, I may win through with both, even now, so late in the goddamned day. My affairs are in order. My actors are on hold. But where's my cab?

I called Guy and told him not to do anything rash while I'm gone. I don't want him to do anything rash until after I get back. With luck, he'll have a quiet time of it. Or a noisy time of it. I foresee a recurrence of Marmaduke's bronchial troubles. Left in sole charge of the child for over an hour, Keith Talent, I happen to know, did more than fulfil his normal quota of one cigarette every seven minutes. On top of teaching Marmaduke how to box and swear and gurgle over the pinups in the tabloid, Keith taught Marmaduke how to smoke.

Keith himself of course I couldn't do anything about. All his life people have been trying to do stuff about Keith, and they never got anywhere. They've tried locking him up. I'd lock him up too, if I could, just for a couple of weeks. Like me, like Clive, like the planet, Keith's debt is getting old; and Keith will do whatever Keith needs to do . . . Anyway I went over. I trudged up the concrete stairway, through the pinged obscenities. Christ, even ten years ago, in London, it was quite an achievement to get past two men talking in the street without hearing the word
fuck
or one of its cognates; but now they're all doing it — nippers, vicars, grannies. I let myself in, Kath having wordlessly presented me, some days ago, with a single gnarled key. Mother and child were at home: no dog, no
cheat.
Kim was pleased to see me — so pleased, in fact, that if I didn't have this love-mission to blind and dizzy me, I might have to admit that something serious is seriously wrong at Windsor House. An hour of Keith's parenting is enough to hospitalize Marmaduke Clinch: and so Kim Talent — and so Kim Talent . . . On the nature short the adult crocodile reaches for the baby with its jaws. You fear the worst: but that ridged croc mouth is delicate enough to handle newborn flesh, cat-and-kitty style. On the other hand reptiles don't normally tend their young. And when daddy gets mad, big jaws will stretch for other reasons, for other hungers . . . Kim cried when I said goodbye. She cried when I left the room. I think she must love me very much. I've been loved before, but no one ever cried when I left the room. Incredibly, Missy used to cry when I left the apartment. And so did I. Before I went I wrote a note for Keith (plus £50 for the skipped darts lesson) and left it on the kitchen table, unmissably close to the October
Darts Monthly.

Jesus, I could drive to the airport myself. The bigger question is: could I drive back? And Mark Asprey will want the use of his car. 'I couldn't ask you, could I, Nicola,' I said on the phone, 'to be prudent, and keep activity to the minimum while I'm gone?' She was eating something. She said, 'What takes you there?' 'Love.' 'Ooh. What a shame. I'm planning some hot moves. You're going to miss all the sexy bits.' 'Nicola, don't do this.'

She swallowed. I could hear her inhaling masterfully. Then she said, 'You're in luck. In fact I just told Guy I'm going away for a few days. To my
retreat
.'

'Your what?'

'Don't you love it? A place with a couple of nuns and monks in it. Where I can think things over in a sylvan setting.'

'It's good. And I'm grateful. Why are you stalling?'

'No choice. So don't worry. You've got a few days' grace.'

'What is it?'

'Guess . . . Oh come
on.
The thing I can't control.'

'I give up.'

She sighed and said, 'It's the fucking
curse
.'

A lordly Indian has just chewed me out for even expecting a cab to show up anywhere definite in the calculable future. He seemed to feel I was living in the past. Things, he told me, just aren't
like
that any more. But he'll see what he can do. I'll take the notebook, of course. And leave the novel. Neatly stacked. Many pages. Do I want Mark Asprey to read it? I guess I do. I'll take the notebook: with all the waiting around and everything — I envisage having a lot to say. Will America have changed? No. America won't have come up with any new ideas, any new doubts, about herself. Not her. But maybe I can take a new reading: a think piece, maybe, based on my own experiences, a substantial (and publishable?) meditation, extending to some eight or ten thousand words, on the way America has started to fulfil —

Oh, this is rich. Outside — what a pal — Keith has just pulled up in the royal-blue Cavalier. I get to my feet. I sit down again: again, the heavy reluctance, in the haunches, in the loins, whence love should spring . . . Now how will the etiquette go on this? He's climbed out of the car and glanced warily down the street. I've waved. He has raised his longbow thumb — his bent, his semicircular thumb. Keith sports a fishnet shirt and pastel hipsters but his chauffeur's cap nestles ominously on the hood. He is polishing the chrome with a J Cloth. If he opens the back door first then I'm out another fifty quid.

Enough. I'm ready. Let's go to America.