London Fields (51 page)

G
UY GOT HIS night with Nicola. Guy Clinch reached the finals with Nicola Six. And got his night of love.

It happened, after a fashion, in its own way. The love force that swathes the planet, like weather, found a messenger or an agent, that night, in Guy, who had never felt so fully elemental. He didn't know that she was just a weatherwoman, with stick and chart. For him it was the real thing. He didn't know that it was just an ad.

First, though, she had to account for the asphyxiating vacuum of her absence: not just for that one night of rain, when Guy's house blew up in his face, but for the further thirty-six hours which she had selflessly devoted to Keith Talent and his needs. Helping her Keith. Oh, how she lived for others . . .

'I went', said Nicola, 'to visit my parents' graves. In Shropshire.'

Guy frowned. Nicola's men, and their vermicular frowns. 'I thought you said you knew nothing of your parents.'

'That', said Nicola, who had half-forgotten a lot of this early stuff by now, 'was a deliberate untruth. In fact long ago I bribed a nurse at the orphanage and she told me where they were buried.' She shrugged and looked away. 'It's not much, is it — just their graves?'

'. . . Poor mouse.'

'Goodness, the trains. Like Russia during the purges and the famines. I felt like Nadezhda Mandelstam. It's a pretty little cemetery, though. Tombstones. Yews.' If he had asked where she'd stayed, she might have hazarded, 'In a rude tavern.' But it didn't come up. After all, he was dreadfully pleased to see her. 'I should have told you, I know. I was in a strange state. Strangely inspired.'

'Well. You're back safe and sound.'

They were having a candle-lit supper on the floor of her sitting-room, in front of the open fire. Firelight and candlelight paid their compliments to her full pink dress (in reply you could hear the whisper of petticoats, the faint gossip of gauze) and to the artless pink ribbons in her disorderly hair. How simple and sustaining: bread, cheese, tomatoes, a smooth but unpretentious
vin de pays . . .
Nicola had in fact peeled off the labels to disguise the thick claret she'd chosen, a Margaux of intensely fashionable vintage.

'This may sound fanciful,' she said wanly, 'but I felt I had to
square
it with them. You.'

Guy nodded and sipped, and sipped, and nodded. His palate, his tutored papillae, continued to savour the fruit, the flowers, the full body (stout, plummy, barrelly, tart) of the examined life, the life of thought and feeling so languidly combined. He was rich in understanding. He was also, by now, a rather poorly paramour: a sick man, in fact, and thoroughly distempered. The cold he had caught in the unwholesome rain soon developed into an arctic fever. Thrice he had called down to demand the complete replenishment of his minibar, on which he had depended for a diet of pretzels, cashew nuts, Swiss chocolate and every potable from brown ale to sweet sherry. Apart from bloodying his chewed fingertips on the telephone dial, he had been incapable of action, or of thought. In his dreams, when he wasn't escorting disfigured children through empty zoos, he was attracting many varieties of unwelcome attention, in moral nudity, and priapic disgrace . . . Now he was full of understanding, full of weakness — and what else? Such vigour as remained seemed to be packed into the logjam of his underpants. Visiting the bathroom soon after his arrival at Nicola's flat, he had been obliged to try a kind of handstand before eventually backing up to the toilet seat with his face almost brushing the carpet.

'I suppose I have some sort of obsession,' she said, now tasting the sensation of risk, 'with the sanctity of the parental role. Certainly for the great rites of passage. Like losing one's . . . like one's first act of love.'

So in a sense Guy got everything.

First, starting at around 10.45, on the rug, before the fire, the stroking of hair, and the gazing into one another's faces, and delicious avowals, and solemn kisses.

At midnight he was led by the hand to the bedroom. Left alone (she wouldn't be long), he unbuttoned his shirt with a battered smile, and tenderly winced as he sat to remove his shoes, and then with grateful fatalism entered naked the weird coolness of someone else's linen. At 12.20 he disobeyed her order to close his eyes as she ran through the doorway and jumped into bed in her flesh-coloured training bra and worsted tights, slipped on, perhaps, in a last whim of modesty . . .

It took her an absolute age to get warm! What playful stops and starts they had before she was fully enfolded in his robust caloricity. He never dreamed there would be so much laughter, so much childish gaiety. Adorable little sulks and grumps, too, and sudden failures of nerve and syrupy successes. At 1.15 the thick bra was undipped. For the first time he felt the liquid coldness of her breasts on his sternum. At 2.05 the fizzy tights came crackling off. When he had got it really toasty he was allowed to run his hand down the shining power of her inner thighs.

Meanwhile and throughout, the hot compacts of kisses tasting of sleeplessness and fever and the intimate dismissal of tomorrow morning or any future. There was the sheer of light sweat everywhere, and, for him, the jabs and volts of the uncovenanted caresses paid to his exterior heart. Her panties, innocently unfeminine in texture (their lateral elastic even suggesting some medical exigency), were last seen at 3.20.

The room had changed colour many times that night but it was full of the pallor of dawn, and of the unslept hours they had logged together, when at last he loomed above her, at 4.55. By now her flesh, too, had a sore transparency; the tracings of blue in her breasts appeared to rhyme with the queries of damp hair on her neck and throat.

'Yes. My darling.'

It seemed to push all the breath out of her.

'
How it hurts. Oh, how it burns . .
.'

He had entered on tiptoe; but by 5.40 he was fully and hugely established in the purple-lined palace of sweet sin. For an hour, her sharp inhalations, her arias of exalted distress, were the guides to his diminishing caution. By 7.15, with five toes on either shoulder, four fingertips in his buttock, a light palm weighing his scrotum, and most of his face in her mouth, Guy was swinging back and forth in the mystic give and take of a negro spiritual, hymned by all the choirgirls and choirboys of love.

'Now,' she said. 'Stop
now
.'

He stopped. She applied her little finger to his chest. And then she was gone, and Guy was falling down through thin air.

'I've just realized what is wrong. What's so terribly wrong.'

Guy blinked into the pillow.

'It would be awful. Quite inexpiable.'

Guy lay there, waiting.

'You have to tell your parents. And your wife's too, of course.'

Already, as if after a lucky escape, she was putting on her panties. They really did look like Elastoplast, there in the morning light. Guy laughed strangely and said, 'I've only got a father. And she's only got a mother. And tell them what?'

'Just square them.'

'I'll call them.'

'
Call
them?' At 7.20, when they had finished discussing it, Nicola said, 'Then go to New York. Go to New England. Go to New London.'

Go to London Fields.

Keith was displeased.

'So there you was, basically,' he said to Kath as she served him a late breakfast, 'sticking your oar in again. With your questions. Eh?
Eh?'

He stared out at her from the clogged seclusion of his hangover.
Given a night off by Nick while she sorted it with Guy, Keith had ventured out to the Black Cross, and to the Golgotha, where, as the night progressed, he had so convinced himself with drink . . . Kath
returned to the washing-up. She said,

'He volunteered the information.'

'I'll volunteer you in a minute. Tony de Taunton?'

'He just said they were making this little programme. About you.'

Wagging his head about, Keith said, 'And you goes "He's my
husband" and all this.' He wagged his head about again. '
 
"We got
little girl." All this.'

'I didn't say nothing.'

She offered this lightly. Keith seemed mollified — though it
remained clear that he was thoroughly out of sorts. He dropped his knife and fork on to the plate as Kath asked,

'When's it on then?'

'What?'

'The TV programme.'

'Never you mind. Business, innit. Darts. It's not . . .' Keith paused. He was actually in great difficulty here. Himself on TV: he couldn't work out how the two worlds overlapped. Try as he might, bringing all his powers to bear, he just couldn't work it out. He straightened his darting finger at her. 'Like the news. You don't want to believe everything on TV. No way to carry on.'

'You can believe the darts, surely to God.'

'Yeah but . . . This thing. It's
—
it's not
on
TV,' he said. 'Obviously.'

'What isn't? The TV programme?'

'Jesus.'

Keith thought it prudent to change the subject. So he started talking about how ugly Kath was now and how depressed he became (he swore it broke his fucking heart) every time he looked at her.

'You know what I'm talking?' he concluded, much more moderately. 'Success. And I happen to be able to handle it. It's a lifestyle you couldn't conceive. It's out there, girl. It wants me. And I'm gone.'

The baby gave notice of waking: the labour of baby consciousness would soon resume. Soon, the baby would be rippling with grids and circuits. And Kath herself gave a jerk as she reflexively moved for the door. Keith's blue eyes filled with everything he could no longer endure: his lips tightened, then whitened, and then vanished inwards as he said, with unbounded venom,

'I intend to complete my preparation elsewhere.'

Sourly handsome Richard was present at the office to let Guy in, as arranged. For a while they stood there amid the Japanese furniture, conversationally revising their holding positions. The world they referred to now comprised about half a percentage point of Guy's reality; to Richard, it had always been everything.

'I see no alternative to riding it out,' Richard said. 'It's sheer cuckooland, of course.'

'Agreed.' Every time their eyes met Richard seemed to lean a further inch backwards, as if to put more distance between himself and Guy's impermissible disarray. I suppose (Guy thought), I suppose I must look . . . 'Agreed,' he said again.

'You know the new buzz word over there?
Cathartic war
.’

'Really.'

'Poor old deterrence is in bad shape, so you give it a little jolt. Two cities. It's good, isn't it. We'd all feel so much better after a cathartic war.'

Richard laughed, and Guy laughed too, with real amusement. Of course, it suited him, up to a point, if nothing whatever mattered. But then such generalized hilarity might be considered a necessary condition for nothing mattering. About a year ago he had at last finished Martin Gilbert's
The Holocaust,
and had sombrely decided that this thousand-page work could also be read as a treasury of German humour . . . Guy went to his desk and called his father on the direct line. He was connected quickly but he still had to get past all the staff: lessening densities of Hispanic bafflement giving way to the forensic interceptions of stewards, secretaries, lawyers, gamekeepers. 'It's nothing to do with the office,' he kept telling a Mr Tulkinghorn. 'It's personal. And rather urgent.' Eventually his father lurched exhaustedly on to the line, as if the receiver itself were some new burden he was being asked to shoulder.

'What's it about?'

'I can't discuss it now. It's far too delicate.'

'But what's it about?'

Guy told him what it was about.

'Well, there's nothing much more to say, is there. You have my . . . my "okay". All the best, dear boy. I'm glad we talked.'

A few seconds later Richard knocked and entered.

'You're absolutely right,' said Guy. 'It's pure fantasy. It'll blow over.'

Guy hadn't come to the office to talk to Richard. He had come for his passport and travel cards — and for that spare cane which he elatedly glimpsed leaning against the wall by the door. As he moved across the room to get it, Richard, who was Guy's younger brother, said, 'Then why are you going to New York? Have you got a hernia or something? I was listening in. It sounds as though you've cocked things up nicely. You
tit.'

Guy looked at the floor: Richard wouldn't understand, of course, but he had never felt happier in his life. Guy looked at the ceiling. 'You wouldn't understand,' he said, 'but I've never felt happier in my life.'

'You
tit,'
said Richard.

He took the tube to the Strand, where he bought a travel bag and lots of new stuff to put in it. In the golden silence of the department store he went from men's wear to women's, in search of a silk scarf for Hope's mother, and one for Nicola, while he was there. The vaults and galleries of female clothing, their catholicity of cut and colour, surprised and impressed him. Compared to all this, men went around in uniform. But then . . . But then, just now (and in a sense it had been this way for half a century): we are all in uniform. Not volunteers either, but pressed men and women, weeping conscripts. The children in anaconda file on the zebra-crossing are in uniform. The old lady over there dithering from hat to hat is in uniform. Our babies are born, not in their birthday suits, but in uniform — in little sailor suits. Hard for love. Hard for love, with everyone being in the army like this. Love got hard to do.

Now the revolving doors delivered him on to the street (the brass-topped cane really did make a difference). Above, the low sun painted the shape of an eagle on to the cirrus haze. Today an eagle, with eagle eye; tomorrow a vulture, perhaps, flexed over London carrion. Looking down, he saw a pretty cat behind the bars of a basement window; it yawned and stretched, outside history. An old man walked past; he was shyly stifling a smile as he remembered something fond or funny. Preserve this! Yes, certainly! Guy stopped a cab and reached quick agreement with the driver in his beefeater outfit. He climbed in. He was no longer afraid. On the way to Heathrow he looked at the books she had given him for his transatlantic reading and glanced again at the inscriptions. Towards the west, like madlady's hair, the thin clouds sucked him into the completion of his reality. He was no longer afraid; and he no longer feared for love. Partly it was her show of principle, so bravely self-sufficient, when you thought about it, with the eclipse only days away. Partly it was the recession of Keith's image in his mind: the only bane here was the recently revealed talent for literary criticism (what other charms and skills might Keith acquire?). But mainly, he admitted to himself, it was those panties. Guy smiled, and went on giving smiles of pain at every bump the cab took on its way. Quite a fright. Unpleasant to the touch, too (and his fingertips had explored their every atom). Exactly the sort of thing you'd expect a virgin to wear, at thirty-four.