Out of This World (9 page)

She said, ‘I hope I’m not damaging your reputation.’

I said I didn’t know I had one to protect.

She raised an eyebrow. More curious than sly.

‘But then village gossip is hardly going to bother
you
.’

She looked at me as if this was an opening to tell her the whole story of my life.

A photographer’s groupie? Such creatures existed, certainly, back in the news-chasing days. Though I never – Women, certainly. (Yes, Michael, if you want to know …) Women in strange rooms and strange beds, and non-beds, in I’ve forgotten how many strange places. Women with no names. Waking up in sticky dawns and trying to focus on where the room is and who the woman is. Shaking her awake, getting up and stubbing
your toe on a half-drained bottle which skitters across the floor. You don’t expect to do this thing, to do this stuff, do you, and then go calmly to bed at night with a mug of cocoa and a good read? Bodily needs. For the nerves. But nothing more. Here’s your money, so you can go now, so I can forget you. Yes, good boom-boom, number-one long-time. Thank you. I’m bound up with this thing, hooked on it now, it’s rubbed off on me so much there’s nothing much left of
me
any more. Just the eyes. I’m not afraid out here, you see. I get afraid in Surrey lanes. I was brought up in the finest English traditions. Yes, I had a wife once. Take the money, please …

The White Lion Inn. Oak beams and horse brasses. Jenny pressing a glass of red wine to her cheek.

But she would have been too young. Only twelve or thirteen when I packed it in. Might never even have looked at a copy of
Aftermaths
or
Decade
, both of which, I suspect, are now acquiring rarity value.

Her eyes go sharp and shrewd, soft and artless by turns. These days I don’t know if twenty-three is still young. Or if the young have any innocence any more.

A week of thinking: So don’t be a fool, don’t be a damn fool. And then a week of quiet agony (surely mutual? surely mutually detectable?) because it seemed that I might – that we might – let something real slip away simply out of the fear that it might not be real. Then a week when the argument turned inside out and I said to myself: Don’t be a fool, don’t be a fool – how would you feel if she didn’t even come three days a week, to be under your roof? And the answer shot back: Empty, bereft.

In the pub car park, when I pulled her towards me, she said, ‘My God, I thought you’d never –’

I said (but this was later, in the dead of night: her car still parked on the road outside, the keys to her flat somewhere amongst the clothes on the floor): ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘About six weeks.’

‘Me too.’

‘But who’s counting?’

(An owl’s hoot in the distance. The whole world of her small body letting me in, letting me come in. Strange bits of my life spilling, now, out of my lips.)

‘This is crazy. I’m forty years older than you.’

‘Who’s counting?’

Now look at Harry Beech. Former rover of the world, former witness to its traumas and terrors. He steps from the back door of a country cottage, dressed only in a dressing-gown and old slippers, to tip bits of bread and bacon rind on to the bird-table in the garden. He sniffs moist Sunday morning air. Inspects spring bulbs. As he stands at the bird-table he hears a knocking at a window, and turns and looks up at the bedroom. He sees a face, a sleepy, smiling, brown-haired, blue-eyed face. Framed in the window, it is like a living portrait. He stands, holding a bread-board, amazed by a single face. All the faces, all the faces, all the shouting, screaming, frightened, weeping, dying, dead faces. Nothing is more exquisite than a single human face. The face comes close to the window. Below the face are bare shoulders, bare breasts. The face blows him a kiss.

Now look at Harry Beech, sitting at his kitchen table (while outside the birds of Wiltshire contend at the bird-table). He is writing a letter. Struggling with the words. (The first of its kind for ten years.)

Dear Sophie. How can I tell you? How can I say this? Your father, who you haven’t seen for ten years and who is sixty-four years old, is going to get married. And she is almost half your age. And a third of his. And though we haven’t told anyone yet, and we haven’t fixed a day, I was wondering, we were wondering – I was hoping – If, after all this time – ? If – ?

Sophie
 

I can tell you exactly when Harry gave up photography. Just as exactly as I can tell you when it was I last saw him. They were almost one and the same.

But why did he have to be there at all? Why when he was never around for the rest of the time did he have to show up for the grand occasions? Weddings. And funerals. Like when he led me to the altar to marry Joe. I didn’t want him there, didn’t want him throwing his shadow on it all. But I was surprised how well he carried it off. How good he looked. And just for a moment, as we entered the church and the organ started and, right on cue, he patted my hand that was hooked on to his arm, I thought – I couldn’t help myself – he is doing this for me, he is making the picture right for me. I am this white, nervous, beaming bride leaning on the arm of her father. And everything is as it should be.

Shit! It was the same church. The same damned church. And we had to do the same thing – the father-and-daughter, the next-of-kin thing. I had to take his arm and we had to walk through the lych-gate, between the yew trees and holly bushes, up the path to the grave.

There were so many cars parked in the sunshine in the lane
by the church. So many black, chauffeur-driven cars. Except, of course, one. Ray would get driven, in a hearse all of his own, to Epsom crematorium.

Three, four police cars. And further down the lane, at a discreet distance, the press and TV contingent. They were supposed not to move in till the service was over. But it didn’t stop them testing their equipment as the cortège glided past. Positioned like snipers, behind trees, hedges, on the roofs of their cars.

I thought I would never get through that day. I thought I would not be able to hold my head on my shoulders, to put one foot in front of the other. But as we ran that first little gauntlet I looked at Harry on the seat beside me, and I knew I would make it. His head was turned away from the window. Fuck you, Harry. Don’t even you have the power to stop them? Your colleagues, your goddam accomplices! He was staring at the floor of the car. I knew from then on his helplessness would buoy me up. I knew I would make it because I could say to those eager pressmen at any time: Hey, you want a good story? I mean, another story, a spicy sub-story. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s going to be called ‘What Became of Harry Beech?’. You want the inside facts? You want to know how Harry Beech was the true journalist, the real professional, right up to the very end? Want to know what I know?

We had to walk through the lych-gate, Joe with Frank and Stella Irving behind us, following the coffin with its froth of flowers. So many wreaths, so many tributes. So many black cars glinting in the sun. And if half the language that was being used had actually taken solid shape, there’d have been muffled drums and plumes and rifle volleys.

How does it happen? How do our little lives get turned into these big shows? Even when all that’s left of us is little pieces. How do they get made into public property?

We had to walk back again, afterwards, down the same path,
knowing that this time they were waiting in full ambush, clustered round the gate. Primed and loaded.

I was clutching his arm. But, you see, nobody could tell it was really the other way round. He was clinging on to me, and under the pressure my flesh was hardening, giving nothing. I was thinking: This is simple. This isn’t real, I am simply not here. I am still in a white daze, I am still in the white, numb, noiseless daze that follows the blast of a bomb. When it clears, I’ll be on the terrace again, with Grandad pouring champagne and saying he’s getting out. I’m not here. I’m just watching this. But Harry’s here. No longer just watching. He thinks he’ll never get out of this churchyard.

Come on, Harry. Why so reluctant? Remember my wedding day. These are your pals here. No? You can’t do it?

Very well, very well. I’ll do it. If it helps. I’ll go soft, I’ll pretend I’m really leaning on you. I’ll pretend to be faint with grief (as if I should be faint with grief!). I’ll do it for you, and Frank and BMC and the whole, gawping British public. Since I can’t do anything for Grandad right now.

It’s amazing, isn’t it, how you never know your own strength?

I leant. I let my legs go a little weak. The papers said: ‘almost stumbled’. At the same time I lifted my hand to my face, because suddenly, like some fit of induced vomiting, I found I could cry. Simple.

We were almost at the gate when he said, so softly, under his breath (to me? to them?), ‘No, please.’ And as if that were a signal, they all fired away. Zap! Zap! Zap!

You should see the pictures, Doctor K. Look them up in back numbers. They’re great pictures. He with his arm round me and me with my leg bent and my hand to my face. You wouldn’t believe from those pictures that he was really clinging to me, or that something had finally snapped between us, and something had snapped inside him.

Snap shots! Ha ha!

And you wouldn’t believe that that wasn’t my grief – ‘The Grand-daughter’s Grief’. No, my grief wasn’t on show. I was just crying for the cameras.

That was the moment, the precise moment. The end of Harry Beech, photographer.

But it wasn’t the end of that long, dazed day. Or of our inane double act. We still had to stand staunchly together (the last of the Beeches!) at Hyfield, while the guests arrived with their rehearsed words and purified faces.

At Hyfield. Where else? Where the débris had only just been cleared and the damage hastily covered or repaired. Fresh gravel on the drive. And where the objection that it was all in the most dubious taste was countered by the very boldness of the gesture. Defiance in the ruins. ‘Business as usual’. Echoes of former, testing times. As if the pocks in the walls and the scorch-marks on the lawn were only there to embellish the theme that had already been squeezed dry by the newpaper pieces and the TV clips. The old warrior. The one-armed hero. The true Brit.

Frank said, Leave it all to me. To us. To BMC. And I didn’t have the voice to resist. I didn’t even whisper the word ‘private’. As new – as acting – Chairman: his duty. Robert had
been
the Company, hadn’t he? I let him gently insist that public outrage, as well as corporate solidarity, could hardly be ignored. So, yes, there would be ‘a few media people’ present. And police too. Some in plain clothes. Some of them (as if this would comfort me) armed. I let him say, on my behalf, into microphones, before flash-lights: ‘Mr Beech’s grand-daughter is too distressed to answer questions.’ (Funny, so was Harry Beech.) ‘However, we at BMC most strongly …’ I even let him feed them that tear-jerking bonus: my pregnancy. ‘Her last words to her grandfather.’

That was the last time I thought of him as ‘Uncle Frank’.
He was there, of course, circulating and officiating while Harry and I stood like dummies. You could see the exhaustion behind the attentiveness in his face. You should have been able to see fear too. Just a flicker, a shadow of fear. But it didn’t show. As if he were high on some rare potion of invincibility. As if, because they’d got Grandad, they could never get him, and this whole day were some kind of lavish propitiation of the gods for his future.

Why not? It was a PR coup. BMC could do no wrong now, could it? And in any case, he had his prize. He must have known by then, without knowing what I knew, that Hyfield was his. On the Company. That even if Joe and I were to make a drastic change of plan, we would not want to live
here
. In this house where –

I didn’t let him know I wasn’t really there. I didn’t tell him I hadn’t come out of the white daze. Death isn’t black, is it? It’s white. It’s the whitest, hottest, coldest, blindingest flash there is. I let him treat me as if he were still Uncle Frank, and I was little Sophie Beech who once used to perch on his shoulders. I let him take my arm and let his invincibility support me, just like Harry’s helplessness. Let him cut in like some ballroom interloper and steer me round the Board members and the company veterans called out of retirement for the day and the young high-fliers. This is Sophie. Our prize asset.

I carried it off like an actress. Such dignity! Such courage! Such – in the circumstances – self-possession! The English are so wonderful, aren’t they, Doctor K, at Events?

I don’t know what happened to Harry. He just disappeared, melted away. But that was always his trick, wasn’t it? The vanishing act. Grandad and I used to call him The Invisible Man. Perhaps he was wandering among the crowd, trying to be anonymous, trying to be just another one of them. Which wouldn’t stop their eyes picking him out with a sort of wary fascination.

That’s him. That’s Harry Beech. He doesn’t put bombs in cars. He just –

We came face to face in the drawing-room as the whole thing was winding up. People were leaving, moving to their cars, and Frank was saying, ‘Go now, Sophie. You’re exhausted. You’ve been marvellous.’ (Never performed better.) ‘You don’t have to stay to the very end.’ (So what end was that?) And Joe saying, as if he were actually standing there waving like some magic wand, in case I’d forgotten, two tickets to New York, two tickets to the Promised Land: ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’ Let’s slip away, just you and I, from the party.