Portobello Notebook (9 page)

The old woman smiled and invited her to join them.
Madeleine
stood, flustered, her forehead cleft by a frown. Like a spoilt child, he thought. Deliberately polite, he moved to make room on the bench, and she had to sit down. There was shame as well as anger in her eyes. He had gone too far, he knew. But he couldn’t take any more. He left that evening.

That was the last time he saw her. He wrote of course, and she replied. She wrote to say that her mother was ill, that she was returning to Paris. He wrote to sympathize when her mother died. She wrote to say how much she liked being back in Paris, and described the job she had found in a small museum. She didn’t put an address on her letter, but when he was in Paris the following summer he found himself walking along by the River Seine to where she worked. In the cloistered courtyard, looking at carved pieces of medieval stone made beautiful by time, he imagined that this was the sort of place where at last she would be at home. He asked for her at the desk, the attendant nodded vaguely, said the name was familiar, but thought that she had left.

He had done his duty, and felt relief as he escaped. But as he went down the sunny boulevard, eyeing the beautiful faces in the flow, he half-expected to see her appear – tense, hurt, waiting for a slight, waiting for love. She was there, somewhere. As he drifted with the crowd he felt he was being carried, farther than ever, out to sea, where there was no love, to her.

‘THAT’S VERY SAD,’
Jack said. ‘I could nearly tell that to herself.’

Eddie said, ‘Don’t.’

‘No, that’d be handing in your gun.’

‘You can’t hand in your gun.’

That was how they talked on Sunday evening, feeling better as they parted and went home to their wives.

HE HAD SPENT
so much of his life scratching for a living that he found it hard to believe he had some money now. His daughter found it easier, and brought him to a hotel starred with bronze plaques in memory of famous residents. When he heard the price and began to bargain, she withdrew, embarrassed; stepping forward again when a deal was done. A tall, laconic black porter led them upstairs. It was like a return to the Sixties. A woman with long grey hair, a long flowery dress was watering potted plants in the corridor. The sound of old rock music, the scent of herb seeped from closed doors.

‘You’re in the tropics, enjoy yourself.’ The porter showed him into a big shabby white high-ceilinged room.

Two windows looked out on New York. His daughter stood at one, her boyfriend at the other. Over their shoulders he tried to see his life from this new perspective: as a man approaching sixty, who had married and reared a family, had had a little success. Alone
abroad he was always nervous, but his daughter’s presence calmed him, as his wife’s would. He needed his family, so he had always rebelled against family. When his daughter and her boyfriend had gone, he felt a flicker of the excitement he had as a boy when his parents went out for the evening – those rare occasions. Rooting about the room, as he used to at home, he found an abandoned painting cut in half in the wardrobe; and written in dreamy pencil above the washbasin mirror:
All things are Buddha things. Language is illusory
– just what he might have seen here thirty-five years ago. He looked at his old face in the mirror. He hadn’t grown an inch. In his school there had been a tree whose bark had grown about an iron paling post until only the tip showed. If he had grown at all, he had grown like that, embracing his limitations.

IN THE EVENING
they brought him out to an Italian restaurant where they ordered a pizza for three, as big as the small table. Like his wife, his daughter was vegetarian, and when he noticed the slices of salami he said as usual, ‘I’ll eat them.’

‘It’s all right.’ She lowered her head, embarrassed again, and murmured, ‘I’m eating meat now.’

‘I’m glad.’

Her boyfriend smiled. ‘We were wondering how we’d be able to keep up the lies for a week.’

‘It’s strange.’ He looked at her. ‘You’re just the age I was when I came here.’

She listened patiently as he reminisced over the red wine. He had thought then that he could leave his past behind. For a short while he had felt like a snake sloughing its old skin. Then he had realized he had no new skin. He had cracked up and gone home.

His daughter smiled too. ‘Welcome back.’

The New York he remembered was remote from the city they
walked through. Times Square was smaller, duller, than the neon jungle where he had lingered. Central Park was bigger and brighter, different from the glittering menacing place he had hurried past at night. In time he had learned to face the panics and elations of those days, and they had flown. Now they were like the sparrows, lovely and ridiculous, squabbling in the ivy below his hotel windows.

He was yanked back from his memories next day. They were in a shop, enjoying the pleasure of dithering between bottles of French wine and half-gallon jars of Californian at wonderful low prices, when his daughter’s phone rang. It was his wife, calling from Ireland to say that their old friend Eileen had died. His daughter crying was suddenly like a child again; and her boyfriend, even as he comforted her. The evening meal in their Manhattan flat became an Irish wake as they drank and talked of Eileen: the Christmas Day they had brought her to a family party, where she had grown bored and stood outside the front door, ringing the bell until they left … Eileen was the last of the artists’ wives. It was fitting they had heard of her death in a wine shop. Wilful,
intelligent
, a chain-smoking, drinking Irish Catholic, she had shown him the way into a wider world at home. He decided to cut his holiday short, change his ticket and go back for her funeral.

IT LEFT HIM
one last day in New York. With his daughter and her boyfriend he visited the Met Museum, watched them walk hand in hand slowly, eagerly past two thousand years of masterpieces, as if admiring a wonderful landscape from a train. That was when he thought of Joe, an old friend now living in New York. Back at the hotel he looked him up in the phone book, hesitated, then called, and in a moment heard a voice direct from the past. It hadn’t changed. Joe invited him to lunch, gave directions to his apartment in the aloof, smiling voice he remembered from school. His
daughter gave him a map, and the sort of advice he had once given her, and then he set off on his own.

Eileen had been old, her death was natural. It was so long since he had met Joe that their meeting could mean little now. He strolled peacefully in the sunlight, sitting here and there to pass the time. In Union Square two stoned buskers, one with a drum, the other wearing a brown cloak and a plastic horned Viking helmet, pranced about the grass. A gay type cried, ‘Horny bitch!’ and he smiled. What had frightened him once, at best amused him now. Two sunbathing girls sat up and laughed as the buskers circled them in an obscene dance. He wandered on, down as far as Canal Street, allowing himself to get lost, asking directions and finding his way again. This was the life he had aimed at, fallen short of, and which his daughter was embracing now. He felt no bitterness. His life had grown in another direction, like that tree at school around the iron paling post.

JOE LIVED
in the sort of shabby smart street he had once dreamed of: up-market, downtown bohemia. As he rang the bell he noticed a jazz bar next door – just right for Joe who had spent evenings long ago trying to win him over to Charlie Parker. The door was buzzed open and he was in a space before another door, of glass, which was buzzed open too. But – excited under his calm now – he missed it, and stood there trapped until Joe came down the stairs.

‘That happens.’ Joe gave his old smile.

His hair was white, but otherwise he was the same tall thin 1960s’ schoolboy, his long fingers still bony and red. Talking,
interrupting
each other, they went up black-painted wooden stairs to a lofty apartment where Joe’s wife embraced him and turned her cheek for him to kiss. He hardly knew her, only at the last minute retrieved her name, and said, ‘Sally.’

He too was a Sixties’ boy still. He felt disappointment at the
neat rugs and paintings, the tidy shelves of books, including an effort of his own, the cushions on the sofa in a row. He had
half-expected
Joe to have cut himself dramatically clear of the past, but Joe had done what he himself had done: made an adult compromise. There were a couple of old prints of Dublin scenes from a set he remembered in Joe’s parents’ home. He smiled as he noticed, pinned to the kitchen memo board, an Irish postcard of silage bales daubed ‘Feck off crows.’

That was the Joe he had known: a sniper, hiding downstairs in the kitchen from his deep-voiced, successful father. Joe had tried everything within bourgeois reason to escape the life his parents had seen as natural. He had dodged Law, tried Medicine instead, but had disliked that too. A working-class boy went to jail for a while, a country boy flogged the cattle and ran off to England, and a middle-class boy in those far-off days had a nervous breakdown. Joe had done his stretch in the desert of loneliness and confusion, then married Sally and gone to live abroad. They hadn’t any children – a quiet
No
to that past, he thought.

He was a smoker still, so they sat outside in the sun on a timber veranda. Joe said he had given up cigarettes – another break from the past. Otherwise, Sally did the talking. She worked for a famous international firm, and mentioned by first name people he knew only from newspapers. He tried to include Joe, turning the talk back to the time when they had been close, but besides not sharing these memories Sally’s role seemed to be centre-stage, and Joe seemed to prefer it that way.

Looking at her, he saw a resemblance to Joe’s father: the same authoritative manner and heavy build. Joe had been closer to his mother; living with her when his father died; the curtains drawn in summer as they watched Wimbledon tennis, sharing their cigarettes; both insomniacs, comparing notes on their sleep. Sally had
rescued Joe from all that, he thought.

She was looking at him now, like a teacher at an inattentive pupil. He nodded to show he was listening. She was talking about her mother’s first meeting with Joe’s mother.

‘… They began to mention people they knew, and suddenly it was like – You know the Fitzgeralds too? – And straightaway they were on the same wavelength!’

She wasn’t bright, he realized, or even confident. He tried again to nudge a way through her talk, asking Joe what he had been doing since they had last met. But Sally took over again, saying they had been in Hungary where her business had taken them. He finished his cigarette, and Joe brought him inside to see a picture they had bought in their travels. Sally stood behind him as he looked at a large painting of hobby horses in a merry-go-round. He didn’t like it. It was like a mural for a fashionable bar. He turned to a smaller, unframed picture. ‘That’s good.’

‘You gave it to us.’ Joe’s voice was dry.

‘That’s right, as a wedding present!’ Sally said. ‘A Charlie Parker, isn’t it?’

‘That’s another Charlie.’ Joe corrected her gently.

‘His widow died yesterday,’ he said, and explained that he was going home to the funeral.

But even as they talked of that, he saw annoyed embarrassment in Sally’s eyes. She wasn’t used to being wrong. That wasn’t her role. She stepped forward, again taking over the conversation. They had a place in mind for lunch, it was just around the corner. ‘You’ll like it. It’s
full
of books!’

‘Well –’ Joe’s mild voice was almost self-mocking. ‘Half-full.’

He went to the bathroom and washed his face in cold water. Sally was heavy going. He felt her presence even in the spotless mirrors and black marble counter. It had the look of a place where
a maid – another shade from the past – came in. Tubes, bottles of make-up and perfume breathed the question: sex?

He looked at them as they went outside – Joe in a blue denim yachting cap, Sally in sunglasses – and tried to imagine them in bed; skinny Joe buried between Sally’s big breasts. She interrupted this reverie, saying how much fun their street was, pointing out a drag queen, a gaunt stubble-jawed freak in a frock and high heels. He was afraid she was going to know the guy by name. She would have liked that. But she was too straight for that. But without her kind the world wouldn’t work, he conceded as she led the way through a doorway in an old brick wall, across a courtyard, into a bar with a plank floor and wooden stalls. It was just the sort of place he liked, where good plain meals were served. He would never have found it on his own.

In his own eyes he was as mild-mannered as Joe, but he hadn’t grown up without effort. Defeated in New York, hurt pride as much as confusion had driven him to fight back. His upbringing had failed him in the big world, and he had declared war on its limitations. He had found other friends, such as Eileen, who had shown him that there was security only in freedom.

Sally seemed nervous of him now, as if she sensed his reserve. She mentioned a public figure, a friend of hers, whom they had taken to dinner in this restaurant. He nodded and she went on, floundering in heartiness. ‘Mary loved it – you know, she could shake off her shoes, say piss and fuck without anyone noticing!’

‘I never noticed,’ Joe said.

It was a normal complicated marriage, he thought. They defended each other. Sally provided the muscle, and in that shelter Joe’s quiet confidence could grow; in turn protecting the other, soft side to her bluster, which no doubt she revealed to him, perhaps in bed.

She said the lunch was their treat; the beer turned out to be a good strong brew, and he warmed to her. She asked about his life. He said his wife was still in the same job, and he was still working at home.

‘Just like us!’ Sally smiled. ‘Joe’s face simply lights up when I leave in the morning!’

He didn’t return the smile. The comparison implied they were the same, that he still lived in the world he and Joe had once shared. They had been close then because their problems had been the same: protected and repressed, afraid of life and women, they had huddled together like swallows on a wire before the inevitable migration.

He didn’t want those days back – never, never – but they were all he had in common now with Joe, and he tried again to turn the talk back to that long golden sunset of boyhood when they had travelled across Europe by train. With Anthony, another school friend, they had visited Paris, Vienna, Athens, Istanbul, even the ruins of Troy. Joe didn’t respond. He had forgotten, left behind, or wasn’t able for those memories, and the dark drop that had followed. The conversation stalled. Sally, like a good hostess, took on the duty of starting it again.

‘How’s Anthony? Still hiding in the closet?’

‘How do you mean?’ He smiled, but raised his eyebrows coolly.

‘Well – single and fifty-eight …?’ Sally laughed. ‘He’s gay, obviously!’

‘He always has a girlfriend.’

‘Camouflage!’ Sally laughed heartily again.

‘I wouldn’t mind some of that camouflage. His latest girl’s a 29-year-old Japanese.’

Sally backed down, but she had lost face and had to make it up. She began talking about her high-flying job, but it reminded him
of a golf-club lady beaten to a parking space, accelerating blindly to find another. She was used to being right. That was the deal. She maintained the high privet hedge and black spearhead railings of Joe’s old suburban home.

That was where his irritation was coming from. He hadn’t had Joe’s bourgeois inheritance to help, or hinder him. He had run out of it straight to New York, cracked up and gone home, and after his own journey through the desert had married and settled down. His life seemed suddenly a mirror image of Joe’s. His irritation became cool anger. He waited quietly, let Sally advance. She began talking about South Africa, where she was going next week to oversee some training programme.