Spring (4 page)

He perked up slightly, said he’d try to think of something special…

‘No,’ she said, ‘nothing special. Let’s just go to the cinema or something.’

He asked her what she wanted to see.

‘I don’t know. What is there?’

He said he’d have a look.

And then, just when that seemed settled, he said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to do something tonight?’

And she sighed and said, ‘I’m tired. Let’s do something tomorrow.’

He slings the tennis ball in the twilight under the trees, slings it with all his strength, twisting his torso and whipping into the throw, trying to find the trajectory that will send Hugo furthest over the still-­wintery lawns. His excitable voice as he pursues it punctures the low moan of the traffic endlessly orbiting the square. Something is not okay. He is thinking again of that strange moment on Monday afternoon at the poolside. Something happened in Marrakech, something he does not know about. When they leave the square it is evening and the signs on the hotel fronts are illuminated.

3

O
n Sunday there is this lunch at Isabel and Steve’s. ‘No Katherine?’ is the first thing Isabel says, opening the door to see her brother standing there on his own. He wishes she hadn’t mentioned her. Everything is pretty fucking far from okay.

He spent Saturday morning under the skylight in the living room, seeing what films were on, interrogating the Internet in his seldom-­used spectacles. Surveying the listings he felt lost, ill-­equipped to find something that she would like. He does not yet have any sort of instinct for her taste. It is not easily predictable. Miriam, for instance, only touched unimpeachably art-­house films, made him sit through the plotless offerings of French and Russian men, whose names still affect him the way memories of lessons at school do—­a trapped mind-­numbing feeling, a surly sense of personal insufficiency, and a quiet thankfulness that he is not in the experience now. Though Katherine sometimes shows an interest in such films too—­he has noticed some
DVD
s lying around her flat with titles like
Andrei Rublev
and
Tokyo Story
—­she is more omnivorous, more promiscuous in what she enjoys. This does not make working out what she will enjoy any easier. Quite the opposite.

He had just finished making an eclectic shortlist when she phoned. Almost as soon as he started talking about what films were on and where, she interrupted him. ‘James…’

‘Yes?’

‘Um.’ She seemed stuck. She said, ‘I don’t…’ then stopped again.

‘What?’

‘You’re not going to like this,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I don’t want to see you today.’ Silence. ‘I just… I need to spend some time on my own. Is that alright?’

‘If that’s what you want,’ he heard himself say.

‘Phew,’ she said. She sounded less nervous. ‘I was worried you’d be angry.’

‘I’m not
angry.
I’m…’

‘Disappointed?’

‘I wanted to see you.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘Why… ?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you want… ?’

‘I just need some time on my own,’ she said. ‘I need a weekend on my own. I need to get my head together. I haven’t stopped moving since we got back from Marrakech. I haven’t had any time to myself. I still haven’t finished unpacking… I’m sorry.’ Then she said, ‘Thanks for understanding. Thanks for making it easy for me.’

Later he wondered whether he had made it
too
easy for her. What should he have done though? Made a scene? Tried to force her to see him? Even if he had wanted to do that, he just didn’t seem to feel enough at the moments when it might have been a possibility. He felt only a kind of numbness, and the infantile frustration of not getting what he wanted. And then the moment had passed and she was saying, ‘What are you going to do tonight?’

‘Well… There’s this party. You know—­the one I told you about.’

Yes, there was this party.

And now, on Sunday, he is hungover. There is a painful-­looking sty, Isabel notices—­a vivid purple, like a Beaujolais nouveau—­just under the lip of his left eye.

‘No,’ he says, in answer to her question about Katherine. ‘She couldn’t make it.’

‘That’s a shame,’ Isabel says. ‘When are we going to meet her?’

‘I don’t know. Hi.’

She kisses him. ‘Hi.’

He hands her a bottle of wine wrapped in tissue paper and follows her in. She and Steve have the lower half of the house, with their own entrance at the side—­97A—­and what is by London standards a huge garden with (they are widely envied for this) a wooden door leading directly onto Hampstead Heath.

‘How are you?’ she says.

‘I’m fine.’

He takes off his jacket in the pale grey entrance hall next to the pair of Banksy prints in white maple frames which match the white maple floor. It sounds like there are quite a few people in the living room—­more than he expected. The whole event is on a larger scale than he expected. He knows the sort of people they will be. Some lawyers from Isabel’s firm—­Quarles, Lingus—­and their spouses. A selection of her university friends, mostly media types now. A few friends of Steve’s perhaps, smoking in the garden in jeans and trainers. Probably that vegetarian architect who always seems to be at things like this. There will be some pregnant women. A smattering of noisy toddlers. A shocked-­looking, marble-­eyed baby.

Entering the living room—­long and high-­ceilinged, with a large sash window at each end—­he wishes he had stayed at home. He feels like he has only just woken up and, in spite of the Nurofen, he has a nagging headache. He has not even surveyed the room to see who is there when he finds himself face to face with Steve.

‘Alright, mate,’ Steve says. ‘How’s things?’ Though he is smiling, Steve seems nervous. He is wearing a brown T-­shirt with a technical-­looking drawing of an open-­reel tape player on it and holding a glass of prosecco. Without waiting for James to answer his question, he says, ‘I hear you got a new lady-­friend.’

‘Yeah…’

‘That’s fantastic. How’s it going? I hear you took her to Morocco.’

‘Yeah…’

‘That must have been brilliant. I love Morocco. Do you want a drink? What do you want? Prosecco?’

‘Uh, just a glass of water actually…’

‘Sure.’

James follows him through the talking people towards a table on the other side of the room. Halfway there, he squeezes past the vegetarian architect, whose name he has forgotten, and who is earnestly listening while a middle-­aged woman lectures him about something. ‘Oh alright, mate,’ the architect says, with a sudden smile.

‘Alright, mate,’ James says, also momentarily smiling.

Steve is pouring him a glass of Perrier. When he has poured it he looks up and hands it to him. James thanks him. Steve smiles. He is a head shorter than James and wears glasses with heavy oblong frames. ‘So,’ he says. ‘You took the lucky lady to Morocco.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Where… where was that exactly?’

James is about to tell him when Steve, whose eyes immediately wandered, sees his four-­year-­old son, Omar, looking lost in the forest of legs. ‘Sorry mate, just a sec,’ he says, and leaves James standing there while he sweeps Omar up and takes him out of the room.

While he waits, James turns to the sash window overlooking the street and has a sip of prickling Perrier. It is a quiet, tree-­lined street, on a steep slope—­and he sees, walking up the slope, looking slightly lost, just as Omar had a few moments earlier, a smartly dressed man, probably in his seventies. At the sight of this man, James wishes, even more than before, that he had stayed at home. The man is obviously looking for a specific house. Finding number ninety-­seven, he first walks up the steps at the front. The door there, however, is only for the two flats on the upper floors, and after peering puzzledly at the nameplates for a few moments, he looks around—­as if hoping to see someone who will be able to help him—­and then returns to the pavement. He looks up at the house. Then he notices the sign saying 97A, and pointing to the path at the side.

Though the sharp trill of the doorbell is hardly audible over the hubbub of voices, James’s pulse quickens at the sound of it and he looks for someone to talk to. There, standing near the fireplace, is Miranda, an old friend of Isabel’s. Isabel once tried to set them up in fact. They went out once or twice. Without hesitation he walks over to her, interrupting the man she is talking to. Though he tries not to show it, this man—­Mark, a singleton from Quarles, Lingus—­is obviously put out by the way Miranda seems positively to welcome James’s interruption. He was just telling her about his planned skiing holiday to Norway with ‘some mates’, hoping to work around to suggesting that she might like to join them, when she turns away from him while he is in mid-­sentence—­‘Most people don’t know how fantastic the skiing is up…’—­and says, ‘James! Izzy promised me you’d be here.’ She puts her hand on James’s shoulder and kisses him. She has to stand on tiptoe. He leans forward to help her. ‘Did she?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how are you?’

‘I’m okay. You?’

‘Fine,’ James says. He is about to say something else when Mark stops looking impatiently off to the side and thrusts out a hand. ‘Mark!’

‘Hello.’

‘I was just telling Miranda about…’ He starts on Norway and skiing again, and James’s eyes move to the door, where, smiling nervously, the smartly dressed older man has just entered with Isabel. She is entirely focused on him. From the way she is treating him, he seems to be some sort of VIP. With his eyes on them, James is not listening to what Mark is saying—­‘And they all speak English, which is—’

Following James’s stare, Miranda says, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Oh, he’s—’

‘They all speak English,’ Mark insists, ‘which is—’

‘He’s my uncle.’

Isabel has ushered him to the drinks table, and is pouring him a glass of prosecco—­with his thumb and forefinger he indicates that he does not want much. Then, with a slightly worried look, she scans the room. James knows she is scanning it for him. She sees him, and says something to their uncle, and they start to move towards him.

Miranda has just turned distractedly back to Mark, who says, ‘So, yes, they all speak English, which is—’

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ says Isabel. ‘I need to steal James for a minute. Is that okay? James, look who’s here,’ she says, with her hand on the old man’s shoulder.

‘Hello, Ted,’ James says, smiling pleasantly. ‘It’s been a long time. A very long time. How are you?’ As they step towards an empty patch of white maple, he hears Mark say, with a sort of wearinesss now, ‘So, yes, um, they all speak English, which is…’

Ted is tall—­the same height as James, more or less—­and has the same high forehead, the same long face and squarish jaw. These are all things that flow to James from Ted’s side of the family, his mother’s side. Ted, though, is losing his white hair. The tightening skin is turning transparent on the prominences of his skull, while the skin of his neck has lost its hold entirely. Isabel has left the two of them to talk, and the first thing Ted says is, ‘The last time I saw you, you were doing very well.’

James smiles. ‘Was I?’ This was one of the things he had feared having to talk about when he saw Ted in the street.

‘You had some sort of Internet firm.’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened to that?’

When James tells him, Ted seems sincerely surprised. ‘Oh?’ he says. ‘Did it? That’s a shame. Um… I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t the only one.’

‘No. No, I suppose not. There were lots of them, weren’t there? What happened with all that? I never really understood what that was all about.’

‘I don’t know,’ James says. ‘I’m probably the wrong person to ask.’ Then, seeing that his uncle is hoping for a proper answer, he stops smiling and says, ‘There was massive over-­investment, essentially. I suppose there was this idea that whole sections of the economy were about to move en masse onto the Internet. I thought so at the time myself. Lots of people did. That’s why there was so much over-­investment, which pushed up share prices so much. Then there was the herd mentality too. That took over. These things have their own momentum. Nobody wants to be left out.’

‘Of course not!’ Ted says emphatically.

‘Even if you think it’s all nonsense, if you see people doubling and tripling their money in a few months, even if you think they’re total fools—­maybe
especially
if you think they’re total fools—­you might be tempted to get involved. Ideas of value go out the window. Then it’s not even speculation. It’s just… a sort of pyramid scheme. Alan Greenspan called it “irrational exuberance”, I think.’

‘Alan Greenspan? Wasn’t he…’

‘The Federal Reserve.’

Ted nods. ‘
That
’s right.’

‘In a sense I didn’t lose anything,’ James says with a smile. ‘I had nothing at the start, and nothing at the end.’

Ted does not smile at this. He just peers at his nephew thoughtfully, and mainly to forestall any follow-­up questions, James says, ‘You still live in Wimbledon?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘The same… ?’

‘The same house, yes.’

On that, they simultaneously turn their heads and look out into the living room, at one end of which they are standing. For a moment, as clouds manoeuvre somewhere out of sight in the sky, pale sunlight pours in from the street end, then fades. Not entirely. Though the shadows lose their sharpness, they stay. They know they are thinking of the same thing—­the Victorian vicarage in Wimbledon, the weeks that James and Isabel spent there in 1974. James remembers surprisingly little about those weeks. Not even how many weeks it was. How many was it? Though it seemed like a long time then—­and seems like a long time now—­it might only have been two, or even one. One or two weeks at the very end. That would make sense. He remembers the thick ivory shagpile in the vestibule and on the stairs. It was unlike any carpet he had ever seen.

Ted does not seem aware of the fact that his hand is fiddling nervously with one of the buttons of his suit jacket.

‘How’s Jean?’ James says.