London Fields, Page 4

  I left the Black Cross around four. I went back to the apartment. I sat at the desk in Mark Asprey's bay-windowed office or study or library. Actually it's more like a trophy room. Actually the whole damned place is a trophy room. Walking from living-room to bedroom — and I'm thinking of the signed photographs, the erotic prints - you wonder why he didn't just nail a galaxy of G-strings to the walls. In here it's different. Here you're surrounded by cups and sashes, Tonis and Guggies, by framed presentations, commenda­tions. Cherished and valued alike by the critical establishment, the media, and the world of academe, Mark Asprey has honorary degrees, pasteboard hats, three separate gowns from Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin. I must look at his books, of which there are a great many, in a great many editions, in a great many languages. Hungarian. Japanese.

  I left the Black Cross around four. I went back to the apartment. I sat there wondering why I just can't do it, why I just can't write, why I just can't make anything up. Then I saw her.

  Across the way from Mark Asprey's bay-windowed library there is a lot-sized square of green, with two thin beds of flowers (low-ranking flowers, nupe flowers) and a wooden bench where old-timers sometimes sit and seem to flicker in the wind. On this green patch, rather regrettably, rather disappointingly (how come Asprey stands for it?), there is also a garbage tip: nothing outrageous, no compost or bathtubs or abandoned pantechnicons, just selected refuse, magazines, old toys, a running shoe, a kettle. This is a London theme; the attempt at greenery would itself appear to attract the trash. The cylinders of wire-netting they put up to protect young trees sufficiently resemble a container of some kind, so people cram them with beercans, used tissues, yesterday's newspapers. In times of mass disorientation and anxiety . . . But we can get back to that. On with the story. The girl was there: Nicola, the murderee.

  I was sitting at Mark Asprey's vast desk - I think I might even have been wringing my hands. Oh Lord, these chains! Something I have suffered for twenty years, the steady disappointment of not writing— perhaps exacerbated (I admit to the possibility) by Mark Asprey's graphic and plentiful successes in the sphere. It shocked my heart to see her: a soft blow to the heart, from within. Still wearing her funeral robes, the hat, the veil. In her black-gloved hands she held something solid, ribboned in red, the load settled on her hip and clutched close as if for comfort, like a child. Then she raised the veil and showed her face. She looked so ... dramatic. She looked like the vamp in the ad, just before the asshole in the helicopter or the submarine shows up with the bathcubes or the chocolates. Could she see me, with that low sun behind her? I couldn't tell, but I thought: Nicola would know. She would know all about how light works on windows. She would know what you could get away with in the curtainless room, what adulteries, what fantastic betrayals . . .

  Nicola turned, wavered, and steadied herself. She dropped her burden into the trash and, embracing her shoulders with crossed hands, moved off in a hurrying walk.

  For perhaps five minutes of stretched time I waited. Then down I went and picked up my gift. Not knowing what I had, I sat on the bench and pulled the ribbon's knot. An adorably fat and feminine hand, chaos, a menacing intelligence. It made me blush with porno­graphic guilt. When I looked up I saw half of Nicola Six, thirty feet away, split by a young tree-trunk, not hiding but staring. Her stare contained - only clarity, great clarity. I gestured, as if to return what 1 held in my hands. But after a pulse of time she was walking off fast under the wrung hands of the trees.

  I wish to Christ I could do Keith's voice. The t's are viciously stressed. A brief guttural pop, like the first nanosecond of a cough or a hawk, accompanies the hard k. When he says chaotic, and he says it frequently, it sounds like a death rattle. 'Month' comes out as mumf. He sometimes says, 'Im feory . . .' when he speaks theoretically. 'There' sounds like dare or lair. You could often run away with the impression that Keith Talent is eighteen months old.

  In fact I've had to watch it with my characters' ages. I thought Guy Clinch was about twenty-seven. He is thirty-five. I thought Keith Talent was about forty-two. He is twenty-nine. I thought Nicola Six . . . No, I always knew what she was. Nicola Six is thirty-four. I fear for them, my youngers.

  And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.

  Chapter 3: The Foil

  g

  uy clinch was a good guy — or a nice one, anyway. He wanted for nothing and lacked everything. He had a tremend­ous amount of money, excellent health, handsomeness, height, a capriciously original mind; and he was lifeless. He was wide open. Guy possessed, in Hope Clinch, a wife who was intelligent, efficient (the house was a masterpiece), brightly American (and rich); and then there was the indubitable vigour of the child . . . But when he woke up in the morning there was - there was no life. There was only lifelessness.

  The happiest time of Guy's fifteen-year marriage had come during Hope's pregnancy, a relatively recent interlude. She had taken her fifty per cent cut in IQ with good grace, and for a while Guy had found himself dealing with an intellectual equal. Suddenly the talk was of home improvement, of babies' names, nursery conversions, girlish pinks, boyish blues — the tender materialism, all with a point. Never entirely free of builders, the house now thronged with them, shouting, swearing, staggering. Guy and Hope lived to hormone time. The curtain hormone, the carpet hormone. Her nausea passed. She craved mashed potato. Then the nesting hormone: an abrupt passion for patching, for needle and thread. Seeing the size of her, the barrow boys of Portobello Road (and perhaps Keith Talent had been among them) would summon her to their stalls, saying sternly, masterfully, 'Over here, my love. I got the stuff you want.' And Hope would rootle to the base of damp cardboard boxes — rags of velvet, scraps of satin. In the eighth month, when the furniture had begun its dance round the house, and Hope sat with regal fullness in front of the television, darning and patching (and sometimes saying, 'What am I doing?'), Guy consulted his senses, scratched his head, and whispered to himself (and he didn't mean the baby), It's coming . . . It's on its way.

  Oh, how he had longed for a little girl! In the sparse gloom of the private clinic, the most expensive they could find (Hope distrusted any medical care that failed to stretch searchingly into the four figures: she liked the scrolled invoices, with every paper tissue and soldier of toast unsmilingly itemized; she had no time for the bargain basements and the Crazy Eddies of the National Health), Guy did his share of pacing and napping and fretting, while titled specialists looked in from dinner parties or popped by on their way to rounds of golf. A girl, a girl, just an ordinary little girl - Mary, Anna, Jane. 'It's a girl,' he could hear himself saying on the telephone (to whom, he didn't know), 'Five pounds twelve ounces. Yes, a girl. A little under six pounds.' He wanted to be with his wife throughout, but Hope had banned him from labour and delivery wards alike — for reasons, soberly but unanswerably stated, of sexual pride.

  The baby showed up thirty-six hours later, at four in the morning. He weighed nearly a stone. Guy was allowed a brief visit to Hope's suite. Looking back at it now, he had an image of mother and son mopping themselves down with gloating expressions on their faces, as if recovering from some enjoyably injudicious frolic: a pizza fight, by the look of it. Two extra specialists were present. One was peering between Hope's legs, saying, 'Yes, well it's rather hard to tell what goes where.' The other was incredulously measuring the baby's head. Oh, the little boy was perfect in every way. And he was a monster.

  Guy Clinch had everything. In fact he had two of everything. Two cars, two houses, two uniformed nannies, two silk-and-cashmere dinner jackets, two graphite-cooled tennis rackets, and so on and so forth. But he had only one child and only one woman. After Marmaduke's birth, things changed. For fresh inspiration he reread The Egoist, and Wollheim on Ingres and the Melting Father. The baby books had prepared him for change; and so had literature,
up to a point. But nothing had prepared him or anybody else for

  Marmaduke... World-famous paediatricians marvelled at his

  hyperactivity, and knelt like magi to his genius for colic. Every half an hour he noisily drained his mother's sore breasts; often he would take a brief nap around midnight; the rest of the time he spent screaming. Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief. When things improved, which they did, though only temporarily (for Marmaduke, already softly snarling with asthma, would soon be emblazoned with eczema), Hope still spent much of her time in bed, with or without Marmaduke, but never with Guy. All night he lay dressed for disaster in one of the two visitors' rooms, wondering why his life had suddenly turned into a very interesting and high-toned horror film (one with a Regency setting, perhaps). His habitual mode of locomotion around the house became the tiptoe. When Hope called his name - 'Guy?' -and he replied Yes? there was nevei any answer, because his name meant Come here. He appeared, and performed the necessary errand, and disappeared again. Now, with Hope's requests, the first time of asking sounded like the second time of asking, and the second time of asking sounded like the ninth. Less and less often Guy would try to hoist the baby into his arms (under the doubtful gaze of nanny or night-nurse, or some other of Marmaduke's highly-paid admirers), saying, rather self-consciously, 'Hello, man-cub.' Marmaduke would pause, reviewing his options; and Guy's bashfully inquiring face would somehow always invite a powerful eye-poke or a jet of vomit, a savage rake of the nails, or at the very least an explosive sneeze. Guy shocked himself by suspecting that Hope kept the infant's nails undipped the better to repel him. Certainly his face was heavily scored; he sometimes looked like a resolute but talent­less rapist. He felt supererogotary. The meeting, the rendezvous, it just hadn't happened.

  So two of everything, except lips, breasts, the walls of intimacy, enfolding arms, enfolding legs. But that wasn't really it. What had meant to come closer had simply moved further away. Life, there­fore, could loom up on him at any moment. He was wide open.

  Guy and Hope had been away twice since the birth, on doctor's advice: their doctor's, not Marmaduke's. They left him in the care of five nannies, plus an even more costly platoon of medical commandos. It had been strange, leaving him behind; Guy fully participated in Hope's dread as the cab made its way to Heathrow. Fear was gradually eased by time, and by half-hourly telephone calls. The inner ear was tuned to infant grief. If you listened closely, everything sounded like a baby crying.

  First, Venice, in February, the mist, the cold troubled water - and miraculously earless. Guy had never in his life felt closer to the sun; it was like living in a cloud, up in a cloudy sea. But many of the mornings were sombre in mood and sky (dank, failed), and seemed best expressed by the tortured and touristless air of the Jewish Quarter, or by the weak dappling on the underside of a bridge (where the pale flames pinged like static, briefly betrayed by a darker background) — or when you were lost among the Chinese boxes, the congestion of beauties, and you could have likened yourselves to Shakespearean lovers until there came the sound of a wretched sneeze from an office window near by, then the nose greedily voided into the hanky, and the resumption of the dull ticking of a typewriter or an adding machine.

  On the fifth day the sun burst through again inexorably. They were walking arm in arm along the Zattere towards the café where they had taken to having their mid-morning snack. The light was getting to work on the water, with the sun torpedoing in on every pair of human eyes. Guy looked up: to him the sky spoke of Revelation, Venetian style. He said,

  'I've just had a rather delightful thought. You'd have to set it as verse.' He cleared his throat. 'Like this:

  The sun, the sun, the . . . daubing sun: The clouds are putti in its hands!'

  They walked on. Hope's oval face looked resolute. The juices in her jaw were already addressing the toasted cheese-and-ham sand­wich she would presently enjoy; then the notebook, the little Amex guide, the creamy coffee. 'Dreadful pun, I suppose,' Guy murmured. 'Oh, God.' A press of sightseers confronted them. As they forged through, with Hope taking the lead, their arms were sundered. Guy hurried to catch up.

  'The tourists,' he said.

  'Don't complain. That's idiotic. What do you think you are?'

  'Yes but-'

  'Yes but nothing.'

  Guy faltered. He had turned to face the water and was craning his neck in obscure distress. Hope closed her eyes longsufferingly, and waited.

  'Wait, Hope,' he said. 'Please look. If I move my head, then the sun moves on the water. My eyes have as much say in it as the sun.'

  '. . . Capiscol

  'But that means—for everyone here the sun is different on the water. No two people are seeing the same thing.'

  'I want my sandwich.'

  She moved on. Guy lingered, clutching his hands, and saying, 'But then it's hopeless. Don't you think? It's . . . quite hopeless.'

  And he whispered the same words at night in the hotel, and went on whispering them, even after their return to London, lying in sleep's caboose, seconds before Marmaduke woke him with a clout. 'But then it's hopeless . . . Utterly hopeless.'

  In excellent fettle, in the pink or the blue of boyish good health during their absence, Marmaduke sickened dramatically within a few hours of their return. Evenhandedly he dabbled with every virus, every hatching, afforded by that early spring. Recovering from mumps, he reacted catastrophically to his final whooping-cough shot. Superflu followed superflu in efficient relay. Doctors now visited him, unasked and unpaid, out of sheer professional curiosity. At this point, and for no clear reason (Sir Oliver asked if he might write a paper about it), Marmaduke's health radically improved. Indeed, he seemed to shed his sickly self as if it were a dead skin or a useless appendage: from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a musclebound wunder-kind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious. The change was all very sudden.Guy and Hope went out one day, leaving the usual gastroenteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchen floor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets, watched by several speechless nannies. He had never crawled. Instead, he appeared to have worked it out that he could cause much more trouble, and have much more fun, in a state of peak fitness. His first move was to dispense with that midnight nap. The Clinches hired more help, or they tried. An ailing baby was one thing; a strappingly malevolent toddler was quite another. Up until now, Guy and Hope's relationship, to the child and to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke's renaissance, it became, well — you wouldn't say paramilitary. You'd say military. The only people they could get who stayed longer than an hour or two were male nurses sacked from lunatic asylums, Around the house, these days there was a kind of swat team of burly orderlies, as well as a few scarred nannies and au pairs. Dazedly yet without bit­terness, Guy calculated that Marmaduke, now in his ninth month, had already cost him a quarter of a million pounds. They went away again.

  This time they flew first-class to Madrid, stayed at the Ritz for three nights, and then hired a car and headed south. The car seemed powerful and luxurious enough; it was, without question, resound­ingly expensive. (Hope whaled on the insurance. Guy studied the gold-rimmed document: they would airlift you out on almost any pretext.) But as they cruised, as they cruised and glistened one evening through the thin forests near the southernmost shore of the peninsula, a great upheaval or trauma seemed almost to dismantle the engine at a stroke - the manifold, the big end? In any event the car was clearly history. Around midnight Guy could push it no longer. They saw some lights: not many, and not bright.

  The Clinches found accommodation in a rude venta. What with the bare coil of the bulb, the lavatorial damp, the flummoxed bed, Hope had burst into tears before the señora was out of the room. All night Guy lay beside his drugged wife, listening. At about five, after an interval reminiscent of one of Marmaduke's naps
, the weekend roistering in the bar, the counterpoints of jukebox and Impacto machine, exhaustedly gave way to the shrieking gossip of the yard -with a cluck-cluck here and a whoof-whoof there, here a cheep, there a moo, everywhere an oink-oink. Worst or nearest was a moronic bugler of a cock, playing tenor to the neighbours' alto, with his room-rattling reveille. 'Cock-a-doodle-do', Guy decided, was one of the world's great euphemisms. At seven, after an especially unbearable tenor solo (as if the cock were finally heralding the entrance of some imperial superrooster), Hope jerked upright, swore fluently and foully, applied valium and eyemask, and bunched herself down again with her face pressed to her knees. Guy smiled weakly. There was a time when he could read love in the shape of his sleeping wife; even in the contours of the blankets he used to be able to read it...

  He went outside, into the yard. The cock, the grotesque gallo, stood in its coop — yes, inches from their pillows — and stared at him with unchallengeable pomp. Guy stared back, shaking his head slowly. Hens were in attendance, quietly and unquestioningly supportive, among all the dust and rubbish. As for the two pigs, they were yahoos even by the standards of the yard. A dark half-grown Alsatian dozed in the hollow of an old oildrum. Sensing a presence, the dog jerked upright, waking sudden and crumpled, with sand dried into the long trap of the jaw, and moved towards him with compulsive friendliness. It's a girl, he thought: tethered, too. As he went to pet the animal they became entangled, entangled, it seemed, by the very amiability of the dog, by its bouncing, twisting amiability.