London Fields

  Edged out from the bar, they stood by a pillar with their drinks, right in the teeth of the snapping steel band.

  'You wouldn't believe,' Keith shouted, 'you wouldn't believe what I'm turning down. Take yesterday.'

  And as Keith launched into a squalid decameron of recent gallops and tumbles, instant liaisons, valiant cuckoldries, eagerly requited grabbings and gropings, quickies and workouts and hip-twangers and knee-tremblers, Guy reflected - and reflected wryly - on the utter artlessness of the standard male strategies. Class strategies too, he allowed. It would take a stretch of cosmic time before Keith would acknowledge the cosmic distance that separated himself from a woman like Nicola Six. You had to be quite near to see and to feel. After all, if you looked out from the virusless morgue of Pluto (Guy was thinking of the latest Journeyer photographs), the sun was no more than an exceptionally bright star, admonitory and cruciform, a bright star — a cold, bright star, like the brandished sword of God, long before you felt its heat.

  When he telephoned her early that afternoon (from a Mexican snackbar in Westbourne Park Road), Nicola's voice was every­thing he had hoped it would be: direct, uncomplicatedly friendly, low with charged warmth — and sane. Yes, he had hoped for the firm clasp of her sanity, because he often feared for that delicate equilibrium. If not too good for this world, she was, in his view, far too good for this time; it was the way he saw her, as an anachronism: a museum piece, time-orphaned . . . She was just dashing off to a lecture (and here Guy screened an image of dedi­cated hurry, of books crushed to the breast and a length of scarf held up by the breeze), but she did so terribly want to talk to him. Could he very sweetly ring her later this evening, at six o'clock, at six o'clock precisely?

  'Of course. What's your lecture?'

  'Mm? Um - "Milton and Sex".'

  'Well that won't last long,' said Guy, whose humour always came from the overflow of happiness, never from the undertow of irony. In any case, he mildly regretted the remark.

  'Actually I think they mean gender.'

  'Oh yes. He for God. She for God in him. That kind of thing.'

  'Yes. That kind of thing. Must run.'

  Guy had the Mexican lady make him up a kind of omelette hero (he hoped to use her telephone many more times) which she put in a bag and which he guiltily secreted in an empty rubbish basket on Ladbroke Grove.

  'Well what did you think?' said Hope.

  'Thank you,' said Guy. He said it, not to Hope, but to the man whose job it was to monitor — or stand fairly near to — the automatic checkout of the underground garage beneath Cavendish Square. He had seen Guy many times now and knew his face. Not that he appeared to be much bucked by this familiarity, or by anything else that happened to him down there.

  Guy retrieved his credit card and steered them up into the light. The traffic,' he said.

  'Jesus, how many times? Listen: You Are The Traffic.'

  '. . . I thought he made a lot of sense.'

  'Three hundred guineas of sense?'

  'On the fresh-air question.'

  'I knew you'd say that.'

  'If not on the hostility-to-me question.'

  'I knew you'd say that.'

  The Harley Street doctor they had just consulted was an expert on infant hypermania. He had seen Marmaduke at his surgery and had also paid a stunned visit to the house, where, as promised, Marmaduke was able to relax and be his normal self. Absolutely impossible at the surgery, Marmaduke had been absolutely unbel­ievable at home. Even today, nearly three weeks later, the doctor was still wearing a patch of gauze over his right eye. All parties agreed that the legal matter need not affect their professional relationship. Recently, Guy had taken out insurance on Marmaduke-related personal-injury suits, on what seemed to be highly advantageous terms. More recently, he had taken out insurance on the insurance.

  'On the hostility-to you question,' said Hope, 'I thought he made a change from Freud.'

  'So did I. But I prefer Freud. I'd rather Marmaduke didn't like me for Freudian reasons. I don't like him not liking me because he just doesn't like me. Why shouldn't he like me? I'm incredibly nice to him all the time.'

  Guy turned his head. Hope was staring out expressionlessly at the car-crammed street. With some caution he patted her twice on the knee. Their last real embrace had, in fact, been staged for that very doctor's benefit — a paramedical embrace, as part of a demonstra- tion. At home, in the kitchen, Guy had embraced his wife while the doctor looked on. As predicted, Marmaduke dashed the length of the room and sank his teeth into Guy's calf. Requested to tolerate it, Guy tolerated it, and maintained the embrace up to the point where Marmaduke started head-butting the cooker.

  'To return to the fresh-air question,' said Guy. 'Or to the half-hour question.' This referred to one of Hope's most controversial rulings: Marmaduke was not allowed outside for more than half an hour a day. 'He seemed to think that an hour was safe.'

  'No he didn't. He said it could be regarded as tolerable.'

  'It's the confinement. Children like to whirl around. How about forty-five minutes? He needs some fresh air.'

  'We all do. But there isn't any.'

  There wasn't any. And hard to explain that one away, hard to justify it - to the young (Guy meant), to those who would come after. How would you begin? Well, we suspected that sacrifices might have to be made, later, for all the wonderful times we had with our spray cans and junk-food packaging. We knew there'd be a price. Admittedly, to you, the destruction of the ozone layer looks a bit steep. But don't forget how good it was for us: our tangy armpits, our piping hamburgers. Though maybe we could have got by with just roll-ons and styrofoam .. .

  'Lookl' they both cried, in childish unison. They were driving down the Bayswater Road and a sick squirrel stood trembling by the park railings.

  Guy and Hope laughed — at each other, at themselves. 'Look!' they had cried — to please Marmaduke. There was the squirrel, leaning on a tree stump, and retching apologetically. But Marmaduke was not in the car. And Marmaduke wouldn't have been pleased anyway, since he showed no interest in animals except as new things to injure or get injured by.

  On the stroke of seven Guy called Nicola from a booth in the lobby of a hotel for the homeless in Ilchester Gardens. The Mexican snackbar was closed; but spotting usable telephones had become something of a hobby for Guy Clinch. In this way Nicola kept showing him more life. He stood there poised with his coins. Behind his back filed whole families bearing plates with little suppers on them. Clearly the kitchen was in the basement and everyone ate in their rooms. Guy exhaled in exquisite pity. One and a half fishfingers? For a growing boy? And then probably the mothers have to-

  He fumbled. 'Hello?' he said. 'Hello? . . . Nicola?'

  'Guy? Wait,' said the voice. 'This isn't me.'

  'Hello?'

  'It's a tape. I apologize, but I didn't trust myself to talk to you unmediated. I didn't trust my resolve. You see ... Dear Guy, thank you for all the sentiments you have awoken in me. It was wonderful to learn that I could have these feelings. My reading, in future, will be much vivified. I shall look at Lawrence with new eyes. My love, if you . . . But I suspect there is something deeply frivolous about pursuing a course that holds so little prospect of good. And that's what we want, isn't it? The good? I'll never forget you. I shall just have to - but no matter. Never make any attempt to contact me ever again. If you had any tenderness for me — and I think you did — then you'll know how absolutely and unconditionally I mean that. If you get news of my friends, well, perhaps a note. I'll never forget you.

  'Think of me sometimes.

  'Goodbye.'

  'Goodbye,' he whispered, after a while.

  Nine hours later, at four in the morning, Guy turned the page and said:

  The north wind doth blow, And we shall have snow, And what will poor Robin do then, poor thing?'

  Marmaduke looked up from a modern edition of Goodnight, Moon, which he was patiently, almost studiously, tearing to pieces. You c
ould read to Marmaduke - it soothed him, or kept him happy or at least busy. But he had to be allowed to tear up the book directly afterwards. Soon he would be tearing up Mother Goose's Treasury of Children's Rhymes and Fables. And yet for the moment the child hesitated and his father read on:

  'He'll sit in a barn, And keep himself warm, And hide his head under his wing, poor thing!'

  Marmaduke watched with his mouth open. The scragged copy of Goodnight, Moon fell from his grasp. He got to his feet with a sigh and approached the low chair where Guy sat. He grinned suddenly and reached out a round hand that trembled with approving interest to touch the tears on his father's cheek.

  Of course, I keep trying to tone Marmaduke down. I thought he was funny at first - but really that kid is no joke. He devastates his parents twenty times a day. I censor him. I bowdlerize him too. There's some stuff you just can't put in books.

  Turn your back for ten seconds and he's in the fire or out the window or over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he's the right height for that, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you'll usually find him with both hands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of his playpen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that some nanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva. Yeah, that's it. Marmaduke looks as though he is already contemplating a career in child pornography: he knows it's out there, and he can tell that there's a quick buck in it. Naturally he's hell with the help and any other woman who strays within range. He's always got a hand up the nurse's smock or a seigneurial tongue in the au pair's ear.

  I wouldn't have thought Lizzyboo was his type but he goes for her in a big way.

  Incarnacion and I are the best of friends. There's absolutely no problem, any more, about her talking to me.

  'Living alone, you know,' she said today, 'it's all right-it's good,' Queenly Incarnacion lives alone. Her husband is dead. Her two children are grown up. They live in Canada. She came here. They went there. 'You have advantages. When you living alone, you do things when you want. Not when they want. When you want.'

  True, Incarnacion.'

  'You want a bath. You have a bath. You want to eat. You eat. You don't need them to say so. It suit you. You sleepy, you want to go to bed. You go to bed. Don't ask. You want watch the TV. Okay! You watch the TV. Up to you. You want a cup of coffee. — Coffee. You want clean the kitchen. You clean the kitchen. You want maybe listen to the radio. You listen the radio.'

  Yes, and the same goes for any solitary activity you care to name. But after twenty minutes on the upside of living alone, we get twenty minutes on the downside of living alone, like there never being anyone else around and things like that.

  A letter from Mark Asprey.

  He mentions a restless desire to pop back to London for a few days, next month sometime. He adduces the wonderful convenience of the Concorde. He allows that it would also be convenient, and pleasingly symmetrical, if I could be prevailed upon to return to New York for those same few days and reoccupy my apartment —which, he adds, he doesn't use much anyway. He drops hints about a certain rather celebrated lady whom it is imprudent to entertain in his suite at the Plaza.

  By now an habituated snooper, I have gone through all Mark Asprey's desk drawers. More trophies, but not for public viewing. Under-the-counter stuff. Pornographic love letters, locks of hair (head and nether), arty photographs. The deep central drawer is firmly locked. Maybe it's got a whole girl in it.

  I have even looked at some of his plays. They are terrible. Frictionless romances, down through the ages. The Goblet has an Arthurian setting. It's all pretty-pretty; but not very pretty. I don't understand. He's one of these guys who hits an awful note and then is uncontrollably rewarded, like Barry Manilow.

  Now here's an intolerable thought. I was looking again at Nicola's diaries. She uses initials for her menfriends. The docile GR, the well-fleeced CH. NV, with his suicide bids. HB, who cracked up after his divorce. TD and AP both hit the bottle. IJ, who fled to New Zealand. BK, who apparently went and joined the Foreign Legion. Poor PS, who bought the farm.

  The only one she kept going back to, the only one who was half a match for her, 'the only one I've ever been stupid for', the handsomest, the cruellest, the best in bed (by far): he's called MA. A resident of West London. Connected to the theatre.

  I burn no torch for Nicola Six. So why does this thought kill me?

  It's happened. A call from Missy Harter, or, to be more accurate, a call from Janit Slotnick.

  'This is Janit Slotnick? Miss Harter's assistint?' 'Yes yes.' 'Well, sir, there's certainly a lot of excitemint here today at Hornig Ultrason.' 'There is?' 'We know we're paying megamoney for it.' 'You are?' 'Mm-hm. The new book on the death of John Lennin!'

  I won't transcribe all the crap she talked about the death of John Lennon. How the KGB did it, and so on.

  'Miss Harter wanted to have me call you — about your treatmint.' 'Well it's hardly a treatment, Miss Slotnick. More of an outline. What's the feeling on it?' 'Disappointmint, sir.'

  At this point the receiver shot out of my hand like a bar of wet soap.

  '. . . agrees that the opening is strong. So is the denouemint.' 'What? The ending?' 'It's the middle we're disturbed about. What happins?' 'How should I know? I mean, I can't tell until I've written it. A novel is a journey, Miss Slotnick. What was the feeling on the first three chapters?' 'We feel they're a considerable achievemint. But we're disturbed, sir. It's a little literary.' 'Literary? Jesus, you must. . . I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. "Sir."I need an advance, Miss Slotnick.' 'I'm not sure we're ready yet to make that kind of commitmint. On this point Miss Harter and myself are in total agreemint.'

  I abased myself with promises of cuts, rewrites, tone-downs and spruce-ups until Janit very coolly consented to take a look at chapters four to six.

  'And we're unhappy about the names, sir.'

  'No problem,' I said. 'I was going to change them anyway.'

  Usually it's late at night, now, when I get the call from Nicola Six. One, two. Even three. It's then that she wants to proceed with our debate or battle-plan or script conference. She summons me. I always show.

  I'm up to it, apparently. Not so long ago I was sleeping like a newborn: I couldn't keep my eyes open for more than five minutes running. Then for a while I slept like a baby: I woke twice an hour in floods of tears. But now I'm really getting on top of my game. Soon I'll be like some coppery old ascetic in the caves of Ladakh, or like Marmaduke: sleep will be something that I can take or I can leave. So, not without difficulty, with night fear, with the heaviness of fatigue indefinitely postponed, I get out there. It's my job.

  Three nights ago, or three dawns ago, as I was girding myself for Chapter 9, I got the call around two-thirty and went straight over in the car. She took my coat and hat with a humorous expression on her face. She was dressed up — black velvet — and drinking champagne. One of her private parties. I sat down and ran a hand over my face. She asked me how I was and I told her I was good.

  'What are you dying of anyway?'

  'A synergism.' See our interdependence? We don't, we can't talk to anybody else like we can to each other. I can look into her eyes and say it.

  'Communicable? No. Direct or indirect? Indirect.'

  'Non-communicable,' I said. 'But possibly direct. Radiogenic, naturally. They don't know. It's quite an unusual case. You want to hear the story? Takes about ten minutes.'

  'Oh yes please. I'm interested.'

  'London Fields,' I began.

  She knew about the clusters — though of course she didn't know that I was in the centre of the bunch. And she is interested. She is familiar with it all. At one point she said, 'Hang on. So your father was working for her.' 'Her? Pardon me?' 'HER. High Explosives Research. That's what they called it.' 'Right.' Or again she'd come out with something like 'And plutonium metallurgy.
That was another area the British were behind on.' She smoked intently, narrowing her eyes each time she exhaled. One thing about that face: it is always beautifully lit.

  'You've really gone up in my estimation,' she said when I was through. 'So in a way you're at the heart of all this. In a way, you are the Crisis.'

  'Oh no,' I said modestly. 'I don't think so. I'm not the Crisis. I'm more like the Situation.'

  'So you know about Enola Gay.'

  'Oh yes. And Little Boy.’

  Later, she showed me the 'letter' she'd placed on the table for Guy to read. 'Professors Barnes and Noble,' I said. That's a cheap shot, Nicola.'

  'It gets cheaper,' she said. 'Read on.'

  '". . . Rembrandt's portraits of Saskia - or, perhaps, Bonnard's of Marte - were 'suffused' with sexual knowledge, or reflect on the painter's yearning to 'get inside' his sitter, or recliner. Such coarse speculation is where this line always leads. To lend a personal note...'"

  'Turn the page.'

  '". . . I've sat for perhaps a dozen painters in my life, and slept with most of them, and it never made any difference to anything, not to me, not to them, and not to that thing on the canvas."'

  I looked up. She shrugged one shoulder. I said,

  'I wish you wouldn't take these unnecessary risks. Very imprudent, what with you being a virgin and all. Still, I take my hat off to your confidence. You just knew Guy wouldn't turn the page?'

  'Come on. You know, with him, passive prying is all right. You don't avoid what's there to see, but it's an indignity to move any closer, to listen any harder. Actually I'm surprised he dared to read a word.'

  'Hubris, Nicola. Hubris. Guy is quite capable of surprises, especially where you're concerned. You should have seen him at the darts. Like a lion. I was half-dead with fear. Though I didn't read it right, I now think. There wasn't any real danger, not for us. Those guys, they weren't going to hurt us. They were going to hurt themselves. You're yawning. It's late. But don't you be snooty about the darts. They matter in all this.'