London Fields

  'I suppose 1 have some sort of obsession,' she said, now tasting the sensation of risk, 'with the sanctity of the parental role. Certainly for the great rites of passage. Like losing one's . . . like one's first act of love.'

  So in a sense Guy got everything.

  First, starting at around 10.45, on the rug, before the fire, the stroking of hair, and the gazing into one another's faces, and delicious avowals, and solemn kisses.

  At midnight he was led by the hand to the bedroom. Left alone (she wouldn't be long), he unbuttoned his shirt with a battered smile, and tenderly winced as he sat to remove his shoes, and then with grateful fatalism entered naked the weird coolness of someone else's linen. At 12.20 he disobeyed her order to close his eyes as she ran through the doorway and jumped into bed in her flesh-coloured training bra and worsted tights, slipped on, perhaps, in a last whim of modesty . . .

  It took her an absolute age to get warm! What playful stops and starts they had before she was fully enfolded in his robust caloricity. He never dreamed there would be so much laughter, so much childish gaiety. Adorable little sulks and grumps, too, and sudden failures of nerve and syrupy successes. At 1.15 the thick bra was undipped. For the first time he felt the liquid coldness of her breasts on his sternum. At 2.05 the fizzy tights came crackling off. When he had got it really toasty he was allowed to run his hand down the shining power of her inner thighs.

  Meanwhile and throughout, the hot compacts of kisses tasting of sleeplessness and fever and the intimate dismissal of tomorrow morning or any future. There was the sheer of light sweat every­where, and, for him, the jabs and volts of the uncovenanted caresses paid to his exterior heart. Her panties, innocently unfeminine in texture (their lateral elastic even suggesting some medical exigency), were last seen at 3.20.

  The room had changed colour many times that night but it was full of the pallor of dawn, and of the unslept hours they had logged together, when at last he loomed above her, at 4.55. By now her flesh, too, had a sore transparency; the tracings of blue in her breasts appeared to rhyme with the queries of damp hair on her neck and throat.

  'Yes. My darling.'

  It seemed to push all the breath out of her.

  'How it hurts. Oh, how it burns . . .'

  He had entered on tiptoe; but by 5.40 he was fully and hugely established in the purple-lined palace of sweet sin. For an hour, her sharp inhalations, her arias of exalted distress, were the guides to his diminishing caution. By 7.15, with five toes on either shoulder, four fingertips in his buttock, a light palm weighing his scrotum, and most of his face in her mouth, Guy was swinging back and forth in the mystic give and take of a negro spiritual, hymned by all the choirgirls and choirboys of love.

  'Now,' she said. 'Stop now.'

  He stopped. She applied her little finger to his chest. And then she was gone, and Guy was falling down through thin air.

  'I've just realized what is wrong. What's so terribly wrong.'

  Guy blinked into the pillow.

  'It would be awful. Quite inexpiable.'

  Guy lay there, waiting.

  'You have to tell your parents. And your wife's too, of course.'

  Already, as if after a lucky escape, she was putting on her panties. They really did look like Elastoplast, there in the morning light. Guy laughed strangely and said, 'I've only got a father. And she's only got a mother. And tell them what?'

  'Just square them.'

  'I'll call them.'

  'Call them?'

  At 7.2.0, when they had finished discussing it, Nicola said, 'Then go to New York. Go to New England. Go to New London.'

  Go to London Fields.

  Keith was displeased. 'So there you was, basically,' he said to Kath as she served him a

  late breakfast, 'sticking your oar in again. With your questions. Eh?

  Eh?' He stared out at her from the clogged seclusion of his hangover.

  Given a night off by Nick while she sorted it with Guy, Keith had

  ventured out to the Black Cross, and to the Golgotha, where, as the

  night progressed, he had so convinced himself with drink . .. Kath

  returned to the washing-up. She said, 'He volunteered the information.' 'I'll volunteer you in a minute. Tony de Taunton?' 'He just said they were making this little programme. About you.' Wagging his head about, Keith said, 'And you goes "He's my

  husband" and all this.' He wagged his head about again. ' "We got

  little girl. "All this.' 'I didn't say nothing.' She offered this lightly. Keith seemed mollified - though it

  remained clear that he was thoroughly out of sorts. He dropped his

  knife and fork on to the plate as Kath asked, 'When's it on then?'

  'What?'

  'The TV programme."

  'Never you mind. Business, innit. Darts. It's not..." Keith paused. He was actually in great difficulty here. Himself on TV: he couldn't work out how the two worlds overlapped. Try as he might, bringing all his powers to bear, he just couldn't work it out. He straightened his darting finger at her. 'Like the news. You don't want to believe everything on TV. No way to carry on.'

  'You can believe the darts, surely to God.'

  'Yeah but. . . This thing. It's - it's not on TV,' he said. 'Obviously.'

  'What isn't? The TV programme?'

  'Jesus.'

  Keith thought it prudent to change the subject. So he started talking about how ugly Kath was now and how depressed he became (he swore it broke his fucking heart) every time he looked at her.

  'You know what I'm talking?' he concluded, much more moder­ately. 'Success. And I happen to be able to handle it. It's a lifestyle you couldn't conceive. It's out there, girl. It wants me. And I'm gone.'

  The baby gave notice of waking: the labour of baby consciousness would soon resume. Soon, the baby would be rippling with grids and circuits. And Kath herself gave a jerk as she reflexively moved for the door. Keith's blue eyes filled with everything he could no longer endure: his lips tightened, then whitened, and then vanished inwards as he said, with unbounded venom,

  'I intend to complete my preparation elsewhere.'

  Sourly handsome Richard was present at the office to let Guy in, as arranged. For a while they stood there amid the Japanese furniture, conversationally revising their holding positions. The world they referred to now comprised about half a percentage point of Guy's reality; to Richard, it had always been everything.

  'I see no alternative to riding it out,' Richard said. 'It's sheer cuckooland, of course.'

  'Agreed.' Every time their eyes met Richard seemed to lean a further inch backwards, as if to put more distance between himself and Guy's impermissible disarray. I suppose (Guy thought), I suppose I must look . . . 'Agreed,' he said again.

  'You know the new buzz word over there? Cathartic war.’

  'Really.'

  'Poor old deterrence is in bad shape, so you give it a little jolt. Two cities. It's good, isn't it. We'd all feel so much better after a cathartic war.'

  Richard laughed, and Guy laughed too, with real amusement. Of course, it suited him, up to a point, if nothing whatever mattered. But then such generalized hilarity might be considered a necessary condition for nothing mattering. About a year ago he had at last finished Martin Gilbert's The Holocaust, and had sombrely decided that this thousand-page work could also be read as a treasury of German humour . . . Guy went to his desk and called his father on the direct line. He was connected quickly but he still had to get past all the staff: lessening densities of Hispanic bafflement giving way to the forensic interceptions of stewards, secretaries, lawyers, game­keepers. 'It's nothing to do with the office,' he kept telling a Mr Tulkinghorn. 'It's personal. And rather urgent.' Eventually his father lurched exhaustedly on to the line, as if the receiver itself were some new burden he was being asked to shoulder.

  'What's it about?'

  'I can't discuss it now. It's far too delicate.'

  'But what's it about?'

 
Guy told him what it was about.

  'Well, there's nothing much more to say, is there. You have my. . . my "okay". All the best, dear boy. I'm glad we talked.'

  A few seconds later Richard knocked and entered.

  'You're absolutely right,' said Guy. 'It's pure fantasy. It'll blow over.'

  Guy hadn't come to the office to talk to Richard. He had come for his passport and travel cards — and for that spare cane which he elatedly glimpsed leaning against the wall by the door. As he moved across the room to get it, Richard, who was Guy's younger brother, said, 'Then why are you going to New York? Have you got a hernia or something? I was listening in. It sounds as though you've cocked things up nicely. You tit.'

  Guy looked at the floor: Richard wouldn't understand, of course, but he had never felt happier in his life. Guy looked at the ceiling. 'You wouldn't understand,' he said, 'but I've never felt happier in my life.'

  'You tit,' said Richard.

  He took the tube to the Strand, where he bought a travel bag and lots of new stuff to put in it. In the golden silence of the department store he went from men's wear to women's, in search of a silk scarf for Hope's mother, and one for Nicola, while he was there. The vaults and galleries of female clothing, their catholicity of cut and colour, surprised and impressed him. Compared to all this, men went around in uniform. But then . . . But then, just now (and in a sense it had been this way for half a century): we are all in uniform. Not volunteers either, but pressed men and women, weeping conscripts. The children in anaconda file on the zebra-crossing are in uniform. The old lady over there dithering from hat to hat is in uniform. Our babies are born, not in their birthday suits, but in uniform — in little sailor suits. Hard for love. Hard for love, with everyone being in the army like this. Love got hard to do.

  Now the revolving doors delivered him on to the street (the brass-topped cane really did make a difference). Above, the low sun painted the shape of an eagle on to the cirrus haze. Today an eagle, with eagle eye; tomorrow a vulture, perhaps, flexed over London carrion. Looking down, he saw a pretty cat behind the bars of a basement window; it yawned and stretched, outside history. An old man walked past; he was shyly stifling a smile as he remembered something fond or funny. Preserve this! Yes, certainly! Guy stopped a cab and reached quick agreement with the driver in his beefeater outfit. He climbed in. He was no longer afraid. On the way to Heathrow he looked at the books she had given him for his transatlantic reading and glanced again at the inscriptions. Towards the west, like madlady's hair, the thin clouds sucked him into the completion of his reality. He was no longer afraid; and he no longer feared for love. Partly it was her show of principle, so bravely self-sufficient, when you thought about it, with the eclipse only days away. Partly it was the recession of Keith's image in his mind: the only bane here was the recently revealed talent for literary criticism (what other charms and skills might Keith acquire?). But mainly, he admitted to himself, it was those panties. Guy smiled, and went on giving smiles of pain at every bump the cab took on its way. Quite a fright. Unpleasant to the touch, too (and his fingertips had explored their every atom). Exactly the sort of thing you'd expect a virgin to wear, at thirty-four.

  Double 17, thought Keith. Bad one. Come inside, you're looking at 1, double 8. But she don't even look thirty. Not nice either. Better go 10, double 10. Moisturizers innit.

  'Now where are my keys,' she said.

  Keith stared moodily at her stocking-tops as she led him up the stairs. She paused and turned and said,

  'When you had two darts for the 66 pick-off. I thought you'd go 16, bull. But no. You went bull, double 8. Magic. That's finishing, Keith.'

  'Yeah cheers.'

  'And the 125! Everyone was expecting triple 19, big 18, bull. But you go outer bull, triple 20, tops. Brilliant kill. . . Keith! What's the matter? Why are you looking at me like that?'

  'It's treble. Not triple. Treble.'

  Nicola climbed the last flight with her head at a penitent angle. In the sitting-room she said cautiously,

  'Darling what do you think? We could go and eat quite soon, or do you want to relax here for a bit first?'

  'Never do that,' said Keith with a wipe of his palm. 'Not when I just come through the door. I get my bearings, okay?'

  'Forgive me. Would you like to take your coat off and try it out?' she said, referring to the new dartboard of which she had taken delivery that afternoon. 'Whilst I go and get you your lager?'

  'All in good time.'

  'Do you like it?'

  'No it's smart.' Keith took off his jacket and reached masterfully for his purple pouch. 'Wood-grained wall cabinet. Of mature mahogany.'

  Nicola hurried to the refrigerator, where the cans of lager were stacked like bombs in their bay. He hadn't actually said she could fetch him a drink, and she did hope she was doing the right thing. She hesitated, listening for the thunk of his darts.

  Over the next few days she took him (Keith) to illustrious old-style restaurants in whose velvet and candlelight he fuzzily shone with class dissonance, with villainy, with anticharisma; he sat with the tasselled menus and heard Nicola translate. She translated him (Keith) to sanctums of terrible strictness, accusatory linen and taunting tureens, where he always had what she had. She bought him (Keith) the dinky black waistcoats and black trimmed trousers that he loved; as a result, when he returned from the toilet to their table, hands would go up all over the room, like in class, when the pretty teacher asked an easy question. He never talked (Keith). He never talked. At first she assumed that he was in the grip of an inscrutable rage. Was he still brooding on her solecism with the triple? Had someone spoken ill of the Marquis of Edenderry ? Then she realized: he thought you didn't. He thought you didn't talk. Though others did. He sat there, chewing (Keith), with caution, without zest, deep in his dreams of darts. Or perhaps he was wondering why, in the fantasy, you felt at home in places like these, whereas of course you never did, and never would. With the waiters, Keith was as a fly to wanton boys; the lightest glance of the maitre d' could harrow up his soul. Nicola supposed that this explained the proletarian predilec­tion for Indian food - and Indian waiters. Who's afraid of those brown-faced elfs? He once tried a glass of Mouton Rothschild (Keith) and spat it out into his napkin. She paid, ostentatiously, always querying the bill, while Keith turned a pensive stare on the chandeliers. He knew the required demeanour of the man shedding humble origins: you act as if you feel it's all your due. But he was having a job feeling that, these days, and a job acting it. When the godlike greeter talked to her in what was presumably French, when he advised and beseeched, wringing his hands, Keith always thought they were asking her what she was doing, going out with someone like him. Like him. (Keith.)

  At home, though, in her flat, Keith was it. He came in at around ten or eleven and looked at her through the shards, the swirling parquetry, of his shuffled hungers. She dressed wealthily for him, to win that admiring sneer. Before he started on his lagers or his Lucozades he was served croissants, and devilish espresso, and once or twice she coaxed him into humour with a Tequila Sunrise, where something sweet fought the heavy tug of the booze. Then he threw darts all day, pausing only to acknowledge receipt of an exquisite snack, for example, and a lager served in the engraved pewter tankard she had bought him, or to relish a new video; with Keith now needing four or five of these a day, Nicola was far from idle! To begin with he desisted from his darts when the telephone rang and it turned out to be Guy, shouting through the ambient clatter of some airport or gas station; but after a while, such was his local suzerainty, he practised right through the calls. On one occasion Guy rang from a deserted motel and remarked on the background noise: Nicola said that it was probably a monitor or money meter, thus covering for the slow triple thunks of Keith's tungstens. When she talked to Guy she sounded like Keats. For Keith, this was all low heaven. He loved her as he would his own manager, in the big time. You sensed it the instant you stepped in off the street: the whole house stank of porno
graphy and darts.

  On the eve of Bonfire Night, of Final Night, a couple of hours before the TV teaser - Keith's docu-drama - was about to be screened, Nicola decided to spare him the usual gauntlet of tuxed torturers and took Keith for a light supper at 192., the media restaurant in Kensington Park Road. He sat there with his orange juice, warily awaiting the sushi she had suggested he try.

  'A penny for them, Keith?' said Nicola gently.

  He said nothing.

  192. The best thing with that is: smack in a maximum. Psycho­logical body blow. Leaving 12. But if you come inside, leaves 6. 6. Double 3. Murder. Avoid it. Here's another way it can happen. You're on 57 and go for 17 to leave tops - and hit the treble. 51. Leaves 6. Or you're going for double 14 and hit double 11. Leaves 6. Wrong bed. Or you're on double 9, pull one, and hit 12. Leaves 6. Or God forbid you're on double 11 and you hit double 8! Wrong bed. Leaves 6. Wrong bed. Nasty, that. Fucking wicked. Murder.

  A fourteen-hour wait in the VIP Lounge at Heathrow; the Mach II to Newark; the helicopter to Kennedy; the 727 to Middletown; the limousine to New London. America moved past him behind treated glass. The pain had now spread downwards as far as his calves and upwards as far as his nipples. Every tick of the second hand on his watch administered an exquisite squeeze to the trauma of his being. He looked out at the cordoned, the sweated fields of New England, and at the woodlands, also brutally worked, but still holding their twiggy, ribboned, Thanksgiving light. Impossible even to imagine that Mohawk and Mahican had once wandered here - yes, and Wampanoag, Narraganset, Pequot, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Abnaki, Malecite, Micmac. He had a sense, as you were bound to have in America now, of how a whole continent had been devoured, used up, chewed up.

  The night before he had tarried in Middletown, at a recently opened airport hotel called the Founding Fathers. Again he had run into indefinable difficulties as he tried to persuade the managerial staff that he was neither poor nor mad nor ill. One of the troubles seemed to centre on his new habit of giggling silently to himself. Perhaps he looked like one of the first English sailors, panting with scurvy, his turn-ups swinging round his calves. In any case his iridium and titanium credit-cards prevailed. After a shower he made a second successful call to the retirement home and confirmed the appointment with his mother-in-law. After a Virgin Mary in the Mayflower Room, he had an early dinner in the Puritan Lounge. By his plate lay the two books she had given him: one for the way out, one for the way home. It was over Stendhal's Love that he now frowned and chuckled and mused . . .In his room he made the last call of the day to Nicola, who despite the late hour and the bad line (the metronomic thunks of the money meter) gave him an extraordinary fifteen minutes on her plans for his return. This complicated his next action: a manoeuvre of long-delayed self-inspection, achieved naked, with one foot up on the writing-desk before the mirror. Mm, quite bad. Possibly rather serious. It really was the sort of sight that would have the nurses scampering from the Delivery Room. There were some tangy tints of green in there, and the surface was rippled as if in a sharp breeze; but overall his flesh was almost picturesquely blue. The blue, perhaps, of the blue lagoon. He fell asleep wondering what would happen if you transposed the heroines of Macbeth and Othello. With a Scottish Desdemona there would be no story, no plot, no slain kings. But with a Mediterranean Lady Macbeth you might have got a stranger tale, and a bloodier one, because such a woman would never have looked so kindly on Cassio's cares, and might have headed straight for lago . . . Now he rode on to New London. Love nestled on his lap, also the second book, as yet unopened, something called The Light of Many Suns. Guy wasn't reading: the migraine in his groin had somehow established connexions with the blinding ballsache in his eyes. He watched the news on the limousine's TV, as it were reluctantly and askance, in the same way that the chauffeur watched his unreassuring passenger, with stolen glances in the rearview mirror. The President had made his decision. They were going in. They had decided to operate on the President's wife.