‘You mean Now with a capital N?’
‘That’s what I mean: the big Now that includes everything all the way back to before there was anything.’
‘Before there was form, before there was emptiness?’
‘What do you know about form and emptiness?’
‘I had a Buddhist wisdom period when I was about your age, Lola.’ He coughs, falls silent for a moment. Then his voice changes. ‘Right now what I know is the emptiness of life without you.’
‘Don’t, Basil. Now is where you mostly don’t get what you want. I can say it better with the sarod. Listen.’ Lola has begun, sooner than Indira expected, to compose a raga of her own. It has the same title as Indira’s: ‘Smriti’.’Memory’. She begins the first melodic sequence, letting herself be the vessel for what has come to her. Noah is with her on the nakkara. Lola has composed only the opening of the raga but as she plays, she hears more and goes with it. Happiness, sadness, longing and regret. She loses track of time, barely noticing the cold air when the door opens and closes. When she’s gone as far as she can with the music she looks up. She and Noah are alone.
64
A Far, Far Better Fantasy
March 2000. Another vernal equinox. Noticed but uncelebrated by Max. He’s working but so far nothing significant has happened. While trying for Page One with Fujitsu/Siemens he takes little mental side trips. He’s always had a rich fantasy life but now his waking dreams take on a nobler flavour than before. ‘Let’s do the train one again,’ he says to his mind.
‘OK, boss,’ says his mind, and sets the scene: some bleak out-of-the-way place under a dark sky. A few ravens croaking around and looking black. A little thunder, maybe some lightning, some Hammer Horror effects. A level crossing with no barrier. Here come Lola and Noah in the E-type. Noah’s ten or eleven. Lola looks as she did three years ago. O my God, the car has stalled on the tracks. She can’t get it started. Max can feel the vibration in the rails. Now he hears the train. Now he sees it, coming fast, its single white eye boring through the greyness. Doesn’t the engine driver see the car? Is he asleep? Doesn’t Lola hear the train? She’s still trying the starter. Max runs to the car, tries to push it out of the way. The E-type doesn’t move. Max puts his back to it, gets a good grip on the rear bumper, heaves back with all his strength. Yes! The car is off the tracks, Lola and Noah are safe but Max falls to the ground and is crushed by the train. His dying words: ‘They’re safe!’
‘Why didn’t Lola grab Noah and get out of the car?’ says Max’s mind.
‘Maybe she couldn’t unfasten their seat belts,’ says Max. ‘Maybe she fainted. We can always change the details.’
‘Get real,’ says his mind.
65
A Little Bit of No Luck
October 2000. Max is of course a little crazier than some. But he’s more or less reasonable and he reasons that it’s pointless for him to bang his head against a wall of noncommunication. He doesn’t know where Lola is but she knows where he is and if she wants to see him or talk to him she’ll get in touch. In the meantime he gets through the days one at a time.
In his morning reading of The Times Max spots an item about a honey buzzard who lost its bearings on a migratory flight from Scotland to Africa. This bird, a juvenile, had only learned to fly a month before. Tracked by satellite, it flew three thousand miles without food or rest. It was thought to have died of exhaustion until signals picked up from the middle of the Atlantic indicated that the bird had landed on a floating object more than two hundred miles from the nearest land. ‘Hang in there,’ says Max. ‘Don’t give up.’ Next morning there’s no news but two days later there’s another report. The signals have continued but the bird is presumed dead. ‘Dammit,’ says Max. Thinking of the honey buzzard’s flight he can feel the ardent wingbeats, see the deadly waters far below. ‘All those hours with no food, no rest! Lindbergh got a ticker-tape parade and this one winds up dead.’
‘It lost its way,’ says Max’s mind.
‘Maybe a little favouring wind was all it needed for a landfall,’ says Max. ‘Just a little bit of luck.’
66
Ark of Mystery
January 2001. Max still thinks about the honey buzzard, still sees the deadly waters far below. He visits Charlotte Prickles. ‘I’m trying to see the river in my mind,’ he says. ‘It’s still the summer river when I was a boy.’
‘The river,’ says Charlie. ‘Sunpoints on the summer water. Dragonflies. The sound of cicadas. You have the bow paddle. Who has the stern?’
‘My father?’ says Max.
‘Your father,’ says Charlie. ‘Drops of sunlit water dripping from the paddles as you lift them after the downstroke. Your father steering you through the rapids, past the rocks, into quiet water. On and on.’
‘To the sea?’ says Max.
‘Forty days and forty nights,’ says Charlie.
‘The flood,’ says Max. ‘Why do I keep seeing the Ark and the raven that flies out from Noah’s hands, from my son’s hands, from my hands? What does it mean?’
‘An understood mystery is no mystery,’ says Charlie. ‘This is yours. Live with it.’
67
Penelope’s Web
April 2001. The population of Diamond Heart is a constantly changing one. Most who come there stay for two or three weeks and then return to whatever they do ordinarily. Business is good in the autumn when summer slackers resolve to pull themselves together for the coming season. But the rush is in the dark days of winter when nights are long and spirits low. This sometimes continues into the spring.
As various types arrive and depart to be replaced by new ones, Lola has not lacked for suitors. In her years as a long-term attraction at Diamond Heart she’s become a challenge to every male who fancies his chances. At the Diamond Heart Ladbroke’s the odds have favoured this one and that one but so far no one has reached the winners’ circle. Has Lola sworn a vow of chastity? Not at all. Her libido is in good shape but Noah’s existence has imposed a critical standard that no one has been able to bend.
They don’t stop trying. The latest hopeful is a retro type called Geoffrey who wears a gold chain with an ankh. In London he drives a Mercedes but he makes his annual Diamond Heart pilgrimage in a white Bedford camper decorated with scenes from the Kama Sutra. Geoffrey is a dentist with a moustache and a beautiful jet-black toupee. He has hairy hands. He’s always got his Nikon with him and he’s been snapping Lola on her way to and from the Ghoshes’ studio and on her evening walks. She ignores him as long as she can but one day she confronts him and says, ‘I wish you’d stop taking pictures of me. It gives me the creeps.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Geoffrey (snap, snap), ‘but I can’t help it. Your face speaks to me.’
‘Read my face’s lips,’ says Lola. ‘They’re saying, “Go away.” She’s only a few steps from the studio but she’d like to clear away this annoyance and compose herself before going in.
‘I’d love to have a proper photo session with you,’ he says. ‘The shots I’ve got so far don’t really do you justice.’
‘I don’t need justice,’ says Lola, ‘only a little mercy. Please take yourself and your camera elsewhere.’
‘Do you believe in destiny?’ says Geoffrey.
The sarod in its hard case weighs eight and a half kilos, and with a healthy swing and a good follow-through Lola could certainly flatten this turbulent dentist. She changes to a two-handed grip on the case and something like a snarl starts far back in her throat.
One of Geoffrey’s hands has jumped on to her arm. ‘Think about it,’ he says. ‘Fate works in mysterious ways. Sometimes both people realise what’s happening, sometimes only one.’
Lola shakes off the hand which does not drop to the ground and crawl away but remains attached to Geoffrey’s arm. ‘I have a large friend who’s a black belt,’ she says. ‘If I phone him he’ll be up here like a shot to sort you out.’
Geoffrey’s hands fly up in front of him, palms out a
s he backs away. ‘Peace!’ he says. ‘I can see that you have a lot on your mind. We’ll talk about this another time.’ He goes off singing, ‘“I met her in a club down in old Soho, where you drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca-Cola. See-oh-el-aye cola, el-oh-el-aye Lola la-la-la-la Lola.”’
Lola, somewhat ruffled, smooths herself down and goes in for her lesson. Her concentration is perhaps a little more intense than usual. Mr Retro is not the only current aspirant. There are of course others, some of them not at all objectionable to a less critical woman. To these she says, when they suggest this or that, ‘I’m sorry, but all I can think about is this raga I’m trying to compose. I really have no time for anything else.’
Lola’s ‘Smriti’ is in a state of becoming; it’s becoming her and she’s becoming it. The becoming changes every day, and every day Lola discards the work of the previous day. Playing what she’s written, she hears a thickness of tone where it should be fine-spun. She hears a tempo false to the impulse of the melody, hears a clumsiness of ascent and descent. She hears the music not voicing what is in it that wants to speak and she shakes her head and starts again. Memory! Sometimes the widening ripples of dark waters, sometimes flecks of gold in the bed of a stream. The blue sky reflected in a lake, the grey sky over the sea. Changing lights and changing shadows always, images dim and deep or sticking up sharp and dangerous. Lola will not stop until this raga lets go of her. And the raga won’t let go of her until it has said everything it needs to say.
68
Lolanesses
July 2001. Max has four Lola songs on CD: the Dietrich one from The Blue Angel; Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’; the Kinks’ ‘Lola’; and ‘Whatever Lola Wants’ from Damn Yankees. Every now and then he plays one of them, but the song he listens to most is Dietrich’s. This takes him back to when Lola came to his place in February 1997 and did her Dietrich routine with the black corset, suspenders, etc. Max is haunted by that memory. Lola was impersonating an actress who impersonated a café entertainer in the Berlin of 1930. ‘Ich bin die fesche Lola, der Liebling der Saison! Ich hab’ ein Pianola zu Haus in mein Salon!’ Dietrich flings out the song with an adorable throwaway don’t-give-a-damn sluttish cheerfulness that is a footnote to Lola Bessington’s performance, a flicker of something ordinarily unseen in Lord Bessington’s daughter. This image, this flavour, joins the Lola of that winter day in St Martin’s Lane and the Dover Bookshop, the coltish Lola with cheeks like cold apples. There are so many Lolas! Flashes of her revolve in Max’s head from the glitterball of moments past. So many Lolas, so many moments. Gone.
More and more it comes to Max that he’s absorbed very little of Lola’s lolaness. ‘What’s the first thing you learned,’ says his mind, ‘when you first started writing?’
‘To explore my material,’ says Max.
‘And did you explore the many and varied lolanesses of Lola? The uplands and lowlands, mountains and plains, forests and savannahs? Did you commit to memory the latitudes and longitudes of the islands and archipelagos of Lola? Her winds and tides and barometric pressures? Her El Niños, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Some,’ says Max, ‘but not enough.’
‘What,’ says his mind, ‘you didn’t have time? You weren’t interested?’
‘Of course I was interested,’ says Max.
‘Interested how? Like when you look at a fast food menu and you say, “Gimme a cheeseburger, large fries, and a Diet Pepsi?” Real deep interest like that?’
‘Come on,’ says Max. ‘Enough already. I’m an idiot and I lost her.’
‘No,’ says his mind. ‘Not enough. You’re missing the point. Let’s talk about Lula Mae Cheeseburger with the large fries. If you’d given Lola all the attention and interest she deserved you wouldn’t have had anything left over for Texas takeaway. Schmuck! That’s what love is – when there’s nothing left over for another woman. Some explorer you are.’
‘You’ve got some mixed metaphors in there,’ says Max.
‘I do that when I get excited,’ says his mind. ‘I can’t help it.’
69
‘Smriti’
October 2001. Today Lola and Noah perform her raga for Indira and Hariprasad. Hariprasad has set up his equipment to record the music and will burn it on to a compact disc. ‘This raga is dedicated to you, our teachers,’ says Lola. ‘I have tried to be the vessel only for what has come to me. And whatever has come to me has come through your teaching. Thank you.’
Now when she plays, the sarod and the plectrum come to her hands like old friends. The music is already there, waiting to be heard. Noah has handled his nakkara since infancy. Now, almost four years old, he keeps the beat impeccably, proud to be making music with his mother.
‘Smriti’ begins so quietly that almost it seems unwilling to leave the silence. The first notes are like leaves falling on autumn waters. Yearning for what has been, tasting the passage of time, calling up faces from the shadows, words from the silence, reaching for departed hands. As it goes on, the raga circles and repeats and lingers over its themes. Happiness, sadness, longing and regret trace their figures with recognition and without anger. This is music that was not in Lola when she first came to Diamond Heart.
When the raga ends, Indira and Hariprasad nod their heads and there are big hugs all round. ‘Now,’ says Indira, ‘you are sumadhur-ragini. Su means good; madhur means sweet; and ragini means an expert in rendering ragas. You have given yourself to the music and we have just heard how the music has given itself to you. You are an artist now, and it is good that you are serious about your music. But don’t be serious all the time. Have a little fun now and then.’
‘Music is all well and good in its place,’ says Hariprasad, ‘but the main action here is Zen poker. You should come back some time and give it a try.’
‘Maybe when Noah’s a little older,’ says Lola. ‘Until then, wherever I go, you’ll be with me.’
‘And you’ll be with us,’ says Indira. Hariprasad gives Noah a wooden flute and she gives Lola a copy of Buddhist Wisdom Books.
‘I’m embarrassed,’ says Lola. ‘I’ve had a borrowed copy all these years and I’ve never read it.’
‘No matter,’ says Hariprasad. ‘Just hold it in your hands from time to time. Maybe not reading it is the same as reading it.’
‘My present for you isn’t much,’ says Lola. ‘It’s only my notation for the raga I’ve just played. Maybe it will remind you of our time together.’
‘This time with you was itself a gift,’ says Indira. ‘We thank you.’
Hariprasad gives Lola the CD, good-luck wishes are exchanged, and the years at Diamond Heart are almost at an end.
70
What Searching Eyes
November 2001. Lola and Noah take a last walk on Kirsty’s Knowe and smell the moonlit sea. Lola’s thinking about what she always thinks about when she notices someone else looking down at the sea. A woman, no one she recognises from the back. Dark shawl, long skirt. ‘Hi,’ says Lola. The woman turns. Only a girl, really, glimmering in the moonlight, almost not there. What a sad face. What searching eyes. Lola says, ‘Are you … ?’
The other nods or perhaps not.
‘Am I going to drown?’ says Lola.
Did the other shake her head?
‘What are you trying to tell me?’ says Lola.
Was that a cloud passing over the moon? Lola imitates what she seems to be seeing and finds herself standing with both hands over her heart. ‘Your heart was broken,’ she says. ‘My heart was broken too. I took up the sarod.’
No answer. Nobody there. Lola standing with both hands over her heart.
‘What was that?’ says Noah.
‘What was what?’ says Lola.
‘Were you talking to somebody?’ says Noah.
‘Did you see anybody?’ says Lola.
‘No,’ says Noah.
‘Just talking to myself,’ says Lola. The E-type is packed. She’s given away whatever wouldn’t fit in the boot. Po
laris in its case is tucked in snugly behind the seats and the Jaguar takes the road for the night journey to London.
71
Destiny’s Dentist
November 2001. Lola likes driving at night. She’s comfortable with the homeward road coming towards her under the headlights and vanishing beneath her wheels. It’s a Monday night, and at 11:40 there’s not much traffic into London. After a while she notices headlights in her rearview mirror that keep their distance and never try to pass. ‘I know who that is,’ she says. The presence of those lights is tiring, and at Heston Services she pulls in for a coffee. The other headlights pull in behind her.
Lola carries the sleeping Noah into the cafeteria with her and gets her coffee. When she sits down at a table she sees Geoffrey, the retro man, waiting for her. ‘Don’t say anything,’ he says. ‘I know that you’re a deeply troubled person and I know that I’ve been sent to watch over you. I’ll follow you into London just to see you safely home and I’ll always be around if you need me. I think I know what Lola wants, and whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.’
Lola shakes her head, says nothing. She drinks her coffee and goes back to the E-type.
72
Philip Nolan Lesser
November 2001. The years since Lola left have been like no other time in Max’s life. He keeps trying to understand what’s happened, trying to get his head around his life. On the walls of his workroom are pinned up photographs of Lola in London and on Mai Dun, words of hers that he’s written down, maps of London and Dorset, thoughts about her that he’s scribbled on bits of paper. It’s like what detectives do in the movies when they’re trying to get a fix on a murderer. After a time Max thinks no, that isn’t it. It’s what Philip Nolan did in The Man without a Country, by Edward Everett Hale. This story was written in 1863 to inspire patriotism in the Union during the Civil War. It was fiction, but so credible that many readers thought it to be fact.