A Week in December

by Sebastian Faulks

  Meanwhile, he had never fully understood what it was in him she liked, why she was so determined from the outset that she must have him. He felt that she had all the cards – the jobs, the charm, the wealthy family, the children, the looks, the enterprise ...

  Once, when they had come back from dinner on a Friday night and were getting ready for bed, he asked her what it was.

  ‘It’s quite simple,’ she said. ‘You know things. You just know so much. No one else had ever told me the story of Nathan and the Ewe Lamb. No one else ever gave me the life of Darwin in ten minutes. Or explained how Phil Spector built his wall of sound, or that Tamla Motown emphasised the off-beat to rise above the noise of traffic on a car radio in Detroit. Or the difference between Monet and Manet, and why I need to know.’

  ‘I just read the papers. I’m not that busy. And knowing what’s in the Bible – everyone used to know that.’

  ‘I suppose so. But it’s what you do with all the things you know. You use them to make the world more interesting for me.’

  ‘And I thought it was my charm.’

  ‘No. Or yes. I mean, that is your charm.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Gabriel. ‘To think old Mr Sanderson’s scripture-knowledge class would one day win me the most lovely woman in London. Roger Topley used to bunk off every week so Sanderson never even had his name on the register.’

  ‘Poor Roger,’ said Catalina, taking off her skirt.

  A knock on the door from Delilah, the junior clerk, announcing tea in Mr Hutton’s room, brought Gabriel back to a dark Thursday afternoon in December.

  ‘I think there’s chocolate biscuits if you hurry,’ said Delilah.

  Gabriel didn’t go home after work, but took the Tube to Paddington and the overground to Drayton Green (‘Zone 4,’ Jenni told him. ‘Ever been that far out?’) The journey was mysteriously either fourteen or fifteen minutes through the western suburbs. Watching the backs of the Acton terraces slip by, Gabriel felt tense about the evening ahead. The voice that came from his throat in the darkest part of the Circle Line, asking her if he could take her out to dinner: what was that about? It was unprofessional and absurd. He couldn’t stop it, though, and he didn’t yet regret it.

  The station was a rudimentary ‘halt’ from which he climbed up and made his way towards the address she’d given him. There was a road sign that said ‘Poets Corner’ with a twenty miles per hour speed limit. Gabriel had already noticed from the A to Z that there were Shakespeare, Dryden, Tennyson, Milton and Browning roads in the area. How had that happened? Maybe it had kicked off with Drayton Green, and only Mr Smith in the Street Names department of Hanwell Town Hall in 1909 remembered that as well as being a place, Drayton was a poet – Michael, author of the famous Elizabethan ‘dry-eyed’ sonnet, ‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part ...’ So perhaps Mr Smith had decided to share his knowledge with the speculators throwing up new houses on the adjoining waste ground. Jenni had pronounced the name of her street ‘Cow-per’ and Gabriel certainly wasn’t going to tell her that the nervous poet in question preferred it to be said ‘Cooper’.

  It was what his mother would have called a ‘perfectly nice street’; in fact it might even have qualified for her highest praise: ‘You could live there yourself’ – though he doubted whether she could have afforded to swap her damp little cottage for one of these trim houses with their bow windows and steeply pitched roofs. Some were in a terrace, some in pairs; they seemed to have been built at different times, the better ones Edwardian, the cheaper ones perhaps in the 1950s. There was the occasional satellite dish or garish ‘No Junk Mail’ sticker, but most of the houses looked neat and of single occupancy. Jenni’s was one of the few to have more than one front doorbell.

  Gabriel, with a bunch of garage carnations in his hand, pressed the bell that said ‘Fortune’.

  He’d seen Jenni in her TfL uniform and he’d seen her in her best coat when she’d come to his chambers, but the girl who opened the door was different.

  She smiled. ‘Hiya.’

  He thrust out the flowers, thinking it would help them round the kissing or shaking hands moment.

  ‘D’you wanna come in then? My brother’s out, luckily.’

  The ground-floor flat had been boxed off from the main stairwell with a cheap partition.

  ‘D’you wanna cup of tea? Or are we going out?’

  Jenni was wearing a green dress with knee-length leather boots and there was some blusher on her cheeks. It was like seeing a policewoman out of uniform, Gabriel thought; she looked exaggeratedly informal, and about ten years younger. She was smiling all the time now, this serious client who’d sat through hours of conferences with him and Eustace Hutton with little more than a grunt. Perhaps being on home ground had made her relaxed.

  ‘Shall we have a drink and then I’ll take you out?’

  ‘OK, then. Do you take sugar?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ He should have brought wine instead of flowers, he thought.

  They sat on either side of the glass-topped coffee table, sipping tea. Gabriel found himself affected by Jenni’s good mood. Catalina she was not; in fact, could two woman have been more different? But that was all right; in fact, everything felt all right.

  At Jenni’s suggestion, they went to a nearby Indian restaurant. Gabriel made Jenni order first – chicken dhansak, spinach, poppadoms – then did rapid calculations about what he could afford. He’d borrowed £40 from Andy Warshaw and, to his shame, £20 from Delilah. He couldn’t stress his credit card any further. He asked for a biryani because the rice was included and when Jenni wanted only a half of lager to drink, flinched with relief.

  ‘Next year,’ he said, when the beer had arrived, ‘my career’s going to take off.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, I have three cases already booked in. I think your case going to the Court of Appeal has been good for me. It’ll get some more publicity. It’s OK, Jenni, don’t look like that. Not that sort of publicity. I mean, it’ll be written up in the Law Reports and people will see my name.’

  ‘Why do you think you’ve started to get work?’

  Gabriel shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just my turn. Karma. Or perhaps the solicitors have sensed that I care. I really found this case interesting and I worked hard on it. Maybe that somehow showed. Or perhaps you’re my lucky charm.’

  ‘Are we still talking about work?’ said Jenni.

  ‘Of course. That was the deal.’

  ‘Why aren’t you married?’

  ‘Bloody hell, Jenni! What’s that got to do with tort law or local authority liability?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Jenni crunched a splinter of poppadom. ‘And what’s the answer?’

  ‘Do you want the long version or the short one?’

  Jenni shrugged. ‘We got all night.’

  Gabriel drank some lager. ‘All right. There was this girl.’

  ‘Oh yeah. I thought there might be.’

  They had finished the main course by the time he reached the end of the Catalina story.

  ‘So she went back to her husband?’

  ‘She never left him. He got posted to America and she had to decide whether to go with him.’

  ‘How old were her kids?’

  ‘Still young. Seven and five or something.’

  ‘She did the right thing.’

  ‘She did a right thing. And you?’

  ‘Me what?’

  ‘Why aren’t you married?’

  ‘Oh, blimey. Shall we have some wine?’

  ‘Is the story that long? It’s just that I don’t have a lot of—’

  ‘I got money too. You don’t have to buy everything.’

  The story of Liston Brown took them through a bottle of house white, the paying of a bill that was still mercifully just within Gabriel’s range, and the short walk back to Cowper Road.

  ‘You don’t seem surprised by all that,’ said Jenni, letting them in.

  ‘I wasn’t. I’m sorry about it, b
ut not surprised. You seem like someone who’s been hurt.’

  ‘Shall we have another cup of tea?’

  ‘Sure. And you can show me Parallax.’

  ‘OK. I’ll turn it on now. Grab a chair from the lounge. The computer’s in the hall there.’

  Within a few minutes they were in the bland, unreal landscape of Parallax.

  ‘Shall we go to my house?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Jenni ‘airlifted’ her maquette, Miranda, from where she’d left her in a shopping mall, and back to her beautiful new house.

  ‘See, here’s my swimming pool.’

  ‘You keen on swimming?’

  ‘No, I can’t swim, but Miranda likes it. Look, we’ll put her in the pool. She’s got a nice bikini.’

  Miranda splashed up and down, then got out and took Gabriel for a tour round the house, showing him the tiled hallway and the parakeets, then the bedroom with its view of the Orinoco.

  ‘Lovely,’ said Gabriel. Although he could see that the game’s designers had done a good job with the figures, this world as a whole was about as interesting as afternoon television.

  Jenni clicked the ‘Events’ tab. ‘Let’s see what’s going on. Hmm. Not much. The trouble is, it runs on Pacific Coast time, so a lot of what they do is not up and running at the moment. Do you want to see a film?’

  ‘OK.’

  Miranda was airlifted to a cinema club, where she was the only customer. By paying 4 vajos, she could watch a film that had been on release in True Life a couple of years earlier. Because it was shown on a screen in a room within the computer screen, the pictures were small, and the soundtrack was indistinct.

  ‘Brilliant, isn’t it?’ said Jenni. ‘I never saw this one when it came out.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s great, it’s just like ... Well. Are we going to watch the whole thing?’

  ‘Not if you don’t want to. I can always come back later and restart it where I left it.’

  ‘Shall we go back to your house?’

  ‘OK.’

  In the airy living room, among the palms, Miranda had a desk with a computer.

  ‘Can you do anything on that laptop?’ said Gabriel. ‘Does it work?’

  ‘Yeah, sure it works fine. And they’re developing an Internet.’

  ‘You mean you can connect to the Internet in the usual way – though we’re already online of course.’

  ‘No, it’s an Internet that just works inside Parallax.’

  ‘God. What on earth is the point?’

  ‘It’s fun.’ Jenni looked affronted.

  ‘And is there a virtual-reality game on your intra-Internet? Is there a game called “Third Life”, or something, where your pretend person Miranda can pretend to be someone else even further from reality?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Oh, Jenni.’

  ‘And what does “Oh, Jenni” mean?’

  Gabriel put his head in his hands. How could she have lost herself so deep in this stuff?

  He knew he was on the verge of saying something lawyerish he might regret, so he stood up and breathed in deeply. ‘Shall we talk about books instead?’ he said. ‘Can I have a look at your collection? I caught a glimpse when we were coming in.’

  They spent twenty minutes browsing through her shelves and Gabriel was careful to show no hint of judgement or even of surprise, even when he found The Voyage of the Beagle next to a sex-and-shopping novelette with embossed gold lettering. He tried to draw Jenni on what she liked about books, but she had become guarded.

  Gabriel was determined to restore some of the lightness of the early part of the evening. ‘I loved this book,’ he said, pulling out The Great Gatsby. ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, it was OK.’

  ‘Do you think it’s important to like the main character in a novel?’

  ‘Probably.’ It was as though she suspected a trap.

  ‘But sometimes maybe you could have a villainous main character – like a Dracula or something. You don’t have to like him, do you? You just have to be interested.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘What’s your favourite book of all these?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Who’s that man staring at us from the other side of the street?’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘Don’t look now, but there’s someone looking. He’s standing on the pavement opposite. He’s quite well lit.’

  Jenni glanced out of the window. ‘Shit. I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you want me to go and talk to him?’

  ‘No, no. It might make it worse.’

  ‘Shall I draw the curtains?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Gabriel pulled the curtains in the bow window, covering his face with them as he did so. ‘Have you any idea who it might be?’

  ‘Well ... I don’t really know. I never seen him. But there’s someone I met on Parallax who seems a bit obsessed. You know, we met online and we had a date. Or rather, Miranda and Jason did.’

  ‘Jason being his—’

  ‘Maquette. Yeah. And another time he said he wanted to meet in True Life and I said I didn’t and then he got a bit shirty. And he threatened me.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said he’d find out where I lived and come round anyway.’

  ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘Not legally, but there’s probably ways round it. From my e-mail address he could maybe find my IP number, and then from the service provider ... I don’t know. You shouldn’t, but there’s ways round everything. You know, like spies and that. MI5. They can do it.’

  There was the sound of a key turning in the front door, and Jenni grabbed Gabriel’s forearm. ‘Shit, Gabriel,’ she said.

  It was the first time she had ever used his name.

  ‘Hell-o-o. Jen?’

  Jenni began to laugh. ‘It’s Tony.’

  A tall man with shoulder-length dreadlocks came into the room. ‘Ooh, sorry. Didn’t realise you had a date.’

  ‘Gabriel.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Hi. I’m Tony. Anything to eat, Jen? I’m starving.’

  ‘No. We been out. But there’s a moussaka in the fridge you can microwave.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘I’d better go,’ said Gabriel. ‘I can see you’re in safe hands, Jenni. What shall I do if I see that man outside? Kick his arse?’

  ‘Yeah! Give him a good kick! And ... Gabriel. Well, you know, thanks for the meal and everything. Sorry I was bit—’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. I ... You know ...’

  ‘Whatever. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Shall I ... You know?’

  Once you knew how, Gabriel thought, you could convey quite a lot in this way of talking.

  ‘Yeah, you can,’ said Jenni.

  ‘There’s still stuff ...’

  ‘Work stuff.’

  ‘Right,’ said Gabriel. ‘Stuff we still need to ... Shall I take your mobile number?’

  ‘OK.’

  She gave it to him. ‘I’m on mid-morning till mid-afternoon tomorrow.’

  ‘Cheers, then.’

  He gave her a peck on the cheek, and it definitely seemed the right thing to do.

  Knocker al-Rashid hurled a book across his son’s bedroom. ‘You cannot read this nonsense. You just can’t.’

  ‘How do you know it’s nonsense? You’ve never read it.’

  ‘Everyone knows. All these people you name. That Ghulam Sarwar. Maybe his book is taught in English schools, but they’ve been conned. He was a lousy business management consultant with his own agenda, not a proper Muslim. And Maududi. He wasn’t a scholar. He was a journalist! A rabble-rouser! And as for this Qutb. Everyone knows he was a terrorist. He—’

  ‘He was not a terrorist,’ said Hassan quietly. ‘On the contrary, he was imprisoned by Nasser and brutally tortured, then hanged. He never killed anyone. You should read Milestones. It’s very good, it’s very well reasoned.’


  ‘I don’t need to read any of these vicious men who’ve twisted things to their own ends. The only book I need is the Koran.’

  ‘But you’ve never even read it.’

  Father and son had never argued in this open way before and Knocker felt he was almost certain to lose, because Hassan had read more books than he had; but it enraged him that his beautiful religion had been perverted by modern demagogues for their political ends.

  It had begun quite amicably, when Knocker called in on his way to an early bed to make sure Hassan was ready for their big outing to Buckingham Palace. He had found him with his nose once more in Milestones.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Knocker, ‘Islam has never had a political home. It’s a state of mind. The beautiful and perfect way of living. To fight for territory is to do what the Christians and Jews have done. We are better than that.’

  ‘Once we had an empire,’ said Hassan.

  ‘Yes, but it was never governed from top to bottom. Sharia law has never been implemented. And anyway, listen, my dear Hass, we have our own little community, our own ummah, here, in our home. You, me and Mum. Every family can be a pure Islamic state. Of course it would be better if we had entire countries and—’

  ‘They’re the worst, the so-called “Islamic” ones. The dictatorships, the kingdoms and theocracies. Don’t they make you feel ashamed?’

  Knocker sat down on the edge of his son’s bed. ‘It is the sadness of my religion and the sadness of living. And since Islam is Life, the only life, then I accept that those are the same things. But I can’t change that. I wish that at some stage in its story Islam had developed a practical society we could believe in and that followed the teachings of the Prophet. We don’t have a church, like the Christians, we don’t even have clerics like the Jewish rabbis. We are, I must admit, rather other-worldly.’