by James Meek
He and Jenny pointed its black brickwork, replaced its two-hundred-year-old window frames, sanded and varnished its wooden floorboards, tore off its Thirties wallpaper, replastered the walls and painted them white, fixed the roof, knocked down dividing walls, turned the attic into a library and remade the garden in Japanese style with bamboo, gravel and a skinny pond. Harry hoped the house would become a meeting place for intellectuals, revolutionaries and artists, a drop-in hangout for the eloquent scuzzerati of north London. He imagined future biographies mentioning the house on Citron Square where the Comries hosted their notorious parties. He imagined the phrase the Citron Square set. He imagined a look – attractive, lean, ready to spring, dressed stylishly in old clothes, confidently witty, learned across the arts and sciences. ‘Look at those two,’ jealous ankle-biters would say, ‘trying to be all Citron Square.’
But nobody dropped in. The Comries couldn’t provide the fuel to feed the interest of ambitious intellectuals – free alcohol and drugs, effortlessly seducible young people, access to the already rich and already famous. Harry refused to see this and blamed his wife for desecrating his academy of joyful enlightenment with her gloom and shyness. It frustrated him that he couldn’t restore Jenny like a house, choose her clothes and give her energy, and he accused her of carelessness for allowing Matthew to be seduced by the cult of Christ.
Work wasn’t enough of a refuge for Harry and he took long weekends away with his brother’s family in Scotland. Even so his pride was hurt when Jenny told him soon after Matthew left home that she wanted a divorce. Back in New Zealand she opened a gallery that sold animal sculptures made of seashells glued onto pieces of driftwood. When she was gone Harry found he missed her, or he missed something, anyway.
It was only him left, the house and his enormous dissatisfaction. Over the years he realised the dissatisfaction kept him going and he began to feed it. A few years before his diagnosis they gave him an OBE.
Harry showed Bec round the house while Alex fixed drinks for the others. He took her to the wine cellar and waved at the racks of dark glass circles resting in the cool dim space below the street. ‘I spent years on this,’ he said. ‘I’d go to Bordeaux every autumn, I learned the names of all the chateaux, I subscribed to wine magazines and went to tastings. I had a thousand bottles this time last year. Now even if I drank two bottles every day I wouldn’t be able to drink it all before I die. These days I can hardly manage half a bottle before I feel like throwing up. I can have parties and dinners, like this, but there’s so much to do before I go, and I get tired easily.’ He stroked the ends of the bottles. ‘My son doesn’t drink.’
‘You could give it away,’ said Bec.
‘Would you like it?’ said Harry.
Bec went red. ‘I didn’t mean to me,’ she said.
‘You and Alex could share it.’
‘We’re not going out. He has a partner.’
‘He’ll leave her. You like him.’
‘He spends a great deal of time explaining things.’
Harry pulled a bottle out and read the label. He showed it to Bec, with wide eyes, biting his lower lip, as if it were a magic trick, and said: ‘Is that the year you were born?’ Bec nodded. ‘I think we should drink some of this. You’re of the opinion that professional explainers of nature like us should only do our explaining during working hours. Alex can listen, you know. When he was a boy he’d ask me questions and I’d give him an answer and he’d listen and remember.’
‘What sort of questions?’
‘What are stones made of? Can birds fly upside down? Is it better to be happy than to be good?’
‘I wonder how you answered that one.’
‘The main thing is not to be happy, but to be lucky. We’re close, Alex and I. Closer than I am to Matthew. It’s not the blood that matters. Ties of sympathy are what count, don’t you think? Alex doesn’t understand it’s good for children to have many fathers. He thinks you have to yield to evolution where parenthood is concerned. He says he’ll never go through IVF again. Personally I reckon Darwin would have given IVF the thumbs-up. If you start saying people have to conceive naturally, where does it lead you? The human race pretty much told evolution where to shove it when we invented the barbecue.’
They went upstairs. A dozen people were arranged around the living room, lit by candles. Candlelight had the power to compel people to sit on floors and lower their voices. There was a smell of hot wax and spilled wine, and a faint trumpet line tootled from a box in the corner. One flame cringed and flickered in the draught from Alex’s moving hands. Bec walked over and touched him on the shoulder. He stopped talking and gesticulating and looked up at her eagerly.
‘I have to go,’ she said. His face fell. He got up and asked her to stay.
‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘Sleeping on the plane isn’t really sleep.’
She waited to say goodbye to Harry. In the short time since he’d come upstairs he’d launched into a story about an argument he’d had with a Russian biologist over the evolution of the organs of the body.
‘So I said “What, you think the liver evolved from a parasite?” and he said “Yes, yes.”’ Harry tugged on an imaginary beard and put on an exaggerated Russian accent. ‘“And the kidneys?” “Why not?” “And the brain, the eye?” “Please, you are welcome.” “The lungs?” “This also evolved in parallel and joined the body.” “What about the heart?”’ Harry punched the air and gave his Russian sudden passion. ‘“Oh, the heart brrroke in!”’
Harry’s audience laughed, and Bec kissed him goodbye, and Harry squeezed her hand. Alex followed her to the front door and said he’d come with her and she said that he should stay with Harry; she’d get the last Tube.
‘I want to stay with you tonight,’ said Alex.
‘You can’t while you’re sharing somebody else’s bed.’
‘I’ll leave her.’
‘Don’t do it for me.’
‘I’ll call her now. I’ll never go back.’ Alex took out his phone. Bec put her hand over Alex’s and pushed the phone down.
‘No,’ she said.
Alex asked if he could see her the next day, and Bec told him she was flying to Spain for Christmas, then going back to Africa. Alex got it out of her that she’d be getting the train to the airport from Paddington at ten and he said he could meet her beforehand. Bec said she didn’t think it would be a good idea.
‘Write to me,’ she said. She had her coat on. She opened the door and stood on the threshold with her hands in her pockets, looking at Alex. He was about to move towards her when one of the women from the party appeared and called to him, saying that his uncle was asking for him. While he was distracted Bec said goodbye and walked off towards Angel.
Alex found Harry coughing and shaking his head in an armchair in the living room. A group of people around him wanted to show willingness to help without knowing what to do; they seemed to be queuing up to touch him. He had a glass of water in one hand and a stained, crumpled white cotton handkerchief in the other. The lights were on and the room stank of cigar smoke. A stubbed-out stogie poked over the edge of an ashtray.
‘We were talking,’ said Harry. His voice was scratched and weak. ‘Now that you’re the director of the institute, we think you should let me have some of those cells, just to see what happens.’
‘Let’s talk about it another time. You should get to bed.’
‘Why do you have to be so bloody negative?’ said Harry. ‘You know what your trouble is? You’re too fond of death. You think he’s got us licked.’ He began to cough.
‘Well, he has form,’ said Alex.
‘I won’t have you speaking in that way! When it’s happening! We’re making the breakthroughs! We’re getting there and all you can do is tell everyone we’ll never arrive.’ Harry began to cough. He raised his voice as if trying to make himself heard over another person coughing and the effort made him cough more. ‘You come over so smug, so pleased with yourself, so glad to pi
ck holes in other people’s work,’ he wheezed and hacked phlegm – ‘and you’re the one with the problem. You’re the we’ll-never-reach-the-moon man, we’ll never know how the universe began, we’ll never cure cancer. We’ll just potter round the margins.’ He bent forward, burying his face in the handkerchief. Alex kneeled beside him and told him to stop talking. Harry leaned back, wiped his mouth, was convulsed once more by a long, bubbling hack that sounded as if he was choking on a sword, and shouted at Alex: ‘You’re a coward! Afraid of death! A bloody coward!’
33
Alex called Harry’s doctor, who told him not to worry. Alex stood in the living room, where in the bright light the candles looked like guests who didn’t know it was time to go. The best minds in cell biology had got drunk on Harry’s wine that night. None had much of a clue about medicine, yet Alex intended to leave and let them look after his uncle. The reward he’d take for giving Harry his immortality concession was a short holiday from caring. He went downstairs, lifted his coat from the hook and stepped out into the open air. For a few moments, while he walked the terraced streets, looking for a taxi, he savoured the guilty joy of walking away from a sick old relative, and thought of what Bec had said. You can’t while you’re sharing somebody else’s bed. It was as if she’d told him what he had to do.
At home in Mile End, where he’d lived for so long, he saw objects with the novel idea that he was about to walk away from them. In the kitchen he heard the flicker and hum of the old-fashioned fluorescent light coming on as if it were a tune from the distant past instead of a sound he heard that morning. He stared like a ghost at the dirty cup Maria had left out, familiar and yet, without its physical substance changing in the least, quite altered. It was the black mug he’d brought with him from Scotland when he came to London as a student. Yesterday it had been something that happened to come to hand to hold coffee when he reached into the cupboard. Now it was an object to be transported or lost for ever. ‘Have it, it’s yours,’ Maria would say.
He’d wanted to have Maria once. Where had the wanting gone? Surely, he thought, into all the other things they had. When you loved someone, having was being; loving any other thing was just having. He wanted to have Maria once, and now he wanted Bec. He wanted to possess her and didn’t want to be distracted by having to have anything else.
In the living room Maria’s shawl lay on the sofa where she’d been lying watching TV. The cushions still had the imprint of her body. A partly drunk bottle of wine and a glass were on the table. Wandering from room to room Alex delayed the moment when he would go to bed and lie beside her. He went upstairs slowly, feeling that what he was doing was like murder.
He kept the light off and Maria seemed to be asleep while he undressed. When he got carefully into bed next to her, close enough to feel the warmth of her back and smell her hair, she stirred and without looking round said: ‘How was it?’
‘It was a grand affair. Lovely speeches. We gave him a good send-off.’
‘Did you meet any nice girls?’
‘Ritchie Shepherd’s sister was there.’
‘Is she single?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you kiss her?’
‘No.’ He wouldn’t tell her until the morning unless she made him and he waited, his heart beating hard, for the next question out of the darkness. But no more questions came. Soon he heard Maria’s breathing hoarsen, as if she’d decided the dangers of the day had all been found, captured and safely fenced in by her and Alex’s community of sleep.
Alex woke early. It was still dark. He got up, dressed, went downstairs and wheeled his bicycle out of the garden. Light rain fell, just slickening the street and putting an oily gleam on the cars. The terms of honour had crystallised in his mind overnight and were presented to him while he waited for Maria to come down, as clear and as arbitrary as a duelling code. He could not have Bec without leaving Maria, and so he would leave Maria. He must tell her that he was leaving her to her face. He must tell her now, because he couldn’t wait. But he must not wake her to tell her. She must wake of her own accord. And once he had told her – this seemed the hardest of all to him, but he was sure that it was right – he must let her have the last word.
He sat in the kitchen tapping his feet, watching the big clock on the wall. He got up and stood close to it, watching the minute hand creep through the space between marks. He cleaned his teeth and put the toothbrush back in the metal cup where it stood next to Maria’s. He stared at the two toothbrushes angled against each other, one red, one blue, then took his out and put it in his pocket, leaving the red one in the cup by itself.
At quarter to nine he heard Maria come downstairs and the swish of her dressing gown in the hall. As she came into the kitchen she glanced at him and moved to the worktop.
She put on a pair of surgical gloves to protect her hands, took a pomegranate and with a serrated knife cut lines through the skin of the fruit. She opened up the pomegranate and began picking out the seeds and putting them into a dish.
Alex got up. ‘There’s something I have to say,’ he said.
‘Say it, then,’ said Maria.
‘You have your back to me.’
‘I can hear you.’
‘I don’t want to live here any more.’
‘Is it about her?’
‘Liking her is what’s making me go.’
‘Liking her? You mean fancying her? Wanting her?’
‘We talked about this moment coming.’
‘So you’re going to her now?’
‘She’s leaving this morning. She’s not expecting to see me. I don’t think I’ll catch her. She’s getting the train to Heathrow at ten.’
He waited for Maria to speak, to have the last word, and as he wondered at himself for daring to cause her such pain, he began to hate her for her silence. It was ten to nine and he itched to leave. He could tell from the care Maria was taking to keep her back to him and the jerkiness in her movements that she was almost crying. The only sound in the kitchen was the ticking of the clock and Maria seeding the pomegranate. The soft rip of pith as her fingers separated the clusters of seeds from each other sounded to Alex as if she were tearing her heart to pieces.
‘You’d better go, then,’ said Maria.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t say that. You’ve been decent so far. Don’t spoil it by lying. Don’t say anything more. Just go. I’m the loser and there’s nothing you can do.’
Alex went over and put his arms round her. She turned and shrank into him but didn’t return his embrace. He felt her tears on his neck and her body shaking.
‘Ho ho ho,’ came her voice, muffled.
He felt a discomfort beneath his ribs, as if a cat were prodding and sniffing his heart and rolling it between its paws. Crying would be the decent thing, he thought, but the tears wouldn’t come. He unclasped his arms from her and left the house.
34
It was nine o’clock. Alex tucked his right trouser leg into a steel clip, unlocked his bike and set off from Mile End against a stiff west wind, under a sky that promised rain and rumbled with jets.
He accelerated between the cherry trees and tight little terraced houses of Lichfield Road, stood up off the saddle, pistoned the pedals, shot round the back of a white van reversing and forced it to brake, barrelled over the Grove Road pedestrian crossing between lines of jammed-up traffic and through the gates into Mile End park, hissed past two schoolgirls in white headscarves close enough to make them yelp, hit the canal towpath, headed under the railway bridge as the fast train to Ipswich crossed, rang his bell, drove a woman pushing a baby buggy out of his way, ducked under Roman Road, past coots fighting in the water, over the hump of the towpath at the Hertford Canal junction, down the far side in high gear with a bang on the bump at the bottom, sliced between a man in a tracksuit and his pit bull terrier, under the concrete bridge of Old Ford Road and the stencilled HOW’S MY GRAFFITI? DIAL 0800-NOBODY-CARES, up the ramp by the lock keeper
’s cottage and round as the canal turned west, past the chestnut trees of Victoria Park and the line of narrow boats at rest in their own smoke. He ducked under a branch two boat-dwellers carried from the park for fuel, fired his bike through the dim narrow space under Approach Road, came out from under Mare Street bridge’s pigeon-infested girders at twenty miles an hour, forced another cyclist to turn sharply into the thin strip of verge and flew under the Lea Valley railway.
Into the long open curve towards Broadway Market he lowered his head and sprinted past the frames of deflated gas holders on the far bank. He dived under the Goldsmiths Row bridge, charged on towards the lock, up the slope, round the wooden shaft of the lock gate with the roar of the weir in his ears and up onto the straight. The loose paving slabs of the towpath rocked under his wheels and he hurtled over three thick white lines and the painted word SLOW. The ringing of the bell filled the murk between the brick arch of the Queensbridge Road bridge and the green water. He passed the painted sign for Ron’s Eel and Shell Fish and went under the grey steel bowstring of the East London Line bridge. The towers of the City rose to the south. He put on speed to beat another cyclist to the barriers choking the lock ramp, wove through them, built up momentum and took the steep ramp to street level without changing gear. He pulled out in front of a Range Rover, rushed through the Danbury Street choker, raced across the roundabout, accelerated past the gardens to Goswell Road and jerked into the bus lane. The old clock on its column reported twenty past nine.
