Eating Air
Page 38
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Mark Scobie took the call at his mother’s house in Tenterden. Vera had been delighted to know that he would be staying in England for good and there would be no repercussions from the past. On the phone Buckley sounded more sanguine than Mark had expected:
‘Well no-one could have foreseen that. I think we’ll have to put that one down to experience. You’ve made some useful contacts which will be helpful to us in the future. We’ll let Khaled go quietly. We won’t pick up Shahid and Massoud. Keep in touch with them and see what transpires. They won’t stop there.’
Mark switched off his mobile and watched the Borzoi dash round in circles in the garden. Vera came into the living room.
‘Darling. Can you run through this last scene with me? I’m not a hundred per cent sure of my lines and it’s the important end section about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. We’re opening for previews on Thursday.’
*
Standing in the foyer of the Royal Court Theatre on the first night of his play Victor Skynnard felt himself to be a man of distinction in the arts. He put aside his worries about debt, the state of the economy and his part in the overthrow of the system as he settled into his seat and waited for the house lights to go down.
The opening night of the play, however, was a disaster. A scenic flat fell down from the flies in the middle of the first scene and at one point, towards the interval, Victor looked round in fury as he thought he heard the slow resounding toll of a bell. It was a critic groaning.
I met him in the Head in the Sand café a few days later. He was clutching a sheaf of creditors’ bills and was very down in the dumps. He pointed at my notebook:
‘You’re writing a novel. Do you think art can make any difference to the world?’
‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘But it might upset things a little. It’s one way of having a quarrel with the world. Art is what those of us do who are too frightened to be terrorists.’
*
Two days later Victor Skynnard hanged himself from the flies of the Royal Court Theatre. Nobody was ever quite sure whether or not he had clambered up there to check on the piece of loose scenery that wrecked his first night or whether he was overcome by failure, debt and the loss of political direction. The play was performed beneath him twice before he was noticed. The actors never looked up to see the body swinging gently over their heads. Vera glanced up once but her short-sightedness made her assume that some bit of the set had come loose again.
*
His memorial, held in the theatre, turned out to be a stunning occasion that only someone with his bad timing would have missed. Left-wing notables turned up. People cracked jokes, told anecdotes, wept and applauded Victor’s radical life. It was agreed that, in general, these days funerals and memorials are more exciting than weddings. Someone remarked that Victor’s great gift had been to understand that there was no such thing as too much flattery and noted how skilful he had been at buttering his way everywhere.
Vera spoke as if Victor had been too good for this world and might at any minute rise up and hover above them like some sort of political reproach incarnate. Her son Mark was present in the auditorium but did not speak.
The director of the play did speak. He was a man who suffered from megalomania – not that surface megalomania that hides deep insecurities but a megalomania that was confident and enduring, written right the way through him like a stick of seaside rock. His tribute to Victor consisted mainly in talking about himself, his own successes and achievements. He failed to mention Victor until the very end when he suddenly remembered why he was there and announced hastily:
‘Three cheers for Victor Skynnard.’
As people drifted out of the theatre and into the autumn sunshine they realised that Victor was indeed dead and the world seemed a poorer place.
Chapter Seventy
Ella had packed up her mother’s house. She made a quick dash to Amsterdam to visit Pa and Ma Tem and reassure herself that they were recovering well. They were surprised to learn that she was going back to Surinam but wished her luck. Before leaving England for good she decided to visit the place where Hector’s ashes had been scattered. She had found out from his workplace that the ashes had been taken to Norfolk, to a place where he and Barbara and Dawn spent many of their summer holidays. They used to stay in a house since destroyed by fire.
A farmer gave Ella directions to where the house had stood. Flat bare fields stretched to the horizon. There were no trees. The landscape was vast, grey and ashen, ploughed with furrows in the orange clay soil that led the eye to where the distant horizon met leaden skies. To Ella it felt apocalyptic and wonderful. She understood why Hector would have loved it there. The wind was sharp and carried the smell of the earth. Where the house had been she saw the large square patch of burnt ground.
She stood there for a while imagining that she could hear the crackle of burning again. Fire was Ella’s favourite element, a purifying Dionysiac fire that could sweep through everything rotten and corrupt and carry dust and ashes into the air. From the blackened earth where she stood burst new grass, full and vital, an immeasurable natural life. At the edge of the burnt area a few brilliant green shoots had sprung up. But she could see no sign of where Hector’s ashes might be. It was October and there was a chill in the air. After walking about for a while she grew cold and decided to leave. She traced her way back to the lane and the open fields.
At the side of a field opposite the house site she came across a raised rectangular patch of rich black earth. To her surprise she found that the earth had recently been turned and planted with crimson and purple fuchsia, sweet william and anemones. The turned earth was blacker and richer than the surrounding fields. She could see the tip of the urn where they had buried it. Stuck in the ground was a sign hacked crudely into a piece of wood:
‘Hector. Dawn. Barbara.’
It was as if his ashes had turned into a blaze of flowers that burst through the earth.
‘Thank you,’ she said to the farmer as she passed him on the way back.
*
When Ella de Vries returned to the interior of Surinam she and Marijke took over the ramshackle country retreat that once belonged to the ex-president. Marijke served her with devotion. Ella looked elegant and out of place swinging in her hammock. She had brought with her a few books and a supply of her favourite Paloma Picasso perfume. At night she slept with two dogs on her bed. Goats wandered in and out of the house. She still carried out her daily routine of ballet exercises on the bare boards of the main room.
Very occasionally, not more than once or twice a year, a card from Donny found its way there as he made his way further and further north. She pinned these up on the wooden plank wall.
In later years her legs would become thinner and her shoulders crabbed but Ella continued with her ballet exercises, holding on to a long wooden shelf to do the barre work. She still danced and despite her age there was the ghost of something beautiful in her movements.
A Goodbye from Your Narrator
I rather miss Victor Skynnard coming into the Head in the Sand café. But it’s as well that I have no distractions. I am in a hurry to finish. This book is the way I can admit to an association with crimes and misdemeanours but avoid prosecution. I hope I have done justice to Hector’s earlier heroic acts of terrorism. This new offence of ‘indirect incitement to violence or terrorism’ is aimed at those who while not directly inciting it, glorify and condone terrorist acts knowing full well that the effect on their listeners will be to encourage them to turn to terrorism. What can I say? Does giving Felix Caspers those notebooks count? What about this book? But I think I can enjoy writing the details of the events, knowing that there will be no redress or comeback. A work of fiction is a way of committing a crime, getting away with it and then boasting about it afterwards. Confession is sweet. Public confession, doubly so. Public confession without retribution is exquisite.
When I finished the last
sentence I lifted my head and took a final look around the café. Its bentwood chairs are uncomfortable. I shan’t be sorry to see the last of them. I indicated to the proprietor that I wanted the bill. I have finished. The End. I got up and stretched, feeling that I too had been released from a spell. Isn’t that how all good stories end – with the breaking of a spell and the release of the spellbound from enchantment? Now I can look around me in the bright light of day. Here in front of me is the café, the muddy olive decor, the plants in their terracotta pots, the polished wooden tables and the gurgle of the coffee machine. There is a ‘Soon to Close’ notice up, of course. No-one escapes the recession.
I tidied up my notebooks. Enough of these pale escapades in the head. Fiction is only the tame cousin of reality and Felix Caspers had given me an idea. Novel-writing has proved to be time-consuming compared with assassination – that underestimated tool of political reform. When I go to work at Mambo Racine’s tonight I will check that my Heckler & Koch sniper rifle is still waiting for me, taped under the lid of my piano.
Better cover myself, I suppose. Any resemblance between the living and the dead is entirely accidental. Sorry. Any resemblance between the characters and any person living or dead is entirely accidental. Sorry about that.
Baron S.
Acknowledgements
If Euripides were around I hope he would excuse my loose re-working of themes from The Bacchae. I also acknowledge standing on the shoulders of many other authors who have given us versions of Venus and Adonis.
For some of the feeling and atmosphere of the Palestinian camps in Jordan in the 1970s I am indebted to Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love.
Thanks to Liz Calder – always an inspiring critic.
There is one image, stolen from Lorca, that has remained in my head but I’m afraid I cannot remember which play or poem was the source of my theft.