by Deborah Levy
22
‘Yes,’ Jack said, ‘you and I are free.’
My head was still resting on his shoulder.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘we are free of ties.’
He took a small sip of tea. My cheek pressed against his throat.
I wanted him to stay and I wanted him to go.
‘Don’t historians use contraceptives?’
I had no idea how to endure being free. And everything that comes with it.
‘In the early days when we were together, Jennifer used to say I looked more like a rock star than a historian.’
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling, ‘but you were not a rock star. You merely resembled one. I suspect it is hard work being a rock star.’
‘Even rock stars have ties.’
I lifted my head and opened my mouth while the nurse fed me cool drops of morphine. Jack chewed on his second scone. After a while I reminded him how I had begged Walter on the steps outside Café Einstein to live with me in Suffolk. And how he’d laughed when I outlined for him the sort of life we could aim for together.
Jack scooped up a strand of his hair and tucked it into his bun.
‘You have told me all this.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes.’ He was still stroking my arm with his new gentle fingers. ‘You and I read the New Yorker in our armchairs. We wake up together and take it in turns to make toast. Our garden is blooming. The blackberries are ripening.’
Morphine silvered my tongue, lifted it this way and that way. I chased it, trying to bite its ripening into truth, but it was too late.
‘Everyone is replaceable,’ I said, ‘but your love is not the love I want.’
Jack was looking in the direction of the stainless-steel lift. After a while he stood up and I walked him over to it.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘it offers me an exit from your cruelty.’
As Jack stepped inside, I noticed the floor was covered with autumn leaves. They crunched under the soles of his black plimsolls and he kicked them away. They reminded me of the leaves that had been swept into two small piles under the trees that lined Abbey Road and how some of them were blowing across the zebra crossing. There was something wrong with the doors of the lift. They closed and then opened again, closed and opened. He glanced at the watch on his wrist. I thought that he was lonely in every time, and so was I.
23
A plane was looping the loop in morphine’s numbing rain.
Looping in the sky above Britain’s food banks and rough sleepers.
My father was the pilot showing me the view.
24
Jennifer had not moved from my side. She was searching her bag for a small hairbrush which she said was called a Tangle Teezer. I took it from her and began to brush her hair. It was very calming. She had her back to me as she perched on my bed. Her silver hair came down to her waist. Every brush stroke took a long time. The shadow of my hands in her hair danced across the wall. It was livelier than my feeble fingers, but somehow it gave me courage.
I told Jennifer how her beauty came from all of her and how her talent was bigger than my envy.
She was wearing a green raincoat.
Although she did not reply, I knew she was listening. After a while, I suggested she take another photo of myself crossing the Abbey Road. We would then have two copies, one from 1988 and one from 2016. It would be a stretch of history.
‘If it’s your last wish, I will take that photograph.’
‘It is my first wish,’ I replied.
‘It’s like this, Saul Adler: I’ve been talking to Jack. He’s decided not to take the train back to Ipswich. He’s staying in a hotel near the Euston Road so he can be near you.’
‘Tell him I’ll be home in a week.’
I continued to drag the brush through her hair, but the steady rhythm no longer made me feel calm.
‘It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau: we were young and clueless and reckless, but I never stopped loving you.’
‘It’s like this, Saul Adler’ – she still had her back to me – ‘you were so detached and absent, the only way I could reach you was with my camera.’
The brush fell from my hand. I was very frightened. Of everything. Of everything I felt. Of how my son lifted his hands as he lay in my arms while I sang ‘Penny Lane’ to him under the blue Suffolk skies. Yes, there is a nurse in the song, Isaac, and a banker and a barber and a fireman. And people are looking at photographs in ‘Penny Lane’. Like your mother, your young mother, let her sleep while I hold you, she won’t walk away, like I will. I was frightened of the way his fingers pulled at my lips as I sang. I was frightened of everything in the past and whatever was going to happen next. I heard Jack’s voice, nearby. His silver hair hung down to his shoulders. He had grown a beard. ‘I forgive you for everything and I love you, Saul.’
He told me with his eyes that I would never see the apple trees he had planted in our garden. The fruit would fall in autumn and I would not be there to gather it up. I was deeply grateful for Jack’s honest love. It lifted me from the Euston Road to Abbey Road, but I think I was still in my bed when I got there.
25
Jennifer and Rainer were waiting for me at the zebra crossing on Abbey Road outside the EMI studios, the zebra stripes, black and white, at which all vehicles must stop to allow pedestrians to cross the road. I was wearing a white suit and white shoes. It was not lost on me that John Lennon, my childhood hero, was no longer with us. This upset me enough to want to call the whole thing off, but Jennifer insisted we pay attention to the detail of the original photograph. I asked her why she was carrying a stepladder.
‘You know why.’
She told me again that was how the original photo was taken in August 1969. The photographer placed the ladder at the side of the crossing while a policeman was paid to direct the traffic. As I was not famous we couldn’t ask the police to do that, so we had to work quickly. The original photographer only had ten minutes anyway. She set up the ladder as she had done when I was twenty-eight and she was twenty-three, climbed up it and sorted out her camera.
This time she did not have to keep changing the film.
‘Okay,’ she shouted, ‘put your hands in your jacket pockets, look straight ahead, walk now.’
There were two cars waiting. Rainer held up his hand to keep them there.
I stepped forward on to the zebra and then back again. Rainer and Jennifer yelled at me to get a move on. I was wounded like a soldier, but I had been fortunate never to have to fight in a war. I knew as I took a step across the black-and-white stripes that I was walking across deep time, trying to put myself together again. Jennifer stood on the ladder in her jeans and black silk shirt, a pencil poking out of its pocket, poised and steady in her leather boots, looking through the lens of her digital camera. She shouted at me to focus on crossing the road, but there was so much else going on.
I heard the exuberant sound of the cello in Cape Cod, humming with life, more life, and the hammering of the typewriter in the GDR, which was knowledge expressed in sound telling me that Walter had to save himself by filing reports on someone he found beautiful and desirable.
‘Cross the road, Saul.’
I could feel my mother’s love nearby and, though I felt betrayed by her death, it moved me forward. I took another step. I could hear the bells of trams in East Berlin and the hooting traffic in West London and the low growling of dogs on the boulevards of Europe, on the porches of America, on the sofas of Britain.
‘Cross the road.’ Jennifer’s lips were close to my ear.
I took another step and kept on walking because there was Luna waiting on the pavement outside the EMI studios.
She was smiling and waving. Luna was carrying a canvas bag and she looked just like she had in 1988.
‘Hello, Saul. How’s it going?’
‘I’m trying to cross the road,’ I replied.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you’ve been trying to cross the road for th
irty years but stuff happened on the way.’
Jennifer and Rainer were breathing near me. Matthew was there too, and my nephews and Jack and Walter and Karl Thomas.
‘East and West are together now,’ I whispered to Luna.
‘Ah yes,’ she said, smiling, ‘I have heard about that. The German Democratic Republic is kaput.’
‘That was a long time ago.’
‘It’s true,’ Luna said, ‘I was not in time with history but blood dries faster than memory. I never made it to Liverpool but you smashed up my Abbey Road so I have come to see it for myself.’
I continued walking and when I got very close to the other side I reached out to touch her hand.
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First published in 2019 in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton
First published in the United States 2019
Copyright © Deborah Levy, 2019
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63286-984-5; eBook: 978-1-63286-986-9
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