‘Go on,’ said Jamie. ‘So what happened?’
He was attentive now. Nell found she didn’t want to offer up Antony for Jamie’s amusement, or for his contempt. She’d heard him speaking at the union – and indeed in the pub – about privilege and corruption, and she could see which way this was going.
‘Oh well, nothing did. I just thought the pool was empty and he’d be killed diving in the dark. But it wasn’t so he wasn’t. It’s not really much of a story.’
‘But why did you think he was a spy?’
‘Oh, he was in Berlin, and he speaks Russian, and he’s a bit mysterious about his private life. The grown-ups were just gossiping.’
‘What else? What were they saying?’
‘Oh, really nothing. I got the wrong end of the stick.’
‘You’re protecting him, aren’t you.’ Jamie was on his feet now, angry. ‘These people. They get away with every bloody thing.’
Nell sat still, chewing her lips. She’d seen Jamie in this mood before and it frightened her.
‘You’re so bloody thick with all this gang.’ He was pacing, his towel dragging. ‘I’ll talk to …’ he said. ‘I can … Well …’
He turned and saw her, as she was seeing him. Hair wet, eye make-up smudged, she seemed even more vulnerable than she had in the bathroom. Something shifted inside him.
‘Hey Nell. It’s just … It just drives me mad. It’s not your fault.’
She stood up in his path and he stepped on and they kissed, teeth clashing at first, and then, in the changing hut, on the floor among the scattered towels, hungrily, Jamie thinking, Why did I never notice her before? Nell thinking, But he doesn’t even like me, and, with piercing regret, Selim!, their bodies ignoring what was going through their tired and callow minds and clinging tighter and tighter until liking or not liking had entirely ceased to be the question.
*
Dear Mr Fletcher
You probably don’t remember our meeting at Wychwood, even though I was doing my best to make myself conspicuous by dressing up as a Bedouin tent. Antony Briggs was kind enough to introduce us.
I’m leaving Oxford, and I’m intending to spend the winter in Berlin, which is currently, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, where it’s all at (I can do contemporary-colloquial, you see, as well as camp-Firbankian). My interests are – in approximately equal measure – those of an elderly spinster, and of a drug-crazed voluptuary. I like austere music – classical or electronic – and tragic histories. Nero has been grossly maligned – making music in a city on fire is just my kind of thing.
May I send you brief dispatches from whatever front line – cultural, sexual, political – I find myself upon? I’ll keep carbons, in the full understanding that you will probably put them in the wastepaper basket unread. But if any of them seem to you publishable you’ll make me a happy man.
Yours sincerely
Guy Waterman
PS I’m sure you’re above nepotism, but it would be underhand to omit to mention that my lamented mother was sister to Benjamin Rose.
Dear Guy
Yes, you were conspicuous and yes, I do remember. Send in your stuff and we’ll see if we can use it. Six hundred words is about right.
Yours faithfully
Nicholas Fletcher
Dear Nicholas Fletcher
It was great to meet you at the Roses’ party, and to talk to you about the Belfast Peace Lines. Sorry if I got too het-up.
I enclose copies of some pieces I’ve written for Cherwell. I leave Oxford this summer. I’ve been working for my local paper in the vacations. It won’t be long before I get my NUJ card.
There’s a story I’ve got wind of. It’s about espionage. I’m not saying I’ve found the fifth man, but there’s someone getting away with treason. He’s very well connected.
It would be wonderful if you could employ me in your newsroom.
Yours sincerely
James McAteer
Dear James McAteer
Ring my secretary and make an appointment to come and see me here.
Yours
Nicholas Fletcher
Dear Nick
I loved our conversation across the moribund Mr W’s famous lap. I’m off to New York to work for him, in what capacity I won’t know until I get there. What do you think? Would it entertain your readers to have a sort of diary of my life as the living-dead genius’s errand-girl?
From Spiv
Dear Ant
Enough! No more! Three letters from young hangers-on of yours in one week. Do they think I’m the labour exchange?
Love N
Presumptuous little gits. I haven’t given any of them permission to use my name. Let me guess – Guy, Jamie and Spiv? All sharp as gimlets. You could do worse.
A x
July
Christopher Rossiter had taken to spending the greater part of the year in Scotland, no longer inviting his friends for shooting parties, no longer shooting. He wasn’t angry with Lil. He hardly thought about her at all. Instead he thought about waterfalls. Standing for silent hours by the burn (he still fished) he talked to Fergus about hydraulics, and the way the power of the river’s movement corrugated its surface, just as muscles surge beneath skin. Fergus was growing up now. His appearance was unchanged but his comprehension of physics kept exact pace with his father’s.
It pleased Christopher that the house’s grounds were separated from the moor only by a straggle of sweetbriar bushes. In Scotland there are no laws of trespass. The rare walkers who came tramping up the glen weren’t lawbreakers, or any kind of breakers. If they paused beside him he’d show them things – ferns or fungi or sulphur-yellow lichen. In the evenings he dined often with an elderly couple he’d known since he was a child. They talked about the past, over and over, patinating dimly remembered facts with layers and layers of nostalgia. It was soothing. Other nights a woman who hoped to marry him would appear in time for the first whisky. He hardly minded her presence at all. He liked it when she stayed the night. But it seemed to him, as a matter not of ethics but of decorum, that marrying was something you only did once.
It rained almost ceaselessly. ‘It’s soft today,’ his housekeeper would say, as the windows misted over with drizzle. A soft life in a hard place. Only when he woke suddenly, in the awful undefended three-in-the-morning, did the dwindling of Christopher’s life to that of a near-hermit seem to him pitiful.
Lil was in London, in a red-brick house near Holland Park built for a Victorian painter. In the enormous room where women had posed for the tweed-clad bearded artist, their pseudo-classical drapery slipping down to reveal their breasts, Lil held court. Helen moved in when she and Benjie split, and made the garden her own for a while. When she moved out again, Lil took in Flora’s friend Seb, and Helen’s shade garden, all hydrangeas and comfrey, was allowed to run wild. Indoors, Seb kept his rooms austerely neat, and then messed them up by bringing back people. However late Lil came home of an evening, there’d be someone there to talk to. It was almost like having a son.
*
‘You’d need to make that last point in the opening para,’ said Nicholas. ‘You can’t count on anyone reading beyond the first sentence, you know.’
Jamie, at a disadvantage on an unstable S-shaped steel and Perspex chair, leant forward and pinched his upper lip between thumb and forefinger. He could see that Nicholas had scrawled remarks in the margins of his copy, but he couldn’t read them. He wasn’t feeling as self-righteous as he would have liked.
‘I can’t use it, of course,’ said Nicholas.
‘Because you know them all?’
‘I must say that alleging one of my best friends is a traitor is an unusual way of currying favour with a person who might offer you employment.’
Jamie, who hadn’t known Nicholas and Antony were more than passing acquaintances, thought: Shit!
‘But, speaking professionally, it’s all innuendo. You can’t stand it up. No one’s talked.’
�
�But that’s the story. The closing ranks and covering up. It’s everything that’s wrong with this country.’
Nicholas raised his eyebrows, and laid the typewritten pages face down on his desk. Silence while he looked out of the window, his feet up on the radiator, tapping teeth with pencil. Jamie struggled not to fidget.
Nicholas picked up the telephone on his desk, pressed a button and said, ‘Ask Ted to come over, would you?’
‘I suppose you’re about to hitch-hike to India?’ he said to Jamie.
‘I’m not going anywhere. I haven’t got the money. I have to get a job.’
Nicholas nodded and began to read through a sheaf of paper. An enormous man came and stood in the doorway.
‘Ted. Could you use an extra hand for a few weeks?’
‘The diary’s short-staffed.’
‘Have a word with Jamie here and see if you can sort something out.’
‘Right you are.’
Ted was already gone by the time Jamie stood up, not sure whether he was supposed to follow him.
‘He’ll take care of you,’ said Nicholas. ‘There’ll be a per diem. This isn’t a proper job, but it might turn into one.’
‘That’s amazing,’ said Jamie, and blushed.
Nicholas handed him back his piece and said, ‘You’ll do all right. You’ve got the knack. You were out of your depth with this one, though. Don’t try to sell it anywhere else, or you’ll have all the libel lawyers in London after you. In fact …’ He held out his hand. Jamie passed the sheets back. Nicholas tore them across twice and tossed them in the basket. ‘Go talk to Ted.’
*
Exam results came through. All but one of Nell’s lot got 2:1s. The exception was Spiv, who got a first. She rang Nell close to midnight. As she picked up the receiver Nell could hear her parents’ door open upstairs. The telephone was in the corridor leading to the smoking room, where she and Dickie had been watching the Wednesday play, and then, too enervated by heat and boredom to go to bed, had stayed lolling on the sofa with the blank screen doing its buzzy thing to their eyes.
‘Nell, it’s Spiv.’
‘Oh wow Spiv, how are you?’ (The upstairs door closed quietly.) ‘You clever clever thing.’
‘Yeah it’s great. But Nell …’
‘Yes.’
Spiv was gulping and gasping.
Dickie walked past, dripping milk from his late-night cornflakes onto the parquet. The green baize door thumped behind him as he went through into the kitchen passage.
‘Spiv. Spivlet. What’s happening?’
More gasping, the sound breaking up as Spiv’s distress crossed the Atlantic.
‘Oh Jesus, what’s wrong? I can’t hear what you’re saying.’
Spiv inhaled deeply and said, ‘Sorry sorry.’ Spiv, so assertive and demanding. Spiv who’d always made Nell feel, by comparison, so unsophisticated and messy.
Now she could speak, with hiccups.
‘It’s evening again. It’s evening. How did that happen? Must be the middle of the night for you. I haven’t been to bed for days. Nell, I’m a wreck. I’ve been a total idiot.’
‘Why. Why. What’s happened?’
‘There was a boy. He wandered off and I don’t know where he went and I’m just so worried about him. I might have killed him.’
Nell remembered when she’d last heard Spiv talking like this. That breathy voice, higher pitched than usual.
‘Spiv … Are you tripping?’
Spiv began to laugh, a cartoonish tee hee tee hee.
‘How long ago did you drop it?’
‘Oh, hours and hours.’
‘Are you with anyone?’
‘No. Well yes, but not my lot. They let Andy and everyone into the Studio, and they’ve always let me in before, but for some reason the guy on the rope turned nasty and Fred said he’d talk to Steve, and just to wait and I waited and waited and I was talking to these sweet boys in the queue and I gave them each a tab.’
Who are all these people she’s talking about? thought Nell. And then she thought, Here I am with my parents and my little brother, and everyone I know is having these adventures. What’s happened to me? What’s happened to that Oxford life? I had a life, didn’t I? What am I going to do?
Spiv was sobbing again. ‘I’ve got a first from Oxford, and now I’m just the girl who calls the cab and waits on the pavement outside the nightclub. I’ve torn my silver dress. Do you remember I said I’d give it to you, and now look it’s all tattered and torn. All forlorn.’ And then she began to giggle. ‘I’ve got a first, haven’t I, I’ve got a first.’
‘Yes, you have,’ said Nell and thought, People are even more irritating when they’re tripping than they are when they’re drunk.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m at these boys’ apartment. But the one who hasn’t come back … Suppose he’s fallen off a bridge or something. It’d be my fault.’
Nell said, ‘Go to bed. Or just lie on the floor if there isn’t a bed. And ring me tomorrow when you come down.’
Spiv said, ‘All right, Nanny,’ and hung up.
*
Germans are efficient. Germans are ruthless. German men all look like Klaus Kinski, with exactly rectangular bony faces and mad pale eyes. German women are blonde dumplings, or predatory stick insects in bias-cut black satin. Germans are philosophers, and spend long nights debating the Four Last Things. Germans tear off all their clothes as soon as the sun comes out and have sex in public, by lakes. Germans create wonderful music, all storm and war-path.
I’ve been in Berlin for less than a month, but already I know that all of the above simple-minded racist allegations are the absolute, indisputable, copper-bottomed truth. About this place, anyway. Walled-in West Berlin is a walled garden of earthly delights positively writhing with the serpents of temptation. It’s full of fetid cellars where boys and girls as beautiful as angels drive themselves out of their minds every night, and its music scene is sublime. Take the concert from which I’ve just reeled away.
Picture a street in which a row of buildings faces a bank of concrete half as high as they are. Picture arc-lights and watchtowers – it’s easy done, you’ve all seen the photos. And then picture one of those houses, its iron-gated courtyard, its rooms with their crumbling plaster mouldings and massive chandeliers from which the electric wiring hangs in loops fit to hang yourself from.
Come inside. Lots of mascara, on boys and girls alike, and henna-red ringlets and sequins. Everyone is thin, except for off-duty soldier boys with their Popeye muscles. Nothing to eat. Lots to smoke.
Go down two hellishly steep flights of steps. Scores of nearly naked people all moving in synch with the eeriest, most mind-bending music to be heard in Europe since Genghis Khan led his hordes ululating off the Mongolian steppe to rap at the doors of Christendom.
On stage, five men in silver boiler-suits. This is Sonder. And the thing that looks like a deep-freeze in the process of shapeshifting into a grand piano is the synthesiser they have built. These aren’t art-school poseurs. They came out of Berlin’s Technoschule. They are engineers, and like the shamans, they can induce trances, and enable flight.
A young woman, whose earrings glowed like ice-shards in the spinning lights, said to me, ‘This is Nirvana.’ I say, No. Nirvana is a happy ending. What goes on when Sonder take the stage is not any kind of ending, but the beginning of something new in Western music. They are unsmiling. They are philosophers. At least one of them looks a bit like Klaus Kinski (the dead-straight, colourless hair). And they make music that kept us swaying together all night like fronds of seaweed in a tide-race. Trance! Ecstasy! The orgasmic whirlwind! The severe unsmiling Paradise of the German Enlightenment regained.
Telex
From the Editor
Thanks, Guy. We can use this, but we’ll have to chop it. Keep to length next time.
N
*
It was nearly ten when Nicholas left the office. He never went to El Vino’s an
y more. Editors didn’t. He threaded his way through Covent Garden. Small wiry men lugging crates of new potatoes. The cloying scent of melons. Piles of discarded lettuce leaves alongside cardboard boxes stained with raspberry juice.
Francesca was waiting for him at Bianchi’s. She ordered saltimbocca. Elena, attentive and spry, said, ‘Cervello fritto and spinach for you, Nicholas?’ He nodded. He’d been coming here, alone or accompanied, for years. He always ate what Elena chose for him, and she never alluded, in the presence of whichever lover or senior minister he was dining with, to any of the others.
He told Francesca about Jamie’s visit.
‘How crass,’ she said. ‘He’s a bulldozer.’
‘Bulldozers are useful,’ said Nicholas, ‘but they have to be steered.’
That night, as on many nights that summer, Francesca went back with him to his flat, with its tobacco-brown walls hung with cartoons from the paper, and photographs of him shaking hands with despots, and rather good paintings by people he knew. Her clothes were unusually adult for a girl of her age, and so was the self-possession with which she took them off and displayed herself to him. It was she who had rung him after they met at Wychwood. He had said, ‘I suppose you want a job on the paper too?’ She’d said, ‘No, I want to seduce you.’
*
Flora and Hugo paced along Woldingham’s Walk, the path that led alongside the lakes, twisting back and forth across the dams between them. Flora had asked for a meeting. ‘We’ve got to have a talk,’ she said. ‘We’ve just been drifting along, haven’t we?’ Then she’d showed up in the estate office and said, ‘It’s such a dreamy day. We can do this out of doors.’
Hugo hadn’t been drifting along. He’d been running the estate, the way he always had done. Flora’s carryings-on up at the house didn’t interfere much with the business of the place. The shoot, the timber, the home farm and tenant farms, the intricate game of matching tasks to the men able to perform them, the maintenance of walls and fences, of gardens and buildings, the breeding and selling of livestock, the purchase and servicing of the massive farm machines; it all went forward under Hugo’s eye. He made a mechanic’s job for a tenant farmer’s son who’d been up before the beak for shoplifting: the boy was doing all right now. He wangled some money from the Forestry Commission for new planting. He set a team of men to battle with the waterweed which, every summer, did its best to choke the upper lake. He and young Slatter went together to the Game Fair, weighing up the pros and cons of investing in a herd of Herefords, and went for it, and made a good fist of it. And now there was the nursery garden, and this garden-design thing with Helen. He was having a lot of fun with that.
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