Andy, flying with one other unaccompanied minor, had had a stewardess to pamper him.
'Well, what did I tell you?' his father said, looking at him in the driver's mirror.
'You were right, Dad.'
The back of his father's head was clearer than his face; the hair on his neck going grey and longer than in the days when he used to come home in an air force cap.
'And your mother?'
His mother and sister had preferred to stay at home in Shaftesbury.
'She sends her love,' and remembered the gift in his pocket. That he fished out and handed over.
'I've missed you,' his father said, laying the squashed blue tissue, still unopened, on the passenger seat, next to the packet of dried pears and the anti-inflammatory cream. 'I've missed you all.'
His hands beat against the wheel as he whistled a calypso: a sure sign of danger.
Then he started coughing, a stridorous wheezing that altered the whole musculature of his face.
'Are you okay?' Andy said when he had stopped.
'It's nothing, nothing,' touching the corner of his mouth. 'It's just that I'm not good on terra firma. Bit like a ship's captain - get me ashore, I can barely drive a car.' And took his hands off the wheel.
'Dad!'
'All I know about cars is to be sick in them,' he said cheerfully.
They participated in a salmon festival. They walked the Corduroy Brook Trail. They went ice-skating. One morning, they flew in a helicopter over a forest - 'so you can tell your mother and sister what I've been up to.'
It was the first time Andy had been in the air with him. His father described how he would sit in this cabin seven hours a day, lifting black spruce and yellow birch to the log-landing on a spur of the river. 'Last month, I was picking a turn when a tree slipped out of the jaws of the grappler. Will never forget that sight.'
Andy looked down at the river and pictured a log falling, falling until it hit the water, exploding on impact into two-by-fours.
His father's favourite timber was the yellow cedar. You did not find it in Newfoundland but in British Columbia, where he next took Andy. 'The yellow cedar's a lovely tree. You can still pull them off the hills when they're sixty years old and lying on their side. Worms don't get into them and they last forever.' Andy leaned out of the helicopter bubble and looked down, watching the grappler taking hold. 'Grey ghosts,' his father called them. The trunks had an alabaster grain and were much prized by the Japanese for temple logs, he said.
As summer wore on, his father himself turned into a bit of a grey ghost, a shadowy presence whose attention came and went, a helicopter whirr on the grass, ruffling his hair, 'I just need to make a call,' beginning the process that would see him vanishing into the cool, grain-scented air of Manitoba.
Because all at once they were driving east through fields of wheat and wormwood sage and switchgrass. His father had decided to show Andy the place where he had learned to fly Sikorskies, on a pilot-exchange programme for NATO and allied air forces. Moose Jaw was one of the most important places in the world from a geopolitical view, he said, to excite Andy's interest as they motored over the flattest country Andy had ever seen. His eyes sparkled like the tin foil he would put up against the windscreen to stop the glare.
Moose Jaw was where his father's friend Lynn lived, in a Tyndall stone duplex on Wildwood Crescent, though Andy never again saw the young pilot with amber-bleached hair for whom his father was to give up family and home. When he thought of the last days of that holiday he remembered missile-launchers trundling by and a summer parade with ethnic pancakes, and going for a walk in a field that went on forever and was full of blue grama grass that gave him hayfever. Through puffed-up eyes he watched his father coming towards him with an armful of wild flowers. 'For your mother.'
On the last day of the holidays, his father drove him to the airport. 'I'll be here another month and then I'll be back. Another month, tell her.'
Andy nodded.
His father drove on in silence.
Over the radio a Canadian voice talked about the competition for university places.
'I went to no university.' His father stuck his arm out the window and pointed at the sky. 'That's my university.'
He caught Andy's face in the mirror and smiled. His face was the colour of the capsaicin cream that he kept applying to the edges of his lips. 'When will I be back?'
From the back of the spacious car Andy groaned: 'In a month, Dad.'
It would be another three years before they saw each other again. And then only for a final few moments.
13
T HE CHERRY TREES EMERGED through the fog like graffiti.
Andy had worked late to make up for his absence. It was eight o'clock by the time he returned home. Hortense Avenue was slippery with black ice. Preoccupied, he picked his way along the pavement and up the steps, and failed to notice how smoothly the front door opened. He had reached his landing when something moved on the stairs to Marina's flat.
'Hello,' in a voice of ebony, dark and sinuous.
She stepped down into the light.
'Jeanine . . .'
'Jerome says to tell you that your landlord's fixed the lock.'
He looked at her. Not knowing what to do. Except to go on standing there as though her appearance outside his door was a reliable forerunner of someone's demise.
Why was he unlocking it and inviting her in?
He helped her off with her raincoat.
'Thank you,' she said. Then slowly turned to face him.
Outside it was minus four degrees, but under her coat it might have been spring. Low-cut jade top. Black mini-skirt. Stockinged legs above the boots.
A woman with a perfumed smile has a stronger chance than a woman who scowls. Nonetheless, there was something blatant about Jeanine's expression that prompted in Andy a moment of circumspection. Her smile did nothing to erase the incurious face of the woman who had driven him home on Monday afternoon. Still less the image of those thrashing eyes that had focussed on him on Friday night in a glare so fierce that he worried in case his skin turned black and started wisping smoke. Now, she smiled through eyes the colour of brown shot-silk in the way that Sophie had smiled at Richard, as though she wanted to peg him to the sisal floor.
'I've got some red wine open,' trying to rescue his gaze that was entangled in her decolletage.
'Red wine would be great,' she said.
He returned to the living room with two glasses quickly rinsed and the bottle of Jacob's Creek that he had opened after her previous visit.
She was sitting in Sophie's chair.
He poured.
She peered at the rim of her glass. 'Cheers,' and sipped.
He raised his glass. 'Cheers.'
Andy did not find it odd that they had settled down like this, before he had asked why she was here. From the way she kicked off her boots and drew up her legs beneath her, there was an intimacy that they already shared, and which he regretted and yet felt powerless to thwart.
'So, Andrew . . .' after her eyes had completed another circuit of the room - which he had spent the whole of Saturday tidying up. This time, above the smile she aimed at him, he saw the outline of a telescopic sight.
He stared into his wine. He felt no urgency to speak. The moment you talk, you say less of what you are. Plus, he was warming to the person he was about to be.
Something was digging into her thigh. She took it out, inspected it.
'Here, let me have that!'
He returned to his seat brandishing the last trace of Sophie. She must have planned her departure for weeks. His only souvenirs of their relationship - the jacket in the cupboard, a pile of fashion magazines. And this hair-clip.
'Sophie's?' as if reading his thoughts.
He nodded. 'She's . . . she was my fiancee.'
'No longer?'
He shook his head.
She crossed her arms, chewing the inside of her cheek. 'I apologise for my behaviour on Fr
iday.'
Andy made what he hoped was a sympathetic noise and looked at his hand. 'I'm sorry about your father.'
'I hated him.'
'Oh, he wasn't so bad . . .' The words slipped out.
'He was. Every bit of him.'
'Come on, no one's that bad, surely. Not when you get to know them.'
Jeanine put a hand to her forehead and stared at the floor.
'He never let anyone get that close.'
'I'm not so sure about that,' Andy said. His own father had found intimacy tricky: a hand on the shoulder, a quick kiss on top of the head - his way to demonstrate affection.
'Well, I am,' she said.
He waited for her to go on, but her eyes had left him, were travelling into some icy past.
'Even so,' he conceded, 'I can see how difficult he may have been.'
His message miscarried.
'Difficult?' sitting perpendicular. 'He cut me off - freezing my trust fund two days before I was due to come into it, and letting me know through his lawyers that I could have it only when he had died and not a moment before. That was how he kept in touch!'
Andy had only been trying to say something nice about a dead man.
She went on: 'It meant I had to earn a living, which was no bad thing.'
But the spell was broken. There was something stubbed out about her face, as though where she had sat a maiden aunt of hers was staring with cheeks the colour of ash.
His finger dialled the rim of his glass. 'Is that why you missed his funeral?'
She frowned. 'Maral left a message on my machine. My first reaction - So what?' Her voice had the hard scraping sound of his sister removing the burn from toast. 'But at the last moment I changed my mind. I thought: Fuck it, no one's going to go. It's pissing with rain, my father's being cremated and not a single person except Maral will be there to register the fact that he has ever lived . Despite everything he had done, I couldn't bear the idea. But I didn't take into account the London traffic. Or you.' She gave a desultory laugh. 'All I had to do was make it for the final prayer . . .' And stopped. 'Odd, that.'
Andy scrutinised the hair-clip, his fourteen months with Sophie reduced to two blonde hairs. 'It happens to a lot of people at the end, so I've read - discovering God.'
'I suppose,' she said. 'Although I don't remember him having a religious bone in his body.'
They each took another nip. Maybe it was the effect of being four days old, but the wine tasted like Andy felt, ferrous and stale and cheap.
'More?' he said.
'I'm fine.'
She pulled at her bracelet and moved her hand through her hair.
The way her legs looked, tucked up under her, encouraged Andy to give the rest of Jeanine a covert glance. She was attractive, but it was a darting beauty; she gave no impression that she derived pleasure from it herself. Maybe it was because she was a firstborn, like his sister. All those scratches on her prow where she had had to break through the ice.
Turning her head, she caught his glance and brought it back to her face, and he knew that this was someone who preferred to have him look her in the eye than at her body.
'That will was typical of the man. He was so cynical. You really must be some sort of miracle not to have fallen out with him. Are you gay?'
'No.'
'That's not why Sophie left you?'
'No!'
Staring at the glass that rose to his lips: 'Was my father gay?'
He drank too fast. 'Now why would you ask that?'
'You said you were a good friend. That's news to me. My father had no friends.'
Andy kept in his head Vamplew's image of a close, solitary, slightly deaf man. 'I saw no evidence that he was gay - or that sex played a large part in his life.' He sounded stilted even to himself.
'So if you didn't have sex with him, how well did you know him?'
'Oh, reasonably,' feeling trapped. 'I only met your father recently - that is to say in the last few years - but I got to know him quite well,' he gabbled. 'He wasn't always so cynical, you know.'
'Then he must have changed a lot.'
'People do change,' Andy said quickly. He had to say something.
'Not to that extent. Where did you meet him?' she asked abruptly, her chin thrust forward. Something not adding up.
'Where did I meet him?' he laughed out loud.
'Is what I asked.' A lethal look had entered her face. 'Why do you always repeat other people's questions? It's very irritating.'
'This is a long time ago now, Jeanine.'
Up flared the dark brown eyes. 'Would you just tell me?'
His brain whirred, splashing the water to deter a circling hammerhead. He raised his eyes to the ceiling as though an answer might appear through the cracked plasterwork.
A voice. Marilyn Manson. But sounding like Furnivall.
'I remember . . .' sitting up. 'I met him first on the riverbank.'
It was the weekend after his father's visit home. Andy was walking along the path below Sutton Mill.
'Your father was sitting on a bench, peering upstream . . .' And there appeared on the ceiling, like a Dutch painting within a painting, the face of a man in late middle age, dimply with joy.
Eager to share his excitement, the man beckoned Andy over. Moments before, an otter had swum across the mill pool - right at a time when it was feared that otters had vanished from this part of England. Stuart Furnivall - as he introduced himself - was tying on a fly when the otter's wide, sleek head had looked at him and continued swimming upriver, 'undulating like the Loch Ness monster'. And then the head went under and he did not see it again. Not even a ripple; only an odour.
'You can still smell him if you come down here.'
Andy followed to the river's edge and the pair bent over a rock covered in golden brown moss and a blackish-grey sediment, and sniffed. The very strong and distinctive scent reminded Furnivall of the fish counter on Shaftesbury high street, with musk in it. Andy did not know what it smelled like, but he would know it for ever.
The scene presented itself to Andy on his ceiling with the clarity of one of Furnivall's favourite Bramers, and he conveyed it to Jeanine. She wished to know about her father; he would tell her about the person he had met on the banks of the Nadder, who less than a fortnight later walked into his classroom to replace 'Stalin' Podhoretz, his face breaking into a smile when he caught sight of Andy: 'We've met before.'
'After that, we often went fishing together.'
'I didn't know he fished,' Jeanine said slowly - the first time she had taken an interest in what he was saying.
'It was his passion - towards the end.'
'Fishing?' she said, stupefied.
'What he loved most,' he said to her, 'was to catch small wild trout with a Muddler Minnow.'
She shook her head. 'He couldn't fish.'
'When did you see him last, Jeanine?' very quiet.
'About seven years ago. I told you, we were estranged.' It was hard for her to come up with the right words. 'I left home when I was ten. I only met him again - briefly - when I was twenty-one. During his last seven years, I didn't see him at all. Not once.'
'Fishing is a sport many men retire into.'
On the calico chair she continued to hold herself tensely. 'But how did he see in order to cast?'
'I don't follow.'
She looked at him and smiled. A little too exultantly, he felt. 'Well, having only one eye - it can't have been easy.'
He pondered this. Vamplew had not mentioned the Cyclopean aspect. Possibly, he hadn't noticed. But a river mist had descended.
'Well, it wasn't always easy. Especially at dusk. But taking his partial blindness into account, he did cast remarkably well.'
She was listening.
'I always stood on - was it the right or left side?'
'You don't remember?'
'I can be a bit dyslexic about things like that.'
She nodded in apparent sympathy. Then moved her hand from her
chin to her right ear and began to tug at the lobe, reflecting. 'I wonder what happened to his rods?'
His previous answer, Andy intuited, had been too ornate, like explaining to his mother why he had not been down to Shaftesbury. He would have to tread carefully. 'Won't Mrs Bernhard know?' dipping a tentative paw in the water.
'You're right. Maral will know.'
'He didn't spend much on himself. Except on shoes and wine.'
But she was still sceptical. 'If you were such a good friend, did he tell you what he got up to in that tower of his? Did he tell you if he was writing a book?'
A closet author. Andy brightened. He sensed the hardening outlines of terra firma.
'That's how our relationship developed. I must have met him shortly after you last saw him. He discovered that I worked in publishing. I offered to take a look at his book. One thing led to another . . .'
'So he was writing a book?' Her eyes stirred. 'I was just joking. What happened to it? No, I can guess,' with a cold laugh. 'Before he died, he asked you to take it into the garden and douse it with petrol and spread the ashes, along with his own, under the copper beech.'
'You guessed well,' and gave her a conspiratorial smile. 'But in the battle of Art against the Artist, I side with Art. If Virgil's executors had listened to him, we would have no Aeneid . If Max Brod had abided by Kafka's wishes we would have no Kafka.'
'What are you saying - my father was Kafka?'
What was he saying? It came out before he could think it through. 'What I'm saying . . .' he said in an earnest voice, rescued by the image of his teacher's still unread manuscript at the back of his desk, '. . . is that I took the precaution of making a copy.'
'You made a copy of his book!' She was impressed, despite herself. 'Was it any good?'
Andy cast his eyes down, coughing. It was one of those plunges. You pinch your nose and you jump. 'To be honest, no.'
'Just as I thought,' slightly relaxing.
He had not anticipated her reaction. But his frank assessment of Furnivall's manuscript gave him an authority he had not so far enjoyed, he could see that.
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