‘Please, darling,’ Lavinia said. ‘We can talk about this later.’
She was aware of how ridiculous they must look, how scripted in their comedy: a very short fat woman with cropped grey hair and a party dress, an obese teenager in a black leather coat and black eye make-up. A junior Goth being shouted at by his mum at the side of the motorway. She had put her second-best party dress on; she wanted to arrive well dressed, not a vicar’s wife in last decade’s Laura Ashley smock. But that was the spectacle they were presenting now to the passing traffic. Please, God, don’t let his father get out, Lavinia begged. Adding the comedy of a fat vicar in his dog collar would make the whole thing perfection in a driver’s glimpse.
‘If you get back in, we’ll be at a service station in no time,’ Lavinia shouted. ‘We’ll sit down and you’ll feel much better.’
‘Only if you give me back my phone,’ Russell shouted.
‘Darling, it was looking at your phone that made you sick,’ Lavinia shouted.
‘It’s not having it that makes me sick, you cow,’ Russell shouted. He stamped his foot in its heavy boot; for a moment, Lavinia felt faint as she saw how he might so easily lose his balance, fall into the slow lane with his head under the wheels.
‘Just half an hour without it. Looking out of the window. Then we’ll be at Grandpa’s, almost.’
‘I hate you,’ Russell shouted. Was there some ritual repetition about the quality now? Was he winding down? But then he remembered. ‘You made me stop just when I was about to finish a level.’
‘It’ll still be there later on,’ Lavinia shouted. ‘Please, Russell, come back into the car. You’re really frightening me now.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Russell shouted. ‘It was level 746. I’ve been stuck on it for weeks. I nearly got it and then you made me stop. I hate you.’
‘Please, darling,’ Lavinia shouted. ‘I know you love Candy Crush Saga, but you were going to be sick.’
‘You make me sick,’ Russell shouted, ‘when you just interfere, you horrible fat old bag. I hate you.’
But then, strangely enough, having made his point, he went over to the car and opened the back passenger door on the side of the grass verge. He looked at his mother with contempt, as if she were dawdling. With some terror, Lavinia went along the road-ward side of the car, half opened the door, slid in with relief. She breathed.
‘All’s well that ends well,’ Jeremy said. ‘There we are. And off we tootle.’
Lavinia concentrated. If she started driving along the hard shoulder she would probably find a gap big enough to slip into. She loathed motorway driving – she actually hated driving in any case, even in their quiet bit of Penge. She should not be doing this. She knew that Jeremy was perfectly capable of driving. When he had been diagnosed with diabetes five years before, there had been no suggestion that he needed to give up driving; even when he had been put on insulin, two years ago, having failed to make the slightest change to his health or weight, the suggestion had only been that he measure his blood sugar before setting off. But he had thought it unwise. ‘My dear girl,’ he had said – and how these fluting pomposities had started to grate on Lavinia, ‘it is those sudden collapses, those abrupt blackouts that frighten me. What should happen if I were at the wheel with you and dear Russell in the back when one of those petits-mals should strike me? One shudders to think.’ To Lavinia those petits-mals looked very much like her husband taking a snooze at short notice in the afternoon, just closing his eyes and having forty winks; surely one didn’t snore during a blackout. But he had not driven since.
‘There!’ she said, having inserted herself into the flood of traffic. She would be all right now. Russell had, as a matter of emphasis, picked up his mobile phone and was, almost certainly, playing the game he was so addicted to. In two minutes he would consider that he had made his point, and set it down.
‘It was level 746, apparently,’ Lavinia said. ‘That was the cause of the trouble. The significance of it!’
‘Thank Heaven for small mercies,’ Jeremy said, seeing that she was inspecting her son in the wing mirror. ‘At least the wretched boy has turned the sound down. I simply couldn’t bear that music.’
Three months ago, Jeremy had had a suggestion from his bishop. It was known that he spoke German – the relic of his degree. The bishop had noticed that he and dear Lavinia had now been in Penge for ten years. They had done awfully well; the bishop had so much enjoyed the fête he had come to with Mrs Bish two years ago. A tombola and a coconut stall! A competition for constructing scenes from current affairs in vegetables (the resignation of Ed Miliband in green beans, pumpkin and a disconcertingly well-carved potato the acclaimed winner)! A Horrifying Spectacle tent which you paid 50p to enter to see Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen, the real one, in a velvet armchair. And (the bishop’s favourite, to tell the honest truth) a Guess the Weight stall with a cake, a guinea pig and an obliging curate to guess at. Awfully charming and entirely like a country fête, but in Penge. The bishop immensely appreciated the efforts that Jeremy and dear Lavinia had put in, and their success in greatly increasing attendance on Sundays and making the church a wonderfully real focus of the community. (There had been folk-music concerts, as well as the occasional string sextet playing Brahms on Saturday nights; one was popular, the other closer to Jeremy’s heart.) But had they ever considered moving on?
The bishop was a cosy old poppet, hopelessly over-promoted; he was grateful for any kind of signs of life below him, and happy to agree with whoever had last voiced an opinion. It was impossible to say definitively whether he was evangelical or not; he was clearly delighted to have been elevated to be Bishop of Wandle, and had, genuinely, no ambition to go any further. For these reasons he was popular in the highest ranks of the Church, and his very occasional requests for favours were usually granted.
Had Jeremy ever thought, perhaps, the bishop went on, of a parish outside England? They were unusual posts, each very much of their own, and very much requiring someone of initiative. It was terribly important not to create scandal, despite the lack of close daily oversight. It wouldn’t do for the bishop in charge to arrive from Gibraltar to find half a dozen teenage rent-boys lolling about the vicarage, entertaining themselves in frightful fashion by smashing priceless antique plates … at least, not again. (Jeremy had heard this story of misbehaviour in a historic European parish in some detail; he nodded sagely.) So, naturally, when the bishop had heard about this coming vacancy, he had thought immediately of Jeremy and, of course, dear Lavinia. Where? Oh, hadn’t he said? It was Salzburg – the Anglican vicar of western Austria. Of course, Vienna looked after itself. Very pretty, the vicar’s house in Salzburg, an eighteenth-century palace, but naturally one wouldn’t need to live in the whole thing. The Archbishop of Salzburg had been awfully unlucky not to have been made an elector back in the old days, and now they really had more palaces than they knew what to do with. One of which was ours, now, incredibly. Inconvenient number of bedrooms. Ideal for hide-and-seek on rainy days, or Sardines – did people still play Sardines?
Jeremy told Lavinia about this offer when they were alone in the vicarage, a three-bedroomed yellow-brick construction from the 1960s with windows that could do with replacing; Russell was out on a Saturday afternoon, hanging around with his three friends. She would always remember that when he said the name of Salzburg, she leant forward and clasped his hands in hers, out of joy. It would make everything all right; it would justify everything; it would mean so much to Jeremy, to be surrounded by beauty and intelligent, charming people, to have friends who were musical, to listen even once a month to the music he loved so much, played at the highest possible level. ‘Do you think it’s a serious proposal?’ she said eventually, keeping her voice as level as Jeremy’s. Jeremy thought that it was a serious proposal, or else why mention it?
With Jeremy’s agreement, she told Russell after a week. Jeremy was not in the house. ‘I hate you,’ Russell said. ‘We can’t go to fucking
Austria. What am I supposed to do? Learn fucking Austrian?’
‘They speak German, darling,’ Lavinia said. ‘You’d pick it up in no time.’
‘Don’t you know?’ Russell screamed – he had gone from nought to top decibels in eighteen words. ‘The system’s completely different there. I can’t learn all that stuff and then learn it in a foreign language. I’d fail every single exam and I’d have no friends because no one could talk to me. You’re always wanting to destroy my life. I hate you. This is your idea, it’s you that wants to destroy me. Always, always, always. I fucking hate you and I’m not going. I’m going to live with Blodwen’s parents. They’re cool. They wouldn’t ever go to live in fucking Australia.’
‘Austria, darling,’ Lavinia said. But at the end of four weeks, in which Russell had, if anything, escalated the hostility and beastliness and, at one point, actually hit his father for the sin of calling him ‘old chap’, Jeremy had felt obliged to go to the bishop and tell him that, having discussed it with his family, he felt it would be too great a disruption to his son’s education.
‘How did he take it?’ Lavinia said.
‘It is fair to say,’ Jeremy said, without levity, ‘that he could not believe it. He was literally incredulous. He had not a shred of belief in what he was hearing. And so things come to an end, and the gates of Salzburg are shut to us.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Lavinia said. ‘There will be other chances. There really will. And it’s only four years until beastly Russell leaves school and we can do whatever we like. Think of that. We need never see him again.’
‘Don’t,’ Jeremy said. ‘I wish I could …’ but at that point he had shaken his head, and Lavinia was horrified to see that he was actually crying. ‘No one is ever going to –’ he got out, before the tears got the worse of him. It was so unfair: he had been offered an eighteenth-century palace in a beautiful Austrian city with a Brahms sextet playing with perpetual kindly rapture in an upper room and, like a gift in a fairy tale, it would be offered only once. That was it. Beastly Russell.
Now they were at the motorway service station, and parking the car.
‘Look at that blind man,’ Russell said. ‘How can he get here if he’s blind? He can’t drive a fucking car, can he? That’s just stupid.’
‘He’s not blind, darling,’ Lavinia said, out of habit, without looking.
‘Are you calling me a liar?’ Russell said. ‘You didn’t even fucking look. Look, that blind man over there with the dog.’
There was, in fact, a blind man in the car park, standing irresolutely with his patient dog sitting by his side.
‘I expect somebody has driven him here and he has momentarily separated himself from his friend,’ Jeremy said. ‘He can hardly have driven here himself.’
‘When they shit,’ Russell said, ‘I mean, when guide dogs shit, because every dog, right, they shit the whole time, what are the blindies supposed to do? Do they just stop and wait, do they think that the dog’s stopping for a reason, like there’s a danger around, or do they see that the dog – ha-ha, I said does the blind person see, that’s funny – do they get that the dog’s stopping to have a shit? Because if you don’t pick up your dog’s shit in the street the Old Bill’s going to be after you. But if the blindie, right, if he works out that his dog’s having a shit and he gets out one of those bags, he’s like blind, and how’s he going to pick up the shit, he doesn’t know where it is? Is he just going to feel around until he finds something warm? Because that’s like disgusting.’
‘Oh, you depress me so much,’ Lavinia said. ‘Every single time you open your mouth, you depress me.’
The telephone in Jeremy’s lap rang. It was Lavinia’s, but he answered it.
‘Yes, it’s Jeremy, I’m afraid … Hello, Blossom – how lovely to hear from you. Are you on your …’
He listened intently to what was being told him, with infrequent ‘Yes, that’s probably right’ and ‘Well, yes,’ and ‘That sounds exactly …’ In a couple of minutes, as they were getting out of the little car, he handed the telephone to Lavinia with a smile, and began to wave at someone walking fast, but separated from them by a hundred silver cars. It was, in fact, Blossom herself.
‘I saw you,’ she said, when she was still thirty yards away, calling out of sheer joy. ‘I was so astounded I couldn’t quite believe what I saw – my little sister out on the hard shoulder and her son, too, waving their arms. I said to Josh – here’s Josh, he’s travelling up with us as well – I said could that possibly be Lavinia? What on earth? And in the end, he said why don’t you go to the next service station and call them, and if they need breakdown assistance, we can organize it from there, and if not, then we can just meet up. Very sound advice, very rational as always. I don’t know what we would – Well, hello, Russell, and hello, Jeremy, and hello, you. Of course we were travelling up today! You knew we were!’
Lavinia embraced her sister, not conventionally, but warmly, knowing that Blossom, in the end, was what she had. She had recognized her sister from hundreds of yards away, in fact, almost before Jeremy had started to wave at her. There was a space in the universe through which Blossom moved, and Blossom’s movements were most special to Lavinia. She was the only one still standing. Of course Blossom had recognized her in return, infallibly recognized her in a moment passing at speed. There was no one else who could fill the space allotted to Lavinia.
‘Well,’ Lavinia said, ‘let’s go and have a cup of tea or something.’
‘And afterwards,’ Blossom said, with every appearance of enthusiasm, ‘we can swap the passengers. You can have Josh and Thomas – here they come, they can’t believe it either – and I’ll have lovely Russell. No, just the three of us – Stephen couldn’t come in the end and boring old Trev and her friend Alison, they’re coming under their own steam. Is that quite all right, Russell? I do hope so. Now, darling …’
Lavinia trotted after Blossom. She could feel herself warmly preparing to be funny about beastly Russell over a nice cup of tea. Behind them her husband was saying, ‘I’m sure Mummy didn’t mean it, but you have to admit, old chap …’
8.
Omith and Raja and Martin were nowhere that mattered, and were in the same place, talking. Or in old-school terms, like real-world terms if you trusted the assumptions inherent in the words real and world, Omith was on the twenty-seventh floor of a tower in Toronto. Raja was in a hotel in Athens. Martin was in the first-class lounge at Qatar airport waiting to change planes. Private jets were bullshit, they’d all agreed. You could save an incredible amount of money if you flew commercial, and the auditors and shareholders would be thrilled with you. Martin preferred to fly with Qatar because the first class had not just a separate lounge but a whole separate building, glistening with white and glass surfaces, the air inside chilled to the bone, and everyone was just … politer all the way through. They were talking about something Martin and Raja said they got and Omith was insisting he didn’t get and thought there was nothing to get.
Just watch it again, bruv
I watched it. I aint watchin it again bruv theres nothing there to get
Old man talking
Yeah yeah and whose forty next March
I get it. Just watch it again bruv
Fuck how much do I have to do to get you to shut TF
Just do it or Im pulling the plug and Mart and me we’re talking and thats the end of it bruv
Right koooooool
They watched it again, all simultaneously, the comments from Raja and Martin coming thick and fast. There was something in the tone of Raja’s enthusiasm that made Omith think that he, in fact, did not get it; he only thought that he should get it; he was worried that there were fifteen-year-olds called Mustafa or Amber or David or Jonelle or Bobby or Anaconda who were watching this, transfixed, seeing the thing they’d been waiting for all their lives in it, the perfection of entertainment and wit and –
He didn’t even know. Was it supposed to be funny? Did Musta
fa and Amber and David and Jonelle and Bobby and Anaconda split their jolly old sides when they watched this stuff? Or was it just Raja, pretending to laugh, alone in the hotel room in Athens, where he had gone to buy a Cycladic figure from a dealer, laughing because he couldn’t think of another response to convey? Omith didn’t know. They watched the thing. It was soon over.
A girl of perhaps eight, a black girl with pink ribbons in her hair and big eyes, had, just before the clip started, run up in the direction of the camera. She said, breathlessly, ‘Seventy-two.’ You wondered, too late to examine, whether something had been done to adjust the size of her eyes when the eyes held and mutated into those of a small boy, rebellious on a rocking chair, who said, in tones of disgust, ‘Sixty-three,’ raising his hand, which focused and turned and went into black and white, an old film of a super-sweet girl with blonde hair and ringlets who said, ‘Fifty-five,’ before the word FIN was printed in screen-sized letters and it was over. It took seven seconds from start to FIN.
That was like the future
Did you see when she said 55 and you thought man that’s Shirley Temple saying it the wrong
This ones better than that prime one
The one that goes 2 3 5 7 10
With the old woman Thatcher is it going the 10 the wrong
I don’t get it
Cos it got to be 54 this one only NOT and maybe like 11 in the old woman Thatcher is it one only NOT.
Don’t you fullstop me asshole
I tell you if you pay a cent more than 25 mil for those jokers in Chicago you aint no kin of mine
Chill bruv they aint gonna need more than 19 max
WILTH but the fuck is Shirley Temple is it IDK and the kooool kids who like this they aint never heard of her neither so this is like sadface
Ye well stick with what you know and is happy with bruv like your board of halma and ludo and a nice game of chess
The Friendly Ones Page 58
