Turning round in his chair, he displays an olive-shaped object on his palm. ‘Dad?’ he calls. ‘Dad? This won’t fit.’
Robert lowers his newspaper to peer at what Gareth is showing him. ‘What is it?’ he asks.
‘I think it’s the clutch,’ says Gareth, regarding his own hand with a serious expression, as if presenting a rash to a doctor.
‘I think you’re right,’ Robert tells him, equally serious.
‘It won’t fit. I know where it goes but it won’t go in.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ says Robert, folding the paper, but before he can get out of his chair she is crossing the room to the table.
‘I’ll help you,’ she says to Gareth, taking the piece from his hand.
‘I want Dad to do it.’
‘I’ll have a go, Gareth. Your father’s reading the paper. If I can’t do it, he can take over. Let him finish his paper,’ she smiles, picking up the lid.
He allows her five seconds with the diagram, then tells her, putting a finger on the chassis: ‘It goes there.’
‘OK, OK. I know.’ She puts the tiny stump that’s attached to the underside of the piece over the hole into which it should fit, pushes lightly, and it doesn’t go in.
‘See. It won’t work.’
‘Easily fixed. This is a bit too thick, that’s all,’ she says, indicating the little stump before raising it to her mouth.
Seeing her put the piece between her teeth, he pulls her hand away. ‘No,’ he protests. ‘Don’t bite it.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t want marks on it.’
‘There won’t be any marks that you can see. This bit’s going in there, so you won’t see anything. These are precision instruments. Look,’ she urges him, giving him a bright, wide, mad smile, at which he flinches in playful fear.
‘OK,’ he agrees, overcoming his reluctance.
‘OK,’ she confirms. ‘One little nip and it’ll be done. Top-grade workwomanship guaranteed.’ Lightly she bites the stub, then pops the piece into place.
Resting a forefinger on the top of the clutch, he tests the tightness of the assembly.
‘To your satisfaction, young sir?’
‘Thanks,’ he says, with a trace of disappointment.
‘My pleasure,’ she replies, kissing the top of his head, as an upstairs door opens and closes, and a minute later Stephanie comes into the room, wearing the black top that they bought for her yesterday, and the new black jeans. ‘The right size, then?’ she asks.
‘Yes. Exactly right. Thank you,’ says Stephanie. ‘Thank you both,’ she adds, with a smile for Robert.
Robert lowers his newspaper. ‘Looks nice,’ he observes.
‘Black is the new black,’ she declares, and she touches Gareth’s ear softly, a gesture which Gareth receives with a smile that has a watchfulness to it, because he has noticed, as they all have noticed, that she has been in a peculiar mood, a better mood, since coming back from seeing her father. ‘What you doing, squirt?’ she asks, crouching beside him, resting a hand on his shoulder.
‘The Land Rover,’ he replies and he explains about the part that didn’t fit.
‘Are they new?’ Robert enquires, when the explanation is over.
‘Are what new?’ says Stephanie, standing up.
‘The jeans.’
‘Yep.’
‘Look like they’re about to fall down.’
‘They’re meant to look like this. I’ve got another pair exactly the same. You didn’t say anything about them.’
‘Amazed you can walk in them, that’s all.’
‘Well I can, see?’ she says, striding into the middle of the room. ‘With practice, anything’s possible.’
‘I wouldn’t try running for the bus,’ Robert concludes, raising the paper.
Jutting out a hip, Stephanie plucks at the ring in her navel, mulling over a reply. ‘I’m going to get a glass of juice,’ she says after a sigh. ‘Anyone want anything? Small unit? Anything?’ she asks Gareth, giving his ear a soft tweak. He shakes his head, engrossed in his model, and Stephanie goes off to the kitchen, making the legs of her jeans flap loudly, watched by Robert, in whose eyes an affectionate amusement is overcoming annoyance.
‘How do they stay up?’ Robert asks the room.
Gnawing his lip with concentration, Gareth eases the engine into its slot.
‘OK?’ she asks. Gareth nods, and she gets up from the table, kissing the top of his head again, too strongly.
Upstairs, Stephanie returns to the e-mail that came this morning.
With best wishes from all the acorns. We hope to have the privilege of welcoming you back soon
she reads. She clicks to open the attachment and the picture of the Oak blooms on the screen. Glowing in the sun, the building rises against an unbelievable blue sky, above lawns that are brake-fluid green. In the middle of each lawn there is a flower bed that appears to have been planted with scarlet plastic tulips, and a driveway as white as a glacier leads to the porch, in which a gang of people in white has gathered. She scrolls down to the second picture, a close-up of the porch, and the staff of the Oak arranged in teams. To the left are the kitchen staff, all smiling and clad entirely in white; to the right are the chambermaids, all smiling, wearing dainty white aprons over black dresses; behind the chambermaids there’s a line of miscellaneous male flunkies in maroon, all extremely happy too, especially the one standing out on his own, which is David, superimposed on the original photo and on a fractionally larger scale, holding two suitcases, with his arms and legs bowed like a gorilla’s, and his tongue shoved under his lower lip to give him an idiot’s grin; and in the middle, on the highest step, are the three suits, who evidently were granted an exemption from the order to smile. The middle suit, the tallest of the trio, is her father. His head is tilted a degree or two, his arms are crossed low on his chest and he regards the camera with an air of condescending welcome.
Like the day-glo artwork. Where did you find the group photo? Mind-boggling. Disgusting.
Letter by letter she deletes what she has written. Unable to think against the interference created by the image of her father, she examines it again. Her father looks ridiculous, like someone in a terrible TV series about life in a posh hotel. She wonders how old the picture is, how old she would have been when it was taken. His face is thinner than it is now, and his hairline is squarer. Perhaps the photo was taken when he became the manager, to mark the start of the new boss’s reign. She studies his face, and sees a man complacently secure in his life, a man satifisfied at being in the occupation for which he was born. He would never have made an effort to get in touch with her, she is sure, no matter what he says. Looking at his face, she finds it hard to believe he ever thought of her. She brings her eyes closer to the screen, until the figure of her father dissolves into the bodies and the building around him. For another half-hour she sits at her computer, typing and deleting and typing.
Malcolm sits on a bench beside the Serpentine, enjoying the light of the last half-hour of sunlight. A stillness, like a pausing of time, has settled on the park. The trees on the opposite bank have pale brass foliage and floes of dark orange lie on the surface of the lake. A mild warmth rises from the wide slope of bare dry earth, where a dozen geese are ambling, their feathers pinkened by the setting sun. The sound of the city’s traffic comes through the trees as a pleasant low monotone, like the movement of air fanned through huge pipes. With a feeling of incipient contentment, a sense of the complications and the pleasures of the coming months, he looks around him. Under a birch tree a burly old man, Scandinavian or German, to judge by the colouring and build, has taken a wine bottle from a vast plastic cooler and is pouring drinks for his family. A man and woman with Andean cheekbones are walking on the path, preceded by three women wearing chadors. Behind them, lads who look Moroccan are playing football, and on the next bench along sits a plump young woman – Ghanaian perhaps – who holds in one hand a book and in the other the ha
nd of her boyfriend, who is scruffy in an English way and seems to be fast asleep, with his head on her shoulder. Surveying the people in the park, he tells himself that it will be good to be in London again, and to be near Stephanie as well, and he recalls again her face as she sat by the window in his office, gazing out at the garden.
When the air begins to cool he gets up from the bench and walks towards the bridge. Ahead of him the crowd is splitting down the centre, and in the gap that has opened he sees a line of plastic cups, upside down, set along the middle of the path. A girl of Stephanie’s age, more or less, and dressed as Stephanie might dress, in a short white vest and olive-green combat pants slung low on her hips, is skating, very fast, backwards, bent sharply at the waist, looking over her shoulder as she races up to the row of cups. Her ankles make a speedy scissoring motion and she slaloms down the whole line without touching a single cup, her boots crossing and recrossing so swiftly he’s amazed she doesn’t fall. She turns in a wide arc, leaning into the turn, her arms outstretched less for balance, it appears, than for the style of it. She skates behind the teenaged boys who have gathered to watch her and are clapping as she passes, though she pays them no attention. Fifty yards away, she swivels to a halt. Resolute as a ski-jumper she crouches, assessing the obstacles, then she is gaining again, skating backwards her eyes fixed on the first cup. Her feet weave through the row at extraordinary speed, but this time she clips a cup, which spins across the path and is retrieved by one of the boys, who runs out to set it upright, a service unacknowledged by the girl. Back at her starting place, she tugs at the straps on her boots, scowling, as if a problem with their fit might have caused the mistake. The boys start up a rhymthic clap, which ceases as she begins her approach. With a whoop of elation they hail her errorless completion of the course, and this time she offers them a modest bow, at which the whooping becomes even louder.
Captivated by the girl’s skill and hauteur, and by the exuberance of the adoring boys, he finds himself applauding too, but instantly becomes aware of how things might appear and walks away, up to the bridge, not looking as the girl swoops across him. Yet he stops on the bridge to watch another run, and another, after which one of the boys – the one who retrieved the cup – says something to the girl as she passes behind him, a comment that makes her laugh. She skates up the slope, shaking her head at whatever the boy had said. The light has gone out of the trees now; the floes of orange are no longer on the water. Three geese glide under the bridge, and the wavelets of their wake are mole-black and tarnished bronze, but in the sky to the south a plane’s condensation trail, lit by the sun, has drawn a streak of luscious carnation pink across the darkening sky. He watches the trail of pink vapour spreading, thinning, and hears the cheering of the boys, and a wistful regret descends on him, the familiar regret, but now unusually acute, for the missed years of Stephanie’s youth. The girl has sat down on the path to remove her skates; one of the boys is picking up the cups, while his friends stand in a semicircle around the girl, at a respectful distance, as if they were in the presence of a famous sportswoman. Over the rooftops lies a wide and narrow bank of cloud, a ridge of modest peaks, rising not far above the roofline even at its highest, dropping below the buildings here and there. Thinking of nothing, in a vacancy coloured by regret, he stares at the ridge of cloud, at its multitudinous greys and whites, the colours of a seagull’s wing. And then, suddenly, with the surprise of realising that the face before him is the face of someone he knows, what he sees is a real range of mountains, a real massif of rock and ice. He has a sense of the distance and the altitude of the peaks, of the gradients of the ravines, just as, standing with his father at the end of Saltburn pier, leaning on a length of rusting rail, he would look at the clouds massing out at sea or looming over the town and would see them as mountains, a landscape so vivid that he could imagine himself inside it, surrounded by immense summits that no one could climb. A time came when, on their walks, his father would sometimes tell him about the mountains he had seen in Switzerland, describing cliffs as sheer as windows, and snow that became ice under the weight of new snow, and the cataract that was inside a mountain and made a noise so loud it was impossible to hear your own voice beside it, even if you shouted. While his father studied the clouds, remembering the real Switzerland, he would be mesmerised by the Switzerland he imagined, a country he pictured as an endless vista of mountains as huge as clouds, with the sunlight gleaming on enormous glaciers, and distant waterfalls as dark as ink. One windy afternoon, after they had been to the cemetery, they went down to the seafront to find that the swells were breaking over the end of the pier. They walked through drifts of spray to the Valley Gardens, and there was something in the gardens – a particular flower, he seems to remember – that started his father talking about Switzerland, and it was on that afternoon, through some observation that his father made, that he understood what he perhaps should have understood by then, from hints he had been too obtuse to hear: that when his father reminisced about Switzerland with such familiarity and affection, when he made him imagine the things he had seen there, he was not talking about a place he knew extensively – he was recollecting just seven days of his life, the single week he had spent there with his wife, a year after they were married. That was what his father saw in his mind when they stood together on the pier, and the sight of it seemed to give him a happiness so intense that it overcame his loss for a while, as though the happiness of the past had flowed undiluted into the present. Leaning on the parapet of the bridge, gazing down on his distant reflection, he can see his father’s face, the way his mouth would be set into a smile by the very act of pronouncing the name of Switzerland. But he can also see his face on the one occasion when the happiness of that week failed his father, the evening on which, for a reason that now is lost, and possibly was never known, he brought into the living room a box, a shoebox, from which he took a wallet of photographs that he had never shown him before. There was the north face of the Eiger, ice-clad in the sun, with a solitary puffball of cloud stuck to it. There was the funicular at Lauterbrunnen, as steep as the one in Saltburn, but ten times longer. And there was his mother, aged twenty-two, with her hair in a ponytail and wearing a skirt that his father told him was cherry red. With the skirt hitched above her knees, she sat on parched grass beside a lake, by a tiny jetty, dangling her feet in the water, laughing, aghast at the coldness of it. ‘That’s Thun. We must go there one day, you and me,’ was all his father said as they looked at that picture. It was the only time he ever saw tears in his father’s eyes. And when at last he did go to Thun, after it was all over with Kate, on the first morning he went for a walk along the shore of the lake. After an hour or so he came to a flight of stone steps that went down into the water, and he took off his shoes to dip his feet. A miniature steamboat was chugging down the lake. As he placed his feet on the submerged step he looked to the left, at a small promontory where the lakeside path swerved out, and he recognised the little jetty and the house beyond it, and the curve of the bank at that point. He walked on, to stand where his father had stood to take the photograph of his mother, looking at the very place where his mother had sat, and tears came into his eyes, at the memory of his father crying, and the thought of Kate and Stephanie and of the mother of whom he knew almost nothing, and at the thought of his father’s grief and his father’s happiness.
Returning to the hotel, he recalls his own week in Thun and the trips to the Lauterbrunnen valley. He recalls the waterfalls spilling over the cliffs as rivers and reaching the ground as mist, the helicopter diminishing to a speck before it was clear of the valley’s walls, the cable car ride through thickening cloud. He recalls the rack railway up through Wengen, and imagines Stephanie with him, craning her neck from the carriage window as they emerge from the trees and being astounded by the sheer north face of the Eiger. Right away, as if the realisation of the idea would be made more probable by its being announced immediately, he calls Stephanie from a quiet corner on the step
s behind the Albert Hall, and Kate answers.
‘I think she’d love it,’ he tells her.
‘And what makes you think she’d love it?’
‘I can’t imagine she wouldn’t.’
‘Not quite the same thing, is it?’
‘No,’ he agrees. ‘But don’t you think she would?’
‘I really wouldn’t like to say. I’ve given up trying to fathom the mind of my daughter.’
‘Our daughter,’ he nearly says, but Kate’s voice this evening, tired rather than hostile, makes him revoke the correction before he can utter it. ‘Well, I thought I might mention it. Just as an idea to think about. Would you mind?’
‘I think you’re getting ahead of the game.’
‘Maybe. But would you mind?’
‘I’ll talk to Robert.’
‘OK. Thanks.’
‘Malcolm, don’t cringe. Please.’
Again he stifles his reply, taking a breath, perhaps loud enough to be heard, and looking up at the great dome of the Albert Hall, at the indigo sky, waiting for Kate to continue.
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