Macy was a silhouette waiting for him outside the gallery. The same dark green coat and beret from the day at Westminster. Leather satchel off one shoulder.
‘I sold a painting,’ she said. Her face shone just like her father’s.
‘You are now an artist.’
‘No. I was always an artist. Now I am a painter.’
He laughed. ‘What would you like to do?’
‘Nothing. Just walk.’
‘In this fog?’
‘Yes, in this fog.’
Again he felt her arm in his, fingers tightening to claim possession, making him feel warm and wanted from the attention. They were in their own world now, cocooned by the fog, where he could protect her from lampposts, pavement edges, reckless pedestrians, strange shadows emerging into their private space before disappearing again. Hazy orange glows from headlamps, street lamps, torches and table lamps. Cold, sharp voices. People humming or whistling to be heard. Car horns. A bus creeping by, passengers with the faces of the dead staring out at them.
‘We’re living in exciting times,’ he said.
‘Yeah, I feel that too. But why do you think so?’
‘I think we are finally shaking off the drudgery of the war. People are looking to the future now. With fresh ideas.’
‘It’s different for you. For you British.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘You didn’t wipe out two cities with atomic bombs.’
‘I never thought the Americans felt too guilty about that.’
‘That’s the problem. They don’t. People like my father feel it was just cause to vaporise tens of thousands of civilians.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘She could never understand it. That was why she hated Japan. People were killing her with kindness yet she felt so guilty. Anyway, we’re here now.’
‘Where?’
‘Where I live.’
He was amazed to discover there had been a direction to their meandering. Now, he stood in a pillared doorway of what must be a grand Georgian mansion. He could just make out the black-and-white tiled steps.
‘I’d like to see you again,’ she said, searching in her satchel for a pen. ‘Do you have a telephone at your digs?’
He shook his head.
‘OK. You can telephone me then.’ She wrote down the number on one of her flyers. ‘You can find your way back?’
‘I think so.’
‘Just keep going east. That way.’
Her lips brushed his cheek. Then awkwardly, they were face to face, her eyes darting nervously. Her fingers played with a button of his jacket. He kissed her. It was such a spontaneous action. For if he had thought about it, he would never have done it. But there he was. Kissing her. Full on the mouth. Her lips cold and dry, yet wonderfully pliant. The sensation ethereal. Like wisps of fog.
That brief kiss lingered for days. He thought he could still feel the imprint as he lifted the receiver of the public telephone at the White Lion, fumbled with his coins, pressed button ‘A’, then ‘B’ on connection.
‘I’m afraid Miss Collingwood is not at home,’ said a cool female voice.
He felt a droplet of sweat trickle down his ribcage. ‘Do you know when she will be back?’
‘I do not have that information. I am only the housekeeper.’
‘Will she be back for dinner?’
‘That I do not know.’
‘Well, when would be a good time to call?’
‘That I also do not know. Sometimes she is here. Sometimes she isn’t.’
‘Can you tell her Eddie called?’
‘Is there a number where she can reach you?’
‘No, that’s the problem. Wait. Give her this number. It is a public telephone at the White Lion. She knows where it is. I will make sure I am here. At nine p.m. Can you tell her to call at nine p.m.?’
‘Miss Collingwood knows of such a place?’
‘Yes, she does.’
‘And you want her to call this White Lion tonight at nine p.m.?’
‘Yes. But it doesn’t have to be tonight. Any night this week.’
‘I will pass on the message.’
The White Lion became his study and his observation post. A table by the fire, the very same table where he had first sat with her. But the telephone never rang for him. After three days, he called once more only to be rebuffed again by the housekeeper. After five days, the end of her exhibition closed off another avenue of opportunity. He became more agitated as his mood rapidly disintegrated from hope to dejection. After a week, he decided he had no choice but to visit her at home.
It took him a while to find the house. He had remembered the number, etched in elegant black on both pillars, from the night of the kiss, but in his excitement he had forgotten to search for the street name. Just as he began to panic that even this connection had been snatched away by the fog, Mayfair revealed her secret to him. For an hour, he set up a vigil across the street. He hunted the lighted windows for a glimpse of her, imagined her in one of the topmost rooms busy at her easel or with canvas stretched across the floor. When that endeavour ended fruitless, he went back into Mayfair until he found a flower-seller, purchased the finest bouquet he could afford. Suitably armed, he approached the impressive Georgian doorway and rang the bell. Where he had expected a housekeeper, an elderly gentleman in a maroon smoking jacket answered the door.
‘Is Miss Collingwood in?’ Edward asked.
The man looked suspiciously at the bunch of flowers. ‘Are these for my wife?’
‘I am looking for a Miss Collingwood.’
‘No one of that name lives here.’
‘A Mr Collingwood? He is on the staff at the American Embassy.’
‘I am afraid you have made a mistake.’
‘But that is impossible. She brought me to this door.’
‘A mistake.’
The door began to close on him. He wanted to push by this doddery gatekeeper, to announce his arrival, to demand to be seen.
‘A mistake.’ And with a final click, Edward was left standing alone on the step.
‘Misery loves company, does it not?’
Edward looked up from the Japanese textbook, which had become no more than hazy scratches before his eyes. Aldous stood before him in a pinstriped suit spattered with raindrops. A pink rose hung limp from a lapel. A raindrop ran down his cheek.
‘Aldous. I didn’t know you drank in here.’
‘I don’t. But I saw your glum face as I passed by the window. I bring you more of the same poison.’ He placed a pint of bitter on the table, a glass of whisky for himself.
‘So what ails the young these days?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Aldous laughed. ‘Then it must be a woman.’
He refused to answer.
‘Young men pine for only one thing. The illusion of love. Am I right?’
‘I grudgingly admit it.’
‘Then please tell.’
And he did. To an almost complete stranger. But who else had he to narrate his tale in this lonely metropolis? Unfortunately, Aldous was not a sympathetic listener.
‘So that’s it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She deceived you with the wrong address and you consider this to be the end of the world?’
‘She hasn’t returned one call in two weeks. And the housekeeper refuses to give me the right address.’
‘Have you tried the embassy?’
‘The guards won’t let me get near Collingwood unless I am on official business.’
‘I think this Macy is just trying to weave a little web of mystery.’
‘A little web of misery is more like it.’
‘That may be the case. But look at the bright side. She gave you the right telephone number. It seems she is reeling you in with the one hand, pushing you away with the other. The classic ruse of seduction.’
‘Well, it’s working.’
‘So, I see. Well, let’s have another drink to celebrate your tortured soul. This Scotch is rather nice. More of the same, Edward. More of the same.’
By the closing bell, Edward was quite drunk. His companion suggested a nightcap at his place, offering commodious yet warm rooms above the meagre offices of The Londinium as the lure. Along with a decanter of the finest single malt.
The stairway to these apartments was dark and steep, rendered more treacherous by the smoothness of the well-worn steps. Using a hand-over-hand grip on the banister, Edward managed the first landing to the door of The Londinium, then needed Aldous to haul him the rest of the way.
‘Onwards and upwards, dear boy. Onwards and upwards.’
Edward had not asked if there was a Mrs Aldous, assumed for some reason there wouldn’t be. And he was proved right. Instead there was a ginger cat, which leapt to greet him, almost tripping him over on the threshold.
‘Don’t mind, Macavity,’ Aldous said, stroking the creature into a purring frenzy. ‘He is the most read-to cat in Christendom.’
The flat was large with doors leading off the hallway into cavernous, high-ceilinged rooms. But any sense of space was reduced by the presence of books. They appeared everywhere, not just on the layers upon layers of shelves but on every vacant surface, tucked into every available niche, slotted into drawers, bowls, even footwear. The floor of the living room was stacked with several tottering towers of magazines, copies of The Londinium mostly, presenting a serious obstacle course between Edward and the sofa, which at this point was his necessary destination. He just had to sit down, settle the wooziness inside his head.
He watched Aldous stoke up the coals in the grate until a fierce fire blazed – the only light in the room apart from the glow off the street lamps through the windows. A hand stroked his shoulder, then a glass brimful of whisky appeared. Aldous settled in an armchair opposite, lit up a cigarette, and for a while they did nothing but sip at their malts, gaze into the fire.
‘What you should do is write about it,’ Aldous said. The fire had tired and the man was a lean shadow in his chair, located by the purring cat, the arc of his cigarette describing the movement of his arm.
‘Write what about what?’ Edward’s head ached, his eyes drooped heavy, giving him little patience for Aldous’ circumlocutions, which he had discovered marked the man’s discourse style. Either that or the complete opposite. Direct and downright rudeness.
‘A short story. About your… how can I say…? Your little tragedy.’
‘You are making fun of me.’
‘No, I am merely making a creative suggestion.’
‘I should write a short story about Macy?’
‘No, no. That would be terribly boring. An awful self-indulgence. No, first you should choose your overriding feeling. For all good fiction must be about something. Some underlying theme.’
‘Well, that’s easy. Anger. That is my overriding feeling.’
‘And why are you angry?’
‘Because I have been rejected.’
‘Good. Then write about rejection.’
‘About Macy rejecting me?’
‘As I said, that would just be autobiographical slush of no interest to anyone but yourself. No, you must find a vehicle for your rejection. A disguise through which you can vent your feelings.’
‘I don’t understand what you are saying.’
‘I think you do. It is just that you are a little worse for wear.’
‘Aldous?’
‘Yes, my dear boy.’
‘I am tired. Awfully tired.’
‘Then you must sleep here. That sofa has a well-used history. I will bring you some blankets.’
Edward adjusted into a prone position, closed his eyes. The movement inside his head, the swaying darkness, began to settle, find its balance. Like waves inside a tub coming to rest. Lipping and lapping into stillness. A warm bath. The water settling gently over him. Playthings floating on the surface. Suds like clouds. A bar of soap slithering around his body. He let himself submerge into the liquidity and then re-emerge baptised with cleanliness. His mother stroking his wet hair. Yes, he liked that. Stroking his hair. So gentle. So soothing. Then a kiss upon his forehead. So light.
‘Goodnight, Edward.’
‘Goodnight, Aldous.’
Edward didn’t remember much of that drunken night but he did take Aldous’ advice. He wrote his story, found a vehicle for his narrative, a platform for his wounded voice. Rejection was his subject, and rejection was what he received. Nine times he submitted the manuscript to his new-found friend and nine times it was returned scarred with the red marks of aggressive revision. But the tenth effort Aldous accepted for publication in The Londinium. It told the story of an ex-soldier, rendered socially useless by the loss of an arm, who had taken to a life of begging on Brighton seafront. Each day, he watched a beautiful woman from one of the nearby Regency houses glide down to the promenade on her roller skates to perform elaborate dances in front of him. Of course, he fell in love with her. And she used that love to cruelly humiliate him in ways that Edward found hard to believe he was capable of imagining. Until she eventually rejected that poor beggar. As did the sea. For his body was found washed up with the pebbles on the shore. The Girl on Roller Skates was Edward’s first published work. And Aldous never paid him a penny for it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tokyo, Japan • 2003
It was all around him. This ping-ding, flashing, Hello Kitty, Softbank-Sony, pachinko-pachinko, vending-machine, giant plasma screen, cartoon, Shibuya girls, 100 Megabits per second, nonsense. And the cars. Of course, he knew all about the cars. Even in alphabetical order. Daihatsu, Fuji, Hino, Honda, Isuzu, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Suzuki, Toyota. The taxi driver had a stop-start Buddha patience for them while beside him Jerome appeared oblivious to the crazy world outside. It was noon yet electric lights rippled and spangled through the windows, staining the vehicle’s interior in shades of synthetic colours. Salary men in identical raincoats brushed past them. A girl with pink hair. A gigantic, lurid-green octopus painted on to the side of a building, its tentacles strangling the concrete. What was that all about? He didn’t belong in this jingle-jangle world. How did Aldous describe it? ‘The Japanese have an exquisite sense of what is beautiful and no sense at all of what is ugly.’ That was it. How these two sensibilities could exist in one culture was an enigma to him. He wondered how Jerome felt about all this rampant consumerism. After all, he had been in MacArthur’s advance party. He had seen first hand how Tokyo used to be. A burnt-out firework with a few charred buildings left standing in the central district, most of which were instantly corralled by the military for their headquarters. It was an opportunity to build again, to create something magnificent.
‘What do you think of all this?’ Edward asked, waving a hand at the madness beyond the window.
‘A moment.’ Jerome blew loudly into his handkerchief. ‘It’s the air-con. Gets me every time. What were you saying?’
‘I was asking about Tokyo.’
‘Youth has taken over, Eddie. It’s not meant to be a place for old men. We’ve no right to criticise.’
‘All right then. But if you had to comment, what would you say?’
‘The crows got bigger.’
‘Is that it? The crows got bigger.’
‘You should see them now. They’re like vultures. Giant black eagles. Stealth bombers. It’s frightening.’
‘You exaggerate.’
‘Don’t bet on it. One of these days an enormous black bird is going to pick up a child, whisk him away. A shrieking, flapping figure fading away into a sky-high blot. That’s when the shit will hit the fan. When people will finally sit up and take notice.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Damn right, pal. That’s my metaphor for the free-market experiment. A population under attack from giant crows. Pure sci-fi. And you know how the Japanese respond to this airborne threat?’
‘I don’t know. S
hoot them down with air rifles. Poison them.’
‘They lay out plastic bottles of water by the garbage collection points. Rows of fucking bottled water. Can you believe that? The light glinting off the liquid is supposed to scare off the predators. You gotta laugh. Talk about treating the symptoms and not the cause.’
‘So why stay?’
‘I’m used to it, I guess.’
‘You’re used to it,’ Edward said resignedly, sinking back into the seat. ‘Never thought you’d get used to anything. Especially Japan.’
‘Why are you so critical? You were here at the beginning. You knew what was coming. The motor industry was probably the start of it all and they moved on from there. Wakon-Yoshi. Remember? Japanese spirit, Western ability. They’ve made a very rich living out of that, thank you very much. And what you see before you is the reward.’
‘That’s not what they do best at all. What they do best is find the beauty in the spaces, in the silences, in what’s in between. Not all this… how do you New Yorkers say it…? All this crap.’
‘Hey, Eddie, I know you’re a great author and everything. But you’re being a bit too Zen. You always had a very romantic notion of life here. Very haiku, shmaiku, you were. Yeah, you can still find what you’re talking about. You’ve just got to look much harder these days, that’s all. Scrape the surface with a bulldozer. Lob in a few grenades. Get underneath all this crap, as you say.’ Jerome leaned forward, tapped the driver’s shoulder, said something in Japanese. The driver just shrugged.
‘If we don’t get a move on, we’ll be late,’ Jerome said, turning back to him. ‘Don’t want to keep the dean waiting.’
Edward closed his eyes, breathed in deep, tried just for a few moments to shut out the noise and the lights, still himself against the anger that seemed to rise so quickly these days. And this sudden tiredness bearing down on him. So heavy and irresistible.
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