To Heaven by Water

by Justin Cartwright

  His memories of former blitheness are crowding Nancy out, as if they are rushing to fill a vacuum. While Nancy was alive he always felt a buzz of unease; this version of himself was burdened by the sense that he was never quite able to make her happy. Yet he knows that almost all his friends – male and female – believe that in some way they have been diminished by marriage. The people who say that their wife or husband is their best friend are deceived; and the reason is that love and friendship are different. Coleridge prized friendship very highly, but it was male friendship: the unspeakable comfort to a good man’s mind, nay even to a criminal, to be understood – to have someone who understands one. The hope of this, always more or less disappointed, gives the passion to friendship.

  He can’t tell Ed or Lucy that their father is in some ways happier now that their mother is dead. But to his own mind he is more himself than he has been for nearly forty years, and he has friends, a little ravaged it is true, who understand him. As far as that is possible. When Nancy was alive, he had secrets that he kept from her. Now that she is dead he has a secret that he must keep from his children: he is not unhappy.

  But he knows that, for example, he will never be as happy as he was that summer in Rome.

  The restaurant is now warmly alive; the rich fog of Hunan chilli and Szechuan pickle and dark soy and faintly medicinal sesame and hot peppercorns has swirled into every corner, and into this suspension the warmth of human bodies has infiltrated itself. From behind their table David can still smell, he imagines, the scent of sweet-and-sour pork. He looks round to see that the man with the nicotine hair is wiping his face with a hot towel while his wife looks on. She smiles at David, who winks, absurdly and conspiratorially.

  Simon, who is now fully animated, asks Adam about his new novel.

  Adam understands that this is his cue.

  ‘Which fucking novel would that be? I don’t write novels. I gave it up. I hate all novels written since 1940. But mostly I hate novels which describe the awful problems of being a writer and novels about a mysterious legacy of papers found in a trunk which may explain the meaning of the Gnostic gospels, and I hate novels which tell you the real story of William Shakespeare, who was secretly a Catholic priest, as you can tell from a small carving on a pew in a chapel in Stratford, and I hate novels about magic and elves and the lost arts of necromancy, and even worse – much fucking worse – I hate novels about fairies and guardian angels and novels about sensitive people who have autistic children touched by fucking genius and I also hate novels of suspense where the writer withholds from the reader details that he knows perfectly fucking well in order to make it suspenseful and, even worse than having my nuts passed through the grinder, I hate reading novels about time travel and what is called – can you believe this? – fantasy, which turns out to be fucking bollocks on a Homeric scale about people dressed in plastic armour with silly names like Snarfbucket of Zadok, Lord of the Fens and the Mountains.’

  David is laughing uncontrollably. He fears that particles of Szechuan pickle will come out of his nose.

  ‘And I hate fucking novels where everybody says that family is a tyranny and I hate novels where people remember child abuse and...’

  The couple from Cornwall are off, hurrying not too ostentatiously, as if this rant is just the sort of thing they were afraid of, a kind of urban anarchy, all restraint lost.

  ‘And it explains everything about why they are hopeless parents and I hate novels where the father finds he has an illegitimate daughter and people go on a long journey and discover they are somebody else or that they are bisexual or fall in love with a gondolier or a horse or move to the country, where everybody is fantastically fucking wonderful – or awful, take your pick – or move to another country where it takes them a while to discover that they can’t really understand the locals who hate them, and even worse, much worse, I hate novels where the author says oh gosh, aren’t we all weak and pathetic but likeable with our immense collections of seventies records and our moody librarian girlfriends, so frankly there’s very little left to read, fuck all in fact, except for Jerome K. Jerome. Fucking masterpiece. Brian, can you ask your mail-order bride to bring some more wine?’

  David applauds. Adam has done what he had hoped for by delivering one of his rants. It’s a relatively subdued performance: in private he can go on for half an hour and strip to his Y-fronts to expose his lightly furred, speckled legs and his strangely unstable chest, which is as pale and unformed as it was when they met as schoolboys. He has no muscular definition at all, but there is something miraculous about the fact that in a sense he is the only one among them who hasn’t aged: he still looks soft and infantile. He loves his drunken children immoderately; a dinner with them in some Italian restaurant, where the owner adores the whole family, is all he aspires to in a social life. He likes to be with the boys and their girlfriends, although that subplot is becoming more difficult, as adulthood begins to take a hold and the boys discover to their surprise that they are subject to the dead weight of responsibility and the drag of expectation. It has happened to Ed, too: his newly critical tone is probably explained by disappointment. He would have preferred to remain a student with his carefree friends. But the friends all began to pair off or move into the City and he found himself with the gravity-defying Rosalie, who had a very clear idea of how things should proceed and David wonders if Ed doesn’t feel constricted, although the law is treating him fine. There is something about women like Rosalie, women with deep instincts, which gives them the edge in the marital dialectic.

  And this may be one of the defining characteristics of our restless age, that all of us believe that our lives could have been better or different. Unlike the cattle-obsessed Masai or the horsemen of the Mongolian Steppe, who derive satisfaction from undying ritual and can imagine nothing better. Stasis is not something you see in the political parties’ manifestos. Why not? This Gordon Brown, this rumpled old political wheeler-dealer, with the coelacanth mouth and just the one eye, is always talking about radical change and reform as if that is what we want politicians for, to change everything. What politicians don’t understand is that a lot of the electorate want them to put things back how they were – at some unspecified time. For example, they would like migrants to go home. David sometimes thinks that he would, too, but at the same time he knows that this is not possible. He can’t even imagine how many times he has read the words asylum seekers and immigrants off the autocue. Anyway, who says everyone should stay in their place of birth? Why don’t the Alps belong to me just as much as to someone who was born there? And then there were the British-born bombers. The whole multicultural conceit fell apart after that. The Muslims seem to think that Iraq and Israel are unbearable provocations, which we are deliberately fostering. But as Blair said, it’s not we who are blowing up mosques and innocent children in Iraq. It wasn’t us who attacked the Twin Towers.

  David feels a kind of contentment settling over them. Nobody accepts Brian’s suggestion of fruit or ginger ice cream; they don’t believe the Chinese know how to do dessert. Brian rather stubbornly orders fresh mango, which comes neatly sliced and laid out in a wagon-wheel. Brian made a lot of money in Hong Kong in the eighties working for a merchant bank, where he became entitled to special treatment from waiters. Somehow they all did, all these English public-school boys who went out there. Simon is the only one among them who has no children. He is not gay, but he once told David that he feels the assumption rearing up whenever he says he has not been married. Sometimes he tells strangers he is widowed. He’s got plans – he’s talking about them now – to put his bookshop on the web, but David suspects that by the time he gets back to Sussex he will have lost heart. Brian recently offered to put money into the bookshop for new computers but Simon never went further than talking about it. He said to David, ‘I can’t really see the point. Do you find that? You wonder why you would make plans to paint the house or visit the pyramids.’ And David knew what he meant, although he ha
s half-formed plans.

  Lucy, too, has taken some time to adjust, but now she seems to have found a niche with the auction house. He worries more about her than he does about Ed. Before he took his law-conversion course, Ed had an idea for a television game show and then for a web project offering interactive tutoring. What he wanted was a way of making money fast so that he could put that behind him and live a carefree life. Now, three years after qualifying, he is working for Robin Fennell, a friend of David’s, near the British Museum. Ed’s doing well as a solicitor, while his soul, David suspects, is seldom present.

  Simon says he wants Adam to come and read in his bookshop: there will be quails’ eggs and celery salt. The bookshop is panelled and pleasantly chaotic. Simon is excited by the idea of Adam reading; he can picture the plates being handed around by his volunteers from the village; he can feel the literary excitement rising as Adam staggers to the podium, which they erect in the widest part of the shop, effectively blocking access to the lavatory.

  ‘Jesus, Simon, I love you, but I haven’t written anything for eighteen years.’

  ‘Of course you have. Scripts, all kinds of things. You’ve written all kinds of things. You’ve just won an Emmy.’

  Simon has a curious voice, slightly over-articulated, as if a fondness for books produces a kind of prissiness.

  ‘Simon, my old bibliophile, your audience out in Wibbly-Wobbly-Wood wants a genuine celebrity novelist or biographer. They don’t want an old hack like me. Anyway, I could never find the bookshop.’

  ‘Come on the train and stay overnight.’

  ‘I hate trains. I hate travel.’

  ‘Oh shit. You are such an awkward bastard.’

  ‘Give me another glass of the old Chateau Beijing 1929 and I may reconsider. Maybe I could sing. I know, I’ll set my radio play about Baden-Powell to music. What do you think? Could it work?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘I’ll drive you down,’ says David.

  ‘OK. Agreed. You can be my Ifor Jenkins.’

  Adam, too, had never forgotten that summer in Rome with Richard Burton, the summer that formed their lives, and David knows that Adam is thinking of how Ifor often had to lift his drunken brother Richard into the Bentley.

  Julian is the first to leave. As a diplomat he was always expected somewhere urgently and David thinks he finds it hard to shake off the habit, now that he has almost nothing to do. He offers Brian some money, but Brian says, holding up a flat palm, ‘Next time.’ In drink Brian becomes their prince-patron, but he does it with grace. They watch Julian exit and stand outside looking around for a few seconds, perhaps expecting the mujahedin, before striding off to the tube. Only David notices that one of Julian’s legs is a little reluctant to march in step.

  A little later the remaining four gather for a few minutes next to some giant wheelie bins at the back of a cinema. It’s becoming dark and a gust of popcorn from a duct on the blank wall of the cinema rushes out into the heavily laden Soho air. They don’t really want to separate. Who knows how much strain the weakening links can stand? Eventually they go – Adam kisses everybody to wish them Godspeed on their almost-elderly way. David is very aware that for each of them these separations have a kind of poignancy, hinting at something more final. He notices, as he walks up Wardour Street, that Chez Victor, the last of the old Soho restaurants, is now boarded up. His father once took him there and they ate rump steak and thin frites, which his father said were authentically French. Victor himself sat grumpily drinking absinthe.

  David loves Soho. In the sixties when he was working here, he felt that it was in some way his secret. Right in the middle of London and untouched. Once Francis Bacon offered him a drink in the French House. Frank, the heavily bearded theatre critic, who looked like a mariner off a tobacco pouch, said that if you let him bugger you he would give you a painting. That would be worth a few million now. Old Compton Street is alive with gays. It’s become their boulevard, the scene of their febrile passeggiata. And they think they have discovered Soho, just as I did. Camisa is still there, even though the Spanish deli opposite, Delmonico, with barrels of sardines in oil standing on the pavement, has long gone, to be replaced by an unnaturally youthful selection of men’s clothing. The currency of homosexuality which once stood for something brave and noble, has, he thinks, become debased. A bottle of sherry cost seven shillings and sixpence. He can see the hand-lettered sign: Amontillado 7/6.

  He walks fast. He wants to get to the gym.

  2

  ‘Your dad’s become very thin,’ says Rosalie. She says it in a way that alerts Ed.

  ‘I know. But he says there’s nothing wrong with him, if that is what you meant.’

  ‘No, I just wondered. Do you think he enjoyed last night?’

  ‘You never really know with Dad, but yes, I think he did. He was in tears during Part Six.’

  ‘So was I.’

  ‘Ah, but you’re a girlie. You love puppies and embroidery. You can’t help yourself.’

  ‘The old jokes are the best. No, I think he’s probably got a girlfriend and that’s why he’s working out. But he doesn’t want to tell you.’

  ‘You’ve got the most amazing talent for fitting the facts to your own theories.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything.’

  ‘Are you saying I am crazy?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘So, if he’s not ill, why’s he working out?’

  ‘Firstly, I don’t know if he is working out and secondly if he is he may just be doing it because he likes it.’

  ‘He doesn’t drink much any more.’

  ‘No, but I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s good.’

  Rosalie looks at him coolly, as if she has never seen him before.

  ‘You know, you have begun to sound like a lawyer. On the contrary, m’lud, I think that, on the balance of the evidence, any reasonable person would conclude that the defendant could not have committed the crime. He is a person of good character.’

  ‘Rosie, Rosie. A few years ago we were in deep shit. I couldn’t get a decent job, and you couldn’t get into a ballet company. Now I’ve got a proper job, and you are accusing me of becoming pompous. I must say in your defence that at least you are very adaptable in your criticism.’

  ‘Yes, you’ve gone from poor and interesting to quite prosperous and boring. Does this happen to all lawyers?’

  ‘Probably. Here’s the thing, in order to be a good lawyer you have to fake a kind of seriousness. As you know I am really deeply frivolous.’

  ‘You used to be. So you don’t think he’s got a girlfriend?’

  ‘No. But he told me last night when you nipped off to the loo that you are wonderful. He loves you. He likes the way you walk.’

  ‘He said those exact words?’

  ‘“Lovely mover,” he said. He notices odd things like the way your feet come down, ballet-style, at forty-five degrees. “Lovely little mover.”’

  ‘Why do you say “Lovely little mover” in that silly accent? He doesn’t speak like that at all.’

  ‘It’s my Peter Cook.’

  ‘Lawyers shouldn’t tell jokes or do voices. They think they can, but they can’t.’

  This is becoming too pointed. Rosalie is oppressed by their inability to have a child. So is he, of course, but her troubled state is oppressing him far more than the prospect of being childless for ever. He knows how desperately she wants a little acolyte following her into the magical world of dance and he knows that she longs to dress her up for children’s parties, perhaps as an angel or a fairy. Often when he looks at Rosalie these days he sees the blithe girl he fell in love with five years ago. But also, just occasionally, although he’s reluctant to acknowledge it, as that would spell the end of innocence, he sees that a shadow has fallen on her. When her dance career ended – she knew that she was never quite good enough – she had a clear idea of how things would turn out:
she would live through her children and induct them into this larger world of dance and music and colour. Last night at the ballet she looked mostly happy, but there was, he thought, a manic edge to her happiness, a hint of desperation. Dad didn’t notice, of course, but Ed was wary.

  ‘Darling Rosie, it will be all right.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘It will be, I know.’

  ‘How long is it now? I make it eighteen months.’

  ‘Nearly, but that’s not unusual.’

  ‘Some people have babies after a one-night stand.’

  He can see that she thinks this is a gross unfairness.

  ‘Mr Smythson said we should relax. There’s nothing wrong with us.’

  ‘The more they tell you to relax, the harder it gets.’

  ‘I know what you are thinking.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘That is that you begin to wonder if you’re doing it because you want to or because you don’t want the other person to wonder if you’re doing it because you want to appear unconcerned.’

  ‘And do you know?’

  ‘Honestly? Not always.’

  ‘Nor do I, so that could be a relief.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  They are sitting in their tiny courtyard garden. It is in deep evening shade. In truth, it has the sun for only one hour a day, somewhere between four and six in summer. For the rest of the time it has a dark, lichenous quality. They have a small, slate-topped table and four chairs of wrought iron, which Rosalie has painted a green-blue, the colour of Italian beans. On the table is a bottle of New Zealand Chardonnay, half empty: the label has a picture of a hawk in flight and the wine comes from Sophie’s Vineyard, her 2002 vintage. Wines have become cheerful and user-friendly; the mystique has been banished, along with the old dour wine makers with nose-hair. They drink a wine called Rickety Bridge and sometimes a red called Chocolate Block, and another called Big Ass Zinfandel. The baby business is encouraging them to drink, because alone together they find that their conversation stalls. He can see why serious drinkers long for that first deep gulp: the wine, for all the fancy adjectives about fruit and nose and so on – Sophie’s Vintage – is just an excuse for surrendering the troublesome self.