Damascus
Page 6
He glanced at the racing page and was relieved to see that the paper’s private handicapper had failed to pick out Mr Confusion at Newcastle. Then he laid the paper aside and asked his father what he was looking at.
‘I was wondering how you felt.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m your father.’
‘I feel fine.’
‘Just fine?’
‘I seldom feel murderous, if that’s what you mean.’
'That’s not what I said.’
'I seldom feel like hurting people until they squeak. A joke. That’s a joke, Dad.’
'It isn’t very funny.’
‘Perhaps not.’
It was true that before leaving Japan Henry hadn’t always been entirely himself. But he still found it astonishing that his father and Dr Osawa should separately conclude that only by asking him lots of personal questions (and smiling sympathetically at the answers) could they save him from a grim future as a serial killer. They’d obviously been corrupted by too many crime novels and police films. Or they’d been taking the newspapers too seriously.
'I’ve changed,’ Henry said. ‘Ever since I came here. I’ve taken Dr Osawa’s advice and remind myself all the time that everyone has a life.’
‘And does it help?’
‘I’ve not hurt anyone yet, if that’s what you mean.’
‘It’s not just now, Henry. It’s not just today. It’s all the other days as well.’
‘You said you’d already booked the flight. Apparently today is the only day I have left.’
Mr Mitsui asked testily, in Japanese, if they could speak Japanese now, but Henry replied in English that he preferred to speak his mother-tongue. He then fiddled with the fascinating controls of his telephone before eventually managing to ask how she was. In Japanese, his mother was fine, although recovering only slowly. She sometimes had nightmares.
‘Does she want to see me?’
Henry’s father said he didn’t know, and Henry unexpectedly felt sorry for him. He was always trying to do the right thing which meant that he was usually unhappy. When Dr Osawa had suggested, more than two years ago, that Henry could profitably spend some time studying abroad, his father had immediately set about organising a place at Trinity College Oxford or Sidney Sussex Cambridge or somewhere sounding equally grand. But Henry had explored the edges of a major tantrum (nervous breakdown) until his father gave way and allowed him to follow a distance-learning course. This meant that he could always be someone and somewhere else, travelling tirelessly round the country making his telephone calls and sending in his essays on British Culture and Society, The British Detective Novel, An Introduction to British Birds and Trees, or The Kings and Queens of Britain. For nearly two years he’d phoned Miss Burns at least twice a week until she became the fixed point of his nomadic life. She calmly answered all his questions, sometimes praised his written work, and gradually convinced him there was nothing she didn’t know.
‘You realise you’re not allowed to stay here?’ his father asked. He repeated it, more quietly, to be sure that Henry understood. ‘You do understand, don’t you?’
‘Mum’s British.’
‘She’s Australian.’
‘She told me a quarter Irish a quarter English a quarter Welsh a quarter Scots.’
‘She has an Australian passport. Listen to me, Henry. You were allowed to stay while you were a student, but now you have your diploma you’re not a student any more and you’re not allowed to stay. Do you understand?’
Henry blamed it on Europe. If Britain hadn’t signed any treaties he was sure he’d be allowed to stay because his mother was practically English. He spoke the language perfectly. He’d even promise to work like a Trojan so they wouldn’t close the door on him.
‘Henry, I’m your father. I want what’s best for you. I’ve come all the way from Tokyo. I’m a design consultant with a multinational company and I have experience. I can see that you’re tense, like you were before, and we don’t want anyone to get hurt, do we?’
‘You mean you don’t want me to get you into any more trouble.’
‘I want what’s best for you. We can spend the day at the Getty exhibition. Yes?’
Henry fingered the plastic envelope of powder which he’d transferred to his trouser pocket. It was about the size of a sugar sachet and he liked to have it on his person at all times, for reassurance. It gave him a sense of power. It was a key to sudden change, and therefore real life.
'It’s at the Royal Academy,’ his father added. ‘Not that far from here.’
'I’m in love.’
Mr Mitsui stared past Henry’s shoulder, finding it as difficult now as always to resign himself to how closely the son resembled the mother. He wondered if it could ever have been any different.
‘We’re going to be engaged,’ Henry said.
‘Congratulations, Henry. We’re leaving this evening.’
‘Then I’d best ask her today, hadn’t I? I’ll ring her up, right now.’
Henry picked up the phone and keyed in the digits. There was an answer, and Henry nodded sagely for the benefit of his father as a woman’s voice in his ear said:
‘Mr Mitsui?’
No matter how many times he’d asked her to call him Henry. Oh the unwavering Miss Burns and her unmistakable voice, strict and beautiful. He took a deep breath.
‘Miss Burns,’ he said. 'I would like to invite you to lunch.’
‘We are not going to meet up. I’ve told you so before.’
‘It’s my last day.’
‘Not today. Not tomorrow. Never.’
'I wanted to thank you. I went to your house.’
Wherever Miss Burns was, it went very quiet. He thought she might be looking at her watch. Then he thought she might have gone, so it was a great relief when at last she spoke.
‘I’m not at home. There’s no point you going there again.’
‘Perhaps we could meet somewhere else.’
‘I’m not getting through to you, am I, Henry? Maybe when you came to my house I was there, but I didn’t open the door because I didn’t want to see you. Have you thought about that?’
‘I know you weren’t there,’ Henry said. ‘If you were there you would have opened the door. It’s our destiny to meet.’
‘I’m going now, Henry. Enjoy the flight back to Tokyo.’
'One last question.'
'No more questions, Henry, I'm sorry. Goodbye.'
Very deliberately, Henry turned off his telephone and placed it back on his plate. She'd called him Henry. He looked up at his father and smiled a sudden and dazzling smile, developed over years of being surprised by excellent presents. One of his two front teeth, the one on the left, was completely brown, of so even and deep a colour it was like a choice made from a colour-chart in a paint catalogue.
'She said yes,' Henry said. 'She'd love to meet me for lunch.'
4
Attitude makes a tremedous difference.
THE TIMES 11/1/93
11/1/93 MONDAY 9:24
This was a perfect example of a time not to be frightened, and not to act like her mother. Henry Mitsui wasn't going to find her here, especially if she stopped answering her phone, and tomorrow he ought to be back in Japan. If he wasn't then she could call the police, so there was no good reason to be frightened. Waiting for Spencer to get back from the library, Hazel had made a complete tour of the house. Many of the impressive rooms were mostly empty, with perhaps just the odd chair or table to suggest how they might be furnished given the will and the means, and the furniture. She looked closely at the scattered paintings: a Van Gogh reproduction, posters of a Lowry and a Vermeer, an original E. H. Shepherd Wind in The Willows illustration of Mole in a snow-storm. She also recognised a Rowlandson and a Vanessa Bell because she’d once offered a course in British Painters and Painting.
Eventually she’d decided to settle down with Sir John Magill's Last Journey in the ground floor dining room which overlook
ed the garden, and by the time Spencer found her she felt quite at home in the comer of an ancient and enveloping sofa. Spencer pulled a chair out from under the polished table. He sat on it backwards, and asked her if she’d seen William anywhere.
'If he’s the oldish man who looks a bit like Fellini, then yes.’
‘How like Fellini?’
‘Tall, chubby cheeks, grey hair. Late middle-age and still growing.’
‘He didn’t say anything to upset you, did he?’
‘He didn’t see me. He was just standing there, staring at the front door. I didn’t like to disturb him.’
‘He’s scared of going out because he thinks it’s the end of Britain. I'd better go and check on him.’
‘You didn’t see him when you came in?’
‘I came in the back way. I won’t be a minute.’
‘In that case,’ Hazel said, ‘you can do me a favour.’ She turned off her phone and threw it across to him. I’ve just decided I'm taking a holiday,’ she said. ‘And it starts right now. Put the phone somewhere safe, where I don’t even have to see it.’
Back in the entrance hall, William was still standing opposite the front door, staring at it. This time he must have heard Spencer coming.
‘I'm going to go outside,’ he said, ‘if it’s the last thing I do.’
Spencer put Hazel’s phone on top of the junk mail on the telephone table, where he was fairly sure not to forget it. William immediately picked it up and tried out various buttons.
‘She’s a rich teacher then?’
‘She has to be available.’
William pretended to make a call.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Is there anybody out there?’
Hazel was right, he did look a bit like Fellini, but in altogether better health. He seemed in no hurry to go outside, so Spencer decided it was safe to leave him on his own for a while.
In the dining room, while she’d been waiting, Hazel had pushed away her book and shimmied the skirt of her sweater-dress above her knees. When Spencer came back she let her hand drift over the cushion beside her. Spencer preferred the chair.
‘Fine,’ she said. She crossed her hands in her lap, and was surprised by how much teacher now crept into her voice:
‘Would you mind telling me what’s going on?’
‘How’s Sir John?’
‘Sorry?’
In the book. Sir John Magill's Last Journey.’
‘It’s his last journey. Come on, Spencer, we ought to be doing better than this.’
He did that incredibly annoying thing where he looked away, as if something somewhere else had urgently caught his attention. Hazel told him to stop it. They were alone, she said, in the same place for a change and together at last. They could actually try to enjoy it.
‘We have the whole day,’ she said firmly. ‘So stop worrying. Or at least tell me what you’re worried about.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Spencer said, changing chairs. 'I can never relax when people are coming to look at the house.’
‘If there’s something wrong you should tell me. We shouldn’t have any secrets.’
‘It’s not a secret. It’s just. Look. Imagine the worst possible scenario.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of us.’
Hazel breathed in, closed her eyes, and imagined more than one Spencer Kelly. This one in the dining room, although he looked something like the Spencer Kelly she’d been expecting, was in fact a completely different Spencer Kelly. He actually owned this house and his father wasn’t a warehouseman. Instead he was a senior politician who’d made his fortune preaching fundamentalist sermons against sex before marriage. When he found out about Hazel’s familiarity with Spencer’s bed, he would automatically suspect an evil connection with Hazel’s father’s sales trips to Iran or Pakistan or Israel. In a fit of rage the father of the fake Spencer Kelly would then exploit his masonic contacts in the military to initiate pre-emptive air-strikes against any of the above-named countries, who would all retaliate instantly with various weapons of mass destruction. Total nuclear war would follow, resulting in the destruction of everything and the death of the planet.
And then Hazel Burns would never meet the real Spencer Kelly, for whom she may well have been destined in love.
‘Well it’s not that bad,’ Spencer said.
‘How bad is it?’
Spencer stared intently at a loose thread behind a button on his suit jacket. Hazel snapped her fingers. He told her that when he’d been in the library he’d asked about the moming-after pill.
‘Well hello romance,’ Hazel said.
Spencer looked up at her, embarrassed but still hopeful, as if she was contemporary art. She wished he wouldn’t do that. It was almost as bad as when he looked away, and not for the first time in her life Hazel wished she believed in a romantic love like Spencer’s Damascus. After the certainty of a revelation, little things like these probably didn’t matter so much. She said:
‘Is pregnancy really the worst thing you can imagine?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then it’s not so bad, is it?’
‘There’s also disease.’
‘We know everything about each other. I thought this was what you wanted?’
'It all seems very sudden. Very quick.’
‘Everything changes, snap bang, instantly. That’s what you were always waiting for. And anyway, what’s so wrong with children if we love each other?’
Spencer: the dreadful unstoppable momentum of it all, a wedding probably, a honeymoon if they could afford it, the child, temper-tantrums, and no more watching television in the afternoon, consoled by the thought that he was hurting nobody by doing nothing because there was nothing to be done and life could always begin tomorrow.
Hazel: on any particular day, not a special day in time of war or social unrest, but just any normal any old newsday, children could be abducted, fall from cliffs, collide with fireworks, contract meningitis. They could be shot in the face from point-blank range or stabbed or stoned or poisoned by a pellet from a customised umbrella. And even if they survived all this, they’d probably still run away from home to star darkly in dubious films with titles like Hellfire Corneror So You Want to Be a Surgeon? or Clarissa Explains It All.
There was, however, nothing to be gained from being frightened.
‘There is also joy,’ Hazel said. ‘Let’s try and live life as if the world was going to stop at tea-time.’
‘Why should it?’
‘What?’
‘Stop at tea-time.’
‘A thousand reasons. Anything could happen. I’m just saying don’t be so frightened.’
‘It’s not fear, it’s thinking.’
Then you think too much. Fear is easy,’ Hazel said. ‘It’s like being sad. Anyone can be sad and afraid. Now come and sit over here.’
Spencer went and sat on the sofa. Hazel put her hand on his knee. She asked him if he ever wondered what Charles Kingsley was like in bed.
It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Baling or Gala or Aberavon or Newmarket, in Thornton Steward or Durham or Matlock or King’s Lynn, Hazel Burns is fourteen years old and a prisoner in her own home. In the front room she and her mother stand opposite each other, locked in full combat.
‘It’s only a mini-skirt. All the girls are wearing them.’
‘Stop being so adolescent.’
‘I am adolescent.’
‘Do I have to spell it out?’
‘Yes.’
‘What would Sam Carter think?’
‘Spell it out, Mum.’
‘Imagine you’re walking home. It’s dark. You hear footsteps behind you. You’re terrified and all you’re wearing is that handkerchief, which, if I may say so, makes you look like a prostitute. The footsteps speed up, following you all the way home. Eventually you reach the front door, you turn round.’
‘And then what?’
‘Use your imagination.’
‘What’s wrong with Sam Carter?’ her mother asks.
‘He’s fat.’
‘What about one of those nice boys you always meet on holiday?’
‘They all live miles away. And anyway, we keep on moving house.’
‘How about your black trousers? You could put on some trousers.’
‘I’m not changing.’
Her mother loses her temper and says well then in that case young lady you’re not leaving the house and Hazel thinks fine, if I’m not allowed to leave the house then I won’t even leave this room. She sits on the sofa with her knees clamped together, arms crossed, and vows never to speak nor move again until either her mother relents or she starves to death. Her mother leaves the room. So, starving to death it is, then.
She will be sorely missed. She has the leading role in the school’s Christmas play, a musical version of Cinderella orThe Secret Garden or Sleeping Beauty, and the cast will be lost without her, utterly devastated. She can think of several boys (including Sam Carter) who will miss her glossy brown hair and her flawless complexion. In fact, it’s only because she’s so attractive to boys that her mother cares what clothes she wears. It explains why she acts as if Hazel is forever ten years old, and holds her captive in this room, unloved among the never-changing beigeness of the three-piece suite, the endless supply of crossword books, today’s predictable paper, and, spread across the coffee table, all the phonecards left over from the disasters which never happened. Hazel and Olive use them as betting slips when they play poker. Hazel wins at poker. Olive usually wins at chess.