Damascus

by Richard Beard

  Left to right, could that be her? No, left to right Miss Anne Howard, the pre-eminent authority on ecclesiastical embroidery. Right to left Mr Michael Lloyd of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Surveyors, and left to right his unmarried daughter Helen, who had a double room in Wimbledon Village to rent to a non-smoking female for £85 a week. People, the first wave of workers out on their lunch break, seemed constantly to be putting themselves between Henry and Miss Burns, as if on purpose. Left to right Alison Thomas, a marine biologist from the Institute of Estuarine and Coastal Studies at Hull University.

  Henry found shelter in a phone-box, and breathed deeply on the unpeopled air. He dried his palms on the front of his patterned sweater and tried to focus through the scratches of Gary marries Laura and Elliot is Dead and Final score: Man U 2 QPR 1. From the phone-box he could still see the house, and he’d already familiarised himself with the street. Behind him there was a bank, a travel agent, a music shop, and a charity shop where British people learned to dress like beggars. There was a pub, the Rising Sun, and there were people everywhere, any one of whom could have been her or a friend of hers. In fact, there were altogether too many people, all blurring into each other, so that instead of having lives of their own they could only be explained as part of a group, as belonging to the 6000 employees of the Crown Prosecution Service or the 33% of children who owned a goldfish. How was Henry supposed to get the attention of Miss Burns among so many people?

  He wondered if he should phone her, but just then a young woman tapped on the glass with the edge of a brightly-coloured phonecard. Henry’s heart reeled. It could have been her, but actually it was Rachel Yates, a classically-trained dancer planning to get engaged at Christmas. Henry bowed (stop doing that) and even as he was leaving the phone-box Rachel Yates was pushing past him, breathless, already looking at the telephone and saying, 'Thanks you just saved my life.’

  Henry decided not to phone. He wanted to surprise her, if only he knew how, if only all these people would stop getting in the way all the time. There seemed to be most of the 80% of young people who claimed boredom was the cause of juvenile crime, and a good number of the 290 next of kin to policemen murdered in Ireland. He escaped into Jepson’s music shop. It was thankfully empty apart from Mrs Jepson, for seven years a Roman Catholic nun, who asked him if she could be of assistance. Henry left his umbrella and his plastic bag on the counter. He rolled up the sleeves of his sweater.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. 'I'd like to try out a piano.’

  He chose the Forte Grand in the window, from where he had a good though often obstructed view of the house. Mrs Jepson, ex-Catholic nun, whose only child died of pneumonia aged fifteen days in 1973, showed him how to adjust the stool.

  ‘That will be all,’ Henry said, and with a flourish, not looking at the keys but outside at the street, he launched into the fearsome opening chords of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C Sharp. And then he kept going. He played loudly and he played all the notes, because his parents had given him lessons in Tokyo with an ex-pat veteran of the Festival Hall, yet another present which failed to make all the difference.

  Henry distractedly ran through his repertoire of keyboard skills. Mrs Jepson, ex-nun, her poor lost child, let the music flood over her thinking it was never too late. The music also had its effect on Henry, making him more confident of recognising Miss Burns immediately, instinctively, as part of the miracle he expected from being in love. He looked out of the window and saw only people between him and the house. He stopped playing. Mrs Jepson, ex-nun, her poor lost baby, who sometimes thought it was never too late, thought now that perhaps, after all, it was. She asked Henry if anything was wrong.

  He was staring out of the window. The door to the house was opening, was it? It was hard to say because people walking left right left kept getting in the way, like left to right Jessica Ashworth an articled clerk at Jauralde and Philips, like right to left Gerald Norcross a former captain in the Derbyshire Yeomanry, like standing still Sidney Keating, non-stipendiary curate in charge of St Oswald’s, and if very soon he didn’t get out of the way Henry would have to move him along, give him a shove, push him into passing traffic, just get out of the way please now Reverend.

  Henry grabbed his bag and fled the shop, colliding with Norman Hopkins, a British Telecom agent working undercover on Operation Clean Hands, stab him shoot him stone him to death and really, it would make no difference. By the time he’d untangled himself the door across the road had closed again. It was even possible he’d been imagining things. He bit his lip and wandered towards the pub, keeping one eye on the door, trying not to be distracted by the 70 business mentors who spend an hour a month in schools, or any of the 3000 birdwatchers on their way to a car park in Kent to see a golden-winged warbler. This was his big chance, and all these people were going to rain it by getting in the way. He had the poison, of course, but it wasn’t nearly enough. What he really needed was an automatic weapon. He would start with the anonymous drinkers in the Rising Sun, provoking instant and utter mayhem, the smell of fresh blood, cartridges and spent bullet cases careering off the floor, off-duty nurses picking their way through the carnage using bar-towels and tablecloths as bandages.

  Because obviously, what with the level of noise produced by a multiple massacre, Miss Burns would come out of that house over there and take a look. This was the moment he’d wait for, positioning himself somewhere unmissable between her and the pub. He’d give her the perfect opportunity to fall in love with him at first sight.

  No, no, no. It was only in the beautiful countryside of Northern Ireland that you could spray bullets round a public house and get away with it. In London one of the victims would probably turn out to be someone important, an aristocrat related to Lord Walton via the Honourable Lady Ogilvy, by marriage to Viscount Goschen or the Duke of Gloucester and onwards and upwards to Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandra and eventually the Prince of Wales. A foreigner would never get away with it. The Crown Prosecution Service would press for a jail sentence equivalent to all the years he would otherwise be spending in wedlock with Miss Burns, raising many children, holidaying at the tranquil seaside. Everybody had a life (remember Dr Osawa), and some people even had a life which led to Prince Charles.

  Persuaded against random massacre, Henry turned back towards the house, just in time to see the front door swing open again. A young blonde woman stepped out, balancing carefully on high-heeled shoes. Her feet seemed to be slightly green. She was carrying a small purse and wearing a long-sleeved grey dress and no coat, as if she was expecting a night out. She looked left and then right, shook out her hair, then stood on the very edge of the pavement peering across at the shops opposite. She folded her arms and stepped out into the road.

  What kind of indiscriminate hostel was this? And why had they trapped Miss Burns inside?

  Seize the day, Henry. Burn those bridges.

  It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, on a train between Pickering and Godalming or Gillingham and Maidstone, between Eskdalemuir and Raith or Hurstpier-point and Treorchy, William Welsby is twenty-four years old and travelling with his back to the engine, a Class 91 locomotive. A boy further down the carriage wearing a Wimbledon or Manchester or Southampton football shirt eats a Bourbon biscuit or a Jaffa cake or some Cadbury’s chocolate. Sometimes the boy pushes his grubby face up against the window, and William wonders if they share the same pride in the passing countryside, like a favoured personal possession. He sees a girl running on sand dunes, a warehouse, some playing fields and a cricket pitch with its summer scoreboard rusting at 199 for 7. They rattle past fields, lakes, buildings, parks, all of which have names, Prince’s Park or Sefton Park or Penn Inn or the People’s Park. Or Bitton Park or Leazes Park. Stop it, William tells himself, you don’t want to start that nonsense again.

  Obviously it’s all his fiancee’s fault.

  She is sitting in the seat opposite, smiling and sympathising, unaware that William never experienced s
uch crises of listing before his official engagement. To Miss K. L. M. Llewellen-Palmer or Ms S. M. Hurley or Miss C. R. B. Maitland Hume, daughter of the late Colonel O. Gibbon of Wivelsfield, Sussex or Mrs Valda Hope of Carinya, Cobbitty, New South Wales, Australia. She says:

  ‘You have to put it all behind you.’

  Because unfortunately, despite his engagement, William has just been rescued from an untimely affair with Louise or Marianne or Lynne or even Jessica, all of whom he truly loves. William stares over his fiancee’s head, back in the direction he’s travelled, thinking only divine intervention can save him now. Before the actual wedding she could always die of food poisoning. It happens. Or become another random victim of a hopeful bombing by the terrifying Irish or Libyans or Algerians. He wonders how many cliff-top walks he can justify between now and the marriage. How unlucky did she have to be, exactly, to catch meningitis or sclerosis or smallpox, or to crash her car, or unwittingly swallow a lethal cocktail of drugs in a celebrity nightclub toilet?

  William understands that such thoughts are not the ideal preparation for marriage. She leans forward and takes his hand. ‘This is all connected with what happened to your parents, isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  'It must have come as a great shock.’

  The best way to forget about his parents, and sometimes even his brother, is to think about four things when usually one would do.

  ‘And anyway,’ she asks, not expecting an answer, ‘how would you survive without me?’

  By busking on street-corners with a flute or a violin or a guitar or a recorder, William thinks, or by trawling for glory as a film director in the style of Robert Bresson or Antonioni or Ingmar Bergman, so filling the vacancy for an internationally indulgent art director created by the death of Fellini. He would wear a brown cloak or a silk tunic or a scarlet blazer with black collar and gold buttons. Why ever not? He is twenty-four years old, and avoiding any consideration of the sudden and violent death of his parents he sees all possibilities with an ‘of between them. Nothing can be excluded, and he refuses to experience only a fraction of what is out there to be experienced. He senses that in later life, or in real life, the reduction of possibility will be the difference of greatest regret.

  She says: ‘We love each other. It’s only your indecision which keeps us apart.’

  Not true, William thinks, that’s simply not true. Meaning it’s true that he loves her but he isn’t indecisive. In fact he loves decisions, and makes them all the time. He decides to get engaged. He decides to leave with Marianne, he decides to come back, he decides to leave with Louise. He makes any number of decisions while all she does is try her best to restrict him to one place at one time wearing the one set of clothes. She hates it when he moves sideways, in among the teeming crowd of people he could still become. He understands this, and loves her for wanting to rescue him, but that doesn’t stop him imagining her funeral.

  ‘Come on, William, what are you afraid of?’

  In Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita the hero played by Marcello Mastroianni isn’t married. Nor is Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice nor Is the butler in The Remains of the Day. They’re entitled to be fictional heroes because an important option remains open to them. It may well be that there are longer lists of married men in real life providing a better model by which to live, but to William it already seems a kind of defeat to take your examples from real life.

  The train stops in the middle of nowhere. Further down the carriage the boy presses his face up against the window, and he and William look down at the long fairway of a golf course.

  'I won’t come back for you again.’

  'I thought we were meant for each other.’

  'There are limits.’

  On the terrace of the club-house a drinks party is under way, and in a neighbouring estate a man relaxes in his garden, putting his feet up. The whole world becomes imperfectly silent and a flight of gulls crosses the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and William can’t think of any place in Britain he’d rather be.

  She says: ‘If you carry on like this I’ll leave you.’

  'That’s another possibility.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You could marry someone else, anyone else, a European or an Australian or a rich Japanese.’

  'Is that what you want?’

  'I’m just saying anything’s possible.’

  ‘Grow up, William. Not everything’s possible.’ William knows there are significant moments, entirely unexpected, which change entire lives. It has happened to his brother, after it happened to their parents. His brother has taken the inheritance, all of it, and made a lucky investment at just the right time in gilts or bonds or German bunds. Now he eats salad in brasseries with Christian Dior or Helmut Lang or Vivienne Westwood, while giving generously to the campaign funds of the Liberal Democrats or the Ulster Unionists or the Tory party. If William allows himself one exception to his rale that everything is possible, he swears never to ask his brother for help, not that it should ever come to that. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be equally as lucky as long as he stays on the right road, even if he’s taking the long way round. He’s waiting for something extraordinary to happen, waiting to be singled out, wanting to be special.

  She says: ‘You’re not thinking straight. You love me. I love you. We belong with each other.’

  William wishes he knew. Either marriage is an ill-judged junction off the road, or it’s exactly the instant difference he’s looking for. Either/or, but how is he supposed to tell? If this is his Damascus, then shouldn’t it be a bit more obvious?

  ‘One day you’ll regret this,’ she says.

  ‘Only if I remember it.’

  There ought to be a sign telling him what to do. Because after today, if he makes the wrong decision, every option will remain open to him except this one. The world will overflow with all sorts of everything except this. His whole life, if he gets it wrong, will change at this exact point, until gradually his only sense of time becomes then and now, now and then.

  11/1/93 MONDAY 12:48

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Spencer said. ‘She wouldn’t have left without telling me. We agreed we had until the end of the day.’

  ‘You don’t know her as well as you think you do,’ William said. ‘You can’t make up your mind. She went to fetch her shoes.’

  Grace said: ‘Can I have my present now?’

  The three of them were in the kitchen gathered round the table, where William had draped a British Lions Rugby League tea towel over the fruit bowl with the fish in it. Like a magician, he made himself ready to whip the cloth away.

  ‘Not yet,’ Spencer said. ‘We should wait for Hazel.’

  ‘She’s gone,’ William said.

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘I don’t know. Home, I suppose.’

  ‘She hasn’t gone,’ Spencer said. ‘She would have told me first.’

  ‘Can I have my present now?’

  ‘What about waiting for Hazel?’

  ‘She can see it when she comes back down.’

  William shook his head meaningfully, meaning Spencer didn’t have a clue. Then he concentrated on the matter in hand. With a flourish he snapped away the cloth, and both he and Spencer looked expectantly from the goldfish (still alive) to Grace. Her face was slow to light in a smile. In fact she didn’t smile at all. William said:

  ‘You love animals.’

  ‘It’s a fish,’ Grace said.

  ‘What’s wrong with a fish?’

  ‘It isn’t going to win any showjumping contests.’

  ‘Well no. No, it’s not. In fact it’s very difficult to argue with that.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Trigger. Don’t you like him?’

  Grace leant over the table and turned her head to stare through the side of the bowl. She made a face. Trigger flicked over to take a look and she giggled. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘It looks a bit glum, though. Why does it keep going
round in circles?’

  ‘He has a very short memory.’

  ‘I think it’s a very nice fish,’ Grace said. ‘I mean considering it’s a fish. Is it a boy fish or a girl fish?’

  Spencer and William looked at each other. ‘We don’t really know.’

  ‘I think it’s a German boy fish,’ Grace said. ‘Because then his full name would be Herr Trigger. Get it?’

  ‘What a lovely girl,’ William said.

  Grace had taken Trigger to leam some computer games, hoping to put a smile on his face.

  ‘She is,’ Spencer agreed.

  'I meant Hazel.’

  ‘It was you who upset her,’ Spencer said. ‘She’d never have left if you hadn’t brought up the whole Jessica thing.’

  ‘That was before I became a convert,’ William said. ‘Come on, I want to show you something.’

  William made Spencer follow him out into the hall and along to the front door, even though Spencer would have preferred to go looking for Hazel.

  'I am about to go outside,’ William said, hitching up his trousers. ‘Hazel showed me how.’

  With little regard for his own well-being he opened the front door. He stepped outside and Spencer moved up quickly beside him, ready to catch him and carry him back in. The wind was stronger now, but not cold, and overhead the single cloud remained unbroken. William swayed a bit but he didn’t retreat. He stood to attention and clenched his hands in tight fists at his sides. His face began to turn a deep cherry colour, but that was because he was holding his breath. He also had his eyes closed.

  He opened his eyes, stared straight ahead, breathed out and then in again, held his breath, kept his eyes open. He looked like a man playing woodwind, but without any instrument.

  ‘What’s it like?’ Spencer said. ‘What can you see?’ He had his arms out to catch William when he fell.