He put on the new shirt, and after breakfast they crossed the Pont des Arts and went to the Louvre, where they had decided to spend the day. Together they strolled through a sequence of galleries but soon, amid a thicket of Roman emperors, they halted to check their map of the museum, and agreed to meet for lunch. Megan went off to look at the paintings, leaving Alexander to wander, with only an approximate notion of where he was going, through the antiquities and beyond, through corridors and rooms he was certain he had never seen with Pen, until he found himself in a room full of swords and enamelled vessels and ivory boxes, and realised that he was far from where he had to be within the half-hour. He arrived at the café moments before Megan, who had seen only a fraction of what she wanted to see, because she had stayed so long with a single picture. ‘It’s wonderful, Eck. I’ve no idea why I didn’t find it before,’ she told him. ‘It’s so beautiful, and so simple and sad, for some reason. I tried to draw it, but I couldn’t get it right at all. It’s like trying to draw the air,’ she said, and she showed him her abandoned sketch and drew an X on the plan of the museum.
In the afternoon they again explored the museum apart. After an hour or so he sought out Gilles, but he was not touched by him, because, it seemed, he was remembering that he had been touched by him before and could not see him without the interference of that thought and of his memory of Pen, who had stood a step to his right, with an expression of impatience that encompassed both himself and Gilles. Following the plan, Alexander came to the room that Megan had marked, and Megan was in it, sitting on a low bench in front of The Astronomer. He sat beside her and she put a hand on his, but she did not break her contemplation of the painting, in which the light seemed to be fading as it was fading in the silent room in which they sat, and the astronomer regarded the globe on which the tips of his fingers rested, as if it were a thing that might destroy him. With the alert and solemn demeanour of the astronomer she regarded the picture, and then she lifted Alexander’s hand and kissed it. ‘Love you, Eck,’ she whispered. ‘See you later,’ she said, and he left her.
Alexander would remember her in the room, with the painting of the scholar and the sunlit globe, and he would remember waiting for her in the Tuileries, sitting on a green steel chair by one of the pools, facing the high buildings on Rue de Rivoli, with a bed of cerise tulips and euphorbia to his right, and a chestnut tree and a bedraggled willow to his left. A boy in an old-fashioned child’s sailor suit pushed across the pond a toy yacht with a single linen sail. Megan arrived and pulled a chair next to his. They rested their feet on the rim of the pond and sat for a while, to feel the evening come in. She put her hand on his neck to soothe his skin where the new collar had chafed. Back in the hotel room, before it had become dark, she sat in the half-length bath and he washed her hair. A tongue of cool shampoo slid from his palm across his wrist and onto her head. As she leaned back a slurry of bubbles ran over her throat. She closed her eyes and drawled, in the voice of the fop in Barry Lyndon: ‘Et maintenant, je suis fa-ti-guée.’ This he would never forget, and one evening, many years later, when Sam Saunders put down the magazine in which he was reading an interview with an actor, to ask Alexander what he would say to someone who wanted him to name the time when he was happiest, Alexander replied immediately that he couldn’t answer, and then, when Liz insisted, chose this day, this hour, in Paris in 1979.
37. A Night at the Opera
A photograph of all the school’s teachers and children was always pinned over Megan’s desk. Because the headmaster liked to surround himself with the more attractive members of his staff, Megan was to be found near the centre, not far from Dominique Seaton, the French teacher, and Valerie Clough, who taught PE, and, in one year’s picture, Claire Mowbray, who lasted four terms and then took a post at a private school in Birmingham. Above the photograph there was a shelf of box files in which she kept the question papers and drawings and notes she had prepared for her classes, and above that there was a second shelf, holding the folders of notes on her pupils, and examples of their work. Many of the names on those folders would remain in Alexander’s memory for a long time, and the faces of some of them, but one boy he would remember more fully than all the others, even though he saw him just twice, and that was Courtney Wilson, who was twelve years old when Alexander first met him.
Megan was at work when Alexander came home from the shop on this Friday evening. The door of her room was open, and he saw her at the desk, with one elbow propped on a pile of exercise books, wearily circling in red ink a sentence on the page she was marking. Massaging her shoulder, Alexander read the words within the red circles: Altantic Ocean, Gulf Streem, Dartmore. ‘He’s a bright boy, Eck,’ she told him, in response to Alexander’s exhalation. ‘Has problems with the written word, but he’s a very bright kid. Very imaginative. Look at this,’ she said, reaching for one of the folders. She took out a photocopy of a crudely drawn map, which was labelled, in uneven capital letters, as a map of Jamaica. ‘He’s done lots of these, a whole series of them. Courtney’s islands of the Caribbean.’
‘That’s not the shape of Jamaica, is it?’
‘Not really, no. He’s made it up. He makes all of them up. But Courtney’s islands make perfect sense. They’re not like most kids’ imaginary maps. He hasn’t slammed things together willy-nilly. His rivers make the right shapes, his trees grow where trees would grow, the beaches are right, the shoreline is realistic. He understands the principles.’ With the cap of her pen she followed the course of a river from its source to the ocean. ‘See? The loops get wider as the terrain flattens out. He might not be able to write words very well, but he sure can draw a map.’ Megan swivelled in her chair to kiss him.
‘Shall I get you something? Modest glass of wine?’ he asked.
She nodded, and put a finger on the photograph. ‘That’s him,’ she said, and Alexander looked at a broadly smiling face in a company of smiling and slightly blurred faces, two rows behind Megan. And then she said, with a small cringe, as if confessing to a mishap: ‘He’s coming over, tomorrow morning.’ Ultimately, it was down to Claire Mowbray, she explained. Observing that Fawlty Towers had awoken the nation to the qualities of well-written farce, Claire had decided that the school was ready for something a bit more ambitious than a musical. She was mounting a production of The Comedy of Errors, with her favourite pupils, the Fielding twins, cast as Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse. The Cartwright brothers, who could pass for twins as long as they remained sitting down and one of them dyed his hair and both wore dark glasses, had been persuaded to take the roles of Dromio and Dromio, and an audition had been held for the other parts, at which Courtney, who was nurturing a blatant crush on Claire, had presented himself. Declining to read from the script, he had delivered instead a scene from faws that he had learned by heart. He had performed both parts of the dialogue, convincingly enough to put Claire in something of a quandary. ‘She thinks he’s dim, and can’t possibly learn the lines. But I know he’s not, and I’m pretty sure he can, and so I agreed to coach him. She’s given him the part of Luciana,’ Megan laughed, ‘because he’s prettier and speaks more clearly than any of the girls.’
They were still eating breakfast when Courtney turned up. He was wearing black nylon shorts and football trainers and a T-shirt with the Ferrari logo across the chest, and he regarded Alexander with eyes that were huge and marvelling and melancholic. Cupping a hand to the back of his head, he asked if Miss Beckwith was in, then followed Alexander as far as the inside doormat, where he remained, staring at his feet so as not to see anything he was not supposed to see, until Alexander beckoned him from the doorway of the living room. Courtney ran into the room and halted abruptly at the sight of Megan in her jeans and old sweatshirt.
‘Good morning, Courtney,’ Megan greeted him, folding the newspaper.
‘Morning Miss Beckwith,’ Courtney replied, and he dipped a shoulder in a paroxysm of bashfulness, as if dodging something that had been thrown at him. He
glanced at Alexander through his eyelashes.
‘This is Alexander, my boyfriend,’ said Megan, at which Courtney gave him a dubious smile. ‘Would you like a bowl of cereal, Courtney? Or some juice?’
‘No thank you,’ said Courtney, as his hands searched for pockets that were not there. ‘Is that what we doing?’ he asked, jerking his head at the book on the table.
‘It is. Shall we start? No point hanging about, is there?’ said Megan. She indicated the chair in which Alexander had been sitting.
‘No point, Miss Beckwith,’ Courtney agreed, and with sideways steps he advanced to the table.
Alexander went out of the room. Taking his coat, he indistinctly heard Megan explaining something to Courtney, and then she went on, in an assuaging voice: ‘Good sister, let us dine, and never fret.’ There was a pause; through the gap between the hinges of the door Alexander saw Megan wave the book over the table, like a conductor’s baton. ‘Good sister, let us dine, and never fret,’ she coaxed.
Courtney rubbed the heels of his thumbs on his eyes and grinned at the newspaper. ‘Good sister, let us dine, and never fret,’ he recited, in a light, bouncing treble.
‘A man is master of his liberty,’ Megan reasoned.
‘A man is master of his liberty,’ repeated Courtney, to the same melody as he had given to the first line.
‘Good sister, let us dine, and never fret;
A man is master of his liberty,’ Megan reprised, with emphatic expressiveness.
‘Good sister, let us dine, and never fret;
A man is master of his liberty,’ Courtney recited, exactly as before, but when Alexander returned, nearly five hours later, Courtney’s delivery of his words was so different it was as though he had been pretending not to understand what he had been saying.
Packets of biscuits and crisps, various mugs and glasses, a bottle of lemonade and a carton of juice were strewn about the table. Megan was sitting where she had been before, but Courtney was strolling around the room, gesturing at an imagined companion, whom he comforted with arguments that were self-evidently sound. She got up when Alexander came into the room, took up a position in front of the window, and waved Alexander to the settee. ‘Your attention, please,’ she announced, and looked to Courtney.
The boy approached her, raising a graceful hand, and while walking he began to speak:
‘Good sister, let us dine, and never fret;
A man is master of his liberty;
Time is their master, and when they see time,
They’ll go or come; if so, be patient, sister.”
Sweetly condescending, he touched a finger to the back of her hand.
Furrowing her brow, Megan responded: ‘Why should their liberty than ours be more?’
‘Because their business still lies out o’door,’ explained Courtney.
‘Look, when I serve him so, he takes it ill,’ Megan complained, assuming a petulant expression that melted only when Courtney, with a demeanour of great wisdom and patience, pressed Megan’s hand and told her:
‘Why, headstrong liberty is lash’d with woe.
There’s nothing situate under heaven’s eye
But hath his bound in earth, in sea, in sky.”
And so Courtney expounded the natural law of the beasts, the fishes, the winged fowls and man, rolling his hands in a way that, as Megan later explained, was a parody of the headmaster’s most conspicuous mannerism. Alexander would remember Courtney’s hands with particular clarity, and the courteous bow with which he took the glass of lemonade from Alexander, as Megan applauded, and he would remember Courtney’s ease on the stage of the school hall, from which the portly, fair-haired Fielding twins kept scanning the half-filled rows to locate their parents or Claire, whereas Courtney occupied it as if it were his room at home and spoke his lines as though they were occurring to him while he strolled across it, and at the end of the scene, stepped back to allow the jealous Adriana to precede him and took her arm supportively, with a grace and genuineness that Alexander found moving, though Courtney was swathed and hooded in a length of turquoise curtain material and Adriana was some three or four years older than him, and perhaps eight inches taller.
In the foyer they encountered Mr Wilson and his wife. Their son had been the star of the show, Megan told them. Scraping a hand across his silvery stubble, Mr Wilson replied that it was bad enough that the boy had been made to dress up like a girl, but if they’d known he wasn’t going to be in action for more than five minutes they wouldn’t have bothered coming. He stooped to look through the doors of the hall. At the foot of the stage, still in their togas, the Fielding twins were receiving the praise of their family. But Courtney was so good, Megan persisted, smiling at Mrs Wilson, who looked at her husband, as if to deflect a compromising question. ‘Didn’t understand half of it,’ said Mr Wilson. ‘Did we?’ he demanded to his wife, and his wife glanced self-deprecatingly at Alexander, then allowed her gaze to drift to a place between himself and Megan. ‘Whose idea was it, doing a thing like that?’ asked Mr Wilson, peering through the doors again. The children had enjoyed it, Megan suggested. ‘Those as were in it, I suppose,’ Mr Wilson conceded. ‘Didn’t see many of them in there, did you?’ With a shrug Mrs Wilson conveyed to Alexander her sympathy with his disappointment at the poor attendance. Alexander and Megan left, having asked Courtney’s parents to pass on their congratulations to him.
The hostility of Mr Wilson was not unexpected. As a boy Lloyd Wilson had built boats with his uncle, but on his uncle’s death in 1958 he came to England, where he worked as a joiner on building sites, mostly in the Midlands and the north-west. Within two years he had married the daughter of the boss of a roofing firm in Coventry and established his own joinery and carpentry business, which by the time of Courtney’s birth was employing Mr Wilson’s brother, a cousin, and the cousin’s brother-in-law. Determined that his son should join the family firm as soon as he was old enough, Mr Wilson could be relied upon to set himself against anything that might divert Courtney from his destiny, a destiny that Megan, whose affection for the boy was in part due to his manifest respect for his parents and most of his teachers, tended to regard gloomily, often envisaging his future as a life on rails. ‘I can see it,’ Alexander would remember her saying, after she had spoken to Mr Wilson about Courtney’s progress, and he would picture her slamming her forearms onto the table, locked in parallel. Over the years there were disagreements between Mr Wilson and Megan and several other teachers at every parent-teacher meeting, until a week in the summer of 1980, from which Alexander would remember two evenings.
On the evening of the meeting he went to his parents’ house as soon as he had shut the shop, bringing the video recorder that he had bought on his father’s behalf. Before they ate he connected and tuned it, and set it to record A Night at the Opera, which, while Alexander was unpacking the machine, his father had noticed was being broadcast at the time they would be eating. They left the doors of the front room and dining room ajar, Alexander would remember, and his father raised a finger expectantly as seven o’clock approached, and offered a handshake when they heard the whirr of the cassette in the other room. Some people thought that Betamax was better than VHS, his father admitted, and perhaps they were right. But he didn’t think quality was what would decide the issue. It was the length of the recording, that was what would settle it. And there would have to be a winner, he said. Had Alexander seen the piece in The Times? he asked, though Alexander never read The Times. Someone had written a long letter to the paper, arguing that the music industry had managed to sustain two different record speeds, so it followed that two different video formats could survive. Which was missing the point somewhat, wasn’t it? It seemed to be, Alexander replied, and the conversation continued between Alexander and his father, with his mother saying little, except, as Alexander would remember, to complain that watching films on TV was not the same thing at all, a proposition with which his father could only agree, patting her hand in commis
eration.
Alexander helped his mother clear up, while his father, instruction manual in hand, stopped the tape and tried to set the machine to record a programme the following day. ‘Shall we see how the film’s come out?’ his father called. ‘Or shall we wait for Megan?’ There was no telling when Megan would be finished, Alexander replied; it could be another hour yet, if some of the parents misbehaved. ‘Let’s give it a look, then,’ said his father. ‘All right with you, Irene?’
His mother said nothing as she loaded the dishwasher and wiped the draining board. She gave the taps a twist to make sure they would not drip. Finding a jug that was not where it should have been, she carried it to the cupboard, and opening the door she said to herself, in a sigh that Alexander was meant to overhear: ‘I don’t understand it.’
Suppressing his annoyance, Alexander asked: ‘Don’t understand what, Mother?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does. You couldn’t keep it in, therefore it matters.’ He took the jug from her and placed it precisely in its gap on the upper shelf. ‘Out with it.’
‘All that time for those children,’ she reluctantly told him. ‘But none of her own. I don’t understand it.’
‘Yes, you do, Mother. It’s not a mighty conundrum. We’ve had this before.’
‘I know, Alexander,’ she said sadly, moving towards the light switch.
‘Not again, please. We’ve done marriage, mortgages and kids, God knows how often.’
‘Megan’s not the maternal type, I suppose.’
‘Nothing to do with being a type. It’s a choice, and not an easy one. I’ve told you before.’
‘The career is more important, I know. Girls today put themselves first. I know that, but still –’
‘It’s a choice we both made.’
‘Was it?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘Like not getting married?’
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