Besides, the seeping discomfort was appropriate to the activity. Two-bit private eyes don’t go everywhere in raincoats for no reason. They carry the dismal weather around with them, in their hearts.
Kreitman was amazed how quiet Soho was among the rooftops, a mere four or five storeys up. You heard the fire engines and the police cars and the occasional blood-curdling scream – usually a joke – but otherwise he felt he could have been in a suburb. Richmond, say. Even the pounding jungle music coming from car radios was no worse than you’d have got in Richmond. As for the din of the streets themselves – ‘Honk, honk, urgent delivery!’ – barely a whisper.
But then, as he’d have been the first to admit, he was engrossed. He couldn’t decide whether or not he’d chosen the right location. Would it have suited his purposes better to be positioned where he could see the capsules front on, looming suddenly on the wheel’s peak, hoving, hovering, then coming crashing down on him like a waterfall? Or even from behind, where he could watch their backs as they ascended from the ground, rose and arched and slowly vanished – the goodbye view? The spectacle he’d opted for, of the entire rotating wheel full-face, like the sun, all but the very lowest capsules visible simultaneously, was picturesque but less dramatic. There’d be no jolt of invidious recognition this way, no lurch of the stomach as the pod containing people you recognised, people you loved and people you hated, people you loved with people you hated, swung brutally into your face. Was he sparing himself, after all?
He was too far away. His binoculars were powerful, but he knew he was kidding himself if he thought he was going to distinguish any individual or individuals with any certainty among the crowds. As for whether he’d be able to make out what they were up to, paddling palms, exchanging reechy kisses, fumbling for each other’s loose change – forget it. A handjob in silhouette in an empty pod, yes, he’d be able to pick that out, from Mars he’d be able to pick that out. But the pods weren’t travelling empty.
On the evening Chas stood him up, Kreitman watched until the Eye disappeared into the rain mists. Twice he thought he’d seen Chas. Her strong profile. The stiff billow of her spinnaker. A hundred times he’d seen Nyman. Insinuating as a rat. But not once together. Being discreet, were they?
Back in his flat he wondered about the logic of Chas’s actions. How many times could she face making circles over London with her lover? Wouldn’t that pall quickly? Silly question, since you would have thought Nyman would pall quickly, since you would have thought he’d pall immediately, but apparently he didn’t. But pall or no pall, why meet somewhere so crowded, so inconvenient, for so short a time, so often? Secrecy, yes, but had Chas not heard of hotels? One possible answer was that she was tormenting Nyman by granting him the favour of her company for no longer than a single revolution of the wheel. A subtle torture, worthy of Scheherazade, that inappropriate patron saint of the children’s story, and a subtle moral prevarication – driving Nyman barmy while keeping herself respectable, confining her infidelity to a single rotation in a public place, and in that way, if Kreitman could only see it, limiting the damage she was doing to him. ‘I am only unfaithful to you Marvin, for the time it takes the London Eye to go round once.’ Could a man who’d lived as he’d lived deny her that?
Perhaps he couldn’t, but in the meantime it was himself to whom he was denying nothing.
The following day Chas cancelled again, and then again the day after that. Still holidaying. ‘No need to follow her,’ Kreitman told Maurice. ‘Just give me a call if you see her getting into a taxi.’
And that was how, late one autumn afternoon, Kreitman came to be mingling with the crowds queuing to climb aboard the wheel. For all the world a holidaymaker himself, until you got close and smelt the agitation on him.
He had no plan of action. If he found them, would he confront them on the spot? He didn’t know. Unlikely. Would he use bad language? He didn’t know. Unlikely. Would he keep his distance, follow them, muffled, into the capsule, wait until they had attained the apex of the ride and unmask them in the very act? Pretty difficult to achieve, given the numbers of people and the regimented ticket-buying. And, no, not what he wanted anyway. He stood back from the mêlée, exhilarated by the machinery, the giant spokes, the great engines painted red like toy trains on their backs, the tensed cables strung very nearly as tight as his nervous system. He leaned against a sculpture dedicated to the International Brigade, THEY WENT BECAUSE THEIR OPEN EYES COULD SEE NO OTHER WAY. Him too. He was here in the same cause, a martyr to the open eye, an international brigadier of love.
Ideally, he would find them, follow them, hop into the capsule next to theirs and spy on them from there. Nothing else. That would do it. Just that. Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course and never blinking an eye.
But first find them in the jostle. The fact of it was that anyone not queuing, anyone on the perimeter like him, was a thousand times more conspicuous than the funsters waiting to climb on. If they were there, they’d see him before he saw them. He decided against looking for them in the check-in lines – he hated the facetious airline vocabulary British Airways had brought to the wheel: it wasn’t a fucking flight, it was a ride – and took himself instead to the disembarkation point. Never mind following them on, he’d follow them off. Catch them not in flagrante but post factum, post festum, post coitum. Not as much fun, not as much pain, but decisive. And in that way, taking the long view, maybe more extended pain eventually. Because it would mean he had allowed the thing to happen, connived at it.
And photographs too! Here was a stroke of luck. Passengers coming off the wheel – more airline talk – found their photographs waiting for them, not pinned to a board in the old innocent style of pleasure-boat snaps, but flickering on video screens. Proof, proof in the only medium that mattered, proof on the box!
Kreitman stepped up to the photograph collection point, to see if Chas and Nyman were already up there, arms about each other’s waists, smiling for the birdie. They weren’t. Not yet. Timed to correspond with the numbers leaving the wheel, the pictures on the video screens changed. You had to be quick. You had also, Kreitman soon realised, to have made the decision to be photographed. You weren’t automatically taken. You had to go into a booth before climbing aboard. You had to mean it. You had to want it. Would Chas have done that? Too risky, surely. But then again, think of her on her knees on the croquet lawn. Hadn’t that been all risk? Wasn’t coming here in the first place, all risk?
He kept looking. Terrible fake photographs they were, super-impositions of yourself on an unpeopled pod high above the city, an artificial expression of slightly sickly suspensefulness on your face. They should have studied him before going in if they wanted to know how you looked when you were feeling vertiginous, what a sickened stomach did to your colouring, how terror pulled at the corners of your mouth, how apprehension of disaster blooded your eyes.
He went on staring at the screens, watching them change. He couldn’t stop himself. It was like pornography. The same obsessional repetitiveness, on and on, page after page, hunting for that ideally disgusting image, the one that would give you everything, the one where the stranger’s outlandish pose finally met, in every specific, all the prerequisites of your own deranged desires. And at the back of your mind, never leaving you free to squander yourself without reproach, the horror of waste, the sense of ruined time. Tick-tock, tick-tock, hunting for that stranger who, by the miracle of revealed porn, happened to know the very thing you wanted. Except that today Kreitman wasn’t wanting anything from a stranger.
How long he’d been there he didn’t know. But it was long enough to forget the wheel itself, turning and disgorging, turning and disgorging, just a few feet behind him. Something made him look round. There it was, in all its density and clarity, the overwhelming knitted mass of spokes and almost as an afterthought, a sudden flash of inspiration, those beautiful fish-bowl pods. And there, climbing out of one of them, also as an afterthought, it seemed, was Chas – in hi
s surprise he almost called her name – and there helping her, holding her elbow, tenderly solicitous, not Nyman, no, not Nyman or anyone remotely resembling Nyman, but Charlie, Charlie Merriweather, her lawful husband.
The two Charlies, together again, looking as though nothing had ever come between them.
Chapter Four
‘You’d be a fool,’ Dotty had told her sister, a week or so before. ‘You’d be going straight back into all that shit again.’
‘What shit? I didn’t see any shit.’
‘Darling, everybody else saw it for you. Some of us were even forced to tread in it.’
‘Dotty!’
‘Have you forgotten already? Do you want me to remind you of the exact form of his proposition to me? The precise words, darling, were –’
‘Dotty, he was distraught.’
‘Of course he was distraught. He’ll always be distraught. Don’t agree to see him.’
‘I can’t. He’s –’
‘I know – distraught.’
‘I was going to say he’s the father of my children.’
‘Then let them see him.’
‘They won’t.’
‘Very wise of them.’
‘Dotty, I’ve got to see him. I’m drifting about.’
‘Why shouldn’t you be drifting about?’
‘It’s not my way. I need to know where I am.’
‘You’re having an affair, that’s where you are.’
‘It doesn’t suit me. I feel like someone else.’
‘That’s the point of an affair, darling.’
Chas fell silent. Then she repeated what she’d said before, ‘I’ve got to see him.’
‘In that case take Marvin with you at least.’
‘Marvin? Don’t be absurd.’
‘Then take me. Maybe he’ll slip in a quick proposition while he’s on his knees to you.’
‘Would you like that, Dotty?’
Dotty Jumper paused to take in breath. ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘The old sisterly reproach. I’d forgotten what it was like to have the sour taste of your marital sanctimoniousness back in my mouth. Don’t ask me what I think, Charlie, if you’ve already made your own mind up. But do yourself one little favour – he’ll be all over you like a rash, so meet him somewhere you can easily pick him off you and throw him out, once you discover, as I promise you will, that you are a changed woman and don’t like anything about him any more.’
With which Dotty, miffed, put down the phone.
The following evening Chas was on the wheel with Charlemagne.
It took one spin for the wife to voice her grievances – some of them going back almost a quarter of a century – and two more for the husband to admit and take the blame for everything. Almost everything. There followed a couple of necessarily stationary meetings in a coffee shop, in the course of which they had dodged, to each other’s satisfaction, the more difficult implications of rhapsodic infidelity, before they went up for a fourth and final time – the time Kreitman saw them leaving – as a sort of sentimental commemoration of the settlement of their differences.
‘So what was it like,’ Chas had to ask, just the once, ‘your sabbatical?’
To which Charlie had replied, ‘I had never realised how lonely sex for its own sake gets. It unpeoples you.’
‘Sex unpeoples you?’
‘We never saw anyone. We never spoke to anyone.’
‘Wasn’t that because you were wrapped up in each other?’
Get out of that one, Charlie.
He took a deep breath. ‘Sexually, yes,’ he said. Charlie Hyphen Smelly-Botty Fansbarns, lost in a dark wood. ‘Once upon a time,’ he started to tell her, ‘a very naughty man …’
‘Don’t,’ she said.
‘You don’t want to hear about the Lilith the Night Hag, and how she made spells to entrap very naughty men called Charlie Hyphen …’
‘Come on, Charlie,’ she said, ‘be honest. No one trapped you.’
‘Sex can feel like that, though,’ he admitted. ‘You can feel ensnared in it.’
She touched his arm. ‘You don’t have to spare me,’ she said. ‘You must have been in love with her a little bit. Don’t say sex when you mean love.’ They were standing shoulder to shoulder, surveying like astronauts the orb of the city, both of them straining their vision towards Richmond. ‘Be truthful. I can take it.’
‘I mean sex,’ Charlie said. ‘But of course, yes, there was some affection.’ He couldn’t bear to say more. He put his hand in her hair, pulling her head into the sanctuary of his shoulder. He loved having her there again, but there was another good reason for holding her to him – he wasn’t in control of his face, and he didn’t want her to see that.
‘So it was all just silliness?’ she asked at last.
He nodded, not trusting himself to words. But he was just able to say, ‘And you?’
She too wasn’t in control of her face. ‘The same,’ she said, with difficulty. ‘Just silliness.’
Lying in bed, Kreitman revolved the question – To whom was an explanation owing?
No words had been spoken when he saw them coming off the wheel. What was there to say? Might not a woman go for a joyride with the father of her children, her companion for more than two score years, and her collaborator in countless stories for young people? Kreitman did not have an inflated idea of his rights. Not for a moment did it occur to him to make a scene. In one action he saw them and, without waiting or wanting to know whether they had seen him, he fled. Novel for Kreitman, this. He did not recognise himself as a fleer. He had slunk away often enough. Skulked off in hyena shame, with his feeling parts dragging in the dirt. Or even faced up to the obligations of retreat like a man, with a tear in his eye and his hand sportingly outstretched – I did you wrong, may you fare better in the future. But this was the first time he had ever turned icy cold, gathered what he could only call his aura about him, as though there were a ghost self he carried on his shoulders, like a loose coat, and fled.
Anyone watching would have picked him for the criminal, not the victim.
And who was to say they would not have been right?
To whom was an explanation owing?
Unable to employ his mind to any better purpose, he remained in his bed for two days, counting his books, counting out the days of his life in his books, feverishly reading their spines backwards, like a boy with the measles – ttebboC mailliW … IliM trautS nhoj … ecalP sicnarF … A nice description of his condition. How did he feel? EcalP sicnarF. SicnarF to death. He didn’t expect the phone to ring. If she hadn’t seen him, she had no reason to trouble herself. She was holidaying from him. If she had seen him, some explanation was owing to her and she was determinedly waiting for it. Why were you spying on me, Marvin? Why were you spying on me for a second time? The answer ought to have been straightforward: Why were you giving me reason? But the disingenuousness of that didn’t get past even him. Why was he spying on her? For the same reason that lovers have spied on one another since lovers have existed. To quiet the demons of uncertainty, Chas. Not to stir the dragons of proof, Marvin? Ah, Chas, Chas, show me the ardent lover who can tell a demon from a dragon, or who doesn’t, in the end, prefer turbulence to peace. I say an ardent lover, Chas. Do I take it, then, that your ardour is now satisfied, Marvin? He shook his head. In bed on his own, he shook his head. Soon he would be speaking words aloud, down to only himself to talk to. Satisfied? No, he wasn’t satisfied. He was as unsatisfied as it was possible for a man of exacting mental appetites ever to be. He couldn’t be jealous of Charlie, or otherwise interestingly damaged by him. Rights and precedence aside, he couldn’t get his stomach to turn over for Charlie. He felt disappointed and lonely, sicnarF to death, betrayed and made a fool of, but there was no accompanying kick in the gut. He considered himself doubly let down. She had deceived him to no perversely satisfying end. And whether she fairly owed him an explanation for that he couldn’t decide. Probably she didn’t. But she could have been
magnanimous and given him something to which he had no right.
Just short of a week, he rang her.
‘What’s there to say, Marvin?’ she asked. ‘My husband has pleaded to be forgiven and taken back. And I’ve said yes. I suppose I’ve done what I always knew I was going to do.’
‘You always knew that, did you?’
Her voice was back to where it had been when she’d relieved him of his cat ttebboC. All its doors closed to him. ‘I suppose I did, yes. Surely you did too.’
He thought he might cry. It was the form of words that did it. Always the form of words.
Not the dead in their coffins, Kreitman thought, not the dead in their winding sheets in their coffins in the sodden ground are ever so finally dead as words make them.
‘I didn’t, actually,’ he said. ‘More fool me, but I didn’t.’
‘Well, there you are,’ she said. ‘We thought it would be me who’d be saying that. It should be a change for you, Marvin, delivering a sentence you must have heard a thousand times.’
He coughed, to get the teary deposits out of his voice. ‘I’m lying here,’ he said, ‘where we lay together, floating among my old useless books, reading my antiquated library from memory. And suddenly I’m reminded that when Francis Place lost his wife he was in such an agony of grief he was unable to attend her funeral. Instead he hid in the barn. “A mere child,” he called himself, “without a particle of resolution.” And he one of the most resolute men of the century.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Marvin? I’m not your wife.’
‘After her death he kept hearing her moving along the passages of the house. Or in the rooms.’
She said nothing. Kreitman wondered if perhaps she was listening for the sound of her own footfalls down the line.
‘I hear you on my ladder, Chas.’
Who's Sorry Now? Page 30
