London Fields (11 page)

I
N HIS DREAM Guy Clinch edged closer to the bare body of a softly faceless woman. For a moment of dream time she turned into a thirteen-year-old baby, smiling, crooning, then once more became a woman without a face. Not even a baby face. This wasn't a sex dream. It was a love dream, a dream of love. He edged towards an oozing
yes . . .

In actuality, in real life, Guy Clinch was edging towards a rather different proposition. Inches from his touch lay Hope in her dressing-gown, unblinkingly wakeful, and far from faceless: the healthy oval and its long brown eyes. Inches from his head, on the innumerable pillows, crouched Marmaduke, his hands joined and raised. As Guy entered the warmth-field of his wife's body, Marmaduke's twinned fists thumped down into his open face.

'Ow!' said Guy. The flesh fled in rivulets. He looked up in time to see the blurred arrival of Marmaduke's next punch. 'Ow!' he said. Unplayfully he sat up and wrestled Marmaduke to the floor.

'Take him,' said Hope in a tranced voice.

'Was he very bad?'

'And quick with breakfast.'

'Come on, you little devil.' He picked up Marmaduke, who embraced the opportunity to sink his teeth gum-deep into Guy's neck. Guy gasped and began the business of trying to force open Marmaduke's jaws.

Hope said, 'He needs changing. He seems to have eaten most of his nappy again.'

'Loaded or unloaded?'

'Unloaded. Hold his nose. He'll give up in a couple of minutes.'

Guy pinched the sticky nostrils. Marmaduke's teeth tightened their grip. The seconds ticked by. Finally he released his mouthful, sideways, for greater tear, and sneezed twice into his father's face. Holding the screaming child out in front of him like a rugby ball or a bag of plutonium, Guy hurried towards the adjoining bathroom. This left Marmaduke with only one option for the time being – the reverse kick to the groin – which he now duly attempted. Guy put him face down on the far corner of the bathroom carpet. He managed to shut and bolt the door and crouch on the lavatory seat before Marmaduke was up and at him again . . . There were two reasons why Guy favoured the seated position: first, because it helped accommodate the unenlargeable erection he always woke up with; and secondly because Marmaduke, while feigning babyish absorption in the flush handle, had once smacked the seat down on him with incredible suddenness and force, dealing Guy a glancing blow that had none the less empurpled his helmet for a month and a half. As Guy used lavatory paper to staunch the flow of blood from his neck, Marmaduke paced yelling round the room looking for good things to smash.

'Milt,' said Marmaduke. Toce. Milt. Toce. Milt! Toce! Milt! Toce! Milt! Toce!'

'Coming!' sang Guy.

Milk toast, thought Guy. An American dish, served with honey or syrup. Hope likes that, and so does Lizzyboo. Hello, something missing: the strainer.

Marmaduke paused and spitefully watched his weaving father, the man with two pairs of hands. 'Toce,' he said, in an altogether more menacing tone. 'Toce
daddy.
Daddy.
Toce
daddy. Daddy
toce.'

'Yes
yes.'
He stood there, skilfully buttering toast as Marmaduke clawed at his bare legs. Then the moment came and Marmaduke sprang for the knife. After a fierce struggle beneath the table Guy disarmed him and climbed to his feet, holding his nose where Marmaduke had bitten it. The knife again. He adored all knives. A calling, but for which occupation ? Friends and relatives, on their rare and foreshortened visits, always said that Marmaduke, when he grew up, would join the army. Not even Guy's ancient father, a brigadier in World War II, had seemed to draw much comfort from this prospect.

Now he crouched smiling and offered up a piece of toast to Marmaduke's drooling mouth.

'Good Lord,' he murmured.

Guy had often suggested that they get specialist advice about Marmaduke's eating. After all, they were getting specialist advice about everything else he did. The child had of course been to several celebrated dieticians, and had been placed on regimes designed to quench him of vigour. The most recent one, said the doctor in his teak-panelled consulting rooms, would have reduced an Olympic sprinter to helpless enervation within a matter of days. It hadn't worked on Marmaduke, whose natural taste, incidentally, was for chips and hamburgers and monosodium glutamate and any kind of junk . . . Guy had seen greedy infants before – but nothing like this. The famished desperation, the neck-ricking bolts and snaps, the coruscating saliva. Halfway through his fifth brick of honey, butter and bronzed wholemeal Marmaduke released a dense mouthful and ground it into the tiles with a booteed foot: a sign of temporary satiation. Guy stuck a bottle in him and carried the child upstairs at arm's length. He locked him into the bedroom, then returned for the tray.

Hope lay back on her barge of pillows. This was more like how things were supposed to be: the tea tray, the telephone, the wallet of mail. The weekend skeleton staff had arrived and were amusing Marmaduke in the nursery above; only faintly could you hear his screams and theirs, and the occasional sickening impact. Guy lay on the sofa, reading the papers. Hope ran her glance cruelly over one gold-trimmed invitation after another.
She said,

'I saw Melissa Barnaby yesterday. Out back.'

'Oh yes?' said Guy. Lady Barnaby: good, sad Lady Barnaby, with her milky eyes. She babysat for Marmaduke in the old days, once or twice. No. Once. The telephone call to the restaurant, just as the cocktails were arriving . . .

'She was looking rather well. She said she felt ten years younger. She's found this marvellous young man. He's fixed up the house. And now she's off to Yugoslavia for a week.'

'How nice.'

'We need one.'

'What? A holiday in Yugoslavia?'

'A marvellous young man.'

'It says here that tourists are advised not to visit COMECON countries. Idiots. They're deploying QuietWall. Darling,' he asked, 'how was it? Did you get any sleep at all?'

'Some, I think, between five and five-fifteen. Lizzyboo relieved me. He was terrible.'

Hope's sleep was a sacred subject in this house – more sacred, possibly, more hedged with wonder and concern, than the subject of Marmaduke himself. Guy had recently come across a scientific description of the amount of sleep Hope got, or claimed to get, during her nights with Marmaduke. It arose in speculation about the very early universe, nanoseconds after the Big Bang.
A Millionth of the time it takes the speed of light to cross a proton.
Now that really wasn't very long at all . . . On the alternate nights when Guy did Marmaduke, he usually got in a good three-quarters of an hour, and frequently dozed while the child wearily belaboured him or beat his own head against the padded walls.

'Poor you.'

'Poor me. Guy,' said Hope. She held a waxed document in her hand. 'What', she asked, 'is
this
shit?'

Guy went on reading, or at least his eyes remained fixed to the page. In the last month he had given £15,000 to charity, and he was feeling terribly guilty.

'Fifteen
grand?'
said Hope. 'Save the Children, huh?' She herself had given a similar amount to charity in the last month, but to galleries and opera houses and orchestras and other repositories of social power. 'What about
our
child? Who's going to save him?'

'Marmaduke', said Guy, 'will have plenty of money.'

'You've seen how he gets through it? Eighteen months old and already it burns a fucking hole in his jeans. In his Osh Kosh B'Gosh! You need therapy, Guy. When this whole thing started I
begged
you to have therapy.'

Guy shrugged. 'We're rich,' he said.

'Get out of here. You're giving me cancer.'

After a deft and speedy bowel movement Guy showered, then shaved: the French soap, the cut-throat razor. He dressed in an assortment of profoundly expensive and durable odds and ends, hand-me-downs some of them, clothes worn by his father, by cousins, eccentric uncles. His closet was a City of business suits – but on most days now his clothes no longer needed to
say
anything. The outer man was losing his lineaments. Soon there would just be an inner one, palely smiling. A flowingly tailored tweed jacket, shapeless khaki trousers, a bright blue shirt, the thumping shoes (Guy's feet were enormous). As he came down the stairs he met with a rare sight: Marmaduke calmly ensconced in his mother's arms. Hope held him protectively while denouncing a nanny, a brawny Scandinavian whom Guy had not seen before. In his left fist he clutched his bays: a posy of long blonde hair.

'And where do you think you're going?' said Hope, turning from one defendant to another.

'Out. Out.'

'Where to? What for?'

'See some life.'

'Oh. Life! Oh I get it.
Life
!
'

Reflexively, but with all due caution (and a shrewd glance at Marmaduke's free hand), Guy bent trimly to kiss his wife goodbye. Then everything went black.

He was in Ladbroke Grove by the time his vision returned. The sloped length of Lansdowne Crescent had reeled past him in the sun, popping and streaming in gorgeous haemorrhages; and only now at the main street, with its man-made noise and danger, did he feel a real need for clear sight. The eye-fork again: the first and second finger of Marmaduke's right hand, searchingly poked into Guy's candid orbits. Wonderfully skilful, you had to admit: such timing. He shook his head with the respectful admiration one knows before a phenomenon, and thought of the six-foot nurse he had seen the other week running down the front doorsteps, not even pausing to sue, with a bloody handkerchief pressed to her nose. Personal-injury suits were another way Marmaduke had found of costing Guy money. None had so far proved serious, but there were now quite a few pending. Marmaduke, and his permanent tantrum; the only thing that silenced him was a parental tantrum, one that left the adult actors still shaking and weeping and staggering, long after Marmaduke's original tantrum had resumed . . . Guy came to a halt on the street and blinked twice with his whole forehead. He raised a hand. With two soft pops he freed his lower eyelids, and waited for the sluicing tears. He had begun to enter the world of duplicity. He was passing through the doors of deception, with their chains of lies. And all London swam.

What kind of man was this? How unusual? Guy gave money to charity. For every other man in his circle, charity began at home. And ended there too. Or not quite: charity continued for a mile or so, into the next postal district, and arrived at a small flat with a woman in it. These men winced at their wives' touch; they jerked up too soon to kiss them hello or goodbye. And Guy wasn't like that.

The thing was, the thing was . . . he was straight arrow. His desires described a perfect arc: they were not power-biased, they were not perverse. He may have had at least two of everything, but he had only one lady. Hope was it, his single woman. When they met at Oxford – this was sixteen years ago – there was something about Guy that Hope liked. She liked his curly-ended fair hair, his house in the country, his shyness about his height, his house in Lansdowne Crescent, his habit of hooding his eyes against a low sun, his title, his partiality to cherries (especially ripe ones), his large private income. They lived together during the last academic year, and studied together at facing desks in the double sitting-room ('Is
Samson Agonistes
epic or tragedy?' 'What were the long-term effects of Pearl Harbor, as opposed to those of Sarajevo and Munich?'), and slept together, vigorously, in the small double-bed. They had both been unhappy at home, had both felt underloved; now they became each other's family. So marriage, and London, and the City, and . . . Hope's social ambitions took Guy by surprise. The surprise wore off after a while (during the thousandth dinner party, perhaps), which was more than could be said for the social ambitions. They didn't wear off: they shone with a gathering brilliance. One of their effects was that Guy naturally came across many beautiful and accomplished and dissatisfied women, at least a dozen of whom propositioned him, in secluded corners, in crush bars, towards the end of masked balls. Nothing really happened. These advances were often sufficiently subtle to escape his notice altogether. True, every few years he secretly 'fell in love'. The redhaired wife of the Italian conductor. The seventeen-year-old daughter of the computer heiress. It was like an illness that passed after a couple of weeks; the love virus, efficiently repelled by a determined immune system. Most worrying and dramatic by far was the case of Lizzyboo, Hope's big little sister. Hope knew something was up the minute she found Guy in the visitor's room weeping over Lizzyboo's ballet pumps. Lizzyboo was sent away that time: seven years ago. All forgotten now, or not even forgotten: a scandalous family joke. Hope herself normally retained several menfriends (a partygoing philosopher, a dandy architect, a powerful journalist), but she was so strict and impeccable that it never seriously occurred to Guy – no no, nothing of that kind. For himself, the world of other women shaped itself into a great gallery, like the Hermitage, crammed with embarrassments of radiance and genius, but so airless, so often traversed, so public – a gallery where Guy sometimes sauntered for an hour, or where he sometimes hurried, looking straight ahead (squares of sublimity moving by like passing cars), or where he was sometimes to be found, though not often, standing before a blazing window and wringing his hands . . .

Marry young, and a melancholy comes over you at thirty, which has to do with thwarted possibilities. It was worse for Guy. Hope was a little older, and had had her fair share of guys at Oxford, earlier on, and at NYU, and for that matter in Norfolk, Virginia. So a new adventure: they overcame their ecopolitical anxieties and decided to go ahead and have a baby. Even then there were difficulties – Guy's difficulties. A process that began with him equably switching from jockey pants to boxer shorts ended up with him out cold and his legs in stirrups while a team of Japanese surgeons and a particle-beam laser rewired his nethers. Thus, after half a decade of 'trying': Marmaduke. For years they had worried about the kind of world they were bringing their child into. Now they worried about the kind of child they were bringing into their world. The gap or hollow that the baby had been meant to fill – well, Marmaduke filled it, and more; Marmaduke could fill the Grand Canyon with his screams. It appeared that from here on in a mixture of fatigue, depression and incredulity would be obliged to keep them faithful. Most of the psychiatrists and counsellors agreed that Hope's unreasonable fear of getting pregnant again might soon start to fade. Their last attempt at lovemaking had featured the pill, the coil, the cap, and three condoms, plus more or less immediate
coitus interruptus.
That was July. This was September.