London Fields (3 page)

Fifteen minutes later, dressed for death, she called her black cab and drank two cups of black coffee and tasted with hunger the black tobacco of a French cigarette.

In Golders Green she dismissed the taxi, and it pulled away for ever. She knew she'd get a lift back: you always did, from funerals. The sky above the redbrick lodge she entered was certainly dull enough for a person to take leave of it with equanimity. As usual she was quite late, but the volley of pale glances did not pierce her. With no attempt at self-muffling she walked evenly to the back and slipped into an empty aisle, of which there was no shortage. The dead woman was not being populously farewelled. So this was all you got: the zooty sideburns and masturbator's pallor of an old Ted in a black suit, and the secular obsequies. Nicola longed equally for a cigarette and the lines you sometimes heard: a short time to live, full of misery. She was always especially stirred — this was why she came — by the spectacle of the bereaved elderly, particularly the women. The poor sheep, the dumbfounded sheep (even mere nature dumbfounds them), as reliable as professional mourners but too good at it really, too passionate, with hair like feather dusters, and frailly convulsed with brute grief, the selfish terrors . . . Nicola yawned. Everything around her said school, the busts and plaques, and all the panels with their use of wood to quell and dampen. She hardly noticed the discreet trundling of the coffin, knowing it was empty and the body already vaporized by fire.

Afterwards, in the Dispersal Area (a heavy blackbird was flying low and at an angle over the sopping grass), Nicola Six, looking and sounding very very good, explained to various interested parties who she was and what she was doing there. It solaced the old to see such piety in the relatively young. She reviewed the company with eyes of premonitory inquiry, and with small inner shrugs of disappointment. In the carpark she was offered several lifts; she accepted one more or less at random.

The driver, who was the dead woman's brother's brother-in-law, dropped her off on the Portobello Road, as instructed. Prettily Nicola said her goodbyes to him and his family, extending a gloved hand and receiving their thanks and praise for her attendance. She could hear them long after the car had pulled away, as she stood on the street readjusting her veil. Such a nice girl. So good of her to come. That skin! What hair! All the way back Nicola had been thinking how good a cigarette would look, white and round between her black fingers. But she was out of cigarettes, having almost gassed herself with tobacco on the way to Golders Green. She now progressed along the Portobello Road, and saw a pub whose name she took a liking to. 'TV AND DARTS' was the further recommendation of a painted sign on its door, to which a piece of cardboard had been affixed, saying, 'AND PIMBALL'. All the skies of London seemed to be gathering directly overhead, with thunder ready to drop its plunger . . .

She entered the Black Cross. She entered the pub and its murk. She felt the place skip a beat as the door closed behind her, but she had been expecting that. Indeed, it would be a bad day (and that day would never come) when she entered a men's room, a teeming toilet such as this and turned no heads, caused no groans or whispers. She walked straight to the bar, lifted her veil with both hands, like a bride, surveyed the main actors of the scene, and immediately she knew, with pain, with gravid arrest, with intense recognition, that she had found him, her murderer.

When at last she returned to the flat Nicola laid out her diaries on the round table. She made an entry, unusually crisp and detailed: the final entry. The notebooks she used were Italian, their covers embellished with Latin script. . . Now they had served their purpose and she wondered how to dispose of them. The story wasn't over, but the life was. She stacked the books and reached for a ribbon . . . 'I've found him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the Black Cross, I found him.’

I think it was Montherlant who said that happiness writes white: it doesn't show up on the page. We all know this. The letter with the foreign postmark that tells of good weather, pleasant food and comfortable accommodation isn't nearly as much fun to read, or to write, as the letter that tells of rotting chalets, dysentery and drizzle. Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page? When I take on Chapter 3, when I take on Guy Clinch, I'll have to do, well, not happiness, but goodness, anyway. It's going to be rough.

The moment that Keith Talent saw Nicola Six – he dropped his third dart. And swore. The 32-gram tungsten trebler had pierced his big toe . . . I thought I might be able to make a nice play on words here. Cupid's dart, or something like that. Arrows of desire? But it wasn't desire that Nicola Six aroused in Keith Talent. Not primarily. I would say that greed and fear came first. Going for broke at the pinball table, Guy Clinch froze in mid-flail: you could hear the ball scuttling into the gutter. Then silence.

While the scene developed I melted, as they say, into the background. Of course I had no idea what was taking shape in front of me. No idea? Well, an inkling, maybe. This moment in the public house, this pub moment, I'm going to have to keep on coming back to it. Edging down the bar, I was intrigued only in the civilian sense – but powerfully intrigued. Every pub has its superstar, its hero, its pub athlete, and Keith was the Knight of the Black Cross: he
had
to step forward to deal with the royal tourist. He had to do it for the guys: for Wayne, Dean, Duane, for Norvis, Shakespeare, Big Dread, for Godfrey the barman, for Fucker Burke, for Basim and Manjeet, for Bogdan, Maciek, Zbigniew.

Keith acted in the name of masculinity. He acted also, of course, in the name of class. Class! Yes, it's still here. Terrific staying power, and against all the historical odds. What is it with that old,
old
crap? The class system just doesn't know when to call it a day. Even a nuclear holocaust, I think, would fail to make that much of a dent in it. Crawling through the iodized shithouse that used to be England, people would still be brooding about accents and cocked pinkies, about maiden names and
settee
or
sofa
, about the proper way to eat a roach in society. Come on. Do you take the head off first, or start with the legs? Class never bothered Keith; he never thought about it 'as such'; part of a bygone era, whatever that was, class never worried him. It would surprise Keith a lot if you told him it was class that poisoned his every waking moment. At any rate, subliminally or otherwise, it was class that made Keith enlist a third actor in his dealings with Nicola Six. It was class that made Keith enlist Guy Clinch. Or maybe the murderee did it. Maybe she needed him. Maybe they both needed him, as a kind of fuel.

Do
I
need him? Yes. Evidently. Guy pressed himself on me, same as the other two.

I left the Black Cross around four. It was my third visit. I needed the company, hair-raising though much of it was, and I was doing all right there, under Keith's tutelage. He introduced me to the Polacks and the brothers, or paraded me in front of them. He gave me a game of pool. He showed me how to cheat the fruit machine. I bought a lot of drinks, and endured a lot of savage cajolery for my orange juices, my sodas, my cokes. Taking my life in my hands, I ate a pork pie. Only one real fight so far. An incredible flurry of fists and nuttings; it ended with Keith carefully kicking selected areas of a fallen figure wedged into the doorway to the Gents; Keith then returned to the bar, took a pull of beer, and returned to kick some more. It transpired that the culprit had been messing with Dean's darts. After the ambulance came and went Keith calmed down. 'Not with a man's darts,' Keith kept saying almost tearfully, shaking his head. People were bringing him brandies. 'You don't . . . not with his darts.’

I left the Black Cross around four. I went back to the apartment. I sat at the desk in Mark Asprey's bay-windowed office or study or library. Actually it's more like a trophy room. Actually the whole damned place is a trophy room. Walking from living-room to bedroom – and I'm thinking of the signed photographs, the erotic prints – you wonder why he didn't just nail a galaxy of G-strings to the walls. In here it's different. Here you're surrounded by cups and sashes, Tonis and Guggies, by framed presentations, commendations. Cherished and valued alike by the critical establishment, the media, and the world of academe, Mark Asprey has honorary degrees, pasteboard hats, three separate gowns from Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin. I must look at his books, of which there are a great many, in a great many editions, in a great many languages. Hungarian. Japanese.

I left the Black Cross around four. I went back to the apartment. I sat there wondering why I just can't do it, why I just can't write, why I just can't make anything up. Then I saw her.

Across the way from Mark Asprey's bay-windowed library there is a lot-sized square of green, with two thin beds of flowers (low-ranking flowers, NUPE flowers) and a wooden bench where old-timers sometimes sit and seem to flicker in the wind. On this green patch, rather regrettably, rather disappointingly (how come Asprey stands for it?), there is also a garbage tip: nothing outrageous, no compost or bathtubs or abandoned pantechnicons, just selected refuse, magazines, old toys, a running shoe, a kettle. This is a London theme; the attempt at greenery would itself appear to attract the trash. The cylinders of wire-netting they put up to protect young trees sufficiently resemble a container of some kind, so people cram them with beercans, used tissues, yesterday's newspapers. In times of mass disorientation and anxiety . . . But we can get back to that. On with the story. The girl was there: Nicola, the murderee.

I was sitting at Mark Asprey's vast desk – I think I might even have been wringing my hands. Oh Lord, these chains! Something I have suffered for twenty years, the steady disappointment of
not writing
– perhaps exacerbated (I admit to the possibility) by Mark Asprey's graphic and plentiful successes in the sphere. It shocked my heart to see her: a soft blow to the heart, from within. Still wearing her funeral robes, the hat, the veil. In her black-gloved hands she held something solid, ribboned in red, the load settled on her hip and clutched close as if for comfort, like a child. Then she raised the veil and showed her face. She looked so . . . dramatic. She looked like the vamp in the ad, just before the asshole in the helicopter or the submarine shows up with the bathcubes or the chocolates. Could she see me, with that low sun behind her? I couldn't tell, but I thought: Nicola would know. She would know all about how light works on windows. She would know what you could get away with in the curtainless room, what adulteries, what fantastic betrayals . . .

Nicola turned, wavered, and steadied herself. She dropped her burden into the trash and, embracing her shoulders with crossed hands, moved off in a hurrying walk.

For perhaps five minutes of stretched time I waited. Then down I went and picked up my gift. Not knowing what I had, I sat on the bench and pulled the ribbon's knot. An adorably fat and feminine hand, chaos, a menacing intelligence. It made me blush with pornographic guilt. When I looked up I saw half of Nicola Six, thirty feet away, split by a young tree-trunk, not hiding but staring. Her stare contained – only clarity, great clarity. I gestured, as if to return what I held in my hands. But after a pulse of time she was walking off fast under the wrung hands of the trees.

I wish to Christ I could do Keith's voice. The
t'
s are viciously stressed. A brief guttural pop, like the first nanosecond of a cough or a hawk, accompanies the hard
k.
When he says
chaotic
, and he says it frequently, it sounds like a death rattle. 'Month' comes out as
mumf
. He sometimes says, 'Im feory . . .' when he speaks theoretically. 'There' sounds like
dare
or
lair
. You could often run away with the impression that Keith Talent is eighteen months old.

In fact I've had to watch it with my characters' ages. I thought Guy Clinch was about twenty-seven. He is thirty-five. I thought Keith Talent was about forty-two. He is twenty-nine. I thought Nicola Six . . . No, I always knew what she was. Nicola Six is thirty-four. I fear for them, my youngers.

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.

G
UY CLINCH WAS a good guy – or a nice one, anyway. He wanted for nothing and lacked everything. He had a tremendous amount of money, excellent health, handsomeness, height, a capriciously original mind; and he was lifeless. He was wide open. Guy possessed, in Hope Clinch, a wife who was intelligent, efficient (the house was a masterpiece), brightly American (and rich); and then there was the indubitable vigour of the child . . . But when he woke up in the morning there was – there was no life. There was only lifelessness.

The happiest time of Guy's fifteen-year marriage had come during Hope's pregnancy, a relatively recent interlude. She had taken her fifty per cent cut in IQ with good grace, and for a while Guy had found himself dealing with an intellectual equal. Suddenly the talk was of home improvement, of babies' names, nursery conversions, girlish pinks, boyish blues – the tender materialism, all with a point. Never entirely free of builders, the house now thronged with them, shouting, swearing, staggering. Guy and Hope lived to hormone time. The curtain hormone, the carpet hormone. Her nausea passed. She craved mashed potato. Then the nesting hormone: an abrupt passion for patching, for needle and thread. Seeing the size of her, the barrow boys of Portobello Road (and perhaps Keith Talent had been among them) would summon her to their stalls, saying sternly, masterfully, 'Over here, my love. I got the stuff you want.' And Hope would rootle to the base of damp cardboard boxes – rags of velvet, scraps of satin. In the eighth month, when the furniture had begun its dance round the house, and Hope sat with regal fullness in front of the television, darning and patching (and sometimes saying, 'What am I
doing?
'
),
Guy consulted his senses, scratched his head, and whispered to himself (and he didn't mean the baby),
It's coming . . . It's on its way.

Oh, how he had longed for a little girl! In the sparse gloom of the private clinic, the most expensive they could find (Hope distrusted any medical care that failed to stretch searchingly into the four figures: she liked the scrolled invoices, with every paper tissue and soldier of toast unsmilingly itemized; she had no time for the bargain basements and the Crazy Eddies of the National Health), Guy did his share of pacing and napping and fretting, while titled specialists looked in from dinner parties or popped by on their way to rounds of golf. A girl, a girl, just an ordinary little girl – Mary, Anna, Jane. 'It's a girl,' he could hear himself saying on the telephone (to whom, he didn't know), 'Five pounds twelve ounces. Yes, a girl. A little under six pounds.' He wanted to be with his wife throughout, but Hope had banned him from labour and delivery wards alike – for reasons, soberly but unanswerably stated, of sexual pride.

The baby showed up thirty-six hours later, at four in the morning. He weighed nearly a stone. Guy was allowed a brief visit to Hope's suite. Looking back at it now, he had an image of mother and son mopping themselves down with gloating expressions on their faces, as if recovering from some enjoyably injudicious frolic: a pizza fight, by the look of it. Two extra specialists were present. One was peering between Hope's legs, saying, 'Yes, well it's rather hard to tell what goes where.' The other was incredulously measuring the baby's head. Oh, the little boy was perfect in every way. And he was a monster.

Guy Clinch had everything. In fact he had two of everything. Two cars, two houses, two uniformed nannies, two silk-and-cashmere dinner jackets, two graphite-cooled tennis rackets, and so on and so forth. But he had only one child and only one woman. After Marmaduke's birth, things changed. For fresh inspiration he reread
The Egoist,
and Wollheim on Ingres and the Melting Father. The baby books had prepared him for change; and so had literature, up to a point. But nothing had prepared him or anybody else for Marmaduke. . . World-famous paediatricians marvelled at his hyperactivity, and knelt like magi to his genius for colic. Every half an hour he noisily drained his mother's sore breasts; often he would take a brief nap around midnight; the rest of the time he spent screaming. Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief. When things improved, which they did, though only temporarily (for Marmaduke, already softly snarling with asthma, would soon be emblazoned with eczema), Hope still spent much of her time in bed, with or without Marmaduke, but never with Guy. All night he lay dressed for disaster in one of the two visitors' rooms, wondering why his life had suddenly turned into a very interesting and high-toned horror film (one with a Regency setting, perhaps). His habitual mode of locomotion around the house became the tiptoe. When Hope called his name - 'Guy?' – and he replied
Yes?
there was never any answer, because his name meant
Come here.
He appeared, and performed the necessary errand, and disappeared again. Now, with Hope's requests, the first time of asking sounded like the second time of asking, and the second time of asking sounded like the ninth. Less and less often Guy would try to hoist the baby into his arms (under the doubtful gaze of nanny or night-nurse, or some other of Marmaduke's highly-paid admirers), saying, rather self-consciously, 'Hello, man-cub.' Marmaduke would pause, reviewing his options; and Guy's bashfully inquiring face would somehow always invite a powerful eye-poke or a jet of vomit, a savage rake of the nails, or at the very least an explosive sneeze. Guy shocked himself by suspecting that Hope kept the infant's nails unclipped the better to repel him. Certainly his face was heavily scored; he sometimes looked like a resolute but talentless rapist. He felt supererogotary. The meeting, the rendezvous, it just hadn't happened.

So two of everything, except lips, breasts, the walls of intimacy, enfolding arms, enfolding legs. But that wasn't really it. What had meant to come closer had simply moved further away. Life, therefore, could loom up on him at any moment. He was wide open.

Guy and Hope had been away twice since the birth, on doctor's advice: their doctor's, not Marmaduke's. They left him in the care of five nannies, plus an even more costly platoon of medical commandos. It had been strange, leaving him behind; Guy fully participated in Hope's dread as the cab made its way to Heathrow. Fear was gradually eased by time, and by half-hourly telephone calls. The inner ear was tuned
to
infant grief. If you listened closely, everything sounded like a baby crying.

First, Venice, in February, the mist, the cold troubled water – and miraculously carless. Guy had never in his life felt closer to the sun; it was like living in a cloud, up in a cloudy sea. But many of the mornings were sombre in mood and sky (dank, failed), and seemed best expressed by the tortured and touristless air of the Jewish Quarter, or by the weak dappling on the underside of a bridge (where the pale flames pinged like static, briefly betrayed by a darker background) – or when you were lost among the Chinese boxes, the congestion of beauties, and you could have likened yourselves to Shakespearean lovers until there came the sound of a wretched sneeze from an office window near by, then the nose greedily voided into the hanky, and the resumption of the dull ticking of a typewriter or an adding machine.

On the fifth day the sun burst through again inexorably. They were walking arm in arm along the Zattere towards the café where they had taken to having their mid-morning snack. The light was getting to work on the water, with the sun torpedoing in on every pair of human eyes. Guy looked up: to him the sky spoke of Revelation, Venetian style. He said,

'I've just had a rather delightful thought. You'd have to set it as verse.' He cleared his throat. 'Like this: