Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 15
Then it was vodka cocktails and champagne all night for those of the congregation who stayed after the door was shut, and Gary was drunk too and played the duet from Don Carlos on the piano even when ‘I only want to be with you’ was playing over the loudspeakers at full volume, and I remember O with his moustache dripping with champagne and his bow tie undone but otherwise still looking the perfect gentleman (I fancied him so much in that outfit I had to stay at the other end of the bar and only look occasionally – have you never seen another man so handsome it makes you almost want to cry or leave the room? Haven’t you? Why don’t you get me a drink?) and I remember him later going down on Boy right here in the bar while we were all looking under a table for a lost pearl shirt-stud or something, and we were all kissing and laughing and almost falling over, and now I don’t remember anything else about that famous night though I do remember that it was wild. And of course the thing was that none of us knew till the next morning, when those of us who had stayed all night opened the door and had to make our way home through empty streets littered with glass and fallen tree branches, none of us knew that around us in the darkness the city was being wrecked in the storm. We heard and saw nothing; we were too intent on our celebration.
And none of them knew that at the height of the storm, as Gary played that single note twelve times to indicate the striking of the ormolu clock, the city itself had celebrated O and Boy’s engagement, but in the strangest fashion. There had been no assaults that night, but the storm had been strong enough to bring the streetlights down and fill the air with tiles coming down like slate knives; whole sheets of copper were torn from the domed roof of the court building and crashed down; parked cars rocked where they stood; the river turned black. The illuminated clock on the tower went dark for an hour, and above the deserted streets all the statues of the city were shaken and tested by the storm. They beckoned to each other, their arms upraised against the winds in benediction, exhortation, jubilation; and when the rain finally came, just before morning, the stone and metal of these limbs, which had become warm, almost as warm as flesh, in the heat of the long summer day and evening, seemed to take on a sort of life. Of course none of the statues was actually seen to move; that would have been a miracle; but as the rain fell they seemed, though immobile, to live. The Temple dragon in the Strand mewed a clear poison which dripped from under his forked tongue. The great, stupid, sleeping lions in the square drooled saliva and seemed about to rise and roar; a kind of clear blood ran down the blade of the uplifted scimitar with which the Allegory of Fortitude protected her naked child from the snake pinned beneath her foot at the Aldwych; there was so much blood it ran over the handle of the scimitar and down over her wrist. The wings of the Victory alighting atop the arch at Park Lane found a wind for once adequate to their size, weight and fury; her horses reared at the lightning and were lathered with sweat. On the parapet of the cathedral at Ludgate, St Agatha expressed a single drop of milk from the nipple of her stone breast. And on churches, tombstones, banks and derelict theatres, all the angels of London wept; tears dripped down their metal cheeks and trickled from under their stone eyelids. Since their faces did not move, their reasons for crying on this occasion remained hidden. There are, after all, times when people cry silently and without moving. One often cannot tell, at weddings or funerals or other festivals, whether people are crying for joy or in still, silent anger. The adolescent angel marking the vanished playground in which thirteen children had been killed by a bomb on the Commercial Road wept with downcast eyes; the gilt angel before the Palace wept and seemed to smile even as she held aloft her unextinguished flame; even Michael, Prince of all the city’s angels, wept on the porch of St Peter, Cornhill. And above them all the great golden figure on the Old Bailey, Justice herself, blindfolded and armed just as Love is armed and blind, Justice herself was seen to move; she rocked and swayed in the storm.
… follow now the direction of her blinded gaze. On the other side of the city, lost in a park, two war memorials stand facing each other, and here too a male couple hold hands before their peers. On one memorial six identical men stand silently at attention. The rain drips from their heavy capes – sodden canvas turned cold as metal, and as heavy – and it drips from the brims of the metal helmets that hide their faces. And down those darkened faces the tears also run. On the other, older memorial, overlooked by their weeping comrades, two men, both moustachioed and wild-eyed, hold onto each other and gaze away from the city to some far horizon, and they too are crying tonight. The younger has fallen to his knees, but is supported and steadied by the hand of the other, who, older, is still able to stand. His shirt is open, and the rain makes his perfect and heroic chest sweat.
These two memorials stand in an avenue of plane trees, and a single branch of one tree endlessly, silently, brushes the standing soldiers shoulder, endlessly tapping, as if endlessly trying to make him turn again, turn again. And in this nights storm the branch begins to slash at and break itself on the standing man’s broad and unfeeling back; the wind makes the tree desperate, a hoyden, breaking its nails and bruising its fingers, pulling tirelessly at the metal buckle on his shoulder; and the soldier is crying, and he holds his dear Friends hand, holding on for dear life; and the tree is crying out into the night wind, saying to him all night, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn.
Sunday
Dear Boy,
I expect you will have seen on the news how terrible it has been down here. We have been hit worse than anyone, I think.
You know that I have always liked to think of this small part of the world as something which I’ll be handing down to future generations, something of value which I can leave behind me having done a good job. I’m more of a custodian or guardian than an owner is how I see it. It is, in a very special way and without being sentimental about it, my life’s work; but it also represents the lives of all the other men who have lived and laboured here.
I often think about the men who planted the orchard, and I have done so many times in the last week while surveying the damage. They must have known they would never have seen the trees mature themselves, but must have hoped that their children and indeed children’s children might one day pick the fruit on summer evenings, and think of them as they did so. It makes me sad to think of all the children who have climbed in those trees, and indeed all the times when ordinary decent men and women have walked under them, holding hands when their work was done – you know how sweet the evenings can be here – I expect those trees have seen some lovemaking and even children conceived in the grass beneath them in their time. Well, it’s all gone now, the whole lot, and the copper beech too, down right across the road it is. All destroyed in one night.
Of course they’ll never be replanted, that’s the sad thing, not that you could replant that orchard now anyway, fifteen different varieties there were, and you can’t get those old varieties any more, just can’t find them. They’ll bulldoze the trees, I expect, and sell the field for housing. It make me sad just to think about it, tiny houses, cheap houses, I expect, all crammed together, and such apples they were, sweetest straight off the tree.
The rest of the garden is unrecognisable. The quince was torn right off the wall; the big bed of roses, which as you know holds such special memories for me, is all but gone.
It’s a sad day for all of us, I think.
Goodnight, Father
Publishing the banns
That was a strange couple of days then, with the city picking itself up, and you noticed how much was gone or fallen in the storm, and you wondered who wasn’t in to work; despite hearing the word frequently on the news, we were all surprised that there could be ‘devastation’ in our time and in our city. People told each other stories, went to bed at night listening out for the sound of the wind rising.
In the aftermath of the storm everything was precarious and strange. Even though the wind had died down, for days afterwards loosened slates would still slide down onto the streets. The injuries the storm caused were frightening; especially because we associated knives and fists coming down with darkness, with shouting, whereas these ‘assaults’ came in daylight; one slate sliced open the astonished face of a four-year-old child walking across a school playground. A man walking on the Charing Cross Road was brought to his knees by a great sheet of hardboard which fell silently and suddenly from a boarded-up facade high above him. It rained on the stage of the opera house; beneath the stage, unseen, a lake was said to be spreading. In the National Gallery a plank came through a glass roof and smashed the face from a valuable terracotta bust; and that night rainwater worked its way down the walls towards the surface of a great and priceless painting. The next morning they rescued the painting and polished the stained gallery floor; an elderly woman, staring intently at the masterpiece, slipped on the over-polished floor, sat there dazed and badly hurt, not knowing why or how she had fallen.
And also there was another assault, the day after the storm, but it went unremarked amongst all these incidents. The knife came down on a man of about thirty-four that time I think. It was a strange couple of days.
That was when Boy received the next letter, which I have included above.
They were strange days, and difficult ones for Boy and O. We worried about them. Mother said: ‘What does happen next, Gary? I mean, I know I’ve seen this film before. Is this the scene where he… ’
And there she petered out, and Gary didn’t answer, he just began to pick out her song on the piano, as if that was some kind of answer to her question.
And Boy said to Older, ‘You know what’s happening, don’t you, you know all about it?’ and O replied: ‘No. She’s never done this before. I mean, I don’t know why she’s doing this to us in particular; God knows, there are enough of us about.’
O took Boy in his arms and said: ‘It would be a great mistake for you to ever assume that I know that much more about what we’re doing than you do.’
The truth was, Mother had taken back the diamond, after lending it to them for their engagement night, but she was giving them money. One man that she had chosen mostly for his looks and one man she had hardly ever spoken to, yet here she was spending considerable money and more time on turning these two into a couple, a prize pair. There was a fierceness about the way she did it; as if this was the last chance for her, for all of us, not just for them. Sometimes she seemed to be staring at them all night, watching every single move they made and you did sometimes wonder why she was doing it, cultivating them like this. I suppose somebody had to be perfect, that was it. She kept no diary, so there is no record of her thoughts on this matter, and nothing was found in her papers to explain it (though what we did find was a meticulous record of every penny she had spent on them, not just the furniture and the flat but also every drink which she had bought them since the very first day of Boy’s life in The Bar). There was one note which I think is something of an explanation:
‘I have never minded before but the buildings are torn down so fast these days, and I don’t mean the storm. Every time you go back something’s gone. Never sure that the schools and public buildings won’t just go too. I think we’re getting used to having things taken away, a few speeches on the nine o’clock news, and everyone will get used to walking from Stepney to the Haymarket again, or from Camden to Covent Garden, at four in the morning like they used to, the cold fingers, and hiring a van once a year to take all the children in the building – ’
When O was working every day of the week, Boy missed him, and wanted to ask him if he would come home for lunch. It was as if he worried about him whenever he couldn’t actually see him. This was the first time he had ever felt this; it was a new feeling. A new phase. Then O suddenly told Boy that he wasn’t going to see him for two days. He said he needed to sleep on his own for two days, needed to rest, needed to eat, needed to go to the pool and do his face and hair. He said, Meet me in two days’ time, OK, give me forty-eight hours. What he wanted to say was, I need to think. What he really wanted to say was, I need to decide.
They had arranged to meet somewhere else for a change, because O had said he didn’t want to be watched by everyone. You’d think, he said, they were waiting for the next instalment of their favourite soap opera. I want you to myself for once. What’s happening between us is private. Boy hadn’t replied to this observation, but had agreed nonetheless to meet O in a cheap restaurant in a different part of town in two days’ time.
Boy had spent the two days waiting, and then finally on the Tuesday night specified he had laid his clothes out, and bathed, and shaved without cutting himself, and did his hair and dressed without changing his mind, which was unusual, and had set out exactly on time. He was looking especially handsome, having chosen a white T-shirt which looked ordinary but in fact had cost him four weeks of economy; it fitted his chest and his stomach with an elegant indecency which, in another age, had expressed itself in a made-to-measure glove, a white evening glove in which one young man’s hand reached out to cup another young man’s chin.
Boy thought he had got used to waiting for O, since now all he did (or so he thought) was wait; especially since O had phoned him that time, because now even when he was alone in his room there was the possibility that not only was O thinking about him but he might actually pick up the phone and call. But evidently he had not got used to the waiting, because now he found that as he was sitting on the bus riding to his appointment with O he was actually holding his breath. He thought, By now, surely, surely by now I should be sure that everything is going to be all right. Surely now I don’t need to worry about what is going to happen next.
He knew at first glance that O was not there. He drank two glasses of wine, which he pretended to enjoy, and even at one point managed to concentrate on the music which was playing. By nine-thirty he knew that O was not coming, and of course he also knew where to find him.
It didn’t occur to him to be angry, since he thought of everything that O did to him as some sort of deliberate test which he must pass. This was another. He walked from the restaurant to The Bar, which was an hour away, and when he arrived he was tired and calm and ready to sit down. Everybody saw Boy come in and of course everybody was thinking, Well, here he is at last, we were wondering what had happened. Boy had a beer, feeling the need to act casually, and then casually he asked if anyone had seen O that evening, and he guessed why they were all half-smiling, and he half-guessed what they would say, and indeed Gary said it, without even pausing in his rendition of ‘Only You’ on the piano (because it was a Tuesday night, which was show-song night); Gary said, He’s upstairs with Mother. Gary said it as if it was quite an ordinary thing to say, as if this happened all the time, and although Boy knew that everyone said no one, but no one, went up to Mother’s room, he thought to himself that perhaps this did happen all the time, perhaps O was often upstairs with Mother, perhaps they went upstairs and planned their next move. Perhaps they were talking about him now.
Boy had the wit not to make for the door behind the bar immediately. He did not especially want everyone to watch him. He finished his beer slowly, knowing somehow that it would be considered tactless to move too fast. He even looked around The Bar, as if to say, Is there anyone else here tonight who would do, is there anyone else I could spend time with instead? And then, Well no, perhaps not, OK, I’ll finish my drink now, yes, there it is, finished, and I’m climbing down off my stool (he had sat on the stool which O usually occupied), and here I go, I’m walking behind the bar which only the most important customers are allowed to do, here is the door, which no one opens except by invitation, and here are the stairs, I’m closing the door behind me, here are the stairs, all I have to do now is climb them.
Let us imagine the scene; we’ll have to, since Boy shut the door behind him, and left us to speculate as to what happened. Boy very much wanted to go upstairs, to interrupt Mother and O while they were talking. Or rather what he really wanted to do was to overhear, to hear them talking about him, to know what they really thought about him. But in fact, he only got half way up the stairs, and then sat there in the dark, his chin in his hands. And I think that is where O found him when he came down; I think O just picked him up, explained that Mother had wanted to talk to him about money, and that it was all arranged, that they were indeed going to live together, that he’d decided, that she was going to provide the money for somewhere suitable for them to live together, and that they should go downstairs now and have a drink and then go quietly home and talk about what sort of place they would need and if they could get it on the rent Mother was proposing. Because when they came down it was very much together, and Boy looked very quiet and happy and had lost that lost-dog expression he had had when he went upstairs. Clearly they had come to some agreement.
