To Heaven by Water Read online

  Justin Cartwright’s novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet, the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers, White Lightning, shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award, The Promise of Happiness, winner of the 2005 Hawthornden Prize and, most recently, the acclaimed The Song Before It Is Sung. Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and lives in London.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Song Before it is Sung

  This Secret Garden (non-fiction)

  The Promise of Happiness

  White Lightning

  Half in Love

  Leading the Cheers

  Masai Dreaming

  In Every Face I Meet

  Interior

  This electronic edition published in April 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  First published in Great Britain 2009

  This paperback edition published 2010

  Copyright © 2009 by Justin Cartwright

  Lyric from ‘Alma’ written by, and reproduced by kind

  permission of, Tom Lehrer (Maelstrom Music)

  All rights reserved

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  publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781408806241

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  For Geza Vermes

  James M’Cann’s hobby to row me o’er the ferry ... To heaven by water.

  Ulysses

  – James Joyce

  ‘Such,’ he said, ‘O King, seems to me the present life of men on earth, in comparison with that time which to us is uncertain, as if when on a winter’s night you sit feasting with your earls and thanes, a single sparrow should fly swiftly into the hall, and coming in at one door, instantly fly out through another. In that time in which it is indoors it is indeed not touched by the fury of the winter, but yet, this smallest space of calmness being passed almost in a flash, from winter going into winter again, it is lost to your eyes. Somewhat like this appears the life of a man; but of what follows or what went before, we are utterly ignorant.

  Ecclesiastical History of the English People

  – The Venerable Bede, 731 ad

  PROLOGUE

  Deep in the Kalahari, two brothers, Guy and David Cross, no longer young, are sitting by a campfire. The sun as it descends is setting light – in an act of mindless arson – to the cirrus clouds that appeared unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon, so that for a few minutes these clouds look like the flags of a medieval army. The brothers have long and unkempt – pilgrim – hair. The older brother, Guy Cross, is reciting, staring upwards at forty-five degrees, as he is inclined to do when smoking dope:

  I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of

  daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his

  riding

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and

  striding

  High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

  In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and

  gliding

  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

  Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of; the mastery of the

  thing!

  Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a

  billion

  Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

  Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermillion.

  And indeed the embers of the brothers’ own little fire are unstable beneath the blackened, cherished kettle, and occasionally crumble and fall, to release for a moment from their depths gold vermilion, curiously free of smoke.

  Guy Cross has tears in his eyes. He is easily moved.

  ‘Shit, that’s beautiful. Sorry, it gets me every time,’ he says.

  ‘No problem,’ says David Cross. ‘I am in my ecstasy.’

  He feels a rushing, unstoppable love for his older brother, whom he has barely seen in the last forty years.

  The stars are appearing as the lurid sunset subsides, soaking away beneath the rim of the vast, flat, inscrutable earth.

  David Cross mouths: L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle. The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

  And the stars are now implausibly bright, scattered carelessly like lustrous seed across the southern sky.

  1

  The truth is, David thinks, that none of us has a clue, although Brian, who lived in Hong Kong twenty years ago, believes he does. We are all losing our hold on small things; the world we were brought up in, and we thought belonged to us, is losing us in the dense, moving panorama which surrounds us. Our forms are still here but they are short on substance.

  Brian is ordering. He knows a few words of Cantonese, or maybe it’s Mandarin, and he believes he is charming the waitress, who wears a cheongsam of that shiny silky brocade material the Chinese favour. Woven into the cerulean sheen are little pictograms of herons. When you look at them closely you see that there are only two herons, flying around or standing knee-deep in water, endlessly repeated. The buttons, you discover, are frogs.

  Some time ago David gave up on Chinese food and took up Japanese for its undoubted health advantages. But for these lunches – once or twice a year – they always meet here, in Lisle Street, and they all know that it is a ritual which must be closely observed, even down to the taking of the monosodium glutamate.

  The waitress has very sturdy legs, which are at odds with her small, delicately porcelain face, the face of a child, perhaps sent here from some poor rural town in the north of China. These people are anyway going to inherit the earth; they have a certain steeliness, and they don’t need or want our understanding or sympathy.

  Brian has the bit between his teeth. He’s ordering soup and sesame toasts and char siu pau, which – every time – he tells them is bread dough with barbecue-pork stuffing, and most times he recommends something Szechuan, which, he reminds them, is hot. The people in Szechuan, he says, not only like chilli but are very tall. He orders something called Man and Wife Offal Slices, which will undoubtedly bring sweat to their scalps. The waitress smiles at his witticisms, but her eyes are as glassy as a heron’s. One of the first poetic images David remembers is the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore in Dylan Thomas. He no longer asks himself why he suddenly remembers things without warning. Or why he finds emotion rising in gusts, unbidden: that child missing in the Algarve; Tony Blair saying my hand on my heart, I have done what I thought was right; a cheetah cub being killed by a lion on TV. In recent days all these had caused that treachero
us welling from the depths.

  He suddenly gets a strong gust of a forgotten fragrance. It is urgently rushing in to fill a space that he has unconsciously kept vacant. He remembers the small takeaway, decorated with two tasselled lanterns, on the high street near his parents’ house in Ewell, where they sometimes ordered sweet-and-sour pork, in those days, small hard kernels of a deep-fried porky batter in a sweet sticky sauce. The recollection is inexplicably pleasurable, like the emotions you have in the cinema, which have no real consequences. When those boys in the Territorial Army complain about serving in Iraq and about how badly they are being treated, it’s because up until now they had only been play-acting, without expecting to see real death or to experience real pain. Nobody signs up for that. When he reported from war zones, David always felt mysteriously protected from what was going on around him, although in his rational mind he knew it was an illusion.

  He looks round in the direction of this scent, which dates from the time of carbolic soap, and sees, in robustly threaded garments, an elderly couple – not that much older than he is, but from another era – tucking in. The man’s tweed hat rests on the table. His hair is grey although stained the colour of nicotine at the tips of the wings, which are trained over the tops of his ears. The woman, pinched by years of disappointment – so David imagines – wears a pale-blue quilted waistcoat.

  He smiles at them.

  ‘Sorry to peer. That smells lovely. I wish we had chosen it.’

  ‘It’s our favourite,’ she says, smiling warmly. ‘We live in Cornwall.’

  ‘Marvellous, enjoy.’

  Even as he says it, he knows that the man, who looks annoyed by this spontaneous bonhomie, will hate that metropolitan injunction: enjoy.

  ‘You still know how to talk to the common people, I see,’ says Julian.

  ‘Nice couple. Up from Cornwall. They were pleased to find someone in London who can speak English. How’s old Brian getting on?’

  ‘Old Brian’s well away. Speaking in tongues.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ says Brian, breaking off for a moment. ‘I plead guilty to being more worldly and cosmopolitan than the rest of you.’

  ‘You are. No question. Are you engaged to Tiger Lil yet?’

  ‘I’ve given her the deposit for a house. She’s just off to ring the agent.’

  Here we are again: Brian officiating, Julian quiet and watchful. Adam half drunk already, a pinkish aureole on each cheek, Simon looking subdued; Simon always starts quietly, as though it has been difficult for him to accept that these are his friends, friends of the inalienable sort, not necessarily the people he would have chosen in an ideal world, but ones with, as the police say, previous.

  ‘I’ve ordered Peking duck for the traditionalists.’

  ‘Brilliant. As you know, we would eat bogies with sesame seed if you ordered them. Where you go on any culinary voyage, we follow.’

  ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Adam’s already drunk half a bottle and the Jiaozi dumplings and soup haven’t even arrived.’

  Adam raises his glass.

  ‘Chill. Here’s to that nice Mr Brown, our new leader.’

  David still believes Blair is a fine person and prime minister and that the new man will flounder. Politics has changed: Brown is from a different time, like something discovered when a glacier moves, and nobody will like him when they discover the truth. The waitress now brings the dumplings, the soup, the char siu pau and some other unspecified bits in little baskets stacked one on top of the other. Brian opens the baskets, glances inside, and closes the lids quickly, as though he is expecting small creatures to pop out if he isn’t quick.

  ‘He’s bonkers,’ says Simon.

  ‘I don’t think he’s bonkers. He’s overly rational,’ says Julian.

  ‘Sadly, politics is not rational. You remember what Macmillan said when he was asked what the pitfalls of a political career were: Events, my boy, events.’

  Of course they all know what Macmillan said, and they also remember him, the prime minister of their boyhood, a bewhiskered old grandee, with sagging eye pouches like empty purses, defiantly Edwardian. Even then it was a mystery how he came to be cast as leader. The memory of Macmillan touches David: it seems so distant. He’s beginning to see his childhood as his children see it: lost somewhere, stranded in an age of mist. The black-and-white family photographs, with their donkeys and beaches and your mother in a one-piece Jantzen swimsuit, help create the impression that the wheel turns pretty quickly. When he sees pictures of himself at the age of eight or ten, he sees an imposter, some little stranger who has come through the wainscot. The Water-Babies was his favourite book and the feeling that his childhood may not have happened as he remembers it is fostered by that book: for a few years he wasn’t sure if he was real or a creature of the sea. And of course he hadn’t realised that it was a tract against child exploitation; Tom was, as Blake wrote in Songs of Innocence, a little black thing among the snow – exploited labour.

  Ed, at thirty-two, thinks of me as encumbered by my past. To him I am a Bactrian camel, staggering along laden with all sorts of goods which nobody needs or wants any longer. In fact all of us here are in some way trying to prepare ourselves for what is to come.

  Adam is ordering another bottle; he hopes, and he has every possibility of succeeding, to be drunk when his end comes. Although none of them talks about their own deaths, these meetings have a subtext: we may be ridiculous and out of time, but we represent something, even if it is something our children don’t see and the world doesn’t require. When Nancy died nearly a year ago, many friends came, some from far away. They hadn’t come to mourn Nancy, so much as to show themselves, like those forest people in the upper reaches of the Amazon who occasionally appear mysteriously from nowhere, in a diffident but defiant sort of way, saying yes, we are here.

  There’s a capacious, unused look to Gordon Brown, like an old rectory with too many rooms. God knows what he looks like without his clothes on: he’s way too fat, unlike Blair who keeps himself pretty trim. More and more the role of the politician is to provide the people with an excuse to air their own banal and inaccurate opinions. Politicians’ lives only have meaning in relation to how they are perceived; in fact Berkeley’s saying, To be is to be perceived, seems to have been stood on its head. David finds his friends strangely eager to make themselves heard, as though this is their last hurrah, the last chance to catch the ear of the heedless. It’s only when they are gathered like this that they can believe that their youth and their vitality and their recklessness and their indiscretions and their sexual and sporting and creative achievements are not forgotten. They like to be reminded of these, because they are inclined to think that they have invented their pasts. It’s an unsettling feeling.

  The fact that many people still recognise him, and often come up to speak to him, doesn’t lessen David’s sense of insubstantiality. And sometimes in the middle of the night when he wakes up and finds to his surprise that Nancy is not there, he feels a little resentment towards his children for treating her death as an excuse to peg him down: he should, in their view, feel himself diminished and his posture in the family should be one of gratitude. Their own lives are not so perfect, of course, but then families have unreal expectations of their blood relations; the family is a sort of Platonic ideal, floating way above the real facts, the facts on the ground.

  ‘You look thin,’ says Adam. ‘You’re getting to be gaunt; are you OK?’

  ‘Funny, isn’t it, when you lose weight, I mean deliberately, everyone thinks you are about to kick the bucket. No, Adam, I haven’t got anything terrible. I’m just trying to get fit.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Well, yes. That is the question.’

  The rest of the food arrives. Adam’s cheeks have anticipatory highlights. When he gets drunk he simply becomes more amiable. His curly hair, only slightly grey, falls over his face; he wears a red T-shirt that displays his rather soft chest to
o frankly. Written on it are the words: The meek shall inherit the earth, after we have finished with it. He has absolutely no dress sense: he is wearing camouflage trousers with many zips and buckles, and huge black trainers, which he almost certainly borrowed from one of his sons. The whole family goes to restaurants together and they eat and drink prodigious amounts. Sometimes they sing. In his heyday as a scriptwriter, Adam once confessed that he had spent forty thousand pounds on eating out in a single year.

  David is getting thinner and stronger by the week, and eating less and less. The gym has become a ritual; endorphins make him happy. (Although scientists are undecided on how endorphins relate to happiness.) This morning there were three fat women on the running machines, wearing headscarves, but with their abundantly feminine bottoms clearly outlined in tracksuits. None of the women jogged, they walked slowly. On the monitors facing them was a music channel, which shows videos of black male singers attended by gyrating girls bumping and grinding, tits on display, legs spread wide, booty undulating, in a kind of shivering motion, which David thinks is demeaning, suggesting they are all dying to have sex with these gold-swagged potentates. He wondered how these Muslim women saw these videos; perhaps from within their headscarves they felt immune to evil impulses. He would have liked to ask them, but he thought that this might be a transgression. Maybe they simply took this video nonsense as lightly as everyone else.

  Over to the right from the cross-trainer, where he was simulating the art of skiing across the snowy tundra, is the weight-lifting section where unemployed men, white and black, lift weights sporadically and then stare at the mirror to see if their muscles are responding to order. They have a curious way of walking from one apparatus to another, stately, self-regarding, profoundly pleased with their bodies, seeing or imagining that something beautiful and significant is emerging.