To Heaven by Water Read online

  As I do.

  The Muslim women never broke into a run; they walked on the treadmill just a little faster than they would on the street. Their bodies probably have a softness and roundness that their husbands like, but now they want to be lean. It is going to take some time at this pace: he could see the LCD display and they were walking at 5.2 km per hour.

  Most days there are also three middle-aged taxi drivers who have had heart attacks, or events, and who arrive together for a workout before their breakfast near Mount Pleasant. All three are shaven-headed and jocular, with legs that look like Mediterranean tree stumps. Cardiac problems have brought them close; illness has become a badge of honour. Sometimes they do runs for a cardiac charity called My Heart is in the Right Place. He wonders if this suggests transplants, but he doesn’t ask. He admires them: a little younger than him, jovial, ironic and clutching at straws. Or perhaps they are Jewish, making bricks without straw. They assume he is also here for his heart: How’s the old ticker this morning, Dave? Still working when I last looked.

  Simon is cheering up as the restaurant becomes foggier and more aromatic. There is a tropical mist of soy and ginger, invisible but closing. It’s always the same with Simon: he starts slowly but eventually remembers what camaraderie and friendship are, so that he is usually the last to leave the restaurant at four in the afternoon, plumped up with human feeling, full of plans which presage a retreat. This is what getting old produces in some people, a deliberate withdrawal from the hurts and insults – the acknowledgement of lack of presence. Germans call it Dasein, being. Being is what we lack.

  Last night he went to the Royal Opera House to see one of Darcey Bussell’s farewell performances. He can’t stand ballet, but it seemed churlish to refuse Ed and Rosalie’s invitation. For Rosalie this leave-taking is something highly significant: his daughter-in-law belongs to that small but clearly identifiable class of pleasantly melodramatic young women who love dance. Dance to them is life, and they wish they could all have been Darcey Bussell. Ed has told him that they are trying to have a child. (How hard would you need to try with Rosalie, he wonders, only mildly ashamed.) If they produce a girl, Rosalie will clothe her in soft airborne materials so that she will look like Edmund Dulac’s fairy drawings in his mother’s calendar. He keeps this calendar in his desk; with its notes about meals and recipes, it summons her more directly than the picture on the piano taken during the war of her in a floral dress, a tea dress, beside his father, who is dapper in naval uniform.

  He likes Rosalie. In the Floral Hall at Covent Garden, where delicate smoked-salmon sandwiches – the food of choice for the dancing and theatrical classes – were pre-ordered, he was proud to be with her as she walked elegantly to find their table, toes placed in classical fashion, her clothes, endowed with mysterious lightness and subtle colours, swirling behind her like the Northern Lights. Waiting with her for Ed gave him a pleasurable sense of complicity. As always, Ed was late, arriving just in time, slightly moist, strangely serious in his dark office suit, but still the rumpled child he had loved.

  He just had time to swallow a glass of the Pol Roger his dear old dad had ordered for him.

  ‘Fucking clients,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Rosie. What’s she doing?’

  ‘Das Lied von der Erde. Her favourite piece.’

  She said this as though it was a widely known fact.

  David remembered Das Lied von der Erde only from Tom Lehrer’s ‘Alma’, about Mahler’s wife:

  Their marriage, however, was murder.

  He’d scream to the heavens above:

  ‘I’m writing Das Lied von der Erde

  ‘And she only wants to make love.’

  But when Darcey Bussell danced, skipping away en pointe, and the soprano moaned the last line, ‘“For ever ... for ever,”’ he recognised the power of art and accepted that it could be found in ballet, even in this sustained cruelty to Darcey Bussell’s toes. Ed was concerned, perhaps embarrassed, when he saw his father in tears. Those treacherous tears. More and more David sees in art a desperate urge to fix ourselves in the universe – which he finds moving.

  ‘You OK, Dad?’

  There was something a little peremptory about the words.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  All his life he had been under the impression that ballet was a sort of high-class vaudeville, full of gesture but signifying nothing much, the tortured bodies and the extravagant costume and the camp sets, a homosexual fantasy, the sort of thing you see writ large in hairdressing salons, but last night he understood – a fact he had in reality always known – that art comes in many guises. And maybe he has been wrong about many other things, he thinks. When Nancy was alive he seemed in some way to be channelled, so that his thoughts and his values butted up against hers and became more rigid. If she had been there last night she would have said how beautiful Darcey Bussell was and he would immediately have reacted poorly to this suburban thought and condemned the whole enterprise. Without Nancy, he is both more uncertain and more free. Darcey Bussell reminds him of Jean Shrimpton, and of his youth. How could he tell Ed this?

  ‘I’m OK, big boy, just sentimental.’

  ‘Is it because of Mum?’

  ‘In a way.’

  But not in the way that Ed imagines and desires. Children crave conventionality in their parents’ affairs. What Ed dreads most, he knows, although they have never discussed it, is the possibility that his father will take up with some gold-digging, well-upholstered forty-two-year-old. The bereaved must live quietly and modestly, forsaking sex, of course, until their time is up.

  And here we are again. We are sitting at this round table, a little battered, but each of us in our own way with a rich history that is not apparent to the other customers and is utterly inscrutable to their waitress, with her enamelled features and functional legs, legs which end in, he sees, pigeon toes. Strange – ballerinas splaying their feet outwards, Chinese waitresses making dutiful, inverted steps with theirs. The waitress is being supervised from a distance by a thin, older man who wears a clip-on bow tie. His face is benevolent but in the course of a slow process of subsiding into a folded-linen shape, as if his upper features are becoming heavy and pressing on the lower section, causing it to crease. And in the rising humidity and quickening tempo of the restaurant, David has the sense of a crowded world composed of infinite numbers of expressions and beliefs and delusions – some of them organised into little groups, like the Noodle Club – which have a central gravitational pull. This pull is to counteract the vortex effect of mortality, which drags on everybody. It all seems arbitrary and unfathomable to David now.

  Nancy sometimes accused him of having autistic tendencies, by which she meant that he often took no interest in her views and judgements, because, she said, he was incapable of understanding other people’s deep feelings. Of course he could not say, I don’t have Asperger’s, I am genuinely not interested in what most people say most of the time. Marriage is not a forum designed for discussing each other’s shortcomings; to work at all, it requires restraint. Now Ed wants me to start digging my own grave. As he grows more plump and corporate, he is suspicious of his father’s leanness. He suspects me of being on the lookout, which, in a sense, I am and always have been, but it is not for some desperately signalling divorcée.

  Adam orders more wine. There is nothing furtive about this, the way it is with some big drinkers; he just can’t conceive of a day or a meal without alcohol and he can’t allow his friends to miss out.

  ‘Are you drinking, Davey boy?’

  ‘Just a beer. For Chrissakes don’t take it as any kind of affront.’

  ‘I won’t. How’s things, generally?’

  ‘Same old, same old.’

  ‘All the better. That’s why we are here. To acclaim the same old.’

  ‘You’re quite a philosophical old bastard these days.’

  Adam’s face has a softness, through which the underlying blood vessels, particularly at the cheeks, are visible, cr
eating a blush like the skin of an apple. He looks unnaturally young, a child with a fever, the curls falling downwards and his small, delicate mouth already stained by red wine.

  ‘How’s the writing? I read about you all the time.’

  ‘Oh shit, David. Don’t go there. Every time somebody comes to me with a script proposal I want to tell them to fuck off. But we spend so much money I can never say no. Now I am running through the Tudor monarchs. I am specialising in cod Elizabethan dialogue, prithee.’

  ‘And winning an Emmy,’ says Simon, who owns a bookshop in Sussex.

  ‘Oh that. Yes, for best dialogue spoken by an actor in a ruff this year. Actually, I am getting the work because they think I was alive in 1589.’

  Adam always has a book in his pocket. He reads, walking down escalators to the tube or waiting at the dentist, but he claims to hate almost every known writer apart from P.G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome, whom he reveres. David doesn’t read either of them.

  ‘And you, are you over Nancy’s death, in so far as old cunts like us can ever get over that sort of thing?’

  ‘That sort of thing?’

  But he’s not really reproaching Adam.

  ‘You know what I mean. No offence.’

  ‘I am not unhappy. No. My son asked me the same question only yesterday. The children, of course, would like me to be pottering around the garden and falling asleep in front of the television at six-thirty. I miss her in the sense that you would miss a piece of your body if it fell off.’

  ‘What, like your cock?’

  ‘I wouldn’t necessarily miss that.’

  ‘Do you know what Richard Harris said to me about his dick?’

  David remembers the story, about the need to have a woman to hand at all times because his erections were so infrequent. As he listens again, he sees that there are various ways of dealing with approaching old age: the Anglo-Saxon way is to be ironic. Adam’s life is anyway a kind of performance; he’s always complaining about producers, agents, the BBC – where countless harridans have stabbed him in the back – and publishing, while at the same time being in constant demand to speak on radio or do an adaptation of Jane Austen or write a drama about the Tudors or speak at a school or college. His one successful novel, written eighteen years ago, The Wise Women of Wandsworth, is a comedy classic, although no longer read. David loves him unreservedly; he loves his kindness and his openness and his willingness – his compulsion – to wear his heart on his sleeve. The strange thing is that his apparent defencelessness hides a very shrewd understanding of how things work. It’s not given to many, not even captains of industry or lawyers, to really understand how things work, the important things like art and politics and love, but Adam understands. This understanding comes mostly from books, but then that is what books are for, although many people believe that books, like politics, are there to confirm their prejudices or to flatter them.

  But now, David thinks, here we are, the ones who scrambled into the lifeboat together, and yet we never allow our intensity of feeling to show except in small considerations which stand proxy for love. Probably it’s just that in the normal course of a life you find you have few friends left who share a kind of intimacy: you need shared experience for intimate understanding. And the English of our age, David thinks, keep that sort of stuff at a distance with little ironic asides and jokes, a difficult habit to break. And perhaps we don’t really have the intimacy that I imagine, but only a kind of resignation: these are the ones I am yoked to and I may as well accept it.

  Adam is drunk. David loves it when he gets that slightly crazy look, combative and crafty, but always benign.

  Adam kisses David on his cheek.

  ‘You look great. If I was a homosexual, I would want to fuck you.’

  ‘Thanks. And you still look like a debauched choirboy.’

  ‘As the Guardian said in 1981.’

  He turns to Brian.

  ‘Brian, Brian, the food is the dog’s bollocks. Well done, mate. A fucking triumph.’

  ‘It could actually be dog’s bollocks, I suppose.’

  ‘A dog’s not just for Christmas, Brian. There should be some left over for Boxing Day. No, fabulous, Brian, I mean it. And so tall, the people from Szechuan. Big buggers. Huge. Didn’t you say that the women are like Douglas firs? Swaying in the breeze? No, Brian, you’re a pro.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  They’re loosening up as they always do before they regress cheerfully.

  ‘Did I tell you how Richard Burton asked David if he wanted to fuck his wife?’

  ‘Yes, Adam, about fifty times.’

  ‘And did I tell you he said no?’

  ‘Yes, Adam.’

  ‘Oh all right. To the Noodle Club.’

  ‘The Noodle Club.’

  David sips his Tsingtao beer. He once filed a report from the brewery, which was founded by Germans in Qingdao in about 1907. He knows many largely useless facts and he wonders on what basis his brain chooses to preserve them. His training doesn’t really permit him to drink, but he doesn’t want to cast a pall over the Noodle Club, which has come together again from London and the countryside – never all the same people each time – and it is his job to lend wholehearted support. Julian’s minor stroke – this is his first appearance since being declared fully recovered – has left him with a frosted appearance. His Foreign Office hair and his features seem to have acquired a fine coating, barely visible – maybe even imagined – of pale, mycological filaments, almost a mould. After the stroke they spoke on the phone often and David knows all the details: the numbness and the blinding headache, the inability to move his mouth for a week, the sense of utter helplessness.

  ‘It was a wake-up call,’ said Julian, in his new tired voice, directed, it seemed, through the wrong chambers of his head, to emerge with an unfamiliar timbre.

  For the last three months he has been very active. He invited David to play tennis at Queen’s. After they played, David saw that his chest hairs had taken on this ephemeral, spun-sugar look and that his circumcised penis poked out of a snowy nest, like a fledgling. Surprisingly, his tennis was as good as ever, neat with plenty of slice, but the permafrost look, perhaps visible only to David, was unsettling. Julian told him in the bar that one of his sons had never discussed his stroke: he attributed this to hypersensitivity. David wondered if it wasn’t the reaction to incarceration in boarding school while his father carried the flag to foreign lands, eating a million canapés for Queen and commerce in the process. Julian is on various committees. He takes a special interest in the Sudan. And he also takes a lot of interest in his three grandchildren, all under five. David wonders if he doesn’t frighten them. Everyone says that having grandchildren wakens very deep family feelings and ties. They also say the best thing about grandchildren is that they go home. David is looking forward to having a grandchild. Julian, for all his detached upper-class English sangfroid, a quality that has largely left the earth, is a Jew. Maybe in his heart he believes that he would have been given one of the big embassies if he hadn’t been Jewish.

  ‘It’s good to have you back, Jules.’

  ‘The wandering Jew returns.’

  ‘Yes, for a moment there we thought you might be wandering off.’

  ‘No such luck. We went to see Darcey Bussell the other night.’

  ‘So did I. Last night, in fact. With Ed and his wife,’ he adds in case Julian thinks he has been exploring his feminine side.

  ‘Wasn’t it wonderful?’

  ‘Utterly fantastic. She reminded me of the girls we used to shag.’

  ‘Or wished we were shagging.’

  ‘Ballet is bollocks, total fucking bollocks,’ says Adam. ‘Poofs’ football, as Osborne called it. What was that girl’s name you had in Rome? She looked just like Jean Shrimpton.’

  ‘Jenni.’

  ‘Sex on a stick.’

  Julian probably thinks this conversation is insensitive, just eleven months after Nanc
y’s death. But sometimes when he is alone in his bed, David thinks of the girls he fucked – a word still strangely evocative to him – and he can remember with clarity many tiny details. It seems important to him to remember these things, as though they contain something vital about the nature of being human. The thoughts that more and more keep him awake at night are really a kind of assurance that he has been alive, although he is not sure how it works. Nancy used to go to yoga classes for a while and could sometimes be heard chanting – actually, it was more like the background electronic muttering of an old and raucous fridge – Om, om, om, om – which was designed to allow the disciples, like Nancy, to have a handy condensed version of the guru’s teaching. David sometimes wondered if you could concentrate all this wisdom into one word – if it was a word rather than notes or a chord – but he understood that it produced a profound meditation. Cheaper than crack, as he once said. Even when Nancy switched to Pilates at Rosalie’s suggestion, David never enquired whether she had felt any regret at ditching the wisdom of millennia concentrated in that chant. Pilates was pioneered by Joseph Hubertus Pilates, who understood the strains dance imposed on the bodies of ballet dancers: faith in mystic forces has been replaced by a belief in quack science. But David didn’t mock Pilates either: he understood that everyone needs a sense of worth. Often extreme credulity is applied to far more high-minded nonsense than Pilates. For instance the love of freedom, as understood by George Bush.

  Jenni Cole. He met her in a discotheque called Sabrina. She was working in the wardrobe department on the film of Dr Faustus. He borrowed the Fiat Seicento from Adam and they drove down to Ostia, where they made love behind a fisherman’s boat until the sun came up. She had straight, jet-black hair and she uttered charming bat squeaks to the rosy-fingered dawn rising from the direction of Yugoslavia. It was the same classical dawn that had risen on Ovid in exile and on the Argonauts on their journeys, a dawn which turned quickly to a white and furred light. Mercilessly illuminating Ostia, it revealed to the hungover and exhausted young couple that the beach was not clean. Unspeakable things lay about, and Jenni’s very short dress, which he had been so keen to remove – it was a sort of provocation rather than a garment – was heavily stained with tar and oil, and some other substances, possibly the excrement of seabirds.