To Heaven by Water Read online

  The Muslim women leave. They are tired. He looks at the wall clock: Christ, he has been rowing for nearly an hour. He has won the boat race single-handed. He glances at himself in the huge mirrors where the weight-lifters preen. He never uses their equipment. He looks drawn, his hair damp with sweat and his grey T-shirt stained to resemble those dark patches on the moon landscape.

  One night they raced Adam’s Fiat Seicento around the Piazza Navona. They were drunk. When the carabinieri stopped them on the second lap, Adam spoke to them in Italian and demanded a pardon. We were commemorating, he said, the fact that this was once the site of Domitian’s chariot races. We were honouring Bernini’s fountain. We were celebrating Italy. Italians love youth and vitality; now the carabinieri would probably lock you up and throw the key into the Tiber, but then they let them go with a warning that contained more than a hint of complicit admiration for the English; they were young and glamorous, and scholar gypsies. Now David wonders why they never considered what would have happened if they had crashed into Tre Scalini or Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers. In those days Rome had a makeshift quality: the lesser ruins were unvisited, the back streets had a rundown rural feel and lunch could be had for a pound in any number of trattorias near their flat in Trastevere. They were free of the Brussels sprout and the brown sauce. It’s difficult for the children to believe how unspeakable British food was back then.

  Once he and Adam watched a cardinal, a prince of the church, take lunch in solitary splendour at a Jewish restaurant known for its deep-fried baby artichokes. The cardinal followed the artichokes with a whole fish, very biblical, deftly filleted under his imperious gaze, and last, a fresh orange, which was peeled reverentially by a waiter to form one long and complete scroll of skin. Finally the orange was neatly sliced so that it lay on the plate, a perfect rose window. Try asking for that in Joe Lyons’, said Adam. The cardinal had a medieval manner: these Jewish waiters seemed concerned that the richly attired old boy should be afforded every dignity. His cloak was brought to him at the end of the meal and there was bowing and abasement. This cloak was lined in a clamorous red, which perhaps had for the waiters a sense of menace after two thousand years, a lethal warning like the colouring of a toadstool. David, too, ordered an orange, Una arancia, per favore – and it was brought to him whole and unpeeled on a plate. Adam thought it was hilarious and celebrated with a third sambuca topped with a pale-blue flame. To this day he still occasionally asks David if he would like an orange.

  He suddenly remembers the name of the restaurant, Il Giardino Romano. He finds it harder every year to remember names. That first night in Rome – he can’t be certain, time is collapsing in on itself – Adam introduced him to Jenni at a huge aircraft-hangar disco and by morning he was in love. Adam was acting in the film of Dr Faustus, directed by Burton, and David had followed his friend to Rome. When Dr Faustus was at the Playhouse, Adam and Burton became drinking companions at the Bear in Woodstock. Burton saw Adam as an innocent, living a life he could have lived in Oxford, and in Rome he invited him to the villa, and then David joined the circle and Jenni, too.

  Those few weeks have loomed far too large in their lives; it is their defining myth.

  David starts to run, in his nostrils and deep in his head the resin scent of umbrella pines and the slightly mineral taste of Frascati rise. His legs feel light. He soon begins to float. He is more closely familiar with this bland room – this machinery, these hip hop images on the screens, this blare of a music station, this strangely assorted cast of fellow supplicants – than he is with his own house and certainly with the natural world. He feels at home here, although he seldom talks to anyone and he never attends any of the offered classes, most of which seem to suggest a back door to enlightenment. You can do stretching, yoga, aerobic dance, and – these are new – courses in assertiveness and anger-management through meditation.

  As he runs, David cannot lose the picture of Burton’s intense, utterly absorbed face against the background of Faustus’ study in Württemberg – bound volumes, phials, a memento mori, quill pens – all positioned unnaturally perfectly by the art department.

  The face, which had been made so familiar, a public property, was now just a few yards away, in the grip of an acting seizure:

  One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah my Christ!

  Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!

  Yet will I call on him...

  As David watched him and heard that astonishing voice swelling to fill the huge stage in Dinocittà with its anguish, he found himself shaking: a forty-two-year-old Welsh miner’s son had dissolved the barriers between the immanent and the transcendent worlds. When it was done, Burton stood on the spot. He nodded finally to the assistant director, who called Cut. He was the director but still he was waiting for a word from his mentor and honorary co-director, Nevill Coghill. Coghill was mute. They embraced briefly and then the quotidian activity started again as the crew, burdened with tape and lamps and props, prepared for the next scene.

  Burton winked at Jenni as he passed on his way to his dressing room for a drink.

  ‘Strange bloody life, isn’t it?’

  ‘You were wonderful, Mr Burton,’ she whispered.

  ‘Thank you, luv. Just doing my job, actually.’

  But it was far from true. He was living out his life as though it was a morality play. Or so David thought. As he walked off, David saw that he was in thrall to something else, a fame which caused people to lie and fawn and disparage, sometimes in the same breath: One drop would save my soul. His soul was already lost on the journey from a miner’s cottage, where thirteen children were conceived, to an enormous villa in Rome, staffed by many including a chef, a valet, two drivers and a minder for Elizabeth’s children. His brother, Ifor, was his personal assistant. What Burton had was unimaginable, almost supernatural, power. And that is what celebrity means to ordinary people, the power to escape the constraints of daily life. Burton had enormous amounts of money, the most beautiful woman in the world, and a voice which contained all the promise and possibility of human endeavour. What a burden for a miner’s son with a drink problem. Elizabeth was his reward: Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies.

  But he had left his first love and his children in Wales and in his heart he knew that he had committed a crime against nature.

  David and Adam are older now than when Burton died. Yet while Adam has retained his essence, David thinks he has lost his. He thinks that he has been thinned out by too many compromises. Still, he is running effortlessly, feeling no tiredness and no heaviness in the legs. His breathing is even. He is licensed to think whatever he likes without being constrained by the rational: he will follow his instincts. He plans to buy a small flat in Soho. Lucy is upset but he has told her that she will have more than enough to buy her flat. What she imagines is a kind of destructiveness – she thinks he is turning his back on the family, the shared myths and comforts, but that is not nihilism at all, it is an attempt to move on to the higher plane. You couldn’t actually use that phrase: his children are attuned to all the ironies, so that almost any phrase can be derided: higher plane would fare very badly.

  He increases the speed. He is now running at 15.5 km per hour. His feet are hammering on the rubber conveyor. The screens ahead are a confusion of football, videos and rolling news. He sees a ticker-tape caption: Breaking news ... 12-year-old boy shot dead in Manchester. When it first came in, twenty-four-hour news demanded that the same few items be hyped up and repeated every half an hour. If news broke suddenly, he was required to flannel away for as long as necessary while they edited the incoming pictures and changed the running order. He became a master of the sonorous platitude, a safe pair of hands, but also someone who graced the news with a kind of bogus gravitas. He wondered if they were living in a time of madness or merely the same world charged by the clamour for sensation. The areas of agreement in society are shrinking; it’s not possible to prescribe behav
iour or belief. Adam said, ‘The genie is out of the bottle.’ Adam loves the sense of chaos. Maybe it suits drinkers to believe that there is no constancy in the world.

  One of the staff, a black man called Ashley, who has two glittering diamond ear-studs, comes up to the treadmill. David slows down.

  ‘You OK, mate?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, Ash.’

  He uses the shortened name to show that he’s chilled.

  ‘No, it’s just like there’s a few people what wants to get on this machine.’

  At first David doesn’t understand him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You bin on ’ere more than ’alf hour.’

  ‘Is there a time limit?’

  ‘No, only like when it’s busy and that.’

  ‘OK. I’ll stop. I’ve probably overdone it.’

  ‘No, you was goin’ great. For real.’

  David looks at the display: he has run 9 km. His heartbeat is 160 per minute.

  ‘I’m outta here,’ he says, overdoing it, in his desire to be unremarkable.

  He showers and changes into his jeans and starts walking down towards the Museum to see Robin Fennell. Since he took up walking he believes his life has acquired a new, more reflective pace. He believes that he is more attuned to the city, its actual materials, the bricks and the paving stones and the decoration of buildings. He finds himself looking at these things closely as if in some way the human effort that went into making them and placing them will reveal itself to him. The granite kerbs that line every street – originally from Caernarvon but increasingly from Portugal – seem to him miraculous. He loves the sense of continuity and the elemental labour that goes into getting these blocks here; he thinks about the days when the farmers drove turkeys along the road all the way from Norfolk to London. Strange thoughts, random thoughts, bearing little connection to the life he has lived so far, engage him.

  He has asked Robin to meet him at a café near the Museum. He doesn’t want his son to be embarrassed at his place of work by his casually attired father, nor does he want him to be reminded that he only got his job here because of his father’s long friendship with Robin Fennell. Since Robin’s third wife, Valerie, left him, he has been agitated. Last time they met David listened to his troubles and still paid a legal bill for what proved to be two hours of his overpriced friend’s therapy.

  By the time he arrives at the café, between a souvenir shop selling teddy bears and a shop selling prints of olde London, he realises that he is exhausted. His legs are vibrating, as if the tendons are playing some gentle chamber music. Robin may be the last of his friends to wear a silk pocket scarf; it matches his tie, the colour of Dijon mustard. He has put on weight since Valerie’s defection and his clothes are under pressure. As he stands up – the old-fashioned manners – he has the shape of a garden bird. He probably thinks that he is dapper, but the effect is dispiriting.

  ‘Old chum, welcome. How nice to see you looking so, so thin,’ he says.

  ‘Oh Jesus, yes, I am thin and before you ask again, yes, I wanted to be thin and no, I am not ill. How are you? Are you over Valerie?’

  ‘More or less. I had dinner the other night with your Eddie and the lovely Rosalie. Cor, what a stunner.’

  He has an obsolete sense of irony, of the same vintage as his pocket handkerchief. Also, David thinks it is a little crass to mention his daughter-in-law, but he couldn’t justify the feeling.

  ‘How’s Ed doing?’

  ‘Terrific. Yes, he’s really doing well. We have some business in Geneva, and he’s handled the first assignment well. I’m going to make him a partner, although I haven’t told him yet. I have to run it past the others. Not that they can disagree, but one is obliged to observe the protocols.’

  ‘That’s great. That’s incredibly good of you, Robin. No nepotism, I hope.’

  ‘He’s up to it, believe me. I just need to ask you a question, Dave, before we get down to business. Is everything OK at home with Eddie and Rosie?’

  Why does he take every name and turn it into a diminutive? He feels a stab of irritation.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘He seems to be very close to a young trainee we have taken on.’

  ‘How close?’

  ‘I’m not saying they’re shagging or anything, but I would hate to think there’s anything serious going on.’

  Coming from Robin, who over the years has seen the trainee solicitors as his personal preserve, this is offensive. At the same time he hopes Ed isn’t looking for some refuge from Rosalie’s unhappiness.

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘Times have changed. Inappropriate behaviour is the cant phrase these days.’

  ‘Can we get on with business? Last time I saw you, there seemed to be some role reversal.’

  ‘Sorry if I unloaded on you.’

  ‘And you sent me a bill.’

  ‘Did we? We’ll send you a credit. Sorry. Anyway I have, as you would expect, lots of papers for you to sign – the trust deeds, the standing orders, the power of attorney, the appointment of agents.’

  David looks at Robin. It’s a little late to be asking himself, but does he trust him? In the sexual arena he has been devious. Often it amazes David just how susceptible women can be to these implausible men, the sort of men who wear coloured pocket handkerchiefs and order expensive bottles of wine in restaurants to impress their underlings. Valerie was an eager trainee fifteen years ago. Now, aged forty-two, she has gone off with a thirty-one-year-old Australian scuba-diving instructor she met in the Maldives. Robin admitted it has undermined his sexual confidence. He has tormented himself with visions of his wife having athletic Antipodean sex on the deck of a dive boat, moored to a palm tree. The rickety foundations of this kind of doomed relationship will be propped up for a while by the large amount of money Robin was forced to give Valerie. Inappropriate behaviour, with a scuba-diving instructor, does not weigh in the financial negotiations. When they discussed it, Robin said the scuba-diving instructor was stupid: ‘As thick as pig shit,’ were his exact words. But then maybe he was a sex instructor, too. And it was that possibility, he guessed, which was troubling Robin, rather than the Aussie Cousteau’s low IQ.

  ‘Robin, what happens if you pop your clogs before I do?’

  ‘Decease is the word you will find in the deeds. It’s all very straightforward. But if I do pop my clogs first, I have nominated an alternative trustee, also a partner here, Annie Morris, and she will keep things going.’

  ‘And if the firm goes tits up?’

  ‘Goes into liquidation, you mean. But yes, if we were to go tits up you have full control of your trust fund. It wouldn’t go with us. The trustees only operate at your discretion. It won’t fall through the cracks or anything.’

  David signs various bits of paper where indicated. As Robin shuffles the papers, marked with tabs placed there by a secretary, or a trainee, David looks at him. His face is utterly, utterly bored, with the cosmic weariness you see on the faces of the higher primates. God knows how many thousands of times he has shuffled papers, helping people to ditch their spouses, embrace bankruptcy, set up dummy companies, sell their businesses, convey their houses. All these kinds of transaction demand a lawyer’s presence, but what are lawyers actually contributing to the sum of human happiness? When his wife left him, no legal redress was available to ease Robin’s heart. Ed told him that Robin had more or less invited himself to dinner at their place; perhaps Robin was on a secret mission to see if Ed’s wife was a suitable consort for a partner in his firm. Or perhaps Robin is just lonely. None of his children speaks to him, and maybe he can’t bear to be alone thinking about his wife and the Australian Lothario going through their sexual repertoire. We are all disappearing, beaten to airy thinness.

  ‘Where are you going to live?’ Robin asks.

  ‘Soho,’ David says.

  ‘Batting for the other side?’

  ‘Robin, Robin. That’s not worthy of you.’

  David
thinks that Robin, in his agony, is becoming bitter. He is losing his humanity. This seems to David to be the most important quality required if he is going to live on a higher plane: the ability to be open and sympathetic. After all, this great play, this maelstrom, of humanity all around us is a miracle, a phenomenon and really the only thing there is. But Robin, chubby, bored, prurient and dressed in this self-regarding way, has pulled down the shutters.

  ‘All done,’ says Robin, closing the folders. ‘Another coffee?’

  ‘Rob, do you want me to talk to Ed?’

  ‘No. I’ll speak to the girl if I find the right moment.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Young. Pretty. Bright. They’re all bright, but not all of them have what it takes.’

  ‘I don’t suppose so. No.’

  ‘Eddie’s got it. You have to grasp the essentials very quickly. It’s no good faffing about with the side issues. That’s really all it takes in the end. And Eddie is as sharp as a tack.’

  David wonders what he is talking about and in what way his son has acquired the ability to home in on the essentials. Robin is drawing some comfort from this opportunity to explain his philosophy, a need which grows more pressing as his essences drain away. When he looks at Robin again he reproaches himself. He remembers him when they first met, doing a holiday job at Allders in Clapham: he was cheerful, irreverent and ambitious. He is still going on about the law and the essentials and the requisite understanding of human nature that good lawyers have, but David sees fear, the realisation that his time is up. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls.

  More and more he finds himself remembering lines of poetry, long forgotten.

  ‘What I have always found, quite frankly, is that not everyone can see the wood for the trees. They think the law is about pompous language and rootling about in obscure precedents. No, it’s not. It’s really intuitive. This is what most people, sadly, don’t get. They don’t see that it’s all about stripping away the...’