Damascus (33 page)

He is outside. It is the end of the first day of November 1993 in Britain and Europe. To the west of the street, over the roofs of the buildings, the clouds striplight an autumn sunset, and it starts softly to rain.

It doesn't matter what day it is and Spencer could be anywhere.

He is fast becoming such an expert in the art of the minimum that divisions of time and place seem meaningless. He doesn't work at the brasserie any more, which anyway was only a café-restaurant financed by city types, and he has no auditions scheduled for today or any other day. He moves calmly from room to room in Welsby's big silent house, living less than the dolce vita he'd imagined for himself, but doing nobody any harm.

He should phone Hazel. He jumps two at a time up some stairs. He really should. This is a thought which recurs more frequently than any other, but he puts it off because phoning now would be like saying that today is different from other days, and to differentiate each day from the next suddenly seems immature, vain, and plain tiring.

He has a hundred and one things to do as it is. He has to clear up William's breakfast, probably while learning the difficult evolution of the tomento or discussing today's version of Jessica. At some stage there are Italians coming to look at the house, and he still has his room to decorate. Then there are the long hours to spend at the computer like a working person, where he regularly comes first second and third at
TOC A Shoot-out Touring Cars
or the
PGA European Tour
. He'll probably make a brief visit to the street, where he doesn't so much buy food as lay up supplies. He might take his library books back or check what time his niece is arriving or see if there's any racing on the telly. He ought also reserve a moment for some inconclusive introspection, notably about why he shied away from the Hallowe'en fancy dress party at the Rising Sun, even after hiring an astronaut costume. But first he should phone Hazel.

Time stretches out flatly into the future, and somewhere out there he can always phone her. No need to rush. In the meantime he makes a major discovery thanks to the grand empty town house of Lord O'Brien Welsby. It's not love or work or travel or rebellion which reveals us to ourselves, but solitude. He has the space and the leisure to wrestle with impossible questions he previously dismissed as impossible. Like would he have been a different person if he'd been born into a different family?

Is there a specific death, horrible or otherwise, out there waiting for him?

Is it sensible to be frightened?

Is he only confused because he wasn't bom intelligent enough to understand?

That wouldn't be very fair, but then he is still haunted by the horrific possibility that everything is fair and he has the life he deserves. So what was it about him, before now, which led to this? Could he really have gone any other way instead? And could he still be influenced by those other mislaid lives, misled, unlived? With a private education he could perhaps have formulated more and better unanswerable questions not to answer. After Oxford or Cambridge he might even have been able to answer them, but now he'd never know.

He'll phone her tomorrow, from a phone-box, for old times' sake. He's too old now to steal (one of the lessons learnt from solitude). That chapter of his life is over, and so becomes a complete memory, finite but repackaged in each remembering. He'll phone her tomorrow, but feels no great sense of urgency now that he accepts his life is unlikely to turn itself round in a single instant. You're bom and you're on your way. You've had the beginning and now it's straight ahead to the end, and nobody ever turns round and comes back. Individual events make only slight adjustments to the inevitable, and this knowledge is somehow reassuring. It allows Spencer to gradually estrange himself from the actuality of the world, and its basic nowness. Time, in any meaningful sense, will cease to exist for him. Where he is and how old he is and what he eats and buys and wears, and all the information which would normally place him in the world will no longer signify. If he ever wavers, he'll remember his sister Rachel and remind himself that he's lucky to be living, as an excuse for not doing all sorts of things.

It makes him feel young again, because doing nothing everything remains possible, and he can be comforted not by what he's achieved but by what he still dreams of achieving. He can still play Rugby League for Great Britain or seduce Emma Thompson or govern the Bank of England or triumph on the stage of the Shaftesbury, because he's never distanced himself from any one of these ambitions by moving in any other direction.

In brief: it is the first of November 1993 and Spencer is not elsewhere in Britain, he is not in Pontypridd or Dorchester or Ryedale or Eton, in Northfleet or Telford or Droitwich or Halifax. He doesn't have his own Peugeot or Ford or Vaux-hall, nor a steady job nor a loving wife nor a son with an extraordinary aptitude for professional ball games. Instead he has all these lives stretching out before him as possibilities, and doing nothing he is never disappointed.

It does occur to him, though only rarely, that there might be better ways of coping with failure, but waiting for miracles isn't one of them.

The phone rings. It's very late and it's dark and it takes Spencer some time to reach the hall and answer it. It's Hazel, and just like in the old days she leaves off the beginning of the conversation.

‘You remember the game?' she asks, ‘Right Now?'

‘Of course I do.'

‘What are you doing, Right Now?'

‘Talking to you on the phone.'

‘Let's meet up,' she says.

‘When?'

‘Now.'

‘What? Now?'

‘Right now,' Hazel says.

‘You mean
now
right now?'

‘Now today now. It's about bloody time.'

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
16:48

It is dusk. The curved amber cover on the street-light outside the bedroom window is pale, unilluminated, and beyond the roofs opposite the day bleeds itself to death. Spencer is lying on the mattress. He's wearing no clothes and he covers himself with the blanket. Hazel moves between the mattress and the window, pulling the sweater-dress up and over her head. She shivers, covers her breasts with her hands, then folds herself under the blanket next to Spencer. They press up close to each other for the feel of warming skin, and both of them sense that at last their lives are almost up to date.

They wonder why they haven''I done this, or tried this, before now. Not the going back to bed, but why they waited until now to spend a day together. Perhaps at some significant stage in their growing up they both missed a crucial sign telling them that this is what they should do and what they should become and how they should cope. But then if a sign had existed just for them, they wouldn't have missed it. More importantly, here is where they are now, and even in each other's arms, wearing no clothes, there is no insistent revelation that this is the right place to be, with the right person, doing the right thing.

Spencer pulls himself away slightly.

‘Would you really have married him if he'd potted that red?'

‘I think I would.'

Spencer thinks he believes her. It frightens and exhilarates him. ‘He could have been a champion billiards player.'

‘But he wasn't, was he?'

‘You'd really have married him for something like that?'

‘Maybe,' Hazel says, ‘but also because he was rich and I quite liked his sweater.'

Spencer grabs her and somewhere in among the wriggling he manages a pinch and gets a punch straight back, first day of the month.

‘Anyway,' Spencer says. ‘It was me who potted the red. Sweet as a nut.'

‘You had one more turn than him.'

‘Home advantage.'

Hazel reaches up and touches her index finger to the index finger pointing down at her from the red-and-white glove pinned above the bed.

‘The glove of love,' she says, staring up at it. ‘The love-glove.'

Spencer strokes her arm from elbow to shoulder, amazed at his certainty that this moment has an obvious and immediate significance, as if he's already remembering it. He thinks that if the event or the decision which changes a life could be traced to one single moment, then for him that moment is probably now. He asks Hazel what she's thinking, and she lets her arm drop, pressing closer to him under the covers.

It is the first of November 1993, and Hazel says you can kiss me if you like.

It is the first of November 1993 and everywhere, all over the country without rhyme or reason, in Bishop Auckland or Sheffield or Clydebank or Cwmbran, in Portadown or Whitley Bay or Cornish Hall End or Stoke-on-Trent, Hazel is twenty-three, thirty-four, forty-five, sixty, seventy-five, eighty, ninety-nine years old, aged and nearly dead and left with no-one a long way from everywhere. Her life has spread, distorted, accelerated, lost all recognisable shape.

Concentrate on now. She is walking fast along streets in the black after-midnight morning, wearing a tight grey dress for going out in, in which she has not been out until now. It is London. There has been rain, and the tyres of a passing bus roll fat lines along the wet road. She finds a public phone-box, and claws at the handle to swing the door firmly shut behind her. Dead raindrops lace the glass sides of the box, and when Hazel shakes out her hair specks of old rain spin to the concrete floor. She fumbles inside her purse until she finds a phonecard. It is the last of her original collection, and an unusual greyish colour. It shows Charlie Chaplin's eyes. She feeds it in and picks up the receiver and is about to punch in the numbers when she hesitates. She looks at her fingers, which are trembling or turning blue, or both.

She pushes the return button and the card slides out again. She feels calmer. Her fingers redden slightly. She turns the card in her hand and cradles the telephone between her cheek and the damp wool of her dress. She listens to the dialling tone, which sounds like flies swarming on something sweet, undisturbed, confident that nothing is coming to disperse them.

‘Hello, Spencer,' she practises, and the flies drone back, indifferent. ‘Let's meet up. Yes, now, I know it's late.' It's late and she may see things differently in daylight, but so what? The early hours of the morning are as honest a time to have feelings as any other.

‘Hello, Spencer. Yes, today. It's as good a day as any, no? What could possibly go wrong?'

Hazel puts the receiver back on its cradle. Today
is
as good a day as any. In fact today is a better day than any other precisely because it's today. She blows into her hands. She forces herself to think of the alternative, and her imagined life as an ageing unloved spinster, old and alone like one in three of all people, with nothing much left to do but sit around and drink tea, read the paper and wait out the day. She snatches up the receiver.

‘Hey, Spencer, listen to me,' she says. She puts the phone-card on top of the phone and combs her fingers through her hair. She wonders if she should have brought condoms, even though she made a conscious decision to leave them behind. Yes, no, it was the right thing to do. She's fed up with the safety of sex, and this time it has to be the real thing, or nothing.