The Last Samurai (72 page)

I tried to remember how long it took rigor mortis to set in. I put his arm by his side again and cried on its chilly shoulder. It was all right to do this now that it couldn’t make him feel he had to make an effort, maybe even that he had to go on being sick.

I spent the night beside it. I felt better with the dead thing beside me, reminding me that he had killed the clubbed child and the weeping eye.

In the morning his cheek was ice cold. It was about 5:00 when I woke up; the light was still on. I lay for a little while by the hard, cold thing on the bed, thinking I should get up and do something. I thought: Well anyway he doesn’t have to get up. He’d said once that he woke every morning at 5:00 and lay staring at the ceiling for two or three hours, hoping to fall asleep again and telling himself he might as well get up. After five or ten minutes he would see the smiling chessplayer for the first time that day, and tell himself he might as well get up, and lie staring at the ceiling.

I put on his denim jacket, and emptied the pockets. Then I took the letters from the table and went down the street to post them.

I got home one night about 9:00. Sib was typing
Sportsboat and Waterski International
.

I thought I could slip upstairs, but she looked up. She said: Is something the matter?

I said: No.

She said: So what’s not the matter?

I said: Well

I said: Somebody killed himself. I told him about Jonathan Glover and leaving your wife but he said that wouldn’t help.

Sib said: Well

She put her hand on my shoulder.

I thought: Why am I keeping her here?

I kept thinking that I had let Red Devlin go where he wanted to go and he’d never done anything for me. I kept thinking I should say You go right ahead.

I said: Do you ever think about Jonathan Glover? Maybe you should leave the country and get another job. Go somewhere where you don’t need a work permit.

Sib said: You mean go back to the States? But I don’t want to go back to the States.

I said: Why not?

Sib said: You can’t get Nebraska Fried Chicken. It’s too depressing for words.

I thought I should not let her get away with this. I was still wearing his jacket; Red Devlin wouldn’t have let her get away with this.

I said: You could stop typing
British Ostrichkeeper
and get another job.

Sib said: There are too many people I don’t want to see. Anyway why are we talking about my problems? Tell me about this person who died. Were you friends?

I said: What’s the point in talking about him? He doesn’t have any problems. There’s no one to have his problems any more. Why don’t you go back?

Sib said: I don’t want to talk about it

Sib said: You know, whenever my father met somebody stupid who’d been to Harvard he took it as a personal insult.

I said: This is a reason not to go back to the States?

Sib said: You should have heard him when they gave a chair to Dr. Kissinger, a man with the blood of millions on his hands.

I said: For this you’re typing
British Ostrichkeeper
?

Sib said: The thing is

Sib said: It’s just

Sib paced up and down. At last she said: You know, I don’t know if you know this, Ludo, but if you have a motel you can always buy another motel.

I said: What?

Once you’ve got one motel you can always get another, said Sib. And if you can get another you can’t really pass up that kind of opportunity.

I said: What?

Sib said: It’s something you only really understand once you own a motel.

I said: As I was saying

Sib said that her Uncle Buddy had vaguely imagined that making a success of a motel might be a route out of accountancy, and that even at 30 it might not be too late to try something different. She said her mother had imagined that making a success of a motel might be a way of paying for musical training, since with her background she was not likely to win a scholarship anywhere she might actually want to go. She said her father had put up the money for the down payment and her mother and uncle had thrown themselves into making it a success, and one day it turned out her father had spotted the potential in another location.

I said: But

Sib said the thing was that the whole scope for profits in motels lies in spotting previously unspotted potential, and that her father had turned out to have an unsuspected flair for it. She said the potential of a place consisted in its being a place people were going to want to be in a few years’ time, and for it to be unspotted it had to be a place
nobody
wanted to be when you were buying the building or site for a future motel.

I said: But why

Sib said few places with unspotted potential boasted even an amateur chamber music society, let alone a symphony orchestra, so that musicians were even less likely to want to spend a lot of time in one than all the other people who had—

I waited for Sib to go on. I thought maybe if I didn’t say anything at all she would finally explain.

My father never talked about his father, said Sib. My mother complained constantly about her parents, who were always sending presents of sweaters from Philadelphia.

I waited for Sib to go on, and after a pause she went on:

A brown paper parcel would arrive at a motel going up on the outskirts of Pocatello. ‘Oh, my, God,’ my mother would say, splashing neat Scotch into a glass and drinking it in a single swallow. ‘Well, might as well open the damn thing.’ She would tear open the brown paper, tear open gold paper, open the shallow box from Wanamaker’s and lift from the layers of tissue paper a cashmere sweater in pale lemon or chartreuse or frosted plum, with mother-of-pearl buttons. ‘Well, might as well try the damn thing on,’ she’d say at last, shrugging into it and rucking the sleeves up to her elbows in the what-this-old-thing way she and her friends always wore cashmere sweaters. She’d take out a cigarette, crack a match and light up, sucking the smoke in deep though she always said it played merry hell with the voice. ‘It’s the hypocrisy of it that really gets to me,’ she’d say, and she’d sit down to start a note that began ‘Dear Mom, Thank you so much for the scrumptious sweater’ and sit smoking and staring into space.

I waited for Sib to go on but she didn’t go on. She picked up the remote. ON. PLAY.

I thought: This is an explanation?

STOP.

The thing is, said Sib. She walked up and down.

Do you know what Boulez says somewhere? she said.

No, what does Boulez say somewhere? I said.

Comment vivre sans inconnu devant soi. Not everyone can.

Fine, I said.

Do you know what I said when I woke up? said Sib.

No, I said.

Rage, rage against the dying of the night. You wouldn’t have wanted to hear that from your friend.

No, I said.

On the other hand what’s done is done and here I am and London, with all its shortcomings, is hardly a place of previously unspotted potential. How many people on the planet?

Five billion, I said.

Five billion, and as far as I know I am the only one in all those billions who thinks children should not be in absolute economic subjection to the adults into whose keeping fate has consigned them. I think I should stick around and write a letter to the
Guardian
.

I said I could write it and sign it Ludo Aged 11.

You can write to the
Independent
, said Sib. And I’ll write one to the
Telegraph
signed Robert Donat just on the off-chance.

For someone who believes in the importance of rational argument Sib avoids the issue 9 times out of 10.

She began walking up and down and walking by the piano paused and sat down and started playing a short piece she has been playing off and on for years.

My father brought out a book about his visit to Easter Island.

Hugh Carey left to walk across Russia alone.

Sorabji got a knighthood.

The painter left to walk across a desert.

Szegeti joined his partner to win the World Bridge Championship 1998 after completing a brief fact-finding mission in Jackson, Mississippi for Nelson Mandela.

People went on with their lives and got on with their jobs.

I didn’t look for another father. I should have gone around saying Open Sesame, but I just wore his jacket and rode the Circle Line around and around and around.

One day I took the Circle Line to Baker Street. It didn’t matter which way I went, so I walked along the Marylebone Road and then turned north. I walked up one street and turned left and down another and turned right and up a third and turned left again. Halfway up the street I heard the sound of a piano.

A herd of octaves fled up and down the keyboard like panicked giraffe; a dwarf hopped on one foot; twelve toads hopped four-footed. I sat on the doorstop while the XXV variations of Alkan’s Festin d’Aesope dazzled an indifferent street. So who’s this? I thought. I had heard Hamelin’s recording of the piece, and I had heard recordings by Reingessen and Laurent Martin and Ronald Smith and I had once heard a broadcast of Jack Gibbons, and when you have heard these recordings you have heard the five people in the world who play it. This wasn’t one of them.

Glenda the Good glided on a gleaming sea drawn by six snowy swans. The Grande Armée crossed Poland on pogo sticks. A woman with a shopping bag walked across the street and up steps. A man with briefcase walked briskly by like an overacting extra.

Six dogs tapdanced on tabletops.

The Variations came to an end. There was a short pause.

A flight of octaves took off like startled flamingoes. No one stopped and stared.

He played variations on the Variations and variations on the variations and he would play one variation next to another next to which it had not originally been juxtaposed.

Are you ready for another fight? No prospects. It could be dangerous.

I stood up and knocked on the door.

A woman came to the door. She said: What to do you want?

I said: I’ve come for my piano lesson.

She said: Oh.

She said: But he doesn’t give lessons.

I said: He’ll see me.

She said: Oh I don’t know

I said: I’ve come for a lesson on
Alkan
, the once celebrated contemporary of Chopin and Liszt, passed over for the directorship of the Conservatoire through sordid political machinations in favour of a mediocrity and so condemned to a life of bitter obscurity only to die (as legend has it) crushed under a bookshelf while attempting to take down a volume of the Talmud. Only six people in the world today play his music of the six perhaps three are active of the active only one lives in London I have come for a piano lesson with him.

She said: He hasn’t said anything to me.

I said: Oh, go on

She said: Well all right then.

I went through the door. I was in a big room with a bare floor and peeling plaster and a grand piano. Someone sat at the piano—I could only see his legs.

He said:

What do you want?

He raises his sword. He draws it back with a slow sweeping motion.

I said: I had to see you because I’m your son.

He stood up. He was about 25. He was no Mifune lookalike, but it was not likely that I was his son.

He said: What is this shit?

I didn’t know what to say. Then I thought of something to say. I said: