‘Not well enough for my husband.’
He realises he does not know where she is from or if she works or why she lets him have sex with her.
‘What is your first language?’
‘There are so many languages.’ She flicks an invisible light switch and the room fills with unwelcome white strobe.
‘I am going to swim in the pool downstairs.’
He nods. He has been dismissed by middle Europe, who has plans that do not include him in the structure of her day. Again, he feels foolish, not sure what it is he wants from her or why he feels so excited when she calls him to say she is in town. He climbs out of bed and looks for his clothes. While he puts on his trousers, shirt, cufflinks and jacket, she slips on a modest white swimming costume. They do not speak until he is standing on the marble floor outside her front door. Only then, facing him in his suit and the heavy overcoat he bought in Zurich when he knew his marriage was over, barefoot in her Italian swimming costume, does she attempt to say goodbye.
Gute Nacht.
Spokojnoj nochi, Magret.
As he walks to the tube station he thinks about the snow of his childhood and all the trams he rode on with his sister. He thinks about the wars and famines his parents lived through and about the 11:07 that leaves promptly every Sunday morning from Zurich where his ex-wife and children live. He thinks about Magret swimming in the cold pool below her apartment, her head surfacing, her mouth opening to take a breath. He knows she is dead inside and he is aroused that this is so, and he takes out a cigarette and lights it. He thinks about how there is life with rye bread and black tea and there is life with champagne and wild salmon. He can live without champagne but he cannot live without his children; that is a grief he knows he cannot endure but he must endure and he knows his hands will itch for ever. He thinks about feeling used, teased, abused and mocked by middle Europe, whose legs were wrapped around his appallingly grateful body ten minutes ago, and he thinks about the twentieth century that ended at the same time as his marriage.
Stardust Nation
Good morning.
The London dawn. The light. The birds. The car alarms. The agitated men and women waiting for buses that don’t arrive. Does anyone still say ‘Good morning’ in the breezy manner of 1950s black-and-white English films? When I was five years old my mother employed a Dutch tutor to teach me mathematics and biology. She definitely had a breezy morning manner when she walked into the nursery in her high white leather shoes.
‘Goedemorgen, little Thomas! How is your heartbeat today?’
Children of my class were taught always to answer an adult politely (no matter what they said or did to you) so I would reply, ‘My heartbeat is very good today, thank you.’
One day I detoured from my usual reply and told her the truth.
‘My heartbeat is jumping all over the place, danke.’
She was touched by my attempt at her language and insisted I wash my hands three times before presenting me with a sweet Dutch milk pudding called vla.
But vla is not what I want to tell you about. Not at all.
Although I am sitting on the edge of the bed in my West London apartment sipping cognac from an eggcup (well, it is breakfast after all), my mind is very much elsewhere. Let me describe the sequence of events so far. We will have to spin time backwards to seven months ago. A cross on my agency calendar (a gift to our clients) marks the precise date, 9th August 2004, when my colleague Nick Gazidis telephoned me at 2am from a howling beach in southern Spain, weeping broken words and images into my ear.
‘We are stardust, Tom.’
‘Nick? Where are you?’
‘Flamingos. Salt hills.’
‘Where are you phoning from?’
‘The moon.’
I knew Nick was on holiday in Almería because I am his boss and have to approve his dates. I seem to remember they filmed Lawrence of Arabia on the sand dunes in that desolate part of Spain. When I looked up Almería in my guidebook it was described as ‘a lunar landscape’, so perhaps he hadn’t gone completely nuts after all. Over the years, I have told Nick more about my life than anyone else I know, so it felt right to return his remarkable gift of empathy by listening to his strange words without judgment. He was somewhere on a beach, it was 4am his time and he didn’t know how to get back to his hotel. I could hear him sobbing in the wind as he dropped coins into a public telephone.
‘Tom? Are you still there?’
‘Yes. I’m still here.’
‘My father beat me when I was a kid. Did you know that?’
Nick’s full name is Nikos Gazidis. His father, Mr Gazidis, is a gentle, elderly man who owns a drycleaner’s in Kentish Town and has never beaten anyone in his life. I’ve met him twice, both times bent over his sewing machine, a tape measure draped over his shoulders. Mr Gazidis is awed by the money his son earns at my agency and treats him like a god. So you can imagine how I brooded on Nick’s peculiar phone call.
My father was a lieutenant colonel in the British Army. Uncomfortable with the lack of excitement on home leave, he did tend to start small post-traumatic wars against his eight-year-old son, usually with his leather belt. While he beat me, I used to imagine myself somewhere else, often on the moon, a boy astronaut floating head over heels away from Lt-Col Banbury-Mines, away from my forlorn mother, away from the marmalade jar and toast rack on the breakfast table, away from the thank yous and yes pleases people seem so nostalgic for these days. My Dutch tutor was appalled by my father and taught me a few martial arts moves specially designed to throw a grown man to the ground.
I had of course told Nick about my childhood over the years, usually in the pub after work. On these occasions he took off his tie while he listened. A little streak of eczema always crept into his right cheek afterwards. I too have long blazed with eczema, especially on my wrists.
Three days later, when Nick returned to work, he wore a Paul Smith suit like the rest of us and acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
‘How are you, Nick?’
‘Yeah. Um. Sorry about that. I’m fine.’
For a man who had so recently been deranged he gave the impression of being entirely normal. I too have spent much of my life perfecting this performance. Nick is a promising accountant and I have been his encouraging mentor. So I kept one eye on him when I invited him to join my copywriters and take a look at a PowerPoint projection of the English meadows I played in as a boy. We were about to launch a shampoo that would conquer the bathrooms of the nation. I proposed we call the shampoo MEADOW MILK.
‘Milk,’ I suggested, ‘is an opaque white fluid secreted by female mammals for the nourishment of their young. It is the elixir of life itself.’
I glanced at Nick. Tears were spilling down his face and his hands hung limply by his side like the dead pheasants my father brought home from the meadow. Afterwards, over a glass of champagne, he told me the reason for his embarrassed tears.
‘My Dutch tutor used milk to make me custard pudding after my father hit out at me. And the meadow you showed in your slide. . I used to hide from him in the long grass when I was eight.’
I smiled and patted him on the back. Nick grew up in a small, Victorian terraced house in Archway, north London. I don’t want to presume, but those cramped, damp houses held together with bricks and spit do not usually come with meadows attached to them. Yet I think I understood what was happening. There is a slight shamanistic edge to what we do here at the agency, which is to say that it is our job to crash into the unconscious of the consumer and broadcast a number of messages that all end with ‘buy this product’. Nick had somehow extended his brief as Head of Finance — and crashed inside me. Although I had told him about hiding in that meadow, I had yet to explain why. I thought that could wait. Giving the right information at the right time is after all the art of what we do here at the agency.