I stayed with Warren and Catherine for two weeks, and it drove me crazy. I was brimming over with destructive energy. There wasn’t enough room for me under one roof with two old people. I moved in with Cameron Fitzpatrick, a boy from my team. He had a flat of his own above Webster’s greengrocer’s. It was a little place. During the daytime I rolled up my sleeping bag and stowed the mattress in the cupboard. I remember cigarette butts everywhere and the exhausted furnishings from the second-hand shop. Cameron’s father had disappeared from sight, his mother couldn’t handle him anymore. He had been to a few boarding schools. Rugby sort of helped to keep him in line. Now he worked in the stockroom at Fraser’s. He was lost. A boy who would only make it with a lot of good luck, which he didn’t have. Cameron had once smoked a joint on the steeple of St. George’s. God knows how he got up there. He talked about it to anyone who would listen. He lacked the class to keep quiet about things like that.
I tried to let things run their normal course, but things got in the way. The article appeared in the Sun, with that disgusting picture of my mother and the one of my team. In which I played piano in that respectable hotel on Alburgh’s quaint market square. You’d be surprised how many well-heeled people read that rag. I became that boy with some kind of problem. The moles had dug deeply, their burrowing had even unearthed Bodo Schultz. They wrote horrible things about him, horrible in the sense that they might have been true. About his destructive art, the riots it provoked. I bore the dubious patina of fame, my origins were a myth. I tried to be unyielding and distant. I thought about my mother’s words, the sentence branded on my skin: In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore. The evil spell that pushed my life in a certain direction. The future looms up before me like the mouth of a smooth metal tube, nothing to grab hold of: I slide, I fall, nothing sticks to me, just as I stick to nothing. My fingers glide across the keys, a Chopin nocturne in G-minor, opus 15-3, I nod politely at the quiet applause. I am a good little monkey.
My mother took a room at the Belfort in London. I called her once a week. I couldn’t quite pin down what she was doing there. When we spoke she put on her long-distance voice, the voice of people who aren’t alone in the room. A claim was being prepared, she said, she had a lot of confidence in the new lawyers. And she had to go to Holland for the reading of a will, but she didn’t say whose. She was behind her veil and she wasn’t coming out. I had the feeling that the house was the rind that had held us together, and that now we had fallen apart into two clean halves. I was worried. I couldn’t imagine her alone in the world, doing everyday things, I had experienced so little of her dealings with anyone other than me.
Twice a week I ate at the house of Selwyn’s parents, Paula and Ashley Loyd. Selwyn had indeed gone off to study medicine at Cambridge, he came home with stories about nightly scrambles across the slate roofs of the city. About vomiting in the dean’s front garden. He played rugby for the university’s first team, and punted on the Cam with stunning girls. His life had taken on an infectious dynamism.
It was with a feeling of relief that I left Cameron’s perspective-free cubicle on those evenings to dine with Paula and Ashley. They didn’t make me feel like they were doing me a favor, they enjoyed having company now that their children had all left home. They asked no prying questions and would never blame you for something you couldn’t do anything about. When we watched TV I could see the old barf spot on the carpet.
Paula had something carelessly aristocratic about her. She wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing a crazy hat at Ascot, but carrying a butterfly net in the jungles of Belize was perhaps a different matter. Ashley was a slyly humorous, good-natured man, a man with see-through, innocent secrets. A general practitioner, he was preparing for retirement by fixing up old furniture in the garage. Hunting was his real passion. He always asked whether I wanted to take a nice piece of venison, a haunch home with me. A leg of hare, perhaps? Sometimes Cameron and I, when we were stoned at night and had the munchies, would fry up the contents of the package I took with me and attack it with blunt cutlery.
I took the train to London. She picked me up at Liverpool Street Station. She laughed a lot, people looked at her. We walked down the street side by side, sometimes she took my arm. We were going to have a nice day together, she had decided that already. She talked a mile a minute about her plans, the progress in the court case. There was no way you could tell we were tragic, not by looking at us. We ate pastries at a tearoom and looked at ships on the river of lead. She wore elegant little white shoes, when we left the tearoom she tossed her mantilla around her shoulders. She held the key to the city. It confused me; after burying herself alive all those years on the coast she now moved along as though the streets were supposed to bend to her will.
‘And what about you, Ludwig? she asked during lunch. ‘Tell me, how are you getting along there with your friend. .’
‘Cameron.’
‘Cameron, I don’t believe I know him, do I?’
It was a senseless question, she didn’t know any of my friends, the people I went around with. I told her about the graciousness of Paula and Ashley Loyd. That I sometimes went to visit Warren and Catherine and, irrational as it might seem, to see whether the house was still there, whether I hadn’t awakened from a dream to find that everything had remained unchanged.
She turned her head away when I told her that I had seen two bulldozers on the beach after the storm, scraping together the debris and dumping it into the bed of a truck. The remains of the house were skimpier than you would have thought. A chimney with chunks of wall attached to it, a large, broken sheet of concrete. Sections of walls, roofing tiles. Shards. Wreckage. I had watched from up on the cliff, and it felt as though I were the one being swept together down there, a ragbag that would never again be whole. No trace of our possessions — tribute, carried off by the hostile army. I stood up there watching the bulldozers’ dance and, in almost mystic fashion, knew myself to be a part of history; in exactly the same way I stood there, with the now innocently cooing surf in the distance, countless others before me had let the destruction of their lives sink in and weighed their possibilities.
That same evening I took the train back home. It got dark early, I bought a single to Darsham. The fact that I had taken a single to London that morning had apparently escaped her. I had assumed that I would spend the night in the city, but her buoyant I’ll just walk you back to the station had set a different scenario in motion.
As the train bored its way through the darkness, I knew that I hadn’t got through to her. I looked at my reflection in the window, a boy closer to tears than to laughter.
I left a note for Cameron, thanking him for his hospitality and explaining that I had found a room of my own. We would see each other at the club. The little apartment I moved into was beside the Readers’ Room, on the esplanade. It was usually vacant in winter, so I could rent it for two months before the season began. My clothes were permeated with the caustic smell of smoke, and I was glad to be able to leave that hopeless mess behind. I was my own master now, and things were in the offing. It wouldn’t be long before I would hand over to Julie Henry that which she wanted so badly. Her sexual aggression repelled and excited me. The difference in our ages was considerable, and then there was also the imbalance of power; factors charged with eroticism. There had been moments when things could have happened. A hotel consists of many spaces perfectly outfitted for love. One time, when I passed her in the kitchen between two stainless-steel counters, she positioned herself so that I couldn’t get by.