Could one ask, then, a male staff member, someone with trouser experience from a male point of view …? No, it wasn’t a prudent use of public funds.
Civil servant squanders man hours on fashion-buying jaunts.
Deputy Director experiences … what? Wildlife mishap. Midlife mishap. Late-life mishap. Trouser debacle.
Deputy Director Jonathan Sigurdsson suffers ambulant blackout in Chiswick — cause for concern.
He couldn’t work out how he’d ended up in the high street.
That was surprising. He didn’t like to be anywhere surprising.
It’s not to do with women, though.
No, not that.
St Martin’s Lane, near Wyndham’s Theatre: a purple balloon is carried by light breezes over the heads of pedestrians and then moves safely across the busy road. As it goes it drifts lower, rolling softly over the bonnet of a passing car. It finally drops almost perfectly by the feet of a man in his thirties, quite formally dressed, who is standing at the kerb. He picks up the balloon. He straightens and stands, holding it between both palms. He smiles. He smiles so much.
07:58
JON LEANED HIS cheek flat to the cab window as London stuttered by beyond it. He was halfway to the office, but no further. Matters were conspiring, according to the cab driver, who also found himself unable to comment on whether they’d be lucky, or crawling and stalled for another half an hour, if not longer. Cunning and manful dodging along alleys had resulted only in their being trapped by the apparently psychotic helmsman of a large delivery van in a space within which only bicycles or mice could possibly manoeuvre.
‘Smug, aren’t they?’ the driver remarked.
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Times like this they get smug — the cyclists. Not so smug when a lorry hits ’em. I’d make them take a test and earn a licence. For their own good.’
‘That’s certainly an opinion.’ Jon let his eyes close and carefully made himself think of Berlin earlier this year and seeing Rebecca.
Nice. A consolation. Necessary. And important to spend time.
A holiday for them both. One day, the Sunday, he’d bought them a boat tour on the Spree — bundled up for the cold, the quite kindly March cold — and he’d leaned his cheek flat to the barge’s chill window as they passed by the Bode Museum, the building fixed in the water, right at the edge of Museum Island like a high round prow, an impossible vessel. Waves patted the stonework at its foot, sneaked and rolled and faltered prettily.
Light in blades on the water, bridges menacing only softly overhead and then a broad European sky. The Fernsehturm spiking up into crisp blue — looks like Sputnik after an accident with a capitalist harpoon, a speared ball, a penetrated curve, although remarkably asexual, unsexual … then again, stainless steel and concrete aren’t notoriously arousing. Never were — not even for Young Pioneers.
I’m not obsessed with sex. Other people are obsessed with my being obsessed with sex.
The Berlin TV Tower — prop for some never-made Bond movie, as fatally dated and inappropriate as everybody’s visions for their futures turn out to be. Für Frieden und Sozialismus — as if either was possible anywhere. Few things say 1960s East Germany like the Fernsehturm, still laden with suggestions of circular ripples emanating from its globe, expanding rings of peaceful and anti-fascist socialist know-how that pushed nobly — with appropriate self-criticism — through the brown-coal-scented air — that particular Braunkohl bitterness — broadcasting the one true faith and a kids’ show about the Little Sandman who sent boys and girls off to sleep. Instead of picking them up in Stasi vans and sending them off to other, less pleasant places. Or inviting them to variations on a theme of suicide.
East’s a beast and West is best.
I could be that simple, then. I could. I was clear-minded.
We all like to be clear-minded and simple.
The Terrible Enemy is different now. And the same. It serves the same purpose.
We like to repeat our themes — like good opera and bad television.
But do I now dwell amongst the least beastly?
Where are there not beasts? Encouraged and permitted and condemned beasts …
I never would have suited the Foreign Office.
And the FO only recruit the cream from the top of the churn. Or the shit from the top of the water. I’m neither I’d hope, although I could be mistaken.
Plus, I sound foreign … I have an unsuitable name. And that would be one of my repeating themes.
Good opera, bad telly and worse propaganda … Of which I watched a great deal, along with the Sandman show, when I was a student — over in Berlin and fastidiously observing. I’ve always been a man for details, can’t get enough of them. Not a spy, not a bit of it, not really. An observer. Product of an unsentimental education.
It’s the least you can do — watch.
Watch it all tumbling down like the Wall — Berliner Mauer, the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart. Never a good sign when your wording tries that hard to fight reality, it suggests the beginning of your tumble. Yes, it does. It always does.
But I’d rather watch beauty.
And is that a denial of reality, or an attempt to embrace it? I think I am too tired to know. I hope I am too tired to know.
That day with Becky, trying to be on holiday with Becky, I watched the city moving, everything moving — details, details — as we motored on. Mild to uncomfortable guilt — the usual — that here she is, an adult, and I’d been so often held back in the evenings and still working when she was a child, when it was time to talk, to be, to set my own dear baby safe in her bed. Night night.
I’ve missed a lot.
School concerts, parents’ evenings, the time she fell off a pony and scared herself, the times when we should have talked.
I missed the lot. Almost.
I’ve missed my life, I think. I think that might be true. If overly emotive as something to mention.
Regrets apart — and I do always pack them for holidays — in Berlin I was having a good day. In terms of weather. An airy afternoon ahead for hands in pockets and brisk walking, arm-in-arming it along Unter den Linden, wandering about in the theme park and high-gloss purchasing opportunity that central Berlin has become. Poor old Mitte — freedom has done some ridiculous things to you.
Which isn’t what I was thinking — I was full of how much, how so much I like being arm in arm.
And that weekend she hadn’t let me yet.
But on the boat Becky had taken his hand. Their barge had sway-glided on while an instructional narration had attempted to intrude via the tour-guiding headphones that he’d refused to wear. And Jon had closed his eyes against the glare, or to prevent the leakage of his own variation on a theme of stupidity, or to prevent glancing across at his only daughter’s disappointment in him.
But then she had taken his hand.
Always the same way, but always more — she is always more.
The stroke of her forefinger at his wrist and then the warm, soft enquiry when her hand closed over his knuckles, when her thumb slipped under to find out the heart of his palm and make it rest.