He remembers everything. She threw the dregs of her coffee into the grass. The birds flew away. It scares me. Makes me wonder if I’m losing my mind. Like Mum.
Who’s the prime minister?
I’m being serious…He could be making it up for all I know.
Don’t we always make them up, our childhood memories? His own mother had slept with another man, the dapper little dentist with the soft-top Mini. Or was it just a spiteful rumour?
They sat for several minutes looking at the view. They had this at least, the ability to sit beside one another in silence.
I have difficulty believing that Richard and I are actually related. The birds were reconvening around the crumbs.
Maybe you were adopted. That might solve a problem or two.
Another of his jokeless punchlines. But Richard was calling, Wagons roll.
♦
Countryside like an advert on TV, for antiperspirant, for butter, for broadband, a place to make us feel good inside, where everything is slower and more noble, cows and hayricks and honest labour. Somewhere out there, hard by a stand of beech, commanding an enviable prospect of the valley, the house where the book will be written and the marriage mended and the children will build dens and the rain when it comes is good honest rain. How strange this yearning for being elsewhere doing nothing. The gift of princes once, its sweet poison spreading. Lady Furlough surveying the desert of the deer park, the monsters coiling in the ornamental lake, that terrible weight of hours, laudanum and cross-stitch. What every child knows and every adult forgets, the glacial movement of the watched clock, pluperfects turning slowly into cosines turning slowly into the feeding of the five thousand. School holidays of which we remember only mending bikes and Gary Holler killing the frog, the featureless hours between gone forever.
And now you must do nothing for a week and enjoy it. Days of rest long past the point when we’re rested, holidays without the holy, pilgrimage become mere travel, the destination handed to us on a plate, the idleness of the empire in its final days.
♦
Melissa had been sitting at the dining-room table reading when Dominic walked through and said he was going for a walk. The door banged and she became aware of how quiet the house was. She stuck her iPod on. ‘Monkey Business’, Black Eyed Peas, but the inability to hear someone approaching from behind made her feel vulnerable so she took the earphones out again. She stepped into the garden, wanting the minimal reassurance of Dominic’s shrinking silhouette, but he was gone and the valley was empty. She went back into the living room and rifled through the stack of DVDs. Monsters Inc., Ice Age 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. There was a Simpsons case but it contained a PlayStation disc for Star Wars: Battlefront.
A whirr and clang behind her. She spun round. The grandfather clock chimed again. Fuck. She needed to talk to a normal human being. Megan, Cally, Henry, anyone. She grabbed her phone and headed for the hills.
♦
He’d been looking forward to it for the last couple of weeks. A town of books. All this learning gathered in and offered up. Trawling, browsing, leafing. But now that he was standing in the bowels of The Cinema Bookshop…That smell. What was it, precisely? Glue? Paper? The spores of some bibliophile lichen? Catacombs of yellowing paper. Every book unwanted, sold for pennies or carted from the houses of the dead. Battersea Books Home. The authors earned nothing from the transaction. Salaries less than binmen, he’d read somewhere. He thought about their lives. No colleagues, no timetable, no security, the constant lure of daytime television. The formlessness of it all made him feel slightly ill, going to work in their dressing gowns. So much risk and so little adventure.
He laid his hand on the bumpy wall of frayed spines and brittle slip covers. His mother had arranged them according to their height, as a kind of subsidiary furniture. Airport novels and Hollywood biographies. He wished he were better at embracing the chaos, loosening up a little. But the journey was always a circle. You thought you were on the other side of the world then you turned a corner and found yourself in the kitchen with the green melamine bowls and the clown calendar. His neatness, his love of order, the need to keep himself constantly busy, these things weren’t a measure of the distance he’d put between them, these were the things they had in common.
♦
The Golden Ocean. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. The House of Sixty Fathers. They Call Me Carpenter. Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive. The Velveteen Rabbit. The Chessmen of Mars. The Eagle of the Ninth. Tarzan and the Forbidden City. The Man Who Could Not Shudder. Typewriter in the Sky. The Naughtiest Girl in the School. Black Hunting Whip. The Secret of the Wooden Lady. Five Go to Mystery Moor. The Drowning Pool. The Courage of Sarah Noble. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Bonjour Tristesse. The Sky Is Falling. The Sound of Waves.
♦
Holy shit. There was a naked woman tied up. Then another naked woman tied up. Then a naked woman tied up and hanging from the ceiling. Then a naked tattooed woman with her arse in the air and a dildo sitting on a record player in the background. Then a naked woman with an Egyptian hairstyle on an old-fashioned hospital bed tied up with rubber tubing that actually went into her cunt. And it was, like, actual art that you were allowed to look at. Or was it? Alex flipped the cover shut. Nobuyoshi Araki. Phaidon. £85. So it was art. Holy shit. You could have it on a coffee table. He imagined being the photographer. Actually being there in the room. There was a close-up of a big veiny penis in black and white which was gross, then two naked women on a bed.
Excuse me.
There were other human beings in the room. The man squeezed past and disappeared into Architecture. Alex stared at the photograph of the two women. He wanted to buy the book. He wanted to steal the book. He wanted to stay here forever. He had to put it down. He couldn’t put it down.
♦
Dominic was thinking of the opening of the second Two-Part Invention, that little canon. When the work stopped he couldn’t bear to listen to music. Sentimental songs were the worst, ‘The Power of Love’, ‘Wonderful Tonight’…He had to leave shops sometimes. Just like Coward said. Extraordinary how potent…etc. After a couple of months he started listening to Steve Reich and suddenly saw the point of those cool, evolving lines. Music for Eighteen Musicians, Electric Guitar Phase. Moving gingerly on to Bach. Another kind of coolness. He ran through the fingering of the Two-Part Invention in his head. Who was the guy on that classical music quiz show when he was a kid? He played a dummy keyboard and you had to guess the piece from the thumping. Joseph Cooper. That was it. Face the Music.
He looked across the valley and heard The Lark Ascending in his mind’s ear, that skirling violin, four semiquavers then up and up, pentatonic scale, no audible root, no bar lines even…Melissa. Jesus. Was that Melissa? He started to jog down through the bracken. What in God’s name was she doing? Vomiting? He tripped and fell and got up again. She was on all fours. He slowed, panting. Melissa? He touched her shoulder and she sprang up and screamed, waving her hands like a frightened woman in silent film. Whoa, sorry. I didn’t mean…