The effect of his long solo foot trips through the city wasn’t to make him suddenly love London, but he began to feel that he understood it a little better – understood where things were, understood the rhythm of the city. Patrick realised that what was disconcerting for him was the impression of everybody being busy all the time. People always seemed to be doing things. Even when they weren’t doing anything, they were walking dogs, or going to betting shops, or reading newspapers at bus stops, or listening to music through headphones, or skateboarding along the pavement, or eating fast food as they walked along the street – so even when they weren’t doing things, they were doing things.
On the third morning Patrick woke late; the building noises which were never absent on a Pepys Road morning had for some reason not broken through into his sleep. He ate toast and an entirely flavourless banana and instead of struggling with the coffee-maker – which had a French-language instruction manual but was still impossible to work out – brewed strong stewed coffee in a jug. He shuffled around the house a little bit, dressed, and left when the housekeeper arrived at about half past ten.
Patrick’s third walk took him north, towards the river. He went down a local street which he’d never visited even though it was just around the corner: it had, it turned out, a delicatessen, a shoe shop, and a gym where an outstandingly fat man was fighting his own shortness of breath as he tried to chain up a bicycle. A minicab office, a pub, a pizza restaurant which might not yet be open for the day, or which might have gone out of business, it was hard to tell. Down the hill, past a greengrocer’s shop with a sign in the window saying ‘African Vegetables’. Under a railway bridge, past a huge poster with a close-up photo of a man’s crotch dressed in Y-fronts. Past a bus stop with the usual cast of Londoners smoking, playing electronic games, listening to music, staring into space, all as if those activities were jobs in themselves. Past the gasholder, through the park, past joggers and cyclists, down to the river, along the riverside walk. The Thames was different colours depending on its different moods and today, with a rare glimpse of blue in the sky, it was lighter, happier, blue-reflecting. Unlike an African river, it seemed to have no smell. Patrick walked over the pretty, delicate, white-painted ironwork bridge. Again he was overtaking stationary cars, in which people posed and fumed as if they too were working at it. A couple in a low-slung car, a Mini, the girl also wearing a miniskirt, were using the time stuck in traffic to kiss and fondle each other. They were going hard at it. Patrick felt a pang of something, loneliness or lust or both. Maybe he should have taken this week to go home after all.
Over the bridge there was a pub, with a sign saying ‘Cat and Racket’. The pub had tinted, mottled-glass windows, and electric lights designed to look like old gas lamps. Patrick looked at it and wished that he could go in. He had heard about pubs and had a fantasy image of what they were like: warm, brown, convivial. Not everything in London was people on their own, and pubs were proof of that. But Patrick had never been in one. He was too concerned about not embarrassing himself to go on his own, and too proud to ask Mickey to take him. That didn’t stop him dreaming, and he briefly dreamed now, about how he might cross the road, and find men inside watching football on television, or arguing about some aspect of the game, and they would ask his opinion, ask him if he knew anything, and he would say, quietly, ‘I am Freddy Kamo’s father,’ and they would be astonished, amazed, and they would be thrilled to meet him, and they would compete to buy him a beer, and to put an arm round him and tell him how great they thought Freddy was and how much they hoped things would work out. That is what he dreamed it would be like.
Patrick cut across the King’s Road, which was a place Freddy had liked to come to and walk along, before he got so famous that it had become difficult. Freddy’s distinctive walk was part of the problem: he could change his profile with a hat and baggy clothes, but no one had an athletically ungainly walk quite like Freddy, bouncing high on his toes, looking as if he might trip over himself but never missing a step. His son, who had been breathed on by the gods. No similar grace had ever rained down on Patrick – or rather, his son was that grace – and he had to accept that he was an accessory to that grace, that luck, that blessing. But Patrick, being honest with himself, had to admit that he didn’t find it easy. He walked along this famous road, looking in the windows of the expensive shops selling things which he could not imagine anyone wanting or needing or using: lamps which did not look as if they would emit any light, shoes no woman could stand in, coats which would not keep anyone warm, chairs which had no obvious way to sit on them. People wanted these things, they must do, or the shops wouldn’t be selling them – and yet Patrick was so far from wanting any of them for himself that he felt that it wasn’t the things for sale which were useless, but he himself. Either the things or the person looking at them were in the wrong place; but the things so clearly belonged here that it must be the person who was lost and redundant. The trim middle-aged African man whose hair was beginning to grey, smartly but inconspicuously dressed in a camel-hair coat and scarf and shined shoes, upright – he was the thing which was in the wrong place.
41
‘You make me feel so young… you make me feel as though spring has sprung,’ sang Roger, to himself, in the privacy of his own head. It would not have been appropriate to sing it out loud, because he was sitting in a meeting with his deputy Mark and some guy from accounts whose name he had already forgotten once, then got Mark to remind him of when the man stepped out of the room to take a call, then had forgotten again. The guy from accounts had a standard English name, but on the long side, Roger could remember that much. Jonathan was a possibility. Alexander also. Several syllables were involved. But for the moment Roger was having to stick to ‘you’.
The purpose of the meeting: to prepare monthly figures matching the department’s performance against budget – which was done daily and weekly too, but was done monthly for submission to Accounts. So Accounts helped prepare the figures which were then formally submitted to Accounts and then sent back to the department. Roger was barely listening, he was barely there. He felt so young, he felt that spring had sprung. In point of fact it was a grey day, with the low sky much in evidence from Roger’s office, and a bleak and biting Easter wind moving the clouds along briskly, like an irritated policeman – but Roger didn’t care about that. If pressed for the reason why he was in such good humour, he wouldn’t have been able to give it.
He had been in a good mood more or less without interruption since the arrival of their new nanny on 27 December. With Matya downstairs, having apparently fallen in love with the boys at first sight and vice versa, Roger was free to go up to his study and work on his revenge. He put a Clash compilation CD in his fancy stereo and took out a notepad. At the top he wrote ‘Economies’. Below that he wrote:
Reality: £1,000,000 shortfall.
Necessity: cut outgoings.
Actions: cut shopping bill by 70 per cent.
(This meant that Arabella’s spending would have to be dramatically, spectacularly curtailed. No more buying whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. In fact:)
All purchases, expenditure over specific figure to be mutually discussed and agreed. Suggest initial limit of £100.