The children watched the adults pointing and yelling at one another, and, before they’d stopped, asked for money to go out and buy a video game and pizza. Max handed over some cash.
‘How fortunate and spoiled they are,’ he said to her. ‘With none of the worry we had about the future.’
‘Is that good for them?’ she asked.
He shrugged. His eldest son patted him on the stomach. ‘When’s it due, Dad?’ he said.
‘You see, a dad is a derided thing,’ Max said to Maggie.
‘Joe isn’t.’
‘I think I’ll fetch some nice wine from the cellar. But have a look at this. It’s for Joe.’
He handed her a tiny oil painting, about the size of a packet of cigarettes: a nude woman.
‘That’s nice.’
He was in the cellar for a while, looking for a wine which might please her. On the way back he passed his jacket, hanging over the back of a chair. He took his chequebook from the pocket and located a pen. When he returned to the kitchen she wasn’t there, but had taken her things and gone.
As he opened the wine he wondered whether they’d be able to forgive one another, and whether they’d see one another again.
Phillip
Until at last he was able to identify himself clearly, I couldn’t recognise the voice on the phone.
‘Who?’ I said again. ‘I’m afraid I can’t hear you. My children are rehearsing their group upstairs.’
‘It’s Phillip,’ he whispered. ‘For God’s sake! Your old friend, Phillip Heath.’
‘Ah.’
‘Fred, are you shocked?’
‘It’s good to hear your voice,’ I said cautiously. ‘Where have you been all this time?’
‘I am still abroad.’
Abroad: it had been a long time since I’d heard that word which was how, when I was a kid, the English referred to the rest of the world.
Over the past fifteen years Phillip had dropped me a postcard every couple of years or so to say he was working in this or that school, or moving apartments. But I couldn’t recall the last time we had actually spoken.
On his last postcard, however, a couple of months ago, he had added, ‘have been a bit under the weather, old boy’. Then Fiona, my university girlfriend, who had remained in closer touch with him, rang to say Phillip had been operated on for throat cancer.
He sounded croaky and weak on the phone, but said he was recovering. He had been ‘thinking things over’ and was keen for me to visit him where he was living alone in Italy, near Lake Como. We could walk together. There were no Muslims, he joked, only hordes of elderly locals walking their dogs. It was old white Europe, where money and glamour had long been replaced by decay and dullness, but not, unfortunately, by decadence. Why didn’t I stay in his spare room?
‘That’s a kind offer,’ I said.
‘But when exactly can you pop over? I beg you to be definite. Who else can I talk to about things?’
‘Things?’
‘One’s life, I mean, such as it is.’
I promised to look at my diary and phone him in a few days. ‘This is sudden for me,’ I explained. ‘I have teenage children. I teach too — you were my example there, friend.’
‘I’m far too weak for that, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Fred, I will wait to hear from you. Please, though, if you want to see my smiling face again better not leave it too long. Dying’s an awful trouble and nuisance.’
I wasn’t sure when I’d last seen Phillip, but it had been towards the end of the eighties, though the substance of the relationship had been in the middle of that decade, which was when my ‘success’ began and our friendship — the friendship of him, Fiona and me — had been at its most intense.
The phone call had upset and disturbed me, and I was torn.
How might one turn down the request of a man so sick, perhaps dying unhappily and more or less alone, someone who’d been such a close friend? I’d liked him; I’d loved him, I suppose, and he me. It had been a passionate friendship which had ended badly, indeed violently. Was an inexplicable outbreak any reason to forget the good, wonderful part of it?
As I considered the trip to Como, I became aware of how angry I still was over what had gone on between Phillip and me. Why exactly had I so taken to heart Phillip’s attacks on me? Why did I still puzzle over them and continue to hear his voice in my mind, as I argued with him over and over?
*
Although the three of us had been at university together, Phillip was ten years older than Fiona and me and, unusually for that punky dissenting period — the mid-seventies — Phillip had worn ironed shirts, a jacket and leather shoes. At the school where later he became a history master, he wore a tie and carried a briefcase. He had a moustache and glasses. He was not hip and didn’t attempt to dress young but looked, according to us, like someone’s father, giggling when we called him ‘Mr Chips’ and, later, Mr Lips.
For us he was knowledgeable and, above all, experienced, seeming to know his way around the world. He’d been married briefly; he wasn’t middle-class; his parents had been ‘in service’ — his mother a cook and his father a gardener — and he had moved far beyond them. After starting as an actor in ‘rep’, he had run theatres, worked as a stage manager, and even been an actors’ agent for a while, before trying to become a journalist. When none of it had seemed to work out, he had returned to university to do a PhD on the British army in the Second World War.
Phillip was the only actively bisexual person I’d known. When Fiona first met him, about a year before I did, he lived with a pretty young male lover with whom he listened to Wagner and went to gay bars like the Black Cap in Camden. But by our third year, when Fiona and I were installed together — and Phillip, having left university, was living alone a few doors down from us — he had had decided life was ‘easier’ as a heterosexual. He was working as a schoolteacher in the local comprehensive school, while supposedly completing his doctorate.
After university I set out as an actor in children’s theatre, but quickly realised that I disliked both children and being on stage. For real money I worked as a typist for an employment agency which sent me to a different office each week.
I had never felt more alienated than I did on that train with the other commuters and in those offices with the other drones. (Of course my father worked in an office, as an accountant.) It was such a fright that I was forced to take myself seriously and become motivated, as they say. At work I began to scribble down plays which were eventually performed on ‘the fringe’, in small venues and lunchtime theatres. Then I wrote a more ambitious work about a group of students — including characters who resembled Phillip, Fiona and me — visiting a Greek island, the first half of which was comic and the second farcical, nihilistic and vicious.
After starting out at a fringe venue, the play had become a success in the West End. It was produced in nine other countries and made a lot of money for others and some for me. For a few months, I was considered, at least by a couple of newspapers, to be the ‘voice of the young’ as well as one of Britain’s ‘most promising’ young writers. As Fiona said, if that wouldn’t spook your life, what would?
Soon I was working on the script of the film version. The producers had agreed to let me have a go at writing it, with the proviso that if I didn’t succeed a proper screenwriter would be brought on. I was keen to do it. The more successful I had become, the more self-doubt I seemed to be prone to.