93. Simpatica
The only thing in the fridge was a large pink box from Fortnum & Mason. Inside were four rows of macaroons, in tasteful pastel shades. Natalie Blake brought these over to where Frank sat, shipwrecked on the kitchen “island.” White space in all directions. He took the box from her and put his hands on her shoulders.
“Blake, try to relax.”
“Can’t relax in a yard like this.”
“Inverted snobbery.”
“I’m so hungry. That food was nasty. Feed me.”
“Afterward.”
He carried her upstairs, past paintings and lithographs, family photographs and a fainting couch in the hall. They went into a little attic room at the very top of the flat. The bed sat right under the eaves; she kept knocking her elbow against a bookshelf. Law tomes, Tolkien, a lot of 80’s horror paperbacks, memoirs of businessmen and politicians. She spotted a solitary friend, The Fire Next Time.
“You read this?”
“I think he knew my grandmother in Paris.”
“It’s a good book.”
“I’ll believe you, Junior Counsel.”
94. The pleasures of naming
Perhaps sex isn’t of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language. The gestures themselves are limited — there are only so many places for so many things to go — and Rodney was in no way deficient technically. He was silent. Whereas all Frank’s silly, uncontrolled, unselfconscious, embarrassing storytelling found its purpose here, in a bedroom.
95. Post-coital
“He was from Trinidad, he lived in South London, he worked for the trains. She says ‘driver’ for effect — not true. A guard. Later he worked in an office somewhere. She met him in a park. I never knew him. Harris. Really I should be ‘Frank Harris.’ He’s dead. That’s it.”
Even naked he blustered. Natalie Blake maneuvered until she was on top and looked into his eyes. Boyish expressions of vulnerability, pride and fear were all still perfectly visible in the adult face. It was of course these qualities that compelled her. “Back to Milan pregnant with me. It was the Seventies. Then Puglia. Then England for school. It’s not a problem, it was a great way to grow up. I loved my school.” An only child. A storied family, rich though not as rich as they once were. “Once upon a time every decent family in Italy had a De Angelis gas oven…” No-one had known what to do with his hair. No spoken English. Dangerously pretty. Eight years old.
96. The sole author
“But you’re making me sound like a victim, my point is I had a very good time, these were just small things, I don’t really know why we’re even talking about them. All your questions are leading. Rare Negroid Italian has happy childhood, learns Latin, the end. Then nothing very interesting happens between 1987 and tonight.” He kissed her extravagantly. Perhaps she would always look after him, help him become a real person. After all, she was strong! Even relative weakness in Caldwell translated to impressive strength in the world. The world asked so much less of a person, and was of simpler construction.
97. Nota bene
Natalie did not stop to wonder whether Frank’s boarding school might have done the same job for him.
98. Sixth-month anniversary
“Frank, I’m going downstairs, I can’t work with the telly on. Can I take Smith and Hogan?”
“Yeah, and burn it.”
“How are you going to pass this exam?”
“Ingenuity.”
“What is that?”
“MTV Base. Music videos are the only joyful modern art form. Look at that joy.”
He reached forward on the bed and put his finger over a dancing B-girl in a white shell suit. “I was in Puglia when he died. Nobody understood. Some fat gangster? Who cares? This was the attitude. It’s not even music as far as they’re concerned.”
Everything he said sounded wonderful. He only lacked what the Italians call forza, which Natalie Blake herself would provide (see above).
99. Frank seeks Leah
The sun pierced through the blinds in long shadows. Natalie Blake stood in the doorway of the lounge, nervous, holding a tumbler of vodka, ready to smooth over any rupture. Leah and Frank sat side by side on his grandmother’s Chesterfield. Natalie could see how Leah had grown into herself. No longer gangly: tall. No longer ginger—“auburn.” The experimental period had ended. Denim skirt, hoodie, furry boots, a thick gold hoop in each ear. Back to her roots. Natalie Blake watched her boyfriend Frank De Angelis cut out crooked white lines on a glass-topped table, while her good friend Leah Hanwell rolled a twenty-pound note into a thin tube. She saw how he listened intently as Leah spoke of a man called, in her pronunciation, Me-shell. They’d just met in Ibiza. Frank was taking the task seriously. He understood that there could be no loving Natalie Blake without loving Leah Hanwell first.
“Here’s something that interests me: you girls — you like your Eurotrash brothers. But isn’t it true? It’s a strange coincidence. There aren’t that many of us. Is it a competition?”
“Look, mate: you’re Eurotrash. He’s from Guadeloupe! His dad was in the underground resistance movement thing — basically, he went on the run, the whole family had to. His dad’s a school janitor in Marseilles now. His mum’s Algerian. She can’t read or write.”
Frank dipped his head and made his mouth into a comic moue.
“Points to Hanwell. He certainly sounds like the salt of the earth. Child-of-a-freedom-fighter. I am forced to cede the moral high ground. I am decidedly not the salt of the earth.”
Leah laughed: “You’re the cocaine on the mirror. The badly cut cocaine.”
100. Natalie seeks Elena
A Mayfair lunch. A beautiful woman slips an oyster down her throat. Her phone is so slim and light it sits easily in the silk pocket of her blouse. “And he is working hard?” she asks. Elena De Angelis tapped a thin cigarette on the tablecloth and gave Natalie Blake a sideways look of fierce cunning. Before Natalie could even stutter an answer, Elena laughed. “Don’t worry — I don’t ask you to lie. It’s not going to be the law for ’Cesco, of course it is not. But I hoped it would be a useful thing generally, for his character. It was like this for his uncle. Well. He met you. You are the first real woman he has ever brought to meet me. This is something. Tell me, is it true you have to have dinner a certain number of times in the year or you cannot be a barrister?” Natalie watched Elena tap ash into her dinner plate. She urgently wanted to know how this woman loved and lost a Trinidadian train guard. “Yes,” she said, “twelve times. In the great hall. Used to be thirty-six.” Elena blew two jets of smoke through her nostrils: “What a curious country this is!” A waiter came over and the bill was settled somehow without any ugly groping after purses and money. “’Cesco, please call your cousin. I said you would ring two weeks ago, and they can’t hold a position forever. It’s embarrassing.”
101. Onwards, upward
Frank flunked the bar spectacularly, turning up forty-five minutes late, leaving ten minutes early. Afterward the first thing he did was call his mother. Natalie saw how this conversation cheered him. Elena was the kind of woman to prefer a spectacular disaster to a conventional failure.
Leah Hanwell found a bleak flat south of the river, in New Cross, and Natalie Blake, out of respect for an old friendship, became her flatmate. She read briefs on the long triangulated tube rides: New Cross, Lincoln’s Inn, Marylebone. She slipped into Frank’s bed. Slipped out. Slipped in. “What time is it?” “Eleven fifteen.” “I’ve gotta chip!” She tried to force herself to get up and onto a night bus, heading south. “Your principles spend more time in that dump than you do,” he observed. She sank back into the pillows.