“He’s not an old man anymore?”
“I’m not a student anymore. I’m not going to do my MBA. What’s the point?”
“What happened?”
“I dropped out of college. I’m going to be Mike’s personal assistant.”
“Mike doesn’t need a personal assistant.”
“He does, Alfie. There are always people calling him up and asking him to write things. To do events. To appear on TV or radio.”
“What he needs is an answer machine.”
“He needs someone to protect him from the outside world. He can’t concentrate. I can help him. He can take care of the writing. I’ll deal with everything else. That’s more worthwhile than any degree. And it will give us a chance to be together all the time.”
“Sounds like a nightmare.”
“You should be happy for us, Alfie. He needs me. And I need him.”
“You both need your heads examined. Especially you.”
“Older people can be amazing, Alfie. We saw your grandmother. We took her some of those chocolates she likes. With the old-fashioned soldiers and the ladies on the box. Something street.”
“Quality Street. She said that you ate all the soft ones.”
“I don’t blame you for being angry at me.”
“I’m not angry at you. I feel sorry for you. I’m angry at my father. You’re silly. He’s a cruel, stupid coward.”
“Oh, Alfie. He’s a wonderful man.”
I shake my head. “He’s only doing this-setting up home with you-because he was forced into it.”
“It would have happened anyway.”
“That’s not what married men do. Married men stay. They stay in their homes for as long as they can.” Under the table, I touch the ring I still wear. “They stay until they are forced out.”
I get a complaint about Lenny the Lech from one of my students. Yumi, the Japanese girl with all the blond hair, stays behind after class and tells me he has been pestering her.
“In the corridor he tries to touch me. He always says-‘Come for a drink, baby. Let me give you extra lessons, baby. Oral lessons, baby. Ha ha ha.’ ” She shakes her head. “I don’t want those kind of lessons from Lenny the Lech. He’s not even my teacher. You are.”
“Can’t you tell him you’re not interested?”
“He doesn’t listen.”
Her eyes well up with tears and I pat her arm.
“I’ll have a word with him, okay?”
During morning break I find Lenny in the staff room. He is drinking instant coffee with Hamish, a fit-looking thirty-year-old down from Glasgow who is far too good-looking to be heterosexual.
“So basically you came to London because you’re a bum bandit?” Lenny is saying.
“You could put it like that,” says Hamish. “I came here because it’s the best place to pursue a discreetly gay lifestyle.”
“And does a discreetly gay lifestyle mean you have a committed relationship with one partner? Or that you get jerked off on Hampstead Heath every night by a succession of anonymous strangers?”
“Can I have a word, Lenny?” I say.
I take him to one side. He puts his arm around me. Lenny is a very tactile man. But it’s more than that. I think he actually likes me. Because I have also taught in Asia, he is under the illusion that we are the same kind of guy.
“What is it, my old mate?”
“It’s a bit embarrassing, Lenny. One of my students has had a word with me. About you. Yumi.”
“The little Jap model? Miss Toyota, 1998? Not very big but you can bet she really burns your rubber.”
“Yumi. The girl with all the hair. The thing is, Lenny, she says you’re misreading the signals.”
“Misreading the signals?”
“How can I put it? She’s not interested in you, Lenny.” Lenny’s monstrous sweating head is corrugated with a frown. “God knows why not, Len, but there you go. Women, eh? It’s just not going to happen, mate.”
“I’m sorry, mate,” Lenny says. “I really am. I had no idea little Yumi was spoken for.”
“No, it’s not-”
“There’s plenty more fish in the sea.” He chortles in that Lenny the Lech way. “I’ll cast my enormous hook elsewhere.” He slaps me on the back. “No problemo.”
I turn to leave.
“And Alfie?”
“What?”
“Give her one for the Lech.”
Yumi is sitting by herself in the Eamon de Valera, nursing a mineral water at a corner table.
“He’s not going to bother you anymore,” I tell her.
“Thank you. I buy you drink.”
“That’s okay, Yumi.”
“But I want to.” She goes to the bar and spends half the night counting out her money in loose change. Usually I feel a kind of envy for my students but right now I feel sorry for Yumi. Coming halfway round the world to improve your English and then getting some fat old Englishman like Lenny the Lech offering you oral lessons. She returns with a pint of Guinness clutched in both hands and sets it before me.
“He’s a very bad man,” she says. “All the girls at Churchill’s say so. He wants rub-rub with just anyone. Any student with nice face. And even some ugly ones. If they are large breasted.”
Then she stares at me with these eyes, these moist brown eyes, that make me realize just how lonely I have been.
“Incredible,” I say. “What kind of teacher does a thing like that?”
12
Y UMI’S ROOM IS AT THE END of a dark corridor in a large, crumbling town house that has spent the last fifty years being chopped up into smaller and smaller flats. As we make our way down the hall you can hear music, voices, laughter, doors slamming, telephones ringing. The cacophony of too many people in too small a space. And having the time of their life. We take off our shoes at her door and go inside.
It’s not much to look at. A bay window dominates the tiny flat, but it overlooks some kind of junkyard piled high with trashed cars. The room’s exhausted carpet looks as though it has been trodden on by an itinerant army of students. The only heating comes from a two-bar electric heater.
It’s a dump. Yet it doesn’t feel like a dump because all over her modest apartment Yumi has decorated the peeling wallpaper with photographs from home. Everywhere you look there are all these Polaroids, snapshots and photo-booth pictures of smiling Japanese girls making V signs. One round-faced, shyly grinning girl seems to feature in many of them.
“Younger sister,” Yumi says.
There is something deeply affecting about Yumi’s attempts to turn this cold, rented little box into some kind of home. Armed with just her memories and a stack of photographs, she has tried to make it her own.
Yumi lights a perfumed candle, turns on the radio to jazz FM and unrolls a futon. The unfurled mattress takes up most of the floor. We stand facing each other for a moment and I realize how nervous I am.
“I haven’t got anything,” I say.
“That’s not true,” she says. “You have good heart. Lovely smile. Nice sense of humor.”
“No, I mean I haven’t, you know, got any condoms.”
“Ah. Okay. I have some. I think.”
“And I haven’t been with anyone,” I say. “Not since my wife, I mean.”
She touches my face.
“That’s okay,” she says. “Whatever happens, everything’s okay.”
It’s what I need to hear. I take it as slowly as I can, and although at first I am overwhelmed by how different she seems to Rose, it is much better than I could ever have hoped. Her body is shockingly young and lithe, and she is a sweet and tender lover, smiling at my excitement, but in a way that doesn’t make me feel bad. Yumi makes me feel nothing but good.
Afterward she hides her face in my chest and laughs, calling me her favorite teacher-her favorite sensei-and hugging me with a strength that surprises me. I laugh too, relieved and pleased, dumbfounded by my good fortune.
Later she sleeps in my arms while I watch the candle burn down until the only light in the little room comes from the glow of the two-bar electric heater. And then, feeling happier than I have in a long time, I start to drift away too.