‘No can do!’ said the driver, a squat and impeccably mannered black man who hailed, so it turned out, from the town of Ogbomosho in Nigeria, and who, from his tone of voice, was evidently caught between sympathy for Larry’s need and pride in the extravagant prohibitions of his adopted country. Larry nodded and tried to settle back on the puffed and shiny seat, gazing out at a wasteland of motels, billboards, minimalls and ‘nude’ diners. He had been to the city many times. Most of Sun Valley General had been shot at the studios on North Las Palmas, and when Doctor B figured large in the storyline Larry had been delivered to the studio in a white stretch limousine. But the place he now entered as they turned off the freeway on to Santa Monica, this megalopolis purpling under its canopy of smog, remained essentially undisclosed to him. Too bright, too big, too dirty, too foreign, Los Angeles had perhaps always been the end of his American odyssey, a last America he could never quite enter.
For ten years, ever since doing his first ads in New York when the tennis career began to fold and he had slipped into three figures on the world ratings, he had carried on his love affair with this country. His first view of New York, of Manhattan, had been through the windows of Nathan Slater’s Lincoln Town Car as they drove, one October dusk, to Slater’s seventeenth-floor offices overlooking Madison Square. Later that evening, with two or three other Slater ‘discoveries’, they had gone to the Palm on the East Side to eat lobsters. Larry was twenty-six, seduced by Slater’s attentiveness, by the baseball summary on the radio (it was World Series time), by the wraiths of steam that rose from the cracks and gratings in the road, and most of all, most breathlessly, by the filigreed beauty of the towers, whose beaconed crowns he bent his neck to get a glimpse of as they passed.
For Alice – for Alec too perhaps – Culture and Beauty and Style were European phenomena, or, more specifically, French. America was Hollywood and Vegas and rednecks. It was razzmatazz and bad food. It was helplessly vulgar. But for Larry and his friends, America had felt like the last place on the planet where things actually happened, a country where a man’s life could still have a mythic weight to it. After school they would hang out in Wimpy bars or Little Chefs, half a dozen teenage boys sat three by three either side of the plastic ketchup tomato, puffing on Craven As or Lucky Strike, smoking half the cigarette at a go, then carefully tapping out the embers, saving the last half for the following day. They read Louis L’Amour and Jack Kerouac and Hemingway. Some, not Larry, graduated on to Mailer and Updike and Roth. On Saturday afternoons they met up at Gaumonts and Odeons wearing American college football jackets from secondhand import stores in Bristol, and lied about their age to watch Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson step from ever-faster cars to pull ever-bigger guns from their coats. On parents’ chrome-fronted music centres they played Dylan and Hendrix, Motown, Lou Reed, Tom Petty, Zappa, Patti Smith. Their language was marbled with Americanisms: ‘cool’, ‘peachy’, ‘neat’, ‘far out’, the ubiquitous ‘man’. And between them it was understood that sooner or later they would go there, go West and drive a Mustang and say ‘easy over’ to the girl in the diner who asked how they wanted their eggs, though as far as Larry knew he was the only one to have actually made it there, the lone survivor of all that teenage yearning.
Halfway through his first martini at the Palm – his first martini anywhere – England had appeared as a remote and underlit island he need never return to, other than on the occasional visit to Brooklands. Jet in, jet out. He had entered the future, and was half dazed with gratitude and the wildest optimism. The following night, in Slater’s Greenwich Village apartment, a party had begun with tall women and cocaine, a party that lasted all through the advertising campaign for luxury cars – British, or apparently so – and then crossed the country with him to California; a pearly necklace of late and later nights as the small acting parts came in and he reached his apotheosis as Dr Barry Catchpole, becoming almost famous and almost rich, though curiously less and less content, as though, in a fatal hour he would never afterwards be able to recall or identify, he had fallen foul of some law of inverse returns, so that the more he drank the less drunk he was, and the more he partied the less pleasure he had, until the morning he had stumbled out into a San Francisco fog to discover himself, a reckless man, married to a woman who cried in her sleep and father to a little girl who had already seen more doctors than most sane and healthy people see in a lifetime.
One got weary trying to work it all out. His life resisted his attempts to comprehend it. He didn’t seem to have the language, or whatever it was you needed – the books, the time, the medication. He had lost count of the number of people who had suggested therapy, who had given him the names of their own therapists, saying ‘Definitely the best Jungian in town’, or ‘This guy guarantees closure’. He thought sometimes the solution would be to get back on the show, but Catchpole was gone (with ghastly irony the show had ‘sent’ him to England to nurse an ailing parent), and the row with Liverwitz had not been of the kind where you could go back the next week and eat humble pie. It had been savage and terminal, and in truth he was glad to be free of the programme’s grinding inanity, its relentless pursuit of the trite. Why, he had bawled at Liverwitz, why were the only patients ever admitted to the hospital friends and relatives of the people who worked there? Was that usual? But there had been no serious money coming into the house for eight months. His last paid work had been a commercial for Wonder Bread in November. Since then there had been promises, a lot of talk over mint juleps and wheat-grass juice, but no firm offers. He had very slightly over ten and a half thousand dollars in the Bank of California, a few thousand sterling in London tied up in stocks and shares. He also had the cars – Kirsty drove a ’93 Cherokee – and the house, which was mostly paid for. Kirsty contributed a modest income from her part-time work in a day unit for people with learning difficulties, but her salary barely covered the phone bills, which, since Alice’s illness, had trebled. Cocaine wasn’t getting any cheaper. Neither were the bills for Ella’s asthma treatment, much of it not covered by the insurance. Then there were the school fees for KDBS, and Mr Yip’s piano classes. The flights to England. Party girls. The IRS. Booze. Hoffmann. Groceries. There was no end to it.
He had long since calculated what he might inherit when Alice died, the preliminary sums done, in the teeth of selfdisgust, shortly after she was first diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer in the winter of ’95. It would not be much. The house would be sold off, but an old place in poor repair on a stretch of waterlogged moorland would hardly raise a fortune, and half of it, of course, would go to Alec. The good furniture, which amounted to the dining table and silver candlesticks, a couple of decent paintings, also in the dining room, and some of Stephen’s collection of antique clocks, would bring in another three or four thousand. All in all he had reckoned – reckoning on despite a shame that made him sweat – he might clear forty or even fifty grand. But when? He had already started borrowing (Kirsty knew nothing of this) from men with pampered attack dogs, people who said ‘We understand each other, right?’ and ‘You’re a real nice guy’, but who would certainly have a thorough and instinctual way with slow payers.
Larry and the man from Ogbomosho entered Century City and the Avenue of the Stars, a zone of high-rises and underground shopping complexes between the LA Country Club and Rancho Park. A few moments later they swung into the half-moon drive of the Park Hotel, where a doorman, dressed in the red-and-gold livery of a Yeoman of the Guard, opened the cab door and examined Larry through mirror shades. Larry paid the driver, tipping him heavily. The man only had one ear; the other looked to have been removed, clumsily, with something blunt – teeth perhaps. He was, decided Larry, peeling himself from the varnished surface of the rear seat, a man who had passed through darkness, and who might, had Larry found a way into him, have proved wise on the subject. Help, like trouble, could come from anywhere. He was sorry he had missed his chance.