Out of the cab, he lit the cigarette he had been holding in his fist since the airport, and nodded at the Beefeater’s uniform. ‘You’re a long way from home,’ he said.
‘Pasadena,’ said the Beefeater. ‘You a dentist?’
‘No,’ said Larry, obscurely offended.
‘Fifty thousand in town. Convention.’
Larry gave a low whistle, and tried to conjure in his mind an image of so many thousand white-coated men marching like an army, ten abreast, through the great boulevards and byways of Los Angeles. Then, recalling a line from a poem he had read in a schoolboy elocution competition for which he had won an honourable mention, he muttered, ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’
‘What’s that?’ asked the doorman, frowning.
Larry shook his head. ‘Think it’s going to get hotter?’ he asked.
‘Bet your life,’ said the Beefeater. ‘Hot as hell.’
Larry took a last drag on the cigarette. He was one of those deep-lunged men who could get through a cigarette in four or five big pulls, the paper uncoiling beneath a long, sharp ember. The Beefeater relieved him of the butt and walked away with it towards some secret receptacle. Larry checked his watch. Two-fifteen Pacific Standard. Something after ten at night in England, at Brooklands. Home?
‘Good night, Mum,’ he said, and he went in to be among the dentists.
8
In her dream, Alice watched her elder son emerge theatrically from beneath the giant weeping willow in her parents’ garden and cross the lawn towards her, telling her in French that he would save her. ‘Je te sauverai, maman. Je te sauverai.’ But even while she slept, held just beneath the surface of consciousness by the ballast of her drugs, she knew that there was something clumsy and improbable in the image. Larry did not speak French, and had, at sixteen, despite her coaching, decisively failed his O-level in the subject. Alec was the linguist, but it was not Alec who smiled at her on the lawn. The dream was a fraud and she woke into the darkness, confused and agitated, feeling herself to have been tricked.
Slowly she brought herself to order, then made herself smile at the memory of a class of eight-year-olds singing the responses to her patient drilling of French verbs.
Je…?
‘SUIS!’
‘Tu…?
‘Es!’
The slower ones, the dreamier ones, mouthing whatever came into their heads, but carried along by the others. She hadn’t liked to force them. For some children that part of the brain just isn’t switched on at eight. It’s not laziness or stupidity. Really stupid children were a rarity, and she used to tell her young teachers, ‘Never write a child off. Never assume the problem is theirs rather than yours.’ There was no great mystery to it. Alec, for example, sitting at the front of the class like a baby owl, his eyes magnified by his glasses, his hair sticking up in tufts, had never had the slightest difficulty learning French. Partly, of course, because in the beginning she was his teacher and he so desperately wanted to please her, a trait charming and irksome by turns and which he had never really grown out of. She had heard the same tone in his voice telling her about the new play as he used to have when he brought her his homework, as though at any moment he might be squashed by an enormous thumb. Well done, Alec. Good boy. Go and find Larry. Je suis, tu es, il est. Larry’s kingdom was the sports field. Captain of cricket. Captain of football. And later, as a senior, captain of the tennis team. Such a manly little boy! And she had always been there, cheering herself hoarse on the touchline, or courtside at tournaments that grew ever grander, her heart in her mouth as he swayed at the baseline and the boy at the far end reached into the air for the ball. The day he beat the Swede, whose name she seemed to have completely forgotten, had been the proudest day of her life. She had wanted to shout out from the stands so that the whole world would hear: ‘I’m the mother! I’m the mother!’ It was difficult for Alec, of course. The inevitable comparisons. Always being introduced as ‘Larry’s brother’ as though he didn’t have a name of his own. But she had doled out her love as evenly as possible. There had been no obvious favourite.
What on earth was the Swedish boy’s name? She searched for a minute, but found nothing except a trace of darkness like a swipe of fresh black paint covering up the place in her head where the name should have been. Gone. Like the name of Mrs Samson’s eldest, who they were only talking about yesterday morning while Mrs S hoovered around the bed and ‘set things straight’. And the names of a dozen flowers, and… what was it, what was it she had forgotten the other day? Something else, the title of an opera she liked, or the name of the man who read the news on the radio which she knew perfectly well and had known for years. What she did remember often seemed quite random, as though her life were an old lumber room through which memory moved like a drunk with a torch, and she would find herself with a photographic recollection of the meat counter at Tesco’s, or remembering word for word a conversation with Toni about her poodle. She didn’t want to go with that in her mind, a last image of Toni’s poodle hovering transcendentally above her like the parrot in the Flaubert story.
Ding! Ding! Ding!…
The little blue-and-white jasper clock in the niche at the bottom of the stairs. Only ten o’clock! How epic the nights had become! And how she longed for someone to lay a hand on her brow, someone who would say, ‘All shall be well, all shall be well…’ Even poor Stephen would be welcome now, the youthful Stephen, the way he was at teacher training college in Bristol when they first met, puffing away at that silly pipe, cracking jokes, talking politics, twang of Manchester in his voice, Stalybridge. Of course, he was drinking even then, but they all did, it was part of being young, everyone talking too much and smoking their heads off. It was never a problem until Alec was born. Then, instead of getting merry on Friday and Saturday nights, he would stop off at the pub on his way home from the school and go on with it sitting in front of the television or down in the workroom. Brooding, drinking, dreaming up new enemies for himself, building his own elaborate hell. People said it got worse after he missed promotion to head of department at King Alfred’s. Others said it was because he wanted to be in higher education, not in a secondary school, that he didn’t really like children, but it wasn’t that. Something had gone wrong with Stephen before she had ever met him. God knows what. Talking personally he called ‘psychobabble’, and she got tired of looking in the end. Probably he didn’t know himself, because it wasn’t always neat. You can’t always give it a name. Like the cancer. What was the root of it? Stress? Cigarettes? Bad luck? Some secret weakness. A hairline fracture that one day brings the house down. None of us, she thought, none of us survives our imperfections.
He used to shout at her, which shocked her at first because she had never been shouted at in that way before, never seen how extraordinarily ugly a person can be when they shout like that. But he only hit her once, once being enough. A push in the back after some idiotic argument about Callaghan or the unions. It was in the kitchen. She had said something to him and was walking away when he lunged at her, shoving her so that she staggered and had to catch at the wall to stop herself from falling. She had been frightened for a moment, a little dizzy from the sheer unpleasantness of it all. Then she had turned to him, slowly and calmly, because she knew by then it was the same rule for drunks and dangerous dogs. Show no fear. And when their eyes met again, when he had the guts to look at her, there was a distance between them that neither would ever cross, and almost immediately she had felt a certain nostalgia, not for him, but for some idea she had had about her own life, some understanding she had suddenly outgrown. He was on a bottle a day by the time of the accident. Vodka mostly, but anything would do. The police said they’d found bottles in the car. In pieces, one imagines.