Do you think, my friend, that it is possible to put things right? To make amends? To atone? The Ancients believed in it. Not just the possibility but the necessity. Or is this some dementia I am suffering from? After all, I cannot run the film backwards. I cannot be eighteen again. So who can be saved? What can be rescued?
No doubt there is something grossly selfish in all of this, but will you believe me if I say it is also us I want to save?
You and I were never the people to spend hours gazing moodily into each other’s eyes. We are sparing with our endearments – it is how we manage our lives together. But let me say this, so that whatever happens, whatever our futures might be, you will have at least some poor idea of how I value you. You have given me ten or fifteen of the happiest moments of my existence. Knowing you, I can never lose faith in life, nor in the sheer generosity of another’s heart. I carry the memory of your face with me now like an icon to be adored secretly among strangers. Trust in this. Destroy this letter. Forgive me.
When he got to the end he read it through again, then tore it methodically into small pieces, placed the pieces in the ashtray, and using the same lighter László had used a week earlier to ignite the sambuca, he burned them and crushed the embers into a black dust. Then he moved the lamp closer to the window and leaned towards the glass, looking south to the boulevard Edgar Quinet, and the walls of the cemetery where Sartre and de Beauvoir and the glorious Beckett lay.
9
At six o’clock, Larry stood at the kitchen stove, labouring over the evening meal. A pillar of steam broke across the red of his face as he prodded the rice with a wooden fork, frowning at it like a soothsayer investigating the liver of a slaughtered ram for those striations and whorls that would betray the future to him. Beside the hob, propped against a mostly empty bottle of white wine, was one of Alice’s cookbooks, an Elizabeth David, open at a recipe for risotto, though it had, of course, been necessary for him to find alternatives to the chicken stock and the beef marrow and the diced ham, and everything that would, in his opinion, have given the meal flavour and nutritional profit, but which his wife – ‘I don’t eat dead animals, Larry’ – would have refused to eat, to touch even.
He had collected her the previous morning – Alec’s old car again – from Terminal 4 at Heathrow, where she had come out a little dazed and fragile in the wake of a sports team of blazered young men with crew cuts, who were joshing each other loudly despite the early hour. When he had called her name it had taken her a moment to locate him, and as she searched the faces at the barrier her expression was unmistakably a look of distress, as though this were not an orderly airport in an orderly country, but somewhere more fluid and dangerous, and still half asleep, time in a tangle in her head, a voice from the crowd had marked her out. But then she had seen Ella and let out a joyful ‘Hi!’, and for a while they had been like any other family there, grinning hard and trading hugs. Only a very practised eye could have seen it for what it was: a tenderness shot through with shared and private fears. She was upstairs now, in the room above his head, tending to his mother.
He checked the recipe and ladled more stock on to the rice. He was wearing one of Alice’s blue canvas aprons and handling the food with a certain alcoholic swagger that made him wonder whether he might not be very suitable for some kind of low-budget cookery programme. Catchpole in the kitchen: classic English cuisine from steak and kidney to spotted dick with television’s best-loved medic. There appeared to be an inexhaustible demand for colourful types who could chatter to camera while dicing peppers or flipping Thai prawns in a wok. Set against his present difficulties, this didn’t seem such an outlandish idea, and while being a TV chef was not, he thought, a wholly proper way to earn a living, it was preferable to what awaited him in the chill of the garage at San Fernando. It would certainly be the better option when KDBS organized the next Take Your Daughter to Work Day.
Ella was on the terrace; he could hear her through the open glass doors chatting in her considered way with Alec. Her stubbornness in the matter of the capsule had, in the last week, provoked Larry to extreme tactics. He had offered her money (twenty dollars). He had threatened to spank her (though they both knew he wouldn’t). He had spied on her through the keyhole of the bathroom, and even followed her into the garden, trailing her from tree to tree, stalking her as she gathered daisies and buttercups, crouched to turn a beetle with a twig, sang to herself. Did she know he was there? Or was this conspicuous innocence unfeigned, so that he was persecuting an entirely blameless child? What if one of the capsules had rolled off the shelf while he was in the toilet on the plane? Would he have noticed? Could he trust himself any more not to make such a mistake? What confidence could he have in his own judgment?
Alec had had his little chat with her. Apparently she had heard him out without giving the least hint she knew what he was talking about. And then Hoffmann had phoned, back from Detroit, telling Larry he would have to bill him for the call, and speaking to Ella while she stood in the kitchen holding the receiver with both hands, wide-eyed, nodding, saying yes, no, yes, I will, OK, uh-huh, OK. It had done no good. She was like a child in an Edward Gorey cartoon, a little thing in a taffeta party dress wandering about the house with a pistol in her hand.
‘Alec!’
Alec leaned into the kitchen.
‘This’ll be ready in twenty minutes, max. We should start getting Mum down.’
‘Right.’ He didn’t move.
‘You want to do it? Or you want to stir this and I’ll go up?’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Alec. But he came over to the stove and took the wooden fork from Larry’s hand.
‘Don’t let it dry up,’ said Larry. ‘And lets put some candles out. Make an evening of it.’
‘Good idea,’ said Alec, without the least enthusiasm.
‘And as for you,’ said Larry, as Ella appeared in the doorway, regarding him shrewdly with her head cocked to one side, ‘as for you…’ But he had no idea what to say next.
In Alice’s room, Kirsty Valentine, only daughter, only child of Errol and Nancy Freeman (formerly ‘Friebergs’) of La Finca, Lemon Cove, California, sat on a stool at the end of the bed holding her mother-in-law’s feet in her hands, palping the soles with her thumbs in the way she had been shown in a class on reflexology at the day centre in San Francisco. Alice leaned against a bank of pillows, already dressed for her evening downstairs. Earlier in the afternoon, Toni Cuskic had come by with her wallet of scissors, her clips and dryer, her poodle, and had brushed out the snags from Alice’s hair, plaiting it, at Alice’s request, into a neat silver rope.
Her hair, and the blusher she had rubbed into the absolute white of her cheeks, put Kirsty in mind of a Bette Davis film she had watched recently, part of a gay icon series on AMC. Yet somehow the fashion suited Alice, suited the newly blatant nature of her stare, the startling bluntness of her questions – ‘Why don’t you have another child?’ ‘Do you still love him?’ ‘Are you faithful to each other?’
This, perhaps, was ‘disinhibition’, a term Kirsty had picked up scanning the cancer literature in Barnes and Noble: the tumours, weevil-like, eating away at the furniture of adult judgment; an irresistible, irreversible decline that ended in full-blown dementia, when the mind was of no more use than a fancy mirror in an unlit room. Nicer then, infinitely more consoling, to imagine there was something rather Zenlike in Alice’s new directness, that her manner derived not from the perishing of the intellect, but from her impatience with the conventional. If people had to die – and Kirsty was enough of an American not to accept the absolute inevitability of it – she wanted them to go full of a profound and liberating knowledge of things. When else should you be wise, if not at the end? But several times in the last twenty-four hours she had witnessed the shadow of vacancy or panic fall over the blue of Alice’s eyes, and in her heart she knew that here was a woman being shut up inside herself. That she bore it at all seemed nothing less than heroic.