At SFO he stopped by the British Airways desk to collect the tickets for London. Two tickets for 3 June and one, for Kirsty, on the 10th. Alice’s birthday was on the 18th.
The girl at the desk, a honey blonde with a fine peach down on the skin of her face which glowed golden in the light of the hall, enquired whether there were any special dietary requirements.
My wife,’ said Larry, ‘is presently a Buddhist, so some kind of high-fibre sushi might be suitable. My daughter won’t eat anything that looks like food. I eat whatever you can send out for at two in the morning.’
She smiled at him with what seemed her entire being. All the food was prepared by a team of nutritionists. There were vegetarian meals and special children’s meals. Everybody’s needs were catered for. Larry smiled back and said that he appreciated it. He wondered if she had recognized him: Americans were not usually shy of saying so. ‘Hey, aren’t you…?’ Being on TV here meant being injected into the bloodstream of the democracy, but in the eighteen months since he had ‘parted’ from the show – he, incandescent with rage and badly cut cocaine; L. Liverwitz Jnr, the new director, their fourteenth, incandescent with rage and too many exotic vitamins – he had begun to look less like Dr Barry, that suave and effective man who had brought a touch of English class to the high-tech corridors of Sun Valley, and more like the doctor’s uncle, a heavier man, more florid than tanned.
‘How d’ya like California?’ she asked.
‘I live here,’ he said.
‘I guess you like it, then.’
She passed over the wallet containing the tickets, her look of professional rapture beginning to fade as their business concluded. Larry wished her a nice day and pocketed the tickets. There were fifteen minutes before the shuttle left. He swallowed, dry, a tab of pink Xanax, and hurried past disciplined queues of elderly tourists (Taiwanese? Korean?), wondering to himself how the BA girl might have reacted if, in some confessional outburst, he had told her the truth about himself, about where he was going and why. He imagined her pressing some secret panic button under her desk and his being led away by airport security, raving as they handcuffed him in some back office with two-way mirrors. Or perhaps he underestimated her. Who was to say what her own private life was like, what dramas she went home to at night? At her age, a face betrayed so little. How were you supposed to tell?
The shuttle was on time: a crowded lunch-time flight. Businessmen and businesswomen filed into their seats and switched off their cellphones. Some began impromptu conferences with colleagues, talking what to Larry’s ears was a kind of corporate super-babble, a strange fusion of figures and gossip and euphemisms of a vaguely military character. The younger ones looked extremely fit, as if they were all members of expensive gyms, which they probably were. Some wore elegant spectacles; most had laptops. Above all, they were people tense with purpose, decision-makers, movers and shakers, compared with whom he – ex-sportsman and soap star manqué – was a kind of decoration, a baroque squiggle.
The seat next to him, which he had hoped might remain unoccupied, was taken at the last moment by a woman and her infant daughter. The woman wore a large shapeless black dress decorated with various ethnic trimmings, and a kind of cloth bonnet from beneath which a pair of thick chestnut curls straggled over her forehead. Regarding her with sidelong glances as the plane taxied to its place in the queue for take-off, Larry realized she was much younger than he had first thought – mid-twenties perhaps – though dressed as if to make herself appear older and less attractive, bulked out by mysterious pouches and padding, designed perhaps to insulate her from too much direct contact with the world. The child on her lap, three or four years of age, thin, listless, rather sickly looking, possessed the darkest and saddest eyes he had ever seen. He smiled companionably at the mother, who did not smile back but said, ‘She’s nauseous,’ in such a strong New York Jewish accent Larry thought at first it must be the child’s name, and was trying to puzzle out which feisty Old Testament heroine she was named after, when the woman snatched the air sickness bag from its slot behind the in-flight magazines.
‘Hope’s she’s not sick on you,’ she said, in a voice that suggested it would be his fault if she were. The child wriggled on her lap. ‘You wanna chuck up?’ asked the mother, and placing a firm hand on the back of the girl’s head she thrust the little face into the mouth of the sack, where it remained for some minutes before reappearing, comically distressed, her cheeks puckering with disgust, her great eyes returning Larry’s anxious stare with a mixture of hostility and weariness and sly appeal. He felt for her, imagining that he understood her, the character of her disenchantment with the world, and as they flew over the scuffed California desert, the coast to the right of them fringed with blue and pearl, he dedicated himself to making the child smile, a game he had often played with Ella, who shared with this little pale Jewish girl a heaviness, an elfin knowledge of things, which he found disturbing.
All the photographs of himself as a boy, most of them at Brooklands still, displayed him in Kodachrome gardens, or the vivid green of the sports field, or shoulder to shoulder with Alec on a beach in Brittany or Ireland, the same trademark grin on his face. Even in adolescence, when now and then he had slammed doors, and the skin around his mouth had turned raw for a year, his features had never failed to exude the good-tempered optimism of a boy entirely at ease in the world. Unhappy children, even children who seemed unhappy, roused in his increasingly suggestible mind the spectre of a darkness from which even innocence gave no immunity, and against this he continued, doggedly, a little desperately even, to do battle.
The child observed him, peeking from behind her mother’s black-cloaked bosom, then staring more openly as her mother harried the air hostess to find a packet of crisps on the trolley bearing the little K for Kosher. Larry wrinkled his nose, winked, crossed his eyes, frowned in mimicry of her own expression, all without the least effect. If anything she became more severe, more regally disapproving of him, his antics, and he began again, this time discreetly including his pulling-off-the-thumb routine, one of Ella’s favourites, but it was not until they banked over the coast above LA and flew in over acres of neat houses, over freeways and brilliant wires of sunlit traffic, that she consented to be amused, her face lighting up with a smile of such radiance he had to turn away from her. He stared down at his hands (the wedding band on the left; his right hand, his former racquet hand, still puffed with muscle) and spoke to himself, spoke behind the curtain of his face, easing himself away from the fear that he was about to commit, in this cramped and public place, some lavish inappropriacy. Laugh like a hyena, or curl up in the aisle, or caress one of the chestnut loops on the mother’s brow – an act that would certainly have startling repercussions. It was part of the new intensity, of course, the new waywardness that forced him to keep checking on himself, taking bearings on normal. But what troubled him most was the sense that something in him was colluding with it all, this unravelling, some impulse whose true character was still hidden from him, but which he suspected might, like his father’s, be merely destructive.