Taking Ludmilla into his arms, Billing gazed into her beautiful tear-filled eyes and begged her to marry him. He had led an irregular life, but that was over. She was an exile, so was he; they would make a home together.
‘There’s a home here,’ Ludmilla said, with a sob that shook her upper parts.
He assured her they would go wherever she wished, anywhere rather than stay in Waterloo, Iowa. Even to Brno in Slovakia, if she wished. He promised he would learn Czech.
‘Slovakian,’ she sobbed.
Brushing the irrelevancy aside, he confessed to her how he had felt about her, how he had never forgotten her during his four years in California, how he had previously said nothing out of respect for Josef. His coincidental arrival at this time must mean something, must mean that they were intended for each other.
‘But Karel …’ she whispered. ‘There’s Karel …’
She wept again and declared that she was happy in Waterloo, Iowa. She had never wanted to go to Brno. She had never wanted to ride in the High Tatras. She was scared of horses – and of High Tatras, come to that. All that was Josef’s dream, not hers. She had been longing for years to marry Karel, Josef’s handsome younger brother. He was the one scowling across the parlour at them, the muscular one, with the little finger missing from his left fist. She appreciated Billing’s kindness and why didn’t he take another cut of the spiced ham?
He headed for New York, to spend another two years of oblivion there, as though years were as inexhaustible as American miles. During this time, on an impulse, he sent a postcard to England, to Mrs Gladys Lee.
When he returned to the surface again, so did images of England. His money from the Remedial Domesticated Space project had all gone. New York was too world-weary to buy RDS. Billing found work around the Village until he had saved his air fare. Then he clipped his moustache, bought a cheap digital watch and returned home.
The eighties had arrived in England, despite delays. Billing himself had changed. He admitted as much to himself as he confronted gritty old London: he was thin, strange, inexperienced, in a city now as cosmopolitan as New York and almost as dangerous. Billing wore a T-shirt and spoke what passed here as American. He was neither young nor old. He surveyed the traffic with a mid-ocean eye. In this sluttish town he felt like a virgin.
Old friends had not returned to favourite haunts. His dead sister’s husband was not to be found. Probably working for the Arabs. He remembered his mother’s funeral, bleakly asking himself if it was because of her death that he had stayed so long abroad. In his hotel, the central heating sighed and made poltergeist noises after dark. Of remedial spaces he found none. Madness would pass unnoticed in such a place.
An older man spoke to Billing on the stairs – a surprising event in itself in an establishment where guests made themselves shadowy, withdrawing into doorways and silences to obscure the stain of their lives.
The man told Billing of a reasonable Indian restaurant nearby where one might eat cheaply.
‘We could go there this evening, why not?’ said Billing, on impulse.
‘You’re American, ain’t you? I thought you was.’
There was a short cut behind a broken fence between two streets.
A path led across a waste lot where an Edwardian block of flats had been demolished and nothing built in its place. Sorrel and nettles fringed the path. It was country for two yards. Walking along it to the restaurant, Billing remembered that he had recently had his recurrent dream again, his consolation.
Together with the reassurance he felt lay a deeper, more permanent sensation, a suspicion that somehow he had allowed himself always to live cheek-by-jowl with his real life. Why this displacement? It was as if he had a doppelgänger; or, rather, as if he were merely a doppelgänger.
‘What do you make of England?’ the old man asked Billing, over a chicken biryani. He had a pale skin, a thick moustache and thinning hair, and the soft indefinable accent of someone born in one of London’s outer suburbs. His suit was of sombre, durable tweed; it would see him out.
‘I can’t tell. In the USA life is so much more expansive.’
‘It’s getting very expensive here, too. Everything’s going up. It’s the government, you’ve no idea.’
‘What I mean is – well, there’s just more hope in the United States. It may be an illusion, but optimism improves – well, it improves the quality of life. You’ve no idea.’
He was embarrassed to think he had echoed the man’s final phrase.
But his companion was not interested in the States. America for him was a dream. He was widowed and in his sixties. Suddenly, breaking a pappadom into two half-moons, he became talkative, though never eloquent. By scraps of revelation, like newspaper cuttings, he unfolded his present existence. His son and daughter-in-law had thrown him out of the room in their house he had occupied for five years. They were expecting a second child. His son had always been violent, even as a boy. He couldn’t explain. His friend lived nearby; he worked down the fire station. Things were difficult. He needed to get a part-time job. Unfortunately, he had lost a suitcase full of belongings. Personal things. He had to go to Kingston. It was all chaos. Really, everything was like chaos. You had to get it together. He didn’t feel he had much longer. If only he could get it all together. He planned to write a letter to his son, explaining … Perhaps it would come right in the end.
‘Yes,’ Billing said. ‘I do hope so. Look, let me pay for the meal.’
‘I was a school-teacher once. One of my pupils became an airline pilot.’
Billing looked for the man next morning at breakfast, when the smiling bright Pakistani girl who served in the hotel brought the grapefruit segments to his table. The man had gone.
Billing too had his little quest. Inspired by isolation, he renewed contact with Mrs Gladys Lee, the missing brother-in-law’s mother. It was the only family connection he could recall.
Gladys Lee had been old when he last saw her. She lived still at the same address. She answered the phone when he rang, voice creaking slightly, remembered his name without prompting and invited him round for a chat. He remembered ‘chats’. The word came back to him from long ago. He was happy she had not said ‘natter’.
‘Come and chat to me, Hugh. I mean to say, not to me, but with me … I’m tired of people who chat to me. It’s one way in which people take advantage of the old.’
He appreciated her care with words, a quality with which his years in the States had made him unfamiliar. He bought a cheap suit, threw away his T-shirt and went to visit her in her unfashionable area of Shepherd’s Bush. The streets seemed narrow, all forehead and no jaw.
Gladys Lee had one of the small terraced houses off Redan Wood Road, where a monastery had once stood. The area had been heavily bombed during the war; it was now rebuilt on a more modest scale. An old retired nurse with a glass eye came to wash Gladys and clean her house every morning.
Gladys Lee was eighty-eight. Her white hair was neatly set and she wore a string of pearls outside a well-cut green suit. She was frail, her flesh like an ancient beach.
‘Come in, Hugh.’ She made the effort of standing to greet him. She walked with a stick, bent double, and looked pained. Her pearls chattered among themselves. When seated in the tall cane-backed chair she seemed more in command and surveyed Billing with some authority.
On an impulse, he gave her his digital watch as a present. She was amazed by it.
‘It was very cheap,’ he said in apology.
‘They saved money by leaving off the winder,’ she explained.