Dad unlocked his desk and took out a ball of strong brown string. ‘There, that’s it.’ Just looking at the string reminded him of too much. His eyes moved beyond it, out of focus.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to ask her to come back and marry me.’
But he was more than twice Harriet’s age, as Harriet’s family pointed out, through Harriet, in her first letter. He wrote back, asking her whether she loved him. Of course she loved him, she said, but she had to think. He said that if she loved him there was nothing to think about. He told her he was going to drive into town and find a piece of string that was six thousand miles long, a piece of string that would reach right across the ocean, from his sad finger to her beautiful big toe. She wrote back saying how much she liked his last letter. She hoped he could find a piece of string like that. But then she said, ‘Maybe we need rope now,’ which only depressed him.
Towards the end of the summer he began to founder. He was still writing almost every day, but she was writing less. He felt a pain in his right hand that was caused, he said, by the great weight of his love passing from his heart into his pen. He also suspected that it might be arthritis. And then, a few days before his forty-ninth birthday, he received a letter, her first for over a week. She said she had a birthday surprise for him. She was coming back to marry him. He turned pale and almost fainted. Nathan had to reach up under his shirt with a towel and mop the cold sweat off his back.
Three weeks later, the marriage took place. Standing on the steps of City Hall for the wedding photographs in her navy-blue suit and her sheer black stockings, Harriet achieved a temporary sophistication. Dad stood beside her. He looked both proud and guilty of something. As if happiness was a reward and he wasn’t sure he’d done enough to deserve it. After the ceremony they celebrated with lunch at the revolving restaurant on Sunset Tower. Forty-two floors up, a 360-degree view. One of the most exclusive restaurants in the city. Harriet ordered a bottle of champagne and four glasses.
‘I don’t think Georgia should —’ Dad began.
Georgia, nine years old, took out her sulking face.
‘Oh, but Jack,’ Harriet cried, the fingertips of one hand touching his lips, to silence him, ‘it’s a special day.’
‘Well,’ Dad said, ‘I suppose so.’
Georgia beamed and swallowed half the contents of the glass in a single gulp.
‘That’s all you’re getting, Georgia,’ Dad warned, ‘so make it last.’
And Harriet glanced at Nathan, a quick glance, the light in her eyes rocking like buoys in the harbour at night, she was recognising, even gently mocking, her husband’s sense of caution, caution on a day that was such a gamble for him. I’ve thrown it to the winds, her glance seemed to be saying, but look at him. Suddenly he felt as if the marriage was a confidence trick, a joke on someone; he felt as if he was being drawn into some kind of conspiracy. He shifted on his chair and looked away.
He remembered Yvonne’s reaction to news of the forthcoming wedding. She’d heard Dad out, then she’d sat back, her eyes focused on the top corner of the room, a cheroot rolling, unlit, between her fingers. ‘Just so long as you realise that she’ll want to change everything,’ she’d said. It was the first time that Dad had seemed worried since the arrival of Harriet’s letter. What he looked for in love, what he hoped to extract, was not change but stability.
Nathan let his eyes drift back to the table again. He watched Harriet carefully as, laughing now, she tilted her face towards a waiter. She wasn’t beautiful, he decided, that wasn’t it, but she seemed to give something off that, like a perfume, excited those around her. The waiters were attentive to the point of subservience. Especially the one with the black hair on the back of his hands, the Italian-looking one, ‘The kind of man,’ Dad whispered, ‘who makes you feel like washing.’
‘Like washing?’ Harriet didn’t follow.
‘Didn’t you see?’ Dad’s voice dropped again and they had to lean forwards to hear. ‘You could clean shoes with the back of those hands.’
Nathan and Georgia doubled up, but Harriet didn’t think it was funny. As for Dad, he’d have preferred not to have had to make the joke in the first place. He’d have preferred less conscientious service. He was the kind of man who was jealous of waiters.
He salvaged the situation by saying, ‘Did any of you hear the one about the string?’ and soon they were all laughing about the same thing, which was a far better way for a new family to start its life together.
Georgia drank a surreptitious glass of champagne, her second, and began to run round the restaurant with a wide, fixed grin on her face, her arms extended like the wings of a plane. They tried to persuade her to land, but she wouldn’t listen, she just went on running, round and round. Just before coffee was served, she threw up on Harriet’s new shoes.
‘My shoes,’ Harriet cried, and a flock of waiters swooped with paper napkins.
Dad mopped Georgia’s mouth. ‘I told you, George,’ he said, ‘but you wouldn’t listen, would you?’ Though, actually, he was talking to Harriet.
Georgia grinned out of her green face. ‘I was sick,’ she said. ‘Sick, sick, sick.’
‘She’s still drunk,’ Nathan said. ‘Don’t you think we’d better take her home?’
It was shortly after the wedding that he ran into Tip again. The summer holidays had just begun, and he was due back on the beach for his second season as a lifeguard. He was riding the bus down Central Avenue one morning when he saw Tip slouching in a doorway. It was only a split-second, and the windows were tinted green and bleary with diesel, but he was sure. The narrow eyes, the broad sloping shoulders. That white skin, hard as lard. He jumped off the bus at the next stop and ran back.
‘Tip,’ he said, and when Tip turned round his eyes were shut to slits against the morning glare, you’d have needed a knife to prise them open.
Nathan hadn’t seen him for a couple of months and he couldn’t believe the transformation. There were shadows the colour of musselshells both above and below his eyes. He wore a grey suit that was two or three sizes too big for him. It was a typical thrift-shop suit, it smelt of mothballs and piss, it smelt of death, which was probably its history.
‘Christ,’ Tip said. ‘What’re you doing here?’
‘I saw you from the bus.’
Tip flicked at a scrap of paper with his shoe. The sole was coming away. The shoe seemed to be grinning. ‘So what’s up?’
‘Nothing much. I’m just going to the beach. You coming?’
Tip shook his head. ‘Don’t reckon so.’
‘How come?’
Tip shrugged. ‘Just don’t feel like it.’
‘They’ll miss you, Tip. They’ll want to know why.’
‘Tell them I’m sick.’ Tip looked away into the street. His narrow eyes followed cars as they passed.
‘Look, Tip,’ Nathan said, ‘you’re not doing anything. Why don’t you just come with me?’
Tip stiffened. ‘I’ve got to be going.’ He was looking past Nathan at something. Nathan turned round. Jed was standing right behind him.
Jed wore a cheap leather jacket with round lapels. The sun snagged on his crooked skin. Thumbs in his belt and eyes flickering behind those hostile spectacles.
‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘It’s Mr fucking Universe.’
Nathan just looked at him.