Then Mark walked round the side of the main house, stood for a minute or two in the little Camera Obscura, and right now he was standing just along from the Talking Telescope, leaning against the railing that overlooked the park he’d just traversed traversed ooh I can think of lots that’s worse / than meeting someone for a quick traverse there, that was more like her. He looked down the slope at the trees in their rugged neatness, the paths that met and crossed themselves, so elegant the way they seemed both planned and random, elegant too the white colonnades and all the grand old whitened buildings down at the foot of the park. The new business towers of the city shouldered each other beyond the river at the back of the view like a mirage, like superimposition. Greenwich. Then and now. He hadn’t been here for a long time. He should come here more. He loved it’s no surprise to me that you’re so keen / a place beloved of many an old queen and straight away as if to spite her he thought hard about the actual old Queen, the literal historical Virgin Queen, and the first thing that came to mind was something that had happened when she was the young Virgin Queen, where had he read it? He couldn’t remember, but the writer, whoever he was I hate to be reminding you again / that writers are not fucking always men described Queen Elizabeth the First quite unforgettably, dancing in the great hall in her favourite palace right there, right here in Greenwich all those hundreds of years ago, she was young and beautiful, pale and thin from having been ill, in fact she was convalescing after a lengthy illness, an illness that had at one point been bad enough to endanger her life, and she was enjoying the first real spurt of energy she’d had for months, had been out hunting, had come back flushed and happy and very much wanting to dance. So the hall had filled with courtiers and musicians and she’d dressed up; she looked, the writer said, like a great tulip as she bowed and turned, but her secretary, Cecil, pushed through the ranks of the dancers all round her, he had urgent news, and he told the Queen of England in her ear that her cousin, the Queen of Scotland, had given birth to a son. The Virgin Queen paled with shock, then flushed with shock; she stopped dancing; stood rigid. Then she, who was usually so controlled, so imperious, who was world-renowned for her imperturbability, turned and ran from the hall and all her panicked ladies-in-waiting followed bewildered in a great rush, their dance finery rustling as they ran, and when they reached her private rooms they found her collapsed and sobbing in a chair. “The Queen of Scotland is a mother of a fair son, and I am but a barren stock” cause that’s all girls are good for ain’t it birth / Gawd knows they haven’t any other worth but the point of this story, Faye, is: the next day regardless she was fine again, unruffled, greeting statesmen, doing her queenly political deals much the same as ever, because even when she met her worst fears, even when she met her demons, she was what you’d call a survivor, that old Queen. Out of sheer strength of character she survived, didn’t she, the vicissitudes of history.
There.
That’d annoy her.
It did.
Silence.
Mark heard birdsong, could hear birdsong for several whole seconds, could hear the murmur of the people queuing up behind him at the meridian line, could even make out some of the things they were saying, before she roared back into his right ear with something of the force of a wind tunnel nearly knocking him off balance just wait you little bastard history / that made a fucking dunghill out of me / is waiting round the corner just for you / to turn you into tulip fodder too.
Silence of the grave my arse, he said out loud.
The couple with the small child, who had been standing quite close to him and had smiled genially at him when he arrived, picked up their child and backed away. They stopped and put down the child further along the railing.
He was still waiting to see if there’d be any comment from her about his my arse.
No.
Nothing.
Fine, he thought.
He felt the usuaclass="underline" bullish, and a little disappointed. Me and my shadow. He stuck his finger in his ear and waggled it about to try and shift the wind tunnel effect. It was frustrating. Jonathan, gone for more than five years now, never said a word to Mark. It was only and always Faye. These days it was like being assaulted by a bag lady, an old tramp in a torn coat that’s come through fifty wars, who shouts like she long ago lost her hearing.
This is going to sound weird but does she ever “speak” to you in any way? he’d texted David when mobiles were new and exciting, in a flurry which had simulated, for a little while, regular contact. David, with the annoying casual savvy of the younger sibling, had texted a whole long message back in roughly the same time it had taken Mark to remember which button to press to make a space between the words this and is. Evn f she did i woulnt answr blve me lfs so much bttr without it U R INSANE mark well spos ive knwn *that * snce I sw u that brkfst tm whn i ws 7 & u wr 12 & u apolgizd 2 th *toast * cz u hd chsn *cornflkes*!;-) David would never be so uncool as to use a semicolon properly in a text, or an apostrophe. Mark missed David. They weren’t much in touch now because David’s wife didn’t like Mark. This was because Mark had taken her side when she’d split up with David, had made sympathetic noises throughout the many drunken telephone calls and had even let her move into his spare room for some of their time apart, all of which left her feeling humiliated at encountering Mark in any way after she and David got back together again.
Regardless of time, memory, family, history, loss, it was an October mid-morning in Greenwich Park today. The sky held the mild threat of rain and the day was warm, about nineteen or twenty degrees, far too warm for this time of year, a flaunting of warmth before the battening-down for winter. How adaptable human beings were without even realizing it, slipping blindly from state to state. One morning it was summer, the next you woke up and the whole year was over; one minute you were thirty, the next sixty, sixty next year quick as a wink, how fast it all was. How quickly and smoothly, yet how shockingly, when you thought about it, the seasons and the years gave way to each other banal philosophizing for God sake / how long’s this sermonizing going to take / you sound like an old vicar on the make he blocked her by thinking hard of the beautiful image he’d sourced back in the spring for the autumn-winter edition of Wildlife. He’d suggested it for the cover, but no one ever listened to mere worker-bee picture researchers (they’d gone with penguins, again). It was a picture of a little gold-coloured bird singing in a field in winter somewhere in Italy. It was a close-up; the field frosty, the bird the colour of summer and so lightweight that it could balance itself on the bend of the stalk of a dead flower. But the really interesting thing about the picture was that you could see the song coming out of the bird’s mouth. You could actually see birdsong. Because the air was frosty the notes the bird had just sung hung there momentarily in the air like a chain of smoke rings and the camera had simply caught them before they disappeared.
Winter. It made things visible.
But today on this balmy day, even though he knew winter was so close, winter was actually unimaginable if I had known, when I was twenty-four / that you’d grow up such a godawful bore / well — what rhymes with back-street abortionist never mind winter, autumn itself was unimaginable, even though this was actually meant to be autumn, even though the leaves had already, this early in October, left the first of their gold-coloured edgings along the pathways down there yawn yawn yawn yawn yawn yawnyawn yawnyawn yawn / YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN but could you call it autumn if it was as warm as May? Could he really be nearly sixty, and still feel so like thirty? Yes, he felt thirty at the most, like someone trapped at the age of thirty inside the body of an old horse, at any rate trapped inside a slower body, a slowing brain, a newly paper-thinning skin, a maddeningly failing eyesight you self-indulgent bastard take a hike / at least you know what failing eyesight’s like / look at me I’m about three minutes long / like the way a whole year gets rammed into three minutes in that irritating I Just Called To Say I Love You Stevie Wonder song.