‘I should think it’s us who will have changed… he’s only, what, thirty, he’s going to look fine. He never looked great in any case. Maybe he will have improved a bit… Don’t feel guilty, darling. I always thought you were a very good father. If it was anyone’s fault, it was mine, not yours.’
He didn’t contradict me. His gaze was heavy. ‘Very good fathers don’t go away. And I’ve hardly written. I don’t like letters. In some families it’s the woman who writes.’
This was completely outrageous. He was desperate, of course, he didn’t know what he was saying.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. In any case, I have written, every now and then. Birthdays, Christmases, and so on.’ I looked very naked in the mirror, my serpent’s hair concealing nothing. ‘When I’ve been in particularly wonderful galleries I always sent him a postcard. How often did your son reply?’ (I knew it was false before I finished my sentence. He had written, at first, before he gave up. Every letter asked the same thing; when were we coming home? My cheery postcards never answered him. In the last few years he’d started writing again, but the gap was too long, I couldn’t bear to read them.)
‘So it’s his fault, is it, that we buggered off?’
‘What’s the point of all this? We have to go down… or do you want me to leave you alone with him?’
‘No!’ It was a great explosion of anger.
‘For heaven’s sake don’t get angry with me. It’s not my fault your fucking son has shown up. From my point of view it’s a fucking bore. Isaac was always a fucking bore.’ There, it was said at last, the first time I had ever said it.
‘Thanks very much. I happen to love him.’
‘Hypocrite.’
But I could see it was true. Only someone he loved could cause such pain.
‘I’m sorry, my darling. He isn’t a bore, you’re not a hypocrite. I’m just upset. I don’t know what to wear.’
‘That is the least of our worries.’
‘I don’t want to look too… frivolous.’
To my relief, Chris managed a smile, and a little bit of colour came back into his face. I went round behind his chair and kissed him, pressing my bare breasts against his back. But I meant what I said, in a way. My last memory of Isaac was as a first-year undergraduate, with those owlish blue glasses which should have looked modish but merely made him look a swot, reading books about Gaudier-Brzeska at breakfast. That boy had the power to make me feel frivolous.
Christopher and I went down together in the mirrored lift, staring at ourselves under the lurid light. I had put on a totally plain black dress which quite incidentally showed off my figure. I thought we looked nervous, but not really older. I was still very slim (might I have grown too thin?), Chris’s hair was as thick as it ever was, and the wings of white merely looked distinguished. His skin was yellow, but that was fear. We were the same handsome couple we had always been (but there were horizontal lines scored across my forehead, and one of my earrings had fallen off and perched like a hard little tear on my collar).
Chris retrieved it, and kissed me. ‘You are what matters. We mustn’t quarrel. I love you, Alexandra.’
We paused for a second in the palm-flanked doorway which led into the bar. There was only one figure to be seen; a broad square back on a barstool, the head bent over his drink on the bar, greasy brown hair lapping over his collar. He hadn’t seen us. My heart kicked hard. A queer shallow ripple passed over Chris’s features. I had a fleeting memory of a plump little boy with a solemn face and stern blue eyes refusing to say hallo to me, before the divorce, twenty-five years or so ago. And I had felt pity, for he was so small, and trying so hard for adult dignity. Now here was a great heavy grown-up man with a defeated weight of grown-up flesh. Inchoate questions rushed through my mind; how could it already be too late? After a painful moment, we went to greet him.
Small chin, long nose, red incurious eyes, thank God, it wasn’t him.
‘Hallo, Dad,’ said a familiar voice behind us, and an unfamiliar man stepped forward from the shadow of the palm by the door. He had a round pink face, puffily round, though the rest of him was surely smaller, as if his skeleton had shrunk inside a thickening envelope of flesh… This couldn’t be Isaac, but it was. The dome of his head was shiny, with a fringe of brown curls falling round his ears. And the glasses were gone; he must be wearing contact lenses; his eyes looked sharp, and unnaturally large, so perhaps those glasses had diminished them.
Chris half-hung there, clutching the doorpost. I thought for a moment he was going to faint. That helped me get a grip on myself.
‘Isaac, how marvellous. Just for a moment —’
‘I know, you didn’t recognise me. It’s the perm, it makes me look different.’
This information didn’t help Chris find his tongue. But he managed to swing round like a boxer lunging and clutch at Isaac with great heavy arms. The two of them did a kind of lurching dance. The leaves of the palm hissed sharply as it toppled.
‘We’d better sit down,’ I said. ‘You two are wrecking the hotel.’
I know how I sounded; cool and hard. Yet my heart hit the walls of my chest as wildly as their two bodies dipped and swerved.
At last they let go of each other. The middle-aged man that Isaac had become had suspiciously wet eyes. He seemed to see me then for the first time, and his lips pursed up into a kind of twitching navel before they suddenly unfolded again and he said, in a tone that was not complimentary, ‘Alex, hi. You haven’t changed a bit.’
I was sure he never used to say hi. It was a bit low-key after all these years.
The bar was cosmopolitan, coolly sidelit, a stage for people to perform gentle rituals and pass on, leaving no imprint. And we, who until that evening’s phone call would have entered that theatre as of right, for these were the cameo parts we knew — we suddenly didn’t fit in. I felt that there wasn’t enough room for us there, though there must have been thirty bamboo armchairs to choose from. No longer a streamlined unit of two, we had grown enormous and clumsy, dragging an ugly, helpless weight of pain.
Isaac followed his father to a seat in a window. I brought up the rear, inspecting his back as we threaded our way between the fragile tables. His small feet tripped against their bamboo legs. His thighs were big, his bottom bigger. The furniture swayed in the wind as he passed. There were hanging lanterns of simulated parchment which cast small pools of golden light. I thought about flayed human skin. Isaac’s dome, as it swam underneath a lantern, became disconcertingly brilliant. Was it normal to lose so much hair in your twenties? Why was he bald when his father was so hairy?
The window was wide, with a deep padded seat. Isaac planted himself in the middle, then spread his hands out in what began as an inviting gesture to Chris and me, as if he had meant us to sit in a line, Mummy and Daddy with their boy in between, but in the middle of the gesture he lost confidence and his plump little hands fell irresolute upon the printed velvet.
We didn’t meet his eyes as we sat down facing him on two bamboo chairs. I stared past his head at the last of the peaks, the snow on the summits still catching the sun, diamond-bright against the coming darkness. The snows would save us. I stared at them. Christopher would take me to the snows.
‘Why are you here?’ I asked him, as Chris went to order a bottle of champagne. It sounded offensive; I tried to soften it. ‘I mean, why are you in Europe?’ I’d forgotten that he lived in Europe.