Damascus (21 page)

‘Says who? Either he likes me or he doesn't.'

Grace suddenly popped up behind them.

‘Europe is like marriage,' she said. ‘My teacher says so. Everyone gets together for the good of everyone else. What she really means is that in the Easter term we all have to pay for a German exchange scheme. Hazel?'

‘That's my name.'

‘Are you going to marry Spencer?'

‘I don't know,' Hazel said. ‘What do
you
think?'

Grace found Hazel odd sometimes. ‘It's not really up to me, is it?'

And then she wanted to know where William had hidden her present, because she couldn't find it anywhere among his stuff in the shed. William said it was a secret, and she had to be patient. Grace's eyes lit up.

‘It's a horse, isn't it?'

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
12:24

Fact: Lime trees were originally popular in London in the nineteenth century as one of the few species of tree robust enough to resist the horticultural rigours of the great peasouper smogs. In these clearer days, aphids and greenfly have become partial to the tree's sweet flower-buds, and these insects exude a colourless but sticky ‘honey', which drops on plants or the pavement. This, in its turn, nourishes an unattractive black fungus. The lime trees themselves are therefore largely innocent of the black muck they seem to bleed, even though every year many are mistakenly destroyed, the unwitting victims of a misunderstood chain of events. The correct remedy involves judicious pruning, or spraying the guilty insects with a good strong sprayer.

British Birds and Trees
, as taught by Miss Burns.

The area where she was staying was full of lime trees, planted at intervals along the pavement and ceremonially either side of the library steps. Facts, like those she'd taught him about trees, helped to keep Henry calm. They were like a drug, subduing whatever he was really feeling or thinking beneath something clearer and more certain. Knowledge became control, which at this moment was just what Henry needed because Miss Burns turned out not to be alone. Watching the house, he'd already seen a young man, black hair, in a flapping suit. And a small energetic girl with a rucksack, who he nearly missed completely because people kept getting in his way.

Left to right, could that be her? No, left to right Miss Anne Howard, the pre-eminent authority on ecclesiastical embroidery. Right to left Mr Michael Lloyd of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Surveyors, and left to right his unmarried daughter Helen, who had a double room in Wimbledon Village to rent to a non-smoking female for £85 a week. People, the first wave of workers out on their lunch break, seemed constantly to be putting themselves between Henry and Miss Burns, as if
on purpose
. Left to right Alison Thomas, a marine biologist from the Institute of Estuarine and Coastal Studies at Hull University.

Henry found shelter in a phone-box, and breathed deeply on the unpeopled air. He dried his palms on the front of his patterned sweater and tried to focus through the scratches of
Gary marries Laura
and
Elliot is Dead
and
Final score: Man U 2 QPR 1
. From the phone-box he could still see the house, and he'd already familiarised himself with the street. Behind him there was a bank, a travel agent, a music shop, and a charity shop where British people learned to dress like beggars. There was a pub, the Rising Sun, and there were people everywhere, any one of whom could have been her or a friend of hers. In fact, there were altogether too many people, all blurring into each other, so that instead of having lives of their own they could only be explained as part of a group, as belonging to the 6000 employees of the Crown Prosecution Service or the 33% of children who owned a goldfish. How was Henry supposed to get the attention of Miss Burns among so many people?

He wondered if he should phone her, but just then a young woman tapped on the glass with the edge of a brightly-coloured phonecard. Henry's heart reeled. It could have been her, but actually it was Rachel Yates, a classically-trained dancer planning to get engaged at Christmas. Henry bowed (stop
doing
that) and even as he was leaving the phone-box Rachel Yates was pushing past him, breathless, already looking at the telephone and saying, 'Thanks you just saved my life.'

Henry decided not to phone. He wanted to surprise her, if only he knew how, if only all these people would stop getting in the way all the time. There seemed to be most of the 80% of young people who claimed boredom was the cause of juvenile crime, and a good number of the 290 next of kin to policemen murdered in Ireland. He escaped into Jepson's music shop. It was thankfully empty apart from Mrs Jepson, for seven years a Roman Catholic nun, who asked him if she could be of assistance. Henry left his umbrella and his plastic bag on the counter. He rolled up the sleeves of his sweater.

‘Yes,' he said. 'I'd like to try out a piano.'

He chose the Forte Grand in the window, from where he had a good though often obstructed view of the house. Mrs Jepson, ex-Catholic nun, whose only child died of pneumonia aged fifteen days in 1973, showed him how to adjust the stool.

‘That will be all,' Henry said, and with a flourish, not looking at the keys but outside at the street, he launched into the fearsome opening chords of Rachmaninov's Prelude in C Sharp. And then he kept going. He played loudly and he played all the notes, because his parents had given him lessons in Tokyo with an ex-pat veteran of the Festival Hall, yet another present which failed to make all the difference.

Henry distractedly ran through his repertoire of keyboard skills. Mrs Jepson, ex-nun, her poor lost child, let the music flood over her thinking it was never too late. The music also had its effect on Henry, making him more confident of recognising Miss Burns immediately, instinctively, as part of the miracle he expected from being in love. He looked out of the window and saw only people between him and the house. He stopped playing. Mrs Jepson, ex-nun, her poor lost baby, who sometimes thought it was never too late, thought now that perhaps, after all, it was. She asked Henry if anything was wrong.

He was staring out of the window. The door to the house was opening, was it? It was hard to say because people walking left right left kept getting in the way, like left to right Jessica Ashworth an articled clerk at Jauralde and Philips, like right to left Gerald Norcross a former captain in the Derbyshire Yeomanry, like standing still Sidney Keating, non-stipendiary curate in charge of St Oswald's, and if very soon he didn't get out of the way Henry would have to move him along, give him a shove, push him into passing traffic, just get out of the way please now Reverend.

Henry grabbed his bag and fled the shop, colliding with Norman Hopkins, a British Telecom agent working undercover on Operation Clean Hands, stab him shoot him stone him to death and really, it would make no difference. By the time he'd untangled himself the door across the road had closed again. It was even possible he'd been imagining things. He bit his lip and wandered towards the pub, keeping one eye on the door, trying not to be distracted by the 70 business mentors who spend an hour a month in schools, or any of the 3000 birdwatchers on their way to a car park in Kent to see a golden-winged warbler. This was his big chance, and all these people were going to rain it by getting in the way. He had the poison, of course, but it wasn't nearly enough. What he really needed was an automatic weapon. He would start with the anonymous drinkers in the Rising Sun, provoking instant and utter mayhem, the smell of fresh blood, cartridges and spent bullet cases careering off the floor, off-duty nurses picking their way through the carnage using bar-towels and tablecloths as bandages.

Because obviously, what with the level of noise produced by a multiple massacre, Miss Burns would come out of that house over there and take a look. This was the moment he'd wait for, positioning himself somewhere unmissable between her and the pub. He'd give her the perfect opportunity to fall in love with him at first sight.

No, no, no. It was only in the beautiful countryside of Northern Ireland that you could spray bullets round a public house and get away with it. In London one of the victims would probably turn out to be someone important, an aristocrat related to Lord Walton via the Honourable Lady Ogilvy, by marriage to Viscount Goschen or the Duke of Gloucester and onwards and upwards to Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandra and eventually the Prince of Wales. A foreigner would never get away with it. The Crown Prosecution Service would press for a jail sentence equivalent to all the years he would otherwise be spending in wedlock with Miss Burns, raising many children, holidaying at the tranquil seaside. Everybody had a life (remember Dr Osawa), and some people even had a life which led to Prince Charles.

Persuaded against random massacre, Henry turned back towards the house, just in time to see the front door swing open again. A young blonde woman stepped out, balancing carefully on high-heeled shoes. Her feet seemed to be slightly green. She was carrying a small purse and wearing a long-sleeved grey dress and no coat, as if she was expecting a night out. She looked left and then right, shook out her hair, then stood on the very edge of the pavement peering across at the shops opposite. She folded her arms and stepped out into the road.

What kind of indiscriminate hostel was this? And why had they trapped Miss Burns inside?

Seize the day, Henry. Burn those bridges.

It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, on a train between Pickering and Godalming or Gillingham and Maidstone, between Eskdalemuir and Raith or Hurstpier-point and Treorchy, William Welsby is twenty-four years old and travelling with his back to the engine, a Class 91 locomotive. A boy further down the carriage wearing a Wimbledon or Manchester or Southampton football shirt eats a Bourbon biscuit or a Jaffa cake or some Cadbury's chocolate. Sometimes the boy pushes his grubby face up against the window, and William wonders if they share the same pride in the passing countryside, like a favoured personal possession. He sees a girl running on sand dunes, a warehouse, some playing fields and a cricket pitch with its summer scoreboard rusting at 199 for 7. They rattle past fields, lakes, buildings, parks, all of which have names, Prince's Park or Sefton Park or Penn Inn or the People's Park. Or Bitton Park or Leazes Park. Stop it, William tells himself, you don't want to start that nonsense again.

Obviously it's all his fiancee's fault.

She is sitting in the seat opposite, smiling and sympathising, unaware that William never experienced such crises of listing before his official engagement. To Miss K. L. M. Llewellen-Palmer or Ms S. M. Hurley or Miss C. R. B. Maitland Hume, daughter of the late Colonel O. Gibbon of Wivelsfield, Sussex or Mrs Valda Hope of Carinya, Cobbitty, New South Wales, Australia. She says:

‘You have to put it all behind you.'

Because unfortunately, despite his engagement, William has just been rescued from an untimely affair with Louise or Marianne or Lynne or even Jessica, all of whom he truly loves. William stares over his fiancee's head, back in the direction he's travelled, thinking only divine intervention can save him now. Before the actual wedding she could always die of food poisoning. It happens. Or become another random victim of a hopeful bombing by the terrifying Irish or Libyans or Algerians. He wonders how many cliff-top walks he can justify between now and the marriage. How unlucky did she have to be, exactly, to catch meningitis or sclerosis or smallpox, or to crash her car, or unwittingly swallow a lethal cocktail of drugs in a celebrity nightclub toilet?

William understands that such thoughts are not the ideal preparation for marriage. She leans forward and takes his hand. ‘This is all connected with what happened to your parents, isn't it?'

‘No.'

'It must have come as a great shock.'

The best way to forget about his parents, and sometimes even his brother, is to think about four things when usually one would do.

‘And anyway,' she asks, not expecting an answer, ‘how would you survive without me?'

By busking on street-corners with a flute or a violin or a guitar or a recorder, William thinks, or by trawling for glory as a film director in the style of Robert Bresson or Antonioni or Ingmar Bergman, so filling the vacancy for an internationally indulgent art director created by the death of Fellini. He would wear a brown cloak or a silk tunic or a scarlet blazer with black collar and gold buttons. Why ever not? He is twenty-four years old, and avoiding any consideration of the sudden and violent death of his parents he sees all possibilities with an
‘of
between them. Nothing can be excluded, and he refuses to experience only a fraction of what is out there to be experienced. He senses that in later life, or in real life, the reduction of possibility will be the difference of greatest regret.