Read Damascus Online

Authors: Richard Beard

Damascus (22 page)

BOOK: Damascus
3.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

She says: ‘We love each other. It's only your indecision which keeps us apart.'

Not true, William thinks, that's simply not true. Meaning it's true that he loves her but he isn't indecisive. In fact he loves decisions, and makes them all the time. He decides to get engaged. He decides to leave with Marianne, he decides to come back, he decides to leave with Louise. He makes any number of decisions while all she does is try her best to restrict him to one place at one time wearing the one set of clothes. She hates it when he moves sideways, in among the teeming crowd of people he could still become. He understands this, and loves her for wanting to rescue him, but that doesn't stop him imagining her funeral.

‘Come on, William, what are you afraid of?'

In Fellini's film
La Dolce Vita
the hero played by Marcello Mastroianni isn't married. Nor is Mr Darcy in
Pride and Prejudice
nor Is the butler in
The Remains of the Day
. They're entitled to be fictional heroes because an important option remains open to them. It may well be that there are longer lists of married men in real life providing a better model by which to live, but to William it already seems a kind of defeat to take your examples from real life.

The train stops in the middle of nowhere. Further down the carriage the boy presses his face up against the window, and he and William look down at the long fairway of a golf course.

'I won't come back for you again.'

'I thought we were meant for each other.'

'There are limits.'

On the terrace of the club-house a drinks party is under way, and in a neighbouring estate a man relaxes in his garden, putting his feet up. The whole world becomes imperfectly silent and a flight of gulls crosses the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and William can't think of any place in Britain he'd rather be.

She says: ‘If you carry on like this I'll leave you.'

'That's another possibility.'

‘Sorry?'

‘You could marry someone else, anyone else, a European or an Australian or a rich Japanese.' 

'Is that what you want?'

'I'm just saying anything's possible.'

‘Grow up, William. Not everything's possible.' William knows there are significant moments, entirely unexpected, which change entire lives. It has happened to his brother, after it happened to their parents. His brother has taken the inheritance, all of it, and made a lucky investment at just the right time in gilts or bonds or German bunds. Now he eats salad in brasseries with Christian Dior or Helmut Lang or Vivienne Westwood, while giving generously to the campaign funds of the Liberal Democrats or the Ulster Unionists or the Tory party. If William allows himself one exception to his rale that everything is possible, he swears never to ask his brother for help, not that it should ever come to that. There's no reason he shouldn't be equally as lucky as long as he stays on the right road, even if he's taking the long way round. He's waiting for something extraordinary to happen, waiting to be singled out, wanting to be special.

She says: ‘You're not thinking straight. You love me. I love you. We belong with each other.'

William wishes he knew. Either marriage is an ill-judged junction off the road, or it's exactly the instant difference he's looking for. Either/or, but how is he supposed to tell? If this is his Damascus, then shouldn't it be a bit more obvious?

‘One day you'll regret this,' she says.

‘Only if I remember it.'

There ought to be a sign telling him what to do. Because after today, if he makes the wrong decision, every option will remain open to him except this one. The world will overflow with all sorts of everything except this. His whole life, if he gets it wrong, will change at this exact point, until gradually his only sense of time becomes then and now, now and then.

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
12:48

‘I don't believe you,' Spencer said. ‘She wouldn't have left without telling me. We agreed we had until the end of the day.'

‘You don't know her as well as you think you do,' William said. ‘You can't make up your mind. She went to fetch her shoes.'

Grace said: ‘Can I have my present now?'

The three of them were in the kitchen gathered round the table, where William had draped a British Lions Rugby League tea towel over the fruit bowl with the fish in it. Like a magician, he made himself ready to whip the cloth away.

‘Not yet,' Spencer said. ‘We should wait for Hazel.'

‘She's gone,' William said.

‘Gone where?'

‘I don't know. Home, I suppose.'

‘She hasn't gone,' Spencer said. ‘She would have told me first.'

‘Can I have my present now?'

‘What about waiting for Hazel?'

‘She can see it when she comes back down.'

William shook his head meaningfully, meaning Spencer didn't have a clue. Then he concentrated on the matter in hand. With a flourish he snapped away the cloth, and both he and Spencer looked expectantly from the goldfish (still alive) to Grace. Her face was slow to light in a smile. In fact she didn't smile at all. William said:

‘You
love
animals.'

‘It's a fish,' Grace said.

‘What's wrong with a fish?'

‘It isn't going to win any showjumping contests.'

‘Well no. No, it's not. In fact it's very difficult to argue with that.'

‘What's his name?'

‘Trigger. Don't you like him?'

Grace leant over the table and turned her head to stare through the side of the bowl. She made a face. Trigger flicked over to take a look and she giggled. ‘Not bad,' she said. ‘It looks a bit glum, though. Why does it keep going round in circles?'

‘He has a very short memory.'

‘I think it's a very nice fish,' Grace said. ‘I mean considering it's a fish. Is it a boy fish or a girl fish?'

Spencer and William looked at each other. ‘We don't really know.'

‘I think it's a German boy fish,' Grace said. ‘Because then his full name would be Herr Trigger. Get it?'

‘What a lovely girl,' William said.

Grace had taken Trigger to leam some computer games, hoping to put a smile on his face.

‘She is,' Spencer agreed.

'I meant Hazel.'

‘It was you who upset her,' Spencer said. ‘She'd never have left if you hadn't brought up the whole Jessica thing.'

‘That was before I became a convert,' William said. ‘Come on, I want to show you something.'

William made Spencer follow him out into the hall and along to the front door, even though Spencer would have preferred to go looking for Hazel.

'I am about to go outside,' William said, hitching up his trousers. ‘Hazel showed me how.'

With little regard for his own well-being he opened the front door. He stepped outside and Spencer moved up quickly beside him, ready to catch him and carry him back in. The wind was stronger now, but not cold, and overhead the single cloud remained unbroken. William swayed a bit but he didn't retreat. He stood to attention and clenched his hands in tight fists at his sides. His face began to turn a deep cherry colour, but that was because he was holding his breath. He also had his eyes closed.

He opened his eyes, stared straight ahead, breathed out and then in again, held his breath, kept his eyes open. He looked like a man playing woodwind, but without any instrument.

‘What's it like?' Spencer said. ‘What can you see?' He had his arms out to catch William when he fell.

‘A music shop,' William whispered. He breathed out and in again. 'I can see a music shop.'

‘What else?'

‘A Japanese man.'

‘What else?'

‘Nothing.'

‘What about the bus going by?'

‘No. Nothing else.'

‘There's a bus. It's going by us now.'

‘I see no bus.'

‘People? You see the people on the other side of the street, looking into the shop windows? Some of them are looking over here.'

‘I see a Japanese man. I see a music shop.'

He took a step backwards into the house, and Spencer quickly closed the door behind him. He started breathing raggedly as if he'd just stopped running. He grinned broadly as he caught his breath, bent over to hold his knees as he coughed a couple of times.

‘There,' he said. ‘Easy. Hazel taught me that.'

‘What about the bus? And the other people? What about the travel agents and all that?'

‘She said I had to block some things out. You have to stop thinking that everything might be important, even though it probably always is to somebody, somewhere. You can't try to see it all. You can't check everybody out, one by one. You just can't.'

Isn't that a bit sad?'

‘Otherwise you'd never move on from one day to the next. You have to believe it's going to be OK. That's what Hazel said, and she's right.'

‘Well she's been to College, hasn't she?'

Hazel was brilliant, William said, and he wouldn't hear a word said against her. He was a total convert.

‘Allah be praised,' Spencer said. ‘But a pity she's gone home, then.'

‘Maybe she hasn't.'

‘She should make up her mind.'

At last William managed to straighten up without coughing. He spluttered a bit and clapped Spencer on the back.

‘You two are made for each other,' he said.

‘How do you know? How does anyone ever know?'

‘Don't fuck it up, Spencer.'

It wasn't the kind of language Spencer expected from William. He thought he probably resented it. He had the same right to make a bad decision as anyone else.

‘Something similar happened to me at your age,' William said. ‘I talked myself out of it and look what happened to me.‘

‘It's not as if I have to decide today, is it? I can decide tomorrow, or the day after that, or next week. There's no need to rush into it, is there?'

‘She might already have left. You'll only get her back if you decide today.'

‘Tomorrow. I'll decide tomorrow.'

Tomorrow never comes, Spencer. Everyone knows that.'

It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Staines or Swindon or Narberth or Horsham, in Melksham or Melrose or Erewash or Huddersfield, everything is stylishly patterned in Paisley. Sprightly white-haired old ladies sit and drink tea and knit one or pearl one or drop one, spooling out cardigans in angora or chenille or alpaca for their children or grandchildren or victims of natural disaster. The poor eat cake and shortbread biscuits. The blind have
The Archers
or
Book at Bedtime
. The mad and the bad and the jealous angry have successfully learnt, in the patient manner of the British, to suppress their emotions. Gruesome murders are no more than amusements, exquisitely investigated in grand houses like Heveningham Hall or Herstmon-ceux Castle by H. R. F. Keating or Philip Dickson Carr or Dame Ngaio Marsh. Children discover first love beneath blue skies on sand dunes. The schools instil a profound respect for Shakespeare and everyone has their own house (their own house their castle) and limitless offers of employment.

Mrs Mitsui, Henry's mother, keeps track of paradise by ordering
The Times
once a week, on Mondays. Any news not to her taste she attributes to the famously dark British sense of humour, which she'd have learnt to appreciate more thoroughly if only she'd been allowed more time.

‘I should have killed myself there and then,' she says.

Henry Mitsui is eighteen years old and it's not the first time he's heard his mother say this. Britain is perfect and once upon a time, a long long time ago, she was engaged to be married to a perfect Briton, to the Duke of Wellington or William Rathbone or Lord George Gordon.

'It was definitely going to happen,' she says defensively. ‘It was published in Forthcoming Marriages.'

BOOK: Damascus
3.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Herring on the Nile by L. C. Tyler
The Kiss by Kate Chopin
NOT What I Was Expecting by Tallulah Anne Scott
Ever, Sarah by Hansen, C.E.
We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates