Damascus (8 page)

Nothing will ever be the same again. Up until now Spencer has always been the same person with the same idea of how life should be, but now he suddenly isn't any more. He doesn't feel old enough for this. He hasn't had enough experience to prepare him for it, and no experience from before now can possibly be strong enough to survive it. He wants it to teach him something, but what? People die and disasters happen bam, suddenly and without warning, just like that. Does it mean, if he knows this, that he is now grown up? Is it an essential grown-up truth that suddenness only works one way, and that anything which happens this suddenly can only be bad? And what if his mother is wrong, and it's not any memory of Rachel which stays available to him, but only the memory of losing her? In which case he'll always be able to trace the day he grew up to this single moment and its particular books and videos, to the way Philip rocks on his chair, playing black, refusing to move his queen.

Time can stop now, if that's alright.

If it moves on from here then that isn't fair to Rachel.

But no matter how hard Spencer tries to freeze the moment (he fixes the names of the writers, the titles of the films, his mother's scarf, his father's word, Philip's French defence and his isolated queen), time insists, eventually, on moving.

‘Tell me how you remember her,' Mr Kelly says.

Rachel pinches him, punches him, and beats him to the bathroom. At breakfast she wins the competition to get the most Bourbon biscuits in her mouth. She is the first into the car, wearing her tracksuit covered in badges meaning one day she'll be International European Champion of the World, and in the paper every other day. She'll be in the paper tomorrow anyway, and Spencer has to work his jaw like his Dad so as not to cry like his Mum. He hides his face in his hands and tries ever so hard to remember how Rachel used to catch her breath, her hands on her knees, knees bent inwards slightly, looking up and smiling brightly. Everything turns out just fine.

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
09:12

Henry Mitsui had eaten late breakfasts all over the country in a hundred hotels no better or worse than this one. The tables in the dining room were round and the choice of pictures discreet and uneventful, like the engraving of a frozen Battersea Park on the wall behind his father. The rest of the dining room was occupied by the breakfast silence of single managers looking forward to the morning session of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management Successful Selling ‘93 Awards. They wore badges to say so, along with their names.

From the buffet, Henry's father had served himself a bowl of prunes and a glass of milk. Henry had a pot of tea and
The Times
, which he'd folded in half over his empty plate.

'I was hoping we could talk,' his father said.

'I 
always
read
The Times
at breakfast.'

His father pursed his lips and chased a prune round his bowl as Henry searched for a particularly British idiom, of the type he'd been collecting, to emphasise the distance between them.

'It allows me to fire on all cylinders,' he said.

He turned his attention back to the paper and the intricate problem of turning a page, flattening the creases and refolding it in half. Not much news today. More people had been killed in Northern Ireland. The Maastricht Treaty came into effect. Nigel Mansell had crashed a sports car and a rare bird had been spotted in a field somewhere. It was a good bad day for celebrity deaths: River Phoenix and Federico Fellini. Otherwise
The Times
was packed with its usual measure of life, with people changing jobs, winning and losing at games, reading and liking and disliking books, hoping for something good on at the cinema, confident that the theatre wasn't what it used to be or maybe it was, and just as curious now as always to learn of the births, marriages and deaths of strangers. Henry had grown to like this part of the morning, but today he was finding it difficult to concentrate, even on the headlines. He felt that no matter what had gone wrong elsewhere in the world his own problems were more pressing, excluding perhaps those of Fellini and River Phoenix.

He glanced at the racing page and was relieved to see that the paper's private handicapper had failed to pick out
Mr Confusion
at Newcastle. Then he laid the paper aside and asked his father what he was looking at.

‘I was wondering how you felt.'

‘Why?'

‘I'm your father.'

‘I feel fine.'

‘Just fine?'

‘I seldom feel murderous, if that's what you mean.'

'That's not what I said.'

'I seldom feel like hurting people until they squeak. A joke. That's a joke, Dad.'

'It isn't very funny.'

‘Perhaps not.'

It was true that before leaving Japan Henry hadn't always been entirely himself. But he still found it astonishing that his father and Dr Osawa should separately conclude that only by asking him lots of personal questions (and smiling sympathetically at the answers) could they save him from a grim future as a serial killer. They'd obviously been corrupted by too many crime novels and police films. Or they'd been taking the newspapers too seriously.

'I've changed,' Henry said. ‘Ever since I came here. I've taken Dr Osawa's advice and remind myself all the time that everyone has a life.'

‘And does it help?'

‘I've not hurt anyone yet, if that's what you mean.'

‘It's not just now, Henry. It's not just today. It's all the other days as well.'

‘You said you'd already booked the flight. Apparently today is the only day I have left.'

Mr Mitsui asked testily, in Japanese, if they could speak Japanese now, but Henry replied in English that he preferred to speak his mother-tongue. He then fiddled with the fascinating controls of his telephone before eventually managing to ask how she was. In Japanese, his mother was fine, although recovering only slowly. She sometimes had nightmares.

‘Does she want to see me?'

Henry's father said he didn't know, and Henry unexpectedly felt sorry for him. He was always trying to do the right thing which meant that he was usually unhappy. When Dr Osawa had suggested, more than two years ago, that Henry could profitably spend some time studying abroad, his father had immediately set about organising a place at Trinity College Oxford or Sidney Sussex Cambridge or somewhere sounding equally grand. But Henry had explored the edges of a major tantrum (nervous breakdown) until his father gave way and allowed him to follow a distance-learning course. This meant that he could always be someone and somewhere else, travelling tirelessly round the country making his telephone calls and sending in his essays on
British Culture and Society, The British Detective Novel, An Introduction to British Birds and Trees
, or
The Kings and Queens of Britain
. For nearly two years he'd phoned Miss Burns at least twice a week until she became the fixed point of his nomadic life. She calmly answered all his questions, sometimes praised his written work, and gradually convinced him there was nothing she didn't know.

‘You realise you're not allowed to stay here?' his father asked. He repeated it, more quietly, to be sure that Henry understood. ‘You do understand, don't you?'

‘Mum's British.'

‘She's Australian.'

‘She told me a quarter Irish a quarter English a quarter Welsh a quarter Scots.'

‘She has an Australian passport. Listen to me, Henry. You were allowed to stay while you were a student, but now you have your diploma you're not a student any more and you're not allowed to stay. Do you understand?'

Henry blamed it on Europe. If Britain hadn't signed any treaties he was sure he'd be allowed to stay because his mother was practically English. He spoke the language perfectly. He'd even promise to work like a Trojan so they wouldn't close the door on him.

‘Henry, I'm your father. I want what's best for you. I've come all the way from Tokyo. I'm a design consultant with a multinational company and I have experience. I can see that you're tense, like you were before, and we don't want anyone to get hurt, do we?'

‘You mean you don't want me to get you into any more trouble.'

‘I want what's best for you. We can spend the day at the Getty exhibition. Yes?'

Henry fingered the plastic envelope of powder which he'd transferred to his trouser pocket. It was about the size of a sugar sachet and he liked to have it on his person at all times, for reassurance. It gave him a sense of power. It was a key to sudden change, and therefore real life.

'It's at the Royal Academy,' his father added. ‘Not that far from here.'

'I'm in love.'

Mr Mitsui stared past Henry's shoulder, finding it as difficult now as always to resign himself to how closely the son resembled the mother. He wondered if it could ever have been any different.

‘We're going to be engaged,' Henry said.

‘Congratulations, Henry. We're leaving this evening.'

‘Then I'd best ask her today, hadn't I? I'll ring her up, right now.'

Henry picked up the phone and keyed in the digits. There was an answer, and Henry nodded sagely for the benefit of his father as a woman's voice in his ear said:

‘Mr Mitsui?'

No matter how many times he'd asked her to call him Henry. Oh the unwavering Miss Burns and her unmistakable voice, strict and beautiful. He took a deep breath.

‘Miss Burns,' he said. 'I would like to invite you to lunch.'

‘We are not going to meet up. I've told you so before.'

‘It's my last day.'

‘Not today. Not tomorrow. Never.'

'I wanted to thank you. I went to your house.'

Wherever Miss Burns was, it went very quiet. He thought she might be looking at her watch. Then he thought she might have gone, so it was a great relief when at last she spoke.

‘I'm not at home. There's no point you going there again.'

‘Perhaps we could meet somewhere else.'

‘I'm not getting through to you, am I, Henry? Maybe when you came to my house I was there, but I didn't open the door because I didn't want to see you. Have you thought about that?'

‘I know you weren't there,' Henry said. ‘If you were there you would have opened the door. It's our destiny to meet.'

‘I'm going now, Henry. Enjoy the flight back to Tokyo.' 

'One last question.'

'No more questions, Henry, I'm sorry. Goodbye.'

Very deliberately, Henry turned off his telephone and placed it back on his plate. She'd called him Henry. He looked up at his father and smiled a sudden and dazzling smile, developed over years of being surprised by excellent presents. One of his two front teeth, the one on the left, was completely brown, of so even and deep a colour it was like a choice made from a colour-chart in a paint catalogue.

'She said yes,' Henry said. 'She'd love to meet me for lunch.'

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
9:24

This was a perfect example of a time not to be frightened, and not to act like her mother. Henry Mitsui wasn't going to find her here, especially if she stopped answering her phone, and tomorrow he ought to be back in Japan. If he wasn't then she could call the police, so there was no good reason to be frightened.  Waiting for Spencer to get back from the library, Hazel had made a complete tour of the house. Many of the impressive rooms were mostly empty, with perhaps just the 
odd chair or table to suggest how they might be furnished given the will and the means, and the furniture. She looked closely at the scattered paintings: a Van Gogh reproduction, posters of a Lowry and a Vermeer, an original E. H. Shepherd 
Wind in The Willows
 illustration of Mole in a snow-storm. She also recognised a Rowlandson and a Vanessa Bell because she'd once offered a course in 
British Painters and Painting
.

Eventually she'd decided to settle down with 
Sir John Magill's Last Journey
 in the ground floor dining room which overlooked the garden, and by the time Spencer found her she felt quite at home in the comer of an ancient and enveloping sofa. Spencer pulled a chair out from under the polished table. He sat on it backwards, and asked her if she'd seen William anywhere.

'If he's the oldish man who looks a bit like Fellini, then yes.'

‘How like Fellini?'

‘Tall, chubby cheeks, grey hair. Late middle-age and still growing.'

‘He didn't say anything to upset you, did he?'

‘He didn't see me. He was just standing there, staring at the front door. I didn't like to disturb him.'

‘He's scared of going out because he thinks it's the end of Britain. I'd better go and check on him.'