Dreams of Speaking (16 page)

‘Thanks,' Alice called back.

He had come to rescue her. In all that had happened and in the extremity of her feelings, this fatherly gesture was a deep consolation. Alice dried her eyes and looked at herself in the mirror. Her face swam there, bleary and immaterial. She wondered what she would look like as an adult. If she would be more solid. If, behind the mask of an astronaut's visor, she would be untouchable and stare down at the world like a god. Space opened before her. Stars. Galaxies. She would float away. They would all miss her terribly.

When Fred brought in a cup of tea and a slice of birthday cake, they sat on the bed together, side by side, and jointly regretted they were missing the big match. It was a quarter-final. Their team was not playing, but all week they had discussed the possible outcome and the shuffling of names and rankings on the competition ladder.

Alice lay her head in her father's lap. He brushed back her fringe and kissed her forehead.

Mr Sakamoto kept looking at his watch. Clare was almost twenty minutes late.

‘She's not coming,' he said, adjusting his tie.

‘She'll come.'

Alice was keen to reassure him. In the restaurant he was
perceptibly nervous. He had begun pleating the tablecloth and straightening the cutlery. Curious waiters glanced in their direction. Around them was the murmurous sound of other people dining, of knives tapping plates and glasses chinking, conversation between mouthfuls, low and courteous.

When she walked through the door, Alice knew Clare immediately from Mr Sakamoto's description. She had, indeed, a slightly Japanese face, and long grey hair held at the back with a clip. She wore a tawny cashmere dress and an overcoat she removed as she walked towards them. Alice thought she looked interesting.

‘Sorry,' she said as she sat down, afluster. ‘Got lost, would you believe it?'

Clare leaned across the table and shook Alice's hand.

‘Clare Keely,' she said.

There was no apparent surprise at Alice's presence. Perhaps Mr Sakamoto had told Clare of his guest.

‘Well, here we are.'

‘Here we are,' Mr Sakamoto repeated.

They smiled at each other. Small talk ensued, talk about the efficiency of the Métro, the volatile weather, the physical changes evident in Paris. As the meal proceeded, Mr Sakamoto began to relax.

‘Why Alexander Bell?' Clare at last asked.

‘I saw men of my age disappear into their possessions. They became their cars, their stereos, their new apartments. They totalled their wealth and drank whisky late at night in smoky bars, looking sullen, looking sad. I wanted something else. It took me a long time to figure it out. I wanted a project to remind me of the complexity of things, and of human endeavour … does that sound pompous?'

‘Not at all,' Clare said, leaning towards him.

‘My uncle and I had begun exchanging confidences on
the phone and I began thinking, in almost boyishly simple terms, about what a marvellous invention this was. Wondering how it worked. When it entered the world. That sort of thing. I knew of Bell, of course, and his Scottish background may also have been an enticement, a kind of nostalgic attachment …'

Mr Sakamoto became momentarily shy. Clare smiled at him and nodded encouragement.

‘And then,' he resumed, ‘I realised there was something more here than the history of an invention. A man with a deaf mother and wife, who was obsessed with voice. Something anomalous. Endearing. Something beautifully particular. I suppose I fell in love with him: this burly fellow with a full beard and a life-long weakness for porridge …'

‘I've seen the pictures,' Clare said, smiling. ‘A love object, indeed.'

Alice felt they had begun talking in a kind of code. She wished she was not present at the dinner and began to think of when she might politely excuse herself, and leave them together.

‘I discovered too that Alec Bell was permanently grief-stricken. A commonplace identification, I suppose, but he had lost two brothers and then two sons, and I felt this gave us a kinship, an emotional connection. Biography is always presumptuous, as friendship is.'

Here Mr Sakamoto glanced at Alice.

‘But we function, do we not, on elective affinities, on the pertinent associations we find in others …?'

‘Well put,' said Clare.

‘I've almost finished,' said Mr Sakamoto. ‘Just a small section on Bell's visit to Japan in 1898, to meet the Emperor. I've been saving it until the end; it will be my conclusion. The Japanese connection, you might say.'

Clare drained another glass of wine. Alice thought she was
drinking too much. She had entered the slurry stage, her body tilted. A stage Stephen used to call ‘imminent loss of verticality'. Alcohol was changing her, entering her metabolism like fog, obscuring the clear and distinct outlines of things.

‘You lot are invading Edinburgh,' Clare suddenly announced.

Mr Sakamoto raised his head with a questioning look.

‘You Japanese tourists. In hordes, every summer.'

Mr Sakamoto looked stricken. ‘What is this collective noun I've become?' he said.

‘Not you. The others.'

Alice could see Mr Sakamoto's dismay.

‘It satisfies Westerners,' he said quietly, ‘to see us as a collective, to make us uniform, to dishonour us in this way.'

Clare seemed not to be listening or not to understand.

‘We are no less specific than you,' he went on.

‘Westerners! Thanks very much.' Clare was leaning on the table. She tilted her glass.

‘I was making an ethical point,' Mr Sakamoto said, ‘about how generalisation destroys.'

They both fell silent. At some point in the dinner mild flirtation had dissolved and they were remade as antagonists.

‘Don't be so touchy,' said Clare, with an aggressive tone.

Mr Sakamoto said nothing. Alice wondered if she had missed her chance to leave. If she left now, it might seem an act of punctuation to their dispute. Nevertheless, she rose, pushed back her chair, and said her farewells.

‘It was nice meeting you, Clare. Enjoy the rest of your journey.'

Clare nodded vaguely in her direction.

‘Phone me tomorrow,' Mr Sakamoto whispered, making once again the gesture of a phone shape with his thumb and curled hand. ‘Tomorrow.'

Alice ran through the rain to the Métro station. The wet
streets were glazed with light, the air was chill and fresh. She felt the life of the city flare up around her. In its reflective multiplications, its rainy surfaces, it appeared streaming, bathed in a numinous glow. She was pleased to be away from the restaurant and in this bright liquid space. She felt youthful, released. The Seine churned with energy. Lovers were out and about, exhibitionist in their passion. Tilting their heads skyward to give and receive kisses.

It was almost noon by the time she rang. Mr Sakamoto was in his hotel room, packing to return home. Uncle Tadeo was unwell; he was leaving that afternoon. Alice was taken aback by this news: she couldn't imagine Mr Sakamoto leaving so soon, so abruptly.

‘And Clare?'

‘It got worse and worse. She ended up abusing me in language I'd heard her brothers use, years ago. Accused me of deserting her. We parted in acrimony. It was a terrible evening. She slipped and fell as we left the restaurant and when I bent down to assist her, she swore at me.'

‘I'll come to the hotel,' Alice said. ‘Come with you to the airport.'

Mr Sakamoto sounded pleased at the offer.

‘Uncle Tadeo should have told me when he rang,' he said distractedly. ‘I had to learn from Haruko that yesterday he rang me from a hospital bed.'

‘What is it?'

‘Some kind of flu. But it could be pneumonia. At his age, in any case, these things are far more serious.'

‘Of course,' said Alice. ‘I'm on my way.'

At the airport they drank coffee in an inhospitable café, ringing with noise. Chrome and aluminium clanged about them. A child was somewhere wailing. Mr Sakamoto appeared tired; his eyes were red from lack of sleep. A strange desolation passed over each of them. Alice reflected that this was yet another characteristic of airports – to induce generic dejection and slapdash conversation. But for Mr Sakamoto the cause was precise: he kept trying to ring Uncle Tadeo on his mobile phone, but got no response. They conferred on the reason. He may have been taken for tests; nurses may have confiscated his phone; perhaps he had switched it off in order to take a nap. There were a dozen reasonable explanations, Alice said. She tried to calm him, to mollify his alarm. Electronically modulated announcements, generated by machines, boomed into the café, incomprehensibly.

‘Come and visit me,' said Mr Sakamoto, his voice gentle against the noise. ‘How can you resist it? The kingdom of modernity, the empire of signs, gadgetry, robotics, futuristic inventions. You could meet my daughters. I could show you Nagasaki.'

Alice said ‘yes' without even thinking. Yes, she would visit him in Nagasaki. Soon. Nagasaki.

She watched her friend enter the exclusive zone of scanning machines, metal detectors and antiterrorist devices. He passed under the archway that somehow knew if he was carrying a gun. He waved. Then he bowed. Alice also waved, and then bowed. The symmetry between them contested the turmoil all around, the rushing passengers, wheeling luggage, the airport staff, the rattling trolleys and impatient lines and bored mingling groups. It was a single event of neat correspondence. It was humane and tender. It was like theatre, like art.

In the city it was still light. Alice wandered the inner streets of Paris feeling bereft. Her time had been so governed by the presence of Mr Sakamoto – even on days when they met for only half an hour – that all was emptiness, now, and mere purposeless strolling. Shoppers carried plastic bags of groceries and clutched their baguettes; tourists peered into windows at Parisian delectables; elderly men and women strolled arm in arm. There were babies in prams, young people in trendy clothes, small dogs trotting along on extendable leads. There was a hum all about, the sound of daily life continuing, a sound congenial and easy on the ear. Stone, wood, concrete, metal: these held up the city before and around her with impressive solidity. She wondered what Paris-in-ruins would be like. What would this city be in a thousand years' time? What might remain? What might fall away? She moved as the traffic commanded, halted on the pavement by red lights, walked when given green permission. There might be decentralisation, no cities at all. There might be shattered spaces and underground retreats. There might be something from the movies: skyscrapers of vertiginous and impossible height, sky channels of zooming vehicles, never colliding, rocket-driven shoes and virtual windows in homes. Everything would be automated – food, sex. Everything would be subject to arcane systems of regulation and the haunting, invisible power of the state. Late capitalism. Simulation. New-improved forms of loneliness.