Slapton Sands (16 page)

She looked to her left, at the wharves lining the southerly side of the working stretch of the river, most of them seemingly derelict. Hooks hung on slack chains from cranes outside buildings marked with the neglect of abandonment. A few barges were still moored here and
there. But they were rust-streaked, ragged tarpaulins taut over their empty cargo holds in a half-hearted gesture of proper upkeep.

‘What are you thinking about?'

He had stopped and was leaning looking out over the bridge parapet. ‘About your boyfriend. Wondering what he does. Who he is. Whether the doubts are beginning to nag, three thousand-odd miles away.'

The bank of the river beyond them described neglect. On the pavement and the road at their backs, all was energy and industry and urgent intent. ‘I'd imagine he's pretty intuitive,' Alice said. ‘It's not a quality I've ever tested in him. Not until now, I don't suppose.'

‘Really?'

She took a deep breath. She shook her head.

‘How long?'

‘Eighteen months.'

David was quiet. Then he looked at her. ‘Poor bugger.'

‘He'll survive.'

‘You'll tell him?'

‘I'll have to,' Alice said. She took a step towards David. He reached a hand out for hers.

They got the car and drove over Waterloo Bridge and along Kingsway and Southampton Row, north towards Euston.

“Where are we staying tonight?'

‘Bloomsbury,' he said.

‘Wow.'

‘Nothing special. A mansion block in Coptic Street. Grand once, I suppose. But the big rooms have all been partitioned off. It's just upmarket bed-and-breakfast accommodation now. I stayed there for a week over the Easter vacation when I needed the British Museum.'

‘Couldn't you have stayed with the Apache?'

‘Ollie's parents barely tolerate him, let alone his mates. Besides, his claim that Wimbledon is the hub of the universe is only true for two weeks of the year.'

‘When it's home to Jimmy Connors?'

‘Jimmy Connors. And his implausible socks.'

They were headed for Hampstead Heath. Alice had requested a walk on the Heath, a look at the view. It was six o'clock by the time they got there and they climbed to the parched heights and she looked down on the city, through England's haze of familiar heat, able to pick out Centre-Point, the Post Office Tower, St Paul's.

‘It looks …'

‘What?'

‘Fabled,' she said.

‘Jesus,' he said. ‘And we haven't even had a drink. You should have maybe worn a hat in this sun, Alice.'

They bought ice creams from a van parked on the Heath and sat on a bench and ate them. They heard and then saw Concorde on its steep descent to Heathrow. Alice thought about Pennsylvania, about Easton and Allentown and the little town of Emmaus, sitting on the edge of Amish country, where they had found her father at the side of a
barn, bound by his own handcuffs and shot with his own gun through the side of his head.

‘Tell me about your dad.'

‘I'd rather not.'

‘I was honest with you. I was, you know, on Blackfriars Bridge.' They were more or less alone. They shared their high part of the Heath with only the odd dog walker. Alice was dry in the mouth from eating ice cream. She could feel ice cream and chocolate flake swelling in her stomach. Sugar had parched her tongue and made her teeth dry and squeaky against its tip.

They could still hear Concorde. The aircraft had begun its supersonic flights earlier in the year, its fanfare muted by all the noise-conscious nations which had banned it from their airports on the grounds of noise pollution. It was a beautiful aeroplane, Alice thought. It was also incredibly, preposterously loud. How had they thought they'd ever get away with it?

Alice bent over and spat on the grass between her feet.

‘I don't believe you did that.'

‘Come on. Give me a break.'

‘You've got the manners of a hillbilly.'

Alice nodded. She felt like putting her head in his lap. She slid up the bench and did so. He stroked her hair.

‘We should go.'

She wanted to go to Chelsea, to the King's Road and a pub where they played live music. They left the Apache's minivan parked outside their hotel in Coptic Street and
walked to Russell Square underground station. Walking towards the tube along Southampton Row with David, Alice was aware of how much this area must have changed since the days of the literary Bloomsbury of preconception and myth.

Myth was the problem. Time encouraged distortion. Now, litter flapped and idled in the gutters of the city, drinks cans and discarded newspapers and sweet wrappers and cigarette ends left there by London's apathetic, strike-happy street cleaners. If you read the newspapers, London was in the grip of uncertainty, the mood militant among its public-sector workers and uneasy among a police force still fearful of a metropolitan bombing campaign similar to that the IRA had so bloodily inflicted on Birmingham. The government was moribund, the culture bankrupt, only the weather a cause of constant, predictable surprise as the freakish heatwave and subsequent drought threatened economic catastrophe. In theory, London was the grim capital of a country on its knees. Maybe it was best viewed from a distance, from the dreamy, arcadian heights of Hampstead Heath.

On the way to the underground, they diverted at David's insistence to a pub called the Sun Tavern in Lamb's Conduit Street. It was quaint. She hadn't wanted quaint. Quaint she could get by the hatful in Canterbury. Quaint could be had by the country mile in Bleen, in Tankerton and around. But he'd asked her to try the cider in the Sun Tavern. The pub had high, decorated windows. Their glass was elaborately
engraved. The images were stylized and pagan, to do with druids and the worship of the sun. Late light poured in refracted beams through the glass. The pub had bare floorboards, and the scrumpy was drawn from large hooped barrels behind the bar. There was no jukebox. But music was coming from somewhere. It was Fairport Convention,
Liege and Lief
, Sandy Denny singing ‘Tam Lin'. Singing about lust, woods, malevolent faeries and their spiteful spells.

‘Scrumpy,' David said, handing her a half-pint glass. ‘You won't get this in Pennsylvania.'

It looked like horse piss and smelled like vomit to Alice. But it felt like a drink, after a couple of mouthfuls, when it got into her blood.

‘How would you sum up London?'

‘I wouldn't,' David said. ‘I'm not a native.'

‘Come on. You're an Englishman.'

‘OK,' he said. ‘In what terms?'

‘I don't know,' she said. She could feel the scrumpy in the heat thrumming through her. The stuff was strong. ‘In boxing terms.'

David thought for a moment. ‘A heavyweight having a bad round,' he said. ‘A great heavyweight, shipping too much punishment.' He winked at her. ‘But the fight's only halfway through.'

Cultured Italians and culture-starved Americans made up most of the pedestrian traffic Alice saw as they resumed
their walk. The thing was she could easily see these streets rain-drenched, winter-sodden, a homesick Katherine Mansfield chain-smoking Woodbines in the window seat of a tearoom watching T.S. Eliot ride by on an old sit-up-and-beg in bicycle clips. And they had been only the bit-part players. The principals shifted like heavy ghosts behind windows opaque with grime and faded nets. Bloomsbury in 1976 was an incongruous movie set. It smelled of street trash and Aramis aftershave and contraband Monte Christos smoked by affluent tourists from Chicago and Milan. It should have smelled of horse leather and books and brilliantine. Wouldn't you know, she thought. The scrumpy had made her imaginative. She thought she was probably drunk on the stuff.

The King's Road pub, when they got there, was hot and chaotic. Alice had endured an awful lot of what the natives happily described as pub rock since her arrival in England. Pub bands aped Bad Company, Thin Lizzie, Led Zeppelin, of course, and sometimes American offenders like Lynryd Skynryd and the Allman Brothers. Amplification substituted for talent, dry ice for stage presence. It was appallingly depressing and disappointing, given that the Brits had fashioned the rock template. But she'd heard alarmed rumours of something original and new coming out of west London.

Alice didn't think that rock'n'roll was going to save the world. She had no time at all for distant millionaires performing before vast audiences, regardless of how badly
they trashed their equipment on stage, or how introspective their lyrics could sound. She loved the English word, ‘wanker'. And she thought it wonderfully applicable to someone like Pete Townsend of the Who, smashing a Gibson guitar worth hundreds of pounds into a stack of Marshal amps before an audience of paying customers who earned less than the guitar was worth in a year. She thought it equally descriptive of Bob Dylan, whose appetite for protest songs had not stopped him indulging his wife's architecture hobby to the tune of two million dollars over some domed garden folly. Or maybe it was doomed garden folly, because his wife had divorced him anyway.

Alice held opinions about music not popular in the student world, where people like the Apache believed Jim Morrison the closest thing to a deity since Jesus Christ. Morrison had actually died masturbating in the bathtub. If that didn't make you a wanker … She was in a country in which well-educated teenagers sprayed graffiti slogans claiming Clapton is God, apparently believing it. No wonder the object of their adoration had turned to heroin. She lived in a century in which it was very hard to believe at all in the possibility of God. If there was one, he wasn't a white blues guitarist from the home counties. Clapton wasn't a wanker. On the other hand, though, neither was he J.J. Cale. Music wasn't significant, to Alice. She believed that anyone who claimed it was in print was self-serving, Professor Champion included.

But she did like to be entertained. A twenty-three-year-
old in a foreign country, she wanted a bit of musical exhilaration. There was an atmosphere in this pub, that night, suggesting she might get it. This was London, after all. This was London.

‘There's a bloke in trews over there,' David said.

‘In what?'

‘Tartan trousers. What the Scots Highlanders dress up in when they have the misfortune not to be in kilts.'

Alice looked. There were about half a dozen of them, with short, spiked hair dyed orange, or bleached. The girls wore black mascara and bright lipstick. One of them was wearing a baggy, shiny black top that reminded Alice a bit of a brief fashion she remembered from her adolescence, when she'd started reading glossy magazines. It had been called the Wet Look.

‘Christ Almighty,' David said. ‘There's a girl over there wearing a bin bag.'

The girl in the trash sack and her friends were ignoring the band, a threesome with a singer in a white flared suit and a shirt striped like a deck chair. Then the band went off and there was a brief commotion as a glass was thrown at the stage and someone from behind the bar came out and wagged a finger at the small bin bag and trews contingent. Although small, their number was growing. A boy came in and joined them; he had a little brass padlock securing a chain around his neck. The girl with him wore a leather jacket, its sleeves fringed with dozens and dozens of what looked to Alice like diaper pins. They all seemed to know
one another. Plump girls in fishnets, skinny boys with acned, amphetamine skin. Then, with a squall of guitar static, there was a band on the stage, four black-haired, emaciated boys in tight drainpipe trousers and torn slogan T-shirts. The noise they made was immediate, unbearably loud with accelerating beat and no discernible rhythm. It was a song, in the sense that the one band member with no instrument to play was bawling words into a microphone. But it wasn't a tune. It was a gathering avalanche of noise. The bin bag contingent rushed towards the small stage and started leaping up and down.

A patrol car delivered them back to Coptic Street at about two a.m. It felt later than that to Alice, or maybe she meant earlier. It looked like dawn was intruding in a corner of the sky above a dark terrace of Georgian houses. Bloomsbury, she thought. Katherine Mansfield puffing away in a café window seat. Eliot in a charcoal three-piece, tall in the saddle. Getting out of the back seat, it occurred to Alice that she had not intended to become anything like this well acquainted with the British police. It was the second time she had been ferried about in a Ford Escort belonging to the force. On this occasion, they'd been much less polite.

‘I'm really sorry,' David said, as the car pulled away from the kerb.

‘So you say. You shouldn't have hit him, though.'

‘Fucker shouldn't have spat at me.'

‘You've got a thing about spitting, haven't you?'

‘He gobbed in my face, Alice.'

‘He was aiming at the band.' She laughed. ‘You were a civilian casualty. The victim of a stray shot.'

‘It's not funny. He could have a disease.'

‘Spit, cannibal lobsters. You're way too fastidious, Davey Boy. You need to lighten up.'

There was a deep cut above David's eye. He'd decked the spitter with a punch so fast she hadn't really seen it and then tried successfully to dodge a pint mug thrown by one of the spitter's friends. A hail of pub glassware had followed the first missile, though, and a heavy ashtray had caught him above the eye, splitting the eyebrow, opening a deep cut he'd had stitched in the casualty department at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital while the police questioned him and decided, reluctantly Alice thought, not to charge him with assault. The spitter had revived in an observation ward in the same hospital, chipper according to the staff nurse who relieved them with the news that he wasn't dead, feeling no wish to press charges.

On the pavement, Alice looked at her watch. Her ears were still raw, her head thick with the volume of the band in the Chelsea pub. She hadn't enjoyed the music. Had anyone? It wasn't there to be enjoyed. Enjoyment hadn't seemed to her to be the point of it at all. She wouldn't be looking out for singles or an album by the band. But she had enjoyed the experience of seeing them, of being briefly part of something alien and new. She touched the wounded place above David's eye and he winced. She kissed her
fingers and touched the wound again, this time very tenderly.