The End of the Alphabet (2 page)

 

Indeed, said the doctor. Arrangements.

Ambrose Zephyr suggested, for all in the outer office to hear, that the doctor might want to wait one damn minute before suggesting that Ambrose might want to arrange his remaining days. Days that until moments before had been assumed would stretch to years. With luck to decades. Not shrink to weeks.

If that, said the doctor.

The room filled with fog. The doctor became a
blurry lump behind the desk. The air turned as thick as custard, sauna hot. Ambrose struggled to keep his questions from spilling out with his breakfast in a puddle on the floor.

Something of a mystery, answered the doctor.

Not contagious as far as we can tell.

Fatal? Yes, quite.

Very sure.

 

Ambrose Zephyr was married to Zappora Ashkenazi, a woman as comfortable in her own skin as anyone else. She had kept her name for the apparent reasons, would have preferred to have been born a Frenchwoman, suffered fools with grace and a smile, loathed insects.

She had decorated the Victorian terrace in tastefully Swedish DIY, updating as budget and wear dictated. She was resigned to the likelihood that a
pied-à-terre
in the sixth arrondissement
might not be in her future. She was content with that.

She wore the best labels she could afford and knew the mysteries that moved a £500 ensemble to the £50 rack. Red and black and white were her ‘colours.' Accessorizing she considered well worth the effort, and her earrings were almost always perfect with that outfit. She owned one pair of stilettoed shoes that hurt just to look at. But Ambrose liked them. Which was enough.

She read everything. Russian epics, French confections, American noir, English tabloids had at one time or another taken their place in a wobbly pile beside the bed. Non-fiction was too much like school, she said. Experimental literature left her cold and annoyed and despairing for the so-called modern craft. She had lost count of how many times she had read
Wuthering Heights
.

She could walk into a kitchen she had never seen before and—without a recipe—plate a meal worthy of a starred review in half the time it took her husband to find an egg to boil. Her kitchen was full of cookery books that had never felt the splash of an errant sauce. She read them, she
displayed them; they felt good in hand. They completed the room. Like earrings.

Men brought out her best and made her laugh. She liked most beards, hated all moustaches and furrowed her brow at the mention of tattoos. Height and weight and size didn't matter. Manners and nice shoes mattered. Doing the better thing mattered.

Her shoulder was ready when friends felt a cry coming on. She knew where to offer opinion and when to shut up. She could juggle oranges. She lied only a little, and they were always white.

 

Zappora Ashkenazi was the literary editor for the country's third most-read fashion magazine. Her publisher had wanted to introduce the magazine's reluctant readership to both new and classic literature, and if that literature held a passing link to couture, so much the better. It was a job with challenge: Austen, Woolf and Parker had never, so far as Zappora knew, assembled a spring collection. Yet those who read ‘On the Night Stand' every month did so faithfully and first. Her writing was known for its economic style and refreshing avoidance of simile. Her
husband was her first reader. Every word, every draft. You always have an interesting story to tell, he would say.

Zappora started in the fashion trade as a photographer's dresser. She flipped collars, fanned skirts, hitched pants, buttoned, tied, zipped. By the end of the first hour with her first model on her first day of her first real job she was given her first nickname.

Zipper.

She was very proud.

 

Zipper was not quite as tall as her husband, not quite as thin and not quite as old. Her hair was dark and fine and trimmed precisely every eight weeks. Coloured, perhaps tied with a ribbon, as required.

Her eyes were creased at the corners. She wore glasses when reading. The glasses were purchased in a small shop in Paris, around the corner from an antiquarian bookshop.

 

Zipper sat silent beside her husband, thinking how curious it was that her body had stopped working. That the doctor sounded like he was speaking under water.

She wondered what would happen if she got up and left. Better yet, hadn't come in at all. She clung to the sense of it.

I am not in the room.

Ambrose is not unravelling into the sweating, pasty stranger sitting next to me.

We are at home, preparing a meal for friends or deciding which film to see or selecting which book to curl up with or standing on the doorstep watching that annoying cat with those stupid birds.

We are not here.

None of this is happening to us.

 

Depending on the storyteller, Ambrose and Zipper met for the first or second time in the offices of Dravot, Carnehan. The third most-read fashion magazine in the country was at the time a fledgling and unread concept. It was being pitched to the city's advertising community in an effort to change that.

Messrs Dravot and Carnehan sat at one end of their unnecessarily long boardroom table. Ambrose stood in a corner trying to look creative.
He was the only man in the room not wearing a tie. The magazine's presentation team was led by a painfully loud publisher and trailed by a nervous junior editor, introduced as Young Ms Ashkenazi Who I Believe Will Be Heading Up Our Literary Efforts.

Ambrose would later admit to a nagging sensation of having seen this Ms Ashkenazi before. How he could not place her, but that her handshake felt small, warm, a touch damp. How he could not take his eyes off her. And how, more than once, he had narrowed his gaze to watch her, topless, eating tapas on a beach in Spain. She might have been twenty, maybe twenty-one years old. It was hard to see clearly, Ambrose would explain, what with the sun and the heat and the glare off the sea.

Zipper had an equally odd feeling throughout the meeting. She thought, but couldn't be sure, that she knew the slightly handsome man in the corner who said nothing. (What she never mentioned to anyone was the pleasant hum she felt as Ambrose spent the meeting trying not to glance at her breasts. Or that she found his periodic squint boyishly charming.)

Looking back, Ambrose and Zipper agreed the meeting could not have ended soon enough. As we'll-be-in-touch's went around the room, Ambrose complimented Ms Ashkenazi on her glasses. In that moment Zipper recalled where she had seen this man before.

Coffee? Ambrose then suggested.

It's Zappora. Zipper, actually.

But if you'd rather not…

Zipper smiled.

You're busy then…not to worry. Right.
Zipper
? Well. Yes. Lovely. Perhaps another time…Have we met? No, my mistake. There you are. Sorry. Right. Well.

Zipper remembered the rain in Paris. Tea would be brilliant, she said.

Ambrose escorted the magazine team to the street. While everyone waited for taxis and compared notes for their next presentation, Zipper conjured a case of performance nerves and told the team she'd catch up. Ambrose never went back to the office.

They spent the rest of the morning and the better part of the afternoon in a tiny café near Seven Dials. The next day a grinning Ambrose
turned up at D&C at noon, wearing a shambled version of the clothes he had worn the day before.

 

Ambrose Zephyr later claimed that Zipper was the only woman he had ever been honest with. Not that he had ever misled anyone (perhaps a mild fib here and there), but with Zipper there would be no showing off, no blurring of unfortunate detail, no exaggeration for effect. In the face of all reason she was interested in him as he was. Not as he wished he was.

From that morning across the boardroom table, or earlier—depending on the storyteller—on a narrow street in Paris, Ambrose and Zipper were almost effortless.

 

They were married beside an anonymous willow near a statue of Peter Pan.

It was a small, drenched affair. All parents attended, as uncomfortable as newly met in-laws can be, but managing to find common ground in grumbles about the weather, the venue, the damned informality of it all. A blown light bulb from the recently acquired and completely bare Victorian terrace was broken under foot.

The following week a notice ran in the social pages of the Sunday editions:

 

ZEPHYR/ASHKENAZI.
  Saturday last, at Kensington Gardens. Ambrose Zephyr (Esq) and Zappora Ashkenazi (Ms), attended by Katerina Mankowitz (Ms) of Bayswater and Frederick Wilkes (Esq) of Her Majesty's Foreign Office. The bride, who will retain her maiden name, wore a vintage ensemble in off-white, tailored by Umtata's of Old Jewry. The couple is currently honeymooning on the continent. Their long-term plans were not available at press time.

 

Why you? Why anyone? responded the doctor.

I'm afraid not. Nothing to be done.

Unlikely, but perhaps.

Could be, but doubtful.

How long? Thirty days. Give or take.

Faculties may dull a bit. Blurred eyesight, ringing ears, numbed fingertips. That sort of thing. Happens rather quickly as far as we can tell.

Yes, the doctor offered, unfair would be a very good word about now.