The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (30 page)

“I’m applying to university, aren’t I, David? I’m going to be a stoooooooodunt!”

Terri smiled the long, long smile of wonder and dismay.

“ ‘Autumn Leaves,’ that was my favorite,” I said to Luca. “I really used to enjoy doing all that. And of course it’s autumn now, isn’t it?”

“I never found such a good lights man since,” he said chivalrously. His jaw, too, must have ached from smiling. “Look, lovely people, I’m very sorry but we have to slip away to a party.”

“A party!” Nikki said.

“Well, you could come, couldn’t they, Terri? Except that it’s a family thing, you know, and I don’t think it’s appropriate.”

“No, that wouldn’t work, would it?” I said. “A pity.”

“Why don’t you give us your telephone number,” Luca said. “Then we could call you. Have a coffee somewhere. Coffee and a nice cake.”

“I don’t have a telephone number. Student, you see. Always broke. You know how it is.”

Terri opened her handbag, struggling with the polythene-wrapped dress over her arm, and produced a pen. “Let me give you our number, then.”

There was a wonderful moment when we thought we hadn’t got a scrap of paper among the four of us on which to write. Then Terri went back into her handbag and found a bus ticket. We had a laugh about that—writing on a bus ticket. How funny. On the reverse of the ticket she very carefully wrote out a phone number, and she handed it to Nikki rather than to me.

After that, Luca held out a hand that wanted shaking. “Goodbye for now,” he said, and we shook hands. Terri stepped forward to kiss me again, and Luca kissed Nikki.

We watched them go. They passed before the yellow lights of the small theater and I watched them, Terri with her quick, almost angry little steps and Luca striding to keep up with her.

“That was hard work for some reason,” Nikki said, as we walked away in a different direction.

“It was.”

“I don’t think they were all that pleased to see us.”

“No. I don’t think they were.”

Nikki turned her collar up to the damp air and linked her arm in mine. In the mist of Nottingham town, she was so beautiful.

NIKKI GOT THE pantomime job in Coventry. I helped her with her O levels in the meantime. We were ecstatically happy. Over the Christmas holidays we stayed with Mum and Ken. They treated Nikki to the best china and silverware, and Ken told stories that even I hadn’t heard. I think Ken had fallen for her.

College life restored equilibrium to our days. There was the routine of lectures, seminars, coffee bars, and the union bar. Nikki got bits of work here and there, but she loved being a student even if we were broke a lot of the time. She changed the way she dressed and wore a duffle coat and a long, winding college scarf. We joined the Anti-Nazi League and sent Tony a badge. We never heard back from him.

The National Front meanwhile turned inward on itself, dissolving in bitter factions and violence as they disagreed on ways to make the country great again. There were court cases, scandals, violence. Some of those leading figures are still around. There were no rivers of blood in the following years, and of course certain people were rather disappointed about that.

In the spring we got a letter from Pinky asking if we wanted to work for him again the following summer.

One night in April I was roused from sleep in the small hours by a tapping on the window. For a split second I thought it was going to be Colin, or perhaps the boy on the beach, all over again, because the boy never completely goes away. But it was only a friend, a fellow student who had locked himself out of his student lodge and wanted to sleep on our floor.

Whether it’s Madame Rosa, or her sister Dot in the steam laundry, or the mechanical fortune-teller on the pier, the
advice comes down to the same thing: The future will be what we choose it to be, just so long as we carefully engineer the present. As for the past, it moves like sand under your feet. These things happened a long time ago yet remain luminous in my mind. As I write this I have resting on a pile of papers on my desk a glass paperweight. Scarlet with black spots, it is designed to look like a beautiful ladybug.

The wonderful American writer Jeffrey Ford deserves a special mention for encouraging me to write this novel after I’d explained to him over a beer the colorful and almost incomprehensible institution of the British holiday center.

Thanks and praise to my wife, Sue, who is my first reader and an indomitable critic, always rising far above my knitted brow and infernal mutterings.

Doug Stewart and Madeleine Clark are pillars of true strength for me at my agency, Sterling Lord Literistic. Likewise my editor, Jason Kaufman, gives me thrilling support for my (some would have it) delirious books. I’d also like to thank Robert Bloom and copy editor Karla Eoff for enormous help with the manuscript.

I worked at different holiday centers all those years ago, and I must say that my fellow workers were generally much kinder than some of the characters in this novel. I hope that in the unlikely event any of them read this book they don’t
feel betrayed by what is mostly fictional. Meanwhile, the 1976 heat wave and the swarm of ladybugs are exactly as I remember them, and the political mood of the time was volatile. I’m very glad that the dire predictions of some political commentators of the time did not come to pass.