Meeting the English E-Book

Kate Clanchy

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 363

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award The 'English' of this novel are a particular kind of family. Their ailing patriarch is Phillip Prys, the once-famous writer unexpectedly eclipsed first by voguish Salman Rushdie, and second by a massive stroke. His third wife, Shirin, pads through their house in Hampstead, resolute in the face of Myfanwy, first spouse, who returns with all the subtlety of a stormy weather front to manage Phillip's care. Their children, Jake and Celia, have each retreated towards drugs and food, their already strained relationship with their father unable to bear this latest rupture. And to cap it all, it's the hottest summer anyone can remember. Enter Struan. Built like a heron, fresh from Scotland, he is thrust -- quite literally -- into the bosom of the family as Phillip's 17-year-old nurse. He's had experience of death, but not of London. It's a foreign country, with foreign food and foreign customs. But it also has a kind of magic. As he comes under the influence of each Prys, his life begins to change in ways he could never have imagined. And so, in the meantime, do theirs. . .

Leseprobe

‘An exceptional first novel . . . Clanchy has a wincingly accurate eye for social comedy, a vivid descriptive sense, and profound understanding of her characters. This is a delectable read – it should certainly be on one or more of this year’s awards lists.’

Daily Mail

‘With wit and zest, Clanchy creates social comedy out of teeth-clenching situations . . . Clanchy’s trenchant, often very funny prose also shimmers with sensual pleasures . . . Meeting the English is a richly conceived, original and very entertaining novel.’

Guardian

‘Every so often, an author bursts onto the scene with a freshness and originality that make the reader give a metaphorical three cheers. Kate Clanchy is one such; her debut novel is funny and insightful and her empathetic, law-abiding hero is full of blinding common sense, a less wet version of Adrian Mole . . . Clanchy has an acute eye . . . You’ll want to hear more from her.’

Country Life

‘Lacerating social observation mixed with Shakespearean comedy powers Kate Clanchy’s first novel . . . her agility with language makes the sentences shimmer.’

Sunday Telegraph

‘A comedy of manners with a sharp edge . . . With its cast of artsy, highly strung, badly behaved north Londoners, Meeting the English feels like an updated Iris Murdoch novel, with sharper haircuts and more Laura Ashley furnishings.’

Independent on Sunday

‘What unfolds is a long, hot summer with more than a little Midsummer Night’s Dream about it . . . Meeting the English is an utter delight.’

Observer

‘Meeting the English is powered by an addictively forward-marching narrative . . . Clanchy displays a verbal inventiveness that unlocks the alarming, delectable newness of the world Struan encounters.’

TLS

‘Meeting the English is a comedy of manners and a comedy of morals . . . [it] has a frothy charm.’

Scotsman

‘Sharp and charming . . . Meeting the English is an accomplished and lively work and Clanchy, who is a distinguished poet, writes prose to relish . . . this is a strong and rather gallant novel of family life and what (if anything) can be done about it.’

Financial Times

‘A charming comic novel with an appealing lightness of touch.’

Literary Review

‘Meeting the English provides many pleasures. Clanchy is a fine describer and she evokes the hot North London summer with skill . . . With its instances of mistaken identity, family dispute and various human foibles, Meeting the English operates squarely in the tradition of Shakespearian comedy.’

The Times

Meeting the English

ALSO BY KATE CLANCHY

POEMS

Slattern

Samarkand

Newborn

Selected Poems

The Picador Book of Birth Poems (ed.)

England: Poems from a School (ed.)

NON-FICTION

Antigona and Me

Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

SHORT STORIES

The Not-Dead and the Saved

KATE CLANCHY

Meeting the English

For Matthew

SWIFT PRESS

This edition published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2022

First published by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan 2013

Copyright © Kate Clanchy 2013

The right of Kate Clanchy to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80075-178-1

eISBN: 978-1-80075-177-4

It is easier for them; they are English.

Alasdair Gray,

The Fall of Kelvin Walker

Bathgate no more

Linwood no more

Methil no more

Lochaber no more.

The Proclaimers,

Letter from America

1

It was March, 1989, and the weather was unseasonably warm; but no one worried about that, then.

Phillip Prys, playwright, novelist, was brushing his teeth in the en-suite bathroom of his large house in Hampstead. The incisors had yellowed over the years with nicotine – much like his study ceiling – and there was a brown crack in the left canine, but Phillip was pleased with the molars. Sound to a man. Every morning, he counted them in and rubbed them over with his noisy hard-bristle toothbrush; jaw wide as a crocodile’s as he shone up the back ones.

In the mirror his head, brown and speckled as a breakfast egg, dipped, spat, rinsed. On the windowsill, the padded Roberts radio belly-ached on about Salman Rushdie and failed to mention the letter to The Times Phillip had put his name to, just two days ago. Not that the letter was his idea: Giles had sprung it on him: and you could hardly say you were pro-fatwa, could you, these PC days? Not even to your agent in the privacy of Simpson’s.

Absurd. He’d married one now, hadn’t he? A foreigner. An Iranian, no less. The ravishing, the twenty-six-year-old, the petite, the scented Shirin, slowly dressing at this very moment in the adjoining room. Some racist he was. No, what Phillip felt – and he’d said this to Giles, openly, after a few drinks, mind – was, when it came right down to it, Rushdie had stolen a bit of a march on the rest of them with the whole business. Because, look, Giles, Rushdie might be brown, but he was a posh boy at bottom, wasn’t he? Went to Eton, didn’t he? Oxford? And with fairy tales like Midnight’s Arses and One Hundred Years of Buggery hogging the book market, people were forgetting about the class system here in Britain, weren’t they? Pulling the splinter out of the brown chappie’s eye and forgetting the bloody pit-prop in bloody Wales, isn’t it? Phillip always became more Welsh when he drank.

Giles had said nothing. In fact, he’d had the cheek to start folding his napkin. So Phillip had asked him directly – of course Giles was a queer, that wasn’t the point – he must have noticed that the real stories, stories of the men of the valleys, rugby-playing men and their sons, those stories were going out and this posh namby-pamby gossamer was coming in instead, written by women half of it. Angela bloody Carter. And Giles had said, gesturing at Phillip’s latest royalties statement, open between them on the table, but Angela sells, old chap, so does Rushdie. They sell. And then he’d told Phillip he was going to retire.

Retire. Giles! Giles gone grey all of a sudden, all his soft sideburns, grizzled. Shocking. As if they’d thrown a bucket of talc on him between the acts, while Phillip was in the circle bar, lining up the pink gins. Giles, in the name of Heaven! You could weep for him, so you could, like poor bloody Arthur Scargill and his men and all the other victims of Thatcher, no such thing as society and other bollocks. In the other room, Shirin yawned: small visceral noise from a strong pale throat.

Phillip wiped the last foam from his lips. He breathed in. Today was, after all, a beautiful day. The new leaves on the chestnut tree were unfurling, and Shirin was sitting on his bed, putting on her lipstick with an exact, exquisite hand. Listen! The tootle of birds, the tiny firecracker of Shirin’s dress being electrically tugged over Shirin’s tights. Phillip laid down the flannel and picked up the TCP.

Thirty years he’d lived in the house in Yewtree Row. Twenty his MG had twinkled at him from its snug parking place across the street. Giles at the end of the phone for what – thirty-five? Longer than Shirin had been alive, clever little orchid in the greenhouse of Tehran. But the MG would stay and Giles could be replaced. One of the smart young men in the office would be honoured, honoured. Of course he would. Phillip would ring him up and say: ‘Bird tootling in a tree, what’s the bugger called, for chapter 2?’ and get the answer, just as he always had. The thought was worth a song. Phillip liked to carol through his TCP – ‘Bread of Heaven’, in Welsh, with his head thrown back – a special knack of his.

His jaw was at its very widest when the spasm hit. The TCP gurgled down his throat, and its precise burn, etching the tonsils, was Phillip’s last clear memory. He fell to the ground and jerked as if he were being shaken by an invisible policeman. He made a series of bad plumbing noises, rusty groans and burps. Spittle leaked from a corner of his mouth. His legs thrashed, then his head, and this all went on for a very long time, as if Phillip were being uncharacteristically brave, as if he were refusing to give up an answer.

All the while, and evenly as a flag in a steady breeze, the radio talked about the fatwa and moved on to the weather, and then to news just coming in about an oil spill, a very large one.

Of course, it was all a terrible shock for Shirin. They kept telling her so in Intensive Care, after she had revived Phillip, carried him downstairs in a fireman’s lift, and delivered him to Casualty at speed in the MG which she was not, in fact, licensed to drive. Phillip was stable now, and Shirin should have a cup of tea, one with sugar, said the handsome young consultant. She should place her narrow hips on a plastic chair and smooth back her heavy shining bob of hair, and he would draw up his matching chair and explain everything in his best, grown-up, low voice.

You see, probably, the blood clot had been around for ages, bobbing around in Phillip’s bloodstream. Phillip was sixty-two? A vulnerable age. Did Phillip smoke? Untipped? And drink? Pink gin was a strong choice. The young consultant looked like a jogger. His eyes were preternaturally bright, blue as glass. He explained that Phillip’s arteries might, because of the smoking, be furred and narrower than average. It must all be hard for Shirin to understand, especially just now, but—

‘He is suffering a revolution?’ asked Shirin, in her tremendously posh voice with its just perceptible Iranian ‘r’, fixing the consultant the while with her famously lucent amber eyes.

‘Well,’ said the consultant, ‘you could say that. Are you familiar with the circulatory system, Mrs Prys?’

‘Yes,’ said Shirin, looking at the ceiling, ‘terrifically.’ And so the consultant started on about Phillip’s clot, how it would have started as something barely tangible—

‘All revolutions start like that,’ said Shirin, ‘do they not? Just a few people? A few, did you call them, platelets? We need a strong tyrant, perhaps, to put them down?’ There was a pause.

‘Was Mr Prys recommended,’ asked the consultant, ‘aspirin? At any point?’

‘Possibly. He would never take such a thing,’ said Shirin. The consultant shook his head.

‘It’s not always easy to make that generation see that drink is not a friend,’ he said.

‘His ally,’ said Shirin, brightly, ‘his comrade. From the days of the Long March!’

‘You know,’ said the consultant, ‘you should consider putting your feet up for a minute.’

‘I think,’ said Shirin, ‘that after all, this is not a revolution, so much as a coup? We have a roadblock, do we not? This clot it is blocking the circulation? And now . . .’

‘I think I’m losing your thread,’ said the glassy-eyed consultant, who had grown up in Harrogate. And so he went off to fill in forms, and Shirin, who was a painter, sat looking at Phillip’s liver-spotted hands with the tubes stuck in them, laid out by his sides, like a pietà. She knew about all this.

After the roadblocks comes the random firing. Rapidly, the streets fill with the injured and the lost, with backfiring ambulances, with gunfire and the reports of gunfire; in moments, the storm troopers arrive and the fires start. Then, the black government vehicles, the ones you’d hoped were rumours, cruise the streets in their sleek silence. Now, the city puts up its shutters, and gets behind them. Now, the new order, the months and years of damage. Last time, she had got away.

She picked up one of Phillip’s hands, carefully. It was only slightly cooler than normal, but it felt hard, like the cast of a hand.

‘Darling,’ said Shirin, ‘you’ll be in for months.’ And, as if in reply, Phillip’s catheter bag filled with pee.

1989: at that time, hardly anyone carried phones, and the phones that were carried were ridiculous, and their bearers objects of fun. There were still messages, then: phone boxes, faxes, answer-machines, pagers, telegrams, Filofaxes, bike couriers, notes. There were pigeonholes in all sorts of places and out-of-the way organizations, and billets-doux and death threats were put in them.

Of course, things often went wrong. You could hang a movie or a novel on a missed message, then; Phillip in his weary later years had done so several times. Conversely, getting through to people was a full-time job for legions of loaf-haired ladies – women who should have been sent to university instead of typing school; who, if they had, would have been running the company instead of the sweaty oafs in pinstripe behind them. Shirin was particularly good at getting through, though she operated on an entirely autodidactic, freelance basis. If she hadn’t been, as she pointed out to Phillip the first time she opened her little green Filofax containing the home numbers of the American ambassador, Douglas Hogg, Salman Rushdie and Charles Saatchi, she would be dead by now, or barefoot and nameless in a prison in Tehran.

Getting through wasn’t just about contacts, you see, it was also about focus, delegation, and intuition. For instance, reaching Phillip’s children from his second marriage would have taken Shirin several hours from the call box at the Royal Free Hospital, so, despite the names that Myfanwy, Phillip’s second wife, had called her at their previous meeting, Shirin phoned her directly, and, when she found her not at home, succeeded, in a single brilliant swoop, in having her paged in Waitrose on the Finchley Road.

In fact, this was the kind of thing Waitrose liked to manage particularly well. Whisked to the Manager’s teak-lined office, Myfanwy was kindly sat down in the Manager’s own leather chair with lean-back feature. She used this to the full as she listened to Shirin saying en suite and crisis. And when she replaced the receiver and murmured, ‘My husband. Stroke,’ and closed her eyes, the Manager did not hurry her, but slipped discreetly forward with a glass of water.

Myfanwy was in a reverie. She was seeing a tableau. She would have said both these words with a pronounced French accent which would have enormously irritated her daughter, Juliet. She’d learned it at RADA, in the late fifties. There, she’d also learned to celebrate, even indulge, her visual imagination. ‘Picture it!’ said the curious Polish movement teacher, Myfanwy’s second or was it third lover, in his heavy accent. ‘Picture it, Myfanwy, and let your body act the picture!’

On her vast bosom, Myfanwy’s be-ringed hand executed a dying fall for the long-lost Zbigniew. Myfanwy’s mind was picturing Phillip dead in his study (though Shirin had said stable, and en suite, several times): dead, yes, quite dead. Yellow, slumped on his vast desk like Marat in his bath, his horn-rimmed specs in his outstretched hand, harmless at last.

And then, into the reverie, entering stage left, gently removing the specs, and folding their legs, came her very good friend and colleague, the young estate agent from Hamptons. He was talking about Yewtree Row; he was saying, ‘More than a million, Mrs Prys, with renovations.’ And with that, the agent opened his hands to show the details of a pair of railway cottages in Cricklewood, property of Myfanwy Prys, that were unaccountably failing to sell, and folded into the brochures, the interest statements from the bank. The agent threw them in the air, like doves, all the bothersome papers, and they flew—

‘Madam?’ said the Waitrose Manager, for Myfanwy had involuntarily described an arc in the air with both hands. Myfanwy kept her eyes shut, raised one hand flat in a Popish gesture.

Now in her vision she saw, under Phillip’s bent yellow fingers, her deed of the divorce, and beside it, the agreement she had providentially pushed through with her lawyer: that in the event of the death of Phillip Prys before the majority of both his children, the estate should pass in trust to Myfanwy Shirley Davies Prys. Majority was twenty-five. Jake was twenty. Juliet was just sixteen. Myfanwy opened her eyes and smiled dazzlingly at the Manager.

‘Not fatal, I trust?’ he said.

‘Stable,’ said Myfanwy, ‘but critical.’ She blew her nose. ‘So no change there,’ she added, shocking the poor man to the core.

Myfanwy’s eye fell on the Manager’s phone. State of the art, push-button, black, and not her bill. Myfanwy adored Directory Enquiries. ‘May I make a few calls?’ she said.

And so it was that shortly, in a girls’ private school in Baker Street, an excited sixth-former went in search of the form mistress of that hopeless skiver, Juliet Prys: and, in a college in Oxford, a porter in a bowler beckoned a random undergraduate across the quad. The form mistress consulted a timetable, and set off for the gym: the porter simply handed over a note, confident that such a conspicuous young man as Jake Prys, one equipped with the quiff of the year, the open shirt of the month, and, the porter strongly suspected, the lipstick of the day would be easily located.

Juliet was found in the gym changing room with her best friend, Celia. Celia was crouched on the slatted bench wearing two coats and clutching a book. Celia was anorexic: her hand on the book was yellow and light as a leaf. Juliet was used to this. Juliet hardly cared. Juliet was standing in her knickers: Aertex on and school skirt off; a small, round, pink girl with a dark pony fringe, aggrieved, up-tilted eyebrows, a loose glossy lower lip and an out-thrust tummy like a toddler.

‘Kirwan,’ said Celia. ‘Heading for you.’

‘I’m in my pants,’ said Juliet, pouting.

‘It’s OK,’ hissed Celia, ‘she’s looking really sympathetic. Whatever it is, I’m coming with you, yeah? I’ll die if I have to pick up a hockey stick.’ Celia might, actually: you could see the double bones of her forearm, clear as a biology diagram. Juliet turned to her teacher, and held out the silly pie-frill skirt.

‘Miss Kirwan,’ she said, priggishly, ‘I’m changing.’ Unnecessary. A nearly dead father on its own, it soon transpired, was top dollar for skivers. Not only good enough to miss PE but also double French, and Celia was warmly urged to take Juliet all the way home. And within minutes the girls stood smoking in Baker Street, just outside the Tube. Though:

‘I should go to French, actually,’ said Celia. ‘I need to revise.’

‘Celia,’ said Juliet, inhaling importantly, ‘you’re a monomaniac. My dad’s had a stroke.’

‘I need all As,’ said Celia, ‘I need to go to Oxford. You know that. And besides, you haven’t even cried yet.’

‘I know,’ said Juliet, grinding her fag out beneath her pixie boot, ‘mad, isn’t it?’ She wandered into the station, trying to remember what her father looked like. She had his yellowy eyes in mind, and his reddish shining head, and his wide cross mouth, and his knees in tweed beneath his keyhole desk, but she couldn’t picture his middle. ‘He must have a middle,’ she said, aloud. ‘What sort of jumpers does he wear?’

‘You’re in shock,’ said Celia, maternally. ‘Sugar. Shall I buy you some sweets?’ Every day, in this their sixteenth year, Celia had bought a family pack of Minstrels and fed them to Juliet: it was behaviour neither seemed able to stop. And now, she did it again.

‘Do you know what I thought when Mrs Kirwan said it?’ said Juliet, on the platform, munching. ‘About my dad? I mean, what I thought at that exact minute?’

‘No,’ said Celia, sourly.

‘Well,’ said Juliet, ‘first I thought, can I still go to Italy?’ (For Juliet was supposed to be going to Tuscany–then, a reasonably recherché destination – that summer with Celia and her family, and she was concerned that Celia was losing enthusiasm for the project. Or was getting too thin.) Celia raised a contemptuous eyebrow.

‘Then,’ said Juliet, ‘I wondered if it would make me thin. You know, grief.’

Celia’s dark pupils flickered in the stretched mask of her face, and her hand came up to cover her mouth, and then she howled with laughter, and Juliet saw in the harsh light of the platform that Celia was the wrong colour, now, the waxy yellow of preserved flesh, and the possibility of death, both for her father and her friend, occupied her mind for its necessarily brief space, like the train for Swiss Cottage rattling just then into the station, so very aluminium, so utilitarian and so large.

In Oxford, the note from the porter travelled out of the quad to the King’s Arms, and thence to a room in Merton where a pretty, smudged girl was still in a rumpled bed, and thence again to the Playhouse where Jake was sitting on the edge of the stage, a script on his knee, his quiff in his hand. The messenger, a chemistry student in Jake’s year who had never previously spoken to him, waited respectfully by his side as he read it. Jake refolded the paper, and handed it back. He looked at the chemist for a moment, then pushed back his quiff and sighed. ‘Just gotta channel it,’ said Jake, looking at his handsome, ringed hands. ‘Death, life, it’s all the same, isn’t it?’ Then, seeing the young man was still there: ‘Hey, man. Thanks.’ And the chemistry student went out to study the buses in George Street and be thankful he had never been drawn to the Arts.

Later, though, Jake did ring Myfanwy’s flat, and got Celia. Myfanwy was up at Phillip’s house, tidying it or something. Fighting with Shirin, probably. Juliet was chain-smoking on the sofa, making ‘v’ signs at the phone.

Jake said: ‘Look, how is he?’

And Celia, modest and calm, said, ‘Critical but stable.’

Jake said: ‘See, I’m on stage tonight. You know. A new piece. I know Dad would want it this way.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Celia.

Jake said, ‘But I’ll ring, you see. I’ll need someone to be in, to tell me how it’s going, even if it’s late.’

‘Well,’ said Celia, ‘that could be me. I’m staying tonight.’

‘First I’ve heard of it,’ said Juliet, in the background.

‘Might be midnight, might be two,’ said Jake. ‘You be there, Celia, hmm? And I’ll see you soon.’

Juliet looked up from her cigarette. ‘Has he fucked off?’ she said.

‘It’s terrible about the oil,’ said Celia, putting on the television. ‘Exxon Valdez.’

‘Seal,’ said Juliet, ‘Jake really is a shit, honestly, he is, he doesn’t care about anyone else. Don’t get a pash on him, Seal, honestly. Listen. I’m giving you advice.’

‘Look,’ said Celia, pointing at the telly, her fluffy head trembling like a dandelion on its stalk. ‘Gulls.’

‘Poor sods,’ said Juliet. ‘Turn it over, Seal. You know I can’t concentrate on the news. There’s too much of it.’

2

In 1989, there were just crazy amounts of news: news from all quarters of both hemispheres of the globe; news of the very meatiest, most ideological, melodramatic sort – the Exxon Valdez was a popped pimple to most of it. Merely in the months Phillip lay in hospital, moving from Intensive to Critical, Critical to General, learning to slump in a wheelchair and sip from a spoon, Poland held democratic elections, the Ayatollah Khomeini died, the Americans went into Panama, there was a massacre in Tiananmen Square, and Mrs Thatcher introduced the poll tax in Scotland. So much news: so much of it, like the sunny weather, so unexpectedly gratifying to the English spectator, so fully supportive of the notion that he had been right all along, right since Hitler – you’d never have thought a playwright’s stroke would make the papers.

But there were also so very many papers, then; and the papers were so fat; and written almost entirely by people who had been obliged to read Phillip’s epoch-making play, The Pit and Its Men, at school, and to include it in studies of Angry Young Men at university; that the stroke did feature in the news. And not just the Ham and High either (‘Local Author Phillip Prys “Stable but Critical” ’) but also a paragraph seven pages into the Independent, and a small article in the Los Angeles Times, which linked Phillip (incorrectly) with Richard Burton, and said that he was dead.

It took yards of Giles’ fax to sort out the LA Times. Meantime, in Britain, English teachers weary of revision, sick of marking exam-practice essays with variations on Describe the dilemma Pip faces in The Pit and Its Men. Does he make the right choice? (GCSE) or In its original production, The P&IM was described as ‘amoral, communist and justifying matricide’. Do you agree? (A-Level), happened upon the Independent notice and told their pupils about it, even as far as Pontyprys, where Phillip grew up, and Cuik High School, Cuik, Scotland, where the young English teacher, Mr Fox, had unconventionally opted to teach The Pit for Higher. Mr Fox had thought, in this breezeblock lowland town crouched among orange bings, that the play would reflect the kids’ mining background and set something alight, but, as his colleagues had predicted, none of the kids doing Higher actually had mining backgrounds, those ones all left after Standard Grade, and several of the Higher students were insulted by the mere idea. Of the thirty pupils in the Higher English set, in fact, only Struan Robertson reacted to the news of the stroke.

‘Would that be an embolism, sir, or a thrombosis?’

Struan worked part-time in an old people’s home and intended to be a dentist. He was also that exotic thing, an orphan, though his dad had died of MS, not a thrombosis.

‘I have no idea,’ said Mr Fox.

‘Well, I’m sure we all wish him well, sir,’ said Struan. ‘Either way. I’m sure we’ll be thinking of him, as we are writing about his play, sir, and wishing him the very best.’

And thus, tranquilly, in the mild early summer, Struan took his Higher English, and aced it. In England, meanwhile, Juliet made an utter arse of her GCSEs, and Celia was hospitalized with jaundice but came out in time to sit her Maths. Jake Prys phoned his mother and told her he was taking his Two Gentlemen to Edinburgh, the postmodern, Tiananmen one.

On the last day of June, Giles went to visit Phillip, and put Wimbledon on the radio: ‘There’s a terrific young chap playing,’ he said looking anxiously at his inert premier client. ‘German. Like a ploughman out of Breughel. Listen, off he goes, biff boff baff! Terrific. You should see him. Calves like hyacinths in sport socks.’ And then there wasn’t a lot else to say, really: it wasn’t as if Phil could talk. So Giles said, as everyone said, on their way to the door: ‘You’ll be out soon, old chap. Can’t quite believe it.’

Because there was another thing about 1989, in England. Hospitals had very surprisingly stopped being places of recovery, where nourishing meals were served at regular intervals to persons on plump pillows and floors were scrubbed by junior nurses. Hospitals instead had become tense, dirty, over-crowded warehouses where anyone able to breathe independently, let alone sit with assistance and eat from a spoon, was sent home. It had taken ages for this change to occur, people had voted for it, and it was very well documented, but somehow, most people went on believing in the Former Hospital, in the matrons, pillows, and scrubbing, until the moment they actually found themselves genuinely on the pavement with a real, incontinent, elderly relative in a dressing gown, in the actual act of hailing a minicab. Even then, as they often said to anyone who would listen, they simply couldn’t believe it.

‘I simply can’t believe it,’ said Myfanwy to Shirin. ‘I can’t believe that they are going to send him home. In that state. With a nappy.’

‘There is a district nurse,’ said Shirin, ‘twice a day. For the rest, I can buy private help.’

‘And what,’ asked Myfanwy, ‘is the hourly rate on that?’

But a lot of the time it wasn’t at all bad. For a start, the sleeping thing. How many hundred nights had Phillip spent stalking sleep across the dark moors of the small hours, or tracking it on the flickering dial of his Roberts radio? How many bunches of hops had he shaken at it, how many cups of hot milk had he abjectly offered, shivering in the doorway in his dressing gown and slippers, only to have it shake its flanks and evade him at the last moment? It was a satisfaction, then, to have it curled up so, plumply on his plumped-up pillow. All Phillip needed to do was shut his eyes (he thought he was learning to move one eyelid. No one had noticed) and sleep would cover him with its scented mink, release him into spectacularly liberated, near-hallucinogenic dreams.

Even when he was awake, memories seemed near, and enormous: meringues from his fifth birthday party, warty with burnt sugar; his great-aunt’s fruit cage in supernatural 3D Kodachrome. And they weren’t static, these visions, they weren’t photographs, oh no. They moved, billiard balls on an infinity of baize. You could travel with the croquet ball, smack through the butterflied hoop, chase its textured scarlet roundness through the tunnel of long grass. A lot of the visions had to do with tunnelling, in fact, a side effect, surely, of the black cone which seemed permanently round his eyes (he did wish he could move his head), but a pleasant one. Like being a camera. You could home in on that greenfly on your great-aunt’s raspberry bush, on the very bulbous fruit. Spectacular. Smashing. Everything there but the smells.

3

Literary Giant seeks young man to push bathchair. Own room in Hampstead, all found, exciting cultural milieu. Modest wage. Ideal ‘gap year’ opportunity. Apply Prys Box 4224XXC.

It was Mr Fox who passed Struan the ad. He had been handing Struan things at the end of class, all year, ever since Struan had taken 20 out of 20 on the Macbeth Test. Books, mostly, but also newspaper articles, also flyers for poetry readings in strange Edinburgh pubs. Struan took it, as he had taken all the others, slowly and courteously, pausing to put his sports bag on the floor and rest his great length on the foremost flip-top desk, to turn the paper over in his extra-large, spade-shaped fingers. It was clipped from the London Review of Books, a journal he had not previously encountered.

This, on Struan’s behalf, was pure philanthropy. Cuik Library was well stocked, and Struan’s card well dog-eared. Struan had read The Outsider, Huis Clos, and Franny and Zooey (though not, it is true, Portnoy’s Complaint) well before Mr Fox handed him his precious paperbacks. Nor had Struan, appreciative though he was of poetry, any wish to go in a pub before he was of age, or indeed to journey twenty miles to Edinburgh on a week night. Struan stayed and talked to his teacher because outside the classroom you could hear the engine growl of tall fifth-years talking from the bottom of their newly broken voices, from the bases of their acned throats. You could hear the chafing sound of third-years kicking the corridor wall. Almost, you could hear the spit they were saving, gargling from one side to the other of their mouths. Struan stayed to keep his teacher in the classroom where it was safe and warm, where the sun was coming briefly through the too-large windows. Struan stayed because he worried about Mr Fox.

He had done so from the first minute, when Mr Fox had bounced into their Higher English class waving his Bog People poems and his unconventional hair. Mr Fox was undersized. He was English. English English: a voice like the telly. He was filling in for Mr Nicholl, who had taught twenty-five years at Cuik, and who had recently suffered a heart attack – an actual, red-faced, groaning, gratifying heart attack during which had shouted at his third-years and clutched at an imaginary tawse. Mr Fox was at most twenty-one. He was keen on acting out. He was a ditcher of worksheets, an importer of photocopied poems about blackberries and frogspawn, poems by Catholics, or folks at any rate with Catholic names, and he believed Shakespeare was gay.

In such circumstances, there was very little Struan could do, but he always wiped insulting graffiti off the board before his class, and regularly removed toilet rolls and once a turd from the teacher’s chair. Struan had the authority to do this. No wee guy, young or old, had bothered Struan since he got his height and his dad had died, which had happened at the same time, two years ago. Overnight, his identity as one of a beleaguered group of skinny swotty third-years with overloaded bags had disappeared into an aura of peculiar, lofty virtue. Now, he was a sort of Lazarus figure, six two in his nylon socks, his grey jaw and set green eyes gazing into another country. It was to Struan, not the staffroom, to whom the third-years ran when they had driven Mr Nicholl to apoplexy, and Struan, not the staff first-aider, who had administered the kiss of life and heart massage and saved the bristly old man’s life. Struan read the lesson at Prize-Giving. He was mentioned in Talks to prospective pupils, and in dispatches to the Council. His outlandish good marks were popularly forgiven as a sort of excess of grief, like his height, rather than a hideous striving after distinction. So Struan could afford to throw the heron’s wing of his protection over his small fluffy teacher as he bounced down the corridor, and he did, as often as possible.

But none of this, he could see now, had done any good. Mr Fox’s hair had declined, flat to his scalp, and his friendly beery eyes had retreated into his head. He had developed a cower. His original nickname, Mr False – a tribute to his accent – had given way to the simple Turdy-Man. And now he seemed to be telling Struan he was quitting altogether.

‘You’re going back to England, sir?’ said Struan, as kindly as he knew how.

Mr Fox started, blushed, then shook his head.

‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t thinking of me, Struan. I was thinking of you.’

‘Me?’ said Struan.

‘You’re the one who works in the old folks’ home,’ said Mr Fox, who had been horrified when he realized Struan had kept up this job, all weekend and three evenings, straight through his exams. ‘I think that’s what “bathchair” means.’

‘Bathchairs are wicker, are they no?’ said Struan. ‘They cannae seriously be using equipment like that.’

‘It’s a joke,’ said Mr Fox. ‘An old literary guy. And look: Prys Hampstead.’

‘Oh,’ said Struan. He crumpled the piece of paper over in his hand. A flush of blood spread up his strange, grey complexion, highlighting his freckles. ‘It wouldnae be Phillip Prys, though.’

‘Why not?’ said Mr Fox. ‘He had the stroke, remember. We read about it?’

‘Still,’ said Struan, ‘it wouldnae.’

‘They do exist,’ said Mr Fox. ‘Famous people. So does London.’

Struan knew that. He had taken Standard Geography. He knew Newcastle was there, beyond the great orange bings that surrounded Cuik, over the vast emptiness of the Borders, and York beyond that. He knew Paris was out there too, and New York, somewhere, full of masturbating Portnoys and Woody Allen, and California, and Lanzarote, where he’d been with the Sunshine Promise People and sat with his dying father on a hot black beach. But London was different from these other places, and Struan felt irritated with his teacher for ignoring this self-evident fact. Plenty folk in Cuik had been to Spain, and even Portugal, and come back burnt red, and settled back down to their Cuik lives. No one assumed their journeys had put them above themselves, or made them homosexual. But no one Struan knew had ever come back from London.

‘You could send your CV,’ persisted Mr Fox.

‘Ma curriculum vitae?’ said Struan.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Fox. ‘Just – speculatively, you know.’ He liked saying that. CV. Speculative. In 1989, CVs were in the air. All of a sudden, everyone had one and was sending it somewhere, by fax. Mr Fox had whizzed his own off that morning, as it happened, to a London publisher’s.

‘Actually, sir, I did a CV, last week, in secretarial studies,’ said Struan. ‘I’m taking a module, you know, now I’ve done my big exams. We had to pretend we were applying to the Council, for a summer job.’

‘That’ll do, then,’ said Mr Fox. ‘And you know, it wouldn’t affect your dentistry application, Aberdeen would hold your place.’

Aberdeen had already asked him to delay a year, in fact. Struan should have told his teacher so. But he didn’t. He was thinking about his CV, and the loathsome, pallid person who had somehow emerged from his busy clack-clacking. He had nothing to put under ‘other interests’. Not Duke of Edinburgh, not Drama, not Sport. You couldn’t put Death, or The Elderly, or Gran in any of those lists. ‘Badminton,’ he’d lied, in the end. ‘Current Affairs.’ That meant telly.

‘It’s a good idea,’ said Mr Fox, as he had been saying for months, ‘to get some life experience. Seventeen is too young for university.’

Struan gulped. ‘They’d feed me?’ he asked. ‘It wouldnae be just the room?’

Mr Fox nodded. ‘It says “all found”,’ he said. ‘Anyway, Struan, look, you’re just applying, right? You’re just shooting off an arrow in the air. Who knows where it will land, mm?’

Struan closed his eyes momentarily. He clenched his fists. He pictured that arrow, buffeting merrily across a blue, English sky, its feathers fluffy and nonchalant as Mr Fox’s former quiff. Then he pictured his grandmother at the kitchen table with her cup of tea. She wasn’t saying anything mean, that was never the trouble. She was saying, ‘I’m that proud of you, son,’ and her pebbly green eyes were watering as they did so often now, since his father died. He didn’t want her to wipe her hands on her pinny because of the rasping noise it made. Would she be proud of him if he did this? Would she mind? He could say, ‘Look, Gran, the Uni want me to take the year off, and there’s no work here,’ and she’d know that was true. There had been no work in Cuik for a decade, since the mine closed. Not even the old people’s home could give Struan more hours for the summer. If he did this thing, went to England, he wouldn’t need to ask Gran for anything. He’d saved up his money from the Home, he could get his own clothes and ticket, he could even leave her a bit of cash, just take maybe £50 with him, as a starter.

‘It’s only England,’ said Mr Fox, ‘in the end, just a few hours on the train. You can always come home.’

‘Ah’ve never been though, Mr Fox,’ said Struan, ‘never been South.’

‘Then you should,’ said Mr Fox, nodding emphatically, ‘then you really should. Everyone should travel, at least a bit. Broaden the mind. I went to Thailand, you know.’

Thailand, Struan wanted to say, was one thing. Mr Struther’s new wee wife came from Thailand. Hampstead was another. But:

‘Uh-huh,’ said Struan. ‘OK. Thanks, Mr Fox. I’ll give it a shot.’

4

July 1989. The news continued strange and beautiful. In South Africa, President P. W. Botha met the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, face to face. In Siberia, three hundred thousand coal miners went on strike and were not attacked with tanks, or forced into gulags. The first President Bush visited Poland and Hungary, and was not attacked, either. In London, the summer continued equally lovely and unreal: each day, a sky like a dazzling silk tent; each night, breezes hot as breath, and spurts of stink like steam from a ham-bone.

In Yewtree Row, the long, closely placed sash windows had been open for weeks, their hand-blown glass flashing in the sun, their shutters pulled half across. In the black-and-white shade behind them, the rooms sighed, and rustled, and smelled: tar, teak oil, polish, dust, the very bricks seeming to give up the last whiff of the horse shit they’d been mixed with two centuries ago.

On the first floor, Shirin was at work in the en-suite bathroom. She had taken to spending most of her time, when she wasn’t with Phillip, in here. Cramped – but that wasn’t much of a problem, for not only was Shirin herself very small, but she painted miniatures, postmodern Persian ones, in acrylic, on boards as big as her hand. The bathroom light was good: high and a little diffused, and one could run a little water in the round grass-green bath for background ambience. If you shut the bathroom and bedroom doors, you could not hear the nurses come and go at all; or Myfanwy, using her key with abandon, banging economical, self-righteous brooms.

At the moment, Shirin was simply letting her. She had an opening in a week, on Cork Street; it would make the papers because of the Iranian election, and her Khomeini/Father sequence was not even half done. So she’d let Myfanwy put an ad in the magazine, instead of employing a professional nurse as the hospital had suggested. She’d accepted that it was necessary to think of the children’s trust fund. She’d insisted on knocking through from the study to the loo under the stairs to make a sort of bathroom for Phillip; but she’d let Myfanwy veto a ramp to the front door, on the grounds that the door case was listed, agreed that a bit of plywood would work quite well instead. She’d let Myfanwy run through the CVs, pick out the Scottish boy; she was currently letting her sort out the room. Shirin had no idea if this was wise: it had not happened to her before that her semi-paralysed husband was returned to her care within six months of marriage while she was preparing for her first major show. Shirin would consider wisdom later. In the meantime, four pieces were still in gesso. One was actually wet.

As it dried, she was gilding: the scimitar of a prince leaning from a black car against a textured silky red and purple background which on closer inspection seemed to be either a gathering of blood corpuscles or a crowd of cowed, veiled heads. Shirin breathed on the foil to make it stick, licked it down with an infinitesimally tiny sable brush.