December (30 page)

'Got nuffink in common wiv
Sile no more,' Tom said. 'Must be due a bus-pass by now, anyway. If not a
bleeding bypass.'

      
'He keeps himself fit,' Case said. 'He's working with a number
of young musicians.'

      
'Figures.' Tom shovelled in the last of his risotto.

      
'Tom's a hopeless carnivore,' Shelley found herself saying,
almost shrilly, as a way of hauling him into their own chat. Aren't you, love?'

      
Sir Wilfrid looked up with grudging approval.
      
'Nothing wrong with that,' Broadbank
said. 'Besides, a chap needs a bit of muscle in Tom's profession. Must burn up
a terrific amount of energy in one of these two-hour rock concerts. Saw that
chap Springsteen on the box the other week, didn't we, Meryl, absolutely
drenched in perspiration.'

      
An unfortunate comment, Shelley thought. Although a good few
miles from his Telecaster and wielding nothing more demanding than a knife and
fork, Tom, at dinner, wore the surface moisture of a musician at the end of a
very heavy gig.
      
Shelley sneaked a glance at her
watch: not yet nine-thirty, and the sweat was already rolling down his checks
like lava from Vesuvius. If she could just get him through another hour without
an eruption, then perhaps they could make an excuse to leave.

      
'I don't know why we're talking about boring old rock and
roll,' she said with a light laugh. 'Tom hasn't done a concert in years.'

      
'Gets plenty of practice, though,' Sir Wilfrid said grimly from
the end of the table. 'Round the clock, sometimes, if I'm any judge. Sounds like
a damned horse having a tooth pulled.'

      
Shelley dropped her fork. 'I'll prepare the pudding,' Meryl said.

It was less offensive for a
while.

      
After that one song as John Lennon, the singer abandoned the
piano and took up an acoustic, a working guitarist's Takamine with the built-in
pick-up and a little Trace amp.

      
He did Paul Simon, clipped and clear, comically over-playing
the Noo Yawk vowels. Then he gave himself messed-up hair, an amiable shamble
and a wonky grin: Neil Young to the life.

      
The bloke was actually good, even better between numbers,
staying in character, fumbling at his machine-heads, mumbling at his audience
or giving them the phoney history of some song: dates, times, women. Sometimes
you could even forget it was an act. When, during his Leonard Cohen spot, he
politely invited a lady from the audience to sweeten his night, the woman
actually looked charmed, and flushed, silly bitch.

      
No real harm in this. Prof relaxed for the first time since
he'd rolled off his sofa around mid-afternoon. The man on stage was screwing a
harmonica around his neck, putting on dark glasses: Bob Dylan.

      
Prof caught a waiter's eye, pointed at his glass. He still couldn't
see anything about the man himself that he recognised.
      
He was in hiding, deep cover - Bob
Dylan being as good a place as any if you wanted to confuse the issue.

      
Prof leaned over the table and closed his eyes, head in his
hands, a five-pound note trapped under one elbow.

      
The Dylan opened with what you'd call an affectionate pastiche,
the young, rasping, incisive folk-rocker of
Highway
61
days, mid-sixties.

      
Prof heard a clinking, lifted an elbow. The voice from the
speakers had loosened, deepening and warming up before your very ears, into the
phoney, countrified, down-home, big-brass-bed Dylan in a cowboy hat.

      
A big whisky had materialised at Prof's elbow in exchange for
the fiver. He was wondering how this act would sound on record. Probably less
effective; you closed your eyes and the actual impersonation was not all that
hot; what made it work was the guy's obvious understanding of his subjects,
where they were coming from emotionally, psychologically. Like he'd been there
too.

      
Like he was there now, in fact.

      
Dylan was into this one-to-one dialogue with his ole buddy
God. After which, in a scruffy little Tombstone hat, he progressively frayed -
you could hear this happening, the artist growing slovenly and decrepit like
the lyrics - so that in the end you couldn't tell whether these were Dylan's
own duff words or substitutes. Clever, very cruel: the transition from
freewheeling hero to a kind of embarrassing vagrant, in ten minutes.

      
Prof laughed, the booze making it easier. He'd a pretty good
impression by now of who this bloke approved of, who made him suspicious and
which one - just the one - was causing him some personal pain. With a few songs
he changed all the lyrics, with others none at all, bringing out the irony
through emphasis, at sometimes he'd alter a single line or maybe just one word
and it reflected back on the composer. In some way he was telling you more than
you'd learn if you saw the guys themselves in concert.

      
And then at the end he dropped the satire. It just fell away;
the whole atmosphere changed. He strolled around a couple of times, looked up
at the ceiling. Sat down to present again the man who caused him pain. And for
real this time.

      
The communion-wafer glasses again. Could the bastard see through
those glasses, or had they been sprayed white, so that when he was wearing them
all he could see was light?

      
And what else? What else
can he see?

      
He sat on a stool, up front, with his guitar. He said, by way
of introduction, Lennon's voice - his speaking voice, which was different, deeper.
'This is one for me old mates.'
      
It went as quiet as these clubs
ever did.
      
In
my Life
. Tissues out, folks, Prof thought cynically. People and things that
went before. Tears in the whisky: poor bastard, this was his personal epitaph
five years before the event.

      
He had a drink, closed his eyes. Rooms didn't even swim any
more when he did that, lead in his boots nowadays.
      
Places he remembered. Some had
gone, some remained.
      
Prof thought about when he had
lived in a real house. Fulham. Wife and kids. Cherry had been remarried two
years now - an estate agent, what could you say? Saw his kids, occasionally,
two at university, the eldest girl, Carla, in what she called 'a serious
long-term relationship', which meant he was going to be a bloody
grandad
by Christmas.
This is your grandad, he once re-mixed an album
by Marc Bolan, dead now but he was famous for a few years
.

      
People he'd known. Some deceased and some still living - just
about. In his life he'd loved them all.

      
Prof took off his glasses, rolled the sticky whisky glass
across his forehead.

      
Had he ever really loved anybody when he was totally sober? He
pushed the base of the glass into an eyelid, bringing up a night sky full of
pulsing nebulae, like he used to do as a kid, a swirling orange-coloured blob
coming at him, expanding and then dissolving into many scattered fragments of
light, like lights in windows, rows and rows of windows in a great, wide tower
block, bigger than any tower block he'd ever seen, bigger than ...

      
places I remember

      
This was one he
didn't
remember. He just felt this overwhelming loneliness, damp and gassy, heavy in
the air. Something had happened to make everybody lonely.

      
And all the people were singing,
Hey Jude.

      
Something wrong. How could you be listening to one song and
yet hearing another sung by many voices, mostly out of tune?

      
Prof, floating above it all in the miasma of loneliness,
thought suddenly,
I'm looking through his
glasses, I'm seeing this through the wrong bloody glasses.

      
Out, he thought, get out of this. This is nothing to do with you,
Kenneth, don't get involved.

      
But he
was
involved.
He'd been involved since he conned his way into a cramped listening studio
under a tatty South London record shop and ran some tape that should have been left
to bake to a crisp.

      
When he managed to open his eyes, the room seemed bigger than
he recalled. He was looking up at the ceiling, so far above him it disappeared
into shadows. The atmosphere was dense and smoky, too many bloody cigarettes.

      
It was all a blur. He patted the table, trying to find his glasses.
The table was damp.

      
He peered at the bleary people at the tables, men and women,
mostly men. He wished he was with them, just part of the crowd, normal, invisible.
And yet they were all idiots, they knew nothing.

      
places I remember ...

      
He was still alone in his little circle - what am I,
radioactive?
      
In his own atmosphere, a different
sphere, not part of their world, thanks very much ... please let me in ...

      
 
... though some have changed.

      
Glasses, glasses, where the hell ...

      
A white hand beckoning. Prof took a tentative step up a long passageway
into a white place. There were people in there. White people. People like gas.

      
... some forever...

      
Stop it!

      
The whisky glass exploded in Prof's hands as he cranked
himself to his feet, his limbs unfolding stiffly like a rusty crane.
      
'Stop it.
Stop it! Get me out!'

      
He was closing his lists, forcing the spearpoint shards of
glass into his flesh, urging the fresh blood to run. He knew he was screaming
again, just like last night, his whole body wracked with painful shivers.

      
In the tumult, he couldn't hear what he was screaming until
the bouncers, two of them now, were escorting him, feet off the ground, towards
the exit and he could hear the echo of it and see the singer's eyes flaring up
behind the glasses and the hands freezing on the strings.

XII

Reassurance for the Living

'If this turns out a
disaster,' Meryl said, 'it'll be no more than his own fault. I did
warn
him not to invite the Tulleys. Sir
Wilfrid is not
a
pleasant man, I said. My
old uncle, that's Geoff Thornton, from Shackleys' old cottage, up by the church
- were they there in your day, the Shackleys? - he once did some gardening for
the Tulleys my uncle Geoff. Never again, he said. Never again.'

      
She was chatting to the Lady Bluefoot. The ghost, a sensitive
soul who did not like upset of any kind, had been the first to leave the dining-room,
gliding ahead of Meryl across the back hall and into the lung, low-ceilinged
kitchen.

      
Meryl could hear the swish of taffeta as the Lady Bluefoot passed
through the wall.

      
'But he'll likely smooth things over. He usually does. Be
a
challenge for him. He's bored, you see, is Martin. Could have twice,
three times as many supermarkets. Not interested.'

      
Meryl, who prided herself on her discretion, became unusually
garrulous when talking to the Lady Bluefoot - who, after all, knew everything
that went on under this roof, so where was the harm?

      
'A challenge for him. Which his work isn't any more, that's the
problem. So he sets up these situations - confrontations, people who he knows'll
be rubbing each other up the wrong way - almost as entertainment. Which he
shouldn't do, m'lady, and he knows that, too.'

      
Meryl held up a cut-glass sundae cup to the soft, concealed lighting.
'There now - what do you think?"

      
A former domestic science teacher at a high school near
Cheltenham, she herself had found it an interesting challenge to prepare a sophisticated
dinner involving no animal products whatsoever. She'd used soya cream for the
raspberry mousse and was pleased with how it had turned out.
      
'Rather like the old syllabub,' she
explained, still trying to calm the ruffled spirit. 'You used to have those in
your day, m'lady. I'll bet you did '

      
To her abiding sorrow, Meryl had never actually seen the Lady
Bluefoot, nor even the tiny blue shoes after which she was named and which, it
was said, could be observed sometimes padding from the hall to the dining-room,
where Lord Rendall's body with its broken neck had been laid when the servants
carried him into the farmhouse.
      
How, then, people would ask, did
she know that the spirit so sensitive to any form of domestic upset was indeed
the Lady Bluefoot?