Enduring Love (22 page)

Wordsworth was a notorious grouch at that stage of his life—he was forty-seven—but he was friendly enough to Keats, and after a few minutes of small talk asked him what he’d been working on. Haydon jumped in and answered for him, and begged Keats to repeat
the ode to Pan from
Endymion
, So Keats walked up and down in front of the great man, reciting in “his usual half-chant (most touching) …” It was at this point in the story that Clarissa fought the restaurant clamor and quoted:

And when the passionate young man was done, Wordsworth, apparently unable to endure any longer this young man’s adoration, delivered into the silence his shocking, dismissive verdict by saying drily, “A Very pretty piece of Paganism,” which, according to Haydon, was “unfeeling and unworthy of his high Genius to a Worshipper like Keats—and Keats felt it
deeply
”—and never forgave him.

“But do we trust this story?” Jocelyn said. “Didn’t I read in Gittings that we shouldn’t?”

“We don’t.” Clarissa began to count off the reasons.

If I had stood up while she did so and turned toward the entrance, I would have seen across half an acre of talking heads two figures come in and speak to the maitre d’. One of the men was tall, but I don’t think I took that in. I knew it later, but a trick of memory has given me the image as if I had stood then: the crowded room, the tall man, the maitre d’ nodding and gesturing vaguely in our direction. And then what, in fantasy, could I have done to persuade Clarissa and Jocelyn and the strangers at the next table to leave their meals and run with me up the stairs to find by interconnecting doors a way down into the street? On a score of sleepless nights I’ve been back to plead with them to leave.
Look
, I say to our neighbors, you
don’t know me, but I know what is about to happen. I’m from a tainted future. It was a
mistake, it doesn’t have to happen. We could choose another outcome. Put down your knives and forks and follow me, quick! No, really, please trust me. Just trust me. Let’s go!

But they do not see or hear me. They go on eating and talking. And so did I.

I said, “But the story lives on. The famous put-down.”

“Yes,” Jocelyn said eagerly. “It isn’t true, but we need it. A kind of myth.”

We looked to Clarissa. She was usually reticent about what she knew really well. Years ago, at a party, I had gone down on drunken knees to get her to recite from memory
La Belle Dame sans Merci
. But today we were celebrating and trying to forget, and it was best to keep talking.

“It isn’t true, but it tells the truth. Wordsworth was arrogant to the point of being loathsome about other writers. Gittings has this good line about his being in the difficult second half of a man’s forties. When he got to fifty he calmed down, brightened up, and everyone around him could breathe. By then Keats was dead. There’s always something delicious about young genius spurned by the powerful. You know, like The Man Who Turned Down the Beatles for Decca. We know that God in the form of history will have his revenge …”

The two men were probably making their way between the tables toward us by then. I’m not sure. I have excavated that last half-minute and I know two things for sure. One was that the waiter brought us sorbets. The other was that I slipped into a daydream. I often do. Almost by definition, daydreams leave no trace; they really do dodge conception to the very bourne of heaven, then leave the naked brain. But I’ve been back so many times, and I’ve retrieved it by remembering what triggered it: Clarissa’s
By then Keats was dead
.

The words, the memento mori, floated me off. I was briefly gone.
I saw them together, Wordsworth, Haydon, Keats, in a room in Monkton’s house on Queen Anne Street, and imagined the sum of their every sensation and thought, and all the stuff—the feel of clothes, the creak of chairs and floorboards, the resonance in their chests of their own voices, the little heat of reputation, the fit of their toes in their shoes, and things in pockets, the separate assumptions of recent pasts and what they would be doing next, the growing, tottering frame they carried of where they were in the story of their lives—all this as luminously self-evident as this clattering, roaring restaurant, and all
gone
, just like Logan was when he was sitting on the grass.

What takes a minute to describe took two seconds to experience. I returned, and compensated for my absence by telling Clarissa and Jocelyn a genius-spurned story of my own. A retired publisher, married to a physicist friend of mine, told me that back in the fifties he had turned down a novel called
Strangers from Within
. (By then the visitors must have been ten feet away, right behind our table. I don’t think they even saw us.) The point about my friend was that he only discovered his error thirty years later, when an old file turned up at the place where he used to work. He hadn’t remembered the name on the typescript—he was reading dozens every month—and he did not read the book when it finally appeared. Or at least, not at first. The author, William Golding, had renamed it
Lord of the Flies
and had excised the long boring first chapter that had put my friend off.

I think I was about to draw my resounding conclusion—that time protects us from our worst mistakes—but Clarissa and Jocelyn were not listening. I too had been aware of movement to one side. Now I followed their sight lines and turned. The two men who had stopped by the table next to ours seemed to have suffered burns to the face. Their skin was a lifeless prosthetic pink, the color of dolls or of Band-Aids, the color of no one’s skin. They shared a robotic nullity of expression. Later we learned about the latex masks, but at the time
these men were a shocking sight, even before they acted. The arrival of the waiter with our desserts in stainless steel bowls was temporarily soothing. Both men wore black coats that gave them a priestly look. There was ceremony in their stillness. The flavor of my sorbet was lime, just to the green side of white. I already had a spoon in my hand, but I hadn’t used it. Our table was staring shamelessly.

The intruders simply stood and looked down at our neighbors, who in turn looked back, puzzled, waiting. The young girl looked at her father and back to the men. The older man put down his empty fork and seemed about to speak, but he said nothing. A variety of possibilities unspooled before me at speed: a student stunt; vendors; the man, Colin Tapp, was a doctor or lawyer and these were his patients or clients; some new version of the kissogram; crazy members of the family come to embarrass. Around us the lunchtime uproar, which had dipped locally, was back to level. When the taller man drew from his coat a black stick, a wand, I inclined to the kissogram. But who was his companion, who now slowly turned to survey the room? He missed our table, it was so close. His eyes, piglike in the artificial skin, never met mine. The tall man, ready to cast his spell, pointed his wand at Colin Tapp.

And Tapp himself was suddenly ahead of us all by a second. His face showed us what we didn’t understand about the spell. His puzzlement, congealed in terror, could not find a word to tell us, because there was no time. The silenced bullet struck through his white shirt at his shoulder and lifted him from his chair and smacked him against the wall. The high-velocity impact forced a fine spray, a blood mist, across our tablecloth, our desserts, our hands, our sight. My first impulse was simple and self-protective: I did not believe what I was seeing. Clichés are rooted in truth: I did not believe my eyes. Tapp flopped forward across the table. His father did not move, not a muscle in his face moved. As for his daughter, she did the only
possible thing: she passed out, her mind closed down on this atrocity. She slipped sideways in her chair toward Jocelyn, who put out a hand—the instincts of an old sportsman—and though he could not prevent her fall, he caught her upper arm and saved her head from a bang.

Even as she was falling, the man was raising his gun again and aiming at the top of Tapp’s head, and would have killed him for sure. But that was when the man who had been eating alone jumped up with a shout, a doglike yelp, and just managed to cross the space in time to tilt the barrel with extended arm so that the second bullet sank high up on the wall. Even though his hair was cropped, how had I failed to recognize Parry?

At our table we could not move or speak. The two men moved away swiftly toward the entrance. The tall one tucked the gun and silencer into his coat as he went. I didn’t see Parry leave, but he must have gone off in another direction and left by one of the fire exits. Only two tables witnessed the event. There may have been a scream; then, for seconds on end, paralysis. Further off, no one heard a thing. The chatter, the chink of cutlery against plates, went stupidly on.

I looked at Clarissa. Her face was rouged on one side. I was about to say something to her when I got it, I understood completely, it came to me without effort, in that same neural flash of preverbal thought that comprehends relation and structure all at once, that knows the connection between things better than the things themselves. The unimaginable lodge. Our two tables—their composition, the numbers, the sexes, the relative ages. How had Parry known?

It was a mistake. Nothing personal. It was a contract, and it had been bungled. It should have been me.

But I felt nothing, not even a flicker of vindication. This was in the time before the invention of feeling, before the division of thought, before the panic and the guilt and all the choices. So we sat
there, unmoving, hopeless in shock, while around us the lunchtime uproar subsided as understanding spread concentrically outward from our silence. Two waiters were hurrying toward us, their faces loopily amazed, and I knew it was only when they reached us that our story could continue.

For the
second time that afternoon, and the second time in my life, I sat in a police station—this time Bow Street—waiting to be interviewed. Statisticians call this kind of thing random clustering, a useful way of denying it significance. Along with Clarissa and Jocelyn, there were seven other witnesses in the room—four restaurant customers from two nearby tables, two waiters, and the maitre d’. Mr. Tapp was expected to be able to give a statement from his hospital bed the next day. The girl and the old man were still too shocked to talk.

It was only a few hours on and already we were headlines in the evening paper. One of the waiters went out for a copy and we gathered round, and found ourselves strangely exalted to read our experience assimilated to the common stock of “restaurant outrage,” “lunchtime nightmare,” and “bloodbath.” The maitre d’ pointed to a sentence that described me as “the well-known science writer” and Jocelyn as “the eminent scientist,” while Clarissa was simply “beauteous.” The maitre d’ inclined his head toward us with professional
respect. We learned from the paper that Colin Tapp was an undersecretary at the Department of Trade and Industry. He was a businessman, recently promoted from the back benches, and was supposed to have “extensive connections as well as many enemies in the Middle East.” There was speculation about “a fearless have-a-go diner” who had saved Tapp’s life and mysteriously vanished. Inside the paper were background pieces about London as a “fanatics’ playground” and the availability of weapons, and an opinion piece on the fading of the “innocent, unviolent way of life we used to know.” The coverage seemed so familiar, as well as eerily instant. It was as if the subject had been mapped out long ago, and the event we had witnessed had been staged to give point to the writing.

There were two detective constables dealing with witness statements, but it was taking them a while to set up. After the excitement of the newspaper, we returned to our seats and a thick silence settled over us. There were frequent yawns, and weary smiles in acknowledgment of how infectious they were. At last the police were ready, and Clarissa and Jocelyn were the first to go in. She came out twenty minutes later and sat by me to wait for her godfather. She took the Keats from its wrapping and opened it to smell the pages. Then she took my hand and squeezed it, and put her lips to my ear. “It’s a wonderful present.” Then, “Look, Joe, just tell them what you saw, okay? Don’t go on about your usual stuff.”

I already knew from something she had said earlier that she hadn’t recognized Parry. I wasn’t going to argue with her now. I was on my own. I just nodded and said, “Are you taking Jocelyn to his place?”

“Yes. I’ll wait for you at home.”

He came out, we shook hands, and they left. I settled down to wait and prepare what I wanted to say. The maitre d’ came out, one of the diners went in, and later, one of the waiters. I was the second
to last to be seen, and I was shown into the interview room by a polite young man who introduced himself as Detective Constable Wallace.

Before I sat down I said my piece. “I might as well tell you straightaway that I know what happened. The bullet that hit Mr. Tapp was meant for me. The man who was eating alone and who intervened is someone who’s been bothering me. His name is Parry. I actually complained to the police about him earlier today. I’d like you to contact Inspector Linley at the Harrow Road station. I even told him that I thought Parry might hire someone to harm me.”

While I said all this, Wallace was looking at me intently, though not, I thought, with any great surprise. When I finished he indicated a chair. “Okay. Let’s go from the beginning,” and he set about taking my name and address and my story from the time I arrived at the restaurant. The process was necessarily pedantic, and Wallace steered it from time to time toward irrelevancies: he wanted to know what we had talked about at our table, and at one point he asked me to characterize the moods of my companions; he also asked about the food and wanted me to comment on the service. He asked me twice if I had heard Parry or the men in coats shout out. When we were through he read my account back to me, intoning each sentence as though it were an item on a checklist. It was a prose I immediately wanted to disown. When he came to “There was a man eating lunch by himself at a table not far from our table where we were eating lunch and I recognized this man to be,” I interrupted him. “Sorry. That’s not what I said.”