Golden Hour (29 page)

What do you say, Brad? We get this show on the road.

Dean stays motionless as the music plays. The volume rises, bass and drums join the intro guitar. He starts to move. Every step brings him closer to danger, but he has no choice. At the open door of the master bedroom he can now identify the room the music's coming from, and assure himself that its door is closed. He wants to run, but forces himself to move slowly, softly. Across the landing. Down the stairs. The music still playing as he enters the living room.

The French windows open with a rattle. Now he's outside, drawing the door closed behind him.

Don't look back. They may be at the window, watching him. Nothing to be done about that. Fast over the terrace, round the house, then slow over the gravel. Running footsteps always a giveaway.

Stroll, stroll, Deanie boy, stroll. Don't look like a fucking
thief now. Only a hundred yards or so to the van. No one shouting after you. No one following.

He swings his bag onto the passenger seat, climbs into the driving seat, starts up the van. His hands are shaking as he makes a three-point turn, grinds back down the lane past the house, and there's still no sign anyone's noticed anything.

The shaking goes on all the way to the main road. Only when he's in the tunnel does he start to feel safe. Then all the way through town to home the sensation builds.

I did it. For once I got lucky.

On Stansfield Road there's even a space to park right outside the house. He checks the time. Almost four o'clock. He picks up his tools and takes them with him into the house. There in the bright conservatory he throws himself down on the couch and feels the blood still pounding through him. A wave of exhaustion leaves him too weak even to get himself a drink. Now that he's safe his body admits how frightened he was.

So fucking what? I did it. I nearly pissed myself, but I did it.

The original plan has not come off. He had expected by now to be on his way to Brighton, to offload a pocketful of jewels for cash. Instead, he's got the one and only thing he wanted, the perfect ring for Sheena. It has to be meant. It's like he's kept his promise to Sheena after all. Thieving is when you take stuff and sell it for money. This is more like a passing on. The ring's old, someone had it before, now it passes on to Sheena. The owner in Edenfield makes an insurance claim, she gets her money back. No one loses.

He takes the ring out of his pocket and gazes at it for a long time. It's a beauty. Sheena will adore it. He'll tell her he's been saving up, that he bought it with money from the odd jobs he's been getting, and that's not a total lie. He's worked for it. He took big risks, he stayed steady when he could have
panicked, he made all the right moves. You deserve a reward after all that.

I didn't do it for me, Sheena. I did it for you. I told you I'd come good one day.

He jumps up, suddenly re-energized, and finds Brad with the rest of the squad, back in the fort. He takes Brad out and shows him the ruby ring.

Brad doesn't care shit about rubies, but he knows a good job when he sees it. You've either got it or you haven't. No need to tell the world. All you need is one good mate who knows what it takes to do what you do. Then you get back from the mission and you look him in the eye and he gives you a nod and that's it.

“Who dares wins, right, Brad?”

The Queen's progress down the lane walled by guests is slow and hushed. As she goes, little groups of guests are drawn out at random to stand in the open and receive her royal attention. The two RAF lads and their partners are among the chosen ones.

The royal party is preceded by security men in morning suits, their function made clear by the way they look everywhere except backward toward the Queen. Then the Queen herself comes into view, accompanied by a tall man with crinkly brown hair, who stoops beside her, briefing her in a low voice. The Queen wears a peacock-blue crepe coat and a white high-brimmed straw hat. She has a triple string of pearls round her neck and a spray of pearls on her lapel. She wears white gloves and black patent-leather shoes. In one hand she clasps a clear plastic umbrella. She's a little stooped, her legs a little bent. She is after all a very old lady.

Laura and Henry watch as the Queen talks to the RAF lads. They hear nothing of the exchange. Henry is experiencing ever greater levels of confusion. He had expected to feel what he has always professed, a genial sense of the absurd at the pantomime of monarchy. Instead he finds himself touched. This dutiful old lady is playing this dull and repetitive part with grace and professionalism. She allows us, who know nothing of her, to
cast her in our dreams and to fulfill whatever needs we have of her, without the interference of any clearly defined self on her part. What discipline must it have taken, for so many years, to retain this formlessness?

After the royal party has passed, Joan hurries over to the RAF lads to find out what the Queen said to them.

“She said her grandson's at Valley,” they say. They are based at Valley. “Never tells her what he's up to, she said.”

They marvel that the Queen should be just like any other granny. The lads' partners give a detailed account of the Queen's make-up. Lots of foundation, blusher, mascara.

Henry asks the young men if they've done a tour of duty in Afghanistan.

“Coming up soon,” they say. “There's a right mess. None of us know what's the point of the war. Don't even know who you're fighting.”

“Oh, I do envy you,” says Joan, meaning the Queen.

“Yeah. It were brilliant.”

Waiters bring round Loseley lemon ice-cream tubs on trays.

“Now this is an initiative test,” says Jaspal. “See if you can find the spatula.”

Laura needs the loo. She and Henry head down the lawn toward the lake, where the toilet block stands.

“Well?” she says.

“I don't know what to think,” he says.

“You don't have to think. It's just a tea party.”

“No, it isn't. It's something else.”

“So you're not sorry you came?”

“No. Not at all.”

While he waits for Laura to get to the front of the loo queue, Henry walks round the lake, and stands gazing back across the water at the great mass of guests on the lawn, and the palace
beyond. He finds himself feeling uncharacteristically warmly toward these overdressed strangers. He tries to analyze the source of this feeling. Partly it's the friendliness of the crowd, and the curious sense he's noted already that each one feels excited and special. Simply by receiving this invitation, eight thousand people across a wide social range have been made to feel equal. Then there's that social range itself. The multiracial crowd, drawn from all regions, actually does give the appearance of being a microcosm of the nation. Here in the gardens of Buckingham Palace Henry is a citizen of modern Britain in a way he can never be at home in Sussex. Even the pantomime pageantry plays its part. The well-oiled machinery of what is, after all, a very minor royal occasion has succeeded in making him proud of being British.

But why should I feel moved?

It's more than nostalgia for a lost patriotism. It's something to do with the honor accorded to people who are in the normal course of public life invisible. Joan, who plans to frame her invitation and hang it on the wall, an enthusiast whose unalloyed delight in the day has given Henry too the gift of delight. Peter, whose father was in the Welsh Guards, and arriving today finds the regiment standing to attention in his honor. Sukhjit, who refuses to wear a hat, who looks more beautiful than every woman there, whose socialist father stood up to racist thugs. The boys from the RAF, who will go to war laughing that they've no idea who or what they're fighting, even as they risk their lives.

How magnificent people are. How resilient, and generous, and unexpected.

Henry has been struggling with dark thoughts ever since his meeting at Channel 4. His shame over his lie about Alain de Botton, his fear of being found out, has come to represent for
him the moment at which his career ended. And when you're judged too old to go on doing the thing you've learned to do, what happens to the rest of your life?

Now in a sudden clear light he sees the question quite differently. The regret that torments him, the failure he dreads, is not the loss of function or purpose, but the loss of status. His pitch to Justin is only half the story. Yes, we manufacture our declared tastes in order to gain status. But that's hardly important. That's just a frill, an accessory. There's something here, something that's been revealed to him this afternoon, that's infinitely more significant.

In our insecurity, we seek ways to make others feel insecure. We're like shipwrecked sailors all struggling to climb onto a life raft. We believe that each person who gets onto the raft lessens our own chances of survival, so even as we fight for a handhold, we push our companions back into the water. And then, safe on the raft, we survivors eye each other warily, knowing that supplies are limited, and each sip of fresh water drunk by another is a mouthful less for ourselves. A cruel existence, a reality-TV-show world, where each week one of the group must lose and be sent away into obscurity. There's no friendship possible in such a world, only alliances of mutual convenience. Kindness is replaced by charm, and all we understand of love is the manipulative power of seduction. This, we tell ourselves, is the harsh reality. If you want to succeed in life you have to look out for yourself.

And it's all nonsense.

This is what presents itself to Henry this afternoon with the force of revelation. This nightmare existence is self-created and self-perpetuated, an intellectually lazy borrowing from a misunderstanding of Darwin. The fittest survive, yes: but why should the fittest be the most selfish? Pursue your own goals at
the expense of others and you survive, but you survive alone. There is another world, where people form and nurture bonds with each other; where the success of one is the success of all. The revelation is that so many people actively want those round them to be happy.

Why should this be revealed to him here, in the palace gardens? Why is it not evident in his own life? Because the people he mixes with are high achievers, greedy for attention, vain of their image in the eyes of others. People who see humility as a weakness.

I have been one of them. I've had my day in the sun. I've taken my bow, I've heard the applause. And ever since, the silence that follows has been working its slow poison. Once a star, forever a has-been.

But what if that spotlit stage is not the pinnacle of dreams, but a windowless dungeon where the single light burns day and night? And what if the door to the dungeon is locked, but only on the inside? We're free to open the door and walk out into a different world. All it takes is a little humility.

Laura returns.

“We should go soon,” she says. “You know there's that black hole after six when there are no trains for an hour.”

“Yes, sure.”

They cross the lawn to say goodbye to their new friends.

“See how the rain held off!” says Joan, as if even the weather is in awe of their special day.

“Actually, it's Jaspal's birthday,” says Sukhjit.

They all offer their congratulations. They joke that the garden party has been Jaspal's birthday party all along. Then Laura and Henry make their farewells.

As they leave by the Grosvenor Gate exit the first spots of rain begin to fall.

Mrs. Dickinson is not quite clear how long she's been alone. There has certainly been one whole night, and quite possibly two. Because she no longer has what might be called meals, the passage of time is hard to gauge. Of course she does eat from time to time, when she realizes she's hungry, but just a little muesli with milk, or some soup heated up on the stove. No, not soup. That's run out. She last had soup when Bridget was here. But none of that matters. Meals are a lot of unnecessary fuss. She can cope.

The real difficulty turns out to be the dressing and undressing. Buttons are a challenge. With her arthritic fingers, and thumbs that have lost their power to press, the undoing of buttons is a matter of long fumbling, and the doing up of buttons is an impossibility. The fingers must locate and position the button and the buttonhole at the same time, and hold both accurately in place while forcing through the button. This requires a control she no longer commands.

Why do people make clothes that are so hard to do up and undo?

Then there's sleeves. One arm can be got into a sleeve with little trouble, but getting the second arm in—well, arms just don't bend that far back and up. How do other people manage it?

On her first night on her own Mrs. Dickinson succeeded in undressing herself and in getting into her nightdress. Since then she has not changed her clothes. She wears a bathrobe over her nightdress and slippers on her feet, as if she's living on a hospital ward. In itself, this doesn't trouble her, because there's no one to see. But there are a few things she needs, and it's quite out of the question to go to the village shop in a bathrobe.

A solution will present itself. For now, the important point is that she's coping on her own. She does not need a carer. Her daughter walked out on her in a rage. Very well, let her go. She doesn't need a daughter either. How does Elizabeth imagine she coped all these years without a husband? You learn to look after yourself.

She sits in the small armchair by the open window, looking out at her garden. Elizabeth spent so much time in the garden when she was a little girl, especially in summer. She had a game called Visiting. She would go visiting imaginary families in make-believe houses under the magnolia, in the big box bush, behind the crab apple tree. As she remembers, the old lady falls into a confusion and supposes that her daughter is out there now.

“Teatime, Elizabeth,” she calls. “Your tea's on the table.”