Meeting the English (2 page)

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?'