Meeting the English (29 page)

Phillip was having a terrific time, the best morning for simply years. The writing thing, the writing thing, see its magic: the village of Armprys rising around him, its narrow streets, its over-hanging slag, the narrow portals of the school house. Would Pip stay there? Never. Would he leave Angharad there, flower of the valleys, thrusting stem of white Welsh bluebell, to become downtrodden and bosomy and start whitewashing larders for no good reason; or to slump on her knees on a doorstep, righteous and smug, no care but for her child?

No! Not Angharad, not this girl, making her speech now to Pip, to the world! What a claiming of female energy, lovely among the lilies, queen of the apple down, pounding on her pony, yes she will, she will yes! The eyes on her, the thighs, the nice firm arse, the curious Scottish accent! Off to hit London in her own right! What a creation: nothing like her had yet hit the stage, Giles, eh?

That was the problem with Osborne, Giles, when you thought about it, his girls had nothing to say, just all that ironing, but listen to Angharad, listen to her now, touch of the
Milk Wood
s, touch of Dylan, touch of Joyce, touch of Phillip Prys, eh, eh, this hymn to lust, to the body, to the deep harmony of man and woman. Who but Phillip Prys could pull that one out, eh, out of the Welsh pits straight to the West End stage?

Angharad and Pip would leave Armprys behind. They would come to London, together; they would take the West End by storm; they would live in a rattling house with a wooden staircase and make love in the drawing room; and for them there would be no disappointments, no retractions, no compromise, no Melissa, no Linda, no children standing slack-limbed in reproach, no fat Juliet, no angry Jake, no gin, no binges, no Brighton, no contracts disappearing, no day when there was no more story to tell, no Giles in a restaurant saying
Angela sells, old chap, she sells.

‘Yes,' said Struan, ‘yes, I will, yes?' But Phillip's eyes were closed now, and his hand was still.

‘Are you going to print it?' asked Shirin. ‘He likes that.'

She was just standing there, beside Phillip's chair. She was wearing jeans and a white shirt, hair pushed off her forehead, tired around the eyes. She looked so young. She looked just his age.

‘Yes,' said Struan, and he began the ponderous process, as it was in 1989, of the saving onto floppy disk, filing and formatting. On his knees, he plugged in the printer, checked its supply of paper, aligned its carbon paper, pulled its ribbon straight.

Then he looked up. Shirin was gone.

So Struan set the little hammer running, and pulled the wheelchair round to where Phillip could see it working. Phillip opened one eye, and shut it again.

‘That's OK,' said Struan, ‘it was a pleasure.' And he pulled the blanket up over Phillip's knees, and adjusted the pillow under his head.

‘Struan,' called Shirin, in a voice clear as the chime of a clock. He looked up, over the dome of Phillip's head. She was standing in the doorway of the study, and she was unbuttoning the white shirt, and taking it off, and reaching behind and unhooking her white bra, matter-of-fact as getting ready for swimming. ‘Struan,' she said. ‘I thought, you could come with me, to Iran.'

Then Struan left Phillip Prys lying there, and crossed the room in two strides and picked Shirin up in his arms, easily, with his young man's strength, and carried her up the stairs to her high-windowed bedroom. For there were one or two activities – driving, the butterfly, life-saving – at which Struan Robertson was a natural, a pure talent, and now, in Phillip Prys's wide bed, he found another.

28

When Phillip woke, his son Jake was beside him, smoking a cigarette.

‘Hello, Dad,' he said, ‘the nurse let me in. She thought I was Stru-anne. And she was pleased to see us, because she needed to bugger off to another job. House was empty, you know. Looks like your wife's fucked off somewhere, Dad. And that Stru-anne.'

Phillip did not react.

Jake regarded him a while, then stood up, and toured the study, lounging and handsome in his ragged jeans. He flipped the handle on the lift-up bed, peeped at the photos of himself on the mantel, lifted books from the shelves tenderly as a dealer, blowing the dust from the gathered pages.

‘Mum's here too, by the way,' he said, to the shape of his father. ‘She went upstairs. Just in case she, you know, startles you.' He checked the back of the Lowry above the fireplace. ‘These,' he said, ‘are starting to be worth a mint. Clever buy, old man, clever buy.'

Jake stubbed out his cigarette on the marble ashtray on the mantelpiece, then picked it up, and strolled back to his father, and sat beside him in the best chair, the one Struan had lined up in the circle of Phillip's vision.

‘Dad,' he said, smiling his long smile, narrowing his long-lashed eyes, ‘Dad, how about you have a cig? This ashtray is horribly clean.'

Phillip shut one eye. Jake winked back.

‘Oi, oi,' he said. ‘Dirty winks all around.'

And Jake lit, with a flare and snort of saltpetre, a Marlboro Light, and when it was burning, blew a little blue cloud of cigarette smoke up his father's nose.

‘How's that?' he asked, his handsome head cocked to one side, a gesture of his since he was on the telly, England's prettiest boy. And slowly Phillip winked again, and then Jake knelt by his chair, and they smoked together, the smoke clouds blue and sculptural in the angled November light.

*   *   *

Out in the hall, Myfanwy considered her house. It smelled different: less untipped fag, more Dettol and gesso and Impulse Body Spray. The hall was silent, abandoned – a Jane Fonda tape by the door, a pile of unopened mail on the bottom step. Quietly, Myfanwy looked it over, tucked a statement or two from the bank in the deep Scandinavian pocket of her Narda Artwear frock. Upstairs, the panelled door of Shirin's bedroom was slung open, sending a dusty shaft of winter sun onto the polished landing. Carefully, standing on the least creaky portion of each tread, Myfanwy walked up.

‘Is this your Amstrad?' said Jake to his dad, approaching the computer. ‘Stru-anne sent me your latest productions. Is this where it switches on?'

The Amstrad grunted and spat into life. Jake touched a key and the message ‘system error' appeared in green all down the screen. Jake snorted.

‘I haven't the foggiest,' he said, ‘do you know, about these machines.' There was a manuscript by the wheelchair table, though. ‘This yours, Dad?' he said. ‘Your latest thing?
The Posthumous Version
? Let's have a read.' And he picked up the crackling pages, settled back in the armchair.

*   *   *

Myfanwy crept through Shirin's room, where Shirin's bed lay flagrant and open, and slid into the en suite, noting the paint marks on the shelves, the splashes on the grass-green bath. Shirin's work was all around her: sketches, red and black gesso outlines, the strange, hyper-bright, super-finished miniatures with their towers and stylized flowers and tiny, averted faces. They reminded Myfanwy of her mother's porcelain collection, the shepherdesses and bunny rabbits, and she wondered why this stuff, too, was not, as Cecil would have said,
irredeemably lower middle.

A series of tiny paintings were pinned by their wide edges to the window frame. Shirin seemed to have given up painting allegorical corpuscles, and turned her attention to women wearing elaborate housecoats, kneeling in bowers. One old lady held a jewel box, opened, with lush
Arabian Nights
strings of pearls spilling out. A younger woman, her hair in a vertiginous pile, held a miniature tower block, each lit fly's-wing window gilded. Myfanwy thought again she could make nothing of it: it was all impossible, like Shirin's clothes, so smart and finished and almost tarty; so much in another code; on their way to a different party.

There was a white board arrangement propped over the basin, with a paper pinned to it and the elaborate tools of gold-leafing laid out next to it. Myfanwy peered at it: the painting was gesso'd and partially painted: an elaborate bower blacked in against a stiff, fanciful green and yellow garden, with one central thumbnail shining in enamelled pink. A face: but the body was part of the bower, part of the building. Myfanwy crouched down; put her glasses on her nose: and when her own face, circa 1962, peeped back, she staggered back and swiftly out of the room, as if discovered.

*   *   *

Jake put down the bunched pages of
The Posthumous Version.

‘Dad,' he said, to the slumped form on the wheelchair, ‘it's terrific, you know. Just terrific. I'll put it on at the Burton Taylor. I'll do Pip myself. What do you say?'

But Phillip didn't say anything. On the Amstrad, the green cursor winked on a black screen. ‘Dad,' said Jake, after a while, ‘I think I need a reply. How does Stru-anne do it? You don't actually type, do you?' Laboriously, he wheeled the chair to the Amstrad, put his father's fingers on the keys. They slid off.

‘No,' said Jake, ‘clearly not.'

*   *   *

Myfanwy crept on, upstairs. The front room was unlocked, open, in fact, the door ajar. Myfanwy had not been over that threshold for more than two years. Now, she stepped in, breathed the dusty air.

No bloodied heads. It was emptier than she had thought, and tidier. The outlines of her pictures were still visible on the grey dimity wallpaper; the sprigged Laura curtains hung faded at the windows. Two filing cabinets were shoved against the walls where her bed had been, and there was a neat stack of sealed cardboard boxes by the fireplace, labelled by year in a hand she did not recognize. The old chesterfield was still in the window, still very much in need of an expensive restuffing. She had left it here on purpose, given it up as a bad job.

Now she sat on its sagging springs, hugged the patchwork cushion she had made from Laura Ashley scraps when you could still buy them in bags, and remembered the last, bad years of her marriage: Phillip and she roaring and cursing as the good parts, the good crits, their good selves, fell away from them; as they sank into fat and age and drink; Jake out of the house, with boys then with girls; Juliet, mulish on the stairs in a stupid school hat, refusing all of it.

Myfanwy wiped her eyes and turned her head, and a little collage of photos stuck to the filing cabinet caught her eye: herself, in the late fifties, the sixties, in a string of tight dresses, dark eyeliners, pale lips, smiles. Look: the cutting from the
Daily Mirror,
her in her knickers, getting the milk. Myfanwy fell forwards on her knees to look more closely. There was the famous picture of her and Phillip backstage at the first production of
The Pit,
grinning over mugs of tea. The studio shot in the cashmere jumper. Only Phillip could have put these up.

*   *   *

Jake's eye fell on the Scrabble board.

‘What about this thing?' he said. ‘How about, I twirl, you wink at the letter?' Slowly, Phillip winked.

So Jake pulled up Struan's favourite upright chair and sat in it backwards, dropping its cushion to the floor. He draped his arms and the Scrabble board over its back.

‘Okey-dokey, Dad,' he said, and twirled. And several goes later, Phillip winked on a ‘B'. Jake looked round for a pen, couldn't find one, typed into the Amstrad.

‘There,' he said, ‘cracked it now, Dad. Next letter.'

There was an ‘L' and an ‘E' and an ‘S'.

‘Another “s”?' enquired Jake. ‘Shall I put one in?' He looked at the green word, flashing on the screen. ‘Bless,' he said, ‘well, that's rather lovely.'

He did think so. It was quite a moment, in his life. Tears came to Jake Prys' eyes, and he stood and called up the stair of his father's large house in Hampstead: ‘Mum, come down. Dad can talk!'

And also in a friendly, softened spirit, Myfanwy Prys came down the stairs, eyes also full of tears, still holding, for comfort, the cushion made from Laura Ashley scraps. She approached her former husband, with a heart full of tenderness and her hands full of patchwork, but the sight of her, pillow in hand, caused in the body of Phillip Prys a surge of adrenalin, which briefly opened his arteries a little wider, and released, in the complex branches of his arterial tree, the ripe black fruit of an embolus, which travelled swiftly to his brain, and lodged deep in his cerebral cortex.

*   *   *

In Archway, Juliet Prys walked gingerly on the grey street with her lover, Ron Fox. In Highgate, Giles Van der Piet was walking to the Heath with his lover Bill, discussing the range of self-help books they were planning in time for the nineteen nineties. Juliet said: ‘Bloody hell, I feel like I just got off a horse.' And Bill, who had in fact a practical bent and was going to make a great deal of money with his books, correctly said that the nineties was going to be a beautiful new decade for him and Giles. And on Hampstead Heath, in the fragile autumn sun, Struan Robertson reached out to his lover Shirin, knowing that she would yield, that he was permitted to kiss her. All of him swooned, it seemed the very air bent and swooned, it was the happiest moment of his life.

Then in the house in Yewtree Row Phillip Prys died, silently, and fell forward onto the computer keyboard. The shift/break key, responding to the pressure of his nose and the archaic command system of those times, reproduced the word BLESS all down the screen. When his son Jake realized what had happened, he lifted his father's head, already so heavy, back against the pillow, then fell to his knees by the desk, and watched the screen fill again and again with BLESS in twitching acid green. Cautiously, he started to weep. Myfanwy put down the cushion and called the ambulance, then sat and stared for a long time unbelieving out of the window, and noticed that Shirin had sold the car.

And Struan kissed Shirin on her bruised lips; and Ron Fox slung his arm round his small cross Juliet; and Giles said, ‘I am terrifically happy, you know,' to Bill. And if there was a grander moment of loss at Phillip's death; some parting and healing of the blue meniscus of the sky, these six did not notice it; they all walked on, full of their separate hopes: for this was 1989; the year the world changed; and the walls came down; and all the old tyrants were suddenly dead.