On Beauty (36 page)

‘Not such a bad idea.'

‘What's that, son?'

‘I said it's not such a bad idea. Reading something – every now and then.'

‘No doubt, no doubt . . . that was always more your mum, though, weren't it? Always had a book in her hand. Walked into a lamp-post once reading a book in the street,' said Harold, a story Howard had heard and heard and heard, as he had heard the bit that came next and came now. ‘Spose that's where
you
got it from . . . Oh, blimey, look at this big tart. Look at him! I mean, purple and pink? He's not serious, though, is he?'

‘Who?'

‘
Him
– whatsisname . . . he's a bloody fool. Wouldn't know an antique if it was being shoved up his arse . . . But it was funny yesterday 'cause he was doing the bit where you guess the price the thing'll go for before it goes – I mean, it's mostly tat, I wouldn't give you ten bob for most of it, if I'm honest, and we had better stuff than that just knocking around me mum's house . . . never gave it a first thought never mind a second, but there you are . . . I've forgotten what I was on about now . . . oh, yeah, so it's usually couples or mother and daughter that he gets on, but yesterday he's got these two women – like bloody buses, both of 'em huge, hair very short, dressed like blokes of course, like they do, ugly as
sin
and looking to buy some military stuff, medals and that, 'cos they were in the bloody army, weren't they, and they're holding hands, oh dear . . . I was
laughing
, oh, dear . . .' And here Harold chuckled mirthfully. ‘And you could tell
he
didn't know what to say . . . I mean, he's not exactly kosher himself, now is he?' Harold laughed some more, and then grew serious, noting, possibly, the lack of laughter elsewhere in the room. ‘But then there's always been that aspect in the army, hasn't there? I mean, that's the main place you find them, the women . . . I spose it must suit them more, mentally . . . as it were,' said Harold, this last being his only verbal pretension.
Now, Howard, as it were
 . . . He'd started using it when Howard came home for the summer after his first year in Oxford.

‘Them?' asked Howard, putting his HobNob down.

‘You what, son? Look, you've broken your biscuit. Should have brought a saucer for crumbs.'

‘Them. I was just wondering who “they” are.'

‘Oh, now Howard, don't get angry about nothing. You're always so angry!'

‘No,' said Howard, in a tone of pedantic insistence, ‘I'm just trying to understand the point of the story you just told me. Are you trying to explain to me that the women were lesbians?'

Harold's face creased into the picture of distressed aesthetic sensitivity, as if Howard had just put his foot through
The Mona Lisa
.
The Mona Lisa
. A painting Harold loves. When Howard was having his first pieces of criticism printed in the sorts of papers Harold never buys, a customer of Harold's had shown the butcher a cutting of his son writing enthusiastically about Piero Manzoni's
Merda d'Artista
. Harold closed the shop and went down the road with a handful of twopence to use the phone. ‘Shit in a jar? Why can't you write about somefing lovely, like
The Mona Lisa
? Your mum would be so proud of that.
Shit in a jar?
'

‘There's no need for that, Howard,' said Harold soothingly now. ‘It's just my way of talking – I ain't seen you in so long, just happy to see you, aren't I, just trying to find something to say, you know . . .'

Howard, with what he considered to be superhuman effort, said nothing further.

Together they watched
Countdown
. Harold passed his son a little white pad on which to do his calculations. Howard scored well through the word round, doing better than both the contestants of the show. Meanwhile Harold struggled. His highest was a five-letter word. But in the numbers round, the power changed hands. There are always a few things our parents know about us that nobody else does. Harold Belsey was the only person who knew that when it came to the manipulation of numbers, Dr Howard Belsey, M.A., Ph.D., was a mere child. Even the most basic of multiplications required a calculator. He had been able to hide this for more than twenty years in seven different universities. But in Harold's living room the truth would out.

‘One hundred and fifty-six,' announced Harold, which was the target amount. ‘What you got, son?'

‘A hundred and . . . No, I'm nowhere. Nothing.'

‘Got you, Professor!'

‘You did.'

‘Yeah, well . . .' agreed Harold, nodding as the contestant on the television explained her rather convoluted ‘workings out'. ‘ 'Course you
can
do it that way, love, but mine's a damn sight prettier.'

Howard laid down his pen and pressed his hands to his temples.

‘You all right, Howard? You've had a face like a smacked arse since you got in here. Everything all right at home?'

Howard looked up at his father and decided to do something he never did. Tell him the truth. He expected nothing from this course of action. He was talking to the wallpaper as much as to this man.

‘No, it's not all right.'

‘No? What's the matter? Oh, God, no one's dead, are they, son? I couldn't stand it if anyone's dead!'

‘
No
one's dead,' said Howard.

‘Bloody out with it, then – you'll give me a heart attack.'

‘Kiki and me . . .' said Howard using a grammar older than his marriage, ‘we're . . . not good. Actually, Harry, I think we're finished.' Howard put his hands over his eyes.

‘Now that can't be right,' said Harold cautiously. ‘You've been married – what is it now? Twenty-eight years – summink like that?'

‘Thirty, actually.'

‘There you are, then. It don't just fall apart, just like that, does it?'

‘It does when you . . .' Howard released an involuntary moan as he took his hands from his eyes. ‘It's got too hard. You can't carry on when it gets this hard. When you can't even
talk
to someone . . . You've just lost what there was. That's how I feel now. I can't believe it's happening.'

Harold now closed his eyes. His face contorted like a quiz-show contestant's. Losing women was his specialist subject. He did not speak for a while.

‘ 'Cos she wants to finish it or you do?' he said finally.

‘Because she wants to,' confirmed Howard, and found that he was comforted by the simplicity of his father's questions. ‘And . . . because I can't find enough reasons to stop her wanting to.'

And now Howard succumbed to his heritage – easy, quick-flowing tears.

‘There, son. It's better out than in, isn't it,' said Harold quietly. Howard laughed softly at this phrase: so old, so familiar, so utterly useless. Harold reached forward and touched his son's knee. Then he leaned back in his chair and picked up his remote control.

‘She found a black fella, I spose. It was always going to happen, though. It's in their nature.'

He turned the channel to the news. Howard stood up.

‘
Fuck
,' he said frankly, wiping his tears with his shirtsleeve and laughing grimly. ‘I never
fucking
learn.' He picked up his coat and put it on. ‘See you, Harry. Let's leave it a bit longer next time, eh?'

‘Oh, no!' whimpered Harold, his face stricken by the calamity of it. ‘What are you saying? We're having a nice time, ain't we?'

Howard stared at him, disbelievingly.

‘
No
. Son,
please
. Oh, come on and stay a bit longer. I've said the wrong thing, have I? I've said the wrong thing. Then let's sort it! You're always in a rush. Rush 'ere, rush there. People these days think they can outrun death. It's just time.'

Harry just wanted Howard to sit down, start again. There were four more hours of quality viewing lined up before bedtime – antique shows and property shows and travel shows and game shows – all of which he and his son might watch together in silent companionship, occasionally commenting on this presenter's overbite, another's small hands or sexual preference. And this would all be another way of saying:
It's good to see you. It's been too long. We're family
. But Howard couldn't do this when he was sixteen and he couldn't do it now. He just did not believe, as his father did, that time is how you spend your love. And so, to avoid a conversation about an Australian soap actress, Howard moved into the kitchen to wash up his cup and a few other things in the sink. Ten minutes later he left.

The Victorians were terrific cemetery designers. In London we used to have seven, ‘The Magnificent Seven': Kensal Green (1833), Norwood (1838), Highgate (1839), Abney Park (1840), Brompton (1840), Nunhead (1840) and Tower Hamlets (1841). Rangy pleasure gardens in the daytime, necropolises by night, they crawled with ivy and sprung daffodils from their rich mulch. Some have been built over; others are in an appalling state of disrepair. Kensal Green survives. Seventy-seven acres, two hundred and fifty thousand souls. Space for Anglican Dissenters, Muslims, the Russian Orthodox, one famous Zoroastrian and, next door in St Mary's, the Catholics. Here are angels without their heads, Celtic crosses missing their extremities, a few sphinxes toppled over into the mud. It is what La Cimetière du Père Lachaise would look like if nobody knew it was there or went to visit it. In the 1830s Kensal Green was a peaceful spot, north-west of the city, where the great and the good might find their final rest. Now, on all sides, this ‘country' cemetery greets the city: flats on one side, offices on the other, the railway trains vibrate the flowers in their cheap plastic pots, and the chapel
cowers under the gas holder, a mammoth drum stripped of its skin.

Behind a line of yew trees in the northern part of this cemetery, Carlene Kipps was buried. Walking away from the grave, the Belseys kept a distance from the rest of the party. They felt themselves to be in a strange social limbo. They knew no one except the family, and yet they were not close to the family. They had no car (the cabbie having refused to wait), and no clear idea of how to get to the wake. They kept their eyes to the ground and tried to walk at the proper funereal pace. The sun was so low that the stone crosses on one line of graves cast their spectral shadows on the plots of graves in front of them. In her hand Zora held a little leaflet she'd taken out of a box at the entrance. It featured an incomprehensible map of the cemetery and a list of the notable dead. Zora was interested in seeking out Iris Murdoch or Wilkie Collins or Thackeray or Trollope or any of the other artists who, as the poet put it, went to paradise by way of Kensal Green. She tried suggesting this literary detour to her mother. Through her tears (that had not stopped since the first scattering of earth was thrown over the coffin), Kiki glared. Zora tried falling behind a little, veering slightly off course to check out any grave that looked likely. But her instincts were all wrong. The twelve-foot mausoleums with winged angels on top and laurels at their base are for sugar merchants, property dealers and military men – not writers. She could have searched all day and not found Collins's grave, for example: a simple cross atop a block of plain stone.

‘Zora!' hissed Kiki, in that powerful scream of hers that yet had no volume. ‘I'm not going to tell you again. Keep
up
.'

‘
Okay
.'

‘I want to get out of here tonight.'

‘
Okay!
'

Levi tucked his arm around his mother. She was not right in herself, he could tell. Her long plait swung against his hand like a horse's tail. He grabbed it and gave it a playful tug.

‘I'm sorry about your friend,' he said.

Kiki brought his hand from behind her back and kissed the knuckles.

‘Thank you, baby. It's crazy . . . I don't even know why I'm so upset. I barely knew the woman, you know? I mean, I really didn't know her at all.'

‘Yeah,' said Levi thoughtfully, as his mother pulled his head softly into her shoulder. ‘But sometimes it's like you just meet someone and you just know that you're totally connected, and that this person is, like, your brother – or your sister,' adjusted Levi, for he had been thinking of somebody else entirely. ‘Even if they don't, like, recognize it,
you
feel it. And in a lot of ways it don't matter if they do or they don't see that for what it is – all you can do is put the feeling out there. That's
your
duty. Then you just wait and see what comes back to you. That's the deal.'

There was a little silence here that Zora felt the need to puncture.

‘
Amen!
' she said, laughing. ‘Preach it, brother, preach it!'

Levi punched Zora in her upper arm, and then Zora punched him back, and then they ran, weaving through the graves, Zora racing from Levi. Jerome called after them both to have some respect. Kiki knew she should stop them, but she could not help feeling it was a relief to hear curses and laughter and whoops fill the darkening day. It took one's mind off all the people underfoot. Now Kiki and Jerome paused on the white stone steps of the chapel and waited for Zora and Levi to join them. Kiki heard her children's clattering footsteps reverberate through the archways behind her. They rushed towards her like the shadows of people escaped from their graves, and came to a halt by her feet, panting and laughing. She could no longer see their features in this dusk, only the outlines and movements of beloved faces she knew by heart.

‘OK, that's enough now. Let's get out of here, please. Which way?'

Jerome took his glasses off and wiped them on the corner of his shirt. Hadn't the burial been just to the left of this very chapel? In which case they had walked in a teasing circle.

After taking leave of his father, Howard walked across the street and into the Windmill pub. Here he ordered and began drinking a perfectly reasonable bottle of red wine. His chosen seat was, he thought, in a neglected corner of the bar. But two minutes after he sat down, a huge flat screen that he had not noticed was lowered down near his head and switched on. A football game commenced between a white team and a blue team. Men gathered round. They seemed to accept and like Howard, mistaking him for one of those dedicated souls who come early to get the best seat. Howard allowed this misinterpretation and found himself taken up in the general fervour. Soon he was cheering and complaining with the rest. When a stranger, in his enthusiasm, tipped some beer down Howard's shoulder, Howard smiled, shrugged and said nothing. A little while later this same fellow bought Howard a beer, saying nothing when he put it down in front of Howard and seeming to expect nothing in return. At the end of the first half another man beside him knocked glasses with Howard in a very jolly way, in approval of Howard's random decision to cheer the blue team, although the game itself was still 0–0. This score never changed. And after the game finished nobody hit each other or got angry – it didn't seem to be that kind of game. ‘Well, we got what we needed,' said one man philosophically. Three other men smiled and nodded at the truth of this. Everybody seemed satisfied. Howard also nodded and polished off the end of his bottle. It takes a lot of practice to ensure that a whole bottle of Cabernet and a pint of beer makes only a slight dent in your sobriety, but Howard felt he had reached this stage of accomplishment. All that happened these days was a pleasant imprecision that settled itself around him like a duvet, padding, protecting. He'd got what he needed. He went down the hall to use the phone opposite the loos.

‘Adam?'

‘
Howard
.' Said in a tone of a man who can finally call off the search party.

‘Hi. Look, I've been separated from everyone . . . Have they called?'

There was a silence at the end of the phone that Howard correctly identified as concern.

‘Howard . . . are you drunk?'

‘I'm going to pretend you didn't say that. I'm trying to find Kiki. Is she with you?'

Adam sighed. ‘She's looking for you. She left an address. She said to tell you they're going to the wake.'

Howard rested his forehead on the wall next to the pinned-up list of minicabs.

‘Howard – I'm painting. I'm getting it all over the phone. Do you want the address?'

‘No, no . . . I have it. Did she sound –?'

‘Yes,
very
. Howard, I've got to go. We'll see you back at the house later.'

Howard ordered a minicab and went outside to wait for it. When it arrived, the driver's door opened and a young Turk in the literal sense leaned out and asked Howard a rather metaphysical question: ‘
Is it you?
'

Howard stepped forward from the pub wall. ‘Yes, it's me.'

‘Where you go?'

‘Queen's Park, please,' said Howard, and walked unsteadily round the car to get into the front seat. As soon as he sat down he realized that this was not the usual procedure. It was surely uncomfortable for a driver to have a passenger sitting so close to him, wasn't it? Or was it? They drove in silence, a silence that Howard experienced as unbearably fraught with homoerotic, political and violent implications. He felt he must say something.

‘I'm not trouble, you know, I'm not one of those English thugs – I'm a bit pissed, that's all.'

The young driver looked at him with a defensive, uncertain air. ‘You trying to be funny?' he said in his thick accent, which yet possessed a fluency that made
You trying to be funny?
sound like a Turkish homily.

‘Sorry,' said Howard, blushing. ‘Ignore me. Ignore me.' He put his hands between his knees. The cab swung by the tube station where Howard had first met Michael Kipps.

‘Straight down, I think,' said Howard very quietly. ‘Then maybe a left at the main road – yes, and then over the bridge and then it's on your right, I think.'

‘You talk quiet. I can't hear.'

Howard repeated himself. His driver turned and looked at him incredulously. ‘You don't know
name of street
?'

Howard had to admit he did not. The young Turk grumbled something furiously in Turkish, and Howard felt one of those English minicab tragedies coming on in which customer and cabbie drive round and round, and the fare rises and rises, finally you reach the ugliness of being sworn at and cast out on to the street, further from your destination than ever.

‘There! That's it! We just passed it!' cried Howard and opened the door while the cab was still moving. A minute later, the young Turk and Howard parted on frosty terms, not much warmed by Howard's twenty-pence tip, the only extra change he had in his pocket. It is on journeys like this – where one is so horribly misunderstood – that you find yourself longing for home, that place where you are entirely understood, for better or for worse. Kiki was home. He needed to find her.

Howard pushed open the Kippses' front door, ajar once again, though for quite a different reason than the last time. The chequered hallway was busy with sombre faces and black suits. Nobody turned to look at Howard except one girl with a tray of sandwiches who came forward and offered him one. Howard took an egg and cress and wandered into the living room. It was not one of those wakes in which the tension of the funeral is released and dissipated. No one here was laughing softly at an affectionate memory or retelling a scurrilous story. The atmosphere was as solemn as it had been in the church, and that lively, surprising woman whom Howard had met a year ago in this very room was presently being piously preserved in the aspic of low voices and bland anecdote, pickled in perfection.
She was always
, Howard heard one woman say to another,
thinking of other people, never of herself
. Howard picked up somebody else's large glass of wine from the dining table and went to stand by the French doors. From here he had a good view of the
living room, the garden, the kitchen and the hallway. No Kiki. No kids. No Erskine, even. He could see half of Michael Kipps opening the oven door and taking out a large tray of sausage rolls. Suddenly Monty came into the room. Howard turned towards the garden and looked out on that huge tree where, unbeknown to him, his eldest son had lost his innocence. Not knowing what else to do, he stepped out and closed the door quietly behind him. Instead of walking down the long garden where, as the sole person out here, he would only make himself more conspicuous, Howard walked round the side return, a thin alley between the Kippses' place and next door. Here he paused, rolled a thin cigarette and smoked it. The combination of this new, sweet white wine in his hand, the bitter air and the tobacco made him feel light-headed. He walked further down the alley to a side door and sat down on its cold step. From this perspective the suburban opulence of five neighbouring gardens announced itself: the knobby branches of the hundred-year-old trees, the corrugated roofs of the sheds, the moneyed amber glow of halogen bulbs. So quiet. A fox keening somewhere like a crying child, but no cars, no voices. Would his family have been happier here? He had run from a potentially bourgeois English life straight into the arms of an actual American one – he saw that now – and, in the disappointment of the attempted escape, he had made other people's lives miserable. Howard put out his cigarette on the pebbled ground. He gulped thickly but did not cry. He was not his father. He heard the Kippses' doorbell go. He rose up halfway, listening out hopefully for his wife's voice. Not her. Kiki and the kids must have come and gone. He pictured his family like a Greek chorus, repulsed and outraged by him, rushing from the stage the moment he stepped on it. Maybe he would spend the rest of his life trailing them from house to house.