There but for The (9 page)

Then Mark walked round the side of the main house, stood for a minute or two in the little Camera Obscura, and right now he was standing just along from the Talking Telescope, leaning against the railing that overlooked the park he’d just traversed
traversed ooh I can think of lots that’s worse / than meeting someone for a quick traverse
there, that was more like her. He looked down the slope at the trees in their rugged neatness, the paths that met and crossed themselves, so elegant the way they seemed both planned and random, elegant too the white colonnades and all the grand old whitened buildings down at the foot of the park. The new business towers of the city shouldered each other beyond the river at the back of the view like a mirage, like superimposition. Greenwich. Then and now. He hadn’t been here for a long time. He should come here more. He loved
it’s no surprise to me that you’re so keen / a place beloved of many an old queen
and straight away as if to spite her he thought hard about the actual old Queen, the literal historical Virgin Queen, and the first thing that came to mind was something that had happened when she was the young Virgin Queen, where had he read it? He couldn’t remember, but the writer, whoever he was
I hate to be reminding you again / that writers are not fucking always men
described Queen Elizabeth the First quite unforgettably, dancing in the great hall in her favourite palace right there, right here in Greenwich all those hundreds of years ago, she was young and beautiful, pale and thin from having been ill, in fact she was convalescing after a lengthy illness, an illness that had at one point been bad enough to endanger her life, and she was enjoying the first real spurt of energy she’d had for months, had been out hunting, had come back flushed and happy and very much wanting to dance. So the hall had filled with courtiers and musicians and she’d dressed up; she looked, the writer said, like a great tulip as she bowed and turned, but her secretary, Cecil, pushed through the ranks of the dancers all round her, he had urgent news, and he told the Queen of England in her ear that her cousin, the Queen of Scotland, had given birth to a son. The Virgin Queen paled with shock, then flushed with shock; she stopped dancing; stood rigid. Then she, who was usually so controlled, so imperious, who was world-renowned for her imperturbability, turned and ran from the hall and all her panicked ladies-in-waiting followed bewildered in a great rush, their dance finery rustling as they ran, and when they reached her private rooms they found her collapsed and sobbing in a chair. “The Queen of Scotland is a mother of a fair son, and I am but a barren stock”
cause that’s all girls are good for ain’t it birth / Gawd knows they haven’t any other worth
but the point of this story, Faye, is: the next day regardless she was fine again, unruffled, greeting statesmen, doing her queenly political deals much the same as ever, because even when she met her worst fears, even when she met her demons, she was what you’d call a survivor, that old Queen. Out of sheer strength of character she survived, didn’t she, the vicissitudes of history.

There.

That’d annoy her.

It did.

Silence.

Mark heard birdsong, could hear birdsong for several whole seconds, could hear the murmur of the people queuing up behind him at the meridian line, could even make out some of the things they were saying, before she roared back into his right ear with something of the force of a wind tunnel nearly knocking him off balance
just wait you little bastard history / that made a fucking dunghill out of me / is waiting round the corner just for you / to turn you into tulip fodder too.

Silence of the grave my arse, he said out loud.

The couple with the small child, who had been standing quite close to him and had smiled genially at him when he arrived, picked up their child and backed away. They stopped and put down the child further along the railing.

He was still waiting to see if there’d be any comment from her about his
my arse.

No.

Nothing.

Fine, he thought.

He felt the usual: bullish, and a little disappointed. Me and my shadow. He stuck his finger in his ear and waggled it about to try and shift the wind tunnel effect. It was frustrating. Jonathan, gone for more than five years now, never said a word to Mark. It was only and always Faye. These days it was like being assaulted by a bag lady, an old tramp in a torn coat that’s come through fifty wars, who shouts like she long ago lost her hearing.

This is going to sound weird but does she ever “speak” to you in any way? he’d texted David when mobiles were new and exciting, in a flurry which had simulated, for a little while, regular contact. David, with the annoying casual savvy of the younger sibling, had texted a whole long message back in roughly the same time it had taken Mark to remember which button to press to make a space between the words this and is. Evn f she did i woulnt answr blve me lfs so much bttr without it U R INSANE mark well spos ive knwn *that * snce I sw u that brkfst tm whn i ws 7 & u wr 12 & u apolgizd 2 th *toast * cz u hd chsn *cornflkes* ! ;-) David would never be so uncool as to use a semicolon properly in a text, or an apostrophe. Mark missed David. They weren’t much in touch now because David’s wife didn’t like Mark. This was because Mark had taken her side when she’d split up with David, had made sympathetic noises throughout the many drunken telephone calls and had even let her move into his spare room for some of their time apart, all of which left her feeling humiliated at encountering Mark in any way after she and David got back together again.

Regardless of time, memory, family, history, loss, it was an October mid-morning in Greenwich Park today. The sky held the mild threat of rain and the day was warm, about nineteen or twenty degrees, far too warm for this time of year, a flaunting of warmth before the battening-down for winter. How adaptable human beings were without even realizing it, slipping blindly from state to state. One morning it was summer, the next you woke up and the whole year was over; one minute you were thirty, the next sixty, sixty next year quick as a wink, how fast it all was. How quickly and smoothly, yet how shockingly, when you thought about it, the seasons and the years gave way to each other
banal philosophizing for God sake / how long’s this sermonizing going to take / you sound like an old vicar on the make
he blocked her by thinking hard of the beautiful image he’d sourced back in the spring for the autumn-winter edition of Wildlife. He’d suggested it for the cover, but no one ever listened to mere worker-bee picture researchers (they’d gone with penguins, again). It was a picture of a little gold-coloured bird singing in a field in winter somewhere in Italy. It was a close-up; the field frosty, the bird the colour of summer and so lightweight that it could balance itself on the bend of the stalk of a dead flower. But the really interesting thing about the picture was that you could see the song coming out of the bird’s mouth. You could actually see birdsong. Because the air was frosty the notes the bird had just sung hung there momentarily in the air like a chain of smoke rings and the camera had simply caught them before they disappeared.

Winter. It made things visible.

But today on this balmy day, even though he knew winter was so close, winter was actually unimaginable
if I had known, when I was twenty-four / that you’d grow up such a godawful bore / well—what rhymes with back-street abortionist
never mind winter, autumn itself was unimaginable, even though this was actually meant to be autumn, even though the leaves had already, this early in October, left the first of their gold-coloured edgings along the pathways down there
yawn yawn yawn yawn yawn yawnyawn yawnyawn yawn / YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN
but could you call it autumn if it was as warm as May? Could he really be nearly sixty, and still feel so like thirty? Yes, he felt thirty at the most, like someone trapped at the age of thirty inside the body of an old horse, at any rate trapped inside a slower body, a slowing brain, a newly paper-thinning skin, a maddeningly failing eyesight
you self-indulgent bastard take a hike / at least you know what failing eyesight’s like / look at me I’m about three minutes long / like the way a whole year gets rammed into three minutes in that irritating I Just Called To Say I Love You Stevie Wonder song.

That didn’t scan at all well. She was upset. Interesting, though, that she’d taken to iambic pentameter. A very cultured lady, Faye. She’d been making her bed in his ear, pouring her lovable poison into it now, for longer than she’d actually lived on this earth.

Ironic, Mark said out loud. Actually very sad.

The couple along the railings exchanged worried looks and shifted a little further off. It didn’t do to speak to yourself, or your dead, out loud. It was inappropriate. Mark turned towards the grassy slope where, historically, for centuries, the boys had dragged the girls up to the top only to drag them down the steepness of it at the kind of full speed that threw clothes and modesty into disarray and called for a lot of screaming. Over the centuries spectators had gathered at the top and the bottom of the slope just to watch this happen.

This world, Mark said under his breath, is insane. I’m sorry. Here’s something you might prefer to hear. The song called Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow was actually written in the hottest days of August. But it’s not a great story because I’ve forgotten the names of the people who wrote it. Here’s another one. This is how Jerome Kern came to write I’ve Told Every Little Star.

(Mark knew, obviously. He knew she was dead and gone, bone and dust in a box in the ground on top of the boxes of dust and bone that were what was left of her own parents, in a grave he never visited any more, in a pretty spot in Golders Green cemetery.)

So Jerome Kern was in bed, Mark said under his breath. It was early in the morning, he’d woken early, and so had his wife, her name was Eva. And lying there in the early morning light they heard a bird outside their window sing a tune over and over. It was a really pretty tune, they both thought so, and Kern told his wife that when they got up he’d compose a song round it. So he hummed it to himself to memorize it and went back to sleep. But when he’d wakened, and breakfasted, and sat down at the piano, of course the tune was completely gone, he couldn’t remember it at all.

(Mark knew that probably the rhyming, which was new, was because this summer he’d looked out some of his old books from back then, the books she’d given him. Possibly it was also because he’d bought online and had been playing on repeat the Ella Fitzgerald / George and Ira Gershwin collection. Faye had had the original LPs. He remembered, now, the shine of them, their paper sleeves, even the feel and the smell of the big square hard-paper box they came in.)

So, Mark said under his breath over the fine view of old / new London. The next morning Kern got up early. He sat in the dark at the window with a piece of paper and a pencil and waited for the bird to come back. And he waited and he waited, as the morning light came up, because he knew that if that bird had come once there was a chance it would come again. And then, sure enough, he heard it again, the bird was there. The bird sang the tune and Kern wrote it down. Then when the bird had finished singing and flown away Kern went downstairs, closed all the doors between his sleeping family and the piano room and roughed out, there and then, the main body of what would become I’ve Told Every Little Star.

(Mark had woken one spring day in his late twenties, on the folding bed in his Kensington basement flat, to a voice in his ear.

Though he hadn’t heard her voice since he was less than thirteen years old, he’d known immediately. Though she was saying very unlikely stuff, as if from a really bad script, or as if she were a posh person pretending to be cockney or were playing the role of a clichéd angry-young kitchen-sink character of the 1950s, it was definitely her.
Well, old man, wake up, I mean I don’t mind and I know you’re a queer one pardon my French but even a lah-di-da layabout who thinks the world owes him a living’s got to make ebloodynough to pay the rent, and I mean just look at my fingers, worked and to the bone are the words for it, d’you hear me?

I hear you!

He’d opened his eyes, overjoyed.

No one.

There was no one in the room but him.)

The bird was a Cape Cod Sparrow, Melospiza Melodia. It spawned not just a song but a musical too, about some people who, yes, write a song inspired by hearing a bird sing. Music In The Air; he wrote it with Oscar Hammerstein. And they all lived happily ever after, until they died. And when Jerome Kern was in hospital dying, Oscar Hammerstein came to his bedside, Kern was in a coma, they knew he’d die very soon, and the song Hammerstein sang to his dear friend Kern in the last minutes of his life was I’ve Told Every Little Star, because Hammerstein knew how very fond, among all his compositions, Kern was of that song.

The end. Oh, no, wait. Interesting fact about Melospiza Melodia, and it’s that if it is well fed, the bird, and hasn’t had to worry too much about finding food, it actually produces offspring that sing less than the offspring it produces if the parent bird has been hungrier. And the other thing about songbirds I was remembering to tell you is that it’s now thought by some experts that they sing in their sleep as well as sing while they’re awake. As if their sleeping selves are a kind of being awake, or their wakened selves are a kind of being asleep.

There. That’s it.

The end.

Mark nodded to himself. Then he nodded at the couple and the child to show he wasn’t mad and he’d meant and taken no offence, both. He didn’t wait to see if they’d nod back. He pushed himself off the railing, turned towards the Observatory building and the ragged line of tourists and schoolkids in the yard waiting to straddle the meridian line, and all the people, one after the other, doing just that and having their picture taken by people holding cameras or phones well away from themselves. That was how people focused these days.