An Exquisite Sense of What Is Beautiful (21 page)

‘It’s all right, Eddie. There is no need to explain.’ And this time it was she who reached out, touched his arm, her tiny fingers so pale against the dark wool.

‘Did you ever read my book?’ he asked. ‘Did you read
The Waterwheel
?’

‘I started it,’ she said. ‘But once I saw you named that stupid
panpan
girl after me, I put it down. How could you do that to me?’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

London
•
1957

For the first time in his life, Edward flew. From Tokyo to
Anchorage
to Copenhagen to London on a Scandinavian Airlines DC7C. Whatever that was. As long as the shiny, noisy metal tube was robust enough to sustain him these many, many hours aloft, he didn’t care what kind of aircraft he was in. This was the newly inaugurated Polar Route and he had decided to take it, needing to move quickly, not languish for weeks on the deck of an ocean liner playing quoits. Publishers were interested. Editing had to be done. He was willing to cough up the cash for the ticket, pack up his fear for a day or so, knock back a few whiskies and let the shining-blonde Scandinavian crew with their perfect teeth and their DC7C perform their
shuddering
, juddering airborne tasks. He had slept for large segments of the journey, but woke for the excitement of passing over the Arctic, of witnessing the white cowl of the world. The floes shone blue in the holy hum of the eerie night and he half-expected to see Amundsen’s frozen Norwegian flag down there somewhere
marking
the spot. After this first rush to the window, he ordered another drink, tried to relax into the majestic monotony. The empty
landscape
would take hours to cross, blank pages needing to be filled.

It was hard to believe that only a short time earlier he had been standing in the hotel forecourt having his photograph taken with the staff. Ishikawa-san had made a speech, presented him with a signed and bound history of the hotel. Sumiko lingered in the background. Then her co-workers came forward to offer small gifts and kind words. Sumiko eventually approached in the wake of her colleagues, head bowed as she gave him a copy of Kawabata’s
Snow Country
. Before he had time to thank her, she had turned and was already hurrying back to the servants’ quarters. It was the last he saw of her. There was no inscription either. He opened the book, translated the first two lines in his head.

“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

The earth lay white under the night sky.”

He quietly mouthed the words again, remembering how Sumiko would do the same as she lay on his bed with the novel propped up against the pillow. As if by somehow reading the words aloud, the story became more alive in her imagination. He slipped back the curtain, looked down at the icy expanse. At this, his own snow country. The earth really did lie white under the night sky. This frozen tundra. Tundra. Such a cold and lonely word. To
accompany
such a cold and lonely journey. He would sleep restless from now on to Copenhagen. For if this DC7C were to crash, it would smash harsh and brutal on the tundra. A wreck of tangled metal lying isolated on the permafrost. And there was still the add-on leg from Copenhagen to London to come.

His feet might have stepped on to the tarmac but his soul was still airborne, in that rushing, droning, pressurised cabin, hurtling along at however many hundreds of miles an hour a DC7C was capable of generating. Body-grounded, soul-flying, he was gliding through a new vocabulary of travel – gates and ramps and passport control and luggage collection and conveyor belts and customs. Whoosh through the swing doors. And there was Aldous, standing at the end of the walkway, wearing the same long raincoat he had worn to see him off at Southampton, leaning against a concrete pillar, smoking a cigarette like some spy come to pick up his contact, striding over
towards him, arms ridiculously extended. “Hello, my dear boy, so wonderful to see you. How was the trip over the Pole? Come, I have a car.” Then the two of them walking across the newly tiled lounge and out of another set of swing doors into the brisk air. “The car is just over here, yes, I learned to drive since you have been away, what is so strange about that? I am not a total
incompetent
when it comes to machinery you know, I’ll take your suitcase, I’ll just open the door for you.” And there was a backseat passenger, just a silhouette, but Edward recognised her immediately.

‘Hello, Eddie,’ she said, her voice coming to him out of the past, down some windblown tunnel.

First one ear popped, then the other, and Edward suddenly could hear the noise of the airport all around him, like a brass band struck up just for this occasion.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

Macy patted the leather upholstery and he noticed his
treasonous
body slipping in beside her even as his heart and mind tried to cope with the turmoil. Perhaps this was what the more experienced flyers called ‘jet lag’. This disembodiment. This detachment. His spirit still soaring above, observing this little play. That was it. He was in a kitchen sink drama. Aldous, the audience, moving in to his seat up front with a suitcase as a passenger, engine starting up, eyes on the road, ears pricked, waiting for the first lines to be said.

‘I don’t have to have a reason for everything I do, Eddie.’

That was his cue. Access the anger. The resentment. ‘So you can just sail out of my life without a word of farewell?’

‘You hit me.’

Edward glanced at Aldous whose head had turned at the remark. ‘There are no secrets, young man,’ he said. ‘I’ve always said men were beasts.’

‘I hardly touched you.’

‘Jesus Christ, Eddie. You punched me.’

‘I didn’t punch you. It was a slap.’

‘I don’t stand for that. I saw enough of it with my father and mother. I won’t let it happen to me. I just won’t.’

‘You hurt me too.’

‘Look, I didn’t ask you to get involved with me. I told you right from the start. Our relationship was to be on my terms. If you didn’t like it that way, you could have baled ship anytime you wanted. You could never say I misled you. I was very clear. You just didn’t want to listen, that’s all.’

He felt hot. His body had been grounded less than an hour and here he was dredging up the past as if Japan had never happened. He unbuttoned his coat, wound down a gap in the window, wiped a sleeve across the misted glass. London dreary in the early
afternoon
drizzle. Dreich. His father’s word. The comforting hiss of the tyres licking up the wet roads. The bowler hat and brolly brigades marching along the pavements. Macy, shrill and brittle beside him, Aldous at the helm, leaning back, mouthing words.

‘Now, now, children. Let’s have a little truce.’

‘Can we, Eddie?’ she said, touching his arm.

‘When did you two become such great friends?’ Edward
grumbled
. ‘You used to be at each other’s throats.’

She leaned forward in her seat, scratched her fingers through Aldous’ hair. ‘Oh, we made up long ago.’

And Edward felt the cut of jealousy in his stomach as Aldous wriggled his neck under her touch. ‘America not to your liking then?’ he said.

‘I fell out with Mother. Again.’

‘So it was a case of run back to Daddy.’

‘He won’t have me either.’

‘How are you surviving?’

‘Turns out there’s huge interest in abstract expression now. Since Jackson got himself killed in that damn car crash. My
paintings
are selling like hot cakes, as you Brits would say. Got myself a nice little apartment-cum-studio in Kensington.’

‘How long have you been back?’

‘Must be nearly two years. I got in touch with Aldous to find out where you were. But you’d packed up and gone to Japan.’

‘I needed to get away from you.’

‘I thought I was the one to leave you.’

‘You know what I mean.’

She sighed and dropped back into her seat. Crossed her legs so that her coat fell away to reveal black-stockinged shins and a glimpse of cream-silk petticoat beneath the hem of her dress. ‘I’ve read the manuscript,’ she said, adjusting her coat. ‘It’s pretty good.’

‘Christ, Aldous. You betrayed me.’

‘And why not? It’s an excellent piece of work. I have booked lunch at the Savoy to celebrate its imminent publication.’

‘What? Now?’

‘Yes, my dear boy. Now. A civilised way to spend an afternoon, don’t you think? As the rest of the world grinds away at its daily toil.’

Edward was still flying. Macy chatting away to him, reassuring him with her fingertips on the back of his hand, with her body-nearness, her body-warmness, as Aldous eased their vehicle out of the Strand traffic into that discrete lane boasting the Savoy in all its art deco, glassy-glossy, illuminated splendour. He was still flying as the car doors were snapped open and he stepped lightly on to the wet courtyard, coat-tightened and scarf-wrapped, Macy joining him, arm-linking and laughing at something Aldous had said, the two of them on either side of him now, balancing him, book-ending him, somehow making him feel whole and happy on this dreary afternoon, as they swept him into the reception area, where they stopped him dead in his tracks on the black-and-white tiles. For in all his heady joyfulness, Edward was the last of their little group to notice the veteran Right Honourable Member of Parliament for Woodford standing alone on the chessboard floor. A despondent king deserted by his subjects.

It was Churchill. Winston Churchill. Soldier, statesman, writer, painter. Knight of the realm and Nobel laureate. A confidant to kings and queens, premiers and presidents. Not ten feet away from Edward stood the greatest Englishman alive, blue eyes peering out world-weary from under his hat brim. The complexion was pale but pink-stained in the cheeks, no doubt fired up from a good Savoy Grill lunch of raw oysters, petite marmite, roast beef and vegetables, a fine glass of red. The mouth no longer defiant and
wittily cruel but curled down at each corner by… what? Regret? Sadness? Disappointment? The depression he used to call the Black Dog? Or just by the gravity of old age? He would be well in his eighties by now. One hand in his pocket, the other hanging loose with a dead cigar stub wedged between these two famous fingers.

Aldous and Macy let go their grip. Edward felt like standing to attention, saluting. Or bowing. Before what the Japanese would call a Living National Treasure. Before this embodiment of so much human achievement. No doubt there would be an abandoned table of illustrious guests back in the Grill and there would be darling Clemmie waiting for him at Chartwell, but for these few moments the great man stood alone, fingering impatiently at coins in his pocket, ignored by the staff in their awe or politeness. His fickle public had receded, his military comrades were long dead, kings and presidents buried in all their pomp, while he too was left to ponder his increasing senility, the decaying organs and diminishing faculties, the journey he would eventually have to make unaccompanied. Take away the Homburg and the cigar, replace it with a flatcap and cigarette, and this was just an old man facing his own mortality.

A uniformed commissionaire arrived, saluted and informed the former Prime Minister his car had arrived. A nod of
acknowledgement
, fingers pressing coins into a palm that would have happily waved away the tip, the touch of greatness better than any reward, and then he was gone, leaving behind the cold draft of his presence.

Macy was the first to speak. ‘What is it with you and me, Eddie? First it was the dead king. And now it’s Sir Winston bloody Churchill.’

The sighting of Churchill had affected them all. It blessed their little lunch, invigorated them, made them drink too much champagne, laugh too loud, suck back too many oysters at Aldous’ expense. Edward felt as if a magic dust had been sprinkled over them, that the weight of history had rubbed off on them, catching them in its vortex, fleetingly for this afternoon. He was still contained in his fuselage of space and time, the rest of the world pushed out,
irrelevant. It was just the three of them in their afternoon hideaway, eating, drinking, laughing. And so he continued in his tubular shell, driven back to Kensington in a taxi, Aldous too drunk to drive, through a clear night of stars unveiled just for them. Edward’s body suddenly weary, limbs desperately heavy, hard even to make the few steps to the flat. Sleep was all he wanted. To drift away. His mind surrendering to the demands of his drunk, jet-lagged body. No resistance. He could feel the cool of the sheets. At last, a
pillow
. Such a welcoming softness. His body still travelling. Over blue snow and frozen tundra. The quiet engine hum sustaining him. Ice flows splitting and cracking, giant continents ponderously
knocking
against each other. A Norwegian flag. Spitfires flying over the Savoy. Churchill waving a two-fingered victory salute. He awoke in the middle of the night. He was still in his clothes. As was Macy who slept in his loose grasp, the straps of her dress slipped off to her forearms, her buttocks shoved tight into his groin. As was Aldous, behind him, snoring softly. He eased himself out of their wedge, went over to the window, open to the cold night and the rain. He could see Kensington Palace, the Gardens, the Royal Albert Hall, lit up in the slick of the night. He was back. Sumiko and Japan seemed very far away.