Making Things Better (6 page)

‘Good morning,' said a hearty man who seemed to be in charge. ‘Thought we'd make an early start. Don't mind us. I'm afraid you've ceased trading. We should be gone by this evening. But we'd like to take possession in, say, ten days' time. That should give you time to make your arrangements, if you haven't already done so, that is. Now, if you'll excuse us . . .' He turned briskly away. The interview was at an end.

Herz had gone out again, drunk more coffee, and waited for the nearest estate agent's doors to open. The girl who seemed to be some sort of secretary still had her coat on, and was obviously preparing to make herself a cup of tea. He took no notice. ‘I need a flat,' he said tersely, more tersely than he thought he had it in him to say. ‘Two rooms, kitchen and bathroom. Independent central heating. Balcony. As soon as possible. Today in fact.'

She looked at him in surprise. ‘You're in a hurry,' she observed. ‘Tea? I can't get going without it. Take a seat.'

He took a seat. Outside the windows the day was now fully fledged, young men with briefcases striding along with an air of purpose. He was no longer that sort of man, not that he ever had been. He had taken only what had been ordained for him, and would go on doing so. This act of buying a flat seemed to him a monstrous aberration, but presumably people did this every day of the week. Buying and selling, getting and spending were the order of the day.

‘I'm Melanie,' said the girl. ‘My card. I can show you two properties this very morning, if you're free. I've got Clarence Court and Chiltern Street. Both very central, both in good repair.'

‘I don't like the sound of Clarence Court,' he said, recovering some composure. ‘It sounds too dainty. I'd like to see Chiltern Street, if you don't mind.'

‘Sure. It's a lovely flat. The last owner put a lot of work into it.'

‘Why did he leave?'

‘She. Got work in the States, left in something of a rush. It's only been empty for a couple of weeks. We're handling the sale: she left everything in our hands. So if you like it it's all quite straightforward. Shall we go?'

As soon as he saw the flat all his doubts were resolved. It was on the second floor of a narrow building which had been well maintained. The ground floor was occupied by a dress shop, the first by what he supposed was a workroom, from which he could hear a chatter of voices. The flat itself was small, admittedly, but light and calm. Someone, the previous owner, no doubt, had laid a hardwood floor and installed a miniature kitchen. The windows looked out onto Chiltern Street at the front and onto a small patio at the back; as he peered out he could see two girls install themselves with coffee cups. This gave an illusion of company which might be welcome. There was little room for additional furniture: he would need only a bed, and perhaps two more chairs. The bed was a priority; the rest could wait.

‘I want it,' he said simply.

‘Great. If you'll come back with me to the office my boss should be in by now. I told you about the lease, didn't I?'

‘The lease?'

‘Rather short, I'm afraid. Eight years.'

He calculated. With a bit of luck he would be dead before the lease ran out. ‘I'll take it,' he said, with an air of finality that convinced them both.

He hired a van, packed his clothes, and prepared to leave, though the actual leaving might take some time. Edgware Road now belonged to the past. He could hear men moving about downstairs in the shop, but they no longer disturbed him. He was in a hurry to be gone. If necessary he would sleep in one of the chairs until the bed arrived. All this had happened rather more quickly than he had anticipated, as if under some kind of enchantment. The afternoon of the following day was spent on purchases which gave him a thrill of ownership. ‘Household Requisites', he read at the entrance to one of the departments of a large Oxford Street store. He was a Householder! He was entitled to Requisites! He felt the same thrill in the supermarket, where he had shopped for years with massive indifference. ‘Traditional Afternoon Tea' and ‘Breakfast Coffee' convinced him that he was at last part of the community, with breakfast and tea adequately recorded. Without compunction he went back to Edgware Road, and removed sheets, towels and cups, piling them into plastic bags. After a last look round he placed his keys on his denuded desk and stood impatiently on the kerb, waiting for a taxi. In the new flat he threw open the windows and surveyed Chiltern Street, which seemed agreeably well-behaved after the clamour of Edgware Road. Again he heard sounds of life from the patio, which he supposed was one of the amenities reserved for the seamstresses. Their conversation, which was in a language he did not recognize, was the only sign that he was not entirely alone.

By the end of the week Ostrovski's mother's table and two chairs looked well against the sunlit wall of the sitting-room. Flushed with success, he went to John Lewis and bought two more chairs, a television, a bedside cabinet, and three lamps. At home, as he now thought of it, he made up the bed which he had bullied the shop into removing from the window, and hung his clothes in the small cupboard. As far as he could see he needed nothing more. He was almost disappointed that the process had been so speedily accomplished. He telephoned Bernard Simmonds to give him his new address, got no answer, and sat down to write to him. This meant that he would have to acquire some sort of desk. It was a reprieve. Happily he set out again for another day of purchases. Again he was lucky. Apparently everything was available to those with time and money. This was a new dimension for him, one formerly unsuspected, or, if suspected, not for his participation. Now this had changed: entitlement again. The time for deference was over. He spared a thought for Ostrovski, promised himself that he would keep in touch. Then he cancelled the past, marvelling at how easily this was done, wondering why the past had kept him in its grasp for so long. In his euphoria he felt new-born, looked forward unrealistically to new friends. Already the landscape was familiar. It would be up to him to make the next move. What that might be he had no idea, but felt confident that it would present itself.

But melancholia, once given house room, is difficult to dislodge. After a couple of months, after having dined with Bernard Simmonds and greeted Mrs Beddington, the owner of the dress shop, after shyly smiling at the seamstresses, only to hear them giggle as he walked on, he found himself once more enveloped in dream and memory, as if they alone could furnish him with information. Though he did not exactly miss his former routine, he regretted that he had so little to do. His days were composed of artificial outings: a newspaper and the supermarket in the morning, and in the afternoon a bookshop or a gallery. He told himself that many were in the same boat, but pitied them, thought wistfully of families, of ideal families, with gardens to occupy them and grandchildren to cherish. Even the Claudes and Turners which he had so loved began to let him down, evoking only a half-remembered response. This seemed uncannily reminiscent of Freddy's evolution, and, beyond that, of the apathy of his parents, whom he now loved and deplored in equal measure. He lived like a recluse, for that was how he thought he must, as if his destiny had reclaimed him. As time wore on the future seemed less accommodating, continuity not to be taken for granted. He revised his expectations, resigned himself to living in an uneasy present. The past took on a new refulgence, became momentarily precious. He was grateful for any additional information that his mind could supply, half-aware that he was now involved in a process that was almost certainly restricted, and caring less and less, as day followed day, that this might be so.

6

Custom decreed that Herz should take a holiday. At least he supposed it was so, since snatches of conversation in the supermarket and the café where he had taken to drinking his morning coffee revealed an unknown world of villas, apartments,
gîtes,
boats, and families overseas, and proved that the city was emptying, a fact which he had observed for himself in his modest perambulations. Even Mrs Beddington, the owner of the dress shop, had come up to inform him that she was joining her sister and brother-in-law in the south of France and to warn him about the burglar alarm, of which he now seemed to be in charge. The chatter from the workroom had diminished in volume and he supposed that some of the girls had gone home, to homes he had difficulty in imagining. He himself felt isolated in the middle of all these plans, elaborated over a cold winter and an even colder spring. Without holidays, it seemed, he had no currency to offer, no travellers' tales, no amusing mishaps, no suntanned face to be presented to his usual constituency of casual acquaintances, and was reduced to questioning others about their plans. These plans seemed to him exhausting, yet they served to galvanize the year's activities into purposefulness. Having no plans of his own to offer in exchange, he accepted that his role was to be a useful audience. His smile dutifully in place, he played his part, but began to weary of it.

His past holidays would hardly pass muster in this dialogue. Those quiet days in small towns, even in suburbs at the end of a bus route, did not make for interesting anecdotes. In Amboise he had listened to a family party discussing a relative's will; in Auteuil he had quietly sympathized with an elderly man on his way to a doctor's appointment, but he was outside of all this, not a participant, and what was a holiday without fervent participation? And he was newly aware of frailties when faced with a major undertaking: again the vision of himself on the ground looking up to a circle of attentive faces presented itself and grew ever more compelling. He clung to his routine, although it bored him, and the days seemed long. Nor did he appreciate what others might see as an altogether enviable leisure. He had too much time at his disposal, and frequently found himself standing at the window, scanning Chiltern Street for a sign of life. He had no appetite for anything, tried to sleep in the afternoon without great success. Such brief dozes merely served to bring back the past, so that when he emerged, with a stale taste in his mouth, his grasp on the present seemed diminished and his resolve significantly weaker. Yet in the long silent afternoons it was hard not to succumb, and although this conclusion of the day's preoccupations was ill-advised it seemed to be a habit that was growing on him, without his encouragement. And if it was easy to slip into sleep in the sunny days of summer, how would he fare in the winter when darkness came early and the outside world retreated?

To counter this all too symbolic descent into the shadows of his mind he took to walking in the evenings in order to tire himself out and to make his rest more appropriate, more excusable. After his supper (it could hardly be called dinner) he emerged into Chiltern Street and began a rambling peregrination of his immediate neighbourhood, hoping to catch life on the wing, and to make himself into a semblance of gentlemanly old age which others might find acceptable. But there were no spectators, only young people drinking and laughing outside pubs or eating pizzas with a crowd of friends. No one expressed any interest as he walked up Gloucester Place and down Baker Street, or even went as far as Oxford Circus in the vain hope of urban company. The park beckoned but it would take him too far from home and darkness would catch him out. Besides, he was unsure when the park gates closed, and imagined, with dread, being locked in, forced to spend the night on a bench, his hair awry, like any other vagrant.

These evening walks fulfilled a purpose, which was to exhaust him, but were accomplished without pleasure. For this reason, as much as for any other, he began to envisage wider excursions, yet these seemed pointless without the prospect of company. Patience had worn him out, yet he knew that his solitary way of life was the only one that suited his temperament. He could, with a little courage, take himself abroad again and sit in the odd unfashionable church or discover the upper floor, usually deserted, of a largely unattended museum, and if he did so, as he had done so many times, he would undoubtedly derive some mild satisfaction from the experience. But then he would have to return to the small hotel, where a hard-faced proprietress would hand him his key without the sort of greeting that he craved, would not question him about his day or enquire about his prospects for the evening, and he would be obliged to go out again, to seek a solitary meal, and to apply himself once more to observing others. And always in the knots of people strolling past him in the streets he would hear snatches of conversation that would intrigue him, make him anxious to know more, even to interrogate those passers-by who had momentarily distracted him; he might then register an unfamiliar reaction—frustration? anger?—not at his inability to participate but distress at the impermeability of others, of all those who did not wish to hear his plans, know his preferences, his tastes, so absorbed were they with their own.

If he were honest with himself he would admit that he had truly enjoyed only one holiday in his life, and that was when he was eight years old. He had the photograph to prove it. He was with his family in a fiacre in Baden-Baden, being driven down the Lichtenthalerallee towards the Casino, where they would drink coffee to the sound of a small orchestra. He could still remember the sun shining through the branches of tall trees, and the amazing size— amazing to him at that age—of the rhododendrons that bordered the road. He could remember the stately creak of the fiacre as they made their way, in the company of similar families, towards the Casino and the enactment of the leisurely morning ritual. The photograph, which he had scrutinized exhaustively, showed a laughing child's face and a hand clasping that of his mother. He could see, as he could hardly remember, that they were comfortably off, secure and harmonious; there was a nursemaid in discreet attendance, probably in charge of his brother, and he remembered her name: Marie. He knew, though this lacked the immediacy of the photograph, that other activities awaited them: walks in the Schwarzwald, with polite greetings to other strolling couples, the heavy appointments of the expensive hotel which so delighted him, the sentimental tunes played by the Casino orchestra, his father's cigar, the lavish meals which would now be frowned upon by today's dietitians, the multiplicity of doctors devoted to one's health and well-being, and who prescribed spa water instead of pills.

That world no longer existed, or if it did would have undergone a change; it had indeed come to an end as his own childhood ended. A braver man might go back to measure these changes, but he was no sociologist; the world he wanted was the world reflected in the photograph, and the laughing face that, for as long as he could remember, only ever now relaxed into a mild smile. Even the smile had become modified with age. The smiling boy had become a polite adult; the smile now had something dutiful about it, as if it were expected of him; he would continue to offer it but without conviction. It was a smile that no longer expressed eagerness but was a suitable feature in his dealings with others. Preparing to listen, to sympathize, he would acknowledge the return of his habitual smile, while all the time registering his lack of joy. That, it seemed, was now in default, was even inconceivable. He accepted this, as he accepted the distance between past and present, wondered whether this feeling was unusual, regretted that there was no way of conducting an enquiry. After examining the photograph he had the fleeting feeling that he was in the wrong country. This was not a welcome reflection. His situation was commonplace. But that occasionally made it extraordinarily difficult to recognize as natural.

He dreaded becoming like the man he saw in the supermarket every day (and who saw him) and who, though respectable, was somehow to be avoided. He seemed always to be seated on a chair near the checkout, his stick planted between his knees, his expression disapproving. He was given to expressing his views on the government to anyone who would listen, and, in a raised voice, to those who would not. Attempts had been made to move him on, but as there was no reason why he should not be in the place these were largely unsuccessful. He was given a wide berth, although what he had to say, or rather to proclaim, was attractive, inasmuch as it was vigorous. He was a fount of moral criticism, with accusations of hypocrisy, of mendacity, delivered with some authority, as if he were in the streets of ancient Athens and had a coterie of impressionable young men. Women took no notice of him, although the girls at the checkout, who, Herz noted, frequently changed places with each other, either wearily assented to his denunciations or laughed without constraint, depending on their degree of kindness or complicity with each other.

For this man there was no complicity; there was none in Herz either, although the man's madness was such as to excite pity and terror, as tragedy was supposed to do. Herz turned his head aside when passing the man, aware that he had been singled out as a confidant. But in fact everyone had been singled out as a confidant, but without success. The extent of this man's solitude was perhaps not particularly obvious except to those who turned away from him, unable to bear the reflection of their own. And yet the man was smartly, even foppishly dressed, which implied that someone was in charge of him. And no doubt one would pass him in the street without a second glance. It was only in the supermarket, with the prospect of a captive audience, that he launched on his accusations. No one seemed safe from his disapproval: all came in for scathing commentary. The most frightening feature of his diatribes was the sensation that they were somehow merited. Even those with a clear conscience felt uneasy, not perhaps on their own behalf but on that of all those government ministers who were being castigated. Why was there no one to rebut his accusations? Where, in fact, were those government ministers, who might be called upon to shed a kindlier light on the issues of the day? A sense of wrongs not righted pervaded the immediate vicinity of this man whose stick seemed ready to strike out, though this had never happened. One reached the street with a relief which had little to do with a chore successfully accomplished. One reached the street willing to embrace the mass, to subside into a comforting mutuality, to dismiss the disconcerting spectacle of the unassimilated, of the unsleeping moral conscience, which, if not checked, might lead to acts one was not anxious to witness.

It was encounters like these, minuscule in themselves but repeated on an almost daily basis, that made Herz feel in need of some protection. Again he invoked that imaginary chorus of encouraging relatives, or, more satisfyingly, because verifiably real, that doctor in Baden-Baden to whom his parents had taken him because he was underweight and who had questioned his eight-year-old self with grave professionalism, with what had seemed like magisterial competence, weighing, percussing, listening, and finally pronouncing a completely reassuring verdict. To be given a bill of health by such a sage was more curative than any regime, although he had had to endure the spa waters, which had no discernible effect but at least did no harm. In Baden-Baden, and even in Berlin, the sun shone, and he might be sitting in his aunt Anna's drawing-room in a haze of excitement, waiting for his cousin Fanny to appear, although when she did she was usually bored and dismissive. In the absence of those strong sensations he was without compensation, and also without purpose. It seemed childish, at the age he was now, to seek rewards for fidelity to those early impressions, yet his life as a grown man had been fashioned by the need to cherish the sensations which had formed at least some part of his character, and to regret, to the point of pain, that they could never come again. Now his sensations were muted, and it was wiser that they should be, in case he turned into the man in the supermarket and railed against his fate, or perhaps fate in general, and recognized the despair he was so anxious to conquer.

He would have liked to discuss these matters with just such a sage as the German doctor, or with an ideal interlocutor, unfortunately unavailable. People went in for such things on television these days, or in the Sunday papers. Television would be the ideal medium. He would be questioned by a sympathetic interviewer, in what circumstances he could not imagine. What he could imagine would be himself discoursing on the persistence of early memory, of images that had stayed with him throughout his life. He would be seen, on the success of such a performance, to be worth consulting in the interests of general enlightenment, would go on—always with encouragement—to describe the Casino at Baden-Baden, its rich debased rococo decoration, so perfectly suited to the spirit of the place, or, more ambitious this, to give an account of his travels, of his artistic delights, Schloss Bruhl, near Cologne, or the house that Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna. Asked back yet again he would be memorable on the Claudes and Turners in the National Gallery, on which his opinion would prove invaluable. These were matters on which he had reflected in the course of his evening walks, but on which he was obliged to remain mute. The existence of such an audience remained his most persistent temptation. His real audience became as strange to him as the people in the supermarket who ignored the man with the stick. Such indifference, with which he was obliged to conform, remained the order of the day.

Instead of which he discussed holiday plans with Bernard Simmonds, whom he met for dinner once a month. Or rather he discussed Bernard Simmonds's holiday plans, which were expansive: he had rented a house near Cortona, to which he had invited different friends, at weekly intervals, to ensure the maximum of variety. This sounded punishing to Herz, who could only tolerate one person at a time, and that at well-spaced intervals. He marvelled at Simmonds's capacity, which seemed an integral part of his youthfulness. He was in his mid-fifties, and looked it, but had the tastes of a much younger man, as these holiday arrangements bore witness. He had a girlfriend who stayed at Hilltop Road in the time she could spare from her various business assignments, which took her to Hong Kong a great deal. Simmonds was proud of her, but in fact just as pleased when she was not there as when she was in residence. He was gregarious, spoke of parties, weekends, plans for the holiday after next. Astonishingly, he had no objection to Herz's company, rather evinced a liking for it, but always consulted his watch to make sure that he was not late for another entertainment, which might have been scheduled for what Herz thought of as an advanced hour. He was not an interesting companion, but he gave the impression of being affectionate. In his smiling demeanour Herz could see something of Ostrovski's odd loyalty to his lame-dog protégés. The association was made comfortable by the fact that neither required anything of the other. Simmonds was his solicitor, and charged hugely. That way there could be no hint of patronage.