Song Of Time (24 page)

“We call ourselves Moderate Christians, Roushana.” Now, in what was obviously a well-honed double-act, it was Lujah’s turn again. “Not that we are Christian, but moderate’s as close along these shores as you can get to calling yourself agnostic.”

Tony let out a laugh. “And that’s a whole other story!”

Claude laughed as well. Everything here—the food, the service, the china, the exquisite room stuffed with towels and flowers and chocolates which Claude and I had been given—seemed to mesh together perfectly. When he finally took me upstairs at the far end of several glasses of fine malt whisky, he bundled me through a door into a smaller, unlit room, then dispossessed and half-undressed me on a boingy bed. Voices drifted outside: Tony’s, then Lujah’s, as they called to the servants about the next day’s arrangements, but by now it was too late for us to stop.

“This used to be my room,” he murmured as he rolled off me. Now that details were coming into focus, I saw the gleam of trophies, of silk banners and crinkled posters. “That was why I wanted you in here.”

I kissed him, but his parents’ voices were still milling across the landing, and I didn’t feel remotely comfortable. I made a desultory grab for the remains of my clothes, but Claude stopped me.

“No, no. Just leave it all here. Someone’ll clear things up in the morning.” He touched my breasts. “Let’s just take a chance and go like this. It’ll be fun…”

So, on the first night in Claude’s parents’ house, we sprinted near-naked along the corridors, and then collapsed laughing in our own huge room and, still possessed by the same insatiable spirit, made love yet again.

I awoke tired and early and happy, as I did each day we spent in Washington, and lay there listening to the quiet of that big house. This was like living in some ideal hotel—there were always gifts, new soaps, floral surprises, innovative snacks—and I left Claude sleeping, showered and dressed in my freshly cleaned clothes, before setting out to wander the pretty streets of Georgetown in the awakening morning. Of course, this wasn’t really Washington DC, let alone America, but I felt a look-at-me pride as I eyed the expensive shops as they unfanned their awnings, and walked along the canal amid storms of blossom, to think that I had got here in my own way, and on what felt like my own terms.

There wasn’t a brick out of place along the elegantly rising streets, the doors all shone with brasswork, and birds sang from the immaculate trees. Menials dressed in cheery smiles and striped blazers ticked about on bikes. Even the barrier fences which surrounded Georgetown made a fair stab at elegance.

Claude, who slept in far later here than ever he did in Paris, would be lazily awake by the time I returned, and we’d make love in amber sunlight and I’d shower and dress again, and Lujah would be up by then and Tony would be attired in whatever elegant suit he’d be wearing for today’s round of seminars, board meetings and committees. Time assumed new aspects here: like the great buildings of State, it grew pillars, pediments and cornices.

Outside Georgetown’s golden bubble, the real city, or at least as close as Washington DC ever came to reality, still waited. But meanwhile, there were leisurely receptions in big halls, and brisk rehearsals for the concerts Claude and I were to give at the JFK, and of course there were interviews and fund-raising lunches and passionate speeches by Claude, and the rejoinders which by now I was getting used to giving. I met famous faces—men and women some of whose names had adorned the Deutsche Grammophon CDs in Dad’s old collection, congressmen, the last living stars of a dying Hollywood—and it seemed they all knew who I was, and wanted to hear what I thought about not merely music but the state of the world. Above all, they were fascinated by the thought of living—and then thriving, succeeding—in Paris, which most of them saw as some dream of cobbled streets, onion sellers and artists in garrets. If I was being patronised, I didn’t notice it.

There were bubbles within bubbles. This froth of liberals was just a small sub-set of the greater political foam of Washington, and an endan-gered one at that. There had been hope three years before on Hardy Yasso being elected president that the fundamentalist doctrines which gripped most of the country could still be reconciled with the liberal principles to which many in the east coast cities were still clinging. Even her sole previous claim to fame as acting the role of mother in a long-running series of coffee adverts had been overlooked. But now, with galloping recession, and the recent bloody farce of the loss of Taiwan and the sinking of the US third fleet by the Chinese, the chasms were growing larger. There was talk that one of the new virtuality stars—not a human at all, but a digital collection of lantern-jawed smiles and creaky eyebrow-raises from a popular series of semi-medieval romances— might stand for nomination. Few thought it was a joke, and even fewer doubted that he or it would do a better job than Yasso.

I was reminded of what Mum had told me of the remains of New Delhi. From the broken-tip of the Washington Monument to the tidal marks on the Jefferson Memorial, from the wingflash of the protective drones which constantly circled the White House to the constant flurries of mosquitoes beyond Georgetown’s saccharine encampments, the place had a similarly languid and decrepit feel. They were both the old capitals of old empires, but Washington, still then being Wash-ington, remained suffused with a glamour you could still imagine would never cease.

“We’re so
proud
of what Claude’s achieved,” Lujah confided to me as she steered me between the tables towards the next important person she wanted me to meet at the end of a sit-down buffet at the Wardman Park. “It never was just about music or achievement for us. These things are hollow without some sort of moral substance.”

There was nothing about Lujah which wasn’t substantial. That after-noon, she’d be working at a sanatorium for breakbone fever victims. Fundraising, she insisted, was empty unless you put your own bare hands and your whole beating heart into it. She was a walking, endlessly talk-ing, advert for compassion. In many ways, she should have reminded me of Mum—if Mum had had a penchant for wearing thick gold necklaces and swishing around in hand-painted silk dressing gowns at breakfast.

“And I’m so glad that Claude’s found someone,” she told me in an interlude between the applause. “Everything about you Roushana—”

But now it was her turn to take the podium, with Claude at the piano as she sang Cole Porter in that sweet, near-professional contralto whilst cheques were written at the tables. And then I performed the Heifetz arrangements from Porgy and Bess, and the whole carousel of privi-leged Washington life continued its spinning.

“Mum and Dad do absolutely everything they can,” Claude told me as we drove out later that same afternoon. “You can see that. And Gran— you’ve met Gran—she’s the same. But I had to go somewhere else. Find somewhere more…” He gestured out of the window as our hire car trundled itself along wide streets of cliff-face offices. Somewhere
less
, I thought, would have said it better. Paris, for all its bustle and rain, seemed small and simple by comparison.

But I felt that I was coming closer to Claude by being here. His philosophy—a sort of happy Existentialism which said that nothing mattered apart from ideas—seemed like a cooler, more modern version of his parents’ Democratic principles, which in turn were derived from the inclusive old-fashioned Christianity for which his grandmother’s generation had once stood. For Lujah really was short for hallelujah, which seemed right to me now, rather than inherently comical. But the current generation of students at GWC, Georgetown and Virginia were demonstrating in favour of a war in Indo-China with as much passion as their great grandparents had once demonstrated against one, and people were speaking in tongues at the Sunday morning service at the National Cathedral…

As the guide-signals gave out and Claude took the car’s wheel as the buildings slunk lower and turned shabbier, I pondered how Lujah and Tony had both accepted me so readily. There were no doubts, no reserva-tions. Hadn’t Claude brought other girls home? For all the liaisons he’d admitted and those which had been documented in the press, his past sexual life still remained elusive. Here he was again, talking as we passed burnt-out and boarded shops of walking with girls on the lost prome-nades of Virginia Beach. But with Claude the names were always too quick, and too many. Here, or in Paris, his life was like his parents’ house in Georgetown. There were always new guests, dinners, recitals, rehearsals, dances, meetings…

We bumped over fallen telephone lines.

“I thought,” he said, “I’d show you some of another side of DC.”

Old women, grandmothers of no more than forty, eyed us from the streetside shade in plastic chairs. White flurries of the plastic peel-offs of drug patches, the other blossom of these other Washington suburbs, billowed across the hot streets. Our hire car, which had seemed small and dented and cheap in Foggy Bottom, suddenly looked new and expensive.

“Are you sure this is safe?”

Claude laughed. “This is
my
hometown as well as my parents’, Roushana. You think I don’t know this place?”

The sun hung low, just as it always seemed to do in Washington. Beneath its glare, the tarnished Anacostia River gleamed with oil and effluent. Rotting piers slumped beside half-sunken boats and wavering tendrils of reinforced concrete. When Claude turned up a side-street and stopped the car beside a burnt-out humvee. I could scarcely believe we were supposed to get out.

“Come on. We’ll be fine.”

Two children in motorised Zimmer frames stood watching us. They managed to look both pathetic and dangerous. Claude walked over to them, smiled, slapped hands, said something. He came back again.

“Did you give them money?”

“No, no.” He laughed at my innocence. “Or not just money. I told them I’m going to see my old friend the Burger King. If that doesn’t do it, nothing will…”

Sure enough, the shattered façade of an old Burger King franchise lay nearby, and I told myself as I stepped towards it over the rubble that we’d walked many of the more dangerous parts of Paris without hindrance. But nothing here was the same. Inside, some individuals far more threat-ening than the UUN soldiers I’d encountered in India lounged amid the plastic seats which remained bolted to the floor. They were kitted out with the sort of fire-and-forget weaponry which had failed the US in its recent military incursions, and it was immediately clear that neither of them recognised Claude.

“Hey—”

The argot was too thick for me to follow—I couldn’t even make out what Claude was saying—but, after a few staccato questions, and some worrying glares at me, the atmosphere began to ease. Soon, there was laughter and sad headshakes as names of people were mentioned which it seemed they all knew, although I got the impression that most of them were dead.

Beyond the counter, past old frying machines and last adverts for combo meal bargains, then up a steel set of stairs, daylight faded, and music boomed with several disparate beats. There were dark curtains, sympathetically pulsing sheets of cheaply coloured scenes. I was eyed from alcoves by more men with high-tech guns, and a few sinisterly casual women. Then, in a flurry of windchimes and fans and yet more brightly pulsing plastic ribbons, and a final fumbling interlude of dark-ness, we were in the presence of the personage who could only be the Burger King.

Harad Le Pape had nothing on this. We were disorientated, instinc-tively stooping. This really did feel like a royal audience. The King was hugely fat, which in itself, seeing as he would have had easy access to the treatments which would have kept him slim, was a declaration of status. He, and the endless layers of glittering silks and prints and velvets and rare animal hides in which he was clothed, spilled and blended in confusing rococo with the gilt—or perhaps it was real gold—throne on which he was supported. Women, some real, some virtual, and all of them even more scantily dressed than those we’d passed on the way, coiled and coiled and mewed around him. Behind and around us, in the further, darker shrines and caverns of which we slowly became aware, lounged many lesser potentates.

“Slow times, Claude Vaudin—and this your—”

“Her name’s Roushana Maitland. She’s a famous musician.”

“Musician…!” The skin across the Burger King’s face was stretched too shinily tight for it to register real emotion, but his eyes, deep-set, another of the room’s caverns, glittered with what I took to be amusement, and the creatures around him twittered in response. “I hear of you sometimes…Where’s it called…?” He raised a tiny hand from a bulk of silk and snapped a finger.

“Paris.”

“Paris…” He nodded, creasing his many chins and looking almost orgasmically satisfied at the mention of that name. The Burger King spoke clearly enough, although he had a small voice, for someone so large, so obviously powerful. You had to listen very carefully over the submerged booming of the music to make sure you heard exactly what was said. “Don’t know why you trouble with travel. You can get it all here…”

Stealing glances around this place as the Burger King talked to Claude in this oblique way, I became aware that we were surrounded by a dragon’s horde of drug paraphernalia. There were pipes, pipettes, nano-irons, hydroponics, old PCs, vials of super-blood and esoteric elec-tronics. Swarms of nerve parasites flittered in jars. Chalices fumed with pleasing, yet unplaceable scents. The Persian rugs and pulsing virtual screens which carpeted the floor were lumpy with wiring. Then, swirling in the darker corner was what I took at first to be the luminous void of some advanced kind of TV screen. But it was more than that. It was brighter and darker—the next great leap into a world of entire virtuality. Even in the Burger King’s presence, it was hard not to keep glancing back.

My skin tingled and pulsed. Like the smoke, the women danced around the Burger King, and I found that I was following what he saying without actually having to worry about the words. It was a kind of telepathy, and soon I felt that he could understand me as well. To the Burger King, the here-place, by which he meant everything beyond that precious screen which he guarded so carefully, was pale and greyly disappointing—useful only as a way of getting quickly on to the proper world, which awaited through the drugs and technologies which were so expansively arrayed. Even in terms of physical safety, he feared a viral attack from a rival monarch far more than he feared guns, car bombs or raids by the DC police. He chuckled, smiled, touched my hand, then stroked my hair and shoulders with gentle fingers as I bowed before him. This was the path which lay ahead, he explained, and like any other apostle or seeker of the truth he was merely following it…