backpacking. ‘What’s he up to now?’ I asked.
Kieran was silent for a second, then he spoke in as pleasant a manner as he could manage. ‘He’s dead, too.’
‘What?’ I did not know the boy at all and the father only slightly, but I felt as if I were being pistol- whipped.
‘Nothing bad. Not like his mother.’ This time I could see his eyes filling, even while he remained in admirable control of his voice. ‘He was perfectly well, twenty-three, just starting at Warburg’s and he couldn’t shake off a bout of flu, so we thought he should be looked at.’ He stopped to breathe, back in that terrible moment. ‘I took him to hospital for some tests and he was dead seven weeks later.’ He rubbed his nose swiftly with his left hand, trying unsuccessfully to push back the tears. He talked on, more to steady himself than to give me any information. ‘And that was it, really. I didn’t quite take in what had happened. Not at first. Not for a while. A few years afterwards I even married again.’ He shook his head at life’s absurdity. ‘Of course, it was ridiculous and it didn’t last long. I made a mistake, you see.’ He looked back at me. ‘I thought I could still go on living. Anyway,’ he sighed, as if this at least was understood between us, ‘after I’d got rid of Jeanne I sold the houses and everything else, and came here. I did bring a lot of stuff with me, as you can see. I hadn’t signed off completely.’
‘How do you spend your time?’
‘Oh.’ He thought for a second, as if this was rather a curious query and difficult to answer. ‘I’ve still got quite a lot of things on the boil and I take a bit of interest in financing research, into cancer, mainly. I’d like to think that it might help to prevent it happening to someone else. And I do worry about education these days, or rather the lack of it. If I’d been born now, I’d have ended up pulling pints in a bar in Chelmsford. I mind about those kids who’ll never have a chance, the way things are.’ He seemed pleased to think about these issues and glad of his role in them. Which he deserved to be. ‘Apart from that I read. I watch a lot of television and I enjoy it, which nobody admits to. You see,’ he tried to smile but gave up, ‘the thing is, when your only child is dead, you’re dead.’ He paused as if to mark the rightness of this sentence to himself. ‘Your life is finished. You’re not a parent any more. You’re nothing. It’s over. You’re just waiting for your body to catch up with your soul.’
He stopped talking and we just stood there in that holy place of love. Kieran was weeping quite openly by this stage, with tears coursing down his cheeks, leaving a dark trail of water marks on his expensive lapels, and I freely confess that I was, too. We didn’t say anything more and for a few minutes we didn’t even move. It would have been a strange sight if anyone had interrupted us. Two rather overweight men in late middle age, standing motionless in their Savile Row suits, crying.
Terry
ELEVEN
Not very surprisingly, after an evening like that I decided I needed some air. Kieran offered to get his driver to take me home but I wanted to walk, just for a bit, and he didn’t insist. So we shook hands in that funny English way, as if we hadn’t been through an emotional trauma together, as though the whole thing hadn’t really happened and the stains of our tears had some other, more banal and more acceptable explanation. We made the usual murmurings about meeting again, which one always says. Unusually, I rather hope it will happen, but I expect not. After that I set off down the Embankment.
It was a long walk home and quite cold, but it did not seem so. I strolled along, both reliving and then laying to rest my memories of Joanna. I was glad to have had a chance to revalue Kieran, even while I knew he was far beyond help, and I felt that I had been allowed to look into a soul that was worth looking into. Filled with these melancholy thoughts, I had just turned off Gloucester Road into Hereford Square when there was a scream, then laughter, then shouting, then the sound of someone being sick. I wish I could write that I was astonished to hear what sounded like a large Indian takeaway being splashily deposited on to the pavement, but these days it would require a Martian, and one only recently arrived from outer space, to be surprised at these charming goings-on. A group of young men and women in their early twenties, I would guess, were loitering on the corner of the square, perhaps recent refugees from the Hereford Arms on the other side of the road, perhaps not. One woman, in a short leather skirt and trainers, was throwing up and another, with suspiciously black hair, was tending to her. The rest just stood around, waiting for the next act in their evening’s entertainment. Foolishly, I paused to study them. ‘Got a problem?’ said a man with a shaved head and a whole array of piercings down the edge of his right ear. I wondered the weight didn’t throw him off balance.
‘My problems seem nothing to yours,’ I said and then rather regretted my clever-clogs answer as he took a menacing step towards me.
‘Leave him, Ron. He’s not worth it,’ the girl with black hair and what looked like four different petticoats swaddling her bottom shouted over her shoulder. Happily he appeared to agree and turned away.
As he moved back, he shouted a crisp ‘Fuck off’ at me, but more as a kind of standard ritual, as one might say good morning in a village street. And so, before he could change his mind, I did.
It’s not often that I walk at night, though more from laziness than fear, but when I do I am amazed at the changes that have come about in London during my adult lifetime, the main one being, of course, not the mugging and the general crime, nor even the dirt and uncollected rubbish that swirls and drifts in piles against the railings and the plane trees, waiting in vain for the men to come. It is the drunkenness that has transformed the streets, not just of London but of almost every town, into a lesser hell for lawful citizens. The kind of drunkenness that in years gone by used to be talked of in Siberia at the height of Stalin’s iron rule as a reflection of the misery of the oppressed, or it was rumoured to be manifest up near the pole, where the long nights of winter drive strong men mad. Why did it happen here? When did it start? I used to think it was a class thing and somehow linked to the ills of social deprivation, but it isn’t. Not long ago I attended a twenty-first party, held in one of St James’s smartest clubs. The birthday boy was clever, charming, tipped for success and linked to half the peerage, and I watched as all the nice young girls and young men cheerfully tossed back the booze until they were staggering or vomiting or both. As I left, I heard a tray of glasses go west amid loud laughter, and a girl in a pretty couture dress of lilac chiffon pushed past me, hand on mouth, hoping to make it just in time. Outside, a fellow with traces of sick on his evening shirt was urinating against the car parked next to mine. I had escaped not a moment too soon.
Certainly some people drank too much in my day, as they always have, but drunkenness was rare and sad, and made men look like fools. Until as little as ten years ago being drunk was a mistake, a regrettable by-product of making merry, a miscalculation which, the next day, required an apology. Now it’s the point. Does anyone out there understand why we let it happen? Because I don’t. Of course I can see the charm of the ‘cafe culture’ we were said to be encouraging. But how long can a sane person contemplate failure without admitting it? At what point does optimism become delusion? The other day some fat-headed woman on the radio was lecturing her browbeaten interviewer, denying that there was anything wrong with binge-drinking, insisting that the true problem lay with the middle-aged, middle-class drunks, apparently swilling it down in their own houses. He, poor battered fellow, dared not argue that even if this were true, even if all the bons bourgeois were lying flat on the carpet, singing sea shanties every night of their lives, they would still not be a problem, because they would not be a problem to
