‘He didn’t choose to turn out to be Jewish. But I see what you mean about difficult positions. And now Hitch, the Marxist hawk, is going to get his war. I saw him on CNN while you were having your shit.’
‘Elena…Uh, and how did he look about his war?’
‘Very steely.’
‘Mm. Did I tell you he rang the day before we left? To “encourage” me, as he put it. “What are your doubts, Little Keith?” Well we’d been through everything else so I just said, “Two things. In the war on terror, is this the best use of resources? And, second, lack of legitimacy.” ’
‘Is that all? And?’
‘He pooh-poohed the first, but the second gave him pause. He acknowledged a certain deficit of legitimacy. But you know what he said to Ian – a couple of weeks ago? Hitch said, “It’s going to be a wonderful adventure.” ’
‘An adventurist war,’ they both said at once.
Actually Martin was starting to think it was something even more capricious than that: it was an experimentalist war. He said, ‘While you in your turn were powdering your nose, Elena, I too had a look at CNN. They’d moved on to Bush. And I didn’t like the way the president was playing with his dogs. With Barney and Spot. I didn’t like the way he was playing with Barney and Spot.’
His wife shifted her weight from foot to foot. ‘Have you told Hitch?’ She gave him a few seconds until he understood. ‘Or didn’t you want to bother him with Larkin at this stressful time.’
‘No, I haven’t. But I do want to bother him. Because he understands something about Larkin that I know I’ll never get. I won’t get it because I don’t want it. The love of that England, you know, all those muddy little villages with fucking stupid names like Middle Wallop and Six Mile Bottom. And Pocklington.’
‘Wait. What’s the Phoebe business got to do with Larkin? I know it’s ostensibly about Larkin. But what it’s really about is Phoebe and your father. And about you. Christ.’
—————
She meant all the oldsters – the slowly and tremulously bobbing coachloads of oldsters…Their numbers had at last begun to thin, and there was a loose sense of calibrated delay – as in a stacked aircraft groaning around high above the tarmac, with the captain coming on to say they were ninth in line for landing. The coachloads of oldsters continued to filter through the gap, stiffly upright, the feet moving in soft-shoe shuffle (no space admitted between cobble and sole); every few seconds they glanced at one another, to give encouragement or to seek mutual recognition – or mutual verification; on they edged, their faces flickering not just with discomfort, difficulty, and mistrust but also with innumerable calculations, every step measured on a scale of soreness, effort, and jeopardy. Looking beyond them, beyond their denim-clad shoulders, their pinions of cloud-white hair, their ears furry in the sun, Martin saw that the next stretch of road seemed reverse-telescoped, and the next junction felt implausibly remote, like gate 97E in a Texan airport. The elderly were making him think of planes – planes, and the poetry of departures. Here we are on our journey. Is it far? Are we nearly there?
—————
Old age kills travel…
I interviewed Graham Greene (1904–91) in Paris on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, and I interviewed V. S. Pritchett (1900–97) in London on the occasion of his ninetieth. ‘Old age kills travel,’ said Pritchett.
Greene talked about failing powers, but only in the context of his religion, his faith. Faith was a power, and faith weakened with time. His listener, who was thirty-five, was far from terrified by this prospect: if it made you less inclined to crave the good opinion of supernatural beings, I reasoned, then old age wasn’t all downhill. Pritchett talked about failing powers in the context of putting words on the page. And that was frightening. His verdict was often on my mind, in 2003.
‘As one gets older,’ he said, ‘one becomes very boring and longwinded to oneself. One’s thoughts are longwinded, whereas before they were really rather nice and agitated. The story is a form of travel. As I go across the page my pen is travelling. Travelling through minds and situations that reveal their strangeness to you. Old age kills travel. Things don’t come suddenly to you. You’re mainly protecting yourself.’ He meant protecting yourself physically and emotionally: no surprises, please. ‘Stories come up on you almost by accident. And now one tends to live a life in which there are no accidents.’ Pritchett paused, and then added with a smile of pain, ‘It’s nothing to do with that really. It’s just getting older.’
Martin said, ‘You mean…?’
‘I mean one can’t travel any more. And one’s pen can’t travel any more. So one can’t write any more.’
Now they were suddenly on the move. His wife stepped forward, and he followed.
Is Europe an elderly?
‘Merci beaucoup,’ she said. ‘Cela va bien.’
And it is now the novelist’s pleasant duty to report that the cappuccino, and indeed the double espresso, were at last on their way.
‘Écoute, Elena. I understood bits of your speech but not all of it. I hope it’s nice and tactful. You know how sensitive France can be.’
‘Sensitive. You mean touchy and vain.’
The two of them were seated side by side at a table in the market square, facing the town’s dominant hotel (which had an Alpine, cuckoo-clock look to it); above their heads striped awnings faintly clacked and rattled in the ozonic gusts. He said,
‘All right, you know how touchy and vain France is. How sensitive Jean-Jacques can sometimes be. And your Secretary of Defense, Mr Rumsfeld, is already being impossibly rude – in all directions. Typical German.’
‘Why, what’s he done now?’
‘Well, this isn’t the main thing, but he said, if you please – he said he could easily do without my help in Iraq! After all that trouble I went to.’
‘You don’t want to be there anyway.’
‘No, I
