She smiled now, with relief (and even approval), ‘Oh, Phoebe said you might be one of them. A good husband. She will be disappointed. I’m afraid she slightly revelled in your divorce. Your new wife, she’s very beautiful.’
‘Thanks. And not only that…Apart from sending you here today with her, with her message, is Phoebe more or less all right?’
‘Oh yes. She’s rich suddenly. She sold her business.’
‘What business? Oh never mind.’ He offered his left hand, his good hand, which she took. ‘Give her my…’
‘Well thanks for the coffee. Personally I can’t see the point of vengeance, can you? I mean, who benefits? And it’s so much trouble.’
‘Mm. Mm. But I bet vengeance was great fun in the old days. If you’re the type and in the mood.’
‘I’ll walk myself down. I apologise for that nonsense about the wand. But I promised Phoebe. She just wanted to know. Anyway, again – sorry to bother.’
Loth and cold
Before I could see what my wife said about it (everything would be laid before her), I was asked to absorb two lessons, two readjustments, bequeathed by September 11. Both involved a subtraction of innocence.
Lesson number one. They would never look the same – those things up there in the firmament, those A-to-B devices, those people carriers: airbus, skytrain. On my way home that evening, at a traffic light, I saw one of them glinting in over the tower blocks…Already and unalterably associated with mass death, a commercial aircraft did not, perhaps, have that much innocence to lose; but only now did it look like a weapon.
Lesson number two. Planes would never look the way they used to, and neither (strange to say) would children.
Or my children. Who did not look the same. At the evening meal that Wednesday night in the house on Regent’s Park Road all five of them were present: Bobbie (twenty-four), Nat (sixteen), Gus (fifteen), little Eliza (four), and tiny Inez (two).
In the L-shaped kitchen/dining room on the ground floor I gave everyone drinks (Eliza ordering milk), laid the table – six places plus a high chair – and did odd jobs for my wife at the stove, and chatted away as convincingly as I could…
My feeling for my daughters and sons: it was more than a change, it was a capsizal. The sensory pleasure they gave me when all of them were gathered had its core in their strength of numbers, the amount of them, all the flesh and bone and brain they added up to; but now it was that same multiformity that made my heart feel loth and cold. Because I knew I couldn’t protect them. Actually you cannot protect your children, but you need to feel you can. And the delusion was quite gone, replaced by a bad-dream sensation, not a nightmare, quite – more like a dream of nudity in a crowded public place…
The connoisseur of vengeance would savour just this – the taste inside our mouths, the mineral sourness of a lost battle, the ancient, the Iron Age taste of death and defeat.
‘Will there be a war?’ asked Nat. Nobody answered.
In the crook of the room there was a miniature TV wedged into a low cupboard (with folding doors). For the last couple of weeks it had often been tuned to the US Open at Flushing Meadows (and only three days ago, on Sunday, Lleyton Hewitt had in the end thrashed Pete Sampras 7–6, 6–1, 6–1). At that moment, I saw, the little set was silently rescreening the clips – the first plane, the second plane…
Inez staggered over there and took the two white panels in her hands ready to slam them shut. ‘No…tennis,’ she said scathingly, as the North Tower (the first to be hit, the second to drop) folded in on itself; and there was New York under its soiled sheepskin of chalk-thick smoke.
Parfait Amour
‘Okay.’ He took the envelope from his breast pocket. ‘Now you’re going to have to be a good sport about this, Elena, and you’re going to have to be wise, too. I know you’re a good sport and I know you’re wise. I need your guidance. Your counsel.’
This was 2001, so his wife was even younger than she would be in St-Malo.
She said, ‘…Go on then.’
He remembered a piece of advice in a novel of Kingsley’s. What it amounted to was this: In conversations with women, never even mention another woman’s name – unless it’s to report her (very painful) death. Yes, but that was in the second of the two forthrightly misogynistic novels he wrote after Elizabeth Jane Howard walked out on him (‘I’m a bolter,’ Jane once levelly told her stepson). To be honest Martin thought that Kingsley’s advice had its applications; but he wasn’t worried about Elena, so advanced and evolved (almost a generation on), and he said with perhaps a touch of complacence,
‘Elena, when it comes to ex-girlfriends, I know there are three or four you take a dim view of, but there are some you broadly tolerate. And some you even like. Isn’t that the way of it? You like some and dislike others?’
‘No. You hate them all.’
‘Do you?’ he asked and laughed quietly (at the instant rout of all his expectations). ‘You’ve heard me speak of Phoebe Phelps…’
‘The sex one.’
‘Roughly speaking.’ Although now he came to think of it, she was, on balance, more like the no-sex one. ‘It’s from her.’
Elena said, ‘The one that didn’t want to get married or have kids. Would you call that a real love affair? Phoebe?’
Man and wife were still at the table. Bobbie, who shared a flat with her (half) brother, had been put in a taxi, and the four others, all supposedly asleep, were in the four bedrooms just beneath his attic study. He poured more wine…Unlike Julian (who wrote a whole novel about it), and unlike Hitch (who had found himself increasingly
