‘Yeah? And what’s the state of her then, eh? Can she hold a thought in her head for two seconds? Or is she all over the fucking gaff like mine. I mean, when your bonce goes, I ask you, what is the sense in carrying on?’
I gestured at the instrument he still held in his hand and said, ‘Just wondering, but what was that – what was all that to do with?’
He sat back and grunted it out: Lanzarote. Sinking deeper, he reached up and eased his writhing neck. ‘For her eightieth, see, I bought her a beautiful little timeshare in Lanzarote. Beautiful little holiday home. Maid looking in every morning. A bloke doing the garden. Good place to park her in the winter. Roof terrace overlooking the bay. And now she’s meant to renew the insurance. That’s all it is. The contents insurance and that. Shouldn’t have taken but a minute.’
‘Well. They do find it hard to…’
‘You know, I’ve got four brothers. All younger. And not one of them’ll touch her with a fucking bargepole. They won’t have anything to do with her. It’s true the old – she does drive you mad, there’s no question. But you’ve got to grind it out, haven’t you. And the four of them, they won’t go near her. Can you credit it? They won’t go near their own fucking mum. Pardon the language. Well, they haven’t got my resources, admittedly. So answer me this. Where would she be without my support?’
With a glance at my wrist I said, ‘Damn. I’d better pack. Early flight.’
‘Here for a day or three yet, me. Take a well-earned rest. Look in at the gym. Room service. Uh, what’s your destination?’
I took his offered hand. ‘Home.’
VI
As I bunched and crushed various items into the splayed bag, I activated my computer. And saw that there was still no message from my wife (nor from a single one of my children). Yes, well, it was the same with Nabokov: ‘Don’t you find our correspondence is a little…one-sided?’ And in my case it was curious, because when I was away like this I never fretted about my other life, my settled life, where everything was nearly always orderly and unchanging and fixed into place…
Otherwise I felt fine, and even quite vain of my vigour (health after all unbroken), and buoyant, and stimulated, and generally happy and proud; the tour had awakened anxiety in me but I have to say that even the anxiety was not unwelcome, because I recognised it as the kind of anxiety that would ask to be written about. At odd moments, though, I seriously questioned the existence of the house in Brooklyn, with its three female presences (wife, daughters), and I seriously questioned the existence of my two boys and my eldest daughter, all grown, in London – and my two grandchildren. So many! Could they, could any of them, still be there?
‘Good morning, this is your wakeup call…Good morning, this is your wakeup call…Good morning, this is your –’
I had one final appointment: a radio interview with a journalist called Konrad Purper, destined to take place in what they called the Centre d’Affaires, with its swivel seats and cord carpets. When it was over Konrad and I stood talking in the foyer until my chaperone promptly but worriedly appeared. There had been many chaperones, many helpers and minders – Alisz, Agata, Heidi, Marguerite, Hannah, Ana, Johanna.
‘There are no taxis!’ said Johanna. ‘They can’t get near us. Because there’s too many people!’
Normally I am very far from being an imperturbable transatlantic traveller. But at that moment I sensed that my watch was moving at its workaday pace; time did not start speeding up, did not start heating up. What was the worst thing that could happen? Nothing much. I said, ‘So we…’
‘Walk.’
‘To the airport.’
‘No – sorry. I’m not clear. To the train station. We can get there from there.’
‘Oh and the station’s close, isn’t it.’
‘Five minutes,’ said Konrad. ‘And every ten minutes a rail shuttle goes to Munich International.’
So with Johanna I started out, rolling my bag, and with Konrad perhaps coincidentally rolling his bike, and the three of us often rolling aside on to the carless tarmac in favour of the pageant of costumed revellers coming the other way. This narrow thoroughfare, Landwehrstrasse, with its negotiations between West and East – Erotic Studio, Turkish Restaurant, Deutsche Bank, Traditional Thai Massage, Daimler-Benz, Kabul Market…
We came out into the air and space of the Karlsplatz and the multitudes of Hansels and Gretels (many of the women, in the second week, decadently wearing the despised ‘Barbie’ alternative: a thick-stitched bodice and a much-shortened dirndl showing the white stocking tops just above the knee). How did it go in the Biergarten? According to Thomas Wolfe, they had merry-go-rounds, and an insane profusion of sausage shops, and whole oxen turning on spits. They ate and drank in tents that could seat 6,000, 7,000, 8,000. If you were in the middle of this, Wolfe wrote, Germany seemed to be ‘one enormous belly’. Swaying, singing, linking arms: Germans together, en masse, objectively ridiculous, and blissfully innocent of any irony…
Now Johanna, I saw, was talking to a policeman who was stretched out in a parked sidecar. Konrad stood by. She turned and said to me,
‘It’s – you can’t even get there by foot!’
For many years I lived in Notting Hill, and sat through many Carnivals (in earlier times often attending with my sons); I knew about cordons, police gauntlets, closed roads (for ambulance access), and panics and stampedes; once I was in a crush that firmly assured me that you could face death simply by means of a superfluity of life. Yes, there were affinities: Oktoberfest was like Carnival, but the flesh there was brown and the flesh here was pink. Hundreds of thousands of high-esprit scoutmasters – hundreds of thousands of festive dairymaids in their Sunday best.
‘The only
