Lessons, p.33
Lessons, page 33
Roland ate alone, with yesterday’s folded newspaper propped against a teapot. The Enron scandal. George Bush had deep connections but was presenting himself as the scourge of corporate corruption. And the bringer of war. Lawrence should have phoned. But no complaining. This was the beginning of the transition, of letting go, though Roland had never heard anyone speak of it, this form of parental dismay. You think of your child as your dependant. Then, as he starts to pull away, you discover that you are a dependant too. It had always cut both ways.
Enron insiders sold their shares before the company crashed. Bush sold his shares. Carl Rove was mentioned. So was Donald Rumsfeld.
There would be more moments like this, slights, and Roland would pretend not to notice. It didn’t suit him to become an object or source of guilt. Nor could he risk conflict. Lawrence might be in a vulnerable state. He had come back with a story Roland needed to hear. He must keep his sticky feelings to himself.
He woke just after one to the sound of his son coming up the stairs. His tread was heavy and irregular. There was a pause before he reached the landing. Roland lay on his back listening, waiting to choose the right moment to get up. A long piss with the bathroom door open, then prolonged splashing at the basin, silence, and the tap ran again. Drinking perhaps. The ancient lavatory needed to be pumped firmly to prompt the flush. But this was too violent. It was wild. The handle must have snapped off, for something metallic crashed against the tiled floor. Roland waited for Lawrence to get to his room, let a few more minutes pass then took his dressing gown and went to see him. The overhead light was on. He was on the bed, lying on his side, fully dressed. On the floor by the night table was his backpack and a plastic bucket.
“You OK?
“Feel like shit.”
“Drunk.”
“And stoned.”
“Drink some water.”
He gasped, possibly in exasperation. “Dad, better leave me. Just want to lie here.”
“Fine.”
“Till the room stops spinning.”
“I’ll take your shoes off.”
“No.”
He did it anyway. Not easy, levering the high-backed trainers off. “Jesus. Your feet stink.”
“So would…” But the boy didn’t have the will to finish. Roland covered him with a blanket, patted his shoulder and left him.
Before falling asleep he read thirty pages of Sentimental Education. Young Frédéric Moreau has fallen deeply in love with an older, married woman. She has touched his hand in farewell at the end of a social evening and soon after, walking home across the Pont Neuf, he stops and in his enraptured state is “seized by one of those tremors of the soul in which one seems to be transported into a higher world.” Roland read the sentence again. A touch of her hand. No possibility, at this stage, of sex between them. She probably knows nothing of his feelings. According to the introduction in Roland’s paperback, Flaubert himself had fallen in love at the age of fourteen with a twenty-six-year-old woman, also married. She remained in his life, with many gaps, for almost half a century. On whether their love was ever consummated, scholarly opinion differed. Roland turned off his light and though sleep was moving in on him, he stared into the darkness, trying to recall his own higher world. No sound from the other bedroom. With Madame Cornell had he once been one step ahead of Flaubert and his Frédéric on Pont Neuf or one step behind? He didn’t think a mere touch of a hand could ever have raised him to such an exquisite state. Madame Arnoux had put out her hand to her other guests and when it was Frédéric’s turn he had felt “something permeating every particle of his skin.” An enviable highly wrought state denied to children of the 1960s in their carnal impatience. He closed his eyes. Strictly formal social norms, extended denial and much unhappiness would be necessary to feel so much after a courteous handshake. As sleep was dissolving his thoughts the answer came clear: he had been many steps behind.
They did not see much of each other the next day. Lawrence slept into the early afternoon and came down for coffee just as Roland was leaving for Mayfair and his Friday afternoon piano session at the hotel. Father and son hugged briefly, then Roland set off. He had a playlist with him which he had to show to one of the managers—usually a formality. Following the New York and Washington attacks last year, it was advisable to arrive early in order to clear the newly installed security scanner at the staff entrance. In his previous job, the pianist was permitted to come through the main doors used by the guests. He now joined a queue of cleaners and waiters coming in for the evening shift. Mohammed Ayub was the cheerful head of security.Roland raised his arms to be frisked.
Mo said, “You playing ‘My Way’ tonight like I requested?” The West Yorkshire accent was strong.
“Never heard of it. How does it go?”
Mo turned a shoulder, extended his palms and sang a snatch in a beefy baritone. The little crowd behind laughed and applauded. Still smiling, Roland went downstairs to the basement to change into his dinner jacket. The tea room where he was to play was thickly carpeted and panelled. The grand piano was on a dais fringed with ferns and a brass rail. Over the years he had come to like it here. The air was sweet with the perfume of lavender polish. The high-ceilinged room was orderly and tranquil, there were oil paintings on the walls under antique downlights, of racehorses and favoured dogs. In the centre was a tinkly fountain surrounded by sprays of white lilies. It was turned off when he started playing. The sandwiches and cakes—he had first choice afterwards when there were spares—were excellent. He had hated it, all of it, back when he started. It suffocated him. Now, in his mid-fifties, the tea room was a comfort and a refuge suspended in time, where he had no other business, no past, a soothing contrast to his Clapham home and all its accretions.
And it was here he played his pleasant music. He showed his list to Mary Killy, the manager of the day. She was small and neat, acutely aware of her status. At their first meeting she had told him he should address her as ma’am. He said nothing, but he never had. She had a sharp nose, slightly raised, with flared nostrils, that gave her a well-intentioned interrogative look, as though she was hungry to know all she could about everyone she met. It was a couple of years before he discovered that she knew about music. She had been a third desk violinist at the Royal Opera House and gave it up to raise three children. People said she was too controlling but Roland liked her.
He would be starting with “Getting to Know You,” he told her, and would follow with a medley of other show tunes, ending with “I’ll Know” from Guys and Dolls.
“Fine.” Mary pointed further down the list. “Chopin? Nothing thunderous please.”
“Just a sweet little nocturne.”
“Begin in four minutes.”
The room was starting to fill, the tea came out with the cake stands and, cushioned on the weak murmur of elderly voices, Roland drifted off through his boundless repertoire. As long as he knew the tune, he could improvise the harmonies—and he knew many tunes. The other managers didn’t notice, whereas Mary objected if his chords became too jazzy. His list was useful as a prompt, but usually one number suggested and flowed into the next. He could daydream while he played. He sometimes wondered if he could fall asleep and keep going. But one element of the job troubled him as much now as it had on his first day. He did not want anyone he knew, anyone from his past, to come in and hear him. An element of pride lingered. None of his friends knew about his promise as a classical player, but some had known him once as a jazz pianist. A few might have remembered him on keyboards with the Peter Mount Posse. He kept quiet about his job unless asked, and then he would dismiss it as very occasional and very dull. He never let Alissa or Daphne come, or any of the others. Lawrence especially was forbidden, though he had never expressed any interest in his father’s workplace. He would have loathed it. Secrecy also heightened Roland’s sense of the tea room as his sanctuary.
He was coming to the end of “I’ll Know.” Like all these numbers, he had played this one too often to have much feeling for it. But he remembered the reinvention of the show twenty years back. The director, Richard Eyre, went for a brass sound with jazz harmonies—the sort of thing Mary did not want in the tea room. A lot of neon on stage, and Ian Charleson, who died of AIDS. The Falklands year. But who was with Roland when he saw it? Before Lawrence. Before Alissa. It wasn’t Diane, the doctor. It wasn’t Naomi from the bookshop. He was thirty-four, in his prime. Certainly not Mireille. As he played, he struggled to summon her. Someone he was with, very lovely, and she was gone from him, no name, no face. He may even have been in love but the mental space was empty, a vacant seat. Around that time he had made a list of people he knew who had died of AIDS. It was savage, but no one spoke much about it now. It was the shame of the living, the helplessness of no cure. Nor did people speak about the Falklands. Awkward in a different way. The years slid over old deaths like a heavy lid. Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget. Should have kept a journal. So keep one now. The past was filling up with blanks and the present, the touch and scent, the sounds of this moment at his fingertips—“The Girl from Ipanema”—would soon be extinct.
That day there was another pianist on the post-dinner shift and Roland was back home by eight. Lawrence was waiting for him, looking scrubbed pink after a long bath and feeling, he said, only slightly fragile. They walked together through the Old Town to the top of the High Street, towards the Standard Indian Restaurant. Lawrence talked about his trip. Paris, Strasbourg, Munich, Florence, Venice. So far, he was avoiding the important part. The roaming ticket worked well, he liked the cities, crossing the Alps was amazing, he had met up with school friends along the way. This afternoon he had phoned a plumber to fix the broken lavatory. Then he called round at Daphne’s for tea. She confirmed the offer of a lowly job for him at the housing association. Six months. Gerald had decided he wanted to go to medical school. He had put his name down for the wrong A levels and would have to persuade the science teachers to take him on. Greta was on her way back from Thailand, Nancy was still hating Birmingham, the town as well as her course. Roland knew all this but he listened as if he didn’t. He was relaxed and happy for the moment, walking slowly, catching up on his son’s news and feeling the last warmth of the city’s day rising from the pavement. Soon he would have to hear the Munich story. Last night’s drunkenness confirmed his suspicions. He had tried to warn his son off his plan.
The Standard was empty. It was resisting the modernising trend sweeping through London’s Indian restaurants. Here they kept to the old ways of flocked wallpaper, failing spider plants and a wide framed print of a lurid sunset. They took their usual table in a corner by a window and ordered lagers and poppadoms. They were silent in acknowledgement of a change of mood. Not all the details would come out at once. They were to return to the story a few times in the week ahead. Roland was serious about keeping a journal and Lawrence’s account would be his first entry.
“OK,” Roland said at last. “Let’s hear it.”
Even before he got there, “Munich was shit.” His train stopped outside the station and did not move for two hours. There was no announcement, no explanation. When they pulled into the station the passengers were kept on the platform for half an hour, then escorted by police to one end of the station to wait along with a thousand others. Lawrence had enough German from school and his grandparents to understand what was going on. A bomb scare, the third in a month, probably some al-Qaeda affiliate. But that did not explain why the public should be kept in the station. It annoyed him, the way the German passengers appeared so compliant. Suddenly, again without explanation, they were permitted to leave. He found a cheap hotel and in the afternoon, on Roland’s recommendation, visited the Lenbachhaus to look at the Blaue Reiter paintings. He thought his father was wrong. Kandinsky was far superior, far more ambitious and interesting than Gabriele Münter.
Late the next morning he visited Rüdiger in his office. His idea was that the publisher would not be able to resist giving him his mother’s address when he was confronted in the flesh. Facing each other over his desk, they chatted for a while. Then Rüdiger was called away to deal with something. Lawrence prowled around the office. Sitting by a pile of books on a windowsill was an out-tray filled with mail. On a hunch he went through the envelopes and there it was, a letter to his mother, a typed address. He couldn’t risk being found writing it down. So he memorised it, the town, the street and the number. Rüdiger took him out to lunch as promised. During it Lawrence asked him where his mother lived. The publisher shook his head. He said there was a long history. At the end of it, she had told him never to interfere again in her personal affairs or try to intervene or even mention her family to her or give out her address, otherwise she would take her next book elsewhere.
The manager at the hotel was helpful. It was a village, not a town, twenty kilometres south of Munich. There was an occasional bus from a street near the station. He kindly phoned for some times, and so, by lunchtime the next day Lawrence was walking along her road, looking for the house. The village was “a nondescript sort of place” cut in two by a busy road and set in flat farmland. Her street was on the way out of the village, more a kind of suburb. The houses were modern and looked vaguely like ski chalets but “kind of squat and totally ugly.” They were set well apart and he was struck by an absence of trees. Not the sort of place a famous writer would choose to live in. Then he was standing right outside her house. It was like the rest, squat, with heavy beams and plate-glass windows. It looked dark inside. Under its thick overhanging roof the house seemed to be “frowning.” He wasn’t ready to go to the door so he walked back the way he had come. He was feeling shivery and sick. A man getting out of his car was staring at him. Lawrence took out his phone and pretended to be talking on it.
Five minutes later he was back outside the house, still feeling shaky. He thought about walking away. But what then? His bus back into Munich was not due for three hours. He put his hand up to the bell and took it away instantly. If he pressed it, he thought, his life would change forever. Then, like diving into cold water, “I just made myself do it.” He heard the ring from deep in the house and hoped she was out. He heard footsteps on the stairs. Too late, he saw a small enamel sign in Gothic script, mounted at waist height. Bitte benutzen Sie den Seiteneingang. Please use the side entrance. His mouth went dry as he heard a lock turn and a bolt withdrawn, then another. The door did not open in an ordinary way. With a loud sucking sound of air pressure against rubber draft excluders, the door was wrenched open, and there she was, “angry as hell,” his mother.
“Was wollen Sie?” The tone was loutish. Burglar, fan, delivery boy, she didn’t care. She was going to see him off.
“Ich bin—”
She pointed down at the enamel plaque screwed to the wall. Irritation caused her forefinger and its glossy vermilion nail to quiver. “Das Schild! Können Sie nicht lesen?” The sign! Can’t you read?
“I’m Lawrence. Your son.”
Everything went still. He thought, Anything can happen now. She didn’t soften and draw him to her in a spontaneous embrace—one of the possibilities he had played with. There was to be no moment of Shakespearean reconciliation—he had been made to read The Winter’s Tale at school. Or was it The Tempest?
Alissa clapped her hand to her forehead and said loudly, “Christ!”
They looked at each other, making their reckoning. But Lawrence’s was vague. He was too nervous to notice or remember much. He thought there was a “sort of shawl thing” round her shoulders. She had a cigarette in her hand, half smoked. Also, she had perhaps a cardigan and perhaps a thick corduroy skirt, even though it was a warm day. There were deep lines around her eyes. She had a “kind of crumpled look.”
Roland said in the restaurant, “Probably writing. Rüdiger has told me how she gets furious when she’s interrupted.”
“Yeah, great. But this was me. Let’s order. I want something gross, like a vindaloo.”
For her part—Roland tried to imagine it—she saw a gangly teenager with a strong gaze in a large head which was shaved close, a style which endearingly enlarged his ears.
Finally, Alissa said in a voice at normal volume, “My question remains. What is it you want?”
“To see you.”
“How did you get this address? Rüdiger?”
“I dug deep on the Internet.”
“Why didn’t you write first?”
A quick shot of anger helped Lawrence out. “You never reply.”
“That would have been your answer.”
His anxiety, the sickness—what he called his jitters—had vanished. He had nothing to lose. He said to her, “What’s up with you?”
She started to speak but “I took the liberty of talking over her—and Dad, it felt great.” He said to her, “Why are you so hostile?”
But she took his question seriously. “I’m not asking you in. I took a decision many years ago. Too late now to undo it, do you understand? You think I’m rude. No, I’m being firm. Get this straight.” She said it slowly. “I am not taking you on.”
He was trying and failing to find words for a knot of thoughts. Something like, why can’t you be big enough to write books and see me? Other writers have children. But he was also beginning to feel that he might not want this hunched and angry woman in his life. It wasn’t so hard then to turn away from her. She was making things easy for him.
And then she made them even easier. After he had gone a few steps, she called out, “Are you having treatment for cancer?”
Baffled, he stopped and turned. “No.”
“Then grow some hair.” She went inside and tried to slam the door behind her but it made the same soft airy sound.
