Part 12 (1/2)

18 Dresden Road

Maida Vale

London NW8

Miss Cohen has also given them a phone number, and the address of the clinic, which is in St John's Wood.

David and Gogo stare at this sc.r.a.p of paper with an unjustifiable degree of faith and expectation. The very name of Lily McNab rea.s.sures them. They thank Gertrude Cohen profusely, and ask if they can ring her a cab. Not at all, she says, quite tardy. She is quite capable of walking to the station. Can David drive her to the station, they ask. Certainly not, she says. Exercise is good for me, she says, and off she marches to Highbury and Islington, on the stick-like and slightly bandy legs that have walked her into Dachau and out of it, that have walked her into the night and out of the night and now will walk her unbowed into the vale.

David does not believe in private medicine. Gogo does not believe in psychoa.n.a.lysis. But they both believe in Lily McNab. They have no choice.

Before we meet Lily McNab, let us return, briefly, to the Herz household by the river. We suspect all is not well with the Herzes. Jessica and Jon are fine, and we don't have to worry about them: let's say that they are lucky in their choice of genes on the Herz side, and although they have inherited the Palmer colouring they have also received a fair amount of natural optimism and gregariousness from their Golders Green gran. They have been only mildly affected by the expurgated news of Benjie's illness, for they had sensed he was growing out of them anyway. It's a pity, but that's how it is. They have not been told about their mother's condition, and they have not guessed that there is anything wrong with her, for they are accustomed to her short temper, her vagaries, her busyness, her exhaustions, her absences. They are enjoying the relaxed reign of a particularly amusing non-live-in paid minder called Chantal, who collects them from school, cooks their suppers, takes them to the movies. Chantal is a laugh. She lets them stay up all hours while she chats on the phone to her boyfriend in Beirut. We can forget about Jess and Jon. As Chantal herself, unmindful of their fate, so often does.

Rosemary demands a little more of our attention, for her situation is more complicated and more developed. Although she feels no physical effects from her medical condition, her mental unease increases, for it is clear that her suspicions have been correct. There is something wrong with her kidneys. Is it serious? The specialist will not commit himself, he hedges his bets. He annoys Rosemary by returning once more to the subject of her ancestry. He seems to wish to insist that she has inherited degenerate kidneys. As Rosemary's mother's kidneys have by now been eaten by the mackerel and the dogfish of the Atlantic, there is no way of inspecting them for clues, and Rosemary is obliged to state quite bluntly that she cannot inform Mr Saunders of the cause of the death of her father, Andrew Palmer. Indeed she cannot confirm that he is dead. And she has no intention of digging around in the family gene cemetery for the kidneys of her grandparents. The Palmers, she bluffs, had been military men, and a lot of them had died of malaria and dysentery and alcohol in India. Smart diseases, positional complaints. The Haxbys had gone in, less smartly, for strokes. He can make of that what he will. It is up to him to sort this out. That is what he is paid for.

Mr Saunders finds her a tricky and unsympathetic customer. He could almost prefer the days when patients were patients. He'd been paid nearly as much, in the good old pre-market days, and he'd been treated with a lot more respect. Respect is worth something. Respect is a positional good.

Rosemary wonders whether to confide her fears to Nathan, as most wives would. But she is not most wives. And Nathan is in unreceptive mood. His position in the firm is embattled, and he is abstracted. He and his team seem quite unable to come up with anything brilliant or new on the Health Marketing Plan. It is all cliche, all pastiche. He wonders whether it would be possible to break out completely, to think the unthinkable, to start marketing not by rea.s.surance and innuendo but by full frontal fear? A Black Campaign? Skeletons, diseased organs, skulls, scare stories? Or what about extending the lottery to spare parts, kidney machines, fertility treatment, hip replacement? He tries this out on Rosemary, who is usually receptive to his darker jokes, but she seems curiously unamused. In vain does he insist that we all know quite well that it's done by lottery anyway, and has been, discreetly, for decades: she's been strongly in favour of the lottery money for the arts, so why should she disapprove of Banglades.h.i.+ kidneys by lottery? She makes it clear that she does not wish to continue this conversation. He can't see why she's being so squeamish, and is not in a position to guess that she is wondering if she has been correctly advised that no private insurance on earth would cover the cost of long-term renal dialysis. She has not yet had the courage to inspect the small print of her own policy. And no, she does not agree with Nathan that we will, by the end of the century, solve the health service crisis by introducing legalized euthanasia. Demographically, it's a cert, insists Nathan. It's got to come, so why not go for it now? But Rosemary won't listen, and neither will the punters or the electorate. Purgatorial flames are already big business, argues Nathan. The American way of death. Forest Lawns. Oh, shut up, says Rosemary pettishly, feeling her pulse flutter.

And Nathan himself can't find much consolation in these fantasies. Can he be losing faith in the market?

Nathan loves the lottery, he is a heavy investor in scratch cards and lottery tickets, he doesn't think much of the dull puritanism of Daniel and Patsy Palmer, of David and Gogo D'Anger, who disapprove of the whole d.a.m.n thing. But he doesn't think his number is going to come up. So far he's only made twenty-five quid back, and he's spent hundreds. What he'd said to Daniel, about his pressing need for 20,000, had been less than the truth. He needs more than twenty, he needs a hundred grand. Nathan Herz is in trouble. He has forgotten to charge a client, for a bill of 120,000; a year has pa.s.sed, and now he dare not send in the bill, he dare not own up to his colleagues. He's not been a criminal: just b.l.o.o.d.y stupid. He has been lying awake at nights with worry, listening to the lap of the Thames. He is getting stale. He is making mistakes. He hears whispering behind closed doors. Rosemary thinks she is for the axe, and Nathan is beginning to think he is for the high jump: from being a two-income, high-earning, upwardly mobile family, they are about to become a no-income, on the skids, debt-ridden casualty. Can this be so?

And Nathan is beginning to think he had never been a real achiever. (He is too subtle, too clever, he tries to console himself.) That summer he and Rosemary had been guests on a week's cruise of the Turkish Aegean, invited by the richest of the rich. Fabulous money, unimaginable money. Nathan had been unnerved, unsettled, and so had Rosemary, though she had tried not to show it. They had been invited by Greta and Bob Eagleburger, patrons of the arts, friends of Rosemary's. Greta painted on Sundays, Bob bought. Theirs was the yacht, theirs were the Braques and the Dufys and the Hockneys that hung on the walls of this floating emblem of good taste. For the Eagleburgers had an eye, they had bought well. Bob Eagleburger had an eye for Rosemary, but Nathan could tolerate that: it was the grand luxe that p.i.s.sed him off. Luxe, calme et volupte. Servants, champagnes, diamonds. And a f.u.c.king Turner, a real Turner, in the Circe Lounge. Generous, were the Eagleburgers, to their little crew of sponging impressionable guests: generous, and mean with it, for they sometimes made them sing for their suppers. The rich are like that. They can make demands. The Herzes and the Spensers had sung to their tune. Even Harry Danzig, lord of unnumbered acres of barren Scottish moorland, had jumped at their bidding. Lord Danzig's demeanour was impenetrably civil and servile, as he accepted Eagleburger largesse, as he toiled round ruins and tinkled old dance tunes on the piano and entertained with indiscreet tales of royalty. The Spensers had been less docile: once Nathan had caught a subversive smirk of astonished disbelief on Sandy Spenser's face at the appearance of yet another farfetched miracle of cuisine. But Sandy was a sculptor: he could afford to smirk. The Herzes could not. They had to toe the line.

Nathan Herz knew he would never be in the big league, but he had not realized, until he set sail with the Eagleburgers, that he was a pauper. The rich are different from us. And in the last decade, they have become more and more different. The rich have got richer and richer. Nathan knew he could not afford to keep that yacht afloat for half an hour, for five minutes. Yet until that invitation, until that cruise, he had thought himself to be doing well. His confidence had gone.

Nathan wanders round the perfume department of Selfridges on the Thursday evening that Benjie D'Anger is rescued from the bath. He is looking for a birthday present for his mother, but he is dreaming of the Turner in the Circe Lounge. It had been of a beauty to break the heart. An unfinished oil, of a rocky Mediterranean sh.o.r.e, with caves and a natural arch topped with a brush of trees: in the foreground, on the beach, strayed dimly painted figures, emerging from stone and sand and sea as though from the ancient forms of time itself. And across the blue and emerald water the faint sketched shapes of * antique ghostly s.h.i.+ps. Gold, amber, aquamarine.

His mother would not want a Turner, so that's all right. She is the easiest woman in the world to please, and Nathan has always enjoyed buying her gifts, for she is delighted by any small female treatby soaps, salts, sprays, oils, lotions, perfumes. And Nathan loves the cosmetic halls of the large department stores. Selfridges has a grandeur, a dignity that the new out-of-town malls will never achieve. Its Corinthian pillars, its carved cherubs, its bra.s.s plaques, its bronzed marble, its Egyptian sphinx-lions, its pigeon-netting, its lofty lifts, its history. A woman here may be queen for a day, a man may be a prince, a benefactor. He enjoys chatting up the sales girls, as they lean forward with their glowing pellicles and s.e.xy clinical uniforms, fluttering their long false lashes at him, dabbing or squirting fluids on to the back of his hairy wrist. He sniffs the scents of Arabia, the distillations of rose and cat and whale. He has the keenest sense of smell. He is a sensuous man. The perfumes glow gold and blue and amber and crystal in caskets and chalices, in ziggurats and phalluses, in pearls and cubes and apples of clear and cut and bevelled and frosted gla.s.s. Their names are the names of Temptation, Obsession, Possession, Frivolity. This is the apotheosis of presentation, the triumph of form over content. Minimal dabs of exorbitantly expensive cream and jelly reside in elfcups magnified by prisms, enclosed in deceitful phials, emprisoned in false-bottomed boxes. Who wants No Nonsense packaging? The package is the product.

Salesperson Tricia Chang insists that the Principessa Venier is the best of this season's new perfumes. She daubs, Nathan inhales. He cannot really get a proper whiff of the Principessa, he complains, for he is already too bespattered by the newest names from Chanel and Guerlain, from Cabochard and Klein, from Lancome and Armani: would Tricia happen to have a spare clear inch or two of her own personal skin to test it upon? He likes the deep sea-green gla.s.s of the container, the long old-fas.h.i.+oned scent-bottle slim column of it, the under-watery pearl of the stopper. Could she oblige? Honey-skinned Tricia smiles, with her curved mahogany-red lips, and stares at him with widened, skilfully outlined, china-and-white-and-cornflower eyes: then she modestly lowers her lashes, opts for her left wrist, sprays it, extends it across the glittering counter to the gallant frog-like Nathan. Nathan takes her hand, smells it, breathes her in.

The Principessa Venier and Tricia Chang do not smell good to Nathan. They smell of dankness and drains. He inhales again. Has some sinister chemical reaction taken place? The Principessa smells of death in Venice. Nathan looks up sharply, at Tricia's waxy cherished blandly smiling face: she is not mocking him, she has not turned into a deathmask, she has not begun to decay before his eyes. But this, this is Belle's little dead hand he is holding in his. He squeezes it, and breathes again, sorrowfully, the putrid odour of river water. Tricia is now pulling her hand back again, aware that the quality of his grip has changed from flirtation to desperation. This attractive, ugly middle-aged man is in crisis, she can tell, and he relinquishes her member with a sigh of profound sadness, and shakes his head. No, he cannot say he likes the Principessa Venier. Nor would his mother like it. It is too dark for her. He wants something lightersomething more ?he searches for a word. More floral? suggests Tricia, sympathetically. She is used to dealing with incompetent, wordless men. Yes, more floral, agrees Nathan meekly. The spirit has gone out of him, the fun of choice has abandoned him. He lets Tricia choose for him. She selects a short list of three, but cannot recapture his interest. He allows her to sell him a small flagon of Vie en Rose, which reminds him of those overpowering synthetic pink roses in Daniel's garden at the Old Farm; Tricia a.s.sures him that it is very popular with the more traditional older lady. Tricia Chang wraps it in s.h.i.+ny gift wrapping, and seals it, and ribbons it, and teases its ribbon into b.u.t.terfly bows and corkscrew spirals, and encloses it in a gift baglet. She does her very best with the packaging. She feels she has failed this mystery man, this man of moods. When he has gone, she covertly sniffs at her rejected hand. She cannot see that it smells bad. She likes the Principessa. But perfume is a tricky, a personal affair. It is, as she has been told on a course she once attended, as much of an art as science.

Nathan boards a cab and on his way home he broods once more on money. He is rich enough to buy his mother a birthday present fit for a d.u.c.h.ess, but he is not rich enough to be able to buy his way out of trouble. The lights of Oxford Street glitter garishly. Jingle bells, Christmas sells. The taxi, avoiding roadworks, makes for Blackfriars Bridge. On impulse (is that the name of a perfume?) Nathan asks the cab to stop on the far side, on the Surrey bank. He descends, and then he descends. He makes his way down steps to the water's edge. He thinks of Belle.

He walks under the bridge, past a panorama of painted tiles taken from prints of old designs of Blackfriars. He is not thinking of old London. He is thinking of Roberto Calvi, G.o.d's banker, who had hanged himself by a yard of nylon rope from a pile of scaffolding beneath the north side of this bridge in 1982. Or was he murdered by the Pope's henchmen, by members of a Masonic Lodge? Calvi was carrying a crudely forged pa.s.sport, and his pockets had been stuffed with foreign banknotes and ten pounds of stones lifted from the grounds of the City of London School which Jonathan Herz will soon attend. A good old-fas.h.i.+oned revenge tragedy, here by the water's edge, so near the stones of the Rose, so near the thatch of the Globe. Mutatis mutandis. There had been two inquests.

The arches of the bridge curve and soar, the traffic above thunders and rumbles. Road-works are in progress, somewhere up therewhen are they not?and strange lumps of cladding and loose heavy dirty swathes of industrial-weight polythene protrude and dangle and flap in the night air. Grey and black, black and grey, a fine nocturne. They have cleaned this stretch of riverside walk, have tamed and urbanized it, but nevertheless Nathan notes piles of greywhite birds.h.i.+t and feathery filth, and a heap of red rags abandoned by a nesting beggar. A browning banana skin lies on top of the red rags. The little heap is eloquenta still life, a dead life. The brave red cries out.

Nathan strides out eastwards along the reclaimed Jubilee pathway, watching the lights dimple and glimmer on the tide. A police boat cruises purposefully downstream, and a little commercial launch advertising advertising buzzes towards him from Southwark. The Bow-belle, The Marchioness. Belle drowned, Frieda Haxby drowned, Robert Maxwell drowned, and Calvi hanged himself where he could dangle in the water.

Nathan Herz, with his glossy oblong gold-corded gift bag and his sober briefcase, stares up at the high brick fortress wall of the power station and at the moon lying drunkenly on her back in the November sky. Swags of cloud are lit silver-blue by the moon's aura. Lottery money will transform this power station into an art gallery, but as yet there are few signs of development. Barbed-wire, weeds, demolition, desolation, solitude.

A flight of steps draws him down to the water's edge. He stands on the margin. The tide is rising. His executive shoes gleam black against the oily black. He listens to the sucking and the sighing. The wash of a midstream wake ripples towards him, but he does not step back from it. It laps upwards, splashes his shoes: it subsides and withdraws. He takes one step down towards it, tempting the next wave, but it does not rise again.

The water sighs, and Nathan sighs, and a seagull cries. Roberto Calvi had been strung up for one and a half thousand million dollars, and brought down the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan. Robert Maxwell had gone under dragging the pensions of thousands in a string of silver bubbles after him. Young Nick Leeson brought down Barings Bank for seven point seven seven seven billions of yen. Nathan Herz is not in their league. He is a small trader. A man of the past, not a man of the future. Or so he thinks, on this sad night.

Now we may return to Lily McNab. You remember the name of Lily McNab, child psychotherapist? We have not yet been introduced. We have several possibilities with Ms McNab. Is she a scholarly grey-haired owl-spectacled Scot with an Edinburgh accent? An imported American from New York? A Belsize Park matron who walks regularly upon the Heath with a small dog? A lipsticked lesbian from Leeds? She could be any of these characters. We had better take care, in our choice of attributes for Ms McNab, for it is a fact that there are fewer than 350 child psychotherapists in the whole of the United Kingdom, and we do not wish to be sued for libel if Lily McNab should fail. (It is a curious fact that the United Kingdom, which indulges in delightful hot-flushed orgies of recrimination and sentimentality whenever a child is conspicuously abused, injured or foully murdered, has refused to finance the long, rigorous and expensive trainings of these 350but that is by the way.) All that we know of Lily McNab, until we are ushered into her presence, is that by some means she has raised the money for this training, and that she must be younger than Gertrude Cohen, who recommended her. But as Gertrude Cohen is in her eighties, that leaves s.p.a.ce for speculation. Lily McNab may be in her sixties. Whoever she is, she has what might be considered a daunting a.s.signment in taking on the D'Angers and their son. But she has been trained, we may a.s.sume, not to be daunted.

We stand on her doorstep in Dresden Road, and locate her doorbell. Already she begins to materialize, for her terraced house is neat, white-painted and well-maintained, and it has windowboxes with flowering plants in them on the upper floors. It appears that she also has lodgers or partners, for there are other names on other bells. This is an expensive district, and smarter than the area where the D'Angers live. Lily McNab cannot be poor. Will she have a receptionist? Will she open the door herself?

Gogo and David stand and wait. They have come together to confront their saviour. United they stand.

Yes, this is Lily McNab who ushers them in. She is tall, bespectacled, large-featured, in her forties, wearing a rust-coloured trouser suit and a cream silk roll-necked sweater. She also wears lipstick. And she is black.

Well, perhaps not black black. More a lightish brown.

David D'Anger hopes that he has not done unto her what has so often been done unto him. But he cannot be sure that he has not.

It will emerge, in the next weeks, that the parents of Lily McNab were Indian Jews from Calcutta. She herself was born in Calcutta but has been educated in Scotland. Her birthname was Gubbay. She is married to a barrister called Jeremy McNab. She has an indefinably hybrid accent when she speaks, and her voice is low and husky.

Is this heritage of any relevance to her profession, to our story, to the fate of Benjamin D'Anger? Has Gertrude Cohen, as David instantly suspects, deliberately matched Benjamin with Mrs McNab? And if so, why? And was it wisely done?

Only time will tell. As Lily McNab explains, as the D'Angers already know, there is no miracle cure. If Benjamin is willing to come to see herand there will be resistance, it is normal for there to be resistancethen she will see him.

The D'Angers drive back to Highbury with hope in their hearts. They have taken action. Surely love and money can save Benjamin.

Will Paine has found himself a job. He has flown east from Jamaica to Trinidad, to cover his tracks, and has been taken on as a cleaner by an American-owned hotel. He has struck lucky. n.o.body seems to want to fuss too much about his papers. He has changed his name, and now calls himself Robert. He answers to his new name smartly, and works hard. He sleeps in a room the size of a broom cupboard, and hides Frieda's money in a sock in his travelling bag. He daren't try to bank it. He's afraid of banks, as his mother was before him. He's changed some of Frieda's money into dollars, and he's spent some of it on airticlcets, but quite a lot of it is still in the very same pounds sterling that had leaped from the cash stations of Exmoor. What if the notes are marked?

Will Paine has found friends to hang out with, to smoke a joint with. One of them is a bellboy and wears a red uniform with gold braid and his name on a metal badge. His name is Marvin. Will also knows Marvin's girl, Glory, who works as a ma.s.seuse and studied alternative medicine at nightschool. These are nice friends for Will Paine. Marvin is political and talks about Black Power and whatever happened to it and why the Caribbean isn't doing as well as it should. Glory is more into New Age mysticism and thinks that all will be well. Will Paine is interested in what both of them have to say. Sometimes he too speaks. He does not tell them about Frieda Haxby, for she is his secret, but he tries to describe David D'Anger from Guyana and Highbury, David D'Anger, parliamentary candidate for a sprawling const.i.tuency in West Yorks.h.i.+re where Will had once worked in a pasta factory. He attempts, not unsuccessfully, to convey the concept of the Veil of Ignorance. They discuss their own initial positions and whether they would have altered them if they could. They agree that the inst.i.tutions of society favour certain starting places over others, and that these advantages provoke especially deep inequalities. They affect one's initial chances in life, and all subsequent chances. Marvin and Glory believe they have been disadvantaged, and are puzzled by Will Paine's view that he himself has had a good deal of good luck. They are even more puzzled by Will's a.s.sertion that, according to David D'Anger, none would urge that special privileges should be given to those exactly six feet tall or born on a sunny day, or special disadvantages imposed according to the colour of one's skin or the texture of one's hair. As far as they can see, such preferences are being urged, not to say practised, all around them every day.

David D'Anger, they agree, must live in a rum world. He has clearly had far more advantages than any of them and they have turned his brain. He has had too much luck and it will do him no good in the long run. They all agree that some of the guests at the hotel where Marvin and Will work do not seem to have earned their leisure and their wealth by any recognizable concept of merit or desert. Jus :ice as fairness hardly s.h.i.+nes out in the Mayfair Hotel. Some of the womenwell, it's hard to imagine what they can have done to get themselves where they are. Can they have been very very good in their past lives? Surely that's not what the Buddhists meanthat if you're very very saintly and live on brown rice with a begging bowl dressed in c range you'll be reincarnated as a waddling fat-a.r.s.e with a loud mouth and fuchsia earrings?

Glory says they are thinking on the wrong plane and that she doesn't envy these poor ladies at all. She wouldn't at all like to be fat like that. They can't help it, says Glory. They don't like being fit any more than you would like it, she tells Will and Marvin.

Marvin diplomatically changes the subject and says he likes the j.a.panese. The j.a.panese, unlike some, are always very civil to him. People make fun of them, says Marvin, but they are a very polite people. And they tip well.

Benjamin will be a long time mending, and Frieda's testaments will be long in the proving. It had not occurred to Frieda or her lawyers that her grandson might not long outlive her, might choose to thrown himself in his bath during the period of probate. Better lawyers than Goltho & Goltho might have been forgiven for overlooking such a possibility. Had Benjamin died on that November night, what would have happened to Frieda's money? It does not bear thinking about. He will live to inherit. Lily McNab will guide him back to life. There is hope for Benjamin. He has deep problems, deep delusions, but he can be brought to the surface. Benjamin D'Anger manages a sort of ghostly smile for Saul Sinnamary, who arrives from Singapore, true to his word, bearing a bright book of the Birds of South America, of coloured plates of great expense and beauty. Saul sits by Benjie and turns the pages. They come to the picture of the whip-poor-will, the goatsucker, a night bird related to the European nightjar with (Saul reads), 'large eyes and cryptic plumage'. That's us, man, says Saul to Benjie. Large eyes and cryptic plumage. And listenSaul reads from the accompanying text, a quotation from an eighteenth-century traveller from Yorks.h.i.+re, who had defended the poor humble bird from its dark, its criminal reputation. Saul reads, Benjie listens. Saul reads very well: he has had a lot of practice.

'The prettily mottled plumage of the goatsucker, like that of the owl, wants the l.u.s.tre which is observed in the feathers of the birds of the day. This makes him a lover of the pale moon's nightly beams ... His cry is so remarkable, that having once heard it, you will never forget it. When night reigns over the immeasurable wilds, you will hear this poor bird lamenting like one in deep distress. A stranger would say it was the departing voice of a midnight murdered victim, or the last wailing of Niobe for her children ... Suppose yourself in hopeless sorrow, begin with a loud high note, and p.r.o.nounce ”ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha”, each note lower and lower, till the last is scarcely heard, pausing for a moment or two betwixt every note, and you will have some idea of the moaning of the largest goatsucker in Demerara. Four other species articulate their words distinctly, crying ”Who are you, who who who are you” or ”Work away, work work work away” or ”w.i.l.l.y come-go, w.i.l.l.y w.i.l.l.y w.i.l.l.y come-up” or ”Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will”.' Saul reproduces these cries with haunting, heart-breaking melancholy, and concludes, in Charles Waterton's words, 'You will never persuade the negro to destroy these birds, or get the Indians to let his arrows fly at them. They are birds of omen and reverential dread. They are the receptacles for departed souls. They haunt the cruel and the hard-hearted master. Listen again! Listen! ”Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...” '