An hour later, he had breakfast with Helen. It was still snowing; the hotel had the slightly excited, pumped-up atmosphere of unthreatening crisis: emergency relief for the pampered. Staff tramped in and out of the lobby, large boots squeaking on the wood floor. White lengths of snow, like fluorescent stripes, were caught in the folds of their nylon coats. The lights seemed to dim and flicker every so often; Alan thought he might be imagining it. Not so, said Helen. American infrastructure was “crap, relatively speaking.” It’s become, she said, a country of patching—everywhere you look there are crews patching roads, patching bridges, patching sewers, roofs, telephone wires. “Maybe that’ll change if a Democrat is elected president next year. Or maybe it won’t.”
Helen was strangely bright. With calm, controlling movements, she played mum. She poured Alan’s coffee from the heavy hotel pot, and then milk from the tiny stainless steel Hunca Munca jug. She asked the waiter to bring Alan orange juice. As usual, she sat very upright. She smiled freshly at him. Even by Helen’s standards, it was an unusual display of vigor.
“I have an idea, I’ve been thinking,” she said. He bent his head. The coffee in his pleasing white mug smelled of morning and bitter resolve. And discretion and keeping your bloody trap shut. “I’ve been thinking about how we should all get together this summer—maybe not in Northumberland, maybe somewhere in France or Italy? Have a family reunion that really includes Tom and the twins, and Josh and Van? There’s that lovely hotel on the Sorrento coast, lemon trees everywhere, the one Tom and I went to for our honeymoon? We could all spend some time together. Candace and Van would actually get to know the twins, and Josh would meet everyone and feel part of the family.”
“Not cheap,” said Alan, witnessing his inescapable parsimony with dislike.
“Well, reason not the need. No—reason not the deed, I guess,” said Helen, with brisk condescension. “If we start counting the pennies, we won’t do anything ever, I certainly wouldn’t be thinking about leaving Sony, for instance.”
“Ah, we should talk about that,” said Alan, preemptively, because he didn’t want to talk about it now.
“If a hotel doesn’t work, we can always do it in Northumberland, but we might be more festive somewhere that didn’t remind us so much of Mum.”
“No, no, it’s a good idea. We’ve actually never done anything like that as a whole family, since Cathy, since Mum … Assuming we’d all get on with each other.”
“Obviously, Van and Josh wouldn’t be able to afford it, so you and I would pick up their costs,” Helen said with certainty. She’d always been like this. She would run down the stairs from her bedroom and announce, eyes shining, that she had dreamed up a mail-order business so that she could resell her old shoes. Or: She and Vanessa would go house to house, mowing people’s lawns. She and Van would teach guitar (Helen) and piano (Van) to beginners. Cathy had rather decided, middle-class views about the impropriety of hawking oneself around the village for sale, but Alan was amused and supportive, partly because he knew each enterprise would collapse like the last.
“We’d all get on because we’d make an effort to get on. Maybe Van and Josh should spend the whole of this summer in England and get a feel for the place. Van’s been away so long it’s a different country now, and Josh has never been. And why couldn’t Van start looking for a job in the U.K.? I mean, she’s not condemned to spend the rest of her life in Saratoga Springs, is she? Why shouldn’t she teach philosophy back in Britain?”
“Well, I can think of one reason,” said Alan.
“Yes, Josh. But Van needs to think of herself first, and it’s mad that she should rusticate, vegetate, in upstate New York for Josh. See, I care so much about it I’m rhyming! If they’re devoting whole conferences to her work, then maybe she could teach at—I don’t know!—Oxford or Cambridge or London? She’s certainly good enough. Isn’t she?”
Helen was leaning forward on her chair, her broad, slightly thickened shoulders filling the space before him, as vigorous and palpable as her plans. A posture he knew, twice over—Cathy used to lean forward like this. Sometimes the similarities were like a shocking plagiarism, an outrageous laziness on the part of the family genes.
“And Josh?”
“Oh, Dad, I’m not sure—”
“Not sure about what?” he said. He carefully placed his coffee cup on the table.
“He has guilty eyes.”
“Come on, Helen. That’s not really good enough, is it?”
“I don’t know if … I wonder if Josh really intends to stick around, if you want my very honest opinion.”
Alan now realized that Helen’s restless planning, her fizzing impatience, her ideas about family holidays and magical, unlikely jobs at Oxford and Cambridge probably flowed from a new anxiety about her sister’s future. She could see something that he could not. Perhaps it was obvious to her precisely because Josh had been flirting with her? Helen saw things like that, much more clearly and decisively than he did.
“I would like to know,” said Alan, looking earnestly at his daughter.
“It’s just a feeling I got yesterday. And also something Josh said to me seemed ominous.”
“What did he say?”
“No, no, don’t panic, it was a small thing, so don’t make too much of it. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. He talked about wanting to live and work in New York.”
“Well, what’s the problem?”
“New York City, Dad, not New York State. Because he only talked about himself. He said ‘I,’ not ‘we.’ When I get to New York.”
“That is a small thing,” said Alan, with manufactured relief.
“Maybe. But I had two boyfriends—Stephen and Roly, remember them?—whose announced plans always seemed to omit me, and you know where those relationships went.”
“You have so much more experience in these things than Van!”
“Well,” she replied, returning to her earlier briskness, “I do things, and Van thinks things. Though I think, too, you know.”
“I know you do.”
* * *
They were the last people at breakfast, their table the last spoiled one amid the prepared perfection. The barman had arrived, was already tuning up his instruments for lunch. The snow was lighter, the flakes had almost ceased: a few frail laggards fluttered down. Alan pushed his chair out, preparing to leave.
“Dad, before you go: this stuff about leaving Sony … You said yesterday that you might get involved in my new project. Did you mean it, or were you being nice?”
“Couldn’t it be both?”
“You know I’m not bullshitting, right? There’s a revolution happening. That book I showed you on the train … The authors say that very soon music will be like water, flowing freely through pipes and networks and plumbing, straight into people’s homes. It’ll be a fact of life. Like turning on a tap. You’ll pay a flat fee for the right to turn on the tap. And that’ll be that. The record companies, though, still want you to buy water in little expensive bottles—Perrier, Evian. Imagine trying to fill your bath with little bottles of Evian! That’s how the big record companies are still thinking. But it’s not the future. The future is the tap, not the little bottle of Evian. That’s what the book is arguing.”
“This makes sense, I suppose. Though music isn’t as essential as water, of course. The plumbing is supposed to be—what? The Internet?” The more enthusiastic she got, the calmer he would be.
“Yes, essentially—digital communication of all kinds, streaming and sharing services. You saw yesterday when Josh got so excited?”
Alan thought: when you both got so excited.
“That’s because,” Helen continued, “he knows about this stuff, it’s his world. He can see a big change coming. They all can. And I want to be there. Do you know what David Bowie said, in 2002—in 2002! He wrote an article about how the absolute transformation of everything that anyone has ever thought about music is imminent, and nothing is going to stop it. He predicted then that copyright would no longer exist in ten years.”
“That last fact sounds like a headache, actually, from your point of view.”
“It doesn’t matter whether it sounds like a headache or an orgasm, it’s what’s going to happen!”
They both knew that she hadn’t quite intended to say “orgasm.” Alan looked down at his hands.
“And yes, I do think it’s exciting,” she added.
“Clearly.” They smiled.
“So it’s an opportunity. You should understand that. You always used to say that you were good at looking for opportunities.”
“Did I?”
“All the time. Well, that’s what it will take—the ability to look for opportunities. We’ll need not to overextend ourselves in the first few years, because profits may be limited to begin with.”
“We?”
“But as long as we’re patient and can see ahead, and keep on reminding ourselves that the record business is not the music business, then I think we could build something that is really exciting, which could become a whole factory for a brilliant new generation of British musicians.” Her eyes were dazzling, her chin was thrust up—she was the twelve-year-old girl on Christmas Day, holding her new three-quarter-sized Yamaha acoustic guitar, the crushed wrapping paper blooming on the carpet, announcing with passionate confidence: “I’ll play this properly by the summer!”
“We,” Helen continued impatiently, “would be you and me and anyone else we can get to commit to the project. I’ll need at least three or four major investors. I have some shares I can liquidate, but that won’t be nearly enough. Tom is being cautious and wary, of course, so he’s basically an obstacle I’ll have to work around.”
“I promise not to be an obstacle you have to work around. That doesn’t sound like a good fate at all.”
“The thing is, Dad,” she began. “Look, do you want a bit more coffee? Why don’t I get a fresh pot?” She raised an imperious hand for the waiter. “Here’s the thing. I know I said, on the train, that I don’t need any financial help. That’s quite true.”
“But not quite true?” he said.
“Not quite true,” she conceded. Her arm was still raised.
“In what way?”
“In the way that a half-truth is also a half-lie, depending on whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty.”
“I see. Well, I guess I do.”
“Of course I need money,” said Helen, “but I would only think of asking you if you told me that you want to be involved. If not, not—you’re totally free to walk away. No big deal. And of course, it wouldn’t be help, but a loan, an investment, a business proposition.”
“Helen, dear—my love! This is a lot to consider. Let me think about this. Just let me think.” He repeated himself more aggressively than he meant to.
“I’m sorry that I asked.”
“No no, please stop that.”
“Stop apologizing, or stop asking?” Helen was grim, flushed, solid, in a way he recognized.
“I would like to help. This is an opportunity. But just at the moment—”
“Well, I’m not asking you to get the checkbook out right now at the table, for God’s sake.”
“It’s that … just now,” he continued, feeling as if he were trying to make his way up the main street outside, walking straight into driving snow, “things are somewhat up in the air at the company. The Dobson project, you heard me talking about it years ago probably, has just fallen through, so a big loan has to be repaid. Profits are down. We have very little of a buffer. And cash flow is not readily available at the moment.”
Helen would remember that last phrase, “cash flow is not readily available at the moment.”
“But surely, it’s in the nature of what you do”—and yet, she realized, she had so little idea of what he really did—“that things succeed and fail, and rise and fall. No? You can’t be telling me that you or the company has no money. That’s just ridiculous. That’s not true.”
“It’s no business of yours how much or how little money I have,” he said quickly.
“Fine, and it’s no business of yours what I do with the next twenty years of my life. You won’t hear me talk about it ever again.”
“I’m sorry, Helen, I don’t want to hurt you. But please listen to me—we’re comfortable rather than rich. You know that. So we need to proceed cautiously. Just give me a little more time.” He sounded like a debtor, and she the creditor. So he rephrased himself, more calmly. “I promise you that we will have this conversation again, in a few weeks, without anger, but certainly not in public, all right?”
“No we won’t.” She rose from the table.
“Come on, Helen.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” she said more gently, and grandly, theatrically even, “I absolve you.” She touched his head as she passed behind him, and walked out of the dining room.