Helen had it worked out. Tart, humorous, and always very efficient, she e-mailed him a bristling itinerary. She was already in Manhattan, where she’d been for a few days, on the record company’s shilling. (He imagined a prairie-sized hotel suite, loaded with goodies.) He would fly on British Airways, London to New York, spend the night at a hotel he’d never heard of on Park Avenue, the same one that Helen was staying in, and the next morning they would take the 8:15 train from Penn Station to Saratoga Springs. Helen could only spend three days with him—she had little Jack and little Oliver, and big Tom, to get back to in London, and big Tom, though thirty-seven years old, was presently as babyish and self-absorbed as the three-year-old twins. Alan was staying for six days. She reminded him to take his laptop, the melatonin she’d given him a few months earlier, his sleeping pills, and a pair of sunglasses (“counterintuitive and counterseasonal, but you’ll understand when you see American sunlight on snow”). He packed the thing he was currently reading about the Big Bang, and two new books from Candace, one about Zen Buddhism by the man with the same first name as him, and a popular Chinese psychiatric guide to decoding your dreams. The problem with the Chinese dream book was that most of the analyzed dreams featured dragons, doves, and pigs, rather than, say, strangely faceless but arousing women, or Cathy. (Though page 23, and this could be useful, told him that a dream featuring doors meant that his children would be “unsuccessful.”)
He flew from Newcastle to Heathrow, and had lunch at the caviar bar in Terminal 4, an allowable luxury. The airport was like a fancy hospital, patients ambling up and down the bright corridors, pushing their medical apparatuses, fatalistic and expectant at once. They popped into Gucci and Prada for preflight necessities. His smoked salmon was very good. They knew how to do things in London, even if they squirted the dill mustard onto the plate from a large plastic bottle. He was thirty-six before he ever tasted smoked salmon, so had no guilt at all, he was making up for lost time. Next to him, rather astonishingly, a man seemed to be sacking a junior employee—gently, sympathetically, warmed by Sancerre, and with pauses to allow him to transfer fresh sheets of pinkish salty tissue from the plate to his fat mouth. Alan leaned closer, as he generally did in such situations. Nowadays, people seemed to enjoy being eavesdropped on, even spoke a bit louder when they knew there was a chance of being overheard.
Alan was in fact quite excited to see his daughters in a new country, so he had to remind himself from time to time that no one was exactly on holiday. Death had made him a Little Englander: he’d only left the country a handful of times since Cathy died twelve years ago. He blamed himself for being out of the country when she finally succumbed to the cancer that had taken so long to plot its steady theft. He’d been in Lisbon, enjoying the warmth, the suffused light, when Helen phoned with the news … Anyway, America was hardly the country he would have chosen for a family vacation. America had never attracted him much. He had watched, with bemusement, his daughters go off there to work or to travel. It sometimes seemed as if in the last thirty years of his life, the little island nation that he grew up in, which for centuries had generated its own history and literature and record of prodigious scientific and industrial innovation, not to mention a fairly eventful politics, had meekly let the Americans come and restock the shelves with their own merchandise. No one objected that American presidential elections, American music, American money, American movies, American technology, and God help us, American food constituted the new reality. (Yes, it was as if the British Isles had turned in the sea, like a child’s boat in a bath, had turned slightly but definitively, away from Europe toward America.) He had quite happy memories of his only trip to the States, twenty-one years ago, on business. Three days in crazy New York, and then a day “relaxing” in some fancy dull suburb outside the city, where the only sounds between nine and six were the workers’ Spanish, and chestnuts falling gently onto the ridiculously wide, empty streets. People always seemed to be hoping he would “have a good day” (Actually, I have other plans). He did sincerely love—and rate as one of the great American contributions—the phrase “Take it easy.” He’d heard that from a taxi driver, from a guy in a shop, even from an air stewardess. Take it easy! That benign blessing wouldn’t catch on in Britain, where the pavements were sopped with cold rainwater and everyone seemed to have attended queuing school, to learn how to do it with the requisite degree of resigned submission.
But he had to admit that America had never quite existed for him. He’d read somewhere that Americans used, per capita, three times as many sheets of toilet paper a day as the global average, which told him what he needed to know. It was an enormous, religious, largely reactionary place, with no real tradition of socialism, where the car parks were larger than many European villages. And Americanism was so bloody contagious! First George Bush’s born-again Christianity and his terrible Iraq crusade, and then Tony Blair’s American-style religiosity. Apparently, no one in the States had ever encountered Samuel Johnson’s dictum—banged into him by Mr. Watson (“Clag”), his school history teacher—that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.