Snowfall had covered the city two days earlier. The cold was exotic—shockingly comprehensive, absolute. At JFK, he shuddered his way to the taxi rank. Was it possible that Helen might come from the city to meet him at the terminal? Okay, it was … not, but he indulged the fantasy for a few minutes as he emerged from customs.
The cold made everything rigid. He was amazed by the icy fossilized hardness, the cars and buses caked in white salt, as if dug out of a quarry, the roads littered with ice, salt, rubbish, everything streaked and blanched. Exhaust fumes hung whitely, painted onto the polar air. But people were shouting as if they were in the hottest tropics. The tall black bloke who looked like a policeman, with a sort of padded orange eiderdown that went all the way to his shoes, was shouting at the taxi drivers, who shouted back at him, and the customers were shouting at each other as crafty ones tried to jump the queue. Now the black bloke was pointing at him and yelling “Fourth car, fourth car!” and he stumbled quickly to a large yellow Ford, and they were off, and it wasn’t very different from how he remembered it twenty years before. The surging of the cab, as if prodding itself into battle, the wasteful slippage of the big automatic V8, the sadistic achievement of the raked partition, which made every backseat traveler a giant in a plastic bathtub, the embattled roads and laughable neglected bridges, on which moved the latest German cars, suddenly futuristic and anomalous. Those fine new European cars, metal cockroaches, will survive the American apocalypse.
The sense of having dropped into the middle of a civil war, with Manhattan as the wrecked spoils.
It was a long way from the quiet stone house in Northumberland, though not unexciting. A long sour tunnel, and suddenly with a few large bumps they were in the middle of the city, which was like heaven and hell combined, infernal but glittering with lights. The forced march of the skyscrapers, herded into groups. But the regime of verticality gave way, on Park Avenue south of Grand Central Station, to a more easygoing administration: he felt he could breathe among the shorter buildings, the apartment buildings, the galleries, even a church or two. His hotel was in fact opposite a church, Orthodox perhaps. As he got out of the cab and looked up Park Avenue, the massive old Pan Am tower, now renamed something else, seemed like a dam that was keeping the crazy tide of Midtown from flowing south.
The hotel lobby was small, gold, and comfortable. Expensive. Helen looked after herself—well, the record company looked after its executives. He got to his room, though not easily, because the corridor was sunk in a deliberate and possibly perfumed designer gloom, and sat on the bed. Asked to be put through to Helen Querry. Certainly sir, room 432—engaged. Of course. Ten minutes: time for a shit, and a Scotch from the minibar. In that order. Room 432, please. Still engaged. So he would part the darkness and make his own way to her. She knew when he was coming in. On the fourth floor he groped along the row of glow-worm room numbers. And knocked on the door—why on earth was he a tiny bit nervous?
Helen opened the door, blew him a kiss, pointed at the uncradled phone and returned to it, standing with it in one hand while she examined the BlackBerry she held in the other. She rolled her eyes at him in self-absolution: the sin of work. There she was, and my, she did look good. “Well for God’s sake, get him to weaponize those fabled ‘media contacts’ of his! It’s being released next month, we need all the help we can get. Yes, he’s got plenty … Yep. Okeydokey. Ciao.” He disliked both “okeydokey” and “ciao.”
“Dad, you got here…”
“I came by the same means as you, you know.” The last words came out a little closer to “you knaw” than he would have liked. Helen’s accent was placeless but not classless: upper-middle class, not quite upper class, southern, boarding-school. (What he wanted to call wine bar posh, if that made sense.) Undeniably the best thing he’d given his daughters was the entitlement never to think about social class. Now she was looking at him, appraising him—warmly but with a sharp eye, as if he were back in the nursing home with his ma. But she was, brilliantly, doing this while also reading something on her BlackBerry.
“Is that shirt new?”
“Are you talking to me or to that screen?” He was smiling.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s newish. Why, don’t you like it?”
“I do like it.”
He wasn’t sure that he liked it that much, in fact. He felt the need to assert himself, take the upper hand—but why was he thinking like this?
“Right, are we going to have dinner somewhere, or what?”
“I’ve booked a place two blocks away. Just let me close down these things.” Swiftly, elegantly, she tattooed the little device in her hand with a single finger, slipped it into her beautiful mustard-colored handbag, then crossed the room—now he noticed properly that it was much bigger than his—to the desk that held her laptop. She knelt before it, and it looked as if she was about to make herself up at a mirror. A little more tapping; not so easy to dislodge herself from this screen.
They went down into the marble and brass lobby, and the doorman eased them out into the astonishing cold. New York met them like another dimension. There was something almost comical about the exchange of opposites: noise and cold for silence and warmth. A fire engine was bucking down Park Avenue, clanking its chains like an angry ghost, and it was impossible to speak or think while its siren warped the freezing air beside them. Helen took his arm, with that easy warmth she had. He relaxed a little, maybe for the first time since Josh’s e-mail.
“How’s work been?” he yelled at her. She shook her head, to signal “not well,” perhaps, or more likely to hint that dialogue could wait until they reached the restaurant. She was so casually in charge. She came to New York five or six times a year. Vanessa lived in America, but in some ways Helen seemed more naturally at ease with Americans, did business with them, went to hear new bands, had twice been to Saratoga Springs in fact, to hear the Dave Matthews Band, a group that had made her, or Sony rather, a fair amount of money. She sped up and down the Sony skyscraper on Sixth Avenue. She nosed around the city in gurgling Lincoln Town Cars, spent weekends at a “legendary” record producer’s house in Amagansett, where there were two pools, a six-car garage, and a basement kitted out with the largest collection of 1960s jukeboxes on the Eastern Seaboard. He’d heard some of her stories; he’d once actually met Dave Matthews, a polite, well-educated bloke whose residual Johannesburg accent was still just audible. He had great respect for her achievement. He could never do what she did, it was so social, involved so much arse-licking and party-going and drinking. And what else? Well, gambling, for one thing. Property was a sure and stable bet, stodgy compared to taking a punt on a rock band or solo singer. Buildings that failed to come up to business expectations were still there; you could use them for something, sell them at a loss, rent them until the market picked up, use them (however sneakily) as collateral, for more loans. They belonged to him, he made them, as surely as the men who put one brick on top of another and spread the muck, the mortar—the gobbo, the shite—between them. Helen, going up and down her great mortgaged tower in that glass elevator, didn’t own the bands she undoubtedly helped to make. There must have been thirty “artists” whose first records came out, with a bit of juice from Sony or from one of its affiliate labels, and then … ran out of juice. Reasonable reviews, modest sales—and no contract renewal. One of them, Verity McQueen, whose music he listened to when he drove along the A68 to see his mum, was now teaching singing at a private girls’ school in London. The girls she taught knew nothing about her brilliant first album, knew nothing about her aborted career as a singer-songwriter, said Helen; it was too long ago, and for kids nowadays the past, as Vanessa lamented about her students at Skidmore, was nothing more than the tree that fell in the forest when you weren’t there.