13

“I suppose you feel proud of yourself?”

I thought he meant smug. I had smugness on the brain. I knew I showed a tendency towards it, even though I also knew I had no reason to. It made a perennial and insidious enemy. “Rid me of it, then.” Not that I thought he would—or even at heart wanted him to. I wasn’t a puppet. I had autonomy. I realized it was a battle I should have to fight alone. I didn’t even say it.

He’d just got on. There was always a long wait at Rickmansworth while they replaced the engine—the electric engine which had brought us out from Baker Street. For the rest of the way we should be steam-driven.

I was aware there was little point in asking him why he’d been at Rickmansworth.

Apart from myself, the carriage had been empty. It was supposedly a non-smoker and yet it still smelled of tobacco—the smell of tobacco and the dust of ages would live on forever in its patterned green upholstery. My initial exclamation of delight had instantly subsided, along with my grin of welcome. He was angry and I hadn’t yet seen him angry. His mood was symbolized, and nearly given shape to, by the darkness of his overcoat. Although it was the same period of spring as the one in which I’d met him nineteen years previously—even a day or two later—the weather continued wintry, with reports of snow still falling in the Highlands. It was true I’d seen him all in black before but it hadn’t been a reflection of the way he felt. His uncovered blond hair again made me think of a flame, yet this time he put me in mind not of a beacon but of a black candle at a witches’ sabbath.

“Don’t be cute,” he snarled. ‘Snarled’ is clearly an exaggeration, even if in spirit it didn’t seem like one. There’d been no smile, no form of greeting, just the staccato delivery of that first question. Or statement. I suppose you feel proud of yourself?

He sat huddled in a corner—as far from me, it felt, as he could possibly get—for I had been sitting in the one diagonally opposite when he got on, and he had probably assumed that I would stay there.

So in the end I did, suddenly too proud to move in closer when I knew I wasn’t wanted.

“Why have I made you so angry? What is it I’ve done?”

“I’d prefer it, please, if you would tell me!”

I held onto the broad leather window strap—gripped it tightly—without even realizing I did so.

“I’ve been getting a bit above myself. I know I can hide it from others but that isn’t quite the point, is it?”

“Don’t be dense. I’m well aware that you’ve been doing your utmost to get on top of that.”

His acknowledgement of this—under such circumstances—was worth more than he realized. (Except, of course, it wasn’t.)

I faltered.

“Is it sex?”

“No, damn it, it is not sex.”

I searched my memory for a sin I hadn’t recognized as big enough to provoke this present outburst.

“Zack, I don’t know. I’m sorry. Is it lack of charity? Lack of tolerance? Lack of understanding? Is it laziness? Self-absorption? I’d hoped I was improving.”

“What about basic dishonesty?”

I stared at him.

“And you don’t even know!” he sneered. “To be dishonest and know it is one thing. But when a person’s principles are so non-existent that he doesn’t even realize…! Oh, yes, go on, cry,” he said. “That’s bound to answer everything!”

Yet for once they were indeed tears of anger, in no way of remorse or shame. And I thought that his referring to them like this (they hadn’t even overflowed) seemed not merely unnecessary, but shabby and contemptible.

“All right, Zack. I don’t know what I’ve done. I suppose I’ve been kidding myself but everybody kids himself about something. That isn’t such a crime.”

His look became sardonic.

“And if you want to talk about basic dishonesty,” I continued, “in fact you could say my whole life is basically dishonest.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“But that’s your fault as much as mine. I even think you could be more dishonest than me. It was never part of our agreement that I shouldn’t just go my own way, lie, cheat, steal, waste my time—exploit my situation—do whatever I felt like. It was never a condition I’d behave.”

“You wouldn’t consider that great gifts carry their own conditions? Their own responsibilities?”

“If they do, it was a bit deceitful not to point that out at the beginning.”

“Nonsense. You should have been aware of it.”

“No. Any honest businessman shows his customer the small print.”

“Unless he prefers him to write his own.”

“What! Write his own small print? My goodness! Optimism!”

“Yes,” he said.

“What does yes mean?”

“That then he’ll always choose his customer with extra special care, won’t he? Or at least—will do his best to!” He emphasized those last few words in such a way as to denote, presumably, his own abysmal failure.

“My God,” I murmured, “you’re such a bastard!” I could only think about how hard I’d tried—how very, very hard—over the whole of the past nineteen years.

I received an icy stare.

“It seems another birthday,” he said, “hasn’t brought any very marked advance in wisdom.”

“That’s rich. I don’t know how old you are—or should I perhaps say ancient?—but you’re obviously feeling it wasn’t all that wise to have picked on me in the first place. I’m sorry I’ve proved such a disappointment. I’m sorry I’ve buggered up all your lovely, fine, do-it-yourself small print.”

I turned my head towards the window, let go of the leather strap almost before I’d become aware of holding it; saw the harsh red marks it had made upon my palm and fingers. I stared across the track at a poster for Ovaltine—the healthy country life it represented, the rewards of a good day’s honest toil, the peaceful rosy future. The tears spilled from my eyes and now I let them run.

Idiot! And you had thought your worst problem had been complacency: complacency freshly engendered by two days spent in London distributing largesse—almost the very shirt off your back, why don’t you say, although in fact it had only been your new padded mackintosh. But at the bottom of Villiers Street there was an all-night coffee stand where I had met a tramp whose teeth had actually been chattering. I hadn’t meant to give away my clothes but the relevant shops had all been shut and if I’d simply handed him the money…

I’d been able to buy him some food, however, plus a bottle of beer and a packet of cigarettes. Afterwards I’d done this for several others I’d found stretched out along the Embankment and sheltering under doorways in the Strand, although it was mainly money I’d been planning to distribute. At the start of the evening I’d had nearly five hundred pounds tucked into various pockets.

And with that much money on me, plus a burning desire to be in one of those places where it might accomplish the most good, yes I had certainly been like a young Lord Bountiful bestowing charity and getting a buzz out of doing so. But I was deriving this buzz more because I genuinely wanted to help than because I thought it turned me into such a great fellow. And wasn’t it better to do it even for mixed reasons than not to do it at all? My last life had been so completely wasted I didn’t regard it as astonishing that, given the opportunity, I should go all out trying to justify this one. Who wouldn’t? Okay, I was plainly having setbacks when I’d thought that I was making progress. But nevertheless…

Though at the moment, it seemed, smugness wasn’t my only problem. Self-pity was pushing its way in.

Then there came a jolt which signified that the new engine had finally been connected. I was damned if I’d feel self-pity. I blew my nose and wiped my eyes and turned my head back. He appeared hardly to have moved.

“All right, Zack. I’m sorry. I don’t know where I’ve gone wrong—I mean, not in any vast and catastrophic way—and I can see why that on its own should make you angry. All I can say is, if you’ll tell me where the trouble lies and if it isn’t too late, I’d like to begin again. Please.”

“No, isn’t too late.” But the steeliness of his expression hadn’t changed.

“Then tell me how I’ve been dishonest.”

“I said no. I want you to tell me.”

“You can’t be talking of the thousand pounds I won?” Over half of it had gone to charities that dealt with famine in the Third World.

“Can’t I?”

“Well, you never suggested that I shouldn’t gamble.”

“And am I suggesting it now?”

“But then what…?”

Yet, looking at him, suddenly I saw.

“You’re saying that of course it wasn’t a gamble?”

“But more importantly, what are you saying?”

“No. It wasn’t. You’re right. Yet it didn’t occur to me that I was doing wrong. In fact it seemed…almost a heaven-sent opportunity.” I smiled. Wanly.

He didn’t. He didn’t smile at all.

“And should it have occurred to you?”

“Yes. I suppose it should.”

“Suppose?”

“I still can’t help thinking you’re overreacting.”

“You’ve always thought that everyone was overreacting.”

“But was it so wrong? All’s fair in love and war. And with bookmakers—”

“Don’t give me that crap.”

“I was merely going to say that with bookmakers—”

“All’s fair in love and war.”

“Zack. It’s only an expression. I wouldn’t stand by it.”

“You just did.”

I tugged at one of my earlobes and decided I shouldn’t try to defend myself. I looked over at the picture of a mother and toddler bouncing a beach ball at Rhyl: Fine sands—bracing air—beautiful scenery. On the other side of a small central mirror there was a father as well: paddling and splashing with his wife and two children at Scarborough. I couldn’t let him get away with it.

“And anyway, Zack, you’d had almost a year in which to prevent me. Surely you knew why I was saving up so hard?”

He must have done. Twelve months before, hearing of someone who had done well on the Grand National, I was suddenly reminded that the following year—when I was working at the Times Bookshop in Wigmore Street, instead of, as now, being on vacation from King’s College Cambridge—that in 1956 I had won a few pounds on a horse called E.S.B. He was practically the only horse whose name I remembered, for he was the only horse on which I’d ever won. Definitely not as a result of studying form but because a friend and I had spent a coffee-break that March inventing middle names for our colleagues: one of these being Ernie Blick, a lad in the stockroom so po-faced he inevitably became Ernie Sunshine Blick. It was an adolescent game but for some reason those initials stayed with me long after all the others had faded. I had greatly liked this friend, Kenneth, and as a matter of fact only that same afternoon, my mission having been completed, I’d called in at the bookshop and chatted with him for fifteen very pleasant minutes, initially of course about books, but then about other seemingly unrelated topics including the Grand National. It had been extremely pleasant, yes, but rather melancholy too. I should have liked to speak to Mrs Morton, who had once said when she’d heard me singing from the Noel Coward Song Book (there was a copy of it visible this afternoon—I saw it on the central table; could it be the selfsame copy I had leafed through and sung from previously?), had once said that my tenor voice was charming—she herself, between the wars, had sung in operetta and she had chosen the word with kindness and with care—and who, even as I watched her single out Gone With the Wind for her present customer, had already, in a sense, been dead for countless years; should have liked to speak to Mrs Morton and Jenny Nyman and to Anthea, Annette, Rosemary and many others. So in the end I felt a little wistful as I walked towards the station, for it had been a good time in my life, full of hope, appreciated not simply in retrospect but even as I’d lived it. While talking to Kenneth I had as usual tried to take in every detail, would have loved to see the small canteen again, hear the echo of our laughter and our silly conversations (I particularly remembered a discussion concerning men’s body hair—sparked off by my own arms and William Holden’s chest), would have loved once more to visit the quaint Victorian lavatory with its wooden seat, flowered porcelain and air of cocooned and comfortable solidity. Also, while speaking to him, I’d grown conscious suddenly of straining to glimpse some spark of bewildered recognition in his eyes, as I thought there might once have been in my mother’s outside Warwick House, this probable absurdity being heightened, of course, by my catching sight of a salesman whom I didn’t know and who had presumably been taken on in place of me. Kenneth had sometimes come my way in the evening, travelling on the Met as far as Harrow, but it was too much to hope that tonight would be one of those times for visiting his grandmother. I thought about returning to the shop before the end of my vacation and after some further congenial talk casually suggesting we should meet. But why? We had lost touch, anyway, after the shop had finally closed—someone thought he might have emigrated—and when at a later date I’d tried to track him down again I was no more successful. Perhaps I shouldn’t have returned at all. It was one of the few moments I had felt something close to regret for my Nottingham decision, and it hardly helped that I knew it was illogical.

Now, scarcely an hour later, I was experiencing a similar uncertainty, a similar illusory pang. It occurred to me I must be tired. “Surely you knew why I was saving up so hard?”

“Of course I did. It was a test. I kept hoping that you might come to your senses.”

“It was only—”

“Ethan, don’t you dare!”

I’d been going to say robbing the rich to feed the poor. Until a moment earlier I hadn’t even thought of it, not remotely, as being any form of robbing.

“If you’d got to me sooner I could at least have given the money back.”

He made no answer. Quite possibly he couldn’t think of one but this didn’t dispose me to feel that I had scored.

“Anyhow. Just bear in mind,” he said, “that there are tests and tests. This isn’t the end of everything. Catastrophic, remember, was your word, not mine.”

“What do I have to do to be forgiven?”

His tone appeared to be lightening. “Well, for one thing, not catch your death of cold. You’d better take this overcoat. I think in all likelihood you’re going to need it more than me.”

The idea of possessing something of Zack’s gave me pleasure in itself, but the idea of his presenting it immediately after such a very low point in our relationship made it even more valuable. I wondered if that was why he’d worn it.

“What do I tell them, then, at home?”

“That you were given it. That it was warmer than yours. That you then gave your own away.”

“Is this another test?” I asked.