It sounds sinister. A massive mechanism for spying. The London Eye.
A giant bicycle wheel, 135 metres in height, 2,100 tonnes in weight, all included, and observable just about everywhere in the city, the London Eye turns at 0.26 metres per second, just fast enough, if you draw a bead on something stationary, to discern with the naked eye. It is a marvel of modern engineering, no doubt about it. And beautiful to behold. Thirty-two luminous capsules, or pods, apparently sea green in colour with the light through them, carry twenty-five passengers apiece. So that’s eight hundred of us up there, in principle, at any one time. On a clear day, we can see for twenty-five miles. Which is how many miles between us?
No citizen of sound mind dislikes the London Eye. Of those who are able to see it, or enough of it to say they see it, from their bedroom windows or balconies or rooftops, a sizeable proportion claim to have stood and watched it complete its thirty-minute cycle. You find a pod you like and then, without changing your position, you follow its painstaking revolution until it returns to where you first hit on it. You can do this alone or with a lover. With wine or empty-handed. With the radio or headphones on, or silent. Watch for more than thirty minutes and you become woozy, uncertain whether you are watching it or it is watching you. At night you can see the flashes of cameras, little light explosions, as pretty as shooting stars, coming from the highest pods. How many of those taking photographs have photographed you looking?
For some people a giant bicycle wheel, revolving high over the city, would be a nightmare. People who don’t like bicycles, people who don’t like wheels, people who have suffered traumas as a consequence of either, people such as Marvin Kreitman.
Yet Kreitman, too, is watching the wheel, fastening upon a pod and following its half-hour revolution. Is that how long you stay on, a half-hour? Can you pay to stay on longer, or is it strictly thirty minutes and then off? If you can stay on longer, do you have to make that decision when you buy your ticket on the ground – assuming that’s what you do – or can you renew as an afterthought, on an impulse, on a lovers’ whim, in the pod itself? Is there a limit to how many times you can go round? Is there an hour when there is so little business that you can have a capsule entirely to yourselves?
These are the questions which trouble Kreitman as he watches, human-interest questions rather than any that bear upon the weight and size of the structure, the amount of cabling needed to keep it upright, or the problems which the wind must pose.
For the wheel Kreitman watches is a wheel of fire, imagination’s wheel, and the skills of engineers are irrelevant to a wheel of that sort.
Kreitman had a sighting of the wheel’s upper rim from his Clapham pencil box, but nothing that could honestly be called a view. It’s even possible that all he had a sighting of were cranes, swaying in the vicinity of Jubilee Gardens, helping to build the new riverside. In order to get a view proper he had to change his address. Nothing permanent. He didn’t want to look at the wheel for ever, or for however long it was provisionally booked to stay up. He just wanted to look at it for a while. How long was a while? He didn’t know. More than an hour, but less than a year. For the best views, in the full-on, reach-out-and-grab-a-capsule sense, there was no beating those characterless flats to which the offices of the once Greater London Council and its neighbours had been reduced. But Kreitman could find nothing rentable there on a short-term basis, nor was he convinced, once he thought about it a second time, that he wanted to be quite so unnervingly close. Seeing the wheel was the object, not the wheel seeing him. In the end he found an apartment hotel in Soho, so new it wasn’t finished yet, and so bijou it made a virtue of that fact, which enjoyed the advantage of a communal roof terrace, commanding panoramic views, and what is more was situated just a collision away from the very restaurant where he and Charlie Merriweather had enjoyed their last ever dinner as good friends, proud husbands and sane men. And Kreitman was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.
From the roof terrace in Soho, on which he has no eagerness to encounter other communal souls, the spindle of the London Eye appears to be the spire of the church of St Martin’s-in-the-Field. Kreitman enjoys the prospect, out over the leaded rooftops, past the tiny attic editing suites and the neon cinemas of Leicester Square – the Odeon showing particularly well – to where the wheel turns on a needlepoint consecrated to God. Close an eye, and the golden cross of the church appears to be entangled in the spokes. In the sun, the wheel is an iridescent orb, as persuasive a covenant as a rainbow. As for distance, well, it is not exactly a handshake away, but near enough for civilities. With the use of binoculars, Kreitman can clearly make out the outlines of people in the pods, can count them, and with concentration, he believes, can even decide on the meaning of their physical dispositions, one to another.
He did not, pursuant to his glittering dinner with his daughters, confront Chas with the evidence of her double-dealing. Although incapable of taking anything lightly, Kreitman was not a man who had to get turmoil immediately off his chest. He could lie peaceably alongside a woman who had wronged him, lie folded in her arms like a vole in the embrace of a cobra, and not raise a murmur of complaint. In general this is a gift – call it a gift for quiescence – which men possess in greater abundance than women. Once wronged, most women find the physical presence of the man who has wronged them abhorrent. Fear may keep them silent, but the abhorrence remains. Perhaps because they aspire to a lesser ideal of perfection, men are better able to swallow their outrage. Kreitman was, anyway. Jealous of the very pillow on which a woman he cared for laid her cheek – a zealot of the minutiae of jealousy – he was yet able to bear it so long as the offending woman engaged him, volubly, in her wrong. Words did not have to be the medium of engagement. A look of connivance could do it. The thrum of silent confession could do it. Gross witness would, of course, do it in spades. It’s a paradox, but then what isn’t – the more access Kreitman was granted to the causes of his agony, which is another way of saying that the acuter his agony became, the easier he bore it.
It was not deception Kreitman found hard to take, it was exclusion.
He had not yet attained that peeled-back intimacy with Chas where he could assure her it would never matter what she did that was outside the letter of their law, provided she included him in it. In all probability he never would. She wasn’t pliable enough. She preferred everything to be straight. She had come a considerable distance, for her, simply being with him at all; but he couldn’t see her bending to accompany him into his spider holes and corners. What is more, he did not, in another, better part of his nature, want her to. For himself he did not want her to. Chas was meant to be a clean slate. She had told him she could not bear to be just another woman added to his total, and he had promised her he had stopped counting. He meant it. He had stopped counting off names and he had stopped counting off failures. And what that had to mean was that he had stopped counting off repetitions. Same spot, same sore, same itch. No more. Please no more.
What it came to was that there was nothing to be gained by accusing her of resuming old relations with Nyman, let alone, for all he knew, of instituting new ones, a) because she would never, in the only way that Kreitman craved, consider taking him into her confidence, and b) because he didn’t want that craving in bed with them. Either she would have to lie, or he would have to leave. If he brought her to the point of having to go on lying, he would be the more inflamed. If he left – but he couldn’t think of leaving with his mind in the state it was and his heart as pulpy as rotten fruit. Exclusion was bound to be the outcome, whatever happened. She couldn’t tell him, he didn’t want to ask her to tell him, but he needed to know.
Did he need to know?
He needed to know.
He was in a torment of needing to know and a torment of neither daring nor wanting to ask.
So he lay there, with Chas wound around him like a snake, saying nothing.
She, for her part, felt him drifting away.
‘He’s going,’ she told Dotty on the phone.
‘Another bulletin? You told me that last time. You make it sound as though he’s dying. Stop listening and get on with it,’ Dotty said.
‘I don’t know what to get on with. I think I may have hurt him when I turned him down.’
‘What do you mean you turned him down?’
‘Don’t scoff, Dotty. He asked me to marry him.’
‘Marvin Kreitman asked you to marry him?’
‘It’s not what you think. It was a gesture. Nothing but that.’
‘And your refusal? Also a gesture?’
‘I don’t know what it was. But I meant it. He asked me out of desperation. I think he was frightened he was missing his wife. I think he asked me to marry him to prove he wasn’t. Or maybe he just wanted me to say no so he could start missing me. Something like that. He’s desperate, Dotty, and I have to ask myself what I want with a desperate man.’
‘There’s no other kind, darling.’
Chas thought about that. ‘Then maybe I don’t want to be with a man at all,’ she said.
But in the meantime she tried to call him back from wherever he’d gone.
‘You’ve left me,’ she whispered one night.
‘I haven’t,’ he said.
‘You’ve stopped looking at me.’
‘Have I? I haven’t meant to stop looking at you.’
‘You’ve withdrawn everything,’ she said. ‘You’ve stopped looking at me, you’ve stopped speaking to me, you’ve stopped kissing me.’
That was the moment, wasn’t it, to challenge her with what he’d heard? It would have been a kindness. Spit it out and have done with. I know you’ve been seeing the faggot. Why did you lie? Why do you go on lying? What do you mean by it, and what do you intend to do with him now? Spit it all out – all of it, no matter how petty and inglorious – and give her the chance to clear the air. But Kreitman couldn’t breathe clear air. Like some inverted bat in a bat cave, Kreitman needed the air fetid.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Take no notice. It’s a man thing. Change of life. I’ll be fine soon.’
Then he turned away from her so that she might hear his body and understand what it was asking for.
In the end he had to know and hang the decencies. He called Maurice up to talk to him.
Was Maurice driving Mrs Merriweather anywhere but home?
He wasn’t. Other than occasionally to the supermarket, where he helped her with her trolley.
Was Maurice perhaps party to any conversations – in the driveway of Mrs Merriweather’s house, say, or in the aisles of Marks and Spencer, or on Mrs Merriweather’s mobile phone – which were not quite in the spirit of Kreitman’s lending her his driver and his car?
He wasn’t.
Would Maurice be offended if Mr Kreitman asked him to keep his wits more than usually about him, and to mention it, should he happen to be in Richmond at an unseasonable hour and see Mrs Merriweather behaving in a way that would cause Mr Kreitman concern?
Maurice knew not to bind his employer in a man-to-man smile. He inclined his head the way a chauffeur should, even though he only chauffeured a Smart. Mrs Merriweather was a very nice woman. But then Mr Kreitman was a very nice man. And Mr Kreitman paid his wages.
I am beneath contempt, Kreitman told himself, but he was quickened in every nerve.
Quickened to no end, for many weeks, to no end at all, unless you count the fraying of the nerves of his relations with Chas, until Maurice, having kept his wits about him, drew Kreitman’s attention to Mrs Merriweather’s having taken a taxi to the London Eye, two afternoons running.
‘On her own in the taxi?’ Kreitman enquired.
‘On her own, Mr Kreitman. Not counting the driver. I followed her all the way.’
So that ruled out an excursion with Kitty, followed by an excursion with Timmy. But then you could say it also ruled out an excursion with anyone else, were anyone else staying over at her place.
Kreitman listened to the beating of his heart but held himself in suspense. This was the wrong way, but there was no right way. He knew himself. He knew what transfixed him. The next week Maurice reported Mrs Merriweather taking a phone call in the car and being upset by it. And the day after that Chas rang, uncharacteristically for her, to cry off an evening which they’d earmarked as romantic.
‘You’re tough to be with at present,’ she’d said. ‘I’m giving myself a little holiday from you. Be kind to yourself’
‘Tomorrow, then?’ Kreitman had hoped.
‘All being well. Maybe.’
A little holiday. At least she hadn’t called it a sabbatical.
But that settled if for Kreitman. He put himself in her position. Where would he go to pursue an amour with a dough-faced cocksucker, a man more rattishly and motivationally, blah-blah, safe from the scrutiny of his children, his friends, his lover, and whoever else he did not wish to shame himself in front of? The Eye, 135 perpendicular metres beyond the reach of discovery. The Eye from which you could see trouble coming, twenty-five miles in all directions. The Eye, that great 2,100-tonne bicycle in the London sky.
Armed only with binoculars, Kreitman climbed on to the roof of the hotel and, at a cost of £290 a night, excluding breakfast, waited for the giant wheel to run over him.