Amsterdam (2 page)

“I can never remember sex,” he said after a pause.
“I’m sure it was brilliant. But I do remember her teaching me all about porcini, picking them, cooking them.”

Clive assumed this was an evasion and decided against any confidences of his own. He looked toward the chapel entrance. They would have to go across. He surprised himself by saying rather savagely, “You know, I should have married her. When she started to go under, I would have killed her with a pillow or something and saved her from everyone’s pity.”

Vernon was laughing as he steered his friend away from the Garden of Remembrance. “Easily said. I can just see you writing exercise yard anthems for the cons, like what’s-her-name, the suffragette.”

“Ethel Smyth. I’d do a damn better job than she did.”

The friends of Molly who made up the funeral gathering would have preferred not to be at a crematorium, but George had made it clear there was to be no memorial service. He didn’t want to hear these three former lovers publicly comparing notes from the pulpits of St. Martin’s or St. James’s, or exchanging glances while he made his own speech. As Clive and Vernon approached they heard the familiar gabble of a cocktail party. No champagne trays, no restaurant walls to throw back the sound, but otherwise one might have been at one more gallery opening, one more media launch. So many faces Clive had never seen by day
light, and looking terrible, like cadavers jerked upright to welcome the newly dead. Invigorated by this jolt of misanthropy, he moved sleekly through the din, ignored his name when it was called, withdrew his elbow when it was plucked, and kept on going toward where George stood talking to two women and a shriveled old fellow with a fedora and cane.

“It’s too cold, we have to go,” Clive heard a voice cry out, but for the moment no one could escape the centripetal power of a social event. He had already lost Vernon, who had been pulled away by the owner of a television channel.

At last Clive was gripping George’s hand in a reasonable display of sincerity. “It was a wonderful service.”

“It was very kind of you to come.”

Her death had ennobled him. The quiet gravity really wasn’t his style at all, which had always been both needy and dour; anxious to be liked, but incapable of taking friendliness for granted. A burden of the hugely rich.

“And do excuse me,” he added, “these are the Finch sisters, Vera and Mini, who knew Molly from her Boston days. Clive Linley.”

They shook hands.

“You’re the composer?” Vera or Mini asked.

“That’s right.”

“It’s a great honor, Mr. Linley. My eleven-year-old
grand-daughter studied your sonatina for her final exam in violin and really loved it.”

“That’s very nice to know.”

The thought of children playing his music made him feel faintly depressed.

“And this,” George said, “also from the States, is Hart Pullman.”

“Hart Pullman. At last. Do you remember I set your
Rage
poems for jazz orchestra?”

Pullman was the Beat poet, the last survivor of the Kerouac generation. He was a withered little lizard of a man who was having trouble twisting his neck to look up at Clive. “These days I don’t remember a thing, not a fucking thing,” he said pleasantly in a high-pitched, chirpy voice. “But if you said you did it, you did it.”

“You remember Molly, though,” Clive said.

“Who?” Pullman kept a straight face for two seconds, then cackled and clutched at Clive’s forearm with slender white fingers. “Oh sure,” he said in his Bugs Bunny voice. “Molly and me go way back to ’65 in the East Village. I remember Molly. Oh boy!”

Clive concealed his disquiet as he did the sums. She would have turned sixteen in the June of that year. Why had she never mentioned it? He probed neutrally.

“She came out for the summer, I suppose.”

“Uh-uh. She came to my Twelfth Night party. What a girl, eh, George?”

Statutory rape, then. Three years before him. She
never told him about Hart Pullman. And didn’t she come to the premier of
Rage?
Didn’t she come to the restaurant afterward? He couldn’t remember. Not a fucking thing.

George had turned his back to talk to the American sisters. Deciding there was nothing to lose, Clive cupped his hand about his mouth and leaned down to speak in Pullman’s ear.

“You never fucked her, you lying reptile. She wouldn’t have stooped to it.”

It wasn’t his intention to walk away at this point, for he wanted to hear Pullman’s reply, but just then two loud groups cut in from left and right, one to pay respects to George, the other to honor the poet, and in a swirl of repositioning Clive found himself freed and walking away. Hart Pullman and the teenage Molly. Sickened, he pushed his way back through the crowd and arrived in a small clearing and stood there, mercifully ignored, looking around at the friends and acquaintances absorbed in conversation. He felt himself to be the only one who really missed Molly. Perhaps if he’d married her he would have been worse than George, and wouldn’t even have tolerated this gathering. Nor her helplessness. Tipping from the little squarish brown plastic bottle thirty sleeping pills into his palm. The pestle and mortar, a tumbler of scotch. Three tablespoons of yellow-white sludge. She looked at him when she took it, as if she knew. With his left
hand he cupped her chin to catch the spill. He held her while she slept, and then all through the night.

Nobody else was missing her. He looked around at his fellow mourners now, many of them his own age, Molly’s age, to within a year or two. How prosperous, how influential, how they had flourished under a government they had despised for almost seventeen years.
Talking ’bout my generation
. Such energy, such luck. Nurtured in the postwar settlement with the state’s own milk and juice, and then sustained by their parents’ tentative, innocent prosperity, to come of age in full employment, new universities, bright paperback books, the Augustan age of rock and roll, affordable ideals. When the ladder crumbled behind them, when the state withdrew her tit and became a scold, they were already safe, they consolidated and settled down to forming this or that—taste, opinion, fortunes.

He heard a woman call out merrily, “I can’t feel my hands or feet and I’m going!” As he turned, he saw a young man behind him who had been about to touch his shoulder. He was in his mid-twenties and bald, or shorn, and wore a gray suit with no overcoat.

“Mr. Linley. I’m sorry to intrude on your thoughts,” the man said, drawing his hand away.

Clive assumed he was a musician, or someone come to collect his autograph, and shrank his face into its mask of patience. “That’s all right.”

“I was wondering if you’d have time to come
across and talk to the foreign secretary. He’s keen to meet you.”

Clive pursed his lips. He didn’t want to be introduced to Julian Garmony, but neither did he want to go to the bother of snubbing him. No escape. “You show the way,” he said, and was led past standing clumps of his friends, some of whom guessed where he was going and tried to lure him from his guide.

“Hey, Linley. No talking to the enemy!”

The enemy indeed. What had attracted her? Garmony was a strange-looking fellow: large head, with wavy black hair that was all his own, a terrible pallor, thin unsensual lips. He had made a life in the political marketplace with an unexceptional stall of xenophobic and punitive opinions. Vernon’s explanation had always been simple: high-ranking bastard, hot in the sack. But she could have found that anywhere. There must also have been the hidden talent that had got him to where he was and even now was driving him to challenge the PM for his job.

The aide delivered Clive into a horseshoe grouped around Garmony, who appeared to be making a speech or telling a story. He broke off to slip his hand into Clive’s and murmur intensely, as though they were alone, “I’ve been wanting to meet you for years.”

“How do you do.”

Garmony spoke up for the benefit of the company, two of whom were young men with the pleasant,
openly dishonest look of gossip columnists. The minister was performing and Clive was a kind of prop. “My wife knows a few of your piano pieces by heart.”

Again. Clive wondered. Was he as domesticated and tame a talent as some of his younger critics claimed—the thinking man’s Gorecki?

“She must be good,” he said.

It had been a while since he had met a politician close up, and what he had forgotten was the eye movements, the restless patrol for new listeners or defectors, or the proximity of some figure of higher status, or some other main chance that might slip by.

Garmony was looking around now, securing his audience. “She was brilliant. Goldsmiths, then the Guildhall. A fabulous career ahead of her …” He paused for comic effect. “Then she met me and chose medicine.”

Only the aide and another staffer, a woman, tittered. The journalists were unmoved. Perhaps they had heard it all before.

The foreign secretary’s eyes had settled back on Clive. “There was another thing. I wanted to congratulate you on your commission. The Millennial Symphony. D’you know, that decision went right up to cabinet level?”

“So I heard. And you voted for me.”

Clive had allowed himself a note of weariness, but Garmony reacted as though he had been effusively
thanked. “Well, it was the least I could do. Some of my colleagues wanted this pop star chap, the ex-Beatle. Anyway, how is it coming along? Almost done?”

“Almost.”

His extremities had been numb for half an hour but it was only now that Clive felt the chill finally envelop his core. In the warmth of his studio he would be in shirtsleeves, working on the final pages of this symphony, whose premiere was only weeks away. He had already missed two deadlines and he longed to be home.

He put out his hand to Garmony. “It was very nice to meet you. I have to be getting along.”

But the minister did not take his hand and was speaking over him, for there was still a little more to be wrung from the famous composer’s presence.

“Do you know, I’ve often thought that it’s the freedom of artists like yourself to pursue your work that makes my own job worthwhile …”

More followed in similar style as Clive gazed on, no sign of his growing distaste showing in his expression. Garmony, too, was his generation. High office had eroded his ability to talk levelly with a stranger. Perhaps that was what he offered her in bed, the thrill of the impersonal. A man twitching in front of mirrors. But surely she preferred emotional warmth. Lie still, look at me, really
look
at me. Perhaps it was nothing
more than a mistake, Molly and Garmony. Either way, Clive now found it unbearable.

The foreign secretary reached his conclusion. “These are the traditions that make us what we are.”

“I was wondering,” Clive said to Molly’s ex-lover, “whether you’re still in favor of hanging.”

Garmony was well able to deal with this sudden shift, but his eyes hardened.

“I think most people are aware of my position on that. Meanwhile, I’m happy to accept the view of Parliament and the collective responsibility of the cabinet.” He had squared up, and he was also turning on the charm. The two journalists edged a little closer with their notebooks.

“I see you once said in a speech that Nelson Mandela deserved to be hanged.”

Garmony, who was due to visit South Africa the following month, smiled calmly. The speech had recently been dug up, rather scurrilously, by Vernon’s paper. “I don’t think you can reasonably nail people to things they said as hot-head undergraduates.” He paused to chuckle. “Almost thirty years ago, I bet you said or thought some pretty shocking things yourself.”

“I certainly did,” Clive said. “Which is my point. If you’d had your way then, there wouldn’t be much chance for second thoughts now.”

Garmony inclined his head briefly in acknowledgment.
“Fair enough point. But in the real world, Mr. Linley, no justice system can ever be free of human error.”

Then the foreign secretary did an extraordinary thing that quite destroyed Clive’s theory about the effects of public office and that in retrospect he was forced to admire. Garmony reached out and, with his forefinger and thumb, caught hold of the lapel of Clive’s overcoat and, drawing him close, spoke in a voice that no one else could hear.

“The very last time I saw Molly she told me you were impotent and always had been.”

“Complete nonsense. She never said that.”

“Of course you’re bound to deny it. Thing is, we could discuss it out loud in front of the gentlemen over there, or you could get off my case and make a pleasant farewell. That is to say, fuck off.”

The delivery was rapid and urgent, and as soon as it was over Garmony leaned back, beaming as he pumped the composer’s hand, and called out to the aide, “Mr. Linley has kindly accepted an invitation to dinner.” This last may have been an agreed code, for the young man stepped across promptly to usher Clive away while Garmony turned his back on him to say to the journalists, “A great man, Clive Linley. To air differences and remain friends, the essence of civilized existence, don’t you think?”

An hour later Vernon’s car, which was absurdly small to have a chauffeur, dropped Clive in South Kensington. Vernon got out to say goodbye.

“Terrible funeral.”

“Not even a drink.”

“Poor Molly.”

Clive let himself into the house and stood in the hallway, absorbing the warmth of the radiators and the silence. A note from his housekeeper told him there was a flask of coffee in the studio. Still in his coat, he walked up there, took a pencil and a sheet of manuscript paper, and, leaning against the grand piano, scribbled down the ten descending notes. He stood by the window, staring at the page, imagining the contrapuntal cellos. There were many days when the commission to write a symphony for the millennium was a ridiculous affliction: a bureaucratic intrusion on his creative independence; the confusion about where exactly Giulio Bo, the great Italian conductor, would be able to rehearse the British Symphony Orchestra; the mild but constant irritation of overexcited or hostile press scrutiny; the fact that he had failed to meet two deadlines—the millennium itself was still years away. There were also days like this one, when he thought of nothing
but the music and could not stay away. Keeping his left hand, which was still numb from cold, in the pocket of his coat, he sat at the piano and played the passage as he had written it, slow, chromatic, and rhythmically tricky. There were two time signatures, in fact. Then, still with his right hand and at half speed, he improvised the cellos’ rising line and played it again several times, with variations, until he was satisfied. He scribbled out the new part, which was at the very top of the cellos’ range and would sound like some furious energy restrained. Releasing it later, in this final section of the symphony, would be a joy.