Comeback (2 page)

The Diving Pelican, less striking than its name, glowed dimly at one end of a dark row of shops. There seemed to be few other signs of neighborhood life, but the twenty or so parking spaces in front were full. I pulled open the outwards-opening door, stepped into a small entrance hall and was greeted by a young woman with a bright smile who said, “And how are you today?” as if she’d known me for years.

“Fine,” I said, and mentioned Fred.

The smile grew wider. Fred had arrived. Fred, it seemed, was good news.

He was sitting alone at a round table spread with a cream lace cloth over a pink underlay. Stainless steel flatware, pink napkins, unfussy wineglasses, little oil lamps, carnation in a bud vase, the trappings of halfway up the scale. Not very large overall, the place was pleasantly packed. Not a pelican in sight, diving or otherwise.

Fred rose to his feet to pump my hand and the smiling lady pulled out a chair for me, producing a shiny menu and showing her molars.

“Great, great,” Fred was saying. “Sorry I’m alone but Meg didn’t want to leave the children. They’ve got chicken pox.”

I made sympathetic noises.

“Covered in spots, poor little buggers,” Fred said. “Like some wine?”

We ate our salads first, in the American way, and drank some reasonable red. Fred, at my prompting, told me about life in his consulate, mostly a matter, he said, of British tourists complaining of lost documents, stolen money and decamping boyfriends.

“They’ll con you rigid,” Fred said. “Sob stories by the dozen.” With a sly gleam of amusement he looked at me sideways. “People like you, smooth two-a-penny first secretaries used to embassy life, you’d fall for the wet-handkerchief routine like a knockover. All half of them want is a free ticket home.”

“You’ve grown cynical, Fred.”

“Experienced,” he said.

Always expect a lie, my stepfather had said right back at the beginning of my enlightenment into what his job entailed. Politicians and diplomats, he’d said, are liars until proved different. “You too?” I asked, dismayed, and he’d smiled his civilized smile and educated me. “I don’t lie to you or your mother. You will not lie to us. If you hear me tell an untruth in public you will remain calm and keep your mouth shut and work out why I said it.”

We got on fine from the start. I couldn’t remember my natural father, who had died when I was a baby, and I had no hangups about anyone taking his place. I’d longed to have a father like other boys, and then suddenly there was this big stranger, full of jokes, who’d swept like a gale into our single-parent-only-child existence and carried us off to the equator before we could gasp. It was only gradually, afterwards, that I realized how irrevocably he’d changed me, and how fortunate I had been.

Fred said, “Where have they posted you, after your leave?”

“Nowhere. I mean, England. Private secretary.”

“Lucky old you!” There was a jealous edge to his voice at my promotion, all of a piece, I thought, with his gibe about two-a-penny gullible young men in embassies: and he’d been one himself in the past.

“Perhaps I’ll get Ulan Bator after that,” I said. Ulan Bator was the pits with everyone. It was heavily rumored that instead of a car there the ambassador got issued an official yak. “No one gets plums in a row.”

Fred flicked me a rueful smile, acknowledging that I’d seen his envy, and welcomed our seafood fettucini with yum-yum noises and a vigorous appetite. Fred had recommended the house speciality. I’d been persuaded, and in fact it was good.

Midway through, there was a small burst of clapping, and Fred, pausing with fork in the air, exuded pleasure.

“Ah,” he said proprietorially. “Vicky Larch and Greg Wayfield. They’re the friends I told you about, who are going to the U.K. tomorrow. They live just round the corner.”

Vicky Larch and Greg Wayfield were more than friends; they were singers. They had come into the restaurant without fanfare through curtains at the far end, she dressed in a white sequined tunic, he in a Madras-checked tailored jacket, both in light-colored trousers. The only thing really surprising about them was their age. They were mature, one might perhaps say, and no longer slim.

I thought reprehensibly that I could have done without the embarrassment of having to applaud earnest elderly amateurs all the way back to England. They fiddled around with amplifying equipment and tapped microphones to make sure they were working. Fred nodded encouragingly to them and to me and happily returned to his pasta.

They got the equipment going and ran a tape: soft sweet music from old stage shows, well known, undemanding, a background to food. Greg Wayfield hummed a few bars after a while and then began to sing the words, and I looked up from my fettucini in surprise because this was no geriatric disaster but a good true voice, gentle, virile and full of timbre.

Fred glanced at my expression and smiled with satisfaction. The song ended, the diners applauded and there was more tape. Then, again without announcement or fuss, the woman smoothed into a love song, the words a touch sad, moody, expressed with the catchy syncopated timing of long experience. Dear heavens, I thought with relief, they’re pros. Good old pros, having a ball.

They sang six songs alternately and finished with a duet, and then to enthusiastic clapping they threaded a way round the tables and sat down with Fred and me.

Fred made introductions. Half-standing, I shook the singers’ hands across the lace cloth and said with perfect honesty how much I’d enjoyed their performance.

“They’ll sing again,” Fred promised, pouring wine for them as if from long habit. “This is just a break.”

At close quarters they looked as wholesome and old-fashioned as their act, he still handsome, she with the air of a young chanteuse trapped in a grandmotherly body.

“Did you sing in nightclubs?” I asked her as she sat beside me.

Her blue eyes widened. “How did you know?”

“Something about your phrasing. Intimate. Designed for shadowy late-night spaces. Something about the way you move your head.”

“Well yes, I did clubs for years.” She was amused, aware of me physically despite her age. Once a woman, always a woman, I thought.

Her hair was white, a fluffy well-cut helmet. She had good skin lightly made up and her only real concession to theatricality lay in the silky dark up-curling false lashes, second nature to her eyes.

“But I retired ages ago,” she said, lowering the lids and raising them in harmless coquetry. “Had a bunch of babies and got too fat. Too old. We sing here just for fun.”

Her speaking voice was English, without regional accent, her diction trained and precise. Under the mild banter she seemed serene, secure and sensible, and I revised my gloomiest views of the next night’s journey. Flight attendants could be chatted-up another time, I supposed.

Greg said, “My wife would flirt with a chair leg,” and they both looked at me indulgently and laughed.

“Don’t trust Peter,” Fred cautioned them ironically. “He’s the best liar I know, and I’ve met a few, believe me.”

“How unkind,” Vicky said disbelievingly. “He’s a lamb.”

Fred made a laughing cough and checked that we all were in fact booked on the same flight. No doubt about it. British Airways’ jumbo to Heathrow. Club class, all of us.

“Great. Great,” Fred said.

Greg, I thought, was American, though it was hard to tell. A mid-Atlantic man: halfway accent, American clothes, English facial bones. Part of the local scenery in Miami, he had presence but not his wife’s natural stage charisma. He hadn’t been a soloist, I thought.

He said, “Are you a consul too, Peter?”

“Not at the moment.”

He looked perplexed, so I explained. “In the British foreign service you take the title of your present job. You don’t take your rank with you. You can be a second or first secretary or a consul or counselor or a consul-general or a minister or a high commissioner or an ambassador in one place, but you’ll very likely be something different in the next. The rank stays with the job. You take the rank of whatever job you’re sent to.”

Fred was nodding. “In the States, once an ambassador always an ambassador. ‘Mr. Ambassador’ forever. Even if you’ve only been an ambassador to some tiny country for a couple of years and are back to being a dogsbody, you keep the title. The British don’t.”

“Too bad,” Greg said.

“No,” I disagreed, “it’s better. There’s no absolutely clear-cut hierarchy, so there’s less bitching and less despair.”

They looked at me in astonishment.

“Mind you,” Fred said to them with mock confidentiality, “Peter’s father’s an ambassador at the moment. Between the two of them they’ve held every rank in the book.”

“Mine are all lower,” I said, smiling.

Vicky said comfortingly, “I’m sure you’ll do well in the end.”

Fred laughed.

Greg pushed away his half-drunk wine and said they’d better get back to work, a popular move with the clientele, always quick to applaud them. They sang another three songs each, Greg finishing quietly with a crooning version of “The Last Farewell,” the lament of a sailor leaving his South Seas love to go back to storms and war at sea round Britain. Shut your eyes, I thought, listening, and Greg could be the doomed young man. It was a masterly performance; extraordinary. A woman at the next table brought out a handkerchief and wiped away surreptitious tears.

The diners, sitting transfixed over long-cooled cups of coffee, gave Greg the accolade of a second’s silence before showing their pleasure. Sentimental it might all be, I thought, but one could have too much of stark unsugared realism.

The singers returned to our table, accepting plaudits on the way, and this time drank their wine without restraint. They were pumped up with the post-performance high-level adrenaline surge of all successful appearances of any sort, and it would take them a while to come down. Meanwhile they talked with animation, scattering information about themselves and further proving, if it were necessary, that they were solidly good, well-intentioned people.

I’d always found goodness more interesting then evil, though I was aware this wasn’t the most general view. To my mind, it took more work and more courage to be good, an opinion continually reinforced by my own shortcomings.

He had trained originally for opera, Greg said, but there weren’t enough roles for the available voices.

“It helps to be Italian,” he said ruefully. “And so few of any generation really make it. I sang chorus. I would have starved then rather than sing ‘The Last Farewell.’ I was arrogant, musically, when I was young.” He smiled with forgiveness for his youth. “So I went into a banking house as a junior junior in the trust department and eventually began to be able to afford opera tickets.”

“But you went on singing,” I protested. “No one could sing as you do without constant practice.”

He nodded. “In choirs. Sometimes in cathedrals and so on. Anywhere I could. And in the bathroom, of course.”

Vicky raised the eyelashes to heaven.

“Now they both sing here two or three times a week,” Fred told me. “This place would die without them.”

“Hush,” Vicky said, looking round for outraged proprietorial feelings but fortunately not seeing any. “We enjoy it.”

Greg said they were going to England for a month. One of Vicky’s daughters was getting married.

Vicky’s
daughter?

Yes, she said, the children were all hers. Two boys, two girls. She’d divorced their father long ago. She and Greg were new together: eighteen months married, still on honeymoon.

“Belinda—she’s my youngest—she’s marrying a veterinary surgeon,” Vicky said. “She was always mad about animals.”

I laughed.

“Well, yes,” she said, “I hope she’s mad about him, too. She’s worked for him for ages, but this came on suddenly a few weeks ago. So, anyway, we’re off to horse country. He deals mostly with horses. He acts as a vet at Cheltenham races.”

I made a small explosive noise in my throat and they looked at me inquiringly.

I said, “My father and mother met at Cheltenham races.”

They exclaimed over it, of course, and it seemed a bit late to say that my mother and
stepfather
met at Cheltenham races, so I let it pass. My real father, I thought, was anyway John Darwin: the only father I could remember.

Fred, reflecting, said, “Didn’t your father spend his entire youth at the races? Didn’t you say so in Tokyo, that time you went to the Japan Cup?”

“I expect I said it,” I agreed, “though it was a bit of an exaggeration. But he still does go when he gets the chance.”

“Do ambassadors usually go to the races?” Vicky asked doubtfully.

“This particular ambassador sees racecourses as the perfect place for diplomacy,” I said with ironic affection. “He invites the local Jockey Club bigwigs to an embassy party and they in turn invite him to the races. He says he learns more about a country faster at the races than in a month of diplomatic handshaking. He’s right, too. Did you know they have bicycle parks at Tokyo racecourse?”

Greg said, “Er ... uh ... I don’t follow.”

“Not just car parks,” I said. “Motorcycle parks and bicycle parks. Rows and rows of them. They tell you a lot about the Japanese.”

“What, for instance?” Vicky asked.

“That they’ll get where they want to go one way or another.”

“Are you being serious?”

“Of course,” I said with mock gravity. “And they have a baby park at the races too. You leave your infant to play in a huge bouncing Donald Duck while you bet your money away in a carefree fashion.”

“And what does this tell you?” Vicky teased.

“That the baby park draws in more than enough revenue to fund it.”

“Don’t worry about Peter,” Fred told them reassuringly. “He’s got this awful quirky mind, but you can rely on him in a crisis.”