Golden Hour (3 page)

“I could run you into Lewes. Put you on the 6:20. If you really don't mind.”

“Give me a chance to catch up on some work.”

“If you really wouldn't mind? For some reason I've just run out of energy.”

“No problem. You get an early night.”

He's so understanding. That's a good thing, isn't it? It's not as if I want some selfish bastard who only ever thinks of himself. Except somehow in this scenario I get to be the selfish bastard.

Look, here's what I want. I want a man who's loving and loyal, but not too eager to please me. I want to want to please him, but I don't want to have to please him. I don't want to be possessed like a chattel, but I do want to be possessed like a woman. I want him to love me out of his strength, not his weakness. I want him to adore me, but for his adoration not to trap me. I want him to lead his own life and let me lead mine, but I want us to live our lives together.

Am I making impossible demands? Dad always said I behaved like a spoiled child. So who spoiled me, Dad? How else am I supposed to behave? This isn't about who lays the table. This is my life. This is happy ever after, if that's not too much to ask.

So now what? Watch something mindless on TV. Go to sleep lying across the bed. Wake up and not have to smile.

Ask yourself this, Justin. When were you last hit by a genuinely new, really big, game-changing idea? Television still has the power to do that. I'm talking about setting the agenda. Getting everyone buzzing, challenging, taking sides. And it all starts in Vienna, in 1913.

Henry Broad walks home with his wife Laura, his mind buzzing, challenging, taking sides. The route home is familiar and requires no mental attention. He is preparing for his meeting on Tuesday with a Channel 4 commissioning editor, at which he will pitch a new series idea. But no sooner has he begun to address the editor in his mind than he is caught off-guard by the mental image of a large rabbit grazing on his lawn. Not a hallucination, a memory: he saw the rabbit yesterday evening. He is overwhelmed by a surge of anger. How is this possible? The garden is rabbit-fenced. He's found no breach in the fence, no burrow holes in the long grass of the orchard. And yet they're getting in. This means they'll start breeding in the garden. By next spring the rabbits will have taken over.

I truly believe, Justin, that this idea is both original and compelling. Ask yourself—

The low sunlight glints silver on the elm leaves. A cool breeze is getting up. Is this the end of the recent warm spell? What is one to think about global warming? It's not the science that's
become murky, it's the morality. You worry about taking plane flights because you want to believe you're a good person. Then it turns out to be more complicated than everyone supposed, and you take the flights anyway because really there's no other option, and you're left feeling a little grubby, a little hypocritical.

And why do I feel this constant louring sense of foreboding? Surely not intimations of mortality. I'm only fifty-four, for fuck's sake. And I'm swearing more than I used to. Is that part of the general decline of civility, or fear of my own fading vigor? Once upon a time we swore on the name of the Creator. Now we appeal to the great god Fuck.

Will the great god Fuck save me from the coming cataclysm?

Terry Sutton is outside his terrace house washing his car, a red Toyota Corolla. He's stripped to the waist, revealing that he has tattoos right up his broad back. His hair is shaved close round the sides and left longer on top, like a brush.

“Not at the fête, Terry?”

“Chance'd be a fine thing,” says Terry.

“Those bloody rabbits are still getting in,” says Henry.

“See you at home,” says Laura, walking on briskly down the lane. Laura is bored by Henry's war on the rabbits.

Terry squeezes out his cloth and straightens up, flexing the aching muscles in his back. The tattoo is an eagle with spread wings, holding the globe of the world in its claws. Beneath it a scroll bears the legend:
Pain passes, pride is forever
.

“Seen any droppings?” he says.

“A few. In the orchard.”

“So they're coming in from the meadow.”

“Yes,” says Henry. “But how?”

“Oh, they're clever little buggers.”

A white Ford Transit pulls up. A small young man in a gray tracksuit gets out. He has blond hair and a boyish face, the skin
scarred with the remains of acne. He smacks one hand on the bonnet of the red Toyota.

“Waste of time cleaning this wreck, Tel.”

“Tell you what,” says Terry to Henry. “I'll run the Nipper through your orchard, see what she finds.”

The Nipper is Terry's dog, a Jack Russell.

“That would be great,” says Henry. “I'm up in London on Tuesday and Thursday this week. But any time you can make.”

He gives Terry and his friend a nod and heads on home. His thoughts revert to his program proposal.

Call it the elephant in the room, Justin. The thing we all pretend isn't there. It's not just about history, it's not just about art, it's about all of us today, and our conspiracy to conceal the truth. The great unmentionable. You know what that is, Justin? We don't know any more what's good and what's bad. We don't even know what we like. We rely on a small band of experts to tell us what to admire, but we've no idea why. And there's a reason for this, Justin. It started in Vienna, in 1913.

Apparently young people don't watch television today. It's all Facebook and apps and smart phones. The days of the great television essays are over. Kenneth Clark's
Civilisation
is a museum curiosity, a footnote on the now-defunct twentieth century. And with
Civilisation
goes civilization. The dark clouds gather. The storm approaches.

What is this storm? How is it possible to have a feeling of dread and yet have no idea what it is you fear?

Henry comes to a stop at the back gate to his house. There before him lies the small orchard. Beyond it the square lawn with its two handsome flower borders, the flame-orange crocosmia in the last of their glory. Above the border rises the brick terrace, where a gray teak table stands with its attendant chairs, and a big sun-umbrella now mottled with mildew. The
last few weeks have been so warm they've had meals out on the terrace. The back door stands open, the door that leads into the kitchen, where Laura will even now have begun making supper.

Is this what I fear to lose? This sturdy russet house flanked by elms and limes, protected by lines of ancient hills. Yes, this too shall pass. But not yet, my friend. It'll see me out.

Pain passes, pride is forever
. In your dreams, Terry. Pride is as mortal as all the rest.

The thought brings in its train a low hiss, like the soft rustle from far off that tells you the rain is coming. So is that it, pride? Some damage to my
amour-propre
, some loss of status? All too likely, but no surprise there. I've been anticipating my descent to the scrapheap for so long that I shall feel quite at home there. I see myself stretched out at my ease on some broken-springed sofa, dreaming of ragged-trousered philanthropy. No cause for nameless dread there.

But there it is again, the distant hiss. The terror to come.

He crosses the garden quickly and enters the house by the back door. Laura is on the phone to her sister Diana. Carrie is by the fridge, looking for something to eat.

“So you'll be here by lunchtime, then?” Laura is saying. “I've asked another couple to dinner.”

Henry touches Carrie's arm, making her jump. He worries about her, she's so withdrawn these days.

“I'm going to get myself a drink. Want anything?”

“No thanks.”

And she's gone. All she ever does when she's home is sit in her room alone and strum on the guitar she's never learned to play properly. Nineteen years old, surely she should be out with her friends. But you can't ask. It's her life.

He pours himself a glass of wine and goes in search of the
Sunday Times
. Increasingly this is the form of escape he craves:
sunk deep in an armchair, legs stretched out before him, wine glass balanced on the chair arm, newspaper spread over his lap. Henry is addicted to reading the papers, though quite what it is he gets out of them he'd be hard put to say. It's not as if he cares much about the events of the day. You tell yourself you need to stay informed, but it's a lie. What you seek is distraction.

You see a photograph of Prince William playing cricket, and you feel a ridiculous twinge of affection, for cricket, or royalty, or both. You read that Muslim bus conductors are ejecting guide dogs from buses, because they believe dogs are unclean. Is that wrong? We believe smokers are unclean. We eject smokers from buses. Nothing is entirely right or entirely wrong. It all floats by the idle gaze, triggering little puffs of disapproval or amusement. After a while the accumulation of information, like alcohol in the bloodstream, results in a fuzzy sense that nothing matters much at all.

Rail fares are going up. A nine-year-old boy has died, strangled by a swing. Four soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan.

Where does it go, all this information? What part does it play in my life?
You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation
. They tell you that to persuade you to spend an absurd amount of money on a watch. A watch! Since when did watches become the primary display of male status?

Laura appears from the kitchen.

“Diana howled with laughter when I said we were going to the Buckingham Palace garden party. She says they're for lollipop ladies.”

“She would.”

“I've still no idea what I'm going to do about a hat.”

Henry is baffled as to why they've been asked, but it seems
churlish to refuse. It must be some form of minor recognition for his services to television.

“The whole affair will be ghastly,” he says. “We'll never get near the Queen. Or the cucumber sandwiches.”

“Oh, Henry. You know perfectly well you want to go.”

“Well, I am curious.”

He turns round to look at her. She's smiling at him, standing against the window, the evening sunlight glowing in her pale hair.

“Did you mind me asking Maggie and her boyfriend to dinner?”

“I was a bit surprised.”

“I really like Maggie, and we've never asked her round. And the boyfriend owns a rare collection of first-edition Golden Age detective fiction. He's not at all interested in it, he's obviously going to sell. Why shouldn't I handle the sale for him?”

“Oh. I see.”

“What do you think I should cook? Do you think we should ask another couple? We'll have Diana and Roddy, of course. Six isn't much of a dinner party.”

Henry groans. Laura's sister Diana is not his favorite person.

“Oh, God. Is it a dinner party now?”

“Stop it, Henry. Stop acting like an old fart.”

Laura goes back into the kitchen, leaving Henry to his newspaper. But the pleasure has gone out of reading it. He sits looking through the French windows at the garden, now striped by the long shadows of the elms. He thinks about the concert in Vienna's Musikverein in 1913, when Schoenberg premiered his
Gurrelieder
. The composer expected boos and cat-calls. Instead, the bourgeois Viennese audience he so despised rose to their feet and cheered. It was a triumph. Schoenberg was appalled. He bowed to the musicians, but he turned his back on the
applauding crowd. “If it is art, it is not for all,” he wrote later. “And if it is for all, it is not art.”

The artist turned his back on the applauding crowd.

This image fascinates Henry. He wants to recreate it on film. The rejection of the popular. There it is, in a single gesture, the fork in the road that became a chasm, that robbed art of its audience.

Am I acting like an old fart?

Admit it, Justin. This is a big idea. This is a fucking big idea. Why has high art become synonymous with difficulty, inaccessibility, a refusal to please? I know the answer, Justin. The great god Fuck has whispered it in my ear. I may be middle-aged and I may deal in concepts that require more than one hundred and forty characters to express, but I'm still sparking. I can still light fires.

Carrie comes in, treading as if she has no weight.

“Dad, I need driving practice. I've got my test in just over two weeks. I really need more time in the car.”

“Yes, darling, of course,” says Henry. “We'll find time.”

“I mean now.”

“Now? We're about to have supper.”

“No, we're not. We could do half an hour.”

“I've just had a glass of wine. I've finally sat down. Let's do it tomorrow.”

“Okay. Fine. Tomorrow.” She adds without bitterness, floating the observation in the air, “It's always tomorrow.”

She drifts back up the stairs to be alone with her guitar. Henry feels guilty, then resentful, then tired. It's summer, for God's sake. Summertime's for sitting about doing nothing. It's officially allowed.

Laura looked so beautiful haloed by sunlight. I should have told her so. Why does one never say these things? It's not
become less true over the years, it's become more true. Almost twenty-seven years now, if you count from when we got engaged.

A thought strikes him. He picks up the newspaper and checks the date: July 18. So this coming Saturday will be July 24.

“Laura!” He gets up, goes to the kitchen doorway. “You know what this Saturday is?”

“What?”

“It's the anniversary of our engagement.”

She turns round, looking perplexed.

“Our engagement?”

“Twenty-seven years ago this Saturday I asked you to marry me. Not a very important anniversary. But even so.”

Laura looks down at her left hand. There on her fourth finger is the antique ruby ring they went out and bought together, after she'd said she'd marry him.