Some Here Among Us (23 page)

‘Oh, I
love
this,’ said Sandra, and she began to sing:

‘
The blue light was my
—’

Then Sandra was aghast. She clapped her hand to her mouth as if she had done something quite wrong. Music – in someone else’s car – on the way to a funeral! She jabbed at the chrome knob, trying to turn the radio off again.

‘No, leave it on,’ said Gideon.

‘Leave it on. Leave it on,’ said Race and FitzGerald together.

‘Oh!’ said Sandra. Then she laughed at her foolishness, and took a puff on her cigarette and exhaled lightly to show she didn’t care. Race saw that her hand was shaking very slightly. She was sitting half-curled on the front seat, in a fur coat. It was probably her mother’s or from an op-shop, Race thought – in any case it was slightly too large for her. The coat completely hid her form and yet Race thought just then he could almost see her naked, or at least that it was easy to imagine her naked and that this was not even sought by him, or by her for that matter – it was the way she held herself, it was unconscious, it was in the micro-muscles, and then some classical phrase – ‘nymph of the fountain always wet’ – came into his mind – but from where? – and in that minute, cruising along the highway in Gideon’s old Velox, the sidelong sun lighting the chrome dashboard and the blue cigarette smoke, Race thought: ‘My God. I’ve fallen for Sandra Isbister!’

A little further on, the car in front of them stopped abruptly in the middle of the highway. Gideon slammed on the brakes. They all slewed forward in their seats.

‘What is it? What’s happening?’ said FitzGerald, craning to see past Gideon’s head.

Standing across the road were four or five men, silhouetted by the morning sun, idling there, barring the way.

The hearse began to move again, but instead of going on down the highway it turned off the road and in through a gate.

‘What is it?’ said FitzGerald again.

‘Oh, they’re just the boys,’ said Gideon. He put the car into gear and moved forward. The young men who blocked the road looked at them impersonally, like car-park attendants with no interest in the people in the cars, just the vehicles themselves. Gideon drove through the gate after the hearse and they went slowly rocking across a grassy field.

‘What’s happening?’ said FitzGerald. He seemed alarmed for some reason.

‘It’s just the people here,’ said Gideon. ‘They want to keep the body. They say: “We loved this boy and now look what’s happened to him. So
we’re
going to keep him safe with us.” So we’ll have a little
tangi
– a little cry – together, then we’ll all drive on.’

In the corner of the field a woman came out from the porch of a house and began to call out in a long, high-pitched cry. The other cars were coming in through the gate. They parked in rows and everyone got out and stood on the grass.

The woman on the porch was calling out, crying out, and then, without any warning, everyone in the crowd of visitors, who had formed several ranks in front of the parked cars, began to weep. Tears were streaming on every face. It was so sudden and unexampled that Race, even through his own tears, felt amazement. ‘How does
this
happen?’ he thought. Yet his own grief – and presumably that of the others – was quite sincere. They were weeping for Morgan, there in the glassy hearse in front of them, and for themselves, standing in the cool sunlight that slanted across the grass, and also weeping, so it seemed to him, because in their thousand-year isolation the Maoris had discovered a certain pitch of the human voice, like that of the woman whose chant was still rising and rising in the air, which instantly and without exception made anyone who heard it cry.

Then the chanting stopped, and, abruptly, so did the tears. Race looked around him. Everything looked the same at first, but then he thought that things were subtly different. The shadows were sharper. Yet everywhere it seemed it was business as usual. Gideon was standing with his legs planted wide, jingling change in his trouser pocket as he chatted to a man in a black blazer with red piping on the collar. A few fields away a man was ploughing with a tractor, turning up sharp lines of wet black earth. A black dog squeezed through the lower bars of a gate and went racing after him, its body stretching and then closing like the symbol – ? – of an ohm. And plump Rawlinson, who had shared a flat with Morgan the previous year, and who a minute before had been sobbing openly, was now looking down at his light-meter with a frown, and at the same time pulling with his thumb at the brown leather camera strap which was a little tight around his neck.

In the distance were the roofs of a town, and a tall green hill stood to the north. The wind was blowing and, as he watched, Race saw a white cloud was continually forming on the peak of the hill and streaming towards the sea. So this is the
world
, he thought. It was the first time he had seen or thought of the world as a single place. Yes, it was a great lit-up room which you come into and from which, in time, you leave. That was the proposition, and the effect, of the tears that had just been wept for Morgan: the world was one great room.

‘Time to go now,’ Gideon said to Race, and he and the others walked back over the grass to the cars, Rawlinson still pulling with his thumb at the dimpled brown strap which was just a bit too tight around his plump pink neck.

Part IV

2004

1

‘My darling, I cannot live without you,’ said a man’s voice. ‘I am in love – don’t you see? Why can’t we leave this awful place and go away together. Shall we go to the seaside? Do you not adore the sea?’

Toby turned around to locate the source of these endearments. Two seats behind him a man in his late thirties and wearing a panama hat with a pink band was addressing Candy. Candy, eyes lively, was drinking in every word. The man was one of the guests at the wedding. Gillian was getting married that day. The man in the panama had just flown in, he was telling Candy, from a film festival in Romania. Only the day before he had been watching a film in competition – he was on the jury – when a woman slipped into the seat beside him and began to whisper in his ear.

‘I am mad about you. Why not leave this awful place and come down to the sea? Do you not adore oysters? Do you not adore the sea?’

‘A few minutes of this,’ the film man was saying, ‘and I’d had enough. I got up and moved away to another seat. But she came after me: “Look into my eyes. Do you not see my love for you?” ’ That was it. I got up and walked out. But she followed me into the foyer. “Madam!” I said. “You have entirely ruined that film for me.” “I am so sorry,” she said. “You did not like my translation? I was sent to translate the film into English for you.” ’

Candy gave a little scream of laughter. At the same time she was looking through the windows into the courtyard, which was shaded by high pines of some Mediterranean species.

‘Where’s Race?’ she said. ‘Where’s Chadwick? Holding everyone up, as per usual.’

The mini-bus was nearly full. The one which had been parked in front of them had already left: it shot off out of the courtyard and disappeared down the hill back into the city. Toby, meanwhile, had flushed a deep dark red. The man behind him talking to his mother must be Jojo’s new lover. Toby had never met him but he knew he was in his thirties, and English, and in the film business. He could not imagine how he, Toby, had come to sit right in front of this fellow without realising it. ‘
Fool
,’ he thought. Though of course it was just like Candy, as well, to tangle everything up, befriending Jojo’s Englishman. As if it was not difficult enough that Jojo had even been invited to Gilly’s wedding, much less to be there as a bridesmaid, at the centre of everything, and not only that but to bring along her new ‘partner’ as well. Toby had not seen Jojo for nearly two years but somehow, during that interval, she had become Gilly’s closest friend. At times Toby suspected it was her way of taking revenge on him. At other times he wondered if it was not more than that. She did not want to leave, to lose, his family. Might that not be construed as a reflection on Toby himself?

‘Oh, just go,’ cried Candy to the driver. ‘
Go!
’

She waved her hands, with her fingers downward, as if saying ‘
Shoo
.’

‘Ma!’ said Toby.

‘They can catch the next one. They can come by cab. We can’t wait here all day.’

Candy couldn’t bear to miss a moment of the wedding. The service had just been held in this little chapel amidst the mountainous suburbs and now they were heading for lunch in a sports club – which was not, apparently, a sports club at all – down on the Corniche. Off they went. Candy would like to have said she’d planned every minute of this day for the last year, but that would not be true. In fact she hardly knew what was going to happen from one moment to the next. She’d flown into Beirut only the day before, like most of the other guests. Everything had been decided and arranged by Maro’s family, who were very well-off and well-connected and knew how things were done in this place. Gillian didn’t mind. She was delighted with everything. She had, in Candy’s view, suspended all critical faculties, but maybe that was just another definition of love. The mini-bus driver, obeying Candy, took off. Down the hills they shot, winding round smooth boulevards and through sharp gorges. The Beirut street tarmac made a smooth hissing sound which Candy liked. It was a strange place, she thought. The outward signs of years of civil war had largely vanished but the town itself, the atmosphere, seemed nervous, careful, absent-minded, like someone who has experienced a psychotic episode. It was staggering as well, Candy thought – these thousand-foot mountains covered in villas, right up to the sky.

At the base of the hills, though, in the very centre of the city, lay ruinous plains, and a gigantic mosque was taking form amid cranes like a great grey egg. And then they were down on the Corniche itself, beside the sea.

They pulled up at Le Sporting, which seemed to Candy an odd name, and an odd place for a wedding breakfast, but what did she know? The real wedding feast was not until the next day, fifty miles away, at Baalbek, near the Roman ruins. Or was it the day after that? She could hardly keep track of the revels. ‘
Baalbek
,’ her future son-in-law had said to her, as if the word was rich with poetry and allusion, which it might have been to him but wasn’t to her. He was a nice boy, though. He was in trade, like all the family. He traded in
parts
. ‘Parts of what, darling?’ she had said. ‘Plant,’ said Maro. ‘
Plant?
’ It was a mystery to her, though not one she was deeply interested in. But she liked Maro and she noticed that, unlike any businessmen she’d met before, in the US for example, he was interested in history, art, architecture.

‘Baalbek!’ Maro said to her. His eyes were large, dark and round. ‘The greatest ruins of the classical world.’

But now here they were at Le Sporting, on the Corniche. And there, across a little sandy piazza, were the bride and groom, standing in the doorway and greeting the guests. Jojo and two other bridesmaids and Maro’s three brothers were just visible behind them.

‘This is my son, Tobias,’ said Candy to the English film-man when they climbed out of the mini-bus. She looked Toby up and down.

‘As you see, his luggage has gone missing.’

Toby was wearing jeans and a slightly frayed cotton shirt. Several other wedding guests were also exiguously attired. They had all got off the plane at Beirut but their luggage had wafted on, to Riyadh, to the Gulf, to the shores of India . . .

Candy was angry with Toby. Instead of going to a men’s outfitters that morning to buy a new suit as she commanded, he’d taken a cab out to the airport to see if his stuff had turned up. And of course nothing had.

‘The logo of Middle East Airlines is a very old cedar,’ said the film-man in his English voice. ‘An excellent thing in its own way, but not exactly a symbol of celerity.’

Toby nodded his head up and down during this speech, as if to hurry it up and get it over with.

‘You going in now?’ he said, indicating the door of Le Sporting with a gesture of his head.

‘Well, yes, of course,’ said the film-man.

‘Cool, I’ll borrow your hat,’ said Toby and he took the man’s panama off his head and stuck it on his own.

‘
Toby!
’ said Candy.

‘Just a quick walk,’ he said, and went off fast along the pavement of the Corniche. At all costs he did not want to enter Le Sporting just then and be greeted by Jojo at the door. Jojo hugging Candy, Jojo hugging her fat film-man, and then, what – my turn? He walked on. He needed to think about something else for a moment. Anything else. This Corniche is something else, he told himself. It’s really something, even after years of war. The big palms had survived, although they had a war-torn look – they reminded him of those tattered and smoke-singed banners you sometimes see in English churches. Toby had already got to know the Corniche. He had been in Beirut two full days and he now thought of the great sea-front boulevard as his own territory. The other wedding guests were staying in a hotel much further up the hill, a thirty-storey monster the colour of pink ham. Toby could have stayed there, but he’d wangled a deal with Race by which he went to a cheaper hotel and Race let him keep the difference. He was down by the sea in a hotel whose ambient decor was not pink ham. There was a little thin marble here and there, but the main visual effect was of raw concrete. The rooms even smelled of raw concrete. Toby didn’t mind that. He liked the smell. The Raw Concrete Palace stood in the sea air and on the previous evening, and again that morning, Toby had borrowed some shoes and shorts from the desk guy and gone out for a run under the great tattered palms, their fronds hanging down like those banners dedicated to the English god of war, and he had gone two or three miles along the wide seaward pavement of the Corniche, the surface of which, while not of porphyry or bronze, somehow seemed, even after years of war, sumptuously darkened with wealth. There were plenty of poor people in view as well; hot-food vendors on bikes shot out in front of the Mercedes and Opels; anglers, poorly clad – not sportsmen, just skinny guys hoping to catch supper – stood on the sea-edge of the fissured rock-shelf. ‘
Slosh! Wap!
’ went the green Med in the slotted rocks. Every fifty paces along the sidewalk’s gleam a beggar had set up his station. Toby had befriended one of them already – a multiple amputee who sat on a little wheeled tray and who wore such an expression, of both knowledge and anxiety, that Toby thought that he himself might now begin to understand the declaration
The meek shall inherit the earth
if by ‘inherit’ was meant ‘comprehend’. His name, this beggar had told him, when Toby first stopped to give him some coins, was Tawfik. And here was Tawfik again, just up ahead. This was the third time they had met. Tawfik had already been at his post when Toby went for a run early that morning. But this time, instead of the look of dignity and gratitude, Tawfik shot him a beam of something like hilarity. Here was this brown-haired stranger again, this foreigner, this probable infidel, now wearing a hat banded in pink, and now – they were roughly the same age – they knew each other. They were almost friends. What a place the world was!