The Light of Amsterdam (3 page)

But his fear and eagerness had no capacity for patience and he blurted out, ‘You're going into hospital? Why do you have to go abroad?'

He watched her place both hands to the side of her face, shake it and simulate a scream. Then she reached out across the table and took both his but it was a gesture of restraint, holding them in the way a parent might the hands of a wayward child whose absolute concentration was required.

‘Alan, I have no plans to get married to Gordon as of yet, and I am not going into hospital.'

‘You don't have cancer?'

She shook his hands slowly from side to side as an emphasis to her words. ‘I don't have cancer though why you thought this I don't know. I haven't done my face but I didn't think I looked that rough.'

‘You look beautiful,' he said before he had worked out whether it was a good thing to say or not, but as soon as he said it he felt like a little boy, a needy little boy, and she dropped both his hands and sat back in the chair, quizzically screwing her eyes into narrow slits while she scrutinised him.

‘You're scaring me now. So please stop saying things that aren't true and don't make sense and just listen to what I have to tell you. Can you do that?' He nodded as above their heads there was the low rumble of a guitar riff. ‘Now just sit back and, without interrupting, try to listen and take in what I'm saying.'

He was still a child, a child about to be told a story by his mother, so he sat up straight in the chair and hugged the comfort he suddenly felt from knowing that she hadn't got the big one.

‘For some time I've been thinking that I'd like a change of direction, that I'd like my life to go a different way. Even before what happened. I just never said anything. I don't want to plod on like I've been doing. So are you ready for this? I'm thinking of going to live in Spain. I'm thinking of opening a guest-house. I've been looking for somewhere suitable for some time, an older place that with Gordon's help I can do up and renovate. Are you with me?'

He was with her. She hadn't got cancer and wasn't marrying Gordon, only maybe going into business with him. It was better, he told himself. So he nodded encouragingly but forced himself to say nothing despite the stream of questions flooding through him.

‘We've got an estate agent looking for a suitable place and something's come on the market. It's not far from Alicante but it's up in the mountains away from the crowds. He's sent email photographs of it. It looks a bit run-down at the moment but we're going to fly out and take a look at it, see if it might fit the bill. Gordon might be willing to invest some money in it, buy a share, but at the very least he would take on and supervise the work.' She stood up again and stirred the soup. ‘I'd rather buy the place outright myself but to do that I need to get my share from this house. So what do you think?'

He didn't know what he thought but there was still the residual relief that she wasn't going to die, and however far away Alicante seemed it was still closer than the silent swathe of eternity so in response he uttered some bland sentiments of approval that appeared to please her.

‘I'd like to put the house on the market reasonably soon. We need to get it valued but the way the property market is right now, we could get a really good price and there isn't a huge amount of mortgage left to pay off. You could use your half to buy somewhere better as well. I know it's a bit out of the blue but what do you think?'

‘It's a bit of a shock. Out of the blue like you say but if it's what you want. I suppose you're sure, that you've thought it through,' he said, looking at his hands to avoid her eyes that had turned into lie detectors. She sat down opposite him again and he would say yes to anything she wanted. ‘What will we get for this place?'

‘Manleys' went for four a month ago. But it had a conservatory. Still we must be close enough to that sort of money.'

‘Four? Manleys' went for four hundred thousand? Remember what we paid for this place and how we struggled those first couple of years when the mortgage rate went up?' But he could see that she didn't want to do nostalgic reminiscence so he focused again on the future that now felt unpredictable, ready at any moment to veer off in some direction outside the realm of his imagination. He was desperate to find something to hold on to; something stable that he might set his feet on and enable him to look about without this feeling of freewheeling, freefalling through unknown and uncharted worlds. ‘And what about the children? Have you told them yet?'

‘I've told them, and Caroline, who is hardly a child, has no problems with it.'

‘And Jack, what about Jack?'

‘Jack,' she said, letting their son's name hang in the air and there was a lengthened vagueness in how she pronounced the single syllable. ‘As always Jack is a bit of a problem. I don't know what he thinks and probably he doesn't know what he thinks either. But I wouldn't even consider going until after he's done his
GCSE
s. Then I suppose it's his choice – he can come or stay. Stay with you. That would be possible, wouldn't it?'

‘I'd have to find somewhere better. But I suppose I could do that with my share of the house.'

‘The thing is I need you to look after him, not this weekend coming but next when I'm flying out to view the property – just the weekend. That's all. You can do that, can't you?' Then she tightened the screw. ‘And you haven't spent that much time together recently.'

Not this weekend but next? It suddenly clicked. ‘Shit! Susan, I'm away that weekend. I'm going to Amsterdam to see Bob Dylan. I've got the concert ticket, booked the flights. You're definitely talking about not this weekend coming but next?'

She looked at him as if he was worse than her worst concept of useless and put a hand to her forehead as if a sudden migraine had just stabbed her. ‘Alan, the one thing I need you to do. There's nowhere else I can leave him. You have to have him. I need to see this place. I have to go to Spain. We can't leave him here on his own – you know that.'

He owed her. He owed his son. ‘I'll take him with me,' he said, following the spurt of his own words with surprise. ‘I'll get him a ticket, book the flights. He can come with me for the weekend. His passport's still valid, isn't it?' She nodded rapidly and dropped her hand from her brow. ‘But will he come, Susan? Will he come to Amsterdam?'

‘He has to, he just has to, and that's all there is to it. I'll talk to him, try to explain. When you think of what we do for him and have done over the years, it's hardly too much to ask. He'll have to go.'

But as he listened to the insistence of her words he knew she was trying to convince herself and he cautioned, ‘Don't put it to him like he's obligated to go in case he puts his back up. Just say that we'd really appreciate it if he'd come. That he might enjoy it. That it's somewhere he's never been.'

‘That's something else I can't understand. Right now you could offer Jack the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of China, and he wouldn't be excited or even interested. I'm tired tiptoeing round him, trying to anticipate things, guess his mood. I'm weary of it and I'm not going to let him spoil my chances of doing something that's really important to me.'

He was about to reach out and pat her hand but stopped himself, instead offering, ‘I know: it's not easy but everything will work out right. And maybe a weekend with his dad won't be such a bad thing?'

‘Bob Dylan?' she asked, her eyes widening with uncertainty. ‘Is he not dead? Why does it have to be Bob Dylan? He's not going to want to go to a Bob Dylan concert.'

‘He can't keep going much longer. Wanted to see him before it's too late. I'll talk to Jack. He'll come.'

Just as he was beginning to feel a sense of something shared, of an unspoken ease with each other that he'd almost forgotten how comforting it could be, there was the sound of a key in the front door and then it opening.

‘It's Gordon,' she said, standing up, and as she touched the side of her hair his heart kicked repeatedly as if a hard stone had been skimmed over it, as he understood she had realised that she hadn't her face on but even in that concern he saw a lightness seep into her features and he swallowed, tasting a bitterness, the intensity and pain of which shocked him. Then instead of fading away it was increased by the realisation that Gordon had an automatic access that was denied to him. The keys to the kingdom.

‘All right, Alan?' Gordon said. There was a green alligator on the left tit of a pink shirt – he thought of these logos now as the mark of Cain – and it felt as if his wife's suitor took up a lot of the kitchen's available space. He didn't have the need of a jumper or coat even though it was raining. ‘That smells good,' he said, peering into the pot but thankfully didn't kiss Susan or touch her in any way. ‘That was some send-off today. Some crowds. And the florists must have cleaned up. They were throwing flowers like there was no tomorrow. Did him proud.' He sat down and clunked a large bunch of keys on the table. ‘Did you watch it on TV, Susan?' But she gave the same answer as before and in the face of her indifference he directed his thoughts to his other listener. ‘Some show then. Though what entitled the politicians to stick their arses in the frame, I don't know.'

‘It was a nice touch when they went outside and invited some ordinary punters into the service.'

‘Nice touch,' Gordon concurred, sniffing the air. ‘Is that soup ready yet?' he asked, shuffling sideways on the seat to look at Susan. As he did so he revealed a glimpse of a gold neck chain. She told him that it would be a little while yet and it felt as if he was in a scene from
Ghost
, watching over the life from which he had suddenly and unexpectedly been ripped. He remembered there was a scene with clay somewhere in that as well. And sex. ‘Some great stories going the rounds about George.' And then Gordon proceeded to tell all the hoary old favourites that had been told a million times about drinking Canada dry and the hotel waiter who, bringing the champagne and seemingly oblivious to a Miss World sprawled on the bed amidst the casino winnings, asked where it all went wrong.

He listened politely and pretended to smile in all the right places. Gordon was a talker, a man with opinions on everything. Someone, too, who knew the price of everything and it seemed as if he absorbed too much of the room's oxygen. He had started to feel suffocated, breathless, but he listened patiently and sometimes when Gordon said something particularly stupid he tried to catch Susan's eye to see if it had registered but there were no clues to be found in her face. Then Gordon leaned back on his chair puffing out the tumbleweed on his chest through the open neck of his shirt and became philosophical.

‘What I don't understand is why in this country we always produce stars who are completely screwed up, out of their tree on booze or just barking mad. There's George, there's Alex Higgins – did you get a glimpse of him at the funeral? Like a walking skeleton – he could have fitted in the box as well. He's spent his life fighting with his own shadow – do you remember the time he told Dennis Taylor he'd get him a head job? Jesus! And Van Morrison! A genius, no two ways about it, but the ultimate grumpy old man. They say he's the pop star all journalists hate to interview.'

‘It's a mystery, Gordon.' One of many mysteries and none so great in his mind as how this man had come to sit in his kitchen, make love to his wife and be about to launch into some business scheme that could take her to a new life in Spain.

‘And, Alan, you're an art man. What about Van Gogh? Another genius but cutting off his ear – what's that all about?'

‘I think it was something to do with a woman.'

‘A woman? Makes sense. They can go on a bit. But you learn to shut it out. Isn't that right, Susan? No need to cut your ear off.' She didn't answer but instead searched in a drawer for something, her hands rattling the cutlery loudly. ‘So what do you think of this Spain idea?'

He was about to answer with a passing attempt at optimism when Jack suddenly appeared in the doorway holding his guitar at his side. ‘Hi, Jack,' he said, raising his hand slightly. Jack nodded and looked at them as if he had just seen a lynching mob, or as if the kitchen – his kitchen – had been taken over by dangerous aliens.

‘All right, Jack?' Gordon asked and there was a muted, mumbled response that might or might not have been a ‘hi' and then he was gone, his bare feet whispering him back down the hall to the front room. A few seconds later there was the sound of a television.

‘Alan,' Susan said and, standing directly behind Gordon who was about to start talking about the price of houses, nodded at him. He understood and got up, silently pointing in the hypothetical direction of Jack to explain his departure as Gordon launched into a story addressed to the empty chair about how developers were buying houses with big gardens, knocking them down, building apartments and then making a killing. Even after he stood up and walked away the story continued and he was suddenly afflicted by the idea that Gordon was some sort of carpetbagger, not just a cuckoo in the nest, who saw the chance of shady property deals and had not so much got his eye on Susan as their valuable house. Perhaps he'd soon be saying that he knew someone who would be interested in their property and how they could save estate agent fees on a private sale. But then his attention focused on his son who was curled up in an armchair, feet tucked under him with his black guitar resting across his lap.