There but for The (18 page)

Mark: I’ve been invited to this dinner party next week.

Miles: But?

Mark: But, well, I don’t want to go.

Miles: But?

Mark: But what?

Miles: Just but.

Mark: What do you mean, but?

Miles: Exactly what I say. Those sentences all sound like they have a but attached.

Mark: But?

Miles: Yes.

Mark: And would that but have one t or two?

[Miles smiles at him, shakes his head.]

Mark: Shame. Ah well. Right. Got that straight, then. So to speak. Ha.

Miles: So. You’ve been invited to this dinner party next week, but you don’t want to go. You don’t want to go, but—but what comes next? See?

Mark: I get it. You mean like a game.

Miles: I mean more than a game, I mean, like actuality, like how things happen. Like … I was going home, but, this man asked me to go for a drink, so here I am.

Mark: Is it always but? Can it be and?

Miles: Yeah, but the thing I particularly like about the word but, now that I think about it, is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting.

Mark: Like … this thing happened at the end of the play which threatened to spoil the whole thing—but …

Miles: See?

Mark: Ah. I see. You’re kind of … amazing.

Miles: Ha-ha. But?

Mark: [laughs] What is it? All that grammar beaten into me at school, and I can’t remember the name of the figure of speech for the word but. Preposition?

Miles: I’m not prepositioning you.

Mark: Ha. Damn shame.

Miles: I’m doing something much better. So. You’ve been invited to this dinner party, but—you don’t want to go. You don’t want to go, but—

Mark: But I can’t really get out of it.

Miles: You can’t really get out of it, but—

Mark: But I’ve just thought of a way to make it do-able.

Miles: You’ve just thought of a way to make it do-able, but—

Mark: But it depends on whether this man I’ve just met will accept the invitation and come with me.

Miles: [surprised] Oh. Oh, you mean me?

Mark: [surprised at himself] Yes. But—. Yes.

[Laughter]

For every new bud there’ll ever be / all the old leaves get shunted off the tree / say it’s a kind of spooning—with a knife / this merciless merciful newness of life
Mark sat, now, on the circular bench not far from the gate of the park. In a minute, he’d stand up and go and try the front door at the Lees’ house again. Forty-six years ago, in the Easter holidays (when he is roughly the age of the boy who sheep’s-eyed him earlier today up on the hill), he is “home” from St. Faith’s and Kenna is at the dentist, and because she has a dentist she particularly likes going to across this side of town, she has left him in a greasy spoon until her teeth are done. Across the road there is an antique sort of shop and in its window is a golden-coloured, medieval-looking picture. Mark pulls his coat on and leaves the caff, crosses the road.

The picture is a holy picture, a religious picture, of two men. They are turned towards each other and a group of men is watching them. One has his arm, his hand, on the other’s shoulders. He is looking at the man lovingly. The smaller of the two men is bending forward slightly. He is putting his fingers, his hand, right inside a wound in the first man’s side.

Beautiful, a man behind him says.

It is the man from inside the shop. He has come outside and is standing next to Mark.

Mark says yes, he thinks it is really beautiful.

The man’s name is Raymond. He’s quite old, about twenty. He hangs a handwritten notice on the inside of the door. Back in 20 mins. He locks the shop up. Lunchtime, he says to Mark. Fancy something? He winks.

He takes Mark for a walk in a park Mark later learns is Greenwich Park. There, in the woody part, on a foggy day in London town, things come to a pretty pass. Somewhere between roughness and gentility the man, who is very beautiful, kisses him so thoroughly that when Mark gets back to the place he’s supposed to meet Kenna an hour later he is flushed and new, a whole new person, and all the way across town it is as if his eyes have changed, as if all the colours in everything he sees are golden and ancient and new. They get home and he goes upstairs. He is lying on the floor playing his records (there is that good-looking boy, John Allford, clever, in the form above him at St. Faith’s who says that record is a word which means, in Latin, something which returns through the heart) on the little portable record player Kenna bought and lets him have on a Friday—or also when he is sad and needs to blot out the sad old songs with something more new, which Kenna understands, because Kenna can sometimes be very kind. He has his one ear pressed hard against the machine’s speaker behind the little chainmail holes, and he leans to get the next record out of its paper sleeve ready to play it, Then He Kissed Me, and that’s when he sees on it right there, the miracle, the word Greenwich, there on the label right under the word Kissed, and it is as if something somewhere has understood him.

LONDON AMERICAN RECORDINGS

Made in England

Then He Kissed Me

(Spector, Greenwich, Barry)

The Crystals

The song gives him an erection and then, when he takes himself in hand, a coming-of-age every bit as beautiful as the one he had in the park. He knows now what it means, to be bigger than yourself. Greenwich! England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty! The world is a bloodrush of rough harmony. Then it’s over; the song, abrupt, dies away, fades to the noise of the needle on vinyl and it’s gone. But he can lean over and do the thing with the mechanical arm so that the record will play over and over, on repeat, until you choose to stop, and you could even be dead and it would go on playing and playing.

Consider the fabric of things the vast / dustbin of detail who knows what will last / nothing left but rough wool skin moment touch / who knew so little would become so much
Mark sat in the park. It is more than fifty years ago. He and his mother are making a dash through London on a day when the rain makes the pavements greyer, the wind makes the litter more littery, a rough spring day. His mother’s sleeve on her tweed dogtooth coat, the one with the big lapels, is turned back on itself at the cuff and the rough cuff is rubbing his wrist as they hurry along. The wisps of her hair beyond her hat are wet, pretty in the rain. She is telling him things as they walk-run, turning to tell him things even on the move and when they pass men the men turn their heads and look at her. Mark is proud. She is clever and quick, she is beautiful, his mother, she is like a bird both clipped and winged, and when she passes people notice, and when she laughs out loud in the street people stop and stare.

It’s genius, old man, she says hauling him along and reeling off, like magic spilling behind her, like that dancer Isadora’s scarves that streamed behind and caught in the wheel and killed her, rhymes by one of her favourites, he rhymes
sour
with
Schopenhauer, Freud
with
avoid, salmon
with
backgammon, civil
with
drivel, yes-men
with
chessmen, solemn
with
spinal column, Irving Berlin
with
pounding on tin,
he rhymes
word
with
absurd,
and
hurled
with
world.
Now Porter has wit, but is shifty, a little seamy, I know, and I couldn’t not love him for it, Mark. But Ira, he’s kind, he’s always kind, and for genius to be kind takes a special sort of genius in itself, Mark old man, come on, we’re late (they were always, she was always, gloriously, just a little late, it made everything worth hurrying for), and his brother dead, imagine, he must feel like half a person, imagine it, try, him still in the world and his other half, the tune half, gone so young, only a bit older than me, and I know you think I’m old, but I’m not old, old man. I’m not old at all.

His mother says the rhymes out loud in the street, in the rain, to the rhythm of her walk. It is because she loves songs. She does, she loves them. The bedtime stories she tells him, after David’s been settled and she comes for the marvellous twilight time to his room, are all song-stories. She comes into the room and she sits on the bed and she says something like, are you ready? Then I’ll begin. Once a baby boy was born with no fingers on his left hand, imagine, just a stump for a hand. And when the baby had grown into a boy, the boy’s mother encouraged him to learn piano even though he hadn’t any fingers on that hand. And he got so good on the piano that when he grew up and was a man, he found he was a musician, and he wrote songs, and what’s more, having a stump was an asset when people got drunk if he was playing piano in a bar. He not only played piano, he landed some great knock-out punches with it. The end.

Then, sitting on the end of the bed, she sings When The Red Red Robin, which is a song this man who only had half his fingers really did write. She sings it slow and lullaby-like even though it’s meant to be fast, and then she turns out the light and leans over him with a kiss, and turns to go. One more, please, Mark says, please, when she’s at the door. So she comes back and sits on the edge of his bed in the half-dark and she sings another song by the man with one hand. Side. By. Side.

But the Gershwins! she shouts now as she dashes along past the shops, pulling him in her wake, rain all over their faces and his bare knees numb with the rain, her hand holding his all paint and the smell of the stuff she uses to try and wash it off. In the rain, in the middle of dull Holborn, with the people and the cabs and the buses going past and the shabby weather round them, she is singing above his head and the words are about how they’re writing songs of love, but not for her. A lucky star’s above, but not for her.

What, if anything, did Mark remember of all this, more than fifty years after it happened?

He remembered the blur of a grey London day and his hand in his mother’s hand.

He remembered she was wearing a coat whose cuff was folded back.

He remembered the feel of the cuff of this coat as they moved, as it rubbed against his wrist.

Say that the line we walk is very fine

Mark sat on the park bench, way in the future. Last week he’d read in the paper about the twenty-fourth copycat suicide in a French telecom company, where suicide was now being treated as a contagion.

What about that, then, Faye?

Say that the concept’s part of our design

On the one hand, nothingness; on the other, birds that sang in their sleep.

On the one hand, nothing; on the other, a feeble attempt at it, rhyme.

On the one hand, nothing; on the other, but here’s something, Faye, I read it in a book and I knew you’d like it. It’s about the song called For Me and My Gal. It took three grown men to write that song. And one of the three was Jewish, well, maybe more than one was, I can’t remember, but this one definitely was. And he fell in love with a girl and wanted to marry her, and she wanted to marry him too. So he takes her to the rabbi, to get married in the synagogue, this was in New York, and the rabbi says to her, are you a good Jewish girl, my child? and she says o yes, your worship, I am that, and he says to her, what was your mother’s full name, my child? And she says, my mother’s name was Emma Cathleen Bridget Hannigan Flaherty O’Brien, your worship. And the rabbi sent them away with a flea in their ear. So they went and got married at City Hall instead. Anyway, the girl’s name was Grace, and Grace’s favourite song all her life was this one her husband had helped write, and when she died he had the title of it engraved on her headstone. For Me and My Gal.