We hear the phone ring, back in the living room. “It’s for one of you boys,” Mum declares. “Bound to be.”
Nigel skids down the hall and into the living room; my trout gazes up with a disappointed eye. A few moments later, Nigel’s back. “Hugo, that was a Diana on the phone for you—Diana Spinster, Spankser, Spencer, didn’t quite catch it. She said you could pop over to the palace while her husband’s touring the Commonwealth … Something about Tantric plumbing? She said you’d understand.”
“There’s this operation, little brother. It would help that one-track mind of yours. Vets do it cheaply.”
“Who wason the phone, Nigel?” asks Mum. “Before you forget.”
“Mrs. Purvis at the Riverside Villas. She said to tell Hugo that the brigadier’s feeling better today, and if he’d still like to visit this afternoon, he’d be welcome to call between three and five o’clock.”
“Great. If you’re sure you can spare me, Dad …”
“Go go go. Your mother and I are very proud of how you still go to read to the brigadier, aren’t we, Alice?”
Mum says, “Very.”
“Thanks,” I shrug awkwardly, “but Brigadier Philby was so brilliant when I went to see him for my civics class at Dulwich, and so full of stories. It’s the least I can do.”
“Oh, God.” Nigel groans. “Someone’s locked me up inside an episode of Little House on the Prairie.”
“Then let me offer you a way out,” says Dad. “If Hugo’s visiting the brigadier, you can help me collect the tree.”
Nigel looks aghast. “But Jasper Farley and I are going to Tottenham Court Road this afternoon!”
“What for?” Alex loads his fork. “All you do is slobber over hi-fi gear and synthesizers you can’t afford.”
We hear a small crash out on the patio. From the corner of my eye I see a flash of black. A toppled flower pot skitters across the patio, the spade tips over, and the black flash turns into a cat with a robin in its mouth. The bird’s wings are flapping. “Oh.” Mum recoils. “That’s horrible. Can’t we do something? The cat looks so pleased with itself.”
“It’s called survival of the fittest,” says Alex.
“Why don’t I lower the blinds?” asks Nigel.
“Better let nature take its course, darling,” says Dad.
I get up and go out through the back door. The cold air shocks my skin as I go, “Shoo, shoo!” to the cat. The feline hunter leaps onto the garden shed. It watches me. Its tail sashays. The mangled bird is twitching in the black cat’s mouth.
I hear the boomy scrape of an airplane.
A twig snaps. I am intensely alive.
“ACCORDING TO MY husband,” Nurse Purvis steams along moppable carpet to the library of Riverside Villas, “the youth of today are either scroungers-on-benefits, queers, or I’m-all-right-Jacks.” The smell of pine-scented disinfectant stings my nostrils. “But as long as Great Britain breeds fine young men of your cut, Hugo, Ifor one say we shan’t be collapsing into barbarism any time soon, mmm?”
“Please, Nurse Purvis, my head won’t fit through the library door.” We turn the corner and find a resident clinging to the handrail. She’s frowning at the wintry garden, as if she’s left something out there. A string of drool connects her lower lip to her spearmint-green cardigan.
“Standards, Mrs. Bolitho,” says the nurse, hipping out a tissue from her sleeve. “What do we watch? Our standards, mmm?” She scoops up the saliva stalactite and deposits the tissue in the bin. “You’ll remember Hugo, Mrs. Bolitho—the brigadier’s young friend.”
Mrs. Bolitho turns her head; I think of my trout at lunch.
“Great to see you again, Mrs. Bolitho,” I say cheerfully.
“Say hello to Hugo, Mrs. Bolitho. Hugo’s a guest.”
She looks from me to Nurse Purvis and whimpers.
“What’s that? Chitty Chitty Bang Bangis on the television, in the lounge. The flying car. Why don’t we go and join them, mmm?”
A fox’s head watches us from the wall with a faint smile.
“Stay here,” Nurse Purvis tells Mrs. Bolitho, “while I take Hugo to the library. Then we’ll go to the residents’ room together.”
I wish Mrs. Bolitho a Merry Christmas but the chances are low.
“She has four sons,” Nurse Purvis leads me on, “all with a London post code, but they never visit. You’d think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we’re all heading to.”
I consider airing my theory that our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Sansara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly areguilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that.
But, no, let’s not complicate Nurse Purvis’s opinion of me. We reach the library where my guide continues sotto voce: “I know you won’t be put out, Hugo, if the brigadier doesn’t recognize you.”
“Not at all. Does he still suffer from the postage stamp … delusion?”
“It rears its head from time to time, yes. Oh, here’s Mariвngela—Mariвngela!”
Mariвngela approaches with a stack of neatly folded bed linen. “Yugo! Nurse Purvis, she told me you visit today. How is Norwitch?”
“Hugo is at Cambridge University, Mariвngela.” Nurse Purvis shivers. “ Cambridge. Not Norwich. Quite different.”
“Pardon, Yugo.” Mariвngela’s puckish Brazilian eyes arouse not only my hopes. “My geography of England, still a bit rubbish.”
“Mariвngela, perhaps you’d bring some coffee to the library for Hugo and the brigadier. I ought to be getting back to Mrs. Bolitho.”
“Of course. It’s been wonderful catching up, Nurse Purvis.”
“Be sure to say goodbye before you leave.” Off she marches.
I ask Mariвngela, “What’s she actually like to work for?”
“We are accustomed to dictators in my continent.”
“Does she sleep at night or plug herself into the mains?”
“Is not a bad boss, if you agree with her always. At the least, she is dependable. At the least, she says what she is thinking, honestly.”
I’d describe Mariвngela as pouty but not vitriolic. “Look, Angel, we both needed some space.”
“ Eight weeks, Yugo. Two letters, two calls, two messages on my answer machine. Ineed contact, not space.” Okay, so she’s between pouty and wronged woman. “You not an expert on what I need.”
Tell her it’s over, Hugo the Wise advises, but Hugo the Horny loves a uniform. “I’m not an expert on you, Mariвngela. Or any other woman. Or myself, even. I had two or three girlfriends before you—but … you’re different. By the end of last summer, the inside of my eyelids was a TV station showing Mariвngela Pinto-Pereira, all day, all night. It freaked me out. The only way I could handle it was space. So often, I nearlyphoned … but … but … I was an inexperienced boy, Angel, not a malicious one.” I open the library door. “Thanks for some great memories, I’m sorry my insensitivity hurt you. Really.”
Her foot’s in the door. Pouty and sultry. “Nurse Purvis ask I bring you and the brigadier coffee. Is still dark, with one sugar?”
“Yes, please. But no Amazonian voodoo stuff that shrivels up testicles, if that’s okay.”
“Sharp knife is better than voodoo.” She scowls. “Milk or Coffee-mate in your coffee, like you drink it at Came-bridge University?”
“White coffee brings me out in a nasty rash.”
“So if— if—I find you real Brazilian coffee, you drink?”
“Mariвngela. Once you’ve tasted the real thing, everything else is a cheap imitation.”
“NEAR THE END now, Brigadier,” I tell the old man, and turn the page. “ ‘But for me all the East is contained in that vision of my youth. It is all on that moment when I opened my young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea—and I was young—and I saw it looking at me. And this is all that is left of it! Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour—of youth!… A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and—goodbye!—Night—Goodbye …’ ” I slurp lukewarm coffee: Brigadier Philby’s cup remains untouched. The vital, witty man I knew five years ago is one and the same as the wheelchair-bound husk. Back in 1986 he was seventy going on fifty, living in a big old place in Kew with his devoted widowed sister, Mrs. Hatter. The brigadier was an old friend of my headmaster, and although I was supposed to be mowing his lawn while his broken leg recovered, he recognized a kindred spirit and we ended up spending my civics-class hours on poker, cribbage, and blackjack. Even after his leg had healed I’d go round most Thursday evenings. Mrs. Hatter would “fatten me up” and we’d retire to the card table, where he taught me ways to “Entice Lady Luck to drop her bloomers” that not even Toad guesses at. A dapper dresser and quite the ladies’ man in his day, an obsessive philatelist, linguist, and raconteur. After a glass of port he would talk about days in the Special Boat Section in wartime Norway, and later in the Korean War. He insisted I read Conrad and Chekhov, and taught me how to get a fake passport by finding a name in a graveyard and writing off to Somerset House for a birth certificate. I knew this but pretended I didn’t.