4

George poured mortar onto the square of hardboard and checked it for lumps with the blade of the trowel.

It was like the fear of flying.

He picked up a brick, mortared the underside, laid it and shifted it gently sideways so that it sat snug against the upright spirit level.

It had not bothered him in the beginning, those bumpy rides on prop planes to Palma and Lisbon. His main memories were of sweaty prepackaged cheese and that roar as the toilet bowl opened into the stratosphere. Then the plane back from Lyon in 1979 had to be de-iced three times. At first he had noticed only that everyone in the departure lounge was driving him to distraction (Katie practicing handstands, Jean going to the duty-free shop after their gate number had been called, the young man opposite stroking his excessively long hair as if it were some kind of tame creature…). And when they boarded, something in the cloistered, chemical air of the cabin itself had made his chest feel tight. But only when they were taxiing to the runway did he realize that the plane was going to suffer some catastrophic mechanical failure mid-flight and that he was going to cartwheel earthward for several minutes inside a large steel tube with two hundred strangers who were crying and soiling themselves, then die in a tangerine fireball of twisted steel.

He remembered Katie saying, “Mum, I think there’s something wrong with Dad,” but she seemed to be calling faintly from a tiny disk of sunlight at the top of a very deep well into which he had fallen.

He stared doggedly at the seat back in front of him trying desperately to pretend that he was sitting in the living room at home. But every few minutes he would hear a sinister chime and see a little red light flashing in the bulkhead to his right, secretly informing the cabin crew that the pilot was wrestling with some fatal malfunction in the cockpit.

It was not that he could not speak, more that speaking was something which happened in another world of which he had only the vaguest memory.

At some point Jamie looked out of the window and said, “I think the wing’s coming off.” Jean hissed, “For God’s sake, grow up,” and George actually felt the rivets blowing and the fuselage dropping like a ton of hardcore.

For several weeks afterward he was unable to see a plane overhead without feeling angry.

It was a natural reaction. Human beings were not meant to be sealed into tins and fired through the sky by fan-assisted rockets.

He laid a brick at the opposite corner then stretched a line between the tops of the two bricks to keep the course straight.

Of course he felt appalling. That was what anxiety did, persuaded you to get out of dangerous situations fast. Leopards, big spiders, strange men coming across the river with spears. If anything it was other people who had the problem, sitting there reading the Daily Express and sucking boiled sweets as if they were on a large bus.

But Jean liked sun. And driving to the south of France would wreck a holiday before it had begun. So he needed a strategy to prevent the horror taking hold in May and spiraling toward some kind of seizure at Heathrow in July. Squash, long walks, cinema, Tony Bennett at full volume, the first glass of red wine at six, a new Flashman novel.

He heard voices and looked up. Jean, Katie and Ray were standing on the patio like dignitaries waiting for him to dock at some foreign quay.

“George…?”

“Coming.” He removed the excess mortar from around the newly laid brick, scraped the remainder back into the bucket and replaced the lid. He stood up and walked down the lawn, cleaning his hands on a rag.

“Katie has some news,” said Jean, in the voice she used when she was ignoring the arthritis in her knee. “But she didn’t want to tell me until you were here.”

“Ray and I are getting married,” said Katie.

George had a brief out-of-body experience. He was looking down from fifteen feet above the patio, watching himself as he kissed Katie and shook Ray’s hand. It was like falling off that stepladder. The way time slowed down. The way your body knew instinctively how to protect your head with your arms.

“I’ll put some champagne into the freezer,” Jean said, trotting back into the house.

George reentered his body.

“End of September,” said Ray. “Thought we’d keep it simple. Not put you folks to too much trouble.”

“Right,” said George. “Right.”

He would have to make a speech at the reception, a speech that said nice things about Ray. Jamie would refuse to come to the wedding. Jean would refuse to allow Jamie to refuse to come to the wedding. Ray was going to be a member of the family. They would see him all the time. Until they died. Or emigrated.

What was Katie doing? You could not control children, he knew that. Making them eat vegetables was hard enough. But marrying Ray? She had a 2:1 in philosophy. And that chap who had climbed into her car in Leeds. She had given the police a part of his ear.

Jacob appeared in the doorway wielding a bread knife. “I’m an effelant and I’m going to catch the train and…and…and…and this is my tusks.”

Katie raised her eyebrows. “I’m not sure that’s an entirely good idea.”

Jacob ran back into the kitchen squealing with joy. Katie stepped into the doorway after him. “Come here, monkey biscuits.”

And George was alone with Ray.

Ray’s brother was in jail.

Ray worked for an engineering company which made high-spec camshaft milling machines. George had absolutely no idea what these were.

“Well.”

“Well.”

Ray crossed his arms. “So, how’s the studio going?”

“Hasn’t fallen down yet.” George crossed his arms, realized that he was copying Ray and uncrossed them. “Not that there’s enough of it to fall down.”

They were silent for a very long time indeed. Ray rearranged three small pebbles on the flagstones with the toe of his right shoe. George’s stomach made an audible noise.

Ray said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

For a short, horrified moment George thought Ray might be telling the truth.

“My being divorced and everything.” He pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “I’m a lucky guy, George. I know that. I’ll look after your daughter. You don’t need to worry on that score.”

“Good,” said George.

“We’d like to foot the bill,” said Ray, “unless you have any objections. I mean, you’ve already had to do it once.”

“No. You shouldn’t have to pay,” said George, glad to be able to pull rank a little. “Katie’s our daughter. We should make sure she’s sent off in style.” Sent off? It made Katie sound like a ship.

“Fair play to you,” said Ray.

It wasn’t simply that Ray was working class, or that he spoke with a rather strong northern accent. George was not a snob, and whatever his background, Ray had certainly made good, judging by the size of his car and Katie’s descriptions of their house.

The main problem, George felt, was Ray’s size. He looked like an ordinary person who had been magnified. He moved more slowly than other people, the way the larger animals in zoos did. Giraffes. Buffalo. He lowered his head to go through doorways and had what Jamie unkindly but accurately described as “strangler’s hands.”

During thirty-five years on the fringes of the manufacturing industry George had worked with manly men of all stripes. Big men, men who could open beer bottles with their teeth, men who had killed people during active military service, men who, in Ted Monk’s charming phrase, would shag anything that stood still for long enough. And though he had never felt entirely at home in their company, he had rarely felt cowed. But when Ray visited, he was reminded of being with his older brother’s friends when he was fourteen, the suspicion that there was a secret code of manhood to which he was not privy.