The iPhone crackles again, drawing attention to Freda’s failure to say ‘Don’t mention it’.
‘So shall I …? When shall I …?’ says Harvey, trailing off, accepting his secondary role.
‘Maybe go to the hotel, now … and you can come tomorrow morning?’ She speaks with the American inflection, the vocal hike indicating a question, a possibility for discussion: but Harvey knows better.
‘Tomorrow morning? I was hoping …’ God, how much trailing off am I going to do, he thinks. He is an uncertain fellow, Harvey, in an uncertain situation – the old son returning to see the dying dad, surrounded by his new family – and now it seems as if Freda’s take-no-prisoners certainty has crushed his ability to make even the smallest statement of intent. And, also, he can’t match her: he can’t fold back her steeliness, can’t say that he thinks he should come straight away, because maybe his father might die today. His fingers reach without thought for the plane ticket in his inside pocket, with its devastatingly open return, something that had cost Harvey substantially more money when ordered – a charge which had provoked a moment of irritation, not with his father for the indefiniteness of his time left, but with the airlines, for not having a special close relative’s last days’ exemption clause. It isn’t fair, he thinks, it’s not fair that I have to pay extra because my dad is dying and I don’t know when to book the flight home. Harvey’s heart is heavy with such unfairnesses.
‘Well,’ said Freda, ‘today we’ve already got quite a lot of people visiting … my mother’s here now, and then a group of Eli’s colleagues from Harvard in the afternoon – plus there was talk of Roth coming by some time this week, so … obviously he gets very tired …’
‘Maybe I’ll just go to the hotel and call later.’ This is the best defiance Harvey can offer.
‘Yes. Please do.’ There is a voice off, high and insistent.
‘Yes, darling, in a minute. Mom’s on the phone.’
‘So we’ll speak later.’
‘Yes. Good to have you here, Harvey. Eli will be so pleased to see you. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’ He clicks the OK button on his phone, and forces it back into his jeans. Roth? Philip Roth? Harvey loves Philip Roth more than he has ever been able to admit to his watchful-for-literary-slights father. He feels intense desire to meet the dark bard of American sex and clear the decks of his depression, making him wonder, angrily, if he shouldn’t just turn up unannounced at this great literary lunch-time: he is, after all, Eli Gold’s son, the only one of the three adult children who has been prepared to make the journey. Then self-awareness settles like soft snow back upon him, and he realizes how far such an action is beyond him, he who has always hated confrontation anyway, and these days need only to be confronted with the smallest of obstacles for his depleted energy reserves to drain away to nothing.
Harvey moves into the Baggage Reclaim Hall, with its always palpable dynamic of tension and relief, as exhausted passengers wait nervously for their cherished belongings to be spat onto the oval belts. His conveyor, No. 4, is sparsely populated now, the phone call having slowed down his movement here. He can see his suitcase, some Samsonite-alike with pull-out handle – again, due to the particular nature of this particular journey, he didn’t know which of the numerous bags piled up under the stairs to pack – forlornly beginning what looks like its twentieth or thirtieth rotation. A woman he had noticed on the plane, sitting four or five rows in front of him on the opposite side, is there, beginning to look anxious. She is in her early twenties, dirt-blonde long hair parted like that of a Woodstock girl dancing towards the crackly camera, sea-blue eyes, and, even under the whip-lash Baggage Reclaim lights, skin so smooth that if Harvey were to reach out and touch it – as every cell in his hands is urging him to do – his fingers would slip.
Her bag, pink like bubble-gum, tumbles out of the conveyor hatch, the relief registering on her features, softening them even further, and making Harvey remember something one of his many more sexually opportune friends had told him once, about how, while waiting at airports for luggage, he would try and steal a furtive glance at the labels on the suitcases of any waiting attractive women, and then offer to share a taxi in that direction. As she picks up the bag, Harvey, impelled by the thought, does flick his eyes downwards and, catching sight of the zip code, thinks it might be an address near his hotel, but never has any intention of going through with all that stilted ‘Hey, I see you’re going my way’ shite. It just tears another little track through him, the idea that it could be done, that someone else could do it.
An older woman joins her, and helps her heave her bag onto a trolley. She moves away: she hasn’t registered Harvey’s presence, even cursorily. He looks at his watch. He now has time, far too much time. He looks again at his iPhone and ponders the text from Stella. I should call her back, he thinks, let her know I’ve landed. But then the other thing grabs his heart with its cold hands, and, instead, he sits down on the edge of Conveyor Belt No. 5, to watch his suitcase travel round Conveyor Belt No. 4, round and round and round, like a lone ship on the greyest, most mundane of seas.
* * *
Eli Gold’s first wife, Violet, is in her room just finishing lunch when she sees the item on the television news. It has been a day on which she has already veered from her normal routine. She usually watches the one o’clock news in the lounge, even though some of the other residents would always be fast asleep in there by then, and Joe Hillier’s snoring, in particular, was more than loud enough to drown out the words of the newsreader. The more able residents at Redcliffe House are allowed to make their own lunch and eat it in their rooms, and Violet takes this option as often as she can, preparing it – baked beans on toast, a cheese sandwich, a tin of ravioli – in the tiny kitchenette off to the side of the room and eating at the table by the window. Lunch always reminds her of Valerie, who is forever hinting that Violet should move to somewhere more structured, which means, Violet knows, one of the fascist old-age homes, a place where her independence would be taken away, her privacy disregarded, and the other inmates comatose, just because Valerie couldn’t bear the idea of her sister eating on her own from time to time. After lunch, she would normally get the lift down from the fourth floor, and, if it was not wet, walk the path around Redcliffe Square Gardens, which, even with a stick, would not take her more than fifteen minutes, and she was always back at Redcliffe House by five to one, ready to watch the news. She could take the lift back up to her room and watch it there, but even though Violet was a woman who liked to keep herself to herself much of the time, she felt there was no point in living in a place where so many other people lived if she never mingled with them at all: and so she always went into the lounge following her walk, and, with her cream winter coat on her knees, watched the one o’clock news.
Unless it was wet, as on the day she hears the news about Eli, a day on which she hadn’t even bothered going downstairs to check the pavements: the rain had been hitting her window all morning, a downpour blown diagonal across the pane by the wind. Over time, an errant branch from the neighbouring hostel’s enormous oak tree had grown along the walls of the house to lie pressed against her sill, and today she could count the drops on its leaves. She had just finished eating a few slices of ham and some crackers, and had already risen to take the plate into the kitchenette, when the item began.
She is shocked by seeing his face on the screen – at first some footage of him, recently giving a lecture, with the beard and the big shock of grey hair that she vaguely knew he had now, followed by an old black and white photo from round about the time they were married. For a split second, Violet thinks they might even show a photograph of her: him wearing his GI uniform, her on his arm in the white floral dress that she used to wear on their first dates.
They don’t – how could they, she chided herself, when the only photos that have survived of us together are all in that shoebox under the bed? I don’t suppose he kept any. The news moves on to a shot of a tall building in New York, which