Frank doesn’t know what to say. ‘Must be handy when he does, though,’ he tries.

  ‘He pays off what’s owing on my credit card. Do you know what it costs to run this place? Rates, insurance, staff, bank interest …?’

  Josh never was one to hold back on embarrassing personal details. But this is quick.

  ‘… advertising, international fairs …’

  ‘I can imagine it must cost to corner the market in Camden Town nudes,’ Frank says. Wherever he looks, Camden Town nudes, Sickert’s wonderful sticky suburban trollops wasting the riches of their flesh in dying light.

  Josh corrects him. ‘Mornington Crescent, most of them.’

  ‘Even costlier, then.’

  ‘You don’t think I own all these.’

  ‘Josh, I’ve got no idea what you own and what you don’t. But I can’t believe you’re not proud of what you’ve achieved, you two. Together.’

  ‘Together?’ Josh Green scratches flesh at the corner of his left eye. ‘Who’s together?’

  Frank knows not to get too excited too soon. A man can be not together with a Finn but very much together with a Swede. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘Not as sorry as I am. We had an apartment in Rome, she’s got that. We had a boat, she’s got that. She’s even got the Ferrari. I’m having to get about in her Fiesta.’

  ‘Is this recent?’

  ‘Too recent. We should have done it years ago. The passion goes out of it, matey. And that’s when you should call it a day, when the passion goes out of it.’

  ‘Josh, we’re middle aged. The passion is meant to go out of it.’

  ‘You sound like my daughter. Act your age, she tells me. Well I appreciate that, I tell her, coming from someone I’ve always tried to treat like a friend. Precisely my complaint, she tells me; I don’t want a friend, I want a father. Don’t come to me, then, the next time you do want a friend, I tell her.’

  ‘Do I remember a little girl from Oxford? Jeannie, was it?’

  Josh pulls a face. Who cares what she’s called.

  ‘How’s she doing, anyway? Married? Kids of her own?’

  ‘Married? Joanne? Course not. She’s gay. Lives with a bird in Lewisham. They run an electrical business together.’

  Frank lowers his virginal eyes. A generational thing. ‘Are you all right about that?’ he risks.

  ‘The electrical business?’

  ‘No, no, the – ‘ Frank swallows air, like a fish hauled out of water.

  ‘Just pulling your leg, matey. Yeah. We knew before she did. We were surprised it took her so long to find out. Anna-Liisa spotted it right away. You know how you notice things when it’s not your own child. In a way she was closer to her than either Jill or I were. Perhaps because she couldn’t have any of her own.’

  ‘Jeannie?’

  ‘Anna-Liisa.’

  So how are we going so far, Frank asks himself. Business – in trouble. Marriage – kaput. Relations with offspring – deeply flawed. Prospects of grandchildren – zilch. Way of life – fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf. If he could bank on every visit to old friends going as well as this one, he’d do it more often.

  He doesn’t want to see Josh Green unhappy. He just wants to be certain that fifty’s no good for anyone. Equality in dismay, that’s all he’s after.

  ‘I can see what you’re thinking,’ Josh says. Some of the merriment that Frank remembers from their language school days has returned to his eyes. ‘You’re thinking I’ve got a bird myself’

  ‘Whereas you haven’t.’

  ‘Whereas I have.’

  ‘And she’s the reason you and Anna-Liisa broke up?’

  ‘Not the reason. No. She was just someone I leaned on while we were breaking up. Her marriage was in trouble, too. We leaned on each other.’

  ‘When you say leaned …’

  Josh pulls a photograph out of his wallet. ‘Look. What would you do?’

  Frank holds his breath as the photograph comes into focus. Softly. Softly. But it’s all right. Not anyone he knows. Not anyone he can’t bear not to know. A squelchy blonde. Squinting in the sun, on the walkway of a marina. Wide apart eyes. Striped nautical jumper over good breasts. Slight blip below, where the belly is wanting to roll. Not so much a boat blonde as a boat blonde’s mother. Navy sail-cloth skirt over deck shoes. Strong legs. Still. It’s the still part that’s upsetting. The defiance. The bravery. Death where is your sting-a-ling? Age where are your ravages? Frank has seen a painting in Josh’s gallery he would buy if only he were a pop star – a Matthew Smith nude rolling in colour, falling through an everywhere of paint, the creamy bedclothes unravelling as she whirls, but bearing her up like a lavishly upholstered magic carpet of clouds, her flesh buoyed, protected from all harm, inexpugnably alive. But Sickert’s truer. Forget space, time’s the issue. It doesn’t matter how voluptuously we turn a woman’s body through its planes, the moment we become conscious of it in time – the moment she becomes conscious of it in time – not all the paint in Camden Town can cushion it against tragedy. But Frank’s a sport. ‘I’d lean on her, too,’ he says, offering to return the photograph.

  Josh isn’t ready to take it back. He waits, hungry for more appreciation. ‘So where did you meet her?’ is all Frank can think of asking.

  ‘Chicago Art Fair.’

  ‘You do a lot of fairs?’

  ‘Used to. Couldn’t resist them. You know what they say an art fair is?’

  Frank doesn’t.

  Josh Green the man is suddenly illuminated by Josh Green the boy. ‘A cunt mine.’

  Frank’s too impressionable. He can’t hear of a cunt mine without wanting to go down it. But that’s all right by Josh. He waits, roseate with pride, for Frank, groggy with gas, to come back up.

  ‘And now that you’ve mined your treasure – ‘Frank starts to say. He means to turn a compliment, but he is anxious that his fidelity to the metaphor shouldn’t lead him back into the cunt of a woman he can hardly be said to know.

  But that too is all right by Josh. He’s been waiting for Frank to open his eyes again only so that he can now close his own. Drowning momentarily was something he always did, Frank remembers, as a prelude to paying a sentimental compliment himself. When he surfaces he looks queerly transfigured, as though he’s glimpsed God’s face among the fishes. ‘Oh, matey,’ he says, ‘you should see her from behind. You should see the lovely little bum on her.’ He makes a mould of it with his hands for Frank’s behoof, a pair of trembling palms like scales for a fairy.

  ‘Josh, how old is she?’

  ‘Forty-eight, forty-nine. But the bum’s half that age. Peter Blake was going to use a photograph I’d taken of it for his Nine Prettiest Bottoms in the National Gallery …’

  ‘But?’

  ‘It isn’t in the National Gallery.’

  He goes over to a drawer and begins sorting through some papers. Frank wonders if he’s going to bring out the photograph of the lovely little bum. Men do this. They confer publicly over photographs taken in the strictest and most solemn confidence. Frank has done it himself. Here you are boys, what think you of this? Nice, eh? Mine. Cunt mine. Mein Cunt. But not of Mel. Mel read him too well. Three weeks into their relationship she confiscated his camera. That was after confiscating all the photographs his camera had taken. He’s not sure he’s ever forgiven her. That you should destroy the previous lot in order to supplant them with poses of your own – that’s only just. But to cut off the supply both ends – where’s the fairness in that?

  In fact what Josh removes from the drawer is a cutting from a not very recent Tatler showing his new love at an old ball, on a boat, shaking a leg with Onassis, circa 1970, about the time Frank was moving his own limbs preternaturally slowly to ‘Je t’aime’. Sad. Frank isn’t the only one stuck in the past.

  ‘Tatler voted her one of the ten most beautiful women in England,’ Josh says.

  ‘I can see why.’

  ‘What would you do if you were me?’

  ‘I’ve told you. I’d enjoy myself’

  ‘What would you do if you couldn’t enjoy yourself?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Josh hesitates. Even for him there are words you can’t use without putting spaces round them. ‘If you had trouble getting it up?’

  ‘You can’t get it up?’

  Josh pulls back from the finality of that. ‘Don’t know about can’t. Haven’t so far. I think it was the fight with Anna-Liisa. You know what it’s like: things get said. You lose your respect for yourself as a man.’

  Know what it’s like? Yeah, Frank knows what it’s like, but he takes a moment to think about it, so that he can add to his list. Where was he? Marriage – kaput. Relations with offspring – deeply flawed. Dick – inoperative. Self regard – down the drain. ‘Isn’t it a question in the end,’ he says, ‘for … what is her name?’

  ‘Sara.’

  Sara with an ah. Not Sarah with an air.

  ‘Isn’t it a question in the end for Sara? What does she think you should do about it?’

  ‘She doesn’t know. It’s never happened to her before. When you’ve been voted one of the ten most beautiful women in the country you’re used to men being able to fuck you. The first time it happened she sat on my face and cried and cried.’

  ‘And the second time?’

  Josh tries to remember the second time. ‘I think she struck me.’

  ‘And even that didn’t work?’

  ‘Joke all you like, matey. It’s hurtful to a beautiful woman. And she’s just coming out of a painful marriage herself. On top of that she’s got to go into hospital for an operation. Only minor, we think, but there’ll be a scar. She’s frightened that’ll make it even harder for me.’

  ‘And will it?’

  Josh shrugs.

  They fall silent. An operation has entered the room. You never know with operations. Sensible, maybe, to concentrate on the scar. Never mind whether my lifeblood is draining out through a plug in the theatre floor; what if my lover will be put off by a two and a half inch suture above my bikini line? This is a gallery. And Josh is a connoisseur. Aesthetics matter. Perfection is everything.

  ‘Do you see a future with this woman?’ Frank asks, once it is clear he must ask something.

  ‘An erotic future?’

  ‘I just meant a future. But I suppose eroticism enters into it.’

  ‘I want five more years of erotic life. With Sara. I’d settle for that.’

  Five years, Frank thinks, of Sara sitting on his face and crying. He could have got that with the Swede ages ago. Or with Mel, come to that, speaking figuratively.

  Five years. We’re into that phase. Just give us five more years. That was what his father reckoned he would have settled for at the end – just five more years. And he was seventy.

  Frank wants to know something. Will there ever be a time when you are happy for it to be over? Not five more years or five more weeks or even five more minutes. Stop now! Case closed.

  Silly question.

  They walk to a Chinese restaurant, where Josh has a regular table. His own wine. His own won ton bowl. His own chopsticks. Frank imagines them being locked away in his absence like private snooker cues on a rack in a snooker club. They used to play together in Oxford when they weren’t fucking. Now he has an image of Josh at full stretch over the table, trying to pot the pink with a ten-inch stick of ivory. ‘Can you get extensions for those?’ he asks.

  Josh takes this to be an allusion to their earlier conversation. His chin recedes. ‘You think an extension might be the answer?’

  Their eyes meet in a sort of silent toast to old mirth. Unspoken between them is the realisation that if they let the same amount of time elapse before they meet again they will be seriously old men when they do. Older than Frank’s father was when he died, wanting just five more years.

  Josh orders them crispy Woodstock duck, over which he remembers to ask Frank what he’s up to. But he starts to go sleepy, slide down in his seat, drown, as soon as Frank starts to tell him. Frank’s own fault. He won’t return the compliment. Won’t open his heart. Won’t say how much he earns. Won’t say who he loves. Won’t make a little floating picture of Mel’s bum with his hands. Though Christ knows there’s a good enough reason for that – Mel no longer has a bum.

  They go back to the gallery for decanted port. Raise glasses. Exchange cards. Before Frank realises that there’s not much point handing over a card with your address on when you don’t have an address. ‘Let me give you my mobile number instead,’ he says. ‘More reliable.’

  He needs a new card, with only his mobile and his car registration numbers on it. Frank Ritz, gipsy.

  Oh, and of course his e-mail. But for the bad dreams, Hamlet could have boarded happily in a nutshell. Why shouldn’t Frank be bounded in a laptop and count himself a king of infinite space?

  Before he goes he asks to have a last look at the Matthew Smiths. Take a bit of fleshly hope away with him. While he’s looking and wishing, it occurs to him that the only paintings on the walls of Josh’s gallery that don’t show a nude on a bed show nudes in a bath.

  ‘Josh,’ he says, ‘where are the landscapes?’

  Josh smiles. A long melancholy smile that seems to go all the way back to the intense seriousness of boyhood. ‘These are the landscapes, matey,’ he says.

  FOUR

  SO WHO’S IT to be next?

  If this is what reunions with old friends are always like, he’s ready for more. Wheel them on.

  He’s stayed away from old friends as a matter of principle since he became old enough to have old friends. As a matter of Mel’s principle, that is. Other than when it comes to crap-watching, Frank has no principles. Principles are Mel’s territory. Don’t look backwards, she is always telling him. Was always telling him. It unsettles you. And you do it out of the worst of motives. There are only two reasons why you ever want to see an old friend: you either want to suffer or you want to crow.

  Living with Mel has been like living with an Old Testament prophet. She denies him every pleasure.

  And foresees only disasters.

  Well, Mel too is now the past, an old friend as of five days ago. He has got through a working week. Had his laundry attended to in a farmhouse bed and breakfast on a stubbly field just outside Shipton-under-Wychwood, and faxed in his weekly column via laptop and modem from a country house hotel in Burford. So far, touch wood, he has eaten well, not got too drunk, and kept his dick in his pants. Not that, touch wood, anyone has invited him to take it out.

  Touch wood.

  He left Oxford after two nights in Summertown. Sleeping badly. The retrospection gang keeping him awake. Since then he has been trying to get into the Cotswolds proper but has been restricted to the margins by holiday crowds. On a rough calculation, he hasn’t ventured more than five miles from the A40 since he was booted out of his home. Not his fault. Twice he has tried to find a hotel room in Bourton-on-the-Water, but everything is taken. August, the girls at the desk tell him, shaking their heads. He knows it’s August, but what he doesn’t know is why August should affect Bourton-on-the-Water. The Venice of the Cotswolds they call it, on the strength of a couple of man-made streams and a bridge. A sign points to a bird-park in Bourton-on-the-Water and another sign points to a place where you pay to see a model of the village you’re already in, otherwise it’s heritage and has-been shops. Has there been a sitcom set in Bourton-on-the-Water? Unable to park his Saab, unable to find anywhere to sit for lunch, unable to get a room, Frank stands in the middle of Bourton-on-the-Water and scratches his head. He is the only person not wearing shorts. Is there something wrong with him? Wherever there is a blade of grass someone wearing shorts is lying on it. The village is so crowded there are people wearing shorts lying on the road. What happened to the idea – prevalent when Frank was young – that you went to a beach if you wanted to lie down in the sun? What happened to driving to the coast, parking by the sea, eating sandwiches in your car and staring at your death in long trousers, as a way of spending August?

  Such questions are driven by serious professional considerations. Already, and there are another three weeks of August still to be negotiated, he has come within a single advertisement break of missing an early-evening programme it was imperative he watched. Bourton-on-the-Water – no room at the inn. Lower Slaughter – no room at the inn. Stow-on-the-Wold, Moreton-in-Marsh, Bourton-on-the-Hill – forget it. ‘I’ll pay you,’ he offered at last, ‘just to let me sit on the edge of someone’s bed and watch their telly for half an hour.’ No go. He went so far as to count out money from his wallet, notes, the stuff itself, rubbing them together to release their irresistible odour the way you do when you’re asking a bellhop to turn a blind eye in downtown Panama City. Money talks, sister. Not in Stourton-in-the-Mire it doesn’t. ‘What about the telly in the lounge?’ Fine, so long as the programme he wants to watch is an Australian soap. They’re in there as well, lying about in their shorts, watching Australians in their shorts. Is this where they get the idea from? Do they think they’re in fucking Melbourne? In the end it was a lay-by on the A429 that saved him. Roof up on the Saab, Hitachi running on its batteries and his laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter. Not good reception, but at least a moving picture. And a fond old sensation of misbehaving in a motor.

  So who is it to be next?

  He tells himself he’s taking time around the peripheries of the Cotswolds because they suit his temper. The yellow of the stone – the yellow of his dying sun. The misty distances of the slumbering hills – the story of his fitfully rumbling life. Their calm reserve – his extinguished fervor. But in truth he is slowly, inexorably, nudging towards Cheltenham.

  Where there are ashes to stir. Who knows, maybe even coals to poke.

  His heart is leaping in his chest. The bones of his cheeks ache like ice. His eyes sting. He can’t speak. He can barely breathe. He opens his arms. Arms are opened to him. In he goes. All the way in, all the way back. Everything blackens and fades – his trespass, his sorrow, the years.

 

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