A Week in December Read online

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was too difficult. People weren’t prepared to put in the hours on the donkey work – you know, dates and facts and so on. I think in retrospect my generation will be seen as a turning point. From now on there’ll be a net loss of knowledge in Europe. The difference between a peasant community in fourteenth-century Iran and modern London, though, is that if with their meagre resources the villagers occasionally slipped backwards, it was not for lack of trying. But with us, here in England, it was a positive choice. We chose to know less.’

  Jenni laughed. ‘You sound like a dinosaur. An old guy in a cave.’

  ‘I think so.’ Gabriel laughed too. ‘Imagine him. He knew his main subjects at school and then his degree and then his professional thing. But he would have expected as of right to have a knowledge of art, music, French kings, all the Bible and so on. He wouldn’t necessarily love music, but he could tell you within twelve bars if it was Brahms or Mendelssohn. The difference between Tintoretto and Titian. Maybe he didn’t care much for either, but he could tell you because he was required to know. He’s probably still alive somewhere.’

  ‘You could sell tickets to him,’ said Jenni. ‘In his cave.’

  ‘I think you could. I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information, say 1975. So a fifty-year dream.’

  ‘But does it really matter?’ said Jenni. ‘As long as somebody knows these things. There’s always going to be a geek somewhere who understands.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I think what’s happened is that because they themselves know less than their predecessors, innovators and leaders today have remade the world in their own image. Spellchecks. Search engines. They’ve remodelled the world so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage. And I should think that increasingly they’ll carry on reshaping the world to accommodate a net loss of knowledge.’

  ‘Though that in itself is quite clever. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. In a way. It’s a perverse form of natural selection. People might have been selected against on the grounds that they had lacked the mutation of knowledge. But they actually changed the environment, so that it was they who were selected, while the people who had what looked like a helpful mutation – knowing stuff – could actually be selected against.’

  ‘I think you’ve lost me,’ said Jenni. ‘Are you talking about the Internet?’

  ‘In a way.’ Gabriel inhaled. There was a pause, as though he was changing the subject. ‘You know that Internet game you play?’

  ‘Parallax?’

  ‘Yes. I mean ... I can see that it’s well made. But don’t you think you should be engaging more with the real world?’

  ‘Is that what you meant when you said “Oh, Jenni”?’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. But, yes, I suppose it was.’

  ‘And what is real?’

  ‘Other people.’

  ‘And what about you?’ said Jenni. ‘Your crossword? Your books?’

  ‘Yes, the crossword’s an escape, I admit. It’s silly. But the books. Well, as we said once before, they’re not an escape, they’re the key to understanding. The key to reality.’

  Jenni suddenly saw her moment. She breathed in deeply, then plunged. ‘You know your big escape, don’t you?’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘Your big alternative-reality game. You know what your Parallax is?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Catalina.’

  There was a silence, and Jenni feared she’d gone too far. Gabriel stared down at the coffee table, with his face between his hands.

  Eventually, he looked up and sighed. ‘Would you like to see a picture of her?’

  ‘All right.’ Jenni couldn’t bring herself to sound enthusiastic.

  Gabriel went over to the desk and took an old mobile phone out of a drawer. ‘There’s one in here,’ he said. ‘I took it in Stockholm.’

  ‘Show me, then.’

  ‘I can’t. The battery’s dead and they don’t make this model any more.’

  ‘You should have downloaded it.’

  ‘I know. It’s too late now.’

  ‘You should throw the phone away, then. It’s no good to anyone.’

  ‘All right.’ Gabriel dropped it in the wastepaper basket.

  ‘But you’ll just pick it out again when I’ve gone.’

  Gabriel stared out of the window again, towards the grey river. ‘I suppose I would be tempted. It’s hard to terminate these things. These dreams. For ever. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you give up Parallax, I’ll chuck the phone in the Thames.’

  ‘But I like Parallax,’ said Jenni.

  ‘And I liked Catalina. Maybe we’ve both lost touch with something, though. Perhaps we all have. Adam, you, me.’ He looked down at the evening paper on the table, whose front page spoke of mounting Wall Street losses. ‘Bankers trading bets on bets on bets.’

  Jenni stood up. ‘Do you ever take anyone with you to visit Adam?’

  ‘No, there’s no point. He wouldn’t appreciate it. He’d hardly notice.’

  ‘What about you, though? Wouldn’t you like some company?’

  ‘Are you—’

  ‘I don’t have anything on. I’d like to go with you. It might make it nicer for you. And afterwards we could go to a restaurant. My turn to pay.’

  They caught a train with two minutes to spare, but it was full and they were forced to stand between two carriages. The train picked its way through Pimlico, on the same track that Hassan al-Rashid had taken two days earlier. Then, as it went slowly over Grosvenor Bridge, Gabriel suddenly pulled down the window in the door, took his old mobile phone from his pocket and hurled it out, as hard as he could.

  Jenni watched as it cleared the low rail of the bridge and soared on for a moment or two, before dropping into the waters of the Thames.

  At 6.30 John Veals was on his way home from the airport, sitting in the debris of giveaway newspapers on the Tube. One last time, just to be certain, he checked the messaging inbox of his green mobile phone. There it still was in bald sans serif glory. In large letters it said ‘O’Bagel’, the name of the sender; in smaller characters, underneath, were the first words of the message: ‘Confirm rheumatism sell ...’ Veals pressed ‘Open’ to read the rest of the message ‘... completed at agreed time. All dumped.’

  Veals felt an intense exhilaration at the thought that he had pulled off the greatest financial coup of his life. The fund could double in size. His name would become even more venerated. He was rich beyond his, or anyone else’s, dreams. Against the elation there was still a niggling fear that he had overlooked some small but vital detail that even at this late stage could derail him. But he hadn’t. He’d run through every angle a thousand times. He’d tested it for hours on Godley and Duffy. He’d even talked it through with Bézamain in New York. It was bombproof.

  And then there was the slight Wellingtonian melancholy of the battle won, almost as haunting as the battle lost. What fresh worlds now remained for him to conquer? But, as the train rattled through the tight-fitting tunnels, there was above all the sense of satisfaction – of having fulfilled the purpose of his life. Billions of pounds and dollars had been diverted from other destinations and re-routed into the bank account marked ‘Veals’. He sat back against the plush of the seat and sighed.

  At seven o’clock R. Tranter walked up from Hyde Park Corner, a station he had never used before. He wore a dinner jacket from an outfitter in Holborn; it had wide lapels and a faint smell of old banquets and mothball. Just as he was approaching the revolving doors of the hotel, a bicycle with no lights shot past him along the pavement, making him leap to one side.

  Tranter swore shortly, then recomposed himself before going in. The rider, briefly visible in the light from a ground-floor room, wore fizzing earphon
es so wouldn’t have been able to hear the curses that followed him.

  The Park Lane Metropolitan was one of the newer hotels, and of an impressive size. It had already attracted a number of welldressed but clearly available women on the plump semicircular sofas in its atrium. Tranter managed not to catch their eyes as he pushed on, head down, to the lifts at the back, where white letters stuck to a black felt board announced: Pizza Palace Book of the Year Prize, Sir Francis Drake Suite, Fifth Floor.

  He ascended silently, his mouth dry, his palms wet. Double wooden doors gave on to the sight of about 400 people standing round in small groups, drinking. Tranter felt the reflexive panic of the King’s Arms in college days, but his literary agent, Penny McGuire, was for once on time and waiting for him. He braved her garlicky embrace, congratulating himself on having splashed out on a new razor blade.

  ‘Are you all right, RT? Not nervous, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  Tranter looked round the room. It was filled with people he disliked, simpering confidently, tossing back the cheap champagne.

  ‘What does Antony Cazenove look like?’ he said.

  ‘He’s the chap over by the window, there,’ said Penny, a large woman in a blue dress with a small bunch of flowers on the bust. Tranter followed her pointing finger to where a man of about forty was talking to two good-looking women, one dark with an oriental look, one with tumbling blonde hair. He was wearing a green velvet smoking jacket.

  ‘Would you like to meet him?’ said Penny.

  ‘Fuck, no,’ said Tranter.

  He withdrew a few paces so that his back was near to the wall, a position from which he could more safely survey the room. He raised his glass to his lips and held it there while his eyes swivelled enquiringly from side to side above the rim. They were scheduled to sit down at eight, with the prize announcement no later than 9.15, to give the newspapers time to get the result into their first editions. Once he was seated, Tranter felt, the evening would be all right; it was getting through the next forty-five minutes that would be the problem.

  ‘Which one’s Sally Higgs?’ he said to Penny.

  ‘The children’s writer? I’m not sure she’s arrived yet.’

  ‘Hello, Ralph.’

  Tranter knew without turning round that it was Patrick Warrender, the only person to use his first name.

  ‘Hello, Patrick. Do you know Penny—’

  ‘Of course. How are you? Everything all right, Ralph? It’s in the bag, I gather. Your Edgerton thing. I looked at the Cazenove. Absolute drivel. “Land of contrasts”. Lots of conversations with random people on trains repeated word for word. Tedious beyond all parody. You’ve got no worries. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t come off this time, you can always go back to writing fiction. More prizes there.’

  ‘Not my thing.’

  ‘You did write a novel once, didn’t you?’

  ‘Just one, yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you do a second?’

  ‘Writer’s block, I suppose.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as writer’s block,’ said Patrick. ‘Don’t you agree, Penny? Writer’s block is God’s way of telling you to shut the eff up.’

  Tranter wasn’t paying attention, however. Over by the huge picture windows with their view above the traffic of Park Lane, Antony Cazenove and the two fawning women in backless dresses had now been joined by the person R. Tranter most detested in the world: Alexander Sedley – on whose judgement his life now depended. ‘Of all men else have I avoided thee,’ he thought, the line remembering itself from some teenage revision notes. He wondered what Sedley had made of his letter of recantation; of course the smug bastard hadn’t bothered to reply.

  The backless vamps were draping themselves all over Sedley’s expensive dinner suit, Tranter noticed through narrowed eyes; now the blonde one, on the pretext of picking up something she had dropped, was virtually fellating him. But worse than that was the body language between the two men. Sedley’s hand was on Cazenove’s laughing shoulder in a familiar way that made Tranter freeze. It was the attitude of the prefect to his personal fag. Shit, he thought. Of course. Schoolfriends. Some awful posh freemasonry of shared studies, tuck and sodomy. Just look at them. Fuck.

  ‘Couldn’t get through it myself,’ Patrick was saying. ‘Did you read it, Ralph?’

  ‘What?’

  Tranter never discovered what, because a young woman came up and introduced herself as being from the diary column of a newspaper.

  ‘Can I just ask you a few questions?’

  ‘OK.’ He glanced at Penny. She shrugged. His call.

  ‘Is this the first time you’ve won a prize?’ said the diarist.

  ‘I haven’t won it yet.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. So, is it a novel or what?’

  ‘No, it’s a biography.’

  ‘Oh, I see. And what gave you the idea for it?’

  Tranter gawped. ‘What “gave me the idea” for it?’

  ‘Yes, you know. Is he a relative, the person you’ve written about?’

  ‘Edgerton? No. He was a great Victorian writer.’

  ‘OK. Can I ask you a couple of personal things?’

  The journalist was only about twenty-five. Tranter thought he should say no, but he didn’t want her to write anything disobliging, saying he was standoffish or unhelpful, so he agreed. ‘All right,’ he said.

  ‘You were educated at Cambridge, right?’

  ‘No, Oxford.’

  ‘And this chap ... Edgeworth?’

  ‘Edgerton.’

  ‘Right. Edgerton. Is he still alive?’

  ‘No. He died in 1898.’

  ‘Pity,’ the journalist said. ‘I wanted a quote from him. And is your wife happy that you’ve won a prize?’

  ‘I’m not married,’ said Tranter. ‘Where do you get your facts from? Your research?’

  ‘Off the Internet. Encyclotrivia dot com mostly.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to write anything down? Take notes?’

  ‘No, no, it’s OK, I can just remember it. Do you know which one’s Mr Cazenove?’

  IV

  At 7.30, Gabriel and Jenni walked the fifteen minutes from the station to Glendale Hospital. Dave was in the porter’s cabin and gave them a wave as they went up towards Wakeley. Gabriel could sense Jenni silently taking in the NHS signs – Long-Stay Unit, Electroconvulsive Therapy – and a slight tension coming over her as she did so. A psychiatric hospital was a daunting place to go if you’d never visited one before.

  ‘You all right, Jenni?’ he said.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘It’s nothing to worry about. Just some unhappy people watching television. And smoking.’ He was starting to wish he hadn’t accepted her offer to accompany him. As second dates go, this was about as unromantic as he could imagine.

  When they arrived in the hallway, Rob, the charge nurse, asked them to wait.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle. Young lad came in. Very distressed. It’ll be all right in a minute. Trouble is, it upsets the others. It’s like a fire going through a field. They seem OK, but they’re on a knife-edge half the time.’

  The corridor leading into the main part of the building was dark. There were dim lights from one of the day rooms used for group therapy; otherwise the vista was one of shrinking darkness. Jenni licked her lips. They could hear soft moaning from inside.

  They silently looked at the ‘art’ displayed around the small entrance hall. Gabriel smiled tensely. ‘Sorry, Jenni. It’s not normally like this.’

  There was a sound of running feet, never a good sign in a hospital, as Gabriel knew from years of visiting his brother. Then the awful quiet resumed.

  The window off the square hall had curtains of orange and brown squares. There were half a dozen hard chairs with their backs to the wall and a cheap whitewood coffee table with some old magazines.

  Gabriel had let not
hing slip, he felt, in his long conversation with Jenni at his flat: he’d maintained a professional facade, but he liked the way that Jenni had played along with him, tacitly acknowledging that it was a game by making no effort to discuss the court case. The fact was, however, that in the last few days he had felt the constellations of his world, which had for so long been fixed, begin to tilt and alter their positions.

  Sometimes he felt his life was not a narrative or a sequence of events, but a succession of disconnected images, fragments of a larger dream. And Catalina had been such a fragment, torn off from the gulf. Everything that made life tolerable derived from a premise that you could expect reward or permanence: that you could build. It had been too difficult for him to accept that Catalina and the feeling that he had for her were not like that at all; that she had been a bubble on the surface of a stream, held in perfect tension – no less real because translucent, temporary – then reabsorbed by the element that had made her, carried on by the current of time. And all the years he’d known her, believing that he loved her, it hadn’t really felt like that: his awareness of time passing had made it feel less like loving than like dying. The only way that he could be with her truly would be after death, in some other place, in some other manner of being.

  What he’d read in the Koran had also troubled him: the strange – yet to him naggingly familiar – violence of the assertions, and the lack of much else other than assertion. The widespread historical explanation, that this simply reflected the desperate social and commercial need of the Arabs of the Peninsula for a modern monotheistic god – and their relief at having found one – was appealing, but inadequate. He sighed. Perhaps the hallucinatory reality of the book with its sequence of ‘heard’ instructions, was no more bizarre than the alternative realities inhabited by people of the twenty-first century.

  The double doors opened on to the corridor and three people came out from the ward into the hall. There was a smartly dressed woman in her forties and a teenage youth, presumably her son. The boy had curly hair and a handful of pimples on his chin. His eyes seemed fixed, and Gabriel imagined he must be sedated. He stared across the hall, unseeing. But it was not the son’s eyes that struck him; it was the mother’s. Her face was stretched tight in anguish; someone had scraped a deep vertical between her eyes and torn her mouth downwards into a grimace. She put her arms round the boy and held him to her breast.