William Boyd - Stars and bars

He woke up to a horrible grinding noise punctuated by shouts and clangs. He rubbed his eyes. Wearily, he went to the window and looked out. The back of his apartment block overlooked the rear of a large hotel. In the courtyard behind it two huge green garbage trucks were being filled with rubbish. Eight foot dustbins — the size of a steamer’s smoke-stacks — were rumbled out from the kitchen by gangs of men, attached to an hydraulic arm, and automatically tipped into the truck. Throughout this, the men engaged in constant shouted conversation, competing valiantly with the whining hydraulics, the rumbling cast iron wheels of the dustbins and the surging, churning noise that emanated from the viscera of the garbage trucks.

For the first week that he had lived in the apartment block, Henderson had hung out of his sixth floor window and had vainly issued requests for a little less noise. “Excuse me,” he would call, “is there any chance of you men keeping the noise down?” The men seemed to hear him and shouted back but he couldn’t make out their replies. It had no effect, in any event. The noise lasted for fifteen to twenty minutes and took place between four and five in the morning, every morning. When, outraged, he had raised the matter with other residents of the block they assured him he would get used to it very soon. To a man and a woman, it seemed, they now slept tranquilly through the infernal din.

But they weren’t insomniacs. Henderson turned away from his bedroom window, went through to his modern kitchenette and made himself a cup of tea. He took a sip and thought about his drive South with the charming Bryant. At least it would please Melissa. He thought fondly of her for a moment. She might not be as exciting as Irene but, under the current circumstances, that seemed like a huge asset. Perhaps, he thought, he should wind up the Irene affair. But that idea saddened him. But then perhaps it was already wound up. You could never tell with Irene.

To distract himself he went back into his sitting room and took out pen and paper. He had decided to write to Lance-corporal Drew and urge him to reply promptly with all the information he possessed about Captain Dores’s death.

“Please do not worry about sparing my feelings,” Henderson wrote. “I never knew my father and am consequently deeply concerned to learn as much as I can about him. I know the place and time of his death, but not the manner of it. If you can tell me anything — or provide me with the name and address of anyone who can — I will be eternally grateful.”

He wrote out an envelope addressed to himself and rummaged in the desk drawer for his supply of British stamps. As he did so, he uncovered an unmarked, age-yellowed envelope. He felt his face spontaneously screw up with disappointment and regret. It was a letter from his father, written on his last leave home, before he departed to the Far East, to his unborn child.

Henderson had learnt of its existence only a year and a half previously and it had been responsible for initiating this quest to discover the details of his father’s death in action.

One afternoon, in the middle of a desultory conversation, his mother had referred casually to ‘that old letter of your father’s’. After the incredulous and heated recriminations had died down (“It’s taken forty years for you to deliver it!”) his mother had hurtfully handed it over.

“Read it,” she had said, a hint of tears in her voice. “You’ll understand why I never gave it to you.”

He unfolded it now, a curious taut expression on his face, and spread it carefully on the top.

My Darling Girl,

In case anything should happen to me I want you to keep and treasure this. All I have is at your disposal. My faith in you is as my affection for you and knows no bounds.

With all my love,

Your Old Dad.

Henderson had tears in his eyes as he read this, tears of frustration. Every time he read this letter he had to suppress a monstrous urge to tear it up.

“He was absolutely convinced you were going to be a girl,” his mother had said. “Utterly convinced. Nothing I said would change his mind. ‘Look after my little girl’ were his last words to me. I thought it would only upset you. It has upset you.”

Henderson sat back in his chair. There was a vague tremble running haphazardly through his body. He put the letter away and sat for a while tracing the contours of his nose with thumb and middle finger. The knowledge that letter contained represented his life’s greatest disappointment, all the more bitter because there was nothing he could do about it — could ever have done about it. It seemed absurd to worry about a father’s speculations on the sex of an unborn child in 1943…But if you were that unborn child…? Somehow by being born male he had let his father down, even though the man had never known.

He stood up. “This is ridiculous,” he said out loud. He must be cracking up. He forced himself to think of something else. Irene. There must be some way of getting Irene south. Perhaps a quick, contrite visit tomorrow. Work out some sort of compromise? He paused. Contrition, apologies, compromise, backslide. He watched his tea cool, its taste metallic in his mouth. He felt an old familiar anger at his indecisiveness. What did he really want from his life? Melissa or Irene? Always assuming they’d have him …He was tired of his own company, he realized; he wanted to inflict it on somebody else, before he got too old and it all got too late.

Henderson walked into the diner round the corner from his apartment. It was long and thin and tastelessly decorated in colours of maroon and brown. In a corner near the door two or three hat-stands crowded in on a blonde Latin-American woman who kept the till. Along one wall ranked booths filed back into the gloom. Opposite them was a high formica bar, with fixed bar stools. Behind the bar in the middle was the stainless steel kitchen.

The diner was staffed with the friendliest middle-aged ladies Henderson had ever met. By his third breakfast there he was thinking of them as favourite aunts, so overwhelming was their celebration of his arrival each morning. The women all had the same hard-curled perm in varying shades of grey. Their voices were harsh — cigarette harsh — but kind. When they weren’t telling Henderson how wonderful it was to see him again, they joked and grumbled loudly to each other, shouting unconcernedly the length of the diner or joshing with Ike. Ike was the short-order cook and enjoyed teasing the waitresses and laughing at them. He did this constantly (“Martha, is that new shoes? What you old man do to you this weekend?”) regardless of the fact that the ‘girls’ never ceased bellowing their orders at him.

While he talked and traded insults he shimmied and swerved above the grills and toasters. He could crack three eggs in one hand, butter five muffins, scramble, poach, fry and slice without breaking into a sweat. At busy times the orders were coming in every three seconds. Henderson never saw him write anything down. And all the while he kept up the banter. “Hey, Joy, what you settin’ yo hair in now? Ceement?” He found his own jokes intensely diverting; his face would screw up as if in pain, his knee would bang the door of a fridge, he’d buckle slightly to one side.

This morning, being a Saturday, the diner was less busy. Henderson still felt irritated and let down by his wasted night. His eyes were hot, his nasal passages dry and prickly. He nodded to the olive-skinned blonde at the till and allowed Martha to hang up his coat.

“How are you today, Mr Dores? Feeling fine today?”

“Not so good, I’m afraid, Martha.”