David Szalay - Spring

‘And,’ said the Scandinavian interviewer, struggling for questions, ‘what would you say about independent production?’

‘It’s excellent.’ Garcia.

‘Why?’

Garcia laughed as if it was a stupid question. ‘Nobody can argue with us. You know, if they tell me I can’t write… There’s the proof. It’s there, on the screen. If they tell Julian he can’t direct… If they tell James he can’t produce… There’s the proof…’

‘James?’

They turned to him.

He smiled warily—and immediately Garcia and Shoe were pulling him into the white light, were holding an arm each, ignoring his modest protests. He no longer wanted to be publicly paraded with them. They embarrassed him now. And the small Scandinavian interviewer was quite attractive, in a pixie-ish way. Garcia’s arm was heavy on his shoulders; Shoe was still holding his left wrist.

‘This is James,’ Garcia said, showing a leery smile. ‘Say hello, James.’

‘James’s the money man,’ put in Shoe.

‘Thanks, Julian,’ James said, freeing his wrist. He wanted to shrug off Garcia’s ponderous embrace too, but decided that any attempt to do this—if it led to a scuffle—might just make things worse. Smiling faintly, the interviewer was looking at him, twisting a strand of her tough hair around a finger. ‘Well I would be the money man,’ he said, trying to make light of the situation. ‘If there was any.’ He noticed that she had exquisite skin, exactly the shade of very weak and milky Nescafé.

He was pleased not to have to spend another night in the mobile home with Garcia and Shoe, who snored so sonorously that the people in the next-door home had insisted on being moved. The hôtel de plein air was a low, humid spot, pleasing to mosquitoes, where the turf was squelchy underfoot and the duckboards in the showers were mildewed and black. Not that Miriam was staying in the belle-époque elegance of the Carlton. She had an overpriced shoebox near the main-line station, within earshot of the platform tannoy, especially in the quiet of the early morning, through open windows. It was at such an hour that James walked through lemony sunlight to where he had left the van, with his silk-lapelled jacket over his arm.

Shoe was sitting on a white plastic chair on the smear of concrete that passed for a terrace in front of the mobile home. He was wrapped in towels, even his hair. Walking down the hill, James was surprised not to stir with irritation at the mere sight of him sitting there, towel-headed, his narrow beard still damp from the shower.

‘Morning,’ he said.

Shoe just nodded. He was on the phone. He spent several hours a day on the phone to his wife. For the last four mornings, James had listened to one side of an ill-tempered and seemingly endless dispute through the negligible partitions of the mobile home. This morning, however, he was pleasingly impervious to the self-importance and monotony of Julian’s voice. He even felt sorry for him, to see him sitting there in his towels, negotiating some tired issue of matrimonial politics. He left him out in the mild morning air, and went inside.

There was no sign of Garcia, and when Julian finally tossed the phone down on the white plastic table, James stuck his head out and said, ‘Where’s Eric?’

Eric, Julian said, had vanished overnight. He had left a note. Initially, Julian had thought it was a suicide note. By the time you read this I will be gone … In fact, Eric had simply taken a train to Paris, and from there another to London. In the note, he said he had had to leave immediately—unable to stand another moment of slow-motion failure—and that he did not want to see either of them ever again.

It was nearly noon when they set out in strong sunlight, leaving the wreck of their hopes on the Côte d’Azur. They stopped for lunch at a motorway service station near Avignon—Julian eating his fill, as always when the production (i.e. James) was paying, loading his tray with starter, steak frites and pudding, wine, while James watched in silence. It was, however, a vacant and not a savage silence. In his pocket he had a piece of paper with Miriam’s London number on it, and while Julian fed he stared out the window, at fleecy flotillas standing still in the shining monochrome sky.

* * *

The very springiness of the still air seems sad to him. Perhaps it is just the way the warming air, on these early spring days, is so sharp with transience. The end of something, the start of something new. Time. It is intrinsically sad. Last night, for instance, James had woken in the dark to hear Hugo lapping at his waterbowl in the kitchen, and for some sleep-fuddled reason he had thought— Many years from now, when Hugo is long dead, I will remember this specific moment, in the middle of the night, and the sound of him lapping innocently at his waterbowl. And with a start of sadness it had seemed to him that Hugo was long dead—how short his life was! — and that he was hearing the sound of his thirsty lapping from a deep well of time. He unleashes him. St George’s Gardens is a little graveyard. Daffodils sprout eagerly between the tombs. Hidden behind the School of Pharmacology, it is usually very quiet—this morning, the only other human presence is a man tidying away last year’s leaves. Hugo trots over to a white stone obelisk, and pisses on its pitted plinth.

Somewhere, in one of the trees, the first tit of spring is singing. He stands there listening to its song—its up-down song. Two notes, starting on the higher one. Up-down up-down up-down up-down up-down. It sings them in sets of five. The sound of spring in London. Up and down. Like the next few days. The next few days are up and down.

When he finally spoke to her, for the first time since leaving her flat on Tuesday morning, she sounded irritable. (That he took to be a positive sign, since it was not him she was irritated with.) She said someone was off sick…

‘What, someone else?’

‘There’s a flu going round.’

… and she had been asked to do two nightshifts, tonight and tomorrow, starting at ten.

Testing the meaning of ‘for a while’—as in, ‘I don’t think we should see each other for a while’—he suggested they meet in the early evening.

‘Maybe,’ she said, as if thinking about it. ‘Phone me later.’ ( Up! )

He did phone her later, in the middle of the afternoon, and she seemed to have lost interest in the idea. She said vaguely that she wasn’t sure what time she would be home—she was out somewhere—and that she would phone him.

Hours passed without her doing so. ( Down. )

Five fifteen found him in a Spitalfields pub with Mike, a friend from his City days. When they were settled with their pints, James asked after his wife and kids. They were fine, Mike said. He had thickened since James first knew him. His wrists, his neck. Though he wasn’t losing his hair—or not much—somehow his head had an increasingly taut, polished look. He had taken, in the last month or two, to wearing a three-piece suit. (James was in nondescript mufti—designer jeans, a soft zippered top, Adidas.) Night was starting to fall outside on Commercial Street when Mike went to the bar for a second pair of pints and James tried Katherine again. When she did not answer he felt deflated. He started to tell Mike, in outline, what was happening. ‘Yeah?’ Mike said. Though not unsympathetic, the way he said it made the story seem insignificant. It made it seem as if next to his own unmentioned worries—London school fees, the state of the markets, the travails of a long-standing marriage—James’s situation was essentially frivolous.

And though he was in fact a few years younger, James felt that Mike was older than him now, that he had managed the transition to a sort of maturity.