David Szalay: Spring

Though the sharp trill of the doorbell is hardly audible over the hubbub of voices, James’s pulse quickens at the sound of it and he looks for someone to talk to. There, standing near the fireplace, is Miranda, an old friend of Isabel’s. Isabel once tried to set them up in fact. They went out once or twice. Without hesitation he walks over to her, interrupting the man she is talking to. Though he tries not to show it, this man—Mark, a singleton from Quarles, Lingus—is obviously put out by the way Miranda seems positively to welcome James’s interruption. He was just telling her about his planned skiing holiday to Norway with ‘some mates’, hoping to work around to suggesting that she might like to join them, when she turns away from him while he is in mid-sentence—‘Most people don’t know how fantastic the skiing is up…’—and says, ‘James! Izzy promised me you’d be here.’ She puts her hand on James’s shoulder and kisses him. She has to stand on tiptoe. He leans forward to help her. ‘Did she?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how are you?’

‘I’m okay. You?’

‘Fine,’ James says. He is about to say something else when Mark stops looking impatiently off to the side and thrusts out a hand. ‘Mark!’

‘Hello.’

‘I was just telling Miranda about…’ He starts on Norway and skiing again, and James’s eyes move to the door, where, smiling nervously, the smartly dressed older man has just entered with Isabel. She is entirely focused on him. From the way she is treating him, he seems to be some sort of VIP. With his eyes on them, James is not listening to what Mark is saying—‘And they all speak English, which is—’

Following James’s stare, Miranda says, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Oh, he’s—’

‘They all speak English,’ Mark insists, ‘which is—’

‘He’s my uncle.’

Isabel has ushered him to the drinks table, and is pouring him a glass of prosecco—with his thumb and forefinger he indicates that he does not want much. Then, with a slightly worried look, she scans the room. James knows she is scanning it for him. She sees him, and says something to their uncle, and they start to move towards him.

Miranda has just turned distractedly back to Mark, who says, ‘So, yes, they all speak English, which is—’

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ says Isabel. ‘I need to steal James for a minute. Is that okay? James, look who’s here,’ she says, with her hand on the old man’s shoulder.

‘Hello, Ted,’ James says, smiling pleasantly. ‘It’s been a long time. A very long time. How are you?’ As they step towards an empty patch of white maple, he hears Mark say, with a sort of wearinesss now, ‘So, yes, um, they all speak English, which is…’

Ted is tall—the same height as James, more or less—and has the same high forehead, the same long face and squarish jaw. These are all things that flow to James from Ted’s side of the family, his mother’s side. Ted, though, is losing his white hair. The tightening skin is turning transparent on the prominences of his skull, while the skin of his neck has lost its hold entirely. Isabel has left the two of them to talk, and the first thing Ted says is, ‘The last time I saw you, you were doing very well.’

James smiles. ‘Was I?’ This was one of the things he had feared having to talk about when he saw Ted in the street.

‘You had some sort of Internet firm.’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened to that?’

When James tells him, Ted seems sincerely surprised. ‘Oh?’ he says. ‘Did it? That’s a shame. Um… I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t the only one.’

‘No. No, I suppose not. There were lots of them, weren’t there? What happened with all that? I never really understood what that was all about.’

‘I don’t know,’ James says. ‘I’m probably the wrong person to ask.’ Then, seeing that his uncle is hoping for a proper answer, he stops smiling and says, ‘There was massive over-investment, essentially. I suppose there was this idea that whole sections of the economy were about to move en masse onto the Internet. I thought so at the time myself. Lots of people did. That’s why there was so much over-investment, which pushed up share prices so much. Then there was the herd mentality too. That took over. These things have their own momentum. Nobody wants to be left out.’

‘Of course not!’ Ted says emphatically.

‘Even if you think it’s all nonsense, if you see people doubling and tripling their money in a few months, even if you think they’re total fools—maybe especially if you think they’re total fools—you might be tempted to get involved. Ideas of value go out the window. Then it’s not even speculation. It’s just… a sort of pyramid scheme. Alan Greenspan called it “irrational exuberance”, I think.’

‘Alan Greenspan? Wasn’t he…’

‘The Federal Reserve.’

Ted nods. ‘ That ’s right.’

‘In a sense I didn’t lose anything,’ James says with a smile. ‘I had nothing at the start, and nothing at the end.’

Ted does not smile at this. He just peers at his nephew thoughtfully, and mainly to forestall any follow-up questions, James says, ‘You still live in Wimbledon?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘The same…?’

‘The same house, yes.’

On that, they simultaneously turn their heads and look out into the living room, at one end of which they are standing. For a moment, as clouds manoeuvre somewhere out of sight in the sky, pale sunlight pours in from the street end, then fades. Not entirely. Though the shadows lose their sharpness, they stay. They know they are thinking of the same thing—the Victorian vicarage in Wimbledon, the weeks that James and Isabel spent there in 1974. James remembers surprisingly little about those weeks. Not even how many weeks it was. How many was it? Though it seemed like a long time then—and seems like a long time now—it might only have been two, or even one. One or two weeks at the very end. That would make sense. He remembers the thick ivory shagpile in the vestibule and on the stairs. It was unlike any carpet he had ever seen.

Ted does not seem aware of the fact that his hand is fiddling nervously with one of the buttons of his suit jacket.

‘How’s Jean?’ James says.

‘She’s fine. Well…’ Ted’s voice takes on a more serious tone. ‘She’s okay. She’s having trouble with her hip. That’s why she’s not here today.’

‘It would have been nice to see her.’

‘She very much wanted to be here.’

‘Do send her my love,’ James says.

‘I will. And she sends you hers.’

They smile sadly at each other.

‘And how’s your father?’ Ted says.

‘He’s fine. He lives in France now. You probably know.’

‘Yes, he’s lived there for a while, hasn’t he? In Paris, or…?’

‘No, in the south. He used to live in Paris. He lives in the south now.’

‘Lovely,’ Ted says. ‘Do you visit him much?’

‘Sometimes. Not for a while actually.’

‘No?’

‘I was there last spring. I may go next month.’

‘It must be lovely down there.’

It was a damp spring in the south of France. The light was milky, the sky a passionless mother-of-pearl. The palm trees looked flustered in the wind. From Nice, he took the train along the sea—watched the white manes tossing far out on the water—and then a taxi inland from Antibes. He arrived at the house in time for lunch. The question was whether to eat outside, where the awning was flapping fitfully. There was a feeling that James, fresh from the fumes and interiors of London, would want to, and they set up on the terrace. Four places. Isabel was there. Unexpectedly. On her own. She had been there, it seemed, for a few days. The light was hard and grey. Under the awning it was quite dark.