Tony Parsons: One For My Baby

There’s a swanky hotel near Bond Street where they serve afternoon tea. The clientele are all tourists who are seeking a slice of ye olde authentic England in a pot of Earl Grey. Apart from me.

The room is ringing with a dozen foreign tongues when I walk in with my Evening Standard under my arm. The waiter looks at me as if I have wandered into the wrong place.

“Tea, sir? How many?”

“Tea for one.”

He brings me a pot of tea and a silver stand that looks like a wedding cake. The layers of the stand are loaded with chunky scones, pots of cream and ruby-red jam, and dainty little sandwiches.

The waiter is friendly. The tourists are not too noisy. The scones are still warm. The salmon and cucumber sandwiches have all had their crusts cut off. The tea is brewed from leaves not bags.

Everything is exactly as it should be.

But it just doesn’t taste the same over here.

The walk to the tube takes me through the shabby babble of Oxford Street.

Music that rattles my fillings pours from clothing stores, record shops, coffee bars. Once the cheap, vibrant glamour of this street seemed to be what London was all about. Now I feel out of place among the new music, the tired fashions, the acned mob. Now it just reminds me that I am getting old. Oxford Street has stayed the same while I have changed. I try to move quickly through the crowds but the rush hour has started and progress is slow.

Near the tube station there are a couple of young foreigners propped up against the wall like bored streetwalkers. They are the funky kind of foreigner, all moody looks and platform boots.

There’s an Asian girl with dyed blond hair and a boy from some sunny corner of the Mediterranean with a pencil-thin moustache and razor-sharp sideburns.

They both have a stack of leaflets that they are listlessly offering to the crowds as they chat to each other in bad English. They give every impression of not giving a toss if they hand out their flyers or throw them in the nearest overflowing bin.

I take one.

Learn Good English

@ Churchill’s International Language School

The First and Best

Start Any Monday

Low Low Prices

Near Virgin Megastore

Help with Visas, Work Permits, Accommodations

Ensuring Excellence!

The leaflet has a Union Jack border and inside that there’s another border made up of flags from around the world. I see Italy, Japan, China, Brazil and plenty more that I don’t recognize.

Next to the words “Churchill’s International Language School” there’s a black silhouette of a bald fat man who is either Alfred Hitchcock or possibly Winston Churchill. The man is flashing two fingers to indicate that you should get lost or possibly that victory is imminent. His mouth is stuffed with an enormous great sausage or possibly a cigar.

The silhouette has been drawn by someone with the artistic ability of a pigeon. I hate the glib modernity of the “@” symbol. I am stunned that an Oxford Street language school would stoop so low as to pilfer Winston Churchill’s name to give it a touch of fake authority. There’s something about all that cheap cynicism in one place that reminds me why I feel so lost on this street.

But I find that I can’t throw the leaflet away. There’s something about all those different flags and the generosity in the promises of help and the cheery exclamation mark after the assurance of excellence that lifts my spirits.

I don’t know. It looks sort of hopeful.

We were never very far from the water in Hong Kong.

From the little café on Victoria Peak to the tea room of the Peninsula Hotel, every spectacular view that we ever held hands to featured the waterfront. We were always on the Star Ferry, shuttling between our apartments on opposite sides of the harbor. And Rose’s firm had a company boat that they called the junk.

Calling it a junk conjured up images of one of those quaintly curved wooden ships with orange sails that bob in the Hong Kong harbor of a thousand tourist postcards. Which was probably the idea.

In fact this junk was a modern, motorized launch that gleamed with chrome and polished wood and was crewed by a smiling Cantonese husband-and-wife team in neat white uniforms. Even as late as the spring of 1997, out on the junk you could kid yourself that the changeover was never going to happen, that nothing was ever going to change, that life would always be this sweet.

The junk was meant to be for corporate hospitality, but if it wasn’t being used for entertaining taipan clients from London or Shanghai or Tokyo, then the staff from Rose’s shop could take it out and spend a day cruising around the hundreds of tiny islands that make up Hong Kong.

Usually it was taken out by parties of gweilo male lawyers courting Asian girls who worked as flight attendants for Cathay Pacific. Rose and I, already at the stage where you believe that the two of you need nobody else, always went out with just the crew.

The last time we took the junk out we sailed to a little island with no name where an old man in flip-flops served us cold beer and spicy prawns in a restaurant that was little more than a shack. I remember a wooden pier, half-wild dogs roaming the beach and a silence that was disturbed only by the murmur of our voices and the sound of the sea.

On our way back I nodded off on deck, my belly full of Tsingtao and what was surely the best seafood in the world.

I don’t know how long I was sleeping but the sun had changed position by the time I awoke. It was very hot now. The deck was burning through the beach towel that I was lying on. I heard the distant caw of gulls, the soft hiss of waves on the shore, the boat creaking beneath me with the swell of the South China Sea.

And then suddenly Rose was standing directly above me, smiling, the features of her face hidden by the dazzle of the late-afternoon sun.

I squinted up at her, shading my eyes. The sun glared down and I couldn’t really see her, just the dark shape of her, moving in and out of the blinding light. Still looking at her through scrunched-up eyes, I made a move to rise.

She held up her hand.

“Stay right where you are,” she said.

Putting her feet either side of me, she carefully adjusted her stance so that her head completely blotted out the sun. It burned around her like the rim of a total eclipse. Her shadow fell across me, allowed me to see.

I uncovered my eyes, blinking away tears. Her face was clear now. She was smiling in the shade, this shade of her own making.

Rose filled the sky.

“Can you see me now?”

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Good.”

For a long moment we were motionless. It was as if she wanted to brand her face on my memory, as if she wanted me to keep this moment forever, as if she wanted to make sure that she would stay in my bones.

Then she moved away.

“You should put something on,” she said. “You’re going to get burned out here.”

I walk past the doorway to Churchill’s International Language School three times before I find it.

The entrance is between an ancient denim store and a brand-new coffee shop, at the part of Oxford Street where the milling crowds are at their thickest, so small that it is hardly there at all. I drink two heavily sugared cappuccinos and almost buy a pair of Levi’s-unfortunately they don’t have my size-before I finally see the open door.

It is being listlessly guarded by two more of Churchill’s students. They are gabbing away and scratching their piercings-navel for her, nose and eyebrow for him-while offering flyers to the indifferent mob. They don’t look at me as I go past them and up a steep flight of stairs.

Churchill’s International Language School occupies one entire floor of a building that seems to open up the farther you go inside, like a secret cave or the magic wardrobe that led to Narnia. It echoes with foreign accents, distant laughter, the sound of a teacher patiently explaining the idiom, “to see the light.”