this golden late afternoon, with the sun falling through the windows and the lilies from Saturday night’s party now full-blown and on the edge of falling, Eduardo looked more dark, glowing and healthful than ever. He had not shaved today, and a dark shadow around the jaw gave him the air of a beautiful navvy. Fitzgerald drew in a great breath, savouring Eduardo’s warm, animal, marshlike odour. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘I love the scent of lilies.’
‘Lilies are so ugly,’ Eduardo said. ‘Everyone else thinks they’re beautiful. For me, they’re ugly, the way they fall, the yellow thing in the middle. I think they’re ugly.’
‘You have interesting opinions,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I always thought you had a lot of interesting views about things.’
‘Do you think so?’ Eduardo said. ‘I think I have interesting opinions. I think you’re right. But Daniel always says, “Darling, just shut your mouth and look pretty. No one wants to know what you think.” And one guy, one friend of his, asked me once if I knew how to tell the time, or maybe if I could tell my right foot from my left foot, some shit like that. His friends, they all think I’m just stupid, I know.’
Fitzgerald’s attention was drawn to Eduardo’s feet, his left foot, his right foot, perfect, dark, hairy and masculine. He would agree to be walked over, by such feet, he truly would. ‘I don’t think you’re stupid,’ he said. ‘I always think you have the most original views about things. Not everyone would say that lilies were ugly, but they are kind of ugly, as flowers, you’re right. I’ve often thought you had interesting opinions about all sorts of things.’
‘That’s funny,’ Eduardo said. ‘Because I do. I do have opinions about all sorts of things. For like, I think what we do in our lives, it comes back and has an effect on what happens to you. Like, if you are bad and mean to someone, then maybe later, someone else will be bad and mean to you. That’s my opinion. I don’t know how it works, but it does. And I think we’re all connected somehow, like maybe if you are friends with someone, and they are friends with someone else, and that someone else is friends with someone else, then you are connected, you have a connection with that person, and in the end maybe you have a connection with all the world.’
‘So because I know you, I have a connection with all sorts of South Americans I’ve never met,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘That’s really an interesting idea. You’re really an intelligent person, Eduardo.’
‘And I think there is maybe enough money in the world for all the people, the rich people and the poor people,’ Eduardo said. ‘So there is no need for there to be poor people and rich people, the rich people, they don’t need so much, so maybe the money can be shared about and the poor people get money from the rich people, and then everyone has enough and everyone is happy.’
‘That’s so true,’ Fitzgerald said, in an ecstasy of happiness. ‘That ought to happen. That definitely ought to happen.’
In the sunlit sitting room of a South London flat, the beautiful man sat, his hands clasped between his knees, his eyes widening, his pupils broad and dark and empty. He dipped now and then into the full box of chocolates, and his brilliant teeth shone from between his full lips as he went on talking, explaining, eating the pralines, emptying his poor unindulged mind before Fitzgerald. And Fitzgerald, understanding at last what it was that Eduardo wanted, and how, in the end, he saw himself, sat, barely interrupting, saying from time to time, ‘That’s so true,’ and ‘You surprise me. I didn’t know you were as intelligent as that,’ and ‘You’re an intelligent person, you really are,’ murmuring and encouraging from time to time, as the light failed and the warm blue evening surrounded them.
It was as simple as that.
(i.m. M.W.)
The air was plump, cold, full of anticipation. Something would fall from it. He was walking along the famous street with a briefcase that was not new; it was empty. To the left and to the right, ministries stood like serious cliffs. Whitehall. At this moment, the people he had worked with all summer and autumn and half the winter, they were sitting down in their office chairs and asking each other whether they wanted anything from downstairs. Their lives were going on, unambitiously, teaching English as a foreign language. Today was the day he started work in the public service, at the centre of the public service, in a building just off Whitehall.
George had a pass to the building – his building, he must start to think. It was in his pocket. He felt it now, as he walked. He knew exactly where he was to go, on this first morning. Mr Castry – Bill, he was supposed to call him – had taken him round and introduced him to people the Thursday before. He had not remembered very much, but Bill had made sure that he knew exactly where to go the following Wednesday. Everything else can come after that, he had said. George had got up at the weekend and walked all the way from the flat in Bloomsbury he was sharing with the Brazilian girl and the American girl. It was a rehearsal of his first day. The streets had been empty at half past eight on a Sunday morning, apart from some tourists and people who might have been hurrying to a Sunday service, here and there. George had walked down to Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall, to the outside of the building where he was going to work. He wanted to make sure that it was still there, where he remembered it was. Nobody was there to see him, and he had walked away quickly, not pausing, his trainers making no sound on the pavement. He might have been walking past purely by chance.
The office where he had worked for the last eight months was a cheerful and undemanding place. A temporary place. It accepted applications from overseas students to study the English language, and it assigned them to the appropriate class. Julie was in charge. She had been there for donkey’s years, she said. Her husband was something in business. Something to do with bacon or coffee, but he was in the City; he never saw any bacon or coffee unless it was in the snackbar by the tube. For most of his day, bacon and coffee were just figures on a screen, Julie explained. Great mountains of notional bacon and coffee. She didn’t know how he could stand it, all day long. There was a sense of fun in the office. They had opened the letters, had filled in the forms that were needed and, twice a week, had gone to the communal meeting room where the biggest empty table was, and arranged the applications from the past few days in order of classes. Probably Julie could have done this on her own, but she liked to get everyone involved. Sometimes a student came to demand his money back or to complain, because he had not succeeded in learning enough English. Those, too, were occasions of fun, once the complaining student had been refused and pacified and sent on his way. Julie had a way of rolling her eyes and holding her hands up to heaven that everyone copied. That office had been only until Christmas, and George had understood that from the start. The office he was going into would be for his entire life, from today onwards. He curbed his spirit of fun. The door to his building was open.
‘Good morning,’ he said to the man in uniform sitting behind the desk. A walk-in cupboard behind him was piled high with documents, tagged and ordered. George pulled out his plastic pass from his pocket and showed it carefully, the right side up so that the guard could inspect it.
The guard looked at it briefly, then at George, more curiously. ‘Morning,’ he said. Of course George should have been more casual about it. He felt like a criminal who, gaining access to a guarded building, had made himself stand out in some way. ‘Starting to snow,’ the guard said. His tone was not friendly, but it made George feel that he was accepted, grudgingly, within the building; it explained, too, something about the day that he had not understood. The metallic sensation of weight and chill obscurity in the air was not, as it had seemed, official London welcoming George to his new life. It was what had happened many times before without reference to the lives of any men or women: it was the sensation of snow
