The Death of Eli Gold Read online

  ‘Freda.’ The strange thing that caller ID gives you, the need not to say hello?, the end of that querulous enquiry, the end, too, of the way that people can garner some small knowledge about what you think about them simply by the rise or fall in your voice when you do find out who it is: replaced instead by this, this ironic, flat certainty.

  ‘Harvey. Hi. How are you? How was the flight?’

  He shrugs, then feels a bit silly for shrugging on the phone. ‘It was an overnight flight, in coach.’ Coach: a sliver of self-disgust goes through him at having slipped so quickly into the idiom, just because he is in this land, or maybe because, reflexively, he is trying to please Freda. ‘But seven hours isn’t so long. And it’s five times the price for Club. What hotel room would you ever pay five times over the odds to spend seven hours in?’

  She doesn’t answer this. The iPhone emits a mournful crackle, before Harvey asks the question he knows she is waiting for.

  ‘So how is he?’

  The pause before she replies is so long, Harvey has time to locate the Baggage Reclaim sign and begin trudging in that direction. As he does so, his gaze is routinely snagged by passing women. His neck hurts from not turning, from the urgent need to follow them as they move past, into places where he is not.

  ‘Not much changed,’ she says, after long enough for Harvey to have forgotten that she is there.

  ‘What do the doctors –’

  ‘Anytime. At best, two months.’

  Harvey stops. He has known that his father must have roughly this amount of time left, but Freda’s bald statement of it comes at him like a fist. He had not been expecting this answer so soon: in fact, he now can’t quite formulate what the second half of his question was going to be – ‘What do the doctors think/plan to do/give him for the pain/ look like?’ He was only going to go for some general question, and work up slowly to the big Specific. He knows why Freda is speaking like this: the directness, the refusal to couch, speaks of her ownership of his father – and of his death. With Eli Gold, she must always have arrived first, even at the place of pain.

  Harvey’s eyes, moistened a little, more by tiredness than tears, stare into the defocusing distance.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We’ve booked you a room at the Sangster. It’s a new hotel on East 76th Street. It’s very good.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes. I know it’s a bit further away from Mount Sinai then we’d like, but it’s a block from Fifth Avenue, and you can get a cab uptown from there.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t complaining. I –’ He reddened. He had assumed he would be staying at their Upper East Side apartment, had already imagined sating his curiosity about his father and Freda’s private life by flicking through notebooks and diaries, or perhaps just through living in their furnishings and amongst their artwork; but now he saw how much of a presumption that was, never having been there, and having seen his father only twice in the last ten years, both times in London. He saw how untaken for granted the idea of him staying there must be, and how clearly Freda was confirming his fringe status in the present family circle.

  ‘We’re still staying at home, but I’m thinking of staying nights at the hospital. It depends on how Eli is. I probably will at some point. But Colette will still be at home.’

  ‘OK,’ said Harvey, uncertain how to take this, wondering about the buried implication that he might be some sort of paedophile, that, obviously, he couldn’t stay in the same apartment as an eight-year-old girl. He wants to protest that he is very good with children – that he has an unmolested, undamaged nine-year-old son himself – but he quells the urge, partly because Freda may have meant nothing of the sort, and partly because Jamie is, clearly, damaged.

  ‘Well, thank you. The Sangster. That’s very generous of you.’

  He colours as he says it, having realized he has assumed that Freda – or, rather, the ‘we’ that Freda refers to, a mystical duality of her and Eli – will be paying. He wonders if he should enquire, but hesitates, not wanting to get into a detailed discussion about whether they are picking up the tab just for the room, or if minibar and hotel porn surcharges will also be included.

  The iPhone crackles again, drawing attention to Freda’s failure to say ‘Don’t mention it’.

  ‘So shall I …? When shall I …?’ says Harvey, trailing off, accepting his secondary role.

  ‘Maybe go to the hotel, now … and you can come tomorrow morning?’ She speaks with the American inflection, the vocal hike indicating a question, a possibility for discussion: but Harvey knows better.

  ‘Tomorrow morning? I was hoping …’ God, how much trailing off am I going to do, he thinks. He is an uncertain fellow, Harvey, in an uncertain situation – the old son returning to see the dying dad, surrounded by his new family – and now it seems as if Freda’s take-no-prisoners certainty has crushed his ability to make even the smallest statement of intent. And, also, he can’t match her: he can’t fold back her steeliness, can’t say that he thinks he should come straight away, because maybe his father might die today. His fingers reach without thought for the plane ticket in his inside pocket, with its devastatingly open return, something that had cost Harvey substantially more money when ordered – a charge which had provoked a moment of irritation, not with his father for the indefiniteness of his time left, but with the airlines, for not having a special close relative’s last days’ exemption clause. It isn’t fair, he thinks, it’s not fair that I have to pay extra because my dad is dying and I don’t know when to book the flight home. Harvey’s heart is heavy with such unfairnesses.

  ‘Well,’ said Freda, ‘today we’ve already got quite a lot of people visiting … my mother’s here now, and then a group of Eli’s colleagues from Harvard in the afternoon – plus there was talk of Roth coming by some time this week, so … obviously he gets very tired …’

  ‘Maybe I’ll just go to the hotel and call later.’ This is the best defiance Harvey can offer.

  ‘Yes. Please do.’ There is a voice off, high and insistent.

  ‘Yes, darling, in a minute. Mom’s on the phone.’

  ‘So we’ll speak later.’

  ‘Yes. Good to have you here, Harvey. Eli will be so pleased to see you. Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye.’ He clicks the OK button on his phone, and forces it back into his jeans. Roth? Philip Roth? Harvey loves Philip Roth more than he has ever been able to admit to his watchful-for-literary-slights father. He feels intense desire to meet the dark bard of American sex and clear the decks of his depression, making him wonder, angrily, if he shouldn’t just turn up unannounced at this great literary lunch-time: he is, after all, Eli Gold’s son, the only one of the three adult children who has been prepared to make the journey. Then self-awareness settles like soft snow back upon him, and he realizes how far such an action is beyond him, he who has always hated confrontation anyway, and these days need only to be confronted with the smallest of obstacles for his depleted energy reserves to drain away to nothing.

  Harvey moves into the Baggage Reclaim Hall, with its always palpable dynamic of tension and relief, as exhausted passengers wait nervously for their cherished belongings to be spat onto the oval belts. His conveyor, No. 4, is sparsely populated now, the phone call having slowed down his movement here. He can see his suitcase, some Samsonite-alike with pull-out handle – again, due to the particular nature of this particular journey, he didn’t know which of the numerous bags piled up under the stairs to pack – forlornly beginning what looks like its twentieth or thirtieth rotation. A woman he had noticed on the plane, sitting four or five rows in front of him on the opposite side, is there, beginning to look anxious. She is in her early twenties, dirt-blonde long hair parted like that of a Woodstock girl dancing towards the crackly camera, sea-blue eyes, and, even under the whip-lash Baggage Reclaim lights, skin so smooth that if Harvey were to reach out and touch it – as every cell in his hands is urging him to do – his fingers would slip.

  Her
bag, pink like bubble-gum, tumbles out of the conveyor hatch, the relief registering on her features, softening them even further, and making Harvey remember something one of his many more sexually opportune friends had told him once, about how, while waiting at airports for luggage, he would try and steal a furtive glance at the labels on the suitcases of any waiting attractive women, and then offer to share a taxi in that direction. As she picks up the bag, Harvey, impelled by the thought, does flick his eyes downwards and, catching sight of the zip code, thinks it might be an address near his hotel, but never has any intention of going through with all that stilted ‘Hey, I see you’re going my way’ shite. It just tears another little track through him, the idea that it could be done, that someone else could do it.

  An older woman joins her, and helps her heave her bag onto a trolley. She moves away: she hasn’t registered Harvey’s presence, even cursorily. He looks at his watch. He now has time, far too much time. He looks again at his iPhone and ponders the text from Stella. I should call her back, he thinks, let her know I’ve landed. But then the other thing grabs his heart with its cold hands, and, instead, he sits down on the edge of Conveyor Belt No. 5, to watch his suitcase travel round Conveyor Belt No. 4, round and round and round, like a lone ship on the greyest, most mundane of seas.

  * * *

  Eli Gold’s first wife, Violet, is in her room just finishing lunch when she sees the item on the television news. It has been a day on which she has already veered from her normal routine. She usually watches the one o’clock news in the lounge, even though some of the other residents would always be fast asleep in there by then, and Joe Hillier’s snoring, in particular, was more than loud enough to drown out the words of the newsreader. The more able residents at Redcliffe House are allowed to make their own lunch and eat it in their rooms, and Violet takes this option as often as she can, preparing it – baked beans on toast, a cheese sandwich, a tin of ravioli – in the tiny kitchenette off to the side of the room and eating at the table by the window. Lunch always reminds her of Valerie, who is forever hinting that Violet should move to somewhere more structured, which means, Violet knows, one of the fascist old-age homes, a place where her independence would be taken away, her privacy disregarded, and the other inmates comatose, just because Valerie couldn’t bear the idea of her sister eating on her own from time to time. After lunch, she would normally get the lift down from the fourth floor, and, if it was not wet, walk the path around Redcliffe Square Gardens, which, even with a stick, would not take her more than fifteen minutes, and she was always back at Redcliffe House by five to one, ready to watch the news. She could take the lift back up to her room and watch it there, but even though Violet was a woman who liked to keep herself to herself much of the time, she felt there was no point in living in a place where so many other people lived if she never mingled with them at all: and so she always went into the lounge following her walk, and, with her cream winter coat on her knees, watched the one o’clock news.

  Unless it was wet, as on the day she hears the news about Eli, a day on which she hadn’t even bothered going downstairs to check the pavements: the rain had been hitting her window all morning, a downpour blown diagonal across the pane by the wind. Over time, an errant branch from the neighbouring hostel’s enormous oak tree had grown along the walls of the house to lie pressed against her sill, and today she could count the drops on its leaves. She had just finished eating a few slices of ham and some crackers, and had already risen to take the plate into the kitchenette, when the item began.

  She is shocked by seeing his face on the screen – at first some footage of him, recently giving a lecture, with the beard and the big shock of grey hair that she vaguely knew he had now, followed by an old black and white photo from round about the time they were married. For a split second, Violet thinks they might even show a photograph of her: him wearing his GI uniform, her on his arm in the white floral dress that she used to wear on their first dates.

  They don’t – how could they, she chided herself, when the only photos that have survived of us together are all in that shoebox under the bed? I don’t suppose he kept any. The news moves on to a shot of a tall building in New York, which Violet gathers is a hospital. A doctor, an Indian, is standing in front of a crowd reading some sort of statement. Without her hearing aid she cannot hear what he is saying, but his name – Ghund … khali? – is subtitled below. She puts the plate down and turns away from the kitchenette, feeling her knees crack beneath her. She goes over to the television, a Hitachi ex-rental model made in 1973 which she brought with her when she left her flat in Cricklewood. Even turning the volume up full, she has to stand right beside it, bending her face to the screen to hear what is being said.

  ‘… is said to be …’ the reporter was now saying ‘… conscious rarely, if at all. His family are by his side. But it seems unlikely at this stage that this man, considered by many to be the world’s greatest living writer, will come home from hospital again. This is Rahim Khan, for BBC News, in New York.’

  The screen cuts back to the main studio. The newsreader looks reverent for a second, before going on to a story about an earthquake in Sri Lanka. Violet watches for a minute, then turns it off. She sits back down by the window. The rain is easing, but even if the sun were to come out and dry the pavements, she would not go out for her walk now. Age has made Violet a creature of routine: the big surprise for her – the failing of her body – is easier to manage if she limits all other surprises. Last week, while moving the dial between her touchstones, Radios 3 and 4, she heard a plaintive voice on the wireless singing the words no alarms and no surprises, please, and it made her pause, thinking how true to her own desire that imprecation was now: since some irretrievable day in the past, all news – everything from finding one day that the gate to Redcliffe Square Gardens was unaccountably locked, to feeling the arrival on waking of some new bad ache in her bones, to hearing that another of the residents has died – all news seemed to have become bad news, and so she’d rather it all just stopped, that the news was all in. The only way she could make her life approach this condition was through habit.

  But news would still intrude, breaking through the fragile circle of routine. Here it was: Eli in hospital; Eli, who she had not seen or heard from in over fifty years; her first and only husband; the only man to have touched the tender sections of her body except for the surgeon who must have at least held her breast for a few seconds before applying the scalpel to remove it in 1987. The world’s greatest living writer: did that include the letters yellowing in that shoe-box? If she took them out and read them now, which she has not done for many years, would the parchment-like paper mirror her skin, of which the words so sweetly sing? Violet Gold feels suddenly nauseous and stands up, heading as quickly as she can towards the bathroom, more aware than ever of the bandiness of her legs, the ridiculousness of her movement. By the time she gets there the wave has passed, and she feels relieved not to have to bend or, worse, kneel in front of the white china and the tiny puddle – not so much because of the horror of having to vomit, but because of the possibility that she might not be able to get up again. She lowers the plastic seat, and sits, in reach of the red panic button on her left.

  Why this? she thinks. Why this physical reaction to the news about Eli? It is not unexpected: the surprise is that he’s lasted so long, what with so many wives – how many since her? Three? Four? – and his generally cavalier approach to all things healthy – although that was a long time ago, and he might have changed. And when they were young everything was different, anyway. He smoked, but so did she: so did everyone. She was smoking when they first met, she remembers; it threw off Eli’s chat-up line. ‘Oh, damn,’ he had said, the first words she heard him speak. He had been leaning against a post in the Rainbow Corner, watching the men and women dance: it was 1944, a Friday night, and the Bill Ambrose Band were playing. Violet was with her friend Gwendoline, who was a hostess, a word Violet was never sure about – the Ra
inbow Corner was simply the drinking and dancing section of the Red Cross Club in Shaftesbury Avenue, where many American soldiers congregated during the war, and there were always jobs to be had for girls who wanted them, but Violet was never entirely clear what being a hostess involved. Mainly, it seemed, never saying ‘no’ on being asked to dance, and Gwendoline had certainly fulfilled her obligation that night: Violet had spent most of the evening on her own watching her friend’s flower-patterned skirt twirling around five identical pairs of olive-brown trousers. She had just decided she was going to leave after finishing this last cigarette when Eli spoke.

  ‘Damn …’ he repeated.

  ‘What?’ she replied eventually, realizing he was expecting some sort of reply from her.

  ‘You’re smoking,’ he said. His voice was low, a throaty rumble. Violet had met enough GIs by now to recognize it as defining him as from New York or its environs. She glanced at her own cigarette, twisting her hand to her face a little self-consciously.

  ‘Yes …?’

  ‘Well, that’s scuppered my plan.’ Violet’s face remained a mask of confusion; she wondered if she’d misheard him over the music. ‘To offer you a cigarette …’ he added helpfully, taking a sky-blue packet of Newport cigarettes out of his breast pocket. His hands, she noticed, were large. Finally she understood; her features relaxed into gentle mockery, the face she reserved for suitors.

  ‘You could always ask me to dance.’

  He shook his head, pausing to light his cigarette. Violet remembers this pause clearly, almost more than anything else about their first meeting. He stopped his head, mid-shake, cocked his lighter, lit his cigarette, took in a deep draught of Newport smoke, and then continued the shake of his head before speaking again.