On Beauty Read online

  After Harold Belsey follows a jolly parade of Howard himself in his seventies, eighties and nineties incarnations. Despite costume changes, the significant features remain largely unchanged by the years. His teeth – uniquely in his family – are straight and of a similar size to each other; his bottom lip’s fullness goes some way towards compensating for the absence of the upper; and his ears are not noticeable, which is all one can ask of ears. He has no chin, but his eyes are very large and very green. He has a thin, appealing, aristocratic nose. When placed next to men of his own age and class, he has two great advantages: hair and weight. Both have changed little. The hair in particular is extremely full and healthy. A grey patch streams from his right temple. Just this fall he decided to throw the lot of it violently forward on to his face, as he had not done since 1967 – a great success. A large photo of Howard, towering over other members of the Humanities Faculty as they arrange themselves tidily around Nelson Mandela, shows this off to some effect: he has easily the most hair of any fellow there. The pictures of Howard multiply as we near the ground: Howard in Bermuda shorts with shocking white, waxy knees; Howard in academic tweed under a tree dappled by the Massachusetts light; Howard in a great hall, newly appointed Empson Lecturer in Aesthetics; in a baseball cap pointing at Emily Dickinson’s house; in a beret for no good reason; in a Day-Glo jumpsuit in Eatonville, Florida, with Kiki beside him, shielding her eyes from either Howard or the sun or the camera.

  Now Howard paused on the middle landing to use the phone. He wanted to speak with Dr Erskine Jegede, Soyinka Professor of African Literature and Assistant Director of the Black Studies Department. He put his suitcase on the floor and tucked his air ticket into his armpit. He dialled and waited out the long ring, wincing at the thought of his good friend hunting through his satchel, apologizing to his fellow readers and making his way out of the library into the cold.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, who is this? I am in the library.’

  ‘Ersk – it’s Howard. Sorry, sorry – should have called earlier.’

  ‘Howard? You’re not upstairs?’

  Usually, yes. Reading in his beloved Carrel 187, on the uppermost floor of the Greenman, Wellington College’s library. Every Saturday for years, barring illness or snowstorm. He would read all morning, and then convene with Erskine in the lobby at lunchtime, in front of the elevators. Erskine liked to grip Howard fraternally by the shoulders as they walked together to the library café. They looked funny together. Erskine was almost a foot smaller, completely bald, with his scalp polished to an ebony sheen and a short man’s stocky chest, thrust forward like plumage. Erskine was never seen out of a suit (Howard had been wearing different versions of the same black jeans for ten years), and the mandarin impression he gave was perfectly completed by his neat salt-and-pepper beard, pointed like a White Russian’s, with a matching moustache and 3-D freckles around his cheeks and nose. During their lunches he was always wonderfully scurrilous and bad tempered about his peers, not that his peers would ever know it – Erskine’s freckles did incredible diplomatic work for him. Howard had often wished for a similarly benign face to show the world. After lunch, Erskine and Howard would part, always somewhat reluctantly. Each man returned to his own carrel until dinner. For Howard there was great joy in this Saturday routine.

  ‘Ah, now that is unfortunate,’ said Erskine upon hearing Howard’s news, and the sentiment covered not only Jerome’s situation but also the fact that these two men should be deprived of each other’s company. And then: ‘Poor Jerome. He’s a good boy. It is surely a point he is trying to prove.’ Erskine paused. ‘What the point is, I’m not sure.’

  ‘But Monty Kipps,’ repeated Howard despairingly. From Erskine he knew he would get what he needed. This was why they were friends.

  Erskine whistled his sympathy. ‘My God, Howard, you don’t have to tell me. I remember during the Brixton riots – this was ’81 – I was on the BBC World Service trying to talk about context, deprivation, etcetera’ – Howard enjoyed the tuneful Nigerian musicality of ‘etcetera’ – ‘and that madman Monty – he was sitting there opposite me in his Trinidad cricket-club tie saying, “The coloured man must look to his own home, the coloured man must take responsibility.” The coloured man! And he still says coloured! Every time it was one step forward, and Monty was taking us all two steps back again. The man is sad. I pity him, actually. He’s stayed in England too long. It’s done strange things to him.’

  Howard was quiet on the other end of the phone. He was checking his computer bag for his passport. He felt exhausted at the prospect of the journey and of the battle that awaited him at the other end.

  ‘And his work gets worse every year. In my opinion, the Rembrandt book was very vulgar indeed,’ added Erskine kindly.

  Howard felt the baseness of pushing Erskine into unfair positions such as this. Monty was a shit, sure, but he wasn’t a fool. Monty’s Rembrandt book was, in Howard’s opinion, retrogressive, perverse, infuriatingly essentialist, but it was neither vulgar nor stupid. It was good. Detailed and thorough. It also had the great advantage of being bound between hard covers and distributed throughout the English-speaking world, whereas Howard’s book on the same topic remained unfinished and strewn across the floor before his printer on pages that seemed to him sometimes to have been spewed from the machine in disgust.

  ‘Howard?’

  ‘Yes – here. Got to go, actually. Got a cab booked.’

  ‘You take care, my friend. Jerome is just . . . well, by the time you get there I’m sure it will have proved to be a storm in a teacup.’

  Six steps from the ground floor Howard was surprised by Levi. Once again, this head-stocking business. Looking up at him from beneath it, that striking, leonine face with its manly chin, upon which hair had been growing for two years and yet had not confidently established itself. He was topless to the waist and barefoot. His slender chest smelt of cocoa butter and had been recently shaved. Howard stretched his arms out, blocking the way.

  ‘What’s the deal?’ asked his son.

  ‘Nothing. Leaving.’

  ‘Who you on the phone to?’

  ‘Erskine.’

  ‘You leaving leaving?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right now?’

  ‘What’s the deal with this?’ asked Howard, flipping the interrogation round and touching Levi’s head. ‘Is it a political thing?’

  Levi rubbed his eyes. He put both arms behind his back, held hands with himself and stretched downwards, expanding his chest hugely. ‘Nothin’, Dad. It’s just what it is,’ he said gnomically. He bit his thumb.

  ‘So then . . .’ said Howard, trying to translate, ‘it’s an aesthetic thing. For looks only.’

  ‘I guess,’ Levi said and shrugged. ‘Yeah. Just what it is, just a thing that I wear. You know. Keeps my head warm, man. Practical and shit.’

  ‘It does make your skull look rather . . . neat. Smooth. Like a bean.’

  He gave his son a friendly squeeze on the shoulders and pulled him close. ‘Are you going to work today? They let you wear it at the wotsit, the record shop?’

  ‘Sure, sure . . . It’s not a record shop – I keep telling you – it’s a mega-store. There’s like seven floors . . . You make me laugh, man,’ said Levi quietly, his lips buzzing Howard’s skin through his shirt. Levi pulled back now from his father, patting him down like a bouncer. ‘So you going now or what? What you gonna say to J? Who you flyin’ wid?’

  ‘I don’t know – not sure. Air miles – someone from work booked it. Look . . . I’m just going to talk to him – have a reasonable conversation like reasonable people.’

  ‘Boy . . .’ said Levi and clucked his tongue, ‘Kiki wants to kick your ass . . . An’ I’m with her. I think you should just let the whole thing go by, just go by. Jerome ain’t gonna marry anybody. He can’t find his dick with two hands.’

  Howard, though duty bound to disapprove of this, did not completely disagree with the diagnos
is. Jerome’s lengthy virginity (which Howard now presumed had come to an end) represented, in Howard’s opinion, an ambivalent relationship to the earth and its inhabitants, which Howard had trouble either celebrating or understanding. Jerome was not quite of the body somehow, and this had always unnerved his father. If nothing else, the mess in London surely ended the faint whiff of moral superiority that had so far clung to Jerome through his teens.

  ‘So: someone’s about to make a personal mistake,’ said Howard, an attempt to widen the conversation. ‘A terrible one – and you just let it “go by”?’

  Levi considered this proposition for a moment. ‘Well . . . even if he does get married I don’t even get why marrying’s so like the bad thing all of a sudden . . . At least he got some chance of gettin’ some ass if he’s actually married . . .’ Levi released a deep, vigorous laugh that in turn flexed that extraordinary stomach, creasing it like a shirt rather than real flesh. ‘You know he ain’t got no chance in hell right now.’

  ‘Levi, that’s . . .’ began Howard, but up floated a mental picture of Jerome, the uneven afro and soft, vulnerable face, the women’s hips and the jeans always slightly too high in the waist, the tiny gold cross that hung at his throat – the innocence, basically.

  ‘What? I say somethin’ that ain’t true? You know it’s true, man – you smiling yourself!’

  ‘Not marriage per se,’ said Howard crossly. ‘It’s more complicated. The girl’s father is . . . not what we need in this family, put it that way.’

  ‘Yeah, well . . .’ said Levi, turning over his father’s tie so the front was at the front. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with shit.’

  ‘We just don’t want Jerome to make a pig’s ear of –’

  ‘We?’ said Levi, with an expertly raised eyebrow – genetically speaking a direct gift from his mother.

  ‘Look – do you need some money or something?’ asked Howard. He dug into his pocket and retrieved two crushed twenty-dollar bills, screwed up like balls of tissue. After all these years he was still unable to take the dirty green feel of American money very seriously. He stuffed them in Levi’s own low-slung jeans pocket.

  ‘ ’Preciate that, Paw,’ drawled Levi, in imitation of his mother’s Southern roots.

  ‘I don’t know what kind of hourly wage they pay you at that place . . .’ grumbled Howard.

  Levi sighed woefully. ‘It’s flimsy, man . . . Real flimsy.’

  ‘If you’d only let me go down there, speak to someone and –’

  ‘No!’

  Howard assumed his son was embarrassed by him. Shame seemed to be the male inheritance of the Belsey line. How excruciating Howard had found his own father at the same age! He had wished for someone other than a butcher, for someone who used his brain at work rather than knives and scales – someone more like the man Howard was today. But you shift and the children shift also. Would Levi prefer a butcher?

  ‘I mean,’ said Levi, artlessly modifying his first reaction, ‘I can handle it myself, don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I see. Did Mother leave any message or –?’

  ‘Message? I ain’t even seen her. I got no idea where she is – she left early.’

  ‘Right. What about you? Message for your brother maybe?’

  ‘Yeah . . . Tell him,’ said Levi smiling, turning from Howard and holding on to the banister either side of himself, lifting his feet up and then parallel with his chest like a gymnast, ‘tell him “I’m just another black man caught up in the mix, tryna make a dollah outta fifteen cents! ” ’

  ‘Right. Will do.’

  The doorbell rang. Howard took a step down, kissed the back of his son’s head, ducked under one of his arms and went to the door. A familiar, grinning face was there on the other side, turned ashen in the cold. Howard raised a finger in greeting. This was a Haitian fellow called Pierre, one of the many from that difficult island who now found occupation in New England, discreetly compensating for Howard’s unwillingness to drive a car.

  ‘Oi – where’s Zoor?’ Howard called back to Levi from the threshold.

  Levi shrugged. ‘Eyeano,’ he said, that strange squelch of vowels his most frequent response to any question. ‘Swimming?’

  ‘In this weather? Christ.’

  ‘It’s indoors. Obviously.’

  ‘Just tell her goodbye, all right? Back on Wednesday. No, Thursday.’

  ‘Sure, Dad. Be safe, yo.’

  In the car, on the radio, men were screaming at each other in a French that was not, as far as Howard could tell, actually French.

  ‘The airport, please,’ said Howard, over this.

  ‘OK, yes. We have to go slow, though. Streets pretty bad.’

  ‘OK, not too slow, though.’

  ‘Terminal?’

  The accent was so pronounced Howard thought he heard the name of Zola’s novel.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You know the terminal?’

  ‘Oh . . . No, I don’t . . . I’ll find out – it’s here somewhere – don’t worry . . . you drive – I’ll find it.’

  ‘Always flying,’ said Pierre rather wistfully, and laughed, looking at Howard via the rear view. Howard was struck by the great width of his nose, straddling the two sides of his amiable face.

  ‘Always off somewhere, yes,’ said Howard genially, but it did not seem to him that he travelled so very much, though when he did it was more and further than he wished. He thought of his own father again – compared to him, Howard was Phileas Fogg. Travel had seemed the key to the kingdom, back then. One dreamed of a life that would enable travel. Howard looked through his window at a lamp-post buried to its waist in snow supporting two chained-up, frozen bikes, identifiable only by the tips of their handlebars. He imagined waking up this morning and digging his bike out of the snow and riding to a proper job, the kind Belseys had had for generations, and found he couldn’t imagine it. This interested Howard, for a moment: the idea that he could no longer gauge the luxuries of his own life.

  Upon returning to the house and before entering her own study, Kiki took her opportunity to look into Howard’s. It was half dark, with curtains drawn. He’d left the computer on. Just as she was turning to leave, she heard it waking up, making that heaving, electronic wave-machine sound they produce every ten minutes or so when untouched, as if they’re needy, and now sending something unhealthy into the air to admonish us for leaving them. She went over and touched a key – the screen returned. His in-box, with one e-mail waiting. Correctly presuming it was from Jerome (Howard e-mailed his teaching assistant, Smith J. Miller, Jerome, Erskine Jegede and a selection of newspapers and journals; nobody else), Kiki refreshed the window.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Date: 21 November

  Subject: PLEASE READ THIS

  Dad – mistake. Shouldn’t have said anything. Completely over – if it ever began. Please please please don’t tell anybody, just forget about it. I’ve made a total fool of myself! I just want to curl up and die.

  Jerome

  Kiki let out a moan of anxiety, then swore, and turned around twice, clenching her fingers round her scarf, until her body caught up with her mind and ceased its trouble, for there was nothing whatsoever to be done. Howard would already be negotiating with his knees the impossible closeness of the seat in front, torturing himself about which books to retain before placing his bag in the upper storage – it was too late to stop him and there was no way to contact him. Howard had a profound fear of carcinogens: checked food labels for Diethylstilbestrol; abhorred microwaves; had never owned a cellphone.

  4

  When it comes to weather, New Englanders are delusional. In his ten years on the East Coast Howard had lost count of the times some loon from Massachusetts had heard his accent, looked at him pitiably and said something like: Cold over there, huh? Howard’s feeling was: look, let’s get a few things straight here. England is not warmer than New En
gland in July or August, that’s true. Probably not in June either. But it is warmer in October, November, December, January, February, March, April and May – that is, in every month when warmth matters. In England letter-boxes do not jam with snow. Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble. It is not necessary to pick up a shovel in order to unearth your rubbish bins. This is because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England’s got to give. Howard knew this, and so was suitably dressed for England in November – his one ‘good’ suit, topped by a lightweight trench coat. Smugly he watched the Boston woman opposite him overheating in her rubber coat, the liberated pearls of sweat emerging from her hairline and slinking down her cheek. He was on the train from Heathrow into town.

  At Paddington the doors opened and he stepped into the warm smog of the station. He wound his scarf into a ball and stuffed it in his pocket. He was no tourist and did not look about him, not at the sheer majesty of interior space, nor at that intricate greenhouse ceiling of patterned glass and steel. He walked straight out to the open air, where he might roll a cigarette and smoke it. The absence of snow was sensational. To hold a cigarette without wearing gloves, to reveal one’s whole face to the air! Howard rarely felt moved by an English skyline, but today just to see an oak and an office block, outlined by a bluish sky with no interpolation of white on either, seemed to him a landscape of rare splendour and refinement. Relaxing in a narrow corridor of sun, Howard leaned against a pillar. A stretch of black cabs lined up. People explained where they were going and were given generous help lugging bags into back seats. Howard was taken aback to hear twice in five minutes the destination ‘Dalston’. Dalston was a filthy East End slum when Howard was born into it, full of filthy people who had tried to destroy him – not least of all his own family. Now, apparently, it was the sort of place where perfectly normal people lived. A blonde in a long powder-blue overcoat holding a portable computer and a pot plant, an Asian boy dressed in a cheap, shiny suit that reflected light like beaten metal – it was impossible to imagine these people populating the East London of his earliest memory. Howard dropped his fag and nudged it into the gutter. He turned back and walked through the station, keeping pace with a flow of commuters, allowing himself to be bustled by them down the steps to the underground. In a standing-room-only tube carriage, pressed up against a determined reader, Howard tried to keep his chin clear of a hardback and considered his mission, such as it was. He had got nowhere with the vital points: what he would say, how he would say it and to whom. The matter was too deeply clouded and perverted for him by the excruciating memory of the following two sentences: