I read the letter with a feeling of unease, then put it in one of the partitioned receptacles on the desk in my study and packed my briefcase for work. From a mahogany periodical rack I selected a publication to read on the tube-a digest of reports on lawsuits arising from shipping accidents around the globe.
Karen was in the room we call the breakfast room, feeding our baby daughter, Sophie.
Spring sunlight, with a tint of green from the foliage of the communal garden, came through the window, and there was a sound of birds in the cherry tree in our own private garden. I noticed that the tree was coming into blossom.
I stepped into the room to say goodbye. Karen smiled at me calmly, continuing to feed Sophie.
"You never met Dimitri, did you?" I asked her.
She shook her head.
"He's an old friend of mine. He's sent me a letter."
"Oh." My wife moved the spoon from the jar of puree to the flower-like mouth of our child and back again. Her hair was already up, brushed back from her forehead and fastened in a tightly-knotted bun. Her lips, full at the centre, but neat and small like the coil of hair on her head, were closed, as they always were the moment she finished speaking; a characteristic that gave an emphatic finality to her utterances.
"We were at school together," I said, "then at university, till he dropped out."
Karen tilted her face up again: serene, maternal, not especially interested.
"I haven't heard from him for years."
She said nothing, though she gave me a pleasant look, as if asking me to forgive her indifference. As a matter of fact I had always admired my wife's attitude to my past, which seemed to be that compared to the great fact of our having married each other, our previous lives were just unimportant sketches; first drafts full of clumsy experiment and fruitless detours.
I kissed her and Sophie goodbye, passing through to the living room that led into the front hall.
As if she now felt safe from the risk of a prolonged discussion, Karen called out-"That's nice of your friend to write. What does he say?"
"Not a lot. He wants to get together some time."
"Will you?"
"Yes, I suppose so."
On the tube I found myself unable to concentrate on the law reports. I hadn't seen Dimitri for almost 15 years, but I could still picture him with perfect clarity: dark, shiny eyes; the close-cropped reddish curls; barrel-chested frame, six inches shorter than mine. I'd always had to bend down in his company, and I liked to think of the slight stoop I had now as a record of our friendship-hardened in me like the crook of a plant bent too long towards the same source of light.
At university we had lived in the same house; a Victorian building at the end of a rundown terrace. I hadn't thought of the place for years and I remembered it now with a feeling of fondness. The big kitchen had been a hub of student social life, with its peculiar blend of hedonism and puritanical zealotry. Over the sound of reggae from the stereo Dimitri's voice would rise with its hornet-like buzz, explaining to someone exactly why Bakunin and Marx had despised each other, how guild socialism had developed out of syndicalism, what the differences were between Fourier's Phalanstery and Robert Owen's New Lanark. In the kind of riptide of oceanic brotherliness that can flood into the mind of a well-read 18 year old, he had discovered radical politics: Marx and Kropotkin, then Luxemburg, Gramsci, Luk?cs... What lustre those names once had! That must have been 1976 or 1977, a time of grandiose political rhetoric. Dimitri had referred to British politics as "The Great Duel," after Heine's phrase "The great duel of the destitute with the aristocracy of wealth..."
Gingerly following his lead, I had dipped my toe in the same waters. As the tube rattled towards Lincoln's Inn I found myself remembering the picket lines I had stood on alongside him, the torch-lit marches of the Anti-Nazi League against the National Front, the time I had thrown a flour bomb at a speaker from the Monday Club; I could still see the thickset face of the man-feigning imperturbability as the paper bag burst open on his pin-striped suit.
By the end of our second year even the limited privilege of being able to study at university had become offensive to Dimitri's principles. To the dismay of his tutors, he dropped out and went to live in Leeds, where the little revolutionary party he'd joined had its headquarters, taking a job as a labourer with a demolition company.
I visited him there once; a spur-of-the-moment detour on a trip to Edinburgh with a girlfriend. We had phoned from the motorway and followed Dimitri's directions to a dilapidated housing estate on the outskirts of the city.
Our reception was subdued, to say the least. Dimitri showed little curiosity about my life and when I asked about his own, he answered laconically, staring out of the window, as if our presence oppressed him and he was trying to draw strength from the sprawl of suburbs and derelict-looking factories spread out below. That was the last time we had seen each other.
I knew people like that at university. There was a whole gang of them who joined one of those parties and then just dropped out en masse. I thought they were complete idiots."
It was night. Karen and I were in the bedroom.
"Don't look at me. I'm covered in cream."
I turned away.
"Anyway I'm surprised you'd want to start up a friendship again with a person who could treat you like that." Karen brought her lips tidily together.
"We're meeting for a drink. I wouldn't necessarily call that starting up the friendship again."
Karen shrugged and stood up to go into the bathroom. After a while I heard her step quietly down the corridor to Sophie's room.
I lay still while she was gone, thinking of Dimitri. What could have prompted him to get in touch after all this time? The letter, which had been forwarded from my parents' home, said only that he was back living in London and that he would like to see me. There was no allusion in it to the fact that we hadn't seen each other for over a decade. In this omission I caught the loftiness, the note of slight condescension that had always been present in Dimitri's exchanges with me. On the phone, when I rang him to arrange the meeting, he had sounded almost offhand, as if it were I who had broken the silence between us. In his casual way he had suggested meeting in a pub in Dalston where he was living now, miles from where I lived or worked. I smiled to myself, remembering how tamely, willingly even, I had acquiesced.
Karen came back into the room and lay beside me, propped on her elbows.
"I wasn't meaning to be rude about your friend."
"That's alright, I'm sure he deserves it."
"He's probably feeling rather lonely these days."
"Maybe."
"And foolish too."
I looked at her.
"I mean with everything that's happened in the world. Like someone who put all their money on the wrong horse."
"Oh... No, I doubt whether he'd look at it like that at all."
I got up and went to wash. From the bathroom I stepped down the corridor to look at Sophie. She lay peacefully asleep, her hands either side of her head like two little starfish. I stood for a moment, thinking of Karen's last remark. It was something I might easily have thought myself, but it disturbed me oddly to hear it voiced. Privately, I had observed the events in the countries beyond what had once been the Iron Curtain with mixed feelings; it had been unsettling to find myself vindicated in the caution, the capacity for endless equivocation, the attachment to comfort and prosperity, that had delivered me to where I was today. It had felt like getting away with a crime, on the grounds that the crime had suddenly been made legal. It's alright, history had seemed to whisper complicitly in my ear, you have nothing to be ashamed of...
Under the cotton blankets, Sophie's little chest rose and fell just perceptibly: up, down, up, down; each motion regular and predictable and yet still surprising to me. As always when I observed it, a feeling of urgent protectiveness came into me. It was more or less superfluous however, considering the bars on the cot, the thick pile carpet beneath it, the baby alarm, the thermostat... Not knowing what to do with the feeling, I went quietly from the room.
Karen had turned out the light in the bedroom. A glow from the pale sodium lamp in the communal garden threw shadows of the cherry tree's knuckled branches against the curtains. I remembered when we had first come to look at the house-it must have been almost exactly two years ago because the tree was in full blossom. Karen was pregnant, and I had just made the move from community to shipping law that had dramatically raised our income. We had both laughed in disbelief at the sight of the tree from the bedroom window. The extraordinarily abundant clusters of blossoms bursting out from even the thinnest twigs had seemed comical, a massive over-calculation of nature; absurd and benign, like an enormous bank error in one's favour.
The pub was quiet when I arrived. A pale gleam from the brass-bracketed lamps lay coldly over the cumbrous furnishings. Empty chairs and stools stood around like giant chess pieces.
A figure in the corner of a horseshoe booth gave a casual wave of his hand.
"Paul, Hello."
"Dimitri!"
For a moment I hadn't recognised him. His hair-longer now and unkempt-had lost its colour, and his face was gaunt and sallow. He wore a lumpy grey coat over a T-shirt, with a white scarf around his neck.
"Good to see you Dimitri."
"You too. You're looking well."
I saw Dimitri take in my suit and overcoat with a faint sardonic glimmer.
On the table before him was a pint, a tumbler of whisky, and a pouch of rolling tobacco.
The drinks were fresh, but he accepted when I offered to get him another of each.
"Cheers" he said, as I returned with three glasses.
"Cheers, Dimitri."
We drank rapidly. Dimitri was forthcoming at first, with none of the aloofness of his behaviour in Leeds. He had been out of the country for much of the past decade, he said, working for a coffee-growing collective in Nicaragua until the fall of the Sandinistas, then in Cuba, where he had travelled with other members of his party, the WPSR, at the invitation of the government.
"That sounds impressive."
Dimitri shrugged, licking on a cigarette paper.
"It was interesting, I suppose." He began to describe his travels, though as he spoke I had the impression that the experience had become remote from him. His words sounded spent somehow. He broke off.
"Actually I don't believe in the idea of individual countries any more. Cuba or anywhere else."
"Oh?"
"As far as I can see a nation is just an expression of the human inability to give a shit about the life or death of other humans beyond a fixed limit. Or put the other way round, it's a way of organising and instituting people's apparently limitless desire to grind their heels in other people's faces."
I smiled. This sounded more like the old Dimitri.
"Do I detect a note of disenchantment?"
"With what?" A suddenly hostile glare faced me.
"With-the human race I suppose." Which was not quite what I had intended to say.
"Oh for fuck's sake." Dimitri turned away.
He finished off his pint, then downed his whisky and stood up to buy another round.
"And what about you?" he asked, returning with the drinks. "I ran into John Mackenzie"-John had lived in our house-"He said you'd become a barrister. That must have been a slog..."
"It was hard work, yes."
"But they pay you well for it?"
I nodded, warily. "The money isn't bad."
"Mackenzie said you'd bought a house on one of those private squares in Holland Park."
"That's true. Not one of the very big houses..."
"He said you'd told him you took home over two hundred grand. In a bad year."
He grinned at me. I felt myself turn abruptly red.
"It's absurd, I know, but what can I say?"
"Good luck to you! That's what I say." Dimitri raised his glass, still grinning.
The pub began to fill up a little. As if jostled awake, a jukebox blinked and started pumping out music energetically. It crossed my mind that Dimitri had summoned me tonight because he needed money. I began to try to formulate a position. What could I lend him without upsetting Karen? A thousand pounds? Perhaps just a few hundred. Or perhaps better to refuse altogether, politely but firmly; offer to help in some other way... He finished his drink. I pointed at the empty glasses.
"Get you another?"
"Thanks."
I bought the drinks and returned.
"You haven't said what brought you to London."
Dimitri frowned; "What brought me to London?" He reached for his tobacco pouch. "Let's see now... Boredom. I think that's what it was. Yes, boredom, as far as I remember."
I looked at him, saying nothing.
"Not much going on in Leeds any more. The WPSR fizzled out. They still exist, but we couldn't afford to run the building or the paper any more."
"Oh dear."
"Yes, isn't it a shame," Dimitri's eyes glittered acerbically. "But there we are." He spat a shred of tobacco from his tongue, and lit his cigarette which flared; sour and pungent.
"And what do you do with yourseIf," I asked. "Where are you living?"
"I live around the corner. Luxury pad. Floor. Ceiling. Doorknobs on the doors... As to what I do with myself... I, ah," he dragged on his cigarette, "actually I'm editing a new magazine."
"Really?"
"I thought you'd find that interesting... "
I smiled uncomfortably.
"What sort of magazine?"
"Oh... International. Utopian. Socialism in the post-Soviet era. Communism after the death of communism... That sort of thing..."
"Good for you!"
"Funny how many people say exactly that when I tell them about it... as if I'd volunteered to rescue a child from a sewer..."
I felt certain that he was about to make his pitch for a loan, and I decided impulsively that I would surprise him with my generosity. No sooner would he ask, than I would be writing out a cheque for whatever sum he named. I could already feel the impending satisfaction of doing this swelling pleasantly inside me.
"Does it have a name," I asked, "the magazine?
"Demos. It's modelled on Jean Jaur?s's paper L'Humanit?." Do you know Jaur?s? He was the leader of the French communists in 1905. Called himself a Marxist-idealist, which was a deliberate contradiction in terms given that Marx dismissed personal idealism as an irrelevance... As I point out in my first editorial-ha! that sounds impressive-Marx himself was in fact totally confused about this. On the one hand..."
Another wave of volubility took hold of Dimitri; rather unnerving this time. He spoke with a strange energy, reminiscent of his student days except that what had once been a straightforward enthusiasm, seemed to have turned into a kind of caustic inversion of itself... His eyes, red-rimmed now, filled up with a harshly sardonic expression, as if he were trying to exorcise some vague disgust or at least exasperation, directed equally at me, his magazine, and himself.
"Jaur?s described Marx's vision of the human race as a sleeping person floating down a river, just carried along with the flow. According to Jaur?s this may have been true enough once, but now the sleeper had been woken by the turbulence of history, and was going to have to take responsibility for itself if it didn't want to sink. What I ask in my editorial, is whether Jaur?s mistook his own energies, which were titanic, for a more definitive awakening of the species than was really the case. Because as far as I can see we're already exhausted with our little spell of consciousness and we just want to go back to sleep..."
He broke off with a grimace, as if his own words irritated him, and went to buy another round.
"Sure you won't have a whisky?"
"Yes, thanks."
He returned from the bar a moment later. "I appear to be a couple of quid short."
I reached for my wallet with alacrity and gave him the money. When he came back with the drinks he was once again taciturn. There was a prolonged and uneasy silence between us. I began to feel apprehensive. I had the sensation of being out of my depth.
"You know, I didn't expect to see you again," I heard myself say, "after our last meeting."
Dimitri knitted his brow, apparently trying to remember. He looked quite blearily drunk.
"When I came to visit you in Leeds."
"Oh."
"I had the feeling you'd written me off."
He frowned again, turning away.
"It was a hell of a surprise to get your letter. Nice-but pretty unexpected."
Suddenly he gazed straight at me. Here we go, I thought. I felt surreptitiously in my coat pocket: there was the little leather case containing my cheque book. Dimitri sat upright, breathing heavily through his nose, his broad chest heaving up and down under his coat. Slowly, with great deliberation, he laid one outspread hand and then the other on the table before him, and gripped the edge. For a moment he looked rather deranged, as if he were about to turn the table over. Then a malevolent glitter appeared in his eyes.
"I read a book about ants recently," he said. "Made me think of you. There's a species called honey pot ants who feed off honey-dew. You can't get honey-dew, whatever the fuck that is, in the dry season, so they've had to invent a storage system. They have a whole class called repletes-compulsive eaters who've evolved this pouchy gullet that can be distended to gigantic proportions. In the wet season the workers stuff these repletes with honey-dew till their abdomens swell up like balloons. They can't walk or do much of anything at all at this point, so what happens is the workers hoist them up and hang them upside down from the roof by their back claws like those bottles there"-he pointed at the bottles behind the bar-"and in the dry season just tap them for a snifter whenever they're thirsty, by stroking their heads. Easy as shoving a tumbler up at an optic."
He gave a chuckle.
"That's me, is it?" I said, "A replete?"
"Have to admit, it fits you pretty well, all things considered... No offence."
I smiled, trying to appear unperturbed. But I could feel the insult travelling into me with a peculiar force, as if there were nothing inside me to resist it.
Having delivered it, Dimitri seemed to lose interest in further conversation. I couldn't quite believe he had summoned me here simply in order to insult me, and yet he appeared to have nothing else to add. Perhaps it was just the belligerence of the alcohol, I told myself, and in an effort not to end the evening on a sour note, I tried to change the subject.
"I didn't mention I'd become a father, did I?"
"No."
"Little girl, Sophie, 17 months. Very lovely."
Dimitri looked at me vaguely. For a few minutes I kept up a conversation about fatherhood, more or less one-sided. Last orders had been called, and as I ground to a halt, Dimitri yawned and stood up, buttoning his coat.
"Time to head off."
We went outside. I turned to him, trying to prepare a suitable goodbye; one that would convey my disappointed fondness without stooping to rancour.
"You can have a copy of the magazine if you want," Dimitri said, before I could formulate my words.
"Oh... Thank you."
"Come up-I'm just over the road there."
I followed him across the road to his building. An uncarpeted wooden staircase led up from a narrow entrance that smelled of stale food. We climbed four flights and walked down a corridor to a bruised metal door. Inside was a room about the size of our breakfast room, with a mattress on the bare floorboards, and a yellow-streaked basin over by the window.
Kicking off his shoes, Dimitri pointed to a pile of papers in the corner.
"There, you can take one."
The papers were stapled in bunches of about 30 pages. I stepped over and saw the word Demos stencilled in black letters on the top sheet.
"It's been out a couple of years. I'm trying to get another issue together. Maybe you'd like to write something."
I looked at him, assuming he was being sarcastic. He shrugged, and flopped down on the mattress.
I picked up a magazine, realising that I hadn't fully believed the thing existed. It smelled inky; felt vaguely as if it were smudging my finger and thumb.
"How much do you charge for it?" I asked.
A muffled "Have it for the two quid I owe you," came from the prone figure.
I put the magazine in my briefcase.
"Well-good seeing you, Dimitri."
"Yeah, yeah. You fuck off now."
"Goodnight then."
A light was on in the drawing room when I got home. I climbed the front steps and looked into the room through the gaps in the half-closed Venetian blinds.
Karen was there with our friends Jane and Ed Maddox. Jane and Ed lived on the other side of the shared garden, and often came over for after-dinner drinks. They both worked in the City.
Liqueur bottles and coffee cups were set out on the table. Liqueur coffee was one of Karen's specialities.
I stood in the cool air, looking in. This was my own drawing room, and these were my friends, but the prospect of joining them was more than I could face. Quietly, I turned my key in the door and crept inside, treading softly along the corridor and up the stairs.
I went into the bedroom and took off my coat. From downstairs I heard laughter. I sat on the bed and took out Dimitri's magazine, holding it to the pale light that came in from the garden lamp. It was a tatty, rudimentary production, a relic from the brief moment between the fall of communism and the rise of the laptop; put together with just a typewriter and a photocopier, by the look of it. There at the front was the editorial Dimitri had spoken of-Idealism in History: Jean Jaur?s and the Millennium. I ran my eye over the dense paragraphs, some of which had been pasted crookedly to the original copy, giving a lurching effect. Grey, broken lines from overcopying lay across the pages in a kind of visual static. I tried to read the article but gave up after a few sentences. The thing seemed unutterably wretched; slightly unwholesome too: a relic that hadn't quite finished decaying.
I put it aside, stood up, crossed over to the window. A peculiar, anxious restlessness moved in waves through my stomach and chest.
"Paul."
My wife was standing in the doorway.
"Why didn't you come in and say hello?"
"I was just on my way down," I heard myself say.
She gazed at me, her lips neatly together. After a moment she turned and went back down. Shoaled clusters of petals on the cherry tree gleamed in the semi-darkness outside. Beyond them, curving up from the mansard roofs of the houses opposite, bright stars dotted the blue-bronze sky. For a moment it seemed to me there was something almost mocking in the incalculable abundance of these things. The blossoming tree; the thick, flowering borders of peonies and roses in the communal garden beyond, the great yellow and brown plane trees with their branches already heavy under a mass of new foliage; then overhead the teeming glimmer of an inexhaustibly profligate creation.
I went downstairs. Sounds of conviviality came from the drawing room. Karen was telling the Maddoxes that I had just been in Dalston.
"Catching up with a Trotskyite he hasn't seen since university," I heard her say "if you can imagine."
As I opened the door, I thought of the repletes Dimitri had described, and for a moment saw myself swollen and distended, hanging upside down from the ceiling of my drawing room, waiting to be milked. I realised it would be a long time before I would be able to rid myself of the image.
Ed and Jane grinned at me as I entered the room. I tried to make myself look cheerful as I said hello.
"Dalston?" Ed said, "you'd better have a drink old cock, then tell us all about it."
