LITMIR.BIZ

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reborn. He wasn’t, but she did not stop thinking about Brian. ‘I’ll see him again. We promised to meet again. It was life or death,’ Anita said. ‘One of us had to go.’ A tough decision. I swung my tired feet off the bed. Thinking was getting me nowhere.

      The elevator was just as slow going down. The bartender was still leaning on the bar, not a customer in sight.

      I walked back to the Imperial Gardens and sat on a green park bench to smoke some marijuana and observe the end of Wednesday afternoon. Maids were clearing the red, blue, and green tables under the orange-and-yellow-striped umbrellas that said Tuborg, where a few people were still eating snacks among the flowers. The inscription on the gardens’ sundial read: ‘I only count your sunny hours/Let others tell of storms and showers.’ Now just one boy and girl were lying on the grass, not moving, as if they intended to spend the night here.

      Looking out over the tulips and trees and softly humming motors of twilit Cheltenham, I thought of Brian saying, on a visit home near the end of his life, ‘If only I’d never left here.’ I fieldstripped the cigaret end, tearing the short paper, rolling it into a tiny pill that would vanish, with the smoking material, into the wind. Then I crossed the Promenade, passing the third military monument I’d seen in this town. The two others were for Africa 1899–1902 and World War I. This one’s plaque read, ‘This memorial was originally surmounted by a gun taken at Sevastopol. During the war of 1939–1945 the gun was handed to the government to provide the metal for armaments.’ Though it was smaller, Cheltenham reminded me of Macon, Georgia, where I went to high school wearing an army uniform, carrying a rifle: the last place where I felt constrained to fieldstrip cigarets, not because of smoking marijuana, but to keep the area well-policed. Both are pretty towns with many trees.

      It was 6:44, and I just had time for a sandwich. Down the street was a café that looked as deserted as the bar at the Majestic, just an East Indian girl in a white uniform behind the counter. She was putting things away, getting ready to close, but she asked if I wanted to eat.

      I bought a watery orange drink and a cheese sandwich, because there aren’t many ways to ruin a cheese sandwich. A woman came in, took the money from the cash register, let the girl out the back door and locked it. As the girl left I realized that she had the only dark skin I had seen in this town.

      Back at the hotel, I was so cool and relaxed that my tape recorder was still packed away when the desk clerk called to say that a taxi was waiting. I loaded the recorder with tape and then decided to leave it.

      Before I could look over my notes the taxi pulled into the parking lane to let me out. The mustard-colored semi-detached houses with tiny squares of glass behind brick fences, perched uneasily on the rim of the middle class, looked so small and regular that I thought I must be at the wrong place. But I entered at the gate and went up to the front door, where a glowing plastic bell-ringer bore the name L. B. Jones. I rang the bell and waited, trying to smile. It was night now, and I was standing in a pool of yellow light under the porch lantern, cars racing past on the dark road, flashing in each other’s headlights.

      The little man who opened the door had receding grey hair and a rather broad but sharp-nosed face, red under the pale, lined skin. As I began talking, I couldn’t stop thinking that he was the same size as Brian, that they must have identical skeletons. He had Brian’s, or Brian had his, way of walking almost on tiptoe, holding his hands back beside his hips. He had the same short arms and small, strong hands, and though Mr Jones’ eyes, behind glasses framed with gilt metal and grey plastic, did not have the quality Brian’s eyes had of being lit from within, he had Brian’s funny one-eyed way of looking at things. He stood before me, one foot forward, hands down by his pockets almost in fists, peering with one eye.

      I said who I was, Mr Jones said he was glad to see me and led me into the living room, where I sat on a couch, my back to the front wall, and he sat in a stuffed chair printed with ugly flowers before the unlit electric fireplace. He told me that I was the fourth of my countrymen who had come to discuss writing about Brian. ‘People come with letters from publishers, then they go away and one hears nothing more. I don’t know what to make of it. I think they’re pulling my leg,’ he said, again turning one eye on me.

      I started to answer him, getting as far as, ‘Er, ah,’ when Brian’s mother came in. I struggled to my feet and said hello. She looked gentler than Mr Jones. She called him Lewis and he called her Louie, short for Louisa. Her eyes were a normal, pretty blue. Her hair was as yellow as Brian’s, a shade that appeared to age well if given the chance.

      We all sat down, Mrs Jones in a chair at one end of the room, me at the other end, Mr Jones in the middle, gazing at the cold fireplace. I tried to explain what I was doing, but the room was capturing all my mind. It contained, besides us and an orange tomcat, typically turgid English furnishings, an old Heathkit record player, an older radio, a black and white television set, a flowering bonsai tree under a glass dome, an American Indian figurine given to each of the Stones in 1964 by the German teen magazine Bravo, and on the mantle over the fireplace, a little rubber doll with bright red trousers and a white mane of spun nylon hair, the most vulgar possible caricature of Brian, and yet it seemed a totem to him, the central object in this tiny grotesque room. The orange cat curled in Mrs Jones’ lap. I asked his name, and she said ‘Jinx.’

      ‘Such a shame,’ Brian’s father was saying. ‘Brian could have been a brilliant journalist, he could always play better chess than anyone else at school, so much talent wasted.’ He put his back teeth together and grimaced as if a horrible transformation was taking place.

      Mrs Jones asked, ‘Did you have a good supper tonight, love?’

      I thought of the supper I had tonight and other suppers missed and other things than suppers missed and some of the things not missed, all because of what I had seen in her son’s eyes. ‘Fine, thanks,’ I said. Then I started asking questions.

      Mr and Mrs Jones met in South Wales, where they were living with their parents. Mr Jones’ parents were school-teachers. His father sang in opera societies and led the choir at church. Mrs Jones’ father was for over fifty years a master builder and church organist near Cardiff. Mrs Jones’ mother was sickly and so didn’t train for anything and was now quite well at eighty-three. Her parents were living, his were dead.

      Mr Jones studied engineering at Leeds University, then married and started working for Rolls-Royce. In 1939, with the war under way, he was transferred to Cheltenham, where he and Mrs Jones had lived ever since, he working as an aeronautical engineer, she giving piano lessons.

      Brian was born on the last day of February 1942. The Joneses’ second child, a daughter, died at about the age of two.

      ‘How did she die?’ I asked as gently as possible.

      ‘She died, and that’s all I’ll say about it,’ Mr Jones said. I tried to explain again why I was asking questions, but Mr Jones had been hurt too many times by lies and by the truth in print, and he was nowhere near ready to trust a writer. He told me that their youngest child, Barbara, born in 1946, now a physical education teacher, wanted no part of anything to do with Brian, and he asked me to leave her alone. He ground his teeth again. But he couldn’t stop himself from talking and bringing out family photograph albums.

      One photograph showed Brian about five years old, playing with a grey tabby cat.

      ‘One day when both Brian and the cat were very young, Brian announced that the cat’s name was Rolobur,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘“That’s Rolobur,” he said. Don’t know whether he was trying to say something else and it came out Rolobur, or what. He painted it blue once.’

      ‘The cat?’

      ‘With no idea to hurt it,’ Mr Jones said. ‘Which he didn’t, he used food coloring that soon came off, and the cat lived with us for about sixteen years.’

      ‘Brian was a strange child,’ his mother said.

      She started giving Brian piano lessons when he was six, and he studied it until he was fourteen. ‘But he wasn’t terribly interested,’ she said. ‘Then he started playing the clarinet.’

      ‘Which

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