The Last Samurai

I thought I should not let her get away with this. I was still wearing his jacket; Red Devlin wouldn’t have let her get away with this.

I said: You could stop typing British Ostrichkeeper and get another job.

Sib said: There are too many people I don’t want to see. Anyway why are we talking about my problems? Tell me about this person who died. Were you friends?

I said: What’s the point in talking about him? He doesn’t have any problems. There’s no one to have his problems any more. Why don’t you go back?

Sib said: I don’t want to talk about it

Sib said: You know, whenever my father met somebody stupid who’d been to Harvard he took it as a personal insult.

I said: This is a reason not to go back to the States?

Sib said: You should have heard him when they gave a chair to Dr. Kissinger, a man with the blood of millions on his hands.

I said: For this you’re typing British Ostrichkeeper?

Sib said: The thing is

Sib said: It’s just

Sib paced up and down. At last she said: You know, I don’t know if you know this, Ludo, but if you have a motel you can always buy another motel.

I said: What?

Once you’ve got one motel you can always get another, said Sib. And if you can get another you can’t really pass up that kind of opportunity.

I said: What?

Sib said: It’s something you only really understand once you own a motel.

I said: As I was saying

Sib said that her Uncle Buddy had vaguely imagined that making a success of a motel might be a route out of accountancy, and that even at 30 it might not be too late to try something different. She said her mother had imagined that making a success of a motel might be a way of paying for musical training, since with her background she was not likely to win a scholarship anywhere she might actually want to go. She said her father had put up the money for the down payment and her mother and uncle had thrown themselves into making it a success, and one day it turned out her father had spotted the potential in another location.

I said: But

Sib said the thing was that the whole scope for profits in motels lies in spotting previously unspotted potential, and that her father had turned out to have an unsuspected flair for it. She said the potential of a place consisted in its being a place people were going to want to be in a few years’ time, and for it to be unspotted it had to be a place nobody wanted to be when you were buying the building or site for a future motel.

I said: But why

Sib said few places with unspotted potential boasted even an amateur chamber music society, let alone a symphony orchestra, so that musicians were even less likely to want to spend a lot of time in one than all the other people who had—

I waited for Sib to go on. I thought maybe if I didn’t say anything at all she would finally explain.

My father never talked about his father, said Sib. My mother complained constantly about her parents, who were always sending presents of sweaters from Philadelphia.

I waited for Sib to go on, and after a pause she went on:

A brown paper parcel would arrive at a motel going up on the outskirts of Pocatello. ‘Oh, my, God,’ my mother would say, splashing neat Scotch into a glass and drinking it in a single swallow. ‘Well, might as well open the damn thing.’ She would tear open the brown paper, tear open gold paper, open the shallow box from Wanamaker’s and lift from the layers of tissue paper a cashmere sweater in pale lemon or chartreuse or frosted plum, with mother-of-pearl buttons. ‘Well, might as well try the damn thing on,’ she’d say at last, shrugging into it and rucking the sleeves up to her elbows in the what-this-old-thing way she and her friends always wore cashmere sweaters. She’d take out a cigarette, crack a match and light up, sucking the smoke in deep though she always said it played merry hell with the voice. ‘It’s the hypocrisy of it that really gets to me,’ she’d say, and she’d sit down to start a note that began ‘Dear Mom, Thank you so much for the scrumptious sweater’ and sit smoking and staring into space.

I waited for Sib to go on but she didn’t go on. She picked up the remote. ON. PLAY.

I thought: This is an explanation?

STOP.

The thing is, said Sib. She walked up and down.

Do you know what Boulez says somewhere? she said.

No, what does Boulez say somewhere? I said.

Comment vivre sans inconnu devant soi. Not everyone can.

Fine, I said.

Do you know what I said when I woke up? said Sib.

No, I said.

Rage, rage against the dying of the night. You wouldn’t have wanted to hear that from your friend.

No, I said.

On the other hand what’s done is done and here I am and London, with all its shortcomings, is hardly a place of previously unspotted potential. How many people on the planet?

Five billion, I said.