Perfect Day

passion.

    The boating attendant grabs hold of the prow and pulls them in. There’s the soft thud of wood on wood, and Kate exhales, as if she’s been holding her breath all the time they’ve been on the water. Alexander steps out of the boat first then stretches out his hand to her. She takes it. He pulls her up and out of the boat and she stands on the jetty again, slightly wobbly. She looks at their hands locked together, then up at him. They walk away from the lake, still holding hands.
    It’s warmer away from the water, almost summery.
    On one of the open playing fields, there’s a group of men playing softball. A heap of sports bags on the sidelines has a row of computer cases beside it. The paths are deserted apart from one or two lone figures. It’s that transition time of day when mothers are waiting for their children outside school. In half an hour, the park will be full of little boys and girls tearing around running off the energy they’ve cooped up all afternoon in a sunny classroom.
    ‘What’s that?’
    Kate’s pointing at a group of buildings in the distance surrounded by a fence.
    ‘London Zoo,’ he says.
    ‘You can see into it without paying!’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Well, I never knew that,’ she says.
    They stop and watch, right opposite the elephants’ enclosure. One keeper is brushing the dust off an elephant’s back with a broom; the other orders a second elephant to lie down, which it does, slowly, almost gracefully, offering up its foot for the keeper to clean with a stick.
    ‘She’s having a manicure,’ Kate observes.
    There’s something incredibly calming about watching the unhurried preparations for the elephants’ afternoon bath. When the beasts eventually lope into the water, Kate and Alexander start walking again.
    ‘So, you used to live round here, did you?’ Kate asks.
    He knew that he was not going to get away without further questioning after the meeting with Helge , who looked much the same today as she did — what? — thirty years ago. Like a tweed-covered barrel, Joan used to say.
    They’re on the Broad Walk, beside the wolves’ enclosure.
    ‘Sometimes, as I lay in bed, if it was a very clear night, or about to rain, I could hear the wolves howling,’ Alexander says.
    He can’t work out whether it’s chance, or whether he has chosen to court danger by coming back to an area of London he’s familiar with.
    He and Joan lived on the wrong side of the Chalk Farm Road in a street that was virtually under a railway line, but in distance it wasn’t far away. Some of his friends lived in Primrose Hill. Before they all went to university, they used to hang out in the pubs round here. Then, they were traditional boozers with sweaty-faced landlords, red wallpaper and old men coughing in the corners. Now, he knows from reading the Sunday supplements, they’re stripped-out spaces that serve char-grilled vegetables and pasta adorned with a few shavings of parmesan or white truffle.
    Pop stars live here now.
    Then, the only famous person was Kingsley Amis. His mother had met him once at a party in the Sixties and she used to get uncharacteristically fluttery when they passed him walking up Regent’s Park Road to the pub. She would say hello, and he would return the greeting with a polite, but slightly mystified smile. And later, Alexander would hear her recounting to her friends: ‘We ran into Kingsley, looking tired and emotional, as per usual, the old lech ...’
    In those days his mother’s friend Helge lived in a tiny top floor flat in a converted Victorian house on Ainger Road . Perhaps she still does. Then, the dogs she owned were a couple of heavy bull terriers with short bristly white coats like pigs. They used to bound around the flat, playing madly enthusiastic doggy games. He and Joan would sit side by side on the only sofa, like defendants facing Helge who sat on a hard kitchen chair. Slowly the room would fill with smoke from Joan’s cigarettes that muffled the pervasive doggy smell. While his mother and Helge gossiped unkindly about the other members of the local Labour Party, Alexander would pass the time imagining what the people who lived downstairs felt about the constant pounding of their ceiling by the pig-dogs.
    In his mind he created a mild-mannered couple called the Dismals who were driven to feats of uncharacteristic wickedness by the constant aggravation. He had them devising increasingly desperate plans to rid the house of the dogs,