Chapter 2

Ego had sent out the invitations with a sense of foreboding; the group had proved to be positively incapable of successfully meeting up. Also, he had hoped to hold off from sending out the messages for a little longer. However, it had become clear that the time was here, and there was little he could do about it. He wished he could have shared in an abstract joy in seeing everyone together again, or spent idle minutes contemplating how they would all look, how they had changed, and how they would react together. It was with growing disbelief that he had watched the replies flood in, from the US, from Africa, from London, from an unreadable postcard, from assistants, from secretaries, and from hand-writing he could immediately recognise – all agreeing to meet back in Mile End. He still could not quite believe they would all successfully arrive – he had his eye on Alex’s delayed flight, Pat’s book signing on Charing Cross Road, and the vague response from Matt, his old knowledge of Lucy’s inability to be on time. At least, this time, he thought ruefully, he could count on himself. If he had not arranged the meeting, he was a likely candidate to cancel.
Lucy had been up the night before. She padded around a lamp-lit house in thick cashmere socks and a crumpled nightshirt, Death Cab for Cutie, not listened to for years, on low, clutching a mug, as if it would relieve the tense anticipation of seeing faces aged and lives changed. This anticipatory stress was felt by Sarah, as her plane landed in the early hours of the morning. She was greeted by a low-level, but pervasive grey that cannot be fully understood unless you have arrived alone in an airport an hour outside of London, after leaving a country of debilitating heat and bright sunlight. Sarah often travelled backwards and forwards – she tried hard to ensure her children had the same sense of extended family as she had had herself – but she had not managed to accustom herself to the stark contrasts between her homeland and the one she had adopted. This journey had been particularly poignant; as well as the Mile End reunion, it represented one of the last of these flights – she had recently decided that it was time to settle back in Britain. The travelling that had seemed so exciting when she was younger, now felt wasteful and mundane. She wanted her children to know their cousins and their grandparents, and feel a sense of their preceding generations. The importance of family and the assumed wisdom and respect for the elder generations was an aspect of life in the village that she particularly relished, and would miss in her move back to Britain. It was something she tried to encourage the British volunteers to adopt – although technology had increasingly entered the village she still asked the volunteers to rely on conversation and friendships with the locals. She had told the group of volunteer teachers and staff from the school about the reunion. They were sitting together, drinks in hand, on a Friday evening, recovering after a long hard week. As they watched their students kick a football around in the twilight, they discussed the reunion with increasing hilarity – at first thinking clearly about the intervening years, speculations becoming wilder until they discussed the possibility of obesity, hermits, people with eighteen cats, and likely danger of being stalked by an old friend, and finally, as the sun finally set, lewd comments about the possibility of passionate reunions.
Pat was pissed off. He had to keep reminding himself why he was there. People had turned up to see him; they bought his books and this allowed him to become sickeningly used to expensive lunches, quality alcohol, and having a butler. And besides, for every few dozen tourists and slathering mindless fans, there was a person worth knowing, a new contact. When he had first started these events, he had felt ridiculous and incongruous in the bookshop environment – so far removed from what he had expected his career to be, and an ideological distance from the banks where he had earned his first millions. Now, as bookshops had moved from selling the actual publications, which were much more accessible online, they had had to focus more on the human sense experience – providing meeting places for authors and readers, communities, nights focused on bringer together the reader communities from the internet, and a few copies for those customers who were committed to the archaic notion of holding a publication in one’s hands. Pat represented one of the biggest names; his ability to draw people out of their homes and into the shop surpassed that of many other writers. It was speculated that this was related to the controversial way his writing became known, and his column meant his opinions were ever present in many people’s lives. Even Pat, and his respected opinions, could not have anticipated the ever-widening effect of that first unwise email.