Chim Chim Cheree / East Wind (piano version by Thomas Newman)
«Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date»
I was reading when Lance came into the living room.
"There is a girl outside who wants to see you, Mr. England. She's very insisting. She says her name is Sarah Vaughan."
I got up from my armchair immediately, leaving the book aside, a first edition I could have donated to a museum but decided to keep because I couldn't get rid of it in a million years. I thanked Lance and went straight to the door.
And there she was.
"Hello, Sarah."
I let her in. How out of place she was there, with those clothes too big for her, the wool hat, earrings in bunches and jeans ripped by the knees.
"I saw you on the television" she said.
"At least this time you were kind enough to come in through the door."
"Listen, did you tell France to say those things? About repentance."
"He thought of it himself. He just came up with it as he spoke" was it disappointment what I briefly saw in her face? "But I felt the same. I couldn't have expressed it better."
"Surely you just apologized because they had you by the balls."
"You're too young to speak that way."
"I am not a lady and we're not in the Victorian times, in case you didn't notice, so I can speak the way I want."
"No. I didn't say so for convenience. Let us say...I've been forced to face something I've overlooked for a long time. Sometimes you need a gun aimed at your face."
"Well, still, your brother...He...nobody, even him, deserved to die..."
"Didn't you say in revolution casualties are unavoidable?"
"I have the right to change my mind too, don't I?"
She was young and mercurial.
«And summer's lease hath all too short a date»
"What did you come for?"
"I just...wanted to say thank you. For not telling what I did to the police or my parents."
"Consider it a chance to build, instead of destructing."
"Only if you keep your promise. Never hurting someone again and...just getting involved in wars when Eurovision comes."
"I'll try."
"Fine. By the way, talking about Eurovision, we'd better go back to punk and forget about ballads and that crap. I'd like to win some time, you know?"
I laughed.
"Maybe next year. Do you have to do something now?"
"Why?"
"Maybe you'd like to stay and have something. I was about to prepare tea."
"Well..." Sarah doubted. "Alright. I have nothing better to do..."
When she passed by my side her perfume hit my nose. She told me later, when she started sharing confidences with me, what she put on the colognes they had for testing at the perfume shops.
"Your house looks smaller from outside. This is amazing. Hey, since we are here, why don't you show me what you have in here? You have things any museum would kill for. Hey, isn't that Mick Jagger?"
I stayed at the frame of the door gazing. Just gazing.
You have no idea of how much it hurt, Titania, to see her nosing around my belongings. I looked at her and saw Peter. The same childish curiosity in her eyes, since, as mature as she pretended she was, she was still a child. How she ran around the room, how she touched everything. Just like him.
Peter...
That is what I most regret out of everything I have done in almost two thousand years of existence. I pushed him away from me and looked down on him. Although they say it was not my fault, I think that is what got him killed. If I had been there, if I had protected him like an older brother is supposed to do...
Now it is too late to make amends and I will have to live with it for the rest of my life. Centuries and centuries...
«But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st»
Sarah could never fill that space. But...But if I can take a lost soul who looks for their place in the world under my wing...if I can fix the mistakes I made in the past...The mistakes I made with Peter, with Alfred, with Jett, Matthew, Jiao Long, Ralph, Muhammad, Michelle...
"Hey, I've seen there's a name apart from England in your mailbox, Arthur Kirkland, do you live with someone?"
"No, that's my human name. Uhm, it is an administrative necessity."
"May I call you that way, Arthur? England sounds so much weird. Yeah, I'll call you Arthur. What's this?"
"That? Oh, I can make a video-call to America and let him tell you himself. You will see. He'll love to mock me."
Peter, if you are watching from some place...and I hope you do...I want you to know I did care about you, little brother. I haven't replaced you. No one could ever replace you. I am just trying to do what I should have done.
I dedicate this to you...
