Could that be why she’d taken such an interest, made such an effort with them all? Could it even – possibly, extraordinarily – be true?
Stephen
1999
England has changed in the four years he’s been gone. Stephen is surprised how strange it feels: the food in supermarkets, the advertising on billboards; the ubiquity of English in print, while other tongues weave around it in the air, and the way people move, gesture, respond to each other. There are some things, of course, that are indisputably new – buildings that have gone up or come down since he left; a political shift with the arrival of New Labour. Perhaps it’s simply that the unfamiliar throws the familiar into vivid, almost exaggerated relief: a recipe for the strange, doubtful nostalgia he feels every time he ventures out.
Today, leaving the motorway for smaller roads that run through countryside still lush despite the warmth of July, he is in a version of England even a City boy recognises by instinct: the modest hills and valleys of Gloucestershire, where small villages punctuate the politely graded greens of copse and grass and hedgerow. Has he missed this country? he wonders. If not London, then the ready access to pleasant, fertile countryside? It’s hard to say. It feels as though the person who left England is not the same as the one who has come back. Perhaps that’s the answer.
So what kind of person has he become, then? He is . . . well, he’s becoming a force to be reckoned with in a world few of his Cambridge contemporaries know about: the mysterious meeting place of high finance and cutting-edge technology. He’s becoming an expert on knowledge, and the future, and the future of knowledge: he knows what it is that you’ll need to be an expert in, to thrive in the decades to come. Since he graduated he has picked up a passable fluency in five languages, including several that are supposed to take years of study: Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin. Sight-reading psalm chants hardly even registers on the scale of challenges faced, or skills acquired.
And now it’s Wagner he’s planning to conquer, he thinks, as a tractor pulls out of a gateway in front of him and he applies the brakes with a quick glance at the clock. One of the great cultural phenomena of the Western world, which people seem either to love or to hate. Stephen’s responses to things tend to be more measured, but he’s keeping an open mind. The opportunity came out of the blue: the last three-quarters of the Ring Cycle, spread over a week, at an opera festival two hours from London. Just a single ticket, I’m afraid, Riordan Cartwright said. My wife hates Wagner. The first night was marvellous, but I’ve got to be in Sydney this weekend; you know how it is. Fine, Stephen said. Why not? He’s on holiday, after all, and the operas are on alternate nights. He tells himself that if there had been two tickets he’d have tried to persuade his mother to come with him, but the truth is that the single ticket is what really sold the idea to him. Three days on his own, doing something that he’ll probably never do again. Driving through the English countryside to listen to music the Nazis held dear.
This morning, while his mother read the newspaper (it pleases him that she sits and reads these days: he remembers her always on the move), he digested the synopsis from the programme Riordan gave him, so he knows what to expect. Valkyries and giants, warriors and gods and star-crossed lovers. He’s packed a picnic so that he can pass the long interval as he’s supposed to, and he’s ironed a dress shirt and unshrouded the dinner jacket he hasn’t worn since he graduated. Riordan’s directions prove a little sketchy, so he almost misses the turning, but here he is, bumping across a field and then joining a steady trickle of people emerging from Porsches and Bentleys and battered Land Rovers, tramping in their finery towards a collection of tents grouped around an elegant Cotswold house. Stephen leaves his picnic hamper under a tree at the edge of the garden and follows the crowd into a tent, where he purchases a glass of champagne.
The opera house itself is in a converted barn. It’s one of several Glyndebourne lookalikes that have sprung up recently. This one specialises in Wagner, which it regards itself as perfectly entitled to stage without the resources of Bayreuth or the Met. The reviews Stephen’s read allude to the distinctive identity of Micklethorpe’s supporters, but he’s in no position to judge whether this audience is different from the ones who flock to see Mozart or Puccini at other opera festivals. One or two people smile as though they recognise him, and he responds with a little nod. Some of the men, he notices, have opted for more eccentric versions of evening dress than the penguin suit: there are several velvet jackets, a couple of kilts, one or two in somewhat ostentatious clerical dress. Perhaps he might chance a hakama and montsuki one night, or even a thawb and bisht. Either would be cooler than a dinner jacket, although none of the men here are dressed in lighter garments than his. What strange people the English are, he thinks. How odd that he should feel less at ease here than he does in Damascus or Mumbai.
But as soon as the performance begins, he knows that he was right to come, and that he won’t regret the time or the money or the mild discomfort of the experience. He’d expected to have to work hard to engage with the music and to bear the sheer length and scale of it, but instead he is instantly drawn into the fantasy world it conjures. The German presents no problem for him, of course, and the acting is good, the characters convincingly passionate. There’s even a moment when he laughs out loud, as Brünnhilde promises Siegmund the services of a harem of wish-maidens in Valhalla. The interval arrives sooner than he anticipated, and he thinks with pleasure of eating his picnic in the last of the evening sun.
But he’s not allowed to get to it just yet. As the lights go up, the woman on his left, a slight, sixty-something grande dame in yellow silk, turns to him with an irresistible air of authority.
‘Wagner is not a laughing matter,’ she says.
‘I beg your pardon?’
Her voice is slightly nasal, but perfectly audible. ‘Wagner is not a laughing matter,’ she repeats. ‘If you want to laugh, young man, go home.’
Stephen is astonished.
‘Madam,’ he protests, ‘I laughed at one line.’
‘At one of the most exquisite moments in opera,’ she says. ‘You are amongst those who take Wagner seriously: you may not come here and laugh at it.’
It occurs to Stephen to say that since he has bought a ticket he may do what he bloody well likes; or even that he has spent the last few years in countries where civil liberties are less assured, but in England, as far as he knows, there is not yet a proscription on mirth; but he doesn’t much like confrontation. Besides, there is another hour and a half to go, and he rather fears that he may have to sit next to this terror not just for the rest of the evening, but for the rest of the cycle.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he says again. He doesn’t smile, reckoning that any further sign of levity would go amiss. He glances beyond her, noting a distinguished English gent and a girl close to his age, wearing a white dress and, at present, an expression like thunder.
‘Hmmph,’ says the woman. She gets to her feet, and her family do the same. Stephen waits until they have exited at the end of the row before he follows: to his relief, his neighbour on the right has gone out the other way.
It would be possible to feel deflated by this encounter, but Stephen isn’t easily deflated. Instead he stores it away as part of the cultural experience of the evening, and seeks out his picnic, grateful that no one else has chosen a spot close to his.
He’s pouring coffee from an old thermos when he spots the girl in white, walking along the line of trees towards him. Going back to the car for something, he assumes, but as she gets closer he realises that she has come to look for him. She stops a few feet away, as though uncertain of her reception.
‘I’m sorry about Mummy,’ she says. ‘She’s extremely rude. She doesn’t care what she says to anyone.’
Her voice is quite different from her mother’s, low-pitched and pleasant.
‘That’s nice of you,’ Stephen says. ‘Don’t worry; I’ll live to fight another day.’
&n
bsp; ‘I suggested that I change seats with her, but she wasn’t keen. She thinks you’d be a bad influence, I’m afraid.’
‘She’s quite right, of course.’ Stephen smiles. ‘Do you want some coffee?’
She shakes her head, then seems to think about sitting down, but doesn’t. ‘I’m Suky,’ she says. ‘Astonishingly enough not a Wagnerian name.’
‘Stephen,’ he says. ‘Have the rest of your family got Wagnerian names?’
‘There’s only me. I’m sure if I was a boy they’d have called me Tristan or Siegfried, but even they couldn’t quite stomach Brünnhilde, thank God.’
‘That would have been quite something in the primary school playground.’
She laughs. ‘Actually, it wouldn’t have been that odd at my school.’
A little way off, a handbell rings, signalling the end of the interval. Stephen spots the teenage boy whose job it is to summon them back to the auditorium wending his way towards them; a dark-haired boy in a dinner jacket that’s rather too large for him.
‘Back to the fray,’ says Suky. ‘Are you here of your own accord? I suppose you must be, if you’re on your own. Mummy ought to be impressed by that.’
‘I bought the tickets from a friend,’ says Stephen. ‘He had to fly to Australia at short notice.’
‘The fat man who was here on Wednesday?’
‘Yes.’ Stephen grins. Riordan Cartwright, global mogul, reduced with the same efficiency Suky’s mother employed on him. The fat man who was here on Wednesday; the young man who laughs at Wagner.
Suky doesn’t quite walk beside him; she stays half a step ahead and a couple of feet to the left. Even so, her mother spots her in his company and glares.
‘Hello again,’ says Stephen. ‘I suppose we ought to be introduced, if we’re going to be neighbours for the rest of the week. I’m Stephen Evans.’
‘Lucy Atkins,’ says Suky’s mother, with a mixture of ice and graciousness-designed-to-instruct. ‘This is my husband, Peter. Lord Justice Atkins.’
Stephen hears Suky stifling a snort of laughter.
*
Stephen is determined to devote the whole of Saturday to his mother. Janet Evans has put a brave face on widowhood: Kenneth was almost ten years older than her, so it was always on the cards that he’d predecease her, even if neither of them anticipated that he’d barely reach retirement age. A year on, her routine continues much the same as always. She’s still child-minding, her house filled from Monday to Friday with a gaggle of tiny children who adore her, their hours occupied with a familiar routine of walks to the park, painting at the kitchen table and playing in the sandpit in the garden.
She has put less of a brave face on the departure of her sons – Stephen to the far corners of the world, as she puts it, and Robert to a residential community where he can have some independence and be properly looked after. Stephen has seen for himself that it’s a wonderful place, the best possible solution for Robert, and he’s already started to donate a regular sum to the charity that runs it. But he can also see that it’s been a terrible blow to his mother, however tough the burden of caring for Robert had become.
As he lies awake in his old room on Saturday morning, he looks around at the boyish clutter that still fills the shelves. It seems no time at all since he was dependent on parents he assumed to be ageless and invulnerable, and now he’s his mother’s mainstay. He’s used to responsibility – he has more on his shoulders already, in some ways, than either of his parents ever did – but this duty of care feels unexpectedly weighty. Emotional responsibility rather than financial, he thinks; and a responsibility conferred by birth rather than by choice. Except, of course, that his has nothing to do with birth.
That thought causes another tug on his conscience – and on his heart. He never wondered, as a child, what might have happened to him if his parents hadn’t adopted him, but he thinks about that now, and about how much there is that he and his mother have never discussed. He sees her in his mind’s eye as a woman who has always been grateful for what she’s had, but he wonders whether she is essentially unrequited by life. Has he – have he and Robert – been enough recompense for her infertility? Has losing Robert revived the pain of those early years of childlessness? None of this, he knows, could ever be discussed, but it seems to him that he ought to consider questions like these if he’s to look after her properly.
He throws off the duvet and pulls on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, thinking that he’ll go down and make his mother a cup of tea, as his father did every morning. He treads carefully, avoiding the step that creaks, wondering whether there’s time to nip out to the bakery down the road. He remembers their bread, so soft and dense and delicious that he used to eat a whole loaf in a sitting sometimes. But as he reaches the front door he hears his mother’s voice from the kitchen.
‘Stephen?’
‘Mum.’ He turns sharply. ‘I thought I’d beaten you downstairs. I was going to go and buy things for breakfast.’
‘That’s a nice thought,’ she says, ‘but there’s no need. Everything’s ready.’
Coming into the kitchen, he sees that the table is laid: cereal, jam, toast rack, eggs ready on the side. His mother is in her dressing gown, not out of laziness, he knows, but because they always used to make a special occasion of Saturday breakfast in pyjamas. He glances down at his own clothes and smiles.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t have any pyjamas. I don’t usually wear them these days.’
‘We must get you some,’ she says. ‘You’ll need them when you’ve got children. I can tell you’ll be one of those modern fathers who gets up in the night when they wake, won’t you?’
Stephen laughs, and his mother shoots a glance at him.
‘I’m jumping the gun. I know I shouldn’t.’
She passes the teapot, and he pours himself a cup. It’s plain from the way her words slipped out that she has given a good deal of thought to the matter, even if he hasn’t. And of course, he thinks, grandchildren are what she wants; what he owes her, even. Grandchildren perhaps settled nearby, if he really must keep flying off around the world. He feels a clutch of dread that takes him by surprise. A half-remembered phrase from English A level flits into his mind: something about a man with a fortune being in want of a wife. He doesn’t exactly have a fortune yet, but he has plenty to support a family, and he’s attractive to women, he knows that. But things aren’t that simple for him. Oh, they’re not: and how can he begin to explain that to his mother?
‘So,’ he says, ‘what kind of wife would you recommend for me, Mum?’
She looks hurt. ‘Don’t make fun of me, Stephen.’
‘I wasn’t.’ He leans across the table and puts a hand over hers. ‘I don’t get much chance to meet people, you know. Not socially. And you’re the expert on marriage.’
She colours slightly. ‘Do you want cereal?’ she asks. ‘Or straight on to toast?’
‘I’ll have some Grape Nuts,’ he says. He’s never seen Grape Nuts anywhere else in the world, but they’re here every time he comes home.
*
They spend the day in what Stephen hopes is exactly the way his mother would choose. Since she defers to him at every turn it’s hard to be sure, but she’s always had a way of turning things to her way of thinking. Oh, but I thought you wanted to check that tyre first, she’ll say, or There’s really no need to go all that way on my account.
The bathroom cabinet is falling off the wall, so he takes her to Habitat, where she objects to the price of a new one, but only in principle, it seems; they choose a sleek stainless-steel version with a mirrored door. Stephen finds his father’s tools and puts it up – an achievement which gives him a sense of pride he can’t confess to his mother, in case she realises how hopeless he really is as a handyman – and then he drives them round the M25 to visit Robert.
It’s almost an hour and a half each way in the car: a serious undertaking for his mother on her own, Stephen thinks, as they spin along the moto
rway. She’s never liked driving long distances, and he can tell from the set of her face that she’s thinking about what it’s like to make this journey alone.
‘It’s quite a way,’ he says.
‘There’s a train,’ his mother replies, ‘but it takes a long time. You have to go across London.’
‘We could always get someone to drive you,’ he says, and she turns a horrified face towards him.
‘You mean a taxi? All that way? It would cost hundreds of pounds, Stephen.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ he says, but he can see that it does; that she’s offended by the profligacy of this suggestion. He can hear an echo of an accusation, in the silence that follows, that he’s trying to buy his way out of his obligations. He feels a flash of irritation that briefly eclipses his guilt.
‘Look at the fields,’ his mother says. ‘You’d never guess it had been so dry.’
*
On Sunday afternoon, Stephen prepares to leave for Micklethorpe with mixed feelings. He hates to leave his mother alone on a Sunday, and the prospect of another evening alongside the Atkins family is not very enticing, even if they parted on polite terms at the end of Friday’s performance.
But his mother urges him away: there’s plenty on the television on Sunday evenings, she tells him, and she knows he won’t enjoy that as much as ‘your opera’. And once the decision is made, Stephen feels a flutter of excitement. He considers for a moment the possibility of donning some fancier form of dress, then settles for digging out the lime-green and yellow St Anne’s College bow tie he used to wear to sing close harmony. He grins at himself in the mirror as he ties it: a little more subtle than that Lord Justice business, he thinks, but he suspects it won’t go unnoticed.
And it doesn’t.
‘St Anne’s,’ says the judge, as they take their seats. ‘When were you there?’
Every Secret Thing Page 15