by Nick Hornby
* * *
—
In the restaurant, the boys suddenly got excited about going with Joseph on the train to their grandparents’ house, for reasons that Joseph couldn’t quite understand.
“Sounds great,” said Joseph, when he’d heard about the W.H. Smiths they visited at the station, where they were allowed to buy any sweets they wanted.
“Plus they’ve got a dog,” said Dylan.
“Cool.”
Lucy felt that she ought to explain, and to dampen the mounting excitement.
“We’re going tomorrow,” said Lucy. “We always go for lunch on my birthday weekend. They used to come up here, but . . .”
“But then Dad called Grandma the ‘c’ word,” said Al.
“Ah,” said Joseph. “That would have put them off.”
“And they don’t like coming to London anymore anyway.”
“Where do they live?”
“Brexit Central,” said Dylan.
“That’s what Mum calls it,” said Al.
“She didn’t used to,” said Dylan. “But then they went and voted out.”
“Yay,” said Al. “Out, out, out.”
“I thought you’d changed your mind,” said Lucy.
“Yeah,” said Al. “I have. But I was supporting out on the day, so I’m still claiming the win.”
“Anyway. They live in Kent,” said Lucy. “They retired there.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Essex,” said Lucy. “Same sort of thing, really. I don’t know why they bothered.”
“So you’re not coming?” said Dylan.
“No,” said Lucy. “He’s got better things to do.”
“I haven’t,” said Joseph.
That was true. He could make some music, but he and Jaz were still trying to find a date when he, she, and the recording studio were all free at the same time, and they hadn’t even bothered trying during the summer. What else was there? Church, football on T.V., maybe a wander around Wood Green with anyone who wasn’t up to anything.
“Good,” said Dylan.
Lucy smiled. It wasn’t a beaming smile, though. It was thin and awkward. There would be more to talk about later.
* * *
—
“You don’t really want to come with us, do you?” said Lucy when they were plugging in and unplugging electrical devices, the last ritual of the evening.
Joseph laughed.
“It sounds like there may be a right answer to that question.”
“I mean, what would your status be?”
“Does it matter? Would anyone even ask?”
“They’d probably presume you were some kind of hired help.”
“What about if we started making out in front of them?”
“I can feel a panic attack coming on already.”
“So let’s not bother,” said Joseph. He could do with some new jeans.
“Do we have to make out?”
“That was a joke.”
“I know, but . . .”
“‘But’? Where do you get a ‘but’ from?”
“Well. We are making out.”
“Yeah, but not constantly. We don’t have to rack up ten hours a day. We can give it a rest when we’re visiting your parents.”
“I think I would have to tell them. Before we went.”
“Not by text, I’m guessing.”
“They don’t really do text. Oh, shit. This is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“It’s an old movie. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Their daughter is going to marry Sidney Poitier.”
“I’m guessing there’s someone black in this movie. Or white.”
“Sidney Poitier?”
“Nope.”
“He was the most famous black actor ever for a while.”
“So this nice white girl is going to marry Sidney Whatsit.”
“Yes.”
“What’s that got to do with us?”
“Well . . .”
“That was a joke as well.”
“Oh. So he’s marrying this white girl, and her parents are liberals, but the dad doesn’t want her to marry him because of all the prejudice in the world. But this film was made in 1967. And here I am, thinking about it in 2016.”
“Well, don’t.”
“Why not? I’m not sure my parents are even liberals.”
“First of all. I don’t know about your parents, or Kent, but nobody gives a shit in London.”
“Yeah. It’s my parents in Kent I’m worried about.”
“Plus we’re not getting married.”
“What difference does that make?”
“It isn’t something they have to get worked up about.”
“Won’t stop them worrying.”
“Worrying? What is there to worry about?”
“They’re old. They worry.”
“Right. I’m going to buy some new jeans and then I’m going to watch Arsenal on T.V.”
Lucy didn’t say anything. She wanted to say, “Are you sure?” but she had to time it right. If she said it too quickly he would know that she was the problem, not her parents.
“Are you sure?” she said eventually.
And Joseph knew that she was the problem, not her parents. He didn’t stay the night.
There was nothing very beautiful to see on the bus home: neon-sick empty fast-food joints with names like L.A. Chicken, random gangs of Deliveroo drivers sitting on their scooters and motorbikes, talking and smoking, a group of teenagers running up and down and shrieking, a man taking a piss through the railings, three or four of the little shopfront churches that his mother lorded it over. This part of the city wasn’t easy to love, he supposed. You wouldn’t bring a tourist up here, anyway. But he did love it. He belonged here. And he didn’t just belong to anywhere on the 134 bus route, either. He felt just as at home in Whitechapel, or Brixton, or Notting Hill. He loved it even more knowing that if he went to Kent, or to Italy, or to Poland, he would find people who didn’t really want him to have a home anywhere, apart from countries and cities he knew nothing about and would probably never visit. Lucy couldn’t do anything about that. Being with her somewhere that didn’t have a London Underground station would probably make it worse for both of them. He felt stupid for even thinking about a family excursion.
* * *
—
After the third or fourth time that the boys mentioned Joseph— “Joseph said . . .,” “Joseph can do . . .,” “Joseph makes us . . .,” “Joseph would like . . .”—Lucy’s mother finally asked the question.
“Who’s Joseph?” Al repeated incredulously.
“Well, how am I supposed to know?” said Lucy’s mother.
Margaret Lawrence was not an easy woman. You could perhaps have predicted that just by looking around her sitting room (and it was very much hers, not her husband’s); whenever Lucy visited, she was struck by the pinched primness of everything—the muted colors, the noncommittal art on the walls, the neat coasters on the little mahogany side tables. When the time came, Lucy would have to sell the entire contents of the house. There wasn’t a single thing, a book or a piece of crockery, that she’d want to keep. When she despaired of the mess at home, she sometimes found herself thinking, yes! Good! It’s not like Cordwallis Road, where nothing is out of place! Even the dog that the boys inexplicably loved seemed characterless. It simply lay there, in its basket, toning in with the room.
“I just thought you’d know,” said Al.
“So who is he?”
“You tell them, Mum,” said Dylan.
“They don’t want to know about Joseph,” Lucy said.
“Why don’t you want to know about Joseph?” said Al, looking at h
is grandmother.
“We do,” said Margaret.
Her husband smiled benignly. Lucy wondered whether Ken was all there, but she’d been wondering that since he was in his mid-fifties. He had checked out around then, not due to any illness or accident. He just seemed to decide that he’d had enough of engaging with the world around him, or the people who lived in it. Or maybe he had simply come to the conclusion that the people he knew best had said everything they had to say, but they said it again anyway, and he was unwilling to go around for a third or fourth time. He listened to choral music and, now he was retired, went on long cycling trips to do brass-rubbing. He’d talk about that, if you asked him, but asking him was always a mistake. Sometimes, when something engaged him enough, or he recognized the germ of a new experience in his inner circle, he’d check back in again, and say something shrewd, or at least pertinent. This was even more unnerving and depressing, in a way. It just made Lucy feel like she’d bored him stupid the rest of the time.
“They do,” said Al. “Tell them.”
“Joseph looks after the boys sometimes.”
“And the rest,” said Dylan, with a snigger.
“Anyway, he doesn’t look after us much, because he and Mum stay in most of the time.”
“We’ve been out,” said Lucy. She didn’t know what point she was trying to make. She certainly didn’t seem to be denying that there was a connection that went beyond babysitting.
“Basically, they’re going out,” said Al. “But they haven’t said anything to us.”
“So a strange man sits watching T.V. every night and nobody says anything?”
“No,” said Dylan. “It’s Joseph. He’s not strange to us.”
Lucy could see that if she just sat gaping over the remains of the lamb, she wouldn’t have to say anything. The boys would do it all for her—yes, in an unfortunate and cack-handed way, but one that had the virtue of requiring nothing from her. She wasn’t sure that the boys understood how much older she was than Joseph, and why it mattered, but if they could somehow drop his age into the conversation, her work here was done.
Her mother looked at her, bewildered.
“What are they saying?”
“They are saying, I think,” said Ken, “that Lucy has a boyfriend.”
“Oh,” said her mother. “Is it serious?”
“He’s twenty-two,” Lucy said. That sounded disloyal to her, as if she were answering the question in the negative because of Joseph’s youth, but she was trying to chuck as much information as she could through the window while it was open. “And he’s black.” She didn’t say that out loud. Joseph’s age had already exploded right in front of her mother’s face, causing shell shock and temporary muteness. Lucy didn’t want to witness her mother’s views on that other piece of information.
“Yeah,” said Al. “So he plays FIFA with us and he still remembers maths.”
“I remember maths,” said Lucy indignantly.
“You remember numbers. That’s different,” said Dylan.
“Well,” said Ken. “Fun for all the family.”
“It really is,” said Al with great enthusiasm.
“How did you meet him?” said Margaret.
“In the butcher’s,” she said. “He works there on Saturdays.”
“And how did you go from that to this?” said Margaret.
“He babysat for us a couple of times,” said Dylan. “And then BOOM!”
This made Al giggle uncontrollably. Even Lucy’s parents smiled.
“Any further questions?” said Lucy.
“Are you happy?” her father asked.
“She’s miles better than she was,” said Al. “Can I ask you something, Grandad?”
There was a look on his face that Lucy didn’t like. Permission to ask did not bode well. She was guessing the question would involve, or end up involving, Brexit and/or something worse.
“Now is not the time,” said Lucy.
“You don’t even know what I’m going to ask!”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“How can it not matter?”
All questions led to trouble, just as all roads led to Rome.
“Grandma wants to know about school,” said Lucy.
“No, she doesn’t,” said Dylan. “Look at her face.”
“Don’t be rude,” said Lucy.
“I wasn’t saying that’s her actual face. I’m saying she doesn’t want to know about school.”
“Tell me about school,” said her mother, suddenly bright.
13
The play started before anything even happened on the stage. There were actors in the audience, shouting at each other across the aisles, blowing each other kisses, laughing, running around. Lucy never really enjoyed that sort of immersion; you needed time to yourself, she thought, between getting off a bus and settling into the evening. There was the queue for the loo, and the queue for ice creams and chocolate, and you usually had to say “excuse me” to an elderly couple who sighed heavily and looked at you as if you should have arrived before them, as they started to pick up coats and get slowly to their feet so that you could push past them. Also, she was afraid that an actor in the stalls would tell her she was a saucy wench, or wink at her, or ask her to buy a sweet juicy orange. She never knew what you were supposed to do. And the lights were on! There was no magic yet, but magic was being forced upon you.
* * *
—
Joseph, meanwhile, just felt that all his worst fears were being realized. If God had meant people still to be going to the theater, he wouldn’t have invented T.V. And when you watched T.V., people didn’t wander out of the screen and into your living room, embarrassing you. That, he now realized, was actually the best thing about T.V. There was a physical barrier between the viewer and the characters. That might even have been why T.V. was invented. “The theater is great, but is there a way of stopping people talking to us directly? It’s awful when they do that.” He thought he’d got away with it, but just as he was about to follow Lucy down the row, a man came up to him wearing a ruffle and carrying a tray, asking if he’d like to sample some venison-and-kidney pie. There were literal pies on the tray, cut into little chunks, and they stank. Joseph gave him a look that would have worked in Tottenham, let alone here, and the guy decided to try someone who didn’t want to punch him. When he sat down, he looked around to see if there were any other black people in the audience. There were two, both girls.
* * *
—
He had tried to prepare. You could download Shakespeare plays for free onto your iPad, so he’d done that, and started to read it, but he couldn’t focus. The play opened with a speech that seemed to go on forever and made no sense. “As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns,” it began, and Joseph started to panic straight away. How much was a thousand crowns? Was that good? No good? “Poor” made it sound no good. He googled “How much thousand crowns in Shakespeare’s time?” and found a website that both explained it all, and made him more confused. Three thousand crowns was a lot of money, it said, but one thousand crowns was only two hundred and fifty pounds, the equivalent of twenty-five thousand pounds now. Twenty-five thousand wasn’t a lot? Why wasn’t it? You couldn’t live off it forever, but it would tide you over until you got a job. And then there was stuff about oxen and dunghills and gentility. If he spent a few hours on it, he could probably work it out, but that was the first page. How long would it take him to understand the whole play? He decided that reading the thing was too ambitious, so he went for a Wikipedia summary instead: Rosalind, now disguised as Ganymede (Jove’s own page), and Celia, now disguised as Aliena (Latin for stranger) arrive in the Arcadian Forest of Arden, where the exiled Duke now lives with some supporters, including the melancholy Jaques, a malcontent figure, who is introduced weeping o
ver the slaughter of a deer. What the actual fuck? There was paragraph after paragraph of this stuff, so mind-numbing that he briefly reconsidered trying again with the iPad. Someone said As You Like It was just a crowd-pleaser, not a serious Shakespeare play, which, if he hadn’t read the summary, would have raised his hopes a little. But Joseph found it hard to imagine a crowd that was pleased by slaughtered deer and Forests of Arden and Jove’s own page.
He wouldn’t mind sitting there, watching the people and the audience and thinking about something else. He could cope with boredom. It was the journey home he was afraid of. What was he supposed to say? Was he required to have some kind of opinion? About what? The actors? The production? He had nothing to compare it to. He googled again, and found discussion questions designed for students. Lucy, in As You Like It is the pastoral life meant to seem ideal? Please provide quotes from the text to illustrate. Maybe he’d forget about that last bit. It was supposed to be an evening out.
Once it started, it wasn’t so bad. You didn’t need to know the value of a crown, really, and also he recognized one of the actresses from Sherlock. He didn’t know why that mattered, but he hadn’t been expecting to see anyone almost famous. But he had forgotten about intervals, which meant that the conversation he’d been afraid of was brought forward.
“What do you think?” said Lucy.
It was, he knew, an innocent enough question, but it was like a dagger through his heart.
“I wasn’t expecting to see the woman from Sherlock.”
“Which one is she?”
“The . . .” He wasn’t sure which one she was. She was one of the women who’d started with one name and was now called something else, but he couldn’t remember either. That was all he had, so far.
“But are you bored?”
“No.”
“Really?”
He examined his experience of the previous hour again. It had gone quickly enough. He had laughed a couple of times, just to show willing, and to offer encouragement to the cast.