As they leave, Ruth says, “Why were you so interested in prices?”
“A piece on art as investment,” Peter replies, rather shortly. He has appropriated the catalog and is making some notes on the back.
“Art is not just a commodity.”
He gives her a slightly weary glance. “No one said it was just a commodity. But it is one.”
Ruth experiences irritation like some physical affliction; it prickles down her spine, it makes her teeth tingle. She says nothing.
Peter scribbles another note and shoves the catalog into his briefcase. “Like any other commodity, it has a shifting value. There are some intriguing comparisons to be made with other investment areas.”
“If you say so.” Ruth’s tone is icy. She holds out her hand. “Could I have that? I want to keep it.”
“What?”
“The catalog.”
“I’ll need it for the editor. We’ll use a print to illustrate.”
They stare at each other. Peter gives a little grunt of exasperation. “I shall return it in due course, Ruth.”
“Don’t bother,” snaps Ruth. “I’ll get my own.” She turns to go back into the gallery. “No need to wait—I’ve got some shopping to do. Oh—and don’t under any circumstances use one of my grandfather’s engravings to illustrate your piece.”
There are apparently people who suffer from this thing called low self-esteem. The condition is spoken of as though it were some kind of debilitating illness. And it is a bad thing to have; those who suffer from it will be quickly spotted, they are losers, they will be passed over for advancement; plus, they make awkward friends and partners. To flourish in the climate of the day, you need to think well of yourself, to walk tall, to put yourself forward, to brandish an emphatic CV.
Ruth knew that she fell short of these requirements. She had never been good at self-advancement, and she did not much care for those who were. But equally, she did not see herself as suffering from low self-esteem. She thought that she was reasonably good looking, competent enough, and she did not lack friends. In a different age, or a different society, she might have been perceived as an exemplary person: unassuming, modest, without pretensions. A Jane Austen heroine, then? Dear me, no—put like that, Ruth sees her persona at once as perfectly modern, of its day, but a variant. She does not conform with contemporary icons. She is not a shrinking violet; just, she is no rampant Russian vine.
Is Peter a Russian vine? Certainly, he has tendrils out all over the media. He identifies a space, picks up the phone, sends out a shoot. His CV would paper a room. All of which is just as well, because it means that he is earning a good deal of money, so it matters less that Ruth is not. So why does Peter’s flair for self-promotion (or his resourcefulness? his endeavor?) bug her the way it does? Why does she find it so unlikeable? When first she knew him, she admired his energy, his drive. Now, that quality has somehow gone belly-up, and is no longer attractive, but has become the aspect of him that she finds most tiresome.
Is she jealous? Well, no, because she does not want to be like that herself. Not in the least. Does she resent his long working hours, his absences? Not really, because his presence can be dismaying: the household is disrupted, the children become unruly, there are suddenly issues about some implement that has gone missing, or a repair that is overdue. He moves impatiently from room to room, he is constantly on the phone, the fax goes into overdrive. No, she does not resent Peter’s absences, because then everything subsides once more, the pace slows up, things calm down.
What, then, is her problem with Peter and his careerism? She knows plenty of others like him who do not have the same effect on her—though she does not necessarily admire them; but of course she does not share bed and breakfast with them, negotiate with them on a daily basis, know everything about them from their taste for pickled herrings to the wart on their left testicle. Could it be that her problem is with Peter, rather than with Peter’s approach to life? That she and Peter are at odds, that Peter no longer looks the way he did when first they were together, that sometimes she wonders why they are together?
Could it be that she is in a dysfunctional marriage?
Ruth first heard this term on the lips of a friend—casually delivered, as you might talk of a recalcitrant child, or a rogue element. A cliché, then, but one that had slid so surreptitiously into the language that you had never noticed. Or did someone simply coin the phrase one day, to fill a vacuum, there being a lot of this problem around? As T. H. Huxley allegedly came up with the term agnostic in the late nineteenth century, by which time it was much needed. This arcane piece of information swims into Ruth’s head, grace of her A level English teacher, talking years ago about the evolution of language. Agnosticism arrives when a lot of people find it impossible to concede the existence of a deity; you get dysfunctional marriage when…well, when many couples are in an uneasy alliance. But surely that has been the case since Adam and Eve? So what was it called before? And what was low self-esteem before it became a contemporary malaise?
When Ruth was a teenager she had been successively, and briefly, a vegetarian, a Buddhist, a supporter of Queens Park Rangers, and an environmental campaigner. The environmental campaigning had consisted of sitting with a gang of friends around the base of a tree that was about to be felled by the council on the grounds that it was unsafe; Ruth and her friends had hoped for arrest and public martyrdom, but in the event the tree fellers struck during school hours, when they could not attend, and the deed was done in their absence.
Molly had been cheerfully supportive of all these enthusiasms: “Why not, if that’s how you feel.”
Ruth and her friend Julia discuss love. Julia has been in love three times, she says. In lust—about three, again. The current love, she confides, is qualitatively different.
Ruth lifts an eyebrow.
“Daisy,” says Julia.
Daisy is her two-month-old baby.
“Oh, well, yes,” says Ruth. “But does that count?”
They decide that it does, as an eruption of feeling that is unanticipated, that is mysterious until you experience it.
Ruth finds herself diffident about her own record. She offers a coup de foudre when she was a student. No—two. She admits to a couple of lust episodes. “And Peter,” she adds, gamely.
Julia has been sleepless, night after night, she has been unable to eat—starved, she has contemplated suicide.
Ruth remembers hanging about outside his hall of residence. She remembers watching a silent phone.
Julia scoffs. Beginner stuff. Pathetic. “And no way,” she says, “Do I ever want to go there again.”
They laugh.
Once, when eighteen, Julia told a boyfriend that she was sorry but it was over, and he threw up. Just like that. She had been impressed: “I hadn’t realised they could suffer too.”
“So you took him back?”
“Certainly not.”
Ruth’s recollection of a rejected suitor is less telling: righteous offense is what she remembers—as though you had trodden violently on his toe.
“Whatever,” says Julia comfortably. “We’re through with all that, thank God. It’s Daisy now, for me.”
Julia is in happy partnership with Alec, so far as Ruth knows. But what does one know of other people’s lives? What does Julia know of hers?
“Suppose it didn’t happen?” Ruth wonders. She is now picking at the subject in general. Love. Being in love. “Suppose we just mated, like animals. Sensible genetic behavior.”
Julia reckons that we can’t know what animals feel. A dog fox was killed on the road, near them, and the vixen howled at night for a week.
“If it didn’t happen,” says Ruth. “Poets and novelists would be more or less out of business. Maybe that’s where it comes from—we get the idea from them.”
Julia observes that many people never read anything, but still go in for love.
“Okay.” says Ruth. “Point taken. But what is it, then?
How does it happen?”
“Disease. Eventually they’ll find a vaccine, for those who wish to be spared.”
“And why do we fix on that particular person?”
Julia proposes pheromones. “You know, like animals—a chemical secretion that says, here I am, come and find me.”
“How unromantic can you get?” cries Ruth.
Julia says that a scientific explanation is perfectly compatible with a romantic effect. “You can still go weak at the knees—it doesn’t matter why.”
“Hmn. Maybe. But why does it end? You fall out of love, too.”
“Not always. It can mutate.” Julia sounds complacent, perhaps. Is this her experience? “Just as well,” she adds. “No one could spend their life in that condition.”
Ruth wonders if possibly some people do. She thinks of the way in which Molly and Sam can look at one another.
“It’s surely the one great thing,” she decides. “Isn’t it? Disease or pheromone or whatever. Would we want to have missed out?”
Julia yawns. Sleepless nights, again. “Oh, no. You have to join the club. Sign up. But that’s it, for me. I’ve signed off, now.”
It is seven-thirty; the children are in bed. Ruth moves around the kitchen with practiced efficiency, as though she were dealing with the engine-room of a ship. She shoves dirty clothes into the washing machine, she turns on the oven. She takes a carton of soup from the fridge, and a quiche and the wherewithal for a salad. She whips up toys from the floor and stows them in various containers. She goes through into the adjoining room, which serves as her office; she checks her e-mail, she reads a fax, she listens to messages on the answerphone. She hears Peter’s key in the door, returns to the kitchen, tips soup into a pan.
Peter opens a bottle of wine. They sit at the table. Peter is flicking through newspapers; Ruth has some household bills and her check book.
“Jess got a gold star for reading,” she says. “Perhaps we have an achiever on our hands.”
Peter turns a page. “Oil Price Rise Forecast,” Ruth reads, and “World Bank Chief to Quit.”
“And I am a multitasker, I learn. It’s the new definition. Do you want to hear about a day in the life of a multitasker?”
Silence.
“No. Probably not,” says Ruth. “How were things at the coal-face today?” She rises, goes to the cooker, starts to heat soup. Peter takes a pad from his shirt pocket, makes a quick note, folds the newspaper. “I shall be going to New York for a couple of days next week,” he tells her.
Ruth does not ask why. The answer would be to do with something obstruse and economic. And she does not think that Peter has a mistress in New York, or indeed anywhere.
She serves soup, and ciabatta bread. Peter pours wine—a Chilean merlot. Machines churn, hum, beep, wink green eyes. Off-stage, a phone rings: a fax grinds. This is a heartland of the late twentieth century, abreast of everything, and its own obsolescence ordained, its tastes and technologies doomed. Ruth is thirty-six, which sometimes seems rather old, and at other times nothing much at all. She has always been aware of the long view—perhaps uncomfortably so. Other people seem to live in the here and now; she is forever conscious of then, and when.
She says, “Have you ever heard my mum talking about that Somerset place where she was a small child.”
“On occasion,” says Peter.
The neutrality of this is an irritant. Veiled criticism? Indifference? But Ruth is now in pursuit of her own reflections. “No amenities. But a sort of paradise. Or is that just how we see childhood? Will Jess and Tom see this place like that, I wonder?”
Peter shrugs. He is not a man given to abstract consideration, unless for professional purposes. “The dear old Zanussi fridge? Of course it might be a collectible by then.”
“Aha!” says Ruth. “Potential investment. Maybe we should be laying down a few.”
Under the table, Peter’s foot has come across something. He bends down, finds a small plastic dinosaur and sets it alongside his place. “Some of these might be a better bet. Dinky Toys have gone through the ceiling.”
“What are Dinky Toys?”
“Miniature cars, buses, fire engines…Correct in every detail. Rubber tires that came off. They were still around in our day, just.”
“I was a girl,” says Ruth. “They didn’t reach me.”
Peter is examining the dinosaur. “Where did this come from?”
“I have no idea. Toys simply appear. Self-propagation, I sometimes think. My mum used to make her own when she was a child—clothespeg dolls.”
“China by origin, would be my guess.” Peter has got up, and is now rummaging in one of the toy bins.
“And stuff out of the hedges. She used to show me how—poppy heads and dandelion clocks and seed pods. I loved it.”
Peter now has an ichthyosaurus and a tyrannosaurus rex. He returns to the table, lines them up with the stegosaurus. “The global market. Kids have the same gear right around the world.”
“You can make a whistle out of a thick hollow stem. You cut a notch—no, two, I think…”
Peter has brought the toy bin over to the table. He extracts a Barbie doll. “I wonder if these are kitted out with regional variations. Burkas for the Saudi consumer?”
“Acorn cups for dolls’ tea parties,” Ruth is remembering. “And conkers, of course.”
Peter returns the Barbie and examines a small robot. “The thing would be to look at demand and supply. Does the manufacturer determine fashion, or do buyers lead the manufacturers?” He puts the robot into his briefcase, finishes his soup and pours wine for them both.
“You can’t take that,” says Ruth. “Tom will go spare.”
“A few hollow stems should keep him happy.”
Ruth shoots a cool glance, before clearing plates, placing quiche and salad on the table. They resume eating.
Ruth says, “Tom is going to be a man who drives a rubbish truck when he’s grown up, he tells me. What were you going to be when you were four?”
“Governor of the Bank of England.”
“That’s not true, is it?” It occurs to Ruth suddenly that perhaps Peter never was four, that he arrived fully fledged, with a calculator in his hand, at about twenty-five. His parents have seldom referred to his childhood, she realizes; they are a reticent couple who live in Amer-sham and seldom visit, finding London unsettling.
“No.” He fills his glass, waves the bottle in her direction.
She shakes her head. “Is there anything you’d like to be?”
“What’s all this about?”
“Nothing,” says Ruth. “Just wondered.”
Peter frowns. “Am I measured and found wanting?”
“Dear me, no. Idle speculation, that’s all.”
“Not something I much go in for,” says Peter.
“I know. Very wise. Coffee?”
Summer in Devon. High summer. Bucket and spade time; combine harvester time; picnic and wasp time; traffic jam time. The motorway has discharged rivers of metal into the resorts, the caravan sites, the bed and breakfasts—cars piled high with cases, rucksacks, body boards, bikes, buggies, complaining children. These spill out over the landscape, homing in on some chosen target. Peter and Ruth, with Jess and Tom, are in the red Datsun, homing upon a farmhouse tucked away up a lane that you can’t find unless you have done so before, where Molly and Sam await them for a weekend of extended family life.
Up and down the land, thousands of such weekends are being spent. Intergenerational weekends. Parents and children and parents-in-law and children-in-law and grandparents and grandchildren. Step-parents and step-children. Step-grandparents such as Sam. Molly and Sam, Ruth and Peter, Jess and Tom. It is Jess and Tom who will be principal beneficiaries of these days, since most of the time is dedicated to their entertainment. There will be a trip to the beach, another to a Farm Center, they will be exquisitely fed, they will be played with and listened to. Since they know that this is their due, they will accept every t
hing as such, and make further demands when any spring to mind.
Molly thinks: Ruth has got thinner; so much stuff they’ve brought; will the children eat cassoulet? Is it still fish fingers and chicken nuggets? I should have got some videos.
Ruth thinks: she looks older, suddenly; did I bring any Calpol? I must make notes for the Observer piece; will the mobiles work here?
Sam listens to the engine of their car, as they come down the lane, and does not like what he hears. Not firing right. He’ll have a shufti under the bonnet at some point, if that’s okay with Peter.
Peter unloads his children, the bags, a box of wine. He would prefer to be elsewhere. Nothing personal, no criticism—just, this is not his scene.
On the beach, the children bale out a rock-pool with buckets. They scamper back and forth. Sam builds a sand castle, with great artistry; it is the Taj Mahal of sand castles. Molly’s leg is hurting; she has walked too far. She watches Ruth, who sits staring at the sea. Peter is reading newspapers. He bought an armful on the way here and reads, apparently, every page of each.
Tom stumbles into the sand castle, the Taj Mahal, which collapses.
Molly and Ruth sit in the garden, watching the children, who are appreciating the swing that Sam has fixed to a branch of the apple tree. Sam is out in the lane, tinkering with the Datsun. Peter is indoors, with his laptop.
Ruth says, “I’ve got this plan. I want to go to Crete.”
“To see…?”
“Yes. To see where it happened. Where Matt…” She always thinks of him as Matt. You cannot call someone of twenty-nine grandpa.
“Was killed.” Molly pronounces, where Ruth stood back. “I’ve thought of doing that. I was too craven, I think. There’s a cemetery. So when is this to be?”
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