‘Does Mami know you’re here?’ As soon as I had asked it, my question made me feel like a grudge-bearing child pretending to be a sensible adult, and I was glad when Karl shrugged it off.
‘I suppose I deserved that,’ he said with a self-deprecating smile, ‘but please can I come in?’ I had already made my mind up not to shut the door in his face, and I was about to step back so that I could open it more widely. Karl’s smile broadened as he gave me a wink. ‘I’d rather we did this in private,’ he said, casting a cursory glance over his shoulder. And as soon as he was in and the door was shut, ‘So where’s your friend Jack? Has he decided what he’s wearing for the funeral? I know you said that he’s a boy now, but why not make a point by dressing one last time as a girl, or do you think I’m being disrespectful?’
‘Jack’s not coming,’ I said, half expecting one more knock on the door.
‘Oh,’ said Karl, ‘his Mami won’t let him?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Ah, but that’s just grown-ups for you, they think everything’s complicated. They just need to be snapped out of it sometimes.’
‘Is that what you did, snap Frau Angela out of thinking this was complicated?’
‘That’s exactly what I did. “I’m going with Jane to her father’s funeral,” I told her. “But first I’d like you to listen to this.” And then I played “Jane” for her. “I wrote that for Jane,” I said when I finished. “After what I did to her the real scandal would be if I let her down again, and I’m not going to allow you to make me do something I’d never forgive either one of us for.” She didn’t dare to speak a single word, not even when I asked her to iron my shirt.’
‘And here you are.’ I tightened his tie, but then I loosened it again. ‘We don’t want you choking,’ I said.
‘Come here,’ said Karl, and as I yielded to what I felt like doing today, already one absolute certainty had sweepingly overridden another.
II
1984
16
The Signing
In a small patisserie in Soho, somewhere off Old Compton Street, I was washing down my second giant slice of Black Forest Gateau. As a matter of fact I had not even wanted the first, but the ritual, a reminder of both happy and unhappy times with loved ones long lost, served as a bittersweet antidote to nerves, so effective that it made even the inevitable onset of heartburn worthwhile. Well, “worthwhile” was perhaps overstating it. It suggested something rarefied, which clearly heartburn was not. Really it was the memories that calmed my nerves, not the number of slices of Black Forest Gateau, but it was in the nature of rituals, once they had become entrenched, that they were indivisible – magic recipes sacrosanct in their irrational entirety. One tampered with them at one’s peril.
But the restless voice inside my head was making a simple thing sound unnecessarily pompous, and I gobbled down another mouthful of Black Forest Gateau in a last-ditch attempt to shut it up, grinning at its silliness widely. My teeth felt thick and sticky with chocolate, but here, where I was just another stranger eating cake, brown teeth were almost de rigueur. I would have plenty of time to brush them, restoring their immaculate whiteness in time for the event. I always carried toothbrush and toothpaste in my handbag.
‘More tea, Madame?’ asked the new waiter, bending over the small round table as though to take in panoramically the view of my greed.
I looked up at his smile – refreshingly friendly, I thought – and just shook my head, my hand over my mouth self-consciously.
‘I am Pierre,’ said the new waiter.
‘Pleased to meet you, Pierre, I’m Jane.’ The hand had not moved.
‘Ah oui, the patron ’as told me. Jane ’areman, the writer.’ While every “H” was silenced, the “J” in Jane was pronounced in that mouth-wateringly French way that I loved, and at the sound of it a little laugh of pleasure escaped me, and I let my hand drop.
‘You must excuse my chocolate teeth,’ I said.
‘Ah but why, I don’t see any chocolate teeth. You must excuse my terrible English, I think. But not so terrible that I cannot read your books.’
‘Really, you’ve read them both?’
‘But of course, and I adore them.’
‘Thank you, Pierre, that’s very kind.’
‘Ah oui, trés gentil, you think I am polite. But I am not polite when I say I adore them, I am honest. The Giacometti Riddle especially, it is more personal, non?’
‘Pierre!’ The patron, a corpulent debonair Frenchman who had never let on that he knew who I was, looked incensed that his waiter was being so presumptuous.
‘And the sculpture on the cover, it is exquisite!’
I looked at my watch.
‘But I take up your time, my patron is right, please excuse me.’ And with a deep bow of the head, Pierre was about to walk away.
‘No, Pierre, wait! I have a signing round the corner at Buchner & White – you know it? It’s a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road. You turn right at Cambridge Circus, and then it’s just on the other side of the road, you can’t really miss it. It’s on the corner with Litchfield Street, I think. Between six and eight, can you make it?’
‘But my book, it is at ’ome. I mean your book, my book it is still in my ’ead. And I think you will be ’appy it is in French.’
‘I’m sure we can spare you another copy, and if you’re able to come you’ll be doing me a favour. I’m not a big fan of these events, they make me very nervous.’
‘So you come ’ere first for something very sweet,’ Pierre ventured with a flourish, but when I didn’t laugh, ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered, ‘I am flirt but I am gay, very single since I come to this city. Perhaps why I like so much The Giacometti Riddle? Very melancholy, I think. Little bit like Kafka, non? And the character of Jack it is so real!’
‘Excuse me, could we order?’ someone called from a distant table.
‘Buchner & White, I will be there,’ Pierre went on in his conspiratorial whisper. And then, already on his way to the distant table, ‘Monsieur, Madame, what would you like?’
It was only 5.20 when I waved to Pierre that I was leaving. A few minutes’ extra walk might help to clear my indigestion, which had now become a bloating in my tummy that I hadn’t factored in when choosing what to wear for the signing – a plain scarlet dress, a black and purple Spanish mantilla draped around my shoulders, and black shoes I could kick off under the table while I signed The Giacometti Riddle for the few people I expected to turn up.
It was a clear spring day, gorgeously colourful and bright, but a spring day nonetheless. Spring was far from being my favourite season. I found its dusks particularly gloomy for some reason, and it brought on all the allergies I had inherited from my father. I even disliked the names of its months: March I found cacophonous and bossy, May made me think of indecision, and as for April… It was April now, and I was already looking forward to July - a rich month for memories, of “life being lived in the present”, but of tragedy too. As “infinitely more exciting than stories” was how I had experienced those heady days around the landing on the moon back in 1969. I had told myself on one of them that “stories” was how auntie Ada and I had dealt with the past, and that “life” already belonged to the future. But then “life” had somehow again become the past.
As I made my way slowly towards Buchner & White, I took in the seediness of Soho, so authentic compared to what life had become like under Thatcher. I had not cared for politics much in my life, but I found the prevalent climate depressing: everything, including one’s happiness, was suddenly being measured in numbers – one’s unhappiness too, if one happened to number among those unequipped to “get on”. The race for the fulfilment of greed had made our lives more cutthroat.
Success was naturally also being measured in numbers, and at least by the yardstick of numbers Jane Hareman, author, was very successful indeed. But this “success”, what did it really add up to? Could I honestly say it was making me happy? Wa
s it perhaps not self-indulgent even to be asking the question, when so many people’s lack of happiness stemmed from far more fundamental deprivations than some vague, egotistical feeling of inadequate self-fulfilment?
Pierre had not been part of anything that could be counted, and yet our short conversation had brought to my day more joy than all the astronomical numbers my agent had been quoting at me since The Giacometti Riddle went on sale. That meaningless comparison made me wonder if perhaps I might have made a mistake by not changing Jack’s name in the book. It had been a deliberate act, borne out of frustration. All my attempts to trace him had failed, and it was fifteen years already since that telephone call on the day before my father’s funeral. Too much time had passed, and what use was my “success” if it had failed to make it easier for Jack to get in touch? If he had read my first book, he would have known I still wanted him to, and the second was an undisguised plea.
It would have been so easy to find me. I had not moved from the house in Angel, where now I lived alone, still sleeping in the windowless box I had steadfastly refused to dismantle. I could not bear to part from the dreams I had dreamt in my bed, and every time I walked into the bathroom without knocking first, I would remember with a flutter my all too brief encounter with Mia-Mia’s penis. The house was still full of Mia-Mia, and so contrastingly empty of everyone else. What little memory I had of my mother consisted mostly of remembered sensations – fleeting moments not attached to any one place. My father I remembered all too well, but had intentionally disconnected from the house. He would forever be the one and only, the inimitable Mr Magikoo, not the man who had withdrawn into himself after losing his wife and then lived his last years in a fantasy world. The recollection of his body lying lifeless in a bath full of blood had retained only the essence of Jack’s magnanimity. Like all the rabbits my father had pulled out of two different hats, the macabre reality of that scene would have otherwise been haunting me still.
To be able to live in it, I had cleared the house of all its ghosts. And conversely I had filled Mr Magikoo’s Magik Shoppe with all of my leftover love. Contrary to another of auntie Ada’s predictions, the shop had continued to thrive, helped by people’s fondness for Mr Magikoo and also by their liking for scandal. To this day, through the maze of streets around it, they wormed their way along to its doors in their droves - in spite of all the changes it had lost none of its magic.
Auntie Ada and I had been rooted together by a mutual affection that the years had made a part of who we were, too resilient to be broken by the keeping of secrets or even by the telling of lies.
‘My secrets are my own,’ auntie Ada had declared, and perhaps because the bulk of her secrets had already been revealed (even if they had remained unspoken), she had wilfully clung on to the few that had not, until almost the end. These details were like knots in the untangling of the truth from that complex web of lies auntie Ada had spun overnight and had then locked away - in a place that had for years seemed inaccessible even to her, until she had been favoured with foreknowledge of her death.
The years we had shared in the house, although they had been marked by the effort of saving Mr Magikoo’s Magik Shoppe while at the same time preparing for Oxford, had for me belonged mostly to Karl, perhaps partly as a means of tolerating auntie Ada. It had taken me some time to accept auntie Ada on her terms, in other words without more discussion. Whereas everyone else had in one way or another asked for my forgiveness – my father with his note, Karl with “Jane” and his last-minute defiance, and finally Jack with the enormity of his false confession – as far as auntie Ada was concerned the present was too pressing and the future too uncertain, and therefore practicality dictated that the past must be held very firmly at bay. And I could see now that she hadn’t been wrong. If the pretence that she had carefully constructed had collapsed too early, certainly the shop would not have been saved, and who knows what other ugly, long-lasting repercussions the baring of the truth might have wreaked. With Karl no longer in the picture, perhaps I might not have left Oxford at the end of my first year, already confident enough in my writing to insist on taking over the house, and on running the shop with the help of a part-time assistant. Auntie Ada had not tried to dissuade me, and had even seemed impatient to return to Tufnell Park. Her mark on the house had been fleeting.
When it came, the end of Karl was a relief, and it came without regret or explanations or even surprise. Acknowledged by both of us at once in the sharing of no more than one short final glimpse, it was the end of a chapter with too many changes of heart, rewriting itself time after time in a stubborn refusal to end. The stubbornness of course had been ours.
We had both suffered loss. Karl had compensated with a sense of his place in the world that had made him feel entitled, and I had drummed into myself the instinct to cling on, almost at all costs. But really we were children growing up, and our moment together had passed, long before the final betrayal: we had sex on my eighteenth birthday, and the next time I saw him, less than one week later, his hands were all over April Fowler.
Looking back, I didn’t need a Reichian therapist’s help to pinpoint what had crystallised my doubts about Karl, and it wasn’t Frau Angela’s hold on her son, or the self-centredness I had mistaken for confidence, or even his violence. It was simply the starkness of the contrast between him and Jack, encapsulated in my memory of a group of children with a ball.
At the corner with Greek Street I stopped. I could see the trees of Soho Square, my refuge on that icy sunny Sunday in the winter before I went to Oxford.
In defiance of the cold I had walked all the way into town, and this small oasis had appeared out of nowhere to offer me a quiet place to sit. In my trips to the West End with auntie Ada, the winding streets of Soho had been out of bounds, but I had just turned eighteen, and at last I could wander wherever I pleased.
‘Jane? Jane Hareman?’
I looked up from the bench I had all to myself, but the noon sun was low, and even with one hand over my eyes, I struggled for some time before I could decipher the tall hatted shadow hesitating in the footpath barely a metre away.
‘Inspector Cambridge?’
‘I’ve startled you, I’m sorry.’
All at once my mood had lifted. ‘You haven’t,’ I said, ‘but I hope you’re not here because there’s been another complaint of assault.’
‘Why, is one likely?’ And when I shrugged my adult shoulders, ‘Is the same young man still causing you trouble?’
I patted the bench for the Inspector to join me. ‘Not since one hour ago,’ I said.
‘I see. And isn’t that good news?’
I shrugged my adult shoulders again before changing the subject. ‘I almost rang you many times,’ I said.
The Inspector took his hat off and put it upside down in the space of bench between us.
‘I’m sorry about what happened,’ he said.
‘Yes, it was horrible. But the kindness of the people at the funeral made up for it. We weren’t expecting anyone, and all his so-called friends stayed away, but we arrived in that enormous limousine to find literally dozens of his fans, kids, grown-ups, all queuing to shake my hand and say how much they’d loved daddy’s magic.’
The Inspector nodded as though he already knew. ‘I’m glad to say the sergeant isn’t with us any more.’
‘Jack took all the blame, but I don’t think he was telling the truth. I even said to auntie Ada that it might’ve been you. But she seemed to know it wasn’t.’
‘She was right.’
‘But how would she have known it?’
‘Is that why you almost rang me?’
‘I thought…’
‘You wanted certainty, I expect.’
‘Certainty? I’m not even sure what that means.’
‘I’ve often wondered too, but I don’t think I’m any the wiser, which is perhaps why I didn’t call you. And other people’s families and friendships, they’re minefields to be getting involved
in, hard to know if one was doing good or harm. I’m speaking hypothetically, of course.’
‘Would one be able to say if one knew something I didn’t?’
Inspector Cambridge laughed. ‘One wouldn’t,’ he said, ‘but in any case one doesn’t.’ And then more seriously, ‘Whatever certainty you’ve settled on, cling onto it if you can.’
I took a deep breath, and sighed its vapour out into the cold. ‘And now Jack’s disappeared…’
The Inspector shook his head. ‘Perhaps one day he’ll just turn up,’ he said, and as he took his cigarettes out and looked through all his pockets for a match, he asked me about my plans for the future.
It was time. I turned my back to Soho Square, where thirteen years before I had put Karl behind me, and I walked across Old Compton Street towards Cambridge Circus.
I had never stopped hoping that Jack would get in touch, but the certainty I had settled on would waver. One moment I would know that he had taken the blame on behalf of Mia-Mia, whom auntie Ada had wrongly accused of blighting our lives. But then missing him would make me suspect him. Too many strange things had happened all at once, and as I turned the details I remembered around in my head, goaded by my sadness I would sometimes rearrange them into elaborate scenarios in which Jack and auntie Ada would take turns at being cast as the villain. I would then become convinced that there had to have been a degree of collusion - an exchange of some sort. And the idea of an exchange between Jack and auntie Ada would always have at its heart the missing Giacometti.
Either Jack had been bribed with it, or auntie Ada must have threatened to accuse him of its theft. Hadn’t he, on that fateful night before the burglary, when he was still half expecting my father to show him the door, wheedled out of me auntie Ada’s address? “Cross” sounded nothing like “Cyprus”. Hadn’t I then left him by a telephone box, with plenty of time to call balaclava man? Had the burglary not happened just hours after Jack had found out that auntie Ada kept a genuine Giacometti on her mantelpiece? And hadn’t the telephone rung at the house in some sort of signal, just a short time before auntie Ada had fled unexpectedly? Hadn’t Jack been acting peculiarly while he and I were trying to catch up with her?
The Madness of Grief Page 21