He has never been unfaithful to Sandra. This is something he is suddenly thinking about, now that there is – is there? can there be? – a chance that Sandra is being unfaithful to him. With Tony, though. With Tony. Really? Tony who was dumped by Sonia’s mum Jean two years ago, and apparently can’t boil an egg for himself. Tony with his red face (though he still has all of his hair, the bastard). Tony whose conversation, all of it that Alec has ever witnessed, is limited to car maintenance. Boring Tony. Helpless Tony. Unbeautiful Tony. What can there be there that would tempt his Sandra, after all these years, that would make that long body draw towards, shift towards, want to shift towards, the pile of Tony on the settee? With his car-coat and his sovereign ring. Probably, nothing. Surely, nothing. Surely he’s just misunderstanding something, over-interpreting something, being paranoid about a situation where surely, surely, there can’t be any temptation operating.
Temptation, he thinks he knows about. He has certainly felt it himself. On the OU summer schools, in particular. Where, crudely, there were two women to every man and therefore all the middle-aged crumpet you could possibly want. You packed up your suitcase and you went away from home, and for two weeks you were living in a concrete student room on a college campus: an eighteen-year-old’s room, with an eighteen-year-old’s tiny bed, and it gave you anachronistic ideas when you went to the college bar in the evening. And all the other titchy, uncomfortable cubbyholes were also full of people temporarily cut loose from their lives, and having anachronistic feelings, and acting on them too, quite a lot of them. Seizing the chance. Doing the obvious with the temporary freedom. There was this lady who ran a B&B in Ramsgate who was very willing, very pressing; and she was all plump curves and freckles, the very opposite of Sandra, erotically speaking. And yeah, he wanted to. But he didn’t, not so much out of any virtue as from a certain idea he had of his life, and of what it was supposed to be like. (If he remembered rightly, she moved on with unflattering speed to an electrician from Salford.)
How did any of that apply here? I mean, thinks Alec, I suppose Sandra must be as prone as anyone to getting bored, and to those irresponsible moments you get where you wonder about what it would be like with someone else. But – Tony?
Maybe, says a malevolent voice in his head, it’s because Tony can’t boil an egg, or run a washing machine, or look after a child for an afternoon. You adapted. You lost your job and you got … domesticated. You learned to do women’s work. She said she didn’t mind, she said she appreciated it: but maybe, down deep, she didn’t like it at all. Maybe it’s made you less of a man to her. To her too. Eunuch grandad. Neutered Alec, good with the kids.
Shutup shutup shutup, he says to himself, and digs the fingers of one hand hard into his scalp, startling Mrs Hyphenated Double-Buggy as she brings her two and Vicky back.
‘Is everything all right?’ she says, making it clear by her tone that his licence to be fit company may be withdrawn depending on the answer.
‘Yeah, fine,’ he says. ‘It’s just so hot.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ she says, reassured. ‘Terribly. Might be time to get out the paddling pool when we get home. Dunk the little beasts.’
She clearly comes from one of the bourgeois battleships on the Rise. A banker’s wife; a surgeon’s. Tut-tut, bit of sexism there, Alec reproves himself. Who says she isn’t the banker or the surgeon, on her maternity leave and taking it terribly, awfully seriously? No reason to assume she’s the class enemy’s dependant. Give the lady her due, give her her dignity. She may well be the class enemy herself.
‘Think I’m going to give mine their snack,’ she continues. ‘Would your little girl like some?’
‘That’d be very kind. Vicky, say thank you to the lady.’
‘Than-kyoo,’ says Vicky, coming forward eagerly with her hand out. But when the top is popped off the Tupperware box, it turns out to contain only sultanas and sticks of carrot. Vicky’s hand drops, and she looks piteously at Alec.
‘Would you rather have your KitKat, love?’ Alec asks, cheering inwardly.
‘Yes please,’ says Vicky, performing good manners without having to be prompted.
Alec fishes out a two-bar KitKat from the multipack in his bag, and, August sun assisting, Vicky proceeds to get chocolatey. The other two watch enviously, carrot and sultana very clearly turning to ash in their mouths. Hah. The care of small people is understood to be a truce in the class war, bringing together people who would talk to each at no other time. But it’s a truce, not a peace treaty.
‘I’ve got two more,’ says Alec. ‘Can I offer ’em to your two?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ begins the woman, looking nutritional daggers at him.
‘Oh please, Mummy! Oh please!’ say her children, bobbing up and down.
Alec cheers inwardly some more.
Unfortunately, a last-minute run back to fetch Horton from his nesting place at the foot of the see-saw trips Vicky over a paving slab and she grazes her knee. It’s not a bad graze, just a white scrape with a tiny criss-cross of red in it on the immaculate pink of her kneecap, and the wipes he used to get rid of the chocolate smear on her face take easy care of the blood. He dabs her efficiently with Savlon, puts on a plaster and kisses it better. But partly because it’s sore, partly because of the scope for drama in the occasion, Vicky declines to walk back home, or to travel in the pushchair either.
‘Carry me, Grandad!’ she commands.
So they travel with her sitting on his shoulders, and his left arm clamping her dangling legs to his chest, while his right steers the pushchair along the pavement in a series of wobbling curves.
Nellie the ELephant packed her TRUNK
And said goodBYE to the CIR-cus
they sing together, and Vicky beats time with Horton on the top of his head.
Back at the house, his head aches from the sun and from the giraffe-strikes, and he’s got a cramp in his side. Vicky, on the other hand, is recharged. She doesn’t want to do drawing, or be read a story, or to play any of the quiet games he can think of. So he puts Rosie and Jim back on and she bounces on the settee like a jumping bean in front of it. He can keep an eye on her through the serving hatch, which means he can step far enough away from her to go through to the kitchen, put the kettle on and start making her tea. He can’t go upstairs, though, where the lesson plans are calling ever louder. Even being out of sight of her while he reaches down the tin of beans for her beans on toast, or bends to bin his teabag, fills him with an anxious picture of – of – but in fact he never gets any further than the ominous beginning of imagining her damaging herself on some hard corner. The idea is too horrible to permit a clear picture.
‘Be careful, love,’ he calls through the hatch.
‘Nellie the CIRcus,’ she sings, ignoring him and coming to no harm.
The bouncing tires her out nicely, and she lets herself be sat peacefully at the kitchen table to spoon up the little cut-up squares of the toast and the orange beans. It’s about half past five. The heat is going off a bit. A pulse of wind shakes the window by the sink, and there are clouds in the brassy sky. Rain would be nice. He sits opposite her, nursing his mug. She’s in what used to be Steve’s seat, when they were doing the previous version of family in this house. New curtains, new washing machine, but a lot else in the room is just the same, as if it’s been waiting to be put back to use. It isn’t the same, though, is it? The first time round, it feels like forever; but when it repeats a generation on, you know that the smallness of small people is strictly temporary, that home is a contrivance that only lasts a while. A shelter built of sticks as we go along the road. You can’t appeal to the elderly phone on the wall to save you, or the cream paint around the hatch: not when you yourself are about to rip up the pattern of your life and do a new thing. Not when Sandra, God forbid, may be about to tell him— Shutup shutup shutup.
‘How about that story now?’ he says once Vicky has finished, and been wiped and dried.
‘All right
, Grandad,’ she says, as if she’s kindly doing him a favour. Maybe she is. Grandad and his books; no one else in the family feels the urge, really. He can’t excite Vicky about the library as an outing any more than he could get Gary and Steve enthusiastic. But she settles comfortably on his knee.
‘Mr Magnolia has only one boot,’ he tells her. ‘He has an old trumpet that goes rooty-toot. And two lovely sisters who play on the flute. But Mr Magnolia has only one boot.’
‘I’ve got wellies,’ says Vicky.
‘Yes, you have. What colour are they?’
‘They are yellow!’
‘Yes, they are. But poor Mr Magnolia hasn’t got any wellies. Look, you can see his toes.’
They reach the end, and Mr Magnolia is safely rebooted.
‘Now,’ he says, as if an internal alarm clock has gone off and he can’t wait an instant longer, ‘we’re going to go upstairs because Grandad needs to look at his work for tomorrow. At the big school?’
‘Don’t want to.’
‘’Fraid we’ve got to, love. Off we go!’
‘No.’
‘Yes, off we go. Come on.’
‘No!’
‘Vicky, yes. Be a good girl.’
‘No! Nononono!’
And all of a sudden the tantrum is upon her. She swells, she goes rigid, she turns red. A volcano of willpower has erupted inside her. Alec should at this point engage in distraction tactics, but he’s had enough of patience himself. He just picks her up, a yammering flailing armful, and carries her bodily up the stairs, and into what used to be Gary’s bedroom. There he lays her flat on the floor to wail, mutters something nominally soothing, and turns on the computer on the desk. Do I really want to spend all day every day with kids? he asks himself. Yes, he does, for all the familiar reasons. And seven-year-olds aren’t like two-year-olds. Mr Torrance the primary school teacher won’t be quite the same being, or stand in the same place, as Alec the tetchy grandad.
Vicky’s roars subside into sniffles. She is gazing at the screen, he sees. What force couldn’t do, the blue glow has accomplished.
‘Feeling better, pet?’ he says, and scoops her onto his knee. Ridiculously huge tears are hanging on her ridiculously long eyelashes, and he blots them with a pang. Together, they watch Windows start up. She does, anyway; his gaze wanders over his neat shelf of OU binders and coursebooks and set texts. Tools for a transformation he’ll have completed at 8.30 tomorrow morning, when he walks through the gates of Halstead Road School with a briefcase. Also, his comfort, his refuge, in a funny way his vengeance. He hunkered down in here with Ways of Seeing and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed to remake himself and show the bastards.
‘Can we do the caterpillar?’ says Vicky. She’s talking about one of the games the machine came with.
‘Yes, in a minute, love,’ he says, and opens Word. More start-up time; strange whirs and bonks from the hard disk. And Alec thinks: Sandra and Tony, what if it’s got nothing to do with sex at all, or not much? What if it’s not about temptation. What if she’s just … lonely. I’ve been in this room, changing. And the more I’ve changed, the less we can talk about what’s on my mind. We can’t have conversations about Paulo Freire; I mean, we’ve tried, and it doesn’t work. So when we talk, and at least we haven’t stopped talking, it’s all about our day, and the boys, and now the grandkids, and what the latest is in the great non-stop soap opera at Tesco, and which of the people I’ve never met there has split up with which of the other people I’ve never met. And it’s kept us smiling at each other, for sure. But there’s this area of me I don’t share, and it grows. I’ve been thinking of that as a loss for me, but of course it’s one for her too. She knows there’s this big bit of me that’s out of her view, out of her reach, now. Maybe, and why on earth didn’t I think of this before, there’s an equivalent piece of her that’s been growing out of my sight, out of my reach? Maybe Tony is just … there. When he sits on the settee, he’s present. His head isn’t off in the clouds.
The file has opened. Bullet points and aims, probably too many of them. Vicky stares.
‘What does it say, Grandad?’ she asks.
‘Oh, boring stuff,’ he says. ‘I’ll tell you what, let’s make the words bigger, and we’ll see if we can find a Vuh-for-Vicky.’
A move of the mouse, a couple of clicks, and he does what he could never do in his lost trade: blows the font up from 12-point to 72-point to 96-point just for the mere asking. Times New Roman, of course, for old times’ sake.
‘Look,’ he says, ‘there’s a Vuh.’
Vicky puts out a finger to trace it. Down below, a key turns in the front door: Sandra come home, to tell him he’s been imagining things or to turn the world upside down.
‘What is it made of, Grandad?’ says Vicky.
‘Light, love,’ says Alec. ‘It’s made of light.’
t + 65: 2009
Vern
‘Where are we going?’ asks Vern.
‘It’s a surprise,’ says Becky at the wheel of the Range Rover.
‘Yes, but—’
‘It’s a surprise, Dad,’ she repeats.
‘You won’t find anywhere to park in the West End, you know.’
‘Well, then, isn’t it lucky we’re not going there.’
‘Oh.’
‘Your old stamping ground, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘You mean Bexford? But – oh, never mind.’
He fumbles in the glove compartment and finds the CD of Kiri Te Kanawa doing Tosca which he uses as an ear-stopper when family life gets too much. Becky rolls her eyes and tuts, but she lets the decibels roll around the pale suede and lime-green metal of the cabin. There’s a frown line on her forehead, even with the tight, tight ponytail scraping back skin as well as hair. There almost always is. It’s how she seems to go through life, his older daughter, perpetually on the boil, always in a hurry.
They don’t know each other at all well. He had seen her, what, once or twice a year, before he got ill? Heard she was getting on okay; helped her out with some of the capital to start up her little empire of leisure centres out in Thamesmead and the Medway towns; felt a faint family pride that she seemed to have a business head on her; had to check her kids’ names, to be honest, when writing a Christmas card. Then came the crash, and the hideous downhill unravelling of Featherstone’s loans. He shouldn’t have leveraged so much: easy to say now, of course, but if the boom had gone on, he knows he’d have kicked himself for leaving anything on the table. Next thing, he was broke. Next thing after that, he was lying in St Thomas’s hospital – on a ward, not even in a private room – recovering from emergency triple-bypass surgery, and there was Becky scowling down at him. ‘I’m taking you home,’ she said. ‘There’ll be no more of this nonsense, mind. Look at the state of you!’ – indicating his twenty-two stone, stitched with drips and drains.
And indeed, after a year under Becky’s roof in Faversham, prevented from putting anything in his mouth that might conceivably give pleasure, obliged to start every day with the vile wheatgrass concoction she drinks instead of breakfast to fight off heredity and stay size 10 – he is much thinner. No, that’s too mild. He is a stickman of his former self, a diagram of him: spindly, pot-bellied, stooped, forcibly clad in leisurewear since none of his suits fit any more. He is a wraith in golfing trousers. He does not feel at all well. The weight is off the scaffolding, but the scaffolding itself aches and throbs. He teeters round the house on his two sticks, and Becky’s boys zoom past him in Lycra on their way to maths tutoring, squash games, paintball, more sessions of mass slaughter on their PlayStations. Is it love that has made Becky put him through this transformation? It doesn’t look like it, judging by her face as she drives. More a kind of irritated responsibility. Embarrassment, even, that anyone associated with her can have deviated so grossly from the trim ideal her business sells.
Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore, sings Dame Kiri. I have lived for art, I have lived for love. Not uncanny, like
Callas, but pretty damn good. And a woman with some heft on her, too, a woman with an actual figure. Non feci mai male ad anima viva, she goes on, I never hurt a living soul, and London spreads the same enfolding wings as ever around the A20. Further out than they used to be, it’s true, and with much of the newbuild sprawl executed in the style that looks as if it’s going to be the English default for the new century. Multicoloured ticky-tacky boxes. Bit of wood cladding; snap-on panel of smoky orange; pane of green glass; snap-on panel of sky blue. Back to the wood cladding again. Toy-box architecture. Yet still blending into the great mix of the Smoke alongside the brick and the stucco and the pebble-dash, the concrete and the glass (tired now) that meant new times when Vern was new. Unmistakably London, and at traffic lights and junctions Vern gazes at it through the tinted windows. Gazes at it hungrily – yeah, that’s the word – as if his life in it were all still out there, and not liquidated, sold off to competitors, distributed to creditors, by Becky’s maddeningly unimaginative accountants. He imagines himself clunking the door open at the next red light, and making a very slow break for home. But that’s all gone. There is no Grand King-sized bed waiting for him up on the fortieth floor of Shoremark Wharf, dressed anew daily in smooth Egyptian cotton.
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