The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  Next item on the agenda: I’m off to visit Lucas in Ladbroke Grove’s hinterland; once there, an incisive interrogation will take place. Before that, a brief detour is necessary. I zip along Upper Street at speed, and after two blocks I’m out of breath—I think the Marlboro intake explains this, though pain, deep emotion, and a near death experience may also have had an effect. No hay problema. I limp into the nearest chemist’s and explain my predicament. The two pretty and charming girls behind the counter take a sympathetic interest. “Ladies,” I say, throwing myself on their mercies, “I need your help.” They sell me eight packs of Nico-Nix patches and eight packs of Nico-Nix gum. With much giggling and many flirtatious glances, they agree to show me how these patches are best applied. One rolls up my shirtsleeve; the other applies the patch, taking far longer to do so than is strictly necessary. Considering the state of my face, I’m encouraged. Maybe I haven’t entirely lost my touch. Pace Julia, and her allegations, is that so very wrong? They were pretty. It cheered me up—for a bit.

  Outside, one Nico-Nix patch proves inadequate, so I apply a few more and try the gum. This tastes so poisonous that it must do some good. I walk on. I reach Nick’s house shortly after nine—pretty good going, considering the complications that fascist in the director’s chair has thrown my way this morning. I mount the steps.

  The nanny answers the door: I’d been counting on that. The nanny is young; she proves not to be Juanita or Perpetua (all right, I’ll confess: I invented Perpetua). Her name is Ingrid, she’s from Stockholm, and we… get on. It’s evident that Ingrid knows who I am, and I suspect she’s been warned off me. Does this influence her? No. This is an independent-minded woman, and she’s going to make her own assessment of my character. We have a pleasant discussion about Sweden and that Bergman movie where a man plays chess with Death. This takes about three minutes. Ingrid says I don’t look well. She says that she’s about to have a cup of coffee, and I might benefit from one. I’m a man of honor, and I don’t want to compound my felonies, so I decline, with thanks.

  I hand her the two envelopes. Each contains a letter, and each letter is brief. The one to Fanny says: “Dear Fanny, I know I can trust you to tell Nick and Julia the truth. I think you should, don’t you? No hard feelings, and good luck, Dan.”

  The one to Nick says: “Dear Nick, There’s been a misunderstanding. Fanny will explain. I’m leaving the country today—that seems the best course of action. I may be away some time. My love to you and to Julia, Dan.”

  Considering these were written when I was concussed, blinded, and bleeding, I feel they cover all necessary ground. They’re pithy and to the point: Maisie would approve. I regret the lie to Nick about leaving the country, but it’s unavoidable. I don’t want him pursuing me to Wykenfield. The tasks I have to face there need to be faced alone.

  So: I hand these letters to Ingrid, and just as I’m about to leave, the one thing I hadn’t foreseen happens. From behind her skirts, a small voice says, “Hello, Dan.”

  It’s Tom. It’s my godson, Tom. It’s four long years since I’ve seen my godson, who’s now peeping out at me, and I was always devoted to him, and—I wasn’t prepared for this. I don’t deal with it too well. In fact, I don’t deal with it at all. What happens, and I can’t prevent it, is that my eyes fill with tears. I want to sit on the doorstep and howl. Howl for all the things I’ve lost and thrown away, howl for friendship, love, marriage, the children I’ll now never have, and the affection of this small, melancholy child from whom I’m barred, this little boy who’s the nearest I’ll ever have to a son.

  I can see that Tom has been warned off me, too—either that or, as children do, he’s overheard fraught marital discussions on my failings, and he’s learned I’m taboo. His face lit up when he first greeted me, but it’s now clouding over and he’s hesitating. Ingrid’s realized her job could be on the line, and she’s trying to usher him away. I never knew what it meant to feel like a pariah until this moment, and the pain is acute. Someone’s just jabbed a great jagged dagger of misery right through my heart.

  I look at my godson. He’s small for his age, and the resemblance to Nick is strong. He has the same dark coloring, the same prep school haircut, the same solemn, trusting air that Nick had as a child. His eyes are Julia’s. He’s resisting Ingrid’s embarrassed efforts to persuade him away from the leper on the step. Tom stands his ground.

  He says: “You’ve hurt your face, Dan.”

  “I know. I walked into a door. Stupid of me. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  “It needs a bandage. You should put a bandage on that cut. Ingrid will get you an Elastoplast.”

  A doctor’s son, I’m thinking. Most hurts can be cured. What bandage would bind up a broken heart? Can you mend a mind? “It’s fine, Tom, really,” I begin. “Can’t stay, have to be going—”

  “No,” says Ingrid, surprising me. “Tom is right. I will fetch first aid. We do not want that cut getting infected. And your poor eye is all swelling up. One minute, please.”

  Ingrid leaves Tom standing in the doorway, at risk of infection from me. She disappears downstairs to the basement. After a lengthy pause, Tom says in a small voice: “I still have that triceratops you gave me. I keep him by my bed. But I’m more into computers now.”

  “Of course you are,” I reply unsteadily. “Everyone has to move on, Tom.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I’m not. It’s just this cut—and the bruising around the eye. It sort of makes it weep.”

  “You shouldn’t be ashamed of crying, Dan,” Tom says earnestly, his brow creasing into a frown. “At school, they say boys shouldn’t cry—that’s for girls. But Daddy says that’s wrong. He says men can cry, too, when something really bad happens.” He pauses and looks anxiously at me. “Like if someone dies, for instance. A man might cry then. And Daddy often cries—I’ve seen him. He was talking on the telephone last night, late last night, after you’d gone, Dan—and he was crying badly then. I couldn’t sleep, and I went in, and I said I’d fetch Mummy for him, because she was downstairs in the kitchen, cleaning up all that coffee stuff. But Daddy hung up the phone very quickly and said, No, not to bother Mummy now, because it was only hay fever. He never used to have hay fever. But there’s a lot of it around.”

  “There certainly is,” I say quickly. “Every second person seems to have it. It’s not serious, you don’t need to worry, Tom. It’s caused by—pollution and…” I stop. I can’t go on.

  “Pollen,” Tom says, fixing me with melancholy eyes. “Pollen is the main cause, Dan.”

  “Right,” I say. I can follow his line of thought. “Absolutely. Pollen is the culprit. And you can get a high pollen count in London even at this time of year. Even in January, Tom. The plants don’t die back, you see—it’s climate change. And pollen gets in everywhere, through the smallest crack, round the edge of windows, under the doors…” I pause. I’m not convincing him. Inspiration comes. I say: “Look, Tom, there’s some right here.…”

  I hold out my empty palm. Tom inspects it. He frowns. He remembers. His face brightens. He looks at me hopefully. He says, “I can’t see anything, Dan.”

  “Watch,” I reply. And—I can still palm cards, I can still palm coins, these are arts I inherited, arts Bella honed, and I’ve never lost them—I perform the requisite hand movement that tricks the eye. One second later, and Tom is clutching a fifty-pence piece conjured from air; he’s been distracted, and Ingrid has returned. She opens a large red first-aid box with a white cross on it and, watched closely by Tom, applies some soothing unguent to the gash on my temple. She applies a pink, shiny Elastoplast. Great. No doubt I look even more foolish than before.

  But these ministrations seem to have done some good. Something has done me some good, I realize. A great wash of emotions flows through my heart. Love for Tom, whose sleeplessness is not caused by anxiety over school, as I’ve just learned. Pity for Nick, whose situation is graver than I’d understood. Gratitude to
Ingrid, for simple kindness to a stranger. A sense that blessings can be bestowed when you’re most aware they are fleeting. Lacrimae rerum, yes, that. The tears of things, I suppose.

  I thank Ingrid. I drop a kiss on Tom’s forehead. As I do so, I make a silent wish, or—who knows—a prayer, that the way will be made easy for him, that he will flourish and not be exposed too young to damage or pain. All the good that a godfather might wish a godson at the font, I wish him now.

  It feels powerful, that wish. How strange. I turn to leave and then turn back. “Have a good day, Tom,” I say, wondering if he’ll remember this, too.

  “Have a better one, Dan,” he replies promptly, and grins.

  That was the form of farewell Ocean taught me, a thousand years ago. She claimed it was a traditional Roma response, as taught her by her great-grandmother—which may or may not have been true. I can still remember the words in her language, in the old language. I say them under my breath. I know I won’t see Tom again; I know this will be our last meeting, so I add a rider: “Good-bye, Tom,” I say, and leave him, waving after me, as I walk off down the road.

  I go to the Angel. The Angel is my favorite of London’s tube stations. When I first came here from Wykenfield and took up the advertising job that Maisie’s letter of application had secured for me—yes, that ridiculous letter did the trick—this was my local station. Nick and I were sharing that shabby flat just around the corner. I’d leave from here every morning, and every evening, when I returned, I’d think: I’m home.

  It’s dangerous, the Angel, of course—and famous for it. In the majority of underground stations, there’s a wall and a concourse between the up and down lines: not here. Here, they run either side of the platform, and that platform is straight. When you stand there, especially at rush hour, it’s perilous. You could get elbowed off the edge in front of you or behind. Standing there, you can feel the doubled deadly suck of air as the trains approach, the thunder that rolls down the tunnels ahead of them and booms its warning from the dark tunnel mouths. It’s four feet from the edges of the platform to the rails that are live. A child could easily fall across them. It’s one easy step for a man, for mankind.

  By the time I get there, the rush hour is past and the platform’s deserted. Out of habit, I judge the posters. They include one of mine, part of the “Handful of Dust” TV, poster, and print campaign we did. At the time, I said: Look, you may not like it, but people get compassion fatigue. The first time they see a starving child, it hits them in the guts. Then they see it again and again, every time they switch on the TV, every time they open a newspaper—and the effect wears off. They go blind to suffering, so if you want them to get out their checkbooks, we’re going to have to do something else.

  I got my way; I usually did. So there were no shots of starving children, no harrowing footage from the field hospitals, and no information as to where this was. We just filmed some of the many, many funerals: the small graves, the tiny coffins, and the mothers’ hands, with their last sprinklings of ritualistic dust. Handheld camera, black-and-white footage, very fast images; jump cuts. There were no words—I was losing faith in words. We used the sounds of grief, that truly international language that everyone speaks. You heard the sounds of the spades, of the actual business of death. Over the intercut images, we ran the terrible statistics, and then: Shall I show you fear in a handful of dust? Presumably we showed them something, because the contributions flowed in. But then they will, if you prompt correctly. People have hearts, and those hearts can be touched.

  My train has arrived. I get on it and then forget to get off. The journey takes forever. At one of the stations, I’m not sure which, I see Finn—and I see her just as the doors are about to close. I leap up, jam my foot in them, and hurl myself onto the platform. I land at Finn’s feet and then discover it isn’t Finn at all; it’s a young, blond-haired Australian backpacker. Close up, she doesn’t resemble the Finn of twenty-three years ago very much, and she certainly doesn’t resemble the woman Finn is now “You all right, mate?” she asks, helping me to my feet. I tell her I am. I can see she doesn’t believe me, and I don’t blame her. I am fine, obviously—but with a shiny pink Elastoplast and all this Fauvist sunset swelling, what can you expect?

  I finally reach the station that is only an eighty-mile walk from Lucas’s house. I trudge the eighty miles and come to a halt at the famous wall that abuts his gate. Lucas, like me, lives in an area on the cusp between desperation and chic. Occasionally, there’ll be excitable articles in newspapers predicting that this neighborhood is next on the remorseless gentrification list. Any minute now, they say, the money’s going to start spilling over here from the adjacent citadels. Any second, there’ll be skips outside every house, the merry whistle of workmen, and those bloody four-wheel-drive tanks, bane of my life—they’ll be parked on the pavements, waiting to pick up the kiddies for the off-road trek to the private nursery two hundred yards down the street.

  Well, it hasn’t happened in Highbury Fields—not yet. And it hasn’t happened here, either. Lucas lives too close to what’s known locally as bandit country. He’s lived here twenty years, only two hundred yards from the overpass that marks the divide, and that’s too close to the border. Besides, the recession is gripping, and the bankers are running for shelter—they’re liquidizing assets, they’re in retreat.

  By now, it’s pouring with rain and threatening sleet. It’s cold. The sky is black. January in London: High noon, and any minute it will be dark on the streets. I stop to inspect the famous wall. I always do this. I find it comforting. In the past, this was a wall of history, of wit. This is where I first saw, in huge crude letters, the slogan nigg a hs out. Hours later, the reply, But he’ll be back tonight, appeared underneath in perfect, corrective, cursive script. That made my month. I also enjoyed no more war, a perennial favorite, that, and hochiminh rules and viva castro, later emended to viva castrol—who was the petrol freak? I enjoyed women need ment he way a fish need a bicycle and what we both need is a ferrari, which swiftly appeared under it. I enjoyed the campaign for nuclear disarmament badges, and the release the birmingham 3,500, or 8.I enjoyed class war and support the miners and life sucks and if you think that you want to try the alternative.

  I liked where is the falklands anyway and the answering go to antarctic adummy & turn right. I liked if they can put one man on the moon, why don’t they put them all there? In that instance, I was touched by the comma and the question mark; it’s nice when people bother to punctuate. I’d look at this wall and I’d think, Talking ’bout my g-g-generation: This is my life.

  Once upon a time, it did the heart good to see all those little Margaret Thatchers and Ronald Reagans dangling from gibbets, the iron ladies so well depicted that I suspected Lucas had a hand in it. I suspected Lucas was responsible for many of the surreal, heretical artworks and imprecations that appeared from time to time, and I’d imagine he crept out, after dark, with his skilled brush and pots of paint.

  He always denied this. And if he ever did indulge in this pastime, he’s obviously given it up. What’s happened to culture? To history? To politics? This country is going to the dogs. The wall’s now a sludgy, ugly mess of tags, not one of which displays the least originality, let alone wit. There are many tedious obscenities, cocks and balls and swastikas, that kind of stuff. There’s only one slogan left, and that’s been here as long as I can remember, though if I had a spray can right now, it’s the first one I’d paint out.

  god is watching, it says under a huge eye. Who is this voyeur, and what’s his problem? Why can’t he stop watching, and intervene occasionally, the way Zeus did? Nothing too extreme, just a few well-aimed thunderbolts, I’m not asking for much. Zap, there goes world poverty. Zap, say good-bye to war, famine, disease, and pestilence. Zap, farewell to the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Zap, I can relive my past, and this time around, Finn and Dan will marry and Maisie will never jump. The eye has a black pupil and a chalky white surround. This large pupi
l is unnaturally dilated, I note, inspecting it. What’s God on? Whatever it is, I could do with some of it.

  I lean up against the wall. My clothes are getting soaked. My face hurts. That Nico-Nix is a total rip-off, because never, in my whole sorry life, have I experienced such intense longing for a cigarette. Just to the left of this famous wall is the narrow arched gateway that leads into Lucas’s hidden, invisible from the road, house. That narrow gate, secured and protected by technology’s cutting edge, is made of steel plate, painted black. You can’t see through it, or under it, or over it, or around its edge.

  The other side of that gate is a small courtyard. On one side of that is Lucas’s studio building, with a huge north-facing window and a door that is never left unlocked. On the other side is Lucas’s calm, civilized, and welcoming house. When you visit Lucas, it’s the house you must go to, not the studio. Even if you know Lucas is in there painting, even if you can see him, you have to pretend he’s invisible. You walk up to the front door of the house and knock. Eventually Lucas will emerge from the studio, wearing one of the many identical boiler suits in which he works. You’ll enter the house—and you will enjoy yourself.

  Lucas is an excellent host. He’s amusing, he’s erudite. I’ve even known him to be kind—up to a point. He will provide excellent wine or excellent malt whiskey—whatever your weakness, Lucas will have it on tap. His food is somewhat peculiar, because on the whole Lucas forgets to eat, and food does not interest him. So it tends to be whatever involves the fewest number of man-minutes. For some years, this was a strange mittel-European soup (Lucas’s ancestry is mittel-European, I think; I wouldn’t know, he never discusses it). Then he discovered macrobiotics, which pleased him; all he had to do was cook up one huge pot of brown rice a week. Recently, he’s discovered sushi, which he can now buy from a new shop nearby called PURE—he approves of sushi, as it’s nutritious, quick to eat, and doesn’t involve heating up. Purity matters to Lucas; it always has.