by Gavin McCrea
—But the Nazis! I’nt they the exception?
—The Jerries fought because they had a duty to, just like us. I never hated them just because I was shooting at them. I respected them. I hope I might live to have a German friend or two one day.
—Mercy be, I ain’t never heard the like.
Doris began to clear the table, loudly stacking the plates on the tray.
—Iris, don’t listen to these silly old men.
—It’s okay, said Iris, who was rubbing her nose in the rabbit’s fur, I know all about the Nazis.
Doris lifted up the tray to take them to the kitchen:
—It’s terrible that you have to know about them things, Iris. But the war won’t have been in vain if mankind begins to understand the price of resignation and selfishness. If we take our fate in our own hands and win peace and freedom everywhere on earth.
Mr Lever growled.
—Don’t listen to that tripe, child. No one never succeeded in ridding the world of evil, and it won’t be got rid of soon, not in our lifetime anyhow. Take the Germans—
—Dad. Stop.
—Me stop? Your man here’s got a blue vein for the Nazis.
—Don’t get the wrong end of the stick, Dad, said Doris.
—I was making more of a philosophical point, said Simon.
Doris went into the kitchen. Iris could hear her washing the dishes. The men’s debate went on. Iris petted the rabbit and listened. Then Doris came back in.
—Oy Dad, she said, I wanted to remind you—
—About next week? Mr Lever said. I remember. I’s got it marked on the calendar.
—You going to come then?
—Still thinking about it. Plays and all that ain’t my cup of tea. And there’d only be commies, wouldn’t there?
Doris took the rabbit from Iris and went to put it back outside.
—No obligations, Dad, but there’s a seat booked for you. I’ll leave the ticket behind the bar with Si—. With Paul.
Doris put the rabbit in the hutch, came back in, locked the balcony door. From her bag she took an envelope, which Iris immediately understood to contain her wages, and put it on the table. Mr Lever watched her doing this and said nothing.
Iris, her hands now free and roaming about, had located a stack of magazines. She was leafing through one containing lurid pictures of the home life of the Royal Family.
—You can take that with you, if you like, love, said Mr Lever. I’m long finished with it. It’s only collecting dust there.
Doris snatched the magazine and threw it back on the pile:
—Leave that rubbish here.
At the front door, Mr Lever said:
—Come back again, Paul. You’d be welcome.
—Thanks, Mr Lever, said Simon, I’ll take you up on that.
Then Mr Lever knelt down and touched Iris’s chin and said:
—As I said, little Iris, I’m not sure what my Doris can do for you, but I hope it’s some good.
Eva
1968
xv.
Miss Julie had been required reading at the Royal Academy, and she had seen two productions of the play, both starring her mother — the first at the Edinburgh Festival in fifty-nine, which had won Alissa blanket praise from the critics and imprinted her as MISS JULIE in the minds of audiences and casting directors alike; the second in London in sixty-six, a more expressionistic production and more controversial on account of its sadomasochistic costumes and imagery, which subsequently got a run in New York and put her mother’s face into the American magazines — so she was not unfamiliar with it. She knew how it went, more or less. Yet only now, lying on her mattress, reading by torchlight because the electricity had been cut off that day, did she quite comprehend what a horrible piece of rot it was.
Strindberg, you lech.
She had read the first half leaning on her right elbow, while keeping the book open with her right hand and holding the torch with her left. Coming now to the part where the valet, JEAN, humiliates MISS JULIE — Servant’s whore, lackey’s bitch, shut your mouth and get out of here — Eva dropped onto her side and rolled over, swapping elbow and hands, but not before taking the opportunity to scratch an itch on her arse and to mumble to herself:
—Ach. Disgusting. I can’t believe my mother got famous on the back of this crap.
A few pages before the end, Álvaro came in. Felt around the wall for the light switch, flicked it, and when it did not work, said:
—Ah, mierda. Claro.
She lit his path across the room by shining the torch on the floor and wagging it rapidly left and right, as an usher might for a latecomer in a dark auditorium. As he stumbled his way over, she dropped the book in order to fix her hair and plump her breasts. Reaching the mattress, Álvaro knocked a shoe against its edge; to save himself from tripping, he keeled over sideways, with enough precision to land with his cheek on the pillow, his back to her. He used his toes to kick off his shoes. Fiddled with the button of his jeans and managed to zip down the fly but ran out of energy before he could take his legs out. His shirt and socks still on, his white underpants poking out of his fly, he pulled the sheet over himself.
Silently Eva punished herself for being the plain Jane of the family, and longed to be beautiful like the girls in the French pictures or even just fascinating like her mother; it nearly made her cry, then and there, to think she was not. She pointed the torch back on her book, found her page again, cleared her throat, blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. Don’t. Don’t say it. You’re not that person. You don’t own him. He’s an autonomous being, and you want him to be free.
—Where were you? Don’t tell me. On the roof. With Iris’s blacks.
He grunted:
—I was telling them about Frantz Fanon. They didn’t know who he was.
—Been smoking again? You know what I think about that. You were doing so well with your drinking. Now it’s this.
—If you’ve a problem with drugs, Eva, stop living off the proceeds.
Stung, feeling her face flush, she returned to her book. Allowed her eyes to run over the text without taking in its meaning. You can’t get angry. If you get angry, you’ll be called angry.
—Have you read this yet? she said, pinching the book by the spine and waving the pages so as to produce a sound like the beating of birds’ wings. We’re supposed to read it before the next meeting.
—Another one? I’m getting sick of all these meetings. Let’s just do the thing already.
—This isn’t your average happening, Álvy. It has to be planned properly. You’d be a better help if you weren’t stoned all the time. Tell me, are you going to read the play or not? It’s important that you know it.
—I’ll read it tomorrow.
—The meeting’s tomorrow.
—I’ll do it in the morning.
—You’ll sleep late. Then you’ll be hung-over. When was the last time you had a morning?
—Eva? Leave me. The fuck. Alone.
She sighed and flipped back a page and began to read, at first with scant concentration — I don’t know why I should care if you read it or not, I’ve been against Iris’s crackpot idea from the start, no skin off my nose if it all goes pear-shaped — but she soon recovered the characters’ voices and settled into their rhythm once more, leaving Álvaro as a faint presence at the edge of her senses.
When, thirty minutes later, she had finished the play, she threw the book onto the floor by the mattress and balanced the torch so that it stood on its end and shone at the ceiling. The room brightened. Downward shadows were cast. The discs of mould on the walls and ceiling formed a kind of constellation. Che and Marx and Mao kept watch, their gaze kind and gentle, like loving fathers, but in this half-light, their contours broadened and their skin yellowed, adding a touch of menace around their mouth
s.
—I wonder why Mama keeps coming back to this role. She must like it. Or get a kick out of it. I don’t understand it. It’s weird, to be honest, thinking about it. What d’you make of it?
She could tell by his breathing that he was not asleep.
—Álvy?
—I told you I haven’t read it.
—But you know the play. We saw it together once.
—I don’t remember.
—When we first started going out. Mama was performing in it, and you wanted to see her. Which is also kind of weird, now that I think of it.
—That’s not weird. I wanted to get to know your family. In Spain that would be totally normal. Only in England would that be considered weird.
—So you remember?
—I don’t. We’ve been to so many plays together.
She lay on her back and crossed her arms over her front.
—God. You’re useless.
In the ensuing silence he must have perceived her need of him, because he turned his head so that she could see his profile: his straight nose, his jutting chin, his left eye straining to look back over his shoulder.
—What’s wrong with you? he said. It shouldn’t bother you that I don’t remember. It doesn’t mean I don’t have other memories of the things we did together.
He sighed then and turned onto his back. They were not touching, but the gap between them was narrow enough for the hair of their arms to stand on end and make contact across it. They had not had sex in Paris, or since, and the longer the hiatus went on the more they hardened against each other. Rather than facilitating intimacy, the things they did now functioned as shields against each other, making them feel safe and justified in their separate corners, but also threatening to crush them.
—You’re thinking too much about the happening, he said. Put it out of your mind. Go to sleep.
—What d’you think of it, though, really?
—Right now, nothing.
—Come on, Álvy. Talk to me.
He kneaded his eyeballs with his knuckles. Ran his fingertips along the darkened troughs under his eyes. Blinked deliberately as if to remove a fog from his vision.
—The group is taking the right course, he said. That’s all you should care about. The fact that your idea was rejected shouldn’t matter.
—It doesn’t.
—What is it then? You should lead by example and embrace the group’s decision.
—D’you think it’s the right one, though?
—It doesn’t matter what I think.
—It does to me. You voted against me.
—Don’t think of it like that. I voted for what I thought was the best course of action for the group.
—So you do think Iris’s idea is a good one?
—I’m not going to do this with you, Eva. It always ends the same way.
He rolled onto his side again, and let out a loud, concluding sigh.
She tugged his shoulder so that he should lie on his back again. He yanked himself free of her grip and sighed even louder.
—I’m worried, she said.
—About your mother?
—She is still my mother. We’re planning to interrupt her play and put her on trial in front of the TV cameras. That’s a big deal.
—You’re being sentimental. That woman is asking for it.
—Like MISS JULIE? In the play?
—What?
—I mean, are you saying my mother is a masochist?
—Are fascists masochists?
—I think they might be.
—Well then she is.
She poked him in the spine:
—Your parents actually are fascists, and you’d never do anything like this to them.
—Don’t bring my parents into this. Theirs is an entirely different context.
A pause, and then:
—And, actually, for your information, I can imagine taking action against my parents. I’ve often thought about it.
—All I’m saying, Álvy, is that I don’t think we should wholeheartedly embrace the first idea Iris comes up with.
—Is that all you’re saying?
—Yes.
—Well, d’you want to know how it looks from the outside? It looks like you don’t like that your sister is asserting herself.
—That’s only how it looks in your drug-addled brain.
—You’ve been begging her to contribute more to the commune’s work, and now she does and you bite her head off. The truth is, you prefer how things were before, when your sister was just bankrolling this place, and you were left to call the shots.
—You’re being unfair.
—You’re the one being unfair. To your sister. You think she’s wishy-washy.
—All that talk about following her instincts and searching out her own experiences. It’s too much for me.
—In Paris, you acted exactly like her.
—What? No.
—You did what the fuck you wanted, when you wanted.
—There was a rebellion going on. Not a moment passed when I wasn’t contributing to the large—
—Contributing to your own little cabaret, maybe.
—You bastard.
—When we hooked up with these Maoists, from day one, you didn’t stop telling them off for being inflexible and dogmatic. How many lectures did you give them about how the new politics has to take account of the individual? Then we get home and what d’you do? You start giving it to your sister for being too flexible, too much of an individual.
—You’re saying I’m a hypocrite?
—I don’t know. I just look at you when you behave like this and I scratch my head and I think, no one can win. Whether we move this way or that, you’re always going to find fault with us. There’s nothing we can do to get your approval. Unless we’re Doris, of course. Then we can do what we like and still you’d think we’re great.
—What do you mean? I’m not like that with Doris.
—You put her on a pedestal.
—Shut up.
—You put her on a pedestal because, unlike your mother, she’s found a way to be an egomaniac that doesn’t depend on selling her soul to the tabloids and the fashion magazines. And you want that for yourself too. But you know you can’t just copy her. You have to figure out your own way, and you haven’t yet, so you go around rejecting, rejecting, rejecting, because nothing you see is it.
—I live for the group. What more do I have to do to make you believe that?
—You’ll only need the group till you’ve figured out a way to do all of this on your own.
—Wow. The truth comes out.
—Which makes you just like your sister. You don’t like to see it, but you’re similar. Iris uses us as well. In her case, for company. She doesn’t really care about us, as people. She just cares that we’re here when she comes back from her parties. She likes having us around because we look after things when she’s out and we look out for her when she’s in.
—You arsehole.
—It’s just a pity you don’t dress more like a hippy girl, and be sexy sometimes, then at least I’d get something out of it.
She rolled onto her side, so that now they were lying back to back. The promise of expression was that it would alleviate pain and make it bearable. The danger was that it would unearth older and deeper strata of torment.
—To top it off, you’re now saying Iris is sexy.
—Not Iris. The cool ones you see around.
The Guineveres. The watery-eyed ladies of the lowlands. The belles dames of legend to whom Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix crooned.
—You men would ball anything. You’ve always said you couldn’t stand Iris. So this must mean you can’t stand me either.
—When you’re like her, you
’re right, I can’t stand you.
She rubbed her palms up and down her cheeks, as if scrubbing them with soap.
—I’m always myself. When am I ever not myself?
—You’re always yourself, yeah. And what you are, is a chameleon. You say one thing to the Maoists, and another thing to Doris, and another thing to me, because you think you’re the only one who sees the whole picture, and we just see these little parts, we’re blind to the rest, and it’s your job to manage us all, to lead us to the light. But you’re careful not to go too fast either, you don’t want to reveal it all to us too quickly, because somewhere you like that we’re limited, that we don’t quite reach the standard. It means that when it comes time to do your bidding, we’ll do it. We’ll go along with whatever you say—
She whirled round and began to slap his back.
—You fucking-fucking-fucking-fucking bastard.
He reared up into a seat, knocked her hands away, put his face into hers:
—Stop it. Now. I mean it.
She cowered, half-expecting him to slap her back, on the cheek, as he had done on one occasion during a quarrel. It had not been hard, his hand had been open, and he had been sorry, racked with remorse, and had kept his promise never to do it again. But the memory was there all the same. It could not be erased, and it often returned to make her flinch.
Satisfied with having produced this fear, which was the closest he would ever come to being right in an argument with her, he collapsed back down onto his side.
She stared at the back of his head.
He burrowed his cheek deeper into the pillow.
—I sacrificed a lot, she said, by setting up Wherehouse. I could have been—
—I know, I know, a proper actress like your mother.
—I could have been a lot of things. But, yes, an actress, as well, if I’d wanted to be. Don’t think I don’t think about the money I could be earning elsewhere, the name I could be making for myself. The reviews. The flowers. The nice dressing room. The comforts. I think about these things every day. I mean, look at where we live, the state of it, how could I not? But instead of fuelling regrets, I think of what I’ve missed and I tell myself, Eva, it can’t be for nothing that you’ve given all of that up. What you do, what Wherehouse does, has to be extraordinary. It has to be worth it.