by Gavin McCrea
Doris looked around for somewhere to go, but there was nowhere.
Her father leaned sideways against the wall. Rubbed the stubble on his face.
—In the interests of saving everyone from hurt feelings, he said, we should talk, the three of us, and come to some kind of understanding, wouldn’t you agree?
—No, said her mother, rubbing circles into her forehead. I don’t need to talk. I just need to rest.
—You owe Doris an apology.
—Oh? For?
—You know what for. The way you spoke to her today. The way you’ve been speaking to her.
Planting her palms on the dressing table, her mother used it to lever herself to her feet. She replaced the dressing gown with a night-dress from the clothes pile on top of the chest.
—I simply told Doris not to touch my children. She was being inappropriate.
—Inappropriate? said her father. Quite the contrary. Seeing Doris with the children has made me think about how we’ve been as parents. The way she takes time with them, the way she listens to them, plays with them. It’s a lesson for us.
Her mother took off her bra under the night-dress. Dropped it on the floor. Signalled to Eva and Iris that they should move further down the mattress to let her in. Then she got under the sheets and patted the space beside her as an invitation to her daughters to join her. Iris did. Eva stayed where she was: engulfed by shame for her parents’ behaviour but at the same time desperately wishing for an argument so nasty that the play would have to be cancelled.
—Should I have to say it, Paul? her mother said then. It was out of line for Doris to take Iris in her car to meet her family. None of your other girls was ever given such leeway. From now on, Doris isn’t to be left alone with either of our daughters at any time. She is not to touch them or talk to them, ever.
—Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve never heard—
—You have more freedom than most men, and I’m content for you to use it. But please don’t abuse it, Paul. Respect the lines we’ve drawn. Now, I’m about to turn off the lamp. Can you turn the main light off on your way out?
—Not until you give Doris the apology she deserves.
The anger that had obviously been simmering now flew up and broke in her mother’s throat as a maniacal laugh. The laughter seemed to travel to every part of her; to every limb; to every tip; to every nerve ending; consume her.
Eva clasped her hands over her face as a mask, and the outside world disappeared. There existed only a tiny point in space, where the index fingers parted, which contained within it the absurdity of life in all its possible forms. A moment, then, and this point turned inside out, and the world returned.
Her mother switched off the lamp. Alone, the main light caused different shadows to fall: dark discs beneath everyone’s eyes; long gullies down their cheeks.
—We’re not leaving until we sort this out, said her father. How about you, Doris? Maybe you should begin? I know you’ve something you’d like to say to Alissa.
—Okay, said Doris, well, ah—
—You’ve been giving Doris a hard time at rehearsals, her father cut in. And it’s very unfair.
—The first thing you learn working in the theatre, said her mother, is that you can’t take things personally.
—Cut it out, said her father. You can see how hard it is for Doris to do this. Just apologise, for fuck’s sake.
How it had always worked was that an understanding would arise between her mother and father — unspoken — that his present affair was nearing an end, and then, barely even willed, it would end. It was not a system without rules; rather it was a system in which the rules did not need to be stated. But maybe that had been the wrong way about it. Maybe by stating the rules they would have avoided the mistake of deeming themselves wiser than the rules.
—I’m going to be honest with you, Doris, said her mother. Really, what you do or don’t do, or whether I like you or not, is irrelevant. Because this situation is only temporary. You’ll be gone from us soon, and you won’t have to worry about me or this place any longer. You clearly have feelings for each other—
She clasped her hands together to suggest the coming together of two bodies.
—and I try hard to see things through your eyes. But I can’t bear dissension between myself and Paul. And I won’t tolerate anyone manipulating my daughters. So, yes, it’ll be coming to a close soon.
Eva was clutching her own throat as though to prevent the anxiety from rising into her head.
Iris — wouldn’t you know — had zoned out and was staring blankly at the ceiling.
Her father brought a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.
—Doris is doing good work, he said weakly. She has become indispensable to me.
—I understand it might seem that way, said her mother. But a deal’s a deal. Perhaps my husband didn’t tell you this, Doris, but the director becomes obsolete after opening night. When the play is up and running, it has no more use for him. So, evidently, we won’t be needing a director’s assistant either, and I’m against you staying on as a permanent member. It wouldn’t be, well, it wouldn’t be right. You understand, don’t you? I’ve nothing against you, personally. Truth be told, I’m trying to protect you.
—From? said her father.
—From us.
Her father had gone white, and a twitch had come to his right leg, making it jig arrhythmically.
Doris, on the other hand, appeared fine. She had a hand on her hip and was sort of pouting nonchalantly.
—Maybe you’re right, Alissa, she said. You’ve been open with me from the beginning. I’ve known all along how things were going to go, I can’t say I didn’t.
—But things have turned out a little differently than expected, said her father, visibly panicked. You’re different from what I expected.
—Your wife is right, Paul, said Doris. I don’t want to come between you.
—My wife? said her father. What if I told you—
—Paul? said her mother, a warning.
—what if I told you she wasn’t my wife? That we weren’t even married?
Which was how Eva found out. That was how she was told.
The voices of children flew wildly around the auditorium. Clichés were given new punch. Insults became sparkling and light. Phrases which in an adult’s mouth would have been dead weights rose up and circled round, escaped through the doors and the cracks, penetrated the ceilings and walls, reaching every part of Wherehouse. Eva was decidedly not in the mood. Had it been up to her, she would not have allowed this. But the course of things was no longer under her command. The reins had slipped from her hands. It was Iris who held them now; it was she who had called the children in.
That morning she, Iris, had knocked on the terrace doors and scoured the bomb sites; at lunchtime she had waited outside the local school gate, hoping to run into the specific types she had in mind to recruit. Of the twenty or so she approached, eleven agreed to come, which ought to have been plenty. But Doris, then, unable to tolerate the idea of a team composed entirely of boys, had insisted on doing a runaround of her own, which had yielded five more: all girls from the same extended clan, prised with great difficulty from the high-walled edifice of familial and neighbourhood control.
Eva sat alone on the stage, her legs dangling off the sides, her eyes closed, her fingertips pressed into her temples: adapting to the new reality. The children had every right to be here, and to make whatever noise they wanted. The theatre was as much theirs as hers to fill. She just needed a minute to find the heart to hand it over to them.
They — these sixteen sons and daughters of King’s Cross, for whom talk other than shouting was impossible — were going to take part in the happening. According to Iris’s plan, the Wherehouse members were going to lead them in a procession through the streets as far as the L
ondon Carlton, where the interruption and then the televised trial would take place. During the procession, the children were going to hold lighted Chinese lanterns, as though delivering fire from the dark parts of London to the bright.
Taking a long breath through her nostrils, Eva opened her eyes and looked around the auditorium floor. The children were dispersed in groups of two and three around the six workbenches. At two of the benches the children were making red armbands, which were going to be worn to distinguish the happening participants from the general public. At the four other benches they were making the lanterns. Laid out on the stage floor, there were already about thirty completed lanterns from previous workdays; Iris’s idea was to make at least twenty more today.
The children’s work at each table was being overseen by a Wherehouse member, a Maoist or both; the interaction between the children and the overseers was what was producing most of the racket. The children were excited, having been admitted both to the mighty league of grown-ups and to the magic circle of entertainers (to their minds, the collective was simply a kind of human circus). The adults here appeared to them as figures of all that was alien: they dressed in a fashion for which the children had no reference, they spoke in an English which the children did not always comprehend, they displayed attitudes and airs which the children had seldom encountered before. Everything the children saw, they wanted to touch; everything the adults touched, they fought to be the first to handle. Once they had learned how to do something, such as how to bend the bamboo strips around the lantern frame and glue them into place, they immediately assumed the role of experts in that thing, and ran around to the other tables showing the others how to do it, regardless of whether the others were involved in that activity or not. They helped each other with heartbreaking generosity and criticised each other without shame. They were tender one minute, violent the next; they fought and forgave with matching vehemence. Not knowing how long this experience would last, they plunged into it, squeezed from it all that they could, without ever forgetting that they were not the kind of people who normally did this sort of thing, and therefore were constantly anxious to know if they were still welcome to be here, and how long it would be before they were not.
The only light in the room came from candles and torches and oil lamps. In the dimness, Eva watched with only a weak sense of her own involvement; a feeling of detachment which saddened her because it reminded her of her mother and father, who, when setting up The East Wind, had not been interested in connecting with the local community. They had decried bourgeois intellectuals who thought it was necessary to submerge oneself in the proletariat. Instead they had seen themselves as a beacon, attracting outsiders similar to themselves into King’s Cross. Royal Court theatre buffs and counter-cultural oddities and society movers and shakers: her parents had been obsessed with taking these exotic creatures out of their natural habitat and placing them here, in this swamp, and leaving them to sink or swim.
Unlike them, Eva really desired submersion. She wanted to be more than just a member of a commune, she also wanted to be a citizen of the locality. But she found it hard to make contact with the natives. The closest she had come was in the neighbourhood pubs, where on a few occasions she had succeeded in striking up a conversation or gaining entrance to a game of darts. But she only went to the pubs if Iris was going, and she followed Iris’s lead about who to associate with and who to avoid; she did not dare to do any of that alone.
It came easily to Iris. Iris had a common touch. Which must have been self-acquired, for she had not been taught it at home. Watching her sister now, Eva was once again struck by this fact, and felt envy on account of it. Iris approached the children without trepidation. She spoke to them seriously, without condescension, and did not have to change the way she spoke in order to gain their acceptance. She answered their queries with forthrightness, and expected the same in return, in this way making it known that she would be more than merely tolerated; she would be treated as an equal and an ally. Patiently, she taught them how to look at things, to take notice, to handle with care, to worry about process as much as outcome. For one of their jokes, she gave them back two, and, taking her lead, they only laughed if they actually thought she was being funny. Of course they had no intention of inviting her into their lives afterwards, they would have been warned against getting too intimate with people like her, but within these confines they trusted her. If they encountered a problem which their own overseers were unable to fix, they rushed to Iris with it. They would not accept anyone else’s word, they would only deal with her.
Doris, too, was able to coalesce with the children, though her approach to them differed from Iris’s. Coming from a similar background as the children, she presumed to know them, perhaps more than she actually did, and was impatient with them for their not having seen beyond their limited horizons already. She spoke their idiom fluently, but she tended to use it to cane them with, to drive them like stubborn donkeys towards the know-how that she believed they ought to have acquired by now, if one day they wanted to get out of their situation. It was clear that, for herself, Doris did not care for children. She did not feel their absence in her own life. Why always children? Eva had heard her say during a discussion on the boat home from France. Ain’t it more beautiful that desire should end where it begins, and not produce all of this messy extra material? Nothing into nothing, that’s the way of the universe, and the way I intend to live. Eva was sure that her father would have liked to have more children, and she was thankful that Doris was denying him this. Eva did not know how she would have responded to seeing her father showering attention on a second brood in order to make up for his neglect of the first.
Álvaro was helping to make the red armbands. Initially he had been assigned to the lanterns, at a table occupied by three girls, but he had demanded to be changed, believing that he would get on better with the boys. He enjoyed the boys’ company, though Eva was not certain if they enjoyed his company as much in return. In him, there was concealed a child that wanted to play. He seemed to believe that if he could reveal that child, be that child, he would forget how illusions were made and everything would seem real again. But the boys were suspicious of the eagerness that attended this belief. Perhaps they saw what Eva saw: that, more than feeling respect for the children as they actually were, Álvaro envied them their potential: who and what they could one day be. He hoped much from them, believed them composed of a finer clay than the rest of disappointing humanity, when the fact was that most of them would grow up into commonplace people. They merely had not yet had the opportunity to be corrupt or shallow or decadent. But they would get their chance. In capitalism, everyone did.
Eva was aware that Álvaro’s primary motivation for getting married was to have children, and that he wanted to get married so soon because he wanted children young. He did not want to be an old father, as his own father had been. Eva alone was not enough to justify Álvaro’s existence. A wedding in itself would not satisfy him. A woman’s oath of fidelity was meaningful only as a means to the greater prize. Only children — sons — would dignify his life. Eva had often spoken to him, abstractly, about the idea of family, and what it meant to him, and she had got the sense that, for him, having children was a way of taking revenge against a future which he could not control. A child of two or three was already a moral being: he moved the right way, made the right noises, and knew what he should and what he should not feel. Álvaro seemed to believe that when Leftists got cynical about family and refused to have them, all they were doing was leaving the field open for Rightists to populate the world with their moral copies. Radicals had a duty to reproduce.
Eva looked at the question through the opposite side of the glass. She believed responsible revolutionaries should not have children. When children were born, they had to be the first consideration. Until they were grown, one did not have the right to live for oneself. To bear children was necessarily to enter a state o
f ceaseless torment as one wondered how one could bring them up well and in what way one could leave them a means of support. Unless Eva begged from her grandparents, which she was not prepared to do, she would not be well off enough to afford a housekeeper, nor would she want to contract out her maternal responsibilities to a stranger like that. She would be forever torn between domestic chores and her artistic fulfilment, which ultimately was her deepest health. Were she ever to become a mother, so as not to become like her own mother, she would in all probability sacrifice her art for the children’s sake. She would trade politics and performance for a dull peace. But the result, the final tariff would be her own illness and death.
As for the future, a part of Eva had already given up on that. She was haunted by the threat that even if a nuclear war did not destroy the planet outright, her children would be born deformed or mad. In her waking nightmares, misshapen children, cretins, crawled on the floor around her feet, pleading for succour that she could not provide. Having physically healthy babies would be no consolation either; it would not put an end to the terrors. For how would she know, even with normal children, whether or not she was toiling for worthless ones? What would she do if they ended up being conservatives? Rightists? Fascists? And — the question had to be asked — would it be any better if, against the odds, they turned out to be Leftists? Destined to spend their lives seeking solidarity and communion in an even more hostile world? Talking about equality and freedom as higher principles when the majority had long learned to see them as meaningless words? What contribution would Eva have made then, except to help engender another generation of failures?
When adults suffered something they could not bear, when they were defeated, they transferred their feelings to their children. There was nothing to suggest that Eva would not do the same. She, like everyone else, would begin by wanting to make amends to her children for being the child of her own parents, but before long she would be taking revenge on them with the same motive in mind. It made a difference to Eva whether she was in agreement with what Doris thought, and whether Doris regarded her as being like herself; on this subject, however, her agreement was unforced. The childless, by their ignorance about whether children proved in the end a happiness or a sadness, won greater happiness than those who were parents.