On the day, of course, the gilded barge had been forsaken by the Queen for a more prosaic Thames cruiser, Gloriana having been deemed too small for all the hangers-on—the protection officers and ladies-in-waiting and lackeys—that were necessary when a queen took to the river. Bertie had intended to join the flocks of people on the banks of the Thames—to be part of something bigger than herself, something that she would remember in the future in the same way that you knew where you had been at midnight on the Millennium. (Drunk, in Soho House, something she regretted now. Obviously.) It had rained, however, relentlessly, for the whole day, and Bertie had watched the admirable perseverance of monarchy on the television, the medium through which she had also experienced Diana’s funeral, the Twin Towers falling and the last Royal Wedding. One day, she thought, she would actually be somewhere when something happened and it wouldn’t be rendered second-hand through a lens. Even if it was a dreadful spectacle—a bomb, a tsunami, a war—she would at least know the grandeur of horror.
Grandpa Ted’s brother Jimmy, dead before Bertie could meet him, had been one of the first to go into Belsen and then after the war he left for Madison Avenue and joined one of the original ad agencies as a copywriter. To have lived a life of such polarities made her envious. Nowadays you just did a degree in Media Studies.
And Grandpa Ted himself, of course, mind and body crumbling a little more every day, like a magnificent, neglected ruin, had once been a bomber pilot, flying into the jaws of death every night. “ ‘The jaws of death’—is that a terrible cliché?” she asked him on their farewell tour, an elegiac revisiting of his old haunts, over ten years ago now. (“Why doesn’t he just die?” Viola wailed. “How long does it take to say goodbye?”) It had given Bertie an insight into her grandfather’s life, into history itself, which although gratifying had also left her existential nerves jangled and confused. “Promise me you’ll make the most of your life,” he had said to Bertie. Had she? Hardly.
She muted the inane BBC commentary and said, “How are you, Grandpa Ted?” She imagined him lying in bed in that horrible nursing home, living this unwelcome remnant of his life. Bertie wished she could rescue him, swoop in and carry him off, but he was too ill and frail now. Her grandfather had lived at Fanning Court for nearly twenty years, then he fell and broke a leg which led to pneumonia which should have led to an easeful death (“The old people’s friend,” Viola said wistfully), but he pulled through it. (“He’s immortal,” Viola said.) He was a lesser person than before, near enough helpless, and he was discharged into the dubious arms of the nursing home, which was where, Bertie supposed, he would die. “Every time I see him I think it might be the last time,” Viola said hopefully.
He deserved a better place to leave this life than Poplar Hill. “And where is this mythical poplar and this mythical hill?” Viola was always ranting, as if the problems with the place were a matter of semantics.
Viola was furious at how much the nursing home cost. The sheltered flat was sold but all the money was being “swallowed up” by the nursing-home fees.
“But you have plenty of money,” Bertie said.
“That’s not the point. He should care enough about me to leave me something.” (“That’s not the POINT. He should CARE enough about me to leave me SOMETHING.”) “A legacy. There’ll be nothing left by the time he dies.”
“Well, nothing left of him, at any rate,” Bertie said. “And you don’t really mean to be so horrible,” she added.
“Yes, I do,” Viola said.
Are you watching the flotilla on television, Grandpa Ted? The Jubilee?” (Oh God, her intonation sounded like her mother’s.) “Sunny sends his love,” she reported and her grandfather seemed to chuckle (or perhaps he was choking) because he had always understood Sunny better than any of them. Grandpa Ted may have been pulsing slowly towards the end of his life but he was still palpably himself, something her mother seemed incapable of understanding. Sunny hadn’t actually sent his love but he would have done if he’d known she was talking to their grandfather. Sunny loved his grandfather. His grandfather loved Sunny. It was the most complicated arrangement.
“I’m going to Singapore tomorrow.” Her mother’s rather shrill tones suddenly replaced her grandfather’s silence and Bertie recoiled from the phone.
“Singapore?”
“A literary festival.”
Viola used to sound embarrassingly pleased with herself when she talked about the more glamorous end of publishing. “A meeting in London with a film producer,” “lunch at The Ivy with my publishers,” “the main stage at Cheltenham.” Now she just sounded oddly defeated.
“I’ll be in London tonight,” she said. “I could take you to dinner. At Dinner.”
“Sorry, I’m busy.” It was the truth but Bertie would have said it anyway. Her mother sounded disappointed, which was interesting as for over thirty years it had been the other way round.
“Are you going to see Sunny?” she asked her.
“Sunny?”
“Your only son.”
“Singapore isn’t Bali, it’s a completely different country,” Viola said, although she sounded unsure. Geography never had been her strong point.
“It’s a hop and a skip away though. You’ll be well over halfway there when you get to Singapore. It’s not as if you have anything else to do. And you should,” Bertie added, “and quickly because you may not know this but the universe has already started collapsing. There are signs everywhere. I have to go.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No, I don’t but I am. Say goodbye to Grandpa Ted for me.”
The Queen had reached Tower Bridge. Bertie turned the television off, alert for signs of the universe collapsing.
There was an old Aga in the kitchen that pumped out heat. She thought of it as akin to a big friendly animal. Next to the Aga was a small armchair covered in a crocheted blanket and on the blanket a large tabby cat was sound asleep. The stone-flagged floor was warmed by hand-hooked rugs. A Welsh dresser held blue-and-white crockery and on the large scrubbed deal table was a little china jug of sweet peas and marigolds from the garden. Bertie was standing at the ancient Belfast sink patiently drying pots and laying them on the wooden draining-board.
She could see the garden from the kitchen window. The garden was a little corner of Eden, the scarlet flowers of runner beans, the neat mounds of strawberry plants and tangled rows of peas. An apple tree next to the—
A siren interrupted this delightful reverie. Bertie was on her way back from lunch at the Wolseley with a production company. On Piccadilly, she discovered, there was a sense of occasion in the air. Or threat, it was hard to tell the difference. Police and military everywhere and crowds corralled on the pavement. A motorcycle escort signalled importance. A huge car containing royalty swept past. “The Bomber Memorial,” someone explained when she asked. Of course, the Queen was dedicating the new Bomber Memorial today, midway between the Jubilee and the start of the Olympics, a patriotic summer of red, white and blue for London.
Later, on television (because this was another second-hand spectacle) she watched the ceremony on the news, saw all the fragile old men struggling to hold back tears and couldn’t hold back her own as each one reminded her of her grandfather and the mysterious past.
Bertie waited patiently with the crowds on the pavement. Bomber Command had waited seventy years, she supposed she could wait a few minutes. A formation of Tornado fighter jets roared overhead, thrillingly noisy, and were followed by a lone Lancaster that dropped the contents of its bomb-bay over London. Poppies bloomed in a stain of red on the blue-and-white summer sky.
Bertie was on her way home from work when Viola phoned. “We’ve been summoned,” she said portentously.
“Summoned?”
“Asked to come. By the nursing home,” Viola said. She sounded excited. She loved drama as long as it didn’t threaten her.
“Grandpa Ted?” Bertie said, suddenly alert. “What’s happened?”
> “Well…” Viola said, as if about to embark on a thrilling narrative when in fact all that had happened was that Teddy had fallen asleep yesterday evening and couldn’t be woken this morning. “They said to get there as soon as possible but I won’t be able to get a flight until the morning. It’ll be late tomorrow night before I can get to York.”
“I’ll set off and drive there now,” Bertie said.
It wasn’t them who had been summoned, Bertie thought, it was her grandfather. The angels had finally called him in.
“They took their time about it,” Viola said.
2012
The Last Flight
Dharma
“There is a Hindu legend that tells us that there was once a time when all men were gods, but they abused their divinity. Brahma, the god of creation, concluded that people had lost the right to their divinity and decided to take it away from them. Wanting to hide it somewhere where they wouldn’t be able to find it, he called a council of all the gods to advise him. Some suggested that they bury it deep in the earth, others that they sink it in the ocean, others still suggested it be placed on top of the highest mountain, but Brahma said that mankind was ingenious and would dig down far into the earth, trawl the deepest oceans and climb every mountain in an effort to find it again.
“The gods were on the point of giving up when Brahma said, ‘I know where we will hide man’s divinity, we will hide it inside him. He will search the whole world but never look inside and find what is already within.’ ”
Viola wasn’t really listening. Sunny liked to finish his yoga sessions with what she thought of as a “little sermon.” Words of wisdom from the enlightened, pulled from all over the place—Hinduism, Sufism, Buddhism, even Christianity. The Balinese themselves, she had learned, were Hindu. Viola had been under the misapprehension that they were Buddhists. “We’re all the Buddha,” Sunny said. “It sounds preachy in print,” Viola wrote in an email to Bertie, “but actually it’s sort of uplifting. He would have made rather a good vicar.” Who was this new docile version of her mother, Bertie wondered?
Sunny taught at a place called the Bright Way in Ubud. To begin with Viola had avoided the sessions at the Bright Way. She was staying at an outrageously expensive “wellness retreat” hotel a half-hour’s drive away, where they had their own yoga teacher—and where the private, individual classes were held in something called the “yoga bale,” a pleasant airy pavilion constructed from polished teak, situated amongst trees in which birds trilled and cackled in an exotic fashion and insects droned or clacked like wind-up mechanical toys.
At the Bright Way, on the other hand, classes took place in a huge upstairs room that was hot and stuffy, even with all the windows flung open in an effort to catch a breeze. It was quite basic or the product of a “simple ascetic,” depending on your viewpoint—Viola’s or that of the Bright Way’s website.
Despite the size of the room, it was always crowded, mostly with women—athletic young Australians and middle-aged Americans. Most of the latter seemed to be doing what Bertie called “their eat-pray-love shit.”
Sunny qualified as a yoga teacher years ago in India and he was currently teaching on Bali. He was, apparently, a “respected teacher on the international circuit.” He frequently travelled to America and Australia to hold retreats that were always booked up. Everyone was in retreat, it seemed to Viola.
Sunny was all over the Internet if you knew where to look—if you knew who to look for—because although you would have thought that Sun (or even Sunny) might be a good name for someone who did what he was doing, he was known to all and sundry as “Ed.” “Sun Edward Todd,” he said reasonably to Viola, “it’s my name.” And that was only a small part of his transformation. The physique of a dancer, the shaven head, the oriental tattoos, the wash of an Australian accent were all a complete surprise to her. A changeling. And women loved him! They were like groupies, especially the eat-pray-love crowd. Viola hadn’t seen Sunny for nearly ten years and in the interim he had turned into a complete human being. (“Perhaps the two things aren’t unrelated,” Bertie said.)
“Thank you for this practice. Namaste,” Sunny said, bowing with his hands in prayer. There were a lot of murmured thank-yous and Namastes in return. (They took it so seriously!) Sunny leaped up from his lotus pose with alarming fluidity. Viola struggled to her feet, not from a lotus pose, merely a stiff and uncomfortable cross-legged position that reminded her of school assemblies.
Sunny lived in a village quite close to her outrageously expensive hotel yet seemed to have no intention of inviting Viola into his home so she decided, reluctantly, that the only way she was going to get to spend time with him was by coming along to his classes and putting up with the inane adoration of his other “students”—to which he appeared sublimely indifferent—not to mention the hideous physical challenges of the class. She had done yoga before, of course—who hadn’t?—but it had usually taken place in draughty church halls or community centres and had involved not much more than a bit of cautious stretching and then lying down and “visualizing” yourself in a place where you felt “safe and at peace.” This was always a challenge for Viola and while other people (women, always women) were lying on a tropical beach somewhere or in a deckchair in their garden, Viola’s imagination was running around fretfully looking for something—anything—that it could recognize as peaceful and safe.
When Sunny finished his Hindu homily and they’d all Namasted each other to death, the American woman who had occupied the mat next to Viola (“Shirlee with two ‘e’s”) turned to her and said, “Ed’s a wonderful teacher, isn’t he?” The boy who couldn’t be taught anything, Viola thought. “I’m his mother,” she said. How long since Viola had said those words? Not since Sunny was in school, probably.
—Oh—
A sudden horrible memory of the Casualty department at St. James’s hospital in Leeds came back to her. Sunny had just started college and she had thought it must be drugs when the hospital phoned her, but apparently he had been found wandering in the street with blood dripping from his arm from a botched attempt at cutting his wrist. “I’m his mother!” she had yelled at the doctor treating him when he told her that it was best that Sunny didn’t see anyone “just now.”
“Why?” she had asked him when she was finally allowed into his cubicle. Why did he do it? The usual inarticulate shrug. “Don’t know.” When pressed—“Because my life’s shit?”
Did he still have the scar? Was it hidden by the complicated dragon that curled up his arm?
Shirlee with two “e”s laughed and said, “I don’t think of him as having a mother.”
“Everyone has a mother.”
“Not God,” Shirlee said.
“Even God,” Viola said. Perhaps that’s where it had all started to go wrong.
Of course, no one would know by observing them that they were mother and son. Sunny called her “Viola” and she didn’t really call him anything. He treated her exactly the same as he treated everyone else in the class, with a detached kind of concern. (“Do you have arthritis in your knees?” No, she didn’t, thank you very much.)
Surprise?” she said when she eventually tracked him down.
“It is,” he said. They had hugged warily, as if one of them might have a knife.
Only Bertie and Sunny knew where she was. She hadn’t bothered to tell the staff at Poplar Hill that she was on a different continent from her ailing father. She was at the other end of a phone if they needed to contact her.
She had stepped out of her life. If she’d known how easy it was she would have done it long ago. She had sent an email to her agent and asked her to tell people that she was having an operation (she was, she was having her mind removed) and to make her apologies all round. She didn’t want people to think she had absconded, disappeared, like Agatha Christie. The last thing she wanted was people looking for her. No, that wasn’t true—the last thing she wanted was people finding her.
The incredib
ly expensive hotel where Viola was staying had been converted from an old estate and sat at the top of a gorge from where there were lovely views along the river a long way below. There were security guards and personal butlers and nothing was any trouble at all. She had a villa—the largest, the most expensive—all to herself. It was far too big, it could have accommodated several families, but she liked the solitude. When she got up in the morning she could make coffee in the high-end espresso machine in the “living area” (surely everywhere was a living area?) and drink it while she watched the mist rising from the valley below and listened to the birds calling to each other across the forest. Then someone would bring her something delicious for breakfast and she would go to the spa and be massaged or walk down the ancient stone steps to the “sacred river.” She wasn’t sure why it was sacred. Sunny said all rivers are sacred. Everything was sacred, apparently.
“Even dog shit?”
“Yes, even dog shit.”
She was compiling a list of things that might not be sacred. Hiroshima, jihadist massacres, kittens in microwaves. Those are acts, Sunny said, not things. But weren’t acts committed by people and weren’t people sacred? Or was it just trees and rivers?
In the afternoons she slept (an alarming amount) and then woke up and had the hotel car drive her to Ubud, where she joined Sunny’s class. He didn’t even save her a place on the mat-crowded floor, so that if she arrived late there was no room for her and she had to sit in the little office and read the books they had in a small “library” (i.e., a shelf). All the books had some kind of spiritual slant, needless to say. There was a handwritten sign attached to the shelf that said, “Please, dear friend, leave these books in the condition that you found them,” which was ridiculous as no book could ever be left in the condition that you found it in because it was changed every time it was read by someone.
The class, if there was space for her, lasted for two hours (it was designed with punishment in mind) and afterwards the driver would take her back to the hotel and she would watch the family of monkeys that came out from the forest every evening to play on the old estate walls around her villa. She would eat dinner too, of course. The “eat” part was easy. The praying and loving were harder.
A God in Ruins Page 42