So this morning he is thinking about male initiation ceremonies in sub-Saharan Africa, and about puberty in Samoa and New Guinea, and how to slot in the discrediting of Margaret Mead, and that he is minus a rather crucial reference, which means that he must go to the library this morning, instead of battening down in his study right away. Never mind—he can get back to the chapter in the afternoon. And then there is this drip of blood from his chin, which he barely notices, intent upon the day and what he will do with it.
On Saturdays, Charles eats breakfast with his children. Weekdays, the kitchen is a maelstrom of departure for school—of mislaid sports kits, of forgotten homework, of haste and crisis; he tends to snatch toast and coffee and seek the shelter of his study. At the weekend, he remains at the head of the big table, reading the paper, and from time to time paying benign attention to the conversation, to opinions, reports, demands, exchanges.
Gina announces that she thinks this war is crazy. The Falklands war. What is the point of people killing one another over some islands stuck out in the Atlantic where no one in their right mind would want to live anyway? Charles remarks that this can indeed be seen as a point of view, a not unreasonable one, but that there is an issue of international law, of sovereignty.
Roger is doing a school project on the ancient Greeks. Does Charles have a book with a picture of the Parthenon that he could copy? Charles ponders, and says that he does not think that he has. All those books you’ve got, and nothing with the Parthenon, says Roger, disgusted.
Clare tells the table that she has a loose tooth.
Katie tells Roger her year did that project too, and you don’t have to have the Parthenon, any old temple will do.
Sandra needs to go shopping. She needs a blue tank top. She needs a haircut. Will Alison drive her into town?
Paul is rather silent. When, once, he asks for the bread, Charles is startled by his hoarse voice, as so often nowadays. His eldest son is mutating, becoming someone else. Charles finds this vaguely surprising, but he is not dismayed like Alison, who would like to tamp him down, to arrest development. She does not like this growing-up business. She was aghast when last she put Paul against the measurement wall.
Gradually, everyone seeps from the breakfast table. Except for Alison and Ingrid, who are clearing up. Except for Paul, who sits eyeing his father. Charles is immersed in this distant forthcoming war, in this new language of Exocets and exclusion zones. Eventually he becomes aware that Paul has spoken.
“Well, can I?”
“Can you what?” says Charles.
“Can I go to Amsterdam for a weekend with Nick and some other people from school?”
“Why?”
“Just to hang out there. See things and stuff.”
“How much?”
“Thirty quid? Less, probably.”
“No,” says Charles, returning to the Exocets.
Alison, at the sink, is silent but evidently attentive. She seems about to speak, but does not. Ingrid removes Charles’s empty cup, sweeps a damp cloth across the table.
“Nick’s parents are letting him,” says Paul. Sullen. Resentful. His voice now a growl.
Charles folds the paper, glances at Paul, and then at his watch. “Do you have a particular interest in van Gogh?”
“Who?”
“Quite,” says Charles. He gets up, turns to Alison: “I’m going to the library, but I’ll be back for lunch.”
Paul is glaring at his father. “So it’s absolute no?”
“ ’Fraid so,” says Charles, quite kindly, “I can see no sensible reason for yes.” He leaves the room.
Paul takes a great swipe at the table leg with his foot. “Shit!” The table rocks. Ingrid makes a tutting sound.
“I do understand, dear,” says Alison. “But you are only fourteen and I’m not sure that Amsterdam is entirely . . . I mean, possibly a little trip to the coast sometime with your friends, Brighton perhaps . . . I’m surprised actually that Nick’s parents . . . You’re quite sure about that?”
“They said maybe,” snarls Paul. “Maybe if I’m allowed to.” He adds, conversationally now, “I hate Dad.” He stalks out.
Ingrid says, “The milk is all finished. I shall go to the shop. Or will you go to Sainsbury later?”
Alone in the kitchen, the sunlit spring kitchen, Alison thinks food. At one level, she thinks fish fingers and beef burgers and chips, macaroni and cheese, toad-in-the-hole, bubble and squeak; at another she rather wistfully conjures up coq au vin and cassoulet and the ratatouille that she proposes to infiltrate into this weekend’s menu. There is family food, and there is grown-up food, which is what Alison would like to focus upon if that were feasible, but it is not because there would be trouble in the ranks. The ratatouille may just about pass unqueried, and she feels pretty sure she can get away with the lemon chicken, which is borderline between child-acceptable and properly grown-up. So she sits at the table, jotting down items, and realizes that she is short of this and that, which will necessitate a supermarket trip—tiresome on a Saturday.
Alison is a homemaker, a housewife, that now outmoded figure, but her management skills are not highly developed. She does not plan ahead enough, she runs out of things, she forgets to get the boiler serviced or the windows cleaned, children berate her because they have grown out of their school uniforms or she did not give them the money for the charity raffle. Ingrid is frequently reminding her (“What would I do without you?”); Charles merely looks resigned, and detached.
She is aware of these deficiencies but not particularly concerned. After all, everyone is fed, everyone is housed and cherished and listened to and helped and supplied with pocket money and birthday parties and love and attention and a real four-star family life, which is what matters, isn’t it? Never mind if there is the occasional blip; never mind if this is not one of those homes that are run like a machine, what matters is being part of a family, isn’t it? One lovely big family. For Alison, Allersmead is a kind of glowing archetypal hearth, and she is its guardian. This is all she ever wanted: children, and a house in which to stow them—a capacious, expansive house. And a husband of course. And a dear old dog. And Denby ovenware and a Moulinex and a fish kettle and a set of Sabatier knives. She has all of these things, and knows that she is lucky. Oh, so lucky.
Alison is not long alone in the kitchen. People come and go. Gina wants to know what Mrs. Thatcher’s address is. Alison supposes 10 Downing Street, and is shown the draft of Gina’s letter, which is brief and to the point. Gina thinks this task force is a stupid idea and this war is a waste of money and people. She warns Mrs. Thatcher that she will not be voting for her when she is eighteen. Clare has lost her scissors, her cutting-out scissors, and wants to use the kitchen ones, which Alison forbids because they are real scissors, sharp, and Clare is not yet allowed to use real scissors. Clare gets petulant, and is diverted by Ingrid, who arrives at that moment: “Look, we will make pastry men.” Clare becomes happy with flour and water and a rolling pin, and is only distracted by Roger and Katie, who drift in, dump themselves at the table, and start to play that game with open hands, closed fists, and snapping fingers—paper, stone, scissors. Clare wants to play too. Katie explains, patiently: “Scissors cut paper, paper wraps stone, stone blunts scissors.” Clare chooses scissors every time.
Sandra requires money for the bus. She is grumpy because Alison has refused a lift to the shops: Alison is going to the out-of-town supermarket later, which is in the opposite direction, and that is all the driving she proposes to do today.
Paul is not seen, but is heard slamming out of the front door, presumably in search of one of his local chums.
Charles does not have a good morning at the library. In fact, he is frustrated. The reference section is inadequate and fails to meet his needs. He does not much use the local library—he goes up to town to the British Library—but for some basic fact checking you would think a decent public library should serve the purpose. He pads around crossly for a c
ouple of hours, harasses a librarian, and comes away dissatisfied. He should have gone up to town. Too late now—he will have to do so on Monday, and fill in some crucial points later. He is twitching to get back to that chapter; he is in a writing frame of mind, the thing is flowing, he must seize the day. This particular day.
So he goes home, in time for lunch, which he smells as he opens the front door—an oveny, lemony smell. The dog (a sort of Labrador, from Battersea Dogs Home—Alison will only have rescue dogs) greets him, subservient and respectful in a way that his children never are. He turns left into his study to dump his briefcase, and finds Gina there, opening a drawer of his desk.
Gina is out of order. Right out of order. No child is allowed in the study. They are forbidden to disturb him when he is in there (“What if the house was on fire? What if Mum had dropped dead?”) and under no circumstances do they go in if he is not. But here is Gina in front of an open drawer.
“What are you doing?” demands Charles.
Gina replies that she is looking for paper and an envelope. She has drafted a letter to Mrs. Thatcher and she needs to copy it out in her best handwriting onto that paper he has with the address at the top.
“You should have waited, and asked,” says Charles. “You know you don’t come in here. And it’s not in that drawer anyway.”
Gina shuts the drawer, rather roughly, and in so doing manages to sweep the top sheets off the pile of typescript beside the typewriter. Charles exclaims angrily and leaps forward to gather up the paper. “Gina, I really don’t want you in here. Look, here’s some paper and here’s an envelope.”
“Don’t you want to read my letter?” says Gina, in a chilly voice.
Charles takes the draft from her, skims through it, and hands it back. “Fine.”
“Does she get a lot of letters?”
“Undoubtedly,” says Charles. His attention is all on the typescript, the pages of which have gotten out of order.
Gina is silent for a moment. Then, “Is that the book you’re writing?”
“Mmn.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s . . . it’s about how people have behaved towards children and young people, in the past and in different parts of the world.”
“What’s that bit about?”
Charles hesitates. He decides not to elaborate on circumcision rituals in Namibia and elsewhere. “Oh—it’s about what it’s like to grow up in societies unlike our own.”
“Actually,” says Gina, “I read some of it. I thought it was disgusting.” She stares at her father with cold disapproval. Charles, momentarily wrong-footed, feels personally responsible for these distressing practices. Then he recovers himself, moves back onto the moral high ground, and says, “Gina, you have no business poking around on my desk. You’re not to do that again.”
There is a movement at the door. Both become aware that Clare is there, watching with interest. “It’s lunchtime,” she announces.
“Right,” says Charles briskly. “Gina, take your paper and envelope. OK, Clare—tell Mum I’m just coming.”
The lemon chicken does not go unchallenged.
“What’s this?” demands Roger. “I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it too,” says Clare.
Ingrid declares that the chicken is very nice. Others eat without comment. Paul has two helpings; Alison beams upon him. He makes a point of ignoring his father.
Charles does not notice that he is being ignored by Paul; he has developed a certain immunity to the reactions of his children, over the years. It would otherwise be difficult to operate with independence. This does not mean that he is unaware, or uncaring, simply that these particular family circumstances require a certain spirit of self-preservation. In any case, Alison is more adept than he is at riding the emotional roller coaster; motherhood is her métier. It is what she always intended. Occasionally he feels that he is incidental to her grand design. Sometimes he feels this quite strongly.
Right now, he is thinking of societies of which he has read in which the care and supervision of children is a more or less collective affair. The kibbutz has always seemed to him an eminently sensible arrangement, which reminds him that he needs to do more research on kibbutzim and their views. And then there are those African tribal groups in which all women keep an eye on all children, and the men get on with whatever it is that they do, which again looks like a healthy system. Whereas the centuries-old Western practice whereby children are hived off into individual family units looks both impractical—you have to have the work-house or the orphanage as a safety net—and potentially lethal. The child cursed with inadequate or cruel parents is in a trap. Charles’s book is not intended to be a vehicle for his personal views—it is to be a detached discussion of practices and attitudes—but, as he sits there thinking, at the head of the table, unimpeded (more or less) by the background clamor of his offspring, he decides that a careful selection of individual family experiences would nicely illustrate this point. The Tolstoys, for a start. All happy families . . . Yes, that would be the way to introduce local color, and a color in appropriate contrast to the setups in Samoa or the forests of the Congo. How many Tolstoys were there? Did old Leo rise to six?
Charles looks along the table at his own brood. He is thinking now about heredity, about gene pools, about kinship. Very important, kinship, in primal societies. Your kinship network could determine whether you sank or swam. Whereas in twentieth-century Britain kinship obligations have been superseded by the welfare state, which props everyone up from the cradle to the grave. No need to go cap in hand to your mother’s brother, by and large. Genes count for rather less, here and now. Charles eyes the storm of genes around him today, the kinship group arranged at either side of him—lanky Paul, dark intense Gina, pubescent Sandra, Roger and Katie, who share freckles and a stocky build, Clare with her straw-colored hair. A fair assortment, he thinks, no dominant feature, a bit of a job lot, really. In aristocratic circles there would be the inherited nose, or the poached-egg eyes, as in Lely portraits. In Namibia there would be the fancy tribal marks.
“Why are you staring?” complains Sandra.
Charles’s thoughts have been once again on ritual. “How old are you?”
Alison laughs. “Really, Charles! We had Sandra’s birthday only a few months ago. She’s twelve.”
“I apologize. I can’t keep track. Now, if you had grown up in some parts of Africa,” he tells Sandra, “you would have had some very pretty scars made on each cheek, at one time, and I would probably have been looking for a husband for you by now.”
Paul snorts. Katie giggles. Sandra says, “Scars! Yuck!”
“All a question of taste.” Charles considers his daughters. “You are offended by the idea of scars. Others would be appalled at jeans and trainers and”—a sharp glance at Sandra—“painted fingernails.”
Alison says, “Sandra dear, you know I don’t like that stuff.”
“ ’Specially green,” says Roger.
“Shut up,” says Sandra. To her mother, she explains, “Everyone’s doing it, Mum. Everyone in my year.”
Charles is back with ritual adornment. He sees the fingernails as a Western version of all that tribal face-painting, tattooing, and creative self-mutilation with which he has become familiar during recent research. In fact, he decides, Sandra is merely responding to an atavistic need to turn her body into a personal declaration—a statement about her affiliations and her aspirations. She is announcing that she is a late-twentieth-century Western adolescent for whom appearance is of central significance. She is setting out her stall in a way that young people have done since prehistory; one can hardly take exception to this. One must accept the fingernails as the symbol that they are. Maybe he will share this perception with Alison, later.
The chicken is followed by jelly, which meets with approval from all except Charles, who declines it in favor of cheese and biscuits. The morning is now tipping into afternoon, the sun is high, the
house is rich with occupation—the aroma of lemon chicken, the chatter of eight voices (only Charles is silent, pondering his various insights)—it is time for the next stage, when people will disperse. Sandra will catch the bus into town, Gina is going to copy out her letter to Mrs. Thatcher and do some homework, Alison has her appointment with the supermarket, Ingrid is taking the three youngest to the local park, where there are swings and slides. Paul is frustrated because his best mate is off somewhere for the day; he will loaf around and see if he can find someone else.
Charles retires to his study. The front door bangs. Once: exit Sandra. Twice: exit Paul. A third time: exit Ingrid and the children. Gina thuds upstairs. The dog whines at the study door, wishing to join Charles, who ignores it, busy making a note of the points that occurred to him during lunch. Does he have a biography of Tolstoy? No. Add to the checklist for Monday’s library session.
The front door again: Alison has gone.
The house seems now to subside a little, to settle itself into relative silence; the dog can be heard to slump down on its side in the hall, the grandfather clock ticks. Charles puts a sheet of paper into the typewriter and starts to type. Chapter eleven creeps ahead, line by line, paragraph by paragraph. Charles is immersed—in his train of thought, in the organization of words, of sentences. Time passes—but, for him, it seems to stand still. He looks out the window occasionally, unseeing, thoughts tumble in his head. He is elsewhere, inside his mind, in pursuit of an argument, a sequence.
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