Family Album

by Penelope Lively

  Paul thinks of his mother, asleep along the corridor. She too is now on the brink of old age, of course, but somehow in her case this is less unexpected; when he flicks back through his images of her he sees a mutation, she has always been getting a bit stouter, a bit more gray. And what she says was always just the background music of Allersmead—wallpaper music, a domestic form of Vivaldi, the accompaniment to childhood, to growing up. It pattered around one’s head, both heard and not heard. And does so today.

  Paul takes evasive action. He ignores Sophie’s hints. He absents himself more and more. Sophie objects. And then one day he is simply not there anymore. He has given in his notice at the school, and, as Sophie will bitterly tell all and sundry, scarpered. All and sundry remark that he was a bit of an odd sort of guy and maybe she is best off the way things are. Sophie is not entirely sure about this but she appreciates the sympathy and, being a sensible sort of girl, she sets about expunging Paul and looking around for a fresh interest. She might derive a certain satisfaction did she know that, in years to come, she will occasionally put in a brief appearance at Paul’s bedside.

  The members of this nocturnal troupe chart Paul’s life—a higgledy-piggledy assortment of people, some of them crucial, others incidental. Sometimes, they crowd in; other times a person will sneak up, unexpected, and require that Paul revisit a particular site. Sophie sits on the sofa of that shared flat and scolds him for disappearing all evening, and yesterday. Fat face holds out his hand for the key to the bike. The shrink at the rehab place wants to know how he feels about himself.

  That policeman leans out of the window, saying, “Paul, let’s have a talk.”

  Let’s not, says Paul, years later. Just clear off, do you mind? I know you mean well, but let’s not go there.

  The room is at the top of this tall building, this office building in which there has been a fire. He is alone in the room, the smoke-blackened walls of which he must clean. The contract cleaning company is perhaps the furthest down that he has got—a job that mops up those who have failed to find more congenial employment. His fellow workers are as motley as they come—a polyglot crew, many of whom do not speak much English. No matter—a cleaner can be briefed by gesture and exhortation. Paul is amongst them because this is a time when he does not care about anything, he does not care what he does or where he is, he would prefer not to be anywhere at all, he would prefer not to be. He is simply moving through days, one pointless painful day after another, he is without anticipation—except for a fix when he can achieve that—without expectation, without will. What will he has is addressed to the operation of cleaning machinery, because otherwise the supervisor will be on his back.

  He has been alone in this room for quite a while. It is his room, his task. It is largely empty; furniture and carpets have been removed. There is just one large desk, which is water damaged, and those black and oily walls to which he has addressed himself for an hour or so. The door is open, and he can hear the voices of others from rooms along the corridor. The supervisor was in five minutes ago; he will not be back for quite a while now.

  Paul goes to the window, which is flung wide and opens onto a narrow balcony shared with other rooms on this floor. The balcony runs the width of the building, and has a parapet. Paul stares at this, and then he puts a leg out of the window, then the other, and stands on the balcony.

  He looks over the parapet. It is a long way down to the street below, a good long way. Not a busy street—parked cars, a few people walking by, a man going into the newsagent opposite, a waiter smoking a cigarette outside the bistro next door to it.

  Paul looks. He stands looking for some while. For a minute, for five minutes, for a quarter of an hour? Goodness knows—time has not much meaning anymore.

  The parapet is fairly high, but not too high. He moves a few paces to his left, away from the window, until he is at a point between that and the next window. He gets one leg over, then the other, and he is sitting on the parapet, legs dangling over the edge, over the street. He is feeling dizzy now, which actually makes things easier. Go on, he tells himself.

  The waiter looks up. He drops his cigarette and shouts. Paul cannot hear what he says. Another waiter comes out, and someone who is perhaps the proprietor, in shirtsleeves. The three of them look up, as does a woman who was passing and now stops. The man who went into the newsagent comes out and he too joins the staring group. He gesticulates, and shouts.

  Paul looks down at them. They seem very far away, and nothing at all to do with him. Go on. Go on.

  Another passerby has stopped. And another. There is conversation going on, consultation. The proprietor of the bistro goes back inside.

  Everything is entirely real, and also quite unreal. Paul hears a car horn, an airplane, the slam of a car door. He sees a face at a window of the building opposite, he sees two pigeons sidling down the roof, he sees a gull floating overhead. When he looks down he feels dizzy again, everything swings a little, the street ripples. He hears a police car’s banshee siren.

  The police car rounds the corner into this street, and pulls up below, silent now, its blue light flashing. Two policemen get out. Paul sees them, but also does not see them. Go on. Now.

  The policemen are not there anymore, and the little crowd on the pavement has grown. A woman has her hand to her mouth.

  Paul watches an airplane crawl across the sky above the roofline. So slowly. How do they stay up? He will put out his arms and be an airplane.

  Someone is talking to him. There is a head at the window a couple of yards away. The head speaks. It says one thing, and then another, and then another, and then something else. Sometimes Paul answers.

  “What’s your name?” says the policeman.

  “Paul,” says Paul. “Just don’t come near me, OK? Just keep away.”

  “Listen, Paul,” says the policeman. “Let’s have a talk. Come inside and we can have a talk.”

  “No,” says Paul.

  “Have you got family?” says the policeman. “Is there anyone you’d like us to get hold of?”

  “I don’t have family,” says Paul.

  “Anyone else?” says the policeman.

  Paul does not reply. The policeman is outside the window now, standing. Paul edges along the parapet away from him, and then he sees that there is another policeman at the farther window.

  Paul says, “Don’t come near me.”

  The pigeons on the opposite roof take off. Go on. Now.

  The policeman says, “I’m going to the Arsenal match this afternoon. Are you an Arsenal fan, Paul?”

  There is no traffic going below anymore. There is another police car slewed across the end of the street.

  “Hot out here,” says the policeman. “Would you like a drink, Paul? Bottle of water?”

  Paul looks down. He looks into the upturned faces of the people below. His stomach seems to liquefy and he has to look up, across at the roof opposite, where a fresh pigeon has arrived. He studies this pigeon, its iridescent breast, its bobbing head.

  The policeman shifts his feet, a little scraping sound.

  “Don’t come near me,” says Paul. “Or . . .” He looks down again.

  And now the other policeman speaks. He too is out of the window and standing on the balcony. When did he do that? “Paul,” he says, “why don’t you get inside and we can have a chat.”

  Paul turns his head towards him. “Don’t come . . .”

  Strong arms grab him around the waist and pull him backwards off the parapet. The two policemen converge and between them they heave him through the window and into the room. He is helpless.

  “Good lad, Paul,” says the first policeman. “Well done.”

  He goes, the policeman. Both of them go; they melt back into that morass of people in the head, and Paul is relieved. He does not care for that particular site; he would like to junk it but you don’t choose what gets junked and what does not, do you?

  “And the first thing to do,” said Gina, “
is to quit that bloody contract cleaning company. Of all the duff jobs . . . Now listen, I’ve got a plan . . .”

  “Don’t tell her,” said Paul. “Don’t tell them. About . . . that. Swear?”

  Gina sighed. “I’m trying to tell you about my plan. All right. Though personally I think they should know.”

  “Swear.”

  “I’ve said all right. Now listen . . . I’ve found this training scheme.”

  Paul does not care to revisit that site either. Training schemes were never his thing. They went on and on, you couldn’t ever see to the end of them, you were bored with whatever it was you were being trained for after a few months, or weeks. The thing was to hop off the conveyor belt before it was too late, before you were processed into being something you didn’t want to be.

  He stares up at the Allersmead ceiling, and it seems to him that Allersmead itself had been a kind of training scheme. Growing up. Growing up here, thus. But six of them had undergone it, and look at us, he thought. Not exactly consistent, as products.

  Allersmead settles itself around him—those familiar nocturnal creaks. He is six again, or ten, or sixteen.

  THE FARMER WANTS A WIFE

  Gina is thirty-nine. You are supposed to be in a slight panic at thirty-nine, about to hit the buffers at forty, but as it happens she is pretty contented, perhaps more so than ever before. She can thumb her nose at forty; work is going well, and there is Philip.

  Gina has always regarded relationships as shifty business: count on nothing, nothing is forever. Some early mistakes and betrayals taught her this. She knows that she herself has been at fault, as often as not. The six years of David have been her record, and that alliance foundered in due course, as she had always glumly anticipated.

  But now there is Philip.

  She finds herself thinking that perhaps this time. She finds herself hoping that perhaps this time.

  Gina recognizes something of herself in Philip. He too is restless, quickly bored or irritated, hardworking, curious. These qualities can lead to the occasional spat, but more often they mean enjoyment, appreciation, the satisfaction of shared responses and reactions. And she likes the way he looks, his thin face with that expressive mouth—the set of his lips is eloquent—those intent brown eyes. She loves his roaming interest, his furious concentration. She loves him in bed.

  Philip’s life is not like hers. He is not forever poised to catch a flight on order. He’s got more sense, he says. He is a producer, a deskman for long stretches of time, a planner and contriver for the most part, with occasional bursts of action. He is amiably derisive of Gina’s globe-trotting existence: out of your minds the lot of you, he says, drama addicts. But she knows that this masks respect and, frequently, concern. She is on the phone home more often than ever before, seeking the comfort of his voice from hotel rooms in some other continent. She knows that this existence does not foster abiding relationships. For the first time, she has considered giving up foreign assignments. Back to the dog shows and centenarian interviews, in some more elevated form: party conferences, outbreaks of foot and mouth disease. When she floated this with Philip, he smiled: “You’d be manic within a month, lusting for Heathrow. It’s habitual now—you’re branded. I know why you’re suggesting this, and I’m flattered. But don’t do it.” She was relieved, and grateful. All the same, she noted that her colleagues on the road were many of them without the tether of a partner. Some of the men had a wife and children tucked away in Surrey; the women were for the most part unhampered. Or unhappy?

  They had talked only once of children. Briefly. Something we should get sorted, he had said. I’m up for it if you really want to. Otherwise . . . Otherwise? said Gina. Otherwise I’ll pass. Well, me too, she had said. And anyway I’m thirty-nine. So that had been that.

  He had no children from his marriage. The ex-wife had dithered, busy with a compelling job, until children were no longer a sensible idea, with the marriage on its last legs. Just as well, said Philip. No collateral damage.

  Gina knew that she might one day regret this decision, if decision it had been. As it is, ironically, her life is full of children. When disaster is afoot, the world over, it is children who are in the front line, who furnish the story, the camera shot, who will hang around thereafter in Gina’s head—mute, wide-eyed, with stick limbs and swollen bellies, ulcerated, malformed, with a stump for a hand or a leg. She confronts these children because it is her job, they are why she is there, the world must know about them. She sends them into a million comfortable homes, to prompt unease.

  Gina leads two lives. There is life in London, at home in the flat with Philip; the tube journey to work, the Saturday supermarket shop, the lunches or suppers with friends, the jaunts to a film or a gallery. A life in which distresses are minor ones and rapidly addressed: toothache (pick up the phone to the dentist), a bout of bronchitis (antibiotic), a leaking pipe (plumber). The bandages are all at hand, in Gina’s life, and in the lives of everyone she knows. Once in a while, something awful happens to someone—the car crash, the cancer diagnosis—but these are exceptional events, so removed from the norm that you are shocked and startled, outraged even at this intrusion, this malign reminder.

  In Gina’s other life everyone lives on the cusp. She parachutes into worlds in which all is awry, worlds where people are routinely starving, or are shot at as a matter of course, are diseased, HIV-positive, mangled by land mines, beaten up by the henchmen of despotic rulers. People for whom some toothache or a plumbing problem would pass unnoticed. Gina and her camera crew move amongst these people, face their situation but know that they do so from behind an invisible screen, distanced from them by the flight tickets in their baggage, by their passports to a place where things are done differently. They are voyeurs, she sometimes uncomfortably feels, and has to remind herself that this voyeurism is benign, it may lead to something, someone may help.

  The children of these distorted worlds have never known anything else, for the most part. Distress is the norm, and that is all. It is not that they accept starvation and brutality, simply, they are not aware that there is an alternative.

  Gina thinks of childhood at Allersmead. Sheltered, privileged. But sharing that universal attribute of childhood: the Allersmead world being the only one they knew, they could not conceive of an existence that was otherwise. Until, of course, they grew up a bit and looked around and saw that families come in other sizes and shapes, that not all homes have a cellar and a kitchen table that seats twelve, that other parents are different but still recognizable as parents.

  She remembers these perceptions as a revelation. She remembers—suddenly? gradually?—finding that she could stand beyond Allersmead and look at it with a kind of detachment, as though she was someone else. She looked at her parents, and saw them with fresh eyes: a cool,

  Gina sometimes wonders if it was this early exercise in scrutiny and assessment, in questioning, that directed her into her present trade. Journalists ask questions. Gina questioned her own circumstances, early on. She then began to question many circumstances, as a matter of course.

  Gina tells the minister for education that the government’s handling of the miners’ strike has been a disgrace. The minister for education says a little tartly that he has not come to the college to discuss the miners’ strike, though he notes her views; he is here to meet sixth-form students and to explain the government’s education policy. Gina has plenty of questions about that; the minister leaves feeling a trifle ragged. You do not expect to be grilled by a kid at some college out in the sticks. He bares his teeth politely at the head teacher and says that it has been an edifying experience, some interesting points made by that lass who had so much to say; she’ll go far, that girl, no doubt. Just so long as it’s as far as possible from me, he thinks.

  Gina enjoys the sixth-form college. It is satisfyingly different from school, you feel grown-up, there are more likeminded people than there had been at school, the work is more challenging.

>   But she had had to fight to get there.

  “You were never my favorite child,” she says. Mum says. And Gina is thrown. She is thrown in a way that is entirely uncharacteristic. She is the one who is capable, self-sufficient, independent, who takes what comes her way and deals with it.

  She stares at her mother, who is now once more in full flow. “. . . Well, if you must go, I suppose you must go, but I do find it odd, I mean, here you are with a lovely family home, everything done for you, lovely home-cooked meals—you do realize you’ll have to take your clothes to a launderette and goodness knows how you’ll manage for eating—I simply can’t see the point, for a different sort of teaching, you say, I mean, you’ve been doing fine at the school . . .”

  Had she said that? Did those words spill out, now washed away? You were never . . .

  “. . . you were always like that, getting some idea in your head and can’t leave it alone, writing to the prime minister if you please I remember, got to have a typewriter last year, months of pocket money, cash only for birthday and Christmas, talk about obsession, and now it’s bolting off to some sixth-form college forty miles away . . .”

  Never my favorite child. Well, one hadn’t thought that one was, and does it matter?

  Somewhere, in some deep tender unsuspected crevice, it does.

  People get labeled in a large family. Sandra was the pretty one, Roger was clever, Clare was athletic, Paul was the eldest—primogeniture counts for a lot—Katie was helpful. I was difficult, thinks Gina. I was “Gina, don’t be so difficult.”

  Difficult meant arguing, questioning an instruction or a decision. Being rational, to my mind.

  Dad wasn’t so averse to difficultness—he welcomed discussion. Argument on some neutral matter was welcomed. Mum thought this being silly at best, being cheeky at worst.