by David Miller
K searched somewhere in the bookcase and found a pile of photographs. He flicked through the portraits for a moment, then pulled out a colour photo. He gave a gentle laugh that built up and faded away, while his soft hand touched the pressure point behind my elbow: “My father was Cun, but he wasn’t like that! Do you see? This is my father’s photo here!”
The photo was of a big fat man wearing a black silk shirt with a starched collar. He also wore a neatly trimmed moustache and was smiling at me.
UNSEEN TRANSLATION
Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson (b.1951) was born in York, studied in Dundee and currently lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year and began her career as one of the most popular and critically praised authors of her generation. Her other work includes Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News?, Started Early, Took My Dog – a series of novels featuring Jackson Brodie, some of which have been adapted for television – as well as the 2002 collection Not the End of the World and, most recently Life After Life. She was appointed an MBE in 2011. “If you don’t have a unique voice, then you’re not a writer,” she once observed, saying about creative writing courses: “I think you have to learn for yourself how to write.”
UNSEEN TRANSLATION
Αρτεμιν αειδω χρυσηλαϖκατον, κελαδεινην,
παρθενον αιφδοιϖην, εφλαϕηβοϖλον, ιοχεαιραν…
I sing of Artemis, whose shafts are of gold,
who cheers on the hounds, the pure maiden
shooter of stags, who delights in archery.
HOMERIC HYMN TO ARTEMIS
They had managed an entire afternoon in the Bird Gallery. From egg to skeleton, from common to extinct, from flightless to free, Missy and Arthur were on familiar terms with the avian world.
“Can we come back and do mammals tomorrow?” Arthur asked.
“If you like. There are a lot of them though, remember. You might want to subdivide them into categories.”
“There were a lot of birds. We didn’t subdivide them.”
“True.”
Missy believed that knowledge was best taken in small, digestible portions. Museums and galleries, in her opinion, were full of people wandering listlessly from exhibit to exhibit, their eyes glazed over with too much information and not enough knowledge.
“It’s an established neurological fact,” Missy told Arthur (Missy believed in using long words with children wherever possible), “that window shopping and museums are the two most tiring activities for the brain. A chronic insomniac could probably come into the Natural History Museum and fall asleep before he’d got past the diplodocus in the Central Hall.” Arthur yawned.
“I’ve noticed you’re very suggestible, Arthur.”
“Is that bad?”
“No, it’s a good thing, it makes my job much easier. Just make sure it’s me that you take suggestions from, not someone else.” The words “like your mother” remained unspoken, but understood, between them.
The Natural History Museum was closing, already echoing with emptiness and a promise of the secret life it led when no one was there. Missy imagined the birds shaking out their feathers and shuffling from one stiff leg to the other, cracking neck bones and easing off flight muscles. Diplodocus himself gave a little tidal tremor along the vertebrae of his huge backbone as if warming up for a leisurely evening stroll. They took no notice of him. Missy never bothered her charges too much with dinosaurs. She thought children (not to mention parents) were far too obsessed with them already.
Outside, the threat of summer rain had darkened the South Kensington sky to an otherworldly purple.
“Are we going home?” Arthur asked, rather indifferently.
“No, we’re going to Patisserie Valerie for hot chocolate and cake. Unless you don’t like that idea.”
“Ha, ha.”
Missy and Arthur had spent Arthur’s school holidays picking and choosing from the capital’s smorgasbord of culture. This week, for example, had begun with a short visit to the British Museum (where they spent most of their time admiring Jennings Dog), followed on Tuesday by a Mozart String Quartet at the Wigmore Hall, Wednesday was Shakespeare in the Park (As You Like It – “Very good” in Arthur’s opinion) and yesterday it had been the eighteenth-century rooms of the National Gallery. Missy was pleased to find that Arthur was able to spend almost twenty minutes in near-silent contemplation of Whistlejacket. It was at that moment, as they sat companionably together considering Stubbs’s huge ideal of a horse (“Essence of horse,” Missy whispered in Arthur’s ear), that Missy knew for certain that Arthur was a superior version of an eight-year-old boy.
Unfortunately, children were usually spoilt for life by the time Missy got her hands on them. At two years old they had acquired all the faults that would mar them for ever and Missy had to spend most of her time rectifying their old bad habits rather than instilling new good ones. Of course, that was why Missy was called in. She had a reputation, like a Jesuitical troubleshooter, a Marine Corps Mary Poppins – when all else failed, call in Missy Clark. They expected her to drop in from the skies on the end of an umbrella, like a parachutist floating into a country in the middle of a civil war, and rescue their children from bad behaviour.
Missy was tiring of this phase of her life. She was even thinking of returning to nursing, although not to the hellish half-world of the NHS. She was considering applying to a private clinic somewhere, plastic surgery perhaps – somewhere where people weren’t actually ill. If she was to remain in this job beyond the age of forty (she was thirty-eight – a difficult age) then she needed a completely blank canvas on which to practise her art. A tabula rasa, untouched by another’s hand. A new baby. That was what Romney Wright had offered. A baby so untouched that it wasn’t even born yet.
Missy was never interviewed by an employer, she interviewed them. Not that she was looking for the perfect family – years of experience had taught her there was no such thing. All she wanted was a family capable of reformation, and failing that, then just one child in the family who could be rescued from the fate which awaited it (ordinariness). Missy made it a rule never to stay anywhere longer than two years.
“Think of me as the SAS,” she said brightly, when the hugely pregnant Romney had engaged her two weeks before the birth of her second child. Romney – sometime wife of a rock star, glamour model and ironic game-show guest, “now concentrating on her acting career”, but mostly famous for being famous – forgot to mention the first child until Missy was dictating her non-negotiable terms and conditions (own bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and sitting room; own car; one and a half days off a week; no nights; full-time maternity nurses for the first three months; pension allowance). In fact, it was only by chance that Arthur wandered into the room at that moment and asked Romney if anyone was going to make his tea or should he heat up some baked beans? Missy was pleased at this – she liked to see a self-sufficient child and had nothing against baked beans.
“Oh, and, of course, this is Arthur,” Romney said carelessly in a grating kind of East London accent that was already beginning to annoy Missy. Hadn’t elocution lessons been on the curriculum at Romney’s stage school?
Missy did actually know about Arthur’s existence as she had checked out Romney’s (entirely tabloid) cuttings file (“My love for my little boy”, “My single-parent hell”, and so on) before arriving at Romney’s Primrose Hill house.
“This is the new nanny, Arthur,” Romney said.
“Oh,” Arthur said, raising surprised eyebrows. Missy liked a child who didn’t speak when he had nothing to say.
“Missy,” Missy said to Arthur.
“Missy?” Romney repeated thoughtfully. “What kind of a name is that?”
“A nickname my father gave me. It stuck.”
“Right. Well, Arthur’s called Arthur because his dad was into like Camelot and all that stuf
f.”
“I think it’s a very good name,” Missy said, smiling encouragingly at Arthur.
“It’s a bit old-fashioned though, isn’t it?” Romney frowned. “I mean “Arthur Wright” sounds like your grandad or something. But that was his dad all over, thought it was funny. His dad’s Campbell Wright? Lead singer with Boak? Useless piece of Scottish string. Completely debauched, the lot of them.” Romney pronounced “debauched” with relish as if it was only recently learned. Arthur, a solemn, bespectacled boy, said nothing. Missy had already looked up Boak on the internet. Romney was surprisingly accurate in her choice of vocabulary. Boak were debauched. In photographs they all wore Second World War gas masks, so it was impossible to see if Arthur looked like his father. He certainly didn’t resemble his mother, at least not in any major particular, perhaps in the whorl of an ear, the oval of a nostril, nothing too relevant.
“What would you have called him?” Missy asked, intrigued by the idea that you could be the mother of a child and not name it.
“Zeus,” Romney said, without hesitation.
“Zeus?”
“King of the gods,” Romney explained helpfully. Arthur looked at Missy with absolutely no expression on his face. Missy liked a child who kept his own counsel.
“He wears glasses, of course.” Romney sighed. “Arthur, not Zeus, obviously. When I was a kid,” she carried on, when neither Arthur nor Missy had anything to add to this observation, “if you wore glasses you were like “speccy four-eyes” or “double-glazing” but now it’s cool, like because of Harry Potter. And that kid in that Tom Cruise film. Or no, maybe not him, I don’t think that kid was cool, was he? Of course, Campbell was very romantic then, now he’s a wanker, but you should have seen our wedding – he planned it all himself – in a ruined castle, I rode over the drawbridge on a white horse and when we were pronounced man and wife – although it wasn’t really a vicar, it was more of a shaman kind of bloke – they released butterflies, hundreds of butterflies, over our heads. It was really something, I never thought—”
Missy stood up abruptly; she could see that Romney was a talker. “I have to go now,” she said. “When would you like me to start?”
“Tomorrow,” Arthur said promptly. Missy was pleased to hear that he spoke a more civilized form of the English language than his mother.
“He’s a funny one, isn’t he?” Romney said, for no particular reason.
Missy allowed Arthur two cakes with his hot chocolate. She understood that sometimes one simply wasn’t enough.
“What do you think she’ll call the baby?” Arthur asked.
“Who are we talking about – the cat’s mother? Wipe your fingers.”
“You know who I mean. I bet it’s something stupid.”
Romney had been delivered of a baby girl the previous day and Missy and Arthur had visited her that morning in the hospital, in the private maternity wing that was like a five-star hotel. Romney had opted to be knocked unconscious and split open rather than give birth naturally. Missy favoured natural childbirth wherever possible. She thought it was character-forming for a child to have to fight its way into existence. Missy herself was a twin and had made sure she’d elbowed her way out first, ahead of her brother.
The father of Romney’s baby was a multi-millionaire, Swiss-born financier who had led an impeccably boring life until a lifelong interest in West End musicals had led him to bankroll a doomed stage version of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette in which Romney had a small and surprisingly naked part. In a moment of champagne-and-cocaine-fuelled incontinence at the opening night party, the Swiss financier had found himself in a backstage dressing-room toilet having frantic sex with Romney – a fact which he subsequently vehemently denied when it became tabloid knowledge. (“ ‘I am a love god!’ Otto shouted in our steamy sex session.”) Romney was now looking forward to the DNA tests to see just how wealthy Otto’s seed would prove.
“I’m glad it’s a girl,” Arthur said, finishing off his second cake (both his chosen cakes had been chocolate). “I like girls. Do you know I used to have a male nanny once?”
“And? Was he all right?”
“So-so. He was Australian.”
“How many nannies have you had, Arthur?”
“Five. I think.”
“Why do they leave? Not because of you, you’re not a difficult child.”
“Thank you.”
“What about the last one, my predecessor?”
Arthur shrugged.
“What does that mean? The shrugging?”
Arthur stood up and piled their dirty plates neatly. “We should go. The tube’s going to be packed.”
The rain held off as they walked to the underground. Missy thought it was important for a child to use public transport, to suffer dreary queues and biting winds. Even when working for the richest families she had made a point of hauling their children around the streets of London on buses and tubes and trains. She believed stoicism was a virtue that was badly in need of reviving.
They went into a newsagent’s so that Missy could replenish essentials – she was never without Elastoplasts, safety pins, first-class stamps, tissues, extra-strong mints, Nurofen, cough sweets, Calpol, bottled water. The search for tissues led them past the newspaper and magazine racks which took up one wall. All of the top shelf was occupied by glossy girls presenting their buttocks or breasts to the camera.
“Difficult though it may be for you to believe, one day, sadly, you will probably find these images attractive,” Missy told Arthur. “But for now you can buy a Beano.”
Arthur wasn’t listening. “Look,” he said, pointing to the rack of tabloids beneath the naked women. Nearly every newspaper had a photograph of Romney Wright on the front, posing in her hospital bed – “Romney’s bundle of joy”, “Love-rat leaves Romney holding the baby”, “Romney keeping mum about dad” (which was hardly true). Romney had managed to adopt a pose similar to the models in the pornographic magazines – her huge, milk-swollen breasts offered to the camera like gifts. The baby itself seemed incidental, almost invisible inside its shawl cocoon. Arthur skim-read the text. “They don’t mention me,” he said.
“That’s a good thing.”
“I know.” Arthur gazed at the photographs of his mother as if she was an interesting stranger. “Do you think we’ll like the baby?”
“What’s not to like?”
Arthur gazed at his overexposed mother. Missy liked a wise child better than anyone but she considered the expression on Arthur’s face to be knowledgeable well beyond his years.
“I realize you’ve already had far too much chocolate today and are probably as high as a kite, which is a technical term used by nannies, but, and against my better judgement, and you will rarely hear those words from my lips, Arthur, you can have a packet of chocolate buttons. Now come on, don’t dawdle.”
The baby was finally named. Romney toyed with a galaxy of goddesses (“Athene? Aphrodite? Artemis?”) and gave up before reaching the end of the alphas.
“What did they do?” Arthur asked as they meandered (“from the river god Maeander, by the way”) through the textile rooms of the V and A.
“Well,” Missy said, “Athene was smug and thought she knew everything, Aphrodite was a troublemaker, and very irritating, I might add, and only Artemis had any sense.”
“What did she do?”
“Virgin, close relationship with the moon, childbirth, wolves. Oh, and the chase.”
“The chase?”
“Shot stags with silver arrows, that kind of thing.”
Arthur looked horrified. “Shot stags?” he echoed (“from Echo – an unfortunate nymph. Show me one that isn’t”).
“It’s a mythic thing, no stags were actually harmed during the … that kind of thing.”
Romney had offered the choice of name to Arthur but reneged when he opted for “Jane”, a name far too plain for Romney’s tastes. In the end, she went for world geography. Romney’s sister Johdi had a child call
ed Africa and her friend Lily had a baby called India so Romney decided on China for Arthur’s sister. “Like collecting countries,” she said to Missy. “They’ll be like NATO or something when they grow up.”
“It could have been much worse,” Missy said to Arthur. “Belgium, Luxemburg, New Zealand, Gibraltar, Uzbekistan. The list of worse is endless. That’s not grammatical, by the way.”
China, although in no way Chinese, was as delicate as porcelain with creamy skin and a rosy blush on her cheeks. She was more robust than her name implied but nevertheless received round-the-clock attention from a series of maternity nurses who themselves received round-the-clock attention from the nanny-cam in the nursery. Romney had a monitor in her bedroom so that she could watch the nurse watching her baby. Otto’s DNA had finally been forced to own up as the culprit (“Kraut comes clean – ‘China’s mine’ ”) much to Romney’s relief, although, “He wasn’t a kraut,” she said indignantly.
Autumn came. The Primrose Hill household was running smoothly – Romney was sated with money and sex, the sex in the stocky form of a soap star, Arthur was as happy as an eight-year-old boy can be at school (“OK, I suppose”) and China was a dream of a child. Even the tabloid photographers had stopped camping on the doorstep and Missy was looking forward to the school break and some leaf-kicking time in London’s parks with Arthur and the baby, when Romney suddenly announced that Arthur was going to visit his father for half-term.
“They have joint custody,” Arthur explained over a boiled-egg tea down in the huge basement kitchen.
“And when did you last see him?”
Arthur thought for a long time. “Two years ago, I think. You have to come with me,” he added matter-of-factly.
“Why?”
“Because he’s on tour.”
“On tour?”
“Oh yeah, didn’t I say?” Romney said when Missy questioned her. “Boak are in the middle of like this huge world tour, actually I think they’re always on it. Arthur’s going to visit him when they’re in Germany. Flying into Munich, flying out of Hamburg at the end of the week. All the arrangements have been made by his publicist, you’re going too. And I tell you what, I’m going to give you your own credit card. How’s that? One more thing for the kraut to pay for.”