by Julie Cohen
This is the life that Stephen sacrificed his for?
‘Last year, he’d found a job, so I’m hoping that everything’s gone well for him. He’s not very good at keeping in touch.’
‘What do you get out of this visit?’ Honor couldn’t help asking.
‘It isn’t for sainthood. The first time I saw him, I wanted some answers. I wanted to know what had happened. And he was able to give me some details, though not quite enough.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘I keep going because I feel connected to Adam. In Stephen’s last moments, they shared something. He’s alive because my husband was a good man. And I like knowing that.’
Honor frowned. ‘I’m not sure I need reminding.’
‘And also, I like him.’ Jo signalled left, and parked the car outside a block of flats made of yellow brick. ‘And he enjoys my cake, which is always gratifying.’
They made slow progress around the tower block to the entrance. There was a wheelchair ramp, and they walked up that. Graffiti spattered the side of the building, the desperate, incoherent communication of those with too much time on their hands. Jo buzzed at the door and held it open for Honor to come through.
The corridor was cramped and had a definite whiff of mildew and urine. On the fourth door along, someone had sellotaped a single green balloon. Honor’s fingers brushed it.
‘Looks like he’s having a party,’ said Jo cheerfully, and she knocked. The door was opened by a woman. Honor took in hooped earrings and part of an elaborate hairstyle. ‘Hi, I’m Jo, and this is my mother-in-law, Honor Levinson. We’ve come to wish Adam a Happy Birthday.’
‘Come in,’ said the woman, and led them though another narrow corridor into what was presumably the living room. Honor stopped short in the door, assailed by the scent of old paper. A library. She reached out and encountered a stack of paperback books lining the wall. All around her vision, she could see books. They appeared to line the walls, floor to ceiling, stacked on top of each other, three deep, tottering. If there had been any bookcases, they were long since buried. The room was dim, and there were other scents as well: cooking oil, coffee, something familiar that niggled at the back of her memory.
‘Happy Birthday, Adam!’ said Jo, going straight to someone sitting in a chair in the corner. She hugged him and gave him the cake tin.
‘My favourite again?’ he asked her.
‘Of course.’
Honor stepped further into the library room and surveyed the details that she could snatch of Adam Akerele. He wore a blue and white football top. His skin was glossy, dark, unlined. Honor stood as straight as she could, defying anyone to offer her a seat.
‘I’ll get some plates,’ said the young woman who had let them in.
‘That’s my girlfriend, Ellie,’ Adam told Jo. ‘We’ve been seeing each other since October.’
‘That’s really fantastic, Adam. I’m so pleased for you.’
‘She’s a good woman. Puts up with me. How are your little ones?’
‘They’re great. Both growing like crazy. And Lydia is about to do her GCSEs; we’re incredibly proud of her. Adam, this is my mother-in-law, Dr Honor Levinson. She’s Stephen’s mother.’
The young man jumped to his feet. ‘Oh wow, Stephen’s mum? Oh wow, please, sit down, sit down here, Ellie will be back with cake, she’ll make tea as well, or would you rather have a coffee?’
‘No, thank you.’ But Adam had grabbed Honor’s hand in both of his before she could recoil, and was shaking it as if he could pull it off. His hands were large and warm and slightly damp.
‘Mum,’ Adam said, ‘this is Stephen’s mum. Stephen’s.’
A seismic move in the corner of the room and a large woman bore down on her. She was not as tall as Honor, but at least three times as broad. Honor caught a glimpse of her hair, straightened like poker irons and sticking out from her round head.
She seized Honor and hugged her hard. Honor squeaked as the air was squeezed out of her, pressed up against the woman’s massive bosom.
‘Thank you so much,’ the woman boomed in her ear. ‘Thank you, I cannot thank you enough.’ She leaned back, still holding Honor, but looking up into her face. She was an indistinct brown, too close to see. Honor breathed, stunned, smelling wool and Anaïs Anaïs perfume. That was the scent she had smelled with the books, the scent she’d recognized. The same scent Stephen had bought her for her birthday, when he was what? Eleven? Twelve? Flowery, too sweet, too girlish for Honor. She had worn it every day until the bottle was empty.
‘Thank you for your son,’ Adam’s mother said. The woman was all softness, all-enveloping warmth and flowers. A rich full voice. ‘Thank you for giving me mine. My only son. As you are a mother, you will know how I feel.’
‘Yes,’ Honor found herself saying. ‘I think that I do.’
They sang Happy Birthday and someone put music on the CD player that nestled in a bower of paperbacks. Adam danced with everyone: Jo, his mother, the social worker who had turned up after they had, even Honor. She sat in a chair, but he took her hands in his large moist ones and swayed back and forth, smiling down at her.
As far as she was aware, she hadn’t met many people with mental illness and she had no idea whether this was normal for Adam or not. But when he danced with Ellie, awkwardly, knocking books off the piles as they moved so that they pooled like petals at their feet, he seemed happy.
Jo clapped along to the music, as if it were the birthday party of one of her own children.
When they cut the cake and put it on paper plates, Adam sat beside her, close enough so that she could hear the soft sounds his mouth made when he ate. ‘I think of Stephen Levinson every day,’ he told her.
She was not able to eat much of the cake. It was too sweet. She was trying to reconcile this corporeal and solid young man with the indistinct person she had always imagined.
‘He was clever, wasn’t he?’ Adam asked. ‘I found out later that he was a scientist.’
‘A physicist.’
‘I could tell he was clever just from the way he spoke to me.’
‘How …’ Honor swallowed, cloying sweetness.
She had thought about Stephen’s last words, late at night, alone, and in dreams. But they were unclear; speculation only, as indistinct as her picture of Adam Akerele. More often, she had heard his voice raised in anger against her, as it had been during their last argument.
Perhaps one set of words could supplant the other.
‘What did he say to you?’ she asked.
Adam settled deeper into his chair. ‘I was on the bridge, going to jump off. I was waiting for a train, so it would hit me. I wanted to be sure, you know? I really wanted to top myself. And then there was this man in running clothes, climbing over the railing. I thought he wanted to jump, too, and I remember thinking, Isn’t it funny that there are two crazies at the same place at the same time?’
He spoke in the manner of a person who had told this story many times: his party piece, perhaps. No; he would have spoken of it in therapy. And to Jo.
‘But then he told me not to jump. He asked me my name, and he told me that I shouldn’t jump. So I knew he was trying to save me. And then he asked me if I knew what gravity was, what caused it.’
Honor had never heard Stephen in a lecture theatre, but she had heard him speak to Lydia when she was small. He was always patient, gentle, never spoke to her as if she were too young for rational thought. She thought that Stephen would have spoken to Adam like this.
‘So I said, “Well, sort of,” because at the moment I wasn’t really thinking about gravity or whatever, I was more interested in when the train was coming. And then he told me this. I’ll never forget it. He told me that gravity was the force between two objects, and that everything in the universe, no matter how big or small, had gravity. That everything was pulling on everything else.’
Honor closed her eyes. The room had gone quiet around them. Adam’s voice was soft, a bit reedy. In her mind it became Stephen’s
deeper voice, the hint of North London accent he had never quite lost. He had always been so good at explaining.
‘Even people,’ said Adam.
Said Stephen.
‘Gravity makes stars burn and worlds turn but it’s in people, too. Any two people, close to each other, exert a force on each other commensurate with their distance. The closer they are, the stronger it is.’
Honor’s mouth formed the words. They came out of her as a whisper.
The closer they are, the stronger it is.
‘And then,’ Adam continued, ‘I heard a siren behind us, and I sort of went to turn around and look, and I lost my balance for a minute. The ledge is pretty narrow. And he reached out to help me – but we weren’t that close, not actually close enough to touch. Just close enough to talk. And I didn’t even see him slip, I just saw his arm and his face. I did put my hand out to grab him but I missed. I wasn’t quick enough. I remember him looking me in the face, though. It seemed like a really long time, but it couldn’t have been a second, even. We just looked at each other. Like we … like we knew each other. Like we understood.’
Adam shifted. She could hear the chair creak beneath him.
‘And then he fell,’ Adam said.
On the drive back, Honor turned over the book that Adam had pressed upon her before they left. It was entirely familiar: A Treasury of English Verse, a paperback with a cover soft from handling.
‘I didn’t expect him to be so young,’ she said.
‘He’s twenty-six. He was sixteen when he tried to jump. The same age that Lydia is now.’ Jo shook her head. ‘I have a lot of reasons to count my blessings.’
‘I also did not expect…’ Honor couldn’t work out exactly which word to choose. She did not like Adam, precisely. Her sympathy for him was limited. But she felt something for him, an emotion that had perhaps not yet been named.
‘I did not know what to expect,’ she finished.
‘You were angry,’ said Jo. ‘Maybe you’re not so angry any more?’
‘No. Not angry. It is difficult to be angry with someone so …’ Again, the term eluded her. She meant something like real, but that was not precise enough. ‘It is difficult to be angry with someone who remembers Stephen’s words so well.’
‘The gravity,’ agreed Jo. ‘I haven’t heard that in a while. Yes. It’s such a Stephen thing to say, isn’t it?’
‘He used to drop stones and feathers and leaves from the bridge in the park, into the pond. He was always doing experiments, even as a child.’
‘I’m glad you came today,’ said Jo.
Honor nodded. She was not glad. But she was …
Thankful?
‘When I first met Adam – he wasn’t in such good shape then; he was actually in hospital because they sectioned him after his suicide attempt – I realized that if Stephen hadn’t been there, then Adam would be dead. And I couldn’t wish that on anyone.’
Honor thought about this. It was very probable that Jo was a better person than she was. As sincere as this young man had been, as grateful as his mother was, whatever connection she had felt in that strange stuffy room lined obsessively with words, Honor knew that if she were given a choice, she would not choose Adam Akerele’s life over Stephen Levinson’s.
But she hadn’t been given that choice. She was given this reality.
Was it time to learn to accept it?
‘When the hospital rang,’ Jo said, in a very quiet voice, so quiet it could barely be heard over the motor of the car, ‘and I found out that Stephen had fallen from a bridge, I thought at first that he had jumped.’
‘You thought that he—’
‘He used to get these depressions. Not often, and not always, but sometimes. He called them black holes. They were times when he felt that all the joy had been sucked out of his life. And there wasn’t anything I could do to help him, then; I just had to be there and ride it out with him, let him know that Lydia and I would be there when he emerged again. He said that running helped. And he was out running, that day.’
Honor did not know what to say. Her Stephen, the person she knew better than any other. She thought back to those long dark days when he had been a baby. What he might have imbibed with the milk he sucked from her body.
‘He didn’t want to tell you,’ Jo added. ‘He didn’t want you to worry. And they weren’t frequent, Honor. He was all right most of the time. He was better than all right. We were happy together.’
Honor thought of Stephen and Jo’s wedding day, at the register office in Cambridge. She thought of how she had sat in the front row and wilfully ignored the way they looked at each other. Smiled at each other. That moment when her son had slipped the ring onto his bride’s finger. She had abandoned Judaism a long time before, but she was seething at the civil ceremony.
She thought of invitations she had refused, the burning jealousy in her gut, masked as contempt. The height she had assumed to look down on her daughter-in-law.
She had thought sometimes that Jo reminded her of Paul’s wife, Wendy: pretty and domesticated. She had used that sometimes to justify her jealous dislike. But the truth was simpler, and worse: in her eyes, no one would have been good enough for Stephen.
Ironically, she was seeing more clearly now.
‘I have not been very kind to you, Jo,’ she said.
‘Oh. Well.’ Jo was clearly embarrassed. ‘It’s all in the past, anyway.’
Honor laid her head against the car window. The vibrations of the engine buzzed against her skull, down her spine, into her hips.
For ten years, Honor had thought that since Stephen, her centre of gravity, was gone, everything and everyone was gone. She had wanted the world to collapse around her, to burn away like the letter with its Californian postmark and its airmail stickers, into ashes and dust. She had thought the tragedy was that it had not collapsed, not burned away. That she had gone on living when everything that she had to live for was being erased, removed from the centre of her life, leaving her with nothing but the periphery.
Incredibly, it seemed that she was moving on. She was discovering other forces of gravity. However late.
When they returned to Jo’s house, she switched on the laptop and typed for a long time, without thinking. It helped, not being able to see the words.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Lydia
LYDIA’S FIRST EXAM was French and it was weird to come into school in the afternoon, in her uniform but without anything but her crib sheet, a pencil case and a bottle of water, and to wait outside near the door to the hall while all the other students in the other years were sitting in lessons. It felt as if she hadn’t been in school for ages, even though it had been only a week. A week of nearly constant revision, most of it alone, some of it with Avril. Their conversation was stilted, but Avril didn’t seem to notice.
Lydia hadn’t thought she would be really nervous for her exams – especially not for French, as French was easy – but there was something gnawing at her stomach, and she was sweating under her school jumper. Mrs Fowler was near the entrance to the hall, directing the students where to wait in the corridor, checking their pencil cases and water bottles, reminding everyone they’d have to throw away their crib sheets before they went in. ‘You’re taking AS?’ she asked Lydia, checking her clipboard. ‘Wait with the sixth form, please, instead of with Year Eleven. Quiet outside the examination hall, please.’
At first Lydia had felt silly in French lessons, as the only one wearing school uniform, but she’d got over that by October. Now, though, standing with a handful of students in jeans and T-shirts or summer dresses, separated by several metres from the other people in her year who were taking French GCSE, she felt silly again. Avril wasn’t taking French and didn’t have any exams till tomorrow, but Lydia knew most of the students waiting to take their exams, and it was odd not to be standing with them.
Bailey stood across the corridor, clutching a bottle of water. Lydia hadn’t seen her since that day before
study leave. She noticed that Bailey was wearing black socks. She was also talking in a low voice with Erin, who wasn’t actually rolling her eyes or curling her lip. In fact, the two of them seemed to be quite friendly.
Well, Bailey must be pleased, anyway. She’d seemed to want to impress Erin.
Just then, the two of them glanced up and caught Lydia looking at them. Bailey blushed and an enormous grin grew slowly on Erin’s face.
‘Good luck,’ Lydia mouthed to them.
Erin blew her a kiss, and giggled.
The sight hit Lydia like a cold weight in her stomach.
A kiss? What did that mean? Had Bailey said something?
Bailey’s head ducked and Erin turned to Olivia, standing beside her, and said something Lydia couldn’t hear.
‘Stop the talking,’ called Mrs Fowler, ‘and sixth form, you may enter the hall. Remember, no talking, no noise whatsoever in the examination room.’
‘Don’t be nervous,’ said the person behind Lydia in the queue, a lower sixth boy called Paolo. ‘It’ll be fine. That said, I’m shit scared.’
He smiled at her and then they were through the door. Lydia found her seat, with her name card on it, scratch paper already laid out waiting for her. She watched as the GCSE group filed into the room, but none of them glanced at her. They were all intent on finding their own places.
It was nothing, she told herself. It was nothing. It was Erin being flamboyant, blowing her a kiss for luck. She was sitting quite near the front of the room and couldn’t see anyone she knew around her. She looked over her shoulder, and was tapped sharply on the other shoulder.
‘Keep your face forward,’ said Mr Singh, and he put an exam booklet on her desk.
Lydia drew in a deep breath and concentrated on writing her name and student number on the booklet. Concentrated on keeping her heart-rate down, on thinking in French. Erin had probably blown sixteen million kisses today. She was a big kiss-blower.