by Tim Parks
‘Mum?’ he came back into the sitting room. ‘Listen …’
She was studying a number of papers spread across the table. ‘Did you enjoy the Taj at least?’ she asked, though without raising her eyes. She had put on her reading glasses.
‘It was a great bore,’ he said. He turned away, went into the kitchen and pulled a Coke from the fridge.
‘What are you looking at?’ he asked, coming back. He didn’t sit.
‘Old stuff,’ she said.
‘Tell me.’ He was turning the can in his hands, licking the drops inside the rim.
‘Oh, it’s nothing that would interest you.’
‘Yes, but what?’
She sighed, still reading. ‘Just old stuff.’
John took two paces and slammed the Coke down on the tabletop beside her. ‘Tell me, for Christ’s fucking sake!’ The drink splashed out onto the wooden surface.
‘John!’ Helen James was alarmed. She pushed her chair back, grabbed a pack of tissues. He retreated a step or two shaking his head.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He sat on the couch.
‘John, what on earth was that about? It’s just some old unpublished stuff of your father’s that I wouldn’t want to bore you with.’ She hesitated. ‘Since these trips have already bored you so much …’
Her son had his face in his hands. ‘I feel ill,’ he said.
Helen James waited. She seemed undecided whether to put her reading glasses back on. ‘I hope you were careful about what you ate,’ she remarked in a calmer voice.
‘Of course. I’ve been feeling odd since I arrived.’
‘In what way?’
He tried to think. ‘In my head.’
‘You shouldn’t drink straight out of those cans,’ she told him. ‘You never know where they might have been stored. We’ve been getting more and more cases of leptospirosis since people started drinking from cans.’
Looking up now, John had the strange impression that his mother was alternately ageing and rejuvenating before his eyes, almost as a light dims, then glows. One moment she was old. There was a web of wrinkles round rheumy eyes. He must look after her. The next she was young again. Mum is so young, he thought. He shook his head. Desirable. She put on her glasses and bent over the papers again.
John waited a while, then said quietly, ‘Mum, I’m not going to go and beg for money from my grandmother.’
She breathed in deeply. ‘You hardly needed to rush back from Agra to bring that up again.’
‘I think you should talk to her, she’s your mother.’
Helen sighed. ‘John, you’re twenty-four. You’re an adult. You’re the one who lives in England and you’re the one who needs the money. Plus there’s the fact that my mother always liked little boys more than little girls. My brother more than myself. You more than her granddaughters.’
‘But …’
John stopped. The anger of a moment before had drained his energy. Apropos of nothing, he thought: I must marry Elaine.
‘What is this work of Dad’s about then?’ he asked vaguely. ‘This stuff on spiders?’
‘No, not that. This is something he did way back, on sex actually.’
‘The Symmetry of Sex,’ John laughed.
‘Don’t be mean, John!’ Helen James smiled indulgently. ‘Obviously, anybody who wants to say something definitive about communication has to talk about sex.’
‘And spiders’ webs.’
‘John, the biggest communications system in the world is called a web. You know your father came at things from various angles.’
Again John had the impression that his mother was a young woman inside an old. She was mocking him. Or an old inside a young. One moment the skin was mottled and slack, then she smiled and it was firm and fresh. He would text Elaine the moment he was back in his room. Will you marry me? He would propose tonight.
‘This paper is about the meta-communicative signals sent out by perfumes, how they mask and mimic natural pheromone signals.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ John said mechanically.
‘What concerned Albert was when the artificially induced meta-communicative signal, typical of contemporary Western cosmetics, sets up a relational context that runs contrary to the more direct messages in gesture or speech, causing unease or confusion in the recipient. The lady’s smell invites, but her behaviour rebuffs.’
‘Right.’ He had finished his Coke and was licking the stickiness off the back of his hand.
‘John?’ she asked.
‘Yes?’
‘After all that determination to have me talk about it, you don’t seem very interested, do you, love?’
He stared. Unlike Elaine, his mother never wore perfumes.
She said: ‘Well, if it’s okay with you I’ll carry on reading. The fact is I’ve been wondering if we couldn’t publish some of these old things.’
‘I feel taken for a ride,’ he said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
He had spoken in a low voice. He smiled at her rather childishly, unable to repeat what he had said. She looked at him, puzzled, then suddenly pushed the papers aside, lifted the string of her reading glasses from her head and turned her chair towards him. ‘John, there’s something I really must tell you.’
She sat forward now with her hands between her knees, rocking slightly on her chair. Her tone had changed completely. ‘John, there’s a man wants to write a biography of your father. A journalist. An American. I talked to him about it this afternoon.’
John sat up. ‘But that’s wonderful!’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ She hesitated. ‘Of course, I need to know how you feel about it.’
‘Oh.’ John felt dubious.
‘I wondered if it might bother you, someone writing about Dad.’
He couldn’t understand. ‘Why would I be bothered? I might find out something at last.’ He burst out laughing. The unexpected news had returned him to himself. When his mother didn’t reply, he frowned. ‘I am a bit surprised, though. To be honest, I thought Dad had been rather forgotten.’ He paused. ‘Elaine’s friends hadn’t heard of him at all.’
‘No doubt there are many people Elaine’s friends haven’t heard of,’ Helen James said dryly.
‘Sorry, Mum, I meant—’
‘John, every week your father got at least one invitation to some conference or other. And he’ll probably go on getting them for quite a while since he never wanted to publicise his illness. Only in recent years he didn’t accept very often.’
‘Oh. It’s just you never hear of him. I mean in the papers, the science journals.’
‘Your father was always on the fringes, John, you know that. And when newspapers did ask for interviews or comments he always refused. He hated newspapers. Even with the conferences, he’d say, “You go, Helen. You can give a talk far better than I can.”’
‘So why didn’t you?’
His mother shrugged: ‘Aside from the fact that people wanted to hear Albert not me, I had things to do myself, I was needed at the clinic.’
For a moment, she seemed to have forgotten what she meant to say and turned back to the papers on the table, only to find she hadn’t got her glasses on, she couldn’t read. John’s mind too was casting about, as if a path had petered out in open country.
‘You know, Mum,’ he suddenly said, ‘I gave Behaviour in Patterns to Elaine to read.’ He laughed boyishly. ‘I mean, one has to show off the family’s intellectual credentials, right? Actually, it was the first present I gave her. Anyway, Elaine said, reading it, it was as if Dad had something tremendously important to say and then wrote the whole book to make sure no one ever found out what it was.’
Helen frowned. ‘Albert’s writing isn’t easy for the uninitiated.’
‘So I suppose if the biography explains Dad to a wider public, it wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it? Maybe his books’ll start selling and there’ll be some money in it.’
For the first time his mother laughed with r
eal amusement. ‘Oh John, John, John!’ She shook her head. ‘You’re incorrigible with this obsession with money! Do you remember when you used to say, “Hurry up and write something that sells, Dad, so I can live off the royalties.”’
‘It was just a joke,’ John smiled.
Pushing her hair from her face, Helen leaned forward across the table. ‘Do you know what this man said, though, John?’
‘Who?’
‘This writer who wants to do the biography.’
John waited, strangely happy.
‘He said’ – Helen hesitated – ‘that he thought of Dad as a great and inspiring individual.’
‘So? That sounds positive.’
‘It’s rather funny, though, don’t you think, about your father of all people.’
When her son still couldn’t see it, the mother said: ‘Well what was the title of his first book, for God’s sake?’
‘Oh right!’ John said.
Albert James had published Mythical Individuals in 1973. Having briefly caused a stir in anthropological circles, the book was widely written off as holistic nostalgia dressed up in modern jargon, only to be discovered some years later by enthusiasts in communications theory who believed James had been suggesting that complex social feedback systems took precedence over the dubious concept of individual identity.
‘I mean, it hardly inspires confidence, does it,’ Helen said, ‘stressing Dad’s individuality? The last thing we need is a stupid biography.’
‘As long as he is appreciative,’ John said, ‘I don’t see how it can harm.’
‘Perhaps,’ Helen James said. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’
He watched her. She was old again now. Her eyes were trapped under a mesh of wrinkles. In a moment she would get up and go off to bed. He felt an inexplicable urgency.
‘Mum, really, I can’t see how you could not want a biography of Dad. He was your whole life! It was a fantastic relationship you two had. A biography would keep him alive.’
‘I’d rather people read his books,’ she said curtly.
‘But they won’t, will they?’ Without thinking, John asked, ‘You’re not worried about that business with the court case, are you?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ She smiled. ‘Heavens, no! That was pure calumny.’
‘Still, to the extent that it affected his career …’
While John was in the last year of boarding school, his father had been accused of having sex with an underage prostitute in Chicago. It was a highly improbable story.
‘It certainly interrupted his work,’ Helen agreed. ‘In that sense a biographer would have to mention it. But the scandal was that it ever got to court at all. No, the problem as I see it is whether this man will do Dad justice at the intellectual level.’
‘But you can’t know that until he’s written the book. At least he takes Dad seriously.’
After another pause, Helen James announced: ‘You know I did go to some conferences to give papers for him.’ She laughed.
‘You did?’
‘For a year and more. While we were in the States. It was quite a success. One in New York, in particular. Melbourne too. I just showed a few slides, said what Dad was up to, read a paragraph or two he had written. Actually, he got more responses that way than when he presented things himself. You know how he tended to digress.’
‘I wish I could have seen you.’
‘Yes, that would have been fun.’
‘So why did you stop?’
Helen looked at her son. The boy was a burden. ‘Oh I couldn’t go on. I always felt I was simplifying things terribly. The way his mind worked went so much deeper than the words I used. Actually, I suppose my success was due to the fact that I was watering down his ideas. I made him more political, more topical, whereas he always steered away from any kind of practical application.’
‘So? Nobody starts at the deep end.’
‘Then there was the court case. He needed me around while that was on. I mean, for about six months he wouldn’t answer the phone. He wouldn’t go out.’
‘Right,’ John said. Again he had the same strange impression that his mother wasn’t fixed. He wanted her to stay still.
‘Then we moved out here and your father’s work took a new direction again. It was quite a radical shift.’
John said nothing. There had always been this vast mystery attached to his father’s work. But what had the man ever discovered or produced? Nothing.
‘Of course,’ Helen now added very brightly, looking at her son sprawled on the sofa, ‘any biography of Dad is also bound to be a biography of the family, in a way.’
John cracked his knuckles. ‘You think so?’
‘Quite possibly the man will want to interview you.’
‘That’s okay. I’ll just say it how it was. In the end I was away at school most of the time. I don’t know anything.’
‘Only during term.’
‘Term was two thirds of the year.’
‘We used to write.’
‘The guy’s hardly going to be interested in the sort of letters Dad wrote me. Anyway, I threw them all away.’
‘And more recently?’ Helen James asked.
John frowned. ‘He hasn’t written to me for years. He never emailed.’
‘He didn’t?’
‘No.’
She sighed. ‘I suppose it’s the extent to which all these people want to look into one’s private life that bothers me.’
‘Which people?’
‘Well, this biographer.’
Suddenly, John was irritated. ‘What private life? I can’t remember anything particularly private?’
‘John, you’re being hostile again.’
‘I’m not hostile. I just don’t understand. What did Dad ever do but work? Or you for that matter. You were always frantic to get hold of some medicine or other for some kid who was dying.’
Helen James backed down. ‘Oh, well, I just feel a bit cautious, that’s all. The man wants me to tell our friends whether they should speak to him.’
‘Surely the key thing,’ John said, ‘is whether you let him see Dad’s papers.’
‘I’ve no problem with that,’ Helen said, ‘so long as I look through them first.’
‘Well then. That should be enough for anyone. It’ll take a lifetime just to put them in order.’
She smiled. She sat back. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘You’re right, thank you. Sometimes it takes someone with an outside view to say the obvious.’
The boy couldn’t remember his mother ever having responded to him in this way. He was delighted. ‘Why didn’t you tell me,’ he asked softly, ‘that I would be seeing the river where you plan to scatter Dad’s ashes?’
‘Oh,’ she smiled. ‘You didn’t ask, did you, John? You never ask.’
As she spoke her voice cracked a little. At once he stood to embrace her, but she had let her head drop. She was digging her chin into her breast. Just one hand reached out to clasp his. ‘I can’t believe he’s gone, John,’ she muttered. ‘I just can’t believe it happened. I don’t know what to do, or who I am, or how to live.’
Some time later, in his room, John wrote a message on his phone: ‘Ellie, it’ll sound crazy coming out of the blue like this, but will you marry me? I have realised I love you. Really. Please, marry me. Let’s do it and be happy.’
The little screen glowed. He reread the message carefully. Were they the right words? He couldn’t decide whether to send it or not.
Agitated, John paced back and forth round the small bedroom. When he stopped, he could hear his mother too was moving in her room, the room Dad died in. Why wasn’t I invited to come before the end? You didn’t ask, John, she would say. Should he ask Elaine? It was hard to think of words that weren’t trite and hackneyed.
John pulled a book from off the wall. All his childhood, the rooms had been lined with the books Dad wrote, the books he read. This one was by a man called Aby Warburg: The Ritual of the Serpent. J
ohn glanced through the pages. There were black and white photos of primitive folk in skins and feathers, then reproductions of childish drawings where lightning over mountains was sketched as if snakes were flickering down from low cloud. In thick, wavy pencil, pressing hard, his father had underlined the sentence: ‘Where human grief in its amazement seeks redemption, there we draw near to the image of the serpent.’
The boy lay on his bed and couldn’t sleep. His hands wouldn’t rest. He forced his mind back to London, to the lab. The work they were involved in was a question of deactivating the RNA of a dormant tuberculosis bacterium, of tricking the ribosomes into some unnatural behaviour so that the disease could never reproduce again. Should he send the message to Elaine or not? His mother continued to pace about the other room. John remembered how strange she had seemed this evening, alternately fading and glowing.
Send it! He grabbed the phone and pressed the appropriate buttons. As he watched, the little envelope flew away across the illuminated screen. Done it! He felt enormously pleased with himself. Yes! He got out of bed and was on his way to tell his mother, Mum, I’ve proposed! But he stopped. You should wait for Elaine’s reply. Mother had always mocked when his girlfriends left him, as if he was bound to be a failure with women. What time was it in England? Early evening. He went back to bed. The phone would vibrate on the wood of the bedside table. It would be loud enough to wake him. The three elephants were there too, one inside the other. They would rattle. He had made his move.
John lay in the dark, waiting. Dad had started out as a biologist. What was it that led him astray? His degree was excellent, his PhD likewise. He had done some good work on amoebas. Apparently. ‘The most challenging question we face when we seek to explain the origin of life’ – Professor Wilson’s lectures came to mind – ‘is not the question of whether some casual collision of electricity and chemical substance could have generated living cells. We know it could. The real mystery is the moment the RNA begins to replicate and the casually made thing reproduces itself. Who knows how many millions of primitive cells lived and died before one began to extend life through time in the form of species, the pattern of generations? Perhaps it is here that we might find a set of targets to attack the cells we wish to destroy, to tell each cell it is only one, one life is enough. Then we can let the individual live as long as it likes. The pattern is broken and no harm can be done.’