by Jan Ellison
“Is she hot?”
“Yes.”
“They’re not shacking up or anything, are they?”
“No, they’re not shacking up.”
“Good. He needs to keep it loose.”
“Loose. Yes. I agree with you.”
“Amazing,” he said. “We agree on something.”
“We often agree. Don’t we?”
“Sure we do. Absolutely. Anyway, Annie, the thing to do is not think about Mom and Dad. Just worry about yourself.”
“Easier said than done.”
“Seriously, try it,” my little brother said to me. “Try it this once.”
So I tried it. I put my parents—and my children and my husband—out of my mind, and thought only of myself. I ordered an artificial branch and a wine barrel from a British wholesaler, then I packed my clothes and got on a plane to London.
Thirty-four
IT WAS MY FIRST FLIGHT without my family in more than twenty years. Appropriate, since I was traveling to the first and last place I had ever lived alone. On the train from Heathrow into London, where I would be staying in a hotel near Hyde Park, I was jet-lagged and suffering the aftereffects of wine I’d consumed on the plane. I had not meant to drink so much. It was not the sort of thing I did these days. But being by myself seemed to liberate me from my obligations. I felt the way I had coming to London the first time: I was alone, and unwatched, and might as well do as I wanted. Now that the flight was over, I was full of regret. I wondered how I would survive seven whole days without your father and the girls. But once I settled in, I enjoyed myself. I did not really miss home until the end.
I arrived in London on a Tuesday, and I was not scheduled to start work on the arc light until Thursday. My hotel was on Park Lane. The room was furnished in deep reds and golds. There was an upholstered chair by the window and an ornate reading lamp and heavy damask drapes pulled closed. The bathroom was spectacularly clean and appointed with tiny fragrant soaps wrapped in pink paper. There were gorgeously thick white robes folded on a shelf in the bathroom. How different this space was from the plain blue room in Victoria I’d lived in two decades before.
I could hear the wind sweeping across Hyde Park. I pulled back the drapes and there, surprising me somehow after all the time that had passed, was the London evening sky I remembered, tender pink and etched with white clouds. I went out and walked straight to the river. It was summer but not warm. I did not feel lonely, but I felt the memory of loneliness. It rained. I had no umbrella. I had never carried an umbrella then, either. Had I changed so little?
I walked to Embankment Station, where I stumbled upon a memory of being pressed against something—a wall, a bench, the glass partition inside the tube—and kissed by Patrick. It was not that the kisses themselves had been so remarkable, but there was a texture of abandonment in them, and in him, a way he had of giving himself over to a moment, that I remembered.
I decided to take a sunset river cruise. Waiting to buy my ticket, I was distracted by a baby in a pram. The baby was small and dark, its face poking alertly from its hooded suit, its dark eyes glowing. The mother was small and dark, too, the father paler, flushed red in the face. There was an older couple along, the woman’s parents, visiting from out of town.
“Fourteen quid for a single journey?” the young father kept saying. “That’s ridiculous. We could get a taxi for a tenner. We could get the bus. Why don’t we catch a bus? We could get the fifty-eight.”
The baby coughed. The mother glared straight ahead. Her parents milled about at a distance, keeping quiet.
“Fourteen quid,” the man said again, igniting an old feeling in me—a clutching feeling about money. I fished a twenty-pound note from my wallet for my ticket. It used to panic me to spend a bill like that. It used to trigger a personal indignation at the price of things. A quick shock in the morning that the twenty pounds was gone. The run home from the tube station at Victoria after work, the sweat on my forehead as I imagined missing the free dinner. The inescapable mental calculations: This meal cost two hours of work; this skirt, a half a day; this journey on the tube, outside zone one, nearly an hour. This night of drinking, a half a day’s work. I used to go to pubs alone to drink. There are worse confessions in these pages, but the thread that came loose the night of your accident was first stitched into the fabric of my life in those pubs, and I wish it hadn’t been. I wish I hadn’t wasted that money, drinking pint after pint, and obliterated all those hours, and set down a habit that returned briefly, last summer, and inadvertently might have obliterated you.
Fourteen pounds for a single journey along the river? I didn’t like this pale man, but I had to agree with him that it was too much. They turned around without buying a ticket. I bought mine and boarded the boat. The rain had stopped, and the sun came out suddenly. The sky became pale gold. The sun glinted green off windows. It glinted off the river, too, flooding the city with an aching beauty. At the edge of the river were birch trees huddled in patches of dirt, the trunks like bleached bones strung upright in the light. They had missed it, this moment; perhaps it would have been worth their fourteen quid after all.
From the boat, I stared at river things: long houseboats painted black and brown or blue and white. The bleached, then blackened, brick of the Tower of London. The gray clouds moving swiftly overhead. Yellow brick tenements rising above the moss-green walls that contained the river and its tides, tides as far up as the point where the river ceases to be tidal and becomes an inland body unattached to the sea.
The next day, I took the Docklands Light Rail to Canary Wharf. I wondered who’d ended up engineering it—this massive station that connected the glittering new buildings to London proper. It should have been Malcolm. It would have been Malcolm if he had not died. Standing there, I came face-to-face with the unwelcome finality of death. What can you do with it? It stops you cold when you think of it; it leaves you no out. So I took the light rail back into London and tried to put Malcolm out of my mind.
I walked the route I had sometimes walked from the river to Victoria. Each landmark was familiar: Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, Victoria Station. I tried to find Victoria House, but the neighborhood was so changed, I did not see anything that looked like the building in which I had once lived. I walked back to Victoria Station. I stood inside its vast white halls. I watched a young woman standing alone before the board, looking up, holding on to her suitcase. The train schedule flipped over in its white letters. She could go anywhere. She could simply board a train and end up somewhere else. As I had done once, with Patrick.
It was not yet noon. I had all day. I’d be back by evening. Why not?
I bought a ticket and boarded the train. I spent the day walking around Canterbury, as Patrick and I had done. I tried to find the place we’d stayed. But all the bed-and-breakfasts looked the same. I did not spend the night this time. I took a train back to London to the hotel on Park Lane and collapsed into bed.
I went to the exhibit hall on Thursday, where a small room had been assigned to me for two days to assemble the arc light. I did not end up building an exact replica. The branch was faux, for one thing. The diamond bulbs the Swedish designer wanted me to use were yellow instead of clear glass, and for hoods, I had shipped over a half-dozen antique copper colanders, instead of the baking tins I’d used the first time. I worked for two days straight, and by Friday afternoon, I was done. I turned off the overhead lights and plugged in what I’d made, and the ceiling and the walls absorbed the new pattern of light. The effect was startling, better than I’d hoped—and I sat for a long time taking it in. Then I was free to do whatever I wanted until the following morning, when the Swedish designer was to help me move the light into his exhibit.
I decided to walk back to my hotel. The exhibit hall was not far from Bond Street, and suddenly the area was very familiar. I wandered around until I found the street where I’d worked for Malcolm on the Docklands bid. It had gone upscale, with posh stores an
d little cafés, and the sandwich shop on the corner had become a Starbucks. I found the building and stood outside and looked up as dusk took hold. I felt that stopping again, the stopping of death, and I went on walking.
THE EXHIBITION WAS a success. The arc light showcased the Swede’s diamond bulbs beautifully, and both consumers and retailers expressed strong interest. I sketched a version of the light I thought could be made easily, manufactured en masse, shipped and assembled on-site. The Swede was impressed, and we struck a deal. He would manufacture and distribute; I would help market, and take a cut.
He invited me to join him and a colleague for drinks when the show closed Sunday, but I declined. It had been a rewarding two days, but I didn’t want to spend any more of my time in London doing business. I wanted, I suppose, to leave room to linger again in the past. And I wanted to talk to your father. I called him as soon as I was back at the hotel. I told him all about the show, and the deal I’d struck. He did not say he was proud of me, but I could tell he was by the tenderness in his voice. Or maybe that was only him missing me, as I suddenly missed him. He gave me a report on the girls. He told me you’d come for dinner and he’d made steaks and you’d spent the night. He told me everything was fine, and I should enjoy my last day tomorrow.
I ate by myself in the hotel restaurant. I felt loneliness like I hadn’t felt in years. I felt it in the endless wine list, and in the menu inside its stiff red jacket, and in the indifferent city below me, flickering with light. I lay in the hotel room bed, later, unable to sleep. I wished, quite badly, that I was already home. I wished your father was beside me, so I could press my body against his coolness until the night was put to rest.
ON THE LAST full day of my stay, I slept late and had an early lunch. Then I set out walking. Steady rain was falling straight down out of a bland white sky. Water was pooling in the gutters, washing up over curbs.
I came to the former site of the Photographers’ Gallery. I sought it out that afternoon and found it, though I’d decided, before I came to London, that I would not. It was still a gallery, but full of paintings, not photography, and it was now called Oxford Fine Art. I asked the woman working inside if she knew what had become of the photographic gallery that had been in this building in the late eighties. She said it had moved a few years ago, to a new site not far away.
She gave me directions. I walked slowly. I stood outside for a long time, then I went into the gallery and climbed the stairs and found a café. It had natural light, which the old café had not had, but it was as white and sterile as the old café had been. It had black counters against the wall and four round tables and a few benches with white legs and the same black laminate surface.
I ordered a coffee. I spoke to the man working at the counter. He told me they’d been in this site four years. He said he liked the old furniture better, but the wooden tables had been too long for this room so they’d had to be sold. On one wall was an enormous black-and-white photograph of a single tree. I was not impressed by it, but I sat on a hard white stool and drank my coffee and stared at it anyway.
I closed down memories, one by one, ticking them off like items on a to-do list. The exercise made me tired. Tired to remember that I had tried so hard, back then. Tired of wondering why that photograph of the four of us at the White Cliffs had arrived in my mailbox. Tired of trying to remember that Malcolm was dead. Tired of thinking of the sad past, and of the way I had behaved, and of Patrick.
I finished my coffee. I went to the counter in the print shop and picked up a brochure to take home as a keepsake. Clipped to the brochure was a business card. THE PHOTOGRAPHERS’ GALLERY, it read. OWNER AND CURATOR: PATRICK ARTGAL.
I stared at the name. It was a different spelling. But could it, might it, still be Patrick?
“Patrick Ardghal?” I said out loud.
The man at the counter looked up. “Do you need to speak to him?” he said. “I believe he’s in his office downstairs.”
There were people behind me, talking about the photographs on the walls. Shadow and color, depth and perspective. There were other voices, too, leaking in from the street, voices full of laughter and boredom and fear. But the only sound I heard, walking back down the wooden stairs, was the sound of my own heart.
I knocked on the door. Patrick himself opened it. He stood for a minute staring at me, then he shouted out, “Annie Black, is it really you?”
What sound then? A gasp as he embraced me, and I discovered that I had long ago given myself permission, if I ever found him again, to find out what would happen next.
Thirty-five
THE GIRLS ARE FINALLY HOME from Wisconsin. Your father delivered them this afternoon. I had to bite my lip to keep from crying when they stepped out of the car. They seemed older, and taller, if that was possible in a week’s time. They gave me a quick report of their vacation. Yes, they’d skated on the lake. Yes, there were cousins their age. Yes, they’d had fun.
I didn’t want your father to leave. The sun was out, and I told the girls they could play in the field across the street. It wasn’t really a field. It was a rare undeveloped eighth of an acre in an overdeveloped city in which you used to spend hours, when you were little, searching for pill bugs and bottle caps and broken glass. Clara worked on her cartwheels while Polly looked for flowers.
“Any news about Robbie?” your father asked.
“No,” I said. “Nothing. How about on your end?”
“Nope.”
A silence hung between us. I felt blame inside that silence, so strong it was as if it were physically embodied and resting squarely over my head. To lay blame. It’s a strange expression. To lay it at someone’s feet, like an offering? To lie inside it, suffocating? To fall in a pool of it and drown?
Perhaps blame is the way the universe organizes itself around tragedy and loss. Without blame, suffering is random, and that kind of randomness leads to madness.
Polly presented herself in front of us, then dragged us across the dirt to a clump of flowers with bright-yellow blossoms.
“See what I found? See how they face the sun?” Polly said. “That means they’re sunflowers. Sunflowers face the sun all the time in the day even if the sun moves.”
They were not actually sunflowers—they were prince daisies—but I wasn’t going to correct her.
“Where did you learn that?” I asked her.
“From Emme-and-Emme.”
Your father gave me a look.
“That’s weird,” Polly said, bending down. “These two aren’t facing the sun. They’re facing away. They must be sick.”
“Maybe they think there’s another sun,” your father said.
Polly looked up in the sky.
“That would be very bad,” she said. “Because then the sunflowers would keep turning and turning, and they would get a pain.”
I picked her up and held her on my hip. Clara came and stood beside us. The four of us looked up at the single sun in its corner, poking between the clouds. Is that what I did last summer—see two suns in a single sky and forget which way to turn for sustenance? It was dangerous, doing that. It was possible to drop seeds at the wrong time, in the wrong places, failing to grow the expected future. It was possible to rush forward, looking back, and break your neck.
Thirty-six
I SEE THAT there is nothing left to do but to set down what happened next in London, last August.
Patrick stood in the doorway of his office at the gallery and shouted my name. He lifted me up and embraced me. There was a feeling that no time at all had passed, that I still knew him well, and that he knew me, that we were both still young in spite of our altered exteriors.
He gave me a tour of the gallery. We had a beer in the pub next door. We exchanged personal histories.
He had never married. He had never had children. He had lived with many women, but so far, he hadn’t fancied the few who’d wanted to marry him, and the ones he’d wanted to make a go of it with had unfortunately wised up in
the end.
He struck me as fundamentally changed. He seemed humble and modest. I asked him if he’d finally discovered humility.
He laughed. “Hard to support my old bravado in the face of such dismal results.”
He was still taking pictures, but he’d given up trying to make a living from it. He was content running the gallery, trying to discover and nurture the talent of others. At some point, he said, it would be necessary to move home to Ireland. His father was still alive, but not in good health.
We took a walk beside the Thames. For the first time that week, I didn’t notice the weather, or the time, or the color of the river. I noticed only Patrick. He said we ought to pop into the Tate. There was a new installation by a Polish artist he wanted to see. We’d just make it before the museum closed for the night.
The exhibit was a simple, enormous rectangular structure that took up most of the first floor of the museum. The outside was steel and wood, painted black, and the inside was darkness. The exhibit was called How It Is, taken from the Samuel Beckett novel of the same name. Patrick read the placard posted on the wall out loud: “ ‘How shall I move forward? you might ask yourself, as you stand at the threshold, confronted by the darkness ahead.’
“Dramatic, isn’t it?” he said.
“Or melodramatic.”
“Shall we have a go anyway?”
“Why not?”
We entered the structure and were suddenly enveloped in an astonishing darkness. It was darkness like you never find in nature. Darkness like you never find anywhere. Darkness like a gateway into a different world. I walked slowly, taking small, uncertain steps. I could hear strangers floating by us, heading out of the blackness as we headed in. I became dizzy, thinking I had a long way to go to get to the end. But the room was shorter than it seemed, and the end was there before I expected it, a sudden velvet wall at my fingertips.