The Universe of Things

by Gwyneth Jones

  So we confided, quickly becoming intimate; like people who first suspect and then confirm that they are both members of the same secret society. As indeed we were, though there’s nothing really secret about modern reproduction technology. Bobbi has never met any prejudice. It helps, no doubt, that you have to be relatively rich, and therefore de facto respectable, before you can afford these techniques. I noticed that Mrs. Brown’s furtive interest in my daughter (which had struck me when we met on the campsite) diminished when she knew Bobbi’s provenance. The regal Mrs. Brown, I decided, had been afraid we Americans had a better, more advanced model of child than her twins. Now she’d assured herself that this was not the case — that Bobbi was a mere copy of her two mothers, with no improvements — her curiosity vanished. We passed on to other topics.

  I wondered if I dared to mention the youngest girl, maybe suggest that she and Bobbi could get together. But when I looked around I couldn’t see her. The corner where she’d been lurking was empty.

  “What is it?” asked Mrs. Brown. “Is something the matter?”

  Celine and Carmen were still happily dancing. “I was looking for Marianina.”

  “Oh, she went back to the villa,” she explained casually. “With Germaine, my nanny.” She laughed. “Marianina hates parties. She’s too young; she gets so bored.” But her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. I knew she was hiding something. Marianina, I guessed, had been sent home in some kind of disgrace. Poor little Cinderella!

  Bobbi stayed with us at the bar until three a.m., along with probably every child of her age for miles around except Marianina. We stayed long after Mrs. Brown and the beautiful twins had departed, until the very end of the party — when the flamenco guitarists joyously played and everybody sang, at the tops of our voices, the simplest of drinking songs: the songs that everybody in Europe knows, or sings along to anyway.

  ce soir je buvais!

  ce soir je buvais heureux!

  A few hours later I woke up in the trailer with a terrible hangover and the dim memory of Suze trying in vain to get me to take an Alco-soothe. Since even miraculous modern medicine can do little about the morning after once you’ve let things get that far, I got up. I took a tepid shower in our tiny closet bathroom and went for a walk to clear my head.

  That covetable pitch on the topmost terrace, which we had admired when we first arrived, had fallen vacant. The red car that had been parked there had disappeared; so had the little climbing tent. I went up there and sat on a rock, in blissful solitude, gazing southward toward the twinkling, three-cornered smile of the sea. I was thinking of a paper I had to write, for a conference in the fall; and of finding a house in Provence or the Alps Maritime, with vines around the door and a roof of roman tiles. It was so difficult to choose a resting place, in this summer world where neither Suze nor I had any roots. Too much freedom can be as frustrating as too little.

  I wondered if I could see the villa where Mrs. Brown was staying.

  I didn’t notice the little girl who came scrambling up the hill until she burst out of the bushes right in front of me and stood there, glowering, holding what looked like a bottle of shampoo. It was Marianina. She had been expecting someone, but not me. This was my first impression as the child stood, stared, and then came slowly toward me.

  “You left this behind in the showers,” she said, in French.

  “No, it’s not mine.”

  It was very odd. I couldn’t think what she was doing on the campsite, or why she was pretending that she’d come from the sanitaires, when those modest toilet facilities were in completely the opposite direction from her approach. She was dressed as she had been at L’Ecureuil, the same shorts and the same tee-shirt. The contrast between this girl and the rest of her family was more startling in their absence: to think of all that golden perfection and see Marianina’s rough brown head, her scratched, dust-smeared arms and legs as thin as knotted wire. She went on staring at me unpleasantly: a child already embodying the threat of adolescence, a neglected child who would throw stones, let down tires, perhaps steal. Perhaps she had stolen the bottle of shampoo.

  “Were you looking for someone?” I tried not to sound aggressive.

  “So, they’ve gone,” said the little girl.

  “Who?”

  “My friends.” She came closer: closer than was comfortable. Still sitting on my rock, I was trapped by her scrawny, demanding presence. I could feel her breath.

  “What is it?”

  “We were going to make a rocket.” She still spoke in French. “But they’ve gone.”

  “I don’t understand you. What do you want?”

  With an indescribably sly and ugly smile, she thrust a finger into the open mouth of her plastic bottle, then pulled it out covered in pale slime.

  I jumped up. Perhaps I was over-reacting, but I did not like the situation. I didn’t want any part of a little girl — perhaps ten, twelve years old — who behaved like this. I did not want to be alone with her. As I sprang to my feet the child darted away. I went to the edge of the terrace and saw her, halfway down the hill already, slithering on her bony little rump. As I watched she reached the level ground, turned, and stood malignly repeating that sexual-seeming play with the bottle and her grubby finger.

  Back at our trailer Suze was making breakfast, breaking fresh eggs into fragrant melted butter. The bread van had arrived at the campsite gates, tooting like a steam-train. Bobbi came running back from there with an armful of warm baguettes. I made coffee. I didn’t mention my encounter. We ate our petit-dejeuner sur l’herbe, and I talked about the paper I was writing.

  “How do you copy a chair?” I asked Bobbi.

  “You could draw a picture.”

  “That would be a picture of a chair. Another chair is another sum of things taken out of the world. A certain quantity of wood, metal, or plastics; varnish, maybe nails, wear on the machinery or tools; a measurable expense of food or energy from whatever source. Something for something. It’s like double-entry book-keeping. A thousand chairs means a thousand objects at a certain cost per unit. One can bring that cost down, but it is always, allowing for all your expenses, a substantial fraction of the first amount. But if you copy a piece of software a thousand times, what is the cost?”

  I was getting my own back for the times when Suze, the scientist, would hold our baby entranced explaining the table of the elements, the anatomy of a star.

  “Erm, wear and tear on the keyboard? Wear and tear on the storage disc!”

  “Infinitesimal,” I said. “And not equivalent in the same way. This is the problem, Bobbi, and it isn’t just a problem of economics. We have a system of values, of morality, based on people competing with each other to copy things, at the lowest possible cost per unit. That’s capitalism. But when the cost, the object of all this competition, effectively disappears, what happens to our system? Life gets very puzzling. Do you remember the Mickey Mouse episode in Fantasia? When Mickey uses the magician’s spell, and the magic broomsticks just keep on coming, appearing out of nothing, more and more of them, and they won’t stop?”

  I’d decided to call my paper “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

  “Leave the kid alone, Thea,” said my wife, passing me a plate of eggs and dropping a kiss on the tip of Bobbi’s freckled nose. “She has no idea what you’re talking about, poor baby.”

  “No, I like it!” cried our daughter, bouncing up and down. “I like it! Let her tell me!”

  Our miracle of the modern world: made possible by prosaic laboratory science, but to us completely magical. I thought of that other little girl and her starved, all-too-knowing eyes.

  I went to the bureau to buy more of that wine. The manageress, an Italian woman with bushy black hair and a beak of a nose, was in a talkative mood. I had the impression that she approved of Suze and Bobbi and me. She liked our American passports. She liked the fact that Suze and I were married, a pleasant example of the new world (a newer world than the USA!) showing affection and r
espect for the old ways. I mentioned the English family, and learned that Mrs. Brown was not a regular visitor. She had arrived in St. Mauro for the first time a week before, but she had created a good impression by spending money locally. We agreed that the twins were phenomenally pretty.

  “And the youngest girl. I suppose she’s made friends with some other children on the campsite? I saw her here this morning.” I was uneasy about that child. Her malevolence, or her unhappiness, had cast a shadow on me.

  “Ah. La Cenerentola!” The woman grimaced and shook her head.

  It was the name I’d used myself. “Why do you call her Cinderella? Because of her sisters? The Brown sisters certainly aren’t ugly!”

  “I call her that because she’s a sad case. Something went wrong, eh? One only has to look at the older girls to see what they are to the mother.” She shrugged. “Vanity parenting! I’ve heard of it. But it looks as if, the third time, Madame wasted her money.”

  I suppose one has to meet prejudice sometime. I muttered (embarrassed, but feeling it was my duty to defend Mrs. Brown) that Bobbi was also the result of an artificial technique.

  “Listen. I’m not saying it’s wrong. It’s the fruit of it. Why bear a child, no matter how the baby was conceived, just to do her harm?” The Italian woman drew herself up, looked from right to left, and leaned darkly forward over her desk, with its innocent sheaves of bright-colored tourist leaflets. “You saw her here, eh?” she hissed. “Do you know why she was here on my camping, la cenerentola? She was looking for the couple who have left, those climbers. And do you know what she wanted with them?”

  “Err, no.”

  “Well, I know. That is why they left, obviously, so suddenly; because she’d been with them, and they were ashamed. It was the woman, I expect. She did it too but she was ashamed, and she wanted to get her man away from the nastiness. Believe me, I tell you what I think. I don’t say the couple weren’t to blame. But it surely was not the first time for la cenerentola. A child doesn’t go around asking for that. Not unless she is getting it already, eh? Eh?”

  I escaped, feeling terrible. If there wasn’t a word of truth in the manager’s vicious gossip, it was still extremely distasteful. The next thing I knew, I’d be under suspicion myself. When I got the chance (while Bobbi spent the afternoon sleeping off her late night), I told Suze everything. We agreed that the child did look neglected, and there really might be something wrong, something ugly going on. What could we do? Nothing.

  But Mauro had turned sour on us. It was time to move on.

  Act II: Cinderella and Her Sisters

  Two weeks later we were in a seaside town called Santa Margarita, south of Livorno. We’d decided to give up camping for a while, and reserved rooms through the international clearing-house site on the internet, that boon to impulse-travelers — our booking whirled in digital fragments by the wild logic of the global network, from Siena to Livorno via Hawaii and Tokyo and Helsinki. The hotel overlooked a quiet, bright piazza: a renaissance chapel with twisted-candy marble pillars, a pizzeria, and a cafe.

  “It’s quiet now,” said Suze. “But at three in the afternoon, anywhere is quiet. Think of the noise at night.”

  “Oh please, oh please,” begged Bobbi, who only wanted to get to the beach.

  The padrone explained that the window shutters were completely soundproof.

  “My wife suffers from asthma and cannot bear a stuffy atmosphere.”

  Ah, but when the shutters were closed tight these rooms — two pretty rooms, and a bathroom between them — would still be airy, beautifully airy, the way you Americans like, because of the inner courtyard —

  I stepped out with him onto the open gallery. We looked down, we looked up. He explained the ingenious and environmentally sound air-conditioning system. It was a very nice courtyard, with a fountain pool in the center and big planters full of greenery. I was delighted with our choice. I suspected Suze was delighted as well, but she was angling for a discount. My Suze always likes to squeeze the envelope: she’s always trying to get the work done with one instruction the less.

  “Suze, this place is lovely —” I began, perfidiously. I looked up, once more. La cenerentola was leaning over the gallery rail on the floor above, staring at me. I stepped backwards, really shaken. That sour little face, peering down at me: so vivid, it was like an hallucination.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s go away. Let’s think about it.”

  “Madame, is something wrong?”

  “Thea! You look as if you’re going to faint!”

  And alas for me, I almost did faint. I was dizzy, it was the heat, maybe my period was coming on. I couldn’t explain myself, I couldn’t possibly tell the truth. Naturally, by the time the padrone had fussed over me, and his wife had administered delicious lemonade (for the sugar, the best thing for faintness), all discussion was over. We were installed.

  But in any case I wasn’t frightened anymore. What was there to be frightened about?

  I was left at the hotel, lying down, because of my faintness, while Suze took Bobbi for her first swim (the padrone having given careful directions to a very nice, really clean beach). I felt fine. After an hour or so I got up and went out. There in the piazza, sitting alone at a table outside the cafe, I saw Laura Brown.

  It seemed to me that we were both struck by the same emotions. We saw each other, would have liked to pretend not to recognize each other: we accepted the inevitable.

  She smiled; I smiled. She beckoned me to join her.

  “It was at Mauro,” I said. “In Provence —”

  “But of course I remember. Thea and Suze, the American couple with the charming daughter. And you’re you staying at La Fontana? What a coincidence!”

  She insisted on buying me a drink, and I ordered a Coke. I spoke of Bobbi, and how difficult it could be to keep a child entertained. I suggested (my voice almost shaking, I had such a bad conscience about my suspicions) she must have the same problem with Marianina. Maybe the two little girls could be company for each other?

  Mrs. Brown said “perhaps” in a tone that meant refusal. We looked at each other through our sunglasses. I thanked her for my drink and went on my way.

  It was all so normal. A holiday acquaintance, that neither of us really wished to pursue. Why did I have the strange conviction that as soon as I was out of sight, Mrs. Laura Brown would leap up, rush into the hotel, collect her family, pack her bags and flee — like someone guilty of a monstrous crime?

  I was wrong. The next day, Suze and Bobbi and I went together to the very nice, very clean beach. Almost at once I spotted Mrs. Brown and her daughters. The twins, in matching green and gold bikinis, were unmistakable. The little girl, as usual, was sitting on her own, ignored by her sisters. I tried to stop myself from watching them. The beach was expensive (Suze muttered bitterly about the entrance fee), but it was beautiful. The Mediterranean, whatever the actual analysis of the water, was on its best behavior: warm, silky, crystal clear. We sunbathed, we swam, we played ball. We had a delightful picnic, we lay in the sun.

  “Tuscany?” murmured Suze, “Culture for you, the beach for me.” She touched my hand as we lay in the shade of our jaunty umbrella, while Bobbi splashed in the sea. “Here?”

  But I was distracted. “I think I’ll take a little walk.”

  I thought I would go up and say hi. I would say hi, and get a close look at Marianina. Your Cinderella daughter, Mrs. Brown. Do you treat her badly? Do you use her worse than a servant? I felt myself a sadly inadequate fairy godmother, but at least I would try to assure myself that there was no need; that the problem was in my imagination. Mrs. Brown and her twins were lying on identical hired loungers. Laura Brown was reading a paperback. Celine and Carmen no longer looked so beautiful now that I believed their sister was being in some way abused. They were giggling and chatting, heads together.

  Marianina didn’t get a lounger; she was sitting on the sand.

  As I approached I was feeling extre
mely self-conscious. My courage failed: maybe I would give them a wave and walk on by. The sunlight glittered. Suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, where there had been three sun-loungers there was only one. Mrs. Brown and la cenerentola were alone.

  So then I did go up to them, propelled by sheer amazement.

  “Hello.” I said. And stood there, dumbstruck.

  “Hello,” said the lady, putting aside her book. I noticed that her bikini was also green and gold. Her eyes were hidden; her smile was frost in the sun.

  “There were three of you here just a moment ago,” I blurted, then corrected myself in confusion. “I mean four. You and the twins, and the little girl.”

  The cold smile faded. “It’s Thea, isn’t it? How nice to see you again. Good day.” Mrs. Brown returned to her book.

  La cenerentola was sitting at her mother’s feet, wearing only a pair of dark blue bikini pants. Her nipples were crusted with sand. She stared at me without speaking.

  I went back to Suze, extremely confused. “Suze, you’ll never believe this. The clones, Mrs. Brown’s beautiful twins, I just saw them disappear. They vanished right in front of my eyes! Do you think I’m going crazy?”

  Suze rolled over, and glared at me. “Save it for your paper, Thea.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m tired of this. What is your problem with that family? What is so fascinating about them? You’ve talked about nothing else for days.” She jumped up, and stalked off to join Bobbi.

  Suze didn’t say another word about the Browns, but she must have been looking out for them. When we were leaving, at sunset, along with everyone else, she marched us across the carpark to a big white Mercedes-solar that I remembered having seen in Mauro. Marianina was in the car. The twins were helping their mother to pack their beach stuff into the trunk.

  “Hi Laura,” said Suze. “Hi Carmen, hi Celine.”

  “Hi Mrs. Bonner,” chorused the twins sweetly, with their identical smile.