‘The problem for me, Chrissie,’ Pam said, ‘was always that, because Mama had been so besotted with my mother, she was never in a position to give me any accurate idea. My mother had been larger than life for her. My mother was Wonder Woman. I also found out that they stole me, by the way. Papa, did so, at any rate.’
‘What?’ Christina said.
The hospital, Pam explained, had already begun discussion with her mother before she died. The process of having the baby adopted had already been talked over. Nobody had mentioned her old schoolfriend, Alice, who was, after all, not even a Catholic. Then suddenly on the day that she died, Joe had ‘found’ a letter, signed by the dead woman.
‘He said that he’d found it in her locker,’ Pam said. ‘In among her effects.’ She paused. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘when I went back home I searched for it, naturally, and I found it. For anyone who is as familiar as I am with Papa’s handwriting, the letter is not bad, but he’s faked it.’
She looked Christina in the eye. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I want you to know that. It’s what I have tried to assure him. In fact, I’m rather pleased, now, that he went to all that trouble. Well, it was a terrific childhood we had, wasn’t it, Chrissie? All that love and richness; all that Venice and Paris and singing lessons and birthday treats. I’ve found my real father, by the way – or, rather, the Sally Army found him. He’s a mechanic in Rome. He’s perfectly nice.’
Christina picked up on Pam’s modified tone. ‘But he watches TV in his undershirt?’ she said. ‘I’m on the way to finding mine, by the way. I believe that he’s a Geordie schmuck with a Born Lump like mine. Bloody hell, though, why did he do it, Pam? Why did he go to all that trouble?’
‘Because he’s infertile,’ Pam said. ‘Haven’t you always known that? It’s people like you, Chrissie, who talk so much, you never notice anything. I want you to be nice to him, by the way. He’s gotten kind of old. He has the gout.’
Christina at this point burst out laughing. ‘Gout?’ she said. ‘People don’t get gout. Not in the twentieth century.’ The sound of her laughter caused her sister’s baby to stir and open his eyes. She became aware suddenly that Pam’s two-year-old son was staring at her, unblinking, through large, velvety brown eyes. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m the aunt. I tried to put a stop to you.’
Jago and Victor had spent the evening falling over each other. They had encountered a problem with simultaneous movement. Each would begin by giving way to the other, after which both would step forward in unison. It happened yet again as they entered the pizza joint, which was blessed with revolving doors. The upshot was that Jago and his brother, tightly wedged together in a segment intended for one, found themselves rotating twice.
‘Bloody hell,’they said.
‘Sacré bleu,’
Jago on the first rotation saw that Pam was sitting very upright on one of those very shiny cheap pine chairs that has its legs screwed to the floor, and that the child was in her lap reaching out for pizza. Behind her, over her head, was a photographic blow-up of Cornetto-ad palazzi. Pam was flanked by Peter and Christina, whom he perceived now as his two redeeming angels. As he rotated for the second time, Jago’s mind engaged once again with those two lines of verse that had taunted him in the art room, three years earlier.
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face –
And suddenly, out loud, he said, ‘Yeats!’ and his brother Victor said, ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?’ to which he gave no answer, though he remembered that the verse went on with an exhortation to move gently in the holy place, and he thought with wonder that he was just about to cross that wide, unbridgeable plain in the form of the pizza joint’s patterned vinyl floor. And with that they tumbled out through the revolving doors and crossed to where the party sat.
What Christina saw was two Jagos and that both were dressed in black. Both wore their hair close-cropped, almost shaved, and both were astonishingly beautiful. The two Jagos came to a stop in front of the table.
‘This is my brother from France,’they said.
‘Je suis le frère qui vient de France,’ They paused and looked at each other. Then they looked back at the company.
‘His name is Victor,’ ‘We lost each other long ago.’
they said.
‘Je m’appelle Victor,’ ‘Nous nous sommes perdus il y a longtemps.’
Christina swallowed hard. Then she held out her hand. The two Jagos hesitated before their hands crashed together along the flight path towards her grasp. Afterwards they repeated the routine with Pam. Then they sat down. Jago seated himself beside Christina, Victor alongside Peter.
Jago withdrew a key from his trouser pocket and placed it on the table in front of Christina. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I took advantage of you. I’d happened to notice that your padlock was the one from the gardener’s wheelbarrow.’
‘Chris is a thrifty soul,’ Peter said. ‘She has become a most efficient recycler.’
‘God in heaven,’ Christina said. ‘Well, of course.’ And she rapped her knuckles against her head. She was staring with interest at Jago and deciding that she did not want him; that Jago Rutherford belonged to her salad days when she was green in reason.
Jago meanwhile had turned to Pam. He had been scrutinizing the baby. ‘He likes pizza,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Pam said.
‘He looks like you,’ Jago said.
‘Yes,’ Pam said.
‘Well, God be praised,’ Christina said, ‘that he doesn’t look like Stetson Gregory.’
The remark was a shock, and it silenced them. Jago looked at his feet. When he looked up, he fixed his eyes firmly upon Pam.
‘Pam,’ he said, ‘I love you. I loved you then. I have always loved you. I have loved you since before the world began.’
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Christina said. ‘Peter, can you shut him up, please?’
‘I love you too,’ Pam said. ‘Jago, I always have. I have loved you from the first moment I met you.’
Christina dropped her fork. ‘Oh, puke,’ she said. ‘Oh, Peter, stop them.’ Then she said, ‘This is degenerating and I have work to do.’ She got up.
‘Dearest,’ Peter said, ‘before you go, may I ask you a little favour? May Victor and I please sleep on your floor? That’s just for tonight, I mean.’
Christina glanced uncertainly at Pam. ‘But what about Pam and the baby?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you staying over, Pam?’
The four of them looked at each other. She felt suddenly terribly naive.
‘Pam will come with me,’ ‘Of course.’
Jago and Victor said.
‘Pam ira avec mon frère,’ ‘Naturellement.’
‘Of course,’ Peter said.
‘I’ll go with Jago,’ Pam said.
‘Of course,’ Christina said. ‘Well, don’t any of you worry about me. I’ve got the secretary’s house keys. I’ll sleep over at Fiona’s. Peter and Victor can have my bed. I’ll double up with the feline eunuch.’
‘Dearest,’ Peter said. ‘Chris, how all of us love you. I say, over Christmas – when I’m away in France with Victor – will you please visit my dog?’
Fiona Campbell’s was the top-floor flat in a three-storey Victorian brick villa. It was no more than two streets away from where Judith and Hugo lived. The key in Christina’s possession was labelled ‘back door’, which meant access was through the garden. Fiona’s back door was approached picturesquely but somewhat hazardously via a Victorian cast-iron fire-escape staircase that spiralled up the full height of the back exterior wall. Christina made her way through the garden in almost complete darkness. One gently lit upper window was throwing a parallelogram of light on to the end of the communal lawn. She groped her way with difficulty to the treads of the iron staircase. Up and up and up she went, until finally she came level with the top.
It was then that it occurred to her that the light was coming from Fiona Campbell’s bedroom.
The back sash-windows of the house had been replaced by larger panels of plate glass which came almost to the floor. Fiona had curtained these panels of glass with fine undyed muslin. As Christina stood on the upper platform, her heart leapt into her mouth. She saw through the curtain that the room was occupied by two female figures, and that the effect, through muslin and muted light, was to cast the figures in silhouette in a kind of shadow-theatre. The shadow-women were slim and lovely. One was tall and one was short. The tall shadow-woman was unzipping the garment of the smaller shadow-woman, so that the garment soon fell to the floor. The smaller shadow-woman stepped from it and half turned towards the other, then the taller shadow-woman stretched forth a long, slim shadow-arm with its curving shadow-hand like an opening lotus flower. She placed the hand on the cheek of the smaller shadow-woman and they moved closer towards each other until their shadow-bodies met and they held each other, merged in a sort of partial eclipse.
It was beautiful, Christina thought, quite lovely, like a strange, slow dance. She leaned sideways to press her nose to the pane and saw then that Judith Levin, in a narrow, knitted tube of a dress reaching almost to her stockinged feet, had bent her head to kiss the blonde hair of the smaller woman, who wore a one-piece moss-green under-tunic like an Edwardian male bathing suit. Then they kissed each other on the mouth. At the same time Judith ran her hands down the line of the smaller shadow-woman’s body, down the slope of her shoulders, down the line of her torso, down the curve of her slight, slender hips. Then the smaller woman turned her head to the window and Christina saw that the woman was none other than her own mother. Alice, seeing the figure at the window, tensed and clutched at Judith and screamed. Christina gasped and stepped backwards, and lost her balance and fell through the air.
Insects and Oedipus
When Christina came round in hospital it was like being on a carousel that was coming very gradually to a stop. Even before she opened her eyes she knew that Judith and her mother were still there and that one of her legs appeared to be encased, from mid-thigh to ankle, in a concrete sewer pipe.
‘Insects,’ Judith was saying. ‘Not only murder but insects. So now you know everything about me.’
‘Judy,’ Alice said, ‘stop doing this to me. Stop doing it to yourself. In the first case, you were a ten-year-old child and the thing was an accident. In the second, you were a confused adolescent who was fooling about with drugs. That was the norm not the exception at the time. Anyway, it’s history. Now is now. Dear one, look at your strengths. You are magnificent.’
‘I was nineteen, for Christ’s sake,’ Judith said, ‘I was already a medical student. I have told this to nobody but you, by the way, absolutely nobody. And now I suppose you’ll go running back to that bald shit of a husband. That’s what you’ll do, I know it.’
‘Judy,’ Alice said, ‘please don’t. In the first place he’s not a shit, you know, and in the second you can’t know what I will do because I do not know myself.’
‘But I know,’ Judith said. ‘And that’s because you, my love, are a wimp and I am a Machiavel.’
Then they were quiet for quite a long time and during the pause Christina dreamed. She dreamed again that mime sequence of the two beautiful women, like ballet dancers, their shadow-limbs curving like pliant plant stems, like swan’s necks, like silk, like lilies so white they were almost green.
‘The catatonic Scotsman has absolutely no idea,’ Judith was saying. ‘He has no more idea than my dear brother.’
‘You seem very sure,’ Alice said.
Judith spoke with her usual assurance. ‘Dear one,’ she said, ‘the boy was stoned. I’m telling you, he knew nothing. The very next week he announced his conversion. Picture it, if you will. Rosh Hashanah. Even in my memory the incident pales in the bigger splash. Parents freaking on all sides. The boy hates his mother. He wants to kill his mother. My son the Jesuit. Oedipus Schmoedipus. Jesus Christ. The boy will nail his parents to the wall.’
It was then that Christina’s brain began to talk inside her head. Insects, Oedipus. Oedipus, insects. Insects, Oedipus – Holy Mary, Mother of God – Oedipus, incest! And could it be that Judith’s brother was none other than the fat priest? Zak Levine. Zachariah. The penultimate book of the Old Testament.
‘And ever since,’ Judith said, ‘there has been, for my sins, the catatonic Scotsman and his sister Fiona. Oh, Alice, my dear Alice, can I say in mitigation that when I married him he was, at least, divinely beautiful.’
‘Judy,’ Alice said, ‘it’s late. Don’t you need to get some sleep?’
‘He was really clever, you know, once upon a time,’ Judith said, ‘in that snotty, irrelevant sort of way. In that stupid, public-schoolish, smart-arse way. And he wanted me well enough. I had some idea that he would “do”, you know, and I didn’t have that much time. One had these ideas – this pathetic idea – that men were necessary to the raising of children. Were we as mad as hatters, Alice, that we should have thought like that?’
‘Probably,’ Christina heard her mother say. ‘Don’t ask me, Judy. What do I know?’
‘I was so certain,’ Judith went on, ‘that I could turn him into something that would suit me. And look at him, after my efforts. What is he now? Mr Volpone? A blob in the custody of his sister and his wife? The kilted bridegroom? The young Lochinvar? He has become ever more emotionally paralysed and recumbent. That’s almost exclusively thanks to my managerial influence.’
‘Ground elder,’ Christina mumbled. ‘In the garden.’
Her mother bent an ear to her, anxiously. ‘My angel,’ she said. ‘Chrissie dear –’
‘Down-a-down,’ Christina said. ‘The unweeded garden. Everything goes down. But not Peter.’
‘Peter?’ Alice said.
‘Horatio,’ Christina said. ‘And flights of angels hymn thee to thy rest.’
‘She’s delirious,’ Judith said. ‘There’s something else I ought to tell you, Alice. Then we will get some sleep. He’s getting to his Polish conference on the back of your Chrissie’s essay.’
‘Good God,’ Alice said. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Chrissie wrote an essay,’ Judith said. ‘An essay on Shakespeare Comedy. Oh, he’s elaborated it and expanded it, of course. It bears all the stamp, now, of his own intellectual suavity. But the germ of the thing is hers, Alice. It’s Chrissie’s and make no mistake.’
Christina opened her eyes for a moment. She blinked twice and looked at the two women before she closed them again. She felt a searing pain in the concrete leg.
‘Anyway,’ she mumbled, ‘I’m switching to maths.’
Though Judith left at midnight, Alice chose to stay. She spent the night beside Christina’s bed and watched her as she slept. In the morning Christina felt much better. She woke to see that the concrete sewer pipe was a two-foot length of rigid plaster.
‘Hello, Mama,’ she said. The two of them hugged and kissed. ‘I expect that I’ve messed up your love life,’ Christina said. ‘I’ve also messed up your marriage.’
Alice felt that there was so much to be said, but because she had no wish to tire her daughter she merely smiled and apologized in her turn and saved her explanations for later.
‘Last night I shocked you, my sweetness,’ she said. ‘And I put your life in danger. Dear Chrissie, thank God that you are all right. You have always been the light of my life.’
Christina bashed at her pillows. ‘Mama,’ she said. ‘But, Mama, it was all so beautiful, what I saw. You. Judith. You were both so amazingly beautiful. I think I was jealous, that’s all.’ And she said, ‘I’m so confused, Mama, I don’t think I know who I am.’
Her mother kissed her and squeezed her arm and said that that had to do with being young, though, even as she said it, Alice knew that it wasn’t quite the truth because she felt so utterly confused herself and needed someone to lean on. So, after she’d watched Christina have her breakfast, she got up to take her leave.
‘I have to see someone in London,’ she sa
id. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow. All right? And right now,’ she said, ‘I’d like to make way for your Papa. He’s coming to see you, Chrissie, and he won’t want me in the way. You’ll be discharged in an hour or two and he’ll drive you back to your digs.’
When Christina pulled a face, she said, ‘Now, don’t you run out on him, Chrissie. Please, dearest Chrissie, I beg you.’
Christina groaned, she pulled the sheet over her face. ‘Fat chance,’ she said, her voice coming muffled through the cloth. ‘Oh, boy,’ she said. ‘Is he going to love this? Me with a wheel clamp on my leg.’
Alice took the tube to Seven Sisters Road. She walked much the same route that her daughter Christina had walked when she had first gone home with Dulcie. She walked from the main road, where plastic bags danced in the front gardens and tethered dogs in studded collars barked above the roar of traffic.
Then she made a left turn into the pleasanter, quieter streets. She passed the tall terraces interspersed with rows of small shops – hairdressers mostly, offering Afro styles, though some, for the lank-haired of the species, still offered the five-pound perm. Newsagents’ windows offered faded plastic toys and nylon fishnet Christmas stockings full of chocolate bars. The greengrocers sold yams and okra. The second-hand furniture shops were depressingly overstocked with vinyl-seated typist’s chairs and buttoned velour headboards.
When the drainpipes got less rusty and the stone front steps less cracked, Alice came upon a second row of shops, among which was the delicatessen run by Zak and Judith’s parents. After making her inquiries, she made her way through to the back. The passage was hung with pungent cheeses and strings of garlic and dark red smoked sausage.
Zak Levine was standing at a workboard wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and the largest apron she had ever seen. It descended almost to his feet. The apron strings were crossed at the back and tied at the front over his belly. Zak was doing something purposeful with a sharp pointed knife and a plastic basin full of herrings.
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