by Linda Grant
For she had a husband who would come home from work and tell her to stop what she was doing, turn off the cooker, lay down her book because he had just been commissioned to make the most fabulous program, a whole history of the discovery of DNA, and he would get to interview Watson and Crick. He would be buoyed up for days with excitement.
But as for his candy bars, Stephen said that all he had was a sweet tooth and there were more important things for her to worry about, like what exactly was wrong with their daughter, who kept them up late into the night, in their shared bed, talking and arguing, each blaming the other for her distressing condition, which to Andrea was absurd since it was obvious that Stephen himself was the problem. Until, exhausted, they turned out the light and Stephen lay in the darkness, his eyes wide open, wondering if it was true and this was what he had done to her, to Marianne.
Portrait/Landscape
For many years Marianne had waited for Grace to come and rescue her. Grace had white-blond hair and her mouth was the color of a post box or a telephone box. When she opened it, her eyebrows moved up and down. People’s faces were always in close-up. Marianne could see, by a power of magnification, their pimples, open pores, the hairs in their nostrils. Many people had a monstrous appearance because of this heightened perception of hers. Grace’s skin was porcelain, and you had to concentrate hard to see her eyelashes when she had just got out of bed and hadn’t put the black on them.
She wore a green embroidered kimono with nothing under it and Marianne came across her in the hall, sitting on an old carved wooden chest, her legs apart, smoking a cigarette, and a patch of blond hair between her thighs, growing down the sides of them.
Her reddened stubs were all over the house. She left them in saucers, in the earth of plants, extinguished in the dregs of coffee cups or abandoned, upended, with a column of tottering gray ash.
In the mornings she did bending exercises in her bra and pants, old gray garments compared with Andrea’s lace underwear. She reached up to scratch her head and a dead insect fell from her hair. Marianne watched in horror and anxiety. Grace picked it up between her fingers and examined it.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said to Marianne. “What do you think?”
“It’s not a spider, it’s not a fly.”
“Something that belongs in a warm climate. That’s why it was attracted to me. It was building a nest as close as it could get to an island.”
“What are you talking about?”
But Grace closed her lips. She flicked the insect away with a finger, it skittered across the room. Marianne followed it with her eyes. Later she would find a matchbox and put the insect into it, it would be her souvenir of the fabulous Grace who came and went without warning.
But she forgot, and the insect was removed by the vacuum cleaner, into a dusty hot world.
She comes and goes, Marianne thought. And one day she will take me. But the visits grew more infrequent.
“You’re my godmother,” she said, the last time she saw her. “You’re supposed to bring me a present!”
“Who told you that?”
“Everyone knows that godmothers bring presents.”
“No, I mean who said I was your godmother?”
“Mummy did.”
“How ridiculous.”
“But you were there when I was born. You named me.”
“Yes, that’s true, I was.”
“What was I like?”
“When?”
“When I’d just been born, of course.”
“Small, slimy and red.”
“Oh! So you didn’t like me.”
“All babies are small, slimy and red. I suppose your brother was too.”
“Let’s not talk about him. He’s got his own godmother, no, not a godmother, a godfather, Uncle Ivan. Do you know Uncle Ivan?”
“Of course. I’ve known him longer than I’ve known your father.”
“He brings Max fantastic presents.”
“He’s rich, that’s why.”
“Well that’s just not fair, that he has a rich godfather and I have a poor godmother. I should have a present.”
“What do you want? What’s missing from your life?”
“Lots of things.”
“Well write a list and I’ll think about it.”
“All right.”
“Or I’ll take you to an island where the sun always shines and there’s singing, and people are happy, apart from the secret police.”
“I don’t know what secret police are.”
“You wait.”
“I’d like to go to the island. Can we go soon?”
“Okay. In a year or two.”
“That’s too long.”
“I’ll get you something in the meantime, where’s that list?”
“I would like… a camera.”
“Why?”
“Then I could make everything stop. You look at someone and they’re doing something interesting and you want to stop it so you can look at it, but they just go on moving.”
“I’ll buy you a camera.”
But Grace forgot all about the promise and Ivan bought it for her instead, with a card on which was written, Love from Godmother Grace. For Stephen, overhearing the conversation through the partly open door of the bathroom, thought that Marianne, at eight, was too young to have it broken to her with such cruelty that promises were just words.
Because of the camera, Marianne continued to believe that Grace would come for her one day and take her to the island, where everyone was happy and people burst out singing for absolutely no reason, which was not something you could say about London, a place where no one even whistled anymore.
Marianne took photographs of her mother and father, her brother, Uncle Ivan and Uncle Ivan’s new wife, Simone, who had large pink lips, and smelt strongly of something which made Marianne’s eyes water. “The closest we’ll ever get again to opium,” Ivan said.
When the pictures came back as rectangular shiny prints, she laid them out on the bed and examined them carefully. There were expressions in people’s faces she did not understand, particularly her father’s. She felt that his eyes and his mouth were pulling in two different directions, they belonged in different pictures, of separate people. Her mother did not look the same in any photograph, but that was perhaps to do with the fact that she was always changing her hair and her cheeks expanded and contracted. Max stayed the same. Ivan and Simone arranged themselves in poses she had to ignore.
She had seen cameras which had lenses that stuck out at the front and when you looked through them, everything was really near. One day perhaps Grace would buy her one.
But Grace did not come back. When she asked her mother where she was, Andrea said, “Southeast Asia, I think. Vietnam and Laos. Let’s go and look at it on the globe, shall we?”
Marianne’s finger spun the sphere, round and round it went. Stephen showed her about why there was night and why there was day, and using her own body, why the moon waxed and waned.
When she was grown up, aged thirteen and taking the bus every day to school in Highgate in her shit-brown uniform, she would take pictures of people, and later, she would walk part of the way home so she could photograph interesting events far from her own neighborhood. She photographed a woman smacking a little boy in a sweet shop because he was naughty, and an old lady with a big bump on her back, and two young men walking along licking ice-cream cones, which made her laugh, and a man with a bunch of flowers, and a woman sitting on the pavement screaming, and a policeman whose head was buried under a heavy hat burnished with a silver badge. She never took any photos that did not have people in them.
One day she saw Ralph sitting on a bench in Highbury Fields. He always dresses very neatly, she thought, he always has a tie and a tweed jacket and lace-up shoes. Daddy almost never wears a tie and his lace-up shoes aren’t real shoes. They are white and you can’t polish them with a brush and a cloth.
He doesn’t see me.
I’m invisible. She raised her camera to her eye. Ralph could be portrait or landscape, words she did not yet know, but she had to decide. A blackbird with its yellow eye hopped about his feet. The autumn leaves were blowing around in a light breeze. It had snowed here once, she had seen it, she had been taken out to make a snowman.
Ralph’s hands lay in his lap. The blackbird pecked at something between his shoes. Marianne decided on her picture and took it. When it was developed she could see that he was smiling, a little bit. He’s so peaceful, she thought. That’s what death must be, it comes and visits you on a bench and leaves you with a smile and a blackbird that isn’t afraid of you anymore.
Ralph’s rooms became Stephen’s study. The house, as Andrea had hoped, was all theirs.
Marianne’s room was the place where she spent hours looking at her pictures, eating food she had bought and hidden in her pockets, on the way home from school.
Anniversary Lunch
Grace is coming! Finally, after years of being a ghost, Grace is returning. Where from? No one knows. Postmarks indicate only that she has passed through a place. It was Indochina, but lately there have been a number of letters from Paris.
These letters are unvaried in their content, amusing pen-portraits of the people she has met, just a paragraph long, sometimes a drawing of a face in the margin of the aerogram. Several lines on her depression and anger, culminating in her desire to leave. Wherever she is, she doesn’t like it, until she’s long gone, and then she looks back with nostalgia: I was so happy in Saigon. But when confronted with the evidence of her unhappiness, she sneers, “What, are you an accountant of happiness now?”
The letters Andrea wrote back to her received a reply only occasionally, because Grace had usually moved on before she got them. Her capacity to survive on very little money since her father stopped making intermittent deposits to her bank account was one of her greatest accomplishments, Andrea thought. She lived like a saint, like Mother Teresa. Her diet consisted of the simplest foods and she made all her own clothes, usually remodeling the discarded garments of others. She traveled by the cheapest means and found jobs when she reached her destination. She took English-language students, she worked occasionally in restaurants, she once directed the decoration of a house in Nice; momentously, she had a job as a set decorator on a film. Andrea had not seen it. She did not know if it had ever been released. The plot, explained to her, was unintelligible.
“My godmother is coming to see me,” Marianne boasted at school. She had grown a great deal both in height and weight since puberty, heavy around the shoulders with a large bust and her black hair scraped back into an unbecoming topknot. Ivan had bought her a basic Pentax and Andrea found a cupboard in the house where she could establish a simple darkroom. A large photo of Ralph, finally at rest on the bench at Highbury Fields (in perfect focus, Marianne noticed with pleasure), hung framed in the entrance hall. The blackbird was caught too, pecking between his shoes. Stephen and Andrea thought it was gruesome but how did anyone know he was dead? Marianne insisted. He was clearly just sleeping the long sleep.
Twenty years ago today, Stephen and Andrea had walked up Little Clarendon Street, Andrea with a flower in her hand, to the register office, with Ivan and John Baines. How many marriages conducted that day still stuck? It would be interesting to find out, Andrea thought. Theirs had been the least likely to survive, yet it had.
She stood in the florist’s surrounded by irises, roses, snapdragons, lilies, baby’s breath, pinks. The flowers seemed to be crying, Choose me. She wanted a centerpiece, she needed strong heads that would not wilt. They were arranged along the wall in massed abundance, as if you could step through the vases into a garden. She looked up to see a slim, confident woman in her early forties surrounded by blossoms.
What happened to me? she asked herself. Where did this self-assurance come from?
She considered the possibilities. The career, the success (not great, she was not a household name, but she had a full client list). Marriage, certainly: the continuity of it, the accomplishment of surviving for two decades in the company of another person who often seemed like a complete stranger when she saw him typing at his computer, and then as familiar as a sock when he raised his bar of chocolate to his lips. The children: they change you. They redraw all the horizons.
Many of her clients were single women in their forties who had never managed, as one had said, “to close the deal.” She tried to tell them that marriage was not one long blissed-out romantic movie, but she knew that she preferred marriage, however imperfect, to their microwave meals for one. She felt like a hypocrite when she suggested that they mourn for their loss of relationships, accept their single fate and move on. She herself could never live with it.
Thirteen people, not including the children who would join them for dessert, were to sit down for Saturday lunch at the oak dining table to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. Even Grace was coming. She had consented to return to hateful London.
Marianne came home from school.
“Has Grace arrived yet?”
“You would know if Grace was here,” said her father, “because there would be a contemptuous expression in the room.”
She arrived late the next morning, only an hour before the first guests, walked silently up the stairs as Andrea showed her the masterpiece, a whole house restored and redecorated.
“If I was living here I’d knock down all the walls and make huge rooms separated by Japanese screens,” Grace said, looking around. “The light would be amazing. These Georgian houses are really poky.”
“That wouldn’t have worked for children’s bedtimes and my patients.”
“Children will sleep when they want to sleep.”
“Like you’d know,” said Stephen.
The sun drizzled through the French windows. Shelves of books reached to the ceiling. Arrayed in lines, the knives, forks and spoons were all shining in the summer noon, radiating out from the empty waiting plates like the place settings on the first-class decks of a transatlantic liner. White, folded linen napkins lay by each one. I have achieved a form of first-class living, Stephen thought. He had got used to his life. It had settled on him lightly, like a snowfall in the night.
Above them, the floors reached up and up to Max’s room, where he was noiselessly practicing his magic act for a performance he had been persuaded to give after lunch.
Marianne, at seventeen, had no show-off party piece, but she did not mind her fourteen-year-old brother being the star. When she returned home from the library at dessert time (she had observed three kinds of cake waiting in the kitchen), she would make adult conversation with Ivan and his wife, Simone, the soap star, who played what Ivan called a gangster’s moll, an idea that made him laugh so much he wiped the tears from his eyes when she was onscreen. And yet she was in the newspapers all the time, often on the front page.
People are so incredibly stupid, Marianne thought. Looking at the passengers on the bus, anyone was more interesting than Simone, who kept her hair held back from her smooth wide forehead in a black velvet Alice band. Your eyes slid all over Simone’s face, unable to get any purchase on it. The man across the aisle had such a hooked nose, it stood out like a gargoyle from above his little mouth. Marianne could stare at him all day. But Simone was kind and had a throaty laugh (identifiable by twenty million people) and did not take herself or her career seriously. “It’s just a ride,” she said, “and rides never last very long, do they, darling?”
What am I doing here? thought Grace, sitting in front of her plate of prosciutto and melon. Who are these people? What do they have to be so smug about? Their opinions were secondhand and second-rate. No, third-rate. No one had had an interesting thought in their lives. Their mouths opened and closed like fish and only bubbles came out.
Everyone ate, they dabbed their mouths with white napkins, they spilt wine on the tablecloth, they knocked over salt and dropped meringue on the floor. The poached salmon was gone. The sal
ads, the breads had all been finished. The centerpiece of peach-colored rosebuds was wilting. The serving dishes contained the broken remains of what was left, a smear of mayonnaise marked the tablecloth, bread crumbs had fallen from the bread board and the plates had been pushed away. A few dropped petals lay among the green beans with almonds.
“Look at this,” said Andrea, the table extending away from her and toward her husband seated at the other end. “If I picked this table up exactly as it is and took it to a gallery and said it’s an installation called Has Everybody Had Enough, would anyone be taken in? Is it art?”
“If a dealer said it was art, then it would be art,” said Ivan.
“So art has no inherent properties of its own?” asked Stephen. “That’s what I always thought.”
“He’s just being cynical,” said Amy, second wife of Nick, meeting the bumptious Ivan for only the third time and unsure whether she liked him or not. “Art has been contaminated by advertising, everything has. When Charles Saatchi entered the art market, art was finished. He has the soul of a salesman, a man who makes us want things we don’t need. I’m sorry if that sounds like a cliché but it’s true.”
“Going on holiday this year?” Ivan asked, winking at Stephen.
“Yes, next month.”
“And where are you going?”
“A gîte near Bordeaux, it’s actually an old mill, not far from the village, and the mill wheel is still working in the stream. It’s amazing to get out of London to a simpler life, even if it’s only for ten days.”