by Linda Grant
His father, long retired from the fur business, and fur itself denounced, out of fashion, had it coming.
Late at night, hunched over the internet, Stephen found a world so shocking that he berated himself for his own ignorance, that he had known nothing at all about it. He had genuinely believed there were people like him, who took a liberal view of politics, and were right; there were the fuddy-duddies who read the Daily Telegraph and still mourned the lost Empire; and there were the stupid people who took no interest in politics unless it involved their own taxes.
Apparently he had not been paying attention, because inside the beige box, where in the early days of the internet he had once guiltily chatted to girls at MIT, were a million cranks and conspiracy theorists, people driven nuts by rage and hatred.
They would say anything, anything at all, however insane, unkind or irrational.
The attack on America was an inside job, a controlled demolition (but why?). The Israelis were behind it. Muslims and Arabs were too dumb to fly a plane or think up such a convoluted plot. From nearly a quarter of a century of working at the BBC, Stephen knew in his bones that cock-up was always the more likely explanation than conspiracy. Bureaucracies were too incompetent to plan and keep secret anything on such a scale, while cock-ups were depressingly frequent, nearly always attributable to someone in the chain of command not having received, or having received but sloppily read, the interdepartmental memo. Or spilling coffee over the relevant paragraph. Or leaving it on the tube. People were just not that good at keeping secrets or executing a plan to flawless perfection, not in his experience.
And washing through the internet, common to the right, the left and the center ground, was this massive hang-up which had been gathering like a vast poisoned underground lake that sprang out of the earth to flood any rational discourse. There was absolutely no crime, no evil that did not have the Jews behind it. Everyone seemed to think the Jews had a secret, and whatever it was, it was definitely a guilty one. The Jews had something to hide.
What was it about the Jews, Stephen wondered, hunched over his screen, that seemed to drive everyone else completely crazy?
Am I a Jew? Stephen asked. He had been circumcised, but that was common in America in the 1940s. No one in his family went to church or synagogue, not the uncles in San Diego, not his father. Religious faith was a superstition, one he had thought was dying out, how wrong could he have been about that? As far as he was concerned the Middle East was a place of archaeology; his eyes had glazed over during any news from the region. The whole thing was too complex to apply his attention to, with no obvious right or wrong.
His identity was not that of either a Jew or a Cuban, but an American in exile. He had never expected his bones to lie in a damp English graveyard. He had told Andrea this often enough, and she merely nodded. It was a problem they would have to thrash out later, when retirement was eventually forced upon him. But she could go on and on, she said; she could see patients until she dropped, and what about the children? Did he want to be on the other side of the ocean to them?
Andrea had no interest in computers. She had never sent or received an email. She did not know what lay in the bowels of the internet and when he led her to the screen to show her the toxic waste that washed across it, she said, “Well, who are these people?” And, of course, he did not know.
A bully is still a bully, even if he has a bloody nose, he read.
“Well, isn’t that true?” said Andrea.
“Christ, are you turning into Grace all of a sudden?”
Much common sense was talked about America, Andrea said. It needed saying. Of course it was appalling what had happened in New York, unforgivable, inexcusable, but no one was trying to forgive or excuse. They were simply stating the obvious, that America was no innocent victim in all this. “That’s a sophisticated argument,” Stephen said, “but look at the filth that underlies it, look at what it says here on the internet.”
“Well, who are these people?” she said again.
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“Exactly.”
You worry about your kids, Andrea thought, you will worry about them for as long as you live, perhaps unnecessarily, but are you really supposed to worry about your husband, who is not ill, not unemployed, not anything that should bring him to his knees except the ridiculous hours he spends on the internet, reading the ravings of lonely people in sad squalid rooms? He seemed to be drawn to the sheer toxicity of it all, he smeared the poison into open wounds. But that was because he had too much time on his hands. She couldn’t remember when he had last been away filming, mostly he went to work and came home again, with the same briefcase full of papers, nothing added, nothing taken away. How could he not be depressed?
She could go for months totally forgetting that her husband was American. He was to her now the hairs that had started to sprout from his nose, and the particular comforting shape of his empty shoes by the bed at night, his flossing, his toenail cutting, his hypochondria, his dietary fads, the fading freckles on his back, the loose sac of skin behind his penis, the memories they shared of all the holidays they had taken together, and the way she could read his mind.
She had been incredibly lucky, she thought. He had given her everything she had wanted. It was preposterous to think that she, a girl of her generation, had only ever slept with one man, but the edifice of their marriage was built on that fact. That he was an American was a meaningless description, like saying he had black hair. Sometimes Marianne asked him for the American expression for something, and he realized he could no longer remember, he had been here too long, more than half his life. He was responsible for nothing America had done, yet America’s arrogance and hubris could not go unpunished. He had gone down to the embassy twice at election time to vote for Bill Clinton, with whom he had once shared a plate of petits fours on the ship that had brought him to England and to her, so long ago. He owed it to Bill to vote for him, he said.
Yet all the accumulated rage against America had been gathering force during his presidency, Andrea pointed out. Surely he could see that?
“This is not rage,” he said. “It’s psychosis.”
“What would you know about psychosis?”
“Nothing, but isn’t it?”
He had a point. There probably was a study to be written about political anger and the mental state of the bombers, but it was so outside her field of expertise, which dealt with everyday sadness, that she could offer no psychological explanation for this fury that was consuming everyone. What she knew came from letters from Grace, and Grace had always had penetrating insights into the state of the world. Grace had seen it coming. She hung out on the edges of the city. She had a little apartment in the Parisian banlieue where she lived with her Algerian boyfriend and he told her things that were so far beyond Stephen’s horizons of knowledge that Andrea had not dared show him the letters.
Grace endured. She went on being Grace. How did she do it? Here they were, in middle age or whatever it was called these days, and Andrea on HRT had reverted to her former plumpness, sick and tired of the bathroom scales and kitchen scales, longing to eat, to drink a glass of fattening wine and eat fattening olives without feeling she was a failure for having no willpower. While Grace was thin as a rake, her white-blond hair just white now and her face a maze of lines, sun-damaged, decorated with a defiant slash of red lipstick, the exact same shade she had always worn. The Algerian was a decade younger than her, the little sponger.
She had not forgiven Grace for what she had said to Marianne on the day of the anniversary lunch. Stephen had told her to get out of his house. Andrea had told her to apologize. Ivan had gone after Marianne when she had run into the garden, and told her, “Don’t take any notice of that old crone. One day she’ll walk into a room and you’ll be there, slim and lovely, and she’ll be sick with jealousy. You’ll have your revenge.”
Andrea said, “Grace, you need therapy. You have spent your whole life ru
nning away from one horrifying encounter, you have distorted your whole personality around this scar.”
Grace sat in the kitchen drinking tea. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
“I know you don’t. And that’s the problem. No, it’s your tragedy.”
Grace said nothing.
It isn’t going to work out, Andrea thought. She’s come to nothing. I thought she was going to be amazing, and she isn’t. There’s nothing here to be impressed with, but I can’t abandon her, who else does she have?
Andrea remembered herself at nineteen, her first day at Oxford, standing outside her college room, too frightened to open the door, looking down at her feet in blue suede sandals and her legs in American tan tights, with reinforced toes in a darker shade. Poor child, she thought. Poor kid. Lost and bewildered, and here was her daughter who at twenty-eight talked calmly of land mines and dismembered children begging on the streets. Wherever she came back from there were no pictures of landscapes, no peaceful water buffalo or paddy fields. Just a series of unhappy faces. Marianne’s photographs were the greatest challenge of Andrea’s life—nothing, not even the froggy day and her hanging rabbit compared with the evidence that her own daughter was in such close proximity to a baby’s head blown off, rolling down a hillside, or a child’s eyeball blasted into a gutter.
On the wall of Marianne’s living room in her flat in Bethnal Green, there was a single photograph, one of her own, depicting a medical team at a field hospital in Bosnia, taken in 1995, one of her earliest pictures. The doctor and nurses gather round the figure of an injured boy and the light is on their faces. The composition, Marianne explained, is exactly that of an Old Master. The medics just seemed to have arranged themselves into a classical pose and the light had shone through a dirty window onto them, illuminating the intense concentration of their work. It was an accidental shot, she insisted, it was always accidental. Life sometimes organizes itself as art, and the photographer is lucky enough to be there and press the shutter at the right moment, and then wait until she sees what appears in the developing fluids, emerging like a ghost returning to life from the hazy grays.
Except now, she said, because of the new technology, digital photography, you knew what you had at once. It was a shame. Another instant experience. Robert Capa’s pictures of the D-Day landings, the tremendous force of the water through which the men were wading, would not have been possible today: the film was damaged during the journey home, this was all that was salvageable, and almost no one at Life had thought they were even worth printing.
Andrea thought it was gruesome to have a picture of an operation on the wall of a living room, over the mantelpiece where she would have placed a gilded mirror. In fact the whole room seemed clinical to her. The camera equipment was neatly arranged on a table, and along the walls were filing cabinets of negatives which her daughter was in the process of transferring digitally to her computer. The intense order of this room struck her as containing an element of her daughter that she did not understand. Everything was technical in some way, masculine, without untidiness or any decorative detail.
Only in the bedroom did a softer touch emerge, with candles by her bed, and a glass bottle of scent on the dresser. This, Andrea conceded, was a woman’s room, and the room very definitely of a woman who has a lover, though Andrea had failed to elicit any information about him, and had assumed, correctly, that he was married and that this bedroom was the place where he came to make love to her daughter.
It did not occur to her that the middle-aged doctor in an open-necked denim shirt with rubber gloves on his hands, probing the abdomen of a boy injured by shrapnel, was that lover.
She felt a dismal failure both as a mother and as a therapist that her daughter told her nothing about her life, that her teenage bounce and gusto had been replaced by a reserve and secrecy, as if she was always tending to some inner flame. She wished Marianne would dress better, she wished she would attend to her looks. But Marianne had accepted plainness, when a more flattering wardrobe and even a slash of lipstick occasionally could have made her a beauty: a beauty with a discerning band of admirers. But perhaps the married man saw what others failed to in her dark face. Andrea assumed that he was in the same business, another photographer.
Andrea prayed for world peace, so her daughter would be reduced to taking photographs of fashion or anything whose shallowness was proof that beyond the frame lay nothing but normal human misery, not made worse by cluster bombs, shrapnel, land mines, white phosphorus, conscripted child soldiers and columns of fleeing refugees.
Her brother was a professional conjuror and going out with a deaf girl. They spoke to each other with their hands, conversations which excluded his mother and father. Their lives were enveloped in quietness, apart from the applause of the audience when he did his act. Was he happy? He said he was. He stood onstage like a little wooden marionette, puppet movements, his public presence tricked you, you could not take your eyes off his unusual face with its pointed eyebrows. He drew them on with eye pencil. “It’s all deception, Mum,” he said.
Max, she could not help observing, had grown into his life, he had filled it. Despite his weird job, not really a job at all, he was the member of the family best equipped to deal with the terrifying changes that worried all of them. He was a man of the moment, she thought, he rode the wave. He had neither hopes nor ambitions, did not wish to make the world a better place. “I just live in it,” he said. And living in it did him well. He had bought his own flat, with only a little financial help from his parents.
She had never forgiven herself for not noticing the gradual loss of his hearing. It made an affair out of the question, she would spend her whole life knowing the body of only one man. She accepted this. Max loved her, even if she didn’t deserve it. Every year on her birthday he performed a special show with an audience of just one, delighting her with tricks he had devised involving flowers, which were difficult to work with. He kept away from his father. “Too noisy,” he had once said.
I used to be so frightened of things, Andrea thought. Birds terrified me, crows in particular. But nothing she had ever feared in her life had come to pass. The bears with their sharp teeth had never found their way into her bed, her rabbit had guarded her. Back in the deep past our life together goes, and our children are the strangers.
The past is a narrative, a story. You try to tell them but they don’t believe you, you might as well relate the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. The facts disturb them, they run from the room jabbing their fingers down their throats when their mother and father reminisce about the afternoon in 1969 when they met and how quickly it all came together, in an hour, because that was how it was in those days, no dating, no hesitation.
They make it all up, you know, she once overheard Marianne tell her younger brother when they were teenagers. They have to invent something to make themselves sound interesting, but do they seem interesting to you? Dad’s a bore and Mum’s a nag.
“I’m a bore?” said Stephen. “When did that happen?”
“Better a bore than a nag.”
Marianne thought her parents’ generation were phonies. They had been given everything and squandered it, they had “eaten up the planet.”
“We weren’t phony,” Stephen said. “Our whole point was to live an authentic life, to challenge the bourgeois conventions of our parents’ generation. We wanted to make it real.”
“And did you?” said Marianne.
Evening Interior, Bloomsbury
“You asked me once why I didn’t tell my mother. She was the last person I would have exposed myself to. As you know, she had three miscarriages before me and another two afterward. She spent all her time trying to get pregnant and failing, failing, failing, and if her fifteen-year-old daughter had come to her and said, Help me, she would have made me have the baby and brought it up herself.
“You think that’s a cruel assessment? It’s quite true. She would have pretended it was hers, and th
e kid would have grown up thinking I was its sister and I’d have been even more fucked up than I am already, except that I would never have got away from home, because she would have kept me there, as an unpaid nursemaid. I don’t mean to say that my mother is a terrible person, she isn’t. But she’s a thwarted earth mother, and that’s why she spent her whole life in the garden.
“So I got the train to Victoria and I turned up at my father’s flat, round the corner from the hospital. He always said it was just a pied-à-terre for the nights when he was on call, and I imagined a little room with a camp bed and a scullery kitchen, a hotplate, you know, a sort of bedsit, but it was nothing like that. I had to wait for him on the step for a few hours before he came back. It was a miserable day, raining on and off, and I was damp and bad-tempered when he finally turned up and said, ‘What are you doing here?’
“I should have known as soon as he opened the front door that this wasn’t going to be a bedsit. It was one of those large anonymous Bloomsbury houses near Lambs Conduit Street, where the residents are rich enough to have installed a lift, and we got into it, and the doors closed. It was lined in some plastic material, pearl gray, very modern. We got to the third floor and there were two doors on either side of the hallway, and he turned to the right and I turned to the left. I have no idea why I was so certain it was the left-hand door, but I kept standing there, rooted to the spot, waiting for him to turn round and say, ‘Of course, it’s this flat,’ which was ridiculous but that’s what I thought, and you can make of that what you will. And I’m sure you will.