by Linda Grant
Dearest Marianne,
I am so sorry that it has taken so long for me to get to a computer so I can email you. I wanted you to know that I am out of the hospital at long last and back at home and Lucy is looking after me splendidly, with the help of a nurse who comes in every day. I’m in a chair now and the hope is that they’ll be able to fit me with prosthetic legs quite soon. They have even brought around catalogues to show me the different options available, it’s like choosing a new car!
I have set up this special email account so we can go on talking, but only if you wish. I do understand how bereft and isolated you must have felt, how shut out, but I am sure you can understand that there was no other option. Now is not the moment to tell Lucy that I have for so long lived another life, with you. So you must be strong, and you must do what I have always asked—find someone, get married, have children. You don’t know what you are missing, and indeed until the attack I didn’t really understand that family is everything, it is everything.
I am quite hopeful for the future. I know I will live with pain, but pain can be managed, and fortunately I know what to ask for, and what doses. I will return to work in a few months, though not, of course, to what I did abroad. I don’t even think I want to. Lying in the tunnel, waiting for someone to come, if someone was going to come, I realized that that other world had reached out its long arm and come to me. I once said to you that you can’t stop genocide with a stethoscope. I no longer know why I tried. In the past few years, the only reason I went on going abroad, into the war zones, was you, to be with you. I loved you.
And I was punished for it.
I’m sorry, darling, I’m a Catholic and I cannot escape sin and guilt and punishment and forgiveness and redemption. Right now I’m lying here learning to forgive those misguided young boys who got on those trains. Why should I hate them? What is the point? No, I pray for God’s love to enter the hearts of all those who hate.
Write to me sometime, if you like, but please, don’t be under any illusions that what we had before will be again, as long as you understand that.
With tenderness,
Janek
Bell Code
Max was waiting for his baby to be born. He already knew they were going to have a son and that the son would not be deaf like his mother, he would grow up oppressed by noise, by traffic, drills, sirens, alarms, shouting. The cacophony of music would assault his ears with its electric guitar chords and the screeching voices of opera and the horrible bang bang of drums. But he would be able to hear applause.
Cheryl had drawn up a spreadsheet of the coming expenses and how they were to be met; it made sense for her to return to work as soon as she had had the baby. Max would get up in the night when he heard his son crying while she slept on beside him, unable to hear their child.
He knew what his father thought about this arrangement. He did not know how to deal with Cheryl, was too clumsy to learn to sign and so much of his reality was about sitting at the kitchen table holding forth about an article he had read on the internet, usually, these days, about Muslims.
Max’s grandfather was still staying with Stephen and Andrea, it had been months. He seemed not to be in a hurry to go home and the bruises on his face were taking time to subside, not surprising in such an old guy. Grace was still there and she too showed no sign of leaving. To Max, who, he acknowledged himself, did not have a well-developed sense of humor, this ménage was incomprehensible. Cheryl saw the funny side of it, the mismatched household, Si sitting down to watch a TV soap and inviting Grace to join him, the pair of them in separate armchairs, the old man near the set with the volume turned up, crouched as if on all fours and his face illuminated by its high-definition glow; Grace bolt upright, incredulous. “So who do you think is the father of this kid?” Si would say, for all soaps seemed to depend on disputed parenthood. And Grace would reply, “The one with the face like a brick, of course.” “You think so? If you ask me it’s the good-looking one.”
It was autumn. Cheryl grew and grew. She could no longer dance and took refuge in a new hobby, embroidery; he understood that he had married a self-improver, while he had a single fixation, learning new magic tricks. He wished his bones could be replaced by an as-yet-uninvented substance which had rubber in it, so he could bend his limbs in every direction.
Cheryl told him Marianne was approaching a crisis. Marianne had learned to sign and could communicate adequately but without nuance or expression. Throughout these rudimentary conversations, Cheryl watched her sister-in-law’s face. There was something terrible in there, she believed, a dark implosion was imminent. She sent Max to her flat to take her by surprise and find out what she was doing when she did not have on the mask of preparation.
Max rang the bell. There was no reply, she might be out and he had had a wasted journey across London but he rang again. He thought he should initiate a bell code with her, so she would always know it was him. After some time, her voice emerged into the street from the intercom.
The flat felt like a grave. Her laptop was on the table, she seemed to have been writing an email.
She was very thin. Years ago she had started to eat only half of what was on her plate and she had lost her excess weight, but now she seemed to eat just a few mouthfuls. He had no idea when she had last been on a job, and when he asked her, she said she couldn’t work, was living off her savings.
He knew she had a couple of pals she went around with, young women from college who like her had not found permanent relationships. Dawn and Isobel. Together they maintained a social life, but she hadn’t spoken of them for some time. It seemed strange to him that she had grown up into his introversion while he had widened his social circle through his wife and all the magicians he knew on the circuit. She had made a fateful choice there on the road, when she was ambushed and her car stolen, and Janek had turned up in the UN vehicle and she had followed him like a dog because she wanted to get into Srebrenica.
He could see what she was doing, she was going the same way as their father, living life on the internet, and the first thing to do was to get her out of the house, turn the damned thing off. He had no use for computers, Cheryl dealt with all of that. Max liked solid objects to manipulate, not screens. And his sister was being drawn into the beige box, to email land.
He persuaded her to go for a walk. It was late September and the trees were heavy with wet leaves from the morning’s shower, but the sun was still warm on the concrete, an Indian summer, and so many women and young girls, he noticed, dressed like Gypsies in long cotton skirts. It must be the fashion. But Marianne was in her jeans, and only her T-shirt strained around her heavy chest. She’s becoming very gaunt, he thought, and it doesn’t suit her. There were spots around her chin, she should have grown out of that by now.
They set off down the street to the park, which was full of young mothers with their children in pushchairs or running along the paths or buying ice creams. He reminded her of their childhood holidays in Cornwall, on the beach watching the china clay ships come in and out. She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “we had a lovely time.”
They walked on, remembering how it was on the sand, their parents watchfully looking after them, the sun fading below a cloud haze, sand in their pants and crabs scuttling in the rock pools and their hands held by grown-up hands as they paddled in the little waves. Then the long stroll back up the hill to their rented cottage, being dried with a towel, and their mother saying, “This was my childhood too,” and their father saying, “I grew up near the ocean, but it was nothing like this, this is just a channel not a real sea. The sea is huge, kids, you wait, you’ll find out one day.”
Max was filled with nostalgia for his childhood, he had been happy before they had discovered his deafness and taken him to the hospital to fix it. Long ago, the world had been quiet and peaceful and he would stand in the surf watching a silent sea. He was going to have a son and the son would hear the loud waves, but they would go there, they would sit on the sa
me sand and it would be his arm around his child’s shoulders, kissing his wet warm skin.
Marianne is never going to have a child of her own, he thought. She will leave it too late. It will take her years to meet someone else. It’s all up to me, to get the next generation up and running.
“Marianne,” he said, “unhappiness can’t last forever. In a year’s time everything will seem different, I’m sure it will.” He said this to comfort her. Always she had been in charge, she was his big sister and he was the little shrimp whom she looked out for, what could he do for her, so bereft and alone?
She turned to look at him. They were sitting on a bench in a place by a small ornamental lake with ducks and rushes.
“Why do you say that? I’m not unhappy.”
“Of course you are.”
“No, I still have Janek.”
“How?”
“We write to each other, we exchange emails. He’s doing terribly well, his rehabilitation is coming along quite quickly and I’m convinced that when he gets new legs he’ll be able to go back to his old life.”
“Has he said that?”
“No, but he misses me, that he has said. So he’ll do everything he can to arrange things so we can see each other again. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“Anything is possible, you’re a magician, you of all people should know that.”
“I don’t perform magic, it’s just illusion.”
“Janek and I aren’t an illusion.”
“How often do you email each other?”
“I write to him every day, sometimes more often.”
“And he replies every day?”
“No, he keeps me waiting. Oh, it’s hard, the bloody bloody waiting.”
He knew he had to say something. Cheryl would not forgive him if he did not. “Come and stay with us for a while, when the baby’s born Cheryl will need help, she won’t hear him crying.”
“I can’t do that. Janek needs me.”
“You can still email him from our place. Please, Marianne.”
“You’re becoming just like Mum, you always want to take care of people.”
“Will you think about it?”
“Maybe.”
They got up and walked slowly back to the flat. Max thought it would be good for his sister to learn to change a baby’s nappy and listen out for its cries in the night. It might be an education, it might plug her back into the world.
Google Search
Stephen had become obsessed with Google. He was busy all day tracing people from his past. You could reach a hand back all the way to the sixties, to Oxford, and far beyond even that, to his high school in Los Angeles and the kids he had grown up with in his neighborhood. The members of the anarchist commune, John Baines, who was the best man at his wedding, the reporters he had worked with on New Scientist back in the seventies… there were many tricks you could use to track them down and, of course, the women were harder to find than the men if they changed their names when they got married, but he had a high success rate because he had time on his hands and he was dogged.
You meet someone in 1970 and they are just starting out on their lives, they have crazy thoughts about what they want to be, you sit up all night talking to someone who says they want to be a shaman, or move back to the land and talk to trees, or be the drummer in a rock band; you are looking into a future that hasn’t happened and making plans, spinning fantasies which might come true. And here they were now, over sixty, and their entire careers, which hadn’t even begun when you had those stoned conversations, had already ended. There were no shamans, no rock stars, the people he had known at Oxford in London in the early seventies had become academics, lawyers, researchers, teachers, salesmen, computer programmers, or they were found living on far-flung islands, like the dealer from his old college (“His flashing eyes, his floating hair!”), who had turned up as something called a rear commodore, running yacht races in the Caribbean.
And others had vanished without a trace, not even the determination of Google could find them, they had left not a single mark. Stephen supposed they had died before the internet, perhaps they could be located in one of the squares of an AIDS quilt.
He did not know why he needed to know. He did not understand his own obsession with finding out the end of the story. Perhaps it was merely curiosity, the same inquisitiveness that had led him to watch his mother with what he thought of as her chocolate cake chemistry experiments, and his own first chemistry set. It was something to do, he thought, with probing for the truth, for answers to the chaos of life and all its messy relationships. But he knew that a life was not mathematics, there was no line of numbers to add up and arrive at a correct figure. He wasn’t like his wife, who tried to rescue the drowning, he felt no urge to help anyone. He was just trying to understand how it had all worked out, for him and for his generation, the ones who were born young and were going to stay young forever because that was their privilege. Surely their parents had fought the war for them to do just that? And they had been betrayed, because despite their squawking insistence, they weren’t young anymore.
They had bald heads, dyed hair, crepey eyelids, lined foreheads, stiff knees and those wars going on inside their blood between the reds and whites, all the cancers that would eventually kill them. This is not right! This is not just! Stephen thought. We are kids!
There was a photograph of a guy sitting on the grass outside Stephen’s own college room. His hair was blond and poker straight, his name was Nick Woodford. This fact was lodged inside his brain when he had forgotten so much. And looking at the picture he could see that Nick was a deeply unhappy man. Or boy, for he was just a kid, they all looked like children and had been only a few years away from childhood. What was it in Nick Woodford’s face that seemed, as soon as he looked at it, to summon up such dread and despair? Maybe he’d just had a difficult tutorial, or had had bad news. Or was there something fundamentally wrong with Nick? He showed the picture to Andrea, who did not remember him at all, and said she had no idea. So he googled him. And produced nothing. He might have been killed in a car crash a year or two later, he might have had a sex change and be living under the name of Nicola, he might have died of lung cancer in his early fifties, or he might be one of those people who simply have no life on the internet and therefore do not, Stephen thought, really exist. “So he stayed young, lucky bastard. The rest of us just have to stumble along as best we can.”
In the rest of the house, which was supposed to have emptied out, his children had been replaced by an aging boy and girl, both dependent on him, his father and Grace. Andrea said that Grace was not inactive, she was processing the time they had spent together in therapy, but all Stephen ever caught her doing was sitting with her hands held tightly under the seat of her chair, staring out of the window. That’s the processing, Andrea said, but to Stephen it looked like some kind of experiment with her own body. He didn’t know what that was about and neither did Andrea. Nor were there any hats. That idea had died the usual death. She didn’t eat much or cost much to keep, she made no demands on his time, but he still couldn’t stand having her there. She gave him the creeps.
His father too seemed to have settled in for the duration. He would get up every morning and set out slowly along the pavement for Upper Street, where he climbed onto the top deck of a red bus and gave himself panoramic tours of London. This, he said, was his education and he could do the whole thing sitting down. He did not want his son to accompany him. “You’ve seen it all already,” Si said, “let me be a tourist.” They all met up for dinner in the evening and he told him where he had been, as far west as Kew Gardens one day, where there were palms and other familiar and pleasant sights that reminded him of home in California, so he had everything he needed right here and why should he go back, there was nothing to go back to, just the widow and her videotapes, and his far-flung daughters and grandchildren, and flights to Boston and Phoenix once a y
ear. It was obvious that Andrea had said nothing yet to Stephen about the secret he had told her. He was still waiting. He had this unfinished business. Meanwhile, he was enjoying an extended vacation.
In December Stephen became a grandfather. Which is more surprising—turning sixty, losing your hair to the attrition of old age, having no more hope of ever fitting into your maroon and white SS United States cabin boy jacket, never being part of a Nobel team—or seeing your own son, whose life you have never quite felt to be properly on track, holding his son in his arms? And knowing that it is his job to protect the child whose head is cradled in his hand, not yours. That your advice is unwanted and the mother of the baby does not hear when you cry, Watch out! Because she is catching her sleeve on a pan that someone has left on the table and if she takes it down, she might stumble, and if she stumbles, the baby might fall.
But the greatest surprise of all is what has happened to Marianne, who has moved in with Max and his young family and is effectively working for them for nothing as a nanny. Marianne gets up in the night when the baby cries, she’s sharing little Daniel’s room. She feeds him Cheryl’s milk from a bottle when Cheryl is out at work, she changes his nappies and takes him for short walks around the block, well wrapped up in layers of blankets against the winter cold. Her sign language is improving and she and Cheryl close the bedroom door and have long conversations which, of course, Max cannot overhear. All he knows is that his sister is confiding all her secrets to his wife, and this is a vast relief because Cheryl is the most sensible person he has ever met, with her hard clear head for figures and her understanding of the obstacles of everyday life.
Stephen was even more amazed at the sight of Marianne holding his grandchild. He had no idea why she had abandoned her career to become an unpaid nanny. He had been proud of her, with all her travels into war zones, terrified but boasting. Andrea said, “I don’t know what’s going on but Max says we shouldn’t worry, he says everything is under control and it’s only temporary, she’ll be back in the swing of things soon.”