by Linda Grant
Once, they had talked about an alternative society. Now he understood there were only alternative realities. He thought about his parents, how little he really knew about them. They both came with a big story, of how they arrived in America, the two immigrants, who started from scratch and built new lives as Americans. It was possible, this narrative told him, for anyone to be reborn, to commence a new identity. It said, Believe in the future, and he always had. That was their precious gift to him, his birthright.
He had been to Poland, seen the small town on the plain, but he had never thought to go to Cuba, partly because his mother had sworn she would not return until the man with beard was gone and her island was restored to what she thought of as the sweetness of the old days. But she was barely in her teens when she left, what would she have remembered?
I have spent my whole life trying to surge forward, he thought. I’ve tried to fulfill the destiny they gave me, to be a new son of America and always failing because I was trapped in Europe.
Perhaps Andrea and Grace were both right, that America and the whole idea of rebirth was an illusion. His past in the Los Angeles suburbs seemed now no less mythical to him than his father’s stories of his determined orphan journey across the continent. There were no more soda fountains, no one walked to school, no one wore a poodle skirt like his sisters or went to Saturday movies.
But what he really could not get over was the sudden realization that for all the arrogance of his own generation, born to be young and stay young forever, their parents were simply far more interesting people than their children would ever be. Even Andrea’s father, whom he had never met, was supposed to have had a war record, to have been a brave man, broken, Andrea guessed, by post-traumatic stress disorder.
And as for him, what had he ever done since he sailed the oceans on the SS United States? Not much. Worked in a doughnut-shaped building accumulating a pension and amassing equity in a house in a now-fashionable part of town (though its desirability was waning; everyone, he was told, was moving on to Notting Hill). A couple of his documentaries had been up for industry awards, but he had attended the dinner in black tie and waited for his name to be called out, prepared to bound to his feet and run to the stage with his speech in his jacket pocket, but it was always someone else’s name. His early documentaries had been erased, the tape was needed for something else, the rest were never likely to be retransmitted, except maybe in far-flung parts of the world on cable stations, where you still found decades-old episodes of I Love Lucy and Friends broadcast in a never-ending loop.
Finally he found Grace’s file, and the link to the sound file on the laptop. Was he supposed to read and listen to them? There had been no instructions to hand them over to her in a sealed envelope.
Down in the garden the bonfire was waiting. He had only to put a match to it and his wife’s career would burn.
He sat down and began to read. A few pages in, he went into the house and rang Ivan.
Blond curls long gone, like disappearing soap bubbles, Ivan the butterball in his Paul Smith shirts and Crockett & Jones shoes, was rich, contented, still happily married against all predictions that he would be on his second or third trophy bride by now, childless, residing in a mansion on the other side of Upper Street whose vast rooms, with their show-off modern furniture imported from Italy, intimidated his old friends. But still the bumptious character of the days when they had sat in the Jericho garden smoking grass.
Grace spoke of him as if he were a caricature of himself, but to Stephen, Ivan was always the same person. He sat unselfconsciously patting and kneading his stomach as he talked, as if he were proud of his corpulence. Ivan didn’t go to the gym, didn’t jog, didn’t eat lean protein, didn’t worry about aches and pains, showed Stephen the first articles about Viagra and said, “Look what God has given us now!”
“Ivan,” Andrea said, “has the gift of happiness.”
“Anyone rich can be happy if they feel like it,” Stephen said. “I’d like to see Ivan struggle with a mortgage he can’t afford.” But Ivan had investments, a guy in New York looked after them. The man was a genius, he said, his shares were always rising, though it was hard to get into his fund, you needed a personal recommendation.
“I don’t understand how shares can always rise,” said Stephen.
“I don’t either, they just do.”
Stephen had no head for finance. He wished he had a guy in New York.
The two men sat in the conservatory looking at the unlit bonfire, winter birds balanced on the fence. It was a cold clear bright day in March. Ivan had come from Belsize Park, where he had been having lunch with his father. The old man, in his nineties, was still in the same house Ivan had been brought up in, the house where once there had been an Arabian Nights party and Stephen had dressed up in a costume made by Andrea. He was still toddling off slowly down the road to Swiss Cottage and coming back again with a newspaper, solely for the exercise. He was working on his book, Trials of the Century, the century being the seventeenth, and the decade the forties, one of extreme anarchy and anti-establishment views suppressed by the coming bourgeois administration. “My father loves the Levellers and the Diggers, all that crew,” Ivan said. Stephen had never heard of them. He would get a large obituary in the Guardian if he ever died, which Ivan thought improbable.
“My son is a snake-oil salesman,” he said of Ivan and smiled with a row of hideous English teeth, a smile nonetheless of real affection for his boy, one of a small brood of brothers who had fanned out across London and the Home Counties, larger-than-life characters, blond men who had the class confidence Stephen had been studying for forty years.
Their fathers were very different, but Stephen said that one of the things they had in common was that they were good boys who loved their parents. They had not been abused or neglected, they had been taught how to be decent men.
Grace’s notes were on the table in the conservatory.
“Poor Grace,” said Ivan. “She was so beautiful. What’s to become of her?”
“You don’t have a theory? You usually have some bullshit explanation. What do your guys have to say about all this?”
“What guys?”
“Marcuse, Reich, were they the names?”
“Wow, I haven’t thought about them for years.”
“They were bullshit, though, weren’t they?”
“Not necessarily. I told you, we were throwing out a great deal of stuff, we were thinking a lot of new thoughts and it was just a matter of separating the gold from the dross.”
“But most of it was dross. What did we accomplish?”
“I don’t know.”
“It seems to me now that our parents led far more significant lives than we did, that generation was more interesting. Wasn’t your father in the war?”
“Yes. Intelligence. So was my mother for that matter. Whatever she did was so hush-hush she never breathed a word of it. But then my mother was a masterpiece of restraint. I suppose she had to be, living all that time with him.”
“And what have we done that was so important?”
“Look, Stephen, you have to accept that we’re all condemned to live in our own times, our own little period of history. We’ve been terribly lucky, you wonder if the luck is bound to run out, but we’ve had it made. I don’t know what we could have done to transform the world, when it had already been transformed for us. The people who won the war and made the peace did that. It’s a hard fact to swallow, for us I mean, our generation.”
“No, that’s not right. They just cleared away the junk and we were supposed to build on top of it. What about orgone? What about turning the whole world on? The ideas were nonsense from the beginning, we screwed it up because we had no idea what we were doing. We never thought it through.”
Ivan, he thought, was the kind of guy who would have made it no matter what age he lived in, he had been born lucky. As for himself, he had given everything he had to the idea of progress, to science. He admit
ted everyone was healthier and probably wealthier, but still, in his own life the rocket had burnt out, fallen to earth.
Something was wrong with the economy, he wasn’t sure what. Max reported getting fewer corporate gigs. Only Marianne’s dog pictures seemed immune to this mysterious downturn, or whatever it was. Maybe things would pick up by the summer, he hoped so.
Ivan was waiting for the moment to tell Stephen his news, he had been holding on since before Andrea’s death, he did not want him to think he was being abandoned by his oldest friend, left alone in the too-large house that Ivan had observed Stephen seemed to be in the process of ransacking. He had seen the chain saw, he knew that Stephen was capable of taking down his whole life with it.
“Simone and I…” He looked at Stephen, whose face seemed to be growing blacker, his forehead kneaded with lines and knots, rage tightening his mouth. He’s not even close to getting over her, he thought, I don’t know if he can ever be fixed up with someone new. He’s already had the love of his life.
“Yes, what are you and Simone up to now?” said Stephen, turning. “What are your plans?”
“We’re leaving London.”
“What?”
“We’re moving to the Caribbean.”
“When did you decide this?” Numb and heavy like a log, he could roll off the chair and fall senseless onto the grass.
“We have lots of money and no kids and we want to live in a beach house and learn to sail and walk around with no shoes and drink all day. We want to go to pleasurable rack and ruin. The guy in New York has made us so much money we can do it.”
“When are you going?”
“In the spring, I hope. We’re putting the house up for sale and going out to Bequia next week to find something to buy.”
Stephen had never heard of Bequia. Ivan explained its beauty and attractions. He was definitely going to buy a yacht of some kind, for racing. This was what retirement was supposed to be, an advertising supplement existence, while Stephen remained in the strangling embrace of this numbness.
“You’ll be welcome anytime,” Ivan said. “You can come and stay as long as you like, no time limits, we’ll make sure we have a permanent guest room for your sole use. You might fall in love with the place like we did and stay there.”
“I have children,” Stephen said, “and a grandchild. I’m not going anywhere.”
For he had already thought of returning to America, at last he was free to do so, but return to what? To a continent of strangers, apart from his rarely met sisters. How would he live, totally alone?
“Plenty of time to think about it,” Ivan said. “We just wanted you to know.”
Grace came into the conservatory. It was the middle of the afternoon and she had already poured herself a drink.
“I have your file,” Stephen said. “Do you want it?”
“No. You can put it on the fire if you like. By the way, my mother has finally died.”
This was what she was like, abrupt and harsh.
“No tears, I suppose,” said Ivan.
“Of course not.”
“What’s happening to the house?”
“Which house?”
“Hers. I suppose she left it to the Royal Horticultural Society?”
“No. She left it to me.”
“There’s a surprise. So finally you’re independent. You’re not going to give the money away are you?”
You’d better not, Stephen thought, elated at the idea that he was finally getting rid of her.
“I’m going to live there for a while.”
“You, in Sevenoaks?”
“I have an idea about something I want to do with the garden.”
She was going to bring the poor and the dispossessed, the homeless and the mentally ill, the crack addicts and the glue sniffers to live there and let them make temporary gardens. She was not stupid, she realized they would burn the place down in a week, fights would start, there would be stabbings, and eventually everyone would be arrested, including her. It was a concept of wanton destruction, but someone would be outside, planting and watering, there were always a few. She had met them in Harlem, they did exist.
She was stubbornly, suicidally true to her principles. Andrea would have tried to talk her out of it and would not have succeeded. She could sell the house and buy a nasty flat somewhere, a place to rot. She would rather go out in a conflagration. The fire would extend out to lick at her mother’s rosebushes, her hedges and hollyhocks and hydrangeas. The earth must be blackened before anything real can grow from it. She had always known this, it was her reasoning. In the garden were the bones of her brothers and sisters, the products of all those miscarriages, her mother had buried them beneath the roses. Grace’s father’s ashes were there, and soon her mother’s would be too.
At peace, she took her notes from the table and placed them on the bonfire. “You can set a match to this anytime you like,” she said.
After she returned to the house Ivan said, “Oh, dear.”
“Much good all those sessions with Andrea did,” said Stephen. “She’s nuttier than ever.”
“She’s stayed true to the sixties, I suppose.”
“It’s a shame the sixties didn’t stay true to us.”
Ivan stood. “We’ve got people coming for dinner later. Why don’t you join us? Have a shower and scrub up. Put your suit on, it’ll make you feel like a different person. We’ve got a couple coming who already own a house in Bequia, they’re bringing some pictures. I think you’ll like it there, you always were a man for a palm tree.”
Stephen nodded. “I’ll think about it.”
He was a shallow person, Ivan, but a loyal friend. Shallow people, he thought, can be very good at heart. And he has had perpetual good fortune, he always will, with his man in New York and his island and that gorgeous, well-chosen wife and her subtle nips and tucks.
It was growing very cold. The bright morning had clouded over and a faint, fine drizzle was coming down over the garden. If it turned to hard rain, there was no point lighting the bonfire; still, he had no urge to return to the house. He went on sitting.
Half an hour later Grace came back out. “I found these,” she said, holding the rabbit jacket Stephen’s father had sent from America when he and Andrea had got married, and still in its box the mink hat, never worn. “You should burn them,” she said. “Some poor animal died to make these things.”
She laid them on a chair and returned inside. He tried to muster up affection for her, she had been wonderful when Andrea was dying, far better than him at washing his wife’s frail body, helping her to the bathroom. The two of them had some lifelong bond from which he had always been excluded. Watching her kissing Andrea’s face, moments into death, he thought that her name now, for a fleeting instant, suited her. She had already closed his beloved’s eyes.
The wind was biting, spring was only a month away but icy winds had blown in from the east, across the continent they flew, from Russia, Ukraine, all the cold places.
He picked up the fur jacket and draped it over his knees. He used the mink hat as a muff to warm his hands.
After a few minutes he heard the front door slam. Grace seemed to have gone out. He didn’t care where.
Max let himself in and walked through the house. He saw his father sitting in the garden. He’s got so old since Mum died, he thought. He had cringed at the idea of his father, a noisy overbearing presence, too American, too opinionated, too talkative, too much. He had once said, “My father is like everyone else’s father, only more so.” Stephen, to him, had an overdose of vivacity. Now his father’s face had taken on the early shape of old age, the dewlaps round his chin, the grizzled hair, the chicken neck. I should tell him I love him, Max thought. Someone’s going to have to from now on.
Yet his father, like all parents do to their children, seemed to him to be a mystery, a person of secrets. They keep so much from you and tell you stories, and the stories are just tales, like legends. He still was
not entirely convinced that his dear dad had once eaten petits fours in a cabin below the waterline with Bill Clinton.
He watched his father slip his arms into the rabbit fur jacket and put the mink hat on his head.
The smell of Andrea, her old patchouli scent, was suddenly impregnating Stephen’s skin. Tears poured down his face.
I don’t understand, Stephen thought. How does it come to this? We were supposed to be so special, we were going to change everything and it turns out we’re just the same, apart from that oddball Grace. He worried about his kids, they were going forward into an uncertain future, the world was warming, he had checked out all the climate change science and the ice caps were melting. Disaster was waiting. There were floods and earthquakes and tsunamis.
He suddenly felt a rushing of air and a weight on the top of his head. A bird had landed on him, it was surveying the garden from the vantage point of the mink hat. He waited for it to depart. A bird, absurd.
The rain passed, the bonfire waited for the match.
Acknowledgments
A number of people kindly answered my questions about various aspects of this novel. So my thanks go to: Judah Passow, who really did work as a college-student cabin boy on the SS United States; Carmichael Wallace, who explained about proteins, biochemistry, labs and how to get sent down from Oxford in the 1960s; Margaret Rustin from the Tavistock Centre, who very kindly met with me to discuss psychotherapy training in the 1970s; Nigel Pike, who did a bravura job of defending advertising and explaining the significance of soap powder; Melvyn Altwarg, who didn’t explain how magic tricks are done but explained the general principles of how magicians fool us; and Pam Dix from Disaster Action, who volunteered some hours to outline the aftereffects of disasters on the surviving relatives and friends. I deeply appreciate the time that H. D. Miller, native-born Californian, took to read the completed manuscript and point out such matters as the temperature of the Pacific and suburban living arrangements in 1950s Los Angeles. Once again, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper provided writer’s respite in Kent, and Conny and David Ellis fixed me up with a house in Fowey, where Andrea’s childhood gradually came into view. My agent, Derek Johns, and my publishers, Lennie Goodings at Virago in Britain and Alexis Gargagliano at Scribner in the United States, have been great supporters of this book, and I am very lucky indeed to have such a dedicated and talented team around me.