by Pat Rosier
“Nice to meet you Mrs …..”
“Chloe does.” She waved them on into the house, saying it was a bit of a mess and she’d be in in a minute, and went back to her watering.
“Believe her about the mess,” said Chloe as they went up the steps. They’d been talking about the pros and cons of volunteering overseas since they met after work, Joshua trying to figure a way to bring into the conversation the idea that they might go somewhere, well, together. Chloe had astonishing grey eyes, and a considered way of looking at him that made Joshua melt inside in an entirely new way. He was smitten. A word his mother might have used.
“Raymond, and don’t let them tell you otherwise,” said her father, shaking his hand. “Oh Ray-ay,” said Chloe.
The house was not as untidy as the shared spaces of Joshua’s current flat. Chloe’s room, which she showed him briefly as they did a tour, was entirely orderly; he liked that. Raymond chopped vegetables and produced a stir-fry with sauces added at random and basmati rice. Jean peeled lettuce leaves off a huge head, chopped some tomatoes in half, put it all in a bowl and got a bottle of Sainsbury’s French Dressing out of the fridge.
If he hadn’t kept noticing Jean watching him watch Chloe, Joshua would have been relaxed. Conversations started and stopped; Raymond joked about Camilla and Charles’s wedding. Jean said they deserved each other and someone should give Tony Blair a good slap. Joshua didn’t see a connection and didn’t ask. Someone called Brian and a family business were clearly contentious and Jean and Ray had a whispered exchange that left them both looking cross. Jean told a rambling story about Chloe’s sister, who had let her down in some way. Joshua lost the thread.
This was different from the dinner-time talk of his childhood. For a start there was more, because the television was turned off, and people had strong opinions about what was going on in the world and with each other. When the McInstrys talked, it was about things that worked, or didn’t, or something lost or broken, or “Who’s nicked my best scissors?”
While Chloe and Joshua cleared up after dinner he asked what the family business was. “Hand-made furniture,” she said. “There’s a factory, a small one, in Sussex. Ray wants older brother Brian who runs it to buy him out, Brian says there isn’t enough cash to do that. It’s getting acrimonious.” Then she started talking about a protest against going to war in Iraq. When the dishes were done she saw him out.
“Thanks, I enjoyed that. A lot.” He wanted to kiss her but wasn’t sure she wanted him to.
“So did I.” Her hand on his arm said no kissing.
“I want to see you again.” And again and again and again.
Her smile and the look from those grey eyes had him grinning goofily back at her.
“Okay. When?”
“Uh … tomorrow?”
“How about the weekend? You can ring me. Here, or at work, either is fine.” Work was the office of an accounting firm, he knew that, and that she wasn’t an accountant and she liked working with figures rather than clients. A quick pressure on his arm, and she was waving her fingers at him as she closed the door. Which direction had he come from the tube station? Which way to the rest of his life? With Chloe.
Their courtship was orderly. That was how Chloe liked things, he came to see. Although he hadn’t previously recognised it, Joshua liked order, too; he kept his room neat no matter how messy the flat he was living in and liked, at work, finding a book or a piece of information and knowing he could find it again.
Soon they were spending one night a week and most of the weekend together. The first time she took him to her room and closed the door he had an attack of performance anxiety. He managed to say. She managed not to laugh. He got over it. Sometimes he stayed all weekend at her place, sometimes she at his. He discovered Chloe’s capacity for outbreaks of glorious, playful joy. In the dodgem cars on the pier at Brighton they stayed in their cars for three turns and came out wobbly and choking from laughter. In November, when the Christmas lights came on in London, she glowed along with them. Joshua learnt to ice skate and they soared around the rink at the Natural History Museum.
He had gotten used to Jean and Raymond. Once they met out, for a dinner in Camden Town organised by Jean, and he hardly recognised them. Raymond was all in black, with a silk rollneck sweater, a blazer, tailored black trousers and black patent leather shoes. Jean wore matching grey trousers and fitted top, large silver-coloured wrap and ridiculously high heels.
“You get used to it. They dress up sometimes. And make plans, lots of plans, most of which don’t happen.” Chloe said they were actually quite conventional underneath, which Joshua couldn’t see, at least not until they decided they’d get a flat together and Jean told them to get married. So they did, in a registry office, with two of Josh’s flatmates as witnesses. Telling her parents before the event, Chloe insisted, would turn it into a circus and she wasn’t having that. Joshua wrote a letter to Joe McInstry and sent it with a photo of them both.
“Dad’s had a stroke and can’t really write,” Jane wrote back. “Congratulations. Be happy.”
While they were looking for a flat one of Joshua’s flat-mates left, so Chloe moved in there. The two remaining flatties referred to them as “Mr and Mrs,” and tried to be tidier.
*
“Come to Jean and Ray’s after work, please.” For Chloe to call him at the library, there must be some kind of crisis. “Brian’s sold the factory. Ray’s got fifteen different plans, Jean’s refusing to go to Africa, they’ve both gone mad. Come as soon as you can.”
There will be a lot of money coming from the business. Chloe’s trying to get her father to agree to sit on it for a while, to think about how best to use the money, not rush off to save the elephants of Africa or something. Brian, his much younger wife, Raewyn, and their ten-year-old twin boys arrive.
“Out of control. They need a good smack,” Jean mutters, “and I don’t just mean the twins.” Joshua couldn’t tell if she was referring to Brian or Raymond. It seemed to him that Brian was the sensible one and Raewyn knew what Jean thought about her children and was anxious. The details about the business were beyond him, but clearly not too much for Chloe, so he offered to take the boys out to Macdonalds or somewhere. They were keen until they realised it meant walking to Elephant and Castle, so he concentrated on Chloe, and watched how hard she worked to keep her parents focused on the details of the settlement, amounts and dates and requirements.
Some weeks later an apparently real decision emerged. Raymond and Jean would buy a canal boat in France, one they could live in, and travel. Would Chloe and Joshua like to rent the Kennington house?
By the end of 2006 Chloe and Joshua are living in the house and Chloe is pregnant.
Chapter 7
Joshua meets Ann off the fast train from Heathrow with a red balloon on a stick as he had promised. When they find each other he unties a knot to let the air out—“Can’t have anything going bang in a railway station these days,”—breaks the stick in half and shoves it into a rubbish bin.
“Come on,” he says, “Northern line.” He’s bought her an Oyster card for the underground and as they walk explains how it works. The train is crowded and they have to stand. Joshua manages her big suitcase. It’s impossible to talk. On the walk from Kennington station past densely parked cars on both sides of the street, Joshua is telling her about the twins, but Ann can only hear part of what he says; he needs the whole width of the footpath for the suitcase, so she is walking behind.
Joshua stops at a house in the middle of a row, heaves the suitcase up a few steps and leaves it inside the door. He takes Ann’s arm to guide her through the house and introduce her to his family. She is to have the attic bedroom, up three flights of narrow stairs. “Stay as long as you like,” says Joshua. “Well, at least until the twins are teenagers or we have another baby.” Ann supposes that’s a joke, but Chloe is not amused.
Chloe is focused on the twins, Jo and Chris, both extremely active and indisti
nguishable to Ann in their interchangeable clothes. The legal firm where Joshua manages library and information systems is feeling the effects of the economic recession. “My job's okay, I think,” he says, “as okay as anyone's is at the moment, it's hard times in the city still.” A couple of lawyers are about to be laid off, and he’s likely to lose a staff member, but his job is, “pretty solid unless the whole firm goes under.”
“It had better not,” contributes Chloe, “I’d have to go back to work—there’s always a job in accounts. And you could stay home with these two,” she adds cheerfully, but Ann gets the idea that neither of them wants that. The house, she learns, is owned by Chloe's parents, who are living on a canal boat in France.
“Our rent just about keeps them,” Joshua says, “along with …,” a look from his wife silences him. None of my business, Ann thinks.
London feels familiar, even though it’s seven years since her last visit, which was two hectic days on her way to a conference in Cambridge. If she’d traveled more, researched original sources, delved into the minutiae of her Romantics’ lives, or studied someone fashionably famous, she might have kept her job. Ann shakes her head to dislodge the thought, then again to cast out Coleridge’s lines from his most desolate of poems.
For hope grew round me like the twining vine,
And fruits and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth.
Although it is not a homeland to either of her parents, England does not seem like a foreign country to Ann, in the same way America had. London is certainly as fast and noisy as New York or Washington; there’s always the sound of a siren, close by or distant, if you listen out for it. The siren call of the city, summons to the something-something metropolis. Heavens, she’s almost making poetry.
The parks, she had forgotten about the parks, with their big lawns, sprawling all around, mown, full of large trees and green-ness, there for when you need a rest from city-ness. And a list of art museums she can go to. A day for each. Yum.
She tries to help around the house, but Chloe resists.
“It's all right,” she says, “I can manage, thank you.” Ann manages to cook a meal for the grownups on her third day, but she isn't allowed near the food for the children. Josh suggests a “cuzzie-beer” at the local after dinner—supper—and Ann offers to stay in so Chloe can go instead, but she won’t.
On her second day in London, Ann is at the Tate Modern, standing in front of a painting by Mondrian, remembering how she had puzzled her way around and through his drawings, his writings and his early figurative paintings in art books, to some kind of understanding of what he called his Compositions. She is now, as then, inexplicably drawn to the black lines, the white between them and the occasional red, yellow or blue rectangles. “Dynamic equilibrians.” The still, straight lines of black against white or primary colours, make shimmers that remind her of the icons quivering on her ipod touch when she’s moving them around.
Ann is deeply involved with Composition C (no 111), the real, actual, original painting, when she feels herself flattening, attenuating in two dimensions, her black jacket becoming lines, her red back-pack a square and her yellow scarf squishing into a rectangle in the bottom left corner. The paint that looked smooth and flat in reproductions is neither, there are brush marks and tiny peaks in the uneven white that give the painting life and strength. Her body moves forward, just a little, wanting to rub against the roughness, and an attendant hovers into view at the edge of her sight. Are her arms by her sides, or out at right angles to her body? She can’t tell, doesn’t care, she feels joyful, glorious.
When the attendant comes alongside her and says, “Are you all right miss?” She says, “YES,” too loudly, and walks away.
She’s on the escalator before, “Thank you,” comes out of her mouth, very quietly.
She sits for a long time over a coffee, thinking about what is happening, loving the joy of it, slightly alarmed. It’s not as though this is the first time she has seen original art works. Maybe it is the first time she has given them such close attention. Should she go further, as it were, into art history, study more, work in the field? No, that’s too prosaic, these—she can't think of a word—painting events will have to do—are pure experience, in-themselves, she doesn't want to turn them into something else, something ordinary, like a career. She feels child-like in the best way in one of her events, it’s like happy play, untrammelled, a treasure, not a job.
A sentence comes into her mind, one that struck her when she read Clarice Lispector, before her life fell apart, because her friend Kate said The Hour of the Star was her favourite novel ever.
Happiness? I have never come across a more foolish word, invented by those unfortunate girls from north-eastern Brazil.
Ann, lecturer in English literature, had never till then heard of Lispector, who was famous in Brazil and not much translated into English before her death from cancer in 1977. The idea of happiness as a foolish word came up a few times in the book and it bothered Ann. She talked with Ex about it and they had a couple of not very satisfactory conversations about what happiness was, and were they happy. Ann recalls pronouncing herself totally happy with their relationship and being agreed with. They both affirmed that they were happy in their careers overall, Paula rising in the ranks of the many managers in the Ministry of Social Development, Ann with her university teaching and no real ambition for the management roles that more seniority would bring. Lispector has her character, Macabéa, think,
It is better not to speak of happiness or unhappiness—such words provoke that vague nostalgia suffused in lilac ….
Macabéa is a product of poverty, who therefore lacks choices, and who puts spoonfuls of sugar in her coffee to be sure she gets her money's worth, even if she isn't paying.
Macabéa continued to be happy thinking about nothing. Empty, empty. … she made the best of things.
If I was as happy as I thought I was then why aren't I more unhappy now? What am I now? Neutral? Except when I am in a painting event. No, an art event, that’s better. I am happy in an art event, and otherwise neutral. How does that make happiness a foolish word? Because you can think you have it and it gets taken away, she answers herself.
“Can I get you something else, madam?” The waiter is young and male, his hair dyed white at its upright tips. She wants to ask him if he is happy.
“No. Thank you.”
Happiness, the idea of happiness, nibbles at her. As a by-product it’s okay; you have your life and if you are happy that is good, but if you try to be happy, as an end in itself, it gets mixed up with being gratified, with getting what you want in the moment, which everyone knows doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness. Her Romantics didn’t go in for happiness, they sought grand emotions like joy and ecstasy, emotions that are in their very nature transitory, swelling and then, inevitably, subsiding. On the whole they wrestled more with misery, despair, sorrow, melancholy, outrage (the latter usually on behalf of someone else). She thinks of William Blake’s “human grapes”
In chains of iron and in dungeons circled with ceaseless fires,
In pits and dens and shades of death, in shapes of torment and woe:
Ann relates to “shapes of torment and woe,” more than usual today. She has given this poem to students because they love its excesses of misery and doom. Suddenly, Ann feels impatient with herself. Solipsism, she writes on the table with her finger; at least her students had youth as their excuse.
What proportion of the world's billions get to even think about happiness? Her survival as a person, part of a community, a culture, a country, has never been in doubt, random accidents excepted, so she is in the privileged position of being able to think about what happiness means, whether it is indeed a foolish notion. Maybe that’s Lispector's point, happiness is a foolish idea for those girls from north-east Brazil. But Lispector wrote, “a foolish word” not “a foolish idea.” Or at least her translator did.
>
“Oh, for heaven's sake!” Ann, thoroughly irritated with herself, stands up so quickly she knocks her chair over, and leaves the Tate Modern Cafe in a flurry of apologies. She walks to Josh and Chloe's through cold wetness, from a few bits of showers above and spraying cars below. Soggy, slippery brown leaves splodge the footpath in treacherous patches. Everything is grey, including the low sky. Ann keeps her head up, facing down the weather, unlike most of her fellow pedestrians, who are huddled into their coats, looking just ahead of their feet, scurrying to be somewhere else.
Chloe looks as though she’s been crying. The twins are watching a children's television show. Ann offers to help, and for once Chloe accepts, so she folds a load of washing that is still warm from the drier and offers to cook dinner. Chloe says, “It's okay, the twins are fed and bathed, I can ma….” then stops. “I'm pregnant,” she says. “Last time I had all day morning sickness.” She looks panicky. “I haven't even told Josh yet.”
“I'll do dinner then.” Ann welcomes feeling useful and thinks of her mother. “Shall I go out and shop?” There’s a superette nearby, she'll find something.
“There's the makings of pasta and a salad.” Chloe gestures at the fridge. “Thanks. You must think we’re complete ninnies, getting caught out like this.” Chloe is embarrassed.
That cost her, Ann thinks, and says, “You don’t have to explain. Mistakes happen.” As if I know. She’s cooking when Josh comes in. He's hearty in his thanks and seems surprised, looking inquiringly at Chloe, who won't look back. As soon as they’ve eaten Ann excuses herself and goes up to her attic. With her laptop and their wifi, she says, she'll catch up with email from home. For the first time her room feels cold in spite of the heating that comes up through vents in the floor.
There’s an email from Evelyn saying, again, how she enjoyed having Ann to stay, and that she has just replied to a message from Shirley, wanting reassurance that Ann was all right. She was, wasn't she? That's what she’d said to Shirley, anyway, but perhaps Ann could reassure her mother herself. Not that she, Evelyn, had minded the contact, she thinks she'll make more effort to stay in touch with her sister now they’ve got started.