“At least he’s a character. Mr. Summers is colorless, I have to say. Super doctor, perfectly nice, but zero personality—except when he’s got a bee in his bonnet about databases.”
“I could do with less personality, on occasion. And perfectly nice sounds to die for.”
“But you’ve hung in there—what?—fifteen years?”
Rose sighed. “So I have. Well, it suits me, I suppose. The easy option, my mum thinks—though she’s tactful enough never to say.”
“Ah, your mum. Now there’s a personality, and I mean that as a compliment. A mind of her own.”
“You can say that again.”
“Come on—as mothers go, you struck lucky.”
“Hmm . . .” Actually, Rose was inclined to agree. When you looked around, considered other possibilities. Not, of course, that any alternative is ever conceivable, when it comes to parentage. You have what you have, they are from whence you have sprung, and had you not, then you would not be who you are, so that is that. Occasionally, Rose looked in the mirror and saw a flicker of her mother, a brief flash of her father—something about the eyes, the set of the mouth.
She said goodbye to Sarah, and left for home, still thinking about parentage. Her own children were rather rudely defiant of descent, refuting any physical resemblance (“I mean, I’m not being rude, Mum, but I just can’t see that either of us looks like either of you”), and heading for determinedly different activities (James a fledgling banker, Lucy reading chemistry at college). You wait, she told them—as she stopped off at the supermarket for a few things, and that Irish bread that Charlotte liked—you wait.
She felt nowadays these painful twinges of compunction where her mother was concerned. Not just on account of the hip, but the whole business of age, of what has happened to her, what happens, the way in which a person is pushed into another incarnation, becomes a different version of themselves. Her old mother was still herself, but she was diminished in some way, had lost emphasis, was not the figure of Rose’s childhood and youth, and Rose felt in some irrational way guilty.
Her father had been spared that, dying in middle age. Rose could not imagine him old—no, no. In her head, he was forever the vigorous, charismatic figure of her childhood—alive with opinions and proposals, cheerful, fun. He and Charlotte were lodged together there, sometimes arguing, often laughing, the immutable unit. Except that of course the unit had not been immutable, and now there was this other, solitary mother. Carrying on. “Your mother will carry on,” people had said. Well, of course. What else?
Rose knew that Charlotte found it agonizing to have to live with her and Gerry, and knew why—that it was not just that she wanted to be in her own house, but that she felt intrusive, superfluous. Rose was occasionally woken in the night by Charlotte’s stealthy forays to the bathroom, and experienced simultaneous irritation and pity.
I know what she feels, Rose thought, and she knows that I know. No point even in discussing it. And then there were those companionable moments—rubbishing a TV program, talking about James or Lucy. Providing tea and scones for this Anton.
That shop, she thought. Things for his mother. Why not? Next week, maybe.
Anton sometimes thought of his own mother, when he was with Charlotte: the two women were much of an age. But that was all they had in common; his mother was anxious, dependent—widowhood had thrust her into a childlike neediness. His sister and brother ministered, tirelessly. While the English woman, he sensed, was relatively robust when not felled by this accident—and with a productive working life behind her. His own mother had behind her the long, troubled, deprived past of their country—a lifetime of making the best of things, scrimping and scrounging, doing menial jobs when any were offered. She had been a school dinner lady, she had cooked in a cheap restaurant. Now, she sat in her two-room flat, day in, day out—waiting for her children to come, for Anton to phone, which he did, each week, at a set time.
For Anton, his experience with Charlotte and Rose was an oasis in his present wasteland of an existence. He relished his visits to the house. He was not depressed or despairing—by no means. He was a man equipped with a certain natural optimism which had seen him through difficult times before now, and he had made the decision to try his luck abroad with determination: things could not be much worse where he was—chances were, they might be better over there. The time of despair was under his belt now, the bleak months after she walked out, when the plug was pulled on fourteen years of marriage, just like that.
The building site was an education, he told himself. Now you know what it is like to work with your hands and your back, not your head. To do what most men do all the time, the world over. His body ached, protested, reminded him that it was not made for this. In the evenings, in the crowded, fetid household of younger men, he made a joke of it, stoically. Besides, he did not want to find himself laid off. This is not forever—he told himself that also. This is just a tiresome induction period, until I can get going here. Until I have enough of a grip on the language to offer myself for a real job. Until I can read it better.
Language blazed at him—all day, every day. It challenged him from the sides of buses, in the Tube, from newspapers. On the radio, the television, in the street. He looked and listened, trying to follow. He snatched what he could—Ah! that I understand, this I can get. Swathes of it escaped him, chattering away into oblivion. And parallel to this perverse, obstructive language ran the words in his own head, the easy, fluent eloquence of his own tongue. Into which he fell back in the evenings, in the grumbling, joshing company of the young. When in a foreign country, he thought, you are behind a fence, or in a cell—everything is going on around you but you are not quite part of it. You open your mouth and you sound like a child; you know that you are someone else, but you cannot explain it.
With the teacher and her daughter he did sometimes feel that his real self could emerge. He had been at first amused by Charlotte’s recourse to children’s books, but now saw that this was enterprising and effective. He took the books back with him and pored over the texts, hiding them from his nephew and the other young men. He read about talking rabbits and tigers that came to tea, with satisfaction. He remembered learning to read as a child, discovering story.
He talked of this to Charlotte, when next they met. Tried to talk of it, hobbled as always by the search for the right word. He had been thinking about story—how it works.
“Story go always forward—this happen, then this. That is what we want. We want to know how it happen, what comes next. How one thing make happen another.”
“Exactly,” said Charlotte. “Narrative. But a contrivance—a clever contrivance, if successful.”
“Con . . . trivance?”
“Made up. Invented.”
“Yes, yes. And that is why we enjoy. Because it is not like our life—the way we live, which is . . .“—he frowned—”. . . very much accident. You get job. Your wife go. You lose job. You are knock down by bus, perhaps.”
“You get mugged,” said Charlotte. “You break your hip.”
Anton frowned further, then smiled. “And so I am here, like this, in your daughter house, because of that.”
“We have a word for it—an odd one. Happenstance.”
“And it is story,” said Anton. “But not like story in book. It is . . . no one can control.”
“Anarchy. Contingency.”
“Sorry?”
“No—I’m sorry. The unruly world in which we have to live. One’s unreliable progress. Are you religious, Anton?”
He spread his hands, shook his head.
“Me neither. It’s said to be a consolation. Or a crutch.” She tapped hers.
“My mother, yes. She go out now only for the church.”
“I rather envy her. I tried, way back, but faith eluded me. There was no way I could believe.”
“And in the Bible,” said Anton thoughtfully. “There are many stories.”
“Indeed. The good Samaritan. The loaves and the fishes. But stories with a message. All very well, but people can be put off by messages. The form needs to get more sophisticated.”
“When I was a boy,” said Anton, “I liked very much . . . how do you say? . . . stories about princes and princesses and giants and magic things.”
“Fairy stories, we say. Not that fairies much come into them. Messages, again.”
“The poor person always come out good in the end?”
“Exactly.”
“Which is not what happen in the world.”
“Quite so. But we love to think it might.”
Anton smiled. “In fairy story, the poor workers on the building site all find bag of gold, and the rich developer man is eat up by the giant.”
“Instead of which, the rich bankers let all their gold melt away, or so we understand, so there is nothing to pay the poor workers and no work anyway.”
He laughed. “But gold is not all good. There was the king who wished everything he touch turn to gold, and then he could not eat or drink.”
“Ooh . . .” said Charlotte. “We’re into mythology now. Midas.”
“From school, I remember this story. But that is message too. You must not want too much.”
“Yes. Greed. But you’re right. Messages die hard. The modern novel has tried to shed them, though I suppose they creep in here and there.”
“And children books have, sometimes.”
“Absolutely. Although not, I think, in this week’s study. Our new text is about a pig and a spider, Anton. Actually, we are moving up the age range. This is for people of around eight or nine. Or seventy-six. Or . . . ?”
“Forty-five,” said Anton.
“And the spider has my name, Charlotte. So I have always identified. Right—let’s get going. Have a try.”
“‘Where’s . . . Papa . . . going . . . with . . . that . . . axe?’” read Anton . . .
An hour later, they were still immersed. For Anton, the building site had receded entirely, along with his evening world of food out of tins and desultory chatter. He was exhilarated by a growing mastery of the words on the page, charmed by this simple, beguiling tale.
“‘No, I . . . only . . . distribute . . . pigs . . . to . . . early . . . risers,’ Early risers—what is this?”
“People who get up early,” said Charlotte. “We’ll have to stop—here’s Rose with the tea.”
Rose picked up the book. “Oh—I used to love this. So did Lucy and James.”
“Listen,” said Anton. “‘Fern . . . was . . . up . . . at . . . daylight . . . trying . . . to . . . rid . . . the . . . world . . . of . . .’ ”
“Injustice.” Charlotte beamed. “Huge progress.”
“Great!” said Rose. She held out a plate. “It’s chocolate brownies today. And Earl Grey, of course.” She smiled at Anton.
He sat thinking that he could imagine a time when he would begin to feel at home in this country. When it could cease to be so impermeable, so tacitly hostile, so eternally other. When he could buy a newspaper and read it, laugh at the jokes on a TV program. Some of his younger compatriots already did this. But how long will this take? he wondered. And how long will I stay?
“Your mother and I have been talking about story,” he told Rose. “Stories.”
“Oh, well—she’s the expert. Her subject.”
“And I am thinking—everything has to be story. On the TV—advertisements are little story, often. I watch, because these I can understand, sometimes.”
“I used to like the one about the girl who walks out on her man but takes the car,” said Rose. “A year or two ago. Car advert, of course. Maybe you should have had a career in writing ads, Mum, and we’d all be rich.”
“Oh, I could never make up stories. Only talk about them.”
“When I was a small boy,” said Anton, “I make up stories very much, and I am in them. I have big adventure—I am very brave.”
“Oh, I did that too.” Rose smiled. “I was amazingly beautiful, and pursued by rock stars. Duran Duran.”
“Really? Who?” said Charlotte.
“Exactly. You didn’t know about my inner life. And you wouldn’t have known who Duran Duran were.”
“It’s sad you cannot do that when you are—grown,” said Anton. “You have just your own story, that you live. That you cannot choose.”
Rose held out the plate. “Have the last brownie, Anton. And I don’t know about that—I’m doing some choosing right now. I’m going to propose to Gerry—no, tell Gerry—that we must have a new bathroom installed.”
“That is small choosing,” said Anton. “I mean—big things that happen.”
“Well, you chose to come here—to England,” said Rose.
“Yes. But I did not choose to lose my job. At home.”
“All right. I take your point. Sometimes we choose. And some big things too. You choose who you marry.”
“I think my wife choose me,” said Anton. “I was very—shy. When young man. And later unfortunately she choose not me any more.”
There was a pause. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Rose. “Why don’t I take you for a whole choosing opportunity next week? Shopping opportunity, that is. Things for your mother.”
Later, in the Tube, on the way back to the communal house, Anton opened Charlotte’s Web. He sat there in the shuddering, hurtling London netherworld, his lips moving as he traveled from word to word, from line to line. Occasionally he copied a word into his notebook, for further inquiry. Sometimes he skipped a word, eager to move ahead—pushed it aside to deal with another time. He rattled through the darkness, reading.
CHAPTER SIX
Henry Peters, too, was reading.
“Scandal, gossip and innuendo received majestic treatment in the Augustan Age. Some of the most elegant art of the eighteenth century addresses itself to the perceived weaknesses and transgressions of aristocrats, royalty and politicians. Think of the style, the wit, the delighted savagery of Gillray, of Hogarth, of Rowlandson. Cartoons, broadsheets and flyers enabled the public of the day to savor the goings-on of the great and the good by way of raucous humor . . .”
Henry had always enjoyed reading his own work—appreciating a turn of phrase, an appropriate word. He sat at his desk with the handwritten sheets spread out in front of him; the first draft was just about done, ready for Rose to type up, and then he would get down to the final tweaking and polishing before sending it off to one of the Sundays.
He read on. More about eighteenth-century circulars and broadsheets, with quotes. A Gillray would be nice as illustration—note to the features editor on that, and a suggested choice. References to some scandals of the day. Move on to a comparison with contemporary style—the crude sledge-hammer operation of the gutter press, the dogged nature of investigative journalism, its sobriety, the absence of any élan. And then the tidbit to make the point that even in the day of investigative journalism things slip through the net—potential political dramas. For herein lies the crux of the whole piece—the nugget of information, in what is almost a throw-away aside, that will be the whole reason that the features editor will light upon this otherwise unprovocative article: “A letter in my possession serves up a nice instance of a choice item thus undetected . . .”
“This should set the cat among the pigeons, Rose. To the Features Editor of The Sunday Times, please, with the covering letter from me—handwritten, I don’t know the man, but a personal note always looks well.”
But The Sunday Times was not receptive. Nor was the rejection letter in any way personal. Henry was annoyed—offended, indeed. “One does wonder if it landed on the right desk. Well, The Sunday Telegraph may well have been a better choice in any case.”
The Telegraph was equally sw
ift to make clear its lack of interest, as was The Observer. Henry was now tight-lipped, wounded rather than outraged. “The fact of the matter is, Rose, that these people don’t know one’s name—one’s reputation. I’ve mentioned the forthcoming memoirs each time, so you would think . . . Or are they so young that they’ve never heard of Harold Wilson’s government?” A mirthless laugh.
Rose had come to dread the sight of those long white envelopes. She shook her head and tutted.
Henry picked up the sheets of paper and put them into a drawer in his desk. “Thank you for your efforts, Rose. We shall have to put this down to experience. One will need to think very carefully when settling on a publisher for the memoirs—some firm with senior, knowledgeable editors. Coffee, Rose, could you?”
She went through to the kitchen and put the kettle on. Oh dear. Poor old boy. She felt a frisson of pity, and was surprised at herself.
Henry reviewed the situation. Evidently a thirty-year-old political scandal that got away was of no concern—at least not in the eyes of the sort of Johnny-come-lately who ran newspapers today. Time was, journalists were more astute. All right, so that was not the way to attract a bit of attention, restore one’s name.
He thought again about a scholarly article. Something not necessarily of generous length, but shrewd, succinct, throwing new light on a neglected part of the eighteenth century.
On what aspect?
He thought. He did some desultory reading. He got out old notes. And, somewhere far away and untouchable, the eighteenth century sneered at him.
No. One’s best work in that area is over and done with—better to face up to that. Archival work is for younger men.
That evening Henry switched on the television. Apart from the news, there were hardly any programs that he watched, except for a furtive interest in costume drama, but he had become mildly addicted to the current series on medieval monarchs. A personable young historian addressed the camera with fiery enthusiasm, scrambled up castle ramparts, strode over the sites of battlefields. Henry could have done without the interludes of enacted coronations, feasts and jousts, and retained a slightly patrician disdain about the whole thing—he had never been able to see the attraction of medieval studies, merely a warm-up to the time when history really gets off the ground—but nevertheless he found himself watching with interest. This young chap was quite compelling, if somewhat unscholarly in appearance (though the credits listed him as Fellow of a prestigious Cambridge college).
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