She sat amid the boxes. What has happened? My life is in upheaval, and all because of a man I met at a lunch, and something called the financial downturn, and running across Laura in Hatton Garden.
Goodbye to this house. Goodbye to Marion Clark Interiors. Goodbye to lunches at Lansdale Gardens, though as Uncle Henry rightly says I shall be coming to London from time to time, and I’m not going to desert the old boy. Not that he hasn’t plenty of support: Corrie and Rose and now this Mark in attendance.
Am I making a ghastly mistake? Am I going to regret this? But you have to be flexible, swerve off course if it looks right—I’ve not done it enough, I’ve just plowed ahead. And anyway I was swerved. Things happened.
Charlotte continued to think of Anton after he had left. She saw his life in contrast to her own. A man driven by circumstance. Well,
I have had some circumstance too—very much so, just recently—but I have not had to shift country, shift culture, find a new life. Good luck to him—he deserves it.
The front door banged. Rose. Dumping groceries on the kitchen table, a brief greeting—preoccupied, it would seem.
Charlotte said, “Anton has been and gone. This was his last time. Sorry to have missed you, I’m sure. He . . .” Oh, but he didn’t. Leave any sort of goodbye message. Forgot, I imagine. He did seem—stressed.
“You’re through with him. Right. I’ve got some salmon for supper—Gerry’s favorite.”
“One wonders how things will go for him. Anton, I mean.”
“Mmn.” Rose stared into the fridge. “Ah, there is a lemon—I’d forgotten to get one.”
“One would like to have known how his story continues.”
Fridge slammed shut. “Tartar sauce, I thought. And there’s still some of that cucumber pickle.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
Rose standing there, a lemon in one hand. Thinking, it would seem, about what is to be had for supper.
“Oh . . . I dare say. You and stories, Mum—an obsession.”
Story? You live twenty years in a London suburb. Husband, children, house, cat—go to the supermarket. Then—something happens. A person happens, that’s all. Him.
You do not mess up everything that has been important to you for most of your life because you are in love with an Eastern European immigrant you have known for ten weeks. You do not do that to Gerry. To Lucy and James.
Do you?
In his head, language flows, lithe and lissom, eloquent, all that he would say, all that he would like to tell her of what he has been feeling, what he has been thinking. Not the broken and faulty language that he has to speak here, but the real language that he does speak, his own.
He remembers the last time with her, a moment then, when he had shaken his head in frustration, and she had looked at him anxiously: “Is something wrong?”
“There is everything wrong.”
Everything.
Stella tells the girls that dad will be home this weekend. The girls receive this news without undue shock, dismay or rejoicing. Since they are aged thirteen and fifteen their concerns are entirely local and immediate, and while they have appeared to register Jeremy’s absence from time to time they have not much applied themselves to asking where he is, or why. They are focused upon the intricacies of their relationships with their friends, on the state of their hair, on the next visit to Primark. Jeremy is of interest to them, but is not a central concern. They do not know, and never will, that he was near to becoming a divorced father. OK—so dad will be home this weekend.
Stella cooks. She cooks up a storm. She makes Jeremy’s favorites: the Moroccan lamb tagine, roast fennel, the pears baked in Marsala with raisins and pinenuts. It is harvest home, or the return of the warrior, or something along those lines, except that Stella is also somewhat apprehensive. Is this the right thing to be doing? Should she be allowing him back? She was going to divorce him, after all, and now suddenly she isn’t.
She is scared witless at the thought of what Paul Newsome is going to say.
There has already been Gill. Gill exploded. “He’s what? He’s coming home? Are you out of your mind, Stella?”
Stella said that she was not out of her mind, not at all. She had been thinking things over (sort of true), she and Jeremy had had some serious talks (not true), and she felt that badly as he had behaved this would never happen again (possibly true).
Henry was much pleased with the progress of the memoirs. He was writing daily, page after page to be handed to Rose the next morning. He was recollecting not exactly in tranquility but with a complacent fervor. So agreeable to settle some old scores, put the knife in here and there, hand out the occasional bouquet. Of course, one had to be careful, double check on who was dead and who was not—there are such things as the libel laws, and you never know who might be lurking yet in some nursing home, prepared to leap out of the woodwork. By and large, though, his cast was safely laid to rest, and he could indulge in uninhibited remembrance.
Henry was well aware of unreliable testimony; he was after all a historian and not a bad one, even if his approach was now quite out of fashion. He knew quite well that his views were idiosyncratic and partial. Fine. The point was to get them on record, given that one was in a position to do so—happily—and those under discussion were not. So one owed it to posterity to set down one’s version of Harold Wilson, Harold Macmillan, Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin and the rest of them. Henry saw himself as a twenty-first century John Aubrey—less fey, more considered. This work would perfectly conclude and embellish his list of publications: revelatory, provocative, entertaining.
“There you go, Rose—today’s offering. Some rather incisive observations on Hugh Gaitskell—you’ll be intrigued. Now, where is young Mark this morning? Rose?”
Rose had apparently never set eyes on Henry before, gazing vacantly at him. She surfaced, swept up the typescript. “I’ve no idea. Oh, here he is.”
The front door opened, and closed. Mark had his own key now. He put his head around the door. “Good morning, good morning. Great! Another installment of the memoir, I see. Fascinating.”
“Indeed,” said Henry. “Gaitskell. Overrated, I always feel. A rather ordinary fellow, in fact. Rose may be surprised.”
Mark smiled at Rose. “How incredibly lucky you are—getting a preview like this.”
Rose did not respond. She left the room, with Hugh Gaitskell’s reputation and the day’s consignment of letters.
Mark was only mildly interested in the memoirs, from which he would probably need to distance himself, if and when they ever achieved publication. It would not do to be seen as a disciple of a superannuated historian whose approach was now entirely discredited. But that was not a problem, at the moment. Right now he needed Henry, both for funding purposes, and in the service of the plagiarism piece, which would give his—Mark’s—name needed exposure, and an entrée into useful academic circles. With any luck it would drum up controversy, and he could be right in there, making further elegant points. In fact, the article was finished—a final polish, and he could get it off to the editor of the learned journal, when expedient. A week, it had taken.
“And your own effort—how is that going?” Henry inquired benignly.
Mark frowned. “Quite tricky, getting the emphasis right. The historical use and misuse of plagiarism, the background to the Bellamy/Carter dispute. I’d love you to look it over when I’ve got it into some kind of shape.”
“Of course, of course.” Henry beamed, and Mark headed for his desk in the lobby, and a productive morning on his interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, which would propel him toward professorial status. Mark’s career would depend upon that shaky quagmire, the past. He also knew only too well that most testimony is unreliable. Again, fine. That’s what history is for—a morass of contentious stories that may or may not have a measure of veracity but are there to serve as fodder for the keen forensic analyst of another age. Glittering careers have been thus fueled,
and Mark had every intention that his should be one. After the Scottish lot, a hop across the Channel, maybe, for a go at the rich pickings of the French Revolution. By which time one would hope to be nicely installed at Warwick or York, or a stint maybe with an Oxbridge fellowship.
He settled at his computer, began to look over yesterday’s entry, and was conscious of a presence. Rose—apparently searching for something in that bookcase by the door. Lansdale Gardens was full of errant bookcases, stashed away in odd corners. Crammed with unsorted books. Ah—now, there’s a thought: get going on Henry’s library, when one has done with the archive. Another few months’ funding, that would be.
“Can I help, Rose?”
“Not unless you happen to know where Debrett’s Peerage for 1975 is. He wants to look something up. Immediately.”
“Let’s have a look. I don’t think I’ve seen it.” Mark joined her in front of the bookcase. “A bit disheveled, I’m afraid—his library.”
“Disheveled?” Rose appeared to be considering the word. “Well, it’s not here, is it?” A little less offhand—less hostile, perhaps—than usual. I’ll get round her yet, Mark thought.
He said, “You’re so marvelous with him, Rose. Not the easiest of employers.”
She looked at him. Quite a sharp look—I’ve gone too far, he thought. But no—a half smile, a shrug. She went.
“It’s a lovely day.”
“Of course it is a lovely day.” He took her arm for a moment, steered her down a rough bit of the path—Hampstead Heath laid out around them, rich with high summer, with growth, with birds, with life. London a blue and distant complexity away beyond. “And we are being very English, that we talk about the weather?”
“I’m sorry,” said Rose. “It’s what you do when you’re wondering what else to say.” When there is everything to say.
He smiled. Understanding, she saw—understanding entirely. “So what is to be sorry? And it is a lovely day because it is Saturday. I have known all the week that Saturday would be good. On Wednesday there was rain, and with rain the site is mud, mud, mud. And I say to the site manager—on Saturday, sun. He is not interested.”
“Well, I suppose he must spend Saturday somewhere.”
“No. I think he exist only in the week. It is not possible have wife and family and other life. At the weekend—pff! he disappear. But soon, perhaps, I say goodbye to him.”
“Another interview?”
“Next week. The last one—no. They give the job to someone else, but they are nice, they say I did well and they tell me another firm who will see me. So . . . I hope.”
“So do I. Oh, I do hope . . . If we go that way,” she said, “there’s a good place to sit. I remember from when I used to bring Lucy and James here. Yes, up here. They used to climb on a dead tree.”
A bench. They sat. “That very tree,” she said. “The one lying on its side. Great for children to scramble about. Amazing—all those years ago, and it’s still here.”
“I think a dead tree does not go away. Unless someone take it to burn it.”
“This is an environmentally correct tree, I imagine. A place for insects and birds. And children—as an afterthought.”
“This is the best . . . park . . . I see yet.” He gestured: the sweep of the Heath, the gray–blue city laid out on the skyline. “You take me always to a good place. And London have so many.”
“Spoiled for choice.” She saw the shadows of her children, young again, playing on that tree. And now to be here with him. You cross your own path.
“And you choose well.” A smile. “So I have in my head . . .”—counting on his fingers—“. . . Victoria and Albert Museum, Richmond Park, the park where . . . in the middle . . . with the dogs and so many people running?”
“Hyde Park.”
“Yes. So all those I have, to remember. And the dogs—spaniel, I think? And . . . terrier and German Shepherd dog. And those deer and the quail eggs and in the museum a plate with birds on it. I see that still.”
“And here,” said Rose. “Here, you’ve got—we’ve got—green parakeets. Look—over in that tree. Little green birds.”
“I think that is not a British bird?”
“No. Apparently they’ve escaped and bred and now there are populations of them.”
“Ah. They are immigrants. But asylum seekers, or economic migrants, like me?”
She laughed. “Hard to say.”
“So I have the parakeets now, to remember.” He was silent for a moment. Then—“But, most of all, there is—you.”
Quite silent now, both of them. She turned to look at him. “Anton . . .”
He put his arms round her. His hand was in the small of her back: gentle, firm, strange. Oh. And then he was kissing her, his tongue in her mouth: alien, warm, arousing. Oh.
Later, he said, “I am sorry. For so long I have wanted to do that.” Moments later; a whole world later—a passage of time after which nothing would be the same.
She shook her head. Wanted to say—me too. Could not, must not. She reached out and took his hand.
He got up. “We should walk some more, Rose. Perhaps we will find more not British birds. The big ones that eat dead animals?”
“Vultures. I don’t think so. Not even on Hampstead Heath.”
They were walking now, and they held hands. Like other couples. Like that boy and girl ahead, like those two over there, not young, married probably but holding hands still. Everything was different, in a few seconds, with what had been spoken, what had been done.
Anton said, “Before I came to this country, I was in a very bad time. I think you know. My wife—who go. No job. And I thought—I can do nothing, or I can do something. So I do something—I decide to come here. Choosing—choice. We talk about that once, with your mother—remember?”
“Yes. I remember.”
“I know now that I choose right. It is not easy here, for me. But it is better all the time. I begin to—to live again. It is like learning to read English—learning to live again.”
“I’m glad,” she said. “I’m so glad.” Her hand in his, all between them different now. Easier—and harder. So much harder.
“Your mother teach—taught—me to read. You have . . . you have shown me I can live. I can want the next day to come, and the next. I can . . . hope”—silent for a moment, his hand tightening on hers— “. . . and that is much, very much. But I know also that with you—that you and me—that there is not the next day, and the next, more Saturdays, more going to good places.”
She said, “Anton . . . don’t.”
“But that is true, I must say it.”
They stopped. Off the path now, away from others, alone under a tree, a great spreading impervious tree, that neither knew nor cared.
He took her face in his hands; he kissed her on the lips.
“You are married.”
“Yes.”
“So this is not good.”
“No.”
They gazed at one another. Rose saw an unimaginable other life, which could not be. Anton saw a woman with whom he could have been happy.
He said, “There are words that say the same in all languages. Three words.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.” Don’t say them. Don’t. I couldn’t bear it—to have that in my head forever.
“I must not say, but I am thinking, Rose.”
So am I.
She said it. “So am I.”
He shut his eyes for a moment. A little shake of the head. His hands closed on her upper arms, holding her like that. “So . . . we think. And we know. And that must be all.”
Beyond them, around them, the Heath went about its business: a dog barked, children called out, somewhere in the distance grass was being cut. Theirs was a moment suspended in time—private, isolated. After a while, he took her arm and they walked away from the tree, back down the path, ba
ck among couples, groups, a jogger, a child with a kite, back with the world. They talked, and did not talk. He told her more of the firm with whom he had an interview. She told him Lucy would soon be home from college. They talked of anything that did not matter, and walked on, and on, as the summer afternoon faded around them, dipping toward evening, the shadows became long, and time carried them with it, back into their own lives, away and apart.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
So that was the story. These have been the stories: of Charlotte, of Rose and Gerry, of Anton, of Jeremy and Stella, of Marion, of Henry, Mark, of all of them. The stories so capriciously triggered because something happened to Charlotte in the street one day. But of course this is not the end of the story, the stories. An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does not end, and stories march in step with time. Equally, chaos theory does not assume an ending; the ripple effect goes on, and on. These stories do not end, but they spin away from one another, each on its own course.
Charlotte is home. Grateful to Rose and Gerry; deeply grateful to be once more her own woman. She is mobile, if precarious, and there is Elena from the Czech Republic who comes in daily to minister, to shop, to do household chores.
Home, alone, she picks up the threads. Pain is contained, corralled, though breaking out from time to time. Friends and neighbors visit, she is not really alone, the world is all around, she lives in an insistent present. But her thoughts are often of the past. That evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion of data on which you depend—without it you would not be yourself. Impossible to share, and no one else could view it anyway. The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system. We remember in shreds, the tattered faulty contents of the mind. Life has added up to this: seventy-seven moth-eaten years.
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