by David Szalay
Ted does not smile at this. He just peers at his nephew thoughtfully, and mainly to forestall any follow-up questions, James says, ‘You still live in Wimbledon?’
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
‘The same… ?’
‘The same house, yes.’
On that, they simultaneously turn their heads and look out into the living room, at one end of which they are standing. For a moment, as clouds manoeuvre somewhere out of sight in the sky, pale sunlight pours in from the street end, then fades. Not entirely. Though the shadows lose their sharpness, they stay. They know they are thinking of the same thing—the Victorian vicarage in Wimbledon, the weeks that James and Isabel spent there in 1974. James remembers surprisingly little about those weeks. Not even how many weeks it was. How many was it? Though it seemed like a long time then—and seems like a long time now—it might only have been two, or even one. One or two weeks at the very end. That would make sense. He remembers the thick ivory shagpile in the vestibule and on the stairs. It was unlike any carpet he had ever seen.
Ted does not seem aware of the fact that his hand is fiddling nervously with one of the buttons of his suit jacket.
‘How’s Jean?’ James says.
‘She’s fine. Well…’ Ted’s voice takes on a more serious tone. ‘She’s okay. She’s having trouble with her hip. That’s why she’s not here today.’
‘It would have been nice to see her.’
‘She very much wanted to be here.’
‘Do send her my love,’ James says.
‘I will. And she sends you hers.’
They smile sadly at each other.
‘And how’s your father?’ Ted says.
‘He’s fine. He lives in France now. You probably know.’
‘Yes, he’s lived there for a while, hasn’t he? In Paris, or… ?’
‘No, in the south. He used to live in Paris. He lives in the south now.’
‘Lovely,’ Ted says. ‘Do you visit him much?’
‘Sometimes. Not for a while actually.’
‘No?’
‘I was there last spring. I may go next month.’
‘It must be lovely down there.’
It was a damp spring in the south of France. The light was milky, the sky a passionless mother-of-pearl. The palm trees looked flustered in the wind. From Nice, he took the train along the sea—watched the white manes tossing far out on the water—and then a taxi inland from Antibes. He arrived at the house in time for lunch. The question was whether to eat outside, where the awning was flapping fitfully. There was a feeling that James, fresh from the fumes and interiors of London, would want to, and they set up on the terrace. Four places. Isabel was there. Unexpectedly. On her own. She had been there, it seemed, for a few days. The light was hard and grey. Under the awning it was quite dark.
No explanation of Isabel’s presence was immediately forthcoming. Over lunch there was at first small talk. How was James’s flight? (Fine—flights are always fine.) How was London? What was happening in the village? How much longer would the local shops hold out against the new Carrefour…
They were talking in a superficial way about Alexander’s work, something he was writing, when he and Isabel slipped into one of the intellectual play-fights they enjoyed so much. From then on Esmeralda said little, and James less. The question of the day was—Is the world changing more or less quickly than it was? Alexander said LESS quickly. The world was changing less quickly now than at any point in the twentieth century. Think, he said, of the fact that in 1900 there was no powered flight at all. The Wright brothers and their experiment on the sands at Kitty Hawk were still some years in the future. And not much more than half a century after that, there were supersonic airliners, spy planes photographing from the edge of space and men on the moon—while in the almost half a century since then we have essentially not moved past that point. We are still using, he exclaimed, as if it were an outrage, except that he was smiling, essentially the same equipment to fly around in as we were in 1970!
James smiled too, palely, when his father’s excited eyes met his own.
Then Isabel threw the Internet at him. Alexander waved that away. It was, he said, merely the latest step in the development of a technology that started with the telegraph (invented 1837), and then flowered into the telephone (1876). Electronic computers, the other necessary ingredient, were invented in the 1940s. What’s more, their period of exponential increase in speed and power seemed to be plateauing. This was his point, he said. Following an historically extraordinary period of invention from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, a sort of technological Russian spring, there was then a further period of working through the practical applications of many of these inventions, a period which in the last few decades had produced things like the Internet and the mobile phone. This period, he said, was now ending—that was his point. Fluently, initially marking them off on his fingers, he listed some of the inventions that had made the hundred years from 1850 to 1950 so extraordinary—the sewing machine, the fridge, the washing machine, the internal combustion engine, the typewriter (1867), the phonograph, the microphone, electric light, the pneumatic tyre, the zipper (1893), wireless communications, the submarine, the electron (1897—i.e. during the reign of Queen Victoria), the tape recorder (also a Victorian invention), television (1925), the jet engine, penicillin, nuclear weapons, the helicopter, the now ubiquitous electronic computer (1946), the transistor, the contraceptive pill—even, more than half a century ago now, the structure of DNA, which was obviously the fundamental step that has made all subsequent efforts in the life sciences possible. And that was hardly something new, it was hardly of our time. ‘Hardly,’ he said to James and Isabel, ‘of your time.’ (And then to Esmeralda, with a smile, ‘Or yours, my love.’) It was a discovery made the year that Stalin died. That was its era. His own era just about. (He was a man of the mid-century, a political journalist of Cold War years, witness of événements in Paris and anti-Vietnam protests in Grosvenor Square.) And since then, he stated provocatively, since the 1950s, there had not been a single invention on a par with the major items on his list.
In spite of the provocative tone in which he said this, Isabel seemed to have lost interest. She seemed to lack the energy to keep up her end of the debate. She just said, ‘Well, maybe,’ and—as if tidying it up—trimmed a sliver from the Pont l’Evêque with a silver knife. The awning flapped. Underneath the vigour of his speech, underneath the sense of excited engagement, his father seemed tired, James thought. His keen, mobile eyes were moist on the exposed terrace. His hair, still thick in his mid-seventies, was slightly unkempt. His hand, however, was steady as he poured the last of the wine, a Provençal rosé. He was making an effort not to seem put out by their presence—that was perhaps what all this energetic talk was about. This did not necessarily mean that he was put out, only that he was worried that he might seem to be. This sort of thing James was used to. His father was not an easy man to interpret, in spite of the wary expressiveness of his hazel eyes.
Now he was saying that scientific, technological and social change had for a long time in themselves provided us with a sense of purpose, of progress—‘and this sense was definitive, in its way’. It was an important part of our self-definition as a society. It was what we were about. It was what we did. We progressed. (Think of avant-gardism in art, how seriously—on the model of scientific progress—that was once taken! All those ‘experiments’. Think of Marxism. Think of our fixation with the ‘modern’, with ‘modernity’.) All of which in turn profoundly shaped our sense of what time was—we thought of time as a vector of progress. The slow erosion of that idea would have all sorts of implications—political, social, ‘even spiritual’.
*
When they had finished lunch, Alexander said that he had to work for a few hours, and went down to his study, and for the first time since his arrival James found himself alone with hi
s sister, in the long salon. The old house was not designed for those thunderheads sagging over the valley. There was something almost Romanesque about its spaces. It had a vaguely ecclesiastical atmosphere. The furniture, the objets, the knick-knacks, the paintings, the small windows punched through the formidable walls, with their seatlike wooden ledges… These were things so familiar that they did not normally notice them. Their father had owned the house—it was in one of those troubadour villages—since the Sixties. It had always been there.
Isabel was sitting very low on a sofa, looking through a wide, flat book.
‘How long are you staying?’ James said.
‘I don’t know, a few days.’
He did not ask her why she was there. There were, he had heard from Esmeralda when they were alone in the kitchen for a minute, ‘problems’. That is, problems with Steve. He was not sure what sort of problems exactly. Perching in one of the window nooks, he looked out at the wet olive trees, the miserable blue shape of the swimming pool. ‘How’re things?’ he said.
‘They’re okay.’
‘Yeah?’
They sat in silence for a minute. The pages of the book creaked as she turned them. Looking out the window, he heard the whisper of her hand smoothing the tissue paper that screened the plates.
‘Oh I like that one,’ she said.
‘Which?’ He stood up to look.
It was the sort of day, he thought, still standing there as she turned the page, when it would be nice to have a fire. Only a fire would be able to deal with the sad damp that, in this sort of weather, permeated the whole house.
Isabel looked up questioningly—he was still just standing there. ‘What?’ she said.
‘What’s up?’
‘What’s up?’ she echoed, as if she didn’t understand the question. ‘Nothing.’ And then, perhaps feeling that that wasn’t plausible—‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Okay…’
‘I’m going downstairs for a bit,’ she said. It was a peculiarity of the old hillside house that the street entrance was on the top floor, so that what you would normally expect to find upstairs, you found downstairs.
On his own, he wondered why he was there. Only out of habit, it seemed. He had spent so much time in that house. The memories merged together. Memories of school holidays. People from different epochs of his life mingled there as they never had in time. He listened to the sound of the rain intensifying on the olive trees, of thunder fraying like acoustic distortion down the valley. The house itself had little or no sense of memory. It was always the same. This dim ecclesiastical light in the stillness of the salon. No photographs on public display, except, as if they had been forgotten there, a few in an unlit whitewashed alcove where the hall turned, including one of his mother. It was a snapshot from the early Seventies in which she was flanked by Isabel and himself. Somehow the setting does not seem to be London. Paris? He does not think he properly understood, at the time, what was happening. She was ill. However, even that he did not understand—it was just an explanation—some words that he himself would offer in his husky voice to explain the situation—he did not understand what they meant. He has no memories of the hospital, nothing like that. All there is is the thick ivory shagpile in the vestibule of the Wimbledon vicarage. In his own flat there are several framed photographs of her, this person of whom he has no actual memories, this utterly mysterious, utterly numinous person. What he finds painful now is imagining it all—that is, those months in 1974—from her point of view. Imagining himself from her point of view. Thus he sees himself as if from the outside, through her eyes. Thus he fumbles towards some estimate of what he might have lost. Well.
The temper he had in the years that followed… They lived in a four-storey house in Kensington. Today it would be a multimillionaire’s house. Kensington was not the same in the late Seventies. Except for the light. The light was the same then—the London light, flat and plain on London streets. The green electric typewriter muttering in the study on Sunday afternoons.
In the seating plan, Isabel has put Ted between herself and Kevin Staedtler’s wife. Kevin is the senior partner at Quarles, Lingus, and he and his wife, being in their fifties, are nearest to Ted in age—that was presumably the thinking there. James is down the other end, Steve’s end, where topics in the early part of the meal include the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini—someone whose name James associates with Miriam. Yes, she once made him sit through The Canterbury Tales… Even so, he knows little or nothing about his films and does not feel able to participate. Nor does he particularly want to, though Miranda, who is sitting on his left, keeps making efforts to include him. He is touched by these efforts but he finds it hard to live up to them—every time she asks him what he thinks, he just shrugs and says some variant of I don’t know.
Eventually she tries a new line of approach. She turns to him and says, ‘So what are you up to these days?’
The main course is just being served—two waitresses are doing the serving. Isabel has pulled out all the stops for this one, he thinks. Probably to impress Ted, to show him how well she’s doing…
‘The last time I saw you,’ Miranda says, ‘you had a magazine. I even remember the name. Plush.’
‘That’s right…’
‘Do you remember the last time I saw you?’
He thinks. ‘No,’ he says finally, laughing. ‘No, I don’t. I’m sorry.’
She hits him. ‘It was at the magazine launch party!’
‘At least I invited you to the launch party…’
‘No, you didn’t. I went with Izzy. I told you I thought Plush was a ludicrous name. You didn’t think that was very funny. Sorry if it upset you.’
He has no memory of the incident. Not even of speaking to her, not even of seeing her at the launch party. ‘That’s okay,’ he says. ‘And anyway, you were right. It was a ludicrous name.’
‘Of course it was. The magazine failed, I hear.’
‘It did.’
‘So what are you up to now? Izzy says you’re always up to something. When she told me the magazine had failed I said, “Poor James, is he okay?” And she laughed…’
‘She laughed?’
‘She laughed,’ Miranda says, smiling, with a secretive inclination of her head, ‘and said, “Oh don’t worry about James. He always finds something new.”’
‘She said that?’
‘And now she says you own a horse. You know my parents are members at Newbury racecourse?’
‘No, I didn’t know that…’
‘I’ve been there loads of times. You should come one day.’
‘I’d love to.’
‘What’s his name? Your horse.’
‘Her name. Absent Oelemberg.’
When he says the name, she says, ‘Sorry?’
‘Absent Oelemberg.’
‘What sort of name is that?’
He shrugs. ‘A horse’s name.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘I asked the trainer—he said he had no idea.’
‘Has she won?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I suppose it’s all totally fixed like you hear. How come you have a horse anyway? You didn’t used to be interested in horses, did you?’
‘No.’
‘So?’
‘Last year,’ he says, pouring them both some wine, ‘I had a sort of tipping service.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I sold tips on the Internet.’
‘What, horse-racing tips?’
‘Yes.’
She stares at him for a few seconds. Her eyes narrow nicely. ‘I can’t believe you were involved in something like that,’ she says. ‘And you look so nice and honest.’
‘Of course I do. I am nice. I am honest…’
‘Ha!’
‘It’s not dishonest,’ he protests.
‘Where did these tips come from? You?’
‘No. I empl
oyed someone.’
‘Who?’
‘A pro,’ he says innocently.
‘A pro? And did his tips make a profit? If his tips made a profit, why did he have to be employed by you? Did they make a profit?’
‘Sometimes.’
She laughs. ‘Sometimes? So much for being nice and honest!’ she says. Her eyes narrow smilingly again. ‘You really are quite louche, aren’t you?’
‘Not at all,’ he says, smiling also.
‘And then what happened?’
‘To the tipping service?’
‘Yes. Was it shut down?’
‘Not exactly. My tipster was arrested…’
Her loud laugh turns Mark’s head. For the last twenty minutes, he has struggled to seem interested in what some pregnant woman is saying to him while his peripheral vision was teasingly filled with Miranda talking and laughing and hitting James playfully on the other side of the table… What they were saying—though he wasn’t sure what it was—seemed infinitely more interesting than what was being said to him, though he wasn’t sure what that was either. Though he is still smiling fixedly in her direction, he has no idea what the pregnant woman is talking about, and when she finally stops—she may have asked him a question—he just says, ‘Yes, yes,’ and then turns to James and says, ‘Did I hear you say you’re a horseman?’
‘No,’ James says.
‘Oh. I thought I heard you say you were a horseman.’
‘I do own a horse. Or part-own it.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Mark turns to Miranda. ‘Your parents live in Newbury then?’
‘No,’ she says, ‘they don’t.’
‘Oh they don’t? I know Newbury quite well.’
She laughs. ‘Well they don’t live there.’
‘Where do they live?’
James leaves him to it and looks down the long table. At intervals there are vases of white flowers, and at the far end French windows into the garden. Most of the suits are up that end, and he sees Ted being introduced to Omar, while Mrs Staedtler looks on through an uninterested smile. Suddenly he hears Steve saying vehemently, ‘Now James was fucking loaded. I mean seriously fucking loaded.’