When the World Was Steady

by Claire Messud

  Virginia nodded and put the photograph down. ‘Do you miss it, ever?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The island.’

  Emmy was busy checking in her handbag, which was tiny and expensive-looking and matched her suit exactly. ‘Oh,’ she said after a moment, ‘You know, it was a holiday. You can’t stay on holiday forever.’ She looked up and smiled, a controlled smile, not like the innocent eruption Virginia had recently seen on her childhood face. ‘Ginny dear, I’m in such a state. You will forgive me if I go on ahead, won’t you? I promised Pod I’d help her get ready, and I’m running late as it is. I feel terrible leaving you’—Virginia shook her head slightly to dismiss her sister’s guilt—‘but you know how it is. The number for the cab company is by the phone in the kitchen, and I’d allow about twenty minutes, if I were you, just in case.’

  Car keys in hand, Emmy fumbled at the front door and turned back. ‘I hope you’re not disappointed that it’s a registry office do,’ she said, blushing visibly beneath her tan. ‘When you’ve come all this way and … well, you know. But the reception should be an event.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘See you there, then.’ With a vague wave, her sister was gone.

  Virginia stood for a while in the centre of the little living-room, conscious of an ache at the base of her spine, puzzling over Emmy’s parting comment—a reference, she took it, to the absence of religious ritual in the forthcoming proceedings. In a different world, in a different time, she might have tried to explain to Emmy the complexity of her own current relationship to the divine, but her sister, she knew, would not have understood. Virginia was momentarily overwhelmed by the loneliness of this sororal isolation, her own greatest human failure, and her sister’s.

  Since the summertime, since the awful cataclysm of their mother’s fall and all that came before and after it, Virginia had not settled back into easy conversation with her God. Citing her mother’s greater need, she shunned the comfort of the prayer group (which no longer met at Angelica’s, since she had abandoned her faith, but gathered instead in the fiery bosom of Frieda Watson’s house), and she could no longer face the sermons that Reverend Thompson continued, so fervently, to declaim. She felt that the church, but not God, had deserted her in her time of greatest need, and yet she was uncertain of where the blame lay: with the Reverend? with St Luke’s? with the blind joyfulness of evangelism itself?

  When Angelica revealed her faithlessness, Virginia had concurred, falsely, that God might Himself be in the wrong, or at least, might be cruel. But for herself, she attributed fault to human inadequacy and she continued to try to believe that He Himself could not disappoint. Almost behind the back of her quavering, invalid mother, Virginia tiptoed from church to church, three Sundays here, a couple there, the larger the congregation the better. She sat quietly in the back corners of these churches, behind pillars, near exits, and learned how to slip away from even the friendliest gatherings without meeting anyone or shaking the minister’s welcoming hand. Her former solace had become a terrifying covert expedition, an addiction almost, that she would have abandoned altogether, even temporarily, if she had been able.

  But out in the world, in the London that looked ruthlessly and exactly the same since her return from Skye (except for the promotion of Martin to Selina’s post when Selina left unexpectedly to marry a wealthy man), she could discern only emptiness and terror, a morass of humanity’s failure masked only by its transparent illusions of meaning. And she felt that the only way open to her was to keep searching for the warm arms of her God. If she had had one wish, it would have been for the restitution of her own all-consuming certainty: never to have seen, never to have known, never to have doubted.

  Under the circumstances, however, she thought as she ran the lukewarm bathwater, she could hardly blame Emmy for holding her daughter’s wedding in a registry office. It would be a quicker ceremony, more impersonal. More honest.

  The Saturday morning traffic crawled across town, and although Emmy was only going as far as Pod and Pietro’s flat in Paddington, she found her anxiety mounting as she inched away minute upon minute. She had a terror that Pod would go ahead and dress without her; that she, Emmy, would be denied that symbolic mother-daughter wedding ritual as she was being denied all the others: for obvious reasons, the reception was to take place on William’s vast lawn, rather than in her own minute garden. She tried, as she stopped and started in the fug of exhaust smoke, to look ahead at the day with an open heart, but she found her mind straying to the photograph Virginia had held in her bony hand, of Emmy—another Emmy—on top of Abang.

  It was Jenny who had sent her the picture, only a couple of months before, with a long and slightly incoherent letter. Buddy, it seemed, had then recently left Bali for good, escorted to the airport by his former friend, the Ubud Chief of Police, and forbidden ever to return. Jenny did not make clear what had occurred, and Emmy could only guess, but the final Sparke departure had evidently been as abrupt as the one she herself had witnessed.

  The house, its swimming-pool completed, had been left open and unchanged, as though Buddy might resurface within hours from one of his periodic junkets. It was Jenny who had scrubbed and washed and folded and pulled the shutters down; it was she who had taken the abandoned photograph of the climbers from on top of the television and had thought to send it to Emmy. She did not speak openly of disappointment in her letter, but nor did she speak of coming to Sydney: her last chance had flown away, like all the others, in a silver 747.

  When she received this communication, Emmy had been moved to a frenzy of remembering, to a nostalgia for a self she had really believed to be truer than her Sydney one. (She had said so, upon her return, over lunch with her friend Janet, but Janet had scoffed and said no self was truer than any other, that they were all the same really, and that it was merely a sign of how unbalanced Emmy had been that she had even considered staying in Indonesia.) Remembering, Emmy had sworn to herself to do for Jenny what Buddy had not: to send her application forms for accounting courses, to look into visa requirements, to try, if necessary, to pull strings to ensure her a place and a future. But then Pod had announced her sudden plans to marry Pietro, and amid the whirl-wind preparations the photograph had slipped from sight, and Jenny with it.

  Emmy felt ashamed, in her elegant silk, on her way to see her daughter married; ashamed that Jenny had been so easy to forget. The self Emmy wanted to be, the innermost self she thought she truly was, would not have forgotten. It was as though, by going out into the world, that self had been encased and mummified by all the other selves she was to other people, until it was impossible to remember, or even to be certain, that there was a truth beneath the skin.

  This was her way of being, she recognized, and her way of not suffering too much, which was why she had come home to the mantles—however tattered—that she knew how to wear. And it was a condemnation of this way that she felt she had seen this morning (felt, indeed, that she had always seen) in her sister’s eyes, her sister who had always found meaning and merit in suffering, even for its own sake.

  As she neared her daughter’s house, Emmy wished she could be certain that after the fuss of the wedding was over, she would think again of Jenny and fulfil her earlier promises to herself, but she found she could not. In all honesty, she did not want to be naked to the world, and wounded, even if that nakedness made her a nobler person. She did not want to remember everything. But she had thrilled to her illusions of honesty and freedom, and even if she forgot Jenny’s future she would treasure her walks in the dream landscape the Sparkes had offered her, and would cling to the few, magical words Jenny had taught her in the Monkey Forest, and she would believe that somewhere, at some time, she had truly been herself.

  And as she ran from the car to Pod’s front door, catching her heel in the pavement on the way, Emmy Richmond hoped more passionately than ever that her daughter had not got dressed without her.

  Virginia accepted a glass o
f champagne from the passing waiter’s tray and stood observing the crowd on the lawn. It was terribly, very un-English-ly hot, and she was grateful again for the broad brim of her white straw hat. That aside, the day could not be faulted. The Australian summer sky had remained impeccable, and both the elegant and the less elegant had dressed in their finest for the occasion. Virginia held her champagne flute with both hands.

  ‘Of course she’s too young,’ she heard her sister say, in a falsely gay voice, ‘but isn’t anyone, anytime? Aren’t we all? Whatever makes her happy … Yes, she does look beautiful. She does. Originally, I wondered about the red and gold, but you know how they are, and now I see it …’ Emmy drifted over to Virginia, her mouth fixed in a crimson hostess’s smile.

  ‘All well, sister mine? Can I introduce you to some people? I know the service wasn’t much, but isn’t this lovely? It is so wonderful that you could be here!’

  Emmy said this, Virginia thought, with exaggerated enthusiasm.

  ‘It’s a lovely wedding,’ she volunteered.

  ‘Trust Portia to choose the week after Christmas, that’s all I can say.’ Emmy’s eyes were darting around as she spoke. She winked or blinked at someone, raised her glass to another, nodded to a third, grinning furiously.

  ‘He’s got a lovely place here, hasn’t he?’ said Virginia. Emmy flashed her a glance, aware in the midst of her formal responsibilities that Virginia was not acting her part: that she either knew nothing at all about her sister or was deliberately trying to wound.

  ‘William? William and Dora? Mmm, lovely.’ Her smile was brittle.

  ‘You do too, of course. I love my room.’

  ‘Pod’s room.’ Emmy said this rather sorrowfully. ‘She does look beautiful, doesn’t she, my baby, going out into the world?’

  ‘Yes, my niece is really very beautiful,’ said Virginia. It sounded strange coming from her, like a sentence in a French lesson.

  Emmy looked her sister up and down, Virginia who had come all this way (first time ever) for this niece she hardly knew. She would almost have said Virginia looked pretty, if Virginia had been someone else. At least she was wearing lipstick, and her dress, while somewhat old-fashioned, was not painfully dowdy. Emmy, in spite of the heat and the hectic to-and-fro of the wedding, continued to look good and knew it: on William’s lawn, among Pietro’s relatives, this was her only armour. It was armour that Virginia, Emmy felt once again, with some exasperation, was looking right through.

  ‘Why did you come, anyway?’ Emmy asked. ‘After all this time?’

  ‘I thought it was important,’ Virginia said. ‘I knew Mother wanted me to. It was important to her.’ She paused. ‘This is an ordeal for you, isn’t it?’ she said, which really made Emmy hate her. In this garden, among these people, wreathed in failure as Emmy felt herself to be (Dora, her ex-friend and ex-husband’s wife, was only a stone’s throw away), the largest part of the effort lay in making it seem effortless. Only an enemy would expose her.

  ‘Such a shame Mother couldn’t be here, no?’ she offered by way of reply, raising a glass to a small, dark, plump woman in stifling-looking purple velvet. ‘The mother-in-law,’ she explained between her teeth.

  Virginia wanted to turn and walk away from her sister. Or to hit her, or something. ‘Mother couldn’t possibly have come. She finds it extremely difficult even to walk, you know. She almost never goes out now.’ She wasn’t sure whether Emmy was listening or not. ‘I told you last night, if my friend Angelica hadn’t moved into the flat to take care of her, I couldn’t have come myself.’

  Emmy clucked in a superficially sympathetic way.

  ‘After the fall, the peculiar thing was, she wanted to stay on Skye,’ Virginia continued. ‘She went on and on about it.’

  ‘Good heavens. How horrible.’ Emmy and Virginia’s eyes met. ‘Was she delirious or something?’

  ‘I don’t know. She never mentions it now.’

  William’s elegant outline loomed into view at the edge of the gathering before them.

  ‘William, darling,’ cried Emmy, lunging for his arm, ‘You remember my sister Virginia, don’t you? Haven’t seen each other in decades. Do us a favour? Take Ginny along to congratulate Pod and Pietro? I don’t see how she’s to make it through the crush otherwise. There are some new arrivals over there I just must say hello to before they’re swallowed up.’

  Both women were grateful for Emmy’s desperate act, although only Virginia had the luxury of feeling superior to it. As they forged their separate paths through the swelling, ever-tightening mass of the party, each woman held up her escape from the other as a tiny, shining trophy, even though both knew that their joy in such freedom could only last moments.

  Read an excerpt from

  THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS

  By Claire Messud

  Available from Knopf

  April 2013

  1

  How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

  I’m a good girl, I’m a nice girl, I’m a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody’s boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents’ shit and my brother’s shit, and I’m not a girl anyhow, I’m over forty fucking years old, and I’m good at my job and I’m great with kids and I held my mother’s hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone—every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it’s pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say “Great Artist” on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say “such a good teacher/daughter/friend” instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.

  Don’t all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We’re all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we’re brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third grade, they’re well and truly gone—they’re full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their hair looks! In the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than “dutiful daughter” is “looked good”; everyone used to know that. But we’re lost in a world of appearances now.

  That’s why I’m so angry, really—not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman—or rather, of being me—because maybe these are the burdens of being human. Really I’m angry because I’ve tried so hard to get out of the hall of mirrors, this sham and pretend of the world, or of my world, on the East Coast of the United States of America in the first decade of the twenty-first century. And behind every mirror is another fucking mirror, and down every corridor is another corridor, and the Fun House isn’t fun anymore and it isn’t even funny, but there doesn’t seem to be a door marked EXIT.

  At the fair each summer when I was a kid, we visited the Fun House, with its creepy grinning plaster face, two stories high. You walked in through its mouth, between its giant teeth, along its hot-pink tongue. Just from that face, you should’ve known. It was supposed to be a lark, but it was terrifying. The floors buckled or they lurched from side to side, and the walls were crooked, and the rooms were painted to confuse perspective. Lights flashed, horns blared, in the narrow, vibrating hallways lined with fattening mirrors and elongating mirrors and inside-out upside-down mirrors. Sometimes the ceiling fell or the floor rose, or both happened at once and I thought I’d be squashed like a bug. The Fun House was scarier by far than
the Haunted House, not least because I was supposed to enjoy it. I just wanted to find the way out. But the doors marked EXIT led only to further crazy rooms, to endless moving corridors. There was one route through the Fun House, relentless to the very end.

  I’ve finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it. No: let me correct that. In recent years, there was a door, there were doors, and I took them and I believed in them, and I believed for a stretch that I’d managed to get out into Reality—and God, the bliss and terror of that, the intensity of that: it felt so different—until I suddenly realized I’d been stuck in the Fun House all along. I’d been tricked. The door marked EXIT hadn’t been an exit at all.

  I’m not crazy. Angry, yes; crazy, no. My name is Nora Marie Eldridge and I’m forty-two years old—which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one. Neither old nor young, I’m neither fat nor thin, tall nor short, blond nor brunette, neither pretty nor plain. Quite nice looking in some moments, I think is the consensus, rather like the heroines of Harlequin romances, read in quantity in my youth. I’m neither married nor divorced, but single. What they used to call a spinster, but don’t anymore, because it implies that you’re dried up, and none of us wants to be that. Until last summer, I taught third grade at Appleton Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and maybe I’ll go back and do it again, I just don’t know. Maybe, instead, I’ll set the world on fire. I just might.

  Be advised that in spite of my foul mouth, I don’t swear in front of the children—except once or twice when a rogue “Shit!” has emerged, but only sotto voce, and only in extremis. If you’re thinking how can such an angry person possibly teach young children, let me assure you that every one of us is capable of rage, and that some of us are prone to it, but that in order to be a good teacher, you must have a modicum of self-control, which I do. I have more than a modicum. I was brought up that way.