The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  “It’s been far too long,” he says.

  “What can I say? I’ve been busy.”

  He laughs. There are new creases at the corners of his eyes. His fingertips brush the back of hers. She glances up at him, smiles.

  “It’s good to see you,” she says.

  He smiles back. “It’s good to see you too.”

  He catches up her hand.

  “This okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Connected and distinct, his hand wrapped warm around hers, their footsteps fall into easy synchronicity.

  After a while, he slows to a halt, and she sees that they’re at an Underground station, the steps open down into the dark.

  “Shall we take the Tube?” he asks.

  Two girls pass, arm in arm, maybe seventeen years old, and they’re singing to themselves, to the open street, the city, happy and oblivious.

  He swings her hand just slightly, gently.

  She smiles. “I’m liking the walk really quite a lot.”

  “I’ll walk with you then, if you’d like that,” he says. “As far as you want to walk.”

  This makes her lean in, up on tiptoes, and kiss him on the lips.

  Holmedene Avenue, Herne Hill

  July 7, 2005

  SHE STIRS AT THE SOUND of the blackbird singing in the rowan tree outside her window. She doesn’t really wake; she is aware of herself, the tangle of the duvet round her right foot, the press of her shoulder into the mattress, the twist of her nightshirt round her thighs. Ciaran lies beside her. She feels him breathe. After a while, she looks at him, the softness of his sleeping face. Then he opens his eyes, dark, unfocused. He puts his arm out, and she shifts herself closer. They lie, almost sleeping, her leg resting over his legs, his arm around her shoulders. Soft.

  She thinks, I have to get up. Then after a while she says, “I have to get up.”

  He mumbles something. He pulls her in closer. They lie together. A car passes the end of the street, heading down Half Moon Lane.

  “I have to get up.”

  “Mmm.”

  She peels herself from him, lies on her back. “God.”

  “What is it?”

  “Work.”

  He rolls onto his side to look at her. “Do you have to?”

  “I’ve got this meeting.”

  “Ugh.”

  “With my boss. About my contract.”

  “All right.” He slides his arm out from underneath her. “You’ll need coffee.”

  As he gets out of bed she watches his body for a moment, the twists of muscle and the sheen of his skin as he pulls on yesterday’s shirt over his boxers.

  “D’you know,” he says, looking round the chaos of the room, the stacks of books and leaning canvasses, clothes slung in a heap in the armchair by the window, her easel standing on tiptoes in the rubble of paints and artboxes and folders, “I really love what you’ve done with the place.”

  She laughs. He smiles at her, heads out of the room. She hears his footfalls on the stairs and the quiet below as he potters round, opening cupboards, boiling the kettle. At least Norah isn’t up yet, to tease them, to be all I told you so about it.

  She rolls onto her front, looks sideways out towards the window, watches the way the light whitens the ancient hare’s skull on the windowsill, catches on the silver of the old toffee tin where she keeps her strange and broken things. The things she’d loved for their ugly mysteries. There comes a point with everything when the thing itself is no longer necessary, like a seed is used up as a seedling grows. Time for a clearout perhaps, she thinks.

  Later, though. She’ll do it later.

  For now, she lies there, the cool cotton beneath her cheek. She closes her eyes and the redness there flares and streaks with other colours. She wants him to come back, get back into bed beside her. She should get up. Coffee, shower, clothes, run for the train; but her body will not move, doesn’t want to. Train to Victoria, Circle line to Edgware Road. Walk—run—from there. If she gets up and showers now she can make the meeting. But time ticks on and she doesn’t stir. The blackbird is singing in the rowan tree in the front garden, and the light through the blinds is soft and early, and she just listens to the birdsong, and Ciaran moving around in the kitchen. She hears him coming back up the stairs, and he’s there. He sets the cups down on the heap of books and newspapers by the bed. Leans in and kisses her.

  “How much do you want the contract?”

  She pulls a face. “Need it.”

  “Ah, well.”

  He sits down on the edge of the bed.

  “There you go.” He offers her a mug. “Careful.”

  She blows on it, sips, winces.

  “I did say careful.”

  “The thing is though,” Billie says, “I’ve already left it a bit late.”

  He looks at his watch. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “I really hate being late.”

  The bird sings. Her hands are hot round the mug.

  “I suppose I could call,” she says. “Say I’ve come down with something.”

  “Better than just turning up late.”

  “She can’t sack me for being sick, can she?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’ll call her.”

  He takes the cup off her, sets it down. “Later.”

  “Yes, later.”

  Later, in the kitchen, she will switch on the radio while she makes further coffee, as he slices bread for toast, and just as she is saying something to make Ciaran laugh they will hear the news. They will hear about the dazed and bleeding people stumbling through the dark. The broken bodies left behind. The bus twisted like a crushed can, the wounded and the dead. And the selflessness, the fierce instinctive kindnesses of ordinary people. She will see herself, a different version of this morning, as it would have been without Ciaran in it. A crowded carriage. Arm linked round a metal pole, she is racing through the dark, towards an important meeting which doesn’t matter now at all, swaying towards the moment of explosion, of the world’s collapse.

  She will grip the edge of the kitchen counter, the breath knocked out of her.

  He will put his arms around her, and she’ll turn to him, and they’ll just stand there, listening, holding each other. Listening.

  She will shake her head, and mumble into his chest, and darken the blue cotton with her tears.

  “Billie,” he will say. “Billie, love, seriously, you are right where you should be.”

  But for years to come, as she moves through the city, she will find herself stepping round empty spaces on the pavement, because they seem somehow occupied. She feels like she is the ghost walking over other people’s graves. It occurs to her: there is no particular reason for me. It makes her reach for her phone, and call Ciaran, and talk for ages about nothing much at all.

  Later, there will be a wedding in the local register office, and a party after at the Commercial Hotel, and her dad will drink too much and dance with Ciaran’s sister, and Matty’s daughter, a crumpled flowergirl, will fall asleep on her father’s lap. Later, Billie will struggle through a difficult pregnancy and birth, and discover a vital, urgent love for her little girl, who inherits Madeline’s pensive frown and uses it when considering Stickle Bricks or unfamiliar food. And there will be inevitable struggles: her work, and Ciaran away for his work, and the baby’s sometimes overwhelming needs, and worries about Matty and their father’s failing health. There will be illness, and there will be death, and through it all there will be love.

  But for now, the blackbird still sings outside the window. Now, there is just the kiss, and the taste of coffee, and the clear strong knowledge that this, however long or brief, is happiness.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the British Council, who co-funded a writers’ residency in Valletta, Malta, in 2004. The seed of this story was sown there.

  During the writing of this novel there were certain books that I returned to again and
again, and to which I am particularly indebted. They are Eric Bush’s Gallipoli, Stephen E. Ambrose’s D-Day, Dan Parry’s D-Day: 6.6.44, Sandra Wallman and associates’ Living in South London, Sandra Koa Wong’s Our Longest Days, Richard J. Aldrich’s Witness to War and Frederick Alderson’s Bicycling: A History.

  I’m indebted to Robert Baker, Daragh Carville, Delphine Maurel Elmaleh, Elizabeth Oakley-Brown, Saleel Nurbhai and Andrew Wille for their help along the way.

  I’m grateful to Clare Alexander and Diana Coglianese, both of whom have contributed to this book in unique and essential ways.

  And to Laura Barber, my thanks.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jo Baker was born in Lancashire and educated at Oxford University and Queen’s University Belfast. The Undertow is her first publication in the United States. She is the author of three previous novels published in Great Britain: Offcomer, The Mermaid’s Child, and The Telling.

  The Undertow

  Jo Baker

  Reading Group Guide

  About This Guide

  The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested further reading that follow are designed to enliven your group’s discussion of Jo Baker’s American debut, The Undertow, an emotionally complex novel chronicling the lives of the Hastings family through four tumultuous generations.

  Introduction

  Jo Baker’s sweeping, hugely ambitious new novel, The Undertow, spans nearly a century in the life of one family, the Hastings, from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2005. Indeed, war is a constant throughout the novel, shaping the lives of each of its main characters, as world history impinges on personal history in complex and myriad ways.

  The book begins as young William Hastings prepares to set off to war. He gives his wife Amelia a photo album and promises to send postcards from every port of call. He keeps his promise but finds himself irresistibly drawn toward the wider world he’s just gotten a taste of. He can’t imagine returning to his grinding, gray factory job after the war is over. In Malta, he talks of jumping ship and declares: “I can’t go back.… There’s so much more to see. It’s beautiful” (this page). This wish to escape—a wish that in William’s case ends in a horrific entrapment—will run throughout the book, as each of William’s descendants is overtaken by similar feelings, though they express them, and act on them, in quite different ways.

  William’s son Billy becomes a champion bicycle racer, escaping from hunger and poverty into the sheer animal joy of biking. “The world is new today.… He has a bike. He has speed. He can go anywhere” (this page). Starting as delivery boy, he eventually achieves stardom as a bike racer. But he fails to make the Olympic team, and when World War II breaks out, he finds himself racing onto the beach at Normandy. His own son Will is born with a congenital disease, leaving him with a permanent limp and a strained relationship with his father. As a young boy Will, too, mounts a daring escape to avoid an experimental operation to “pin” his hip. He overcomes his disability, attends Oxford, and becomes a college professor, but cannot remain faithful to his wife, Madeline. Will’s daughter, Billie, so distressed by her parents looming divorce, briefly runs away from home, taking a train to her grandparents in London and thus completing her own version of the ritual of escape each generation of the Hastings seems compelled to attempt.

  But the desire to escape is not the only thread that runs through the Hastings family history. Secrets, infidelities, great loves and great losses recur as well. Sully, William’s treacherous shipmate who survives the war, makes several menacing, ghostly reappearances—like a repressed thought that will not stay away. But though they all share the same name, and resemble each other, as Billie says to her father, “like Russian dolls,” they are also markedly different.

  Baker captures not only the personal changes from one generation to the next, but also the evolution of the zeitgeist—the growing urge toward greater openness and self-awareness, which culminates in Billie, a painter who wants to make people look at what they do not want to see. In a fitting ending to a remarkable book, she tells her father: “You’ve got to look fate right in the eye. You’ve got to stare it down” (this page). The desire to escape that runs throughout the novel is beautifully resolved, and overcome, in Billie’s defiant, anti-escapist aesthetic.

  Questions for Discussion

  1. Why has Jo Baker chosen The Undertow for her title? Where does a literal undertow appear in the novel? What is the metaphoric undertow that exerts a pull on all the main characters?

  2. Why does Baker begin the novel with Amelia and William at a cheap movie theater watching a film about treachery, jealousy, and betrayal, but which ends happily: “All troubles are over, all discord is resolved: no one loves the wrong person or wants something they can never have, or has to face something they simply cannot face” (this page). How does this opening scene set up some of the themes that will recur throughout the book?

  3. What is the appeal of following a single family through four generations? In what ways are William, Billy, Will, and Billie remarkably alike? What common threads run throughout the generations? In what ways are they quite different from one another?

  4. The desire to escape is a major theme of The Undertow. In what ways do William, Billy, Will, and Billie all attempt to escape? Why do they feel trapped? What different methods do they use to get free?

  5. In what ways are history and family history deeply intertwined in The Undertow? How does the history that one generation lives through affect the next generation?

  6. When William wanders into a cathedral on Malta in 1915, he sees Caravaggio’s painting The Beheading of St. John the Baptist and thinks: “This is not a holy picture.… This is not a holy place. There’s too much dirt and dark and blood: this is all too human … there’s no God, no guidance, no forgiveness here” (this page). Nearly ninety years later, Billie views the very same painting. Compare her response, on this page–this page, to her great-grandfather’s. How does the painting influence Billie’s own sense of artistic purpose?

  7. Why would Billie want to paint “what people don’t look at … to paint it and put it in a frame and make it something that people really look at. Deliberately. That they linger over” (this page)?

  8. When Will worries that Billie’s painting of Matthew—which appears in a group of her paintings of wounded soldiers—is tempting fate, Billie says: “I think, whatever it is, by not looking at it, not saying it, not admitting it to yourself, that’s the temptation, that’s the danger. You’ve got to look fate right in the eye. You’ve got to stare it down” (this page). Is Billie right about this? In what ways does she embody a new openness that none of her ancestors could achieve?

  9. What are the major secrets that run throughout the novel? What are their consequences?

  10. How does Billy react to his son Will’s disability? Why does he feel his killing the boy in Normandy was the “down payment” (this page) for a second chance at having a healthy son?

  11. In what ways does war pervade The Undertow? How does it affect each of the main characters? In what ways does the novel show the emotional costs of war across generations, for both men and women?

  12. What role does Sully—William’s shipmate who survived the sinking of the Goliath—play in the novel? Is there a larger significance in his menacing reappearances?

  13. When Amelia’s boss, Mr. Jack, mentions the rumor of a new front opening in France, he tells her: “But keep it to yourself, eh? … Keep mum.” Amelia thinks: “Motherhood and silence: why the same word?” (this page). What is the connection between motherhood and silence, especially for women of Amelia’s generation?

  14. In what ways does The Undertow offer a very personal history of the twentieth century? Discuss the emotional evolution that occurs from William in 1914, through Billy and Will, to Billie in 2005?

  15. Why has Jo Baker chosen to end the novel with a scene of lyrical tenderness, as Billie thinks of the future and the
present: “There will be illness, and there will be death, and through it all there will be love. But for now, the blackbird still sings outside the window. Now, there is just the kiss, and the taste of coffee, and the clear strong knowledge that this, however long or brief, is happiness” (this page)? Why would Billie locate happiness in such a simple, ordinary moment? In what ways does this passage echo Billy’s philosophy of not looking further than the next ten yards?

  Suggested Further Reading

  John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers; Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex; James Jones, The Thin Red Line; Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory; Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms; Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore; Zadie Smith, White Teeth; Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour.