Towards the end, he mentions that he likes the UK because it’s designed for left-handers, to which tribe he belongs. My love for him is complete.
A few years ago, Robert bought me a left-handed bread knife for my birthday. If you don’t know the difference, it means those serrated bits are on a different side of the blade. They make it possible for a left-hander not to look a complete idiot when slicing a piece of bread. I show a group of friends lunching at my house this new and wonderful thing. A group of women who’ve all been pretty committed to women’s rights. ‘Does this mean,’ says one of them, in a sort of have I heard you right sort of way, ‘that Robert has to use a knife with the serrations on the wrong side?’
In the kitchen alone, I deal with the mixer—having to use my right hand to manipulate the bowl—along with the espresso machine and the coffee grinder, both designed for the right-handed. The toaster is wonderfully even-handed, though the timer is turned clockwise, which is counter-intuitive. Opening a tin requires me to do the hard bit with my right hand. All this means that we left-handers constantly look clumsy. We’re also gently mocked: have you seen a left-hander writing? So funny!! We have our hand upside down, which, I’ve worked out, means we’re pulling the pen across the page like right-handers do. Rather than pushing it and smudging the ink as we go. Eftpos machines in shops require us to use our awkward right hand. Don’t get me started again on sewing machines.
In America, says Bryson, his mother used to get mad at him for holding his fork in the wrong hand. This is because the Americans use their right hand to cut, as we do, but then they transfer the fork to their right hand to shove enormous amounts of unhealthy food into their faces. To his mother’s fury, Bryson determinedly forks away with his left hand.
I’m quietly crowing at 3 a.m. when he says this. It’s a small triumph, but I’ve always felt the English—and we—eat left-handed. We also, he points out, drive left-handed, especially when we have cars with gear sticks.
I could go on, but the last thing I want anybody to feel is pity. We left-handers are a secret, happy club. We put up with the implications contained in sinister and gauche. We smile empathetically when we see someone else turn their hand around oddly to write. My mother was left-handed until it was strapped out of her at primary school. My daughter is left-handed and she’s downcast when her children, Lucie and Max, show a strong preference for their right hand. Ten per cent of you are nodding. Benedict’s Flora’s right-handed. At time of writing we hold out hope—it’s too soon to be sure—that Edward is on our team. He uses both hands, but he seems to be showing a preference. Gemma and I are crossing our fingers.
A couple of years ago Robert and I went to tai chi in Karori. It’s held in a hall that has since been demolished in case the earthquake gets it. There are about 10 women, and two men, the other of whom is about 90. Robert immediately proves that he can follow instructions. He becomes a hit with the class; one woman asks for his email address on the pretext that she’s going to send him something to do with classes elsewhere for the talented.
They all ignore me. I’m okay for the first two or so moves, but the minute the lithely fluid man teaching us starts getting us to mirror what he’s doing, I’m lost. We’re so used to over-compensating, us left-handers; when we’re standing opposite an instructor, we wouldn’t have a clue. Do we move our left leg when he moves his left leg? Do we mirror him? I get hopelessly lost. I’m back in Form 4 when the teacher in charge of what was then basketball says in front of everybody that Linda’s going to play in one of the 3rd Form teams. There are too many 4th Formers. Linda, she says, won’t mind. ‘You’re not quite as flat-footed as last year,’ she says later.
I don’t have stamina. I don’t have grit. I’m not the sort of person who on television swears to face up to a challenge and beat it. Standing there hopelessly entangled in my own limbs, I say to the patient instructor, ‘Sorry, I have trouble following instructions. It’s because I’m left-handed.’
The woman next to me, neatly attired in the perfect gear, who knows exactly when to bend, swoop, keep her eyes to the front and extend her arm, the one who’s going to forward Robert details of a class elsewhere, the class for the physically gifted, says, ‘I don’t have any trouble.’
‘And,’ she says, ‘I’m left-handed.’
19.
TRAVELLING
WITH
LUCIE
In which we take our eldest grandchild to Europe
We’re in the doorway of our bedroom and we’re having an argument. It’s not loud, it’s one of those low-level vitriolic ones, right on the border between love and hate. Lucie, somewhere round knee-level, is standing quietly between us. She says, her voice full of wonder, ‘You’re both going to die.’
She’s the first of the grandchildren, born early, in Auckland, when Gemma, just 24, develops pre-eclampsia. She’s 34 weeks pregnant, we know that this is okay statistically, but as we get her stuff together to go into hospital, Gemma says, ‘It’s too soon. It’s too soon.’ Joe, also just 24, is learning how to cope with this sort of thing. They seem like children. They’re playing at being grown-ups, right down to renting a darling cottage at Bethells Beach which they share with their dog Toots. With the birth still meant to be weeks away, they haven’t really believed they’re going to have to get things ready for this child which is going to turn them into a family. Nothing is ready.
We’re up in Auckland, by fortunate chance, so we stay. Our friends Di and Alistair offer us a bed far closer to the hospital than Bethells Beach is. I go into Gemma’s room at the hospital and she’s crying, and Joe helplessly, lovingly, holds her hand. I ask what’s wrong. The midwife has just been in. She wants to connect something to the baby’s head, a clamp, to monitor what’s going on in there. Gemma says, ‘But that’s horrible for the baby.’ And the midwife, who Joe has already described as a Westie surfie chick, says, ‘Well, it’s better than a dead baby.’
I’m down the hall, into the nurses’ room, and I’m feral mother. ‘Who,’ I say, ‘is in charge of my daughter Gemma?’ A timorous hand is raised. ‘Never,’ I say, as if I’ve just discovered a 4th Former is peddling drugs, but far more terrifying than I ever was as a teacher, ‘never never never use the words dead baby to a woman who’s giving birth.’
Minutes later, the sort of woman whom writer Russell Hoban names Bundlejoy Cosysweet comes quietly into the room. She’s warm-faced and curly-haired and she says, in the most practical, comforting way, ‘I’m Luise Brandt. And we’re starting again.’
‘Brandt?’ I say. The year before I’ve been working on the TV show Duggan with a Brandt. ‘Are you any relation to William?’ She’s his sister. There are three Brandts in their family, and 17 years later we discover that the third one is the father of Lucie’s dear friend Elsa. It’s neither here nor there, just a deeply satisfying coincidence.
They’ve asked not to be told the baby’s sex in advance. It’s a girl. Quite by chance we’re there to see her born. Gemma holds her and says, ‘I feel so … privileged.’ Then, with extreme loss of blood, she falls into a deep faint. I think, I’m seeing a birth and a death. But the staff are onto it.
Joe’s mother Rose and I, sick with love, are on either side of the clear plastic bed that contains a small but perfect Lucie. She’s hiccupping, and we’re worrying if this is normal. The neo-natal nurse says, ‘Grandmothers?’
When she’s about 18 months old, Lucie starts to call me by my name. What she thinks is my name. They’re living in Rotorua, and when I get off the plane a tiny thing with fine blonde hair is running towards me and she’s yelling, ‘Wellingtong! Wellingtong!’
She’s nearly three. We’ve had The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, and Bread and Jam For Frances, and she’s standing next to me on the sofa and we’re just chatting and she says, ‘I love talking about flings with you, Granny.’
2013. We’re in Auckland for Lucie’s thirteenth birthday in June. We’ve vagu
ely discussed it: we’re sort of planning to go to Europe towards the end of the year. Something mad deep inside me makes me say to Lucie, ‘Would you like to come to Europe with us in September?’ Such joy. Such ecstasy. It means we can’t change our minds, even when we go home and Robert learns there’s to be a restructuring, and it’s the expensive ones who’re to go.
Amsterdam Airport. The man in authority who is stamping our passports looks at all three, then indicates that the queue behind us divert to the one beside us.
He says, ‘What is the relationship between you and this child?’
We say, ‘We’re her grandparents.’ He looks pointedly at our different surnames. We say, ‘Our daughter’s daughter.’
‘Do you have permission,’ he says, ‘to bring her to Europe?’
‘Of course,’ we say. ‘We’re bringing her here on holiday.’
‘Do you have proof of this?’ He turns to Lucie. ‘Who are these people?’ he asks politely.
She says, ‘My grandparents.’
He says, ‘Why aren’t you in school?’
She says, ‘Because they’re bringing me here on holiday.’
‘It’s against the law in Holland,’ he says, ‘to take children out of school.’
We say, almost truthfully, ‘It’s holidays at home.’
He says to Lucie, ‘How old are you?’
And she says, ‘Thirteen.’
‘Nearly 14?’
‘No!’ she says keenly. ‘I’m not 14 for nine more—’
‘Nearly 14?’ he says again, and she’s sharp enough to get there’s a message in here.
Yes, she’s nearly 14.
Stamp. Stamp. Pause. Stamp. ‘Have a good time in Holland,’ he says. ‘With your grandparents.’
My sister Deborah and her husband Henk collect us from the airport. They live in Haarlem, an exquisite town just outside of Amsterdam. It’s first thing in the morning, and everywhere parents are taking children to school. Everybody is on bikes. No helmets to be seen. One mother, on her bike, riding at full speed, talks to her five-year-old riding along on his bike beside her. In a large basket on the front of her bike sits a toddler. He has some sort of game with him, which requires twisting and turning a piece of equipment. He plays, as uninterrupted, as engrossed, as he would be if sitting on his bedroom floor.
Lucie looks out of the window and she says, ‘It’s the movies. It’s like being in the movies.’
We go to the Hermitage museum in Amsterdam where there’s an exhibition on the life of Peter the Great. There’s a vast tapestry that Peter the Great himself has made. Amazingly, you’re allowed to touch it. Lucie cautiously fingers a corner of it. ‘To think,’ she says, ‘to think I’m touching something that Peter the Great has touched.’
Deborah’s organised a spare bike, and Lucie and Robert set out on a ride along the canals to meet up with the three of us at a café in the countryside. We see them in the distance, flying towards us. No helmets. Lucie never, never, never wants to leave.
We go to Anne Frank’s house, where nearly 30 years before we took Lucie’s mother when she was the age Lucie is now. It has been one of Gemma’s strongest memories, and bookish Lucie has read the diary. But the house has changed. Then it was still as it had been, with Otto Frank’s ex-offices a simple art gallery; now the attic itself is reached through something much larger. It has become a Destination. There is a queue that reaches out the door and around the corner, and some Americans in the queue say to us, ‘If only we’d known!’ Apparently, you’re meant to book online! Online didn’t exist in 1989.
We cross the canal so we can gaze up at the window from which Anne Frank could only ever look at night. We stand there and we tell Lucie that if we’d been exactly here 70 years earlier, looking up, we might have caught a glimpse of the girl who didn’t go outside for more than two years, and who left this house to go to her death. Across the canal, the queue hardly seems to have moved. So we sit there for a while, looking up, and Lucie looks and looks so quietly, thinking about the girl who went into that very place when she was the age Lucie is now. Then we go on our way.
France. Paris. We arrive at night and from our hotel we can see the Eiffel Tower in the distance. Lucie says, ‘I want to go there.’
‘Tomorrow,’ we say, but she says, ‘Let’s go now, I’ll take you.’
‘Okay,’ we say. ‘We’ll follow you.’
She adeptly follows her nose, and we zigzag across Paris, but it takes us nearly two hours, with the Tower never seeming to get much closer. We’re stopped briefly by the sound of sirens. We stand by the Seine, and police cars and black vans with the sort of klaxons that remind me always of the film about Anne Frank that I saw when I was Lucie’s age are streaming past. DA da DA da DA da. On and on they go. There must be 40 or 50 vehicles travelling in convoy at great speed, and we wonder which vault has been robbed, or how much money is being moved, or which important person is being transported.
Not a family from an attic.
Finally, we arrive at the Eiffel Tower, and there’s just time, if the queue moves fast enough, to go up in the lift partway. Lucie says she doesn’t mind if we don’t, she just wants to stand underneath it and look up. Up we look, at the giant Meccano model.
We get a taxi back to our hotel.
In the countryside, near the Swiss border, staying with Jean-Louis and Christiane. Lucie is homesick. She huddles upstairs in the room that Gemma slept in when she was Lucie’s age. She can’t be pulled away from the iPad. She can’t understand a thing anyone is saying to her. She’s sick of explaining to the incredulous French that she doesn’t eat meat. I go up to lure her down, and she’s under the blankets, head turned to the wall, and she’s crying. It occurs to me that we could all be home in round about three days. If worse came to worst. Stuff travel. So often it doesn’t feel worth it.
I sit on the bed. She says in a small, damp voice that girls from school are being mean to her. They’re saying things about her. Because of … something she said. She’s been spending time on her school’s Facebook page and … I say, No more iPad. Except to Skype Mum and Dad and Max. And she says okay. We wait a few minutes and she comes downstairs, and Christiane asks her in French if she’d like a crêpe with some lemon and sugar, and Lucie says, ‘Oui, merci.’
‘You understood!’ I say, and she looks puzzled for a minute and says, ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘What did she ask you?’ I ask, and she says, ‘If I wanted a pancake. With lemon and sugar.’
Robert and Jean-Louis go to a rugby game in Lyon: the LOU is playing. They meet up with Maurice, who 40 years ago used to pay our bills. We wonder if we can hit him up for this holiday. He spontaneously invites us all to dinner. He and Nicole now live in the country. She will be thrilled to see us! Two hours’ time? He’s 80 now, but he looks exactly the same. Bright eyes and smooth rosy cheeks. Thick hair brushed straight back.
With substantial help from Jean-Louis’ GPS, the five of us finally pull up in a house that sits alone in the countryside. In New Zealand it would be called the backblocks. There’s a large gloomy modern house, the sort the French specialise in—plastered walls, shutters, wrought iron, heavy tiles, geraniums. That crunchy skid which is tyres on gravel, and it’s Maurice, just arriving home.
Nicole comes to the door. Unlike Maurice, who’s stayed so young, she is old, tired and looks slightly deranged. Their entrance hall with its high stud and its bare walls looking as if they’re just waiting for some antlers would be at home in a modest medieval castle. Maurice ushers us all into a dark sitting room and rushes off to get champagne from the cellar.
In the vast, dark sitting room, Lucie has found the only place with a dim light and she’s reading. Comfort reading: she’s brought one of the Harry Potters to reread for the zillionth time. She’s happy. She has a whole bag of chippies.
Jean-Louis and Christiane have stopped on the way to buy chocolates and flowers, because no French person ever goes to someone’s place without a gift. Maur
ice, barely visible across the other side of the room, takes the flowers away for Nicole to deal with. I follow him into the kitchen; she’s standing gripping a densely cluttered bench. She gives him a look of palpable hatred, but he doesn’t even notice. He bounces out again. He’s on a high. He’s gabbling with pleasure. He’s bouncing. He’s twirling. He has Jean-Louis, captain of the LOU when it was at its peak, and best of all Bob, oh my God, Bob, for whom he has feelings of true romance, who he associates forever with the LOU’s greatest days.
Nicole says Maurice has only just told her we were coming. The plumber, she adds, who’s been there for hours, has just left. There’s been no water all day. Fortunately, she says, she has water now.
‘I don’t know what we’re going to eat,’ she says.
I say, ‘Truly, nothing matters. A sandwich.’
She’s looking in the fridge and she’s pulled out salami and a fillet of beef.
I say, ‘Don’t worry, but Lucie doesn’t eat meat.’
Nicole utters a sentence that has gone into our family’s lexicon: ‘Not even foie gras?’
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘She eats vegetables.’
She says, ‘But I have no vegetables.’
She’s relaxing though. A little. She’s calming down. We eat foie gras. We eat charcuterie. We eat fillet steak accompanied by the sort of mushrooms that cost $10 each. ‘No thank you,’ says Lucie. I’m so proud of her, sitting there, crunching on her chippies, barely able to see the words on the page, quietly keeping a low profile.
Nicole apologises, but because she hasn’t been warned (glares at Maurice, but the glare is softening), she has no tarte aux pommes. Only ice cream.
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