‘Like a peacock.’
‘Exactly. Even if that man is a fifty-eight-year-old conveyancing specialist with psoriasis.’ Harvey laughs: but then she continues: ‘It helps you believe that I may not be such a dried-up old skank, after all.’
Harvey doesn’t reply. ‘How’s Jamie?’ he says, after a while.
‘He’s fine. Good,’ replies Stella. ‘I’m going to have a chat with Mrs Irshad when I pick him up – he seemed a bit worried this morning about his eight and his nine times tables – but otherwise – you know how it is …’
Harvey does. Jamie goes to Blue Hill, a special school in Rochester. It is a brilliant school, specifically designed for children with dyslexia, dyspraxia and what the brochure describes as ‘specific learning and language difficulties’ – which would include Asperger’s. He had gone to various schools in London before, and never settled: at Blue Hill, he seems to be approaching something like happiness.
Stella’s mention of Jamie’s multiplication problem nags at Harvey, reminding him of his secret issue with his son’s Asperger’s. Jamie is not a movie Asperger’s kid. He is, as far as his condition will allow him to be, sweet-natured, but he has no special talent: he cannot sketch St Paul’s Cathedral in charcoal from one viewing, he cannot in a flash tell you what day of the week 21 May 3080 is, cannot look at a confectionery jar and instantly guess how many pear drops are in there, and cannot go into a casino and win millions on blackjack because of a computer-like card-counting ability. Although Harvey loves his son, he can’t help feeling that this is at some level unfair: that the sheer slog that he and Stella have had to go through to deal with Jamie’s condition – the lack of speech for years, the shutting down for no apparent reason, the tantrums, the obsessive itemization of every Pokémon card ever made – should have some kind of payback. And underneath this secret issue, another one, even more secret: a notion that Jamie’s condition represents a trickle-down degradation of Eli’s genius. That he, Harvey, with all his neuroses and anxieties and depression, has inherited only the backside of genius: and that he has passed on this shredded gene to his son in the form of Asperger’s, this particular form of Asperger’s, all idiot and no savant.
‘When are you seeing him again?’ says Stella.
‘Who?’ says Harvey, thinking she means their son, and wondering if this is the beginning of some kind of pressure to come home.
‘Who do you think?’
‘Eli? Oh, I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Well … the whole visiting Dad thing is kind of regimented – lots of people wanting to get in there – and Freda, she seems to be in control of it all, and you know I’ve always had a weird relationship with her.’
‘So?’
‘Well, she hasn’t told me when I can come again.’
‘Harvey. You’re his son. The only one of his adult children who’s bothered to turn up to visit him on his deathbed. You don’t have to get an OK from his fourth –’
‘Fifth.’
‘Fifth wife, in order to get to his hospital bed.’ There is a beat. ‘Five? Is it really five?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who am I forgetting?’
Harvey, glad of the small respite from the scratchy subject of his access to Eli, puts out his fingers for counting.
‘Violet. That was his first one. Then Isabelle, the French film star.’
‘Mother of Simone and Jules. Who didn’t bother to come.’
‘They didn’t not bother. They fell out with Dad. Years ago.’
‘At least they had enough contact to fall out with him.’
‘Yes, anyway: then, there’s Mum. Then the one we don’t really talk about …’
‘Pauline Gray.’
‘Shh. For us Golds that’s like saying Voldemort.’
‘Us Golds. Of course.’
‘Then Freda. Obviously.’
‘So which one did I forget? Violet, I think. The first one. Do we know anything about her?’
‘No. I’ve never heard Dad talk about her.’
‘So that’s two wives us Golds don’t talk about. Is she still alive?’
‘No idea. Maybe it’s in one of the biographies? I should read one.’
He hears a tsk sound over the line. He knows it portends his wife getting back down to business, having enough with distraction. ‘Anyway, Harvey, you must get over there. Your father’s very ill. He might die at any moment.’
‘Stella, Freda’s his wife …’
‘And I’m your wife. Who let you go to America at a really difficult and inconvenient time.’
‘Oh, come on: don’t make me feel guilty about going to see my dying dad.’
‘So go and see your dying dad!!’
Harvey pauses: then starts to laugh. After a beat, he can hear Stella joining in.
‘Sorry … sorry, darling … I shouldn’t have shouted …’ she says, through her laughter. ‘And you told me you were working, which is really great, so …’
‘No,’ he says, ‘you’re right. It’s idiotic.’ He is relieved; she has let him off, for the moment, the anxiety about Lark. ‘I’m gonna go for a run, and then go right there.’
‘Why don’t you run there?’
‘What?’
‘Well, it’s only about – what is it – about five blocks away? You could run along the park.’
Harvey tosses this around in his mind. ‘But then I’ll be in my running gear. And all sweaty.’
‘So?’
‘Well …’ he feels a hot shoot of embarrassment, the prescience of having got something wrong: but this is not painful. Harvey likes the transformation of embarrassing moments into anecdotes for Stella, presenting himself as a naïf, an unfortunate, who, hoping only for the best, seems cursed with wondering into social discomfort – these stories make her laugh, and sometimes hug him. He wonders, occasionally, if perhaps he seeks out embarrassment – for he seems to find himself confronted with the sensation often – as material to make his wife look upon him fondly.
‘I went quite smart last time.’
She doesn’t laugh, but he can hear the smile. ‘Did you? Oh, darling, that’s so sweet.’ Another pause. ‘How smart?’
‘A jacket.’
‘Not a tie? Your suit?’
‘No.’
‘Thank Christ for that. If he’d have woken up he’d have thought it was his funeral.’
Harvey laughs at this joke, although it is not so ridiculous an idea. He hates wearing suits, and has only brought one for this trip: a black one.
‘Sorry, Harvey, I can hear my other phone ringing. Listen, darling: seriously. It doesn’t matter what you wear. It doesn’t matter if you’re a bit sweaty. Go and see your dad. If it was me, I’d be running there every day. Like the wind.’
Harvey looks out the window once more. He wishes he did have the view he always covets, because that might show him the way: the way across Central Park, to his father.
‘I love you, Stella.’ It is not difficult to say: it is not as ash in his mouth.
‘I love you too, darling.’ And she is gone.
* * *
Valerie, Violet’s sister, stands in her room at Redcliffe House looking out of the window. She has been standing there for the last fifteen minutes, talking. Violet has not heard everything she has said, and certainly would not have been able to remember it all anyway: but she has noticed the standing. Valerie is only three years younger than her, but never misses an opportunity to make clear to Violet her greater level of health and fortitude. She has always found ways of making clear to Violet how much better her life is than her sister’s – particularly since Eli became famous. Eli was not long in staying with Violet after the hail of praise that rained down on him following the publication of Solomon’s Testament, propelling him through the high windows of celebrity and genius, but still, it was Violet who was with him when he was writing it, Violet who could say (although she almost never did), my ex-husband Eli Gold and peop
le would instantly be impressed; therefore it was Violet who had made the better match, trumping at a stroke Valerie’s certainty that that would always be her, with her marriage to Michael, a chartered surveyor from Bexley Heath. Deeply, without ever admitting it to herself, Valerie felt that there was something unfair – something not in the rules – about Violet bringing into play (however unwittingly) fame: one’s husband’s career, money, houses, children, number and intensity of close personal friendships with local dignitaries – these were the categories on which she could rank their status. Fame, or an association with it, blew all these away: it didn’t belong in her intricate calibrations of social standing, but made those calibrations seem faintly ridiculous, and for this Valerie could never forgive her sister.
So here she was – after years of demonstratively mentioning to Violet Michael’s progress to partnership, and the success at various redbrick universities of her two sons, Jeremy and David, and the whole family’s movement upwards to bigger and better houses in Bushey, and many other signifiers of small-world success – here she was, deliberately standing in Violet’s room for fifteen minutes. Michael was dead, of what Violet always imagined was a blessed heart attack four years ago; the sons were middle-aged and married with their own children, who Valerie did often mention, Violet being childless, but not that often, seeing as Jeremy would not let her see her grandchildren and David had moved to Australia; the biggest house, the one she and Michael had continued to live in long after their children had left, had been sold, replaced by a one-bedroom flat in Stanmore. Valerie had one card left to play and she played it with a firm and extremely well-moisturized hand: her relative youth. She was saying a lot of things, but, really, Violet knew she was only saying one thing, over and over: You’d have probably had to sit down by now.
‘… I mean surely it could be a little bigger. And the view! That tree is just in the way. Couldn’t they get the council to trim the branches?’
Violet nodded, understanding that this was just a sub-section of Valerie’s triumphalism, meaning of course I don’t have to live in an old-age home. The problem with Valerie, Violet found, was not so much her pettiness, or passive aggression, but her transparency. Her motivation shone so clearly through every action that it was all Violet could do sometimes not to shout ‘I know! I know why you’re saying this! I get it!’
But then, so much of the world seemed obvious after Eli. Valerie didn’t like to mention Eli at all (when telephoning Redcliffe House, she would always make a point of asking for her sister by the name they once shared, Evans – Hello there: can I speak to Violet Evans, please – even though, since Violet called herself Gold, and was registered as such, this would always lead to confusion); but when forced to, she would talk about Violet’s experience with him as if it had been a form of abuse. But what exactly, Violet wondered, was the nature of the abuse? It wasn’t physical, not in the straightforward sense: he never hit her. Nor was it sexual, exactly – she was an adult, and she consented to everything, and even, sometimes, enjoyed it. Psychological, then. Well, yes, she was unhappy much of the time; he neglected her, first for his work and later for other women; she had a miscarriage. But this was so par for the course for women of her generation, before feminism forced both genders to recast marital behaviour previously thought of as standard as unacceptable.
It was complexity: that was the abuse. Being with Eli was like being hit over and over again with complexity, more dizzying and disorientating to the young Violet than a cosh. A simple soul – that was how, through the misty glasses of self-pity, she sometimes saw her pre-Eli self. She had believed the world was as it was. Even as the bombs rained down on London, and in Wannsee Reinhard Heydrich was outlining how a half-Aryan might be exempt from extermination unless he were possessed of a ‘racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew’, still, the young Violet had no reason to doubt that the universe was essentially as suggested by the slogan ‘A Nice Hot Bovril Is Better Than A Nasty Cold’.
Eli, though, presented her with a version of the world in which everything she knew was wrong. At first that was exciting: Eli seemed to be able to display all sorts of secret, new knowledge. Not just about things of which she knew nothing, but in combinations that she had not thought possible. He was a Jew and a Catholic; a God-hater who could quote the Gospels by heart; he liked classical music and jazz – Louis Armstrong and Mahler; he loved all sorts of books, philosophy and fiction and poetry, and if there was one thing Violet had learnt from her time at school it was that if a man loved books he wasn’t that bothered about girls, but the opposite was true of Eli (he also really liked and knew about sport, or sports as he called it, something else which didn’t fit with liking books).
Physically, too, he confounded her. His nose was too long and more bulbous at the end than it should be; the skin on his cheeks was overcrowded with hair follicles, each one so marked and ringed sometimes when he fell asleep – as he did often, in the middle of the day, stretched out on the floor even though the bed was just there – she would start counting them; the lobes on his ears were long and hanging, like those of a much older man – but taken together his features seemed to work. Or, rather: Eli’s absurdly heightened sense of self, his sheer power of identity, seemed to manage his essentially unharmonious features into a taken-for-granted version of male beauty. His face challenged you to find it unattractive.
And he was thin enough for her to imagine, if it was anyone else, that given the wrong sort of contact he might snap like tinder, but there was something sinewy and contained about his skeletal frame, as if it held much greater power than his weight would suggest. But then he ate like a horse, as her mother said on one of the few occasions that she fed him. Violet remembers her mother saying it, and thinking immediately that Eli would hate the cliché. Cliché was a word that Eli had taught her. He didn’t take her that far into his intellectual lair, but this much he had uncompromisingly imparted: cliché covered the waterfront of everything he despised. It had taken her a while to understand what the word actually meant – to understand that it covered more than just proverbs, more than just a stitch in time saves nine; and that although it was a French word, it was English, too – but by the time of this meal she knew, if only by the hot pinch of anxiety that accompanied her mother’s words.
As it was, he only smiled between mouthfuls and said, ‘No, Doris: I eat like a ravenous dog.’ Her mum pursed her lips a little and stirred her stew with her fork, uncertain about being contradicted, but perceptive enough to know that his analogy was the more correct: put food down in front of Eli, and it would be gone so quickly, Violet sometimes wondered if it were not a magic trick. Sometimes, she would put plates down for the two of them, go back for the salt and pepper, and by the time she returned he had finished. Another contradiction – a thin man who ate like a fat one; a cerebral man, but a man of great appetite.
Once, late at night in bed, Violet brought up the subject of living with her parents. She had imagined that after their marriage they might live for a small time in the house in which she had grown up, as most of her friends had done, but Eli had insisted on finding somewhere independent for them, even if all they could afford was a room the size of two cupboards suffused with the thick smell of dough. It was a speech she had carefully rehearsed: she knew Eli had wanted them to be together, by themselves, but – seeing as, so far, his work at the post office and her job in the typing pool at International Shipbrokers Ltd wasn’t putting enough in the bank for them to rent somewhere better – maybe they should just move back in with her mum and dad? Just for a little while? It would mean – and this, she thought, was her trump card – that maybe Eli wouldn’t have to work so hard at his job and would have more time to write.
Eli just carried on reading – some book by some American writer whose recent acclaim she knew just made him angry – and said, without looking up: ‘I couldn’t take the chewing, Birdy.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ Violet
said, pleased at least that he had been jokey about it, and pleased in a deeper way that he had noticed this idiosyncrasy of her mother’s.
‘Anything is bad that involves the mouth which goes on that long. Apart from …’
She leant over and put her hand over his lips. His eyes, locked with hers, laughed. It was true enough. Her mother had a habit of chewing every morsel of food for an inordinately long time.
‘It’s because when she grew up they didn’t have much food. Even less than we have now. So that’s what Nana – that’s what her mum told her to do.’
She took her hand off, having felt his lips curve upwards on the soft skin of her palm. It was a mild night: her hands and feet were not cold in bed like they sometimes were. They had a coal fire in the room, but Eli could never be bothered to light it.
‘Hmm … OK,’ he said, a word she had found herself using recently, even though Gwendoline would chastise her for trying to sound American. ‘But did Nana take into account the fact that your mother would one day wear dentures? What the fuck do Mom’s false teeth look like? Don’t tell me she leaves them in a glass of water at night – to clean the food off those gnashers she’d need some battery acid. Or maybe a machine gun.’
Violet laughed, a bit louder than she might have done, to cover up feeling guilty: there was something sacrilegious about the idea of joking like this – this violently – about her parents.
‘I could probably still get one from my old unit. A gun. What do you think?’ The book fell out of his hands and off the bed, as he mimed, with surprising grace and certainty, holding an invisible M917 Browning and spraying a round of bullets towards the offensive dentures. ‘Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!!’
‘Shh,’ she said, worried that he might wake the neighbours. The walls of the house were very thin: Mrs Black from the bedsit below had already knocked on their door three times to complain about the sound of Eli typing at all hours, visits which Violet had kept from her husband, partly so as not to disturb him, but also because he might respond to the news by going downstairs and shouting at the old woman about being bourgeois, whatever that meant.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 19