She puts her hand on his knee as she says this. Harvey nods, adopting the role of the child, even as she is talking to him about another child.
‘Thanks for the pep talk, Elaine,’ he says. Elaine smiles. She is a nice woman. Harvey hates himself that he cannot end his thoughts about her there. What a great thing that must be, to be that person, the one who just looks about the throng and thinks: she’s a nice woman; he’s a nice man; she’s not a nice woman; he’s not a nice man. He imagines this person as living in the 1950s, in an English market town, resting his or her weight on a fence between backyards, watching the smoke curl up from the 1950s chimneys.
‘It’s what I do,’ she says. ‘Someone has to …’ She gets up, smoothing the skirt again. ‘Anyway. It was super to meet you properly.’ Super: yes. ‘I’ll see you later, when I bring back Colette.’
‘OK.’ He stands. This is what people do, isn’t it? They stand when someone else is leaving. And arriving. Harvey doesn’t know why, nor why it might be rude to stay sitting down. She smiles once more at him, and moves away. He judges that it is OK to sit down again. At the door, though, she turns and says: ‘Oh. And Harvey … I should have said this earlier, but I’m so sorry about your father.’
There it is again, that h after an s: I’m so shorry about your father. Harvey wants to say: he’s not dead yet – but he admires Elaine for this, this saying of the same sentence she will say when he is. He likes, too, that at last – and in this house, as well – there has been an acknowledgement that he also is someone who sorrow needs to be conveyed towards: someone who people must apologize on behalf of death to.
‘Thanks, Elaine.’
She makes a face expressive of sad wisdom, and leaves. Harvey hears the click of the door, and makes his way down the corridor to his father’s study.
* * *
I just cannot believe that Mom has moved in The Larvae! I cannot! And she didn’t even ask me!
This is what he does, OK? He sleeps till about ten thirty. Ten thirty! Like a teenager! Then he gets up and wanders about in his dressing gown. There are some things you need to know about this dressing gown. One: it’s brown. With weird stains on it. And, secondly, he never ties it up properly. And, thirdly, he wears it without pyjamas. Which means that he sits in the kitchen eating eggs and sausages with it all flapping open! He doesn’t seem to care! I haven’t seen his winkywonk, thank God, but the way he sits without ever sorting out the belt or anything, I probably will soon! Maybe then I can call the police or something and he’ll have to move out.
What I DO have to look at all the time in the morning is his chest. It’s all hairy but loads of the hairs are grey, like Daddy’s. But then he’s got these boobies. He’s a man and he’s got boobies! They hang off him like two hairy haddocks! It’s sooooo disgusting. Thank God he DOES get up so late and I don’t actually have to eat breakfast with him. I wouldn’t be able to eat my granola.
And then he tries to talk to me. I can’t stand it. I always know it’s going to be one of those questions ’cos he always starts by saying, So, Colette. ‘So, Colette … what kind of things are they teaching you at school?’ ‘So, Colette, do you like living here?’
‘So, Colette, do you like Harry Potter?’ And I don’t say anything. Well, not nothing at all, like I’ll just nod or say, ‘Y’know … loads of stuff’ or ‘Whatever’. And then usually he looks a bit sad and shuts up.
I feel bad sometimes treating him like this. I mean, I know he’s my half-brother. But it’s so hard to think of him as any sort of brother! Jada has a brother – Emile – who’s a bit of a pain, really, what Daddy used to call a pain in the ass when he thought Mommy wasn’t listening (he didn’t mind me listening – I think he quite liked me hearing rude words from him, sometimes he’d say them and wink at me). But he’s only two years younger than her! At least when he’s not being too much of a pain and not being too rough or crazy you can play with him. You can’t play with The Larvae. What would we play?
Here’s the problem. He treats me too much like a kid. He thinks I won’t understand anything! He doesn’t understand that I’m different from an ordinary eight-year-old! Like yesterday, OK, he showed me a photo of his son on his iPhone. Which was an OK thing to do, I guess. I mean, he looked nice, his son. He’s called Jamie. He’s got red hair, which is a bit weird, ’cos Harvey hasn’t – he hasn’t got much hair at all, and it’s mainly grey, but I guess when he was younger it was black – and brown-green eyes. He was wearing some kind of red shiny shirt thing that The Larvae told me was a football shirt, and then he started going on about how it wasn’t like an American football shirt, it was a soccer shirt, and he said soccer in a weird way like I would never of heard of it, so I said:
‘I’ve played soccer. And my friend Jada is like the best player in the school.’
‘Oh. Yes. Of course. I forgot that American girls play it.’
‘How old is Jamie?’
‘Nine.’
‘A year older than me.’
‘Yes.’ Then he looked at me. ‘Maybe if you come to England ever …’
And then he stopped. I don’t know why. Maybe because he didn’t really want me to come.
‘Why is he looking away?’
He didn’t say anything. ‘Harvey,’ I said. ‘Why is Jamie looking away? Have you got one of him looking into the camera?’
‘Well …’
‘He is smiling though. I always smile in photos. Sometimes I say cheese. My friend Jada says smelly subway sausages!’
He looked back at the phone.
‘Jamie has got an illness.’
Then he stopped again.
‘What is it?’
He didn’t say anything.
‘Is it cancer?’
He didn’t say anything.
‘Diabetes? Parkinson’s? Kidney stones? Arthritis? Heart trouble? Migraine?’ I know about all these diseases. They’re all ones that Daddy has had.
‘No, it’s none of those.’
I thought about it for a bit. ‘Is it AIDS?’
I said it quite softly ’cos Jada has told me about it and she says it’s a really bad one. He looked quite surprised. Then he laughed! He’s such a weirdo. What’s funny about such a terrible disease?
‘No, Colette, my son doesn’t have AIDS.’
‘So what is it then?’
‘Asperger’s Syndrome.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a … do you know what autism is?’
‘Yes. It’s that disease where you can do really clever sums. I saw something about a guy with it on PBS. Mommy lets me watch PBS.’
‘Right.’
‘But how is it a disease if it means you’re really good at sums?’
He went quiet again.
‘Harvey?’
‘Yeah, it’s complicated, Colette. People with autism aren’t necessarily really good at sums.’
‘They aren’t?’
‘No. And Asperger’s is kind of different. It’s really hard to explain.’
‘To a kid, you mean.’ This is what I mean. He thinks I won’t understand.
‘Well … no. It’s hard to explain in general. Lots of people don’t really understand it.’
He got up then and went into the kitchen. I looked back at the picture of Jamie. Even though he wasn’t smiling, he had a nice face. It made me wonder. He didn’t look much like Harvey, except maybe round the mouth. He doesn’t smile much either.
I had seen how he flicked his finger across the screen to move to a different photo, so I did that. There was another photo of Jamie, not as good. Then there was another photo of Jamie with a woman. The woman was smiling. She was hot! That’s something Jada says. I know I’m not supposed to say it. I once said it about one of the ladies on the cover of a magazine that we saw in the drugstore, and Mommy got really cross. She explained to me that ladies on the cover of those magazines are just there to sell the magazines, and, even though they might be beautiful, that’s what their beaut
y is being used for, to sell the magazines, and that was bad. She said: I’m going to have to explain to you what sexism is. And I said, is that something to do with sex? And she didn’t say anything, so I said, because you haven’t explained what that is to me yet. This was a while ago, when I REALLY didn’t know what it was. Like, seven or eight months ago. Anyway, she said the point is saying things like ‘she’s hot’ is offensive to women. Not to mention vulgar. I was going to say what does vulgar mean but I didn’t.
‘Who’s this?’ I said to Harvey, when he came back into the living room. He did a funny scrunched-up face and came over. I held the phone up to him.
‘It’s my wife,’ he said. ‘Stella.’
‘Wow,’ I said, ‘she’s hot.’ He looked at me weirdly when I said it, so I guess he must think all that stuff my Mom thinks, too.
* * *
It is hard, really, for Violet to focus on the bingo. She likes bingo. She used to like it a lot in the old days, when she played in the Galtymore on Cricklewood Broadway. That that is the old days – even though she first went there in 1971, when she was already approaching fifty – surprises her. She wonders how old the really old days must be.
Joe Hillier is the caller. It used to be a member of staff, but Joe decided he really wanted to do it, because of his names for numbers. He has thought up a lot of new ones. Violet did think some of them were funny when he first did it, but now everyone in Redcliffe House has heard them a hundred times on Bingo Nights.
‘My age: forty-three!’
This is greeted with silence, although it is the silence of concentration, of the crowd staring at their cards, rather than simply the silence of non-laughter. About fifteen residents have turned up. The seat that Meg Antopolski normally sits in has been left empty, as if out of respect.
‘Will you still love me now that I’m way past it … sixty-four!’
She almost misses it: she has a sixty-four. It gives her a horizontal line. But there isn’t that much point in shouting it out, as only a full house leads to a prize, which tonight is a book, a second-hand autobiography, sent in as a charitable offering: Chris Noth: Bigger Than Big. She doesn’t know who Chris Noth is – and thinks that that must be a misprint: North, surely? – but he looks like a nice man, from the cover.
In a way she wouldn’t mind winning it. It would be nice, she thinks, to read something nice, something easy, after Solomon’s Testament. It might clear her head, in the same way that Valerie once told her, at that posh meal she once took her for, that a sorbet cleanses the palate. She still hasn’t finished her ex-husband’s entire masterpiece, or doesn’t think so, because she has continued just to open it at random. She will read the pages for as long as they hold her, and then stop, and then open it again somewhere else. She knows that it is more likely to hold her attention if she divines herself in the text; part of her wishes Eli had written it with an index, so she could refer to that, like:
Queenie 5–12, 16–30, 34, 38, 42–7, 53, 55–69, 75, 80–82, 110, 111, 113–22, 127, 159, 170, 177, 183–99, 202, 204, 208, 222–34, 251, 258, 267–80, 287–97, 301, 323, 344–56, 390–411, 413–14, 420–22, 443
Body of 6–7, 34, 45, 55, 60–64, 115–20, 177, 185, 231, 269, 293, 348–50, 414, 422
Cooking 28
Death of 420–22
Face of 8, 23–5, 45, 81, 186–7, 228, 289, 351, 409
Habit, biting bottom lip 81, 301
Habit, blinking fast 345
Habit, dressing uncaringly 188
Habit, humming while eating 159, 185
Habit, speaking in rhymes 60
Habit, speaking ungrammatically 347
Habit, twisting hair 18, 189, 399
Habit, washing herself methodically 65, 396
Non-Jewishness of 184
Smell of 44, 392 Solomon’s disgust with (sense of imprisonment by; uncertainty about beauty of; projections of future with; feelings about when drunk; paranoia about sexual past) 17, 58–61, 114–15, 188, 189, 227–30, 269, 222–9, 273, 290–93, 348–50
Solomon’s love for 34, 36, 55–9, 82, 184, 233
Stupidity of 114, 230, 288
Stupidity of, reconfigured as innocence 441
Virginity, uncertainty about 58
That would have made it all much easier.
‘The man who lives here really wants to be at Number 10 … Number 11!’ She does not think that she is upset by the book. Even though Queenie is hated by Solomon, she isn’t simply hated: she is also loved, lusted after, feared, envied, made fun of. She is, primarily, explored: she is the object of fascination. What it calls up in Violet, even as it intrudes on her, is the comfort, the repletion, she used to feel when opening her body up to Eli’s eyes, that here at last she had his full attention. It reminds her of something she lost such a long time ago that it feels no longer even a memory: the ability to hold a man’s gaze.
‘Mid-life crisis at … fifty-two!’
Of course, there are the affairs that Solomon has (ideally, she’d have liked the pages that described those indexed, too). It does not, however, enrage her, or make her feel humiliated, or wish for revenge, or even sad, that Solomon Wolff has affairs. Any of these responses feel ridiculous, now. It does make her try to think of anything she can remember about her eight years with Eli that would prove he had affairs, but there is so much proof of that, and none. He would stay out a lot. Sometimes he would smell different. Odd nights there would be when he wasn’t interested in her sexually. It is a strange exercise, trying to relate incidents in the book to her actual memory: there is something monastic about it, like transcribing from one ancient language to another.
She knows she never interrogated Eli on the subject back then. Perhaps she should have done. That’s what wives did: do, for all she knows. Gwendoline would sometimes bully her about it, saying: ‘Are you keeping a close eye on him?’ (And often: ‘He’s half-Jewish, isn’t he? They’re always at it …’ and ‘He’s like Henry, I can tell: a ladies’ man’, this latter phrase solemnly intoned as if packed within its walls was everything that could be said about gender and its troubles), to which Violet would nod, and say yes she was, but internally think no: he is the one who looks; I am the looked-at.
She’s found three infidelities in the book so far, but thinks there might be others, some of which may or may not be fantasies. This is the other problem with the book. It is, she understands, a work of literature; she understands, too, that it is a modern work of literature, and so it isn’t just going to straightforwardly tell a story – there are bits that you’re supposed to think, Did this really happen? Not did this really happen like she sometimes thinks when she reads the Daily Mail, but did this really happen in the book, which she knows is not real?
Except it is real for her. It is her life, refracted. But her life is already refracted, by time and space: and, more, by disbelief, a pushing away of her history from herself. Reading the book is like remembering a dream, only not halfway through the morning, but years and years after waking. It is discomfiting. At the same time, it gives her something back. This is something she has sometimes heard celebrities say on the telly, when they have done a good deed, or appeared on a funny event for charity: I’m trying to give something back. She was never sure what it meant, but she feels that Solomon’s Testament has given her something concrete back, a version of her youth that she had begun to doubt ever existed.
‘Better get her married before this number of months goes by … nine!’
Idly, Violet crosses off this number on her card. Then, with a small double-take, she realizes that she has a full house. She feels both excited at the prospect of winning, and frightened of drawing attention to herself. In Solomon’s Testament, she recalls, there is a page-long rant by Solomon at Queenie, in which he says, ‘You’re so full of fear for what you want!’ Maybe that was true. This was going to be a thing, she knew, her life, or what was left of it, back-referring to the book, trying to see how much she was living out those old words.
She looks over. It is Pat Cadogan, rising from her seat so fast Violet fears for her joints. She is waving her card about her head. Joe Hillier looks disappointed, firstly because he detests Pat, and secondly because that’s the bingo over. They only have the one prize, and even though everyone usually carries on playing for a bit after this point, the heart goes out of the night.
‘Can you check?’ says Frank to Corrinda, the staff carer on duty. Corrinda, another large black woman, who breathes heavily at all times, even when seated, gets up slowly, and moves her neck backwards and forwards.
‘Oh, I see …’ says Pat.
‘It’s procedure. We always check.’
‘Yes, that’s right, Pat,’ says Molly Bowen, one of the wheelchair-bound residents, ‘you remember I won last week – the Marks & Spencer’s Cheese Selection? – and Joe checked my card himself.’
‘Well exactly, himself. He’ll have just glanced at it. He didn’t insist on an independent adjudicator.’ She says this, looking at Corrinda – who has begun to amble over, still moving her neck from side to side – with menaces.
‘Oh for crying out loud, Pat,’ says Joe. ‘It’s only a book.’ He pronounces it buke. He looks at it, raised on the table by some form of plastic stand. ‘By Chris North.’
‘Right, then …’ says Corrinda, holding Pat’s card out in front of her, ‘You, Mrs Cadogan, are now the proud owner of …’ she picks up the book and hands it Pat, ‘this buke. I imagine you’re a big Sex and the City fan, aren’t you?’
And with that, she moves away. Pat looks down at her prize uncertainly. She sniffs. Eventually, she holds it up:
‘Does anyone else want this?’
The residents shuffle in their seats. The man who Violet now knows to be Frank takes a handkerchief, embroidered with a blue F in one corner, out of his jacket top pocket, and sets about cleaning his glasses. Molly Bowen adjusts what Violet assumes to be the gears in her wheelchair.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 31