Heidi awoke when Eos’s rosy raiments covered the sky. She reached across for the feel of fur and found there was none. There was an emptiness in the house, more than just the damped-down sound that snow brings. She climbed out of bed and drew the curtains and looked out the window. Huge paw prints were impressed in the fresh, virgin snow, the only tracks visible in the empty street. At the traffic lights, frozen on permanent amber, they appeared to go left. He had gone as suddenly and as mysteriously as he had come.
THE ULTRASOUND TECHNICIAN rubbed cold jelly over the bowl of Heidi’s belly. “How far on do you think you are?” she asked.
Heidi thought about the last time she had had sex with Fletcher, tedious, rather irritable sex. “Four months?” she hazarded.
“I’m not sure.” The technician frowned at the ultrasound picture. “It doesn’t look like…”
“Doesn’t look like what?” Heidi asked, craning her neck to see the ghostly picture of her insides.
“Maybe a multiple…” A student nurse came into the room carrying a chart and, without turning round to look at her, the technician said, “Could you fetch a doctor for me?” in a calm, controlled voice that Heidi recognized because it was the one she used herself when something was going badly wrong on her ward.
The technician was biting her lip in an effort to understand the ultrasound, but then she grew suddenly pale and made a funny noise as if she was going to be sick and fled the room. Heidi didn’t even notice she was gone. She was too busy counting the tiny feet and noses and ears. And the tails. There were at least four, possibly five of them, nestling inside her, curled kittenwise around one another. Heidi didn’t think she’d ever seen anything more beautiful.
IX
THE BODIES VEST
Only a sweet and vertuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.
GEORGE HERBERT, “VERTUE”
VINCENT’S FATHER, BILLY, died a woman’s death in 1959. He had been washing the windows of their tiny Edinburgh eyrie and in an act of reckless bravado tried (and fatally failed) to reach the awkward top corner of the living-room bay Billy was just twenty-four years old, a reluctant widower who had embraced his role as Vincent’s lone parent with enthusiastic incompetence. Vincent’s mother, Georgie, was already four years dead by the time her foolish husband plummeted onto the cracked concrete path in front of their tenement home on one of the long summer evenings of Vincent’s childhood.
Vincent had a good view of his father’s final moments, sitting as he was, one neighboring story lower, in the window of Mrs. Anderson’s flat, finishing off a supper of fried potatoes and Lorne sausage. Mrs. Anderson was a homely barge of a woman—her grandmotherly bulk wrapped in a flowered Empire apron—who supplemented Vincent’s rather meager diet with a bottomless cornucopia of custard creams and bread and dripping. Mrs. Anderson’s small polished flat, scalloped everywhere with beige crochet mats and antimacassars and perfumed with Lifebuoy and fried mince, was a haven of domestic bliss compared to Vincent’s own home. For all Billy’s efforts at housekeeping, father and son occupied a dingy sett in which every available surface seemed to be crumbed with cigarette ash and desiccated fragments of pan loaf. Their clothes, washed to a uniform scummy gray, were hung to dry on the pulley above the gas cooker so that the scent of fried bacon was always on their skin.
Worst of all, perhaps, were the bedsheets, unwashed from one month to the next, pastel-striped flannelette on which no pastel stripes were now discernible and which were heavily impregnated with tangy male aromas. Vincent shared a bed with Billy even though there was a small box bed in the wall that would have done very well for him if it hadn’t been occupied by an old dismembered BSA motorbike.
The windows, the cause of Vincent’s orphan status at the tender age of six, had not been washed since his mother’s funeral, when Mrs. Anderson had paid her own window cleaner to take care of them as a mark of respect. Vincent was two years old when Georgie died and had no memory of her at all so that what he felt was her absence rather than her loss. Vincent had an image of what life would have been like if his mother had lived. It involved living in a warm house and eating fruit and grilled chops, wearing clean, ironed pajamas, and sitting in front of a blazing coal fire while Georgie read out loud to him from the Dandy. Both Billy and Mrs. Anderson implied, in their own ways, that it wouldn’t necessarily be like that if Georgie was still around. “Georgie was… flighty,” Mrs. Anderson said, searching for an enigmatic word, so that Vincent imagined his mother as a ball of feathers wafted on a kindly wind.
Scant evidence remained of Billy and Georgie’s existence as a couple, only a photograph on the sideboard in a tarnished frame that showed them on their wedding day looking far too young to make solemn vows about anything, let alone the rest of their lives. Billy was eighteen, Georgie sixteen. “Already up the duff,” Billy explained sadly to Vincent when they occasionally contemplated this photograph together. In her cheap knee-length bridal white, bird-boned Georgie looked as though she was attending her confirmation, not her wedding, while Billy’s jockey physique was ill fitted to his borrowed suit. Even their names hinted at a childishness they would never grow out of. When Vincent himself was grown-up, he wondered if this was why they had given their unlooked-for son such a mature name—although later still Vincent suspected that he might have been named for the Vincent Rapide motorbike. As with most things to do with Billy and Georgie, it was too late to ask. Vincent supposed he was lucky he hadn’t been called “Norton.”
Many years after their absurdly untimely deaths, Vincent came into possession of their wedding certificate, but the “William Stanley Petrie” and “Georgina Rose Shaw” who were incorporated at Gretna Green in 1953 seemed to have little to do with the happy-go-luckily named Billy and Georgie of that nuptial photograph, with their cheery smiles and accident-prone natures.
No one ever really discovered what happened to Georgie, of course. The way Billy told it she went out one evening and never came back—a simple narrative that explained nothing. Mrs. Anderson’s version of the tale was more complex—his mother had gone out for a drink with some friends, she was a “very friendly” girl apparently, and had been found in a close the next morning by a milkman, strangled with one of her own stockings. “No one deserved that,” Mrs. Anderson sometimes said to Vincent, in a way that suggested his mother might have deserved other bad things that fell only slightly short of murder by persons unknown.
The last of the fried potatoes were cold and ketchup-sodden and Vincent’s appetite had already moved on to a plate of snowballs sitting pristinely on Mrs. Anderson’s checked cloth when his father fell past the window like a wet sandbag. Billy’s end had been presaged by the watery arc and clank of his galvanized bucket a split second before Billy himself was pushed into space by the invisible hand of fate. Billy made no sound at all except for the muffled thud of his landing, a strangely anticlimactic noise like a shell failing to explode. Mrs. Anderson, in a moment of elderly distraction, muttered, “There he goes again,” as if Billy annoyed her on a regular basis with his giddy antics. Vincent had expected to look out of the window and see Billy laughing and dusting himself off and was surprised when all he saw was a crumpled heap, not immediately recognizable as his father.
Like Georgie before him, Billy was cremated, leaving nothing for Vincent but a few atoms dancing on the air.
SOMEONE, SOMEHOW, traced Georgie’s parents, or “Mr. and Mrs. Shaw” as they seemed to prefer to be called. (It was with some difficulty that Mrs. Shaw finally settled on “Grandmother” as an acceptable epithet.) Mr. and Mrs. Shaw ran a guest house in Scarborough called (somewhat mendaciously) “Sea-View.” They accepted Vincent into their lives with considerable reluctance. “You were the last thing we were expecting,” Mrs. Shaw said, as if Vincent was a disappointment rather than a surprise.
A small attic room was cleared for Vincent. Geor
gie’s old room had already been turned into a guest bedroom after Mr. and Mrs. Shaw decided some time ago that Georgie wasn’t coming home. (They were right.) The last her parents had seen of Georgie was when she left the house one evening to go to the pictures with a girlfriend and never came back. It seemed disappearing was more of a personality trait than a consequence for Vincent’s mother, although of course it later emerged that she hadn’t met the girlfriend nor gone to the pictures but had run off with a fairground worker, a weasel-faced youth who had spun her round on the waltzer before leading her astray on the beach. “A greasy Gypsy,” according to Mrs. Shaw. It was some time before Vincent understood that she was talking about Billy, his father. Vincent didn’t think that Billy was actually a Gypsy. He may have led an itinerant life but he had looked and spoken like a badly nourished Scot.
Mr. and Mrs. Shaw had never met Billy, of course, and in their version of Georgie’s life he was a swarthy ogre of a man who had carried off their not-very-innocent child. Even her own parents had to admit that Georgie was a “bit of a handful.” Nonetheless, Georgie had been in possession of a school certificate and good RSA speeds (junior secretary in the planning offices of Scarborough district council!), and had had a future ahead of her as the wife of some respectable East Coast burgher, instead of which she had debunked with a microscopic Vincent in her belly and fled to Gretna Green.
“She didn’t have to do that,” Mrs. Shaw told Vincent irritably. “We would have stood by her. Someone would have adopted you.”
Mrs. Shaw “ran a tight ship” at the guest house and Mr. Shaw, a man somewhat lacking in personality, remained firmly second-in-command to his wife, fetching and carrying breakfasts and coal scuttles and wholesale boxes of breakfast cereals. Mealtimes for guests were announced with a gong and were served with commendable precision by Mr. Shaw and a squint-eyed girl called Lorna, who slipped Vincent forbidden chocolate digestives when Mrs. Shaw wasn’t looking. Vincent and Lorna ate together in the kitchen at odd hours in between the gong, dining on toast and marmalade—a more palatable meal, they both agreed, than the leftovers Mrs. Shaw expected them to eat.
Sea-View was a veritable reliquary of Georgie’s effects—a scratched and muddied hockey stick in the toolshed, her first pair of Start-rite sandals in a sideboard drawer. Her autograph book (“Georgie Shaw’s book—do not read on pain of death!”) nestled amongst Mr. Shaw’s Flanders and Swann records and contained the mundane testimonials of her classmates (“Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you” being the favorite token of no fewer than four of her secondary-school consœurs). Vincent was particularly intrigued by the countless well-kept albums of photographs that charted Georgie’s progress from premature birth but stopped slightly short of her premature death.
Many of Georgie’s girlish possessions had been boxed up and placed in the cellar, where sea air and mildew had wreaked havoc on them. Her jewelry case, a musical box with a pert ballerina on the top, had rusted so much that the dancer now executed her pirouettes with an odd jerky intensity to the discordant music of metal grinding on metal. Vincent was sad that he would never know what tune had once played on the box. (“ ‘Au Clair de la Lune’?” Mr. Shaw hazarded with little conviction.) Georgie’s books—stories of wholesome, enterprising boarding-school girls with bemusing names like Jinty and Jax and Pippa—had become foxed and limp and smelled of earth.
Her collection of expensive dolls—sitting now on an ottoman in the Shaws’ bedroom—had weathered better. Pale-faced and rosebud-lipped, they wore inscrutable expressions as they waited stoically for their owner to return. Vincent was forbidden to play with the dolls as the Shaws had developed a fear that his puny body and pale adenoidal countenance put him at risk of turning into a “fairy”—a fate that sounded infinitely more attractive to Vincent than one where he was harried and bullied at school and largely overlooked at home, especially after Lorna left abruptly one morning after being discovered by Mrs. Shaw in one of the guest bedrooms doing something unspeakable with Mr. Shaw. Mr. Shaw was allowed to stay on but from then on was treated by Mrs. Shaw as little more than a deckhand.
From his attic perch, Vincent observed the family life he had always been denied—guests coming and going with their burdens of rubber buckets and spades, fishing nets and beach balls. The fighting, pinching, squealing children, the fretful mothers, the holidaying patresfamilias attempting to sustain bonhomie—it all looked as mysterious as the adventures of Jinty. The Shaws never took Vincent to the beach, a place they held in contempt, and he was almost a teenager before it struck him that he could go there any time he wanted, although he hardly ever did as the front was too disturbing—full of noise and sweat and stickiness. Vincent did not like the sea. He did not see a limitless gray horizon; he saw a careless edge over which anyone might fall and vanish into an infinite limbo.
Vincent’s little bedroom was four stories up so that he was able to get a good idea of how far Billy himself had fallen on his final day. Sometimes Vincent viewed it from the other way round—standing on the pavement looking up and trying to imagine what the expression on his father’s face must have been when he found himself plunging to earth like a suddenly flightless bird. Vincent supposed it was one of astonishment.
Vincent had formed a theory—at the moment of death, he believed, a person would be doing the very thing that would have made him happiest in life. He hadn’t known Billy well enough to be sure what that might have been but decided, in the absence of proof otherwise, that Billy flew off to his end on the seat of a 1952 Royal Enfield Bullet, a smile of bliss transforming his peaky face.
The Shaws liked Vincent best when he was quiet, so he spent the rest of his childhood keeping out of the way. He became a bookish boy, introverted and obsessive, yet slightly more sanguine than might have been expected. When he was eventually accepted into a more than half-decent university to read English, Mrs. Shaw remarked—by way of congratulations—that he must have got his brains from his mother, because he certainly hadn’t got them from his father.
Mr. and Mrs. Shaw died in their separate beds many years later and long after Sea-View and its contents had gone up in flames while they were away visiting Mrs. Shaw’s sister in Warrington. When Vincent received the news of the fire he thought sadly of Georgie’s dolls, their nylon hair incandescent, their patient plastic faces melting like candle wax. He thought too of Jinty and Jax and Pippa, once game for anything and now reduced to papery ash. Most of all he felt for the pert ballerina, her tiny foot stilled forever, midpirouette. There was not even one photograph of Georgie left now. Vincent’s mother had been successfully erased from history. Vincent did not dwell on this tragedy, however, because at the time that the last earthly relics of Georgie were being carbonized, he was having round-the-clock sex with Nanci Zane and fearing that his brain might actually explode with ecstasy.
VINCENT MET NANCI Zane on a passenger ferry bound for Crete when she came to his aid during a panic attack (“Hi, I’m Nanci with an ‘i’—breathe into this paper bag”). Nanci-with-an-i diagnosed agoraphobia caused by being afloat on so much sea. This was 1977 and Nanci was on a world tour after college (“Berkeley—English major”), traveling alone except for a huge rucksack that Vincent could barely lift. Nanci thought Vincent was cute. She mistook his timidity for reserve, his neuroses for eccentricity, his self-deprecating irony for sparkling wit—in short, he was the perfect English gentleman, particularly if you were an orthodontist’s daughter from Sacramento who had never met an English gentleman before, perfect or otherwise.
In Crete they wandered round cities unoccupied for three thousand years and then traveled to Athens, where they took refuge from the heat in endless museums, and then finally on to Italy, where, arm in arm, they walked the ghostly streets of Pompeii and Herculaneum. By the time they boarded a train in Naples, Nanci declared herself thoroughly sick of the ancient world “which was all about death” and said she never wanted to see another funerary urn or death mask or ind
ecipherable inscription, and so they missed out on Rome, which Vincent had been looking forward to, and stayed on the train all the way to Ostend, by which time they had declared themselves in love with each other and Vincent thought that was better than Rome any day.
Vincent was bewitched by Nanci’s foreignness. For starters, she had a name beginning with a “Z” (or a “zee,” in Nanci’s American alphabet) and was almost unnaturally healthy—not only a vegetarian but a devotee of almost every form of exercise that Vincent had heard of and several he had not, the first person he’d ever met who did “aerobics,” something which at first Vincent thought had to do with airborne germs. She was also the first person Vincent had ever encountered with perfect teeth, teeth which “Dad” had devoted much of his spare time to and which were indeed pearly—something Vincent had presumed was a figure of speech until he saw Nanci’s small, opalescent molars and incisors. Her skin seemed to have been buffed and polished, and it retained its California blush even beneath the alien London skies to which he subjected her while he finished his doctoral thesis—“Body and Soul: The Transcendence of Death in Metaphysical Poetry.” (“Wow,” Nanci said, “sounds cool.”) Nanci “wrote a little poetry” too but it tended towards Hallmark rather than Plath. Vincent told her it showed fantastic promise.
Nanci “rerouted” her world tour after Crete and went back to England with Vincent, sharing the poky flat he rented in one of the outer circles of London, her wanderlust temporarily on hold while she took a course in art history and cooked complex complementary-protein meals from the Moosewood Cookbook before demanding energetic sex. Sex with Nanci had a sporty rather than an erotic feel to it and after particularly vigorous sessions she would collapse (for a few seconds at any rate) and say, “Wow, what a fantastic workout, Vince,” so that Vincent experienced pride for the first time in his life. Once, he asked her what it was she’d worked out but she didn’t understand his feeble joke.
Not the End of the World Page 14
