by James Wood
It would have to wait, Alan thought—the conversation. Christ, he was tired.
9
He’d said goodnight to Helen, and now wasn’t sleepy, half-naked on his hotel bed. A powerful impulse arose whenever Alan spent time with one of his daughters—he immediately wanted to speak to the other about the one he’d just seen. Helen and Vanessa, Vanessa and Helen … And what would he say now to Van? That Helen seems tired, overworked, but not especially keen to return to Tom; that for some reason—despite what must be a very good income—she’s worried about money but hiding it well; that something weird is going on at Sony (thanks to Helen, it “somehow” hadn’t come up again at dinner); that she was cross at herself for choosing the wrong restaurant and wouldn’t really admit the mistake (how he enjoyed “forgiving” her for that). He wouldn’t tell Vanessa that men—certain men, or more precisely men of a certain age—looked twice, looked three times at Helen, and that he didn’t so much mind being mistaken for her seedy older husband or boyfriend.
He glanced at his wide feet: the littlest toe of each foot was not quite right, a birth defect, slightly squashed or deformed, as if crushed by one of the other little piggies on its way to market … It was 4:00 a.m. in Northumberland, too early even for sleepless Candace. He pointed the remote at the gigantic looming TV, hanging like a vertical table, the place at which everyone now meets for hospitality, and jabbed at the buttons with not very expert fingers. The colors were more garish than on English telly—a violent brightness in the lighting (a leathery man and a pretty woman at a news desk, virulent reds and blues behind them, the news crawl along the bottom of the screen just obscuring the woman’s breasts). He flicked through five, seven, eight channels. American television seemed to be an endless procession of local news programs in which people kept on promising weather forecasts. They were clearly far more obsessed about the weather than the British. He tried a few times to get an actual forecast, and then gave up, muted the volume and lay on the bed—Scotch in one hand and his book on Zen Buddhism in the other.
10
It had been impossible to sleep—hot air exploded into the room at unreliable intervals, and trucks seemed to be collecting rubbish all night outside his window—but oddly he felt quite rested when he met Helen for breakfast. There she sat, as she used to at home, eating nothing of course, drinking sweet black coffee, very straight in her chair, exact and controlled—and how he loved her: her slightly thick shoulders (Cathy), her longish nose (his), the light amusement around her mouth (the sardonic grimace his mum was so good at), and Cathy’s thin lips. He loved even her impatience, it was so familiar. He would have to say, as he now did, “I think we’ve got plenty of time, there’s no hurry,” and she would have to say, as she now did, “I never said a thing about being in a hurry.”
Every time he saw his daughters, he experienced such hunger for them, and the hunger was so simply satisfied that he was freshly amazed that he didn’t see them more. That extraordinary power family had, to blot out all other considerations, all other desires and dissatisfactions: perhaps he’d feared that, recognized its engrossing fanaticism. If you surrendered to that, you would do nothing else in life, build nothing else. And there had always been the company alongside the family—the company, that word the poor kids heard probably every day when they were young. A word they must have learned to tiptoe around, as if past the closed door of a sickroom. I’m doing it for the company! If the company goes down, then everything goes down with it! Look, I’ve built a bloody company, it takes effort!
“Don’t tell me: you slept atrociously. It was too hot, you couldn’t open the window, and the garbage trucks came along at four in the morning, which sounded like bombs going off just outside your window.” Helen had the blue amusement again in her eyes.
“Actually, not bad at all. I feel pretty good.”
“Well, I slept fairly badly. And according to Tom this morning the twins both have terrible colds.”
“Oh no—I’m so sorry to hear that … But you wouldn’t go back now?” He said it a little too needily; he couldn’t make the trip to Vanessa on his own.
“Absolutely not. Let Tom deal with it for once. Don’t worry: I’m here for the weekend, as promised.”
* * *
They walked from the hotel—less shockingly cold today, though he still needed his woolen cap. They both pulled little wheelie cases, and the doubled noise of the coarse plastic granulation on the pavement caused New Yorkers to look round, though never actually to make any space for them. Their words expired in steam.
He was walking a little faster than he wanted to. Alongside Helen, he always had the sense of a tall woman taking long strides. At the mouth of the station—hideously chaotic, with once again a lot of pointless American yelling—she took his arm and gently steered him onto the escalator, and they went down into what appeared to be a depressed underground shopping mall: a dirty-looking pharmacy (a contradictory combination in Europe), a Krispy Kreme doughnut franchise, a shuttered Staples, the air heavy with smells of cinnamon, cheese, and … vomit? A local train must have arrived, and suddenly he and Helen were pushing against thick waves of commuters, thousands of rank-and-filers, most of them marching—to judge from the earbuds and headphones—to the beat of their own drums. The floor seemed to shake, and he was glad to join a docile queue for the “Adirondack” train to Albany and Saratoga Springs.
“Is it possible you’ve never been, Dad, on an American train?”
“It is possible.”
“Well, fasten your seat belt.”
And then they were descending again, by narrow escalator, and at the platform they climbed up into a carriage that looked like some futuristic design from one of the boys’ comics he used to love: ribbed silver steel, a horizontal rocket, the windows defensively small, the wheels massive. The locomotive was a solid primitive block of engine. To open the heavy carriage doors, you kicked a spring-loaded magic trigger. Inside the carriage, there was a large vacated space of plastic and cloth in autumnal browns and oranges. The seats were twice as wide as in an English train. Hot air roared from rattling circular vents that resembled plastic drains. The train started, then stopped again. Started once more, accelerated coarsely, as they swayed through sooty tunnels. They were moving at about the pace of an old English steam train on a rural route. In 1951, when he and his parents had made the great trip to London, his first—for the Festival of Britain exhibition—the steam train reached ninety miles an hour … He was twelve. A little boy in gray short trousers … dressed in his school uniform, because everything else was too worn and there wasn’t enough money to buy him a new jacket. He wasn’t self-conscious, was proud actually, it looked as if he was going to London to receive some kind of prize or scholarship, and the uniform was distinguished (a St. Cuthbert’s cross in silver wire on the breast pocket). He felt like a little lord in it. Acted like one, too. His parents often told the story of how Uncle Dan (the only person in his family to make any money, before he did) once took him for a fancy afternoon tea at the Royal County Hotel in Durham. The posh hotel. Little Alan was dressed in his school uniform; with a princely gesture, he handed his school cap to the bellboy at the door; and the bellboy, probably only ten years older than he was, meekly accepted that cap and looked after it until tea was over … In London, no one looked twice at the little boy in his uniform. But it didn’t matter, once he got to the Festival of Britain site. It was on the South Bank, next to the river. The Thames was right there, sluggish and brown with history, and the huge exhibition looked over it, in rebuke: because the Festival was the Future! All the boys his age made straight for the Science Dome, where 1950s-style robots snapped up and down the length of an enormous hall, and you could put your head right into the jet engine (invented by the Englishman Frank Whittle) of a de Havilland Vampire, the RAF jet fighter that arrived just too late to do anything useful in the war. There were stalls about amphibious vehicles, electric cars, new helicopters, and a plane that could take off
and land vertically like a helicopter. Thrillingly, an engineer in a white coat selected Alan and another boy for the Great Radar Game. In a dark room, the boys got to look at a screen full of moving dots, a mock-up of a typical night during the Blitz, the dots representing German bombers. With a click of a switch, the two boys destroyed every single plane as if they were clay pigeons, and saved London. And after those excitements (with a boring wander around the exhibit on the history of English gardens, endured for the sake of his mother—but now gardening was his great adult passion…), there was a big afternoon tea at the Turntable Café, which rotated through 360 degrees in the course of every hour, and was decorated with thousands of gramophone records.
He could see that old world so well, despite all the decades that had passed: everyone in their browns, blacks, and grays. People overlapped, resembled each other more closely than nowadays. The men, in those high-waisted baggy trousers, had a way of putting their hands in their pockets and thrusting their hips forward—a little womanishly, he now thought. Everyone was more modest—in expression, in expectation. Food was still being rationed: he remembered the moment, two or three years later, when Uncle Dan brought something out of a packet and said to him, “Do you know what these are?” Alan looked blankly at the handful of small, chipped, irregular sand-colored pebbles, and shook his head. Uncle Dan exclaimed with complacent triumph: “They’re peanuts.” On the way back from the London exhibition, he was very hungry but there was nothing to eat. He remembered that, being hungry. Still, the steam train went amazingly fast, storming and burning its tremendous way through the soft countryside.
“Does it go any quicker than this?” They had left New York, and the Hudson River was gleaming through trees.
“Not much … but you hardly ever get the big accidents that happen in Europe. I actually get fearful when these trains try to go fast! You can get lots of work done, because the journeys are always so long.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you.” She already had her laptop out anyway. He couldn’t compete with an electronic screen.
“Do you need to get stuff done, too?” she asked.
“Nothing that can’t wait. I’d like at some point to talk about Vanessa.” It sounded more formal than he wanted it to.
“Of course,” she said in a businesslike way, as if it were a necessary, rather poorly paid chore. “Let’s do that now, so that we have a bit of a plan for the days ahead.”
“I hope we don’t need a plan, exactly,” he said, thinking that indeed they did need some sort of plan. “It’s not that bad, is it?”
“I have no idea. But for instance, neither of us knows Josh, though we’ve been through versions of this a few times now with Vanessa, over the years.” She glanced blandly at the laptop screen.
“She just needs us, at the moment, which is why we’re here.”
“Oh, Dad, I wish it were that simple!”
“I didn’t say it is simple. Christ, you’re not simple either.”
“But you remember the first ‘episode’? When she ran away from school? It was Vanessa responding belatedly to the divorce. We can see that now. And yes, it was a very difficult time for everyone, but why did she deal with it so differently from you and me? We just got on with it. She went to a billion pieces—and the way she attacked me at the time, as if I was the cause of it all.”
“But maybe the logical thing, after all that sadness, was to go to pieces?”
“Well then she needed to take it out on you or on Mum, not on me.” She looked again at the screen; her fingers hovered over the keyboard, a pianist about to start a performance. Alan was hurt that she had said “on you or on Mum.” It was Cathy who walked out, Cathy who had the affair, Cathy who left him with two young daughters.
Calmer, he wondered if Helen’s anger was partly formulaic. To sound exasperated was how Helen felt she should sound. For so long now, the closed circuit of their relationship had been that Helen did things while Vanessa thought things. In fact, as Alan knew, Helen was tender, generous, even sentimental. During that first “episode,” Vanessa ran away from her boarding school in Shropshire. Alan got a phone call, it was Vanessa’s housemistress, the formidable Miss Plummer, a classicist whose first name, wonderfully, was Athena, and who had once firmly told Alan, when he inquired about the point of learning ancient Greek at a modern English girls’ school: “The point? The point, of course, is to read Herodotus in the original!” Athena Plummer said that Vanessa had been missing for eight hours. If she didn’t turn up by 7:00 p.m., the school would call the police. Miss Plummer had an idea that Vanessa might be making her way north, to her parents’ house. Alan didn’t have the heart to tell this unworldly woman that home was probably the last place on earth that Vanessa wanted to go. She had taken a bus to Bristol, in search of an older girl who had left the school a year earlier and was at university there; spent a couple of days sleeping on the student’s floor, and then phoned home. It was Helen, extraordinarily mature for her thirteen years, who spoke to Vanessa, and persuaded her to go back to school; and when it emerged that the headmistress would decide Vanessa’s fate, her status at the school imperiled not just because she had run away but because—this was a bit murky—she might have taken another girl’s transistor radio with her, it was Helen who carried the family typewriter to her bedroom and wrote an intimate letter to the headmistress, laying out the family situation, her parents’ separation, the finalization of the divorce, Vanessa’s sadness and anger, and how Helen herself had felt several times like running away, too. Helen did not know that her father had seen the letter; the school’s headmistress sent it to him, with a note calling it “remarkable.” It was beautifully “remarkable.” Alan had to control himself while reading it.
“That’s all old history,” he said quietly, “ancient times. What should we do when we get to Saratoga Springs? I mean, how … bad do you think she is?”
“How bad? I’m a bit sick of grading Vanessa’s collapses, assessing the ferocity of ‘the demons,’ you know? Giving each drama its review. Maybe for once it would be nice not to be in the audience at all?”
He said nothing, just closed his eyes, and she took his hand and held his middle fingers.
“Why am I here, then? That’s what you’re thinking. I’m sorry … But, you know—Newtonian law, for every action there’s a reaction … Look, I forwarded the e-mail to you. That’s why we’re both here.”
“What did Josh mean when he talked about Van’s ‘history’? Do you think she’s told him everything—going all the way back?”
“Dad, it’s okay, you’re not under surveillance! You’re not the subject.”
“What happened on the stairs? Was it an accident? I should have written to Josh.”
“I don’t exactly know, but it sounds, to me, like another of Vanessa’s performances,” said Helen.
“For goodness sake, Van has certainly ‘surprised’ us over the years, but I’d like to think that I don’t have a daughter who throws herself down the stairs just because she damn well feels like it.”
“Oh, Dad, I know you’re angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“All right, if you say so … I don’t know whether it was just an accident. But I know that something has happened in the last few months that has been enough to frighten Vanessa’s first boyfriend in many years. Will that do? That’s why I’m here. What we can do is not be scared or angry, and find out what’s behind all this. Or under it.”
“I’m very glad you’re here,” he said. She was still holding his fingers, for him a wonderful childish forgetfulness. Then she detached, and turned.
“You know I almost left Tom two years ago? Almost just walked out with the twins?”
“No, of course I didn’t know that. How could I, if you…”
“Well I’m telling you now, and … just saying. And now you know.”
“Okay. What do you want to tell me about it? Anything?”
“No, because it never happened. I coul
d have created an almighty fucking drama.”
“Please don’t,” he said firmly, as if she were a little child about to fiddle with a fragile object. She looked at the rather prim alarm on his face and started to smile, and he couldn’t help smiling a little uncertainly back at her.
“I won’t, because we’ve patched things up. As they say. I actually don’t want to break up my whole family.” There was a long pause. “Anyway, it’s not Tom I want to leave, it’s Sony.”
“Sony?”
“It’s a long thing to tell. I don’t want to bore you with it.”
“No, yes—go on.”
“Okay: I want to start my own company. Like you did. Remember that spat I had with Andy Farwell?”
“Andy…?”
“Yes, Dad, Andy, do you listen to anything I tell you? Andy Farwell, my direct boss in London.”
“Oh yes, okay.” As far as he was concerned, her colleagues blended into a single suspect mass.
“Well, I came that close to quitting, you remember? I come into work on a Monday morning, and I find that the extremely long memo I had spent weeks on, about the future of the music industry, really important stuff actually, but what they were soporifically calling ‘strategies for the next decade,’ and ‘charting a corporate course ahead,’ blah blah blah—I found out that Andy had shelved my report, was dissing it left, right, and center. But that was nothing, comparatively. Over the weekend, he had commissioned a new report from a tedious guy in marketing who he plays squash with, a guy who knows absolutely nothing about the future of music!”
“I do remember that, of course I do.”
“The Sony suits don’t have the faintest idea about the future music scene. They’re like a drummer who’s a fraction of a second behind the actual beat. You know what I mean? They need some kind of corporate click track … People are still buying music, but increasingly they’re going to be essentially borrowing it, not buying it. See this?” She pulled a paperback out of her bag, and showed him the cover: The Future of Music. “I think almost everything the authors say is correct.” When she said, “I think almost everything the authors say is correct,” she had an earnest, open look that touched him: he could see her as a teenager, arguing with Vanessa about God, or Mrs. Thatcher.
