by James Wood
15
Vanessa phoned, to propose that she come to them for dinner. The hotel food was uninspired—but it was so cold outside, and they could at least stay indoors. She would pay. Alan insisted that he would pay, and she crumbled with graceless, childish haste: “Oh, all right then.”
They were waiting for her in the lobby when she arrived twenty minutes late. Helen, who had changed and looked furiously sleek in a tight black woolen dress, was of course beginning to get irritated, though they had drinks to sustain them. But Van had changed clothes, too. Alan assumed she was trying to keep up with Helen, but why would she want to? She had never shown the slightest inclination. When they were younger, Helen almost curated her many clothes—tended to the sartorial archives, kept a closet of perfectly ordered fashionability; dresses, skirts, nice jeans, and so many shoes, scrupulously aligned in rows, that Alan used to joke that her bedroom was like the antechamber to a mosque. But Van’s clothes all seemed to be the same color—hues of gray and black—and were left in sour piles all over her bedroom. Clothes belonged in the same neglected, even disdained, category as television, exercise, and friends. Alan and Cathy hoped for more of all these things in Vanessa’s life, and this minor-key anxiety became the reflexive mode of parenting. She needs more friends … She should go for a good walk … She should bike over to Corbridge … How can she meet someone special?… And now, after a couple of forgettable disappointments in love during her early thirties, she had met someone special—and Alan realized that of course the clothes, the improved hair, the contact lenses, were not for Helen, but for Josh. She looked radiant tonight, in a gray skirt and a sea-blue Indian top, inlaid with sequinny whatsits, and wearing a mother-of-pearl hairband (he had never before seen her wear a hairband). And her lovely eyes: he couldn’t get used to the idea of her without spectacles.
It’s not what I would have worn, thought Helen, but for Vanessa it’s pretty good, especially the skirt. She felt warmer toward her sister when she looked better, when she had made an effort. Dear God, was she as shallow as that? Oh, she was weary: as she looked at Vanessa, she didn’t know if she could do three days of this immense sisterly engagement. When Van had her “collapse,” in her final year at Oxford, her father had asked Helen, who was in London, to go to Oxford and bring Vanessa home. Two nights on the freezing floor of Van’s room at New College, and a day’s train journey up to Northumberland—enough: unhappiness was so boring, in the end. She wanted the best for Van, of course she did, but she had her own very pressing concerns at work, and Tom had been such a shit to her just now on the phone, and she wanted to be home with the kids. Of all that, Vanessa knew next to nothing. She had never really asked Helen about her work, at Sony or before; she had met the twins exactly once. In London, two years ago, Van handed them each a hideous stuffed toy, ruffled Jack’s hair (which made him cry), and then lapsed into wary watchfulness, as if she were keeping her eye on a dormant but largish spider. To be fair, it couldn’t be said that she herself was much better with the babies in the early days: “latching on,” for God’s sake … Everything was difficult—the twins doubled all anxiety, all practical problems, doubled the terror. And doubled the joy, too. What did Van know about the joy of being a parent? This happiness was intensely private—she and Tom shared it, and didn’t need to speak of it. Joy seemed so much more incommunicable than grief. Grief had tears, the visible signs, the obvious rain of sadness, and in that way was ultimately childish. Grief took you back to childhood, to the performance that got an adult running: “What’s wrong, why are you crying?” But what was the sign of joy—the sun of joy? Who came running to the joyous one to say, “Why are you smiling? Tell me what makes you so happy?”
* * *
The dinner was proving uneventful, thought Alan. It was wrong to think of it like that, of course … Vanessa had spent a good part of the evening telling them about Josh. She had met him eight months ago, at a conference in Boston, on technology and consciousness. Vanessa was delivering a paper, Josh was poking around to see if there was something to write a piece about. He was only thirty-three, seven years younger than her, but had lived a few lives already, according to Vanessa’s account. He started and abandoned a Ph.D. at Columbia; taught briefly in a very poor Brooklyn high school; wrote an unpublished novel (on his mother’s old Corona, for the beatnik hell of it); and was now “figuring out what’s next,” while earning a perfectly decent income writing pieces about technology and innovation for magazines like Wired and Rolling Stone. To Alan, this sounded like a handful of snipped threads, and no pattern. It didn’t matter how brilliant he was—Van said that he was the brightest person she’d ever met—if he didn’t stick at anything. And Alan had other thoughts: it can’t possibly be true about his earning a decent salary from freelance journalism. She’s keeping him. As the financial benefactor, Van has the upper hand. But as the younger man, Josh has the upper hand. A bloke who won’t stick at a job won’t stick at a relationship. And how she loved him! That much was obvious. When Vanessa spoke about Josh, she was shy and alert at once, a beautiful combination. She sat up straight, and perched on the edge of her seat, and stopped eating.
There was a lovely cherry tree in the garden in Northumberland: in the spring, it shed so much blossom that the air around it seemed to be charged with pink activity. When they were small, the children would climb onto the lower branches, and jump off into that rouged carpet; the little kid-glove petals clung to their clothes when they stood up. Each time they jumped, even though he knew it was safe, even though he had been a thousand times more reckless when he was a boy—Alan and his best friend, William, used to race their brakeless bikes down Western Hill, and once he walked in his bare feet along the Elvet Bridge parapet—he tensed himself, prepared for disaster. Sentimental of him, and certainly not very useful: imagine if his own parents had been as soft and anxious … Still, he wanted that carpet of blossom to stay forever on the grass, he wanted his children only to jump from the lower branches. To see them grow older was to realize that they would only climb higher and higher, and that all he could do was silently watch, as they jumped.
16
The same night, at her desk, Vanessa was looking for an old diary, the one she had kept in 1982. She had a drawer full of personal scraps, and she often sat and sifted: it was better than reading a novel. She thought of it as her English drawer. There were many photographs; the program from her mother’s funeral; old school reports (“Vanessa has been studying Juvenal’s Tenth Satire with reasonable enthusiasm,” wrote Miss Plummer); a road map of Northumberland; three love letters; a block of formal writing paper, engraved with the address of New College, Oxford; letters from her mother, including the first she received at Oxford (“this is the beginning of everything, darling—your first real step into adulthood; how envious I am that you are taking it while still so young”); a Pitkin Guide to Durham Cathedral—it had lost its back page; the driest note she ever received from a professor at Oxford, typed by the philosopher P. F. Strawson onto a white Magdalen College postcard and left in her box at New College, a note now astounding to her—certainly when compared to the cosseted American college scene—in its teasing and ironic discretion, its condescending respect, its willingness to treat a student like a feckless adult (“Am I right in thinking that you still have my little book about Kant? If so, perhaps you could leave it at the Magdalen porter’s lodge for me—with any essays you have managed to write. I think you owe me at least one. I hope you have recovered from your illness”); notes she made, at the age of twenty, on an essay by Thomas Nagel; many letters from Helen; a guide to learning German; blunt pencils and defunct staplers; a story she wrote when she was ten years old (“I mount Arrow, my favourite horse, using the stirrups, not the mounting block. Mummy and Daddy are watching me, and they are frouning—they are afraid I will fall off! I click my heels and then we are off, into posting trot…”); her InterRail Pass from 1983, and the all-important Thomas Cook European Train Timetable; old student I
D cards, not hers but Helen’s (1980s hair!—the Toyah Willcox week, the Suzi Quatro season); ancient Rizla cigarette papers, unused but now so old they looked smoked, burnt with age …
She found the diary, and located the relevant passage. There it was, and the words she had remembered were very close to the original: “I couldn’t believe that Daddy would say what he did about Allen. That he would sit there and lecture me about love?! ‘Van,’ said Daddy, ‘you won’t like to hear this, but I’m not paying for your expensive boarding school down south so that you can marry a plasterer’s son from Corbridge. It’s not happening. His family have no prospects.’ How glad I am that I didn’t tell Mummy!” She read on for a line or two, and then in fascinated dread began to flick through the pages, through weeks and months of her old, old life, afraid to stop because if she stopped she would have to read herself properly, afraid to find what she knew was lurking there, in the same diary: “Happy today. But why?”
17
Up early the next morning, Alan had breakfast in his room. His promised “croissant,” an obese horn of plenty, didn’t deserve even its mispronounced name. But the coffee was excellent, the sun was melting the snow—it sounded as if a hundred old taps were leaking—and the American sky was joyfully, piercingly, utterly blue. He understood what Helen had meant when she told him to bring sunglasses. It was as bright as the Alps. They weren’t due at Vanessa’s until lunchtime, and Helen had work to do. Business. Alan, too. He was aware of having had a dream, now vague in content except for the general memory of horror, about the Dobson Arts Centre and Café. The waterfront—he’d had such hopes for it. But David and Lee were the wrong partners, he knew that, even five years ago; they did nothing to help. It had taken so long to get off the ground, the city hall people had been utterly obstructive, and the whole thing had swallowed the firm’s resources. It was going to drag him down … That’s what the dream had been about, being dragged down. He glanced at his little laptop, a proud white magic box full of secrets and tricks. Yes, he should check his e-mails, see what Eric Ball had to say about work back in Newcastle, but he couldn’t really bear to open Pandora’s box, he hadn’t touched the thing since leaving Northumberland; so he decided to go for a walk, explore a little.
What had been snowily shrouded yesterday was sharp and bright now, each building immaculately lucid against the blue air. He walked along the main street, where plows had cleared a narrow path between firm, gritty walls of dead snow. What a baroque, and actually quite appealing, place it was … There was the Alexandria Hotel, of course, in its Venetian finery; and a big squat post office, a real art deco bulldog, whose doorframe of solid brass was adorned, he noticed, with undeniable gold swastikas; the marble pomp of the Adirondack Trust Company; a huge nineteenth-century apartment building that loomed over the street like a contested inheritance in a Victorian novel—who owned it, how many of its units were occupied, who on the city council wanted to tear it down? The upkeep on a place like that: you could see where it was being neglected. Not on the ground level, where a row of decent enough shops and cafés was doing good business, but above. Outside Uncommon Grounds, a coffee shop of course, a Lab sat in the snow, noble and indifferent. At the pharmacy next door, a woman in a white coat was poking with a long pole at the underside of the striped canvas awning, to get the snow to slide to the ground. People were clothed gigantically, polar clowns in vast boots and puffy glossy coats. He felt underdressed in his gray wool overcoat and black leather shoes; he also felt cold, so obviously they knew something he did not.
The town seemed prosperous. He passed a fine new bookshop, with an enormous American flag outside it, some kind of expensive gourmet food place, but then came a row of hard-luck tales: one shop was boarded up; another sold what looked like arts and crafts trash; and another, called Rasputin (with a sign sporting a crude drawing of the bearded Russian invincible), held some secondhand LPs. Helen could have bought up the entire stock of the little record shop and made the day of its gnarled owner—he presumed it was the owner—a man who was somewhat Rasputin-like himself, just fatter; probably about as old as Alan, but he’d been round the existential block a few more times: lined, tired, he stood on the doorstep, wearing a leather jacket and patched jeans, and held a ragged cigarette, or perhaps joint, in a beringed paw. The man was friendly, like so many Americans, and said “Good morning,” which no one did anymore in England. He passed a hat shop called Hatsational, and then another apartment building—this one was well maintained; a sign said that it was a former synagogue.
He liked that people were living in the middle of town; this was now rare in Britain, where high streets were occupied by the same large businesses—Boots, Tesco, Marks & Spencer—and everything was pedestrianized, the streets paved in the same cheap municipal bricks of sickly russet. The uniformity was tedious: Durham looked like York, and York like Chester, and Chester like Newcastle. The Krauts were partly to blame; once they’d bombed the old hearts out of Southampton and Canterbury and Coventry and the other cities, there wasn’t anything to do with them but build big ugly shopping centers and multi-story car parks. Which was what the Germans had done with their bombed towns—Hanover, Hamburg, Braunschweig, beautiful Heilbronn. But the town planners and the city councilmen of the 1960s were far more efficient than the Germans. Under the pretext of “modernization” and “progress,” they widened medieval lanes for cars and knocked down entire streets of lovely old buildings. It was scandalous, what was done to Newcastle. That trumped-up crook T. Dan Smith, and bloody Wilfred Burns—they were the modern vandals. Eldon Square, which had to be one of the finest Georgian squares in Britain, demolished in the 1960s to make way for a new shopping center. And the Royal Arcade!—he remembered his dad taking him there. You went past the British Oak Insurance Company, and into a magical, glass-roofed Victorian palace, with shops and offices. The glass of the delicate roof was always grimy-green. The Socialist Hall and Café was at the back of the arcade, and was run by a strange red-haired man—Archie? Arthur?—whose voice had never properly broken. He wasn’t a eunuch, he just had a high voice like a little boy’s, even though he was at least fifty. Alan was embarrassed by him and wanted to turn away, but Da treated him normally. How did he manage to shout effectively at the waiters and cooks, with that little squeaky voice? The same crooked gang from the 1960s demolished that lovely old Royal Arcade, demolished the Socialist Hall and Café—for a roundabout! Just knocked it down, so that Ford Cortinas and Triumph Heralds could zip in and out of the city. Don’t blame the Germans. We did it to ourselves. The Europeans hadn’t succumbed to the vandalism and mediocrity in the same way. They understood that a fifteenth-century town hall, a medieval corn exchange, a glassy Victorian arcade, were valuable in themselves. He went on holiday to these fine provincial towns, to Laon or Château-Thierry, to Ghent or Leiden (where, in the Protestant church, Alan marveled at the proud seventeenth-century statement, in gold lettering: God Is Wonderlick), and saw that the past was properly respected. The Americans shared some of that decency: they left the past alone, let it rot, if need be. Not necessarily because they respected the past—everyone always said they didn’t, couldn’t afford to, as New Worlders—but because they were careless, individual, and had a bloody lot of space.
It was difficult for him to think about these things without some guilt. He had profited from what dismayed him. In Newcastle, he’d been an early investor in the new commercial development of the quayside, and although most of the old buildings there had been unoccupied and undistinguished, he was sometimes a bit wistful about the handsome redbrick Victorian warehouse that was knocked down to make way for the proposed Dobson project, in which Querry Holdings was one of three partners. In Durham, his firm developed the Flambard Houses, a decent but aesthetically mediocre block of flats on the site of a shabby terrace of half-timbered Elizabethan houses, owned by the university, which had stood in the same place unmolested for four hundred years. (The university had been embarrassingly eager to sell that
terrace and turn a profit, he now recalled.)
