by James Wood
“But … you said yourself—he’s very cheerful. He still walks everywhere. So it can’t be an absolute image of life.” Why did she think like this, in these massive terms? He was desperate to keep things prosaic, local. “And maybe,” he added, “it was the best soup he’d ever had in his life? You don’t know how much pleasure it brought him. It sounds pretty meaningful to me.”
“You should be one of my students. Yes, he is cheerful—he’s an absolute model of sane, fulfilled cheerfulness. He has made his life just as meaningful as it needs to be.”
“But not a model you can easily follow.”
“Not easily. Not without effort. That’s what it means to be an adult, for me. And when there’s effort, when you are concentrating so hard just in order to be alive, it’s not really good cheer, is it? Not exactly ‘human flourishing,’ is it? Dad, you said when we walked along the road, you said you weren’t ‘naturally buoyant.’ Those were your words? But I don’t think that’s true. You were humoring me. I think for you it is natural. It’s innate. Is happiness just a trick of birth, a completely accidental blessing, like having perfect pitch? Josh has it: healthy, instinctive optimism. Helen has it, mostly. I don’t have it. Do you ever think about it?”
“About being happy … I don’t think about it really. I think about many other things, for sure, too many other things, but not about whether to be happy. Happiness, since you’re asking, seems more like … a desire or stabilizing energy or force—”
“—and less like a puzzle.”
“Not a puzzle, no.”
Alan’s resistance had turned to sadness. He cleared his throat and took his daughter’s hand.
“You said that the professor, your neighbor, has ‘fortitude.’ My love, fortitude is important. You told me a story, so can I tell you one? When I was at school—many centuries ago now—there was a nasty bully called Welby. He was always going around the school yard trying to give boys a fat lip, trying to start a fight. Instead of fighting him, which was what the big bastard clearly wanted, we clever lads—there were only three of us in that lousy school—used to taunt him when he came our way: Welby, why do you want to start a fight with your fists? What’s wrong with words? Are you no good at swearing? And that worked. We were immune. He turned away. Sometimes what I wish for you is that you could just swear at life rather than always getting into a fight with it.”
“I think I know what you mean, but I don’t know how to apply it to me,” said Vanessa.
“I don’t know either, quite. I wish I did.” He tried again. “I mean—outwit life, tell it where to go, tell life just to sod off, and do it with … defiance. Close it off—the problem, I mean. Just don’t engage with it so much. Don’t let it get so big. Does that make any sense? You go to war with the army you have—I suppose that’s what I mean.”
“Rumsfeld?”
“He wasn’t wrong about that.”
They smiled gently at each other; he still held her hand. He gripped it harder.
“You know how precious you are to me,” he said.
“I do know it.”
“Mummy loved you so much…”
The past tense—he hadn’t meant to use it. She made a small sound in her mouth.
“We had a family,” said Vanessa, wiping her cheek, “and it was the best one in the world, and then it stopped being the same family and it all disappeared forever.”
He could never bear it when the children cried. Half in pain, half in anger, he would remonstrate with them; quite sternly but in actual anguish he would always say, “No, come on, stop it, there’s really no need for that.”
“Come on, Daddy,” Vanessa said to him, “it’s okay, it’s going to be all right. Let me get you a tissue. One for me, too.”
They sat quietly for some time. There was much more to say, much more, but now he had a feeling that there would be plenty of time to say it. If not today, then tomorrow.
39
He suggested going out—dinner at Café Filippo was his sly proposal. Vanessa would never have thought of it, but sure, why not? He told her he’d met a musician who would be playing there tonight. “You’ve met more people in the last two days than I have in eight years here,” said Van, a joke which nonetheless pierced him. All day the snow had been melting, a wide thaw, so it was finally warm enough to walk into town. The air was damp. Filthy hard snow was still packed high against the walls of the shops, deeply impervious, locked there until the spring; but the quivering shop awnings were dripping melted water into his neck. Students in loud, loose, bleary groups shunted along the sidewalks, moving joyfully in and out of the warm coffee shops.
But it was quiet at Café Filippo. Alan was sorry that the band would have such a tiny audience. Presumably their fee was fixed and did not depend on numbers? It was pleasant there—wide wood floors, redbrick walls and a touchingly clumsy mural along one whole wall, which seemed to show a collection of musicians from the 1960s, playing together at an ideal party; he only recognized Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. The mural celebrated the fact that Baez and Dylan performed in this very café, said Van, before they were famous. A stage was set up at the front, with idle guitars propped against boxy amplifiers, and the white drum kit he had glimpsed in Ryan’s car. They ordered dinner.
Around ten o’clock, as Alan was getting weary and thinking about leaving, the musicians climbed onstage. He was glad that he and Van were near the back, in the shadows; he never had any intention of taking up Ryan’s suggestion of free drinks and a prominent seat. Now the room had filled up—those in the know did not come amateurishly early. Surely that was the Trask lady up at the bar? Wasn’t it her? Van confirmed the identification. The band was introduced to the audience: Ryan on drums, Wes on bass (tall, long-armed, with spiky peroxided hair), Cat on the banjo (youngish, bespectacled, in her twenties), and Emmy on acoustic guitar (older, with a long silver-gray plait). They were called the Mystery Tramps, a name Alan thought quite terrible. Van agreed, but said that it was almost certainly taken from “Like a Rolling Stone,” which perhaps mitigated the awfulness. Or increased it, whispered Alan, filling the role usually occupied by Helen. “How strange,” whispered Van back, scanning his mind, “that we’re here listening to music, without Helen!”
They played extremely well, far better than their name suggested they would, with precision and subtlety. Their second song was noisy and full of rage, and allowed the drummer to get busy: it was “one of our own compositions,” called “When the Blues See Red.” There were whoops and whistles from the loyal crowd. After it was over (Alan was mainly glad the noise had ceased), they took a moment to retune. To Alan, the process seemed unprofessionally slow. “It takes a village to tune a banjo!” joked the young woman. “We tune because we care,” added the older woman. Alan was getting restless. The next song, said the older woman, “was made famous by Mississippi John Hurt, but was probably played for years, maybe decades, before he sang it, and no one knows who actually wrote the beautiful darn thing.” It was called “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor.”
She began by playing an intricate series on her acoustic, picking the strings. The accompaniment was minimal—the bassist was barely touching his guitar, and the drummer was hitting only a tambourine and kicking his bass drum. It sounded cheerful, it was cracking along at a good pace, but the words were wintry, soulful. Alan was fascinated, and sat up, suddenly full of concentration. He had never heard this song, but he and his parents had loved “Hard Times Come Again No More,” and one thing he’d always cherished about that tune was that it was a sad song, a lament, even a dirge, but with lyrics that hinted the other way, at resolution, solidarity, conviction.
’Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
That song had sometimes given him strength during his own hard times. It was neither purely sad nor happy, but had the wisdom of its mixtures; the fortifying power of dappled things. And it was the same with the song the band was now playi
ng. “What is this?” he eagerly asked Van. “Shush, Daddy, I don’t know, just listen.” It was set in a winter landscape, there was a traveler, a bed for the night. He heard “Make me a pallet on your floor,” and he heard “I’m going up the country by the cold sleet and snow.” His eyes swam, he was even more grateful for the shadows.
Just make me down, make me down
Make me a pallet down, soft and low
Make me a pallet on your floor
40
It was warmer still, next morning. Outside, water was trickling everywhere; the roofs of the houses were now bare of snow. He liked his little bedroom, its thin walls, the air coming in through the closed window. He had a single bed with a New England quilt. Make me a pallet on your floor. He opened his laptop and waited for the Internet connection. He wrote a message to Eric Ball. He reminded Eric that selling off the Seddon was the top priority of the next two weeks; after that, they would shift the two buildings in York. He gave him Vanessa’s telephone number, and explained that he had quit the hotel. This was where he could now be reached. And he asked him to contact Helen, whose e-mail Eric already had, and set up a three-way meeting in the next month, in London or Newcastle or somewhere else, it didn’t matter where. Eric, Alan, and Helen were going to get together to discuss a new venture. “Exciting, I think. (More to follow.)” Then he logged off, shut down the white contraption, and serenely bade it farewell.
Downstairs, he sat with his coffee and read The New York Times. Van was in the main room, reading for class, pen in hand. The phone rang, and it was Josh, so Alan stepped out the door onto the front deck. For the first time since his arrival, it was warm enough to do so without flinching. Van had said that when spring came, she could feel her body unclenching—you’ve gained another lease on life, she said, you’ve successfully finished another precarious chapter. He understood that. Spring was still far off, but now he could imagine it in this landscape: the plains of solid ice would turn scabby and piecemeal; the redundant snow, packed against the sides of the buildings, would weep away into the gutters, leaving grit and salt on the perilous sidewalks. Then would come the movement, the blessed stirring he knew so well from his old life in Northumberland—it was the season when he and Candace would start their long walks, and long before Candace, he and Cathy: the daffodils would come, and then the sharp yellow life-stab of the forsythia bushes, like an advance envoy from summer; and the frivolous, brief cherry trees; eventually all the birds would return, the swallows and cuckoos, and the male chickadee whose hopeful minor third, a mating call, she would hear every morning at the bedroom window. And upstate, upstate, spring would turn to summer, with peals of wisteria bells, and the strong trees—the poplars, the maples, and the oaks—would fill out and become joyful green worlds again. Upstate. And the rest of life, that American life that had become Vanessa’s world, would wake up, too. She would learn to love again the most familiar things: the crimson-and-black livery of the Boar’s Head trucks (the triumphant gold animal, joyfully licking its lips), the growl of the brown UPS vans, the squeal of the rusty squat blue mailboxes (which looked, to English eyes, so much like rubbish bins), yes even the hard flap of the fifteen American flags on Broadway. The beautiful train horn would yell across the valley’s warmed air—no longer the sound of a wintry Christmas harmonica, but now the searching cry of a migrant animal …
Van appeared at the door.
“Josh has to stay another night in Boston. Apparently one of the MIT scientists rescheduled on him at the last minute. So you will miss him after all. He sends his apologies.”
He looked at her. She seemed untroubled by this news; but it was hard to tell. He knew what to do.
“Van, what if I stayed here a bit longer? Changed my ticket?”
“A bit longer? I’d absolutely love that, Dad. But how long?”
“I don’t know yet. A little while.”
“Well, well! You’ll need some new clothes.”
Boston, June 2017
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Also by James Wood
About the Author
Copyright
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Pagebreaks of the print version
Cover Page
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