He rifled through the papers, looking.
You live on through your children, people say. But that didn’t provide much comfort either. Rosa would be at best an unenthusiastic steward of the paternal memory. Who could blame her, given the fact that for most of her life he hadn’t been around?
And anyway, memory does not endure. After Rosa, he thought gloomily, there would be no one who would remember him. And if she had children or, at the very outside, grandchildren while Russell was still alive, once they in turn were dead there would again be no one left to remember him. The only evidence of his existence would be a few faded photographs to be looked at with detached curiosity and with no more purchase on the future than a statue or a picture in a history book. He would not even be a distant memory. He would have simply vanished from the human imagination.
Was it for that reason, when he realized that the undertakers had left behind his father’s prayer shawl after they wheeled his body in its black zip-up bag (what indignity!) out to their van, he ran into the street with it and banged on their window for them to take it? It wasn’t just that it was the custom for a Jew to be buried wrapped in his own prayer shawl. It wasn’t just that it would have mattered to his father. It somehow mattered, desperately, to him.
He had always had a horror of death. It was the obliteration of himself that was so…preposterous. Rosa talked vaguely about becoming one with the universe and everyone merging their atoms with those of the earth and the trees and the air. She appeared to find comfort in this, but it just freaked him out even more. Thinking of himself as a bag of atoms did not reassure him in the slightest.
He told himself that being dead was going to be no worse than not having yet been born. But that didn’t help either, because if he hadn’t been born in the first place he wouldn’t be worrying about being dead.
Strap-hanging on the Tube, he would marvel that the entire carriage appeared not to be preoccupied by the fact that every single one of them was going to disintegrate. In bed at night, the sheer suffocating horror of it got so bad he would sit bolt upright, trembling and gasping for breath. “For Christ’s sake, Russell,” Alice would hiss, furious at being woken up, “it’s being you that you should worry about, not being no longer you.”
Even when woken in the middle of the night, he marveled, she still managed to snap into full advocacy mode.
“You looking for something?”
Beverley’s voice cut into his reverie.
“No, nothing.”
But he wondered if somewhere there was a letter. Some kind of farewell, some expression of regret, a still flickering spark of affection? Something to show he had not been erased, not totally.
“He missed you, you know. He spoke about you just before he died. He said he wondered whether you still played the piano.”
As if she had read his mind. But that wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
“The piano? I haven’t played it since I was a child.”
“He was always very proud of you.”
“His mind had gone.”
“My God Russell, you are one cold fish.”
Why was she so angry, he wondered.
“Just look at you. You come swanning in after all this time, not so much as a peep out of you, never picked up the phone to see how I was coping with it all…”
“Coping with what? You seem to have it all very much under control.”
“Coping with wha…? Let me tell you what. His mind came and went like a mobile phone signal. You’d be talking to him quite normally and then suddenly he’d say something barmy so you never knew where you were. If you talked to him as if he couldn’t understand he would get very upset. He would cry and say I’m not going senile, don’t behave as if I’m going senile. And I couldn’t get any decent care for him. He was on the waiting list at the home where Mum is. The girls I hired were dreck, had to be constantly watched like a hawk. I was in and out of here, cleaning up, cooking for him, trying to work out whether these girls were hurting him because that’s what he was saying. A nightmare. And all this time not one call from you, not one visit, nothing. And now you say I had it all under control!”
Mechanically, Russell humped sacks full of clothes out to the Volvo to take to the charity shop. Someone had been hired to come and take away the furniture. A shabby van was parked down the street and two shifty-looking men went in and out carting away tables and chairs.
Russell watched with every nerve jangling as the Georgian reproduction wine cabinet with the interior light and the little cocktail sticks with plastic cherries tinkling in their tray was heaved unceremoniously into the van. He stood and gazed through the open back door at the furniture with which he had grown up, and which he had loathed, now stacked in the back of the lorry, waiting in silence for its last journey like a group of condemned French aristocrats in a tumbril.
A cold fish. He thought of Alice. She was always very focused. That night when he got back home shattered from filming in Melbourne he found Alice waving a chart at him and insisting that they must “do it now” because it was the optimum time for conceiving and they couldn’t afford yet another month to go past; and so he obligingly pumped away while feeling quite detached from his brain, let alone any other part of himself.
Afterwards he must have passed out from the combination of exhaustion and too much whisky on the plane. Three hours later he was wide awake again. In the morning Alice slammed the coffee mugs down on the table and wouldn’t look at him. Halfway out of the front door she paused.
“Emotional literacy. You really have to do something about this. Can you feel? Or is it all just me me me with you?”
He gazed at her through a fog of fatigue. He supposed she must be right because he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.
Back in the flat, he found Beverley on the floor in the dining room surrounded by photograph albums. He picked one up; its stiff, cracked and musty cover reminded him of Kuchinsky’s secret find. His secret.
A few photographs fell out, small and sepia-colored, some with deckled edges. He squinted at them. The faces of two carefree people laughed up at him: the man thick set with shiny slicked-back hair, a cigarette between his fingers and his arm round a ravishing younger woman, her hair piled up carelessly in a dark cloud above her head, in sunglasses and tight trousers. His mother? His father? Surely not. These people were strangers to him. He turned over the photograph. Scrawled on the back was “Biarritz, June 1956.”
“Didn’t know the old man smoked.”
“There’s a lot you didn’t know.”
“Quite a looker then, wasn’t she.”
He idly turned the pages of the album. Picture after picture of Jack and Sylvia with uncles, aunts, cousins at weddings and bar mitzvahs, with Russell and Beverley as babies and then as children.
There was one man he didn’t recognize who seemed to appear in a number of photographs, usually walking and smoking alongside Jack. He appeared nonchalant, debonair; he loped along with hands in his pockets, cigarette dangling from his mouth and with his jacket slung over one shoulder. In one, though, he was pictured with Sylvia alone, both of them sitting at a table drinking beer. He was looking at her, serious, his face in profile; she was smiling at the camera, her hand shading her eyes against the sun. She looked radiant.
“Who was this?”
Beverley busied herself with emptying shelves of packets of tea, sugar and porridge oats. After a while she said: “That was Uncle Eddie.”
“Uncle who?”
“Don’t you remember him? He wasn’t a real uncle.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He was a chartered accountant. He used to come and do the bookkeeping for them, for the shop. They met on holiday, and then after that he came and did the books.”
She paused and seemed to brace herself.
“He was in love wi
th our mother and wanted to marry her. She was infatuated with him. It was a holiday affair, which went on afterwards. Several years, actually.”
Russell stared at her.
“What on earth are you talking about?” Was this her idea of a joke?
She looked at him for a while over the top of her royal blue Dolce & Gabbana spectacles. There was a glittery motif on the side.
“You never saw how unhappy she was, did you. Mum was highly intelligent. No education because she had to leave school early and look after Gran. Found herself on the shelf in her thirties and so married Dad out of desperation, I suppose. But she married beneath her. Realized she’d made a terrible mistake when she clapped eyes on Uncle Eddie. By all accounts, they were both smitten. But by then she had had you and she was trapped. That’s why she resented you.”
His mother! No no, he thought wildly, not possible. Not his mother. She was the rock, the anchor, the still and unchanging center of this world he had put to one side. It was his father who had pushed him away. How could his mother possibly have loved someone else? She didn’t have the imagination. With that unchanging life in this humdrum little flat, this tomb, where even the windows had been stuck fast against the outside world since being painted shut years previously?
“Did he know?” He was in an agony on his father’s behalf.
“Do me a favor! Went on right under his nose—all of our noses—and he didn’t know a thing.”
“She betrayed him?”
“Dear God, pots and kettles! Just listen to you!”
“I can’t believe it. Resented us? All those years?”
“Not us,” said Beverley cruelly. “You. When I came along she was already trapped. Besides, I was a daughter and she thought I would look after her. Which I certainly have done.”
She sniffed and flashed her eyes. She certainly had a sense of timing, he thought. Who would have thought she had it in her?
“How long have you known this?”
“She told me years ago. It was as if she needed to get certain things off her chest. As if she knew she wasn’t going to be with us much longer.”
“What else did she say?” Russell asked in dread.
“She said she wished she could have been a proper grandma to Rosa. That really upset her.”
“Was that all?”
“Yes.”
No, that couldn’t have been true. His mother must have talked about him. About what happened.
“Well she could’ve…but this…this is just too…banal, for God’s sake.”
He looked at the photograph again. He studied first his mother’s face and then the face of this man Eddie. He had never seen her look so carefree. Eddie’s expression was intent but inscrutable. So his father had been cuckolded, made a laughing stock, all behind his back. Could there have been a greater demonstration of contempt, he thought bitterly. He felt wounded to his very soul.
“How come you remember this character and I don’t?”
“Not sure if you ever noticed anything that wasn’t about you. You never saw what Dad made her put up with. You were always his favorite because you were clever. He never so much as looked at me. I also could have made something of myself if I’d had any encouragement. Not that she gave me any, either.”
He closed his eyes and pinched the top of his nose between his finger and thumb. His head was beginning to throb again. A picture floated into his mind of Beverley as a schoolgirl with her skirt hitched up over ungainly thighs and ladders in her tights, giggling over cosmetics and teen magazines with her friends. The idea that she had ever had any ambition was news to him.
“I had some talent for art, you know. And I’d have loved to travel. Could even have got to university if anyone had taken any trouble with me. But I was sent to rotten schools. Unlike you.”
That wasn’t quite how he remembered it. True, he had got into the grammar school and Beverley had not. But hell, she had never been cooperative, not even before that. Never willing to concentrate for five minutes together—and bolshie with it. She was always in trouble, always doing detentions and the like. So she kept being moved from school to school until at last, to everyone’s relief, she left for good.
For a while, she hardly got out of bed during the day, and then slopped around in tracksuit bottoms eating tubes of Pringles. Then she had got herself together, smartened up and gone to work as a secretary in the solicitors’ office where Elliott worked; and to general surprise, not least her own, had ended up marrying him.
He had always wondered what Elliott saw in her. He assumed he had wanted a doormat. He had never given much thought to what Beverley may have wanted.
Now it was as if a tap had been turned on and left running.
“She just wrote me off. Always screaming at me to do my homework, why didn’t I get better marks, why were my reports so bad. She never took my side, even when they bullied me, even when the teacher threw the blackboard rubber at me. My God, how she used to shout.”
He remembered the screaming. It was true their mother had had a volcanic temper. But generally it had been used against Jack.
“Well you’ve done all right now, haven’t you.”
She looked away. For the first time he wondered about her and Elliott. They seemed such a perfect fit. Everything was just so—the big house and garden, the solid husband, the four sons all of whom had been to or were destined for Oxbridge and were slotted into careers in the law, medicine or the city. So unlike the mess in his own life.
Of course Elliott was a total joke and a lump of lard to boot. Russell had assumed that was what Beverley had wanted.
Was Beverley capable of a grand passion like the one their mother had had for Uncle Eddie, and he for her? Was he himself capable of such a thing? He thought of Alice, her perfect oval face set hard and white beneath her glossy blonde bob, her entire body taut as a piano string flinching away as he reached out for her.
“I fancy a bit of hot chocolate. Want some?”
They both sat cradling the steaming mugs. He tried not to think about the powder he was spooning from the half-empty tin that his father would now never finish. The neon kitchen light buzzed incessantly.
“Funny how certain tastes or smells bring things right back. When I was five I ran away. It only lasted an afternoon. I opened the front door and went upstairs and said to the woman in the top flat, I want you to be my mummy. I can hear myself saying it even now. She said, but you’ve got a mummy, and I said, I don’t like her, I want a new one. She gave me hot chocolate and toasted raisin bread and we watched TV on the sofa together. Then I went back downstairs.”
“I’m sorry. I really had no idea.”
“Oh, you were the little prince. At least you gave her something to boast about to her friends. On me she took it out, all the rage that she had been trapped in and that had ruined her life.”
What was it with the women in his life, he thought dully; all of them saw him as the enemy. Was he really so inadequate as a human being? He suspected he was.
He thought of Rosa, of the razor blade slicing silently into her soft skin—swift, rhythmical, deliberate incisions.
“Ridiculous!” he had shouted down the phone when Alice had rung from the hospital. “Just attention-seeking, that’s all! It’s just a fashion! Stupid, stupid girl!”
Afterwards, though, he had wept copiously, great hot scalding tears.
7
IN THE WEEKS that followed, Russell’s life took on a new pattern. At the beginning, he would slog up to Cockfosters in the evening. But then, bit by bit, he would find ways of going there for a morning or an afternoon.
Gradually, he was spending longer and longer at Kuchinsky’s. The story of Eliachim of York had got under his skin. He was hooked. He couldn’t wait to open those crackly pages between their stiff covers and reveal the next section of the story. At first,
it seemed like a kind of game. After a while, though, he felt, strangely, that he himself was being changed by what he was reading. He felt as if the book was somehow physically pulling him in between its wooden boards.
He wondered whether it was some sort of traumatic shock after his father’s death. But he didn’t feel disordered. He felt exhilarated.
Not that it was easy—far from it. Maybe that was part of its appeal, as an antidote to the cultural semolina through which he had to paddle every day.
Until this point, he hadn’t realized just how intellectually lazy he had become, how little mental challenge there was in the work that he did. So he supposed he was bored. But it took Eliachim to shake him out of his torpid state. It was as if he’d stepped through a looking glass.
To begin with, he couldn’t believe that it actually was what it seemed so alluringly yet implausibly to be—a medieval English narrative in an old French dialect written in Hebrew characters. There was, however, enough in books he dug out of the library to confirm that yes, given the culture of twelfth-century English Jews, this was an entirely plausible literary mode of expression.
But then it was far from easy to translate it, particularly given the constraints Kuchinsky had laid down for him. After all, translating a transliteration, in two languages with which you are by no means familiar, is a tall order; and to do so in someone’s front room with that person breathing down your neck hardly helps.
At the beginning, he was daunted by the task and several times nearly gave up. He brought in more and more dictionaries, lexicographies of Old French and Middle English, histories and other reference books, until Kuchinsky’s grim little front parlor started to resemble a corner of the London Library.
He recalled that an old friend, Toby Pritchard, whom he hadn’t seen in donkey’s years, had gone off to do a doctorate in linguistics. Well actually, he had been more a friend of a friend—amiable enough, but a bit of a library lizard. One of the saddos. Through buttering up the warden’s secretary at his old college, he tracked him down and rang him up.
The Legacy Page 7
