by Ian Mcewan
As for Lola—my high-living, chain-smoking cousin—here she was, still as lean and fit as a racing dog, and still faithful. Who would have dreamed it? This, as they used to say, was the side on which her bread was buttered. That may sound sour, but it went through my mind as I glanced across at her. She wore a sable coat and a scarlet wide-brimmed fedora. Bold rather than vulgar. Near on eighty years old, and still wearing high heels. They clicked on the pavement with the sound of a younger woman’s stride. There was no sign of a cigarette. In fact, there was an air of the health farm about her, and an indoor tan. She was taller than her husband now, and there was no doubting her vigor. But there was also something comic about her—or was I clutching at straws? She was heavy on the makeup, quite garish around the mouth and liberal with the smoothing cream and powder. I’ve always been a puritan in this, so I count myself an unreliable witness. I thought there was a touch of the stage villain here—the gaunt figure, the black coat, the lurid lips. A cigarette holder, a lapdog tucked under one arm and she could have been Cruella De Vil.
We passed by each other in a matter of seconds. I went on up the steps, then stopped under the pediment, out of the rain, to watch the group make its way to the car. He was helped in first, and I saw then how frail he was. He couldn’t bend at the waist, nor could he take his own weight on one foot. They had to lift him into his seat. The far door was held open for Lady Lola who folded herself in with a terrible agility. I watched the Rolls pull away into the traffic, then I went in. Seeing them laid something heavy on my heart, and I was trying not to think about it, or feel it now. I already had enough to deal with today. But Lola’s health was on my mind as I gave my bag in at the cloakroom, and exchanged cheery good mornings with the porters. The rule here is that one must be escorted up to the reading room in a lift, whose cramped space makes small talk compulsory as far as I’m concerned. As I made it—shocking weather, but improvements were due by the weekend—I couldn’t resist thinking about my encounter outside in the fundamental terms of health: I might outlive Paul Marshall, but Lola would certainly outlive me. The consequences of this are clear. The issue has been with us for years. As my editor put it once, publication equals litigation. But I could hardly face that now. There was already enough that I didn’t want to be thinking about. I had come here to be busy.
I spent a while chatting with the Keeper of Documents. I handed over the bundle of letters Mr. Nettle wrote me about Dunkirk—most gratefully received. They’ll be stored with all the others I’ve given. The Keeper had found me an obliging old colonel of the Buffs, something of an amateur historian himself, who had read the relevant pages of my typescript and faxed through his suggestions. His notes were handed to me now—irascible, helpful. I was completely absorbed by them, thank God.
“Absolutely no [underlined twice] soldier serving with the British army would say ‘On the double.’ Only an American would give such an order. The correct term is ‘At the double.’”
I love these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail that cumulatively gives such satisfaction.
“No one would ever think of saying ‘twenty-five-pound guns.’ The term was either ‘twenty-five pounders’ or ‘twenty-five-pounder guns.’ Your usage would sound distinctly bizarre, even to a man who was not with the Royal Artillery.”
Like policemen in a search team, we go on hands and knees and crawl our way toward the truth.
“You have your RAF chappie wearing a beret. I really don’t think so. Outside the Tank Corps, even the army didn’t have them in 1940. I think you’d better give the man a forage cap.”
Finally, the colonel, who began his letter by addressing me as “Miss Tallis,” allowed some impatience with my sex to show through. What was our kind doing anyway, meddling in these affairs?
“Madame [underlined three times]—a Stuka does not carry ‘a single thousand-ton bomb.’ Are you aware that a navy frigate hardly weighs that much? I suggest you look into the matter further.”
Merely a typo. I meant to type “pound.” I made a note of these corrections, and wrote a letter of thanks to the colonel. I paid for some photocopies of documents which I arranged into orderly piles for my own archives. I returned the books I had been using to the front desk, and threw away various scraps of paper. The work space was cleared of all traces of me. As I said my goodbyes to the Keeper, I learned that the Marshall Foundation was about to make a grant to the museum. After a round of handshaking with the other librarians, and my promise to acknowledge the department’s help, a porter was called to see me down. Very kindly, the girl in the cloakroom called a taxi, and one of the younger members of the door staff carried my bag all the way out to the pavement.
During the ride back north, I thought about the colonel’s letter, or rather, about my own pleasure in these trivial alterations. If I really cared so much about facts, I should have written a different kind of book. But my work was done. There would be no further drafts. These were the thoughts I had as we entered the old tram tunnel under the Aldwych, just before I fell asleep. When I was woken by the driver, the cab was outside my flat in Regent’s Park.
I filed away the papers I had brought from the library, made a sandwich, then packed an overnight case. I was conscious as I moved about my flat, from one familiar room to another, that the years of my independence could soon be over. On my desk was a framed photograph of my husband, Thierry, taken in Marseille two years before he died. One day I would be asking who he was. I soothed myself by spending time choosing a dress to wear for my birthday dinner. The process was actually rejuvenating. I’m thinner than I was a year ago. As I trailed my fingers along the racks I forgot about the diagnosis for minutes on end. I decided on a shirtwaisted cashmere dress in dove gray. Everything followed easily then: a white satin scarf held by Emily’s cameo brooch, patent court shoes—low-heeled, of course—a black dévoré shawl. I closed the case and was surprised by how light it seemed as I carried it into the hallway.
My secretary would be coming in tomorrow, before I returned. I left her a note, setting out the work I wanted her to do, then I took a book and a cup of tea and sat in an armchair at a window with a view over the park. I’ve always been good at not thinking about the things that are really troubling me. But I was not able to read. I felt excited. A journey into the country, a dinner in my honor, a renewal of family bonds. And yet I’d had one of those classic conversations with a doctor. I should have been depressed. Was it possible that I was, in the modern term, in denial? Thinking this changed nothing. The car was not due for another half hour and I was restless. I got out of the chair, and went up and down the room a few times. My knees hurt if I sit too long. I was haunted by the thought of Lola, the severity of that gaunt old painted face, her boldness of stride in the perilous high heels, her vitality, ducking into the Rolls. Was I competing with her as I trod the carpet between the fireplace and the Chesterfield? I always thought the high life, the cigarettes, would see her off. Even in our fifties I thought that. But at eighty she has a voracious, knowing look. She was always the superior older girl, one step ahead of me. But in that final important matter, I will be ahead of her, while she’ll live on to be a hundred. I will not be able to publish in my lifetime.
The Rolls must have turned my head, because the car when it came—fifteen minutes late—was a disappointment. Such things do not usually trouble me. It was a dusty minicab, whose rear seat was covered in nylon fur with a zebra pattern. But the driver, Michael, was a cheerful West Indian lad who took my case and made a fuss of sliding the front passenger seat forward for me. Once it was established that I would not tolerate the thumping music at any volume from the speakers on the ledge behind my head, and he had recovered from a little sulkiness, we got along well and talked about families. He had never known his father, and his mother was a doctor at the Middlesex Hospital. He himself graduated in law from Leicester University, and now he was going to the LSE to write a doctoral thesis on law and pover
ty in the third world. As we headed out of London by the dismal Westway, he gave me his condensed version: no property law, therefore no capital, therefore no wealth.
“There’s a lawyer talking,” I said. “Drumming up business for yourself.”
He laughed politely, though he must have thought me profoundly stupid. It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
After twenty minutes we had spoken enough, and as the car reached a motorway and the engine settled into an unvarying drone, I fell asleep again and when I woke we were on a country road, and a painful tightness was around my forehead. I took from my handbag three aspirins which I chewed and swallowed with distaste. Which portion of my mind, of my memory, had I lost to a minuscule stroke while I was asleep? I would never know. It was then, in the back of that tinny little car, that I experienced for the first time something like desperation. Panic would be too strong a word. Claustrophobia was part of it, helpless confinement within a process of decay, and a sensation of shrinking. I tapped Michael’s shoulder and asked him to turn on his music. He assumed I was indulging him because we were close to our destination, and he refused. But I insisted, and so the thumping twangy bass noise resumed, and over it, a light baritone chanting in Caribbean patois to the rhythms of a nursery rhyme, or a playground skipping-rope jingle. It helped me. It amused me. It sounded so childish, though I had a suspicion that some terrible sentiments were being expressed. I didn’t ask for a translation.
The music was still playing as we turned into the drive of Tilney’s Hotel. More than twenty-five years had passed since I came this way, for Emily’s funeral. I noticed first the absence of parkland trees, the giant elms lost to disease I supposed, and the remaining oaks cleared to make way for a golf course. We were slowing now to let some golfers and their caddies cross. I couldn’t help thinking of them as trespassers. The woods that surrounded Grace Turner’s old bungalow were still there, and as the drive cleared a last stand of beeches, the main house came into view. There was no need to be nostalgic—it was always an ugly place. But from a distance it had a stark and unprotected look. The ivy which used to soften the effect of that bright red façade had been stripped away, perhaps to preserve the brickwork. Soon we were approaching the first bridge, and already I could see that the lake was no longer there. On the bridge we were suspended above an area of perfect lawn, such as you sometimes see in an old moat. It was not unpleasant in itself, if you did not know what had once been there—the sedge, the ducks, and the giant carp that two tramps had roasted and feasted on by the island temple. Which had also gone. Where it stood was a wooden bench, and a litter basket. The island, which of course was no longer that, was a long mound of smooth grass, like an immense ancient barrow, where rhododendrons and other shrubbery were growing. There was a gravel path looping round, with more benches here and there, and spherical garden lights. I did not have time to try and estimate the spot where I once sat and comforted the young Lady Lola Marshall, for we were already crossing the second bridge and then slowing to turn into the asphalted car park that ran the length of the house.
Michael carried my case into the reception area in the old hall. How odd that they should have taken the trouble to lay needlecord carpet over those black and white tiles. I supposed that the acoustic was always troublesome, though I never minded it. A Vivaldi Season was burbling through concealed speakers. There was a decent rosewood desk with a computer screen and a vase of flowers, and standing guard on each side were two suits of armor; mounted on the paneling, crossed halberds and a coat of arms; above them, the portrait that used to be in the dining room which my grandfather imported to give the family some lineage. I tipped Michael and earnestly wished him luck with property rights and poverty. I was trying to unsay my foolish remark about lawyers. He wished me happy birthday and shook my hand—how feathery and unassertive his grip was—and left. From behind the desk a grave-faced girl in a business suit gave me my key and told me that the old library had been booked for the exclusive use of our party. The few who had already arrived had gone out for a stroll. The plan was to gather for drinks at six. A porter would bring my case up. There was a lift for my convenience.
No one to greet me then, but I was relieved. I preferred to take it in alone, the interest of so much change, before I was obliged to become the guest of honor. I took the lift to the second floor, went through a set of glass fire doors, and walked along the corridor whose polished boards creaked in a familiar way. It was bizarre, to see the bedrooms numbered and locked. Of course, my room number—seven—told me nothing, but I think I’d already guessed where I would be sleeping. At least, when I stopped outside the door, I wasn’t surprised. Not my old room, but Auntie Venus’s, always considered to have the best view in the house, over the lake, the driveway, the woods and the hills beyond. Charles, Pierrot’s grandson and the organizing spirit, would have reserved it for me.
It was a pleasant surprise, stepping in. Rooms on either side had been incorporated to make a grand suite. On a low glass table stood a giant spray of hothouse flowers. The huge high bed Auntie Venus had occupied for so long without complaint had gone, and so had the carved trousseau chest and the green silk sofa. They were now the property of the eldest son by Leon’s second marriage and installed in a castle somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. But the new furnishings were fine, and I liked my room. My case arrived, I ordered a pot of tea and hung my dress. I explored my sitting room which had a writing desk and a good lamp, and was impressed by the vastness of the bathroom with its potpourri and stacks of towels on a heated rack. It was a relief not to see everything in terms of tasteless decline—it easily becomes a habit of age. I stood at the window to admire the sunlight slanting over the golf course, and burnishing the bare trees on the distant hills. I could not quite accept the absence of the lake, but it could be restored one day perhaps, and the building itself surely embraced more human happiness now, as a hotel, than it did when I lived here.
Charles phoned an hour later, just as I was beginning to think about getting dressed. He suggested that he come to get me at six-fifteen, after everyone else was gathered, and bring me down so that I could make an entrance. And so it was that I entered that enormous L-shaped room, on his arm, in my cashmere finery, to the applause, and then the raised glasses of fifty relatives. My immediate impression as I came in was of recognizing no one. Not a familiar face! I wondered if this was a foretaste of the incomprehension I had been promised. Then slowly people came into focus. One must make allowances for the years, and the speed with which babes-in-arms become boisterous ten-year-olds. There was no mistaking my brother, curled and slumped to one side in his wheelchair, a napkin at his throat to catch the spills of champagne that someone held to his lips. As I leaned over to kiss Leon, he managed a smile in the half of his face still under his control. And nor did I mistake for long Pierrot, much shriveled and with a shining pate I wanted to put my hand on, but still twinkly as ever and very much the paterfamilias. It’s accepted that we never mention his sister.
I made a progress round the room, with Charles at my side, prompting me with the names. How delightful to be at the heart of such a good-willed reunion. I reacquainted myself with the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Jackson who died fifteen years ago. In fact, between them the twins had fairly peopled the room. And Leon had not done so badly either, with his four marriages and dedicated fathering. We ranged in age from three months to his eighty-nine years. And what a din of voices, from gruff to shrill, as the waiters came round with more champagne and lemonade. The aging children of distant cousins greeted me like long-lost friends. Every second person wanted to tell me something kind about my books. A group of enchanting teenagers told me how they were studying my books at school. I promised to read the typescript novel of someone’s absent son. Notes and cards were pressed into my h
ands. Piled on a table in the corner of the room were presents which I would have to open, several children told me, before, not after, their bedtime. I made my promises, I shook hands, kissed cheeks and lips, admired and tickled babies, and just as I was beginning to think how much I wanted to sit down somewhere, I noticed that chairs were being set out, facing one way. Then Charles clapped his hands and, shouting over the noise that barely subsided, announced that before dinner there was to be an entertainment in my honor. Would we all take our seats.
I was led to an armchair in the front row. Next to me was old Pierrot, who was in conversation with a cousin on his left. A fidgety near-silence descended on the room. From a corner came the agitated whispers of children, which I thought it tactful to ignore. While we waited, while I had, as it were, some seconds to myself, I looked about me, and only now properly absorbed the fact that all the books were gone from the library, and all the shelves too. That was why the room had seemed so much bigger than I remembered. The only reading matter was the country magazines in racks by the fireplace. At the sound of shushing, and the scrape of a chair, there stood before us a boy with a black cloak over his shoulders. He was pale, freckled and ginger-haired—no mistaking a Quincey child. I guessed him to be about nine or ten years old. His body was frail, which made his head seem large and gave him an ethereal look. But he looked confident as he gazed around the room, waiting for his audience to settle. Then at last he raised his elfin chin, filled his lungs, and spoke out in a clear pure treble. I’d been expecting a magic trick, but what I heard had the ring of the supernatural.
This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella
Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow.
It grieved her parents to see their firstborn
Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne
Without permission, to get ill and find indigence
Until she was down to her last sixpence.
