The river is the river

by Buckley, Jonathan;

  ‘I am not the—’

  ‘But what’s difficult – what has been difficult – is that she thinks that I’ve ended up doing what I do because I didn’t make enough of an effort.’

  ‘No, that’s—’

  ‘She would never say it, but it’s what she thinks.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘Well, it’s what she used to think. I don’t know what she thinks now.’

  ‘She’s never thought that.’

  ‘No, Katie, I’m right. If I’d stuck at it, I could have done better, but I don’t have the drive or the backbone or whatever you want to call it. Practice makes perfect – that’s all there is to it. Practice enough and Wigmore Hall is yours for the taking.’

  ‘That’s just—’

  ‘No husband, no children, earning zilch. Failure on all fronts.’

  ‘Your income is neither here nor there, Naomi,’ Kate tells her.

  ‘Mum has always had a healthy respect for the earners of the world,’ Naomi insists. ‘Another of Dad’s attractions.’

  ‘He wasn’t much of an earner when they met,’ Kate points out.

  ‘True, true. But it would have been obvious that he was never going to be a pauper, don’t you think?’

  ‘I imagine so. That’s not why she married him, though.’

  ‘But it was a plus point, I’d say.’

  ‘As it would have been for most people.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Naomi concedes, by way of putting the point aside. Her eyes are directed at the road, but her gaze has no power. She turns to the window beside her, and seems to notice now the faint reflection of her face in the glass; she looks at it, as though it were the face of someone on the other side of a two-way mirror, someone who is of no particular interest to her. Raking her brow with her fingertips, she closes her eyes and says: ‘The thing is, she is a strong character.’ The adjective is given a peculiar emphasis, as if it bore a private meaning. ‘She’s like you,’ she says. ‘Not crushable. Whereas I am. I’ve always been too fragile for her taste. Too delicate, too sensitive. An aptitude for music was the upside, but not as much of an upside as she’d hoped it would be. Primarily because I didn’t put the work in. I allowed myself to be beaten. That’s it, in a nutshell. She’d never—’

  ‘No,’ Kate interrupts, as softly as possible. ‘Mum always—’

  ‘And I can see her point of view. I could never have done what she used to do. Never. The things she must have seen. Every day, surrounded by the stricken. The ailing and the injured. And she just got on with it. She tended to the broken bodies. She helped them to endure. To keep despair at bay. Despair is a sin, and breaking down is a kind of self-indulgence. I know that’s what she thought. People manage to live with terrible pain and disability, and there’s nothing worse than that, so I should have been able to cope with a dose of unhappiness. Being bonkers – it was like choosing to step out of the real world. Fundamentally, she regarded it as a kind of weakness.’

  Statements much like this one, and some even more extreme, have had to be corrected before, often. ‘That’s not true, Naomi,’ she says. ‘It simply isn’t true.’

  ‘I think it is.’

  ‘She loves you.’

  ‘It’s not a question of love,’ says Naomi gently, smiling as if there were no element of grievance in what she is saying. ‘I know she loves me, in her way, and I love her, in mine. She has been a good mother, despite the fact that I have made life difficult for her. She had a tough time with Dad and all that business, a very tough time, but she came through it. And I made it worse for her, I know that. I know she loves me, but the fact remains: she is disappointed in me. And to tell you the truth,’ she says, bowing her head, ‘I’ve been a disappointment to myself. Until recently, that is. I couldn’t accept that I had become what I’d become. Another sin: pride,’ she says, with a weak snort of a laugh, staring into the footwell. ‘And envy too. I’ve often been envious,’ Naomi tells her sister. This admission has no precedent, but it is uttered less as a confession than as a report, as if envy were a locality that she visited a long time ago.

  ‘Of?’ is all Kate says.

  ‘People with talent.’

  ‘But you have talent.’

  ‘Not enough,’ says Naomi. ‘Sloth as well. I’ve been slothful,’ she goes on, with the same impersonal frankness. ‘I’ve imagined that I might have chosen a different road, and wallowed in regret for having taken the wrong one. I have been a first-class wallower.’

  Kate shakes her head, and answers her sister with a sigh and a smile of helpless sympathy. ‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ she says. In two minutes they will be home; there is some relief in the prospect of being able to retreat to her room, and some guilt at that relief.

  ‘No. I’m not,’ states Naomi. ‘But it doesn’t matter. Everything is different now,’ she says, and she smiles at the view of the river and the meadows through the trees, as if seeing there the image of her new life.

  ‘You talked to Mum about what you’re doing?’ Kate asks.

  ‘Sort of. Didn’t go into the details. Couldn’t see any benefit in telling her I’m going to be at the other end of the country.’

  Kate hesitates, then says: ‘I’ve already told her.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Naomi; it is to be seen that she is suppressing her displeasure at this news. ‘Well, she didn’t let on.’

  ‘Probably slipped her mind.’

  Naomi turns to look through the trees again, and does not respond.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Kate.

  ‘No harm done.’

  ‘So what did she say?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You leaving London.’

  ‘Nothing much,’ says Naomi, as if the question were trivial. ‘Not sure how much of London she remembers,’ she says. She is looking closely at the reflected woman in the car window; she might be trying to ascertain the colour of her eyes. Then the tissue goes back up, for a single touch to the left and right.

  ‘I know,’ says Kate. ‘It’s difficult.’

  ‘Yep,’ answers Naomi. Not until they reach the house does she say anything more. Kate turns off the engine and opens her door; her sister stays in her seat, seatbelt still fastened, staring into the garage doors with the eyes of someone in the midst of a migraine. ‘When she was falling asleep,’ she says, ‘she said something, but I have absolutely no idea what it was.’

  ‘I often can’t make out what she’s saying.’

  ‘No, I could make it out. She wasn’t mumbling. I just couldn’t understand what she was saying. It wasn’t English. Portuguese, I assume. A couple of sentences, it sounded like. I don’t know if she thought I was someone else, or was talking to herself. Maybe she knew who I was but thought I could understand her. I don’t know,’ Naomi murmurs. Turning to look at her sister, she asks: ‘That ever happened with you?’

  ‘Not that I can recall,’ Kate answers.

  Naomi describes what she had heard: two sentences, with a slight alteration in her mother’s voice in the second sentence, as if it were a line of a poem or a saying. Her smile, after she had spoken, suggested the satisfaction one would get from hearing something well expressed.

  ‘You didn’t ask her what she’d said?’ asks Kate.

  ‘No,’ answers Naomi, distractedly, immersed in the memory of the scene, it seems. ‘No, I didn’t,’ she says, with greater firmness. ‘That wouldn’t have been a good thing to do. She was happy. Why bring her out of it?’

  Kate waits for a few seconds, looking at Naomi, who stares at the garage doors. ‘Let’s go inside,’ says Kate, but her sister does not answer, and she does not move. ‘I’m going indoors,’ Kate tells her.

  Still Naomi does not move. Staring ahead, she says in a whisper: ‘It really hit me: the things that are most important to her – perhaps we know nothing about them.’

  ‘I think her family was the most important thing,’ says Kate.

  ‘She had a family before we came along,’ says Naomi.
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  ‘And we met them.’

  ‘We met the parents, yes. But that’s all we did. We encountered them. But we couldn’t speak to them.’

  ‘Yes, but you can’t say we know nothing about them.’

  ‘Next to nothing.’

  ‘No. We—’

  ‘What if her early years, long before us, were the best of her life? That wouldn’t be so unusual. Perhaps that’s what she’s going back to. Perhaps in her mind she’s going home, and we don’t know where that is.’

  ‘Yes we do. We’ve been there.’

  ‘We’ve walked along the streets, as kids, that’s all.’

  ‘And she talked to us. She told us stories. Lots of them.’

  ‘True, but the stories were for our entertainment. Maybe stories aren’t the essential stuff. And what about Daniela.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She seems to have been important. But we know her name and that’s about all. And we’d never heard of her until recently.’

  If she’d been really important, we would have heard of her a long time ago.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’ asks Naomi, with a grimace of incredulity.

  ‘Yes,’ says Kate, ‘it is. Lulu knows about all the people who mattered to me when I was growing up.’

  ‘Not the same situation, Katie. One very big difference: Mum grew up in a foreign language, a language that we don’t speak.’

  ‘She speaks ours.’

  ‘Yes, but the situation is different when you have to translate. Explanation can only take you so far. When we stayed with her parents, when she showed us around, there were things we were never going to understand, because we’re English. We could see, but we were looking through dirty windows.’

  ‘We were just kids. Even if we’d spoken the language, we wouldn’t have understood.’

  ‘We’d have understood more. We’d have been more than tourists.’

  ‘We weren’t tourists, Naomi. That’s an exaggeration.’

  ‘Not much,’ says Naomi. And now, at last, she unbuckles the seatbelt. ‘But don’t you wish she’d taught us to speak the language, at least a bit?’ she asks.

  ‘If we’d shown an interest, she would have done, I’m sure. But we didn’t. And why would we have wanted to? What would have been the point? We were in Portugal for a few days, once a year. I don’t recall either of us ever regretting that we couldn’t understand what Jorge was grumbling about,’ says Kate, getting out of the car. She hears a barely audible sound made by her sister, indicative of a modicum of amusement.

  ‘I take your point,’ says Naomi. ‘Not understanding Jorge was a good thing.’ Walking two paces behind, she follows her sister down the path to the front door. ‘Odd, though,’ she remarks, ‘to be half-Portuguese but not Portuguese at all. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Can’t say I do,’ says Kate, putting the key in the lock. ‘Born in England, raised in England: I’m English.’ She steps into the hall, and without looking she knows, from the quality of the pause, that Naomi is going to start talking about Bernát.

  Bernát’s situation is very interesting, Naomi tells Kate, pursuing her into the kitchen. His parents had ensured that he did not become estranged from the mother tongue, but he had left Budapest when he was very young and so had heard and used Hungarian only at home, with his parents and his uncle and to a lesser extent with his brother, who hadn’t been as keen as Bernát on keeping the link intact. And, though he was pushing forty when he returned to Budapest for the first time, Bernát had always felt a great attachment to the homeland. English, his second language, had become his first, yet he loved the music, the films, the literature of Hungary more than any native Englishman could, more than anything that England had produced. There was no writer he valued as highly as he valued Gyula Krúdy, no book he read with greater pleasure than Napraforgó, says Naomi, dropping the pitch of her voice for the exotic syllables. The point she wants to make is that when Bernát returned to Budapest, as a mid-life adult, it was not a case of getting in touch with his roots. (Of course not, thinks Kate, busying herself at the coffee machine. Nothing so banal for Bernát.) It was a hugely rewarding experience to be back in the city of his birth, the city of his parents and his ancestors, but it was not a homecoming for him. Budapest was as beautiful as he had expected it to be; it was not opaque to him, but there was a sense of distance. For almost a month he stayed there, and at the end of the month he still felt as if he were playing a part, a part for which he had done a vast amount of preparation, he told Naomi. He was in the city but not of it, he joked, reports Naomi. In Hungary he was an imperfect replica of a Hungarian; in England he was an imperfect replica of an Englishman, but a replica that was almost indistinguishable from the real thing. However, having been in Budapest, when he went back to England it was with a sense of being less English than he had been before. Every year he visits Budapest, says Naomi; with each visit he feels that he has moved a yard or two across a bridge that has no visible end.

  ‘Interesting, as you say,’ Kate comments. Unable to muster any worthwhile observations on the fable of rootless Bernát, she nods and tightens her brow, to imply that food for thought has been given. With unnecessary carefulness she settles her cup on its saucer.

  Naomi peers at her sister’s face. ‘Interesting, but too much,’ she diagnoses. ‘You need a break from me,’ she says, as if the last word did not refer to her.

  ‘I need to finish what I was doing,’ answers Kate. ‘Give me a couple of hours and I’m all yours again.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you about Bernát’s book,’ Naomi promises.

  ‘OK,’ says Kate, with a smile and a fleeting kiss to the cheek, but seized by something like foreboding.

  21.

  At her desk, Kate studies a photograph of the family in Coimbra. They are standing on a flight of chipped stone steps: Kate and Naomi at the top, squinting against the sun; their mother below, bright and pretty indeed, laughing, flanked by her parents. This is the last photograph of Jorge with his daughter and her children. His wife is smiling but he, as usual, is not; he looks like a man with a long-festering grudge. Kate regards the face of Jorge and tries to raise a memory of him. What comes to mind is approximate, and lacks warmth. She recalls a gnarled little man, with eyes like turtle beans, and a habit of mumbling in a manner that suggested that he was commenting, sourly, on what he had just seen or heard. Her mother rarely bothered to translate what Jorge had said. Almost every day, as Kate recalls, Jorge would leave the house at ten o’clock and return at one; he went to a café to talk to old workmates. The family’s visit was no reason to adjust his routine. In the evenings he would watch the TV programmes that he always watched, and go to bed at his customary time. For his daughter there was an embrace upon arrival and another on departure, but otherwise almost nothing that an observer would interpret as evidence of love; much the same could be said of his dealings with his wife. When one has been married for so long, Kate’s mother explained, one attains an intimacy so profound that mere gestures of fondness become superfluous; at some point this explanation was withdrawn from service. Had her mother, Kate came to wonder, offended Jorge irretrievably by leaving her home country? That was sometimes an interpretation that seemed persuasive. In his dealings with the girls and their father, Jorge was like a long-term resident at a hotel who was passing the time of day with some short-stay guests, as Kate once remarked to Naomi. It was hard to understand why Cíntia had married him, the girls agreed.

  Cíntia had outlived her husband by four years, and is a more vivid presence: a nimble and energetic woman, with a scurrying stride and fidgety hands and a face as smooth as oiled wood. She seemed to be astute; she read every page of the newspaper, every morning, quickly, as if she had only a certain amount of time in which to process all this information, though all she had to do with her day was look after the house and her husband. Looking at the photograph, Kate can hear the sound of Cíntia’s voice, a gentle patter of syllables in which nothing
like an English word was ever caught by the granddaughters. Her doting gaze was turned upon the girls repeatedly, as if to transmit a spell to prevent their departure. She hugged them, stroked their hands, clasped their faces for intense inspection, as though to expend the surplus emotion that had accumulated since the previous visit. The attention came to be too vehement for Kate, however much she sympathised with her grandmother for having to live with joyless Jorge. And the world-view of Cíntia, as expressed in the décor of the house, became more oppressive as the years went on. Wherever you stood, you had Jesus, Mary or a saint in view. Mementoes of Lourdes were ranged on a shelf in the living room. A pope smiled at you from above the kitchen window, and a different pontiff emanated his sanctity at the top of the staircase. Even in the bathroom there was a Crucifix. ‘I can’t breathe in this place,’ Kate complained to her sister. The whole house was gloomy. Its windows were small and the furniture was dark and heavy, like pieces in a museum, though it turned out that much of it had been bought when their mother was a girl. Hideous thick bowls and dishes, made in the factory where Jorge had worked, were displayed on shelves of black wood. Fat cushions of muddy hues adhered to the chairs like fungi.

  Jorge did not seem to care greatly for his daughter’s husband; but Jorge did not seem to care greatly for anyone other than the former workmates whose company appeared to be a daily requirement. Cíntia, on the other hand, respected her son-in-law: he was a successful and intelligent man; he had made her daughter happy and comfortable; he was the father of two fine young girls. The respect was reciprocated: one should of course respect the mother of one’s wife. The conversations between them, mediated by Leonor, were exquisitely courteous; it was like a meeting of ambassadors, Kate came to think, with her father representing a large and powerful country and Cíntia a nation that was considerably smaller. There was deference in the way Cíntia listened to him; she seemed wary at times, perhaps because his mind worked in ways that were unfathomable to her. She found him interesting, even if, Kate thought, she could not love him as she might have loved a less analytical man or a man from her own country. But her father, Kate soon knew, was often bored in Coimbra. She understood that he did not greatly enjoy being there, and that their excursions from the city were as much for his benefit as for the children’s, in compensation for the long days with the in-laws.