Inglorious

by Joanna Kavenna

  Contrite, she said, ‘Delicious dessert. Really good food. This place is better than I remember it,’ because her father was paying and it seemed ungrateful to complain. ‘Nice chocolate sauce. Delicious.’

  Her father said: ‘We are meant to be industrious. And our industry should make us happy.’

  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA said everyone together. The whole restaurant was laughing. It was only Rosa and her father who were sitting pensively at their small table.

  Later Rosa allowed her father to pay for her lunch. He had known all along, and only grumbled briefly. Embarrassed, she said she would buy him lunch next time. They stood outside the door of the restaurant, and he eyed her bags. ‘Off on holiday?’ he said, arching his brows and, Rosa imagined, thinking of the money he had just spent.

  ‘No, I told you, I have to go to see a friend. Just for a couple of nights. I’ll apply for jobs while I’m away. Then I’ll be back and busy, don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘But, Dad, are you sure you’re OK? I never really asked.’

  Her father’s face was pale in the sunlight. But his eyes were still bright blue. He fixed her with them and said:

  ‘I told you Rosa, my days are very structured. I read a lot. Most importantly, I feel I have improved in some things since September. My Spanish is slightly better, even with my ancient brain. My bridge is much improved. I am fitter, if more deaf.’

  He was like a character in Gogol, his jacket almost worn through at the sleeves. He was carrying folded papers in a shabby satchel. Now he was talking about the virtues of planning, about how important it was to plan a life.

  ‘You have to have a scheme,’ he said.

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Rather, I am in the process of developing one.’

  ‘Well, there’s the telephone,’ he said. ‘Give me a call soon. Don’t leave it another month.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course I won’t.’

  They stood in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘Nothing is more important than happiness. Nothing is worth being unhappy about.’

  A bus went past. The wind blew in their faces. Her father’s faded jacket flapped at the corners. Rosa was still thinking about the money and her unanswered question. She had it phrased. I wondered, could you lend me a small amount of money? I’ll pay you back almost immediately. Just to tide me over for a few weeks. Instead she said: ‘I understand that. But there’s the theory and the practice. It’s hard for the two to coalesce.’

  Coalesce? she thought.

  He turned to go, and she said, ‘Father?’

  ‘Yes, Rosa?’ He turned back towards her, holding his satchel with both hands. That was the moment! Just a hundred or so, though she knew that made little difference. Still she stood there, trying to say something. A thousand, and I will have a job by the end of the month! Just a thousand! He was expectant, troubled, waiting for a confession. He had come for lunch, hoping to rally her spirits. His story about having a friend to see – she wasn’t sure she believed it. Her father didn’t really have any friends. He had paid for a ticket, a lunch, the trip had cost him a couple of hundred. She had his stapled article in the pocket of her coat. She thought of him sitting on the train, holding a book to his face, his legs under a plastic table. If she divulged all, he would go home sad. She had caused him pain already. Now to ask him for money!

  ‘Have a good journey home. Thanks so much again for lunch,’ she said.

  ‘My pleasure,’ he said, and walked away quickly, not turning back.

  She said goodbye to his retreating form and headed towards Notting Hill. She was thinking of him going to the station, his jacket flapping in the wind. She imagined him holding out his ticket to the guard, his face blank. It was clear she had no sense of proportion. But she was crying hot tears as she walked along. She was moving as fast as she could, rubbing her face. It was nearly too late, she was suddenly aware just how late it was. With her head down, she walked on. Her train was leaving soon, so she turned the corner and found a bus. It was a fine bus, which took her past the park, where she saw the trees in their autumn severity, thin and sinewy, and underneath she saw the lower lines of bushes and the meandering silver string of the river. With her nose against the glass, she noticed joggers on the path below, and the straight-backed forms of cyclists, turning circles with their feet. There was a queue of cars at Hyde Park Corner, jammed up at the lights, waiting. The traffic shifted slowly. The bus turned left at Marble Arch, and moved up towards Marylebone.

  Hunched into her coat, she tried to stay calm. It was absurd to be so mournful about her father, who was a grown man with a lover and a sense of a benevolent deity to console him. Her father was religious, she thought. He had found his church and locked the door behind him. It was how he coped, in the end, with the death of his wife. His belief rendered things palatable, perhaps. When he went home, he thought of God and a celestial palace. He went to church on Sundays with Sarah on his arm. This should make her pity him less. It was of little importance if he was right or wrong. What matter if he boiled off into oblivion, so long as he was happy while he lived? He was right in that. Of course it didn’t matter, and the only thing to do was keep your head up, keep on going. Jung said that for psychotherapeutic purposes it was best if a person believed that death was not the end. For the sake of mental well-being, it was the most relaxing state to be in. You wouldn’t know until it was too late either way, so why not chance it? Still she couldn’t. And she thought of Tolstoy with his life crisis, at fifty or so he suddenly wondered what the point of it all was, and she had always thought he had left it late, but there he was trembling under the sentence, horribly frightened, in such torment he thought he would hang himself, and he resolved it by thinking himself into faith. He looked out at the peasants tilling the fields and worshipping a just God, and he rendered himself religious. Rendered himself, through a willed process of reasoning – it seemed impossible!

  Even so, she was fortunate. It was a slick trade-off, from the former certainties of religion, to a better state of finitude. Instead of a cloudless eternity, the prospect of an afterlife, in this age you got the consolation prize – death as the unspoken secret of life, immanent but ignored, suffering as something that happened to other people, life to be lived free of the awareness of death, like being a dog or a cat. Free and ignorant. Then suffering came as a shock, and death as something incongruous, having nothing to do with life. Perhaps it was better like that. She had read about Zeno and she understood the argument though it hardly helped. If you were rational about it, death didn’t happen to the individual because it was at the point of death that the individual ceased to be. At death, one’s subjectivity ceased. You were no longer yourself. This was all well and good, thought Rosa, quite coherent philosophically but no damn consolation for the snuffing out of me! Me of all people! she thought. This made her grip her bag in a spasm of fear, and then she turned to a man near her who was shuffling his feet and wondered how he was bearing up under the knowledge, this irrefutable knowledge that he would be nothing, one day, or at best something else entirely. Then there were days when she thought it was absurd to mind so much. There was nothing of interest about her – why not feel far more scandalised by the death of Shakespeare, or the death of Socrates – murdered by Athens – or the death of Mozart with his works unfinished? With Rosa, the world would only lose another drone, supplied with her set of interests and anxieties. For her grief, her self-mourning, she was a fool. It had sent her off in a great hurry, trying to find something she was too unreasonable to identify. She was chasing over the hills, following the weft, thinking I lost it last time, but just one more try, I’m sure I’ll find it – stamping over ruins and then it would vanish and she would be thinking some miniature thought, something diced about Liam, or her concerns would shift to the rent, or she would notice her neighbour – and here she glanced to one side and found her neighbour was a gun-faced man of forty-five, baked in body odour. She moved away from him, she didn’t want his energies flowing
into hers; she didn’t want to catch a trace of his aura or id, or any other categorisable aspect of him that might be coming her way.

  On this bus full of people casting sharp glances at each other, she was thinking of Socrates, who said that it was foolish to fear death, because there was no knowing if death was a better state than life. That was sensible enough, in the abstract, but there were absolutes. In the here and now death – the deaths of others – robbed you of love. While you were living it robbed you; who could say what happened later. A couple of decades ago she had been a teenager, loved by both her parents, by her remaining grandparents. She had been young and mostly oblivious, and she had passed the days driving through the Avon countryside with her friends in borrowed cars. They went off drinking cider; they went to caves in the cliffs where the boys smoked pot. They were impetuous and lucky. There was nothing illustrious about her youth. She didn’t really read and she wasn’t talking ancient Greek at the age of six. She was bred on teenage magazines and TV; it was only later she started leafing through Plato with a guilty conscience, trying to please someone or impress herself, she wasn’t sure. Of course we were barbarous, thought Rosa, but it didn’t matter. That was our undeveloped state. Now we have no excuses for our barbarity. Then we could say – hand on heart – that we were truly witless. Pure in our lack of wit. We drove out with boys in the back of the car, thrilled by their closeness, the proximity to sex they represented. Peer pressure was mighty and terrible. Despotic youth, thought Rosa, smiling to herself.

  And now she was thinking of grandmother Lily, who never really recovered from the death of her husband. Grandfather Tom went modestly, in his prime. It had become his custom to spend the days after his retirement working under the car, for no real reason other than his liking for spanners and grease. He emerged around teatime smelling of sweat, wiping his hands on a rag. In the evenings he liked to go to the working men’s club. He played bowls, watched Tom and Jerry cartoons, wrote comic verse, smoked with friends. One day he had observed the usual ritual, wiped a rag around the back of the car, polished it and washed his hands and he was sipping tea in the kitchen when it started to rain. Grandmother Lily ran outside to bring the washing in, calling to her husband to help. He failed to follow her; exasperated, she dragged the basket in, preparing to remonstrate, and found he had collapsed. He recovered a little in hospital, waking to say that he had fulfilled all his ambitions; he had no complaints, he said, and then he had another heart attack and died. But grandmother Lily preserved a quite unSocratic view of things. She wasted slowly, grew thin and blotched. And there was grandmother Mary, tall and graceful, with her hair newly permed. She was the direct antithesis of grandmother Lily: she was always smart and cheerful; she went out regularly for a shampoo and set. She had ten outfits that she wore in strict rotation. A pleated skirt or two, a cashmere jumper. Much of it in pink and blue. Then she had a pair of blue trousers, long and wide-legged. Her clothes were forties in style. She had fixed her taste as a young woman, and had never faltered. She liked watching snooker – she called it snukker – and reading crime novels. Rosa always thought it was incongruous: her delicate, kindly grandmother, holding a book with a bloody corpse on the cover. She had a drawer full of multicoloured pencils. They had belonged to grandfather Don, who had been an engineer. She was devout, a quiet member of the church. Dear grandmother Mary, who never worked in her life. She knitted jumpers and made Victoria sponges. She helped with a thousand village fetes. Early in her marriage she took in girls – fallen women, pregnant at sixteen, cast out by their families. It was a gentle life, spent in small villages, dealing with people who knew her well. Virtuous, in its way. When Rosa thought of grandmother Mary she saw her in the living room of her house surrounded by ancestral china, in repose.

  Grandmother Mary believed that things were orchestrated by a benevolent deity. Still she died alone, stricken by dementia. She never questioned the God that sent her mad, but Rosa wondered how she might have understood it, had she still been capable of rational enquiry. Because the self was memory and memory defined the self, and at the last grandmother Mary had no memory at all. She would be a fugitive eternal being, unable to find anyone she recalled in the celestial wash of souls, or confusing those she found, mixing up her father and her husband, uncertain of her friends. Though there might be an essence, and Rosa had hoped this was what grandmother Mary had thought, on those few days when she was lucid enough to understand what was happening to her. There might still be a kernel of the self, untouched by disease, preserving the original personality of the creature. This might have been what Socrates meant, thought Rosa, when he talked of the self. Something untouched by all the things of life. Untouched even by memory and the shifting pattern of concerns that define the individual. An eternal spark, divorced from everything ephemeral.

  She shook her head hard, and forced herself to focus. Now the bus was stuck behind a ritual file of cars, hemmed in on all sides. Gathering her bags around her, her hold all weighed down with a pair of Jess’s walking boots and now these presents in their plastic wrappers, Rosa stared at the street, at the flecks of brown and black on the buildings, flecks of great age, at the columns of a church, the glass sheen of an office block. The street was a mingled frieze of shine and drab. It was mottled, but she liked it. She stared around at the other passengers. She watched a pair of boys slapping each other warmly around the head. There was a man with an immense nose reading a paper, apparently absorbed in it. Each nostril a work of art. Truly unusual. That was a characterful face, she thought. The bus was taking its time, shuddering along Euston Road, the glass shaking. Not far from here, thought Rosa, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her works, birthed her children, and expired. Rousseau declares that a woman should be made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself. What nonsense! Still the wind was gusting down the streets. Everything outside the bus was controlled by the force of the wind; on one side of the road people were hunched against it, on the other they were gusted onwards. The bus came to a sudden halt, and everyone jerked forwards. For a moment their faces showed confusion and injured pride. For a brief instant, they knew the whole thing was unnatural and absurd, being on this bus in this road jammed with traffic, being jolted around as the bus trembled on its sluggish course. They understood, briefly, all of them, that it was crazy, that wherever they were trying to go it didn’t really matter, and really they should have just stayed in the savannah swamps firing arrows at the fauna. That would have been better than sitting it out on this rattling clattering bus with a mounting feeling of nausea and this underlying sense of perplexity, this semi-suppressed question of why the hell? But then she looked around again and they were all rustling newspapers, and she was no longer sure if that was what they had been thinking at all.

  The buildings were stained black and brown. She liked their weathered faces. At the junction of Tottenham Court Road everything stopped again, and Rosa stared up at the blank windows of the high-rise offices. But the sky was deep dark, clad in clouds, dynamic ether, even as Rosa festered in the bus. Rosa could see the grimy face of Euston Square station, with the dome of UCL just visible round the corner. She wondered if she should beg the driver to let her off. She sat up straight and looked at her watch. She sang quietly to herself: Would you like to swing on a star? And be better off than you are? Or would you rather be a Pig? Yeah yeah, tell ’em ‘bout the pig. She stared around, stared at the traffic stuck to the heels of the bus, remembered her bags and subsided. She was tense for a few minutes, then the bus started its shuddering progress again. It started, moved quickly, stopped as quickly again. There was a fierce sound of horns outside. And now she could hear the King’s Cross backing track of diggers and drills, the shuddering scrape of metal on concrete, and she saw clouds of dust dispersing.

  When the bus came to a halt outside Euston, Rosa was staring up at the sky. Then she stood. Pulling her bags along, she moved
towards the exit. It is almost too late, she thought, as she saw the glass doors of Euston Station. She passed the police with their guns, and arrived at a big clock telling her the time. If you were ever so slightly out of synch these clocks and the people beneath them quite confused you. You weren’t sure what might happen but you were fearful all the same. She was uncertain on the forecourt and then, with minutes to go, she remembered the drill. Thinking only of the task at hand, she rushed for a ticket, fumbling with her purse, dropping her credit card, stuffing it into the machine again, seeing the price and cursing faintly, receiving a delayed then spewed out ticket, running for the platform. She was trying to keep her thoughts clean and practical. She saw a train and ran towards it. But her hurry was superfluous; the train was delayed. Everyone was queuing at the doors. A man in uniform was holding a whistle, ready to blow. Was it a race? thought Rosa. They were all poised for the off. She saw some ruddy, fat families, and kids smiling, and a host of the elderly. Daytime travellers from London. A few business types in suits, men and women, holding their phones and palms and computer cases. Most of that crowd filed off to first class, while Rosa set her bags down on the floor and waited with the rest. The atmosphere was good-tempered. Everyone fidgeted and raised their eyes to each other. There was a strict sense of protocol – you had to be stoical and expectant. The train stood on the platform and the clock ticked past the hour. ‘Not too bad,’ said one old man when the carriage doors opened, and the clock said they were fifteen minutes late.