All the Water in the World
Page 23
“Why not?”
“I am a happy transplant.”
“Completely happy, Antonio?”
He looked up. “Yes, of course. Why do you ask that?” He spaced his syllables evenly. “Wherever you raise your children is home.” He paused and repeated: “Why do you ask?”
“Tell me about your sons.”
“Eve, really . . .”
“They are Maddy’s half brothers. I have a right to know.” I kept my voice light. “Oscar must be eight now and Daniel’s six?”
“How did you know?”
“The letters, remember?”
“They are a handful. They argue sometimes. I guess that’s normal. But the older one looks out for his brother.”
“Are you going to have any more?”
He smiled at the intrusive question. “We have not decided for more. But you never know. You cannot always plan these things.”
“Really?” I said, mocking. “Can I see a picture of them?”
Again he looked shocked.
“Please. I’d like to.”
He found one on his phone and handed it to me without a word.
The boys sat on a low wall, gripping it with both hands. Their mother leaned down from behind to fit in the frame, an arm around each boy in the green-gold of summer. Hold still. Smile for Daddy . . . The instant the picture was taken was nothing to them now, a forgotten speck of time. I did not trust my voice. Enlarging the image with my fingers, I studied each face in turn. Of course he would have an interesting wife. Alison was right. Of course she would be much younger than he was. The older boy had Antonio’s springy reddish brown hair, the same confident backward tilt to his head. The small one was fair like his mother, with her wide-apart eyes and pointed chin.
“Do they like school?”
“They don’t like sitting still all day! It is hard on boys to sit still.”
“They’re at the same school?”
“Year two and year four. All Saints is very good. One of the best in Lewisham. The Church of England can’t hold on to its members, but it still runs good schools.”
His phone had gone dark and I handed it back.
“They are both great readers,” he was saying. “We try to keep the screen time down.”
“Good for you.”
“Erica would have been heartbroken if they did not like reading.”
“Shame she had to give up her job.”
“She might go back to it.”
“It’s not easy to work your way up, later on.”
Antonio shrugged. “I don’t know. I think you can.”
“Would you want her to go back to work?”
“She loves being there for the boys.” Abruptly he got to his feet. The wall clock said twenty after seven. He had a home to return to, excuses to make.
I stood too. “I’m leaving Monday.”
He hid what looked like alarm under his courtly smile. “So soon?”
“I did tell you.” I gathered my things and stepped to one side so the table was no longer between us. “There’s an opening at the Tate Modern on Saturday night. Would you like to come?”
He took my hands and kissed me on each cheek. “Thank you. I’d like that.”
“Can you get away?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“You think so? Or you can?”
“I can, as a matter of fact. Erica’s taking the boys to her mother.”
Late as it was, we parted on New Oxford Street. I watched Antonio’s long coat dwindle rapidly toward Kingsway. When the road bent to the left, he disappeared along with a turning fleet of black cabs, one of which I knew he would hail as soon as he was out of sight.
33
Do you think there is any hope for us? The human species, I mean. Jack thinks we are probably doomed. Not right away but eventually. In the very long run there are asteroids. And entropy. Or we will fall into the sun. He says people are the worst thing that ever happened to the earth. Do you agree?
I missed my train at London Bridge and made a wrong turn out of Blackheath station; it was three-thirty by the time I found the road leading down to All Saints School. Through the drizzle, I could see the bright coats of the parents clustered like balloons at the gate. The redbrick schoolhouse fit snugly across the cul-de-sac. It looked smaller and friendlier than the photograph on its home page. Families were already coming up the hill as I hurried down, agitated and out of breath and half hoping I was too late. A pair of mothers and daughters passed in matching coats; a father flicked the rain cover into place on a stroller; older students cut their own giggling paths. A woman in a purple jacket came forward, with a boy on either side.
“Mum, I’ve still got one in my bag—” said the taller one.
“Give it to Daniel. Go on, be fair—”
“But I’ve only got one, Mum—”
“Really, Oscar!” Abreast of me now, she flashed me a smile I was too bewildered to return. It was the face I’d seen on Antonio’s phone, leaning down to fit between her sons. The suddenness of the encounter, the ease with which I had found them, and her amused, conspiratorial smile paralyzed me. I’d imagined no further than wanting to be in their company. She opened an umbrella; the older boy tugged her arm, still arguing; the younger one skipped alongside. I watched them climb the hill toward where the spire of a church pierced the sky at an odd angle. At the top they tilted over the edge and disappeared.
Friday morning, I completed my final interview at the Royal Academy and in the afternoon I set off again for Blackheath. There would be no other chance. The Tate opening was the following day, and Monday I was to fly home. I arrived early this time and settled on a low wall near the school gate.
When Maddy was small, an even greater pleasure than taking her in the mornings had been picking her up after school. I’d shared that task with my parents. Tuesdays and Fridays had been my days. I could see that in good weather, English parents stood around as I had once done, knowing their children had been kept safe for another day and would be returned to them soon.
The last two houses on the street had been converted into classrooms, their windows now covered with paper snowflakes and letters of the alphabet. Staff with clipboards crossed the courtyard to open the gates, and the children spilled out. Erica was easy to spot in her purple jacket. I watched the boys run to her. Oscar soon veered away to wrestle with another boy, but Daniel stood looking up into his mother’s face, playing with the toggle of her zipper. She was talking to someone, resting her hand unthinkingly on her son’s head.
I stood. Antonio would be furious to see me there. He would rush his family away and never speak to me again. I could feel the child’s skull under my hand. If I left now, no one need ever know. I forced myself down, gripped the edge of the wall, and fixed my gaze on the pointed dormers of the school, until the unruly group of Erica, the boys, and their friends moved together up the sidewalk. They passed close enough to reach out and touch me.
Once they crossed the road bordering the heath, they kept to the low ground while I made my way to a bench partway up the slope. Crisscrossed by footpaths, the yellow grass stretched down to a gray-stone church that looked defeated and out of place on the bare heath.
Erica was easy to keep an eye on, milling below with the other mothers while their boys romped. She pulled off her hat and her hair fell in a loose braid down her back, rendering her younger still. This woman ran Antonio’s life. She slept in his bed. She loved his children. She was like a fictional character I had conjured up so successfully that she roamed around paying me no attention and doing exactly what she felt like doing. It could have been me standing on a patch of grass in the flattening light of a winter’s afternoon while our boys played. I was the fiction. My own life did not exist.
Oscar was marching the others around lampposts and over the dead grass. He would grow up to be someone of importance. I saw it in the way he held his head, the way he shouted at his friends and laughed raucously before they had a chan
ce to reply. He took up all the air, as ambitious people do. One had to cut off parts of oneself to be with them. Space and sound were oddly elastic between where I sat, the cluster of women, and the running children. I could barely hear their cries, but I could see them with dreamlike clarity, these boys who were free to play and grow up, never knowing they had a sister who had died. They would greet the news with puzzlement, then indifference: a fairy tale that had nothing to do with them.
Daniel had been trailing halfheartedly after the group. He broke away to follow his own path of widening circles, talking or singing to himself. Would he come to me? Nearer . . . Nearer . . . I caught my breath, not daring to move. He strayed so close I could make out the Velcro straps of his shoes, his slender wrists protruding from his cuffs, the soft spikes of his hair, finer and paler than Maddy’s. He stopped a few feet away and studied me, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. I smiled. He smiled back, uncertainly, and turned to squint under the visor of his hand to where his mother was calling him. But he didn’t go to her. Instead he offered me his face again, appraising me with Maddy’s intelligent eyes, Maddy’s stillness. The seconds stretched and trembled. I held him in my gaze, refusing to let go until he did. In that moment, I held her too.
The boy turned and zigzagged down the slope without a backward look. At the bottom he joined his family and they moved off, growing smaller and less distinct until the ground dipped and they disappeared. No doubt by the time he got home he had already forgotten the lady on the bench.
34
Sorry about not being in touch. I haven’t had a lot of time to write. It’s sad that summer’s almost over. Well, I’m feeling sad in general these days. I used to love going back to school. So every baby that’s born is a miracle, no matter what, right?
I suggested meeting on Hungerford Footbridge. I made a point of crossing the Thames whenever I could, even if it meant a longer, more roundabout route. The human scale of the bridges drew me, and the way two or three of them could be seen in either direction, like straps fastening down the shoreline while the river moved freely underneath.
He was resting his forearms on the railing, the sides of his long gray coat hanging down. Behind him the cranes formed red constellations above the glitter of the night city. He turned and watched me approach, kissed me on both cheeks, and briefly gripped my hands. He’d cut his hair even shorter. It made his lips prominent, made him look more Spanish. This grown-up Antonio scared me a little, reminding me of the small part I had played in his life.
“Is your family gone?” I asked, to keep everything out in the open. Let there be no nonsense between the progenitors of Maddy.
“They left this afternoon.”
“Thanks for coming with me. It’s no fun going to these things alone.”
“At your service,” he said with mock gravity. He took my arm and we set off. During our year together in Washington, we had done a lot of walking along the Potomac, under the foaming cherry trees or their skeletons, and around the basin to the outlying monuments. We strolled through Georgetown and down the length of the Mall, cutting our earnest talk with laughter, stopping to embrace, my heart expanding to house the future that I believed was ours. It was a giddy sensation now, being in London with Antonio, without Maddy. All the traveling I’d never done, the adventures I had deferred to the mythical future! I would not tell him I had stalked his family. For one evening I would not think about the past, or what our lives were made of now.
“Can we stop a minute?” I let go and went to the railing. I had inherited the childlike delight my mother took in looking down at bodies of water. In the wide view, the river appeared almost motionless, but nearby, around the pilings, the muddy water coursed dangerously fast.
We set off again. Antonio’s hands were jammed deep in his coat pockets, his shoulders so square and straight he seemed to be leaning back into the arms of a following wind. My eyes fixed on the glossy black tips of his shoes. Poor Antonio! While I’d been applying waterproof mascara and cream blush, carefully so as to suggest the high color of health, not the tragic masquerade of an ex-lover, he had been polishing his shoes for me.
“You are so quiet,” he said, shooting me a glance. “Is everything okay?”
“Okay as it ever is.”
A violinist wearing fingerless gloves was performing at the end of the bridge. Antonio tossed some coins onto the man’s tartan rug and we descended to the South Bank.
Once Maddy fell ill, I had been treated not only to routine makeovers but to pedicures, exfoliators, mud masks, Dead Sea salt scrubs. I’d gone along with anything she wanted. Why not in all the years before? It had been our game. She badgered me; I laughingly refused. Given long enough, Maddy might have turned out to be an ascetic like me. Or maybe our clash of pleasures had in itself been pleasurable. There was no pleasure in it now. I longed to feel her hands steadying my temples, her earnest patting and tugging ministrations. Why had I not let her fuss over me when she was seven, ten, twelve, when she wanted to help me be a glamorous mother? Instead I tried to teach her that a woman’s worth did not rest in her appearance.
We joined the crowds beside the river. I made Antonio stop to read the paving stones commemorating the Queen’s Jubilee. I took a picture of him looking urbane by a serpent-twined lamppost. He took my arm again, and the place where he touched me felt warm, even through my coat. By sheer effort of will I could open myself up to the here and now. The boats churning past, the toy buses sliding over the toy bridges, the flow of strangers on the pavement who seemed to be generated from a hidden source, some of them no doubt with disasters in their lives worse than mine. By the time we reached the caged birches in front of the Tate, I no longer felt disloyal for taking pleasure in the evening, for walking freely by the Thames with Antonio. I was not turning my back on Maddy. I had her with me.
• • •
Gillian and Ian were chatting in a small group. While we waited for them to notice us, I faked interest in the view of the Millennium Bridge that Antonio was admiring, hands behind his back. He had only been here once, years ago. I felt the place belonged to me now.
Ian came forward, an iPad in his hands, slashes of pink on his cheeks. “Come in. Into the belly of the beast.” Gillian in her bat-wing blouse introduced me to the others, and I presented Antonio as an old friend, causing Ian’s gaze to alight on our faces briefly in turn. I plucked two glasses of wine from a passing tray.
“Yes, I believe Mr. Bryce was an early postmodernist . . .”
“The permanent as well as the temporary . . .”
“I expect you’re a victim of your own success? We are . . .”
Returning to work after Maddy’s death, I had been painfully alert to every averted gaze, every brave question, every conversation that dried up as I approached. Here no one was afraid of me. Antonio was a highly presentable escort and his presence protected me from the wounding I had come to expect on social occasions. I did not mind sharing him with these women, the one with fiery hair braying, “We’ve got to ring the changes! If we don’t ring the changes . . .” and the other one coaxing him away with her painted eyebrows. “If you do nothing else, go down and see the Tanks. Oh, you must . . .”
I nudged Antonio in the back. “Stop . . .” he whispered, and his lips did what Maddy’s did when she was trying not to laugh.
On my other side, Ian was holding forth. “. . . isn’t there a danger these hybrid practices thrrive in a liberal environment, but in a consairvative one the picture looks different. Verry different indeed . . .”
“Change the subject, do,” Gillian murmured in my ear. “He’s about to tell you he’s an old warrior of the left.”
“Do you have any children?” I interrupted, regretting it at once.
“Girl and a boy,” said Ian. “For my sins. Twenty and twenty-two.”
“I’ve got one twelve, one fourteen . . .”
“Mine are four and eight . . .”
Antonio was silent.
 
; “Sixteen,” I said. I was still a mother.
“My daughter’s in Egypt.”
“My son’s been swimming with dolphins.”
“Mine got hepatitis B.”
“They survive.”
I pointed to Ian’s iPad. “Will you take our picture?” He obliged and passed it to me. I remembered that Antonio did not smile for the camera. He raised his brows, which made him appear dignified and enigmatic. I was reluctant to give back the picture and its curious distancing and doubling effect. Antonio and I lived in two places, in ourselves and in the image of us.
“Can you send it to my cell?”
“Are you in prison?”
“Mobile.” I laughed. “Send it to my mobile.”
“Your mo-bull?” said Ian.
Antonio touched my waist. “Shall we go look at some art?”
We made our way through the rooms. Older works from the collection had been paired with the contemporary—Monet’s lilies and Long’s stones, a Sickert interior with a Kienholz tableau—and upcoming artists had rooms to themselves. Antonio pressed on to the farthest display, in which houses sewn from colored fabric had been torn, stretched out of shape, and glued to slabs of handmade paper. He moved rapidly along the frames, reading the labels out loud. “Home One . . . Home Two . . .”
“The past exists in the present,” I said, “but it can’t be lived in. I think that’s the idea.” Desolation was always there, biding its time. No reprieve could last. No escape was far enough. I could reason out a curatorial concept, but that’s not what I saw in this art of the flattened and torn. Would I ever be able to look at the world and not perceive bodily damage or the possibility of damage?
“Let me guess . . . Home Three?”—leaning in—“No! Travels in Inner Space. Oh, E-vie, help!”—chortling—“Is this art? This can’t be art.”
I did not reply. My alliance with Antonio did not go so far as to make me want to join him in cheap shots at contemporary art. Plenty of men like him came to my gallery talks, dragged in by wives eager to talk about meaning. Of course art could be pretentious and fake, ridiculous, even. But the impulse to art was not ridiculous. It was not ridiculous to try to make something out of nothing, to think with materials. Art allowed you to look at what you were afraid of. There was humility in it, and courage.