by Amanda Craig
‘Any idea why he came to Devon?’
‘I think he was in love. He had that look. He was very happy, for a while.’
‘With whom?’
His mother exhales. ‘Don’t bother about it, Quent. I’m too tired.’
Dying takes so much out of everyone’s life. Hugh hardly eats or drinks; just getting a little sweet tea or thin soup into his father’s mouth is the most that can be managed. Sometimes he seems to be awake, but the periods between lucidity seem ever shorter, and the opiates delivered through the cannula stronger. Quentin has become used to removing and replacing incontinence pads with a competence that slightly surprises him, rolling his father onto one side and back as the nurse has shown him, and sponging his limbs clean before patting them dry. To his great surprise, he finds that the hatred he has nourished for so long for his father has vanished. This poor stick draped in skin was once a man. Almost nothing remains but pity and the inevitable disaster.
His other most practical task is to ensure that the fire must never die out. He feels it as a kind of religious duty. Naomi shuffles about in the kitchen, making endless pots of chicken soup. It’s the smell of his childhood; only later had he realised it to be the smell of all Jewish homes.
‘Come out for a drive,’ he says. ‘The change of scene will do you good.’
‘I don’t dare,’ she says. ‘He might need me.’
It’s endlessly frustrating, but Quentin does his best, watching his father’s face as he sleeps or chatting to his mother as she potters slowly around doing chores she won’t let the nurse help her with. She is small and bent and old, too, but he’s surprised to see a large mound of clay kept soft under damp cloths in her studio when he passes it.
‘Who is this?’ Quentin asks.
‘Your father,’ Naomi answers, turning the cloth back. ‘I was just letting my fingers remember.’
‘You remember him so clearly?’
‘Who is it, really, who loves a person for what they are?’
‘Yes, Lottie used to be like that with me. I was her project.’
‘Although I loved Hugh for himself, even with his faults.’
‘Lottie can’t tolerate my spots of commonness.’
‘Is that what you think? I think what she can’t tolerate is your lack of guilt.’
‘My lack of guilt!’ Quentin almost howls. ‘I’m nothing but guilt these days.’
Quentin returns to Shipcott and its manor, pressing a button at the gatehouse and looking into the security camera. Janet must be out, because the voice that answers is distinctly Australian.
‘Hi there.’
‘I’m Stella and Rosie’s dad.’
‘Come right in.’
The electronic gates swing open. The drive is long and pleasantly shaded by an abundant wood, bumping over a lively little stream.
Quentin had been expecting the usual brick or granite manor house, so the white, lace-like arches come as a surprise. To one side is an enormous and very ancient magnolia tree, shaped like a lyre. He parks, walks up the stone steps and pulls the iron handle to the side of the large oak door. A bell yelps within – or is it a dog? To think that his wife and children have been coming here all this time … he’s envious, and slightly appalled by his own temerity at inviting himself over.
Barefoot, Di Tore opens the front door.
‘Hi. You must be Stella and Rosie’s dad.’
‘Botticelli’s Venus by way of Bondi Beach,’ says Quentin. ‘Hello!’
‘Brisbane,’ she corrects, and he knows he’s annoyed her. ‘The kids are in the garden.’
‘Thanks so much for collecting them,’ Quentin says. She’s no longer young, but has the noli me tangere air of authentic beauty. ‘Sorry if I’m late. It’s difficult being on time, given the situation with my father.’
Her face clears.
‘Yes, I’m sorry to hear about that. I hope your mum is OK. Come in.’
He follows her through the hall to an enormous, light-filled room. It’s fan-vaulted with delicate white plasterwork branching out like fantastical trees. The view is superb, but Quentin prefers to watch his hostess, and the arse inside her jeans like two perfectly boiled eggs rubbing gently against each other. She is so much a part of the wealth that bought this house that she is, curiously, sexless. It’s a relief to realise this.
‘It’s very good of you to take the girls home for tea.’
They can see their children playing in the garden below.
‘As you can see, they get along fine.’
‘I’m very grateful,’ he says. ‘They’ve settled in well.’
‘Great.’ Di smiles brightly. ‘No bad vibes, I hope? I take it Lottie told you about its past.’
Interesting, Quentin thinks: so Lottie knows about the murder, and didn’t mention it.
‘No, though I am curious about Oliver Randall. What can you tell me?’
‘You know, I think the best person to answer that isn’t me.’
A figure rose from the long sofa by the window. It’s the tramp from the pub, Quentin thinks, astonished. Then, as if the light has changed, the molecules of the man before him rearrange themselves. The ripped jeans aren’t rags. The long dark hair is a product of artifice, the lean frame of the gym, and the deep lines are those of a man who has had everything money, fame and talent can buy.
‘Hi.’
‘You – you’re Gore Tore?’
‘I owe you a drink, mate.’
26
A Pinnacle of Existence
Xan thinks of London as a form of radiation. You can’t live here and not be changed. To survive its pressure, its energy, heat, light and power, you must adapt – run faster, find wings, stretch eyes and grow a thicker skin. Above all, you must be young.
It’s been so long since he’s lived in a population where most of the faces he sees are unlined, with hair that isn’t white or grey, that for the first week it doesn’t quite feel real. Where are the fat people, the ones in awful clothes, the ones bent over with age and infirmity? He never noticed their existence before he moved to the country, and now he isn’t sure whether London has simply abolished the poor, or whether they are afraid to come out. Having chafed at the slowness of country life for months, he is now slightly bewildered at those running or skateboarding or just walking very fast. To be able to go out of his grandmother’s house and find himself buying a pint of milk in three minutes seems miraculous.
When he looks around the streets of London he understands, dimly, that he is living in some kind of pinnacle of existence, a great pyramid of labour, ingenuity, law and effort whose base is so remote as to be almost out of sight. These wide streets with their carefully pruned trees and washed pavements, these towers sparkling with brilliant lights, these shops bursting with perfect produce, this rich ferment of commerce and creativity – it is a wonder of the world. Who here knows or cares about the places from which its prizes are drawn? If the countryside exists in popular imagination, it’s as a place of recreation, in which food is produced in Elysian fields of buttercups from happy hens and immortal herds. Xan has been to the so-called farmers’ markets in which the middle classes sell artisan meats and hand-made goats’ cheese to each other from within state school playgrounds, in the belief that this is a more authentic shopping experience. It had been mildly entertaining then, but now he thinks that if people could see the inside of Humbles, or a slaughterhouse, or a field in freezing weather, they might not be so complacent.
And yet … Even when he’s lying in bed, he can feel the pressure of all those other people sharpening him to a kind of peak of himself. I have been half-asleep, he thinks. Sometimes, at night, he leans out of his old bedroom window just to listen to the murmuring roar of the capital which seems as much a part of him as his heartbeat.
Of course, this isn’t just being a Londoner, it’s Marta living on a different plane. Xan wonders how much she spends a month on culture; he suspects that it’s as much as his family’s entire supermar
ket shop.
‘I wish to give these things to you,’ she says when he thanks her for yet another theatre ticket, or delicious foreign food. ‘You are my beautiful grandson, and you need it. No, don’t look embarrassed; you are beautiful because nothing has happened to you yet.’
‘I feel as if quite a lot has happened to me, Oma, actually.’
She shakes her head.
‘Darling! You are still just out of the egg.’
‘There are all kinds of things we have now that your generation didn’t.’
‘Really?’ She puts her head on one side enquiringly. ‘Like war?’
‘Well, no, but … we have the Internet.’
She laughs, and whips out an earpiece from her iPod and thrusts it towards Xan, who listens for a few minutes. ‘Sublime.’
‘Don’t you ever feel Bach is a bit remote, Oma?’
‘Notatall!’ Marta’s accent always emerges when she feels strongly. ‘Bach is always asking a question, you see,’ she says.
‘What’s that, Oma?’
‘Whether we are loved. He had absolutely no doubt that we are, by God.’
She’s never been like other people’s grandmothers. One of the first things she’d asked him to do for her in hospital was to paint her toenails with brilliant scarlet nail polish.
‘Darling, it keeps the nails nice, and I do not want to be one of those old ladies with hoofs. Ah, listen to this! How can you listen and not believe in God?’
‘Do you believe in God, Oma?’
‘Only when I listen to Bach.’
Xan thinks of Dawn, and when she had sat down without saying a word and played the first of the Goldberg Variations. It still haunts him. Without her playing, would he even have noticed her? He’s grown up thinking of himself as anti-prejudice, antiracist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic: only it’s one thing to define yourself as against something, and quite another to embrace what you are for.
In the brief minutes when she had played perhaps the most exquisite short piece of music for the keyboard ever written, Dawn had looked quite different. The Goldberg Aria looks simple, the merest handful of notes, but it is not, and somehow she had caught the way the Aria seems to float on a golden thread between earth and heaven. How was it possible?
‘Oma, can someone very stupid play music really well?’
His grandmother raises her eyebrows.
‘One can learn to play mechanically, as far too many Japanese and Chinese do—’
‘Yes, like Uchida and Lang Lang …’ Xan says ironically.
She sniffs, as he knew she would. Marta is old school: black tie, no showbiz, preferably Russian or Canadian.
‘Could you, Oma?’
‘There is muscle memory. If someone has learned a piece, their body can remember it even if the brain has forgotten. There are cases of people with Alzheimer’s whose memory has gone, but who can still play.’
‘Even a piece like the Goldberg Aria?’
‘Yes, certainly.’
‘I wonder why somebody’s body would remember that particular piece, though.’
‘Perhaps if they needed it very badly, they might. It reminds us that joy is more powerful than sorrow.’
Marta has experienced things she never speaks of, but which they all somehow know about. She had been a child during the invasion of Berlin.
‘Seriously Oma, you need to think about moving. Your dog could have broken your neck.’
‘Heidi could have broken it in a flat, too.’
Marta is always stubborn. It’s another thing she has in common with Lottie, and although Xan admires his mother for having principles, he also wishes hers weren’t quite so rigid. Of course hurt feelings matter, and when he thinks of what Quentin has done, especially to his mother, he wants to punch him. But do hurt feelings matter so much that they’re worth splitting up a family for? Do a few months of infidelity count for more than a long marriage? Do they matter more than his sisters?
It probably doesn’t help that Marta makes no secret that she loathes her son-in-law.
‘The Dummkopf’ is what she calls him, meaning ‘blockhead’.
Quentin is vain, pretentious and a snob, but there is also another aspect to him of which Xan is, reluctantly, aware. He has been a good stepfather. He’s been generous with money. He’s encouraged independence. He’s taken the time and trouble to teach him skills like riding a bicycle, shaving and tying a school tie. He was the one to give Xan a proper mobile, even when being sworn at. Xan loves his mother a lot, but he also knows she doesn’t understand why organising Smarties on a birthday cake according to their place on the spectrum isn’t actually necessary.
‘Mum, stop it. Just stop it,’ he’s pleaded, so many times.
Maybe, though, it’s a female thing: for Katya is also bossy. In the beginning, her ‘do this to me, do that’ had been useful, as well as sexy. He’d admired the Poles’ energy and enterprise. Yet the other side of this is a private contempt for British people.
‘Not like Polish peoples,’ is a refrain he hears, uttered with a mixture of regret and satisfaction. ‘English peoples so dirty. You can’t even cook.’
‘Why shouldn’t people buy meals? Once upon a time women were expected to churn their own butter. Nobody wants to go back to that, do they?’ Xan has retorted, but Katya would only shrug.
‘You waste your money.’
‘What about wasting time which could be better used by, I don’t know, reading?’
‘But what is the use of that?’ Katya asked, in amazement; and that was the moment when he knew he did not and could not love her.
Sometimes, Xan wonders whether he is a thorn in his mother’s flesh to remind her that she has flesh. Not so Marta. Often when Xan returns from walking Heidi on the Heath, he opens the door to the rumble of male laughter from elderly men for whom seats at Covent Garden Opera House and a lifetime subscription to the New Statesman are as much a part of life as bifocals. They may be ancient, and as wrinkled as lizards, but they are actually flirting with her and she with them.
He hopes Marta has had lovers after his grandfather died. It’s dreary to think that she might only have devoted her life to J. S. Bach.
‘Did you ever want to get married again?’
‘I like independence more.’
Whether she can still be independent is the worry. It’s a battle for her to get in and out of the bathroom. She refuses his help. To her, discussing medical problems is simply a bore.
‘Let us talk of more interesting things. Has your brain woken up yet?’
‘I think so. Though I need a break, Oma, after being in an exam factory for years.’
‘The modern world is very cruel. In Africa, you would have killed a lion at thirteen.’
‘I wish I’d known what my father was good at. I don’t even know what part of Africa he came from.’
‘He was Nigerian.’
‘How do you know? Mum never saw him again.’
‘No,’ Marta says. ‘But I did.’
Astounded, Xan stares. All these years, and his grandmother has known.
‘He came here? So what happened? Why didn’t they meet?’
‘I thought it best not,’ Marta says calmly.
Xan knows that both his mother and his grandmother are over-controlling, but this is beyond anything.
‘Oma, why?’
‘She went through a bad time after you were born, much as she did with your sisters. She did not need this extra thing.’
‘He was my father,’ Xan says. ‘Not a thing.’
The enormity of what Marta has kept concealed astonishes him.
‘Would it have made a difference if he’d been white?’
‘No. I’m sorry, my darling.’
How can she not have known that he wanted to have a father? Nigerian, he thinks, and it’s as if the shadow he has never quite seen becomes solid at his heels. A thousand questions rise in his throat, and it’s his old enemy asthma, squeezing like a boa constrictor. It
’s what he always dreads, and strong emotion is a trigger as bad as cats. There is an inhaler in his spongebag, at the top of the house, but Marta won’t be able to get it in time, and neither will he. Why hadn’t he got one in his pocket? His fingers turn cold, but he keeps breathing out, praying for it to loosen. Gradually, the spasm passes. Marta hasn’t even realised what he’s just been through, for she says, ‘I have his name, if you want it. I promised to give it to you.’
Xan says, as evenly as possible,
‘So he knows I exist?’
‘Yes. That was why he came.’
‘How? I mean, he and Mum only got together that one time.’
‘They must have had at least one acquaintance in common, to meet at a party. And … well, people talk. She had returned to live with me, and as a musician, I am not difficult to find.’
‘Is he in London now? Was he a student too? What did he study?’
‘I have no idea. He asked if he could see you.’ Oma sighs. ‘I did what I thought best.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Julius Okigbo. I have it written down somewhere, but I didn’t forget.’
Xan seizes this straw. Julius Okigbo, he says to himself. I can find you, if you are to be found. Then a new thought strikes him.
‘Did you tell him my name, Oma?’
‘Yes, I did.’
Everyone can be found on the Internet, now – and his father has not tried. Xan is on Facebook, and probably has a dozen tags to his name. Perhaps he doesn’t want to, Xan thinks. Perhaps he’s dead. Perhaps he’s changed his mind. He must have another family by now. There are so many reasons.
Or he might just be waiting for Xan himself to get in touch. Oma can be pretty scary at times, and walking up to her front door and announcing yourself as the bloke who knocked up her daughter must have taken some balls.
However, the main thing was that he had tried, perhaps not very hard, but he had left his name. Maybe he thought Lottie was some kind of weirdo, rather than acting totally out of character, being pissed for once. (And what kind of man took advantage of that, by the way?) He wants to get back to Devon, and talk to his mother. She ought to know what he knows, at least. Marta’s leg isn’t mended, but she is well enough for him to leave. The sad, anxious look he had seen peering out when she was in hospital has gone. She is back, a little more frail but herself.
