by Linda Grant
“All I do is work a job,” he said. “I recycle press releases. I might as well invent a better breakfast cereal.”
“Yes, but there are jobs and jobs,” she said, stubbornly. She was going to save her marriage. She had got what she wanted, they had not moved permanently to America, but she knew he thought she had entrapped him, somehow. He must stay trapped, happily trapped.
She found an advertisement in the Guardian for researchers to work on BBC science documentaries for the Open University. The programs would not just be in the chemistry or pharmaceutical field, he would be able to cover the whole spectrum. A science degree and a background in science journalism was required, he had both. Inquiries revealed that a researcher became a producer. He might even be sent on location to film primates, that would be fun, he consented, reading the advertisement. “I’ll go for it,” he said.
And it turned out it was fun. It brought out in him the latent polymath who had sat in the science library reading about the glories of particle physics, or watched the space capsules hurtle toward the moon, or synthesized his own LSD.
Stephen thought of the voyage over on the SS United States, of the cabin boy who ran along the gangways in his Prince Edward jacket, carrying coffee and dry cleaning for the gilded passengers. Of the first-class staterooms, and his own tiny cabin below the waterline, too small even to sit up and read in bed. It was a process of emigration, he now understood. He had waved good-bye to the Statue of Liberty, and Manhattan had receded behind him. Goodbye. Good-bye.
The only person he ever told about the girl in the van was Ivan. “She was so pretty until you got up close, and then she smelt of not having washed much lately, that’s what I chiefly remember about the whole thing. That she didn’t have a good smell and afterward, all I could think about was that maybe she had some disease, I don’t even mean the clap, herpes would have been bad enough. Imagine if I gave Andrea herpes, it would have killed me. Yet I still wonder what happened to her. I wanted to give her money, just to make sure she had somewhere to sleep, but giving her money would have looked really insensitive.”
“It was nothing,” Ivan said. “Absolutely nothing. Don’t give it another thought.”
Ivan was in Gibson Square on the other side of Upper Street. It was permanently, obstinately wealthy. The square lived on opulently, despite the petrol-fumed dusty main road it lay alongside of, where coffee was a beige, sweetened drink served from a metal urn.
What Stephen liked about Ivan was that he had no principles, just ideas flitting about his mind from moment to moment. He was like a kid chasing soap bubbles, how could you despise him for that? The idea of now was to eat tremendously expensive meals on the company expense account and go out with actresses.
“The orgone thing was correct in a certain sense,” Ivan said. “We’re a mass of desires, Andrea was the person who convinced me of that. We are doomed to be irrational so any political system based on reason has to fail. You can accuse me of selling out, but I only make people aware of the things that make them happy.”
“Candy bars?”
“Yes. Why not?”
“Fish fingers?”
“Very useful if you have kids. The portion size is right for them. Don’t you feed your kids fish fingers?”
“Yes, we do, but…”
“There isn’t a but, Stephen. You saw them advertised. You bought them. No?”
Stephen had no idea how they came to buy fish fingers for the children. He just knew they were in the kitchen, waiting to be heated up and served with ketchup. He had no idea why they always bought the same brand and not random ones. He calculated the mathematical possibilities of always buying random products, it was far more likely than buying the same ones every week, yet they didn’t. There must have been something they liked about Birds Eye, yet there was nothing special about it. What was going on? The problem troubled and baffled him. He felt that there must lie in the unexplored territory Andrea called his subconscious all kinds of irrational pathways, a maze of knots. Neural pathways would have to be relaid.
And Ivan just sat there and smiled, sitting at his matte black ash dining table, laying out a line of coke. He was still the same boy who had driven through the night to see the white horse carved in the hillside. He was like his old man, the barrister, Stephen thought, who took the bus to chambers, put on his wig and the rest of the legal fancy dress and then came home and read a book about the whirling dervishes.
“Have you heard anything from Grace?” Ivan asked.
“Andrea has. She’s traveling in Latin America.”
“Cuba didn’t work out?”
“I don’t know what happened there, I just know she’s in Nicaragua at the moment.”
“Poor Grace.”
The coke took hold of them and they stared exultantly out of the window to the square, which inexplicably had filled with sunshine, though Stephen thought that on his side of Upper Street there were border guards who did not grant it permission to enter.
In 1981, Ralph, turning sixty, was tired of the responsibility of the sitting tenants, some of whom had already been there when his father had bought the house during the war for five hundred pounds, cash. He had been the custodian of the property after his parents died, they had wanted him to bring up his family in it and he’d let them down. There had been a fiancée for a couple of months but that was as far as it ever got. He would have liked to move to Finchley, but that was just a pipe dream. If he could sell the house to Stephen and Andrea, they might tolerate him in a couple of rooms, which was all he needed; he could close down the underwear shop and live on the interest from the house sale. He could practice his conjuring tricks all day long and take long pleasurable naps. It was enough. He’d never wanted more, except what he could not have, what he understood would always thwart him, forbidden longings that he subsumed in magic, which was also all about concealment.
“We should buy it,” Andrea said.
“Why?”
“It’s a good house. The area is coming up, it will be harder to buy if we wait.”
Stephen could not work out why he was resisting. His father had owned his own home, it was a point of pride with him that he had put down a deposit on a house as soon as his first child was born, though he had never quite made it to that middle-class accessory of Californian life, the pool in the yard. But that was L.A. Everyone owned their own home in California, you were a dolt if you did not. This was London, a place that people like him came to temporarily.
Andrea said, “We can’t live like students forever. Ivan has bought a flat.”
“Ivan’s parents are rich. We can’t make the deposit.”
“Well, we’ll just have to find a way.”
“We’ll still be living with Ralph and all the old folks. We can’t get rid of them.”
“For now, Stevie. Just for now.”
What does the past matter? Stephen thought when he cut his hair short to open a building society account and put down their names for a mortgage. They were already expanding through the house. He saw the family as an enclosed square with four sides, mother, father, daughter and son. He felt he walked on air, like the cartoons where the tomcat runs like crazy until he comes to the edge of a cliff and keeps on running, halfway across the ravine before he glances down and realizes he is without support. The trick, Stephen now understood, was to keep on looking straight ahead in order to stay airborne, and this had always come easily to him.
At work he was approached to apply for an internally advertised post as producer on a new science strand on BBC Two. It was a fantastic job, you traveled the world making glorious documentaries, you met and interviewed everyone you might want to meet. Carl Djerassi, who had synthesized artificial estrogen to make the contraceptive pill and launched the sexual revolution, the man who launched millions of free fucks! Linus Pauling and his theory of the molecular clock, which pinned down when humans and chimpanzees first diverged as species, and so much more—there was nothing this man’
s teeming mind had not thought of, and then some. And he campaigned against the Bomb! Under Pauling’s influence, Stephen first began ingesting large quantities of vitamin C as a way of warding off the common cold. He was convinced of Pauling’s correctness, though the system failed every time to prevent his congested bronchi. He did not cease to collapse with a wheezy chest until he finally gave up smoking, at the age of thirty-seven.
Stephen took the tube to White City each day and had his own office with his name on the door and a team of production assistants. This BBC, it was like working for an exclusive club where everyone was doing something interesting, and when you sat down to lunch in the canteen you might as well have been at an Oxford High Table, where your colleagues talked of poetry, history, plays, music. He was once more a member of an institution. He felt comfortable there, he enjoyed office politics. The building circled around like a concrete doughnut, ugly, functional and beloved. His first assignment was a series about the origins of the universe, which involved the commissioning of animations of the Big Bang. Soon he and Andrea had enough for a deposit and a crippling mortgage, so they bought the house from Ralph, guaranteeing him a lifetime tenancy of two rooms.
Nothing would now remove Andrea from this place, it would take a crowbar to get her out, Stephen realized. She was finally home. He was as far from home as ever, but looking at her climbing ladders, painting hallways in her jeans, how could he not feel grateful for what was his, this feeling of love for someone who drives you nuts and you don’t understand but who brings you soup when you’re sick, and touches your shoulder when she passes you in the kitchen, for no reason at all, except that your bodies have exchanged themselves, over and over again? You’re the same person. That’s marriage, that’s how his parents got through it, and he would too. He was happy to give it his very best shot. He adored her. Why wouldn’t he? She was his wife and the mother of his kids.
Ralph first showed the children simple card tricks, then moved on to feats of close-up magic with pieces of cord. Both watched his hands carefully. Max still believed in magic, in fairies, goblins, elves, witches, wizards, unicorns, flying chairs and wishing chairs. He was too young to understand that the nature of the tricks was deception, and when Marianne explained this, he believed that all she had done was illuminate the principles behind magic, which remained deep and significant and beautiful. For if you took ordinary things in the house which were stupendous, like flipping a switch in the wall and the objects in a room and the persons in it were suddenly obliterated, they too had an explanation. It wasn’t an illusion.
Ralph had trouble not touching Max, he wanted to kiss his peachy cheek. He could cup his hand over the boy’s when he showed him how to conceal a card, but that was as far as it could go. The business with boys was a locked door in his head which found its expression only in sleep and the moments after waking. Most of the sitting tenants of the house had eventually left in their final boxes, only he and one old lady on the top floor remained, and him in his two rooms with his mother’s furniture, her double bed, her china ornaments, her lace antimacassars. Andrea and Stephen’s dinner guests, bearing wine, flowers, chocolates, a silver twist of hash, Ivan with a folded paper of powder, arrived, rang the bell and, entering, would sometimes see the old man emerging from the bathroom, buttoning his fly, and ask, Who is that ghost in the hall?
“It’s Ralph. He was here before we were and when we bought the place we agreed to give him a sitting tenancy. We can’t get rid of him, it’s the law. But he’s absolutely harmless and Max likes him.”
The years growing up in the failed hotel had taught Andrea how to manage a household. Money was terribly tight at first. They economized on all luxuries and took their summer break in her hometown, another place which was coming up. The hotel still lay empty but the fishermen’s cottages were being turned into holiday homes. Stephen learned to like it there: the port, the pilot boat, the customs house, the dredgers, the Russian sailors walking through the tiny streets, the up and down paths straightening out to become the old rope walk, which led to the mouth of the estuary and then the sea. He enjoyed the stubborn ugliness of the tugs towing the ships in and out of the deep-water harbor.
The children played on the beach; he and Andrea sat on the sand reading the newspapers, with the raucous cries of “Watch me, Daddy,” the water wings attached to his son’s shoulders (the little rubber angel), the melting ice creams dripping onto the newspaper and onto the face of the prime minister, the smell of the sea, and the ships sailing out under their flags to unknown ports. That could be me, Stephen thought. Still, he sat on the beach while Andrea unpacked a picnic lunch.
She bit into an apple and felt a hard, unfamiliar crunch in her mouth. She spat the contents out into her hand. A blackish lump lay on the palm.
“What’s that?” said Stephen.
“A filling, I think.”
“You know what? If ever I make real money I’m going to get your teeth fixed.”
“Fixed in what way?”
“There are all kinds of things they can do, in America we have veneers.”
“What are they?”
“They’d give you a row of straight white teeth, like mine. At least the kids don’t seem to have inherited your British teeth. I hope not, they go to the dentist enough.”
“You don’t like my teeth?” In all the years they had been married he had never mentioned them. She was in her thirties, what other imperfections did he find in her body? She struggled with her weight, slimming down with difficulty after Marianne was born and gaining it all back after Max, then making the Everest climb to the unreachable summit of nine stone. A stubborn ten pounds would not leave her thighs and stomach, yet he told her he liked her body, he wanted something to grab hold of. Her breasts drooped, he said he didn’t care. And all this time she had overlooked her own teeth, which suddenly were defective and needed “fixing” as if they were a leaky roof or unstable foundation.
“The point is, you don’t like your teeth. You smile without opening your mouth.”
“Do I?”
“Of course you do.”
“I never realized.”
She looked across his shoulder to the sea. A shaft of sunshine illuminated her face like the old days, in the squat, when the light from London lent her that spiritual expression, the old movie star look he had fallen in love with.
There were little lines round her eyes. He did not care. What was going on in her mind? He had to know, she could still surprise him.
“You’re lost in some thought. Tell me what it is.”
“I was thinking about what Freud said about teeth, how across all cultures everyone has the same dreams involving the same four themes, flying, falling, being naked and losing our teeth. Some cultures believe that dreaming of losing a tooth portends the loss of a family member but Freud thought it symbolized fear of castration.”
“I’ve never dreamed about my teeth.”
“How would you know? You say you can hardly remember your dreams.”
“True.”
“I think dreaming of our teeth is to do with the fear of growing old.”
“We’ll never grow old,” said Stephen, watching his children building a sandcastle with their plastic buckets and spades.
On summer weekends in London Andrea landscaped the long garden with fruit trees and wisteria trellises. The house and garden were all flamboyant display, while work was a secret pact between therapist and patient. Did she ever really cure anyone? No, she just made them less dependent on her, more equal to surviving with equanimity life’s sorrows and unpleasant surprises. After several years she came to realize that the problems were always the same. The patients presented themselves at her consulting rooms and opened up their hearts, exposing their torments, and nothing was surprising anymore.
A patient told her husband she was leaving him. He told her he would kill himself if she went through with it. Still, she left him. She took a new job in London. He told her that when she l
eft Norwich he would kill himself. She moved to London. She told him she was divorcing him, he said if she served the papers he would kill himself. She served the papers. He invited her to the house to sign them and have a drink for old time’s sake. When she arrived she found him lying on the bed dead, with a plastic bag tied round his head and a note beside him saying that he could not live without her.
As a story went, it had an unexpected twist. Most people who threatened suicide were all talk, those who wanted to end their lives did so quietly and with resolute determination. But what was predictable were the intense feelings of guilt in the woman who believed that she had murdered her husband, or at least had given him tacit permission to kill himself. Andrea’s task was that of the defense lawyer who gets their client off on a charge. She was teaching her clients (particularly the women) that they were not responsible for the actions of other people. Women, she observed, had centers that were constantly leaching away from them to others. They had no sense that they deserved to put themselves first and foremost.
She thought of Grace often, and they kept in touch by letter and Grace’s occasional visits to London from wherever it was that she was traveling. Grace put no one but herself first. Perhaps it was an unhealthy extreme, her life, the way she lived, but Andrea admired her. She had mastered the art of absolute freedom. This is what I do, Andrea thought, I teach women to be free, even if they are, like me, in a marriage, with children. You can still be a feminist when you’re married.
She and Stephen laid down a stone-flagged patio where they sat on summer evenings when he came home from work. Stephen, holding a glass of wine, would gaze up and up past all the windows to what they owned, or what the building society owned. Birds sang in the branches of the pear tree. His children looked out from their bedrooms and waved to him. Inside, Andrea was spraying herself with scent and stepping into a white linen dress, fitted at the waist. Her hair was not exactly the same red that he remembered. Neither was he the same man in the mirror.
