To Heaven by Water

by Justin Cartwright

  As he remembers Alice’s surprisingly rough hand on his cock, he has a crazy certainty that he will father a child. Alice, without intending it, has lifted the weight that was constricting his seminal vesicles.

  The last thing he sees as he drifts – staggers – into sleep is a picture of Ophelia he saw on the side of a bus, advertising an exhibition at the Tate. She looks just like Rosalie, lying on her back, floating downstream. Her face is strangely calm for someone soon to drown in his hotshot lawyer’s potent semen.

  6

  Lucy wonders if she has a self. A self is not just a sort of serviceable act which can be applied to life, an imitative process of appearing – for example – upbeat and enthusiastic, or pretending to like Renaissance art or knowing about books; it’s not having in your head a lot of voices you can call on. It is most likely having solid values and firm beliefs about the world that are not subject to fashion. In our family, only Mum has ever had a clearly defined self. A self – a real self – would not require constant examination; it would be firmly moored.

  Below them on the pond two small boys are operating radio-controlled boats. One of the boys steers his boat viciously into the other’s.

  ‘Fuck you, you wanker,’ the second boy screams. It is hard to know if they are friends, as children routinely scream abuse at each other.

  Dad loves the Heath. He says he has never liked Camden, but knowing that the Heath is just a few minutes up the road has made living there bearable for him. And it is still a revelation every time he goes for one of his walks, that you come upon this small country perched up here, not far from the mean streets. Up here, Dad says, the air is fresher. The freshness he imagines is probably moral as much as real. You can still see the hedgerows of the home farm that the Mansfield family used to own, he says. And he loves the ponds they created to provide a vista from the house. But he can’t resist adding, ‘Of course if the last owners knew that there would be a thousand gays in thongs lying about on a sunny day, they would never have left the place to the nation.’

  ‘Dad, do you think we have a self?’

  They are walking up from the model-boat pond on a sweep that leads past the swimming ponds. He turns to her and looks at her silently for a few moments. When he was on television he was known for his listening, or his appearance of listening.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says finally. ‘In my job I had a kind of cultivated self which wasn’t me, really. Why?’

  ‘Why do I ask? I feel like I’m a shadow.’

  ‘Since Mum died?’

  ‘Maybe even before.’

  ‘I’ve thought about this, too, my darling. My conclusion, for what it’s worth, which is probably bugger all, is that your self exists only in relation to other people. And as other people see you, you sort of adapt yourself and gradually you settle into this self. Obviously in my business it was more extreme. But I don’t think there is a permanent, unchanging self. In the Army, for example, we were expected to be something completely different, and we adapted. Except for Adam. He hasn’t changed. Is that the question you were asking?’

  ‘So what do the Masai bracelets say about your self?’

  ‘Don’t be worried, darling. I’m not going to run off with a bimbo or take to crack in a big way. I see a future of purely recreational crack use, actually.’

  He still walks fast, in fact faster since he’s been working out. He is wearing shorts, with lots of pockets, and leopard-print trainers. His wire and elephant-twine bracelets gleam and occasionally jangle. He’s treading a fine line on the edge of the ridiculous. They rise up to the top of the hill, passing the men’s bathing pool behind the bushes. Often in summer if they go this way they see men striding briskly, towels over their shoulders, heads often cropped, heading back to the straight world. She wonders if these men are plagued by erotomania, flirtation with danger and the addiction to novelty. She also wonders if it isn’t the transgressive nature of gay sex that is a big part of the excitement. She thinks but, of course, has never said it, that gay men have somehow elevated sexual behaviour into an aesthetic principle. Despite his weight-loss, bracelets, baggy shorts and the bizarre trainers, Dad would never be taken for gay.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s been brought on by Mum dying, but I just wonder if we aren’t all three of us a little over-conscious. With Mum what you got was a kind of mooring. Grounded is the word, I think. She wasn’t swayed this way and that. Am I making sense?’

  ‘Yes, absolute sense. Darling, is this really a way of asking me where we’re going now?’

  ‘No, no. I was thinking about myself and Josh, actually. When he dumped me, I was devastated, but now that he’s back and eager I keep thinking what a creep he is. If he’s a creep, why did I want him back, and now that I have him back, why do I find him so deadly? It’s me. I don’t have a fixed personality.’

  ‘That’s showbiz.’

  ‘Oh thanks. I’ll try and remember that.’

  ‘You may not have a fixed personality, but you’re the best-looking of us all. I wonder who your father was?’

  He doesn’t want to talk about Josh, who, of course, reveres him. He has this effect, that people instantly believe they have a rapport with him. They are passing a huge, sprawling oak, which she used to think must be like the oaks in Sherwood Forest. Mum believed firmly in the old children’s books.

  ‘Dad, why are you so evasive these days?’

  ‘Am I?’

  He stops and hugs her.

  ‘You’re bony,’ she says.

  ‘Pleasantly bony or emaciated?’

  ‘Different. You used to be chubby. This is a little strange.’

  ‘I hope I am not being evasive.’

  ‘Maybe evasive was too strong. But you are distant. It’s worrying. Ed and I both think so.’

  ‘Let’s walk up through the wood to the tea room. What do you say?’

  They enter the dark, leafy, damp and fungal woods that lead down to the concert bowl on the lake, where once they heard the 1812 performed with cannon effects that sent startled fowl crashing into the heavy foliage.

  ‘Lucy, you know I can’t replace Mum. We are what we are now, three individuals. Our family has shrunk. And what you say is true – she provided the mooring. I was sort of on the periphery. I had a busy life, obviously. And she was in charge at home, but I didn’t think of myself as detached. And I don’t want to be distant either but to tell the truth I don’t really know how, without Mum, to re-create what we were. If I tried to do Sunday chicken and so on it would be false.’

  His voice is reasonable and measured as though he is reporting from Darfur, but she is distressed now because he has confirmed what she feared most, that they can’t go back, and that is what she wants most, even as she knows it is impossible.

  ‘Don’t cry, darling.’

  That face which was famous for its concern, its manly compassion, its reassuring intelligence, is now directed to her.

  ‘All I can tell you, Lucy, is that you and Ed are everything to me. I have nothing else. And I don’t want anything else.’

  She quietens in his embrace now. She feels suddenly calm. Perhaps that’s all I need, she thinks, his declaration of unequivocal love, something that was always obvious with Mum.

  ‘Do you mean that?’

  ‘I don’t want anything, except maybe to use the time, the empty spaces, to think a bit. You can’t really think in television, except in a sort of “how’s this going to play” fashion.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Daddy. I am being boring and self-obsessed. Let’s walk.’

  The water on the lake is leaden, moving slowly and heavily. It’s a strange effect on such a small stretch of water, a wrinkled sea, more appropriate to the North Sea. By the lake, grimly cheerful couples hover around their children and encourage them to run about and express themselves in this little paradise. There’s a competition for excellent parenthood going on in subtle ways, fathers being unusually active, mothers being showily caring, and so on. When she wa
s a child Dad would sit under a tree as she ran after Ed. In those days, not so long ago, there was no fence around the lake. One day Ed was pecked by a swan. Swans are malevolent creatures, not easily placated. Dad laughed, which sent Ed into a tantrum until Mum calmed him.

  ‘Do you remember the swan?’ Lucy asks.

  ‘Ed and the swan. Oh yes. You and Ed ran and the swan pecked Ed right on his bum. It was hilarious.’

  ‘We were terrified.’

  ‘It’s good to be terrified. My brother and I were often terrified.’

  ‘Yes, I know, you and Uncle Guy didn’t have any toys and you made your own puppets out of conkers and old tyres and you shared a spinning top and you both had a paper round. And we were spoilt and over-protected.’

  ‘Yup. That’s more or less the way it was. And, by the way, we only had brown bread.’

  ‘And that’s why you loved white Wonderloaf. Sad. So, so sad.’

  ‘Oh – my – God, it’s soooh, soooh sad,’ he says in a teenage voice.

  She hates to admit it, but he is a good mimic.

  ‘Are you mocking your only daughter?’

  ‘Not really.’

  They walk on up the steep path to the house.

  ‘Am I going to get over it?’

  ‘Mum? You will, although at a deep level I think your parents’ death is always there somewhere. Actually I think peripheral things will trigger your memories. Whenever I want to remember my father, I think first of his brown brogues, always polished, and if I ever smell shoe polish I think of him without meaning to. Ox blood. That was the colour of the polish. I don’t think Guy ever got over our mother’s death, and I’m sure that he went to Africa to get away from the memories, but that may be a bit glib, I know. Although a Freudian might say his problems with women all go back to that.’

  ‘And your point is?’

  ‘My point is that you will always be reminded of Mum, by unexpected things. But the pain will subside.’

  ‘How’s Uncle Guy?’

  ‘He’s not well, according to his son.’

  ‘Lovely man, Uncle Guy.’

  ‘I may have to go out to see him sometime. He has all sorts of problems.’

  But at the moment she is not really interested in Uncle Guy’s problems. The tea room puts an end to this unexpectedly reassuring conversation. It’s not possible in a tea room in London, in contrast – she imagines – to the Closerie des Lilas in Paris – to have a serious conversation. If you are middle class you are obliged to be glib and humorous in public, as though the people around you are scoring you for knowingness and irony. When you want to talk seriously and bitterly, you whisper and lean forward. The other day in the restaurant with Ed, she saw a man and a woman leaning close; the veins on their foreheads bulged alarmingly, the hatred was spewing noxiously in terse, half-heard sentences, like the telegrams in old films. It’s a different matter out on the streets: since Mum died she seems to see women threatening their children every day: I’ll give you a slap. I told you once, and now you’re gonna get it. The young children have frightened, feral eyes. The older children have developed a kind of sullenness. Their time is coming.

  After tea – Dad refuses a biscuit – they walk on a long loop across a meadow scuffed by rabbits, and on through a tangled forest. After a while they realise that they are being followed meekly by a hairy dog, possibly a wolfhound. It appears to be lost and comes up to them when called. Dad looks at the tag around its neck. He reads: Wolfowitz and a phone number.

  ‘A Jewish dog,’ he says.

  He calls the number. Lucy listens.

  ‘OK, fine. By the model-boat pond. Oh, it’s a girl. She’s a girl. Wolfie. I see. OK, no, she looks calm enough. Red boots. OK, and we will have the dog, of course.’

  ‘Right,’ he says to Lucy, ‘it’s a girl and its owner will head for the boat pond. And we will know her by her red boots. Come, Wolfie, you are going home.’

  He takes the Australian jackeroo belt from his shorts and slips it under the dog’s collar. They march along up to the high point of the wood; Lucy thinks the dog looks like the one that accompanied the soldiers at the funeral of some Irish Guards recently. It has a subdued demeanour; like an undertaker’s, easily assumed. Returning the dog to its unknown owner has given them a little mission. The dog may be depressed, but she and Dad have a new lift in their step.

  As they descend the path towards the pond, they see the red boots before they can make out the figure of the dog’s owner. They hear her calling, Wolfie, Wolfie as she sees them cresting the hill and the dog begins to whimper. Dad slips the leash and the dog gallops with huge strides deliriously towards its owner, who is kneeling to welcome it. By the time they reach her, she has the dog on a lead; as they approach, the dog growls at them.

  ‘Oh thank you, thank you,’ says the woman.

  She’s in her late thirties, with wild, dark, streaked-blonde hair and a tight pair of jeans tucked into red cowboy boots. She wears an embroidered waistcoat. Overall she is faintly rosy, in a Celtic sort of way.

  ‘I’m Sylvie, by the way, and you’ve met Wolfie. She’s my baby. I can’t thank you enough. Oh my goodness, you’re the TV person. I didn’t recognise you in shorts.’

  ‘Yes, I’m the TV person, and this is my daughter Lucy.’

  ‘Thank you so much for finding Wolfie.’

  ‘We didn’t actually find her, she surrendered to us,’ says Lucy.

  Lucy is used to the shock of recognition that assails people when they see her father. Sometimes they seem to believe they have a personal relationship with him as though in their minds they have for years been conducting a conversation, a Socratic dialogue, about world issues with him. Lucy watches her: she is one of those women who light up in front of men and employ a whole range of coquettish devices; her hands run through her hair and she adjusts a bra strap, subconsciously – perhaps deliberately – drawing attention to her best features. The deployment of breasts, as most women know, is a kind of semaphore.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t introduce myself properly. My name is Sylvie Mellors, and this is Wolfowitz. Wolfie for short.’

  Sylvie has very white teeth, and there is something vulpine about her, too, with all that brindled blonde hair.

  ‘Well, thanks, lovely to meet you,’ says Dad. ‘We must be on our way. Bye, Sylvie. Bye, Wolfie.’

  Wolfie growls, her funeral director’s mien now abandoned.

  ‘Nympho,’ says Lucy as they begin the homeward trudge.

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Absolutely. Trust me. Women who make up sexy names for themselves are nymphos. Or desperate.’

  ‘Not really stepmother material, then?’

  ‘Don’t even joke.’

  As she has done all her life, she looks at Dad and tries to see him as the public sees him, a national figure, whose voice and mannerisms and honest-broker questioning are still known to millions.

  ‘She was jiggling her tits, Dad.’

  ‘Didn’t see a thing.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘I do.’

  He’s smiling as they walk up the hill towards the row of grand houses where Sting once lived. They never knew which house it was, but they always said, ‘Sting lives here.’ In families you develop certain phrases, certain lyrics, which enter the family songbook. As children, every time they drove up Highgate Hill, Ed would say, ‘Whittington’s cat. Fuck, you missed it.’ For years Lucy never saw the bronze cat on the pavement. In his teens Ed said fuck to annoy Mum. In families you take up positions to distinguish yourself from the others, but also to cement the family rituals. Rituals in families – she thinks – are no different from religious rituals: they dispel anxiety with repetition. Dad has become something of an Islamophobe – although of course he sees himself as part of the liberal elite – but he doesn’t understand that fear and anxiety are what are driving Muslims to the rituals of Islam.

  ‘Dad, do you think people like Ms Jiggly Tits love you because you are familiar an
d reassuring?’

  ‘It could be. Mostly, they seem to think I know what’s really going on. I realised a long time ago that celebrity is something other people project on to you.’

  ‘And a few of them think you owe them something, because they made you.’

  ‘That’s true, too.’

  But she doesn’t want the conversation to go this way into generalities. She wants him to say something more to put her mind at rest, something to explain himself, something that goes beyond reason. She wants to feel as though she is properly attached to the world again. She wonders if it’s true what Dad said, that little things will for ever remind her of Mum. Far worse would be to forget her bit by bit until she faded right away to the status of a postcard from the other side. Already she sees that she is remembering her mother in short and random scenes – her love of the sea, her near veneration of the linen cupboard, her insatiable and indiscriminate reading and the way she folded clothes carefully before putting them away at the dictate of the seasons – summer clothes, winter clothes: they were distinct categories in her mind. And she remembers how she looked absolutely serene in bed. Sleeping, she looked like a child. She was always very interested in Lucy’s schoolfriends, and they loved her because they knew instinctively that her interest was genuine; and she remembers her driving – erratic, impulsive and even comical. But it’s becoming an edited version of her mother’s life. And this is what memory seems to do: it abridges and condenses as the object distances itself through separation or death. She was listening to a radio programme the other day and some expert said that we are the only animals that sing. He said that tunes remain embedded in the brain for ever, whatever happens to the powers of reasoning. Mum hummed tunefully around the house. But she stopped humming when the cancer was diagnosed. Perhaps the cancer had invaded that part of the brain which houses musicality.