To Heaven by Water

by Justin Cartwright

He is conscious that he is speaking in the strangulated fashion you employ when trying to be sincere and natural to a message service. At least she’s not at home arranging the closets. Her childlessness is now biblical to her: the barren woman in a stony land. And, despite his more than adequate sperm count and his energetic commitment to the task, he is also diminished. It’s the connection between fucking and children that needs looking at. Production of children is clearly not, as the Church suggests, the sole purpose of marriage. Feeling guilty about having difficulties conceiving is a hangover of the religious disapproval of the barren woman. After all, what have he and Rosalie done wrong? Even in the strictly technical, the plumbing, sense he is a hundred per cent confident they have done nothing wrong. The time for IVF is upon them. But also, he must free himself from the shackles of this little place with its excruciatingly limited horizons and its banality. It’s weighing heavily on him: it’s not human to lack a sense of humour. We are, after all, the only animals that laugh and smile. In this place, from Robin downwards, humour is the retelling of jokes heard at parties or jokes that have appeared on the Internet. Invariably his colleagues tell them badly. They are unaware of what somebody called the cleansing baptism of irony. This person, someone like Kant or Kierkegaard, said – approximately – that anyone who has no ear for irony lacks what is indispensable to being human. Introduction to Philosophy 1 is fading into obscurity. He must look the passage up. But he is cheered by these musings: they give him the hope that he is not yet enslaved.

  Mum never understood irony: it seemed to her a silly artifice and wholly unnecessary. Yet in her own way she was the most human of us. Even when she was dying, she made lists of minor tasks, which she entrusted to him and to Lucy. But the great irony – that none of this would matter after she was dead – escaped her. When your mother dies, you feel it particularly strongly because you and she were for a while one flesh. He misses her every day and he knows that Lucy does, too. When he thinks about childbirth, he sees a sacred mystery, that you can create new life in this strangely primitive and messy fashion. He and Rosalie don’t seem to be able to create new life as easily as people on the tundra and the savannah and the rainforest do, routinely.

  He rings Mr Fineman. Olla answers.

  ‘Hello, Olla. It’s Edward Cross.’

  ‘Mr Edvard, how are you?’

  ‘I’m fine. And you?’

  ‘I quite a bit happy.’

  ‘Good. Can I speak to Mr Fineman?’

  ‘Sure, I put through.’

  ‘Fineman.’

  ‘Mr Fineman, I’ve had a preliminary talk with the Council. In principle they have accepted that they were derelict in serving the notice. It’s just a question of getting the agreement signed and sealed. It will take about a week, but you can relax.’

  ‘I’m relaxing.’

  ‘It was good to see you.’

  ‘Something bothering you?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘Are you unhappy?’

  ‘No, just the usual stuff.’

  ‘You don’t sound too good.’

  Mr Fineman has told him his family spoke German in Prague: other lives, almost always a surprise. He feels deep sympathy – not unconnected to his own problems – for Mr Fineman and the teetering Olla in their rundown little parlour, adorned with spectacle frames, certificates and pictures of women who contrive to look beautiful despite being four-eyed, and the scent of sprays intended to disguise the creeping mushroom-flavoured invasion of their doomed building, now stranded on a traffic island. Maybe Mr Fineman is hoping to ditch his elderly wife in favour of this trembling beauty with the milk teeth. Stranger things have happened. Her skin has a faint sheen, a suggestion of goat’s milk. Alice’s skin is very white, with the tiny indelible pencil lines of veins on her inner thighs. Which he’s never going to see again. He tries calling her. It’s that heavy time in the afternoon when the urge to work is dulled. She doesn’t answer. She’s still in the Highlands or the Trossachs; the geography of Scotland is something of a mystery to him, apart from Edinburgh, where he was in a student production of The Real Inspector Hound at the Festival. He played Birdboot. Dad wanted to be a professional actor: Rome was his high point. It’s strange how older people seem to feel a greater intensity about what happened to them forty or fifty years ago than things in the present. What’s happening to them now seems to be short on meaning, thinned out. It’s as if in retrospect they recognise certain key moments in their lives on which the whole thing has turned. Robin would call this a tipping point. You don’t necessarily know it at the time, but Ed has the feeling that here, in this narrow little office, in front of the half-dozen leather-bound books in the dark cabinets, which he has never opened, he may be at a tipping point.

  12

  ‘Language is being debased. That’s not a good thing.’

  ‘Give us an example,’ Lucy demands.

  ‘“Head up your arse”. Once English people used to say, “He has his head in the clouds.” Now they say, “He’s got his head up his arse.”’

  ‘Languages are always changing. And by the way, “head up your arse” is not the same thing as “head in the clouds”.’

  Nick ignores her nit-picking.

  ‘Yes, language is changing but that doesn’t mean you should limit yourself to a few portmanteau words. Or approximations. Most people seem to think “picaresque” means “picturesque” in French, but it has a very specific meaning relating to literature. But if you don’t know what the word means, especially if you think you do, it is just another useful word down the toilet. Soon you will be saying things like, “Ooh, like that’s so fun.” Soon every halfwit from Hawaii to the Scilly Isles will be using the same half-baked phrases. I am being boring?’

  ‘Not too bad, so far. But you are probably going to go on to texting and email next, and how they are dragging the language down.’

  ‘I’m not, actually.’

  She watches him as he talks; talking is something he evidently likes a lot. He has a long, very straight nose, flanked by cheeks that slope away rather urgently, so that he appears to be very alert, almost raptor-like. This alert, sniffing-the-wind look reminds her of pictures of Native Americans, before they became obese and bipolar. He may be gay, although he’s not at all camp. When he interviewed her on the phone for the Evening News a few days ago, he suggested they meet to look at the finished magazine piece.

  They are now in the coffee bar he suggested. He loves coffee and claims to know all the best places in London, although she suspects he must once have had to knock off a feature for the ‘What’s Hot and What’s Not’ section in the Friday colour magazine People and Places. They have this section open in front of them. The café is in a blank street behind a theatre which opens on to Shaftesbury Avenue and it has – he says – a unique blend of beans from Turin, which he calls ‘Torino’. He recommends something called a bicerin.

  ‘There are three versions, pur e fiôr – coffee with milk, pur e barba – coffee with chocolate, and un pô’d tut – a bit of everything.’

  ‘You are truly one of the worst know-alls I have ever met.’

  ‘You should get out more. Which one do you want? If you asked me, I would be a devil and have the third, a little of everything.’

  He orders in Italian, but the waitress is from Gdansk, so he has to point at the menu. The photograph of Lucy, busy sorting early Christian Roman coins, appears above the caption: Golden Girl Gives Lustre to Golden Hoard.

  ‘If we are talking language, what about this headline?’

  ‘Ah subs, subs. A law unto themselves. They live in a parallel universe because they are never allowed out of the office. Troglodytes, poor cunts.’

  For a moment he seems genuinely moved by their fate.

  ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘it sounds like “Golden Girl Gives Blow Job”.’

  ‘O – my – Go-od. Now I am shocked. Oh – my – Go-od.’

  ‘I don’t speak like that, if that’s supposed to be me.
’

  ‘It isn’t. Tell me, did you like the bit where I said, “Lucy Cross, daughter of television icon David Cross, definitely belongs in London’s smallest minority, young women with brains and beauty. She is in at number 6”?’

  ‘It wasn’t news to me, of course.’

  ‘Which part, the brains or the beauty?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘Look, let’s be honest, the whole series is a load of crap, but because I liked you, I promoted you from number 14.’

  ‘Lucy says, “I love the early coins. They breathe, they whisper, they break down the barriers of history.” Did I really say that?’

  ‘You did. But a little more prosaically.’

  ‘Thanks. I know about you, by the way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I rang somebody in your office. No, don’t ask. She said the editor thinks you are talented but erratic.’

  ‘That’s about right. Have you got a boyfriend?’

  His questing features incline towards her.

  ‘No. As it happens I gave him the push a few days ago.’

  ‘So you are on the rebound.’

  ‘Am I? I might be. I hadn’t really thought about it like that.’

  Lucy thinks that if they are talking like people in a British comedy – brittle and ironic – that’s OK with her: it’s undemanding and even restful, a familiar gambit.

  She glances at the magazine. In the picture she does look almost beautiful. She can see something of her mother, too, in the way her eyes appear to have slightly more white beneath the iris than other people’s. As a result, her mother sometimes looked startled without cause. And her smile is similar to her mother’s, with the appearance of spontaneity, although the photographer made her laugh by telling her a joke. He was a rumpled, bald fellow called Arnold, wearing a grimy Belstaff jacket.

  ‘What’s pink and tastes of ginger?’

  ‘Dunno. What is pink and tastes of ginger?’

  ‘Fred Astaire’s willy.’

  She laughed because the joke was so venerable and he told it with such lack of verve.

  ‘Works every time,’ he said, although she imagined that she might be the only under-thirty in London to get it, and that was only because her mother loved Fred Astaire movies.

  ‘Why did you chuck him?’

  ‘He is very good-looking, but it’s deceptive. He’s a twerp. It took me a while to see past the looks.’

  ‘Twerp. Nice antiquarian word. You haven’t asked me if I have a girlfriend.’

  ‘I didn’t ask, but thanks anyway.’

  ‘Are you pleased?’

  ‘That you can’t find a girlfriend?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I’ll pass on that one. But can I ask a supplementary? If you didn’t know who my dad was, would you have asked me to be in the series?’

  ‘Frankly, no. The editor’s assistant knew who you were. But the truth is the editor is under pressure from the management to deliver celebrities, even daughters of celebrities, so she lays it on us, the Oompa-Loompas.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have had you down for an Oompa-Loompa. Look, Nick, it’s been great, but I have to go now, back to the fourth century – that’s the three hundreds to you journos – in old Byzantium. The coins are whispering to me. In fact they are screaming, “Get back to work.”’

  ‘OK, bye.’

  ‘Thanks for the caffè con tutto.’

  ‘Can we meet again?’

  ‘You have my mobile number.’

  Back in her corner with the coins in front of her on green baize and a pile of reference books to the side, she finds that the coins are indeed breathing. When she took this job, to write up the catalogues, she had no idea that ancient coins and pottery and pieces of vellum could interest her. But now she sees, perhaps a little too late, that she has a keen interest in imagining what the world was like when these things were made. Perhaps she could have been an academic. She wonders who handled the coins and how the coins survived: she is familiar with every face that appears on them, a sort of family album of the Constantines at play, which involved incest and murder. Her favourite is Julian the Apostate, who reinstated the old Roman gods for a while.

  These coins, all gold, are new on the market. She has met the man from Derbyshire who found them with a metal detector; he sees great wealth coming his way, and he could be right. Up until he found the gold, his best find had been a Swiss Army penknife. Her good mood, she knows, is partly to do with Nick, perhaps also a result of drinking very strong coffee with chocolate. Everybody in old Torino must be buzzing. Her friend Yvette at the News said that Nick is only given minor pieces, but everyone can see that he’s a natural journalist. He’s curious. As her father says, journalists will read the small print on a cornflakes packet when they have nothing else to read. Journalists cobble together meaning from whatever is at hand, a chimera. It’s not real meaning, built to last. Her mention in ‘What’s Hot’ at number 6, because Nick fancies her, is a perfect example of a journalistic rendezvous: pretty girl, daughter of once-famous TV person, posh semi-academic job – all compacted to make sense. She understands better than most that, while what appears in the media is not absolutely true or real, it acquires a reality of its own. Her father once told her, quoting somebody or other, that diplomats lie to journalists and then believe what the journalists have written. Now she almost believes that she has brains and beauty.

  She wonders what it would be like to have sex with Nick. It’s impossible to tell by appearances. Men are always speculating about women in bed; it’s as if they have a masculine obligation to keep tabs on women’s sexual potential, in some wider and disinterested pursuit of knowledge. They are apparently unaware that women do the same, although – broadly speaking – women are more interested in the emotional aspect of sex than men are. Not all of them, though. She looks at Helena, mother of Constantine, commemorated on a coin of Constantine II. She was a slapper. On this coin, Helena has become an icon, the subject of a Christian cult. Her hair is elaborately coiffed and she wears a diadem. But she was once, some scholars claim, a prostitute – ‘a sex worker’, as they kept saying at the prostitute-murder trial – and her elevation in the Roman Empire was a triumph of sexual politics. Coins and medals tell you a lot about politics. When her son first adopts the chi-rho, his coins still have an image of Venus on them: he’s working both sides of the street. By sending Helena, his old mum, to Jerusalem to bring back the True Cross, he is trying to ally himself and his empire with what he sees as the future. And in this way Helena goes from sex worker to Christian saint. The edited version of her ascent is recorded on the coins.

  Maybe I am turning into a blue stocking. I will be one of those daft old parties with snaggly, crazy hair, who wears thick dark tights in all weathers. But then she remembers that she looks pretty good in the magazine and the magazine places her at number 6 in the brains-plus-beauty stakes. Who is she to argue with London’s leading evening newspaper?

  Noel, who is a trainee in fine-art evaluation, comes in to see her. He often drops by in his broadly spaced pinstripe, in what he imagines is a casual fashion. His ambition is to conduct auctions one day, effortlessly debonair. But he doesn’t have the kind of confidence that Lucy finds attractive: he is ingratiating and awkward. Today’s ruse is to say that he has some tickets for a gig next day at the O2: ‘Gold dust. Absolute and total gold dust. Four hundred big ones each on eBay. Some mate of mine knows the promoter. Want to come?’ She doesn’t but at the same time she doesn’t want to be cruel: he was very kind to her when she was low and he even took her to Sotheby’s Café down the road for a lobster club sandwich. The combination of lobster and sandwich is a masterpiece of nuanced snobbery, a signifier, if ever there was one.

  ‘Oh no, can’t do it, Noel. This catalogue is way behind.’

  ‘Too bad. By the way, I saw your picture in the News.’

  ‘Did I look OK?’

  ‘You looked great.’

 
‘It’s all in the lighting.’

  ‘I thought it was exactly you. I liked your dress.’

  ‘Noel, you’re a sweetie-pie. Thank you. Now I have to finish off the Derbyshire Hoard, or I’m dog-meat. Sorry, really, really, really sorry; another time.’

  He leaves awkwardly, unable to close the conversation in the way that assertive men do, with a hint of threat or a self-congratulatory pay-off, which trumps all that has gone before. He was at boarding school in some damp part of the country. It’s odd that this habit of boarding school lingers on. All her London friends at university were far more worldly and socialised than the boarding-school boys and girls, who substituted slogans for conversation, as if forms of words, learned from that odd assortment of monks, spinster teachers and boys who never grew up, were more important than feeling or emotional truth. In a world loudly preoccupied with self, this third column of the stilted, polite English person – over-represented in British comedy – is still turned out by these remote schools. Noel has that sort of slightly chubby, formless face, neither good-looking nor unpleasant, just somehow neutral, which won’t age well: this sort of face lapses into anonymity. She can’t help thinking that it is very different from the planed, sculpted version of a face sported by Nick. It’s true that we all have a kind of sexual ideal, which explains why people often marry someone who looks like their first love. Dad doesn’t go for women like Sylvie, owner of the wandering, hirsute dog, women with a kind of outdated, breathy girlishness. At least she hopes he doesn’t. Just as she settles down with the coins again, her mobile rings. She sees, with a lurch of anxiety, that it is Josh.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is that the best you can do?’

  He is slurred. The words are unstable.

  ‘More than. What do you want? I’m working.’

  ‘I saw the piece about you in the News.’

  ‘Oh, good. And?’

  ‘And I just think they missed a trick.’

  ‘What would that be?’

  ‘They didn’t mention what a fucking cunt you are.’