"Let's get away from the street."
Spence found them handfast, sitting on the edge of Jake's bed, Werg the bear in close attendance; comforting each other with talk of the beautiful game. Jake was still wearing his mother's jacket. The ambush had not yet dispersed: Jake and Anna had heard its war cry start up again as Spence came through. MR SENOZ! they called him, but the ones who thought they were clever yelled, HEY, SPENCE.
"Sorry I was so long, couldn't find a parking place. Those assholes." He dumped Jake's rucksack. "I've left the rest of the bags downstairs, I thought I'd better empty the car. D'you feel like making a cup of tea? Or d'you want something stronger?"
Anna shook her head. She never wanted to move or to let go of Jake's hand. "What's the point of it? That's what I don't understand."
"Simple. You refused to feed them; it makes them mad;, there's nothing more in it. I must admit, I thought the fuss was over."
The rough love of public interest had reached them almost as soon as Anna's findings hit the press. Is this the end of the line for the male chromosome??? Anna, partly from shock and partly because it seemed like common sense, had stonewalled: she'd tried denying these idiots the oxygen of attention. It hadn't worked. There'd been skulkers in the street, reporters on the doorstep. Neighbors had been interrogated; Jake had been followed on the way to school. When they found out she'd been fired, the frenzy had intensified. SEX SCIENTIST DENOUNCED; they'd loved that. Spence was right; she should have given the pack what they wanted straight away, when she was still to some extent in control. It was too late now. She knew she wasn't capable of handling an interview.
"They'll give up," she insisted. "They'll go away."
"Thank God they didn't track us down in Manchester."
There had been phone calls, which Anna's mother had calmly fielded: nothing worse. Maybe the media people had been restrained by legal considerations.
"Poor Jake!" said Spence. Anna heard the accusation: so did Jake, of course.
"I'm all right," said the child stoutly, hugging her. "Poor Mummy!"
Over his head, Anna and Spence exchanged challenge and truce. I know you think this is all my fault, signaled Anna, but please try not to act nasty to me, for his sake. They put Jake to bed together, with a show of parental solidarity: brush your teeth, no, it's too late to have a bath, wash your face and hands. No we can't go and fetch Fergie (his hamster) from the Rectory, we'll get her in the morning. Into your pajamas. Through the bathroom window Anna saw figures prowling in her garden. There was no access to their garden except through someone's house. How much was that worth? Which of our neighbors took the money? She closed the blinds.
They said prayers: Anna thought of Lavinia Kent. Never underestimate the power of ritual; never think yourself above the comfort it can give. How can it be false comfort if it palliates the suffering, for a little while? Beggars can't be choosers. God bless the bad reporters, said Jake firmly. And help them stop being bad soon. They lay together, Anna and Spence on either side, Jake in the middle, squeezed into precarious shelter. Anna held Jake close against her breast, and turned her face into Spence's shoulder. She'd never felt so much like a woman—the mythical nuclear-family, dependent, stone-age woman, huddling in the shelter of a male arm—in her entire life. Ironic, or what? She'd have liked them to spread sleeping bags on the floor and stay with Jake all night, but Spence wasn't in the mood to play shipwrecks. As soon as the child slept he withdrew his arm, as a matter of course, and they went to bed without speaking to each other.
She did not sleep. How soon would it be dawn? She would get up and do her yoga: paschimottanasana, where are you little fish? No wonder Spence was furious. It must seem to him she'd maliciously kept the destructive power of her paper a secret, until all hell broke loose. Did she deserve his anger? She'd known there would be trouble. Way back in Sungai, when her intuition had been strong that those bizarre results would stand up to verification, she had known what would happen. There would be an uproar, and it would be based on ideology, not science, so it would be truly vicious. . . So why had she done this to Spence? Why? Because like any scientist she couldn't leave a puzzle alone, and it was instinctive, innate, to deny the troublesome aspects. She had treated her husband badly; she shouldn't be surprised that he was bitter and distant.
She shouldn't have been surprised that Nirmal fired her, either. He'd warned her, but as always Anna Anaconda had tuned out the warning. From his point of view she had dragged his fledgling department into scandalous controversy. He'd taken vengeance for what he saw as a personal betrayal, exactly the same as long ago in Leeds. . .
She lay drowsing, mulling over the situation. She had been called a naive fraud, a man-hating hysteric, a deranged eco-terrorist. (What did they think? That she'd been tipping vials of fast-breeding TY viroid into the global weather systems?) Impossible to stop the tabloid machine, but the serious trouble was mostly her own fault, she could see that now. If she hadn't panicked. . . She felt better. She could see her blunders, her tactical errors: better to know you've been stupid than feel yourself in the grip of an incomprehensible nightmare. She must have slept, because she woke, and Spence was not beside her. A trapezoid of light lay across the landing outside their bedroom, coming from his work room next door. She put on her dressing gown and went to see what he was doing.
He was at his keyboard, wearing the worn blue cotton djellaba he used as nightclothes; it was a long time since they'd slept naked. He was checking his email. No, talking to someone online. She watched as he typed, paused to read a reply, typed again. Ah, the quirky old intimacy of chatroom-world. She felt envious and affectionate. Who was he talking to? How strangely alive he looked, so poised and so alert. . . From the past she had visited on the journey home there rose an image of Spence at the foot of the stairs to the chill-out loft in the Riverrun. He was tossing his head and teasing poor Wolfgang. Spence, at home among the tropical clubberati, drowning the air around him with the pheromones of a fine sexual animal, certain that he is desired—
"Hallo?" she whispered.
He logged off, so quickly that he must have left somebody puzzled. "Who were you talking to?"
"Meret," he said, turning in his chair with a stern expression. He seemed to wait for her reaction, but Anna was too slow. "Got some Shere Khan problems we have to sort out."
"Oh."
They went back to bed, without another word.
But Anna knew. She knew because she'd known already, with a secret, normal-person part of her brain that she usually ignored. The world fell into a different shape, a new gestalt.
She slept. When she woke again Spence was by the bed, with a mug of tea and a newspaper. They hadn't taken a newsstand paper for years. They relied on mTm and the freesheets to keep them up with current affairs. "The hounds have gone," he said. "But here's something that explains their excitement last night. Some guys in Canada have supported your results." He laid the folded paper by her. Anna picked it up and looked at the headlines, feeling no interest. Of course her results were real.
She didn't know what to say to Spence. She put the paper aside.
"Not the right kind of support," said Spence, and sighed, with compressed lips. "Nothing satisfies you, does it? Jake's not going to school. We'll collect Fergie from the Crafts, bring her back, then I'm taking him to see a movie. Is there anything I can get you?"
"No thanks." She lay back listlessly, closing her eyes.
* * *
The hellhounds were under an injunction to approach nobody except Anna herself, and this morning they seemed to be respecting it. As long as she stayed indoors and never answered the phone, as long as she refused to give interviews, killed their email, they would have to give up in the end. Spence and Jake were in and out. Anna went through the house, tidying clothes into drawers and books onto shelves, setting cushions straight, tasting the horror and dread that filled the air. When her wanderings took her into Jake's room, Fergie the anarchist hamster was wide awake. She watched Anna with con
cern through the bars of her cage.
On the last of their camping summers, they had found a good spot above the Gorge du Tarn, to hole up and avoid the mayhem of le quinze. They were chilling around the yurt, after a hot and exciting walk, scrambling limestone crags, and Jake had implored his daddy to give Charlie and the Chocolate Factory another try. Anna had spread a blanket in a secluded corner of the emplacement, to do some yoga: Spence lay on an airbed in the evening sun, the book propped on his smooth, tanned chest while Jake walked up and down, tried to play with his diabolo, exhibited terrible adult signs of nervous distress. Please, thought Anna, between pity and laughter, please, Spence, stretch a point, be kind. Finally Spence sat up, shaking his head.
"I'm sorry kid," he said, holding out the book. "This still stinks pretty bad."
Jake walked over.
"Will you let me explain to you why? You see, this guy's take on poverty is just vile—"
"No!" yelled Jake. "No no no! Don't EXPLAIN!" And he ran, hugging the paperback, jumped over the low wall at the back of their site, disappeared into the scrub oaks.
"I'd better go after him," said Spence, sorrowful but unrepentant.
"You stay where you are, Rhadamanthus. You've done enough damage. For God's sake Spence, it's only a kiddie's book. And he loves it."
"Well, he shouldn't."
She found her little boy sitting on a ledge of warm stone, on the very edge of the gorge. Under his dangling feet a mass of treetops fell away. Far below the river snaked, a ribbon of sea-washed bottle glass, striated with tiny moving rods of bright color: those were kayaks. He turned his head away, a tear glistening on his cheek.
"Where's the book?"
"It's here. I was going to throw it away, but I didn't."
"I'm glad you didn't. It's not the poor paperback's fault."
She put her arm around his small, warm, naked shoulders. Almost at once he relaxed, and she rocked him, murmuring soothing words, don't worry, dearest Jake-boy, don't cry, I love you. . . "Maybe you ought to let him explain, so you'd understand. Jake, you can't make a person like something. Especially not your daddy. What's the use in forcing him to say what he doesn't mean? That's not what loving people do. You're going to have to accept that he's just not keen on Roald Dahl. Think of you and porridge." He was so in love with his father, so touching in his heartbreak: down there the river runs, up here the lizards blink on the hot rock. I hug my baby, I love them both so much:
Throw this jewel memory away; it is fouled.
One winter Monday morning. Anna discovered to her horror an unheard of thing. She had forgotten to make her sandwiches! "I hate Mondays!" howled Anna, running around looking for the hairbrush for Jake's hair. Every Sunday evening from time immemorial she had prepared five frugal lunches, packed in plastic bags and stowed in the freezer, five because though she was often at work on a Saturday (not to mention Sunday), there were days when her apparatchik duties turned up a free meal, and it averaged out. Spence, who in honor could never be asked to make these lunches, began to slice bread, the bread he baked himself, grinning very sweetly. "No!" she cried, "I've done that! I got that far, and then I couldn't find the butter! It was in the freezer, remember, because Jake had unpacked it there—" She unearthed from the crock five pairs of slices, but Spence took them out of her hands.
"Hey hey hey," she boasted. "Look at this, I'm getting my sandwiches made for me!"
"Under close supervision from the gaffer." He divided slices of organic salami into five modest portions. "How much mustard? One dyne, ten dyne, how many nanograms?" and then someone let rip a fart.
"Cor!" said Anna. "What a woofter. That was you, Spence."
"The one who smelt it dealt it," said Spence.
"Ha! The one who said the rhyme, done the crime. . ."
Jake had found the hairbrush and stood in the kitchen doorway giggling, gently smoothing his own curls, ready to dart away if attacked. His parents, if they could catch him, were far too thorough.
Sweetness, sweetness, in every living moment—
Throw it away.
All the farting, nose-picking, bottom-scratching, snuffling intimacies of the nest, robbed of foundation, collapsing like the iridescent surface of a bubble when it bursts.
In the cold snap, before last Christmas, Spence and Anna lie in front of a coal fire in the piano room, bicycle stable, occasional winter parlor, sifting charity appeals. Anna meant to spread their contributions, but it always ended up being Christmas and Easter. Spence liked being coaxed. He liked having her take charge of this part of life, the mothering he missed in her professional daze. "Well gee whizz, marmee, I'm just waiting for the day when you send me and Jake out into the snow, to give our Christmas dinner to the poor. . ." And here, another jewel. A snowfall at dusk, Anna and four-year-old Jake are trotting along by the park gates, in the magic glimmering. They have been to see the dentist, and they both got a clean test. They are proudly wearing stickers to this effect on their coats, to take home and show to Daddy. Jake is telling his mummy about a new Shore Khan character Spence has invented, called Billy Blue.
"Hilly Blue isn't a grown up, mummy. He's a little boy like me and you."
Throw it away, it's fouled.
* * *
Anna had hoped that she wouldn't have to know the Crafts, but it had not worked out that way. Insidiously, helplessly, she'd had to endure it while the two families and the children became "friends." Birthday parties, barbecues on the beach, lunches at country pubs, treats for the kids: McDonalds, the ice-rink, the flumes, the laser-gaming. Anna didn't like it. This wasn't the way they'd reared Jake, this endless, greedy, placatory circus. How can you expect them to make sense of the world if you believe one thing and behave completely the opposite. And it didn't even work: Meret and Charles's kids were horrors. . . She knew she had no choice, and anyway, she didn't want to admit Charles Craft was a problem. She couldn't possibly tell Spence that old story now.
Secretly, irrationally what she'd hated most was being able to keep up with the Charles Crafts because of Spence's earnings. At least this aspect was a private humiliation: Spence was convinced that his Anna was indifferent to material reward, and the people they met at the Crafts expected Anna to have a "wife" job, something minor, a second-income thing.
One Saturday last summer it had been Anna's turn to cook for one of the gatherings that she didn't like. She'd been late home, the guests had been in situ, Spence hadn't done a thing about the food, which was a tiny bit bloody-minded of him, but fair. Anyway, she was happy to have an excuse not to join the party. My mother used to do this, she remembered, when annoying Senoz friends and relations turned up. . . When a woman disappears into her kitchen it's not a submission, it's a statement: a retreat in good order. She was peeling roasted peppers and aubergines for pisto castellano, a finicky job, and feeling irritated because Charles, along with a children's writer called Neal Hight, had elected to take roost in the kitchen, watching her while she worked. They were talking about Sheltered Housing in the Algarve. Neal's old Mum was installed. Charles was very interested in getting Meret's parents sorted out, but he had to convince Meret. She must see that her work was suffering, and it was so important to her—
"It's your wife's drawings that make those books," said Neal, "Spence is a lovely guy, don't get me wrong. But he has no idea how to write for children—"
Meret and Spence suddenly appeared and passed between the gossiping pair, crossed the kitchen and went out through the open door into the June garden. Neal mugged embarrassment at Charles, but Anna's eyes followed that visitation, the lucky Spence who didn't have to cook, out into the tiny paradise where three tiers of flowers beside the path were in bloom together: carnation, lily, lily, rose. A frog croaked, among the yellow flags by the pond where Jake's famous DRAGONFLY had lingered. Meret and Spence stood by the pool. Anna felt a prickling in her shoulders. She looked round and found that Charles was staring at her, a strange glare she couldn't read, except thank God it didn't l
ook like sexual interest.
Truth doesn't go away. It stays, patiently waiting to be understood.
Of course everyone had known. The situation was so obvious! Anna's teammates on campus had probably talked about the affair whenever she left the room. Publishing folk had talked about it, in those after-work gatherings for cheap wine. Rosey McCarthy herself had issued a serious warning (and Anna had been embarrassed and disdainful, feeling that she was above women-talk, bitchy gossip).
She stood in the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror above the basin.
Here I am, within another of those sanctuaries. I have become a woman. I can be a matriarch like Rosey, who though she loves Wol truly, never forgets to treat him with contempt. Throws him out when he fails to satisfy, allows him back on sufferance. It is what they expect, it is the way relations between the sexes have to be. You have to keep the whip hand, or else they will turn on you. He'll want a divorce, because Meret will want another white dress, another hired Rolls. I will have one of those complicated families: ex-husband, husband's new girlfriend, son, girlfriend's children, all around the same table. I will buy one of those huge gas-guzzling people-carrier tanks to carry them all around. Correction, I'll make Spence buy it. I will take his money and sit with my elbows on the kitchen table and gossip about what a shit my ex-husband is, men are all the same. Could she endure such a life? Of course. A woman can endure anything.
She could see the huge black jagged malign complacent shape of female power, the greedy rancor of it, reflected in the mirror, breaking through her skin. I was afraid of Transferred Y, and I pretended other reasons, but this is why. I didn't want to think of what it meant for real people because that means me, that means Spence. . .all the dirt about sexual relations, that I didn't ever want to handle.
A shadow moved in the depths of the mirror. A floorboard creaked.
"Spence?"
Spence and Jake were out. She was so certain that she had glimpsed someone behind her that she went through the house from top to bottom. She looked in closets and behind every door, convinced that one of the hellhounds must have broken in. There was no intruder, only the dread and fear that had greeted her last night. Maybe the house has always been haunted, she thought. How would I know? My life has been lived elsewhere; that's why I'm in trouble.
Gwyneth Jones - Life(2005) Page 35
