by Maggie Gee
For Gracie and she had got a new interest. They had both become anti-capitalists. This had lasted a long time; at least two weeks.
They sat together over Lola’s lap-top. Nothing much happening this weekend. All the exciting stuff was in other cities. Protests in Varna where a massive new dam was said to be threatening the whole coastline. A chunk of the island as big as a city could apparently fall into the sea. Eco-protesters envisaged tidal waves, global disaster, millions drowned.
‘They go over the top a bit, don’t they?’ said Lola. Things like that made her feel very nervous, as if it could suddenly all be dissolved, the comfortable, perfumed, glittering city, the only thing that she had known. She wanted to attack it, but not actually destroy it.
‘It could be true though,’ Gracie insisted.
‘Not much we can do about it any case. Varna’s a long way away, isn’t it?’
‘Not far enough, Lolo, Lollikins. It says tidal waves would sweep around the world.’
The two girls stared riveted, for a moment, at a computer simulation of a tidal wave. Tiny people struggled like ants. Something big and important at last. Something marvellous that would sweep them away and spare them the slow bits of growing up. Something massive, sexual, final.
Yet they loved their playthings, their friends, their homes.
‘I could ask Davey. Davey would know. Davey knows everything about science.’
Davey was Lola’s half-brother, her favourite person in the whole world. He had done a degree in science, she thought; after that he’d been a salesman of scientific health-food, then written for a magazine called SpaceTime which was a monthly guide to the galaxy, actually ending up as editor; then presented science on kids’ TV, and had now become CTV’s Mr Star-Lite, fronting a weekly programme on astronomy. Its ratings were very high.
‘I think your brother’s so cool,’ said Gracie. ‘You know, I watch his show on TV He’s really handsome, for, like, an older guy.’
‘He’s not really old. His thirtieth birthday was, like, just a few years ago, I can’t remember,’ his sister said, defending him. ‘Our mother says he knows everything. Not that she knows anything.’
It was tea-time in the City Institute, where Lola’s mother was working in the library (as Shirley Edwards would have liked to be). Lottie’s tongue was caught between big white teeth as she wrote an essay on ‘Conservation’. It could have been about pictures or buildings, but Lottie, with a newly discovered enthusiasm, wanted to write about books and manuscripts. Lottie was searching the internet. She had previously used it to buy flights and flowers, but the world of information was a marvellous surprise, gleaming with brainy-ness and cleanliness. She stretched like a cat and smiled to herself.
Paul Bennett, her lecturer, was watching her, amused, from a carrel twenty metres away. He loved his wife Alma, but all the same, his female mature students sometimes tickled his fancy. It was one of the good things about making his move from schools to universities; some of your students were not off-limits. Lottie Whatwashername – ah yes, Segall-Lucas – was sexy, absurd, good-looking, fun.
Quarter of an hour later, Lottie’s sense of fun was deflated. She was reading about the ‘Memory of the World’ programme. The title really appealed to her, but the content was incredibly lowering. Most of it was about loss and forgetting. Except for Hesperica, which only fought wars in other countries, the biggest cause of loss to libraries was ‘armed conflict’. Way down the scale came accidental fire, flood, mould, damp, dust, insects. Even fire and flood quite often came about as a result of contractors ‘improving’ the libraries. Lottie knew this was an irony: her third Art History lecture was all about irony. Irony had a bitter taste, not the kind of humour Lottie enjoyed. She kept on reading. The metal taste got worse. Some of the libraries destroyed by fighting in the last ten years were full of books salvaged from the second world war. The last fifty years had been the worst in the history of the world for losses to libraries. And there was another, nightmare problem: more and more writing was being produced, more and more copies of more and more documents, until no library system could cope, and Lottie found her eyes glazing over … She shook herself awake from an enjoyable dream about fire-fighting librarians with long, thick hoses. Human beings were impossible, she decided: they wrote the words, a great flood of words that was meant to explain and record the whole world, then they fought the wars that destroyed the lot.
Mind you, war was important. She wasn’t against it.
Elsewhere on the campus, Angela Lamb, Iceland winner and minor celebrity, mother of the red-haired girl called Gerda who was watching a Painted Lady butterfly at the zoo, had a tea-time date with an academic. It wasn’t something she looked forward to. Fifteen years ago, before she was successful, before she had won the Iceland Prize, she had been grateful to receive a letter from a Dr M. Penny, senior lecturer in English at City Institute, enclosing a paper she had written on Angela. The signature was illegible; for some reason Angela assumed she was male. Being between boyfriends, at the time, and liking men who admired her work, Angela sent back a sheet of sharp comments with a charming letter asking Dr Penny to lunch. Thus she had got landed with what she described in unbuttoned moments as ‘that daft old biddy’.
At first Moira was quite pleasant. Both of them were fairly young at the time; Moira was in her late thirties, still hopeful of fame and love and a baby or two, Angela half a decade younger. Moira was sure she had the upper hand. She could give this girl the patronage she needed – a sympathetic (and brilliant) reading, her work discussed at feminist conferences. Angela was virgin territory. The novelist’s flat was poor and small, allowing Moira to feel kindly towards her.
Angela, for her part, quickly recovered from the disappointment of Moira being female, and turned her attention to correcting her errors. But Moira, when challenged, swiftly changed the subject, and later, when Angela tried to insist that some of the ‘influences’ couldn’t be right, because she simply hadn’t read those authors, Moira said, smiling, chin held high, ‘Influences aren’t quite that simple. I’m adducing a pattern of intertextuality, setting your work in its cultural context. You tell me you haven’t read Jude the Obscure, but how do I know you aren’t unconsciously suppressing it? In any case, some texts are just in the air – to put a lay-person’s gloss on it.’ As she said that, her large long-sighted eyes stared suddenly very hard at Angela.
‘Jude the Obscure? In the air?’ queried Angela.
But that first time they agreed to differ. Both of them thought there was something to gain. Angela gave Moira some first editions, which she signed, sweetly, ‘To Moira; thank you from my heart for your interest in my work.’ Moira, for her part, invited Angela to a well-endowed conference in Barcelona.
They kissed each other’s cheeks on parting, and just for a moment their eyes met appraisingly. Moira’s slightly bulging brown ones stared into Angela’s blue-grey gaze. Moira was older and more established. Angela was younger and prettier. Moira was a critic, with a PhD; Angela, though, was the artist. When the chips were down, she was the source. The chicken came before the egg collector.
Then Angela won the Iceland Prize. The Iceland meant the global big-time; even Hesperica took notice of it. Angela jetted to New Work a few times, but decided to stay in the satellite cities. A certain loyalty impelled her to assent when Moira wrote to say she had been offered a contract to write the first critical biography.
Soon strains entered their relationship. Things had been going less well for Moira. The menopause found her still childless, loveless. Despite a good record of publications, she was only a reader, not a professor, because of prejudice, she insisted, against the female authors she wrote about.
Angela thought it was more likely to be because Moira was impossible to work with. Moira never actually agreed with anything, specializing in amused dissent, even to remarks about the weather, with a certain expression like a sneering camel that Angela began to anticipate, wincing. Moira never seemed to c
hange her mind. To her, the author was a kind of appendage, useful to know, but not a source of knowledge.
Then Angela committed the unspeakable crime. Two years after winning the big prize, she conceived a child, by a Danian writer of fairy-tales she met at a conference.
‘Are you going to have an abortion?’ asked Moira, when Angela confided she was six weeks pregnant. Moira happened to know the Danian writer’s wife, a suicidal sculptor. ‘You never said you wanted to be a mother.’ (She meant, It’s unfair: I have longed for a child.)
‘I didn’t,’ said Angela, ‘but soon I shall be. I think it’s a girl. My baby girl.’ That was the way she imagined it; a tiny beauty who lay at her feet.
Moira could never forgive Angela that naked statement that she would be a mother. My baby girl. The words were white knives, in a city full of childless women.
Now, six years later, they hated each other. Moira’s biography was long overdue, though she always insisted it was near completion. They hadn’t met in the flesh for three years.
Today’s rendezvous in the City Institute’s café had been arranged by Angela, following a letter from Moira asking her to read a draft of the biography, ‘to check the spelling of personal names’. She had also written, vaguely but alarmingly, of ‘certain new spiritual commitments’. Angela realized, reading this letter, that Moira had never asked her any questions about her childhood, her love-life, her daughter. What kind of biography, she wondered, would leave all these areas a blank?
Moira turned out to be reluctant to meet. Angela had learned over the years that it was vital to Moira to have more commitments than anyone else, even as it became increasingly apparent that she didn’t have a boyfriend, and wouldn’t have children. Meetings involved a long and tortuous process of negotiation. Umbrage was taken if Angela didn’t pay tribute to Moira’s crowded schedules. The ‘spiritual commitments’, though, were new.
They finally met in the 1930s café overlooking the drenched campus as the sun went down. Angela was shocked by the change in her appearance. Moira looked gaunt, pale and mad. Her hair lay long and grey on her shoulders, with a greasy lankness suggestive of dirt. She had aged ten years in the three since they’d met. She sat in the window in the cruel late daylight, her hand clamped round a mug of water.
Was it the menopause? Angela wondered. ‘Hello,’ she hailed her, nervously. ‘Lovely to see you. I’ll get us some tea.’
‘But I don’t drink tea,’ said Moira, frowning. ‘Why do you assume that I drink tea?’
‘Coffee? Juice?’ Angela asked.
Moira ignored her. ‘You’re late,’ she said.
‘Only five minutes, surely. I couldn’t find the café, you see. Some of the paths were blocked off, with the flooding.’
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ said Moira, with a thin smile that meant the opposite. ‘I rushed back from an important meeting in the centre of the city to be here, that’s all, and now I’m stuck here waiting.’
Angela retreated to buy herself some coffee. There were anti-war posters everywhere. A sturdy, youngish woman with dark curling hair was standing on a chair, sticking up the last few: the man behind the hatch called across to her, ‘I think we’ve got enough now, Zoe.’ The most popular poster had a flock of vultures, each with a replica of Mr Bliss’s face, brooding over a field of corpses. Angela looked at them dispassionately. Once she had believed in all that. It was harder, when you got rich and soft. (She wondered, briefly, if she still existed, somewhere, the sullen schoolgirl she had been? Awkward, pious, Angela Ship, the girl who refused, with her father’s name; her friends called her Ange; she wrote ardent, embarrassing poems against starvation and nuclear war: ‘Children of Dust’, ‘The Bone-shadows’. Thank God that most of them had never been published. And her brother George, whom she’d loved so much, who had been her friend when they were both children, was dead; and so was her younger brother, Guy. And she had survived as a different person.)
Thank God she was a different person.
While she was queuing, two students came up to her, all shy smiles, to say they liked her work. She got rid of them as soon as she decently could, but was aware of Moira craning round in her seat, frowning at them, looking at her watch.
(Lottie, taking a break from her essay and drinking a cup of dreary herb tea, spotted Paul Bennett at a nearby table. She was about to join him when the silly young woman who’d been sticking her anti-war posters everywhere went over and started harassing him. Lottie hoped the lecturer would tell her off, but to her surprise Paul started laughing, and when she left, she kissed his cheek.)
Angela brought two slices of cream-spliced carrot cake back to the table where Moira sat.
‘Would you like one?’ Angela asked. ‘They look frightfully healthy.’
‘Why do you assume that I need health food?’ Moira asked, on a rising note.
‘That’s OK, I’ll eat them both.’
But Moira watched her eat the cake resentfully, hungrily. Angela saw she was much too thin. That white bent wrist, with the knobbed bones showing, those skeletal fingers, plucking at crumbs.
‘Are you sure you don’t want some?’
‘Do you think I want your food? Do you think I eat leftovers?’
‘Of course not, Moira. But it’s, you know, delicious. Don’t worry, I’m really enjoying it.’
Though by now there was only a morsel or so left, Moira suddenly plunged on it like a heron, stabbing the cube off Angela’s plate and snapping it down, her throat briefly bulging.
This was something new in the scale of hostility.
Angela began to feel annoyed, but she tried again. ‘Those students,’ she said. ‘I’m so grateful to you, really. You actually seem to have made them like me. You must be a terrific teacher.’ Somewhere Angela had read this advice: to win over any human being in the world, try a smile, money, or flattery.
But something had gone extremely wrong. Moira suddenly flushed red, from pale.
‘Why do you assume,’ she was nearly shouting, ‘that I am the person teaching your work?’
‘Well, I’m sorry, it did seem likely – Aren’t you?’
That expression appeared, the contemptuous camel, the mouth curling, the eyes half-closed, and Angela remembered that camels could spit. And kick, surely. Her chair inched backwards.
‘The department in its wisdom has given other, junior staff my graduate teaching.’
Angela looked at her narrowly. Moira’s face was working wildly. There was something furious yet absent in her mouth, her eyes, her twitching fingers.
‘Is something wrong?’ Angela asked.
‘I have been ill,’ Moira announced. ‘You never asked if I was ill. It never seems to have occurred to you.’
This was so unfair that Angela fell silent. Moira always put her on the defensive. Around them the café was emptying. In the latticed window the sky burned scarlet, then crimson, magenta, preparing for dark. The red reflected on Moira’s face, flared in her iris: mayhem, fury. There was another world outside the window. Angela longed sharply for escape. Somehow she had to calm Moira down.
‘I was busy,’ said Angela. ‘I had my daughter –’
‘Why do you think I want to know about her?’
This time the words were ejected with such venom that Angela actually flinched, and moved back. She looked at her hands, and tried again. ‘Well if you’re doing a biography, I think that Gerda might have to come in. They change your view of the world, you know.’
‘My view of the world? My view of the world? What do you know about my view of the world? What do you know about my book? Why do you think I wanted children?’ Moira had stood up, and was shouting loudly. People in the café were turning to look.
(Lottie stared from her adjacent table. One of those women looked vaguely famous, and the other one absolutely barking. If you were too clever, you clearly went mad. Still, cleverness was not Lottie’s problem.)
Angela Lamb was far from unselfish, but she saw a person in
awful distress, a person who was surely damaging herself, losing her temper here in the café in front of students, in front of colleagues. She got up too, put her hand on Moira’s shoulder, and said, quite gently, ‘I don’t mean to upset you, Moira. I think you’re very unhappy about something. Why don’t we go outside for a walk. We don’t have to talk about the book today.’
‘The book is rubbish,’ Moira said, quieter, but still with terrible intensity. ‘The book doesn’t matter any more. I have been given a sign, today. Father Bruno has spoken. All the books will drown. Even your books, Angela. Your books which follow me and contradict me. Except the One Book, the One True Book. “God said to Noah, ‘I intend to bring the waters of the flood over the earth to destroy every human being under heaven that has the spirit of life; everything on earth shall perish …’ The second angel blew his trumpet, and what looked like a great blazing mountain was hurled into the sea. A third of the sea was turned to blood, A THIRD OF THE LIVING CREATURES IN IT DIED, AND A THIRD OF THE SHIPS ON IT FOUNDERED …”’
By the time she finished Moira was shrieking, a long metal ribbon of screaming sound, one arm lifted to the fluorescent ceiling, the other gesturing towards the red window, and all the faces, the eager, the indolent, city-worn faces, tired clever faces, innocent, ardent faces of the young, were fixed, startled, on the old woman prophesying.
Lottie decided it was time to leave the café. As she did so, somebody touched her shoulder. ‘Well that was quite something,’ said Paul Bennett. ‘I need a stiff drink, after that. Coming?’
At half-past six, Lottie still wasn’t home. Lola began to feel cross with her. She ought to come home every day at five so she could make Lola and her friends some tea. Lola was sixteen, but that wasn’t the point. She had homework to do, and so did Gracie. They might do it and they might not, but they shouldn’t have to waste time on housework. Her mother had been less reliable lately, since she’d started doing this Art History.
