She headed up Primrose Hill, stepping off the path to crunch along on the grass – something reassuringly solid about the sound and texture of iced grass underfoot. She exchanged nods with the local power walkers and stopped to talk to her neighbour who was out walking his Airedale. On the St. John’s Wood side of Primrose Hill the streets were well covered with grit and the walk to the station was much easier.
The station smelled of damp and cold. She picked up a newspaper and rode the escalator down to the train. She changed at Baker Street and arrived at King’s Cross St. Pancras at the rush period. It was all so different here since the 2005 attacks, with shiny new shops, including not one but two M&S food stores (since she had stopped cooking she noticed these places). As she made her way to the exit she was aware of a stiffening of the spine, an alertness she did not feel at other stations. Not that she had been caught in the bombings, she was not even in Britain at the time, but Kings Cross was her station, she passed through here daily, and the Eurostar to Paris took off from St. Pancras International.
Paris by train. She and Daniel had loved the romance of it. Every summer they would make at least one day trip across the channel, leaving home at seven in the morning and arriving back late at night. There would be the Paris lunch, a gallery visit, shopping in the Latin Quarter or the Marais, promenading along the Seine. And the train journey itself – such a brilliant mix of the old Orient Express adventuring spirit with modern speed and ingenuity. The Paris trip made so many times, but since Daniel’s defection going to Mongolia would be more likely.
When a Paris job arrived on her desk a few months back, Jamie had tried to reason with her. The job was tailor-made for her, he said, an uncomplicated single-issue affair, no massacres, no bombings, no competing interests, just a single monument to honour Foucault. ‘You could do it in your sleep, it would get you back to France, and –’ his trump card, ‘you’ve actually read Foucault.’ But Paris was synonymous with Daniel and she did not tender for the job.
She exited the station, crossed the Euston Road and entered the narrow streets. This area was a long-time favourite: North Bloomsbury, she called it, the bluestocking’s wild sister who drinks too much and stays out late. The last fall of snow had been a few days ago, and in typical British fashion the authorities had run out of grit. Clearly the good burghers of St. John’s Wood had acted quickly, but here, after several days of freezing temperatures, the pavements were crusted with ice; it was lethal stuff and nothing short of crampons would make it safe. She trod gingerly, trying to find those patches cleared by pedestrian use. Certainly no one had been out scraping the footpaths as they would in the litigious United States.
Ahead of her, moving slowly but steadily was an elderly woman, her body bent over a walking frame, her gaze fixed defiantly to the ground. So many old people had been forced to stay indoors during the cold spell, making do with whatever food was in the cupboard and the kindness of neighbours. Nina popped across the road daily to see Harvey, bringing him food and checking the heater was on and the stove was off. Harvey said it wasn’t necessary; he was of the old school, a Depression-era baby who grew to maturity during the years of rationing. But these days Harvey’s memory held much truer to the past than to current events, and Nina worried about him.
The old woman with the walking frame was approaching the intersection. Nina quickened her pace as much as she dared and reached the lights in time to cross with her. Safe on the other side the woman looked up. ‘You can’t just stop because of a bit of weather,’ she said before trundling off. Her gloveless hands had been blotchy with cold, she’d been wearing a wedding band. Nina wondered about the old woman’s husband, whether he was alive and in good health, for what husband of long-standing would let his aged wife negotiate these lethal pavements alone?
Nina continued her careful walking past the familiar shops and houses, making her usual detour via Tavistock Square – an automatic response seriously at odds with the treacherous conditions, but worth it when she saw that a caring soul had decked out the bust of Virginia Woolf in a hand-knitted purple scarf and beanie. A few metres away in the middle of the square, hardy Gandhi had no such luck: he was his usual semi-naked, cross-legged self, the bronze now slick with a layer of ice.
She retraced her steps and entered Marchmont Street. Here it looked as if some of the ice and snow had been cleared, the work of the shopkeepers, she assumed, to bolster trade at a time when the weather and the national economy mitigated against it. She quickened her pace, only to lose her footing a moment later on a patch of black ice. She grabbed a street pole, caught herself mid-fall, and proceeded more slowly.
Jamie was already at his computer when she arrived at the office, and with two empty cardboard cups on the desk had clearly been here for some time. Jamie was her wonderboy; he was also colleague, business partner and dear friend. It was her great and good fortune he had stood his ground all those years ago when she did everything to push him away. She’d advertised for an assistant and he had pestered her to hire him. In the end she spelled it out: she doubted the male capacity to handle the detail of office work generally and her work in particular.
‘Try me,’ he said. ‘Give me a month’s trial.’
And she did because she needed someone urgently, someone to handle all the everyday tasks while she finished a submission, a vital submission if she was to be noticed in the post-9/11 world. Jamie moved in, he reorganised the office, and within a week he was running it. At the end of the month if he hadn’t wanted to stay she would have resorted to bribery or kidnapping to keep him.
He was only twenty-one at the time, a history major fresh out of university. He had seen her advertisement and knew this was the job for him. Five years later he married Greta, and at Nina’s suggestion he started to buy into the business. He and Greta were now expecting their first child.
He looked up from the computer. ‘What brings you in so early?’
Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t bear the empty house, couldn’t stand the wail in her brain, couldn’t be still. None of which she said. People expect you to get on with your life; it was a marriage break-up after all, not a death, and you’re expected to be doing just fine, in fact, better now that the two-timing bastard is out of the way.
‘I want to send off the final paperwork on the Lise Meitner monument,’ she said.
It was the truth, not that it had occurred to her until a moment ago. The official unveiling had happened the previous month and her own work on the project had finished long before that, but she had been reluctant to let go of a project that had started when Daniel and she were still together. It was a commission she had fought hard for, not because of its importance or uniqueness, but because it was Lise Meitner, a great scientist and one of the significant names in nuclear physics, a woman who like so many other women scientists had missed out on the Nobel when her male collaborators had not. Nina hung on to the project because she clung to Meitner, as if Meitner’s extraordinary strength and focus could somehow help her find her own. The monument was not in the US where Meitner had lived after the war, but in Austria where she was born and grew up. The location added to the project’s significance.
New monuments invariably have double allegiance: they recall significant people and events from the past, but at the same time they have to satisfy current concerns. In working with commissioning groups, Nina often had to employ complex and delicate manoeuvres to expose these concerns and thereby clarify the project, while ensuring she did not do herself out of a job. But the fact remained, because of their allegiance to the present, monuments often give history a cut and polish. So while shameful events are easily buried beneath attractive structures, contemporary values have become quite expert at digging up neglected or forgotten pieces of the past. As a result of her own research on Meitner, Nina had discovered all the uncomfortable truths omitted from the committee’s briefing notes. These Austrians had made life so hard for Meitner, firstly as a highly intelligent girl, then as a youn
g female physicist and lastly as a Jew. But with the worldwide rush to memorialise admirable events in a nation’s murky past as well as its significant sons and daughters – even if these have only been recently acknowledged – Meitner was an Austrian hero.
Nina had felt a heightened commitment to this project, made all the more special when Daniel accompanied her to Austria for the foundation ceremony. They returned home and a few weeks later he was gone. She had clung to this project that straddled her old life and the new a good deal longer than was necessary, but now, this morning – she had no idea how these things happened – she was ready to let it go.
Jamie was leafing through a pile of mail. ‘It’s a good thing you’re making space in your workload,’ he said, handing her a letter. ‘Your home town wants you.’ He looked at her in that knowing way he had, eyebrows raised, his mouth pursed in a wry grin. ‘Not that you’ll want the job; it sounds like the project from hell.’
She read quickly. Jamie was right. It was one of those vague, feel-good projects which, in the abstract, promises to fix the evils of the world: a multicultural, inter-faith committee proposing a monument to promote religious tolerance, unity in diversity, individual courage, and freedom for all. A heap of stone with a water feature and a few well-chosen words to right the wrongs of the world – as if that was all it required. The naivety of what this monument was to achieve was irritating rather than touching, and the camaraderie enjoyed by the organising committee in regular meetings and tours to religion’s hotspots wouldn’t survive the first stage of a project like this. The committee, made up of a handful of moderate religious and social leaders, appeared to have ignored all other interest groups from liberal-minded atheists to hard-line fundamentalists. They called themselves the TIF group: Together In Freedom. The project from hell didn’t start to describe it.
She stared out the window to the building opposite. Snow had banked up on the pediments and formed channels in the roof angles. According to the weather bureau more falls were expected: London would be white for Christmas and possibly the new year too. Melbourne was stifling in one of the hottest summers on record and Nina hated the heat. Yet suddenly, and without prior warning, she yearned for the people, places, objects and events that filled her first memories; she longed for space and parrots and eucalypts and the Australian coast; she wanted the environment that was hers before she met Daniel.
‘You’re surely not considering it?’ Jamie looked incredulous. ‘You’re not going to accept the job?’
She shrugged and there was a brief weary smile. ‘I know the project is awful, but I want to go home.’
She booked her flights that morning. She would be in the air on New Year’s Eve, saving her the bother of making plans for a night that shouldn’t matter but did. Later in the day she rang her sister who was thrilled at this unexpected visit. She invited Nina to stay with her. Elliot was finishing his book, Zoe said, and was largely absent, and the children had a hectic holiday schedule. ‘And I’ll not be teaching so we’ll have lots of time together.’
Nina explained about the TIF project that, unlike Zoe, she would be working and therefore better to have a place of her own. In truth, relations between Zoe and Elliot had become so bitter, that Nina determined on her last visit never to stay with them again. Indeed, it was her plan to see as little of them together as possible: she’d had more than she could bear of wrecked marriages. She booked a serviced flat near the Botanic Gardens, she corresponded with the TIF committee, and by the time she left London a meeting had been scheduled.
During the long flight to Australia, as she hovered in that aeroplane twilight of not-quite-asleep, thoughts of Daniel slipped in unbidden. Vague and fleeting thoughts mostly, with one exception: the possibility that this time, with this relationship, it was not she who had failed but Daniel. It was a faintly disturbing notion, yet at the same time curiously enticing.
Chapter 2. Mugged by the Past
1.
Despite one of the hottest summers on record and jetlag more stubborn than any she had ever known, Nina was glad to be home. The familiar roads, the shops and buildings, the clatter of trams, the squawk of parrots, even the nasal twang of Australian speech all settled her, shedding an anxiety that had become so entrenched she had worn it without question.
The serviced flat was modern, functional and beigely anonymous; its air-conditioning was pleasingly arctic. She made her usual slow start to the day: coffee, reading, and an early walk in the Botanic Gardens. For so long, caught as she was in the grip of Daniel and her lost marriage, she had been unable to look ahead, but since she’d been back in Melbourne, just a few short days, she was already making plans.
She had been wanting to explore the still untapped area of virtual memorialising, something that went beyond blogs and Facebook posturings; now she felt an urgency to get started. And there were changes to the Primrose Hill house and garden that would make the place more her own. Nothing major, it was a rental after all, but she’d buy a new armchair made for her body not Daniel’s, and a new crockery set with a jazzy geometric design, not the plain white of Daniel’s preference. And she would demolish the bed of suffering succulents that had been a pet gardening project of Daniel’s. And travel, too, to the Amazon or to Greenland, she hadn’t yet decided. Both trips had been planned with Daniel, but now they looked tempting even when envisaged alone.
Until mid-January, when her first meeting with the TIF committee was scheduled, she was on holiday. She had hired a car and each morning she made her way across to Zoe’s house. Although they were in close contact no matter where in the world Nina happened to be, they were relishing this face-to-face contact, the most they’d had for years. When she arrived, Zoe would make fresh coffee and they would talk through several cups. They had visited their great-aunt, their cousins, a former neighbour; they’d been to an art exhibition (the artist was a distant relative); they’d had lunches and dinners with friends; there’d been a bush walk and shopping expeditions. And through it all they talked as always, about work, music, their parents (somewhere in Far North Queensland swimming with reef sharks, according to a recent email), Zoe’s children, films, fashion, politics.
Only one topic was out-of-bounds: Zoe’s marriage. Rotting beneath a thin crust of convention, it was never referred to, not with Nina, nor, Nina suspected, with anyone. Although she hoped that some time in the next month it might be discussed, but with a week already passed she had her doubts. On those occasions when she had nudged the conversation in the direction of the marriage, Zoe had leapt to safer ground, and leapt so adeptly that Nina guessed she was well practised in avoiding the swampy bits of her life.
The house itself was an accessory to the sad deceit of Zoe’s marriage, or so it seemed to Nina who lived with what she believed to be a healthy amount of mess. No mess in Zoe’s house, not a chair out of place, nor bowl nor flower arrangement, no jacket flung over a couch, no cup left on the sink. The kitchen was of a style Nina expected to see only in magazines. All appliances, free of the scratches and drips found in her own kitchen, were satin-finished chrome. Benchtops and floor were white marble, the splashback was ebony-coloured glass; Zoe’s vast collection of utensils was arranged inside smoothly sliding white drawers; the pantry, as neat as a freshly stocked supermarket, was located behind folding doors. Zoe’s kitchen looked as if it was never used, but in fact she was an enthusiastic cook, turning out lunches and dinners for family, relatives, friends, her children’s friends, sick colleagues, neighbours.
The entire place was a study in elegance and convenience. The furniture upholstery, a dove-grey suede-like material, actually repelled stains; the TV could be viewed from any chair in the living room; the sound system was linked by Wi-Fi to iTunes and piped via discreet ceiling speakers throughout the house, a design feature, according to Zoe, rendered obsolete by teenagers with ear-plugs fixed permanently to their ears; each bedroom was equipped with its own ensuite; the carpet felt like tufted silk. And surprising the white,
grey and black colour scheme was the occasional burnt orange or rust-red cushion, an abstract painting in red-earth tonings, a splash of yellow in a glass sculpture. Outside was a solar-powered swimming pool, surrounded by a garden with separate modules – Australian native here, flowering bushes there, fruit and vegetable patch, white garden, private grotto – all of it designed to complement a variety of moods.
Zoe’s house was a domestic paradise; so much comfort, so many state-of-the-art utensils, but no one, as far as Nina could determine, wanted to be there. Hayley and Callum were at an age when home and parents were embarrassing encumbrances; Elliot divided his waking hours between the university, the gym and his AA work; and Zoe, here in her own home, was a match for the designer homemaker an advertising agency would hire for a photo shoot of this perfect place.
And there was the nub: there was something unreal and contrived about both home and mistress, or so it seemed to Nina. When they were growing up Zoe was the one to leave her clothes on the floor, dirty mugs would litter her desk, and she never made her bed or hung her towel on the bathroom rail. But then back in those days there was no messy marriage to endure, no husband who would fly at her without provocation. Nina couldn’t help but think that Zoe’s clinging to all this external order was a means by which she strove to imprint sense and predictability onto the private and chaotic aspects of her life.
The Memory Trap Page 3
