‘And what does she have to say about me?’
‘Well, for one thing she thinks you think she’s a Stepford Wife. You and Celia.’
‘That’s not what I think,’ I tell her.
‘That’s what I told her.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘“Maybe it isn’t, maybe it is.”’ Then she adds, as though refusing to back down: ‘I like her a lot.’
By the time Peter and Freddie reached school age they were remarkably mature and attractive children: imaginative, considerate, humorous, attentive, polite, et cetera, et cetera. They were, everyone agreed, a credit to their parents. Chiefly, it must be said, they were a credit to their mother, who had assumed full-time responsibility for their upbringing (no nannies for these boys, and she regarded nurseries as little better than battery farms for small hooligans), while Charlie assumed responsibility for earning the requisite cash, a function he performed so conscientiously that from Monday to Friday his sons barely saw him. It must be made clear that this deeply conventional arrangement was not dictated by any aversion on Charlie’s part to the mess and tedium of parenthood. Far from it: no man was ever keener to sterilise teats and liquidise bananas, but his opportunities to participate in these joyous chores were necessarily confined to the weekends, because the infancy of the boys coincided with the rockiest episode in the history of the business that our grandfather had founded. This was the period in which Charlie rescued the Brennan family enterprise and set it on the path to becoming what it is today, and Janina ensured that his boys grew up fully aware that their father, though for several years a somewhat peripheral presence, was every bit as devoted to them as she was. And, conversely, the boys from a young age understood that their mother’s devotion, though absolute and freely given and a source of the profoundest pleasure, nonetheless entailed a great deal of work, which was not to be regarded as a less valuable or less demanding form of labour than the salaried work of men. Inculcated with a deep respect for work in all its aspects, the Brennan boys were never idle, and no teacher ever had to tell them to keep quiet and pay attention. For Peter and Freddie, teachers ranked just below parents in the hierarchy of estimable adults.
Their Aunt Celia, of course, was a teacher, and their mother often impressed upon them what a difficult job she had, teaching adults to speak English, which was a very hard language to learn if you weren’t born into it. Aunt Celia, however, was a special case. She lived in a foreign country – or rather, she lived in one country one year and a different country the next, which was even more exciting. It was never clear why Auntie Celia had moved from Italy to Spain and then to Portugal. The boys assumed that her job must be very important if she was being asked all the time to travel from one part of the world to another. When she came to visit, she brought an air of holiday with her. Her skin was always several shades darker than their father’s, and she wore interesting clothes: multicoloured shawls and heavy plastic bangles and big earrings, like an actress. She had seen so many things and had so many stories to tell, and whenever she came to London she brought them terrific presents, like the box of crystals from the Italian cave and the little black bull that pawed the ground with its hooves. Nearly all the aunts of their friends were married, whereas Auntie Celia had a boyfriend – not just one boyfriend but different boyfriends, which was confusing because Auntie Celia was the same age as their mother, but this just made Auntie Celia even more mysterious. And when Auntie Celia came back to London to live, it was wholly in keeping with her image that the new boyfriend was not a man who worked in an office – he was an artist, sort of, and was going to be famous.
When Celia came back from Lisbon the boys were six and seven years old; when she departed they were nine and ten. This period – Celia’s last sojourn in London – might be seen as the Golden Age of our generation of the Brennan family. Charlie had by now turned the company around; from Monday to Friday he was still out of the house for ten hours each day, but it was no longer necessary for him to spend whole evenings at work, and alarming letters from the bank were a thing of the past. The intra-familial relationships were at their best: Celia, charmed by the boys, had nothing but praise for Janina’s talents as a mother, and for Charlie’s unexpected creativity in devising ways of keeping his sons entertained, no matter what the cost to his personal dignity; Janina and Charlie, having been impressed by Celia’s tenderness with the infant Peter and the frequency with which, unprompted, she had volunteered to lend a hand, particularly in the months before and after Freddie was born (hence disappointment when Celia went through with her decision to leave), were even more touched by the warmth of the affection that grew between aunt and nephews (hence more acute disappointment when Celia re-emigrated), while never making the mistake that so many others had made, of bemoaning Celia’s childless condition. It was clear to them that aunthood was as close to motherhood as Celia wished to get, certainly for the time being, possibly for ever.
The family circle was completed by myself. I had by now been re-integrated into the world of Peter and Freddie, having spent some time on the sidelines. Peter had been introduced to me soon after he was born, and I saw him regularly in the first year of his life. Whenever Charlie and Janina visited the parents and myself, Peter came too. But with Freddie’s arrival things changed. For a while it was simply too tricky for Janina to get out of the house: the practicalities of caring for one neonate plus a highly active one-year old would have been enough to tether her to the home, even without the complications of Charlie’s schedule. So it was necessary for the grandparents – with whom I resided – to travel to see the boys, which they were perfectly happy to do.
After six months or so, however, Freddie had become the ideal baby, sleeping through the night, rarely crying, eating well, et cetera, and Janina had achieved a steady routine. Charlie was still working the hours of a junior doctor, but nonetheless it would have been possible for them all to stay for a night at the weekend: beds could easily have been rigged up for everyone. But when Janina and Charlie eventually came over again, they left the boys in the care of a babysitter for a couple of hours. They’d all managed to take a week’s holiday in Switzerland without any apparent problems, but a five-mile excursion within Greater London was an insurmountably complex operation, it appeared. There was a second visit from Charlie and Janina, minus offspring. On this occasion Charlie, with excruciating tact, confirmed that my supposition was correct. Exposing the very tiny Peter, sparingly, to the bizarre form of his uncle had not been contentious, given the rudimentary state of his cognitive apparatus, but he was now a considerably more sophisticated little entity – he was acquiring a sense of the abnormal, but was of course far too young to understand what he was seeing. ‘I think we have to wait until he’s a bit older,’ said Charlie, meaning that this was what Janina thought. She was quite right: I might have terrified the child. And so, pending the ripening of the nephews’ faculties of comprehension, I stayed out of their sight.
It became known to them that there was an uncle, and that this uncle wasn’t well. The question of where this uncle lived was fudged until the evasion became unsustainable. ‘Why don’t we ever see him?’ Peter began to ask. The truth was broached; a picture was shown to Peter, who reacted more or less as Janina had expected he would. He had nightmares. Then one day he asked to see the picture again. He put it on the table and stared at it for five minutes without looking up, as if someone had bet him that he couldn’t do it. ‘I want to see him,’ he announced. He may have been only six years old, but Peter knew his own mind.
(And at this point let’s note that one of the cardinal rules of Janina’s method of mothering was that there was never to be any baby-talk in the house, because baby-talk was a hindrance to the child’s development. Dogs were dogs, not doggies. Cats were cats, never pussy cats. That neither of her children ever threw a tantrum was directly attributable, she was convinced, to their having been treated as rational beings from the outset.)
The reintroduction to P
eter was arranged. He was brought into my room by his mother – she had her hands on his shoulders, to brace him against the shock. ‘Do come in,’ I said to him, in as mellifluous a voice as I could muster, and Peter obediently took two steps forward and looked at his mother, fearful that she might leave him there. ‘How are you?’ I asked, and Peter squeaked: ‘I’m fine.’ I invited him to sit down; there were chairs, but Peter sat down on the spot where he was standing. Janina squatted beside him and directed his attention to the big new television in the corner. ‘We could watch something later,’ I suggested. I asked him what his favourite programmes were, but he couldn’t remember. He looked to his mother again. I thanked him for coming to see me and said that I hoped he’d visit again, which he did, a month or so later, and this time he stepped into the room alone. We watched cartoons; I concentrated on the screen, giving him time to study the uncle’s face unobserved. ‘Does it hurt?’ he asked, and when I told him that it didn’t he replied, very seriously: ‘That’s good.’
On his second visit, he came in carrying some drawings he’d done, of Batman and Spiderman. On his fourth or fifth visit, he brought Freddie in. That didn’t go well. Emerging from the lee of his brother, Freddie instantly stepped back, pulling at Peter’s hand, as if I were an animal on a chain and he was afraid they were standing too close. ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ were I think the only words that Freddie uttered in the five minutes he was in my presence. In the following months, Freddie on occasion joined me and Peter for half an hour of Bugs Bunny, but he was never to be as comfortable with me as his brother had become within a mere month.
Both boys, as I say, loved Celia, but Freddie’s attachment to her was especially intense. Auntie Celia was a bit bonkers and always ready for a spot of rough and tumble (not one of his mother’s strong suits), and could also be pretty and ladylike. And Celia, though she would never admit it, had a particular fondness for the softer lad; Peter, at times, was a somewhat unnerving boy. You might come across Peter in the garden, staring open-mouthed at the antics of a starling, as if it were a stray from the rainforests of the Amazon. Often, while the family was watching TV, Peter would go into a reverie, with his eyes trained for minutes at a time on a place an inch or two above the screen. Death seemed to be on his mind more often than was normal in one so young. The folklore of the family has preserved the day on which, aged three, Peter insisted that they should cross the road before they reached the cemetery, because he knew that cemeteries were where people died, so if you didn’t want to die you had to keep clear of them. His questions about death and infinity were never answered satisfactorily by his parents. Aged six he was seized by a fear of being buried alive, a fear that grew to be a terror that kept him awake night after night, trembling as if in a fever, and led to sessions with a child psychologist who concluded, correctly, that he was being bullied at school. (Exemplary though they were in the eyes of teachers and other elders, neither Peter nor Freddie was immediately popular with their classmates; gung-ho Freddie’s standing soon improved, but sport-loathing Peter’s entourage was never extensive.) Peter was an unusual boy, and I became very fond of him. I remember him coming up to my room one afternoon in spring. Holding one hand cupped over the other he crept towards me, saying nothing, smiling as if he were about to reveal something incredible. He raised his hands to my face and parted the thumbs slightly, so I could peer into the cavity of his palms and see in there the insect he’d just caught. ‘This creature,’ he murmured, ‘is alive for only one day,’ and as he peered at the captured insect his frown suggested that his mind had been occupied by an idea that was impossible to grasp in its entirety and therefore thrilling. For his tenth birthday he was given the telescope; they set it up in the garden of my parents’ house, and I remember Peter’s expression when he stood back from the eyepiece to let Freddie take a look: it was a smile of astonishment, which then took on an abstracted quality, as if he were hearing in his head a succession of questions that he couldn’t answer but which he knew had to be answered.
This may be the fancifulness of hindsight. But I can hear in my head, as clearly as a recording, Peter telling me ‘Light is less ductile than gold’, as if he’d made the discovery that morning, and as if the very word ‘ductile’ was a treasure of adult knowledge. This was followed by a pause, in which it became evident that the uncle was failing to appreciate the enormous repercussions of this announcement, and then there came an explication – with the aid of diagrams – of how it could be proved, very simply, that there were parallel universes, in which Peter and I existed, but in many different forms. ‘You see?’ he shouted, jabbing his pencil through the paper. He would have been thirteen or fourteen. I didn’t see. None of the family saw. His grandmother, listening to his news about black holes and whole galaxies rushing away at unimaginable speeds, would smile and try not to look appalled; his grandfather, no less bemused, found it easier to adopt a demeanour of fascination, which wasn’t wholly a pretence; his parents, startled and proud, strove to make some sense of it all, but almost none of it made sense, and it was saddening, a little, that their boy was so quickly disappearing into a world that was beyond them. (And with each month it was becoming clearer that the Brennan commercial dynasty would be coming to an end with Charlie. Neither son underestimated his father’s talents; neither ever expressed, except in infancy, any interest in following in his footsteps.) Even his brother was often baffled – and Freddie was smart and scientific, albeit in a more pragmatic way. Mechanisms and systems were Freddie’s speciality; quasi-philosophical speculation he was happy to leave to his brother. (On Peter’s weblog, should you wish, you can read some of his thoughts on quantum gravity – If the deep structure of spacetime is that of a causal set … The text hereafter is off-limits to the layperson.) Whereas Peter came to regard his visits to the uncle as an opportunity to instruct and confuse, Freddie was more a chap for computer-based entertainment and technological advice. (I should say that, even through the turbulent years of adolescence, both boys came to see me quite frequently – once a month in Peter’s case, rather less in Freddie’s. Freddie never came without Peter.)
In the summer of his second year at university Freddie took a barely paid job at a company that developed computer games. He took along a neat little programme that he’d written, and a full-time job was quickly offered. Freddie reasoned that there wasn’t much point going back to university to sweat over exams just to get a degree that was only of use as a way into a job of the type that was now his for the taking, so he quit university, to his parents’ dismay. This dismay quickly evaporated with Freddie’s rapid promotion. One day, says Freddie, he’s going to be earning a packet – and living in the States. Making a packet is not one of Peter’s priorities, and neither has he ever shared his brother’s obsession with hi-tech make-believe. But Peter is fond of his brother and wants him to have a rewarding life, so if Freddie finds pleasure (and profit) in crashing virtual cars and slaughtering virtual stormtroopers and falling off virtual snowboards, so be it.
Charlie and Janina have always been commendably even-handed with their sons. Observing the family together, one would never observe anything that might lead one to suspect that either parent in any way favoured one boy over the other. With Charlie, I believe, there is no underlying preference. The paternal love, now that the boys are adults, has perhaps a stronger element of self-distancing than the maternal; it approximates more closely to admiration. For Janina, I think, the situation is different. I wouldn’t say that she loves the elder son any less than she loves the younger, but Freddie inhabits the same world as she does; he gets a kick out of many of the things she gets a kick out of, and their dislikes often overlap as well. (Hot weather and folk music, notably – more on the latter later, perhaps.) Freddie likes tennis; Janina likes tennis; Peter – whose hand-eye co-ordination was once compared by a games master to that of a blindfolded drunk – has an aversion to all ball games. Janina enjoys skiing, and is proficient at it; Freddie took to skiing like a sparrow t
o the air; Peter regards ski-resorts as a heinous form of landscape abuse. (The family’s customary holiday destination – Munich and environs – might be regarded as unusual, but it was chosen partly as somewhere that might appeal to the increasingly divergent temperaments of the siblings, and proved to be an excellent choice. One day they’d go skiing (or hiking, depending on the season), the next day they’d do the greatest science museum in the world. This was the template: hike/ski – Deutsches Museum – hike/ski – Deutsches Museum. Freddie liked the museum too, but not three times in a single week, so Janina would take him elsewhere while husband and number one son returned to the never-ending galleries of scientific knowledge. Pale Janina’s intolerance of intense sunlight made summertime in the Mediterranean inadvisable. They did risk a week in Cyprus once, where she spent most of the week indoors.) Other instances of the deep congruency of Janina and Freddie could be adduced, but for now suffice it to say that they have been well attuned to each other for a considerable time, which is why Janina is particularly aggrieved by Freddie’s failure to visit us. She’s worried too about some aspects of his lifestyle, having noticed at Christmas that he had developed a new nose-rubbing mannerism.
The nasal fidgeting was something I noticed myself when Freddie last visited me. I hadn’t seen him for a long time and it struck me that he was strangely twitchy. But he was on good form, and very happy with his latest girlfriend, the lovely Valerie. A month or so before I saw him he’d taken Valerie down to meet the folks. He’d told them a little about Valerie Johnson – that she was a layout designer for a magazine, that she was gorgeous and intelligent, that he’d met her at a club in Covent Garden – but he hadn’t explicitly told them that Valerie’s parents were from Trinidad, and although his mother on saying goodbye had given Valerie a protracted hug (a blessing conferred on few girlfriends at first meeting), there was nonetheless a perceptible self-consciousness to the evening, especially in the conduct of his mother, who was distinctly quieter than usual, as if afraid she might violate some unknown protocol that should be observed with a black person. There’s no way that his parents are in any way racist, Freddie insisted – it was a new experience for them, that’s all. I think this is genuinely what he believes, and he may well be right, but Celia might take a somewhat different line, having several years ago, when staying overnight with Charlie and Janina in London, been taken aback by a remark made by Janina in response to a salvo of high-volume reggae from the sound system of a car that had stopped outside, a remark which Celia relates as juxtaposing the crudity (or, as some would put it, warmth and spontaneity) of African and African-derived cultures with the more sophisticated creativity of civilisations nurtured in the beneficent mildness of temperate zones. Celia believes she has also discerned that Janina has a particularly strong aversion to those recordings in her husband’s collection in which the performers are not white, and reports that she once felt compelled to point out to her sister-in-law that in the final analysis we are all Africans – which prompted the rebuke: ‘Don’t be silly.’ And Celia is also convinced that for Janina one of the many attractions of this corner of England is its population’s un-Londonlike homogeneity of pigmentation.
Telescope Page 7
