Chapter Two
1
Lucy Embleton made a stab at the washing-up and then took the tube to Brixton, knowing her grandmother would do them again. They’d cleaned out all the beans and even squabbled over the cold ones lying limp in the sieve. It was macabre, for Agnes would soon be gone, and eating had suddenly become a singularly futile activity. Waving goodbye, Lucy sensed every gesture now had another meaning that each of them would recognise, but never articulate, shaped by the torpid proximity of death. Her spirits sank into a chilling silence: a part of her past was almost complete and she’d never even understood it.
Lucy was twenty-five years old and had spent a large proportion of that time trying to understand her family’s winning ways. She had never been able to locate any particular moment of crisis within the family history that might account for the present entanglement. It was more of a cumulative happening constructed out of tiny, otherwise insignificant building blocks tightly pressed together and cemented over time. As a child she asked penetrating questions borne of innocence; she guarded the answers with such care that, when she was older, confidences rained upon her — but never from Agnes or Arthur. Lucy became the one in whom the different facets of the past had been consigned, as if she was the one to bring them all together. And from that privileged position she concluded that if there was a simple explanation for what her father called ‘the mess’, it lay in the war years.
The received history was as follows: Agnes was half French, half English, and had lived in Paris during the Occupation. She was there when the black shroud from burning oil reserves hung over the city. She saw the German troops taking photos of ‘La Marseillaise’ on the Arc de Triomphe. She heard the thin, high voice of Marshal Petain say he made a gift of himself to France, that he would seek an armistice with Hitler. About this period she was able to talk. It was the time after that had to be handled carefully, if at all. As a child, Lucy was small enough to inch under the fencing with her curiosity, moving from one month to the next, into the following years. But always the details from her grandmother became sparer, begrudging; her mood increasingly unsettled, her replies sharper, until Lucy learned she was approaching the place of shadows where she could go no further: where, as Freddie once spat out to his burning shame, Agnes became ‘La Muette’: the dumb one.
Of course the family knew what lay beyond the wire. A town and a village: Auschwitz and Ravensbruck. As to the why and wherefore, that was a mystery. Susan often said that only Grandpa Arthur knew where she’d been and why, but Lucy, as usual, moved as close to the line as possible trying to find out.
‘No, I was never in the Resistance,’ Agnes said wearily to one of Lucy’s unremitting schoolgirl questions.
‘Did you know anyone who was?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘So you were involved with them?’
‘Not really I was just on the edge.’
‘Were they brave?’
‘Very brave. ‘
‘So you must have edged towards bravery?’
Agnes became very still, distracted. ‘We were all so young, so very young.
‘So you did do something?’ pressed Lucy, eating chocolate.
‘Nothing much to write home about. Now, stop your questions.’
That was usually where the probing ceased. But this time Lucy chanced her arm, pushed into the place of shadows: ‘You can’t have a big secret and not tell us what happened.’
Agnes gave a low animal growl through bared teeth. ‘Enough.’
It was Lucy’s first experience of atavistic fear. She became scared of her own grandmother. For Freddie, who was sitting in the corner, watching over a collapsed newspaper, it was simply another example of his mother’s hopelessly introspective temperament. But Lucy, aged fourteen, still possessed the awesome non-rational percipience of childhood, and was young enough to be acutely sensitive to something neither she nor anyone else could name or know It was that which made her shrink instinctively back: a smell on the wind.
So the reason for arrest and what had happened during two and a half years of incarceration lay out of reach.’ The narrative trail resumed, through Lucy’s persistence, at the moment of Agnes’ release, as if nothing had gone before: ‘A Russian soldier stood gawping at me. He was no more than a boy, and his gun looked like a battered toy He couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak.’ I was standing with children on either side. He cried.’ We just watched him.’ Eventually he said in English, “You’re free now.”‘
Agnes wearily passed a blue-veined hand through her grey hair, rearranging a silver clip, and added, ‘I got out of Babylon, but there was no Zion. No promised land.’
‘What’s that, Gran?’ Lucy enquired, puzzled.
‘Just an old song about homesickness. And hope.’
‘By Boney M?’
‘A psalm.’
It was an opaque exchange, and all the more peculiar because Agnes was not a religious woman.’
After the war Agnes returned to Paris where she met Captain Arthur Embleton in a hospital. They were married within two months, staying on in France for the next couple of years, during which time they had twins: Freddie and Elodie. After leaving the army Grandpa Arthur brought the family back to a suburban existence in north London.’ He became a solicitor in a large London firm and their life was superficially comfortable and predictable, except for those who knew otherwise. After Lucy’s unnerving exchange with her grandmother, Freddie told Lucy about his own inexplicable childhood memories.
At times Agnes was captivating and extrovert, Freddie explained, but could suddenly and for no apparent reason become swamped by abstraction.’ It was as if the apparatus of her personality shut down, like a vast generator losing its source of power. The life in her would drain away until all the lights blinked and flickered before going out. And then she was gone, even though she was still in the same room, and everyone else was left adrift and awkward, trying to make contact across the space left by her absence.
This was the kind of thing Grandpa Arthur called ‘a tactical withdrawal from the field of conflict’, which was his thin attempt to joke with the children. But it also named a truth. Ordinary life was a battle for Agnes. Lucy’s father also remembered those frightening moments: when Agnes suddenly froze, as if gripped by vertigo, shaking and sweating, holding on to the rim of the sink, the edge of a table, the back of a chair, until talked down by Grandpa Arthur.
Later, when Lucy’s relationship with her father became more complicated, her mother. passed on a little more history so that Lucy might better understand the man she had ceased to know in a simple way
‘Try to understand your father,’ Susan said appealingly. ‘It wasn’t easy for him as a child, even though Grandpa did his best.’
Grandpa Arthur, she said, had tried to provide some consistency for Freddie and Elodie, giving them what he thought was a warm English upbringing, with lots of Gilbert and Sullivan, Wisden annuals (which Elodie loved) and regular tea at four o’clock. But he could not completely protect them. Where Agnes had been approachable and inviting one day, Freddie in particular would run towards her the next only to find her withdrawn. There had been one little incident that Freddie had never forgotten:
‘Mum, look what Alex gave me. It’s Excalibur. The sword pulled from a stone.’
Freddie held out the plastic brand with both hands, holding tight, just in case anyone actually tried to take it. Agnes slowed for a moment, but carried on peeling carrots.
‘Mum, look, it’s Excalibur. Alex gave it to me.’
Agnes continued roughly peeling off the skins, aware that Freddie was at her side, unaware he held out the toy he no longer wanted.
And Susan continued: ‘You see, it wasn’t easy for your father. It wasn’t that bad for Elodie.’
‘Why?’ Lucy asked, and was granted more history.
Part of the problem for Freddie was that Elodie did not need Agnes like he did.’ Ironically, that made relations between mo
ther and daughter moderately relaxed. Elodie drew water from another well. She naturally gravitated towards her father, with their shared love of cricket, leaving Freddie behind, resentful. Batting averages held nothing for him and he vainly searched for something he could bring to his mother, but she gave no lead. So he found himself unable to reach his mother and jealous of his sister. When they grew up and left home, the distance between siblings was weakly bridged by Christmas cards and awkward phone calls, the most memorable of which was when Elodie rang to say she had cancer. Freddie didn’t know what to say and to his horror said nothing of consequence. He groped for the language they had once shared as children but that was long gone. He asked questions but could not remove the note of polite enquiry. He said goodbye as if nothing had really happened. The illness took its time, drawing Elodie down despite treatments, prescribed and otherwise. Curiously, as Freddie heard the details of decline he felt the need to talk to her. He rang spontaneously, often in the middle of the day, without knowing what he would say. More often than not conversation flowed easily, and something began to grow He paid a few visits, always arranging another. And then Elodie died, sedated and beyond the comfort of her family, aged thirty-two. He blamed himself for having become a stranger.’ And, somehow, Freddie blamed Agnes.
And Susan said to Lucy, ‘So you see, it hasn’t been that easy for your father.’
Lucy could remember her father still trying hard, despite his confusion. Grandpa Arthur had always said, proudly, that Agnes was a jolly good musician. So her father bought a piano. But Agnes never played it. He bought various records, but Agnes never listened to them. In that conventional period of family calm, after Sunday lunch, the piano and records became a silent accusation. The lid had not been lifted; the records were still wrapped in cellophane. It was Lucy who first pressed the keys and introduced ‘Chopsticks’ to the house. It was Lucy who scratched Faure’s ‘Romance sans parole’, anxious because of the simmering politesse among the grown-ups. The scratching was a symbolic mishap, because the second of those three little piano pieces was her grandmother’s favourite melody. That was why Freddie bought it.
It seemed to Lucy — not surprisingly — that her father’s attempts to reach his mother became more deliberate and dutiful, his need constrained by a thin skin of self-protection. And yet, simultaneously, as Agnes grew older her oscillations in mood were replaced by a more moderate inaccessibility. But by then it seemed to be too late for Freddie. He could not slough the skin. Lucy’s memory of Grandpa Arthur at this time was of a tired man, endlessly patient and exquisitely gentle with Agnes but a man who had learned to live more or less alone. He died quietly in his sleep one day, after a sudden stroke, as if he had slipped out of the back door in his slippers, unnoticed.
Agnes was strangely composed until the funeral, when her grief broke out like a flood. Then it sank away like a stone beneath flattened water. However, she refused to stay in the family home and sold up within two months, moving to a spacious flat in Hammersmith, by the river.
The loss of Grandpa Arthur left Freddie bereft. And Agnes, of all people, could not help him.’ The remaining links between them began to fragment, and Freddie’s anger at his mother began to break out. He snapped at her more frequently, his outbursts becoming less of a protest and more of an accusation: for being his reluctant mother.
2
Even as Lucy received and experienced the living history of her family she understood that her father’s problems had juddered wholesale into Susan, and embrangled her own most formative years.
What should have been a playground for a child had turned out to be more of a No Man’s Land, strewn with adult debris. As she’d tried to romp around she’d snagged herself on unseen obstacles, until she’d learned by experience to locate and map out the specific danger spots between all her relations. By the age of fifteen Lucy had acquired the ability to move among her family with the supreme ease of a sophisticated adult. She became the deft one, prodding people away from plotted minefields. She seemed wise.
It was this shining characteristic that led her father to speak so unguardedly, and her mother to say more by way of further explanation. They didn’t mean any harm, but they said enough to take, inadvertently, the glow off Lucy’s innocence. Only Agnes and Grandpa Arthur left her alone.
So, it was not surprising that, after Grandpa Arthur died, Agnes and Lucy were imperceptibly drawn to one another, without effort, decision or the swapping of inner wounds. They grew to enjoy each other’s company, neither of them placing demands upon the other. There was no weighted expectation. Long periods of silence could be shared, punctuated by clipped, comfortable conversation. It was obvious to anyone else in the same room that there was an alliance of sorts between them. But this only triggered a jealousy within her father that he could not bring himself to acknowledge, but could not stop himself from expressing, even when something far more serious was at stake.’ As he did when Lucy announced she was leaving home to live with a man:
‘A man?’
‘Yes.”
‘Could you be more specific?’
‘Tallish…’
‘Don’t be cheeky to your father,’ said her mother, flushed.
‘Have I met him?’ he pursued. ‘No. But Gran has.’
‘Gran has?’ said her father, incredulous, and lowered his head.
‘Only once, Freddie, by accident,’ said Agnes apologetically from her chair by the fire.
‘He’s called Darren and he’s thirty-seven.’
‘But you’re only twenty,’ Susan said, pale and desperate, smoothing her blouse. ‘Darren, you say?’
Her father collected his coat and left the room, saying, ‘Lucy, I’m going home. You can tell me as much as you see fit when you feel like it. Or maybe Gran can tell me next Sunday.’
He apologised profusely that evening for his petulance, by which time he’d got to grips with the anxiety that really troubled him. At the time of her announcement Lucy had recently dropped out of Cambridge, after winning a scholarship at King’s to read Economics. It had been more of a triumph for Freddie than for her — she had made it to the same college to read the same subject as he had done. It was just marvellous… even though Lucy’s interest lay in literature, not the science of wealth distribution. When Lucy left university at the end of her first year, her father entered a sort of mourning. So did Lucy; she wore black and dyed her hair. For a short while she attacked the structure of Capital by drawing Income Support. Her father spoke to his old college? the place was open for the next academic year. But she found a job as a finance clerk for a small company that manufactured pine chairs. Pine chairs? Freddie cried. Yes, and a few tables. Oh my God, he said. Her mother bought a rocker. And then, at a party, Lucy met Darren, who had a lively interest in Lenin. He was the only person she knew who’d read the lambent phrases of Joseph Schumpeter. He introduced her to the vast, liberating plain of Other People’s Misery but he quarried his authority from Lucy’s lack of self-esteem. Age and force of manner overwhelmed her innate, cultured sophistication and she became a disciple. The large house called Home fell under the heavy sword of ideological scrutiny. She moved out. There was little Freddie could say. Her mother cried and cried.
The most interesting aspect of this episode was that Agnes didn’t like Darren either. But she knew instinctively that it had to run its course. As a consequence, while Lucy knew Darren she kept visiting her grandmother; she rarely went home. That was the thing about Agnes, and in it lay a mystery: while she was inaccessible to ‘normal’ people the route was left open for ‘outsiders’; like the bag-lady she frequently met in the park; like Lucy, in a way
Then, long after Darren had left the scene, Lucy turned up at Chiswick Mall, Agnes’ home, while her father was listening to the cricket (he’d lately discovered its secret joys, but only after the other two ‘had been bowled out’).
‘Dad, I’ve got a place to read English at King’s College.’
‘Cambridge?’ h
e said, alight.
‘No, London.’
He smiled broadly At least it had the same name as his alma mater. Susan baked a cake. And Agnes, the person who had always been there, to whom there was never a homecoming, pretended nothing had happened.
3
In leaving the cut and thrust of chair sales and becoming an undergraduate, Lucy entered another sort of No Man’s Land that was not altogether unattractive. She had made no lasting friendships in the office and her new youthful companions at King’s were broadly interested in drinking and running through the preliminary stages of an emotional crisis that would probably flower in the second year. This was familiar, uninviting territory. And so, in her first year studying English, aged twenty-five, Lucy found herself between a life she had left behind and a future that was yet to find a shape.
Lucy did retain, however, a small link with her past. It presented itself one morning when she was walking down High Holborn. Among the bobbing heads she caught sight of blonde hair and a stare of enquiry that turned rapidly into recognition. It was Cathy Glenton, a girl Lucy had known at Cambridge. She was one of the few people with whom Lucy had found any affinity. Their mutual attraction appeared to lie in sheer difference. Cathy was effortlessly brilliant and endowed with generalised talent, more like a machine that smoothly went to work on any activity she cared to assume. Between hot-air ballooning and acting in the drama club she discharged high marks in all her papers. She ate what she liked without putting on weight. She had it all, including a sublime boyfriend called Vincent. Even misfortune seemed toothless before Cathy’s exuberance. Shortly into her first year she had had an accident in a drunken bicycle race, striking a pot-hole on a narrow bridge over Hobson’s Brook, flying off her bike and landing on the railings, cutting her hands and face. She had been left with an almost insignificant scar, more of a twisting in the skin, situated upon her left cheek. For anyone else such an outcome would have teetered on the edge of psychological importance. But not for Cathy She couldn’t have cared less. When Lucy met her in High Holborn she noted the subtle presence of pink foundation, something Cathy had never used, and wondered why it should be needed now. After the preliminaries and the truncated histories, Lucy said, ‘Still ballooning?’
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