by Kyo Maclear
We were not at our best. I walked about, feeling removed from the world. London was a giant toy city. I seemed not to be part of things. I watched children playing ball in the street or running around the playground and thought their games looked empty and futile.
Oliver avoided the grass and hedges, refused to sit on a bench with his back to the street, confused starlings for lobbed grenades, mistook the crunching sound of bicycle tires on gravel for machine-gun fire.
Some mornings he stayed in bed just because he was afraid to open his eyes and see and meet nothing but darkness. He still slept at the edge of the mattress, ready to spring up. When I saw him like that I wondered: How do you survive the survivor? To help calm him, I brought in the radio and turned the dial to classical music. I left the window open a crack. I thought the music and fresh air might flush him out. I knew he was stopped up with guilt.
Slowly we improved. Oliver began eating proper meals and started grooming and venturing out more. But those were the easy transitions. The harder shift was one of identity. For Oliver this was a comic-book-hero adjustment. Having flown around the world, he had now returned to his earthly mortal form; resigned himself to the tininess of his life. (How little a mortal’s pulse raced! How few beats a mortal’s heart skipped!) To console him, I moved all the souvenirs and artifacts of his travels into his bedroom: a Moroccan table lamp; handmade soapstone chess pieces neatly arranged on his bookshelf; a geometric rug from Togo; a Kente cloth wall panel.
Strange things made us wistful. Oliver would react to a room full of men smoking cigarettes, the sight of an overflowing ashtray, in the way someone else might respond to a fragrant lilac bush that had scented his childhood. I would look at brown men walking down the street and wonder what it would have been like if my real father had known about me. Would he have stayed? Would Pippa have risen to the occasion? The thoughts were terrible. Sensing danger, Oliver and I tried to shape our nostalgia into safer contours. He began reminiscing about Coronation cakes. I asked if he would make an Irish stew he used to make years before. All our hankerings—past and present, big and small—were mixed up. But mostly we missed Pippa.
While visiting Mr. and Mrs. Bowne one day, Oliver picked up a silver-plated frame that sat on the mantlepiece and popped out an old photograph of Mr. Bowne in soldier’s uniform and slipped the frame into his jacket pocket. When he got home, he replaced it with a photograph he kept of Pippa.
Little by little, my feeling of apartness lifted. I was back in touch with Kiyomi, Natsumi and Stasha, who all claimed to miss Pippa too. I found it puzzling that no one knew her exact whereabouts. They said she was visiting family, my family, in Montreal, Canada. They said that she was on vacation in Morocco. That she was working on a window display contract for Le Bon Marché in Paris. But they couldn’t keep their stories straight. Hoping to gather more information, I went to see Pippa’s friend Jean Cordon, who still worked in the lingerie department at Marble Arch.
Jean was busy cleaning when I arrived. At first she claimed she had no idea where Pippa was. We were standing in the slip section under bright overhead lights.
“Haven’t seen her in about two months,” she said. “She convinced the boss to hire her back for a short while, but that didn’t work out, did it.”
“Did they argue about window displays?”
“That and other things. Step over here, love. You looked squashed between those two racks.”
Jean spritzed and buffed a metal shelf while she talked. “Sorry about all this. We’ve got a Hygiene Campaign underway. Every corner spotless. A war on dirt. Long live the Marks-ist Revolution! Right, love?”
She took me around the counter and showed me her arsenal of cleaning supplies, and for a moment I felt so sad and heartbroken thinking of Anh I could barely speak.
“She talked about you, though,” Jean continued. “She had a photo of you in her purse.”
I eyed her for a moment. “Did you know?”
She nodded yes.
Did everyone know?
Then her face softened a bit and she said: “I’ll tell you that she came back to London because of you. She could have stayed on the continent where she had good wages and an independent lifestyle. It was you that brought her back here. And I figure she’ll return again when she’s right and ready.”
“From?”
Silence.
“Please help me, Jean.”
“From Paris.”
I stared at Jean and nodded.
Before I left, Jean tucked two rolls of biscuits into a bag for me and gave me a hug.
“She used to say there were times that you looked at her like you knew.”
I shook my head. “I looked at her because I loved her.”
On my way out, I took one last glance at the main window before I headed for the bus. A display of mannequins in the season’s olive and brown palette, stiff arms frozen in mid-robot-dance.
I confronted Oliver now and then.
“You know, all that time I was asking about her, and wondering where she was, and you were pretending—”
“I wasn’t pretending. I didn’t know where she was.”
“But we could have traced her. Stasha, my aunt, all those people you knew in common . . . I bet they would have given you a phone number. We could have found her. Why didn’t you?”
“It’s complicated. I guess I felt that wherever she was, if I didn’t hear otherwise, she was probably doing well. I think she felt her life was too small when she was with us. I wanted her to want to come back.”
As deceived as I felt, when he said that I also felt that I had somehow failed, that I could have changed events if only I had been more . . . something. My real father kept wandering into my thoughts. I wanted to ask about him but I was also scared to find out. The words So where is my father, really? just wouldn’t come. How much truth could one person bear? I needed to wait.
When we ran out of money from the Bownes, Oliver began working again. He didn’t want to return to Novus but reporting was all he knew. He placed calls and sent out a few letters and awaited a response. Days later, Oliver awoke to a ringing phone. It was his old desk editor at the Chicago Tribune.
He was hired to write short roundups for the new international gossip section. Local events, celebrity news, sightseeing tips, small budget, nothing weighty. He started shaving more regularly, cut down on Nescafé and cigarettes, developed an addiction to boiled sweets and gained a few pounds. He even tried sleeping in the middle of the bed.
Then the Bownes bought a Philips TV-ette and suddenly weekends that might have been spent listening to the radio or playing Scrabble were taken up admiring the new box, shunting it from room to room, commenting on the BBC’s new rotating globe logo and watching the reports. Mr. Bowne, nearly finished by a second stroke, now an almost-silent haze of his former self, sat in his chair doing hand rehabilitation exercises with a tennis ball. Mrs. Bowne, slowed but still strong, carried out bowls of Burton’s potato puffs and slices of apple on a brown plastic tray. And Oliver, seated on the sagging sofa, complained about the announcers and the mechanical way they reported on deadly hurricanes and coal mine disasters and a revolution in South Yemen. He glared at that box as though the telly itself was intent on usurping him of a career in print. When the reception was snowy, and the Bownes were busy with other things, he turned the plastic dials and shook the set with a vigour that struck me as unnatural. He complained about “distortions,” which I knew had nothing to do with bad-picture quality.
We were sitting on the sagging sofa staring at that small screen the first weekend of November 1963 when we learned that military officers in Saigon had launched a coup d’état against President Diem and that he had been executed. The camera showed many places we had visited, but they looked different in silvertone, almost unrecognizably historic and foreign. Oliver said the streets and cars looked wrong and I agreed. It was oddly consoling to see the city this way, like gazing at the moon.
Back at o
ur flat, we eventually got through to Arnaud, who reassured us that Anh and Dinh were fine.
But the news and images from Vietnam set Oliver back. With the assassination of President Kennedy and the inauguration of President Johnson three weeks later, America was steeped in war. It disturbed Oliver to know that things were escalating in Vietnam, but I think what upset him most was knowing that it was all going on without him. He felt like a deserter. Arnaud called with regular updates to keep him informed, but these conversations seemed to make him feel even more helpless.
Mrs. Bowne noticed Oliver’s frustration and blamed it on his “whole miserable childhood.” She said the first sounds he had come to know were the thunder of shells and the rain of bombs and that he had stored these in his “memory bin”—the way others might store train whistles, pop melodies, the theme to The Avengers, the skid of a bicycle against gravel. These sounds of war were stored deep and seeped into his dreams. Mrs. Bowne said they wouldn’t kill him, but nor would they completely go away.
“I know, I know,” I said. “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.”
American planes kept flying over Vietnam, dropping bombs. And I kept watching, because in a strange way, war was a good way to keep my mind off things.
It was almost December before Pippa contacted us. All along she had been hiding in Paris, receiving our rerouted letters and phone calls from Stasha and trying to build up the nerve to come back.
When she finally turned up at our flat, it was the Saturday before Christmas. Her fingers shook as she unbuttoned her wool coat and slipped it off. She had lost some weight and wore a pale frock in a dingy shade of plaster-bandage pink. Her hair was clipped behind her ears with pins in a way that revealed sections of scalp.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” she said, smiling and blinking apologetically. “I’ve been nervous about this. I’ve never had to meet someone I already knew.”
She carried her coat into the living room and sat down to drink the tea Oliver had prepared. She quickly downed a cup, then held it up, and said, “I remember when Mrs. Bowne gave us these.” She lifted the teapot and poured herself some more tea. I watched her hand shake a bit and the brown liquid slosh against the side of the cup. She downed it with two big gulps.
I looked over at Oliver, who was tucked in a corner of the sofa with an interested expression on his face, then back at Pippa, now on to her third cup of tea.
“I guess you’re very thirsty,” I said.
I had needed her to be vivid and exuberant. To have her arrive after such a long wait, and be gulping tea like a parched desert wanderer, well, it made me feel almost sick with disappointment.
Finally, she turned to look at me. “Mish,” she said.
I shifted back and forth in my seat. There were small ball bearings of sadness inside me that needed to be levelled out before I could speak.
“Are you feeling ill?” she asked.
I pressed my fingertips against my closed eyelids. I suddenly felt unbearably tired.
“Sit down beside me,” she said.
I stumbled over to her. The tears were dribbling now. “I’m sorry,” I said, my voice cracking, while she wrapped me in her arms.
I pulled back a bit and gazed at her, and saw that she also looked tired. The skin around her eyes was pale and wrinkled and she had chewed her lipstick off so all that was left was a frayed red outline. I vaguely registered Oliver slipping away to leave us alone.
“I know it’s hard,” Pippa said. “But maybe we should try anyway. There are so many things I have to tell you. So many things you deserve to know.”
Pippa’s story did not come simply. The first telling that day was short and made up of simple blameless facts. It was a story fit for a child. The second time it was told, some of the gaps were filled but there were still blanks and rushed-over parts. By the third time, I realized I would have to be patient. Some stories are just hard to tell. They can take years.
I wish I had a better memory of what I learned at what point, but at some stage I sat down and stitched all of the events together. Maybe that’s what you do when truth is withheld for so long, when you feel shattered by betrayal. You attempt to resolve the irresolvable. To me, it felt like plunging backwards into a hole, my whole world falling down with me.
I had a mother who one day disappeared out of my life. For an interlude of years. Her name was Philippa (“Pippa”) Nowak.
I was born between worlds, between eras. My birth father was a stranger to this country. A dreamer. In 1950, at the age of twenty-one, he came to England to make a life for himself that was impossible at home. London was full of young immigrant men looking for bedsits, men doing odd jobs, working for the National Health Service or public transport organizations.
The day Pippa met him, she had spent a lonely afternoon wandering the streets of London, puzzling over her marriage to Oliver, a man who seemed unable to enjoy the pleasures of ordinary life. She was drifting alone with her thoughts, walking and walking, when she realized she had walked too far. She hopped on the bus but when she looked in her bag, she discovered that she had forgotten her change purse.
The brown-skinned man who boarded behind her worked for British Rail. He was lugging his tools around in an old metal box. When the bus conductor told her to get off, he put his tools down with a thud and offered to pay her fare.
“Well, thank you,” she said. “I was just heading home. Can I offer you an orange? I have two right here in my bag.”
She asked his name and told him hers. Eating the oranges, they talked about the weather and how he missed eating fruit from home and how she sometimes missed the snow of her birthplace, Montreal. Ignoring the looks they were drawing from other passengers, she asked about the book he had in his jacket pocket, a copy of a Chekhov play. She hadn’t read that one but she liked another one of his. He smiled and told her he remembered liking that one too, but it had been so long since he read it, the sister characters were a bit hazy.
“I want to write plays,” he said.
She nodded.
“What are my chances, do you think?” he asked.
“Good,” she said.
She instantly liked him. The dimple that appeared on his cheek when he smiled. His curly dark brown hair and casual readerliness, the way he put the book into his metal box as if it were no more or less important than any of his tools.
When he jumped off at Waterloo Station, she jumped off after him. “May I walk with you to work?” she asked. Within a few minutes, she found herself walking in step with him, the two of them matching strides, slowing down to stretch the time.
They started to meet regularly, before he went to work in the afternoon. They discovered all the secret places around Waterloo Station. They strolled through neighbourhoods she had never been to before, looking in on other lives, past metal-gated mansions, half-demolished buildings, recently built prefabs and rundown tenements where new immigrant communities were forming.
At the end of each visit, they chose a time and place to meet again. On rainy days, they met at the Boots photo kiosk inside Waterloo Station.
“You are a remover of loneliness,” she told him.
And he said, “There are a lot of lonely people in this city. I should buy a lorry.”
As time passed, she began to feel guilty. What was she doing? How could she deceive Oliver this way? She resolved to tell Oliver the truth about the man she had met. But when she told him, his reaction surprised her. He insisted she had been led astray, that she had lost her bearings because this man had tricked her. She was helpless, he said, a victim.
In the days that followed, Oliver tried to anchor her. He came home with a new apron and a set of heavy pots. He wanted her to imagine herself a married woman standing happily in her own kitchen, patiently stirring soup. She left the pots in their boxes and folded away the apron and went out again.
When she finally confronted Oliver and told him that their marriage was over, pleading
with him to accept the truth, he still wouldn’t listen.
That week she was too ill to meet the man as they had arranged, so she sent Stasha to the Boots kiosk to deliver a note with her phone number. Stasha left the message with the shopkeeper, who promised to pass it on. Please call me as soon as possible, the note said.
And he did call.
Only she wasn’t awake to answer the phone.
Having heard no word from her lover and believing he had not received the note Stasha left, and knowing now that she was two and a half months pregnant, Pippa went looking for him. She visited all the places they had been together. She sat on a bench in St. James’s Park where they used to sit. She returned to their favourite sandwich shop and their preferred bookshop. Finally, she went back to Waterloo Station and discovered from the man at the Boots kiosk that her lover had picked up the note the day it was left.
“Why hasn’t he called?” she brazenly asked Oliver that night.
“I don’t know.”
“Where has he gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know why?” She slid off her chair onto the floor. “You don’t know where?”
“I said no!”
Had he gone back home? He had mentioned that his mother was ill. Had he returned to her?
She went back to the park. She walked around with her coat open the way her lover used to do when he was hoping for warmer weather.
Pippa had no idea that there had been a call and a letter, nor that both had been intercepted.
Desperate to connect with her, a month after they had lost touch, her lover had tracked Oliver down at his office. He arrived wearing his British Rail work clothes and carrying his metal box. He believed in the idea of a man honouring another man and wanted permission to leave with Pippa.
But Oliver would have none of it. He told the man that if he really loved Pippa, he would leave her alone. He told him never to call again.
