Late in the Day

by Tessa Hadley

  When tens of thousands of refugees from East Germany had begun pouring into Czechoslovakia in November 1989, Alex had brought his mother round to their flat so they could watch together the events unfolding on the television. For a few nights Margita slept in their spare bed. Zachary had telephoned from New York; Alex had stayed home from his classes in the language school and walked from room to room with the radio pressed to his ear in case he missed anything. Christine sat breastfeeding Isobel, watching the abandoned Trabants blocking the Prague streets, the tent city growing in the courtyard of the West German Embassy, the police trying to stop the men and women climbing over the embassy walls. There were mass demonstrations, the crowds jangled their key rings, Alex thought you could pick out on the television the StB men moving amongst them, taking photographs. In Bratislava they broadcast dissident music via television signals from Vienna. Alex and Margita and Christine couldn’t turn their eyes away from the police in their white helmets breaking up demonstrations, using tear gas, pulling the peaceful demonstrators down by the hair, kicking at them and beating them with their truncheons.

  Then Havel in his leather coat was addressing the crowds in Prague, and the crowds were waltzing in slow motion and waving sparklers. Havel was embracing Dubcˇek, recalled from his desk job working for the Forestry Service – somehow he had not been hanged or shot. A bust of Stalin was paraded with Nic Netrva Vecne written on a paper strung around his neck; the cameras loved that, Nothing Lasts Forever. Margita turned to look at Christine on the sofa, tears running down her face, making runnels in the pink powder. She said she’d thought it would last another hundred years, or four hundred. She was still handsome at sixty, with her fierce stare and thick shock of hair, home-dyed, streaked blonde; her hand was pressed to her heavy bosom in its close-fitting jazz-print dress as if she were holding in something fighting to get out, and she pulled her cardigan tight across her chest, squeezing its buttons in her fist, in tense concentration on the TV screen. She and Alex spoke together in their own language, which Christine hadn’t often heard him use. The family had always tried to speak in English, it had been the first rule Margita and Tomas adopted on arriving in the new country, to save their son. Stesk was homesickness, Margita explained to Christine, it was for sentimentalists, she’d refused to feel it on principle. But on a day like this . . .

  Alex’s spoken Czech was rusty and he felt ill at ease, trying to express himself in it. He had experienced the same pain of exile as his parents but now was unable to share wholly in the joy of liberation: he was exultant but felt shut out at the same time, cheated. There was no part for him to play in their revolution – you had to be there, you had to belong. ‘My eyes are dry,’ he quoted from some poet. ‘I need them for looking with.’ And at first Margita was adamant, she didn’t want to go back to Czechoslovakia even for a visit, there was nothing for her there, her life was in London now. Her sister and her cousins were narrow-minded country Catholics; they’d hated Tomas first because he was a Communist, then because he was a dissident. And the regime hadn’t made things easy, she said, for the relatives of émigrés. Also, they would think she was sniffing after a share of the value of the farm in Galanta, which they were trying to get back into ownership under the restitution. Margita didn’t want anything, she hadn’t brought anything out with her and wanted nothing back. In 1968 she and Tomas had left their rented flat without packing suitcases or telling anyone, and had posted the keys to a dear friend, long dead, who had rescued a few of their books and possessions. Though it turned out now that he’d also been informing on them to the authorities. Ah well, that’s what life was like, back in the old days.

  When the fuss had died down, after two or three years, Margita changed her mind. She could afford to pay for a trip home out of her inheritance from her uncle Vas, who had owned a delicatessen and took care of Tomas and Margita when they first came to London – Margita had worked behind the shop counter, while Vas paid for Alex’s schooling. She began to think that going back to the old country would put a stop to her bad dreams. But she would only go if Alex would accompany her. One cousin nicer than the rest had an apartment in Bratislava – by this time capital of its own republic. She could stay with her cousin and pay for Alex to stay in a hotel. They stopped off in Prague first, sharing a room in a guest house: Alex had no memory of the city, though he’d lived there for a couple of years as a small child. The baroque houses were restored and painted in candy colours, there were restaurants and gift shops on every corner; he had felt no connection to it. Margita bubbled over with delight at using her own language, chattering uncharacteristically to women in the shops and cafes; she waxed lyrical, remembering the little backstreet theatres and cabarets of the sixties, occasions when she’d skied in hilly lanes in the suburbs. You could smell the pine forests in the heart of the city, she insisted. There was something feverish and inauthentic, her son thought, in this rush of romantic enthusiasm. The cafe customers looked as if they’d heard it all before.

  In Bratislava he had begun to remember things, standing with his mother outside their old apartment on the second floor of an austere nineteenth-century tenement – inevitably now repainted candy pink – and then outside the school he’d attended, and in a little park where once he had played on the swings. For a few uncanny minutes it was as if two epochs of their lives were superimposed and coexistent, the present transparent and the past showing through behind it. Then the superior solidity of the here and now was bound to prevail over fragile memory; a different generation of children, born into a different politics, came pouring out through the school gate, jostling and calling. Margita’s shy cousin was a radiographer and read poetry, her tiny apartment hadn’t been updated yet to the new more affluent reality, was still lit by forty-watt bulbs, decorated with sample squares of carpet nailed to the walls, faux-bronze reliefs of Bohemian castles. The family were invited up from the country one Sunday to meet the visitors, and arrived full of curiosity and welcome, bringing dishes of prepared food and their own wine from the farm, in yellow plastic bottles. They toasted the homecomers gravely, courteously. But after the first warm rush of reminiscence they didn’t have much to say to one another. Alex could just about follow their conversation in Slovak, but he knew his speech sounded alien and formal to them. He and Margita wanted to know more about tumultuous events and political change, but it was clear that the questions they asked seemed banal and outdated to their relatives. Any passion about the country seemed exhausted too, even the idea of the new Slovakia.

  All that was over with. And how could they be interested in what Margita and Tomas’s lives in London had been? — I realise that while we were away, we no longer existed for them, Margita said. She grew more subdued and in fact, Alex realised to his surprise, she began to seem rather distinctively, awkwardly English – smaller than her whole self, private and diffident – in contrast to the formal country manners of her relatives, and their broad humour. She mentioned his father’s work insistently, as she never did at home; the others responded with vague embarrassment. Certainly they hadn’t read Tomas’s books – they probably didn’t read any books, let alone the clever, difficult kind of novel that his father wrote. Margita and Alex visited Tomas’s older brother, who edited history texts for schools and had been busy recently, revising them. He was smaller and neater than Tomas had ever been, his silvery hair floated with static. His skull was polished as ivory, he was worn very fine: like his ironies, so mild they hardly registered in his tone or facial expression. In place of a ‘diligent and modest Lenin’, he told them, children now learned about the ‘ruthless and cunning Stalin’. Once revolutionary movements had been ‘thriving’, now it was independence movements.

  Alex had a suspicion that, as far as he could understand their conversations, his mother told everyone about his own job as if he were lecturing at a university, not teaching English part-time in a language school. She must be ashamed that her son didn’t have more to show for all the opportunities he�
��d enjoyed. When they were alone together he asked her if she were disappointed in him, but she brushed him off with her quick irritation. What was he talking about? He’d got the wrong idea completely. What did she care about whether he was some kind of big success, admired by everyone? That was his own business. Hadn’t she had enough disappointment with his father?

  Every morning, coming out from his small hotel in a side street, heading for the apartment where his mother waited for him to join her for breakfast, Alex had crossed a bridge over a river which pooled in muddy, stony shallows, then made his way along a street planted with lime trees. A new road was under construction, whose concrete viaduct would carry it over the top of the street he walked in, which seemed to belong already to an old world in retreat. Passing a neighbourhood bar which was no more than a small cubbyhole off the street, he fell into a pattern of stepping inside for a coffee and a shot of plum brandy, and to smoke a cigarette. For those moments each morning he felt some slender thread of connection with the place.

  Was it possible, he wondered in his intervals of solitude, that without knowing he was doing it, he’d held off from choosing his life until he could come back here? He had been waiting to rejoin these places and people he’d left behind as a child; naturally, now he’d rejoined them it turned out they meant nothing to him. So now that the waiting was over, could he do something at last? He felt his own strength, not at all abated, locked up in potential, only he didn’t know what it was for. Not for putting things into words; he felt a violent revulsion from that. Late one evening, making his way to the hotel, he saw that his bar was still open; as he stepped inside the bartender recognised him, put his hand ready on the brandy bottle. A young woman, blonde, wearing a leather skirt and a white ribbed jumper tight over her breasts, was standing alone at the bar drinking coffee, her light mac folded over her arm because the night was warm. The bartender didn’t seem to know her. Perhaps she was a prostitute; Alex wasn’t confident that he could read the signs, in a strange country. Anyhow, he liked her pale skin and defined, small features, faintly cruel and impersonal – he thought of a Venus in a Cranach painting. She asked him for a cigarette and when he lit it for her she tilted her head and dropped her glance in a certain way – at once flirtatious and withheld – which made him nostalgic, as if it were a gesture from an old film. The bartender was cashing up, the bar was closing.

  He had walked companionably with the woman as far as the bridge, where they heard the river hurrying below them. In the darkness Alex pulled her into his arms and began to kiss her, tentatively at first and then more urgently. She yielded passively to his kisses, he tasted alcohol in her mouth. The two of them had hardly exchanged ten words. Stroking her neck and her hair, and then her breasts, he was murmuring, trying to persuade her to come back with him, to his hotel. Since his marriage to Christine he hadn’t been seriously tempted, until this moment, to make love to any other woman. The girl managed to wriggle out of his grasp, laughing. — I don’t know you.

  — Or we could find somewhere to get another drink?

  Smiling, she wasn’t offended. But she wouldn’t stay. — No, no. N˘ekdy jindy. Another time perhaps.

  Lydia said she was lost in wonderment, watching her offhanded parents transform into doting grandparents. Apparently they had been heartbroken when their only grandchild was born so far away in America. — How was I supposed to know? Lydia exclaimed. — As far as I was concerned, they were bored to death by babies. Mum made it clear to me how she’d resented all the mess I made. I even thought they’d be relieved, only having to be grandparents long distance. Turns out they had reservoirs of familial devotion which they’d decided in their wisdom not to waste on me. They were saving it all for Gracie.

  Now they had Grace back in Britain, Pam and Tibs couldn’t get enough of her. She stayed for days at a time in their new pub out at Epping, ruling over it like a little princess; Pam bought her smocked Victorian-style dresses and white lace tights, black patent leather shoes with straps across the instep, a furry-dog hot water bottle cover. They adored how thoroughly she was unlike her guarded mother or grandmother: Grace was incapable of calculating to please anyone, or of holding anything back. She looked like a little African, Pam said proudly; no diamanté barrettes or Alice bands could tame the fierce black fuzz of her mop of hair. Out of hours, she was allowed to have the same thing played over and over on the jukebox; on her birthday her grandparents invited her friends from nursery to a party in their upstairs function room, whose violently patterned wallpaper and prints of hunting scenes usually presided over meetings of the local Rotary Club.

  This new pub was Tibs’s grandest venture yet: 1930s half-timbered, painted black and white, with eight guest rooms which were often full, standing back from a wide road that had been a trunk road until it was superseded by the M25. Pam’s only grumble was getting up early to do the breakfasts – they had someone in to do lunches and dinners; though even when things were going well she always had her aura of trouble stoically endured. She was more firmly upholstered and gilded than ever, in response to their move upmarket; Tibs was still racy in his slim-cut suits and narrow ties, with his shifting glance and chronic restlessness. Even serving behind the bar, he always seemed on his way out somewhere else, though they didn’t know where he went. Fifty yards down the road, a shabby sixties shopping precinct – video rentals, hairdressers, Chinese takeaway, newsagents – had fallen on hard times; opposite the pub, on the other side of the road, the forest mysteriously began, its grey beech trunks receding in stately order across the washed-out tan of fallen leaves. At night the Earl of Essex glowed with coloured lights, strung along under the eaves. — It’s a roadhouse! Zachary exclaimed. — A jewel from a more spacious age of motoring.

  Tibs was itching to modernise the place, Zachary begged him not to do it. Alex and Christine brought Isobel to the birthday party, then sat drinking out of hours with Lydia in the empty bar downstairs, while Zachary threw himself with the grandparents into party games, only coming down to report delightedly that all the layers in Pass the Parcel were wrapped in pages from the Sun, including the breasts, and that Tibs was a sinister Pied Piper with his doting gang of four-year-olds. In the bar a red carpet, patterned with scrolled gold leaves, exhaling stale smoke and beer, rolled everywhere like a tide; mirror glass behind the bars replicated over and over, like infinite riches, the glitter of bottles and labels and coloured liquors, the cut lemons and maraschino cherries, the packets of peanuts on their card. The space was cavernous, segregated into cosy nooks and corners behind sections of banister, shallow flights of unexpected stairs. No fire was ever lit in the stone fireplace under its gleaming pink copper hood, but the air was hot and dry from central heating, sealed imperviously against whatever weather was outside. Children in their herd-ecstasy thundered in the room above, and a leftover Christmas decoration in gold paper, drawing-pinned to a beam, swayed in response.

  — It’s hard to believe in progress, in here, Lydia said. — If I try to imagine eternity, I think it might feel like an English pub on a Saturday afternoon. Time’s actually standing still, isn’t it? It’s like a ghastly syrup and we’re all preserved in it. No, not standing still, ticking away inexorably towards the doom of opening. I swear those same novelty teapots have stood on that same windowsill since the world began.

  She was prodding in her drink with a plastic cocktail stirrer, trying to spear the cherry; looking surprisingly at home behind the bar, she had concocted Manhattans for the three of them. There was some irony in the fact that Pam and Tibs’s daughter – whom they’d shucked off, she claimed, so coolly – seemed made for pub life. Weren’t her sumptuous looks perfect for a barmaid – and her preferences for late hours and for company, and her dry remarks? She had her mother’s gift, Zachary said, of reeling the men in and throwing them back at the same time. — Zacky, you’re such a flatterer, said Pam complacently. She extended the same fond indulgence to Zachary as to Grace: these two were the exceptions to all her ir
on rules.

  — To me it’s exotic, Alex said. — I never visited anywhere like this in my childhood. My parents wouldn’t have known such a place existed.

  — Nor mine, said Christine enthusiastically. — That’s why I love it.

  — I’m too unsophisticated to love it, Lydia said. — I hate it. It makes me want to die. Except that I might wake up in an afterlife which looked just exactly the same. How would we even know that we were dead?

  — Alex doesn’t believe in progress anyway, said Christine.

  — Oh Alex, don’t you? Believe me, it was progress when I got to stop living in a place that smelled of other people’s beer and cigarettes.

  He was only faintly amused, opening up Tibs’s newspaper from yesterday which he’d found folded under the bar counter. Alex preferred to get his news from the enemy. He believed you risked banality if you only read to confirm your prejudices – though there wasn’t much news of any sort in Tibs’s paper.

  — Don’t you think Alex’s pessimism is so mid-century? Christine said. — So Central European. He can’t adapt. But I say, let’s shake off all the horrible old burdens! Why must we always be expecting the worst?

  — Because the worst mostly happens? he suggested, not looking up.

  — Not always, though. It doesn’t always. Things sometimes change for the better, you know: anaesthetics for instance. Or antibiotics, or flush toilets. The end of the Cold War! You’ve got to have something to believe in, Alex!

  — Why?

  She displayed him triumphantly to Lydia. — You see?

  — Something’s always lost though. Even in the end of the Cold War.

  — Nothing good was lost! Really, was it?

  He thought about it. — Something crabbed and cobwebby and disenchanted. I hated that crabbed thing in my father. Yet it was also very ambitious, very purely intellectual. We may come to think that those dissident Central European cultures were the last to keep a classical ideal alive, an ideal of disenchantment.