A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (25 page)

She felt obliged to purchase the book, although it was not the kind of work she would wish to be seen reading, and she carried it off concealed in a plastic bag to the privacy of her own home by the canal. There she waited until seven o’clock, poured herself a stiff gin and tonic and addressed the volume. Her alarm was justified. The footnotes were ominous. Their precocious and summary dismissal of the undead Peter Elsevir was calculated to give pain: ‘Elsevir, Peter, b. 1941, educated Borrowburn and Gladwyn College, Oxford. Achieved a brief notoriety in the 1970s with his organized “happenings” at the Boxed Garden in Fulham. Married in 1968 to the geneticist Hannah (Blow) Elsevir, divorced 1976. Now lives in California.’

Hannah stared at this brief life with dismay. At least there was no qv attached to her name; that was a mercy. But the implications of these few lines were unpleasant. She had not seen Peter for years, and had herself remarried and once more separated since their divorce. She felt no ill will towards Peter, or so she at first bravely told herself, and was not wholly surprised to see his name bob up. But if it bobbed up here, so tangentially, so insignificantly, where else might it appear? And what else from her past might emerge to claim her? Even now a network of letters and diaries and biographies was closing in upon her. Peter himself had seemed a long-forgotten threat, safely exported to another country; his own memories were surely lost in the amnesia of alcohol, but other recorders were nearer, more alert, more coherent. She must watch out.

She finished her drink and poured herself another. Then she sat down to think. She found herself obliged to confront the uncomfortable knowledge that it was possible, indeed likely, that one day somebody would want to write about her life. She would not be allowed to rest in the decent obscurity of a
footnote. There were people out there (she gazed, nervously, across the black dimpled water at the lighted houses opposite) who would spy on her. This prospect she found both implausible and unpleasant, but she knew she had to face it. What had seemed like a natural modesty had persuaded her, since her rackety years with the drunken Peter, to lead a discreet, an almost hidden, existence, but her work had necessarily brought with it a certain kind of fame. One cannot win a Nobel Prize and remain utterly unknown. Particularly if one is a woman. Not many women have won a Nobel. Biographies of female achievers are hot properties.

Women and fame have a peculiar relationship. Women believe themselves undervalued and ignored and powerless, and indeed most of them are, but a consequence of this, reflected Hannah, is that those who achieve eminence are more visible than men of the same rank, and are subjected to a more prurient curiosity. Hannah’s first husband, Peter, whose all too memorable and elegant name she had so unfortunately if understandably adopted in her career, had been a self-publicist of the most blatant sort, unhappy unless his name was in print and on lips. Hannah had reacted against this cheap glitter and had lived a life of quiet industry and secret sex. Her second husband she had suppressed from her
curriculum vitae
; he had been a mistake made on the rebound. But even he, unknown though he was, had connections. Even he could be used against her. He too had stories to tell.

Hannah Elsevir had received her Nobel with discreet dignity. She had been photographed and interviewed, and had even appeared on television, but she had given little away. She had been a disappointment to journalists, who had been hoping for something a little more sensational from the woman who had discovered what they dubbed ‘the Vanity
Gene’. Surely the scientist who had added so much to our understanding of peacocks and paradise birds, of gender and display, ought to be willing to display herself a little more? But Hannah, quiet brown peahen, had kept her feathers well tucked in.

Nobody, at that period, had thought to ask her about the wild and handsome Peter, who had had so much of the peacock in his nature; he had disappeared into another world, leaving only his name behind him. His drab successor had been edited out. Hannah had appeared to the world’s press as a dedicated professional woman, uncomfortable in the limelight. She had worked hard at this lack of image, for she had impulses towards confession, even towards a certain flamboyance. But now she was unsure that discretion would save her. She would have to work harder at dullness if she wished to be thoroughly ignored.

She resolved, on that evening, to make herself preternaturally dull. She would become so dull that nobody would dare risk pursuing her. She would sacrifice even her genius to obscurity. She would pass off her work as the work of others. She would hide forever behind a reputation of nonentity. Anything, anything rather than an exploration of her relationship with Peter Elsevir. For, as she sat there, she was forced to realize that it was the resurrection of Peter that would alarm her most. He was her secret, her buried skeleton, her murdered sexuality. He must remain entombed at all costs. Let science falter, let discoveries remain undisclosed. She would not publish, she would not divulge. Her name would fade from the records. Others could claim her credits. She would unmake herself and her past.

She set about this project with characteristic determination. Over the next few years, she nursed and encouraged her young underling, Brian Butterworth, to answer all queries on her
behalf, and to take as much credit for their research as he reasonably could. Brian was a fine geneticist but an innocent in worldly matters, and he did not seem to realize that he was being manipulated – and anyway, reasoned Hannah, why should he care? His reputation prospered as hers remained static. Rumours began to circulate around the Institute that Hannah Elsevir was finished, that she had lost it, that Butterworth had been covering for her for a decade, that Butterworth should have got the Nobel. This was satisfactory.

Less satisfactory were her attempts to appear undistinguished. She had in her youth been possessed of her fair share of vanity, and as she matured had watched her diet and dyed her hair, as middle-aged women do. Now, as she embraced ordinariness, she decided she could eat as much as she liked and let her hair grow grey. The results of this new regime were odd. She put on weight, as she munched her way happily through buttered crumpets, roasted ducks, cream-filled cakes and Belgian chocolates, but the weight suited her. Her body billowed, and she had to buy flowing tents for dresses, but her face glowed with health and wellbeing. Her hair turned not a dull pepper-and-salt but a luxurious and brilliant white. She looked radiant. She had never looked so good. Hannah Elsevir might have lost the track of the hidden gene, people muttered, but she must surely have a secret lover. Who and where was he or she?

At first Hannah was indifferent to this gossip, as it was so wide of the mark, but in time it made her uneasy. She had become an object of curiosity, which had been far from her intention. But losing weight is more difficult than putting it on, and she found she could not revert to average dimensions. She was condemned to an outsized glow. And with the glow came energy. She had never felt so energetic in her life. She hardly knew what to do with the excess. She worked long
hours, alone and unobserved, and she went for long walks. She swam length after length, she cycled round France, she climbed Great Gable. But wherever she went, she was highly visible. Heads turned in restaurants, cars slowed down to inspect her. What was she to do?

A kind of paranoia possessed her. She sensed that Peter Elsevir was about to resurface in her life, was about to return to undo her. This was all his fault. Could she blot him out, as she had blotted out her second husband? She would try. She began by going through all her papers and photographs and letters, searching for any reference to Peter, and systematically destroying anything that mentioned his name. She hesitated over her marriage certificate and her decree nisi, but they too went into the bin, with the wedding photos, the press cuttings, the snapshots of Peter as a baby. (She shut her eyes as she shredded some of the photographs, as Peter had been a very handsome man, but she shredded them just the same.) Then she turned her attention to public records. Was it possible to rewrite the past? No, it was not. She bought a bottle of Tippex and contemplated taking it to St Catherine’s House, but realized this was folly and would only draw attention to herself; she satisfied herself with inking out his name and date in the
Who’s Who
in her local public library. But the thought of all the thousands of libraries beyond her reach caused her much disquiet.

As she lay awake at night in her house by the canal she worried about the depth of the silence that came out of California. It was as though Peter Elsevir had disappeared from Earth. She had already taken to searching through the indexes of all memoirs and biographies that could possibly contain any references to him, and had discovered him lurking here and there – most dangerously, in a hostile and dismissive analysis of the Counter Culture by a critic from the New Right.
However, here too, he was laconically dismissed as only briefly notorious. She wrote to the author of this work under a pseudonym, from a false address, requesting any information about the subsequent career or whereabouts of Peter Elsevir, but received a not very helpful answer: he had, according to this source, left England in 1976 (well, she knew that anyway) and had gone to Santa Monica. Two possible contacts were suggested: she could try Elsevir’s ex-wife, the geneticist Hannah Elsevir, or she could try to locate a religious sect called Icon, with which he had once been involved. That was the last that had been heard of him. Maybe he was dead. So many of that generation had died young. (And serve them right, the source implied.)

Hannah could find no references to this mystery sect. She drew a blank. She even thought of contacting Peter’s family, through a third party, but dismissed this as too dangerous. She leafed her way through Elsevirs in international directories, even rang a few random phone numbers, but found nothing promising. Could she employ a private detective? She thought not.

Inspiration came to her as she was browsing yet again in the open shelves of the reference and biographical section of her university library – shelves which she had begun to haunt with conspicuous frequency. What about his old school? Peter Elsevir had attended a well-known, historic public school, to the memory of which, like many Englishmen, he had been attached by a sentimental hatred. Perhaps he had, against all the odds, kept in touch with it? Perhaps he still received its old boys’ annual newsletter?

There was nothing as helpful as an address in the newsletter, but there was, miraculously, a sighting. Her instinct had been right. Peter’s old pal Giles Reader had spotted Peter, by chance, in distant Anatolia. He had been, claimed Giles, in
search of God. ‘A much changed figure, of monkish austerity’, wrote a shocked but admiring Giles Reader, himself now a successful financier.

They had met, it seemed, in a rock church in Goreme, staring at a fresco of the raising of Lazarus. They had exchanged a few words. Peter had not been forthcoming. He had not, he assured Giles, taken a vow of silence, but he claimed to be in semi-retreat, and out of the habit of conversation. Giles had respected this, and had moved on to complete his own theological art tour of Turkey and Syria. (He gave colourful accounts of Saint Eustace chasing the hart of Christ, of Saint Simeon the Stylite stinking on his lonely tower, of the Forty Christian Martyrs of Sebaste shivering and dying in their frozen lake, of the Thirty-five Salman Rushdie Martyrs of Sivas suffocating in their smoky hell.) ‘This is a tormented landscape,’ wrote Giles Reader in the
Old Borrovian
, ‘a landscape of lonely extremes, of miserable pinnacles and underground cells. It tempts the traveller to hermit’s dreams, to dreams of union with history and God.’ But most of all Giles Reader had remembered the haggard features of his old friend, and his pale blue eyes, ‘which seemed to see beyond this veil and pierce another world’.

From this unlikely eloquence it seemed that Giles Reader too was changed, and that he had been much shaken by this chance encounter with his old school friend.

Hannah stared long at this account, already three years old, and wondered if she should pursue the cold trail. There was something in Giles’s description that assured her Peter had not merely been passing through Goreme. He had been there for some time, and was perhaps there still. Anyway, it was a beginning. A starting point. She had never seen the eastern regions of Turkey. She had never been east of Ankara. She thought she might visit Cappadocia in the spring. It was said
to be an interesting region. She collected guide books and brochures, browsed her way through accounts of sculpted tufa, fairy spires, almond blossom, obsidian, apricots. She resolved to go in April.

There was pleasure in planning her trip. She could travel in style. She could join an exclusive art tour, as Giles had done. She could take a cruise with an art tour option. She could hire a car. She could hire a car with a driver. She could advertise for a tame archaeologist, or offer to lecture on Vanity in Trebizond.

She chose to travel alone. Over the past ten years she had taken several packaged excursions, sometimes as paying holidaymaker, sometimes as guest lecturer. She had spoken on her Gene in Kenya and the Galapagos, she had listened to the lectures of others in Egypt and Mexico. And once or twice, on these outings, she had met other single or divorced women whose lives too uneasily echoed her own. On one occasion, to their mutual chagrin, she and the archivist of her university library had found themselves sailing along the Danube together. They had felt obliged to share a table at dinner. They had cramped one another’s style. She did not wish to risk such embarrassed proximity again.

And so, in April, Hannah Elsevir found herself driving along a straight road of uneven habit past rock and mountain and snow and stream towards the rock caves of Cappadocia, in pursuit of her vanished husband. The scenery was monotonous, or, more accurately, repetitive. Browns, greys, purples; the colours of infertile upland mineral earth. Was it the prevailing drabness that had goaded one or two of the villages through which she passed to paint their houses in a lurid, lively shocking pink and turquoise? Hawks circled high above her, watching from afar. There was not much cover on this barren high plateau. Where had Peter Elsevir gone to ground?