Fallout (23 page)

They were standing in the book department among the Christmas decorations.

‘And Paul?’ Erica asked her daughter, staring eagle-eyed from the soap-box standpoint of her self-realisation. ‘You omit him from your letters.’ She turned pages, drifting through Brancusi, Kandinsky . . .

‘Do I?’ said Leigh.

‘Does he oppress you?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘And the other one?’

‘Luke.’

‘Luke . . . ?’

‘Kanowski.’

‘Is he Jewish?’ Her mother’s sophistication did not stretch to neglecting this question about every man Leigh associated with.

‘No.’

‘My daughter – keeping house for two men. Are you writing?’

‘Erica, I don’t keep house. Luke does nearly all the cooking. And he’s the writer. He—’

She saw Luke in her mind; preoccupation, conversation, working at the typewriter in the corner; frying fish for dinner; breakfast when they were up late. The sound of the door as he left for work at four. Came in at seven. His footsteps in the hall. His restless movement, laughing.

‘Beware the worship of the great male brain,’ said her mother.

‘Shut up.’

‘So
are
you writing?’

‘Not just now.’

‘When did you stop?’

‘Ages ago. I work.’

‘Wasted talent.’

‘I’m not a writer.’

‘That’s what all the writers say. Except your father. Honey, you know I’m proud of you, but how many men do your job? You’re a glorified maid.’

Leigh thought of all the cups of tea she made for people at the Duke of York’s, changing Nina’s dead flowers. ‘Come and see
In Custody
,’ she said.

‘If it’s any good they should bring it over.’

‘It’s too political for Broadway.’

‘No pinko subsidies to pay for it,’ said Erica, with heavy irony; she considered herself a virtual communist. She turned to Leigh beneath the bright shop-lights, examining her face.

Leigh shrank from the scrutiny. ‘Can we get out of here?’ she said. ‘You know I hate shopping.’

‘I shouldn’t get a gift for Paul’s mother? What kind of a woman is she? Christmas. My
God
. Are they religious?’

‘Of course not, they’re English.’

They trailed past gold bottles of scent and diamonds behind glass.

‘I don’t know how you stand this city,’ said Erica, and they went to the Food Hall with all the other tourists, where Erica bought marrons glacés, a ten-year-old port and a gift basket of marzipan fruits.

On Christmas morning Paul and Leigh drove Janis the Beetle into Knightsbridge to collect Erica from the borrowed flat. Leigh got into the back to let her mother have the passenger seat and Paul drove because he couldn’t fit in the back as easily – although, Leigh thought, Luke did it all the time. Looking at the back of her mother and Paul’s heads, Leigh had the uncomfortable sensation she was watching her older self. It was easy to imagine. Here they were, in their forties, driving to his parents on Christmas Day. She looked out of the window, preferring deserted pavements to visions of the future. As they got out of the car in Stoke Newington, Paul turned to her.

‘What’s up?’

Erica was already striding towards the door, cape swinging.

‘Christmas,’ said Leigh, avoiding his eyes. ‘Let’s go in.’

Paul’s family house was a modernist beginning; a Victorian terraced house knocked through to an engine shed next door and separated from the railway by twenty feet of brambles. It had been an ongoing project for twenty years. Christmas Day was chaotic – trestle tables that wobbled, all the food ready at different times. Paul’s brother and his wife had two little girls and his younger brother had brought friends along. Paul fitted into the cranky family machine with unquestioning solidity, and Leigh and Erica were welcomed by his parents and then largely ignored.

‘This is a zoo,’ said Erica to Leigh, not very quietly. ‘You know, I
like
these people.’

In Tite Street, Tony and Nina dressed up and went forth. Nina tried to shut Luke from her mind and play her part. Christmas drinks with friends for an hour in the morning and more friends for an hour before lunch. At two o’clock it was widows and orphans at the Dorchester; white tablecloths and obsequious waiters among the old ladies. Nina drank a lot. She gave up trying not to think of Luke. She surrendered. But telling herself she would see him soon, sometime, didn’t help her sorrow. It didn’t stop the longing for him. She wanted to talk about him, recklessly, caring less and less what might happen if she did, but something stopped her. His heart, she thought, was too good for the company.

Lunch was a long, many-coursed, drawn-out affair. Wines and brandies of every type and colour were passed around the table, spillages and stains marking the damask, layer on layer of debris. The ten of them, mismatched family-less acquaintances, grew louder and wilder as Christmas night fell outside.

‘We’re scaring the wildlife,’ said Tony, glancing around at their fellow diners.

Nina felt his hand under the table on her thigh. He didn’t know that Luke had been there too, and more recently than he had. She wanted to laugh in his face.

There were several different Christmas lunches at Seston Asylum depending on which wing and which ward the patients and staff were in. Hélène, Luke and Tomasz were at the best and most public, the one Dr Herrick, the other consultants and even Seston’s mayor would occasionally visit and praise. All twenty patients and their assorted, strained families were at table, looking their smartest, while the catering staff served them their special meal: sprouts sticking in a green mush to the bottoms of the brown and blue pottery bowls, roast potatoes that were leathery and evenly shaped, grey meat. Luke always leapt up and down to help because it was easier to be active than to be present – better than to feel, absorb, hurt – far, far better to have a job to do. Each of the other six years since leaving home he had found a nurse to flirt with – or more than flirt – but he didn’t crave that particular anaesthetic now. The habitual medication of desire had dissolved into the air like ether. He had Nina at his shoulder, a different kind of spirit. The thought of her did not numb him but brought his too-sharp awareness of his parents’ tragedy out into the glare.

Tomasz sat next to Hélène but rarely looked at her. She behaved herself immaculately, as if her outward appearance didn’t condemn her before she moved a muscle. She had aged. No residual gleam of prettiness relieved her face of its situation. Luke saw how she would glance at her husband occasionally as if he had the power to transform her – there had been years he hadn’t even been sure she recognised him. This year she was lucid. It was worse. She had the look of someone in unrelenting pain who would writhe or scream but knowing she could not escape, was quiet. His father had a way of staring into the middle foreground that was specifically his. He took his world with him like a carapace. He might have been anywhere. He did not partake. Luke, in perfunctory habit, talked to his mother as well as he could, told her things that had happened, reminded her of things he had said before, but as the hours scraped by, all the time his anger built against his father. He hadn’t felt such outrage for a long time; growing up he had learned not to waste himself on it. It frightened him, dragging him back into his childhood.

His mother took him to her room to show him the postcards he had sent, as she always did, all in rubber bands, stacked in her cupboard and made her repeated reassurances that he was not to worry about her. They held hands as they returned to the dining room. He felt older than she, every year more separate and relieved to be. He pulled out her chair for her and they sat down again. Tomasz, heavy with self-obsession, bitter, did not even acknowledge their return.

After the farce that was pulling the crackers and before the travesty of the pudding ritual, Luke left the table again alone and stood in the blessedly empty staff toilets breathing his distress into submission. He thought of the small flat in Fulham – his and Leigh and Paul’s things. Their books. Their records that meant home. He pictured the cover images one by one: the brand-new – black-and-white Lou Reed with his electric-outlined guitar – and the old – Bob Dylan and his girl in the winter Greenwich Village street arm in arm. With an effort, he reminded himself of his realities.
Paper Pieces
. His friendships. And Nina. Nina. He summoned the sense-memory of her, the scent of neck beneath her hair, the particular sweetness of her skin.

But it was no good. As he and his father walked home his resolve faltered, his perspective failed. Perhaps it was the absence of visual reference points in the obliterating country dark. Just the two of them in their pitch-black disablement. He was holding the torch in one hand and his father’s arm with the other, keeping the yellow beam on the road ahead. Winter frost was falling down around them, cracking and splintering the night. He heard himself saying, ‘You should visit her. It’s wrong not to. You should know that.’ His voice low and angry.

He never said it. Not since he was a child and had imagined he could change things. Tomasz did not answer but slowed his pace. His breath was heavy.

‘You didn’t even speak to her,’ Luke said. ‘She’s just a – she’s ill, and you should visit her.’

No answer and so he kept talking, not knowing if he was confessing or accusing. There was too great, too painful an accumulation of fault.

‘She couldn’t help leaving you. There’s no one for her now. She doesn’t have anybody.’

Still no answer from his father at his side, arm hard-braced beneath Luke’s young man’s hand. The yellow torch beam lit their way. Luke kept his eyes on it as he spoke.

‘She wouldn’t have left you if she could have stayed,’ he said. He couldn’t see his father’s face but he knew it. He knew his feeble, badly shaved chin, cut from shaking hands; his weakness, his empty lumpen failure to give battle—

‘You fought a war, didn’t you?’ he said viciously, and with a sudden formless shout Tomasz wrenched his arm away, pushing Luke sideways so that the road disappeared, the torch beam swinging into the empty air. His father hurried ahead of him into the dark. He heard his running footsteps stumble, and he fell.

An exhalation of breath, scuffling shoes – quiet. Luke stopped. He pointed the torch at the old man slumped on the road. He went to him and knelt.

‘Are you all right?’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’ He touched his father’s arm.

Tomasz pulled away, cursing him in Polish, incoherent, and Luke couldn’t help but smile because all he could clearly make out was that he wanted his vodka and his home.

Tomasz, enraged, clambered to his knees and walked stubbornly on alone with Luke, accepting, faithfully lighting his way, and ready to catch him should he fall again.

By morning his father was his sodden affectionate self. All was forgiven – or forgotten. Boxing Day. The trains would be few and the journeys broken, but Luke was leaving. He hugged his father at the door.

‘Write to me, Luke,’ said Tomasz. ‘I like to read the news and stories.’

‘I will.’

Luke’s letters to his father were rare and perfunctory. Tomasz did not write back as his mother did, and Luke did not feel he owed him anything, least of all revelation.

‘Did you know your grandfather was a poet?’

‘No,’ said Luke, ‘I didn’t.’

His father eyed him with calculated sentiment. ‘You are not alone,’ he said.

He put his hands on Luke’s cheeks and smiled.

‘Such hope. Such optimism. But remember you are a man, now, eh? Forget your mother.’ He spoke with perverse delight. ‘She’s gone, for a long time.’

Luke turned from him to the welcoming cold. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘You do what you can.’

The train was crowded on the way home. Most of the travellers were young, heading for the city and away from the bonds of their history. Luke felt a grateful part of the collective relief; Christmas escapees coming back to life. He looked out of the window. With heightened clarity, he remembered his mother smiling at him on the bus as he took her away from the hospital to London, so long ago, and felt again the thrill of rescue. He thought of Nina crying on the telephone, and the taste of her release against his tongue. Who would not free a caged creature? Who would not help the wounded?

Paul’s younger brother and his friends ate, drank and left, able in their youth to play with Christmas. In the kitchen Paul, his father and elder brother washed up the pans and plates, scratching off the cold grease. Leigh and Erica and Paul’s mother, Joan, sat around the fire; heaped coalite and ash, glowing like a furnace in the concrete sitting room, and watched Paul’s brother’s wife chase after the two baby girls; one tottering, the other crawling and reaching with tireless acquisitiveness.

The television in the corner played endless Christmas Specials; song and dance men in wobbly sets with studio Christmas trees covered with blue tinsel.

Joan was settled comfortably, sherry and Milk Tray by her side.

‘Erica, tell me about your psychiatric practice,’ she said.

‘No, Joan, as I said, I’m a Jungian therapist. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor.’

‘Americans pay so much more attention to themselves,’ said Joan. ‘I’m sure it’s very good for you.’

Politely, they sized one another up, like matriarchs in a historical court. Leigh watched the eldest child tipping matches out of a box and putting them back in again with finger and thumb, concentrating earnestly, as if she were catching up on homework.

‘That child is playing with matches!’ cried Erica suddenly.

‘It’s all right,’ said Joan, ‘she can’t strike them.’

In the kitchen Paul’s brother swept the floor as their father, head of washing-up, handed the dripping baking trays to Paul to dry.

‘So you’ve stopped with this theatre company and it’s an
independent producer
now, is it?’ he asked.

‘Working on it,’ said Paul, envying his brother, safe from interrogation with his teaching job and exemplary young family.