How It All Began (26 page)

“
Don’t
,” said Rose. “You know it’s not like that.”

A silence. “No, I think it is not. But I must tell myself that.”

Footsteps. They were no longer alone. Two women were inspecting salt-glazed dishes. Rose got up: “Let’s go—we’ve hardly seen anything yet.”

In Jewelry, they considered art nouveau brooches. Rose thought: It is out now—not spoken, but out—and so nothing can be the same. She wanted to take his arm, to behave like other couples, and that was out
of the question, quite out of the question. How can you feel happy, but also entirely sad? she wondered. Well evidently you can.

In Glass, they studied an engraved Venetian goblet, and Anton thought fleetingly of his wife, who had been irrelevant for a long while now. She hung there for a moment, a reminder of lost emotion. I had forgotten how to feel, he thought. Until now. I had forgotten what it was like to feel. And now I am feeling what I must not feel.

Later, they sat in the courtyard, with coffee and a snack. It was sunny, warm; Victorian brick glowed all around, children paddled and shouted in the great central pool, people sprawled on the grass. Voices rang out.

Anton said, “So many people. So many language. So far, I hear French, German, Japanese, Italian.”

“And Scandinavian of some kind, just behind us. The museum is polyglot. There’s a good word for you—speaking lots of languages. I’d forgotten I knew it.”

“So I say to the site manager that his building site is polyglot. I think he will tell me to—get stuffed. And that I learn from my nephew. It is rude, I think?”

“Fairly rude,” said Rose. “It depends who says it to whom. Between friends it would be acceptable, just about, if joking.”

“The site manager is not my friend, and he does not do joking. So it would be rude. But there is so much rude on the site nobody would notice.”

“If I may say so, I think you’ve become slightly obsessed with this site manager—with how much you don’t like him.”

“That is because he is somebody who have come into my life by accident—he should not be there.”

“You could say that of me, too,” said Rose, staring out across the courtyard, at the arched windows, the twisted columns, the Grecian frieze figures.

“He is a bad accident. You are . . . you are the good thing that has happen.” He smiled.

That smile. She had to look away again. “All meetings are accidents really, I suppose. They might never have happened.” Marriages, she thought.

“Oh yes, unless you believe in . . . how do you say? . . . what is going to happen anyway, it is going to come, it have to come.”

“Fate. Destiny.”

“Is that how you say it? And no—I think I do not believe in that.”

“I suppose it would be worse if one did. No escape. As it is, you can always hope for a bit of luck.”

“And I have luck. Today. That I am with you at this nice museum, and I think that there is much we have not yet look at.” He pushed his chair back. “So perhaps we see some more? And I will forget the site manager and perhaps next week I will have luck with the job interview. There is another—I told you, I think.”

She got up. “Yes. You did.”

They moved away. Into Islamic, into Chinese. With all that was now understood, but unspoken.

Rose stares at her mother, not seeing her. Rose is elsewhere, floating free.

“Lucy rang,” says Charlotte. “She wants you to ring back.”

“Lucy?”

“
Lucy
.”

Rose stares on. A second. Two seconds. Then she crashes back into her own kitchen, her life. “Oh,” she says. “Did she?” She gulps down her breakfast tea, gets up. “Thanks. I’ll ring her.”

The house closes in on her. The family. All of it.

“And another thing . . .” says Charlotte. But Rose has left the room. Two minutes later she returns—coat on, bag in hand.

“Another thing . . . I’m so sorry, but I’ve broken a mug. One of the Habitat blue and gray ones.”

Rose laughs.

“Well, I’m relieved it’s funny. I was afraid you treasured them.”

“Not particularly. I had no desire to bequeath them to Lucy.” Another laugh. “I must dash, Mum. I’m late, and Henry’s always sitting there waiting. So much fuss about My Memoirs—huh! That Mark has been a pain. See you later.”

Charlotte bins the broken mug. Why the laugh? She’s odd these days—some Rose I don’t know has surfaced. But who knows their own child? You know bits—certain predictable reactions, a handful of familiar qualities. The rest is impenetrable. And quite right too. You give birth to them. You do not design them.

Is she worried about something? Probably—most of us worry much of the time. The human condition. Lucy? James? Some problem there? No, she’d have said. A minor worry, let me hope. And now here am I worrying about her. Of course—human condition stuff again. On the Richter scale of worry, child-worry peaks at ten. Money noses in at five or six. Health zooms up and down, depending on severity of threat. The one or two of household inconvenience is mere indulgence. Give me a leaking pipe any day.

Old age worry is its own climate, she reflects. Up against the wire, as you are, the proverbial bus is less of a concern: it is heading for you anyway. The assault upon health is inevitable, rather than an unanticipated outrage. You remain solipsistic—we are all of us that—but the focus of worry is further from the self. You worry about loved ones—that tiresome term, as bad as closure—you worry about the state of the nation, about sixteen-year-olds sticking knives into one another, about twenty-year-olds who can’t find a job, you worry about the absence of sparrows and the paucity of butterflies, about destruction of habitats, you worry about the decline of the language, about the books that are no longer read, about the people who don’t read.

All of which is entirely unproductive—self-indulgent, maybe. Leave the knives to the police, the habitats to the environmentalists. If people don’t read, that’s their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

Charlotte clears away the breakfast things, feeds the cat. Gerry has gone to work, Rose is on her way to his lordship. The morning lies ahead, yawning. What to do? Pain is muffled today, thanks be. A trip to the library, despite Rose’s strictures?

Anton plays poker with his nephew and the boys; he loses, disastrously, and forfeits a six pack of beer. The boys remonstrate, telling him it was his own fault, he wasn’t concentrating, he played a crap hand, and Anton concurs, laughing. His back and his legs ache, as always after work, and it doesn’t matter.

Don’t think of her, he tells himself. But that is no good—of course he thinks of her. Of what was said, of what was not said. This won’t do, he tells himself, you know it won’t do. And of course he knows, and that makes no difference.

It is like feeling well again after a long illness, he thinks. But much more than that. Coming alive again. I had forgotten . . . not just what it was like to feel, but that feeling existed at all. It is like coming out into the sunlight.

He sends the nephew for some more beer, proposes another game, and plays with steely attention. This time he trounces them. There is much hilarity. What’s got into the uncle? they say. First he’s in a trance, then he’s like a man possessed. He’s got something on his mind, they say. Come on, Uncle, give—what’s going on? Have you won the lottery? Are you planning to liquidate the site manager?

Rose types up the morning’s dollop of My Memoirs. Or rather, she types, pauses, stares out of the window. Don’t think of him. Yes, think of him—because I must, have to, can’t help it.

And it is not, in any case, thought. He hangs there in her head—his face, his voice, the way he looks at a seventeenth-century plate, that finger on her wrist. He fills her mind; he takes up all her time.

No. Stop it. Grow up, Rose. This isn’t happening, can’t happen.

Can’t it? It happens to others. Another life. A different life. Him.

She types: “. . . my intermittent association with Harold Macmillan prompts me to . . .”

Anton turns to her; he smiles. Again, and again. He says, “You do not want to talk . . . about this?”

The door opens. Here is Mark. “Oh, Rose—I mustn’t butt in, but you’re taking a break anyway, I see. Where do we keep spare wallet files?”

Rose tells him that as it happens there are no spare wallet files right now. She suggests Ryman’s.

A
t Lansdale Gardens, database creation was now on hold while Mark worked on the plagiarism article: “I feel that this is rather a priority, as a teaser for the memoirs—we want to start whipping up interest.”

Henry concurred entirely, and was himself setting to work with renewed enthusiasm. However, there was a certain disagreement about the eventual placing of the article. Henry did not seem to understand that this challenge to the reputation of a dead scholar was unlikely to grab the attention of the broadsheet editors.

“But why not? I thought that was the idea?”

Actually, the idea all along has been to generate a nice little dust-up in a heavyweight journal which would have Mark’s name conspicuously attached, thus raising his profile and, with luck, lodging the name with a few of those influential in the academic world. No need for Henry to realize that.

“Popular exposure . . . ?” wondered Mark, frowning. “Isn’t that a bit—well, tawdry? I do feel it’s more appropriate to make a splash in one of the scholarly outlets. And we need them on board for the memoirs, in due course, don’t we?”

“I take it one’s name will be—prominent?”

“But of course. That’s the point.”

Henry beamed satisfaction. What luck that young Mark had come
into his life. Though Henry couldn’t now quite remember how or why he had. Oh yes, something to do with all that television nonsense. A good thing that never went any further; one had been on quite the wrong track there. No—the memoirs, that was the thing. “Off you go, dear boy. Get going on this valuable work.”

Henry reached for his pen and a clean sheet of paper. Trevor-Roper today; some reflections on the man and his work. What a mercy the fellow’s dead—no holds barred.

Mark, in contrast, was not inclined to write a word until he had some indication of interest. You don’t waste effort. Accordingly he set about drafting an enticing proposal, and wrote a few letters, which he planned to follow up with a phone call or two. Mark knew himself to be good on the phone, and with any luck he’d be able to maneuver an invitation to drop by the editor’s office. Only after that would he get going on the piece. Meanwhile, what was in theory Henry’s time would be devoted to Mark’s work on his thesis. The old boy was never going to know what exactly Mark was tapping away at on the laptop, in the Lansdale Gardens lobby.

Marion was sitting at a pavement table outside a coffee shop near to Hatton Garden. On her lap was her bag, not trusted to the table or the chair alongside her. Inside the bag was a small jewelry box, and, within the box, the most valuable items of the jewelry left to her by her mother: a pearl necklace, a diamond ring, diamond earclips, a diamond and sapphire brooch.

When do I wear them? Practically never.

Will I miss them? Not really.

So do I mind? Well, yes. They were hers.

She had already cruised past the Hatton Garden jewelry outlets, without going into any of them. The process repelled her: producing the box, laying out the contents for the inspection of some hard-eyed guy on the other side of a counter. The proceeds of the sale would barely make a dent in her overdraft, but she would feel that she had done something. A panic step, not rational—she knew that.

She sat there, putting off the moment. And was overcome suddenly with a sense of desolation. Here I am, she thought, getting middle-aged, beset by financial worries, my personal life centered around an entirely unsatisfactory lover. And I am about to sell my mother’s jewelry. She was on the edge of tears. She fished for a tissue, dabbed at her eyes.

“Marion!”

She looked up.

“Marion!
What
a lovely surprise!”

“Laura!”

“Oh—
how
good to see you. What
luck
. I’ve got a solicitor appointment but I’m early.
Don’t
tell me you’re about to rush.”

“No, no—I’m in no hurry at all.”

Laura Davidson and Marion had been at art college together—best friends, indeed. They had always kept up, but Laura had been living in America for the past ten years, married to an American artist, and they had rather lost touch. Laura was a craftswoman—enamel work her specialty, though she also did glass engraving and some jewelry making. She was tall, blond, merry, and occasionally raucous—somewhat Marion’s opposite. They had always felt that they complemented each other nicely.

Laura sat down, ordered a flat white, at once filled the pavement with talk, swept aside any inclination to despair. “So how
are
you? How’s interior design? And listen, let’s get it over with—I’m divorced. So snap! And it’s not that
bad
, I’m finding. I’m sniffing the air—and, boy! is it good to be back this side of the pond!”

She was living in a leafy cathedral city, it emerged. “And I just love it. I’ve got a ducky little terrace house, and I’ve leased a big warehouse just near that’s going to make a fantastic studio when I’ve got it properly set up. I’ve got all these plans . . .”

The leafy cathedral city seemed a touch unlikely, for Laura. Why there? Marion inquired.

Because Laura’s brother was there, it seemed. A schoolmaster. “His wife died last year, poor darling. And his kids are gone and he’s lonely and anyway we’ve always got on.” Laura laughed. “We can prop each other up in our old age. But what about
you
?”

Marion began to talk, slowly and with restraint. And then the restraint deserted her, and it all came out. Everything. George Harrington. The overdraft. Recession. Even Jeremy.

And her mother’s jewelry.

Marion opened her bag. Opened the box, shielding it from observers.

Laura looked. Closed the box. “Put it away,” she said. “Marion, you are not doing this. You absolutely are not selling your mother’s jewelry.”