We Had It So Good (22 page)

“Did you marry Mike?”

“Yes, I did, as a matter of fact.”

“So is he here? I could set him straight.”

“God no, we were divorced years ago.” He looked down at a handful of silver rings, none on the relevant finger. “I used to read you, you know, in that column you did in the underground paper, I don't even remember its name anymore, it all seems so long ago. What do you do now?”

“I'm in television.”

“How did that happen?”

Someone came down to the summerhouse with a bottle. “Leave it here,” Stephen said.

He told her about the voyage over on the SS
United States,
and being sent down from Oxford and the squat in Chalk Farm—this story, this novel it seemed now to him. He laid it at her feet like a dog eagerly bringing in a bird from the garden.

“So we had you all wrong.”

“I don't know. I don't know how I was supposed to be. What about you?”

“I love the law, I'm argumentative. My practice is litigation, personal injury and clinical negligence. The more difficult the better. I'm considered what is called in the profession robust.”

“So I shouldn't get on the wrong side of you.”

“Inadvisable. How do you know the Pallants?”

“We live two doors down, look, that's my house.”

“The lights are on. Who's home?”

“My son, I expect, he's a bit of a loner. My daughter is in Yugoslavia, or whatever they call it now, taking pictures.”

“How frightening.”

“Yes.”

It was eighteen years since Susie in the van, with the musty smell, the dirty hair and the angelic face, the running away of both of them, but he had turned back, had not gone to San Diego, of course he had not shipped out. His maritime union ticket stayed in his wallet, a lifeline to the sea, but he had never used it since he jumped ship at Southampton. They were inching toward the New Year, he would be wanted very soon in the house to listen to the clock chime, sing “Auld Lang Syne” and kiss his wife. He was expected, he looked at his watch. “Only ten minutes to go,” he said.

“Another year.”

“I'm gonna be fifty.”

“Are you?”

“I don't know what comes to an end, or if anything does. I don't know what to expect.”

“We'd better go into the house now,” she said. “Your wife will be waiting for you.”

“Yes, she will. Perhaps you'll remember her, she was at Oxford too, she was often at Ivan's flat.”

“Did you marry that very melodramatic blonde?”

“God no.”

“Then the plump carroty one.”

“That's her. Or was. She's neither plump nor a redhead now.”

“We all change. Here's my card. Give me a ring if you ever feel like lunch.” She took the card out of her evening bag and placed it in his breast pocket. They walked into the house where Andrea was waiting, holding a glass of champagne, looking at them walk in together, a handsome if ill-sorted couple.

Mary Bright. Mary Bitch. Andrea was forced to endure five months of her before Stephen finally sent her away.

“Do you have to be so fucking obvious?” she said. “I had never thought of you as banal, a midlife crisis, spare me.”

But Stephen was enslaved to Mary Bright's little erotic secrets, such as her penchant for wearing stockings and a garter belt under her tight bandage dresses and the first shaved pussy he had ever seen. She was not so far from fifty herself, but had an entirely different mental attitude toward this queasy milestone. She was full of life, and she was out there in the world, she did not brood as Andrea did on who she was or where she had come from. Andrea described her as a carnivore. “Well, so am I,” Stephen said. “No you're not, you just wish you were.”

For years he tried to recollect their first meeting at Ivan's flat with the large windows and the expensive sound system until one day, in a box of photographs, he saw her. Andrea and Grace were posed standing by their bicycles in their radiant days of pre-Raphaelite hair, colored stockings, ripped cerise skirts, the velvet dress—looking to him now not like women, but plump-cheeked children. And there she was, Mary Bright, a passerby pushing her bicycle, standing at the side of the frame while the photograph was taken, leaning against the wall of Oriel, looking straight at him, into the future, through the curtain of parted black hair.

There were so many beautiful girls like her at Oxford, seen on the street but never in the Dyson Perrins lab. They were inaccessible to him, the horny lonely grad student who could only look. And he finally had her. She was his reward, he felt like someone who had been on a long diet who finally allows himself dessert.

The five months had nothing to do with Andrea, or their marriage, or the family, the house, his career. He had never had any intention of giving up the gains of thirty years to compensate for the loss of some strands of hair. Mary Bright was the loser, but surely, he said to her, she must have understood that from the outset, being strong, bold, independent and liberated. He had assumed she knew. How could she
not
know?

E
veryone was waiting. Day after day, nothing was advanced in the situation, the guests sat under the gilded dome of the Hotel Esplanade drinking coffee, eating strudel and waiting for the dinner hour, when waiters wheeled metal trolleys across the carpeted floors and stood by the white-clothed tables flambéing cherries in liqueur. Blue flames rose from the sizzling pans, illuminating bored faces. The diners walked back and forth restlessly. Was there any news? If there was news, no one would share it. News was a secret you kept to yourself, it was a commodity you did not give away.

Marianne could not afford to dine in the restaurant. She was not a guest at the hotel, nor was she interested in its sumptuous menu, the veal dressed with cream and brandy, the braised pork, the white wine soup, the goulash and the schnitzel. The staff was trying to keep up standards, but only five tables were taken out of fifty and the diners had no idea about etiquette and decorum; they clamored for hamburgers and macaroni dishes, which the chef despised. The maestro at the piano kept his head down, smiling secretively. It was rumored that he was a spy, though for whom it was not possible to determine.

Marianne's hotel was a more modest affair, its guests were Croatian, Slovenian, Austrian and Italian commercial travelers, dealing in sunglasses, drill bits, coffee, wine, Mercedes parts
(stolen), aluminium pipes, chocolate, nylon tracksuits, Swiss watches, lightbulbs and fancy china. These guests were all men, though one or two had stationed mistresses in the city and brought them back to their rooms for entertainment. Only the young blond desk clerk spoke to her in a way that did not involve a sexual invitation. But her English was not good and all she could offer was a poorly printed map of notable churches.

Marianne was in a rush, she had not expected to be delayed. No one had told her that war was five percent fear and ninety-five percent boredom, she was only twenty-two and she expected things to happen immediately, the world revolved around her, why shouldn't it be arranged according to her own wishes? Sitting on the narrow hotel bed with its yolk-colored counterpane, she looked out of the window to dark drizzly streets, the evenings were still coming too quickly, it was a late spring. A small TV showed only Croatian and German programs, a war was going on and she was out of the loop, she had already been waiting for two days.

She had walked around the city taking pictures, of women in the markets, of the UN vehicles along the half-empty boulevards, a brass band marching with drums and bugles, a policeman eating an ice-cream cone (there was nothing funnier than men eating ice cream, particularly men in uniform, she took such pictures whenever she got the chance), but didn't she know there was a war on? And was she not separated from it by the impediment of a missing piece of laminated card?

Everyone went to the bar at the Esplanade, a place she had not yet entered. She felt intimidated by the old hands she had already seen at the UNPROFOR office, who all knew each other and were woven together by a web of connections going as far back as Vietnam. They were the same age as her mother and father, or that was how they seemed. No one had spoken to her. She was all by herself with her camera bag and her letters certifying that she was an accredited correspondent.

But the night was so long in Zagreb, lying on the single bed with only the Croats and Germans on the TV for company. You must do it, she told herself, you have to get up and go there, try to strike up a conversation. Entering the bar in her jeans, Timberland boots and the familiar lopsided stoop of the photographer, she was immediately recognizable as one of the band of brothers.

The band of brothers: “I haven't seen you since Pristina.”

“No way. Surely we ran into each other at Mostar? Didn't we get totally wrecked on some plum brandy?”

“That wasn't me, that was Foxy.”

“Foxy? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, he told me all about it. He said you were sitting slumped against a wall unable to tie your shoelaces.”

“Well, then, it must have been Pristina. I did have some trouble with my boots in Mostar.”

“Don't worry, it's hard to keep it all straight. All these fucking Yugo towns look the same to me. Have a drink.”

Marianne entered and sat at a table by the window, the waiter brought her a glass of wine. It felt no better to be waiting here than in the hotel room, except there were people to look at, such as the old woman in the black hat with the veil who was sitting alone in a corner writing a letter. She seemed to Marianne to have been sitting at the table for fifty years, with her doll's face and her two spots of rouge and her glass of brandy, which she had not touched. She reminded Marianne of the old tenants with whom she had lived when she was a child. She could recollect all their faces, every one. But the woman did not look up, her cramped hand moved slowly across the sheet of paper.

In her boots and jeans, her dark hair loosened, her heavy bust and her impatient hands on the table, Marianne was sexually confusing. Men were initially put off by her. They did not know if they were attracted or not, this took some time to work out.

Pretty girl, thought Colin, who had a vocabulary designed for
short, descriptive signaling sentences and designated all women as pretty/dogs. She was marginal but young enough to give her the benefit of the doubt. Funny face, thought Tim. Her mouth looks like it was put on upside down.

“Hello,” Colin said. “Are you stuck too?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Come and have a drink with us.”

“Okay.” She picked up her glass and went over to the bar.

“First time in Zagreb?”

“Yes.”

“Enjoying yourself?”

“Not really, I can't get into Bosnia.”

“No one can, if your pass has expired or you haven't picked one up yet. We're all in the same boat.”

Every day Marianne went to the UNPROFOR office to get her press pass and every day she stood with the crowd of waiting journalists, and every day the official said there were no passes. This happened from time to time. Where were they? They were on a plane that had been diverted to Sarajevo, they had been sent to Belgrade by mistake, they were out of stock at the printer's, they were lost, they were being deliberately withheld by the authorities to prevent any access to the worst of the atrocities. None of the explanations satisfied the journalists, who waved their expired passes in frustration or made ham-fisted attempts to alter the final date.

They could not get into Bosnia without the press pass. With it, things were rosier, they could be ambushed, their car stolen, shot, left for dead on the road, or occupying a room in the shelled structure of the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, where there was no running water or electricity. They could take a cruise down Snipers' Alley. Without it, they were forced to sleep in sumptuous splendor beneath satin counterpanes, brush their teeth in marble bathrooms, drink coffee and eat cream gâteaux in the echoing public rooms and periodically
check at the desk to find out which new journalists had arrived today. It was even possible to have a facial and a massage at the beauty spa on the first floor.

“So who are you?” said Colin.

“I'm Marianne Newman.”

“Who are you with?”

“I've got a commission from a magazine.”

“What magazine?”

“It's a women's magazine. They were the only ones who would give me press credentials. I've shot a lot in Britain, but this is my first war.”

The war had been going on for four years. Like a cumbersome tank, it had been making its slow but determined way eastward from Croatia, treading familiar pathways, tracks worn over centuries, entering Bosnia and with its yellow eye on Kosovo and Macedonia. It was the kind of war that had been fought on European soil since the Middle Ages, admittedly with more sophisticated weapons and materiel, but sometimes neighbors grabbed what was at hand and hacked each other to death with agricultural implements. You could not walk a step on this soil without treading on the blood of its ancestors who had died in primitive battles. European wars had absurd names, the War of Jenkins's Ear, the Hundred Years' War, the War of the Spanish Succession. This one was the War in the Former Yugoslavia.

It was a war both bloodthirsty and convenient. The militias swept into town and made a base for themselves. They rounded up a few local girls and locked them up in the school or a small hotel. Every morning they took tabs of Ecstasy and went out for a day's slaughter; in the evening, thrumming with blood and surplus energy, they came back, got drunk and raped their captives. They wasted the surrounding countryside, laying land mines, looting and burning. The first rule was to kill, there was no second rule to complicate matters, and everyone fed on everyone else's enthusiasm.
But the civilians were not entirely innocent either; families who had been neighbors for a hundred years turned on one another and burned down their houses. When people spoke to each other, their principal feeling was distrust, you killed the family across the road to be on the safe side. In the cities where at the beginning of the decade the population had been renting videos and getting home deliveries of pizza, medieval siege conditions were now prevalent.