We Had It So Good (30 page)

“This was her guilty conscience?”

“I don't think it was. I believe, if she's telling the truth, and she usually does tell the truth, that she wanted Marianne to have the freedom she had had herself, to travel.”

That his own daughter had been able to go to war zones, those terrible places, because of a subsidy paid by Grace made him feel demented. And now Grace had run through all her money and had slunk home to England. He supposed she could find no more boyfriends, they were all coming up to sixty, or he was, the girls, as he still thought of Andrea and Grace, were both a little younger, and Grace looked a wreck, years older than his own wife, who was the same age.

Ivan confirmed what Andrea had told him, Simone had said absolutely not, she had never forgiven her for her terrible remark to Marianne the day of the twentieth-anniversary lunch party. If she could say that to the daughter of her best friend, what foul rudeness might she come out with when Simone and Ivan had guests?

“She has nowhere else to go,” Andrea said. “If she doesn't stay here, what do you think will happen to her?”

“Cuba?”

“Don't be silly. One of my conditions is that she has to have a course of therapy. It's time we got to the bottom of all her problems, to clear out the accumulated junk.”

“And she agreed?”

“Eventually.”

“Good luck.”

It was just the four of them at dinner, Si struggling with risotto, hunting out some evidence of meat in the dish (I won't make that again, Andrea thought). His tastes ran to meals with separate
ingredients clearly laid out on the plate in quadrants: a protein, a starch, a vegetable and a slice of bread. Grace came down looking worse than Stephen had ever seen her. She made no comment on the food she was served, eating almost nothing.

“It's amazing how quickly everything has got back to normal,” Andrea said. “Most of the tube lines are running and Oxford Street was full of shoppers today, according to the news.”

If she says London had it coming, Stephen thought, she's out. But Grace merely remarked, “It will be interesting to find out where they came from.”

“Who?”

“The rebels.”

“For crying out loud, they are terrorists.”

“And what do you know about them?” Grace said scornfully.

“I read up.”

“I had several boyfriends from North Africa, sweet young guys. They see the world startlingly differently to the view from Islington.”

Bile rose in Stephen's throat.

“How can you sit there and complacently come out with this nonsense? Real people are dead. Don't you get it?”

“Baudrillard might plausibly disagree, but the real people include the rebels themselves.”

“The
terrorists
.”

“If it comforts you to call them that, then let's call them the terrorists. They made a literally superhuman sacrifice to achieve justice by embracing their victims and removing themselves from the ongoing struggle. Can't you see the complexity?”

“No.”

“Well, it won't work,” Andrea said. “I mean how could it? What do they think is going to happen as a result of these bombs? London is far too large to bring to its knees. I had clients all day Thursday and Friday and they talked about the same problems and
anxieties as they had on Wednesday, adultery, eating disorders, the commitment-phobes, the lonely and the sad. The bombs made no difference to their sorrows. These things don't touch us. The terrorists are narcissists. Their influence is far less than they believe.”

Stephen's father was struggling to hear the conversation. Two of the voices, English-accented, were unfamiliar and his slight deafness could not always register what they said. He knew they were talking about the terrorists, but the ghost-woman, who was not a ghost but a friend of Andrea's, had a mouth which went up and down like the opening and closing of a pair of shears and
gornisht mit gornisht
came out. Nothing, salted and sweetened with nothing.

“Can we talk about something else?” said Stephen. “We have, after all, just got back from Poland.”

“How did you feel about returning, after all this time?” Andrea said, laying a hand on Si's arm in the sleeve of a pale blue sweatshirt, a garment he had begun wearing after his retirement. “Was it traumatic, or a happy experience?”

“I saw my house, it was still there after all this time, but not in good condition, the Poles haven't looked after it.”

“And did you find out what happened to your parents and sister?”

“I don't need to go to Poland to find that out.”

“Was it not upsetting, being in the town of your childhood, walking the streets you walked when you were with your mother and father?” To Andrea, Si's case was fascinating. What childhood could have induced such life-affecting trauma as his?

“I don't get upset. Life is too short for tears. And what should I be upset for? I lost my wife, that was a tragedy, I thought I would go first, but these tragedies are normal. We live with them. I have nothing to complain about.”

“Warsaw was disappointing,” Stephen said. “We'd planned to spend longer, but there didn't seem to be anything much to see.”

“My parents were from the sticks,” said Si. “I realize that now. To them, Vashar was Paris and Rome. Maybe before the war it was
beautiful, but now… a really ugly place with a horrible monument to Stalin. And no beach. That's the thing I forget about Vashar. I couldn't stand that.”

They ate ice cream, and went into the sitting room to watch the ten o'clock news on TV.

“We start tomorrow,” Andrea said to Grace. “Please be in my office at eleven a.m.”

The day finally ended, the sun setting on the garden and the trees, the geraniums gradually losing their color, turning black in the twilight. Cats passed and repassed across the lawn, hunting mice in the shadows. It was only two weeks since the solstice, and summer seemed still like the normal condition they would always be in.

M
ax knew. He was the only one she had ever confided in about having a married lover.

“It's him, isn't it?” he said, looking at the photograph on her living room wall of the field hospital triptych.

“Yes, that's him.”

Seeing Janek interviewed from his hospital bed on the news, Max got in his car and drove across London to his sister's flat. She had always justified her situation to him, she would batter him with words. But looking at her now, sitting on the white sofa, the desolation of her face staring out onto the street, he wished he had not been so malleable. He was the younger child, the little brother, and he had not manned up to the situation. He had been too placid, he should have forced her to understand that she was making for herself a grave of her life. He should have said, he should have said, and he hadn't. Now she was going to make a shrine of the mantelpiece with Janek's picture above it, she was going to turn the flat into a mausoleum.

He didn't know anything about sorrow, he had not yet felt it. He fell in love aged twenty-two and the girl he had chosen had loved him back. He learned sign language to talk to her with his dextrous hands, he practiced words of love with his fingers. Cheryl was an accountant, she spent all day with her fascinating numbers and in the
evening she went out dancing, tap and modern ballet, and he met her at a wedding where he pulled scarlet ribbon after scarlet ribbon from her high-heeled shoes, bending down at her feet. All the happiness their parents had wished for their children had come to him, in compensation for what they thought of as his late start in life, but which he considered a gift. The reward of silence, dark, mysterious, profound. He heard things Cheryl did not: birdsong, wind in the trees, waves, and he tried to make hand-words for her to express them.

And here was his sister, his noisy, confident sister, saying, “I feel like I am in a black hole. I'm buried alive. Am I going to have to spend the rest of my life in solitary confinement?”

They were expected for Sunday lunch in Islington to see their grandfather and listen to their father tell them of their origins, of the small town on the plain with a river running through it, in Poland. The idea was that they would find out who they were, but Max knew
exactly
who he was. His passport was just a travel document.

Max did not get on with his father, he had no opinion of his grandfather. He was oppressed by loud voices and his father shouted. “He doesn't shout,” said his mother, “he just enunciates clearly.
He
says the British mumble and swallow our words.” He saw his father's face bearing down on him with its nostril hairs, shouting, “You gotta have an education!”

“We will have to both go,” he said to Marianne. “I don't think there's any way we can get out of it, but I will try and do most of the talking.”

He sat down on the sofa next to her and held her in his arms. It was the first time he had ever done this. She felt all kinds of strange objects beneath his clothes, it was second nature to him to keep magic things about his person. A few cards nestled in the small of his back and coins dropped from the hem of his jeans.

“I tried to go to the hospital, I got into his room for a minute but he told me to go away. It was like I was one of the bombers, he was scared of me, he was scared Lucy would come back, she'd just
stepped out to go to the bathroom and I'd snuck in when he was on his own and the nurses weren't guarding him, and he looked at me, his face stricken, and he said, ‘Marianne, you have to go.' Why? Why was he so cruel to me? I don't understand.”

He held her tighter but she floated out of her body and through the open window. She felt like a balloon let loose from its moorings, with nowhere special to go.

Andrea had laid the table in the conservatory. Grace was already there, standing with a drink, looking out at the garden. She looked as old as time, Max thought, the fabulous cheekbones remained but the skin was mottled and brown spots were already on the backs of her hands. He noticed she swayed slightly, as if unable to keep her balance, but still she remained standing, on her feet.

“Hello, Max,” she said. “Long time no see. Where's your wife?”

“At home.”

“Can't stand enforced family occasions, I suppose.”

“Only Mum and Marianne have sign language and neither of them are very good at it. It's quite boring for her having to wait for me to translate.”

“And then what you would translate would be inconsequential anyway.”

Max tended to agree, but he couldn't see the point of Grace. She had not excited him as a child with her comings and goings, and he thought there was nothing romantic about her life. Her opinions, her experiences bored him. He wasn't interested in politics, the bombings were just random acts of sadism, incomprehensible, they were not worth the effort of investigating their cause. They did not matter.

Andrea came out into the conservatory. Stephen and Si were in the study preparing a slide show on the laptop of the visit to Poland.

“He's very much on the ball,” she said. “He doesn't remember what he doesn't want to remember, but that's just a tactic, I suppose.”

Grace did not care about the visit to Poland. She was thinking about herself, and what had befallen her, about the Algerian who had finally become so unpleasant that she had been forced out of her own flat: she paid the rent, the furniture was hers, the scraps of jewelry, the pictures on the walls amassed over all the years she had had a base in Paris. He had driven her onto the streets with a knife, and she had spent two nights in a homeless hostel. She rang everyone she knew but no one would take her in. They were all fucks, total fucks, these people you thought were your friends. She despised them, the so-called artists, the so-called intellectuals.

She was a down-and-out standing with a drink in her hand looking out at a garden which suddenly appeared to resemble closely the garden her mother had made in Kent. Andrea had never had any hint of imagination, she just copied.

But Andrea was the final default position, she had taken Grace in. She had defied her husband. Because they had once lain down together on the college lawn, aged nineteen, and looked up at the sky and told each other all their secrets. And everything was innocent and their day was only just beginning. All would turn out well, and they would do great things. Very great things, or that was what Grace had thought of herself; Andrea had thought she had already achieved the limits of her greatness by being there, a student at Oxford. But I have done nothing, Grace thought, apart from exactly what I wanted to do.

Marianne arrived, white and silent.

What is wrong with her? thought Andrea. Something has happened.

Stephen set up his laptop and they sat round it, looking at the photographs of the market square, the Latvian folk dancers, the apricot-colored house where Si was born, the distant wheat fields, the cemetery, the plaque marking the fate of the Jewish population, the flour mills, the concrete hotel, the road back to Warsaw, the site of the ghetto, now interred under blocks of flats, the synagogue.
They were bad photographs, indifferently shot on a cheap camera. Marianne observed that there were generally no people in them. Neither her father nor her grandfather were posed by any site of interest. The only inhabitants were passersby who could not be removed from the shot. The pictures were evidence: that they had been to Poland. At the airport they had bought a bottle of kosher vodka.

And what did any of it mean? Simon Newman, displaced in time and space from his natural environment, the house in Los Angeles, sat watching as the pictures flickered, one to the next. “That's right,” he said, nodding. “That's what it looked like.”

Max, who had promised he would do the talking, had no idea what to say. His grandfather was remote, strange, a relic of his father's paternity. The two of them looked so alike,
were
so alike, he thought.