We Had It So Good (37 page)

How she loathed God.

A
delayed spring, and Marianne takes the baby for a walk along the disused railway line that has been turned into a thin park that snakes through London, from north to south. Max and Cheryl live in an anonymous block of flats three stories high called Cedar Court, though there are no cedars anywhere near. There are cedars a mile west in Highgate Cemetery; it is, in London, a funeral tree, coniferous and evergreen. The most famous cedars are in Lebanon, where they adorn the national flag and there Marianne has seen bombed cedars, their trunks blackened by fire.

Halfway down the street a gate is usually open and you can pass through it to the narrow park. After ten days of rain, the sky has given a great sigh and the clouds have cleared. This happened when it was dark, and when Londoners awoke the next morning, it was to a different kind of light, blue, sharp, making short, clearly outlined shadows. The sky is threaded with filmy strands of high cloud, it's what everyone calls a beautiful day, and in London a beautiful day drives people outdoors, rushing for keys and shoes, because by afternoon it will have clouded over, and a thin drizzling rain will begin to fall with the monotony that is accepted with the usual moaning.

Marianne pushes baby Daniel through the gate and finds the path thronged with walkers, joggers, women with pushchairs
like herself and many dogs. Max told her he had once seen horses being ridden here, huge chestnut creatures with iron feet, and she is hoping that she will come across this strange sight.

The trees are still without buds, there is no sign at all of spring, apart from some twigs with catkins hanging from them. Half-frozen pools of water are filled with last year's fallen leaves. Some tree trunks are tightly embraced with ivy and other parasites. She is like her father, she doesn't really know the name of anything, the names of the trees don't interest her, she is a London girl and she has never joined her mother out in the garden with her trays of seedlings and little sticks with Latin words on them.

The path is lined with other people's houses and lawns, she can see conservatories and drawn curtains. The grass is rimed with frost. A man is standing smoking a cigarette, looking up at the canopy of bare trees, in which birds' nests are clearly outlined. Not much birdsong at this time of year.

Occasionally the trees clear for a few steps and the city spreads out to the east, unfamiliar, moving toward the estuary and the Tilbury docks and the sea, and then the trees close in again and she is walking behind her nephew, occasionally looking down at him to see if he is okay, but the motion of the pushchair always sends him straight to sleep, a small face slumbering beneath a hat, dressed in a BabyGro, a jumper and several blankets and the canopy up to protect him from the wind, which still has the winter's bite.

Marianne has settled into a dull tenacious grief. She can no longer bear to hear about the events of July 7, she doesn't care about the identities and motivations of the four young men who traveled down to London and got on the trains and bus and blew themselves up. She can't stand listening to her father droning on about
Islamism,
a word he's picked up from the internet and which means, he says, not ordinary Muslims, of course not, but religion fused with political ideology to form a kind of fascism. Shut up shut up shut up, she thinks.

Max keeps telling her that in a year the grief will have died down, she will taste the sweetness of life once more. How can she be unhappy when she looks at the face of his newly born child with all his features in the right place, the nose in the middle and eyes above, the mouth, and the adorable little ears on either side? A child who cries and gurgles and hears and is beginning to form smiles.

She's an excellent nanny, he says. It's because she's responsible and good with her hands, and because having to respond to the needs of someone entirely dependent on you and not lie in bed brooding on your fate is a challenge to which she has risen. But she doesn't want to be a nanny for the rest of her life. Nor, she realizes, does she want her own children, she has thought about it enough.

When she met Janek she accepted that when he left Lucy, as he was
bound
to do (only her parents and Uncle Ivan being so unfashionable as to stick to the same spouses their whole lives), he would probably not want to start a new family, he was already in his forties. As time went on, she understood that Janek wasn't going to leave his wife for her, that
she
was that place outside time. He was always telling her that he felt guilty for stealing her childbearing years, but she didn't care. She was a photojournalist, what business did she have to give birth to small dependent creatures?

Now she no longer had the urge to travel abroad. She didn't care about wars, she didn't care about floods and earthquakes and refugees and extra-judicial killings and occupation and imperialism and child soldiers. She actually wanted to shut all that out. Over the years she had amassed a collection of photographs of waiters: waiters with oiled hair, wearing long, spotless white aprons in grand Parisian restaurants, and waiters in grubby shirts, laying a few tables in a bombed building with a sign blown to smithereens and just enough crockery intact, because life has to carry on, eating has to carry on, everyone has to eat. There were almost enough for
an exhibition, Max pointed out. He liked her collections of people types, she could do conjurors next, he could get her the necessary introductions and why not start with him?

She sat down on a bench, Daniel still sleeping. It was true that these rare, sudden sunny days in winter made you feel exultant, she thought. Something soared inside you, the spirit leaped.

More and more people were making their way onto the path, it felt like a national holiday, some ran fast and some ran slowly, some walked arm in arm in good wool coats and patterned scarves as though they were parading along a European boulevard, and others were dressed as if for sport in tracksuit bottoms and fleeces, and they were talking or they were lost in their own thoughts. A trio of urban youths with paint in their pockets.

And dogs.

All her life Marianne had been denied a dog. Her father had stamped on that desire. Dogs marched up and down and ran and chased their tails and fought with other dogs and mounted them and strained on leashes and were carried in their owners' arms like babies and came in a huge variety of shapes and sizes and colors.

After a while, she started to watch the dogs. The dogs came over to her and she held out her hand and they licked it, she smiled at them, the dogs seemed to her to smile back. They had large brown or black eyes which stared into hers. She began to consider the dogs' faces and their expressions. It was important, she thought, not to anthropomorphize them, they weren't human, feelings like joy and interest and indecision were human traits. No, they evidently felt something else. They felt with their noses, black and wet. The whole urban path was a banquet of scents, whereas all she could smell was tree bark faintly, sludgy pools of decaying leaves and dog shit.

A dog with smooth hazelnut-colored fur walked toward her and stood looking at her, its tail wagging. No owners were in sight. Marianne looked back at the dog. It has a face, she thought, they all have
faces
. Not just the usual arrangement of features, the eyes,
the nose, the upright wagging ears, the lipless mouths, it all came together in a face as full of expression as those of the waiters and warlords. The dog reminded her of an army officer in Bosnia she had once seen leaning against a wall lighting a cigarette. He had stared at her over his long nose and allowed her to take his picture, smoking. The same arrogance and curiosity.

Marianne and the dog were transfixed by each other. What is it thinking? she asked herself. The dog's black eyes appeared to understand everything. The two of them could probably communicate by some form of telepathy if she tried hard enough, she would tell him about Janek and her tragedy and he would wag his tail, knowingly.

Daniel slept on for a few more minutes until an acorn from the tree he was parked underneath suddenly snapped from its twig and hurtled down, sharply tapping his sleeping face. He awoke with a howl, the acorn had drawn blood on his cheek. The dog barked and ran off, Marianne attended to the baby, picking him up and holding him in her arms, dabbing the spot of blood away with a wet sleeve. But she went on looking after the disappearing dog.

S
i tried to avoid seeing the pictures of dogs spread out on the dining room table. How many more of them were coming? She kept putting another one down and he had to look at these terrible creatures.

He knew he had outstayed his welcome, he had been there for months, waiting every day for Andrea to tell his boy the big secret but she wouldn't do it. If he wanted Stephen to know, he would have to tell him himself.

His son was a big shot with time on his hands, he didn't have to do a day's work and still he was wealthy, drove a very nice car and owned this beautiful house. He had everything, why should his own father take from him his self-respect by revealing a secret Si believed to be sordid? Only Andrea, the good soul, could present it in a way that would soften the blow, and she wouldn't, no matter how long he waited.

He could not find the words, the ones that had come so easily to him, when he was talking to Andrea with her sympathetic face, dried up in his mouth when he thought of sitting down with his son. Your old man might be a murderer and your grandfather was a brutal sadistic old-timer. You have nothing to be proud of, you come from trash, at least on my side. No, he couldn't do it. Better to let the girl soften the blow.

Although she wasn't exactly a girl, but that was how she seemed to him next to the old lady, who was not so old, in fact the same age as his daughter-in-law. She was still there in the house too. They had settled into a routine of watching TV together, and just like the first night,
gornisht mit gornisht
came out of her mouth. For one thing, she didn't know anything worth squat about Cuba, even though she had been there and he hadn't. She talked to him about that island and the guy with the beard his wife had detested.

“My late wife could never go back there,” he told her. “You have no idea what a beautiful place it was in the old days before the war, when the big gamblers from New York used to take a plane down there to the casinos. The women had to leave their minks behind, it was warm every evening, she told me all about it, she used to watch them in the streets with their American clothes and their wealth.”

Grace had plenty to say in reply and most of it he didn't understand, and the rest he didn't listen to. The communists were like this, they had stomachs full of words which they spat out at you, but words were all they had. The capitalists had everything else, the houses and the cars and the lovely women and the factories. This had always been the side he had been on, of course he was a union man, but that was because the union fixed your pay, no other reason. The union took care of a man in ways the boss wouldn't, but that was as far as it went.

All winter he tracked down the remaining fur salesrooms, it was a tragedy what had happened. Not a single woman he had seen in Stephen's neighborhood wore a fur. He heard they still wore furs in Europe, but not here. In Italy, which had the most stunning women in the world apart from Cuba, there they kept their furs, but in England a fur was a hated thing.

It was hard times for his old business, he heard stories of how the furriers kept going by paying peanuts for secondhand furs that no one else wanted, and remodeling them for wealthy
Eastern European women who passed through London. Did they know, he told them, that Yoko Ono had a whole room in her apartment for her furs? Or at least she used to, he didn't have any up-to-date information. The old men mourned past times, when you could walk along the street even in Los Angeles and every wealthy woman had her mink or an exotic like an ocelot, and women who couldn't afford anything better had a fox fur collar on their cloth coat. During the war, in England, when times got very tough, the furriers had had to resort to cats. They laughed when they remembered this. The good times were the fifties when a mink stole was all the rage, such a wonderful garment, a lady could wear a stunning strapless evening dress and the stole kept her shoulders warm. It was very practical and why had it fallen out of fashion? A woman earned her fur coat, the gentleman in Mayfair said. When she was forty and her husband was starting to have affairs with chorus girls, then he had to give her a pricey fur as compensation.

Now, they cut their wives off, divorced them for trophy wives, there was no honor left.

The pictures of the dogs kept coming. All kinds of dogs were passed across the table, all shapes and sizes and colors. Si tried to concentrate on their coats, some had lovely pelts in cream and honey and brown, and others had short tight black fur, and the poodles were all curls. But Marianne's pictures showed you very little of their bodies, and nothing of their tails. These were dog portraits, close-ups. The faces of the dogs with their dark eyes looked up at him from the table, they had expressions, you could see that however much you wanted to deny it. She had caught the inner lives of dogs, Andrea said, it was an incredible thing to do, and this was just her early experimental work. She was getting a grant to put on an exhibition, she had a commission from a magazine, everyone was crazy about her pictures, she already had requests to buy prints and it was obvious that some would go for high sums
eventually. The soul of a dog, the spiritual essence of a supposedly dumb animal.

“Not so stupid after all, Stephen,” Andrea said.

But Stephen still couldn't stand dogs.

The dogs looked at Si and passed judgment. It was time for him to go home to Los Angeles, he couldn't live in a house where every day a new dog was going to accuse him of being an accomplice in the murder of all its fellow creatures. The dogs seemed to imply he was a Nazi. To hell with dogs.