We Had It So Good (40 page)

The horrors of nineteenth-century people, who lived without showers or toothbrushes or tampons or electric light or central heating or airlines, made him weep now. For in a hundred years time, his great-grandchildren would say, “And in the olden days, when a woman got cervical cancer
she died
!” And a hundred years after that, cancer would be a disease from the history books, like
bubonic plague. “And they
irradiated
them. Shoved chemicals into their systems. It was as barbaric as leeches.”

So he would not burn her patient notes while she was alive because, although improbable, he could not discount the hope that medicine could save her. Two months after her death Stephen built a bonfire in the garden out of wooden boxes he found in the basement, which were from before their time, they might have been from Ralph's parents' day, and the furniture from her consulting room, which he broke up with a rented chain saw and carried outside. He was not a man who was good with his hands or had ever built a bookshelf. The feeling of power tools in his hands frightened him, it was usually Andrea who stood on the stepladder and made holes for Rawlplugs.

The weight of the chain saw, carving her blue sofa, felt good. Ergonomically his hands fitted the instrument, it seemed designed for him. He looked around the office. Apart from the armchair, what else could he cut up with it? Once he had started, he thought, he might take down the whole house, beginning with the bed she had died in. He could go completely crazy with that thing and then wreak havoc on the streets. Sometimes he thought he might go to a firing range and learn to shoot a gun, he wanted the experience not just of hitting the target, but the explosion in the barrel, the bullet in midair taking his heart out there with it, zoom.

When he had sliced the rug into spaghetti strips and carried it down to the garden, he opened the filing cabinets with the keys she had instructed him to find in her desk drawer.

The oldest files dated back to the seventies, after they came back from America and he was facing what he regarded as the end of his life, the finality of the voyage on the SS
United States,
the reverse emigration, marooned forever on the shores of an old continent, the Statue of Liberty behind him, its frozen beacon lighting the paths of others into safe harbor, freedom.

He read a few files. People's problems are so trivial, he thought.
They believe they have difficulties, they don't. Her earliest patients had been seen at a rented office she shared with three other recently qualified therapists, so he could not put any faces to the details of their quiet or noisy despair. He read her notes, made with a red ballpoint in her neat handwriting with its careful loops: “Worked to death. Needs a holiday.” “Always in control. Always insists she's right. Heading for major breakdown.” “Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Will get him into trouble if he's not careful.” “Sexual abuse? Or subconscious?” “Raped on street. Developing general fear of men.” “Possible schizophrenia, refer elsewhere.” “Transference. Get rid.”

He put all of the seventies and all of the eighties into a cardboard box and carried it down to the garden, then went back upstairs to collect the nineties. In some of the files he found cassette recordings; he remembered she had bought a tape recorder so she could listen back to some of her more recalcitrant patients, make detailed notes and discuss them with her supervisor, a woman in Highgate with a pageboy haircut that turned an even and becoming shade of gray as the years passed. She always wore gray, dove gray, steel gray, graphite, anthracite, and turned up at the funeral all in white, the Far East's color of mourning, she explained.

Andrea herself had gone to be ash in the fire of the crematorium.

The tape recorder was on a shelf, obsolete technology. He had fixed her up with a device which transferred the voice files onto a laptop. After he retired it was his job, every week, to do the technical work of updating her files. He showed her how to listen back to them. After several tries, she got it, but then she became ill and the patients were sent away.

He put a tape in the cassette deck. A moaning woman's voice was emitted, talking about her useless husband. There was no Andrea there at all, except for some brief, muffled, faraway questions and the sound of the tissue box being moved across the table.

Good God, he thought, she spent all her life listening to
this
!
How could she stand it? The nineties went into a crate. He wasn't sure what to do with the tapes, it was probably illegal to burn them, releasing toxic fumes into the atmosphere, but where else could they go, other than on a landfill site? He had no idea how long a cassette tape would take to corrode.

The final decade of Andrea's life, and of her career as a psychotherapist, was the one he was most eager to discard. She had been, without either of them knowing it, sick and growing sicker. It was patients and their trivial anxieties that had prevented her from going for a routine screening. Which patient? he had asked her. But she said she couldn't remember. She knew she had canceled the appointment because someone had rung with a crisis and she had simply forgotten to make a new one, had ignored the slips of paper that came from the doctor, reminding her to call. Some stupid bitch had sat there, droning on about her self-inflicted or imaginary misfortunes, while his wife was being bombarded with disease. If he'd known her name, he would have punched her.

But also in the 2000 files were Grace's notes. Andrea had instructed him to hand them over to Grace in person. “That is, if she wants them, if not you can burn them with the rest, but it's up to her. And anything else you find.”

“What else
would
I find?” he had asked, puzzled.

After her father-in-law had died on the plane crossing the Atlantic, and Stephen had returned home to California to bury him in the plot alongside his mother, Andrea had thought that perhaps she should tell him Si's secret. She had discussed it with her supervisor. But what, Andrea asked, was the point? Then he would be left with a situation without resolution. The old man had not had the courage to face his own son, and she believed it was best to leave him with the comfort of illusions. Stephen admired his dad. Why should she take that away from him?

So the story was still there, in the files, and she was conscious that he might come across it, and then she too would be gone,
unable to help him. She wrote her supervisor's phone number on the file, and a note:
Is briefed. Call if necessary.

Stephen thumbed through the files, pausing at one with his own initials, SN, and inside a tab that said
Si Newman.
The sheets of paper inside were the notes that Andrea had made during the session, and stapled to them was a more detailed account of what he had told her. He went to the laptop and ran through the sound files.

Having mutilated and destroyed the sofa, he was obliged to sit on a metal upright chair in her office as he heard his father's voice telling a story to Andrea that neither of them had chosen to reveal to him. Listening to the account of the whacking of his grandfather, his father's confession that he might be a murderer and was anyway not what he seemed, that the stories of his lonely solitary journeys across America were only stories, fictions, lies, Stephen felt… Well, what do I feel? he asked himself.
She
would have tried to drag this out of me. She'd be nagging away,
What do you feel, Stephen?
The truth was, nothing, numbness.

When a person loses a sensation in a limb through paralysis and they touch it, it feels like they are touching someone else's leg, he knew this because he had made a documentary about it. When he probed his emotions now it was as if he was observing, with dispassionate detachment, the rage and hurt and betrayal of a stranger.

Numbness, which was replaced by a spasm of irritation, how
dare
the old man visit on his own son these outrages? Didn't he have enough to do, grieving the loss of his beloved wife, and she had indeed turned out to be his beloved, no faking that. Sweet Andrea with the carroty hair, the green velvet dress, the large eyes, the parted lips, the stink of patchouli oil, the blood on the sheets, the love of his life, there had been no other, nor would there be. She had left him alone for perpetuity, he had to deal with that.

Yet he might have never come to England, not applied for a Rhodes Scholarship, or been rejected, might never have got
into that stupid scheme of manufacturing tabs of acid and been discovered and sent down. Had he stayed in America he might have avoided the draft by doing his doctorate there and getting successive deferments. Who would he have been if he had stayed in the States? Not the husband of Andrea but of some unknown woman with different unknown children. And that wife would still be alive, he would not have chosen unwittingly a girl with a fatal flaw, a clock ticking inside her, down to her sixtieth birthday and then a black line drawn under.

He felt a spasm of longing for this other wife, the one he had never met and the children they had not had together. The sensation made him feel sick, dizzy with nausea. That she existed, somewhere in America, the girl he would have married had his father not sent him to sea, given him the taste for travel, and sent him off on the SS
United States
. He wondered who she had married, his girl, and whether they were happy or if he had been a no-good bum who beat her or left her, or if she had been the one who had done the leaving. Had been a two-timing bitch or a career woman who would have left any husband long behind.

Once, they had talked about an alternative society. Now he understood there were only alternative realities. He thought about his parents, how little he really knew about them. They both came with a big story, of how they arrived in America, the two immigrants, who started from scratch and built new lives as Americans. It was possible, this narrative told him, for anyone to be reborn, to commence a new identity. It said,
Believe in the future,
and he always had. That was their precious gift to him, his birthright.

He had been to Poland, seen the small town on the plain, but he had never thought to go to Cuba, partly because his mother had sworn she would not return until the man with beard was gone and her island was restored to what she thought of as the sweetness of the old days. But she was barely in her teens when she left, what would she have remembered?

I have spent my whole life trying to surge forward, he thought. I've tried to fulfill the destiny they gave me, to be a new son of America and always failing because I was trapped in Europe.

Perhaps Andrea and Grace were both right, that America and the whole idea of rebirth was an illusion. His past in the Los Angeles suburbs seemed now no less mythical to him than his father's stories of his determined orphan journey across the continent. There were no more soda fountains, no one walked to school, no one wore a poodle skirt like his sisters or went to Saturday movies.

But what he really could not get over was the sudden realization that for all the arrogance of his own generation, born to be young and stay young forever, their parents were simply far more interesting people than their children would ever be. Even Andrea's father, whom he had never met, was supposed to have had a war record, to have been a brave man, broken, Andrea guessed, by post-traumatic stress disorder.

And as for him, what had he ever done since he sailed the oceans on the SS
United States
? Not much. Worked in a doughnut-shaped building accumulating a pension and amassing equity in a house in a now-fashionable part of town (though its desirability was waning; everyone, he was told, was moving on to Notting Hill). A couple of his documentaries had been up for industry awards, but he had attended the dinner in black tie and waited for his name to be called out, prepared to bound to his feet and run to the stage with his speech in his jacket pocket, but it was always someone else's name. His early documentaries had been erased, the tape was needed for something else, the rest were never likely to be retransmitted, except maybe in far-flung parts of the world on cable stations, where you still found decades-old episodes of
I Love Lucy
and
Friends
broadcast in a never-ending loop.

Finally he found Grace's file, and the link to the sound file on the laptop. Was he supposed to read and listen to them? There had been no instructions to hand them over to her in a sealed envelope.

Down in the garden the bonfire was waiting. He had only to put a match to it and his wife's career would burn.

He sat down and began to read. A few pages in, he went into the house and rang Ivan.

Blond curls long gone, like disappearing soap bubbles, Ivan the butterball in his Paul Smith shirts and Crockett & Jones shoes, was rich, contented, still happily married against all predictions that he would be on his second or third trophy bride by now, childless, residing in a mansion on the other side of Upper Street whose vast rooms, with their show-off modern furniture imported from Italy, intimidated his old friends. But still the bumptious character of the days when they had sat in the Jericho garden smoking grass.

Grace spoke of him as if he were a caricature of himself, but to Stephen, Ivan was always the same person. He sat unselfconsciously patting and kneading his stomach as he talked, as if he were proud of his corpulence. Ivan didn't go to the gym, didn't jog, didn't eat lean protein, didn't worry about aches and pains, showed Stephen the first articles about Viagra and said, “Look what God has given us now!”

“Ivan,” Andrea said, “has the gift of happiness.”

“Anyone rich can be happy if they feel like it,” Stephen said. “I'd like to see Ivan struggle with a mortgage he can't afford.” But Ivan had investments, a guy in New York looked after them. The man was a genius, he said, his shares were always rising, though it was hard to get into his fund, you needed a personal recommendation.