Live a Little, page 6
* * *
In order to prove her point about Mrs. Beryl’s condescension to the exotic, Nastya turns up to work the following week in Moldovan national dress. Mrs. Beryl is going to rave about it, she tells Euphoria.
“How I look?” she asks her employer with a twirl.
“Like shit,” the Princess replies.
So that, Dear Diary, is Dear Albear, but before I get on to the Bs—in point of fact there were no Bs unless we count Baldwin, who kissed my hand when I was a young girl, and Blair, who kissed my cheek when I was an old woman—I must record my determination not to go out perplexed and petrified as Albear did. You get everything in some sort of order if you don’t want to end up howling. Keep a record of where it all is. Just in case. Stop it all slithering away.
What they call dementia, she has decided, is nothing but a failure to maintain a comprehensive filing system. And what they call losing your mind is forgetting to use it.
The more names desert me, the more I make up. Soon, like God, I will know no one except by the names I’ve given them. Dementievna I’ve conferred as a female patronymic on the Moldovan harlot who is paid to sit up all night in case I fall out of bed but is almost certainly performing sexual activities on her mobile phone the minute I turn out my light. It wouldn’t surprise me if Pen and Sandy turned out to be among her clients. “Now I taking off my girdle…”
That would excite my boys, given the frigid bitches they’ve married.
Nastier Dementievna…
So plausible I mightn’t have made her up after all. Either I’ve seen her business card lying about or she’s a Russian tennis player I’ve caught a frilly glimpse of on the floor-to-ceiling television Pen bought me for watching Wimbledon—anything to keep the old hag quiet. (A 52-inch television for every person over seventy in the country was his avowed ambition when he was Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions. No pension, just a television. Unless that was Sandy.)
Albear would have fallen for the slut. “Where is it, Dementievna darling? Where’s it gone?” And I don’t doubt she’d have shown him. I was never the right woman for him. But then he wasn’t the right man for me, if a right man for me existed. Someone who was rarely there is the closest I can get. Company only for the hours or minutes I needed it.
Everyone stays too long. A couple of great-grandchildren have just been to see me. Hoping to be remembered in my will I must presume, since they can’t be coming for the affection. Pen’s children’s children they must have been. Pen whom, if you believe me, I named after Pentheus, eaten alive by his mother. Sandy, as must be no less obvious, being short for Tisander who was murdered by Medea. These mothers! I belong to a long and proud line of filicides. If only I’d been born two thousand years earlier, which I very nearly was.
“Hello, Great-grandmama.”
Pen’s they must have been. I am no more a marvelling great-grandmama than I was a doting granny or caring (there’s a word I’d like to forget) mother, and would rather look away from any child than at it, but I took in enough of this pair through the back of my head to recognise that don’t-see/don’t-want-to-see expression in their eyes, the blind stare of the baby-righteous, looking down their noses at their deluded great-grandmama already, using their eyelids to bat away unpleasing visual information. Pen’s eyes to a T, and before him his father’s—the marooned Marxist Leninist whose plebeian vestiary it fell to me, as Hand Maiden of the Revolution, to launder. Funny, you never see a portrait of Marx in a vest. Your true revolutionary dresses like a dandy and is too vain of his appearance, as a rule, to turn his face from you, as Pen’s dad did, in the hope that when he looked again you’d be gone.
A tender lover notwithstanding, Pen’s dad, which wasn’t half a surprise. Deposited a baby in me sweetly, left it there as though by happy accident, and even helped, when he could get his union chums round to observe, with the associated chores. Eyes averted the whole time for fear of offence—receiving it, not giving it—but help’s still help in whatever form it comes.
Conservatively, no—Freudian slip—conversely, the father of Sandy, my High Tory Boy, stared his eyeballs out as he fired me into pregnancy, like a pilot looking down to see where his bomb had landed. Otherwise, now I come to think of it, he rarely took me in. Never saw what I was wearing. Never saw what I wasn’t wearing, come to that. He used his eyes for two activities only: driving and fornication. The rest of the time he might as well have been blind. So maybe I’m wrong about whose grandchildren have just visited me. The grandchildren of men—let’s leave it at that. Heirs to the alarms that shook their fathers and their grandfathers out of bed at night and made them run from everything with their eyes lowered.
Has this last hundred years been the worst ever for men? Too smug or too scared to look at anything, the lot of them, and I’m not sure even that distinction is worth making. Pen senior—what was his name?—could not stomach a contrary view on any subject, could not bear a person to so much as look as though he held a contrary view, but wasn’t that because he feared what anything contrary might reveal to him about himself? Terror. Terror is the only word for it. Terror of something else. And in woman, if they look at her, they know they’re going to meet the ultimate, finally unanswerable something else.
So it’s eyes down and plough on.
How old am I? I have authority, whatever my age. So don’t doubt me when I assert that there isn’t a man out there who can candidly and fearlessly meet a woman’s gaze, whether in the bedroom or out of it. Will I be up to it? they’re all thinking. Will I make it through? Will I be man enough? War, lovemaking, career—each one another test. Can I do this?
It would have been a kindness in every case to tell them No. It needn’t matter—I have absolutely no expectation of you—but No, you can’t.
I’ve heard it said that the Great War put paid to men.
It did.
* * *
—
MY FIRST SON was conceived on the day Britain declared war on Germany. I suspect many children were conceived that day. “I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received,” we listened to the undertaker who was our Prime Minister say, and went immediately back to bed. It was like jumping off a cliff and taking out a life insurance policy at the same time.
“If it’s a boy we’ll call it Neville,” my husband Harris said, mopping his brow.
“And if it’s a girl?”
“Nellie. But let’s hope to God it’s not a girl.”
“Why?”
“It’s too cruel a world for a girl.”
He was a sentimental man, Harris. “Soppy,” his mother had warned me. “You’ll have to wear the trousers.”
Harris was the headmaster of a primary school in Salford where I helped out sorting the children’s toys. We were only home that day because it was September 3—you can’t fault my long-term memory—and the school holidays weren’t over yet. “I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to the children,” he said.
“Our going back to bed?”
“Our going to war with Hitler.”
“Tell them we’re opposing evil with good,” I said.
He shook his head. “We’ll be killing people who aren’t all evil,” he told me.
As I say, a sentimental man. He was always buying me coats and scarves and wellingtons to protect me from the weather. “You’re so young and so fragile,” he said. “Sometimes I think of you as more of a daughter than a wife.” Yes, well. I was still a teenager. Like Hamlet’s father with Gertrude he would not beteem the winds of heaven visit my face too roughly. Does that mean I would go on to have an affair with his brother? We’ll come to that, if I remember to. If not, don’t despair. I’ll concoct something comparably méchant.
It was a boy and we did call him Neville. He looked a Neville from the off. You could imagine him in a morning suit similar to the one Chamberlain wore to broadcast the solemn news to the nation. The same moustache as well. And now my offspring talk to the nation in vests. God help us all if we have to go to war with them in charge.
Harris and Neville—my little world of men. In truth, though I was a chit of a girl, I was guardian to them both. Harris might have protected me from the weather but I protected him from everything else. When he went off to fight I did up his shirt, straightened his tie, put a pen in his pocket to write newsy letters to me with, and held him by the ears. “Be strong,” I said.
Tears shot from his eyes as though from two water pistols.
It was then that I realised for the first time how cruel it was for a man to have to be a man. There seemed to be nothing inside him. Just a liquid flow of feelings. The wrong sex had been chosen for the job.
I held him in my arms. “I’m not afraid for me,” he said, “I’m afraid for you and little Neville.”
He couldn’t imagine how we would get on without him though he’d never been much of a protector. I had to kill the rats and the spiders. I had to get out of bed carrying a shoe and shouting like a gang of navvies when a floorboard creaked in the night. He wasn’t much of a provider either. The little he earnt he didn’t know how to spend wisely. How many pairs of wellingtons did I need? How many cash books and ledgers into which he religiously wrote his name, his address, and the year, and then ignored? He kept a record of every stamp we bought but had no idea how much our rent was. The children at his school loved him because he was one of them—he had the same irresponsible meticulousness, biting his pencil over a problem and then running out to play. “Boys and girls,” was how he began each day’s assembly, and when he returned home he addressed me and the baby Neville in the same way. “Boys and girls…”
He was killed within a week of his arriving in Libya, unless it was the Lebanon, though he fancied he’d be safe there, fighting Italians rather than Germans. I think he thought it would be more of a singsong, an exchange of arias from popular operas rather than gunfire. But I knew in my heart he’d never survive wherever he was sent. They’d have been better sending Neville. I imagined him charging at the enemy, waving his rifle like a piece of chalk and shouting “Boys and girls, settle down.”
I can see him vividly now, more vividly than I see men for whom I had far stronger feelings, but he slipped out of my life with a terrible facility at the time. Just as memories of this morning do now. It was as though I’d been held upside down and he just fell out of the pockets of the trousers I’d worn for us both.
Harris. Was he thinking of Neville and me when he fell in battle? If so, what sense does it make that we have had so much life entirely unknown to him? Was he thinking that himself—that in time he would be as no one to either of us? Was he thinking his tears were just a waste of grief? Or was he thinking nothing, as I’ll be thinking nothing when the plates finally disconnect and fly off randomly into orbit? In which case, is oblivion a condition to be welcomed?
Lest we forget,
best we forget…
1939. Bloomers year. Incidentally, the outbreak of the Second World War. There is a point to war. It can put personal problems in perspective. For Shimi Carmelli it was the frozen snapshot of himself in his mother’s underwear that put the war in perspective.
It was Ephraim’s war, not Shimi’s. As soon as the reality of it dawned—a column of armoured vehicles passing through Stanmore and an old man with a Union Jack leaning out of his bedroom window to cheer them on—Ephraim enlisted. He made a wooden rifle out of an old broom handle and ran out onto Little Stanmore Common, pointing it at anything in the sky that could be taken for an enemy aircraft. His parents ordered him to stay inside, especially when smoke could be seen rising from the City to the south, and sirens warned of danger closer to home, but he was always able to find a way of getting out of the house, wearing his gas mask to frighten invaders, and spraying the night with anti-aircraft fire. Little Stanmore itself wasn’t an object of particular interest to the Luftwaffe but Hendon aerodrome, where Polish pilots trained, was worth taking a pop at, and when a German plane was reported as having come down in the vicinity of Hendon, Ephraim claimed responsibility and cut a notch in the lapel of his school blazer. “That’s another one,” he told his brother, who shrugged and walked away.
They argued about patriotism. Ephraim thought Shimi wasn’t doing enough for his country.
“Like you with your wooden rifle,” Shimi said. “Do me a favour.”
“At least I’m cheering the country up. When people see your face they think it might be better to lose.”
Was losing so terrible? Shimi wished no harm to other members of his family but for himself the idea of a German pilot singling out their house had much to recommend it. Fall, bombs, and destroy my shames.
* * *
—
“WE’LL NEVER SURVIVE this war,” Sonya told her husband. “I know how these things end.”
She feared the boys would be evacuated, but they weren’t. She feared Manolo would be called up, but he wasn’t. “Little Stanmore is as safe as Derbyshire,” Manolo insisted. “That’s why I brought you here.”
She nodded, as she always did at whatever Manolo told her. His words had magical properties. They reassured his wife so long as she could see them coming out of his mouth. But the moment he left her his words left her too. Derbyshire? How safe was Derbyshire?
Manolo would not be conscripted because the work he was doing was considered too important to the war effort. He had told her he was fixing motor cars for bigwigs but he hadn’t mentioned that the bigwigs were senior members of Fighter Command, which had set up its headquarters in Bentley Priory just a few miles away on Stanmore Common. He knew what she would say to that. If a bomb was going to fall up here, it would fall on Fighter Command, wouldn’t it? Yes, if you took the gloomy view. No, if you were Manolo Carmelli.
When the local school closed, first because of teacher shortage, then because Anderson shelters had to be built in the playground, then because no one remembered to reopen it, Sonya undertook to teach her boys herself, but she didn’t get beyond borrowing textbooks, opening them on the kitchen table, and leaving them there. The family ate their supper around them. So it was an education of sorts—dining within the purlieus of knowledge. Otherwise, she would sit for hours on the straw sofa, by the window from which nothing could be seen, with her knees drawn up to her chin, enshrouded in a nest of antique babushka shawls and quilts, holding an embroidered folk-art handkerchief to her mouth, pretending to read, but in reality listening out for bombers. With Manolo fixing cars for Fighter Command and Ephraim busy shooting down planes, she had only Shimi for company. They could hear each other breathe. Another mother might have shooed the morose boy out to help the war effort like his younger brother, but Shimi’s silent presence suited her lowness of spirits. “He’s my fault,” she sometimes mused, but like him she was too lonely to think about what wasn’t her for long.
So they sat, in a crossfire of mutual guilt, he on the floor, supported by his elbows, engrossed in the markings on a ceramic phrenology bust which his father’s brother Raffi, an extrovert with a Pashtun’s complexion and an English wing commander’s moustache, had given him for his birthday. This he would compare with his own head by taking constant measurements of them both. When he thought his mother wasn’t looking at him he would stop what he was doing and look at her. Who was she? Yes, yes, his mother, but what did that mean? He had inherited her drooping horse face, with those great blank spaces beneath the eyes, but he couldn’t trace himself back to her or see anything about her to which he could feel bonded or attached.
He was sure she didn’t know what he’d done. His father hadn’t told her. He began to wish she did know. He could have said sorry and she could have said he had nothing to be sorry for. All secrecy did was breed more guilt.
As it was, he winced in her embrace, uncertain whether the smell that overpowered him with its powdery sweetness was her, the mouldering Russian fabrics, the peasant scarves and crocheted shawls she wore, or the mouldering thing that was him.
He’d invaded her—that was his sin. He’d invaded the sacred privacy of her marriage, and his punishment was to know more about her than it was right for him to know. There are some places a son should never go.
And never expect to return from? That was the big question he wanted an answer to.
Tell me I’m wrong, Ma. Tell me it was nothing.
But she didn’t know what he’d done or what he was going through. Yes, his nature was sullen and defeated. But so was hers.
No wonder his father couldn’t look at him. One flinching person in his life was enough. Thank God for Ephraim.
* * *
—
UNCLE RAFFI’S GIFT turned out to be a brainwave. Shimi borrowed books on phrenology from the local library and fingered his own head a hundred times a day, intent on discovering where secretiveness or mimicry or hope were to be found, or whether some abnormality in the size of his brain, detectable on the uneven surface of his skull, might account for the deviancies of his personality.
Soon he began to make crayon portraits of the cranium. Anyone not knowing what he was doing might have taken them to be maps of Africa, the neural pathways like great rivers dividing the continent, the cranial sinuses flowing beyond the confines of the skull like jungle vegetation gone mad.
These interconnecting rivers were not based on science. Phrenology didn’t look inside the brain, but assumed that whatever it was up to showed in the configuration of the cranium. Shimi’s crayon portraits were similarly externalisations of inner workings. It was art, not science. What the skull denoted confirmed what he knew to be true of those terrible caverns below the skull. So why did he go on feeling for bumps and craters? Was it a wild hope that in the act of exploration he would discover a pathway to another, better him? Somewhere, between the selfish propensities and the moral sentiments, the great cleansing river of expiation?
