How It All Began (30 page)

S
o that was the story. These have been the stories: of Charlotte, of Rose and Gerry, of Anton, of Jeremy and Stella, of Marion, of Henry, Mark, of all of them. The stories so capriciously triggered because something happened to Charlotte in the street one day. But of course this is not the end of the story, the stories. An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does not end, and stories march in step with time. Equally, chaos theory does not assume an ending; the ripple effect goes on, and on. These stories do not end, but they spin away from one another, each on its own course.

Charlotte is home. Grateful to Rose and Gerry; deeply grateful to be once more her own woman. She is mobile, if precarious, and there is Elena from the Czech Republic who comes in daily to minister, to shop, to do household chores.

Home, alone, she picks up the threads. Pain is contained, corralled, though breaking out from time to time. Friends and neighbors visit, she is not really alone, the world is all around, she lives in an insistent present. But her thoughts are often of the past. That evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion of data on which you depend—without it you would not be
yourself. Impossible to share, and no one else could view it anyway. The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system. We remember in shreds, the tattered faulty contents of the mind. Life has added up to this: seventy-seven moth-eaten years.

Jennifer next door has brought her baby around to be shown off to Charlotte—sitting up now, the baby, cooing, smiling. The baby has no past, she lives from emotion to emotion, a sliding present—now I’m happy, now I’m not, now I’m hungry, now I’ll sleep. But she is learning: hot, cold, sweet, sour, nice, nasty. Her hands learn; her eyes learn; her brain learns. This is called experience, and there is a whole mountain of it to climb, she is on the foothills, striving away; presently she will indeed start to acquire a past, a fledgling past, something that teases in her head. She will have, in time, a yesterday—eventually, last month, last year.

The baby bashes together two plastic bricks. Her mother talks to Charlotte.

“So how
are
you? If there’s anything you need do please let us know.”

“I’m fine,” says Charlotte. “And thanks, I will.”

She asks to hold the baby, and enjoys the feel of her solid little body, new-minted, ready to grow and to go. She thinks of her own, which is time visible. She is walking proof that time is real, time exists, she is a demonstration of the power of time.

And this is a story that will indeed end. But not for a while, she thinks, not for a while.

Marion Clark’s marriage to Nigel Davidson was an appropriately discreet affair, given the circumstances—he not that long a widower, neither of them spring chickens—but was managed with a certain panache by Laura. The warehouse was decked out for the reception, the Italian restaurant round the corner took on the catering, and did a grand job.

For Marion, it was a quietly blissful day. She had never imagined
that she would marry again; this had stolen up on her, ambushed her, and she was entirely happy. The little house would now be sold, as she and Nigel would look for something larger.

She had sent Jeremy an e-mail, explaining what had happened, but received no reply. And truth to tell she did not much think of Jeremy; he seemed now an interlude, an aberration even. And, surprisingly perhaps, she thought even less of George Harrington, who could be said to be a factor in her present joy.

And as for Harrington himself, somewhere in a prison cell, he sits amid a welter of papers, immersed in the preparation of the arguments that will convince a court of his innocence. Or will not, as the case may be.

It would be absurd to say that Jeremy and Stella lived happily ever after. They settled back into their marriage and did their best with it. Stella tried hard not to go off the rails quite so often, and managed with just the occasional wobbly. Jeremy put Marion out of his mind (not difficult, after that e-mail—
married?
Well, sod off then, darling) and determined on fidelity and making lots of money. None of this quite came off; in due course there would be a girl he ran across at an auction, and a rather delightful customer, and one or two other distractions, while the business took a nasty lurch when the bank began to talk really tough, requiring Jeremy’s utmost skill and ingenuity to get them off the hook. Money was lost rather than made, but there you go, and anyway he was wondering about a move to the Cotswolds—reclamation alongside a guy who he’d met who ran a garden center and bistro, nice little enclave they could be.

Paul Newsome’s bill was impressive.

Mark’s article caused a considerable stir, in the backwater of historical scholarship. The Bellamy/Carter controversy simmered on for months, with Mark giving a judicious poke every now and then to ensure that his name remained prominent—making a new point, flourishing some
further evidence. In the meantime, he got on with his own work, while slowly—very slowly—assembling Henry’s archive: “One cannot rush things, with material of this importance.” And then there could be the library . . . were further funding required.

In the event, Mark landed a job rather sooner than he had anticipated. A lectureship at Bristol, which would not suit for long but could be used as a stepping stone. And so it would go. He never did become a vice-chancellor—the admin would drive one mad—but a few well received publications and some assiduously cultivated contacts propelled him into a distinguished professorial chair at an early age. He always remembered Henry with affection.

Henry devoted himself to My Memoirs for some years to come. The pages piled up, duly printed out by Rose, who, as time went on, perceived more and more repetitions, confusions, digressions. “I can’t see anyone publishing this,” she told Charlotte. “I mean, I’m no expert, but even I can see it just doesn’t cut the mustard. He’s going to be devastated, poor old boy, when people start saying, no thanks. What do I do?” “Just keep him at it,” Charlotte advised. And so Rose commenced a strategy of procrastination by stealth, a marriage of encouragement and cautious obstruction, whereby enthusiasm was followed by proposals for a bit more here, a bit more there. Henry took to reading aloud to her his daily offering, and Rose would comment accordingly. This worked very well: “I agree,” said Henry. “One mustn’t rush this. Possibly a seminal work, though I say so myself.” The long shadow of Mark was helpful here, reinforcing self-belief. And so Henry wrote, and wrote, and time went by, until at last he wrote rather less, and took to reading and rereading in a desultory way, and eventually ceased to do even that, and Rose saw that the danger had passed.

Long before that—soon after Charlotte returned home—in Rose and Gerry’s garden the cat died. Gerry found her under the hedge. She had been missing overnight, and he had been concerned—off her food
for a while now, something not right. He went into the house for something to wrap the little body before digging a hole, found Rose sitting in the kitchen, doing nothing, with that abstracted look, and told her what had happened. She stared at him, and then, to his astonishment, burst into tears.

Rose sat at the kitchen table, weeping. She wept and wept, and Gerry put his arm round her: “I didn’t realize you were so fond of her, Rose.” Rose seemed to shake her head, reached blindly in her bag for a tissue, and went on crying. Gerry sat beside her. Presently she reached out and laid her hand on his knee, and they sat there for a long time, in silence, with Gerry both moved and perplexed, until at last Rose was apparently all cried out, and he suggested a cup of tea.

At Barnsbury Accountants his line manager is well pleased with the new appointment. Couple of months now, and he’s doing fine. Amazing, some of these Eastern Europeans, how they apply themselves, adapt. The occasional difficulty with the language, but nothing to get too bothered about, and when it comes to the nuts and bolts of the job, no problem. Nice guy, too.

The boys hold a farewell party for the uncle, who is moving into his flat. Quite a binge—delivery of pizzas, plenty of booze. Several of the boys get nicely wasted, including Anton’s nephew. Anton is more abstemious—genial enough, but perhaps a bit preoccupied. The boys tease him: “The uncle is thinking in numbers already. He’s in his classy office now. He wants to talk to a computer, not to us. Come on, Uncle, we’ve got some vodka, specially for you.”

Anton’s flat is above a newsagent that is run by an Asian couple with whom he is on excellent terms. The wife brings up a savory offering in a plastic container from time to time, all smiles. Her husband is British born, son of Ugandan Asians thrown out by Amin, immigrants twice over, but he is a Londoner to the core. The wife is from Bradford, she explains, so she has had to adapt to down here. Anton can understand all this; identify, up to a point.

The flat is something of a haven. There is traffic noise, and the
decor leaves much to be desired, but perhaps he will do something about that, in time. He can cook for himself, he has the choice of what to watch on television (and he begins to follow, to become addicted to a sitcom, to be absorbed in a documentary). He has arranged his possessions—the table for the computer, the shelf for his books. The dictionary stands apart, sacrosanct. He reads now, in the evenings, grateful for the solitude and the quiet. Eat, watch television, read—reaching frequently for the dictionary. He is occupied, but every now and then something shunts these occupations aside, something more insistent; he sits staring at nothing, he is somewhere else, another place, another time.

He has bought some new clothes. A couple of suits for the office. Good shirts. A sweater. Respectable shoes—throw away those that did duty on the building site.

But he still wears, mostly, the black leather jacket. In the pocket, there is an acorn. His fingers reach for it daily. It will be there for a long time to come.

And what of the mugger? The catalyst, he or she who set everything off, who sent them all on their way.

The delinquent—fourteen years old, male, as it happens, despite equal opportunities—was himself set upon almost immediately by a hostile gang and relieved of the £67.27, which were distributed among the gang membership and disposed of within the hour. The delinquent was much annoyed at his loss, but recovered within a day or two; so it goes. Beyond him, unknown and of no interest, he had left Charlotte on her crutches, the embattled Daltons, Henry in his humiliation, Marion, Rose, Anton . . . Demonstrating that no man is an island, even a fourteen-year-old with behavioral problems.