The Accidental (9 page)

Curiouser and curiouser, as the paedophilic mathematician wrote in his book for children, Dr Michael Smart noted cleverly to himself.

But actually it was a little disturbing that all he could picture her doing was sitting there, opposite him, on this train. That was possible. That was perfectly possible. There she was. She was looking out of the train window. She was examining her nails. She was examining the ends of her hair. She was reading a book in a language he didn’t know.

He thought about how those two girls in the tent, when he was a boy, sat him down between them, fed him the minced meat and onion they’d fried on their blue-flamed primus stove and ignored him, leaving him dozing against them with his book open at page one in front of him, warm in their body heat as they talked to each other over the top of his head in a language he didn’t recognize any of the words of.

Epiphany! dear God it was an epiphany! the empty seat filled with nothing but goodness was a holy moment! and on a filthy train crossing the filthy fens!

But here was a new truth for Dr Michael Smart–because who in the world gave a damn, when he was really alive, like this, about ‘epiphany’, in other words about what things were called, about devices and conceits and rules and the boundaries of genres, the learned chronologies, the sorted and given definitions of things? Now he had finally understood, now he knew for the first time, exactly what it meant, what the Joyce and the droney old bore of a Woolf and the Yeats and the Roth and the Larkin, the Hemingway, the authentic post-war working-class voices, the Browning, the Eliot, the Dickens and the who else, William Thackeray, Monsieur Apollinaire, Thomas Mann, old Will Shakescene, Dylan Thomas drunk and dead and forever young and easy under the appleboughs, and all of them, all the others, and every page he had ever read, every exegesis he had ever exegesed (was that even a word? who cared? it was a word now, wasn’t it?) had been about.

This.

He had sat opposite her at supper. She looked the kind of girl, no, the kind of good full adult woman, that you’d pick up in a car on the road and give a lift to the next village, then she’d get out of your car and wave goodbye and you’d never see her again, but you’d never forget it.

She looked like the dishevelled, flower-strewn girl in Botticelli’s Spring.

He had got off the train surprised at himself. He had stood for a moment in the sun. He had stood watching simple sunlight glinting off his car in the station car park. He had felt strange, different, shiny under his clothes, so much so that on his way home he had begun to think he should maybe take an antihistamine. When he got home the Volvo was still in the drive. He parked his car alongside it. He walked round the side of the house. She was lying on her front in the garden examining something, like a girl. When he saw her his heart was a wing in the air.

He had made supper. He had made an excellent supper. Is she staying for supper? he’d asked Eve when she came in. I’ve no idea, Eve said, have you asked her to? He’d called to her in the garden, where she was lying on the grass with Astrid. Would she like to stay for supper? Astrid, sweet Astrid, called back that she would. Now she had pushed her chair back and left the table, gone upstairs, and Michael Smart had opened his eyes into what he knew was light, like a coma patient after years of senseless dark. He could see Eve. He could see Astrid. He could see his own hands like he’d never seen them. He had seen the light. He was the light. He had been lit, struck, like a match. He had been enlightened. He was photosynthetic; he had grown green. He was leafy and new. He looked around him and everything he saw shone with life. The glass. The spoon. His own hands. He held them up. They floated. He was floating, he hovered in air here on this chair. He was a defiance of gravity. He was fiery, full of fire, full of a new and uncorrupted fuel. He picked up his glass again. Look at it. It had been shaped in an intense heat. It was miraculous, this ordinary glass. He was it. He was this glass. He was that spoon, those spoons there. He knew the glassiness of glass and the shining spooniness of spoon. He was the table, he was the walls of this room, he was the food he was about to prepare, he was what she’d eat, sitting opposite him, looking straight through him.

She had ignored him over supper.

She had ignored him the whole time.

She had sat opposite him as if he wasn’t there. He may as well himself have been an empty chair opposite her, a space, an innocent nothing. But he had made her car start. He had made an excellent supper. He would make warmed pears in hot chocolate sauce and then he would watch her cut with the edge of her spoon, scoop it up, put her spoon in her mouth and chew and swallow something that tasted very good indeed, and scoop more food into her spoon and open her mouth for the spoon again.

Any minute now she would step back through the door into the room.

There she was now, in the doorway.

Oh

the beginning was keeping her awake. She by far preferred the edit, the end, where the work in the dark was over and you could cut and cut until you saw the true shape of things emerge.

Where was Eve, exactly?
Eve was lying in bed in this too-dark too-hot room, completely awake in the middle of the night, next to Michael completely asleep with his head under his pillow.

No other reason she couldn’t sleep?
No.

Honestly?
Well. That girl of Michael’s was a little distracting.

What girl?
The girl who had had the effrontery to turn up at their holiday house, eat their food, charm Eve’s children, tell what Eve suspected was one of the most blatant packs of lies she had ever witnessed anyone straight-facedly tell. The girl who, at the end of the (actually rather pleasant) evening, for no reason at all, had taken Eve by the shoulders and shaken her hard.

She had what?
She had physically shaken Eve and then she had stepped back, opened the front door, said a cheerful goodnight, shut the door behind her and gone out to sleep under the stars (well, actually under the roof of a Volvo parked in the drive, to be more measured about it).

She had shaken Eve?
Yes. Outrageous.

Why had she shaken Eve like that?
For no reason at all. For no reason Eve could think of. Eve had absolutely no idea.

Who was the girl?
She was something to do with Michael.

How was Eve right now?
She was very very awake.

Was it a little bit too dark in this holiday house?
Yes. It was unnaturally dark for summer. The windows of this house were far too small. The curtains were far too thick.

In what way was the girl ‘something to do with Michael’?
She was clearly his latest ‘student’.

Was Michael pretending she wasn’t?
Naturally he was:

Michael: (
already in bed, to Eve, as she takes off her clothes and gets ready for bed too
) How did it all go?

Eve: How did all what go?

Michael: What kind of questions did she ask you? Eve: Did who ask me?

Michael: What’s her name. Amber. Were they good ones?

Eve: (
deciding not to mention the humiliation of being shaken half an hour ago in the hall
) How do you mean, exactly?

Michael: You know. Genuine. Was she good? Is she clever? She seems quite clever.

Eve: Well you should know.

Michael: How do you mean?

Eve: Well, she’s one of yours.

Michael: One of my what?

Eve: Your students.

Michael: No she isn’t.

Eve: Ah. Right.

Michael: (
turning over
) She’s here to do some kind of Genuine interview, isn’t she?

What is the latest publication sensation to take the literary world by storm?
It’s the Genuine Article Series from Jupiter Press, a series of ‘autobiotruefictinterviews’ created by Eve Smart (42), who hit upon the original concept eight years ago when she published Genuine Article 1: The Story of Clara Skinner, a profile of real-life London barmaid Clara Skinner killed in the Blitz at the age of 38. (Other Genuine Articles feature an Italian POW, a cinema usherette, a fighter pilot and an infant evacuee.) Excitement over her most recent Genuine Article, The Story of Ilse Silber, has galvanized the former independent Jupiter Press, whose usual print-runs average five thousand and who have sold nearly forty thousand this spring alone of Silber and seen demand for the previous volumes rocket (one of the reasons for the spotlight purchase earlier this year of small press Jupiter by multi-conglomerate HarperCollins). ‘It certainly caught us out,’ says Amanda Farley-Brown, at only twenty-seven currently chief commissioning editor at Jupiter Press. ‘We are still reeling. We can’t believe our luck. We are crossing our fingers that Richard and Judy will feature a Genuine.’

What are these books about?
Each takes the ordinary life of a living person who died before his or her time in the Second World War and gives him or her a voice–but a voice that tells his or her story as if he or she had lived on. ‘I let them tell the story of an alternative aftermath–the story of how things could have been,’ says Smart.

What’s so new about these books?
Each of the slim volumes is written in Question & Answer format. The ‘speaker’ in The Story of Ilse Silber, a German-born woman, secretly Jewish but outwardly a good Nazi mother even awarded the special Mother’s Iron Cross by Hitler for giving birth to seven children (all of whom subsequently perished in allied bombing raids), is asked to describe the moment of her real-life death when her clothes caught fire in heavy shelling and she threw herself into the Wuppertal river. With the help of Smart’s questions she goes on posthumously to describe what happened when she dragged herself out of the river, dried herself off, healed her burns with the help of a local farmer and carried on with life for another thirty years.

Why the Q&A gimmick?
‘It’s not a gimmick. Every question has an answer,’ says Smart.

Don’t living relatives have something to say about Smart digging up their dead?
‘Usually relatives are delighted. They feel it is very positive attention,’ says Smart. ‘I always make it clear that the Genuine Articles are first and foremost fictionalization. But fiction has the unique power of revealing something true.’

Have the critics finally caught on to Smart’s smartness?
‘Ingenious and moving’ (Times). ‘A book which makes the metaphysical as much part of the everyday as a teacup on a saucer on a scullery table in the year 1957’ (Telegraph). ‘Brilliant, profoundly atoning. A deeply assuaging read’ (Guardian).

Is this ecstatic reception unanimous?
‘When will writers and readers finally stop hanging around mendacious glorified stories of a war which may as well by now have happened planets away from this one? Smart’s Genuine Articles are a prime example of our shameful attraction to anything that lets us feel both fake-guilty and morally justified. No more of this murky self-indulgence. We need stories about now, not more peddled old nonsense about then’ (Independent).

What’s next?
Speculations about whether Smart will seek a more lucrative publishing deal are rife; meanwhile, is she tucked away working on Genuine Article number 7? Who will she resurrect this time? Only Smart knows.

What does Eve Smart (
42
) know?
God only knows.

Where was Eve Smart (
42
) right now?
Lying next to Michael in bed in an insalubrious holiday house in Norfolk.

No, I mean where was she with her next project?
Please don’t ask.

Why?
She was as useless as a blunt pencil on the floor of the ‘elegant summerhouse with internet connection-point’ in the ‘mature garden’ of this ‘Tudor Farmhouse next to picturesque village on the Norfolk Broads’. The advert should have read ‘1930s swindle of a summer let off the Norfolk B roads, next to a near-slum full of houses that look like the kind on old council estates’. Someone had stuck slices of old railway sleeper across the ceilings throughout this house. Mock Tudor all right. Eve laughed, but to herself, so as not to wake him.

Why?
Partly because she genuinely didn’t want to disturb him and partly because she didn’t want to have to have sex again. He was asleep with one of the pillows he’d brought from home over his head.

Why did he bring pillows?
He was often allergic to pillows that weren’t his own. Other than that he didn’t find sleeping difficult. He didn’t find beginning anything new difficult either. He was always ‘beginning’ something else, something new.

Why those little ironic ‘ ’?
Eve chose not to answer that question.

What was wrong with the village?
Eve had imagined a picturesque place of big comfortable houses with recording studios in their barns, people summering on decking overlooking Norfolk’s legendary big open skies. Norfolk did have very nice skies. But one of the village’s two shops had a skull in its window with a plastic rat stuck in its eyehole.

Why didn’t they leave?
Eve had paid up front.

Why were they here, exactly?
Break from routine. Change of scene.

Why else?
To get away from 1. dead people’s relations phoning and emailing all the time to agree or disagree or demand attention or money; 2. all the pitiful letters, calls and emails from people all over the country desperate for her to choose their dead relations to be brought back to life in her next book and 3. people from Jupiter phoning several times a week asking her how and where the book was.

How and where was the book?
Please don’t ask this.

Wasn’t she working on it?
Every night at six she came out of the shed, went back into the main house and changed, and ate as if a day’s work had been done and everybody’s summer wasn’t being wasted in a Norfolk hell-hole. Today Astrid had come over the grass rather than up the gravel so Eve hadn’t heard her, had only just seen the shadow cross the window and only just managed to get up off the floor and on to the old chair at the desk to make a noise at the keyboards of the off laptop. After Astrid had gone Eve had stared at the blank screen. Calm. Measured.