We Had It So Good (19 page)

Marianne's finger spun the sphere, round and round it went. Stephen showed her about why there was night and why there was day, and using her own body, why the moon waxed and waned.

When she was grown up, aged thirteen and taking the bus every day to school in Highgate in her shit-brown uniform, she would take pictures of people, and later, she would walk part of the way home so she could photograph interesting events far from her own neighborhood. She photographed a woman smacking a little boy
in a sweet shop because he was naughty, and an old lady with a big bump on her back, and two young men walking along licking ice-cream cones, which made her laugh, and a man with a bunch of flowers, and a woman sitting on the pavement screaming, and a policeman whose head was buried under a heavy hat burnished with a silver badge. She never took any photos that did not have people in them.

One day she saw Ralph sitting on a bench in Highbury Fields. He always dresses very neatly, she thought, he always has a tie and a tweed jacket and lace-up shoes. Daddy almost never wears a tie and his lace-up shoes aren't real shoes. They are white and you can't polish them with a brush and a cloth.

He doesn't see me. I'm invisible. She raised her camera to her eye. Ralph could be portrait or landscape, words she did not yet know, but she had to decide. A blackbird with its yellow eye hopped about his feet. The autumn leaves were blowing around in a light breeze. It had snowed here once, she had seen it, she had been taken out to make a snowman.

Ralph's hands lay in his lap. The blackbird pecked at something between his shoes. Marianne decided on her picture and took it. When it was developed she could see that he was smiling, a little bit. He's so peaceful, she thought. That's what death must be, it comes and visits you on a bench and leaves you with a smile and a blackbird that isn't afraid of you anymore.

Ralph's rooms became Stephen's study. The house, as Andrea had hoped, was all theirs.

Marianne's room was the place where she spent hours looking at her pictures, eating food she had bought and hidden in her pockets, on the way home from school.

G
race is coming! Finally, after years of being a ghost, Grace is returning. Where from? No one knows. Postmarks indicate only that she has passed through a place. It was Indochina, but lately there have been a number of letters from Paris.

These letters are unvaried in their content, amusing pen-portraits of the people she has met, just a paragraph long, sometimes a drawing of a face in the margin of the aerogram. Several lines on her depression and anger, culminating in her desire to leave. Wherever she is, she doesn't like it, until she's long gone, and then she looks back with nostalgia: I was so happy in Saigon. But when confronted with the evidence of her
unhappiness,
she sneers, “What, are you an accountant of happiness now?”

The letters Andrea wrote back to her received a reply only occasionally, because Grace had usually moved on before she got them. Her capacity to survive on very little money since her father stopped making intermittent deposits to her bank account was one of her greatest accomplishments, Andrea thought. She lived like a saint, like Mother Teresa. Her diet consisted of the simplest foods and she made all her own clothes, usually remodeling the discarded garments of others. She traveled by the cheapest means and found jobs when she reached her destination. She took English-language students, she worked occasionally in restaurants, she once directed
the decoration of a house in Nice; momentously, she had a job as a set decorator on a film. Andrea had not seen it. She did not know if it had ever been released. The plot, explained to her, was unintelligible.

“My godmother is coming to see me,” Marianne boasted at school. She had grown a great deal both in height and weight since puberty, heavy around the shoulders with a large bust and her black hair scraped back into an unbecoming topknot. Ivan had bought her a basic Pentax and Andrea found a cupboard in the house where she could establish a simple darkroom. A large photo of Ralph, finally at rest on the bench at Highbury Fields (in perfect focus, Marianne noticed with pleasure), hung framed in the entrance hall. The blackbird was caught too, pecking between his shoes. Stephen and Andrea thought it was gruesome but how did anyone
know
he was dead? Marianne insisted. He was clearly just sleeping the long sleep.

Twenty years ago today, Stephen and Andrea had walked up Little Clarendon Street, Andrea with a flower in her hand, to the register office, with Ivan and John Baines. How many marriages conducted that day still stuck? It would be interesting to find out, Andrea thought. Theirs had been the least likely to survive, yet it had.

She stood in the florist's surrounded by irises, roses, snapdragons, lilies, baby's breath, pinks. The flowers seemed to be crying,
Choose me
. She wanted a centerpiece, she needed strong heads that would not wilt. They were arranged along the wall in massed abundance, as if you could step through the vases into a garden. She looked up to see a slim, confident woman in her early forties surrounded by blossoms.

What happened to me? she asked herself. Where did this self-assurance come from?

She considered the possibilities. The career, the success (not great, she was not a household name, but she had a full client list).
Marriage, certainly: the continuity of it, the accomplishment of surviving for two decades in the company of another person who often seemed like a complete stranger when she saw him typing at his computer, and then as familiar as a sock when he raised his bar of chocolate to his lips. The children: they change you. They redraw all the horizons.

Many of her clients were single women in their forties who had never managed, as one had said, “to close the deal.” She tried to tell them that marriage was not one long blissed-out romantic movie, but she knew that she preferred marriage, however imperfect, to their microwave meals for one. She felt like a hypocrite when she suggested that they mourn for their loss of relationships, accept their single fate and move on. She herself could never live with it.

Thirteen people, not including the children who would join them for dessert, were to sit down for Saturday lunch at the oak dining table to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. Even Grace was coming. She had consented to return to hateful London.

Marianne came home from school.

“Has Grace arrived yet?”

“You would know if Grace was here,” said her father, “because there would be a contemptuous expression in the room.”

She arrived late the next morning, only an hour before the first guests, walked silently up the stairs as Andrea showed her the masterpiece, a whole house restored and redecorated.

“If I was living here I'd knock down all the walls and make huge rooms separated by Japanese screens,” Grace said, looking around. “The light would be amazing. These Georgian houses are really poky.”

“That wouldn't have worked for children's bedtimes and my patients.”

“Children will sleep when they want to sleep.”

“Like you'd know,” said Stephen.

The sun drizzled through the French windows. Shelves of books
reached to the ceiling. Arrayed in lines, the knives, forks and spoons were all shining in the summer noon, radiating out from the empty waiting plates like the place settings on the first-class decks of a transatlantic liner. White, folded linen napkins lay by each one. I have achieved a form of first-class living, Stephen thought. He had got used to his life. It had settled on him lightly, like a snowfall in the night.

Above them, the floors reached up and up to Max's room, where he was noiselessly practicing his magic act for a performance he had been persuaded to give after lunch.

Marianne, at seventeen, had no show-off party piece, but she did not mind her fourteen-year-old brother being the star. When she returned home from the library at dessert time (she had observed three kinds of cake waiting in the kitchen), she would make adult conversation with Ivan and his wife, Simone, the soap star, who played what Ivan called a gangster's moll, an idea that made him laugh so much he wiped the tears from his eyes when she was onscreen. And yet she was in the newspapers all the time, often on the front page.

People are so incredibly stupid, Marianne thought. Looking at the passengers on the bus,
anyone
was more interesting than Simone, who kept her hair held back from her smooth wide forehead in a black velvet Alice band. Your eyes slid all over Simone's face, unable to get any purchase on it. The man across the aisle had such a hooked nose, it stood out like a gargoyle from above his little mouth. Marianne could stare at him all day. But Simone was kind and had a throaty laugh (identifiable by twenty million people) and did not take herself or her career seriously. “It's just a ride,” she said, “and rides never last very long, do they, darling?”

What am I doing here? thought Grace, sitting in front of her plate of prosciutto and melon. Who are these people? What do they have to be so smug about? Their opinions were secondhand and second-rate. No, third-rate. No one had had an interesting
thought in their lives. Their mouths opened and closed like fish and only bubbles came out.

Everyone ate, they dabbed their mouths with white napkins, they spilt wine on the tablecloth, they knocked over salt and dropped meringue on the floor. The poached salmon was gone. The salads, the breads had all been finished. The centerpiece of peach-colored rosebuds was wilting. The serving dishes contained the broken remains of what was left, a smear of mayonnaise marked the tablecloth, bread crumbs had fallen from the bread board and the plates had been pushed away. A few dropped petals lay among the green beans with almonds.

“Look at this,” said Andrea, the table extending away from her and toward her husband seated at the other end. “If I picked this table up exactly as it is and took it to a gallery and said it's an installation called
Has Everybody Had Enough,
would anyone be taken in? Is it art?”

“If a dealer said it was art, then it would be art,” said Ivan.

“So art has no inherent properties of its own?” asked Stephen. “That's what I always thought.”

“He's just being cynical,” said Amy, second wife of Nick, meeting the bumptious Ivan for only the third time and unsure whether she liked him or not. “Art has been contaminated by advertising, everything has. When Charles Saatchi entered the art market, art was finished. He has the soul of a salesman, a man who makes us want things we don't need. I'm sorry if that sounds like a cliché but it's true.”

“Going on holiday this year?” Ivan asked, winking at Stephen.

“Yes, next month.”

“And where are you going?”

“A
gîte
near Bordeaux, it's actually an old mill, not far from the village, and the mill wheel is still working in the stream. It's amazing to get out of London to a simpler life, even if it's only for ten days.”

“And how did you book it?”

“There was a small ad in the back of the
Sunday Times
magazine.”

“An
advertisement
? So you are susceptible to advertising?”

“For heaven's sake, that's not the same thing at all.”

“Really? It's exactly the same thing, it's just that you are a snob. More than half of the advertising in the Sunday
Times
magazine comes from classifieds, but you perceive them not to be advertising but individual things for discerning people like yourself.”

“Come off it, Ivan, you sell people toothpaste and washing powder and bog roll,” said Grace. Grinning, smirking yuppies bobbed their heads up and down.
This fucking country,
she thought.

(Back in Harlem the transitory gardens would be reemerging, the tomato seeds rushing up from below the earth, threatening the foundations of the buildings that had been raised on top of them. Under London there are fields and rivers. What is under this house? Suppressed rivers. Let them come, let them rise up and overwhelm fucking Islington.)

“And can you do without toothpaste and washing powder and toilet paper? Is there anyone around this table who doesn't use any of these products? Or do you make your own soap and your own shampoo?”

“No, I don't make my own soap, but in the Third World they probably do,” said Amy, turning to Grace and nodding, incorrectly perceiving her as an ally. Grace ignored her.

“In the Third World, as you call it, they would far rather have a shampoo made by L'Oréal than wash their hair with bananas. Why do you think L'Oréal sells all over Africa?”

“Because you've forced them to believe L'Oréal is a superior product,” Amy said.

“That's because it is. Have you actually tried washing your hair with bananas?”

“Oh, do stop talking about bananas. The point is, how can a grown man earn a living persuading us to buy Bold rather than Persil?”

“Because they're different. It's all in the name. They may seem the same to you but few people use them interchangeably. In fact, I'm prepared to bet that you're brand loyal. You pick up the same packet of soap powder every time.”

“Yes, of course I do. I'm not going to agonize over which powder to buy. I don't want to have to think about it because they
are
all the same.”

“No, they are not. They have personalities, as the people round this table do. You've got your powerful, brash Bold, which will clean a car mechanic's overalls, you've got your Fairy, which is nice and soft, to wash baby things and delicates, and then there's your Persil—it's on Mum's side, the understanding brand, for kids' dirty T-shirts, and finally Ariel, which is ‘scientific.'” He raised a finger on each hand to indicate quote marks, which everyone understood and laughed at, even Amy, who could see now that she had unwittingly set herself up as straight man for a well-worn comedy act.