We Had It So Good (25 page)

She blushed a dark red, it blackened her face.

“Yes.”

“I'm sure that's the problem. I have some unscented soap I can give you. It will probably clear up very quickly.”

He waited in the shop while she bought a new camera and lenses. She seemed to him to have an unlimited supply of money, but it was a friend of the family, she said, who was secretly paying the bills when they came in, her parents had no idea. Janek didn't believe this, about the parents not knowing. He suspected some arrangement, a carefully contrived safety net was in place, and were
she in trouble she would be hauled back straightaway. As soon as the charge came up for the new camera they would be alerted to her current difficulties. That is how he would have behaved if his daughter had grown up and gone to Bosnia.

For half an hour he forgot about the past in the present, the land of “never again.” She told him about her parents and the house where she was born and had grown up and all the strange people who used to live there. The American father, the mother with the faded red, later blond, hair, the brother who had come back reluctantly from deafness. She had refused to follow her parents to Oxford, had done a photography course instead.

Her elbows on the table. Her black eyes. Her upside-down smile.

God forbids, he thought. Yet God allowed so much worse. She was right to have made that very basic point to which he could supply no intelligible answer.

I
t was a
coup de foudre,
a blow to the side of the head as she photographed Janek holding the limp arm of an old man, trying to find a pulse. The other place was as he had told her: mud-colored under a low brown sky.

He was physically exhausted, had gone without sleep for twenty-four hours and had lost his temper with the Dutch peacekeepers. “There is no bloody peace to keep,” he shouted. “What are you doing here? Being neutral is to close your eyes, to tie a blindfold round your head, it's perverse and dogmatic. Take off your helmet and
see
.”

Turning away, she felt the whack, and staggered. Two days later, watching him remove shrapnel from a girl's body by the light of a torch she was holding, she resolved that she had to say something. She could not stay silent, she wasn't interested in unrequited love. The girl, bandaged, was taken away by her father, who was crying.

“You can put down the torch now,” Janek said.

Instead she shone it on his own face for a moment. It was an unassuming face, the sandy hair receding from the hairline, the watery blue eyes with pupils suddenly contracted. What was it about this face that she adored? She did not know, she didn't understand it, but understanding was unnecessary. Her mother had taught her children to be in touch with their feelings and to trust them.

“Listen,” she said, “we have to talk.”

“About what?”

“I know you will find me ridiculous, but I can't help it.”

“Why should I find you ridiculous?”

“Because I love you.”

“My God, this is a bolt from the blue. Marianne, I'm married.”

“I know that. I don't care.”

“You should care.”

“Why? Because it's a sin?”

“What do you know about sin?”

“Nothing. I don't believe in it, but you're a Catholic, isn't sin what your religion is all about?”

“Of course not, it's about God's love.”

“I'm not interested in God's love. I want yours.”

“Are you always so bold in your affections?”

“Not at all. I don't have much experience with men. I have some, but not much.”

“So I'm your first love?”

“Yes, you are.”

“I'm flattered but I really don't know what to say. I don't have a good answer for you, not the one you want.”

She was wearing a strange hat, of khaki cotton lined with rabbit fur, more like a hood than a hat, with flaps that came down over her ears and tied under her chin with two strings. She looked like a creature from a fairy story, an elf; she was unkempt and her fingernails were rimed with dirt. She stood in her heavy coat and boots and her fairy-tale hat with a child's face, a dark mole almost hidden by rabbit fur, peering out, asking him to go to bed with her. It was ridiculous. But she was so earnest and unafraid. She was at the beginning of life and he was in the middle of it, with all the fuss and complications.

“Look,” he said, “I have work to do, the work is all that matters.”

She shook her head.

“What?” he said.

“It
must
happen,” she said. “I want it so much.”

She sat down on the edge of the makeshift operating table, still and stubborn, looking up at him full of impatience and yearning.

“I like you a lot,” he said, “but…”

“Well, then.”

“No, Marianne. I'm afraid not. You'll meet someone.”

“I
have
met someone. It's all done.”

“Who?”

“You, you!”

He laughed. “Why me? I'm old enough to be your father and I'm not exactly a film star.”

“I don't know. I'm not even interested in the question, my mother would be, but I'm not her. I don't understand why things need explanations when they are so obviously real. Do you ask why children are coming in here with their limbs blown off by land mines? Do you ask God and get an answer?”

“No, I don't receive an answer, but I do ask.”

“But you still operate on the children, don't you?”

“Of course.”

“You see, everything is easy when you stop questioning it.”

She took off her fur hat and loosened her hair.

“Is this your seduction?” he said, laughing. “Are you going to undress now?”

“No, I'm hot.”

It was true that he had never met anyone like her. She was certainly fearless and her pictures were beautifully composed, he barely recognized himself in them. His face had an intensity of purpose which he never saw when he looked in the mirror. She made him look like a holy man, a priest, delicately probing the abdomen of a small child with his instruments. He was astonished by what she showed him.

“Look, next week I'm going to Split. Come with me and we'll
talk again, there. I expect everything will seem different once we're back in the real world.”

“What isn't real about this? I thought you said this
was
the real world?”

“No, you've misunderstood. This is the place out of time, it's a place to visit from the real world.”

“But it's real for the people who live here.”

“No, it is not. What is real for them is what they can remember, renting videos and eating pizza. This is a bad dream.”

Split was developing signs of once again being a seaside resort. There was a certain levity in the streets, despite the refugees, the wards of injured in the hospitals, the UN vehicles, the journalists, the active life of war. You could eat ice cream and forget about blood.

She was still in her fur-lined hat and her Timberland boots; she had done nothing whatsoever to make herself an attractive and seductive proposition. She could be cross, blunt, impatient, she could talk too fast and with too much conviction; she would fall in love too foolishly for her own good and retire, hurt and then hardened. It was such a shame, he thought, and she was so young.

After lunch, walking along by the sea under cloud-speckled skies, she raised her camera and began to photograph him.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“I'm doing what I do.”

“Why do you have to separate yourself from the rest of the world with a piece of glass?”

“I don't know, it's the kind of question my mother would ask, and I would just ignore her.”

“Maybe your mother is right.”

She laughed. “My mother believes in helping the afflicted.”

“I was brought up to go to the parish priest and tell him everything, all my secrets, now no one tells the priests anything,
even though they do their work for nothing instead of charging by the hour. And what does your father do? I can't remember.”

“He works in television. He makes science documentaries.”

“Of course, so the two things come together in you, looking through a lens at the afflicted.”

“I never thought of that.”

“Put down your camera for once, Marianne.”

“Okay.”

They walked on, along the seashore, watching the large ships coming in and out of the harbor, connecting them to Brindisi and other normal places. Janek's mother had had a brother in the tank regiment who was killed in Italy during the Second World War. The photograph of him in a pair of rimless glasses and with a soft blond moustache stood framed on the sideboard in their house in Surrey all the time he was growing up. Poor boy. He was only twenty-three. Later in life Janek wondered if he had died a virgin.

I'm forty and I have never had an affair, he thought. What do you do when someone throws herself at you? How are you supposed to respond? I'm only human. But what's wrong with my marriage? This is having your cake and eating it, and what a strange cake. A cake with salt instead of sugar. And all day I try to prevent genocide with a stethoscope.

They ate dinner at the restaurant they had gone to on the first night in Split, a month ago. This time, Janek thought, the food tasted fine. The other place seemed distant, he experienced no guilt in wolfing down a large meal and drinking most of a bottle of fresh white wine. My appetites are returning, he thought. He tried to concentrate on the image of the field hospital but it kept evading him. She sat opposite him, still in her jeans and boots but with a white T-shirt. What glorious breasts, he thought. Suddenly he felt the urge to eat them too.

Returning to their hotel, he kissed her in the lift. It was an act without explanation. Why did I do that? he asked himself.

The hallways were white stucco, yellow in the low-wattage bulbs of the ceiling lights.

“I will always tell you the truth, Marianne,” he said. “I'm married, I have children. I'll show you photographs if you want. You have to understand that from the outset.”

But as so many of her school friends' parents were divorced (her own an anomaly in staying together for so long, almost, she thought,
ludicrously
faithful), she regarded Janek's marriage as an easily alterable detail.

S
tephen could not get out of his mind how lucky they had been: himself, Andrea, Ivan and all their other friends. The sun had risen on them and had stayed all this time on their faces. Their purpose was to fulfill the ultimate destiny of the human race.

He was fifty-five years old and for the first time he understood that nothing bad had ever happened to him. He lived in a house worth a fortune with his wife of thirty years. His children's lives had worked out, no one was on drugs or in prison, no one had died of AIDS. Everyone he knew led a nice life and on and on it was all supposed to go.

Then this. Out of the clear blue.

Only in the days after the catastrophe did he realize that all kinds of warning signs had been there all along. Not of the atrocity, but of his own misguided judgment about the permanence of the universal condition of his generation, to whom nothing bad was
supposed
to happen.

“We've had such a long run of good luck,” he said to Andrea. “We thought it would go on all our lives. We were born in sunshine…”

“You were. Not me.”

“We all were.”

How could it be that he, Stephen Newman of all people, should
have turned into one of the gray men of the BBC, the stooped ghosts who lived on in a deluded fantasy of public service broadcasting, who stood with begging bowls outside the commissioning editors' offices wanting handouts to make extravagantly expensive programs involving whole production crews being flown off to the Galápagos Islands to film a documentary about Charles Darwin?

He knew that people like him, his grizzled head, his sad leather jacket, his Gap jeans, were figures of fun. He was by far the oldest person in his department, everyone else was hatched at twenty-two and rose and rose until they reached their late thirties and then they vanished. He had no idea where to. Independent production companies? Or did they just wither and die? Almost no one had clung on as long as he had, ducking and diving redundancy and the temptation to accept a big payout to leave the institution. That life, the life outside, was not for him. He was a company man, and as such belonged in a museum.

Once he had been the object of satire for the conventions of his existence, for his Islington address and psychotherapist wife, for having once or twice been at dinner parties with the Blairs; now he was merely ridiculous. He was just clinging on. Was it cheaper to promote him to some nonjob like executive in charge of notice boards and paper clips and drive him out through boredom and shame than to pay his expensive redundancy and final salary pension?

I've been complacent, he thought. I truly believed this trip would go on and on. The commissions were drying up, he went for months with nothing to do, ashamed of drawing his salary but dependent on it. They had remortgaged to build a conservatory six years ago, Andrea had wanted it, and why not? He enjoyed sitting out there with a glass of wine, talking over their day, talking over the children's lives, their naïve errors, marveling at their toughness and cynicism. At their ages, they agreed, they had been babies.

Colossal pressure had been brought to bear on him to leave last year. The advantages were sketched out over lunch with the
controller. He could set up an office in Soho, pitch ideas to any channel he liked, pocket the money from overseas sales instead of drawing a monthly paycheck, but what guarantee was there that he would have any ideas commissioned? And deeper still was his anxiety about what lay outside the doughnut. He
liked
feeling himself to be a cog, it didn't diminish him; it was teams who won the Nobel, even the humblest researcher had a hand in every scientific breakthrough. Of course, the ideal was to be at the head of the team, the genius, but he was no genius. He would have been content to know that he was part of something bigger than himself, and this, he thought, was what his generation was all about.