We Had It So Good (26 page)

“Our parents had the war, that was their big thing, we had ideals,” Ivan said. “Most of them cranky and failed, but we did dream, didn't we?”

“Have you noticed how acid is completely out of fashion?” asked Stephen. “My kids admit they smoked dope and their friends have done Ecstasy and amphetamines, but when I asked them about LSD they said it was an old-school drug. I've no idea why.”

“It's because no one wants to open the doors of perception anymore, acid was about revelation, about the vision of what lies beyond the rim of the knowable, it's a drug for revolutionaries and they have no interest in revolution. And the other thing is it just takes up so much bloody time, eight hours minimum and then a day or two to recover. I just don't think anyone has that kind of leisure. If I had to market it I'd aim the product exclusively at retirees.”

Stephen wished that he was not laughed at for clinging to an old-fashioned way of thinking. No one at work looked him in the eye. He was, as the expression went, merely meat in the room. It was brutal, the cocky assurance of glossy youth, a youth without optimism. They lacked what had sustained him for forty years, belief in the future, retaining the quaint notion that there were technological fixes for everything. One of the things which had drawn him to the BBC was a funky little program called
Tomorrow's
World
in which a gasping audience was introduced to Velcro and the Sony Walkman. But no one believed in tomorrow's world anymore.

Now everything changes. He had a nephew in New York. He had no idea where the boy worked, not even a boy anymore, a thirty-seven-year-old man he had never met who was in the restaurant business somewhere in Manhattan. His sister Carole, the boy's mother, was living in New England, over sixty now, divorced twice, riddled with arthritis, every joint in her hands and feet swollen and dysfunctional. She still wore too much makeup, still nostalgically sat down after dinner with a glass of wine to listen to Elvis on her thirty-year-old record player, went once a year for a three-day vacation in Vegas, but every day was an hourlong struggle to get out of bed, to fasten the tabs of her white shapeless shoes with fingers that did not straighten out, and unsteadily stand on feet which could no longer support her weight. Was this what
he
had to look forward to?

On the phone it took several hours to get through to her; Anthony was fine, she had spoken to him, and all the family, no one had been affected, just shocked, then frightened and enraged.

And at the BBC, from people he had known for years, lunched and joked with in the canteen, and at home in Islington, from his charmed circle of friends, the Islington set whose kids were now all grown up, yet still met for dinner and still went on holiday together to Tuscany and Provence, he first heard the words that made him understand that everything he had taken for granted about himself, his adopted country, his own sense of reality in time and space had been just dead wrong, he could not have been so far out of kilter with what he imagined his own life had been.

“America had it coming.”

His mother was frail. He came from long-lived stock, it turned out, but at the age of eighty-three she was dying. He hoped to God that she would last a few more weeks so he did not have to try to return
home for her funeral in this state of chaos and confusion. His father had hung a flag on the porch, everyone had, all the neighbors. His mother watched the news on TV from her hospital bed; she ordered a Stars and Stripes pin in red, white and blue rhinestones from a TV shopping site, and got the nurses to attach it to her nightdress. They took a picture of her and it arrived in London a month later, the old Cuban lady, the white roots of her hair now relentlessly moving down the wave that partly hid her ravaged face. But still she had put on her red lipstick for the occasion. For sixty years she had worked through one tube after another, Max Factor every time, the makeup of movie stars.

And this dying woman in a hospital bed in Los Angeles, who jabbed her finger at the TV screen whenever Fidel Castro came on the news (“Why doesn't he shave off that horrible beard after all these years?”), for whom Che Guevara was not a poster but a common murderer—she, it turned out, was held responsible for every evil in the world and
had it coming
. His nephew and wife, and their kids in New York
had it coming
. His sister Carole in New England with her arthritic hands that could barely cook a meal and his sister Rita in Phoenix, running a little gift shop in the mall, the two once-glorious girls with their hair spray and face powder and poodle skirts and Frankie Avalon records,
had it coming
.

His father, long retired from the fur business, and fur itself denounced, out of fashion,
had it coming.

Late at night, hunched over the internet, Stephen found a world so shocking that he berated himself for his own ignorance, that he had known nothing at all about it. He had genuinely believed there were people like him, who took a liberal view of politics, and were right; there were the fuddy-duddies who read the
Daily Telegraph
and still mourned the lost Empire; and there were the stupid people who took no interest in politics unless it involved their own taxes.

Apparently he had not been paying attention, because inside the beige box, where in the early days of the internet he had once
guiltily chatted to girls at MIT, were a million cranks and conspiracy theorists, people driven nuts by rage and hatred.

They would say anything, anything at all, however insane, unkind or irrational.

The attack on America was an inside job, a controlled demolition (but
why
?). The Israelis were behind it. Muslims and Arabs were too dumb to fly a plane or think up such a convoluted plot. From nearly a quarter of a century of working at the BBC, Stephen knew in his bones that cock-up was always the more likely explanation than conspiracy. Bureaucracies were too incompetent to plan and keep secret anything on such a scale, while cock-ups were depressingly frequent, nearly always attributable to someone in the chain of command not having received, or having received but sloppily read, the interdepartmental memo. Or spilling coffee over the relevant paragraph. Or leaving it on the tube. People were just not that good at keeping secrets or executing a plan to flawless perfection, not in his experience.

And washing through the internet, common to the right, the left and the center ground, was this massive hang-up which had been gathering like a vast poisoned underground lake that sprang out of the earth to flood any rational discourse. There was absolutely no crime, no evil that did not have the Jews behind it. Everyone seemed to think the Jews had a secret, and whatever it was, it was definitely a guilty one. The Jews had something to hide.

What was it about the Jews, Stephen wondered, hunched over his screen, that seemed to drive everyone else completely crazy?

Am I a Jew? Stephen asked. He had been circumcised, but that was common in America in the 1940s. No one in his family went to church or synagogue, not the uncles in San Diego, not his father. Religious faith was a superstition, one he had thought was dying out, how wrong could he have been about that? As far as he was concerned the Middle East was a place of archaeology; his eyes had glazed over during any news from the region. The whole thing
was too complex to apply his attention to, with no obvious right or wrong.

His identity was not that of either a Jew or a Cuban, but an American in exile. He had never expected his bones to lie in a damp English graveyard. He had told Andrea this often enough, and she merely nodded. It was a problem they would have to thrash out later, when retirement was eventually forced upon him. But she could go on and on, she said; she could see patients until she dropped, and what about the children? Did he want to be on the other side of the ocean to them?

Andrea had no interest in computers. She had never sent or received an email. She did not know what lay in the bowels of the internet and when he led her to the screen to show her the toxic waste that washed across it, she said, “Well, who
are
these people?” And, of course, he did not know.

A bully is still a bully, even if he has a bloody nose, he read.

“Well, isn't that true?” said Andrea.

“Christ, are you turning into Grace all of a sudden?”

Much common sense was talked about America, Andrea said. It needed saying. Of course it was appalling what had happened in New York, unforgivable, inexcusable, but no one was trying to forgive or excuse. They were simply stating the obvious, that America was no innocent victim in all this. “That's a sophisticated argument,” Stephen said, “but look at the filth that underlies it, look at what it says here on the internet.”

“Well, who are these people?” she said again.

“I told you, I don't know.”

“Exactly.”

You worry about your kids, Andrea thought, you will worry about them for as long as you live, perhaps unnecessarily, but are you really supposed to worry about your husband, who is not ill, not unemployed,
not anything that should bring him to his knees except the ridiculous hours he spends on the internet, reading the ravings of lonely people in sad squalid rooms? He seemed to be drawn to the sheer toxicity of it all, he smeared the poison into open wounds. But that was because he had too much time on his hands. She couldn't remember when he had last been away filming, mostly he went to work and came home again, with the same briefcase full of papers, nothing added, nothing taken away. How could he not be depressed?

She could go for months totally forgetting that her husband was American. He was to her now the hairs that had started to sprout from his nose, and the particular comforting shape of his empty shoes by the bed at night, his flossing, his toenail cutting, his hypochondria, his dietary fads, the fading freckles on his back, the loose sac of skin behind his penis, the memories they shared of all the holidays they had taken together, and the way she could read his mind.

She had been incredibly lucky, she thought. He had given her everything she had wanted. It was preposterous to think that she, a girl of her generation, had only ever slept with one man, but the edifice of their marriage was built on that fact. That he was an American was a meaningless description, like saying he had black hair. Sometimes Marianne asked him for the American expression for something, and he realized he could no longer remember, he had been here too long, more than half his life.
He
was responsible for nothing America had done, yet America's arrogance and hubris could not go unpunished. He had gone down to the embassy twice at election time to vote for Bill Clinton, with whom he had once shared a plate of
petits fours
on the ship that had brought him to England and to her, so long ago. He owed it to Bill to vote for him, he said.

Yet all the accumulated rage against America had been gathering force during his presidency, Andrea pointed out. Surely he could see that?

“This is not rage,” he said. “It's psychosis.”

“What would you know about psychosis?”

“Nothing, but isn't it?”

He had a point. There probably was a study to be written about political anger and the mental state of the bombers, but it was so outside her field of expertise, which dealt with everyday sadness, that she could offer no psychological explanation for this fury that was consuming everyone. What she knew came from letters from Grace, and Grace had always had penetrating insights into the state of the world. Grace had seen it coming. She hung out on the edges of the city. She had a little apartment in the Parisian
banlieue
where she lived with her Algerian boyfriend and he told her things that were so far beyond Stephen's horizons of knowledge that Andrea had not dared show him the letters.

Grace endured. She went on being Grace. How did she do it? Here they were, in middle age or whatever it was called these days, and Andrea on HRT had reverted to her former plumpness, sick and tired of the bathroom scales and kitchen scales, longing to
eat,
to drink a glass of fattening wine and eat fattening olives without feeling she was a failure for having no willpower. While Grace was thin as a rake, her white-blond hair just white now and her face a maze of lines, sun-damaged, decorated with a defiant slash of red lipstick, the exact same shade she had always worn. The Algerian was a decade younger than her, the little sponger.

She had not forgiven Grace for what she had said to Marianne on the day of the anniversary lunch. Stephen had told her to get out of his house. Andrea had told her to apologize. Ivan had gone after Marianne when she had run into the garden, and told her, “Don't take any notice of that old crone. One day she'll walk into a room and you'll be there, slim and lovely, and she'll be sick with jealousy. You'll have your revenge.”

Andrea said, “Grace, you need therapy. You have spent your whole life running away from one horrifying encounter, you have distorted your whole personality around this scar.”

Grace sat in the kitchen drinking tea. “I don't want to talk about it,” she said.

“I know you don't. And that's the problem. No, it's your tragedy.”

Grace said nothing.

It isn't going to work out, Andrea thought. She's come to nothing. I thought she was going to be amazing, and she isn't. There's nothing here to be impressed with, but I can't abandon her, who else does she have?

Andrea remembered herself at nineteen, her first day at Oxford, standing outside her college room, too frightened to open the door, looking down at her feet in blue suede sandals and her legs in American tan tights, with reinforced toes in a darker shade. Poor child, she thought. Poor kid. Lost and bewildered, and here was her daughter who at twenty-eight talked calmly of land mines and dismembered children begging on the streets. Wherever she came back from there were no pictures of landscapes, no peaceful water buffalo or paddy fields. Just a series of unhappy faces. Marianne's photographs were the greatest challenge of Andrea's life—nothing, not even the froggy day and her hanging rabbit compared with the evidence that her own daughter was in such close proximity to a baby's head blown off, rolling down a hillside, or a child's eyeball blasted into a gutter.