We Had It So Good (27 page)

On the wall of Marianne's living room in her flat in Bethnal Green, there was a single photograph, one of her own, depicting a medical team at a field hospital in Bosnia, taken in 1995, one of her earliest pictures. The doctor and nurses gather round the figure of an injured boy and the light is on their faces. The composition, Marianne explained, is exactly that of an Old Master. The medics just seemed to have arranged themselves into a classical pose and the light had shone through a dirty window onto them, illuminating the intense concentration of their work. It was an accidental shot,
she insisted, it was
always
accidental. Life sometimes organizes itself as art, and the photographer is lucky enough to be there and press the shutter at the right moment, and then wait until she sees what appears in the developing fluids, emerging like a ghost returning to life from the hazy grays.

Except now, she said, because of the new technology, digital photography, you knew what you had at once. It was a shame. Another instant experience. Robert Capa's pictures of the D-Day landings, the tremendous force of the water through which the men were wading, would not have been possible today: the film was damaged during the journey home, this was all that was salvageable, and almost no one at
Life
had thought they were even worth printing.

Andrea thought it was gruesome to have a picture of an operation on the wall of a living room, over the mantelpiece where she would have placed a gilded mirror. In fact the whole room seemed clinical to her. The camera equipment was neatly arranged on a table, and along the walls were filing cabinets of negatives which her daughter was in the process of transferring digitally to her computer. The intense order of this room struck her as containing an element of her daughter that she did not understand. Everything was technical in some way, masculine, without untidiness or any decorative detail.

Only in the bedroom did a softer touch emerge, with candles by her bed, and a glass bottle of scent on the dresser. This, Andrea conceded, was a woman's room, and the room very definitely of a woman who has a lover, though Andrea had failed to elicit any information about him, and had assumed, correctly, that he was married and that this bedroom was the place where he came to make love to her daughter.

It did not occur to her that the middle-aged doctor in an open-necked denim shirt with rubber gloves on his hands, probing the abdomen of a boy injured by shrapnel, was that lover.

She felt a dismal failure both as a mother and as a therapist
that her daughter told her nothing about her life, that her teenage bounce and gusto had been replaced by a reserve and secrecy, as if she was always tending to some inner flame. She wished Marianne would dress better, she wished she would attend to her looks. But Marianne had accepted plainness, when a more flattering wardrobe and even a slash of lipstick occasionally could have made her a beauty: a beauty with a discerning band of admirers. But perhaps the married man saw what others failed to in her dark face. Andrea assumed that he was in the same business, another photographer.

Andrea prayed for world peace, so her daughter would be reduced to taking photographs of fashion or anything whose shallowness was proof that beyond the frame lay nothing but normal human misery, not made worse by cluster bombs, shrapnel, land mines, white phosphorus, conscripted child soldiers and columns of fleeing refugees.

Her brother was a professional conjuror and going out with a deaf girl. They spoke to each other with their hands, conversations which excluded his mother and father. Their lives were enveloped in quietness, apart from the applause of the audience when he did his act. Was he happy? He said he was. He stood onstage like a little wooden marionette, puppet movements, his public presence tricked you, you could not take your eyes off his unusual face with its pointed eyebrows. He drew them on with eye pencil. “It's all deception, Mum,” he said.

Max, she could not help observing, had grown into his life, he had filled it. Despite his weird job, not really a job at all, he was the member of the family best equipped to deal with the terrifying changes that worried all of them. He was a man of the moment, she thought, he rode the wave. He had neither hopes nor ambitions, did not wish to make the world a better place. “I just live in it,” he said. And living in it did him well. He had bought his own flat, with only a little financial help from his parents.

She had never forgiven herself for not noticing the gradual loss
of his hearing. It made an affair out of the question, she would spend her whole life knowing the body of only one man. She accepted this. Max loved her, even if she didn't deserve it. Every year on her birthday he performed a special show with an audience of just one, delighting her with tricks he had devised involving flowers, which were difficult to work with. He kept away from his father. “Too noisy,” he had once said.

I used to be so frightened of things, Andrea thought. Birds terrified me, crows in particular. But nothing she had ever feared in her life had come to pass. The bears with their sharp teeth had never found their way into her bed, her rabbit had guarded her. Back in the deep past our life together goes, and our children are the strangers.

The past is a narrative, a story. You try to tell them but they don't believe you, you might as well relate the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. The facts disturb them, they run from the room jabbing their fingers down their throats when their mother and father reminisce about the afternoon in 1969 when they met and how quickly it all came together, in an hour, because that was how it was in those days, no dating, no hesitation.

They make it all up, you know,
she once overheard Marianne tell her younger brother when they were teenagers.
They have to invent something to make themselves sound interesting, but do they seem interesting to you? Dad's a bore and Mum's a nag.

“I'm a
bore
?” said Stephen. “When did that happen?”

“Better a bore than a nag.”

Marianne thought her parents' generation were phonies. They had been given everything and squandered it, they had “
eaten up
the planet.”

“We weren't phony,” Stephen said. “Our whole point was to live an authentic life, to challenge the bourgeois conventions of our parents' generation. We wanted to make it real.”

“And did you?” said Marianne.

“Y
ou asked me once why I didn't tell my mother. She was the
last
person I would have exposed myself to. As you know, she had three miscarriages before me and another two afterward. She spent all her time trying to get pregnant and failing, failing, failing, and if her fifteen-year-old daughter had come to her and said, Help me, she would have made me have the baby and brought it up herself.

“You think that's a cruel assessment? It's quite true. She would have pretended it was hers, and the kid would have grown up thinking I was its sister and I'd have been even more fucked up than I am already, except that I would never have got away from home, because she would have kept me there, as an unpaid nursemaid. I don't mean to say that my mother is a terrible person, she isn't. But she's a thwarted earth mother, and that's why she spent her whole life in the garden.

“So I got the train to Victoria and I turned up at my father's flat, round the corner from the hospital. He always said it was just a pied-à-terre for the nights when he was on call, and I imagined a little room with a camp bed and a scullery kitchen, a hotplate, you know, a sort of bedsit, but it was nothing like that. I had to wait for him on the step for a few hours before he came back. It was a miserable day, raining on and off, and I was damp and bad-tempered when he finally turned up and said, ‘What are
you
doing here?'

“I should have known as soon as he opened the front door that this wasn't going to be a bedsit. It was one of those large anonymous Bloomsbury houses near Lambs Conduit Street, where the residents are rich enough to have installed a lift, and we got into it, and the doors closed. It was lined in some plastic material, pearl gray, very modern. We got to the third floor and there were two doors on either side of the hallway, and he turned to the right and I turned to the left. I have no idea why I was so certain it was the left-hand door, but I kept standing there, rooted to the spot, waiting for him to turn round and say, ‘Of
course,
it's this flat,' which was ridiculous but that's what I thought, and you can make of that what you will. And I'm sure you will.

“So eventually, I turned round, and he'd already opened the door and inside you could see it was quite a palatial little setup he'd got himself there, with
eau de nil
walls, and all the sofas and armchairs were cream satin. There was a bunch of shop flowers in a vase on the sideboard. When we went into Sevenoaks I always used to wonder who bought flowers in a shop when the garden was full of them, but in his flat, I realized for the first time that it was people like Dad who buy cut flowers and for that reason I've never been able to stand them. I can't go into a florist's. Every single flower standing on its amputated stem reminds me of him.

“We sat down and he made me a cup of coffee and he said, ‘To what do I owe the pleasure, Grace?'

“I told him, and I asked him to help me, and he said, ‘And who's the lover boy?'

“I had absolutely no intention of telling him, that was the last thing I wanted to do, but then I realized that he wasn't going to go to his house and make a fuss, he was simply curious. He wanted to know about the boy who had fucked his daughter. He kept asking me questions about him, what he looked like, how tall he was, and then he asked me if I'd come.

“‘Mind your own bloody business,' I said.

“He just smiled and said, ‘Yes, I can see that was rather intrusive. But you know you are a healthy young woman and you haven't inherited all your mother's gynecological disorders, apparently. If you orgasm, it draws the semen up through the cervix and makes pregnancy more likely.' Yes, I know
now
that that's rubbish, but this was my father telling me, so of course I assumed he was right even though he had absolutely nothing to do with gynecology, he was a pediatrician, a children's doctor.

“‘Anyway,' he went on, just sitting there in his black leather slipon shoes, his town shoes, Mum always called them, ‘what exactly is the form of help you're seeking?'

“I just couldn't help looking at how he was dressed. He'd get up after breakfast and put on his coat and hat and drive to the station in the Rover and I paid no attention because that's what happened every day, but I could see now he had a change of clothes, he had these
town
clothes, which he must have kept in the flat, because he looked so different, slightly fashionable. At home he wore tweeds, but in London he had a suit which, now I think about it, was an Italian cut, it had narrow lapels, and he wore a narrow navy knitted tie which was squared off at the bottom instead of coming to a point, and then I had this very precocious flash of understanding that these were the clothes a mistress bought for her lover.

“But all this was going on subliminally, I don't think I was aware of it at the time at all, at least not consciously.

“I said, ‘Can you help me get an abortion?'

“There was this terribly long silence. Was I supposed to think he was wrestling with his conscience? No, I emphatically do not believe he
was
conflicted, he never gave any evidence of that.

“‘Hmm,' he said finally. ‘Hmm. Well. I don't think I can risk that. No, I don't believe there's anyone I could ask. No.'

“I was fighting myself, I was thinking, Don't cry don't cry don't cry, I could see my whole life disintegrating, I would be stuck at home with my mother forever and I'd turn into a shadow.

“‘No need for tears,' he said, ‘all is not lost. I certainly can't ask anyone else to do it, I could get into very serious trouble. They might go to the police and inform on me, just for asking them. I could go to prison. But I don't like to see you in difficulties, so I will do it myself.'

“This had never entered my head. I tried to think of where I could go, but the only people I knew were the ones I went to school with, and James, whom I hadn't even told. There was no one. I was stuck, like the prey of those insects which pierce their food while it's still living and keep it in a kind of larder, alive. I sat there looking at him. I couldn't speak. You know that sensation, when your tongue feels like it's been frozen, and it's huge and wooden and cold in your mouth and it won't move? No? Well, that's how it was. I couldn't say anything.

“And then
he
said, ‘Of course, you'd have to keep your mouth shut. You can't tell anyone, do you understand that?'

“I just nodded. What choice did I have?

“He gave me a five-pound note and told me to come back a couple of hours later, and he'd have everything ready. There had to be certain preparations. I took the money and I wandered through Bloomsbury. There was the British Museum, I could have gone in there, I suppose, it would have been educational, but I didn't, I just wandered around and I saw some people my own age talking on a street corner, I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I knew that I now felt like a different species from them, I was cut off. I don't know what he thought I would do with the five pounds, because I couldn't eat anything.

“I went into a phone box and began to ring James, but then I thought, What am I going to say? He didn't even know I was pregnant. What was the point? The only person in the whole world who knew was my father. I walked past the hospital and saw the children coming and going, the poor sick kids and their parents, for whom my dad was a hero, a saver of lives. And to me he was this man who had complete power over me.