We Had It So Good (31 page)

“Come and sit next to me, Marianne, darling,” said Si. “It's been so long since I saw you.”

He wished she had turned out pretty. The genes of her two paternal grandparents ran strongly in her, and they had not combined the way they had in her aunts, who had briefly blazed as beauties. There was something heavy about this girl. She carried a weight around in her soul. Something wrong.

She laid her lips on his cheek, he smelt of soap and fragments of the previous night's risotto. A line of startling teeth lay across his mouth, white and even and plastic.

He tried to think of something to say to her. She was a woman of the world, that he knew.

“So tell me, young lady, who do you think are the terrorists? I guess you met plenty of terrorists in your time?”

“Not really terrorists, they're usually dead by the time you find that out. But I met plenty of warlords.” The words in her mouth were formed of lead letters like old-fashioned type.

“What's a warlord?”

“Someone with an armed militia.”

“Doesn't sound like a nice gentleman at all.”

“Not really, no.”

“But here in London. Warlords?”

“Do you mean are there warlords here?”

“No, I mean, who do you think is responsible?”

“I don't think
responsibility
came into it.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Never mind, it's a play on words.”

“No one knows who planted the bombs, Grandpa,” said Max, leaning across the tablecloth. “We have to wait and see.”

“It's probably al-Qaeda,” said Stephen.

Grace snorted. ‘What
is
al-Qaeda? Does it really exist?”

“Here is the expert,” Si said. “Marianne, what do you think?”

“Have you ever met anyone from al-Qaeda?” said Grace.

“I've met people who claimed to support them.” They had no idea how much she hated al-Qaeda now, having never previously given them much thought.

“See? This is a girl who knows what she's talking about.”

“I've met people who believe in God, but that doesn't mean he exists.”

“What are you talking about, Grace?” said Andrea.

“Al-Qaeda is a convenient free-floating concept which attaches itself to actions and ideas we don't like and to people who want to feel powerful, that there's something bigger than themselves which can challenge known reality.”

How long can you hold your breath before you fall unconscious and your breathing starts without you? Marianne thought. You cannot kill yourself this way by your own volition. And Max is no use, you didn't think he would be.

“Marianne?” said Andrea.

“What?”

“Do you think what she says is true?”

“I don't know.”

“I thought I was going to get an education,” Si said. “I thought the girl was going to explain everything.”

“Don't nag her,” said Andrea, “she's not a politician, she just photographs what she sees.”

“Look,” said Stephen, “let's not beat about the bush. These people are nihilists, they believe in nothing but some black hole of destiny.”

“I thought we had established that they believe in al-Qaeda?” said Grace.

“Which you just said is nothing. Doesn't exist.”

“To believe in something which doesn't exist isn't the point, the belief is the point.”

“You get this from the Algerian, don't you, who took everything you had.”

If you can relax people you can produce an elephant, Ralph had once told Max. But perhaps producing an elephant would relax them.

“When we've eaten,” he said, “I thought I'd do a show.”

“But you never do a show for us,” said Andrea.

“Well, it's in honor of Grandpa.”

“That would be wonderful.”

“I saw David Blaine many times on TV,” said Si. “The man is a genius. If you are half as good.”

“I'm not even a tenth as good, but I'll do my best to please you.”

After the show, he told them that Cheryl was pregnant. It seemed disrespectful to flout her wishes, that it was bad luck to say you were pregnant until the third month, but the sight of his father's face, as he said, “So you're going to be a grandfather, Dad,” gave him a satisfaction he rarely felt in his dealings with Stephen.

And Marianne was forgotten, except by Grace, who saw that she too was trying to fly away from the table and out of the room, and out out out of there.

I
f Marianne lays her watch on the table and waits until the second hand reaches its highest point on the dial, and then, concentrating, carefully follows the steel rotating round until it almost reaches the quarter—then fourteen seconds passes fast. But she has to try it five or six times before she can focus her eyes to fix on the fourteenth second. Eventually, she realizes that the only way to do it is with the stopwatch timer on her mobile phone and over the course of a morning she comes to develop some understanding of fourteen seconds.

If, she thinks, you were on a descending plane and the pilot announced that you would be landing in fourteen seconds, your brain would alert you to an event that was happening right now, the wheels would have hit the runway before you really registered the passage of time. But if you were an athlete, watching the retreating back of your opponent taking the final strides to the finishing tape, it would be another matter, the fourteen seconds would pass agonizingly slowly as you willed yourself to catch up (though it might depend on the duration of the event—how long does it take to run a mile these days?). So time is not fixed, it's all relative, just as her father had explained to her. Time has its own agenda and operates in its own interests.

Sitting at the kitchen table waiting for fourteen seconds to
pass, she is free to let her imagination roam. For as long as she can remember her father has been a hypochondriac, detecting in every symptom the announcement of a fatal illness. A headache could be a brain tumor, heartburn is obviously a heart attack. Pain is magnified by his fear of what exactly the pain means. Pain itself, as a pure experience, is something different from the anxiety attached to it. But Marianne is investigating pain alone, unaffected by emotions. Pain for, say, fourteen seconds.

So, sitting in the kitchen, she takes a pair of pliers and clamps her little finger in them. She tries to hold on for as long as she can, but she finds she is able to bear a metal ache with reasonable fortitude for fourteen seconds, so next she tries putting her finger in the flame of the gas grill and doesn't last for even three seconds before involuntarily pulling her hand away in a reflex reaction that someone experiencing real pain would be denied. But that was pain's point: it was a signal, to let you know something was wrong. Her father had once told her about a girl born with no sense of pain: she was a mass of scar tissue.

But how does anyone know it
was
fourteen seconds? It might have been two hours and this is intolerable because she cannot imagine that length of time. In two hours anything can happen.

M
eeting his father at the plane in Warsaw, Stephen had been so anxious that Si would disembark alive, in good health and not mentally disturbed at the sudden realization of what returning to Europe meant, he had not noticed his father's shoes. Failed to take them in until father and son were walking through the square with the folk dancers, looking around at the video rental shop and the minimarket.

“Dad, what are you
wearing
?”

“These? They're all the rage.”

Orange plastic clogs with holes in them? And since when did his father wear anything that was all the rage?

“You should try them, it's like wearing slippers all day long. I never had such comfort.”

Later, in the lobby of the hotel, his father took off one shoe, picked it up in his hands, the dust of the Polish landscape still clinging to the sole and to his sock, and extolled their many virtues, how they had been engineered, and how cheap and indestructible they were. A craze had taken hold in California for these shoes. The president had a pair.

Stephen thought, I must have been in Europe too long, because to me they seem like an abomination. Their ugliness astounded him. He always wore the same white leather Nikes, he bought five
pairs at a time and kept them in their boxes until one pair was too soiled to wear anymore, then he moved on to the next. In his side of the wardrobe were: his Nikes, one pair of tan leather boots for the winter and two pairs of leather shoes, Florsheim penny loafers he had bought in Saks on a visit home twelve years ago, and black lace-up shoes from a fancy shop that specialized in footwear for Englishmen, which had been a present from his wife.

Arriving home in London, he had said, “Dad, did you bring any other shoes?”

“Of course, these are just for sitting on a plane when your feet swell, and for sightseeing. Don't worry, I won't embarrass you.”

His father had purchased a lime green nylon fanny pack in which to keep his money, plane ticket and passport. He had a blue baseball cap to keep the sun out of his eyes. He was ready to be a tourist.

“You don't really need that thing around your waist. All it does is draw attention to where your money is.”

“But I'll be robbed.”

“No, you won't. Give your money to me, and anyway, you don't need to spend anything. It's all my treat. I'm rich.”

He was not rich, not compared to the neighbors, but it was a word his father understood, and the many-floored house had so deeply impressed him, with its garden and Andrea's consulting rooms, that he believed his son to be a huge success, wealthy and contented and admired. His name appeared on the TV screen at the end of science documentaries on PBS and the Discovery Channel. My son, he told everyone he knew, is an important man.

So he surrendered the fanny pack but not the orange plastic shoes, which he insisted were so heaven-sent for old guys like himself, with corns and blisters and fallen arches and hammertoes and all the other ailments of the foot that took him to a monthly appointment with the podiatrist, that he would not take them off for any occasion except their evening meal. Out of respect to his
daughter-in-law who cooked. And even so, who could see them under the table? But he agreed to some formality.

They set out from Islington on the bus, because Si's first request was to travel on the top of a red double-decker. Seated at the front, Si felt as if he was in the cockpit of a plane, flying through the unfamiliar streets of a city not as vast as Los Angeles, but L.A., he realized, was not a
city
like London was, but just a conglomeration of suburbs. Warsaw was a city, London was greater and grander than Warsaw. London to his eyes was unbearably beautiful, its houses, its public buildings, its shops, its triumphal arches, palace gates, parks, the red road leading to the Queen's house, the snaking river and its bridges, some graceful, one a kind of drawbridge, the Parliament and its clock, the boats on their way to Greenwich or the open sea or upstream to Teddington Lock.

The stores with beautiful clothes in the windows, watches, couches, the street markets with fruit and other produce and cheap clothes and shoes and CDs. The blue sky under a sun warm but not scorching, not a sun anyone would ever need to escape from, even in July. And all the gardens, the roses and other flowers he had no names for and the beautiful trees heavy with leaves and bearing fruits you couldn't eat that made new trees, little things that grew from any piece of ground they found themselves in—all making an
effort
. To grow, to be, to become.

And all the people walking and talking on their cell phones, and dressed very differently from people in Los Angeles, something more formal, more in keeping with life in a city. Everyone amazed him, when he overheard them speak, their accents sounded like an orchestra tuning up at the beginning of a musical show, discordant, crying, weaving through the words, and himself in this crowd, the American who was born on this continent. He had the right to be part of all this.

The fur shops were all closed. The addresses he had once known, the famous furriers, were long gone. Harrods did not sell furs
anymore or keep them in cold storage. The people in England liked their animals, they kept them close by them in their houses and they preferred a dog or a cat to the sight of a woman in a mink. It was tragic, and he was a relic of a way of life which had died under him. In his own lifetime, his occupation had been made obsolete, by whom? Moral puritans, zealots, people with no appreciation of the finer things in life like a lovely face under a sable hat. They threw paint at such women. Barbarians. The Hollywood stars were afraid of them, they were frightened of the mob, the spoilt babies.

Stephen took him across the river to the great wheel. They stepped into a capsule which rose without the sensation of movement up into the sky until the panorama of the city was revealed to him, the hills in the distance, the river winding through its banks and toward the west, Stephen said, Oxford. This is what it's like to be a bird, he thought, not the plane, where you were strapped into your seat and could see only clouds or darkness. He wished his wife could have been here with him. Tears in his eyes, remembering her in bed next to him, her light snores, the opulence of her skin, her black hair smelling of scented oil and the bathroom full of her secret potions which were still there, in the cabinets. He could not throw her away.

The magnificence of London on a clear day. “Thank you, Son,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

Stephen, towering over his diminished father, the gnome, bent down and kissed his head.

His father, he realized, retained his feeling of the wonder of the world, he was still alive, not half-dead. His generation was indestructible, they had passed through the worst of what the twentieth century had had to offer, born during the first fighting in Europe. You could step on a train at Warsaw station in the year of his father's birth and step out of it at a station a car's drive from the trenches. His parents and sister were dust in Europe. He had arrived in America with nothing, begun with nothing and had made
a modest something. But its modesty belied its tremendous success: a job, a marriage, a family and no one coming to any harm. It had taken hard work and fortitude. I have grown up with a loving father, he thought, remembering suddenly the hard whack on the side of his head as his father, turning, saw his son twirling in Marilyn's mink. He smiled. It was done from love. All love and pride and hope.