We Had It So Good (33 page)

“And yet you cannot help thinking that one day you will be punished. By God, maybe, or whoever else is out there, it should be the devil who does the punishing. There is a day for atonement, and a book of life, and God is supposed to write down or cross out the names of everyone in it. You cry and you rend your garments. I believe that justice is only in this world, not the next one. I don't believe in another world.

“I told a story since I was seventeen. I said they all got left behind in Europe. I saw that movie,
Schindler's List,
and I thought that if the story was true, this is what happened to my mother and father and my sister, but it's not true. Not for them. They were safe in Canada, in a little town where only the winter was a murderer. And so I wanted to go home to Poland because that is the only time when what I told of the story is not a story. It happened. There was a Łomża, there was a mill, there was a yard and there was a house. I wanted Stephen to see it, because everything else is a lie. I gave my son lies and I don't feel good about that.

“
You
tell him, you tell him everything and explain it to him. You know the words. There must be words that can make this right.”

W
hen Si, or Motty, whatever his name was, was in his room watching television, still bandaged, Andrea sat in the garden with a cup of pale lifeless milkless tea, supposed to be good for the heart, and contemplated the geraniums. Sturdy flowers. She got them in red and they usually survived the winter, the stems growing woodier. July is a strange month in the garden. It is the height of summer but the best flowers have already bloomed, the roses gone, the jasmine gone, and what you are left with are the allarounders, the Michaelmas daisies and the geraniums. Everything is growing fast, the leaves are engorged with rainwater and sun, the grass needs mowing every few days, and the dandelion clocks are shedding their spores. On the pear tree hard green lumps are appearing.

What is she to do about her father-in-law and his story? Does she even believe it? It sounds embellished to her. And should she tell Stephen anything? Her business was client confidentiality, it was not her job to right wrongs. She had urged her father-in-law to sit down with his son and make his confession for himself and take the consequences, and if he could not take them, then he should not tell. She saw that he wished to unburden his mind of a secret held inside for most of his life, and that it was only the imminence of death that was forcing it out of him.

Stephen, in the years when he sat with his veins being fed the invisible ink of the internet, the conspiracy theories, the crackpots, the propagandists, had become what he had never been in the whole of their marriage, a Jew. When she had first met him, in the garden in Jericho, all those years ago when she was twenty, she had never met a Jew. Jews were mythical creatures like unicorns and pixies, they existed in books. Dr. Freud was a Jew, of course, and many of his disciples she had studied, but that was an abstraction. In the town in Cornwall, a couple of Jews had been evacuated during the war and had vanished back to the East End of London as soon as they were able. A story had gone around that when they had arrived and were billeted on neighboring farms, they had been ordered to lower their trousers and their backsides had been examined for tails.

Stephen had told her about the Jewish father and Cuban mother, and being brought up in a home without religion—America was their religion, he said, and the movies. But in the internet period he had suddenly become one hundred percent Jew. He had tried, on a genealogy website, to trace his Newman ancestors, and failed. He had sent off to examine the records at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and come up with nothing; he had talked to his children about how it was possible to live and then vanish from the earth, to be turned into smoke. And now to find out that none of it was real—she did not know how to break it to him. How can you wind back your whole life and discover that a thread running through it, a red thread, is also a false flag?

She had thought for years that she had been lucky with her parents. They had given her life and not much else and demanded nothing. Unlike so many of her friends' parents, they were not suffering from final illnesses that required train journeys, the upending of parental responsibilities, the child becoming the mother or father. There was no Alzheimer's, no old people's homes, and of course no inheritance. There was no ongoing psychodrama,
they had cut her out of their lives and though she had been hurt, she knew that in meeting Stephen, she had fallen on her feet.

Her father died of lung cancer. It went through him very fast, seven months from diagnosis to the grave, he was dead at the age of sixty-two. Her mother lived on in a little flat in Keswick, eventually with a man she called her boyfriend. Lionel. The two of them went on coach trips together, visiting stately homes. She felt that her mother had finally got what she wanted from life, walking round behind a guide, looking at antiques, marble fireplaces, maids' quarters, butlers' pantries, and Persian carpets. She gazed at family portraits and fancied herself beneath the powdered wigs, while Lionel counted the rooms and peered into the lavatories. Then Julia died of a stroke. She took to death even quicker than her late husband.

Lionel gave Andrea her father's war medals. He had had, he said, a good war.

“But he never talked about it,” Andrea said.

“Did he not? Well, you should look him up. He was a good egg.”

Her father an egg. She found the records of his regiment, he had been, as they say “all over the shop,” she had had no idea. He had been at El Alamein, then run up the boot of Italy, crossing the Strait of Messina, driving back Mussolini's forces and taking Rome. He had once had spunk and spit, then lost it again, she supposed that the trauma of his experiences of battle had never been dealt with, there was no counseling, no treatment; his generation of servicemen just went home and were supposed to forget all about the past. They turned their backs against history, they who were formed by it, each little fingernail growing or not according to their diet in the thirties, whether they had enough vitamins and minerals or not.

Frank had gone back into the wine trade, and met and married her mother, and they had bought the semidetached house on the edge of London with the rows of Toby Jugs in the hall, the stained
glass panels in the front door that led to a garden with stiff military flowers like antirrhinums, the pulley in the kitchen from where Andrea's rabbit had once been hung by its ears, the ottoman in her bedroom and the crows on the fog-bound lawn. Frank doggedly pursued his inheritance and they went to Cornwall. Her family history was so meager she had never taken any interest in it, all she had focused on was the idea of the family itself, that place where the child was nurtured and grew, and where its neuroses were laid down, like DNA strands. They had executed her rabbit, but she had forgiven them that long ago.

What was the point of telling Stephen and why should she have to take on the burden of it?

“Have you told him yet?” Si said.

“No, I haven't.”

“When will you tell him?”

“I don't know.”

Until now, Andrea thought everyone could benefit from the talking cure. For the first time, in the summer garden with her pale tea, Andrea began to doubt her own profession. What would Si/Motty do with the insights that he could learn from the hours he would need to spend excavating his relationship with his own father? He was an old man. He was looking not for insight but forgiveness from his son.
Would
Stephen forgive him? She had no idea and the realization that she did not know, did not sufficiently understand her own husband to be able to predict his response, worried her.

There was always another day. Events moved on. Marianne was extremely withdrawn and consumed with an inexplicable sadness. Grace was demanding more and more of her attention in their sessions. Andrea had two patients under one roof. If she told Stephen his father's story she would have three.

Grace came out in her green embroidered kimono, her feet bare on the patio tiles.

“How long is the old man going to be here?” she asked.

“I don't know. Stephen won't let him get on a plane until he's better.”

“Stephen is just like his father.”

“In what way?”

But Grace clamped shut her mouth and refused to say more. She did not know herself why she came out with such things. It was a long-established habit, and she defended each statement with her insistence that she never had to explain herself.

She did not care about the old man. She was beginning, for the first time in her life, to feel fear. The fear that the future is a steep descent to a dark lake and people on the shore will hold your head under. She tried to think of something else, such as how she might turn the curtains in her room into a dress and how Andrea would be bound to forgive her, because she would detect in the action some meaning to be analyzed, but all she craved was a new dress, she wanted one very badly. She was worn out with being her, Grace. She hoped a new dress would uncover a facet of her own personality she had not yet detected. There is always something inside you to unwrap, she hoped.

S
ometimes Marianne gets into her car and turns the key in the ignition and feels the engine warming, her foot thrumming against the accelerator, and she takes off the hand brake, propels the Honda out of its space a few meters from her flat, drives to the end of her road and becomes completely stuck at the traffic lights.

Should she turn left or should she turn right? For in this decision is her fate. You have the illusion you are in control, that you decide where you are going, yet these tiny decisions affect everything. There was another route to the hospital, Janek could have taken a different line. He could have eaten less for breakfast, not had a second cup of coffee, he might have noticed an inky mark on what he had thought was a clean shirt and climbed the stairs to the bedroom to change it. He could have overslept, he might have woken from a nightmare at five in the morning and, unable to get back to sleep, gone into work early. An interesting article in the newspaper or a news report on the radio could have delayed his departure, sitting at the kitchen table instead of hurrying into the hall to get his jacket and taking off down the road to the station. Or his wife could have turned to him in bed and touched him and he touched her, and he would later say, “I'll be late for work, but it doesn't matter.”

This thought is unbearable. But she would rather imagine him
having morning sex with his wife than taking off at that precise moment, leaving the house in his summer jacket and open-collared shirt to reach the station at the particular second at which his own life converged with those of some young guys marching toward their destinations with backpacks, who themselves could have been delayed, or got there early. And anything could have happened to make Janek not on the underground train, and yet he was, he was.

So she is paralyzed at the intersection, the lights turning green and cars angrily blaring their horns behind her because she cannot decide if right or left means death or life. The randomness of fate is killing her. Had she not had her car stolen on the road to Sarajevo she would never have met Janek. The meeting had seemed to her so fated, so outside coincidence that it was unimaginable that she could instead have been sitting on the tube opposite him, a stranger behind his newspaper, getting up and leaving while she still sat, watching the faces of the passengers. Just a middle-aged man with sandy hair and freckled hands. But what was fated about his stepping on the very train—and not just the very train but the very carriage where the murderers were waiting?

And then she pulls out, to the right, because if she does not she will have to get out of her car and abandon it at the traffic lights, walking home. There is no one she can talk to apart from Max, because although she has friends, and some of them know she has a married lover, she has always been too discreet ever to tell them who he is or how she met him, and to do so now would be a betrayal, because he never gave her permission. So Lucy goes on living with and caring for the false Janek, the loyal husband and family man, who is a compassionate person, an excellent doctor, a church-attending Catholic, and an active member of an organization that brings medical help to those in need. And Marianne is left with the real Janek, the adulterer, who didn't tell his priest everything. The real Janek, who does not lie in the hospital bed, corporeal, but exists
only in the change of clothes in her wardrobe and the toothbrush in her bathroom.

Marianne was in hell. Her private grief was a public event. When she turned on the television there it was, when she opened a newspaper, there it was. Everyone was talking about it, analyzing it, expressing opinions, and she heard that
London had it coming
because of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, or that the moderates should speak out to show their loyalty to their country, if they really were moderates and all this chatter chatter chatter was irrelevant to her agony.

She took up smoking again. She had learned to smoke in her teens when she began to lose weight, Simone had told her it suppressed the appetite and Ivan had worked in the past on tobacco accounts. Janek had told her he would not sleep with her anymore when the stink of old nicotine was on her clothes and in her hair though she knew it was medical advice he was giving her. She chewed nicotine gum and gradually lost the habit. She started smoking again because as far as she was concerned the worst had already happened. She often forgot to fasten her seat belt.

When she worked abroad, she was never interested in the political questions; other photographers were, she was not. She simply wanted to be in that place where she could find an unusual range of human expressions, instead of the flat complacency of people who were miserable in all the usual, banal ways.