We Had It So Good (36 page)

Max was filled with nostalgia for his childhood, he had been happy before they had discovered his deafness and taken him to the hospital to fix it. Long ago, the world had been quiet and peaceful and he would stand in the surf watching a silent sea. He was going to have a son and the son would hear the loud waves, but they would go there, they would sit on the same sand and it would be his arm around his child's shoulders, kissing his wet warm skin.

Marianne is never going to have a child of her own, he thought. She will leave it too late. It will take her years to meet someone else. It's all up to me, to get the next generation up and running.

“Marianne,” he said, “unhappiness can't last forever. In a year's time everything will seem different, I'm sure it will.” He said this to comfort her. Always she had been in charge, she was his big sister and he was the little shrimp whom she looked out for, what could he do for her, so bereft and alone?

She turned to look at him. They were sitting on a bench in a place by a small ornamental lake with ducks and rushes.

“Why do you say that? I'm not unhappy.”

“Of course you are.”

“No, I still have Janek.”

“How?”

“We write to each other, we exchange emails. He's doing terribly well, his rehabilitation is coming along quite quickly and I'm convinced that when he gets new legs he'll be able to go back to his old life.”

“Has he said that?”

“No, but he misses me, that he has said. So he'll do everything he can to arrange things so we can see each other again. I'm sure of it.”

“I don't see how that's possible.”

“Anything is possible, you're a magician, you of all people should know that.”

“I don't perform magic, it's just illusion.”

“Janek and I aren't an illusion.”

“How often do you email each other?”

“I write to him every day, sometimes more often.”

“And he replies every day?”

“No, he keeps me waiting. Oh, it's hard, the bloody bloody waiting.”

He knew he had to say something. Cheryl would not forgive him if he did not. “Come and stay with us for a while, when the baby's born Cheryl will need help, she won't hear him crying.”

“I can't do that.
Janek
needs me.”

“You can still email him from our place. Please, Marianne.”

“You're becoming just like Mum, you always want to take care of people.”

“Will you think about it?”

“Maybe.”

They got up and walked slowly back to the flat. Max thought it would be good for his sister to learn to change a baby's nappy and listen out for its cries in the night. It might be an education, it might plug her back into the world.

S
tephen had become obsessed with Google. He was busy all day tracing people from his past. You could reach a hand back all the way to the sixties, to Oxford, and far beyond even that, to his high school in Los Angeles and the kids he had grown up with in his neighborhood. The members of the anarchist commune, John Baines, who was the best man at his wedding, the reporters he had worked with on
New Scientist
back in the seventies… there were many tricks you could use to track them down and, of course, the women were harder to find than the men if they changed their names when they got married, but he had a high success rate because he had time on his hands and he was dogged.

You meet someone in 1970 and they are just starting out on their lives, they have crazy thoughts about what they want to be, you sit up all night talking to someone who says they want to be a shaman, or move back to the land and talk to trees, or be the drummer in a rock band; you are looking into a future that hasn't happened and making plans, spinning fantasies which might come true. And here they were now, over sixty, and their entire careers, which hadn't even begun when you had those stoned conversations, had already ended. There were no shamans, no rock stars, the people he had known at Oxford in London in the early seventies had become academics, lawyers, researchers, teachers,
salesmen, computer programmers, or they were found living on far-flung islands, like the dealer from his old college (“His flashing eyes, his floating hair!”), who had turned up as something called a rear commodore, running yacht races in the Caribbean.

And others had vanished without a trace, not even the determination of Google could find them, they had left not a single mark. Stephen supposed they had died before the internet, perhaps they could be located in one of the squares of an AIDS quilt.

He did not know why he needed to know. He did not understand his own obsession with finding out the end of the story. Perhaps it was merely curiosity, the same inquisitiveness that had led him to watch his mother with what he thought of as her chocolate cake chemistry experiments, and his own first chemistry set. It was something to do, he thought, with probing for the truth, for answers to the chaos of life and all its messy relationships. But he knew that a life was not mathematics, there was no line of numbers to add up and arrive at a correct figure. He wasn't like his wife, who tried to rescue the drowning, he felt no urge to help anyone. He was just trying to understand how it had all worked out, for him and for his generation, the ones who were born young and were going to stay young forever because that was their privilege. Surely their parents had fought the war for them to do just that? And they had been betrayed, because despite their squawking insistence, they
weren't
young anymore.

They had bald heads, dyed hair, crepey eyelids, lined foreheads, stiff knees and those wars going on inside their blood between the reds and whites, all the cancers that would eventually kill them.
This is not right! This is not just!
Stephen thought. We are kids!

There was a photograph of a guy sitting on the grass outside Stephen's own college room. His hair was blond and poker straight, his name was Nick Woodford. This fact was lodged inside his brain when he had forgotten so much. And looking at the picture he could see that Nick was a deeply unhappy man. Or boy, for he was
just a kid, they all looked like children and had been only a few years away from childhood. What was it in Nick Woodford's face that seemed, as soon as he looked at it, to summon up such dread and despair? Maybe he'd just had a difficult tutorial, or had had bad news. Or was there something fundamentally wrong with Nick? He showed the picture to Andrea, who did not remember him at all, and said she had no idea. So he googled him. And produced nothing. He might have been killed in a car crash a year or two later, he might have had a sex change and be living under the name of Nicola, he might have died of lung cancer in his early fifties, or he might be one of those people who simply have no life on the internet and therefore do not, Stephen thought, really exist. “So he stayed young, lucky bastard. The rest of us just have to stumble along as best we can.”

In the rest of the house, which was supposed to have emptied out, his children had been replaced by an aging boy and girl, both dependent on him, his father and Grace. Andrea said that Grace was not inactive, she was processing the time they had spent together in therapy, but all Stephen ever caught her doing was sitting with her hands held tightly under the seat of her chair, staring out of the window. That's the processing, Andrea said, but to Stephen it looked like some kind of experiment with her own body. He didn't know what that was about and neither did Andrea. Nor were there any hats. That idea had died the usual death. She didn't eat much or cost much to keep, she made no demands on his time, but he still couldn't stand having her there. She gave him the creeps.

His father too seemed to have settled in for the duration. He would get up every morning and set out slowly along the pavement for Upper Street, where he climbed onto the top deck of a red bus and gave himself panoramic tours of London. This, he said, was his education and he could do the whole thing sitting down. He did not want his son to accompany him. “You've seen it all already,” Si said, “let me be a tourist.” They all met up for dinner in the evening
and he told him where he had been, as far west as Kew Gardens one day, where there were palms and other familiar and pleasant sights that reminded him of home in California, so he had everything he needed right here and why should he go back, there was nothing to go back to, just the widow and her videotapes, and his far-flung daughters and grandchildren, and flights to Boston and Phoenix once a year. It was obvious that Andrea had said nothing yet to Stephen about the secret he had told her. He was still waiting. He had this unfinished business. Meanwhile, he was enjoying an extended vacation.

In December Stephen became a grandfather. Which is more surprising—turning sixty, losing your hair to the attrition of old age, having no more hope of ever fitting into your maroon and white SS
United States
cabin boy jacket, never being part of a Nobel team—or seeing your own son, whose life you have never quite felt to be properly on track, holding
his
son in his arms? And knowing that it is
his
job to protect the child whose head is cradled in his hand, not yours. That your advice is unwanted and the mother of the baby does not hear when you cry,
Watch out!
Because she is catching her sleeve on a pan that someone has left on the table and if she takes it down, she might stumble, and if she stumbles, the baby might fall.

But the greatest surprise of all is what has happened to Marianne, who has moved in with Max and his young family and is effectively working for them for nothing as a nanny. Marianne gets up in the night when the baby cries, she's sharing little Daniel's room. She feeds him Cheryl's milk from a bottle when Cheryl is out at work, she changes his nappies and takes him for short walks around the block, well wrapped up in layers of blankets against the winter cold. Her sign language is improving and she and Cheryl close the bedroom door and have long conversations which, of
course, Max cannot overhear. All he knows is that his sister is confiding all her secrets to his wife, and this is a vast relief because Cheryl is the most sensible person he has ever met, with her hard clear head for figures and her understanding of the obstacles of everyday life.

Stephen was even more amazed at the sight of Marianne holding his grandchild. He had no idea why she had abandoned her career to become an unpaid nanny. He had been proud of her, with all her travels into war zones, terrified but boasting. Andrea said, “I don't know what's going on but Max says we shouldn't worry, he says everything is under control and it's only temporary, she'll be back in the swing of things soon.”

“Something has happened, it has to have. He should tell us if he knows anything.”

“Don't interfere. It's their lives, not ours. Let them make their own mistakes.”

“Don't tell me you don't worry.”

“Of course I worry. But I'm not getting involved. You can be very hotheaded, Stephen. Just leave the kids alone.”

“That's what we said to our parents.”

“And we were right.”

Andrea in her late fifties, postmenopause, taking to aging with even more difficulty than him, sitting in front of the mirror holding her mascara wand, her face a mask of beige cream, her mouth not yet painted. He preferred her in bed at night, when she had washed it all off and they tried painfully to make love. The pain was hers, inside her. He didn't understand why she didn't take HRT, the wonder drug, but she said it scared her. Eventually he talked her into it, it starts with the pill and it ends with HRT, she thought, a life bracketed by artificial hormones.

“I only wish there was a drug like this for us middle-aged guys,” said Stephen.

“You've got Viagra.”

“I don't
need
Viagra!”

“That's true, if you've had a good night's sleep.”

Stephen watched his grandson. He had sought detailed reassurances about his hearing and had been told that everything was fine. He spent an hour a day practicing sign language, with limited success. Cheryl said she could lip-read him fine but he could not really lip-read her. Max was a marvelous father, he had inherited his mother's capability and her way of just getting on with it. Stephen and Marianne were the neurotics. What is wrong with my daughter? he thought. All he could think of was a broken heart. Was she gay? But why would she hesitate to come out to her parents, who would be totally accepting if that was what it took to make her happy? Nothing made sense to him, and so he took refuge more and more on the internet, which in turns frightened and excited him.

T
he final email from Janek told her he was closing the account. She went on writing to him but her letters had nowhere to go. She spoke of how her heart was breaking and that he had been so cruel to her. His wife could not love him with such devotion as she did, it was not possible.

The whole city had taken part in this great public event, there was common grieving for the dead of the terrorist atrocity. People who had never met Janek felt empathy for his condition, the doctor who had lost both his legs, and she, who was in love with him, had to share her heartbreak with total strangers. And now even Janek himself had cut her out.

He said that her daily emails were not what he had expected, he said he had not planned to continue the relationship by other means, he only wanted to keep in touch with her while they both made new lives, but he had come to realize that he had led her to believe they had a future when there was none. He had spoken to his priest, confessed the entire affair and had accepted penance. It was a good-bye of characteristic tenderness, but it was, he said, definitively good-bye.

Some things come to an end, my darling, both good and bad. The war in Bosnia is long over and people go about their lives
as they used to. They are renting DVDs now, not videos, and they have the internet, but that terrible place out of time is back in time. They go forward to the future. And this is what you must do. God's love will take care of you, it is the same thing as mine.