Cooee (10 page)

There, at any rate, in this old and rather creased photograph of his portrait, is Max, elegant as always in a crisp, white, open-neck shirt, tailored grey pants, black shiny shoes. He's sitting back in a dark leather armchair; his long and beautiful hands lie, relaxed, on its armrests. Beside him is a small table and on the table is a photograph of me, sitting at my desk at Rain. On my desk is a photograph of Max's portrait, with its photograph of me inside it, and so on. It was something Hilary wasn't keen on, but Max persuaded her: he loved tricksy little things, puzzles that made you look twice and three times, and charmed you. Sophie doesn't fail to notice it, of course.

‘Look, Gandie!' she exclaims. ‘It's a trick, isn't it? It goes back, and back, and back. It's so clever!'

‘Yes. It is clever.'

‘Who thought of doing that? Was that you?'

‘No, honey, that was Max. Max liked puzzles. Conundrums, riddles — anything like that.'

‘He's got such a
nice
face,' says Sophie, studying the nice face closely.

‘Yes.'

Sophie twines her arms about my neck.

‘He just went away, didn't he, Gandie?'

‘Yes, he did, honey.'

‘Wouldn't you like to have him back?' she says, coaxingly, as if she were offering me an especially delicious chocolate.

‘Oh, honey, it's all water under the bridge. When you're older you'll understand that. There's no point looking back, saying I wish, I wish.'

‘Where's Max now, Gandie?'

‘It sounds like one of those books, doesn't it?' I say with an effort, giving her a quick hug. ‘Where's Wally? Where's Max now?'

‘Yes, but don't put me off, Gandie.'

‘I don't know, honey.'

‘But he might come back?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘But he might, Gandie?'

‘Sophie, darling, leave it. Max is dead, that's the truth of it. He's dead: he's not coming back. Let's not talk about it any more. And you make sure you pop that picture back in your mum's drawer, okay?'

‘Yes, I will. Of course I will, Gandie. But listen, Gandie darling, you don't
know
he's dead, do you? Mum says he's still alive. Mum says he'll come back, one day.'

Bloody Kate, interfering again, I think in fury. And, suddenly, something snaps. She's twisted the terrible knife enough. I can't take this any more.

‘I do know he's dead,' I say, tightly. ‘I do know it.'

She cocks her head, sceptical, a little dismayed. ‘Do you know it for absolute certain sure? I mean, have you visited his grave?'

‘Yes.' I reach out and hold her hand. ‘I have visited his grave. I do know he's dead. Sophie, you mustn't tell this to anyone. It's our secret, okay? You mustn't tell your mum, or your dad, or anyone. Can you keep an important secret, like this?'

Sophie's eyes grow wide as she absorbs this. ‘But, Gandie, Mum would want to know, wouldn't she? Mum really liked Max; she says he was the best friend she ever had. Why don't you tell Mum?'

‘I can't explain,' I say, aware that I am gripping her hand too hard and loosening my grasp. ‘When you're older, I'll explain. I can't talk about it, Sophie. Not at present. When you're older, I'll tell Mum. I'll explain everything. But I can't do it now. Believe me, darling, you mustn't say anything to your mother.'

At last, puzzled and chastened by my disclosure, she settles down to her milk and apple and homework. She looks serene, but what is she thinking? What does she make of what I've told her? What will she do about it?

She sprawls at the kitchen table to work; I sit on the other side of the bench, in the living room, which opens out between the kitchen and the small, pretty back garden, with its ferns and roses and two young birch trees. This is what we usually do when Sophie does her homework. She's at the kitchen table; I'm in the living room drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, available to answer questions.

I often sneak a look at her around the side of the paper when she doesn't know I'm doing it. I like to watch her sweet face creased with concentration; I like to watch her chewing her hair and mumbling figures to herself and doodling on the side of the page.

Today, however, I use the paper to hide my face from her perceptive eyes. My hands, I notice, are trembling. Does she believe me? I wonder. I think she does. Will she tell her mother? I don't think she will: Sophie and I have shared secrets before, and she's been reliable. But this is different. It matters.

When she goes, I say, quite lightly: ‘You won't forget, Sophie? It's our secret, darling. Just ours.' She nods solemnly, and leaves me on my own, with nothing to do but fret, and gnaw my fingernails.

I don't want to think about Max. I don't want to think about anything, really: I just want to calm myself down and return to a state of dreary neutrality, so that Sophie's interest in these matters loses its edge, so that I escape this awful sense of staring down the crevasse.

I know that the more emotional I get, the more her ready sympathies are stirred, and the more she wants to know and understand. I should be grateful, I suppose: how many children are obsessed with their grandmother's past?

In my determination not to think about Max or his fiftieth birthday, I find myself thinking about mine instead. It wasn't as we'd envisaged it when Max spoke of hanging our portraits together. I would have let it pass, frankly. The celebration of having spent half a century battling away at life is bound to be an ambiguous kind of occasion, after all; although I suppose survival pure and simple is probably something to celebrate.

Anyway, Kate and Zoë between them were determined not to let the day pass without some kind of family get-together, God save me. They even had a mild disagreement about where it should be held. Kate wanted it at her place so that, she said, the children could feel part of the festivities; Zoë thought it more appropriate (she actually put it like that) that she and Henry host the event. Ever since Max's departure from my life Zoë has treated me with a kind of scrupulously considerate and self-conscious benevolence that drives me stark raving mad.

‘I don't see why we have to do anything at all,' I say. ‘I've never been a party person: you both know that. It's just another birthday. Let's let it go.'

‘Rubbish, Minky,' says Zoë. ‘It's not just another birthday. I had a big fiftieth and I want you to have the same.'

‘We're not kids, Zoë. I don't have to have a party because you had a party.'

‘Of course you must have a party, Mum,' says Kate, beaming, misinterpreting my genuine pleading for a variety of specious attention-getting. She thinks I'm merely making a fuss so that I can then gracefully give in. Zoë knows better: I can tell that from the look in her eye, but all her native persistence is to the fore and, terrier-like, she's not going to let go till she gets her way and forces it on me as well.

‘I don't like fuss,' I say.

‘You used to like it,' says Zoë. ‘Remember your sixteenth birthday? You had a huge party. I helped with that one, too.'

‘Zoë, you mightn't have noticed this, but I'm not sixteen any more.'

Zoë laughs immoderately, as if I'd cracked rather a funny joke, and continues to discuss menus and methodologies with Kate.

The event was held at Zoë and Henry's. I could have told Kate this would happen: someone with her pliancy is at a disadvantage when dealing with resolve of Zoë's calibre. They actually went to a lot of trouble, or Zoë did, anyway: I don't suppose Henry had much to do with it.

It's a big house, in which they rattle around like a pair of dried peas. Sometimes they have students staying in one of the three spare bedrooms: they both involve themselves in their school's international program and a succession of Chinese and Malaysian and Vietnamese and Thai adolescents have come and gone through Zoë's militant domesticity and Henry's fussy over-organisation. They are always suckers for good causes, Zoë and Henry.

Sometimes, as I've said, I think our family is as dysfunctional as families get; other times I marvel, startled into unwilling admiration, at how well we manage, all of us, how we scrub up for the big occasion. We've improved, no doubt about it. This is partly because of Sophie, as I've said, but it's also because we ourselves try so damned hard. Assiduously we paper over the cracks, snip off the dangling telltale threads; and we front up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, to the big occasion.

We carry out all this feverish remedial activity only partly for the outsiders who will attend and for whom some sort of fiction needs to be maintained; principally it is all for our own benefit, to fool ourselves into a temporary acceptance of family unity and bonhomie.

Oh, the poses we adopt, the grins we artlessly flash at each other, the greetings and wishes and presents, the outward registering of all levels of pleasure between satisfaction and delight, the chattering and gossip and kindnesses with which we spuriously bless each other on such occasions! All of these are part of the same deluded plan we have concocted towards an ephemeral new reality that depends on our cooperation and whose success is measured by the extent to which we are able temporarily to forget old divisions, old quarrels, old hatreds.

There's a lot of energy involved, when you think about it. Duplicity always does eat up energy, I suppose, even when it's half-instinctive, as this is. Why do we put ourselves to the trouble? Is it a tribal, collective impulse, designed to ensure our survival by protecting us all from the awful truth about ourselves and each other? Or is it a more individual response, a deliberate and explicit resolution from each of us, grounded in pure self-trickery? Whichever, in my family we're all past masters, and our mastery came to the fore for my birthday.

All the family were there, of course, even Liam, who can't have been more than three at the time. Kate insisted on his presence. Sophie's excitement was touching: Zoë arranged for her to propose a toast and she made up a little nonsense rhyme for it. How did it go?

Swiftly Gandie's turning fifty
Gandie's always very thrifty
Will she be niftier, will she be thriftier
As she gets fitter and swiftly more fiftier?

Something like that, anyway.

Steve kissed my cheek in an unforeseen access of affection (unforeseen by him as well as by me, I imagine — or perhaps it was premeditated; perhaps he had to steel himself to it). Gavin told several Millie jokes. Kate beamed. Liam played with small cars in a corner. Henry fretted over the drinks. Dominic brooded darkly. Zoë bustled around capably and presided triumphant over all. I tolerated it as best I could. That is, we all behaved true to type. I trust some of us enjoyed it: I know I didn't, much, but then I don't suppose my enjoyment was the principal aim of the undertaking.

How fatiguing these celebrations are! How many of them one has to attend! At what point in my life will I be permitted to say:
No. No more.
How old will I have to be before my children and grandchildren will simply say that Gandie is a cantankerous old so-and-so and there's no point inviting her along?

One of the surreal things about resting in the bosom of my family on such occasions is that I can look around me and it is almost as if Max never happened. There is Steve. There is Dominic, with Paula or whoever. There is Kate, with her husband and children. There are Zoë and Henry. It is all too normal for words.

Ah, Max, Max. Where did you appear from? Why did you come into my life at all? It wasn't so bad, as it was. Unremarkable, I grant you, but there are worse things than being unremarkable. Why did you storm my threshold, lay waste to my life, come prancing in with your glitter and your glamour? How did it all happen?

Part Two

Max entered my life as a hot knife enters butter. Without warning, without resistance. Suddenly, I was transformed, penetrated. Perhaps impaled would be a better word. There was no prevision, no sly astrologer's forecast. One moment I knew nothing of his existence; the next, there he was, in my studio at the office, saying, charmingly: ‘Hello. My name's Max Knight. You're Isabel Weaving? You designed a house for a friend of mine.'

I had been working, as I always do, in the square patch of sun directly beneath the skylight, puzzling over the doors to a courtyard. As I blinked and looked up it seemed to me that the bright flicker surrounding him was no trick of the eye but a sexual dazzle, an aura of danger and appeal, a cross-hatching of faint glitter festooning him like a profane halo.

‘Hello,' I said, squinting. ‘Which house? Which friend?'

I don't do a lot of work on houses. Beatrice and I tend to concentrate on commercial and sometimes government developments — buildings for small businesses, alterations to municipal offices, that sort of thing. Sometimes we'll do sets of villa units, if an up-market developer will give us enough land and not demand too much crowding on it: we're successful enough to be picky. But we don't do many houses. It's not that I don't enjoy them: it's just the way it's worked out. They don't on the whole come my way.