Inglorious (21 page)

Of course the dead faded away. It was impossible to mourn them all the time. The memories dissolved, slowly. But if she thought about it she became aware just how furious and abandoned she felt. She was sure her mother would have helped her. ‘The matter, Rosa? Explain to me?’ ‘Not sure, mother.’ ‘Well, write it down, call me up again when you want to talk. Let’s think of an action plan. Lots of love.’ Their conversations would have been pertinent, to the point. It was her father who was irresolute. Her mother was always brisk and quick-witted. The family home was shabby and comfortable. The kitchen was sparsely furnished with old-fashioned appliances, things her parents bought when they first married and never replaced. The cooker was a monument to an earlier era of domestic technology. The furniture was always second-hand,
bought from adverts in newspapers, never fashionable or expensive. It wasn’t that her family was poor, though her parents had irregular jobs. Rosa’s mother with her shop in Clifton Village, selling jewellery and scarves. It never boomed, but it brought in enough. Her father worked hard on his works of local history. He was always engaged on a new project, working in his study for hours, and eventually a book was published, something about the Victorians in Bristol. He bought up dozens of copies and gave them all to his friends. That made Rosa cringe in her chair, because she remembered mocking him, talking with her friends about him and his free books. Suggesting they have a competition, first prize a copy of his book, second prize two copies, and her teenage friends snorting in the garden, hands to their faces. She had no idea at all; she was ignorant of everything that was important. In their home in Redland, a crumbling Victorian town house, Rosa remembered her mother and father preparing food, and it seemed now she thought about it that there had always been something steaming on the cooker, some pot of stew or soup. She saw her father standing over it, adding vegetables and talking to her mother in a soft voice, her mother pushing back her hair, leaning over him to stir the soup again. Hardly aware at the time, Rosa now knew that her parents had been happy.

Now she was sitting rigidly in her seat. Her mouth was trembling. She rested her arms on the table and put her head in her arms, feigning sleep. Certainly it would be a terrible thing to shatter the tranquillity of the carriage. No one would thank her, and the old Bible reader would be quite perplexed. Rosa lifted her head and cast a glance towards her, and still the woman was engrossed in the Holy Book. Her mother had always fallen silent as they approached the Lakes. Well, of course, thought Rosa, no reason to assume you have a monopoly on retrogression. Possible that the entire carriage is musing on years long vanished, the freefall of the seasons. Though the woman with the Bible and the knitting couldn’t be, thought Rosa. She would be praising the Lord, and the child eating
crisps would be thinking about crisps, and the small hunched man by the door who was tapping his stick on the floor – it was impossible to know what he was thinking about! Perhaps he was reciting an Upanishad,
in the beginning this universe
was but the Self in the form of a man. He looked around and
saw nothing but himself. Thereupon his first shout was, ‘It is
I!’ whereupon the concept ‘I’ arose.
Perhaps he was thinking something she couldn’t imagine, something so rich and holy she would never think it (or something so perverse and disgusting, she thought, glancing across at the man again).

Really, she had nothing to complain about. For hundreds of years – time uncharted – her ancestors were anonymous hordes, busy with the practical conditions of survival. They tilled fields; they went down mines. Some of them went to sea. Then in the twentieth century there was a subtle shift. At fifteen grandmother Lily left school and started work. She was one of seven children; two died in infancy. She went to work in a shop, a miniature revolution. At the age of thirty she married Thomas Marswick, a carpenter. Rosa remembered her grandmother as a tired old woman with a round face and tightly set hair, wearing an apron, distributing sweets. Her idea of leisure was to talk over the wall to the next-door neighbour, Jackie, about other neighbours who had recently died. Rosa’s grandmother loved disasters, and in response to polite social questions she would release a volley of despair, deaths, cheated expectations. This attraction to the mournful overtook her progressively, and she fell into depression after the death of her husband, sliding through the house in her slippers, muttering about adversity. According to family legend, she had hidden all her money around the house, and most of it was never found after her death. She had a pair of false teeth which she kept in a mug by the bed. She accepted the structures of society, the random distribution of wealth, accepted it all and died quietly.

For many years after, grandmother Lily was preserved in a few tattered photograph albums. She had been young in the
1930s, and there were bleached black and white shots of her on day trips to Windermere, smiling at the camera, wearing her smartest clothes. Grandfather Tom stood by her, in a group of young couples, soon to be married. There were photos of her laughing at an outrageous friend, hovering at the edges of a dozen groups, petite, her hair carefully curled. Sitting astride a donkey on the beach, waving at the camera; singing on stage, dressed in stage finery, feathers and furs; bent double at the sight of a vast turkey, which her husband had just won in a Christmas tombola. Her parents, Rosa’s great-grandparents, whose names she didn’t know, lived in a small cottage in the village of Cartmel, which Rosa always remembered as a verdant garden bathed in a rosy dusk. If she went, she thought, what would she find? Nothing changed like the landscapes of childhood; it was scale that changed, the simple fact of individual growth. Former vistas, vast plains, were compressed into simple playing fields and modest gardens. The aspect shifted but there was much in the mind that changed.

As they passed through Preston station she was thinking of grey-stained streets, and the old grey slate of her grandparents’ house. She was remembering the excitement she felt as a child on these trips north. For no real reason at all, Rosa had once had a vivid childhood dream that her grandfather Tom had turned into a camel. Worse still, because he died when she was six this camel version of the man became entwined with her early memories of him setting her on his back and crawling on all fours around the room. She had a few other fading visual memories of her grandfather: a large man, she thought, though all adults were large to a child, with ears that moved when he chewed. A man with a shining pate and a long pointed nose. To her his features were gargantuan, outlandish, though in photographs she saw he had been handsome enough.

The arrival was a series of snatched kisses, embarrassed expressions of affection, with grandmother Lily supreme in
the kitchen, rattling cutlery, telling her mother – who pulled faces – what to do. Her father was feted, given a cigar. Grandfather Tom took Rosa into the living room, where there was an ornamental brass dog with a poker resting on its back, superfluous by the electric fire. He dressed her in his braces. He took her out and sat her on swings and there was a photograph of Rosa at four, her eyes glassy from the flash, clutching a terrified tiger cub, with her grandfather smiling beside her. It had been taken at a circus, under a Big Top when, after all the people juggling plates and women in leotards hurling themselves from high platforms, the ringmaster had taken the tiger cub into the crowd. You could hold the cub and pose for a photo. Grandfather Tom thought it seemed like a good idea, and called the ringmaster over. But when the ringmaster arrived, a fat man sweating under his greasepaint, Rosa had shrunk more from him than from the frightened animal, which looked like a soft toy, compressed into the fat man’s armpit. The ringmaster had been dismissed, but as the cub disappeared across the other side of the ring, Rosa had begun to cry. It was an early sense of a moment in time forever lost, demoted from memory to mere possibility. Of course she thought nothing like that at all, she just saw the tiger cub vanishing away from her and wailed. Her grandfather asked her what was the matter, reassured her that the cub had gone, that it wouldn’t bite her anyway, offered her ice creams and other small bribes, but she held her head in her hands and sobbed. He knew anyway, and just as the cub was about to disappear backstage he leapt from his seat and ran across the sawdust, to ask the trainer to bring the cub back to Rosa’s seat. So they took a photo of her and her grandfather bought it. Now the trainer, the cub and her grandfather were all dead, thought Rosa. Perhaps not the trainer. He might still be clinging on. But definitely the cub! The cub had been dead for years.

Grandfather Tom wrote comical verse in his spare time, after he had injured his knee, which ended his career in amateur football. He never published anything, but Rosa’s mother’s
desk at home was crammed with folders of his writings, immaculately drafted and redrafted, poems for friends. He had written until the end, making neat copies of even his swiftest doggerel, storing them away. For years, Rosa thought he might have been an unsung genius of modern letters, and had prepared to campaign for his reputation, but after her mother died she read all his poems again. They made her cry, but she understood they would never be published. They were loving, funny poems, but nothing more.
To my dearest Rosa/
Whose mother really chos-
a/ tricky name to rhyme/ I’ve tried it
time and time/ but can’t get my old brain/ To find a good
refrain./ It’s hard to tell your daughter/ She really didn’t oughta/
Call her daughter Rosa/ Because the name would pos-
a/
Such a rich conundrum/ To Rosa’s old and humdrum/ Very
adoring grandpapa/ When he tried to write to her!!
That was one she remembered. It was definitely not Swift. But it wasn’t bad for a man who left school at fourteen. His collected poems, his life’s work neatly copied into a school notebook, was inscribed Thomas Marswick, Barrow, 1975.

She had been lucky with her family. They had been kind and loving, these long-dead people. It was odd she thought about her grandparents so seldom. Only as the train ran north did she really consider them. It took a jolt, a change of location, for her brain to grind backwards. Of course she had hardly known them at all. It was just a dim sense of familial recognition, a twitch of the genes, but it made her shift sadly in her seat. They would have been appalled by her, she understood. They would certainly have told her to calm herself. Grandfather Tom had been a clever man, but he was pragmatic. He had a wife and a daughter, a group of good friends, he played sport at the weekends. He divided up his time – work and play, everything in its place, a time for fooling around and a time for getting your head down, earning some money. His daughter had done well, and he expected things to progress from there. Rosa’s parents expected her to better them, as they had bettered their parents. That was how they thought it went,
they assumed – onwards and upwards with every generation. And if not upwards, then at least an effort, in honour of those who had tried before you. They were all trying to tell her this, her father and the ghosts of her family. You had to live. You had to try your best. There was nothing else for it. But at this she felt rebellious again and kicked them all off, these kind-eyed ancestors of hers.

And now Rosa watched the sun sink towards the hills. The day was drawing on. The closeness of the evening made her tired, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again she had gripped her pen, and she wrote:

Now she stopped. If you understood God as an ideal, as something thought, part of the human longing for perfection, perfection unattainable but possible to imagine, to feel a sense of, then perhaps she understood. The mind was impersonal and therefore divine. The body was personal and therefore mortal.
Dream the dream the dream the dream
… Yet she – like the rest of the race – possessed a mind that felt its finitude as unnatural, though really it was the most natural thing of all. That was the problem. Her mind felt the disappearance of her mother to be incomprehensible, whereas in reality it was inevitable. It seemed a crazy way for a species to think. It didn’t help with morale. Why, she wondered, had the species not evolved with an inbuilt acceptance of death – not the sort of acceptance that would cause people to die without a struggle, but a sort of inbuilt sense of death as the natural end of life? Why did the mind –
the mind, or your mind,
she thought? – return constantly to the very element of life which made it so
unhappy? Especially when it sapped your will, stopped you from achieving anything? If you were so preoccupied with this immutable fact, so very concerned about it you could hardly participate, then what was the good of that?

Had she been more self-disciplined, altogether more Zen, she might have understood that age was an arbitrary marker, that growing old hardly mattered, because one could die any day. Would she not have apprehended the absurdity of human time? What about
durée
, she tried to remember, what about inner time? She could only perceive this relentless linear motion, this surging wave that was carrying her ever onwards. She should become more magnanimous, she thought. It was impractical to think so keenly about herself. Her hands were sweating, and there was a strong smell of coffee around her. It made her think about buying a cup, but she stayed in her seat, holding onto the table. For ten years, she had a simple means of self-definition. She was a journalist. It lent a confident ring to her voice. ‘Rosa Lane, calling from the Daily Rag, could you give me a few moments of your time.’ Through the years, Rosa’s voice had dropped, becoming more deep and jovial, trustworthy and efficient. ‘Hi, I’m Rosa, this is my partner, Liam. Yes, I’m a journalist. Liam is a political lobbyist.’ Subtext:
We’re a pretty savvy couple, and you’d better know it.
If something failed, if something went briefly awry, they could bask in the regard of the other – until the last stages at least, when there was no basking and mutual regard had been extinguished. Prior to that, she had delivered her lines well, with assurance, self-importance coursing from her larynx. ‘Hi, Rosa Lane here, I’m a veritable goddess of the media. Hey, listen to me! And I have a fine relationship as well, no doubt I’m on the way to something called a happy life.’
I hardly thought
about this stuff at all,
she thought. It was true she was sounding more hesitant. She had become afraid of striking up casual conversation with her neighbours. What do you do? they might say. Well, that was a question! What did you say?
I do
nothing, or nothing worth revealing anyway. I bow before the
unrevealed secrets of TEMP. I am, professionally speaking, a
despairing toad. Yet there are many things I intend to do! Even
today, I fully intend to find a place to stay. Then I will phone
Liam and ask about the furniture. I will call the bank and beg
them for an extension – that’s Mr Sharkbreath, you see, he’s
been quite cruel recently and I’m not very pleased with him. I
assure you, it’s quite terrible what he did. He loaned me a load
of money, and then he asked for it back, the callous varmint. I
fully intend, after dealing with Sharkbreath, telling him exactly
what I think, to read the comedies of Shakespeare, distinguish
the various philosophies of the way, read
History of Western Philosophy,
Proust, Cervantes, Racine, the Ancient
philosophers and the works of the major religions and a few
more peripheral and the rest, find the TEMP – my own personal
TEMP, you’ll have to find yours yourself – whatever that is,
I don’t suppose you know either.