Letters From Prague (4 page)

‘I wish I could be bridesmaid every day,' said Marsha, and ran to open the door, running along the landing calling out ‘Granny! Granny! Look at me now!'

And Harriet, following, stopped to look in the mirror once more, and saw there someone else who looked different: a tall dark woman usually in jeans, usually in a hurry, dressed now in midnight-blue linen, with a slender string of pearls, and lipstick, going to her brother's wedding, by herself; watching her daughter be bridesmaid, by herself.

So. There had been all that – the arrival at Chelsea Town Hall, the flowers, the photographers; Susanna in sandwashed silk and heavenly cut-away shoes; Marsha, grave and exquisite; the smiles, the tears, the signing of the register; the reception – too many speeches, too much champagne; the waving goodbye, goodbye. Hugh and Susanna, a banker and a banker's daughter, meeting in Brussels: he, even then, beginning to look middle-aged, but with such a dear, kind face; she all fair hair, slender hands, cool charm, smiling and waving as they climbed into the waiting car in a cloud of confetti, and drove away. For a honeymoon in Tuscany, then back to Brussels.

Since then, almost four years ago, they'd seen each other only once, when Hugh and Susanna came over for her father's seventieth birthday, when the house, as for the wedding, had been full of visiting relatives, with little opportunity for real conversation. Susanna, in any case, had seemed – Harriet was not sure if she had misinterpreted this to avoid real conversation. And watching, once, over a crowded lunch table, Harriet had the sense that things between her and Hugh were not, somehow, quite right. Or perhaps she had imagined it.

Well. Hugh had sounded welcoming enough in his letter, and it was only the first lap of the journey. It gave them a good reason for seeing Brussels, and then they'd be back by themselves.

The track was straight again, the train picking up speed. They passed small brick houses crammed together; tower blocks rose beyond them. Karel, travelling along this track twenty-five years ago, would have looked out on to much the same view, give or take a tower block. Harriet, reading history at university, had almost forgotten Karel, but she had kept his letters.

She kept other letters, too. The second drawer of the polished bureau held those from Marsha's father, who had, as Karel never had, told Harriet that he loved her, but who had, when it came to it, loved her not quite enough.

Late on a Saturday afternoon one mid-November, when Marsha, at almost three months, was screaming with colic, her baby legs drawn up and her scarlet face contorted, her father told Harriet he was just going out to the shops. It was 1083, and Harriet, like many women of her generation, was trying to do everything: have a baby, run a house, go back to work and entertain on Saturdays. They were entertaining tonight: two couples who had not yet thought about babies, who showed no more than polite interest in Martin and Harriet's baby, and who were certainly not interested in having her appear during supper, let alone be breastfed in front of them.

Harriet, exhausted, dreading the evening, pacing up and down the knocked-through sitting room of the terraced house in Shepherd's Bush with screaming Marsha, barely noticed Martin had gone. He was a good cook, he was cooking tonight: she assumed he had forgotten cardamoms, or cumin or turmeric, none of which went well with breastfeeding, though she could hardly expect their guests to enjoy Weetabix and banana or slices of ham with mashed potato, which was what, in her heart, she felt like. She didn't really care what ingredient Martin had forgotten, she didn't care about anything except how to stop Marsha crying, and she barely heard the front door close, though she did feel, not for the first time, a rising resentment that it was usually she who did the pacing.

Some forty minutes later, with Marsha, at last, asleep in her basket – about, Harriet knew, to wake and start screaming again, as she did every evening – she went, almost shaking with tiredness, into the kitchen. Martin had been making preparations. There was a bunch of supermarket coriander, a china bowl with eggs in it, a bottle of red wine and a chopping board put ready, with a sharp Sabatier knife, to chop the meat which Harriet dimly recalled was in the fridge with a large carton of sour cream. None of these things looked as though it had anything to do with her, or her life as it had become since Marsha's arrival.

There was also a note, with her name on it, propped up against a box of wild rice. She put on the kettle and looked at it, as if from some distance.

She took it back to the sitting room. The light was fading. She read the note, and then she read it again, sinking on to the sofa from Heal's which she and Martin had chosen together, long before Marsha was thought of.

I am sorry … this is not … I cannot … I never wanted … you know I never wanted … you are better off without … I am sorry … goodbye … goodbye …

It had grown dark. Beyond the uncurtained doors at the end of the room the little square of West London garden was invisible. In her basket, Marsha was stirring, beginning to draw her legs up, screwing up her baby face with pain. Harriet, on the Heal's sofa, cried and cried.

She had largely – not quite – forgotten Karel at university: there had been many times since when she had thought of him. She had thought of him whenever Czechoslovakia was in the news again: in 1973, the year after she left with a good degree, when an amnesty was granted to those Czechs who had remained abroad after the Russian invasion. Forty thousand exiles returned, then, hoping for better times. She thought of him in 1977, when hundreds of intellectuals signed Charter 77, the manifesto of human rights, and a new wave of arrests and imprisonments began. Was Karel among the signatories? Had he, too, been arrested? She pictured him, long and dark and beautiful, brutally woken from sleep – on his own? With his wife? His lover? – by a bang on the door and harsh, implacable voices; driven away, as Dubcek had been driven away.

Never I think I will meet someone like you, Harriet
…

In the summer of 1981, she sat watching programmes about the strikes and unrest in Poland, about Solidarity and Lech Walesa: all this was in the neighbouring country, and might spread. There were more arrests in Czechoslovakia. Again, she wondered: was he safe? Had they come for him in the night?

Harriet, sobbing on the Heal's sofa as Marsha, in her basket, began to wail, remembered Karel's departure and cried even harder. The only men she had ever loved, and both had abandoned her. But Karel had a reason, a real reason, and besides, they were both so young.

And so in love, she thought brokenly, picking up her baby.

It had grown even darker; people were coming to supper. In tears, Harriet made a phone call, and asked for another to be made, explaining about babies, and colic, and tiredness, sensing a mixture of concern and impatience at the other end.

Who cared? They were his friends, not hers. Childless accountants. Is that what Martin wanted to be? She hated them all.

In tears she went into the kitchen, and swept every last item of dinner-party fare into the swingbin. Marsha continued to scream.

At last, as every evening, she stopped, and Harriet fed her. She changed her and watched her fall at last like a stone in a well into a deep, real sleep; she took herself into a hot bath and afterwards, in her dressing gown, she ate slices of ham and bread and butter. Then she went to bed and fell asleep too, her baby beside her, both waking in the night to cry again.

Gradually, they recovered. Marsha, on the dot of three months, gave up colic, as the clinic had said she would. Harriet, finding herself with a transformed baby – smiling, cooing, feeding well – stopped crying quite so much. Christmas was miserable, spent with her family, trying to be brave. New Year was worse, spent with a friend she'd made in the NCT class, whose husband had not abandoned her, and who was radiant. Marsha's father, as Harriet had begun to think of Martin, severing painfully his connection with herself, sent a letter. He would arrange for a monthly sum, a standing order.

Well. That was something. No. That was the least he could do.

Harriet, back at work, with Marsha at a childminder, typed out a four-line announcement, and photocopied it in the school office.

Harriet Pickering announces the end of her marriage to Martin Rivers. She and Marsha Pickering will continue
to
live at their present address until further notice and look forward to seeing you there.

She posted a copy to all her friends, she put up a copy in the staffroom. And then, because she had to, and because she had a baby, she got on with her life.

Marsha went to nursery school. She went to primary school. Harriet changed jobs, moving to a school closer to Marsha's. She became, in due course, head of the history department; she became, somebody told her, rather intimidating. She and Marsha had lodgers, they had friends; they had, on the whole, a well-run and enjoyable life: two strong-willed individuals who battled in the mornings and made it up in the afternoons, collapsing at the end of school with tea and television, curling up with a book at bedtime. There were people in and out of the house. It was, said Marsha, a nice house.

There was not, however, a man in Harriet's life. Nor, for a long time, wary and angry, did she wish for one. When that changed, and she did begin to wish, there seemed to be no one who was both desirable and free. There was certainly no one, among those few men with whom she went to the cinema, to the park with Marsha or even, occasionally and discreetly, to bed, for whom she felt it might be worth disrupting the settled existence she and her daughter had now established.

Some of the energy which might have been given to a man went, rather more usefully, she felt, into local politics, community issues, national campaigns. It was the Eighties, and a lot of money was being made by a certain kind of person. It was not, on the whole, being made by the parents of Harriet's pupils, many of whom were facing unemployment. Her department budget was being cut with every term. She spent a great deal of time in meetings, on marches, writing angry letters.

Now and then, in discussions with friends, or in rare quiet moments on her own, she reflected on the political progress of her life: from privileged, privately educated accountant's daughter to radical teacher, campaigning member of the Labour Party. She retained much affection for her parents, but she dissociated herself from her background and their politics, refusing, in particular, to send her daughter anywhere but the local school.

Sometimes she tried to connect the person she was now with the girl who had watched the Russian tanks invade Czechoslovakia. She reflected that to be a socialist in Britain, where the class divide grew in some ways ever wider, did not mean identifying with Russian imperialism. She reflected on something she had heard at university from a lecturer she had much liked the look of, who had told them, in a seminar, about a badge worn by Communist Party members in Britain after the Hungarian invasion of 1956, when she had been only five.

I think, therefore I see.

Well, yes, that was right. She tried to be clear-sighted.

She tried, too, to give Marsha a sense of the world.

In Marsha's bedroom there stood on top of the bookshelves an illuminated globe. There was also a map on the wall. Sometimes Harriet tested her on seas, or capital cities; she told her about the Berlin Wall, which meant there was a capital city divided. She told her about the Iron Curtain, and once or twice, as their fingers moved eastward over Europe, reaching Czechoslovakia: ‘I used to know someone from here. He lived in Prague, the capital – here, see? It's supposed to be beautiful.‘

Marsha yawned. Harriet put the globe back on the bookshelf and kissed her goodnight. She stood in the doorway, looking at patchwork Europe, shining down; at the pointer, marking Prague.

‘Will we ever go there?' asked Marsha, pulling her lion pyjama case down beside her.

‘I shouldn't think so,' said Harriet, hearing Annie the lodger come in downstairs.

‘Because of the Iron Curtain?'

‘Yes. Goodnight.'

Hugh and Susanna were married in the summer of 1989. That autumn, Europe changed for ever. On a grey November Saturday, Harriet and Marsha and Annie the lodger sat on the worn Heal's sofa watching the Berlin Wall come down.

Within a fortnight they were watching a demonstration of two hundred thousand people in Prague, snow falling on Wenceslas Square, bells ringing, a government, without a shot being fired, giving in at last. Harriet found herself searching, with every close-up of every face, for a particular face, thin, dark-haired, older. She could not find it, but she could not tear herself away.

Then, at Christmas, the cameras swung to Romania. Harriet and Marsha, spending Christmas in Kensington, sat with her parents and various aunts, watching the demonstration, a very different one, before the presidential palace. They saw the dawning realisation on Ceaucescu's face: the angry crowd, the helicopters on the palace roof, the trial, the execution. Harriet did not like Marsha watching this, and was glad of the distraction of presents.

At the end of Boxing Day they drove home across a deserted London. Next day, they watched a tumultuous Prague, as Dubcek, smiling, triumphant, older, came out on to the balcony of the National Museum, waving to the thousands ringing bells in the square below. Harriet wept.

‘Why are you crying?' asked Marsha. ‘I hate it when you cry.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Harriet, drying her eyes, giving her a hug. ‘I just can't help it.'

It's a great circle, she thought later, having a glass of brandy by the fire, amongst the Christmas cards, as Marsha fell asleep upstairs. Dubcek had fallen, been taken away and humiliated, and now he was back: although once that seemed impossible it now seemed inevitable.

Perhaps other things, also, had possibilities.