Mad Hope (22 page)

Max and Samantha return to what has become – within so short a time, in so few exchanges, but life is lived like this, isn't it? –
their
table, to find the ice in their drinks has melted into tiny translucent disks. The serving staff is still loitering around the periphery, wiping down surfaces, scowling with a handsome lack of conviction. Samantha drains her glass in two long pulls. Max places his hand on her knee like a comrade. She watches her sister and Philip on the dance floor, studies their embrace as if from far away, and farther still.

She can feel the weight of Max's hand on her knee, can sense what was once friendly becoming something more, something her body insists she must requite. She shifts her legs to the side, makes to cross them, and Max lifts his hand up and away. Up, up and away, she thinks as a bridal bouquet sails unbidden into her mind's eye. At the next table a baby cries out in hunger or in pain or in anger or in loneliness. The baby's parents stick their heads into the baby's bassinet; they are quicksilver sleuths and the most essential of superintendents. They do not emerge from the baby's lair for a long time. Samantha understands that it is impossible to just sit back and observe a baby. You cannot pass a baby by. A baby has needs, it draws you into its orbit surely and quickly. She looks at Max. He toasts her extravagantly. A person could do worse than a marketer-slash-performance-artist for a father. Samantha lifts her own glass, sips, then excuses herself again. ‘Bladder,' she says, ‘like walnut.' She holds up her hand in an
A-OK
sign by means of demonstration.

Max looks elated, then puzzled. ‘Okay,' he says.

Samantha walks past her Gran and Bea, huddled together like frail football players with a plan; she steps over her six-year-old cousin Graham tying napkins together in the shape of a lasso; she notices Sebastian Newton in a pile against a wall, his hand gripping the top of a barely upright beer bottle as if it were a ski pole. Was it she or Annie who had kissed him, French-style, after a party at Suzy Ludcombe's? Neither of them can remember, and it strikes her (although not forcefully) that this is perhaps odd. The bathroom looks different this time around. Someone has stacked the stones next to the sink in the shape of a lopsided inukshuk. So we don't get lost! Samantha thinks, thrilled and troubled. She turns towards the mirror, although there is no need, really. She is beautiful from the booze, smart too, thoughts linking up with loud connective clicks. She bends over to check stall vacancy. Ah, shoes she knows. They are her sister's round-toed ivory pumps, size six wide. She reaches under and grabs an ankle. ‘Annie?'

‘Let go, you stuck-in-mud monster.'

Samantha lets go.

Annie steps out of the stall and bumps her hip against Samantha's. ‘Hey,' she says. ‘Kidding.' She rinses her hands, glances over at the towel dispenser, then wipes them on her dress.

‘That's your dress, Annie.'

‘Yes it is. Yes. It. Is.' She grabs Samantha's hand. ‘C'mon, Mudstick. Let's play Concentration.' She lifts her palms. Samantha does the same and Annie begins. It is a game less dependent on strategy than memory and association; it is an accounting of sorts. ‘Let's play Concentration.' She taps Samantha's hands. ‘No repeats, no hesitation.' She taps them again and Samantha taps back. ‘You go first, I'll go second.' Another tap. ‘Topic is ... Names!'

‘Names of what?' Samantha drops her hands and takes a step back.

‘Well,' says Annie. ‘People we know!' She lifts her hands to tap Samantha's hands again. ‘Sebastian!'

Samantha smiles and taps her sister back. ‘Dad.'

‘Not a name,' says Annie.

‘Yes it is.'

‘Okay, I'll allow.' Tap. ‘Remington Steele.'

‘You don't know him, Annie.'

‘No,' says Annie sadly. ‘Your turn.'

‘Maggie.'

‘Who's that?'

‘Mum's second cousin – she visited from England when we lived in the high-rise on Southam Road. Red hair and those tight dresses with sashes?'

‘Oh yeah. Okay. Hands up.' Tap. ‘Dominican Republic.'

‘That's a country, not a person.'

‘Yes, but it should be a person. I think we'd be pals.' Tap. ‘Bobby.'

‘Don't say his name, Annie.'

‘Why not?'

‘It's not your turn.'

‘Then you go.'

‘I can't.'

‘Why not, Mudstick?'

‘Because I would have killed him.' Samantha leans up against the counter and reaches down to unstrap her shoe, which is rubbing annoyingly against her heel, but finds she cannot undo the buckle. Her hands are trembling. ‘I
could
kill him.'

Annie squeezes Samantha's chin and gives a gentle wrench. ‘I know that, Mudstick. That's why I never had to.' She smiles. ‘Hands up,' she says. Tap. ‘Philip.'

‘Yes,' says Samantha. ‘He's a good one.'

Eliza: In the Dark

When Annie was twelve I gave her my autograph book. It was only partway full, the inscription on the first page still fierce, intact, a message from my own mother. On the first line, in careful cursive:
Above all to thine
. And on the second:
Own self be true!
I remember what I felt when she gave it to me, a thrill like eating ice cream too fast and a guilt that settled cloudily in my chest. I thought I knew what the message meant: that I must be true and never lie. And I knew the reason she had written this – it had something to do with a missing saucer and one of my unlikely falsehoods involving the cat. Still, I treasured that book, and even felt a twinge of regret when I handed it over to Annie. ‘Own self,' she said, patting her chest. Then, ‘Be true!' as if signing to a caveman.

Samantha is still talking to the tall man, her eyebrows meeting in the middle of her forehead like something from a political cartoon. Smile, I will her. Look into his eyes. There is softness in her, I've seen it. Post-Bobby, for an entire year, Annie refused to dress in anything but purple. When her mother lost patience, what little she had, it was Samantha who emerged in a lavender pantsuit and mauve eyeshadow to intercede. Softness and loyalty the girl has – it's a certain spontaneity that's missing. Always skidding around inside her own damn head. Still, I will give her this: there is no one Samantha despises more pointedly than her cousin Bobby Mason. But our Annie forgave. Annie invited him to the wedding. It was me and Samantha who burned the sealed envelope – queenly stamp and all – over the gas flame of my stove, relished the flames licking and flickering, then feigned puzzlement when the bastard never replied.

I have arrived at many conclusions in my life whilst wrapped in the charm and force of the moment, only to cast my certainty away when the next challenge foils me. Still, here is what I know: there is a brand of betrayal that cannot ever be forgiven, but it is unique to each and every person. There is a night I will always remember. Frank had left us for a while – found something sweet and comfortable with a secretary or some such. Annie and Samantha's mother – my daughter, Sandra – was young when he left, three years old. She got up the night he came home and stood at the top of the stairs in her nightie, staring at him through veils of sleep. He held out his arms, then reached into his pocket for the trinket he had bought in the hopes of being welcomed, reborn. She blinked and remained suspended in her place. Then she raced into her daddy's arms and I understood in a flash how – with a child's certainty, the most certain of certainties – I had been blamed, and how much, how absolutely I had lost.

I look around me at the leftovers of celebration. Napkins wadded like sad ghosts on the tables. Sleek, silver cameras abandoned next to bread baskets, delicate fringed swaths of cloth used to keep out the cold tossed casually over the backs of chairs. Glasses – half-full and half-empty – everywhere. The couple of the hour on the dance floor, swinging each other round, holding tight to hands as their friends watch and cheer. The city night through the window, the tower – that desperate beacon – standing straight up to the stars none of us can see, here in the company of streetlights and skyscrapers.

It scares me still, how bright we keep things, how hard it is to preserve the dark. Even now I believe that darkness is where we are most safe. In the dark they cannot see you. Bea – only seventeen! – came to us in the dark in June of 1944, her wide eyes made whiter, more round, by the gloom. We found her mother in the morning, crushed under a wardrobe that had worked itself free, shaken loose when a bomb hit blocks away. Six days later her father came home with one arm and three bars of chocolate. He hugged Bea lopsidedly, then left her to her own devices. We shared the chocolate, and my fiancé booked us a passage to Canada.

‘Annie, she deserves this,' sighs Bea, her plate heaped high with tarts and confections.

‘Yes.'

I give Bea a little squeeze and she turns to me, surprised, then smiles.

‘You're not getting any of this coconut pie, if that's what you're thinking,' she says.

Samantha: We Fail?

‘You know,' says Samantha, ‘I had this one student in Vietnam who cycled for an hour and a half each morning to get to school. He wasn't bright – average, I'd say, or just above – but my God, he tried his nuts off in every single subject. I've never met anyone so young and so dedicated. I helped him fill out a university application for a school in the States. Some business school whose name escapes me – associated with one of the Ivy Leaguers. Princeton, I think. I want to go to a world-famous university, he kept telling me. I want to make my father proud. I must come back and get a very good job. Yes, I said, and thought, How terrible for him, to be carrying so much, to wake each morning and step, unthinkingly, into that fierce forward motion. He was one of three, the middle child, living in a house with dirt floors. His favourite book was
Who Moved My Cheese?
' Samantha stops talking to take a sip of her drink. She knows she is drunk and holding forth. Max is making a listening-type face, his eyebrows raised generously, but she's pretty sure he is also sneaking discreet peeks at her cleavage. She doesn't care; a message is burning inside her, it begs telling.

‘This boy's father told the children, when they were very young, that there would be money for only one of them to go to school.' Although it is a hackneyed, possibly ethnocentric image, Samantha cannot help picturing the family huddled around the central cooking fire of their ragged home. She places the aspiring boy at the edge of the circle, clothes him in a Nike football jersey, some cut-off jeans and a pair of worn leather thongs. She smooths his brow with one open hand, then steps back, into the shadows. ‘This man set up a scholarship fund for the child who earned the highest marks, then he worked like a dog in the rice fields to make the funds grow.'

Samantha pauses. She is telling this story for herself more than Max. Why? Because there is a lesson to be learned. If you want something, you must not waver. If you need something, you must try your damnedest, always, to get it. While in Vietnam, she had explained to her students the difference some marks on a page could make.

Macbeth: If we should fail –

Lady Macbeth: We fail?

You had a choice between indecision and imperiousness when it came to the relative success of your plans. Like all of life, it was only a matter of intonation. Samantha leans forward and places her hand lightly on Max's forearm.

‘Did he get in?' says Max.

‘What?'

‘Did he get in to the school?'

‘Oh,' she says. ‘Yes.'

‘Well, then, you did a good thing helping him the way you did. His father must be so proud.' Max announces this matter-of-factly, almost curtly, so that it resonates with truth.

‘Yes,' she says, beginning to like the way he makes her unsure of the point of things.

They go out together into the night, into the courtyard and the grassy stretch of park, over a small knoll, to a spot under a maple buttressed by chicken wire near the chain-link fence. The city surrounds them, blocks and blocks of blinking, squared-off ambition. Standing there under the ozone – tattered, as it is, like a child's security blanket – Samantha tips up her face to kiss Max.

Eliza: Forget-Me-Nots

Frank begged off with seasickness on the journey from Carlisle. Bea and I spent most of our time on deck playing games with the wind, watching it work our hair into strange birds of prey, ­boisterous bouffants. The ship felt luxurious and large to us, despite the crowds, and I still get shivers thinking about the red velvet ropes in the stairwells.

I found them lapping at each other on his narrow bunk, Bea's eyes squinched shut in love or concentration – who can really tell the difference when it comes right down to it? Frank's eyes fluttered at the sound of my step. He could always, in all our years, hear me coming. Our gazes met, magnetized, mid-air.

Up on deck the spray had real spunk, and I hated the fact that the ship was my home.

Bea's mother had embroidered her handkerchiefs for her sixteenth birthday – tiny blue forget-me-nots with black staring centres sewn along the scalloped edges. I brought Bea to tears halfway across the Atlantic by snatching one from her sleeve and waving it over the churning grey of the waves. She was on her knees with nausea and frustration before long, and stayed there, sobbing, until I placed the hanky daintily, royally, on her bowed head. In this way we forgave.