We Had It So Good (18 page)

Periodic cravings washed over him with the longing and yearning he had once felt as a hormone-assaulted single man at Oxford, staring at the girls in the next-door garden with their spectacular breasts. He wept at the thought of lemon chiffon pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side, maybe two scoops. He drooled over the recollection of fudge brownies, fudge sundaes, apple cobbler, chess pie. Sometimes he ate two chocolate bars on the journey home from work and put his key in the door feeling guilty and nauseous. He badly missed a candy from his youth called Mounds, which was unavailable in Europe. Its name summed it up: a pile of sweetened coconut enrobed in chocolate. The British had something similar, they called it a Bounty bar, but it wasn't the same in a way he could not put his finger on, perhaps it was as simple as the color of the packaging and its associations. Nor did it have, as its sister confection, the Almond Joy, which was identical to Mounds but with an added nut.

Whenever he went to America to see his parents, he took an extra bag with him, to fill with Mounds, Almond Joys, Peppermint Patties, Clark bars and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. His favorite candies did not have caramel in them, which he couldn't stand. Snickers would be an ideal bar were it not for the thin layer of light brown goo holding in place the peanuts. Caramel, he worked out, was primarily used as engineering, to make things adhere to the base ingredient, usually a fondant or nougat, while chocolate held the whole thing together and kept it from sticking to your hands. He suggested to the commissioning editors a fun science program on the construction of famous confectionary bars but was knocked back by the BBC's ban on using brand names, which rendered the idea pointless.

He was forced to buy a small refrigerator for his study to keep his American candies, as he called them, from deteriorating before he
had worked through them all. Chocolate, he observed, developed in the heat a whitish moldlike substance called bloom, which he found unappetizing though he knew it was harmless. A subsection of research argued whether the bloom was caused by phase separation or polymorphic transformation. This was how he could have earned a living in the commercial sector: analyzing chocolate deterioration. It no longer seemed as shameful as it had when he had been in Professor Whaley's office at UCLA; you settled for less, he thought, that's what life was, perennially settling for less.

And you fought these absurd little domestic wars, such as with your wife, who would not permit sugar of any kind in the kitchen, which wasn't needed as she did no baking and expected guests to take their tea and coffee without it. All meals ended with fruit selected according to the season. Winters were an endless bore of apples and pears until the short tepid summers of strawberries or raspberries, served with yogurt. On special occasions they were allowed a sorbet. In the end, arguments over sugar had become his protests.

Andrea had been plump when he met her, he liked that, he liked a
zaftig
woman, short and squeezy. Now she was lean. She was a jogger, pounding the streets of Islington, where there were no parks and no fresh air. She did three circuits of Highbury Fields, thinking through her patients' problems as she went; Stephen did nothing. At home at his parents' house in L.A. no one followed any sports, physical activity outside work was for jocks and in England he had never learned to watch soccer, let alone cricket or tennis. Andrea bought him a set of what he insisted on calling dumbbells, suggesting he might lift them for twenty minutes before breakfast three days a week. They gathered dust, under the bed.

Stephen no longer had any real idea what his wife's hair color was; white lines occasionally appeared at the roots, which he was too polite to mention. Was it his imagination, or was she growing blonder, with what he called yellow streaky pieces? He'd gone to bed with a plump redhead on a mattress on the floor in a room
scented by joss sticks and patchouli and woken up in an Islington mansion next to a firm, toned body and a sleek, ever-lightening bob of hair. In the mirror, he saw his own wiry black hair grazed with gray, and a widow's peak developing as it receded from the temples, leaving pink, mottled skin. Scared of the new health hazard, skin cancer, he started to wear a hat: an American baseball cap from the Gap, the only kind of hat he was prepared to wear, with its name and logo on the front. His old clothes still hung in the wardrobe, he was not prepared to get rid of them, they were who he really was, he could not forget the boy who had sailed across the Atlantic on the SS
United States
with high hopes.

When he went out to buy a pair of 32-inch-waist jeans and they didn't fit him, he came home empty-handed. He was a 32-inch waist. This was his measurement, it was a descriptor, like a birthmark. “But self-evidently you are size 34,” said Andrea. “No, I'm not,” he said, stubbornly. “You should cut out chocolate, then you'd be back in your size 32s.” “Never happen,” he replied, in a sulk.

To Andrea, her husband's refusal to abandon the childishness of what she called his sweeties was obviously a symptom of unresolved issues which he refused to confront. He had, from the start, declared himself not a candidate for therapy. He accepted and indulged her career as a way of making money out of other people's neuroses, but if he possessed a subconscious, and he unwillingly accepted that he must, since she insisted (and he was prepared for the sake of a quiet life and respect for her and her career to agree), it was and would remain concreted over. The world in his opinion had too many wonders to investigate to waste time exploring imaginary ones. He had purchased one of the first Apple Mac computers and one of the first modems on the market. He could enter, like an intruder, university departments where he experienced the eerie sensation of walking through the halls late at night when all the faculty had gone home, and the place was silent but you could read the notices on the boards, the names of the professors, the courses they taught
and their research interests. These were the first websites. He joined user groups and chatted about biotechnology. Andrea caught him on the internet, a half-eaten Mounds bar on the desk next to him, “talking” to a woman at MIT.

What did this compulsion to eat chocolate mean, she wondered, and why the candy bars of his childhood? Something infantile had not been fully outgrown; he had always been a breast man, and before that a momma's boy. There was something not entirely adult about her husband, she thought, he retained a boyishness he should have long ago abandoned. It was her theory that in all marriages there is one person who is the grown-up and the other who is the child, and she knew which role she fulfilled in this particular partnership. He still had the eagerness, the curiosity, the straightforward humor of the boy she had first met in the garden and had decided that he was the One, the one to whom she would lose her virginity. This was what she still loved about him, that he was not depressed or sour or bitter or angry, like many men who sat before her in the patient's chair. She was very tired of listening to male rage and male misogyny.

For she had a husband who would come home from work and tell her to stop what she was doing, turn off the cooker, lay down her book because he had just been commissioned to make the most
fabulous
program, a whole history of the discovery of DNA, and he would get to interview Watson and Crick. He would be buoyed up for days with excitement.

But as for his candy bars, Stephen said that all he had was a sweet tooth and there were more important things for her to worry about, like what exactly was wrong with their daughter, who kept them up late into the night, in their shared bed, talking and arguing, each blaming the other for her distressing condition, which to Andrea was absurd since it was obvious that Stephen himself was the problem. Until, exhausted, they turned out the light and Stephen lay in the darkness, his eyes wide open, wondering if it was true and this was what he had done to her, to Marianne.

F
or many years Marianne had waited for Grace to come and rescue her. Grace had white-blond hair and her mouth was the color of a post box or a telephone box. When she opened it, her eyebrows moved up and down. People's faces were always in close-up. Marianne could see, by a power of magnification, their pimples, open pores, the hairs in their nostrils. Many people had a monstrous appearance because of this heightened perception of hers. Grace's skin was porcelain, and you had to concentrate hard to see her eyelashes when she had just got out of bed and hadn't put the black on them.

She wore a green embroidered kimono with nothing under it and Marianne came across her in the hall, sitting on an old carved wooden chest, her legs apart, smoking a cigarette, and a patch of blond hair between her thighs, growing down the sides of them.

Her reddened stubs were all over the house. She left them in saucers, in the earth of plants, extinguished in the dregs of coffee cups or abandoned, upended, with a column of tottering gray ash.

In the mornings she did bending exercises in her bra and pants, old gray garments compared with Andrea's lace underwear. She reached up to scratch her head and a dead insect fell from her hair. Marianne watched in horror and anxiety. Grace picked it up between her fingers and examined it.

“I don't know what it is,” she said to Marianne. “What do you think?”

“It's not a spider, it's not a fly.”

“Something that belongs in a warm climate. That's why it was attracted to me. It was building a nest as close as it could get to an island.”

“What are you
talking
about?”

But Grace closed her lips. She flicked the insect away with a finger, it skittered across the room. Marianne followed it with her eyes. Later she would find a matchbox and put the insect into it, it would be her souvenir of the fabulous Grace who came and went without warning.

But she forgot, and the insect was removed by the vacuum cleaner, into a dusty hot world.

She comes and goes, Marianne thought. And one day she will take
me
. But the visits grew more infrequent.

“You're my godmother,” she said, the last time she saw her. “You're supposed to bring me a
present
!”

“Who told you that?”

“Everyone knows that godmothers bring presents.”

“No, I mean who said I was your godmother?”

“Mummy did.”

“How ridiculous.”

“But you were there when I was born. You named me.”

“Yes, that's true, I was.”

“What was I like?”

“When?”

“When I'd just been born, of course.”

“Small, slimy and red.”

“Oh! So you didn't like me.”

“All babies are small, slimy and red. I suppose your brother was too.”

“Let's not talk about him. He's got his own godmother, no,
not a godmother, a godfather, Uncle Ivan. Do you know Uncle Ivan?”

“Of course. I've known him longer than I've known your father.”

“He brings Max fantastic presents.”

“He's rich, that's why.”

“Well that's just not fair, that he has a rich godfather and I have a poor godmother. I
should
have a present.”

“What do you want? What's missing from your life?”

“Lots of things.”

“Well write a list and I'll think about it.”

“All right.”

“Or I'll take you to an island where the sun always shines and there's singing, and people are happy, apart from the secret police.”

“I don't know what secret police are.”

“You wait.”

“I'd like to go to the island. Can we go soon?”

“Okay. In a year or two.”

“That's too long.”

“I'll get you something in the meantime, where's that list?”

“I would like… a camera.”

“Why?”

“Then I could make everything stop. You look at someone and they're doing something interesting and you want to stop it so you can look at it, but they just go on moving.”

“I'll buy you a camera.”

But Grace forgot all about the promise and Ivan bought it for her instead, with a card on which was written,
Love from Godmother Grace
. For Stephen, overhearing the conversation through the partly open door of the bathroom, thought that Marianne, at eight, was too young to have it broken to her with such cruelty that promises were just words.

Because of the camera, Marianne continued to believe that Grace would come for her one day and take her to the island, where
everyone was happy and people burst out singing for absolutely no reason, which was not something you could say about London, a place where no one even whistled anymore.

Marianne took photographs of her mother and father, her brother, Uncle Ivan and Uncle Ivan's new wife, Simone, who had large pink lips, and smelt strongly of something which made Marianne's eyes water. “The closest we'll ever get again to opium,” Ivan said.

When the pictures came back as rectangular shiny prints, she laid them out on the bed and examined them carefully. There were expressions in people's faces she did not understand, particularly her father's. She felt that his eyes and his mouth were pulling in two different directions, they belonged in different pictures, of separate people. Her mother did not look the same in any photograph, but that was perhaps to do with the fact that she was always changing her hair and her cheeks expanded and contracted. Max stayed the same. Ivan and Simone arranged themselves in poses she had to ignore.

She had seen cameras which had lenses that stuck out at the front and when you looked through them, everything was really near. One day perhaps Grace would buy her one.

But Grace did not come back. When she asked her mother where she was, Andrea said, “Southeast Asia, I think. Vietnam and Laos. Let's go and look at it on the globe, shall we?”