We Had It So Good (38 page)

Later that afternoon, he told Stephen he was going home. In the time they'd had together, father and son had developed an easy relationship, one that neither cared to investigate or analyze. His father, Stephen thought, was a man of his own time, a hard worker and provider. He had earned the right to be a tourist in London. He reminded him of the time he had tried on Marilyn Monroe's champagne mink and had been whacked round the head for it.

“I don't remember that at all,” Si said. “When did this happen?”

“But I dined out on that story my whole life,” said Stephen. “I thought you thought I was gay or something.”

“You, gay? It never entered my head.”

Stephen thought it was possible that he would not see his father again. He was so old, he might not survive until the summer, when he planned a short visit to L.A. to check up on him. At the airport he held in his arms the fragile little man.

“I love you, Dad,” he said.

“You made a hell of a life for yourself here in England. I can't criticize a thing. Thank God you never went into the army.”

“I know. Isn't it strange how it all turned out? You came to America and I wound up back in Europe. I never meant to.”

“Call it fate.”

Stephen let his father go, through security and into the departure lounge. He had bought him a business-class ticket, he was going to be comfortable.

Across the Atlantic, darkness enclosed Si's mind, and he died. Failing to rouse him with a defibrillator, the crew had no option but to cover him with a blanket and on he flew across the ocean, no longer susceptible to air pockets or turbulence or the terror of take-offs and landings, in peace.

T
he froggy day is always returning.

The crows are back. They are hopping toward the house and won't stop coming, someone has left a back door open and they are inside, navigating the kitchen, walking on their scaly feet toward the upstairs where she lies in bed waiting for them and Stephen can do nothing to prevent their advance. He can't protect her, it drives him wild. And Andrea needs to protect Stephen from his own failure. It's out of his hands.

She must find the strength to counter them by the power of positive thinking, which doesn't kill crows, she hasn't been married to a scientist for thirty-seven years to believe that, but fear itself can make you ill.

Returning to the froggy day, Andrea understands for the first time that though she had analyzed her childhood, she had never returned to it with the affection of nostalgia. She had not been an unhappy child. There was so much in the past to comfort her.

She thought about the radio programs she used to listen to on the walnut radiogram in the sitting room of the house in Barnet. “Do you remember, Grace?” she said. The lady with the cut-glass voice who came on in the early afternoons, after the shipping forecast with its mysterious place names and terrible weather. German Bight. She imagined a German with huge teeth. “Are you
sitting comfortably?” the lady asked. “Then I'll begin.” And would tell a story about teddy bears.

The program's name was
Listen with Mother
. Neither her mother nor Grace's was often there to listen with their daughters, so perhaps the woman on the radio was the surrogate mother. She was incredibly nice, you could not help but love her. Her name was Daphne Oxenford, the prettiest, most melodic name in the world, and the simple piano music tinkled with the words. Deep, deep comfort to remember Daphne Oxenford and find the theme tune on the internet, listening in bed on Stephen's laptop under a snow white duvet with a cup of green tea by her bed, which her throat found difficult to swallow, though she must drink it, so parched was she.

When they moved to the hotel in Cornwall there was a television room housing a huge piece of equipment with a tiny gray flickering screen set inside a monstrous mahogany cabinet and concealed behind a set of doors. It was turned on at lunchtime for the benefit of any small children staying in the hotel. They were provided with a special sandwich meal and Andrea was permitted to watch with them. Inside the gray screen she saw a strange doll called Andy Pandy with strings coming from his arms, hands, feet and shoulders, which her dolls didn't have. There was a family of clothes pegs, and two rustic men made out of flowerpots who also lived in flowerpots in a garden with a large talking weed thrusting up between their adjacent homes. To the accompaniment of xylophone music, hand puppets called Rag, Tag and Bobtail (a hedgehog, a mouse and a rabbit) moved around a papier-mâché set.

Grace was unable to share fully in this intense nostalgia for a fifties childhood. Her parents had not bought a television until 1960 and she had spent those years playing in the as yet unbuilt-over woods. She knew the names of birds and plants and wild animals, and they had had three cats whose litters she had seen born and then found new homes. She had ridden horses and been driven out
on Boxing Day into the countryside to watch the hunt. She had been half-promised her own pony and had gone to gymkhanas. She and Andrea had both read the same horsy books, but Andrea had never put her foot in a stirrup, there was no time for her to be taken on any pursuits like this, her parents were always too busy. She had the sea instead, the rock pools, the scuttling crabs, her bucket and spade and her friendship with the (harmless) ice-cream-van man.

Andrea returned more and more frequently to the house on the edge of London before it turned into Hertfordshire, the stained glass shields in the panels of the front door and the pools of colored light that fell on the parquet hall floor, the brass stair rods that she used to count when she had learned counting, the cupboard where the electricity meter was kept and the red and black wires, her doll Elizabeth, whose empty body cavity she had filled with water. Out in the garden the coal hole, the marks on the grass where the air-raid shelter had been, the beds of upright flowers, tulips and
antirrhinums,
which was the hardest word in the world to spell, the privet hedge, the rockery. Her mother in the gray early-winter light sweeping the ashes from the grate and building a new fire from black, glittering dusty coal, the immersion heater and the airing cupboard where clothes that had been taken down from the overhead pulley in the kitchen were left until they were bone dry. Green caterpillars crawling across a leaf, white cabbage butterflies, the garage where her father's Humber was kept and also the washday mangle through which her mother fed the wet clothes. And Nunny hanging by his two ears from pegs in the kitchen's steam while the kettle boiled and outside the fog advancing and retreating and the crow on the lawn looking up at her as she stood balanced on the velvet cushion of the window seat, and her ottoman with all her picture books and toys (except Nunny) safe inside it. And the wallpaper was a recurring pattern of more rabbits, eating nettles.

Marianne drove to Barnet and found the old house and photographed it and brought a print to her mother. “It looks exactly
the same,” Andrea said, examining it, in her hands with fingernails Grace had painted, at Andrea's request, an aggressive post-box red. Her wedding ring shone gold above them. “It's just as I remember, and even the garden has the same rosebushes. Do you think they're the originals, do roses last so long, what's their life span?” How strange, she had thought, that the garden roses in her childhood home would live longer than she would.

Whatever fears we are prey to in childhood, she thought, it is so easy to be happy when you are two years old, waking up every morning and the memories of the day before are wiped clean. Even little children who are cruelly treated still smile, happiness has to be beaten out of them. Of course, she acknowledged, it's in childhood that we are building our neuroses, and God forbid, if you
are
abused and neglected, something can go so badly wrong so early that it can never be put right. But on the whole childhood is the time of our greatest happiness, even Grace conceded this, remembering herself on her mother's lap, her mother singing to her, and Andrea tried as best she could, through the meditation classes she has been taking, to recall and restore what it was like to be a small, loved child, through the successive and horrifying nausea of chemotherapy.

Going back deep into her own past for hours every day, watching old episodes of
Watch with Mother
on YouTube, she feels comforted. These programs can sometimes be as good as a strong painkiller, though she is very much looking forward to morphine, which Stephen had described to her, having observed his father's sudden happiness in the hospital after the escalator fall. The pain is worse than she expected, but she resents it mainly for preventing her from putting everything in order. From the start the diagnosis wasn't good. Cervical cancer is hard to detect in its early stages and she had missed one smear test, being too busy with patients to turn up. Now the cancer is all through her. It is secondaries, it's in her lungs, she'll die. It's just as she'd always thought, that it would be Stephen, with his neurotic hypochondria, who would
have nothing wrong with him. And she, the healthy one, who would die young.

Not really young, but she feels young, that is, she has no idea what it feels like to be old.

Stephen had forced Grace to go to the doctor about her shaking hands. He said to Andrea, “She's got Parkinson's.” She hadn't—it was hypoglycemia, low blood sugar, she just had to eat at regular intervals. When she did, the tremors stopped and she gained weight, she looked better than she had in years, without the eyes in shrunken sockets, outlined with black, and the wrinkles of her face filled out a bit with the extra fat. But Stephen had not foreseen his wife's cervical cancer, no one had until she finally told him about the pelvic pain and in fright he took her to the emergency room of the hospital and sat and waited until she came out, white as a sheet.

Why her
? Why my wife? Stephen screamed.
She
didn't care about why, she cared about what was going to happen now, if she was actually strong enough for the chemo and the radiation therapy, and whether it would offer her enough hope to be worth it. She could accept her fate, have a few months with her family and go, but Stephen went mad. How could she
not
put her trust in science, sure, it may not always deliver, but you had to try, you had to goddam try.

She tried.

Now, lying in bed with the laptop, watching Andy Pandy, her mother's pet name for her, she wishes she hadn't bothered, had devoted her remaining time in the world to closure. For she feels that when she leaves her children behind, as she is going to, they will be in a state that feels to her similar to the moment when, as a therapist, she would suggest to her patients that they could manage without her. This often produced tears, anger and panic in the patient.

But Marianne had had a wildly successful exhibition of dog portraits timed to the publication of her coffee table book. She was constantly in demand from private clients to take close-ups of their
dogs' faces which seemed to reveal the soul and essence of their pet. She had no plans to travel abroad to cover any more wars and she was seeing a dog breeder who came to the house with the smell of dog on him, which Stephen couldn't stand, but Marianne was happy, this is all that matters. And Andrea's grandchild, Daniel, is three years old and loves his grandma, and tries to climb up on her knee, but she is too tired to lift him and hold him in her arms and plant kisses on him, so Max lifts him onto the bed so he can crawl all over her and she feels only sorry that she will not see him at five or ten or fifteen.

Her kids will be fine, Stephen will meet someone and remarry within a couple of years, of that she's certain, he's the type who cannot stand to be without a wife, he is simply not cut out to be single and never has been. He hasn't been on his own since his junior year in high school and she expects that a year will be about as long as he will be able to take without going out to look for someone else. But Andrea does not care because she knows that she has had the best of him. Someone else can come along and deal with the old age that will fall upon him soon enough, which she knows only too well he is going to deal with very badly indeed. Ivan will fix him up, she has already told Ivan he has permission to do so, “But not anyone too young, Ivan. And please, promise me, not Mary Bitch.”

On some days she is terribly bad-tempered and shouts at her husband. She wants him to leave her alone. She is in pain and he is clumsy when he turns her in bed.

There was no one alive but her, she thought, who knew about the crows on the lawn, unless others were looking from the window that morning out at the fog and saw a bird staring up at their house. “So when I die, the memory dies and the past ceases to exist, though I told Stephen, but that's just a story to him, like the mink stole is
for me. I only see it through his recollection.” The fog was all over London. In the winter of 1951 there must have been many others who experienced that blanking, frozen whiteness. But how many
remembered
it? It was possible that she was the only one.

She knew she had been born the year after a terrible winter when the trains were frozen on their tracks, and lights were turned out for hours, and her parents were still hungry with rationing. “It was so bloody cold,” her mother had said. “That's when we started to talk about Cornwall, because the climate was milder, it was the Riviera of England, of course they don't tell you anything about the rain and the estuary flooding. The winter was worse than the war, in my opinion, apart from the bombs, of course. We were all starving and your hands were numb and you went to bed and did whatever you could to keep warm, if you were married, that is.”

So I was conceived in a dreadful winter, she realized. If the weather had been milder there would have been no me. But everything was a game of chance, like Stephen moving into the house next door and the don's fountain pen rolling toward his fume hood and the torn-out page of the library book, the party in Highgate, the walk across the heath and the limpid midsummer morning below Marx's tomb.