England and Other Stories (20 page)

‘We have to do some tests.’

‘He flew into the drinkski.’

‘Mrs Kaminski—’

‘It was a flying bomb, dear. It wasn’t the Battle of Britain. He got through all that. Do you remember the Battle of Britain?’

‘I’m twenty-five. I wasn’t born.’

‘Nor was little Teddy. You’d like little Teddy. I can see it, you and him. But I was the lucky one, I had his father. Not for long. Tadeusz Kaminski. He flew into the Channel. I married a Pole. I didn’t mind at all. The Germans invaded Poland. And we’ll all be in Poland soon, we’ll all be together.’

‘This is England, Mrs Kaminski. It’s Tooting.’

‘A flying bomb. He shot it down. He blew it up, then he flew into the sea. That’s what they told me. But it doesn’t matter now. We’ll all be together.’

‘Nora—’

‘They were coming over by the hundreds, nasty buzzy buzz bombs. It was worse than the Blitz. Nothing you could do, except not be under one. Fifty, a hundred people gone in a flash. If they landed on a school. Or a hospital.’

‘Mrs Kaminski—’

‘Just think about it, dear, just thinkski. If one of them dropped right now on this hospital. I know it’s a hospital. You must have a boiler room somewhere. But I’m not here for long, I’m on my way to Poland. Just imagine. If one of them drops we’ll all be gone. You, me, doctors, nurses, all gone in a flash.’

H
IS FATHER HAD
once said to him, ‘Money doesn’t buy you happiness, Adrian, but it helps you to be miserable in comfort.’

He’d wondered ever since at this equivocal utterance. Was his father saying that his own life had been miserable? Or that life itself, as a working premise, was miserable? These possibilities were suddenly dreadful.

All he’d done—though it had taken courage—was ask for more pocket money. He wished he’d never opened his mouth. Perhaps his father, who was rich and not given to utterances, had felt the same.

His father had died long ago anyway, and he’d heeded the recommendation—if recommendation it had been. He’d made money himself, lots of it. He’d made it when it was possible to make lots of it and he was one of those clever or lucky ones who’d got out before losing it, and put it where it could keep working.

Now here he was featherbedded with the stuff. Which was just as well, with an ugly divorce and an estranged family to pay for. Though all that, too, was now some time ago and all the bills had been settled. So, had his father’s words been only wise? And what counsel—the same?—had he given his own children? Hugh, Simon, Rebecca. He couldn’t remember giving them any counsel at all. He couldn’t remember them ever seeking it. They were all grown-up now.

He pushed the buggy which contained his daughter Lucy, though he was old enough, easily, to be her grandfather, listening to her wordless burblings and knowing that he loved her wholly, that right now he loved her more than anything in the world. She shouldn’t really be there, she shouldn’t be there at all. He already had, he’d already raised, a family. He shouldn’t be pushing a helpless infant still years from articulate speech on a journey to the park. Yet he was, and he loved her completely and loved her burblings as if there were a string running directly from his heart to hers. He loved her as he couldn’t, in all honesty, remember quite loving his other, now adult children.

Whenever his new young wife Julia urged him to take Lucy for a buggy ride to the park so that she, Julia, could have some respite, he tended to feign reluctance or even resentment, for the simple reason that he didn’t want Julia to know that he really loved doing it. Nor did he want her to know that, though Lucy could sometimes be impossible at home, she instantly became utterly sweet-tempered once she felt him pushing her along.

He loved being alone with Lucy perhaps more than he loved being alone with Julia, though Julia, even after a difficult first pregnancy, was a beautiful slender woman with light brown hair, some twenty years his junior. Why, after all, had he fallen for her, then married her? But he knew (he wasn’t stupid) that the question was rather: Why had she inveigled him, seduced him into marrying her? Because she’d wanted a Lucy of course. A Lucy plus security.

And now look.

There was something particularly entrancing, he couldn’t say why, about this physical act of steering Lucy in her buggy, about having his hands on the handles and feeling through them the bumps and swerves that she felt through her whole body. These rides seemed to induce in her such a simple infallible delight, she became a kind of living cargo of happiness, and he could sometimes find himself, quite unselfconsciously, echoing out loud her burblings, as if infected (at last, at fifty-six!) with mindless
joie de vivre
.

His father had spoken those disenchanted words. But these babblings! And of course he didn’t tell Julia that, while she put her feet up, he was only too keen to push Lucy to the park yet again.

Lucy, of course, had no control. She had no power of decision, and she had no control literally. She relied on him entirely to steer her. The fact that she did so with such delirious trust made his own steps light, and right now he loved her absolutely because her helpless burblings matched, though entirely benignly, the fact that he’d lost all control of his life and that she was the product of that loss of control.

It was a mild day in late February. Spring was in the air. A few innocuous white clouds hung in the sky. Crocuses were poking through by the entrance to the park.

When had he lost control? He hadn’t lost control of the business of making money, he’d been a dab hand at that. He hadn’t even lost control of the money itself, though he’d handed over large chunks of it. But when had he lost control of himself, of his life, of who he was?

When he was twenty-eight, say, he’d felt pretty much in control. At least he’d felt a good notch surer of himself than when he’d been eighteen or twenty-one—when all doors are supposed to open. He’d even say now—now he was exactly twice twenty-eight—that twenty-eight was actually the age he was inside. He was a twenty-eight-year-old in heavy disguise.

But by the time he was thirty-eight, or certainly forty-five, the sense he’d once had long ago as a little kid—long before that bleak interview with his father—that life and growing up could only ever be about gaining more and more control, a steady upward graph, had deserted him. It wasn’t that he was losing control in some ways but gaining it in others, he was seriously and centrally losing control, and he knew it. And he knew that very probably this loss of control would only increase and accelerate for the rest of his life, he’d crossed some sort of dire threshold, till one day he’d be approaching his death in a state of utter and terrifying loss of control, never having—to put it mildly—put his affairs in order.

When he understood this he did what most people do. He ignored it. He had another drink. Was putting your affairs in order the purpose of life anyway? Affairs! A poor joke of a word. It was his affairs, having them, that had got him into this mess. Once, when he was twenty-eight—or was it thirty-five?—he’d thought that having affairs and their rather thrilling disorder was actually the stuff of life, if not maybe its purpose. He was, he’d have to confess, quite good at it.

Did anyone put their affairs (other sense) in order? People said, didn’t they—people not like his father—that you should seize life, grasp it while it was there? Which sounded like taking control, big-time. But it also sounded exactly like what he did when he toppled—dived—into another affair. It was taking control, but it was also like going full-tilt for the complete opposite.

By his forties he’d started to do something he’d never done before. He looked at people. That is, he studied them and wondered about them, as if he might be the other side of a glass wall. Did they look out of control, did they look as if they all secretly felt like him? No. The amazing thing was that they didn’t. They looked as if they were pretty much holding it together, as if they were moving along paths they felt they should be moving along. How did they manage it?

He’d never had this feeling of a glass wall before, he’d never felt he was an observer, not a doer. Though what he’d been doing, perhaps for some time now, had been losing control.

And now here he was pushing a buggy along a park path—an act of control and calm purpose if ever there was—with a child in the buggy astonishingly remote from him in years yet to whom he felt closer than anything else in the world.

It was a Sunday morning. The sun, with a real warmth to it, seemed to be seeing off the clouds and the park was doing good business. There were other people pushing buggies, like him, either towards or back from the little mecca of the play area, with its brightly coloured attractions, that had opened recently and been an instant success. On Sunday mornings it could heave. It was hard to tell if adults or small children dominated. There were buggy-parking issues. There were multiple-child buggies. You understood at once one of the principal local activities: it was to breed and to do so with a certain public self-congratulation.

But there were also joggers, in Lycra, with headsets. There were people with dogs. There were also people—they were professionals—with lots of dogs, whole packs of them, because their owners were too busy, even on a Sunday, or too lazy to walk them, so they paid someone. Money, the things it could do. Even some of the buggy-pushers would be hired live-in nannies, speaking foreign languages. Nannies! He’d had a thing once—he’d lost control—with a nanny, called Consuelo. It hadn’t lasted long, not long enough even to call it an affair. Now, spotting the nannies, and even though Julia wasn’t around to catch him looking, he wasn’t even tempted.

There were about as many dogs as buggies. And—setting aside the nannies—not a few of the buggy-pushers and dog-walkers had a similar appearance. They were men, otherwise unaccompanied. They weren’t young. They were often rather chubby, jowly or flushed of face and their hair was receding, if they weren’t in fact bald. If they’d had looks once, they’d lost them. Yet for all this, they didn’t appear out of control. Far from it. They were in charge of a buggy or a dog after all. Some of them even had a pretty lordly air and issued, to the dogs, bellowing commands.

In other words (though he refused to acknowledge this outright) they looked like him. And sometimes, in the case of the buggy-pushers, the age of the child or even children they were pushing told the whole story. It was a bit like his story.

But he was pushing Lucy. No one else was pushing Lucy. In a little while he’d unstrap her from the buggy and place her with a father’s tender care—a quite experienced father’s care—on one of the contraptions in the play area. She wasn’t old enough to be more than placed briefly in this way, but the mere contact with the colourful apparatus seemed enough for her. It gave the buggy ride its goal, but he felt that for her as well as for him it was the ride itself that was really the thing.

All the time she was out of the buggy and just perched on one of the bits of equipment his hands would hover close to her, his whole body would want to shield her, as much from the roughness of other children and the intrusions of other parents as from any other form of harm. He’d keep guard of her and would think while he did so, as he would at other times of such close vigilance, of what would become of her in later life, of how her life would be when he was gone, of the possibility, which was not at all unreal, of his being gone before she was a woman with whom he might have a grown-up conversation. He’d feel a punishing stab. But he had her burblings.

They approached the play area. But the whole park, with its tree-lined paths and expanses of grass, its peeping bulbs and its joggers, dog-walkers and buggies, was like a play area, and on this smiling Sunday morning was the very image of communal well-being. It was the serener broader version of the kids’ place, without the latter’s tendency (he could see that this morning it was thickly patronised) to teeter into stressful frenzy. In truth, he didn’t greatly like the play area, but Lucy wasn’t able to say to him, understandingly and exoneratingly, ‘It’s okay, we don’t really have to go there.’

The dog came from nowhere. If it was one of the many dogs he’d been loosely holding in his view, it still seemed that it hurled itself from a different place, as if through some unperceived screen, and there it suddenly and loudly was. And it was one of those breeds of dog that weren’t supposed to be let off leads, or even to be owned by people, or even, possibly, to exist at all. But there it was, and it was mauling—no, it was attacking—a child strapped in another buggy on the edge of the play area. Another little girl of less than two, with pale blonde curls, only yards away. With a father and mother who appeared to be momentarily paralysed.

It seemed that he too was suddenly on the scene, like the dog—that to others looking on it would seem that he too had sprung without warning from nowhere. It seemed so even to himself. Who was this man? He was suddenly grasping, grappling with a vicious snarling dog (whatever its behaviour had been just seconds ago), a dog that, but for his action and the sturdiness of modern buggy accoutrements, might have had in its mouth, in its claws, a helpless defenceless child.

The little girl was screaming and the dog must have been making a terrible row. People all around must have been yelling, but he didn’t hear them or care, and he didn’t even care, for some reason, if this dog was about to savage his own flesh or claw out an eye. He was
going to stop it
.

For a moment it writhed in his weird embrace, he felt the uncontainable spasm of its muscles—yes, it was going to bite his face off—but he wrenched it somehow from the buggy, then, as it shot from his clutches, it lost its balance and he was able to kick it, kick it
hard
, in the ribs, in the head, in its skidding legs, he didn’t care. He’d won the battle, he knew, it had been a matter of seconds. Were people cheering? But he kicked it, and kicked it again.

He knew too, even as he did this, that the outcome of this episode would be that the dog would be put down. A dog that attacks a child. No arguments. It was what would happen. He could already picture the child’s father—galvanised now into action—speaking righteously into a mobile phone, gathering a circle of witnesses round him. This is what would happen. And he would be a principal witness, and in some people’s eyes a hero. And the dog would be put down. Professionally.