Exposure (32 page)

'This is Mila.'

The girl shook his hand awkwardly.

'So, where are you from?' Luke said.

'You know Kosovo?' said Goran.

Immediately Luke felt that he did not watch enough news, that he skipped the long articles in the papers, and that he lacked original opinions for dinner parties.

'Um — yes. Yes — the war,' he said, unthinkingly, remembering something about the Albanians and the Serbs and a news clip of a girl with a gun on her back, saying she would defend Serbia until she died in the snow. 'Yes, of course. Of course I do.'

'We are from there. We are Serbs. And you are English?'

'Yes.'

Goran nodded approvingly.

'Pretty boring, really,' Luke said, smiling.

'What is boring?'

'Just English—I meant.'

'I'm sorry I have misunderstand you.'

'No—just I mean so much more interesting to come from Kosovo, that's all I meant, not just from boring England.'

Goran laughed. 'Boring England? I hope it is the most boring place in the world. This is why we came. We have enough of interesting Kosovo.'

'Look, I'm sorry—I'm not putting things ...' It was not as if the articles were that long—or as if he had anything so much better to do. He read the Style section, the sports pages. Why? Because he was superficial. That was why Arianne had got bored with him.

Goran waved his hand genially, dismissing Luke's embarrassment. 'So, you live here in Dover?'

'Me? No. God, no—I'm from London. Holland Park. I'm just here for the day. A day trip.'

'Ah, yes? From London?'

'Yes. Have you been there?'

Goran smiled. 'No. We have been inside England just twenty-four hours.'

'Yes I see. Not much time to look around, then.'

Luke listened as Goran and Mila began to talk in whatever their language was. The exchange became heated, with Goran appearing to disagree with something Mila had suggested. It was odd how you could work it out. Goran ended the conversation firmly with 'Ne, Mila.'

She stared at him with her ravenous eyes and Luke thought she would have been quite pretty if her face had not been so thin. But she looked feverish—endangered. Luke wondered how old she was and decided she might be anything between twenty-four and thirty-four.

'OK. Thank you for these cigarettes,' Goran said. 'We must go now.'

Luke wanted to ask where they were going. He wanted to ask Goran how old he was because he might have been about the same age as Luke, but he seemed much older.

This act of comparing himself with other people of his own age had started to preoccupy Luke. The talk-shows he had watched obsessively for the past two weeks had fascinated him in this respect. Every so often litde descriptions flashed up at the bottom of the screen, under the shouting faces: 'Shewanda from Detroit, 21. Mom of three'. They all looked so much older than they were and it had occurred to him for the first time that this was what happened to you if you had a difficult life, if you were poor. He had studied his stupid baby face in the sitting-room mirror and wondered if he would look older for losing Arianne. 'OK, then. Was nice to meet you. Goodbye,' Goran said, raising his hand.

Luke wanted to stop him. He wanted to say, 'Excuse me, but what have you come to England for? Will you tell me about your lives, because I never read the long articles in the newspapers and I don't know anything about the world.' But instead he stood there with a paralysed smile on his face as they walked away in the sunshine, smoking his cigarettes.

'You'll appreciate the property is in poor condition, Mr Langford,' said Mr Wilson, the surveyor. 'There is rising damp, there is rot—both dry and wet—and there is significant structural damage to the roof. I'm also sorry to inform you that the plumbing is in poor repair and...'

There was something obscene about this summation. To Alistair, it was almost as if his mother's body was being criticized, not her house. Her worn hands, her aching hips and back, the ankle that had always given her trouble since she twisted it trying to carry in the coal when it had snowed.

'...and I'm afraid the boiler is nothing short of a museum piece,' he went on.

'Yes, I appreciate all of that,' Alistair said. 'Why don't we just decide on a realistic price and do this as simply as possible?'

'OK. Well, I'll give you a detailed breakdown, of course, but I think we might get £40,000 for it, Mr Langford. At a push.'

Suddenly Alistair wanted him out—him and his clipboard, his breakdown, his pushing. He wanted to be alone in the house with his nostalgia, free of this earthbound presence in its shiny suit.

'As I say, I will send you through a breakdown in the next few days, Mr Langford.'

'Yes,' Alistair said, hurrying him towards the door. 'Thank you. Thank you very much.' He could not help reacting to the surveyor's alarmed expression:'I'm sorry—I'm in a bit of a rush,' he explained.

'I see. Well, goodbye, then, Mr Langford.'

'Goodbye.'

When the door was shut, Alistair let the familiar dim light of the hallway sink into him. It felt like drinking. He ran his fingers along the uneven wall, he inhaled the musty smell of the old carpet and then he pressed his weight on the second stair up to hear the creak. He found there were tears running down his face and he rolled his eyes in gentle mockery of himself and sighed.

He had not been alone in the house for a moment when he and Luke had first visited it and he realized that his son's presence had spared him these depths of ... whatever it was that he was feeling.

He looked down at his shoes on the patterned carpet. His mother had died just where he was standing. He moved his feet quickly as if he were walking on her grave. Then he sat down on the stairs and looked out at the hallway for the first time like an intimate of the place, one whose eyes were ready to forgive and love any deterioration they saw, as one loves the lines on an old friend's face.

His mother had written to him once, after the birth of Sophie was announced in
The Times.
She had been shown the clipping by Geoff, she said. Alistair remembered how Geoff had always skimmed through the births and deaths in every one of the newspapers he ordered into his shop—'Just in case,' he would explain smilingly to a young, fidgeting Alistair. 'Because life's going on, Al, beginning and ending all over the place,' he would say.

Alistair had been allowed to sit on the counter beside the till, his eyes rioting over the penny sweets in their glorious rainbow of jars on the shelves. Jelly babies, flying saucers, sherbet balls, liquorice sticks, chocolate buttons and strawberry chews. Geoff flicked the pages of a newspaper in the background, indulging his peculiar, boring adult whim. Then he would ruffle Alistair's hair, reach up behind him and put his magician's hand into one of the jars. Geoff could produce pear drops, peppermint creams—anything.

'Yes. Just in case.' He would sigh contentedly, brushing off his sugary fingers on his apron, carrying the papers to the rack by the door. 'It's a job keeping up with it all—with life and death and all that.' As it turned out, it was all just in case of:

 

LANGFORD
On 6 June,
to Rosalind (née Blunt) and Alistair, a daughter,
Sophie Rose Catherine.

His mother's letter had been brief:

Dear Alistair,

I saw on a clipping your Uncle Geoff showed me that your wife give birth to a little daughter and I thought why not write and congratulate you and wish you and the little one all the best. I hope you and your wife are truely happy and she is now comfy and all rested up at home. Funny how it makes me remember having you. It's been a long time since we saw each other but I do think of you.

God bless—

Mum.

 

He never replied. He had thought about it and just not been able to imagine how his life would accommodate his mother, how her ungainly griefs and sentimentality, her vulgar anxieties and resentments (which would play out so obviously in her clumsy syntax) could ever fit into his smooth new reality. It was too late anyway. He drove Rosalind home from hospital. She was wearing the elegant navy blue suit she had purchased for the occasion. Sophie was wrapped in a white cashmere blanket on her lap, and Rosalind's own mother was stern and formidable in the passenger seat, her pearl earrings catching the sun like armour each time she turned to check that all was well.

When they got home, Alistair went upstairs and threw away the letter, tearing the incriminating evidence of his past self into hundreds of pieces and flushing it down the toilet.

What an act that had been—so impulsively performed. Had he really known what he was doing?

He had told Rosalind a version of his childhood, of course; a picturesque version containing intimations of noble struggle against adversity. His mother cleaned and sewed, he told her—'For
other people
? For a living, you mean?' Rosalind gripped his hand.

'Yes. She had to.'

But blessed with innate culture and breeding, in spite of the poverty and widowhood into which Fate had cast her, his mother had also made money translating French poetry and novels, literary ones, not silly romances, long into the night. How fondly he remembered her teaching him French and reciting Shakespeare's sonnets while she mended the rich women's blouses and skirts. And after she had kissed him goodnight she would go to her desk and translate.

It was all so poignant! He drew tears from his blue-eyed girlfriend with this Cinderella story. He even fed her the line about his father being killed in the war. Somehow this felt like the worst lie of all—perhaps because it was the first he had ever been told: his archetypal he; the charged source of all lies.

Some of what he had said to Rosalind was true—that he went to a grammar school, not a public school, that he had been bullied for being more interested in Greek than football. But none of the real sordidness was there. He had edited out the boarding-house with its smell of fried eggs and sleep, and there was no mention of the male guests who stayed up drinking and talking with his mother. Talking and drinking, drinking and talking, long into the night, until he couldn't stay awake to listen and worry any longer.

He saw no need to mention these details at all.

But, of course, as soon as he had given her this story of himself and the miracle had occurred—the delicate, refined girl, falling in love with
him\—
he could not risk exposure. It was as if her love was maintained by a potion: alter the recipe even slightly and she might wake up and open her beautiful eyes!

His mother would only have had to speak. She would only have had to sip her sherry and burp, or to use a singular verb with a plural subject, and the whole story would ring false. And people who did elegant translations of Racine did not say 'Scuse my French' if they swore—which they did
all the time.

The absolute impossibility of introducing her was further heightened by his own struggle to be accepted by Rosalind's family. They had held 'high hopes' for Rozzy's marriage, her father had explained, when Alistair and he had had their highly significant first drink together. 'I'm sure you understand what I'm saying,' he said, swirling the brandy in his glass. 'It's just that—as I said—we had very high hopes.'

'Yes,' Alistair said.

'Now, I know you're considered to be terribly bright and all that...' Rosalind's father had failed his Oxford entrance exams. He had subsequently developed a philosophy in which 'common sense' and 'decent manners' outranked all other virtues. He derived a great deal of relief from the slights life had dealt him by mocking the 'impracticality' of his brilliant wife—or that of anyone else who might have succeeded where he had failed.'...but one has to be
practical
,' he said. 'There are certain things Rosalind has been brought up to expect. Clothes, restaurants, holidays. It's all very well to be an intellectual, but—'

'Yes, I understand. Of course. One has to be practical.'

'And, not to put too fine a point on it, but who are your people? We don't know anything about them.'

So, while he sat there in Mr Blunt's study, holding a cigar, which had to him the sublime flavour of acceptance and conventionality, Alistair began the murder of his mother. There was no choice—it was done in self-defence. He gave her lymph cancer and she died shortly before they announced the engagement.

Six months later, people kissed the bride and said it was a great shame Rosalind and her mother-in-law had never met. They pressed the groom's hand and said how sorry they were that Mrs Langford could not be there on that day of all days ... and Alistair, whose eyes missed nothing, felt sure he saw relief on his new mother-in-law's face as she took a neat forkful of kedgeree.

He had just four guests at his own wedding, all acceptable friends from Oxford, one of whom was Rosalind's cousin Philip, who had introduced them.

What he couldn't understand now was why, after the early days of love when, like all couples, they had both been prone to infantile sensitivity, he couldn't simply have admitted his dishonesty and ended it. Surely he could have talked openly to his wife, she could have forgiven him and they could have set about repairing the damage together. Couldn't they?

But when he thought of the distance, which, for one reason or another, had always been there between himself and Rosalind, he knew it would not have been possible. In the difficult first year of marriage, they had felt this distance painfully whenever it tested the elasticity of their dreams. Suddenly they would be forced to see each other simply as a man and a woman lying in a large bed together, rather than 'powerful husband' and 'devoted wife' in a novel or a glossy advertisement.

They had quickly learnt to fill the distance with life—with searching for Sophie's hamster or Luke's hockey boot, with rushing into the back pews at the carol service, with ski-trips and dentists, with tearing the clingfilm off the salmon and pouring the Chablis just as cars pulled up for lunch. They had been very, very busy for years.