Questions of Travel (12 page)
BEA MORLEY INVITED LAURA
to spend a weekend in Berkshire with her parents. Bea had spoken of a cottage; Laura, stirred by poetic thoughts of thatch, was confronted with a substantial stone house. At breakfast, the jam spoon had been a present from Queen Anne to a Morley godchild now going to pieces under the churchyard yew. The cottage also sheltered candlesticks, pillow slips, engravings and so on passed down through generations. But what really struck Laura was a quite worthless object: a broken brick that served to prop open the back door. As she toed it into place with her wellington, Bea remarked that they really should get a proper doorstop, it was just that they no longer noticed the brick. It had been there forever, as long as she could remember. Her father, coming into the scullery, said much longer than that, he could remember it as a small boy. He picked it up, and they all looked at it. It was locally made, said David Morley, the bluish-black color came from the manganese in the region’s soil. He was a metallurgist, interested in minerals and materials. He pointed out faint creases and pockings in the brick, signs of insufficient control over its firing and hence of considerable age. It was smaller, too, than a modern brick—and by the way, did they know that bricks no longer contained clay but only sand and cement with pigment thrown in? Then Bea fetched a book, a local history. It confirmed that an Elizabethan manor house had stood on the far side of the cow pasture until a fire destroyed it in 1698. She examined the lump of brick: could it be Elizabethan, salvaged from the ruin? Maybe, said her father, it was very old anyway. He returned it to its place, and the two young women left the house to walk in polished September air, and the brick wasn’t mentioned again.
But it weighed on Laura’s thoughts. Blue-blooded jam spoons and their like remained within families through time and space, were transmitted by inheritance, accompanied their owners through displacement and change. That was to be expected: such objects were cherished, if only for their associations. Somewhere in her father’s house lurked a pair of Victorian fire dogs, relics of the sizeable cargo shipped over oceans by Frasers for the embellishment of their stolen acres. But a broken brick! It was more matter than artifact. No one would think of packing it up to carry with them. Nor would it have survived in a house swept clean for a change of owners. Its neglected presence pointed to the persistence of Morleys in that one place. Her own people struck Laura, by comparison, as a vigorous, shallow-rooted plant still adapting itself to alien soil. The Frasers were undeniably modern, however. What was the modern age if not movement, travel, change?
She remembered Theo once saying that the twentieth century was best represented by an unwilling traveler. “I mean, think of the millions of soldiers mobilized by wars. And all the people made homeless because of them. Now the world is full of people who don’t belong where they end up and long for the places where they did.”
That was what Laura looked forward to, evenings alone with Theo, the coils and flows of their talk. They were comfortable in two old leather armchairs, Theo’s long legs propped on a hideous corduroy pouf. The Dr. Gebhardt epic would continue. Her groundbreaking study of
Hegel, Disco and Rhizomatic Hermeneutics
was in fact the work of a graduate student, subsequently dispatched to an entry-level appointment in Tierra del Fuego with no provision for sabbatical. He disappeared there in mysterious circumstances—all that was known was that he had wept on receiving a letter from Dr. Gebhardt the previous day. After a costly investigation smuggled into the faculty’s budget under Research, this suggestive document fell at last into the dean’s hands. But Dr. Gebhardt’s menaces were so thoroughly encrypted in references to
Horizontverschmelzung,
text-as-paradigm and even—boldly!—to eumeneis elenchoi that nothing could be proved.
But as the evening deepened, and the level in the third bottle sank, it was always of childhood that Theo spoke, recounting pleasures and dreads, tea in the garden with the scent of mignonette borders, a sinister china mandarin that adorned his mother’s workbox, where it nodded its wobbly head. There were scenes to which he returned obsessively, enlarging on earlier versions. Daydreaming of adventure, safe under the window at the top of the house, was one such recurring tale. Another involved a different window, this one in his bedroom. It opened straight into the branches of a pear tree. In spring there was an abundance of blossom. The child was told to be careful of bees. But he would stand at his open window listening to the bees at their busy work. “I thought of it as the sound of love. A patient, devoted murmur.”
There came a spring when blossoms and bees were few; and one day the great silver tree was gone, cut down. The child blamed himself. He had not listened hard enough to the bees, he had failed in the loving concentration that keeps things steady and whole.
Laura asked if the apple tree outside the kitchen had been planted to replace the lost pear.
“I’ve never eaten such pears as came from that tree. Perhaps there aren’t any left in the world.” Theo’s hands made a shape. “Solid, narrow. A
sculpted
look.”
It was an old-fashioned upbringing, Laura thought. There was a rocking-horse with a rolling eye, and a holiday beside a lake where the boats were shaped like swans. There were violin lessons and Sunday pony rides and wet afternoons spent with jigsaws or paints.
She once asked, “Weren’t you allowed to watch TV?”
He frowned. “It wasn’t important.”
Laura’s notion of how the English reared their young was vague. Largely gleaned from books about children who tracked down smugglers or held midnight feasts at boarding school, it bolstered her Australian conviction that the old world was a backward sort of place.
As soon as Laura showed signs of getting ready to go home, Theo would beg. “Why are you going? It’s still early. Stay.” She, poor fool, would have to run for the last Tube. The next day she would slop soup, suppress yawns as she scribbled down orders. But Theo had declared, “You’re necessary.” It was quite true. As long as she stayed, he went on drinking. Laura saw and didn’t see this.
There are paintings of flowers or fruit whose sheer lusciousness suggests the invisible, lengthening worm. Theo was like that: at that stage of ripeness where his attractive surface held an intimation of decay. So it was possible to speak to him of fear. It was possible to speak of the queasy sensation, running under the drift of Laura’s days, that her life was dribbling away unused. “I suppose I’m talking about a career.” Because the only professional progress she had made since the course in word-processing had been to exchange the pub in Clerkenwell for a restaurant in Islington, which had smaller servings and larger tips.
It was true that she was prized as a house sitter these days. She picked and chose among clients who lived within a restricted circumference and who would be away for at least a month. Even so, Fitzrovia, Balham, Primrose Hill. Even so, Shepherd’s Bush, Camden Town, Holland Park. It seemed to Laura that she was always packing up. And recently she had minded a flat for a physicist summoned to a bedside in Johannesburg and worried about an elderly cat. A day or so after moving on to Highgate, Laura missed a favorite shirt. The physicist said, “Yes, I wondered when you would call.”
“Oh, you’ve found my shirt,” said Laura, pleased.
“Shirt?” said the physicist. “
Shirt?
It’s my bin-liner that’s at issue. There was a black plastic liner in the kitchen bin when I entrusted you with my belongings.” She spoke distinctly, enunciating with rageful care. “When I came back, the bin was empty. What I want to know is, when do you intend to make good your theft?”
Laura told Theo that she had had it up to
here
—the edge of one palm slicing at the throat—with other people’s houses. She was tired of the box at the post office, tired of tending leafless gardens that flowered for other eyes, tired of public phones. “I want people to call
me.
” She wanted a telephone number. She wanted a teapot. “I’m fed up with other people’s teapots,” she wailed.
She pulled a face as she spoke, deprecating her need. But there was nothing comic about the fierceness with which she coveted the teapot in the window of a shop in Camden that sold North African wares. It was a small metal pot with a hinged lid, shapely and inexpensive, enameled in cheerful red. “But I can’t lug a teapot around London. I need a place of my own. I need
proper
work.”
Bea Morley’s firm had upgraded her laptop. Bea passed on the old one—ancient, it dated from three years back—to her friend. Every few weeks, Laura would use it to compose an application for a job that seemed congenial and that might be assumed, if she remained optimistic, to be not incompatible with an Australian degree in English literature. To letters expressing her desire to assist a publisher or work in a bookshop or even, fueled by the insomniac elixir of lunacy and despair, to help an ex-SAS officer compose his memoirs (
Must be under thirty-five and willing to live in. Send full-body photo
), she received no reply.
She attended an information evening about a career in librarianship and a workshop on proofreading. These experiences discouraged her from working in a library or reading proofs.
Who should alight in London but Tracy Lacey, now in possession of a hedge fund–managing husband, a Grad Dip in Museum Studies and an assistant directorship at a university gallery in Melbourne.
Je regrette,
darl, Tracy couldn’t stay long, in her deconstructed hair and PVC and linen shift, being en route to guest curate an Australian show at the Guggenheim.
“But I couldn’t resist a stopover in London—not with you here, darl.” And there was Paree to patronize as well. Her flight to Roissy left that evening, she informed Laura. “I don’t know why I bother, I’m so over Europe these days. The work they show here—darl, it wouldn’t get past the door at home. I always say Melbourne’s the new New York. But you know what I’m like when it comes to Paree! Gary says I’m such a softie. As if he wasn’t the one crying buckets at the airport! His men’s dream group has really opened up his feminine side.”
Having on sight declared Laura
gorgeous,
Tracy was examining her old friend with a connoisseur’s eye. So she might have appraised a painting, acquired as a kindness, that she had seen at once was second-rate but which she didn’t quite like to let pass. The type of thing she might hang in a dark corner in case it came good over time.
What could Laura Fraser, tucking into reckless tortellini in cream, deploy against the triple assault of Gary, the Guggenheim and the new New York? It would have been nobler to refuse the contest. But she was human and imperfect. Tentatively, she offered Theo. In such a spirit Abraham might have led forth his son, each step a betrayal.
But Tracy Lacey was as magnanimous as her maker. She interrupted only to address a Do you
mind?
to the man at the adjoining table who was showing signs of lighting up.
Buoyed by victory and a Caesar salad (no egg no anchovy no dressing,
merci
), “He sounds gorgeous, darl,” she conceded. “Do you have a piccie?” While thinking, One of those plutonic things—no thanks! Mind you, it was just like Laura Fraser to end up a fag-hag.
A few weeks later, a card arrived from the old New York. Steve Kirkpatrick—did Laura remember him from art school?—had hanged himself in his studio. Tracy felt terrible. But it was Steve’s own fault that no one wanted to show him. If only he had progressed his aesthetic. Laura would find it hard to believe, but he had never read Kristeva: Tracy knew it for a fact.
THE NEIGHBOR’S DAUGHTER CAME
to Carmel’s door to announce a phone call for Ravi. She peered at him through her glasses and touched her hair. A long time ago, when they were children, a lady had referred to Anoma as Ravi’s girlfriend. Now he had a son and a frightening wife, but Anoma knew that Ravi was conscious of their older, deeper bond. Standing at the door, he had looked first surprised, then happy—that meant
recognition.
So what did it matter that Anoma’s younger sister had married first?
How ridiculous, thought Ravi, as he dashed up the lane, that he had always pictured the summons to Silicon Valley as a letter: modern news arrived by phone. He had time to wonder how the Swedish boy had known the right number to call. Was there some kind of tracking software, known only to Californians, that had enabled it? In any case, a magical event requires an element of mystery. He seized the receiver and heard a familiar voice. It was his old professor, known to all his students as Frog-Face. He informed Ravi, without preamble, that an assistant lectureship in maths was coming up. Ravi stood there, breathing hard. He would be well advised to apply, Frog-Face said.
The young family moved to a rooming house above a bicycle-repair shop just outside Colombo, conveniently close to the university where Ravi would be working. The street door gave on to a stair that led up to the lobby of the rooming house; the cheaper rooms, such as Ravi and Malini could afford, opened off this communal space. There was a gathering of rattan-bottomed chairs there, and a huge old black-and-white TV in a wood-veneer case. The vertical hold tended to slip, but of an evening all the tenants gathered in front of it anyway. They would smoke and gossip and watch teledramas. If the Mendises shut their door against the noise, the room quickly grew stifling. But life in the rooming house was companionable, and Malini was content: she had escaped her mother-in-law at last.
There was a morning when Ravi woke very early. He saw his wife and child asleep, and thought, Who are these people? He grappled with feelings of suffocation and fear.