‘Gloria’s a cow,’ said Harry. ‘Laura’s all right, but all the guys in the sixth are chasing her.’ Gloria was forced by her mother to acknowledge Harry because they were both Jewish, but she was embarrassed by the fact that he looked like a schoolboy. Laura was different. Although she gossiped all through the lesson she seemed able to absorb everything the teacher said. When he came over to tick her off he would look down at her exercise book and find she had somehow taken down all the notes. She would swivel her brown eyes up from beneath her blonde fringe and turn them on him in an expression of hurt innocence; he would retreat to the blackboard.
Gloria used to get Harry to run messages for her and carry her books. Harry used to make an effort not to, and put on an exaggerated Jewish manner. ‘Don’t make me do it, Gloria, don’t make me do it. If it was up to me of course I would. But listen . . .’ He ended up doing it anyway. Laura used to laugh and didn’t herself ask Harry or Pietro to do anything for her. When Gloria made them carry both her and Laura’s bags, however, Laura didn’t object. Gloria and Laura called them the Blazers, because they were the only two who bothered with the uniform.
Pietro liked being in London. Sometimes after school he would go to a coffee bar and look in the record shops with Harry or with one of the other boys. Harry’s father ran a chain of bookmakers and once a week would ease from his pocket a densely packed round of banknotes, from which he would peel four or five to give to Harry without making any appreciable change to the size of the bundle. Pietro went to their house in Highgate for tea. It was a big, noisy place, with the telephone ringing and people shouting up and down stairs. Harry was quite different there. Although he was frightened of his father and his elder brother, he answered back to his mother and swaggered around, testing out his strength. Pietro dreaded the return tube journey. Mr Freeman dropped him in his Jaguar at Hampstead station, and on the Northern Line he thought of the airless corridors of the Baker Street flat and the starchy supper the German daily help would have left for him and his father.
In the course of two years Pietro came to know the shops and cafés of the Fulham Road. The street was in a spasm of self-importance. Hairdressers and restaurant managers enjoyed unexpected status if a singer or actress had recently called. People who couldn’t get a reservation in the King’s Road happily came a block further north where more record shops, hamburger bars and unisex coiffeurs opened up for them. Pietro and Harry, now sixteen, sat in cafés after school, their ties loosened, their blazers concealed beneath the seat, and watched the people come and go. The young men and women had a look of innocent urgency – the girls with their black-rimmed eyes and the men with their flowing hair and waistcoats, as though no generation had ever understood before the inspired responsibility of being young.
From the moment Pietro arrived in London he felt at ease there. It was the first place he had lived where he felt the character of it had eluded the inhabitants. Because it was so amorphous it could not be described or comprehended; therefore it could not be oppressive or limiting. London had been seriously misrepresented, he felt, by visitors and by people who lived there. The double-decker buses, Piccadilly and the Mall were all there, sure enough, but they accounted for less than a hundredth of what the city was about. It was so ugly, to begin with. It was comical, this hideousness, when you compared it with other capitals, yet it was also an unacknowledged deformity. No one mentioned the thousands of Archway Roads; they must have closed their eyes and kept them shut except for fleeting moments in Regent’s Park. Who talked about Green Lanes, Old Street, Shadwell or North End Road, which were not marginal suburbs but central, typical parts of the city? This huge con trick made Pietro like Londoners more. It was like the way some women loved their husbands when they were bald and overweight and set in their dull opinions: they looked at them still with bright, loyal eyes, amazed that anyone might see in them anything other than a paragon of virile life.
For somewhere so ugly and so important, London seemed also strangely calm. Perhaps it was so large that people could lose themselves in its quiet pockets; it did not have the cohesion to be daunting. Foreign students in the bedsits and hotels of Bayswater seemed to like it; they gathered on the steps of their language schools or ate American hamburgers in the rubbish of Leicester Square with no visible sense of disappointment. They didn’t mind that in the middle of town there were long streets of residential houses with no shops, cafés or dry-cleaners. They accepted that they needed to walk, and that even then the place would probably be closed.
The best thing about London, Pietro felt, was discovering it for yourself. Some of the more blasé of the students at the US Collegiate made disparaging remarks about how early the clubs seemed to close, but he doubted whether they had found the unadvertised parts of the city. At the very least in London you could be sure you were not missing anything; no town in England was likely to offer more.
In the summer came O levels and then the long holidays. Pietro went to stay with his grandfather in Nottingham and then with his father for a week at the seaside. He was glad when term started again and Heathrow was busy welcoming back the children of the Collegiate school from Washington, Tokyo, Rome, Beirut – still the garden capital of the Middle East – and New York City.
The teachers read the roll call with difficulty at the start of the term when children with complicated Oriental or Middle Eastern names had arrived at all levels of the school. Those who couldn’t speak English went to language classes; those who could were given an education that was English in the exams it addressed, American in the structure of the discipline, and stateless in the way the teachers tried not to stress the claims of one culture over another. The imperatives of Chanukah, Ramadan or Thanksgiving were given the same respect as those of Easter.
Arab and Israeli children, whose parents’ mutual hatred had extended in some cases to bearing arms, sat next to one another. Their antipathy was stilled in the muggy air of their London classroom under the inflexions of an American teacher. For the duration of the lesson the children meekly conceded that the need to learn about inert gases or punctuation was all-important: they borrowed books from one another, competed in tests, copied each other’s exercises. Released from class they still had tenuously common interests in sport or music, shared sexual anguish or urgent new enthusiasms. But as they left the school at dusk Jewish boys made disdainful comments about the Arabs; girls from Lebanon looked back in soft incomprehension as old allegiances re-formed.
In their uncertainty most of the children preferred to carry with them an idea of the place they had come from and to take their identity from that. Pietro sometimes wondered whether they would not be happier if they were more enthusiastic about their adoptive city; but their parents were sometimes strict, retaining in the service apartments of Marylebone and St John’s Wood the settlement or enclave of a distant country, which London was too big and too indifferent to break down.
The O level results were not good. Weiner hadn’t done himself justice. A certain middle-European largesse had caused him to write too much on single questions and to show a highbrow disregard for the examiners who wanted only pellets of schoolboy information fired back legibly and to length. Gupta had scored, as far as anyone could see, one hundred per cent in maths and physics, but some retentiveness had made him finish only half the questions in the other subjects, as if his one perfect answer would excuse him the rest. The best results were Laura Heasman’s. Somehow her absurd calmness and instinctive knowledge of what was needed had satisfied the examiners. Pietro had managed three – a scatter of art, physics and Italian – which left his proposed course of study as a scientist in doubt.
Laura had become even more beautiful, he thought, during the holiday. The school’s navy-blue skirt clung to her hips and her perfectly shaped legs moved beneath it encased in shimmering grey. Even when she wore the tiny skirt the girls were given for games, the skin of her bare legs was so smooth it looked as though she was wearing some fine powder or an
exquisite invisible covering. She sometimes seemed embarrassed by this physical perfection, especially next to the lumpish Gloria, but after turning aside the boys’ comments with a blushing puzzlement, she was able to forget them in the intrigue of gossip.
Pietro shook his head in anguish. The whole class would meet in the morning for roll call in the lower sixth common room. This was a large room on the first floor, littered with old coffee cups, Coca-Cola bottles, footballs and books. Pietro’s locker, as luck would have it, was next to Laura’s and it was inevitable that he would remove his books from it at the same time as she did each morning. Then they might be in different classes, but Pietro got to know her timetable so he was always able to be passing in the corridor when Laura emerged from her lesson. At the end of the day he would naturally be packing up at the same time as her and would watch with anguished eyes as she disappeared with Gloria or a group of boys from the upper sixth.
The pleasure of being close to her was enough. In the lessons they shared he simply gazed at her, incredulous that anyone could be so perfect. Even when her legs were tucked away beneath the desk there was her choice of tops, which were within the regulations prescribed by the school but with a button or two undone or a raffish black cardigan instead of the navy-blue pullover. The sunlight shone through the dusty window and into her hair. Pietro laid his head on his folded arms and with one eye still partially open gazed at an oblique angle, so no one could see what he was doing, at Laura’s enflamed golden head. Her brown eyes were alternately sparkling as she talked to Gloria or capable of a brimming look of injured innocence when addressed by the teacher. She had a short, slightly upturned nose, full lips and small white teeth. Her face was never in repose for long enough for Pietro to say if her natural expression was innocent or wicked. Sometimes when he couldn’t bear to gaze at her any more he would force his eyes to the blackboard.
Harry Freeman was slowly making ground. He had bought some new clothes, had got himself four or five O levels. He had rumbled the Americans. ‘They can’t write,’ he told Pietro. ‘I know I’m no one to talk, but you should see that Dave Snyder’s essays. He’s got handwriting like a five-year-old!’ ‘And a Harley Davidson.’ ‘OK, and a Harley Davidson. But I tell you, they’re thick, those guys.’ ‘I know,’ said Pietro, ‘but who’s going to tell Laura that?’
Two weeks before the end of term a notice was pinned on the main notice board announcing a school skiing trip to France. Pupils over fourteen were invited to put their names down. There was a wait while everyone consulted their friends; then cliques of two or three signed up. When it was known which teachers were going, more people signed. Pietro and Harry watched the notice board. Finally the sixth form condescended. Dave Snyder said he was going skiing in Colorado and wouldn’t mind a warm-up. He made the Alps sound very small.
Eventually Laura signed, and so did Pietro and Harry, their urgent signatures piercing the paper.
GHENT
BELGIUM 1981
‘MARY, MARY, MARY,’ said Hannah. ‘When are you ever going to learn to be sensible?’
The four-year-old girl looked up from the floor of the kitchen, where she was making a sculpture from potato peelings, her younger brother’s water bottle and the electric flex of the washing machine, which she had disconnected from the wall.
Hannah viewed herself, above all else, as capable. If she had had to give a one-word description of her character she would have chosen either that one or the related ‘realistic’. Yet Mary’s perversity and lack of any apparent sense of self-preservation taxed her more than she could have predicted. Each day she had to stop, keep calm, and try to find some deeper reserve of patience inside her. It was not that she didn’t love Mary; on the contrary, her devotion to her made the worry more acute. The trouble was that she found that the little girl’s irresponsibility wore down her own natural good humour. She never seemed to have time to talk with Pietro as she had in the old days. With Anton as well, now two years old and in the first exuberance of discovering his voice, she could never complete a conversation, or a book, or even a newspaper article. She often felt as though the person she had been would be lost; that when, in ten or more years’ time, she attempted to resume an ordinary life she would find her ability to concentrate had left her, that the world had moved on irrevocably during her decade’s sabbatical, and that she was unable to reconnect with the calm adult pleasures of other people’s lives.
She had stopped working when she moved to England with Pietro. She had been a director of her father’s import-export business in Antwerp. Now she did occasional translations for companies that needed expertise in French, Dutch, Flemish and English. Her father was from Holland, her mother from northern Belgium; Hannah was therefore, according to Pietro, ‘very Flemish, whichever way you look at it’, though she herself was not much concerned with nationality. She liked Paris and had had no difficulty settling in London.
Nothing had surprised her as much as the depression that shook her after Mary’s birth. It was uncharacteristic and it made her feel guilty. She had wanted a child; always, from as long ago as she could remember, she had wanted a child. She had seen no conflict between being a mother and any other activities she wanted to pursue; she did not think it would compromise or limit her but make her, if anything, more happy and complete. The depression passed, helped by her determination. The storm of physical imbalance blew over, but it left an impact.
In the utter frankness of her character she told Pietro of all her emotions. She saw nothing to be ashamed of and hoped that by sharing them with him, she might more easily dispel the gloom or anger. In any event, she saw it as his function or duty to help her. He often looked perplexed by her honesty, but evidently tried to help in his own oblique way.
Her good humour reasserted itself, though the birth of their children did change things between them. Usually Hannah saw the change as a deepening of their affection through their involvement in a common task. Occasionally, however, she saw the feeling that existed between them as if it were a third person, an organic thing in its own right, and she worried that it had become hardened or sclerotic with all the strain it had had to take.
‘Come outside,’ she said to Mary. ‘Go and play with Anton.’
Mary made off meekly enough into the garden of their rented house near Avignon.
‘Is everything all right?’ said Martha Freeman, coming into the kitchen with a breakfast tray from the terrace.
Hannah smiled. ‘Yes, thank you. I do worry about that girl, though. She never seems to learn. She sticks her fingers in electric sockets. She kisses stray dogs.’
Martha said, ‘I’m going to put Jonathan to sleep in a minute. What time are we due in Uzès?’
‘Not till one. I expect they’ll be late too. It’s quite a long way over to Bédoin.’
‘If we can get the kids to have a nap,’ said Martha, ‘why don’t you tell me that story you always promised. About how you and Pietro met?’
‘Must I?’
‘Yes, Hannah, you promised me.’
‘All right. I’ll keep it short.’
‘No, no. I want all the details. Absolutely everything. Clothes, who said what and when. What the houses looked like. Everything.’
‘All right,’ Hannah laughed. ‘I’ll make some more coffee and see you out on the terrace.’
I was living in one of the nicer parts of Ghent, in an apartment block. It had beautiful wrought-iron balconies and windows with long slatted shutters.
My parents were from Antwerp but I had come to look after my uncle, who was very unwell. My aunt was dead and there was no one else to look after him. He owned the top two apartments in the block. He lived in the lower one; the top one was not as good because it was right under the eaves and you had to walk up a little wooden staircase to get to it. They used to let it out to young men, often doctors who were still studying. It was also smaller than my uncle’s flat, which was one of those huge apartments where the rooms seem to keep opening
off each other for ever.
One night I was awoken by a tremendous banging from upstairs. The floors in the top apartment had only one or two thin rugs and we relied on the tenants to be very quiet at night. I could hear loud voices and laughter and the words of what sounded like English songs. There was a deafening crash, as though someone had pushed over a huge wardrobe, and I heard my uncle calling for me from along the corridor. From upstairs I could hear the sound of muffled laughter and of people trying to move very quietly, but without much success. They sounded clumsy.
I rushed naked to the bathroom (I had never worn anything in bed) but could find only my uncle’s old dressing gown, which was much too big for me. I rolled the sleeves up and put it on, tying the belt tightly. I prepared to go upstairs and tell them off. I wasn’t worried about speaking English, if that was what was necessary, because we had been brought up to speak it in Antwerp.
I went to make sure that my uncle was all right and then I went and hammered on the door at the top of the wooden stairs. There was a sound of surprised laughter inside and eventually the door opened straight on to the sitting room.
Wilfred, the young doctor who rented the apartment, attempted to introduce me. He was very drunk. He could barely get the words out. I was angry, but felt at a disadvantage because of my uncle’s dressing gown. There were two girls in the room, and a young man with dishevelled hair I had never seen before. One of the girls was called Kitty. I had seen her around and knew she had a bad reputation. I didn’t know the other one. All four of them were finding it hard to control their laughter.