“No.” He looks defensive. “We moved, you know. We couldn’t keep our old place after…”
He still can’t seem to tell her. “After the shop closed,” she said. “Oh, Dani, I don’t get why you didn’t tell me about that. I found out after you were here in the fall.”
They stand a foot apart now, Tommy aware of how defensive they both look. “I meant to,” he says. “And then, I don’t know. This place isn’t good for me. It’s always pissed me off. Like I’m the pauper and he’s the king. Except…fuck. Never mind.”
Tommy remembers that he isn’t alone. She glances through the kitchen but sees no one coming in. Dani reads her mind.
“Okay, so this might piss you off,” he says, “and I really didn’t get the full story till we were halfway here, but the person who drove me is Merry Galarza. She’s outside. She didn’t want to come in until I told you. She’ll drive right back to the city if you want, but she’s desperate to talk with you.”
“I’m about to have a nervous breakdown.” Tommy sits on the nearest couch.
“I can tell her to go. I can go with her.”
“Don’t be silly, Dani.”
He smiles, flinching. “I wonder how often you’ve said that to me.”
“Can you just let me think for a moment? A lot is going on right now.” She sees her brother look around, as if a troupe of acrobats might emerge from a closet, as if she’s referring to a physical commotion of some sort. She doesn’t need him to ask about the drawings.
“Dani, go tell her she can stay. Did you have lunch? I have no idea what time it is, but I need to eat. And if I put food together, I stand a chance of calming down.”
—
Merry loiters in the driveway by her car, feeling as foolish as she is. When was she last here—four, five years ago? Mort gave her the grand tour. She thought it was such a privilege. How naïve, how vain, was that?
The two hours she just spent in the car with Dani Daulair felt, at once, like a shaming and a liberation. Her fraying nerves turned her, as usual, into a profligate chatterbox. Before they even hit the Sawmill Parkway, she was well into her narrative of betrayal. “It’s like that will of his was a suicide note,” she found herself saying. “A final fuck-you before tumbling on purpose off that roof. I know that’s a bitchy, selfish thing to say. But if I don’t vent before we get there, I’ll end up cooking my goose. Or shooting myself in the foot. Pick your cliché. I’m it.”
Merry pulled herself up short. This righteous soliloquy had begun to sound uncomfortably comfortable to her, playing itself out in her head so regularly now that she could practically set it to music. “Listen to me. Wow. I’m sorry. You’re just trying to see your sister and I’m…”
“I have a beef with him, too,” Dani said sharply. “It’s stupid.”
“Stupid?”
“Stale, I guess.”
Merry might talk too much, but she knew when to shut up and listen.
“Forget it,” he said.
“Please,” she said. “Tell me.”
“I’m Ivo.”
Merry waited for more. What was he talking about? “Ivo, Mort’s Ivo.”
“I was the model.”
She glanced quickly at him. He was looking ahead, no real expression. She tried to guess at his age, do the math. No one thought of Lear as an artist who used live models. In endless interviews, he spoke about his pictures, along with his stories, as emerging from deep within, words and images drawn up from a well in a bucket, brought into the light.
She thought, surprisingly, of Lear’s reverence for all the history and lore surrounding Charles Dodgson’s inspirational Alice Liddell.
“You modeled for Mort?”
“Except I didn’t know it. And I know I shouldn’t care. Not like I deserve something in return, but I’ve always felt…” Dani sighed. “It’s so stupid.”
“It sounds too important to be stupid,” said Merry, although she was confused. How was the sister involved in all this?
Carefully, coaxingly, she got him to tell her the whole story.
“But what the hell does he owe me, really?” Dani said at the end.
“I think the problem,” said Merry, “the thing that makes us angry, even if we don’t have the right, is that we know he didn’t feel like he owed anything to anyone.”
She realizes she’s been standing in the driveway for nearly ten minutes. But she swore she wouldn’t enter the house until Dani—or his sister—emerged to invite her in. At least she can wait in the shade. She wanders across the grass to stand beneath a tree by the studio. Too curious to resist the temptation, she presses herself between a pair of shrubs and peers through one of the windows. Papers and files are lying about everywhere; it looks like a burglar’s been through. Somebody’s already packing things up. “What?” she mutters aloud. Isn’t it far too soon to take such drastic measures? Where is everything headed?
She steps back, careful not to snap any branches, and when she pivots, she nearly collides with a strange man, except that—
“Yikes,” she says. “Hello.” She knows him, though he’s clearly out of context.
“Yes, hello,” he says tersely. His smile is more like a grimace.
“We know each other, I know we do.” Merry extends her hand.
“I’m afraid not.”
“But…” Merry brushes pine needles off her skirt. She now wishes she had worn jeans. Her skirt and blouse make her look like the kiss-ass she’s desperate not to be—though who would she be fooling?
“Nick,” he says, holding out his hand just as she’s withdrawn hers. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
She realizes she’s peering at him, as if he’s not in focus.
“Nicholas Greene,” he says.
“Oh…oh Christ—oh sorry—I mean, of course you are. God, I’m an idiot.” And then the picture does come into focus. “You’re playing Mort. In the movie. Oh my God.”
“Yes,” he says. “And you’re not…some skulduggerish gal reporter, chasing me into the woods, Diana the Media Huntress.”
“No,” says Merry. “I don’t think so, at least.”
What is he talking about? And does anybody really talk like that? And why is he roaming around outdoors, by himself? (Well, what is she doing?) “No,” she says again. “I’m just a jilted museum curator, here to beg for alms.”
Now she’s the one talking like that: blather is contagious. “Right. My name.” She introduces herself. They shake hands again, too forcefully.
“All square then!” he says. “Should we go in? Are you here to see Tomasina?”
“Yes. Or I hope so. Wow, that was a lot of talk to figure out next to nothing.”
All Tomasina can do is tell her to leave. She’s endured worse.
Tommy opens the door before they reach it. “I’m thinking lunch,” she says, looking straight at Merry. “I’m putting on canned soup and I’m making a salad, and I think I’m opening a bottle of wine.” The actor slips past her while she speaks.
“I know I owe you a call,” she says, grasping Merry’s outstretched hand. “Only now I guess I don’t. Come in.”
When Tommy closes the door behind her, she sees beyond Merry that Dani is staring, openly astonished, at Nick.
“Everybody, will you please just sit for a minute?”
Like children in a game of musical chairs, Tommy’s three guests immediately reach for the nearest chair, pull it out from the table, and sit—even her brother.
“Well,” says Tommy. “Something in my life goes according to plan.”
Nobody laughs. Nick’s phone buzzes from one of his pockets. The others stare at him. He holds his hands aloft. “Not answering.” He then reaches inside, pulls out the phone, and disarms it.
“You’re not my hostages,” says Tommy. “I’m just not sure how to…” She turns to Dani, perhaps because he’s the one person over whom she has an established authority, however dated, and says, “I wish you had called,” as kindly as she
can.
They are all silent now, as if chastised. For a few beats, Tommy feels calm—until something catches her eye in the oblique view she has through the doorway to the dining room, the windows beyond. She leaves the kitchen, to get a better view. When she returns, she glares at Nick.
“Did you invite a photographer here? Please tell me you didn’t do that.”
Twelve
2010
The cancer, too swiftly, wheedled its way into her bones, her spine first of all.
He was in Bucharest when Annabelle rang, hardly able to speak through her sobbing. “All for bloody nothing, the slash and burn. Now it’s too fucking late for the chemo.”
Nick had just returned to his hotel room and wrapped himself in the cheap duvet, exhausted and chilled from hours of shooting outdoors in the morning mist and afternoon rains, sore from horseback riding in ersatz medieval armor, sick of soggy sandwiches by day and meaty, cabbagey stews by night. (It felt as if, even off set, the meals were meant to evoke Arthurian England.) He did not want this news, but he craved a reason to catch a break.
The director gave Nick a three-day leave; they would shoot around him.
“Don’t you dare get up,” he called into Mum’s flat as he let himself in with his key. He threw his bag and his mac on the floor just inside the door, nearly tripping as he made his way to her bedroom.
She was sitting up on the bed, dressed in jeans and a thick jumper, a book laid aside on the coverlet.
He sat next to her, carefully; Annabelle had described how merciless the pain could be, how cunningly unpredictable, how hard it was for her to sleep.
“Will it hurt if I hug you?” he asked.
“Hug me, sweetie,” she said. “Hug me no matter what.”
He pulled himself up against the headboard, so they sat side by side. He slipped an arm around her shoulder and leaned in. She smelled medicinal. He willed away tears. (How much harder, he couldn’t help noticing, it was for him to hold them back than, if required, to summon them.)
“I saw you in the magazine,” Mum said.
“Oh, that frothy bit about my show.”
“I love the thought of you as Sir Gawain. My noble knight.”
“It’s pretty daft, really. I mean the whole plot. I don’t know how long it’ll last.”
“Be optimistic, Nicky. I didn’t impress that on you, any of you, I see that now.”
He wanted to give her the same advice, but it would be insulting. She had asked the doctor not to soft-pedal anything.
He picked up the book. “Iris Murdoch.”
“Plot like a maze. Keeps me occupied.”
“You have visitors, don’t you?”
“Your sister’s here too much. I couldn’t stay here without her, so I let her come. Selfish, I know. Weekends, your brother takes over.”
“High time you were selfish, Mum.”
“If only because there’s not much of it,” she said quietly.
“Of what?” he said, realizing in an instant what a dolt he was.
“Time, sweetie.”
She quickly changed the subject to Nigel, how well he was doing, though his advancement at work might mean moving to Scotland. In fact, she said, Nigel had taken over paying her rent—at which Nick felt a surge of envy. He could pitch in, now that he had regular work (if only for a few more weeks).
In the middle of a sentence, she stopped cold, blanched. She looked as if she were holding her breath.
“Mum?”
She closed her eyes.
“Can I get you something?” He tried to take hold of her hand, but she’d clenched it tight, an impregnable fist.
When the pain passed, she told him that it felt as if some invisible assailant were striking her spine with a bat. The blows came without warning. If she took the powerful drug her doctor had prescribed, the pain dimmed to an intermittent ache, but then all of her dimmed, all her senses, her memory, her balance, her consciousness (even certainty) of being alive.
What could Nick say? That he admired her grace, her courage, her kindness to three children who had probably as good as scuppered her prospects of a considered life? And the time had long passed, he knew, when he might have asked her more about his father, something he had blithely expected he would do in some distant future they were clearly never to share. Nick knew the man’s name, and he knew that, last Mum had known, the blighter lived somewhere in Northern Ireland. (“Probably has a wife and kids there. Now she’s a woman I wouldn’t trade places with.”)
“Are you peckish? Can I go out and fetch us the best carryout in London?” he asked, helpless.
“You know, I am,” she said, deliberately brightening. “But no curry. Anything but curry. I went off that for life a good while ago.”
“Then I’ll be back. Stay right here with Iris.” He patted the book.
Even this errand was a matter of his needs over hers. He was desperate to be out in the fickle city air—in the mean wind and temperamental skies of April—not because it would clear his head but because it would allow him somewhere to cry. He walked several blocks in a locomotive rush, wiping his face again and again with the sleeve of his mac, till he reached a small, motley park. He turned on his mobile and called Annabelle to reassure her that he had arrived, that she could take off the next two days.
“I’m pregnant,” she told him, just like that.
“Annaboo,” he said. “Oh Annie.” He found himself crying again, his sister joining in.
“I don’t know whether to tell her. I’m barely three months along.”
“You have to.”
“She’ll refuse to let me care for her. What then? Not like Nige can take time off.”
Nick was about to say that he would refuse to let her care for Mum, but what could he offer—to quit his show and move home, just as he’d found work to sink his teeth into, even if it was second tier?
“It’ll give her something to live for,” said Nick.
“You haven’t talked to her doctors,” Annabelle said coldly.
“But it’s good news, Annie.”
He heard his sister sigh. “Well, it is. For us. Michael’s on the moon.”
“Congratulations. How could I forget that bit? Congratulations.”
She promised to let him know what she decided to do.
He brought back to his mother’s flat an Italian lunch, aubergine and chicken dishes baked with tomato and cheese. He’d asked the girl to leave out the garlic. Mum ate a few bites and seemed endlessly grateful. Nick had a glass of the red plonk he found at the back of a cupboard.
Annabelle had told him that if everything went well, Mum would sleep for much of the afternoon (though seldom so well at night). That first afternoon, Nick muted his mobile and slept as well, curled up, prawnlike, on the narrow bed in the spare room off the kitchen, wearing the same clothes he’d put on before dawn in Bucharest.
He was awakened by the sound of running water, the consciousness of a sun much lower in the sky. At least the clouds had cleared.
Mum was leaning against the sink, filling the kettle. From behind, she looked even more alarmingly tiny than she had on her bed. She had always been small—in healthier times, compact and trim, nimble on her feet. More than once, she had told Nick that he was lucky to have inherited two of the three traits that drew her to his father: the man’s stature and his striking complexion. “The third, his gift for opportunistic flattery, that one I hope he kept to himself.”
“Mum, let me do that,” he said in the kitchen.
He startled her, of course, and it distressed him to see her catch herself with one hand, nearly dropping the kettle onto the dishes in the sink. Recovering her balance, she turned. “I’m done for if I can’t do a thing for myself, Nicky. But thank you.” She set the kettle on the counter and let him take over. She sat in the sole chair beside the café table in the corner.
Rummaging, he found a tin of shortbread biscuits.
“Have as many as you like,” she said. “No
ne for me.”
“Calories, Mum. According to Annie, the doctor said we’re to stuff you like a Christmas goose with calories.”
“I have clotted cream with my porridge. How’s that?”
While waiting for the water to boil, he struggled for something to say that wasn’t about her cancer. He reached for a story about his work on the set in Romania.
His mother saved him the trouble. “Your sister’s pregnant.”
“Mum? Did she tell you that?” Had he been so dead to the world that he failed to wake at the sound of a ringing phone? What kind of useless carer was he?
Mum shook her head. “Anybody can see. Or any woman who’s been through it three times. I hope she plans to let me in on the news. Before it’s too late.”
Should he pretend he didn’t know? The plaintive look on his mother’s face reminded him, suddenly, sadly, of the look she often wore when her three children returned home from a posh lunch out with Grandfather.
“I shouldn’t say this,” Nick said, “but I’m glad Grandfather’s gone. I’m glad he’s not around to see you like this, and I don’t mean because I think it would break his heart or any of that rubbish.”
“Oh, Nick.”
The kettle began to hint at a whistle. Nick turned to put things together on a tray. “Let’s go in the other room, shall we?” He watched to see if Mum needed his help, but she stood and walked through on her own.
After they were settled, she looked at Nick in that lingering way only mothers are permitted to look at their grown sons. He thought she was about to tell him how well he’d turned out, how proud she was of him, that he seemed on a good path; he had heard such homilies from her before, and though he was always embarrassed by them, they had a surprisingly powerful effect. Sometimes he felt as if they literally inoculated him against the kind of crumping surrender that even made sense in his world (that sometimes saved a bloke from squandering a whole life on dreams).
“Nicholas, I don’t want to hear you run down your grandfather. He gave you so much.”
“But not you. And by withholding from you, he withheld from me—from us, Nige and Annie, too.”
“They’d agree with you, I’m sure. But they don’t say so.”