Aunt Margaret inclined her head. “Lovely to see you again, and to meet”—she groped unsuccessfully for Ben’s name—“your husband.”
“My pleasure,” said Ben. “A most enlightening afternoon.”
Aunt Margaret appeared gratified by this comment. The four of them moved back to the house. Carol retrieved her purse. At the front door, they exchanged kisses and handshakes, their farewells erupting simultaneously so that nobody much heard what anyone else said. Later, only the Colonel’s emphatic bass would lie around in Carol’s head: “Tell your president to keep on backing up our Mrs. T.”
In the car, heading for the pub in which they had booked a room for the night, Ben said, “So? Did your aunt fill you in on the family tree?”
“Up to a point. But I rather think I may have fallen off the family tree after today. Or jumped.”
“Come now, they weren’t so bad. A different climate of mind, put it that way.”
“You can say that again!”
He laughed, and reached across to hold her knee. “Look at it as life experience. I don’t often get to meet a guy like your uncle. It’s an education. A man of firm views and a fine contempt for the evils of book learning. I was careful to play down my trade.”
“He patronized you,” said Carol.
“Of course, what else? A raw colonial.”
“I was embarrassed.”
“People are not responsible for their relatives. And in any case, you’re making too much of it. Personally, I enjoyed myself.”
“It’s all very well for you,” she said. “You’re detached.”
But that evening, in the pub, she felt an interesting surge of liberation. They drank a lot of wine over dinner; Ben came up with a rather crude imitation of the Colonel which had them both convulsed with laughter. She saw that her uncle would become an icon, one of those private jokes that are the bedrock of a marriage. She felt an absurd gratitude to him.
She said to Ben, “You know, this trip has had a peculiar effect. Maybe it was not just you who is detached.” An image kept coming into her head—she kept seeing those geological maps in which land masses are shown in a state of fission, splitting apart into the familiar shapes of the modern globe: continental drift, America shaping up, floating free of its anchorage. Maybe people do that too, she thought, maybe it’s what they have to do.
A few days later, they flew out of Heathrow. I am going home, Carol thought. On previous visits, over the years, she had always experienced at this point a faint sense of loss, as though in lifting off into the sky—taking out her book, glancing at the menu—she left a shadowy fragment of herself behind, down there among the boxy houses, the checkerboard fields. This time, she knew that she was whole. Whatever it had been, that shadow self, it was gone now—gone with her parents, perhaps. She was heading home.
I have lived in a century of mass migration, the time when millions slipped from one culture into another, were born with one identity and died as someone else. Such shape-shifting is a wonder—that people are so flexible, so permeable. Today, I am a Londoner. Cities absorb; new arrivals creep into cracks and crevices. They reinvent both themselves and the place. The minicab driver from Turkey, here just a month, but already able to navigate his way around—after a fashion; the Indian corner-shop proprietor who came from Uganda decades ago and whose children now have the speech of north London. I look at the faces of the city’s migrants, which reflect other worlds, and wonder if I could have done that.
Comet
A faithful exercise in confabulation would proliferate like an evolutionary tree. I should write not one book but hundreds; I should pursue each idiosyncratic path. Not an option, clearly, and to follow a single outcome seemed like a constriction: more inviting to pounce on remembered climactic points and let speculation run free. And how they do cluster within a particular time frame, those portentous moments. When we were young. When we were least well equipped to make rational and expedient decisions, when we blew with the wind, when we lived for the day.
There was an explosion of choice, back then. The paths do not so much fork as flourish. Up here? Over there? This way? Or that? In the mind’s eye, they mirror the evolutionary tree in which a brief central trunk throws out a series of branches, each of which divides yet again, and none of which is the inevitable course, arriving eventually at Homo sapiens. Contingency: the great manipulator. Under the laws of contingency, human evolution is an overwhelming improbability. In the Burgess Shale of British Colombia, there has been found a range of fossil animals about 570 million years old, most of which are unrelated to any existing fauna: dead ends, victims of evolutionary contingency. There is a creature with a nozzle like a vacuum cleaner, another that appears to be an animated bath mat, another like a lotus flower, another that resembles a feather duster. Bizarre elaborations; the routes that evolution might have taken, the alternative scenarios. I look at these and find myself thinking of the lives I have not had. Shall I be the lotus flower, the bath mat, the feather duster? What if I had followed the advice of the University Appointments Board and applied for a job with Shell? Or got serious and taken the civil service exam? Or gone abroad as a teacher of English?
I was young in the middle of the twentieth century. The year 1900 was history; the millennium was science fiction. We had wind-up gramophones and stockings with seams; we bought Chianti in straw-covered bottles, we smoked Gauloises and admired French films and American musicals. Sex was out in the open, but a nice girl did not go into a pub on her own. We got married, on the whole, and some lived happily ever after, unaware of looming divorce statistics. Our babies wore real nappies and drank ersatz orange juice supplied by the government; our toddlers were guided by Dr. Spock. We bred early, usually on account of unreliable contraceptive methods. When we made choices, we did not look back; life seemed to have its own momentum.
From time to time I stay in a hotel in Oxford that was undergraduate lodgings in the 1950s. I spent many hours there, back then; it harbored a group of my friends, young men who wore duffel coats and drank a lot of beer. The wind-up gramophones worked overtime in smoke-filled rooms. Today, the sixteenth-century stone building with mullioned windows has been reinvented as a classy establishment catering for the discriminating visitor. The warren of small personal dens is gone, replaced by tastefully comfortable rooms with all facilities. The pillows are fat and the water is hot; the barman prepares Irish coffee with elegant dexterity. But every now and then I seem to hear distant, scratchy melodies: “Begin the Beguine,” “La Mer,” “These Foolish Things.”
What I feel is curiosity, not nostalgia. The girl in the bat-wing sweater who propped her bike against the wall is not so much an alter ego as another person. I am not she, because of all that has happened since; she is an ancestor, it seems, and I am just one of many possible descendants. I wonder what she would feel about me? Dismay, I imagine; when we are twenty, we are never going to get old.
Two boys are out shooting birds on an Italian hillside. Two boys, two guns, four dogs. They have strayed far from the village, up into the hills, farther than they have ever been before, high into the rocky, scrubby bird haunts of the high slopes, where they blast off happily at all and sundry. Few people come here; it is a barren place, and treacherous, with deep unexpected gullies and crevasses. And now, at the end of the day, one of the dogs has got itself into one of these clefts and cannot scramble out. They can hear it, whining and yelping, down there in a morass of twiggy, prickly growth, invisible and insistent.
What to do? They eye the gully without enthusiasm, but the dog is useful, they are fond of it, and neither is going to chicken out in front of the other. So there is nothing for it but to get in there and effect a rescue.
They slither down the rocks. They bash a path through the bushes, collar the frantic dog, and prepare to climb back out.
And then they see it. Some sort of seat, wedged between boulders, half-smothered in brambles; a rusted frame, amid which there are rags of materi
al and a bundle of collapsed sticks or something. They peer closer; they understand. And they are out of there like a dose of salts, back up the rocks and away, bawling at the dogs. They are not going to hang around here; this is not one for them—this is for the carabinieri.
Sarah Low said to her friend and colleague Clare, “I have had a very odd letter. An official letter from an official person at a very official address—the Foreign Office, no less—asking if I am my father’s daughter. If I am, they will be in touch again with some information.”
“Dear me,” said Clare. “And are you? There’s not some dark family secret?”
“None that I know of.”
“Money? An unexpected inheritance?”
“I think not,” said Sarah. “I think,” she went on after a moment, “that it is going to be something about my half sister. Penelope.”
Sarah has received, wrapped in polythene, a rectangle of water-stained, sun-bleached, insect-chewed leather, attached to a long strap, equally degraded. This was once a handbag. You can open it, still. It has a flap, like an envelope, and on the front of the flap there are three rusted metal initials: PML. These initials made identification possible. They set in train the process of consulting files and lists, collating, eliminating, searching, enlisting the help of Somerset House—the process that led to the arrival of that letter. The initials, the bag, its contents, the strap by which it hung across its owner, have lain on an Italian hillside for nearly fifty years, waiting to give testimony. They have lain there since before Sarah was born.
The bag had contents, which are also neatly wrapped. A pair of sunglasses, quite well-preserved. Some Egyptian coins. A corroded circular metal object and an equally corroded metal tube. These last, she realizes, are a powder compact and a lipstick. She finds them peculiarly disturbing. They are mundane, and intimate. She imagines them back in pristine condition: the shiny compact, with some pretty design on the front, and the mirror within (there are shards of glass); the lipstick selected for shade and brand. Elizabeth Arden? Max Factor?
There is also a wodge of fibrous brown matter. It is possible to see that this is many-leafed, like a mille-feuille. Even so, she would not have realized what it was were it not for the inventory that accompanied the package. This is the remains of a British passport. How are the mighty fallen.
It would have been one of those old blue ones, she thinks. The real McCoy—the dark blue gold-embossed stiff-covered booklet from the days when a British passport was just that, and no qualifying coda about European Community. It would have had a photograph in it; somewhere in this wodge of matter there is the ghost of a face, a face that would be eerily familiar.
She has seen photographs of her half sister. She has seen in them her own myopic look—the thick-lensed glasses, the look that is a legacy from their father. And his nose, she has seen—his slightly beaky nose on that face, echoing her own.
In the family albums, photographs of Penelope cease. She is there, and then she is not. Everyone else gets older; babies and children appear. She is simply an absence. There is one further item in the package, separately wrapped. This is clearly recognizable as a locket, still attached to the chain on which it hung around a neck. The locket is heart-shaped; it is blackened and battered—there is a dent at the back, the hinge is broken. It is just possible to make out intricate patterning on the front, and there are inlaid chips of some other material. She rubs at one with her finger and sees that it is blue. Some of the chips are missing; there are tiny empty sockets.
“A Comet,” Sarah tells Clare. “Apparently they were rather given to dropping out of the sky. It was 1956. In the run-up to the Suez crisis. She’d gone out to Egypt to teach in a language school, and then Brits were advised to get out. She was twenty-three.”
“After all this time . . .”
“Quite. And now there’s only me. Closest surviving relative.”
“And you never even knew her?”
“Of course not. I was the second family, by the second marriage. She was just a legend. A sad legend, mentioned less and less.”
“Oh my goodness,” says Clare. “And now I suppose you’ll have to do something about . . . well, arrangements.”
In the chapel of the crematorium, there is a miasma of embarrassment. Hardly anyone here actually knew her; they are attending the funeral of a stranger. Most of them are unknown to each other; various people are unknown to Sarah. The mourners do not fill the room—far from it. They are scattered about, glancing furtively at one another. A couple of cousins remember Penelope, vaguely (“But we never saw her that much, you know. All the same, we felt we must be here”). A very old man has gamely struggled up from Bournemouth, leaning on a stick; he knew her father well (“Nice girl—such a shame”). The cousins’ husbands are dutiful but a touch restive, wondering about traffic conditions and the route home. Clare has come, and a few more of Sarah’s friends. There is an elderly woman who was at college with Penelope (“Thank goodness I happened to spot your notice in the paper”), attended by a patient daughter. And there are others, as yet unidentified.
They wait in silence, staring at the coffin, on which there is laid a sheaf of white lilies. And then the priest arrives, the mourners rise to their feet, and the process of dispatch begins.
Sarah tours the room. There is finger food, soft drinks, a glass of wine for those who would prefer. She has done her duty by the cousins; Clare is looking after the old chap from Bournemouth. And now this man is bearing down on her, one of the strange faces noted earlier. He carries a plateful of food and has preferred red wine.
“Tom Sayers. I was in Cairo.”
In fact, it emerges, he ran the language school at which Penelope taught, for that brief time she was there. “We old Egypt hands tend to keep in touch, and someone told me about this, so I thought I’d come along.”
“That was good of you.”
He inclines his head, graciously. He must be eighty, at least. “I thought there might be some people I knew here. And one’s not that busy these days. An outing’s quite welcome.”
“I take it you do remember my sister,” says Sarah. Cool, now.
“Oh, indeed I do. Mind, there were quite a few expat girls around. My staff came and went like anything. Here today, gone tomorrow. Some of them left more of an impression than others. The bombshells, you know—and she wasn’t that. Nice girl, though. Tall, wore glasses.” His glance strayed over Sarah’s shoulder. “Truth to tell, I don’t see anyone here I recognize from Cairo days. Pity.”
“I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time.”
He waved his glass at a passing waiter. “Red for me. Not at all, not at all. I wanted to pay my respects anyway. Nice girl, as I say. Of course, one heard all about the crash at the time. Terrible thing. And we all took those flights home. There but for the grace of God, one thought.”
Sarah eyed him. This old horror had lived to be eighty, shoving his way through life. There is no selective system, none at all. Let’s not talk about God.
“Please excuse me,” she said. “There are people I haven’t yet spoken to.”
She had written to the aunts and the uncles and the cousins. You will remember my half sister, Penelope, she wrote. Well, there is this news . . . I feel we should commemorate her, she wrote. A small event for family and friends. I very much hope that you will be able to come. It occurred to her that these were quite the oddest letters that she had ever had to write. And, no doubt, for others to receive. Puzzled spouses and partners would say: Who? Elderly aunts would be anxious about travel arrangements and frame guilty excuses.
She had put a notice in selected newspapers: discreet, succinct. There might be others interested.
And there were. For now there is this second stranger standing before her, explaining himself, but hesitantly, with diffidence. He, too, had been in Cairo. John Lambert. He had known her sister. He had known her very well. At first, his diffidence makes it hard for him to get to the point. He, too, had been teaching
in Cairo, at the university. He had met Penelope soon after they both arrived. And . . . well, they had become quite close. Very close. In fact, he says, eventually, the idea was that we were going to get married, in due course.
“Oh . . . ,” says Sarah. “Oh, good heavens. I don’t think my father ever said . . .”
He tells her that nothing was exactly formalized. She hadn’t told her parents or anyone. “People got engaged in those days,” he says. “The ring and so forth. We hadn’t got around to that, but it would have come.” He smiles, embarrassed. “I hope you don’t mind hearing this, but I felt I’d like to tell you.”
Sarah said, “I’m so very glad you’re here. And of course I don’t mind.”
“It was a shock, coming across your notice. It’s something you do at my time of life”—a wry grin—“You tend to trawl through that page to see who’s popped their clogs. And so I saw it. It made me feel very odd, I can tell you. It’s not that I don’t think of her—I often do. But it made the whole thing seem new again. Hearing about the crash, back then. What one felt. And I sat there looking at your notice and thinking that if that hadn’t happened, my life would presumably have been very different. My wife was pouring me a cup of coffee and I thought: I’d never have known you. You’d be somebody I never met.”
Sarah nodded. There seemed no appropriate comment.
“Mind, I’m devoted to my wife.”
She gazed at this man: lean, slightly stooped, long thin jowly face, old enough to be her father. Somewhere behind and beyond all this there lurked another person entirely—a man who had been young with her sister. Penelope had stopped; he had continued. But he carried her still in his head; she survived in his mind, an untransmittable image.