Authors: Penelope Lively
Simon filled glasses. “Well—happy seventy-fourth, Dad.”
“You’ll have to shout, all of you,” said Lucas. “I am getting interestingly deaf. Interesting because the process seems to have a selective facility. I hear things I don’t want to hear, like my French girl lodger prancing up the stairs at midnight, but miss choice passages of a Mozart concerto on the radio. I heard seventy-fourth quite clearly, unfortunately. Is it really that?”
Molly ladled casserole. “Eat, everyone.”
Ruth said, “I’m freezing.” She wore jeans and a skimpy cheesecloth shirt. She sat hugging herself.
“If you won’t wear a vest, like any sensible person would in January,” Molly told her, “Then that’s your lookout.”
“And this is the very winter of our discontent,” said Lucas. “Or so we’re told. Mind, for some of us it is just rather nostalgic. Shades of the 1940s—eh, Molly?” He looked kindly at Ruth. “Your mother and I have lived thus before, in this very room.”
Ruth sniffed. “That was the dark ages, wasn’t it? This is 1979, for heaven’s sake!”
Simon was shoveling down bœuf bourguignon. “Great nosh, Moll. So what are you going to do, Ruth? Join the picket lines—help bring down the government?”
Ruth gave him a stern look. “I simply want to get on with my A level work, and how can I do that in darkness, with rats everywhere?”
Simon sighed. “We look to your generation. You should be manning the barricades. Sorry—womanning.”
“Leave the child alone,” said Lucas. “And anyway, if she brings down the government, there’ll just be another one, won’t there? I have long since lost interest in governments. You can’t tell t’other from which. In fact, it’s surprising how easily one gets used to this blackout—though I dare say it helps to be a veteran. Did I tell you I have a new lodger?”
Actually, this is a rather inviting scene, thought Molly. The light on people’s faces, like in a Rembrandt; the candle flicker dancing in the surface of a pewter jug; the way the corners of the room fall away into darkness. We are some group from the past, she thought, a domestic scene from another century, locked away in the benign light of a lost age. Wipe out our modern gear, and we’d fit nicely—Ruth as the archetypal young girl, Lucas and Simon so evidently father and son, with those beaky faces and the specs, and me—well, I’m the hausfrau, I suppose, with my good peasant stew on the table. I need a kerchief and an apron.
“He’s a Nigerian student,” Lucas was saying. “Only been here a couple of weeks and today I realized that he thought this state of affairs was the norm. I explained that we are suffering a spot of industrial unrest and he was quite surprised. The poor fellow does feel the cold, though. He has borrowed the long johns I used to wear when on duty on blitz nights and is most appreciative.”
There was a constantly changing population of lodgers at the house in Fulham, and had been for many a year—an economic necessity for Lucas but also, as he pointed out, a challenge: “At the very least I get a parade of contemporary types—it prevents a moribund view of the world.” Molly and Simon, who conferred about Lucas, behind his back, would point out that the flotsam of the bedsit scene are not really representative of society in general. “Just as well,” retorted Lucas. “I am spared solicitors and estate agents and stockbrokers. I get fringe figures—like myself.”
“What happened to the clairvoyant?” enquired Molly.
“Oh, poor old dear. She went to live with her sister in Enfield. Business had got worse and worse. I suspect she was clairvoyancing all the wrong things—out of touch with the times.”
“She told me I was going to marry into the aristocracy,” said Ruth.
“There you are. Couldn’t spot a nice egalitarian girl.”
“One day,” said Simon, “you’ll get some real nutter. And we shall have to come to the rescue.”
“I’m sure you’ll do it with great zest,” said Lucas comfortably. “Is there any more of this delicious dish, Molly?”
There are so many shadows in this room, she thought. Candlelight creates a further dimension. No wonder people used to believe so fervently in ghosts. Space seems suggestive, packed with possibility. It’s Caravaggio as opposed to David Hockney. The Fulham kitchen had become a glowing cavern, its mundane furnishings muted, turned into vague murky shapes. The light picked out faces, hands, the red intensity of wine, the white cascade of wax from candles. Everyone had acquired a new presence; Lucas and Simon were craggy Hogarthian characters, Ruth was romantically pretty. When you can’t see things clearly, thought Molly, they are open to interpretation. What is that shape in the corner? The small dark blob on the dresser shelf? What elegant hands Lucas has.
“So, Moll—what are you up to these days?”
“I’m lining poets up for a poetry festival in the summer. Next month, I shepherd three writers around the north country. Arts admin lies low in the winter, gearing up for activity. How’s the bookshop?”
“Doing pretty well,” said Simon, “considering that we are not much more than a broom cupboard. The thing is to specialize, I think. I’m into travel and topography.”
Lucas beamed. “I’m full of admiration. He can talk stuff about turnover and profit margins.”
“How’s Paul?” inquired Molly.
There is a fractional pause. “Actually, I’m not seeing so much of Paul.”
Ruth said, “Doesn’t
anyone
in this family ever do anything that isn’t arty in some way?” She flung out her hands—histrionic, half serious—stood up to reach for the bread on the dresser, and became for a moment the center of attention, each of the others seeing a different girl. Molly saw the person with whom she had spent much of her life—the
people,
the infant, the child, the children, stage by stage, subsumed into this almost-woman. Lucas thought: dear me, the child is half a head taller than her mother, and Molly is taller then Lorna ever was. Do women grow, generation by generation? Simon saw a flicker of Molly in Ruth’s face, caught in the candlelight and remembered—hazily—the schoolgirl Molly, a bustling presence. This girl is different, he thought—quieter, less charged. Not Molly’s fire and dash, but there’s something else there. Something positive, firm. Got her own views. Good-looking, too—I suppose the boys are sniffing around by now. Help! A grown-up niece.
“We’re looking to you to make the break,” Simon told her. “Marine biology? Econometrics? And I’m a businessman, I’ll have you know.”
In fact, thought Molly, we are a conversation piece from another era. Goodness knows what we are, or do. We are a scene at which people stare in an art gallery, wondering about that woman’s smile, and what the man is saying, and who spilled the wine.
The overhead light snapped on. Everything in the room leaped into sharp focus. The shape in the corner was the rubbish bin. The blob on the dresser shelf was a roll of insulating tape. There were cereal packets on the side table, and a pile of old newspapers on the floor. The candle flames became faint and foolish. Everyone looked a little seedy. Lucas needed a shave. Ruth had more blue stuff on one eyelid than the other.
“Eureka!” said Simon. “Thank you, Mr. Edison.” He blew out the candles and reached for the wine bottle. “Where’s your glass, Dad?”
“Now we all look overexposed,” said Molly. “Too definite. I liked us better before. And the room.”
Simon emptied the bottle and started to open another. “Yearning for a simpler life? That doesn’t sound much like you. Actually, come to think of it, this kitchen has caught up with contemporary style—or rather, was always ahead. Dad has had a pine dresser for forty years.”
Lucas was peering at the label on the wine bottle. “Good heavens—Australia! I had no idea wine could come from there. Maybe you have some atavistic memory of the Somerset cottage, Molly. That was the simple life all right.”
“I remember hens,” she said. “And going to the loo outside.”
“Outside!” cried Ruth. “Yuck!”
“In a shed, silly. It was rather cozy. There was a bench with a big hole for the grown-ups and a little one for children.”
“This is turning into a search for lost innocence,” said Simon. “Personally, I’m up for any modern device that’s going. I am splurging on the latest in hi-fi systems.”
Lucas spoke with complacency. “Well, it’s obvious where I stand on this issue, as one of the last operators of Gutenberg-era technology.”
“And look what’s happened to it,” said Simon. “More’s the pity.”
“Oh, I know, I know. A museum piece, now—the dear old press. I give each new lodger a conducted tour. Responses are various. The French girl was much entertained—she apparently had no idea such primitive techniques ever existed.”
“I loved the press when I was little,” said Ruth. “You used to let me arrange letters in sticks, to make words.”
Ah yes, thought Molly. Goodness!…unto the second generation. She saw the press suddenly through her own nine-year-old eyes—larger, mysterious, arcane. “We’ll make a printer of you yet,” Lucas had said. She saw a younger incarnation of Lucas, not so very different.
“They’re collectors’ items now,” said Simon.
Lucas lit a cigarette. “Really? Maybe I should give it to one of these craft archives, where it can outlive us all.”
“Not just yet.” Molly rose, and began to clear plates. “You’re not going to dismantle this place. It’s the one constant element. By the way, did I tell you we’re moving next month? I’ve found a small house in Tufnell Park that’s just right.”
“Footloose as ever,” said Lucas. “I don’t know where you find the energy. Or the time.”
Ruth yawned. “She gets bored easily. She
likes
packing cases and removal vans. She always thinks somewhere else will be fabulously different.”
“Actually,” said Simon. “It is the sensible thing to do. It’s called trading up.”
Molly glared at him, outraged. “I am not sensible and I am profoundly uninterested in property values. Footloose is probably right. Call it some basic insecurity. We’ve got fruit and cheese and biscuits now—Okay? Bath Olivers, Lucas—your favorites. We’ll have to be off before too long. Ruth has school in the morning.”
Over the years, there had been the flat in Notting Hill and the one in Earls Court and the maisonette in Primrose Hill and the cottage in Highgate and the house in Kentish Town. They had migrated around London, with Ruth a size bigger each time, and with equipment that leaped from Lego and furry animals to stereo systems and posters of rock groups. There was little that was sensible about the removals, and Molly knew that, but knew also that she would forever have an ambivalent relationship with the places in which she lived, and there was nothing to be done about it, except to get rid of the current one from time to time. James Portland had bought the original flat in Notting Hill, overriding all objections. The first move onward and upward had been a deliberate strategy that would enable her to take out a small mortgage, now that she was working again: an act of bravado that she knew well was defiant rather than expedient. She was not short of money; James’s child maintenance arrangement was generous. From time to time they bickered about this: “We don’t
need
any more…” “She is getting older, and therefore more expensive. You turn self-denial into some kind of perversity.” “It’s not self-denial, it’s just that we don’t live…” “Like I do? Oh, Molly, you don’t change, do you?”
And thus she had jumped from postcode to postcode, from flat to house, and could not fail to note that there had been financial gain in the process, which provoked contemptuous irritation. That was never the idea. Initially, she had wanted simply to be paying something herself for the place in which they lived, and after that it had become somehow a necessity to kick off and move on every few years. But each time she was startled and annoyed to find that bricks and mortar had a new accretion of expense, that the figures in estate agents’ windows were larger: smugly and defiantly larger. It was as though the London stock bricks of which most of the houses in which she lived were built had turned into some substance that had intrinsic value. And if you wanted to look out of a different set of windows from time to time you had no choice but to hitch up with this inexorable process, however much it offended you. When once she told Lucas what the Fulham house would now sell for, he was aghast. “But it simply isn’t worth that. I paid less than a thousand for it, in 1930.”
“It’s money that has got out of hand, not the house.”
“Fickle stuff,” said Lucas. “I never did have much faith in it.”
Molly and James spoke quite often: arrangements for Ruth to visit him or be taken for a holiday to his house in France, quarrels over Molly’s resistance to subsidy. In the early years, there had been an edge to these exchanges. He would be stiff, polite, reserved. She sensed that he was wounded, angry, and wanted to distance himself. And then, over time, there was a shift toward an accord that found an echo of the camaraderie they had once enjoyed; she even felt a nostalgia. He would arrive to fetch Ruth himself, rather than sending Maria and the chauffeur, and would sometimes come in for a while, looking around intently. On one of these occasions he said, “I suppose I see now what you meant.”
“Meant when?”
He waved a hand at the heartland of the maisonette in Primrose Hill or the cottage in Highgate, with the beanbags and cheap rugs, the wicker chairs, the clutter. “When you rejected my way of living.”
“That wasn’t about furnishings.”
“I know that. But there’s a superficial symbolism. Well, you were probably right.” He paused. “I still miss you, you know.”
“I…”
“Go on. Go for broke. Say it.”
“All right. So do I, in a way. Miss you.”
“In a way? Never mind, that’ll do. And there is Ruth, as a precious legacy. Who has started to look like me, people are saying.”
“Yes. She does.”
Around this time, James got married. Molly never saw or learned much of Claudia, and supposed her to be one of the stylish women who had frequented those evening parties. Ruth was not forthcoming about her: “She got a headache when we went to Whipsnade and Dad said we won’t take her another time.”
James was an attentive father—increasingly so as Ruth grew up. In babyhood, he had been at a loss; he was not a man to push a pram in the park. But as she advanced into articulacy and high spirits he became entranced. He said to Molly “I had no idea children could be so entertaining.” Ruth, for her part, clearly enjoyed these sorties into a more extravagant milieu, where there were patisseries from Harrods for tea, and outings to the ballet. And she was evidently attached to James, who must have loomed all her life as a sort of benevolent patron on the fringes of everyday existence.