Mischief (22 page)

If only this hotel, which claimed to have air conditioning but had only a hideous roaring box in a corner of the dining-room, was more American: if only her child didn’t knock at her conscience, saying ‘Remember me?’ then she could think.

Aaron was in the air now, somewhere up above the frozen seas or the hard unyielding land; on wings of love or self-interest, how could she know which? Knock-knock, who’s there? God or the Devil?

Harry put down his spoon and asked politely if he could leave the table. Rosemary said yes before Jessica could speak. He must go to his room to put on sun block first. Harry said OK.

Bill remarked that he was an unusually good child. Jessica said yes, but she’d had him checked out with a therapist, who’d said no problem, except he might be overly mature for his age: Rosemary observed that Hollywood must be a dreadful place to rear a child: either vulgar wealth in Bel Air or shoot-outs in McDonald’s, and therapists everywhere. Bill said any child was best reared in green fields in a gentle climate, Jessica should get a cottage in the village near them. Presumably Aaron would look after her financing. They’d be near, as families should be, but would of course respect each other’s privacy. And so on.

Harry was now out in the garden: the other side of the long French windows. He threw a ball against the wall, hard: it bounced back off uneven bricks, he’d leap to catch it. Hurl again. The garden was remarkably pretty. English pretty. The high wall was made of slim, ancient, muted red bricks, beneath which were hollyhocks and delphiniums, pleasantly tiered. Drought restrictions were in place, but Bill said he’d looked out of his window in the early hours and seen the gardener using the hose.

‘Harry’s got a good throw,’ said Bill. ‘He’ll be good at cricket.’

‘Or baseball,’ said Jessica. Rosemary groaned. Jessica understood, suddenly, what was obvious but she hadn’t seen: that she was their only child, Harry their only grandchild. Of course her parents wanted her back in the country. She could hardly look to them for impartial advice. Thud, thud, thud, against the wall. Knock-knock. What about me? Father, lying but loving, v. doting grandparents? Broken home v. green fields and no air conditioning?

‘We both like Aaron,’ observed Rosemary, ‘you know that, but there’s no denying he’s ambitious!’

What did her mother mean? That no truly ambitious man would put up with Jessica? That she wasn’t bright, beautiful or starry enough for Aaron? That it was a miracle he’d taken her on in the first place? So long as Aaron was the one persuading her to stay while she tried to leave, she could cope. But supposing it went the other way, Aaron decided he preferred Maggie Ives to Jessica? How would she survive then? She was playing games she might regret.

‘I could take the car and drive to meet him,’ said Jessica to her parents. ‘He and I could at least talk. I owe him that. I’d just about make it to the airport in time.’

‘I’d have to drive you,’ said Bill. ‘My car has gears. You can only drive an automatic.’

‘Bill can’t possibly drive you,’ said Rosemary. ‘It’s much too hot. His heart won’t stand it. We don’t have air-conditioned cars over here, which is just as well for the ozone layer. And I daresay you think you could afford a driver but where would you find one at such short notice?’

Such silly practicalities! But still they stood in her way. It was Fate. Better, Jessica thought, to stick by her original decision. So public and powerful an insult from husband to wife could not be excused, and that was that. All her friends would agree. The waiter poured more coffee. ‘Good to see the little fellow enjoying himself,’ he remarked. Everyone nodded politely.

Harry came in from the garden.

‘If I died,’ he said, ‘you’d forget me at once.’

‘We wouldn’t, we wouldn’t,’ exclaimed Jessica. ‘We all love you so much!’

And even Bill and Rosemary, though talk of such emotion came with difficulty to their lips, assured their grandchild of undying and unflinching love.

‘No,’ said Harry, refusing their comfort. ‘I’m right about this. I’m just not important to you. In a couple of hours you’d forget all about me. In fact if I were out of your sight for just ten minutes you wouldn’t remember who I was.’

And he bowed his head beneath the shower of protests and went back into the garden, to his ball. Thud, thud, thud.

Jessica stood up and said, ‘Dad, give me the keys. I’m going to meet Aaron. I’m going to bring him back here, you’re going to be nice to him; then we fly back to Hollywood. I’m not leaving Aaron, I’m not divorcing him, I love him. And I have to think of Harry. Every good boy deserves a father; we’ve made him so dreadfully insecure. I hadn’t realised.’

Bill handed over the keys.

‘We all have to think of the children,’ he said.

‘We abide by your decision,’ said his wife. ‘For Harry’s sake.’

‘Tell Harry I’ll be back with his father,’ said Jessica. ‘Tell him to stop worrying.’

Bill and Rosemary watched as the car lurched and shuddered on the gravel drive while Jessica got the hang of the gears. Then it shot off into the heat haze, grating and grinding, out of the shade of the willows into the sun. The waiter hovered. Harry stopped throwing and came to stand beside them, watching.

‘Where’s Mom gone?’

‘Mummy,’ corrected Rosemary. ‘She’s gone to meet your father.’

‘Um,’ said Harry, approving but not especially so. Then he said, ‘Knock-knock.’

‘Who’s there?’ asked Rosemary.

‘Told you so!’ said Harry. ‘Forgotten me already! Ten minutes and see, you’d forgotten all about me. Gotcha!’

And Harry laughed uproariously, cracking up, bending over a gold and damask chair to contain his stomach and his mirth, making far more noise than they’d ever heard him make before. And the waiter was bent over laughing too, holding his middle.

‘I told him that one,’ said the waiter. ‘Poor little feller. He needed a laugh! We all do, this time of year.’

When Harry had finished laughing he went serenely back into the garden, for more throwing, thudding, catching. The heat seemed to affect him not one whit.

1993

They’re turning the City into Disneyland. They’re restoring the ancient facades and painting them apple green, firming up the medieval gables and picking out the gargoyles in yellow. They’re gold-leafing the church spires. They’ve boarded up the more stinking alleys until they get round to them and as State property becomes private the shops which were always there are suddenly gone, as if simply painted out. In the eaves above Benetton and The Body Shop cherubs wreathe pale cleaned-stone limbs, and even the great red McDonald’s ‘M’ has been especially muted to rosy pink for this its Central European edition. Don’t think crass commerce rules the day as the former communist world opens its arms wide to the seduction of market forces: the good taste of the new capitalist world leaps yowling into the embrace as well, a fresh-faced baby monster, with its yearning to prettify and make the serious quaint, to turn the rat into Mickey Mouse and the wolf into Goofy.

Milena and I walked through knots of tourists towards the famous Processional Bridge, circa 1395. I had always admired its sooty stamina, its dismal persistence, through the turbulence of rising and falling empire. It was my habit to stay with Milena when I came to the City. I’d let Head Office book me into an hotel, to save official embarrassment, then spend my nights with her and some part of my days if courtesy so required. I was fond of her but did not love her, or only in the throes of the sexual excitement she was so good at summoning out of me. She made excellent coffee. If I sound disagreeable and calculating it is because I am attempting to speak the truth about the events on the Processional Bridge that day, and the truth of motive seldom warms the listener’s heart. I am generally accepted as a pleasant and kindly enough person. My family loves me, even my wife Joanna, though she and I live apart and are no longer sexually connected. She doesn’t have to love me.

Milena is an archivist at the City Film Institute. I work for a US film company, from their London office. I suppose, if you add it up, I have spent some three months in the City, on and off, over the last five years, before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Great Retreat of Communism, a tide sweeping back over shallow sand into an obscure distance. Some three months in all spent with Milena.

Her English was not as good as she thought. Conversation could be difficult. Today she was not dressed warmly enough. It was June but the wind was cold. Perhaps she thought her coat was too shabby to stand the inspection of the bright early summer sun. I was accustomed to seeing her either naked or dressed in black, as was her usual custom, a colour, or lack of it, which suited the gaunt drama of her face, but today, like her City, she wore pastel colours. I wished it were not so.

Beat your head not into the Berlin Wall, but into cotton wool, machine-pleated in interesting baby shades, plastic-wrapped. Suffocation takes many forms.

‘You should have brought your coat,’ I said.

‘It’s so old,’ she said. ‘I am ashamed of it.’

‘I like it,’ I said.

‘It’s old,’ she repeated, dismissively. ‘I would rather freeze.’ For Milena the past was all dreary, the future all dread and expectation. A brave face must be put on everything. She smiled up at me. I am six foot three inches and bulky: she was all of five and a half foot, and skinny with it. The jumper was too tight: I could see her ribs through the stretched fabric, and the nipples too. In the old days she would never have allowed that to happen. She would have let her availability be known in other, more subtle ways. Her teeth were bad: one in the front broken, a couple grey. When she wore black their eccentricity seemed a matter of course; a delight even. Now she wore green they were yellowy, and seemed a perverse tribute to years of neglect, poverty and bad diet. Eastern teeth, not Western. I wished she would not smile, and trust me so.

The Castle still looks down over the City, and the extension to that turreted tourist delight, the long low stone building with its rows of identical windows, tier upon tier of them, blank and anonymous, to demonstrate the way brute force gives way to the subtler but yet more stifling energies of bureaucracy. You can’t do this, you can’t live like that, not because I have a sword to run you through, but because Our Masters frown on it. And your papers have not risen to the top of the pile.

* * *

Up there in the Castle that day a newly-elected government were trying to piece together from the flesh of this nation, the bones of that, a new living, changing organism, a new constitution. New, new, new. I wished them every luck with it, but they could not make Milena’s bad teeth good, or stop her smiling at me as if she wanted something. I wondered what it was. She’d used not to smile like this: it was a new trick: it sat badly on her doleful face.

We reached the Processional Bridge, which crosses the river between the Palace and the Cathedral. ‘The oldest bridge in Europe,’ said Milena. We had walked across it many times before. She had made this remark many times before. Look left down the river and you could see where it carved its way through the mountains which form the natural boundaries to this small nation: look right and you looked into mist. On either bank the ancient City crowded in, in its crumbly, pre-Disney form, all eaves, spires and casements, spared from the blasts of war for one reason or another, or perhaps just plain miracle. But Emperors and Popes must have somewhere decent to be crowned, and Dictators too need a background for pomp and circumstance, crave some acknowledgement from history: a name engraved in gold in a Cathedral, a majestic tomb in a gracious square still standing. It can’t be all rubble or what’s the point?

I offered Milena my coat. It seemed to me that she and I were at some crucial point in not just our story, but everyone’s; that the decisions we made here today had some general relevance to the way the world was going. I could at least share some warmth with her. My monthly Western salary would keep her in comfort for a year, but what could I do about that? Not my doing. If she wanted a new coat from me it would have nothing to do with her desire to be warm, but as a token of my love. She didn’t mind shivering. Her discomfort was both a demonstration of martyrdom and a symbol of pride.

‘I am not cold,’ she said.

The City is a favourite location for film companies. The place is cheap; its money valueless in the real world and its appetite for hard currency voracious, which means good deals can be had. The quaint, colourful locations are inexpensively historicised – though the satellite dishes are these days becoming too numerous to dodge easily. And there are few parking problems, highly-trained post-production technicians, efficient labs, excellent cameramen, sensitive sound-men, and so on – and cheap, so cheap. Those who lived in the City had escaped the fate of so much of the hitherto Russian-dominated lands – the sullen refusal of the oppressed and exploited to do anything right, to be anything other than inefficient, sloppy and lazy, in the hope that the colonising power would simply give up and go away, shaking the dust of the conquered land from its feet. And the power it had amassed lay not of course in the strength of the ideology it professed, as the West in its muddled way assumed, but in the strength of arms and organisation of that single, colonising, ambitious nation, Russia. Ask anyone between Budapest and Samarkand, Tbilisi and the Siberian flatlands, and they would tell you who they feared and hated. Russia, the motherland, announcing itself to a gullible world as the Soviet Union. Harsh mother, pretending kindness, using Marxist-Leninism as the religious tool of government and exploitation, as once in the South Americas Spain had used Christianity.

In the City they kept their wits about them; too sophisticated for the numbing rituals of mind-control ever to quite work: the concrete of the workers’ blocks to quite take over from the tubercular gables and back alleys, to stifle the whispers of dissent, to quieten the gossip and mirth of café society. McDonald’s has achieved that now with its bright, forbidding jollity, and who in the brave new world of freedom can afford a cup of coffee anyway, has anything interesting or persuasive to say now that everyone has what they wanted. Better, better by far to travel hopefully than to arrive, to have to face the fact that the journey is not out of blackness into light, but from one murky confusion into another. Happiness and fulfilment lie in our affections for one another, not in the forms that our societies take. If only I was in love with Milena, this walk across the bridge would be a delight. I would feel the air bright with the happiness of the hopeful young.