To Heaven by Water Read online

  ‘Brilliant. And when you were banging on about fucking Roman coins, they were like totally entranced? I don’t think so.’

  At Grimaldi she has applied herself determinedly to the cataloguing of the early Christian Roman coins for the sale, and was complimented by the head of antiquities and classical artefacts, Rachel Owen Jones, who is a ferociously serious person with wild, twisty Celtic hair, that would have ornamented a warrior queen, although she herself is extremely composed, with the sort of fluting voice and over-enunciated vowels which experts seem to acquire. Experts and serious musicians.

  The pigeon is settling itself down, as if it deserves a good rest, plumping up its feathers and cooing happily. Perhaps it wants to show its approval of the conservation-grade muesli. Outside a few unregulated trees are shedding their leaves. If the garden below were hers, she would regulate the trees. These town gardens need form and structure. You don’t want a cat’s lavatory with self-seeded trees for a garden.

  The coins of Constantine the Great demonstrate his political and religious paths, Rachel says. You can see the exact year he adopted the chi-rho, the shepherd’s-crook version of the cross, as he understood the political importance of instituting Christianity in the empire. He sent his old mum Helena to Jerusalem, and she came back with the True Cross. She was herself what we would now call a Serb or a Croat, and an innkeeper’s daughter, a woman with a past. She ordered the demolition of the Temple of Venus, which stood on the site of the crucifixion, and she ordered the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Modern research shows that the Holy Sepulchre is in fact built on the true site of the crucifixion. Constantine forbade crucifixion and replaced it with leisurely hanging. You can trace lines in history: nothing comes from nothing, says Rachel, but of course she says it in Latin: ex nihilo nihil fit.

  Ed rings.

  ‘Josh is upset. He says you are being unfair.’

  ‘Josh is upset? Oh dear. Why have you been appointed his spokesman? Although, to come to think of it, it’s better than talking to him myself.’

  ‘He says he loves you.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘This is as far as I can go, Luce, without putting my finger down my throat. I’ll tell him you said piss off.’

  ‘Good. Succinct.’

  ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘I’m having an exciting evening at home communing with my pigeon and thinking about Helena, mother of Constantine. I’ve been writing catalogue descriptions of early Christian Roman coins.’

  ‘Different strokes for different folks. Do you want me to bring round some takeaway?’

  ‘Where’s the lovely Rosalie?’

  ‘Why do you always say “the lovely Rosalie” like that? As it happens the lovely Rosalie is giving a dance class – don’t laugh – to Congolese orphans. Or perhaps they are Zambian.’

  ‘Just what they need, tutus in the jungle. Come round. I’ll lay the table.’

  ‘Right. I’ll be about forty minutes and I’ll bring some chicken tikka and strong drink.’

  ‘Great, let’s get smashed.’

  She suddenly feels elated, as if the pigeon and Helena have been holding her back. She tidies up and lays the table and even runs down the road to the underground to catch the flower-seller, a deranged but harmless woman who chain-smokes in a wooden hut. She is restlessly confined in this small cell of gaudy flowers and plastic buckets; Lucy has the sense that she is tethered there, like a dog in a kennel. She buys a mixed bunch, all that’s left, carnations, gerberas and chincherinchees all miscegenating happily; when she gets home again she throws out the carnations and loosens the bunch and sticks it artlessly in a jug, where it looks good: We English with our petty snobberies, which extend even to flowers.

  Ed’s late. But then he’s always late, always distracted by something. Eventually he buzzes from below.

  ‘Hello, it’s me.’

  ‘Hey, it’s the legal hotshot. Come on up.’

  She can hear his progress as he comes up the two flights.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, I had to speak to one of my clients. I couldn’t get him off the phone. His wife has withdrawn all the money from their savings account and gone, and he thinks this may be a bad sign.’

  ‘I’m no expert, but it sounds like it.’

  ‘It does, doesn’t it? Now to important matters. This chicken may need heating.’

  ‘I’ve already fired up the oven.’

  She loves him. He’s come because he wants to talk to her. His eyes are dark. They seem darker than she remembers them. How is this? He has changed out of his office suit and wears jeans and large trainers, but his Jermyn Street shirt, with knotted-silk cufflinks, diminishes the intended effect. As he leans forward to unpack the fragrant chicken tikka, she sees that his hair is thinning a little at the crown. His features, a slightly less defined version of Dad’s, are beginning to bunch under the forces that life is exerting. Soon the kitchen fills with a dense aroma. Domestic aromas are usually missing from this kitchen. Instead it has the aroma of apathy, which is perhaps more a psychological notion than something real. Ed opens a bottle of good wine: good wine is one of his recent lawyerly affectations.

  ‘How’s Rosie?’ she asks.

  ‘She’s getting a little desperate.’

  ‘No signs yet?’

  ‘No, not a thing.’

  ‘I’m sure it will happen. I just know it.’

  ‘Mum used to say that sort of thing, but usually it was just a kind of comforting thing.’

  ‘I’m sure it will. I’m not just saying it.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘No, I mean it.’

  ‘The trouble is the whole thing begins to take over your life. Shagging becomes something totally different.’

  ‘Too much information.’

  ‘Sorry, but I mean that it’s just that Rosie’s becoming preoccupied.’

  ‘Why are children the be-all and end-all?’

  ‘It’s not just about children. We can’t have a normal conversation any more. Everything we say seems to have another meaning. I find myself becoming completely fucking stilted.’

  ‘You’ll get over this. You know what Mum would have said.’

  ‘It all comes out in the wash?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I miss her wit and wisdom.’

  ‘So do I. But it upsets me that Dad seems so, I don’t know, sort of...’

  ‘Detached?’

  ‘Yes, deliberately detached.’

  It seems unfair that she and Ed should still have a strong sense of loss while Dad has little or none. What she and Ed want is in some way to cling on to her, even as her presence fades and is replaced by phrases and incidents remembered for no good reason. And maybe we are worried because it suggests that our lives are just a kind of flare in the dark. She looks closely at Ed, who is noisily propelling the wine round his mouth to make absolutely sure that it is up to standard while sitting sideways on an armchair, his legs hanging over one side.

  ‘What’s bugging you, Ed?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You didn’t come just for my company, brilliant though I am.’

  ‘Nothing. I’m fine.’

  ‘Oh dear. I know you.’

  ‘Rosie’s out and I just thought I would call in.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This business with Rosie and the sperm count and so on is getting me down.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And now my new best mate Robin is beginning to get up my nose, too.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He sort of thinks he’s got me where he wants me because I’ve taken the shilling. He’s in love with Rosie. He’s asked her to help decorate his bachelor flat, which he calls a pad. And he’s interfering with my assistant.’

  ‘The perky one with the short skirts?’

  ‘What are you saying?’

&n
bsp; ‘Moi? Nothing. I’m like just asking.’

  ‘You more or less accused me of banging her.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Oh Jesus. Of course I’m not.’

  ‘You are, you devil. You are. Admit it: you’ll feel better.’

  ‘Please, Lucy. What happened was, OK, we had a one-night stand. It was a mistake, nothing; I was a little overexcited by being made a partner. You had one.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You told me you had a one-nighter.’

  ‘Ed, there’s a big difference. I’m not married. Does this bimbo say she loves you?’

  ‘She doesn’t even like me, I don’t think.’

  ‘Ah, now I see.’

  ‘What do you see?’

  He pours himself another glass.

  ‘I see why you came round. You want me to give you a Mum-style blessing for your folly.’

  ‘I know you won’t tell anybody, but do you swear?’

  ‘Of course. Who am I going to tell? Rosalie, Dad?’

  ‘And I haven’t come for your blessing, by the way.’

  ‘It’s called transference. You’re trying to replace Mum with me.’

  ‘Bollocks. Don’t overestimate my affection for you. I’m seriously thinking of looking for another job.’

  ‘Already? Oh shit, the chicken’s burning.’

  She gets it out of the oven and spoons it on to plates. It’s only lightly charred. Ed drinks a little too deeply.

  ‘Ed, maybe you should give it another few months, seeing Robin is Dad’s pal.’

  ‘I won’t do anything silly. I’ll just put out feelers.’

  She sinks on to the stained carpet and sits holding his leg against her cheek. Like Mum, she thinks, I am in thrall to some very unfashionable instincts, for instance, unthinking love, even hero worship, for my older brother.

  ‘Ed, do you think Josh is a wanker?’

  ‘I don’t have any empirical evidence of his personal habits, but as a metaphor, wanker may be a little too kind. Forget him.’

  ‘Oh good, all settled then. The adulterous brother and his spinster sister.’

  ‘They’re lining up for you, pumpkin. You are almost certainly one of the most attractive young women in early Christian coinage, I’m sure.’

  ‘You’re such a shit. You unburden yourself on me, and then you let me have it.’

  ‘You know that’s not true. I trust you and – listen, because I may never say it again – I love you not just as a little sister but as a truly lovely human soul.’

  ‘Oh – my – God, is this what marital infidelity has done to your brain?’

  ‘I told you to listen, now it’s too late. You’re annoying me.’

  She sees that he is deeply shaken by his one-night stand – usually a few more than one in her experience – and he needs to demonstrate to somebody that he has a capacity for loyalty, that he is really a decent person. Perhaps, as much as anything, he needs to hear himself say it. She looks up at him. It’s a strangely unfamiliar view, like looking from ground level at the enormous statue of Constantine on the Capitoline, from where the great emperor’s nostrils are cavernous. Constantine had once lived in York but she found this difficult to believe when she first read about him: York sounded too damp to have been part of the Roman Empire.

  ‘You’ve got hairs in your nose.’

  ‘Everyone has. Now you really are turning into Mum.’

  ‘Oscar Wilde?’

  ‘Is that the one about every woman’s tragedy ... et cetera?’

  He defers to her in matters of culture.

  ‘Yep. That’s the one, The Importance of Being Earnest.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘I hate Oscar Wilde.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s just that he is not half as funny as people think he is. It’s all camp bitchery.’

  ‘Are you homophobic?’

  ‘Of course I’m not homophobic. I like individual gays or dislike them in exactly the same way I like or dislike individual straight people. And by the way, you are not homophobic just because you don’t warm to the idea of putting your cock up another man’s bum.’

  ‘I don’t think they do that any more.’

  Their conversation goes on in erratic leaps as they eat. She thinks that a transcript would make very little sense, but what a transcript could not reveal is the human texture, which they both crave. She knows that her hotshot brother, in his very clean trainers, has come for just this, the meaningless provocations, the loaded exchanges, the sense that they are of one flesh with a shared understanding.

  When he leaves, rising quickly in response to Rosalie’s phone call, Lucy feels that she has been revived. She thinks of those desert ticks that lie in the dust and can be dormant for years, disguised as pebbles, until a mammal breathes on them. Ed’s revived her. But she feels a little unease. Naturally she’s on his side, with blind loyalty, but she can’t help fearing what will happen to him and to Rosalie. The lovely Rosalie. When her mother died, she realised with surprise that the world is not at all stable. She remembers a line – the strange disappointment which overcasts every human youth – which is sobering: the bloom of youth fades too soon. She found it in a package of spiritual-transcendental nonsense from her father’s brother Guy, sent from the back of beyond, part of a campaign to woo Dad away from excessive worldliness. Or success.

  10

  David is running on the Life Force treadmill.

  He remembers that, before she turned to Pilates, Nancy used to say that her mantras helped her to think calmly. In Sanskrit, she said, ‘mantra’ simply meant an aid to thinking, what the newspapers these days call a brain workout. David finds running an aid to thinking, although the value of his thoughts is unclear. After her affair, he found himself unable to see Nancy clearly. Now he feels he can inhabit her mind, as if he’s moved into a vacated house. She was desperately lonely while he was travelling to the Congo and Israel and Washington; she was young and needed some respite from the children. A former boyfriend provided it. When the Dutch au pair, Marjamiek, told him on her last day before going back to Aalsmeer that Nancy had been seeing a friend of theirs, he deliberately cauterised his feelings for the sake of the children. It took a determined effort of the will never to bring the subject up, never to confront Nancy. He couldn’t anyway take the high ground, although by comparison his occasional encounters in different countries with an assistant producer from NBC were casual misdemeanours, and when she said she wanted him to come and live in the US, he told her he wouldn’t ever see her again. Although he and Nancy were friendly and even affectionate, the only way he could maintain his silence was to avoid exposing his soul to her, the person he had loved. He sometimes thought he should have had it out with her, but he remembered too vividly his own parents’ desperate, choked rows, caused – he understood much later – by his father’s adultery, rows which had blighted his childhood, and he felt that he could not inflict that on his innocent children in turn. More than anything, he wanted to avoid the sordid banality of the recriminations; he remembered his mother shouting in the middle of the night, ‘If you don’t get rid of your fancy woman, you’ll see the back of me.’ He wasn’t sure what she was saying, but he suspected it meant he would soon be an orphan.

  After a year or more he found that the pain of Nancy’s affair had passed, but the detachment had become a habit of mind. Perhaps typically, he believed his willed blindness had given him some inner strength. He thought of Burton, who believed in the possibility of divine qualities on earth. He had a fear of bringing vengefulness or even contempt into his relationship with Nancy. He became a poor lover, but he believed it was because sex and love were too closely allied in his mind.

  The reading group has suggested that he read for ten minutes from his book on Afghanistan under the Taliban – To Afghanistan in a Burkha – and then talk about his career. He hasn’t been to a book club for at least four years and wonders
what Sylvie and her pals want from him. As he runs, he feels a familiar nervousness. In all his years as newsman, every new assignment, every day in the studio started with a little nervousness. Politicians with their conceits and evasions made him pleasantly nervous: he couldn’t wait to drive a hole through their strategies for coping with an interview. In his last five years, they were all coached to say good morning and to appear utterly reasonable in the face of provocation. But he usually knew what message they were trying to deliver and what they were trying to hide. Under Blair they had become aware that staying on message, any message, was the way to get promotion; Dr Johnson talked about the unnumbered suppliants crowding Preferment’s Gate. He doesn’t know what Sylvie and her book group are hiding. Book clubs, he thinks, are cover for the myriad longings and disappointments of female life. Women have a far stronger sense than men of what life might have been.

  He’s running very easily as he passes the 5-km mark. From where the weightlifters are flexing or walking about, yawing as if they have just stepped ashore, he knows that he must look a little ridiculous, perhaps even obsessive, but still he finds satisfaction in his fitness and the lightness of his tread as though he alone may escape life’s gravitational pull. Actually, he doesn’t want to divide his life into phases, for example, the years of promise, the years of success, the years of reflection, the years of decline. As he zips along, like a dragonfly over a river, he sees that the important phases of his life correspond not to his age or his success, but to a personal barometer of his moral worth. How pious that would sound if he ever articulated it! He smiles as he runs: in the privacy of your own consciousness you can say and think whatever you want to. When he left Rome, Jenni attached to him with the sensuous, slightly sinister insistence of a python, he was in a froth of youthful hubris. He, like his new friend Richard Burton, could avoid many of life’s constraints. The little people, the small-minded, the unambitious, made the coils that held them back.