“Like who?”
“Och,” he laughed. “Any girl.”
“Angus …” Roisin was doing her nails, red. “Do you ever wonder why I should want you to win? Especially if you are appointed Secretary of State; what do I get out of it? You and the wife, up on the podium, grinning for the cameras, flapping Union Jacks. I can’t even wave from the crowd, sure I can’t. I catch it on the news.”
“You’re to light out for Piper Heidsieck and leave the door unlatched the next afternoon. Private parties, pet, are the best crack.”
“Does it ever strike you that I could ruin you?”
“In a word? No.”
“Meaning I couldn’t or wouldn’t?”
“Meaning what good would that do anyone?”
“Angus,” Roisin abjured, “you said so yourself: since when do people only do good?”
Lately Farrell could not watch the news sitting down. He would perch on the edge of the bed and then pace, glaring at Channel 4 and rattling his soda water, anxious for eight o’clock. Ordinarily this time of evening, Farrell would shave and unwrap a fresh shirt, break the baby-blue paper band; swish the tie around his neck, chin high. Nestling into the shoulders of his jacket, he would assess the effect. Everyone assumed he was so thin because he ran himself ragged; in fact, he dieted to a scrupulous 155. He would send a pair of trousers back three times to get them tailored right. Farrell was vain. And a former eyesore primps with a special gratitude. Every night, now forty-four, Farrell checked his face for spots.
Tonight, however, through some miracle or mistake, he’d no dinner date, and he missed dressing up. Even the news was more interesting when he was ignoring someone because of it. These broadcasts were particularly thorny as well, because every other bloody interview was with Angus MacBride.
Farrell should have been delighted. Plugging the referendum, wasn’t he? And hadn’t Angus weaseled himself onto every story from the IRA postal assassination to the privatization of Shorts. But if he was pushing the Border Poll, why did he keep sneaking in his own stats? You’d think the lad was up for reelection himself, the incessant mentions of the European What-have-you, the New Ireland This, the Washington Democratic That, the Royal British Something-or-other Award, law school, Cambridge—
Cambridge. About an hour ago, that was the thorn, and it was still in his side, about the size of an ice pick. More truthfully, it had wedged there twenty-seven years ago; why, it was a miracle Farrell could walk.
Why did you not go to Cambridge? Not for the education, for the sound of the word! And was that sound worth all the testing, the expense? Unquestionably! And fine if you were turned down or couldn’t afford it, but you didn’t even apply.
MacBride never let you forget it, either. You gave yourself away there: how much have you played the loner just because a bit of company might show you up? You didn’t even write away for an application. MacBride never hesitated, with that putrefying, clear-eyed assurance of his, of course the only question was Cambridge or Oxford. And after losing and losing to him, at chess, at sports, at girls, you folded like a ten-high hand. MacBride may think he’s better, and though you are better, you’re not sure and so you’re worse.
Hasn’t it been the pattern of your whole life, to make a bollocks of it so you have something to overcome? Wasn’t that what Talisker was all about, a ploy by which getting up at eight, putting on clean BVDs, and ordering coffee instead of a short—from your peers proceeding with any dowdy Monday morning—was transformed into an achievement for which your mother would kiss your cheek? But you can’t ever play it straight. That’s why MacBride started hammering you at chess, isn’t it, because your gambits were too clever, too squiggly, too oblique? But he’s caught on to you, as he’s been on to you ever since, as he surely is now—and if so, what is he planning— How he frightens you. How hard that is to admit.
Because it intimidates you how much people like him. You can only cut a phrase with a knife. In company you are sharp but wounding. Fair enough, plenty want you, like the women, since like children they see something they can’t have. And in your distance, you blur; they see what they wish. Angus is up close, no tricks, and still charming as hell. Angus imagines he’s an ordinary fellow, while you find him a marvel.
Playing yourself at chess, didn’t that tell all? Ingenious! How could you help but win? Isn’t that why you originally pressed for an independent solution for Ulster, economically goofy as it proved, because you liked the idea of your own tiny country where you seem important, and didn’t MacBride have to grab you by the short and curlies with graphs and studies to give it up? An independent solution, that would be your favorite. Why, the only opponents you’ve ever taken on board were bombs: objects! That was the secret to Porter’s self-destruction: when you only fight yourself, the contest is rigged.
Aye, your schoolmates assumed Angus went to university across the water because the Prod had more money. An inconvenience, MacBride’s family was no better heeled than yours. No, the only reason you didn’t apply to Cambridge was you were afraid you wouldn’t get in. So this ate and ate at you, every summer Angus returning with his pip-pip, here-heres, until senior year you did something furtive, bizarre, and maybe even degrading.
You wrote Admissions. You claimed to have taken the years after grammar school in the civil service. You had passed your A, O, and S levels, and you would now like to apply. You filled out the forms and told no one. You were invited to sit the special qualifying exams for Cambridge and Oxford. You told your mother you had research for papers in English libraries, and boarded the ferry for Liverpool for the first time in your life. England was not so terrifying; you were mostly afraid of running into MacBride. They treated you nicely. They gave you a dormitory swanker than your room at home. You spoke to no one, though others—English!—were friendly. The food looked all right, but you couldn’t eat. And after all this, the test was just a test. You’ve always loved tests, the way the path is laid out for you: B, not C. If only the rest of your life were an exam. In the Catholic Church, you pass whether or not you’ve earned it; you pass shamefully. In your own home, you have never passed, but the test is fixed. Here the questions were clean and straight, in fact, so easy you were dejected, sure you had done badly because you had obviously missed what made it so difficult. You packed your spare shirt unused, for the one you were wearing hadn’t even gotten sweaty.
When the envelope came you trembled, but the surprise wasn’t the news it bore but your own reaction: you were not relieved or exultant, but destroyed. The letter only proved what Angus had maintained from the start. Had he ever claimed you weren’t good enough? No, Angus knew you could get into Cambridge, and that’s why he mocked you. You tucked the envelope in your OED, in the drawer for the magnifying glass along with one crusty condom. The Durex was weeks too late, but this gracious letter was four years too late, and pathetic.
That was a week of test results. Germaine, you were so obliging. For on the arrival of that letter my sails went slack. How could I finish a paper for this Bally-Boondocks college when I could have stretched the lawn between those tawny spires? I know it’s English, pretentious, a sell, but that was the most beautiful town I ever saw. You may have been my first girlfriend, but that April I fell in love with a life that I stole from myself. Meanwhile Cambridge was wasted on prats. Those students did not love libraries as I loved libraries—low light, whispers on musty air, maroon, manila, and marble, tiptoes on spiral stairs. But I did not love Queen’s University. Surely a degree in philosophy from Queen’s qualified me for nothing but despair.
So, never in England my whole life, I go twice in a spring. You were so overwhelmed I would go with you instead of sit my exams, but you did me the favor. How I clutched at your misfortune, how happily I jumped my sinking ship into that lifeboat of a ferry. What an Irish story we made, having to go get an abortion with my girlfriend and so destroy a fine career—in what, mind you? And do you think I didn’t know that if we’d waited two weeks for
the term to finish we’d still have had time to clean you up? You were my excuse, turtledove, and I have used women as my excuse ever since, for less and less honorable journeys. They have picked me up and saved me, fed me, dropped me when I arranged that, and most of all explained me; why, without women and Angus MacBride, I’d disappear.
That’s right, MacBride, for that’s what the competition was all about: context. It would be lovely, for once, to win. But Farrell preferred inferiority to Angus MacBride over no relation to anyone.
The papers were deceptively quiet. There were rumors of the conference, of course, of “talks,” but after a whole winter of Molyneaux’s “talks about talks about talks,” most readers skipped to acrostics. Fluctuating support for the referendum copped the front page with every quiver of a percentage point, but after sixteen years without a government, the better part of the Province denied the possibility of change with a kind of ferocity. Meanwhile, the Provos, having raised a ruckus of car bombs and assassinations in August and September, had cooled back out, well aware that when you kept up a “resurgence of violence” for any length of time it was no longer a resurgence but simply the status quo; you got trapped into spending all that Semtex and personnel just to maintain the impression that nothing was happening. It was more cost effective to lie low, so when you did blow up a bakery, customers actually looked up from their treacle cakes instead of blowing off the dust to count their change.
Farrell saw Estrin when he could. He did not know quite why, except she was texturally important to his life; she was a smooth place. He had a vague feeling of preferring evenings he saw the American to certain other evenings. And though he could tell any stranger that Estrin was planning to leave Belfast within the next few months, he had never once told himself.
As an exercise this evening, once again he paid attention. She wanted him to ask her to remain here. Then she would leave. He was amused by her tactics—she’d long ago dropped tugging his sleeve outright; why, she even resorted to Northern Ireland.
She was affecting a desperate good humor. She laughed too much, after nearly every sentence; her voice was high and a little nasal, her gestures manic. She was actually wearing a touch of makeup, unlike her. Maybe that was it—her face seemed fuller and flushed. She devoured their entire plate of bread.
“I accommodate myself too fast,” she was saying—damn, Farrell had already missed the first part; this was going to take work. “I’m one of those people who would wash up on the shores of a desert island and have a hut, a set of fishing lines, and a regular afternoon swim by the third day. I can travel because I’ll relinquish one reality for another without much of a fight. One reason I understand this place. Someday you should get me to explain my theory of overadaptation.”
“Go.”
“Just, Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge, South Africa—the problem is overadaptability, Darwinism gone awry. Like finding yourself in a dream and not trying very hard to wake up. In wildly short order an entire society can make do. Like, oh, I see, last week you earned a loaf of bread by marketing cold cream, this week by throwing bodies in pits. Here, the North has adapted, beautifully: your business is blown up, you get restitution from the NIO, all in a day’s work. They hack up stray Catholics, you strafe their bars—both executions of cultural norms. That’s the way it works now; this is the dream.”
Farrell translated: If Estrin left Ireland tomorrow, he could turn her off like the Six o’Clock News. That was overadaptation.
“It comes down to conventions of scale,” she maundered. “Last fall a few blocks from me one kid shoved a younger kid on his stoop. Instead of shoving back or tattling to his mother, the younger shot the bully in the head. My neighbors’ ideas of everyday fairness have been altered. In Belfast, murder is within the realm of ordinary revenge.”
It occurred to Farrell that the main thing Estrin did was talk. He was hard-pressed, then, to explain the little excellence off her, a sheen—pewter. In Belfast terms, your woman was sound. Still, it pained him to see how hard she tried to please him, talking politics when Farrell would much rather discuss Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And despite her animation, when Estrin rose for the bog he watched her face go limp. Tired? So you’re tired, Swallow, at thirty-two? How many projects have you seen crumble, how many convictions fall away? How many people have you been, how many earlier exhaustions have you plumbed and overcome? Don’t you know this is only one in an endless series of evenings you’re sure you can’t survive?
He worried about her. Travel was going to get harder when her looks had faded and foreigners didn’t fall over themselves letting her flats and offering her the management of pubs. Estrin should have children. Otherwise she was just going to get drier and tighter and take to drink, that was clear. There was something especially depressing about women drinkers—sloppy, without splendor. Drink drove them to corners. Farrell pictured Estrin at forty-five. She was not as strong as she imagined. Shuttling cups of coffee in some Scandinavian diner, or wherever she was when her motor ran out. Black wages, the same blouse five days a week, not that she cared. Still eating practically nothing, dry toast; thinner than ever, but drawn, veins varicose from serving smorbrod all day. The exercise long ago by the wayside. Gin bottles lining the windows the only decoration in the flat she let from a family that was concerned.
Farrell was amused he chose gin. He didn’t like it. Estrin didn’t, either.
When she walked back across the room, he started. She could have passed for sixteen; her hair was washed and for once not pulled back but curling softly over her cheek. She looked inexpressibly lovely, and Farrell laughed at himself: the diner in Sweden with the gin bottles in the flat, that was Estrin’s terror, and it was absurd. Yes, she should have children, but not to save her. You’re an altruist: because the world would be better. Estrin’s family would be sarcastic, with the scowling strong opinions of American kids; smarter than you sometimes wished, why, you couldn’t have talked like that at their age—smart in that way only children can make you feel stupid. One would be obscenely private, the one their mother liked best. None would understand their mother, though they’d make a sport of trying, studying the snapshots of foreign men in attic shoe boxes, squeezing the foam-rubber earplugs from Galilee, now gone a bit hard. Estrin would be unpredictably terse and unpredictably affectionate, and would ruin at least one good son by being so gorgeous, even, yes, at forty-five. For Estrin would grow old beautifully, because she did everything beautifully—the excellence was grace. And eventually she would stay put, in a sprawling jumble sale of a house full of frayed New England quilts, unmatched dishes, Monopoly sets missing Chance cards, and motorcycle parts. Neighboring children would all wish Ms. Lancaster was their mother. In some capacity, she would rise to responsibility, as she did everywhere. Estrin was stronger than she knew. She was a supremely disciplined woman, and if drink was ever getting the better of her, she would give it up. He would run into her someday and be proud.
She ordered dessert. Not fruit salad, either, but white chocolate mousse torte. She fed him bites, but otherwise dispatched the entire slice. Finishing off that much whipped cream in a sitting was the single most wonderful thing he had ever seen her do.
In the ritual walk from 44 to Whitewells, her voice lost its pinch and filled with layer cake. “Irishness, Britishness—I don’t understand it!” She swung his arm. “What you are, having to give it a name. Everything I am, I resist: American, female, thirty-two—it all makes me crazy! I mean, sure I like Ray Charles and strong coffee, but even personality is a crutch. So is culture. I constantly run into other travelers knitting national portraits like little booties. Now, maybe you have to assume some shape, but I see people as closer to gas or vapor than furniture. Besides, if there is such a thing as identity, then it just is and you don’t have to worry it. You are a chair, a cabinet, and you know the nicest thing about furniture is that it doesn’t sit around dithering whether it’s a table or a lamppost when it’s really a bookcase. —I wonder if you h
ave the slightest idea what I’m talking about.” She said all this so fast she was panting.
Farrell said, “No.”
“I want to be bigger! Wherever I fly I want to be someplace else, though I still want to be where I am! Sometimes I’d like to evaporate.” Estrin looked up; the sky was clear. “That’s the way stars make me feel: as if I’m surrounded by everyone before me, shattered to pieces. A lot of people find starscapes depressing; they feel small. I feel huge, envious at worst, I just want to—”
“Die?”
“If that’s what it’s like? In a minute.” She paused. “But first, I want to go to the Soviet Union.”
Farrell laughed. “That’s the only time you’ve referred to your next trip without sounding like Ivan Denisovich. Most nights you’d think they were going to scoop you up from the airport and ship you straight to the salt mines.”
“I know,” she sighed, and gripped his hand harder. “I’ve been a little ill.” She didn’t explain, and shivered.
Farrell hadn’t gotten all that last carry-on but fit snippets into what he knew. Everything Estrin was she also was not. She had long insisted how much they had in common, and though he did not always see it, he did see this: they were both at war. Bits. Travelers gave themselves away by where they felt comfortable, and Estrin took to cities divided: Belfast, Manila, Berlin. Anything she claimed would also be a lie—Estrin had a flip side. She would not be ambitious, but she was; her very lack of ambition was not like other people’s, not placid, but perverse, and fired with a black determination that made it an ambition of its own. Certainly her regular ascent in the ranks across the world was no accident but Estrin working hard and getting herself noticed and promoted because she did well. She wanted to be in control, ate carrots and ran ten miles a stretch, but later that same night could down half a bottle of whiskey to flee her own dictatorship, with considerable success. She was half adventurer and half middle-class Pennsylvanian; brave but still essentially safe, loving edges but never quite living on any of them. She wanted a man/she did not. She did not want children/she should. She would not be a woman/she was one, and how; she wanted to leave/Christ, did she want to stay!