Just then I heard footsteps so I took my hand out of my jumper and tried to look like everyone else. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that it was the man who’d spoken to me on the steps. This time he just stood behind me trying to see around me until I turned and was rather unkind to him. His only response was to ask me if I’d be finished in fifteen minutes or so. Americans! There was nothing for me to do but walk away although I was sure that he had designs on my bat. I hadn’t had my full fix and I was frustrated and deeply resentful at the intrusion.
I went round the corner towards the lift but then on impulse I moved back to where I could see him. He had his camera out and was taking pictures of the bowl with my bat. The day had started badly and now I seemed to be in danger of losing it altogether. Taking what was left of it back home was like carrying water in my hands.
What was my bat to that man? What did he want with it, why did he need it? Why couldn’t he find something else to get interested in? That sort of thing happens to me too often at auctions: when I want something it attracts other dealers who jump in and even if it’s a lot they don’t fancy they’ll bid it up out of sheer perversity and then drop out so I’m stuck with paying more than I’d planned to.
Between Earls Court and West Brompton the train stopped as if reality had run out of film and for a while there was silence except for a City type who said into his mobile, ‘I’m stuck here between Earls Court and West Brompton.’ When the train started he made another call and said, ‘Now we’re moving again.’
Think about something else, I said to myself. I thought about what I’d pack for Chelsea, reviewing costume jewellery, handbags, dresses, china, and various oddments. Should I loosen up and take the minaudière? I wondered. The hammer price at Christie’s last year was two-forty and I’d been saving it as an investment but I needed to create some excitement at my stall so it mightn’t be a bad idea to bring it out into the world. While imagining how it would look on the stall I found myself at home without having noticed how I got there. ‘Collectors’ Lot, I’m home,’ I said, and switched on Channel 4 in time to catch a man whose obsession was the history of dentures. ‘Amazing,’ said Debbie Thrower, flashing her own original dentition as he showed her a pair of Chinese choppers exquisitely carved in ivory. That reminded me that I had an appointment coming up in a fortnight with Mr Sharif for two implants in my lower jaw, so I switched off the denture man and went down to the kitchen to sort through my treasures.
‘Yes!’ I said, as my own space settled cosily around me. I took off my boots, got a started bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon blanc out of the fridge and poured myself a glass. ‘There!’ I said. ‘That’s better, isn’t it? At least if he gets my bat tattooed on his arm I need never know about it.’
I took the minaudière out of its case and set it on the table. Lot 24, it had been:
An Art Deco minaudière, of hinged cylindrical form, the exterior with black enamel and marcasite decoration, the interior with compact, mirror and aide-mémoire, and with inscription ‘BUDAPEST 1934’, with cord suspension, and tassel concealing a lipstick, in a fitted case.
Inside the case BARUCH, BUDAPEST was printed on the velvet in gold capitals. How had it arrived in London? Could it have belonged to a Jewish woman who left Hungary some time after 1934? Was she tall and elegant? Short and stout? Was her husband in business? This wasn’t something a poor woman would have carried, she’d have had to have the clothes to go with it. Where were her frocks now? For that matter, where was she? I took the minaudière in my hands and closed my eyes as I’d seen clairvoyants do in films. It felt like another time, another life, but nothing came to me.
Nonetheless, I am in my small way a medium — I traffic in ghosts and the possessions, as often as not, of the dead. Almost all of the things I buy and sell were once in someone else’s hands: necklaces from long-gone bosoms, rings from fingers long since departed in one way or another. And the punters, untroubled by ghosts, haggle. If I say, ‘Fifteen pounds,’ they look shrewd and say, ‘Ten?’ So I let it go for twelve; it cost me five.
Why had that man looked so failed? He wasn’t memorable in any way except that.
Have you known anyone else with that look, Mrs Varley?
Objection!
Objection overruled. Witness will answer the question.
Well, yes, come to think of it, I have.
Would you name that person, please.
Giles Varley.
Any relation?
My husband. Late husband.
Thank you. Nothing further.
Giles had blue eyes, a face you could trust, a winning smile, and he worked hard. Bank managers pressed loans upon him and extended his overdrafts as he moved from one failure to another. I did my best to be a supportive wife; I propped him up as well as I could but it was like trying to build a tower out of wet dishcloths, and if I hadn’t been stalling out regularly we’d have gone hungry. In all his ventures he had the necessary capital and skills and knowledge; he had everything except the knack of succeeding. He failed in antique clocks; he failed in stripped pine; he failed in picture-framing; he failed in loft-extensions but when he went into doll’s houses he was quite successful until he found a way out with a bottle of sleeping tablets and half a bottle of Scotch. He left me with a house, a scattering of unpaid bills, and the conviction that if I’d tried harder he might have been a big man in doll’s houses. Giles was a lovely man, really, but if there was one thing I learned from our nine years together it was that you can’t turn a failer into a succeeder and you might as well not bother trying.
I felt doubly bereft when Giles was gone — propping him up had propped me up as well. Some weeks after his death I was in the V & A browsing in Chinese ceramics when I happened on my bat. ‘Off my own bat, that’s how I’ll have to do it now,’ I said to myself, and that’s how I’ve done it ever since, with the tattoo to help me. Being alone is a lonely thing but that’s all there is and in five hundred million years it won’t really matter any more.
3
Roswell Clark
Sometimes when people hear my name for the first time they give me strange looks or nod their heads knowingly and say ‘Mmm hmm’ or even ‘Oh yes’. It was my father who chose that name for me. I didn’t know it was anything out of the ordinary until I was nine, the year he died. I came home from school one day with a black eye and he asked me what happened. We were in our basement where the bulb over the work-bench in its green metal shade picked up the glitters and gleams of tools and a jumble of glass vessels and tubing. He was an inventor, and the place smelled of oil, metal, wood, rubber, Jack Daniel’s (a bottle and glass are beside me as I write this; it has a wood-smoky smell and taste; it seems to me as I drink that the flavour is peculiarly American — long rifles; coonskin caps; ‘D. Boon killed a bar on this tree in the year 1760’) and something sharply chemical. I see him by the light of the green-shaded bulb, his face half in shadow; average height, average build; blue jeans, navy sweatshirt, sneakers. Brown hair, round face, glasses; he always looked surprised. He had a quiet and thoughtful way of speaking when he’d been drinking. ‘What happened?’ he said.
‘George Kubat said you and Mom were aliens.’
‘Who won?’
‘I did. What’s an alien?’
Dad heaved a big sigh. ‘Roswell,’ he said, ‘back in 1947 there was something that happened at Roswell, New Mexico. People said they saw things — flying saucers. Then something crashed near there and they reported finding debris and the bodies of alien beings.’
‘But what are alien beings, Dad?’
‘Beings from outer space, from another planet. The government hushed everything up and said that nothing happened but a lot of people still think something did happen and it’s been covered up.’
‘And that’s why you named me Roswell?’
‘Well, I gave you that name because …’ He seemed to have lost the rest of what he was going to say.
‘Because what, Dad?’
‘What, son?’ He was leaning his folded arms on the work-bench and his eyes were closed. Sometimes he dozed off standing there like that.
‘You were going to tell me why you gave me my name.’
‘Yes. Because … Because you never know.’
‘Never know what?’
‘All kinds of things. Mysteries, life is full of them, whether it’s UFOs or the Bermuda Triangle or whatever. And the government is always saying there’s nothing out there.’ He swept his arm to take in the whole basement workshop and knocked over the Jack Daniel’s which was stoppered and didn’t spill. ‘Saying this is all there is.’
‘You mean …?’
‘I mean this whole thing we call reality that you wake up in every morning and go to sleep in every night. Not just the government, ordinary people too.’
‘Ordinary people what?’ It was hard to follow him sometimes.
‘Only seeing what’s in front of them or behind them. Just because the past is what it was doesn’t mean the future can’t be something else.’
I waited for him to go on but he didn’t. I said, ‘Is that why you named me Roswell?’
He went quiet and I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he looked at me as if we were resuming a completely different conversation. ‘It won’t always be like this,’ he said. He tapped a flask with some blue liquid in it and smiled at me. ‘“From this moment on,”’ he sang quietly, ‘“no more blue songs, only whoop-dee-doo songs, from this moment on …”’ Then he did fall asleep standing at his work-bench.
He was not a big success as an inventor; he often started out with something that led to something else that went nowhere. There was a self-winding hourglass. Why? I don’t know but I remember what it looked like: the hourglass was supported by an arm that held the waist of it. When the sand ran into the bottom part the weight of it released a spring that flipped the hourglass over and wound itself up to do it again. After a while it ran down because of what Dad called ‘the energy deficit’. ‘If I could just lick that,’ he said, ‘I’d have perpetual motion.’
Mom came down to the basement looking for something just then. ‘Perpetual bullshit,’ she said.
My father owned the house but we never had much and I don’t know what we’d have done if my mother hadn’t always worked, mostly as a waitress. I had a newspaper route until I was old enough to work in the supermarket after school and on Saturdays. This was back in the sixties and Mom was a handsome woman then, fair-haired and taller than Dad, with blue eyes that seemed used to miles and miles of distance. Her maiden name had been Lindstrom and she looked like one of those pioneers who’d settled the Midwest, trailing a rope behind their covered wagons to help them steer a straight course through the tall grass of the prairies. Men liked to be waited on by her and tipped her well.
As soon as she got home from work she’d take her shoes off and put on a pair of fleece-lined slippers. Sometimes if she wasn’t too tired she’d read to me, more often than not from her Bible which was bound in black leather with HOLY BIBLE stamped in gold on the cover and spine. It had what I thought of as a Presbyterian smell; if I closed my eyes I saw men in black with large hard hands and stiff collars. There was a blue ribbon bookmark and the type was good and black, the columns of text very strong, like verbal pillars to support the roof of faith. Sometimes the numbers of the verses seemed like eyes that watched me. I still have that Bible. On the flyleaf is written, in a firm and faithful hand:
Presented to our daughter Rachael
on her seventh birthday, March 21st, 1930
by Christian and Ursula Lindstrom
Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain:
but a woman that feareth the Lord,
she shall be praised.
Proverbs, 31.30
Mom skipped around between the Old and New Testaments when she read to me; she’d use a verse as a point of departure for a one- or two-minute sermon. I recall Matthew 5.13 — she was very intense when she did that one:
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?
She always paused there. ‘You hear that, Sonny? Remember that, and don’t you lose your savour.’
‘What’s my savour, Mom?’
‘Just remember the words — you’ll understand them when you’re older.’
Now and then for a special treat she’d read to me from Grimm’s Fairy Tales; her favourites were ‘The Goose-Girl’ and ‘Clever Elsie’, both women who were hard done by. She read those not in her Bible voice but in a younger and more intimate way. When she did the part where Clever Elsie got turned away from her own house it gave me goose pimples.
Dad read to me sometimes too; he liked Andersen: his favourite was ‘The Tinder-Box’ in which the soldier ended up rich and married the princess. I could never understand how that soldier was able to lift the dog with eyes as big as the Round Tower in Copenhagen — that dog would have had to be at least as big as a house. ‘I’ve given that a lot of thought,’ said Dad. ‘The soldier was down inside the hollow tree when he saw that dog, and because it was a magic place everything around the dog got bigger, the inside of the tree and the soldier too; that’s how come he could lift it — he sort of grew into the job.’ Dad’s name was Daniel. If anyone asked him, ‘As in the lion’s den?’ he answered, ‘No, as in Jack.’
But I was talking about Mom. She hummed or sang when she was cooking and doing housework. Some were hymns and some were standards and there was one, a tune that she made up for Psalm 137 that she used to sing almost under her breath; sometimes she just hummed it: ‘“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion …”’ I don’t recall that she ever got all the way through it. We were not a religious family but Mom sometimes turned to the Bible in the same way that Dad turned to Jack Daniel’s.
‘What’s Zion?’ I asked her. Dad was down in his workshop and we were alone.
She was ironing at the time, and she paused and blew out a little breath. ‘Sonny,’ she said — she always called me that when she was about to impart maternal wisdom. ‘Sonny, Zion is where it was a whole lot better than it is now and you never get back there.’
‘What are we supposed to do then?’ I asked her.
She tilted her head to one side and looked at me across a few thousand miles of prairie. ‘“The ants are a people not strong,’” she said, ‘“yet they prepare their meat in the summer.” Proverbs, that is; I forget the chapter and verse.’
‘What does that mean, Mom?’
‘It means that winter is always coming, and don’t you forget it,’ and she went back to the ironing.
Dad patented several things: in his notebook there were sketches and notes for a new kind of safety razor, magnetic buttonholes, and a self-cleaning comb. Mom told me that the razor had actually been made and sold but hadn’t brought in much and was quickly superseded by a better one. Dad never got to develop all the ideas in the notebook. One rainy night in November after I was in bed but still awake I heard him go out and start the car. When everything was all right Dad was careless about the noise he made shutting the front door, but this time he left the house without a sound so I knew that he and Mom must have had an argument. Later I woke up when the police came to the door. They told Mom that Dad was dead: he’d wrapped his car around a tree while driving under the influence. He was forty-two years old.
Next morning I took his notebook off the work-bench, and when Mom asked me if I’d seen it I said no. I could read most of the words but I couldn’t understand very much and there were numbers and symbols I couldn’t make head or tail of. I hid the notebook in a cigar box in my sock drawer for when I got older.
Right after Dad’s death my mother was on the phone a lot. A big man in a dark-blue suit came to the house, his aftershave was like a kick in the head; his eyes looked as if they’d been shot in with a rivet gun; you could tell from his smile that he enjoyed his work. He looked around at the furniture and the car
pet and the wallpaper. He had a briefcase and he took some papers out of it, then Mom sent me out of the room while she talked to him. I listened at the door but they were too quiet for me to hear anything; I looked through the keyhole and saw Mom signing the papers.
After he left she just stood there looking out of the window. I asked her if that man was going to take away the furniture and she said no. Then I asked if he was the undertaker and she said no, there wasn’t going to be a funeral. She told me that some people left their brains to science and Dad was doing that with his whole body. ‘His brain too?’ I said. I was thinking of all the ideas he had in his head, like perpetual motion; I was thinking of the words he hadn’t said.
‘Well, yes,’ she answered, ‘they’re taking all of him.’
‘What are they going to do with him?’ I wanted to know. I wondered what kind of experiments they had in mind. I could see him high up on a platform in a thunderstorm where lightning would strike him.
‘They’ll do whatever scientists do,’ she said, ‘and he’s bringing home more money this way than he did when he was alive, so be proud of your father. He finally achieved perpetual motion.’
‘Is he in Heaven now?’
‘I don’t know where he is but it’s just you and me from now on. He’ll be missed at the liquor store but they’ll have to stagger on without him.’
‘I’ll miss him too, won’t you?’
‘Oh yes, but, like they say, there is a Balm in Gilead.’
‘Where’s Gilead?’
‘I’ll let you know when I find it.’
The first I heard of what was really happening was that afternoon. I was out on our front walk killing ants with a hammer and Herbie Johnson came by. ‘Are they going to let you watch when they crash-test your dad?’ he asked me.