‘Thank you, Amina,’ he says, taking it.
Scrupulously, Ramzi takes the lens off his daughter and films around the whole table, lingering on each child.
‘We’ll have the cake soon,’ says Lisa. ‘They’re getting tired.’
‘She’s done so well,’ said Adam. ‘She’s beautiful.’
Ramzi puffs out his cheeks, lets his breath escape slowly.
‘Now we can say that,’ he says.
The other babies are much bigger than Amina. They crawl, or stand holding a table leg. One of them makes a staggering run from the hands of his mother to the hands of his father.
‘They’re all my friends from the baby group,’ says Lisa. ‘We started off meeting once a week, but it’s more now, isn’t it, Mel?’
‘Most days, really. It keeps us sane,’ says Mel.
‘More or less,’ says the girl who seems to be the mother of the newborn baby as well as another who can’t be more than fourteen months. She hoists her big square boy onto her hip and touches Amina’s cheek gently with a finger.
‘She’s a little princess,’ she says. ‘Any time you get tired of her, Lisa, you send her down to me.’
There are no grandparents here. Nobody over twenty-five, he guesses, except him. On the table there’s a bunch of pink and cream roses. Lisa sees him look at them.
‘Ramzi bought them for me. They’ve got a scent as well.’
‘Everybody gets presents for the baby, but I think the mum deserves something,’ says Ramzi.
‘You hear that, Ross?’ calls Mel.
‘Ramzi, get the camcorder ready, I’m going to get the you-know-what.’
They draw the curtains and switch off all the lights. The babies stare uncomprehendingly. One starts to cry but is quickly silenced with a dummy. And here’s Lisa coming through the kitchen door with the cake held high, its one candle alight. Carefully, she sets it on the table before Amina.
‘Ooh, Lisa, did you make it yourself?’
‘It’s lovely.’
‘Where’d you get the teddy bears?’
‘Tesco’s,’ says Lisa. ‘They sell them in packets.’
And then, hush. Lisa bends by her daughter. ‘It’s your cake, Amina. You’re the birthday girl.’
The baby’s eyes shine dark in the glow of the flame.
‘Happy Birthday…’ begins one voice, and then they are all singing. For the first time, maybe, Adam thinks as he sings, since they were children themselves with their own birthday cakes and candles. And now they are the grown-ups, the parents learning how to give birthdays to their children.
‘dear AmINa…’
‘Now, we’re going to blow out your candle, Amina. Big breath. One, two, three…’
The candle falters, rises again.
‘Go for it, Lisa.’
‘Show your mum how it’s done, Amina.’
The candle blows out. The curtains are drawn back.
‘You cut the cake with her, Ramzi. Ross’ll film it, won’t you, Ross?’
And there they are. Father and daughter look the same way, into the lens. The father holds the knife and guides Amina’s hand.
‘Make a wish, Amina.’
The knife goes down clean into the pink and white icing.
They come to the door to see Adam off.
‘Are you going back to the hospital?’ asks Ramzi. He has Amina in his arms, curled up and drowsing.
‘No. I’m taking some leave. I’m getting a train down to Cornwall tonight.’
‘I hope this weather stays for you,’ says Lisa.
‘They say it will.’
‘You need your holidays.’
‘Thanks for coming, we appreciate it, don’t we, Lisa?’ says Ramzi. Suddenly he has authority, standing there with his baby girl in his arms. He is twenty-two but he is a man.
‘It was a pleasure,’ says Adam, with truth. And before he knows he’s going to do it, he adds some truth of his own.
‘It’s not really a holiday. I’m going down to Cornwall to see my wife.’
It’s just a shade of expression in Lisa’s face but he knows she has been told. Someone in the unit has talked about Rebecca, and Ruby.
‘She’s been away for a while. Things were bad after our little girl died.’
They say nothing. Lisa makes a little sound of sympathy.
‘So we’re going to spend some time together, down there. It’s where my family comes from.’
‘Nice place to come from,’ says Ramzi. ‘I went there once when I was a kid.’
‘I’ve never been,’ says Lisa.
‘When we got back from our holiday, I asked my mum, “Why do we live in Huddersfield when there’s places like Cornwall?” She wasn’t best pleased.’
‘We’ll take Amina one day.’
They glance at each other.
‘I hope it goes well,’ says Lisa to Adam. ‘You know, if it could be the same for you, as it is for us. I mean, look at where we were a year ago.’
‘I’ll come and tell you, on Amina’s next birthday,’ says Adam.
PART TWO
Boomdiara
Have you left the ground in murkiness, all clammy, grey
and soaking, And struggled through the dirty, dripping white?
Have you seen the blank sides closing in and felt that you were choking,
And then leapt into a land of blazing light…
Dearest Rebecca,
I enclose the story so far. Most of the action takes place in 1917 – the prologue a little later.
Olya and I are finished. It’s really over this time. I’ve had enough of messing her about. All right, I’m ready to acknowledge now that messing Olya about is exactly what I was doing. You told me once that I ought to leave Olya if I wasn’t going to give her what she wanted. I was very angry with you then, wasn’t I?
But it wasn’t Olya who stopped me writing about Stalin. I’ve told you some of the reasons already, but there’s one more that I haven’t told you.
He was a young man whose name I don’t know. He was sitting on a wooden trolley, begging. He was a veteran of one of Russia’s many wars. A killer, and an innocent as well. He’d been conscripted because he couldn’t get out of it.
No pull, no clout, no college place, no connections. Just a boy with blue eyes and no education.
He lost his legs, Rebecca, both of them. Imagine it. He can’t get artificial legs, because there isn’t the money. So he sits on his wooden trolley, and the pensioners who have no money themselves give him what they can.
He told me that if Stalin was still alive, it wouldn’t have come to this. They would have won the war. Iosif Vissarionovich wouldn’t have left veterans to rot in the street.
What could I say? I said nothing. It wasn’t my war. I could write about Nadya, and what I’ve written I’ve written. I’m not ashamed of it, but I can’t go any farther. I cannot get to the heart of what that man was.
All I can do is stand here with my head bowed, and ask Olya to forgive me. I’ve used up too many of her years. I’ve taken up love that ought to have led to the life she wanted. She wanted children, she wanted us to have a real life together.
I can’t argue for how you came to be in that shoebox, even though it’s a key event. That bloody shoebox. You’re not still carrying it around with you, are you, Rebecca? I hate the sight of it. It’s not you. It’s not what you are worth. Don’t just leave it behind: bin it, burn it.
I’ve found a woman who might have been your ancestor, and a man who might have been mine. Because that’s what we are, aren’t we, Rebecca? Brother and sister.
And I wanted to write about flight. Do you remember what I told you once, about Mandelstam’s baby aeroplanes? I expect you’ve forgotten. Why does the thought of those aeroplanes move me so deeply? Why do I stare up into the sky when a certain type of aeroplane passes – an old-fashioned plane, flying low? It looks fragile, but at the same time it looks as if it’s really flying, really riding those waves of air.
When I was a child I slept under my father’s coat. It was an RAF greatcoat. It was heavy. It pressed me down and it had a smell which was peculiar to that cloth and which I’ve never smelled anywhere else. I used to think it was the smell of my father, but I think the smell of aeroplanes was mixed up in it, too. And if war has a smell there would have been the smell of war deep in the fibres of the coat. He never talked about the war to my mother, and maybe he wouldn’t have talked about it to me, even if he’d lived.
His own father, my grandfather, flew those baby aeroplanes of the First World War. The men in my family father their children late, and so they don’t stay around to father them for long. For most of my life it’s felt improbable to me that I had a father at all.
I don’t remember him any more than you remember your mother. I’d love to have known him. Sometimes I get a sensation in my head, in my mouth almost, like a taste or a smell. I nearly remember him, but then I don’t. I try not to reach after it too much. The thread that links us is so slender that I’m afraid it’ll snap if I strain it too far. It drives me crazy. Maybe there’s a sensation like that in your head.
All those months inside your mother’s body, those hours when she was yours and no one else’s, and you were hers. The fact that the relationship between you didn’t continue doesn’t invalidate it – that would be like saying that love isn’t real unless it lasts for ever.
Yes, I wanted to write about flight. Flight was such a pure thing when it began. They made machines that followed any crackpot shape they had in their imaginations. Those baby aeroplanes looked like bundles of sticks. But how beautiful it must have been, when the only purpose of flying was flight.
But of course it changed, almost at once. There began to be other purposes for flight, because as soon as a man picks up a stone, he thinks of throwing it, and then of what his target will be.
When the First World War started, there were a hundred planes in France. Most of the generals couldn’t see the point of them. When it ended there were twenty-two thousand. This is what we do with our inventions. This is what we have to do. You and I grew up in a time of peace, but that was by accident. What shapes our lives is war. I tell you, we haven’t absorbed those blows yet. We are still reeling from them. Only we don’t see ourselves reeling. We don’t have young men on the streets without legs, on wooden trolleys.
I wanted to write about these people who might be our forebears. Maybe I started off by trying to manipulate them. But my characters weren’t having any of that. They are like children – they seize their own life in both hands and race off with it.
And characters see through the tricks in the writer’s mind. Will might be my grandfather: the dates are more or less right. Florence’s daughter might be your grandmother. But however much I try to write without knowing what I’m writing, I can’t help seeing that Florence is closer to you than that. And if Will’s my ancestor, then he’s also the man I see in the mirror.
You’ll see how rough the story is. This is work in progress – or so I tell myself. In December I’m going over to France to do some research. But maybe I won’t ever really finish this story. It’s going to take me a long time to write about the next generation, my father’s generation.
Writing it is the point of it. Being with Will and Florence is the point of it. It’s like those baby aeroplanes. They’ve got nothing to do with anything except flight.
You’re my reader, Rebecca. You can read me as no one else can. Here we are, brother and sister, writer and reader.
But don’t, for God’s sake, feel you’ve got to like it. Or comment on it.
And so my story opens. My characters are in a graveyard. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think that sometimes we recognize history as a sensation – a smell, or a touch – before we can name it or know what it really is. If it’s our own history, that is. Even if we’ve never seen those graveyards, we know about them. They are our key events.
With love,
Joe
Prologue
A field is enough to spend a life in.
It’s a raw seam of earth with wooden crosses set into it. Committees are working hard on it. No one has ever had so many graves to deal with. Everything must be considered. How are all these dead to be looked after, and introduced to history?
A grey, wet sky. It has rained all morning and will rain again. Here comes a woman with a child stepping at her side. They’re nothing remarkable. There are many such figures here, erring between the rows of graves. But this woman, unlike the others, is not dressed in black. Neither is the child in mourning.
The woman has a piece of paper in her hand which she consults from time to time. It’s a map, maybe, or a plan. Everything here is new and raw and temporary. Even the graves look as if they might shift from one week to the next.
The task is enormous. The earth around here heaves up bodies wherever it’s touched. They must be identified, catalogued, put to rest, memorialized. And yet there must also be something for those who remember the scent of skin or the timbre of a laugh. At the very least there must be a place to visit.
She’s found it, or she thinks she has. The numbers match. Woman and child stop. They stand side by side for a minute, looking at what they’ve come to find as if it’s trying to conceal something from them, until the child, overcome perhaps by the atmosphere, turns and burrows her head into her mother’s waist. Mother and child bend together in the shape of giving comfort.
What to do? What to say? These fields have been ploughed up for the sake of the dead. Nothing else will ever grow here, that’s a promise.
It begins to rain. The field looks even more provisional. A small aeroplane makes its way westward and both woman and child look up, arrested by the sight of it. The plane’s noise comes and goes as it falters across their field of vision.
‘Look, an aeroplane,’ says the little girl.
‘Yes.’
They don’t kneel at the graveside. They don’t drop flowers or plant a rose – besides, that is contrary to the plans of the committee. After a while of standing, the woman wipes some touches of rain off her face, takes the child’s hand, and begins to retrace her steps.
1
Florence, 1917
Will was naked the first time I saw him. He was in the bathroom and the door was open. Not wide open, but wide enough for me to see inside.
He should not have been there at all. We don’t have visitors so early. Who had let him in, I wondered. And then I wondered if Madame Blanche would blame me for it, when she returned.
I stayed safe in the shadow of the door. I leaned forward, just a little. The room was full of sun and steam, and against the far wall there was the big claw-footed bath that Madame Blanche had installed. No one in town had a bath as fine as ours, with its wide gushing taps and the powerful pipes running down to it and away from it. Built to last a lifetime, and plumbed in only a few miles from the front.
It was Madame Blanche’s one act of faith. Petit Paul would continue to stoke the furnace, hot water would pour from the taps, the bath would fill and men would clean themselves. The house would stand and we would do well.
At the end of each week Madame Blanche comes out of her private office after doing the books. She always seeks me out then.
‘We are doing well, Florence,’ she says gravely, as if letting me know the fate of some invalid who is precious to us both. We never speak of the fact that the house is hers, the bath is hers and the profit is hers. I have never seen inside those account books.
God help Marguerite if she doesn’t buff the porcelain to shining whiteness each morning, and again between clients. The bath must appear pristine, as if no one else has ever lain in it.
I like the bathroom in the early mornings, when our bath lies in its lair like a lion couchant, waiting for the officers. Nothing has happened yet. The towels are folded. Danielle and Marie-Claude run about in their kimonos with their hair scraped back off their foreheads, like little girls. And so do
I. We drink our coffee in the garden before we dress. It’s cool and the dew is on the grass in the orchard. Claire holds my hand and we go to visit the hens.
But this man was in our house at ten o’clock in the morning. He bent forward and sluiced his face. He took the long-handled bristle brush and began to scrub his back. I watched. He groped for an enamel can of clean water that stood on the edge of the bath. He lifted the can high, and poured fresh hot water over his head in a long stream.
I knew that the water would be fresh and hot. These things were my responsibility that day. Madame Blanche was away on a visit, but she might come back at any time, perhaps in two hours, perhaps in two days. She never tells me, or anyone. She opens the well-oiled front door with her silent key and she’s suddenly there among us. Her eyes go straight to the rumpled bed, the smear on a glass, the girl with her face red and sweaty after romping on the orchard swing. And especially she sees everything I’ve done. I am in charge now until she returns. I’m her deputy, her aide-de-camp, her lieutenant.
Will was naked. The fresh hot water parted his short hair and flattened it, and the sun shone on it. Water flowed over his face, his shoulders, his chest. The clean water disappeared into the milky, dirty water that lapped his waist. He sat in his dirt. He wasn’t young, I saw that at once. He was more than thirty, thirty-five maybe. Heavy-set.
The men who come to us are dirty. They don’t know it themselves, because they are so used to it. (Madame Blanche would correct me if I said that they were men. They are officers. We don’t take men.)
But they are all dirty. They smell of raw earth and sweat and metal. They smell of smoke and explosives. They aren’t aware of it. They wash before they come to us and they comb their hair and put on fresh clothes if they have them. Sometimes they wear lemon cologne. It makes no difference. All of them smell of war and it’s the dirtiest smell there is.
This is why Madame Blanche installed the bathroom. No other establishment has one to match it. I was doubtful because of the expense, but she was right, as always.