Elgar’s Nimrod music was so sweet that he loathed it, yet listened to its long mellow pre-womb Edwardian English dirge as if playing before an impassable wall that the spirit of the music was too gutless to climb and cross, weaving out the soothing sounds of glorious resignation, the peculiar self-satisfied English pipe-smoking resignation that engenders viciousness and sadism if it goes on too long. It showed him the corrupt rotten soul of the English played out of a burning stillborn heart. He understood its suffering: such music lacked the messianic human love of great work, locked as it was on an island where no armies have moved or revolutions swayed for hundreds of years and where liberty has no meaning any more. Elgar had his hands in its entrails all right, writing music while his country rotted — not the Enigma Variations, but the Enema Variations, more like it.
He lifted the needle and slid the record back into its case, thinking he might give it to Ralph as a wedding-present. He reset the painting against the wall, flush on the biggest easel. Cancer is the sum of their unrealised ideals, the festering nation that hasn’t got rid of its king or queen recently. He stood back and surveyed the hole, the eye, the magic eye, the third eye and only eye, not my left or my right but my middle and best, straight from Tibet by P & O packet-boat. I’ll hem it round and paint it blue, and leave it like that, Albert Handley’s third eye looking out on this world of yours, with no one looking in on mine.
Chapter Twenty-three
She pulled up tufts of grass that grew from the borders of the path, and where she had worked already was clearly defined, but beyond, where she had not, only a thin uneven trail led between two apple-trees to the back fence. It was slow work, without purpose if there were more important things to do — which there were not. What had frightened her into sending Handley away? Was it fear of being deflected from her course of waiting for Frank to come back? From that sort of war she might wait ten years, then discover he’d died at the beginning. Or she might know nothing at all. Nevertheless, she could wait. She was fond of Handley, and to say she had sent him off out of fear was merely a way of gratuitously attacking her resolution, so she changed her reason to one of self-preservation in order to be more truthful and feel better.
After lunch she put Mark in his carrycot and wedged it in the back of the car. He was a fat pale baby, anything but placid, and objected to the movement and noise. Her father, seventy-five years old, was ill with a stomach-ache that wouldn’t leave him, and on warm days he lay in the garden on a special bedchair reading the Jewish Chronicle and shouting in rich Yiddish at the black torn from next door who stalked across his lawn after the birds.
Mark roared, but she couldn’t turn to him, being on the outside lane of the motorway and overtaking a line of cars at seventy miles an hour. The right-hand blinker flashed as she raced along in her new MG. A car from the middle lane suddenly set itself to swing out in front of her. She pressed the horn, and braked sharply. A ripple went through all lanes of traffic, and the ash of panic filled her mouth as she thought of Mark behind. She skidded, but stayed in control, and the car that had tried to join her lane slid back, allowing her to accelerate and roar by. Mark was no longer crying, mollified by the common danger. The only answer to English traffic, she thought, was to get a bigger car, which was safer because it tended to frighten the souped-up souls in their fast sardine-tins. The driver had been a young girl in a red Mini, now on the outer lane but a quarter of a mile behind.
Her mother came to the car and picked up Mark even before saying hello to her daughter. Myra smiled. Anyone over twelve was valueless to her mother, had to be looked after and deferred to perhaps, but lacked that spark of life in their eyes to say that they were still growing. ‘How’s father?’ Myra asked, struggling to get out the empty cot.
‘He’s asleep right now,’ she said. ‘What a lovely baby. He’s like you, you know. I suppose he gets his blue eyes from your grandfather, because George’s eyes were brown, weren’t they?’
She took off her coat in the hall, and Mark was already in the kitchen and propped in a high chair kept specially for him. The house smelled of the same floor-polish and mothballs, carpet-cleaner and paint, and places where dust wanted to settle but had never been allowed, as when she was a young girl rushing in from school to get out of the hat and uniform she loathed before going to meet friends.
The baby, whatever her own feelings, loved his grandmother, and never came so much alive as when he was at her house. To her, he was George’s child, and she only knew of Frank Dawley through vague stories from Pam, much of it speculation because Pam didn’t know much either, Myra thought, pleased at how secretive she’d been. Mrs Zimmerman made a bowl of cereal and mashed a banana in it. ‘He won’t be hungry,’ Myra said. ‘It isn’t his feeding time yet.’
‘Of course he’s hungry. Look how fat and beautiful he is. They’re always hungry at his age. Don’t think I don’t know. I’ve had three of my own, so I should. And I looked after Pam’s four when Harry left her and she went to get him back.’
‘That was rather shameless of her,’ said Myra. ‘I always thought she’d had more pride.’
‘He came back, didn’t he?’
‘And look how ecstatically happy they are.’
‘That’s not the point. The children are better for it. Your father and I were wondering the other day when you are going to get married again. It would make us very happy, you know, especially if you found someone who understood you a bit better. I know you weren’t very happy with George, but we never said anything.’
‘That’s true, you didn’t, though I don’t know what you could have said that wouldn’t have made it worse. But I’ve no intention of rearranging my life just yet.’
‘I know you went to Morocco with another man just after George died, but since you parted from each other perhaps you ought to get someone else, if only for the baby’s sake.’
‘Get someone?’ she smiled, hardly covering her irritation. ‘We don’t live in a slave supermarket.’ Yet it was no use being angry. Their two worlds simply could not meet. Mark, with wide smiles and an arm waving, devoured each spoon of food before him. He was happy, relaxed and lively here, whereas it had the opposite effect on her. If she fed him at this time he could have rejected it, but here, with the inane cuckooing ministrations of her mother, he puffed and blowed and gulped endearingly. ‘Thank goodness you have such a good child,’ she said. ‘And such fair hair. Go on, darling, eat, eat! You melt the ice in your grandmother’s heart. None of Pam’s were like him. He’s so knowing. He knows me, don’t you? And what about grandfather, then? You see, he’s looking for him. He is. You see it? Only seven months old. Eat. Go on, eat! Of course he’ll eat it all up, won’t you? No, he’s certainly not like any of Pam’s. They were never like this at his age.’ A baby in front of her, no matter what its faults, was better in every way than any other far-off baby no matter what its virtues. ‘And to think you waited so long before having one. You should get married again and have a few more. You can’t think how much pleasure that would give, and not only to me and your father. You make such a good mother. Look how marvellous he is!’