“The way of the world,” my mother said. “Favors for favors. For example, that’s one of the reasons I’m here: the Norwegian government’s licensing agreement with a large software company is ending shortly and there are interesting new parameters to explore, particularly relating to security. I’m talking to the executive team purely informally, as a favor to the Labour Party.”
I forgot the zoning issue. “The party, not the government?”
She nodded.
Party politics operated only in the domestic arena. “You’re thinking of going back to Norway.”
Her face smoothed into that automatic pseudo-candid expression all career diplomats—all politicians—learn, but then she paused and glanced at Eric. He shrugged: your daughter, your decision. She took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“What have they offered you?”
“The Ministry of Culture and Education. For now.”
“Well, well, well.”
“What?” Dornan said, looking from me to Else to Eric and back again. “What?”
Eric took his wife’s hand. “Aud has just discovered that her mother has greater ambition than she knew.”
“You’re aiming for the top,” I said.
“Yes.” Now that she had made up her mind to tell me, she seemed quite calm about it.
“What’s your timetable?”
"Move back later this year, assume the junior cabinet position next year, then ...”
“Madame Prime Minister.” We all looked at each other. “But why?”
“Victor Belaunde,” she said. “Do you remember?”
It had been a long time, but Belaunde, onetime Peruvian ambassador to the UN, had been quoted in our household all through my childhood. My mother was very fond of quotations.
I said from memory, “When there is a problem between two small nations, the problem disappears. When there is a problem between a big country and small country, the little country disappears. When there is a problem between two big countries, the United Nations disappears.”
“It’s even more true today than it was then. Norway needs to be bigger. We have work to do. But the sense of importance must come from inside. That’s what I want to do.”
“You want to change the world.”
She didn’t deny it.
Dornan looked around the table, shook his head, and said, “It’s genetic.” Which everyone seemed to find funnier than I did.
“Aristotle,” Eric said, with the air of a magician producing a rabbit from the hat. “Humans have a purpose in the world, and that purpose is to fulfill their destiny.”
“Destiny is a pretty creepy word,” Dornan said, and then, with a disarming smile, “depending on the context.”
“Quite so. There again, Aristotle also said that greatness of soul is having a high opinion of oneself.”
“Yes,” Dornan said in his best Trinity debating voice, “but do we believe him or Socrates when it comes to moral action? Socrates declared that it’s impossible to know the right thing and not do it. Aristotle, on the other hand, asserted that one can have the knowledge but fail to act because of lack of control or weakness of will.” He was enjoying their surprise. “Straw polclass="underline" Aristotle or Socrates?”
“Aristotle,” said Eric.
“Aristotle,” my mother said, but more slowly.
They looked at me. “Socrates,” I said. “Because it’s all about what you mean by ‘knowledge.’ And ‘the right thing.’ ”
They looked interested.
“There are hierarchies of knowledge. It depends on which you privilege: somatic knowledge or extra-somatic. If you tell a child the fire will burn if she sticks her hand in the flame, she’ll only believe you if she knows what hot means.”
“You mean like the razor?” my mother said.
“Razor?”
“You were seven, or perhaps eight—old enough, anyway, to have had more sense—and you found a razor blade on the turf at York races, and picked it up, and I said, ‘don’t touch it, that’s sharper than any knife,’ and you just couldn’t help yourself, you had to see how sharp it was. You tested the edge on your thumb and bled all over your new shoes.” She turned to Dornan. “We had to spend half an hour in the first-aid tent until she stopped bleeding.”
Dornan grinned. I looked at my thumb.
“You were saying?” Eric said.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, think of religion. If you believed, really and truly, that you would spend eternity burning in hell for having sex with your brother’s wife, you wouldn’t do it.”
“Unless you couldn’t help it. And if you’re nineteen and in the grip of powerful hormones, you’re next to helpless. Reason might not exist.”
“Yes, but while you’re feeling the rush of hormones, at that moment, you know—physically, somatically—that having the sex is the right thing. It doesn’t matter what your frontal cortex is trying to tell you. Except that I sound as though I think our minds and our bodies are separate things, and they’re not.”
Before I got myself even more muddled by trying to explain how I thought of the layered brain—the limbic system not under conscious control, the cerebral cortex being a lightly civilized veneer over everything— Dornan stepped in.
“So,” he said, with a Groucho Marx eyebrow waggle, “if Aristotle is right, are we to believe that (a) most politicians are weak, or (b) uncontrolled, or (c) just not smart enough to know the right thing?”
“Politicians are like con men,” my mother said. “They persuade themselves to believe ridiculous things, and then pursue them in all sincerity.”
Startled silence.
“Which is why powerful people need people they love by them, to say the unwelcome thing, to help them believe what is right.”
It was the first time I had heard her use the word love. We had never said to each other, I love you. When I was little, it had never occurred to me to believe otherwise. By the time I was old enough to wonder, I would not make myself vulnerable enough to ask.
Over after-dinner drinks we talked about politicians, and family members and lovers who had damned or saved them, and Eric paid the bill, and we walked outside and stood on the dock for a while. Dornan and Eric moved down the ramp a little, and a Canada goose waddled fatly behind them, hoping for a handout.
My mother and I watched the water. It was the blue-black of an old-fashioned Beretta that someone had oiled lovingly for twenty years. It heaved lazily, constantly, and the reflected boat lights smeared and ran like Day-Glo paint.
My mother and I watched the water for a while. “You didn’t say what you thought of my plan for national politics.”
“Eric seems as though he would be willing to say the unwelcome thing. I would, too.”
“Thank you,” she said, “I would listen.” And I imagined us clasping hands in the dark, though neither of us moved.
AS I GOT OUT OF THE CAR AND STARTED UNLOADING THE TRUNK, THE SLANTING sun turned my windshield to gold. It wasn’t just the light, it was a faint dusting of pollen. Yesterday there had been one minute less than twelve hours of daylight, today one minute more; it was twenty degrees warmer than the past week; tomorrow there might be rain: spring gamboling as senselessly as a new lamb.
I opened the basement door with difficulty at 6:01. That familiar scent of dust, competing perfumes, and carpet.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said, and kicked the door shut behind me.
“What the hell is all that?”
"Swords,” I said, dropping one bag, “or maybe they’re lightsabers, it’s hard to tell.” I dropped another bag, the one full of T-shirts and the sponges and the red ink, and set down the cheap gas station cooler. I pulled one of the plastic toys, lime green, from the first bag and examined it. “No, it’s a sword. A cutlass, I believe.”