So he left home on the agreed day, stamping over Hampstead Heath at high speed—they lived in a capacious, double—fronted house on Willow Road and had always both rejoiced in having the Heath, North London’s treasure, its lung, just outside their door—and in his absence Eleanor had everything properly packed and taken away to a long-term storage facility. He’d have preferred the whole caboodle to end up at the Highbury garbage dump, but on this, too, he compromised. Eleanor had insisted. She had strong archival instincts and, needing her to take charge of the project, he waved a hand at her strictures as if at a mosquito, and didn’t argue. He walked for hours, allowing the Heath’s cool music to soothe his savage breast, the quiet heart-rhythms of its slow paths and trees, and, later in the day, the sweet strings of a summer con cert in the grounds of the Iveagh Bequest. When he got back, Little Brain was gone. Or, almost gone. For, unknown to Eleanor, one doll had been locked away in a cupboard in Solanka’s study. And there she remained.
The house felt emptied when he returned, voided, the way a house feels after the death of a child. Solanka felt as if he had suddenly aged by twenty or thirty years; as if, divorced from the best work of his youthful enthusiasms, he at last stood face-to-face with ruthless Time. Waterford-Wajda had spoken of such a feeling at Addenbrooke’s years ago. “Life becomes very, I don’t know, finite. You realize you don’t have anything, you belong nowhere, you’re just using things for a while. The inanimate world laughs at you: you’ll be going soon, but it will be staying on. Not very profound, Solly, it’s Pooh Bear philosophy, I know, but it rips you to pieces all the same.” This wasn’t just the death of a child, Solanka was thinking: more like a killing. Kronos devouring his daughter. He was the murderer of his fictional offspring: not flesh of his flesh but dream of his dream. There was, however, a living child still awake, overexcited by the day’s events: the arrival of the moving van, the packers, the steady come and go of boxes. “I was helping, Daddy,” eager Asmaan greeted his father. “I helped send Little Brain away.” He was bad at compound consonants, saying b for br Little B’ain. That’s about right, Solanka thought. She became the bane of my life. “Yes,” he answered absently. “Well done.” But Asmaan had more on his mind. “Why did she have to go away, Daddy? Mummy said you wanted her to go away.” Oh, Mummy said, did she. Thanks, Mummy. He glared at Eleanor, who shrugged. “Really, I didn’t know what to tell him. This one’s for you.”
On children’s television, in comic books, and in audio versions of her legendary memoirs, Little Brain’s protean persona had reached out and captured the hearts of children even younger than Asmaan Solanka. Three was not too young to fall in love with this most universally appealing of contemporary icons. “L.B.” could be driven out of the house on Willow Road, but could she be expelled from the imagination of her creator’s child? “I want her back,” Asmaan said emphatically. Back was bat. “I want Little Brain.” The pastoral symphony of Hampstead Heath gave way to the jangling discords of family life. Solanka felt the clouds gathering around him once again. “It was just time for her to go,” he said, and picked up Asmaan, who wriggled hard against him, responding unconsciously, as children do, to his father’s bad mood. “No! Put me down! Put me down!” He was exhausted and cranky and so was Solanka. “I want to watch a video,” he demanded. Viduwo. “I want to watch a Little Brain viduwo.” Malik Solanka, unbalanced by the impact of the absence of the Little Brain archive, of her exile to some DollElba, some Black Sea town, such as Ovid’s barren Tomis, for unwanted, used-up toys, had been plunged quite unexpectedly into a condition resembling deep mourning and received his son’s end-of-day petulance as an unacceptable provocation. “It’s too late. Behave yourself,” he snapped, and Asmaan, in return, crouched down on the front-room rug and produced his latest trick: a burst of impressively convincing crocodile tears. Solanka, no less childishly than his son, and without the excuse of being three years old, rounded on Eleanor. “I suppose this is your way of punishing me,” he said. “If you didn’t want to get rid of the stuff, why not just say so. Why use him. I should have known I’d come back to trouble. To some manipulative crap like this.”
“Please don’t let him hear you talking to me that way,” she said, scooping Asmaan into her arms. “He understands everything.” Solanka noted that the boy suffered himself to be taken off to bed by his mother without the slightest wriggle, nuzzling into Eleanor’s long neck. “As a matter of fact,” she went on levelly, “after doing this entire day’s work for you, I thought, stupidly as it turns out, that we might use it as the moment for a new beginning. I took a leg of lamb out of the freezer and rubbed it with cumin, I called the flower shop, oh God this is so silly, and had them deliver nasturtiums. And you’ll find three bottles of Tignanello on the kitchen table. One for pleasure, two for too much, three for bed. Perhaps you remember that. It’s your line. But I’m sure you can’t be bothered anymore to have a romantic candlelit supper with your boring, no-longer-young wife.”
They had been drifting apart, she into the engulfing, full-time experience of first-time motherhood, which fulfilled her so deeply and which she was so eager to repeat, he into that fog of failure and self disgust which was thickened, more and more, by drink. Yet the marriage had not broken, thanks in large measure to Eleanor’s generous heart, and to Asmaan. Asmaan, who loved books and could be read to for hours; Asmaan on his garden swing, asking Malik to twist him around and around so that he could untwist in a high-speed counterclockwise blur; Asmaan riding on his father’s shoulders, ducking his head under doorways (“I’m being very careful, Daddy!”); Asmaan chasing and being chased, Asmaan hiding under bedclothes and piles of pillows; Asmaan attempting to sing “Rock Around the Clock”—rot around the tot—most of all, perhaps, Asmaan bouncing. He loved to bounce on his parents’ bed, with his stuffed animals cheering him on. “Look at me,” he’d cry-look was loot—“I’m bouncing very well! I’m bouncing higher and higher!”
He was the young incarnation of their old high-bouncing love. When their child was flooding their lives with delight, Eleanor and Malik Solanka could take refuge in a fantasy of undamaged familial contentment. At other times, however, the cracks were becoming ever easier to see. She found his self-absorbed misery, his constant railing against imagined slights, duller and more of a strain than she was ever cruel enough to show; while he, locked into his downward spiral, accused her of ignoring him and his concerns. In bed, whispering so as not to wake Asmaan sleeping on a mattress on the floor beside them, she complained that Malik never initiated sex; he retorted that she had lost interest in sex entirely except at the baby-making time of the month. And at that time of the month, routinely, they fought: yes, no, please, I can’t, why not, because I don’t want to, but I need it so badly, well, I don’t need it at all, but I don’t want this lovely little boy to be an only child like me, and I don’t want to be a father again at my age, I’ll already be over seventy before Asmaan is twenty years old. And then tears and anger and, as often as not, a night for Solanka in the guest bedroom. Advice to husbands, he thought bitterly: make sure the spare room is comfortable, because sooner or later, pal, that’s your room.
Eleanor was waiting tensely by the stairs for his reply to her invitation to a night of peace and love. Time passed in slow beats, arriving at a hinge moment. He could, if he had the wit and desire, accept her invitation, and then, yes, a good evening would follow: delicious food, and, if at this age three bottles of Tignanello didn’t send him straight to sleep, then no doubt the lovemaking would be up to the old high standard. But now there was a worm in Paradise, and he failed the test. “You’re ovulating, I suppose,” he said, and she jerked her face away from him as if he’d slapped her. “No,” she lied, and then, giving in to the inevitable, “Oh, all right, yes. But can’t we just, oh, I wish you could see how desperately, oh, to hell with it, what’s the use.” She carried Asmaan away, unable to hold back her tears. “I’m going to go to sleep, too, when I put him to bed, okay?” she said, weeping angrily. “Do what you like. Just don’t leave the lamb in the fucking Aga. Take it out and throw it in the fucking bin.”