As they passed through Preston station she was thinking of grey-stained streets, and the old grey slate of her grandparents’ house. She was remembering the excitement she felt as a child on these trips north. For no real reason at all, Rosa had once had a vivid childhood dream that her grandfather Tom had turned into a camel. Worse still, because he died when she was six this camel version of the man became entwined with her early memories of him setting her on his back and crawling on all fours around the room. She had a few other fading visual memories of her grandfather: a large man, she thought, though all adults were large to a child, with ears that moved when he chewed. A man with a shining pate and a long pointed nose. To her his features were gargantuan, outlandish, though in photographs she saw he had been handsome enough.
The arrival was a series of snatched kisses, embarrassed expressions of affection, with grandmother Lily supreme in the kitchen, rattling cutlery, telling her mother — who pulled faces — what to do. Her father was feted, given a cigar. Grandfather Tom took Rosa into the living room, where there was an ornamental brass dog with a poker resting on its back, superfluous by the electric fire. He dressed her in his braces. He took her out and sat her on swings and there was a photograph of Rosa at four, her eyes glassy from the flash, clutching a terrified tiger cub, with her grandfather smiling beside her. It had been taken at a circus, under a Big Top when, after all the people juggling plates and women in leotards hurling themselves from high platforms, the ringmaster had taken the tiger cub into the crowd. You could hold the cub and pose for a photo. Grandfather Tom thought it seemed like a good idea, and called the ringmaster over. But when the ringmaster arrived, a fat man sweating under his greasepaint, Rosa had shrunk more from him than from the frightened animal, which looked like a soft toy, compressed into the fat man’s armpit. The ringmaster had been dismissed, but as the cub disappeared across the other side of the ring, Rosa had begun to cry. It was an early sense of a moment in time forever lost, demoted from memory to mere possibility. Of course she thought nothing like that at all, she just saw the tiger cub vanishing away from her and wailed. Her grandfather asked her what was the matter, reassured her that the cub had gone, that it wouldn’t bite her anyway, offered her ice creams and other small bribes, but she held her head in her hands and sobbed. He knew anyway, and just as the cub was about to disappear backstage he leapt from his seat and ran across the sawdust, to ask the trainer to bring the cub back to Rosa’s seat. So they took a photo of her and her grandfather bought it. Now the trainer, the cub and her grandfather were all dead, thought Rosa. Perhaps not the trainer. He might still be clinging on. But definitely the cub! The cub had been dead for years.
Grandfather Tom wrote comical verse in his spare time, after he had injured his knee, which ended his career in amateur football. He never published anything, but Rosa’s mother’s desk at home was crammed with folders of his writings, immaculately drafted and redrafted, poems for friends. He had written until the end, making neat copies of even his swiftest doggerel, storing them away. For years, Rosa thought he might have been an unsung genius of modern letters, and had prepared to campaign for his reputation, but after her mother died she read all his poems again. They made her cry, but she understood they would never be published. They were loving, funny poems, but nothing more. To my dearest Rosa/ Whose mother really chos-a/ tricky name to rhyme/ I’ve tried it time and time/ but can’t get my old brain/ To find a good refrain./ It’s hard to tell your daughter/ She really didn’t oughta/ Call her daughter Rosa/ Because the name would pos-a/ Such a rich conundrum/ To Rosa’s old and humdrum/ Very adoring grandpapa/ When he tried to write to her!! That was one she remembered. It was definitely not Swift. But it wasn’t bad for a man who left school at fourteen. His collected poems, his life’s work neatly copied into a school notebook, was inscribed Thomas Marswick, Barrow, 1975.
She had been lucky with her family. They had been kind and loving, these long-dead people. It was odd she thought about her grandparents so seldom. Only as the train ran north did she really consider them. It took a jolt, a change of location, for her brain to grind backwards. Of course she had hardly known them at all. It was just a dim sense of familial recognition, a twitch of the genes, but it made her shift sadly in her seat. They would have been appalled by her, she understood. They would certainly have told her to calm herself. Grandfather Tom had been a clever man, but he was pragmatic. He had a wife and a daughter, a group of good friends, he played sport at the weekends. He divided up his time — work and play, everything in its place, a time for fooling around and a time for getting your head down, earning some money. His daughter had done well, and he expected things to progress from there. Rosa’s parents expected her to better them, as they had bettered their parents. That was how they thought it went, they assumed — onwards and upwards with every generation. And if not upwards, then at least an effort, in honour of those who had tried before you. They were all trying to tell her this, her father and the ghosts of her family. You had to live. You had to try your best. There was nothing else for it. But at this she felt rebellious again and kicked them all off, these kind-eyed ancestors of hers.
And now Rosa watched the sun sink towards the hills. The day was drawing on. The closeness of the evening made her tired, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again she had gripped her pen, and she wrote:
God exists eternally, as pure thought, happiness, completeness. The sensible world, on the contrary, is imperfect but it has life, desire, imperfect thought. All things are in a greater or lesser degree aware of God, and are moved to admiration and love of God. So the sensible world aspires towards the perfection which is God. God is the cause of all activity.
Now she stopped. If you understood God as an ideal, as something thought, part of the human longing for perfection, perfection unattainable but possible to imagine, to feel a sense of, then perhaps she understood. The mind was impersonal and therefore divine. The body was personal and therefore mortal. Dream the dream the dream the dream … Yet she — like the rest of the race — possessed a mind that felt its finitude as unnatural, though really it was the most natural thing of all. That was the problem. Her mind felt the disappearance of her mother to be incomprehensible, whereas in reality it was inevitable. It seemed a crazy way for a species to think. It didn’t help with morale. Why, she wondered, had the species not evolved with an inbuilt acceptance of death — not the sort of acceptance that would cause people to die without a struggle, but a sort of inbuilt sense of death as the natural end of life? Why did the mind — the mind, or your mind, she thought? — return constantly to the very element of life which made it so unhappy? Especially when it sapped your will, stopped you from achieving anything? If you were so preoccupied with this immutable fact, so very concerned about it you could hardly participate, then what was the good of that?