“ ‘Let my name be ever the household word it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the ghost of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was-there is absolutely unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.’ ”
It was a bad moment following the coffin out of the church, feeling all those eyes on me, feeling all that pity that I didn’t want. But I held it together while we were walking behind the coffin. And it was a bad moment when Rose’s parents were holding each other by the graveside and her oldest friends were starting to come apart. But I held it together at the graveside.
It was only when the funeral director-there are no more undertakers-took me aside and softly asked me if the wreaths were to be buried with the coffin or kept for the graveside that I began to unravel.
“All with her,” I said, “bury it all with her,” suddenly overflowing with helpless tears.
Not for myself or for her parents or even for Rose, no, but crying for the children who would never be born.
I always get a jolt of surprise when I enter my nan’s tiny flat. One little box in a block of sheltered accommodation, it’s as fashionably minimalist as any local restaurant or art gallery, all white walls and creamy blankness, a study in trendy emptiness. Damien Hirst would be right at home in my nan’s flat. One look at this place, and Damien would want to chop my nan in half and stick her in a jar of preservative.
Not that my nan is trying to keep up with the cutting edge of interior design. A few years ago the stairs got too much for her in the home she had lived in for over fifty years, the Oranges for Christmas house in that East End banjo, and this white flat is where the council put her. She refused to move in with my parents.
“I value my freedom, love,” she told me.
The TV has the sound turned down and Sinatra is playing. It’s Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie and the Orchestra, Frank’s finest live album, in my opinion. My nan is a habitual player of Sinatra records. She is not really all that interested in music, but I know Frank reminds her of my granddad. No, it’s more than a reminder, hearing Sinatra swagger through “You Make Me Feel So Young” or “Fly Me to the Moon” or “The Shadow of Your Smile.” It’s a kind of communion.
Among all the souvenirs from other people’s holidays-my nan is keen on grinning Spanish donkeys and leering leprechauns-there are lots of family pictures on the mantelpiece. Rose and I on our wedding day. Me as a child. Me as a baby. My parents on their wedding day. Her own wedding day-she is black-haired and smiling, a beautiful young woman, a woman who shines-on the arm of her husband, my granddad. But the white flat remains stubbornly indifferent to these signs of life. My nan just hasn’t had the endless years to impose her personality here the way she did in the old place. As I watch her shuffling around the kitchen, laboriously making us some tea-she forbids me from making it as I am her guest-I wonder if she ever will.
“He was here,” my nan says. “Yesterday. With his fancy woman.”
For some reason I am dumbfounded.
“My dad?”
She nods, smiling grimly. “With her. His fancy woman.”
“He brought Lena? Here?”
“His fancy woman. His bit on the side. Bit of crumpet. Bit of skirt. His tart.”
I am glad that my nan is not siding with her son in the dismantling of our little family. She still comes around to our house for lunch on Sundays. Either my mum or I deliver a bag of shopping once a week. We talk on the phone every day, even when we have nothing much to say. We are all pretending that our family is still intact, and I am comforted by that pretence. But something stops me from smiling and nodding at these slanders on Lena.
“You really liked her a little while ago,” I say. “Lena, I mean. You thought she was okay.”
She snorts. “Young enough to be his daughter. What are they going to do? Have a baby?” Another snort. “He won’t be able to pick it up. The old goat. Do you want a biscuit?”
“No thanks, Nan.”
“Chocolate digestive or custard cream?”
“Not for me, Nan.”
“I’ll just bring some in case you change your mind,” she says. “That marriage hasn’t been right since her last loss. You know. Miscarriage. If you dip them in your tea, they go all soft. Do you have sugar? I can’t remember.” She laughs with delight, shaking her head. “Sorry, Alfie. It’s my old timer’s disease.”
“What did he want?” I say, helping her to cart the tea and biscuits to the low table that faces the television. She doesn’t mind me helping with this bit. “I mean, of course he wanted to see you. You’re his mum. But what did he want?”
“To explain. To explain everything, he said. And he brought her with him. Bold as brass. Sitting there holding hands, they were. Like some kind of courting couple. I said-I’ll have none of that in my house. None of your holding hands business. They brought me a box of Quality Street. And then she went and had the strawberry. Bloody cheek. He knows I like the strawberry. I can only eat the soft ones.”
I can believe that my nan has given her son and his girlfriend a hard time. My grandmother was endlessly tolerant when she was visiting my parents. She contemplated all manner of strange phenomena that she has never had any truck with in her life-au pairs, exercise equipment, foreign food, bestselling books-with a benign smile.
But in her own home she makes all the rules and expects you to obey them.
“He says he loves her.”
“Men say a lot of things. You can’t listen to what men say. Men will say anything to get what they want.”
“He says he’s not coming back.”
“I wouldn’t have him back. I’d kick him out. If he came back. I would. If I was your mum, I’d be hoping he came back so I could kick him out. I mean it. I knew something was going on. It’s ridiculous.”
Ridiculous is one of my nan’s favorite words.
“I’m worried about my mum,” I say.
“He’s disgusting.”
Disgusting is another one. She gets a lot of mileage out of ridiculous and disgusting.
“She’s lost without him. She pretends she’s not, but she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She put so much into him.”
But my nan is no longer listening to me. She turns off Sinatra and Count Basie and hits the mute button on the TV’s remote control, really pushing it as hard as she can, as if she has never got used to remote controls. Then she produces her lottery ticket from an old biscuit tin with a kilted Highland piper on the front and stares with rapt concentration at the chortling game-show host who is presenting this week’s live draw.
My nan is happy to debate adultery, miscarriages and fancy women with me.
But only if they don’t clash with the National Lottery.
10
I SAW THEM EVERY DAY, the old Chinese people moving through the morning mist of Kowloon Park, Victoria Park and Chater Gardens. But I never really noticed them. I saw no beauty and no meaning in their unhurried ballet. They were old and I was young and I believed that there was nothing they could ever teach me.
I saw them doing their slow-motion exercises-saw it most mornings for over two years-but it was never more than a little background color to me. The Tai Chi I saw in Hong Kong registered on the same shallow level as the stalls selling their nameless herbs on Ko Shing Street, the incense smoldering in a temple’s stone cauldrons on Hollywood Road, the skyline full of countless potted plants on the balconies of apartments ten, twenty, thirty stories high, the occasional talk of good and bad feng shui among the Cantonese staff of the Double Fortune Language School, the fake money burned in the streets every August for the Festival of Hungry Ghosts.