Consequences (28 page)

But then there is willed change. There is that moment of fervent choice: no more of this car, this house, this job, these people.

This husband, possibly.

The thing is to arrive at that moment, thought Ruth. To recognize it, to look it in the eye, to meet it head on. To see it as opportunity, not threat. To say, “Well now, let me consider the options.” To have a strategy, several strategies, a whole quiverful of strategies.

I am young, she thought. Reasonably young. So far, most of my life has simply ploughed ahead—stage 1, phase B, this work, that work, this marriage, these children. Decisions—oh, yes—but muted decisions, more a sort of acquiescence: okay—fine, this’ll do if that’s what’s on offer, let’s not be difficult, all’s for the best. No bravado, she thinks. No challenge.

So go for it, Ruth.

Part 7

RUTH E-MAILED PETER:
“Jess has piano lesson after school so please see that she takes her music with her. Tom’s eczema is back—on left leg. Use the cream night and morning. I am going to Crete for long weekend on 22nd, so would appreciate it if you have them Friday and Monday.”

Their two flats were in adjoining streets. The children could thus live with Ruth but spend periods with Peter, as agreed. Ruth’s flat was the ground floor of a large Edwardian semi; an Indian family pattered about in the maisonette above. Peter had the top floor of a similar building. Once, turn-of-the-century bourgeoisie had raised their broods here; today, the houses were chopped and spliced, accommodating flat-share girls, gay couples, and the fallout of failed marriages. Ruth had never been into Peter’s flat; the children reported an accumulation of laundry, an enormous television, and claimed that he had tried to make toast in the microwave. From time to time Ruth gave them kitchen offerings to take to him—a batch of frozen soup, a serving of stew, some fruit salad. Like Red Riding Hood, they trotted away with a basket shrouded in a cloth; Ruth diagnosed her own guilt, compunction, a need to propitiate. She and Peter did not often meet; he would deliver or collect the children with a brisk wave; negotiation was mainly by e-mail.

It was the year 2000. She could never quite get used to that string of noughts, to the fact that you had arrived in that mythic future, another century. Jess had said, on January first, “Why is everything just the same?,” which seemed a fair comment. They had talked about the arbitrary nature of the calendar, about the ancient need to harness time.

“Actually,” said Ruth. “There are just days—daytime and nighttime. All the rest is like…like names on a map. The place would be exactly the same if it had no names. Do you see?” This concept of time and space pleased her. She had considered it, as she served the children’s breakfast, and the new century rolled in. How appropriate, she had thought, that it should coincide with her own new beginning. She did not care at all that the flat was half the size of their old house, and that she had to keep a sharp eye on expenditure. She worried about the children, but for herself felt only a sense of anticipation, a kind of unchanneled energy.

The e-mail to Peter was followed up by others: proposals to editors, a completed piece, inquiries in the service of ongoing work. To Simon, she wrote: “Hi! How’s the book trade? How about I interview you as basis for an article on the stranglehold of high street chains and demise of the independent? Jess says huge thanks for Laura Ingalls Wilder set and will write shortly. We are immersed—what good taste in children’s lit you have. Mum has to see new specialist but no cause for alarm, it’s thought.” To her father, she said: “Lunch on Friday would be great. Sorry to hear about the hip op.—but they work, don’t they? Thanks a lot for the birthday check—so
much!
” James Portland’s periodic largesse made her feel obscurely uncomfortable. She had always enjoyed dipping into his prodigal way of life, but had never wanted to have it for herself. “My fatal puritanism,” Molly had said. “Sheer perversity. What we’ve missed.”

Nevertheless, that check would come in handy. There could be a new sound system—Peter had the old one—and bikes for the children and maybe a winter coat for herself. And the car was due for a service and the washing machine was on the brink of expiry. She had no complaints about Peter’s financial contribution, but somehow there was often a shortfall. Undoubtedly, he would step up his payments if asked, but she did not wish for this. Their relationship was equable but distant; sometimes she thought that it was not so very different from that of their married years. Once, she caught sight of Peter in the local shopping center with a woman she did not recognize; what she experienced was hard to identify—not jealousy, exactly, but a startled sense of deprivation, as though you saw someone else walking around in a familiar garment of your own. She no longer wanted to be with him, but he was a part of the narrative of her life: with him excised, it was as though an aspect of the story were missing. Ruth supposed that this effect would fade, and anyway he was still there, off-stage, and forever would be. She did not know much about his own new life; he had been matter-of-fact and surprisingly compliant over the whole separation process. “I refuse to rack up massive legal bills,” he had said at an early stage. “We are both reasonable people—we can sort this out.” And they had done so, dealing out the household furnishings without dispute, agreeing on arrangements for the children, on who should pay for what in future.

When she looked around, Ruth saw that her own new circumstances seemed to be reflected on all sides. Most of her contemporaries moved on, or away, or aside, with airy ease; they shifted jobs, departed suddenly for America or Australia, found new partners, sold their London house and set up a consultancy in Yorkshire, converted an Umbrian farmhouse into an arts center. A few had made so much money from a handful of years in the City that they retired at forty, all set presumably for several decades of restless under-occupation. Was such fluidity the hallmark of the new century? What had happened to careers, to long service anywhere—in work, in a house, in a marriage? At a job interview, people were asked what they saw themselves doing in five years time; volatility was the expectation. She had discussed this with Molly and Sam, on one of her visits with the children.

“Don’t look at me,” said Sam. “I’m doing exactly what I’ve been doing for thirty years—fixing machinery and writing poetry.” He turned to Molly. “You faffed around a fair bit—at least before we met. You were ahead of your day, it seems.”

“Unemployable, more like. Until I discovered how to boss poets around.”

Ruth was dismissive. “The likes of you don’t count. The artistic set have always lived hand to mouth. Now everybody’s doing it.”

“There’s a man in the village used to be a carpet importer,” said Molly. “He’s bought the Old Manor and they’re doing B and B. Luxury B and B, mind.”

Ruth nodded. “There you are. It’s a kind of universal bohemianism. Or instability.”

Molly said, “Does it matter?”

“I’m not saying it matters. Just that it’s interesting. People living differently. Expecting differently.”

“If you’re middle class,” said Sam, “You expect to earn better and better throughout life. If you’re working class, you don’t. That’s the only sociological truism I know. I suppose it’s a question of…”

Ruth broke in. “And that’s what’s changed. No more jobs for life, climbing up the ladder. Short-term contracts. You’re better off as a plumber.”

Sam grinned. “Those of us in a skilled trade have always known that.”

“Which skilled trade are you talking about?” asked Molly. “Poetry?”

“Ha ha! But what’s with this forensic study of society, Ruth? Some work project?”

“Actually, no. Just noticing. And thinking. Since Peter and I split up.”

Molly sighed. “How are things going? Did you sort out that problem with the mortgage?”

“More or less. My flat has changed hands four times in the last ten years, I discovered. That seems to say something, too.”

“Not about the flat, I hope?”

“No, it’s a perfectly good flat. Just that people don’t stay put, in any sense. And now I’m joining the movement. Up-to-date, at last.”

“So enjoy Crete,” says Peter, taking the children’s bags.

“It’s not a holiday.” Ruth is a touch defensive. “I’m doing a travel piece.”

Peter cocks an eyebrow, smiles slightly. “So enjoy anyway.” Then, apparently, he remembers. “And of course there’s the family connection.”

“Exactly.”

The travel piece will fund the trip. She has had to solicit. The editor in question was surprised: “I thought you didn’t do travel, Ruth? On account of the kids.”

She was not prepared to expand. “There can be the occasional exception.”

“Okay, then. I could use something with a historical/archaeological slant. For the discerning visitor. Some off-the-beaten-track sites. We can put you in touch with a local guide.”

So Ruth has a rucksack filled with books—stuff on the Minoans and on monasteries and on the Venetian period. She also has books on the 1941 battle for Crete, which she has read and re-read. She sits in the departure lounge at Gatwick looking again at the crucial chapter, while the screens flick up Palma and Rhodes and Corfu and Heraklion and the holidaying masses eddy around her. All travel is casual now, but this is travel at its most mundane, its most banal. The departure screens cite the globe, an eloquent litany of names, but the concerns here are shopping opportunities, delays, foreign currency, and which way are the toilets? Many people are yawning; some are sprawled, asleep. The atmosphere is not one of anticipation but of lethargical endurance. The only fix is to spend money: a coffee, a beer, some perfume, T-shirts, cameras, watches…anything to gobble up a few minutes of time, to distract, to amuse. Ruth calls Sam. She is concerned about Molly, who is ill again—another vicious chest infection—but there is no reply. She returns to her book.

Ruth reads of destroyers forging their way across the Mediterranean. She reads of the ships that evacuated Allied troops from Greece, the hazardous crossing to Crete. Periodically, she looks up, returns to the present; departures come up on the screens—Gate This, Gate That, Boarding, Delayed. Each time she surfaces from the page, she is startled by the gaudiness of it all; the vivid clothes that are worn—that pink sweater, the purple jacket, someone’s emerald pants—the fluorescent sign above a shop. The world of which she is reading—the German parachute drop, the ten-day battle, the men dug into vineyards, pinned down on hillsides, hanging dead in trees—is somehow all in black and white, or rather, shades of gray. This may be an effect of the grainy contemporary photographs in the books, but it seems also to be some distancing requirement, as though that other time can only be known in a different dimension. She cannot see the blood, though that is there in the text, time and again, nor the palette of the landscape, nor the flowers that sometimes appear as furnishings, nor the blues of the Mediterranean and the sky. Only the departure lounge at Gatwick is allowed full-frontal color.

Her flight is boarding. She puts the book away, for now, and joins the stream of people that is funneled down ramps, along travellators, processed into the correct slot. She arrives in her seat in the plane, an aisle seat alongside a couple who are complaining about the non-provision of movies on short-haul flights. “Perfectly possible,” says the man. “They could do short features.” The woman agrees: “They’re just cutting corners, aren’t they?” The couple spend the flight in disgruntled boredom, riffling through magazines, eating and drinking everything on offer.

Ruth reads. She knows the campaign inside out by now—the parachute drops, the Stuka attacks, the disposition of the Allied forces, the engagements, the defeats, the ebb and flow of it, the place names—Canea, Rethymnon, Suda Bay, Galatas, Maleme airfield. And Heraklion, for which this plane is headed. When they touch down, she looks in surprise at the runways, the airport building, the waiting coaches, the ranks of taxis. Where are the bomb craters, the disabled aircraft? And where is the battered city, from which the inhabitants fled?

Ruth is disgorged into the airport, along with the packaged masses—the children and the buggies and the straw hats and the beach towels. She trundles through immigration and customs and achieves the exit, where she finds herself named: a smiling driver is holding up a sign that says Faraday. He is to take her to the hotel near Rethymnon booked by the travel editor. With relief, she sinks into the back of the car.

They drive through mountains, and then along a fast coastal road. Full color now—that grainy gray world of the books is extinguished. Tawny hillsides criss-crossed with silvery rows of olives, scoops of blue sea, brilliant white houses covered in purple bougainvillea and the cerulean blue of morning glory. Outside, the temperature is in the nineties but the car is air-conditioned. A tactful bottle of water sits in the pocket of the door beside her.

Back then, very young men were killing each other all along here. Lying in the vineyards and the olive groves—waiting, watching, desperate with heat and thirst, while out of the blue sky the Stukas came screaming down, and then the Junkers troop-carriers, black shapes that shed their flower trail of white, red, green, yellow parachutes that floated slowly down—hundred upon hundred. And if you were on the end of one of those parachutes, one of those other very young men, clutching your machine gun, you fell into a place with its fangs bared, where the bayonet waited, and the grenade, the pistol.

The car draws up at the hotel, which is not so much a building as a post-Minoan fantasy, a complex sprawled over several acres, with the sort of social zoning system that is usually built up over centuries—villas for the bourgeoisie, bungalows with little gardens for the less affluent, and suites in the main building for the nobs.

Ruth has a bungalow with a tamarisk in its garden, two reclining chairs and a parasol, from which she wanders down to the beach. All around her, German is spoken, and the beach itself is dense with mature mahogany northern European flesh. The car had passed similar beaches; in the mind’s eye, this island wears a fringe of sunburned bodies, laid out like kippers on the coastal sand. Ruth considers having a swim and returns to the bungalow for her costume, where a flashing light on the telephone tells her that she has a message.