How to Be Both (25 page)

And? her mother says.

I’m ever so sorry Lisa but I am very busy spending quality time with my family and am so taken up with all the loving things happening with my husband and two children that I’m afraid I won’t be able to meet with you for some considerable time, George says.

Her mother explodes into laughter. George is stunned. Her mother is laughing like it’s the funniest thing she’s heard in a long time.

Oh you’re a beauty, George, you really are, you’re a perfect beauty, she says. Did she write back?

Yes, George says. She wrote back and said, like, Are you all right you don’t sound like you.

Her mother slaps the bed in delight.

And I wrote back, George says, and said I am very well thank you just very busy with important and time-consuming private family matters but so busy that I no longer have much time even to look
at this phone. I will be in touch with you so please don’t get in touch with me. Goodbye for now. And then I deleted my messages. And then I deleted her messages.

Her mother laughs so loudly and so delightedly that Henry, asleep above them, wakes up and comes downstairs to see what’s happening.

When they’ve got Henry back to bed and settled again they get into bed themselves. Her mother puts the lights off. They listen for Henry’s breathing to regulate. It soon does.

Then this is the story her mother tells her quietly in the dark:

One day I was waiting at a cash machine in King’s Cross and there was this woman ahead of me, about the same age as me.

As I am, George says.

George
, her mother says. Whose story is this?

Sorry, George says.

She gave me a smile because we were both waiting our turn. The bag she had at her feet was open, it was full of things that interested me, rolls of artisan paper and a big ball of green yarn or wool or gardening string, and a great many pens and pencils and some metal tools and rulers. Anyway her turn came and she was putting her numbers in and then she started patting all her pockets and riffling through that open bag and looking at the ground all around her feet and I said,
are you looking for something? can I help? And she clapped her hand to her forehead and she said
when did I become the kind of person who panics about where her bank card is when she’s at a cashpoint in the middle of getting money out of it when the card is right there in front of her, it’s just that she’s forgotten she’s actually put it into the machine?
Which made me laugh because I recognized myself in it. And we had a chat and I asked her about the rolls of paper in her bag and she told me she made books, one-offs, like artworks, books that were themselves also art objects. You know me. I was interested. We swapped emails.

About a fortnight later there was a message from this woman in my inbox, all it said was :
what do you think?
and when I opened the attachment it was some photos of a beautiful little book, all colours and swerving written lines and figures, sort of like if Matisse had written it, and I wrote back and told her I really liked it, and she emailed me back saying
but should I be doing something different with my life?
and I was struck by the intimacy of the question, from a stranger to a virtual stranger. I wrote back and said,
do you want to do something different with your life?
Then I didn’t hear anything and I forgot about her again. Until one day she left me a voicemail inviting me to lunch, which was odd because I didn’t remember ever giving her my phone number, you know me, I
never give it out. The voicemail said she had something to show me and invited me to come to her workshop first.

It was pretty exciting going there. There was lots of printers’ type, drawers of it open and half open, and inks and paint everywhere, and machines for cutting, and an old press, and bottles full of who knows what, fixatives, colours, I don’t know. I loved it.

The thing she wanted to show me was a glass box. She was making a set of books for a commission for someone who wanted her to make three of these books then deliver them to him sealed in a glass case. So these books would be full of beautifully decorated pages that no one’d ever be able to look at, without breakage at least.

And she sat there and said, so my quandary is, Carol, do I even bother to fill these books with beautiful text and pictures or do I just rough up their edges so it looks like there’s something in them, you know, wear them out and smudge them about a bit so it looks like they’ve been well worked, and deliver them to him and get paid and get away with doing much less work myself? Do I choose to be a charlatan or do I make quite a lot of work that the risk is no one will ever even see?

We went for lunch and we got quite drunk. She said,
this is exciting for me because I get to watch
you eat
, and I said, what? really? something like that excites you?

But all the same. How flattering. Someone wanted to watch me eat.

Weird, George says.

Her mother smothers a laugh to herself.

I liked her more and more, she says. She was repressed and respectable and anarchic and rude and unexpected, she was trivial and wild both at once, like a bad girl from school. And she was lovely. She was attentive, sweet to me. And there was something, some glimmer of something. She’d look at me and I’d know there was something real in it, and I liked it, I liked how she paid attention to me, my life. Like she personally cared how I was feeling from day to day or what I was doing from one hour to the next. And she did kiss me, once. Properly, I mean against a wall, a real kiss –

Oh God, George says.

That’s exactly what your father said, her mother says.

You told dad? George says.

Of course I did, her mother says. I tell your dad everything. Anyway sweet heart, after that I knew it was a game. You always know where you are after a kiss. It was a pretty good kiss, George, I liked it fine. But all the same –

(
I will never forgive her
, George is thinking)

–
I knew after it something didn’t quite ring true, her mother says. She was always so curious, about where I was, what I was doing, who I was doing it with, who else I was meeting up with or working with, especially that and what I was working on, what I was writing about, what I thought about this or that, it was constant, and I thought, well,
that’s
a bit like love, that obsessiveness, when people are in love they need to know the strangest things, so maybe it
is
love, perhaps it just feels this odd to me because it’s the kind of love that can’t be expressed unless we both choose to really mess up our lives. Which I’d no intention of doing, George. I know how good my life is. And, I presumed, neither had she, any such intention, she has a life too, a husband, kids. At least I think she does. At least, I saw some photos once.

But then there was the day I went to see her in her workshop without telling her I was coming, and I knocked on the door and a woman came to the door, she was wearing overalls, and I asked for Lisa and she said who? And I said Lisa Goliard, this is her bookmaking workshop, and the woman said, no, that’s not my name, I’m whatever, and this is
my
bookmaking workshop, can I help you? And I said, but you sometimes let your workshop to other printers or bookmakers, yes? and she looked at me as if I was crazy and said she was really busy and was there anything she could help me with, and it’s
as I was walking away that it came to me that the whole time I’d known Lisa, which was by then a couple of years, I’d never see her once make or do anything in that workshop. We’d just sat around in it, talking. I’d never seen her write anything, or bind anything, or print anything, or cut anything.

And then when I got home I looked her up online and there were the same couple of web pages that I’d looked at before, a page still saying Site Coming Soon and a link to a bookseller in Cumbria, but not much else. In fact nothing else. Not a trace.

She almost didn’t exist, George says. She only just existed.

Not that an absence online means anything, her mother says. She definitely existed. Definitely exists.

If this was a film or a novel, she’d turn out to be a spy, George says.

I know, her mother says.

She says it quite happily in the dark next to George.

It’s possible, she says. It’s not at all impossible. Though it seems improbable. It wouldn’t surprise me. I did meet her rather oddly, it did all happen very oddly. It’s as if someone had looked at my life and calculated exactly how to attract me, then how to fool me once my attention was caught. Quite an art. And she’s quite a nice spy. If she is one.

Is there such a thing as a nice spy? George says.

I wouldn’t have said so before, her mother says.
We even had conversations about it, we had a running joke. I’d say, you’re in intelligence, aren’t you, and she’d say I’m afraid I can’t possibly answer that question.

Did you tell her you’d rumbled her workshop? George says.

I did, her mother says. I told her I’d gone and it hadn’t been her workshop the day I went. She laughed and said I’d met the other person who worked there occasionally, and how this person owned the building and was fearful that the authorities, the council, would know she was letting space to other people so always swore no one used it but her whenever she was asked. And when she told me that, I thought, well, that’s perfectly feasible, that explains
that
, and at exactly the same time I could feel myself thinking, well, that explains that
away
. I think this double-think is the reason I started to see much less of her.

But George, what I’m about to say, I don’t expect you to understand it till you’re older –

Thanks, George says.

No, her mother says. I’m really not being patronizing. But understanding something like what I’m going to say takes having a bit of age. Some things really do take time. Because even though I suspected I’d been played, there was something. It was true, and it was passionate. It was unsaid. It was left to the understanding. To the
imagination. That in itself was pretty exciting. What I’m saying is, I quite liked it. Even if I was being played. And most of all, my darling. The being seen. The being watched. It makes life very, well I don’t know. Pert.

Pert? George says. What kind of a word is pert?

The being watched over, her mother says. It was really something.

But by a spy and a liar? George says.

Seeing and being seen, Georgie, is very rarely simple, her mother says.

Are, George says.

What? her mother says.

Are very rarely simple, George says. Did you tell dad she was a spy? What did he say?

He said (and here her mother puts on a voice that’s supposed to be her father), Carol, nobody is monitoring you. It’s a sub-repressed expression. You’re attracted to her middle-classness. She’s attracted to your working-class origins. It’s a classic class-infatuation paranoia and you’re both making up an adolescent drama to make your own lives more interesting.

Does dad not know about how there are no longer just three but a hundred and fifty different social classes to which it can be decided that we belong? George says.

Her mother laughs in the dark next to George.

Anyway, sweet heart. Games run their course. I
got a bit tired of it. I stopped being in touch with her back in the winter.

Yeah. I know, George says.

I was a bit down about it, her mother says. You know?

We all know, George says. You’ve been awful.

Have I? her mother says and laughs gently. Well, I missed her. I still miss her. It felt like I had a friend. She
was
my friend. And God, George, something about it made me feel permitted.

Permitted? George says. That’s insane.

I know. Allowed, her mother says. Like I was
being allowed
. It made me laugh, when I realized it. Then it made me feel rather, well, special. Like a character in a film who suddenly develops an aura of light all round her. Can you imagine?

Frankly? No, George says.

Can we never get to go beyond ourselves? her mother says. Never get to be more than ourselves? Will I ever, as far as you’re concerned, be allowed to be anything other than your mother?

No, George says.

And why is that? her mother says.

Because you’re my mother, George says.

Ah, her mother says. I see. Anyway. I quite enjoyed it, while it lasted. Am I mad, George?

Frankly? Yes, George says.

And at least now I know why the texts asking
why I wasn’t in touch stopped coming. Ha ha! her mother says.

Good, George says.

How funny, her mother says.

Your Lisa Goliard, or whoever she really is in the real world when she’s not pretending to be someone else, can fuck off back to spy-land, George says.

There is a short disapproving silence in which George senses she’s gone too far. Then her mother says

Please don’t use language like that, George.

It’s okay. He’s asleep, George says.

He might be. But I’m not, her mother says.

Said.

That was then.

This is now.

It’s February now.

But I’m not.

Her mother’s now not anything.

George lies in bed with her hands behind her head and remembers the one time in her life she ever saw Lisa Goliard in the flesh.

They were all on their way on holiday to Greece, they were in the airport pretty early, half past six in the morning, they were getting breakfast in a Pret and she turned to ask her mother to get her a tomato and mozzarella hot thing. But her mother wasn’t there. Her mother’d fallen back, was behind
them talking to a woman with long white-looking hair though the woman was young, and beautiful, which George could tell even just from looking at her back; and something about her mother was most strange, she was sort of standing on tiptoes, was she? as if straining upwards, like trying to reach something just too high off a tall shelf, a very high apple off a tree. The person leaned forward and put her hand on George’s mother’s shoulder and kissed her on the cheek and as she turned to say a final goodbye George caught the moment of her face.