Pravda (40 page)

Susan let out a low whistle. "I didn't know. I mean, I had absolutely no idea ... That was your
dad."

"Well, Gabriel didn't want anyone to know. So we kept it quiet. What else could we do? It's not exactly the sort of thing you can explain." Isabella shrugged. "And nobody came to the play then, of course, so he lost the money he had borrowed as well."

"My God."

Isabella began walking again. "That was just one thing, Suze. There was a lot of other stuff too. And physical violence between them. All the way through. Though I don't think Gabriel ever struck back. Even though he could have put Dad on the floor."

Susan's voice hardened. "Did your father hit you?"

"Yes, sometimes. When he was angry. Until I was about thirteen."

"Your mum?"

"Not sure. I don't think so. I reckon Dad has all the classic misogyny stuff going—women are to be worshipped or denigrated. Virgins, whores, princesses, dolls, waifs, angels. I think it would go against some twisted machismo of his to hit grown women. He prefers to use money to fuck with their minds."

"No wonder you both hate him."

"I don't hate him, Suze." Two gray squirrels shot out in front of them and raced across the road. "Maybe it's something to do with Mum dying. Or maybe I never absolutely hated him. Not like Gabriel hates him. I just think he's ... I don't know—that he's emotionally selfish, that he's a bully, that he's congenitally manipulative, abusive..." Isabella made a face that acknowledged the ironic humor. "All the things Gabriel has in his magazine."

They were almost at the top of the hill.

Susan clicked her tongue. "You know, I completely missed all the stuff that must have been going on in your house. I mean ... I suppose-pose you don't see the whole story when you are little. You think someone's dad is strict or whatever, or their mum is a bit mad, but there's no reason that you'd get beyond that." They stood aside to let a family pass, and Susan turned to face Isabella. "Of course, I remember the stuff when we were older. All that palaver about your boyfriends. What was
that
about?"

"Don't ask."

"And those fights you used to have with him. You screaming. Bloody hell, Is, it makes me cringe just to think about them."

"Not as much as me." They came to the edge of Pond Square.

"Now I think about it," Susan said, "the last time I saw him—God, it must have been before you went—the last time I saw him was in your kitchen. He started telling me all this rubbish about how hard it is out there and you've got to learn your lesson and pull your weight and pay your way and all of that. He was so snide. I didn't know what to say. I was furious."

"There's nothing
to
say. Dad just repeats himself to anyone who is around. Or he used to. It's a kind of self-validating mantra or something."

"And I thought, Hang on a minute—I work seventy hours a week and what the hell has he ever done, anyway? Six or seven jobs on local rags—part-time at best—while his wife has worked solidly for twenty-five years as a copy editor on a serious and stressful newspaper
in her second bloody language."

Isabella had to smile.

"Apart from anything else," Susan said, "it's very hard to understand why a man like your dad, who's basically had a pretty good life, should have such a sense of grievance."

"That's just it. That's exactly it." Isabella nodded and turned her head to meet her friend's eyes, appreciative of the accuracy of the observation. "He
does
have this overwhelming sense of grievance. And it sort of permeates everything he says and does and thinks. He can't get away from it. Every conversation, every action, everything has some reference to this grievance of his. Which we all have to acknowledge and dance around, even though none of us—including him—have any idea what specifically he is so aggrieved about."

"I guess it's also a way of building himself up," Susan suggested. They were walking along one side of the square, watching for a break in the traffic.

"If you're doing better, he wants to pull you down," Isabella said. "If you're doing worse, he wants to gloat. He's only got one mode of discourse. He can't converse—all he can do is goad."

"Maybe that's just how he is with people our age, Is, or his children or something." Susan shrugged. "Maybe he's completely different with other people when you're not around."

They crossed the main road and walked toward the Grove, the tall Georgian houses seeming all the finer in the sharp winter's sun.

Susan looked across. "Have you thought what you are going to ask Francis?"

"I'm going to ask him lots of questions about the house and I'm going to be very normal and then—"

"No. You need to actually ask him outright if he was your dad's lover, Is." Susan's expression was pure, wholehearted sincerity. "You need to do that. You have to be absolutely no shit now. And you've got to start today. If you don't, I will. I mean it. You cannot spend the rest of your life kowtowing to whatever messed-up version of reality your dad enjoys. We'll just have to think of a way of telling Gabs."

Two hours later, Susan caught the bus back down the hill and Isabella set out alone, wearing her friend's gloves for the return walk, the sky still a burnished December blue. She knew two more things for certain now: that she could enter her old home without weirdness after all, and that gentle old Francis had indeed been her father's lover. Most of all she felt relieved. But, curiously, she also felt (at last) that she was nearly as old as her father and mother—not in age, but in the sense that she was no less an adult than they, and not in the fake way she had pretended to be an adult in her twenties but for real: parity. Perhaps it had been Susan's influence.

The cemetery tours were thriving. Old ladies bossily shepherding groups this way and that.

Karl fucking Marx.

Fierce histrionics or fierce history (there was, as ever, no way of telling), she had once seen her mother cry real tears at that grave. Tears for the parlous state of her marriage, tears for her fate, tears for the fate of nations. Or tears for Karl himself and all the murder done in his name. Impossible to know. Impossible even to guess. But she could remember the afternoon clearly—could see the fresh flowers, bright yellow and crimson, lying scattered on the hard cut stone, could the hear the hushed voices of the visitors (as if the dead might be further offended—beyond the final insult of mortality), could feel her mother, not much older than she was now, letting go of her arm to press the heel of a hand into the corner of one eye, then the other.

And even as an eight-year-old girl, Isabella was conscious that she was supposed to see her mother's tears. And conscious that she was absolutely
not
supposed to see them. That was the whole reason she had been brought along: to see tears and not to see tears.

The sickness was on him. The sleeping pills were wearing off. He hadn't got any. All he had to do was get up, somehow. Go. Find some. (Call Grisha.) Then this would be over. He hadn't got any. (Club Voltage—go there.) The stink was unbearable—acrid. Each cramp a fresh agony. Make it quicker, God, make it quicker. You bastard. Make it quicker. The smell was the worst thing. And this was him: this body, in these moments. He was this man. Cramp. Shudder. Flesh like a gray plucked goose. (All he had to do was get up.) His stomach squirting. So onto his side, braced against it. His eyes squeezed shut and watering. His nose streaming. Then eyes open again—used syringes. Onto his back. The sallow ceiling. So ill. He was sweating the mattress sodden. Then eyes shut—a blackness made of headache reds and flashing yellow shapes. He wanted to die. All he had to do was get some. (Get up and go. Find. Easy. Half an hour?) He was hot. His armpits wet. He wanted it over. (No. Stay—take the rest of the pills.) He could not keep his legs still. Twitching, shifting, jittery. Worms burrowing through his stomach. So back onto the other side. The pain in his bones, an aching that seemed to dwell in his marrow's marrow. Oh God. All he had to do was get some, end it. Then it would be over. (Don't take the pills. Get up and go.) Lizards' feet on his skin. A nip. A tremor. Take the rest of the pills. Use them all up now. Adrenaline. Oh God, he hadn't got any. All he had to do was get some. Roll over. The sear of a sudden spasm. Oh. God. There was liquid shit in the bed now. He could not do this. He could not believe this. He could not believe that this was he, living
and conscious through these moments. This was his life. And he had made it so. (All he had to do was get up. If he got up, he could stop the pain. Go out. Get some.) He gulped at the water. He swallowed the sleeping pills, all six. Make it quick. Take this from me, God, you bastard. I owe nothing. (All he had to do.) I have nothing. I know nothing. I am nothing.

Gabriel doubled back on the Northern Line, a trip no Northern Liner truly enjoyed: down to Camden, then across the platforms, and then up again to Chalk Farm. Felt like treachery, somehow, going up the other branch. He broke ground, the swarming city there to greet him, walked left around the sharp corner, and so set off up Haverstock Hill. He was looking forward to drinking, Sunday or not. He bent forward as the incline bit. The morning's frostiness had been replaced by an unusually strong wind; it was one of those dark and low-skied cloud-scudding London nights when the windows rattle in their casements and the tarpaulin that hangs on the scaffolding flaps and slaps as if it might fly away at any second. Sudden gusts snatch at scarves, toss careful hair awry, or chivvy at the cracked chimneypots and threaten to tear the roof tiles loose, and the forgotten trees sway and creak, heavy branches bending hard upon their natural snap.

He was late. He reached the cheerfully ever-empty Chinese restaurant and the off-license, passed the tall, amber-lighted, stained glass windows, walked beneath the old-fashioned lamps that hung from the side of the building, under the old sign (swinging heavily) on which Sir Richard Steele himself (a little drunk in the wind) continued to watch the footsore folk of London making their way up the endless hill away from the cramp and toil of their city, and so he entered the pub, tousled and ruffled, through one half of the oddly narrow double wooden door.

The noise rose to greet him like a friendly dog as he stepped into the fug. Just inside, to the left, a two-piece band was playing—or
rather had that very second finished a song, which Gabriel recognized as "It's Alright, Ma." He excused his way through their audience (all standing and trying to clap with their drinks in their hands) and made for the bar. He took stock a moment and then eased his way along, checking the huddles and clusters sitting cozily in the deep red seats at the tables on his right.

He had the impression that he was moving amid an old, old scene. The pub, proudly named after a fourth-rate playwright, had stood in much the same aspect as he saw it now for some three centuries, a wayside host to countless conversations, fights, kisses, partings, declarations, collapses, dances, intrigues, songs, jokes, and tears—everything but work in fact, and therefore everything important in the lives of its denizens. He loved the place—as did his sister. The Steele's great secret being that it never allowed any one deputation of humanity to get the upper hand. Indeed, he sometimes thought that it was as if the very wood of the long crook-shaped bar held it a truth that any section of society quickly becomes unbearable if left to congregate and fester unchallenged among its own.

There was no sign of Isabella. He had the feeling that she would be in the back room, so he edged around the narrow end of the bar, past the turtle-backed stool-sitters (whose drinks arrived without their seeming to make the slightest movement by way of an order), and then ducked left again, around by the big old table that was really the heart of the place, and so came through the low doorway to the semisecret snug at the rear of the building. In here were four or five homely wooden tables, an aged iron brazier in which a fire glowed, a tall mantelpiece on which several candles burned in empty gin bottles, a high mirror above these, and rows of unread books on either side of the chimney breast. For reasons nobody could quite remember or guess, there was also a life-sized mural of a seminaked and rather camp-looking Christ on the interior wall—he was standing entwined in what appeared to be vines, an expression neither particularly ecstatic nor redolent of recent crucifixion on his face. Isabella was sitting at Christ's feet, poring over a printout of some description.

"What you reading?"

She looked up and raised her eyebrows in greeting. "Dylan interview off the Internet."

"Anything interesting?"

"Not really—more or less says that he can't understand why anyone would want to bother interviewing him when everything that is important is right there, clear as day, in his songs."

"I could have told you that." He smiled and came around to her side of the table to put his arm around her for a moment.

"You have. Many times," she said with mock-weariness. "And you will again."

"They were playing 'It's—"

"I know."

He eyed her glass. "You want another drink?"

"Six vodka and cranberries—easy on the cranberry and as much vodka as they can spare."

"You as well?" Gabriel smile became a grin.

"I blame the parents," she said.

He set off back to the bar to find himself a Guinness to go with his sister's request. It was always good to see her. He had missed her when she left. And he missed her still. She looked as sharp as ever. Though he was not sure quite what he was expecting—her jet-black hair suddenly gray, her brown eyes red with sleeplessness and grief? It had been nearly seven weeks. Was it just his imagination, though, or was she looking thinner since the funeral? Hard to tell. The minute he saw her, he felt that it was his responsibility to ask, his responsibility to look after her. More so now than ever. A strange feeling, because of course she could look after herself in all the obvious ways ... But still, he had always felt as if it were his duty to keep watch on those deeper parts that she herself did not even acknowledge or recognize.