Anticipation (23 page)

So Joshua Harding’s brain calls it quits at the respectable age of seventy-two, lucky Harry makes it to eighty-nine with nothing more than shaky hands and a tic in his eye, but Ted is bedridden at sixty-seven and Sarah can’t stand at sixty-two, and my mother — my mother is only fifty-eight years old.

Twenty-three years older than me.

Suddenly, twenty-three years doesn’t seem like a long time. I can feel them rising, time and acronyms lapping against my plate glass. I can feel myself going under. It’s not that I’m afraid of death — spontaneous non-existence has its charm. But this is a long ride down. Waiting for the water to find its way in. Around the sills or up through the floor. Watching it mount to ankle and knee. My chest. My chin. Unable, by then, to move at all. Wedged in by garbage. The Hardings’ genetic inability to get rid of their old rubbish.

It’s a sobering thought. And I’m so busy with it — with Wikipedia, with my emptying bottle and sceptical ghosts — that I don’t have much time to consider what Maggie might be doing right now. What’s going through her dying mind tonight, sixteen hundred kilometres away. How quiet it is there in Bradbury Street, for my mother, alone in her bed.

I do see Maggie. Of course I do. When I still live a fifteen-minute drive away from her, I mean. After William’s death, I pop round there every few months — when I want something, usually. One of my old books. A Swiss roll tin or a bain-marie or pickled onion forks or a clear conscience. On a winter’s day in ’96, it’s Lester Bodgewick I want. Which makes this visit tricky.

Six months have passed since we saw them, but Grandpa William’s photographs still offend my mother — which, in its turn, still offends me. Their content, of course, is enough to upset anyone. But that isn’t Maggie’s problem.

‘I just don’t see,’ she’ll repeat, if I give her the chance, ‘why he had to keep it all bottled up. Why he didn’t tell anyone.’

Of course she doesn’t. How could she, my problem-halving mother, generous to a fault with all kinds of discomfiting information?

I know that by ‘anyone’, she really means her. And the last time we got into this, I was forced to point out — only half in spite — that he might have talked about it all the time to the blokes at the RSA. For all we knew.

I almost hope he did.

But for my mother, that would only make it so much worse. Because already she feels betrayed. Poor little Maggie whose real Daddy hid in a suitcase all his life and never came out to play.

I, on the other hand, feel — what, exactly? Precious. Exalted, even. Are those the right words? Like an American TV child, or the leading lady in an old film.
Casablanca
, maybe. Whatever you call it, I like the view from up here, on Grandpa’s pedestal of silence.

I won’t have Maggie run him down. I’ll be grateful enough for both of us, because, to tell the truth, I’m a little in love with William Biggs. Not that I can’t see there are things he might be blamed for. (Sarah, that forgotten heel of a stone wearing down to nothing in his pocket. Not marrying Nurse Maura, and having happy, chubby grandbabies, free of Harding blood, to gurgle in front of Dublin Bay.)
But not his silence. Never for all those things he knew, and didn’t say.

My backstage grandfather, who knew there was no magic. But still he came out and took his seat, and let us enjoy the show. And if he did spoil it for me, in the end, with his left-over suitcase of proofs, it was only by accident. He did his very best not to give the trick away. He really tried.

My hero, William Biggs. That quarter of my blood. It’s too late, of course, to love him now. But I’m grateful — not just for his silence, but for what he wasn’t, all the things he didn’t do. For his lack of prejudice. His utter belief in the democracy of evil. (And maybe I’m wrong about Sarah. Maybe Will Biggs was the perfect man to marry a Harding, after all. What could the sins of one bloodline be to a man convinced that it’s cruelty and need, not sugars and phosphates, that form the backbone of all human DNA?)

All of which, if I’m not careful, could take my mother and me a long way from Lester Bodgewick. Or at least that’s what I think, on a winter’s day in 1996, as I knock on Maggie’s door.

She’s looking well. Even and neat. Though her hands shake a bit as she puts the kettle on, and when I go to the toilet, I look in the bathroom cabinet, just to see. I try to keep up. It helps to know which drugs you’re talking to, sometimes.

‘You know,’ I say, when I get back to the lounge, ‘I came across this thing on the internet the other day.’ Very casually, as if I hadn’t been looking. ‘About reading soldiers’ service records from World War Two. It sounded really interesting.’ I sip my coffee, nibble a gingernut. ‘I was wondering about sending away for Uncle Eddie’s.’

Sharp-nosed Maggie rises above her chemical calm. ‘I don’t think we can do that.’

She’s half right. I can’t. She can, though.

‘We should be able to,’ I say. ‘They’re released to the serviceman’s closest living relatives. That’s us, now, right? We just have to sign a form.’

And there it is, laid out on the table between us — the real reason I’m here. I’m my mother’s daughter. Curious. And I can’t wait until Maggie dies. You see, I’m presuming, back in ’96, that it will be a long time.

‘It gets worse,’ I say, eight years later, to Maggie’s Dunedin specialist, ‘with every generation. Isn’t that right?’

‘We don’t know what type of cerebellar degeneration we’re dealing with yet,’ he admonishes me. ‘It may not be genetic.’

Really? Just five generations of bad luck?

‘But yes,’ he continues, carefully, ‘I’m afraid inherited
polyglutamine
diseases do tend to become more severe as they’re passed down. It’s a phenomenon we call anticipation.’

I tell him I can wait. He doesn’t laugh. But then, maybe he’s heard that one before.

‘I really don’t think you should worry too much. Those diseases are very rare — SCA3 is usually only seen in people from the Azores.’ And then he makes his own little joke. ‘I take it Galbraith’s not a Portuguese name?’

(Ah, Marialuisa. But the tests will show what they show, and the Portuguese Widow’s Dosshouse seems too long and strange a story for a sceptical man with a foot of files on his desk and his back to a harbour view.)

He looks, as busy doctors must, at his watch. ‘Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?’

Maggie has already gone off to wait for her blood test. I’ve a contract on a six-bed listing in Parnell due to confirm today, and I should be calling solicitors, checking clauses, making sure my new PA remembers to send flowers and champagne.

‘When will you get the results?’

‘We’ll be in touch when they come through.’

With some difficulty I make my way out, back down to the ground, through an obstacle course of the variously ill, the lost and nervous. Students in scrubs learning that it’s harder than it sounds to do no harm. If they’re more than a year past doodling on pencil-cases, I’d be surprised.
Janine 4 Greg 4 Eva.
God, I hate being back down here.

Outside, there’s a cold wind blowing up from the port. And somewhere, above the motorway noise, a bell — an actual fucking
bell, for Christ’s sake — is ringing. I stand there, breathing in other people’s cigarette smoke, surrounded by concrete. My phone is in my hand, but I can’t seem to make my calls.

Maggie and I drive home, the setting sun in our eyes. Skirting the swan-black lake in silence, breathing in as we cross the Balclutha Bridge. White-knuckled, not looking down.

It’s well into 1997 before Uncle Eddie’s army service record finally turns up in the post. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge, if I was looking — houses sold and chardonnay drunk, mothers and husbands avoided.

But I can’t say that I really notice the wait — I’m not in any hurry. It’s idle curiosity, not smouldering need, that makes me wonder about the meaning of Lester Bodgewick. The significance of that one dead boy, between the mountains of Belsen Camp and Will Biggs’ dead brother-in-law. Just one exposure before Eddie.

It’s a beautiful shot — a grubby pietà, the Death of Innocence perfectly framed. But Will Biggs’ proofs contain plenty of those. So there must have been something else about Bodge. Something to merit enlargement, and a name. And I wonder what that thing was. What my grandfather saw to make him press the shutter.

Not all the time, though. There are nights when I do just eat ice cream and watch
Friends
. A lot of the time I forget all about him. (Am I contradicting myself? Yes and no. It was true and not true — it came and went, my obsession with Lester Bodgewick. There were moments, many of them, when I might have let it go completely. It’s only hindsight that tempts me to give him more weight than he had, back then, in those years when he was just a romantic loose end, my tender boy, arranged on no particular blanket.)

And I have to admit that I’m not at all interested in Uncle Eddie. I already know how my great-uncle got his head blown apart. I must have heard it a hundred times. And I believe in it, that story of Sarah’s brother, Ted’s son. Because I like him, I suppose. People always did, even William Biggs. So there’s nothing to wonder about dead Eddie.

Even his military record turns out to be, if I’m honest, a bit of a snore. I read over it when Greg goes out, sitting on the sofa, curled up in front of the muted TV. There was some trouble with a girl in a Bremen bar. Otherwise Eddie didn’t do much that anyone thought was worth writing down. Not until his very last day. Of which there is an account, rather terse, but no different to Nanny Biggs’ in its details.

Lester Bodgewick isn’t mentioned at all. So I’m disappointed. And a little aggrieved. Not just that I’ve wasted my time and money, but for Uncle Eddie, too. Because he saved all his heroism right to the end, when the war was hours from over and no one was looking any more, and they were all so busy celebrating they forgot about him, the medal he should have been up for.

I put the file down and raise a glass to him. The Hardings’
last-minute
hero. Raise another to Bodge. Whatever their connection was. And that’s where I could stop.

But I don’t. The next week, I start all over again, with Bodge himself this time. It occurs to me that he, too, must have next of kin. So I go looking.

I’d like to say that it’s out of respect. That I owe some debt of understanding to the fallen. To Bodge, for being young and innocent and dead without a story. To Eddie, the saviour of my blood, for proving that Hardings do choose to die for things other than their own convenience. I owe it to them to find out what happened on their last day.

I could even say that it’s my business. That the meaning of Bodge is the key to my grandfather, the one missing piece in the puzzle of William Biggs. That I owe it to him — a duty of my newfound love — to unearth the last of those things he made it his life’s work to bury.

But those would be lies, I think. I’m pretty sure it’s just my genes at work. That all I’m carrying with me, as I stroll, at a leisurely pace, towards Vita Bodgewick, is a great big festering bag of Harding curiosity.