Life: An Exploded Diagram (29 page)

I don’t know whether to call it courage or stubbornness or what, but Win went back to work at the laundry three days after the world had failed to end. I imagine she endured a great deal of mockery as well as pain in her gnarled old feet, although the white hat would have covered the shame of her cropped head. She served out her six months to retirement. When she left, she was given an elaborately written certificate confirming her forty years’ devotion to soiled clothes and sheets, a fancy teapot, and a pension of two pounds and twelve shillings a week. She devoted her remaining years to making my parents’ life a misery, by means of prayer and eccentricity and a calculated indifference to personal hygiene. She died, at home, in her sleep, in 1978.

A week after Frankie and I were blown up and apart on Hazeborough beach, my father came face-to-face (or maybe side to side) with Gerard Mortimer in the toilets between the men’s and women’s wards of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. Now, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that here were two men united in grief who might console each other. Might even defy male convention and embrace each other. Oh, no. They had a bitter, foulmouthed, and furious row that attracted the attention of the nursing staff. They were ushered out of the building onto the forecourt (I’d like to think they both still had their flies undone), where they continued their altercation until the police were summoned.

George got his notice, and his outstanding wages, through the post two days later.

When it was decided that I was unlikely to die, he went looking for work. Eventually he was employed by a small factory in Norwich that produced metal-alloy models of tanks and aircraft and soldiers. He bought a secondhand Ford Popular to travel back and forth in. It was an absolute pig to start in the winter. Ruth had to go out in her dressing gown and Wellies and shove the damn thing, with George pumping at its pedals, until it fired and farted off up the road, leaving her shapeless and breathless inside a small cloud of exhaust.

In 1983, two months before he was due to retire, George had a heart attack in the factory storeroom, where he’d gone for a quiet smoke. Falling to the floor, he dragged a number of boxes from the shelves and died under a scattering of samurai warriors and Prussian cavalry.

Ruth never quite recovered from the double blow that she’d suffered on October 28, 1962. Both Win and I had shamed her. Photographs of our different embarrassments had appeared in the
Eastern Daily Press
and the
North Norfolk News.
Smaller reports found their way onto the inside pages of the more vulgar national newspapers. Illicit sex and spectacular religious mania: not the kind of activities that would enhance your status on the Millfields estate. Especially if you were a family with a reputation for getting Above Itself. So Ruth became more and more reclusive. Conveniently — because she was looking after her mother — it became increasingly difficult for her to leave the house. Fortunately, it was still the age of the delivery van. Butchers and fishmongers and greengrocers and coal merchants and milkmen cheerfully supplied her and took the money she proffered through the half-opened back door. When such tradesmen disappeared from the streets, she came to rely on her neighbors and the telephone. She ordered clothes and shoes from the Littlewoods mail-order catalog.

She spent the last twelve years of her life alone, never venturing farther from the house than the end of the garden. The telly increasingly obsessed and satisfied her. She planned her week from the
TVTimes
and grew very fat on sweets and biscuits. In 1995, halfway through
Countdown,
her brain choked on an anagram and she fell sideways onto the sofa. Two hours later, a neighbor who’d failed to get an answer from Ruth’s phone came to the house and found her unconscious.

I flew back from New York the following day. I was sitting by her hospital bed, drawing her, when she died.

Goz surprised us all by becoming an actor. And surprised me even more by becoming a bit of a star. At Cambridge, he’d performed with the Footlights, then joined a repertory company as a do-anything dogsbody. “Assistant stage manager” is the correct term, I believe. He wrote to me now and again during my years with Julie. I may have replied once or twice; then we lost touch. Years later I went with friends to see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of
Twelfth Night
at the Aldwych. Goz was playing Malvolio. He’d changed his name, and it was well into the second act before I recognized his body language, saw through his beard, remembered his voice, and realized that it was him. I almost got to my feet and yelled, “Goz! What the hell are you doing up there?” He’s rather famous because in middle age he got to play, on TV, the part of a melancholic and alcoholic detective who always gets his man but never gets the girl. He has the perfect face for it, a slumped face you couldn’t lift into a smile with the help of a crane. Actually, he’s just about the happiest man I know. His show is in its sixth series, it’s an international hit, and he’s loaded. He writes and directs plays, too. Last year he was here in New York, directing and performing in an off-Broadway production of his play
Brethren.
We had dinner at Le Bernardin. He slupped the oysters like an expert. On my increasingly rare visits to England, I stay with him and his partner, David, at their home in Surrey.

And the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Well, it petered out. The truth is that Nikita Khrushchev was not the reckless and brutal barbarian that Kennedy had taken him for. He’d lived through the Second World War, in which more than twenty-five million Russians had died, one of them his son. He was no more eager for Armageddon than Kennedy was. It’s clear, now, that he never intended to hand control of the Soviet missiles over to that wild boy Fidel Castro. And, despite all his bluster and huffing and puffing, the fact is that as soon as Kennedy announced the sea blockade, Khrushchev gave orders that no Russian ship was to cross it. He knew the game was up. He argued, of course, that he’d won. He’d given the Americans a taste of their own medicine. Taught them what it felt like to have enemy missiles parked on your doorstep. He’d frightened them. He’d put the hedgehog down Kennedy’s shorts. Plus, he’d got Kennedy’s word to take the Yankee missiles out of Turkey. All in all, a good result. So, on Sunday, October 28, 1962, Khrushchev ordered the Cuban missiles to be dismantled, crated up, and sent home. When this decision was announced on Radio Moscow, the newsreader made it sound like a moral and military victory for the peace-loving Soviet people. (As he was speaking, two bloodied bundles of rags, previously known as Frankie Mortimer and Clem Ackroyd, were being wheeled through the doors of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.)

If the Russians had won, the Americans had won even better. The Soviet Union had backed down. The unwavering determination of the United States and the cool nerve of its young president had banished the Red Menace from the neighborhood. The brave frontiersman had stared down the grizzly bear and dispatched it, shuffling and grunting, back to its lair. So everyone was happy, and the cold war continued on its merry way.

Actually, not
everyone
was happy. When Fidel Castro learned of the Russian “betrayal,” he kicked the walls and roared and trashed a mirror. And the hawkish U.S. military men were livid. On that Sunday, the air inside the Pentagon was thick and foul with curses. The generals were psyched up, erect, ready to go. The invasion of Cuba was scheduled for the following Tuesday, for Christ’s sake! And the goddamn politicians had screwed it all up.

“This is the greatest defeat in our history,” crazy Curtis LeMay said. “We should invade Cuba today.”

Much time has passed since then. A lot of blood has flowed under the bridge.

A sniper murdered JFK in 1963, in Dallas. A year later, the hard men of the Kremlin gave Khrushchev the shove; he died, obscurely, in 1971. In 1968 a young Palestinian man by the name of Sirhan Sirhan gunned down Bobby Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel. At the time of writing, Fidel Castro is old and sick but still alive. Since the thrilling days of the crisis, he has seen nine American presidents come and go and witnessed, in shocked disbelief, the defeat of Communism. His brother Raúl runs Cuba now.

The Soviet Union collapsed in on itself, like a diseased lung, in 1989. In that year joyful Germans swarmed over the wall that had divided East Berlin from West Berlin; the wall that had divided, symbolically, Europe. Christian capitalist democracy had won the cold war! Rejoice! The world was no longer divided by crazed ideologies! Rejoice!

I lived through all these times, these great events, without caring very much, concerned with my own aging rather than the world’s. Most of us do likewise. History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We’re not especially interested in what it consists of. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.

And I lived down all those years with the absence that was Frankie. I grew a coating over it. Several coatings. It grew bearable. No longer a mortal wound but a familiar and manageable affliction. A small ulceration of the soul. A slight tinnitus of the heart.

I
WAS UP
and about early on the morning of September 11, 2001. I had a meeting downtown scheduled for eight forty-five, and a good deal of money depended on its outcome. I’d spent the last four months on layouts and drawings for a book with the working title
Fantastic Machines from Fantastic Movies.
It was to be a large-format volume with hyperrealistic spreads by yours truly: cross sections, cutaways, exploded diagrams of James Bond’s cars, spacecraft and gizmos from
Star Trek
and
Star Wars,
stuff like that. A lot of work, because I’d had to invent lots of futuristic technology that doesn’t feature on the screen, that gets bluffed with special effects.

There was more riding on the meeting than my nice fat fee. I’d been commissioned for the job by Val Leibnitz, an art director I’d worked with several times already. I liked Val. She knew what was possible and what was impossible, and if she needed the impossible, she was always prepared to pay extra for it. She’d just moved to a new publisher, and
Fantastic Machines
was her first big project there. She really needed it to succeed, and so did I. The trouble was that the budget for the thing was starting to get swollen and ugly, largely because the film companies wanted big greedy slices of the pie. So I knew that as well as Val and the editorial people, there’d be a couple of cold-eyed accountants at the meeting. Which is why I was at my worktable two hours earlier than usual, getting cranked up on black coffee, going through the designs one last time, rehearsing my spiel, thinking about what could be sacrificed when the accounts people asked how we were going to trim the figures.

The phone rang just before seven thirty. I was going to leave it to the answering machine, but picked up at the fifth chirrup, figuring it might just be Val.

“Hi,” I said.

There was that little pause you often get when someone realizes they’ve got the wrong number.

Then, “Hello? Is that Clem Ackroyd?”

A woman’s voice with an upper-crust English accent. It spoke my name with a tiny hint of amusement, as though not quite able to believe that anybody could really be called that.

And I knew. Ridiculously, impossibly, I knew. My heart hiccuped. I couldn’t speak, and in the ensuing short silence my dodgy hearing played one of its tricks. The faint static on the line turned into an echoic rustling: the sound of time sloughing its skin.

“Hello?”

“Yes,” I managed, and cleared my throat. “Yes, it is.”

“Clem, it’s Françoise. Françoise Mortimer. Frankie.”

“Dear God.”

“Yes.”

“Frankie?”

“Yes.”

I felt dizzy. (Dizziness when I’m confronted by the unexpected is one of the features of my damage.)

“This is . . .” I said, and couldn’t think what the next words might be.

She supplied them. “Something of a surprise, I imagine. A nice one, or horrid?”

“I don’t know. No, of course not horrid. Christ, Frankie.”

“You don’t want to hang up? You can if you want to. If you do, I won’t call again.”

“No,” I said, and there was probably a touch of panic in the word. “I don’t want to hang up. I’m, I was just . . .”

“Oh, Lord,” she said. “What time is it in New York? Have I got my sums wrong? It’s nearly lunchtime here. Did I wake you up?”

“No, it’s fine. I was . . . I had an early start.”

I was staring down at a penciled piece of nonsense labeled
Android Phase Transformer.

I said, “Frankie.”

Like a child who has just discovered a thrilling word and can’t stop saying it.

“Where are you, Frankie?”

“Bratton. The manor. I’ve been here for some time. Looking after my father. He had a stroke. Then he got pneumonia and died. His funeral was yesterday, actually.”

Actually.
I was telescoped to a barn.
It’s beautiful, actually.
Her covering the body that I’d drawn. Memory like a keen fragrance. One I didn’t want. I’d healed and moved on.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“There’s no need to be. He was suffering, and I didn’t like him, anyway. I never forgave him. But I thought it might be interesting to play the role of the dutiful daughter for once. Besides, there was nobody else.”

“What about your mum?” I asked, and immediately regretted it.
Mum
was a word I hadn’t used for years. I was regressing, losing control.

Frankie said, “Nicole died several years ago. They’d separated, anyway. So now I’m a poor little orphan. That’s not true, actually. I’m a terribly rich middle-aged orphan.”

I couldn’t cope with it. I didn’t want to hear this. For almost forty years Frankie had dwelled like a pearl in my chest, oystered in my heart, something to be dug out and examined when I was wheeled, beyond speech and explanation, to my postmortem. On this morning it was grotesquely inappropriate. I was alive and had stuff in the present tense to deal with.

I looked at my watch. I couldn’t read it. The numerals were blurred because I was freshly full of ancient loss.

Somehow, I said, “How did you find me?”

“It wasn’t difficult. I came across one of your books. Months ago. On the back flap, it said, “
Clem Ackroyd lives in New York City.
” I rang Information, and guess what? There were only two C. Ackroyds listed. One was an upholsterer. So the other had to be you.”

“You looked for me.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t look for you.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

She said, “You were always apologizing, Clem. I thought you might have grown out of it by now.”

“I’m . . .”

I stopped myself, and she laughed. I laughed, too, sort of.

I said, “I’m . . . It’s amazing to be talking to you, Frankie. It really is.”

“How damaged were you, Clem? I never really knew.”

Like introducing a normal topic of conversation, such as,
How’s the weather where you are?

I took a breath and said, “I lost most of my left ear. Left side of my face pretty screwed up. Skin grafting was still a primitive science back then. I look pretty good, right profile. Left profile, more like a map of the Norwegian coast. A pink glacier sort of a thing. I lost two fingers of my left hand. Also, I’ve got a gimpy left leg.”

After a small quietness, she said, “You married, though. Julie.”

“How’d you know that?”

She made a humorous sound before she answered. I saw her, imagined her, lift her shoulders and smile.

“Borstead is still the headquarters of the Norfolk CIA.”

“Right,” I said, then, not wanting to, afraid to, “How about you, Frankie?”

“How much do you know?”

“Not a lot. They flew you to America. After that it was just, I dunno, wisps. Rumors. Nobody would talk to me.”

I sat, quietly cracking up and worrying about the time, while she told me her story. Her tone was droll and matter-of-fact.

She’d spent ten months in a clinic in Los Angeles, then another year in California as an outpatient. Nicole had stayed with her all that time. Her father had flown out for both Christmases, and on three other occasions. The doctors and cosmetic surgeons had done a great job, and it had cost a fortune. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to save her eye.

“Oh, no, Frankie. No. You lost an eye?”

“Yes, the right one. It’s okay. One gets used to it. The fake I wear these days is rather brilliant, in fact. You wouldn’t be able to tell, unless I’m watching tennis.”

She hadn’t thought that anyone would be interested in her. But was surprised by how many men seemed to find a girl with a glass eye and a limp attractive. When she was twenty-four, she married “a rich chump” and for nine years went by the name of Françoise Chamberlain before leaving and later divorcing him. They had a child, a daughter, now twenty-eight, a textile designer, living in Paris. Her name is Clementine.

Frankie paused after telling me this, as if waiting for me to comment.

“I don’t have any children, myself,” I said eventually.

Her parents’ marriage was, according to Frankie, a late victim of what she called “our accident.” Nicole had not wanted to leave California. She’d liked the climate, hadn’t wanted to return to the twin bleaknesses of Norfolk and her marriage. She used Frankie’s “condition” to make excuses for delaying their departure.

“Besides,” Frankie said, “I think she had a little thing going on, if you know what I mean.”

“Really? A man, you mean?”

“One of my surgeons, believe it or not. I don’t know. Maybe I was imagining it. He was a lovely man. I was a bit in love with him myself.”

And, at last, a worm of jealousy stirred in my chest.

Gerard had issued an ultimatum, then another. All the same, it was another year before Frankie and her mother returned to Bratton Manor. Things turned nasty almost immediately. For reasons Frankie couldn’t understand at the time, each of her parents blamed the other for what had happened to her. And they both blamed Frankie.

“So there was this triangle of blame, Clem, you see? We couldn’t get outside of it. If one of us did get free for a while, the other two would drag her back in. Or him. Because that’s the only way we . . . it was the only relationship we had.”

“So, uh, how were you at the time? Like, physically, I mean.”

“Oh, I was fine. Well, I was fine with myself. I didn’t particularly want to meet people, you know? I rode a lot. Hey, d’you remember Marron?”

“Yes, of course.”

So anyway, Frankie said, after eighteen months of triangular hell, Nicole went to Montreal to visit her parents. She never came back. She wouldn’t allow Gerard a divorce on the grounds that she was a catheter.

“Christ, Clem, did I just say
catheter
? I meant
Catholic.
”

I thought,
She’s been drinking.
What time did she say it was in England?

I said, “Interesting Freudian slip.”

“No. Catheters have been a major concern of mine, these last few months.”

“Right,” I said.

So Gerard had soldiered on, pretending that the separation was temporary. His wife’s parents were unwell and needed her. She was looking after their business interests over there. The story varied, then became uninteresting. Gossip and conjecture moved on elsewhere. Gerard started drinking heavily.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Your mother didn’t take you with her?”

“No. She left me, too.”

But, Frankie said, that was okay. She wouldn’t have wanted to go back to Montreal, anyway. As it turned out, Nicole moved to California within a year. Frankie had, she said, married the Chamberlain guy so as to put an end to “the boomeranging back and forth across the Atlantic” between her parents. Then, when Clementine was three years old, Nicole had died in a road accident near San Diego. In her will, she’d left everything to Frankie. A lot of money. Much more than Frankie had expected.

I checked my watch again. Oh, my God, five past eight already. I tucked the phone between my shoulder and my ear and started fumbling drawings into my portfolio.

“Frankie, listen, I’m sorry, but I have to . . .”

“I’ve thought about you a lot, Clem,” she said, out of nowhere, stopping me in my tracks. “More than you could imagine. Especially since being back here. Revisiting the places where we used to meet.”

I felt myself welling up again, like an inconsolable child.

I said (
why,
for God’s sake?), “Have you been to Hazeborough?”

“Yes.”

I waited.

“I . . . I didn’t recognize it. I didn’t remember it. I can’t remember anything about . . . about that day. Actually, that’s not quite true. I do remember that morning, cycling down the back lane away from the manor. I can even remember what I was wearing. Then nothing until I woke up in the hospital. I wish more than anything that I could remember. I thought that going there might bring it back.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does, Clem. It does to me.”

There was a sort of challenge in the way she said it. But there was no way I was going to respond, even if I’d known how to. And time was pressing.

“So, Frankie, what will you do now? What’s next?”

“I’m staying here, of course.” She sounded surprised by my question. “The estate is my responsibility now.”

“And is that a responsibility you want?”

“Oh, yes. Very much so. In fact, that’s why I called you. Or, rather, it’s one of the reasons I called you.”

“Really? How so?”

I heard her take in a long breath and let it out.

“I intend to restore it, Clem. Make it beautiful again. Put everything back.”

“Uh, right. What does that mean, exactly?”

She started to talk faster, more urgently. For which I was grateful.

“You know what my father did to this place. He, he
scoured
it. Leveled it. Trashed it. Turned it into a prairie, a wasteland. It’s ugly. I hate it.”

“
Our
fathers,” I said. “Fathers, plural. Yours and mine.”

“Yes,” she said. “George bulldozed everything Gerard pointed at. But I’m going to put right what they did. I’m going to replant trees, hedges. Copses. Woods. Dig out the ditches and ponds they filled in. I’m going to bring birdsong back to this place before I die. I don’t care if it costs every penny I own.”