Authors: Margaret Drabble
So, while Bessie Barron spent her first night on ice, Chrissie Sinclair drank pale pink iced soup from an iced goblet, followed by a large rare steak and a glass of burgundy. Emotion had rendered her ravenous. She needed meat. The waiters did not ask after her mother, so she assumed that they already knew that her mother was dead. The diners at the other tables did not know. None of them spoke to her, though they nodded a polite good evening to her, as usual. It was as well that they had all kept at a discreet distance: receiving condolences over steak and burgundy would have been awkward and inelegant.
Chrissie, loitering over her coffee, read her book. She had finished
Manhattan Transfer
.; and was reading or pretending to read a bilingual edition of the poems and translations of Yves Bonnefoy which had unaccountably been presented to or perhaps off-loaded upon the
QE2
library. She had picked the volume up out of curiosity, but clearly providence had placed it there. The French poet, of whom Chrissie had never heard, spoke of the deep light leaping from the dark wood and the cracked earth, and of the lifeless shore beyond all singing. This was the shore that Bessie Barron had reached.
Un inerte rivage au-delà de tout chant.
Chrissie gazed at the words on the page, and part of her mind read them.
Cracked earth and deep light. Chrissie ate a truffle, and thought of Nick Gaulden. She thought of her mother, sitting by the fire at Queen’s Norton, rehearsing her everlasting litany of complaint.
Her father, on his deathbed, had taken to reading poetry. Chrissie had seen the volume of Keats on his bedside table in the hospital. He had gone back, at the end, to the old Breaseborough School favourites he had studied with Miss Heald, and had boasted to Chrissie that he was rereading Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
and
Jane Eyre
—a cheery duet, he had drily observed. But he had long given up his old chant of ‘If with all your heart ye truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me.’ Had he found God? Had God found him? Or had he despaired of God?
Chrissie sat long over her coffee, thinking of these things.
At last she stirred herself, as the Irish waitress began to hover. She suffered and survived a small crisis about the tipping of the excessively attentive wine waiter, and then she set out again to prowl the floating but by now almost immobile island. She put her head through the door of the cinema, but rejected the infantile sex comedy on offer. The harp-playing in the Crystal Bar was too refined for her mood, but she sat for a few minutes in the Yacht Club sipping a brandy and soda and watching an unfortunate cabaret vocalist trying to arouse some response from an apathetic audience. She then moved on to the Queen’s Grill, where there was dancing, and, as she had rightly guessed, a complement of gigolos of both sexes.
The ageing dancers were a little more lively than the cabaret audience, and willing to be organized into one or two group routines by a fresh-faced young man with a microphone. Grey-haired women linked arms and raised their Pop-Sox-clad knees and put themselves through their paces, old men tripped and turned. Legs bulged over elastic garters, knickers and petticoats flashed, bald heads glittered beneath the coloured lights. This was the dance of death. Chrissie smiled vaguely at the macabre scene and had another brandy, tapped time with her foot and sped them on. When the next quickstep began, a kilted professional approached her solitary table, but she shook her head, and kept her station, and gazed on in admiration as a six-foot dyed-blond Valkyrie in stiletto heels swooped down upon a small, silver-haired, moustached and dapper chap in a tuxedo, and swept him onto the dance floor. She pushed him and shoved him and swung him and pummelled him round. She could have picked him up and thrown him over her shoulder, but she didn’t. Chrissie almost fancied taking a turn with this giantess, but did not think she would get the offer.
She was not interested in sex comedies or gigolos. It would have been brave to celebrate her mother’s death by bedding down with a stranger in a kilt, but she wasn’t up to it. She had lost interest in sex decades ago, when she had lost Nick Gaulden. She had once tried to explain this to a therapist, who had greeted her assertion with disbelief. But the therapist hadn’t been to bed with Nick Gaulden, had he? So how could he know what he was talking about?
Midnight found Chrissie Sinclair by the roulette wheel in the Casino, with a pile of five-dollar plastic chips on the green baize in front of her. In the old days, in Italy, she and Nick had bet on their own ages, and had won. They had scooped in their spoils and departed from the table in triumph. Luck had been with them, for they had believed themselves lucky. They had needed the money, and it had come to them. Now she needed it no more, and the numbers of her years were well off the board. What should she bet on? She followed the play. The red and the black, the
pair
and the
impair.
She ventured a chip on a
carré,
and lost it, then ventured another on the red, and won. This was cautious play for reckless Chrissie Barron. Should she risk all on the age of her daughter? Now was the time, for even Faro would soon be too old for the roulette table, and off the map of chance.
Chrissie did not want to bring bad luck to her daughter by losing on her number. Chrissie was filled with superstitious fear about Faro. Would Faro marry, have children? Begin again with the little birthdays at the bottom of the table? Faro had proved cautious so far, with lovers whom Chrissie could not approve. Faro was too cautious, too kind. So far she had wasted a couple of years of her young life on a drunken Irish student, and another three on a temperamental married bookseller old enough to be her father, and nearly as unreliable. Faro, like her father, suffered from the delusion—or was it a delusion?—of thinking herself indispensable and irreplaceable. She found it hard to get rid of spongers and admirers. Faro ought to be more ruthless. Was it Chrissie’s fault that Faro played the game she played?
The wheel spun, and Chrissie watched it, and did not venture.
The last time Chrissie had slept with Nick Gaulden had been in New York. They had been divorced for some years, and he had already left Fiona McKnight for Stella Wakefield. Chrissie had encountered him there by chance, as she walked along the south side of Central Park. They had met beneath the great golden angel who leads William Tecumseh Sherman to victory on his golden horse. Nick had materialized like a phantom before her eyes in the neon-lit New York twilight. She had so often seen Nick’s double appear and fade and alter before her that she had doubted this apparition, but instead of shedding Nick’s gait and features as he approached, this figure had continued intensively to acquire them, and he it was, and there he was, before her on the gravel path. What had he been doing in New York? She could not remember. Why had she herself been there? She could not remember. They had greeted one another and spent the evening drinking disgracefully together, as in the old days of their youth. They had ended up in bed together in the Hotel St Moritz.
She could not remember what had happened during the night. Had he made love to her? He had probably tried and failed. He had been very drunk. And so, to be fair, had she.
Not much of an ending to her grand passion, to her one-and-only passion.
Nick had probably forgotten the whole dreamlike and improbable episode. Had it ever occurred, or had she invented it? Should she ring him, ship-to-shore, and ask him? She hadn’t spoken to him for a year. Had she got a number for him? Where was he living, with that woman called Jenny Pargiter, and their two brats? Was he still in Kentish Town? Faro would know. Faro was still in touch with her father.
The wheel spun, and defiant Chrissie placed a pile of five-dollar chips on Faro’s number. Lucky Faro, let her win. The ball rattled, and settled, and fell neatly into Faro’s slot. Of course it did. She had known it would. She should have gambled her all on Faro.
Chrissie took herself and her winnings to bed at two in the morning. She kept one of the plastic counters, and cashed in the rest. The sin ship had now entered territorial waters, and the tables had closed, but the television was still playing. Had Bessie been watching the image of the ocean even as she crossed the straits between this world and the next? If so, hers had been an easy and a blessed passage. Joe had died fighting for breath.
Chrissie lay in bed and watched the bridge and the water and listened to Schubert, and then flicked channels until she found the channel of the perpetually playing Shakespeare cycle. The Shakespeare lottery, the
Sortes Shakespeareanae.
Would there be some riddling equivocation for her at this dark hour, some joyful or fearful prophecy?
Shakespeare’s Antony held the screen, in extremis, at the gates of death, calling upon Eros and the night sky.
Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish,
A vapour sometimes, like a bear, or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain or blue promontory
With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs;
They are black vesper’s pageants.
Chrissie lay on her bed in the luxury of unnatural survival. Her head was spinning as the wheel had spun. Unlike her poor father, she had managed to outlive her mother. Time and space stretched before her. She was free to go where she would, and do what she would, and nothing she did would ever hurt Bessie anymore. She no longer needed to protect her mother from the insults and derision of the world, from hostile strangers, from herself. Her suffering mother could suffer no more. It was over. She could never harm her mother more, in thought, in word or in deed.
Unarm, Eros; the long day's task is done
And we must sleep
.
Chrissie listened, entranced. It was enough that such words had once been written and had come down through time to her. Her mother had appropriated and imprisoned words and language, and now they were freed for Chrissie. At last she could acknowledge their dominion. Chrissie had for many years been a secret reader. She had resented Bessie’s approval of this activity. She could make her peace, now, with the Word.
Chrissie shut her eyes, and listened. Bessie had, in her peculiar way, despised Shakespeare. She had been heard to say that she never wanted to see
King Lear
or
Macbeth
again, thank you, she had had enough worries in her own life without going looking for them. And as for
The Winter’s Tale,
why, she could write a better play herself.
Remembering this, Chrissie smiled. And Chrissie fell asleep to Shakespeare, as the liner sailed slowly onwards to the Verrazano Bridge and the Statue of Liberty and the St Moritz Hotel, into which, for old times’ sake, she had booked herself and her mother.
Faro told a spirited version of this story to her new blood-sealed friend Steve Nieman. She related it as she clambered down with him from Coddy Holes towards her blue Toyota. Faro had heard her mother’s version of this tale many times, and this time, as usual, she had not avoided the often reiterated cliché that always accompanied the telling of it. How lucky Grandma Barron had been, to die so peacefully, in her bed, in her sleep, in expectation of a nice holiday! Not many people have it so good. Nothing in her life became her like the leaving of it, said Faro to Steve Nieman, tritely, over a cappuccino in the organic restaurant. Though poor Ma had had a nightmare with the New York immigration authorities and the customs formalities and the coroner and the chapel of rest. One of Grandma Barron’s suitcases was never seen again, though luckily it hadn’t been the one with the Cudworth jewels in it. Grandma had been flown home at great expense and cremated back in Farnleigh, and scattered under the beech tree at Woodlawn. That’s where her Cudworth-Bawtry DNA ended up. Good-bye, Grandma. Faro had been there and had helped to dig her in.
And thus, once more, that complex, unfinished, difficult and unhappy woman was dispatched to her last resting place, simplified beyond recognition. Faro told the story well. She told it better than her mother did. She was able to make it more amusing than her mother could. Faro had been quite fond of her poor old grandma.
The mitochondrial DNA of Bessie Barron lives on in her granddaughter, although Bessie’s had cheated the worm and the maggot and the prying needle of Dr Hawthorn.
Faro’s DNA swab lies with many other Cudworth swabs in a laboratory. It is simple extract of Faro. But Faro is not a simple person, and she too has been simplified by narration. We do not know much about Faro. Why, at her age, and with her beauty, is she living alone in a flat in Shepherd’s Bush? Why, at her age, is she so obsessed by death? Why does she collect lame ducks? Why is she attached to the deadly Sebastián in his dreary Holborn flat? Why is she allowing him to devour her with his sticky secretions?
Faro, driving south, away from Steve Nieman and Steve the Skeleton, is asking herself these very questions, and is not coming up with many answers. It must be her dead father’s fault, but she can’t work out quite why. She is hoping that Steve will help her to change all that. It is early days yet with Steve, but they have exchanged vows—not lovers’ vows, but vows of a sort, vows to speak soon, to meet again, to keep in touch, to touch one another again.
If Faro does not have a daughter, her mitochondrial DNA will perish with her and the chain will be broken. It is already getting late in the biological day. She is in her thirties, and the hours hasten. Does Sebastian’s DNA call to her? Is it trying to intertwine its helix with hers? What can it be that he wants of her? He does not seem to want to marry her or even to live with her. He does not want to make an honest woman of her, but he seems to expect her to spend her energy making some kind of an honest or at least a viable man of him. Nothing like a marriage has taken place, and yet, at times, thinking of Seb, Faro feels like a drearily married woman, committed to making do and making the best of a bad lot.