The White Family E-Book

Maggie Gee

• Herausgeber: Telegram Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Alfred White, a London park keeper, rules his home with a mixture of rigidity and tenderness that has estranged his three children. For years, Alfred's daughter Shirley and her black partner Elroy have avoided her comically ignorant younger brother Dirk, who admires his father and hates people of colour. But family ties are strong: when Alfred collapses on duty one day, all the children rush to be with him. The scene is set for bloodshed, forcing Alfred to make a climactic choice between justice and kinship. Exploring the roots of racism in British society, The White Family traces what happens when a family reaches breaking point after years of love and hate, violence and polite silence. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes an introduction by Bernardine Evaristo and a note from the author revealing the story behind this contemporary classic. SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION AND THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 'In this ground-breaking new novel, Maggie Gee bravely and uniquely explores the nuances of racism from the perspective of the perpetrators, within the context of family relationships. The resulting work is a brilliant depiction of British society at the end of the twentieth century.'--Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other 'Outstanding … tender, sexy and alarming.' --Jim Crace 'Courageous, honest, powerfully real'-- The Times 'Gee is unflinching in her exploration of the causes and consequences of racism.'--The Observer 'The White Family points to new directions in British writing. Full of power and passion as well as some timely warnings … it deserves the widest possible readership.'--Literary Review 'A transcendent work.'-- Daily Telegraph 'A triumph of hope over despair, reconciliation over bitterness … an unashamedly contemporary novel that embraces the ideological and emotional chaos of our time.'--The Independent  'An audacious, ground-breaking condition-of-England novel that delves for the roots of xenophobic hatred and violence in the English hearth … The White Family is finely judged and compulsively readable. Its head-on scrutiny of the uglier face of fair Albion is the more impressive for its rarity in British fiction.'--The Guardian

Leseprobe

THE WHITE FAMILY

Maggie Gee is the author of seventeen acclaimed books, which have been translated into more than fifteen languages. These include the novels The Red Children and My Cleaner, and a memoir, My Animal Life. First published in 2002, The White Family was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Gee is a Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She was awarded an OBE in 2012 for her services to literature.

‘The White Family points to new directions in British writing. Full of power and passion, as well as some timely warnings, this is one of the year’s finest novels ... it deserves the widest possible readership.’Literary Review

‘Intensely touching, full of ironies, situational and verbal, [and] brilliantly connected with contemporary society.’Financial Times

‘The White Family tackles an unspeakable subject with quiet courage. Beautifully written, it tells the complex story of racism from the point of view of the perpetrators. The result is an astonishing examination of the changes, complexities and difficulties at the heart of a multi-ethnic suburban community.’The Big Issue

‘The White Family is an audacious, groundbreaking condition-of-England novel which tilts expertly at a middle class fallacy that racism is something “out there”, in the football terraces or the sink estates … Finely judged and compulsively readable.’The Guardian

‘A transcendent work, splitting open a family to bare the rough edges of prejudice, self-righteousness and petulant self-justification that we all recognise. The words of James Baldwin resonate throughout: “Books taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the things that connected me to everyone who was alive and who had ever been alive.”’Daily Telegraph

‘Gee’s book is bold because of her willingness to write about the living, shifting present. An unashamedly contemporary novel – a millennium novel, if you like – that embraces the ideological and emotional chaos of our times.’The Independent

‘Skilful structure and tender, precise prose.’The Observer

‘Picking up where Toni Morrison leaves off, Gee reminds us that racism not only devastates the lives of its victims, but also those of its perpetrators. Like Eugene O’Neill, Maggie Gee moves skilfully between compassion and disgust.’TLS

‘Elegant style and an expert ear for dialogue … courageous, honest, powerfully real and not a little disturbing.’The Times

‘Full of good writing ... Maggie Gee is one of our most ambitious and challenging novelists.’The Spectator

‘Outstanding … tender, sexy and alarming.’Jim Crace

ALSO BY MAGGIE GEE

The Red Children

Blood

Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

My Animal Life

My Driver

The Blue

My Cleaner The Flood

The Ice People

The Burning Book

Lost Children

Where Are the Snows Grace

Light Years

The Burning Book

Dying, In Other Words

Maggie Gee

THE WHITE FAMILY

TELEGRAM

TELEGRAM

An imprint of Saqi Books

26 Westbourne Grove

London W2 5RH

www.telegrambooks.com

www.saqibooks.com

First published 2022 by Telegram

Copyright © Maggie Gee 2002, 2008, 2022

Maggie Gee has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All rights reserved.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84659 215 7

eISBN 978 1 84659 137 2

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

To Vic and Aileenand for Hanna

CONTENTS

Introduction

Author’s Note

The White Family

Acknowledgements

Reading Group Questions

INTRODUCTION

It has been such a pleasure re-reading The White Family after a gap of twenty years since its first publication in 2002. I always remembered it as a powerful and important book that was way ahead of its time. Returning to it confirms this.

Maggie Gee has long been a consummate imaginer of other people’s lives through her many books. The central characters in this one are mainly, but not exclusively, the inner circle of the working class ‘White’ family. Their complicated relationships with each other are the product of Gee’s deep interest in and understanding of human motivation and behaviour. Even when her protagonists aren’t likeable, they remain complex and intriguing. Her sensitive portrayal of them makes them understandable, even relatable.

Gee has long been a clear-eyed interrogator of the power dynamics inherent in class, gender and race, as well as inside families. All of this plays out in her novel. By detailing her characters interior and exterior lives, she gives life to these important social issues. Their thoughts, reactions and intimacies occur in real time, with the tensions between them providing a strong narrative for us to connect to.

Set in Hillesden, an imaginary conflation of the London towns of Harlesden and Willesden, the novel centres around the patriarch of the family, Alfred, an elderly park keeper who is as bigoted and difficult as they come. He could so easily have been portrayed as a one-dimensional ‘baddie’, but instead, we are invited to empathise with him, even though we might not agree with much of what he does, thinks and stands for. His devoted wife, May, is almost saintly in comparison – although not without her own guiles. Their only daughter Shirley has chosen black partners, which is akin to putting a knife in the heart of her racist father. Of the two sons, the eldest is leading an apparently glamorously successful life, while the younger one is unable to make much of a life for himself at all. Tagging on is Thomas, a family friend, another underachiever.

Hillesden is as much a character as the people, especially Alfred’s beloved park. He mourns the supposedly halcyon days of the pre-war era with which he was so familiar, and despises the now solidly entrenched multicultural, multiracial one of today. Through him, we see the difficulties people can have in adjusting to this social change and progress, because they are too attached to the past – a past that infuses the present throughout the book as people reflect on what was, and what is, and what they might become.

The novel shows how anger and unhappiness at one’s own life can lead to the targeting and scapegoating of people who are not responsible for it, including domestic violence; how bigotry and repressed homosexual desires can lead to an expressed rage; and how the messy dysfunction of family relationships and resentments, when buried and unresolved, can lead to a terrible emotional toxicity.

Maggie Gee is a consciously political writer who bravely dares to delve into the big social schisms of our times and refract them through perceptive and enjoyable storytelling. As her characters undergo their own transformations, so too do we. Over twenty years ago she was a rare white voice exploring race as a British novelist. It is territory that even today few white writers dare to tread, as if it’s a minefield to be avoided rather than one of the most important challenges to be explored. Her subsequent two novels, both brilliant and very funny, My Cleaner and My Driver, about the relationship between a Ugandan woman and a white Englishwoman, also picked up on issues around race, culture and difference.

Maggie Gee is one of Britain’s most fearless and accomplished novelists with a substantial oeuvre of seventeen books to her name. With the publication of her latest novel, The Red People, and the reissue of this one, I hope that her inspiring, risk-taking, compassionate and compelling writing will reach a new generation of readers.

Bernardine Evaristo

London, December 2021

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When The White Family was first published in 2002, it received excellent reviews and was shortlisted for two global prizes, that year’s Orange (now Women’s) Prize and the 2003 International Dublin Literary Award. All in all, the book seemed like a big success.

In fact, though, I had begun writing it nine years earlier, in 1993, and between 1995 and 1996 it had been turned down by most mainstream British publishers and a few independents. The rejection letters were as negative as the eventual reviews were positive. I spent a long period in creative despair before I wrote another novel, The Ice People, and tried to publish The White Family again, this time successfully. So what, if anything, changed between 1995, when it was universally rejected, and 2001, when it was accepted?

The White Family was about many things. At the time we were living near beautiful Roundwood Park, in the borough of Brent, and loved Kensal Rise Library. The book was about the importance of public space, and the need to protect it, as the titles of its parts, ‘The Park’, ‘The Hospital’ and so on, suggest. Both my parents had died in 1992, freeing me to fictionalise some aspects of their characters in this novel’s May and Alfred (though as it happens, neither of them was a racist.)

In a more direct, primary way, I was motivated to write The White Family by my grief and shame about the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager with a brilliant future, at the hands of white racist thugs in South London. The local primary school which my daughter Rosa attended was, like Brent itself in those days, very multiracial and multicultural. Our neighbours were Jamaican, Bajan, Ghanaian, Indian and Pakistani as well as Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

In the immediate aftermath of the murder and during the hopelessly inadequate police investigation, some of my black friends became unable to look or smile at me: they were, for obvious reasons, disgusted with all white people. I was driven to write a book that, putting it as simply as I first felt it, said which side I was on. It’s a choice that my character Alfred also faces in the climactic scene of the book, as does his daughter Shirley, but ‘sides’ don’t exist in the same way in novels, evolving slowly and subtly through time, and only tested at climactic moments.

I hope I turned my indignation at this stupid, senseless crime into a deeper exploration of how hatred and prejudice begin, within the family, like everything else, but spreading out into every level of society and existing within every cultural and racial group. My focus was on white British prejudice against people of colour, but the novel also shows black homophobia and prejudice. I asked whether there is desire in hatred, and satirised small blindnesses in white liberal thinking.

It is difficult to reconstruct what you feel when you are writing a book, because very soon the book has its own overwhelming momentum, the characters are thinking and talking on their own and the sentences are the emotional rhythms of the writer’s life. I think one part of me always knew this was a dangerous book – but at the same time what I wrote seemed clearly true. After living in Brent for eight years I had seen and heard most of what I describe in these pages. I had also got to know, and feel respect and sympathy for, members of the old white working class who lived here and reminded me of both my parents’ families – my family.

In publishing terms, The White Family was meant to be the second book in a substantial two-book contract with a major publisher, the first two-book deal I had ever signed. But my brilliant editor Jonathan Warner killed himself in 1994. I submitted the book in 1995, and his successor turned the book down. This was a shock, though the successive rejection letters from other publishers exploded more dully. Some of these were surprisingly long and unflattering, as if the book actually made them angry, and the adjective ‘dark’ came up a lot, an interesting subliminal choice when characterising a book discussing white prejudice against black people. Until then my career, after a slow start (my first novel came out seven years after I wrote it) had gone well: I was on the original 1983 Granta ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ list and my advances had steadily grown. Now it seemed I was not only no longer bankable, but no longer publishable. ‘This is when character tells,’ said someone wise and kind.

In that long crisis, as the rejections continued one by one, I turned mostly to black friends and neighbours like Hanna Sakyi and Wesley Kerr for help and advice. It also mattered that my husband, historian Nicholas Rankin, loved the book, as did an older Carcanet poet, my friend EJ Scovell. But had I, all the same, got everything wrong?

Novelist Mike Phillips was at the time writer-in-residence at the Royal Festival Hall: I went to see him, horribly nervous. He became the first person I didn’t know, other than publishers, to read my book. Mike was a writer I respected, and he read it and said he thought I was doing something unusual and worthwhile. That mattered so much. Roy Kerridge, a gifted, wildly original and conflicted white writer who had grown up in a black family and knew black churches, read and praised it. Later two other writers of colour, Bernardine Evaristo and Colin Grant, read it, made comments and encouraged me – with how much generosity? – seeing that life was hardly easy or straightforward for writers of colour in 1990s Britain, as events like the Museum of London’s conference, ‘Tracing Paper: Black Writing in London 1770–1997’, made clear. I started rewriting the novel in 1997 or 1998, but the only substantive change I made was cutting perhaps 5 percent of its length. Then, in 2000, another writer, Turkish novelist and PEN Vice-President Moris ‘Musa’ Farhi, read the book, loved it and sent it to his publisher, the long-lasting independent Saqi Books, where his editor was Mai Ghoussoub, famous in those days as an artist and activist. There was a long wait. She phoned me at 5.40pm on one unforgettable afternoon of April sun and cold to tell me they wanted to publish. My whole life changed.

There are things in this book that I would write differently now, and that I have written differently since. At some stage in the writing, I pulled back from making Elroy a central character: I focused instead on the white characters from whom the terrible crime would emerge. Perhaps as a white writer I should look hardest at where my own house was not in order? And it was surely irrational that black voices were expected to spend so much time focusing on racism when it was, in Britain, most often a white problem.

Since the publication of The White Family, I have made good its virtual lack of black narrating voices by writing two novels, My Cleaner and My Driver – yes, the titles are ironic – with central black narrators. In other novels like The Flood and my latest, The Red Children, the children of The White Family’s central encounters come of age and are principal characters. I would not, now, write a novel which could be assimilated to the trope of ‘Love across racial borders punished by death’, as in Othello, musicals like ‘The King and I’, ‘South Pacific’ and countless westerns. Remember, though, that it was the 1990s and I was writing about a real-life London where a young man who wanted to be an architect had been punished with death for simply being black.

Saqi were remarkable in the British publishing scene for their international outlook and list. Mai Ghoussoub and André Gaspard had come to London from Lebanon in the 1970s and were no strangers to the subject I was writing about. They were the right readers, not petty or defensive. But I also think the wind had changed between 1995 and 2001. In 1999 the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report by Judge Sir William MacPherson castigated the police for ‘institutional racism’, ‘discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.’ This report received a huge amount of media attention and could not be ignored.

Writing about our multiracial society, or rather media recognition of that writing, seems to go in waves, and individual reading is idiosyncratic. The 1950s had seen the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and novels like Sam Selvon’s and Colin MacInnes’s. In 1980, Ben Okri began publishing and Anita Desai was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Caryl Phillips published his first novel in 1985 and Peter Fryer’s ground-breaking history of the black presence in Britain, Staying Power, came out in 1987. In the 1990s, I read writers of colour as disparate as Diran Adebayo, David Dabydeen, Bernardine Evaristo, Andrea Levy, SI Martin, Valerie Mason-John, and Alex Wheatle, but they were not yet widely known. To me, it seems as if in the aftermath of the 1999 Stephen Lawrence Report, some sort of public tide turned. In 2000 the anthology of black British writing co-edited by Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay, IC3, was published, the same year as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Mike Phillips’s A Shadow of Myself. More people began to accept that Britain as a society was not, as several white people had earnestly explained to me, ‘post-racist’. Perhaps I was not behind the times, but in tune with a time when we had to look at ourselves, and listen to ourselves, and think where we wanted to go next.

Despite the series of investigations that followed the Lawrence case and the eventual conviction of two of the perpetrators, racism did not melt away and racist murders have continued, as the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement has told us loud and clear. The theme of public space, too, always central to this book, has stood the test of time. Maybe something very precious really was at risk as we crossed the millennium, and is being eroded even more dangerously now. When public servants like park keepers, doctors, teachers and librarians are neglected, when public space is sold off or privatised, we weaken a vital implicit social contract which tells British people that despite inequalities and unfairnesses there will always be something worth having for all to share.

I remain proud of this book, though it was written nearly thirty years ago – partly because it was written thirty years ago, when the tragic follies of ‘race’ and racism was rarely being written about by white writers.

Maggie Gee

London, December 2021

THE WHITE FAMILY

THE BEGINNING

1 • Thomas

Albion Park on a fierce spring morning. A mad March day of ice and fire. Thomas’s feet beat a tattoo on the path. Every hair, every bristle on his chin stands on end. He is a small star-ship of blazing neurons –

He is a librarian, on his way to work, half-blind with sun and cold and memory. He used to come here with Darren after school (were they six, or seven, when they first escaped their mums?) And Darren’s dad, Alfred, was the Park Keeper –

Was, and still is. Still at his post. Something epic about it; nearly fifty years of service … Alfred White, who holds the fort.

Thomas hears raised voices, a little way away.

And glimpses Alfred beyond a row of plane trees, a small brisk figure in a military greatcoat. His familiar flat cap with its thin fringe of white hair, in the middle distance by the prize flower-beds. It’s the only bit of grass where people aren’t allowed to walk; one of Alfred’s main jobs is shooing them off it.

Thomas sees that the woman he is talking to is black. There are two young children; she holds one by the arm.

‘It’s my job, lady. I’m doing my job –’ The voice of authority, from Thomas’s childhood.

‘’Ang on a minute. I’m tryin’ to tell you –’

‘Can you move off the grass, madam. I’m asking you nicely –’

‘People like you don’t never listen!’

‘You don’t have to shout, miss.’

‘Look, I weren’t shoutin’ –’

‘Next thing is, you’ll be all over the tulips.’

Now the little girl begins to cry, a high-pitched sound that seems to come from a childish realm of pain and loss quite unconnected to the grown-ups’ quarrel. She tries to yank her arm away. ‘Mum, Mum, Mum, I can see it!’

‘Shut it, Carly, I’m talkin’ to the man!’

‘Mum, Mum, I want to –’

‘SHUT IT!’

From the woman’s other side, Alfred presses his advantage. ‘If everyone walked here, there’d be no grass left –’

Harried by both of them, she suddenly cracks. ‘Fuck off! I’m tellin’ you, you’re OUT OF ORDER!’

A tall black man comes hurrying across, carrying a purple basket-ball, and stands close to Alfred, looming over him. He looks at least a foot taller than Alfred, and two feet wider across the shoulders. (Was he actually threatening? Thomas wondered later. Could you say he was threatening? No, just tall. And black, of course, that was part of it.)

‘What’s the problem?’ the man asks, fairly politely.

‘No ball-games here, sir, I’m afraid.’

‘We’re not playin’ no ball-game. Why’s Carly cryin’?’ he demands of his wife, who has subsided a little.

‘He upset her, didn’t he.’ She indicates Alfred. ‘She went and lost Dwayne’s new plane, innit. So she gets it in her head that it’s in the flower-bed.’

‘So what’s up with you man?’ the father asks, frowning down on Alfred. ‘What’s your problem?’

The girl wails louder. Dwayne pokes her in the ear.

Alfred looks pale and old beside them. ‘No mention was made of any lost plane,’ he says, uncertainly, peering round him.

‘This Park belongs to everyone,’ the black man informs him.

‘That’s just it!’ Now Alfred perks up. ‘Same rules for everyone, as well. I’m just asking you lot to get off the grass.’ He wags his finger vigorously.

The woman’s face changes. Is it rage, or glee? ‘“You lot”!’ she shrieks. ‘That’s racist, innit!’

A pause. The two men avoid each other’s eyes. The word lies between them like an unexploded bomb. ‘I’ve been doing this job for fifty years,’ Alfred begins, but the rest is lost.

‘JOHNNY!’ she screams. ‘Call the police on this bastard! Use your mobile! I’m tellin’ you!’

But Johnny snickers, and turns away. ‘You’re windin’ me up,’ he says to his wife. ‘Come on … An’ leave it out,’ he snaps at his children. ‘Don’t whine, Carly, do you hear me?’ But he pauses a moment, staring back at Alfred, saying something with his eyes: this is our Park too.

Thomas feels it is time to announce his presence. ‘Hi Alfred,’ he calls, so Alfred knows he is there. For a moment the old man just stares at him, then raises his hand in a lame half-wave. He manages a smile, but his face is very red.

‘The man is ignorant,’ the black woman announces, beckoning her children in a queenly fashion. When the boy doesn’t stir, she yells at him ‘Dwayne! Get over here! Move it!’ Cowed, Dwayne does as he is told.

They sweep away, a good-looking family, smartly dressed, young, glossy. The mother has righteous arms around her kids, who are still resisting, and pointing at the flower-bed.

‘You see how it is?’ Alfred asks, out of breath. There are bubbles of spit at the corner of his lips. ‘Can’t bloody win, whatever I do. And the language … The women are worse than the blokes. They’d turn the Park back into a jungle. There are notices. These people can’t read.’

Now they are gone, he feels safe to say it. Thomas starts to protest, but nothing comes out. It’s just a generation thing, he tells himself. The polite silence hasn’t fallen, for them. ‘Are you all right, Alfred? You don’t look well.’

‘Calling the police on me. Bloody cheek. They’d laugh in their faces, down at the station. I’ve got good mates there. Known me for years.’ Alfred pauses, still breathing hard, and his pale blue eyes focus shrewdly on Thomas. ‘I’m not against them, you know. Don’t get me wrong –’

‘I didn’t think you were,’ Thomas lies, feebly. This is a subject that cannot be spoken. He veers away. ‘Have you heard from Darren?’

‘They go on the grass. Always doing it. English people know not to go on the grass –’

‘Alfred, shouldn’t you sit down for a moment?’ There is something very wrong about Alfred’s pupils.

‘I’m not a man of leisure, like you,’ Alfred says. ‘Things to do. Jobs on my list. Not least the toilets. It never stops.’

‘You’re upset.’ Which is the wrong thing to say.

‘I never let that lot get to me.’

‘I’m not sure they intended –’ Thomas tries.

But Alfred is off, with a bony smile, launching himself against the wind like a fighter. ‘Bye, lad. Take care now.’

‘See you, Alfred.’

Thomas watches him go, lickety-split, a white-haired soldier off at the double. Glancing back for an instant, his eye is held by a cross of scrap paper flickering on the red swathe of tulips ten metres away. As he stares, the cross becomes a child’s toy plane, crazily poised on a crimson runway. He thinks of going to pick it up; rushing after the family, making everything right –

But as he turns to look for them, he sees Alfred collapse, fifty metres away, his cap coming off as he wheels and crumples, falling heavily backwards in his army greatcoat as if he has been shot in battle.

And Thomas begins to run, in slow motion, trying to run though his legs have stalled, to the spot where the Park Keeper lies felled, yelling ‘Alfred, I’m coming …’

Darren’s dad.

Alfred White, the Park Keeper.

2 • May

It’s different in winter. Days are shorter. Alfred’s locked up by half past four. So he’s home in the evenings. We sit for hours. And I get used to him being there. Then when the days get longer, he’s gone. Out all hours. And I’m alone. Never really alone, though. I know he’ll be home. But spring is coming … spring is coming.

We’re like the seasons, we ebb and flow. You take it for granted, after forty-odd years. His key turning. The voice saying ‘May?’ His familiar voice, which will always come, no matter how late, always the same.

I’m proud of him. The job he does. A big job for a little man. Looking after the Park. It’s the best thing we’ve got. In summer I almost start to hate it, because I don’t like his being out till ten, but I know the Park matters more than us.

It’s something we can all share, isn’t it? The place people go to be together. I think it’s the heart of Hillesden, the Park. As London gets dirtier, and more frightening.

We don’t talk a lot. But of course, I do love him.

And there he is. He forgot his sandwiches. I’ve kept them for him, and his tea in the thermos. The clink of the gate, then his feet on the path … Heavier than usual.

Why is he ringing?

Silly old thing, he’s forgotten his key. We’re getting older, both of us …

May opens the door, to smile, to chide. But it’s Thomas, not Alfred. Black shapes behind him. A short policeman in a giant helmet. She furrows her brow, turning back to Thomas …

On his face, the dark, the cold.

THE HOSPITAL

3 • May

May read, as usual, before she went out.

First she got herself completely ready. Alfred’s pyjamas, freshly laundered, neatly folded in a plastic bag inside another, larger plastic bag that held today’s Daily Mirror and a quarter of extra strong mints, just in case he should be feeling a bit better, just in case he should fancy something. It was comforting, getting the bag together. It meant she could still look after Alfred, though she also experienced the usual sense of boredom; women spent their lives looking after men. And even that tiny skin-tag of irritation was comforting, because entirely familiar. The house was so much colder since he had gone.

She was completely ready, hat on, coat fastened, twenty minutes too early to leave for the hospital, even if she walked slowly, even if she dawdled, not that she would dawdle on a day like this, even if she stepped into the Park to have a quick look at the café and the flower-beds so she could report to Alfred later. Each day she had half-meant to do it; each day she had found herself unable to, because she couldn’t bear to see the Park without Alfred. Without the hope of seeing Alfred …

Without the hope of seeing Alfred come hurrying down one of the distant paths, trim, narrow-shouldered in his old army greatcoat and the new check cap she had bought him for Christmas, eyes turned away from where he was going to follow the deeds of some child or dog. Then she might hear him shout or whistle to recall the wrong-doer to order. Not today. That piercing whistle. The Park Keeper’s whistle which had sometimes pained her like the sound of chalk pulled the wrong way across a blackboard now seemed in its absence an arrow of light, a clear white line shooting out across the darkness.

Twenty minutes early. So she sat in her chair as she had done every day this week and began to read, clumsy in her coat, catching its heavy woollen sleeves on the pages.

And again she noticed a difference. It was normally evening time when she read and Alfred would be there, rustling his newspaper or clicking the cards as he laid out a game of patience, and he always said ‘What are you reading?’ in a grumpy, almost affronted way, as if he had failed to entertain her, as if she was rejecting him, and she always made herself answer cheerfully, she always ignored his tone of voice and said ‘Auden, dear,’ or ‘Catherine Cookson, dear,’ though he had been doing it for nearly half a century. But now he had stopped, May found she missed it.

‘Tennyson, dear,’ she whispered in the silence, slipping inside the entirely familiar Victorian patterns in their long cool scrolls, the beloved rhythms of her other Alfred:

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

But she couldn’t concentrate; Alfred, Alfred.

It was still too early, but she picked up her bag, checked its contents and the angle of her hat (for she wanted him to be proud of her; appearances mattered a lot to Alfred), slipped in her book as an afterthought although she knew she’d have no chance to read it, and let herself out into the chill March wind.

She always liked to have a book in her bag. In case she got stuck. In case she got lost. Or did she feel lost without her books? There wasn’t any point, but she liked to have one with her, a gentle weight nudging her shoulder, keeping her company through the wind, making her more solid, more substantial, less likely to be blown away, less alone. More – a person.

Perhaps it was a little piece of the past, since her books all seemed to belong to the past, a far distant past when she was thin and romantic and in love with – what had she been in love with? Life, which seemed to mean happiness then, a word for the future, not the past. Not ‘Life gets you down,’ or ‘That’s life, I’m afraid,’ but life, hope, poetry …

The harsh wind battered her hands and face, pummelling her ears with great noisy blows, and she felt she would never get in through the high red gate-posts of the hospital with their ugly array of cardboard notices, temporary things with clumsy writing … What was she but another piece of scrap, blown willy-nilly across the forecourt? Would the main entrance be closed again because of the endless building works? (They were building new bits all the time, but it never got finished, and the rest was falling down.) She tried to ask a nurse on her way home but the light was already beginning to fade and the wind blew hard between her teeth and turned her voice to a soundless whisper, so the woman passed by oblivious.

I don’t exist. I no longer exist. When Alfred dies, I’ll be nothing, nothing … I couldn’t even read, today. The words were there, but they didn’t help.

I love them still … idyll, ambergris … but maybe they’re no more solid than us. Dirk only reads his computer magazines, Darren never liked poetry, Shirley reads mostly catalogues, so who’ll have my books, after I’m gone?

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark …

Onward, onward. Over the threshold. Into the frightening new place which was suddenly part of their life together …

Part of their new life apart. A place where he must go alone, a place where she could only visit.

But she shouldn’t be frightened of this place. It must be one of the last good places. May told herself, this is here for us. We fought the last war for places like this. Hospitals and parks and schools. Not concentration camps, like the other lot had.

A hospital was a place to share. Where all could come in their hour of trouble. The light was harsh, but it shone for all. (Some of the bulbs were dead, she had noticed. Broken glass was replaced with hardboard.)

She stood for a moment, blinking, breathing.

She would get there first, because she loved him. Proud always to be the first. She stood by herself in the fluorescent sweep of the hospital foyer, taking off her hat, patting her hair, slipping off her old coat to show the blue dress, for blue was always his favourite colour … She saw herself reflected in the glass of the doors, astonishingly tiny, a little old lady, but I’m not old, nor particularly small.

Soon other figures would come out of the shadows, out of the dark with their bags and bundles, their flowers and sighs and shruggings-off of coats and scarves and hats and gloves. Nervous smiles, frowns, whispers, biting their lips, blind in the light. Newcomers. Latecomers.

May set off briskly, ahead of them.

She walked down the ward. It was becoming familiar. She no longer always took the wrong turning after passing the Hospital Volunteers’ Shop. She no longer peered anxiously across into the nurses’ room which guarded the ward, asking for permission and reassurance. The black sister gave her a smile (were there two of them? Did she muddle them up?) They saw she was not a time-waster; they had helped with the problem of Alfred’s boots. They knew her now. She was almost a regular. Before she drew level with their open door she had already located the precise spot far down the long bright fallen ladder of the ward where Alfred would be, if he hadn’t died. And there he was: he had not died. A stern face propped on an enormous pillow, staring straight ahead of him, a king on a coin.

A rush of relief; he would always be there. Like the head on a sixpence, never wearing out … but growing smaller, somehow, as the world grew larger. A few more steps, and she saw he was asleep, upright as ever in his good blue pyjamas but his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open. She hoped he hadn’t snored; Alfred was too proud to snore in front of other people. She would never let him, if she were with him. But they had been parted, after a lifetime.

I suppose that pride won’t help us, now.

How did my Alfred come to be here? Alfred of all people, who never was in hospital, Alfred who never took a day off work, Alfred White who was never ill.

But we all come here. I shall come here.

She shrugged the voice away, impatient.

The ward was getting ready for visiting time, combings of hair, straightenings of dressing-gowns, eyes turned longingly towards the entrance where faces from the other world might appear, younger, healthier, bearing gifts. Faces that once seemed ordinary, now brightly coloured, glowing, miraculous.

Why was he still sleeping? There was so much to do. In her bag there were documents for him to sign. Only now did she realize how foolish she had been, letting everything be in Alfred’s name, the house, the pension book, the bank account.

Darren had got angry, on the phone. He rang so rarely, and it was gone eleven, the middle of the night, it seemed to May, and she was so drowsy and confused that she’d spilled out all her worries, and cried. And he’d made her feel a fool. ‘What do you mean, you can’t draw any money? You mean Dad always got the money? How could you be so bloody daft …?’

But then, she had never really pleased her sons. Even the names she chose annoyed them. Darren and Dirk … They were film star names that Alfred was unsure about, but he said ‘That’s your department, May. Women know better than men about names.’ Their daughter was Shirley, after Shirley Temple. Then Dirk and Darren. She had done her best, though Dirk, the youngest, always complained. May had loved Dirk Bogarde with swooning intensity; his sideways smile, his dark deer’s eyes, the narrow elegance of his body, and though he had mysteriously changed, become old and angry and homosexual, she still felt she had let him down, giving his name to someone who despised it.

Dirk was sulky, but Darren was rude. ‘…You’ve never even had a banker’s card? I can’t believe it, it’s unbelievable …’ He shouldn’t have talked to her like that. She had heard him be sharp with his wives and children – worse than sharp, worse than his father – but he had no right to be sharp with his mother. Why couldn’t he be nice, like Thomas? Thomas was Darren’s oldest friend, and he had always been kind to her. Thomas didn’t make her feel old and stupid. (Yet he was quite successful too. As she’d once told her son, when he was rude about Thomas, Thomas was a real writer. And Darren had gone silent. She knew it hurt him.)

Of course Darren lived in a different world, where women had armfuls of credit cards, and wrote all the rules to suit themselves …. Whereas with Alfred, everything had been laid down. Rules that were lost in the mists of time, walls he built and cemented in till that red-brick labyrinth became her life.

Only now nothing seemed quite safe any more. The walls were shifting. The sea was rising.

May stared at the chart at the foot of his bed. The marks were mean and small, as usual, and she squinted at them, but they told her nothing.

There were languages you weren’t meant to read. Medical people had their secret language. May’s mother had felt that about all books, that they were meant for other people, better people, richer people with drawling voices, the ladies who sometimes peered in through the window of her father’s workshop where he sat mending shoes, only coming in doubtfully, little mouths pursed, holding their skirts as if they might get dirty. Her father read books, history, politics, not books for women, he told her impatiently, books for men, serious books. But May knew different; both parents were wrong.

Because books were meant for everyone.

Of course there were writers she couldn’t understand. Some she could like without understanding, but some she was affronted by because she felt they didn’t want her to understand. If so, she could do without them. There were plenty of writers who spoke her thoughts.

Did doctors want people to understand? Probably not. It was probably less trouble. That way, they didn’t have to get into arguments. But it didn’t matter, she told herself. They were professionals. She trusted them. They were a bit like priests, in their clean white coats, and the nurses were like women tending a temple … She wished she could pray. She wasn’t really religious, but Alfred looked so little, so lonely.

There must be a prayer. Shirley would know it. May found herself praying, in a kind of dream, praying to the past, or the future, or the doctors, and the words came slowly, refused to come …

Do what You like to him, but get him out … Send him back to me. He wants to be out … he needs to be outside, in the light. Please, if there’s Anyone … or Anything …. we’ve done our best … You know we tried … family was everything to us … There’s the kids to think about … especially Dirk … he’s no more than a baby … he needs his dad … Do what You like to him, but send him home.

4 • Dirk

I’ll die before I get to the hospital, thought Dirk. Die of a fucking heart attack. They’re killing me. All of them. Fucking killing me.

He rested his head against the window of the bus, leaning away from the fat cow in a sari who was taking up three-quarters of the seat. The thud of the engine beat a sickening rhythm through the bones of his head, so he jerked upright again. No fucking rest for the fucking weary.

His heart was full of furious dread. Dad would be lying there, looking … different. Horribly different. Everything changed. And Mum by his side, little, miserable, that fluttery, stupid, awful look she had had since Dad had his fall or whatever. She’d stopped cooking, hadn’t she? She was never much cop at it but last night she’d done something disgusting with tuna and the rice was burnt black like mouse droppings. As if Dirk wasn’t busy all day and didn’t need his tea when he got home … Now his parents had to go and let him down.

And the bus had kept him waiting for half an hour. Three bloody buses went sailing past while he was ringing up the till in the shop. Then as soon as he got out to the bus stop, sod all. It was freezing cold, with a bitter wind. So then he’d gone in the pub for a drink. First you felt warmer. Then colder than ever. And he had to go back to the bus stop and shiver. He could have walked but his trainers hurt him, pressing on his corns, savage, spiteful. They were cheap, weren’t they. Because he was poor. Going by bus was for poor people too.

Which was why they fucking mucked you around when you tried to pay with a five pound note (it wasn’t like a twenty, or even a ten).

The driver had looked at Dirk as if he was rubbish. ‘What’s this?’ he had said. ‘I don’t want this. Haven’t you read the notices? Can you read? It says “Tender exact money please.” In plain English.’

And so on and so on, blah blah blah, while Dirk tore his pockets searching for change, and there wasn’t any, not even ten pee, and the whole bus was glaring and muttering as if it was Dirk’s fault the driver was a tosser.

They’re all in it together, of course. Look around this bus and you can see it. Ninety per cent coloureds. Well, fifty, at least. And the driver’s coloured, so they’re on his side. And he has the fucking cheek to talk about English. As if they owned it. Our speech. Our language. (Tender exact money … that’s not proper English. Does a normal bloke use a word like ‘tender’?)

The trouble is, they do own most things. They’ve taken over the buses, and the trains. And the bloody streets. You can’t get away from them.

Not down our pub, mind. They know what’s good for them.

The woman next to Dirk was very old and very fat, perched awkwardly upon the seat. A man’s overcoat half-covered her sari. Indian people smelled of funny food. As the bus rounded a corner, she suddenly flung out one great fat arm upon Dirk’s lap. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked her, stiff, outraged, but he didn’t want to touch the arm to move it away. She smiled and nodded, not understanding, muttering some mumbo-jumbo at him. He turned away, furious, disgusted, but there was no way to escape her body, brown, gigantic, pressing upon him, old people, he hated them, and now his dad was suddenly old.

He felt beneath his jacket for the thing he kept there that always comforted him, always helped him. His fingers found it, pressed it – pressed – pressed until there was no more blood in his fingers, pressed until all the life was gone, and when the pressure reached the point of pain he released it again, and breathed a bit easier, for he could simply cut them up, if he had to, slice off their limbs, their eyes, their hair …

Women and coloureds. They were everywhere.

He’d never liked women. Except his sister, till she went funny, till she went mad. And now he hated her worse than the others. Because Shirley had once been something of his own, she used to make him feel he was a bit special, but then she’d turned against her own flesh and blood.

He hated his family now. Except Dad.

Flesh and blood. It was meat. It was nothing.

5 • Thomas

Thomas was back in his high flat, writing. Or staring at the manuscript he should be writing. He was trying to write about the Death of Meaning, but would it mean anything to anyone else? He had a page by Mikhail Epstein open in front of him, which last week had seemed to explain the world. ‘Post-postmodernism witnesses the re-birth of utopia after its own death …’

He scratched his head. Was he growing more stupid? Less modern, perhaps? Less post-postmodern? Thomas’s mind began to drift.

Sex snapped on to it, like a magnet.

Could he hear Melissa above his head? Four o’clock. She would still be in school. Mornings and evenings were the hopeful times when he might hear her sweet feet padding on his ceiling.

Melissa. The first Melissa I’ve known. The name is cat-like and swift, like her. Honey-tongued, delicate, purring, golden …

Very groomed, was Melissa, in the early mornings, when he chanced to meet her on the stairs. Stumbling back upwards with his milk and his Guardian and his pyjamas under his clothes, he sometimes heard her come tip-tipping downwards in her brisk black booties with their sexy eyelets –

Six slick eyelets, slim pale ankles. She smelled of cinnamon, apples, musk, and soap and cornflakes and cleanliness. He probably smelled of old beer and bad breath but she still favoured him with her celestial smile, always slightly surprised, as if she thought she was on the moon and had just discovered that someone else lives there. ‘Oh, hello. You’re up early.’ As if she wasn’t always up early. Her job was so hard he shuddered to think of it, teaching hordes of savage young children. How could they ever appreciate her?

I could protect her. I could look after her …

Actually of course he had little to offer. A bad track record with relationships, a three-bed flat in a seedy part of London, a day job as senior librarian, one novel, written eight years ago (influenced by Proust and Woolf and relativity theory, though no one noticed – The Wave, the Bridge and the Garden, a title he now agreed was too long), a middling income he overspent, a guilty slither of credit cards, a second-hand car, a gift with words, his amazing penis, currently unused, needing tenderness, loving, licking …

Melissa does like me. It isn’t an illusion.

But her eyes were bright, unkindly young, seeming to pierce beneath his skin.

Am I any good? Is there any point to me? What shall I leave behind on this planet?

Books. Words. The English language. I try to serve it. (And other languages. We have to now. Three-hundred-odd languages are spoken in London, and people expect us to have books in all of them. Which is fair enough … Or maybe too fair. Sometimes I feel it’s all gone too far. But I’m not allowed to think things like that. Librarians are servants of the people.)

He was writing his second book, very slowly. He’d been writing it for five years, to be honest. Postmodernism and the Death of Meaning. Perhaps non-fiction was harder than fiction. He hadn’t exactly got a publisher, though he’d sent a synopsis out to nine or ten editors, and one of them responded very encouragingly, wishing him the best of luck with finishing it, but begging him not to send the manuscript in case it should get lost in the post. Thomas still blushed with indignant shame, remembering what his ex-wife had said: ‘It’s twaddle, isn’t it, you great lummox. Is this all you learned at university?’ (Could she be right? Was he wasting his time?)

It was Thursday, the library’s half-closing day, the day when his book should be sprinting along. Pull yourself together, he told himself. Forget about the book and set off for the hospital. See how Alfred’s getting on.

It didn’t seem believable that he was in hospital. Alfred who was never ill … A man of iron, Darren’s Dad. They’d kept him in for a week already.

Thomas had decided to go and visit now, at once, in case Alfred died. Not that he often went round to the house (every few years? twice a decade?) – but he liked to know Alfred was there. Somewhere. The family he had always known. Safer than his. More stable than his parents, who had broken up, hopelessly, three years before they died, in different hospitals, still rowing by proxy. May wasn’t a good cook, but she’d always made him welcome.