Staring at the Sun Page 9

  He looked much like other babies, and Jean, much like other mothers, found him perfect beyond the description of poets. He was an ordinary miracle: a mixture of vulnerability and achievement which kept her oscillating between fear and pride. When that heavy head flopped backwards on its inadequate cabbage stem of a neck she prickled with alarm; when the tiny fingers held her thumb like an athlete gripping wall bars she felt swathed in pleasure. At first she seemed to be clearing up after him a lot: every hole in his body competed to exude the most secretions; only his ears knew reasonable behaviour. But quickly she got used to this, and to all the other new smells a baby brought. She was starting again, that was the important thing to remember; Gregory had given her the chance to start again. For that, she would love him even more.

  She learned the noises that calmed him, some borrowed from the days when she kept animals. She clucked and chattered; sometimes, for a change, she would utter a buzzing noise, as of an insect, or a distant aeroplane. His first tooth arrived, and she considered it a world event, something of much greater significance than the first Sputnik.

  Until he went to school, she took him everywhere with her. She worked in pubs, cheap restaurants and hamburger bars. She remembered the reek of fried onions on his nappy; she remembered tucking him away in a back room at the Duke of Clarence like a secret two-year-old drinker; she remembered his patient, alert gaze as it took in a sweating cook, a harassed waiter, a cursing drayman. Her employers often pressed titbits on her to feed the little fellow up. She clothed him with erratic help from Uncle Leslie, who had returned from America, and who now sent clothes parcels instead of food hampers. Some of the clothing needed a little alteration. On his fifth birthday, Gregory received a double-breasted evening suit, chest size 42, a goose-pimple evening shirt and a purple cummerbund.

  Gregory complained little. He grew into a quiet, passive boy, his curiosity restrained by fear; he preferred to watch other children play rather than participate himself. They lived in a succession of market towns—the sort of place with a bus garage but no cathedral; Jean was distrustful of village life and wary of cities. They rented accommodation; they kept to themselves; she tried to forget Michael. Gregory never complained about their peripatetic existence; and when he asked what his father was like, he received answers which were fairly accurate, and which made allusion to stern masters at schools he had already left.

  At first they moved house a lot. She rarely passed a policeman without thinking of Michael, and she nervously assumed that the entire force was passing back messages to him. When a constable in the street ducked his head towards his lapel and started confiding in his walkie-talkie, Jean saw Michael sitting in some underground HQ like Winston Churchill. She imagined her face displayed on posters lit by a dim blue lamp. Michael knew exactly where she was and would have them brought back. He would have them brought back in an open wagon. Placards would be hung round their necks, and all of the villagers would turn out to hiss the fugitive wife. Jean wryly recalled the line of advice from her marriage handbook: Be always escaping.

  Or he would have Gregory taken away from her; that was her more real fear. He would say she had run away and was unfit to bring up her son; that’s right, he’d finally get her pronounced defective. He’d say she was irresponsible, he’d say she had affairs. Gregory would be taken away, he would go to live with Michael, Michael would install a mistress and pretend she was a housekeeper. The village would praise him for rescuing his son from a life of vagabondage and prostitution. They would say she had gypsy blood.

  So they had to keep on running away. They had to keep on running away, and Jean wasn’t to have affairs. Not that she wanted them; and perhaps she was a little frightened of them—what had Prosser said about getting burnt twice? Certainly she was afraid that, if she had them, Gregory would be taken away. There were cases like that in the papers. And so when men approached her, or seemed likely to approach her, and especially when she half wanted them to, she would become quietly unavailable; she would play with the brass wedding ring she had bought at a market stall; and she would call Gregory to her. She became a little careless about her appearance; she let her hair streak increasingly with grey; part of her looked forward to the time when she wouldn’t have to worry about all that.

  Michael didn’t pursue her. Many years later she discovered that he used to telephone Uncle Leslie every so often, make him promise silence, and ask for news. Where they were living, how Gregory was doing at school. He never asked them to come back. He didn’t install a mistress, or even a housekeeper. He died of a heart attack at fifty-five, and Jean, as she claimed the estate, regarded it as retrospective maintenance.

  One Christmas, when he was ten, Gregory received a model aeroplane kit from Uncle Leslie. After the war, Leslie had returned to England with tales—if you would but listen—of extravagant and perilous endeavours: yarns which began with him tapping the side of his nose to indicate that the matter he was about to describe was still hush-hush. But nowadays Jean found she had had enough of masculine adventures. Or perhaps she had grown out of Uncle Leslie: it was a pitiless rule, but you could not remain the same kind of uncle forever. She was fond of Leslie, but there was no point in children’s games between them anymore; increasingly, she found herself saying, “Oh, Leslie, do shut up,” when he was telling Gregory how back in ’43 he had piloted a midget sub across the Channel, garrotted a German guard on the beach near Dieppe, scaled a cliff, dynamited the local heavy-water plant, abseiled down again and away. As Leslie would be describing the starless night, and the ripples on the surface as the pocket sub slipped beneath the dark waters, Jean would murmur, “Oh, Leslie, do shut up”—though she felt unfair when she looked at two disappointed faces. Why was she depriving Gregory of what she had herself enjoyed with Uncle Leslie? Because it wasn’t true, she supposed. Leslie was now about seventy, though he would admit only to not seeing twenty-five again. He no longer popped down the Old Green Heaven, except to wash behind his ears. Perhaps all the washing had affected his sense of truth.

  The model aeroplane kit was a Lysander, and Gregory worked on it for several days before discovering that the undercarriage and part of the tail were missing. Perhaps the model had come from one of Leslie’s elaborate bartering arrangements: he seemed to consider money a very primitive form of exchange. Jean went to a model shop and asked about replacement parts; but that particular line had been discontinued some years before.

  As consolation, she bought Gregory a Hurricane kit, and proudly half watched as he cut the first balsa wood struts. He worked in silence, the light occasionally catching the small brass knife with the curving blade. She liked the aeroplane best when it stood on the wad of newspaper in skeleton form, elegant and unthreatening. Afterwards, it was clothed, and took on hinting seriousness. There was Perspex for the hood, tissue paper for the wings and fuselage, a yellow plastic propeller and yellow plastic wheels. For a day there was a smell of pear drops as Gregory applied dope to the aeroplane’s skin; the cladding sagged and drooped, then pulled tight as it dried. The instructions suggested painting the Hurricane in camouflage colours: swirling green and brown on its top surfaces, so that it would merge with the English countryside, and blue-grey underneath, so that it would merge with the uncertain English sky. Gregory painted it scarlet, all over. Jean was relieved. That lissom outline, familiar from years ago, had pleased but also upset her; now, with its joke colouring and silly yellow wheels, it had ended up as no more than a child’s toy.

  “When shall we fly it?”

  But Gregory shook his head. He was a studious, round-faced ten-year-old, who had just been prescribed glasses. He had built the Hurricane to look at, not to fly. If he flew it, it might crash. If it crashed, that would prove he hadn’t built it properly. This wasn’t worth the risk.

  Gregory made a scarlet Hurricane, a purple Spitfire, an orange Messerschmitt and an emerald Zero; he flew none of them. Perhaps he sensed his mother’s quiet surprise, and perhaps he understood it a
s disappointment, because one evening he announced that he had bought a Vampire, that it came with a jet engine, and that he would fly this one. Jean watched yet again the frowning concentration, the tender precision as the glittering knife cut across the grain of the balsa wood. She watched the glue hardening on Gregory’s fingertips into a second skin, which he would peel off at the end of the day. She smelt pear drops and observed again the cunning way in which a fragile structure acquired strength and taut certainty. The Vampire seemed an awkward aeroplane, with its brief, podlike fuselage and a tail assembly joined to the wings by long struts. Jean thought it resembled a butter bean in scaffolding—until Gregory painted it gold.

  They were renting rooms on the outskirts of Towcester, in a house with a fire escape zigzagging down its back wall. Gregory normally distrusted this flaking iron staircase and feared even those solid platforms where the steps turned; now he showed no apprehension. They stood fifteen feet above the ground; twenty yards away two fir trees marked the end of the garden, and then beyond a ginger beech hedge lay open countryside. The sky was pale autumn blue, with thin, high clouds like vapour trails; the wind was soft. Perfect flying weather.

  Gregory uncapped the small aluminium engine in the Vampire’s belly and inserted a brown cylinder of solid fuel. He pushed an inch of wick through a small hole, held the aeroplane at shoulder height by its butter-bean fuselage, and asked his mother to light the fuse. When it crackled and flared, Gregory gently launched the Vampire into the welcoming air.

  It glided perfectly, as if keen to confirm how meticulous Gregory’s craftsmanship had been. The trouble was, it didn’t stop gliding: gently, it descended to the lawn beneath, landing without harm. Probably the wick had burnt out too soon and failed to ignite the rocket fuel; or perhaps the fuel was too wet, or too dry, or something. They went down the steps and picked up the shining gold Vampire.

  The engine was missing. There was a scorch mark on the tissue paper and a hole in the fuselage belly. Jean could see Gregory scowling: the engine must have dropped out during the launch. They searched first at the foot of the staircase, found nothing and continued down the rough lawn to the point at which the aeroplane had landed. Then they searched at different angles to the flight path, until the implications of where they were looking amounted to a libel on Gregory’s constructional skills; he went silent and retired to the house. Late in the afternoon, under a disapproving sky, Jean discovered the small aluminium cylinder in the ginger beech hedge beyond the fir trees. There had been nothing wrong with the engine. The engine had certainly flown. It had just left the Vampire behind, that was all.

  Gregory gave up making aeroplanes. Soon afterwards, it seemed to Jean, he began to shave; he stopped wearing his child’s spectacles with the elasticated metal earpieces, and took to a pair of horn-rims; he began to look through his horn-rims at girls. Not all of the girls looked back.

  They continued running away even after Michael’s death. During his adolescence Gregory knew a dozen schools. At each one, he quickly joined that safe, anonymous band of boys who avoid being bullied without ever becoming popular. No one could object to him; but no one had any particular reason for liking him. From the corner of a dozen playgrounds he watched the noisy fury of others. Jean remembered him at fourteen sitting in a motorway restaurant where she was assistant manageress. The restaurant bridged the road; Gregory was at a table by a murky plate-glass window, playing with a computer chess set Leslie had given him. The machine—which was missing two pawns—would give out little bleeps and pips as it announced its moves and chivvied its opponent. Gregory sat there, smiling benignly at the chequered instrument as if applauding its humanity. Occasionally, when waiting for the computer to make up its mind, he would shift his gaze to the traffic below, to the wailing flow of people quickly going to other places. He stared at them without envy.

  Jean didn’t. She kept her eyes on her work because it was temptingly easy to look down from that bridge and get tugged away in the slipstream of some family Ford with camping equipment on the top, or some open sports car trailing hair and laughter, or even some filthy van trundling junk from one county to another. How could Gregory sit there so phlegmatically, nodding across at his bleeping friend, untouched by the whirling pull of the traffic? She had a good job at the motorway restaurant, but she did not keep it long.

  Finally, when Gregory was old enough to be left, Jean began travelling. There had been some money when her parents died, and more from Michael; Gregory urged her to spend it on herself. Now, in her middle fifties, she felt the desire to be somewhere, anywhere else. She had seen most parts of England while bringing up Gregory; but running away didn’t count as travel. A temporary friend explained that her new urge was probably a substitute for sex. “Spread your wings, Jean,” remarked this girl of twenty-five who had already flapped hers until the membrane was stretched as thin as tissue paper. Jean thought most things weren’t substitutes for other things; they were just themselves. “I want to travel,” she replied simply.

  She didn’t want to explore and wasn’t especially adventurous; she just wanted to be somewhere else. At first she took package tours to European cities: three days of blurry coach rides and dutiful museum visits, three days of asking for things on the menu she hoped would surprise her; mostly they did. She went alone; and if she missed Gregory, she was seldom lonely. She found the simplest things would keep her company: a newspaper whose language she couldn’t understand; a dank canal with oil patches full of rainbows; the window display of some primitive chemist or brutal corsetière; street-corner smells of coffee and disinfectant.

  One autumn Leslie reported a betting coup and bought her a day trip to the Pyramids by Concorde. Such a combination of extravagance and banality: she was too excited to ask her uncle the names of the horses involved. Jean had breakfast high above the browning English wheatfields and a buffet lunch at the Cairo Holiday Inn. She was hustled through the bazaar; she had a Lawrence of Arabia headdress crammed on her skull for a group photo and was hoisted aboard a camel; finally, she was shown the Pyramids and the Sphinx. How close they were to Cairo: she had always imagined that the Sphinx skulked among the shifting sands, and that the Great Pyramid rose distantly like a mirage from some dangerous moonscape of desert. But it took only a coach ride through the suburbs of Cairo to discover them. One of the world’s Seven Wonders had turned out to be day-tripper material.

  Somewhere over the blacked-out Mediterranean, as the aeroplane slipped its lead, a rhyme came into Jean’s head, something taught decades earlier by her Scripture teacher at the village school:

  The Pyramids first, which in Egypt were laid;

  Then Babylon’s Gardens for Amytis made;

  Third, Mausolus’ Tomb of affection and guilt …

  She got stuck. “Third, Mausolus’ Tomb of affection and guilt …” Guilt, guilt … built, that was it. “Of Ephesus built.” What was built at Ephesus—or did it mean by Ephesus? “Fifth, Colossus of Rhodes, cast in brass, to the sun”—the fully formed line suddenly came to her; but she couldn’t get much further. Jupiter’s something, was it, and something else in Egypt?

  Back home, she went to the library and looked up the Seven Wonders of the World, but couldn’t find any of the ones from her rhyme. Not the Pyramids even? Or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? In the encyclopedia it said: the Coliseum of Rome; the Catacombs of Alexandria; the Great Wall of China; Stonehenge; the Leaning Tower of Pisa; the Porcelain Tower of Nankin; the Mosque of St. Sophia of Constantinople.

  Well. Perhaps there were two separate lists. Or perhaps they had to update the list every so often as new Wonders got built and old ones fell down. Maybe anyone could make up their own private seven. Why not? She didn’t think the catacombs of Alexandria sounded up to much. They might not even be there anymore. As for the porcelain tower of Nankin: it sounded extremely improbable that anything made of porcelain could have survived. And if it had, the Red Guards might well have knocked it down.

  A plan came
into her head to visit these Seven Wonders. She’d already seen Stonehenge; and the Leaning Tower and the Coliseum, for that matter. If she replaced the Catacombs with the Pyramids, that made four. Which left the Great Wall, the Porcelain Tower and St. Sophia. She could do the first two in one trip, and then if the Porcelain Tower didn’t exist she’d swap it for Chartres, which she’d already seen. That left St. Sophia, but Uncle Leslie had once told her that they ate hedgehogs in Turkey, so she changed it to the Grand Canyon. She was aware that this was cheating a little, as the Canyon wasn’t exactly man-made, but she gave a little shrug. Who was there to check up on her now?

  In June she joined a package tour to China. They went first to Canton, Shanghai and Nanjing (as they now seemed to call it), where she asked the regional guides about the Porcelain Tower. There was a Drum Tower, and a Bell Tower, but nobody had heard of a Porcelain Tower. Just as she had suspected. Her guidebook was also silent on the matter: it told her instead that Nanjing was proud of “Zu Chong-zhi, the mathematician who made an approximately correct calculation of pi” and “Fan Zhen, the philosopher famous for his essay ‘The Destructibility of the Soul.’ ” How very strange, Jean thought. Wasn’t the soul meant to be some sort of absolute? Either it existed or it didn’t exist. How could you destroy one? Perhaps it was just a bad translation. And as for pi—wasn’t that an absolute as well? What was the point of celebrating an approximately correct calculation, and wasn’t this in any case a contradiction in terms? She had expected the Chinese to be a bit different, but this all seemed back to front.

  They stayed in Beijing, as Peking now seemed to be called, for three days. On the first they visited the Great Wall, stiffly walking up a short stretch while in the distance the Wall itself airily hurdled the hills. It was the only man-made object visible from the moon: Jean tried to remember that as she ducked into a dark guard tower which smelt as rank as a public lavatory. She also noticed the large number of graffiti cut into the top stones of the Wall. Chinese graffiti, so they looked elegant and appropriate. A jovial, red-bearded fellow from the tour, noting Jean’s interest, suggested that one of them meant “Don’t shoot until you see the yellows of their eyes.” Jean smiled politely, but her mind was elsewhere. Why did the Chinese cut graffiti into their Wall? Was this a universal instinct, to cut graffiti? Like the universal instinct to try and calculate pi, however approximately?