I bought a fish on the way home. I had Jenny in the car – it was my turn to pick her up – and stopped outside a fishmonger’s. As we walked past the dead-eyed things on the slabs of marble, I realised I was used to sea creatures. Bream, bass, mullet and plaice. Here we had carp and gar and pike and trout, all from rivers and green, muddy lakes. I chose a thing called a zander, or a pike-perch, and saw it lifted from the ice and wrapped in clear plastic and wondered was I doing this because someone else had taken the thing I should have given her.
Why are we cooking fish? Jenny asked.
Because Mummy likes a surprise, I told her.
No she doesn’t.
And I realised she was right. That the thing about people who know each other is that they know each other. Whatever love may exist between them has already been mediated by what they know of each other. The unexpected action, the wanted or unwanted gesture, happens on a landscape of anticipated sameness, so the simple and safe course of their day must now be interrupted by some obstacle they have to climb. And while the unexpected is so often what is demanded – by self-help books, magazine articles and marriage therapists – it causes problems of its own. And I wondered, was I going quietly mad? The pearls were a worry. But the fish was an absurdity.
I cooked her a bouillabaisse once.
What’s that?
A Provençal fish stew.
And that’s what this is for?
She stared at the dead eye through the clear plastic. It was obscuring itself in vapour, as if the fish was breathing.
I thought I’d bake it in garlic and lemon, with a few olives maybe, lots of onions.
What’s it called?
A pike-perch. They swear it’s a delicacy here.
Butter, the fishmonger said bluntly.
Butter?
Is best with butter. Just butter. Fried in butter.
Maybe butter, then, I said.
Fish with butter, Jenny whispered on the way out. Sounds horrible.
So it does, I agreed. I’ll pull up a recipe for baking it on the internet. You can feed me the instructions.
Feed you, she said.
While I skin and chop and peel. It’s called cooking. She’ll love us for it.
She loves us anyway, she said, with the odd wisdom children have.
And I was thinking of that odd wisdom when I turned left and found myself in a line of stalled cars with some kind of fracas in between them. There must have been a demonstration up ahead, a riot or an event, because they came running through the cars like multicoloured hornets, some of their balaclavas already red with paint or blood, followed by the khaki-coloured storm troopers. One of them leapt on the bonnet of the car in her hiking boots and gave a strange throaty cry. It could have been a whoop of triumph or a scream of pain. her coloured dress was ripped and I caught a glimpse of a muscular torso and realised that the she might well have been a he. Whatever the gender, she was athletic, because she crossed bonnet after bonnet like a competitive hurdler and had vanished down a side-street before the khaki ones could touch her. And the police behind them, with their velcroed flak jackets and their Perspex shields, were hopelessly late. Then the traffic began to move again, slowly, and I heard the dull thump of drum and bass and saw a Special Forces member in a black balaclava climbing a statue’s pedestal, trying to reach the speaker that had been perched above its muscular arm. The hand of the arm held a gigantic hammer, a symbol of some industry long dead now, and the electric cord of the speaker was wrapped round the bronze wrist. So they had performed their absurd dance and drawn a crowd and an outraged counter-demonstration and a flotilla of police vans to subdue the subsequent riot and on it went. I was thinking of Istvan’s comments on the genius of the coloured balaclava when Jenny spoke from behind and asked me where she could buy those facemasks.
Why do you want one? I asked.
Not one, she said. Three or four. So we can all do the dance.
And as I parked the car, she pogoed up the driveway towards the Tyrolean house. I imagined three disembodied coloured balaclavas pogoing with her.
So we cooked. I deboned the fish and chopped the onions and garlic and wrapped the lot in greased paper and placed it in the baking oven. Jenny washed a salad and Sarah came in late and we ate the resultant dish to the sound of Pablo Casals.
Why do you always play that? Jenny asked.
Because I found it by accident and I want to listen to them through, from beginning to end. And it’s good for you to listen to great music.
That was Sarah, not me. But I could have asked the same question.
How’s the fish? I asked. I found the flesh buttery and slightly wet and I was glad I hadn’t heeded the fishmonger.
It’s brilliant, she said. An unexpected treat.
How was work?
We had an unspoken understanding that we never talked about mine.
Becoming impossible, she said, between mouthfuls. And I realised for the first time, it seemed, that she ate painfully slowly. My plate was almost empty, as was Jenny’s.
Like everything else, she continued.
What’s impossible, Mummy? Jenny asked.
We’re working on a site, darling, that some people think is sacred.
So you’ve had more of it, I said.
It seems to now go with the territory. Baghdad, and now here. Who would have thought that archaeology and politics could make such a combustible mix?
Combustible, Jenny repeated, as if she was savouring the word.
There are misunderstandings, darling. About the present and the past. And they can lead to demonstrations. People throwing things.
Pussy Riot, Jenny said.
Sarah gave me a concerned-parent look.
One of them jumped on the bonnet of the car. And I asked Daddy for a coloured what’s-it-called.
Balaclava, I said. And don’t worry. It was all quite uneventful.
The smell of fish permeated the house afterwards. I put Jenny to bed and she wrinkled her nose, as if to dispel it. I entered the office where Sarah was working and found it hanging round there too, like some ghostly residue. She asked what the fish was and I told her it was a zander, some odd Mitteleuropean cross between a pike and a perch.
You hated it, I said. She had her glasses on and was going through some notes.
No, she said, it was quite lovely, but boy does it stink the place.
And I wondered did we have extractor fans.
No, she said. Open the doors and the windows.
So I opened them all, but the smell persisted, intermingled with the humidity of the suburban fumes.
We may have to leave soon, she said. It’s becoming intolerable.
And I didn’t ask what was becoming intolerable. It was a broad subset that covered many different things.
Where would we go?
England, I suppose.
I’ll have no work there.
Aren’t there people to be followed? An errant wife or a wayward husband? Don’t they counterfeit Gucci bags there?
And what about you?
I’m worried about Jenny. And I’m in need of a – what do they call it? A sabbatical.
It began to rain later, one of those sudden heavy downpours that seem to come from a solid lake above the skies. And I realised every door and window was open, water was trickling in on the carpets and the window sashes, and I went around the house once more, systematically closing them. I went back to bed then, and curled my arms around her.
I feel I’m drowning, she said, only half-awake.
It’s the rain, I said. I’ve closed all the windows.
No, she said. I feel I’m drowning, in you.