She had a broken arm. Vanessa came carefully down the steps of her house to greet them beside the cab, her right arm in a—pine-green?—cast. How could she not have told him?
As soon as he saw his elder daughter, Alan felt he couldn’t say anything to her about her depression, and was filled with despair. He couldn’t say anything to her. But she looked surprisingly good, had lost weight. Her dark hair, always beautiful, wasn’t baked into that matronly bun she had affected in recent years. It was loose around her neck. She was wearing tight jeans, and there was something else: no glasses. Had she left them in the house, or did she now have contacts? Her sweet face. He kissed her, held her to him, and then, as she went to embrace her sister, he said, “What happened? With the arm?”
But Vanessa, in a very Vanessa-like way, was fussing with Helen about whether they had given a big enough tip to the cabdriver. “We gave plenty,” he said, annoyed that this was how they would begin things. He pulled the bags from the cab’s boot, and double-slapped the roof of the car, as he’d seen the bloke at JFK do it: a smack on the rump and the horse is quickly dispatched. Not so, the driver was examining some piece of paper and wasn’t in a mood to hurry. “Why can’t he bugger off?” Alan muttered. Vanessa was beginning to look a little fearful, as she did whenever she perceived any conflict, and especially the glint of her father’s temper, and Helen, seeing this, picked up their bags and moved them all inside. It was caustically cold, anyway.
Vanessa’s house was at the top of a gentle hill, near the college campus, on what seemed to be the more expensive fringes of Saratoga Springs. It was almost rural, certainly more rustic than he had expected. There was a lot of wild land around the house, dead patchy grass mostly covered with snow, huge bare maples. The place was charmingly run-down. Probably Victorian, covered in long horizontal strips of elephant-gray wood, with tall old windows he immediately thought of as maiden-aunt windows (the old loyal face glimpsed for a second behind the uneven glass, the blurred candle flame, the winter outside) and an ample front porch on which two white rocking chairs, icily disabled, gestured at warmer seasons. The stairs were rotting, with several nails coming out. Josh was no handyman, then. Give him half an hour with a good hammer.
Inside, the house was large, loose, original. He wanted to study the pictures on the walls (some fancy abstract stuff; an Indian with a turban against a beautiful washed-pink background), to look closely at the bright fabrics thrown over the sofa and over the very baby grand piano (not a surprise, that piano, given Vanessa’s early devotion, but a surprise still), at the rugs and books—these last were piled absolutely everywhere, as if in exaggerated homage to “the life of the mind.” He had an urge to be dismissive, vaguely vandalistic. Surely she hadn’t read them all? But the place seemed comfortable and free, somehow, and he also admired that. This was her life, then! This was where she read her books, and wrote (or failed to write). And played the piano. Cathy and he used to laugh at the repetitious practice, the same wooden pieces day after day, Van’s narrow back turned to the room, the Mozart and Burgmüller audible anywhere in the house, even in the upstairs bathroom.
He took a minute before going into the kitchen, where Helen was talking, at speed and volume, and Vanessa was stirring something in a pot with her good arm. Helen sounded confident as ever, but Alan knew that she spoke loudly, more forcefully, when anxious, and he was fairly sure that Vanessa knew this, too. How tedious that everyone was so nervous.
“That looks uncomfortable, can’t Helen do it for you? What happened to the arm?”
“I already offered, she won’t let me.”
He had a strong desire to touch Vanessa again. He and Helen had not embraced or even pecked each other on the cheek last night, when he turned up at her room. The BlackBerry partly to blame, of course.
“I fell down the steps you just walked up. Just before Christmas, on the first ice of what’s feeling like a very long winter. The good news is, I get the cast off next week.”
“That’s what happened?”
Vanessa didn’t reply, but briefly slowed her stirring and looked at her father, a glance of tenderness, of pity almost. For an uncanny instant things were turned upside down: for he was supposed to protect her, if need be, not the other way round …
“Well, look after it. Those planks are going to get loose, maybe that was what made you fall. The nails are coming out, I saw when I was walking in … I like the house, by the way! What you’ve done with it. But the maintenance must be a nightmare. The windows are all shot, for a start.”
“Dad, it’s been here for a hundred and twenty years, quite a long time for an American house. Tell me about New York—last night, the hotel, the trip up here: everything. What do you think?”
“Great scenery from the train. You’ll have to explain to me exactly what this ‘upstate’ thing means. Are we ‘upstate’ now?” asked Alan.
“It’s quite simple,” said Vanessa. “Technically, it means New York State north of New York City—up the state, like upriver. As opposed to downriver. Actually, it’s a bit more specific than that, and generally refers to northern New York State. Yes, where we are now.”
“That Hudson sure is one amazing river,” he added, with an attempted American twang.
“All American rivers make English ones look like piddling streams. I like that.”
“Dad availed himself of the Amtrak café car, against my advice,” said Helen. “He’s now officially addicted to Doritos.”
“Sensible man.”
“New York was pretty crazy for me, as per usual.” Helen looked very finished and urban, alongside Vanessa. “Silly meetings, large amounts of dreary business, buzz buzz buzz. I’m just extremely tired,” she concluded, perhaps more flamboyantly than she’d intended to. Alan was about to mention what she’d told him on the train, about wanting out of Sony, but refrained. Perhaps she didn’t want Vanessa to know.
“Then welcome, both of you weary ones,” Vanessa said quietly, “to the world-famous Saratoga Springs Rest Cure. Now, some lunch.”
“Where’s Josh?” he asked.
“He’s in New York—research for a piece. He won’t be here till tomorrow. He sends apologies. He’s very keen to meet you both. Of course, he’s heard nothing whatsoever about you.” That was more like the old Vanessa, whose sense of humor resembled her sister’s, so that at the dinner table, years ago, if you had shut your eyes, you couldn’t tell them apart—joke for joke, cruelty for cruelty, sweetness for sweetness, allied but apart. Now they sat at Vanessa’s big pine table and had a late lunch. Through the drafty tall windows, the white landscape had a frigid glow. But the clouds were closing in. He watched his two highly intelligent, grown-up daughters, as they approached and drew back from each other, like switched magnets: Helen apparently more confident, acute, with her slightly sharp teeth, elegantly handsome, but also being disagreeable somehow, as if she were necessary medicine Vanessa just had to take; Vanessa quieter, softer, with her long dark hair and slightly squinting eyes, but exact, precise in her every word and thought, and so, to him at least, quite as formidable as her more obviously intimidating sister. How had he and Cathy produced them?
Helen was talking about Tom and the twins—Tom didn’t really do his share around the house, she was so tired when she got home, she had so little time, and it was frustrating that the nanny hadn’t tidied up or done the kids’ dishes but was just squatting on the ground, as if her willingness to get down onto the same level as the kids absolved her of adult duties. Again, there was the blade of complaint, as if it were all his fault or more likely Vanessa’s. In fact, Alan didn’t care for Tom that much, was a little suspicious of him from the start, Tom quickly breaking one of his cardinal “male rules”: he clapped his hands when someone told a joke or a funny story. (Everyone was now doing this, but men at least could refrain.) And Vanessa, deliberately refusing to provide the desired sympathy, was now slyly implying that Josh was a domestic paragon in this respect, a male feminist who did all the cooking and shopping. When it came to cleaning—“the historic feminist fault line,” she said—neither of them cared too much about it: they muddled through. Of course, Vanessa conceded that unlike Helen, they didn’t have children, so there was less mess, less work to do. Less of everything, thought Alan, with a tremor.
And then Helen, perhaps softened by Vanessa’s concession, was asking her sister about her academic work, and Vanessa got that delicious look of frowning concentration she had whenever philosophy was at issue, her tongue unconsciously peeking out of her mouth. She explained that she’d recently been to a conference, and shyly suggested that part of the conference was devoted to a discussion of her old paper about marrying Anglo-American analytic philosophy with European theory, and how she delivered a kind of postscript to that original paper.
“I did a riff on the old joke about how the difference between them is that English analytic philosophy examines your moral obligation when you have an overdue library book, and European philosophy examines your moral obligation when the Nazis invade.”
“When the Nazis invade, they’d close all the libraries and burn the books anyway,” said Helen swiftly, as if solving the issue there and then. Vanessa smiled and looked at her father.
“That’s great news about the conference,” he said. “People were giving talks about your work?”
“Well, for two hours, between four and six on a Friday, after most people had gone home. It was a two-day thing.”
“Come on, Van,” said her sister, “admit a triumph.”
Vanessa said nothing, looked full of color for a moment, and stood up, reaching for Helen’s bowl.
“Look, let us do that,” said Alan. “You’ve only got one bloody arm. Thank God it’s your right one, though. Do you remember, I’m left-handed, but—”
“But in my right mind,” finished Helen. “We remember.”
“I always liked that joke, for some reason,” he said.
“It’s on a par with those others, Dad,” said Vanessa.
“My mother-in-law has been on the continent for a week … Well, has she tried bananas? Your grandpa loved that.”
“And, The Commer has come to a full stop,” said Vanessa with childish enthusiasm.
“For years, I didn’t get that one, and was too embarrassed to ask,” said Helen. “And then I asked you and you explained that it was about Granddad’s Commer van.”
“Yes, his Commer van was always breaking down,” said Vanessa.
“Astonishingly unreliable vehicle, even by British standards … By the way, do you still have your old NatWest bank account, in Newcastle?” Alan asked Vanessa.
“The one I opened at sixteen? Yes, I do. What a funny question, where did that come from?”
“I don’t know, just thinking about your childhood, about old things, I suppose.”
“I do still have it, and I even have some real British money in it,” Vanessa added.
“Good.”
“You mean ‘good’ as a deposit for my eventual return?”
“No, just good,” he said.
“Good in itself?” She had the Querry tease in her face.
“Yes. You never know.”
“Money in the bank,” said Helen, doing a Durham accent—troublingly well. “Money in the bank” was what his own dad used to say to him. Not much, but same an’ all, it’s money in the bank. His father never knew that Alan got hold of his parents’ bank account number, and secretly deposited small sums every so often, not large enough for them to notice, thirty or forty pounds only.
* * *
At the end of the summer holidays, not so long after her attempt to run away from school, Vanessa had gone with her father to open that bank account. Alan guiltily put four hundred pounds into it, as if that might help. Vanessa remembered well that large sum, and not being able to say anything about it. She couldn’t thank him, even if she had felt like it, which she hadn’t, particularly. She couldn’t tell Helen, who had apparently not been granted the same largesse. It was the summer when the divorce was made final, became a legal fact. But her anger at that time wasn’t about the divorce so much as the way Dad had acted earlier in the summer, when she had the job at the café in Corbridge and got close to a boy who worked there—called Alan, unfunnily enough, except that his name was spelled “Allen.” Dad clearly couldn’t stand the idea that she might be about to go out with a local boy who’d left school at sixteen and had a very “strong” Northumbrian accent, and he did everything he could to ensure that they did not spend much time together. “Okay, Van, you’ll take this the wrong way, but I’m not sending you to a pricey boarding school so that you can marry a plasterer’s son from Corbridge. He has no bloody prospects. None.” He actually said that. She wouldn’t believe it now, except that she’d always been a passionate diarist, and she had those words down on paper, dated August 22, 1982.
Allen Farnley was a lovely boy with a beautiful soul and a slightly coarse, heavy face. He looked older than sixteen, with bulky shoulders and long arms he held tightly down against his sides, like an owl at rest. He might have been “a plasterer’s son,” but he was at war with his semiliterate family. He knew a lot more than Vanessa did about classical music, kept Brahms and Ligeti scores under his bed. He was greedy for everything, for all knowledge, he swallowed the universe like a pill. That was a phrase they had discovered in an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, discovered it together, it became the phrase of the summer of 1982: swallow the universe like a pill. Allen’s dad was worried that his son was homosexual—queer—which was especially amusing to Vanessa, because he never stopped staring at her bum in the café, and eventually got his way. Not all the way, they were both too shy and inexperienced for that, but there was a breast squeeze or two, a lot of kissing, and she remembered an inexpert hand stolidly wedged between her legs as a kind of stabilizing device, the way chocks were wedged under the wheels of an aircraft: ecstasy always paralyzed Allen, it was the same when he listened to music. They talked a lot about God, and tried to “philosophize”: What is music? What is “the good life”? Does death make life pointless? And so on. She had no idea where he was now. But she doubted that Allen’s life had suddenly developed “prospects.” Of course she was never going to marry Allen. They both knew there was no real future in it. Even at sixteen, she slightly pitied her father for his misplaced anxiety. She looked at him, across her own dining table. Here he was, at last: he had come all this way to see her in America. He looked tired. His handsome, narrow face was pale, and she realized that she could no longer picture him as a younger man. That loss tormented her whenever she thought about her late mother: she could still hear Cathy’s young voice but could no longer see her as a young woman. Poor Dad, with his worries and all his striving, and his endless “northern” will! What was the point of that extraordinary will? To succeed, to make something, a successful company, to make money, to have children, to keep that beautiful old house … But he hadn’t kept hold of his wife, and so he hadn’t really managed to keep hold of his family—hadn’t kept the family intact—so what good was the beautiful hollow old house? Now he was just old, like everyone else will eventually be, and soon enough he wouldn’t possess the last remnants of any of it. You swallow the universe like a pill, but then you piss it out, too, it passes out of you, along with everything else important. Yes, she must not think like this, must not dwell on things like this—so everyone seemed to be telling her, so Josh told her, so Dr. Lasky hinted—but it was very hard not to.
Helen, she remembered, was patronizing; she implied that she found Allen Farnley hideous but that Vanessa couldn’t really afford to be choosy. Vanessa was looking forward to Josh’s return tomorrow, because Josh was undoubtedly handsome, was better-looking than Tom, and was younger, too. Helen’s husband was beginning to wither on the vine, somewhat.
“Does anyone object if I have a smoke?” she asked.
“No, blow some of it my way,” said Helen.