Vanessa phoned, to propose that she come to them for dinner. The hotel food was uninspired—but it was so cold outside, and they could at least stay indoors. She would pay. Alan insisted that he would pay, and she crumbled with graceless, childish haste: “Oh, all right then.”
They were waiting for her in the lobby when she arrived twenty minutes late. Helen, who had changed and looked furiously sleek in a tight black woolen dress, was of course beginning to get irritated, though they had drinks to sustain them. But Van had changed clothes, too. Alan assumed she was trying to keep up with Helen, but why would she want to? She had never shown the slightest inclination. When they were younger, Helen almost curated her many clothes—tended to the sartorial archives, kept a closet of perfectly ordered fashionability; dresses, skirts, nice jeans, and so many shoes, scrupulously aligned in rows, that Alan used to joke that her bedroom was like the antechamber to a mosque. But Van’s clothes all seemed to be the same color—hues of gray and black—and were left in sour piles all over her bedroom. Clothes belonged in the same neglected, even disdained, category as television, exercise, and friends. Alan and Cathy hoped for more of all these things in Vanessa’s life, and this minor-key anxiety became the reflexive mode of parenting. She needs more friends … She should go for a good walk … She should bike over to Corbridge … How can she meet someone special?… And now, after a couple of forgettable disappointments in love during her early thirties, she had met someone special—and Alan realized that of course the clothes, the improved hair, the contact lenses, were not for Helen, but for Josh. She looked radiant tonight, in a gray skirt and a sea-blue Indian top, inlaid with sequinny whatsits, and wearing a mother-of-pearl hairband (he had never before seen her wear a hairband). And her lovely eyes: he couldn’t get used to the idea of her without spectacles.
It’s not what I would have worn, thought Helen, but for Vanessa it’s pretty good, especially the skirt. She felt warmer toward her sister when she looked better, when she had made an effort. Dear God, was she as shallow as that? Oh, she was weary: as she looked at Vanessa, she didn’t know if she could do three days of this immense sisterly engagement. When Van had her “collapse,” in her final year at Oxford, her father had asked Helen, who was in London, to go to Oxford and bring Vanessa home. Two nights on the freezing floor of Van’s room at New College, and a day’s train journey up to Northumberland—enough: unhappiness was so boring, in the end. She wanted the best for Van, of course she did, but she had her own very pressing concerns at work, and Tom had been such a shit to her just now on the phone, and she wanted to be home with the kids. Of all that, Vanessa knew next to nothing. She had never really asked Helen about her work, at Sony or before; she had met the twins exactly once. In London, two years ago, Van handed them each a hideous stuffed toy, ruffled Jack’s hair (which made him cry), and then lapsed into wary watchfulness, as if she were keeping her eye on a dormant but largish spider. To be fair, it couldn’t be said that she herself was much better with the babies in the early days: “latching on,” for God’s sake … Everything was difficult—the twins doubled all anxiety, all practical problems, doubled the terror. And doubled the joy, too. What did Van know about the joy of being a parent? This happiness was intensely private—she and Tom shared it, and didn’t need to speak of it. Joy seemed so much more incommunicable than grief. Grief had tears, the visible signs, the obvious rain of sadness, and in that way was ultimately childish. Grief took you back to childhood, to the performance that got an adult running: “What’s wrong, why are you crying?” But what was the sign of joy—the sun of joy? Who came running to the joyous one to say, “Why are you smiling? Tell me what makes you so happy?”
* * *
The dinner was proving uneventful, thought Alan. It was wrong to think of it like that, of course … Vanessa had spent a good part of the evening telling them about Josh. She had met him eight months ago, at a conference in Boston, on technology and consciousness. Vanessa was delivering a paper, Josh was poking around to see if there was something to write a piece about. He was only thirty-three, seven years younger than her, but had lived a few lives already, according to Vanessa’s account. He started and abandoned a Ph.D. at Columbia; taught briefly in a very poor Brooklyn high school; wrote an unpublished novel (on his mother’s old Corona, for the beatnik hell of it); and was now “figuring out what’s next,” while earning a perfectly decent income writing pieces about technology and innovation for magazines like Wired and Rolling Stone. To Alan, this sounded like a handful of snipped threads, and no pattern. It didn’t matter how brilliant he was—Van said that he was the brightest person she’d ever met—if he didn’t stick at anything. And Alan had other thoughts: it can’t possibly be true about his earning a decent salary from freelance journalism. She’s keeping him. As the financial benefactor, Van has the upper hand. But as the younger man, Josh has the upper hand. A bloke who won’t stick at a job won’t stick at a relationship. And how she loved him! That much was obvious. When Vanessa spoke about Josh, she was shy and alert at once, a beautiful combination. She sat up straight, and perched on the edge of her seat, and stopped eating.
There was a lovely cherry tree in the garden in Northumberland: in the spring, it shed so much blossom that the air around it seemed to be charged with pink activity. When they were small, the children would climb onto the lower branches, and jump off into that rouged carpet; the little kid-glove petals clung to their clothes when they stood up. Each time they jumped, even though he knew it was safe, even though he had been a thousand times more reckless when he was a boy—Alan and his best friend, William, used to race their brakeless bikes down Western Hill, and once he walked in his bare feet along the Elvet Bridge parapet—he tensed himself, prepared for disaster. Sentimental of him, and certainly not very useful: imagine if his own parents had been as soft and anxious … Still, he wanted that carpet of blossom to stay forever on the grass, he wanted his children only to jump from the lower branches. To see them grow older was to realize that they would only climb higher and higher, and that all he could do was silently watch, as they jumped.