When the taxi had gone, Alan stood at the chilly window, looking out, as if the cure of whiteness would empty his head—the hard, packed drive, the white snowy roofs of two clapboard houses nearby, offered up like tilted blank canvases … He admired Josh, suddenly—their conversation had altered his estimation of the young man. It couldn’t have been easy to speak in the way he did. Josh still loved Vanessa. But he could not live with her. He was fearful, he felt Vanessa’s unhappiness like a threat. Or he didn’t love her enough, and could not live with her enough. One or the other, or a bit of everything—these were just different fractions of withdrawal. The withdrawal was the sum. Not this week or next, maybe not even this month or next, but sooner rather than later, especially if Vanessa was set on returning to Britain. Sooner rather than later, Josh would go. Helen had been right about him, though not perhaps for the reasons she offered. Maybe it wasn’t fair to assume that Josh had asked Alan to come from Northumberland to manage the breakup of the relationship. Josh, he now noticed, had in fact asked for nothing, for no help of any kind. But Alan understood his new task. An idea began to form. Was he brave enough to carry it out? Could he say what needed to be said? Could he be as brave as Josh had been?
He wanted to talk—not to Candace right now, but to Helen. He went to the living room and dialed Helen’s mobile in London.
“Dad! What’s up? Is everything okay? How’s Van?”
“She’s out, teaching. I went to her class yesterday, sat in. She was very impressive indeed. Wonderful actually.”
“Why wouldn’t she be? She knows that stuff up and down, backwards and forwards.”
“Yes she does.”
“And Josh? Be kind to him, he’s just a big excitable puppy … So what’s up?”
“Josh has just gone to Boston for a couple of days. He’s researching some long article.”
“Again? To be completely honest, I don’t like the sound of that. He’s away an awful lot. What does he get up to, on these trips of his? I mean, if I were Vanessa, I’d keep an eye on him.”
“No, no,” said Alan sadly. “I think you’re wrong. I think he’s very loyal actually.”
“What’s happened, Dad?” she asked with suspicion. Alan was about to tell her, but suddenly could not.
“Nothing, all’s well…”
She was getting distracted by something, he could tell.
“Dad, when you’re back here—you come back in two days, is that right?—I will take you up on your idea. I’d like to bring the twins up to Northumberland for a weekend, soon.”
“And Tom, too, of course?”
“Yeah, sure. Tom, too.”
“We’ll make a plan.”
“It was fun, you know, being in Saratoga Springs with you and Van, even if you didn’t always feel that way.”
“Oh, I did. I loved our train journey…”
“Me too—me too. I’d better go, someone’s buzzing me.”
“Off you go. Speak soon.”
* * *
He set off again in the despised Prius. He was heading for Troy, but all he really wanted to do was drive and drive—through the cold suspended countryside, where the snow made everything equal. He would drive all day if need be. And at the end of his journey, having been to Troy and come back, perhaps all the old facts would be magically different.
He couldn’t protect his daughters, he couldn’t help them. Helen was a survivor, of course. Tough Helen could look after herself. But could Vanessa? In the lecture room, she had been so confident and easy, bringing up all her quotes and references. Alan was proud of her, as if she’d won the top prize at school. How much of that confidence and happiness now rested on Josh? Without Josh, would she quickly fall, as if a plinth were removed from a statue? And then what? How far would she fall? Josh had tried to withdraw—Alan knew this now—and Van had fallen hard. For some reason, he thought of how very differently each child used to sleep, and wondered if it was still the same. Helen used to lie in a kind of fury, on her side usually, with her knees drawn up and her arms tightly flung around her chest. She breathed through her open mouth, and frowned. Vanessa was peaceful. She slept on her back, and her features were serene and smoothed of worry. Distant, patient, calm. She seemed very far from life, as if in a Victorian photograph. He didn’t mind waking Helen, because it would likely be a blessing. But Vanessa appeared to have attained a peace that waking would shatter. He would put his hand on Van’s soft brow and quietly whisper—far too quietly to wake her—“Van, love, it’s time. Time to get up. I’m sorry to do this…” He longed for her to find the peace by day that she seemed to have found at night.
He was driving past a modern church—a redbrick community center with a white witch’s hat for a steeple—and then, only half a minute later, past another church, this one older and much more handsome, its dignity somewhat vitiated by a large banner that had these words: 1 CROSS, 3 NAILS, 4 GIVEN. More churches than bars in this state. In England, any decent village functioned on a two-to-one ratio of pubs to churches. He pulled up behind a yellow school bus, whose octagonal STOP sign was extended on a mechanical arm. The gunshot of American commands; he liked that. The blunt YIELD on all the signs that, at home, would have said GIVE WAY. He could hear that YIELD. If it was necessary to stop, then nothing worked better than STOP. Children were boarding the bus, dressed like schoolkids everywhere—like paratroopers or marines, bulkily padded and hooded, burdened by massive backpacks, huge plastic water bottles dangling from their belts like army-issue desert canteens. Ready for combat, the poor things.
Troy was half an hour down the interstate. He understood what Helen meant when she called it “Soviet.” The snowy distances, the tall buildings and freezing, martial spaces; the big river, embalmed in ice, and lashed by a sternly unattractive bridge. Maybe Kiev or Ryazan was like this. The city had an overwhelming atmosphere of broken utility: empty warehouses, ruined factories by the river, many unused offices. People—Trojans, would that be?—moved through the streets as quickly as they could. Life was bitten down to the quick here, the cold punishing all civic life. But there were fine church steeples, beautiful old flat-roofed buildings, wide sidewalks. Gracious unmolested streets, apparently unchanged from the 1880s. Down by the windy river, it was an utter wasteland: weeds, rubble, grit in the eyes. But what an opportunity for redevelopment—there must be half a mile at least of empty waterside space, just waiting for the right hotels, restaurants, and flats. Build, and the people will come. Oh yes, like his beloved Dobson Arts Café. Troy should be twinned with Newcastle: the inhabitants would understand each other much quicker than a Geordie could explain himself to a Londoner.
Down a side street, he found a quiet bar, sunk in wooden gloom. But the barman was large-bellied, generous, very talkative. He exuded an indiscriminate masculine joy. The regulars, as they arrived, were welcomed, and awarded equal banter.
“You behavin’, Mike?”
“No.”
“Ha!”
He told Alan to sit up at the bar, flourished a place mat, menu, napkin, and cutlery; Alan felt nicely babied, as if he were on a plane, in first class. His host quickly found out where he was from, and flattered him with counter-information.
“I’m figuring that ‘coals to Newcastle’ means your city has quite a lot to do with coal?”
“Coal, steel, shipbuilding. Used to. Newcastle was the first city in the world to have electric street lighting. Most of it has gone now. What we have instead are a set of splendid bridges. Well, we do still have the streetlights.”
“Ha—back in the nineteenth century this place was the city for steel. Second only to Pittsburgh. That’s what we did: steel. For the whole country. After the steel moved out, then we did shirts, we did collars, buttons. ‘Collar City’ wasn’t for nothing. We’ve got the Rensselaer Institute. We still have some of General Electric. Huge company. Speaking of electric lights, you know that it was Thomas Edison who founded General Electric?”
“I didn’t.” Amused, Alan felt he was up against an American version of himself.
“Yeah, that Edison. But have to say, it’s been kind of downhill from the time of the great man. People leave here, they don’t come back. And this used to be one of the wealthiest towns in America! The new mayor has all these plans, sure, but I’m tellin’ you, you can’t rebuild a whole city by getting a few artists to move up here from Brooklyn. Stupid. Stupid.”
On the way back from Troy, the interstate was crowded, the cars moving faster than he wanted to go, and the salt and slush stormed against his windshield, as if he were piloting a small boat. He saw an exit for Malta, and took it. Van, Josh … leave it, leave it. The road was pleasantly rural after the busy highway—snowy fields on either side, a massive wood just coming into view over the hill. It was getting darker: a stunted winter afternoon. Van’s radio station—he assumed it was her usual choice—was playing The Four Seasons, which Alan disliked as cordially as everyone else in the world did. To keep his mind off the situation in Saratoga Springs, he tried to listen to the familiar music as if for the first time. He leaned over to turn up the volume, a tiny downward gesture, only the tiniest moment away from the road, but when he looked up again through the windshield, a parked car he had not seen was preparing to pull out right in front of him. Alan had it under control: to pass, he lightly dabbed the brakes, touched the horn, and swerved out into the middle of the road. Nothing was coming the other way; he glimpsed a white bass drum in the backseat of the car he was passing.
He did not have it under control.
The steering wheel twisted in his hands, and suddenly the Prius was skidding, almost gracefully, without effort, right across the road. He pressed the brakes again, hard this time, in panic now, and the steering wheel retaliated and spun the other way. The car was gliding, gliding fast, and there was absolutely nothing he could do until the skid was finished with him. He had enough time to realize that he wasn’t going to die, to see that the oncoming lane was still empty of traffic, to be grateful for his seat belt, which had locked and was tightly bracing him. The Prius came to a stop at the far side of the road. The accident, such as it was, had taken a few seconds. He had turned himself completely round—he was now facing in the direction he had been coming from.
The memory of that queasy impotent slide made him feel sick. Vivaldi sparkled on. He’d been lucky, the car was untouched.
A young man, bearded, wearing a baseball cap, got out of his car, also a Toyota, Alan noticed, and ran across the empty road. Alan opened his door.
“Jesus, you okay? I’m sorry! I wasn’t actually pulling out.”
Alan’s legs were trembling, his breath short.
“It’s okay. I’m okay, the car’s fine. Actually, I looked down for a second, to deal with this … damn … music.” He pushed the Vivaldi off. “And when I looked up, you were somehow right in front of me. My fault.”
“You must’ve hit a patch of snow or ice or something. They don’t salt the roads much around Malta. Look, this was totally my bad. By the way, I’m Ryan … Your accent—is British? Where are you heading?”
Ryan explained that he was going to Saratoga Springs, too. He was a musician—hence the drums. His band was playing tonight and tomorrow night at Café Filippo, just off Broadway. Blues, folk, country. If Alan came, he’d give him the best seat in the house and make sure he got free drinks all night, too. Least he could do.