IN THE MORNINGS NOW, Genevieve Hunter walked. Sometimes she walked for one hour, sometimes two, and always at random. Walking was beneficial: it occupied her body, lulled her mind, and made the day shrink. If she stayed in her apartment, she felt obliged to try to write, but the words that came up on her computer screen refused to cohere or make sense. If she stayed in her apartment, she felt the absence of Pascal too acutely. This was the first home they had ever shared: they had found it together, furnished it together; it was a place that proclaimed their love—and they had lived in it together for less than five months.
It was on the fringes of Notting Hill, on the top floor of a huge, extravagantly turreted house designed for his pre-Raphaelite artist friends by an architect whose work was regarded as radical in 1868. Though Rossetti had once had one of the studios in the building and Ruskin had been a frequent visitor there, Gini could not sense her building’s past life. For her, its existence only truly began the moment she and Pascal first saw it: after weeks of searching, of losing heart, of viewing one overpriced gimcrack conversion after another, suddenly, like a miracle, they had come upon this.
There was one vast studio room, as tall, as spacious, as the interior of a church. A spiral staircase led up to a gallery bedroom lined with shelves for books. One entire wall was window, a tall, arched north-facing window. Light flooded through its panes and moved upon the walls. It was a spring day, a glorious spring day, a day in which regeneration sang out in the air, and that window let spring into the room. From it, the city was invisible: still transfixed in the doorway, they looked out at a pale azure sky, at small high clouds that raced, at the branches of plane trees just green with new leaf; the brilliance of the sunlight dazzled their eyes. “It’s ours,” Pascal said after a long silence. “It was intended for us. It has to be ours—yes?”
After that they had both tried very hard to be pragmatic. Hand in hand, they explored. They searched for defects. Solemnly, Pascal tapped walls, inspected wiring and plumbing; equally solemnly, Gini examined a kitchen she knew she loved at first sight. They discovered there was a second bedroom, on the studio level, a small, romantic turret bedroom, a domain Rackham might have drawn for some fairy-tale princess. It was a room made for a child with imagination. Gini could see Pascal, thinking of his daughter.
She said, “Marianne could come to stay, Pascal.”
“She could,” he said. “She would love this room.”
For a while after that, neither of them quite dared to speak. They returned to the huge studio room, and stood holding hands in front of that tall, glorious window. Pascal jangled the keys the agent had given him. They looked at each other; Pascal’s gray eyes lit with amusement. He knew that she was about to voice the unspoken. Before she could do so, he lifted his hand and rested his fingers lightly against her lips.
“No. Wait,” he said. “You’re about to be sensible. Before you’re sensible, I have to do this.”
He lifted her long, pale hair away from her face. He looked into her eyes, then, drawing her toward him, bent and kissed her on the lips.
The embrace was long, and it left her shaken, her mind in disarray; he had, she thought, intended this. She drew away from him at last, with a smile and a shake of the head. She laced her fingers in his and examined his face from a safer distance, arm’s length. She watched the sunlight move across the darkness of his hair, across the planes of his face. She loved the line of his brows; she loved every aspect of his face, every inflection in his voice, every variation in his touch. Finely attuned to him, she knew precisely what he was thinking. It was there in every lineament, in the set of his mouth and in the glint of amusement that still lit his eyes. Nonetheless, the unspoken had to be voiced sooner or later.
“It’s too expensive,” she said, “we have to face facts.”
Pascal, the most determined man she had ever known, a man who could always contrive to get himself to the back of beyond, by yesterday, when there were no flights, gave a shrug. He began to pace the room. Gini, familiar with his refusal ever to accept defeat, watched him with quiet affection. She had seen him like this before, when he worked. Pascal, who could argue or charm his way past any barricade or impediment, Pascal, who, failing to get in some front entrance, would always contrive a way in through the side or the back, Pascal, who went into war zones and brought back the pictures no one else could get.
Gini tried to concentrate. She added up, again, the money she could expect from the sale of her own London apartment; the money Pascal thought could be raised from the sale of his Paris atelier; the figures the mortgage companies had mentioned. No matter how she added up those figures, the discrepancy was huge. She gave a sigh; Pascal, undaunted as always, returned to her at once. He put his arm around her waist.
“My car,” said Pascal, who drove fast in a classic, old, and much-loved Porsche. “I’ll sell my car. I’ll get a dull car. That would help.”
“I’ll sell mine too.” She smiled. Gini drove an ancient Volkswagen Beetle. Pascal, who did not admire this vehicle, gave her a serious look.
“A sacrifice I couldn’t permit. Besides, we’d have to pay someone to take it off our hands.”
“We could live on vegetables.”
“We could.” He drew her closer to him. “Turnips. Parsnips.”
“No new clothes for the next ten years.”
“A better idea. I prefer you without clothes, in any case.”
“I could change careers. Stop being a journalist. Become a merchant banker. A corporate lawyer. An advertising whiz kid…”
“I think not. That would be a waste. Look at me, Gini.”
She turned to face him; his arms encircled her waist.
“Do we want this, Gini?”
“Yes. We do.”
“Then let’s get it,” said Pascal.
From that moment onward he was as she most loved him—very energetic, very charming, very steely, and very French. First the owners of the apartment, then their agents, then the bank, began to give way under his onslaught: the price, it seemed, might after all be a little negotiable; the mortgage might be, after all, increased. Returning to Gini’s apartment, with its forlorn For Sale sign, he found her a buyer within a week. At night, when to his annoyance and chagrin—for Pascal himself did not observe office hours and despised those who did—the bank or real estate agents could not be reached, he covered hundreds of sheets of paper with calculations. Sum after sum, all the sevens neatly crossed. He added up their expenses, his child support payments to his ex-wife for Marianne, the mortgage payments, the cost of heating and travel and—Gini saw to her amused delight—wine and bread.
“Wine?” she said, leaning over his shoulder. “That’s a luxury. Cross that off.”
“To you, my darling American, it may be a luxury. To me it is a necessity.”
“You’ve left out electricity.”
“Candles?” He looked at her with a smile.
“Insurance?”
“Damn. I’ll have to call Max.”
He called Max there and then, as—Gini suspected—he had intended to do from the first. He told Max that he was enjoying being wooed by the Correspondent very much, but if Max wished courtship to lead to marriage, the dowry would have to be increased.
“I have been doing sums,” Pascal said. “I had allowed for wine but not electricity. A foolish oversight…When you come to dinner with us, you see, Max, in this wonderful place we mean to have, it would be useful to be able to cook for you—Oh, really? A ballpark figure? What is that?”
There was a pause while Pascal, who understood the term very well, listened intently. He then named a sum of money. Gini paled; Max said yes.
And so it had become theirs, all this wonderful space. Pascal went to see an antiques-dealer friend with a warehouse on King’s Road. After an excellent lunch, and several hours of fierce Gallic bargaining, he acquired a bed. It was a high, wide, glorious four-poster, once the property of a king’s mistress—or so the dealer claimed. It had pillars carved with vines, and its original hangings of worn scarlet silk. He kept the purchase secret, and had the bed installed on a day when Gini was out interviewing a very dull and self-satisfied Cabinet minister. When she came home that spring evening, there it was.
They climbed into it together at once. It was like being aboard a sailing ship. From its pillows, they looked out across the gallery balustrade to the magnificent window, to the tops of trees, to a scudding sky, to the lights and sounds of the invisible city that thrummed five floors below. They drank wine there, then ate supper there, then made love there, then slept.
“I am content,” Pascal said, gathering her into his arms the next morning, “I have never been so content.”
Gini was also content. She liked the word, which seemed to link them in its embrace. She thought of all the years since she had first met Pascal, and realized with a shock that they comprised almost half her life. She thought of the weeks when she had first known him, and first loved him, in Beirut. She thought of their years apart, and their reunion. She thought: I want for nothing. Everything I love and value and esteem is here. Oh, yes, I am content.
She felt no unease, not the least premonition, not even a prick of superstition that the beneficent gods who dispense bounty to humans have a grim habit of giving with the right hand, then immediately taking back with the left. Five months after moving into that apartment, she was granted what had always been her other wish: she was sent to Sarajevo, to cover the war in Bosnia. She went with Pascal, and worked there with Pascal. He had operated from war zones before, many times; she had not.
Six months later, she returned alone. Pascal, unaware of the extent of the change in her, agreed that her return to London was the best course. He would remain in Bosnia for a brief period—at most three weeks, a month. He had now been there, alone, for nine weeks, and the date of his return was still not fixed. At first, although Gini was careful not to tell Pascal this, she was glad of the delay. She thought it would give her time—time to cure herself of the aftermath of Bosnia and what she saw there, time to cure the nightmares, the sleeplessness, time to cure herself.
Wars could be exorcised, she told herself as the weeks went by. It must, somehow, be possible—not to forget, she would have despised herself had she ever forgotten—to distance herself. But death—the sound, taste, sight, and smell of death—pursued her. It prevented rest, jerked her awake with a cry of fear in the lonely morning hours; it seeped into this lovely apartment and soiled its contentment; it pursued her out into the ordinary streets.
She had, as had many of the reporters out there, been physically wounded while in Bosnia. One evening, in a small village set high in a mountain pass, on her way with Pascal to Mostar (and above all she feared to think of Mostar) they had been caught in a mortar attack. A piece of shrapnel had lodged in her upper arm. It was a minor injury of which she was almost ashamed, given the maimings she had witnessed; it was quickly, and with reasonable efficiency, patched up.
Now, nine weeks after leaving that country, the wound had almost healed: her mind had not. Pascal, long acquainted with modern warfare and its hideous results, had tried to warn her. And she, not being a fool, had listened to those warnings, of course. Quietly, with reluctance, he had shown her, before they left for Bosnia, some of the pictures he had taken in the past, pictures taken as documentation only, never intended for publication, pictures no magazine or newspaper could ever reproduce.
“You have to be prepared.” He laid out the black and white rectangles in front of her. “You will see this, Gini. And worse.”
He waited, in silence, as she looked down at the photographs.
“That’s the threshold,” he said eventually. “Are you sure, Gini—absolutely sure—that it’s one you want to cross?”
Shaken, nauseated, fighting the physical symptoms of her distress, she had turned away, unable to face him. Their journey to Bosnia was still one week away; he had timed this, she thought, so that it was possible for her, even then, to back out.
“It wouldn’t be cowardice,” he went on gently. “You mustn’t think that. It would simply be a choice. There is a difference, Gini, between the sexes. It is harder for a woman to look at this, to live with this—”
“Why?” She swung around to face him again, sensing he might be right. “Why, Pascal? These things happen. These atrocities exist. Why should women be shielded from them? That can’t be right. I think that’s weak—and I don’t want to be weak.”
“It isn’t necessarily weakness. I don’t think of it that way. These incidents you see here”—he gestured at the photographs—“they are perpetrated by men. So they are something all men have to confront. But if a woman turns away from them, if you turn away, Gini, might that not be a sign of strength?”
She had been moved then by the concern and the gentleness in his face. It was very characteristic of Pascal, she thought, not only to offer her an escape route, but to do so with grace.
The offer had been quietly made, and quietly she refused it. But once they reached Bosnia, Pascal did attempt to shield her at first. There were dangers he, if alone, might have risked, to which he would not expose her. He was careful what she saw, and tried to ensure that, like a plant susceptible to frost damage, she was gradually hardened off.
It took Gini less than a week to understand that this process, which he never admitted but observed meticulously, was hampering their work. And so, almost from the first, it became necessary for her to act. She, who had had no secrets from Pascal, now had many: if he had suspected her true reactions, he would have insisted she return to London at once.
She could disguise fear and fatigue well enough. It was harder to disguise the tears, and hardest of all to hide the pain and mounting incomprehension that lay behind the tears. Day by day she would discover new devices to deceive him—and they had to be rigorously employed, day and night (no weakening when she lay in his arms and could not sleep), for Pascal was quick, sensitive, and attuned to her. Just one glance, one wrong inflection, one gesture, and he would begin to see the truth.
So, day by day, she perfected herself; she put her heart on ice; she made herself numb, turned herself into an efficient walking-talking automaton, an automaton who looked at ruined buildings and ruined bodies and ruined lives, and got on with the job. To do so, she found, was to un-sex herself. It was as if something fluent and fluid in her body began to dry up; made her dry-eyed, bloodless, without appetite for food. When Pascal embraced her now, there was no immediate rush of response; she felt like a husk, a dried, withered thing. It came as no surprise to her, although she was on the pill, when her periods stopped: women bled—but she was no longer a woman, she was a robot.
Some of these symptoms, of course, no lover could mistake. She could see that Pascal was hurt by them, and redoubled her efforts at once. She began to fake her orgasms, and Pascal quietly allowed her to do this for two weeks. At the end of that time he took her in his arms, waited for the confession that did not come, and then said:
“Gini. Never do that again. I won’t have you lie to me. And above all, I won’t have you lie to me in bed.”
She could hear pain, and regret, and anxiety in his voice—also a certain sternness. On that occasion she did briefly weep, and Pascal held her while she did so. After that he questioned her, and tried to persuade her to speak, but when she avoided his questions or denied any reason for concern, he ceased to press her. He made a private decision to accept her reticence, she saw, and said nothing, though she knew that this scrupulousness, both verbal and physical, cost him dearly.
Professionally, impressed by the coolness she showed, he did gradually accede to her requests. Ratchet by ratchet, he increased the risks. He allowed her to bear witness; he took her on the necessary stations: the rape victims, the dead, the dying, and the mutilations of death. She thought he could see what she found the hardest—after Mostar, he was certainly in no doubt; he could see that while she had learned to look at dismemberment, the grief of parents and the injury to children remained hard for her. The tears would spring to her eyes, and her hands would shake. He tried to avoid places and situations where such encounters were unavoidable, but even Pascal could not entirely succeed in this. In that country, predictions and plans could never be sure: mortar fire would suddenly open up in a remote and apparently deserted mountain pass; death could be across the next street.
The proximity of death, the skull beneath the skin, the abomination around the corner, that was, for Gini, the essence of Bosnia. And it returned with her to London, although writing to Pascal, and telephoning Pascal, she never mentioned this.
“You are sleeping, darling? You’re eating properly?” he would ask, and she would say yes, of course, her appetite was back to normal, she’d slept for ten hours straight the previous night.
“And you are going out, darling? You are seeing people? Your arm—you’re sure it’s healed?”
Yes, she would lie, she’d been to the theater, the movies, she had seen Lindsay, her arm was fine now that the stitches were out. How well she could act on the telephone! How well she could deceive when she wrote! The last thing she should do now, she knew, was burden Pascal with worries on her behalf, and so she would inject warmth, amusement, conviction into her voice. He was surprised, she suspected, but he was gradually convinced. He was lulled into postponing his return, when that return was the thing she most desired in life. Yes, she acted well, but she had had six months in Bosnia to practice—and she knew it was easier to convince someone who was himself working under great stress.
Some of what she said was true: her arm had healed; but Gini, walking the London streets, knew her mind had not. How long did it take for a mind to cure itself, she wondered. Six months, a year, a decade?
Nine weeks had achieved very little. The normality of London made it worse. Here, not surprisingly, people continued with their day-to-day lives, and Gini, trying to communicate with them, remained locked in some other private place. There she was, on the other side of a glass panel, gesticulating, trying to speak, trying to fight her way out of her mental war zone—and failing. Days passed: weeks passed: friends became impatient with her, and her sense of dislocation increased.
Now, alone in their lovely apartment, alone in their lovely bed, she was beset with fears. She would begin weeping for children she wanted to save, and whom she knew were months dead. She would hear bombs and mortar fire, think of snipers, and remember that Pascal, said to lead a charmed life, could become a statistic like anyone else. There could be a telephone call, a somber visit from a stranger: Pascal might never come back.
Fearing for his safety, she would open the closets and touch his clothes, take down his books from the bookshelves. She would read his letters, then reread them, until she knew them by heart, all these reassurances of his love. She would write, careful words that hid her despair, and she would make sure that no tears ever fell on the ink. At Christmas—she had been sure he would return for Christmas—she began to hope again. It would be their first Christmas together. She rushed out, bought a tree and tinsel and stars to decorate it. She bought him presents, and—rationing her joy—wrapped one present only each night so her happiness and excitement might last for an entire week.
But Pascal did not return as planned; the opportunity suddenly came for him to get through to a zone in the north to which no journalists had had access in months. “You must take it—you must go,” Gini said on the telephone—and after some persuasion, he did.
That was when the new fear gripped her. She had gone into the bathroom, switched on all the lights, and made herself confront the image in the glass. She could see, she made herself see, the physical effects of lack of appetite and sleep. She looked at the pale face in the mirror in front of her: she knew that Pascal found her beautiful, for he told her so often enough. She turned her face this way and that, searching for some sign of the woman he described, the woman he loved.
She could not see her. She felt a flurry of panic then. This woman he would scarcely recognize, and surely could not love. She had a thin, tense, secretive look; her eyes were secretive, shifting away from her own glance. One secret above all, of course; one confession that should have been made in Mostar, but was not. That secret she still nursed. If Pascal had walked into the room now, she would have longed to voice it, but feared to do so: the words would stick in her throat.
She spent a sleepless night; the next morning, febrile with new resolve, she did the sensible, the obvious thing. She consulted a doctor. It was a necessary step—and one she had been avoiding for two months.
The doctor was a stranger. His office had been closed over Christmas, and there was a backlog of patients. Gini sat in the crowded waiting room, an unread magazine on her knee. She tried to block out the sounds of fractious children and squalling babies. She was trying to decide how much to tell the doctor, and how to make her explanation brief.
She thought: I must be clear and concise. I must tell him I was in Bosnia. I must mention the hours we worked. I must explain that I thought I could cope, and I tried to cope, but I found it very hard to look at—death. Yes, she thought, that was the word. Just death. No need to be more specific than that. She jumped; her name was being called for the third time by an irritable receptionist. Clutching her purse, she rose to her feet.
She found the doctor in a room the size of a small cubicle, a young man of about her own age, with a harassed air, who said without preamble, “What’s the problem?”
Outside, telephones rang; a child shrieked. Gini fixed her eyes on an antismoking poster. It was immediately clear to her that she could not mention Bosnia to this man; she could not mention Bosnia in this place. It would be too long, too complicated; it would be too cheap.
The doctor was staring at her, tapping his pen.
“Symptoms?” he asked. “What symptoms are troubling you?”
“I—can’t sleep,” Gini replied. She was starting to sweat. The room felt airless; the pen tapped. “I’m having nightmares. I’ve been under—some stress. I’m not eating too well. I’ve lost weight—about fourteen pounds, I guess…”
The doctor was scribbling notes. He did not appear sympathetic. Gini was unsure whether that was because he viewed unmarried women with sleep problems as neurotic pests, or because his ballpoint was refusing to work properly. He shook it irritably.
“I—cry sometimes,” she went on, “for no reason at all. I’ll be in a grocery store, or just walking along the street, and—I can’t seem to control it. It just happens. I can’t stop.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Around two months.”
“What triggered it?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Bereavement? Divorce? You lost your job?”
“No. I’m not married. I—”
She stopped. Bereavement: she tried the word in her mind. Perhaps that was the word she should use. Except no, bereavement implied the loss of someone you knew and loved—a mother, a father, perhaps. Could the deaths of strangers be described as bereavement? No, she decided, she could not use that word; she did not have the right.
“The weight loss is rapid. Anything else? Vomiting?”
“No.”
“Periods normal?”
“No. I haven’t had a period in four months. I’ve been—abroad, and they stopped while I was out there. But that can happen to me, it has before. If I’m working hard, if I’ve been under stress, and—”
“Abroad? Abroad where? Not India, Africa, anywhere like that?”
“No. I was in Eastern Europe.”
He lost interest at once. He was writing again. He wrote a “4,” and drew a circle around it. Over and over, above the noise of children and telephones, Gini could hear the rattle of machine-gun fire, the soft crunch of masonry falling. This happened sometimes, and it had to be controlled, because if it was not, those sounds would take her back to Mostar, back to that hospital ward, and back to a certain young boy there. She would remember his eyes. She gripped the arms of her chair tightly. She spelled out the words on the poster, letter by letter.
“You’ve been tested presumably?” The doctor glanced up.
“Tested?”
“You’ve had a pregnancy test?” He shot her a cold look, as if her stupidity irritated him. “I would assume you have, since you haven’t had a period in four months.”
“Yes, I have. While I was away—I had a test out there…” She hesitated, coloring. “As soon as I missed the first time, I went to a doctor, and—”
“That would be too soon. Didn’t you know that?”
“Yes. I suppose I did. It was just—I was eager to know, and…And anyway, I’ve tested myself since. Last month. This month. I bought those kits. In a pharmacy—”
She broke off. She could hear how odd and breathless her voice sounded. The room felt insufferably hot. The pen was still tapping. He looked at his watch.
“They were negative. I knew they would be. I’m not pregnant. I’m on the pill. At least—I was on the pill. I stopped taking it when I returned to London.”
“Why?”
“Because I—well, I’m not sleeping with anyone in London…”
“That could change, presumably.”
His tone was dismissive. The femaleness of this was beginning to annoy him, she could sense.
“In any case”—he made another note—“those pregnancy testing kits can be unreliable unless you follow the directions on the package exactly.”
“Look, I can read instructions on a kit, all right? A five-year-old child could understand those instructions. I just—”
“Of course. Of course.”
Her voice had risen; her tone had been a mistake. He became instantly soothing, a veneer of calm over a deepening lack of sympathy.
“Well, I very much doubt that there’s anything seriously wrong. You’ve been overdoing things, I expect. We’ll take our own sample, however, so we can rule out pregnancy for certain. I’ll run a blood test too. I don’t like the weight loss. See the nurse now and come back in three days. I’ll see you then.”
Gini returned three days later. She saw a different doctor, the first being out on emergency call. The second, a woman, was cheerful and brisk. The pregnancy test was negative. The blood test was normal. She diagnosed stress. She prescribed a short course of Valium. Gini collected the pills, took them home.
They made her violently angry. She tipped them down the sink.
CONFRONT THE DEMONS: THAT’S what Pascal would have said. Her stepmother, Mary, her friends—they might have given the same advice. But Mary, to whom she was so close, was away on a three-month trip to the States, and Gini did not ask her friends, not even Lindsay. To confront demons properly, she believed, you had to do it alone.
She tried to work, and failed; she tried to sleep and mostly failed. And, in the mornings, to make the day move, time pass, she walked.
No set pattern. That Friday, the Friday she was due to meet Lindsay, she walked north to Portobello, then south to Holland Park, then west to Shepherd’s Bush, then back along the main road to Notting Hill Gate. It was raining, a fine, thin rain, and cars hissed by on the streets. All the shops and restaurants seemed to buzz with a peculiar disjointed, distant life. Normal, normal, normal, Gini said to herself. This is normal—people shopping, friends meeting. It will be a normal weekend. I shall be my normal self. I’ll talk to people and function properly. I’ll stop sleepwalking through my life.
“A weekend in the country,” Lindsay had said. “Do you good, Gini. You like Charlotte. You like Max. You like their kids. You’re turning into a bloody hermit, a recluse. You’re coming. I’m driving you. No argument. That’s it.”
Gini had argued. She said a country weekend was just another kind of Valium. She said she wasn’t turning into a hermit, or some dotty recluse, she just liked to be alone, and she needed time to think.
“Bullshit,” Lindsay said. “You think too damn much. You always did. Pascal will be home soon…”
“It might be soon. It might not.”
“…And when he gets back, what’s he going to find? A wreck. You’ve lost too much weight, you look ill and sad. You’re not working, not writing, not going out. You’re getting peculiar. So stop.”
“All right,” Gini said obligingly, anything to make Lindsay stop nagging. “I’ll come. I won’t shame you. I’ll talk. I’ll eat. I won’t twitch.”
“You don’t twitch,” Lindsay replied fondly. “Not yet anyway. But you have to reform. Twitching’s next.”
She had arrived, Gini saw now, at Lindsay’s house, although she had no recollection of aiming for it, or turning into the right street. She mounted the steps and rang the bell, and after a long delay it was answered by Tom.
“Oh, hi,” Tom said, leaving the door wide, and sprinting for the stairs. “Come on up. I’m alone. Gran’s out. Mum phoned. She said to make you a sandwich, she’s going to be late. I said I would make a sandwich, but there wasn’t any bread. She said there was a shop on the corner, and she hung up. She sounded mildly premenstrual, but then, she often does. I had a temperature of 102 two days ago, did Mum tell you? Extreme, huh? I mean, four more degrees and your brains boil. Did you know that?”
“Not consciously,” said Gini, reaching the top floor and the kitchen. “But it makes sense.”
She looked at Tom, whom she had not seen since leaving for Sarajevo. He had grown a ponytail since she last saw him, and he seemed to have acquired new powers of speech. He was wearing a torn sweater, torn jeans, and he had nothing on his feet. He was about to be a man, and about to be handsome, Gini thought, but he had not yet acquired a man’s social duplicity. He was staring at her; then he blushed and his eyes slid away from her face.
“I know,” she said. “Didn’t Lindsay tell you? I’ve lost weight.”
“I’ll make some coffee…”
He was already turning away in embarrassment, trying to fill the kettle at a sink overflowing with unwashed dishes. “Shit,” he muttered. “Maybe I’d better clear up a bit, before Mum gets back. It’s Gran’s turn—we have assignments now, Mum’s latest ploy to keep chaos at bay. Gran skives off though. She doesn’t like washing dishes. She says the detergent gives her a rash.”
“Convenient,” said Gini, who knew Louise of old.
“Yeah. That’s what I said.”
“I’ll help. If I wash and you dry, it won’t take long. What time is Lindsay getting here?”
“She said one-thirty. Maybe two. She’s in a flap because she’s off to Paris Monday. Away this weekend with you. The social whirl.” He grinned. “That makes her guilty. When she’s guilty she gets, like seriously premenstrual. Plus there’s some creep at her office and they’re at war, about to go nuclear, and this creep held her up.”
“Concise,” Gini said, running hot water. “Perhaps a little crude on the female psychology, but I get the picture. You didn’t want to join us at Max’s, then?”
“Not my scene.”
“It was once.”
“Not anymore. Too many babies. Charlotte’s pregnant again, and—What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I just scalded myself, that’s all. This water’s a bit hot.”
“Anyway, there’s a Bergman retrospective at the NFT this weekend. Twelve hours’ solid viewing. Immaculate art.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Bergman. Antonioni. Fellini. Godard. Not your American directors. Not anymore.”
“You used to like my American directors. Mean Streets. Taxi Driver. The Godfather. We saw The Godfather three times at least, Tom.”
“Yeah. Well, early Coppola’s okay. And Scorsese is great. Did you see Goodfellas? Oh, and Tarantino, of course. I mean, Tarantino is seriously amazing. You’ve seen Reservoir Dogs? Pulp Fiction?”
“No.”
“The two greatest American films ever made. Bar none. Postmodern cinema. They’re violent, of course.”
“So I hear. I’m not in the mood for violence right now. I’ll catch up with them eventually, I guess…”
“You must. There’s this scene in Pulp Fiction—I don’t want to spoil it for you, because he plays these narrative games, of course, but there’s these college kids, and you know they’re about to get shot, and Travolta gets out his gun, but he doesn’t point it at them or anything. He’s just standing behind them, and then—” Tom stopped.
“Hey, look. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have started in on that. Mum warned me. She said—”
“It’s fine, Tom. Really. Don’t worry about it. I’m okay. Just pass me that saucepan, would you?”
Tom passed it across. He stood beside her, wielding his dish towel ineffectively, occasionally glancing in her direction.
“I would like to know—” He hesitated. “I mean, what happened to you in Sarajevo? Do you talk about it? Mum says you don’t talk about it. Not to her, not to anyone. Why?”
“You used not to talk,” Gini countered. “Tom, for three years, four years, you scarcely spoke at all. It drove Lindsay wild with anxiety and guilt. I’m sure you had thoughts, ideas, feelings, that you could have chosen to communicate. You decided, for reasons of your own, not to do so. And I don’t think I badgered you, Tom, at the time…”
“No. You didn’t You were cool.” He paused. “That’s okay. I can read that. People talk too much anyway. In this family they talk all the time. Mum never draws breath. Gran never draws breath. I just needed a bit of space. A bit of silence for a while.”
“Yes, well, sometimes that can help.” Gini looked away.
“Sure. No sweat. You used to talk, that’s all. I liked talking to you—you remember that? We’d go out, you’d treat me to a movie, grab a hamburger. It was fun.”
“Yes. I remember. I enjoyed it too.”
“So I can’t help wondering… what brought this on.” He hesitated again. “Mum says it’s post-traumatic stress disorder—did she tell you?”
“No, she didn’t. And it’s nothing so grand.”
“Too many dead bodies, Mum says. I said—Pascal can handle all that, he’s covered hundreds of wars, so why can’t Gini? Mum says it’s different for women, because they feel things more, but I don’t buy that. I think…” He weighed his words. “I think you’ll get inured to it in time. And it had to be hard for you, because it was your first war, and it meant a whole lot to you because that was always your ambition, right? To cover wars?”
“Yes, it was. Once. Why don’t we change the subject?”
“Sure.”
There was a brief silence. Tom dried a saucepan and some plates while Gini grimly scrubbed and rinsed. She would be fine, she told herself, if she could just concentrate on this small, menial task. Then Tom did the one thing she would never have expected, the one thing she could not deal with at all.
Blushing again, and with a gauche clumsiness that reminded her of him as a much younger boy, he put his arm around her shoulders and apologized. He said he knew it was crass, and he shouldn’t have raised the subject, and he was sorry he had, but someone—well, his girlfriend, actually—had told him he had to get in touch with other people’s feelings, so he had been making an effort, and it seemed to be working, kind of, and he hadn’t meant to be intrusive, but Gini did look so different that he felt he had to say something…
She began to cry. She could see that her tears distressed Tom, but she was powerless to stop them. Tom drew her to the table. He brought her a handful of Kleenex. When she saw how agitated he had become, she battled the tears, and finally controlled them. Seeing her grow calmer, Tom grew kinder still. He made her some coffee, then he sat down beside her and took her hand.
“Tell me,” he said. “You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone else, I promise. I understand. What made you cry?”
“It wasn’t you, Tom.” Gini squeezed his hand, then released it. “Please don’t blame yourself. You were very kind. It’s just—in Bosnia I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t let myself. So it’s as if the tears stored themselves up. They waited till I got home—and now I suddenly remember something, and they begin, and I can’t stop them. That’s all.”
“What do you remember?” He looked at her gravely, and Gini was touched. She could see that, half-boy, half-adult, he was trying to act as he considered proper for a man.
“Ugly things I saw. People dying. Wounds. You watch the news on TV, Tom. You can imagine. I’d seen those programs too, before I went, obviously. I’d seen Pascal’s photographs. I knew what I’d find. I thought I was prepared. Only when you see it, stand by it, for months at a time—when you know that nothing you do, and nothing you write, is going to alter it…” She bent her head.
He frowned. “Why did you want to go there, Gini? Why cover wars? Was it because your father did? Because he won that Pulitzer Prize thing? Or Pascal, maybe? So you could work with him, be together?”
“All of those things, I guess, Tom.” She sighed. “I don’t know anymore. All I know is—I couldn’t go back to Bosnia. I’ll never write about another war.”
“I expect you will,” Tom said in an encouraging tone. “I read those pieces you wrote. They were really moving. When Mum read that one from Mostar, she cried, and—”
“Don’t, Tom. Let’s not talk about it anymore. Okay?”
“You miss Pascal.” Tom rose. “Mum says that’s half the problem, and I agree. She says you’ll be okay when he gets back. In fact, she’s pretty mad at him for staying away so long. She said the other night, if she had his number, she’d call him, give him a piece of her mind.”
“What?” Gini also rose. She looked at him in consternation. “Tom—she didn’t mean that, did she? She mustn’t do that. She has no right to interfere.”
“It’s okay. She won’t. She just gets these ideas.” He paused, his face changing. “Oh, I see. I understand. You haven’t told him, have you? He doesn’t know you’re ill—”
“I’m not ill. Can we stop this?”
“Because if he knew, Mum’s right, he’d be on the next plane.”
“Tom, will you just stop this?”
“No. I won’t!” Tom, she realized suddenly, was also angry. His face had paled. He shot her a glance fierce with adolescent purity. “You’re lying to Pascal. You shouldn’t lie, not to someone who loves you—”
“I am not lying.” Gini rounded on him furiously. “There may be certain things I prefer not to tell him, but there are reasons for that. He has to work, Tom.”
“It’s still a lie. It’s a lie by omission, that’s all. I don’t lie. I wouldn’t lie to my girlfriend. I haven’t told one lie, not since November ninth last year. Not even a single white lie—”
“So I see. Well, you should learn, Tom. Sometimes the truth causes pain. Sometimes lies can be helpful. Or merciful. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”
The final remark was fatal, she knew instantly. Blood rushed up into his neck and face.
“Couples shouldn’t lie especially,” he burst out. “That really makes me sick. Wives lying to their husbands. Husbands lying to their wives. My dad does that. When he’s here, which is once every century, he just fucking lies all the time.”
Gini could now hear the mounting distress, could feel his sudden rage. The turn in the conversation, and the speed of his unforeseen reaction, took her by surprise.
“Tom, don’t,” she began, holding out her hand. “I’m sorry I said that. And you mustn’t think that way. Lindsay doesn’t lie. Lindsay is one of the most truthful people I know. And your parents aren’t together. They haven’t been for years. You mustn’t make judgments about them like that.”
“Why not? It’s true. I know the facts. They were married. For ten minutes. They had a wedding. They made all those vows. I was born. Then they split. They made a promise, and they never kept it. And you—you’re just as bad…”
“Tom, I don’t think you mean that. You don’t understand.”
“I thought you were different, you and Pascal.” His voice rose: “I should have known—”
He broke off. From below, a door slammed. They both listened to his mother’s footsteps climbing the stairs. Tom’s face worked. Gini stared at him helplessly. She had little experience of children, no knowledge of how you spoke to someone who was half-adult, half-child. She was only twelve years older than he was, not yet thirty, but she watched him now from across a huge divide. Her own inadequacy silenced her. Her hand was still extended toward him, and Tom was still ignoring it. His mother had reached the first landing below. He gave a sudden angry gesture, began to speak, stopped, then stalked from the room and slammed the door.
The door of his own room thundered shut a few seconds later; almost immediately, a blast of rock music rent the air. Lindsay entered, looking ebullient, and secretly pleased with herself. As if on cue, the second she entered, the telephone began to ring. Lindsay picked it up and listened in silence.
“Markov,” she said eventually. “I don’t want to hear this now. I don’t need to hear this. It’s the weekend, okay? Now, piss off, Markov, and leave me alone.” She replaced the receiver, turned to the door, and raised her voice. “Tom,” she shouted, “down a few decibels, please…”
The boom of drums reduced.
“What happened?” She turned to Gini. “A row?”
“Sort of. I’m not sure. Tom was being very good to me. We were talking. Then the conversation took this sudden swerve. Then…”
“Fission?”
“Yes. Oh, Lindsay—I think I failed him in some way.”
“Don’t worry. That’s what adults are there for. I fail Tom around five times a day. Teenagers!” She flashed a smile. “Let’s get going. I’ll call Charlotte, then we’re on our way. I have a million things to tell you…”
Heading west toward Oxford, Lindsay drove at top speed, and without sign of skill. Gini, who had forgotten just how appalling a driver she was, eventually closed her eyes while Lindsay steered and talked. She talked all the way to Oxford; she talked in Oxford, where having missed the turnoff, she lost the way. She talked on the country roads beyond Oxford, and she did not, it seemed to Gini, have a million topics to discuss, despite her claim.
She had one topic, and variations upon it. Her subject was a man Gini had never met, and in whom Gini was not interested. His name was Rowland McGuire—and Lindsay could not stand him. Or so she said.