… what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave.
Night, however, succeeds to night.
And only when Virginia was asleep – I was afraid she would read my secrets on my face – only then did I do what I wanted to do.
For among the films on offer that night I’d seen one choice I never expected.
A film I knew all too well, though even three years ago, hard to watch. The Palace of Ice was a documentary made to raise awareness of global warming, starring a father and daughter who sleighed across the Arctic.
So long ago. Or so it seemed. But what is three years, after all? Is it possible that then we were a close family? So recently, such an ache ago.
Three years. Gerda was, let’s see, nine or ten. Edward must have been forty? It was Edward’s idea. They made the film together.
But who had to deal with all the problems? With the furious school, who never accepted that travels in the Arctic were educational, with tracking down extra-warm thermals for Gerda, and patient lists of everything she needed – all right, to be fair, she made the lists, but I found it all, I ticked it all off! Who had to extract school-work for her to do on the trip from the self-righteous primary school teachers? ‘She may be bright, but she does need to work. It’s not good for children to feel exceptional.’ But even as they said it, I knew that she was, and I knew they knew it, for they let us go.
(Let them go, I mean. No, not me. I was never invited on their adventures.)
So who was left crying at Heathrow Airport when they went through the doors of the departure lounge? – I can see them still, I love them still, for all my hurt do I love him still? – two backs disappearing, one small, one tall, unnaturally inflated by the blue duck-down parkas they could not fit into their luggage, going away from me into nowhere, but his hand, his dear big hand, on her shoulder, and her round face turned up to his, as usual. I could only see part of her cheek, her eyes, but every particle of it was smiling, she was totally happy, alive with laughter.
I could never love my own father like that. But Edward was Gerda’s role model. I think she wanted to be him, not me. That wasn’t easy for me to see.
(And now I wonder: who did the leaving? Did I go away too much myself, to write? Did I leave them? What was the truth? Flying through the air, so far above the earth, our story fell apart, my role became less certain.)
And now it was here, the film they made, The Palace of Ice, and to be fair, I knew how much it had cost Edward as he struggled to keep the backers on board, to balance the books and appease Channel 6, who veered from one mad suggestion to another as different editors tried to make their mark. He had to keep believing it would happen. It was one of the ways he gave Gerda confidence, his buoyant belief in the next new thing. He always worried less than I did. (Of course, he could leave the worrying to me.)
I paid the price. For I did the dull things once her Grandma and Grandpa were no longer around, homework, bedtimes, early mornings – so yes, I was the dull one, and yes, I felt resentful.
When she came back from the trip, she was so round and rosy, so sturdy and so full of – yes, joy. She had had her father to herself, she had been round the world, why shouldn’t she be happy? And besides, she had been off school for five weeks. ‘Mum! Mum!’ She rushed straight in and hugged me. ‘I’ve never been so happy in my whole life!’
I was happy for her, I was happy for them, I was happy for Edward, but of course I felt – lonely. There is an arithmetic of happiness: other people’s doesn’t always add to your own, sometimes there is only so much around, and if you see too much of it has gone to others –
I looked at them, radiant, framed on the doorstep, his tall form outlined against the light behind her, and his hair was long, and his beard was long –
What I saw was duty. A lot to do. They would come in laughing, not wiping their feet, and their bags would be full of dirty washing.
‘That’s great, Gerda. Tell me all about it. But first, to look at you – you need a bath. Did she wash her hair once while she was away?’ I turned to Edward, behind her in the doorway.
‘What kind of welcome is that?’ he asked.
‘I’m only joking. I’m so happy to see you.’
But they had been so long away …
I would not think about that day. The precipitous decline into actual screaming.
Gall and wormwood rose under my ribs.
No, press the button, the film had begun. Great sheets of ice: aerial footage shot with a hand-cam from a small plane, and as I looked at it, my bitterness went, and I saw how wide, and how beautiful, and how little we human beings mattered, and I wept. Nothing, nothing but love for them.
Then Edward turned the camera into the cabin, and there was Gerda, three years younger. My child, who will always be part of me, and I of her, though she will have to forget me, at least enough for her to shine.
In our short, human lives, three years could be everything. Everything could change. From a child, to a woman, an angry young woman, a teenager sent away to school.
I had only done the best for Gerda. The best for her – and the best for me.
I stopped the film for a moment, and breathed deeply.
(Another Gerda, on her own trajectory over the ocean, under the stratosphere, went on reading To the Lighthouse, unknown to Angela, far away. Only two hours until she landed, only two hours to reach the lighthouse, no-one must interrupt her now.)
Round Angela, Virginia, and all the sleeping bodies on the Turkish Airways plane, the semi-night of an enormous machine. The engines must always go on turning, the electricity can never go off. The flight staff are doing their calculations: how many vegetarian meals had been eaten? Maybe Yasemin had not cleared the rubbish away, or Emir was taking his break early. It didn’t matter, someone must bring aspirin to that mother with four children and a terrible toothache.
All right for the pilot: gallant at the helm, he could trust his computer to carry them onwards, over the Atlantic, above thousands of feet of ice crystals and roaring air currents, with his coffee beside him that someone else had made; eagle-eyed, erect, the brain behind the beak, thinking, perhaps, of his garden in Denizli, if the lilies would be standing when he got home, if his beloved zambaklar would have survived the winds, and whether that heron would have taken his carp: his duty is simply to be a brain, while the flight attendants, most of them, fortunately, women – he considers it more natural than having men, though sometimes the families made terrible trouble (it was easier for women to look after people, even these new feminists could not deny that) – the flight attendants care for the great bird’s body, the bodies of the passengers, the body of the plane.
Angela jerked awake in dreadful anxiety. A dream of the day after Gerda started boarding school (the child was very brave, she had barely cried, perhaps she didn’t really mind leaving home?) Angela, too, was perfectly calm, yet she woke in the night and stumbled down the dark landing to go to the bathroom, Gerda’s light was showing, she walked in, unthinking, to switch the light off as her daughter slept, and stretched out her hand to feel the warmth of her cheek.
But Gerda having left the day before, she reached further, and further, touched nothing and no-one. She clutched at the duvet: her arms remained empty.