Joshua meets Ann off the fast train from Heathrow with a red balloon on a stick as he had promised. When they find each other he unties a knot to let the air out—“Can’t have anything going bang in a railway station these days,”—breaks the stick in half and shoves it into a rubbish bin.
“Come on,” he says, “Northern line.” He’s bought her an Oyster card for the underground and as they walk explains how it works. The train is crowded and they have to stand. Joshua manages her big suitcase. It’s impossible to talk. On the walk from Kennington station past densely parked cars on both sides of the street, Joshua is telling her about the twins, but Ann can only hear part of what he says; he needs the whole width of the footpath for the suitcase, so she is walking behind.
Joshua stops at a house in the middle of a row, heaves the suitcase up a few steps and leaves it inside the door. He takes Ann’s arm to guide her through the house and introduce her to his family. She is to have the attic bedroom, up three flights of narrow stairs. “Stay as long as you like,” says Joshua. “Well, at least until the twins are teenagers or we have another baby.” Ann supposes that’s a joke, but Chloe is not amused.
Chloe is focused on the twins, Jo and Chris, both extremely active and indistinguishable to Ann in their interchangeable clothes. The legal firm where Joshua manages library and information systems is feeling the effects of the economic recession. “My job's okay, I think,” he says, “as okay as anyone's is at the moment, it's hard times in the city still.” A couple of lawyers are about to be laid off, and he’s likely to lose a staff member, but his job is, “pretty solid unless the whole firm goes under.”
“It had better not,” contributes Chloe, “I’d have to go back to work—there’s always a job in accounts. And you could stay home with these two,” she adds cheerfully, but Ann gets the idea that neither of them wants that. The house, she learns, is owned by Chloe's parents, who are living on a canal boat in France.
“Our rent just about keeps them,” Joshua says, “along with …,” a look from his wife silences him. None of my business, Ann thinks.
London feels familiar, even though it’s seven years since her last visit, which was two hectic days on her way to a conference in Cambridge. If she’d traveled more, researched original sources, delved into the minutiae of her Romantics’ lives, or studied someone fashionably famous, she might have kept her job. Ann shakes her head to dislodge the thought, then again to cast out Coleridge’s lines from his most desolate of poems.
For hope grew round me like the twining vine,
And fruits and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth.
Although it is not a homeland to either of her parents, England does not seem like a foreign country to Ann, in the same way America had. London is certainly as fast and noisy as New York or Washington; there’s always the sound of a siren, close by or distant, if you listen out for it. The siren call of the city, summons to the something-something metropolis. Heavens, she’s almost making poetry.
The parks, she had forgotten about the parks, with their big lawns, sprawling all around, mown, full of large trees and green-ness, there for when you need a rest from city-ness. And a list of art museums she can go to. A day for each. Yum.
She tries to help around the house, but Chloe resists.
“It's all right,” she says, “I can manage, thank you.” Ann manages to cook a meal for the grownups on her third day, but she isn't allowed near the food for the children. Josh suggests a “cuzzie-beer” at the local after dinner—supper—and Ann offers to stay in so Chloe can go instead, but she won’t.
On her second day in London, Ann is at the Tate Modern, standing in front of a painting by Mondrian, remembering how she had puzzled her way around and through his drawings, his writings and his early figurative paintings in art books, to some kind of understanding of what he called his Compositions. She is now, as then, inexplicably drawn to the black lines, the white between them and the occasional red, yellow or blue rectangles. “Dynamic equilibrians.” The still, straight lines of black against white or primary colours, make shimmers that remind her of the icons quivering on her ipod touch when she’s moving them around.
Ann is deeply involved with Composition C (no 111), the real, actual, original painting, when she feels herself flattening, attenuating in two dimensions, her black jacket becoming lines, her red back-pack a square and her yellow scarf squishing into a rectangle in the bottom left corner. The paint that looked smooth and flat in reproductions is neither, there are brush marks and tiny peaks in the uneven white that give the painting life and strength. Her body moves forward, just a little, wanting to rub against the roughness, and an attendant hovers into view at the edge of her sight. Are her arms by her sides, or out at right angles to her body? She can’t tell, doesn’t care, she feels joyful, glorious.
When the attendant comes alongside her and says, “Are you all right miss?” She says, “YES,” too loudly, and walks away.
She’s on the escalator before, “Thank you,” comes out of her mouth, very quietly.
She sits for a long time over a coffee, thinking about what is happening, loving the joy of it, slightly alarmed. It’s not as though this is the first time she has seen original art works. Maybe it is the first time she has given them such close attention. Should she go further, as it were, into art history, study more, work in the field? No, that’s too prosaic, these—she can't think of a word—painting events will have to do—are pure experience, in-themselves, she doesn't want to turn them into something else, something ordinary, like a career. She feels child-like in the best way in one of her events, it’s like happy play, untrammelled, a treasure, not a job.
A sentence comes into her mind, one that struck her when she read Clarice Lispector, before her life fell apart, because her friend Kate said The Hour of the Star was her favourite novel ever.
Happiness? I have never come across a more foolish word, invented by those unfortunate girls from north-eastern Brazil.
Ann, lecturer in English literature, had never till then heard of Lispector, who was famous in Brazil and not much translated into English before her death from cancer in 1977. The idea of happiness as a foolish word came up a few times in the book and it bothered Ann. She talked with Ex about it and they had a couple of not very satisfactory conversations about what happiness was, and were they happy. Ann recalls pronouncing herself totally happy with their relationship and being agreed with. They both affirmed that they were happy in their careers overall, Paula rising in the ranks of the many managers in the Ministry of Social Development, Ann with her university teaching and no real ambition for the management roles that more seniority would bring. Lispector has her character, Macabéa, think,
It is better not to speak of happiness or unhappiness—such words provoke that vague nostalgia suffused in lilac ….
Macabéa is a product of poverty, who therefore lacks choices, and who puts spoonfuls of sugar in her coffee to be sure she gets her money's worth, even if she isn't paying.
Macabéa continued to be happy thinking about nothing. Empty, empty. … she made the best of things.
If I was as happy as I thought I was then why aren't I more unhappy now? What am I now? Neutral? Except when I am in a painting event. No, an art event, that’s better. I am happy in an art event, and otherwise neutral. How does that make happiness a foolish word? Because you can think you have it and it gets taken away, she answers herself.
“Can I get you something else, madam?” The waiter is young and male, his hair dyed white at its upright tips. She wants to ask him if he is happy.
“No. Thank you.”
Happiness, the idea of happiness, nibbles at her. As a by-product it’s okay; you have your life and if you are happy that is good, but if you try to be happy, as an end in itself, it gets mixed up with being gratified, with getting what you want in the moment, which everyone knows doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness. Her Romantics didn’t go in for happiness, they sought grand emotions like joy and ecstasy, emotions that are in their very nature transitory, swelling and then, inevitably, subsiding. On the whole they wrestled more with misery, despair, sorrow, melancholy, outrage (the latter usually on behalf of someone else). She thinks of William Blake’s “human grapes”
In chains of iron and in dungeons circled with ceaseless fires,
In pits and dens and shades of death, in shapes of torment and woe:
Ann relates to “shapes of torment and woe,” more than usual today. She has given this poem to students because they love its excesses of misery and doom. Suddenly, Ann feels impatient with herself. Solipsism, she writes on the table with her finger; at least her students had youth as their excuse.
What proportion of the world's billions get to even think about happiness? Her survival as a person, part of a community, a culture, a country, has never been in doubt, random accidents excepted, so she is in the privileged position of being able to think about what happiness means, whether it is indeed a foolish notion. Maybe that’s Lispector's point, happiness is a foolish idea for those girls from north-east Brazil. But Lispector wrote, “a foolish word” not “a foolish idea.” Or at least her translator did.
“Oh, for heaven's sake!” Ann, thoroughly irritated with herself, stands up so quickly she knocks her chair over, and leaves the Tate Modern Cafe in a flurry of apologies. She walks to Josh and Chloe's through cold wetness, from a few bits of showers above and spraying cars below. Soggy, slippery brown leaves splodge the footpath in treacherous patches. Everything is grey, including the low sky. Ann keeps her head up, facing down the weather, unlike most of her fellow pedestrians, who are huddled into their coats, looking just ahead of their feet, scurrying to be somewhere else.
Chloe looks as though she’s been crying. The twins are watching a children's television show. Ann offers to help, and for once Chloe accepts, so she folds a load of washing that is still warm from the drier and offers to cook dinner. Chloe says, “It's okay, the twins are fed and bathed, I can ma….” then stops. “I'm pregnant,” she says. “Last time I had all day morning sickness.” She looks panicky. “I haven't even told Josh yet.”
“I'll do dinner then.” Ann welcomes feeling useful and thinks of her mother. “Shall I go out and shop?” There’s a superette nearby, she'll find something.
“There's the makings of pasta and a salad.” Chloe gestures at the fridge. “Thanks. You must think we’re complete ninnies, getting caught out like this.” Chloe is embarrassed.
That cost her, Ann thinks, and says, “You don’t have to explain. Mistakes happen.” As if I know. She’s cooking when Josh comes in. He's hearty in his thanks and seems surprised, looking inquiringly at Chloe, who won't look back. As soon as they’ve eaten Ann excuses herself and goes up to her attic. With her laptop and their wifi, she says, she'll catch up with email from home. For the first time her room feels cold in spite of the heating that comes up through vents in the floor.
There’s an email from Evelyn saying, again, how she enjoyed having Ann to stay, and that she has just replied to a message from Shirley, wanting reassurance that Ann was all right. She was, wasn't she? That's what she’d said to Shirley, anyway, but perhaps Ann could reassure her mother herself. Not that she, Evelyn, had minded the contact, she thinks she'll make more effort to stay in touch with her sister now they’ve got started.
Ann's friends' lives carry on much as they were before she left. There are snippets about the new National-led government; some are worried about their public service jobs. The women cabinet ministers are universally disliked, at least among Ann's friends. That’s discouraging. She cuts and pastes her way through replies to the messages, glad of the connections with home. Nothing from Ex. Good. Not much about her, either, except for one comment from a mutual friend that Paula doesn't know what to do about a couple of things still in the house she thinks Ann will want.
Everything about the house is settled, her mother writes. Paula has been very cooperative. Would Ann regret anything, she worries, like leaving that lovely oak hall table? It's only a table, for heaven's sake Mum. Oh, and Dad has done very well for her on the money for chattels—she knows that, is slightly embarrassed by it, he sent her a list—and is she having a good time? It’s lovely to get news of family members, even if she can barely remember what they look like. Is she taking photos? Oh shit, thinks Ann, I need a digital camera.
All that news from home leads to a restless night and it’s nearly nine in the morning when she wakes. Down in the kitchen things are different. The twins are happy enough in their high chairs, breaking up toast and dropping bits on the floor. Last night's dishes have not been done, it looks as though Joshua has left half eaten cereal and half-drunk coffee. There are noises coming from the toilet down the passage. Ann knocks on the door.
“Chloe, are you all right?”
“No. Yes. Twins.” And some more Ann can't figure, then the sound of heaving. Omigod.
“Okay, you two, eat it or lose it,” Ann announces to the two high chairs.
“Mummy,” says one. “Mummy,” says the other. Questioning rather than upset.
“Mummy's in the toilet throwing up,” says Ann cheerfully, “so it's me you've got for now.” And she wriggles her ears and crosses her eyes and laughs. The twins look at each other, then laugh with her. When Chloe appears twenty minutes or so later the kitchen is tidy and the twins are practising saying their version of “Aunty Ann” and their own names and pointing and Ann is learning to tell them apart.
“Tea? No, you like coffee in the morning, right?” Chloe looks like she might be leaving again, she stands poised for movement for a moment, then turns and fills the jug.
“This is how it goes,” she says. “Last time it lasted six weeks. Joshua's going to see if he can get some time off work.” She’s getting Chris out of his high-chair, then Jo. They chase each other around the table a few times then retreat to the toy corner. “You haven’t had breakfast …”
“I'll do it,” said Ann, dropping two slices of bread into the toaster. “Would you …? No. Okay.” She pours boiling water into the coffee pot. “You like tea, right?”
Chloe nods. “Weak, no milk. My mother would come over from Europe,” she says, “but it's a bit difficult, she thinks kids need a smack now and then, quite now and then, actually, and I—we—don't think it's right and so it's really awkward…”
“I could stay on for a bit.” Ann is as surprised as Chloe at her offer.
“But you're on holiday. And you've got plans.”
“Nothing I can't change. A hostel in Paris I can put off for a few weeks, a Eurostar booking ditto, a flight back to New Zealand I can delay. I'd like to stay, really.”
“I don't know what to say. I'm a coper, I don't need anyone's help, not usually. But you've just seen. It's lucky they were in their high chairs … But you haven't, you know, had them yourself …”
“I haven't had children, you’re right, but I'm quite competent, you know, and you'll be here, just, well, what we used to call chundering at unpredictable moments. I think I'll enjoy getting to know you all and being helpful in a family kind of way.”
There hasn't been a lot of that in my life.
“How about you talk to Joshua about it tonight. I could stick around until the new year if that was helpful. But what about today? I was going to go into the Courtauld, but I could put that off.” She passes the other woman her cup of tea and sits down with her own coffee and toast.
“No, no, you go. I've a friend coming around later this morning, with her three-year-old, I'll manage all right. I always do. Anyway, I seem to have stopped for now. Maybe it won't be as bad as last time. And thank you for your offer, it's very kind.” Chloe still sounds doubtful. Ann is warming to the idea of being in a family with young children, not to mention a chance to put off making decisions. Oh, all right, she admits to herself, and not going back to New Zealand until after Christmas, not having Mum and Dad “do” Christmas for her, or convincing them not to, not fielding invitations from friends, not having them deciding whether to invite her, or Ex, or Julie, or all three or none. Not being there would be great, and being here would be well, interesting, okay even, especially if “I-can-manage” Chloe can stand having another woman around for so long.
Jo has climbed onto her mother's lap and Chloe is stroking the child’s hair, staring into space.
Ann doesn't know how much the other woman knows about why she is travelling, so she tells her it all, and tells her how she isn't just being kind. While she’s talking Chris stops his play and tries to climb up with his sister. Ann's attempt to get his attention and lift him onto her lap are a complete failure and he starts to cry. Chloe holds out her arm and adjusts Jo and cuddles a child on each knee. Ann smiles at her and gets a weak smile back. This is Chloe's world and maybe there’s no place for Ann in it. Staying in the attic for a few days, beers with Joshua, might have to be enough.
“You're a lesbian, then. Joshua didn't say.” Ann prickles.
“Well, yes. Does that matter?”
“No. It's just—interesting. I worked for an accountant who was a lesbian once. She was a great boss, but her private life was a shambles.” Ann is carefully silent. “Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, I just had no idea, I guess I'm trying to fit you into my picture of Josh's family or something. Does he know?”
Ann can't believe her cousin has not passed on to his wife any of the conversation they had the other night in the Pestle and Mortar. She told him her life story, or at least the short version, and he talked about growing up in Liverpool. Joe had been a good enough father, a bit brusque and outdoorsy, fascinated by machinery and how things worked in a way that Joshua could never share. He had wanted a son to do mucky, noisy things with machines with him and eventually accepted that the youngest, Jane, was the one who shared his passion. Joe, he said, would have preferred he and Jane to swap interests. Tracy taught infant school and wanted to get married and have babies, but had a penchant for unsuitable—as in lacking in provider potential—men. His mother? She died after he left home; they hadn’t been close.
“Yes, he knows, I told him when we went out for a drink.” Ann stood up. “If you're sure you're okay for now I'll go off and commune with some Cézannes. And my offer stands.” She didn't say, unless the idea of a lesbian looking after your kids freaks you out. “And my reasons, too, both the helping ones and the selfish ones.”
Ann watches Chloe stand, with a sleeping child on each shoulder, nod at her and mouth, “thanks’ as she heads off to the children’s room.
It’s cold out. Cold and wet. November in London. She hurries to the underground station. Because it’s just outside the city's congestion charging zone small cars are packed into the narrow streets and a red-faced man is trying again and again to back into a space that can only be thirty centimetres longer than his car. She waits on the platform for a train that goes via Charing Cross. There’s no rain when she exits to The Strand, but it’s still cold, still grey, and people are still huddled into their coats. Ann rather likes the bleakness, but maybe that’s because it suits her, well, not exactly mood, because she’s far from dismal, but suits her in a way that sunshine, or the ebullience of spring would not, not right now.
The Courtauld Gallery is nearly empty. She wanders around, enjoying the impressionists and Manet, keeping her hands in her pockets at the Rubens because she wants to stroke the skin of the women. She has come for the Cézannes, though, for compositions where he sought, as he had written somewhere, a harmony parallel to nature. Today it’s Montagne Sainte Victoire that holds her. That mountain of Provence that he made famous, not so big in fact, but monumental in this painting. She is looking at the way the colours change, very, very gradually as the painted space moves further into the apparent distance, leaning forward to see the brush strokes that carefully layer the paint multi-directionally, and for a moment she is under the over-arching tree, in its shade, the heat of the sun palpable from a few feet away, the air full of summer insect sounds, leaves falling, air moving. Just for a moment she is there; then she isn't.
She meanders through the drawings, marveling at the turn of a hand, a drape of cloth, the way a line can define the expression on a face, shading make an arm or a leg solid. She knows, again, that one of the attractions of paintings and drawings like these is the illusion of depth that an artist can create on a flat surface. In the actual landscape of the Cezanne she briefly inhabited, the distance from the tree that frames the mountain to the mountain itself is something like ten kilometers. In the painting there is no distance from the tree to the mountain-top; near and far is an illusion on the single plane of the canvas. Saying the mountain is far off is like saying the sun rises and sets knowing that it does neither, that the earth turns on its own axis, moving each place in its surface towards and away from the sun. Yet even with this knowledge, sunrise and sunset are a wonder.
Out on The Strand, the light is fading. Ann is hungry. Too late for lunch, too early for di—supper. She sends Chloe a text that she'll not be in until after supper unless Chloe texts her back that she needs her, and sets off for Covent Garden. Something to eat and a movie, she thinks, they can talk about me in my absence and I'll see what's what when I get in. She doesn't want to want to stay on as much as she does, but apparently that’s how it is; she hopes that Chloe and Joshua will say please, please stay until well into the new year, we'd love you to and you could be a real help to Chloe while she's like this and Joshua can take more time off work when the babies are born. Babies? Omigod. Ann stops walking and the man behind her stumbles, scowling, to avoid a collision. What if Chloe has another set of twins?
She buys a huge falafel from a place at the edge of Covent Garden and finds a movie theatre showing The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas. At the end of the harrowing film it’s still only seven o'clock so she goes to Bolt! the next film on the schedule, and laughs her way to the end in spite of its heavy-handed message.
Back at the Kennington House, Joshua and Chloe are in the sitting room watching television. Ann puts her head around the door,
“Hi,” she says.
“Hello,” says Chloe. She has the remote in her hand and turns off the programme. “Can you come in for a moment?”
“Come on in cuz. Pull up a seat. We were talking about you, and your offer to stay on for a bit.” Joshua is hearty again.
“Hold off a minute, she's had a whole day to think about it, she might have changed her mind.” Chloe is careful.
Would you like me to have changed my mind, Chloe? Ann doesn't say it. “How was the rest of today?” she asks.
“Not bad. I had some lunch with my friend Trish that stayed down. Cooking supper wasn't fun, smells do me in. Look, Ann, about your offer to stay on. I'm glad you told me about your, um, things, unlike Mr Silent here.” She pokes her husband in the ribs with her elbow. “I like it that there's something in it for you, as well as doing us a favour. So, anyway, if you're sure it would suit you to stay on until January, that would be great, wouldn't it Josh?”
“It sure would, I can save my time off work for later …”
“Wonderful! Great! Let's have a celebratory—cup of tea! I'll make it.” What is it with me? Ann is thinking as she makes the tea. What's to be so pleased about in staying on to help a vomiting mother with two little kids. In winter. So I won't make Paris until January, what's Paris like in January? She starts when she realises Joshua is in the doorway.
“You're very cheerful about taking us on for six weeks,” he says. “Brilliant! Though I thought this was an art tour.”
“Art and family. So the family bit just got bigger. It was my Mum's idea to tour around the rellies, fortunately you live in places I wanted to go. Here, take these in.” She'd found some chocolate biscuits and a tray for the teas.