the cramped conviviality, and tried to nestle back into the family atmosphere.
He tried and failed. To his surprise, what wouldn’t hold now was the idea that his family quite belonged to him at all. How disorientated he felt, as though the night had already changed him and lent a cold regard he’d never known. The feeling stole over him that he could travel neither back, nor forward, and he wondered exactly what it was that had just happened, precisely what kind of experience his almost-accident had been.
There they’d all gathered – as so often on Christmas Day – in the house on Wickham Lane, just over Shooters Hill, where London fringed into Kent. There they’d all met, the ten of them at the festive table, his aunt with drops of perspiration on her brow, his uncle, the mechanic, sucking at his new false teeth as he carved the bird, his grandfather sitting stoical with that Edwardian watch-chain stretched across his best brown waistcoat, his nan, his cousins, their gran. He and his parents were the unwelcome guests.
Unwelcome, that was it. He wondered how on earth he’d always failed to notice such tension under the pleasant surface of things. Had he been blind? Why, if ever he’d stopped to think, it was obvious. Feelings simply bristled between the two sides of the family; they barely tolerated each other. To tell the truth, it was as clear as daylight: he and his mother and father weren’t liked, they didn’t fit in, never had done.
He knew the cause of it immediately. That stood out a mile. It was his father, of course. But he’d never have guessed it in the normal run of events, never in a million years got such a dispassionate angle on his own kith and kin. He was seventeen, sacrificial, entranced – only something like the crisis at the Elstree roundabout could have shaken the awkward truth out of him. It was his dad.
LIONEL. ALAN HAD watched him, between the gravy-boat and the tureen of sprouts. Lionel – he savoured the slight unfamiliarity of his father’s Christian name … Lionel had worn the yellow paper crown out of his cracker in a spirit of pure misrule. The slim, Nordic face of the wedding photograph, that innocent face, not so much handsome as candid, the face which at home in the brown album tied up with fine cord once used to remind Alan of royalty, had grown ill-defined. And what suddenly showed through wasn’t the loved father at all, but some aspect of clown, jester, agent provocateur. Lionel’s hair contrived to stick up in odd spikes through the paper hat. His clothes! Shrunk and over-ironed by Alan’s mother, his striped pullover hung round him like a smock. The tie, the shirt-sleeves … Lionel was bizarre.
It wasn’t just the squeamishness of youth. Alan’s vision was immaculate. A kind of hypnosis had genuinely ended, an illusion peeled off, for his legs no longer shook and he felt calm and focused – on his father. Lionel was a spectacle of contradictions. He lacked any authentic shape. He was plump and he was puny, he was muscular and he was effete. Like some gigantic baby, he told his subversive jokes to himself, ate his turkey with a strange expression of exaggerated innocence. Catching Alan’s eye, as he would do, he made a pretence at being drunk, even though the one bottle of Sauternes between ten was regarded as daring, and quite celebratory enough. His behaviour was a local chaos, masked with abstruse, science-couched observations. It was a flagrant naughtiness that subtly, yet emphatically, disrupted the good intentions of the dinner. And all the while grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins conspired to pass no comment at all.
The single-sash window framed the winter grey. The pink glass bowl chained overhead supplied the little dining room with an electric glow. A blazing coal fire scorched the back of Alan’s uncle’s mother, who would always deny discomfort. The party took their meal and put up with Lionel, the problematic star in their midst, the clever working-class child made so prodigiously good. In turn, Lionel, who’d travelled the world, who’d flown first class in Boeing Stratocruisers and had seen so many things that everyday folk never would, seemed to insist on remaining that child.
He was a star – government work. But the family never asked Lionel Rae about it, nor responded to his permanent, self-absorbed pantomime. They tolerated his dogmatic outbursts. Warily, they observed the formalities, praised the aunt’s labour and the uncle’s skill with the knife. They avoided any subject that smacked of politics, let alone of religion, lest the fault that ran through the little clan should widen and engulf them.
Lionel was clever. His was a frightening, almost artificial intelligence. He’d lightly remark to Alan that he was a soft, bloody machine for designing bloody hard ones. And Alan loved the complicated wit he shared with his father. All these years Lionel’s creature, his sense of possession left him bucked, even exalted. A couple of winters before, Lionel had been De Havilland’s senior telemetry engineer, when the big aerospace firm had been developing Blue Streak. Had the missile ever come to fruition, each warhead would have been targeted on Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk. It was rocket science.
But his genius was of the cankered kind, as Lionel himself wryly acknowledged. Fate had targeted him, he said, because he refused to believe in her. Rockets had sent him on his travels, and Alan had the postcards to prove it: incredible images of tropical beaches with sand and palm trees, Californian scenes with fin-tail Cadillacs in sundrenched streets, the lush greens and impossibly quaint temples of the Far East. In Alan’s sock drawer at home there were still pairs of pale blue-and-white chaussettes, issued by PanAm Airlines against the cold of altitude and brought back by his dad as trophies. Somewhere in his long-untouched toy box, he kept the miniature plastic cruets made by Americans for air meals simply to throw away. Lionel had been in Nevada, he’d been at Cape Canaveral. He’d seen the Yanks put their man in orbit. When others in the family had never risen twenty feet above the ground, the magician Lionel had placed a foot on the threshold of space. Then the Ministry axed Blue Streak, and suddenly rockets had let him down, they’d jilted him. Now, he sat here at the Christmas dinner, claiming only half in jest to be a Martian.
He wasn’t drunk. Lionel hardly touched alcohol, never smoked. He didn’t sing or dance, read novels, listen to music. He had no time for art, less for films. He hated churches, the sun in summer, the rain in winter. He hated vicissitude, the Victorians, God, history, the city, the country, winding lanes, other drivers. He loathed the class system, the Tories, Labour, nature. But Alan had never minded these foibles of malediction so long as he could bask in their astringent, apparent comedy.
At the previous dinner, Lionel had invoked the death of Schrödinger – whom he’d actually met, but no one else had heard of – with the story of the cat that was alive and dead at the same time. Until you opened the box! It was the bones of a joke. As for his own death, he suggested, nothing would do but a perfectly controlled space capsule, a warhead womb stamped ‘Made in England’ and primed to fall right back on London. Neither would he stay in one job long enough to put down roots. Nor could he touch anything, he grinned, darkly, without it either going wrong or going down – including, so it seemed, the British Independent Nuclear Deterrent. And he was proud that no one had ever come up with a name for what might be the matter with him. He was too clever to be anything so ordinary as insane.
They lived in extraordinary times. Alan had no idea of it; then again he knew it well enough. Lionel had done no more than carry on the family tradition, hadn’t he, preparing to bandy shell fire? His own dad had been an artilleryman, and his father before him. The uncle had been in the Engineers. Lionel hadn’t. What better way to outdo them than with these intercontinental ballistics? His hubris had left the family little profit, though: Alan’s parents were hardly well enough off to lord it – they’d shifted ground too often to accumulate capital. Now Lionel was a mere circuit designer with a company called Lidlock.
Alan bit his lip. Something else filled his thoughts. No, it was outrageous, though there was dazzle in it, perfection. It seemed, for a fleeting second, to explain everything. But it was shocking, out of the question – the very notion of treachery and spying far too melodramatic, and Lionel wasn’t a melodramatic man. Steam hissed in the urn. A burst
