by Homer and herself the night before.
Jason’s American grandparents had sent a cowboy suit in real leather, with silver-plated holsters and guns.
‘Should we?’ said Homer. ‘Guns?’
‘It’s his birthday,’ said Isabel. ‘And everyone else does. And research shows that children deprived of the formalised expression of aggression via fantasy perform more aggressive acts than children not so deprived.’
‘How convenient,’ said Homer. But the guns were beautifully made, light, delicately filigreed, and Jason would be proud of them. So Homer sighed and added them to the pile.
There was no present from Harriet in Australia. There never was.
‘I don’t think my mother is a woman at all,’ Isabel had said to Homer the night before. ‘Not now. Once she was, but now she’s turned herself into the trunk of an old gum tree, and the sand has silted her up.’ Homer had kissed Isabel and held her hand and said nothing, for there was nothing to be said.
Harriet! Of course, that was it. Something wrong! Isabel went downstairs to the living room – the two ground floor rooms made into one – where the blinds were still down, and the two companionable glasses still stood from the night before, and three half-smoked cigarettes, evidence of Homer’s attempts to give up smoking by the idiosyncratic and expensive method of smoking less and less of each cigarette he lit. She telephoned Australia. She could dial direct now: she did not need the intermediary of a telephonist. Twelve numbers, and there was her mother, and her past.
The telephone rang and rang in her mother’s house, unanswered. The instrument stood in the window sill by the front porch, and whenever it rang grains of sand would jump and bounce around its base in a dance of amazement. Isabel had watched them, many times. Perhaps my mother is lying there on the kitchen floor, she thought, on the other side of the fly screen, and that’s why she doesn’t answer. She’s dead, or had a stroke, or a heart attack; or she’s been raped and robbed; or perhaps she has a boyfriend at last and stays out nights.
A tune rang through her head. A folk singer had sung it on last week’s show:
‘Bad news is come to town, Bad news is carried, Some say my love is dead, Some say he’s married.’
Or perhaps she no longer answers the phone. Eight years since I last saw her. She has sunk finally back into herself; allows me to live her life for her.
The ringing stopped. Her mother said hello.
‘Hello, Mother.’
‘Oh, it’s you, Isabel. How are you, chicken?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Everything OK? Husband, kid and so on?’
‘Yes, they’re fine.’
Silence. Then:
‘It’s very late at night. I was in bed.’
‘I’m sorry, Mum. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.’
‘Why shouldn’t I be? Nothing ever changes here. How about your end?’
‘I have my own TV show. Once a week. It’s only a chat show, but it’s a start.’
‘Good on you, chicken. Given up journalism, have you? Or did it give you up?’
‘It’s the same thing, really.’
‘Is it? I don’t watch much TV; I wouldn’t know. It all seems rather crude to me. But this is Australia, isn’t it. Down under, here. Enjoy it, do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s the main thing. Homer doesn’t mind?’
‘No. Why should he?’
‘You know what men are. What suits you never suits them. Listen, chicken, I hate to do this to you, but there’s some sort of goddamned hornet got through the hole in the fly door. This place is rusting to pieces. I’ve got to go.’
‘Of course, Mother. Is it big?’
‘Very.’
‘It’s Jason’s birthday today.’
‘Jason? Oh, the little boy. He must be – what? Four, five? Give him my love. I’m not much use as a granny, but at least I exist.’
‘At least you exist. Bye, Mum.’
‘Why don’t you just call me Harriet? Bye, sweetheart.’
Isabel crept back into bed, dry-mouthed, tasting dust and ashes. Everything was possible, yet everything was impossible. She could wring what she wanted out of the world – success and wealth and personal happiness – and it would do her no good. Her mother would always stand somewhere at the periphery of her vision, out of touch but never quite out of sight, watching her efforts and smiling, passing on the knowledge that the old would do better to keep to themselves – that in the end all goods must be pointless and all sweets tasteless. Better be deaf, and lame, and blind, than know these things too young.
Homer turned towards her in the bed. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What’s the time?’
‘Early.’
‘Where have you been?’
‘Ringing my mother.’
‘Christ, why?’
‘It’s Jason’s birthday.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Not what I wanted her to say.’
‘What was that?’
‘Well done. Congratulations. I miss you. Why don’t you fly out and see me. The things your mother says to you.’
Homer enclosed her body, as he did her mind, the better to drive out doubt. He folded her in lean, well-exercised arms. He weighed, year in, year out, exactly what the chart at the doctor’s surgery said he should, increasing or decreasing his calorie intake as the need arose. He cycled to his office every weekday morning, and cycled home again every evening. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he rose early and ran almost the entire circuit of Regent’s Park.
‘I would live for ever if I could,’ he would say. ‘As I can’t, I will live as long as I can.’
He is a happy man, thought Isabel, he must be. And she wondered what it would be like, to have such an appetite for sheer existence, and when they made love, would try to catch it from him: but the very evenness of his temperament somehow prevented there being a surplus of whatever it was he had; he kept it to himself: worked upon her physically and rhythmically, and left it to her to create the heights and depths she felt appropriate, which, indeed, she did create and felt no disappointment in him, and could answer, in truth, were anyone impertinent enough to ask for details of her
