neat and orderly as his mind. It smelt sweet. Her response to it was easy and immediate. She trusted him. Homer did one thing at a time. She liked that. When he made love he focused his energies and concentrated upon the action of body against the body within, as if the least he could do for his partner was to keep the messiness of emotion out, to offer himself clean and whole and untired and uncluttered. The show of emotion, affection, came before and after. It was Isabel’s nature to do everything all at once: to concentrate the emotions of the day in herself, however inchoate and troublesome and tumultuous, and open her legs at night and be taken body and soul. And because she offered both, he took both, body and soul: but to her he offered one at a time. Body first – this, and this, like this, firm and decisive – soul after, icing on a cake, made a little too thin, slipping and sliding and insecure. ‘Was that all right, Isabel?’ And she would say yes, yes, of course, never quite recovering from one night to the next that he found it necessary to ask. What was, was.
He never cried out aloud in orgasm: the noise was stifled, as if there were always listeners, watchers. ‘Hush, hush,’ he’d say to her, if they were away and the bed creaked: or even at home, when she forgot, when something – perhaps only the accumulated emotions of the day – required a wilder protest, noisier relief. And since they were not the emotions he, Homer, had engendered, she had no real right to them at such a time, and so was readily hushed.
Sometimes, after they’d made love, she would weep and not know why.
‘What’s the matter?’ he’d ask.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Didn’t I do it right?’ he would ask, slipping and sliding into insecurity, and she would laugh, because he so patently did do it right, and brought her such gratification.
‘Of course you do it right,’ she’d say.
‘Then what is it?’
But she couldn’t say. Perhaps she wept for the sorrows of the world, or because all things end in death, or because she could not experience pleasure without experiencing too the pain of knowing it must end, or perhaps she wept because Homer never did.
Today at least there was an easy answer.
‘I’m crying because my mother upset me,’ she said. ‘I wish she loved me more.’
‘I wish my mother loved me less,’ said Homer. ‘Then I wouldn’t feel so responsible for her.’
‘We’ve both run out on them.’
‘Run out?’ said Homer in surprise. ‘I like to feel I’ve run in.’
Sometimes disagreeable people would suggest to Homer that he had run out on his country; that his anti-Vietnam stand made him anti-American: that living in Europe was a form of treachery to the country that had nurtured him.
‘If you say so,’ Homer would say, easily. ‘I guess you’re right. I’d rather the world was my oyster, than America, in its present mood, was my country. I’m doing nothing illegal. I pay my taxes. I just like it over here.’
But now that self-doubt and national guilt suffused the American soul as much as they did the European, he crossed the Atlantic more easily. He went to the States some three or four times a year, about his employer’s business, or to take Jason to visit his grandparents.
‘I know they support the handgun lobby,’ he’d say, ‘and so on and so forth, but a breath of air-conditioning and general efficiency can be quite stimulating.’
Isabel, unsure of her welcome, never went home to Australia. Sometimes she wondered, had Jason been a girl, whether Harriet would not have taken more interest in her grandchild.
‘Don’t worry,’ Homer would say. ‘We’ve made London our home, so let it be. We’ll build our dynasty downwards; we’ll forget what has gone before. Our past lies in our genes – that should be more than enough.’
Jason, the child of the continents, played happily in Wincaster Row, and wanted no other life.
Jason’s birthday – upstairs, Jason woke and yelled his greeting to the world. It was not his custom to meet the day with quiet murmurs or gentle moans, as did to all accounts the children of Homer and Isabel’s friends; rather, he liked to hail it with a shout of mixed elation and reproach.
Having released, as it were, the pent-up noise and passion of the night, he would then fall back into sleep for some five minutes before waking, permanently, for the second time. This time his yell would demand acknowledgement: it would go on until one or other of his parents appeared in his room.
‘I expect he’ll calm down when he reaches sexual maturity,’ Homer would say, ‘and has something else to do with the night and his energy.’
‘Five minutes’ grace,’ he said this morning, dabbing away at Isabel’s tears.
It was Homer’s turn to see to Jason, but since it was his birthday both parents went. Isabel got out of her side of the bed; Homer got out of his. They pulled on jeans, and T-shirts, and sneakers. The telephone rang. It was one of Isabel’s researchers, apologising for the earliness of the call, asking permission to contact a Norwegian architect breaking a world tour in London that day. Isabel’s anxiety disappeared. The world was back to normal. There were decisions to be made, money to be earned, the world to be mastered.
Homer opened Jason’s door: ‘Pa-ra-pa-ra-pa-ra,’ rattled Jason, firing his new filigreed gun at his parents, machine-gun style. ‘I’m six, I’m nearly seven, I don’t have to go to school today.’
‘Yes, you do,’ they said. Jason yelled and screamed and stamped. His parents reasoned and explained and cajoled.
Homer took Jason to school on Mondays and Wednesdays and collected him on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Isabel took him on Tuesdays and Thursdays and collected him on Mondays and Wednesdays. On Fridays both parents took him and collected him. The routine suited everyone.
Jason rode behind Homer on the bicycle when the weather was fine. Today was a bicycle day. Jason, still tear-stained, turned round to smile at his mother as they rode off. It was the smile of a prince to a courtier, immensely kind and immensely gracious. It was all-forgiving. It was clear to Isabel that he had always meant to go to school.
Isabel returned to the kitchen for coffee. The radio was on. The news had begun. Isabel listened half-professionally, half as an innocent citizen. She knew a sufficient number of journalists, had met enough editors, had worked on the fringes of enough news rooms, to know the processes by which balance was evolved: the half-accidental, half-purposeful ways in which bias was created, and truth, once again, slipped through the fingers and scattered, like a drop of mercury splashing on the floor: elusive in the first place, now gone for ever. Today some things were clear enough.
The long haul up to the American Presidential election had begun. The Primaries were under way. An outsider, the young Senator from Maryland, was looking good for the Democrats. His name was Dandridge Ivel – commonly known as Dandy Ivel. The commentator, speaking over a crackly line, was speculating on the advantages of having youth at the American helm again, harking back to the Kennedy era, and Camelot, and the golden age of the USA, before national shame, depression, monetarist policies, inflation, unemployment and street riots became commonplace topics of conversation. The age before responsibility – the adolescence of a nation. Perhaps the USA could be young and vigorous again, with Dandy Ivel at the helm? The commentator, his enthusiasm bouncing and crackling off
