A Hard Time to Be a Father

Nothing was disorderly, nothing was out of place. Even the papers on Miss Oslo’s desk, at which she had evidently been disturbed, were neatly arranged: her reference books evenly placed. Old books. A Small Hut in Bali. The Penang Peninsula in the 1920s: Art and Habitat. Asian Myth, Eurasian Artefact. Distant places, distant years, collected, confined and organised, here in this Northern city.

‘I am not in the least welcome,’ said Stella. ‘I don’t want to be welcome.’

‘Ah, Stella,’ said Miss Oslo, kindly, ‘still the naughty little girl!’

And she made the Englishwoman sharp black coffee and they talked about George’s health and Karianne’s new black lover, and anything other than why Stella was there. Stella enquired about the possibility of marriage between her daughter and the black man, and Miss Oslo laughed and said Stella was old-fashioned: these days in Oslo, marriage was a rare occurrence. ‘But George would like her to,’ said Stella. ‘Or so he wrote and told me.’

‘I didn’t know you and George corresponded,’ said Miss Oslo, taken aback.

‘He writes to me,’ said Stella, ‘when you have an affair, or he’s upset in some way.’

‘How strange,’ said Miss Oslo, ‘that he should turn to you, when he and I can discuss everything freely.’

‘He doesn’t want to discuss,’ said Stella, ‘he wants to complain.’

She went out on to the balcony, and stood there, to look over the frozen park and the hapless ducks, and the city she once knew so well. Miss Oslo came out after her.

‘It’s quite chilly out here,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you rather be inside?’

‘I felt I couldn’t breathe in there,’ said Stella. ‘But that’s just Oslo, isn’t it? Airless.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said the younger woman. ‘Oslo is exceptionally unpolluted for a major city.’

‘Even out here it’s airless enough,’ said Stella, ‘I remember standing here one day while you explained to me how my marriage was over, and George nodded and agreed. I thought I was suffocating. So much sense, so little passion, it was hard to breathe.’

‘It was all for the best,’ said Miss Oslo.

Looking down, Stella could see the shiny roof of the BMW and the children who circled it.

‘Is it school holidays?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Miss Oslo. ‘All the children are in school. Do come in and finish your coffee. It’s strong, but it’s decaffeinated.’

‘One is always so safe in Norway,’ said Stella, but she didn’t go inside. ‘More and more things to be safe from. Caffeine, nicotine, alcohol.’

‘These things are bad for one, or put others at risk,’ said Miss Oslo primly hovering.

‘These things are beautiful,’ said Stella. ‘It is one’s right to self-destruct before time.’

Miss Oslo’s face stayed blank.

Stella lit a cigarette and puffed. Politeness and distaste warred in Miss Oslo’s face; politeness won: she said nothing. Ash from Stella’s cigarette span in the wind and landed on the soil of a potted plant.

‘You can remove it later,’ said Stella, ‘flake by sinful, uncivilised flake! I see you have a string of nuts hung out for the birds. How kind you are, Miss Oslo; even the birds of the air experience your goodness! But Miss Oslo does not work out what happens next. She is naive. Those you do good to hate you. The birds of the air and the beasts of the earth will eat your crumbs, and return to take everything you have.’

‘I have a deadline,’ said Miss Oslo. ‘An article to deliver by this afternoon. I really have to get back to my desk.

But it was wonderful to see you.’

Stella came back inside, but made no move to leave.

Downstairs in the front of the BMW, Lothar stared fixedly at his knees. The children circled. There must be nearly twenty of them now. There were a handful of girls amongst them now, he noticed, not so good-looking as the boys; they had more crowded, cramped, sullen faces. Surely someone would come along soon. The boy he assumed was the leader – the one he had hoped to draw – drew out a coin and scratched it along the side of the car, slowly and deliberately. The children laughed. Lothar froze. He did not know what to do, or what would happen next.

‘Tell me why you’re here,’ said Miss Oslo.

‘I thought perhaps you’d like to know,’ said Stella, ‘that George has been sleeping with your baby-sitter, Camilla. Sometimes he writes to boast as well as to complain. It happens when you’re away, on your case studies.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Miss Oslo eventually. ‘George and I are totally open with one another in sexual matters. If there was anything to tell me, he would have discussed it with me.’

‘Disloyalty takes all forms,’ said Stella. ‘What you citizens of Oslo have to fear is not the enemy without, but the enemy within. It’s not the Russians creeping down from the tundra, or the Germans seeping up from the lowlands; it’s the serpent in your bosom, the snake you saved from the cold. George writes to me to say he wishes to marry Camilla; but he does not know how to break it to you.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Miss Oslo, white as a sheet: she had run her hand through her hair, and wisps had escaped from their confining band.

‘I wrote to him; why! I said, just to be honest about it, civilised. Do it in Camilla’s presence. Explain to her that her relationship with you is finished, dead. Your turn, Miss Oslo, to stand on the balcony, and try to breathe. Tora is so close to his father, from what you say, no doubt he’ll choose to live with his father and his new mother, not you and your no one.’

Some six or seven of the children had coins in their hands: they ran them in patterns over the car: the paint on bonnet and doors split, blistered and flaked as in their poison hands the sharp metal edges of the coins crissed and crossed. The children laughed to see the damage. Lothar reached for the gun in the glove compartment. He pointed it at the circling enemy, first this side then that. The children laughed louder and jeered and pointed. Either they thought the gun was a toy or they didn’t care what happened next. That last was the most frightening thing.

‘What goes around, comes around,’ said Stella, upstairs. ‘As life goes by, it becomes apparent there is some justice in it.’ Miss Oslo wept.

The leader of the boys leaned over and pressed his face, gargoyle-like, against the windscreen of the BMW. Lothar screamed aloud in fear and fired the gun; the bullet hit against toughened glass, failed to pierce it: instead ricocheted around the inside of the car, bouncing off walls and seat backs and dashboard, finally hitting and lodging in Lothar’s right shoulder. He screamed again, and the children scattered, scared off by noise, and running feet, and the wail of approaching police cars. By the time the ambulance had arrived, there was no sign of the children. Lothar freed the locks with his one usable hand, and even that was bloody. Someone opened the car door, and helped him out.

Stella came out of the apartment block in time to see the commotion: Lothar saw her and called out, but Stella could see it was not in her interests to be involved. She didn’t cross the road to him, but turned away and walked swiftly round the corner and out of sight.

Come on, Everyone! (#ulink_ab11c777-b330-59e9-bd4b-7a2998dc459c)

All kinds of things puzzled Maureen Timson when she was eighteen, and nothing puzzled her more than her friend Audrey Thomas. If Audrey was a friend: Maureen couldn’t even be quite sure of that. Maureen and Audrey were both at college, doing languages. They shared a room, being next to one another in the alphabet; a kind of fated closeness. Maureen had all the advantages, Audrey (in Maureen’s eyes) very few. Yet Audrey led and Maureen followed, and Maureen could not understand it, and chafed, and was riled. Maureen liked to get to the bottom of things: to work away at them like a knotted shoelace, yet here there was something bottomless, un-unknottable. The tangle stayed. It was not fair.

She, Maureen, was pretty: she only had to look in the shared bedroom mirror to know. (Maureen’s mother had discouraged mirrors, being the kind who said it was your character that counted, not your looks, but mirrors are everywhere. Puddles or shop windows will do, or the interested eyes of others, when they reflect back a flattering image.)

Audrey was not at all pretty. She had a face like – as Maureen’s Great-Aunt Edith would say – the back of a bus. (Maureen’s mother had eight aunts and Edith was the one she most disliked – but then Maureen’s mother disliked almost everyone, scorning the weak, the frivolous, the idle, the soft, which meant almost all the human race, excepting only sometimes Family.)

Maureen was an only child, Maureen’s mother having scorned her father right out of the house, shortly after Maureen’s birth. (Maureen had a vision of him, stumbling with thick boots and beery breath, up the damp path between the sad rhododendron leaves and away for ever, her own infant crying echoing from the right-hand upstairs window.)

Maureen had a tidy little waist, and Audrey had rolls of flesh above and below hers: that is the kind of thing you get to know if you share a room. Maureen had never shared a room before. It puzzled her that for all her bodily imperfections Audrey could wander around it naked and easy. Not only did it puzzle her, she didn’t like it.

Maureen was clever: from the age of thirteen she’d never let a past participle not agree with a verb, not once. Audrey could hardly tell a grave from an aigu. Heaven knew how Audrey had wangled her way into college. Maureen read Machiavelli and Audrey read women’s magazines. But still there was something Audrey had, that Maureen didn’t. Audrey led, Maureen followed, half grateful, half resentful. Maureen was solitary, Audrey was not. Maureen hated to be solitary.

‘You make friends so easily,’ said Maureen to Audrey, making it sound like a reproach, some in-built lack of discrimination. ‘How do you do it?’

And that seemed to puzzle Audrey, who was so seldom puzzled.

‘You just talk to people,’ she said.

‘Anybody?’ asked Maureen, with distaste.

‘Well, yes,’ said Audrey. ‘Anyone who comes along. Why not?’ Sometimes it was more than talk, it was into bed with just anyone, and then into someone else’s, so the first anyone would go off in a huff, and Audrey would weep. But as Maureen would say to her, what did Audrey think would happen? Maureen kept her virginity to the last possible moment, and then surrendered it to the Secretary of the Debating Society, a steady and reliable boy with a car. Maureen was sensible, Audrey was not.

Audrey was popular with boys but Maureen could take her pick of them, so that wasn’t a problem. But Maureen felt when she looked in the mirror of their eyes she saw something different from what Audrey saw. Now why should Maureen think that? She tried to talk about it to Audrey. ‘Well, what do you see?’ asked Audrey.