‘He’s very good-looking,’ Cordelia says.
Her father nods, apparently in agreement. And then says, hurriedly, as if it was not something he had ever thought about, ‘Would you say so?’
‘Yes, I would.’
‘He’s married, I think,’ he says, oddly.
‘Well, so am I,’ Cordelia points out.
‘No.’ He seems flustered. And knowing that he seems flustered makes him more flustered. ‘I just meant…’
‘I said he was good-looking, that’s all.’
‘Okay.’
He tries to smile — knows he doesn’t quite pull it off.
She is looking at him strangely, is how it feels. He says, ‘Well, it was nice of you to ask him in.’
She doesn’t seem to hear — she just keeps looking at him in that strange way.
He has hoisted The Sleepwalkers up in front of him — is staring without seeing it at a map of Europe in 1914.
She knows, he thinks.
What does she know, though? What is there to know? What does he know himself? That certain men…What would the word be? Fascinate him? And that disturbed by this fascination — if that is the word — he is sometimes…What? Ineffably embarrassed in their presence? That’s it, though. That’s all there is to know. Not even in his imagination has he ever…
Finally he lets his eyes leave the page — the same page, the map of Europe in 1914 — and look for her.
She isn’t there.
There is a sense that something has happened. That something has passed between them. He feels slightly sick, as he did when, about twenty years ago now, Joanna said to him that he was ‘obviously queer’. It had seemed an extraordinary thing to say. With Joanna, the subject was never mentioned again, not even alluded to. That was, however, when they started to live more or less separately. He doesn’t know if she has ever said anything to Cordelia about it.
He finds her in the kitchen.
She is holding a framed photo — her parents. The way they live — mostly apart — has always upset her.
‘What’s that?’ he asks.
She doesn’t answer.
And he thinks, standing at her shoulder, sharing her view of the photo of himself and Joanna — She’s thinking it’s all a sham. It’s not all a sham, though. He wants to tell her that. He doesn’t know what words to use.
He is trying to find a way of saying it when it occurs to him that perhaps Joanna does see it as a sham, their marriage, the forty-five years they’ve spent together, and sort of together. And of course Cordelia will see it from her mother’s point of view, mostly. She will pity her mother, for having had to live for so long like that. With someone who is ‘obviously queer’. The words still seem to have nothing to do with him. He wonders if Cordelia knows about Joanna’s affairs. Probably she knows more than he does — he knows nothing specific. It’s difficult to know what information passes between them, his wife and his daughter.
She is still looking at the photo. He’s in morning dress, you can just make out. It’s the day he got his knighthood, twenty-odd years ago.
‘The day I landed the K,’ he says.
It is so obviously not what she is thinking about, so obviously not the aspect of the image that is absorbing her, that to say it makes him sound much less sensitive than he actually is, much less perceptive. He knows that, and knows that it’s the price he pays for steering things away from what he does not want to talk about, or for trying to steer them away.
She seems to have taken the hint, though. ‘Yup,’ she says, and puts the photo down. ‘Is it too early for a glass of wine?’
He looks at his watch.
It’s not even five.
She says that in London it’s office-party season, the Christmas drinking season, liver-punishing time. Afternoons in the pub. All that.
‘I vaguely remember,’ he says.
‘Do you still miss work?’ she asks, obviously not very interested, but knowing that he doesn’t mind talking about that so much.
‘Not as much as I used to.’
He stoops thoughtfully to the wine rack.
‘Not as much as I used to,’ he says again.
He puts a bottle on the table.
‘I’ve had to accept,’ he says, matter-of-factly, ‘that my life, in terms of potential, is over.’
It’s as if he is trying to make up for not wanting to talk about what she wants to talk about — the forty-five years he has spent married to her mother, what was the story there — by talking with unusual frankness about something else.
That’s what he thinks himself as he starts to open the bottle, first nicking the lead foil, and then unpeeling it. With a satisfying heaviness, it separates from the glass underneath. He says, ‘I don’t have much left to offer. In a practical sense.’
‘You shouldn’t say that.’ She still seems distracted, her mind on something else.
‘Oh, I’ve achieved everything I’m going to achieve.’
‘Professionally, you mean?’
‘Yes. Partly. I mean, I’m not down in the mouth about it,’ he says. ‘I’m very proud of what I’ve achieved.’ Which is true. Even as he says it, though, he is aware of how weightless, how intangible, how even strangely fictitious, his achievements feel — even the ones he is proudest of, like his minor part in negotiating, over many years, the expansion of the European Union in 2004. Something, he is not sure what, seems to nullify them. He says, trying to maintain his philosophical tone, ‘I’m very proud. It’s just that that’s it now.’
‘Do you want a hand with that?’ Cordelia asks. She means the wine he is struggling to open.
He hesitates for a moment. He seems to think about what to do. Then he says, ‘Yes, okay, please,’ and passes it to her.
‘Now this wine,’ he says, obviously keen to talk about happier matters, ‘we got, your mother and I,’ he slightly emphasises, as if to point out that they did sometimes have fun together, which indeed they did, ‘some years ago, when we went down to Umbria, in the old Passat, may she rest in peace, and we got this wine in Perugia, I think. Anyway, it’s one of the best, supposedly, that they make down there, and I think it’s time it was drunk.’
‘Hear, hear,’ Cordelia says — though something is still missing from her voice.
He pours out two glasses, not too much in each, and slides one over to her.
‘So,’ he says. ‘To…?’
He waits a moment — long enough for her to smile, and shrug. The smile is wistful, sad, it withholds something, is unpersuaded.
He does not let it deflect him.
‘To life?’ he suggests.
She seems to weigh this up, then acquiesces. ‘To life.’
—
The next morning they drive to Ravenna. He needs to have another scan at the hospital. They take the new Toyota. Cordelia drives.
As they drive towards the sea the farming country gives way gradually to something more garish — the tourist economy of the sandy coast. There are signs for theme parks. Hotels. Everything shut up for winter. Except that the prostitutes who line Strada Statale 309 in summer are still there, though fewer. Bosnian girls, quite a lot of them, he has been told.
‘Poor things,’ he says.
Cordelia nods, driving.
They near Ravenna and there are signs for the Area Industriale. For the merchant port. She handles it all unproblematically — the tricky, poorly signposted approach, the Ravenna traffic, the one-way system; he is almost embarrassingly impressed by the way she handles it.
‘You’re doing very well,’ he says, as they stop at a traffic light somewhere in the city — she seems to know where they are, though he has no idea.