He thought about going into the kitchen but the state it would be in would be even more depressing than the sitting room and his mother wouldn’t drink the coffee anyway. He sat and talked to her for a while but it became clear she wasn’t coherent and it would be a brief visit. Perhaps that was why he asked, that day.
‘Ma, do you remember Bud?’
Anika didn’t answer. She moistened her lips, clutching at the small glass tumbler that looked like it had recently held some sticky liqueur.
‘Bud, Ma,’ he repeated. ‘He was christened Joseph but we all called him Bud. Michael’s son.’ He wasn’t going to help her out by adding, your son too.
‘Michael. .’ she said slowly, savouring the word, the ghost of a smile on her face. ‘Michael. .’ She roused herself in her chair, using her elbows on the armrests to lever herself more upright, smiling openly now, looking at him, then lifting a bony finger.
‘You know, baby boy,’ she said. She hadn’t called him baby boy in a while. ‘The only one I ever really loved was Michael.’
Harper looked at her.
‘It’s true,’ she said, a little indignantly, suddenly lucid and seeing him, seeing his look. She pushed a few strands of grey hair back from her face, then patted at it, as if it was still bouffant. ‘He was the one, the one for me. Michael. Handsomest man ever, and so tall.’ Her face darkened again. ‘I was broken-hearted when he ran out on me. The Tatum Pole Boogie, now that was something. You think these old farmer types ever even heard anything like that?’ She waved her hand towards the window to encompass the various men since Michael, or the whole male population of Amsterdam, perhaps — possibly the European continent.
‘California. .’ she said in a singsong voice. ‘Now that was where we should have stayed. We only came back for your education. We should have stayed. I was happy there.’
Harper closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again to fix an expression on his face that would hide his despair. Was it possible that his mother, in her alcohol-induced dementia, had rewritten the history of their lives so comprehensively that she really believed they had come back to the Netherlands for his welfare? The thing about your mother is, Poppa had said, nothing is ever her fault. And he knew then that it was truer than it had ever been, that his mother, in her relentless quest for love, had gone crashing around the world wreaking havoc in other people’s lives and never once paused to consider that any other person had a right to happiness but herself. That included her own son. He was fifty-four years old. Maybe it was time to divorce his mother.
Bud had been a tall, solid boy, a little tank, Nina used to say. He liked sucking lemons, of all things. Nina would slice one in two for him and put one half face-down on a saucer to stop it drying out, then give him the other to chew on. He would wander around all day with it pressed against his mouth, eyes twinkling. ‘Nicolaath,’ he would say — he had a slight lisp as a toddler, he had already grown out of it when he died — ‘Nicolaath, why don’t you like lemonth?’ When he said this, he would beam, as if the existence of lemonth meant that all was right with the world.
‘But Bud, Ma, do you remember Bud?’
His mother stared at him, pursing her lips, frown lines two deep tracks on her brow, tipping her head to one side with a slightly coquettish air, rifling her memories of husbands and ex-husbands and other women’s husbands. . And he knew that the only thing he wanted to do was to run away from her as far and as fast as possible, and to be on the other side of the world when she died.
He walked slowly back down Noorderstraat after his visit to his mother — not because he was reluctant to leave her behind, alone in the mausoleum, but because he was unwilling to arrive back home. Francisca wouldn’t be there until later but once he got back, there was a small job he had promised he would do while she was out: fix the top drawer of the chest of drawers. It was sticking: it annoyed her every morning. ‘When will you fix this thing?’
The summer air was still light, not too hot, the sky still pale and fresh. It occurred to him that the most enjoyable part of this Sunday would be the walk from one obligation to another — that neither his mother’s large dark house or his wife’s small bright one held any sense of comfort for him, that the place he felt most at home was in the transition between the two.
His boss had been asking him for some time how he would feel about returning to Indonesia, given his background knowledge of the archipelago. They had just widened the currency trading band from eight per cent to twelve per cent: the rupiah was heading down and given what was happening elsewhere in the region, their clients were getting twitchy. He had been prevaricating — he hadn’t discussed the possibility with Francisca — and at one point his boss had said, ‘Is it because of what happened before, in sixty-five?’
‘No,’ he said, with a small smile. ‘That was thirty-two years ago.’
He liked his current boss; Gregor was long gone, Jan was solid and decent, had said to him once, ‘You know, I’m horrified what we exposed young operatives to back then, wouldn’t happen now, not on my watch.’
He had not thought about Jan’s suggestion too much at the time. He was an old man now; he had his commitment to Francisca. The Asia Department was huge in comparison with the sixties and in the intervening three decades the company had gone from a score of operatives plus back-up staff to hundreds of employees in Amsterdam alone — that was before you counted the offices in most capital cities in the world. There were plenty of other people they could send. Now though, as he walked back home, it came to him clear and clean. If he went to Indonesia, he would get away from. . everything.
He did a small inventory of his life. It was 1997 and he was fifty-four years old: fifty-five later that year: a middle-aged man, married with no children, who had had a disrupted childhood and a dramatic youth but had spent the last three decades behind a desk. His mother hardly knew who he was any more. His marriage was not in a good state: he had known it for some time but this was the first occasion he thought it out loud to himself. Interesting, that, how you could know something and yet take so long to acknowledge it in so many words.
As he walked, he also acknowledged to himself that he had known it wasn’t a good idea at the time. He had married for the novelty value: it was one of the few mistakes he hadn’t made yet, after all. And still, they had tried for the baby, and then after the baby had died, they had had their grief to nurse instead, to wean and to raise, until it became old enough for them to have a little more time to themselves. That was four years ago. The grief should be a bit less dependent by now, he thought, play on its own sometimes, sleep through the night. Why was it still giving them broken nights? What were they getting wrong?
As he walked back to the small house he shared with his wife, he thought about Jan’s offer to send him back to Indonesia. Francisca, brave and delicate and throwing herself into caring for his elderly relatives in the absence of a child to care for; their pleasant home, very much to her taste; their occasional dinners with friends, all Francisca’s; his one-sided conversations with his mother. . that was the inventory, that was the sum of it.