‘What we have lost,’ she will tell them, ‘is the experience of a deep antagonism. Not a casual, take-it-or-leave-it, family or neighbourly antagonism — but something altogether less accidental and arbitrary than that. A shapely, long-ingested, cultural antagonism, in which everything, from who we worship to what we eat, is accounted for and made clear. We are who we are because we are not them.’
They stare at her.
‘Remove them from the picture and who are we?’
They are still staring at her.
‘We must give the people back their necessary opposite,’ she will tell them, heated by her own fierceness, the splintered bones in her body a thousand weapons to slay with.
‘And how do you propose doing that, young lady?’ someone dares to ask.
Ah, she will say. Now you’re asking.
iii
At the very moment Esme Nussbaum was knocked down outside her place of work, her mother fell off a chair on which she’d been standing to dust the bookshelves. Mothers and daughters, especially when no man beloved of either is around to break the current, can be attuned like this.
In the time her daughter was in hospital Rhoda Nussbaum never gave up hope of her coming out of her coma because she could hear her thinking live thoughts. And now that Esme was home, back in the room that had been her nursery, back in her care, her mother heard even more of what was going on inside her head. Planets, marriages, collisions, commotion — she heard all that. Some of her daughter’s thoughts and phrases she even recognised as her own. How could it be otherwise? If she was attuned to Esme, then Esme was attuned to her. Even in the womb the baby hears its mother’s music. And as an essentially companionless woman, with a rich store of anger in her, Rhoda had confided in her daughter, sometimes in words, sometimes silently, earlier and more frequently than was common or even desirable. Necessary Opposites, for example, was the name of a two-girl, two-boy rock band Rhoda had danced to when she was a teenager. She was pretty certain the band vanished at about the time most hard-rock bands were consensually driven underground, and that would have been a few years before Esme was born. How extraordinary that a phrase that had been lying there in pieces in Rhoda Nussbaum’s mind, unused and unreferred to, should suddenly reassemble itself in Esme’s. But then again, maybe not. Rhoda had tried to dance her brains out to Necessary Opposites because she didn’t like what her brains contained. Was it coincidence? The evil thing she wanted to dance out was all trace of a man in pain — or pretending to be in pain — declaring over and over I am who I am because I am not them as though it were an incantation, and begging her to kiss him, forgive him, enfold him, make him better. As though he had a better self she could release.
Hearing the words returned to her in Esme’s thoughts did not bring back a long-forgotten event because she had never forgotten it — where she was when she heard them, how they made her feel, the feebleness of her response. .
EIGHT. Götterdämmerung
i
A BLOOMING, STRONG-JAWED girl of just sixteen, still to meet the husband she can’t bear, Rhoda Nussbaum (to be) had a brief affair with a man more than three times her age. Though she called it an affair, there was not much sex in it. Nor much love. It was an affair of curiosity. She was inexperienced, but with a fierce sense of the ridiculous that made her courageous, and he was her schoolteacher. An unattractive man physically, but you don’t say no to your teacher. Especially when he wants you to know he’s emotionally damaged and you might just be the one to heal him.
‘I’m in bits,’ he told her when she put her face up to be kissed.
The hands with which he held her shook. At first she thought it was she who was shaking, but she saw the light dancing in his wedding ring like sun on choppy water. ‘Make me whole again,’ he said, his scraggy beard moving independently of his lips, as though it too was bouncing on a wild, wild sea.
‘That’s a lot to ask of a pupil you’ve only ever given B+ to,’ she said.
He had no sense of the ridiculous and didn’t laugh. He was a folk singer in his spare time and, though they were a long way from any wild, wild sea, sang about fishermen bringing in herrings. The fact that he sometimes brought his guitar to school was another reason Rhoda allowed him to try it on with her. The other girls would be jealous if they found out and Rhoda had every intention of their finding out.
‘I just want you to be yourself,’ he said.
She swivelled her jaw at him. ‘What if I don’t know which of my selves to be?’
‘You don’t have to worry. You’re being the self I care best about now.’
Care best about! But what she said was, ‘And which self is that?’
‘The good and innocent one.’
‘Ha!’ she snorted. Lacking experience she might have been, but they were in a hotel room drinking cider on the edge of the bed, on the outside of the locked door a frolicsome sign saying LEAVE US ALONE: WE’RE PLAYING, and she knew that while there were many words for what she was being not a one of them was ‘innocent’.
‘Oh yes you are,’ he said, unbuttoning her school shirt. ‘Where there’s no blood, there’s no guilt.’
‘There might be blood,’ she warned him.
He overcame his surprise to smile his saddest folkie’s smile at her. ‘That’s different. Blood shed in the name of love is not like blood shed in the name of hate.’
She wasn’t having any love talk, but she could hardly not ask, ‘How do you know? Have you shed blood in the name of hate?’
He let his long horse face droop lower even than usual. ‘All in good time,’ he said.
He was teasing her, she thought. This was his sexual come-on. I have done such things. . Boys did that but she didn’t expect it of a grown man. She liked him less for it and she hadn’t liked him much to start with. He shouldn’t have supposed she needed him to have terrible secrets. This was terrible secret enough. He was married, her teacher, older than her parents, undressing her, describing the shape of her breasts with his fingers, his touch so intrusively naked he might have been describing them in four-letter words. They were offending against every decency she had been taught.
He thought he guessed what she was thinking. He thought the mention of hate had startled her. But he had guessed wrong. She wanted him to finish a conversation he had started, that was all.
He told her in the end, some three or four visits to the hotel bedroom later. Very suddenly and brutally.
‘You’d have been about ten,’ he said. They were still dressed, looking out of the window on to a bank of air conditioners. Two pigeons were fighting over a crumb of bread that must have been thrown out of a window above theirs. The room had a worn, padded reproduction of the Rokeby Venus for a bedhead. In the days when the economy boomed and nothing yet had HAPPENED this had been an expensively raffish hotel, softly carpeted for high-heeled assignations. It still spoke knowingly of indulgence and love, but with only half a heart. So great a change in only six or seven years! Now a schoolteacher could afford to bring his pupil here.
A scented candle burned. His guitar case stood unopened in a corner. Was he going to sing to her, she wondered. The sign announcing that they were playing so leave them alone was swinging on the door.
She knew what he was referring to. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED was the thing that happened when she was about ten. She hadn’t known much about it, living too far from any of the centres of conflagration to see anything with her own eyes or hear anything with her own ears. One or two school acquaintances must have been caught up in it because they never showed their faces again, but they hadn’t been close friends so their absence didn’t impinge on her. Otherwise, apart from her form teacher once bursting into tears, and the headmaster banning all mobile phones and personal computers from the school premises, nothing occurred at school to suggest anything was wrong, and at home her parents remained tight-lipped. There was a blackout imposed by her father, no papers allowed into the house and no serious radio or television, but that had hardly bothered Rhoda aged ten. OPERATION ISHMAEL, however, in which she went, in a single bound, from Hinchcliffe to Behrens, could not be accounted for without reference to the turbulence it was devised to quiet, and so, one way or another, Rhoda learnt what she had never been taught. Namely that something unspeakably terrible had happened, if it had.