Cameras, though. That’s more complicated, isn’t it? When every true American child, brought up within a certain income bracket, is directing their first home movie at least by the age of fourteen. Watch them in front of the TV. Lifting the cookies to their mouths without even moving their eyes. You got something to tell us, Mom? To explain? What, now? While we’re watching –
Dear Doctor K, you say such wise, such clever things. I wish I could say such things. Like: ‘Life is a tug of war between memory and forgetting.’ Like: ‘What you are afraid of, Sophie, is to leave the cocoon of surrogate amnesia provided by your children’s ignorance.’ Wow! And fuck you too. You used to put your cool, papery palm on my hot forehead, as if you could draw out the trouble with just a lift of your hand …
To remember — that can be bad, Sophie. And to forget — that can be bad too. Isn’t that the problem? Either way, you’re in a mess. But the answer to the problem is to learn how to tell. It’s telling that reconciles memory and forgetting. Sophie, let us try a little experiment. Let us suppose that I am that part of you which wants to forget: yet which, deep down, would really like to hear what another part of you is longing to tell. Or — one step further — let us suppose that I am your two twin boys, Tim and Paul, your two dear boys who are waiting to hear the story that you know one day you must tell them. You have been putting it off and putting it off, and so long as they ask no questions, so long as they remain in happy ignorance, it is as though you too can believe that certain things never happened.
Dear Doctor Klein, I would happily lie back on that couch of yours, in that cocoon of yours above 59th Street, and let you tell me a story. Hush little baby. A bedtime story …
Once upon a time in the reign …
My darling Tim and Paul. I want to thank you for nine years of Safety. That’s what I gave myself — eight, nine, maybe ten years. When you grow up, my darlings, you’ll find out that at the beginning there were the years without any memory at all. And then even when memory began, there were the years without wanting or caring specially to know. Your gift to your mother. She needed a rest from memory.
I knew one day my time would be up. I thought one day you must just say: Tell us about England, tell us about where we come from. (Like: Tell us about the facts of life.) Or one day you’d find somewhere a copy of Aftermaths or Photos of a Decade (you won’t find a copy in the house). And you’d say: Did Harry really take these pictures? Hey, tell us about Harry. (Harry is your grandfather, my angels.) Faces frightened? Agog? Or just mildly curious? Pictures like that are just two-a-penny now, aren’t they?
I never thought my time would come up like it did. A toy gun.
And a letter.
Dear boys. I don’t allow cameras in the house, but your mother still takes her mental photographs, still puts on mental film her aides-mémoire of your ignorant, growing years. As now, through the kitchen window, where in the fading Brooklyn evening you are playing with your father (no gun this time) in the yard. A rough and ready game of soccer (in deference to Joe who still follows the fortunes of Tottenham Hotspur). Tim and Paul. Dark shocks of hair, dark eyes. Like your mother’s, and her mother’s. It was a kind of recompense perhaps, nature’s double peace-offering for the agonies of that spring and summer: twins. Twins! And it was only because you were twins that I didn’t, in the end, call either of you what I would certainly have called you if you’d only been one: Robert.
Joe, gallantly defending the apple-tree goal-mouth. Fair hair, touched with grey. Paler skinned than his sons and reddening more quickly. Handsome about the eyes still, and still sometimes, as now when he’s locked in this boys’ game, boyish and mobile around the mouth. It used to please me once, to excite me, that combination. It was so good to meet a man who simply didn’t have the knack of setting his mouth and jaw in that grave, grim, piously masculine way. Who could actually say and mean it, with never an inch of tongue in his cheek: This is a good time to be born in, this is the age of Fun! As if he would always be young. As if despite all his efforts to be the slick, shrewd man-of-the-world, innocence would perversely win and he would never lose the conviction that he had been set down in some vast playground.
Pouring out the wine and piling his plate high — barbounia! garithes! kalamarákia! — in that taverna by the waterfront under the stars in Poros. Touching me up under the table. Isn’t life grand, isn’t life just a peach? Omorfí i zoi!
He couldn’t believe his luck — dizzy with luck upon luck — when I said, Yes. Yes.
And now it disturbs me (it shames me) when I see it. That smile like a boy’s.
He lets in a header from Paul. Mops his brow. Laughs.
A perfect snapshot. Framed in the kitchen window. The laughing father, the laughing sons.
An image, my dear Sophie, is something without knowledge or memory. Do we see the truth or tell it?
And would that image through the window still be the same if those two happy boys knew what their mother knows (and will tell them), looking at them through the glass? And would it be the same image if the father, who knows what the mother knows, didn’t have the knack — I don’t know what it really is, a sort of generosity or a sort of stupidity — of ignoring what he knows and endorsing only the image?
‘Things Not to Miss in Beautiful Britain.’
You can shoot with both. You can load and aim with both. With both you can find your target and the rest of the world goes black.
First Tony the pony. Then Hadrian the horse. I used to ride round the paddock, then along the bridleway, over the heath. Can you imagine that? A real English heath. Crisp winter sunlight. Frost melting on the gorse and bracken. I haven’t ridden for years, but I love horses. Sometimes I think I should have been born in the age of horses. That’s what Grandad said, when I asked him more about the medaclass="underline" It was worse for the horses. I didn’t understand. But I had this picture of a whole lost age of horses.
Over the heath, down the dip, along by the wood. Don’t let anyone kid you, Doctor K, that there’s nothing sexual about little girls and horses. I first menstruated on a horse. So — she told me after Grandad’s seventieth: I was drunk and I said, ‘Snap!’ — did Carol Irving.
I was Mrs Hyde. Grandad was Nicholas Hyde. Then one summer a stranger from the future came to visit. Harry. He was sun-tanned but he didn’t look as if he’d been on holiday. He watched me ride, but never came near — do you know something? I think he was scared of horses — and asked me about school, and sat talking with Grandad. He didn’t have his camera, but he had this portfolio, full of photos, with the rest of his things up in the bedroom. I wasn’t supposed to look. But I wanted to know about my father. And now I did.