“We’ll come straight to it, Isabella—we’re worried about your attitude, especially in front of the clients. At the moment this is probably a perception problem. But maybe we also have aptitude issues to address in the short term and performance issues going forward. So, to be frank—I know you appreciate candor in…”
Robe was one of those people who found himself insightful because he considered the human emotions as if they were a range of competing brands, honesty being his proud brand of choice. And yet there was something about the word “frank,” she always thought, that vociferously signaled its opposite.
“…We just wanted to see if there’s maybe something we should be doing. That we are not doing. From our side. Maybe there is a way we can all work together to try and help you get your focus back… It is a focus thing, right?”
She hadn’t told them the whole story—i.e., death. She had left it at “ill” and come back without changing the news much beyond an upgrade (as Robe might say) to “seriously ill.” As far as she was concerned, her mother wasn’t the issue. Or rather, she was, but not in a way that could be unraveled for these people.
To the question of focus, therefore, Isabella bit her tongue and tried to think of something appropriate to say, some complaint that maybe Robe might have come across in one of his management “away days.” She settled on the word “unchallenged,” since she had heard Robe himself use it during some hideous life-insulting inanity of a presentation. And sure enough, “unchallenged” did the trick. Robe hit his stride almost immediately and talked thenceforward without the need for any further reciprocation.
Meanwhile she absented herself entirely from the situation and returned to the troubled Kremlin of her mind… remembering a phrase of her father’s that had not made sense to her before (delivered in a rare good mood after one of his innumerable firings from some magazine or other): “Watch out for the clichés, Izzy. They’re not lazy, they’re malicious—they’re out to get you.” Something to that effect. Only now did she realize he was talking about the clichés of life rather than those of speech. And how strange, she thought with a jolt, that so many apparently random things that her parents had said to her (and that she did not remember for years), how strange that they came back like this. Her mother too, in the midst of one of her ludicrous anti-West rants, delivered (she now recalled) with punctual timing on receipt of the news of Isabella’s acceptance to the Harvard MBA course: “One day they may just about persuade you to believe that business is the engine and money the fuel, Izzy, but whatever they say, you can be absolutely certain that neither is the journey and neither is the view. Remember that. Who would you rather be listening to on your deathbed, Bach or the chief executive?”
At first she had thought that nothing had changed, that the death of her mother was having next to no effect on her. Indeed, for the first few days she had entertained the view that maybe she was just one of those ascetics who didn’t (or couldn’t) respond to loss—or, for that matter, anything. Emotionally cauterized, to use one of her brother’s less glib phrases.
Not that she was entirely fooled by herself: she was wise enough to recognize shock for what it was, and she saw too that it must eventually wear off. So regardless of the temporarily blank screens, she had been monitoring herself with close attention ever since arriving back in New York. But it was the stealth with which shock slipped away and the disguise in which grief arrived that had caught her out. Because of all grief’s many masks, she had not expected anger.
It had begun as an almost friendly perplexity at her own numbness, which had increased somehow to impatience with herself, increased again to resentment against her mother—for the cryptic distancing, the idiotic, adolescent, unnecessary attempts to manipulate and pose with those bloody letters when, oh God, she must have known that she was seriously ill; until finally, yesterday, it had become the tumultuous fury from which she was now suffering. And yet only this lunchtime, during an e-mail exchange with Susan, her oldest friend back in London, had she realized—bang!—that this was it: that fury was the reaction. At last. And only later (while smoking on the fire escape to get away from the Jimmy Choo chat) had she recognized her error, that the precise opposite of that which she had imagined was in fact true: when a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat but rise from their sarcophagi and move out across the borders of the mind, swearing in their puppet regimes as they pass. And from here on in, it would be frontline, hand-to-hand: her against them. You think that your journey from birth to death is a journey away from the clutches of your parents, but in fact it’s the reverse. Life is a journey toward mother, father. Because as a child, though you live by their hands, you understand not a single one of their decisions, not a single action, not a single response. But each year that passes, through adolescence and beyond, you begin to grasp more and more, you grow a little closer, start to see what they see, think what they think, realize what they have realized, believe what they have believed. Am I right, Mum? Am I right, Dad? And don’t it make you sick.
The Internet café continued its very global and yet simultaneously very local existence. She curled and uncurled her toes. Then she clicked on Compose—a button designed to flatter if ever there was one—and began to type, careful to avoid the greeting because she knew that she would not know how to start, deliberately trying not to think, aiming only to communicate the essence of what she wanted to say.
I just wanted to let you know that the funeral went okay. Some people from the consulate turned up. You know this, of course. Gabe is okay, I think. I’m in New York at the moment —surviving. E-mail to this address if you ever intend to visit Petersburg. I’ll give you the details—it’s the Smolensky cemetery. Is.
It was the work of less than two minutes. And it was all she could muster. Her face was burning with the thought of betraying her brother. And she could feel her heart beating against the unforgiving conscience of her sternum. An image of her father careened into her mind—his face livid with the drunken discovery of her and Gabriel trespassing in his office, trying his locked drawer.
She forced herself to return to the top of the screen. For five further minutes she typed one greeting after another, deleting the words as quickly as she entered them: “Dear Dad”; “Hey Dad”; “Dear Nicholas”; “Dad—”; “Hello Nicholas”; “Hello Dad”… Nothing felt right. But nothing had ever felt right. After all the years of silence, she simply did not know what to call the man. She remembered that once, when he had hit her so hard that she could not hear, she had called him a “shoevanist pig.”
In the end, fearful that she would lose her courage (or fury, or the need of a child to know, or whatever the hell it was that was driving this), she just left it blank. No greeting at all. Feverishly, she picked up her bag, rummaged until she found the e-mail address that Julian Avery had given her (and what a conversation that had been), and typed it in… And then, for a few seconds, she allowed herself the costly luxury of the truth—that it was actually communication itself that she wanted to establish. That the content was merely a means. And that in this subterfuge she was… She was just like her mother. And that her father, the cleverest man she had ever met, would see through it as surely as if she were made of glass. But—shallow breathing—maybe that didn’t matter anymore. Banish thought. Banish games. Banish play. (Another image—of her father swimming with Francis, his friend, in the men’s pond on Hampstead Heath while she and her brother stood by the railings, scared of dogs.) The point was to get the journey started. Take the bastard on. Do it. Send.