Then she lets go of Tony and gets up and moves to the window, and stands with her back turned, unpinning her hat really this time. She takes it off and throws it down on the sofa, and fluffs out her dark hair at the back. After a moment she kneels and looks out. “Who’s been making all these smudges?”
she says, in a higher, tighter voice. It’s the voice she uses for mimicking happiness, when she’s angry with Tony’s father and wants to show him she doesn’t care. She knows the smudges are Tony’s. Ordinarily she’d be irritated, she’d make some remark about how much it costs to have Ethel clean the windows, but this time she laughs, breathlessly, as if she’s been running.
“Nose marks, just like a dog. Guppy, you are such a funny child.”
Guppy is a name from long ago. Anthea’s story is that she called Tony that right after she was born, because of her time in the incubator. Anthea would come and look at Tony through the glass, and Tony’s mouth would be opening and closing but there wouldn’t be any sound. Or Anthea said she couldn’t hear any. She kept the name because later, when Tony was out of danger and she’d taken her home, Tony scarcely cried; she just opened and closed her mouth. Anthea tells this story as if it’s funny.
This nickname—enclosed by quotation marks—is pencilled in below Tony’s baby pictures. in Anthea’s white leather My Baby photo album: “‘Guppy.’ 18 months”; “‘Guppy’ and Me”; “‘Guppy’ and her Dad.” After a while Anthea must have stopped taking these pictures, or stopped sticking them in, because there are just blank pages.
Tony feels a rush of longing for whatever it was that existed once between herself and her mother, in the photo album; but she feels annoyance as well, because the name itself is a trick. She used to think a guppy was something warm and soft, like a puppy, and she was hurt and insulted when she discovered it was a fish.
So she doesn’t answer her mother. She sits on the piano bench, waiting to see what Anthea will do next.
“Is he here?” she says. She must know the answer: Tony’s father wouldn’t have left Tony in the house alone.
“Yes,” says Tony. Her father is in his study at the back of the house. He’s been there all along. He must have heard the silence, when Tony wasn’t playing. He doesn’t care whether Tony practises the piano or not. The piano, he says, is her mother’s bright idea.
XXII
Tony’s mother cooks supper as usuaclass="underline" She doesn’t take off her good bridge club dress, but puts her apron over it, her best apron, the white one with ruffles over the shoulders. She has redone her lipstick: her mouth shines like a waxed apple. Tony sits on the kitchen stool, watching her, until Anthea tells her to stop goggling: if she wants to be useful she can set the table. Then she can go and dig up her father. Anthea often puts it this way: dig up, as if he’s a potato. Sometimes she says root out.
Tony has no particular desire to be useful, but she’s relieved that her mother is acting more normally. She deals out the plates and then the forks, knives, and spoons, a left right right, a left right right, and then she goes into her father’s study, knocking first, and sits down crosslegged on the floor. She can always go in there as long as she keeps quiet.
Her father is working at his desk. He has his desk lamp on, with its green shade, so his face has a greenish tinge. He’s a large man with small neat handwriting that looks as if it’s been done by fastidious mice. Beside it, Tony’s own writing is that of a three-fingered giant. His long arrow nose is pointing straight down at the papers he’s working on; his yellowy-grey hair is combed back, and the nose and the hair together make him seem as if he’s flying through a strong headwind, hurtling down towards the target of his paper. He’s frowning, as if braced for the impact. Tony is dimly aware that he isn’t happy; but happiness isn’t something she expects, in men. He never complains about not having it; unlike her mother.
His yellow pencil twiddles. He has a jarful of these pencils on his desk, kept very sharp. Sometimes he asks Tony to sharpen them for him; she turns them one by one in the businesslike sharpener clamped to the windowsill, feeling that she’s preparing his arrows. What he does with these pencils is beyond her, but she knows that it’s something of the utmost importance. More important—for instance—than she is.
Her father’s name is Griff, but she doesn’t think of him as Griff, the way she thinks of her mother as Anthea. He’s somewhat more like the other fathers, whereas Anthea isn’t very much like the other mothers, although occasionally she tries to be. (Griffis not her Dad, though: Griffis not a Dad.)
Griff was in the war. Anthea says that although he may have been in it, he didn’t go through it, the way she did. Her parents’ house in London was destroyed by a bomb during the Blitz and her parents were both killed. She’d come home—where had she been? She has never said—to find nothing but a crater, one standing wall, and a pile of rubble; and her own mother’s shoe, with a foot in it.
But Griff missed all that. He only got into it at D-Day. (It meaning the danger, the killing; not the training, the waiting, the fooling around.) He was there for the landing, the advance, the easy bit, says Anthea. The winning.
Tony likes to think of him like that—winning—like someone winning a race. Victorious. He has not been noticeably victorious lately. But Anthea says the easy bit in front of people, in front of their friends when they come over for drinks and Tony watches from doorways. Anthea says the easy bit, looking straight at Griff with her chin up, and he turns red.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.
“He never does,” says Anthea with mock despair, lifting her shoulders. It’s the same gesture she makes when Tony refuses to play the piano for the bridge club.
“At the end it was just children,” says Griff. “Children, in men’s uniforms. We were killing children:”
“Lucky you,” says Anthea lightly. “That must have made it smoother for you.”
“It didn’t,” says Tony’s father. They stare at each other as if no one else is in the room: tense and measuring.
“He liberated a gun,” says Anthea. “Didn’t you, darling? He’s got it in his study. I wonder if the gun feels liberated.” She gives a dismissive laugh, and turns away. A silence eddies behind her.
That was how Anthea and Griff met—during the war, when he was in England. Stationed in England, Anthea would say; so Tony pictures the two of them in a train station, waiting to depart. It would have been a winter train station; they had on their overcoats and her mother was wearing a hat, and their breath was turning to white fog as it came out of their mouths. Were they kissing, as in pictures? It’s not clear. Perhaps they were going on the train together, perhaps not. They had a lot of suitcases. There are always a lot of suitcases in the story of Tony’s parents.
“I was a war bride,” Anthea says; she gives a self-deprecating smile, and then a sigh. She says war bride as if she’s making fun of it—minor-key, rueful fun. What does she mean to imply~ That she has fallen prey to an old trick, an old confidence trick, and knows it now and deplores it? That Tony’s father took advantage of her in some way? That it was the fault of the war?