Chapter Text
There are forms of patriotism that are really quite degrading.
— Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist"
2016.
It’s morning when the plane lands, a silvery drift on downwards.
What kind of sky is this, if you look up at it? He’ll find out soon, in only an hour or two, when the airport disgorges them. A mackerel sky perhaps: restless, changeable, glory-be-to-god-for-dappled-things. Is England past change? Robin knows the answer to that one, if he knows anything. He rolls his neck left and right, releasing knots. Everyone he has seen go hungry, go undoctored and unschooled; everyone he has seen go houseless, helpless, unfriended; everyone he has seen die. They are countless and yet he counts them still.
More than would fill every seat on the plane, he thinks. More than could crowd into the JCR, the games room, the Buttery. Six years ago he was voted onto the JCR committee: Charities Officer, a non-executive member. On the agenda this week, where will our support be directed? The Child Brain Injury Trust, Oxfordshire Mind, Shelter. These are good suggestions, thank you to everyone. We could look further afield, as well; we could look at charities working overseas; have you heard of this smart giving thing.
The money went to Shelter, in the end, and he couldn't begrudge it.
Oh, look at Much sleeping, still. His breath, impossibly gentle, mists the near edge of the plane window, but there’s plenty of room to see. He’d tried to give Robin the window seat, like every time.
They walked along New College Lane, one May morning, golden and deserted. “We’ll go out for breakfast,” Robin said. After the riot of singing their hearts felt unsteady, on the edge of blooming, as if they left scent in their wake. “This law conversion,” Robin said, and the words came easily. “It’s not the right time. I mean, if it involved converting some laws, that might be another matter, but—“
Much said, “What will you do? When did you decide?”
“Go abroad,” Robin said. “I’ll apply for the Coeurdelion Internship. My dad knew him but I never actually met him when I was a kid. He was always overseas, you know?” He looked at Much sidelong and couldn’t miss the sorrow. Those open, comprehensible eyes. “I emailed him, a couple of weeks ago. He got back to me straight away, he was passing through Damascus.”
Somewhere for the bleeding hearts to sweat away a couple of years before going into the city. The last gold star on your résumé: harder to get in here, than to win a Fulbright. Even Richard Coeurdelion’s own brother sneers at the interns on Twitter.
But your ideals, Much thought, at midnight in the garden of the Turf, crowded next to Robin on the bench seat. Their breath smoked in the freezing air, and mist filled the doorways like low-hanging clouds. Who would you be without them?
They left on the same plane, though Much was not a Coeurdelion intern.
Robin drinks coffee, and it’s bitter. He tears open the blue sugar packet they gave him, pours a stream of tiny crystals. What a lot to come back to, before you even have your feet back on the ground.
*
Sometimes, dancing at East Bloc, all his thoughts wash away. Here, where you need no one but the man who touches you. Here, where any hands are the right hands. His pulse speeds to the beat and sweat bathes his body. Do not, do not be afraid, the heat whispers, for you are only human. When a man slides his leather leggings down, his thighs are dripping sweat, scratchy with its familiar warm salt. Guy trembles in the stranger’s grip. He wants to ask for something, but in these moments his mouth still shapes only French words for itself. His mouth opens, empty, gasping.
“Donne-moi,” he chokes, “Donne-moi ton foutre—“ His eyelids fall shut, they are so wet and heavy. The toilet stall where they are fucking reeks of shit. The stranger kisses him, it takes a long time, the man tastes like rice and gin and cigarettes. It’s pleasant.
*
She doesn’t get in until almost six o’clock — and her feet hurt, the fucking shoes, beautiful shoes are always a dreadful idea, they deceive you and hobble you. A leather dyed to the indecipherable instant where orange flushes into red, they are shoes to blush in, shoes to make a lover cry. What rash, brilliant girl would put those on at eleven a.m. and think yes, they’ll do, I can manage for nineteen hours. Pas de problème. Marian, Marian would. The stockings in their virgin packet, Dior bought on Etsy. The dress she found at Rellik last October on the day of the hailstorm, when she forced Guy to drink a matcha latte and he liked it. Oh, the dress is white as foam, unflawed, and she wears it because, why not? Yes, a day of charcoal, wax, vellum, wood, ink. She’s never been lazy.
And yet why not, for it was made to wear and it will rot; it’s only fabric. The shoes are only skin. She dresses herself like she would dress a sculpture. With passion, thought, certitude, and the very best. Why not? She’ll teach a life drawing class for pregnant women, dressed like this — no charge, at the Bethnal Green Mission Church. Look at her little waist and ankles. Marian is delicious as an apple, sweet and sharp. The people who dislike her call her, the Duchess of St Martins, or Marian-Toinette.
She’s been drinking, but only to help her with the last hour’s work. It’s enough to fumble the heavy front door, and it crashes closed. Marian hears her father’s uncertain step two floors above in his bedroom. She has woken him, and the remorse drops her head; curls fall over her face and she swallows, hungry, starving, wanting everything.
I know I said, she thinks, I know I said. She crouches and pulls off the shoes. It’s like dancing, like what’s-the-time-Mister-Wolf. On her Dior feet, she dances, creeps, into the kitchen. Of course the carers have left everything clean, pin-neat, nicer than she would have done. She thinks, promises promises.
Brie, grapes, soda bread. Her hands shake with hunger. The dress creases and hangs around her body, lovely as ever. Nothing spoils it. She could sweat a river of guilt and it would only hold her closer, as if the maker looked ahead and saw her, and said: ah, there is Marian — I thought of laying down my needle, but for her I shall go on.
*
2013.
He hates it, but Coeurdelion talks about going native. He says it when Robin reads the Quran in the jeep to pass the time, or if he talks too eagerly, too demotically with the fixer. This one thread of ugly disdain in such a vast man, of whom it is not an exaggeration to say that he contains multitudes: generosity, intellect, self-abnegation, loyalty, discernment, wit, and undoubted physical courage. Is it, perhaps, a difference of linguistic taste, and nothing more than that? Your line of acceptability falls here, and mine here.
What is native, though. That’s what Robin wonders. He’s finished the internship now, it’s only meant to be two years: but he stayed, Much stayed. Michael-Miller-everyone-calls-me-Much. People smile at him readily because he is so good with children, even dying ones. Robin has been promoted twice but he takes his turn at the grave-digging every other day. It’s not that you need that reminder, because no one forgets. It’s about never letting yourself think it’s just something for others to do.
I want to talk to them of God. Is it any wonder, he thinks, here, now?
There’s never been such sun. He remembers that in his last year at Oxford he went back to the Nottinghamshire house once in spring, a weekend in Trinity, for no reason other than to see it. He wanted to take that with him, the mid-May greens exploding all around it: it’s worth less than the London house, but it’s always meant more.
Marian texted him and he sent her back a picture without any words. It was the view from his father’s study, the room which should be Robin’s study now, or at least the study. But he could not take from his father that little space, as he took the title and the houses, the lands and the death duties. It was the last thing he could really call his father’s, and he sat in the red leather armchair that once seemed cavernous, reading Slavoj Žižek. She rang him and he could hear her smiling.
“Come and watch me, then, if you want to,” she said. “I’ll probably fall off, you know.”
“If you fall off, I’ll buy you a Mr Whippy,” he said. “But if you win, you have to fête me with lobster and like delicacies for having such unshakeable faith in you.”
He remembers her straight spine and her thin body in a black coat; the swell of her breasts; the alien neatness of her hair. Her legs encircling Artemis’s sides, dark boots against that shining palomino body. The routine comes back only in snatches. Her piaffe. The swift flying changes. And the full pirouettes, their beauty: already he is afraid of forgetting, of being Robin who is drowned in the sand and the grave-digging, with no space in his mind for the girl on her glinting horse, half-dancing, half-flying.
*
2007.
Saffiya’s place mat is almost done. It’s very neat work, she has always been neat. Inside her there’s a whirling storm, something angry: she doesn’t let it rule her. Saffiya is in charge. She has drawn an anatomically correct heart on her place mat. Some of the inmates will complain about it, any excuse, but the brief was something that inspires you.
AS-levels in Biology, Chemistry, Maths, Further Maths, and English Literature — to show how well you know the culture now, Saffiya, to show you have a heart. No one has put it quite like that, Saffiya, be fair. But they don’t have to.
Medical school inspires me, she will say if they ask her to do another one. If Beth or Lulu or Katie says they can’t eat, not with that gross heart staring at them, sorry.
Saffiya finishes shading the aorta, and that’s it. She’s finished. But the door opens and it’s Cath pushing a new girl in a wheelchair, a girl who bizarrely is wearing silver fishnets under a hospital gown. A ghost girl, tube tucked behind her ear like an outlandish decoration, clouds of black hair around her face.
“She’s French,” Cath says desperately. “Saffiya, didn’t you say that you did the GCSE—“ and she sighs with undisguised relief when Saffiya nods. “Just say it will be sorted soon,” she orders. “We’ll get someone on who can talk to her properly, Nina’s calling the bank now — you don’t have to say all that, but say we’re getting someone. Say welcome.” The older woman’s face is mottled with stress.
“Bienvenue à notre incarcération,” Saffiya says, and Cath is relieved by the unmistakably gallic sound of her words. She hurries away and Saffiya smiles at the newcomer.
“I speak English,” the girl says. “We didn’t move to France till I was nine.”
It immediately takes its place as one of the best jokes on Staff they have ever had: how Isabella Gisborne had them thinking she knew no English for a full week, until they upped her feed rate and she snapped, and screamed. There was no more pretence after that, for she’d sworn fluently in both languages at the top of her voice as she went for their eyes. Saffiya is old enough to see the cruelty, the worry, the extra work, but she’s not too old to enjoy it, this small revenge. The humiliations of being an inmate weigh on everyone, no pun intended, and it’s a petty enough thing. “Une petite vengeance,” Isabella whispers to Saffiya, leaning towards her during the supervision hour. “À mon avis? Elle est insuffisante.”
Isabella says: that her brother killed their parents. That he was never arrested. That he is now at university in Paris. That she has had intimate relations with fourteen men, and that this is why her uncle has sent her to the Priory. “He did not trust that they would not visit me in hospital, and have a fight there,“ she explains. Also three women: one of them a teacher at her lycée, two weeks before leaving France. She says that after they moved, her brother took four overdoses and then gave up on it. “He decided that if nobody was going to punish him, not even God take away his life, then killing three people could not have been so bad,” she says. Saffiya wants to ask who the third person was. She wants to say, you can only have had two parents, after all. That is a biological absolute, Isabella.
Isabella says she had an abortion last year, and it was fine; she’d do it again. “My brother thought I was going to die,” she says scornfully. “Isabella, oh no, you are so pale. Oh, don’t leave me. It’s silly because one or other of us will die first; he never thought of leaving me, did he?”
She is fifteen.
*
2000.
One funeral is aristocratic. The press are kept away and Robin, dry-eyed, walks behind the coffin flanked by his father’s aunts, Valerie and Julia. They are both widows, and their strong Locksley features lend an air of surreality to the occasion. Great Aunt Julia would like to weep, but guilt restrains her. Who is she, to force that upon the boy?
Great Aunt Valerie pats his arm, as Robin would pat an eager young hound wiggling its stern at him.
That is his father they are putting into the earth, ashes to ashes.
The other funeral is hideous. No one can disperse the news vans, and two or three reporters even shout out the children’s names. Isabella, Isabella, Isabella. Guy, you’re out of hospital, then. Their uncle holds Isabella’s hand tight enough to hurt.
“Venez,” he snaps at them, as if they were late for school.
Out of hospital, still dizzy with tranquillisers. Unless Isabella is holding him, he can’t sleep at all. At times he is the only one she wants. She wants him to cut up her food for her and brush her hair and run her bath. She asks him to wash her but he knows it isn’t right. Other times, she hides. There are many places to hide in a hotel if no one looks for you, and Oncle Jehan is telecommuting to France, and Guy thinks, I don’t have the right.
They’re not going to school, because as soon as the property is disposed of they will move to France. And Guy can’t go to school, can he? Robin went back two days later. He was in the match, the Saturday after — only ten, already in the first eleven, the boy’s really something — and they won. Oncle Jehan told him, as if it showed Robin couldn’t be minding much.
Sometimes Isabella lets him sleep. On those nights, she is tender, kissing his eyes and saying it’s not your fault, really. The dearest lie. She changes the sheets, like their mother did. She whispers to him, Isabel met an enormous bear, Isabel, Isabel didn’t care; the bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous, the bear’s big mouth was cruel and cavernous. Guy shudders in her arms until it seems like breaking: not being about to break, but the moment when the pieces come apart. Incongruous thoughts come back to him: sitting on the beach at St Ives and his mother rubbing sun cream into his back. The year Isabella got Miss Natasha for Christmas, wrapped in blue and silver paper: the joy on her face. It's funny that they have no toys now, nothing to do. Robin beating him at tennis, slapping him on the back. Knocking a jar of marigolds with his elbow and how it fell and broke, and Melanie, the cleaning lady, frowned a sweaty, white-faced frown and said, “You’ll come to a bad end, you little shit,” and his mother sent her straight out of the house, away for good.
Isabel, Isabel didn’t worry, Isabella says, Isabel didn’t scream or scurry. She fastens her fingers into Guy’s and locks them there. His hands are hot and wet with tears. She puts her mouth to his ear: she washed her hands and she straightened her hair up, then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.