They spoke of the business of children now and then in the years that followed, prompted by the arrival of other people’s babies; or, as their generation aged, by protracted, harrowing encounters between depleted flesh and biotechnology. Meanwhile, Karen would roll her eyes, telling him of this or that colleague who had chosen ‘the Mummy track’.
She worked fifty, sixty hours a week, often spending a day and a night and another day at the office. When she was made a partner, they celebrated with five days at a resort in Tahiti. In the airport bar, waiting for their flight home to be called, she looked up from her second vodka tonic. ‘Look: this whole children thing. I just don’t want to go there, OK?’
Her pale eyes, always very clear, were luminous in her tanned face. Tom was visited by a brief, brutal need to take her to a private place and ram himself into her. A blurred
voice overhead announced destinations, delays.
He said, conscious of awkwardness, ‘Of course it’s OK.’
‘Sure?’
‘Positive. It’s exactly the same for me.’
‘That’s good.’
Time passed. Tom witnessed the lives of men and women he had known for years bent into new configurations by the impact of children. He understood, with the brain not the heart, as one understands a syllogism, that paternity might represent an enlargement of experience; to him it seemed dilution. Babies arrived and individual histories thinned, became difficult to distinguish from the great biological tasks. The small parcel of clotted tissue he had helped bring into being rarely crossed his mind; and never as a lost possibility in his marriage.
It didn’t occur to him to doubt that these things held true for his wife as well.
Yet a year after she left him she had a child; and then another. A boy and a girl, the right number in the right order. It was all very Karen: perfectionism in everything she undertook. Malicious friends reported on impeccable toddlers, sleep-schooled and potty-trained within months of arriving on earth. There was a rumour that the three-year-old had begun violin lessons.
It was gossip Tom relished and propagated. At the same time, recognising that Hugh Hopkirk had addressed what he himself had neglected to notice in Karen: an aptitude for love infinitely larger than any caricature concocted from her fl aws.
It was to that sense of something private and true in the woman who had been his wife that Tom spoke now, across the silence of oceans, telling her what had happened.
She said, ‘Oh, God. Oh, it’s too horrible.’
When leaving Tom, she had wept for the dog. Who could not be conveniently transported to the Hague.
Tom talked of the cold in the hills, the unseasonable spring. Then he spoke of the dog’s strength, his freedom from the diseases of old age. Ending weakly with, ‘I still stick to that diet you came up with for him. Always.’
It became clear, to him at least, that he was trying to prove he had not fallen short of her standards.
‘I’m going back first thing tomorrow. I’ll keep looking. I haven’t given up hope.’
He massaged his neck, his temples.
Into the silence Karen said, ‘He must have hanged himself.’ Her voice, which had wavered earlier, was now fi rm. ‘The rope would have got caught up around a tree or something and he’d have gone over the edge of a gully and broken his neck.’
When Tom didn’t reply, she said,‘It would have been quick. He wouldn’t have suffered.’
She sounded quite calm; even contented, having found consolation in picturing an animal she had loved dying at the end of a rope.
The microfish darted through Iris’s mind, flashes of emerald and garnet and iridescent opal. She never thought of the little fish without feeling comforted; even though they had taken away her job as a filing clerk in the department store, where she had been happy, in her pale blue uniform, for four years, splashing out once a week on a hot lunch in the cafeteria, choosing chocolates from the revolving assortment in Confectionery to take home on a Friday. Even now, so many years later, as she sat on the lavatory slow with sleep, the warm, sharp scent of banknotes rising from her pay-packet remained distinct to her.
Then Mr Parker called everyone together and said the microfish were taking over. Some of the girls began to cry. Mr Parker was a knife-faced man with an infinite capacity for kindness. His pinpoint eyes moistened readily; when the girls clubbed together for a layered sponge on his birthday, for instance. His moustache quivered as he spoke of redundancies throughout Clerical. ‘Length of service doesn’t come into it. My own future’s on the line.’
Tommy had said that the microfish weren’t fish at all. ‘Christ, Ma, I can’t believe you thought they’d trained fi sh to take over the filing. That’s really dumb.’ He was sixteen, a scornful age. Iris had long forgotten, having in the fi rst place not understood, his impatient explanations. But she could remember the long filing room, with its green-shaded lights and the row of potted plants Mr Parker tended under the high window. It looked to her not unlike an aquarium. And whatever her clever son had to say about microfi sh, Iris had heard from Mr Parker’s own lips that his future was on the line.
Henceforth she would always picture him perched on a fi ling cabinet, long legs dangling as he hauled in one tiny fi sh after another, filling the green-tinged room with their brilliance.
Iris grasped her walker and began the process of hauling herself off the lavatory. Pain was a drawn-out shriek in her knees as they straightened.
Every Sunday she had lunch at Tommy’s, where the toilet seat was lower than her own.Audrey dismissed this as nonsense. ‘There’s a standard measure for everything.’ Iris’s knees knew better.
Upright at last, she looked down at her hands: two plucked birds welded to her walker. Her rings were buried in fl esh. But the cabochon ruby Arthur had bought for a knockdown price from a fellow who once managed a mine in Burma glowed on her fi nger.
Her father had taken one look: ‘Glass.’
Lowering herself onto her bed, Iris sighed. She wriggled her buttocks into position. Swivelled from the waist-slowly, like a tank on manoeuvres-and brought her right leg up, then the left. She reached for the jar beside her bed and began rubbing a herbal cream into the swollen hinges on which verticality depended.
Her bathroom cabinet contained a mess of half-used tubes and jars. Each had marked a station on a path that shimmered before Iris, promising to lead her from pain.
Sometimes Iris would listen to late-night talkback when she returned to her bed; sometimes she reached under her pillow for her rosary. Tonight she lay with her eyes closed and listened to the wind, which was breathing among leaves with the sound of the sea. She thought of miracles, of waking to find her knees strong and supple; of hunger satisfi ed with loaves and little fi shes.
The rain started up its brisk conversation. Standing under a banyan tree, a child looked into an amber mask in the fork of the trunk. A monsoon was crashing in the compound and, ‘Come on,’ shouted Matthew Ho, over the din. ‘Climb up the rain.’
Iris sucked the end of a ringlet; balanced on her right foot, her left. Then she tucked her drenched skirt into her knickers, hoisted herself skywards and began swarming up the ladder of rain.