She worried about Tommy: her clever son without wife or child, his life an accumulation of unwritten pages. She feared he would meet a modern, untimely death: a plane dropping from the clouds, a madman at a service station swivelling a gun. She feared the loneliness that was accruing for his old age.
As a toddler, he had learned to use his china pot only to reject it. The household entered a phase during which a telltale reek would lead Iris to a little mound deposited behind an armchair or under a table. Once a glistening serpent lay coiled inside one of her shoes. The child was visibly excited by these incidents, gleeful even while scolded.
Iris’s father detected depravity and counselled thrashing. ‘Children are animals. The two things they understand are food and pain.’ It was clear that Tommy knew what was required of him; yet he refused to conform. Iris’s anxiety mounted. Arthur advised her to let the boy be, saying he would outgrow the problem. It was no more than his wife expected. That from the sensible English multitude she had managed to acquire a specimen devoid of sense had long been all too plain to her.
With time and observation, she saw that her son’s offence had the aspect of a game. If anyone other than Iris happened upon his faeces, the child’s pleasure was mixed with agitation. But when the discovery fell to her, he chuckled and whooped. Eventually she understood. She had schooled him herself in the use of his pot, praising him as he strained to please her. The habit acquired, she had left him alone; now, when he moved his bowels a servant bore away the aromatic receptacle and returned it scoured. And so the child’s ingenuity had contrived a means of continuing to make her the present of his stools.
The foundation of a pattern was laid. The mother fretted; the son provided for her. What neither grasped was that worry, too, might be a form of giving. As Iris aged, her anxieties multiplied to encompass the trivial and the sublime, rational eventuality and wild hypothesis, lost keys, toothache, ATMs, road accidents, seizures, what people would think, the years that had elapsed since her last confession, running out of sugar. To voice anxiety was to risk her son’s disapproval. At the same time, he might allay apprehension: find her key, go to the ATM in her place, assure her that the brakes wouldn’t fail. Her worrying empowered him. That was part of its value to her.
There was also this: worry, eating away at the present, made room for the future. ‘For God’s sake, Ma: it’ll never happen.’ Thus Tom, missing the point. Because worrying was a way of looking forward to something. That it might be a calamity was irrelevant. Fear was Iris’s mechanism for allotting herself time. It was a crafty manoeuvre. She was old and ill and poor. Fear was her best hope.
After Saunders, Iris shunned Hosiery, forgoing her staff discount to buy her tights in a rival establishment. She told no one what had happened. But one morning, years after the encounter, she found herself speaking of it to her son.
Tom pressed for details. At once Iris ended the conversation: ‘What’s the use?’ It was her standard response whenever he asked about the years before her marriage.
Fragments of knowledge-photographs, dates, conversations half heard when he was young-formed a patchwork in Tom’s mind. His mother, a beautiful girl, had married late. The strange word jilted had snared his attention in childhood. Now he assumed that Iris had run into the suitor who had once betrayed her. He had lately met the woman he would marry; was himself in love. It rendered him susceptible to romantic explanation.
He looked at the lipstick escaping in fine red threads from his mother’s mouth; the skin below her chin hung pleated. His own flesh was replete; satiny with consummation. He thought, Nobody touches her. He thought, No wonder she doesn’t want to dwell on the past.
How we imagine another person reveals the limits of our understanding. Tom was then not yet thirty. He could not have guessed that, surrounded by artifi cial limbs encased in nylon, Iris’s first thought on seeing Saunders had been, Who’s that old man? It was not the past she had recoiled from in their encounter but the future.
Fear had this advantage too: it could sidle up to the future side on, by wiles. There was no need to look what was waiting in the face.
The weeks in 1965 when Indian tanks rolled to within three miles of Lahore had left no impression on the child Tom’s mind. Six years passed in relative peace; then, with Indian troops already moving to support bloodied Dacca, Pakistan declared war on its sibling.
It so happened that Tom had recently read the diary of Anne Frank. With the formalisation of hostilities, he sensed a meeting of life and literature. He was a child built by books and his excitement was boundless.
He couldn’t quite settle on his part in the confl ict: would he shelter Hindus when Pakistan invaded? To this end, he searched the house for secret places, paying particular attention to cupboards. There was the equally thrilling possibility that he himself would be forced into hiding. He reviewed the Muslim boys he knew: he counted no special friends among them, but trusted that in time the rules of plot would reveal one. What was certain, in any case, was that his role would be heroic. He passed agreeable hours trailing a stick in the dirt, his lips moving soundlessly, imagining the raids he would conduct under cover of night. Sometimes he swung his arms and counted his strides, shouting out numbers as if they were blasphemies. A spindly twig or leaf might enrage him by appearing defenceless, and he would strike it to the ground. His dreams of pursuit and daring were broken into now and then by fear; but like the delicious shiver provoked by a tale of ghosts, it was merely his body’s involuntary tribute to art.
This happy state lasted a scant fortnight. Then the war was over, and in the midst of national jubilation, Tom tasted the melancholy of those who wake from visions. His refl ection in the mirror appeared to have shrunk. For a glorious interval, he had been larger than life. It was his first, dim perception of the power of narrative: war, like love, raising its accomplices to the status of figures in a known story.
Tom knew that a lucky country was one where history happened to other people. For thirty years after his marginal involvement in its adventure, he had found a place in which to take cover from its reach.
On the September night when he stood in a bar with Nelly watching towers sink to their knees, the fear he felt was an acute version of a child’s alarm as the seeker in a hiding game draws near. He had always known it was only a matter of time before it happened. Living in Australia was like being a student at a party that went on and on; he didn’t want it to end, but couldn’t suppress the knowledge that exams were approaching.
Tom Loxley wished what anyone might: that a pleasant life should go on being pleasant. He wished for continuity. He wished for the orderly progression of events. He wished, that is to say, for an end to history. It was incompatible with modern life. It raged over benighted continents and there it should have stayed, ripping up sites already littered with its debris. What was unnerving was the juxtaposition of that ancient face with Power-Point and water coolers. Its eruption in nylon-carpeted cubicles where people were sneaking a look at stuff on eBay.
It was as if the events of that year had set out to demonstrate that history could not be confined to historical places. In the same spring as the towers fell, boats making their way to Australia foundered on the treachery of currents and destiny.
People looking for sanctuary drowned. They might have been found; they might have been saved. But what prevailed was the protection of a line drawn in the water.