Aux Barricades, Then

Set in London and the countryside in the 1990s.

Tim tries to recollect

Awake with a scene in mind, Tim got up and wrote “Quiet rooms” in his notebook. It meant nothing when he read it later. This wasn’t so unusual, yet he remembered how complete it had seemed. Well, not the first time a scene had slipped in and out, yet there the words were, asking to be deciphered.

At dinner with Tem and Jack, he learned from his brother-in-law that the Docklands’ glistening rival to The City was foundering, its Concorde-flying owner in difficulties. Glad he’d packed it in, he added. He and Lev had bet big against the market, and their ship came in sufficiently that he set up on his own, a bare-bones approach, drawn from Lev’s example. Banking always drifted into fiction, Tem commented, concocting stories and flogging them relentlessly. Jack was tired of it, Tim saw, longing for tangibility: children and gardens in particular.

At lunch, Lev would sometimes parody City lingo, the chatter of the traders as they tried to keep one game or another going. He kept his own small office there primarily to catch the spillover as they emerged from the trading floors despite the banks’ endless stock of snacks and caffeine-intensive drinks.

Jack loathed the Wall Street model of trading that the American banks imposed on The City: acres of carpet on top of raised floors, identikit trading desks “ bristling with screens, and the constantly displayed network news. Despite turmoil, this was the future.

China was Lev’s topic. “I give it two amazing decades,” he said. “Then it will lapse into sclerosis.” It would be made worse by inequality and the Party, but its growth would be phenomenal and whoever figured out how to navigate it would make real money. The Hong Kong tycoons would prosper, but then China would take it back. “They will wreck it.”

This typified their weekly table talk. Jack’s nose for the trees, as Lev called it, how they’d perform in floods, droughts, talent wars, and fads informed his part of it. Like a groundskeeper, he could spot infestations, blights, and vulnerabilities, taking nothing for granted. Or like a gardener, really, as he was aware of the fatal inertia that overtakes large organizations. Like the traders, their leaders chattered among themselves reassuringly.

“Quiet room,” Tim tried to think what it meant. Such a room can be refuge or foreboding. Tim liked an undercurrent, whether distant traffic, children in the house or the street, oe the sounds of the country. A too-quiet room was as bad as its opposite. Which one did he have in mind? It could be Zen’s emptiness or Whitehead’s uterus. Neither added up to a scene.

Tim remembers himself

An odd start into an old millennium’s final decade, he thought, his search for the meaning of his prompt derailed by memories of their recent dinner. It was right of course that Jack fled the scene, as the scene was pretty grim among his old circle and it was only his good luck to have avoided it, he’d modestly say. What saved Jack and made him the object of Tem’s enduring affection was his refusal to put any stock in his abilities as banker, trader, gardener, or father other than acknowledging a minimal competence.

Tim admired Jack and was grateful to have him in the family. His affinity for Tem relieved Tim of his constant wariness on her behalf, his fear that grief’s hold on her would sink her, despite a buoyant spirit. Tem was Tem; her grief was innate, easily surfaced, yet contained by their life together, luck too in Jack’s estimation, owed to Tim for intervening. One good thing I’ve done, Tim always felt, Pen being the other.

“Quiet room” suggested distance. He thought of their country place with its outbuildings, filled with the sounds of activity but also silent. The shed where he repaired the Appia was one such, almost a shrine to his relic of a car, a beauty in an older sense almost entirely lost now, meant to fit a bourgeois impulse to mix business and pleasure. It’s not so easy to mix them, he felt. For a writer to make his car a lifework seemed odd, but the car took to him like Pen had, saying his name aloud. “Appia,” he answered back as when he set to work on whatever she demanded. “Not unlike Constance,” he would add to himself.

The state of the world for Tim was overheard. He read things, of course, but the world that mattered to him was the everyday of experience, whether direct or filtered through informants. So, Jack’s account was taken in, including Lev’s account as he recounted it. In Tim’s view, everything was like this, in reality, the news as reported just the tidal flow of all of it. A bit of that tide edged his world, a beach of sorts set somewhere beyond his writing desk. “The rest” was another way he put it, but he liked “a beach” better, as a tide went with it, his bit of it. It may come from living on an island, he reflected, a place of coasts.

Insular, he added, Donne notwithstanding. He was right, though, so much else came along, and yet I am an island, Tim affirmed, or perhaps a fragment of this place, at once small and self-important. In his Commonplace Book, Forster too noted this dichotomy. Tim didn’t keep one, but he kept notebooks filled with asides and prompts, lines heard on the street.

Tem bicycled, but Tim generally walked, often to a train, a bus, the Underground, rarely to a cab except to reach the country house from the station. He kept a leisurely pace, arranging his life as much as possible to avoid a rush. Pen’s life was set by her academic work, and the children by theirs, but Tim had learned from women that time is malleable if pleasure enters into it. It was his Appia’s lesson too.

Tem’s afterthoughts

Tim’s passing mention of his elusive writing prompt opened a channel of thoughts about quiet amid the press of young children. Pen must have them too, she imagined. They both had help, but it only went so far. Yet they were far more fortunate than others who rose early to find an hour or two of quiet, the way Trollope did. And the press in Bayswater was as nothing compared to what other women felt as they dealt with the full weight of family life and still managed to write. They should get the prizes and the stipends, she thought, not women like her.

Quiet is almost spatial, Tem felt. Even a house like theirs could use the room she sometimes dreamt, a common occurrence, she’d read, finding a doorway not previously noticed, separating oneself from the rounds of the ordinary despite the pleasure she took in hers, a certain pride in having made it happen. Yet a dreamt doorway. Tim wrote in much the same way that he fixed bicycles and kitchen equipment. He was remarkably undistracted by distraction, not irritated by it, rather, as irritation is what derails us. Like his elusive prompt, he was confident he’d come back to the work he was doing when something else arose. Distractions arise, Tem thought. It’s the nature of their current ordinary. Later on, there will be quiet, rooms of it. Will they find that better?

The acute differences between writers’ situations were also Britain’s ordinary, made much worse by neoliberalism, as Jack observed, with its Laffer curves, self-serving slogans, and magical thinking.

An Anglo-Saxon disease, he called it, and we and the Americans pass it between us, feverish about the money to be made, oblivious of anyone it will barely touch or never touch at all. It was one reason he left The City. He understood Lev’s sports analogy. It had to be played that way if one played at all. Life hands us these dilemmas, he said, and we try to balance a role here with a role there, find a middle ground. It’s considerably less than an examined life, he added.

Tem felt he gave himself too little credit. He kept clear of so much that stank of excess, hype, illusion, but the stench remained, blighting lives by diverting social largesse into useless, frittering diversions. It was this blight that bothered Tem. Bayswater was a refuge from it, but really it was an enclave, a cordon sanitaire of the sort that dotted Britain, pockets of affluence with their barriers to entry: class, money. It was the oldest drama, even if one wrote around it.

Marriages had secured her family’s fate, if it was ever actually in doubt. That they were orphaned was coloring, she saw, a variation that drew sympathy. It could all be read as a second- or third-rate novel, yet it was her family, her particular experience, a drama all her own, however much as a novelist she knew it had no claim, that even an account from squalor also fell into a broad category, despite harrowing scenes. I make no claims, she said aloud, but even this is a trope, she added to herself, our ingrained modesty, the usual way we guard against hubris, always one foot planted on the ordinary so it doesn’t float away.

Some Appia-inspired thoughts

Tim set out for the country house early, knowing the journey in the Appia would be indirect. He wasn’t sure it made sense to ferry the car back and forth. It preferred the country, where Stephen could drive it in his absence and he could work on it at leisure. It had a room there, just as he did. Characteristically, he drove down alone, thinking and rethinking the sorts of dialogues that gave rise to his writings.

One could take them several ways. That he was given to irony could be seen as a fault. In general, he was a benign observer of human follies. That we’re stalked by tragedy almost goes without saying, he thought, but this reflected the way he’d deflected his own, putting distance between himself and what he categorized broadly as the untoward. Tem felt that it arrived unexpectedly always, a thousand disguises to slip past her out of mind to wrench it back again. Tim was immune. First his mother, then his father: the first was a surprise; the second long visible. He was a realist even as a child, taking what he saw plainly at face value and doubting his ability to alter the outcomes. It too was a fault, he concluded, an aspect of his passivity, his tendency to let things play out or at any rate arrive in their own time. And with this came irony toward a world mixing its rules with streaks of rule-denying randomness, mixing its kindnesses, like Pen’s arrival, with its inexplicability.

Dialogues he overheard captured this sometimes with stunning pertinence. Life in the world exposes people to a cross-section of its opposing tendencies, and they regularly express a baffled wonder at this.

IIrony might not be the right word. It was more his fidelity to the words themselves, the atmosphere of hard as life coming up against inertia, a planetary spin that sees the sun rise again or the moon revive a feeling of having loved or been loved, or of hope, an evening star signaling wishing, a prayer followed by a curse or the reverse. He put it down as received, as it reflected how we crack jokes inappropriately and speak banalities in the face of the extraordinary, left speechless by beauty or horror, speech returning to us later as discontinuities, a cut-off articulation that breaks the lines like a poet does, the mind jammed or is it the mouth? Some sort of impediment that’s funny and wrenching at the same time, overheard.

Life arrives and departs without advanced notice or overstays or distracts or is too much or too little. It took a practiced openness bordering on passivity to live with this and not be torn apart by comings and goings. And yet the effort to anchor self and others, however tentative or putative, deluded, a believer in old and long discredited truths, weight of tradition: yes, also this. We are all believers, he affirmed

The Appia found the route not too taxing. It was in tune, responsive, a pleasure to drive on winding roads, take in what remained of an agrarian or forested realm punctuated by occasional towns with their typical features and monuments, a sameness colored by local differences that he also noted. Soon he would be home again, one version of home.

A break from the city

Catherine and Stephen had no children. Nor did Elizabeth, who never married. He attributed this to her being left stranded by Mary and Tom’s demise, the one too fast and unexpected; the other too slow and foreseen. Catherine made him breakfast when he finally appeared, having taken advantage of a house momentarily without children. He felt a tang of guilt knowing that Pen had to pick up the slack, but then he did much of it across the academic year, as she had classes to teach. She and the children would come down by train as soon as the academies’ spring breaks freed them from their clocks.

Catherine wrote gardening books and running commentary on semi-rural life, a staple of weekend supplements. Country Life pressed her for articles, but she politely put them off. To their credit, they reviewed her books positively. To her credit, she felt the life they depicted was a sham.

This place fell to the side of various categories. In other hands, it would probably be a country inn with a kitchen garden for a seasonal restaurant. Catherine was a good cook who episodically went to France to hobnob with a coterie of friends there who she felt were models of how to live. These visits were added to her repertory of observations, often with recipes. She brought things back to plant. They had a small vineyard, made quite drinkable whites and reds.

He’d imagined he could learn, but a season in Bordeaux convinced him that while he had good taste and an eye for presentation, his skills were rudimentary, good enough for ordinary life but not for feasts. Catherine doted on the family’s children, passing it along to them in a learn-by-doing manner, emphasizing how to rescue things and how not to panic or stamp one’s young feet if it nonetheless went wrong. Hers was a fundamentally kind and patient nature, in contrast to their wound-up, wounded father.

The domesticity Catherine radiated made it odd that she alone could see their father if he chose. Not very often, apparently, but enough to be an aspect of the place, which was one reason she chose to live here. Tem had her own relationship with Tom, but it was nocturnal, one dream at a time. Stephen, that sort of medium whose appearance is so contrary to anything mysterious, was his channel, so it was no surprise to Tim when, bending over the Appia’s motor, Stephen told him, “He sends his greetings, Tom does, noticing your arrival.” As he sunk into sleep later, Tim paused to say hello aloud for his father’s sake, since Stephen only received but could not reply. “Hello, dear father.” It was Catherine’s sense that he would depart along with the last of them, Tem probably, finally untethered from the place, but Tim was doubtful. Perhaps it was to it he was tethered, in fact, like so many other ghosts.

Tim goes for a walk

The path to the river ran through the kitchen garden and the fields that Stephen sometimes farmed or else rented out in whole or in part or simply left fallow. Nearer the river were the trees that give rivers away. It was along its banks that Catherine occasionally saw their father, although she felt him sometimes closer to the house, but choosing not to manifest. If Stephen linked his proximity to the messages he received, Tem did not, Tim observed, reconsidering his assertion. Although dreams were their shared medium, they were very different people.

Now it was midday, warm for the season. When he reached it, the river speckled. He brought his notebook along, hoping to set down some of what he’d thought on the drive. Pen and the children came tomorrow by train, so a bit of productivity would be good. It was pretty rare to have a stretch of idle time, and he’d accustomed himself to fitting writing in. His work had no fixed tempo, although of course there a life with young children has one, as Tem affirmed. Jack was more present in Bayswater; Pen’s weekdays were scheduled except at the breaks. Children were born at intervals, with leave-taking, but then she was back at it, teaching and researching.

Tim was at ease with children, who he always found interesting. They had their tics, mismatches between their young lives and their temperaments, but adults were exactly the same. Pen saw weekdays as her metronome, needed to get anything done in the outer world. Tim didn’t need one.

He found a place to sit, shaded so he could see the pages of his notebook. The time in the Appia had replayed different strands of dialogue, which he grouped in disconnected bunches as a prelude to giving them an arc or looking for one within this mélange of words batted back and forth, all of them arising in everyday life as experienced here and there. He rarely went home once the children were brought or sent off to their schools, but rambled, sometimes quite a distance, then sat in a familiar or unfamiliar place, notebook in hand, and write down things thought or heard. Later, he’d run back through it and block out some scenes.

Tem also wrote without a metronome, but her sources were different. Things gave off sparks. He too saw the river speckling, but for her it would be a chorus, whereas for him it was a warm pleasant day. Things were things, like the Appia or a bicycle, and people were source material. Tem reversed this. Her characters were in conversation with their objects. It was, he felt, a codependent relationship. He saw it with his children, their animism giving life to things.

He shared with Pen an affinity for texts. With the children, he recited quantities of them from memory, and they too remembered and recited, as did she. It enabled him to remember what he overheard, as it was awkward or impossible often to set it down as others said it. So much is partial, the way people lapse into shorthand with companions or when a situation is familiar, yet it all speckled, did it not?

Gathering

Tim fetched Pen and the children in Stephen’s Land Rover, then went back to fetch Tem, Jack, and theirs. Lev came last with August and Tatania, Constance opting to remain at home. He drove down in his old Jag sedan, but a lorry preceded him with groceries and drinks, provisions for the feasts he foresaw.

It was not yet summer, but a flat and shallow stretch of the river warmed up sufficiently that the children could wade or venture into colder water with one parent or another. Catherine lay down the law in her habitual way, with Jack offering a coda of his own misadventures, failing to adhere to rules like hers. One could survive, with luck, he told them, but it’s never good form to offend aunt Catherine, is it? His argument always seemed persuasive, although it was sometimes tested in the longer summer holiday.

Pen arrived slightly frazzled, relieved to be with Tim and the assembled families. The country house seemed to run itself, its days stretched out as spring unfolded. The children aligned with this, finding Catherine up before them. Their parents, sleeping in their own rooms, tended to emerge later. Lev was an exception; he found the children good company and often organized their morning’s adventures. A City man, he was used to rising early, and they kept his mind off the market and everything that affected it.

Stephen was their main tie to the outer world unless someone telephoned. He had a radio in the outbuilding that housed his tractor and his tools; he conveyed the weather and any news that struck him as worth mentioning to the others. Not much did.

Catherine kept up in her own fashion, gleaning how the world was doing through the reviews that came in the post, or glancing at the headlines if she went to town. Her siblings commented on things they thought or did, translating for her benefit if they knew she’d be baffled by the reference. My world is here, she told herself, and this was accurate, a choice.

The children spoke their patois and she listened attentively, learning by inference what they meant. They hummed tunes and referenced their shared impressions of shows watched on television. Their parents discussed politics, cultural life, the academy, the market, but this tapered off as conversations fell in with the place itself, registered by all comers. As a tribe of writers, readers, and close observers, even the children were eloquent about what they took in. “And they carry it back,” Tem said. “I carry it back.”

Catherine was the family’s confessor, the one who listened as Tem recounted her dreams of Tom, intently, as she shared Tem’s interest in their father’s welfare. Pen revealed the horrors of academia she hid from Tim. Jack shared his gardening ideas, and anything he and Stephen discussed that needed a third opinion. He was their go-between, something like Stephen was for Tom and Catherine, for it was mainly to Catherine that Tom directed his messages.

At night, Tim sat in the children’s dormitory and read them poems and stories. He also organized the sketches they performed on the last evening of these occasions, a kind of pantomime or Players’ Theatre.

Latecomers

Elizabeth and Constance were the last to arrive. No was sure if they would deign to come, but then Tim fetched Elizabeth at the station and Lev drove up to London to bring Constance down. What drew them to the country was, in Elizabeth’s case, a desire to talk shop with Pen; in Constance’s case, she wanted to see Tatiana appear in the masque, as August called it in a letter home. He included the transcribed words of Tat herself, her name signed in full in block letters. The entertainment was very loosely based on Shakespeare, hence its title, “A Mid-Semester Day’s Dream.” This was August’s idea, derived from a conversation with Pen, who’d told him effusively how was glad she was to have a break.

It was also his idea to make Tat central to the action, a single magic word pronounced to alter a situation or turn a boy into a donkey. She looked the part and said her magic word with relish. August wrote the rest around her. Costumes were minimal, but Catherine made one boy a donkey’s head.

Constance felt the country house was more Lev’s world than hers. Still, it was interesting to see Tim in action, this man she took to many beds, was really in love with in that season, now married to her sister, a happy ending, but still an ending to a time she looked back at fondly. This decade was so decidedly different from the last. Her Russians were known enough now to have teaching posts or else lost to free enterprise or victims of their excesses, and their replacements showed up less and less in London now that Berlin had opened up.

In the car, Lev more than once expressed his happiness that she came down at all. It wasn’t Italy, he admitted, but he felt at home in the midst of the extended family Pen and Jack had married into. (He thought of Jack as family.) The four of them were tied together in his mind, writers, scholars, bankers with sidelines in gardening and repairing things. In the past, such breaks occasioned breeding, but they’d aged past that, hadn’t they? Tatiana was their last.

Constance and Tim interacted mostly at meals, when she could laugh openly at his remarks and ogle him a little, a favor he returned, affirming that she still looked stunning in a light spring dress. She was a beauty, just like her sister, but self-absorbed and, despite her love of Russian poets, not much of a reader. It was Russian declaimed or conversed that brought her alive, Tim thought. Fucking, too, of course. She really had enjoyed it.

They were all a bit older, immersed in children and careers, if that word applied to him. No, it did. He was quite entrepreneurial, in reality, despite the boundary he set up to avoid feeling pressured. Ideas arrived and opportunities followed, not without a bit of effort on his part, seeing people, but he did more now in the theater and with films, a natural offshoot of his ear for dialogue. Like Constance, they brought Tim in sometimes just to listen. He’d learned how to charge for that from Jack, a formidable pitchman in his City days, justifying eyewatering fees for advice. It was a running joke between Jack and Lev, “the exorbitant price of a meal,” each said of the other.

At the river and later

Tim didn’t really fish, but he brought a folding chair to the bank to join Jack and Lev, who did. He found some shade, but the midday warmth made him sleepy and he sank into his thoughts, a prelude to nodding off, likely, but then his companions took to talking. One topic was Canary Wharf falling into receivership, an event long foretold in their opinion. Lev blamed it on Margaret Thatcher, although the deep property recession was a factor. “Where was the promised Jubilee Line?” he asked rhetorically. “A tram is not the Underground.”

Jack said his bank’s migration to Canary Wharf was one reason he’d left it. “To hell and gone, even had there been a train,” he added. Tim spoke up to deplore its stubby tower, visible across the heath. “There will be others,” Lev said. “Reichman will likely claw it back once the Jubilee Line’s put in.”

Tim’s gaze fell on the other bank, part of the farmstead, protected from depredation. “I would have thought they’d make a fuss about the view,” he said. “Yes, a shame, but it’s on the Isle of Dogs, and Thatcher could care less about the heath,” said Jack. Lev meanwhile caught a fish suitable for cooking, while August appeared with Tatiana, who held a short rod. Lev took charge, showing her how to find a worm and hook it, and how to cast it out and then “think like a fish,” imitating one swimming with his hand. He kept an eye on her as they fished together. She got a bite and, quite determinedly, reeled it in. “An eel!” Lev said. “August, take Tat back and find Catherine. Ask her if she can cook it for her lunch.”

Tim went with them, as he and August had to oversee a last run-through before the early-evening finale. Despite its sprawling cast, every child given a role, and what Tim thought of as a rolling script, it came off. August did well as the chairman, while his sister charmed the adults as a wonder-working fairy who, to Lev’s amusement, adlibbed enthusiastically about eel for lunch. “She’s hooked,” Constance noted.

A dinner in stages followed, children first so they could calm down and, suitably sated, head off to bed. Their parents, aunts, and uncles dined later, picking up their different strands of conversation. Constance talked with her sister and Elizabeth, who was writing about Virginia Woolf’s Kot’s criticisms of Constance Garnett’s translations from Russian. “You can see at a glance she got it wrong, but she’s so readable you overlook it.” Elizabeth had enlisted a well-known translator. “Only translators from Polish and Czech focus on new writers,” Constance said. “Leave the classics to Garnett and get to work on the Samizdat is what I tell them.” She offered to advise.

The men discussed Canary Wharf again. “The French built La Défense to keep Paris free of towers like the one at Montparnasse,” Jack said. Lev scoffed. “No chance that will happen here. Once Canary Wharf gets some heft, you’ll see towers in The City. If they can take a view of St. Paul’s private, they’ll do it.” Tim shook his head in dismay. “Aux barricades, then. Is Bayswater with us?” Jack nodded. It was.