Time Present

The prevailing view of my grandfather Zazee was that he was a tyrant, his hollowed-out brothers the cautionary proof.  Until the Lake District I’d always felt that we were somehow exempt from his rule.  My father had died three years before.  Our family, our nuclear family, had emerged from the dazed, wounded phase of grief, during which time Zazee had tried to come too close, but my mother had managed to hold him at bay.  In any case, hadn’t I always been Zazee’s golden boy?

I was alone in my grandparents’ sumptuous hotel suite, feeling as pampered as a prince.  My mother and grandparents were out with the little ones, visiting Dove Cottage.  I could phone down for what I wanted: smoked salmon sandwiches, a beer, cigarettes.  A very pretty waitress brought up my order.  She had green eyes and wavy red hair, and pale freckles on the bridge of her nose.  She bit the insides of her cheeks when she saw it was just me.  I blushed and said:  ‘Don’t worry, I can do it.’  But she went on with her work regardless, placing a linen serviette carefully on the table, the silverware around it.  ‘Thanks very much,’ I said, smiling in embarrassment, ‘that’s great.’  I longed to explain myself to her, that I was revising for my A levels, that my grandparents were wealthy but that we decidedly were not. 

I tried not to stare at her figure in her uniform.  She reminded me of Camilla, and I fell into the familiar turmoil as I wondered how I was ever going to escape our relationship. What if I ended up with Camilla out of inertia, and regretted it all my life, trapped with the wrong person when the right one was somewhere out there?  It had to be done; I had to end it, but I dreaded the despair that awaited me.  Without her, my face would be pressed right back against the grief.

The suite was massive and light, its long windows overlooking the lake, low mountains rising on the far side.  I commandeered the reproduction antique desk in the window.  A pleasure-craft circled the islands, ploughing the water’s surface like a tractor.

I had two tasks, which I alternated when the pressure or boredom of one grew too much.  The first was to learn quotes.  I had strings of them to commit to memory, from Dubliners, Antony and Cleopatra, The Pardoner’s Tale, The Caretaker — my A level texts.  Intoning the lines and bobbing my head like a rabbi somehow helped force the gobbets into my brain, laying them down in sediments. 

The second was to read Four Quartets for my Oxbridge class.  I kept trying, but I couldn’t get past the first ten lines, and there were pages more.  Each time I read the opening, my mind seemed to freeze and my vision glazed over.  I couldn’t take it in.  Not a word!  I felt baffled and humiliated.  How on earth could I hope to compete with all those sinuous minds I was up against?

Once more I made the attempt; once more the words ran together.  I gazed out at the lake, imagined a gigantic creature beneath the surface.  The lake itself seemed at times to have grown muscles, sinews, to be rolling about in a bath as if there were a congealed slippery core within the rest of the liquid surrounding it. 

Back, back to the text, the dry abstraction:

Time past and time present
Are both perhaps present in time future.
And time future contained in time past…
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

What on earth did it mean?  I thought of Rebecca working on her huge Waste Land essay just before our dad died, crying, smoking packet after packet of fags, tearing up the whole thing several times and starting again, her attic room a mess of paper.  At the end of her opus, whose composition had left her in bed with glandular fever, she had written:  ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ the last line of the Waste Land, like a humorous Amen.  How steeped she’d been in the work; how much it had taken for her to finish!   Compared to her, my engagement was pathetic.  When I wasn’t working, I was glued to the Watergate hearings live on the large television, Nixon’s haggard face close-up, his deep voice defensive, lacking any self-awareness or humility.

Zazee had been generous with his wealth.  He had installed his five brothers on the Board of his firm, set up his sisters and their husbands, paid the school fees of nephews and nieces.  In return he interfered in all their lives.  He’d cut one nephew off for marrying out, done the same with his youngest brother for marrying a ‘tart’. 

I was Zazee’s confidant, the son of his favourite daughter.  It had been that way since I was four, when I’d solemnly declared him to be my best friend.  I was the grandchild who still went out with them to the Mirabelle or Le Boulestin, still went skiing with them to Zermatt or Wengen.  Mamar would greet me when I arrived at their Regent’s Park flat with her usual smacking kiss, and whisper:  ‘Talk to him!  He listens to you.  He’s fretting over Henry again.’

Zazee loved the fact that I was clever and that I loved him in return.  And I did.  I relied on him.  When I couldn’t face going back to school after my first break-up with Camilla, he was the one I turned to.  He listened, and said:  ‘You really love this girl?’ which made me sob as I nodded into my handkerchief.

The hotel was perched on rising ground on the lake shore, with fir trees surrounding it.  It had its own private jetty.  Flagpoles with the flags of the nations announced its importance.  Before lunch the next day, I felt an acute anxiety and thrill that it would be the waitress again serving me my solitary meal.  I bathed and dressed carefully, and at the knock called:  ‘Come in!’ pretending to be absorbed in my work.  When I looked up, I saw it was a good-looking young waiter with black hair and brown eyes.  He stared at me with a kind of sneer until I looked away, and I almost felt afraid.

In spite of my unease, I couldn’t suppress the pleasure I felt walking down the quiet carpeted corridor to dinner, the lofty sense of privilege.  I liked seeing the waiters in a row with their backs to the long sideboard, liked being acknowledged by the arrogant head waiter and bidding him Good Evening. 

The discussion began at dinner.  The little ones had been put to bed after an early supper, tired after a long walk round the lake.

‘I just don’t approve,’ said Zazee, his lips pushed out in an apelike expression.  ‘That’s all there is to it.’

‘But it’s ridiculous,’ I said.  ‘We moved to Lewes, for god’s sake!  Not a Jew in sight.  You can’t have expected us to stay chaste?’

‘Hardly!’ said my mother.  ‘You and Camilla took the handle off your bedroom door!’

Mamar gave me one of her humorous frowns, all eyebrows. 

‘Well, the little ones never bothered to knock!’  I protested with a smile.  ‘Look, it was inevitable we’d go out with non-Jews,’ I continued.

‘We could have moved to Hove, of course,’ said my mother, lighting a cigarette and breathing out smoke through her nostrils.  ‘But we’d have hated it there.’

‘Exactly,’ I said.

‘Go out with anyone you like, by all means,’ said Zazee.  ‘It doesn’t mean you have to marry them.’

‘True, but it might.  That’s the logic,’ I said.  ‘Rebecca and Rog are a couple.  Sorry, but you’re going to have to accept it.  Anyway, I’d better get some sleep.  Goodnight.’  I kissed them all affectionately and went upstairs, thinking of Camilla and whether perhaps I was waiting for a Jewish girl.

In bed I imagined the waitress knocking softly on my door, coming in with her uniform rustling, sitting down on the bed next to me.  But the waiter’s challenging gaze seemed to intrude.  With a sigh, I picked up the Four Quartets, with its hateful plain cover that was so forbidding.  I didn’t even bother to read the opening this time, but skimmed until I found something, anything, I could grasp:

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.  My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

Instantly, I had a vivid image of a bare white passageway, a secret garden with a wooden door.  The lines gave me the feeling of retracing my steps back through time, as though it were possible to recover precious things I had once lost.  It was the same feeling I got when I pored over photos of my father and felt that if only I could concentrate hard enough I could re-enter that world.  I read on avidly:

There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air

This was just like my recurring dream in which my father was gliding across the lawn, approaching the glass door of the TV room, his face pressed to the glass.  For a long time I lay in bed in a kind of swoon, as if I could move without hindrance between past and present, one reality and another.

Zazee resumed the discussion as we sat on the grand sofas in the lounge, watching the weather outside.  Hailstones were throwing themselves onto the glass conservatory roof like gravel.  Then the hail turned to silent sleet in the gathering darkness, lines of ice like thick flights of arrows.  The pretty waitress wheeled our cream tea over on a trolley, attracting all our gazes as she laid out the heavy teapot and hot water jug, the scones and jam and cream on the low table.  She gave me a smile — at least, I thought it was for me — and I quickly began pouring out the tea to hide my blushes.

‘It’s about not letting the fragile flame go out,’ said Zazee, picking up exactly where he’d left off.  ‘Think of the sacrifices we’ve made over thousands of years.  Just for the right to be who we are.  I can’t help how I feel.  You wouldn’t want me to keep quiet, would you?’

‘Not at all!’

‘Maybe I would, actually,’ said my mother.  There was a moment of silence.

‘Well I shan’t.  You know I always speak my mind.’

I felt a chill, as if someone had opened a window.

I could see Zazee’s temper rising:  ‘Well, I won’t allow it!  I forbid it!  It’s about time somebody said so.  You’ve taken your eye off the ball, Eva; it’s a terrible mistake you’ll live to regret.  Listen boy, I’m warning you.’ 

‘Of what?’  I said stubbornly.

He took a deep breath as though to calm himself and started again:  ‘If everyone married out, there’d be nothing left.  It’s so easy to destroy things.’  He clapped his hands, brushing away centuries of tradition.  ‘Will you be the one to do it?  How could you carry it on your conscience?’

Did I really bear that responsibility?  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘You’d be letting go of a beautiful delicate thing, infinitely precious, a line stretching back centuries.  Who are you to do that?’ Suddenly his own words seemed to incense him and he grew red in the face. ‘What — so you know better than all those Jews in the past who fought to retain their identity, and refused to give in? Your dad held onto it. Why? Why did he think it was so important?’

‘I’m not letting go of anything,’ I complained.  ‘I’m just not agreeing with you immediately.’ 

Faces had turned to our raised voices. 

I could feel the heat on my face.  How dare he invoke my father!

‘No, but Rebecca is.’  Zazee stood up.  ‘She’s a bad influence.  Let’s go up to the suite if we want to carry this on.’

Even before we’d all sat down, I leapt in to defend my sister who was away at university and was always the one to confront things first, letting me off the hook:  ‘Rebecca may well go and live with him in London.  You can’t expect them to break up to please you.’ 

‘Just stop.  Think a minute!  She’ll want children at some point.  What will those kids grow up to be?’

‘They’ll be people,’ I said.

I could picture what the highly-strung Rebecca would have been like had she been here, her small pale face drawn, under fire.  She would soon be storming out of the room, slamming the door, sobbing. 

‘Jews aren’t pure anyway,’ I said.  ‘There are black Jews, Chinese Jews, red-heads.  Eh?  Ginger!’  I was referring to his famous red hair as a boy.  ‘We meet and fall in love with whoever we meet and fall in love with.  It’s artificial to make us love Judaism.’

‘Well, I’m very sad you don’t feel it.’  He rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses, and I knew that I’d caused him pain.  He reached for Mamar’s hand.  I was glad to have pricked him.

‘Joe, leave it now,’ she said, patting his knuckles with her chubby palm.

‘How can I?’

‘I do like being a Jew,’ I said to soothe him.  ‘I am proud of the fact.’

‘Yes, and if you marry out, you lose that!’  he seized the point.  ‘I have no objection to you going out with non-Jews,’  he said, still rubbing his eyes, pushing his glasses high up onto his round, bald head.  ‘But I won’t have them in my house,’ he said, and his voice had hardened.  ‘It’s your choice.’

‘But that isn’t a choice.’

He gave a slow shrug that served to close the conversation.

There was nothing more I could say or do.  My words seemed to hang idly in the air like an echo.  Silence.  There was no pretence that I was above all this, no ironic distance.  My mother lit a cigarette and I leaned over and took one out of her packet for myself.  Everything was in slow motion.  Blue smoke curled up in tongues, dispersing slowly.

‘Well, Dad,’  said my mother in a restrained voice, full of anguish, her hands shaking:  ‘I’m afraid if you won’t invite Rebecca and the person she’s chosen, I won’t be able to see you either.’  Her face was squeezed in a vice, wincing in pain.  Tears were streaking her cheeks, snot glistening in her nose like at the funeral.  ‘She’s my daughter, you see.  I have to take her side.’

I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.  It was a moment that seemed to determine the entire fate of our family, but it had arrived too swiftly for me to take in.  Everything was live, everything in the here and now.  She was prepared to give up her own father and mother.

The silence pulsed. 

If I lost Zazee, I knew it would somehow be like losing my father all over again.  Zazee’s losing Judaism was nothing compared to this black hole gaping beneath our feet, as dark as death.

He nodded.  He said nothing, just kept nodding his big head, breathing heavily.  He said:  ‘I don’t believe you.  You don’t mean it.’

‘I do, Dad.’

‘I can’t change.’

‘Do you want to lose your grandchildren, your daughter?’ she continued. 

‘If it has to be,’ he said.  He looked at her with unwavering eyes.

‘But what is the point of diminishing your life — at your age?’

‘I’ll do what I have to.’

She knelt before him, seemed to beg his forgiveness.

Mamar whispered urgently:  ‘Joe, Joe, listen to her!’

‘Please, Dad.’

‘Joe, don’t be a bloody fool!’

His face was like white marble.  Then he blinked rapidly, and with a little nod of acknowledgment his power vanished.  I could hardly bear to watch.  He gazed into the distance, sitting slumped in his chair like a defeated general.

Zazee’s tears were unstoppable.  He took the white handkerchief out of his top pocket, shook it out fully and blew his nose in a faltering trumpet.  My mother kept shaking her head.  Her eyes with their dark shadows made her look ancient.  It was as if her tragedy had given her majesty, stature, of which she was unaware, but which he recognised, and accepted humbly. 

Up to now it had always felt like a kind of game arguing with him, piling onto the gorilla’s back.  But now he was wounded.  What remained?  How could he go on after this?  Part of me couldn’t help pitying him, as if my mother had been cruel.  Yet he’d been perfectly prepared to sacrifice Rebecca; and me.  Only the prospect of losing his daughter had stopped him.  It dawned on me that I’d been freed from his strictures for the rest of my life.    Perhaps I’d been wronged for years by him without recognising the fact, feeling that none of it touched me when it really did.  I wasn’t sure whether to rejoice or grieve.

The rest of the week, there was driving rain every day, sheets of water pelting the dull long-suffering earth.  The wind rattled the huge hotel windows.  In between, there were bright bolts of blue sky, and the pleasure-boat back on the lake. 

I had learnt my quotes, rattled them off perfectly as I paced and bobbed about the large empty room.  I had come to my own interpretation of the bewildering lines too.  ‘Time present’, for instance, meant now.  But now only existed momentarily.  As soon as you thought it, it had flashed into the past.  Yet those flashes were the only present there was, and nothing else existed:  ‘All time is eternally present.’  That meant that all our lives were taking place within a single instant of light.  Life consisted of jumping from one disappearing moment to the next, like walking across a cracking ice floe.  I saw it, I grasped it!  Soon we would all vanish into darkness, one after another, and new lives would shine for a moment and in turn go out.  What did it matter if I stayed with Camilla or not, or whether I went to Cambridge?  Soon we would all be gone. 

Except that moments did matter.  I thought of my mother’s instinctive No — implacable yet without rancour.  The scene wouldn’t stop replaying itself in my head.  How superb her strength.  What had I ever done?  When had I had an effect?  Were you only alive when you resisted?

As we trooped out through the hotel foyer on our last day, the commissionaire, Giuseppe, held open a large umbrella, which Zazee waved away:  ‘Coming out for a walk, Giuseppe?’

‘Not on your nelly sir,’ he answered with a smile, ‘but madame would like umbrella?’

‘No, no, we’ve got macs.’  Zazee held his big round face up to the rain.

A football game of the waiters and other staff was going on in the field bordering the lake.  In the sleet, there were shouts, laughter, the pang of the plastic ball.  I saw the handsome waiter among the players, and the pretty waitress on the touchline in an anorak.  She was cheering him on.  The weather cleared for a second.  The reflection of the shore in the lake made me want to lean over the jetty to see how far the upside down, alternative world extended. 

At a wooden signpost pointing to the Lodore Falls, 1 mile, I turned away from Derwentwater, felt my thigh muscles begin to strain on the path uphill.  I enjoyed the steady rhythm of my breathing, my footsteps as I pushed on through wet bracken, rocks stained dark with lichen.  I stopped for the others, small figures below, Zazee’s form moving forward solidly.  The next burst of rain came racing across the leaden lake, falling almost sideways, joined the water to the sky by diagonal pins or threads, fasteners.  It was solid material, moving continually, flexible as a steel fence through which the wind blew and made it curve and undulate.  Now it was a sheet of water, solid enough to cast shadow on the lake surface which was like mercury.  Now it was like the silvery fin of a giant fish, ploughing through the water, a great dorsal, poking upright from the surface and moving down towards the town of Keswick in the distance.