‘Milk?’
‘Yes please. And one sugar. I mean … if you have any,’ she adds hastily.
That’s the thing about the upper classes: beautiful manners. Very well brought up by their nannies and housekeepers and boarding-school matrons.
When I return with her tea, I sit and face her from the sofa. I allow her the chance to speak, but she doesn’t take it. Instead, she clasps the mug between her small, pale hands and blows on the tea.
‘Why are you here?’ I ask.
She tells me a convoluted story about how she became an activist and got involved in various protests – shackling herself to oil tankers and spraying orange paint over pricelessobjets d’artand so on. It all sounds terribly effortful and dreary, especially the nicknames which are things like Turnip and Knotweed. At some point in her story, she mentions an undercover police officer called River and claims to have fallen in love with him. Well, she’s seventeen, I suppose. I thought I was in love at seventeen. It was this chap, River, who gave her the hushed-up reports on what happened to Fliss. Then she says she was at an ‘action’ earlier this evening at the British Museum and hadn’t known her parents were going to be there, but there they were and when they recognised her she ran away.
‘But why on earth did you come here?’ I ask.
‘Couldn’t think of anywhere else.’
We hadn’t been in touch with each other since she’d given me access to the files that night at Tipworth. It had seemed safer not to be linked but I realise now that she thinks we are bonded in some way because of the secret she confided in me. I confess, I hadn’t thought of it like that. And yet I suppose we are.
‘You must have friends …’ I counter.
‘Not really,’ she says. ‘I mean, there are the other activists but I’ll be dead to them now.’
There is a certain starkness to her face when she admits this.
How interesting, I think. Maybe we have more in common than I might previously have imagined. Because I don’t have friends either.Unless we’re counting Ben, which, obviously, given the present circumstances, we are not.
‘Do you really think you’ll save the world?’ I ask.
‘Probably not,’ she says. ‘But you have to try, don’t you?’
I leave this unanswered. There’s no point in trying, is what I want to say. The odds are already stacked against you. There’s nothing you can do to stop the onward march of collective self-interest. The world is going to implode no matter what you or I do.
‘But do you really believe in it all?’ I press.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean: did you do it all because of what you believed in – the “cause”, as you put it – or because you were angry at your parents?’
Cosima contemplates this.
‘Bit of both, not gonna lie.’
Not gonna lie. One of my least favourite phrases: no liar would ever use it, rendering the whole point of it meaningless.
‘I hate what they’ve done to the world,’ Cosima continues calmly. ‘Capitalism, greed, the rapacious march of corporate misogyny.’
‘That’s quite a statement.’
She shrugs.
‘If we aren’t going to right the wrongs of our parents’ generation, then who is?’
A memory comes to me then, unbidden, of my mother sitting in front of her large television in her airless bungalow, slumped forward in her dressing gown, shouting at me to get out of her house, screaming that I wasn’t ‘right in the head’. I remember her withered chest, visible under the open neck of her nylon nightie. She had dementia by then, with a vituperative turn of phrase, full of effing and blinding. When I had been a child, swearing would make her angry. It was one of the many forbidden behaviours in our home, along with elbows on the table, forgetting to take your shoes off, and saying ‘what’ instead of ‘pardon’ (although, when I went to Burtonbury, it transpired she’d given me the wrong advice. If you said ‘pardon’, it marked you out as unbearably common. ‘What’ was actually the posher expression).Alzheimer’s had stripped my mother of her hard-earned propriety, the rules she’d learned from etiquette books andReader’s Digestperiodicals. Her viciousness, which had previously been kept in check, burst forth like a marauding drunk thrown out of a pub at closing time. I was never sure whether her failing mental acuity revealed her truest nature or obscured it, but I strongly suspected that she had always despised me for not knowing.
I had spent years being scared of her. My solution was to remove myself from her life and when she died, in my late thirties, it had been a relief. I never hated her, though. Hating would have felt too close to caring and so I refused the lure of it and didn’t allow myself to feel anything at all for Sylvia Gilmour. But her existence as my mother was an inescapable fact. I couldn’t deny her, like Cosima is trying to do. Instead, I chose to blame love itself. I became wary of it. I held it at arm’s length, finding it untrustworthy. I began to regard love as a slippery pollutant which turned the seas toxic.
As a tactic, it had worked pretty well for me – minus Ben and his assault on my fragile certainties. Even then, I tried not to love but instead to control him (and by extension, myself). I can see it now, the inevitable linear progression of it: Sylvia to Ben to my current existence as an almost fifty-year-old man who has never had a relationship in the way he would have liked. Stupid, really, to have fallen into the trap set by love despite my strenuous attempts to avoid it. Because even the avoidance shapes you.
‘… they don’t understand me and they never will and I don’t want to be anything like them,’ Cosima is saying. From outside comes the high-pitched wail of a mating fox. The foxes are everywhere at the moment. This morning, one was strolling along the road in broad daylight, snouting through pavement rubbish, unperturbed by my presence.
