There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [41]
Much more interesting, Miles says.
Ha! Bernice says.
Easy to go to the bad, Miles says. I’m always much more interested in things going to the good.
Room’s full of pansies, Richard says not quite under his breath.
Pansies, the child says, are for thoughts. Rosemary is for remembrance.
She couldn’t, Hannah says. Remember. Anything. But, the thing is, nothing at all seemed to have happened to her.
So it’s a pointless story, Richard says.
Hannah looks crushed.
No, it’s a philosophical conundrum, Bernice says. How would you ever trust yourself again, or anything about yourself, or the world, or you in the world?
I know, Hannah says. It’s awful.
You just would trust yourself, I think, the child says.
Bernice smiles across the table at her.
Optimist, Terence says.
Bet it was her husband’s credit card, Hugo says. Or is that sexist, Miles, and is it offensive, and are any of the women round the table offended by it, or is it just you who can’t take a joke?
Not very, only mildly, maybe about as sexist as a quite benign 1970s sitcom, Miles says. But yes, I think it definitely is.
As a what, sorry? Hugo says.
He narrows his eyes. He is getting quite drunk. Caroline cuts in, suddenly earnest, about the Viewfinder she’s bought on eBay, exactly the same as the one she had when she was a child, which is why she bought it.
It was lovely to feel the little click of the black lever thing, it felt exactly the same as when I was small, except, of course, smaller, she says. I also got online a set of the Viewfinder pictures of the Eames house for Hugo, they’re like designers—
They’re not like designers, they are designers, Hugo says.
Caroline rolls her eyes.
—and some Womble pictures for me, she says, because that’s what I had when I was that age. And when the package came and I opened it and took it out, the Viewfinder, it felt much smaller in my hands. Funny to think of my own hands, you know, so much smaller. I never thought it would be the Wombles that would reveal that to me. Sometimes we find out in the strangest ways how fragile we are, don’t we? Mark, do you know what I mean?
Mark has been feeling a steady mental pressure on him coming from Caroline all night. He doesn’t know whether he is creating it or she is. He suspects they both are. He knows Caroline most probably doesn’t really know about Hugo and him; he knows at the same time that her subconscious will know everything there is to know. Now the whole table is waiting to hear from him about fragility.
He takes a deep breath.
He starts telling a story about when he was taking a taxi between a couple of small towns, for work, and about how the taxi driver had a picture of the Virgin Mary tucked into his sunshield, and four differently scented Magic Tree air fresheners plus another Glade air freshener, all in the one car. He is about to tell them what the taxi driver said to him, that he’d pick up anyone, anyone at all, he’d pick up gays, blacks, Jews, Asians, Muslims, druggies, he wasn’t judgemental, except there was a pervert he knew about, who dressed in women’s clothes, and there was a paedophile, and he knew where each of them lived in this small town, and he reserved the right not to pick them up because he didn’t want people like that in his cab, and also he refused to take gyppos, the so-called travelling people could find their own means of so-called travel, far as he was concerned. As he said it Mark, belted in in the back seat, had watched the holy water glint inside the plastic bubble next to the Virgin Mary and had wondered if the holy water was selective too, and if that’s what God was these days, and whether everybody now simply had a private god who sanctioned his or her own choices about who he or she would pick up in a cab.
But here at the dinner table, with everybody listening, he loses confidence halfway through and finishes his story at the fifth air freshener.
Plus a Glade air freshener. For luck, he says.
Hugo looks bored. Richard looks furious. The women laugh politely.
Didn’t like the smell of people, that person, Bernice