There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [44]
Hannah yawns audibly.
Art is stupid, she says.
But what about that boy, Mark says, in Germany, the boy who set up the resistance movement with his sister, I can’t remember their names, in the Second World War?
Everybody turns to look at him. It is quite frightening.
The boy was in the Hitler Youth, he says, and he was reading a book one day, he was really enjoying it, until his troop leader found him reading it and gave him a severe warning because it was by a, a Jewish writer, it was a banned book. And the boy was so incensed that this really good book he’d been reading had been banned—was the wrong kind of book, the wrong kind of art, if you like, written by the wrong kind of writer—that he thought twice, he began to ask questions about what was happening, and then, it turns out, he went on with his sister, Sophie Scholl, their name was Scholl, to do this stellar work, to try to change things, make it possible for people to think, I mean differently. And they fought back, and they did change things. They did a lot of good before they were caught. And they were killed for it, his sister and him, the Nazi authorities took them to court, tried them, and they spoke out bravely, and were sentenced to death for treason, the Nazis cut their heads off, I believe.
Yeah, and after they did, they found out that their skulls were, like, encrusted with diamonds, and then the lights in the room they were in went on and then off by themselves, Hannah says and makes a spooky ghost noise.
Mark, shaken, realizes he has just made the terrible mistake of not just seeming to be but actually being sincere. It finally strikes him that this conversation about art probably takes place every time these people meet for dinner like this. As if to consolidate what he’s just thought, Jen makes a little performance of checking that the child is asleep before she leans forward and says with deliberate sincerity:
But of course you must have seen some terrible times yourself, Mark, if you were gay before it was legal to be gay, were you?
Oh yes, I was, Mark says. I was gay all along.
He blushes.
Yes, and it was criminal, wasn’t it, right up until the beginning of the 1970s, Jen says nodding.
End of the 1960s, Mark says and looks down at his own hands on the table.
I mean, you must have been quite a young man when all that was going on, Jen says in her sincere voice.
Oh, I was, Mark says. It’s exactly what I was.
Everybody laughs.
It must have been terrible for you, Mark, Caroline says on the other side of him.
She puts a hand on his arm.
What was it like? she says.
Oh, it was all very jolly, Mark says. We all hid everything. All very exciting. Very stimulating.
I didn’t know it was ever even criminal! Hannah says.
If they caught you it was prison. Or oestrogen injections, Terence says. That’s what happened to Turing.
It’s called cruising, not touring, Richard says, as far as I know, that is. I don’t know. We’d have to ask the experts among us. Eh, Hughie-boy?
Caroline cuts in quickly and asks the Bayoudes did they call their daughter after the actress Brooke Shields.
Who’s Brooke Shields? Hannah says.
You’re too young to know, Jen says. She was an actress who went out with, what’s his name, the royal, not Edward, the Fergie one, Prince Andrew, but when she was very young, much younger, she was associated with a seedy scandal when a rather dreadful filmmaker used her in a salacious film even though she was under-age.
It wasn’t a rather dreadful filmmaker, Eric says. It was by one of France’s best twentieth-century film directors.
Well, we’ve always disagreed on that, haven’t we, darling? Jen says. He’s always putting on things with subtitles. I look at it, and I think, oh no, subtitles. It’s