James Wood has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2007. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. He was the chief literary critic at the Guardian from 1992 to 1995, and a book critic at the New Republic from 1995 to 2007. He has published a number of books with Cape, including How Fiction Works, which has been translated into thirteen languages.
Alan Querry, a successful property developer from the north of England, has two daughters: Vanessa, a philosopher who lives and teaches in Saratoga Springs, NY, and Helen, a record company executive based in London. The sisters never quite recovered from their parents’ bitter divorce and the early death of their mother, with Vanessa particularly affected, and plagued by bouts of depression since her teenage years. When she suffers a new crisis, Alan and Helen travel to Saratoga Springs. Over the course of six wintry days in upstate New York, the Querry family begins to struggle with the questions that animate this profound and searching novel: Why do some people find living so much harder than others? Is happiness a skill that can be learned, or a cruel accident of birth? Is reflection helpful to happiness or an obstacle to it? If, as a favourite philosopher of Vanessa’s puts it, ‘the only serious enterprise is living’, how should we live? Rich in subtle human insight, full of poignant and often funny portraits, and vivid with a sense of place, Upstate is a perceptive, intensely moving novel.
Non-Fiction
The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief
The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel
How Fiction Works
The Fun Stuff and Other Essays
The Nearest Thing to Life
Fiction
The Book Against God
For Claire, Livia, and Lucian
The author would like to thank Per Petterson for his moral and literary encouragement.
FIRST HE WOULD have to go and see his mother. He would tell her – something about Vanessa, but not everything, of course. The Home, six miles along a favourite road, was a formidable old place, with that grey strictness of the north he loved. But now it looked abandoned: everything was in wintry abeyance. Four years she had been living there, and he was still never sure how to announce himself. It was also ridiculously expensive, he could no longer afford it. What did she, what did he, get for the money? Two small rooms rather than one, extra space for the dark massing of a lifetime’s heavy old furniture; and maybe she got two biscuits with her tea on Fridays.
He made his way through two huffing fire doors, which bottled a weekend’s stale yeast. School food. Outside his mother’s room (‘Clarendon’), he gathered himself a bit like a clown, pulling up his trousers, dusting down his coat, and entered with a light knock. The television was off, thank goodness. She was asleep in the chintz chair his father had used as the family throne, issuing directives and decrees from behind his newspaper. She was tiny, sunken, some of her teeth were out. The old music-hall joke … Her teeth are like stars. They come out at night. But it was early afternoon. As she breathed, something seemed to catch in her throat. She’d always had a large nose, and now she seemed to be reducing around it, shrinking down to bone, the nose tenacious, final, root-like. I have hers, so this will be mine, right enough. He knelt beside her, and whispered. She opened her eyes and said with slight affront, ‘When did you get here, Alan?’ as if he’d been spying on her.
‘Just a second ago.’
‘Fetch me my teeth – by the side of the bed, please, in the glass.’ She turned away from him to insert the plate. ‘Now we need to call for some tea and biscuits. They’ll bring it, if you ask.’ As a child, in a lower-middle-class suburb of Edinburgh, she had made herself unpopular at school by affecting an English, or maybe Anglo-Scots, pronunciation; since his dad’s death, her accent seemed to have moved up the ranks again, by another notch or two. It usually had the effect of making her sound slightly irritable.
In truth, these days she sounded like the mistress but looked more like the servant – short, bent, too modestly or shabbily dressed today.
‘You don’t need to wear this shawl thing, do you?’ he said, lifting it over her shoulders.
‘Certainly not, I just put it on for my nap. Thank you … You look very tired. You know you can’t burn your candle at both ends.’
‘A Roman candle, maybe?’ He had just had his sixty-eighth birthday. ‘How are you?’
‘All right, I suppose … But this English view isn’t my landscape, of course,’ she added, gesturing at the window with splendid authority.
‘Well, it’s not a bad one,’ he said, looking at the line of leafless trees, and the icy hills. He was paying for that English view. ‘And we’ve been over this. You don’t want to live with me, you need your independence, though it would be a lot cheaper if you did move in with us.’
‘Absolutely not. I took in your grandmother, as you perfectly well know, and it made my fifties a complete blank. All I did, day after day, was look after her. I’ll never do that to you.’
In that house, the two women had seemed to detest each other; with stealthy expertise, each made the other immovably depressed.
‘But you want me to visit. And I want to visit you.’ He took her hand. ‘You’re no good to me three hours away up in Scotland, even though you’d have your own landscape there.’ He said it gently.
The tea arrived, carried by a very red teenaged boy. He offered a biscuit to both of them and then left, making sure to take the full plate with him.
‘Wartime rations round here!’ said his mother. The young man appeared again.
‘Mrs Querry,’ he said, ‘I’m supposed to remind you that the residents are gathering at three-thirty in the sun-lounge for the winter flu vaccination. It’s – you know – the booster for them that missed it first time round. Need any help?’
‘No, I have my son. Thank you.’
The room could have been a lot worse. High ceilings with ornate mouldings, Roman laurels almost; textured wallpaper with chips in it like slivered almonds – though in fact these always made him think of splinters caught under a child’s skin – all painted a pleasant cream. And parental things he had known all his life: a reproduction watercolour of Durham Cathedral, an antique mirror that you couldn’t really see yourself in (it looked valuable but he knew it wasn’t), a cushion whose faded lilac cover, bought by him at Heal’s, London, on the Tottenham Court Road, had not been replaced in thirty years at least. It was all pretty good, or as good as can be when one’s whole life has been reduced to souvenirs of selfhood. It was a nice place. But he couldn’t afford it any longer.
She looked at him with her pale-blue eyes: Vanessa’s.
‘This whole place is up in arms! My next-door neighbour lost her hearing aid yesterday, she put it in some tissue paper on her bedside table and the cleaner threw it out by mistake, she thought it was a bit of rubbish. And in the room that’s just two doors down the hall, Mary Binet is furious, because she likes to talk French to another woman here who can understand it, she’s the only woman who can, and now Mary’s been told to stop talking French by the staff – apparently, someone else, we all assume it’s one of the residents and I have a very good idea who, has complained that they’re speaking a secret language to exclude everyone else. I’ll miss it, I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I liked hearing the French … And now the manager is leaving at the end of the month, she’s only been here for six months; she’s Czech, I think, a nice woman, though for some reason she hates to be thought of as Polish—’
He interrupted her. ‘Ma, I have to go to America for a week.’
‘America? Well, well. On business?’ She had always enjoyed enunciating those words, so he spoke them back to her, with finality:
‘On business.’
‘Well, don’t … get caught up in anything.’
‘Caught up in anything?’
‘It’s a dangerous place, from what I hear – there was that terrible thing with the towers. You’ll go and see Vanessa? She’s always wanted you to visit her in … in that place …’
‘In Saratoga Springs.’
‘Yes, I wanted to say … Sarsaparilla.’
‘I will see her. And Josh.’
‘Oh good Lord … courage, there! He’s far too young, and certainly not good enough for her.’
‘You’ve never even met him!’
‘Yes, that’s two of us, but I do have a telephone here, you know, I get reports, and I was about to say – before you interrupted me – that Vanessa isn’t getting any younger, is she?’
‘Ma, I can’t keep up with you – now you’re giving him your blessing?’
‘Well, why shouldn’t the poor thing have a boyfriend? Maybe Josh is the one? And when they marry, you’ll blame him for taking Vanessa away …’
‘Oh, Vanessa was already away. Well away. She did her PhD there, not here, after all. That was the beginning.’
‘Silly girl. It was a shame she didn’t come back at Christmas. I suppose she’d rather spend time with her beau.’
There was a moment or two of old-fashioned silence: the tick of his mother’s fancy carriage clock. His gift.
‘Alan, love, can you help me to the sun-room? I want to get there early – while the needle is still sharp …’
They smiled at each other, and he helped her up and walked beside her, as she gripped the mouse-grey tubular Zimmer frame, a marvel of engineering, as strong as a weightlifter but as light as the bones of a very old lady, with wheels on the front and two splayed yellow tennis balls stuck on the back legs. These dragged along the carpet as the aged couple, mother and son, moved slowly down the corridor.
THE HOUSE OF Querry certainly looked good – as if it were built on rock rather than sand. A curved gravel path (as he drove up it now, his car tyres ground and displaced the little blanched pebbles in an expensive flurry), ample stones, tall windows, a black metal S to keep some sagging stonework together, a stout old front door, a bent, black iron boot-scraper (the kind you could never buy, only inherit). It was circa 1860. Alan Querry hadn’t built it, but sometimes felt as if he had. Here he and Cathy had brought up Vanessa and Helen, and here he had raised them, after Cathy walked out. Here was the window he’d replaced, on his own, there the guttering he’d fixed, on his own, there the garage roof he’d replaced with the help of Rob, the slightly retarded odd-job man from the village.
It looked like the place of someone who’d done well for himself. He lived in the poshest part of Northumberland, where all the neighbours – if that was the word for people so richly distant – seemed to be ‘gentleman farmers’. They had all boarded at Eton, and strode around the county wearing those rust-coloured baggy corduroys, tired but glowing somehow like the embers of old money. (Where did they get those ‘old’ but very expensive new clothes? New & Lingwood, Jermyn Street, London: he’d once shopped there himself, triumphant but sweaty in the hushed emporium.) His nearest neighbour was a balding, middle-aged baronet, a gentle but unremarkable chap who had done nothing at all in his life, and whose only distinction, celebrated in the area, was that he read The Shining when it was first published, and was so scared he’d been unable to sleep for three whole days and nights.
It wasn’t his world. His father left school at sixteen, and went into the shipbuilding industry in Newcastle. Da was clever and industrious, and was soon working at Parsons, buying parts for their great steam turbines. Alan was born in Newcastle; after the war, the Querry family moved to Durham, and Da eventually opened a big hardware shop there – on Saddler Street, on the way up to the cathedral. His father had truly established himself; not just a ‘shopkeeper’ but a ‘proprietor’, whose name was proverbial in town: ‘I’m popping into Querry’s.’ Da never made more of it than that, though. It was seeing his father try and fail to expand, try and fail to acquire a second shop, that gave Alan the idea of going into property – first in Durham, then in Newcastle, York, Manchester. Their only child liked making enough money of his own to buy his parents a brand-new Volvo – the only new car they ever owned – and to pay his dad’s hospice bills, when the end came.
Now he was paying his mum’s bills, and he couldn’t afford it, and no one – least of all Helen and Vanessa – would believe him when he told them this, it would be incomprehensible to them. How could the Querry Property Group, with buildings throughout the north of England, even a shiny (but it was only one-room!) new office in Manchester and a fancy website designed by an American firm from Salt Lake City – how could all that not keep on paying and paying?
He walked across the gravel and pushed open the heavy front door. Otter jumped from his basket, writhing with pleasure. He hadn’t seen Candace’s car at the front, so perhaps she was out. There was no one in the kitchen, or in the expensively subdued sitting room. The French windows glowed; the short February afternoon was sloping away. It was very still. For so many years, after Cathy left, and after the children went off to university, the house had seemed desperately quiet; the thick carpet held the ghost of their footsteps. He even thought about selling the beautiful old place. Candace had changed all that. His daughters, Helen especially, didn’t much like her. Among other things, they found her free-market anti-communism strident. Well, he didn’t like Candace’s politics that much; he’d always been reflexively Labour, everyone in Durham was, even the successful ones who ‘got away’. Maybe they were jealous, as they got older and greyer and wider – as they wanned (Vanessa’s coinage, combining ‘wane’ and ‘wan’) – jealous of her still-black hair, straight and glossy, her trim hips, her formidable vitality. The only time he’d seriously attempted to get his daughters together with Candace, they argued about whether Mrs Thatcher had been ‘a net benefit’ to the country (Candace’s brisk conclusion) or a bloody disaster (Helen’s). Vanessa later said she found Candace ‘coercive’; Van had sulked like a child and retreated to her bedroom, he now recalled.
Whatever Vanessa and Helen felt about the situation, he’d been saved by Candace, that he was sure about. She was ten years younger than him, and had great optimism and strength. She had saved him from solitude, from overwork and the widower’s musty celibacy, saved him from ageing, from dying, even.
‘Candace! … Candace, love?’
She was in the small television room at the back of the house, sitting cross-legged on a dense round cushion. For over a decade, Candace had been a management consultant in Hong Kong, but she told Alan she had never liked it much. A year ago she decided to train to become a Buddhist psychotherapist. There was an emphasis on meditation, of course – and gardens, somehow. The self like a plant, perhaps – growing, dying, reborn. She now spent a fair amount of time sitting on that low cushion, which was covered in crimson chinoiserie, and he knew it was coarse of him but she always seemed to be basically asleep, not meditating. Helen said that Candace lacked any obvious therapeutic gifts. (‘It’s like Quincy Jones attempting monogamy.’) Alan laughed willingly, and later looked up ‘Quincy Jones’ on Google. It wasn’t true, not at least about Candace Lee.
She was intense, dry, coherent: she could do no wrong. Alan saw that she was shoeless – her naked feet.
‘Did you tell her?’ Candace disliked his mother, was amusingly bad at hiding it.
‘Well, I told her I had to go to America.’
‘Of course I don’t mean that, Alan. You didn’t tell her why you’re going there?’ She got up from the floor, as if it was easy.
‘I don’t think this is the right moment,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait till I’ve come back.’
‘You were afraid.’
‘I suppose I am, a bit.’
She drew closer and lightly tapped his chest.
‘You can’t be afraid, you have to be there for Vanessa. She needs you.’
‘Be there for her …’
‘Yes, you have to be there for her, I’m not embarrassed by that phrase. You are her father, so you must embody what it means to go on – why you go on doing what you do.’
‘I “go on”, I suppose, because I don’t think about life too much.’
‘Like the centipede,’ said Candace. ‘When it discovers it has a hundred legs, it stops being able to walk. That isn’t true about centipedes, it turns out. Most don’t have a hundred legs.’
‘Can I use that? When I’m over in Saratoga Springs?’
She looked at him sternly, an atmosphere of hers he particularly liked. Candace’s mother had been so relentlessly ambitious, so determined to get out of her impoverished provincial Chinese village, that her school friends mocked her as ‘the toad who dreams of eating swan meat’.
‘You are taking this seriously? Send me, if you’re not going to be serious about it. Vanessa’s life – it isn’t some silly English play.’
Alan thought for a very brief moment about how poorly Candace’s arrival in Saratoga Springs would be received.
‘Of course I’m serious. But I can only be myself.’
THAT SELF WAS in need of a bath, and later a drink or two. He turned on the taps in the main bathroom, the grand one he liked best – the one that would have to become his mother’s if she moved in with them. He had a routine for bath-taking: as soon as he climbed into the tub, itself a decreasingly facile project, he emptied the water, so that he never spent more than four minutes immersed, and most of that time in mild discomfort. Da had instructed him in that particular hardship; it was the way a lad kept himself ‘hard’. (Though Dad’s baths were also cold.) In the north of England, ‘hardness’ mattered more than cleverness or beauty or gentleness. The young men like him would roll their shirtsleeves high, so their biceps showed like a ball emerging from a cannon. They nailed metal crescents – ‘segs’ – into their shoe-heels, so they could stomp and click and scrape hard military sparks from the pavement. He still conformed to his father’s mindless code, and the rare bathing exception seemed like a great luxury: today he would sit for twenty good minutes in a warm bath whose waterline didn’t immediately start wavering down to nothing.
He looked down as he stood by the bath: odd that his dick looked darker than the rest of his body, as if somehow it were older than the rest of him. White meat or dark meat? His chest-hair, which when he was young had been like the tangled stuff on the floor of a forest, was now blandly grey, and crisp like dried tobacco. Behold, the wanning. And what was so strange, or maybe not that strange because he had friends who said the same, was that when he looked at the mirror, a sixty-eight-year-old Alan Querry did not look back, but little Alan, ten-year-old Alan, twenty-year-old Alan. It was as if everything that had happened to him between ten and sixty-eight had happened in a very small set of rooms; as if childhood were just down the corridor, and adolescence in that curious little cupboard off the kitchen, all of it near at hand, not decades away, not houses or streets away, but absolutely near at hand. Sixty-eight years – marriage, births, divorce, deaths, money – had taken no longer to live than the time it took to cross from one side of that corridor to the other. Nothing really had diminished, withered or waned or wanned, not sex, nor the potential for happiness, nor curiosity. For three months now, his life had been full of financial worry. The business was shaky, they had clearly over-extended themselves with the foolish Dobson project, but on good days he still had the optimistic feeling that he could climb out of all this as one could just get out of the bath, leaving the swill behind.
His dad had been optimistic like that – imperturbable, robustly good-natured, intelligent. He never saw his father shed a tear, never once saw him lose his temper. His mother had had some kind of nervous breakdown just after Alan was born; they treated her in Newcastle with electric-shock therapy. Maybe that was where Van got her problems from? But Mam, at least, was the source, the keeper of emotion in the family. She had the keys: if she had died before Da, the gates to feeling would have been shut. Alan and his father never spoke about feelings. It was Mam who raged and cried and laughed. Emotion was female. But so were joy and tenderness. Social aspiration, too – Mam’s fake ‘middle-class’ accent.
And now – he was sitting in the bath, steaming and spreading like a sponge – he had to go in three days to Saratoga Springs, to be there for his daughter, for poor Vanessa.
The first warning sign had come just before Christmas, when Vanessa cancelled a long-standing plan to come over to England for the holiday. She wasn’t feeling well, she had too much ‘work’ to do. Alan knew from deep experience that Van’s physical ailments were rarely confined to the body, and that claims of ‘work’ covered many evasions and much non-productivity. Then a few weeks later, in early January, came the terrible email from Josh – sent only to Helen, but forwarded by her to Alan. Josh said that Vanessa had slid into a deep depression in early December. Vanessa began to ‘withdraw’ from him ‘and withdraw from life – that’s how I would really put it’. There had been what he called ‘an incident’, just before Christmas, when Vanessa fell down some stairs and hurt her arm. Josh got scared: ‘I think she was in danger of doing harm to herself.’ He said that she’d been better in recent weeks, but was still pretty fragile, and he was writing because he knew that Helen came to New York often for business. When Helen was next in the city, would she think of coming upstate, to Saratoga Springs? ‘You and your dad, of course, know her “history” so much better than I do.’
Helen replied that she was in fact going to be in New York City, for the record company, in early February; she could make a trip upstate then, and she would try to bring Alan. And Alan, perhaps because Josh had not written to him but to Helen, perhaps because he was too afraid, too polite, too bloody English, had not emailed to ask exactly what Josh meant when he suggested that Vanessa’s accident had been deliberate. ‘In danger of doing harm to herself.’ Not this again: Alan had thought it belonged to the past, had been left behind in Oxford, when Van was a student. If she had tried to harm herself, it was clearly not for real, it was just a ‘signal’, a message, an SOS – isn’t that what people said about such gestures? While he also thought, with horror: but she couldn’t just toss her life aside, like an unfinished crossword puzzle … A father – a parent – helped his grown-up children in any way he could. He had known unhappiness, and some of it had been quite severe; but he didn’t think he’d ever really known despair. Despair was of the spirit, it was terminal. Despair was the colour-blindness that afflicted those who could not see hope. Why did Helen find happiness easy, when her sister found it hard? The girls had always been so different. Perhaps Van’s ‘history’ went all the way back to birth. And then what could Alan possibly do? That had always been his torment; how little he could do. He couldn’t make Van see life through his eyes: where he saw a white bird, she saw a black one. But of course he would come, of course: he would buy a plane ticket immediately, and he would go with Helen. It would be Van’s belated Christmas gathering.
VANESSA AND HELEN, Helen and Vanessa … Vanessa was the elder by two years, born just after ten o’clock on the evening of 30th July 1966, the day England beat West Germany in the World Cup. The one and only time! You couldn’t forget that day: those jubilant hours, the black-and-white television bringing forth its frail, unlikely pictures, and Cathy walking stiffly around the sitting room, pressing her hand into her lower back, her groans mixed now in his memory with the roars from Wembley Stadium – and there, a little later, Vanessa was, jaundiced and moist, furrowed with folds, most loved because the first. ‘Only the best for her.’ A lucky girl. But as she got older, she became harder to embrace, awkward, softly distant. She didn’t or wouldn’t fit – like Alice in Wonderland, either too tall or too short. It was the divorce that changed everything. After Cathy walked out, Vanessa withdrew. The girls dealt differently with that catastrophe. Always fierce, Helen sided with her father and accused her mother, who had, after all, left Alan for Another Man, of being ‘obsessed with sex’. (She was only thirteen, poor thing.) Vanessa was different. She took no sides, just went quiet; seemed to absorb all the consequences of the event, and disappeared from sight. She was always upstairs in that damn bedroom of hers, where she lay on her bed and read: massively, widely, seriously – novels, poetry, philosophy, feminism, even ecology. He had never heard of most of her authors; sometimes he thought she chose the most obscure people she could, just to spite him.
In happier times, Alan and Cathy had loved to observe the differences between their daughters. How often, in the evening, when other conversation faltered, the two parents talked about ‘the girls’, with the kind of fanatical wonderment – monotonous but somehow never boring! – that revolutionaries must lavish on their plans for the future. Helen was exuberant, playful, disobedient, physical; Vanessa was shy, gentle, slow to anger, studious, very private. For a while, these differences seemed provisional, part of the scramble of growing up; everything was potential. But eventually, so Alan discovered, the child’s feet stop growing, her trousers don’t need to be let out any more, her handwriting has the form it will have for the rest of her life, her bed sheets bear the occasional but unmistakable bloodstains of new adolescence – and, as if suddenly, while you were not properly attending to the matter (or so it seemed to him now), while you were too busy with your own foolish crises, your daughter became an adult, and those qualities that had seemed malleable were now hardened and fixed. Both girls were full of will, but while Helen’s wilfulness seemed to bring her pleasure, Vanessa’s brought her unhappiness. She seemed so keen to mess up her own chances. That was the phrase he kept on reciting to himself in those days. Why did she want to mess up her own chances? Why didn’t Van invite any school friends over to the house? Didn’t she have any friends? She said she wanted to put herself forward for the school debating society, but it never happened. It was the same with the school orchestra, the school play. All her pastimes were solitary: reading, playing the piano or the flute, listening to music, writing poems. (Poems mostly full of despair and lament: one of them was especially horrifying, it seemed to be about some unrequited crush on a boy, and it ended with a line he would never forget, about wanting to ‘jump from a high wall onto a hard pavement’; these poems greatly alarmed her parents when they discovered them in a notebook hidden under Van’s mattress.) Later, a student at Oxford, Vanessa decided that she would give away all her possessions; a friend was so worried about her stability that she reported her to the university health services, who contacted Alan and Cathy. Helen spoke so easily to adults, confident in her ability to charm; Vanessa held back, in a gesture that seemed to combine – worst of all worlds – judgement and fear. Helen was naturally joyful; Van needed to be reminded of that category of human experience. And one day, you realise that your children’s differences are not only temperamental and biological, but also moral and political, that each has a very distinct worldview. One day – he remembered it well – you witness your eldest daughter, now seventeen, firmly lecturing her younger sister about the misery of life and the cruelty of all human beings, of all life, holding up a book her father had no idea she possessed, George Ryley Scott’s History of Torture, waving it around and saying: ‘Read this, read this, Helen, and you won’t have any doubts about it!’
Is that how it had been? Her childhood a torture?
HELEN AND VANESSA, Vanessa and Helen … Vanessa did her doctorate at Princeton – ‘because I’m stifled in Oxford, and they’ll pay for me to be at Princeton, and they actually want me there’ – and had been seven years teaching philosophy at Skidmore College; there was now a faint suggestion, like a breeze carrying a smell of rot with it, of a career stagnating. Of unfulfilled promise. There had been a few papers: one of them, which Alan understood to be about how to combine French philosophy and English analytic philosophy in order to make a great new product – like combining French grapes and English soil, to make that questionable wine they were now producing in Kent? – did fairly well, and bounced around the conference circuit. But now she was forty, and there had been no ‘big book’, and no advancement. The same faculty profile and atrocious snapshot sat on the departmental website for all these years – these academics, thought Alan – Vanessa’s beautiful dark hair pulled harshly tight at the back into a scholarly bun, her lovely intelligent face obscured by hideous clock-sized spectacles; and that fixed bibliography, with the eternally dangling promise of ‘Four Essays on Personhood (forthcoming)’. Alan couldn’t imagine her in Saratoga Springs, NY. She told him that Skidmore College was one of the best private institutions in America; and she told him something about the town, about its history as a holiday resort, a nineteenth-century spa with healing waters: the Baden-Baden, the Vichy of upstate New York. It was full of parks and grand hotels; people still gambled and raced horses there, and there were handsome, wide streets. Five years ago, he was reading Diamonds Are Forever – he had been rereading all the Ian Fleming books, on a whim – and was chuffed to see that James Bond and Felix Leiter visited the famous horse track at the very same Saratoga Springs.
But he didn’t go to see her. She came to him, and he imagined that she came to Northumberland every summer because she was keen to escape America, or New York State. In summer, in Northumberland, the sheep made their pleated, laugh-like noises and rubbed their wool onto the dry-stone walls, and the straight old Roman roads glimmered in the broad gentle light, and there was really no better place to be on earth. Last summer, she had come for the whole of August – he liked that very much. He left her alone for a few days, went down to London, and when he came back there she was, still there – sometimes in her old bedroom, lying diagonally on the bed in her usual way, reading a book, sometimes in the sitting room, or outside on the lawn, in a deckchair, smoking, always with a book and a pen in hand, wearing those curious baggy trousers. Unlike Helen, Vanessa seemed to need very little. She wanted to be at home, to be intermittently alone, and to be able to work. Little else. From the back door, he could see her in the deckchair, notebook open, pen in hand, cigarette packet and lighter on the grass beside her coffee cup; she’d got a bit heavier in the last year, perhaps the curious wafting trousers were hiding that. She slouched in the chair, her tongue slightly protruding. The notebook was balanced on her knees, and with her right hand she intensely twirled her hair, as if twisting thoughts from her brain. If Candy seemed to be asleep when meditating, Vanessa seemed almost to be posing as a thinker. She rarely wrote anything: fascinating, the ratio of thought to frequency of writing. She was like a trumpeter playing Haydn in a symphony, picking up the instrument only every hundred bars or so. Aphorisms, maybe? Philosophical fragments? It would be funny if she were just writing jokes, or writing a letter, or doodling aimlessly. And though he knew he shouldn’t, he would go out and disturb her, offer her some more coffee, ask her if she needed anything from Corbridge, tell her one of his own jokes, to match those in her notebook.
Had she really tried to do herself some harm in Saratoga Springs? Put aside her life – he kept coming back to this image – like a half-finished crossword puzzle? Of course, thought Alan, Josh had been deliberately vague with Helen, when he described the incident on the stairs, probably because he wanted to ration the alarm – enough to get them to come, but not so much that they would insist on taking Vanessa home with them. Josh must love her, then; he was possessive in the right way, watchful in the right way – and obviously kind. Alan thought the email reflected pretty well on the young man.
After Vanessa ran away from boarding school, Alan and Cathy decided that she should ‘see someone’ about her depression and anxiety. They found a child therapist in Newcastle, who was attached in some way to the teaching hospital there. She was hard to find, he remembered. No one had ‘therapy’ in Newcastle, in 1982! And Vanessa did not want to go, had to be almost dragged into the grim office on Percy Street. Worse, much worse, the therapist – her last name was Lennon, like John – insisted that she wanted to see the whole family for the first session. All of them, even Helen. Alan and Cathy had been separated for eight months, and had stopped communicating, except to talk about matters relating to the girls. Alan sat there in a fury, as Dr Lennon told them that she was going to use a tape recorder; she found it useful to listen to them talking – to detect, after the session, their recorded hesitations and evasions and weaknesses and lies. Of course she didn’t put it quite like that, but that was the gist: cherchez the parents, find out how the parents were to blame, and stitch them up. And they were to blame. Of course they were. Poor, poor Vanessa – she cried and cried, while the little gap-toothed wheels of the Memorex cassette squeakily rotated, while Alan and Cathy tried to explain how hard things had been for both girls. (And yet Helen did not cry, did she?) Dr Lennon then had four sessions with Van on her own, and when it was all over, she called in the despicable parents and explained that she couldn’t of course share any details of what Vanessa had told her – just what had Van told her? – but she could certainly inform them that, in her opinion, their elder daughter was extremely anxious and ‘severely depressed’. The therapist recommended that Vanessa write about her fears and sadness, in creative form. Alan didn’t mention that Van was already doing that …
Van did get better; happier, more fulfilled in her academic work, drawn – drawn out – by the task of serious philosophy. The last two years of school, and the first year at Oxford, were comparatively serene. (Everything was comparative, in Van’s case.) But then she collapsed againthatdepressionhadand