Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

And now she was thinking of grandmother Lily, who never really recovered from the death of her husband. Grandfather Tom went modestly, in his prime. It had become his custom to spend the days after his retirement working under the car, for no real reason other than his liking for spanners and grease. He emerged around teatime smelling of sweat, wiping his hands on a rag. In the evenings he liked to go to the working men’s club. He played bowls, watched Tom and Jerry cartoons, wrote comic verse, smoked with friends. One day he had observed the usual ritual, wiped a rag around the back of the car, polished it and washed his hands and he was sipping tea in the kitchen when it started to rain. Grandmother Lily ran outside to bring the washing in, calling to her husband to help. He failed to follow her; exasperated, she dragged the basket in, preparing to remonstrate, and found he had collapsed. He recovered a little in hospital, waking to say that he had fulfilled all his ambitions; he had no complaints, he said, and then he had another heart attack and died. But grandmother Lily preserved a quite unSocratic view of things. She wasted slowly, grew thin and blotched. And there was grandmother Mary, tall and graceful, with her hair newly permed. She was the direct antithesis of grandmother Lily: she was always smart and cheerful; she went out regularly for a shampoo and set. She had ten outfits that she wore in strict rotation. A pleated skirt or two, a cashmere jumper. Much of it in pink and blue. Then she had a pair of blue trousers, long and wide-legged. Her clothes were forties in style. She had fixed her taste as a young woman, and had never faltered. She liked watching snooker — she called it snukker — and reading crime novels. Rosa always thought it was incongruous: her delicate, kindly grandmother, holding a book with a bloody corpse on the cover. She had a drawer full of multicoloured pencils. They had belonged to grandfather Don, who had been an engineer. She was devout, a quiet member of the church. Dear grandmother Mary, who never worked in her life. She knitted jumpers and made Victoria sponges. She helped with a thousand village fetes. Early in her marriage she took in girls — fallen women, pregnant at sixteen, cast out by their families. It was a gentle life, spent in small villages, dealing with people who knew her well. Virtuous, in its way. When Rosa thought of grandmother Mary she saw her in the living room of her house surrounded by ancestral china, in repose.

Grandmother Mary believed that things were orchestrated by a benevolent deity. Still she died alone, stricken by dementia. She never questioned the God that sent her mad, but Rosa wondered how she might have understood it, had she still been capable of rational enquiry. Because the self was memory and memory defined the self, and at the last grandmother Mary had no memory at all. She would be a fugitive eternal being, unable to find anyone she recalled in the celestial wash of souls, or confusing those she found, mixing up her father and her husband, uncertain of her friends. Though there might be an essence, and Rosa had hoped this was what grandmother Mary had thought, on those few days when she was lucid enough to understand what was happening to her. There might still be a kernel of the self, untouched by disease, preserving the original personality of the creature. This might have been what Socrates meant , thought Rosa, when he talked of the self. Something untouched by all the things of life. Untouched even by memory and the shifting pattern of concerns that define the individual. An eternal spark, divorced from everything ephemeral.

She shook her head hard, and forced herself to focus. Now the bus was stuck behind a ritual file of cars, hemmed in on all sides. Gathering her bags around her, her hold all weighed down with a pair of Jess’s walking boots and now these presents in their plastic wrappers, Rosa stared at the street, at the flecks of brown and black on the buildings, flecks of great age, at the columns of a church, the glass sheen of an office block. The street was a mingled frieze of shine and drab. It was mottled, but she liked it. She stared around at the other passengers. She watched a pair of boys slapping each other warmly around the head. There was a man with an immense nose reading a paper, apparently absorbed in it. Each nostril a work of art. Truly unusual. That was a characterful face, she thought. The bus was taking its time, shuddering along Euston Road, the glass shaking. Not far from here, thought Rosa, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her works, birthed her children, and expired. Rousseau declares that a woman should be made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself. What nonsense! Still the wind was gusting down the streets. Everything outside the bus was controlled by the force of the wind; on one side of the road people were hunched against it, on the other they were gusted onwards. The bus came to a sudden halt, and everyone jerked forwards. For a moment their faces showed confusion and injured pride. For a brief instant, they knew the whole thing was unnatural and absurd, being on this bus in this road jammed with traffic, being jolted around as the bus trembled on its sluggish course. They understood, briefly, all of them, that it was crazy, that wherever they were trying to go it didn’t really matter, and really they should have just stayed in the savannah swamps firing arrows at the fauna. That would have been better than sitting it out on this rattling clattering bus with a mounting feeling of nausea and this underlying sense of perplexity, this semi-suppressed question of why the hell? But then she looked around again and they were all rustling newspapers, and she was no longer sure if that was what they had been thinking at all.

The buildings were stained black and brown. She liked their weathered faces. At the junction of Tottenham Court Road everything stopped again, and Rosa stared up at the blank windows of the high-rise offices. But the sky was deep dark, clad in clouds, dynamic ether, even as Rosa festered in the bus. Rosa could see the grimy face of Euston Square station, with the dome of UCL just visible round the corner. She wondered if she should beg the driver to let her off. She sat up straight and looked at her watch. She sang quietly to herself: Would you like to swing on a star? And be better off than you are? Or would you rather be a Pig? Yeah yeah, tell ’em ‘bout the pig. She stared around, stared at the traffic stuck to the heels of the bus, remembered her bags and subsided. She was tense for a few minutes, then the bus started its shuddering progress again. It started, moved quickly, stopped as quickly again. There was a fierce sound of horns outside. And now she could hear the King’s Cross backing track of diggers and drills, the shuddering scrape of metal on concrete, and she saw clouds of dust dispersing.

When the bus came to a halt outside Euston, Rosa was staring up at the sky. Then she stood. Pulling her bags along, she moved towards the exit. It is almost too late, she thought, as she saw the glass doors of Euston Station. She passed the police with their guns, and arrived at a big clock telling her the time. If you were ever so slightly out of synch these clocks and the people beneath them quite confused you. You weren’t sure what might happen but you were fearful all the same. She was uncertain on the forecourt and then, with minutes to go, she remembered the drill. Thinking only of the task at hand, she rushed for a ticket, fumbling with her purse, dropping her credit card, stuffing it into the machine again, seeing the price and cursing faintly, receiving a delayed then spewed out ticket, running for the platform. She was trying to keep her thoughts clean and practical. She saw a train and ran towards it. But her hurry was superfluous; the train was delayed. Everyone was queuing at the doors. A man in uniform was holding a whistle, ready to blow. Was it a race? thought Rosa. They were all poised for the off. She saw some ruddy, fat families, and kids smiling, and a host of the elderly. Daytime travellers from London. A few business types in suits, men and women, holding their phones and palms and computer cases. Most of that crowd filed off to first class, while Rosa set her bags down on the floor and waited with the rest. The atmosphere was good-tempered. Everyone fidgeted and raised their eyes to each other. There was a strict sense of protocol — you had to be stoical and expectant. The train stood on the platform and the clock ticked past the hour. ‘Not too bad,’ said one old man when the carriage doors opened, and the clock said they were fifteen minutes late.