But she goes to the members’ room for her meeting with the trustee, Eva, a woman whose passion remains vibrant and expansive. When Anna first met her, she used to make quite beautiful paintings, small and entrapping. Now she puts her considerable energy into working with Callum and concurrently running a valiant arts organisation, its many tentacles reaching out to prove that art does not belong in the elitist cul-de-sac it seems to have exerted so much effort to achieve. A good address, exclusive decor, crumbling foundations. Anna is no longer beguiled by the thick cream layer of pseudo-intellect, the slap, the greasy cover-all of invented meaning. For Eva, if you scrape that back, scrape it off, there is a vibrant, animate being, an expressive face underneath. For Anna, now, in her less forgiving years, if that greasy layer is scraped away, all she finds underneath is a plastic pot. Yet she used to love it. She used to believe. Anna feels depressed by her own indifference, feels further trapped by it. She likes Eva very much. She feels momentarily that perhaps she could follow her, let Eva’s spark relight her own ashy fire. But she does not feel that she can stand next to her and match her. Let me watch, not contribute. She tries, out of a sense of duty to some kind of action in life, to keep her options open. But they are done, and she will say no. She is glad to leave.
It rains, small drops that seem to arrive rather than fall, lightly slicking the surfaces, enough to make the dark pavements shine in the street and shop lights. She travels the weary Underground, back to the car, sends her furtive text and leaves with thousands of others, clotting the huge roads out of the city. A slow procession home.
Thoughts drift to the ongoing struggle of finding a way to fill her time. There was hope in the morning that this meeting would signal the beginning of a new phase, time once again filled with worthwhile, distracting work, a mind occupied with problems to be solved and ideas to be made manifest. But she could not summon any enthusiasm. She feels herself to be emptying out, leaving infinite space for further emptiness.
The mantras of remaining occupied, finding things to be interested in, have fallen from the lips of anyone who ever tried to offer solace in the years of Anna’s struggle with grief. She knows that a stoic determination to help her students at the university accomplish their goals provided her with a kind of relief. She knows it would be better for her to find something engaging, exciting even, to occupy her thoughts. At the very least achieving the compensation of feeling useful. She harasses herself half-heartedly about what the possibilities are. A question of filling up time or of being valuable. A matter of not crumbling to dust with brittle boredom. But she does not attack the problem with any vigour, accepting bleakly that useful may no longer be a thing that she will feel. She feels suddenly very lonely.
The heat of recent anger is cooled to turgid bitterness. She didn’t choose this parched and wasted life. It is the subplot of another story. Small acts of authorship tumbling outwards, unfolding relentlessly and becoming historic, sweeping harms. So much havoc wreaked by such a weak, callow man. And he has paid, what, less than a quarter of the life he had already been given; the rest, the future, comes free. He paid so little it amounts to nothing. The bitterness is poison. She swallows it back down once again, a repeat dose, an endless self-administered prescription.
Traffic slowly snakes along the shiny black road. The rain persists, scattering taillights in red bursts. Wipers whining across the screen labour relentlessly to pull the lights, for brief seconds, back into shape. The traffic creaks, a heavy chain dragged through the country. It is slow but still frenetic.
Anna’s thoughts turn, in a swift move of self-preservation, onto a familiar bypass. The woman from Baghdad with the turquoise trousers and yellow top might be sitting in her garden now, calm under a warm sun, enjoying a moment of quiet. Where is eternity spent otherwise? A calm garden is as good as anywhere. Anna wishes she could join her there. She pictures the house behind her, filled out in idle moments over recent months. She presumes it was most often busy with the noisy love and tumble of family, and that the pleasure of quiet in an empty house is cherished. She regrets knowing nothing about the life of an ordinary, happy, harried woman sitting in a garden in Baghdad. She doesn’t know whether the dangers make ordinary life, ordinary happiness, impossible.
Imaginary friends were not one of Anna’s childhood strategies. She had always been content in her own company; if real friends were not available she did not substitute an invention. A tall girl, self-contained and clever-clogs sharp, in the slipstream of schoolyard life she made durable friendships and sometimes bound less self-possessed girls to her in a way she found quite thrilling. Not a gang that had tangible status in the playground hierarchy of that bare-kneed world, but a small principality, usually ignored, occasionally strategically useful to those more involved with the statecraft games of dominance and triumph. A small principality of which she was definitely the prince. She had no swish or swagger but was forthright, and unafraid of the girls who did. And as so often is the case, these brash and needy girls, unable to manipulate her by invoking fear or envy, were enfeebled and, perhaps, privately somewhat afraid themselves.
The playground consisted of a patch of tarmac next to a Victorian red-brick school building, a patch of grass and a small, ungainly tribe of countryside children with brutal haircuts and noses red from cold. She was a child on her own at home, a child who learned her survival strategies at school. Her sense of outrage and fearlessness served her well, though it was years before she accorded her relatively unscathed school years to those qualities. She just knew that she could set her jaw, withstand people, defy them until they were no longer a threat. She liked that. Though to say she was fearless is an exaggeration. She had the will to force herself to confront wrong and was confident enough to believe she knew when wrong was being done. Where is that Anna now? Packed in the loft with the old blankets and interminable school-years diaries.
She has friends now whom she values and loves, kind people, clever, interesting and valuable people. She has more social life than she knows what to do with. But it is not enough; there is a chasm that they cannot fill. As though to compensate, she is inexorably, greedily drawn to reach for people she has invented. She reaches out as if she wishes to be friends with them. And strangely, these invented people have been accorded most of the power.
Though this woman may not be real, she stands for a real person, someone who was beloved, someone who slept, ate, stretched in the morning, someone who rubbed tired calves, or maybe rolled tired shoulders. A person whose life ended when they were shopping or walking in a market. A person whose life, in the middle of its most ordinary enactment, was taken by somebody who believed they had a right to make that choice. And what of them, the ones who did choose? The cyphers, the fools, the lost-soul assassins who walk into the midst of people like themselves and share out death.
A queasy anxiety laces these thoughts. It is a private affair, death. Not something for casual public consumption. She devoured them, these people, these deaths, for a thought experiment, then finds they have stuck in her, a sickly marzipan weight lying in her belly long after the cake has gone. She has more in common with the politicians who ripped into that country and made a hole big enough for such violence to thrive. Being from the same place, she can make a pretty good guess as to the layout of their gardens, the type of clothes they would wear. Does she have the right to disown that connection and claim affinity with a woman – dark, lovely, a mother and wife – who died in the bombing of a market place?
She feels bound to people whom she invented at the precise moment of their dying, hobbled by a tangled yarn, thickened with complicating knots. It is not, perhaps, so much wanting to become a friend, more that she is compelled to delve, to unravel, to try to understand the meaning of their death. It is uncomfortably presumptuous. She feels the guilt of her Englishness heavy on her shoulders. That young girl in the playground, now a woman, the inheritor, the beneficiary of Empire. A land that she