Where There's Smoke by Black Inc. Page A

the room, and behold, it is the girl from the hotel.’
    â€˜Go on. What happens next?’
    â€˜It depends. Perhaps nothing more happens. Perhaps it is the kind of story that just stops.’
    â€˜Nonsense. It depends on what?’
    Now John speaks. ‘It depends on what passed between them in the hotel room. Depends on the demands you say he made. Do you spell out, Mother, what demands he made?’
    â€˜Yes, I do.’
    Now they are silent, all of them. What the man with the new job will do, or what the girl with the sideline in prostitution will do, recedes into insignificance. The real story is out on the balcony, where two middle-aged children face a mother whose capacity to disturb and dismay them is not yet exhausted. I am the one who cries.
    â€˜Are you going to tell us what those demands were?’ asks Helen grimly, since there is nothing else to ask.
    It is late but not too late. They are not children, none of them. For good or ill they are all together now in the same leaky boat called life, adrift without saving illusions in a sea of indifferent darkness (what metaphors she comes up with tonight!). Can they learn to live together without eating one another?
    â€˜Demands a man can make upon a woman that I would find shocking. But perhaps you would not find them shocking, coming from a different generation. Perhaps the world has sailed on in that respect and left me behind on the shore, deploring. Perhaps that is what turns out to be the nub of the story: that while the man, the senior man, blushes when he faces the girl, to the girl what happened in the hotel room is just part of her trade, part of the way things are, part of life. “Mr Jones … Uncle Harry … How do you do?”‘
    The two children who are not children anymore exchange glances. Is that all? they seem to be saying. Not much of a story .
    â€˜The girl in the story is very beautiful,’ she says. ‘A veritable flower. I can reveal that to you. Mr Jones, Uncle Harry, has never involved himself in something like this before, the humiliating of beauty, the bringing down of it. That was not his plan when he made the telephone call. He would not have guessed he had it in him. It became his plan only when the girl herself appeared and he saw she was, as I say, a flower. It seemed an affront to him that all his life he should have missed it, beauty, and would probably miss it from here onward too. A universe without justice! he would have cried inwardly, and proceeded from there in his bitter way. Not a nice man, on the whole.’
    â€˜I thought, Mother,’ says Helen, ‘that you had doubts about beauty, about its importance. A sideshow, you called it.’
    â€˜Did I?’
    â€˜More or less.’
    John reaches out and lays a hand on his sister’s arm. ‘The man in the story,’ he says, ‘Uncle Harry, Mr Jones – he still believes in beauty. He is under its spell. That is why he hates it and fights against it.’
    â€˜Is that what you mean, Mother?’ says Helen.
    â€˜I don’t know what I mean. The story is not written yet. Usually I resist the temptation to talk about stories before they are fully out of the bottle. Now I know why.’ Though the night is warm, she shivers lightly. ‘I get too much interference.’
    â€˜The bottle,’ says Helen.
    â€˜Never mind.’
    â€˜This is not interference,’ says Helen. ‘From other people it might be interference. But we are with you. Surely you know that.’
    With you? What nonsense. Children are against their parents, not with them. But this is a special evening in a special week. Very likely they will not come together again, all three of them, not in this life. Perhaps, this once, they should rise above themselves. Perhaps her daughter’s words come from the heart, the true heart, not the false one. We are with you. And her own impulse to embrace those words – perhaps