Free The Book of Other People by Zadie Smith Page A

ripple of the air Hanwell Snr was sweating and rambling about the Suez business and the Araby bastards and other matters of the world that Hanwell - the least political of men, a man for whom the world was, and could consist only of, those people he saw or spoke to every day, fed, washed or made love to - could not comprehend. At last the topic turned to the people who concerned Hanwell - Hanwell’s wife, Hanwell’s daughters. Hanwell shyly described his current difficulty, making use of the doctor’s careful and superior phrases (‘mental disturbance’ and ‘a tendency toward hysteria’). Hanwell Snr drew a hankie from his back pocket, worked it round the grime on the back of his neck. He took his time folding it back into quarters. Hanwell saw at once that his father thought it entirely typical of Hanwell to marry a woman who was broken in some way, and now felt much the same satirical disgust he’d expressed when the boy Hanwell, instead of laughing at being dangled from a pier, took it in his head to cry.
    ‘Well, I’ll say this,’ he said, finishing his lecture about Hanwell’s ineptitude at choosing things right and seeing the way of things, and moving on to the more general subject of ‘women’, which allowed, at least, the concession that Hanwell’s trouble might not be Hanwell’s fault alone: ‘They rewrite history - can’t let a man be himself. Always telling you what you would be and should be and might be, rather than what you are. And what they’re offering in return for all that isn’t half as good as they think it is - or I’ve never found it so. But maybe you’ve done better - Lord knows, they look a damn sight better these days than in my day . . .’
    Twenty yards from where they sat, two young women in sun-dresses were helping each other achieve a handstand. Hanwell Snr nudged Hanwell in his gut, and Hanwell felt strongly the implicit insult to his own mother, who still lived, and still wore her flapper curls - white now - close to her forehead, and the same heavy felt cloche caps and Harold Lloyd glasses, perfectly round and thick-rimmed. He said nothing. He ate his chips as the blonde, peaky-looking girl firmed her body in preparation for the arrival of the lovely thick ankles of the brunette, well fed as they never were ten years earlier, and when this brunette overreached, and her breasts pressed tight against the cotton of her yellow dress and her legs went backwards, and the crinoline frothed over her blonde friend’s narrow shoulders, Hanwell and Hanwell watched them laugh and shake together and fall, finally, in a human heap on the grass. Soon after, Hanwell Snr gathered the two empty paper cones and pressed them into a soggy ball in his hands, and said he’d better open the shutters, as it was teatime and folk would be wanting their food. Hanwell never saw him again.
    On a date in 1986, one that only the record office would remember now, the phone rang in Hanwell’s kitchen as he cooked. He was making pizza with homemade dough for the young children of his second family, and his topping was a loose, watery, fresh tomato sauce, laced with anchovies and black olives, so piquant and delicious you could eat it by the spoonful and forgo the crust altogether. It is possible only I liked to do that. I extrapolate my feelings too generally.
    ‘Yes, I see - thank you . . . it was good of you to let us know,’ said Hanwell in a voice a shade more posh than his own. He put down the phone and left the room. After the pizza was finished, he came back in, pale, but composed. He said his father had died, a sentence that required us - my mother, my brother, and me - to invent a whole human in one second and kill him off the next. Hanwell had said nothing to prepare us. He had known weeks earlier that his father’s death was imminent - he did not go to him. Twenty years later, Hanwell’s son would not go to Hanwell when his hour came. It happens that in the course of my professional