A Longer Journey

Family

Fan managed the following summer to get a full eight weeks' leave to come and visit me. I could, of course, have visited him first, if more briefly, but he didn't seem to help me to that, somehow. What was he afraid of now? Me? Evidently he wanted the initiative, to know me on my own ground, and I was willing to grant him this if it was important to him.

We had to be close friends; that was necessary to both of us, as much as it had been decided for us in early childhood by total strangers: that was the vulnerability. We had to be agreeable to one another: that was the safest way.

Usually it is hard to spot a friend or relative at an airport, but we saw one another immediately. The sheer lack of drama to our meeting bewildered but also relieved me. We shook hands; I took a piece of his luggage; I found a taxi. It wasn't until we were on our way that we even spoke.

“Long flight,” I said.

“I slept,” he replied.

“So glad you're here,” I said.

“I too,” he reciprocated.

“I got you a room in the same house where I board,” I said.

“That's lucky,” he answered.

“Fan,” I said. “We're pausing as we do on the phone! How will we ever get used to real-time conversation, the two of us, after all the phone calls?”

“It's true,” he said, relaxing a little. “We are talking very badly. I so accustomed myself to your crackling and gapping, I hardly recognise your voice. We must keep talking until we get it right.”

So we talked all night, sustained by more than a few beers and then whiskies. I brought out some expensive cigars, too, but when Fan refused I left them alone myself. As dawn rose I was elaborating on a pipe dream I had, in which all six of us new-edition humans clubbed together and bought a desert island upon which to spend the next century or so in peace and happiness together. Fan called it a commune and wanted me to explain its government, economy and legal and defense systems. I refused, mildly nettled, and was shocked by a sudden look of panic on his face.

Fan is really terrified of falling out with me, I realised, wondering at the same time if Fan could read my face as easily as I could his. I was unaccustomed to being read, and I imagined he was too. I tried to backtrack.

“Well, you know,” I said, “we don't know what we want ahead of time. We'd thrash it out as we go.”

“And the peace and the happiness?” Fan couldn't help asking, but with eyes averted.

“Ohhh, I meant, obviously, the peace and happiness of a good argument fairly and honourably concluded. All points of view taken into account, everyone's thoughts given due consideration.”

“It's a Parliament,” Fan said, watchful but with a touch of glee.

“Or,” I said, determined not to sound defensive,”a family.”

Fan was silent. I moved around the room aimlessly, picking up a glass, opening the curtains as though for inspiration. It was raining, sporadically, stormily; chimneys gave off early morning smoke: the dawn was a Turner in grey monochrome. I felt mildly hypocritical: what did I know of families? Had I and Aunt Emily ever given one another's thoughts due consideration? Had I ever tried to break the real silence between her and me? Abruptly I broke Fan's silence.

“You introduced yourself to me as a relative,” I almost accused him. “In the first letter.”

“And that means we argue?”

“OK, it means that if we disagree, we fight it out; we don't walk away. Fists if you like, Manga Man, or judo-type stuff. It means disagreements aren't final. It means we mustn't try too hard to get along, but always make up. What did you mean when you said 'related'?”

“Ugh, Thoo.” Fan was laughing now, nose wrinkled. “I meant whatever you like, just start the conversation, don't stay strangers—which comes to the same thing maybe. You can write the next letter when we find another one of us. You're good at this family thing; you know how it works.”

I know how it doesn't work, I thought.

“I can't believe you're a single child,” Fan was saying. “You ought to have had half a dozen siblings to fight with—”

“I did,” I said quietly, and he stopped laughing.

“No?”

“My parents were married for a long time before I was born. I was the last in a long line of attempts.”

“Thoo! My apologies.”

I shrugged and nodded, but I saw his eyes widen with another thought. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“That won't do,” I told him in an older-brotherly tone, presuming upon my new role as arbitrator of family relationships.

“Your big dream,” he said eventually. “Maybe it was not us six, but you six.”

“Well, it makes no difference to anything. It was a dream. With a bit of psychobabble on top.” I could tell he was disappointed, though. Why? Disappointed to find me not as alone as himself in birth, or did he really believe in dreams? Or was he merely jealous of any emotional ties to the absent—however permanently absent?

“I have to get to work,” I said, heading for the bathroom. “I'm doing a short day today, then after tomorrow we'll make plans for the weekend. Hiking if the weather clears. We can hire a motor if not.”

Fan walked with me to work, came into the offices, made coffee for the two of us and for a chargirl who was repeatedly running her mop over the clean floor at our doorway, in between apparent inspections of the door hinges for traces of dust. She took the mug in an attitude of shock, looking from one of us to the other like an observer at a tennis match.

“Eh yous are related?” she asked him finally.

His nod seemed reluctant, non-commital, and for a moment I felt unreasonably hurt, but when the girl had left the room he turned to me: “What did she say?”

“Ah,” I said. “She's Scottish.”

“It's the same language, not?”

“Not really. She's asked you to marry her, and you've agreed.” (His face was a picture.) “You'll have to go through with it, Fan, or else represent yourself in a Breach of Promise—Oh, all right, Manga Man, don't kill me. She just asked if you're a relative of mine.”

“My beloved brother-in-species, I shall not kill you, but allow me to edit your facial features for you. Broken nose or black eye? Your choice entirely, chap.”

“Wow, Fan, you are going to make one terrifying lawyer type.”

“Hum; flattery; very well, I shall listen.”

“Seriously,” I said, straightening my collar. “Just look at them like that, give them that tone of voice. No witness is going to last five minutes.”

“You have earned your release—for the present. Thoo, I must leave you to your work. I will wander around, a solo tourist; I can meet you here. One o'clock?”

“Let's make it two.”

It was still early enough for me to be alone when I went to the workshop. I needed to think. At first, soldering tiny connections on my latest prototype, I gloated over the connection between Fan and myself. I liked his term brother-in-species, but I needed space. Something had occurred to me at the end of our long night's conversation. It was about my aunt, and there was something I hadn't done.

As a child, I had feared and obeyed Aunt Emily. I had, at age 13 or 14, whether she knew it or not, fought her, and won. I had forgotten her, pitied her, deferred to her, kept a sort of silence to her. This is what I had not done: negotiated a peace treaty. I had made silence instead of peace.

On my desk I was drawing diagrams, and musing that in a decade or so a robot could take over this task for me. Another part of my mind complained that Aunt Emily, the senior in our relationship, ought to have been the one responsible for designing a more functional bond between us. Yet my conscience would not entirely accept this. A child is not entitled to a perfect youth, but only to the best that his or her family can give. To what is an adoptive aunt entitled? What is gratitude?

People were talking to me now. Someone gave me instructions to repair or re-do something, and I made brief notes, my mind still revolving the question of Aunt Emily.

Hadn't she always wanted a quiet life? Was it fair, now, to disturb the calm, stagnant waters of her existence? She had chosen—No, I could not get that past my conscience. If it came down to choice, I had had more than she, and I had the choice here.

I took a break, and a cigarette, later than usual so as to be alone. I knew what I could do. I could visit Aunt Emily, and let her see me smoking. She would be surprised, pained, disapproving. I would confess to her that I had smoked, on and off, for years without telling her, and I would apologise not for the dirty habit but for my lack of frankness with her. If the ice between us thawed, broke, even just cracked, I would promise never to smoke on her property again.

I extinguished my cigarette, irritably, halfway through. I didn't even want to smoke. If Aunt Emily would understand that I meant it as a freewill favour and not as a deference to her moral rectitude, I could happily promise never to smoke again. As for my new box of fine cigars, I knew a tramp who lived under the railway and picked up cigarette ends: he would know what to do with them. I could give him my whisky bottle too, and he would sit under his bricked archway, gaze out across the nettles and pretend he was lord of all he surveyed. He didn't know a woman named Emily Wychworth.