didn’t ask Spencer,” Liz cut him off. “I mean I texted him and left him a message, but sure he never got back to me.”
Stephen looked from Liz to her father. Already a gloom of mutual resentment was setting in on both their faces.
“The garden looks very well,” Stephen offered, but the thought of the garden only reminded Kenneth of the tent that was destined to destroy his lawn.
“The marquee people were supposed to come tomorrow morning to put it up, but now they say they can’t come till the afternoon.”
“It’ll be fine,” Judith said, throwing Liz a glance. “It’ll all be fine.”
Liz lugged her rucksack up the stairs, and set it on the bed beside one of her old exercise books. She flicked through it and felt a great rush of sadness. There was such pathos in childish handwriting, especially one’s own. Time had this terrible habit of creeping up and pistol-whipping you on the back of the head. She unzipped her suitcase and decided she couldn’t be bothered to unpack yet. She emptied her pockets of her passport and coins and gum on the vanity unit, where her mother had set a little vase with a head of blue hydrangea from the garden. Behind the vase, propped against the mirror, was a neat row of eight copies of her own book—all signed by her—which Kenneth kept there in case he ever found anyone else to give it to. She lifted the books and set them in the bottom of the built-in wardrobe.
After she received her PhD from King’s College, London, Liz had entered “her slump,” as the family referred to it: two years of trying to get her thesis on Lévi-Strauss accepted by academic publishers, and being rejected for dozens of research fellowships and junior teaching positions, and working in a bar in Clapham, and smoking a great deal of weed. One lunchtime, having woken at noon, she stood in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, and noticed the letter on the table, a smear of raspberry jam on its corner. Aberystwyth University Press was keen to meet and talk about the thesis, meaning they were interested in bringing it out, and the very next day, a Friday, she traveled at ludicrous expense on two trains and a rail-replacement bus service to see their publisher, Owen Hughes, who was, it turned out, a Lévi-Strauss expert himself. He disagreed about aspects of Liz’s characterization of Lévi-Strauss’s relationship to art, had met Claude, more than once, and had come away with many subtly self-flattering anecdotes from these encounters. Liz perched in a low leather club seat and felt herself sliding lower and lower and lower, until it seemed she looked up at the desk from several feet beneath it. The interview concluded with Liz being asked whether she’d be capable of writing a short guide to either quantum physics or dogs, which was the kind of thing that sold at the moment, and her replying no, not really, no.
For the next month Liz got up and sat in her pajamas and watched daytime television, smoked more weed, and read only magazines, and on a drizzling Wednesday morning woke up knowing instinctively what she had to do. She caught the 34 bus to the Victorian library on Brixton Hill, walked between the rows of computers where recent immigrants typed up their CVs, and found the self-help section. She photocopied the chapter pages and indices of every book that didn’t look obviously stupid or crazy. She found an empty carrel, set up her laptop, and started a spreadsheet in which she collated the main recurring topics, and typed in what Lévi-Strauss had to say about them. And that was the genesis of The Use of Myth: How Lévi-Strauss Can Help Us All Live a Little Better. Whenever she couldn’t find anything relevant in the actual work, she just extrapolated from the circumstances of his life, and soon she had a seventy-thousand-word manuscript that told the story of Lévi-Strauss’s life and work and pontificated cleverly, or cleverly enough, on the usual topics of love, marriage, infidelity, work, ambition, children, parents …
It found a small but respectable publisher, Hawksmoor, within a few weeks. The advance was a modest two thousand pounds, but after a series of interviews, the book began to sell quite well. When it was taken as a Radio 4 Book of the Week, sales accelerated and they went to a fifth reprint. A week after that, the publisher forwarded an e-mail from a producer called Henry Barfoot who was interested in possibly making it a program for BBC Four. Was Liz interested in presenting?
Having taken a few months to write and rewrite, and a few weeks to shoot, and one tortuous day to add voice-over to, when it was finally broadcast at 10:00 p.m. on a Wednesday evening the Times heralded the hour-long show, The Use of Myth, as “fairly informative,” the Guardian trumpeted it as “standard BBC Four fare,” and the Telegraph lauded Liz’s presenting as “adequate, if a little stiff.” Judith had half of Ballyglass watching and was in tears on the message she left on Liz’s answerphone, telling her how proud she was. She’d even coaxed Kenneth into leaving a bluff “Well done.”
She had been writing the follow-up—attempting to do the same with Margaret Mead—for the last seven years. The book seemed to expand in every direction as she got more and more and also less and less interested in her, reading volume after volume of published work, then diaries and letters, and taking notes and underlining and stockpiling the timeline with anecdote and incident. The work had grown monstrous. She’d stopped actually putting words on the virtual page when the word count had hit 321,123, though her reasons for halting there were random and inscrutable to herself and seemed to be based solely on the palindromic, magical nature of the figure. That had happened several months ago, as she sat marking essays in the Moonlight Diner on Tenth Avenue. Now just seeing the file on her desktop gave her a singular feeling of dull terror. She was currently managing to look at the manuscript for a few minutes every couple of days before getting bored, or panicking, or getting bored of panicking. She’d follow the thread of her inattention through a maze of hyperlinks, and two hours later would know slightly more about, say, Hawking or fracking or twerking.
Alison’s voice came up from below. She was describing something as just completely pointless to her parents. Liz went down and met her younger sister at the bottom of the stairs, where they hugged and then pulled back and thought to themselves how old the other one appeared.
“You look great!” Liz said.
“I do not,” Alison countered with a wince. “I’ve been dieting for the wedding, but sure I’ve only lost seven pounds—”
“That’s not bad.”
“That short haircut really suits you—” Alison said.
“Och, it’s an old woman’s cut.”
“And you’ve lost weight.”
“Not on purpose.”
“Don’t sicken me.”
“How was your dress fitting? All ready to go?”
“Sandra’d put the zip on upside down. Can you believe it? It’s sorted now. I’m not paying her to fix it.”
Liz followed her into the kitchen.
“Is this new?”
Liz ran her finger along the top of the dining table. Alison nodded and whispered to her, “It wouldn’t be to my taste, but I can see why it’s nice.”
Kenneth’s voice arose from the armchair. “No one’s asking you to sit at it.”
Alison made a face at her sister. “Nothing’s changed.” She raised her voice: “I’m just saying it’s very dark, for my taste. For a kitchen.”
“Is it mahogany?” Liz asked.
“Yes, and extendable,” Kenneth’s voice announced.
Home was where you could spend an hour discussing any fixture or fitting or real estate question. Judith tended to praise, Alison to criticize, Kenneth to lament—the mysteries of planning permission or building regulations, the fad for Artex, the difficulty of removing stone cladding. Bay windows, rockeries, conservatories, the exotica of PVC apexes and dado rails and pelmets and the