Astonishing Splashes of Colour Read online

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” says the stewardess.

  “We need to get off,” I say, and smile pleasantly as I discover that I can be articulate in the middle of James’s crisis.

  The man studies us. “I’m your pilot,” he says. He is fiddling with the banana skin, not knowing what to do with it. He almost slips it into his pocket, but stops himself and apparently considers just dropping it on the floor.

  “Let us off,” says James, his voice hard with anger.

  Two identical men emerge from the passenger cabin. They’re smartly dressed, very tall, very wide, very alarming. “Do you need any help?” says one of them.

  The pilot looks as taken aback as I am. “No,” he says. “I think we can cope.” He hesitates. “Thank you.”

  The men look at each other. “Well, if you need us, we’re sitting at the back.”

  “Who are they?” says the pilot.

  “No idea,” says the stewardess. She relaxes for a second, and James pushes himself to the door, his foot outstretched to reach the movable steps.

  “Please can we get off?” I say.

  “You can’t leave,” she says. “You have to stay with your luggage.”

  “That’s all right,” I say. “I’ve got it here.”

  “It’ll be in the hold now,” says the pilot, easing himself gently between James and the exit.

  “We didn’t have any big luggage,” I say.

  The stewardess looks at the pilot. “Check,” he says. “On the computer.”

  “Maitland,” I say. “James and Katherine.”

  She disappears. James stands next to me, silent and rigid.

  The stewardess returns. “There isn’t any luggage,” she says. She looks at the pilot. He hesitates, then nods.

  “Let them go,” he says and moves aside. James runs down the steps.

  I start to follow him, but the pilot catches my arm and pulls me close to him. “They do courses,” he whispers in my ear. “You have to confront the fear.”

  I pull away from him.

  The stewardess leans forward. I try not to look at her gaping blouse. “Have you tried yoga?” she says. “I hear it’s very good.”

  I fight a terrible urge to giggle, waves of laughter working their way from my stomach upwards. “It’s all right,” I say. “He has a heart condition.” My voice is shaking with the suppressed laughter.

  The stewardess steps away from me and looks offended. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It would have helped if we’d had prior notice.”

  “That’s all right,” I say, and I’m running down the steps to where James is waiting. As we stand isolated, on the edge of the runway, looking for a passing bus, the engines start on the aeroplane. We cling to each other in alarm and the noise becomes deafening. A bus stops in front of us. We climb on and join a group of Japanese tourists who have just landed.

  “Is this Toronto?” a man asks us.

  “No,” I say worriedly.

  “Oh good,” he says, getting a French phrase book out of his pocket. He starts to read, turning the pages faster and faster.

  James’s tightness seems to be dissipating now that we are off the aeroplane. “I’m sorry,” he says at last. “I couldn’t do it.”

  “You should have told me you were afraid.”

  “I know.” A huge sadness settles over him. “I messed it up, didn’t I?”

  I put my arm through his. “Let’s have some breakfast.”

  The Japanese remain on the bus when we get off, and continue towards their unknown destination. In a café, we order croissants and rolls and jam and coffee. We eat in silence for a while and I think about our empty seats flying across the Atlantic without us.

  “Do you think those men were gangsters?” says James, taking a second croissant. “Twin gangsters.”

  “I don’t think the pilot believed in them.”

  He looks at me and we both start to giggle. “Well,” I say, “he was our pilot, so he should know.”

  James wipes the tears from his eyes, and then starts to laugh again. “Did you see—?” He has to stop to try and control his voice.

  “The bra?” I say. “I hope she realizes sooner rather than later.”

  We gradually calm down and the giggles subside. “What are we going to tell people when they find we haven’t gone away at all?”

  “Do we have to tell them?”

  I think of my father splashing paint on to his canvas, not really noticing if we’re there or not; Paul, looking at us cynically, finding the whole situation hilarious; Adrian trying to make us understand that it was inevitable. “No,” I say. “Let’s not tell them.”

  “We don’t have to go back home,” says James. “We could stay in London instead.”

  So that’s what we do. We buy clothes and books and suitcases to put them in, and then find a hotel. We go to the Planetarium, Madame Tussaud’s, the British Museum; a tour of London on an open-topped bus and a river trip up the Thames. Photographs by the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, postcards which we send to ourselves at home. We’re like children again, doing all the treats, having fun in a way that you forget once you’re an adult.

  And every night before we go to bed, we talk. James talks about his fear of flying. “I thought I could do it with you there.”

  I’ve never before understood that I too can be needed and wanted. I’ve been the youngest child for so long that I’ve never seen myself in any other way. I like this new role.

  We nearly talk about the baby. But we don’t—not quite.

  Then, after a week, we go home.

  We decide to live in the same flat for a while, to bring back with us some of the fun we had in London.

  We both try. I cook, James washes up. Then he cooks and I wash up except I don’t do it carefully enough and he does it all again, wiping up immediately and organizing the china in the cupboard so that it looks like an illustration in a catalogue. The china belongs to us both, a wedding present from his parents. Royal Doulton. Delicate, fragile bone china, white with red and gold round the edges. It fits well into James’s flat where it can sit untroubled by nightmares of breakage.

  I try to stack my books neatly. He tries to scatter his disks carelessly on the coffee table, but even his random patterns are calculated. I have discovered that there is shape, an order in everything he does, so that when he picks them back up again, he knows immediately where they all are.

  Then, one evening, he gets up and fiddles with the curtains that I have just drawn. They don’t quite meet in the middle. He has to open the curtains and close them again, so that they hang symmetrically.

  I watch him and a great pain opens up inside me. I get up, gathering all my books and papers in a pile. He watches me without a word.

  “I think I’ll go home for a bit,” I say.

  He nods and walks with me to the door, picking up the pencils as I drop them. I look at him, his bouncy hair and his carefully composed face, and wonder if he feels as desolate as I do.

  4

  feeding the rhododendrons

  Now that I am home, surrounded by my own silence, I can wander through the muddle of my life without trying so hard to produce a pleasing image of myself for James.

  Whenever I’m on my own like this, I like to think about Dinah, my sister. She’s fifteen years older than me, and doesn’t even know of my existence. She ran away with the raggle-taggle gypsies.

  I wonder if she left because she needed to make her own space. Like me leaving my father, and then not moving in with James.

  Am I like her? Does she ever wish she could come home? It’s even harder to find pictures of her than of my mother. There is just one—of all the children except me, because I hadn’t been born. On the back of the frame it says SUMMER 1963 in a clear round handwriting that I believe is my mother’s. The children are listed with their ages. Five children. And then she had me. She must have loved children.

  I know this photograph by heart. The
three younger children are sitting on chairs at the front with Dinah and Adrian standing behind. It’s rather formal. Jake, Martin and Paul have been placed close together, leaning against each other, tense with the touching they’ve been forced to endure. Jake and Martin are ten, and put next to each other because they are twins, although you would never know this. Martin is already much bigger than he should be at ten, and you can see the muscles in his arms and the slightly confused expression he still has today.

  Jake looks like a little gnome. His face is delicately and artistically structured, framed with large, sticking-out ears, and his dark eyes stare away from the photographer, slightly feverish. He must be in the middle of a cold as he has a shiny nose.

  Paul, at eight, looks healthy, and older than Jake. There is no sign of his domed forehead, or all those brains that are meant to be inside. He doesn’t look clever at all. I think the photographer made a mistake and thought that Martin and Paul were the twins, and Jake the youngest. That’s why he’s arranged them on either side of Jake—for symmetry.

  Behind, Adrian at twelve looks serious. He didn’t have glasses then, and his face looks naked without their intellectual frame. He could afford contact lenses now, but presumably he prefers to cultivate the practical, sensible look that comes from wearing glasses. He has his right hand on the inside shoulder of Paul.

  Dinah stands next to him, and she ought to have her left hand on Martin’s shoulder. But she doesn’t, and it’s that one act of rebellion that fascinates me.

  The boys look connected, related, by the physical contact between them. And because of this connection, you can see the family resemblance too—the slightly long noses, olive skin, the tilt of the mouth to one side and the very slightly cleft chin.

  Dinah doesn’t belong to them. She is standing slightly back from the others, so there is space round her, and she stares directly into the camera. She’s fourteen, two years older than Adrian, and there’s an independent look about her. She knows who she is, what she wants, and she won’t be pushed into anything. I think often of her two hands hanging down by her sides, of the distance between her and the boys, and I realize that she is stronger and cleverer than all of them, because she makes no concessions. She won’t pretend to be what she is not.

  When I was fourteen, the same age as Dinah in the photograph, I decided that I needed to know more about her. I wrote DINAH on the cover of an exercise book in big black letters and underneath, in brackets: (PRIVATE. DO NOT OPEN).

  I went to my father first. He was painting at the time, of course, but when I mentioned Dinah, he stopped abruptly and scratched his head. “Did someone speak?” he said.

  I realized I’d chosen a bad day. He didn’t always like being interrupted. “Nobody ever tells me anything,” I said.

  He started painting again, without turning around. “Dinah? Wasn’t that Alice in Wonderland’s cat? Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?”

  I tried again. “Dad, what really happened to her?”

  He ignored the question. “There is a clear cat connection here. Cat, kittens, Kitty.”

  I rose to my feet. “Thanks a lot,” I said and slammed the door.

  I went back to my room and opened the first page of my exercise book. At the top of the page, I had written “Dad.” I found a pencil and put a diagonal line across the page.

  Jake was in bed with tonsillitis. I ran down the road to buy him a newspaper and some sweets. Sherbet lemons. Pineapple chunks.

  “Hello,” I said, putting the newspaper on the bed beside his mound of bedclothes, and went to open the curtains. “It’s too dark in here,” I said loudly, as if he would pay more attention to me if I raised my voice.

  He rolled over and sat up, narrowing his eyes against the sudden light. The room smelled of dirty socks and sweat. I felt threatened by his germs and opened the window to give them a chance to escape.

  “Kitty,” he muttered. “Shut the window. I’m ill.”

  “You’re always ill,” I said, and left the window open.

  I moved a chair to the bed, but not too close, then sat and looked at him. “I’m conducting an investigation,” I said.

  He looked interested. “What into?” His black hair was greasy and lank, making his ears even more prominent than usual. His nose was red and sore, his cheeks flushed.

  “Have you been taking the antibiotics?” I asked.

  He nodded. “What are you investigating? The effectiveness of antibiotics? Don’t bother. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. What more is there to know?”

  I ignored him, crossed my legs and opened my exercise book. I picked up my pencil and sat poised, rather as I thought a journalist should look. “Dinah,” I said.

  “Dinah? You’re asking me about Dinah?” he said, looking baffled.

  “I want you to tell me about her.”

  He lay back and looked at the ceiling. “I don’t know anything about her.”

  I could see he was just being lazy. “You were twelve when she ran away. You must remember something about her.”

  “She was a bully,” he said eventually, and smiled with a peculiar satisfaction.

  I was taken aback by this. I had an image of her in my mind: strong, fearless, daring, but not selfish in her superiority. I saw her as higher than her brothers, cleverer than them, but guiding them occasionally out of kindness.

  “She used to pick legs off spiders.”

  I relaxed. Being a bully to spiders is not a desirable quality, but it’s not as bad as bullying people.

  “On a Saturday when we bought our sweets, she would wait until we got home and tell me to give her half of my sweets.”

  I waited. “Did you do it?”

  “Of course I did. Wouldn’t you give all your sweets to someone who pulls your arm behind your back and promises to break it if you don’t give in? I was a musician. I couldn’t take any chances.”

  I looked at him with contempt. She only bullied him because he let her. “She was only bluffing,” I said. “She wouldn’t have really done it.”

  His eyes slid past me and over to the open windows. “She would have,” he said. “She did it to Martin.”

  Now I knew he was making it all up. Martin must have been the same size as her and much stronger. But Jake looked awkward and I didn’t think he’d respond well to further interrogation. I looked out of the window at the mulberry trees where the fruit was ripening into a deep black-red. We should keep silkworms, I thought: there are enough mulberry leaves to feed an army of them. We could make a fortune. “Why did she go?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “How should I know? Her friends were more interesting than us.” He smiled tiredly. “She was probably right. Life was much easier after she left.” He shut his eyes and sank down on his pillows. “Do you mind, Kitty? I feel awfully tired.”

  I stared at my empty book and wondered what I should write. The investigation wasn’t proving very productive. I went to the door.

  “Thanks for the paper,” Jake said behind me, but I didn’t acknowledge him. This small glimpse of his vulnerability, his fear of Dinah, made me uncomfortable.

  I found Paul at his desk. I think he was working for a Ph.D. at the time. Every time I saw him, he walked with a curious swagger, as if his mind were elsewhere, and he talked in monosyllables. There weren’t many girlfriends during this period.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hi,” he said but didn’t look up from his work.

  “I wanted to ask you—” I was a little nervous of him.

  “Yes?” He wrote down more figures.

  “About Dinah.”

  He looked up while still writing. “Diana? I went out with her for a bit—last year.” His pen slipped slightly and I was worried that I’d distracted him and made his calculations go wrong.

  “Not Diana. Dinah.” I was getting fed up with everyone’s inability to remember her. “Your sister.”

  “Oh,” he said and wrote down “5?n(x—4y).” “She left years ago.�
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  “Exactly,” I said. “You knew her. I didn’t. She’s my sister too, you know.”

  “Mmm.” He frowned and it wasn’t clear if he was frowning at me, at Dinah, or at his work. “Well, I didn’t really know her. She was much older than me.”

  “Of course you did. She didn’t leave until you were nine.”

  He sat back. “That’s true. But I didn’t have a lot to do with her.”

  “Jake says she was a bully.”

  “Did he? I don’t remember.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Of course she might have been and I didn’t know. Don’t forget, six years is a very big age-gap when you’re nine. She had her own friends, and went off with them in the end.”

  “Gypsies,” I said confidently.

  “No, I don’t think so. What makes you think that?”

  I didn’t know. I just thought it was gypsies. “Where did she go then?”

  “She went off with a group of hippies—into free love, I think. They had long hair and beads and didn’t wear shoes. I imagine they went to live in a commune.”

  “What’s a commune?”

  “You know, everyone living together and sharing everything, sex mainly. I shouldn’t think it lasted very long.”

  “Why didn’t she come home then?”

  “I rather think Dad told her never to return.”

  This was beginning to get interesting. I liked the idea of Dad standing on the doorstep, raising his arm in anger and shouting, “Never darken my doorstep again.”

  Paul picked up his pencil again. “I have work to do.”

  “But what was she like?”

  “Like? What do you mean? She was just there and then she wasn’t. It was more peaceful after she left.”

  I felt somehow that Paul knew more but wasn’t going to tell me. I suppose it had been a difficult time when Dinah left. I was born, and mother died—big changes in a short space of time.

  Adrian wasn’t much more help. He had recently married Lesley, and they spent all their spare time doing DIY, first in the house, then the garden.