Astonishing Splashes of Colour Page 11

  “I must get this next slab down,” he panted when I arrived unannounced. “So we can lay the turf tomorrow.”

  I watched from the kitchen window as he and Lesley heaved an enormous slab into position. I thought he would be the best person to tell me about Dinah, because he was closest in age.

  But when he came in, he was vague. “I don’t think about Dinah very often, I’m afraid. It’s so long since she went. I certainly didn’t miss her at the time.”

  “Jake says she was a bully.”

  He shrugged. “She didn’t bully me, but then she wouldn’t have, would she? I was bigger than her. There’s a photograph of her, in the sitting room, all of us together. Except you, of course.”

  “I know,” I said. Obviously. “Why aren’t there any others of Dinah?”

  “I think Dad threw them away when she left. He was angry.”

  “Was he angry with Mother too?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Well, there aren’t any photographs of her either, are there?”

  “Interesting thought.” He filled the kettle. “I suppose he was angry with her. Leaving him on his own to cope with four children.”

  “Five,” I said. He had forgotten me as a baby.

  He frowned, then nodded. “Five,” he agreed.

  “Why do you think she ran away?”

  “I suppose it seemed romantic at the time.”

  “Was she clever?”

  He looked surprised. “I don’t know. She may have been, I suppose.”

  He started to make the tea. “Look, I hardly remember her. When we were little, we played together, but it wasn’t very successful because we both wanted to be in charge. Then we had different friends and only met at mealtimes. When she got older, she shouted a lot, threw things around, and one day she left. She hung around with a group of dodgy people who had a van—you know, a motor-caravan—painted pink with distorted question marks all over it in lurid colours. Rather like Salvador Dalí—” The kettle boiled and he poured it into the teapot. “Kitty, what’s the matter?”

  I couldn’t think. My mind was racing. The question marks were green and yellow and orange and the colours went spiralling through the pink background as if they were snakes, huge and swollen and somehow disturbing. I knew the van that had taken Dinah away.

  I went home to find Martin, who was ironing his shirts.

  “Martin,” I said, perching on the arm of the sofa opposite the ironing board, “you know the van that Dinah went away in?”

  He nodded absentmindedly.

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Listen, Martin. I know it. I’ve actually seen it.”

  He smoothed a sleeve with his hand before ironing. “You can’t have, Kitty. You weren’t born when she left.”

  “I know, I know, but I’ve seen it.”

  He didn’t reply. He was guiding the iron between the buttons—very, very slowly.

  “Why do I know what it looks like, Martin?” I said miserably.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe you’ve seen one like it. Lots of people had vans then.”

  “Do you think they came back? Dinah and her friends?”

  He stopped ironing and looked at me closely, apparently thinking hard. But you can’t tell with Martin. Sometimes he’s not thinking at all. “No,” he said. “They didn’t come back.”

  He started on the collar.

  “Did she break your arm, Martin?”

  He looked puzzled, but continued ironing. “Who?”

  “Dinah. Jake says she did.”

  He looked at me again, vaguely puzzled. “Well, I did break my arm, but I can’t remember how it happened. We were playing, I think, on holiday near the sea, and I fell several feet off the cliff.”

  “Did she twist it—your arm?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know. I just remember that I had to go to hospital. Let me get on with this, Kitty. I’ll talk to you later.”

  But I didn’t go back. I wasn’t happy with my information. There was something about it all that made me uneasy. I wrote nothing in my exercise book. I kept thinking about the van, and each time I did, my stomach churned, I started to sweat and felt ill.

  These conversations took place a long time ago. What I really learned was not about Dinah, but about my brothers. They were completely isolated from each other—and still are. Families are supposed to have an inner closeness, a network of roots that go deep down into the soil and connect—a collective memory. What happened to the Wellington connection? Has someone dug down there below the soil with secateurs and snipped them all apart, so the plants on the surface grow independently of each other? Have they become so absorbed in their present lives that they have dismissed the past completely?

  Since then, I have learned to live with the image of the kaleidoscope van without becoming so agitated, and I have gradually allowed Dinah to exist in the same shadowy place that she is in for everybody else.

  IHAVE A BACKLOG OF BOOKS to work on, so I start at the top of the pile and read and read and read. I occasionally watch myself objectively, as if from the ceiling, and wonder why I can’t keep still. I’m on the move all the time, rolling over and leaning on alternate arms, sitting up, lying down, crouching, twisting, turning. Sometimes I read all night, typing up my comments as the early morning sun creeps bleakly into my cold sitting room. I don’t know the time, I don’t eat. Twice I sneak out in the late afternoon, furtively watching James’s door, afraid he will come out and we’ll have to talk. I post the completed manuscripts back with my pithy, authoritative comments, and I know it is not my opinions that come out, but some alter ego within me. An intellect without a body, a mind without emotion. Then I buy a loaf of bread from the corner shop and run back into my flat, grabbing the next manuscript from the shelf by the door and read walking around, eating bread and jam.

  A third time, I leave the flat on impulse, run down one flight of stairs and knock on Miss Newman’s door. As I stand there, I realize that I don’t know the time of day.

  The door opens and Miss Newman peers out. “Kitty,” she says, and she seems pleased to see me. “Come in.”

  I follow her into her flat, which is overflowing with pictures and ornaments that she’s collected over seventy-five years. The furniture is dark and heavy, there are twisted overgrown plants and thick curtains. An enormous wooden trunk stands in the hall, with figures of monkeys and exotic trees carved deeply into the dark, almost black wood.

  “It’s Indian,” she told me once. “I was born in India and lived there for many years.”

  I like to imagine her as a baby, waking and crying in the heat, a mosquito net round her bed, peacocks in the garden. She came home with the end of the Empire and never went back. She doesn’t put her Indian mementos out for inspection. She keeps them all in her trunk.

  “That trunk is very precious,” she says.

  I long to open the lid and look.

  I follow her into the kitchen. She is small and frail, her white hair thinning at the back, pink scalp showing through. It reminds me of a baby, and it surprises me to be confronted so graphically with the inevitable, circular shape of our lives. This baby must be travelling around with us, always there, lurking beneath the skin, biding its time, waiting to resurface. I would like to be a baby again. No more decisions, no need to go forward any more.

  She opens a cupboard and carefully removes two cups and saucers, which she places side by side on a tray, each with a silver teaspoon. The cups and saucers are made of wafer-thin bone china, vivid with flourishes of deep pink roses on a white background and edged with gold. They are very beautiful and I know she has a whole set. She always puts a milk jug and a sugar bowl on the tray even though I don’t take sugar: a social grace that she has brought with her from her prewar generation. She places everything on the tray very slowly and with great care. She treats the china with enormous respect.

  We go into her sitting room and she carries the tray because s
he is more careful than me. We sit opposite each other and smile.

  “There,” she says, “just a few minutes for the tea to brew.”

  She makes tea properly, warming the pot, using loose tea, not teabags, keeping it warm with a tea cosy. When she pours, the water comes out eagerly in a perfect light brown arc, and the sound of it filling the cup, gurgling gently, reminds me of something—my grandparents in Lyme Regis? breakfast with my father and Martin? It makes me want to cry.

  “I haven’t heard you much recently,” she says. She’s directly under James’s flat. I often wonder what she can hear.

  “No. We’ve both been working hard this week.”

  We smile at each other. She smiles like a child, tentatively, watching for my smile first.

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Reading.” She never believes me.

  “Well, how strange. When I was a girl, reading was considered to be a waste of time. ‘You’re squandering your life away,’ my mother used to say if she found me reading.”

  “It’s a good thing we’re more enlightened now.”

  For some reason, she finds this funny and we laugh together. We have this conversation every time. I know how it starts and I know how it finishes; the routine is reassuring.

  “Have some shortbread.” She hands me the plate with a doily on it and five pieces of shortbread arranged in a star shape. I take a piece and bite into it, waiting for her to start talking.

  She chatters without prompting. “We lived in the country, you know. Jack and I were courting just before he signed up. He wrote me some lovely letters—but not so many when he was flying. He was killing people, you see, and he didn’t like it very much. It upset him. He came home on leave once, and they had a dance in the village hall for him. There was a theme—Dancing for Victory—and my mum fixed me up in a Union Jack dress. She swapped thirty tomatoes from our allotment for some parachute silk, and we painted the dress with red and blue crosses. It rained on the way home and the colours ran, all down my legs. But it didn’t matter because I had danced with Jack. He didn’t talk much when he came back …”

  She’s like a tape recorder. You press “play” and everything starts to come out.

  “We knew how to enjoy ourselves then and we didn’t need much money. Nothing to spend it on. My Jack’s dead now, of course, shot down in the Battle of Britain.”

  She’s told me this before, many, many times, but I’ve recently realized that there’s something wrong. If she stayed in India until the end of the Empire, she can’t have been in England for the Battle of Britain. I went to the library and checked the dates in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I’ve tried to question her, to establish which event is truth and which fantasy. But she is convinced of both stories and she can produce the memories, the sights, the smells—they’re locked into her memory in cinematic detail.

  Miss Newman gets Jack’s photograph down from the wall and holds it, gaining comfort from the physical contact. Then she passes it to me.

  I look at the two of them together, each holding a bicycle, the two front wheels making a V-sign at the front of the picture. It’s impossible to tell where they are—just a road and some indistinct sepia bushes in the background. She shows me this photograph each time and I know every detail, but I still like to look again. There is something satisfying about a happy memory, when everything was bright and exciting. Somewhere you can retreat to, where you know nothing will change. A place of safety, where everything is certain, the details already mapped out.

  I look at Miss Newman now. She’s thin and shapeless, her skin drooping slackly over her elderly bones. She covers her shapelessness with a plain silk dress which drapes flatteringly downwards, covering most of her unused body, in sympathy with her deceptive vision of the past.

  In the photograph, she’s lovely. Young and sweet-faced, smooth, fresh. She is smiling, wearing lipstick, her curled hair clipped up; smart, but somehow innocent. I compare her image of today with the photograph of yesterday, straining to find a resemblance in the nose, the curl of the hair, the sparkle in the eye, but failing every time. I look at Jack and wonder if he was ever as she saw him.

  I hand the photograph back and she replaces it on the wall. “I was sorting through some old letters yesterday,” she says, “and I found the poetry that Jack wrote for me.”

  She pauses and I wait. We haven’t had this conversation before.

  “I don’t think I will show you, dear.” She lowers her eyes coyly. “It is too private to show anyone else.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “They didn’t all go up willingly in the Battle of Britain,” she says. “Jack told me that some of the young men had to be forced into their aeroplanes, crying. It wasn’t like the films.”

  I have heard this before.

  “Of course, Jack found it difficult too, but he followed orders. He knew where his duty lay.”

  I sometimes think she hesitates before she says it, as if she’s pushing away a darker, more truthful picture.

  “Such beautiful poetry,” she says.

  If Jack had lived, his patriotism might have turned to prejudice. He might spend his time at the golf club, drinking double whiskies, fighting a rearguard action against immigration, having affairs with a succession of secretaries, and she would be trying to stay cheerful, knowing all about his indiscretions. She’s better off with a memory.

  “Did he write many letters?” I ask.

  “Oh yes, dear. I kept everything. I’ve got a box full of Jack’s things—his medals, other photographs. His senior officer sent them to me when he died, because he left a letter telling them what to do with his private possessions. His parents were annoyed—they thought they should have them. But I didn’t give in to them. I knew his last thoughts would have been about me.” She folds her hands carefully on her lap and I catch a glimpse of that stubborn girl who wouldn’t give in.

  Jack’s life in a box, I think, and then something occurs to me. There could be a box with my mother’s life in it somewhere.

  Miss Newman talks on, but I’m no longer listening. Would my father really have destroyed all traces of my mother? Maybe he has more of her hidden away. There might be a box in the attic which would reconstruct her and tell me about her.

  “We never argued: there wasn’t time,” says Miss Newman. “Do you know, I remember more about that period of my life than the things I did yesterday. His mother was dying of cancer at the time, but she was still busy, organizing fêtes, running committees.”

  I make myself concentrate. I imagine the cake stalls in the garden, under the marquee, the committee meetings in the village hall, Jack’s mother smiling graciously as she bullied everyone into doing what she wanted. Miss Newman treasuring Jack’s medals, believing he thought only of her. Don’t men think of their mothers when they think they’re going to die?

  “They did a scan, you know. She had to lie very still and they pushed her through this machine while they looked at the pictures of her brain.”

  She’s gone wrong again. Muddling her own memories with Coronation Street or EastEnders. Perhaps none of her memories are correct. Does it matter if she weaves false memories with the true, embroidering the story, losing the thread in the middle, twisting it round in the wrong direction? Maybe all memories are like this, a core of truth, suffused with a golden glow, becoming more pleasurable the more they wander.

  I wait a bit longer and listen to her talking. When I finally remember to look at the clock on the mantelpiece, I see that it says 8:30. A strange time to be having tea and cake, whether it is morning or evening. “I have to get back,” I say. “I have so much to do.”

  She comes to the door with me. “It was lovely to see you, Kitty. Do come again.”

  “Thank you for the tea.”

  We walk into the hall, and I fight my usual desire to open the trunk and see all her Indian life packed away. As we stand there, she remembers something. “Wait a minute,” she says, and disappears abr
uptly into the kitchen. I hesitate for two seconds. Then I bend over and hastily lift the trunk lid—it is heavier than I expected—and shut it again immediately.

  It’s empty.

  Miss Newman comes back with a tidy parcel of shortbread in a paper napkin and presses it into my hand. “Something for later,” she says.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Now I know why she talks more about Jack and less about India. She has lost her memories of India.

  She stands at the door, watching me climb the stairs. “Goodbye, Kitty.” She is waving.

  I turn back and wave. I don’t call out in case James hears me and comes out.

  I find it difficult to settle after this. My mind, which has been leaping through the last few days, letting me read quickly and think analytically, has suddenly braked. I know why. It’s the thought of finding out more of my mother’s life. I like this idea of a person being contained in a box. Better than a few unidentifiable ashes in an urn. There are boxes and boxes of papers in the attic of Tennyson Drive, amongst forgotten furniture and spiders’ webs. I don’t like going up there, but I intend to try.

  I want to go immediately, but know I should slow down and approach it cautiously. I need a time when nobody is home, which is almost impossible. I need an excuse to go up there, but I can’t think of one.

  The doorbell rings and makes me jump. James waits all this time to speak to me and when he finally gets here, he rings the doorbell. He has a key. He can come in any time he wants to. I wish he would learn to be spontaneous.

  I open the door, and there he is looking foolish, holding a Tesco’s carrier bag.

  “You’ve got to go for your doctor’s appointment,” he says. “I thought we could eat together afterwards.”

  “What do you mean, I have to go? I thought it was we?”

  He coughs and looks at the floor. “I rang up and told them I won’t be coming.”

  Anger rises inside me, boiling up from my stomach and branching out in all directions, making my feet, my hands, the tip of my nose throb with the desire to scream at him. “She wants to see you too,” I say slowly, my voice shaking.