Astonishing Splashes of Colour Read online

  I realize that I could spend hours sorting through these letters and getting nowhere, so I shove them back into their boxes with the bills. Why does he keep them? What’s the point?

  I look in another box and find more letters, bills, receipts, invoices, my father’s records of all his early paintings and the people who bought them.

  What I am looking for is photographs. I want to see my mother when she was older, when she had me. I’m desperate to see myself as a baby being held by my mother.

  I finally find a box of photographs and sift through them quickly. All the school photographs are here, including some of Dinah, who I recognize from her clear, forthright gaze; and even some of me. There are countless pictures of babies, chuckling, sleeping, crying babies. There are babies in prams, in cots, in high chairs, babies on laps, on shoulders, where the one holding the baby is hidden and anonymous, so that only a fold of dress is showing or a hand hiding coyly behind the baby’s shawl. It’s impossible to know who is who.

  I pick one out and study it. The baby is very young, sitting propped up by a cushion covered with a lacy shawl, but slipping sideways, so her head is at a slightly uncomfortable angle, and there is a beaming smile on her face, rather as if she knows she can’t sit up much longer, but will go on being happy until the last possible moment. A hand is just visible on the edge of the picture, hovering, waiting to save her. It’s the photograph of a baby who knows that her mother is close by, who smiles at her mother’s voice, waiting to be picked up. She has dark curly hair springing carelessly from her head. I want this baby to be me.

  I eventually look on the back and see what I had missed the first time. Printed in faded lilac ink: “Adrian 1951.”

  I put the photograph away quickly and leaf through the piles in another box. I soon realize that although these date from before my mother’s death, I’m not there, and neither is my mother. I rush through piles and piles of them and they are all the same. Just the boys as children, and Dinah. Why is my mother not here? It’s almost as if she’s not real, as if she never existed. Why am I not here? I search ever more frantically and find nothing.

  As time passes, the light of my torch becomes yellower and less certain. I turn it off for a few seconds and listen. I can’t hear the mower anymore, but I can’t hear anything else either. The loft is as silent as the photographs. It has nothing to say.

  In the dim light from the loft entrance, I start to return the photographs to their boxes, trying to make neat piles at first, but then not bothering because it takes too long. I shovel them all up and stuff them in wherever there is a space.

  There are plenty more boxes up here, gathering dust on their inaccurate memories, but I am convinced that my mother isn’t here. It’s as if, when she died, she took everything of herself with her. As if she knew in advance and sorted through her personal life, destroying all the evidence of her existence. She seems to have disappeared, suddenly and completely, and there is not even a hole where she was because she’s bricked up the entrance.

  I stand up awkwardly and find I have pins and needles in my left foot. I shake it, hanging on to a beam, until it’s ready to work again. I switch on my torch and the black cavernous space shrinks behind my immediate surroundings, where boxes and joists brighten into cartoon shapes, too bold and angular to be real.

  Weighed down by a curious, heavy exhaustion, I pick my way back across the joists. I have no idea how long I have been up here. It feels as if I have been on a trip to Narnia, filled with snow and the adventures of thirty years, while the world outside has blinked for a few seconds and then carried on in a normal way, bright and light and real.

  I listen at the loft entrance before lowering the ladder. I can hear nothing, so I gently ease it down to the floor and climb down.

  “Kitty!”

  I nearly pass out with shock and then realize it’s Paul again. “Will you stop doing that?”

  He helps me fold the ladder and store it behind the mattress in the spare room. “Find anything?”

  I shake my head. “You’d think she never existed.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “You might have said so.”

  “Not really. You needed to find out for yourself.”

  “How long have I been up there?”

  He looks at his watch. “A couple of hours, I would think.” He leads me down the stairs. “Come and have a coffee.”

  I follow him, confused by his friendliness. It’s not normal. Maybe he’s run out of girlfriends. Maybe I am being given a glimpse of the mysterious charm that attracts the girlfriends in the first place.

  I watch him make coffee, putting the kettle on the old Aga, rooting around in the cupboard for clean mugs.

  “You seem very cheerful,” I say.

  He looks at me in surprise. “Do I? Oh, sorry.”

  He starts to pour coffee granules into the mugs because he can’t find any spoons. “I knew you wouldn’t find anything in the attic. After Mummy died, Dad took all her clothes, photographs, letters into the garden and had a huge bonfire. It lasted all day. He rushed backwards and forwards with armfuls of stuff, shouting to himself, dancing round the bonfire for hours until it all died down. We stayed in the house watching bits of ash shooting off into the sky, settling all over the garden. I think he took the ashes a few days later and dug them into the soil round the rhododendrons.”

  Feeding the plants with my mother’s memories. I’ll never look at the rhododendrons in the same way again. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  He pours water from the kettle into the mugs, his face away from me. “I wasn’t sure you wanted to know.”

  “Did you go to the funeral? Did he dig in Mother’s ashes as well as her things?”

  Paul hesitates, holding the kettle over the mugs, but no longer pouring. “There wasn’t a funeral,” he says. “Or if there was, we didn’t go. We weren’t told.”

  I look at his back and see in his rigidity a great sadness, an incomplete grief.

  “Nobody ever told me that,” I say in amazement. They all knew there hadn’t been a funeral and no one has thought to mention it.

  My father comes bursting in through the kitchen door, smelling of freshly mown grass, his crimson bow-tie crooked, grass stains on his shirt.

  “Kitty! Why didn’t you tell me you were here?”

  “Just in time for coffee,” I say, searching for another clean mug to give to Paul.

  But when I turn around, Paul is gone and he has left the two mugs of coffee on the edge of the Aga, steam rising from them and circling in the dusty, empty air.

  IWONDER HOW SOMEONE as small as Dr. Cross could help me. Surely, there won’t be enough of her to go round. She has short hair, soft and feathered, and it makes her look somehow fragile. What if she doesn’t survive, if she’s too gentle for today’s world, if she can’t go on being there?

  My appointment is for twenty minutes—she always tells me to book a double appointment. When I am sitting with her, my mind slows down and I start to think properly. Sometimes we say almost nothing, but when I get up to leave, everything seems slightly easier, less muddled. I wonder why I stopped going to see her before.

  “Suzy’s going to have a baby,” I say.

  “I thought there was some doubt about this.”

  “Oh no. She’s definitely pregnant. I expect she’ll tell everyone soon and they’ll all start knitting.”

  I’m not sure who will start knitting. There aren’t enough women in our family to care for babies. I bend down to my bag and pull out a ball of wool. “Look. I bought cream. Then it doesn’t matter if it’s a boy or girl.”

  “Which would you prefer? A nephew or another niece?”

  A niece, I think. “A nephew,” I say. All the babies related to me should be girls.

  “Do you do much knitting?”

  “Occasionally,” I say. Actually, I can’t knit. There was never anybody to teach me. I just saw the pattern in the window of a local shop and
bought it. The wool is a baby colour—warm, creamy, rich. I’ll teach myself to knit because of this wool. Sometimes I put my hand secretly into my bag and feel it, smoothing my fingers along the folded strands, touching the living, throbbing colour. When I’m on my own, I take the wool out and hold it to my face to smell its newness and feel its texture with my lips, the part of me that can pick up the baby softness with most accuracy.

  “What does James think about Suzy’s baby?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t believe me when I told him.”

  “Do you tell him what we talk about?”

  I look at her in surprise. “No. I don’t think he’d be interested.” I never offer him information—his refusal to ask is his way of being supportive.

  She says nothing and we sit quietly.

  “It’s a bit peculiar, isn’t it?” I say. “I don’t suppose you know many married couples who live next door to each other.” I’ve probably said this to her before, but I can’t remember her response.

  “Does it matter?” she says. “Does it make your relationship any less valid?”

  I let the wool drop into my lap. “Don’t you think it’s a bit—unethical to have two homes?”

  “People live temporarily apart from each other for all sorts of reasons—jobs, family obligations. Things still work if you want them to.”

  I need to think about this. I’ve always assumed that married people shouldn’t be next-door neighbours. Most couples I know blend and merge when they marry, take each other’s colours and become stronger. Like Adrian and Lesley, who are always apparently in harmony. Or Jake and Suzy. James and I don’t seem to have worked out how to do that permanently, so our colours only combine for short periods of time, then easily divide back into two halves which exist next door to each other.

  I walk home quickly. We’re expecting James’s parents for supper and Adrian said he would bring round his latest book, the autobiographical one, that might tell me something about our mother. He always gives me a copy as soon as he gets them, because I’m his little sister. The others have to go and buy their copies from a bookshop so that he can earn royalties. I’m the only one who will definitely read it and give a considered opinion. Martin will try, but he finds reading laborious and probably won’t finish it, although he’ll never admit this. He carries each book round in his lorry for about six months and then it mysteriously disappears.

  Paul might read it so that he can offer criticism, which is usually brutal and possibly a little spiteful. I think Adrian accepts his comments with good grace, but pays little attention to them. Jake and Suzy read the books because they feel they should, but they don’t realize that they could read them on a deeper level. Suzy takes things too literally—she is, after all, committed to mortgages, investments and insurance policies—and can’t see the point of fiction. Jake says he doesn’t have time for reading, but he’ll try to read his brother’s books if nothing else. This means he has nothing to compare them with. They’re just isolated periods of escapism in his largely aural world.

  Lesley reads them, of course. But since Adrian dedicates every book to her—in different words each time—she doesn’t really have an option.

  My father never reads books, not even the cookery books he keeps buying. He doesn’t pretend to. “Waste of time making up stories while the world gets on with living,” he says. “Much too time-consuming. If you like a work of art, you stop and look for—what?—ten minutes maximum. A symphony takes an hour, a piano sonata half an hour. Think how much you can see and hear in the time you give to a book.”

  Adrian doesn’t argue. He says it’s not important. “If Dad never reads any books, he’s not singling out mine for special criticism, is he?”

  He said this to me a long time ago and I thought he was happy about it, but he still offers each book to Dad. Not personally—he leaves it on the hall table, or on the stairs leading up to Dad’s studio, or in the glove compartment in Dad’s car. They remain untouched for weeks until Adrian removes them in such an unobtrusive way that it takes me some time to realize they are no longer there.

  “Why bother?” I asked him once. “You know he’s not going to read it.”

  He shrugged. “He might change his mind. I like to give him the chance.”

  Does he secretly long for his father’s approval? I watch him and wonder if all this mature, eldest brother act, encased and sellotaped down by responsible, diplomatic manoeuvring, is hiding an uglier, more private bruising. The child who lost his mother without saying goodbye, and would like his father to be proud of him.

  I let myself into James’s flat and find Adrian’s book waiting for me on the hall table. The picture on the front cover looks vaguely familiar—four boys and a girl looking solemnly outwards—and, after a few seconds, I recognize the grouping from the photograph in the living room. It’s not the actual photograph, but it’s very much like it. The girl stands behind independently, like Dinah, and there’s a circle round the boy who’s in exactly the same position as Adrian in the photograph. The title is written in big purple letters: Lost Boys by Adrian Wellington.

  I open the book and the newness of the pages breathes out at me. I would always have books around me even if I were blind. I need the smell.

  “Kitty!” calls James and comes into the hall. “Oh yes, Adrian dropped it in.”

  James will read it after me. Carefully and precisely—he’ll have opinions that differ from mine. We’ll argue about it.

  “Don’t forget my parents are here for supper,” he says quietly, and leads me into the lounge. Since the wedding he’s bought a

  white leather sofa so that he can entertain more than one person, although he never does unless his parents come, which is rare. By his standards, the room looks cluttered with the four of us and the sofa.

  His parents are sitting opposite each other in the single chairs, sipping sherry. They rise as we come in, holding their glasses, because James has inexplicably removed the table, and his mother, Alison, moves towards me in an attempt to kiss my cheek. Her lips just miss, gliding smoothly past me, as usual, but at least we make a pretence at being civilized. His father, Jeremy, hovers in the background and smiles benevolently. He is a good-looking man with the same physical ingredients as James, more aesthetically distributed. He’s tall and symmetrical. “Looking well, Kitty,” he says. He always says this. He doesn’t cope easily with illness, unless it’s one he can operate on. Then he can move in smoothly and professionally and take over. There was nothing he could do when Henry died, so he moved back a step and smiled. He couldn’t sew my womb back in again, or mend the baby. He was no use at all.

  We sit down and James goes back to the kitchen to see to the supper.

  “So how are you, Kitty?” says Alison.

  “Fine,” I say. “Fine.”

  She tries very hard. She has no daughters—only me, a daughter-in-law—and she wants us to be friends. “I see Adrian has a new book out.”

  “Yes,” I say and show her the book. I would prefer not to give it to her until I have leafed through it, because I like the sense of the book being fresh and untouched when I read it. But she has stretched out her hand and I have to pass it over. They’re impressed by Adrian. He is my passport to acceptability, my only relative they’re proud to know. They find the rest of my family bewildering, but are reassured by Adrian’s sense of responsibility,

  his reliability, his success.

  “I’ve read the review in the Times,” she says. “They seem to think he’s scaled new heights.”

  “Good,” I say, annoyed that it’s been read by a reviewer before me. Why has he been so slow in giving me my copy?

  “I’ll buy one tomorrow,” she says, handing mine back. “If I drop it in, you will ask Adrian to sign it, won’t you?”

  “Of course.” They think of it as an investment, in case he dies young, or he becomes great instead of just good. A signed first edition might be quite valuable in twenty or thirty years’ time.
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br />   “We’re ready to eat if you are,” says James, coming into the lounge, his hair springy and defensive. He tries so hard to please them.

  “How nicely you keep the flat,” says Alison, with an admiring glance round James’s immaculate kitchen.

  “Thank you,” I say. James has never told them that I live next door. They must think I just go there to work. They see James and me together in his flat and think we are perfectly suited. The same taste, the same high standard of hygiene.

  James has cooked coq au vin. We sit in his shiny kitchen, waiting obediently while he pulls dishes out of the oven and places them in front of us. He used to ask me to pretend that I had cooked the meal, but I made such a mess of the pretending that we gave up. Now everyone knows that James cooks and cleans while I read.

  We murmur politely as we help ourselves and James sorts out the wine. I watch him. What I want to know is, why did he learn to cook before he met me? Who was he feeding and trying to impress? He must have practised on someone to be as good as he is now. He denies it. “I just follow recipes,” he says. “Anyone could do it.” He’s never yet admitted to a previous girlfriend, but I can’t resist asking at odd moments.

  “So how was New York?” says Alison once we are all served.

  “Wonderful,” James and I say almost together, urgent and desperate to prove we were really there.

  “Good,” says Alison, and we lapse into silence.

  For some reason—and I don’t know what that reason is—I find it difficult to make conversation with James’s parents. Nothing seems to lead us into a discussion.

  “Have you been watching the tennis?” James asks his father after a few seconds.

  Jeremy nods and drops a slice of courgette off his fork as he raises it to his mouth. He puts the empty fork into his mouth and looks slightly bewildered when he can’t find anything to chew. He brings the fork down to the plate and tries again. “We’ve been playing a lot recently—in between the showers,” he says. There’s a tennis court in their garden and they always dress in white to play, even when there’s no one to see them.