Astonishing Splashes of Colour Read online

  Her face loses all its colour, and the words that come out are tight and furious. “You are completely wrong. But even if you were right, what business is it of yours? Who do you think you are, coming here in the middle of the day, accusing me, refusing to leave, making a scene in front of everyone?” She’s pressing harder with the pen, moving it angrily, making vicious ridges in the paper.

  She’s admitting it. She’s angry because I’ve discovered the truth. “I can’t believe—” I say, and my voice is shaking, “I can’t believe that you could have had—” I can’t use the word. I don’t want it in my mouth.

  “Why is it such a terrible thing?” She spits the words out and uncrosses her legs with her frustration. She doesn’t look entirely at ease sitting there and I realize she must still be sore. “People have different opinions about that, don’t they? Otherwise it wouldn’t be legal. Who are you to say if it is right or wrong for me to have a baby? You live your life, I live mine. You like your job. I like mine. I’m good at it. I want to go on working. I already have a child at home. His name’s Jake and he needs a lot of my time and care. How dare you come here and make accusations you can’t back up and judgements about how I should live my life?”

  I watch her. She’s looking over my shoulder, as if there’s someone standing behind me. I think she’s holding back the tears.

  She takes a breath. “Look, Kitty,” she says more gently. “I’m sorry about—everything. I wish it hadn’t happened, but nothing I do is going to make any difference. I’d like to help you in some way, but I don’t know how.”

  I can’t speak to her any more. There’s a howling rage inside me which is unfamiliar and frightening. I want to leap up and grab her perfect hair, to pull at her professional suit and tear it apart, shake her and shake her for the terrible thing she’s done. I can’t look at her. My hands are trembling.

  “I think you should go now,” she says, standing up and opening the door.

  I follow her silently downstairs. At the bottom she opens the fire door and I go through. As I leave the bank, I see her going over to a man in a suit with a briefcase. “Mr. Woodall,” she says and holds her hand out to him. She looks utterly professional. Her smile is wide and welcoming, her voice warm. There are just two red spots on her cheeks to reveal that she might have been mildly unsettled by my appearance.

  I watch her and I know that I’m right.

  I ring James’s doorbell. I have a key, but I want him to know I’m coming.

  He opens the door as if he’s been expecting me. “We can’t see Jake and Suzy any more,” I say. “I’ve only got two brothers left.” I burst into tears. He leads me in and takes me to the bedroom. I lie down fully clothed. He takes off my shoes and puts the quilt over me, then he holds me for a long time. He doesn’t ask. He never asks. He just holds me. He’s a good man. If it wasn’t for me, he would be a wonderful husband.

  Nobody rings for the next two days. I stay in James’s bed and cry and cry for the baby that never had a chance. The baby that I could have had if they didn’t want it. It’s not fair, I keep thinking. It’s not fair. Sometimes James comes and sleeps with me. Sometimes he doesn’t. He occasionally brings me warm drinks and I swallow them eagerly, trying to get some of the warmth inside me. But it’s only temporary. I eat some of the food he brings me and leave the rest.

  “You must have the flu,” he says. “Should we go to the doctor’s?”

  “No. It’ll go on its own.”

  “OK,” he says. “But if it goes on longer than a week, you have to see a doctor.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Suzy doesn’t phone and Jake doesn’t phone to tell me off for upsetting her. So she hasn’t told him. Or she has told him and he too has a guilty conscience. Either way, I know I’m right.

  I stay with James for three days. On the fourth, I wake up in the early morning and my mind is clear, so I write a note. “Feeling better. Back to work. See you later for supper.” Then I leave him asleep and go home.

  I start work immediately, anxious to catch up with myself. A manuscript a day. My weekly newspaper review comes first—only just in time, as always. My thoughts leap ahead as I type out each report, so I have to keeping going back to make corrections. The future opens up with the prospect of reading, reading and reading. Adrian and Lesley, Jake and Suzy, they’re behind me, drifting further away by the second. Maybe I’ll never see any of them again. Maybe I don’t want to. They don’t need me—I certainly don’t need them. If I want to make contact with my family, I can go and see Martin and Paul and my father. No problems there with sisters-in-law. We are the same as we always were—just a bit older.

  The phone rings and I am surprised to hear Martin on the other end. He seldom uses the phone.

  “I’m going to Exmouth tomorrow.” His voice is slightly too soft, as if it has slipped back down his throat, searching for security in his comfortable centre. I have to strain to hear him.

  “Can you talk a bit louder?” I shout. “I can hardly hear you.”

  There is a pause. I wait for him to register my comment and to think about it. His telephone conversations are always like this.

  “I thought you might want to come with me,” he says, without changing his volume.

  “Would we have time to go to Lyme Regis to see Granny and Grandpa?”

  A long silence. You can’t rush him.

  “So is that yes or no?” he says.

  “Well, it depends. I’d like to go and see Granny and Grandpa,

  but …” I’m working well. If I keep going like this for two more days, I’ll have cleared my backlog. Caroline is on the phone twice a week. I really shouldn’t miss any more time.

  “I was going to stay the night—maybe two. You could spend the day on the beach, or go to see Granny and Grandpa.” Is he answering my question about Lyme Regis, or does he think he’s just thought of it?

  “I’m tempted.”

  “Have you been to Exmouth?”

  “Yes,” I say. “You’ve taken me there a few times.” Has he forgotten that Dad met Mother in Exmouth?

  “Oh, have I?” He pauses again. “So do you want to come?”

  I think of James. I don’t want to go off and leave him behind. I don’t want to stop working. “No, I don’t think so. I have too much to do.”

  “All right then.”

  “It was nice of you to ask.”

  “Yes,” he says. He always sounds exactly the same, never disappointed. He lets the world fall into place around him, and he doesn’t seem to realize that he could change anything. When the genes were divided between Martin and Jake, they went in opposite directions and there was no overlapping of the central characteristics, no compromise in the middle. They’ve nothing in common but their birth date. Jake has told me they couldn’t even play together as children, because they had no connection. He says he’s never felt as if he were a twin. He would be more convinced if his other half hadn’t survived.

  “I’ll come another time.”

  “OK,” he says. “Bye, Kitty.”

  “Bye, Martin. Thanks for …” My voice trails off as he puts the phone down.

  I go back to my reading. Evacuees today. Yesterday it was occupied France. My mind is full of bombs and Nazis and scattered

  families. The children’s library is going to do an exhibition on the Second World War. It’s part of the national curriculum. They want me to compile a recommended reading list.

  As I read, I think about my father and his mysterious medals. He’s never told me about his life during the war. He spends so much of his time talking that he never really says anything. I sometimes think that what I see isn’t real. He throbs with rich vibrant red, but red is only a colour and you need a surface to paint it on. Where is the surface?

  I work solidly for two more days and then decide it’s safe for me to go out. Martin will be in Exmouth by now. I think of him walking along the seafront, visiting Granny and Grandpa, and I’m jealous. I decide to visi
t my father.

  I check with James on my way out. He’s working hard. He doesn’t want to talk to me because his thoughts are following clean, logical paths.

  “Do you want me to get any shopping?” I suggest, because I can see he’s only half listening.

  He looks past me as if I am not there. “I don’t know—bread, I suppose. Maybe some apples …” But he’s not interested.

  “I’m going out,” I say. “I may be some time.”

  He smiles briefly and accepts a kiss on his nose. Today I’m in control and he’s not quite awake. This makes me feel good. “I’m going to see Dr. Cross,” I say. “Want to come?”

  He looks vague. “No, I don’t think so. See you later.”

  Before I leave the room, his thoughts are back with his programs. His fingers chase each other over the keys, rapid but accurate. He seldom needs to correct. His fingers and his brain move along parallel lines. His work is as immaculate as his flat.

  I don’t mind. I’m not threatened by his intimacy with a computer.

  The house is silent when I arrive, but Dad’s car is parked in the drive. The garden is empty, the kitchen abandoned, with dishes piled up precariously, waiting to be put into the dishwasher, so I know he must be painting. I make him some coffee and carry it up to his studio, creeping up the stairs. I want to surprise him. I always want to surprise him.

  I find him painting an enormous picture of a beach. “Buckets, spades, sand, deckchairs, sandcastles, shells, seaweed, sand, waves, rubber rings, ice-creams, flip-flops, blanket, sunglasses, sand, shingle—”

  I discovered recently that you can buy books of lists. My father has missed a golden opportunity.

  “Sand, beach balls, sandwiches, swimming costumes, sand—Kitty!”

  I stop. He’s done it again. “How did you know I was here?”

  He grins and looks pleased with himself. “I can sense your presence, that’s all.” He takes his mug of coffee and looks at me over the top of his glasses. “Are you speaking to Adrian and Lesley again?”

  “I never stopped talking to them.” I don’t tell him about Jake and Suzy. He doesn’t know about their baby. There are only three people in the whole world (except the anonymous doctors) who knew about the baby. And once memory starts to malfunction, the baby will cease to exist. A non-event.

  “I want to know about the war, Dad.”

  He sips his coffee and watches me through the steam. “Everybody has an opinion about the war,” he says. “It was a world event. There are thousands of books, thousands of writers making money out of it. Go and ask them.”

  “I’m reading the books,” I say. “That’s what I’ve been doing in the past week. I just—” I sit down on the sofa. “I would just like to hear your version.”

  He picks up a thin paintbrush and moves it delicately, marking tiny blue shadows on a little boy’s face. “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “How do you know? You should pass on your memories, otherwise they’ll all disappear when you die.”

  “Mmm. Nice to know you have me dead and buried.”

  “That’s not what I said.” I try not to get irritated. “But you can leave something of yourself behind if you want to—a way of continuing. You can’t just disown the memories you don’t like.” I think of Miss Newman. She should have told someone earlier, when she could get it right. Then the memories would have been sorted out properly, and won’t disappear into a puff of smoke at the crematorium.

  “I will leave something behind—my paintings.”

  “Not the war,” I say. “You don’t paint the war.”

  “I hate the sea,” he says, slapping red and purple into his apparently calm sea.

  This takes me by surprise. He has such fond memories of meeting my mother in the sea. Almost every picture he has ever painted has been of the sea.

  “Well,” he says, as if he has heard my thoughts. “OK. I’ll tell you about the war, or the sea, or both, I suppose. I’ve parachuted into the sea in the middle of the night, and I can tell you, it’s a lonely place to be.” He looks past me, suddenly urgent. I turn round to see what he’s looking at, but there is nothing there except the door. This is a dramatic device. He’s pretending to look into himself, to relive his experience for my benefit. Why don’t I believe in this?

  “My crew went down with the Lancaster. They slipped through the waves and never came back up.” As the plane slips into the sea, his right hand dives smoothly downwards, fingers first. “I was absolutely alone in those few dark silent minutes as I floated down. You see things differently after an experience like that.”

  I have a suspicion that he’s enjoying himself. In the few dark silent minutes, he stops pacing and his voice drops. He leaves short gaps between each word for emphasis. I try to look impressed.

  He studies his painting, but possibly only for show. He steps backwards, leans forwards and peers. The picture is enormous, with detail everywhere—a departure from his usual practice of concentrating on a small object or space. He waves his paintbrush vaguely, moves to add some colour, but finally doesn’t. He’s pretending to be emotional, I realize.

  “Some memories are best forgotten. We all change. The man I was then is nothing like the man I am now.”

  “No problem,” I say. “You might have been nicer when you were younger.” He might have been the kind of man who would show respect to his future son-in-law.

  He’s looking out of the window at the treetops. You can see my flat from here. “They called me Boots. Wing Commander Boots Wellington.”

  I’m not sure if he is expecting me to laugh, so I half smile and watch his reaction. He ignores me.

  “We dropped bombs on Germany.”

  I’m surprised. I’ve always seen him as a fighter pilot, another Miss Newman’s Jack.

  “Everybody thought it was a pretty good idea at the time. Dresden, Berlin, Munich, they were just names to us—points on a map. We chucked the bombs down and got out as soon as possible.”

  “Did you know you were killing people—women and children?”

  “Well, of course we did. That’s what bombs do. What did they expect us to do? Send a message that we were coming, so they could all get away?”

  Does he feel guilty? Is that why he’s never talked about it before?

  “The life expectancy of a bomber crew was very short. Some of them went out on their first operation and never came back. They either crashed or ditched into the sea.”

  The Dambusters—Richard Todd leading his men on a suicide mission. Twelve O’Clock High—Gregory Peck counting the returning planes. My father is seeing his life through a black and white lens.

  I notice a baby on the edge of his picture. He’s crawling towards the side, as if he wants to escape. His family haven’t noticed. They’re all looking at the man selling ice creams. It reminds me of Brueghel—Icarus splashing into the sea, while everyone else is getting on with their lives.

  “We came down in the end, just like everyone else, hit by shrapnel on the way out. We dropped our bombs short of the target and turned round. Only four of us were left alive—two badly wounded.” His voice is speeding up with the action. “There was petrol everywhere, washing round the floor—could have been blood too, I suppose. Anyway, something kept banging into my leg while I tried to control the plane. I put my hand down to see what it was, and it was wet and sticky and warm. I picked it up and it was a severed hand. The glove was still on it.” He holds his hand dramatically in front of his face and studies it gravely for several seconds, as if he is searching for the right words. “I didn’t even know who it belonged to.” He says this casually, like an afterthought, but I feel that none of this is spontaneous. It’s been worked on.

  “Well,” I say, “can I assume it wasn’t yours?”

  He ignores me. “We were obviously going down. I told everyone to get out, then I scrambled on to a wing and jumped. My parachute opened almost immediately, but it was too dark even to see the plane hit the water. Just a loud
bang, a roaring of water, and then nothing. I couldn’t see any other parachutes. I couldn’t see anything. I was the only one to get out.”

  “What about the moon?” I say.

  He looks confused. “What moon?”

  “The moon in the sky. You can usually see something by the light of the moon.”

  He stops as if he’s examining a picture inside his mind, then shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. “Maybe there was a new moon—or it was cloudy.”

  “Was the sea rough?”

  He stops again. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  “So how were you rescued?”

  “The navy fished me out at first light. There were no other survivors.”

  He stops for a long time, still with his back to me.

  “So why didn’t you tell me all this before?” I say. “It’s a good story.”

  He turns and looks at me sharply. “Don’t mock, Kitty.”

  Thousands of people died in the fire bombs of Berlin. An aeroplane crew fell into the sea, and my father couldn’t save them. Nobody would have noticed the bomber going down. There were too many other deaths to worry about.

  “The sea is a very lonely place in the middle of the night. Huge and threatening and without horizons. I hate it.”

  “But you spend all your time painting it.”

  “Yes.” He sighs, a long, slow, exhausted sigh. “Well—I feel as if I lost something that night. I keep thinking, if I try again, paint the sea from a different angle, a different colour, a different mood, I’ll find what I’ve lost.” He sighs again. “It never works.”

  He won’t look at me, and I suddenly know that this is the truth. Somewhere in amongst all that drama, he has told me something private and true. “Did you go straight back to dropping bombs on Germany with another crew?” I ask.

  “No. I had a leg wound. By the time it was patched up and functional, the war was all over. They gave me some medals and I took them, but I never wore them.” He seems to be saying, it’s not his fault. He wasn’t responsible for any of it: the war, the bombing, the death of his crew. I feel a rush of understanding for him.