Astonishing Splashes of Colour Read online

  I look at the back of my father’s head and see that he’s an old man. He must be nearly the same age as Miss Newman. Why have I never seen that before? His hair has gone grey without my noticing. His shoulders are more bent than I remember. As he turns back to the painting, I see that his paintbrush is trembling very slightly.

  “I don’t paint hands,” he says.

  I drink my coffee. He studies his picture carefully, as if looking for something to criticize.

  “I like the crawling baby,” I say.

  He doesn’t hear me. “That’s all,” he says. “Nothing really.”

  He hasn’t told me much, I realize. Just a story that must have been heard in thousands of homes, dramatized in hundreds of films. A story he’s been telling for fifty years inside his head, over and over again, neatening it, tidying it up, making it concise.

  “I must get back,” I say and wait to see if he’ll turn round.

  He starts to mix colours together on his palette, squeezing and stirring angrily.

  I pause at the door, but he’s painting again and acts as if I’ve already gone. He is hurling paint on to the canvas, swirling it around in the sea. I’m sure that the baby has crawled further out than before.

  “Crabs,” he says. “Sand, tides, currents, rocks, jelly fish …”

  As I walk down the stairs, I see that there is crimson paint on my skirt. I should have checked before sitting down.

  I tell Dr. Cross about my conversation with my father.

  “Does it worry you?” she says, knowing that it does.

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have pressed him.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Well, he may not want to look me in the eye again. That bit about the sea—I think he was being honest, which isn’t normal for him. He paints pictures when he’s talking—so you never really know what he thinks.”

  “Ring him up in a few days’ time,” she says, “and have something casual ready to say.”

  I nod. Maybe we can both pass it by.

  “How do you feel about Jake and Suzy’s baby?” she says.

  “I don’t know.” And this is the odd thing. I can’t think about it properly any more. It’s as if it never happened.

  “Have you tried talking to them?”

  I shake my head. I don’t want to talk to them now.

  My father tells me something true, possibly for the first time in his life, and Miss Newman tells me her memories. I think I should be more honest, so I tell Dr. Cross about my yellow period. I hadn’t intended to when I came into her room. If I’d thought about it in advance, I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words.

  She sits quietly and listens. “Thank you for telling me, Kitty,” she says.

  I stand up to go, feeling clumsy and awkward, like a small child.

  “Don’t forget to make an appointment for next week,” she says. She doesn’t smile as I go. She looks thoughtful.

  I run home. All the way. I feel as if things have shifted slightly, as if I’m not quite going down the same inevitable road. Something is different. I rush in because I want to go and talk to James, drag him away from his work.

  The phone is ringing as I come into the flat. I pick it up.

  “Kitty, this is Dad.”

  That was quick, I think. I haven’t had time to think of something casual to say.

  “Martin’s just phoned. Granny and Grandpa Harrison have died.”

  6

  locks

  I throw some clothes into a suitcase, and James carries it for me on the bus to New Street Station. He’d like to come with me, but I want to go on my own. The rest of the family will come later for the funeral. Granny and Grandpa knew me properly, whereas they were a bit muddled about my brothers.

  Granny cooked proper meals, and we would all three sit round their dining-room table and eat lamb chops and mint sauce, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, pork and apple sauce, in an agreeable silence. They liked me to come. Granny would air the bed for me, putting hot water bottles between the sheets; there was always a vase of fresh flowers from the garden on my bedside table. Primroses and grape hyacinths, roses, marigolds, winter jasmine—something for every season. They would leave the window open a crack—”to blow away the cobwebs”—and put glossy magazines they’d bought for me on the window seat: Cosmopolitan, Elle, She. I hoped they didn’t read them after I’d gone. I didn’t want them to know about what was happening in the world.

  I stopped going to see them after the baby. They didn’t write or telephone. I knew they would just be waiting for me to come, happy to see me if I turned up unannounced. I imagined them airing the bed regularly, waiting, knowing I would come eventually.

  Martin meets me at the station in a taxi. We climb in and I study his face, wanting to know how he was affected by finding them dead. He looks the same as always.

  “I had to break the door down,” he says. “I thought they were out, so I went for a walk along the Cob. I had fish and chips and watched the sea.”

  “They’re never out.” I say. “They can’t walk far enough.”

  We drive along the narrow lanes and I strain to see the view over the hedgerows. When we meet a car coming the other way, it has to reverse to the nearest lay-by. Our taxi driver makes no concessions.

  “I thought they might have gone shopping,” says Martin.

  “They don’t go shopping,” I say. “A neighbour does it for them. Neither of them can walk properly.” That was three years ago. The neighbour might have moved away or died. A small hard knot of guilt settles in my stomach.

  “I came back the next morning, and one of their neighbours turned up as I was ringing the bell. She said she hadn’t seen them for over a week.”

  “Was that Betty?” I say anxiously.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “She was upset.”

  She usually goes in every day. What had gone wrong?

  “I’ve never broken a door down before,” says Martin. I look at his huge hands in his lap, one white, one brown, and I’m glad that he’s a gentle man.

  “Was it difficult?”

  “Yes,” he says after a pause. “Not like on the telly. I had to go round the back.”

  I think of their locks. A Yale lock, a mortise lock, two large bolts and a chain on the front door. They were proud of their door chain, because a policeman had suggested it when he came round to advise them on security.

  Grandpa had been delighted. “We don’t have to open the door to anyone now if we don’t want to,” he said and laughed, slapping his leg. He showed me how the chain was fixed. “Two-inch screws into the frame of the door. No one’s going to break that in a hurry.”

  I admired the efficiency.

  “Try it, Kitty. Look, I’ll go outside and you use the chain.”

  So he went outside, leaning on the door frame to support his weakened legs, while I locked the door and put on the chain. He rang the doorbell. I opened the door and peered through the gap.

  “Who is it?” I said in a doddery voice.

  “Double glazing,” he said.

  “No thank you,” I said and shut the door.

  When I opened the door to let him in, he was almost bent double with laughing. I led him to his chair in the lounge.

  “Mrs. Harrison,” he shouted between his wheezes of laughter. “We need a cup of tea.”

  Granny brought in the tea and a plate of chocolate biscuits. She winked at me over Grandpa’s bald head. “Mr. Harrison loves his locks,” she said. “Always did.”

  “That’s right,” he says. “I’ve always loved locks.”

  So they had locks on their windows, the back door, the shed door and the back gate. Granny and Grandpa were frail and vulnerable, but they were never burgled. Even the burglars knew it wasn’t worth trying. Grandpa used to go round and check all the locks once a month. I think he would have liked a burglar to try—so he could congratulate himself on his locks.

  “They were dead in bed together,” says Martin
.

  I try to imagine them side by side, dying together.

  “There’s got to be a postmortem before we can arrange the funeral. Suspicious circumstances.”

  I can’t see why it’s suspicious. They should be allowed to die together if that’s what they wanted.

  We go in through the back door, which is secured with a padlock and chain because the original locks are too badly damaged. I’m impressed by Martin’s strength.

  Nothing has changed. The house smells nearly the same as it always did—shoe polish, roast potatoes, ironing. It feels old and creaky. I can feel the slow movements of old people around me. There is a new, sickly smell coming from the kitchen, so I go to have a look. The yellow tops are bare, as clean as ever. On the table two places are laid for breakfast. The blue and white striped cups and saucers sit waiting for coffee. The matching milk jug is there in the middle, a hard yellow crust formed where the milk should be. The knives and forks and spoons gleam warmly. Granny always polished them after washing up.

  “I like a good shine on my cutlery,” she used to say. “People don’t bother nowadays. But I do. I like to see my face in it.”

  I remember picking up a spoon and trying to see my face in it. I couldn’t understand why it was upside down. “That’s a test to see if you’re a good girl,” said Grandpa. I soon discovered that I was the right way up on the other side and wondered why they hadn’t explained it in more detail. I worried if I was good or bad.

  On top of the cooker there are two plates, with bacon, egg, beans, sausage and fried bread arranged carefully, in exactly the same way on each plate. The eggs’ centres have sunk and congealed, grey mould has appeared on the fried bread and the shrivelled sausage, the beans sit solidly in their tomato sauce that has hardened and cracked.

  Martin sees me looking. “I didn’t like to throw it away,” he says. “I thought it might help us work out what happened. Evidence.”

  I don’t want to throw it away either, despite the smell. It seems so typical of their life together. Mrs. Harrison in the kitchen, Mr. Harrison watching the telly. A picture of a life that doesn’t exist any more. A generation that saw the beginning of the century and survived two world wars.

  I go to look in the bedroom where Martin found them. The bedcovers have been pulled back and you can see the imprint of their two bodies lying side by side, two hollows that represent over seventy years on the same bed. You can see which side Grandpa slept in—he was heavier than Granny. I should have encouraged them to buy a new bed years ago.

  Granny’s hairbrush and comb lie neatly on the dressing table—wooden handles with inlaid mother-of-pearl. I used to play with them when I was little, tracing the patterns with my finger, stroking the smoothness of the wood. There’s a lace cloth on the dressing table and a three-way mirror where you can see yourself watching yourself.

  On Grandpa’s bedside table there’s a book about gardening, although he had to abandon the roses in his last few years. There is also a tea-maker, which they saw as a life-changing invention. When I stayed with them, I could hear it boiling up at six o’clock every morning.

  “Have a good lie-in,” said Granny. “Don’t get up when we do. We’re older than you. We need less sleep.”

  But I woke anyway, when the tea-maker started to gurgle and hiss as the water came to the boil. Then I waited for Grandpa to get out of bed at 6:15. I heard the tea being poured out, comfortable and satisfying, and I heard the clink of china as he passed a cup and saucer to Granny. They would have whispered conversations and I could catch isolated words. ”—Margaret—dahlias— rain—Kitty—” After a while, I’d turn over and go back to sleep, soothed by their predictability.

  Granny’s bedside table has the clock, a reading lamp and her glasses.

  For as long as I’ve known her, she’s been trying to read Jane Eyre. I used to watch her as she read. Every now and again, she would turn a page, sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards, and I saw that her eyes weren’t moving. She wasn’t reading it. Perhaps she couldn’t read at all, but gained some restful moments of peace without having to justify her inactivity.

  I find Jane Eyre fallen to the floor, and the two cups and saucers on the window sill, still stained by the last drops of tea. They drank their tea before they died, but didn’t make it to breakfast.

  There’s a wedding photograph of them both on the wall. Black and white, both of them rigidly upright, a crack across one corner of the glass. Two fresh young people—not like Granny and Grandpa at all. He’s handsome and looks like Adrian in the picture, although I was never able to see the resemblance in real life. She’s tall, black-haired and a bit like me now. Neither of them is much like Margaret, my mother. I examine the photograph and long to know what was in their heads when it was being taken. They seem so—young. Unmarked.

  “They were dressed,” said Martin. “It was very strange. Both in bed with their clothes on, but covered by the blankets.”

  I try not to see their old bodies lying side by side on the bed that they bought when they were first married, dressed in clothes that had never changed in style for all my life. A knee-length skirt in mottled green Crimplene, polyester pinstripe trousers and an Aran jumper.

  Martin and I sleep in the lorry. We neither of us feel able to sleep in the house, because we feel it doesn’t belong to us.

  During the day, I go through their lives. Piles and piles of old bills going back to the thirties: letters, cinema tickets, premium bonds, things they didn’t want to throw away. A pile of cards from their golden wedding anniversary, wedding presents they had never used—a tablecloth of Irish linen, still in its original wrapping, a box of sherry glasses that has never been opened.

  Each time I sort through a drawer, there are more things to remind me of them. I have to cry a little before I probe into each new compartment of their life. I feel I owe it to them. I can’t just throw things away without a struggle, but we fill black bag after black bag.

  “What do we do about the furniture?” I ask Martin.

  He shrugs. “I suppose we see if anyone wants any of it and then sell it to one of these house-clearing firms.”

  I want it all. How can I let any of it go to a stranger? Every item of dark, heavy, cumbersome furniture is precious. It bears the handprints of all those years, polished by Granny’s busy hands, sat upon by Grandpa every day of his adult life, opened and shut daily throughout their quiet old age. If it’s sold in an auction, it’ll be stripped down, painted, varnished, years of familiarity rubbed away by harsh chemicals.

  On the second day, the police arrive. I invite them in, a sergeant in uniform and a policewoman, and we stand awkwardly in Granny and Grandpa’s sitting room.

  “We have the results of the postmortem,” says the sergeant. “Could we sit down?”

  “Of course,” says Martin, and we perch on the edge of the furniture, unable to make ourselves at home.

  “It seems that she died first. She had a massive heart attack ten days ago. He died about eight hours later, also of a heart attack.”

  “But why didn’t he ring for an ambulance when Granny had the heart attack?”

  The policeman clears his throat. “Well—we think that they both got up in the morning and drank their morning tea. Then she dressed and went to make breakfast while he shaved. She felt ill and came back to the bedroom where she was hit by the heart attack. He got her into bed, and then … We think he lay down beside her and waited to die.”

  I look at them. “You mean he wanted to die with her?”

  The policewoman nodded. “They were very frail, weren’t they? He must have been dependent on her.”

  I remember two cats that a schoolfriend once had. One of them had to be put down by the vet and the next day the other one was found dead in her bed.

  “It’s not particularly unusual with the very elderly,” says the policeman. “They lose the will to live without each other.”

  I look out of the window at the distant sea. There are s
everal sailing dinghies out in the morning sun, their different-coloured sails scattered gaily amongst the sparkling waves, forming a pattern in their randomness. I suddenly, desperately, long for James.

  We arrange the funeral for five days later. Martin has to go home until then, to finish off his work contracts. I move into the house, taking over my old bed, where I always slept when I came to visit. The sheets and pillowcases are in a linen-press in the hall. It’s so neat—not neat like James’s obsessive tidiness, but neat and cared for. I can see Granny’s old, bent hands folding slowly and carefully, smoothing the fabric down with every fold, taking pleasure in her role as a housekeeper, a carer.

  I phone James every evening, so that I’m not alone too often. We have long talks, better on the phone than in real life. I tell him about staying in Granny’s house. “They’re here with me,” I say. “I can’t imagine anyone else living in the house.” New owners, who would breathe their air, walk over their dust that has drifted down into the floorboards. They would dig Grandpa’s garden, plant their own plants in soil enriched by Grandpa’s compost.

  James finds our separation difficult. “Shall I come down early, Kitty, before the funeral?” He’s more lonely than me. He has days, even weeks on his own when we’re both working hard, but he can’t cope with the distance. He feels that the length of string that binds us together is stretched too tightly. He’s afraid it might break.

  “Don’t come down yet, James,” I say. “Come the day before the funeral.” I want him to come now, to be here with me, but I need time on my own to think. I need to remember Grandpa and Granny properly in case I forget later on.

  James phones up over and over again. “Where did you put my red tie, the one with Bugs Bunny on it?”

  “How long should I leave the fish in the oven?” He rings me? He’s the one with the cookery books.

  “Should I cancel your doctor’s appointment?”

  “Yes, please. Unless you want to go instead.”

  “No—I don’t think so. I’ll just cancel it, I think.”