Astonishing Splashes of Colour Read online

  Underneath the china shelves are bookshelves, which are completely inadequate. My books fill every blank space, pouring out of the shelves, creeping along the narrow hall in piles, spilling into the bathroom, sitting on top of the television, tottering off the top of the fridge.

  This is why I exist, to read books, children’s books. Not picture books, but stories for children who can read. I review them (I have impressive credentials: Adrian Wellington, the novelist, is my brother) in various newspapers and I read them for agents and the children’s library. I type out a two-page report or a one-page review, intended to be neat, but actually full of pencilled corrections and new, exciting thoughts which occur to me too late. I put it in an envelope, and then start on the next book.

  So this is my life. I sit or lie and read and read and read. My head is full of bullies, wicked stepfathers, catastrophes on Betelgeuse, successful mothers who leave fathers in charge of the children. Children who run away from home, children who live at the top of a tower block, children with no friends.

  But in the end—and I can’t help seeing this as failure—I am only a consumer. I eat up other people’s ideas and have no serious impact on anyone.

  Perhaps my mother was a consumer. Perhaps I am like her.

  MY FATHER BOUGHT 32 Tennyson Drive with money he had inherited after the war, when it was surrounded by similar houses. In the last thirty years, the others were first divided up into bedsits and then demolished. New houses have been built, neo-classical and detached, with double garages fronted by block-paving drives. Now number 32 doesn’t fit. It looks tired and dishevelled, the window frames rotting, the gutters rusting. A delinquent child, it exaggerates its failings in a bid for attention.

  My father sometimes talks about modernizing the house, but I don’t want any changes. It’s exactly right as it is—the place where my memories always end up. Every time I step through the front door, I am filled again with the experience of my brothers when they were big and I was small. Their willingness to play with me.

  We often played sardines, a version of hide and seek, where one person hides and everyone who finds him joins him, until there is one person searching alone. I remember hiding first, alone in a tin trunk where we kept dressing-up clothes. I could hear approaching footsteps, see a crack of light as Paul looked in. I crept into myself, stopped breathing, willed myself invisible.

  “No,” he called cheerfully to someone and I heard the footsteps move away.

  Then suddenly he was back, silent in his slippers, leaping in beside me and pulling the lid down carefully.

  But Jake returned, not fooled by Paul’s trick.

  We squeezed together in the darkness. I could hear Paul’s watch ticking—was he calculating even then, his mathematical brain analysing the odds of remaining hidden against the ticking away of the seconds? Jake was breathing through his mouth, his blocked-up nose whistling gently in time with a tune in his head. The dressing-up clothes smelled old and musty. They were all men’s clothes: velvet dinner jackets, tartan waistcoats, a spotty bow tie. How did we all get into that tiny space? It doesn’t seem possible now.

  Then there was dodgems, another version of hide and seek, where the one hiding keeps on the move, doubling back to occupy spaces already searched.

  Brushing through the cobwebs, we crawled under beds, inside wardrobes, crouched motionless on a high mantelpiece, hidden by the dingy gloom of forty-watt lightbulbs.

  There were so many hiding places, so many unused rooms. Furniture was piled redundantly into corners: wicker chairs, camp beds, chairs with holes instead of cushions to sit on. Cupboards were built into the walls, with crumbling plaster at the back, their doors hanging loose from broken hinges. There were huge cardboard boxes, trunks, piles of newspapers. We hid underneath tables, squeezed up against bare floorboards, mingled with the dust of generations.

  We discussed tactics. Adrian, of course, giving instructions: “Paul, start in the old bathroom. Kitty, go to the other end in the green toilet. Martin can try the bedrooms. If I stand here, I’ll see him move. He’ll have to come this way eventually.”

  The green toilet: dark with bottle-green lino curled at the edges. The walls were hidden by my father’s failed portraits. Eyes watched your every move, wherever you were in the room. Jake, small and slippery, moving rhythmically, sneaked out behind me. I heard the air move, the floorboards creak, and I missed him.

  “Adrian!” I shrieked. “He’s out, he’s coming your way.”

  He had us turning in circles, falling over each other, catching us out each time.

  But we cornered him, cut off his escape routes, and suddenly there he was, between us, trapped in the middle of an upstairs corridor. A last-minute leap to a landing halfway down a flight of stairs, but we jumped after him and caught him. We piled on top of each other, breathing heavily, the air full of sweat and dust, as we emerged from the half-lit secret places of the house.

  Sardines again. I was the last one, unable to find them, stumbling through empty corridors, an edge of panic working its way up from my legs. I thought they had all gone, and started to whimper, believing I’d been left to wander for ever alone.

  I tried to call them. “Jake. Where are you? Paul, I give up.”

  I stopped to listen. A creak, a moved foot, a stifled cough. The sounds came from nowhere and everywhere, memories of previous occupants, their silent traces drawn in the dust.

  And then I found them, my four brothers cramped up in the linen cupboard, standing on each other’s feet, cobwebs in their hair. I slid the door back and it jammed, but I had seen their shoes, the reflection of Martin’s eyes in the dark, the paleness of Adrian’s hand.

  “Found you!” I yelled. They all came tumbling out, and everything was all right.

  Do I remember this correctly? Did these brothers who were half men drag themselves away from their records and girlfriends and their cricket lists of England v. the Rest of the World to come and play with a little sister?

  Have I embroidered my memories? Perhaps the experience of one occasion has multiplied into dozens of new memories, each developing a life of its own.

  They live such respectable lives now. Adrian and Jake are both married, Adrian has children. Jake’s wife, Suzy, is a bank manager. You can’t get more respectable than that. It’s difficult to believe that they were ever boys, stalking each other through the endless spaces of our home, playing children’s games with such conviction.

  MY FATHER’S STUDIO is on the second floor, built into the eaves, with a huge window that looks out over the rooftops and treetops of Edgbaston.

  This is where I went to talk to him on the day, seven years ago, when I had committed myself to buying the flat. I was twenty-five; it was my first major decision. I should have told him earlier, but I knew he wouldn’t want me to go, so I kept putting it off, waiting for the right moment. I crept in and found him standing, half-facing his easel, working on another picture of the sea—a red fishing boat rocking up and down in the blue-green swell, a seagull perched on its prow, the boat straining against its anchor. He spent much of the time looking out of the window, apparently gaining inspiration from the Birmingham landscape, where the leaves became the sea and the magpies became seagulls.

  His paintings are full of colour. He can create Mediterranean light from memory—or possibly imagination, since he has not been there in my lifetime. With a sweep of the brush he produces palm trees, balconies, plants in terracotta pots, washing on a line, blue, waveless seas. Has he ever been there? I don’t know. If I ask him, his answers are vague; I’m never sure what he’s telling me. Perhaps he doesn’t need to have seen it. Maybe his head is so full of vivid colours that they just spill out of him, splashing down on the paper, jumping around until they settle, forming their own images and patterns.

  He started to teach me when I was three. He set up a small easel next to his, where I painfully tried to draw. I must have been a great disappointment to him.

  “Never mind the
shape, Kitty,” he said. “Throw on the paint, the colours, mix them up. Bold and strong.”

  I learned to love colour. Or maybe it was already programmed. A tiny genetic thread, a map guiding me down a certain road, the scenic route, handed down from him to me.

  On the day I went to tell him about the flat, I stood for a while, watching him paint. He wore a grey overall that was streaked with decades of paint, predominantly red. As far as I knew it had never been washed and probably never would be. It was a work of art in its own right. He wore, as always, a crimson bow tie underneath.

  “Kitty!” he said.

  He always did that. He knew I was there without looking.

  “How did you know it was me?” I asked.

  He turned around, peered at me over the top of his glasses and smiled. “Work it out for yourself.”

  I found this unsettling. He seemed to be suggesting that I knew the answer, but was too blind to see it. I hoped he meant that my silence wasn’t as effective as I thought. I didn’t like to think that he could just sense my presence, or hear my thoughts.

  “I brought you a cup of coffee,” I said, placing it on the window sill. I ran my hand over the red and black throw that Adrian’s wife, Lesley, had given him a few years ago to smarten up the sofa. He showed his contempt for this by using it as another convenient surface to wipe surplus paint off his brushes. There didn’t seem to be any wet patches, so I sat down cautiously, nursing my mug of coffee. I slipped off my shoes and drew my legs up underneath me, wriggling a bit to avoid the broken spring.

  He was muttering to himself all the time. “If you have a red boat, the red must be reflected into the sea. Can’t understand why people don’t see this. Think Turner, I say to them, he knew how to put in every colour in the world …” He was attacking a section of his sea, slapping on reds and purples and blacks and stirring them together. “No Swallows and Amazons today? Not flying off to Neverland?”

  “Don’t mock,” I said. “I don’t read them for pleasure.”

  “Rubbish,” he said. “You wouldn’t do it if you didn’t like it.”

  I took a sip of my coffee, burning my tongue. “When’s Martin due back?” I asked.

  He didn’t seem to be listening, absorbed once again by the contours of the red boat.

  “Tomorrow,” he said after a while. “He was hoping to catch an early ferry from Boulogne.”

  I was glad he would be back soon. I always missed him. Martin’s a safe person, with a slow careful manner that manages to soften my father’s edginess.

  “Bother,” said my father, throwing his paintbrush down on the floor. He picked up another, bigger brush and painted a wide black cross over the entire picture. “There,” he said and reached for his coffee.

  This used to alarm me. Many times when I was younger, I felt that it was me who had driven him to these acts of destruction. Now I knew it was all for show. He would paint it out tomorrow and the picture would become stronger, with more depth.

  Once a month, a man called Dennis comes and takes his pictures away. When I was little, I thought Dennis was stealing the pictures. I hated him coming, because I could feel the life draining away from my father, as if it was his blood going with Dennis. It always took several days for him to accept the loss. During that time, he would perform great feats of endurance—shopping, cooking in batches for the freezer, washing and ironing curtains. The house lost its neglected feel and started to shine with energy and polish. We all became sharper, funnier, more willing to help.

  Then, gradually, he’d be drawn back to the studio, spending longer and longer hours there while the house drowned in dust, we ran out of underwear and baked beans on toast became our daily meal.

  Now I know that Dennis is his agent. He sells my father’s paintings to restaurants, managers of large businesses, fast food outlets, libraries, schools. All over Britain, my father’s pictures look down on people and bring unexpected relief to their cold, grey world. Curiously, he only ever puts his signature on the back—Guy Wellington, large and ornate—and remains anonymous to the general public.

  He thinks he is a misunderstood genius, while Adrian thinks he has a mediocre talent, earning money but not acclaim. Paul, Martin and Jake refuse to comment, and I’m uncertain. My opinion seems to depend on my mood. There are flashes of brilliance, but at the same time, I can see evidence of his showmanship everywhere: flamboyance, exaggeration; ultimately a con trick.

  I took a breath. There was no easy way to say this. “I’ve found a flat,” I said.

  He didn’t react. But I watched his body tense and his breathing become even. His reaction was a carefully calculated non-reaction.

  “I thought I’d get Martin to move my things in his lorry.”

  “Bought or rented?” he said.

  I hesitated. It had taken me a long time to reach this decision. “Bought,” I said, and a wild exhilaration rushed through me. I’d done it, made an adult decision in an adult world. I’d filled out forms on my own, been to speak to my bank manager, to mortgage lenders, and made an informed decision, all without any help from my family.

  My father put the coffee down and went back to his painting. “Nice of you to let me know in advance,” he said quietly.

  “I wanted to make the decision on my own,” I said, a little too loudly. “I’m telling you now—you’re the first to know now that it’s definite. It’s not far from here. I can come and see you all the time.”

  “Oh no,” he said in a hard tight voice. “There wouldn’t be any point in moving if you did that.”

  I’d known he would be hurt. I wanted to go up and put my arms around him, but that wasn’t the way we behaved.

  He was stabbing at the painting. “Well,” he said, “you seem to have got it sorted. Congratulations.”

  I wanted to tell him that it was difficult for me too, that I knew he liked to have me around. “You keep me young,” he often said. But he was seventy, and I couldn’t keep him young for ever. I was unable to say any of this, because he wouldn’t hear the words. So it hung unsaid in the air between us. I wanted to put my hand out to break through its barrier, but I didn’t know how to. You can’t just start to communicate if you’ve never managed it before. Neither of us had the language.

  He was slapping huge wodges of red paint on to his picture—on the boat, in the sea, in the sky. I waited to see if he wanted to say anything else, but he didn’t, so I stood up, my legs trembling with uncertainty.

  “Yes, off you go,” he said viciously. “You’d better start packing.”

  “I won’t be far away,” I said again. “I’ll be back all the time.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said, and jabbed his paintbrush so hard it went through the canvas. He looked at it in surprise. “Now look what you’ve made me do,” he said and his face was genuinely puzzled.

  I knew it was not a major disaster—he worked fast and could easily reproduce the same work tomorrow—but I felt bad anyway as I slipped out of the room. I didn’t make him do that, I told myself firmly.

  As I climbed down the stairs to my bedroom, an idea came to me. I would ask for the painting later, when he had reproduced it, and hang it in my new living room, where the hole in the canvas would greet me every morning.

  In bed that night, I listened as my father clattered repeatedly up and down the stairs, watched the late-night film at full volume and threw books at the giant stuffed panda that stood in the corner of the living room. Paul had won the panda at the shooting gallery on the pier at Weston-Super-Mare three years ago, but his smart girlfriend of the time had not been interested in cuddly toys. The books were cookery books that my father kept buying and never consulted. I lay still in bed and pretended that I was asleep and didn’t care.

  Martin came home in time for breakfast, just as I was pouring the tea and my father was putting bread into the toaster. Our usual routine. Cornflakes on the table, fetch our own plates and cutlery, nothing to say to each other, because my father won’t talk in
the morning. I wondered if he would have breakfast at all after I left. Did he only do it for me?

  A shadow cut out the early sunshine for a few seconds; Martin was parking the lorry on the drive under the mulberry trees. I happily took another mug out of the cupboard. It had a picture of Winnie the Pooh clutching a large blue balloon that was floating into the sky. I’d bought it for Martin a few years ago, because there was something about Pooh Bear’s bewildered face—trying to remain unconcerned, but actually terrified—that reminded me of Martin. He was very fond of it. The handle had fallen off some time last year, and he was so upset that I stuck it back on again with Superglue.

  The front door opened and Martin ambled in, stopping to hang his anorak on the pegs behind the door and remove his shoes, replacing them with the ancient pair of sheepskin slippers that he seems to have worn for the whole of my life.

  “Morning,” he said with his usual amiable smile. “What’s for breakfast?”

  Neither of us answered because breakfast was always exactly the same.

  We sat down together, but didn’t speak. I might have talked, but my father’s early morning silence was too uncomfortable to break. Martin occasionally made a comment if there was a major disaster impending—”Why is the toast burning?” or “Why is there water dripping through the ceiling?” He was always ready to talk if anyone wanted him to, but no one ever responded.