Astonishing Splashes of Colour Read online

  “She would say that, though, wouldn’t she?”

  Martin stands beside us, looking awkward. “I think I’ll go and sit in my truck,” he says.

  “What if she wants to speak to you?” I say.

  “Tough.”

  “We’ll come and fetch you if she asks for you,” says James.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  He walks away from us, head down against the wind, shoulders broad and somehow closed, locked on the inside.

  We make our way slowly back to the bungalow. “Apparently,” says James, “it wasn’t just your father. Something to do with Dinah. All the rows they were having, and then Dinah leaving. She disappeared, she said, and they had no idea where she’d gone. She says everything just fell apart after that. She thought she was no good for her children, that you would be better off without her.”

  “So she had a breakdown. Why didn’t she come back later, when she got over it?”

  “I think she’d had enough of Angela and Philippa and Lucia and the rest.”

  “But what about us?” I say. “Why didn’t she come back for us?”

  “Maybe your father’s right and she was an alcoholic. Maybe she couldn’t cope.”

  I picture my father burning everything connected with my mother’s life, scattering the ashes on the rhododendrons, and I see that his anger then was greater and possibly more justified than I’d realized. I see him painting in the attic, slapping on the paint, crimson, full of energy. “Kitty!” he says, as I creep up silently. Always welcoming, always pleased to see me—and all the time he’s been telling me lies.

  “Regardless of whether he was right or not,” says James, putting an arm round me and guiding me in the right direction, “your father was trying to protect you. He stayed, she didn’t.”

  “But was he to blame for it all?”

  James hesitates. “If she really wanted you, she would have found a way. She knew where you were. She could have made contact with you any time she wanted. She chose not to.”

  He’s right. She can’t just appear thirty years later and say it was my father’s fault. She is, after all, our mother. I feel a silence begin to take shape inside me, settling coldly, soft and unstoppable as snow.

  “Do the others admit she drank?”

  “No one’s saying. They don’t seem sure.”

  I start to shiver. James stops, takes off his jacket, then puts it round me. He won’t get too wet. It’s only drizzling now. I slip my arms into the sleeves, which are too short, and smell his warm familiar smell of deodorant, computers, wooden floors, cleanness. I wrap it round me tightly, but I still shiver.

  “Actually,” says James, “you can’t entirely blame her, can you? Who could live with your father and remain sane?”

  I suspect he might be secretly pleased that my father’s world has fallen apart. This is what happens if someone is perpetually ignored. It takes away their objectivity.

  Dinah and Margaret and their rows. How do you get to that stage of noncommunication with your child? Does it inch up on you, your voices rising a little more every day? Or does it jump out suddenly, and there you are, angry without any warning? Is it inevitable or avoidable?

  How would I know?

  The bungalow looks innocent from outside. It’s too precise, too normal to contain all the emotions that are bubbling away inside, all that anger—just a tiny desolate house for two old people. Grandpa’s roses in the front garden have become bushy and neglected and many of the petals have fallen in the heavy rain. It’s a garden that needs attention. They had a gardener once a week for the last three years, but it wasn’t the same. Weeds amongst the roses, moss and daisies in the lawn. There used to be clusters of yellow-orange stones edging the flower beds, lifted from Chesil beach when Granny and Grandpa were younger and had a car. Now they lie haphazardly over the path and rose beds.

  I might never see the house again, I think with a jolt. It will all be divided up, sold and scattered.

  We pause outside the front door and look at each other.

  “Never mind,” says James. “The worst is over. The next thirty years should be more predictable.”

  No such complications for James and me.

  AS WE COME BACK INTO THE ROOM, I look at Margaret—my mother. I try this in my head. Hello, Mother, I’m Kitty. I turn towards her, ready to identify myself, ready to call her Mother. But as I look at her, I see a strange blankness in her. She doesn’t glow, sparkle, reflect colour from anyone else. She has no colour. She’s not a mixture, a combination of colours, a half-colour; not pastel, not bright, not dark, not light. Is this what happened to her thirty years ago? Did my father wipe her out? Perhaps she has to be angry to stop herself from disappearing.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” my father is saying. “Are you seriously suggesting that I got up early every day for the past thirty years, so I could sort through the post and remove anything written in your handwriting?”

  “Yes,” she says, almost spitting at him.

  I slip down on the sofa, anxious not to disturb anyone’s thoughts. I keep James’s jacket on, even though it’s warm inside, because I feel comfortable in it. It might shield me from the next round of accusations that will, inevitably, start flying about the room again. James hovers over the table and comes to sit next to me with a plateful of ham sandwiches and slices of ginger cake.

  “As if I’d bother—”

  “Of course you would—you always wanted to come between me and the children.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “What about that time I said they couldn’t climb the cliffs on holiday?”

  My father looks bemused. “What are you on about?”

  “You know. You just wanted to undermine me, appear as the benevolent father—”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  Jake and Suzy come out of the kitchen with a trayful of cups of tea. Jake is strangely calm. I know he’s good in a crisis, but this is an exceptionally big crisis and he doesn’t even look flushed. Only a few coughs or sneezes. “You’ll probably be ill tomorrow,” I say to him.

  “Did you find Martin?”

  “Yes,” says James. “But he doesn’t want to come back for the time being. He’s decided to retire to his truck.”

  I would like a truck, I think. Somewhere to go when things get difficult.

  Suzy is handing out the cups. James and I both take one and avoid looking at her directly. We seem to have come a long way since the pregnancy issue, but as far as I’m concerned, all the resurrected mothers in the world don’t cancel out a dead baby.

  Jake and Suzy sit down at the table. “Have a cup of tea,” Suzy says to Margaret.

  Margaret looks at her suspiciously. I can see her thinking, “Who are you? Are you Kitty, or someone’s wife?” I wish she’d say it out loud.

  “Why turn up now, after all this time?” says Paul angrily. “Wouldn’t it have been better to have left us with the fictional version?”

  If you don’t know the truth, but you think you do, it’s not so bad. Your truth will do. We believed she was dead. Was it fair of her to come back? Who does it benefit? Her or us?

  Margaret reaches over and takes an egg sandwich from a nearby plate. She eats it greedily, as if she’s ravenously hungry, and won’t catch anyone’s eye. “I didn’t realize you thought I was dead. I thought you’d all rejected me,” she says, and her voice is harsh and high-pitched again.

  But she was an adult and we were children. We didn’t know how to think.

  “Adrian invited me,” says Margaret. “They were my parents, after all. Why shouldn’t I come to my parents’ funeral?”

  “But you let them believe you were dead,” says Paul.

  “No, I didn’t,” she says. “I often talked to them on the telephone.”

  I stare at her. This can’t be true. Granny or Grandpa would have told me. They looked after me for years of holidays. Grandpa would have slipped it in with the locks. “Can’t lo
ck your mother out, can we?” he’d have said, chuckling away. Granny would have told me as she fed me with homemade scones. “I’d better put some away in case your mother turns up.”

  “So you would have come to the funeral anyway?” says Adrian.

  She hesitates. “Maybe,” she says defiantly, but we know the answer is no.

  She’s lying. She must be. Granny and Grandpa couldn’t have kept this from me for all these years. They were too transparent for secrets. My mind is racing, listening to her, but thinking about Granny and Grandpa. Did they drop me hints that I didn’t notice? Didn’t I listen to them properly?

  Margaret puts her cup and saucer on the mantelpiece and sits down in an oddly calculated way. She places her feet exactly together and straightens her back. Maybe she’s been taught relaxation. Take a breath, relax your shoulders, stop your hands from moving unnecessarily. It’s something that she’d never have learned if she’d stayed with us. It’s difficult to learn calmness when you have six children. The veins on her hands are raised, the skin pink and mottled.

  “I’m a different person now,” she says. “I live with my husband in Norfolk. By the sea. In a caravan.”

  “Husband?” says Adrian into a shocked silence.

  We think we’re grown-up, but we’re only pretending. I’m three years old again, with a cold gap deep inside me, an unfilled hole. My brothers are boys, the gap inside them only partially filled. They’re trying to grab everything desperately, pour it in, press down the lid.

  “Bigamist!” yells my father, leaping out of his chair. “We’re not divorced.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” shouts Margaret, equally loudly. “People just think we’re married. He looks after me.”

  “Living in sin!” says my father, and he’s so pleased with himself that he sits down again and folds his arms triumphantly. Philippa, Angela, Lucia, Helen, etc., are congregated round him, over his shoulder, but he doesn’t see them.

  “Did you bring him with you?” says Jake.

  She looks at him sharply. “Of course not. Why should I? You don’t know him. Who are you?”

  I can see Jake struggling with himself. He can’t decide whether he should identify himself and thus legitimize her inquiry, or remain anonymous. His observations will be freer if she doesn’t know who he is.

  “Jake,” says Adrian.

  Margaret nods. I think she’s forgotten him but she adds, “Do you still play the violin?” she says.

  “Did you even think of us?” says Paul.

  “Of course I did,” she says and looks directly at him. “Every day, every hour, every minute.”

  I don’t believe this.

  “Then why didn’t you come back for us?” says Paul. “You don’t seem to have made much effort.”

  “No effort?” Her voice rises hysterically. “You think I made no effort? I wrote and wrote and wrote to you all. Nobody replied. It was as if you’d wiped me out of your life. I came back and stood on the corner of the street when you came home from school, waiting to talk to you.” She pauses. “But you didn’t recognize me. You walked past me, talking to your friends. It was as if I didn’t exist.”

  “We wouldn’t have been looking,” says Jake. “We thought you were dead.”

  Could she be imagining this? Why didn’t she rush up to us with open arms? I try to picture myself not talking to Henry at sixteen. I wonder if she has a cold dark space inside her which stopped her loving us enough.

  If a mother has this emptiness inside her, can she pass it on to her children? So it spreads onwards and outwards. An inherited disease. The mother thinks she knows everything. She knows nothing.

  “I came back and watched you at the school gates. I saw other children being met. You didn’t seem to mind. You had friends, you talked to each other. You didn’t look as if you missed me.”

  I was three years old. I didn’t know how to miss someone.

  “Why didn’t you speak to us?” says Jake.

  “I don’t know,” she says in a voice that is suddenly bleak. “The longer I waited, the harder it became. Now I can’t really understand it myself. I thought you didn’t need me—and in the end I gave up.”

  “But you were wrong,” I say.

  “No, she’s right, quite right,” says my father, sounding pleased. “We didn’t need you. We managed perfectly well on our own.”

  “We should have been asked,” says Adrian angrily. “You made our choices for us. We weren’t given the option.”

  But we would have spent the last thirty years wondering if she was going to turn up. Watching. Waiting.

  “No,” says Margaret. “You should have been given the option.”

  “You could have told us where she was,” says Adrian to Dad. “An address would have been helpful.”

  “I didn’t have an address,” he says.

  “Yes you did. It was on every letter I sent.”

  “I threw them away unopened.” He realizes that he has confessed to something he has only just denied, so he picks up a mini-Battenberg and stuffs it into his mouth in one piece.

  “Where did you go?” says Paul.

  “Lots of places. In and out of hospital. I found jobs here and there for a while. Waitressing, shop work, cleaning.”

  So my mother was a cleaner. The mother who was clever and went to university, but never qualified because of my father. The meeting on the beach, the wedding, six children. A golden age to my father. Dark ages to my mother.

  “A burden to society,” says my father. He eats a handful of crisps, loudly.

  “I paid my way when I was well enough,” says Margaret. “I worked in a maternity hospital for a bit. They let me look after the babies.”

  It is difficult to reconcile a woman who helps others give birth with a woman who has abandoned her own children. We were all babies once—her babies. We were all delivered by her from her own womb. How many unknown babies must you look after to compensate for your own lost babies? Is there a specific number? Two unknown babies equal one lost baby? Three, four, ten? Do you get there if you keep it up long enough? Does the guilt subside more quickly once you’ve passed the hundred mark?

  “Waste of a life then,” says Dad. He unfolds his arms and takes his tea off the table. We can hear him sipping it—unnecessarily noisily—and then its progress as he swallows it. I try my own tea, but it’s still much too hot; he must be burning his tongue.

  “Who do you think you’re fooling?” says Margaret. “Do you seriously imagine I had a meaningful life living with you? You couldn’t even be bothered to hold a conversation with me. At least I wasn’t dancing artistically from one nonsense to another.”

  “That’s not fair,” Paul says angrily. “Dad’s painting is art, not nonsense.”

  “I earn good money,” shouts my father.

  Some of it is nonsense, I think, remembering the painting with a hole in it on my wall.

  “There is some value in being artistic,” says Jake, still calm. “We must have inherited some of this nonsense from Dad, I suppose.”

  Margaret looks away from Jake and says nothing. She probably thinks he’s a serious violinist, not someone who busks every other day and lives off his wife’s earnings. How can we ever hope for a real truth? It will be different for everyone.

  Dad unfolds his arms and smiles. I’m annoyed by his obvious delight in her discomfort, disappointed that he’s so unforgiving. I want him to stop acting like a child and to demonstrate the generous and kind spirit that I know is there.

  “So you gave up in the end,” says Adrian. “You didn’t come back to the house to try to talk to us?”

  “I did come back, almost straight away, in the first week, when I thought you’d all be at home—it was the summer holidays—but you weren’t there. I watched your father go out, then let myself in to talk to you and to collect some of my things. Just a few clothes, books, photographs. I thought you could all join me later, when I had a home. But you weren’t there, and everything, all
the evidence of my life was gone. Completely disappeared. As if I never existed. What do you think it’s like to come back to somewhere you have lived for the last nineteen years, and discover that there isn’t even a space where you were?”

  “Dad burnt it,” says Adrian. “We watched him do it.”

  “Typical.”

  “You didn’t think I’d keep all your stuff and wait sweetly for you to come back—”

  “Hardly. I knew how your mind worked—”

  “You had no idea. You were incapable of understanding.”

  Where was I? My father was out, the boys were presumably off with friends, so where was I? Who looked after me?

  “Why didn’t you leave us a note?” says Adrian. “You could have left it in my bedroom. Dad would never have known.”

  “I thought—” Her voice rises. “I thought you’d all wiped me away. You obviously don’t need me, I thought. So I left and I’ve never gone back.” She is crying, great tears oozing out of her pinched, tiny eyes and rolling down her cheeks, black with smudged mascara. I can’t look at her. “Now I see your father again and realize I was wrong. I shouldn’t have left you in his care.”

  “You wouldn’t have got in a second time,” says Dad. “I changed all the locks.”

  “Surprise, surprise. I couldn’t work out why you hadn’t done it already.”

  “I wanted you to come back and find you’d left no mark on our lives.”

  She wipes her eyes and looks round at us all. “See,” she says. “This is the man I lived with. He couldn’t wait to get rid of your mother.”

  Why is my father so cruel? I haven’t seen this in him before. What is this nastiness that makes him enjoy her misery? Where does he keep it hidden? Does he practise it when he’s on his own, so he can bring it out when it’s needed, all perfect and fully formed?

  He is muttering to himself. “All that time when I could have been painting—wasted on cooking, ironing, washing-up …”