Astonishing Splashes of Colour Read online

  My brothers rarely talk about her, as if they’ve all agreed to forget. Unlike me, they have a memory of her being there for their childhood, but they can’t seem to translate that into a physical description. Sometimes I think they all knew a different person.

  When I was about twelve, I tried to find out more about her and pushed my brothers for some details.

  Paul’s mother is tall with short hair. “She liked gardening and her nails were always black with soil. She only talked to us for a bit at mealtimes, and even then she started looking through the window again, thinking about the garden.” He can only describe her outside, pruning, raking the leaves, designing an herb garden.

  “She sang in the garden,” he said once. “I could hear her sometimes, after I’d gone to bed, when there was still some light left outside. I think she went on gardening in the dark, with a torch.”

  “What did she sing?” I asked.

  He looked confused. “I don’t know. I couldn’t hear the words.”

  “‘A Hard Day’s Night’? Or ‘Penny Lane’?” I discovered the Beatles records in the lounge when I was eight, and played them over and over until I knew all the words. My mother always sings them in my dreams.

  But Paul shook his head. “No, of course not. She was too old for that. We were the Beatles fans. She sang—” He stopped and tried to think. “I don’t know—folk songs, I suppose. ‘Green-sleeves,’ ‘The Ash Grove,’ and things like that.”

  I was disappointed, and certain that he was wrong. He was only twelve when she died.

  Martin’s mother is small, like me, and her hair is straight and long. He thinks she was blonde, but he’s not quite sure. In several of the black-and-white photographs in the wedding album, the light falls on her hair from the side and it looks blonde. I think Martin only remembers her from the photographs.

  He finds it even harder to remember what she was like. I asked him about her soon after I talked to Paul. Martin had to deliver 500 boxes of crisps to Newcastle, and I was allowed to go with him because it was the Christmas holidays and he could be there and back in one day.

  “No,” he said, leaning on one of the tires he had been examining, “I don’t remember her singing.”

  The cold of the early morning surrounded us. I put my gloved hands into my pockets and snuggled into my scarf. Martin’s breath came out slowly in huge milky clouds. I wished he would hurry up and get into the cab where we could warm up, so I didn’t say any more.

  Twenty miles later, Martin decided to continue. “I remember she had a brown dress covered with tiny white daisies. She wore it a lot.”

  I waited for more, but nothing came. Martin, who had known her for fourteen years, had only a tenuous grasp on her image. I know nothing of her brown, daisy dress. It is nowhere in the wardrobe of my memory, so it must have worn out before she even thought of me.

  Jake’s mother is just a presence, with no physical details at all. He remembers her only in connection with his violin playing: “She always came to my concerts, even when I was small.”

  If he talks about her now, he gazes mysteriously into the distance. I don’t believe in this. He’s thinking about how he should look when remembering a tragedy. “At least, I think she did.”

  I can’t understand all this uncertainty. I can remember more detail than anyone else and I was only three when she died. Don’t any of my brothers have dreams?

  Jake has occasionally offered more information. “She often used to play the piano for me,” he announced in the middle of another conversation. “I’d forgotten that. Extraordinary.”

  It didn’t surprise me. Jake doesn’t play with other people, he plays for them. When Jake is playing, he thinks of Jake, and he’d expect the accompaniment to be there. But I like the idea of my mother playing the piano. “Did she sing?” I asked.

  He looked vague. “I don’t really know.”

  “Didn’t you ever realize you belonged to a family?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if you can’t remember your mother, there isn’t much hope for brothers and sisters, is there?”

  “Mmm,” he says. “That’s interesting.”

  I think he’d have preferred to be an only child.

  I’ve always expected Adrian to have more to tell, since he’s a writer and should be interested in details. He was sixteen when she died, and his first novel was published when he was twenty-three. He must have written something about her, but he denies it. I’m sure he’s not telling me everything—perhaps from some brotherly motive of sparing my feelings. He likes to think he’s responsible.

  He occasionally produces details in passing and, for a time when I was younger, I used to hang around him so that I could gather information. He must have found me intensely irritating, however, because he was always busy. “Later, Kitty, later,” he would say, flapping his hands at me. “Not now.” He’ll regret it one day, when his biographer interviews me about his early life. I shall be entirely truthful.

  “She had long hair. Then she had it cut. Then she grew it again,” he said in answer to my question, giving the only logical explanation for her ever-changing appearance.

  “Did she sing?”

  “I don’t remember. Oh yes—I think she sang in the bath. And nursery rhymes. I remember ‘Little BoPeep.’”

  “Did she sing in the garden?”

  He looked surprised. “I’ve no idea. I never went out there. We weren’t keen on her gardening, because she sometimes forgot to cook the supper. I suppose she might have sung outside. Does it matter?”

  Of course it does. I’ve a right to know about my mother. “You were there, you should be able to describe her.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But I don’t seem to have a very clear picture of her any more.”

  Why’s he so vague? Is he trying to hide something from me?

  I like to think of my mother in the garden, growing and creating things with her fingers, refusing to conform to a wifely image. I’m glad she didn’t like cooking. I’ve always assumed she was calm and good-natured, but more recently I’ve realized that she and my father must have had rows. Nobody could live with him and not have rows.

  “She argued a lot with Dinah,” Adrian added unexpectedly. “It was a relief when they went and shouted in the garden. I imagine that’s why Dinah ran away.”

  Dinah left when she was fifteen. There’s very little information about her either. The men have apparently erased them both as an irrelevance. No time for women.

  Nobody ever mentions the accident.

  When I asked Adrian about it, he looked amazed. “Well, I don’t remember—”

  “You must remember what happened.”

  He looked almost distressed—unusual in Adrian. “Dad didn’t give us many details. He was very upset—wouldn’t talk about it.”

  As if my father wanted her removed from their lives. Cleaned up, swept away, all gone as quickly and neatly as possible.

  I find my brothers’ lack of interest astonishing. They’ve closed their minds down, shut the door, moved on. But then they never talk to each other, so I suppose it would be difficult to get the memories stirred up and moving. It’s a good thing I talk to them. They might forget the others exist.

  None of them give any indication that they missed her, but I don’t believe them. I think she had long and short hair; she was tall and short; she sang in the garden—folk songs to herself, nursery rhymes to the boys and Beatles songs to me. I think she held us all on her lap, even Dinah, one at a time and loved us all. Nobody can remember because she did it so well that the memories have become lost in the inner contentment of a happy childhood. I think that the others dream of her occasionally, but forget when they wake up.

  I would have given Henry that inner contentment. I would have learned how to sing for him.

  My mother loved the garden, which has grown wild and strong in her absence. I think it was the conflict between her and Dinah that led to Dinah’s leaving.


  My father gives me stories about my mother, but only of the time before they married. He never talks about her as a mother, or even a wife, as if he is still angry with her for dying and can only see her in the context of a fairy-story beginning. Even now, when I’m thirty-two, he tells me the same stories, but he muddles and embroiders them.

  “No,” I say, “that isn’t right!”

  He stops painting, or ironing, and looks up at me with a strange, affectionate smile. “Oh dear,” he says. “Wrong again.”

  He met my mother, Margaret, in 1945. His parents had both died in the bombing in London, and he never talks about his part in the war. I once found some medals in an old shoebox in the attic, and brought them down immediately.

  “What are these, Dad?”

  He was making an apple crumble at the time, and turned to look, his fingers in the bowl of flour and margarine. He saw the medals and his hands became still in the breadcrumbs. The apples sizzled urgently in a saucepan, but he ignored them. His fierce energy drained away, and he looked different—smaller. “Where did you find those?” he asked.

  “In the attic. Are they yours?”

  He muttered something and leaned over to stir the apples, turning his back on me.

  “Were you in the RAF?” This was exciting to me. We were doing the Second World War in History.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said quietly.

  “Can I take them into school? For my project?”

  There was a pause. “If you want to. Put them back when you’ve finished.”

  I looked at his silent back for a long time. He was fifty-five, and I was ten, old enough to feel his discomfort. Something wasn’t right.

  I put them back in the attic, replaced the lid and pretended that I had never seen them. Neither of us spoke of it again.

  After the war, and whatever he did in it, he decided to explore the coast of Britain, he says. “I made sketches, looked for shapes and patterns in the sand, pebbles and shells. I liked the depths and shallows in the sea, the storms and the stillness. I always wanted to be an artist, so this was my inspiration.” I have seen his collection of sketches from that period, and although they are fascinating, there aren’t many.

  “It’s all in here,” he says solemnly whenever I ask, tapping the side of his head.

  I was scornful then, but now accept that he did store it all somewhere in his mind. Where else does he get ideas for his paintings? A perfectly formed pebble, rubbed smooth by the sea, saturated with colours that shimmer and change as you look at it. A sea that always surprises, a restless gull. I picture him as a young man, standing on the edge of the ocean, watching the pebbles roll in and out, seeing things that others can’t see and recording them for later use.

  While he was roaming the seashore, my mother was studying at Exeter University. According to my father, when she was waiting for first year exam results, she and a group of friends went on the train to Exmouth. They walked from the station to the beach and took their shoes off as soon as they reached the sand dunes.

  Margaret and two young men raced across the hot beach, over the hard, tightly packed sand at the water’s edge and into the sea. The men stopped to roll up their trousers, but my mother pulled up her skirt higher than her knees and waded in, shrieking with delight at the coldness of the water. My father was standing at the edge with his feet just in the water, wearing shorts and holding his sandals in his right hand. On his back was a rucksack containing all his worldly belongings. His hair was too long, creeping down his neck towards his shoulders, and he was tanned and fit. There were torn patches on his shorts, which had been cut from an old pair of trousers. He describes himself and I can see him: the first hippy.

  My father still takes pleasure from Margaret’s appearance then. He rolls the words round in his mouth, tasting them, pulling them out of his memory, like an almost forgotten feast from the past.

  “Tall, thin, alive,” he says, and pauses. “Part of the beach, shrieking like the seagulls, her hair long and loose, flying behind her. She was waiting for me in a dress of red poppies that was too small, with her thin arms poking awkwardly out of the puffed sleeves. The angles of her elbows were sharp and hungry, her smooth skin white and unlived in, waiting to be touched. She looked innocent, as if she hadn’t yet woken up. The wet edge of her skirt clung to her skinny legs, and she danced with excitement and cold.”

  My father didn’t take much notice of the two young men with her, or the larger group still chasing each other among the sand dunes. I’m surprised he even knew they were there.

  He threw his sandals and rucksack down on the beach and rushed through the shallow waves to my mother. She saw him coming and stopped her shrieking. She stood still, alarmed by his response. She tried pulling her skirt down, but the edge started to float in the water.

  “She looked like a frightened doe,” he says. “Waiting for rescue.”

  Did he really think that then? Bambi hadn’t been made in 1945.

  “I waded through the water towards her and took her by both hands. I whirled her around, and she had to follow, otherwise she’d have fallen over. She laughed, with her head leaning back so that the laugh came more clearly through her open throat, and the sound skimmed over the surface of the water. I laughed too, and we whizzed round faster and faster until we fell over.”

  They stood up, both of them looking at their wet clothes and sobered by the cold shock of the sea.

  “My dress,” said Margaret, suddenly nervous.

  “My shirt,” he said in the same tone. They both laughed again.

  “It’ll dry in the sunshine,” said my father and held out a hand to her. She took it.

  “My name’s Guy,” said my father.

  “My name’s Margaret.”

  My father tells this story as if it were a Hollywood film—the background a blur behind them, a Rachmaninov piano concerto swelling to fill the gap left by their silence.

  “What happened to the students who came to the sea with her?” I asked once.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Weren’t there other people in the sea? How did she know that you were only interested in her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again.

  “What happened next?”

  I’ve wondered if what he tells is the truth. Was it really so romantic? The scene is full of detail, but no facts. Did my mother go back to the university with her friends, or did she ride off into the sunset with him? There must have been some practical matters that needed to be sorted out first.

  “Then we got married,” said my father, abruptly, as if I was asking for details as the credits rolled up the screen.

  Just like that. “But did she finish her degree?” I asked. I knew the answer already, but have never been happy with it. I want it changed. “Did she go back to the university and finish?”

  He always looks puzzled when I ask this. “No, of course not. She didn’t need to. We got married.”

  So. My father wants me to believe they lived happily ever after. My mother, Margaret, probably with a promising academic career ahead of her, surrendered it to get married and have six children.

  The mother of my dreams is tall, thin, brown-haired, laughing in the sea. Where do I come into all this? I look through the wedding album, black and white, and my father never looks quite right. He should be full of restless energy and his fierce eyes should stare out of the photographs, somehow willing the photographer to get it right, to capture his real identity. But the very nature of a photograph—freezing him in time—misses a vital part of his personality. What we see is only half the man.

  My mother looks so young and pretty next to him, her hair unfashionably long and straight. I suppose if my father was the original hippy, she was the second, fashioned out of his rib. Did she always look like that, or did he change her? Was the mother we knew the same as the university student who never finished? Do we only see half the woman in the photographs?

  I have grandpare
nts—Margaret’s parents, who live in a small bungalow in Lyme Regis. I used to go and stay with them in the school holidays, because my father was always busy and my brothers were unreliable. I still occasionally go down for a weekend. They’re over ninety. My grandfather sits in front of the television every day, barking with laughter at regular intervals. In the evenings I sit with him and watch programmes I never knew existed.

  “Did you see that?” cries my grandfather every now and again, slapping his leg and sucking the edges of his moustache. I try to see what he is laughing at. I used to think I was too young to understand. I now think he doesn’t understand either. He wants to convince himself that he is still alive, that he still has an active brain under that shiny bald dome. Sometimes he calls his wife from the kitchen. “Mrs. Harrison,” he shouts, “come and see this.”

  She comes in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a tea-towel, and stands in front of the television for ten seconds. “Well I never,” she says. “Don’t laugh too much, Mr. Harrison—your teeth will fall out.”

  For years I thought old people didn’t have first names, that they were christened Mr. Harrison or Mrs. Harrison.

  My grandmother lives in the kitchen, baking, cleaning, scrubbing the floor, constantly wiping her dishcloth over the yellow Formica tops. “Such wonderful things you can buy today,” she says to me with pleasure. “These tops come up lovely.”

  She is very thin and pale, her skin settling in loose folds round the base of her neck. Her hands are mottled red and blue, as if she were permanently cold. She tries to feed me nonstop. “Have another scone, dear,” she says. “You’re far too skinny. All this rationing—it’s not good for you.”

  She frequently thinks I’m Margaret, that she’s lost fifty years somewhere and is starting again. I like this confusion. It makes me part of my mother.

  There is a large black-and-white studio photograph of Margaret in the lounge, mounted and framed. She’s sitting sideways, but her face is turned towards the camera, looking across her shoulder. She has a long pale neck and her skin is smooth and unblemished. Her dark hair is tied into the nape of her neck and she looks beautiful, like an Edwardian lady, graceful and frozen into a past that doesn’t exist any more.