by Jonathan Coe
‘That would have been in 1969. I was coming up to my tenth birthday. I remember it, because that was the summer my parents decided to go away for a long holiday by themselves. Their marriage was always a bit rocky and I dare say they were doing it to patch things up. So that summer, they left me and Gill with Grandma and Grandpa for a few weeks.
‘I never did learn to play anything else on the piano, apart from that little tune I made up. The only other time it got used was when Grandma used to get out her hymn book. From out in the garden, Gill and I could hear her, singing along with herself in this incredibly high, thin, quavery soprano. We used to cover our ears and get as far away from the house as we could. They had a huge garden – at least three or four acres – and right at the bottom of it was a little chicken house my grandfather had built; that was where we used to hide. He knew her singing always used to drive us away. Sometimes, when she started, he’d come and find us there, and bring us something to eat – some bread and cheese, or a couple of the apples from his orchard.
‘If you slipped out from the bottom of the garden, through the gap in the hedge, you came out into a field where the grass was always kept long and wild. If you walked across the field for about ten minutes it brought you within sight of Warden Farm, where my great-aunt and -uncle lived. In fact, it brought you to a little stretch of water which lay at the foot of their grounds. Gill and I used to call it “the lake”, although it was probably closer to a pond. But I knew it was quite deep, because Grandpa and I would fish there sometimes; I remember him wading out almost up to his waist once, when my line got tangled on one of the branches. The water was overhung with trees – willow and alder, mainly – so you got shade there, even in the midday sun, and the shade used to make the water look a strange colour, somewhere between green, grey and brown, but filled with light: a colour I can’t describe, really, but which I’ve always thought of, ever since, as the colour of summer.
‘I suppose it’s weird that my best memory of childhood is from a time when my parents were away. But even though they stayed together so long, there was always an edginess – some feeling of instability – between my mother and father, and children pick up on that sort of thing very early on. With Grandma and Grandpa, you had the sense that things between them were changeless. And that’s what you want, isn’t it, if you’re a child, and you’re happy? The feeling that nothing is going to change. I don’t know how many times we took a picnic down to that pond – me, Gill, Grandma and Grandpa – but it makes no difference now anyway. One time, ten times … they’re all gone, that’s the point. The tune, that’s the only thing left of that time now.
‘And then, about five or six years ago, we all went back there. You came as well, do you remember? We decided to meet up with Gill and her daughters, and spend the day in Shropshire. I don’t know why her husband wasn’t there – he couldn’t make it, for some reason. But you came. And we saw the farm, which is owned by some businessman now, and we saw my grandparents’ old house, which looks so different, with that big new extension, and we went down to the pond, and you took a photograph of the five of us: me and Gill, and Catharine and Elizabeth, and Amy. And now I can’t find that photograph. I’ve been looking for it all afternoon. Which means that another moment in time has just gone missing. Everything just … slips away, and I don’t know how anybody can stand that feeling. First you have to say goodbye to your own childhood. Then you get the chance to live another one, vicariously, through your children. And soon that’s gone as well. Things slip by faster and faster. It keeps speeding up. Saying that time passes sounds like the simplest, most obvious statement in the world. But … what if you don’t want it to pass? What if the most basic condition of our lives is something you simply … can’t tolerate? What if you can’t live with it?’
I turned and looked at Jennifer – a grey, anguished look – but in the half-darkness of our bedroom, I could not tell what she was thinking. There was nothing more to say. I continued to stand beside our window, staring out at our moonlit garden.
Time passed, as if in laconic affirmation of everything I had just blurted out.
Eventually Jennifer held out her arms. ‘Come to bed,’ she murmured.
Jennifer was quiet the next morning. I’d fallen asleep pretty much as soon as I got back into bed. She’d been woken up, again, by a call from Australia at about four in the morning. And after that, I don’t suppose she’d closed her eyes once.
A day or two later, she announced that she was going to have to go back to Melbourne to sort the situation out. She booked herself a last-minute return flight and left me at home to look after Amy. She was gone for just under a month. When she came back, she told me that she’d decided to go and live in Australia permanently. She didn’t want me to go with her.
It was a difficult, uncomfortable summer – if I can allow myself, for a moment, the luxury of understatement. I had no choice but to stay in the house while Jennifer and Amy were packing their things up, ready to leave. As a temporary measure, I bought a cheap fold-up bed and moved it into my study. During the day, I spent as much time as possible on campus. The endless admin – the form-filling, the report-writing – against which I’d railed so monotonously for the last few years now came to seem like a welcome distraction.
One day, about a week before they were due to leave, Amy came to me and said, ‘Daddy, is Grandad really crazy?’
The idea was that they were going to find a little place in Melbourne and all live together – Amy, Jennifer and her 83-year-old father. I could see that Amy was pretty apprehensive about the whole thing.
‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘So what’s wrong with him?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you know he fought in the war. When he was still really young.’
‘Is Grandad Australian?’ she asked.
‘No. He’s lived in Australia for a long time, and that’s where your mother was born, but he’s American. He fought for the Americans in the Second World War, in the Pacific. And that’s where some of the worst fighting was. And sometimes, if you go through really terrible things when you’re very young … Well, you never forget that stuff. It does strange things to your mind.’ I felt uncomfortable saying this, so I decided to change the subject. ‘Listen, are you going to be OK, leaving your friends behind? Because I know you were pretty close to some of those girls.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Amy, resignedly. ‘I’ll make new friends. And they’re all on Facebook. We’ll stay in touch. Besides, I was kind of embarrassed to be going back to school in September anyway, after what Mum did on prize-giving day.’
I had no idea what she meant, so later that day, when Jennifer was out in the garden, getting ready to put a whole lot of paperwork on a bonfire, I found her and asked, ‘What did you do at school on prize-giving day? Amy said she was embarrassed about it.’
Jennifer paused for a moment, and looked at me, as if the question surprised her – although perhaps what really surprised her was that it had taken me so long to ask it. She tipped the last contents of one more cardboard box on to the pile, and said, ‘Bit late to have this discussion now, isn’t it?’
‘Better late than never.’
‘If you must know, I went to talk to Miss Pemberton, the headmistress.’
‘The headmistress?’
She was already heading off down the garden path, back to the house.
‘Jennifer, can you stay and talk about this, please?’
There was an unsteady wooden bench, much preyed upon by lichen, which stood at the edge of the lawn facing the house. We sat down on it, side by side.
‘I know you were upset that day,’ I began, when it seemed clear that she wasn’t going to say anything more herself. ‘I saw you when we were singing that hymn, and I could tell something wasn’t right. But I thought –’
‘You thought, just like you, that I was in mourning for the end of our daughter’s childhood?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Well, as usual, David, we were on completely different tracks. You were caught up in the music, apparently. I wasn’t. I was thinking about the words.’
I stared back at her, still not quite understanding.
‘The words, for God’s sake,’ she repeated. ‘The words to that bloody hymn. “I Vow to Thee, My Country”. I’ve always hated those words, at the best of times. But that day? When I knew what my father was still going through, sixty years after it had all happened. And still we’re getting our daughters to sing about sacrifice, and laying down your life for your country, without even asking any questions about it? I’m sorry, but no. I got that … Pemberton woman into a corner and told her that she should not be getting a whole lot of young girls to sing that hymn. That’s what I was doing, while you were mooning about the school playground with Amy, in some sort of … melancholy haze.’
She leaned forward on the bench, away from me, speaking to some point in the middle distance now.
‘We’re different people, David, and one of the reasons for that is that we had different childhoods. While you were having waterside picnics with your sister and composing nice pentatonic tunes on your grandma’s piano, do you know what it was like for us? I mean, I’ve told you this a hundred times before, but can you remember any of it? Did you ever read that book I gave you, about the battles my father fought in? You don’t get over that kind of experience. You can never get past it. One time my brother woke up in the middle of the night in his bedroom and his father – his own father, for God’s sake – was holding a gun to his head. “Wake up, soldier,” he said. “We’re on the move.” Every mealtime, we would sit there, the four of us, completely terrified, not knowing what he was going to do or say next. Who he was going to attack. I mean, literally going to attack. For eighteen years, I went through that. Eighteen years of living on the edge. And it’s still happening! He’s still living with it: nightmares, fugue states, panic attacks … So when you tell me that you want time to stand still, that you wish things didn’t change … Some of us are longing for change. And for some people, time does stand still. It always has done, and it’s their definition of hell.’
She sat back against the bench, and closed her eyes.
I took her hand and clasped it. Stroked it, tenderly, with the tips of my fingers.
There was no response.
It has taken me a long time to follow them over there. A long time for Jennifer to decide that she wants to be followed.
They have a three-bedroom apartment in South Yarra. A posh part of town, by most people’s standards. There’s always been money in that family, though I don’t know where it comes from. I’ve visited them in that time, of course, and Amy has been back to the UK. She’s not a child any more, that’s for certain. There isn’t much she doesn’t know. She’s well aware of the differences between me and her mother, why we decided to separate for a while, but she doesn’t judge or take sides.
I’m talking as if I know her, but I don’t, really. There hasn’t been much communication lately. A few emails – not as many as I’d like – and last month, on my fifty-third birthday, she sent me a card, with a letter inside, and also a photograph. Somehow or other, in the rush of packing up four years ago, they must have managed to take it with them. It was the photograph Jennifer had taken in Shropshire, the one I hadn’t been able to find. The five of us: me, my sister, Gill, and our children, sitting by the side of that lake – which looks, to me, more and more like a pond – smiling for the camera. A moment in time, frozen, preserved, made permanent.
On the back of the photograph, Amy had written all our names, and underlined the first letter of each one.
A for Amy.
C for Catharine.
D for David.
E for Elizabeth.
G for Gill.
And underneath the names she had written: ‘Pentatonic!’ With an exclamation mark.
I haven’t seen my daughter for almost two years, but I know this: that she understands, by now, exactly how her father’s mind works. And when you realize that, it really is time to admit that she’s grown up.
Rotary Park
For a while, after we had moved to Canada, I began to think that my mother was happy again. It was 1967, and ‘London had become too much for her,’ as Dad put it, trying to explain to us – or rather to Joseph, since he was the one who objected most strongly – why we had been obliged to relocate. And such a bruising, brutal relocation, too! From swinging London (not that I’d seen much of that, at my private girls’ school in Pinner) to suburban Saskatoon. From a country in the throes of a social and cultural revolution to a country too well off, well regulated and plain well adjusted ever to need one.
The house was nice, at least. A traditional homemaker’s fantasy in white weatherboard, with a covered balcony on the first floor, and above that, the oddly shaped, low-ceilinged attic bedroom which I loved from the moment I saw it. And the weather here was better. By which I mean that in Canada, at least we had weather. Instead of twelve months of London drizzle and monochrome British skies, we had vibrant, multicoloured springs, golden autumns and, best of all, winters unfailingly blessed with snowfall. Here, winter was really winter – which meant that Christmas was really Christmas.
But my mother was not happy. And Christmas continued to present a problem. From about mid-November onwards, her random mood swings became more violent, the sudden outbursts of temper came at shorter and shorter intervals. My father had a strategy for dealing with all this that was quite simple: when the going got tough, he would disappear into the garage, sit in his car, turn on the radio and listen to some classical music. It was a tactic which may have worked for him, but which left me and Joseph directly in the firing line.
Christmas, 1969. Five o’clock on Christmas Eve. Darkness and stillness outside. Inside, at one end of our sitting room (an enormous room, it still felt to me, with its swathes of sand-coloured carpet and aggressively modern furniture), stood our Christmas tree. And beneath it, a circle of five or six presents. More would be added later that night, I knew, but there was already a package which thrilled and fascinated me: wrapped in green-and-silver paper with my mother’s trademark precision, and bearing my name on the label, in her copperplate handwriting. I picked the parcel up. It was satisfyingly heavy …
‘What is this, Dad?’ Joseph was asking, at the other end of the room, next to the colour TV.
Dad had only just brought back his car from the mechanic’s, and was showing my brother an unfamiliar object: a chunky cuboid of grey-brown plastic Joseph was turning over in his hands.
‘That,’ my father said proudly, ‘is an 8-track cartridge. The recorded-music medium of the future. This is going to wipe all those old LP records off the face of the planet.’
‘Why?’ said Joseph. ‘What’s so great about it?’
‘Come on, I’ll show you. You too, Alice!’
As we followed my father out to the garage, caught up in his excitement, there was one thing that none of us paid much attention to: my mother was still hard at work in the kitchen, where she had been confined for some two hours. She was supposed to be making pecan butter tarts, after Dad had told her that these, not mince pies, were the most popular Christmas treat in his home country. But, as usual, things were not going well: there was flour scattered over most of the available surfaces (and part of the floor), a half-empty bottle of sherry next to the chopping board, and a distinct smell of charred pecans. Mum herself was nowhere to be seen, but the back door was open, letting in a blast of icy air.
Heedlessly, we ignored these symptoms of impending crisis and followed Dad out into the garage. Actually our house had two garages. There was a smaller one on the eastern side of the house, where Mum kept the beloved Volkswagen Beetle she still insisted on driving. It had been shipped over from London, was painted hot pink with patterns of big white daisies over the bodywork, and had become quite a talking point in the neighbourhood. But it was the other, bigger space, where the Buick
was parked, that was inescapably seen as Dad’s domain and referred to simply as ‘the garage’. It contained his golf clubs and fishing gear as well as the car, and gradually, over the previous two years, had grown more and more homey. Some scraps of carpet had been laid down, an armchair, reading lamp and electric bar fire had appeared from somewhere, and a whisky bottle was kept stashed in one of the drawers that also overflowed with tools and other oddments.
Today the three of us piled into the big car. I didn’t notice anything different about the dashboard, but Joseph spotted it at once.
‘Wow!’ he said, running his fingers over the controls on the new cartridge player. ‘It looks amazing.’
Smiling, Dad took the massive plastic box and slid it awkwardly into the slot on the dashboard. He pressed one of the buttons with a firm, satisfying click. And then, after a few seconds’ hiss, we heard the comforting tones of one of his best-loved pieces – the overture to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.
‘See?’ he said. ‘Now we can listen to our favourite music when we’re driving somewhere. Can’t do that with a record, can you?’
We listened in awe for a few more minutes: until, halfway through the ‘Waltz of the Flowers’, I became aware of something: my mother’s face, looking in at us through the car window, a deadpan mask beneath which, I knew, lay reserves of wordless, suppressed rage. I tapped Dad on the shoulder and he turned guiltily: caught in the act of enjoying himself; caught in the act of bonding with his children.
‘Having fun?’ she asked, as I wound the window down. My father turned off the music and we all clambered out in silence.
I never asked for specific presents; Joseph always did. This year, it was a twelve-string Hofner guitar he had seen hanging in the window of the local music store. On Christmas morning, it was pretty obvious that his demand had been met: the pile of presents around the tree had now been augmented by a large, unmistakably guitar-shaped parcel. I knelt down and examined it more closely. Mum had excelled herself, this time: every inch of the thing had been wrapped, from top to bottom, the paper clinging to the curves of its body and even to each of the twelve individual tuning pegs. Nothing but perfection would do, for my mother, and this must have taken her hours. It would also have put her in a foul mood.