In a Kingdom by the Sea

by Sara MacDonald

  Dominique and I leap back from the window, embarrassed.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘We were admiring your new windows, but we were peering in because we used to live here, once, a long time ago. This house was our home.’

  ‘Did you indeed!’ the man says. ‘Would you like to come inside and have a look around or would you rather remember your house as it was?’

  Dominique says quickly, ‘I’d love to see inside.’

  She turns to me. I hesitate, unsure. I’m afraid of the shadows of my parents clinging to the fabric of the house. Dominique wants to face them.

  ‘My name is Alex Collins,’ the urbane man says as he shakes our hands.

  ‘Dominique.’

  ‘Gabriella.’

  We step over the threshold cautiously.

  For a fleeting second I am eight again. Then light floods into what used to be the dark hall with pegs for coats and a boot rack. Light and sunshine and raised children’s voices fill the house.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse the noise,’ Alex says. ‘I have three small girls like baby elephants.’

  Disorientated, stunned by the transformation in the house, we turn, Dominique and I, in a half circle trying to recognize the contours of our old kitchen that is no more.

  ‘We knocked the wall down between the annex and the kitchen and extended this side of the house,’ Alex tells us. ‘And made this a large living room-cum-kitchen with a little playroom off to the side for the girls. We made French windows out to the garden and enlarged the wooden steps to the orchard so they were less steep and the children could come safely in and out of the garden …

  ‘We’ve enlarged the window onto the balcony so it’s almost a glass wall, to get the most of the winter light, as it’s east-facing …’

  Dominique and I gaze around us in wonder. Papa’s ugly extension is gone. Every room in this house is full of reflected light pouring in under smooth white cotton blinds.

  Three little girls peer round the door of their playroom.

  ‘My daughters,’ Alex says proudly. ‘In order of size … Isabella, Phoebe and Alice. Say, hello, girls. Dominique and Gabriella used to live in this house when they were little.’

  The small girls smile at us and the youngest one says through gappy teeth, ‘Did you uth to have guinea pigth?’

  ‘Rabbits,’ I tell her. ‘They were always escaping.’

  ‘Did they get died then?’

  ‘Oh, no, they hopped off down the valley to make friends with the wild rabbits. Sometimes we’d see them, white or black little rabbits playing with the grey ones, but we could never catch them.’

  ‘Bad luck!’ says the middle girl and we laugh and let Alex show us upstairs.

  There are two new bedrooms where Alex has extended. One bedroom is facing the garden and the other looks out onto the road and church tower. The bedroom where Maman and Papa slept now has an en-suite bathroom. Everything is white with honey polished floorboards that creak beneath our feet as they always did.

  My small room looking out over the garden seems much the same, full of dolls and chimes and hanging butterflies. Our shabby bathroom is now a gleaming shower room but I can still see the old-fashioned lavatory with the large wooden seat and the cork floor that curled and the old fashioned curved bath.

  I look up the small flight of crooked stairs to the top floor where Dominique used to sleep and feel uneasy. I cannot see her face as she is ahead of me. Maman eventually used her attic room for storage. No one ever went up there.

  Dominique stops at the bottom of the stairs. I put my hand on her arm. ‘We don’t have to go up there, Dom,’ I say under my breath.

  Dominique shakes me off gently and climbs the polished stairs that have a bright little striped runner. Alex, quick to pick up the atmosphere, lets us go up the stairs on our own. ‘Isabella’s room,’ he calls and stays on the landing.

  Isabella’s room is blue and white and untidy. It has childish drawings and pretty wallpaper. Books and dolls are scattered everywhere. Dominique’s old bed is long gone and her red, velvet curtains have been replaced by homemade blinds with silver stars.

  Dominique is very still as she stares at the child’s white bed. There is a stuffed rabbit with a chewed nose lying on a patchwork bedspread of vibrant blues. She moves dreamlike and sits heavily on the bed and holds the rabbit to her, folds it to her chest and rocks gently. Silence fills the room. Sizzling tension fills the air. I stand frozen, afraid to break it.

  I hear Alex’s footsteps coming slowly up the stairs. Perhaps he is worried by our silence. He stops in the doorway casting a shadow into the room.

  Dominique’s face is so bleak that Alex, catching her desolation, her haunting hymn to a lost childhood, says gently, ‘Come down and meet my wife, she’s just come home. Have a cup of tea with us on the new terrace …’

  Dominique looks up at this kind, gentle man and smiles her lovely smile. ‘This house is full of happiness,’ she says. ‘It’s brimming with love and safety. I’m so glad it was you who bought this house and made it a home for your family.’

  Alex’s face lights up. ‘Thank you, Dominique.’

  We go downstairs and meet his wife, Sophie, who is, unsurprisingly, an interior designer. This house is an architect and designer’s house. It is no longer a labourer’s house. Sophie is crisp and matter of fact in contrast to Alex’s dreamy sensitivity.

  While they make the tea Dominique and I go down the widened terrace steps and roam the still wild orchard and kitchen garden where Papa planted his vegetables. Amazing now to think Maman picked them fresh each day for us.

  We bend to the guinea pig pen and turn and smile at each other. For a moment, in the shadows of the garden, we are children again. Safe and carefree children like the little girls indoors.

  Dominique says, ‘How lucky we were, Gabby, to live here, to have all this.’

  We were.

  ‘The orchard smells just the same. Do you remember the evening the fox got trapped in the chicken run? Maman yelled for Papa to fetch his gun and we yelled for him not to shoot it …’

  I laugh. ‘Papa couldn’t do it. It was a big beautiful dog fox …’

  ‘And while they were shouting at each other he managed to escape …’

  We both shiver. It had been exciting and horrible. We had not wanted Papa to murder the sneaky, beautiful beast.

  Dominique leans against an apple tree.

  The garden rustles around us as the light fades. Voices rise and fall from the house, as they always did, with snatches of conversation and laughter.

  Dominique says so softly I have to bend closer to hear her, ‘Life is so … random. A split second and all could be different. That night it happened, what if I had not put on my silly, skimpy nightie but I had been wearing my old tatty pyjamas. What if I hadn’t hopped down to have a pee the exact moment Papa came up the stairs? What if he hadn’t drunk half the night away at the pub … maybe, maybe it would never have happened.’

  I stare at her appalled. ‘Dominique, are you finding excuses for Papa?’

  ‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘No, but, I need to try to … let go of something I’ve lugged about half my life …’

  She pulls me further into the orchard where the branches of the old apple trees are decorated by lacy, pale green lichen. I am startled to see that a small, wooden Wendy house with little blue shutters is sitting in the same place as my old, damp den. The memory of Papa helping me build my funny little house in the rain is still vivid.

  ‘We got soaked,’ I say, moving to touch this new, posh little house. ‘The day Papa made me my house. We were both missing you so much we hurt.’

  The memory of Papa sitting on the steps in the rain, and of Maman eventually lifting her wine glass to him, is so visceral, I wince.

  ‘Gabby!’ The intensity in Dominique’s voice makes me turn. ‘I was going to tell you later, but I want to leave our parents here in the garden so you and I can move on. Aunt Laura told Cecile that Maman had ov
arian cancer when she was a young woman. She said Maman never told anyone at the time and did not want her children to know. I told Cecile she had got it wrong, but she was adamant because Aunt Laura had been upset. She only found out when Maman was ill again …

  ‘Gabby, I suddenly understood. That’s why she went to hospital that summer. That’s why Papa was in such a state. That’s why you were sent away to stay with a friend and Papa told me to help at home with the chores. Maman wasn’t allowed to lift or do anything physical, don’t you remember?’

  I stare at her. ‘No, all I remember is your banishment. Cecile misunderstood. Maman didn’t have cancer then, Dominique, that came much later …’

  ‘Gabby, don’t you see? Maman must have had a hysterectomy. She had ovarian cancer,’ Dominique says quietly. ‘She was in remission for years but it eventually came back in her breast …’

  My heart jumps. ‘But … Maman must only have been in her late thirties then. She never told me.’

  ‘In those days people didn’t talk about it, especially if they were young. It must have been a terrible shock for her. I don’t know what advice women were given then, whether HRT was available then …’

  I lean against an apple tree, shaken. ‘Papa must have been terrified he was going to lose her. A hysterectomy …’ Sadness snakes through me. ‘Do you remember, they used to joke about having a boy one day …’

  Dominique and I had been only too aware of our parents’ intense physical relationship.

  ‘I don’t think their sex life ended after her operation,’ I add.

  ‘No,’ Dominique says, ‘but it must have changed things for them both for a long time. I remember when she came back from hospital Maman would not even let Papa put his arm round her or sit near him. Now, I see she felt she was diminished as a woman and Papa felt rejected.’

  I stare into my sister’s eyes. Maman lost her womb as you reached puberty. And there you were … like a little peach.

  ‘I had to go,’ Dominique says softly. ‘Poor Maman.’

  I let out my breath. ‘Oh, Dom …’

  ‘It explains why Papa got so inexplicably blind drunk …’

  ‘For God’s sake, Dominique, it makes it worse. Drunk or not, he was a grown man responsible for his actions. You were a child. He damaged you and he damaged Maman. You can’t keep making excuses for him.’

  My sister says, quietly, ‘I don’t think I’m doing that, Gabby. All my life I have been trying to make sense of what happened that night. Why Papa, a good, kind man, lost control of himself, for one terrible moment, that changed all our lives …’

  The leaves of the apple tree make shadows across her face.

  ‘Maybe this will shock you, Gabby, but Maman sending me away in the way she did was far worse than Papa raping me …’

  The pain of those words said out loud. I turn away from her. It really is impossible to truly know anyone. Not a husband who plans another life while you are still in his bed, or a beloved sister who adored my papa so much she must try to make what he did acceptable.

  Somewhere upstairs, Alex puts some jazz music on low.

  Dominique touches my arm. ‘Now that I am menopausal, Gabby, I can imagine the anguish Maman must have felt at suddenly being infertile in her thirties … No pretence of more babies with Papa. It is all suddenly over …’ My sister’s voice is low in the familiar orchard that smells of dried grass and fallen apples.

  The sun drops and she shivers. ‘I told you something I should never have spoken of when I was low and confronting the menopause. Like Maman, I felt it was all over, that no man would ever desire me again … I do not think the timing of that was a coincidence.’

  She turns and looks up at the sky. ‘I’ll always regret that I spoilt Papa’s memory for you. What he did had terrible consequences for me. He broke a sacred trust, but I want you to remember what my childhood would have been like without him. I was never sure of Maman’s love but I was always sure of Papa’s, and he tried so hard to be the perfect grandfather …’

  Dominique throws her arms up to the house, the garden, the orchard where we stand, at the sea glinting through the trees.

  ‘Gabby, look at all Maman and Papa gave us, growing up here. Remember all the love and the fun and security they gave Will and Matteo and Aimee and Cecile right up until the day they died …’ She takes my hands. ‘Let’s leave our parents here in their garden as if nothing bad ever happened. Let’s claim them back, loving and bickering, exactly as they were before we knew they were flawed. Alex’s little girls have recreated some of the happiness we had for a while. This house doesn’t have any unhappy or lurking shadows. We’re the only ones who could conjure those up and we’re not going to …’

  She opens her arms and I hold onto her, feel the sheer breadth of her courage, her need to love and understand, to make right a wrong. To recapture the innocence and hope and belief of childhood, all the love held there, just for an afternoon. I think again how impossible it is to understand the inner lives of anyone else, a parent, husband or sister. We have glimpses. That’s all we have. We have only what people want to share with us and the rest is guesswork.

  We rock in the dusk of evening and I conjure for the last time our childhood from the smell of apples and the sound of the wind through the trees as the sky flames red over the sea. For a second I hear Maman laughing and my papa calling back to her from the bedroom, a small, secret endearment.

  A pigeon coos evocatively somewhere in the orchard and I try not to think of all the years we lost as a family. There is a click and a whir of a camera and Alex calls down. ‘I had to take a photograph of two beautiful women in grey dresses. You seem, down there in the shadows, to be almost ghosts.’

  We smile and climb back up the steps to the terrace and drink tea with the sweet English family who now inhabit our home. Sophie goes and prints out the photo Alex took. There we are in a garden of dappled evening in the last of the sunlight. Almost ghosts.

  ‘May I keep a copy?’ Alex asks. ‘I’d like to frame it and put it on the landing between the flights of stairs. In memory of two little girls conjured from nowhere …’

  Sophie rolls her eyes affectionately. ‘He’ll pinch you both to see if you’re real in a minute …’

  ‘Two pretty ladies, you mean,’ Phoebe says, sternly.

  ‘Indeed,’ says Alex. ‘Two little girls who grew up into beautiful ladies …’

  ‘Like uth?’ asks Alice, the littlest girl.

  ‘That is quite possible!’ Alex says laughing and throwing her up in delight.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  Cornwall, 2010

  Dominique is tired. I leave her at the beach café with a coffee while I walk back to Priest’s Cove to fetch the hire car. Alex offered to drive us but I need to walk, to be on my own for a while.

  The sun is dropping over the sea and the late afternoon is so lovely I feel a rush of loneliness. I think about the little family who are beginning their lives in my parents’ house. Despite its new beauty, despite it being all that Maman ever dreamed of, I want to remember it just as it was when we lived there.

  Below me the sea slides over the rocks in a peaceful rhythm. I stop and close my eyes for a moment to hold this sound to me. I dreamt of this in Karachi. I did this walk so many times in my head. I let my shoulders relax, feel my head clear.

  I look up at a buzzard hovering over the fields that are ploughed to a perfect pattern of curves and angles and catch sight of a crude homemade FOR SALE sign up on the hill. The house is just out of sight, but I can see the chimney rising up from the fields.

  I turn and walk up the track trying to remember what was up here. I find a shabby little farm cottage lying on its own, facing southwest to St Michael’s Mount. I peer in the windows. There is functional shabby furniture inside so it has probably been rented out. Summer lets here are not kitted out with white blinds and IKEA furniture but are functional for muddy walkers and sandy feet.

  I open the dilapidated garden
gate and walk round into a small garden. Once, someone loved this garden. I stand in the overgrown grass and listen to a blackbird sing his heart out into the silence. Between two camellia trees, in a perfect oval, the sea is forming into smooth bands of silver and purple.

  I shiver. I am that long-ago child, standing in Loveday’s garden with Papa in awe of a house that could be ours. The windows of this house look steadily back at me. The back door has peeling white paint and a rusty knocker.

  As I stand listening to the sound of a blackbird I see my grandchildren tumble out of the door and flow past me as if I am invisible. Out onto the overgrown lawn they roll with their fat little legs in the air.

  Their giggles rise in the air like the cry of seabirds. I see them older, running down the track to the coastal path to the beach lugging surfboards. I see Will and Matteo heading here each summer recreating important bits of their childhood for their children, making new roots … I can make it happen.

  I close the gate and hurry back to the path.

  It might be way too much money but it is worth a phone call. I asked Mike if I could keep the London house instead of a settlement, mainly for the boys. Mike generously agreed and said he would pay off the last bit of our joint mortgage.

  Not so generous, my solicitor said. Your husband was forced to reveal all his assets and a separate bank account in his own name holds a considerable amount of money that he was not keen to declare. Did I know that? No, I did not know that, nor had I ever really known what Mike earned. I told her that I was perfectly capable of earning my own money. Up until now, Mike had always provided for the boys and we both paid the mortgage

  I walk fast for the car. I think of how little I had felt when I saw Mike again. He was polite and businesslike. He seems to have drawn a line, with apparent ease, between the life that he had and the one that is beckoning. On the day they left for Scotland I watched Will and Matteo hurry out of the house to the waiting taxi and I cried one last time for the end of the four of us, for the end of family life.