Talking to the Dead

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ A feeling stirs in me, like something coming to life, but I don’t know if I can explain it to Isabel. ‘It’s not a sad thing. He’s not going to die like Colin, I know he isn’t. It’s the thought that Colin hasn’t really gone, not completely. You know what it was like, it seemed as if he’d just disappeared. You remember how we looked in his room and the cot was gone, and everything. And Mum never being happy again, it all seemed completely pointless.’ It’s only at that moment, as I say those words, that I admit to myself that my mother never was happy again after Colin’s death. She worked, she looked after us, she smiled, she had friends, but her happiness had gone. I never wanted to believe it. I would sit in her lap more than I’d ever done, playing with a long necklace of amber that she had, warming the beads in my hand, singing and humming like a little girl who was happy.

  ‘It was pointless,’ says Isabel. ‘I don’t see why you want to talk about it.’

  Her sureness stamps down on the stirring thing that I can’t quite put into words. Perhaps all I remember is a disc, too. But I don’t think so. I don’t easily forget anything I’ve seen, once I’ve really looked at it. I remember a baby’s face, turned sideways in a cot.

  I’d tiptoed in alone, feeling guilty because Isabel never played with the baby and I always wanted to be the same as Isabel. But I also wanted to see him. He was awake, but not crying, peeping through the cot bars at some dancing light on the opposite wall. There was so much light when we were growing up, coming up off the sea so that even on a grey day my eyes stung with it. The baby moved his head, hearing me come in, and then a big gummy smile spread across his face. I peered in at him through the bars. His arms and legs waved like weed in a rockpool. He could turn his head but he couldn’t roll over. There was a special smell all round his cot, a baby smell. He dabbed at a string of cotton reels my mother had hung across the cot, but his fist went wide. Both his legs kicked in the air and he turned to me and smiled again. His head was lying on a muslin nappy which my mother would put over her shoulder later. His hair stuck up in sweaty feathers. I stood there for quite a long time, and then I went away.

  Edward opens the door without knocking. ‘He’s woken up, Isabel. Susan’s changing him, then if you feed him we can go straight out.’ He’s got the sling dangling from one hand.

  ‘All right, I’ll just –’ says Isabel, and she hurries out of the room.

  ‘She looks awful,’ says Edward, staring after her. ‘What’s happened? She was fine when she woke up.’ He drops the sling on the bed, a bright coil of nursery stripes. Then he turns to me with an edge of real dislike in his voice. ‘What have you been saying to her?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You don’t think I notice anything, do you, Nina?’

  ‘You come across as fairly self-absorbed, yes.’

  ‘Not where Isabel’s concerned.’

  ‘Jesus, Edward, what is this thing about Isabel? Anybody would think you were in love with her. If they didn’t know you.’

  ‘I do love Isabel, as it happens. Isn’t it interesting, Nina – you think you’re so liberated, but really all you see when you look at me is “Isabel’s gay friend”. You can’t look beyond that’

  ‘It’s not that I can’t. It’s that I’m not interested enough to do so.’

  ‘You’re not all that interested in Isabel, either, are you? I think you’re a shit, Nina, but since she doesn’t see through you I’ll keep my thoughts to myself.’

  I’m bad at dealing with people who don’t like me. A bit of me wants them to, even though I know it’s not going to happen, and I don’t like them at all myself. And I’ve always found it unbearable to think of affection flowing towards Isabel, and a blank face turned to me. But I fight it now. I can be hard and cold.

  ‘You do that,’ I say. ‘Isabel and I are sisters. We share a past that you don’t know anything about and can’t possibly understand.’

  ‘I hope that’s all you share,’ says Edward.

  The words gleam, so double-edged they cut wherever they touch.

  I watch them, from Isabel’s window, walking down the paths. The sling is round Edward, because the pull of it was uncomfortable for her. They look small and happy, walking slowly to and fro across the lawn, bending to look at things which are too small for me to see, disappearing down paths, between shrubs, and then reappearing. Once, I hear Isabel laugh. Beyond the wall the meadows are bleached, with a diagonal green scar running across one of them where there must be water just under the ground. I move to the side of the window, where I can see and not be seen, and just then Isabel and Edward come out of the trees and walk towards the house. Edward stops and hitches at the sling, trying to adjust it, but it fastens at the back. Isabel goes behind him and fiddles with the clip while he bends at the knees to make it easier for her. When she’s made the adjustment they both turn to look down the garden, with their backs to me, shading their eyes against the glare of the midday sun. On the back of Isabel’s pale-green dress, between her shoulder-blades, there is a dark patch of sweat.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The sea was there all the time. I would wake in the night and listen to the sea until it took me back into sleep. When we were older Isabel and I slept in the attic that ran the length of our narrow terraced house, our beds under each of the dormer windows. We looked out over Porthmeor Beach, over the Island, at the shining trail left on the sea by fishing boats heading west from the harbour. On winter nights storms punched the wall by my ear and our house shuddered before the wind. If the storm came by day Isabel and I would go out in it, in our yellow oilskins and hats, to watch the sea boil and the spray explode at the base of the cliffs.

  The sea got into everything. Our leather school sandals were white with salt before we’d had them a week. Later they would rot at the seams, long before we’d grown out of them. There was sand in the carpets, sand in the grass. Every year my mother would slap paint on every window-frame she could reach, so that the sea would not eat down to the wood. Wind and salt scoured off paint and covered the windows with spray. Our hair was sticky, whipped into tangles until we couldn’t get a comb through it. Each summer one streak bleached white over my forehead. In winter there were thick white mists that clung to us like cobwebs, and the noise of a foghorn lowing; then the air would begin to move again and black humps of rock would slide out of the silence. When the fog was heavy I kept my mouth shut, frightened that it would get into my throat and choke me. But Isabel danced ahead, just out of sight, daring the fog to swallow her up. Our father had a rhyme for Isabel:

  Isabel, Isabel, met a bear;

  Isabel, Isabel, didn’t care…

  I thought he’d made it up for her, and was surprised to find it in a book years later, with someone else’s name under it.

  He was often away. He was a poet, but not the poet he wanted to be. He was a very good critic, and he couldn’t stop being one when he looked at his own work. I still try to read his poems sometimes. You can find his collections in secondhand bookshops, and they don’t cost very much. There’s something terrible about the way titles of books fade. He wrote poems about us, but he didn’t see us very much. He had to spend a lot of time in London, where he did his reviewing and critical articles. St Ives was my mother’s place, and if he wasn’t there too much I suppose he could avoid seeing how much better she was as a potter than he was as a poet. Although I don’t think he was the sort of man who could easily avoid seeing things.

  He was a handsome man, our father, and five years younger than my mother. He was fair, with the same eyes as Isabel, the same golden skin, which was creased by the time I knew him. By some reckonings my mother was lucky to get him. He drew people round him, because he was funny, because he had the way of making you feel that you were something new and delightful he’d just discovered, and above all because there was something lost and pained in him which people felt without knowing quite what it was. He seemed to need you. My mother didn’t seem to need
anybody much. Only after Colin died I heard her cry out, behind a door, and I thought she’d called my name. I slid the door open. It was dark because the curtains were pulled over the window, but I could see her. She was lying on her face, clutching the pillow. Her head thumped from side to side. My father was sitting on the bed, smoking a cigarette, and he saw me because the light changed as I opened the door. My mother didn’t notice. He just looked up and shook his head slightly, and I went out again.

  A bit later she went away for a while. My father looked after us on his own, the only time I can remember him doing that. We loved every minute of it. A weight had gone out of the house, and though Isabel still had stomach pains and didn’t eat much, she seemed much happier once our mother had gone. He didn’t cook at all. In the mornings we had cornflakes, at lunch-time we had money for fish and chips, at night he took us out. Things must have been going quite well then. There seemed to be money for going out and for real shopping. Sometimes we just had what we couldn’t do without, fetched each day from the corner shop by me and Isabel.

  We went out late, because my father hated eating early. We had steak and chips, or spaghetti. Isabel ate, too. I watched her out of the corner of my eye when the waitress put the plate of steaming sauce and wriggly spaghetti down in front of her, the first night. But she ate it, wrapping up the pasta on her fork expertly, in a way I couldn’t manage. I forgot to eat my own food, stopped in my tracks by Isabel’s cleverness.

  The next night the waitress leaned over me and whispered to us, ‘I’ve got something you’ll like.’ She brought two plates from behind her back. On each there was a chocolate teddy-bear, gleaming brown. Their skin had a mist of cold on it.

  ‘It’s ice-cream inside,’ said the waitress and watched us, smiling. I picked up my spoon but it was too beautiful to eat.

  ‘Go on. It’ll only melt.’

  I tapped the chocolate as if it was a boiled egg. Immediately tiny cracks sprayed over the chocolate, showing the white icecream underneath. I looked at Isabel to see what she was doing, but she hadn’t touched hers. Isabel was always able to wait for things. This was different though. Her hands had dropped to her lap and her face was closed. She wasn’t going to eat it.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ the waitress asked Isabel. Her voice was cross with disappointment.

  ‘I’d rather have fruit salad,’ said Isabel in a tiny thread of a voice. Saying nothing, the waitress swept up the plate with the chocolate teddy-bear on it, and bounced out. I dug deep into mine and began to eat fast, hardly tasting it, hoping I’d have finished it by the time the waitress got back.

  Isabel’s salad looked sour. Our father gave the waitress one of his big, soft smiles. ‘You’re very good,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think she feels much like eating at the moment. She’s still upset.’

  The waitress’s face went weak, and she nodded, looking at Isabel in a quite different way. ‘Of course, the little one’s too young to feel it the same,’ she said. I ate on, my face burning, the chocolate teddy-bear slipping round the plate as I chased it with my spoon.

  Once the waitress had gone our father hummed to himself, quietly,

  Isabel, Isabel, met a bear;

  Isabel, Isabel didn’t care…

  I loved his face when it crinkled up with laughing, or with trying not to laugh. He seemed to find us funny most of the time, even when we weren’t trying to be. Soon after this he told me he was thinking of starting a pudding club, and I could be in it if I liked. The only rule was that members had to discover at least four new puddings a year. I didn’t see how I was going to discover any puddings, as I had no money of my own, but he told me that one day he would take me to London and we’d go to a place where they did nothing else but puddings. When I was big and had learned to read he would buy me a book of puddings and I could learn to cook them.

  ‘It’s no good relying on your mother and Isabel. They’re fruit salads, the pair of them.’

  Of course my father had a woman in London, and she wasn’t a fruit salad. I met her later on; she was called Amy Ludgate. He married her for a year after my mother’s death, before he died too. My mother had expected to die, because she’d had breast cancer for two years, but my father hadn’t. He went out almost between one step and the next, on his way back from the launch of someone else’s new collection. It was an aneurysm, a weakness no one had known about. He hadn’t made a will and there wasn’t any money, but Amy offered us his manuscripts. She was sure they’d be worth a lot of money one day. Besides, we were his daughters and she thought we had a right to them, whatever the law said. She was generous, Amy. She could love things and not want to own them. She never stopped fighting the battles against neglect that my father would not fight for himself. But we knew no one was ever going to care for his poetry as much as she did, so we said she should keep the manuscripts, and she has them still. I had a letter from her not long ago saying she’d made her will, and naming the university library she had chosen to have his papers. I only hope they’re willing to take them.

  He’d been with Amy before Colin was born. Colin was a fluke, not an attempt at reconciliation. I found out later that my parents hadn’t slept together for two years before he was born. But my father was down from London for a few days and they sat for a long time over a meal after we went to bed, drinking rich red wine that my father had brought back from France. And so they stumbled into bed and later there was Colin. No, not stumbled. They weren’t that drunk, my mother said. They still knew what they were doing. It was very important to her to be accurate about things like that, and not to give us false ideas about what had happened between them. I suppose it was a good thing, but it could feel a bit bleak. Colin was born, and then he died, and his death brought them closer than his life had done, for a while.

  My father wrote a poem which was read at Colin’s funeral. I didn’t understand a word of it and I couldn’t work out why he was suddenly standing up at the front and reading it, when I knew this wasn’t a poetry reading. One odd thing followed another, like strange fish you have to separate from the catch and throw back.

  I can still taste that chocolate teddy-bear. Cold, sweet, tender, the splintered chocolate giving way to smoothness. In fact I can taste it better now than I could then as I rushed to please the waitress. I see us all: Isabel poking at a segment of tinned grapefruit with her face in shadow as her long hair slipped forwards; my father smoking and chatting to the waitress over our heads; and me kicking the chair legs and waiting for someone to admire my nice clean plate.

  When both your parents are dead great slabs of the past drop away like eroded cliffs. I want my past back. I need it now, to ask it the questions I never realized I needed to ask. But there’s nothing. Silence, and the shining of the sea where once there was land. I have Isabel’s stories. She’s made a story of the past which I used to accept without question. She’s so persuasive that it doesn’t seem like persuasion, but like the truth. Edward is persuaded. There they are, walking again side by side, but even more slowly now, as if the heat of the sun is pressing them down. No. It’s not that. Something’s wrong. She isn’t walking right. I lean forward and push up the window and at the same moment Edward grabs Isabel’s arm, but she buckles away from him, very slowly, her body folding up and dropping to the grass. He kneels. The baby’s in the way, the sling hampers him. He can’t get at her, can’t lift her and turn her over. He turns, looking for help, and sees me watching.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Isabel should never have gone outside. The sun at midday is hotter than it’s been for two hundred years. Ladybirds swarm, clay-puddled dew ponds crack in the heat, empty. The Downs are yellow-brown, like the flanks of lions. At midday the emptiness of the sky and the pounding of the sun are frightening. But then evening comes, and the light liquefies to yellow and Isabel’s absent, knocked out.

  It’s evening now. Past nine, getting dark, and I’m in the garden. I’m watering Isabel’s apple trees bucket by bucket, because it’s forb
idden to use a hose. I’m thinking of Isabel and sickness. The afternoon’s been full of it, the doctor coming, the midwife calling in to check up, the health visitor advising Isabel on feeding. Isabel says she wants to stop breast-feeding the baby now. It’s making her ill. The health visitor says she’s doing so well, she mustn’t give up, ‘Mustn’t?’ says Isabel, and she shuts her eyes, turning her silky brown shoulder on everyone. Later she tells Richard to drive into town and buy bottles and tinned milk. Everything turns on Isabel. And hasn’t it always done, since she lay in bed, in pain, while our brother was buried.

  I am sick of it all. Milk and blood and babies. I lug another bucket down the path, the dark water shivering inside it. Water slops over my bare feet and raises scent from the dust. These trees should never have been planted in a drought. I heft the bucket and walk on, all my skin prickling with attention. I’m waiting. I leave the full bucket standing by the trees and wander on through the gloom, down to the raspberry canes. There are big moths flying. When they land patches of white show up on their wings so they look like jigsaws. Daytime life closes down, and night life begins with its own excitement. I wish I was in the city now, where day and night brush each other for hours. I wish I was in a taxi, hurtling round the corners of parks as they turn from blue to black with dusk.

  There’s a tall, thick double row of canes. Some have finished fruiting, others are still in season. I feel for berries in the dark and find them, their ripe seeds melting on my tongue. I hear feet on the path behind me but I keep on picking, prolonging that moment of not looking round.

  It’s gone much darker. Most of the garden has been gulped down into shadow, but white flowers glow across it.

  ‘Give me one,’ Richard asks.

  I pick off a berry and hold it to his lips. He’s half-opened his mouth, ready.