‘All I want to do is sleep,’ you murmured as you turned away.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 10
Where was I? Not curled up on a ferry’s bunk bed, the hum and pitch of the ship a mechanical lullaby for the exhausted traveller, no, I was waking into sunshine. And not an Italian sun; the light was more diffused, from a much lower angle, it came streaming through a yellow-curtained window. No dream, this was me lying awake in broad daylight. The pleasant warm air of another clear morning in September, a late September day.
I must have slept like a stone, because it seemed no trace of any nightmares remained, no persecuting faces, no sleepless spells with thoughts going in circles. There’d been nothing but hours and hours of darkness. Hard to tell what time it was. Then slowly the room came into focus, the unfamiliar room with its oak chest of drawers, a rarely played guitar, and a decapitated teddy whose fur was cuddled threadbare. Placed on the shelf by the washbasin lay a human skull, a candle, and a Bible. So the room belonged to Kate. Then this was her bed with its summer quilt half slid off onto the floor. The alcove dormer in the roof-slope faced seaward. Your room was the one beside this one, but last night you had been put in a spare room on the floor below, next to your parents’. Now here I was, feeling wide awake in that attic back bedroom at the top of their house.
I could see the Isle of Wight from its window. A small desk had been pushed beneath the sill. Late morning, it must be, for the sun came flooding in through fully closed curtains. Placed behind the chair on the alcove’s other side there was a small bookcase containing faded and well-thumbed editions of Beatrix Potter, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and Complete Nonsense by Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan … each prompting a stab of recollection. On the brightly lit desktop lay an empty inkbottle, a black crust of dried residue staining its label, and a girl’s pencil case. Scratched in its wooden lid were love pledges of the lower sixth.
Better not get up just yet; they won’t know what to say. I would need to make sure that you were already down. Your parents were light sleepers and would have breakfasted already. Kate was still away on holiday at that evangelical retreat she would annually visit in France.
Suddenly, like a rainstorm on the brickwork and gutters and windows of that detached house, water was gushing from a cistern. Then came the echo of somebody’s footsteps on the landing. I pulled the sheets around me and closed my eyes: there was the taxidermist’s fish in its box above the toilet at Isabel’s flat, the broken attachment in a Brussels’ hotel, and a magnolia wall from the guesthouse where we stayed on the outskirts of Otterlo; there she was walking from its bathroom with the sink taps left running, soaping her groin with a red flannel mitten, one leg arched slightly and foot on tiptoe.
Bottles and tubes crowded Kate’s dressing table. In the bathroom mirror downstairs, you might be brushing the straight dark hair you were able to wash the night before, cut to the shoulders, parted above the left eye, your plucked eyebrows growing back and your cheeks without their colour, hair limp and tangled at its ends. You would decide to get it cut that day, and might be worrying about your looks, leaning close up to the glass and pinching the skin of your cheeks between two fingernails. Even then, her wide suntanned back kept returning, skin peeling in a curve between the shoulder blades. Perhaps she had already moved to Bristol. She wouldn’t be expecting to hear from me for at least a week or two.
Out of bed, I drew the curtains, and sat down at Kate’s desk in the alcove. Strong daylight broke over my head with the clear-cut chiaroscuro of sunshine falling across a sculpture. It made a well of light in the bedroom, a large bright square on the carpet. Through Kate’s window I could see backyards of large red brick houses. They faced the fenced-off putting green, the tennis courts and a cricket field, and beyond them ran South Parade, the seafront promenade marked out by ornamental wrought-iron lampposts with flounces of lights suspended between them.
Across the road a concrete seawall gave on to a pebble beach subject to powerful long-shore drift. From time to time, a frigate or a passenger liner could be seen in the stretch of water visible from Kate’s window. Now regattas of white sails fluttered and billowed as yachtsmen tacked or gybed, swinging their booms on the glistening water with the dazzling stripe of light. A spinnaker suddenly filled out like a pregnant woman’s maternity dress. And there it was, the Ijselmeer: a gleaming silence locked in me forever.
Black against the channel’s shining waters were posts in a row with waves lapping round them. They marked the remains of a submarine boom. There, too, the rotten wood stakes and planks protruded from a pebble beach, set there to prevent the long-shore drift that had destroyed them. The rose garden where people walked their dogs had clearly been constructed from what was once an emplacement; the rusted iron discs were gun traverses that could still be walked around as you strolled enjoying the garden’s flowers.
Half way between the seashore and the Isle of Wight, one of the Spithead Forts lay silhouetted in the sunlight. ‘Palmerston’s Follies’ was what the townspeople called them. He was the seaport’s MP back then, and ordered the building of various fortifications during invasion scares around 1860. Perhaps the building of all those fortifications had dissuaded the French from attempting an invasion, or Napoleon III never in fact intended to launch his attack. Nevertheless, the local name your mother used for them did suggest a tradition of irony at the then Foreign Secretary’s expense.
There were tourist trips organized to look around Palmerston’s Follies. Though we once passed close on an Isle of Wight ferry, your family would never have dreamed of visiting them. Still those abandoned forts pretended to command the entrance to Solent Water and the Royal Dockyard. They were painted like a chequered flag in 1912 when the Titanic sailed past them to its doom, but were black now, stripped of their obsolete armoury. At night they would be glinting on the darkness, beaconed so as not to be hazardous, with the lights of Ryde in the distance. Running swell foamed against encrusted green slimed stonework, a lurid glow on the tireless spume.
CHAPTER 11
We had been treated with consideration on the ferry from Calais. Presenting passports on board, you were naturally obliged to explain why yours was a temporary document: without needing to go into any of the details beyond the bag-snatching in Rome, berths were provided, and a purser conducted us off the ship ahead of the queues and the crush at the dockside.
Back in London, we walked across the dusty dead ground beneath the Westway’s fly-over at Royal Oak. Going up the stairs to your flat, you were relieved to find the children’s quarters silent, the entrance to their living room closed. You had opened the door to that large, still under-furnished flat; two tower blocks, a cream and brown speckled church spire, and, further, a great gas cylinder appeared in the broad picture windows. The room had that silent inertness of a place just returned to, as if its few things were rebuking our presence, our having been absent. Your large black and white television stood in the angle by the window, a stereo rested on a low wooden table, its two vast speakers at the room’s far corners, cushions and rugs neatly arranged on the floor. And there were my winter clothes, my books, paint boxes, sketchpads, art history notes—scattered about like the relics of an altogether different life.
The first thing you did was to telephone the doctor. He arrived soon after, and saw you in your bedroom. After just a few moments he reappeared clutching his bag; he glanced at me by the sink and stove, then hurried out of the door. I went to your bedroom: you were sitting on the eiderdown, a look of blank amazement on your face.
‘So what happened?’
‘I told him about the chill on my kidneys, and he was going to examine me. Then I mentioned Italy, in case of complications, and he just recoiled in horror.’ You made the theatrical gesture with raised palms, wide eyes, and a twisted mouth. ‘He said he couldn’t touch me. As if I’d get him struck off or something.’
It was then you decided we should go to your parents’ house in Portsmouth.
Your father met us off the London train. Once arrived, we were put into the different rooms and went straight to bed.
Feeling a little better now, despite the chill on your kidneys, you had started to report a conversation that morning with your mother.
‘Mum’s been in touch with Mr. Draper. We’re going round to see him at his offices this afternoon. There may well be some things he can do,’ you were explaining. ‘Do you want to call your mother?’
‘No. No, I don’t think so—as far as she’s concerned, I’m still on holiday with you. No need to upset her unnecessarily. No need to upset her at all.’
‘So that’s it, is it?’ you came back. ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention any of this to your mother!’
‘I don’t think she’d be able to cope. Better keep it between us.’
‘Right then,’ you said. ‘Get that jacket. We’ve got a bit of shopping to do.’
Your mother had also arranged an appointment with a local doctor friend of hers. The fact that she didn’t consider saving her daughter the public embarrassment by examining her herself only seemed to show how uneasy were your relations with your mother, or how what happened had only further troubled them; or perhaps it merely meant your mother wasn’t qualified to ascertain whether any physical damage had been done.
When we reached the surgery, I stayed in the waiting area while you went through to a consulting room. Beside me sat a pregnant woman smiling with a mixture of awe and pity at a mum opposite her. The mother had a baby with a scalp rash, cradle cap, and there were two moaning twins at her ankles. Next to her was a grey-haired man with grey complexion, sunken eyes, and bony fingers intertwined upon his lap.
There were the usual heaps of women’s magazines, day-old newspapers, and some brightly coloured plastic toys that the twins were ignoring. Public advice posters lined the walls: one suggested I have a full check-up if over thirty-five; another recommended that I try to avoid over-eating and to maintain a balanced diet; was I recently bereaved? Here there were some phone numbers I could ring. Wasn’t it time I gave up smoking? As I strained to read a notice about cancer research without my glasses, a prolonged piercing shriek came through the thin partition between the waiting and consulting rooms. It was you. The others there looked up, startled. All of them sat as if bracing themselves for the next cry of pain. But only the sniffles of the twins disturbed the waiting room’s silence.
Seven minutes later, you emerged with a nurse who smiled a kindly farewell and, glancing round the waiting room, said ‘Mrs. Weekly’. The pregnant woman struggled to her feet and followed the nurse out of the holding area.
‘What did he do? Why the scream?’
‘You won’t want to hear,’ you said, now that we were safely outside. ‘He was looking for damage …’
‘Did he find any?’
‘You want to know?’ you asked me, then relented. ‘We have to wait for the results … He had to insert a speculum. “This won’t hurt,” he said. They always do. “We’re just going to take a little look inside and have a scrape around.” It’s cold when they first put the thing in. That’s when I yelled. He said, “Now don’t be silly.” I really hate that.’
A stylist on Elgin Road gave your hair a trim without an appointment. Now a slight breeze ruffled the hair, cut to fall from its centre parting in two layers, thick and curving inward to the neck, then in a fringe down to the shoulders. We were walking between rows of redbrick terraces, narrower streets where the house-values declined. Identical door and window frames, foreshortened by perspective, succeeded each other, the one design repeated ad infinitum: but here with turquoise snowcem, there with Cotswold-stone faced walls; and now one had some coach lamps screwed into a featureless door surround. Here the old red brick was distempered pink. A sailing ship had been picked out in the front door’s frosted glass. The house fronts were like thick make-up on anxiously aging faces.
We had got as far as the cemetery’s few acres of white-veined marble, overhung by weeping branches of diverse species. Here was the gardener’s house, outside it a standpipe and the buckets to help tend graves. Now we were glancing into windows of house-clearance businesses down the Albert Road: fender irons, sewing machines, electrical goods, unwanted presents, musical instruments, fog lamps for cars …
‘She’s offered to pay for a few days at a hotel in Dorchester if we’ll go.’
‘Who has? Your mother?’
‘Who else? I’ve still got some holiday and mum thinks it would do me good to have time to recuperate. But that’s not the reason. Actually, she’s finding it difficult to have us both in the house. She wants rid of us. Over there we’ll be safely out of harm’s way.’
I was gazing abstractedly into one of the junk shop windows. It had an enormous heap of sand and wheelbarrow on display. So now they’re reduced to selling the beach. About to make the remark out loud, I thought better of it, and turned instead to say:
‘Maybe I should go.’
‘Wouldn’t make any difference. It’s me that’s the problem.’
Which sounded like an invitation not to keep my distance.
‘How much does your mother know?’
‘I wrote to mum when you’d gone on holiday with her,’ you said, ‘and I told her we were planning to meet up, then travel to Italy, but, you see, I didn’t think we’d be staying together. When you left Paddington for the Harwich ferry, everything was over, I thought, and so that’s what I told her. Then this morning when she asked me to tell her what had happened, I did, but she’d no idea what to do or say. She didn’t even seem shocked, just numb. I’d hoped she might say something, anything, but she just couldn’t. It’s understandable, I suppose. But she’s my mother, for God’s sake. She probably thinks I’m tainted—more tainted than before. And I told her it was all right because I got my period almost immediately. No need to worry on that score.’
‘Did you tell her about the gun?’
‘I did, yes, because of course she asked where were you all the time, and I told her you were there.’
‘What about your father?’
‘They’ve probably talked about it by now.’
‘Do you think they’ll say anything about it?’
‘I don’t know. Shouldn’t think so. He never believes a thing she says, anyway. “Invention is the necessity of mother” and all that.’
On we went past the second-hand bike shops, antique businesses of the poorer sort, the junk dealers, sellers of soiled paperbacks, nearly-new clothes stores, a closed-down launderette, two off-licenses, a done-up stripped pine furniture business, a gun shop, three or four dingy cafés. Behind lay the crumbling commercial façade of a once prosperous seaside resort where Sherlock Holmes’s author had set up in practice, a place still home to the exiled Sultan of Zanzibar and his wives.
‘Town gets worse all the time,’ you said, in a voice that didn’t quite exclude a fondness for those streets that had certainly seen better days. ‘Anyway, I said we would take the coach to Dorchester tomorrow, so we’d better go and book some tickets.’
Then you went into a chemist’s for something to relieve your kidneys and upset stomach.
Mr. Draper had agreed to see us a little after two thirty. A late lunch finished, your mother drove us out to the appointment. At that time she was approaching sixty, but seemed much older to me, for she walked with a slight stoop, and her face was tightly wrinkled, especially round the lips; yet her eyes had a watery gleam when she smiled—and good bone structure meant that she’d retained the ghost of her youthful beauty.
You were sitting beside your mother, your small-featured face reflected in the driving mirror. We were being taken through the rings of urban growth, brick terraces with primary colours painted on gutters, doors and windows; the clear sky taut with vapour trails, brown leaves on
the clearway’s tree-lined flanks beginning to tumble; high-cambered, even curves led from the trunk road into an inland district of the city. Your mother’s pale blue, slightly rusting Wolseley Hornet with its soft suspension rolled into corners as she swung the wheel.
The offices of Erwin, Sons & Draper were composed of two houses in a crescent of Edwardian terraces with rooms branching off from a central hallway, reached through an outer office. The entrance had an open door, a polished brass nameplate on the brickwork; an inner door, being opened by your mother, with a frosted glass window and the names of the solicitors again in gold lettering, let into the outer office with a desk and a bright-faced receptionist.
‘Mr. Draper is expecting us,’ your mother announced.
The receptionist stood up, left the room, returned and gave a fresh formal smile.
‘This way, please.’
She was showing us into a spacious office with, for the solicitor, a leather-topped desk and chair behind it, for his clients, a number of lower, more comfortable armchairs in which to sink. As we followed her, your mother called to you from the door.
‘I’ve some shopping to do, but will be back to drive you home, as soon as Mr. Draper’s ready. I won’t be long.’
Then she smiled at the solicitor and hovered at the doorway.
‘Hello, Mr. Draper,’ she added. ‘I’m sure you’ll do everything you possibly can.’
‘Of course,’ said the man. ‘It must be a great relief to have your daughter back with you.’
‘It is,’ she said. ‘You’re both well, I hope? How are the children? Then I won’t disturb you any longer.’
Your mother closed the door.
‘Please do sit down. Please,’ said Mr. Draper, gesturing with his hand towards the armchairs.
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