When I was twenty and Gillian was fifteen, I fell in love with her. I knew such behaviour would be frowned upon or forbidden even though we weren’t blood relatives. It wasn’t really love on my part, just serious infatuation, and she must have viewed me as a convenient male anchorage while she figured out what the stirrings under her belt meant. She surprised me by knowing that too and joked about giving birth to a baby with webbed feet. Where did she get that kind of information? With others we went to the pictures a couple of times. We sat together. Once, I ran my fingers down her arm. She pouted, smiled and crossed her bare legs. Her arms were covered in golden down, which I found exciting. But it was not long before she had a boyfriend, one of many preceding that snowy Christmas in Cornwall. On her sixteenth birthday, she said something odd to me: ‘You’ll be there, won’t you?’ By ourselves for a moment in the kitchen, I gave her a present and kissed her, a peck, on the lips. Her eyes closed. After that she became a cousin again, a relative at arm’s length, growing up as a much-loved family member. Between the age of five and ten, she’d holidayed with us a couple of times, along with Ted and Vera, our regular companions in travel. I was still excessively fond of her. But I had been almost to the brink. Whether she had or not, I never knew. I fantasised a lot, mainly about catching her if ever she fell. Being there, you see. Guy hadn’t changed much, except for drinking more. Sometimes you smelled it on his breath. Gossip smouldered, flaring briefly now and then.
I can’t remember who had suggested spending Christmas at Birch Cottage, St Ives. It was a cottage in name only and spread out on its half-acre in a dip between St Ives and Carbis Bay among clumps of exotic gunnera, which hovered with menace among the trees. Perhaps the others had got tired of Spain and we, mischievously, needed to go one step farther. Although available for holiday letting most of the year, the house had evidence in a downstairs storeroom of permanent residence; or perhaps its contents – among them two surfboards hanging from a cross-beam, roller skates, walking-boots, a toolbox, cobweb-covered oilskins on hooks – had been left by its last owners and the rental company hadn’t got round to clearing the place. We turned up in two cars on Friday, December 23 at four o’clock. It was already dark, the town almost deserted. Cold rain was slanting in off the sea.
I often wonder if my mother and father were happy with three sons – me and Doug and Johnny – particularly as Gillian seemed to have been the making of Ted and Vera from the start. She gave them no cause to revise their innocent sense of wonder, which in adults is often a source of vulnerability. Innocence deflects curiosity, so that odd behaviour comes as a shock. I had a sense that Christmas in St Ives of being on the cusp of something, of knowing but not admitting that it would be the last time our two families would get together away from home. My father’s moodiness had long worried my mother to the point of debilitation. Ted and Vera, having anguished over parenthood for so long, simply saw their anxiety take different forms as Gillian grew older, changed and attached herself to others, which they in particular must have read as the irretrievable loss of something hard won. None of these things stopped us enjoying ourselves. Some of us were just more philosophical about them. The rental people had provided an artificial Christmas tree with lights. We’d just finished piling presents around it when Ted offered me a cigar and I volunteered to make coffee, which was when I noticed the first snowflakes through the kitchen window. The kettle switched on, I lit the cigar, opened the back door and stared into the void.
After a minute or two, I heard a car slowly free-wheeling down the slope from the narrow top road and could see its one brake light going on and off. I somehow knew it was Guy, but even when he’d parked near the coastal path next to the house, taken his big seaman’s duffel bag out of the boot and begun climbing the path towards me, I did not call the others, because for once I was not sure what sort of welcome he’d get. Things had changed. For instance, in obedience to some unspoken lurch in the way the world behaved, we still smoked but not in front of others if it could be avoided. As Guy came into the light and raised his head, the bag over his shoulder, I greeted him with a puff of smoke: ‘Father Christmas, I presume’. He may have thought there was an edge to my voice, a lack of fulsome embrace, though my face had registered a genuine welcome. He just thumped me gently in the midriff and smiled, and I realised, if I hadn’t before, that hierarchies, the self-conscious regulation of one’s surroundings in order to deal with how people behave, were meaningless to him. In this non-threatening world, Guy and Gillian and others like them roamed. One could feel protective towards them if only their need for succour was even less keenly felt than their sense of danger, or was so because of their indifference.
Christmas day itself began with sunshine, the snow having fled Penwith’s peninsular winds. Presents were exchanged. Guy’s bag was topped with the ones he’d brought. We moved sluggishly towards lunch and afterwards we went for a walk along the coastal path. I smoked another of Ted’s proffered cigars. We talked in ever-changing groups, until Gillian ended up with Guy and they walked for a long while together, twenty yards in front of the main group. Past the headland, we descended to Porthminster Beach. It was deserted, except for a gambolling and barking black dog, its owner out of sight. As usual there was barely any wave motion, the flat sea offering just a token breaker to the strand. There was a feeling of permanence about the scene, or an air of relief from human attention that some invisible force was wishing would last. The sand gave way reluctantly under our feet. We were interlopers. Though the sun was up, a lid of cloud was sliding in from the West, and the taste of the air was metallic, sickly marine. I wished we hadn’t come.
On route up to town, Ted drew alongside me. ‘Our Gillian,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’ I imagined the inflections his query supported, concerning his adopted daughter’s appearance, assumption of womanhood, outlook on life, ambition, fitness for dealing with fracture and tribulation. I also tried to imagine what parenthood must be like – the secrecy involved in all that solicitude for someone whose independence you willed. Then I wondered if he actually wanted to know what I thought of the couple still out ahead, specifically the match, for now Gillian had slipped her arm through Guy’s and they were sharing a string of hilarious private exchanges, her head leaning against his shoulder. I told Ted I thought she was grown-up, and his head nodded with a score of rapid, smiling assents, meant to communicate that that was precisely the problem. I sensed that my answer had not been much help.
That night, Christmas night, we watched television. Only the parents were sober, offering us an unspoken and unsolicited lesson from the past. Austerity and privation – they’d known both and would never forget them. My gaze fell on Guy and Gillian, who were sitting side by side on the floor and leaning against a settee. Was I the only one to notice that Guy’s arm was resting lazily on Gillian’s breast?
Just before midnight they turned in, following the parents and leaving me, Doug and Johnny watching a documentary about the Beach Boys.
‘This is the last time I do this,’ Johnny said.
‘Me too,’ Doug said. ‘It’s ridiculous. All these bloody pensioners.’ I thought they were referring to Brian, Dennis and company, just then harmonising in high register while crammed into a psychedelic sand buggy, a conjunction that made me laugh. My brothers looked towards me like a pair of Midwich cuckoos, clearly offended at what they mistakenly thought was a dismissal of their rebelliousness, exposed now by one drink too many.
Sleep wouldn’t come. By two o’ clock the house was silent except for someone snoring far away and the noises of an old building. I got up and looked through the window. There were flashes of white on the top road where the gulls were swooping past the streetlight like giant moths. The sky was starry, flickering in the cold. Then, the ceiling immediately above my south-facing window, the one looking out on to the sloping garden, brightened. A light had been turned on somewhere. I thought an animal might have tripped a security lamp so I waited for it to go out. But it
stayed on. I got up again and put on my dressing-gown. Stepping on to the landing I was aware that the rest of the house was ‘well away’, as my mother called it. Footsteps, a light tread, wouldn’t bother anyone. I stepped gingerly down the stairs, aware of the drop in temperature as I reached the hallway. At the far end of the south wing through an archway were the kitchen and the blister of a small conservatory. Opposite the kitchen was a study – locked – and the lumber room where the surfboards and oilskins were kept. But there was no longer any light, even if it had come from the house, inside or out. Making little or no noise, I switched on the kitchen light and took a biscuit from the cookie-jar, and then wandered down to the conservatory’s sliding glass panels. As I passed the door to the lumber room I heard a faint clacking noise. I stopped. I don’t know why, but I imagined it to have come from the two surf boards I knew were hanging from the ceiling. The door was slightly ajar. It was only then that I thought of intruders. Cornwall for us had long been the place where people had no need to lock up their homes at night, or so some old polo-necked ‘salt’ had once told us, when we were tousle-haired, pink and peeling. In an act I knew straightaway to have been silly, I hesitated then gave an almost inaudible knock. I pushed the door open.
In the downstairs light, the natural light the eyes get used to, I could see Gillian standing alone, naked. I recall every detail of that moment: the surfboards almost imperceptibly swaying, the absence of anyone else, the dark inverted triangle between Gillian’s legs like something brazenly painted on, the expressionless face minutely transforming itself into the faintest of smiles, the bee-stung lips smeared with red gloss, the upturned forefinger moving to rest against lips mimicking a ‘Shh’ sound; but above all I remember the intense blue cold of that room and its abandoned contents, its lingering seaweed smell. The cold that is the sister of loneliness. I said nothing. I thought of an apparition, a dream, and quickly retraced my steps.
Lying in bed later, I realised that Guy must have crept out when I was in the kitchen and that Gillian hadn’t managed to leave before I began wandering towards the conservatory. I must have imagined the smile. There cannot have been a smile. In just over twenty-four hours, we would be leaving that place, once Boxing Day had been spent in more drinking, eating and walking – and chatting about everything and everyone except ourselves. Guy and Gillian were even more outrageous, at one point paddling in the wilder waters of Porthmeor beach. I could sense the others looking at me, as if I were able, as the oldest of the wild generation, to censure or explain. Only my mother said anything. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked, tugging at my sleeve on the path back to the cottage. ‘I think you know what I mean.’ I told her what I felt about Gillian and Guy. She shook her head in disbelief and pulled me closer.
Doug had been right. That lingering family fraternity had gone on for too long. Was it about not letting go, an unspoken belief in safety in numbers begun long before when poverty pressed people into communities, perhaps against their better judgement or natural inclination? Or did it all start with the desperately childless Ted and Vera, and then, when Gillian came along, our groping attempts to reach outside ourselves towards this threat to our impregnability?
That St Ives Christmas was twelve years ago. I haven’t even been to Cornwall since. The place has become, during my absence and in my mind, its former self: primitive and struggling, in the manner of its salt-soaked forebears, who trudged streets reeking of fish oil. When I speak to Gillian now we joke about that Christmas at Birch Cottage, when I and everyone else seemed to be so concerned that she and Guy, ‘two on their own’ as my mother would have said, were beginning some vague dance of destruction.
For the joke was on me. If there was a louring atmosphere in that cottage it was because everyone was concerned for me and my own unconscious form of oddity. It all makes sense now. When Ted asked me on the first walk what I thought of Gillian, he wasn’t concerned about her but about me, his solicitude even avoiding any reservation he may have had about his stepdaughter and me being a pair; and when my mother, on that final pull up from the beach, asked me what was happening, she was not referring to anything beyond what she thought was my own well-being.
It’s just been a long resolution or, for most of the time, no resolution at all. I was never much aware of anything inside forcing an issue. Perhaps I was too anxious for outcomes in others. Only once have Gillian and I talked about that incident, or whatever it was, in the lumber room. She said she’d fallen, and that I was there, as promised. I didn’t let on, but the smile that crossed her lips was the very same I’d witnessed that night as she stood in the freezing cold, in her own world, the embracing repository of my love but forever untouchable. Guy’s name, like its possessor gone roaming in places undiscovered, was not mentioned. Poor Guy – once thought by his actions to have been like me, whose inaction and steadfastness, inherited from my once impoverished parents, delayed the moment when I would turn up not so much unannounced as with a shocking announcement to make.
Ornithology
It’s the migration I cannot bear, the going away, the estrangement posing as its opposite, the one I love being exactly that – ‘one’, ‘her’, ‘she’. I must have picked it up from the doctors, who minister to third persons, the nameless, so that they don’t get involved. But I am so, so involved with her, though she is now set apart. It, the unspoken, has stepped between us. Like is repelling like. She truly moves in mysterious ways and I, the godless, pray for her return. I want her back, to be reunited with her self. First name, surname; genus, species.
What is it they say – you only fully appreciate the little things of life when they are gone? How useless other ways of uttering these obvious truths sometimes seem. Especially when a struggle is involved to restore their depth; you always feel that the effort obscures the truth and isn’t really worth the bother.
I was considering all this the evening I looked up at the first of the year’s housemartins, which were flickering below the eaves like the ignition of a tiny straw fire. They arrive each year almost to the day – first the daring outriders, then the rest, wreathing the house with invisible garlands. Apart, that is, from two years before, when only a couple of them turned up, investigated the old nests and flew somewhere else. It was just after the lapwings failed to show in the field opposite.
‘I miss their madness in the air,’ she said. (I’d like to add ‘prophetically’, but truth’s strangeness bars me.)
‘Their flocks have been decimated. Perhaps the same has happened to the housemartins, some far-off, cosmic grab at bird life that has left its remnants to perform without support or not at all.’ Everything I began saying to her sounded like something lifted from a book. It was as if intimacy would invite trouble.
That summer without housemartins enabled me to climb a ladder and hammer their abandoned nests to dust.
‘Be careful,’ she said, with a hint of reproof.
Standing below, she almost got showered in the stuff. Her arms were folded in the manner that denotes impatience, especially in women, in mothers waiting for a naughty child to admit its wrongdoing. They remained folded even when she stepped aside to avoid the crashing fragments, toeing back on to the concrete path a piece that had fallen on the lawn. What I didn’t understand was how strongly the nonappearance of the birds affected her.
I knew, of course, that it had; such events, the lacunae created in routines and natural cycles, had long begun to leave her silent, first for hours, then for days. She’d always been what others call ‘quiet’, which for the uncharitable meant not awkward, not a bother. The only compensation for such people was a sense of humour, but in those like her its backswing of cruelty limited deployment.
‘I always feel the bump whenever someone slips on a banana skin,’ she said once, at a party. Everyone laughed except her. She looked down and tried to submerge the cherry in her cocktail with an outstretched finger, its nail chewed to the quick.
At the start, it was something that attra
cted me to her. It enabled me to see in her an aspect of myself that, unexpressed, allowed it to flower without being wounded by comparisons.
You can read any number of books on depression and be no closer to understanding it. I pick them up in bundles and go through them when she is away for a long time. But concentration is difficult. I am for ever thinking back to what people did before problems like hers were even recognised. Then I am distracted by what is going on around me, with the curious result that I come to resemble the impatient onlookers of yesteryear, who must have been irritated at least by an individual’s retreat from joy and responsibility. I feel like that sometimes, as if I were the injured party and she is not so much withdrawing into herself as shrinking from my irksome presence. Perhaps I am partly to blame for the way she is. Who knows? I do know I’d be accused of saying these things while she was unable not so much to defend herself – what was to defend? – as have her say. Except that she has been saying very little. Perhaps I am speaking up for her against the ‘pull yourself together’ school of reparation.
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