‘Climb!’ said Tabby. I climbed. I knew – did she? – that the rust might crumble beneath us and drop us into the heart of the wrecks. Climb, she said, and I did: each step tested, so that I learned the resistance of rotting metal, the play and the give beneath my feet, the pathetic cough and wheeze of it, its abandonment and mineral despair. Tabby climbed. Her feet scurried, light, skipping, the soles of her sandals skittering and scratching like rats. And then, like stout Cortez, she stopped, pointed, and stared. ‘The woodpiles!’ I gazed upwards into her face. She swayed and teetered, six feet above me. Evening breeze whipped her skirt around her stick legs. ‘The woodpiles!’ Her face opened like a flower.
What she said meant nothing to me, but I understood the message. We are out! she cried. Her arm beckoned me. Come on, come on! She was shouting down to me, but I was crying too hard to hear. I worked myself up beside her: crab arms, crab legs, two steps sideways for every step forward. She reached down and scooped at my arm, catching at my clothes, pulling, hauling me up beside her. I shook myself free. I pulled out the stretched sleeve of my cardigan, eased the shape into the wool, and slid it back past my wrist. I saw the light on the still body of water, and the small muddy path that had brought us there.
‘Well, you girls,’ Jacob said, ‘don’t you know we came calling? Didn’t you hear us?’
Well, suppose I did, I thought, Suppose she was right. I can just hear myself, can’t you, bawling, here, Daddy Jack, here I am! Come and save me, Daddy Jack!
It was seven o’clock. They had been composing sandwiches and Jacob had been for ice cream and wafers. Though missed, we had never been a crisis. The main point was that we should be there for the right food at the right time.
The little boys slept on the way home, and I suppose so did I. The next day, next week, next months are lost to me. It startles me now that I can’t imagine how I said goodbye to Tabby, and that I can’t even remember at what point in the evening she melted away, her crayons in her satchel and her memories in her head. Somehow, with good fortune on our side for once, my family must have rolled home; and it would be another few years before we ventured so far again.
The fear of being lost comes low these days on the scale of fears I have to live with. I try not to think about my soul, lost or not (though it must be thirty years since my last confession), and I don’t generally have to resort to that covert shuffle whereby some women turn the map upside down to count off the road junctions. They say that females can’t read maps and never know where they are, but in the year 2000 the Ordnance Survey appointed its first woman director, so I suppose that particular slander loses its force. I married a man who casts a professional eye on the lie of the land, and would prefer me to direct with reference to tumuli, stream beds and ancient monuments. But a finger tracing the major routes is enough for me, and I just say nervously, ‘We are about two miles from our turn-off or maybe, of course, we are not.’ Because they are always tearing up the contour lines, ploughing under the map, playing hell with the cartography that last year you were sold as le dernier cri.
As for the moorland landscape, I know now that I have left it far behind. Even those pinching little boys in the back seat share my appreciation of wild-flower verges and lush arable acres. It is possible, I imagine, to build a home on firm ground, a home with long views. I don’t know what became of Jacob and his family: did I hear they went home to Africa? Of Tabby, I never heard again. But in recent years, since Jack has been wandering in the country of the dead, I see again his brown skin, his roving caramel eyes, his fretting rage against power and its abuses: and I think perhaps that he was lost all his life, and looking for a house of justice, a place of safety to take him in.
In the short term, though, we continued to live in one of those houses where there was never any money, and doors were slammed hard. One day the glass did spring out of the kitchen cupboard, at the mere touch of my fingertips. At once I threw up my hands, to protect my eyes. Between my fingers, for some years, you could see the delicate scars, like the ghosts of lace gloves, that the cuts left behind.
Father, Father
Susan Hill
Susan Hill (b. 1942) is a British author, best known for her novel The Woman in Black, which was adapted into a long-running stage show in London’s West End. She won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1971 for I’m the King of the Castle, and was awarded a CBE in 2012.
‘I never realised,’ Nita said, standing beside the washbasin rinsing out a tooth glass. Kay was turning a face flannel over and over between her hands, quite pointlessly.
‘Dying. Do you mean about dying?’
‘That. Yes.’
They were silent, contemplating it, the truth sinking in at last with the speaking of the word. In the room across the landing their mother was dying.
‘I really meant Father.’
Naturally they had always seemed happy. Theirs had been the closest of families for thirty-seven years, Raymond and Elinor, Nita and Kay the two little girls. People used to point them out: ‘The happy family.’
So they had taken it for granted that he loved her, as they loved her, fiercely and full of pride in her charm and her warmth and her skill, loved her more than they loved him, if they had ever had to choose. Not that they did not love their father. But he was a man, and that itself set him outside their magic ring. They simply did not know him. Not as they knew one another, and knew her.
‘But not this.’
Not this desperate, choking, terrified devotion, this anguish by her bed, this distraught clinging. This was a love they could not recognise and did not know how to deal with – and even, in a way, resented. And so they fussed over him, his refusal to eat, his red eyes, the flesh withering on his frame; they took him endless cups of tea, coffee, hot water with lemon, but otherwise could not face his anguished, embarrassing love, and the fear on his face, his openness to grief.
The end was agony, though perhaps it was more so for them, for their mother seemed unaware of it all now. She had slipped down out of reach.
It lasted for hours. There was a false alarm. The doctor came. Next she rallied, and even seemed about to wake briefly, before drowning again.
They had both gone to sleep, Nita on the sewing-room sofa under a quilt, Kay in the kitchen rocking chair, slumped awkwardly across her arm. But some change woke them and they both went into the hall, looking at one another in terror, scarcely believing, icy calm. They went up the stairs without speaking.
Afterwards, and for the rest of their lives, the picture was branded on their minds and the branding marks became deeper and darker and more ineradicable with everything that happened. So that what might have been a tender, fading memory became a bitter scar. Their father was kneeling beside the bed. He had her hand between both of his and clutched to his breast, and his tears were splashing down onto it and running over it. Every few minutes a groan came from him, a harsh, raw sound which appalled them.
The lamp was on, tipped away from her face and the golden-yellow curtains she had chosen for their cheerful brightness during the day were now dull topaz. The bedside table was a litter of bottles and pots of medicines.
Her breathing was hoarse, as if her chest was a gravel bed through which water was trying to strain. Now and then it heaved up and collapsed down again. But the rest of her body was almost flat to the bed, almost a part of it. She was so thin, the bedclothes were scarcely lifted.
Nita felt for Kay’s hand and pressed until it hurt, though neither of them was aware of it. Their father was still bent over the figure on the bed, still holding, holding on.
And then, shocking them, everything stopped. There was a rasping breath, and after it, nothing, simply nothing at all, and the world stopped turning and waited, though what was being waited for they could not have told.
That split second fell like a drop of balm in the tumult of her dying and their distress, so that long afterwards each of them would try to recall it for comfort. But almost at once it was driven ou
t by the cataract of grief and rage that poured from their father. The bellow of pain that horrified them so that in the end they fled down to the sitting room, and held each other and wept, but quietly, and with a restraint and dignity that was shared and unspoken.
There was to be a funeral tea, though not many would come. She had outlived most of her relatives and had needed few friends, their family unit had been so tight, yielding her all she had wanted.
But those who did come must be properly entertained.
Nita and Kay arrived back before the rest to prepare, though the work had been done by Mrs Willis and her daughter.
The hall was cool. Nita, standing in front of the mirror to take off her hat and tidy her hair, caught her sister’s eye. They were exhausted. The whole day, like the whole week, seemed unreal, something they had floated through. Their father had wept uncontrollably in the church, and at the graveside bent forward so far, as the coffin was lowered, that they had half-feared he was about to pitch himself in after it.
Behind Nita, Kay’s face was pinched, the eye sockets bruise-coloured. There was everything to say. There was nothing to say. The clock ticked.
She will never hear it tick again, Nita thought.
For a second, then, the truth found an entrance and a response, but there was no time, the cars had returned, there were footsteps on the path, voices. The truth retreated again.
They turned, faces composed. Nita opened the door.
Every day for the next six months they thought that he would die too. If he did not, it was not any will to live that prevented it. He scarcely ate. He saw no one. He scarcely spoke. He had always been interested in money, money was his work, his hobby, his passion. Now, the newspapers lay unopened, bank letters and packets of company reports gathered dust. For much of the time he sat in the drawing room opposite his wife’s chair. Often he wept. Whenever he could persuade Nita or Kay to sit with him he talked about their mother. Within the half-year she had achieved sainthood and become perfect in the memory, every detail about her sacred, every aspect of their marriage without flaw.
‘I miss her,’ Kay said, one evening in October. They were in the kitchen, tidying round, putting away, laying the table for breakfast.
Nita sat down abruptly. The kitchen went silent. It had been said. Somehow, until now, they had not dared.
‘Yes.’
‘I miss laughing with her over the old photographs, I miss watching her embroider. Her hands.’
‘People don’t now, do they? There used to be all those little shops for silks and threads and transfers.’
They thought of her sewing box, in the drawing room by the French windows, and the last, intricate piece, unfinished on the round wood frame.
‘Things will never be the same, Kay.’
‘But they will get better. Surely they’ll get better.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Perhaps – we ought at least to start looking at some of the things.’
The sewing box, her desk, the drawers and wardrobe in her bedroom. Clothes, earrings, hair-brushes, letters, embroidery silks were spread out for inspection in their minds.
‘You read about people quarrelling with their mothers.’
‘We never quarrelled.’
‘You couldn’t.’
‘You read about it being the natural way of things.’
‘Quarrelling is not obligatory.’
They caught one another’s eye and Nita laughed. The laughter grew, and took them gradually over; they laughed until they cried, and sat back exhausted, muscles aching, and the laughter broke something, some seal that had been put on life to keep it down.
Outside Nita’s room, they held one another, knowing that the laughter had marked a change. In the study, hearing their laughter coming faintly from the distant kitchen, their father let misery and loneliness and self-pity wash over him, and sank back, submerging himself under the wave.
What would life be like? They did not know. Each morning they went out of the house together, at the same time, and parted at the end of the next street. Nita walked on, to her hospital reception desk. Kay caught her bus to the department store where she was Ladies’ Fitter.
At six they met again, and walked home. And so, life was the same, it went on in the old way – yet it did not. Even the shape of the trees in the avenue seemed changed. When they neared the house something came over them, some miasma of sorrow and fear and uncertainty, and a sort of dread.
Each knew that the other felt it, but neither spoke of it; they spoke, as before, of the ordinary details of the day, the weather, the news of the town.
And in each of their minds was always the question – will today be different? Will this be the day when he wakes from the terrible paralysis of misery?
But when the door opened into the cool, silent hall and the light caught the bevel of the mirror, they knew at once that after all, this was not the day, and went in to hang their coats and empty this or that bag, to wash and tidy before going in to him.
The medicines had been thrown away and a few bills and receipts and shopping lists, otherwise he would allow nothing to be sorted or moved or cleared.
Everything must remain as she had left it.
Once, a few days after the funeral, Kay had crept into her mother’s bedroom and sat on the bed, which the nurse had stripped and re-made with fresh linen, as if, somehow, her mother might come back and it must be ready for her. And she had been everywhere in the room. Kay had touched the dressing gown behind the door, and the touch had disturbed the faint fine smell of the violet talcum powder and soap her mother had used, and brought her back even more vividly.
Six months later, nothing had been moved, but going into the room again, in search of her mother’s old address book, she had sensed the difference at once. There was a hollow, she was no longer there. The bedroom was quite empty of her.
Kay had found, as she stood for a few moments at the window looking out over the garden, that she could not conjure her mother up in any way, could not picture her, could not remember the sound of her voice. When she touched the dressing gown, the smell had gone.
‘Father ought to go in there now,’ she said, going in to Nita. ‘Surely it might…’
Her sister shook her head.
‘Perhaps Dr Boyle—’
‘But he isn’t ill.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Perhaps you are right though, about the room.’
‘What should we say?’
They imagined what words might conceivably serve, where they might possibly begin.
‘It would be best to be straightforward,’ Nita said at last.
‘Could you?’
‘I – I think I must.’
But two days later, it was Kay who spoke, coming into the drawing room and finding it in darkness, so that she startled him by clicking on the light.
There had been some petty irritations during the day and she was suffering from a cold; if it had not been for those things she might never have confronted him, would never have had the courage.
‘Whatever are you doing sitting here in the dark again, Father? Whatever good is this going to do any of us?’
She saw that she had shocked him and his shock gave her nerve.
‘It is six months since Mother died, half a year. What good are you doing? We have to go out, carry on a life. That’s how it should be, how it has to be. Do you think we haven’t felt it and missed her as much as you? Do you suppose she would think well of you, hiding away, wringing your hands? You’ve interest in nothing, concern for nothing. You’re in the half-dark. Have you wondered how it is for us, coming back to it at the end of every day?’
She heard herself as she might hear someone in a play. She was not startled or made afraid by her own voice, or the passion with which she had spoken. She simply heard herself, with interest but without emotion and when she stopped speaking she heard the silence.
Her father was staring at her, his face bric
k-red, his mouth working.
She began to shake.
It was Nita who saved them, coming without any warning into the room.
‘Kay?’
She looked at her sister, at her father, at the two shocked faces and though she had heard nothing of what had been said, the force of it seemed to press down upon the silence that filled the room and Nita understood the enormity of what had happened.
‘Kay?’
But Kay was frozen, she could neither speak nor move, could scarcely even breathe.
And then he got up and without looking at either of them, blundered out of the room, and through the hall towards the stairs.
When they returned home the following evening he was not in the house. He had left before ten, Mrs Willis said, in a taxi which was taking him in to the city.
By the time he returned they had gone to bed, though both were lying awake, turning the events over in their minds. Both heard his key in the lock, his footsteps, the closing of his bedroom door. Both thought of creeping along the corridor to the other. Neither did.
The next day, the pattern was the same, and so, until the end of that week, on the Saturday, he ate lunch and supper with them. But something in his look forbade them to refer to any of it. Kay was terrified of catching his eye.
‘He is my father, why should I be afraid of him?’
The news was on the television, the one programme they always watched, as they had watched it every night with their mother. Somehow, speaking over the voices on it seemed to Kay like not quite speaking at all.
The news ended. Nita got up.
‘He should be grateful to us,’ she said and her voice rose. ‘Grateful!’
Her sister’s face had flushed and Kay saw that there were tears in her eyes.
‘It had to stop and I didn’t have the courage to say it.’
She went quickly out of the room. Kay stared at the blank screen, and quite suddenly, her mother’s face came to mind; she saw her as she had been, long before the illness, saw her grey, neatly parted hair and the soft cheeks, saw her smiling, pleased, patient expression. She had gone and now she had come back.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 68