Bills and business letters I put in a folder to give to Mum’s accountant and secretary. Personal letters I answered with a formal note. There were seven calls and three text messages on Mum’s mobile, and grimly I returned them all and said the words all over again, thinking not real not real not real.
But it was, now.
They say it takes a year and a month, or is it a year and a day, to accept someone’s death. Once all the anniversaries are over you can believe in the person’s absence. Christmas would be tough, the first without Mum, and then there would be New Year’s Eve, when we always had a party, and next year’s birthdays, but for now I had reached some level of acceptance that made it bearable.
Emails next. Those to Mum’s accounts were either messages of condolence, or business, or the usual chitchat from friends and people in her history and literature groups. Nothing needed particular attention, so I composed and sent a group email. About to delete everything and close the accounts, I thought I’d better check stored and recently sent messages in her private account. Of course I didn’t read the personal ones, to Dad or Toby or Silvia, to Uncle Quentin and other friends, and I gave her ‘draft’ folder a quick glance. There was one email, to Dr Marian Elder, subject “Belinda Tate”. I remembered that letter I’d found in her hotel room, and made a note to follow up and see that a reply was sent.
The draft email, never sent, read:
Dear Dr Elder,
I am afraid I had completely forgotten about Belinda Tate until I received your letter. It was all such a long time ago. I think I was under the impression that she had drowned.
Much as I would like to help your researches, I’m afraid I can’t. I rarely kept letters once I had answered them, and anything from the 1960s would have been destroyed long ago. It is hard to remember now, but I think I only wrote to Belinda two or three times, and I can’t recall anything we discussed in letters. Usually with my pen friends of the time we wrote about current affairs. Certainly I have no memory of anything personal.
Hmm. Oh well.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: B Tate/Chris Randall
Date: 19.12.07
Dear Dr Elder,
My mother received your letter about Belinda Tate a week or two ago, not long before her death in an accident. She had drafted but not yet sent a reply to you, and although of course I don’t know whether she meant to write more, I am sending you that draft, hereunder.
Regards,
Jaques Randall
Ping! I had mail. Dr Elder had replied. She was fast on the draw – but of course it was early evening in South Australia, and I pictured her at her desk, conscientiously checking her emails before she pulled on her swimsuit and flip-flops and headed for the beach.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: B Tate/Chris Randall
Date: 19.12.07
Dear Jaques Randall,
Thank you for your email. It was very thoughtful of you to reply.
Please accept my sympathy on your mother’s death. My father died not long ago, so I know what a very difficult time you are going through.
Kind regards,
Marian Elder.
Well, wasn’t that nice.
On I toiled. I made the mistake of starting to tidy Mum’s bookshelves, and realised that many of the books were too ancient and tattered to keep. No one likes destroying books, but some of these paperbacks had been read to bits, repaired, repaired again. Besides, we had copies of many of them in the library downstairs. These had been Mum’s own copies, the “C. Bryant” or “C. Randall” of ownership maturing as she aged. Some had quaint old prices on them, in shillings and pence. Amazing to think that you could once buy a Penguin for twenty pence. Hardening my heart, I fetched a roll of bin-liners and some cardboard boxes, and I started at Douglas Adams and worked on to Zola, clearing metres of shelf as I went, until Toby came to call me to lunch.
Then back to it. I’d finished the books and the business letters. Now for the row of boxfiles, thirty-odd years of correspondence.
Making the task somewhat easier than it could have been, Mum labelled each box file with either subject or date. Her habit was to start a new box each year and simply toss in anything she wanted to keep, so the contents were, or so I hoped, roughly in chronological order. Perhaps I should have started with the latest to see if there was anything that needed attention, but what I was really doing was getting rid of rubbish, so I started with the earliest. This was marked, in Mum’s large, left-handed writing, PRE-HISTORY; under that, in small letters, ‘Late 60s to about 70’. Groaning, I opened it, and discovered that apparently Mum at some stage threw in here the contents of several other boxes or files, for none of it was any order. There were letters she received, carbons of her own letters, notes, postcards, theatre programmes, invitations. In the last few years Mum mostly emailed people, or if she had to write a letter she would save it on her PC, but up until the late 80s she typed most of her letters and filed the carbons. To tackle this first file, I tipped the contents out on the floor, positioned the bin handily close by, and started.
God knows why she didn’t throw a lot of this stuff out years ago. Perhaps it had all held fragrant memories. Postcards from Majorca saying ‘having a wonderful time’ and signed ‘M and Z’ might have been resonant to Mum, but now they were all bin-fodder. I found notes: “Having a party for L on Sat nite, do come, fancy dress, love Nxxx’.There were loose photos, unidentified, hilarious now for their fashions. Then I picked up a letter typed on old-fashioned foolscap paper, very yellowed now and fraying along the folds, and as I unfolded it the name at the bottom leapt out at me.
Belinda Tate.
*
At first I quite seriously thought I was hallucinating. This was, or seemed to be, a letter from a girl who forty years ago disappeared, was perhaps murdered.
It was dated 16 October 1966 and it began “Dear Chris”. No one ever called Mum “Chris.”
Dear Chris,
I found your name in the [here the fraying along the fold had rendered several words illegible]… en-friends. I too enjoy writing to people in other countries, and it would be very nice if you’d like to exchange letters with me. I am nearly 18. As you see from the address I live in Adelaide, which is the capital of South Australia. I envy you living in England, because it is rather dull here and we feel so out of touch with things that are happening. News and fashions and films all take so long to get here. I would love to be able to go to London and see all the places and people I’ve read about. Is London really as ‘swinging’ as they say?
I am at a secretarial college, which is very dull, but I wasn’t allowed to stay on at school and go to university. Next year I will get a job and save up to leave home. My interests are mostly reading and history and music. I like pop music. I like the Beatles better than the Rolling Stones, and I used to be keen on Cliff Richard but he seems so old-fashioned now. I can’t buy records because I don’t have a record player but we get all the latest songs on the radio. I wasn’t allowed to see the Beatles when they were here in 1964, nor [another passage, almost three lines, was unreadable here, along another fold.]
I do hope you will want to write to me. I look forward to getting letters from you.
Yours sincerely,
Belinda Tate
The name was typed and underlined, and above she signed her name. Small, rather characterless writing, apparently using a fountain pen.
Well, well.
I pressed on with the rest of the stuff in that folder, and near the bottom I found another Tate letter. This one was an aerogramme The date and salutation and first few lines were missing, a whole corner torn off.
…er’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. Isn’t it mighty??? I can’t decide which is my favourite track, I love them all. John is my favourite, George second favourite…
Another bit was missing here, whe
re the letter was folded.
…It does get quite hot here in summer, yes, often up to a hundred degrees.
You asked about the Vietnam War. We have conscription here for men over 20; not all of them are sent to Vietnam, I suppose, but quite a lot are. My cousin has been, for instance. People here are starting to turn against the war and question the government; there are marches and demonstrations…
Here another piece was missing, as if, folded, the letter had been torn at one end, and only part of the signature remained.
Something I share – shared – with Mum is that we are both synaesthetes. Synaethesia is quite rare, apparently, and a lot of syns don’t even know it’s unusual; unless it comes up in conversation they don’t realise. Synaesthesia is a state, or condition – I like to think it’s a gift – where you ‘see’ numbers and letters, word and names and sometimes musical notes, as coloured. It’s not something you make up; it just is. To Mum, the letter A was yellow, and she would have thought both ‘Christina’ and ‘Bryant’ yellow names. My colours are different; they vary from person to person. Synaesthesia is often inherited, and Toby’s a syn but Silvia isn’t. Nor is Dad. They don’t know what we’re talking about, sometimes I think they don’t really believe in it. Synaesthesia often goes with eidetic memory. When syns remember say, last Christmas day, they (I) see it like watching a colour film, every detail. Non-syns remember differently, or so they say, not they can usually describe how they remember, poor bastards. Mum and Toby and I share this sort of memory, and we have, had, excellent aural memories too. We can hear a song once and repeat it, we can repeat verbatim conversations we’ve heard. We can remember colours and details of people’s clothes, of houses, places we’ve visited. We dream in colour too. There’s often a form of photophobia and an inability to hear properly and concentrate if there’s a lot of background noise. Shopping malls and airports are hell to us.
There are studies being done on synaesthesia. Mum and Toby and I took part in one, sending in answers to surveys on colours etc. Some names have distinct colours for us – Jaques is red and yellow to me as it was to Mum, although to me there’s blue and green in it too. ‘Randall’ is green and yellow and silver. ‘Shakespeare’ is one of the names that to me has no overall colour but is a rainbow of all its constituent letters. ‘London’, say, is silver to me, was dark green to Mum.
‘Belinda’ is to me a red name, a dark name. The red of blood, the darkness of murder and mystery. I wonder what it was to Mum.
Seven
I don’t want to think about Mum’s memorial service. Oh, it was fine, fine – just unbearable. I read “Fear No More”, a theatrical sir read “The Love that I Have”, and the music was exactly what Mum had wanted. We invited anyone who wanted to, to say something about Mum, and about a dozen people did so. A nervous boy said that because of Mum’s literacy charity he’d gone from illiterate rent boy to university graduate. Two kids talked of having found good homes after years on the streets. A Booker Prize-winning author said that he’d still be an accountant but for Mum’s good advice on his first novel back in the 70s. And so on. Everyone was so very kind, and so full of love and sadness for Mum.
Dad didn’t cry, just stared stoically ahead as if the world was ending.
Unbearable.
Eight
Toby went back to New York to see Peter. Silvia stayed with PoorMatthew’s family, and Dad stopped on in Cornwall. I couldn’t raise the energy to go anywhere, do anything, see anyone. I’d gone to my London house to collect my cat, Sylvester, and realised I only wanted to be at Williamscourt. I’d like to say that this was for Gran’s sake, to keep her from being lonely, but of course it was for mine; I felt as if I had to absorb the lack-of-Mum before I could face anything. So I had Gran for company, and Mum’s two cats, Allingham and Christie, who clearly missed her, as well as Sylvester, and Yvonne solidly cooking away, cramming us with love in the form of good home cooking, most of it fattening but who cared. For as long I could remember Gran had seemed quite self-sufficient, resilient, moving contentedly enough through her own small world of family, friends, Bridge, gardening, reading, music and TV. She had her own flat on the ground floor, modern and decorated to her taste ̶ but how often, I now wondered, had she retired to these rooms not out of independence but out of a need not to be a nuisance, not to intrude into our family life? Did she sometimes cry alone in here, for her dead husband and family? For Mum, now?
“Oh, darling, no,” she said when I asked her a couple of days before Christmas. We were in her drawing room, wrapping presents together. “Of course I cried for darling Tia, but other griefs are too far in the past. It’s different when you’re very old, you know, you become inured to death, you don’t fear it. Hate it, of course, when it’s someone young and unexpected. It’s a cliché, but time really does heal. But really I think the last twenty years have been almost the happiest of my life. Except for during the War – I rather loved the War, you know, I was doing such interesting work and although I lost some friends I lost no one irreplaceable. Your grandfather, you see, was wounded at Dunkirk and had a desk job after that, so he was physically safe.”
I said something or other, then she began talking about the first Christmas Mum spent at Williamscourt, and because that hurt I changed the subject and told her about Belinda Tate and those letters we found among Mum’s things. Granny looked at me over her specs as if I’d gone a bit mad.
“Your mother wrote to that girl?”
“Yes – I found letters. At least, I found letters from the girl. Two letters, so Mum must’ve replied to the first one.”
“Well, Jaques darling, I think you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. You see, it wasn’t your mother who was that poor girl’s penfriend, it was your father.”
Oh God, Alzheimer’s. “No, Granny, it was Mum. I saw the letters, Granny – ‘Dear Chris’, and –”
“That’s right, darling, your father. I remember it quite well because your memory for the past gets better as you age and anyway you do remember that your son’s little pen-friend was murdered. Or did they never find out what happened to her?”
“Granny – that girl wrote to Mum. 'Dear Chris’. You’re getting confused. Dad’s name is Jonathon.”
She snapped off a bit of Sellotape between her teeth. “I know my own son’s name, darling, and I’m not getting confused. Jonathon Christopher, Jonathon after his grandfather so he was always called Christopher until the old man died and he went to Oxford. Your father went to Oxford, I mean, not his grandfather, who was dead by then and never went to university even when he was alive. I know it’s silly using these family names over and over, so confusing when there are two in the family, but there we are, your grandfather insisted, so he had to be called Jonathon Christopher and it was very confusing. But when Jon was eighteen his grandfather Jonathon died, and he said he wanted to be called Jon, your father did, I mean, and anyway he thought the name Christopher was a bit sissy, he’d been teased a lot at school with jokes about Christopher Robin, but up until then we all called him Christopher or Chris. So you see, dear, he was that poor girl’s pen-friend, not your mother. No one ever called her Chris. Jon had a lot of pen-friends when he was at school; he liked the stamps, you see.”
All I could find to say was, “But –”
Granny went happily on, enjoying remembering, “You see, darling, your father was always such a dear little boy but young for his age, and he was never much of a one for games or country things, he was good at cricket but loathed hunting and that sort of thing, he much preferred his stamp collection, and bird-watching and things like that, and of course his music, and he had pen-friends all over the world when he was at school, mostly for the stamps, you see. There was a boy in Argentina, or was it Peru? And one in Japan, another in Canada, I think, and one in Finland. And there was a little lad in, oh, where was it, Jamaica? And this poor girl in Australia. He used to read me some of their letters and of course some of them hardly knew English and I s
uppose we did laugh a little at some of them, although of course it wasn’t their fault, but some of the letters were quite interesting, although for Jon it was mostly the stamps he was keen on. But by the time he went to Oxford he’d rather grown out of stamps and butterflies and birds’ eggs, he was keen on music, and he wanted to be called Jon not Christopher, so he changed his name and I think he gradually stopped writing to all his pen-friends. And really, darling, the only reason I remember that Australian girl was because of what happened to her, although they didn’t really know, did they? And because it was Jon’s cousin Adrian who told us about it, because he’d gone to see the girl when he was in Australia, and I remember as if it were yesterday his first Christmas home and him telling Jon about meeting that girl then seeing it in all the papers, about her being murdered or whatever it was that happened.”
With leaden incomprehension I said, “Dad wrote to that Belinda girl. Not Mum. And his cousin, Adrian, met Belinda Tate.”
“That’s right, dear. I wonder if there’s enough paper left on that roll to do Barbara’s present? Perhaps I’d better not risk it. Pass me the other roll, dear.”
“But Mum had those letters in among her stuff,” I objected.
“Well, she was always the one who had to tidy things up, your father always was hopeless at that sort of thing, bits and pieces everywhere.”
I remembered all the other junk we found in that folder; most of it could have belonged to either Mum or Dad, or anyone. I remembered, too, the way Mum always had to sort out Dad’s desk, his study, his financial records and letters. No wonder all those ancient papers were jumbled in together in one box. Yet Mum must’ve seen those Tate letters, she must have known.
Missing Christina Page 6