The Things We Know Now
Page 11
This is a very small country. Six degrees of separation are not possible here. With any luck, you get maybe two, perhaps three, at a push. But news always travels – particularly news such as this.
Couldn’t they – couldn’t she – have waited?
I always suspected that this might happen, despite my father’s original protestations to the contrary. This new child was to be only four or five months younger than Ian. Its impending arrival seemed to me to unpick whatever little remained of our family tapestry. It felt to me that, strand by strand, our shared past was becoming unravelled and a new, ill-fitting, uncomfortable future was being woven from all that forgetting.
My mother, brushed aside by Ella. And now her grandson, brushed aside by this new arrival. I’m sure all of this showed on my face the day my father told me.
‘I’m sorry if you feel hurt by this, Rebecca.’ He was uncharacteristically gentle – something that infuriated me even more. Once again, he had what he wanted: now he wanted me to like it. Same old, same old.
‘It’s been a huge surprise – completely unexpected. A delightful one, of course, but . . .’ and then he trailed off.
At first, I could say nothing. I had a lump in my throat that made speech impossible. Eventually, I managed to congratulate him. The following day, Frances could not understand why I was so upset.
‘Is it to do with money, Rebecca?’ She sounded tentative, genuinely puzzled. She had Ian on her knee. She’d been looking intently at him, and now she raised her eyes to me. I thought she seemed embarrassed. ‘I mean, I’m sorry, I don’t understand why you are so distressed. Are you worried about your inheritance, or what?’
I shook my head. ‘I doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Forget it. I’ll get over it.’ And I tried to smile. How could I explain? The truth is, back then, I did not understand it fully myself. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out the warp and weft of all that emotional entanglement. I know now, and I think I also knew then, that it wasn’t simple. Hindsight has not illuminated everything.
Leaving my mother aside for the moment, what was simple was that I did not like Ella – had never liked her. And not just because she became my father’s new wife. I didn’t like her professional faux-empathy. All that eye contact, that kind attentiveness to your words, the goddam reasonableness of the way she looked at the world.
Am I a bitch? Quite possibly. My sisters certainly think so.
But, apart from all the feelings that had to do with Ella, it seemed to me more and more that my real life had been lived in my old family home. Since Cecilia’s death, I’d felt cut off from that life; abandoned. It was like being set adrift. My anchor had slipped and I’d been carried along on the rolling tide towards another life that wasn’t mine.
And being married to Adam had not changed that. Our life together had a quality of waiting attached to it. As though I was killing time, as though all that was significant was taking place somewhere else. I kept waiting for my real life to catch up with me – the one that had slipped from my grasp around the same time as my mother did.
The years that followed her death were awful ones. All that loss, all those cruel pregnancies filled with hope and desolation. Looking back, I am surprised that I did not go out of my mind. Perhaps I did.
And then Ian arrived. My son grounded me: he, at last, made me feel that beside him at least, I had a place. There is no doubt about that. Our bond was clear and strong. Being with him made me happy. Once I was with him, I felt that I belonged to something bigger than myself. But outside that charmed circle of two, everything else felt in disarray.
And so the news of Daniel’s arrival came wrapped up in a grief and a sense of loss that I found myself quite unable to explain. I felt surrounded by it: as though past and future were both defined by it. I knew, too, that I had never forgiven my father for the way he treated my mother – something else that my sisters did not understand. And so we never discussed it.
Over the years, I learned to let it all slide.
After the day that my father announced Ella’s pregnancy, he never mentioned it again to me, not in that way. It was now a fact, an accepted future for him and his new family, something that need not be spoken of, other than in terms of universal delight.
But, by that time, there wasn’t a lot of contact between us anyway. Oh, I went along to the christening: pretty much frogmarched there by my sisters. The baby was a boy, of course. Somehow, I had known it would be. To me, it felt inevitable that, once again, my father would get whatever it was that he wanted.
I went along to some of the subsequent family gatherings, too. But only when I had to. My sisters were tireless in their efforts to create and maintain a nurturing family network.
‘It’s what Cecilia would have wanted, too,’ Sophie snapped at me one day. ‘Get over yourself.’
I was shocked. First Adam. Now silent Sophie.
I decided there and then that I would keep my feelings to myself. My sisters’ views were different; my husband was clearly not interested. And so I did my best: I remembered birthdays, exchanged gifts at Christmas, turned up on family Sundays when my punishing schedule permitted, and just got on with things.
Patrick
I SAVOURED EVERY MOMENT of Daniel’s young life: from his first faltering steps across the wooden bridge at the end of our garden, to his fascination with the birds that visited us, to his endless tree-climbing and bicycle-riding summer days. But to tell the truth, of the two of us, it was Ella who was the more occupied with him while he was still a small child. I see now that I was more an observer of, rather than a participant in, all the more robust activities of my son’s earliest years.
I have always found it easier to relate to my children once they become older – not necessarily more sensible, just more sentient. I did, of course, my share of bathtimes and bedtime stories. I took part in both of these activities with alacrity. I loved tucking in my son’s small, sleep-furled body at night, smelling of soap and warmth and vulnerability.
However, when he was about eight years old, Daniel seemed to become quieter, more self-contained, almost overnight. And although a dizzying array of children came and went during those early years, including his growing brood of cousins – even Ian, from time to time – for birthday parties, sleepovers, day trips to the lake, athletic contests in the garden, I began to notice that, more and more, Edward became Daniel’s chosen companion.
Maryam and Rahul’s eldest son – also born just a few months before Daniel – Edward was a sweet, gentle boy, a little in awe of us, I always felt. And Daniel felt it, too – he even spoke to me about it on that memorable day when we went fishing together – but that part of my story comes later.
Edward was the eldest of four boys – the energy they unleashed together could have powered the national grid. Home for Edward was noisy, busy and, truth to tell, somewhat cramped. Maryam and Rahul’s rented farmhouse was a short drive from us. It was one of those old sixties monstrosities – drab and poorly insulated and lacking in any coherent living space. Our house was an oasis for Edward; we loved having him. The other side of that particularly satisfactory coin was that Daniel loved the chaos and the jostling and the perpetual motion of Edward’s family – or he had done for all of his first eight years.
What I remember best, that autumn when Daniel became very precise about his age – eight and a half – is his developing passion for colouring, painting, collage work. He and Edward used to spend every evening after school with their heads bowed over their sketchbooks or their scrapbooks. I was curious. It surprised me that such a relatively quiet activity had sustained two energetic young boys for so long. It seemed to be a focus that had come out of the wide blue yonder.
One afternoon, I glanced over their shoulders as I placed a glass of milk before each of them. I took a furtive look at Edward’s page first – he was closest to me – and I pushed the plate of biscuits and fruit towards the middle of the table. His painting was as I would have exp
ected it to be: some smiling stick figures in the foreground, a two-storey, double-fronted house in the background with smoke curling towards the sky from a squat and ill-proportioned chimney. It seems that this is the sort of house all children love to draw. Perhaps it is the symmetry that they like. Perhaps the regularity of its features is what pleases them, no matter how far this ideal is from their own home-place. The colours of Edward’s picture were vivid, some leaching into others, the paper rising and bubbling under the watery application of poster paint.
‘Very nice, Edward,’ I said. ‘I love all the happy faces.’
He smiled, shyly, and reached for a biscuit.
I felt that I could now look over Daniel’s shoulder – politeness had been adequately served. I can still remember the sense of shock I felt as I looked. The page shimmered. The painting was, unmistakably, of our garden: but a garden transformed into a kind of pastoral transfiguration scene. The colours were astonishing: I could see where Daniel had mixed his own shades in the old, chipped saucers that Ella had given him for the purpose. Two figures – not stick figures – but well fleshed-out human children – flew kites high into the cloudless sky. I could have sworn that the kites fluttered, that the two boys moved, across the garden, down the slope to the river. The scene had energy, life – a vibrancy that was wholly out of keeping with the tender age of the artist. And I know that I can be accused of seeing something with a highly indulgent parent’s eye: perhaps. Nevertheless, I also know that another, more critical part of my photographer’s eye was equally arrested by the power of my son’s painting.
‘Very nice, too, Daniel,’ I said. ‘I like the kites. Well done, you guys.’
I spoke to Ella about it in the kitchen afterwards. ‘Is it me?’ I asked. ‘Or is he just very good?’ I was unable to hide my amazement.
She smiled as she handed me the plates for the dishwasher. ‘No, it’s not just you. The teacher spoke to me this afternoon, actually, when I collected the boys. She said he has real talent.’
I was pleased. What father wouldn’t be? I began to watch Daniel more carefully, encouraging him whenever I could. I suppose our relationship shifted somewhat as a result of this burgeoning talent. It might sound callous to say that my son suddenly interested me more, but that is the truth. I loved him completely and unreservedly, of course, and I always had done; but now there was a different conversation beginning between us. I felt that there was a whole other level on which we could engage.
Years later – in fact, during those heady, optimistic months of his first year at secondary school – I had cause to recall that earlier fully formed picture of the kite-flyers. I rejoiced in his transfer to secondary school: he was fired up about everything. It was wonderful to watch his interests expand, to hear of how teachers encouraged him – particularly in art and English – and to watch how he blossomed under the new regime. One afternoon, sometime in late October of that first year, I think, we were in the conservatory, Daniel and I. I was wrestling with the remains of that day’s cryptic crossword, he was sitting at the table, his paints and sketchpad and some sheets of A2 spread out in front of him. He often painted there: the light was better and there was more space at the round table than at the desk in his bedroom. His head was bent in concentration, the cow’s lick falling, as usual, over his freckled forehead. I knew better than to interrupt. Besides, he often showed me his work during those early months, once he felt he was finished. I think he trusted my eye: his questions would always revolve around perspective, or proportion, or form – never around the subjective. He never asked me whether I ‘liked’ what he had done. And so I felt free to be critical; constructively so, but critical nonetheless.
I had told him once that the Chinese believed that painting was the outcome of the harmonious relationship between the hand, the eye and the heart. None of these three should be missing. He never forgot.
That evening, he stood up from the table and carried his work over to where I was sitting. As ever, his expression was a mix of excited apprehension and earnest awareness. Daniel knew well that he had talent; he carried that knowledge lightly.
‘Miss O’Connor told us to paint “Farewell”. That’s all – just one word. We were only to use black and white, and one colour of our choice. What do you think?’
I put down my newspaper. ‘Stand back a bit into the light, and hold it up so that I can see it properly.’
It was our lake – of that there was no doubt. Waves were painted here and there with suggestive, undulating flashes of black: the expanse of water was implied rather than explicit. Casey’s boatyard – which we had visited together, during that summer – was a smudge in the distance, the pier a ghostly finger reaching out into the dark water. The scene brought a delicious shock of recognition with it.
Two figures sat in a lake boat – George Casey’s lake boat – and they were painted in silhouette. The boat pretty much filled the entire page. As I looked more closely, I could see Edward’s long nose, the unmistakable shape of his gangly body, leaning forward, intent on something between his fingers. There was just the glimpse of a grin – a mere flash of white teeth. Across from him sat a boy with a cow’s lick falling across his forehead. One of his hands was raised – whether in greeting or farewell it was hard to say: a nice piece of ambiguity. And above the boat was a psychedelic starburst of blue – a sun, a moon, a planet: it didn’t matter. The scene was imbued with an extraordinary stillness, the intimacy of friendship. It struck me then, and not for the first time, how fortunate Daniel was to have such a close friend, something that had eluded me all my young life.
I found his painting moving, and I told him so.
‘Hand, eye and heart?’ he asked, grinning.
‘Absolutely. I think you’ve got it just right. The proportions are excellent. There’s a sense of mystery to it, too. I like that. And there’s something extra for me, of course.’
He looked at me, questioningly.
I pointed to the smudge in the distance. ‘Casey’s boatyard. It’s always good to see familiar places.’
He frowned, quickly, as though he had missed something. ‘And if they’re not familiar?’
‘There’s more than enough to intrigue. People bring their own experiences with them when they look at a painting. Don’t forget that. There’s a real story here – the background is just an extra.’
He nodded, satisfied. ‘Okay. It’s for next week, so I’ll just leave it and see what we think in a few days. Something might need to be changed.’
That ‘we’ thrilled me. My son always made it easy for me to be a good father.
Some three years earlier, when Daniel was nine, I took him sailing with me on his own. I’d hoped that this would be a regular activity for just the two of us. We had six Saturdays in a row to spend together, while Ella pursued some training course or other in the city. He had grown somewhat sturdier during the previous winter. For his birthday that February, he had asked for nothing other than a pair of binoculars.
That pleased me, too. I felt that, soon, I could teach him the rudiments of photography. I already knew that he had a keen eye.
The first Saturday, we went to the lake very early. The mist was just rising. There was an eerie stillness: water, sky, air – nothing moved. Great swathes of steel-blue mist ribboned across the countryside.
‘Can we go to the bird sanctuary?’ Daniel asked suddenly.
‘Sure we can,’ I said. ‘When this mist clears, it’s going to be a really fine day. You’ll have a great view.’ I smiled at him. He seemed so serious, standing there on the quay wall, watching carefully as I untied the Aurora. He looked suddenly small and fragile, and something tugged at my heart. ‘Hop on board,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to use the engine. But there should be a bit of a blow later on this afternoon, if we can trust the weather forecast.’
He jumped lightly onto the deck. His landing barely made a ripple. I started the engine and Daniel fended us off the quay wall. Then he sat and opened up his ruc
ksack. I had made us sandwiches and flasks of soup. I wondered how he could be hungry already – barely an hour after breakfast. But he wasn’t interested in the food. Instead, he pulled out a brand-new sketchbook, some pencils, a box of charcoal. He placed the binoculars around his neck.
‘I want to try drawing the birds,’ he said. ‘I’ve never tried before. Do you think we’ll be able to get close enough?’ His eagerness was touching.
‘We’ll do our best,’ I said. ‘We’ll need to sit still and be very patient, though.’
He nodded. ‘I know that. I’m ready.’
‘Do you know what you’re looking for yet?’
‘Oh, yeah. I’ve looked up loads of stuff.’
I smiled. His and Edward’s familiarity with technology never ceased to amaze me. It was as though they’d been born with an extra gene – one that is capable of absorbing new things effortlessly, rather than having to learn them. His ease with a keyboard, a mouse, even a mobile phone, astonished me. I felt slow and fumbling and awkward in comparison.
And old. Let us not forget old.
‘I’ll read the names to you.’ Daniel looked over at me. ‘The site says they’re all here – you just have to look for them carefully.’ He flipped back the cover of his sketchpad. Immediately, he began to recite.
‘Blackcapfieldfareperegrineskylarksparrowhawkmerlinshortearedowl, stonechat. The stonechat is very rare, but . . .’ He paused finally and drew breath.
The engine fired and sputtered. ‘Right, then,’ I said, let’s get underway.’
We didn’t see the stonechat, but we did see a sparrowhawk, some fieldfare and several skylarks. We crouched in the grasses until I could no longer feel my legs. But Daniel’s enthusiasm was infectious.
Eventually, I persuaded him to come back to the boat for lunch. We sat in the sunshine, a breeze blowing that would soon become stronger, brisker. ‘I think we might be able to sail back,’ I said. ‘Would you like that?’