by Patrick Gale
‘Your mother,’ he kept saying.
‘Yes?’ she would prompt him repeatedly.
They made that little exchange about eight times and just when she thought that’s all there was going to be to it, that he was maybe trying to say her mother had been good or that he’d always loved her or that she was waiting for him on the other side, he had a coughing fit then began the sentence another way.
‘There’s one thing I could never forgive her.’
‘Yes, Dad?’
‘She had another baby.’
‘She did?’
‘Joanie had a twin. It happens. Her twin died during the birth. Caught up in Joanie’s cord. Not a thing that would happen now. And Joanie was a beautiful child. A cute baby. Perfect. And your mother told her. When she was, what, five or six could she have been? Could she?’
‘Maybe Dad. What did she tell her?’
‘She’d been a bit bad and your mother told her, and told her the wrong one had died. That was evil of her.’
Evil. The word so rarely on his lips. The word that even in church only got said once a sitting, during the Lord’s Prayer. It buzzed in the room between them like a meat-fattened fly.
Which was just where Winnie’d left it. She couldn’t take stories like those back to Josh to see his kind face wrinkle in the effort to understand. And now, twenty years on, that fly was out and bothering her again.
She and Josh had not been blessed with children. They had tried. They had tests. They had discussed and rejected adoption. Leastways, she had discussed and he had rejected it. He was funny about wanting his own and wouldn’t go for the idea; she had to respect that.
There were advantages. She kept her figure. He kept his hair. They never had to go without interesting adult holidays and she’d had the freedom to build her own career after all and to put in three hours a week as a volunteer counsellor at the Clarke, helping distraught relatives work through their feelings at having a loved one join the wavering ranks of the mentally ill.
Josh’s sisters had three apiece but their husbands took them to Los Angeles and Chicago respectively, so they were never close. The time she had really missed motherhood, of course, was during Josh’s bypass surgery and its failure. When there was no one to prop her up or cosset her.
In a curious way her little business had become her child and her employees, her family. Simple Gifts sold wooden furniture and household items and a small range of clothes and linens, all produced by Amish or Shaker communities. Housed in an old warehouse in Cabbagetown, the old Irish district whose fortunes had greatly improved, it had doubled in size since she first opened it with a single assistant and now had an Internet-based mail order side that had greatly increased its turnover. She was not quite a millionaire but what had begun as an indulgence, a venture in which Josh humoured her, had bought her a security. She was well past retirement age and had handed the running of the business over to her junior partner Petey, a sweet man who had come in as her first sales assistant straight out of high school. But she retained a desk in the office and came in almost every day because being home alone was lonely and boring. Something in the eagerness with which Petey had packed her off on this adventure told her it was time to cut everyone a little slack and try to be a merrier widow. Take cruises and stuff.
She sat up. She couldn’t sleep, not with all those seagulls screaming outside, and she wasn’t going to doze.
She reached for the phone and her diary, took a deep breath and rang him.
‘Hello?’ He didn’t sound so old.
‘Antony? It’s Winnie MacArthur.’
‘What?’
‘Hello!’
‘Sorry. Let me turn up the volume on this thing.’ There was a deafening clunk as if he had dropped the receiver on a table then he came back on. ‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Winnie MacArthur, Antony. From LongLost.com. Joanie’s sister? Rachel’s sister, if you like.’
‘Oh. Oh yes. Hello. How are you?’
‘Excited. Tired.’
‘Ah. Sorry if I sounded a little distracted. We’ve rather a full house at the moment. My son Hedley’s here, still, and my daughter, Morwenna, who isn’t very …’
‘Oh. Antony, you must say if it’s not a good time to visit.’
‘Why? Where are you?’
‘The Queen’s Hotel,’ she told him. ‘Just around the corner from you, according to my map.’
‘The Queen’s. I see. I thought you were calling from Toronto. Come. Of course you must come.’
‘What. Now?’
‘Why not? Just … Hang on a second.’ She heard that clunk again. Evidently his phone wasn’t cordless. And then there was the sound of a closing door. He picked up again. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit deaf and I worry about shouting without realizing it and hurting people’s feelings. Morwenna isn’t very well, that’s all. If she strikes you as a bit … Oh dear.’ He sighed. ‘Sorry. Life has been rather interesting.’
‘It’s a bad time. I knew I should have waited to hear back from you.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll leave you in peace. We can meet another day.’
‘No. Please come. I insist. I’ll be looking out for you. But I… I haven’t had a chance to explain who you are, that’s all.’
‘I understand. Sometimes I’m not sure I know who I am any more.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Nothing. I’ll be there in about half an hour, Antony.’
She had trouble hanging up neatly because her hand was shaking. Then she made herself roll off the bed (in the special way her latest back man had taught her), strip off her travelling clothes, retrieve the steamed ones, shower and dress before she could panic and change her mind. At least by calling round in the early afternoon she spared anyone the obligation to lay on any kind of meal.
It was a sort of terrace of charming houses, much older than the houses she had walked past along the seafront. He met her out on the street, so perhaps he was as nervous as she was. He smiled. She laughed. They shook hands and then he just looked at her.
‘You’re so like her,’ he said.
‘No I’m not,’ she laughed. ‘She was always so dark and striking and…’
‘You’re like who she became, then. Because I can see you were sisters.’
‘Oh. Oh good. What a beautiful place. Have you lived here long?’
‘I was born in this house.’
‘Oh goodness.’
‘After you. Please.’
She walked through the unexpectedly subtropical garden to the pretty Georgian porch and through the open front door.
Used to the clean lines and calm paintwork of Simple Gifts and her house in Rosedale, the initial impression was one of a kind of crazy 1970s exuberance now frayed at the edges. Her mind had nowhere to settle. She had startled a shorthaired woman sitting on one of a pair of old brown sofas with her back to the door. As Winnie said, ‘Hello. I’m Winnie,’ she turned, stared at her with an expression she knew all too well from patients at the Clarke and slipped quickly past her and up the stairs.
‘Morwenna,’ Antony said quietly.
‘I guessed.’
The woman had looked confusingly like a combination of how Joanie might have turned out and her early memories of their mother early in the mornings, without makeup. Perhaps illness had aged her but she looked at least twenty years older than Joanie was when Winnie last saw her.
A young man, clearly her brother, but cut of a sunnier cloth, was visible in a paved area at the back. He was talking excitedly on a cell phone.
‘Jack, our GP, wanted to hospitalize her,’ Antony said. ‘But I wouldn’t let him. I don’t want her locked up.’
‘Is she …?’
‘She turned up out of the blue. She’s been wandering, staying all over the place for more than ten years now. She seemed quite calm at first but perhaps that was just the shock of learning about Rachel having died. Then she …’ He sat at the bashed-up old pine
table. Winnie sat across from him. ‘There’s an old lido across the seafront from here. A sea-water bathing pool from the Thirties, you know?’
‘I know,’ she nodded, although she didn’t.
‘She took herself off there without warning one morning and tried to drown herself.’
‘Jeeze.’
‘Jack has got her medicated now but, well, we’re all a little jumpy.’
Winnie could not believe she had managed to impose herself at such an appalling time. ‘Maybe I should go,’ she said. ‘Gee, I’m so sorry.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he said with a rueful smile. ‘We’re just happy to have her back where we can care for –’
‘Hello?’
The young man had come in, tucking his cell phone back in his jeans pocket. He was a honey, in that poignant stage between being a pretty boy and whatever came next. Just Petey’s type. He looked her straight in the eye and held out his hand. Just her type too, actually.
‘I’m Hedley,’ he said. ‘How d’you do.’
‘This is Winnie,’ his father said. ‘From Toronto. We’ve been e-mailing.’
Hedley glanced quickly from one to the other and for a second she could see he thought they’d met on some wrinklies’ dating site.
‘You knew Mum,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m your long-lost aunt.’
‘Oh my God of course you are!’ He laughed, kissed her, hugged her and sat her down again. ‘Let me put the kettle on. Have you had lunch? When did you get here? Antony didn’t say anything.’
‘Well it sounds as though you’ve had other things to …’
‘Oh. Well. Quite. But still. Tea?’
‘Yes please.’ She chuckled.
He had that gift, Petey had it too, of being able to improve the atmosphere in a room simply by entering it. He busied himself filling the kettle, putting a cherry cake and teacups and little plates on the table. Nothing matched but it was charming.
‘One good thing about a death,’ he said, ‘is not having to bake another cake for months. This freezer is packed! That was Oliver,’ he told Antony. ‘He and Ankie have driven down this morning. He was calling from Truro so they shouldn’t be long. They’d been to that gallery on Lemon Street. Oliver’s my hubby,’ he explained.
‘And who’s Ankie?’ Winnie asked and saw that his face briefly clouded over.
‘Oh. She’s … she’s a painter friend.’
They had tea and cake and then Winnie opened her bag and took out the envelope of photographs she had brought them, of Joanie, of her parents, of their house in Etobicoke, of Simple Things, of her place in Rosedale, of their grandparents, of her Josh. An instant second family. She wrote down names for them, dates when she could recall them. She sketched out what she knew of the Ransome family tree. She told them they must come visit. Prompted by questions, she told them about the Clarke Institute and volunteering there and Joanie escaping it and managed not to cry, although she got a little choked up when she explained about Ray Kelly and the whole train thing.
There was what her grandmother used to call a speaking silence then, as the two of them took everything in. Even chatty Hedley fell quiet and his eyes looked full and teary.
‘You must be very hurt and angry,’ Antony said at last. ‘At the way she cut you all out of her life.’
But before she could think of an answer they were interrupted by Hedley’s phone chirruping and a video message coming through of the first trimester scan of his sister-in-law Lizzy’s baby. Which of course made everyone happy and led to congratulation phone calls and Antony had to take the phone upstairs to Morwenna’s room to show her the scan too, although there was really nothing to see but a blob with a heartbeat. Winnie knew he’d be asking her to come down and join the party and she’d be shrinking in on herself and saying no, not just yet. She badly wanted to be able to go up there and say hello and look I’m not so bad really and give her a big hug and buy her a ticket to Toronto for a nice long visit. Even offer the poor woman a job if she wanted one. But although her mind was upstairs with that stricken deer she had encountered on arriving, she sat with Hedley and slipped into counselling mode instead. She told him she knew it was hard for him because it was always hard when you wanted to help the one you loved and they sort of pushed you away but at least she was here at last and at least she was safe. And he gave her a long, tearful hug, which was nice of him as she needed it too by now.
Antony came down again, looking shattered, and Winnie thought she really should be leaving them, at least for today but then they started pulling out photographs for her to see and then suddenly this drop-dead gorgeous man appeared, a real silver fox, who turned out to be Oliver and so there was another round of introductions and a confusing explanation of how Ankie, who sounded kind of demoralizing, had insisted on being dropped at the airport suddenly which had held him up. Then there was more tea and she felt she badly needed the bathroom, less to use the John than to sit quietly in a clam space for a few minutes to give her poor jetlagged head a chance to catch up.
When she came out, Antony was loading the dishwasher and the boys had disappeared somewhere. She was an inveterate snoop so she thought to seize the chance of looking around the place before she started socializing again. There was a broad staircase, very light because of a tall, thin window to the back of the house with blue glass at the edges.
And then, of course, she came face to face with some of the paintings. She’d somehow guessed they were Joanie’s even before she saw the signature – R. Kelly – that was exactly like the J. Ransome one she’d been working on in her teens, the same Greek E and neat underlining.
She knew absolutely nothing about what she thought of as modern art. On holidays with Josh they’d tended to home in on buildings rather than galleries, although she liked museums and museum shops. There was a big painting above the staircase and another on the landing. She could see they weren’t of anything but the colours were fantastically intense, probably too intense to be hung so near one another. There was a blue like seawater over sunny sand and a thin strip of orange you could almost feel like heat on your face if you stood near enough. She caught sight of other smaller paintings through open bedroom doors. (Morwenna’s door – she assumed it was hers – remained firmly shut.) There were no pictures anywhere but Joanie’s and Winnie sensed how her sister would not have made life easy for this kind family.
She came upon a little flight of wooden steps, a ladder in effect, let down from an attic room off one end of the landing. She started up there then stopped because Hedley was up there with Oliver’s arms about him but they sensed her and called her up.
‘Sorry,’ Oliver said. ‘Haven’t seen him properly for weeks.’
‘We were just looking at these,’ Hedley said. ‘Come and see. Can you manage?’ He held out a hand to hoist her up off the last few rungs. God alone knew how she would get back down.
It was a kind of lookout tower, like being in a lighthouse.
‘Was this her studio?’ she asked him.
‘One of them. But look. This is what she was working on at the end.’
There were six pictures. The boys had arranged them in a rough semicircle which made the little room feel like a sort of chapel. Six circles. Only they weren’t all circular. One was a sphere, like a burning sun, but the others seemed less even. Or perhaps it was an illusion? She had built up layers of paint in such a way that the longer you looked, the more colours seemed to emerge until it was like cloud lifting off a planet. One, which seemed murky brown at first, nothing like the intense canvases on the stairs, slowly revealed itself as having patches of bronze and even purple within its texture.
‘Did she tell anyone what they were?’ she asked tentatively, shy of revealing her ignorance. ‘I mean, they’re beautiful, really, but what was she trying to do here?’
‘I think it’s whatever you want it to be,’ Hedley told her, still staring at the paintings and she saw how his waist had gotten e
nfurled by Oliver’s arm again.
She heard another door open and the woman, the girl for God’s sake, Morwenna appeared at the foot of the ladder thing.
Winnie smiled what she hoped was her least threatening smile. Morwenna stared up at her. It could so easily have been Joanie down there, an older, wounded Joanie, that Winnie had to swallow before she dared speak.
‘Hi,’ she said, her voice still cracking a little bit. ‘Did you see these already? Come and see them. Come on up.’ And she held out a hand.
NIGHTDRESS (c.2001). Brushed cotton. Lace.
This mundane but comforting garment is fashioned in a style commonplace in Kelly’s 1940s childhood. Full length, in cream brushed cotton, its only impractical touches are narrow lace edging to the cuffs and hem and a design of china blue flowers around the yoke. Some burnt umber oil paint (possibly from Exhibits 60–69) can be seen on both cuffs and, clearly displaying Kelly’s fingerprints, near the hem at the front. She remained loyal to this style all her life, claiming it was warm enough to double as a dress if she woke in the night and started painting. Later examples, like this, had to be purchased from a specialist mail order company.
For the first few days … Or was it weeks? She had lost all sense of calendar time. For the first few whatevers she was only allowed out of her nightgown to bathe, and then only with a nurse in the bathroom in case she drowned herself or decided to run naked down to one of the men’s floors.
Her mother had done her packing, so of course had chosen the long, warm, sensible nightgowns she never wore any more over the babydolls she had bought for herself. She had tried asking for the other ones during one of their visits but whatever chemical straitjacket they had strapped her in made her tongue feel so fat and heavy that her words came out mangled like a drunk woman’s.
‘I hate this Little House on the Prairie shit,’ was what she thought she’d said but her mother only looked distressed and said,
‘No, dear. Don’t try to speak. We can just sit here a while and be nice and calm together.’
And calm she was, for what seemed like the first time in months. For that she did thank the drugs. Or the shocks. Whichever. Her fears had gone. And the baby. They would have drugged her and given her an abortion, of course. Everyone knew that had been going on for years. To corrupted daughters and wayward spinster sisters alike. So much easier than sending them to an aunt in Whaletown B. C. or wherever. This way if they had to say anything they could say she was taking a rest in the Clarke for her nerves.