Astonishing Splashes of Colour

by Clare Morrall

  I wish he would stop. He mutters away, gradually subsiding into a semi-silence punctuated by the occasional inarticulate word. I wish I could reassure him. He brought us up on his own—no help from Angela, Philippa, Mary, etc. He loved and cared for us all. He was my mother and my father. I have a sudden clear picture of me in his studio, playing with paper and felt-tip pens, trying to imitate his picture on the easel. “Be bold, Kitty,” he said. “Put in all the colours, mix them up, don’t be afraid of them. Colour is life.”

  “You haven’t changed, have you? As pretentious as ever. ‘I’m an artist,’ you told me and my parents, and I believed you for years. If you hadn’t wasted so much time painting—”

  “Wasting my time painting? I’m highly successful, I’ll have you know. I’ve sold pictures in America, Brazil, Ceylon—”

  “It’s not Ceylon any more,” says Adrian. “It’s Sri Lanka.”

  “Whatever,” says Dad. “Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Outer Mongolia, Peking—”

  “You’re exaggerating,” says James irritably. “Why would anyone in China want your pictures of European beaches?”

  “Actually,” says Dad, “I sell a lot of pictures in China.” He picks up a pack of cards and starts flicking them one by one at James. Some miss, some don’t. They make contact and slide miserably to the floor. There’s a picture of The French Lieutenant’s Woman on the back, from the film, on the end of the Cob. Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep.

  “Reverting to childhood?” says James, and smiles charmingly. He loves to see Dad cornered. He picks up the cards carefully and starts to neaten them into a pack again.

  I look at my father. I know he would like to throw books, plates, furniture, but he restricts himself to cards. He’s more in control than he would like us to believe, I think. But I can see real anger too. He resents being found out. This happened such a long time ago, and we have all survived, after all. I’m not sure we are giving him enough loyalty.

  “Anyone for bridge?” says James, once he has collected all the cards together.

  Margaret laughs—too enthusiastically. “So who are you?” she says. “Not one of my children, of course.”

  James smiles back. He seems to be enjoying himself more now that he can argue with my father. “I’m James,” he says. “I’m married to Kitty.”

  “I’m Kitty,” I say at last, and I seem to be leaning towards her, pulled by an invisible thread that was once physical and is now emotional.

  But she looks puzzled. “Kitty?” she says. “I thought Kitty was the cat.”

  There’s a silence. Then I realize that she wouldn’t know my nickname. “No,” I say quickly. “I’m Katie. They only called me Kitty when the cat died.”

  There is another silence. My father starts to mutter.

  “What?” I say loudly. “What are you saying? I can’t hear you.”

  More silence. I can hear everyone breathing. I can hear everyone thinking. There is no movement.

  “Dinah’s daughter,” says Dad. “They brought her back after Dinah died.”

  A shaft of sunshine pierces the window and lights up the room.

  The silence is not in the room. It’s inside me.

  It is cold and empty and vast.

  7

  a seriously happy world

  James and I are travelling back to Birmingham on the train. He sits opposite me and doesn’t speak, but even if he does I won’t hear him. I’m far away from here, lost in this silence inside me.

  Strangely, my first reaction after the initial shock of Dad’s announcement was relief. It’s all right, I thought. I don’t have to make her my mother. I don’t have to try any more. My legs went weak and I was pleased that I wasn’t standing. Then I had to get up anyway, because I was going to be sick. I dashed outside just in time and threw up all over Grandpa’s dying roses. The egg sandwiches, the salt and vinegar crisps, the Cherry Bakewells—they were all there, part-digested, vomited painfully over the stones from Chesil beach.

  I leaned against the side of the bungalow and tried not to think of being pregnant. I could feel sweat dripping off me, but I was bitterly cold. I looked at the distant sea, which blurred into the sky so you couldn’t see where one ended and the other started. The greyness was more desolate than before, with none of its earlier vitality. A dead, dry greyness, which fell round me, seeping in, merging with my own bleakness. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  Eventually, I realized that James was standing beside me. I ignored him for a bit, but he wouldn’t go away, so I let him stay there while I tried to stop my teeth chattering.

  Maybe the others came out to see if I was all right. Maybe Dad came out. “Kitty!” he would have said, but I didn’t hear him.

  I thought he was my only parent, a father and a mother to me. I accepted his faults, his eccentricity, his unreasonable shortlived anger because he was my father, but all my life he’s been pretending. I thought we had a special relationship because I was the youngest. I pretended to myself that I reminded him of Margaret.

  I think of how clever my brothers have all been, how they’ve never even hinted that they’re really my uncles. Uncles are not the same as brothers. I try to look at them again: Adrian, bringing me back jugs from all over the world; Jake offering me sanctuary; Martin taking me for trips in the truck; Paul putting up the ladder to the loft. The brothers who met me from school. The brothers who are not my brothers.

  “I want to go home,” I said to James.

  And then, somehow, I found myself in a taxi, with my coat, my case and James.

  “Did you know about my mother?” I said to James as we sat rigidly next to each other.

  He looked unusually angry. “Of course not. Do you think I’d have lied to you for all this time?”

  It hadn’t bothered my father or my brothers. How stupid I must have seemed to them when I asked about my mother—who I thought was Margaret. Perhaps they’d described Dinah anyway. I don’t even know who the mother is in my mind—Margaret or Dinah.

  The station platform was crowded with students and their clusters of rucksacks, suitcases and backpacks. I wanted to sit down, but there was no room, so we leaned against a large pipe that ran along the rear of the platform, the wind whistling round us. The greyness had come with me and found its way into the station. The train was late and everyone was hovering nervously, checking their watches, keeping an eye on the hanging monitors that said our train was ten minutes late, then twenty, then thirty. I watched the people round me, afraid that I would see my brothers or father among them. Every time I thought of them, I felt sick. All those years, they’d been pretending, and I didn’t know. None of it was real. Everyone was acting. Everyone was lying.

  The train pulled in and we found some seats. There may have been conversations as people took out their books, their newspapers, their sandwiches, but I haven’t noticed. I don’t want to look into anyone’s eyes or acknowledge anyone else’s existence. James will have been looking out of the window, his eyes darting from side to side as he spots distant road lights and the glow of towns and estimates the train’s average speed per hour, as he always does. He carries a map inside his head; he knows distances and times.

  A trolley comes down the aisle between the seats, and from a distance I can hear James asking for two coffees.

  “Anything else?” he asks me, but it’s too much effort to shake my head.

  He takes a sandwich and a Danish pastry. He gives the man the pound coins first, neatly on top of each other, then the ten-pence pieces, then the pennies. How does he always manage to have the right change? I don’t know how he survives in a world that is seldom neatened up, where you can’t always tie up the ends.

  I sip my coffee. James smiles at me and opens the sandwiches.

  He tackles the complexities of the packaging with meticulous care. He is like a magnet. Stray crumbs are drawn towards him so that he can keep them under strict control, liquids never spill because they recognize a force more powerful than their own. He offe
rs me a sandwich, but I look past him.

  Emily and Rosie aren’t my nieces, I think in a sudden panic. We’re only cousins. I’ll never be allowed to look after them again. I can’t be their favourite aunt anymore.

  The train is warm and glowing, protecting us from the outside darkness. We stop at stations, we move on. We could have gone through the Channel Tunnel and been in France by now, for all I know. I don’t read the names of the stations. We are a small yellow entity moving through the uncertainty of a black world. And yellow is deceptive. It is hard and bright and brittle and can disintegrate at any time. The darkness is constantly threatening to break through. I always thought I could easily separate colour from absence of colour, but how simple it is to step from one to the other without even realizing.

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” I say out loud.

  “I don’t know,” James says.

  “What difference would it have made? What was the point of the secret?”

  That’s what bothers me most. Not losing a mother—who I thought was dead anyway—not being a granddaughter when I thought I was a daughter, not being a niece when I thought I was a sister. It’s the pointlessness of it all. The realization that everyone else was in on a secret that I knew nothing about. They were all together, conspirators huddling over their makeshift fire, while I was out in the cold, in the dark, because nobody thought fit to invite me in.

  “Perhaps they thought it would be better for you at first,” says James. “And then no one knew how to tell you the truth as you got older.”

  I sip my coffee, which has gone cold.

  “I’m probably not even called Kitty Wellington.” I stop and think about this. There is no such person as Kitty Wellington. I feel the blackness surround me, and I try to look inside for solace, but there’s nothing there. James is saying something and I can’t hear him.

  The lights start to flicker, but it’s so brief that I might be imagining it. I shut my eyes and open them again. There. Is it real or imaginary? I watch the other passengers for signs that it’s real, but they’re reading, sleeping, looking out of the window with glazed eyes.

  “Strange,” says James. “Something wrong with the power, I suppose.”

  The lights go out, suddenly and completely, and I hear a howl of fear. It takes me a few seconds to realize that the sound came from me. I shouldn’t have done that, I think. I knew it was going to happen. Yellow never lasts.

  I can hear James’s voice, repeating something over and over, but I can’t hear the words because the blackness is pushing its way inside me, pressing so hard that I need all my energy to resist it.

  I feel his hand on mine as it rests on the table. “It’s all right,” he says. “It’s all right.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen.” The metal voice makes me jump. “This is the guard speaking. We appear to have a fault with the lighting, but rest assured we are doing our best to put it right and normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.” He overac-centuates the end of some words and it takes time to make sense of the extra syllable.

  I look out and discover that the blackness outside is not as black as I thought. I can see windows in houses, cars on distant roads, even light from the moon. The pressure in my head eases a bit. James’s hand is rubbing mine gently, soothingly.

  The lights flicker on briefly, go off again, and then come back and stay on.

  I look at James looking at me.

  “Oh, James,” I say, and start to cry.

  The receptionist looks at me across the desk. Her short black fringe makes her look like Cleopatra, but her label says Antonia. Her lipstick is perfect, immaculately drawn and coloured in, so her lips look artificial, painted on to disguise the fact that her mouth is small and tight. “You missed an appointment,” she says sternly.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “My grandparents died suddenly.”

  She still looks too authoritative, but her voice softens a little. “Oh dear.” She pauses to think what to say. I can see it’s not easy. “It’s hard to lose grandparents, isn’t it?” she says.

  It’s hard to lose a mother too, I think, and to gain a new grandmother.

  She looks at the screen in front of her. “We have a cancellation this morning—ten thirty. Do you want to wait?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  The waiting room is crowded, and a woman with a baby and an older girl sits down next to me. The girl has to stand, while the mother puts the baby on her lap.

  “Mum,” says the girl, “I want to sit down.” She has wispy light brown hair tied into two long plaits. The plaits are too thin and end in a tiny feathery curl. I remember girls at school like this, who’d never had their hair cut. It doesn’t get a chance to thicken and flourish. The girl looks about eight, and is picking at patches of leftover purple varnish on her nails. She stands defiantly close to her mother. “I want to sit down,” she says again, quietly, but firmly. Her face is very pale and the skin below her eyes has a purple tinge, as if she hasn’t slept all night. She has enormous eyes—blue and very bright. She might be older than I first thought. She stands close to her mother and stares at her fiercely.

  “Sit on the floor,” says the mother, and pushes her down. The girl reluctantly bends her knees and crouches on the floor, holding herself tightly in a neat bundle.

  Then she looks up at me, her eyes steady and intense, as if she believes she can hypnotize me into moving. I try a nervous smile, but she doesn’t respond, so I look away.

  “Ma—ma—ma—” says the baby.

  “Henry!” says the mother delightedly and holds his hands while she shakes him up and down on her lap.

  He chortles. His laugh is long and infectious, a perfectly tuned, rhythmical giggle. “‘Gain,” he keeps saying, “‘gain.”

  I watch him. I want to put out my hand and touch his chubby arms, kiss his padded cheek, make him look at me as he giggles. I smile at him.

  The girl is interested in his fun. She puts a hand up to him. “Henry,” she calls gently, tickling his elbow.

  Henry tries to turn and see her, so his bouncing rhythm is lost. “Leave him alone, Megan,” says her mother sharply.

  Megan’s hand falls back and she turns away from them.

  I catch her eye again and smile sympathetically. This time, I see a flicker of response in her eyes and a quick grin flash across her face.

  The mother tries to jiggle Henry on her lap again, but he has lost interest. He puts a finger into his mouth and sucks urgently. Then the finger slips out and he starts to wail. I want to take him, put him on my lap, cuddle him tightly.

  “Mrs. Maitland.” The receptionist is calling my name. “You know which room?”

  I nod and walk quickly down the corridor to Dr. Cross’s room.

  She’s expecting me. The receptionist must have rung through.

  “Hello, Kitty. Come and sit down.” She always looks pleased to see me. I enjoy the sensation of being welcomed, until I remember that she must say the same to everyone. It’s just a professional skill.

  I sit. I look at the ceiling, out of the window past the venetian blinds, without seeing. They ought to have mirror windows, so that people inside can see out, while people outside only see their reflections. They could know how ill they look before they meet the doctor.

  I tell Dr. Cross about my grandparents dying. I tell her about the funeral. Then I stop. She knows there’s more and she waits. She doesn’t push or prompt me. I experiment with various phrases in my head, then I give up and let the words come out in the way they choose.

  “My mother came back from the dead,” I say. “The prodigal mother. And it turns out that she’s not my mother at all.”

  I tell her the story, about Margaret and about Dinah, about the terrible betrayal I feel from my father who is not my father, and the brothers who are not my brothers.

  She listens and doesn’t say anything immediately. She appears to be thinking. So I sit in her silence, which wraps itself round me like a blanket, a pro
tective layer of comfort. All the confusion, anger and loneliness that have been racing around in my mind seem suspended for a time. I would like to stay like this all day.

  “Did James know?” she says.

  I hesitate. “He says not.”

  “Then we must believe him, mustn’t we?”

  I like the way she has identified the most alarming part.

  “What do you want to call your father now?”

  This takes me by surprise. I’ve been so tied up by the difficulty of knowing what to call my mother, or even myself, that I haven’t realized I can no longer call him Dad. I couldn’t call him Guy, and I can’t think of an alternative.

  Dr. Cross somehow knows this. “Perhaps we should go on calling him your father for the time being.”

  I feel absurdly relieved.

  “Have you talked to him since all this happened?”

  “No,” I say.

  He’s been to my flat. I heard him ringing the bell, banging the knocker, calling through the letterbox. “Kitty!” he called. “Kitty, I need to talk to you.” And then, more quietly, “Please let me in, Kitty. Please.”

  I’ve never heard him sound like this before. He demands, he shouts, he expects; he never asks. Eventually he went away. I wonder if he’s tried James’s flat, but I’m not sure if he realizes that James and I live next door to each other. He hasn’t been back to my flat since the day I moved in. I always go and see him.

  He tried phoning, but I didn’t pick up the phone. I heard him on the answer machine. “Kitty. It’s Dad. Talk to me.”

  After five attempts, he decided to offer an explanation. “I was going to tell you, Kitty. I always said I would tell you the truth when you were eighteen, but you grew up before I realized. Why does it change everything? Have I ever let you down?”

  That’s not the point. You lied to me.

  “I like being your father,” he said again. “I want you to stay being my daughter.”

  Fine. Whatever you want.

  I still didn’t answer the phone.

  Dr. Cross listens to this in silence. I am sorry to be burdening her with this, but who else can I tell? She seems to absorb it all. Nothing surprises or shocks her.