“Hello,” she said when she saw me looking at her. “You’re awake.”
I smiled. I can still do that—the burns are not too close to my mouth.
“How do you feel?”
“All right. I don’t know. It hurts.”
I won’t be too disfigured, apparently. My hands are the greatest problem, but the doctors think they’ll be functional after a few operations to graft on skin from the top of my legs. I’ll still be able to use a word processor, I’ve been told by one of the many doctors who appear and disappear mysteriously. My back will heal without interference, but they may need to do more work on the side of my neck, just below the hairline. Not too bad really. It could have been a lot worse.
Dr. Cross and I didn’t talk much. I couldn’t think of anything to say. But we sat together and I felt her calm soak into me. Before she left, she told me that someone from the hospital would come and see me regularly.
“You’ll like her, I think,” she said.
“I like you,” I said.
“She’ll have more time.”
I wish she would stay, but I know she’s very busy. “Come and see me when you’re home,” she said.
I will have to go on liking her, because it is impossible not to.
Martin’s willingness to save us makes me feel inadequate. Like a terrible mistake, that I am not worth saving.
I think of all the people who will now never meet Martin. Never know what a likeable person he was, never see the simple goodness that made him special.
I cry again.
My father comes to see me every afternoon for thirty minutes. He usually arrives just after James leaves, so presumably he hovers around downstairs until he knows I’m on my own. I know he’s not my father, but names are habits, and it’s too difficult to change things yet.
He sits by my bed and talks. “The insurance is paying up—no problem. But I don’t know if I’ll have the house repaired. It might be cheaper to sell the whole thing. They can knock it down and start again.”
I’m amazed that the house is still standing. The fire spread to two bedrooms and a bathroom on the floor below, but no further.
“There’s a lot of smoke and water damage. It seems a good moment to give up the old place.”
I don’t want the house to go. I want it to stay the same, the house where I was brought up by my father and my brothers. But it isn’t the same anymore—part of it has already been destroyed. I see the fire as the symptom of a disease, a cancer that spread through the house, growing stronger the further it advanced. It didn’t reach every corner, every dust-laden mantelpiece, but it will get there in the end. The treatment worked on the surface, but the rot continues, eating its way through the house quietly, destroying.
“Pity I lost all that work. But I’m not too worried—I can remember most of it. I’ve been looking at new houses. I don’t need anything so big, as long as I have a studio …”
I watch his mouth moving up and down and wonder what he’s really saying. Is he just thinking about houses, or is there more that he can’t speak about? It’s impossible to know his real feelings—he’s so good at being dramatic that nothing seems genuine anymore. How do I know what is real and what is fake? Is he capable of responding instinctively to Martin’s death?
I’ve tried to remember how it all happened, how everything got out of control so quickly, but my memory isn’t clear. I can’t even work out what happened when. Looking back now, it seems that I always knew it was Martin who tried to save us. I see his shape under the blanket. I see the bookcase fall on him, and it’s Martin I see, not some anonymous hero.
I can’t quite believe he’s not coming home again. Every day, I open my eyes expecting to find him sitting next to me. The space left by his absence is enormous. I keep looking at the chair beside me, worried that it wouldn’t be big enough for him, then I cry again, because the size of the chair is not important.
My father goes on talking, without saying anything. Does he lie awake and cry for his lost son, or does he hide it from himself?
“The funeral’s on Thursday,” he says on Tuesday.
“I want to go,” I say.
“I don’t think so,” he says, frowning.
“I’ll ask a doctor.”
He doesn’t reply. He’s silent for the first time in days.
“You don’t want me to come.”
“Kitty,” he says sadly and shakes his head. “It will be hard to—”
“I want to go,” I say.
“I won’t allow it,” he says as if I am still a child and he has the authority to make decisions for me. He picks up a chocolate before he goes, looking at it critically. “Coffee cream,” he says. “I’ll leave it for Jake—he likes them.” He puts it back and takes three caramel cups.
When I try to look back at everything, I seem to have been caught up by a whirlwind and thrown around: dropped for a while in one strange place, then picked up again before I had recovered my breath and tossed somewhere else. I can’t understand how all those things happened: my yellow period outside the school; Emily and Rosie; the baby equipment; taking the baby from the hospital; Megan. Was that person really me? Kitty Wellington? Something was twisting the world into unnatural shapes around me and however much I tried to stop it all I was set on auto. My feet kept on walking without my permission. There should have been a way to stop it, but I couldn’t work out the formula.
In the end, I go to the funeral. Adrian comes for me in his car and the hospital lends us a wheelchair. James sits by me in the back of the car, hovers over me, fusses. He’s so attentive that I want to give him things to do, but I can’t think of anything.
The crematorium is almost identical to the one we went to for Granny and Grandpa’s funeral: dark and cool, with wooden pews, men in black who glide effortlessly backwards and forwards, talking in hushed voices. It’s all wrong, I want to shout. You’ve made a mistake! Martin wasn’t ninety—there were lots of things he wanted to do, lots of places he will never go to.
Adrian arranged everything. He reads out a tribute he’s written about Martin, and it makes us all cry, because he knows how to use the right words. He remembers him as a child and highlights his qualities of loyalty, stubbornness and reliability.
Martin has become a lost boy. No mother, like Peter Pan, no future, like Henry.
Several people have come from the firms Martin worked with. They wear black suits and ties and sit awkwardly together in the pews, strangers to our family and to each other. But I watch them and see that they are genuinely upset. I see one big middle-aged man with a beard, wiping away tears. I would like to go and talk to them. If they loved Martin, then they’re my friends too.
Jake plays the violin while the coffin goes down. He and Adrian are in black, but Paul is wearing a powder-blue suit and looks as if he is going to a summer wedding. He just needs a white carnation in his buttonhole. My father is soberly dressed, not wearing a bow-tie, as if he knows nothing will ever be the same again. I watch his profile while we listen to Jake’s violin and I finally see how he feels. There is a look of defeat about him, a downward-pulling force, an oldness. His cheeks sag, his mouth droops, his shoulders hang slackly. He seems to have shrunk, dragged down to the earth with Martin.
I sit at the back in my wheelchair, wiping away torrents of tears, and then we go out and huddle together in a chilled family group. Margaret doesn’t appear this time. Does she even know? A gusty summer wind whips round our heads, blowing Suzy’s hat off, ruffling James’s hair. Prematurely dry leaves scurry in miniature whirlwinds at our feet, magpies clatter in the beeches edging the cemetery and scattered drops of rain hide in the blustering wind. James wants to take me back to the car, but I make him stay for a bit. We’re all there, except Emily and Rosie.
“They’re too young for funerals,” says Lesley when asked.
I try to make sense of this. She’s very keen on life experiences—and I’m sure that includes death. I think children should know
about death and funerals, so they won’t spend the best part of their lives wondering why people disappear. Parents should explain things properly to children.
“Surely,” I say, “if you explained—”
Lesley looks at me sharply and I realize that the girls are not absent because of the difficulty of explaining death. They are absent because of me. She will never let them near me again.
We hover awkwardly, but it’s cold and nobody knows what to say. This is all my fault. If I hadn’t gone off with Megan, it would never have happened. We would be like we were before Granny and Grandpa’s funeral—like we were at my wedding.
But we didn’t talk to each other then. Not properly. We missed the opportunity. Now, too late, we come together again, without the habit of speaking our real thoughts. The pain of losing Martin hurts us all, but we struggle to comfort each other.
“It’s not a question of blame,” says Jane Harrow.
Dr. Cross was right: I do like her. “Call me Jane,” she says, so I do. She’s much older than me, with grey wavy hair and a weathered, wrinkled face. She looks like a gardener. I can see her pruning the buddleia, down on her knees digging out bindweed, dandelions and ground elder. She’s tall, with long, thin arms and legs. She’s someone you feel safe with, like a mother. And she seems to know everything, but she waits for me to say it anyway.
“We all make mistakes and wish we could go back and undo them. It’s worth working out why they happened, but we can’t change things. We need to put them behind us and move forwards.”
I tell her about my life—no forwards, no backwards—but she won’t accept this. “There’s always a forwards,” she says, “and we need to go backwards occasionally to help us move forwards.”
“I can’t do either. I have to live in that pinprick of time that is now.”
She smiles at this. “I’m here to help you move forwards.”
It has never occurred to me that anyone could help me, and I’m still thinking about it. I’m not sure if I’m ready to step out of my pinprick of time.
Jane has told me what she can about Megan. No one else would answer my questions. Two policewomen came to talk to me as soon as I was able and I told them everything. It seemed best to tell the truth. I knew I was guilty. They were kind to me, but they wouldn’t tell me about Megan. Detective Sergeant Pauline Ryan was very pretty, with long blond hair tied into a tight bun. It’s difficult to imagine her seeing and dealing with the dark world of muggings and murders and abductions, but she appeared very capable and her questions were all precise and logical, unbiased. The other policewoman was called Beth Locke. She wore a uniform and acted like a trainee. They turned on their tape recorder while we talked. Our conversation was very ordinary, like talking to a doctor, or someone next to you on the bus. But we went over it several times and they wanted proper details: times of trains, the address of the bed and breakfast. I hoped they wouldn’t go and find Mrs. Benedict. I wouldn’t like her to know that her kindness was unnecessary and that Megan isn’t going to die. I just wished they would tell me what’s happened to her.
“Megan’s all right,” Jane said. “She wasn’t badly burned. You did a good job in protecting her.”
I should’ve found this reassuring, but, oddly, I didn’t. “Has she gone home then?”
Jane hesitated. “No. They’ve kept her here a bit longer. She doesn’t want to go home.”
“I could have told you that.”
“Her mother and father are very concerned.”
“Stepfather,” I said.
“Yes,” said Jane.
And that was it. No further explanations. “She can’t be all right,” I said. “Children don’t normally start fires all over the place.”
I’ve told Jane about the other fires, about her unwillingness to go home. She accepts what I say without question.
“The police will have to bring charges against you,” she says one day. “We’ll have to hope that the judge will be lenient in view of the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“You saved Megan’s life.”
This sounds ridiculous now. All my actions seem to have been entirely selfish and I feel a fraud. I can’t bring back the sense of power I felt, the feeling that I was finally doing something of value for someone else.
“But I stole her,” I say.
“Yes, they can’t ignore that.”
“Can I see her?”
“No,” says Jane, “I don’t think that would be appropriate.” I look at the picture behind her head, a landscape by Van Gogh, with a blue, blue sky and orange and yellow fields.
Adrian has been to see me several times. He comes alone, guiltily, as if he shouldn’t be here. He brings me books, flowers, chocolates, cards. He never comes empty-handed, but he doesn’t bring Emily or Rosie. I long to see them again.
“How are the girls?” I ask.
“Fine,” he says. “Fine.” He doesn’t tell me that Lesley doesn’t want them to come, that she’s afraid to let them out of her sight. But I know I’m Kitty the baby-stealer, Kitty the child-stealer. I can never be trusted again. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I cry about this. I put my head under the blanket and choke silently into my pillow.
“We should have told you,” says Adrian one day.
“Told me what?” There can’t be more secrets, surely.
“About Dinah.”
Dinah, my mother. Someone is actually going to talk about my mother. I think of the terrible betrayal I felt when Margaret appeared. “You all lied to me.”
He drops his eyes. He looks embarrassed. “It didn’t seem like lying. You were only little when you turned up. Dad suggested it would be easier to make you a little sister—that at least you would grow up feeling you were part of a proper family.”
“A family that hid the truth.”
He flushes. “It wasn’t like that. We wanted to protect you.”
“From what?”
“I don’t know, it seems rather foolish now. At the time, we agreed. I suppose we thought Dad would tell you when you were older. Then it became a habit—too difficult to break.”
“So you never thought I ought to know?”
He hesitates. “I did, actually, when I was researching my book. I began to realize that you needed to know.”
“But you didn’t tell me.”
“No. You’d lost the baby. It didn’t seem the right time.”
When is the right time to tell someone they’re not who they think they are? “I’m surprised Martin didn’t tell me. He was no good at secrets.”
He nods. “I thought he’d have told you years ago, but maybe he forgot.”
“You don’t forget something like that.”
“But I think he really did. We all did. You stop thinking about these things in the end, and your memory becomes unreliable. You start to believe things that never happened.”
Miss Newman again. She crops up everywhere.
“When I wrote my book, I found I remembered very little about Dinah.”
“You didn’t think about talking it over with the others? Sharing opinions?”
He looks startled. “Well—no.”
“Not much good writing things down if you can’t talk to your own family.”
“I know it’s not much of a defence. I can see that now.”
I move restlessly in my bed. “We’re useless. Other families do things together.”
He looks at the floor. “We all loved you, Kitty. You were important to us.”
“Oh, Adrian.” I never thought I would hear him say that.
“We were wrong. I see that now. You had a right to your own history.”
“Do you miss Martin?” I want him to acknowledge his own loss.
But he hesitates. “I don’t know. I feel that I hardly knew him. Or Jake, or Paul. You were our link, Kitty. Without you, we might never have connected at all.”
Tears drip again. Where does all the liquid come from? “I miss Marti
n,” I say. I’m not afraid to say it.
We sit in silence for some time.
“I’m going to do an American tour soon,” says Adrian after a while. “For six weeks.” He sounds unhappy, as if he doesn’t want to go.
“Great,” I say. “It’s been a long time since you last went.”
“I’ve been putting it off.”
“Why?”
He sighs. “I don’t know. Lots of things. I wanted you to be out of hospital before I left.”
“No problem. I’ll be home before you come back. Bring me a jug from San Francisco.”
“Yes.” He pauses. It’s not like Adrian to hesitate. “When I get back, I thought I might go and visit Margaret—”
“In Norfolk?”
“Yes.”
“In her caravan by the sea?”
“Yes.”
I wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t. “She’s real then?” I say. “I wasn’t quite sure.”
He smiles. He is very handsome when he smiles. I wonder why he doesn’t smile for the photographs on the back of his books. His publishers seem to like the brooding, anguished look of genius, but lots of people would prefer an amiable, handsome man. Besides which, he might well not be a genius.
“Well, it would be worth finding out more details, wouldn’t it?” he says.
He’s not committing himself. Apparently, after the funeral, she gave him an address and left. Without a backwards glance, according to my father. “Didn’t you believe her, then?” I say.
He pauses. “I’m sure she was—is—Margaret—I don’t know about her life, though, or her motives.”
He’s preparing himself for disappointment. He’s nearly fifty, and still searching for the mother who deserted him, but he doesn’t expect to find her.
“So she didn’t come back the next day, or make arrangements to meet you all again?”
“No,” he says. “I was disappointed, I admit. I’d spent such a long time looking for her. When I was doing my research, finding her became very important to me. That’s when I realized that you needed to know about Dinah.”
Astonishing Splashes of Colour Page 29