I’ve been thinking about Margaret, and I’ve decided that she didn’t tell us the complete truth. No wonder everyone else was so good at lying. It must run through the genes. I’m convinced she didn’t contact her parents after she left. They had no idea she was alive. She lied about that, so how could we believe anything else she said?
I want this mother to be real for Adrian. I don’t want his need for her to be unfulfilled. But I’m afraid of what he will find out.
None of us saw Margaret through unprejudiced eyes. In the memories of my brothers, she is a warm but remote mother, romanticized by the thirty-year gap. My memories are equally agreeable, but they’re not of her.
“Go and find out,” I say. “It can’t do any harm.”
Adrian gets up to leave.
For a brief moment I worry about him. “You will be careful in America?” I say. “Mugging and things.”
He looks astonished, then touched. “Of course,” he says.
I don’t want any more lost boys.
“Can I write to the girls?” I say quickly.
He pauses, looks at me. “I don’t really see why not,” he says.
Paul comes to see me at strange times. I sometimes wake up from a doze and he’s sitting beside the bed, writing out mathematical formulae, or doing the Times crossword. He has an amazing ability to concentrate wherever he is.
One day, he walks in breezily and finds me awake. “I have good news,” he says.
He’s engaged, I think. To one of the thin women in tasteful suits. “Congratulations,” I say.
He looks confused. “You know already?”
“Go on,” I say. “Tell me.”
“I’ve got a job.”
This takes me by surprise.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?”
“Yes, of course. What is it?”
“They’ve offered me a full-time job at the university as a lecturer.”
“But you don’t like teaching.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ve applied, had the interview and been offered the job.”
I stare at him. “Do they pay enough?”
“It’s enough, Kitty. I need to settle down.”
Now it all fits. “You’re getting married.”
He looks amazed. “How did you know that?”
“Who is she?”
“Well, she doesn’t know yet—”
The job is impressive. He must be serious. I wonder if his change of direction has come about as a result of finding his mother again.
“Are you in contact with Margaret? Will you invite her to the wedding?” I say.
“No,” he says. “Well …” He doesn’t know, isn’t ready to think about it. He’s never been good at personal questions.
Martin’s death has changed him, though. I’m not sure he knows this himself, but he’s lost that boyish charm. There is something graver in his face. He needed to be shocked out of his lack of commitment. He’s far too old to go on being irresponsible. He’s nearly bald, for goodness sake.
Next time he comes, he brings Lydia with him. She is small, with Pre-Raphaelite hair, curly and tangled, never tidy. She has huge round glasses and a floppy cardigan. I stare at her. I think he’s brought the wrong girl by mistake. But she grins and gives me a kiss, and she is warm and funny and lovely. Well, I think. A sensible decision from Paul.
Jake and Suzy always come together, presenting a united front in case I start talking about babies. But I’m not going to. I talk about babies to Jane, so Jake and Suzy are quite safe. Jake seems unconcerned about Margaret, apparently not minding if she comes back into his life or not. I’m not sure if I entirely believe this.
One day he brings his violin, and gets it out of the case without telling anyone. He plays Massenet’s Meditation, and the music is so piercing that I wonder if Massenet ever lost a child. Two nurses come in hurriedly, but stop to listen and forget what they came for.
I watch Suzy: she’s quiet, contained, with her hands in her lap, but I see something in her that I have never seen before. She’s happy. She and Jake approach each other from different poles and somehow meet exactly in the middle. Jake lives in a crazy, unpredictable world of music and nonconformism. Suzy steps out of her successful, sophisticated world and they slot together so well that you can’t see the join.
I wonder why I’ve never seen this before. It seems so blindingly obvious and yet I had no idea.
Jake puts his bow down into silence. Seeing the nurses and the other patients, he grins, then leaps into a hornpipe, fast and furious, and I see how he almost breathes through the music. With an audience, he sparkles and glistens and gives off spectacular displays of light and sound, lit by an inner energy and excitement.
My talented brothers (who are really my uncles). And the one without a talent, but the one I loved the most, is dead.
“You’ve lost a twin,” I say to Jake when he’s finished playing and the audience dispersed.
“I hardly ever thought of him when he was alive,” he says, looking out of the window. “Now I can’t forget him.”
“Adrian thinks we should meet up more,” Suzy says. “I think it’s a good idea. I could never understand why you were all so remote from each other.”
They’ve come in Suzy’s lunch hour and she has to go back. She says goodbye and goes to the door. Wait, I want to call out. If you’re pregnant again, can I have the baby?
But I don’t.
I don’t ask Jake about Dinah either. They didn’t feel they were lying—they were just muddled.
“I don’t think I’ve grown up,” I say to Jane. “I don’t feel important enough.”
“What do you think makes someone grown-up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then perhaps it doesn’t matter.”
I wake quietly from a drugged dream to see my father sitting beside me. He hasn’t brought anything to read, he’s just sitting, and this is astonishing, because there are no twitching fingers, no jiggling leg, no restless energy waiting to be released. He looks like the father I saw at the funeral, desolate, old, shrinking fast. Is he happy? What would make him happy? What has he wanted from his life for himself? Even his paintings are not his reason for living: if he puts a hole in them—or they are burnt—it doesn’t matter, he paints them again. Does he love us, his sons and me?
I wonder if he feels guilty because Martin died and he didn’t. Perhaps he remembers his plane going down, his lost crew. There’s a sadness in him that wasn’t there before.
He brought us up on his own—accepted the challenge, even if he didn’t have a choice. He’s always pleased to see me when I go home, and I’m always pleased to see him. Is that his reward?
He moves slightly and sees that I’m awake. He smiles, sits up straight and starts talking. He’s the same as ever, alive, frenetic, exhausting.
“I know I should have told you about Dinah,” he says into the silence, as if we have been discussing her, “but when you came, it was like a second chance. You were special—you gave me a sense of purpose.”
I saw my mother die. Sometimes while I lie awake in a silent ward, I go over it in my mind. I think I can see it again. The bright colours of the skirt, her scream, my scream. But I’m not sure if I can remember the feeling. Going over it, replaying it, freezing the image, I try to grasp the terror, but I can’t quite. I’m sure it’s there, somewhere inside me. I want to find it because I think it would help me sort it out. I want to recapture my last memory of my mother and frame it. It’s the only part of her I have left.
In between crying for Martin, I have started to cry for myself, for the small child on a mountain in Austria, who watched her mother die.
James is with me. He’s always here. Sometimes he talks, sometimes he reads, sometimes he just sits. When he’s not with me physically, he’s in my head. I tidy the blankets for him, rearrange the flowers, but he still finds something to do. My books need to be facing the same direction, he wants to straighten th
e pillows. He tries to be frivolous. One day he brings a tiny clockwork frog, and we watch it whizzing across the top of my water jug. Ninety-five percent for effort. But I put it safely away when he comes again. I can see it disturbs him.
He has changed. I’m afraid that he likes me as a child, so he can look after me, and when I grow up, he might become redundant.
A letter arrives from Smith, Horrocks and Smith, solicitors. The Peter Smith on my answer machine. He should have written in the first place, then we might have sorted things out earlier, although I would probably have thrown it away unread. Granny and Grandpa have left me their house in Lyme Regis. I am greatly moved by this. No strangers will be moving through their dust, sweeping it away, modernizing it.
“What about Margaret?” I say to James. “Shouldn’t they leave it to her?”
“You’re named in the will. There’s no provision for Margaret.”
“She didn’t telephone them, I’m sure. That was a lie.”
James shrugged. “Does it matter? They wanted you to have the house.”
So many things we don’t know. We think we know them, but we’re wrong. We think we remember things, but the memories aren’t reliable.
“Should we go and live there permanently?” says James.
“I don’t know,” I say, thinking about our separate flats. Why does it matter that you live next door to each other? Dr. Cross said. You can make your own rules. “We could just use it for holidays.”
He seems pleased. He doesn’t want to lose the bare empty air in his flat. “That’s a good idea.”
“Then we can have holidays whenever we want to without going on an aeroplane.” He smiles. “Once they let me out of prison.”
He stops smiling. “Don’t say that.”
“But it might happen.” I want him to be prepared.
“Let’s worry about that when we need to. Not now.”
We sit in one of our silences.
“I’ve been to see Dr. Cross,” he says very quickly. “She’s arranging for me to see a counsellor. There’s a long waiting list, though.”
I open my mouth to speak, then shut it again. I want to ask him what he said, what she said, how it went, whether he likes her. Then I see that he can’t tell me. This is the man who can’t cope with a brightly coloured rug.
“Should I try to find my real father?” I say one day.
He watches me. He is careful. “What do you think?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Maybe, then.”
So maybe I will go backwards. It might be possible. There must be people who remember the hippies in the pink van. I have the sense that I’m catching up with myself at last, after all those dreams of chasing my own skirt through empty rooms, all the wandering in circles, the trips round the number 11 bus route.
“James …”
He waits. He knows what I’m going to say.
I can’t go on.
One of us has to say it. “We won’t be able to have children,” he says.
“No,” I say in a low voice. “No forwards.”
“We can do other things.”
Yes. Have a cat, a dog.
“There are lots of people who don’t have children,” says James.
“Yes,” I say.
The silence hangs around us.
“We have to manage without—make a life that doesn’t involve children, doing things we want to do.”
I find it hard to speak. I look at the ceiling and see a tiny spider rushing along with an appearance of purpose. Does it know where it’s going? I think. Or where it’s come from?
“Yes,” I say.
acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following:
Jackie Gay, Emma Hargrave, Penny Rendall and Tindal Street Press for all their help and support;
Chris Morgan, Pauline Morgan, Gina Standring (without whom there would be twice as many adverbs in this novel), Jeff Phelps, Dorothy Hunt and Joel Lane for their many valuable words of criticism and belief;
Terry, Yvonne, Anna, Simon and Nicholas Gateley for their generosity in giving me space in their house.
PRAISE FOR Astonishing Splashes of Colour
“Beautifully subtle…. It draws the reader in page after page.”
—Boston Globe
“Morrall’s ability to plot the destruction and reshaping of Kitty’s mysteries, while still plausibly unpacking her character, is nothing short of stupendous. Astonishing Splashes of Colour is a brave and startling book, tinted, shaded, and stained like life itself.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Compelling…. Morrall is a sure, sharp writer, and she understands the single-minded nature of grief—Kitty’s thoughts are determined and clear, even as they spin wildly out of control. The other characters are astutely observed, each one appealingly unusual without falling prey to seeming artificially odd.”
—Newsweek
“With strong, first-person narration and a uniquely fresh perspective…. [Kitty] lives on the periphery, observing people while walking among them, and we accompany her on this often unreal journey.”
—Miami Herald
“Astonishing Splashes of Colour remains ‘a core of truth, suffused with a golden glow, becoming more pleasurable the more [it] wander[s].’ For even madness is not without order and logic; it has a vision and an arc of forward movement even when it’s turning in on itself.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“This finely constructed novel … [by a Man] Booker Prize [Finalist] … should please readers of both popular and literary fiction.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Wellington, a memorable heroine, narrates Astonishing Splashes of Colour, a terrific debut novel by British writer Clare Morrall.”
—Buffalo News
“A remarkably tender and unblinking look at a woman coming apart in the wake of her grief…. What’s truly ‘astonishing’ is how Clare Morrall reveals the fugue state as a work of art, illuminating the creativity behind the sorrow and how we subsist on a diet of our own stories when there’s nothing else to eat…. Equally dangerous and endearing, Astonishing Splashes of Colour is a poignant tour through the many moods of loss.”
—Laurie Fox, author of The Lost Girls
“Morrall has created an ethereal novel of loss and redemption that is both heartbreaking and beautiful. As the story is told through Kitty’s engagingly intimate voice, the reader is compelled to follow her wanderings, searches, and flights. Characters are brilliantly drawn, the pacing is perfect, and the tone is never maudlin. A finalist for the Man Booker Prize, this is a novel to be savored.”
—Booklist
“Astonishing Splashes of Colour commands us from the first page…. As Kitty hurtles toward madness, we are unable not to follow. And to care. To care very, very much.”
—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of Twelve Times Blessed
“An extraordinary, gripping novel written with no sentimentality. A wonderful piece of writing—it is astonishing that she has never been published before.”
—Professor John Carey, chair of the Man Booker Prize
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Tindal Street Press Ltd.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in the United States in 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
ASTONISHING SPLASHES OF COLOUR Copyright © 2004 by Clare Morrall.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permi
ssion of HarperCollins ebooks.
EPub Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-03517-2
First Harper Perennial edition published 2005.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Morrall, Clare.
Astonishing splashes of colour / by Clare Morrall.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-073445-0
1. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 2. Birmingham (England)— Fiction. 3. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Book reviewing—Fiction. 5. Childlessness—Fiction. 6. Married women—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6113.O75A75 2004
823’.92—dc22 2004040895
ISBN-10: 0-06-073446-9 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-073446-6 (pbk.)
05 06 07 08 09 /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com
Astonishing Splashes of Colour Page 30