If Only You Knew

by Alice Jolly

My mother is sorting through her workbox, trying to find the right colour cotton. Her head is bent down and for a moment her hands are still, then she carries on searching. She takes out three different reels of thread and lays them on her knee. When she looks up, she makes sure her face has no expression at all. ‘Maya? In Moscow? How strange. I never thought she’d go back.’

  I explain about Harvey.

  ‘But I thought her husband was French?’

  That was her first husband, I say.

  ‘Ah yes, I see. So that marriage didn’t last?’

  ‘Obviously not.’

  ‘She used to drink. Does she still?’

  ‘Yes, I think perhaps she does.’ My mother’s hands pull at pieces of thread, laying them against the cream material she’s working on. Rob had said about Maya, Well, it’s not as though we’re going to get to know her, is it? But during the two weeks before I left Moscow, I’d spent every evening at her flat. That lavender-coloured cardigan my mother had just picked up was a present she’d given me, something she didn’t wear any more. A ballerina-style cardigan, it crossed over low at the front. ‘Oh, I do so like to corrupt a nice Catholic girl.’ That’s what she said, as I tried it on.

  ‘You didn’t get on with Maya?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. She was charming – as people who’ve been spoilt so often are. And she was terribly exotic for Norfolk, what with those clothes, and speaking four or five languages.’ My mother unwound cotton from a reel and took a needle from a felt case.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Well, nothing really. Except – well, she did interfere. Such fun to lead other people’s lives vicariously, encouraging them to take risks when you’ve no intention of taking any yourself.’

  ‘And she wasn’t married at that time?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘But she was thirty-six?’

  ‘Well yes, but Maya was strange like that.’

  I think of Estelle and the way she always stands too close to Maya. She came around to Maya’s flat once just a couple of days before I left Moscow. Filling the whole space with her insistent voice, her shiny nail varnish and swinging fur coat, she ignored me completely. I said I’d go, but Maya wouldn’t let me. And the voyeur in me did want to stay. Harvey was away. I wondered if Estelle would spend the night at the flat and what would happen if she did.

  ‘Strange in what way?’

  ‘Restless. She could never settle for anything.’

  My mother holds a strand of thread up to the light, then lays it flat on the material. Perhaps she’ll go down and get me some supper, she says. Would I like a bowl of soup? A sandwich? Some stewed fruit and custard?

  ‘You know, I talk to Maya about my father.’

  The silence is tight and I hear my own breath.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Cottons drop from my mother’s knee and she leans down to pick them up.

  ‘Why do you and I never talk about him?’

  My mother shrugs. ‘Well, you’ve never really asked.’ I wait for her to say that my father never sent any money. Or that only his early paintings were really any good. Instead she unwinds cotton from a reel. This is the moment. I can ask whatever I want. Why did he leave? Maya had an affair with him, didn’t she? That’s what happened, isn’t it? But the words won’t form. I think of Jack. I do have a right to know this. It’s not necessarily about some big problem, he said. It’s just a question of getting things clear in your mind. Sometimes we don’t see the present clearly because it’s distorted by the lens of the past.

  ‘I loved him, of course.’ Those words sound so alien that I find myself looking around the room as though trying to identify some speaker other than my mother. She’s never said anything like that before. Now she’s staring at some invisible point far up the wall. ‘Isn’t that the most important thing?’ Her words sound too naked. Suddenly I don’t want her to say anything more, but now she’s started, her words come easily. Sitting with her hands folded, she tells me about the day she met him.

  An April day, she says, showers of rain, bursts of sun, then sudden battering wind. She was working in Soho then and her sewing machine was in the window of the shop. Outside, paper bags blew around and a dustbin lid rolled down the street like a wheel. And then this man appeared, dodging the dustbin lid, and crashing in through the door of the shop. He’d got a bad cold, a gaping hole in the knee of his trousers, and an interview for a teaching job in twenty minutes. She sewed up his trousers while he stood beside her in his long shirt and socks. Miraculous, he said, miraculous, when he put his trousers back on, because he couldn’t even see where the hole had been. Then he bent over and kissed her, and the men who worked at the back of the shop whistled, and everyone laughed, and she just wanted to hide under the table.

  When she left work that evening he was waiting for her, and took her out for a cup of tea. They shared an iced bun and a piece of apple tart. And then she just didn’t know how, but it was impossible to say no, and he wouldn’t listen to her, and so she found herself on the last train to Norwich. When they got back to Marsh End House, it had rained so much that the porch was six inches underwater. My father picked her up and carried her over the threshold. Three weeks later they were married.

  As she finishes telling me this, her head is tipped back, and I suspect that she’s trying not to let tears fall. I feel the world she’s created fading away and I want to keep hold of it. I know now that I won’t ask her any of those questions. I watch her as she stands up, and moves to the door. She says that I need to put the light out and go to sleep.

  ‘Mum, don’t you ever wish he’d come back?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Every day.’

  After my mother has gone, I lie awake and think of the day when I went to Tsaritsyno with Jack. He asked me then whether, in my everyday life, I’d ever had a sense of my life as spectacular. And now memories come back to me of when I was eighteen – those few short months when anything seemed possible, followed too soon by a perilous descent into darkness.

  I see myself propped on the sofa in the sitting room of this house. I’ve got a bandage on my arm from the hospital and packets of pills lie on the table. The application forms lie beside them. My mother comes in with a cup of tea, and after she’s put it down, she rubs at her hands uncertainly. Her face is the colour of fear. ‘Eva, dear, I know it’s difficult. Of course, you should really go up to bed and rest. But the deadline is tomorrow. I could try to ring and see if there’s any way it can be extended …’

  I look down at my trailing patchwork skirt, fingerless gloves and jumper down to my knees. A trilby hat, and a long scarf in stripes of brown and green, lie beside me. I pick up the scarf and twist it in my hands. Mr Raven used to have a scarf like this, except his had wider stripes, and no tassels. I look over at the forms with their black lines and boxes. ‘Mum, I don’t need to fill those in. I’ve already decided.’

  ‘Yes, I know, dear. But what if you change your mind?’

  My arm aches where the nurse put a drip into it. She dug around in my arm again and again because she couldn’t find a vein. I think back to the day four months before, when I first bought my patchwork skirt, my scarf and my hat. They were the best clothes I’d ever had. They made me brave enough to do anything. In those clothes I could become one of the girls hanging around the Clock Tower, and I could smoke dope and say how we-eird everything was, and how it made me feel like I was flying, and how everything looked technicolour.

  And I could lose my virginity to a man in the park, who had a raincoat and a Highland terrier. And I never even asked his name, just pulled my knickers over my clumpy shoes and lay down in the grass, while the dog watched with a look of hairy disbelief on his face. And in those clothes, if I got sent to see Father James, or the headmistress, I didn’t care what either of them said. You’ve always done so well at school, why throw it all away? You must think of your mother. Things have not been easy for her, she’s done her best in a difficult situation.

 
; I watch my mother as she stokes up the fire and adds another log. Despite all her efforts the room is still cold. She pulls up a chair, sits down beside me and pushes the cup of tea towards me. Mascara is smudged on her cheeks from when she was crying at the hospital. She looks through those forms, as though she doesn’t know perfectly well what they say. ‘How about geography? Or history? You’ve always been good at that. Or Development Studies? Rob is really enjoying his course.’ She’s been going on like this now for weeks.

  The ambulance came to the school this afternoon because I couldn’t breathe. At the hospital they kept saying, ‘What happened? How did it start?’ I couldn’t say that I’d just been waiting too long. Over six weeks. And perhaps the letter had got lost in the post. Or perhaps he and his girlfriend were just too busy setting up their new flat. But then – in the middle of double geography – the idea came to me that perhaps he never would get in touch. Perhaps I would never see him again.

  But he had liked me, he definitely had. He said that my work was the most promising in the class. And when I was the model in the life-class, he said I was easy to draw because I was well-proportioned, and had good bones. And when he looked at the picture Liza Grant had drawn of me, he said, ‘But you haven’t made her look pretty – she’s much prettier than that.’

  And it was because of him that I’d decided to become an artist. The school hadn’t wanted me to do art in the sixth form. Art was for people who couldn’t do real subjects. I could carry on for a year if I wanted, but after that I should concentrate on a place at a good university. But then Mr Raven arrived and I knew I would become an artist. I spent hours after school in the art room, I borrowed piles of books from the library, I persuaded my mother to take me to London to the Royal Academy, the National, the Tate. My father had been an artist, so why not? I wanted to know about his paintings, but when I asked my mother she said yet again that only the early paintings were any good. I found a box under her bed but it didn’t have paintings in. There didn’t seem to be any way of finding out anything more.

  My mother lays the forms down on the table and reads the details on the pills. ‘You need to have another one of these in an hour.’ She goes to the fire again, trying to stoke some life into it. When she lays down the poker her shoulders go up and then collapse with a sigh. ‘Eva, I don’t know what you think, but I don’t want you to go and see that Doctor Gurtmann again. I blame all of this on him.’

  I’d always had asthma, but over the last year it had got worse, so the school had sent me to see Dr Gurtmann, who was some kind of specialist. My mother had insisted there wasn’t any need. I’d been to see Dr Evans, a man with an excellent reputation, and he’d said it was simply a question of rest. But the asthma kept on getting worse. When the headmistress asked me whether there was anything I wanted to discuss, I couldn’t say, ‘It was all your fault. You let Mr Raven leave, you let him take another job.’

  Finally, when I did go and see Dr Gurtmann, he told me that my problem wasn’t asthma. I was furious and sure he was wrong. How dare he accuse me of making things up? I wouldn’t let him take my asthma away from me. And I couldn’t allow my mother’s judgement to be questioned in that way. He asked me a lot of questions. Do you suffer from headaches? Have you had problems with your eyesight? Abnormally bad period pains? Why are you so thin?

  His office was furnished with thick cream carpets, shiny pine, Hessian wall hangings and tactfully positioned boxes of tissues. A bronze of a naked woman with her legs splayed stood on a side table. ‘What did you feel like when your father left?’ he asked. I said that it was upsetting for my mother because she was Catholic and so she didn’t believe in divorce. ‘And what did you feel about it?’ he said. I said that my mother had never really had many friends. ‘Yes, and what did you feel?’ My mother couldn’t start another life after he’d left. His voice was suddenly loud. ‘And you?’ he said. ‘You?’ I looked at him and wondered what he was talking about.

  I reach out for the mug of tea with my good arm. ‘I think you’re right,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I should go and see him again.’

  ‘Yes. It’s really too far to drive. You know, if you’re feeling too tired I can fill these forms in for you. It doesn’t matter, as long as you sign them.’ She’s got the pen in her hand but I shake my head.

  Earlier in the day, when I couldn’t breathe, I’d seen this child. A child standing on a path in a wood, staring at a gate. And it wasn’t a memory or a dream. It was as though the past had stepped forward into the present. It was vivid, every detail sharp. I think of Mr Raven. I want to lay my head on his shoulder and tell him what’s happened. I look down again at my skirt and jumper. Really I look ridiculous. Of course I won’t become an artist. I’ve never been any good. Mr Raven said I was, but he was a liar. He lied about everything.

  I look at my mother as she reaches for the poker again. That stain of mascara is still smeared on her cheek. This afternoon at the hospital, a nurse brought her a cup of tea and held her hand because she was crying so much. I reach out and pick up the application form. Art is frivolous anyway. Why paint pictures when so many people are dying of starvation? Rob told me that in some countries, a child dies every eight seconds due to lack of clean drinking-water. I start to fill out the form.

  Marsh End House, Malthouse, Norfolk

  Christmas, 1990

  My mother has gone out to Evensong. I get out of bed, put on a dressing-gown and wander through the house, rediscovering its particular sense of unease. The doors, staircase and window-frames are all made of the same dark wood which never changes colour, no matter what the light. In the back corridor, patches of mildew rise above the skirting boards and the parquet in the sitting room is warped. Stained glass in the front door, and in the bay windows, creates faded spectrums of light. Books, which no one has opened in years, line the sitting-room walls. It seems to me that the rooms should smell of pipe smoke although, in fact, they don’t. I wonder what it must have been like for my mother when she came here with my father that first night. A man with too much past, and a woman with too little.

  The hall is decorated with holly and loops of tinsel hang over the doors. I idle up the front stairs, cross the landing, and open the door to the guest room. It waits in sparse and dusty anticipation for the guests who never come. In my mother’s bedroom the wallpaper is patterned with thick-stemmed pink roses. The wardrobe and chest of drawers are tall, dark and polished. I walk over to the window. I still can’t get over how small England looks. Everything is quaint, clean and brightly coloured. Even the sky seems cosy and well-organized.

  In the garden the monkey puzzle tree is shrouded in frost. That wrought-iron gate with the cobweb pattern which leads out to the lane has been left open. I think back to that photograph at Maya’s flat. The shadowy figure in the frockcoat, the tree in the background. That photograph wasn’t taken here because the tree is on the other side of the garden. My eyes turn back to the gate. My mother will be worried when she finds that it’s open. She likes to keep it shut, although no one ever comes to the house that way.

  I feel much better today, the sore throat and headache have gone. Tomorrow I’m going to London and then back to Moscow. Whenever I come here it’s the same. I tell myself that I’m desperate to get away but, as the moment of departure draws near, a hollow feeling gathers in my stomach. That endless sense of missed opportunity. I turn away from the window, kneel down and feel under the bed. The two boxes are still there – the tin trunk which provided the inspiration for the Montezuma Mystery and the cardboard box containing those few remnants of my father. When I opened it more than ten years ago, it didn’t seem strange that one box is all that remains of him. Now I’m not so sure. People don’t disappear and leave so little trace.

  The contents of the box are no more interesting than they used to be. A slide rule, a medal on a green ribbon, a leather case containing screwdrivers, an ivory paper-knife. I look at some papers in a cardboard file and then lay them to one side. In an a
lbum I find photographs which look similar to the pictures I found in Maya’s flat. The same over-bright colours, the same thick fringes and long collars. Flicking through them I find several of Maya. In one she’s sitting on a rug with my father. He’s got his arm around her waist. I’d forgotten how attractive she was. That manic smile, those teeth which are a little too long, a scarf in her hair, a white lace dress.

  There’s also a photograph of me, looking exactly like that child who stands on the moonlit path. I’m at the top of the staircase in this house, shock-headed and with thin legs. In my hand I’m carrying a stick and I’m wearing a red tunic and bar shoes which are too big. I hesitate at the top of the stairs. My eyes are brimming full of expectation. As I look at that photograph I remember that costume. It was one of several I had in my dressing-up box but I wore it more than any other. The little red devil. Yes, that’s who I was. My mother must have made that costume. But when was that photograph taken?

  I pull out the tin trunk and open that as well. Folded on top of the files and books is Aunt Amelia’s shawl with its Paisley pattern of question marks. I haven’t looked in this trunk since that autumn day of telephone calls and sofa cushions. All through my childhood Amelia was never mentioned. She was my father’s cousin, and since he had ceased to exist, then she was banished as well. To this day I don’t really know exactly what happened to her. I did once ask and my mother said that, as a diplomat’s wife, Amelia shouldn’t have become involved in politics. Independence had been declared in Rhodesia, it was a dangerous time. That’s what she said, and then briskly changed the subject. I suppose Rob must know more but he pretends to take no interest. I gather the shawl up to my face, as my father did on that autumn day. It smells of old tin trunk, nothing more. Maya had gone away and then he lost Amelia as well? Was that why he left?

  I turn back to the cardboard box and unearth from the bottom spiral-bound calendars, stacked in piles. I was six when he left – in 1966 or 1967? I sort through the pile, pick out 1967 and flick through the pages. Early January is crowded with entries. Exhibition. Boltons, two crates of wine, a barrel of beer, six bottles of champagne. 6 January – 15.30 Hislops and Carrs. 17.02 Rachel and Edith. A scattering of telephone numbers. Then, after that, three more entries, all crossed out, then the calendar is empty until September and my mother’s hand – Eva school.