If Only You Knew

by Alice Jolly

  I open the 1966 diary. Entries appear on every page in both hands. I flick through the pages – school starts, Eva dentist, then Cornwall with a line which runs on over the next two pages. So we went for a three-week holiday and I have no memory of it. Perhaps most people can’t remember much. At the beginning of November, I find half-term marked and the names – Amelia, Guy, Rob. Except only Rob ever came.

  I open the 1967 diary again and look at those blank pages between mid-January and September. So he left sometime early in 1967 but that was more than two months after Amelia’s death. What happened in those two months? I look through piles of bills, files and old newspaper cuttings. Underneath them is an envelope. I remember this envelope, it contains the separation papers. The paper is cream, the postmark red, and the address of the solicitors is printed on the back. Hammond & Jones, 55 Red Lion Square, London WCI. I tear out that section of the envelope and lay the address down with the cardboard file.

  I unfold the papers and start to look through them, but I already know they don’t contain anything of interest. My eyes brush over a few paragraphs – arrangements about the house, the bank account. I’m about to push the papers back into the envelope, when some pages drop to the floor. Held together by a staple, they are photocopies, and the person who made them didn’t put the originals straight on the machine, so the words are tilted to one side. That Theo Adam Curren … The document is a court order. Resident of 54 Redesdale Street, London SW3 … Just another part of the separation papers. Then my eyes slow. I read the words once and then again. Shall be forbidden from any contact with his daughter, Eva Lucy Curren … The papers are dated November 1966.

  I try to put the papers back into the envelope but they won’t go. One page sticks out. I realign them, try again. But I’ve got them at the wrong angle. I force them and the envelope tears. I ram the papers and the envelope together, my knuckles smashing against each other. And then suddenly I’m sure that the window must have come open because I can smell the garden, frost, pine trees.

  The child is with her father and she kneels on the kitchen table. It’s a bright evening and the room is yellow. The kitchen windows hang open and she can see tall sunflowers outside nodding in their pots. Her father holds a spoon covered in honey and the child watches a strand of gold dribble down from the spoon. Although it’s teatime, the sun outside is so hot that it makes her want to yawn. Her father twists the spoon, watching the honey slide across the back of it. The child puts her finger into the stream of honey and tastes it. The spoon wobbles and honey spills on to the table.

  Her father laughs and passes the spoon to her. She tries to hold it steady over the pot but the air is so hot that she can’t concentrate and soon there’s honey dribbling all over the table. The child and her father laugh. He finds another spoon, and together they start to draw patterns across the table. The honey makes intricate squiggles as they swing their spoons back and forwards. The child rubs the back of her spoon across the surface of the table, merging the squiggles together into one golden pool. The honey smells of summer and flowers. Her father flies his spoon through the air, trailing a thread after it. He’s talking about the country where the beach is.

  I could show you a map, he says, and their spoons drop back into the honey pot. Her father takes an atlas down from a shelf and opens it on his knee. He tells the child that her great-grandfather went to Mexico and never came back. The pages of the atlas are a patchwork of pale blue, pink and green. The names are written at crooked angles. The child licks at her fingers and watches her father’s hand moving over the page. Mexico is a fat, pink country with a long tail, and it is very far away.

  Further than London?

  Yes, much further.

  The child leans down to look at the page more closely.

  I’m wondering, her father says, whether you might like to go there?

  The child looks up at him. Then she jumps up and down, and swings on her father’s shoulder. So when will we go? When?

  The back door opens and then shuts. The child’s mother comes in and sees the honey spread on the table. Her head goes back like a horse refusing a fence. What are you doing? What are you doing? Her face crinkles up in lines. She gets a cloth and wipes up the honey. Moving back and forth between the table and the sink, she rinses the cloth, wrings it out, then scrubs as though she wants to wipe the whole table away. She sighs and mops at her forehead with her apron. Then the atlas is put away, and knives and forks appear on the table. The oven door opens with a gush of heat.

  Daddy and I are going to go to a place where stars come down to earth.

  Her mother turns to look at her but says nothing. The child pulls herself closer to her father. She looks up at the shelf where the atlas is. Where is that place? Show me where it is. She feels her father’s hand in her hair but he doesn’t get the atlas down. He’s staring across the kitchen at her mother. The child gets a chair and tries to reach up to the shelf.

  No, get down from there, please. Supper is ready.

  The child’s mother pulls her down. The child sits between her parents as supper is served. She says she doesn’t want green beans but her mother says she must have some. Outside, the sun is getting hotter and hotter. It’s hard to eat or even to breathe. The sunflowers at the window look weary. The chicken casserole steams on the table. She looks up at her parents and their faces are closed tight. Her mother clatters chicken down on to her plate. The silence feels like a great mouth opening ready to swallow them. The child stares down at her plate and sees that the green beans are moving.

  Perhaps I’ll just go to Mexico for the weekend, she says.

  Yes, her father says. Quite right. Back in time for school on Monday.

  By the stove, the dog howls. Despite the heat, the child shivers. The green beans are standing up on end now. She pushes them away but her mother tells her to behave and pulls the plate back towards her. The green beans are dancing a devilish jig. The child is up from her seat, her chair tips over, she presses herself against the sideboard. She screams and screams and still the beans dance, faster and faster. Her father picks up the plate and tips the beans into the bin. He takes the child into the sitting room and holds her tight, sitting beside her in the big armchair. Together they make up rhymes – bean-greens-dancing-stop. Lean-seams-dancing-pop. Pop-seams-prancing-lean.

  When her father goes back into the kitchen, she hears her mother talking. I don’t understand what’s the matter with her.

  The beans were screaming.

  No, I mean, what’s really the matter with her.

  Well, I expect if she says the beans were screaming, they must have been.

  Theo, Theo, for pity’s sake.

  The child lies on the sofa. Her father comes and asks her if she wants to go up to bed. She’s frightened to go so he brings her nightdress downstairs and makes a bed for her there. Outside, the sun is fading but the heat still clings to her. Voices rise and fall with the jangle of pots being cleared from the table. The child drifts towards sleep, then wakes to hear those same voices snarling like fighting dogs. The room is half-dark, the child goes to the kitchen door and eases it open a crack. Her bare feet curl on the carpet. The kitchen light shines low over the table. She sees her mother but not her father. Her hands press over her ears so she can’t hear. Her mother’s face is hard and white. An envelope lies on the table. It has a red postmark and an address printed in red on the back. The diamond engagement ring on her mother’s finger catches the light as she pushes this envelope across the table. Her father’s hand appears pushing the papers back. The child shuts her eyes so she can’t see his face. Inside the dustbin the green beans still dance.

  I’m sitting on the stairs when my mother opens the front door. She’s got her smart shoes on and she wipes them on the mat. She’s singing a little tune to herself, in the way she sometimes does. I wonder now if this tune-singing is how she convinces herself that she’s happy? She takes two steps across the patterned tiles of the hall and then stop
s. The light is dim but she’s seen me. She moves forward, ready to make some cheerful greeting, then her eyes fix on the papers lying across my knees. I’ve left the cardboard file and the solicitor’s address in my bedroom, but I turn the slanting photocopy towards her. ‘He wanted to take me with him.’

  For a moment she thinks of rushing forward and offering comfort, she considers hurrying me away to bed and filling me up with aspirin. But she knows now that neither will work. Instead she lays her gloves down on the telephone table, takes off her coat, brushes at it with her hand, then hangs it on the hooks next to the sitting-room door. She sighs over a scarf which has fallen to the floor. As she bends down to pick it up her hair swings forward, covering her face.

  ‘You sent him away. Why?’

  She hangs the scarf back on its hook.

  ‘Eva, if you look at those papers you’ll find they were never signed.’

  I turn to the third page and find the place where the signature should be. Dots file across the page, but above them the paper is empty. For a moment I feel defeated. Of course, she’s right. Why didn’t I look at that before? My eyes turn to her face. She looks so determinedly innocent but behind her eyes there’s a glimmer of triumph. She thinks she’s going to put a stop to this conversation.

  ‘Why don’t you come and sit down? We can have a cup of tea.’

  I hold the papers out to her, trying to force her to see what I’m asking.

  ‘Eva, you must understand. I was placed in a difficult situation.’

  ‘What situation?’

  My mother moves to the telephone table and reorganizes the papers there.

  ‘Was it because of Amelia’s death? Was he upset about that?’

  ‘Yes. He was certainly badly damaged by that. Yes, of course.’

  ‘And then?’

  My mother picks up her leather gloves from the hall table, straightens out the fingers, and puts them away in the drawer. ‘I was thinking we might have cauliflower cheese for supper, would you like that?’

  ‘Why did he leave?’ My voice is suddenly loud.

  ‘Oh Eva, really. Why must you go on and on?’ She walks to the bottom of the stairs and stares up to where I sit. Both of us are shaky, drunk on the strangeness of this. Around us the house stirs. It’s as though windows, long closed, are being opened. Inside me, a strange excitement surges. My mother wants to shout at me that there isn’t any mystery, that I mustn’t be hysterical. But I’m not six years old any more.

  ‘Sometimes you marry someone and they turn into another person,’ she says.

  ‘What other person?’

  ‘Eva, I don’t know. He just – he became very extreme. He wanted to know things you can’t possibly know.’

  ‘Things like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. He had all these odd ideas about the Mayan culture, and shamans, and the planet Venus. He talked about meeting God, or something. But all he really wanted was some peace of mind.’

  ‘And he wanted his freedom?’

  ‘Freedom?’ My mother’s mouth moves around that word as though it tastes bitter. She raises a hand to push her hair back from her face. She’s staring upwards at nothing. Her hand waves in a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s what everyone said. “Just leave him alone, give him his freedom”.’

  She turns and walks towards the door into the back corridor. I think that she’ll just go into the kitchen and leave me alone here. But she stops at the door, her head drops, and she rests her hand against the frame. I mustn’t start to feel sorry for her. She should have let me go with him. And ever since, she’s been fighting with me. Trying to make me into the kind of small person she is, trying to stop me becoming like him. But it just isn’t going to work any more. I am no longer the Good Girl. I am not like my mother. He wanted me. She even had to get papers to stop him taking me.

  Slowly I stand up. Those careful Christmas decorations – the sprigs of holly tied in bunches, the looping tinsel – suddenly seem unbearably mournful. Like so much else in this house, they suggest some other life, which lies within reach, but is never grasped. Perhaps the life he took with him when he left? I have to stop myself going towards my mother, laying a hand on her arm.

  ‘Mum, I’ve been thinking. Perhaps I’ll go to London tonight. It’s just – I’ve got rather a lot of shopping to do. You know, things to take back to Moscow. And I’ve also got to pick my visa up.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘I just think it would be easier.’

  We discuss the time of the train and the fact that I should get a cab from the station. And do I have the key to the flat? And do I need to ring Uncle Guy to tell him I’m going to stay there? She goes to the kitchen to check the time of the train and make me a sandwich. Upstairs, I push things into my bag. I’m suddenly desperate to get away. I feel pity for my father. Him and me. We can never be what she wants us to be. I know now what he felt. People my mother loves do seem to feel a need to leave the country.

  I push a child’s jumper, coat and skirt into my case. They’re old clothes which used to belong to me and I’m going to give them to the hopscotch girl. I look at those crooked photocopies again. 54 Redesdale Street, London SW3. Whose address is that? I take the cardboard folder with me and I put the letter I’ve written to my father in my coat pocket. It’s enclosed inside another envelope which is addressed to the solicitors at 55 Red Lion Square. I’m going to write a separate note asking them to send the letter on.

  As we drive to the station, my mother says, ‘I think you’re right, it’s much better this way. You’d have been so rushed tomorrow.’ As the car rolls on under the dark dome of sky, she maintains a stream of chatter. Messages for Rob, advice about my health, when will I next be home? In my head I’m already back in Moscow and I’m talking to Jack in the No Name Café. He said he wasn’t sure about his plans but I know that he’ll be there, waiting for me. At the station my mother comes with me on to the platform, carrying my bags, asking, have I got this, have I got that? I check that the letter is still in the pocket of my coat. I wait until the train is pulling in before I speak. ‘I’ve decided I’m going to write to him.’

  ‘Oh Eva, no. Please. Don’t do that. All you’ll do is hurt yourself. Endless people have tried to get in touch with him but he never replies to any letters, never has. You’ve got Rob. You’ve got your chance of happiness. Don’t let him spoil that.’ She lays a hand on my arm. ‘Listen, dear. Please don’t let this come between us. We’ve always got on so well, haven’t we?’

  Despite myself I kiss her goodbye and tell her not to worry. As the train pulls out I watch her growing small on the station platform, in her neat little coat, and her smart shoes. I think of her driving back on her own to that dark and uneasy house. The carriage of the train is almost empty. I put my two bags down on a seat and my coat on top of them. Then I sit down at the window. I see my face reflected in the glass, surrounded by lights. Turning my head away, I push my face down into my coat, suddenly hating myself. But still, when I arrive in London, I will post that letter.

  The No Name Café, Moscow

  January 1991

  I stand at the window of the No Name Café and wipe a circle in the steamed-up glass, but Jack isn’t there. My eyes move from table to table. I go into the café and walk the length of it. Once, twice, three times. The woman with the headscarf mops the floor, a couple kiss in the corner, two businessmen look through papers laid out on their table. But I don’t see any of that, I only see the place where Jack should be.

  This is the third day now. He knows this is the time I finish work, he said he’d be here the day I got back. In the street the cold is vicious. Layers of ice have built up on pavements, above windows, along pipes. The roads are cracking open, the kerbstones splitting apart. I wear two alpaca jumpers which I bought in South America and two pairs of gloves. I’ve borrowed an old fur hat of Rob’s and I tie my scarf across my nose and mouth. With Jack gone, the whole of Moscow is depopulated.

  I think
of the Church of the Resurrection – that’s where he’ll be. I travel down the long wooden escalators into the Metro and take the train to Polianka. As I hurry through the walkways, I’m sure I see his golden-grey head moving away from me, the tail of his coat flick as he disappears through a swinging glass door. When I get to the church, the metal gates of the factory are shut up. The church looks insubstantial in the bronze light. I walk away, digging in my pockets for a handkerchief.

  It’s not as though I care that much. I really don’t. I just want to understand why he’s doing this to me. I was meant to be like Valia or Anna or whatever her name was. He wanted to kiss me, to fuck me. He wanted a holiday romance perhaps.

  I walk back to the Metro, trying to work out how I can find him. That job which first brought him to Moscow? It was something to do with a team of neurologists, an American aid programme, advice on restructuring Soviet mental hospitals. But he never told me exactly who he worked with, or where.

  When I get back to the flat the telephone is ringing, but when I pick up the receiver, the line goes dead. Rob won’t be back until late. Last night he wasn’t back until two o’clock. He told me then, as we lay in the darkness, that in Vilnius crowds of civilians have erected barricades to defend their elected parliament. But Gorbachev has warned them that they need to restore the Soviet constitution.

  I open that cardboard file I took from the box under my mother’s bed. My father’s handwriting is distorted and jumbled, but it seems to contain notes he was making from a book. The language is a mixture of Spanish and English. Something about Mexico? About astronomy? Maya had mentioned shamanism, my mother had mentioned mysticism. I think of that day on the beach and his promise of stars which came down to the earth. I wonder now whether that was just a game. I want to talk to Jack, he’s the only person who might understand.