If Only You Knew

by Alice Jolly

‘She should have told me,’ I say. ‘She should have told me.’

  ‘Yes, she should.’ His gaze is direct. ‘She was mistaken in that.’

  My voice conceals a shriek of disgust. ‘Mistaken? She fails to look after you properly, and then she lies to me.’

  ‘She didn’t throw me out. We both knew, even before that night, that I needed to go. And I did go – the following morning.’

  Yes, that’s how it happened. He went to Mexico without even saying goodbye, and later the pain was so great that every memory of that night was wiped from my mind. I look down and the glass I’m holding has snapped in two at the stem. I want to throw the remains of it onto the floor but the old man lifts the two pieces neatly out of my hands. He pulls out a chair but still I don’t sit down.

  ‘Eva, your mother loved us both.’

  I bang my hand down on to the table but despite my anger the action lacks conviction. ‘Love? Love? I’m sick of that word. I’m sick of it.’ My voice shakes and I put my hand on the side of my head. ‘What does anybody mean by that? Everyone claims to have loved everyone else, so how did we finish up unhappy?’

  The echo of my voice hangs around us. The old man’s eyes blink as he weighs my words. He stirs his tea, places his teaspoon on the saucer, then pours a cup for me. I don’t actually want, or expect, an answer to that question but he’s going to give me one.

  ‘Perhaps love has to do with the opportunity to set another person free.’

  His words silence me. I pull a chair further away from him and sit down. That phrase sounds uncomfortably similar to some of the things my mother said when we sat in her sewing room foolishly looking at wedding dresses. I was so sure she couldn’t be right, and I didn’t want to hear anything she said. I wanted a perfect father, someone absolute, who could explain me to myself. Now I stare down at my hands and long for the comfort of a simple explanation while knowing there isn’t one to be had.

  ‘Well, maybe,’ I say. ‘Maybe. Perhaps that’s what my mother did for you. It’s just a shame she didn’t do the same for me.’

  ‘Yes. You’re right. Of course.’ He looks out of the window for a moment, his eyes distant, then he turns back at me. ‘But you know, your mother had been through a terrible time. She was trying to speak the truth and no one was listening.’

  ‘Yeah, and I’ve been asking for the truth and she hasn’t been listening.’

  He stares at me, his head nodding slowly. ‘I know, Eva. I know. Nothing can possibly justify the fact that she didn’t tell you what happened. But, you see, children are the hope in our lives. We want them to put the past right, we want to make some better world for them. But sometimes in doing that we deny them a fullness of life.’ His hand moves to the side, a small gesture, the palm facing upwards. ‘And then circumstances made it easy for her. All knowledge of that night seemed to have been wiped from your mind. And then the path to the lake was closed up. Your mother always meant to tell you, but the right moment just never arrived. The tragedy is that you can make a child believe anything.’

  The cup of tea he made for me still sits in front of me. I feel I should start to drink it, but I don’t want to allow him any victory. I don’t want this old man sitting at my table. What I wanted was my father. He wouldn’t have said these things. He loved me, not my mother. He is not drab and careful. He is someone who creates other worlds, and has the power to catch a star in a butterfly net. I look at my watch and find that it’s already half past three. I haven’t got time for this old man with his slow voice. I need to carry Jack’s boxes down the stairs and then finish my packing. In a few days’ time I’ll be on my way to La Paz.

  The old man has seen me looking at my watch. He drains his cup and reaches for his stick. ‘Tomorrow I leave early. I’m going to England to see your mother.’

  Oh yes, of course, that’s what he really wants to do. And perhaps they’ll laugh together and walk on the marsh, as they did before I was born. Before the little red devil arrived and wouldn’t do what she was told. Never mind that little accident, that little white lie. She’s always been rather hysterical, Eva. The old man is going now. He has his coat and scarf on, his stick gripped in his hand. The cup of tea he made for me is going cold on the table. At the front door he stretches out his hand and his fingers brush my arm. ‘I’m so very sorry, my dear. I didn’t want us to meet again in this way. I can only say, for me …’

  I pull my arm away, but I’m turning to water inside. He steps out of the door. I ought to touch him, to kiss him, but I don’t know how. His stick reaches out, and he fixes the rubber point of it on the floor. I can feel the place on my arm where his fingers touched me. ‘You know, I always remember … I always remember a day on the beach. And you were so happy. And there was that dog. I think it was the Reynolds’s dog and it followed us down the beach. It was a red setter. Do you remember?’

  He blinks as he considers that question. ‘The beach, of course, I remember the beach. But the dog – I’m not sure. If it was the Reynolds’s dog it wouldn’t have been a setter. They never had setters, always Labradors.’

  I stare down at one of Jack’s boxes, my eyes running over the words on the side scribbled in Cyrillic script. It was a red setter. I know it was a red setter. I want to hold on to the old man’s arm and make him say that. Yes, I remember that day. Yes, it was a red setter on the beach.

  He puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘Oh my dear, my dear …’

  His hand still rests on my shoulder and we’re quite still, on the landing of the flats, close to each other and yet endlessly separate. And it seems as if we’ll be like that forever now, frozen by the knowledge of what can never be recovered. A patch of sunlight touches on the tiles by the top of the stairs. From somewhere below, a Hoover whirs. He turns and looks at the boxes spread along the corridor. ‘You’re trying to move? Let me help you. At least let me do that. I’ve got some time now. I can carry some things.’

  ‘No, no. It’s all right. These aren’t my things. I was trying to get rid of them. But anyway, I’d need a car and it’s too late now.’

  ‘I have a car. I hired one at the airport.’

  I don’t want him to have a car. He shouldn’t make this possible. I look along the landing at Jack’s boxes. ‘Really, I need to burn them and it’s too late to start that today.’

  ‘To burn them? Oh, I see. Yes – difficult, but by no means impossible. We can do that. I’ll go and get the car. And some paraffin, we’ll need that. Perhaps a rake.’

  Yes, paraffin, he’s right, and a rake. I hadn’t thought of that. One of Jack’s shirts lies spread over a box. For a moment I see him sitting on the bed in Room 815, his hand struggling to do up the button on the cuff of that shirt.

  ‘The boxes belong to someone who is dead.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ the old man says. ‘Of course. Perhaps not now, then.’

  ‘Yes, now.’ I look up at my father and I know he’s going to make this possible. A car, paraffin, a rake. ‘Yes, please, if you could help me.’ I begin to push papers and books back inside a box. I can do this now because I know that these boxes were not Jack’s legacy to me. I don’t need the information they contain. Was he a drug trader or a spy? Was it purely a matter of chance that he went to Vilnius just before the conflict there? I realize now that I’m never going to know the answers to those questions and I don’t care. He was a man who understood the transforming power of the truth. That’s all I need to know.

  My father starts to move some of the closed boxes towards the lift. He looks so frail but strangely he seems able to manoeuvre them without much difficulty. I pack away Jack’s coat, his shoes, a pile of notebooks. Grief, perhaps, consists mainly of things left unsaid. I begin to understand now that between Jack and me, everything was understood. As I rearrange the contents of a box, I find a square tin and open it. Packed away inside newspaper I find that one family photograph and those two white china cups which, amazingly, have made the journey unscathed. I decide I’ll keep those things, as a m
onument to those lost and perfect moments, with their power to soothe and destroy. And as a reminder of the importance of possessing the past, whatever it may be.

  My father’s already got eight of the boxes into the lift. All this is going too fast. The lift goes down. I close up the last box and push it out of the door. At the car it seems as though they can’t all be made to fit. ‘Never mind,’ I say, ‘it doesn’t matter. I could keep some of them. Or I could leave it and do it tomorrow.’ But my father gets them out of the car, then loads them again, fitting them neatly together as though doing a puzzle. When that’s done, he sends me upstairs to get some newspaper and then we get into the car. I feel too close to him but he doesn’t smell of mothballs or hair oil. Instead he smells of beaches and sun. He tells me that he spent some time in Geneva as a young man. I never knew that. He suggests that we should drive up into the mountains, to the wine villages.

  As we head out of town through the rush-hour traffic, he stalls the car twice and lets it rabbit hop across a junction. Despite myself, I start to laugh and he laughs as well. It’s more than ten years since he’s driven a car, he says. I tell him that the boxes we’re going to burn belonged to a man called Flame, and suddenly that’s riotously funny. We stop at an out-of-town hardware store and buy paraffin and a rake. My father is wide-eyed amidst the slug repellent, bird-boxes and coils of wire. He says isn’t it convenient for people now, the way they can buy all these things by just giving the cashier a card.

  Soon we’re in a land of stone farmhouses and fields etched with row upon row of leafless vines. Frost has turned the land white. I consider conversations I should start, but they are all so large that they keep me silent. I open the window so that I can breathe in the spacious mountain air. I find it exhilarating to be somewhere else, in a car, travelling. Oh yes, I’d forgotten, there’s a whole world out here. My father is concentrating on finding a place to burn the boxes, but it isn’t easy because there are few turnings off the main lanes. He drives down a track, reverses, then explores another unmade road which leads to two barns. He discusses the merits of various options. I’m shivering inside and my hands fidget. I feel the weight of Jack’s boxes behind us. This is all a bad idea. It’s too late in the day, none of these places are right; something will come along to save me from this.

  Finally we settle on a place at the end of a track, near the entrance to a wood. Smoke rises from the chimney of a cottage nearby, but the land here is overgrown and unused. We heave the boxes from the car and try to pile them up. Despite the cold, we’re soon sweating and puffing, our muscles pulled, our hands dry from the cardboard. I can’t lift the boxes high so they finish up in a spreading heap but my father picks a couple of them up and piles them on top. Then he screws up pieces of newspaper and pushes them in between the boxes. Picking up the tin of paraffin, he looks at me for permission. For a moment I nearly put out my hand to stop him, but these events have taken on a purpose of their own and are outside my control.

  My father heaves the canister up and soaks each box in turn. He takes the matches and lights the corner of a box. The flames begin to eat their way into the cardboard, flaring higher and higher. Blue and then orange, they splutter and leap. I feel their light on my face. The boxes turn black, their shape disintegrating. I imagine tongues of flame wrapping around Jack’s notebooks, licking at the collars of his shirts. The heat touches my cheek and warms my hands. The flames leap high, blurring the air all around.

  But then, quite soon, they begin to die, and my father and I sit down on a tree trunk and watch as they flicker lower and lower. The light is changing from white to grey. Frost is closing its grip. Later tonight – or perhaps tomorrow – there’ll be snow. The cold bites through my boots. My father sits silently, watching the flames. They die but not everything is burnt. The corner of one box remains, the spines of books, pieces of cloth. I stare down into the embers and see Jack’s glasses. The frames are twisted, the glass melted, but the wire structure still holds them in shape. I feel a sudden desire to reach down into the smouldering heat and take them out. I want to touch them, to hold them to me.

  My father has fetched the rake from the car. He uses it to draw pieces of cardboard in from the outside of the fire, and makes a pile of all that remains. Then he sloshes paraffin over that pile and throws a match down into it. He’s not going to stop until everything is burnt. He understands the importance of properly settling the dead. Flames flare again but they’re uncertain and gentle now. Around us, the light has abandoned the fields. An owl hoots from the woods. I’m stiff with cold and aching with tiredness. This day has gone on much too long.

  I sit down on the tree trunk with my hands gripped together. In the darkness my father rakes through the ashes, pours paraffin, lights matches, rakes again. Still the metal skeleton of the glasses remains. He picks it up on the end of the rake and lays it down on the grass beside the canister. I sit and watch him, shivering. Finally only a mound of ash remains at the centre of the grey scar in the grass. My father rakes the ash out so that the earth is flat again.

  Everything is finished now. There’s nothing more to be done. My father picks up the wire of the glasses and puts it in his coat pocket. I sit on the tree trunk staring at the place where the fire was. Slowly tears gather and roll down my cheeks. But I hear Jack’s voice: Don’t live on secondhand emotions. And so I admit to myself that I’m not grieving now for him. I’m grieving because this is the beginning of the end of my grief.

  We drive downhill, heading back to Geneva. The boxless space around us feels infinite. The night is deep and starless. Car headlights flicker on the windscreen. Rain clatters like a round of applause. My father turns on the wipers and they creak across the glass, scattering fragments of light. He says perhaps I won’t mind stopping at his hotel, as he has something to give me.

  He’s staying in one of those small hotels, hidden away in a back street, which exist in every city. A glass door jangles as you open it, the corridors are narrow and hushed, a static fizz rises off new nylon carpets. My father leaves me sitting on a black leather sofa in the bar. I’m alone there, surrounded by electric organ music and palms in brass pots. Exotic fish stare at me from a gently bubbling tank. Christmas cards are looped on a string across the bar. On a windowsill a laughing Father Christmas frolics in a pile of fake snow. Is it Christmas? I hadn’t even noticed.

  My father comes back with a plastic bag. He takes out a flat package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. I realize it must be a painting and I’m expecting a miniature version of that canvas in Maya’s flat. But it isn’t like that at all. Painted in oils on a wooden panel, it might be Mexico but equally it might not. It might depict a beach, but it might not. All the colours are pale, and merge together. I move it into the light but that doesn’t help. ‘It’s wonderful. Really wonderful.’

  ‘It’s the scene I see outside my house. I’ve painted it hundreds of times over the years. In fact, I don’t paint anything else. It interests me to see how much I can take out.’

  It looks to me as though he’s taken out rather too much, but I don’t say that.

  ‘You know,’ I say, ‘whenever I thought about you I always imagined a beach like that. Because that was where I thought you were going to take me.’

  ‘It was unforgivable. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.’ He looks at me and his eyes are old and sad and clear as water. I know that for him sorry is not just a word. But I don’t want his apologies and he is aware of that. I want him to tell me that that place does exist, that we will go there. I want him to become the magician who put everything upside down and back to front, and made words jumble together. I look at him, pleading for that. But he’s busy putting the picture back into its wrapping.

  He offers to walk me home. It’s only half a mile, so I say that he shouldn’t bother, but he wants to, so I let him. We set off into the damp night. He asks to see the lake so we take a detour in that direction. A string of lights loops along the path, and around us, trees dr
ip. We stand together looking out at the blackness as the water laps close to our feet. Above us, a few stars hang vivid under the low lid of the sky. I see my father gazing up at them. ‘Looking for Venus?’ I ask.

  His head jerks towards me and his eyes open wide in surprise. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘It’s time to be getting back.’

  We walk on along the side of the lake. My father moves ahead of me, his head stretched upwards, drawing in the smells of the night. I understand that because he’s cured, he’s less than he was before – but also more, infinitely more. His head is shaggy and his stride crooked, his arm gripping the picture in its plastic wrapping. I thought he looked nothing like Jack, but I was wrong. Physically there may be no similarity, yet something pulls me back to that day at Tsaritsyno, and the sounds of the snow shifting in the branches of the trees. Despite that crooked walk, my father moves as easily as a bird in the air, or a fish in water. As I follow him, walking two steps behind, our eyes move together over the scene around us.

  And I’m back in the strange place where the sole of my foot on tarmac is charged with splendour. Shades of grey merge and contrast – the bruised-grey of my father’s coat smudges against the concrete-grey of the path. Railings cast a striped shadow which dances as we move towards it. Pinpricks of light shine out from the distant shore. Brighter lights radiate from cars and streetlights on the main road. Each ray breaks into pieces and shimmers on the wet path, the surface of the lake, the branches of trees. I know now that I’m feeling – really feeling – in a way I never have before.

  We arrive at the path which leads back up to my building, and I point it out, but my father and I walk on. We take a fork leading away from the lake and come to a pedestrian crossing. The lines of the shadowed streets ahead are collaged one against another, blurred and suddenly tender. Outside a Chinese restaurant, I smell ginger and fried beef. A man passes with a small dog which wears a tartan jacket and strains and leaps on the end of its lead.