‘Are you happy?’ my dad said suddenly.
I looked at him in alarm. No, was the word I wanted to say. And hearing that word in my head, I felt that it was not the answer a woman of my age and good health should be giving. In the beat of my blood, in the swallow of a glass of water, in the glance of a stranger, I could see happiness. I have known happiness – but I feel as if I can taste other people’s happiness much more strongly than I can my own. I couldn’t have told you what makes me happy, yet I was tired of constantly trying to improve myself. To find, amongst my many shitty selves, my best self. Joe would just roll out of bed and be Joe, but I could not escape my failing self or the potential selves inside me. The Internet told me, daily, that there were many routes to happiness: good yoga leggings, a scented candle. A plant we call the succulent. But the Internet also loosed a second message, a subliminal arrow that still breaks the flesh: by thirty-five, you ought to have it sorted.
I felt a slight collapse. ‘I’ve been a bit stressed, I guess.’
‘I talked to Joe at the market,’ Dad went on. ‘He told me you two were thinking about starting a family.’
I turned to him in disbelief. ‘Joe said that to you?’
‘Just in passing. Just in terms of the long term.’
‘Right.’
‘Which I guess is normal, for a woman of your age, to be thinking about.’
‘Yep,’ I said tightly.
‘It might be the making of you,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘It might be—’
‘I heard you the first time.’
My father looked pained. ‘It’s coming out wrong. I’m just saying, Rosie. A baby is no bad thing.’
‘Depends on whose baby it is.’
‘It’s worked for Kelly, hasn’t it?’ he said, ignoring this. I’d known Kelly since my first week of secondary school; so had my dad, because we were inseparable from the off, always in and out of each other’s flats. Now she had one daughter, Mol, aged four, and had recently shared with me, not without some shock in her voice, her discovery that she was in the very early stages of a second pregnancy. She wasn’t the only one – most of the friends that I had held on to from school or university were baby-producing, marrying, house-buying pragmatists. I said nothing.
My dad cleared his throat. ‘When I thought I was going to – you know – die – I just, all I wanted was to know you were going to have a good life when I was gone.’
‘But you’re not gone. So I can carry on having a shit life!’
‘Rosie, be serious. I know it hasn’t always been easy for you. But I want to say – that I think you’d be an excellent mum.’
I couldn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Dad,’ I said, my voice husky. ‘Don’t.’
He fell silent, and we said nothing for a few moments. I turned and turned a pebble in my palm. ‘How can you say it would be the making of me?’ I said suddenly. ‘What was I doing the last three decades?’
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘You sort of did. You don’t get to say that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I fucked this up, didn’t I?’
It was late afternoon, and a wind was coming over the sea, whipping small waves of white foam. Autumn was somewhere near. I thought of London, of what was there and what was missing. ‘You didn’t, Daddy,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’
4
On the last day, about an hour before Joe and I were due to go back to London, Dad and I were sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for the morning coffee to be ready. Joe was still asleep and Claire had gone for a run. I’d slept badly, tossing and turning, my mind uneasy. It was the fresh air, I told myself. People always say they sleep better when they get out of a city, but I found the cleaner air and the endless sound of water almost psychically disturbing, because I couldn’t hide my habits of thought from them in the same way I could from the stupor of London’s fumes and flashing lights. My selfhood lurked in London’s layers, hidden under the millions. Here, by the sea, I felt naked.
Dad’s face was pale and tense. His lips pressed tight together as if he was trying not to breathe. He reached down to the bench he was sitting on and brought up two books, placing them on the scarred table Claire had sourced years back from a local flea market. The books sat between us, a pair of innocuous paperbacks.
‘Have you ever read these?’ he said. ‘Ever read them in your degree?’
‘What?’
He pushed them towards me, and reluctantly I picked them up. The first one was called Wax Heart, and the second was Green Rabbit. The covers were dated but imaginative, the fonts simple but the pictures elaborate. Wax Heart had a giant heart on the front, made from an old-fashioned woodcut. The heart had been divided like the twelve signs of the zodiac, but instead of the usual symbols – the goat, the crab, the bull – there were seemingly traditional feminine pursuits; a saucepan, a needle, a ball of wool, a pressed flower, all in that heavy Elizabethan black ink. Green Rabbit was wilder, a freehand, masterfully dashed-off single green ink line drawing of a rabbit’s outline, except if you looked at it again, the rabbit could also have been a silhouette of a woman. They were both written by a woman called Constance Holden.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I focused on the Victorians.’
‘She’s a very good writer, actually. Was.’
‘Is she dead?’
‘I don’t know. You’ve really never read them?’
‘No, Dad,’ I said with exasperation. ‘Why are you asking me?’
‘You should read them,’ he said. ‘They were very popular when they came out.’
I wondered if this was the beginning of senility; the non sequiturs of conversation, the sudden retrieval of the past’s objects, lifting water from the well of your own life and finding no one wants to look inside the bucket.
‘The covers are beautiful,’ I said, leafing through the pages of Green Rabbit. They were faded on their edges, the type small and dated. ‘But why have you got them?’
He didn’t say anything. I looked up. ‘Are you just trying to get rid of them? You haven’t read them, have you?’
‘Your mum—’ he began, then stopped. He took a breath.
I was alert now, my fingers gripped hard on the yielding paperback. ‘What? What about my mum?’
The air between us thickened. My dad pointed at the name on the cover. ‘Your mother knew Constance Holden,’ he said.
‘Dad, I don’t understand.’
He looked away from me, through the kitchen window towards the sea. ‘I should have just come out with this years ago,’ he said.
I could feel my heart thump harder. ‘What should you have just come out with years ago?’
He looked back at me. ‘Before I met your mother,’ he said, his fingers twisting to a fist, ‘she and Constance – they were together.’
I stared at him. ‘My mum?’ I placed my hand on the top of Wax Heart. ‘My mum was with this woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘My mum was a lesbian?’
‘I don’t know, Rosie. She might have been. For a time, they were inseparable. I mean – we had you, so I can’t . . . qualify it.’
‘So she was bisexual?’
‘I guess that’s what you might call it.’ My dad looked like he wanted to curl up in a ball and never unfold himself.
I took a deep breath, clutching Green Rabbit like a talisman. ‘Wow,’ I said.
‘I need some air,’ said my dad, exhaling heavily. ‘Let’s take the coffee outside.’
*
So there we were, side by side on the pebbles again. I still hadn’t let go of the book, but now I laid it on the top of my thigh. The tide lapped a few feet away, and this time a crab moved mechanically along the edge, its front pincers raised. I looked at the sky, an unshifting haze of cloud. My head was pounding, but all I wanted was more. ‘Why are you telling me this now?’ I said. My father didn’t reply, just stared out at the flat grey line of the horizon. ‘Dad?
You’re not . . . ill, are you?’
‘No, no. I’m fine. I just – I don’t know. It’s been on my mind. You. Your mum.’
He made it sound like he’d been worrying about Arsenal’s performance in the league, but I knew, on the very rare occasions when he was expansive like this, that the best thing was to let him find his way. ‘It was when Joe talked to me,’ he said. ‘I just thought, this isn’t right, you know? You not knowing anything about her, and thinking about becoming a mum yourself.’
Without any warning, tears sprang into my eyes. Sometimes it would come at me, how much he tried, how ill-equipped he was, but how he had done everything for me. How much I meant to him, how powerfully bound to him I could sometimes feel. I said nothing and wiped my eyes.
‘You’ve always asked me, Rosie. You’ve got angry with me.’
‘I know. I—’
‘And quite right too. And I never said much, because the truth is – I just don’t know what happened to her.’
I turned to him. ‘Dad, is that really the truth?’
He swallowed, gripping his tin mug in one fist. ‘Yes. She vanished. That’s the truth.’
‘In a puff of smoke?’
He gave me a hard look. ‘One day she was there, Rose, and the next she was gone. I looked for her. Not for my sake. For yours. Do you think I could understand what happened?’
‘You’d understand it better than me.’
He sighed. ‘Your mum, she . . . we weren’t together by then. She left. Took you with her. And Connie – Constance – was there.’
‘In New York?’
‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘But your mum went to live with a friend. A woman called Yolanda.’
‘Yolanda? But what about this Constance woman?’
My dad batted the air with his hand impatiently. ‘Just wait, Rose. Listen. Your mum and Yolanda worked together in a diner in Manhattan. Yolanda was as clueless as me about what happened. After your mum disappeared, Yolanda rang me, and I came to get you. I’d had enough.’
I’d never heard any of this before. I took it in, staring at the sea. ‘How hard did you look for her?’ I said quietly.
He turned to me, angry. ‘I spent months looking for her. I was even brought in for questioning.’ He paused. ‘But your mum didn’t want to be found. She’d gone.’ He stared back out to the water. ‘What I want to say, Rose, is that if you want to know what happened to your mum – if that’s what you really want – then it isn’t me you need to talk to. I don’t have the answers. And the only person who might know is Connie.’
‘Why are you calling her Connie? How well did you know her?’
‘Well enough,’ he said with a grim expression. ‘But we weren’t the best of friends.’
‘Why not?’
By now, my father was looking as if he wanted the sea to drag him under. ‘It’s hard to talk about. We all make mistakes. It was – a very difficult time. All I’ve ever cared about is you, Rose.’
‘If you cared about me, you would have told me this years ago.’ I felt the tears rising again and I jumped to my feet. The paperback of Green Rabbit tumbled to the pebbles. I kicked it and my dad scrambled to rescue it. ‘Why did you let me make up stupid stories about her?’ I went on. ‘How could you keep this from me? This is information.’
Dad tried to encircle me with his arms. I pushed him away and staggered a little down to the edge of the shore. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just thought it wouldn’t help. It was all such a mess! We were back in England, your mum was God knows where. I just wanted things to be stable.’
Gingerly, he took a few steps towards me, and I didn’t move away. ‘If you still want to know about your mother,’ he said gently—
‘I do,’ I said. ‘You know I do.’
‘I know. Constance Holden was there, just before she disappeared. She was the last one to see her.’ My dad paused, his face as pale as a winter bulb. ‘All I know is that Connie went to visit Elise at Yolanda’s, and we never saw your mother again. I don’t know where Connie is, Rose. All I’ve got left of that time are these bloody paperbacks.’
‘I want them.’
‘You can have them. That’s why I pulled them out of the cardboard box. But Rosie, the chances are she won’t want to speak to you.’
‘Why not?’
My dad sighed again, pinching the bridge of his nose as he always did in moments of discomfort. ‘It wasn’t a happy time. So if you do find her, you’ll have to be careful.’
‘Why?’
He looked miserable. ‘Your mum was – easily led. You’re strong.’
‘I’m not strong.’
‘You’re stronger than you think.’ He turned towards the water. ‘Sometimes, Rose, we say things and do things, and we don’t for one second imagine the consequences of our actions.’
‘I just can’t believe you never talked to me about this.’
‘Believe me, I thought about it. But what could you have done? I’d have been imposing it on you when you were too young to be able to do anything about it, or to see it from all angles.’
‘Dad. I’m thirty-four.’
‘It wouldn’t have been fair. It would have been too much of a burden.’
‘You don’t think I’ve been burdened anyway, this whole time?’
‘Maybe me telling you now is still unfair. I don’t know all the angles, Rosie, and I was there. But I’ve told you what I know. Connie was a charming woman and your mother was in her thrall.’ He placed the novel in my hands and turned away, heading back to the cottage, arcing the dregs from our coffee cups against the uneven stones.
‘What the hell am I supposed to do, Dad?’ I said.
He stopped, but he didn’t turn round. ‘Find Constance Holden if you want answers. I don’t know any more.’
1982
5
All twenty-six of Frida Kahlo’s principal paintings had come from Mexico to be displayed in the Whitechapel Gallery, the stipulation being that they travelled together, or not at all. Connie and Elise wandered the rooms, looking into the small and vivid portals. Foliage, babies, blood and beauty, a prayer book of a different order, its pages torn and hung against the wall. Illumination by a woman, her mouth closed on silent screaming prayers, a poetry they couldn’t teach in church. Always, that gaze: a suspended, knowledgeable survey of herself that managed to include you too.
Electrified by these images, Elise watched Connie’s lovely neck, the tendrils fallen from her messy attempt to tame her hair – her hair the colour of a fox’s pelt, the scoop of her shirt revealing a pattern of freckles across that collarbone. Her fingers upon that collarbone, then pointing at this painting or that, moving, always moving, so slender and pale like the fingers of a maiden in a tapestry. Her cologne of citrus and smoked wood. Her small chin that widened up into a heart-shaped face, with grey-green eyes and neat brows like the wings of a settling dove. She was so russet and English compared to the Mexican enigma she was facing. Frida and Constance could be creatures from two different planets and yet they both inspired something similar inside Elise. Nearly two years they’d been together, and Elise felt she’d come to the point of loving Connie so much that she wouldn’t last long in this world if Connie died first. Her body would give in, knowing Con’s had been handed to the gods.
Elise had never experienced this before: the mind with the flesh. Her father still didn’t know she was in love with a woman; he would never know. She’d left his house when she was sixteen, her mum dead long before that. Now Elise had entered the most beautiful chapter of her life – perhaps the only beautiful chapter she’d ever had.
*
Connie had invited Elise to come and live with her some six months after that first hungover morning in Hampstead, and Elise had sat on the floor of John’s flat with nothing more than two duffel bags, her heart jumpy as she’d waited for the sound of the tiny red Citroën. This is the right thing, she’d told herself, going down the stairs, the bags bumping her hips like the buckets o
f a milkmaid. She’d left a month’s rent in an envelope on the kitchen table, which Connie had paid. It feels like the right thing.
That drive from Brixton to Hampstead had taken a long time. Elise admired the deftness with which Connie switched gears and never hesitated to zoom through an amber light. ‘This city’s wonderful,’ she said to Connie. ‘Can you imagine what the Blitz was like? The Great Fire?’
‘I’d rather have the wanker bankers,’ said Connie laughing, lifting her hand off the steering wheel to put it on top of Elise’s. She had dry, strong fingers. And she was such a confident driver! They sat at the traffic lights, touching hands, and Elise kept looking out until the lights turned green and Connie left her hand alone, shooting them up the Euston Road, past St Pancras, past the women standing in the street on York Way, then further north, to Hampstead.
*
After the Kahlo exhibition, Elise and Connie stood next to each other outside, watching the traffic go up and down the street. They walked towards Whitechapel Station in silence, not holding hands. ‘She really ran the gamut,’ Connie said eventually, as if talking of a friend. It was April, and breezy, and Connie’s pale red curls were blowing all over the place.
‘Gamut?’ Elise repeated. She had no idea what a gamut was. It sounded vaguely Yiddish. She was still reeling from the intimacy of the paintings. She wanted to be like Kahlo, to know every smashed moment of herself and accept it anyway. She looked at Connie and wanted to touch her, but you never knew who was looking. Soon, everything they had together was going to change. Soon, Wax Heart was going to be turned into a Hollywood movie called Heartlands. They were going to Los Angeles to see it happen. Suddenly, Elise wanted to kneel on the East End pavement and hold it close against her palms. This was her city, wasn’t it?
The Confession Page 3