Turning for Home

by Barney Norris

  I shift uncomfortably. I feel wounded.

  ‘She always used to work to make everyone happy,’ Laura continues. ‘That was what gave her pleasure. And she wanted you happy most of all. You were a lucky man. I don’t know where she got it from. I was never as nice as her. And you remember Mother, of course. Mother was a terror.’

  We both smile then, because it was true, she really was, though I’d never have said so when Hattie and Laura’s mother was alive.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve been absent.’ I think of saying more, but I don’t know what I can say to Laura. Here I am, surrounded by family for an all-too-brief day, and still chasing after my work. When that has been over for long years, when it is only a phantom now.

  ‘Don’t apologise to me,’ Laura says. ‘Just get out there and mingle a little.’

  ‘I will. I’ll make more effort, I promise you. I’m sorry. I do appreciate it all, so much.’ I think it would be unwise to say any more, but some impulse compels me to go on speaking. What is wrong with us all today? Why are the words flowing out? ‘I know you and I haven’t always been as close as we should have been, Laura. I know I’ve let her down in that.’

  Laura turns away from me. ‘I don’t think she’d want you to feel like that.’

  ‘No, you’re right, she wouldn’t. But you and I both know the reality, don’t we?’

  She looks at me again, and I am shocked by the sudden discovery that she loves me. Laura loves me, and I love her in turn. We are the only route either of us has any more back into the memory of Hattie. I never saw till now quite how closely that binds us together. How much of our lives we have shared after all, though we’ve always felt far apart from each other.

  ‘It’s all right, Robert. We don’t have to have big conversations on busy days, it’s not the time for them. Why don’t you go and finish your work, and I’ll go out to the lawn and talk to people?’

  ‘It’s all right. It’s all done.’

  She looks hard at me, staring fiercely into my eyes to check I am telling the truth, then smiles. I suppose she believes me.

  ‘Well, that’s good news. You can get out there and do your speech now.’

  I roll my eyes. Every year I have to give a speech, that has always been part of the day, and I always hate it, standing there, everyone looking at me.

  Laura laughs. ‘You go through. I’ll refill this and follow in a second.’

  I leave her, and come to the brink of the lawn, and look out at my family and my friends. Once, I would have looked for Hattie among them all. It’s hard not to look for her now. It’s hard not to listen for her laugh somewhere. I remember the sight of her moving among people on the days of other parties, a glass in her hand, seeming always so elegant, so happy with these people around her. I remember the feeling of pride when she turned and looked for me, when our eyes met, and in the midst of the gathered crowd the two of us shared, for a moment, the secret of having been in love with each other all our lives. I sometimes think very few people really know that feeling, but I feel sure I did. I feel sure in the way Hattie used to come over and take my hand, and kiss my cheek, and tell me I was late to give the speech, that we loved each other.

  People see me and stop their conversations. Of course, I have been away from them; I have missed the lunch and half the afternoon. My absence must have cast a pall over things all day, and now everyone is waiting for me, more or less consciously.

  And aren’t they used to it by now? How have I been so fortunate to know people who will still travel to see me like this, when I have kept them waiting all my life? It has always been that way, really, though no one ever talks about it. I have always been away from them, doing other things, and everyone else is left behind. I wonder how many shadows I’ve cast through my life, which others have had to walk in. The party falls quiet, and I see Laura with her glass filled smiling at me, urging me on, so I raise my hand to ask for silence. Just beyond the people on the lawn around me, just beyond the limits of the day the eye can see, I can cast my gaze back across years, across all the time I have spent in this place, and I can see Hattie standing slim and filled with laughter on this lawn, lifting our baby up in the air as if to kiss the sunlight. I can see her turning to laugh with me, and the little cloth hat Hannah wore, and the yellow dress she had on, and Hattie’s dress pale air-blue and bright and lasting for ever in the memory, in the sun. And I can see the spot where I had my heart attack, no more or less beautiful than anything else circling me now, no more or less human than everything else I have experienced. It has been part of life, and that is beautiful. I was weeding, the garden fork in my muddy hands, tired and unused to the exertion, of course. I had the soft weak hands of a pen-pusher, a presser of flesh. And I paused for a moment, stooped over a particular spot of the flower bed, and stared in bewilderment at the horseshoe I had unearthed from the ground beneath my feet. Twenty yards from the stable, and securely concealed underground, waiting for me like a secret. It must have been flung there once, long ago, kicked off by a horse, abandoned by someone who lived there before me – there was no way of knowing who. But the memory came to me of the time Hattie called to say Hannah had been kicked by her horse, and that she had been flown by helicopter to the hospital at Southampton. I remembered how clear and sharply defined every detail of my Belfast office seemed to me then, my senses sharpened, my heart rate accelerating at the discovery of danger to my family. And I remembered how another twelve hours passed before I got on a flight. How I had concluded the work on my desk, signed off a couple of purchases, and attended a briefing with the minister which I had felt unable or unwilling to delegate to anyone else, before I finally allowed myself to pack a bag and head home, to find my way to my daughter’s bedside, and discover that she was in the operating theatre, and Hattie had sat alone for hours with no knowledge of what was happening to our child while I concluded my business abroad. How could I have done that to her? The guilt of that memory, the way I had failed time and again over all those lost years to do the right thing, and love the people closest to me as well as they deserved, washed over me, and that was when I felt the pain in my arm, and fell to the floor, and was taken in turn to the hospital. Was it the guilt of how I had lived my life that did that to me? Is that possible? Or was it only the exertion of an afternoon’s gardening? Do we get all we deserve in the end, or are these things just chance?

  I thought there would be time to make it up to her, and learn the lessons my life had to offer, and love her as I thought that she deserved, but things turned out differently. A few years later, she started complaining of always feeling tired. And so she went to the doctor. And that was the start of the end, and then it was too late for ever. At the end I tried to tell her I was sorry, tried to tell her it had always been for her, even when work took us far away from each other, but she wouldn’t allow me to let it all out. It was too late by then, I suppose. The past had stopped being important for her, because she had so little present left to get any talking done. Better to talk about the reasons we had been happy. Better to talk about why we had loved our life together.

  ‘I’m grateful, that’s how I feel, I promise you.’

  We both knew that wasn’t the whole of the story. You can’t only be grateful when you know you’re going to die. You can’t only say that you’re ready, you’ve lost enough in the years that have gone, you’re prepared to go on. You’re always angry and afraid as well, as you lie there sweating your life out in the hospital bed. But she wanted to end our time together with a smile, and so she found one, and she wore it as gracefully as everything she’d ever done.

  ‘I don’t know why you’d ever feel grateful for having to put up with the likes of me,’ I said.

  She laughed, quietly, in the back of her throat. ‘You brushed up all right. You were a rough enough diamond, but I brushed you up.’

  It seems sometimes as though the beats of a life never end, but sing on for ever, echoing through the landscapes where they happened, waiting alw
ays for you to dive back in. I can see Hattie here, just beyond the corners of my vision, just out of sight of everyone else, the woman I loved, our baby in her arms and the light falling soft through the willow. I draw myself up to my full height and start to speak.

  ‘Thank you so much, everyone, for coming today.’ I look around for Kate, but can’t see her. I feel close to her today. It isn’t just that she arrived before everyone else. I feel our different losses make us closer kin, somehow. ‘I’m sorry to have disappeared for a little while. I hope you will forgive me.’ There’s nothing else to say about that, is there? I abandoned them, really, and it is done, and what is the point of apologising further? ‘It means such a very great deal to celebrate this milestone in the company of my family.’ I wonder what I’m going to say about Hattie, how I can adequately remember her in the presence of all these people. I find now the thought is in my mind that I can’t do it. Not this year, not again. I can’t put myself through it. I stood in front of many of these same people in the church last year at the funeral, and spoke about her, and that is enough, that is all I can give. It is too raw, too awful still to be looking back in that way as we all journey ever further on without her. ‘Of course, today is also a day filled with memory, as much as it’s filled with you, and I appreciate very much this opportunity to think about the people who can’t be with us today. We remember them, though they no longer remember us.’ I stop. For a moment I stand in silence. ‘So I’d like to raise a toast now to everyone who used to stand here with us, if you’d all like to join me. Let this day be about them, as much as it is about anything else, certainly as much as it’s about my birthday. Because it’s never been about me, not really. That’s never been why I loved this day. It’s always been about all of us.’

  I get through the toast, drink back my drink and smile, then break the spell of silence that always circles around speeches with a nod of my head, and turn to the person standing nearest me, a cousin of mine named Matt. Matt is the son of my aunt’s eldest daughter. For a long time he didn’t come to these parties. He fell out with his brother and sisters so badly that when their mother died, he wasn’t informed, and missed the funeral. He was left nothing in the will. He has struggled a little in his own life, losing his driving licence in his twenties because he was pulled over full of drink, and losing his job as a result of that. Of course, he has recovered after a fashion, but people never quite get over a thing like that. All the momentum goes out of them after such a setback, and some of the hope. It is frightening how the slightest snag can set you back for life. That is the fear I have for Kate, that she might take the same course Matt has, that she might never reach the mountaintop she once seemed to be bound for. Does it ever occur to Matt that his life is a poem just like hers is, that his dreams move me, his dreams are mountains? Of course not. Hardly anyone ever notices their lives are that kind of important. People are too worried about the washing-up, the holiday arrangements, the rent.

  ‘That was lovely, Robert,’ Matt says.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘A lovely thing to say.’

  ‘Well.’ We smile at each other, neither of us knowing what to say next. There is so much to talk about in anyone’s life, we end up not talking about any of it. It’s impossible to know how one might ever start crossing such mountains and meet.

  ‘Did you get anything nice for your birthday?’ Matt asks.

  I despair, and put my hand on Matt’s arm. ‘That reminds me. Will you excuse me for a moment?’

  ‘Of course.’ Matt pats me on the shoulder with a meaty hand.

  I turn and walk away, across the yard, into the dark of the barn that is still open from when Kate and I collected the trestle table in the morning. I stand as still as I can, and am silent. She is gone, my love, and I try, but I just can’t bear it. I can’t get used to it. Nothing gets easier. She was here, and that made everything all right, and now she is gone, and how am I supposed to live? How does anyone live without that prop to support them, the other half of their life? Who am I supposed to talk to when I become afraid?

  I hear footsteps behind me at the door of the barn, and pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to compose myself, then turn to see who has followed me. I suspect before I see her – it is Kate.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. It was all just a little overwhelming for a moment.’

  ‘You’re upset.’

  ‘A little. It’s all right. I’m all right.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Neither of us speaks for a moment, and she knows I’m pretending as clearly as I do. My hands are shaking slightly; I can feel them. It feels strange to be speaking to each other in a new role. We have never played out this scene this way round before. It was always me picking Kate up after a fall, a graze on her knee, or finding her hiding under the stairs when she was sad. Or visiting her in Bristol while the dieticians coaxed her back into the world. But I suppose all the roles we ever play are temporary. Everything is recast in the end. It makes me feel so weak, to be leaning on her now, to be relying for strength on a girl who was a baby in my arms just a moment ago.

  The truth is that I’m not all right at all. I have never been so old before, and I will never be so young again, and every minute of the day I grow slowly weaker. I start speaking again, and feel barely in control of the words as they roll away from me, hardly aware of what I am going to say before I say it. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m being punished. Or I’m going mad. It’s been a year now, but really, all that stages-of-grief nonsense, it seems to me to be absolute rubbish. I don’t think you ever get used to any of it. Because she’s gone, hasn’t she? And it’s just, I don’t know. It’s just very sad. And it’s infuriating. I don’t think it would even help me very much if I had the sort of faith that allowed for the possibility of a meaningful afterlife. Because I know I sound like a spoiled child, but I don’t want her then, I don’t want to wait, I want her now. I have been so bored and lonely and angry since she died, and of course you can have perfectly good conversations with other people, but it’s not the same.’ I glance at Kate, who looks as shocked as I am at how much I’m pouring out. ‘No one else knows about all the other conversations I had with her, all the years and years, so there is no real stake in any conversation I ever have with anyone any more. No one else gets all the jokes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Grandad,’ she says, and I know I must have embarrassed her.

  What am I doing? This isn’t fair. She doesn’t want to hear all the troubles I carry. She has her own that she is coping with today. Everyone has their own, really, that is the secret to people. I wish I could find a way to bring my daughter and granddaughter closer together. I remember the way Hannah used to cry while she held Kate and tried to rock her to sleep, when she was just a baby.

  ‘I can’t do it, Dad,’ Hannah said. ‘It’s too hard. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know it would be this hard. I don’t know how to do it.’ Somehow, in the months after Kate was born, Hannah convinced herself she didn’t deserve what she had been given. It set a pattern in the lives of both women that has never broken since. I wish I could have shown my daughter when she was young and things might still have been mended that she was good enough; she did deserve the luck that had come to her; everyone found life difficult, that was normal, that was all right. It didn’t make her mad or strange. But I didn’t know the words to say, and the moment passed, and by the time the vulnerability in her became clear, the die was cast for ever.

  There ought to be truth and reconciliation in every stratum of the lives people live. All that laying out of things shouldn’t be only reserved for the public sphere, the fractures in families are just as complex, just as terrible. I wish I could have sat them both down and talked things through. Perhaps I have got the balance wrong. Perhaps I ought to be trying harder to make a difference.

  ‘What have you been discussing in your office all afternoon?’ Kate asks. ‘People are wo
rried about you, you know. Has it upset you?’

  ‘No, it’s not that. I’m sorry I’ve been away from everyone.’

  ‘It’s all right. As long as you’re OK.’

  ‘You’re very brave to try and get back to talking to your mother,’ I tell her. ‘I know that’s part of why you’re here today. I think it’s very brave of you. I know it’s hard, but we have to keep trying, don’t we? Because family is what we have. Family is what will save us when we need saving. You and I both know that.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘you’re right.’

  ‘Your mother wasn’t well after you were born, you know. It was always a struggle for her.’

  She puts her head on one side, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was postnatal depression. That was how they diagnosed it in the end.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘She doesn’t like to talk about it. I think it makes her feel ashamed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She felt that she’d failed.’

  ‘But if it was only just after I was born, that’s a bit early to write the effort off, isn’t it?’

  ‘She found it very hard. It took her a long time to see how she was going to cope. She always felt she’d let you down.’

  Kate doesn’t say anything for a moment. Have I done the wrong thing, telling her that? I wasn’t sure whether she already knew it or not. If she could only see: they are both just frightened of each other; it’s just that they can’t break through to each other.

  ‘She never told me that.’

  ‘She holds her secrets close, your mum. You might understand that, I think.’

  Kate smiles, in spite of herself. ‘Maybe so. You’re not so different yourself, you know.’

  ‘I suppose I’m not.’