‘We all keep too much to ourselves in this family.’
‘Yes.’ That was my job once; discretion used to be important to me. Perhaps I have prized that quality too highly, and taught my family to hold their stories in when they should have been sharing. Perhaps I should have had more regard for the value of simply opening up and talking.
‘I thought it was wonderful, that you stood up like that, and said what you did,’ Kate says. ‘It must have been so hard. Grandma would have been very proud of you.’
‘Perhaps. It doesn’t help though.’
‘No?’
‘No, it doesn’t help. All anyone wants is someone who likes them best. Someone who will put them first. I think that’s all we need, really. That’s what I find so hard, that I had someone. I had all that happiness. And now she’s gone. I don’t know whether we’ll have any more of these parties after this year,’ I say.
Kate looks surprised. ‘Why not? Don’t you enjoy it?’
‘I enjoy it all very much. I think it’s very important, to spend time with family – I think it’s the greatest pleasure there is. But it could become very mournful if we plough on too long, couldn’t it? Don’t you think? And I’m eighty today, and that seems as good a milestone for bowing out of this sort of thing as any. I was forty when we came here – I’ve been throwing this party for half my life. Time for a break, I think. I’ve come to a good round number. If I don’t wrap it all up now, I’ll have to wait years for another good round number to tie things up.’
‘Do things have to be tied up with a round number? Can’t they just end when they want?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. People say it doesn’t matter how many chapters a book has. I think it does, really. If you’re paying any attention, a thing like that surely means something.’ I glance out at the day through the barn doorway, at the house and the empty sky behind it, then back to Kate and the silence growing in between us. ‘I’m sorry. All day, I’ve been talking too much.’
Kate steps forward and puts her arms around me. I feel the heat of her body, the sudden childlike silence linking us, and hug her back. It is closer than any words have brought me to anyone in so long, simply to share a hug. It says more than I know to explain, and I suddenly feel perhaps she understands me after all.
‘It’s all right,’ Kate says. ‘It’s all right.’
I stand, a hand placed on my granddaughter’s back. I hadn’t recognised how lonely I felt today, not really. I can feel my shoulders shaking. I try to breathe, and the tension eases. I realise I am crying. I have started to cry, and Kate doesn’t mind, she is happy to wait like this while I close my eyes and admit to myself how tired, how frail, how on my own I am feeling. I didn’t realise anyone else could see it, the fear in me.
I have gone wrong so many times, taken so many turnings I regret, now I look back over them. And when Hattie died, I didn’t learn the lessons of the years I had lost that might have been spent with her. I grieved on my own, I stayed here rattling round the house, when I could have been going to see Kate, and Hannah, and helping them both, and trying to bring them back together. Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t I try to be more like Hattie, and make people happy?
And the thought comes to me: It’s not too late. You’re still alive – just about, old goat; you can still do something about it. So why not act on this impulse, this sharp, clear moment, and earn the sympathy you’re getting today?
I will change. I’m not too old to change. I will try and be someone Hattie would have been proud of, try and be someone who can help Kate. I will try and unlearn the circumspection of a lifetime, and be there for my family, my daughter and my granddaughter, the people I have been so proud of all my life.
from Interview 83
Back in the long ago, before Gaddafi got into supporting the IRA, every rifle that got into Ireland travelled the same way, behind a false panel in a locker on the QE2 from America over to Southampton. From there it headed up to Liverpool or Holyhead by car or truck, only ever one gun at a time, mind, and then someone smuggled it into Ireland and into whatever arms cache was lined up. You couldn’t dream up a system so inefficient, but that was the way that was open to us then. I was the guy used to run the scam on the cruise ship. I’d load the weapon on to the ship then load it off to someone at the other end. They used to rotate whoever picked them up, made it easier to track. One stranger after another, always the same kind of raincoats no one would remember, always the same kind of nondescript car no one would pull over. They’d take the gun off me and load it into the boot of their car, and then they were gone, and we never said much to each other.
Kate
PERHAPS IF I were to tell the real story of my life, I would do it by writing a dream diary. That’s where I see myself unfettered; there’s no pretence in dreaming. In my mind’s eye I appear as stupid or romantic or angry or afraid as I really am, and the pictures expressing my life don’t have to conform as they do in life to what has physically happened to me, they only have to conform to what seems true from where I’m standing. A dream can’t tell the whole story of a day, or a life, but it can be a way of telling the truth. It’s the bubbling up and the clotting together of all a person’s feelings, and perhaps that’s a way of getting at the heart of them.
The strange thing about dreams, and the thing that makes them faithful, and the thing that makes them reliable as a way of understanding a person, is that they never stop happening, they never abandon anyone. We always dream. A person who achieves their ambitions simply finds the horizon has receded a little further, and goes on travelling towards it. A person right at the end of their life will still find when they fall asleep in their hospital bed in the evening that the brain needs to tell itself stories, to process experience, impose a shape on the images which have assailed it in order to make sense of them. Dreams, as far as I can see, are as natural and inescapable as the shadows people cast when they stand in the light.
I think if I could only keep hold of them all, and fashion the dreams of my life into one long chain, perhaps I might be able to make out the route I’ve been taking, and see where I’m aiming for. It will never be possible, of course. I will have to be like everyone else, and live in the space between reality and dreaming instead, and cling to what clues I can find to the code that would decipher me, if only I could ever make it out.
I emerge blinking into the sunlight outside the barn, and see my parents walking towards me, separating themselves from the crowd of people still milling around on the lawn. Dad speaks first, tentative and hopeful.
‘Your mum said you wanted to talk to us.’
‘That’s not quite what I said, is it, Mum? I said I couldn’t talk to you now and maybe I’d talk to you later.’
Dad flushes, distressed. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.’
‘I just think we need to have a conversation, love,’ Mum says. ‘It’s time we sorted this out.’
I suppose there’s no point giving more of the day to evasion. If I wanted to hide, I shouldn’t have come to the party, after all. ‘All right. What do you want to sort out?’
‘Why don’t we all get a drink before we start?’ Dad says. ‘We’re not in a hurry, are we? We just want to have a chat together.’
‘Fair enough.’ I shrug, moody like a teenager.
We walk to the bar and help ourselves, and I know both Mum and I are boiling inside, hurt and angry. In many ways we could be twins, really; we think the same things at the same time, and perhaps that’s half the trouble.
‘All right then,’ Dad says, holding his glass of wine to his chest as though it might keep him safe from all that’s about to happen. ‘I suppose me and your mum wanted to talk to you because we want to know you’re safe. That’s all we care about. We just always want to know that you’re all right. Of course, we both know it’s best for you to keep yourself to yourself, while you’re still getting better. And we know that’s a long process and we want you to know we’re here for you, a
s long as you’re doing that, as long as it takes. We just want you to know that we love you very much. We’re here for you, all the time, whatever you need from us.’
It’s so difficult to know how to respond. I don’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings. I love him. I owe him everything. He saved my life by stepping in when he did. But there doesn’t seem to be much honesty in simply biting my tongue, in staying silent.
‘I think that’s probably what you want to say, Dad, and thank you, but, Mum, I don’t think that’s what you want to talk about, is it?’ I look Mum in the eye. I feel scared, but I won’t look away. I will be strong today. We are going to actually talk to each other. Mum stares back at me, and it seems like defiance to hold her gaze. I wonder how dangerous a confrontation like this could be for me, how close I could come to sliding back into the black places I’ve been to if I have an argument with Mum now.
‘I do wish I knew what I’d done to you,’ Mum says. ‘I do wish I knew what I could have done differently so that you didn’t hate me.’
‘Hannah,’ Dad snaps at Mum. He is embarrassed and upset.
‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It’s OK. People are allowed to feel what they want. It’s all right you think that, Mum, it doesn’t upset me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say back to you, though. Because we’ve said it all before, and it doesn’t get better.’ That’s the trouble between us, really. I’ve tried explaining to her that she makes me feel unhappy. I’ve tried not speaking to her when that didn’t work. But the problem is still there, tight like a knot, nothing moves it.
The first time I ever had a drink, I was standing here with my parents. For some people it’s vodka at a friend’s house, or lager at a bus stop, but I was trying to decide between Coke and Dr Pepper when Dad put his hand on my shoulder.
‘Do you want to have a glass of wine, Kate?’
I was eleven years old, and the weather was hot that year. It was warmer than today; the sun seemed to beat down on us, golden. Perhaps that was only the colour of memories, but all the same that’s how I remember it.
‘I don’t know whether I’ll like it.’
Mum, who was standing next to Dad and watching us, leaned over then and gestured for a glass. ‘You should try it and see, I think. For a treat. You might think it’s nice.’
So I poured myself a half-glass of white wine, and took a sip, and didn’t really understand why people were so keen on it, but finished the glass anyway. And my parents drank glasses of their own alongside me, and laughed with me at the faces I pulled because it tasted so tart and I wasn’t used to drinking anything that wasn’t fizzy and sweet. I remember walking with them over the lawn and sitting down on a bench that has fallen apart in the years that have passed since then. We watched the crowd: Aunt Laura drinking too much among them, and laughing too loudly, and Terry, one of the neighbours, laughing with her. Mum said she thought Terry and Aunt Laura were getting on very well together, and Dad laughed, as if she had said something much funnier than she actually had. Only now, thinking back, do I understand the joke. I can see the three of us, sitting together, all facing in the same direction. I wonder what I thought I wanted from life back then. Perhaps I didn’t know. Perhaps I was still happy not thinking of the future, and going with my parents to visit my grandparents, and the world didn’t yet seem big or frightening at all. I look at my parents now, and see how much taller than Mum I’ve grown, and can’t help feeling like I’ve outgrown all those memories. I wish I could still be filled with that much hope, and feel that free of any worry, any care, and able to concentrate only on the taste of wine, the way the light passed through the glass when I held it up, the way Aunt Laura’s laugh seemed sharp enough to crack glass.
‘We’re not here to upset you, Kate,’ Dad says.
‘I know.’
‘It’s so hard to have to watch from a distance, darling,’ Mum presses on. ‘We’re left feeling so powerless.’
In a strange way, I know what she means. I came here today hoping it would help Grandad somehow. But it seems there’s nothing I can do. When I followed him into the barn it was because I thought I recognised something in him during his speech – I could tell he wanted to curl up and turn into fire, into nothing, and not be speaking any more with all eyes on him. I know that feeling. I used to think it was only me that felt it. It frightens me now to see him so vulnerable. I tried to say something comforting to him just now, but I can tell it didn’t help. So this must be what Mum means, what it was like for my family to visit me while I was ill, that fretting, powerless feeling when you see someone’s hurting, and don’t know what to change. All day, the humanity in Grandad has unnerved me. Have we ever spoken to each other before like we have today, as if we are equals, as if we might reach the different islands of one another’s feelings? I wonder whether I have ever really thought about what it must be like for him now, properly set my mind to what it was to be him. Too often it’s easy to think of someone like Grandad as being no more than the role he plays in my own life, not as a person who struggles with flesh-and-blood feelings. What he told me about Mum makes me wonder if I’ve been thinking of her that way too. An extraordinary thought – that under their different skins everyone I’ve ever met is feeling the same things I am, experiencing the same little dramas. All the problems of their lives seeming as vast to them, as all-consuming, as my own are to me. And does that mean all those problems must be important, and the world is completely beset around? Or might it mean that, actually, none of it matters at all?
People put up screens between themselves and their endings. I think that’s how they cope. I suppose everyone needs a project to focus on, an image to hold their attention, so they don’t have to think of what’s next. When you’re my age they can be very ambitious constructions, they can take in the span of a whole life. As time passes, the scale of what can be imagined changes, until the goal you set yourself has to happen sooner, if you want to be sure you can finish it. In the end, those projects all shrink down very small, to the seeing out of the year, the weeding of the garden, the making of a cup of tea, the taking of one breath after another. But people still call on their screens. Anything not to think about the ending until the time comes when you have to start puzzling out what that will mean.
On the day we’re born, the future lies infinite before us, and all our lives can be spoken of as lying in the future. Then a change, a migration begins. Little by little you journey away from the place where you started, and start to grow a past for yourself, and trail that out behind you. In the end, a day comes when you have no future left at all, only the past tense to speak in.
What nothing in the world ever changes, though, is the present. The present is always only one day long. It’s always now, and everywhere, and endless. And that’s the most important screen we have to protect us – the world we’re mired in, distractions and details and miracles of the everyday.
‘I’m sorry you feel that, Mum. I really am.’
Dad can see that we’re both becoming emotional. ‘All that matters to your mum and me is that you know we’re here for you. That’s all you need to know. We’re going to be here for you when you need us, when you’re ready, we’ll be there.’
I don’t know what they want me to say to them. I wish I could tell them we could forget it all. I look up at the car park, and stop, surprised by a familiar figure. I only glanced across the roofs of the cars because my eyes were caught by the light. But someone is standing at the mouth of the drive, uncertain, silhouetted in the lengthening light, and when I look for a second time I realise it is Sam.
I thought the day had unspooled all it held for me already. I didn’t see his arrival coming. I watch him over the roofs of the cars, looking around, taking everything in. All day I’ve wanted to be furious at him because he made me feel lonely, but now I see him there I find I can’t feel angry. I want to feel happy that he’s come, that he cared enough to give up a day. Even though I’m tired by everything around me. Even though
he’s arrived late, now all the heart is wrung out of me by talking to Mum, by remembering, by watching my grandad feeling so alone. For a moment I think of hiding, ducking out of sight, behind the wheels of a car, staying there till night falls and I can slip away, and then going home to Bristol, or maybe London on the run. Or I could turn now and flee from him, over the fields, stay in flight all through the hours of the dark till the morning, and see where my feet might lead me. I dreamed of that time and again when I was a girl, turning my back on it all and running away. I really wanted that. Does everyone young pass through that phase? But I’m old enough to see now that it wasn’t a dream worth having. It wasn’t anything to build on, the idea of getting away from everything. All your troubles come with you wherever you travel, and in the end they have to be faced down, and peace has to be made.
Grandad has just appeared in the doorway of the barn. He spots the young man standing in the driveway, looks back at me, and smiles. I guess he knows exactly what’s happening.
‘Hannah, will you help me with something in the marquee for a minute?’ he asks, striding towards us. Mum looks at him, confused, her face still tense from our conversation, but follows him across the lawn anyway. Dad gives my arm a reassuring squeeze, and heads after them. I turn to face Sam where he stands, twenty feet from me, nervous like a first date, like a stranger.
He must have come in a cab from the station, which will have cost him far more than he had to spend, and he’s looking for me. I walk towards him.
‘Sam.’
He smiles in relief that I’m there, that I’ve found him before he had to go searching for me. He comes forward and we meet in the middle of the yard, and he kisses me, and I let him, but I don’t kiss him back. I don’t know yet what I’m feeling.
‘Hi,’ he says.
‘You’re here.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You weren’t going to come.’
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