‘I like your new look.’
‘Thanks. It’s one of the requirements for the witness protection scheme they’ve put me on.’ Seeing his look of confusion she adds in a flat voice: ‘That’s a joke.’
When Edward sees that she is unsteady on her feet he asks again if she is OK.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not about to faint again.’
‘Your mother used to faint, you know.’
Hannah knits her brow. ‘I’d forgotten that … But she did, didn’t she? … She fainted when Uncle Niall told her you had been declared dead … Is it hereditary?’
‘I don’t know.’ He follows her down the stairs. ‘Can you smell something?’
Hannah now has a roll-up dangling from her lip, a half-smoked one taken from an ashtray. She lights it, tests the air and wrinkles her nose. ‘It’s coming from the kitchen.’
She seems quieter, he thinks. Withdrawn and distracted. They walk into the kitchen together and Hannah opens the pantry door. Winces. It smells like putrefaction. ‘There’s something decomposing in there.’
Edward opens the window and retrieves some sheets of newspaper from the recycling bin. ‘What is it?’
‘I think it might have been a tuna steak. I, like, vaguely recall putting one out to defrost the night before I left.’ She hooks her thumbs in the belt straps of her jeans and shrugs apologetically.
Edward opens the back door, scrapes the rotting fish into the bin and sprays the dead air with a can of something intended to evoke the freshness of mountains. It makes it worse, merely adding a chemical smell to the noxious mix. ‘I’m going to take a shower,’ he says.
Ten minutes later, wrapped in a towel, Edward gathers up his clothes and makes his way along the cool corridor to his bedroom, savouring the air on his tightening pores. Instead of dressing, he looks out of the window and sees Hannah in the garden, her face now washed and clean. She is sitting at the table listening to her iPod through headphones while applying fresh mascara to her lashes. He continues staring as she dips a brush in and out of a tube, then, with delicate little upward flicks, moves down the length of a lash, then across to the other eye, then back to the first, brushing again and again, as if in a trance.
Now she is holding a compact mirror up to her face, her eyes wide, brushing off stray lashes. A crimping device comes next, and all the while she is studying her reflection – her hardened, hopeless face – as if trying to come to a decision.
He hears himself asking: what have I done to you? What have I become? You look so self-possessed as you sit there in the sunlight, so deep within yourself.
In moments such as this, when the fog lifts, when he is feeling morally strong, he understands that he is being selfish, and that there is a sacrifice he can make which will improve things, for both of them. He must leave. And when he does, he cannot tell her the reason.
She looks up. Puts her glasses on and sees him looking down. Neither looks away.
Early the next morning, when he is more awake than asleep, Edward tries to slip back into his dream. As it drifts away from him, losing its shape and colour, he remains lying on his front in an erotic stupor. After half a minute, he tenses his buttocks and shifts his position in the bed, savouring the prickling sensation in the backs of his thighs. ‘I love you,’ he mumbles into his pillow, and the articulation of the words brings him closer to the surface of consciousness.
He now opens his eyes and gasps for breath, as though he has been breathing underwater only to realize in panic that this is impossible.
He rolls over and, feeling evidence of nocturnal emission against his back, sits up and looks around the bedroom, dazed and heavy-limbed. The stillness in the house intensifies and is then broken by a knock at the front door. He blinks. There are three more taps, evenly spaced.
He reaches for his dressing gown and, as he descends the stairs unsteadily, his knees still watery, he curses to himself. Bloody journalists. Why won’t they leave me alone? Niall had promised he would make them stop.
When he looks through the spyhole he sees it is a woman with a grey fringe and glasses, middle-aged. It takes a moment before he recognizes her as Hannah’s therapist. Instead of letting her in, he watches as she knocks again and paces for a couple of minutes before walking away.
More awake now, he draws his dressing gown around himself and knots the cord before heading back up the stairs to his bedroom, pulling his sheet and duvet cover off and carrying them in a loose bundle down to the washroom. He stops. Thinks:What am I doing? This is crazy. Hannah isn’t going to inspect my sheets. He continues anyway and, as he slams the door of the washing machine and clicks the dial to the correct cycle, he hears someone entering the room behind him and flinches guiltily.
‘Who was that at the door?’ Hannah says with a yawn.
‘No one.’
‘What are you doing?’
He doesn’t look up, hiding the colour rising in his cheeks by studying the temperature settings. ‘Putting a wash on.’
‘I can see that. Why are you doing it now? You’re not even dressed.’
As he searches for a way out of this conversation, a diversionary tactic of some sort, Edward looks up at her and says with a tight laugh: ‘Carpe diem, Frejya.’ He knows it has been a long time since he has mistaken his daughter for his wife, and he wonders if she will hear the falseness in his tone, recognize the deception for what it is.
‘You called me Frejya again, Dad.’ She says it wearily. Exhausted by all this now.
‘I’m sorry. I …’ He knows her question about the sheets has already been forgotten, that he is in the clear. He also wonders whether his pretence might help their situation. If he can convince Hannah that the love he has started feeling for her is not the same as that which he felt for her mother they might yet avoid the fate that seems ordained. ‘How did you sleep?’ he asks.
‘Not great. You?’
‘I had a dream about Frejya, that was why I said her name just now.’
‘Do you ever dream about me?’ Her question sounds like an accusation. She is studying him with furrowed interest.
‘Not that I’m aware,’ he says. Every night, he thinks. Last night. But I cannot tell you that.
‘Mummy never really loved me, you know.’
‘Of course she did.’
‘She didn’t. Not in the way she loved you. She thought of me as a rival. She couldn’t bear it when I made you laugh.’
‘She loved you.’
Hannah raises her hands in an open gesture. ‘She used to cut me out of photographs. I found them. Photographs where the three of us had been together. That’s why I always made sure I was in between you two, so she couldn’t get the scissors out.’
Edward shakes his head. Looks away.
‘Didn’t you ever wonder why you didn’t have more children after me?’
He meets her eye now. ‘We weren’t able to.’
‘She wanted you to herself.’
‘Stop it, Han.’
‘It’s OK, I can live with it.’
Edward freezes. He sees for the first time a truth that had been glaring at him for years. The way Frejya had looked at him whenever he was playing with Hannah … ‘She loved you with all her heart,’ he says.
‘How could she kill herself, then?’
Edward stares at the floor as he takes two steps towards his daughter and gathers her in his arms. My darling girl, he thinks. How we have failed you as parents, one loving you too much, the other not enough. ‘She did love you, and so do I.’ More than I should, he adds in his thoughts. More than is right. ‘But I don’t know how to be the father you need.’
Hannah finishes the thought as she pushes him away. ‘But I know how to be the daughter you need. If you’ll let me.’
Ambiguity again? The phone rings in the hall. Neither moves to answer it.
Hannah checks the time on her mobile. ‘I’m expecting someone.’
‘That therapist?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What if it’s you I want to talk about?’
Edward feels as if he has been punched.
‘Sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean anything by that. Perhaps you need to see her.’
‘Waste of time.’
‘Is it?’ Hannah tents her fingers and presses them to her chin in a parody of a psychoanalyst. ‘Is it really?’
He stares at her. ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ he says. ‘That’s all that matters. That I love you.’
Hannah replies with a silence that once again seems like an accusation. She then says: ‘Do you love me more than her?’
‘That’s not a fair question.’
‘I have my answer.’
Edward sees something in her eyes, like a cold wind passing over a Northumbrian beach. Good, he thinks. This is for the best.
‘I thought I wanted to be her, you know,’ she says. ‘So that you would love me, but I can’t do it any more. I can’t compete with a ghost.’
‘There’s no competition. No, that sounds wrong. I mean, it’s not a competition.’
‘Oh, but it is.’ Hannah’s voice is tightening. ‘And the funny thing is, Mummy knew it, too.’
The doorbell rings. Why won’t those bastards leave me alone? Edward looks through the spyhole and sees that it is not another press photographer but a delivery man, shrunken and distorted. He jumps when the bell rings again. A note is pushed through the letterbox, informing him that a trip to the post office is required. What will it be? There is nothing he wants, nothing he expects. Besides, contact with the outside world seems unwelcome lately.
He opens the door, signs for a large parcel and carries it through to his study. Here he sits down cross-legged on the floor and opens it to find it is from the nursing home.
At the top of the box is a pair of slippers. Underneath these is a leather motorcycle helmet. Placing this carefully on the floor he reaches for his father’s kimono. Next he comes to a tightly folded newspaper cutting. It shows the photograph that his Taliban guards had taken of him holding up a copy of the Daily Telegraph. Scrawled across it, in his father’s hand, are the words ‘Call F’, followed by a number.
He continues searching, for what he does not know. Here is a cigar box full of letters tied with ribbon. The writing on the envelopes is Gothic. Here an RAF tie, a khaki armband with the words ‘Official War Artist’, a collar stud, a cravat, an exhibition catalogue, a cap badge depicting a guinea pig with wings, an old and scratched pair of binoculars, and a silver hip flask engraved with the letters ‘HR’. He opens it and sniffs. Whiskey. Of course. And here is a collection of paintbrushes tied with an elastic band, some pencils and a carrier bag full of paint tubes, mostly used, carefully rolled, solidified. Paint had been his father’s lifeblood, he thinks. Now it is dry and hard.
Though his father’s possessions are spread out around him on the floor, the box is still not empty. He lifts out a copy of the ‘Wolfenden Report’ on homosexual offences, 155 pages long and published in 1957. It is stained with coffee-cup rings. There is a bookmark halfway through: a newspaper cutting about an inquest into the death of Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park codebreaker. It reports how a verdict of suicide had been recorded after he bit into a poisoned apple in imitation of Snow White.
Paperclipped to this is a sepia photograph. It shows two men bending slightly to kiss the same woman on what looks like VE Day, judging by the flags and the crowds doing a conga behind them in Trafalgar Square. All three look to be in their mid-twenties. The men are in profile, as one kisses the woman’s right cheek, the other her left. Because the faces of the men are at exactly the same height it gives the illusion that they were about to kiss each other when the woman popped up between them. She is staring straight at the camera, laughing. There is a cigar in the corner of her mouth and she is wearing an army officer’s cap that is too big for her and seems to belong to the uniformed man on her left. Edward recognizes her, and him. They are his mother and father. He doesn’t recognize the other man, a civilian in a suit whose face is partly obscured by the trilby he is wearing.
He puts it on the floor and takes out a picture frame from the box. It contains a black and white photograph of the same man holding a baby. Next to him is his father aged about fifty, judging by his thinning hair and paunch. His sideburns date the photograph to the Swinging Sixties, as does his striped jacket, open-neck shirt and the silk scarf he is wearing instead of a tie. He has his arm around the shoulder of a boy holding a football. Edward guesses that the boy is about ten and wonders for a moment if it is him. No, he is sure it isn’t.
Wondering when the photograph was taken, he opens up the back and feels a skid of pain as he pushes at the rusting clips with his fingernail. He presses with both thumbs to ease the glass out of the frame. There is a tourist postcard of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. It is in colour and looks as if it dates back to the 1950s. There is nothing written on the back of this except the small type of the caption across the bottom: ‘Eros came to symbolise the cult of beauty for the Aesthetic Movement of Oscar Wilde, William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley.’
Under this is what looks like the back of the photograph, and handwritten on it is the word ‘Anselm’. What does it mean? Is it a name? He peels it out of the frame and realizes it is written on the back of a second photograph tucked behind the first. He turns the second photograph over and sees it is of two young men laughing and raising their glasses in a toast. One of them is in RAF uniform. It is his father again. How handsome he looks. Who is he with? Whoever it is, he is handsome, too. They look about the same age.
Is this Anselm?
The sound of the word has purchase. Where has he heard it before? Anselm … Answer … Anselm … Answer. Was this what his father had been saying? He studies Anselm’s face in the photograph. It looks familiar. He then compares it to the man holding the baby in the other photograph and the man with his arm around the woman in Trafalgar Square on VE Day.
The same.
Edward continues sifting through the contents of the box. Here is his father’s Croix de Guerre and the thin silver flower of the George Cross stuffed carelessly into the same presentation box. And here in a random pile is a dog-eared copy of The Waste Land, a polished Sam Browne belt, motorcycle goggles, a pack of Horniman’s Quick Brew Tea, a Comet typewriter ribbon, a bar of Sunlight soap in a sun-faded packet, a receipt for dinner from the Chelsea Arts Club (10s. 6d.) … And this … a yellowing cutting from the Baltimore Sun about the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp. It is little more than a photograph and caption.
He holds it up to the light and realizes the photograph is of his father again and that he is carrying what looks like a concentration camp victim into a hospital. He looks at the face of the victim. Then he looks at the photograph marked ‘Anselm’ and then at the photograph of the three people in Trafalgar Square. The same. The same. The same.
His thoughts are interrupted by the sound of keys turning in the front door. He looks up distractedly and, realizing it is Hannah coming home, lowers his gaze once more to the photograph in his hand.
Who are you, Anselm? What were you to my father? And what kind of a name is Anselm? Is it German? Why didn’t my father talk about you?
He fans the photographs out on the desk and stares at them in frustration. What use are they without captions? Without names? Without dates? Photographs are only meaningful when they come with memories.
The doorbell rings again. He can feel his neck muscles tightening. Why won’t they all go away? Leave me alone?
Hannah must be upstairs with her headphones on. He feels too tired to answer it himself, to find out what the world wants from him today. Perhaps it is the police, he thinks. Perhaps they have worked out the secret of my heart and given it a label. That cold and clinical word.
He can hear the letterbox flap being opened. ‘It’s Niall. Northy, are you there?’
He doesn’t want
to talk to Niall. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone.
His chest expands with inhaled breath. Of what had he been thinking just now, before the doorbell rang? He is finding it hard to concentrate, as if silt in his mind has been stirred with a stick and is now swirling chaotically.
The old man at the funeral had mentioned a second trial after the war.
He thinks he knows who Anselm is now. Thinks he understands why his father never mentioned him.
III
THE PERMANENT UNDERSECRETARY DOES NOT LOOK UP WHEN HE hears the knock at the door. Instead he continues chewing his gum, wincing at the ulcer that seems to be burning a hole in his stomach. There is another knock and this time a mandarin enters tentatively without waiting to be asked in.
‘Something you should be aware of, Sir Niall: the Guardian are running a story tomorrow about Friedrich Walser, the German financier. They’ve been trying to reach you for a comment.’
He has the PUS’s attention now.
‘Why me?’
‘Your name has come up on Wikileaks. I don’t know the details.’
‘Bad?’
‘I didn’t get the impression that it was good.’
‘Can we take out an injunction?’
‘Too late. The Twitter monkeys are all over it.’
Niall’s hair has flopped over his forehead, and he now presses it back using the tips of his fingers, his hand as stiff as that of a tailor’s dummy. ‘Where is the Foreign Secretary?’
‘Out of reach until later.’
‘Thank you. Did the Guardian leave a number?’
The mandarin hands over a Post-it note.
When the door closes, Niall remains motionless as he weighs his options. Plausible deniability? Damage limitation? After a minute, the movement-sensitive, energy-saving light above his head clicks off. A further minute passes as he sits in the gloom, then the phone rings several times before he reaches for it, and the recessed ceiling lights come back on.
The caller has hung up. Niall pushes back his chair and walks over to a filing cabinet, taps in a security code and removes a slim dossier marked ‘confidential’.
The Road Between Us Page 37