‘I might stay a while,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got a few things of Dad’s to sort out. You don’t need to send the mail to Sydney.’
‘Alright.’ He handed me more letters. ‘Listen, can I borrow you this afternoon? Do you have time?’
‘Yes.’
‘I need help with the path. Do you have time?’ he asked again, as though I possibly hadn’t meant it.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Around two, then.’
Eric closed the door and left me with the letters. In Lillie’s, she reminded me of the visit she’d made during my last year of school, and asked me if I’d visit her in Whitby. Her health was up and down. She wanted to know me again, she wrote, while there was time.
I remember, from my visit when you were sixteen, how much I loved the home that you and your father had made in Lion’s Head. But I also thought he was terribly lonely, and I worried that his loneliness would one day be yours, because he seemed so determined not to come home. I don’t know if he told you, but he and I fought badly that summer. And there has been such a silence between us ever since. I didn’t think this was how you were, but I saw that you understood him, even at that age.
Still, you are much more like your mother. She always wanted things to be said aloud, fully.
Ted, your father’s last letter told me about how you lost your friend Anthony, who I remember meeting. But you and Claire are still friends. I’d so like to hear about all of these things from you. We have so much to catch up on.
30
Eric had put out wood stained with creosote and cut into triangles, leant against trestles to dry. As we worked, the afternoon brought only thin winter light through gums braced by undergrowth. When, across the road, the canopy began to throw a distracted shadow towards the beach, Eric said we were about halfway. He passed me a bottle of water.
‘I’ll go up and get us a coffee,’ I told him.
‘Wait until we’re finished,’ he said. ‘Another five or six steps and we’ll reach the gate.’
He’d brought me in to help muscle a boulder out of the way. It was a short job, but I’d stayed and now we were having the afternoon together. If I wasn’t careful, I’d soon be the new member of the great project to replace all the paths from the road up to the beach. We broke up another step and then installed the new planks. It took a few goes to find a pattern that worked and that we could repeat quickly: break up the old path and clear it away, set the frame, place the wooden planks and level them, fill them in, and then level again.
‘I bumped into Diane today,’ said Eric, ‘from the funeral home.’
‘Oh?’
‘She said you’d collected the ashes.’
‘Yes. Can I make that coffee now?’
‘No, we’ve got another hour in us, at least.’
I was desperate not to offend Eric, but I was still unsure about what those ashes were asking from me. Had Claire also spoken to him? ‘You probably know that he asked to be buried here.’
‘Will you let me tell you something he once said? It was after your accident, while you were still in hospital.’
‘Yes.’
‘There wasn’t any reason you’d notice this as a boy, but he was very low at that time. For a few days, they thought you might die. Did you know that? He blamed himself. He said he hadn’t given you the care you needed; the whole thing was his fault.’
‘I know all this.’
‘Listen for a second.’
‘Sorry. I’m listening.’
‘Your dad told me that he’d have to try harder to put the past out of his mind. He thought you were so reckless because he wasn’t close enough to you as a father. Do you see that?’
‘We had our own ways of dealing with Mum’s death. I understood that. I didn’t ever blame him for it. The problem was that he never really gave her to me. He kept her to himself.’
‘That was grief, Ted. He wanted to be more in your life.’
‘He was ready to go back. He told me. There’s something there he needed to go back for. I’m sure he wanted it.’
Eric took the shovel from me. ‘You can’t burn ashes. That’s not how it works. That’s when we get to rest.’ He held the handle, and for a moment was going to try again. ‘Have you spoken to Claire?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Talk to her again, then.’ He leant the shovels against a post and concluded, ‘Alright, make me a coffee.’
I booked myself on a flight to London that would leave in a week’s time. Afterwards, I held his wooden cigar box, smelt it, and then I put it at the end of a line of records that concluded with The Death of Klinghoffer. Between them, enough Wagner to fill a Viking mound, enough Verdi to produce tears and irritation from the whole population of Lion’s Head.
My hand rested on the corner of I Puritani, but I settled on Norma, the recording with Edita Gruberová. To open the windows and share the high notes, I thought, would be just the thing. If I played the music loudly enough, even Eric would hear that one note that I had heard, the one that said even the oldest questions could be answered. There was time.
Then, a week of late nights, waiting. I sat up drinking Dad’s coffee and then wine and then scotch, and tried to write about the coming journey, but in fact wrote very little: nothing real would come until I’d left, I knew. And so the usual stimulants to writing took me instead to a stack of CDs and records, and a vague sorting process. I discovered that his collection was ordered by date of purchase, so I thought I might catalogue them as a timeline of his listening life. It seemed a way to order the week, as well – I’d do a decade per day. But each time I started, rather than finishing a section, I found a record I hadn’t heard him play for a few years and put it on, and I began stealing his cigars, too.
The smoke and the music played a kind of dedication. And at the same time they supplied the injunction to write an email to Claire, for I knew that Eric was right: I had to explain better why I was going.
I know why you don’t want me to go. At the end, Dad said he didn’t want to, and I see, like you, that he was meaning to protect me, just as Anthony wanted to protect me when he sent me home that night. But the truth is, Claire, that night I knew it straight away, felt it. Underneath my anger at what was happening I knew that I shouldn’t have left Anthony and shouldn’t have gone home. I’ve learnt that you have to listen better than I did then.
I think Dad wanted to protect me, and maybe that’s why you’re upset with me. Because I won’t take the warning. He wanted to protect me when I was a boy, and I didn’t take the warning then, either. I know what you’re thinking: look how that ended. Yes, but it also ended with me meeting Anthony and you, my two most precious friends. And so much more than that, as well.
I’m sure that Dad knows I am going back. I don’t blame you if you’re angry with me for this. But at least now you see my thoughts.
Your Ted
During the night I checked, but Claire didn’t reply. I slept fitfully until three; not really believing that I’d slept, only that the time on the clock had changed. The wind was up, and I wasn’t as used to the banging of the screens anymore – I moved from my old room to Dad’s, because it was further back in the house and more sheltered from the weather. At five, the wind dropped completely and I got up wondering if it had been a good idea to write to Claire.
I walked down to the beach. I expected Eric to appear, but it was still too early, and for an hour I was alone on the dune. The salt air laid its second skin, its greasy insulation, and I didn’t feel cold until the sun broke. Then, one of the sandbanks to the north was lifted out of the sea by strips of gold seaweed that traced its tail. A low-tide island appeared.
At six, Eric also turned up, inspecting the erosion of the night. I watched him stooping as he walked, as though into the headwind that had settled with dawn. The stoop was more marked whe
n he was on his own. He came up to say hello, and I asked him if he had backache.
He smiled and said no. ‘I’ve always bent forward a bit.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s probably because I’m a worrier.’
‘We all worry,’ I said.
‘Yes, but for me it’s a way of life. I think it’s my retirement plan.’
He said the beach had cut further into the dune. It seemed Eric thought that by living in Sydney I wouldn’t notice. ‘One day we’ll have to move our houses,’ I joked.
‘With any luck, I’ll have followed your father out before that happens.’
‘You’re not an optimist, then.’
‘And you’re not as nice as you look,’ he quipped.
Others enjoyed the work of the sea, and could relate to the gradual disfigurement. Anthony would find things to draw: a row of trees collapsed down the sand wall; fence posts and railings twisted into rust sculptures. This was where the beach once stopped; this was how far the dune used to come out. ‘Don’t you think it’s a relief to know that it all gets washed away?’ he had once said. But I had thought of Eric and my father and the afternoons they spent repairing the path, and replied, ‘I think I liked the path where it was.’
31
Eric and Claire understood that there was more to Dad’s leaving England, our coming to Australia – a piece of the story that he’d held on to for himself to think about. I’d never known what it was, only that it was there, and that it was quietly expressed in his bearing and in that impenetrable dedication to a wife that he’d lost young. And perhaps that was the part of him that many loved most of all. We knew that one day I would find out, and join his secret to my own story, just as a wave that holds you back when you swim out rushes you to shore when you come back in.
Now, it brought me to Whitby.
As though stepping from the aircraft to the estuary wall, I immediately retraced my infant steps there. At first, my parents and my younger self were almost as strangers – but as the days passed I re-inhabited the town and a sense of us here.
It happened through repetition: for a day I repeated a walk around both sides of the estuary, the little beach, and the streets that bordered the water in uneven steps of red and grey brick houses. I did it until I recovered a sensation held over from childhood, one that brought me their company as I walked, my parents on either side of me.
Also, I had a room near our old house, at a B & B two streets from the water. On the second day, I called Lillie, but the phone rang out. The morning was long and damp: a low, grey sky stuck to the brickwork of the terrace housing until lunchtime, when the atmosphere lifted and retired couples emerged from the other B & Bs, trooping past like the last guard of the British coast. The ruins of Whitby Abbey sat above the town, a perfect witness to the gentle confusion below. A steep line of steps from the waterside rose to a wide field of sodden grass and ponds. From there, the grey-blue edge of the Yorkshire coastline: the Whitby of my parents’ life together and, to the south, the open beaches where my mother had drowned.
I found the house, almost felt I knew it. My feet took the streets that led to it, and a narrow set of steps that ran as part easement, part entrance to the door, to where we’d lived until I was four. I knocked on a cloudy glass pane but no one came.
Would I wait for Lillie, or use the day to visit my mother’s plot? As strange as it seemed, I’d hoped that Lillie would be home, so that I wouldn’t have to go to Mum straight away, for after having rushed to Whitby I felt only shyness towards my mother, the hesitation of a long-awaited meeting. But at Lillie’s no one came to the door, and seemingly there was nothing else to do but catch the bus to Scarborough, the next town to the south, where my mother had drowned and where her ashes were kept. I caught a bus used mainly by pensioners with shopping carts, and then walked up to the cemetery.
That day, I learnt that my father had left Whitby too soon. Or, sooner than I’d always thought. We’d arrived in Australia a little more than a month after my fourth birthday, on 24 January 1992. I knew the date precisely: there was the stamp in our passports, and also a ritual he’d instituted after my accident. On that day every year, we took the car for a country drive, inland from Lion’s Head, through the dairy-farming land of creek valleys, and villages of half-a-dozen houses, a general store and, if we were lucky, a pub.
Our drive was a way of re-migrating, of insisting we were home – I saw even then that Dad was convincing himself that many of the things he’d left behind could be found in our new country, and I guessed they were things he’d once done with my mother.
So I had no doubt of the date we came to Australia. And yet on my mother’s certificate, brought out by a kindly woman at the cemetery who was empowered to release her ashes, the registered date of her death read 14 March 1992. I stared at the date and waited for it to change. To go back to a date before our departure. But it wouldn’t.
My father had left before she died, not after.
I heard her voice, and a conversation between the two of them. An argument? At the very least a difference in time: two months that separated what I’d always believed – that we’d left Whitby a year after my mother died – and what I now knew, and barely understood. My father had spent the greater part of his life protecting me from the date of her death.
At last I saw that much in our relationship had grown from there, and that the cost had been a kind of silence between us. Was this the gap that had given him a complex theory of music and me a child’s philosophy of swimming out to find her?
But why the lie?
The next afternoon, through the grey panes of Lillie’s front door, I watched the even, wide-hipped approach of Angela, Lillie’s part-time nurse. ‘Come in out of this,’ she said, and took my raincoat. ‘You must be Ted.’
She said Lillie was much better. A trip to the hospital yesterday had been exhausting, but she’d had a rest this morning.
‘Yes, I came by. No one was home.’
Now, my aunt sat in an armchair. I’d called to say I was coming, but she seemed unready for me to arrive. She held her hand to my face and said she wouldn’t get up. I looked at her eyes, which, like her handwriting, took not only the shape but the emphasis of Dad’s. But as when she’d visited Lion’s Head, it was her hair that you noticed most. The seven years since had aged her, but they hadn’t changed that. It was cut short and had thinned into a silver web of curls. As she had then, she clutched at the strands of hair that escaped and fell across her face, as though to remind them to stay still.
Then she concealed the skeletal hands under the top folds of a blanket. I felt that she didn’t want me to see them, their cartography of red and blue highways. But they made it out of their confinement and illuminated the things she needed to say: faint gestures, turns of the hand towards an idea or a recollection.
Her health had declined since she last wrote to me; Angie said that it tended to run in cycles. She could well rally again. Lillie muttered that her back was very bad; on the worst days, she even had trouble moving her head and face. She wouldn’t be able to speak much today.
I wasn’t sure how much she could tell me about my mother’s death, but for a week I lingered, and I found myself returning to the house. Her back slowly improved, and each day I wanted to see her once more before I left, if only to say goodbye.
One afternoon I found her suddenly sitting upright watching the soaps. As Angie and I walked into the living room, Lillie switched off the television and said, ‘I hoped you might come back. Sit down close. I’m feeling … you know.’
‘You’re better,’ I said. ‘You look very well.’
‘I am in a state of flux, that’s what,’ she answered with a breathless laugh. ‘I take days like these when they come.’
‘Do you mind me being here?’
‘I wasn’t sure I’d see either of you again. This is so much bet
ter. I’ve had you back for a little.’ We turned to face the television, seeing ourselves reflected in the dull screen, seated on either side of an occasional table that was somehow too well preserved. I noticed how far forward I was leaning, as though I was waiting to catch her.
I tried to reassure her: ‘What I meant was, I don’t want to upset you by coming back and going over old ground.’
She wasn’t interested. ‘I know what you meant. Do you know what I meant? I meant that I want to talk to you. You think I can give you a little bit of your mother. I can. But what I have from those days is very selfish; it’s my treasure. She was my friend. First, that’s what she was to me. I disagreed with your father, you must know that. He ought to have forgiven her. He ought to have stayed. She deserved that from him. She never stopped loving him. It was his choice to go.’
‘I’m sorry – did they separate? Did they get back together?’ I didn’t quite yet understand what Lillie assumed I knew.
‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’ There was an apology in her eyes. But her expression also said, Interrupt me less, wait for it. She went on, ‘Your mother and I understood each other very well. She was a friend in a way I hadn’t experienced before. I knew her from the inside. I loved her. Everybody said she was beautiful, yes. But I saw where her beauty came from. And your father knew that about her, too. Through and through she was a good person. That’s why he should have forgiven her.’
‘So … she left him?’ Was that the knowledge that Dad had protected me from: that she had left us?
‘Yes.’
‘And he wouldn’t take her back?’
‘He left before she came back. She thought it was too late.’
I turned to Lillie’s reflection. ‘Are you going to tell me why she left him?’
‘Probably not.’
And perhaps I knew enough. Lillie was right; her perspective was different from mine. It seemed she’d waited all these years just to talk about her friendship with Mum. Evidently, that was what she felt she could give me. The rest missed the point.
The Ash Burner Page 18