A Hidden Life

by Adele Geras

‘Is anything wrong?’ Mickey said, frowning and peering more closely at Nessa’s face.

  ‘No – nothing really. I had a bit of a quarrel with Gareth in the car before I dropped him at the station.’ She had better say something. Mickey knew her too well to be fobbed off. This might keep her happy for a bit. Part of Nessa was longing to tell the whole Melanie story, but she restrained herself and smiled. ‘I’ll be okay. Honestly. We have to get on to those Italians about that pink silk today. D’you want me to do it?’

  ‘No, you’re okay.’ Mickey stood up and started to go to her own desk, which was on the other side of the room. She turned before she reached it and said, ‘You do know, don’t you, that you can tell me anything?’

  ‘I do know. And I’m grateful – truly.’ Nessa felt something like happiness creeping through her. It was comforting to know Mickey was on her side. I don’t care what Gareth decides to throw at me, she told herself.

  *

  Lou stared at the piles of paper laid out on the table in her flat. She’d decided that until she’d read every single thing in the two boxes her father had helped her bring back to London, they had to stay out in the open: visible and available. And because Poppy wasn’t here, anything she arranged on the table stayed in the same spot till she moved it. Lou was trying hard not to feel guilty about her daughter. There were moments, especially in the middle of the night, but also at what used to be bathtime, or bedtime, when she would be overcome with anguish, missing Poppy so much that she came close on several occasions to picking up the phone and ringing Mum to tell her this wasn’t working and she wanted her daughter back here, where she belonged.

  But she wasn’t going to kid herself. Everything was working out okay. It was like being on a short holiday and though Lou felt guilty sometimes, she was also profoundly grateful to her parents. She phoned her mother every night and reports of Poppy’s happiness and good behaviour were comforting. She’s fine, Lou told herself. It’s got to be good for her to relate to grandparents who love her, and she doesn’t seem to miss me. Not a bit. This thought worried her a little, but she did now have hours and hours to spend on thinking, on reading, on trying to remember everything she could from her childhood and put it together with what she’d found in the boxes. This time was a precious gift and she was grateful for it.

  The boxes had turned out to be a mixed bag of stuff. There were letters from publishers, mostly boring, but which would have to be read through again. A few fan letters from the months just after the publication of each book, an envelope full of newspaper clippings, and heaps of receipts, bank statements, and miscellaneous bits of bumph. None of this looked as though it would yield any useful information, though Lou didn’t have a clear idea of what she was looking for. There were three notebooks, which she’d hoped would turn out to be diaries, but which were more like sketchbooks. Clearly, the things written in them related to events and times and places, but Lou wasn’t sure if they were about the characters in the novels or about Grandad himself. Some of them were no more than ramblings. For instance, what was one supposed to make of a passage like this:

  Not being who you are, or who you say you are, or the person you’ve been told you are has an effect on everything. Rosemary says I’m better off like this, and maybe that’s true but my problem is I’m not sure who I’d have been if I hadn’t been brought back here, to England. But of course I would have been someone else. C says who I am is what I’ve got and I shouldn’t waste time worrying about things that are in the past and can’t be changed however much I fret about it. I can’t help fretting. Maybe that’s all the book is: a kind of permitted fretting. Trying to see it clearer. But it’s hard work.

  Lou read the words again. Certain things weren’t in doubt. C must be Constance, surely? And Grandad had been brought back to England from North Borneo. She’d known since childhood that her grandfather had lived there during the Second World War, and now that she’d read Blind Moon, she could see that he’d used that time as a basis for the novel.

  She remembered one particular day when they’d been together in his study and he’d shown her something: a little ornament in the shape of a horse, painted turquoise, with a flying mane. He’d said that came from North Borneo. It looked Chinese. Had he talked to her then, about his childhood? If he had, she’d forgotten what he’d said. He hardly ever spoke about himself. What she did remember was an argument between her grandparents. They often argued, or rather, Constance was nasty to Grandad and he answered her mildly or not at all. Sometimes he managed to get through one of these sessions without saying a single word.

  On this day, the one she remembered, Grandad had been late for lunch. Constance said, ‘Punctuality is the politeness of princes.’

  ‘We’re not princes,’ Lou told her, ‘so maybe we don’t have to be punctual.’

  Constance lowered her head and looked at Lou over the top of her silver-framed spectacles. ‘Nonsense, dear,’ she said. ‘It’s simply a saying, that’s all. Everyone should be as punctual as a prince. That’s what it means.’

  Lou opened her mouth to object, to argue and then Grandad walked in.

  ‘So sorry I’m late, dear,’ he said and then slid into his seat and began to help himself to the mint sauce. I’d forgotten about the mint sauce, Lou thought … We must have been having roast lamb that day, so it must have been Sunday. I was the only other person there.

  ‘I was working, and quite forgot the time,’ Grandad continued. ‘It’s going quite well, I think.’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised you think your scribbling is more important than luncheon. You’ve always put yourself first.’

  Grandad said nothing for a while. Lou looked at each of them in turn. She burst out, unable to stop herself, ‘It’s not scribbling! He’s writing a story.’

  ‘Don’t contradict me, Louise,’ said Constance. ‘What on earth do you know about it, anyway? Don’t speak till you’re spoken to.’

  Grandad said, ‘She’s trying to be kind to me, Constance. You should be a little more understanding.’

  ‘I understand perfectly, John. And I think I must be allowed to discipline my own granddaughter.’

  Grandad fell silent and the scrape and clatter of silver on china had sounded as loud as an orchestra in the room. Constance continued, ‘Oh, I don’t imagine it’s a real story. Not what I’d expect to find in a novel anyway.’

  Grandad put down his knife and fork. ‘How do you know what I’m writing about, Constance? You’ve never shown the least interest in it.’

  ‘Because I know you and I know what you’re capable of. The sort of thing you’re used to writing doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of book that anyone sensible would want to read. I’d have thought you’d have realized by now that no one is interested in the sort of thing you write any longer. It has been a good many years since anything of yours was published.’

  Grandad said nothing in reply, Lou recalled. She remembered feeling embarrassed for him. Wanting to cry. She could remember how the room smelled, of furniture polish and gravy. She had a memory of Constance talking to herself for the rest of the meal, chattering away about golf and bridge and coffee mornings and the last letter she’d had from Justin, written from his school. She could still see her grandfather’s stiffness as he sat in the chair at the top of the table. He finished what was on his plate and then stood up.

  ‘Please excuse me,’ he muttered, and walked quickly out of the room.

  Constance had nodded her head and turned to Lou. She said, ‘I expect he tells you all kinds of lies, doesn’t he? What he never mentions is that until he met me, he was nothing but a boring provincial solicitor. His mother, Rosemary, was a social climber and she practically forced him on to me. There were plenty of other young men I could have married and perhaps if I’d known then what I know now, I would have done.’

  Lou had stared at her grandmother and wondered whether she was expected to ask what that was: what had she found out? Was there something about Grandad that s
he, Lou, wasn’t being told? She said, tentatively, ‘What do you know now?’

  ‘You’re too young to be told such things. Go and play, dear.’

  Lou went away wishing she hadn’t asked. Now, she thought how many more wonderful novels might he have written if he’d been married to someone other than a grudging old bat like Constance. Someone who might have encouraged him – loved his work, understood it. Someone who’d loved him. Lou knew that that was the reason Grandad had loved her so much. He realized not only that she loved him, but that she was perhaps the only person who did, really and truly, unquestioningly, and without reference to whatever he had done in the past or was still doing. The bonfire, Lou reflected, happened only a very short time after this. I was seven years old, and what I was watching, though I didn’t think of it like that at the time, was Constance murdering Grandad’s dreams and ambitions over the roast potatoes.

  The bonfire. Lou sat down in the armchair and stared at the black face of the TV. She’d scarcely turned it on since she’d come back here without Poppy. Instead of television, she’d been absorbed in memories. She’d never realized how it worked, this remembering business. You thought of one thing, one conversation, and when that came back to you, it attached itself to another and soon you had a whole string of them and then that string led on to something else and so it went. The problem was, was what you remembered accurate? Had it really happened like that? Lou knew that anyone else who’d been around at the time would have a totally different recollection. Almost every conversation she’d had with Nessa and Justin since they’d grown up revealed that their memories tallied scarcely at all with hers. They didn’t match up. And each of them would have sworn that theirs was the one, the truth, the definitive account of how it was.

  Okay, so what she could recall of that day was probably not exactly what happened. She closed her eyes and leaned back in the armchair. Perhaps the bonfire was on the following Sunday. Did she only go up to Milthorpe House at the weekends? That was likely, if it was during term time, but it might just as easily have been during the holidays. Thinking back, Lou was almost sure it was. The day was a hot one. She could remember sitting in the rough grass at the back of the house and picking a couple of long-stemmed poppies, whose petals became disappointingly floppy and sad after they’d been pulled out of the ground. She’d thrown them away in the end.

  She’d come out with Grandad. He must have been building the bonfire for days. It wasn’t, Lou thought, as big as the one he always made for me and Nessa and Justin every Guy Fawkes Night, but it was quite big.

  ‘What’re you going to burn, Grandad?’

  ‘Oh, rubbish. Just rubbish. Should have done it years ago.’

  Next to his feet, there was a cardboard box overflowing with notebooks that had red cardboard covers. Dad sometimes used to bring them old ledgers from his work to scribble in and Grandad’s notebooks looked a bit the same.

  ‘What’s in them?’

  ‘Nothing anyone would want any longer. They’re just gathering dust. That’s what your grandmother says, and she’s right.’

  He lit the fire then, Lou reflected. I went and stood next to him to watch the flames catching the wood and rags, to see how they spread along the branches and gathered the whole pile into their scarlet and gold brightness. It was hot, too, and I took a step away. Grandad began throwing one notebook after another into the heart of the bonfire.

  ‘Are you crying, Grandad?’ I’m sure, she thought now, that his cheeks were wet. He must have been weeping, but in those days no man would have admitted to that. Certainly not someone of Grandad’s generation. Men never cried.

  ‘No, no,’ he’d answered. ‘The fire’s making my eyes water, that’s all.’

  How many notebooks did he burn? Lou couldn’t remember. The next thing that happened was that he took her by the hand and they went to sit on the bench that went all the way round the apple tree near the back gate which led out to the Downs.

  ‘When I was a little boy,’ he began, ‘I was in a prisoner-of-war camp. D’you know what a camp like that is like?’

  ‘No, not really,’ Lou said, hoping for a story.

  ‘You’re too young to know about such things, but they teach you – being there teaches you something important.’

  He’d sat silent for ages after that, staring into the distance till Lou prompted him. ‘What does it teach you?’

  ‘Not to get attached to anything. Or anyone. That’s it. Don’t ever get attached to anyone, because they can be taken away.’

  She hadn’t known what he meant. She sat staring at the flames she could still see burning at the other end of the garden, not sure of what she might say, and Grandad went on, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s complicated. You’ll read my books, I hope, when you’re a bit older. I’ve written about those years. Maybe I’ll read some of the stories to you, one of these days.’

  And now, she had read about those days in Blind Moon herself, and understood something of what her grandfather had gone through. She looked down at one of the passages she’d marked with a Post-it note stuck to the edge of the page:

  Nigel, who’d had the next bed, and was only six, had died two days ago from a fever which turned his skin clammy and greenish and made him talk nonsense and his noises and babbling kept everyone in the hut awake all night long. Peter hadn’t liked Nigel, but he wouldn’t have wished his death. It was horrible in the children’s hut and as soon as breakfast was over he went to find his mother and Dulcie and the baby. The baby was too small. He’d heard someone say that: one of the women. He didn’t like looking at her, even though she was his sister. She was like a skinned animal … perhaps a rabbit or a piglet. Mummy called her Mary but that was a name for a person and didn’t suit her. You couldn’t imagine her turning into a real child. Have you had breakfast? Dulcie used to ask every day. What a joke! It was a joke. He didn’t know why Dulcie said it. There wasn’t anything funny about a few grains of sticky rice in a small wooden bowl. Sometimes there were insects scattered through the grains, looking like sprinklings of pepper. But every day he ate it hungrily anyway. Peter thought of food all the time. Birthday cake and jelly and meat but what he wanted more than anything was lemonade. The water in the camp was cloudy and tasted slightly salty. It was always warm. Ice cubes. He dreamed of lemonade and ice cubes.

  That, Lou thought, sounded awful. I’ll find out about that time. I’ll go on the internet and read about the camps in North Borneo. I’ll speak to people who were there if I can. But what had been in those notebooks? More details perhaps, or earlier drafts of the novels which would have been useful now. And why had Grandad decided to throw them on to the fire? Lou had been assuming that Constance had nagged him till he couldn’t bear it any longer and that he’d burned them because she’d made him do it. Now another reason occurred to her: perhaps there were things in them he didn’t want her to see. Didn’t want anyone to see. That was an intriguing possibility.

  The phone rang and Lou sprang up to answer it, feeling as though she’d been woken out of a deep sleep. She shook her head as she picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello? Is that Lou?’

  ‘Yes, speaking. Harry?’

  ‘Yeah – hope you don’t mind me phoning you at home.’

  ‘No, that’s fine, really.’ Where had he got the number? Lou wondered, before realizing it must be in her file in the Cinnamon Hill offices.

  ‘The thing is, I wondered if we could get together before your next visit to the office … I need to find something to show George Fuertes from Disney who’s coming over next week. There’re a couple of things I put in the almost pile I’d like to talk to you about, if that’s okay?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ This was not the moment to say she’d quite forgotten what they’d decided ought to go in the almost pile. ‘I’ll come in tomorrow, shall I? What time’s good for you?’

  ‘I thought it’d be good to do it over a meal. Are you busy Thursday night? There’s a nice place in Camden Town –
that’s quite near you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is. Thanks, Harry, that’d be great.’

  ‘No probs. I’ll pick you up at your place at seven-thirty, okay?’

  ‘Yes, that’ll be fine.’

  A silence fell and Lou wondered what she ought to say next.’ I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘Me too. Bye.’

  He was gone. She sat down at the table and opened her laptop. As she went through the moves that got her into her screenplay file, Lou kept returning to what she’d said; what Harry had said. He’d asked her out. He thought it would be ‘good’ to do this over a meal. That meant he wanted to have a meal with her, right? Not necessarily. It could be that he wanted to do this work and didn’t have time at the office. This was just convenient. He’d said he was looking forward to it. But that was only in response to her saying she was … Oh, God, did I come across, Lou thought, as too eager?

  She’d wanted to do some more work and speaking to Harry had disturbed her. She felt … she had no idea what she felt. Churned up. Worried. What on earth was there to worry about? She took a deep breath. She was worried that Harry might really like her. What if he meant this to be a date? A first step in trying to get closer to her. Was that possible? And if it was, what was she going to do? I like Harry, she thought. He’s kind and good-looking and so why does the thought of him touching me, of anyone touching me, scare me stiff? She dreaded the thought that this, the way she was now, was how she was always going to be. Surely not – she’d get over it in the end, of course she would. She knew that not all men were like Ray, but that knowledge didn’t seem to make any difference whatsoever. Since he left her, she’d been out with a couple of men who seemed really nice and gentle and unthreatening. She was no longer attracted to bastards, and had developed a kind of radar that allowed her to spot the obvious ones a mile off. Still, the moment any relationship moved towards the physical, she’d been unable to cope and had pushed – sometimes literally – whoever it happened to be as far away as possible. I must, she thought, hold a kind of record for pushing blokes away. Tears came into her eyes as she stared at the screen and wondered how long it would be until she was normal again. How would she feel about Harry kissing her? She had no idea. She was drawn to him. She liked the idea of him, but wondered whether she would be able to relax enough to allow him to come that close to her.