Find Another Place

by Ben Graff

  Katharine had been a Bristol law graduate too, but she was older than me and had finished the year I started the same course. We only met much later when, somewhat ironically, she covered someone’s maternity leave at the company where I worked. A mutual friend thought that we might hit it off and invited me on a work night out with the team they were both in.

  “So, who are you, then?” she had said and that was pretty much me. When we eventually got together we agreed it made more sense to live in my house in Coventry while we went through the logistics of selling both properties and buying something new. A decision Katharine still winces at today; she never much took to Wyken.

  I got the bookcases into place. Loading the shelves, fresh pine scent mixing with the aroma of books, mixing up our collections another sign of where we were and where we were heading. The television news was on in the background, Tony Blair to speak at the TUC Conference, the reassuring comfort of the world unspooling as it was meant to, neatly presented with block heading captions and widescreen angles.

  Our books all needed to be properly housed and I was focussed on completing the task before Katharine returned. Perhaps I was instinctively nesting, I don’t know. I thought to a work dinner where someone had asked why anyone should bother to keep books that they had already read. Most of them will not be read again, a friend had said. My manager, another reader, sighed. “It’s your inner life, is it not? If you don’t keep them you might as well throw away your soul.” A comment that drew blank looks from the rest of the team, but I knew exactly what she meant. Books said a lot about who you were – the stories that interested you, the places to which your mind had travelled.

  I remembered a line from somewhere, to the effect that no one should be allowed to carry a photograph of anyone else without that person’s permission. It was too personal, too much theirs, not yours. I used to think the same about anyone seeing your book collection; that to do so was to let them look into you in a way that was deeply personal. It was not something to be taken lightly.

  I continued to mixup and house our collections, but the images on the screen stopped making sense even when I turned the volume up. Many things we thought we knew had been changed, first by one plane, then another. Blair heading back to London. Bush talking about the folks who had done this. But still I loaded volumes onto the shelves, unable to tear myself fully from my task; what I was watching simply did not resonate.

  Eventually I sat on the floor amongst the novels, just watching. A film that was not a film; the noise and the rubble and the panic were all too real. Years later I watched a replay of 9/11 in real time with our second daughter, Maddie, who had developed an avid interest in the subject. The programme was based on video footage captured on people’s phones. Maddie described the twin towers to me as looking like wounded animals, with the smoke that billowed out of them their blood; and now whenever I see the footage again I think to her description.

  I was told that our London office closed down early that day, and Katharine returned home from Birmingham early too, at around 4pm. We sat and watched as people who had come into work for a normal day, only hours before, jumped from ledges, a hundred storey up in the sky, sometimes holding hands. There were already extracts of desperate telephone calls being played on the news and it was almost impossible to feel even shock; there was no reference point to make sense of what we were watching.

  A radio transcript played of the former world chess champion, the American Bobby Fischer, who claimed that the day was one for celebration. Rejoice, rejoice, he says. What goes around comes around! The USA had this coming.

  “Chess players are all crazy, right?” Katharine says to me.

  I speak to Martin on the phone and ask him, this compares to everything else he has seen in his life. “It doesn’t,” he says, but does not elaborate. There are only so many words.

  But in our house in Coventry that evening, other things were happening, and while we deferred our plan for an hour or two, the pull of it was too great. We needed to know, and the test confirmed it. A solid blue line; she held the white plastic handle and then gave it to me to look at. Katharine was pregnant.

  I was reminded of John Updike’s Rabbit books. But there it was, the extraordinary set against the personal. He watched the moon landing, whilst getting divorced. Here a terrorist atrocity was unfolding, while we gained concrete knowledge that a new life had been formed.

  Not the best of omens, I thought but did not say. Mum phoned and we did not tell her, but managed to reassure her that it was unlikely that Coventry was going to be the focus of a second wave of attacks, irrespective of what had happened in World War Two.

  When things like this happened she always had a way of talking about them as if they were somehow my fault or had something to do with me, which was not her intention but just how she could come across on occasion. I could hear Dad sighing and muttering in the background; things were pretty much as they always were in their house, if not in ours, or in New York or Pennsylvania or Washington, DC. Then Katharine and I watched more of it, curled up together, both with our own thoughts.

  I sometimes wondered who else might have been sitting on a sofa at the same time, on that day, reflecting on something similar. Holding a strip with a solid blue line; of course, there must have been many other pregnancies confirmed that day and births and deaths and other ordinary extraordinary things that people would remember, normal life wrapping itself around tragedy like a vine.

  They all, Mum, Dad, Martin and Theresa, seemed surprised but pleased when we told them around the ten-week point. It must be safe to do so by now, we thought. Not long after Dave’s death, six years after Anna’s, and now the first step toward renewal, a generation that would carry us on.

  Asking my father for advice would never have occurred to me. Partly an age thing, also that I felt I was going to have to figure this out for myself, to create a new pattern for how to be a parent, even if this would in turn inevitably prove to be wrong too.

  We started to plan at a more practical level, to think about cots and nurseries and baby clothes and where we would spend Christmas, given that the other set of grandparents would then have the first Christmas with our new baby the following year. The permutations were more complex than I had ever really considered; the politics of extended families and the need to keep everybody happy not straightforward.

  Then at twelve weeks it all became academic. No sound at the scan. Nothing. No baby anymore. What could they say? There was no reason. No reason why it wouldn’t work next time. Everything was normal. “It’s part of life,” the nurse had said. “Sometimes it is just nature’s way.” We think it was a boy. The closest I would ever come to a son, who I did not want as much as I wanted a daughter, and who I had somehow let down before he could live long enough for me to disappoint him.

  We decided to change our plans and get married first and then see what happened. Then Katharine got pregnant again and we brought the wedding date forward. Mum and Dad were supportive. I think by this point they were never quite sure what we might tell them next.

  “You’re getting married? OK, son,” Dad said, with a tone of approval that I was grateful for. I also heard in him an echo of his father which I hadn’t really noticed before.

  “You’re committed now,” said Mum, which was fine. She went on to say that I hadn’t really known Katharine for very long, which was less so, but I told her not to worry.

  A week before the wedding we had our twelve-week scan and set out to the hospital with an entirely different mindset, almost assuming that it would all have gone wrong because it was easier to approach it this way. But it hadn’t, and we could see what appeared to be a miniature bean leaping around on the ultrasound.

  “Would you like to know the sex?” the radiologist asked.

  “Well…” I said, and I could tell you that I do not know why I hesitated, except that would not be true and I ha
ve promised the truth if nothing else. Partly I was scared that knowing might jinx things. It was more than that though. I assumed it would be a boy and that my first, secret reaction would be one of mild disappointment. Something that would never be admitted to but might colour all that followed.

  “Of course we want to know,” said Katharine.

  “I’m as certain as I can be that it’s a girl,” said the radiologist.

  We married in Coventry, in the local church, where occasionally I would go with Katharine to the short Saturday evening services, at which the neighbouring streets were prayed for on a rota basis. I had tried to show a new interest in religion, as it mattered to Katharine just as it did to my mother, but that was not enough to make it stick. But being in the church on our wedding day felt very natural and Mum did a reading, as did Katharine’s mum, Anne.

  I still watch the video sometimes, but where once I watched it to look at me and Katharine, I now do so to hear my mother speak. Theresa sat in the front row, the only surviving grandparent on my side, Martin having faded in the December after the miscarriage.

  Katharine had three of hers there. Flora in her eighties was the eldest person at the wedding and eventually became the last of her generation within the family to pass on, aged 101. Cliff and Kathleen were there too, Katharine’s biological grandparents on her father’s side, except years later it would transpire that Cliff wasn’t. Rather, David was the product of a brief fling that Kathleen had had years ago with a Coronation Street actor.

  His sisters had already known for some time, but when Cliff told him it was too late, the actor was already dead, but we did watch an old tape of him in an early episode of Coronation Street once.

  Cliff and Kathleen are both gone now too. Kathleen’s son-in-law cut off his pony tail and put it in Kathleen’s hand in her coffin, because she had always wanted him to cut his hair, he told us. No one knew quite what to say to that.

  Cliff died a few years later, having been very clear about the arrangements for his family vault and who was going to have which of the remaining berths within it. I remember telling my father this story and we both had the same reaction, which was that we thought this was a Jewish thing. We both liked Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold with its blazing family arguments over the dinner table as to who might ultimately be buried next to whom. Dad swore that he had been to too many bar mitzvahs when he had been growing up which had been dominated by heated rows on precisely this subject.

  “People are people, right?” I said with a smile.

  “It is all much madder than I thought,” he said. There were photos at Kenilworth Castle in the rain and then in the sun, part of the package deal with the Holiday Inn, the photographs that is, rather than the elements. Dad had wanted to make a speech, but it wasn’t what the father of the groom did. It would have been difficult in any event, with Katharine’s biological father David and her stepfather Roger, who had married Katharine’s mother Anne while Katharine was still little, both there. But I think my saying no disappointed him, just as he was subsequently disappointed for the same reason at my brother Matt’s wedding to Rachel, who also had a father and a stepfather. I think back now to whether we could have done something differently, found another setting for him to speak. I know he felt a bit let down by it all, and given that most of the time I wanted him to talk more, it was ironic that at one of the moments when he actually wanted to speak I prevented him.

  We were terrified throughout the pregnancy. The antenatal classes felt an unnecessary temptation of fate. Katharine asked more questions than anyone else, as if thoroughness of preparation might act as a guard against anything going wrong. A month out we panic, an emergency scan follows and confirms all is well. Then Katharine’s waters break. Two days later, Annabelle is born.

  I speak to Mum from the hospital. She said she could hear her own mother, Anna, in the name we had chosen, a silent affirmation of something that was bigger than all of us, perhaps. A year and six days after 9/11, Annabelle was with us. For all of the horror and the hate we had seen, it was pretty clear that there was one thing in the world that was amazing.

  Maddie followed nineteen months after Annabelle, after an all-night wait and a caesarean. There are photos of me in hat and medical gown. The surgeon offered the chance to watch while Katharine was cut open, which I politely declined. Maddie had been breech and the plan was to turn her. As was so often to prove the case, Maddie had ideas of her own and there was not time. She is a formidable child. I remember her, still tiny in a playhouse, confronting a boy who had taken Annabelle’s ball. “Give it back, little boy,” she said, and brokered no room for debate.

  They were all a bit shocked by Francesca, who was conceived whilst Katharine was still on maternity leave with Maddie. “You’ll have to stop work now,” Katharine’s boss said. It was the same pattern. Three weeks early. Before we headed to the hospital I ended up taking Annabelle and Maddie, and a pan of half-cooked pasta, to a neighbour. A story still retold by the children today, even if they do not remember it. So our super sporty one was born. The one who always makes everyone smile.

  A new family was taking shape, but the old one remained. There are photographs of Mum, Dad and Theresa with the three girls at varying stages. Baby pictures, complete with glasses of champagne, holiday snaps, and the two images I most associate with Mum during this time: a picture of Annabelle aged four, on Mum’s lap, at a Christmas Eve meal in a restaurant. Both smartly dressed, Annabelle sits up straight, her hair blonder then and in a little bob. She holds her book and they smile at each other. Then a later one with Mum, Annabelle and Maddie in St Nicks park, a spring day by the looks of it, but I don’t remember the moment. Maddie on reins that Mum gamely holds. It is not entirely clear whether Maddie is under control or not.

  “It is really with older children that I’ll be able to come into my own,” my mother says. But she will not get that chance. There will be presents she has wrapped beautifully for Maddie’s fourth birthday that we will open a week or so after her funeral. Tasteful dresses, carefully chosen with love, and there is a temptation just to preserve them for posterity, whatever that is. But ultimately she bought them to be worn, and they fit Maddie perfectly.

  Then finally, six and a half years later, Gabriella arrives, but out of Mum, Dad and Theresa, only my father will get to see her. A freezing cold December night, the new house bought in anticipation, at this moment our belongings barely unpacked. The nearly new car frozen on the drive hastily de-iced.

  She is the most expensive baby in history and the one who, with her brains and non-flexible negotiating positions, will run the house from here on in. Maddie was not as challenging as we thought, it will turn out. We tell Dad that Gabriella’s middle name is Mary. “Mary,” he says as he cradles her, whispering in her ear. He smiles. The whisper is not just for her.

  Three years later he will be gone and the move from one generation to the next will be complete. The join between them will not be as deep as any of us would have wanted, and I will doubt, whilst not wanting to, the memories the children will claim to have of Colin, Mary and Theresa. But all of it will be something, and I have come by now to better understand the doubts and fears I had that day at the poolside in Greece. How all the questions we have about parenting never go away entirely, and the realisation that they must have been present in my own father in some way, just as they were in both Martin and Arthur and perhaps every other father who has ever been.

  I would like to think if we had had a boy it would still have been alright.

  Introduction to Martin’s Journal

  It was years since Martin had first handed me the copy of his journal that I was subsequently to lose. The leaves, which that day had been starting to fall and mix with the mud in the garden of The Fishbourne Inn, were long gone, as were those that belonged to many subsequent seasons, as was Martin himself. I stood on roughly the same spot during the summer when I was writi
ng this, trying to remember if there was more to that moment, if there were things I had forgotten.

  Listening to the sounds of a ferry I could not see docking at Fishbourne harbour a few hundred yards away, I wondered if she might have been Saint Clare, which had come into service the year of Martin’s death and which he had lamented as being too large, bringing too much traffic to the Island. Perhaps it was also her that I had heard but could not see that earlier day; then new now older. I felt older myself as I stood alone, thinking back to that moment between the two of us, that now only I was in a position to remember. It had been years since I had been ill myself, in 2004, after Martin, after Annabelle, before Maddie, before any other deaths.

  I scolded myself for thinking of me, rather than him, but there it was. Was this why things sometimes went wrong in families, that even when we were trying to think of others we thought to ourselves? Did I do this with my own children now? They often said that they would try to talk to me and get nowhere.

  “Look at me,” Francesca would say, turning my head with her hands, bringing me back to her and a present that I should have been more capable of embracing than was often the case.

  There it was. In that instance I started to think about not him but my own health and mortality. Optic neuritis in my left eye. I had first lost the peripheral vision, and then over the course of a few weeks the rest of it. When I eventually went to the doctor it was one of those times when you see a medical professional go very quickly from routine boredom to not being bored at all. Too quickly to realise that it is not a good thing.

  Over the next few weeks I struggled to urinate and finally had to admit that I could not, and spent a week in hospital with a catheter, on steroids, having scans of my brain and an excruciating lumber puncture in my back. Over time the symptoms went away and different doctors gave different verdicts. I definitely had MS, or I did not but might develop it in the future, or it was possible too that I had something that was MS-like but not full-blown. The only option, even if it was not very writerly, was to get on with things and never to mention it again to anyone.