by Fiona Neill
Ailsa remembered her as a tiny baby tracing intricate patterns in the air with her fingers like a semaphore as she slept and how Harry had pretended he could decipher their secret meaning. ‘Our spiritual leader says we should open another bottle of Chablis,’ he would say so that Ailsa couldn’t protest. Unlike Rachel, she had never developed much of a taste for alcohol.
Seeing her father drunk as a child had been the best aversion therapy, she had joked to Harry shortly after they met, entertaining him with amusing anecdotes about his drunken mishaps (Adam mistakenly getting into bed with the wife of one of his friends during a family holiday in Spain; Adam turning up drunk for a school open day and having a row with the History teacher over American involvement in the Second World War; Adam stopping off at a pub on his way to deliver a George III dresser to a client in London and coming back at closing time to find it stolen).
‘Addiction is a disease of the brain,’ Harry had replied with utter conviction and without any sense of judgement. It seemed incredible now that Harry’s certainty had been one of his main attractions.
‘If they’re dubious, which they are, they can’t really be banal,’ said Romy suddenly, just as Ailsa had abandoned the idea of conversation.
‘What does he mean when he says you know you want it?’ Ailsa waved her hand for emphasis and accidentally hit the windscreen wipers.
‘I think you know what he means. I think you have a radar for it,’ said Romy in a bored tone. ‘It’s been controversial.’
‘Like he doesn’t think no means no,’ Ailsa continued.
‘That’s why it’s called “Blurred Lines”,’ said Romy. ‘Lots of people find it kind of rapey.’
‘Do you?’
‘Mum, if you are trying to get into a conversation about New Year’s Eve and how my body is my temple and the importance of having sex within the context of a loving relationship, then I’ve heard it all before. But relationships take up a lot of time and energy that I could be using for revision. They hold you back. I need to be really focused if I want to get into medical school.’
‘Aren’t the lyrics repetitive?’ said Ailsa, trying to regain equilibrium.
‘You know, Mum, sometimes it’s good to be brain dead. To think about nothing. Stops your imagination running wild. You should try it some time. Stop analysing everything and see if you loosen up a little.’
Romy always expressed her frustration with her hands, and Ailsa could tell from her wild gesticulations that she had annoyed her again. Romy pulled headphones from her bag and indicated that she was going to listen to her own music.
Ailsa glanced at Romy’s long delicate fingers as they unravelled the headphones. Harry had excitedly announced when Romy was around ten years old that she had surgeon’s hands after watching her painting a picture of wild flowers in a jam jar in the kitchen at her grandparents’ house. Ailsa suddenly remembered how Romy had once spent hours painting sprigs of heather picked from the marshes and then held up the painting, tilted her head left and then right and knotted her brow. Before anyone realized what she was thinking she had torn it up into tiny pieces because it wasn’t perfect. Harry’s excitement about her steady hands had eclipsed the more significant revelation about her uncompromising nature.
‘I don’t like this song either, Mum. You should have more faith in my judgement. In everything.’
Romy was completely right. Ailsa felt guilty. It was the first time that her daughter had failed to match her expectations. Over the past year Romy had remained steadfast. She had accepted moving out of London with relative equanimity, especially compared to her brothers. She had worked like a dog for her GCSEs, even as her familiar world crumbled around her, and scored some of the highest results in her year. She had changed school and apparently fairly seamlessly fallen in with a new group of friends. Romy was entitled to have sex with whoever she wanted to. After all hadn’t Ailsa at almost exactly the same age? Maybe that was the problem.
Another niggling thought weevilled its way into Ailsa’s head. This was less palatable. Maybe she required Romy to be predictable to counterbalance Luke. She could talk to people about Romy’s aspirations and achievements and in the next breath joke about Luke’s recent rocky patch and total lack of ambition. Romy made her feel like a good mother. Luke didn’t.
‘I’m really sorry, Romy. I shouldn’t have reacted like that. I was being overprotective. I mean, you haven’t even had a proper boyfriend and suddenly I find you straddled beneath some boy you hardly know with your skirt halfway up your hips. What am I meant to think?’
‘I do know Jay. We’re at school together and I like him, but he’s not my type, and even if he was, I wouldn’t stand a chance after your psycho-mum episode. You should trust me more.’
‘I realize that now. Actually, I realized it almost immediately. And I do trust you, but can you see how I might have misinterpreted the scene?’
‘Even if there was something going on, you still had no right to barge in like that.’
‘First love can be very powerful,’ said Ailsa. ‘Even overwhelming. All subsequent relationships are cast in its shadow. Like a chimera.’
‘Is that so, Obi-Wan Kenobi?’ said Romy, looking down at her phone again.
‘So significant that Dad has dedicated an entire chapter of his book to it,’ Ailsa gamely continued. She precised the chapter explaining how love flooded the brain with dopamine. ‘Like a tsunami, Romy. Heart rate and blood pressure go up. Serotonin levels go down, which takes away your appetite and affects your mood. Activity in the amygdala slows down, judgement is impaired and fear is suppressed. Lust makes people do irrational things, Romy.’
‘You make it sound like an illness.’
‘Actually it is. “There is always some madness in love. But there is always some reason in madness.” ’
‘Who said that?’ asked Romy.
‘Nietzsche. I found it for the beginning of Dad’s chapter.’
‘I thought Nietzsche was meant to be a complete killjoy,’ said Romy.
‘He fell in love with the wrong person,’ said Ailsa.
Romy groaned. ‘Know when to stop, Mum. That’s what you’re always telling us.’
‘This is a big year for you.’
‘Don’t you think I know that?’
‘And sex is great as part of a long-term loving relationship … but you have to choose the right person.’
Even as she said it Ailsa wasn’t sure she believed it herself. Sex was sometimes even better when you knew you wouldn’t see the person ever again.
‘Mum, please, you’re beginning to sound like one of those banal songs you hate so much.’
‘You don’t want to get distracted by a load of messy link-ups –’
‘Hook-up not link-up, Mum. Have you considered that you might be having the right conversation with the wrong child? Luke is the king of the hook-up, not me.’
It was true. A couple of weeks after he started school last term Luke had asked if he could invite someone home for the night. Gratified that at last they might get to meet a potential girlfriend, Ailsa and Harry had enthusiastically agreed. But Luke and the girl got home so late and she left so early that they never got to meet her. The following night he brought a different girl home. On Monday morning Ailsa had found a thong, coiled like a spring, under his bed. The next weekend, a different girl had made so much noise at 3 a.m. that she had woken them up.
When Harry casually mentioned to Luke the next day that they could hear everything, ‘and I mean everything’, Luke joked they should feel proud that he was such an unselfish lay. Harry said it was unfortunate that he didn’t pay the same kind of close attention to his schoolwork. Shortly after this they decided to tell Luke their recently implemented policy of allowing girls to stay the night was over. They explained that when they rashly agreed to his request, they hadn’t realized he would bring home a different girl every night. Luke argued the experiment hadn’t lasted long enough to draw any conclusions. Harry remained r
esolute and bravely tried to have a conversation about sexually transmitted diseases, even going as far as to point out that there was a link between throat cancer and oral sex with reference to Michael Douglas. ‘Please. I get it, Dad,’ said Luke, putting up his hand. Their brief foray into liberal parenting was over.
‘We spoke to Luke. He’s reined himself in.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. He just takes them back to other shag pads. Now, please. Let me listen to my music.’
Ailsa took a hand off the steering wheel and fumbled for the headphones and pinned them down in Romy’s lap.
‘Look, it’s been a tough Christmas, Romy. We’re all trying to find our way without Granny. It’s new territory for everyone. And Grandpa isn’t coping very well without her. We all miss her. I’m sorry I overstepped the mark.’
‘You can’t blame everything on Granny dying.’
‘I don’t.’
‘I even heard Dad tell the Fairports we moved here because she died. It’s not true. You had already sold the house in London. Why do you and Dad keep rewriting history to suit your own version of events?’
Romy put on the headphones. She turned up the volume until it was so loud Ailsa could hear she was listening to Tim Hardin. ‘Reason to Believe’. It was a track written before Ailsa was born.
Their conversation was over but progress had been made. Romy turned away from Ailsa to stare out of the window at the slate-grey sky. Ailsa switched off the radio. She had reached a long flat stretch of coast where an estuary meandered out to the sea across boggy fields. A few sheep were standing under trees blown into strange arthritic contortions by the wind. The sea was raging.
She drove faster, anxious about her father. The road snaked closer to the coast and marshland where she had grown up. A land with no foreground, her father called it. It was true there were no trees, no gates or railings. It was a land without limits.
Ailsa caught the flash of a rock pool glimmering under the hoary grey sky and knew that beneath its inky surface it would be bubbling with molluscs, crabs and sand shrimps. She passed the turn to a beach where a dead sperm whale had been washed up one summer when they were teenagers. They had gone to see it with their mother and Rachel. She frowned with the effort of recalling all the details. They had walked all the way there. Why hadn’t they gone by car? Then she remembered Georgia couldn’t drive because her arm was in plaster and she couldn’t change gear. Her mother had wiped away discreet tears. Was she crying for herself or for the whale? Rachel had wondered.
When the golden ridge of shingle bank appeared in the distance Ailsa knew she was almost home. Behind lay the beach where she had bunked off school to go swimming on hot summer afternoons. A bird flew over the road. It was a spoonbill. The way he carried his neck drawn back between his shoulders was a dead giveaway.
The presence of her mother was so overwhelming that for a moment Ailsa forgot that she had come to the house to check on her father. Or that Romy was waiting in the car outside. A pile of unopened envelopes addressed to Mrs Georgia Peploe caught her eye on the hall table. Beside it lay one of her mother’s notebooks with floral covers. Ailsa picked it up and turned to the last entry. There was a carefully handwritten list of guests to be invited to their fiftieth wedding anniversary party. A few names had been struck off, not because they had fallen out of favour but because they had died before the invitations were sent out. ‘The curse of Peploe,’ Adam had joked. Less than a week later Georgia was dead and the list was being used to let the same friends know about funeral plans. Totally unexpected. No flowers. Donations to be made to the British Heart Foundation.
This room was the last place she had seen her mother alive. Ailsa now wished the content of her last conversation with her had been more significant. If she had known she would never see Georgia again, what would she have asked her? She might have asked why she had stuck with their father through the lost years. If there was a point in her life where she felt she could relax and know that everything was sorted. Whether Georgia had any inkling about what had happened the night before Ailsa got married. And if she did, why she had never said anything.
Instead they had a slightly cross conversation about why it was correct in a mobile phone conversation to say a call was breaking up but not that it was breaking down. Since Georgia hardly ever used her mobile phone and rarely switched it on because she was afraid of wasting the battery, it was a particularly futile exchange. But Ailsa knew it was a displacement argument to avoid discussing the end of Rachel’s most recent relationship.
‘Let’s hope Rachel’s break-up doesn’t lead to a breakdown,’ her mother had said finally, trying to introduce levity back into the conversation.
‘Marriage isn’t the only construct available to forty-something women nowadays, Mum,’ said Ailsa. ‘Rach has a great job, great friends and some pretty exciting relationships. A quarter of women her age don’t have children any more.’
‘What will she do when she’s sixty?’ asked Georgia. ‘She could be living alone for the next third of her life.’
‘She can move in with one of her gay friends.’
Her mother had gone over to the bookshelf that dominated the right side of the room and pulled out a pocket guide to the birds of Britain. She had opened it on a page dedicated to the Arctic tern and excitedly explained that for only the second time in her life she had seen one on the marshes the previous day.
‘It travels over 44,000 miles a year so that it can have two summers. One here and one in the Arctic,’ Georgia marvelled as she showed Ailsa a picture of a bird that was indistinguishable from a seagull apart from its blood-red bill. ‘So it makes the most of everything. That’s how we should all live. And it mates for life. Amazing.’
She went on to say that she was alone when she spotted it and that Adam doubted that she had really seen it at all because only two had been sighted in the past decade.
‘If you knew how to work your phone you could have taken a photo to prove him wrong,’ Ailsa had chided her.
‘I know what I saw,’ said Georgia. ‘And that’s all that matters. As long as you know the truth, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.’
The cardigan her mother had been wearing that day was still hanging over the back of the armchair from where Georgia used to watch the sun set over the marshes in the evening through the hall window. Ailsa couldn’t help herself: she closed her eyes and lifted the cardigan to her nose and inhaled the scent of her mother. It was a blend of the Anais Anais perfume she had worn for the best part of half a century, the heathery musk of the marshes and smoke from the fire she was tending in the garden when her heart failed her. When Ailsa dropped the cardigan back onto the chair, she felt light-headed with loss.
‘Dad,’ she called out as she went from the hall into the small kitchen at the back of the house. No one answered. The floor was like a hamster cage. There were porridge oats, grains of instant coffee and scabs of burned rice underfoot. Ailsa crunched her way over to the sink. It was full of dirty crockery. On the windowsill she found his pills untouched.
She opened the dishwasher but shut it immediately because the smell of decaying food and rancid milk was overwhelming. Apart from a half-bottle of tonic water and an open tin of baked beans, the fridge was almost empty. The freezer, however, was filled with all the food that Ailsa had made. There were portions of shepherd’s pie, chicken casserole, meatballs, neatly marked with labels and suggestions about which vegetables might be compatible. None had been used. Ailsa could tell from the empty packets of Weetabix and the bottles lined up by the back door that Adam was probably existing on a diet of breakfast cereal washed down with milk and whisky.
‘Dad,’ she called out again. She went into the sitting room, half prepared to find him slumped in a chair. An old bar heater that had lost its grille glowed red hot in the corner and steam emanated from a pair of underpants that he was drying on an upturned bucket just inches away from the bars. Ailsa tried to remove them from the bucket but
they had fused to the melted plastic. A cup of tea was stuck to the surface of the table. Ailsa dipped a finger into the mug. It was stone cold. Feeling anxious, she headed towards the staircase. She ignored the banks of photographs on the wall as she went up, taking the stairs two at a time.
‘Adam,’ she shouted, thinking he might respond to his name. Since Georgia had died he had started taking a nap in the afternoon. He hated getting into bed on his own, he had confessed to Ailsa over Christmas. It took him hours to get to sleep and he woke up as soon as it got light in the morning. Not wanting to frighten him, Ailsa tentatively opened his bedroom door. The bed covers were so crumpled that it took a moment for Ailsa to realize there wasn’t a body beneath.
The back legs of the bed were still broken, and it now sloped at an even steeper angle. Ailsa could see that her father had tried to prop up the base with a makeshift pile of bricks that had collapsed, leaving a fine coating of red dust over the furniture. The sheets were filthy. He might have been sleeping in his shoes. On the bedside table on the side where her mother used to sleep, nothing had been moved. A book lay face down in the same position as her mother had left it. Slipstream by Elizabeth Jane Howard. There was a half-drunk glass of water. Ailsa held it up to the light and could see the faint imprint of her mother’s lipstick around the rim. Georgia’s nightdress was still under the pillow.
He wasn’t here. The bedroom window was open. It was so cold that Ailsa could see her own quickening breath. She looked outside and saw Romy in the car below. She tried to attract her attention, shouting and knocking on the glass, but Romy was wired up to the headphones, oblivious. She looked out towards the marshes, wondering if Adam had gone for a walk. He had slowed down over the past six months, and when the tide was in it was a struggle for him to get beyond the first few small wooden bridges across the mudflats. She couldn’t see him.