by David Rees
“Have they drunk a lot?”
“I don’t know.”
The chorus of the song came again, and the two women pranced along the hall once more, their leg kicks even higher. “OIIII!!” The record finished, and they broke apart, shouting with laughter.
“Well, it was before our day,” Aunt Bridie said eventually. “Momma’s favourite piece.”
“Yes,” my mother answered. “I remember her trying to teach us the steps.”
“Let’s have another drink.”
At the sitting room door Mum saw me staring down from the top of the stairs. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
“You were making one hell of a noise! You woke Nic up!”
The phone rang. Mum—the call was for her—talked for a long time, very quietly and seriously. We couldn’t hear a word and Nic, bored, went back to bed; but I was intrigued and stayed on the landing, trying to eavesdrop. She wasn’t in the habit of holding lengthy, half-whispered phone conversations.
Some time later she rang off, then said, loudly, “Michael, are you still there? Michael?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Come down. I’ve something to tell you.”
In the sitting room Aunt Bridie was half-way through another bottle of Guinness. Mum said “That was your father,” and she stared at the ceiling, a variety of strange expressions flitting across her face. Her hands more than anything else betrayed her agitation. Her right hand was pulling almost savagely at each finger, in turn, of her left hand; I could hear the joints crack. “He wants you to go and stay with him. For a couple of weeks.” I was dumbfounded. “I agreed that you should,” she said.
“Why?” My voice was high and strangled.
“Because. . . you’re old enough, perhaps, to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Is this really a good idea, Nora?” my aunt asked.
Mum looked at her helplessly for a moment, then said “I can’t explain. I mean I can’t bring myself to explain.”
“But you have to!”
“Oh, keep out of it!” my mother said, angrily. Aunt Bridie got up and left the room. “Michael . . . no.” She shook her head. “I guess you’ll find out when you’re there.” She added, after a moment, “Your father has . . . some good points. He can be kind, gentle, thoughtful. Well . . . he was. I don’t know what he’s like now.”
“Nobody’s asked me if I want to go. I suppose I have a choice?”
“I think you should see him.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s your father.”
“That’s no reason to force anyone to do anything.”
She sighed, took a sip from the Guinness her sister had left on the table, and said “You shouldn’t walk about the house in your underwear. It’s not decent.”
“I don’t want to go!”
She then said one word which astonished me: astonished me because I don’t remember her ever saying it to me before, at least not in that tone of voice. The word was “Please”.
Which was why I found myself two days later bound for a suburb of Bournemouth with the very odd name of Pokesdown. Normally I would have enjoyed the journey, changing trains at Winchester, and seeing the complex railway junctions at Eastleigh and Southampton—one of my mother’s favourite stories about her childhood in the second world war was of being marooned in a crowded train at Eastleigh for nine hours while German bombs deluged on Southampton and smashed the place to bits. I’d often been to Eastleigh and Southampton, but always by car or bus; I wanted to know if their stations were anything like the mental pictures I’d obtained from my mother’s reminiscences. There would certainly be some worthwhile railway paraphernalia to observe in Southampton, where I had to change trains yet again. And stations en route with names that interested me, like Totton and Sway. And Pokesdown, of course.
But I could’t concentrate on any of this. I was too worried about meeting my father. No amount of pestering my mother—and Aunt Bridie when Mum was out of the house—had given me any explanation of why he had left his wife and young son to go and live in Bournemouth. There had subsequently been a divorce, but I knew that, just as I knew what my father looked like in photographs of thirteen years ago; and that he was a writer of children’s books, that he hadn’t remarried and didn’t have a girlfriend. (On this last point Mum was always curiously certain, even though they had not been in touch with one another for more than a decade.) After the Lambeth Walk evening both women went round the house grim-faced and tight-lipped, scarcely speaking; so it was Nic who supplied me with one detail I had not heard before. “He owns a house on the cliffs in Boscombe,” he said, “and he shares it with the harp player of the Wessex Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra.”
“How do you know that?”
“Mum told me. Ages ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Didn’t think it worth mentioning. Anyway . . . I suppose I thought you knew.”
“But . . . he doesn’t have another wife. Or a girlfriend.”
“The harpist is a he.”
Perhaps my dad is queer, I thought, then laughed at such a silly notion even entering my head. What did I really think of him? When I was seven, eight, nine, I used to feel angry that he wasn’t around. Sometimes very angry. A whole bit of life that was mine by right was being denied me. It was hurtful to see other kids with their fathers playing football, swimming, or even just walking along a road. They had a dad and I did not. I felt jealous and wounded. Mum did little to assuage these emotions, indeed possibly aided and abetted them, though whether consciously or not I don’t know. In the rare moments when the subject of my father came up in conversation, she would always run him down; he was unreliable, or self-centred, or didn’t understand other people. She never suggested he was some kind of monster, just a rather faulty man who hadn’t grown up properly. But, I would say to myself, he invariably sends us money, every month, dead on time.
Sometimes I was teased at school for having only one parent, but I usually settled that by punching the offending kid on the nose, quite hard. When I reached the age of eleven and went to school in Winchester, I was no longer angry and sad. I’d become used to the facts of existence, and was indifferent about my father: he didn’t live with us; there was nothing I or anyone else could do to remedy that, and there were plenty of other things to worry about or enjoy. Until the Lambeth Walk evening. As the train rumbled on through Totton and Sway, I began to shiver inside, like a leaf in autumn. If only she hadn’t said “Please!” By the time I arrived at Pokesdown, Alresford and that afternoon I’d yanked the stone off the railway line seemed light years off in the past.
He hadn’t aged a great deal, to judge from the photographs I’d seen, though his hair was greyer than I’d imagined. He was wearing a tee-shirt and shorts, which rather surprised me, and he looked suntanned and fit. He was nervously smoking a cigarette. I recognized him at once: he didn’t recognize me, but I told myself not to be upset by that; how could he possibly know who I was? I was three when he saw me last, and now we were the same height.
“Dad. . .?”
“Mike? Is it you, Mike?”
“Yes.”
He smiled and laughed, then shaking his head, exclaimed “Terrible! I could have walked by you in the street and not have known!” We stared at each other for a while in silence; almost, I guess, as if we were drinking in each other’s appearance, fixing it in our minds like a snap-shot. Then he said, “The car’s outside. Let’s get back to the house.”
During the drive he asked how my mother was and Aunt Bridie and Nic, and wondered how I’d amuse myself in Bournemouth for two weeks—as if, I thought, this visit had been thrust on him unwillingly instead of occurring at his own request—and he wanted to know what foods I did not like eating. He hoped I’d get on well with Adrian, the harpist, who was the cook of the household; “I’ve never learned to do that sort of thing,’’ he said, laughing again. The beaches were superb at t
his time of the year, he told me; I could, if I wanted to, swim every day. He was going to a concert that night. The Wessex Philharmonic Symphony were playing at the Winter Gardens, and maybe I’d like to come too; he usually went to all their concerts as Adrian provided free tickets. “It’s Mahler’s tenth symphony,’’ he said. “Do you know it?’’
“No.’’
“It’s a bit . . . esoteric.’’
“What’s that mean?”
“Out of the ordinary. Do you like classical music?”
“Some. Yes.”
“Good. That’s settled then.”
What was settled? Nothing, as far as I could see. Maybe this visit had been imposed on him; could Mum. . .could Mum have deliberately arranged it? If so, why? And as far as classical music was concerned, I knew what I liked: Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart. The little Mahler I’d heard was a confusing jumble of sounds, too much going on at once.
There were no buildings on the other side of Boscombe Overcliff Drive, so from my bedroom window there was a marvellous view: grass that abruptly stopped on the edge of the cliffs, and beyond that a great expanse of blue sea dancing and winking in the summer sunshine. The beach was out of sight, tucked under the cliffs, but in two minutes I could be running through warm sand into the waves. The whole sweep of Poole Bay was visible, from Swanage and Studland on the right to the two piers, and on the left the dunes and beaches that led up to the great lump of land called Hengistbury Head. Out in the sea were the jagged rocks and lighthouse of the Needles, the nearest corner of the Isle of Wight, its feet and toes.
Perhaps I could enjoy myself here. Bournemouth seemed large, and inviting—it couldn’t be worse, for a teenage kid in the summer, than Alresford. Dad didn’t want me around all the time, I assumed—he was probably working on a book and would need peace and quiet. Adrian, who wasn’t at home when we arrived, would probably be out most days practising his harp.
I liked Boscombe Overcliff Drive. The name was a help to start with—it sounded so unusual. And rather grand. “Oh, I live in Boscombe Overcliff Drive” had a better ring to it than Grange Road, Alresford. During my first hours alone that afternoon I explored the immediate neighbourhood; the houses, all built before the second world war, were solid, reassuring structures that didn’t look as if they’d blow away in the first gales of autumn, like windy Tralee. They had big, established gardens, lovingly tended by their owners who seemed to be frail old men and women in their seventies and eighties. “Bournemouth is costa geriatrica,” my father said when I asked where the kids were. “An old people’s haven. They come here to rot and die. I think Adrian and I are the youngest people in the whole road.”
“There must be some kids around.”
“Oh, you’ll find plenty on the beach,” he said.
He was right. At the foot of the cliffs, just below where he lived, was another world—families, young lovers, and kids playing games and swimming and snoozing in the sun. The sea was warm, too: I really enjoyed swimming on that beach. Back on the cliff top was the grass, the old ladies huddling in shelters and looking at the sea or walking their dogs; an immense profusion of pine trees with their gummy, resiny scents drifting on the wind; the summer gardens—roses, vivid scarlet geraniums, flashy zinnias, montbretia a dazzling orange, and cool blue scabious. At a turn in the road was the building that dominated the area—a block of flats, but no ordinary block of flats: it was like a huge Moorish palace all curlicues, turrets, pergolas and zigzag ornamentation as if an Arab sheikh had installed himself there with room enough for a harem of a thousand wives. “A millionaire’s folly,” Dad said. “I don’t know when it was built; turn of the century, I guess. Been split up into flats for years now, and it costs the absolute earth to live there.” It gave the right touch of the bizarre and the mysterious to what I already felt was a totally different place from sleepy old Alresford and dull old Winchester, even though I was only fifty miles away and still in the same county. Bournemouth was as foreign as if I’d been whisked off to the coast of Morocco.
Dad’s house was also something different, quite unlike shabby Tralee which was too much lived in and not always clean, its garden neglected as Mum and Aunt Bridie said there was never a spare moment to weed flower-beds and prune shrubs. Nic and I were the only members of our family who did any work out of doors, and that was confined to mowing the lawn in order to earn our allowances. Dad was enthusiastic about his well-kept garden, particularly the begonias in the greenhouse, and the pond with its goldfish and red water-lilies. “But it does take up an enormous amount of time,” he said, “especially when you have to do it yourself.”
“Doesn’t Adrian give you a hand?” I asked.
“All Adrian ever does out here is to demand that half the plants get moved around. He has a mania for wanting to dig things up and shove them in somewhere else.”
“Does he actually do that?”
“I won’t let him.”
The living room and the kitchen were as neat as the garden, and I said Tralee was never like this. I expected Dad to pick up the cue and ask me why, or make some comment about Mum not caring enough, but his mind was more preoccupied with his own house. “I sometimes think this place is too much of a museum,” he said. “I prefer my home to look as if people live in it. At least in my study I can enjoy making a mess.”
“Why not down here?”
“Adrian tidies everything away. He’s extremely house-proud.” Adrian wasn’t getting a very good press, I thought, and wondered, if that was the case, why Dad decided to share his existence with someone he didn’t seem to get on with tremendously well.
“Where is Adrian?” I asked.
“At the Winter Gardens rehearsing the Mahler. It’s a very difficult piece, and the harp has quite a lot to do. He’s nervous and excited about it: they’ve never played it before.”
He took me upstairs and showed me his study, which was next to my bedroom and had the same view of the sea. On his desk, which was by the window, was a typewriter and a manuscript written in long-hand; if he was lost for inspiration, I supposed, he could look up and enjoy what the weather was doing with the English Channel. The walls were covered with pictures and shelves—there were books, papers, ornaments, and potted plants on every available surface. I noticed a framed photograph of me as a baby. Two shelves were devoted entirely to his own works. “I didn’t know you’d written so many,” I said.
“Twenty-two published. More than that written; I still get rejections, but I’m hardened to that.” I was, I said to myself, the first rejection to which he became hardened.
“There’s a lot more than twenty-two here.’’
“Ah, well, American editions, paperbacks and translations. The Acacia Tree was even translated into Afrikaans; Heaven knows why the Dutch South Africans were interested in a second world war story about three English boys in Kent!” He pulled out a book, glanced at it, and replaced it.
“Do you earn a lot of money?”
“Just about enough to keep going.”
“Are you famous?”
He laughed. “What a strange question! Does it mean you haven’t read any of them?”
“I read them once. It was in the school library.” He frowned, as if he was hoping I’d read them all and could give a scholarly dissertation on the subject. Or maybe he’d thought that by reading his books I’d have discovered a way of keeping in touch with him. “The person you learn most about when you read a novel,” my English teacher once said, “is the author. He leaves a smudge of himself on every page.” But Mum never encouraged me to read Dad’s collected masterpieces. Not that she actively discouraged me either; I just felt that she would have been hurt if she’d found me with my nose stuck in the pages of The Nightmare of Malta or The Acacia Tree. Anyway, as I said, after the age of eleven, I hardly ever thought about Dad at all.
“Which book was it you read?” he asked.
“The Nightmare of Malta.”
“Ah. Did you enjoy it?”
/> “Yes. Yes.” I knew I sounded insincere, but I couldn’t help that; it was so long ago that I really didn’t remember much about it.
“Well, they’re all here,” he said, waving an arm at the bookshelves. “If you’re in the mood, you can read some of them during your stay. But—” he added, a
little anxiously, “—don’t think you have to.”
“I will. I’d like to. But. . . what age are they for?” He winced, as if that was a disagreeable question. “All ages. A novel is a novel is a novel, whether the main character or the reader you have in mind is seven or seventy. But . . . to be more specific . . . I’ve written children’s books, and young children’s books like Disappointed Dragons, and young adult books.”
“Young adult? Does that mean for teenagers?’
“Yes.”
“I’ll try one of those.”
Perhaps he didn’t care for the way this conversation had developed, for he said “Let’s go downstairs now.” On the landing he stopped, opened a door, and said “This is Adrian’s study.” It was a smaller room than Dad’s, very uncluttered—a desk that had nothing on it, two chairs, a tiny bookcase, and one picture, a strident violent painting in clashing yellows, reds and purples that showed two cockerels fighting. Their claws and beaks looked murderous, and feathers were flying all over the place. I disliked it at once—it was far too disturbing. It reminded me of my fight with the boy who had put the stone on the railway track.
“I don’t think much of it, either,” my father said, as if he was reading my thoughts.
But there was one object that was fascinating: certainly not something you’d find in other houses in Boscombe Overcliff Drive, or indeed anywhere else in Bournemouth. Right in the middle of the carpet, so you had to walk round it to get to the corners of the room, was a full-size orchestral harp.
“That is beautiful,” I said.
“He plays it like an angel.” I plucked it—a gorgeous, resonant low note—then brushed my finger-nails across the top strings, producing a delicious cascade of cacophonous noises like a jet of water in sound. “Don’t do that!” Dad said.