“And yet you treat me like one,” I spat out.
“This is about the book, isn’t it? You think I went too far.” You turned towards me and put a hand on my arm. You didn’t blink. “You don’t need to worry that Nan or Flora will read it. We won’t keep a copy in the house.”
“For God’s sake, not everything is about your work, Gil.” I pulled my arm out from under your hand.
“There’s no need for you to be concerned. You’re the mother of my children—it’ll always be you and the girls I come home to. I’d never desert any of you.”
“So you did take some stupid book groupie to your hotel and fuck her!” My fingers found my seat-belt button and the strap flew loose with force.
“It didn’t mean anything, Ingrid. It just happened.”
Without thinking I reached out across the gap between us and struck your face with the flat of my hand. It wasn’t hard, but you flinched and knocked the side of your head against the driver’s window. You said nothing, still looking ahead, as if punishment was something you wanted, something you deserved.
“It means something to me!” I said, pushing your head with both hands and slamming it into the window. I grabbed at the handle beside me, yanked the door open, and stumbled out of the car.
“Ingrid!” I heard you call. “Ingrid, I’m sorry!”
But without looking back, I ran into a gap in the gorse by the side of the road, slipping and tripping across roots and through sharp grass, sobbing as I ran. I kept running until my heart was pumping and my breath painful, and I had to slow to a trot. After a few minutes of walking, I recognised the path and found my way over the dunes to the sea. Behind a bank of clouds, the moon glowed and sprinkled its light across the moving water. The wind whipped my hair around my head. I considered wading in, thought about what would happen and whether I’d be missed, and although I believed I knew the answer, I took off my shoes, tied the laces together, slung them around my neck, and walked towards home on the firm sand that the retreating sea left behind. The car was on the drive when I got back, but you must have been in your writing room because you weren’t in the house. I paid the babysitter, sent her home, and went to bed.
In the morning, I telephoned Louise and she arranged everything for me. Two days later I went to a clinic and aborted our fifth child.
Ingrid
[Placed in Brilliant Creatures, by Clive James, 1983.]
Chapter 39
Gil went to bed when they returned from the beach. Nan gave him some water and one of the tablets he kept beside his bed. Flora sat next to him on her mother’s side, and Nan, still in her pencil skirt and top, in the chair.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Nan said, “but Viv doesn’t have that book, the one you were holding when you fell. She asked what it was called, though, because she might be able to get you a copy, or she thought there could be another in the shop. Sometimes Viv has duplicates.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gil said. “It was that particular one I wanted.” He coughed, his jaw clenched against the pain.
“Shall I get the doctor?” Nan stood up and plumped his pillows.
“No more doctors,” Gil said.
“Did the book have something in it, Daddy?” Flora asked.
“Just another note. Too late now.” He coughed several times, his head bending with the effort.
Nan held a glass with a straw up to his lips for him to suck on.
“You don’t want to see this, you girls. An old, sick man.”
Nan looked accusingly at Flora as she held the water.
“Better to be remembered like your mother—still young, still beautiful.” His eyelids dropped slowly, and Flora wondered if he saw Ingrid wearing her wide-brimmed hat and pushing a garden fork into the sandy soil or standing in the sunlight on the veranda.
They were silent for a while, Gil’s mouth falling open, his bottom jaw slack. Flora thought he was sleeping until, still with his eyes closed, he said, “Ambiguous loss.”
“What?” Nan said.
He opened his eyes. “I went to the library and they looked it up for me on a computer.”
“What did they look up?” Flora said.
“It’s when you don’t know if someone is dead or not and you can’t mourn. No closure.” He paused, as if gathering strength to continue. “Apparently I once told your mother that it was better to live without knowing, because then you could always live with hope.”
“You told me that, too,” Flora said.
“Dad, it doesn’t matter,” Nan said. “You should sleep.” She tugged on the side of the bedcover, straightening a wrinkle which wasn’t there.
“I was wrong,” Gil said. “Reality is better than imagination. Your mother is dead. I know that now.”
“No,” Flora said. “You saw her.”
“An apparition.”
Nan crossed her legs, said nothing.
“I don’t believe you,” Flora said.
“I used to think I needed a body, some kind of proof; I didn’t. It’s all in here.” He lifted a hand halfway to his head and pointed. “It’s not possible to live in limbo. You need to accept it, Flora. Bury her, say good-bye. All of us need to say good-bye.”
Two swimming costumes and a bikini hung limp over the bath-curtain rail. They were still damp, and sand was clumped in the gussets where Flora hadn’t bothered to rinse them out. She opened the airing cupboard crammed with old sheets, towels, blankets, and stained and flattened pillows—coloured layers of cloth like the tinted sand in the tiny bottles sold by Hadleigh’s tourist shops. Somewhere in the mass of fabric would be more swimming costumes and trunks like the ones she had found for Richard—left behind by long-gone summer visitors and stuffed amongst the linen. Only the top third of each shelf was ever used—washed, ironed, folded, and returned by Nan. Flora wormed her arms into the dense bottom layers, her fingers searching for smooth, slippery material. When she was immersed up to the elbows she grabbed a piece of cloth from the rear of the cupboard and pulled it forwards. A corner of a towel appeared. She hauled it out and recognised the faded sandstone colour, the bald patches where the nap had worn away, and the hole on one edge where the towel had been jammed over the peg on the back of the bathroom door. Flora held it up to her face, closed her eyes and inhaled; it smelled grey, the odour of fabric that has lain too long without being washed. Still, the image of her mother came, forever turning away in the pink dress, the scent of coconut from the gorse, the colour of golden honey, a book in her hand.
Flora went into the kitchen, where Richard was washing up the breakfast plates. Nan, standing beside him, was scooping a pot of sour cream into a glass mixing bowl. A large salmon was flopped in an oven dish, and salad ingredients and a bag of new potatoes were scattered on the counters.
“Do you remember this?” Flora said, holding out the towel.
Nan looked around. “What do you mean, remember it?” She blinked. “Flora, please put some clothes on. It’s not right.” She dolloped another pot of sour cream on top of the first and added a handful of chopped parsley.
“Richard’s seen it all before, haven’t you, Richard?” Flora said.
He smirked over Nan’s shoulder.
“It was Mum’s towel,” Flora said to Nan.
Nan stared down at the bowl in the crook of her arm as if she couldn’t bear to see her sister’s body. “I don’t recall any of us having our own towels, although that would be preferable. It’s always a free-for-all in this house, as far as I can see.”
“No, I mean the day she disappeared.”
“Put some clothes on, please.”
Flora wrapped the towel around her, tucking it in under her armpits. “Well?” she said, and sat at the table.
Nan picked up a spoon and stirred the parsley into the white cream. “It might be; I don’t remember.”
Richard filled the kettle, lifted cups from the cupboard. “Tea or coffee?” he said.
“If she took this towel to the beach that last t
ime”—Flora tucked it more tightly around her chest—“how did it get to be in the airing cupboard?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Nan snapped. “Where else would it be?”
“How did it get here, and what happened to the other things Mum had on the beach?”
“The same way that the ridiculous dress that you insist on wearing got back,” Nan said. “I put the things away, in the airing cupboard, in the wardrobe, on the bookshelves, wherever they were meant to go—which is a lot more than other people do.” She picked up half a lemon and crushed it in her fist so the juice flowed out from between her solid fingers into the bowl of sour cream.
“But how did they get home?”
“I don’t know. Martin must have brought everything over the next day—Mum’s clothes, the towel. Somebody picked it all up from the nudist beach and stuffed it in a bag. One of the search party, I suppose.”
“And her book?” Flora said. “What happened to that?” She wasn’t sure why it was so important to know how her mother’s things had got home, where they were now. An answer to a question she couldn’t quite work out.
“Like I said, I put things away in their proper places.”
“Didn’t the police want to see them?” Richard said.
Flora had almost forgotten he was in the room. “The fucking police were only interested in whether Daddy had murdered her and buried her body under the floorboards.” Flora stamped a foot. “But as soon as their dense little heads had worked out that he hadn’t, they weren’t interested in anything,” she said. “No suspicious circumstances. They were crap.”
“Flora,” Nan said, “that’s not fair. Mum was an adult.” To Richard she said, “She went for a swim; she left her clothes on the beach. The coast guard searched, of course, but . . .” Nan trailed off.
“What about her passport?” Richard said. He opened a cupboard and found the teapot, brown and round with several zigzags running through it where it had been glued together. He held it up to the window, as if unsure it would hold water.
“It was never found,” Flora said, as if proving something.
“She hadn’t used it for years—not since I was a baby. It would have expired anyway.” Nan stirred the sour cream with a spoon.
“You think she’s dead, too, don’t you?” Flora said. “I bet you’ve always thought that.”
Nan looked at her, sighed, and sat opposite, placing the glass bowl on the table between them. “She wouldn’t have left without writing a letter, a note, something. She wouldn’t have done that to us. She went for a swim, got into difficulty, and drowned. It’s as simple as that.” Nan gave a small laugh, and when Flora didn’t speak, she continued, “Mothers don’t leave their children.”
“Who says so?” Flora dipped a finger into the sour cream. “Fathers leave their kids all the time and there’s barely a shrug—or maybe someone’s a bit disappointed. Why should it be so shocking when a mother does it?” She put her finger in her mouth.
“Tea, I think,” Richard said.
“It’s different for mothers,” Nan said.
“Why? Because mothers are meant to love their children more than fathers? Because it’s supposed to come naturally?”
“I see it all the time at work,” Nan said. “There’s an instant bond between the mother and her child. The father might be in the room, might even be the first to hold them, will be delighted, but it’s not the same.” She stood and picked up the bowl.
“It wasn’t like that for this family, though, was it?” Flora said. “You just don’t like to admit it. Our mother didn’t have an instant bond with us. I’m not sure she had a bond with anyone. Probably all she had was duty, expectation, and guilt. She could have left because it was all too much and still be out there.”
Nan talked over the end of Flora’s words. “I don’t know why you want her to come home if she was so terrible.”
“Being a mother didn’t come easily to her. Not like being a father does for Daddy.”
“You have no idea, do you, little sister?” Nan shook her head. Richard waited with the tea caddy in his hands.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Flora said. “He’s been a good father.” Nan took a deep breath, and Flora waited. “What?”
“The man’s dying. It’s not right to talk about this now.” Nan stirred the cream once more.
“When will it ever be right?”
“You really want to know? How about this? He was a womanizer. He slept with whoever he could get his hands on.”
Flora laughed. Richard swilled warm water around the teapot and counted three spoonfuls of leaves into it.
“When I was fourteen, fifteen,” Nan said, “every time Dad went out, Mum and I used to worry where he’d gone, who he would bring home to that damn writing room.”
“That’s ridiculous. Daddy wouldn’t do that.” Flora’s voice rose; she felt the rush of anger and expected Richard to intervene, to say something, but he was waiting for the kettle to boil.
“What did you think he was doing there? Writing?” It was Nan’s turn to laugh. “For your whole life he only managed to produce one book. And what a book that was. I’m still not sure how much of it’s true. I could never work it out.”
From the corner of her eye, Flora saw Richard look at her. “Of course it’s not true.”
“How blind have you been all these years?” Nan said. “While you and I were in our beds, he was down the garden having sex with Megan or some other girl, and Mum would leave the house and go swimming.”
Richard took the milk out of the fridge and sniffed it.
“Megan?” Flora said. “Megan who used to babysit? I don’t believe you.”
“God, none of it matters now,” Nan said. “Just forget it.”
“You can’t drop a bombshell like that and then say forget it.”
“Look, he’s been making things up his whole life. The big important writer that everybody loved, speaking to Mum on the phone, seeing her in Hadleigh. It’s all been nonsense.”
The kettle rumbled.
“Not all of it,” Flora said, almost to herself, almost hopefully.
“Oh, Flora, there are so many things you conveniently remember wrong. Sometimes I wonder if you were living in the same house as Mum and me.” The metal spoon chinked against the glass of the bowl and some cream splashed onto Nan’s chin.
“Nobody told me anything,” Flora shouted. “I had to work it out by listening at doors, overhearing snatches of conversation, and filling in the gaps. Don’t blame me if I made it up.”
“Stop complaining,” Nan said. “At least you had Dad. Who did I have watching out for me? Not even Mum when she was here. And you didn’t have to suddenly become the adult at the age of fifteen because there was no one else to do the job of a mother.”
“No one ever asked you to do it.” Flora pushed her chair out from the table.
“Who else was going to make sure there was food in the house, that there were clean clothes, that you went to school? It wasn’t going to be our father. Overnight I had to become a mother to a daughter I didn’t want.”
Flora flinched as if Nan had struck her. The kitchen window clouded with steam.
“You have no idea how difficult it was finishing my training,” Nan continued, “when I had to keep coming back here and worrying what you were doing—staying out all night, drinking, smoking, sleeping around. Don’t think I didn’t know. Like father, like daughter.”
Flora stood up, her chair tipping behind her and knocking over some books stacked against the wall. “I was only out all the time because being at home was so fucking awful I couldn’t bear to be here.”
“You can’t blame me for that,” Nan said. “That’ll be because of the man lying in the bedroom, who you think is so bloody amazing. The two things he was good for were providing the money and the house, and the first came from a sleazy book which makes me ashamed to be his daughter, and the second was inherited from his own terrible father.” A
s the kettle reached crisis point, Nan took hold of the bowl with both hands and hurled. Flora ducked as it flew over her head, shards of glass and sour cream spraying the kitchen wall, table, and floor. In the doorway Nan turned. “Actually,” she spat, “I wasn’t telling the complete truth earlier. Yes, I think Mum drowned, but it could easily have been suicide, and if it was, it’s your precious daddy who bears the responsibility.”
Chapter 40
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 30TH JUNE 1992, 4:35 AM
Gil,
I’ve been thinking about getting a job. (Although who’d have me—undereducated, inexperienced—with so many unemployed? Maybe I should learn to drive.)
In the suitcase under my bed there’s a photograph Jonathan took of you and Flora sitting on the steps of your writing room: you’re fifty and Flora’s nearly five—in a month she’ll start school. It’s late afternoon, the shadows are long, the light is golden. For once she’s wearing clothes—a bikini with a frill around the bottom. Her feet are crusted with sand, as if she’s just come up from the beach. You sit beside her in jeans and a T-shirt, leaning with your arms folded on your knees, your head angled towards her. The sun highlights your cheekbones and the fair hair on your forearms. Flora is looking up at you, an intense, concentrated stare, and it is clear that you’re deep in conversation. Studying the photograph brings back the childish sting of being left out. And the hardest thing to write is that Nan wasn’t enough compensation for your connection with Flora. Nan has always been complete, self-sufficient; she hasn’t needed anyone, least of all me. The one person in our family who I was meant to mother was my dead boy, George. Maybe I should have gone years ago.
It was less than a year ago (last September, in fact), when I saw the young man through the glass of the front door. I thought he was a junior reporter or an evangelist. He was holding a book with both hands as if it were ballast, a weight to keep him grounded on our doorstep, and if he were to let go he’d rise and bob in the rafters of the veranda roof. He tried to smile when he saw me approach, but it was strained.
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