The Illuminations

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Really?’

  She looked at him. She waited. ‘Anyway, she gave it up. Then she started going to Blackpool just before I was born and she met the man who must be my father.’

  ‘You didn’t know him?’

  ‘I saw him a few times. His name was Harry. She met him at a night school or something. A young woman who’d lost her goal. And suddenly there was this Harry and he was a photography lecturer in Manchester. He was in with that group of young photographers who were out on the streets and in the factories, you know, recording it all, and it gave her another chance. She was the only woman – I mean, among the photographers.’

  ‘They didn’t get married?’

  Dr Sabin found it interesting to talk to somebody who didn’t have angina or a common complaint. People tend to forget you’re human when you’re a doctor and what he liked most was conversation. So the appointment with Alice ran on, the doctor wishing to expand his knowledge of this strange family who had travelled the world, who had talent, stories. The old mother was even quite famous, she was saying.

  ‘No, they were never married. She got pregnant. She’s got some information about Harry written down. I think he wrote it.’ Alice shook her head and the silence that came said enough.

  ‘We can move on if you like.’

  ‘It’s hard to talk about. It’s hard to know what’s true. Harry was a war hero. Harry flew the spy planes. But I’ve never seen any of the medals she talks about.’

  ‘They’re a bit overrated, those things,’ he said. She chose to ignore the doctor’s easy familiarity with all the world’s predicaments and situations. He was a bit like that. She came quite regularly to see him and always left feeling better, but it annoyed her the way he found every problem so familiar. It was clearly a part of his effort at cheerfulness and she found herself hoping he was a secret drinker.

  ‘Other people’s great deeds,’ Dr Sabin said. ‘They’re sometimes a bit hard to take. I know I find that.’

  ‘I was never able to ask.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because, you know, the truth is so obvious to some people that they don’t feel the need to share it. In fact, they resent being asked about it. They just want everyone to behave as if their story is the only story. And the people who ask questions in that situation are treated like traitors. It’s a form of control and a kind of bullying.’

  ‘You describe it very well.’

  ‘I’ve had it all my life.’

  He told her to take her time. Sometimes Alice would just shudder at the memory of things. ‘Okay?’ he asked.

  ‘She always left me with other people. I was really brought up by the neighbours.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a thing in Glasgow. Somebody should write a book about the role of the next-door neighbour. She’s got the same thing again with some woman who lives next door to her now. Maureen, she’s called. We don’t really know anything about her, though she’s learning a lot about us, I’m sure. Same old story: the neighbour’s in charge.’

  ‘And you can’t speak to your mother about the past?’

  ‘Too late, doctor. Too late. For years I tried to please her and be more like her. She thinks I’m boring, I’m conventional, and I am those things, to people like her. Married to the wrong person. Too interested in the wrong things. You know. But the fact is, my existence threatens her story. I used to think she might love me more by realising I was all she had left of Harry. But that’s not true, Dr Sabin. My father has never gone because the great story of him only grows and grows.’

  ‘You feel you’ve been overshadowed?’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’ve been sacrificed.’

  ‘You might be wrong.’

  ‘Maybe. I used to think it would be possible, one day, to get back to a kind of reality – you know, about her own achievements, her photographs, everything she did. But it wasn’t possible. She just transferred her worship of Harry onto my son, Luke. She always wanted a son. He’s always been close to her and now he’s coming back.’

  ‘He’s been in Afghanistan?’

  ‘He discharged himself. Or something like that. And now she’s so far gone it’s like all her fantasies coming home to roost. None of the lies were shot down or set to rights, and I didn’t get to talk. I didn’t get to ask about my father or get a grip on the past.’

  ‘Their past.’

  ‘It’s my past, too,’ she said.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I will never be able to ask her.’

  ‘And that’s important to you?’

  ‘It was. But it’s too late.’

  ‘Her life’s not over,’ Dr Sabin said. ‘And yours is very far from being over, Alice. We’ll keep talking.’ He stood up and walked to the window and stood looking out at the sea. ‘We have a lot of it now, with the ageing population,’ he said. ‘And dementia presents insidiously, so that patients, carers, family – doctors, too – we all find ourselves only slowly understanding it. But it’s true that dementia can dramatise some of the issues the patient might have had with memory and so on.’

  Alice stood up. ‘Dramatise. Yes. With memory. It’s as if my mother turned to something else when she gave up her photographs.’

  ‘Something else?’

  ‘Make-believe,’ Alice said. ‘Fantasy. Like all her hopes went sour and she just couldn’t take reality any more.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve always been made to feel I lack faith.’

  ‘I agree there’s drama in it while it’s happening,’ Dr Sabin said, ‘but I can tell you from experience, Alice, that life reveals itself, in any case. I see it every day in this room. Time shows everything.’

  She lifted her coat off the back of the chair. ‘I didn’t ever think it would be so hard. So hard to face it.’ She could feel her eyes well up and her breath staggered from one sentence to the next. ‘I would love to spend half an hour with the woman who made those pictures.’

  ‘She hasn’t gone,’ he whispered. ‘Quite the opposite. She’s coming back. And maybe you could prepare to meet her halfway. Between the person she is now and the person she used to be. Enter into the spirit of where her mind is going and allow her …’

  ‘She’s never needed my permission for anything.’

  ‘Well, maybe she does now.’ They sat in a state of hesitation for a few seconds and the seconds seemed long. ‘There’s been too much denial in this family,’ Alice said.

  ‘Maybe so. Maybe in all families. But your own counselling might mean you can help her by helping yourself. Your mother isn’t your enemy. She isn’t your only resource. She’s losing parts of herself and gaining others. And if it’s possible, Alice, you might take it less personally.’

  ‘I worry that her lies shaped my life. I worry that I only took up with Sean, my husband Sean, because of her war-hero thing. I was always trying to keep up. My husband was a soldier and I lost him and I used to worry I would lose my son the same way. You don’t see the connections in your life until it’s too late to disentangle them.’

  ‘So, Luke’s on his way home?’

  ‘Yes, he is. I think it’s been hard for him. He’s been through a lot out there and I want him to know, when he comes back, that he doesn’t have to talk about it if he doesn’t want to.’

  The doctor turned. ‘We all have something to hold back,’ he said. ‘And maybe some of us depend on other people’s mistakes to make us feel better about our own.’

  ‘So, it’s my fault?’ She produced a ball of tissue from her sleeve and held it against her nose.

  ‘Not everything reduces itself to the question of fault, Alice. Most things don’t, in fact.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You’ve coped well.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Sean and I thought we would live for a hundred years. And when he died it was going to be me and Luke against the world. But Luke chos
e my mother, just as she chose Harry.’

  ‘You feel the men got the better deal?’

  ‘God, yes,’ she said. ‘What were the men really like? God knows. Because they always got top billing. The boys are the heroes in this family.’

  ‘She didn’t like women?’

  ‘She loves women. Her friends. The woman next door. The girls she knew when she was young. She just doesn’t particularly like the woman she gave birth to.’

  ‘Just remember, she’s not well.’

  ‘I think her mind’s gone. I told you about the rabbit?’

  ‘Yes, you said.’

  ‘Caring about a fake rabbit. What’s that about?’

  Some smiles aren’t smiles. What he did with his mouth was more like an acknowledgement, a firm admission that some mysteries must be endured and never solved. He sat down and laid a hand on the mousepad and put a finger to his lips. ‘Nobody takes me seriously,’ he said. ‘But the thing I wish I could prescribe isn’t available in the pharmacy.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They don’t keep it in bottles.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Time,’ he said.

  She got outside and breathed the sea air, taking her time, moving on very precisely to another self. You have to dust yourself off and get on with it and that’s that, she said. Alice could drop in and out of her own feelings and now she wanted a latte. She walked down the street to the Marina Cafe thinking of something entirely new, and, once inside, she waited. No one was there and the sweet jars lined the wall, the jukebox playing ‘Love Me Do’ to the mirrors and the clean tables.

  BLUE

  Maureen said she wanted one of those sky-coloured radios and a light blue rug for the living room. Not exactly the same blue everywhere but very similar and kind of summery. ‘I’ve never been one for dark colours,’ she said. ‘People with black sofas and brown curtains, heaven help us, they want their heads examined. There are such nice things in the shops and our Ian’s handy with a screwdriver, so if you go to IKEA you can just get him round and he’ll hammer it together, because you don’t want those men coming, you know, the ones with the van. They make you smile. They charge you a fortune and leave a right mess in your hall.’

  Maureen always said she had too much time to think.

  ‘I love them to death, but …’

  Maybe her children had betrayed her by seeking happiness elsewhere. She’d think it mad if anyone said it, but her children saw how affronted she could be by their ambitions and their progress. ‘Nobody is prouder of their children’s success than I am,’ she’d whisper. And she did enjoy their achievements in a boast-to-the-neighbours kind of way. But she didn’t like what comes with success in one’s children: the independence, the sudden confidence, the distance, the self-sufficiency. That was all bad news from her point of view. More than bad news: it was selfish. They should be holding themselves responsible for the way she felt, as if only their guilt could assuage her. And, because of this, it was impossible for her ever to let them see that she was happy. Maureen was a woman who kept her good times a secret from her children for fear they might stop pitying her.

  The great secret was she liked her life. The routines at Lochranza Court suited her down to the ground and she loved her friends. But that didn’t stop her from leaving messages on the voicemails of her children, messages that ended with a few tears. She would sniff into the phone and slowly her bad feelings would become an aria of blame about them not doing enough. In all their adult lives – and Ian hadn’t been a teenager for twenty-five years – Maureen had never sat her children down together at a table for a meal. And it wasn’t because she couldn’t cook or couldn’t buy a chicken. It was something else: making a meal would have suggested a level of well-being that some part of her, some sad part of her, couldn’t bear them to witness at the same time. She resented their spouses as if they had cast a spell on her children and made them forget who they were.

  She had put out a lovely spread for Alice. Cut sandwiches sat on plates, pieces of Victoria sponge, amid the mugs and spoons at the kitchen table. Good God, thought Alice: sugar in the tea and all this cake and it isn’t even lunch-time. ‘She measures out her life in sugar spoons,’ her mother cracked one time, when she was well. And it was true Alice always worried about her weight.

  ‘Oh, what the hell. Who cares?’ Maureen said. ‘It’s just us two. If we’re not good to ourselves, who’s going to be?’

  Coming along the corridor that day, Alice had enjoyed an unexpected feeling of belonging. Some days she experienced a random turn for the better and it usually didn’t last. She suddenly admired the housing complex and saw it as a wonderful cooperative. She said to herself she hoped that, when her time came, they would bring her to live in a place like this. With the Yamaha organ and the board games, the large-print books, the knitting patterns, it seemed made for tired wanderers, except that most of the people in there had lived all their lives in the town. She thought she probably deserved a place at Lochranza Court after all her upsets, before realising that was the sort of thing Maureen would say.

  Each flat had a ledge by the front door, like a low concrete table, which the resident would crowd with ornaments. Flat 21 had a collection of porcelain dogs with sad eyes, jowly faces and hanging ears. Maureen’s daughter once said it was a black hole of empathy. Flat 20 had a host of fairies hopping about in eternity on gossamer wings. ‘Life is much more interesting if it scarcely exists,’ said their surprised little faces, their slender hands. Alice was heading to Maureen’s place, but passing her mother’s she saw again the photograph on her ledge of a shipyard and a red poppy stuck in the corner of the frame.

  ‘That photograph,’ Alice said, putting down her teacup, ‘the one outside my mother’s door. It’s one of hers, isn’t it? One of the ones she took years ago?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maureen said. She was washing the butter knife in the sink. ‘It was one of the pictures from those suitcases she keeps in her bathroom. But she says there’s a lot more of her stuff somewhere.’

  ‘And why get them out now?’

  ‘Well, your mum being the way she is, it’s good to get things out and try to remember, you know? The nurse in the Memory Club, she encourages that kind of thing. Get stuff out, she says. Get the old albums out and stir up the memories. So in the evenings your mum and I have been pulling things out and I’ve been making piles of them. We thought we’d put that one outside the door for people to see.’

  The late-night tasks. The letters to Luke. Alice couldn’t be sure she wasn’t envious of Maureen. It’s the sort of thing a daughter should be doing with her mother. And yet she was grateful to the neighbour because she knew that Anne would never have enjoyed doing those things with her. Anne trusted strangers, and so, quite clearly, did Maureen: they liked a new person’s willingness not to jump on the things you said, questioning everything and doubting you. Families did that but strangers didn’t. And so Alice swallowed another insult when she was told about the picture. The photographs were coming out of the suitcases and it was a good thing. And when she thought about it, well, it probably was a good thing if the past could emerge, at last, without her mother’s editing.

  ‘They’re fantastic pictures,’ Maureen said. ‘And I suppose they show you what Anne was like in her prime, you know, long before this started happening to her.’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ Alice said. ‘Some people hide away in their prime. You can’t know them.’

  ‘And you only get to them later?’

  ‘That’s right. When they need you.’

  ‘You know I help her with her letters?’ Maureen said.

  ‘I do, yes,’ said Alice. ‘It’s been very kind. I appreciate it. Especially you helping her keep in touch with my son. We’re an odd family.’

  ‘I could show you odd. You should see mine. One minute you’re the best mammy in the world and the next minute you could be missing and they wouldn’t notice.’

  ‘I don’t thi
nk this tour’s been easy for Luke,’ Alice said. ‘The Ayrshire boy who died. You know about that? Well, Luke was there. He saw it.’

  ‘Aye. You and I spoke on the phone, remember? For a terrible moment we all thought …’

  ‘Yes.’

  They sat in silence for a moment. Maureen felt Alice was a bit strange that day, a bit stressed or something, but frankly, it was hard enough trying to keep up with Anne without worrying about her daughter as well. ‘Anyway,’ Maureen said, ‘it’s not only the letters from Luke. Anne’s been getting other letters, too, and there’s one that seems quite important. It’s from Canada.’ Maureen brought it from the cutlery drawer and handed it to Alice. The envelope was marked with crayon and with various stamps and crossings out. The name of the place it came from was across the top of the letter. ‘The Art Gallery of Ontario,’ read Alice. And when her eye dropped to the foot of the page she read out the whole address: ‘317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T 1G4.’

  ‘That’s the address. It’s a woman, I think,’ Maureen said, twisting her head to get a better view of the letter she’d already looked at many times. Alice went on in silence and pressed her own lips with a finger when she noticed they were moving. The curator who wrote the letter said she was writing about ‘Mrs Quirk’s photographs’, and she used the words ‘honoured’ and ‘intrigued’, ‘visionary’ and ‘important’. It said the gallery was planning an exhibition of lost women photographers and that Anne Quirk was an artist with a connection to Ontario. The word ‘marginalised’ appeared in the third paragraph, and, further down, where Alice noticed a teacup stain, it spoke of ‘permission’. Alice felt a sudden weight of responsibility reading the letter. She wasn’t at all sure what to think so she folded it away immediately and put the envelope in her bag.

  ‘Isn’t that something?’ Maureen said.

  Alice found it hard to say anything. She simply stood looking at the images on the television, staring at them before realising there was no sound on, then she turned with damp eyes to the centre of the room and tried to regain her composure. In some rooms you don’t notice the contents so much as how carefully they’ve been polished.