The Illuminations

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Once in a blue moon,’ she said. ‘And it always made her happy. And that’s why you can’t really judge: people come up with all kinds of arrangements to make sense of what happens to them. You can’t judge. I think the poor fellow didn’t know what to do. I can picture him then myself. The 1970s it was. I looked out one night and saw him chipping stones up at her window. His lies had gone all the way into her life, but he really made something of her and she wanted him. So she was Mrs Blake and he was a war hero and the boy was never mentioned.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And your mam was hardly mentioned either.’

  ‘But how did he die, the boy?’

  She sat quiet for a moment. ‘Weird, isn’t it, how life turns out?’ she said. ‘My father died the same year as Harry, 1976. You find people are just people, after all. And we all have stories.’ She took out a balled-up napkin from her sleeve. ‘I remember Dad telling me the story about what happened to the boy. It was on one of those holidays up in Scotland. Harry was trying to spend some time with Anne and the twins. His second family. And he drove them out to some place. My dad said it had been snowing and they were on this particular road up there, this famous place, where, if you stop the car and take off the brake, you get the illusion of rolling uphill.’

  ‘The Electric Brae.’

  ‘That’s the one. An optical illusion; you’re supposed to see it in the daytime but it was dark by the time they arrived. Anne told my father they could see a bonny white rabbit on the road. Harry was driving or I think my dad said they were just rolling with the handbrake off. Harry told the children to look at how the rabbit’s eyes were shining. He turned the headlamps off, you know, so they could see it better. But then a car came out of nowhere and they were in the middle of the road with no lights on and the other car went straight into them. And that was that.’

  ‘Oh my God. That’s horrific.’

  ‘The boy died. His name was Thomas.’

  Luke shook his head and stared at the table. ‘That was the end of it.’

  ‘For Mrs Blake, yes. And for your mum. My dad said Harry was like a bird, actually hollow inside, you know, hollow in his bones. He wasn’t a bad man. He just wasn’t there. Wasn’t solid. And she found a purpose in covering for him and was happy in her own way.’

  ‘It’s hard to imagine,’ Luke said. ‘I knew they had their own secrets, but …’

  ‘It’s what they’re made of.’

  ‘All of us,’ he said. ‘We were all made of it. They never said anything.’

  ‘Never once?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not in so many words. When she got ill, she started to talk about a rabbit, and … well, maybe that’s the rabbit in the story. For the last year, so much of her talk has been about Harry and her past.’

  ‘Happens his wife had known about it for years,’ Sheila said. ‘Knew about his affair. Put up with it. But when he died she wouldn’t have Anne at the funeral. She just came down from Glasgow and sat in the room with all her things. I remember that week, seeing her on the front steps. She was on her way onto the prom and she tied her headscarf and tried to smile. Gave me fifty pence. Her eyes were so sad.’

  Luke was sorry and was lost for a moment. He knew it was monumental, what Sheila had told him, he knew it explained the people he loved. All his life his family had been moving, perhaps invisibly, perhaps unknowingly, around this terrible event that happened years ago and that was never mentioned. His hand shook when he reached for his pint, as if this secret about Anne had suddenly recast the story of his childhood and his mother’s childhood too, changing everything.

  ‘In Canada they want to put her into a show,’ Luke said. ‘The best of her photographs.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Aye. They’ve got some pictures she did when she was young and they say she’s one of the pioneers.’

  ‘Lord Jesus,’ Sheila said. ‘That was the life she wanted. My mam and dad would be so proud of her.’

  IF

  Life had been rearranged, and always is.

  If Luke had opened the newspaper he bought that morning, if he had listened to Anne’s radio or turned his phone back on, he would have learned that Major Scullion had taken his own life the day before. When he did see the news, he was shocked, though it didn’t really surprise him. He believed that Scullion knew he would never make it to India. If he hadn’t seen him on that hill above Kajaki, if he hadn’t seen how he rushed into the mortars in one last gasp of the old soldier, he might have been unable to believe it. Scullion loved poetry and he made others love that thing in themselves. Luke tried to calm down and salute him. He wrote a text and sent it to each of the boys:

  Remember Charlie at his best. He wanted intelligence back in the game.

  Flannigan texted back the regimental motto.

  Veritas vos liberabit.

  25 AUGUST 1962

  In one of the locked cupboards, Luke found a stack of Airfix models of World War II planes. He opened one of them, a Lysander, that was half-built inside the box, a small tube of glue partly squeezed out and gummed around the cap. A betting slip from Ladbrokes was wrapped around the cockpit; it had something written on it in faded blue ink, a few notes about the closing of the Hawker factory at Squires Gate. Luke supposed it was Harry’s hand and the remains of Harry’s hobby.

  The ladies had been in that morning. Anne was sitting up in the chair dressed and washed, listening to the radio, wearing a clasp in her hair and some carpet slippers Luke had found at the back of the wardrobe. Sheila was right: she looked beautiful and seemed content, just listening, occasionally looking over and saying something odd. The girls wanted to take Anne to the Regal Cafe and soon they arrived carrying shoes and winter coats. Anne wanted the scarf with the gloves sewn in and soon they were off down the stairs. ‘Are you all right, Gran?’ Luke said from the door. And when she looked up she was smiling like a gala queen.

  ‘Shake a leg, Mrs Blake,’ Sheila said. ‘There’s nowt in the world between us and a peach Melba.’

  He placed the folders and boxes on the sink unit and then he spread them on the floor. He first opened a green, cloth-coloured album labelled ‘Menier Camp, 1948’. He got lost there, a pier with boats at an angle, Light through the trees, Clifton Falls. The album was filled halfway and ended with a group photograph, showing some young women lined up against a boathouse with linked arms. Monica Eames, Reva Brooks, Ruth Silverstein, Diane Arbus, Anne Tully, Anne Quirk. Her teenage face was so bright and he stared at the picture and wondered about the others, those young women. He wondered if their lives had gone elsewhere, too.

  He didn’t open any cans or the backs of any cameras. He didn’t know about photography but he understood that new light isn’t good for old film. The contact sheets were filed and so were many of the actual photos, some of them yellow or dark or only half-developed, with smears. One of the prints, labelled Jane Street, New York City, showed a box of soap powder sitting on top of an old washing machine. He’d never seen anything like it, so real and yet so imagined, in a realm of its own. He began to set some of her photos aside but he kept getting caught up in one of her new ventures, a make-up counter in Harlem, a row of prams in the Gorbals, a carpet factory in 1956, and, finally, what he’d been looking for, ‘Teenagers, 1962’. He also found an old copy of a woman’s magazine, fresh as the morning. It had a knitting pattern attached, but on the cover, above the title, he read five words written in pencil. ‘I was his spiritual wife.’

  ‘Teenagers, 1962’ was thick with prints. There were contact sheets and in a number of round tins he imagined there must be negatives. The photos showed groups of young people with slick hair and cigarettes. A girl wearing lipstick was kissing a boy with lazy eyes. Luke noticed the slim ties on the boys and the way the girls laughed and he noticed their hands and the light coming off a vinegar bottle. Each print was described on the back and some of them had been taken in dark alleyways or out on the pier during the day. And then, towards the back of the
folder there was a group of twenty-four colour prints, sharp and clear as anything, labelled ‘25 August 1962, The Beatles, Fleetwood Marine’.

  ‘These are edited. More on rolls. See contacts.’ This was the folded note acting as a clip. In one of the photographs the group was smoking as they leaned from the tower; in another they ate in a seedy canteen. Here they were, the four boys in the back of a van, huddled round a newspaper, as if the words really mattered. In the nicest of them all, John Lennon lay on a sofa writing a postcard. Anne had caught the mischief in his eyes as he glanced at the camera. Luke had to stand up, astonished at the scale and the mystery of what she’d done. He lifted them again. He wanted to race down the stairs or throw open the window and shout, but he just paced the room. He just stood in silence. For all her mistakes and her bad luck, she had managed this. She had taken these pictures and kept quiet.

  The boy died and the gift was gone. Harry was away, and maybe her talent departed along with her belief in herself as a mother. Luke couldn’t say, and, for all he knew, Anne had simply set out to preserve an ideal version of herself, someone the world couldn’t spoil, or recognise, or celebrate, or even know. She left herself behind in a room, and that way survived her own potential, until her mind began to fray. He cried into his hands and an hour passed when he had nothing to add. He just sat in the gloaming of these facts and wished he had known a way to rescue her from her secrets. When he returned the prints, he stood over the boxes, and he lifted a single photograph from the side of one of them. It showed the shadow of a woman and her camera against a grey pavement. Self-portrait, it said in Anne’s hand, the same hand, he knew, that once wrote the names of the talented girls at the Menier Camp.

  On his way down the stairs, Luke phoned his mother and was glad to hear her voice. ‘At last,’ she said. ‘We were beginning to wonder what happened to you. Do you never answer your phone, Luke?’

  ‘I switched it off. Sorry.’

  ‘What’s the weather like?’

  He looked out and felt time was nothing at all. They were all young. A feeling of optimism fell from the deep past. There was a way to work out how to pity his mother and not blame her for needing it. He felt the impulse to move on, to improve things, to put what strength he had at the service of his family, without pausing for explanations or statements or reckonings.

  ‘Clear today,’ he said, ‘but really windy.’

  ‘Did you see the lights?’

  ‘Aye. It was fantastic. All the way down the front. I think she’s having a nice time. No stress, you know? Just peaceful.’

  ‘Well,’ Alice said. ‘It’s her place.’ He waited. ‘You know she’s spent a fortune on it, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose she must have, over the years.’

  ‘A fortune. And she didn’t have a fortune. But that’s what she wanted to do and she did it. You could buy a house for the money she’s spent on that flat. But she’s never wanted my opinion. The bills alone …’

  He realised he was listening to her for the first time. She rattled on, and she would always rattle on but Luke wanted to listen, just as he wanted to think the best of Charles Scullion. It wasn’t justice and it wasn’t quite understanding, but Luke was glad he had come to Blackpool. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever mention what he’d found out. He could see her as a small girl with a dead brother, a boy she perhaps knew little about but who took up all the love, and Luke could see – even as Alice’s old defences rose to meet him – that her mother’s investment in her own life had left Alice out in the cold. It had shaped her life, and of course she couldn’t bear to think of Harry or to admire her mother’s talent, or to talk about the boy.

  ‘I never liked Blackpool,’ she said. ‘And those people down there never had anything to do with me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Luke said.

  ‘Don’t know what you’re sorry about. It’s her money to waste any way she wants. I’ve long since given up. And I bet you she’s not even getting a rebate on her council tax. I mean, it’s a second home, isn’t it? That means she should be getting something off and it’s always been a mystery, that flat. She’s helped that family out, you know.’

  ‘They’re nice people.’

  ‘They’re lovely people,’ she said.

  ‘And they kept her room together.’

  ‘She paid their bills.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Mum. They kept it together for her. Two generations of that family did that.’

  ‘They probably had lodgers in.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Honestly, it doesn’t. Her stuff was locked away. And they weren’t interested in it.’

  ‘What stuff? Her camera stuff?’

  ‘Everything she had.’

  She went quiet and he could hear the years over the phone and all the dismay of her unspoken life. ‘Maybe sometime we can sit down and talk,’ he said. ‘Just you and me, Mum. It’s going to be just us when this is all over.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ she said.

  ‘And we’re going to be fine.’

  She cried very quietly into the phone and he just let her cry and said there was all the time in the world. When she stopped crying some of the old hardness came back and he saw her as a person who had always been bullied by the powerful stories that surrounded her and diminished her. ‘I suppose you’ve been treated to my mother and father’s great love story,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not just about them,’ he said. ‘They’ve had their turn. And we’ll see my gran through this time, but we’ll do it together, okay?’

  ‘Did something happen to you in the army, Luke?’

  ‘We all have bad things to answer for. I’ve seen some evil and I might have done some, too. But you learn to forgive. You can even learn to forgive yourself. And I believe Gran would say that if she could.’

  ‘I’m no angel,’ she said. ‘None of us is.’

  ‘We’re a family,’ Luke said. ‘Just a family. Sheila’s people are a family but so are we. Let’s do what we can.’

  They just breathed for a moment into their phones and then Alice sighed, as if the practical world called to her.

  ‘We put Mum’s furniture in storage,’ she said. ‘The boxes too and the suitcases from the bathroom. The lady next door’s been really great. She did it all with us.’

  ‘How is Maureen?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, she’s fine,’ Alice said. ‘Has all her Christmas cards ready to post. Already! She said you can’t be too early with things like that. Christmas, would you credit it? The presents all wrapped and sitting in a bag by the front door. She loves it. She loves all the drama. “Families!” she says. “Families!” One minute she’s looking forward to seeing them at Christmas, getting the train, and the next minute she can’t wait until it’s all over. Oh, but she makes me laugh. I was just saying to Gordon: you can’t keep up with people. You may as well not even try because it’s different every day and you never know about people’s lives, do you?’

  ‘I’m glad she helped, though.’

  ‘Oh, she was brilliant.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘The warden, too. They all pitched in.’

  ‘You could run a war, Mum.’

  ‘That’ll be the day. They wouldn’t want the likes of me running up and down the place.’

  ‘I’ve seen worse.’

  Neither spoke for a moment and it was easy to wait and to think and let things settle. Alice sighed.

  ‘Do you think she senses what’s happening?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I’ll tell her eventually. I just want to give her this time. A bit of time down here. A day or two.’

  ‘Blackpool was always her favourite,’ Alice said, and Luke’s heart went out to her. He could hear the hurt, the nervousness, fading into relief. It was somehow easier now for her to talk and he knew she wanted to say more. ‘She never really wanted children. Her life had been held back enough. She wanted him. And Blackpool was the place where she hoped it would all come together.’


  ‘I’m sorry, mum.’

  ‘Ah, well, Luke. It’s over now. And I’m glad you’re there with her.

  ‘You’re here.’

  Luke drove to the Regal Cafe and found Anne sitting at a corner table with the women. He hadn’t known it before, but his gran obviously liked women’s company and had missed it – the girls at the Menier Camp, her aunts in Glasgow, the neighbour Maureen. She was laughing with Sheila and her sister when he came in and she touched the clip in her hair when she saw him and she looked up at the coffee machine. ‘We were just on about Woolworth’s,’ Sheila said. ‘Your gran mentioned it and we were just saying there was nothing left of Woolworth’s nowadays. Harriet used to have a Saturday job there, didn’t you, Hats?’

  ‘I got fat on the Pick ’n’ Mix,’ she said.

  Luke paid the bill. He turned to smile at Anne and the two sisters. ‘I want you all to come in the car,’ he said.

  ‘Fab,’ said Sheila. ‘Are you taking us for a drive or something?’

  ‘I want to take you to the Fleetwood Marine.’

  ‘Is there something on?’

  Luke said it was just a wee outing – nice for Anne and it wasn’t far. And so they drove up the coast and passed the factory for Fisherman’s Friends. ‘That’s very nice,’ Anne said. ‘The sweeties.’

  ‘I could never stomach them,’ Sheila said. Then she pointed out the changes, new houses and spots where things had been demolished or done up. They came to a place close to the beach, an art deco building that seemed brilliant and white against the green hill behind. They got out and Anne took Luke’s arm as they walked over the car park.

  ‘I know it here,’ she said.

  Luke smiled. ‘Do you now?’

  They walked into the foyer. Luke didn’t know why he felt as if a season was over. There was something new about her, and he admired how confidently she walked on the blue carpet, the look on her face and the feeling of her arm inside his.

  ‘I danced here,’ she said.

  The print gets perfect with dodging and burning. Conceal this part to make it lighter if you like, and this corner, this bright place in the picture, expose it for longer, my love, and after it goes dark we can go to bed. All will be well. Come here, Harry. I waited up. This is your home tonight.