When we arrived at the house, Miriam put the kettle on and Frank dropped into a wicker chair in the corner of the kitchen. He was lamenting the fact that we hardly ever saw each other. He wished we didn’t live so far away. I reminded him that, not so long ago, when Kate’s father, Fred, was ill with cancer, we had been living just up the road, in Cheshire. We hadn’t seen much of each other then either.
‘I know, I know,’ Frank cried, closing his eyes and waggling his head. ‘I kept meaning to drive up, but there was always something – always something …’
I couldn’t help smiling. Frank liked to portray himself as put upon, if not victimized; it was as though immensely powerful forces had singled him out for special treatment.
‘I’ve just been so busy,’ he said, ‘with the mill.’
He would never not be busy, I thought. How old was he? Eighty-one? Eighty-two? Frank was the opposite of most people. Anxiety seemed to keep him going.
I watched as he put a hand on my daughter’s head. ‘Such a dear little thing,’ he said.
We moved to the dining-room. A crimson cloth covered the oak table, and candles burned in matching silver candelabras. We were halfway through the twelve days of Christmas, and a tall tree filled the bay window, its coloured lights ablaze. Sitting opposite me, Frank was surveying his plate. His mouth had turned down at the corners.
Miriam gazed at him steadily. ‘What is it, Frank?’
‘You know I can’t stand chicken.’ With a kind of frantic desperation, Frank scraped the mustard sauce off the chicken breast, then speared it with his knife and dumped it back into the solid silver serving-dish.
Miriam looked at me. We both smiled.
‘The sauce is nice,’ Frank said after a while.
Towards the end of the meal, I mentioned the photos of Ralph. Frank let out a groan. They were upstairs, in his study. He didn’t know where, though. It all needed sorting out.
I reminded him that he had promised to let me see them.
‘Did I?’ he said.
For a moment he remained quite motionless. Then, all of a sudden, he pushed his chair back, hauled himself to his feet and hurried out of the room, elbows jabbing at the air. I heard him making for his study on the first floor. Thump-thump-thump. He seemed to stamp on each stair rather than simply tread on it.
He returned five minutes later, empty-handed, head tipped back in despair. ‘I don’t know, Rups. I thought I had them.’
‘I know where they are,’ Miriam said.
A wail from Frank. ‘No, poppet, you can’t go up there, poking around. You’ll mess everything up.’
My aunt and I exchanged a glance.
Off he went again, to have another look. Stomp-stomp-stomp. Back he came. Still nothing. While he was eating his pudding, Miriam slipped out of the room. She reappeared with a rectangular packet. ‘Here we are.’
‘Is that them?’ Frank said. ‘God.’
The packet contained half a dozen snaps of Ralph and his family. The sky was a deep, flawless blue – the blue of childhood skies, the blue of the past – and Ralph was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and loose white trousers, exactly the sort of clothes he had worn during the summer of 1984. In three of the pictures he had a cigarette between his fingers.
‘So he smokes,’ I said.
‘Oh yes.’ Frank nodded enthusiastically. ‘Like a chimney.’
Ralph’s hair had been receding when I last saw him. Now he was almost completely bald. He was pale too. In our family we were all pale – as a boy, people were always asking me if I was ill – but Ralph’s pallor was pronounced, extreme: he looked as though he had spent his entire life under fluorescent lights. In one of the photos he was hugging his youngest daughter, and I was surprised at how strong his forearms were. The baldness, the pallor, the muscularity – I found myself thinking, incongruously, of Jean Genet.
I showed the pictures to my wife, Kate. She didn’t think Ralph looked very well. He looked, she thought, like somebody who hadn’t got too long to live.
‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ I said.
She shrugged, then grinned mischievously. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you asked.’
I studied the photos again. There was Ralph with his arm round Vivian. There were Ralph’s children, three of whom I had never seen. These were my nephews and nieces, and yet I didn’t even know their names. Was that my fault? Should I have made more of an effort?
I hadn’t set eyes on Ralph since 1984, but my last contact had been in 1987. Sonya had asked us to release some money from the trust we had set up for Rosie and Hal. As executors of Dad’s will, we needed to approve the request and to sign the appropriate forms, but neither Robin nor I knew where Ralph lived. Frank thought Ralph worked for an Italian bank in the City. He didn’t have a clue which one, though. I consulted the phone directory. There were about twenty-five banks with Italian names. I rang them, one after the other. When I reached bank number eight, the receptionist put me through, and I heard Ralph say his name. ‘Ralph,’ I said, ‘it’s Rupert.’ His first words were, ‘How did you get this number?’ He seemed on the point of hanging up. Despite being utterly wrong-footed, I managed to persuade him to stay on the line. At the end of the call, however, he told me not to ring him again. If I wanted to make contact, I should do so in writing. Shocked by the formality – the finality – of what he was saying, I laughed. In writing. As if I were dealing with a lawyer. Over the years I had abided by his ruling – I hadn’t called; I hadn’t even written – but now, in my uncle’s dining-room, it occurred to me that since there were two parties involved, Ralph and me, surely I had some say in the matter. I thought about what Kate had said when she saw the pictures. He looks like someone who hasn’t got too long to live. With a jolt, I remembered Vivian giving him until he was forty-five. I did a rapid mental calculation: Ralph had celebrated his forty-fifth birthday in September, just over three months ago! I didn’t take Vivian’s prediction seriously, but all the same … It would be strange, wouldn’t it, if we were to die without ever seeing each other again? It would be strange if I didn’t at least make a stab at solving the mystery of what had come between us. I didn’t think Ralph would reach out, though, not after all these years. I wasn’t sure he would be capable, or even interested.
In which case it would be up to me.
Not What He Would Have Wanted
In the letter he wrote to accompany his will, Dad assumes we will be keeping the house in the family, and though Ralph has been considering the idea – it’s a good place to bring up children, and he and Vivian are planning on having more – he doubts he will be able to borrow enough money to buy myself and Robin out. This leaves us with no option but to put the house on the market.
In the middle of May, we ring a firm of estate agents, requesting a valuation. The following day, I answer the door to a man in a suit whose hair is the colour of sawdust, and I’m not sure I don’t catch a faint whiff of teak or maple as he brushes past me into the hall. Methodically, he moves from room to room, almost all of which are private galleries for Dad’s innumerable paintings, and I sense surprise, bewilderment, and even, just occasionally, a bright flash of alarm. I watch him peer up into the stairwell, its mint green wall dominated by several abstracts in the style of Jackson Pollock. ‘Most unusually appointed,’ he murmurs.
Once he has completed his inspection, he recommends an asking price, which I discuss with Robin and Ralph that same evening. The next morning, we ring the estate agents and give them the go-ahead. Not long afterwards, a photograph of our house appears in the Herald with the words SOUGHT AFTER SUMMERDOWN ROAD beneath.
Within ten days, a local architect has offered the asking price, and the sale is agreed, with completion to take place on the thirteenth of September. At midday on that date the property must be empty, the man with the wooden hair informs us. If we fail to comply, we will be subject to financial penalties. Though this is the news I have been waiting for, I retreat to my bedroom and, sitting a
t my writing-table, stare out over the garden. The main obstacle to my leaving Eastbourne has been removed. In three months’ time I will be free to go anywhere I want. Why, then, is my stomach turning over? Why do I feel as if I might be sick?
A breeze pushes past me, the smell of roses in full bloom and new-mown grass tempered by hints of ash and rubber from our most recent fire. I imagine my grandparents first viewing the property on a day like today. With its walls of grey pebble-dash and its steep slate roof, the house had never looked particularly inviting, and the diamond-paned windows in the front rooms only added to the air of melancholy, but all that would have been forgotten when James Gausden saw the cherry trees that lined the south side of the garden. The sight would have reminded him of the cherry blossom festival, one of the more significant events in the Japanese calendar. He might even have muttered the word under his breath. Ohanami.
‘This is the place, Pim,’ he would have said.
And Pim would have murmured, ‘Yes.’
Her husband was not a man you disagreed with.
In photographs taken before the First World War, when he was still a bachelor, my grandfather often appears in a white suit and white shoes, with a cigarette between his fingers. He reminds me of certain film stars from the silent era – Ronald Coleman, or Douglas Fairbanks Junior. Whether seated at the dinner table in his club or lounging in some house of doubtful repute, he exudes a supreme sense of entitlement: he could do anything, have anything – including, as even a cursory reading of his diaries attests, the young women in kimonos who stand coyly in the background. I never met him – he died seven years before I was born – but something of his character can be glimpsed in an interview he gave to one of the national daily papers in 1920. ‘When I first came to Japan,’ the ‘Lady Reporter’ quotes him as saying, with a smile on his ‘still rosy cheeks’, ‘you were a babe-at-arms, to be sure …’
James Gausden was employed in a managerial capacity by a succession of American oil companies. A passionate mountaineer, known among fellow members of the Alpine Club as ‘the Mountain Goat’, he is believed to have scaled every notable peak in Japan. He was a photographer too, his expeditions recorded in black and white at first, and then in a series of exquisite colour plates. He had arrived in Tokyo in 1900, aged twenty-one, and returned to England only once, when he was forty, to look for a wife. He found her in Eastbourne, at the annual tennis tournament in Devonshire Park. Her name was Winifred Tolson, though most people knew her as Pim, the nickname taken from a fish-and-chip shop called Pim’s that she’d been mad about when she was growing up. James assumed she was in her twenties, and she was either too embarrassed or too ashamed to correct him, and they were married within a month, in a village church in Staffordshire. After the wedding, James left for Japan, travelling west this time, since there were mountains in the United States that he was eager to attempt. Some weeks later, Pim set off for the Far East on a P&O steamship to start her new life as a married woman. She had the first of her nervous breakdowns shortly afterwards, brought on by the certain knowledge that she would never see her father alive again.
The Gausdens lived in Tokyo to begin with, then moved to Kobe. Despite Pim’s age, she had three children: Francis was born in 1923, Cedric in 1928, and Wendy in 1931. Pim would have been forty-six when she gave birth to my mother. When did Jim find out how old she was? I don’t know. But he did. Frank once told me that his father ‘was very cross about it’. ‘Oh yes,’ Frank went on, ‘very cross. Mummy was much older than she looked, you see. Not at all what he would have wanted.’ Did Jim feel deceived, or cheated? Again, it’s impossible to know. A marriage, children – this was what society expected, and he had kept his side of the bargain, yet I have the nagging suspicion that family life failed to engage him fully. Did he go on seeing the young Japanese women who were so readily available? I can’t say. If he wrote diaries after 1920, I have never seen them. His passion for mountaineering didn’t fade, though, nor did his interest in photography. When the Great Kanto earthquake hit the Tokyo area in September 1923, Jim hurried home from the office, not to check on the safety of his wife and new-born son – they were in the garden, part of the house having collapsed – but to pick up his precious Voigtländer. He spent hours in Yokohama that day, taking more than a hundred pictures of the devastation.
In 1934, with Jim’s retirement looming and Japanese nationalism on the rise, the Gausdens were sent back to England. According to Frank, his father was ‘furious’; the way of life that he had loved was over. At first they lived in a Buckinghamshire village, near the Thames, then they moved to Eastbourne, the place where they had met. When Jim bought the house in Summerdown Road, he named it ‘Rokkosan’, after the mountain that overlooks Kobe, and that mysterious word was still on the front gate when I was a boy, though I never gave it too much thought. All the houses in our road had funny names. Arklow, Frimleigh. Buttevant.
In a large dark green album that dates from the late thirties or early forties, I find a photograph of Jim standing outside the main glasshouse, his right hand clamped on my mother’s shoulder. Bald and portly, his eyes concealed behind a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, he has an austere, draconian air. He might be the chief interrogator in a totalitarian state. He might even be a dictator. Had he not been posing with my mother, I’m not sure I would have realized that it was him; certainly there is no trace of the film-star looks. When I was in my teens, I remember Dad saying that he got a shock whenever he saw himself in the mirror. The passing of time makes us unrecognizable, even to ourselves; age is a kind of fancy dress that no one can take off.
The physical change in my grandfather is so pronounced that it is tempting to link it with his premature, enforced departure from Japan. I once asked Georgina, a close friend of my mother’s, what it was like to visit the house on Summerdown Road during that time. She hardly ever saw Wendy’s father, she said. He would be locked in his study, and would only venture out for meals. She spoke briefly of a cruel streak. He used to hit them a bit. Years later, she wondered whether he might have been struggling with depression.
A picture of Pim in the same album shows her on the back lawn in a pale shift dress and flat shoes. Her hair is white. This happened overnight, apparently, during the earthquake of 1923. With her thick waist and her square hands, she looks clumsy, almost mannish, and her smile, which reveals large, uneven teeth, has a precarious quality, like a plate balanced on a stick. Though she is giving the photographer – her husband, presumably – a passable impression of happiness, tears don’t seem far away. According to Frank, his father had been so domineering that his death left a kind of vacuum. On her own suddenly, Pim became ‘mentally poorly’, ‘sad and weeping’, ‘deranged’. I turn back to the photo. She must have known this would be their last home, but did she also suspect that it would be here, in this house, that her life would start to unravel?
I have always been drawn to my mother’s side of the family, but now that I am back in the house, and back for the last time, I can feel the connection tightening, becoming almost visceral. My mother’s parents lived here. My mother lived here too. So did my mother’s brothers, Frank and Joe, and so, for a while, did her favourite cousin, Beth. They ate and slept in these small, awkwardly shaped rooms. They laughed and cried. Some lost their minds. Others died. Three generations have been superimposed, one on top of the other; there are times when the air feels crowded. In selling the house, we’ll not only be disregarding my father’s wishes. We’ll be disposing of my mother’s history, and our own.
I get up from the table. Leaving my room, I walk down the stairs and out through the front door. I pull it shut behind me. The rattle of the metal letter box, the solid shudder of the lock. A clock strikes two. When I think of my childhood in this house, it is always early afternoon, the part of the day when time seemed to slow down, to swirl and then disperse, like ink in water. I step away from the door, then come to a halt. I am standing in the place where I last heard – or thought I hea
rd – my mother’s voice.
She died playing tennis. She was about to serve. The courts where it happened, Manor Gardens, are located in Gildredge Park, only a few minutes’ walk away.
The day after we accept the offer on the house, I decide to go on a pilgrimage. Turning left out of our front gate, I take the first right into Vicarage Road. The pavement tilts unevenly, its weathered bricks forced upwards by the roots of the elm trees that are planted at regular intervals on the south side of the street. On the north side the houses are clad in red scalloped tiles, and flint walls enclose the small front gardens. The windows are all blank. Most of the residents are old, and live alone.
I pass the vicarage, a vast, rambling place, its window frames and drainpipes painted yellow. Beyond the vicarage is Love Lane, an unpaved track that runs past the back of my mother’s school. I move on along the road. The houses become fancier, with white clapboard gables. White wooden balconies cling to the upper storeys. It’s so quiet and still that I can hear my own breathing. A cloud appearing from behind a clump of fir trees makes me jump.
I enter the park through a green metal gate. The world tightens around me. I have been here so many times, but not for years. My mind drifts back to 7 July 1964. A game of mixed doubles had been arranged. My mother set off up the road in her tennis clothes. White pleated skirt, white plimsolls. She would have been carrying her racket, its head zipped into a beige canvas cover. I don’t know who partnered her, but I seem to recall that one of the players was a doctor. When she collapsed on court, her friends must have thought she had fainted. It was a hot day. I imagine the doctor hurdling the net, but she was dead before he reached her. Then what? Someone must have hurried to a phone and called an ambulance. The others would have stayed with the body. Did they cover her? Did a small crowd gather? Who told my father?
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