I see the courts off to my right. Pigeons scatter as I approach. Though summer has hardly started yet, the air smells bitter, autumnal. I cross the wet grass and hook my fingers through the wire mesh. Grey asphalt, neat white lines. The net sags between its posts. A high laurel hedge on two sides, leaves dark and glossy. I try to picture the scene, as if I am someone who just happened to be walking through the park that day …
A Tuesday morning in July. The air already warm, sharp edges to the shadows. Four friends in their thirties. The scuff and squeak of gym shoes, a grunt as a player stretches to smash a lob. A groan of despair. Then laughter. A woman with dark hair is about to serve. As the ball loops up into the air, she draws her racket back, hips swivelling, left knee bent. She lets out a cry, then crumples. A moment of stillness. Only the ball is moving, bouncing away across the court. A man drops his racket, leaps over the net. His partner has covered her mouth. Her hair is gold in the bright sunlight, and her shoulders hunch, as if she is expecting a deluge of cold water. Behind her, the laurel hedge looks black. The dark-haired woman is lying on the ground. The ball fetches up against the wire-mesh fence, irrelevant, forgotten …
Later, as I pass the pavilion with its ice-cream kiosk, I remember how I found my mother’s racket once, by chance, in the box room. Dad must have hidden it, unable to bring himself to throw it away. The handle was bound with strips of dark-blue leather made darker still by sweat. Her sweat. I realized this was the last thing that she ever touched. I put my nose to the handle. Musty, ancient – utterly impersonal. Even the smell of her had faded.
I sit on a swing, pretending not to have noticed the sign that says CHILDREN UNDER 14 ONLY. It’s term time, a weekday; there’s hardly anyone about. I grip the metal chains. You can try your utmost to get back, you can do all the imagining you want, but you can’t change the fact that you weren’t there. I tuck my legs under the seat, then thrust them out in front of me. The sky tilts. My stomach lurches, and is left behind.
Horrible Trees
While in Eastbourne in 2007, I called in on Dr and Mrs Mynott, who had been friends of my parents in the fifties and early sixties. I had always known that Rosalind Mynott was one of the people who had been playing tennis with my mother when she died, but I had never spoken to her about it. Thinking the Mynotts might be able to bring me closer to the events of that day, I had phoned and asked if I could pay them a visit.
When I arrived, Dr Mynott showed me into the living-room. Rosalind was standing by a picture window, the muted colours of the garden behind her. She stuttered, just as she used to when I was a child, blinking rapidly if a word eluded her, and it was this more than anything that gave me the feeling that time had dissolved, and that we were all the same age as we had been when we last saw each other, and for a few uncanny seconds I was sure that if I looked down at myself I would see grey shorts, bare knees.
I took a seat by the window, and the doctor settled in a wing-backed chair across the room. Rosalind stepped into the kitchen to make tea. When she returned, I smiled up at her. Stopping in front of me, she reached down, took my face in both hands and kissed me on the forehead. Driving into Eastbourne that morning, I’d had an image of Rosalind as a brisk, no-nonsense woman, but this spontaneous gesture revealed a side of her that I had forgotten.
While she cut me a slice of cake, I filled her in on my behaviour following my mother’s death. Auntie Miriam had told me that I had carried on almost as if nothing had happened, though sometimes I would run into the house and call out, ‘Mummy?’
‘I would forget, you see?’
Rosalind stared at the carpet, her eyes liquid, opaque.
I asked her what she remembered of my mother.
‘Well, she was very, very pretty.’ Rosalind lifted her cup, then lowered it again without drinking. ‘She was always cheerful and enthusiastic and welcoming, whereas I think your father was inclined to be a bit dour, perhaps.’
I asked if they’d had many friends. Rosalind thought they had, but couldn’t recall any of their names. When I tried to prompt her by suggesting that some of the socializing might have revolved around tennis, she started to describe the day my mother died. She talked quickly, her words eroding, incomplete, as if snatched from her mouth by a strong wind.
‘I know there were eight of us – we were playing at Devonshire Park – there were eight – two lots of four – I was serving, and I’d turned round to get the balls – and I looked back, and Wendy had collapsed –’
‘You were serving?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
I had always imagined my mother was serving – it was what I had been told, perhaps – but Rosalind had been there, on court. It wasn’t a game of mixed doubles either; no men had been involved. Not a doctor, then. A doctor’s wife. I didn’t know what to ask next. The atmosphere in the room seemed troubled suddenly, and tense.
‘So she collapsed,’ I said slowly. ‘What happened then?’
Dr Mynott remembered that his wife had called him at his practice, and that he had hurried round to the tennis courts. But by then, of course, it was already too late. ‘These things happen just like that,’ he said.
I spoke to Rosalind. ‘Where did you say you were playing?’
‘Devonshire Park,’ she said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ Dr Mynott said. ‘I remember it quite clearly.’
Rosalind was nodding. ‘I can picture it.’
I thought back to my pilgrimage of 1984. I had imagined my mother dying in Manor Gardens – I had brought the day of her death to life, and it had felt so real, so authentic – but now it turned out she hadn’t died there at all. She had died somewhere else entirely. I smiled sadly down into my tea.
‘I have no recollection of who else was playing,’ Rosalind said. ‘And of course we didn’t play again. We were so completely shattered.’
With no other leads to follow, it looked as if Rosalind might be my only source, but when I pressed her for more memories of that day, she shook her head. She didn’t think she had anything to add.
‘She just collapsed.’ Rosalind touched the cake crumbs on her plate with the tip of a finger. ‘I think of her with a fringe, and her hair in a ponytail. Always cheerful and smiling and friendly – a ray of sunshine, really.’
‘One of those people who make you feel better when you see them?’
Rosalind nodded. ‘Eternally youthful – and that, of course, is how you remember her. Because she died as such a young woman.’
It was as though my mother’s character was also her destiny. I remembered how her piety had worried Auntie Beth, and how Beth had suspected Wendy of knowing something no one else knew – not consciously, but in her blood, her bones. Her high spirits became more significant if they were set against a fast approaching darkness. In 2006, I opened a book by Imre Kertész and came across the following phrase: that fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time. In just eight words, Kertész had captured what it was like to grow up in my family. I never had the feeling I would live for ever. Immortal? We’re about as immortal as dandelion flowers. One breath of wind, and we’re half gone. Another breath. That’s it. All over. My mother’s death taught me that the things I took for granted could be taken from me. The ground could open up; the sky could fall. Life was as flimsy as the model planes I used to buy, all balsa wood and rubber bands.
The doctor and his wife walked me to my car.
‘Strange that she died in Devonshire Park,’ I said. ‘It’s where her parents met.’
‘Really?’ the doctor said. ‘We didn’t know.’
As I drove away, I felt I was still lacking the one detail or fragment that would help me to see my mother’s final moments – the real-life equivalent of the ball bouncing away across the court – and it was possible no one could supply it, though I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might have learned more if I’d interviewed the Mynotts separately. It was only a few days later, though, when I was back home in Barcelona, t
hat I realized what I would have to do.
I flew to England again in the spring of 2008, staying the night with Bill and Jenny Martin, who were now living in lush farming country a few miles north of Eastbourne. The following morning, I rose early and drove into town. I arrived at the Mynotts’ house at a quarter to nine to find them both dressed to go out, and it was apparent from the doctor’s opening remarks that he was fully intending to join us. On the phone I had asked if Rosalind could come to Devonshire Park with me and show me exactly where my mother died, but maybe the doctor and his wife were used to doing things together, and I decided it would be insensitive of me, or even rude, to attempt to come between them.
Since Rosalind had an appointment at ten, we took two cars. The doctor led the way, and I followed in my rented Astra, with Rosalind beside me. We had been driving for less than a minute when she turned to me and said, ‘There’s something I should tell you. The tennis courts aren’t there any more. It’s a car park now.’
I looked at her, not sure what to make of this.
‘The grass courts are still there,’ she explained, ‘but not the hard courts we were playing on.’
We passed the Congress Theatre, where building work was going on, then turned into the car park Rosalind had just alluded to. Once parked, we joined Dr Mynott, who was standing some twenty yards away. I asked Rosalind whether she could identify the place where my mother had collapsed.
The doctor responded first. ‘Well,’ and he lifted an arm and pointed, ‘where that puddle is, frankly.’
He laughed, and I laughed with him, but Rosalind was staring at the ground. She was moved by the thought of my mother’s death, perhaps, and also by my floundering attempts to get closer to it. She seemed to feel a responsibility to me: if she couldn’t remember enough, she would be failing me, letting me down.
I followed her into an empty parking space, and we came to a halt between a grey Renault and a white Iveco van. In front of us lay an area of tarmac, which was where the puddle was. Beyond were more cars, all with their backs to us, and then a high flint wall and a row of trees shifting in the wind.
‘I had just served,’ Rosalind said, ‘and I turned round to get a ball. I was going to serve again, into the left-hand court this time. And Wendy was on the other side of the net – actually over there.’ She pointed at a silver Saab. ‘And I turned round, and she had fallen down … But I know the trees were there. So there was a green – a green background.’
‘Do you remember how she fell?’
‘I don’t. I wish I could.’ Rosalind stared straight ahead. ‘She was just lying on the ground when I turned round. Everything else is blank. The horror – and fear…’ Looking up at me, she laid a hand on my shoulder.
We were silent for a moment.
‘I wonder what kind of trees they are,’ I said.
‘They’re – they’re – they’re horrible trees.’ She spoke with such vehemence that I had to laugh. ‘They’re holm oaks, and the leaves fall all year round.’
She took me through some other aspects of the place that hadn’t changed. Sometimes it was hard to hear her voice above the drilling from the building site nearby.
‘And the weather was lovely?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘A lovely sunny day – and that only added to the horror of it …’
‘But you can’t remember how she looked?’
‘She was just – just lying there …’ All of a sudden, Rosalind lowered her chin and drew her right arm up in such a way that it encircled her forehead. Watching carefully, I thought she was telling me that my mother had fallen forwards, that she had ended up face-down on the court. Rosalind’s gesture had the sketchy, haunting quality of a re-enactment, but it also looked like a portrayal of sorrow, as though, in that moment, she was imitating one of the stone angels you find in graveyards, as though she herself was grieving. We were so shattered. We didn’t play again. I put a hand on her arm. The drilling became still more persistent.
‘I’m sorry about the noise,’ she said. ‘Do you want a moment of quiet here?’
‘We’ll go and sit in our car,’ the doctor said.
When they had walked away, I stood between the Renault and the van. Marked in white, the parking spaces seemed an eerie echo of the tennis courts they had superseded – eerie and yet logical, since the one looked like a reworking or corruption of the other. I took a photo with my mobile phone, then moved towards the place where my mother had collapsed. Kneeling by the Saab’s rear bumper, I reached out and touched the ground, and for a moment I thought I could feel her there, beneath my hand, she was lying in the position Rosalind had hinted at, face down, one arm circling her head, and I had my hand on her back, in the space between her shoulder blades, the cotton of her shirt against my palm, she was still warm, and a murmur came out of me, as if I were comforting her, or comforting us both. The wind swooped, then dropped. A man passed behind me, car keys jingling.
Later that day, on Terminus Road, I made a hard copy of the picture I had taken. Three cars seen from the back, some shallow puddles – a few white lines … The photo seemed oddly empty, without a focal point.
No, more than that: it looked tampered with. As though the subject of the original picture had been removed, and all that remained was a background. She had been here once, right here. It had happened here. But she was gone.
The Sticky Cherubs
Since I started writing at night, I have stopped drinking in the evenings, and I usually sleep until two in the afternoon. Feeling at a loose end, perhaps, Robin announces that he is off to Wales. While at art college in Newport, he became close to a family called the Atwoods. Jeremy, the husband, was one of his tutors. Robin also knows Jeremy’s wife, Lynne, and their two daughters. He is going to stay at their house, he says. He isn’t sure how long he’ll be away.
After about a week, he calls with some news. He has bought two Rover 90s for £600. Two? I say. The second one’s for spares, he explains. He wants me to come to Wales. Obviously he can’t drive both cars back to Eastbourne by himself. He needs my help.
‘But I’d have to stop working,’ I say.
‘Only for a day or two. You can carry on when you get back.’
I hesitate.
‘Think of it as an adventure,’ Robin says.
I catch a train the following day. Arriving in Newport in the late afternoon, I ring the Atwoods’ house from a phone box outside the station. Lynne answers. She tells me to stay where I am. She and Robin will come and pick me up.
I am sitting on the kerb, near the taxi rank, when a grey car with big, astonished headlights pulls into view, Robin behind the wheel. Beside him is Lynne Atwood, dressed entirely in black. Her long hair is pinned up in an extravagant bun, and she is holding a glass of red wine. When Robin brakes, she puts her glass down on the open flap of the glove compartment and shakes my hand through the window, the expression on her face at once imperious and playful. I climb into the back of the car. The interior smells of warm leather.
‘Smoothly, please,’ Lynne says as we leave the station. ‘I don’t want to spill my drink.’
On the drive back to the house, she quickly establishes that I have arrived empty-handed, and seems insulted. I feel hard done by. I have interrupted my work and travelled halfway across the country. This wasn’t my idea.
That evening, on the way to the pub, I find myself walking next to Lynne. As the narrow road dips down towards a railway bridge, she gives me a cool, appraising glance.
‘You know, Robin knocks you into a cocked hat,’ she says.
I stare at her. ‘What do you mean?’
She doesn’t answer.
I swallow and look away. Most people have a sense of the different lives they might have lived, of turnings not taken, chances squandered, but in my case there is a definite ‘other’. He is the person I would have been if my mother had not died, and he is always beside me, just beyond the corner of my eye. Sometimes his presence feels mocking or dismissive, a
t other times sympathetic, even concerned, but usually he strolls along in his own world, head high and easy in his skin, oblivious to my existence. The death of your mother hit you hard, Miriam told me once, because you were old enough to know what was going on. I asked her how she could tell that I’d been hard hit. She thought for a moment, then said, You went very quiet. This was the beginning of what Robin once called my ‘inscrutability’. In a single afternoon I stopped being myself and became somebody else altogether.
Perhaps as a consequence of his disability, my father had a hunger in him, a kind of greed, and I indulged him, allowing him to replace my wishes and desires with his own. At the age of ten, I took up golf, a game he could no longer play. The war had deprived him of the chance to go to university, so I sat the scholarship exam and was awarded a place at Cambridge. He had always dreamed of sailing round the world. It’s a wonder I didn’t do that too. He exploited my new uncertainty, my diffidence, and I went along with it. Why? I suppose I wanted him to be proud of me. Also, since I had my health and he didn’t, it would have seemed ungrateful, if not callous, to have refused him. For years, I felt that I was living on my father’s behalf – or rather, that he was living through me; I became the host for his ambitious and frustrated spirit.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these traits or tendencies have carried over into some of my relationships with women. I tend to use the side of myself that seems the most appropriate, and temporarily discard the rest. I’m used to being what others want me to be. It comes naturally. Unthinkingly. If a girlfriend leaves me, I don’t pursue her. How can you pursue the dead? I just go quiet, turn away. Begin again.
Look at me from the outside, and you might well say what Lynne is saying. You have no resources or convictions of your own. All you do is simulate. You’re hollow, empty. Is that what she is driving at? I can’t be sure, and she isn’t about to elaborate, but she appears to be gloating as we pass into the deep shadow beneath the railway bridge. She thinks she has seen through me, and – who knows? – maybe she has.
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