by Ajay Close
I thought about looking into every buggy I passed, about the tugging in my chest when I saw a knitted mitten speared on a park railing. I thought about the first time I held Torcuil, and how tiny he was, and how the tension in my neck and shoulders relaxed as some comfort I hadn’t known I could give flowed out of my body into his.
Frankie sat up. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ he said, ‘so you can cut it out.’
I didn’t trust myself to speak.
‘Cut it out, Freya.’
We were back on familiar ground. The way I turned his anger by acting hurt, my refusal to engage in any discussion that might end with me looking bad. And these were faults of mine, just as it was true that I had never given a moment’s serious thought to uprooting myself to Perthshire.
He dressed quickly.
I knew when he strapped on his watch. ‘You’re going out?’
‘There’s a couple of things I need to do at work.’
‘On Sunday afternoon?’
‘And I’ve to catch the dry cleaners before they shut.’
His blue chalkstripe. I had forgotten to pick it up on my way back from the gym.
‘I’ll get it tomorrow.’
‘I’m wearing it tomorrow.’
Blue chalkstripe or Prince of Wales check, it was hardly the end of the world. Come the morning, he’d admit as much, but at that moment it was game, set and match.
There were rules to rowing with Frankie. His rules. You gave it your all in the heat of the moment, and afterwards it was forgotten. No sulking or casting-up. I could see the sense in this. But to accuse me of not wanting a child, that was beyond forgetting.
‘Frankie—’
He turned in the doorway. If he hadn’t raised his eyebrows like that everything might have been different.
‘Take a key. I’ll be out when you get back.’
Trunk
The man I called Uncle Nellaney wasn’t a blood relative. The connection was Gina, who’d dressed Lilias during her four-month stint in Garnock Way. Six years before her stroke, Gina met and married a naval officer, moving from her spruce tenement flat into a medieval towerhouse furnished with Chippendale and Hepplewhite. I’m not saying this was her only attraction, but Lilias never formed a lasting bond with any other wardrobe mistress. Gina had been dead seven months when I arrived. All her things were gone. The house was dark, and cramped by the thickness of the walls and all those antiques picked up for a song. You could leave a block of ice cream on the kitchen table in midsummer. In winter, I slept in my socks. After dropping me off at school every morning, Nellaney drove to HMS Euterpe, a bottomy vessel built to help Admiral Nelson defeat Boney, by then used for training in the Firth of Clyde. He didn’t drink, or eat out, or drive a high-performance car, or care what he wore (cardigans, mostly, when out of uniform), but he owned a Bang & Olufsen turntable. If I wanted him to notice me, I had to replace Ashkenazy with Kajagoogoo or tamper with the chiming sequence of his fourteen clocks.
I foisted the familial nickname on him but neither of us was fooled. As long as I was tidy and polite and made him cups of tea and saved my tantrums for the school holidays, he was willing to have me there, but I knew his tolerance was thin. There would be no warnings, no sending to bed without supper, just a phone call, and my bags packed in the morning. Why did he take me in? Lilias paid him. Not regularly and not enough, but it covered the odd extravagance in the sale rooms. And maybe he was a little in love with the woman she performed for him. Until I was old enough to travel alone, she would turn up to collect me at the end of each term and stay the night so we could make an early start. I’d go up to bed leaving them playing cribbage in the drawing room. Next morning, when I went in to open the curtains, I’d smell her perfume and the peaty astringence of whisky over the usual fust of pipe tobacco, cracked leather and old wood.
It never occurred to me he might want company on the nights Lilias wasn’t there, still less that he might be lonely for the daughter he’d never had. I would hear the click of his fingernails on the polished table, turning over the cards in game after game of Patience, as I slipped upstairs with my illicit packet of ginger nuts. Solitariness is the natural condition of a certain sort of child. I was happy enough, flopped on my bed amid the biscuit crumbs, and I wasn’t completely alone. There was a man I used to talk to, a tall man with Othello’s build and an intelligent, unblackened face. Yes, he was a figment of my imagination, but he was there when I needed him, as Lilias so rarely was.
I found her in bed, swathed in white. The room was small, the bed large and made larger by its avalanche of lace-trimmed pillows, the billowing duvet, all the veils, saris, fringed shawls and pashminas draped over the brass bedstead, the tray of cold coffee and biscotti balanced on the mattress and, rolling from side to side in an ecstatic stretch, Toby the tortoiseshell cat. She was wearing a white djellaba in some slubbed fabric that might have been raw silk, its open neck exposing the fragility of her throat above a long sliver of bloodless flesh. It was a while since I had seen her white-gold hair released from its pins, brushing her shoulders in a straggle her bewitched lovers would surely see as gamine. That’s if she risked the seductive illusion by actually doing it these days. Could any woman, even Lilias, be promiscuously sexually active at sixty-nine? I chose to leave the question open, ignoring the silk scarves tied to the brass posts, their weave creased and stressed as if from knotting in bondage games. She was quite capable of dressing the set before I arrived.
‘I know you’re not asleep,’ I said, ‘you’ve only just pressed the button to let me in.’
Her eyelids fluttered. ‘Hello, darling.’
I pushed the cat to the floor and took its place. ‘Everything all right?’
She didn’t reply. I felt the first stirrings of concern. ‘What’s happened?’
Again she made me wait, then keeked at me from under her eyelids. ‘Nothing, darling. I’m just having a la-a-azy day. I’ve been out every night since Sunday.’ She gave an extravagant yawn. ‘And this morning I thought I’ll just spend the day catching up. It’s not as if there’s anything else I have to do.’
I touched her brow and felt her recoil. Her skin was reassuringly cool, despite the guardless fire crackling in the dog grate. On the other hand, she was very pale.
‘You’ve got to look after yourself.’
‘I do.’
‘Drinking every night? Staying up till all hours?’
‘It’s called pleasure, darling. You should try it.’ She pulled the quilt higher, snuggling her chin into the fabric. ‘It’s good for you, boosts the immune system.’
I stood up. ‘Well, you can go back to sleep now.’
We couldn’t have lunch if she was in bed, she kept next to no food in the house, yet she didn’t want me to go.
‘I wonder how you’ll remember me,’ she said, musingly.
‘I won’t,’ I said, ‘I mean, I won’t have to. You’ll be here for a long time yet.’
‘But not for ever.’
‘None of us are going to be here for ever.’ I saved her the trouble of correcting my grammar: ‘Is going to be here for ever.’
She did that little tilt of the head which meant have it your way, and I realised that, somehow, we’d switched roles. I was now the one making light of her illness.
I sat down again and sloughed off my jacket. It was too hot in there, hot and unwholesome: the clutter on her bed, the intimate smell of sleep and coffee and cat. Those flames suspended part way up the wall spooked me the way an actor lighting a cigarette on-stage or opening a beer with that unfakeable hiss can spook. With the obscene intrusion of the real.
‘They’re much better at treating it these days,’ I said. ‘The survival rates are—’
She cut me off: ‘I wasn’t a very good mother to you, was I, darling?’
I stared at her in astonishment.
‘I wasn’t like any of the other mothers. You didn’t fit in. I know how important that is to children. You wanted a sock d
arner and cake baker, someone who had your tea ready on the table when you came in from school.’
I noted how little there was to choose between Lilias’s neglected child and the classic domestic tyrant.
‘I should have bottled my own jam and knitted you Fair Isle sweaters.’
‘Kids with homemade clothes got picked on.’
She smiled briefly. ‘But you wanted me at home.’
‘I wanted a home,’ I admitted. ‘I could have compromised on how often you were in it.’
‘Ah,’ she said.
Yet she didn’t give me away. She passed the parcel, but when the music stopped she always took me back. I could have been put up for adoption at birth, or later, once the novelty had worn off. She could have skipped the Easter holidays, whittled down her summers with me from six weeks to three. All it would have taken was a British Council tour of former colonies, and the precedent would have been set, but she stuck to the child-friendly British Isles. Which must mean something.
‘My poor deprived darling—’
I heard the satire in these words but they touched me all the same.
‘It just wasn’t possible.’
We both knew what she was talking about, but I never thought she’d actually say it.
‘Every child wants a father, of course. It’s only natural. But I was surprised how single-minded you were. Most little girls would have wanted a sister or brother as much.’
I held my breath. I could feel him in the room, he had never been closer, but one misjudged word could banish him for ever.
‘If I talked to the ASM for five minutes you’d be tugging at my skirt. “Is that my daddy?” It was terribly embarrassing.’
Through the open door I heard the cat snagging its claws on the linen sofa.
Carefully, I said, ‘I needed a wee bit more than a photograph.’
‘It was all I had, darling.’
‘You had three years with him. You could have told me, I don’t know, what made him laugh, his favourite food.’ Maybe even his name, I thought, but we’d had that argument too many times for me to reopen it now. ‘Something more definite than that he made his living pretending to be other people.’
‘That is something definite, darling. You just don’t like it.’
The cat reappeared in the doorway and leapt onto the mattress, where it sniffed at the plate of biscotti. I scooped it up and dumped it back on the floor.
‘I’ve never really understood why. It’s in your blood. You’ve got the voice and the height and there are always going to be character parts. You’d have made a good actress. Only you’d have to have learned how to feel.’
I thought of a couple of feelings I might express there and then.
‘Did he know how to feel?’ I said. ‘My father?’
She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I suppose you could say that.’
I had been waiting all my life to hold this conversation, and now that the long-bolted door had cracked open I was paralysed by how much there was to ask. Why now? Was she clearing her conscience before it was too late? Or just playing out the scene because, well, she was an actress?
‘Can I have it?’ I nearly didn’t ask, and it was the catalyst that changed everything.
‘Have what, darling?’
‘His picture.’
I felt the static crackle across her skin.
‘I gave it to you,’ she said.
‘No: I wanted it, but you said he’d given it to you so you should keep it.’
‘Did I?’
Of all Lilias’s vocal tics I found did I? the most infuriating. A stalling tactic while she groped for her next line, it meant nothing, and at the same time it was the most revealing thing she said. Behind its urbanity lay a limitless indifference to the truth.
I knelt on the floor and peered under the bed. The theatrical trunk was still there, along with a crumpled tissue and a tube of KY jelly. I leaned in among the dust balls and grabbed one of the handles.
She raised her head from the pillow. ‘You won’t find it in there.’
I hauled the tin box across the floorboards, coughing in the lemon-scented dust that rose as I lifted the lid. When I was a child, this trunk had been my most illicit pleasure. Even now I felt it. The thrill of bypassing the smokescreen of her presence. All this archaeological evidence of my mother’s actual self.
It was just as I remembered. The red Leichner tins, the gold-edged invitations smudged with lipstick, the bundle of programmes secured with pink ribbon, the crumbling newspaper reviews.
She pushed back the duvet and swung her legs to the floor. ‘Freya.’
‘Just making sure,’ I said.
I riffled through the clutter. A platinum-blonde wig matted with spilled face powder. That tin of Coty L’Aimant talc I had coveted as a dolls’ pillarbox. A Peter Blake sketch on a paper napkin (she’d approached him in a café, told him it was her birthday). Tickets for the Edinburgh Festival and the Oban Ball. The spare keys to all those long-forgotten boyfriends’ flats. A body stocking still in its cellophane envelope. And her love letters, not separated according to sender, but tied together in a fervid, dog-eared millefeuille of desire.
‘What did I say?’
I caught a glimpse of starveling breasts through the djellaba’s slashed neck as she slammed her hands down on the lid. If I hadn’t braced my arms to stop it from shutting she could have severed my wrists.
‘Ma!’
She sat on the bed. ‘I don’t have it.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I threw it away.’
She was hopeless at improvisation.
‘Really,’ she said, ‘I didn’t need it any more.’
‘What about my needs?’
‘You were the one I needed it for.’
The picture of my father as Othello had never had a frame. She wouldn’t have tolerated the extra weight in her luggage. And I liked being able to touch the grain of the photographic paper. It was a monochrome print taken on stage but not, surely, during a performance. The lens was too close, the pose too visibly held, the other actor on stage (Iago, I surmised) artfully blurred. I first read the play when I was nine, and saw it performed in the late 1980s, by which time no one would have dreamed of casting a white man in the part. Watching that glamorous, Rada-educated Trinidadian striding about the stage, it seemed to me he was playing both the Moor and the man whose genes I carried. I only saw that production once, but I can still repeat the cadences of It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul note for note.
‘What’s this?’ My eye caught something dark amid a sheaf of papers. There he was. Half of him, anyway. The whites of his eyes staring out of that boot-blacked face, his right arm intact, along with most of his torso in its doublet, his left arm severed just below the shoulder. The print had been torn in two, pinched between finger and thumb and ripped in a diagonal line straight enough to suggest considerable force.
I found the other half of the photograph face-down at the bottom of the trunk.
‘I should have thrown it away,’ she said.
I fitted the torn pieces together.
She took a deep breath. ‘Darling, you’re not going to like what I have to tell you.’
I met her eye.
‘But I can see you don’t like me much anyway right now.’ She touched her tongue to her upper lip. ‘It’s not him.’
I kept looking at her.
‘Your father. It’s not his picture.’
I tried to calculate the advantage she would gain from this fiction.
‘I found it in a second-hand book shop. I’ve no idea who it is. I never worked with him, and I couldn’t find him in Spotlight. I think he must have been foreign.’
I could tell my silence was unnerving her, but I wasn’t going to respond until she told me the truth.
‘You were fine till you went to school. Then, too, for a while. It was when you learned to write. They showed me your compositions. I thought they were making a fuss a
bout nothing: all children make things up. Especially if the teacher sets such unimaginative assignments. But there were so many, and they were so similar, scratching and scratching at the same itch. It was quite heartbreaking. You needed someone to love.’
Finally I believed her. ‘So you found a picture of a professional pretender doing some pretending and pretended he was my father.’
‘He could have been an amateur,’ she said.
I wanted to hurl something and hear it smash, to snap my jaws and feel the teeth shatter in my head. I wanted to scream until my ears bled. But I suspected that, in her melodramatic heart, she too wanted me to do these things. And so I did not.
Little girls and their daddies. You see them everywhere these days. Shampooing hair at the swimming baths, rubbing sore knees in the park, leaning sideways to keep hold of a tiny hand. As a teenager I was obsessively interested in the sensory development of the foetus. One day I would be weaving through the crowd and a man’s voice would stir the marrow in my bones. God knows why I told Lilias. She looked thoughtful for a few moments, then told me she went on tour the day after she conceived and, apart from the acrimonious phone call when she broke the news, they never spoke again.
She was watching me from the bed. I realised I was still holding the photograph together.
‘There’s a roll of Sellotape in the kitchen drawer,’ she said.
I uncoupled the pieces and dropped them on the fire.
1972
Every afternoon Lili does a circuit of the farm. There’s always something new to see, a buzzard on a fence post, a roe deer among the beets, and it passes the time, gets her out of the house. God knows how she filled the hours off stage before she came here. There was screwing, of course, but that never took long with Brod. Mostly they talked, and drank, and smoked. None of which she does now, what with her queasiness and the lack of company. She’ll never have a better chance of finishing the last hundred pages of An Actor Prepares, if only she could concentrate.
All day every day the same thought circles in her head. When did Brod stop loving her? For all his talk of being careful, he took her everywhere last summer. All those parties. Didn’t they have fun, walking into that walled garden in the Borders, the bricks still warm with the afternoon’s sun, a glass of fizz, the smell of lavender and trodden turf, shaking hands with some chap whose great-granny’s great-granny had accommodated Bonnie Prince Charlie? They all knew Brod was screwing her, but he liked to introduce her as a ‘valued client’. It wasn’t just insurance against Rosie finding out, the pretence turned him on. Having to watch while she flirted with his old schoolfriends. That time she danced with Roddy, he couldn’t wait till they got back: he had her in the van. So she didn’t think twice about telling him she’d been out all night helping Ludo with his lines. How was she to know he’d go round there fists flying? Those were the golden months, everything so deliciously new. Even their rows. ‘Christ strike a light!’ he’d roar, so marvellously quaint, as if he were bringing out the family silver to hurl in her face. Of course, she has other memories, less delicious, less marvellous. When had she lost her lustre in his eyes? Wasn’t it around the time he started saying ‘She’s going to be Mrs Broderick’? In which case the spur was not love, but guilt, or even a devious impulse to extricate himself. He never said much about Rosie, just enough to paint her as a Martha type, all duty, no dereliction. Lili was a Mary through and through, yet as soon as he started referring to her as the future Mrs Broderick, she became a Martha too. So many things she wouldn’t do if she got another run at it. Understanding him and showing it, anticipating what he would feel or say. It infuriated him, which made her nervous. ‘Do you love me, Broddie?’ She remembers the way he looked at her, measuring her weakness. She should have told him to go to hell. Only by then she was so confident the prize was within her grasp.