‘The funny thing about when the miners came,’ said Coral, ‘was that even though they were suffering, their families starving, even, our lot looked like vagrants in comparison. We were of the same generation, remember. These guys, who came to stay, we were all barely a few years apart, but we were like foreigners to each other. There were Mikey D and Bryn, spouting their socialism and wearing garments that were more hole than jumper, while Mark and his mate stood there in their designer watches and smart clothes. You used to earn good money as a miner.’
Harmony had insisted on tagging along and was treated by her brother as little more than a nuisance. She barely spoke but when she did it was softly and unobtrusively. That is not to say she was apologetic – she was far from being that. Coral said that, despite her serene composure, it was clear she had an inner core of wildfire. ‘They underestimated her,’ she said, ‘but I knew.’
She quickly endeared herself to everyone, especially the children in the house, by helping with the cooking and playing with them. She won over the women, including my mother, almost immediately, simply by talking and listening to them, spending the long, early summer afternoons in the kitchen drinking mint tea. ‘She was the focal point of any room, though whether this was from choice was always mysterious. People relished her attention. She had a clever way of making you feel as though she needed you. It flattered people.’
As Coral spoke, I revisited my meagre memories of that summer. My images of this woman smiling barefoot in the garden, and holding me in the living room as I wept into the curtain of her hair were, I was fairly sure, true recollections from that time.
‘She was, I think, slightly in awe of your father. The others she treated as equals, you’re supposed to in a co-op, after all. But she must have sensed that there was an unspoken hierarchy, seen how everyone looked to Bryn for decisions on group matters. She was exceptionally bright but had left school two years earlier, and was keen to see and learn more of the world.’
I suspect that this fulfilled a fantasy for my father, who, as my mother had said bitterly several times, could never find gainful full-time employment due to a persistent belief that his true calling lay in becoming a guru, if not in name, then at least in wisdom. A youthful and moon-eyed Harmony provided an outlet for that. And, obviously, he really wanted to sleep with her.
‘Your mother wasn’t happy,’ said Coral, ‘but it was presented to her as a fait accompli one evening in the kitchen, and made clear that she had little say in the matter.’
In those short weeks after her brother went home, Harmony had succeeded in establishing a devoted friendship with my mother. Only a couple of years apart, they were always laughing and conspiring together, shopping for records down Camden Lock, making clothes with the sewing machine, drinking cheap red wine. I imagine that they had the shared intimacy of the youthful dropout. Both were running from something – Stella from her middle-class upbringing, and Harmony, it seemed, from a man who had never hit or hurt her, but who simply, because of a limited imagination, failed to inspire in her anything apart from the sensation of being suspended in aspic. Which is a different sort of violence. But you should know that this is all guesswork, and in all likelihood I’ve got her completely wrong.
And so, when the miners left, Harmony decided that she would not be returning with them. ‘That’s when I saw her fiery side,’ said Coral. ‘She would not be moved or cajoled. She had seen her future and it was in this house, with all of us, with Bryn and Stella.’
How strange, I thought. To fall in with a houseful of hippie throwbacks, who would have been viewed by so many as ludicrously crusty and out of date. But then that was the charisma of Bryn. My mother used to joke he would have made an excellent cult leader.
‘She was a lovely girl. A joy to have around, and a wicked sense of humour. Very clever. She may have worshipped your dad, but she never stood for any bullshit. She was constantly questioning, analysing and challenging. Their late-night discussions were legendary. And I think for a while Stella appreciated the respite. She had wrapped so much of herself in him from such a young age that it gave her a chance to breathe a bit. I never remember Harmony doing anything that really inspired a passion in her, work-wise. She didn’t need to work – odd jobs and dole payments brought enough in for us to live simply, and I think some of the others had money off their families. She did a series of temping jobs intended to bring money into the house, but she had been tipped for university when she was at school. She spent a lot of the time reading.’
‘Was Stella jealous, of her and Bryn?’
‘I’m not sure jealous is the right word for your ma. She knew herself too well for that. Say what you like about her, and I have, but she knew who she was. To her, Harmony was just a hiccup. I think the relationship bothered Stella more on an intellectual level than an emotional one – why should Bryn have two women? Why should she have to share him?’
‘So she didn’t have the option to see someone else too?’
‘She had the option, but it was simple for her. She loved your father. She wanted to make it work, as a nice little family unit. Like normal people. And eventually she won. She got that ring on her finger, but that wasn’t enough.’
Stella had told me that I had been my parents’ impetus for moving out of Longhope to the cottage, but I knew very little about her pregnancy and the immediate aftermath. According to Coral, she had fallen pregnant about three years after Harmony first joined the household, by which point the two women and Bryn had established a sexual routine where he would move between rooms according to some mysterious timetable at which the others could only guess. Meanwhile, my mother’s unhappiness with the arrangement had, Stella later told me, begun to fester, so the pregnancy came as something of a relief: the baby growing inside her was an atavistic sign of possession. It was leverage.
‘The balance of power changed as soon as your mother came back from the doctors’,’ said Coral, ‘as of course it would. Suddenly your mother was carrying life, precious life, and it was almost as though Bryn began to see her anew. She went from hopelessly rigid and parochial in his eyes to a pagan fertility goddess in a peasant dress. He used to pick wildflowers from the garden and weave them into her hair, and cook her macrobiotic meals.’
If Harmony was jealous, she didn’t show it. ‘She embraced your mother’s pregnancy, viewing it as her role to help as much as she could. She knew the dynamic had shifted. The thing about Harmony was that she projected this powerful sense of unconditional gratitude towards the world, for the privilege of existing. I’ve never seen anything like it before.’
‘Are there any photographs of her?’
‘Tell you what, I think there might be.’ Coral shuffled over to a darkened corner of the room and reached under a chair, pulling out a peeling suitcase on whose dusty surface her shaking fingers left a smeary patina. ‘Do me a favour and get me a can will you? There’s years’ worth of junk in here.’
We sat on the floor sorting through the photographs, pausing occasionally to take gulps of lager, over the course of many hours. Because what Coral had in that tatty suitcase amounted to a history, an archive of alternative London seen through her own lens, ranging from the late sixties to the early nineties, a mishmash of quaintly-sized, white bordered instamatic oblongs and Polaroids and glossy black and white prints that she had developed in a dark room in the cellar. Most had been taken in the building in which we sat, Woodstock being one notable exception (so she had been there), a set I found remarkable not just in its historical value but because of how not a single semi-clad festivalgoer appears to be overweight. How slender and tanned they all looked, with their post-war portions.
Coral had taken portraits of practically all those who had passed through the house, some fleetingly – ‘He crashed here on the way to Berlin’; ‘She was ANC’; ‘They had some strange religious ideas and eventually joined a sect out in Wiltshire’ – and some longer term, all young and good-looking and exuding a bemused cool, ho
lding cigarettes and spliffs and beers and mismatched glasses. There were punks and anarchists and hippies and new romantics, and girls dressed like fairy brides in pale lace. There were men in make-up and dangly earrings made of paste, and women in boiler suits. I saw Fleur in her teenage goth phase, arm in arm with a grinning Rufus, his T-shirt much too big for him. In one photograph, my mother and father sit side by side on the batik sofa. My father is reading a slim paperback, and my mother is asleep, her head on his shoulder, the ink of her hair a spill down the front of his cheesecloth shirt. There are group shots, too: one shows fifteen or so adults – hair long and corduroy shabby – at the turning to Longhope Crescent with its dilapidated terraced houses with windowless facades, sometime in the late seventies, all blinking in the sun as they hold up the various toddlers and babies of the house to face the camera. A family.
As I examined the prints, tracing my fingers across their patent surfaces, skimming the faces of strangers whose names I would never know, I experienced a swell of pride in my parents. I had always felt a slight sense of embarrassment at how invested I felt in their past, the extent to which, like much of my generation, I idolised their lifestyle by copying their music and the clothes they had worn. But here was the proof that that life had been in many ways magnificent, and how the supreme loss of it had felt, to Stella, a tragedy. This woman, who had come to hope for a smaller, more settled life, only to find when she achieved it that it revolted her, was made palpable to me for the first time.
And there was the Harmony of my memories, in greyscale and technicolour, smiling out at me across the decades, ageless in her cut-off shorts against the wildness of the backyard, laughing as she sits cross-legged on the Turkish rug, always barefoot (those pale, opal feet) and, most arrestingly, lying on a screen-printed bedspread the colour of tiger lilies, a baby in the boney crook of her arm. ‘Is that . . . ?’
‘You,’ said Coral, turning her face away. ‘She loved you so much. She was heartbroken when they took you away. I don’t think she ever recovered. She was like a mother to you. It was cruel of Stella, considering what Harmony had been through.’
‘You mean watching my parents bond over me as a baby?’
‘That, and basically raising you, once Stella’s depression kicked in. She had you most of the time, you know, from when you were a few months old. You probably don’t remember, but you used to call her Mony. That was your first word. Not Mummy. Mony. Stella didn’t like that, I can tell you. I think that was when she started to think about going. Well. And then, when you were four, Harmony got pregnant.’
I stared at her, waiting for her to continue.
‘She was so happy, thinking you’d all be a family. Your mother was the only person she told. Didn’t want to excite Bryn before the three-month mark. And when Harmony miscarried, less than a month later, it was your ma who found her crying in the bathroom upstairs and put her to bed, who cleaned the blood off the floor.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘Bryn didn’t know. Stella took you both away less than a week later. She was never the same after that.’
There had been no secrecy; we left in daylight. She had stood at the door as they had packed up the car. Coral said she could barely watch, that when Stella gently prised me away from her arms and carried me to the car that Harmony fell to the floor and howled.
She handed me another photograph. This time, we are sitting in an armchair, backlit by the bay window, framed in incongruously opulent heavy gold brocade curtains. From the composition, you would think Madonna and child. I am very small and gazing up at her in wonder as she smiles down at me in partial shadow. On her lap rests a silver hand mirror, its handle a knot of art nouveau swirls.
‘You didn’t have a christening, obviously. But we had a little party, where we all gave presents, after you came back from the hospital.’
‘I have that mirror upstairs’, I said, crying, ‘on my dressing table. I never knew it came from her.’
‘Doesn’t surprise me. Far as I can tell, Stella’s barely told you anything about her. Guilt, probably.’
‘How did they cause her death? You can tell me.’
‘It’s not that. I’m not saying they’re murderers or anything. We were hardly the Manson family. But something you learn over time, you see, is that there’s more than one way to kill a person. That’s the trouble of it.’
Butterflies
STUNNING VINTAGE RETRO SHABBY CHIC FRAMED BUTTERFLY TAXIDERMY
4 x framed butterflies in gold frame (38 cm x 32.5 cm), mounted on white cotton. Real specimens, domestic species (Western Europe).
There are men that I have slept with, whose naked bodies I have pressed to mine, whose names and faces I can barely remember. My reasons for coming across them, for choosing them to be the ones to take me home, are lost in the maelstrom of my punch-drunk twenties, but what I can always remember from these episodes, in vivid microdetail, is the clothes that these men removed from my body. So while I couldn’t tell you, for instance, the name of the young man who scooped me off a Soho curb at 3am one November with the words, ‘Alright, girl’, I could tell you that I was in a black taffeta cocktail dress and ankle boots, and that I kept those clothes but never wore them again.
My wardrobe was full of these past versions of myself. The larvae of the moths spent that humid summer solidly chewing through this collection I had curated until the cloth reached the point of disintegration. My attachment to these clothes, cut-price items I had shed like a second skin reflected in the dilated pupils of total strangers, was altogether typical of my tendency to distil my emotions into material objects. The men I cared little for; the clothes they had pawed were heavy with smoke and meaning.
The final time I saw the academic, I was wearing cut-off denim shorts, and a semi-sheer, seventies-style floral blouse, which I had tied together at the front to expose my stomach. No bra; plain black cotton pants. On my feet I wore white patent leather sandals that gave me blisters, so the back straps had a tendency to smear pink with blood.
These are the clothes he removed from my body as we lay on his bed in a room that had the appearance of belonging to a boy my age, not a man of nearly forty. In the six months he had lived there, he had barely unpacked. Cardboard boxes filled with hundreds of books lay open on the floor, his dirty clothes a pile in the corner. ‘When the bills mount too high, I simply move out,’ he had told me, at the beginning, and I had found this somehow impressive, a sign of his nomadic spirit, rather than what it was – the peripatetic existence of a middle-aged man whose life was slowly unravelling.
I had not seen him since he had taken me to a hotel and told me that he loved me. ‘You don’t,’ I had said, ‘and that is fine.’ Afterwards (broderie anglaise sundress, no underwear, converse trainers) I had got up and left, assuming his interest in me would slowly peter out as I spent my nights in Josh’s bed, the phone vibrating, ignored, in the other room. But the messages continued, and so after several weeks of this I decided to meet him. I told myself it was to throw him over, but there was another impulse lurking there too. One more time, I told myself, and I’ll make sure to feel every second of it. Then I’ll file it all away, forgotten.
‘I know you have a child,’ I said, when I first walked into the room (his flatmate had let me in). He was sitting in the bay window, and if nothing else confirmed the truth of this, his look did, then.
‘How did you know?’
‘I just guessed. I knew you didn’t just walk into my life without a past, I’m not a fool. I knew there was a wife somewhere.’
‘Not wife, girlfriend. Ex.’
‘How old is he? Your little boy?’ I knew it couldn’t be a girl.
‘He’s two. David.’
‘David.’
The child, or rather his lack of honesty about the child, made it easier to leave him, but I didn’t blame him for it all that much. I knew barely anything about this man or his life, and I had made very little effort to find out. I had met only one of
his friends, a slightly podgy writer with spectacles who, unlike the academic, looked his age and treated me with a leering offhand resentment that I found all too transparent. I would stay true to my word, would not see the academic again after leaving his room that day, but weeks later, as the warm weather tailed off and the beer garden and the punters switched from rosé back to red, this writer sidled up to me as I worked in the pub, having slipped away from his boozy lunch.
‘You know he had a wife––.’ His opening gambit.
I looked at him. ‘I’m working.’
The writer swayed slightly. ‘Don’t think you were special,’ he said. ‘What man his age wouldn’t want a twenty-four-year-old body in his bed . . . ?’
I pushed past him, sighing audibly. He wobbled after me, his voice a hiss.
‘There’s a lot you don’t know about him. He’s done smack, you know.’
‘None of this matters to me. You know we stopped seeing each other.’
‘He shot a Palestinian child when he was in Israel.’ His voice rose. I turned to wipe a table down, only to almost crash into him.
‘Come for a drink with me when I finish.’
‘You’re pathetic.’
I doubt, as I doubted then, that my academic lover had ever harmed a child, but I can’t deny that there were other things that hinted at an underlying malice, that had occasionally manifested themselves over the course of our time together: his sexual dominance; his strange messages. The only picture in his barely lived-in room had been a giant tableau of butterfly taxidermy, containing twenty or so pinned creatures in vivid colours. I could identify them because of a book I had once had, names I would repeat in a whisper under my breath like a mantra: ringlet, brimstone, peacock, bramble hairstreak, mournful dusky wing, comma. Fender’s blue.
The Tyranny of Lost Things Page 19