by Alice Jolly
In the hall I pull my hair back from my face and wipe my glasses on my cardigan. The fanlight throws a diamond pattern on the tiled floor. The props of their improbable marriage are all still here. His worn brogues, under the hall table, next to her trainers, his camel overcoat next to her black mack, his trilby next to her baseball cap.
‘You know your father is coming as well,’ Geoffrey says. ‘And Gus, I think.’
‘Oh good. That’s nice.’
Just what I need. I follow Geoffrey through to the study. Before the fire he was slow and lumbering but now he buzzes like a bluebottle. His steps bounce and his shovel hands gyrate on the end of long arms. His curly hair is like a bobble hat pulled down too far. Dad always says that he was born with two rows of teeth and had to have an operation to take the second row out.
We go into Geoffrey’s study, at the front of the house, and he pulls back the dark velvet curtains, to let in dirty grey light. The grate is empty and the room feels damp and hollow. Grief is encrypted in the air. The shabby, bachelor clutter which I’ve known since childhood is all still here – the shelves of leather-bound books, the bald carpet, the print of an eagle with its foot chained to a metal ball. But Tiffany had started to make improvements – a watercolour of sugary flowers near the desk, a bowl of pot pourri, dusty now, on a table near the door. Near the window splashes of pink paint – colour tests, quickly done, the flick of the wrist dried on the wall.
Geoffrey pours me sherry, which I don’t like. Switching on to auto-chat, I tell him about Brussels and my new job and packing up. He flaps around the room, not really listening, leafing through papers on his desk, sighing, shaking his head. His clothes are too big for him now but, although shrunk, he’s not diminished. Grief has reduced him to something stronger and more dense – a man of clay, cast in iron.
‘Later I want to show you the orchids,’ he says. At the back of the house there’s a whole conservatory full of Tiffany’s orchids. He excuses himself and goes to see to the lunch. I sit down near the empty grate with my coat still on because of the cold. Everywhere there are photographs. Close to me, pinned above the mantelpiece, there’s a recent snapshot of Fiona and James. Fiona used to be pretty before she married Dad – and she had her own career. Then she put on the marriage mask and her face grew to fit in. Now she’s out of focus, under-exposed. She wears a Brillo pad skirt and ghastly bi-focals – probably quite useful when you consider all that she needs to overlook.
Most of the photographs are of Tiffany. Dad is in nearly all of them. The nose in different guises, seen from different angles. A laughing nose, wrinkled up, below delighted eyes. A wise nose, pointing down, inquiring, sensitive. An aquiline nose, held high, rising above a bad smell – proud and patrician. In one photograph Dad and Tiffany are playing croquet in the garden at Brickley Grange. Tiffany’s long legs stick out from underneath shorts – she wears strappy sandals and a baseball cap. A big model-girl smile. After that Dad and Geoffrey pinned me to the lawn with the croquet hoops, and Tiffany didn’t much like that, because she wanted it to be her, but no one would ever have dared do that to her. Beside her Dad waves a croquet mallet, his silver hair standing up like wings.
In a tortoiseshell frame Tiffany, Dad and Geoffrey are all together at some formal dinner. Then there’s the Texas wedding photographs with Dad there as best man. In one shot he walks beside a white-robed Tiffany, coming down stone steps. In his morning suit, slim and elegant, he towers above her. Knowing just how good he looks, indigo eyes turned to the camera, he stretches out a hand to escort her down. Why do I have to tell Geoffrey anything? Why can’t he see for himself?
I don’t want to look at the photographs any more but they have grown large around me. All those past moments are assembled now. Soon people will step out of the frames and grow life-sized. I shut my eyes but there’s no safety in darkness. Images still crowd in on me. Memory leafs back to that night. I let the pages turn. Fire crackles in my head.
I’m home from London, a Gloucestershire weekend, driving back from a party, tired, dizzy-headed. Over the brow of the hill and down towards Brickley. A clear night with a sharp wind carries with it an autumn smell of damp earth and over-ripe apples. Across the fields I see a distant sparkle, like a smouldering coal, not far from Hyde Cottage, where Geoffrey and Tiffany live. I nearly drive straight on home but then I turn down the lane, just to check. I pass through a tunnel of banks and hedges, unable to see more than a few feet ahead, until I turn the last corner.
Then flames tear across the sky in ragged strips of orange and smoke fills the windscreen. I get out of the car and run towards where Hyde Cottage should be, towards the flames, as though I’m going to beat them back. Smoke is in my mouth and my eyes and I’m crying out for help but there’s no one there, nothing but fields for miles around. My heel twists on the gravel path and I stumble and fall, kneeling in my shrivelled party dress in the lane, with stones digging into my knees.
The flames reach up like pleading arms and the furnace heat is solid. The cottage is a blurred outline and thick black smoke billows from where the roof should be. A yellow halo lights the dark sky and the flames roar and crash. A storm of black ash blows all around me. The smell is like burning rubber, it clutches at my throat and stings in my eyes.
Partly I’m drained by shock, but at the same time I’m not quite there, because this only happens on television or in other people’s lives. I’m separate from the sick excitement inside me, already thinking how I’ll tell the story later, planning how I’ll go to the phone box in the village, and ring the emergency services, and explain to them how to get here, how to find the entrance to the upper lane. I even imagine a local newspaper report, praising my prompt actions.
Through stinging eyes I see the timbers of the roof collapse. They groan and sigh, as the cottage releases its last breath. The orange heat of the flames is on my face and my chest is squeezed up. I run back to the car, reverse, and drive back up the lane. My hands are shaking so that the car shudders and then plunges across the top road. I have to brake hard to miss the hedge on the other side and it’s then that I look back. My mind clicks, sealing the image.
After that I don’t remember much. A moment of indecision – should I go straight home or call from the phone box in the village? Doesn’t matter, just decide. I called from the village and then went home. Straightaway Dad went back to Hyde Cottage. Then two policemen were at the back door, and Dad came back, and I made cocoa for us in the kitchen. The young policeman – with buck teeth – asked me about my rucksack and, when I told him about Thailand, he said he’d been there two years ago and we got talking about that. He kept looking around Fiona’s sparkling kitchen, which made me feel awkward. The older policeman was too polite because, of course, they knew about Dad. They yawned as they left. Past two o’clock, they said, time to get some sleep.
But half an hour later they were back. Tiffany’s car was in the garage, they said. This time they were in the sitting room, manoeuvring their boots carefully across Fiona’s clean carpets. When they mentioned the car, Dad’s forehead folded up in pleats. She often called a taxi and then took the train to London, he said. But she had been at the cottage earlier in the day, he knew that. Strangely, as the truth soaked through me, there was horror but not much shock. Although I hadn’t thought she was in the cottage, it was as though I had always known. Dad looked at me with the face of a dead person, and laid his hand, flat, across the side of his cheek, as though he’d been hit. And after that we couldn’t look at each other, our eyes were too naked.
Then there were voices rumbling behind doors and telephone calls made. I sat on the front doorstep with my head pressed against a stone pillar. It was as though bits of me were bursting out from inside, and somehow I had to hold on to them, and keep them all together, so I sat with my arms wrapped around me, and my head down. I wasn’t crying because it was too bad for that. To start with I didn’t think about Tiffany but then I imagined her blue eyes, framed by perfect mascara a
nd perfect eye shadow, and I imagined her flesh, rippled and burnt. Then I choked on the smell of it, and I had to go upstairs and lock myself in the bathroom. None of this was how a tragedy is meant to be, there was nothing heroic about it.
The police didn’t ask much, just our names. But I couldn’t say mine. The words turned into birds and fluttered in my throat so that I coughed and gagged. Dad said – Magdalena. I tried to tell them that I’m not called Magdalena, always Mags or Maggie, but the words were still battering in my throat and wouldn’t come out. We none of us slept. Dad walked back and forwards through the house, suddenly old. At four o’clock he put my rucksack in the car and said we should go to the airport, because that was what had been arranged, a few days before, in some other world. My flight was at seven and he had to go to London anyway and he would drop me off.
I said I shouldn’t go but Dad said I must. I refused and Dad and I would have finished up shouting at each other, except the police were there, so I had to do what he said. He and I drove in silence through the early morning darkness and rain shattering on the windscreen. I sat with a dry handkerchief in my hand and my fists clenched. When we had been driving for an hour, Dad pulled over onto the hard shoulder and his fumbling hand took cigarettes and a lighter from the glove pocket.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Then he said it again. I said that I didn’t want to go away, that I should cancel the trip. But he said I must go. What about Geoffrey, I said. There was nothing to say. Dad’s hands fumbled with the cigarettes and the lighter, but he couldn’t make them work, so I leant over and lit a cigarette for him. Then I watched the shaking end of the cigarette in his hand, and the taste of smoke was dry and flaky in my mouth. On the main road, cars roared and splashed past us and their headlights touched the silver edges of Dad’s hair, and flashed on his signet ring, as he pressed his hand against his head. Between the cars there was silence and then I could hear his breathing, shallow and quick.
There’s a crash in the hall as the front door opens. I open my eyes and sit up. Dad and Gus roll into the room in relentlessly good spirits. Dad wears his rural-life clothes – a little too neat and tidy, a Londoner playing at country squire. He bends over to kiss me, smelling of aftershave, letting his cold hand rest on my cheek. Gus sits in a straight-backed leather armchair, lumpy and lardy, his short legs swinging above the floor. They behave as they always do with Geoffrey, or other old friends. Everything is political chat and little-boy sniggering. Sometimes I used to find it amusing, but not any more.
They have various Ealing Voter conversations. Dad speaks in a flat, nasal whine. ‘What I don’t understand is why my granny is lying on a hospital trolley for eight hours in a corridor, when the Government is committing money to sending our boys to some place I’ve never heard of …’
Gus picks up a magnifying glass from a side table and peers at me. He tips the lens and his eye pours down across the glass. As always that mole on his throat catches against the collar of his shirt. I tend to watch the mole rather than his face. ‘So what exactly are you going to be doing for the European Commission?’ he asks me.
‘Legal reform for Poland. It’s a contract for a year but it can be extended.’
‘You know the European Commission will be endless men in short-sleeved shirts with rows of pens in their top pockets,’ Dad says.
Gus is tapping his shoes up and down, the sound of them slaps on the carpet. He lowers the magnifying glass and then passes it from hand to hand. ‘I still don’t understand. Tell me more.’
‘Well, basically it’s aid administration.’
‘Ah, Department of the Bleeding Hearts?’
‘Lady Bountiful and the Peasants, perhaps?’ Dad says. They nod their heads, give each other knowing looks, turn down the corners of their mouths. They’re trying to make this like it always was. Maggie – always good for a laugh, the butt of all their jokes, but they haven’t the heart for it now, and neither have I.
‘Maggie, take no notice of them,’ Geoffrey says. He pours more whisky for Dad, then paces, stopping occasionally to hook a long leg up onto the fender, or over the back of a chair, revealing a patch of white hairy leg above an Argyle sock.
‘So I understand you’ve met our biographer?’ Geoffrey says to me.
‘Adam Ferrall? Yes, I have. Twice actually. He took me out to dinner. He’s rather interesting. I like him.’
Dad and Gus look at each other, their eyes opening a little wider.
‘I think you’ll find there’s less to him than meets the eye,’ Dad says. ‘After all, he’s a journalist. All they do is watch. Anyone can do that.’
‘I don’t think so. Journalists do a very important job. I mean, some of them even die for what they believe.’
Gus and Dad roll their eyes. Geoffrey darts around the place, pouring more whisky. ‘Now come on,’ he says. ‘Don’t let’s argue.’
‘I’m not arguing. I’m just saying that I don’t think Adam Ferrall is stupid.’
‘Oh no, certainly not,’ Geoffrey says. ‘In fact, he’s undoubtedly rather clever. I mean, he obviously knows how to get his story, doesn’t he? I think we should be very worried. Maggie is going to tell him all of our secrets.’ Geoffrey laughs but nobody joins him.
Gus’s jittery eye clicks. ‘I wouldn’t credit him with too much guile.’
‘Oh really,’ Dad says. ‘I thought you liked him, Gus. Rather your type. No?’
Gus’s flayed skin turns a darker shade of red. I wish Dad wouldn’t tease him. He can’t help the fact he’s one of the many people trapped inside the wrong body. Or the fact he’s so tiresomely pudgy and enthusiastic, and always in the way, like a dog, endlessly under your feet or lying in doorways. It’s terrible the way Dad uses him – except I suppose people aren’t really used unless they want to be.
‘So what are you doing now?’ I ask him.
‘Oh, we ventriloquists always carry on,’ he says. ‘I may have lost one dummy but I’ve got another. And at least the current one doesn’t try to create his own script.’
‘Oh, very funny,’ Dad says.
Geoffrey ushers us through to the dining room. He can’t cook and his housekeeper is not around on Saturday and so the lunch is sparse. Tinned lobster bisque, toast and Gentleman’s Relish, cheese and then rhubarb crumble, made by the housekeeper, keeping warm on the hotplate. Geoffrey serves the soup out of the pan. He doesn’t seem to have heated it properly – either that or he’s left it too long and it’s gone cold again. He switches the stereo on and weighty strains of classical music grind in the background. Conversation turns back to my departure.
‘It’s all very well you jumping ship and going to Brussels,’ Dad says. ‘I just don’t think it’s very fair on Hanbury.’
Hanbury was my former head of chambers and is an old friend of Dad’s – not that I got the job that way, I didn’t. Now I sigh at the mention of his name. ‘You should try working for Hanbury. He’s an embarrassment. Women come to see him about their awful divorces, and they cry, and he looks at his watch and says – oh come on, love, this is costing you two hundred quid an hour.’
‘So did he sack you?’ Gus asks.
‘No, Gus. In fact, out of the three people who started with me I was the only person who was offered a tenancy.’
‘Oooh, now that’s telling us,’ Dad and Gus say together in their camp way.
‘But I still don’t understand,’ Gus says. ‘Why didn’t you take it?’
‘I just didn’t see the point of it.’
‘There’s no point in most jobs,’ Dad says. ‘But people have got to work. I mean, there’s no telling what the devils would be up to if they didn’t have to go to work, is there?’
I give Dad a beady look. ‘Quite right.’
An uneasy silence.
‘I just didn’t think it was a job that needed doing,’ I say.
‘Look, eventually everyone realises they’re not really needed,’ Dad says. ‘I mean I’m a politician, an unemployed politician admittedly,
but I realised years ago that there’s never going to be a voice over the Tannoy saying – is there a politician on this train?’
Everyone starts to laugh, even me.
‘When I became a barrister, I knew it wouldn’t be about justice,’ I say. ‘But I did think people might pretend a bit.’
‘The role of the barrister is surely just to represent a point of view,’ Gus says.
I sigh. ‘Thank you, Gus, for that brief glimpse of the blindingly obvious.’
Geoffrey hasn’t eaten his soup and he’s staring into nothing.
‘The legal system leads to unnecessary confrontation,’ I say. ‘Sometimes all people want is an apology, but no one apologises because they’re terrified of the insurance liability.’
‘Yeah, man, right on,’ Gus says and raises two fingers in a hippie salute. ‘When there’s been a murder then everyone should have a workshop, hug each other and sort through any childhood traumas.’
‘You can take the piss as much as you want but there are other ways of solving these problems. If you talk to Nanda …’
I am drowned out by Dad and Gus groaning. ‘Oh my God, send her to Brussels immediately.’ Dad grips his head in theatrical distress. ‘Listen, Maggie, there’s not much wrong with the legal system really, it’s just that it deals with the probable – with what the reasonable man might think – and that’s all right most of the time, except that events are often improbable and men are usually unreasonable, so then you get mistakes.’
I get up to help Geoffrey clear the soup plates away. From the stereo violins creak and whine, straining towards some resolution which is never reached. I feel stretched as tight as the violin strings. Gus is tapping one fat finger up and down on the table and the tic in his eyes is working. Dad picks his teeth.
‘I think that whatever the legal system does or doesn’t do then the truth tends to come out anyway. Because it is what people want …’
‘Rubbish,’ Dad says.
‘It isn’t rubbish. And why should it be so unreasonable to expect that the legal system should try to find the truth?’