Astonishing Splashes of Colour (15 page)

Paul, at eight, looks healthy, and older than Jake. There is no sign of his domed forehead, or all those brains that are meant to be inside. He doesn’t look clever at all. I think the photographer made a mistake and thought that Martin and Paul were the twins, and Jake the youngest. That’s why he’s arranged them on either side of Jake—for symmetry.

Behind, Adrian at twelve looks serious. He didn’t have glasses then, and his face looks naked without their intellectual frame. He could afford contact lenses now, but presumably he prefers to cultivate the practical, sensible look that comes from wearing glasses. He has his right hand on the inside shoulder of Paul.

Dinah stands next to him, and she ought to have her left hand on Martin’s shoulder. But she doesn’t, and it’s that one act of rebellion that fascinates me.

The boys look connected, related, by the physical contact between them. And because of this connection, you can see the family resemblance too—the slightly long noses, olive skin, the tilt of the mouth to one side and the very slightly cleft chin.

Dinah doesn’t belong to them. She is standing slightly back from the others, so there is space round her, and she stares directly into the camera. She’s fourteen, two years older than
Adrian, and there’s an independent look about her. She knows who she is, what she wants, and she won’t be pushed into anything. I think often of her two hands hanging down by her sides, of the distance between her and the boys, and I realize that she is stronger and cleverer than all of them, because she makes no concessions. She won’t pretend to be what she is not.

When I was fourteen, the same age as Dinah in the photograph, I decided that I needed to know more about her. I wrote
DINAH
on the cover of an exercise book in big black letters and underneath, in brackets: (
PRIVATE. DO NOT OPEN
).

I went to my father first. He was painting at the time, of course, but when I mentioned Dinah, he stopped abruptly and scratched his head. “Did someone speak?” he said.

I realized I’d chosen a bad day. He didn’t always like being interrupted. “Nobody ever tells me anything,” I said.

He started painting again, without turning around. “Dinah? Wasn’t that Alice in Wonderland’s cat? Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?”

I tried again. “Dad, what really happened to her?”

He ignored the question. “There is a clear cat connection here. Cat, kittens, Kitty.”

I rose to my feet. “Thanks a lot,” I said and slammed the door.

I went back to my room and opened the first page of my exercise book. At the top of the page, I had written “Dad.” I found a pencil and put a diagonal line across the page.

Jake was in bed with tonsillitis. I ran down the road to buy him a newspaper and some sweets. Sherbet lemons. Pineapple chunks.

“Hello,” I said, putting the newspaper on the bed beside his mound of bedclothes, and went to open the curtains. “It’s too dark in here,” I said loudly, as if he would pay more attention to me if I raised my voice.

He rolled over and sat up, narrowing his eyes against the sudden light. The room smelled of dirty socks and sweat. I felt threatened by his germs and opened the window to give them a chance to escape.

“Kitty,” he muttered. “Shut the window. I’m ill.”

“You’re always ill,” I said, and left the window open.

I moved a chair to the bed, but not too close, then sat and looked at him. “I’m conducting an investigation,” I said.

He looked interested. “What into?” His black hair was greasy and lank, making his ears even more prominent than usual. His nose was red and sore, his cheeks flushed.

“Have you been taking the antibiotics?” I asked.

He nodded. “What are you investigating? The effectiveness of antibiotics? Don’t bother. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. What more is there to know?”

I ignored him, crossed my legs and opened my exercise book. I picked up my pencil and sat poised, rather as I thought a journalist should look. “Dinah,” I said.

“Dinah? You’re asking me about Dinah?” he said, looking baffled.

“I want you to tell me about her.”

He lay back and looked at the ceiling. “I don’t know anything about her.”

I could see he was just being lazy. “You were twelve when she ran away. You must remember something about her.”

“She was a bully,” he said eventually, and smiled with a peculiar satisfaction.

I was taken aback by this. I had an image of her in my mind: strong, fearless, daring, but not selfish in her superiority. I saw her as higher than her brothers, cleverer than them, but guiding them occasionally out of kindness.

“She used to pick legs off spiders.”

I relaxed. Being a bully to spiders is not a desirable quality, but it’s not as bad as bullying people.

“On a Saturday when we bought our sweets, she would wait until we got home and tell me to give her half of my sweets.”

I waited. “Did you do it?”

“Of course I did. Wouldn’t you give all your sweets to someone who pulls your arm behind your back and promises to break it if you don’t give in? I was a musician. I couldn’t take any chances.”

I looked at him with contempt. She only bullied him because he let her. “She was only bluffing,” I said. “She wouldn’t have really done it.”

His eyes slid past me and over to the open windows. “She would have,” he said. “She did it to Martin.”

Now I knew he was making it all up. Martin must have been the same size as her and much stronger. But Jake looked awkward and I didn’t think he’d respond well to further interrogation. I looked out of the window at the mulberry trees where the fruit was ripening into a deep black-red. We should keep silkworms, I thought: there are enough mulberry leaves to feed an army of them. We could make a fortune. “Why did she go?” I asked.

He shrugged. “How should I know? Her friends were more interesting than us.” He smiled tiredly. “She was probably right. Life was much easier after she left.” He shut his eyes and sank down on his pillows. “Do you mind, Kitty? I feel awfully tired.”

I stared at my empty book and wondered what I should write. The investigation wasn’t proving very productive. I went to the door.

“Thanks for the paper,” Jake said behind me, but I didn’t acknowledge him. This small glimpse of his vulnerability, his fear of Dinah, made me uncomfortable.

I found Paul at his desk. I think he was working for a Ph.D. at the time. Every time I saw him, he walked with a curious swagger, as if his mind were elsewhere, and he talked in monosyllables. There weren’t many girlfriends during this period.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi,” he said but didn’t look up from his work.

“I wanted to ask you—” I was a little nervous of him.

“Yes?” He wrote down more figures.

“About Dinah.”

He looked up while still writing. “Diana? I went out with her for a bit—last year.” His pen slipped slightly and I was worried that I’d distracted him and made his calculations go wrong.

“Not Diana. Dinah.” I was getting fed up with everyone’s inability to remember her. “Your sister.”

“Oh,” he said and wrote down “5?n(x—4y).” “She left years ago.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You knew her. I didn’t. She’s my sister too, you know.”

“Mmm.” He frowned and it wasn’t clear if he was frowning at me, at Dinah, or at his work. “Well, I didn’t really know her. She was much older than me.”

“Of course you did. She didn’t leave until you were nine.”

He sat back. “That’s true. But I didn’t have a lot to do with her.”

“Jake says she was a bully.”

“Did he? I don’t remember.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Of course she might have been and I didn’t know. Don’t forget, six years is a very big age-gap when you’re nine. She had her own friends, and went off with them in the end.”

“Gypsies,” I said confidently.

“No, I don’t think so. What makes you think that?”

I didn’t know. I just thought it was gypsies. “Where did she go then?”

“She went off with a group of hippies—into free love, I think. They had long hair and beads and didn’t wear shoes. I imagine they went to live in a commune.”

“What’s a commune?”

“You know, everyone living together and sharing everything, sex mainly. I shouldn’t think it lasted very long.”

“Why didn’t she come home then?”

“I rather think Dad told her never to return.”

This was beginning to get interesting. I liked the idea of Dad standing on the doorstep, raising his arm in anger and shouting, “Never darken my doorstep again.”

Paul picked up his pencil again. “I have work to do.”

“But what was she like?”

“Like? What do you mean? She was just there and then she wasn’t. It was more peaceful after she left.”

I felt somehow that Paul knew more but wasn’t going to tell me. I suppose it had been a difficult time when Dinah left. I was born, and mother died—big changes in a short space of time.

Adrian wasn’t much more help. He had recently married Lesley, and they spent all their spare time doing DIY, first in the house, then the garden.

“I must get this next slab down,” he panted when I arrived unannounced. “So we can lay the turf tomorrow.”

I watched from the kitchen window as he and Lesley heaved an enormous slab into position. I thought he would be the best person to tell me about Dinah, because he was closest in age.

But when he came in, he was vague. “I don’t think about Dinah very often, I’m afraid. It’s so long since she went. I certainly didn’t miss her at the time.”

“Jake says she was a bully.”

He shrugged. “She didn’t bully me, but then she wouldn’t have, would she? I was bigger than her. There’s a photograph of her, in the sitting room, all of us together. Except you, of course.”

“I know,” I said. Obviously. “Why aren’t there any others of Dinah?”

“I think Dad threw them away when she left. He was angry.”

“Was he angry with Mother too?”

“Sorry?”

“Well, there aren’t any photographs of her either, are there?”

“Interesting thought.” He filled the kettle. “I suppose he was angry with her. Leaving him on his own to cope with four children.”

“Five,” I said. He had forgotten me as a baby.

He frowned, then nodded. “Five,” he agreed.

“Why do you think she ran away?”

“I suppose it seemed romantic at the time.”

“Was she clever?”

He looked surprised. “I don’t know. She may have been, I suppose.”

He started to make the tea. “Look, I hardly remember her. When we were little, we played together, but it wasn’t very successful because we both wanted to be in charge. Then we had different friends and only met at mealtimes. When she got older, she shouted a lot, threw things around, and one day she left. She hung around with a group of dodgy people who had a van—you know, a motor-caravan—painted pink with distorted question marks all over it in lurid colours. Rather like Salvador Dalí—” The kettle boiled and he poured it into the teapot. “Kitty, what’s the matter?”

I couldn’t think. My mind was racing. The question marks were green and yellow and orange and the colours went spiralling through the pink background as if they were snakes, huge
and swollen and somehow disturbing. I knew the van that had taken Dinah away.