Astonishing Splashes of Colour (18 page)

I stop. There are so many things in my head that he’ll never do that I can’t cope with them all. I want to stop and examine each one in detail, but I can’t. It would take a lifetime to go through them all. A lifetime that will never happen.

James puts down the spoon that he is using to stir the sauce, puts a lid on the saucepan, leaving a small gap for the steam to escape, and turns the gas down. Then he puts his arm round me and leads me to the living room where I sit down heavily on my battered sofa.

“Why won’t you talk about him?” I ask, and my eyes fill with tears.

He doesn’t sit with me. He stands and looks out of the window at the same patterns of Edgbaston trees that can be seen from my father’s studio. “Because—”

Because you spent all those years before you met me not talking, not learning how to express yourself, hiding behind your aggression and your computer. Because you’re a coward. You’re stuck in the old stiff upperlip way, however hard you try to persuade me otherwise.

“How am I supposed to have an argument when you won’t speak?” I say.

He sighs and remains still. Then he turns back to the kitchen.

“How about a career move?” I shout to the empty air. “You’d
get on really well with deaf people. You could learn sign language. That would be useful.”

My father is mowing the lawn when I arrive. I go upstairs to the first floor and look out of the window on the landing. He is manifesting his usual fury with the lawn mower, swinging it round viciously, and his mouth is moving up and down as he talks to himself. I know he is reciting lists of plants. I’ve heard him do this many times: buddleia, potentilla, rhododendrons, ceanothus, lavender, hydrangea … After a while, he’ll put them into alphabetical order.

The plants themselves are too big and wild, tumbling out from their beds with the wet heat of the summer, blurring the edges of the lawn. Taking over the garden. My father won’t mind—there’s less grass to cut.

He doesn’t like gardening. Sometimes he sends Martin out to do some tidying, which Martin will do in his usual amiable way, piling up the pruned branches and having a bonfire in the evening. I used to enjoy helping him when I was younger, happy with his easy acceptance, smelling the dark, brown earth, the restful scent of the bonfire. But Martin is away on a trip to Germany, and however hard he tries, my father cannot persuade Paul to go out into the fresh air. So he has to mow the lawn. He’s already let the grass grow too long and it washes up in untidy piles behind him as he moves urgently through it.

Now’s my chance to go into the attic. I’ve brought a torch, and have some excuses ready, if anyone finds me there. A broken chair that I want to renovate, my old maths books which must be up here since they don’t seem to be anywhere else, old clothes for a jumble sale.

The entry is difficult. There is a step ladder behind a lumpy mattress in an unused bedroom, which smells damp and unlived
in. I extract it with some difficulty and open it up under the loft entrance. It’s too short. I can push the loft cover away and place my hands on the edges of the hole, but I can’t pull myself up far enough. This is puzzling. I have been up here before, a long time ago, but I can’t remember how I did it.

“You need muscles for that, Kitty.”

Paul’s voice makes me jump and I nearly fall off the ladder. I look down at him and feel the sweat of embarrassment breaking out all over me, dripping down my back.

“Paul!” I say, and notice that his hair is going thin on the top of his head. I climb back down, my legs trembling.

“Whatever are you doing?” he asks. He’s holding a pile of papers and looks as if he hasn’t slept all night. He often brings his research work home and gets so interested that he stays up all night. The skin on his face is patchy and loose and there are dark creases under his eyes. He looks middle-aged and he’s only ten years older than me.

“Well,” I say. “I wanted to have a look in the attic.”

“Whatever for? It’s full of spiders and cobwebs.”

“I can cope.”

The mower is still whirring out in the garden.

“It’s full of junk.”

“But it might be interesting junk.”

He looks at me and I think he can read my mind, so I surprise myself by being honest. “I just thought I might find out something about Mother up there. In a box—” This sounds unconvincing.

He puts down his papers on a stair and looks up into the hole of the attic. He looks at the torch that I’ve stuffed into my pocket. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything.”

“You could just ask someone.”

“But nobody remembers anything.”

He sits down on the top stair and frowns. “How do you know?”

“I’ve asked before, you know.”

He looks perplexed. “When?”

“Lots of times,” I say.

He rubs his eyes. “I don’t remember you asking. Ask me now. Anything you want—I’ll do my best.”

I hesitate. I am torn between the chance to go into the loft without my father’s knowledge and the chance to speak to Paul, who normally only ever has half a mind available for conversation and who can disappear for months at a time. But I’m all geared up for the attic and the box of memories.

Paul looks offended and picks up his papers, making my mind up for me. “Well, if you don’t think I’m any use, I’ll get on. I’m very busy at the moment.”

“No,” I said. “I do want your help. But can I come and find you later—when I’ve tried the loft?”

“I’ll have to see,” he says and starts to walk down the stairs. “I might not have time then.”

“I really need your help now.”

He stops.

“Could you help me climb into the loft? It’s too high for me.”

He sighs, puts down his papers and comes back. Without a word, he waves me away from the ladder and takes it down. He folds it up and then opens it in a different way so that it is one long, continuous ladder that reaches right up to the loft entrance.

I feel foolish. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“No,” he says as he walks away again. “That’s why a world inhabited only by women wouldn’t work.”

“By the way,” I say, “did you know you were going bald on top?”

He stops again. I am expecting another insult. “Adrian has a new book due out next week.”

“Yes. So?”

“He hasn’t told you then?”

“Told me what?”

“It’s semi-autobiographical. We’re all given parts in the book—he’s changed the names, but Lesley says you can easily tell who is who. He says we were only the starting point and the characters develop into new people. But how many families do we know who grew up in an extra-large house, where the father is an artist and there are four sons: a writer, a musician, an academic and a lorry driver?”

I stare at him.

“I just thought he might put something of Mummy into this purely fictional account of his early life.”

I’ve never heard him say Mummy before. It’s difficult to believe he still thinks of her in that way, but I suppose his relationship with her stopped when he was twelve, so he can’t call her anything more adult.

“By the way,” he says over his shoulder as he goes downstairs, “I’m the academic, in case you were wondering.”

I stand at the bottom of the ladder and try to get my breath. If this is true, why hasn’t Adrian told me?

Because every time I’ve seen him recently, he has spent most of the time telling me off for being irresponsible.

But he could have told me this. It’s important.

I consider chasing after Paul, but decide not to when I hear my father still mowing in the garden. There’s a lot of lawn, but it won’t go on forever.

I go up the ladder, one step at a time, unsure if I feel safe enough. I climb in and hover nervously at the loft entrance, trying to calm my breathing. Then I reach down and pull the ladder
up into the loft. I don’t like the idea of someone creeping up behind me.

I switch on the torch and shine it round. The loft is enormous, although a section has been bricked up to make my father’s studio. In all directions, the light shines on old furniture, boxes, pictures, bags of clothes. I am appalled by the sheer quantity of everything and realize that I’ll need more than an hour up here. This depresses me and makes me unwilling to even start. I should have taken up Paul’s offer.

Make an effort, I tell myself, and be methodical. One box at a time. Anything about my mother is bound to be furthest away. So, shining my torch in front of me and lighting up each section with astonishing clarity, I pick my way across the joists. Everything is stored haphazardly. Whenever anyone wanted to put more stuff up here, they simply hauled it up through the entrance and pushed the previous rejects further back.

There must be amazing things to find. The story of our lives over and over again—not just in one box, but hundreds. Momentarily distracted, I swing the torch round rapidly, expecting a high chair, a cot, a pram, but see nothing significant. It was probably given away or, more likely, sold secondhand.

I stop and examine a bag, wondering if it might contain my mother’s clothes. I prop the torch against a box and sort through the contents. They are boys’ clothes—short trousers, braces, a tiny green and purple bow tie on elastic. I stop and examine this. Who wore it last? Which of my brothers looked cute and intellectual in it? Adrian, who has always been serious? Jake, when performing in a concert? Paul, when he won the next round of the Maths Olympiad? Not Martin. It’s the wrong colour. It wouldn’t suit him. I stroke it. Henry could have worn this.

Perhaps the clothes have all been waiting here for the first boy of the next generation. I slip it into my pocket and move on.

There are boxes and boxes of bills and letters. I make an attempt to sort through one box, but it’s impossible. The letters go on forever. Letters to my father, from Lucia, Angela, Helen, Sarah, Philippa, Jennifer—who are these women who knew him so well? The dates are from before I was born. There are none more recent than thirty years ago, and none are sent to or from Margaret.

I realize that I could spend hours sorting through these letters and getting nowhere, so I shove them back into their boxes with the bills. Why does he keep them? What’s the point?

I look in another box and find more letters, bills, receipts, invoices, my father’s records of all his early paintings and the people who bought them.

What I am looking for is photographs. I want to see my mother when she was older, when she had me. I’m desperate to see myself as a baby being held by my mother.

I finally find a box of photographs and sift through them quickly. All the school photographs are here, including some of Dinah, who I recognize from her clear, forthright gaze; and even some of me. There are countless pictures of babies, chuckling, sleeping, crying babies. There are babies in prams, in cots, in high chairs, babies on laps, on shoulders, where the one holding the baby is hidden and anonymous, so that only a fold of dress is showing or a hand hiding coyly behind the baby’s shawl. It’s impossible to know who is who.

I pick one out and study it. The baby is very young, sitting propped up by a cushion covered with a lacy shawl, but slipping sideways, so her head is at a slightly uncomfortable angle, and there is a beaming smile on her face, rather as if she knows she can’t sit up much longer, but will go on being happy until the last possible moment. A hand is just visible on the edge of the picture, hovering, waiting to save her. It’s the photograph of a baby
who knows that her mother is close by, who smiles at her mother’s voice, waiting to be picked up. She has dark curly hair springing carelessly from her head. I want this baby to be me.

I eventually look on the back and see what I had missed the first time. Printed in faded lilac ink: “Adrian 1951.”

I put the photograph away quickly and leaf through the piles in another box. I soon realize that although these date from before my mother’s death, I’m not there, and neither is my mother. I rush through piles and piles of them and they are all the same. Just the boys as children, and Dinah. Why is my mother not here? It’s almost as if she’s not real, as if she never existed. Why am
I
not here? I search ever more frantically and find nothing.

As time passes, the light of my torch becomes yellower and less certain. I turn it off for a few seconds and listen. I can’t hear the mower anymore, but I can’t hear anything else either. The loft is as silent as the photographs. It has nothing to say.

In the dim light from the loft entrance, I start to return the photographs to their boxes, trying to make neat piles at first, but then not bothering because it takes too long. I shovel them all up and stuff them in wherever there is a space.

There are plenty more boxes up here, gathering dust on their inaccurate memories, but I am convinced that my mother isn’t here. It’s as if, when she died, she took everything of herself with her. As if she knew in advance and sorted through her personal life, destroying all the evidence of her existence. She seems to have disappeared, suddenly and completely, and there is not even a hole where she was because she’s bricked up the entrance.

I stand up awkwardly and find I have pins and needles in my left foot. I shake it, hanging on to a beam, until it’s ready to work again. I switch on my torch and the black cavernous space shrinks behind my immediate surroundings, where boxes and joists brighten into cartoon shapes, too bold and angular to be real.