Astonishing Splashes of Colour (23 page)

I watch her and I know that I’m right.

I ring James’s doorbell. I have a key, but I want him to know I’m coming.

He opens the door as if he’s been expecting me. “We can’t see Jake and Suzy any more,” I say. “I’ve only got two brothers left.” I burst into tears. He leads me in and takes me to the bedroom. I lie down fully clothed. He takes off my shoes and puts the quilt over me, then he holds me for a long time. He doesn’t ask. He never asks. He just holds me. He’s a good man. If it wasn’t for me, he would be a wonderful husband.

Nobody rings for the next two days. I stay in James’s bed and cry and cry for the baby that never had a chance. The baby that I could have had if they didn’t want it. It’s not fair, I keep thinking. It’s not fair. Sometimes James comes and sleeps with me. Sometimes he doesn’t. He occasionally brings me warm drinks and I swallow them eagerly, trying to get some of the warmth inside me. But it’s only temporary. I eat some of the food he brings me and leave the rest.

“You must have the flu,” he says. “Should we go to the doctor’s?”

“No. It’ll go on its own.”

“OK,” he says. “But if it goes on longer than a week, you have to see a doctor.”

“Yes,” I say.

Suzy doesn’t phone and Jake doesn’t phone to tell me off for upsetting her. So she hasn’t told him. Or she has told him and he too has a guilty conscience. Either way, I know I’m right.

I stay with James for three days. On the fourth, I wake up in the early morning and my mind is clear, so I write a note. “Feeling better. Back to work. See you later for supper.” Then I leave him asleep and go home.

I start work immediately, anxious to catch up with myself. A manuscript a day. My weekly newspaper review comes first—only just in time, as always. My thoughts leap ahead as I type out each report, so I have to keeping going back to make corrections. The future opens up with the prospect of reading, reading and reading. Adrian and Lesley, Jake and Suzy, they’re behind me, drifting further away by the second. Maybe I’ll never see any of them again. Maybe I don’t want to. They don’t need me—I certainly don’t need them. If I want to make contact with my family, I can go and see Martin and Paul and my father. No problems there with sisters-in-law. We are the same as we always were—just a bit older.

The phone rings and I am surprised to hear Martin on the other end. He seldom uses the phone.

“I’m going to Exmouth tomorrow.” His voice is slightly too soft, as if it has slipped back down his throat, searching for security in his comfortable centre. I have to strain to hear him.

“Can you talk a bit louder?” I shout. “I can hardly hear you.”

There is a pause. I wait for him to register my comment and to think about it. His telephone conversations are always like this.

“I thought you might want to come with me,” he says, without changing his volume.

“Would we have time to go to Lyme Regis to see Granny and Grandpa?”

A long silence. You can’t rush him.

“So is that yes or no?” he says.

“Well, it depends. I’d like to go and see Granny and Grandpa,

but …” I’m working well. If I keep going like this for two more
days, I’ll have cleared my backlog. Caroline is on the phone twice a week. I really shouldn’t miss any more time.

“I was going to stay the night—maybe two. You could spend the day on the beach, or go to see Granny and Grandpa.” Is he answering my question about Lyme Regis, or does he think he’s just thought of it?

“I’m tempted.”

“Have you been to Exmouth?”

“Yes,” I say. “You’ve taken me there a few times.” Has he forgotten that Dad met Mother in Exmouth?

“Oh, have I?” He pauses again. “So do you want to come?”

I think of James. I don’t want to go off and leave him behind. I don’t want to stop working. “No, I don’t think so. I have too much to do.”

“All right then.”

“It was nice of you to ask.”

“Yes,” he says. He always sounds exactly the same, never disappointed. He lets the world fall into place around him, and he doesn’t seem to realize that he could change anything. When the genes were divided between Martin and Jake, they went in opposite directions and there was no overlapping of the central characteristics, no compromise in the middle. They’ve nothing in common but their birth date. Jake has told me they couldn’t even play together as children, because they had no connection. He says he’s never felt as if he were a twin. He would be more convinced if his other half hadn’t survived.

“I’ll come another time.”

“OK,” he says. “Bye, Kitty.”

“Bye, Martin. Thanks for …” My voice trails off as he puts the phone down.

I go back to my reading. Evacuees today. Yesterday it was occupied France. My mind is full of bombs and Nazis and scattered

families. The children’s library is going to do an exhibition on
the Second World War. It’s part of the national curriculum. They want me to compile a recommended reading list.

As I read, I think about my father and his mysterious medals. He’s never told me about his life during the war. He spends so much of his time talking that he never really says anything. I sometimes think that what I see isn’t real. He throbs with rich vibrant red, but red is only a colour and you need a surface to paint it on. Where is the surface?

I work solidly for two more days and then decide it’s safe for me to go out. Martin will be in Exmouth by now. I think of him walking along the seafront, visiting Granny and Grandpa, and I’m jealous. I decide to visit my father.

I check with James on my way out. He’s working hard. He doesn’t want to talk to me because his thoughts are following clean, logical paths.

“Do you want me to get any shopping?” I suggest, because I can see he’s only half listening.

He looks past me as if I am not there. “I don’t know—bread, I suppose. Maybe some apples …” But he’s not interested.

“I’m going out,” I say. “I may be some time.”

He smiles briefly and accepts a kiss on his nose. Today I’m in control and he’s not quite awake. This makes me feel good. “I’m going to see Dr. Cross,” I say. “Want to come?”

He looks vague. “No, I don’t think so. See you later.”

Before I leave the room, his thoughts are back with his programs. His fingers chase each other over the keys, rapid but accurate. He seldom needs to correct. His fingers and his brain move along parallel lines. His work is as immaculate as his flat.

I don’t mind. I’m not threatened by his intimacy with a computer.

The house is silent when I arrive, but Dad’s car is parked in the drive. The garden is empty, the kitchen abandoned, with dishes piled up precariously, waiting to be put into the dishwasher, so I know he must be painting. I make him some coffee and carry it up to his studio, creeping up the stairs. I want to surprise him. I always want to surprise him.

I find him painting an enormous picture of a beach. “Buckets, spades, sand, deckchairs, sandcastles, shells, seaweed, sand, waves, rubber rings, ice-creams, flip-flops, blanket, sunglasses, sand, shingle—”

I discovered recently that you can buy books of lists. My father has missed a golden opportunity.

“Sand, beach balls, sandwiches, swimming costumes, sand—Kitty!”

I stop. He’s done it again. “How did you know I was here?”

He grins and looks pleased with himself. “I can sense your presence, that’s all.” He takes his mug of coffee and looks at me over the top of his glasses. “Are you speaking to Adrian and Lesley again?”

“I never stopped talking to them.” I don’t tell him about Jake and Suzy. He doesn’t know about their baby. There are only three people in the whole world (except the anonymous doctors) who knew about the baby. And once memory starts to malfunction, the baby will cease to exist. A non-event.

“I want to know about the war, Dad.”

He sips his coffee and watches me through the steam. “Everybody has an opinion about the war,” he says. “It was a world event. There are thousands of books, thousands of writers making money out of it. Go and ask them.”

“I’m reading the books,” I say. “That’s what I’ve been doing in the past week. I just—” I sit down on the sofa. “I would just like to hear your version.”

He picks up a thin paintbrush and moves it delicately, marking tiny blue shadows on a little boy’s face. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“How do you know? You should pass on your memories, otherwise they’ll all disappear when you die.”

“Mmm. Nice to know you have me dead and buried.”

“That’s not what I said.” I try not to get irritated. “But you can leave something of yourself behind if you want to—a way of continuing. You can’t just disown the memories you don’t like.” I think of Miss Newman. She should have told someone earlier, when she could get it right. Then the memories would have been sorted out properly, and won’t disappear into a puff of smoke at the crematorium.

“I will leave something behind—my paintings.”

“Not the war,” I say. “You don’t paint the war.”

“I hate the sea,” he says, slapping red and purple into his apparently calm sea.

This takes me by surprise. He has such fond memories of meeting my mother in the sea. Almost every picture he has ever painted has been of the sea.

“Well,” he says, as if he has heard my thoughts. “OK. I’ll tell you about the war, or the sea, or both, I suppose. I’ve parachuted into the sea in the middle of the night, and I can tell you, it’s a lonely place to be.” He looks past me, suddenly urgent. I turn round to see what he’s looking at, but there is nothing there except the door. This is a dramatic device. He’s pretending to look into himself, to relive his experience for my benefit. Why don’t I believe in this?

“My crew went down with the
Lancaster.
They slipped through the waves and never came back up.” As the plane slips into the sea, his right hand dives smoothly downwards, fingers first. “I was absolutely alone in those few dark silent minutes as I floated down. You see things differently after an experience like that.”

I have a suspicion that he’s enjoying himself. In the few dark silent minutes, he stops pacing and his voice drops. He leaves short gaps between each word for emphasis. I try to look impressed.

He studies his painting, but possibly only for show. He steps backwards, leans forwards and peers. The picture is enormous, with detail everywhere—a departure from his usual practice of concentrating on a small object or space. He waves his paintbrush vaguely, moves to add some colour, but finally doesn’t. He’s pretending to be emotional, I realize.

“Some memories are best forgotten. We all change. The man I was then is nothing like the man I am now.”

“No problem,” I say. “You might have been nicer when you were younger.” He might have been the kind of man who would show respect to his future son-in-law.

He’s looking out of the window at the treetops. You can see my flat from here. “They called me Boots. Wing Commander Boots Wellington.”

I’m not sure if he is expecting me to laugh, so I half smile and watch his reaction. He ignores me.

“We dropped bombs on Germany.”

I’m surprised. I’ve always seen him as a fighter pilot, another Miss Newman’s Jack.

“Everybody thought it was a pretty good idea at the time. Dresden, Berlin, Munich, they were just names to us—points on a map. We chucked the bombs down and got out as soon as possible.”