Astonishing Splashes of Colour (27 page)

“She drank,” says my father to all of us. “Whisky, all day and every day.”

“No, she didn’t,” says Adrian. “That’s not true.”

Margaret stops pacing and turns to him. “Thank you, Adrian,” she says, and she sounds almost normal.

Adrian nods, and for a brief, terrible moment, I think he is
going to burst into tears. The thermostat cuts in at the last moment and he tries to smile instead.

“Except it is true,” says my father. “Can’t remember a single time when she wasn’t drunk.”

“But where did you find her?” says Jake.

Adrian shrugs. “You can find people if you want to. Hospital records, electoral rolls, the Salvation Army.”

“Ha!” says my father. “She wasn’t living a civilized life in a respectable neighbourhood then, was she?”

Silence. It’s obvious that he’s guessed right.

“Drunk,” he says in triumph.

“What do you know?” says Margaret scornfully. “People change. Even when they’ve been treated so badly.”

How do you know if your mother is an alcoholic? When you are three, your mother is as she is; any behaviour would seem normal. But Adrian was sixteen. Surely he would have noticed. Was he really looking?

I hold on to the side of my chair and wish I was next to James. How do I know if she really is my mother? She’s not as I expected. But I had no expectations. I’ve had no mental picture of her physical presence. She has only ever existed in my mind as a person with no body. She has never been real, but this elderly woman who looks half mad is real, and I find her far more alarming than reassuring.

“You’re not welcome,” says my father. “You’ve managed to upset everybody.” He starts to mutter. “We come down here for a funeral, the food is prepared, we’re all dressed up—it’s a funeral, you know, not a wedding—maybe you should have come to a wedding—it might have been easier to take at a wedding—”

“No,” says Paul, picking up a handful of peanuts. “My mother is dead.”

My father starts again. “You deserted us, remember. You were the one who left. ‘Learn to cook,’ you said to me. No thought for the children—putting your own selfish needs first—”

“Perhaps you should have told them the truth,” she says, and although her voice is softer, there is a dangerous edge to it. As if there are lots of things we don’t know and she’s about to tell us.

“Yes,” says Adrian. “I think we should have the truth.”

He already knows the truth. He has spent the last few months trying to find her. He’s been writing letters, telephoning, talking to people who might know her. Why didn’t he tell us what was going on? Why didn’t he tell me?

“It was the book, wasn’t it?” says Jake suddenly.

Adrian looks defensive. “No, not really—”

Paul stops crunching peanuts. “What book?”

“Yes it was.” Jake’s voice is sounding more confident. “You wanted to write a book about our family, and when you did, you decided you were going to look for an exciting family secret, didn’t you?”

“The book is fiction,” says Adrian.

“Oh,” says Paul, “that book.”

“It’s just that, when I really thought about it—” Adrian looks uncomfortable, moving his neck awkwardly, as if his shirt collar is too tight. He doesn’t look a healthy colour at all. I worry about his blood pressure. “It seemed odd that there hadn’t been a funeral—”

“Nothing odd about that,” says Dad. “Lots of people don’t have funerals.”

“No, they don’t,” says Paul.

“Yes, they do. Far too expensive. Waste of money.”

Paul bites a sausage off a stick and points the empty stick at Dad. “Most people do something: have a memorial service, or scatter ashes somewhere. They don’t start pretending the dead person never existed.”

“Anyway,” says Dad, “you have the truth now. She left us to get on with it on our own. Does it make you feel any better?”

“But you didn’t tell us that, did you?” says Adrian. “You told us she was dead.”

“What about the car accident?” says Jake. “None of that was true?”

“I was protecting you,” says Dad, pacing around the room. “You were all young. You couldn’t handle being deserted—better to lose a mother in death than desertion. How could you have coped with the idea that your mother didn’t want—?”

“Don’t poison their minds like that,” says Margaret. “Feeding them with your warped ideas—”

“You left us without a word of goodbye,” says Paul. “I went to bed one night and you weren’t there in the morning. You hadn’t even washed my jeans. You promised they would be ready for the first day of the holidays. I found them screwed up on the floor by the washing machine, mixed in with everyone’s socks. I was never able to get rid of the smell.” Paul’s cheeks have gone very pale, almost blue, but a pink flush is creeping upwards from his neck. He is forty-two years old, and he’s angry. I have never seen him angry before. Only ever indifferent.

The smell of Paul’s jeans, the smell of babies, the smell of your mother. I’ve identified the emptiness inside me: I don’t know the smell of my mother. I have no memory of smell.

“I don’t know who is who,” Margaret says, and she sounds annoyed. She looks carefully at all of us, one at a time, as if she is trying to match us up with our childhood selves. I’m Kitty, I want to shout. Look at me, notice me, remember me as a baby. But I can’t find the words.

“You lied to us,” says Adrian to Dad.

“I protected you,” Dad says again. “Don’t look at me like that. You do all sorts of things for your children. You’d have done the same for Rosie and Emily—”

“You’ve got children?” says Margaret. “I’ve got grandchildren?”

She looks excited. Why? Are grandchildren more valuable than your own children?

Anyway, it’s all in the biographical notes at the front of his books. Married with two daughters, lives in Birmingham. Does she even know he’s a writer?

“And you went on lying to us all that time,” says Adrian. “For thirty years, I believed she was dead. I am astonished by the scale of your deception.” He is calming down, as he finds words to substitute for his anger.

“But you weren’t deceived, were you?” says my father. His hands are working compulsively in his lap, washing with imaginary soap, round and round, wringing out and starting again. “You decided that you knew better.”

“And it turned out I was right. I just needed to make things easier in my mind.”

“Easier?” shouts my father. “How can it be easier to be abandoned—like unwanted orphans, left to fend for ourselves? I didn’t even know how to work the washing machine—”

Martin next to me is strangely still. I can hear him breathing very evenly. He’s still devouring sandwiches, but it’s an automatic process and I’m not sure that he is chewing them enough. I try to move closer to him, to reassure him a bit, but he moves away at the slightest contact.

I’m having difficulty with Margaret. The others all remember her, they have pictures in their minds. They can remember having breakfast with her, going to school with her, being read bedtime
stories, calling her in the night when they felt sick. Did she tell them off, was she often angry? They’ve never told me bad things. Perhaps they’ve forgotten all that—the bad things slipping out of reach, the good things sharp and bright in their memories, cancelling out her anger, her frustrations. I can only produce a crinkled skirt, a lap, a low voice singing “It’s been a hard day’s night.” Nothing more substantial than a vague memory of warmth, and the wedding photos, which are over fifty years old. There has never been any place in my imagination for how she might have been if she had stayed with us. That she would grow old, that her hair would go grey and her voice would be harsh and shrill. It has never occurred to me that she could be alive.

“Well,” says Margaret. “Tell them the rest, Guy.”

Dad stops pacing and stares at her. “There’s nothing else to say,” he says. “Only the fact of your desertion—”

“What about the women?” she says. “You can’t have forgotten Angela, Helen, Sarah and the rest. More than one on the go at the same time—popping in and out of my house in relays—”

“My house,” says Dad. “It was never your house.”

Margaret looks at him triumphantly. “Quite,” she says, and almost smiles, looking round at everybody for their reaction.

“I don’t remember any women,” says Jake.

“You were too busy playing your violin,” says Adrian.