Astonishing Splashes of Colour (31 page)

“Waste of a life then,” says Dad. He unfolds his arms and takes his tea off the table. We can hear him sipping it—unnecessarily
noisily—and then its progress as he swallows it. I try my own tea, but it’s still much too hot; he must be burning his tongue.

“Who do you think you’re fooling?” says Margaret. “Do you seriously imagine I had a meaningful life living with you? You couldn’t even be bothered to hold a conversation with me. At least I wasn’t dancing artistically from one nonsense to another.”

“That’s not fair,” Paul says angrily. “Dad’s painting is art, not nonsense.”

“I earn good money,” shouts my father.

Some of it is nonsense, I think, remembering the painting with a hole in it on my wall.

“There is some value in being artistic,” says Jake, still calm. “We must have inherited some of this nonsense from Dad, I suppose.”

Margaret looks away from Jake and says nothing. She probably thinks he’s a serious violinist, not someone who busks every other day and lives off his wife’s earnings. How can we ever hope for a real truth? It will be different for everyone.

Dad unfolds his arms and smiles. I’m annoyed by his obvious delight in her discomfort, disappointed that he’s so unforgiving. I want him to stop acting like a child and to demonstrate the generous and kind spirit that I know is there.

“So you gave up in the end,” says Adrian. “You didn’t come back to the house to try to talk to us?”

“I did come back, almost straight away, in the first week, when I thought you’d all be at home—it was the summer holidays—but you weren’t there. I watched your father go out, then let myself in to talk to you and to collect some of my things. Just a few clothes, books, photographs. I thought you could all join me later, when I had a home. But you weren’t there, and everything, all the evidence of my life was gone. Completely disappeared. As if I never existed. What do you think it’s like to come
back to somewhere you have lived for the last nineteen years, and discover that there isn’t even a space where you were?”

“Dad burnt it,” says Adrian. “We watched him do it.”

“Typical.”

“You didn’t think I’d keep all your stuff and wait sweetly for you to come back—”

“Hardly. I knew how your mind worked—”

“You had no idea. You were incapable of understanding.”

Where was I? My father was out, the boys were presumably off with friends, so where was I? Who looked after me?

“Why didn’t you leave us a note?” says Adrian. “You could have left it in my bedroom. Dad would never have known.”

“I thought—” Her voice rises. “I thought you’d all wiped me away. You obviously don’t need me, I thought. So I left and I’ve never gone back.” She is crying, great tears oozing out of her pinched, tiny eyes and rolling down her cheeks, black with smudged mascara. I can’t look at her. “Now I see your father again and realize I was wrong. I shouldn’t have left you in his care.”

“You wouldn’t have got in a second time,” says Dad. “I changed all the locks.”

“Surprise, surprise. I couldn’t work out why you hadn’t done it already.”

“I wanted you to come back and find you’d left no mark on our lives.”

She wipes her eyes and looks round at us all. “See,” she says. “This is the man I lived with. He couldn’t wait to get rid of your mother.”

Why is my father so cruel? I haven’t seen this in him before. What is this nastiness that makes him enjoy her misery? Where does he keep it hidden? Does he practise it when he’s on his own, so he can bring it out when it’s needed, all perfect and fully formed?

He is muttering to himself. “All that time when I could have
been painting—wasted on cooking, ironing, washing-up …”

I wish he would stop. He mutters away, gradually subsiding into a semi-silence punctuated by the occasional inarticulate word. I wish I could reassure him. He brought us up on his own—no help from Angela, Philippa, Mary, etc. He loved and cared for us all. He was my mother and my father. I have a sudden clear picture of me in his studio, playing with paper and felt-tip pens, trying to imitate his picture on the easel. “Be bold, Kitty,” he said. “Put in all the colours, mix them up, don’t be afraid of them. Colour is life.”

“You haven’t changed, have you? As pretentious as ever. ‘I’m an artist,’ you told me and my parents, and I believed you for years. If you hadn’t wasted so much time painting—”

“Wasting my time painting? I’m highly successful, I’ll have you know. I’ve sold pictures in America, Brazil, Ceylon—”

“It’s not Ceylon any more,” says Adrian. “It’s Sri Lanka.”

“Whatever,” says Dad. “Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Outer Mongolia, Peking—”

“You’re exaggerating,” says James irritably. “Why would anyone in China want your pictures of European beaches?”

“Actually,” says Dad, “I sell a lot of pictures in China.” He picks up a pack of cards and starts flicking them one by one at James. Some miss, some don’t. They make contact and slide miserably to the floor. There’s a picture of
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
on the back, from the film, on the end of the Cob. Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep.

“Reverting to childhood?” says James, and smiles charmingly. He loves to see Dad cornered. He picks up the cards carefully and starts to neaten them into a pack again.

I look at my father. I know he would like to throw books, plates, furniture, but he restricts himself to cards. He’s more in
control than he would like us to believe, I think. But I can see real anger too. He resents being found out. This happened such a long time ago, and we have all survived, after all. I’m not sure we are giving him enough loyalty.

“Anyone for bridge?” says James, once he has collected all the cards together.

Margaret laughs—too enthusiastically. “So who are you?” she says. “Not one of my children, of course.”

James smiles back. He seems to be enjoying himself more now that he can argue with my father. “I’m James,” he says. “I’m married to Kitty.”

“I’m Kitty,” I say at last, and I seem to be leaning towards her, pulled by an invisible thread that was once physical and is now emotional.

But she looks puzzled. “Kitty?” she says. “I thought Kitty was the cat.”

There’s a silence. Then I realize that she wouldn’t know my nickname. “No,” I say quickly. “I’m Katie. They only called me Kitty when the cat died.”

There is another silence. My father starts to mutter.

“What?” I say loudly. “What are you saying? I can’t hear you.”

More silence. I can hear everyone breathing. I can hear everyone thinking. There is no movement.

“Dinah’s daughter,” says Dad. “They brought her back after Dinah died.”

A shaft of sunshine pierces the window and lights up the room.

The silence is not in the room. It’s inside me.

It is cold and empty and vast.

7
a seriously happy world

J
ames and I are travelling back to Birmingham on the train. He sits opposite me and doesn’t speak, but even if he does I won’t hear him. I’m far away from here, lost in this silence inside me.

Strangely, my first reaction after the initial shock of Dad’s announcement was relief. It’s all right, I thought. I don’t have to make her my mother. I don’t have to try any more. My legs went weak and I was pleased that I wasn’t standing. Then I had to get up anyway, because I was going to be sick. I dashed outside just in time and threw up all over Grandpa’s dying roses. The egg sandwiches, the salt and vinegar crisps, the Cherry Bakewells—they were all there, part-digested, vomited painfully over the stones from Chesil beach.

I leaned against the side of the bungalow and tried not to think of being pregnant. I could feel sweat dripping off me, but I was bitterly cold. I looked at the distant sea, which blurred into the sky so you couldn’t see where one ended and the other started. The greyness was more desolate than before, with none of its earlier vitality. A dead, dry greyness, which fell round me,
seeping in, merging with my own bleakness. I couldn’t stop shaking.

Eventually, I realized that James was standing beside me. I ignored him for a bit, but he wouldn’t go away, so I let him stay there while I tried to stop my teeth chattering.

Maybe the others came out to see if I was all right. Maybe Dad came out. “Kitty!” he would have said, but I didn’t hear him.

I thought he was my only parent, a father and a mother to me. I accepted his faults, his eccentricity, his unreasonable shortlived anger because he was my father, but all my life he’s been pretending. I thought we had a special relationship because I was the youngest. I pretended to myself that I reminded him of Margaret.

I think of how clever my brothers have all been, how they’ve never even hinted that they’re really my uncles. Uncles are not the same as brothers. I try to look at them again: Adrian, bringing me back jugs from all over the world; Jake offering me sanctuary; Martin taking me for trips in the truck; Paul putting up the ladder to the loft. The brothers who met me from school. The brothers who are not my brothers.

“I want to go home,” I said to James.

And then, somehow, I found myself in a taxi, with my coat, my case and James.

“Did you know about my mother?” I said to James as we sat rigidly next to each other.

He looked unusually angry. “Of course not. Do you think I’d have lied to you for all this time?”

It hadn’t bothered my father or my brothers. How stupid I must have seemed to them when I asked about my mother—who I thought was Margaret. Perhaps they’d described Dinah anyway. I don’t even know who the mother is in my mind—Margaret or Dinah.

The station platform was crowded with students and their clusters of rucksacks, suitcases and backpacks. I wanted to sit down, but there was no room, so we leaned against a large pipe that ran along the rear of the platform, the wind whistling round us. The greyness had come with me and found its way into the station. The train was late and everyone was hovering nervously, checking their watches, keeping an eye on the hanging monitors that said our train was ten minutes late, then twenty, then thirty. I watched the people round me, afraid that I would see my brothers or father among them. Every time I thought of them, I felt sick. All those years, they’d been pretending, and I didn’t know. None of it was real. Everyone was acting. Everyone was lying.

The train pulled in and we found some seats. There may have been conversations as people took out their books, their newspapers, their sandwiches, but I haven’t noticed. I don’t want to look into anyone’s eyes or acknowledge anyone else’s existence. James will have been looking out of the window, his eyes darting from side to side as he spots distant road lights and the glow of towns and estimates the train’s average speed per hour, as he always does. He carries a map inside his head; he knows distances and times.

A trolley comes down the aisle between the seats, and from a distance I can hear James asking for two coffees.

“Anything else?” he asks me, but it’s too much effort to shake my head.

He takes a sandwich and a Danish pastry. He gives the man the pound coins first, neatly on top of each other, then the ten-pence pieces, then the pennies. How does he always manage to have the right change? I don’t know how he survives in a world that is seldom neatened up, where you can’t always tie up the ends.