Astonishing Splashes of Colour (4 page)

I leaned across the table. “Martin, I’ve bought a flat.” I couldn’t help it, the excitement was still with me. I had to tell him.

He chewed thoughtfully. “So you’re going to leave us?”

I loved his calm acceptance. “Can you take my stuff to the flat—in your lorry?”

“Of course. When?”

“Saturday. I want to move on Saturday.” The excitement was spilling out of me. “It’s not far—only one bedroom—wonderful view. It’s just right for me—”

“Fine,” he said and lifted his cup for a large gulp of tea. “Good for you.”

Paul was home by Friday evening, looking tired and unshaven. Dad had phoned him—how did he know where he was?—and he wanted to help, he said. Things hadn’t worked out with Jody. He needed an excuse to come home.

I couldn’t remember which one Jody was.

“Was she the one who shaved her eyebrows?” said my father. “Purple fingernails?”

Paul thought for a minute and seemed unsure. “No,” he said eventually. “That was Jenny. You’ve muddled Jenny and Jody.”

“Well, as long as you know which is which,” said Dad.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Paul. “I’m not likely to see either of them again.”

He’s a researcher, working from home, spending hours at a desk, thinking, calculating, inventing. I’ve lost track of his girlfriends. Immaculately dressed women under thirty-five, in linen suits and straw hats, their bobbed hair ending in razor-sharp edges. They must be impressed by his brain. I can’t see what else they see in him. I suppose he’s exciting at the beginning, when he buys them flowers and meets them from work, openly adoring them. They end up feeling neglected when his latest project takes him over and his mind can only focus on numbers and equations. When each affair ends, he goes through a denial stage, then he falls desperately in love with the next woman and all his old girlfriends become intimate friends with each other. They are happy to talk to him for hours on the phone, letting him pour out his feelings about someone else. Perhaps they feel
safe once they know his love has moved on, and his romantic demands are falling on someone else’s shoulders.

There wasn’t really much to take, I realized on Saturday morning. Paul and Martin carried my bed downstairs, my MFI wardrobes, my stereo, my boxes of books. I watched them load up all my possessions and they looked small and insignificant in the enormous darkness of the lorry. My father stood with me.

“You need more furniture, Kitty. Come with me. We can do better than this,” he said, leading me back to the house. We went into the kitchen and he emptied piles of cutlery out of the rickety drawers. “We don’t need all this. Take them, take them.”

He opened more drawers and cupboards, producing saucepans, frying pans, plates, dishes, bowls. There were so many they filled the table.

“Boxes,” he shouted out of the front door to Paul and Martin. “Go down to Tesco’s and fetch some boxes.”

He was enjoying himself, rooting through cupboards that hadn’t been opened for years. “Come on,” he said. “Help yourself. You need chairs, a table, sofa, cushions, curtains.”

I picked up the knives he’d put out—old knives that had lived for many years, cooked in the dishwasher, old, warped, used. I loved them all.

He stopped suddenly. “But you need a cooker, a fridge.” He ran his hand through his hair and looked appalled. “What are we going to do? We should have thought of this ages ago.”

Did he really think I was so incapable? “I’m going to buy them, Dad. I’m earning money.”

He looked amazed, then relieved. “That’s all right then. You can come and eat with us to start with—until you get your own cooker.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

Paul and Martin came back with the boxes and we started piling in everything we had found. Paul picked up each item reluctantly and with distaste. “You can’t take these, Kitty,” he said. “They’re disgusting, a load of junk.”

“No,” I said with surprise. “They’re lovely. When you use them, you think of all the hands that have held them, all the mouths that have eaten off them. Years of memory, decades of history that most people have forgotten.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been reading too many books.”

“You shouldn’t criticize what you use,” I said and scowled at him. Yes, everything needed to be cleaned—I would do that when I was settled—but I thought he was being unkind. He’d lived with these things all his life. He could have moved into a home of his own somewhere, but he chose to stay here amongst our broken rubbish.

He looked back at me, cool and impersonal, unmoved by my irritation. I’ve never been able to penetrate his thoughts.

“Stop arguing and carry these out to the lorry,” said my father. “Then get Martin and you can take out the sofa—the blue and yellow and red one.”

“Dad,” I said, “you don’t want to give me that. It’s been there for years. It’s part of the house.”

He laughed uproariously. I could see that he was beginning to get overexcited. “So what? It was your mother’s. Take it. She would want you to have it.”

“Oh, Dad,” I said and could feel tears forming. That was the first time he had ever mentioned my mother in the context of our home. Never mind that the sofa was decades old, losing stuffing through a hole in the back, one corner resting on a
Chambers Concise Dictionary.

So we left 32 Tennyson Drive in a convoy. Martin and I went
in the lorry, Dad followed in the Volvo and Paul drove behind in his metallic-blue sports car. We were high up in the lorry, and when I looked back I could still see the house behind the wall. The mulberry trees looked wet and miserable in the autumn dampness and our house seemed to be sinking into the mud, settling into its history and our history, refusing to acknowledge the forward movement of time.

We unloaded the furniture into my new flat, carrying everything up three flights of stairs. No one came out of the other flats to greet us or welcome me. We arranged the rooms, hung the curtains and put the china into cupboards.

Then we all went back to 32 Tennyson Drive for lunch. Dad stirred the sweet and sour sauce into the frying pan and muttered lists to himself. He was going through all the things that were needed to set up a home, happy to keep talking even if no one was listening. The subject matter was unimportant.

“Potato peeler,” he said dramatically, turning round to face me. “I bet you haven’t got one.”

N
OW I HAVE A POTATO PEELER
and a cooker and a fridge. Am I richer for the accumulation of objects? Have they changed me? I don’t go home very often. I have James instead.

I don’t feel grown-up any more. Somehow since my move, my marriage, my loss, I seem to have gone backwards. I feel as if I’m the pet again, little, without forward drive, dependent on others. I find myself wanting to ask permission before I do anything:

Can I go to bed now?

Am I allowed to use the cooker?

Is it all right if I finish the book tomorrow?

Shall I turn the light off?

I make myself some toast, look for orange juice in the fridge and find there isn’t any. I fill a glass with water from the tap and gulp everything down, not because I am hungry or thirsty, but because I think I should.

The telephone rings and makes me jump, but I don’t answer it. Perhaps the school has discovered who I am, perhaps it’s Hélène.

When it stops ringing, I set the answer machine. Then I lie down on my sofa and go to sleep.

My dreams don’t refresh me. I wake up exhausted. If I try to remember the dreams, it’s like stepping into an alien existence, a world that is parallel to reality, but sinister and twisted, with shapes that expand and distort like a Salvador Dali painting.

I dream in colours, astonishing, shimmering, clashing colours. So many shades. Not just red, but crimson, vermilion, scarlet, rose. There are not enough names for the colours in my dreams. I wake up longing for visual silence, looking for a small dark place where there is no light.

“Kitty, it’s James. Are you there?”

Why does he have to tell me who it is? I know his voice. I’ve been married to him for five years.

“I know you’re there, because the answer machine wasn’t on when I rang last night—”

Very clever. Why didn’t I think of that? I stay on the sofa. I don’t want to talk.

“Pick up the phone, Kitty.”

He sounds so sad, but I’m not sure if I believe him. He likes his space as much as I like mine. Perhaps he phones because he feels he ought to. Perhaps he secretly hopes I won’t answer, but needs to convince himself that he doesn’t.

I nearly leap up to answer the phone, to go next door, but I don’t. I know he will be happy playing on the computer on his own.

I know he won’t come round unless I ask him.

“I’ll try later, Kitty. I’m at home if you want me.”

The phone rings every hour. He doesn’t say anything. He just waits. I wish he would do something positive. I wish he would use his key, rush in and find me on the sofa, sweep me up in his arms.

But he won’t, because if he did, he wouldn’t be James.