Homing (10 page)

They were impractical clothes for beach walking: the hem of her skirt was crumbed with sand, and the dark-red crocheted shawl draped around her shoulders was damp at one end.

The wind picked up, strafing her cheeks with sand. She pulled the shawl across her face, her other hand closing around the porcelain chips. Then the cold rain came in from the sea, wetting her through and tightening her clothes against her breasts and thighs. She started to trot towards the trees, skipping awkwardly in the damp skirt, gasping with pleasure. She was young enough to be sped along, without warning, by such moments of animal exhilaration.

Breathless, she peeked into her palm, where the blue-and-white china gleamed. The rain had washed away the dullness. It was bluer than new, as if the pigment were still wet, the glaze just applied. As if it did not know that it had been mortally damaged, its pieces scattered and lost.

She allowed the squally wind to pull her up the beach and along the gravel road, towards the old wooden house that stood beyond the milkwoods. Pausing just before the veils of rain obscured the view completely, she saw, far out on the horizon, the faint suggestion of a ship – just a hint of tall masts, misty shreds of sails unfurling, palest smoke on pearl. Eyes closed, she put her head back and gave her neck and chest to the rain. When she looked again the ship had dissolved into cloud, but she stood for another minute or two in the downpour, staring out.

The wet steamed off her in the fire-lit house, where the walls were festooned with dry seaweed and strings of sea-urchin shells. Amelia, Marion’s aunt, was sitting in her swivel chair at the trestle table in the corner, glueing together the pieces of a vase. She scowled through her spectacles, their mauve plastic frames clashing with her brown eyes.

Aunt Amelia had a special technique: she would fashion an armature out of chicken wire, vase-shaped, onto which she fastened the broken bits of china with Prestik – a lark here, a pagoda there, two lovers on a bridge. So fragile, these ghostly vases, more air than porcelain. All around her, arranged on shelves and bookcases and table tops and in big woven baskets on the floor, were other pieces and assemblages: piles of shards, cracked plates with triangular bites taken out of their rims, undone jigsaw puzzles of smashed china.

“I saw the ghost ship,” Marion said, unwinding the damp shawl from around her neck.

Aunt Amelia held up angled tweezer-tips and gave Marion a keen glance. “Did you really?”

Marion looked into the round mirror on the wall. She understood at once what had given Amelia that apprehensive look. In the mirror she saw not her own face, but her mother’s: high colour in the cheeks, bright hair darkened with dampness that could be rain or sweat, eyes glowing as if they were melting in her face. Celia’s face. Marion quickly looked away.

“No, of course not
really
, Auntie A. It was just the cloud coming in.” She went towards her aunt with her hands cupped together.

“Ooh, what have you got for me?” Amelia swivelled in the chair. She was in her late fifties, compactly built, although rounded and busty like all the women in the family. Despite the rainy weather, she was dressed as always in a loose short-sleeved shirt, khaki shorts and leather sandals. An outdoors woman: her calves were muscular and her biceps tight, beneath skin that was crinkled from years of solitary beach-walking. Hair that had once been gold was greying now, cut short every month with the kitchen scissors by Auntie Belle. As a result it always looked a little tufty, with an irregular fringe.

Marion unclasped her fingers and let the chips of blue and white trickle off her palm and onto the table. They were still slightly damp.

“A good haul,” Amelia said intently. The gleaming points of her tweezers, like a fussy beak, teased apart the five shards. One with a tight geometric pattern, mesh-like; two plain white; one white with a narrow double band of navy; and the last, the smallest, showing the roof of a tiny pagoda.

“Will they fit?” asked Marion.

“Hard to tell …” Amelia turned the pagoda fragment with the tips of the tweezers, flipping it over. “This one – possibly …”

Amelia was absorbed. Marion retreated to sit cross-legged in front of the fire, watching her aunt sort through the pieces that lay heaped on the table and in the woven bowls at her feet.

A few moments later, Marion heard footsteps behind her and felt firm fingers on the crown of her head. She twisted around to smile up at her other aunt.

“Hello, Auntie B.”

Aunt Belle took a hairbrush down from the mantelpiece and started to untangle Marion’s damp hair, teasing out the knots. “Such beautiful hair,” she said.

Belle was the second-oldest sister. She was less physically toughened than Amelia, softer around the middle. Her face was rounded, her upper arms fleshy and a little sagging. But the two women had the same clear brown eyes, the same air of vigour and resourcefulness. Belle was also dressed in a practical uniform of sandals, loose shirt and slacks, her silvering hair cut into a pageboy bob – the result of Amelia’s more painstaking handiwork with the scissors. Belle did not share her sister’s fascination with smashed china. New pots were her thing. She enjoyed the company of the women in the village, where she ran a craft workshop: local women brought their clay pots to be fired in her kiln, and she arranged for the wares to be transported to town and sold to tourists.

There had been three sisters, all raised in this wooden house, all buxom and bright-haired. Amelia had helped their father, a GP, in his practice until his death, then later had volunteered at a veterinary clinic. Belle had been a social worker in the town before getting involved in the craft project. Neither of them had ever lived more than an hour’s drive from the beach.

Of three sisters, only two now remained. Marion’s mother had been the youngest and prettiest, a brilliant child, but not strong. Despite her vital appearance, Celia had been secretly fragile.

When Celia was only nineteen, Amelia and Belle had started to lose her. So careless. While they were busy on their energetic projects, their younger sister had floated away to the city. There she’d studied drama, sung cabaret, had love affairs, produced a child before she was twenty-three. She’d return to the beach house every now and then – always sparkling, always bringing too many gifts. But the soft sea mists had dimmed Celia’s shine. When her mood darkened, she would leave at once, which meant she never stayed for long. Over the years, she visited her sisters less and less.

And in the city, with its late nights and loud days, its electric light and shadow, Celia had started to separate. Her highs had become towering, her lows abysmal, until there’d been little left in between. Gradually she’d got lost in the troughs and ridges, the heavy waves of her illness – an illness that had probably always been in her, but that her sisters had not recognised until Celia was far, far out on a dark sea.

And Marion was with her, most of the time. When Celia was feeling good, the days were bright: she’d take her daughter shopping. She loved pretty things – ornaments, bric-a-brac. Often, these breakables were the things her hand fell to first when the mood shifted. She liked to throw things. Celia’s frenzies of destruction were operatic, terrifying. Marion – aged six, seven, nine – rode them out. She would hide behind the couch or under the bed, barely breathing, waiting for the fit to pass. This was repeated many times, with accelerating rage, until, by the end, almost everything fragile in the house had been destroyed.

When things were quiet again, Marion would bring her mother tea and aspirin in bed.

Celia tried. She sent the little girl back to the aunts when she could. Marion spent school holidays and long weekends in the house by the sea; also the two occasions when Celia was hospitalised. Each time, she felt a guilty buoyancy in being away from her mother, released from her duty of watchfulness. Later on, the beach house was where she went for her boarding-school holidays, and where she lived for her first year out of school. By then, guilt was part of the complex taste of the place, like the salt in the air.

Marion had been with her aunts when the news came. It was when she was eleven. Although the details were never discussed with her, she knew that her mother’s death had been no accident. Celia had been just strong enough to make her own exit.

She was aware of how much she physically resembled Celia; how she too could fly into moods and rages and transports of exuberance, fits of tears or laughter. And she knew how her turbulence provoked her kind aunts, how it summoned anxiety into their eyes. They were vigilant, watching for cracks; for the signs they’d missed in Celia. And so Marion tried to be placid and cheerful, to gentle their suspicions. She hated it when they went still and watchful around her. It made her restless; made her miss her own life back home. In Cape Town she worked as a vet’s assistant, just like her Aunt Amelia. She missed the incurious gaze of the animals.

“Why do you want to go back to the city, sweetheart? The sea air is good for you. Look at the colour in your cheeks,” said Belle. A quick glance from Amelia, over the mauve rims.

Marion sat still, keeping her head motionless as the brush tugged at her hair, suppressing the impulse to leap to her feet and shake out her hair with a shout, to kick and jump about. As a child she’d hated having her hair done, hated the enforced stillness every morning as Celia hacked at the knots with a comb, the tugs painfully communicating her mother’s own frustration.

“Leave the child, Belle, for heaven’s sake. She’ll go if she goes and she’ll stay if she stays.”

“What’s in the city? Greed and grief, that’s what. Greed and grief.”

Belle had worked out the knots now. The brush made a few last passes through the damp hair, and then Marion could feel her aunt nimbly separating three handfuls, the weight lifting away from her nape as the strands were braided together and secured. The tight sensation at the base of the plait was pleasurable. She was calmed, like a groomed horse.

And sitting here by the fire, watching the rain beating at the milkwoods outside the window, one mad gull spinning high up in the turbulent air, Marion did indeed feel safe – in the warmth of her aunts’ affection, in this house that her grandfather had built for his daughters. She wanted to be in here with them, not out in the storm. Perhaps it might be possible to stay for good this time.

Behind her, Amelia sighed with satisfaction. “
Voilà!
”

Marion turned to see her positioning a piece on the framework of the phantom vase. It floated there, bellying out the lost curve.

“Well done, Auntie A! You got a fit.” Marion stood and went to her, reaching out to touch the vase.

“Careful,” said Amelia, and Marion smiled. After storm and wreck and tidal grinding, now to treat it like crystal. But she was careful.

“You’ll never find all the pieces, surely?”

“Of course not. That’s not the point. This isn’t a jigsaw. But we can make it more whole than it was.”

“You and your old pots!” Belle snorted, pinching hair out of the brush. “Spoils of empire, that’s what they are. Flotsam of greed and conquest!”

Amelia directed a private smile at her floating vase and pressed the abutting pieces more snugly together. “But still, very pretty,” she murmured.

“Rubbish. Why don’t you collect the local pottery, Amelia? Now that’s beautiful. And useful.”

“Stop fighting, you two,” said Marion. It was an old argument, and the aunts were enjoying themselves. In this house, nobody raised their voices in earnest – not any more.

“Oh, don’t go back to the city, darling child,” Belle sighed, laying a hand on Marion’s smoothed hair. Marion knew that she was thinking of storms and disaster, greed and grief. But her aunt sounded resigned, as one is resigned to history.

That night, Marion dreamt again the dream of her mother: her young and beautiful mother, burning, throwing again and again a clear glass vase against the wall of the bedroom. Marion woke with the shattering all around her. It took a moment or two for her ears to clear, her heart to still; to hear only the quiet of the night, with its distant hushing of waves.

In the dream it was always that one particular vase, turning and turning through the air, while around her mother’s tall, ecstatic figure the room was filled with sparkling splinters and a constant grinding sound of breakage that never seemed to slacken or to cease.

One ordinary evening two weeks before, Marion had taken each of twelve good dinner plates – plain white china, which she had desired and saved up for and bought precisely because of their blank purity, the only complete set of crockery she’d ever owned – and thrown them, one by one, at the wall of her flat. For no real reason. A bad day in a bad week. A fight at work, a phone call from an old boyfriend. Not really reasons at all. It had frightened her, had made her feel that she was standing on the edge of a cliff, hurling her possessions into the void. In a way she was still standing there, waiting for the sound of them hitting the bottom.

It was this incident that had brought her back to her aunts, to the peace of this old house, as consternation had often done in the past. Although never before had she done something so startling, so alarmingly futile.

None of this could she tell the aunts. To tell them would be to confirm all their fears; it would force them to make some terrible gesture of recognition. But although she’d said nothing, still they seemed to sense that danger had touched her, that she’d fled to them from some pursuing shadow. This visit, the aunts had been particularly solicitous, watchful, kind.

But in her heart, Marion knew it had not been real. Yes, her wrist had flicked and the plates had spun from her hand, hair whipping across her cheeks and colour flushing the skin. But even as she’d acted out her mother’s mad ballet – performed so many times, long ago in another small apartment, when Celia was not much older than Marion was now – she hadn’t truly believed. She had never felt the weight of true madness under her arousal.

And afterwards, standing there with her bare feet, nicked and a little bloody, in the heap of shattered porcelain, she’d known that it had been an experiment. Drawing blood from the perfect skin inherited from her mother, cutting it to find what was inside. She had not entered the fury, had not been lifted away. And with the small wash of relief she’d felt at the ordinariness of her emotions – embarrassment, fright – there’d been a tickle of something else: maybe shame.