The Seven Sisters (31 page)

I never got any flowers from her. She was right about fucking credit-card fucking International Flora, they hadn’t bloody delivered, had they. Actually that wasn’t their name, they were called Blooms of the World, I found that out from her credit-card statement, and they’d charged her thirty-five pounds for their No Show. Maybe I’ll prosecute them. And then again, maybe I won’t bother. As the fabulous Mrs Jerrold said, life’s too short.

Mum could have lived another thirty years. Grandma Pratt is still alive, though she hasn’t got much to show for it. I don’t think she knows Mum is dead. Somebody has probably told her, in that nice kind way that people have, but if so, it wasn’t me. I think she’s past taking things in. She sits there waiting for her God to call her home. I think her God never even noticed that she existed.

It was hell getting up all those stairs to my mother’s apartment, for my last look around. Though she’s right about the view when you do get up there. It’s mesmerizing. Many-layered London town. It was just as she said, just as she wrote. I’d been there before, I went to see her just after she first moved in, but I’d been too distracted and too worried about her to look about me properly. This time I had all the time in the world and I took it all in. Eventually I even found the flaw in the glass through which she used to gaze, as she tried to change the shapes of her future. Poor Mother.

My leg isn’t too brilliant, though Dr Cornelius swears it will be all right in the end. He says I’ll be able to go cross-country skiing again.

She’s right about the perils of the neighbourhood, too. She hadn’t exaggerated them. Getting up her stairs wasn’t easy, and getting into her street wasn’t easy, either. The whole area was cordoned off. I’d just been to see Anaïs, to pick up the key and the laptop, and although she lives only a couple of streets away, I was cut off. There was a young man in scruffy plain clothes on the corner who said he was a policeman. He told me I couldn’t come past the cordon. I said I had to get to my mother’s flat, and he asked me to produce some ID. I hadn’t got my passport on me – I’d locked it up, on purpose, in my suitcase, because I knew from my mother that the area was full of thieves and bag-snatchers. He didn’t seem to like the look of my
Finnish driving licence. I asked what had happened and demanded to know why I couldn’t pass. He said there’d been a shooting. They’d found a gun but not a body. They were looking for the body. I’m not joking. I wish I were. I said I couldn’t stand there all night, and eventually he offered to accompany me to the front door. At this point, I said, ‘How do I know you’re a policeman?’ His opinion of me seemed to go up rather than down when I made this suspicious demand, and he became more friendly, and flashed his badge at me in a conspiratorial manner. He seemed to keep it stuffed away out of sight in his jeans pocket. For good reason, no doubt. There’s probably a brisk trade in stolen police badges in those parts. Then he walked me to the door, and saw me in. The sirens wailed for hours, as I went through her refrigerator and her laptop. I wonder if they ever found the body.

Don’t think I didn’t feel intrusive, reading that diary. I did. But think of the anger that welled up in me while I was reading it. She may or may not have lied about how many samosas she was in the habit of devouring, but she sure as hell lied about a lot of other things. Lies of omission and of commission.

It was Anaïs Al-Sayyab who heard the bad news first. She rang me in Amsterdam, and introduced herself to me down the line, and told me what had happened. I said I’d come over, though I wasn’t sure what use I was going to be to anyone. With my leg just out of plaster, and worried about missing yet more work. But I’m glad I went. I’d rather that it was me that got hold of the laptop than anyone else. I’d rather keep the bad news in the family. When Anaïs rang, I booked myself on the next cheap flight to Stansted. A funny thing happened on the way from Stansted to Liverpool Street Station. I didn’t realize quite how odd it was at the time. The Stansted Express train stopped at Seven Sisters station, on the way into London. It’s not scheduled to do that, but it did. There’d been a signal failure somewhere down the line. I’d been looking out of the window, in a desultory way, at Essex and the Hackney marshes, and at the encroaching desolation of London – that line has some weird high redbrick arches that would delight that brick connoisseur Cynthia Barclay – when we ground to a halt in this non-station. And I remember thinking, what
a pretty name for such a dismal dump. An empty windswept platform, broken benches, tattered posters, boarded windows, brambles, buddleia. I wonder where the Seven Sisters Road got its name? I must look it up one day.

Anaïs had lifted the laptop from my mother’s apartment. It seems she has a key to the apartment – she says Mum was always afraid of locking herself out. They’d registered the location of this spare key at the police station, so the police would know where to look in an emergency. It’s a very high-risk crime area, as I think I’ve said already. Anaïs had gone round immediately, after the police called her, to remove anything of value. She doesn’t seem to have a very high opinion of the morals or competence of the police. She’d taken the laptop, and a silver soup ladle, and a strange and rather sinister black metal crow that looked as though it might have been made in Mexico. She hadn’t found anything else worth appropriating. I told her to keep the crow, as a memento. It looked at home with her.

Anaïs’s flat, in contrast to my mother’s, contains a lot of stuff that might well have attracted the attention of both police and burglars. She’s got an impressive Danish music system, and a Beovision television set, and a vast library of CDs and videotapes, and a litter of expensive-looking bits of oriental carpet and tapestry and wall hangings. And hanging in there is the unmistakable perfume of high-quality North African hash, inadequately disguised by joss sticks and incense. The curtains are drenched with odour. It’s a lovely smell. I wouldn’t mind sharing a joint with Anaïs one day. I like Anaïs. When I met her, I found myself saying that I was sorry I looked such a mess – which I did; I’d rushed to the airport with whatever I could grab, and I seemed to be wearing an old, long, not very clean dark green cardigan that I’d been using as a bedjacket, and a pair of baggy trousers cut back to the knee. And she said, ‘Well, darling, you do look a bit of a frump, but never mind, anyone looks a bit of a frump when they’ve had a leg in plaster for weeks, don’t you think?’

The way she said that word ‘frump’ was very exhilarating. She managed to make it sound like a compliment. Yes. I think I could get on OK with Anaïs. Even though she was a friend of my mother’s.

She pressed the laptop on me. I didn’t need much pressing. I was quite curious to see what my mother had been up to, and to try to discover any clues to her untimely death.

I think I may have discovered them.

I suppose I could have deleted her documents, but I didn’t. She’d put a lot of work into them. People don’t write all that kind of stuff down without secretly wanting somebody else to read it, do they? I could have chucked her laptop after her into the canal, but I didn’t.

I don’t suppose she’d got it on disk anywhere. There’s no evidence that she knew what a disk was. Poor Mum, she was sort of stranded between generations. She didn’t belong to the old world, where nobody was computer literate, but she was too old to move into the new world.

I don’t suppose this tragedy will have done my father’s reputation much good. Two drownings in his near vicinity is two too many. He survived the affair with Anthea, but this might swing things posthumously in my mother’s favour. Not that she’s likely to be worrying about her reputation, wherever she is. She doesn’t seem to have had much idea about what was really going on with my father and Jane and Anthea, does she? Or is she simply pretending not to know? She must have known about Jane and my father.

But maybe she didn’t. Isobel and Martha know, but they pretend not to know. Maybe my mother really didn’t know. I know I knew, but I didn’t tell anybody, did I?

Of course, a great deal of what went wrong was my mother’s fault. When I was younger I used to blame her for everything, but I got over that years ago. My father was also in part responsible, though there was a time when I suppose I wouldn’t have admitted that. And I have to take on board the fact that I am now more critical of my father because of what happened with Jane and Anthea, and because Isobel and Martha have stuck by him in that sycophantic way that they have. But however you look at it, it’s still true that it was my mother’s frigidity that drove my father into the arms of other women. I don’t suppose she ever slept with him, after Martha was conceived. Martha’s conception was a bit miraculous. God knows how it happened. It must have given them both a shock.
Unless, of course, they were trying for a boy. In the way that people are said to do.

Her frigid seepings have chilled me to the marrow. Walking under the motorway, where she so often walked on her daily route to the Health Club, I saw those ‘crusted city tears of salt and nitrate and lime and droppings’ that she described (described rather well, I have to say) and they seemed to me to be an emblem of the cold and cavernous home life of the Wiltons. She was drawn to them. Like to like.

You may wonder why, feeling this way, I took myself off to Finland, of all places. It is a good question. And there is a good answer, though you would get no inkling of it from my mother’s account of me.

I cannot describe how annoyed I am by my mother’s infrequent references to me. No, let me be honest, I don’t mean just
annoyed
, I mean
wounded
. Hurt and wounded. Well, annoyed too. Hurt, wounded, annoyed, and
angry
. I took myself off to the permafrost in order to avoid this kind of pain but I don’t seem to have managed it. She can still get through to me.

There is no reference, in my mother’s entire narrative, to what I actually do.
I can’t tell you how offensive I find this. I have been through her text with a toothcomb, looking for any indications that she knew what I was doing in Jyväskylä, or why I was interested in going there and living there, but I have found nothing. All we get is a whimsical little fantasy about my playing the violin and living alone in a wooden house on the edge of a lake. Now, it’s true that I used to play the violin when I was a child, though not very well, but I haven’t touched an instrument in fifteen years. I sometimes strum to myself on the piano, but I don’t play a violin. I repeat,
I do not play the violin
. And I don’t live alone in a little wooden house by the edge of a lake. I live with my partner Clyde Hughes in an apartment in a large modern well-appointed house that belongs to the university. It is not far from a lake, but nowhere in that part of Finland is far from a lake. It is the Land of the Lakes. (She has got that bit of geographical terminology right, I concede. But the Land of the Lakes is not in the Arctic Circle, as she elsewhere, with what I suppose she thinks of as poetic
exaggeration, suggests.) It is true that Clyde and I do dip into a lakeside sauna in the season, but I don’t see anything wrong with that. Who doesn’t? She seemed to have taken OK to her Health Club sauna, didn’t she? There’s nothing intrinsically comic or contemptible about a sauna, is there?

To be fair to her, she does at the very last, towards the end of the story, seem to have recognized that I have a proper job in Finland. When she refers to my having been given a month ‘off work’ for the operation. So she did know that I was working. But nothing, not a word, not a breath of interest in what I was working
at
. She knew about it. She can’t not have known about it. It’s interesting, my work, and I think it’s important. To be honest, there was a time when I thought I’d been driven into it by a sense of over-compensation, or by an inability to get rid of that ‘do-good’ attitude that my father was always ostensibly so keen on. But I’ve come to think that whatever my motives, the work itself is important, in its own right. It’s worth doing, whether or not I am worthy to do it, and whether or not I am successful at it.

I work as a speech therapist, in an international and multilingual research clinic attached to the university. Although my mother does not see fit to acknowledge its existence, it is a world-famous clinic. People come to us from all over the world. We do not promise sensational results, in terms of successful therapy, but people trust us, gain hope from us, and are anxious to volunteer themselves as part of our ongoing investigations. They know we have shown more dedication than any other institution in the world to the causes of some speech problems. We are investigating new theories of Mixed Cerebral Hemisphere Dominance (also known as MHD). These theories have been around in various forms for a long time, and in the past have resulted in some cruel and protracted experiments – there was at one time a fashion for attempting to force right-handed patients to revert to a hypothetical primal left-handedness by constraining them (and I mean physically) to use a variety of slings, braces, mittens and splints. This was better than the severing of the vocal cords and other experimental mutations that used to go on in earlier centuries, but it was never very helpful.

In the clinic, we don’t go in for that kind of treatment, but we do observe closely what is happening in the areas responsible for speech production and comprehension. We have interesting new data on what happens in Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area while the actual process of stammering or stuttering or clustering takes place. We also work with stroke patients – we don’t call them victims, and we aren’t really supposed to call them patients, but personally I like the word ‘patient’. And they have a great deal of patience, some of our clients. One of my colleagues, who has perfect pitch, thinks she has made a breakthrough discovery about the connections between pitch, tone, tune and speech. You can hear her chanting with her group. They enjoy their sessions. They learn new tunes, new tongues.

I wasn’t very good at the violin because I haven’t got a very good ear, I’m afraid.