A Million Windows (6 page)

His mother herself was dark-haired, as were four of her six sisters. Three of those four had faintly olive skin. Once, as a young man, he had studied his mother's family tree, hoping to learn the source of the dark colouring, but the surnames alone told him nothing; all were English, all of his mother's eight great-grandparents having been born in either Devon or Cumberland. He supposed there might have been dark-haired descendants of the Celts still living in Devon in recent centuries or that a gipsy from the Lake District might have married into one of his ancestral families of small landholders and tradesmen. In this, as in many other matters, he preferred speculation to research.

His mother herself was dark-haired, as he seemed to have learned for the first time one cold morning during his fifth year and later to have forgotten until a certain cloudless afternoon with a cool wind blowing while he was sometimes writing at his desk and sometimes watching through his window the waving of a clump of treetops in the middle distance. (The reader will surely bring to mind some or another image formed earlier
while he or she read references to distant wings, upper storeys, sunlight falling on window-panes, and the like.) On the cold morning mentioned, he and she were together at the kitchen stove, she cooking porridge or toasting bread and he trying to warm himself. His two siblings were surely nearby, but he remembers only himself and his mother. All through his life, he was able to call up numerous memories from his fifth and his fourth years and some even from his third year, but his memory of the morning at the stove is the earliest memory in which a visual image of his mother appears. He has earlier memories of words spoken by her or of things done by her and memories of her as an unseen presence, but the image of the dark-haired woman at the stove is his earliest visual memory of his mother.

The woman at the stove wore a dressing-gown tied with a cord at the waist. Throughout his life, he has taken scant notice of clothes or fabrics or furnishings, but he believes he can recall the exact colours of the dressing-gown – he would call them indigo and silver-grey – and the exact feel of its silky texture. The dressing-gown belonged not to his mother but to his father. He was a minor public servant who neither drank nor smoked, and he and his family might have lived in frugal comfort except that he bet heavily on racehorses. He had never operated a bank account but carried a roll of banknotes always with him. After a series of winning bets, he would treat his wife and children to crayfish, blocks of chocolate, and what were called in those days family bricks of ice-cream and would peel off several banknotes from his roll and would tell his wife to buy with them something
for herself and the children. His winning bets, however, were fewer than his losing bets, and during some of his lean periods, so to call them, he would place credit bets with bookmakers. After an especially lean period, three years after the cold morning mentioned above, he escaped from his gambling debts by quietly resigning from his public-service position, giving the minimum required notice to his landlord, and fleeing with his wife and children from the northern provincial city where he had lived for several years to his native district far away to the south-west.

The dressing-gown was one of several costly-seeming items that his father had bought from the proceeds of winning bets in the years before he had married. (He had been a bachelor until his mid-thirties.) Other such items were a bespoke three-piece suit that would have cost the equivalent of ten times his weekly earnings before his marriage; several pairs of gold cuff-links; a gold watch that his widow would finally sell, thirty years after his death, for a sum equal to her yearly income from the pension for the aged; and, of course, the dressing-gown, which was described earlier as having a silky feel and may well have been partly or wholly of silk.

His mother would have been wearing the dressing-gown because she had no dressing-gown of her own. She had been married in her eighteenth year, after she had been working for several years on the small farm belonging to her mother and her stepfather, who could seldom afford to pay her any wage. He, however, the chief character of these paragraphs of fiction, had not surmised until later years who had been the true owner of
the gown. On the cold morning beside the stove, he considered the blue and silver gown his mother's property. She wore the gown often; his father never.

In his memories and in the connections between them, colour is always important. Nearly twenty years after the cold morning mentioned, he would try to write a poem to explain to himself why he had for long disliked the colour blue. While he was trying to write the poem, he supposed that the cause of his dislike was his never having been able during his first twenty years to fall in love with Mary, the mother of Jesus, even though he had felt continually obliged to do so. (Blue was traditionally associated with Mary, who was almost always depicted as wearing a blue robe or mantle.) He had never finished the poem, but before he had abandoned it he had recalled for perhaps the first time in twenty years, and in minute detail, the colours and the texture of the indigo and silver-grey dressing-gown and even the subtle interweaving of alternate strands of the two colours in each of the many approximate rectangles separating similarly shaped areas occupied by one or the other colour alone. He had recalled these details for the first time in many years in somewhat the same way that he would recall, many years later again and likewise for the first time in many years, and while he was at his desk in an upper room and preparing to write about certain dark-haired female persons, that his own mother had been dark-haired. And again, as on the earlier occasion, he seemed to feel what he had felt on the cold morning mentioned: as though his feelings came not from some mysterious part of his own person but from the
blue and silver strands of a fabric that he had not seen for sixty years and more.

On the cold morning mentioned he had decided, and for reasons that he could never afterwards recall, that his mother was not to be trusted. If he did not understand at the time how singular was his decision, he began to learn soon afterwards and went on learning throughout his life that it was singular indeed. He learned at the same time, however, what he ought to do and to say in order to seem to be a son who had never made any such decision about his mother. And she, his mother, whom he always suspected of knowing what he had decided on that cold morning, seemed to have learned what
she
ought to do and to say in order to seem what the two of them knew her not to be.

He had followed her home, so his mother had told her neighbour, in order to learn where she, the dark-haired girl, had lived, but at his desk who could say how many years afterwards, he could not be sure why he had walked out of the schoolyard through the gate that he had never before used and had walked ten or twenty paces behind her past the pepper trees marking the course of the creek and then over a timber bridge and into a network of streets where he had never previously been. He had never, in fact, learned exactly where she lived. It might have been enough for him to know that she lived in a district strange to him, or so he had surmised long afterwards when he recalled that the end of his adventure had been her turning around, soon after he had followed her across the bridge, and her staring at him until the face that he had previously considered pretty was
creased and frowning, although perhaps not hostile. So he had surmised at his desk, but then he had got up and had stepped to the window. The sun had set, which allows
me
to surmise that the last rays of sunlight may have reached his window only a little while before, and while he had been writing his own version of the substance of this paragraph. He looked through the twilight towards one of the distant wings. He supposed it to be one of the wings occupied mostly by female personages, but he could not be sure. Here and there in the far wing, a window was already lit from within, and while he stared at one or another distant glow, he composed in his mind a sentence reporting that the boy turned back towards the bridge and the streets familiar to him from a concern that he had been about to disturb an existence hitherto untroubled.

She who had lived on the far side of the creek was named Barbara. (She was the first of four of that name who had attracted him during his first twenty years. Three of the four were dark-haired, although the one that he had most often in mind while he wrote fiction had pale hair.) After her came someone whose name he never learned. He could recall having seen her only once, and she was probably unaware of his existence. Like the first of the four Barbaras, she and her family moved into his suburb and then out again within a year, although this was not uncommon at a time when many families rented rather than owned their homes. When he saw her, she was with her two young brothers in the dusty front yard of their weatherboard house. After more than sixty years, he recalls only an approximation of her face but
he can readily visualise what he believes to be the exact shade of the newly painted weatherboards behind her: something between grey and turquoise. He learned long ago not to struggle to recall her face but to call to mind first the bluish grey of the old timber house and then to hold the rare shade in focus, as it were, until he not only caught sight of some or another detail of clear, pale skin or dark eyebrows but felt what he supposed was something of the impression that the actual face had made on him long before, during the few minutes while he had observed it. He learned in time that this feeling was sometimes available to him even when he was unable to recall the face that had first given rise to it, and often in later years he needed only to call up an image of blue-grey weatherboards in order to feel again as though he was sauntering past a certain shabby house on a hot afternoon in the mid-1940s, in an inland provincial city, was staring at a girl of about his own age who was pushing repeatedly a worn rubber car-tyre suspended from a tree-branch and serving as a swing for one of her two younger brothers, and was waiting for her to turn so that he could see her face.

If, in the further reaches of some or another remote corridor in an immense house of two or, perhaps, three storeys, and behind some or another door that remains mostly closed but in sight of a window overlooking some or another tract of far-reaching landscape of mostly level grassy countryside with low hills or a line of trees in the distance, a certain man at his desk, on some or another day of sunshine with scattered clouds, were to spurn the predictable words and phrases of the many
writers of fiction who have reported of this or that male character that he once fell in love with this or that female character, and if that same man, after striving as neither I, the author of this sentence, nor even the most discerning reader of the sentence, have or has striven nor will ever strive, in late afternoon, and at about the time when the rays of the declining sun might have caused the pane in the window of his room to seem to a traveller on a distant road like a spot of golden oil, had found in his heart, or wherever such things are to be found, the words best fitted to suggest what he seemed to have felt long before, on a certain hot afternoon, in a distant inland city, and whether he had simply kept those words in mind or whether he had actually written them, either as notes for a work of fiction that he might one day write or as part of an actual work of fiction, then I do not doubt that the words would have been to the effect that a certain boy, a mere child, while he watched unobserved a certain girl, a mere child, whose name he did not know and who had almost certainly never had sight of him, wished for the means to inform her that he was worthy of trust.

He passed the house of grey-blue weatherboards every day on his way to and from school, and he seems to remember that he saw her once or twice more, but he has no memory of the dark-haired girl's having looked even in his direction during the few months before she and her family moved whither he never knew. If she had attended his own school, matters might have gone differently between them, but he assumed that she walked every day to the distant state school by a route that did not
cross his own. And yet he was not altogether content to remain unknown to her. The three or four unruly children in the shabby house next to his went also to the state school, and he recalls his confiding to two of them, a brother and a sister of about his own age, that the dark-haired girl in the grey-blue house was his girlfriend. What should have followed, according to the customs of that time and place, was the two confidants' hurrying to tell the girl what they hoped would unsettle or even annoy her and afterwards bringing back to the boyfriend an exaggerated or false report meant to affect him likewise. When, after several days, he had heard nothing from the children his neighbours, he waylaid them and asked for details. He took their vague answers for lies and surmised that they had forgotten even to approach the dark-haired girl. He made no further effort to reach the girl, although he looked out for her whenever he passed the blue-grey house. He seems to recall as his chief regret that he had not enabled her to experience what would have been for him strangely satisfying: an awareness of the esteem of someone altogether unknown.