Astonishing Splashes of Colour (29 page)

“Kitty,” says Martin.

“What?”

He pauses. “Nothing.”

We sit in silence for some time. I really want James to come and find me. The owner of the poodle appears along the edge of the sea and the dog dashes into the water to meet him.

“I was fourteen when she left.”

He is going to tell me something. Something he’s not said before.

“She used to fight everyone—”

I look at him in surprise.

“I mean people who were nasty to me. She would go into the school and see my teachers, the headmaster, the children who were bullying me, their parents. She never gave in, she made them sort things out. I think she might have beaten up the children herself if they weren’t punished properly.”

I look at him and he’s crying again. “I didn’t know you were bullied,” I say.

“Well … They used to call me Simple Simon, didn’t they? I couldn’t do things as quickly as them.”

“Oh, Martin.” I want to give him a hug and tell him that he’s a brilliant lorry driver, and the best brother in the world.

“So why did she do all that and then leave me behind when she went, as if she couldn’t care less about us?”

“I don’t know.”

“One day, she just wasn’t there any more. I remember the
date: July 21st, the first day of the school holidays. We got up for breakfast and there wasn’t any. We looked everywhere for her. We thought she might be shopping, or gone for a walk, or out in the garden. Back in bed.”

I could see the boys searching for her, running out into the garden, opening cupboards, looking under the beds.

“We called her. We thought she was playing a game. ‘We give in,’ we shouted. ‘You can come out now.’ But she didn’t come out. She never came out, ever again.”

Where was I in the middle of this search? Asleep in my cot, or running around on my little toddler legs, calling “Mummy, Mummy”?

“Then Dad came back and told us about the car crash.”

I watch the water of the rain piercing the water of the sea. Gulls swoop down, balance on the surface and ride the waves. They rise and fall with nonchalant expertise, unthreatened by the hostile weather. The day, the sky, the sea are grey, but there is a vigour to the greyness here on the beach. It is not cold and lifeless, it’s rich and multi-layered.

I imagine myself awake at night, listening for Henry’s breathing, because I know that this is what mothers do. The love that children never hear. Did she do that for me? Do I know about it in some secret inner part, or did I lose it somewhere in the thousands of nights between then and now?

“Why did she do it?” says Martin, with a catch in his voice. “How could she leave her own children?”

“I don’t know.” To leave Henry would have been so inconceivable that I can’t think myself into the role. Margaret left five children. Inconceivable five times over.

“If it is her,” he says, “I hate her.”

“Kitty!”

And here comes James, finally, a bit later than acceptable. He stumbles awkwardly over the shingle, stopping to look and shout at regular intervals. “Kitty! Where are you?”

“Over here,” I shout, but my voice gets caught up and lost in the wind.

He stops and turns round, looking in all directions. I stand up and wave to him, my clothes wet and cold against me, my hair sticky and salty round my face.

James sees me and immediately changes course. He moves determinedly towards me and I stay standing. I want him to hold me for a bit when we meet.

“You took your time,” I say.

James is obliging. He puts his arms round me and holds me tightly. “Kitty,” he says gently and pats me rhythmically on the back.

Martin stands up next to us. He doesn’t speak. He half smiles, then looks away at the sea.

A woman walks past us, fiercely pounding across the stones. She looks like Granny’s friend from the funeral, but I’m not sure, so I watch her carefully. She won’t meet my eyes. She strides on with her head down, so I don’t find out if it’s her or not.

The three of us climb the stone steps back up to the road. It is quieter now, further from the sea. My pink dress is dark enough to be red and sticks to me uncomfortably. I wonder if it’s transparent.

“Have I missed anything?” I ask James. “Has she explained anything?”

“There’s a lot of arguing going on, but as far as I can make out she had some kind of breakdown. She says she didn’t know what she was doing.”

“She would say that, though, wouldn’t she?”

Martin stands beside us, looking awkward. “I think I’ll go and sit in my truck,” he says.

“What if she wants to speak to you?” I say.

“Tough.”

“We’ll come and fetch you if she asks for you,” says James.

“I’ll think about it.”

He walks away from us, head down against the wind, shoulders broad and somehow closed, locked on the inside.

We make our way slowly back to the bungalow. “Apparently,” says James, “it wasn’t just your father. Something to do with Dinah. All the rows they were having, and then Dinah leaving. She disappeared, she said, and they had no idea where she’d gone. She says everything just fell apart after that. She thought she was no good for her children, that you would be better off without her.”

“So she had a breakdown. Why didn’t she come back later, when she got over it?”

“I think she’d had enough of Angela and Philippa and Lucia and the rest.”

“But what about us?” I say. “Why didn’t she come back for us?”

“Maybe your father’s right and she was an alcoholic. Maybe she couldn’t cope.”

I picture my father burning everything connected with my mother’s life, scattering the ashes on the rhododendrons, and I see that his anger then was greater and possibly more justified than I’d realized. I see him painting in the attic, slapping on the paint, crimson, full of energy. “Kitty!” he says, as I creep up silently. Always welcoming, always pleased to see me—and all the time he’s been telling me lies.

“Regardless of whether he was right or not,” says James, putting an arm round me and guiding me in the right direction, “your father was trying to protect you. He stayed, she didn’t.”

“But was he to blame for it all?”

James hesitates. “If she really wanted you, she would have
found a way. She knew where you were. She could have made contact with you any time she wanted. She chose not to.”

He’s right. She can’t just appear thirty years later and say it was my father’s fault. She is, after all, our mother. I feel a silence begin to take shape inside me, settling coldly, soft and unstoppable as snow.

“Do the others admit she drank?”

“No one’s saying. They don’t seem sure.”

I start to shiver. James stops, takes off his jacket, then puts it round me. He won’t get too wet. It’s only drizzling now. I slip my arms into the sleeves, which are too short, and smell his warm familiar smell of deodorant, computers, wooden floors, cleanness. I wrap it round me tightly, but I still shiver.

“Actually,” says James, “you can’t entirely blame her, can you? Who could live with your father and remain sane?”

I suspect he might be secretly pleased that my father’s world has fallen apart. This is what happens if someone is perpetually ignored. It takes away their objectivity.

Dinah and Margaret and their rows. How do you get to that stage of noncommunication with your child? Does it inch up on you, your voices rising a little more every day? Or does it jump out suddenly, and there you are, angry without any warning? Is it inevitable or avoidable?

How would I know?

The bungalow looks innocent from outside. It’s too precise, too normal to contain all the emotions that are bubbling away inside, all that anger—just a tiny desolate house for two old people. Grandpa’s roses in the front garden have become bushy and neglected and many of the petals have fallen in the heavy rain. It’s a garden that needs attention. They had a gardener once a week for
the last three years, but it wasn’t the same. Weeds amongst the roses, moss and daisies in the lawn. There used to be clusters of yellow-orange stones edging the flower beds, lifted from Chesil beach when Granny and Grandpa were younger and had a car. Now they lie haphazardly over the path and rose beds.

I might never see the house again, I think with a jolt. It will all be divided up, sold and scattered.

We pause outside the front door and look at each other.

“Never mind,” says James. “The worst is over. The next thirty years should be more predictable.”

No such complications for James and me.

A
S WE COME BACK INTO THE ROOM,
I look at Margaret—my mother. I try this in my head.
Hello, Mother, I’m Kitty.
I turn towards her, ready to identify myself, ready to call her Mother. But as I look at her, I see a strange blankness in her. She doesn’t glow, sparkle, reflect colour from anyone else. She has no colour. She’s not a mixture, a combination of colours, a half-colour; not pastel, not bright, not dark, not light. Is this what happened to her thirty years ago? Did my father wipe her out? Perhaps she has to be angry to stop herself from disappearing.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my father is saying. “Are you seriously suggesting that I got up early every day for the past thirty years, so I could sort through the post and remove anything written in your handwriting?”

“Yes,” she says, almost spitting at him.

I slip down on the sofa, anxious not to disturb anyone’s thoughts. I keep James’s jacket on, even though it’s warm inside, because I feel comfortable in it. It might shield me from the next round of accusations that will, inevitably, start flying about the room again. James hovers over the table and comes to sit next to me with a plateful of ham sandwiches and slices of ginger cake.

“As if I’d bother—”

“Of course you would—you always wanted to come between me and the children.”

“Rubbish.”

“What about that time I said they couldn’t climb the cliffs on holiday?”

My father looks bemused. “What are you on about?”

“You know. You just wanted to undermine me, appear as the benevolent father—”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

Jake and Suzy come out of the kitchen with a trayful of cups of tea. Jake is strangely calm. I know he’s good in a crisis, but this
is an exceptionally big crisis and he doesn’t even look flushed. Only a few coughs or sneezes. “You’ll probably be ill tomorrow,” I say to him.