Astonishing Splashes of Colour (44 page)

“A family that hid the truth.”

He flushes. “It wasn’t like that. We wanted to protect you.”

“From what?”

“I don’t know, it seems rather foolish now. At the time, we agreed. I suppose we thought Dad would tell you when you were older. Then it became a habit—too difficult to break.”

“So you never thought I ought to know?”

He hesitates. “I did, actually, when I was researching my book. I began to realize that you needed to know.”

“But you didn’t tell me.”

“No. You’d lost the baby. It didn’t seem the right time.”

When is the right time to tell someone they’re not who they think they are? “I’m surprised Martin didn’t tell me. He was no good at secrets.”

He nods. “I thought he’d have told you years ago, but maybe he forgot.”

“You don’t forget something like that.”

“But I think he really did. We all did. You stop thinking about these things in the end, and your memory becomes unreliable. You start to believe things that never happened.”

Miss Newman again. She crops up everywhere.

“When I wrote my book, I found I remembered very little about Dinah.”

“You didn’t think about talking it over with the others? Sharing opinions?”

He looks startled. “Well—no.”

“Not much good writing things down if you can’t talk to your own family.”

“I know it’s not much of a defence. I can see that now.”

I move restlessly in my bed. “We’re useless. Other families do things together.”

He looks at the floor. “We all loved you, Kitty. You were important to us.”

“Oh, Adrian.” I never thought I would hear him say that.

“We were wrong. I see that now. You had a right to your own history.”

“Do you miss Martin?” I want him to acknowledge his own loss.

But he hesitates. “I don’t know. I feel that I hardly knew him.
Or Jake, or Paul. You were our link, Kitty. Without you, we might never have connected at all.”

Tears drip again. Where does all the liquid come from? “I miss Martin,” I say. I’m not afraid to say it.

We sit in silence for some time.

“I’m going to do an American tour soon,” says Adrian after a while. “For six weeks.” He sounds unhappy, as if he doesn’t want to go.

“Great,” I say. “It’s been a long time since you last went.”

“I’ve been putting it off.”

“Why?”

He sighs. “I don’t know. Lots of things. I wanted you to be out of hospital before I left.”

“No problem. I’ll be home before you come back. Bring me a jug from San Francisco.”

“Yes.” He pauses. It’s not like Adrian to hesitate. “When I get back, I thought I might go and visit Margaret—”

“In Norfolk?”

“Yes.”

“In her caravan by the sea?”

“Yes.”

I wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t. “She’s real then?” I say. “I wasn’t quite sure.”

He smiles. He is very handsome when he smiles. I wonder why he doesn’t smile for the photographs on the back of his books. His publishers seem to like the brooding, anguished look of genius, but lots of people would prefer an amiable, handsome man. Besides which, he might well not be a genius.

“Well, it would be worth finding out more details, wouldn’t it?” he says.

He’s not committing himself. Apparently, after the funeral, she gave him an address and left. Without a backwards glance,
according to my father. “Didn’t you believe her, then?” I say.

He pauses. “I’m sure she was—is—Margaret—I don’t know about her life, though, or her motives.”

He’s preparing himself for disappointment. He’s nearly fifty, and still searching for the mother who deserted him, but he doesn’t expect to find her.

“So she didn’t come back the next day, or make arrangements to meet you all again?”

“No,” he says. “I was disappointed, I admit. I’d spent such a long time looking for her. When I was doing my research, finding her became very important to me. That’s when I realized that you needed to know about Dinah.”

I’ve been thinking about Margaret, and I’ve decided that she didn’t tell us the complete truth. No wonder everyone else was so good at lying. It must run through the genes. I’m convinced she didn’t contact her parents after she left. They had no idea she was alive. She lied about that, so how could we believe anything else she said?

I want this mother to be real for Adrian. I don’t want his need for her to be unfulfilled. But I’m afraid of what he will find out.

None of us saw Margaret through unprejudiced eyes. In the memories of my brothers, she is a warm but remote mother, romanticized by the thirty-year gap. My memories are equally agreeable, but they’re not of her.

“Go and find out,” I say. “It can’t do any harm.”

Adrian gets up to leave.

For a brief moment I worry about him. “You will be careful in America?” I say. “Mugging and things.”

He looks astonished, then touched. “Of course,” he says.

I don’t want any more lost boys.

“Can I write to the girls?” I say quickly.

He pauses, looks at me. “I don’t really see why not,” he says.

Paul comes to see me at strange times. I sometimes wake up from a doze and he’s sitting beside the bed, writing out mathematical formulae, or doing the
Times
crossword. He has an amazing ability to concentrate wherever he is.

One day, he walks in breezily and finds me awake. “I have good news,” he says.

He’s engaged, I think. To one of the thin women in tasteful suits. “Congratulations,” I say.

He looks confused. “You know already?”

“Go on,” I say. “Tell me.”

“I’ve got a job.”

This takes me by surprise.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?”

“Yes, of course. What is it?”

“They’ve offered me a full-time job at the university as a lecturer.”

“But you don’t like teaching.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve applied, had the interview and been offered the job.”

I stare at him. “Do they pay enough?”

“It’s enough, Kitty. I need to settle down.”

Now it all fits. “You’re getting married.”

He looks amazed. “How did you know that?”

“Who is she?”

“Well, she doesn’t know yet—”

The job is impressive. He must be serious. I wonder if his change of direction has come about as a result of finding his mother again.

“Are you in contact with Margaret? Will you invite her to the wedding?” I say.

“No,” he says. “Well …” He doesn’t know, isn’t ready to think about it. He’s never been good at personal questions.

Martin’s death has changed him, though. I’m not sure he knows this himself, but he’s lost that boyish charm. There is something graver in his face. He needed to be shocked out of his lack of commitment. He’s far too old to go on being irresponsible. He’s nearly bald, for goodness sake.

Next time he comes, he brings Lydia with him. She is small, with Pre-Raphaelite hair, curly and tangled, never tidy. She has huge round glasses and a floppy cardigan. I stare at her. I think he’s brought the wrong girl by mistake. But she grins and gives me a kiss, and she is warm and funny and lovely. Well, I think. A sensible decision from Paul.

Jake and Suzy always come together, presenting a united front in case I start talking about babies. But I’m not going to. I talk about babies to Jane, so Jake and Suzy are quite safe. Jake seems unconcerned about Margaret, apparently not minding if she comes back into his life or not. I’m not sure if I entirely believe this.

One day he brings his violin, and gets it out of the case without telling anyone. He plays Massenet’s
Meditation,
and the music is so piercing that I wonder if Massenet ever lost a child. Two nurses come in hurriedly, but stop to listen and forget what they came for.

I watch Suzy: she’s quiet, contained, with her hands in her lap, but I see something in her that I have never seen before. She’s happy. She and Jake approach each other from different poles and somehow meet exactly in the middle. Jake lives in a crazy, unpredictable world of music and nonconformism. Suzy steps out of her successful, sophisticated world and they slot together so well that you can’t see the join.

I wonder why I’ve never seen this before. It seems so blindingly obvious and yet I had no idea.

Jake puts his bow down into silence. Seeing the nurses and the other patients, he grins, then leaps into a hornpipe, fast and
furious, and I see how he almost breathes through the music. With an audience, he sparkles and glistens and gives off spectacular displays of light and sound, lit by an inner energy and excitement.

My talented brothers (who are really my uncles). And the one without a talent, but the one I loved the most, is dead.

“You’ve lost a twin,” I say to Jake when he’s finished playing and the audience dispersed.

“I hardly ever thought of him when he was alive,” he says, looking out of the window. “Now I can’t forget him.”

“Adrian thinks we should meet up more,” Suzy says. “I think it’s a good idea. I could never understand why you were all so remote from each other.”

They’ve come in Suzy’s lunch hour and she has to go back. She says goodbye and goes to the door. Wait, I want to call out. If you’re pregnant again, can I have the baby?

But I don’t.

I don’t ask Jake about Dinah either. They didn’t feel they were lying—they were just muddled.

“I don’t think I’ve grown up,” I say to Jane. “I don’t feel important enough.”

“What do you think makes someone grown-up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then perhaps it doesn’t matter.”

I wake quietly from a drugged dream to see my father sitting beside me. He hasn’t brought anything to read, he’s just sitting, and this is astonishing, because there are no twitching fingers, no jiggling leg, no restless energy waiting to be released. He looks like the father I saw at the funeral, desolate, old, shrinking fast. Is he happy? What would make him happy? What has he wanted from his life for himself? Even his paintings are not his reason for living: if he puts a
hole in them—or they are burnt—it doesn’t matter, he paints them again. Does he love us, his sons and me?

I wonder if he feels guilty because Martin died and he didn’t. Perhaps he remembers his plane going down, his lost crew. There’s a sadness in him that wasn’t there before.

He brought us up on his own—accepted the challenge, even if he didn’t have a choice. He’s always pleased to see me when I go home, and I’m always pleased to see him. Is that his reward?

He moves slightly and sees that I’m awake. He smiles, sits up straight and starts talking. He’s the same as ever, alive, frenetic, exhausting.

“I know I should have told you about Dinah,” he says into the silence, as if we have been discussing her, “but when you came, it was like a second chance. You were special—you gave me a sense of purpose.”