Family Album (33 page)

She forgets but she also knows. This knowledge is tucked away somewhere deep in the mind, digested, received perhaps rather than accepted, seldom taken out for examination.

I suppose some people would have rushed screaming to an analyst long ago, she says to sleeping Alex. But I’ve never been that way inclined. I think when I first began to realize I just pushed the whole thing away, it was too confusing, too much of a challenge, maybe that’s partly why dancing became such an obsession. Wanting to be a dancer shoved anything else aside. And since—with adult eyes—I just see it as all pretty weird; what were they thinking of? How was it for them? One has no idea, none at all. They’re like some other species, when you think about them that way. But also they’re exactly the same. Mum and Dad and Ingrid.

Ingrid knows that I know. Don’t ask me how I know that—I just do. She knows and she doesn’t propose to talk about it, that’s been the message. Ingrid’s come up with surprising things, occasionally, but never anything touching
that
—the main issue. Other things, once in a while. Sudden revelations. I was complaining about Dad—it was just her and me in the kitchen at Allersmead, when I was back once from dance school, and there was some fuss with Dad about the money I needed for my flatshare. We all used to complain about Dad being tightfisted—actually now I just see him as a man with rather a lot of children.

“He’s so
mean,
” Clare complains.

Ingrid makes no comment. Her face, as ever, registers little but there is perhaps the hint of a smile.

“You cut up his book that time,” says Ingrid.

Clare gasps in astonishment. The destruction of Dad’s typescript is family legend. “I did? I don’t remember anything. How do you know?”

“I saw you. I saw you come out of the room, with the scissors. You were not allowed to use scissors. You were six.”

Clare laughs. “Wow! Did I really!” She is struck by a thought. “Did he ever know? Does he know?”

Ingrid shakes her head. “Only I knew,” she says with satisfaction. “And now you.”

When I look back at them—look back in a grown-up, detached way—what you can’t work out is who was the sufferer, who was exploited. All of them? Nobody?

 

 

 

 

I
ngrid no longer thinks in her own language. Somewhere within, she has this other resource, this speech that she could call on at any point if she so wished, and that does sometimes well up spontaneously—in a dream, or making some comment—but it is shut away, set aside, it refers to pre-Allersmead days, which are now very long ago. It refers to young Ingrid, girl Ingrid.

Ingrid today is far from that other Ingrid, who seems indeed like a person who speaks a different tongue. And that person is succeeded by yet another—an Allersmead Ingrid who is still bilingual, just, but subsumed within Allersmead culture, gone native. Ingrid today is still in touch with that alter ego; from time to time that other Ingrid surfaces and bears witness.

I was amazed, when I saw Allersmead first. I did not know there were such homes. I had no home then, my mother was dead more than a year, I was living in a hostel, doing waitress work by day.

And before that there were the different places with my mother, the bedsits and the flats, here and there wherever she decided to be, and sometimes the man who was my father coming for a bit but not much, and in the end he went. My mother had men friends, different ones, many, and they would be there, and then go again. I remember faces, the one with the beard and the one with tattoos. I remember being in bed, and noises of drinking and shouting next door. Often my mother was drunk. She was drunk I think when she walked into the road that night and a car got her.

I came to England I think because I did not know what to do next, and that agency offered jobs, and you would learn to speak better English. I had English from school but not so good then.

The agency sent me to Allersmead, and there was Alison, she was young too but very much a mother, as though that was what she was always meant to be, and there was just Paul then but Alison said, of course another soon, and more. Laughing. She always laughed a lot, Alison. And it was all so far from what I had known, my mother, and the men, and those not nice flats and bedsits and always moving on, and the next place just as bad. I began to forget all that, and now I can hardly remember, it is like looking at old photographs gone brown. I was not going back there, I knew that, I was at Allersmead now, and Alison saying, Ingrid you are such a treasure, I couldn’t manage without you.

For Alison it was children, children—husband I think was necessary but not so important. Back in the first years, with Paul small, and Gina, and Sandra, I thought it was odd she was not so interested in Charles, odd they talked so little, I thought perhaps that is just how English people are, when they are married. I saw Charles must be very clever, with his books, and Alison is—different.

Six children is many, but for Alison not. For Alison it is family that matters, and more family is better. So there were babies, another and another and Allersmead is a big house so there was space, and for him to go in his study and shut the door and you must not disturb him. I do not know about his books. I have looked but I do not read books like that. So he was writing his books, and Alison was having babies and soon there was the family and always Alison said of course you are part of the family, Ingrid, what would we do without you? And I suppose that is what happened. Only perhaps more than she meant then.

I did not like him so much, in the beginning. Alison, yes. With Alison it is very easy to get along, there is no difficulty—she is always talking, yes, but you do not need to always listen, and we have worked together very well. There was much work then, with all the children young.

Much work, but it was good. For me, Allersmead was what a home should be. I had never known anything like that—the big house, and the children, and the garden and the dog and food like Alison makes.

Perhaps it was not so much that I did not like him. I did not know how to relate to him. I did not understand the way he sometimes talks that you think is perhaps to be funny but it is not. You get used to that, it is just his way, it is sarcasm, so there is no need to pay attention. I was very young. It’s hard to reach back to when you were young—that person is someone else. I was someone else. I think he too was someone else.

He looked at me. I saw that he began to look at me. I had not had much to do with men. There was a boy before I came to Allersmead, but that was nothing much.

I think now that was a bad time for him, for Charles. He was drinking sometimes—you would see the bottle and the glass on his desk. Alison was busy, busy with the children. Perhaps his work was not going well.

And he saw me in a new way, I suppose. And I saw him, as a man.

We were having sex for a short while only. Some weeks, I think. The first time, I was surprised, I hardly understood what had happened. Then I felt bad. So did he—I know that. He was a little bit crazy then, I think. And I was young, I was confused, I knew he should not, I should not, and then he said this must stop, he was sorry, he had done a bad thing and we must try to forget it, and I suppose that has been done, but there was Clare.

Alison arranged everything. Where I would go and how I would come back after and what would be told to the children. This is a family, she kept saying, and Clare must be in the family, and that was what mattered. So that is how it was, and they were all quite young still so they did not much ask questions not then and not later except that later I think they somehow knew, her too. It would not be good to talk about it with her, it is best left the way it is. Perhaps she knows, I think she knows. To talk would be to open up that time and I do not want that. It is over now, finished, a mistake. Except that there is Clare, and a person cannot be a mistake, she must never think that, so it is better never to talk.

I can know what I know without talking. I can feel the things I feel. About Clare, about what happened. Back then, I hated him a bit, because of everything, and then somehow he began not to matter so much, Allersmead was as it has always been, and he was a part of it, and so was I, and so was Clare. But it is always there, what happened, and sometimes if I am annoyed I say something, perhaps I have learned from him to be sarcastic. Anyway, I am a person who says what she likes.

I know everything, in the family. I have always heard, watched. I know things no one else knows, and I like that. I say what I like when I want to, but about some things I say nothing. I know all of them, all the children, from when they were babies. Paul cannot ever stay with anything, he has never known where he was going, he was like that from young. Gina you knew always would go where she wanted, would go high. Sandra was like girls in magazines, even in her school uniform. Katie and Roger were always together, but he did his own things, Roger, he worked hard at school, Katie too, and she never gave trouble.

Clare was the youngest, the baby, people made a fuss of her always, she was a bit spoiled perhaps, and she was athletic, right from quite small, handstands and somersaults, and then later she found dancing, and you could see in the end dancing would take her away, and it has.

I have never danced. I do not know from where it comes, this dancing.

Much later, I went away that time to see how it would be. To see if I could be somewhere else. I had jobs and there was a man for a while. But all the time I felt I was in the wrong place. I told the man about Clare and he said I should go to fetch her, and when he said that I saw that he did not understand. He did not see that that was not possible. I stopped seeing the man and in the end I went back to Allersmead. I knew I had to go back, that was my home now, it was our family, like Alison says. And there was Clare.