You Don't Have to be Good (35 page)

She shivered and looked up. Weak winter sun warmed her face but her fingers were cold on the patched and salted railings. The blue-black flank of the sea rose and fell and her time alone in Spain, that early limbo time before Kiff and Lanjarón, flickered through her mind. She had called herself Katharine then, first for disguise, out of fear of discovery, and then for comfort. Those stunned and empty days of October, then November, she had kept moving and rarely slept in the same place twice. She was no Laurie Lee. She was too anxious and desolate to explore the town. Instead, she surveyed varnished pine, limp nets and portraits of Christ from her single bed.

She pressed the tears from her face. ‘You should have stayed with Kiff in Lanjarón,’ said Precious, giving her a poke with one long purple nail. Bea twitched her shoulder away and shook her head. ‘No. It wasn’t me.’ She sat down on the metal deck, clutched her knees to her chest and cried out into the wind: ‘It wasn’t me!’

‘
H
E’S NOT
such a bad chap, you know, Katharine,’ Richard said after their second day in Granada.

Katharine lay motionless beneath the sheet, eye mask and neck support carefully in place. They had walked miles that day, up through the Moorish quarter to the square of San Nicolas at the top. Frank insisted it offered the finest view of the Alhambra, which must be seen from afar before actually visiting it. Then they had trudged back down the hill, over the river and back up the other side to the palace and gardens themselves. It had taken hours, and as Katharine kept saying, it was most unlikely that Bea would let herself be seen in a place as public and as photographed as either of those, even if she was there, which in her opinion was unlikely. Adrian walked ahead wherever they went, consulting the map. Richard and Frank strolled together discussing the Moorish conquest and the defeat of the Visigoths. Laura lagged behind putting posters on fences and handing them out to passers-by. Katharine found herself largely alone during the day, watching her feet as she plodded upwards, past cafés and doorways that smelt of cigarettes and mint tea. Now her feet hummed and fizzed under the sheet. She hadn’t realised how unfit she was, unlike Richard, who had clearly been putting in the hours at the company gym. She could hear him taking off his underpants and shirt, then wandering around the room, picking her clothes up from the floor. She wondered whether a sleeping pill might be wise. There had been a lot of barking during their first night. An awful lot of barking.

‘I mean, I know he’s not your favourite person, darling, but when all’s said and done, he is our children’s uncle and in point of fact he is remarkably—’

Katharine sighed. ‘Adrian thinks he saw her.’

Richard shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that he didn’t. He wanted very much to see her and so he—’

‘He said he saw her in a car at the airport.’

‘Well why didn’t he tell us to stop?’

‘Because she saw us and then drove away. Or rather was driven.’

Richard looked out across at the view of the Generalife lit up against the night. There, clearly illuminated, he could see beauty and meaning and grandeur on a scale that endured. He could hardly tell Katharine that where the search for her sister was concerned, he could see nothing of the kind. Indeed, he was beginning to feel that it might be better if they never found her. After all, history was buried all around them; who was to say whether—

‘Where is Adrian now?’ asked Katharine, sitting up in bed and pushing up her eye mask. She looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight. ‘You did hear what he told me today, didn’t you? You did hear that Frank has got himself a lodger? He’s got a bloody lady lodger holed up in Bea’s house, keeping it warm for him till he gets back from his fucking trip! Where is Adrian now?!’

Richard cupped his balls and cleared his throat. ‘He’s out with Frank.’

Katharine threw back the sheet and put one leg out of the bed. Rapidly Richard pulled on his underpants and put a hand out to stop her. ‘Katharine, they’re looking for Bea. That’s what we’re here for.’

Katharine started to cry. ‘They’re not going to find her here and you know it.’

Perhaps Precious was right and Bea would get herself to Patrick somehow. She felt despair at having got there too early, rushed off there before she discovered that Bea had no passport. Would Patrick want her? He had contacted Precious, she knew that. Precious said he was wanting reassurance that it wasn’t his fault, forgiveness of some sort, but he had not gone so far as to ask what he might do to help. And anyway, thought Katharine, what would be the point of replacing a Frank with a Patrick? Who knew what kind of a man Patrick would be without a marriage to support him? She watched Richard clipping his toenails and thought how Bea should have married someone like him – tall, dependable, solvent, normal. She felt the sleeping pill pull at her consciousness. Their father had been tall. Richard was a little like him but without the accent or the cycle clips, and Richard was hopeless with his hands – he couldn’t make a balsawood model if his life depended on it.

It worried her that her memories of her father seemed only to be of his hands and his feet. She could not retrieve a complete image of him; all the complete images were in photographs and they were useless, they were lies. Once he was dead, when she was little, she feared thinking of him because of what must be happening to his body. It seemed impossible and horrific to her that he should be lying in the ground left alone to dissolve, and that had been when the sleeplessness began. There had been one night, a week or two after he died and after there came no answer to her repeated small ‘Are you still awake, Bea?’, when she experienced not the fall, the drop into sleep that she so dreaded and feared, but the sensation of being hurled to a place. The hurl took time, and the terrifiying velocity and speed of the journey was matched by the beating of her heart and the physical sensation of terror. That place, she was sure, could only be death. Somehow she had got herself out of her own bed and into Bea’s, where she clung to her sister’s talcy body, shoving and poking her sides until she woke and turned and put her arm round her . . .

Katharine fought for breath like a drowning swimmer breaking the surface and sat bolt upright in bed. It came to her with a terrible clarity. That was why Bea was lost. She used men to navigate by. She set her sights on men. Fatally, Bea thought men would save her, when really, what might have saved her was . . . Katharine struggled for the answer, flailed around for the truth before it slipped from her grasp. What was it? Richard was there at her side, solid, loving, calm. She felt the warmth of his hand on her arm and tried to push it away, tried to retain the truth she had glimpsed. ‘Shh. You mustn’t worry.’ She concentrated and closed her ears to him. It was work. That was what it was. Gratifying, demanding, worthwhile work. ‘Adrian is fine with Frank,’ soothed Richard, trying to make her lie down again. No. That wasn’t all. There was something else. ‘It’s a process, darling.’ What the hell was it? ‘For Frank and for Adrian. A healing process.’

Katharine pushed Richard away with all her strength. She sat up. ‘Nothing is
healing
,’ she wailed. ‘There is no healing in this.’ She banged her fist to her chest, then leapt to her feet. ‘Frank is
not
all right. Frank is a ruinous cunt!’ She threw the alarm clock at him. ‘Just fuck off out of here and fetch our son!’

Richard didn’t look at her.
In pectore robur.
He pulled on his clothes. Sophie had never sworn. Never, ever.

Katharine sank back on to the bed. The travel clock lay on the carpet by his shoes. The back had come off and its face was blank. She watched the shoes as he placed a carefully socked foot in each of them, then bent to tie the laces with his large gentle hands. If he picked up the clock it would be all right. If he picked up the clock they could rewind.

Richard straightened up and turned his feet away.

She stretched out her hand to the place where he had been. ‘Oh no,’ she whispered. She heard him take a weary breath in and pause.

‘It’s the children,’ she said, not daring to raise her face. She withdrew her hand and kept her eyes on the floor. ‘Have we been . . . reckless?’

His shadow crossed the room and she heard a floorboard creak.

She closed her eyes and swallowed. ‘Have we been careless with our children?’

When she opened them again, his feet were back near her own. She felt the dry warmth of his palm as he drew it along her jaw. He tilted her face up to him. She took his hand in both her own and held it tight against her cheek.

W
HEN THE
boat reached Genoa, Bea was soaked from the spray and from the drizzle that had started up in the afternoon. She waited on deck, reluctant to disembark and enter the Italian grandeur spread out before her, proud villas sweeping up from the waterfront in pink and yellow. She missed the familiar hewn ruggedness of Spain. Reaching Ithaca became suddenly urgent. She needed to get there.

At the train station, she bought a ticket to Brindisi, a port in the south-east. The journey would take, as far as she could tell, two days and involve some changes that she only partially understood. As she pushed a wad of notes under the glass, she found she had more money left than she thought. That would be Kiff’s doing. It warmed her to think of that as she made her way to the platform. She should have enough to pay for a room in Ithaca for a couple of weeks at least. She folded Kiff’s blanket and carried it under one arm. It was mid-March. The island would be in flower; there would be almond blossom, figs, and peppery olive oil. In Ithaca, she thought, she would buy some inks and draw.

She boarded the train, sat in a window seat and waited for the rhythm of the tracks to begin. She ought to write to Kiff and she wanted to write to Adrian. She thought he might have seen her at the airport and she didn’t want him to think she didn’t care. The train rolled, lurched and stopped. Iron squealed on steel as it lurched again, then reversed. Office blocks, slums, motorways, fields, hills and quarries rattled by. She smiled at the thought of Adrian. He used to say that the landscape was coded in our genes, hard-wired into our brains. He explained that was the feeling she had when she visited Hastings – saw the sea and the lie of the land, the cliffs and the shingle beach. Perhaps it was why she loved the rolling hills and farmland of Ithaca, the rugged coast and stone beaches in deeply carved bays. It was Hastings but heated and in colour. In Hastings, with Adrian and Laura, she had showed them how to play the Storm Game, the game she used to play with her father, when they would run on to the beach holding hands, lean into the wind and shout and scream at the sea. Then their father would bundle them back up the hill, up the steps to their door, and the three of them, wet and breathless with laughter, would fall into the hall. Their mother would pretend to be cross and pull the rough jersey off over Bea’s head, rubbing at her hair with a towel that smelled of pie. The radio would be on. ‘Lift up your hearts,’ the radio announcer said, and after dinner, it was
Listen With Mother
. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ asked the radio, and on some days, when the washing-up was done and home had a calm and lemony air to it, their mother would allow them to slide on to the slippery warmth of her full, patterned skirt. ‘Then we’ll begin,’ and they would lie across her lap and listen, thumbs in their mouths and very still.

She had shown Adrian and Laura, from when they were quite small, the walks of her childhood – the hills above the town, the cliff path and down along the beach. Adrian said that walking was the metronome of thought, that humans needed to walk to keep sane, to keep body and soul together. The leg bone was connected to the brain bone, and if you needed to work something out, you should just take a walk until it was sorted. She thought of his slow, loose body, of how he folded his legs beneath him like a deer and told her what he thought.

Dear Adrian.

It wasn’t sudden. It took me fifty years to disappear, a slow rubbing out until the final days before I went, when far from feeling absent, I felt painfully present, like a bulb filament that glows too bright before it blows, and on that last day, when I walked to work, I walked the long way and just kept walking . . .

T
HE TRAIN
journey was a mistake. Geography had never been her strong point. She changed in Turin, Milan, Bologna and Ancona. She found the stations hectic and hostile, the information system confusing. Food and water became a problem. Often, she was too anxious about missing her connection to buy food at a station and on board the train she was afraid to leave her bag unattended. Her route was shackled by the hard, implacable iron of the tracks. She travelled north, south, north-east and south again. The train stopped frequently, at deserted stations and in the middle of nowhere. After the first twenty-four hours, at each stop she felt hope trickle from her on to the filthy track below.

On the second day, beginning the final eastern stretch, she caught glimpses of the Adriatic Sea and she prepared herself for arrival at Brindisi at any moment. Yet hours and station names rolled interminably by – Barletta, Trani, Bisceglie . . . As night fell, she woke, freezing, from a dream of needles and steel. She was alone in the carriage. The train had come to a halt and sadness lay in her lap. The aborted child of ten years ago. Had it really travelled with her all this way? She knew that it had, that now, fleeing her failed life, there was the realisation that she had destroyed the only part of her that would have made any sense.

The writing pad before her was blank.

Dear Laura.

It was nothing and everything. It was you. It was him. It was me.

A
DEEP
tremor ran through the body of the ferry as it docked at Ithaca two days later. Bea was asleep, wrapped in Kiff’s blanket, stretched out like an effigy on the plastic banquette in the bar. She got up and was helped down the gangplank, blinking up at an Ithaca shrouded in cloud. The air, warm and damp on her face, carried on it the scent of the soil.