The Missing One Page 2
I shall be at the airport to meet your flight and will drive you both straight down. It takes about two hours to get to Sussex from the airport. I’ve been getting the London train every day from Cooksbridge – the station is a few miles from the village – and it is perfectly manageable, though it does make for a long day. I shall probably have to find a place to stay in London for some nights during the week, eventually. Working at the firm is exciting, if exhausting, and although Derwent treats me like a schoolboy, I think he is pleased with what I’ve contributed so far.
I do miss you and long to see you. You must know that I never stopped loving you – and I never will stop loving you.
Gray
The paper crackles as I refold it and stuff it back in the file. I feel as if I have barged into a room that someone forgot to lock. My father would be appalled if he knew that I had read this. Whatever happened between them all those years ago, I have no right to know.
But it’s obvious what happened – his guilt is palpable – and it makes total sense. They never talked about California or reminisced about how they met. There is no family story of a romantic proposal and I have never seen a wedding album. My mother always shut me down instantly if I asked about America. Now I know why.
It is hard to imagine my father doing anything so passionate or so morally wrong as to have an affair. But it was California in the seventies, and maybe he was different then; priorities or morals were different then. I have never heard him call himself Gray. He has always been Graham.
I shouldn’t have read the letter. The last thing I need is confirmation that all marriages are subject to betrayal, or that even my upright father could cheat.
I wonder if Alice knows about the affair. She might, since she and our mother talked about everything. I’d hear the chatting in the kitchen with Radio 4 in the background, spaghetti sauce bubbling on the hob, Alice’s homework spread across the table, and I’d walk through the door and they’d stop talking and look at me. Then Alice would jump up and make a space, or ask me for help with her maths, trying, almost pathetically, to include me – as if it were her job to make me feel wanted. But at some point, inevitably, my mother and I would lock eyes over her head. It must have been exhausting for my sister to be stuck between us all the time.
But this is old news. I’m not going to do this, not now. It’s much too late.
The birth certificate isn’t in these files. It isn’t here at all. I scoop everything back and scramble to my feet, resting my hands on the desktop. I feel the tightness around my heart, a physical reality, but a numbness, too. Somewhere in my gut the pain is organizing itself for another day.
The desk is rickety, with curlicues of woodworm running across the surface. There are two drawers. I slide one open and peer inside, as if, miraculously, the birth certificate will be lying there, waiting for me. But the drawer is packed with postcards. I prod at them.
There are pictures of pottery vases, a few Native American paintings, mostly cubic-looking fish in bold blacks and reds, square faces, square eyes, thick black outlines and curling designs on their bodies. I notice a painting of a man’s face and turn it over. It comes from a chapel in Ecuador. There is a single sentence written on the card:
Thinking of you today,
Susannah
I turn the others over, one by one, and for a moment I think I have lost my mind: my brain is short-circuiting. Every card says the same thing, in the same cramped hand.
Thinking of you today,
Susannah
Most of the postcards have Canadian stamps, though one is sent from Taos, New Mexico, another from Seattle and a few from even further afield – Quito, Moscow, Durban. Not all the postmarks are visible, but every one I can read was mailed on the same date: May 6th. The earliest I can make out was posted thirty-seven years ago. My mother’s birthday was in June, so these aren’t birthday cards.
I notice that most of the later postcards, from the early nineties onwards, come from the Susannah Gillespie Gallery.
Thinking of you today,
Susannah
I push them all back into the drawer and shut it, then open the second drawer. It contains pencils and rubbers, a paring knife, a packet of Orbit chewing gum, a nail file, Post-its, a stapler, a box of Swan matches, an ancient silver lipstick.
The base of my skull throbs and I feel the fury massing in my chest: who ignores a lump in the breast? Who sits and watches it grow beneath the surface of their skin and does nothing? Tears are coming down my cheeks, and I give in and lean on the desk, gasping for breath as they roll off my face and into her drawer.
Then I stop, almost as abruptly as I started. I slam the drawer shut, stand up, wipe my nose on my sleeve, swallow, breathe in and out. There is no reason to believe that my mother actually wanted to die. Maybe she just thought that she was invincible. I wipe at my damp face with both wrists. She didn’t believe in illness. When we were young, if we ever complained of headaches, shivers, fevers she’d say, ‘If you think about being sick, you’ll get sick.’
*
I think of the time before this – the last time I saw her properly. It was August, just after the diagnosis. We were in the garden. Finn was on his haunches by my chair, putting dirt into his mouth then spitting it out. My mother was thinner and bone-pale, as if her skeleton were sucking away at her flesh. Her old jeans were rolled up, feet bare as usual, but her hair was lacklustre, curls looser, scraped back, more silvery. She looked intensely small, with blue flowers towering behind her.
We sat with a pot of tea and a lemon cake that she had baked, but didn’t eat. On my one day in the office that week I’d had to interview three women for the new ‘living with breast cancer’ section. While they told me their intimate, awful stories, all I could think about was my mother and what she must be going through and how she would never – ever – talk to me like this. Afterwards, one of the women, about my mother’s age, clutched my hand and said the website was a ‘life-saver’. When she logged on and watched the videos of others talking about their similar situations she realized that she wasn’t alone.
But my mother, sitting upright on her white wooden garden chair, was so alone that it hurt to look at her. She would never find comfort in videos of other people talking about this disease. The new section on the website wasn’t even worth mentioning to her. I couldn’t bear to look at her, so I looked at Finn instead, ruddy-cheeked, squatting in his dungarees with his fat fists buried in the dirt.
Doug obviously felt the tension rising because he pointed at the tall flowers, and said, in a slightly desperate voice, ‘They’re such a nice colour, what are they?’
‘Wolf’s bane.’ She gave him a grateful smile. Even at the end, when she was so thin and her cheekbones so sharp and huge, her green eyes sunken, she still had dimples on each cheek when she smiled. Then she told him how the roots of the plant are used in Nepal to make a deadly poison, but in Chinese medicine, detoxified, they are a healing tonic. ‘Death and salvation,’ she said, ‘all in one lumpy root.’
Finn set off in a crawl towards the blue flowers. I leaped up and hoiked him back, but my mother didn’t even move. She just turned her face to the blue sky.
‘Granny’s flowers are poisonous,’ I said, pointedly. ‘Don’t touch them. Yuk.’ But I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and scream, ‘Oh my God! Your grandchild is right here! Don’t you even care? Can’t you see him? Don’t you want to know him before you die?’ But of course, I swallowed that back down, too, and turned away from her, setting Finn down on the grass, far away from her wolf’s bane.
We stayed out in the garden for too long that day, and in some ways it was as if nothing had changed at all. She was solicitous of Doug, as always, asking about university politics, his latest book, cutting him a second, thicker slice of cake. She didn’t offer cake to Finn and I had to ask – is it OK? – and then she looked surprised, and a little embarrassed.
‘Yes, sorry, of course.’
She s
miled at Finn in her distant way as he ate the little corner of cake I gave him, sitting on my lap and spraying crumbs over us both. He looked up at her, and grinned back and I saw her face melt. She leaned towards him, and touched her fingertips to his toes. ‘Do you like that cake?’ she said, softly. ‘Do you?’ Then a film came down over her eyes, and she blinked, and looked away, leaving him gazing up at her with his big brown eyes. I felt my throat tighten and put my hand on Finn’s head. Doug stiffened next to me, perhaps anticipating trouble. But I started to talk – something about Finn’s eating, the first time I tried him on solids and how he didn’t spit it out the way the baby books said he would, but wolfed it down madly. As I babbled she just stared at the sky, nodding vaguely, gathering whatever it was back into that dark place.
I couldn’t bring myself to ask her directly, that day, about the treatment she had refused. I couldn’t find a way to lift my hand and touch hers; to say I was sorry, beyond sorry, and that I loved her despite all our difficulties and misunderstandings and furies; that this was unbearable – that she couldn’t die. I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t just blame her for the way we were – I blamed myself too. This was both of us. I couldn’t tell my mother that I loved her.
Only one thing was different between us that day. After I’d strapped Finn into his car seat, found his lost teddy bear, packed his wellies and board books and bottles and clothes into the boot, and snapped at Doug for not getting the travel cot down, we all stood for a moment by the car. Suddenly, she held out her arms and pulled me towards her, and kissed my face, ‘Take care, my lovely darling.’
She hadn’t called me that for years and years. Her words knotted themselves around my heart so tight it was all I could do to breathe and smile and get in the car with Finn and Doug, and roll down the window to say goodbye, see you soon.
But I didn’t see her; I didn’t visit again until the last day, just a week ago, when Alice called at five in the morning, and I had to get out of the leather armchair and come.
*
I straighten up. I really can’t be in this room. This is hideous. I am so cold now, cartoonishly cold – my teeth are actually chattering. I wipe at my wet face with both hands. No wonder Alice couldn’t face it up here.
*
As I come out of the studio I see a shape at the bottom of the stairs, standing in silence. The hall light isn’t on and for a disorientating moment, I think it’s a ghost, waiting to claim me. Then I realize it is my father.
‘Oh!’ I say. ‘Are you off to bed?’ But his bedroom is the other end of the corridor. He must have been on his way to the studio but heard me up here and stopped, not wanting to deal with my grief too. ‘Are you coming up?’
He says nothing, he doesn’t move. For a second I wonder if he is about to collapse.
But as I come down the stairs, I smell the whisky on him. I notice that he is swaying, gently. I have never in my life seen my father drunk and I know without even hearing his voice that this is going to be appalling. The smell on him is all wrong. At seventy-two, he is still tall and upright. He doesn’t move, but his faded grey eyes settle on my face.
‘She loved you very much,’ he says, with no lead in, as if we’re in the middle of a deep conversation, which has never, ever been the case. His accent, I notice, has become much more Edinburgh.
I lean away from the fumes. ‘Yes, well, I loved her too.’
‘Good God, Kali. You are so like her, that’s the real problem: the two of you are just so stubborn – and so entrenched. But she loves – loved – you so very much. She loved Finn too – you need to know this … ’
‘No, it’s OK. I do know it, Dad. It’s OK.’
‘She just had … she had … she had awful … She had so many complicated memories – they got in the way of everything for the two of you – it was … ’
‘Dad, please—’ I don’t want to be reminded of how nightmarish I was and how perfect Alice has always been. But he holds up a hand so I close my mouth.
‘She never,’ he enunciates carefully, ‘ … there are so many things you don’t know about your mother – oh Lord, Kali, so many things.’ He swallows, his upper body swaying slightly, forwards and back. He rarely calls me Kali, almost always Kal. Hearing him call me by my full name has a strange effect on me: one part of me melts while another freezes.
He is, I assume, alluding to my mother’s unhappy childhood – the death of her mother when she was just a child; the father she disliked so intensely that she could never even talk about him. Perhaps he’s talking about his affair, in California. He probably wants to give me details, as if this will explain why she found it so hard to be my mother. Maybe I reminded her of her hated father.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘So, what things don’t I know about her?’
He takes a long breath in.
‘Dad?’
‘I probably wasn’t here enough.’ He clears his throat. ‘When you were growing up. I just left you all to it and I am sorry about that. Truly.’ He looks into my eyes then. His are set deep, pink at the rims. I desperately want to look away, but I force myself not to.
‘But good Lord! I just couldn’t stand all the drama. You and your mother were,’ his voice is loud now, and suddenly outraged, ‘impossible!’ We are back on slightly more familiar territory now.
I consider telling him that, yes, he probably should have been there more, but I’m not sure this is really true. What good would he have done if he had tried to be more involved? He kept his distance because all these messy female emotions were alien to him and no sane person could blame him for that. It must have been unbearable when I was a teenager, with my mother and me ranting around the house, me yelling and slamming doors, her shutting down and cutting me off, both of us crawling under each other’s skin all the time, wriggling inside each other’s heads.
Then there would be the remorse – I’d sob and she’d stroke my hair and tell me she loved me, would always love me, no matter what I did or said. I remember the softness of her body under my ear, the rumbles and sighs inside her belly, her steady heartbeat as we settled into a temporary truce. And then hours – minutes – moments – later we’d be at it again, something would change, some switch would flick in her or me, and we’d be at each other again. No wonder my father stayed up in London as much as he could.
I am suddenly extraordinarily tired. ‘Listen, Dad, it really doesn’t matter.’ I lean one shoulder against the stairwell. ‘You did your best. You really mustn’t feel bad about anything.’
‘I always treated you and Alice exactly the same, didn’t I? Always. Exactly the same.’
‘Yes.’ I realize this is true. ‘Actually, you really did.’ It was only my mother who openly found my sister so much more delightful and easy.
He reaches out and grabs my hand, and pins it to his forearm. The tweed feels rough and his hand is chilly and leathery, but surprisingly strong. ‘I should have let her … We should have … ’ he says. ‘It might have made things better. She wanted to … ’
‘What, Dad? Wanted to what?’
‘Oh God.’ He closes his eyes. ‘Oh dear God. This is not right.’
‘Dad. Please, it’s OK.’ I pat his hand a few times with my free one. He is incoherent. He doesn’t really know what he’s saying. I realize that even if he does have something to tell me, I actually don’t want to hear it. This is too much. I want to erase myself from this stairway. I just want to be somewhere else. ‘Look, Dad, all this is just ancient history, all this, and anyway, we were fine, in the end, weren’t we? Mum and I really got on fine.’
He sways and his face is suddenly distressed. The muscles seem to collapse, presaging the elderly man that is just round the corner. It’s as if a layer has been stripped off him by the grief and whisky and he’s just pulsing there in front of me, exposed.
All my life, my father has been this beacon of self-control: a tall, dignified, priestly man with his unwavering routines, anchoring the family from afar. But now the struct
ure of his face is unsteady; he might actually cry.
But then he stiffens, raises himself upright again and clamps his jaw tight. He would never let that happen, even in this terrible state. He lifts his chin and looks up the staircase behind me, and I turn, too, and I think we both half-expect her to emerge from her studio, Medusa-haired, and order us to stop this nonsense and go to bed. The landing is dark and the door is shut.
‘Well,’ he says, and clears his throat. ‘Bedtime, I suppose.’
His legs fold at the knee as he slowly walks away.
As I stand in the stairwell, listening to his footsteps recede, I feel an emptiness spread through my bones, as if I too have failed him. How can he bear to go and sleep in that room, in the bed where she just died? He must feel so alone. But maybe that is just it – maybe you cling to the space because the space is all you have left.
Chapter two
It is only as I begin to read the Emily Dickinson poem out loud that I realize how totally inappropriate it is.
I chose it because I found the book under the coffee table, and my mother had marked this poem with a card. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Finn was toddling around, pulling books off the shelves with methodical focus. I didn’t really read it properly, I just saw that the poem was about loss and thought she must have wanted it, or she wouldn’t have left it out like this, as a sign – and that reading it would mean I didn’t have to talk about her in front of all these people.