Astonishing Splashes of Colour (14 page)

We leave Birmingham barely awake, and arrive at Heathrow in the cold grey of early morning. There is a bleakness about the time, and I imagine the rest of England just waking, preparing to live through another ordinary day. We’re escaping. I want to jump up and race around like a toddler, shouting with joy. It’s so difficult sitting still and pretending to be patient.

We listen carefully to the announcements and follow directions. The departure lounge is full of slumbering people.

“Did I remember to turn off the central heating?”

“Yes.”

“Whose idea was it to come at this ridiculous hour?”

“Yours.”

“Do you think they really give us boiled sweets?”

“No idea.”

After a time, I realize that James isn’t as excited as I am. I lean against him and pretend to doze, jumping every time there’s an announcement, but James feels hard and rigid. I wonder if he’s nervous about meeting the Americans.

“I’m sure they’ll like you,” I mutter, but he gives no sign that he’s heard me.

Finally our announcement comes and we join the group of people forming a new queue. We board a bus and get driven to our aeroplane which looks like a toy in the distance. It gets bigger and bigger until suddenly it’s real, and we’re making our way up the steps.

“It’s very easy, isn’t it?” I say to James. “Anyone could do it.”

He doesn’t answer. His face is set into an artificial expression of endurance. Someone jostles him from behind as we try to get into our seats and he stumbles forward.

It’s a middle-aged man with glasses. “Sorry,” he says kindly, offering his hand to help James to stabilize himself.

James ignores him and pushes me into the window seat, sitting down heavily next to me. I smile at the man who jostled us and he smiles back. “Sorry,” I say, feeling my good spirits draining rapidly away.

James is white and angry. “Don’t apologize for me,” he says through tight lips.

“What’s the matter?” I’ve never seen him like this before.

He is breathing heavily, in and out through his mouth so that I can hear it. There are trickles of sweat running down his forehead, getting caught in the creases round his mouth.

“Are you all right?”

He gives a strange, drawn-out groan and gets clumsily to his feet.

“James,” I say in alarm.

But he’s gone. I’m sitting in an aeroplane bound for New York, and my husband, who’s holding the tickets and passports, is not here. I feel a vibration through my seat, and I’m sure that the engines have started and we’re about to leave. I leap up and grab our bags, stumbling over the legs of the people sitting next to us.

“Sorry,” I say, “sorry,” as if it will somehow save me. “Sorry. Only my husband—he doesn’t seem to be well—”

They nod and smile, but they don’t care. They have their own well-being to worry about. I reach the gangway, but he’s not here. I don’t know which way he’s gone. People are still finding their seats, so I have to force my way through them to the exit.

I find James arguing with a stewardess. “Let me off,” he is saying very deliberately. “I have to get off.”

The stewardess is about six inches taller than he is, with red hair. She doesn’t look pleased and is trying to bar the doorway, to push James back in.

“I’m sorry,” I say to her. “I think we should get off.”

“Don’t apologize,” says James through clenched teeth. “Let me out, woman.”

“We can’t delay the takeoff,” she says.

She’s still trying to look professional, but a button has popped open on her blouse and we can see her bra—black with tiny pink roses along the top. Strands of wiry, red hair are bursting out from her hair clip. Why doesn’t she just let us go?

A uniformed man comes running up the steps from behind her. He’s putting the end of a banana into his mouth and is still holding the skin. He chews quickly and swallows. “What’s going on?”

“Thank goodness you’re here,” says the stewardess.

“We need to get off,” I say, and smile pleasantly as I discover that I can be articulate in the middle of James’s crisis.

The man studies us. “I’m your pilot,” he says. He is fiddling with the banana skin, not knowing what to do with it. He almost slips it into his pocket, but stops himself and apparently considers just dropping it on the floor.

“Let us off,” says James, his voice hard with anger.

Two identical men emerge from the passenger cabin. They’re smartly dressed, very tall, very wide, very alarming. “Do you need any help?” says one of them.

The pilot looks as taken aback as I am. “No,” he says. “I think we can cope.” He hesitates. “Thank you.”

The men look at each other. “Well, if you need us, we’re sitting at the back.”

“Who are they?” says the pilot.

“No idea,” says the stewardess. She relaxes for a second, and James pushes himself to the door, his foot outstretched to reach the movable steps.

“Please can we get off?” I say.

“You can’t leave,” she says. “You have to stay with your luggage.”

“That’s all right,” I say. “I’ve got it here.”

“It’ll be in the hold now,” says the pilot, easing himself gently between James and the exit.

“We didn’t have any big luggage,” I say.

The stewardess looks at the pilot. “Check,” he says. “On the computer.”

“Maitland,” I say. “James and Katherine.”

She disappears. James stands next to me, silent and rigid.

The stewardess returns. “There isn’t any luggage,” she says. She looks at the pilot. He hesitates, then nods.

“Let them go,” he says and moves aside. James runs down the steps.

I start to follow him, but the pilot catches my arm and pulls me close to him. “They do courses,” he whispers in my ear. “You have to confront the fear.”

I pull away from him.

The stewardess leans forward. I try not to look at her gaping blouse. “Have you tried yoga?” she says. “I hear it’s very good.”

I fight a terrible urge to giggle, waves of laughter working their way from my stomach upwards. “It’s all right,” I say. “He has a heart condition.” My voice is shaking with the suppressed laughter.

The stewardess steps away from me and looks offended. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It would have helped if we’d had prior notice.”

“That’s all right,” I say, and I’m running down the steps to where James is waiting. As we stand isolated, on the edge of the runway, looking for a passing bus, the engines start on the aeroplane. We cling to each other in alarm and the noise becomes deafening. A bus stops in front of us. We climb on and join a group of Japanese tourists who have just landed.

“Is this Toronto?” a man asks us.

“No,” I say worriedly.

“Oh good,” he says, getting a French phrase book out of his pocket. He starts to read, turning the pages faster and faster.

James’s tightness seems to be dissipating now that we are off the aeroplane. “I’m sorry,” he says at last. “I couldn’t do it.”

“You should have told me you were afraid.”

“I know.” A huge sadness settles over him. “I messed it up, didn’t I?”

I put my arm through his. “Let’s have some breakfast.”

The Japanese remain on the bus when we get off, and continue towards their unknown destination. In a café, we order croissants and rolls and jam and coffee. We eat in silence for a while and I think about our empty seats flying across the Atlantic without us.

“Do you think those men were gangsters?” says James, taking a second croissant. “Twin gangsters.”

“I don’t think the pilot believed in them.”

He looks at me and we both start to giggle. “Well,” I say, “he was our pilot, so he should know.”

James wipes the tears from his eyes, and then starts to laugh again. “Did you see—?” He has to stop to try and control his voice.

“The bra?” I say. “I hope she realizes sooner rather than later.”

We gradually calm down and the giggles subside. “What are we going to tell people when they find we haven’t gone away at all?”

“Do we have to tell them?”

I think of my father splashing paint on to his canvas, not really noticing if we’re there or not; Paul, looking at us cynically, finding the whole situation hilarious; Adrian trying to make us understand that it was inevitable. “No,” I say. “Let’s not tell them.”

“We don’t have to go back home,” says James. “We could stay in London instead.”

So that’s what we do. We buy clothes and books and suitcases to put them in, and then find a hotel. We go to the Planetarium, Madame Tussaud’s, the British Museum; a tour of London on an open-topped bus and a river trip up the Thames. Photographs by the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, postcards which we send to ourselves at home. We’re like children again, doing all the treats, having fun in a way that you forget once you’re an adult.

And every night before we go to bed, we talk. James talks about his fear of flying. “I thought I could do it with you there.”

I’ve never before understood that I too can be needed and wanted. I’ve been the youngest child for so long that I’ve never seen myself in any other way. I like this new role.

We nearly talk about the baby. But we don’t—not quite.

Then, after a week, we go home.

We decide to live in the same flat for a while, to bring back with us some of the fun we had in London.

We both try. I cook, James washes up. Then he cooks and I wash up except I don’t do it carefully enough and he does it all again, wiping up immediately and organizing the china in the
cupboard so that it looks like an illustration in a catalogue. The china belongs to us both, a wedding present from his parents. Royal Doulton. Delicate, fragile bone china, white with red and gold round the edges. It fits well into James’s flat where it can sit untroubled by nightmares of breakage.

I try to stack my books neatly. He tries to scatter his disks carelessly on the coffee table, but even his random patterns are calculated. I have discovered that there is shape, an order in everything he does, so that when he picks them back up again, he knows immediately where they all are.

Then, one evening, he gets up and fiddles with the curtains that I have just drawn. They don’t quite meet in the middle. He has to open the curtains and close them again, so that they hang symmetrically.

I watch him and a great pain opens up inside me. I get up, gathering all my books and papers in a pile. He watches me without a word.

“I think I’ll go home for a bit,” I say.

He nods and walks with me to the door, picking up the pencils as I drop them. I look at him, his bouncy hair and his carefully composed face, and wonder if he feels as desolate as I do.

4
feeding the rhododendrons

N
ow that I am home, surrounded by my own silence, I can wander through the muddle of my life without trying so hard to produce a pleasing image of myself for James.

Whenever I’m on my own like this, I like to think about Dinah, my sister. She’s fifteen years older than me, and doesn’t even know of my existence. She ran away with the raggle-taggle gypsies.

I wonder if she left because she needed to make her own space. Like me leaving my father, and then not moving in with James.

Am I like her? Does she ever wish she could come home? It’s even harder to find pictures of her than of my mother. There is just one—of all the children except me, because I hadn’t been born. On the back of the frame it says SUMMER 1963 in a clear round handwriting that I believe is my mother’s. The children are listed with their ages. Five children. And then she had me. She must have loved children.

I know this photograph by heart. The three younger children are sitting on chairs at the front with Dinah and Adrian standing
behind. It’s rather formal. Jake, Martin and Paul have been placed close together, leaning against each other, tense with the touching they’ve been forced to endure. Jake and Martin are ten, and put next to each other because they are twins, although you would never know this. Martin is already much bigger than he should be at ten, and you can see the muscles in his arms and the slightly confused expression he still has today.

Jake looks like a little gnome. His face is delicately and artistically structured, framed with large, sticking-out ears, and his dark eyes stare away from the photographer, slightly feverish. He must be in the middle of a cold as he has a shiny nose.