Astonishing Splashes of Colour (20 page)

We murmur politely as we help ourselves and James sorts out the wine. I watch him. What I want to know is, why did he learn to cook before he met me? Who was he feeding and trying to impress? He must have practised on someone to be as good as he is now. He denies it. “I just follow recipes,” he says. “Anyone could do it.” He’s never yet admitted to a previous girlfriend, but I can’t resist asking at odd moments.

“So how was New York?” says Alison once we are all served.

“Wonderful,” James and I say almost together, urgent and desperate to prove we were really there.

“Good,” says Alison, and we lapse into silence.

For some reason—and I don’t know what that reason is—I find it difficult to make conversation with James’s parents. Nothing seems to lead us into a discussion.

“Have you been watching the tennis?” James asks his father after a few seconds.

Jeremy nods and drops a slice of courgette off his fork as he raises it to his mouth. He puts the empty fork into his mouth and looks slightly bewildered when he can’t find anything to chew. He brings the fork down to the plate and tries again. “We’ve been playing a lot recently—in between the showers,” he says. There’s a tennis court in their garden and they always dress in white to play, even when there’s no one to see them.

“Jenny has come to visit Marjorie for a few days,” says Alison breezily. Marjorie lives next door to them and she’s a close friend.

James pauses in his eating.

“Jenny used to be at school with James,” says Alison to me.

“Yes,” I say. “You’ve mentioned them before.”

“She brought the grandchildren, Katie and Ben. Such sweet children—Katie’s only nine months, of course, but crawling, and her eyes are so big and round, as if she knows everything.”

Why do they do this? It’s as if they want to make believe it never happened. As if they can persuade me to do it all again, but win this time round. Maybe I should mention it, remind them of the reality: “By the way, I lost the baby and I can’t have any more”—just in case they’ve really forgotten.

“More wine?” says James, leaping up.

Alison and Jeremy give off this glow of respectability. Professional, affluent, middle-class people, wanting grandchildren, so
they can start putting money aside for their education. Perhaps they’re thinking about surrogate mothers, perhaps they want to donate money to the cause. I used to think they put on this air of respectability to impress everyone, but I realize now they’re really like that. Everything they show us is genuine. They never lighten or darken. They are like a smooth, beige carpet, completely neutral, calm and secure beneath our feet, able to blend easily with anyone round them, offering co-ordination, not contrast. I see beige as a non-colour.

“Have you tried jogging yet?” Jeremy asks James. He’s concerned about our lack of exercise.

“No,” says James.

Jeremy jogs for an hour every morning from seven till eight, trotting round his village three times, jumping up and down on the spot while he waits for the pelican crossing. He has to do it, he says, because he sees so many clogged up arteries on his operating table, he knows the dangers.

“James finds it difficult to jog because of his leg,” I say.

They both look at me. “He can run on it,” says Alison. “He always took part in school sports days.”

I know about James’s torture on the school’s cross country runs. He was always last, except the day when he cheated with three other boys and hailed a taxi. They were dropped two hundred yards from the school gates, but the others told James to wait twenty minutes before going in, because he would give the game away. He waited, but still arrived in the first ten. The sportsmaster refused to believe he’d run all the way in the time. He didn’t exactly accuse him of cheating, but James didn’t get a certificate and was told to put the episode behind him.

“We’re off to Australia next week,” says Alison. “The Great Barrier Reef.”

They dive. They rise every morning at 6:45, never eat anything
with sugar in it and take three holidays a year, which they use to go diving.

“You must think we all have very boring lives next to yours,” I say.

“Of course not,” says Jeremy. “You’ve just been to New York. We’ve only ever been there for conferences.”

“Well—actually—” I say.

James interrupts. “I thought you went to the Great Barrier Reef last year.”

“Yes,” says Alison. “It was so wonderful we thought we’d go for longer. You really should come with us. You’d love it, both of you.”

How can she be so sure that we’d love it when she doesn’t really know us at all? I look at their lightly tanned faces and their trim, fit bodies and I don’t envy them. They live for their work, their flexibility, their success, but somewhere along the way they seem to have missed the point. They only had one son, and he was physically flawed. Better than me, I think angrily. I couldn’t produce one live child, not even an imperfect one.

They always look the same, amiably satisfied, interested, well-intentioned. I think they genuinely care about James and me. I don’t think they would favour an early divorce so that James could try again with another potential mother. But they’re like shadows. There’s not enough colour in their world.

I look at James and I am proud of his uniqueness, his refusal to conform. No more operations on his leg, no compromise on his choice of career. He’s got colour below the surface. He’s inherited genes that they didn’t know they possessed, and he refuses to bleach out. I love him for this.

“What’s for pudding?” I ask James.

He looks up and catches my eye, realizing that I’m annoyed. “Treacle tart.” He knows I like puddings. He made it for me.

“None for me,” says Alison.

“A cup of black coffee for us,” says Jeremy.

They know we know they don’t eat puddings, but they’re always scrupulously polite.

I know I’m being unfair about them. They can’t help their ordinariness. They were born with it. When they first went out together, they each must have seen the other’s sameness rolling towards them, meeting and merging, until it was impossible to tell where they joined.

Perhaps they know this. Maybe that’s why they go diving—so that they can visit a great underwater world that is saturated with colour. Then they come back on to dry land and can’t recreate it. They can’t take it away with them and that’s why they keep going back. To see a world they can’t contain.

They are good people who save lives all the time. James and I are nothing next to them, with our failed trip to New York and our treacle tart. They probably know the latest advance in artificial wombs. It’s only a matter of time, they’d say.

James wants me to stay after his parents leave, but I don’t want to. I kiss his right ear lobe and leave him happily washing up, pleased that we have impressed his parents with our efficiency.

I take Adrian’s book and slip back to my own flat. I want to read this one as soon as possible: I want to know if my mother is in it.

I put the light on, draw the curtains and relax on my sofa with the book. I am still reading when the sun rises and the postman drops the daily brown envelopes through my door.

I forget about eating. I forget about everything. The telephone rings and people leave messages which I don’t listen to. At eleven thirty in the morning I read the last page. I get up from the sofa and find that my legs have forgotten how to walk. I
wander unsteadily into the kitchen and drink three glasses of water. I go back to the living room and dial Adrian’s number.

“Adrian Wellington.”

“Adrian? It’s Kitty.”

“Hello, Kitty.” He sounds cautious.

“It’s all right. I’m not asking you to let me have the children.”

“Oh.” He pretends not to sound relieved. “Have you started my book yet?”

“Yes, and I’ve finished it.”

“And?”

“Why aren’t I in the book, Adrian? Don’t I exist?”

5
outer circle

I
want to be angry, but before the hot rush of indignation sweeps through me, I want to cry. Then I think it is ridiculous to be upset and I’d rather be angry instead, so I let the rage take over, raise my temperature, heighten my blood pressure, sharpen my mind.

The book is good. He knows how to describe people, how to give them an inner life. He has used his family as a starting point and I know that much of it is made up. But not all.

There are four boys and a girl in the book—Andrew, John, Michael, Peter and Daphne—and they are, of course, Adrian, Jake, Martin, Paul and Dinah. This is so obvious that it would be impossible for Adrian to argue otherwise. My father roars through the pages as he does through life. There’s no need for embellishment. He’s theatrical enough in the first place. But where am I? I know the book isn’t autobiographical, I know it’s fiction, but it was unfair of him to leave me out.

“It’s only a novel, Kitty. It’s not meant to be real.”

“But you managed to include everyone else.”

“You weren’t there when I was growing up.”

“Yes, I was. I remember your hair down to your shoulders and the flared trousers.”

“I didn’t wear flared trousers.”

“Yes you did. I remember them.”

I can hear him getting annoyed. “I never wore flared trousers.”

“You did. You’ve just forgotten.”

“Anyway, if you can remember that, it was past the time of my book. I’m writing about the childhood of a boy in a big family. I didn’t grow my hair until I was about eighteen.”

“You were only fourteen when I was born.”

I can hear him sigh. He’s trying not to be annoyed and his voice drops in pitch as he makes the effort. “I didn’t include you, Kitty, because I thought it would confuse things.” He’s like a car engine. If he becomes slightly overheated, the thermostat cuts in and he falls back down a few degrees. Not just with his voice. He can do it with his mood. He analyses his anger, decides if it is too heated and regulates himself.

“So I just confuse everything.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you meant it.”

“Kitty, it’s just a novel. It’s a made-up story.”

“Dinah’s in it.”

“She was there when I was growing up. She was my older sister. She affected everything I did.”

“But it’s only a novel. You could have left her out altogether.”

He stops. I can hear him breathing carefully. I try to work out how upset I am. I feel hot and uncomfortable. My stomach is rolling around, almost as if I am afraid, but I’m not quite sure why. The conversation is civilized. My feelings are not.

I can hear his breathing calm down and I try to do the same with mine. Long slow breaths; in, two, three, four, five; out, two,
three, four, five. Relax the neck muscles, the shoulders, the fingers. Unclench the teeth—

“Apart from your absence, Kitty, what did you think of the book?”

“Was Mother really like that?” She comes over as a shadowy background person. Someone who put meals on the table, washed up, knitted jumpers, sewed buttons back on shirts. I’m sure she was more than this. Adrian should have acknowledged her nearly-degree, her love for life.

“Well, the book wasn’t about the mother. It was about a boy called Andrew—”

“Who is you.”

“No, not exactly.”

“You can’t write a story about a boy growing up without including his mother. The mother is the most important person in his life.” I stop and think of Henry. I would have been the most important person in his life. Forever. When he finally died at ninety after a long, happy and fulfilled life, his last thought would have been about his mother. He would have remembered me. “Mothers and sons have a special relationship.”

“I know that, but I thought she would come over best by just being there. Most children don’t analyse the significance of their mothers. They simply accept their existence. So the impact of her death would have seemed especially harsh—from always being there to not being there.”

“But she didn’t die by falling out of an aeroplane.”

“No, I made that up. I am writing a novel, not telling my life story.”

“Do you remember how she died? Were you there with her? Was anyone in the car?”

“Who are we talking about now?”

“Who do you think?”

“No, there was no one with her.”

“How did you hear about it? What were you doing at the time?”

“Kitty, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did you go with Dad to identify the body?”

“No, Kitty. Stop it.”

I stop. I’m being unfair on him, but I’m angry. We wait in silence for a while.

“Kitty,” he says at last. “Are you still there?”

“Yes,” I say. “No. Remember your book. I wasn’t there in the first place.” I can feel tears brimming over my eyes, dripping down my face, plopping as they fall onto the telephone.

“Are you taking your pills?” he says gently.

“That’s none of your business,” I say and put the phone down.

I sit for a long time without moving. The phone rings several times, but I don’t answer it. I sit and watch the light fade for a second time. The darkness creeps in and settles over me. I sit alone and in the dark all night. Eventually, the phone stops ringing. I imagine Adrian going to bed and apologizing to himself for deserting me. “It’ll be all right in the morning,” he’ll say to himself—or to Lesley if she’s awake and interested.