I left them and headed towards the stairs, and as I walked down I was overwhelmed with the gratitude of wellness. I walked out and breathed fresh air. I felt the sun on my skin. The world is a different place when you are well, when you are young. The world is beautiful and safe. I said hello to the gatekeeper. He said hello back to me.
29 July 1997
Jenny
Something happened that I thought you’d like to know about. Last afternoon, riding painlessly on a wave of morphine, Ginger told us about a visit she’d had earlier in the day. That was strange because neither Arthur nor I had seen a visitor and we’d been there all morning. He’d brought her flowers, she said, this man; he’d brought her favourites, white roses; flowers that adorned her dressing room in her heyday and whose scent made her feel that anything was possible. I looked at Arthur and we shrugged, because there were no white roses, just a small vase of freesias that one of the nurses had brought in a couple of days before. But she made us smell the white roses, and we did and she was right, the scent was strong. Ginger said her visitor was an older man, sixty, maybe, but still handsome, but age didn’t matter because he’d found her and he was exactly as she’d imagined. His name was Don and he was her son. She’d given him up years ago, she said, but she knew it was him when he walked in. He’d brought her flowers, you see. Roses. White roses. And his name was Don. He’d come looking for her and he’d found her. And now she felt good. She was calm and now she could go.
We’ll never know the truth of that story, and I don’t think either of us wants to really. It was a story that began and ended in that room. Arthur says everyone takes something to the grave . . .
There were no long speeches or great goodbyes in the end; Ginger simply slipped away at four in the morning whilst we were sleeping. I awoke soon after – an intuition, maybe? – I looked over at her and knew she’d gone, as if the very air that once inhabited her body had been sucked out and replaced by a contoured landscape of concavity. I kissed her and said goodbye. Arthur stirred; I knelt down and gently woke him up.
‘She’s gone, Arthur,’ I said, and he nodded and said, ‘Oh,’ and then I left him to say his farewell, as I went to find a nurse.
I walked down the one hundred and thirty-one steps that I had walked four times a day for six weeks and went into the square. It was dark, of course; sporadic lights and the sound of the fountain. I looked up at the sky. ‘There’s a new star tonight,’ my brother would have said, had I been younger, had he been there; and for forty minutes I looked for it. But I had become too old. I couldn’t see her anywhere. Where she had been, was now just space.
She died a month before Princess Diana.
‘So as not to steal her thunder,’ we all said.
7 September 1997
Dear Elly,
The whole prison watched the funeral yesterday. Those poor boys walking behind. It was very quiet in here. Everyone had their own sadness. For many it was the wasted time – the time they’d spent inside away from families or the time spent drinking or on drugs or the death of Loved Ones they never got to see again. Or the children taken away from them and put into care. Westminster Abbey looked beauti ful. I’ve never been. Never been to St Paul’s either or the Tower of London. So many places to see.
There are lots of conspiracy theories in here. Always are. I said people should have stopped calling her ‘Di’, that would of been a start.
You mentioned Mr Golan in your last letter.
I had a Mr Golan in my life too.
One of my mums old boyfriends.
Sometimes when I’d arranged to meet you and I was late, it wasn’t because of my hair. I wish I’d told you of all people. Im sorry. Their helping me in here about it. Its good. Talking. Lots of talking.
I shaved my head two days ago. I thought I might look like a man but everyone says I look pretty. I feel strangely free. Funny what hair can do to you.
Sorry about your last visit. Never stop being patient with me Elly.
Take care always
Your Liberty, your Jenny x
The last August of the millennium drew upon us and my father suddenly cancelled all reservations and refused all bookings, and instead left our house empty and yawning and waiting, in preparation for us, his family. It was the first time we would all be together since the scattering of Ginger’s ashes, and it was an action so out of character for this man who flourished in the presence of guests that my mother found herself constantly monitoring his every move in case he should once again plummet to those unknown depths, where he would become a mere trophy to the power of the unresolved.
And yet it was simply excitement that had gripped him, nothing more sinister; the same excitement that had him wake us up as children in the middle of the night to watch his favourite film, a Western usually, or to watch Muhammad Ali box into legend in our sleepy minds. His excitement was the taper that ignited our sluggish souls, and drew us all towards him that summer; that summer when the light went out.
Joe flew over with Charlie on the red-eye and I met them at Paddington station, where we performed a ten-minute turnaround to catch the nine o’clock train to Penzance.
We dozed intermittently, fuelled by a passing buffet trolley. The boys started on beer as the coastline met the tracks, and I watched them – intrusively, I felt – for signs of burgeoning love, for signs of a commitment to a shared future. But the paralysis that had taken hold the moment of their reunion still remained, and they shared nothing – no home, no dreams, no bed – nothing, except the can of lukewarm beer now traversing the table. My longing was left unresolved; my meddling heart again dissatisfied.
Alan was waiting for us at Liskeard, as usual. But when he came down the slope with hands outstretched for handshakes and bags, I could tell he was different; the robust joviality was gone, his eyes heavy and dull. And as he was pulled towards my brother’s chest and embraced in a tight unforgiving clasp, he didn’t blush or pull away as he normally did, but offered himself up to the safe warmth of another’s hold.
‘All right, boys?’ he said as he took their bags and placed them in the boot.
‘Yeah,’ they said. ‘You?’
No answer.
We weaved through the familiar lanes with their tightly banked hedges and scattering colour of yellows and blues, and faintly tinged pinks, and we stopped and reversed more than usual as holiday-makers panicked in the face of an oncoming car. We passed the monkey sanctuary where years ago I saw an unprovoked attack on a man’s wig. And then as we turned onto the main road, Alan quietly reached for one of his fabled CDs, blew on its underbelly before slipping it seductively into his new state-of-the-art CD player, the one my father had bought as a surprise last Christmas.
It was a song about a depressed man and his longing for a girl and her selfless love. We joined in as the second line began, and captured the mood – the anguished tone – in a frenzy of descant; and even the hairs on Alan’s forearms rose, in, what I believed to be at the time, indescribable pleasure.
It was at the point, however, just after Mandy came, of course, and gave without taking, that Alan suddenly turned the music off. He said we were ruining it for him and he didn’t speak to us for the rest of the journey.
(My father later told us that there was trouble in Alan’s marriage, or rather he’d brought trouble into his marriage in the form of a foxy little hairstylist from Millendreath. Her name was Mandi.)
They waited for us at the top of the driveway, all four of them, like a motley picket line, holding tall glasses and a jug of Pimm’s instead of placards and banners, and sharing a roll-up cigarette, which at first we thought was a spliff, but soon realised it couldn’t be because my mother still had her top on.
‘What kind of shoddy welcome is this?’ said my brother as he jumped out of the car, and everybody laughed as if he’d just told the funniest joke in the world, as if that roll-up cigarette had actually been a spliff.
We tried to persuade Alan to follow us down to the
house for drinks but he wouldn’t, he just wanted to unload the bags and sulk. He drove back up the slope with the music blaring, and crunched into third gear a little too quickly and immediately stalled. In the heavy silence that surrounded him, the music echoed through the trees, pitiful and forlorn, wailing like an illdisguised omen. Oh Mandy.
Oh Alan, I thought.
I strode down to the jetty alone, disturbing a heron quietly lazing on the bank in the afternoon sun. I watched him take flight, groggy and lethargic, low over the water. I looked back up to the house and saw my mother framed in an upstairs window, preparing the rooms as she always did. And I remembered again the house as I first saw it as a nine year old, with its off-white peeling façade like a tatty crown on an uncared-for tooth, shadowed by ragged trees, and grieving the frail ruin at its side. I remembered again the sense of adventure that flooded my thoughts, the breathlessness of the what-ifs, the connection, the infinite connection to a horizon that reached beyond and whispered, Follow, follow, follow.
I sat down on the grass, lay down until my back was wet, uncomfortable and wet, and the aching gratitude that burnt my eyes had rolled away. I’d been feeling like this for a while, the continual looking back, the stuckness of it all. I blamed it on the coming New Year, only four and a half months away, when the clocks would read zero and we would start again, could start again, but I knew we wouldn’t. Nothing would. The world would be the same, just a little bit worse.
My mother leant out of the window and waved; she blew kisses to me. I blew kisses back. She was about to embark on an MA, the secret dream that had so recently found voice, and she no longer saw Mr A and the contents of his wayward mind. Three months before, he’d fallen in love with a holiday-maker from Beaconsfield and had stopped his sessions immediately, giving credence to the myth that love cures everything (except perhaps the settlement of an outstanding bill).
I stood up and ran back up the lawn towards the house and that upstairs room where I would shake the pillows and smooth the sheets and fill the jugs and arrange the flowers, and all just to be with her; to be with her with the something I could never tell her.
‘Arthur!’
I shouted his name again and just as I unleashed the rope from its mooring loop and was about to give up, he appeared from his cottage and ran towards me with an empty, old rucksack bouncing on his back like a deflated blue lung.
‘Sure you want to come?’ I said. ‘You could stay with Joe and Charlie.’
‘They’re napping again,’ a touch of disappointment in his voice.
‘OK then,’ I said, and helped him carefully into the boat.
He loved it when we all returned; he was nearly eighty but became a chameleon around us, and our youth became his. I pushed away from the bank. I didn’t start the engine immediately, but let us drift towards the central tidal flow where we said out loud as we always did, ‘All right, Ginger?’ And where we both felt the slight jolt of the boat; the swift acknowledgement of our words, caused not by wake, nor wind, nor shallows, but by the something other that outwitted proof.
I slowed along the bank to pick blackberries and early damsons, and we hid under overhanging branches to look out for the large male otter my father reckoned he’d seen a few days before; a figment of his imagination really, a ploy I believed, to get us to really look once again, to soften the impenetrable gaze of the harried.
‘I’ve been getting dizzy,’ Arthur said, as he trailed his hand in the cool clear water.
‘What kind of dizzy?’
‘Just dizzy.’
‘Have you fallen?’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Dizzy, not doddery.’
‘Have you changed your diet yet?’ I said, knowing full well he hadn’t; and he scoffed at such a suggestion, for it was as unworthy to him as a life without bacon and cream and eggs, utterly unthinkable.
His cholesterol and blood pressure were as high as they could be; something he delighted in as if it had taken the utmost skill to get them to such dizzying heights. And he refused to take the tablets prescribed, because a few months before he’d secretly told me that he wasn’t going to die that way and so he didn’t need to take them, and instead reached for another scone dripping with jam and clotted cream.
‘Are you worried?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘So why are you telling me?’
‘Just filling you in,’ he said quietly.
‘Do you want me to do anything?’
‘No,’ he said, drying his hand on his sleeve.
He’d started to do that, started to inform me of everything; the inconsequential, the meaningful; conversations that ended in a cul-de-sac of unanswerable rhetoric. I think it was because I knew everything about him, had read it all – the beautiful, the sordid, the all of his book. I had been his editor for five years, and now it seemed, had become his editor away from the printed page.
‘I’ll be back here in ten minutes,’ I said as I took the rucksack and climbed the vertical, rusty steps of the harbour wall. At the top, I stopped and watched him nervously manoeuvre the boat around two red buoys before he zigzagged out to sea, and I wondered if I’d see him again, or if he’d suffer once again the indignity of being led back into harbour by an irate coastguard deaf to his consoling pleas. In his imagination Arthur Henry was a seaman, competent and brave; but in reality nothing except terra firma could provide those qualities, and I knew he’d stop just beyond the harbour mouth and go round in circles until the ten minutes were up. And sure enough, by the time I’d descended the ladder weighed down by my order of packed ice and crabs and langoustines, sweat had appeared across his forehead and in the cleft of his bony chest, and he moved back swiftly to his position at the bow of the boat in a manner that said, Never again.
We glided effortlessly across the glassy surface, the phut phut phut of the engine quiet and considered against the bustling backdrop of the tourist-crammed village.
‘Here, Arthur.’
He sat up as I handed him an Orange Maid.
‘I thought you might have forgotten.’
‘Never,’ I winked, and he pulled out a handkerchief to catch the first of the drips.
‘Fancy a bite?’
‘It’s all yours,’ I said, as we veered left up the open sprawl of river towards home.
They were dozing on the lawn when we returned and, seeing Charlie engrossed in a proof copy of his book, Benders and Bandits, Busboys and Booze, Arthur walked briskly up the slope and flopped eagerly into the unclaimed chair next to him.
He leant towards him and said, ‘Where are you up to, Charlie?’
‘Berlin.’
‘Oh dear me,’ said Arthur, rather strangely adjusting the right leg of his oversized desert shorts. ‘Close your ears, Nancy!’
‘Oh, yeah right, Arthur,’ said Nancy, not looking up from her American Vogue. ‘Never lived, have I, sweetie?’
‘Not in a dark little room on Nollendorfstrasse,’ said Arthur, leaning back blissfully into his chair.
My brother was in my father’s workroom. He didn’t turn round at first, so I watched him carving and chiselling, practising a simple tongue-and-groove joint. He’d made two already and they were balanced on the ledge above his head. He looked like my father in that dim light, the father I knew when I was small; the same silhouette, the hunched, curved back that never seemed to breathe, for breath disturbed precision, and precision in woodwork was everything.
He was going to night school, learning furniture restoration, might learn more, he said. He’d given it all up, the life he’d run away to. Left his job on Wall Street, left the space in SoHo that sucked thousands every month, and he’d bought the townhouse in the Village, with its bird’s nest and ailanthus and its brown hall wall that we knocked down after Christmas. And he was restoring it by himself; had been restoring it room by room, month by month, in an unhurried tribute to its former state. This slow pace suited him, because there was now weight around his middle and the weight suit
ed him, but that I would never say. And it was really only Charlie now who was his connection to the old life and the trading floors, to the constantly changing numbers and those early breakfasts at Windows on the World. Because it was Charlie who now worked in the South Tower, overlooking Manhattan from the eighty-seventh floor, an untouchable presence as I flew over New York, him King of the World.
My brother rubbed his eyes. I turned on the light; he turned to me.
‘How long have you been there?’
‘Not long.’
‘Come here, sit down.’
I went to the fraying armchair and brushed away the wooden curls that he’d planed from a piece of oak.