‘So you never went to Sweden, but you went to France,’ I say.
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t try again, after that? To come to The Palladian? To see Dad, or try to get addresses for us, although obviously I was there all along.’
‘I thought you were gone. I saw it as my punishment. I knew I didn’t deserve you. That I never had. I didn’t come back again. I continued with my life, what it was. It’s such a surprise to see you now. I never expected to.’
‘I was quite surprised, too,’ I say. ‘I walk past that travel agent’s all the time.’
‘I’m so sorry for everything.’
‘Sorry is just a word.’
She nods. ‘Can I explain myself?’ she says. She is fiddling with the sugar sachet; she has spilled some on the table but makes no attempt to clear it up and nor do I. ‘I presume that’s why you came to see me, why we’re here?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. I’m not sure I want an explanation; there’s nothing new to know, is there? My mother was a drug addict. ‘Well, we haven’t got long so make it potted. They’ll be needing you back.’ I look at my watch like a foreman of a factory.
‘Oh, it’s a short story,’ she says. Someone walks past us – a lady in a red mac, despite the weather, and in her downdraught I get a waft of the perfume I think Ellen is wearing. I know it, but at the same time I don’t. ‘I had to go; you know that, don’t you? I just had to. I was twenty-one; I’d had you when I was sixteen.’
‘Yes, it was very young,’ I say with a tight smile. ‘But it happens. And you were married. Things were stable. You had a good future with Dad and it was getting better. He was going to be an architect.’
‘I had to get married,’ says Ellen. ‘There was no choice in the matter. There was so much shame back then. There was no other course of action. Especially with our parents.’ She smiles at me but I can’t bring myself to return it.
‘I know all this,’ I say. ‘That you were just two kids who got yourselves in trouble and marriage was the only answer.’
‘Vince Alberta …’ she muses, and I feel like she has stepped out of the café and into her past. ‘He was certainly something else … sixteen, cocky as hell, a smile that could light up a school hall … I thought I loved him, I suppose, but who really loves anyone at sixteen? You’re more likely to love a pet rabbit or your favourite skirt.’
‘Or The Beatles.’
‘Or The Beatles.’ She gives me another smile I don’t mirror.
‘We got married two months before you were born – those ridiculous photos, everyone trying to look happy when mostly we were just feeling numb, all of us. I was supposed to go to secretarial college; I was supposed to have a life! But my life was all mapped out for me: housewife and mother. I just plodded on, I suppose. Plodded on with my life.’
‘You’re not a plodder, though,’ I say. ‘You like running away.’
She ignores me and I almost admire her for it. ‘I wasn’t happy. I found it so hard. And then your dad – well, your dad had left school at sixteen, become a carpenter. We knew our places – we knew the life that had been set for us – but then he got this idea to go to college, to become an architect. I couldn’t see it happening, not at all, when he first talked about it, but he did it, he made it happen, and he was studying and all excited and had this future ahead of him and it was all going to be so great, except it wasn’t going to be that great for me. I was going to be the one to facilitate that marvellous career. Be behind the scenes, supporting. Doing the housewife and mother stuff. It was all going to be brilliant for him, but nothing was ever going to change for me.’
‘Same for many women all over the country in those days,’ I say, disloyal to womankind in my bitterness. ‘Supporting men in their careers. And you could still have gone to secretarial college, once we were older.’
‘Those other women knew they had married men like that. Ambitious. Successful. I had married cheeky little Vince Alberta. I thought we were going to be equal – him a working man, grafting in a job he didn’t particularly enjoy, and the same for me … at home.’ Thanks, I think. ‘Secretarial college would hardly have been the giddy heights, would it, even if I had ended up managing to go? I’ve always known my limitations. Your dad was making something of himself and I knew I never could. He was going to change. I was frightened of that, what it meant for me.’
‘You could have waited,’ I repeat. ‘Saw how things panned out.’ I get it. She was jealous of my father, of his future, his ambition and his mind – all of which she’d had no inkling of when she was screwing cheeky Vince Alberta behind the gelato shop (probably) on a Thursday afternoon. She resented his successful future – the future, ironically, he never got to have.
‘I may have waited for ever,’ she says. ‘While my parents were alive I would never have left. But they both died. They were—’
‘They died and you took your chance.’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that—’
‘I would. You took your chance and you escaped it all,’ I say. ‘Dad, us. You became a hippy bumming round Europe, and then a druggie in London. It was hardly better than what you had, was it?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ve wasted a huge part of my life. Whatever reasons I give doesn’t excuse that I have behaved terribly and lost everything. That I have been despicable.’
I drum my fingers on the Formica, pull a virgin napkin over a tea stain. ‘Hey, if only Dad had gone blind earlier,’ I add sarcastically, ‘then you both could have suffered together and everything would have been all right.’
‘I’m so sorry Vince is blind,’ she says. ‘But I would never have escaped how he saw me. The disappointment from him, that was always there. When I took drugs … well … I was part of something. I felt I belonged. No one was ever disappointed with me.’
‘That’s because everyone was always off their faces!’
She laughs and I remember that laugh. From long ago. But I think about what she’s saying – that Dad was disappointed in her. He had told me he loved her fiercely, that he was determined to make the marriage work. Did she view that ferocity as a directive for her to do better, to be better? To not struggle or be flighty? That she was a kind of enforced and failing work-in-progress for him?
‘Yes, there is that.’ She turns her untouched teacup in its saucer and I fear I might suddenly feel sorry for her because I understand. I understand that how you perceive people looking at you – looking at you in a certain way – can destroy you. ‘Maybe if I’d been older, I would have worked out a way to deal with that disappointment, or to change things in my own life, but that disappointment destroyed me.’
‘So it was never my face?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My face? Was part of you leaving ever because of my face?’ I fear I might cry and I absolutely must not. I must not cry in front of this woman. I have not cried for her for forty-three years and I’m not about to start now.
‘Of course not!’ She looks shocked. ‘I loved your face. I’ve missed your face. I’ve missed both your faces. You were both amazing girls. Amazing girls.’ I swallow down my tears and place both hands flat on the table, to steady myself. ‘It was a pity I only ever had it in me to be the opposite of anything even close to amazing.’
I take a deep breath. ‘Angela wrote to you,’ I say. ‘She wrote you these.’ I take the stack of airmail letters out of my bag and put it on the table, among all the spilt sugar granules. ‘There were a couple more that she sent to Sweden, before I intercepted them – we found Torge’s address in your old book – and of course you never replied, so I started to reply for you. I did it for over a year. I wrote as you on fake postcards I posted to Angela from the letter box at the bottom of the street.’
‘What on earth did you say?’ She is fingering the letters without looking at them. She is looking at me.
‘Not much.’ I smile weakly. ‘Not much at all. We don’t have them any more – I think Angel
a threw them away.’
She nods. She is looking down at the letters now and her face crumples at the sight of Angela’s childish handwriting on the top envelope. There are doodles, too, some swirly flourishes in the corners, some flowers and rainbows. Angela’s hope is in those doodles. My mother takes the elastic band off and leafs through them in turn, soft tears falling on delicate pale blue. ‘I’m sure you made a better me than I could ever have been. Can I have these?’
‘Yes.’ I feel pity and sadness and I don’t like these emotions. I am already walking away, in my mind. I have already got up and left this table with the two still-full cups and the spilt sugar and am out on the sunlit street, making my way back home.
I stand up. ‘I’m going to go now,’ I say. ‘Angela has been trying to get in contact with you. Her number, in Canada, is on the back of the last letter.’ I had scribbled it there whilst in the back of Derek’s taxi. ‘Maybe you could give her a call. Oh, and if you do, please don’t mention the postcards you never sent. Or that you only have Angela’s letters now. It would break her heart.’
I think we both realize the irony of this. That hearts were already broken, long ago.
‘No, I won’t. And yes, I’ll do that. Thank you. And you? Could I give you a call?’ She looks at me and I see her whole life and some of mine in her eyes. I see regret and I see longing. I see something that looks a little like love.
‘I haven’t written my number down,’ I say quickly.
‘Might you come back again? To the travel agent’s?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s a miracle to me that you’ve found me,’ she says quietly. ‘That you’ve come to see me. That we’ve talked like this. Could we see it that we’ve found each other now, maybe? That there’s still a chance … of something? Will you at least think about it?’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I say. And I pick up my bag and I walk out of the café and I am back on the street in the still bright sunshine, heading for home.
CHAPTER 45
Dad, of course, is not at The Palladian. I knew he would already have left, with Kemp, for Hornsey Wood Reservoir. I need to see him. I need to tell him that I’m not angry now, that I understand a mess of a mother – a too-young, fleeing, disappointed and disappointing mother – would have been worse than no mother at all. That I know he was shielding us from hurt. That our mother may have been in the shadows of our lives all along, without us knowing – but she was better there, than out in the light.
I don’t blame Dad for keeping their secret. This painful, justified secret he engineered and instigated. He did it for us, and at least Angela will have her answer now – she will finally get the reply she’s been searching for, all this time. Who my mother is, and where she has been. If she has thought about us, cried for us. Seen our faces in her dreams. I have never sought a reply, but I know the one she gave me in the café was incomplete, full of gaps and blanks and missing pieces. Do I want them filled in? Angela may seek to read between the lines of the letters our mother never wrote or sent, from a Sweden she never lived in. Angela may want to re-start a dialogue with Ellen – resurrect a relationship, a lost life. Do I? Do I want to go searching behind shadows for more answers? When my answer has always been Dad?
He has been both father and mother to us. All those years ago, he kept the ship sailing when the seas were rough and the skies dark, keeping the light in our lives when the sun seemed far from us all, and though he left that helm a long time ago, when the guide dogs went, and he and I both, eventually, withdrew from the world and sat in our chairs – the window and our hearts closed – he has still been there, my dad. He has always been there.
I don’t know about my mother, not yet. If there is still a chance for something. But I’ll seek Dad out tonight. My constant, my source of light. The reservoir is just beyond the fair, if I can find it. I’ll meet Salvi, then I’ll go and look for Dad and Kemp. Kemp … oh God, I can’t think about him right now. He said he loved me. This is the sort of miracle I would have prayed for seven years ago. For him to say I meant more to him. That those times in the houseboat were not just drunken conversations and power ballads. That it wasn’t just me who was sinking and sinking …
I couldn’t see him, when he was talking; I couldn’t listen to him, out on the street like that, when I was rushing to my mother. I don’t know what to think about it all. He loves me? That just doesn’t make sense. How can he love me? How can he now be reflecting back at me the feelings I’ve had for him for so long and kept so far out of sight? This is huge. A huge, hunkering ball of bewilderment I need to stand back from and view clearly, when I feel at the moment nothing much is clear. And what about Salvi? Salvi is the man I have obsessed over recently, have imagined as my future and allowed to light up my life. If Kemp loves me, then how can Salvi be my miracle?
I need to see him. Salvi. Once I see Salvi’s face I’ll know. I’ll know what to do.
When I get to Finsbury Park, in through the arched entrance of the fair, lit by giant bulbs from a starlet’s mirror, I feel light-headed. Of course I have been to fair-ish kinds of places over the past years: a seaside pier on a work’s trip (jolly from the local sandwich factory), an indoor bowling alley that had arcade games and its own carousel (jolly from the bookies); but I never thought I’d be back here again – with the clanging music, the flashing lights, the whirring machinery, the smell of kerosene and candyfloss and hot dogs – and the memories. Telling Dad about that awful encounter with Shaun only this afternoon has hardly helped. I remember how upset he was, so helpless in hindsight. It’s a big thing to tell a father. I can’t wait to see him.
The only thing that’s different about the look and feel of this fair from the one in my teenage memory – they haven’t really moved on, have they? – is the music. It’s Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift all trying to out-do each other under flashing neon, instead of eighties cheese. A bored youth slumps at the gate of the Ferris wheel, where I’m to meet Salvi, mouthing along to ‘New Rules’ and pretending not to despise the children that are flashing their wristbands at her. I think of Philippa, in the laser place where she worked – another assaulting sensory overload, I expect, under a confining roof. At least here you can see the night sky and the stars above the jangle of coloured metal and the lights. I can breathe this time, I think. I’m not fourteen any more. I’m a grown woman who makes her own decisions and is in control. Maybe Philippa couldn’t breathe – anywhere. Maybe she just couldn’t see the night sky and the stars, no matter how hard she looked.
Salvi is not here. I look into the surrounding crowd, I double-check the long queue; I even look skywards to the mini-gondola capsules of the Ferris wheel and half expect him to be hanging out of one, laughing, greeting me with a shout and a bottle of beer. A woman and a young boy shove past me to get to the queue. She glares at me: I am in the way. I feel exposed, waiting here. Why am I always waiting for him?
There are two lads over by the red cab where the operator sits. They are all snarls and crew cuts and basketball vests; baggy track pants and monstrous bright white trainers. They keep looking over at me. I move away from the Ferris wheel. Perhaps there’s been a misunderstanding; perhaps Salvi meant somewhere else. I wander over to the other side, to the distorted mirrors attraction. I go from each like a crab. Here I am tall and stretched and thin, a pin head. Now I am short and squat, sat upon. Then I have hilarious lanky legs, but a squashed body and no neck. In the last one I just see my face.
‘Tricked you!’ says a sign above it. ‘This is YOU!’ Charming. My foundation is still on – just. My eyes are a little wild. I look a bit like I did in the mirror of Salvi’s car. In the corner of this mirror I spy the back of his head. There he is. He pulls his phone from his jeans pocket then he turns round. For a moment Salvi doesn’t see me. He looks serious, his eyes are cold. Then he spots my face in the mirror and his breaks into a smile.
‘Prue! How you doing?’ He saunters over, kisses me on the che
ek – the wrong one.
‘Good, thanks.’
His eyes are a rich green in the lowering sun that chequers through the rides and the stalls, his smile wide and mischievous. He has cut himself shaving and there is a small red nick on his chin.
‘This is Dino,’ he says.
I hadn’t noticed there was a man lurking behind him: a very tall, gangly man, with freckles and sandy hair and an almost safari-like outfit of beige chinos and beige T-shirt. Beige suede shoes. He doesn’t look very Italian but he’s quite attractive, if you like the pale and interesting colonial jungle-explorer look. Dr Livingstone, I presume?
‘What are you doing?’
Dino has stepped forward and quickly holds up his phone to take a photo of me and Salvi. I can’t imagine it will be a very good one. Salvi smiley and confident; me nervous and caught-out.
‘Sorry,’ says Dino, in a thick Scottish accent. ‘I thought it might be nice to get a picture of Salvi and his new girlfriend.’
‘You could at least say “hello” first,’ I argue. I don’t like the look of him. He looks as shady as the rainforest palm leaves I imagine him pushing through in that outfit.
‘Sorry,’ he repeats, putting his phone in his pocket. He steps forward, goes to kiss me on the cheek – bad one, also – but I recoil and stick my hand out for him to shake, instead. ‘Hello,’ he adds.
‘I wanted him to meet you,’ says Salvi.
Summer in the City Page 32
