Tamar

by Mal Peet

  His daughter-in-law, Mrs. Sonia Hyde, told the inquest that Mr. Hyde was a very intelligent and thoughtful man, though emotionally scarred by his wartime experiences. He had enjoyed a “deep and caring” relationship with his fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Tamar. However, in the weeks before his death he had become “noticeably withdrawn and depressed.” Mrs. Hyde told the inquest that her mother-in-law, Mrs. Marijke Hyde, currently in a nursing home, had been diagnosed as suffering from a degenerative mental illness and that Mr. Hyde had “coped very badly” with the situation.

  That was it, start to finish. I’ve got the clipping here in front of me now, but I could’ve written it out without looking. I know it by heart, word for word. At the time, when I read it, I felt all sorts of things. Proud of him, I suppose. Embarrassed. (At school: “Was that your grandad jumped off the balcony, then?”) A bit ashamed of myself — I didn’t know what DSO stood for. Postcodes: boring. Now when I look at it, all I see is the spaces between the words where the truth might have been. But I’ve kept it anyway, along with some of the things that were in the box he left me. The box I refused to open until long after he died, because I was too angry with him. All those other feelings were wrapped up inside a thick layer of anger that stayed with me long after the grief had gone.

  Because he had jumped, definitely. It wasn’t an accident. He wasn’t the kind of person who had accidents. He was the most careful man I’ve ever met. He thought about everything, even the simplest thing. You’d say, “Fancy a cup of tea, Grandad?” and he’d think about it. You could almost see him turning the question in his hands, like a squirrel looking for the best way into a nut. The coroner knew that, I think, when she said there was some evidence he’d committed suicide. I know what that evidence was. He was naked, for a start; and there is no way, no way at all, that he’d walk around the flat, let alone go out onto the balcony, like that. Not if he’d been in his right mind. He’d taken his false teeth out, and his glasses were on the living-room table. He couldn’t see a thing without them, so he must’ve felt his way onto the balcony. But the clincher, for me, was that he’d shaved his moustache off. Such a strange thing to have done. It was the first thing Mum said, poor Mum, when she got back from identifying the body. “He’d shaved his moustache off,” she said. “I hardly knew him.”

  I didn’t understand it at the time, but I do now, I think. It was a sort of ritual. The clothes, the teeth, the specs, the moustache — it was as if he was stripping himself down to the bare minimum of what he was, removing all those disguises at last. And there was a suicide note; it’s just that no one realized it. How could they? It was this box, and the things in it.

  So it wasn’t an accident, open verdict or not. He’d jumped, and he must have bloody known what that would do to me. He’d have known that it would open up the wounds my dad had left me with. And it did.

  Dad had disappeared five years earlier, when I was ten and a half. We’d just moved to a bigger house near Ravenscourt Park, ten minutes from Gran and Grandad’s. The upstairs seemed a lot farther away from the downstairs than in the old house. There was a landing and a turn in the stairs and then a long walk along the hall to the kitchen. My bedroom was nice, but the wallpaper had a pattern that sometimes turned into faces, and I’d have to get out of bed to turn the big light on to get rid of them. The new school was okay, but I spent a lot of break times sitting on my own. I wasn’t much good at making new friends. I suppose I thought that if there were friends out there, they’d find me. I’m still a bit like that.

  I had a lot on my plate back then. I’d been sent to an orthodontist, who said I needed braces. My new teacher told my mum that I might be a bit dyslexic. Mum was always messing with my hair. It seemed like everyone was always wanting to do something to me, change me in one way or another. So what with all that, and the move, and the new school, I was a bit slow noticing how strange Dad was getting.

  My dad worked for the DTI, the Department of Trade and Industry, and he was away quite a lot, abroad. We were used to it; it was okay. But then he was away a lot more, and it seemed to me that Mum was on the phone all the time, getting emotional. I had no idea why. He never came back from one of his trips without a present for me: a cowboy hat from America, a pair of clogs painted with flowers from Holland, a beautiful little wooden horse from Czechoslovakia. When he was home, he read to me at bedtime, nearly always from our favourite book, The Wind in the Willows. It’s in my head, that story. I could recite you bits, like when Ratty takes Mole out in his boat for the first time:

  “I beg your pardon,” said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. “You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So — this — is — a — River!”

  “The River,” corrected the Rat.

  “And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”

  “By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”

  But then when he’d turned my light off and I was trying to dive into sleep, I’d hear him and Mum rowing downstairs. Their voices came and went in waves: loud, quiet, loud, silent. I never went down, though. Not because I thought I’d get into trouble if I did. I never got any serious grief from my parents. What I was afraid of was that I’d walk into the room during one of their silences.

  And then the rhythm of his coming and going just stopped. He simply stopped coming back. He didn’t phone. I waited for a long time, then one day I got in the car to go to school and I asked her.

  “Mum? When’s Dad coming back?”

  And she said, “Put your seat belt on, love. Have you got your lunch box?”

  And I said, “Mum? Is Dad coming back? Has he gone?”

  We were at the traffic lights on Goldhawk Road. Mum leaned on the steering wheel with her head on the back of her hands. “Christ,” she said, “what have I done to deserve this?” She wasn’t crying, exactly, but her throat was going in and out as if it was hard for her to breathe. Then there was a blast of car horns from behind, and I said, “Mum? Mum, the lights are green.”

  William and Marijke — Grandad and Gran — took it very hard, of course. Gran was already getting a bit “ditzy” — Mum’s word — but I’m sure it was Dad’s vanishing that sent her sliding down to the edge of darkness. At the time, though, she was the more practical one.

  “Sonia, we must inform the police,” she said.

  I don’t think this had occurred to Mum, because she said, “The police? Do you think so?”

  “Of course,” Gran said. “Jan is a missing persons case.” She held up three fingers. “There are two things here. Missing persons is a police matter, and we must report it. Next, we can do nothing ourselves. Are we to drive all over the place looking for him?” Gran gazed at her hand, puzzled for a moment that she was still holding up one finger. Then she curled it down into her fist and said, “He is not dead, I believe.”

  That was when Grandad moaned softly and cupped his hands around her face. “I am so sorry, my love,” he said.

  Marijke said something in Dutch that Mum and I couldn’t understand. I didn’t say anything because I don’t think I was supposed to be in the room.

  The police came three times. They talked to me once, but they asked funny kinds of questions and I couldn’t have been much help. The day after the first police visit, Tweedledum and Tweedledee turned up. That’s what Mum called them because they looked so alike: both Dad’s sort of age, round faces, glasses, suits. I answered the door, and they said they were friends of my dad’s from his office, and could they speak to my mum? Mum took them into the living room and shut the door, so although I lurked on the stairs for a while, I couldn’t hear anything. They stayed about half an hour, and when they’d gone, I asked Mum what that was all about, and she said, “Oh, work stuff, money,
you know.” But I could tell from the thoughtful look on her face that there was more to it than that.

  They came back a few days later, around teatime, and asked if it would be all right if they had a look in Dad’s “study.” Mum wanted to know what for, of course. Tweedledum said that “the department” was having trouble tracing some of the papers to do with “the project” Dad had been working on, and perhaps he’d brought them home. Mum wasn’t too happy about it, but she took them upstairs to the back bedroom, where Dad had his desk. When they got there, Tweedledum — or it might have been Tweedledee — said, “Thank you, Mrs. Hyde,” and shut the door in her face. When they came back down, they were carrying two cardboard files. They gave Mum a receipt for them and off they went. Some time later, Mum discovered that a load of old bank statements and phone bills had disappeared as well, but I don’t think she did anything about it. She had a lot on her plate too.

  I’m ashamed to say that I started eavesdropping on her phone calls. But then, what else could I do? Nobody was telling me anything, and I was aching, aching for . . . I don’t know. Big things, I guess, like certainty, hope, understanding; things that ten-year-olds aren’t supposed to concern themselves with. Things that are hard to replace once you’ve lost them. Things you aren’t supposed to lose in the first place. Our phone was in the hall, in the recess under the stairs, so it was easy to hear her from the upstairs landing, driving myself crazy trying to imagine the other half of the conversation.

  “Oh, hi.”

  So it wasn’t Gran or Grandad.

  “No, nothing at all. Well, sort of numb, really . . . Pardon? I don’t know. Very quiet a lot of the time. Up in her room, yes.”

  In a lower voice, talking about me.

  “I know you do, Andrew. That’s one of the reasons it’s always a comfort talking to you.”

  Ah, Andrew. Oily Andy, her boss.

  “I know. Yes. Sometimes I think . . . I dunno, a letter from Brazil, or somewhere. A call saying they’ve found his clothes on a beach in Dorset . . .”

  I wanted to run down and cry “No!” but I stayed still, clutching the banister.

  “Yes, I know, I know. But it’s a melodramatic bloody situation, Andrew . . . Well, of course I’ve thought about that, but . . . No. Funnily enough that’s the one thing I’m fairly sure of. I’m certain I’d have known if anything like that was going on. Yes, I know, still waters run deep and all that, but no, I really don’t think so. That’s what the police think, though. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? It’s the usual reason.”

  There were quite a few calls to and from Andrew, and fairly soon Mum started working full-time. She had to, I daresay. So I started spending more and more time at Gran and Grandad’s. I’d go there most days after school because Mum was never back before six or half past. Then she started going away for a day or two, for work, or to conferences at the weekend, and I’d stay over at their flat. They made their spare bedroom into my room, and bit by bit I took a lot of my stuff over there. Pretty soon I was living with them as much as I was living with Mum.

  Looking back, it must have been hard on her. It was a big house to be alone in. I remember one time when I was there with her, watching Coronation Street, and she said, “I’ve been thinking about your birthday, love.”

  It must have been my thirteenth.

  “I thought you might like to do something on the Saturday, perhaps. Have you thought about it at all?”

  And I said, “It’s okay, Mum. It’s sorted. Gran and Grandad are taking me and Lauren and Emma to the cinema. Then we’re all going out for pizza, and Lauren and Emma are sleeping over at the flat.”

  “Oh,” Mum said, and then I looked at her, thinking, Uh-oh!

  So I said, “I’m sure it would be okay if you came too. You can, if you like.”

  “Um, well, I’ll see,” she said. “Seems like you’ve got it all worked out anyway. Sounds great.”

  Then we went back to Coronation Street. I felt bad, but I knew it was okay really. Mum was probably thinking that she could spend the weekend with Andrew after all. Cynical little cow, wasn’t I? But then, why not?

  I’d put Dad away by then. He wasn’t lost or gone or dead. In my head (or maybe my heart) I’d put him somewhere safe. He was tucked up in a tiny drawer that was one of hundreds of tiny drawers in a great big chest of drawers inside a great big cupboard, and the cupboard was in a locked secret room at the end of an endless corridor that was one of hundreds of endless corridors in a great big house. And that was fine. Until Grandad jumped into the sky and sent me back along those half-forgotten corridors, and I found myself standing in front of the little drawer labelled DAD wondering if it was full of nothing but dust and bones, or worse.

  I must have hated him, surely.

  I suppose you’d say that Gran was heart and Grandad was head. At first, he didn’t do much except help me with my homework. Gran did everything else. She wasn’t what you’d call a great cook, but she had a talent for conjuring something out of nothing. She’d had to learn to do this during the war, she said. I’d always been a picky eater, and I was worse after Dad went. I’d got a bit skeletal, to tell the truth. Mum worried and nagged at me about this, but Gran didn’t; maybe that’s why I started to eat, and then enjoy, the strange little meals she invented for me. She gave me a human shape again.

  If I was ill, Gran would sit with me and fetch me things and watch daytime TV with me. When my periods started, it was Gran who went to the chemist’s and got me the things I needed and talked to me about it all, very straightforward, very Dutch. It was Gran, not Mum, who went with me to Marks & Spencer and bought me my first bra. But all the time she was slipping a little bit farther away. She was like sunlight on a cloudy day or shadows on a lawn: here, then gone, then back again. In the shady patches her two languages would get thickly entangled, and I’d have to appeal to Grandad to explain what she was saying; but sometimes he couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Sometimes she would sit in her armchair with a book or watching the telly and I’d look at her and realize that she’d gone. Often when she was like that the only thing she would say was my name.

  “Tamar.”

  And I’d go and kneel beside her and hold her hand and say, “Yes, Gran?”

  “Tamar.”

  “I’m here, Gran. Do you want something?”

  “Tamar.”

  Grandad would just watch, not saying anything, his eyes wet and magnified behind his glasses.

  He loved her. It was dead simple, the way he loved her. Seamless. His love was like a wall that he’d built around her, and there wasn’t a chink or flaw in it. Or so he thought. But then she started to float out of the real world, his world, and he was like a little boy trying to dam a stream with stones and mud, knowing that the water would always break through at a place he wasn’t looking at. There was nothing desperate about the way he did it, though. He was always calm, it seemed. Expecting the worst and determined not to crack. She started to get up in the night and turn on all the taps, and he would get up too and stand quietly beside her watching the endless flow of water as if he found it as fascinating as she did. Then he’d guide her back to bed before turning the taps off. One night I heard something and went into the living room and saw the two of them standing out on the balcony. He’d wrapped his dressing gown around her, and I heard him say, “Yes, you are right, Marijke. The traffic is like a river of stars. Would you like to watch it some more, or go back to bed?”

  When the calls started coming in from police stations, he handled them as if it were just business, something that happened in the normal course of things. He’d call a taxi, get his coat, rescue her, and return the stolen goods to the supermarket. (Usually it was exotic fruits, sometimes just bags of rice or potatoes.) I never once heard him complain or curse, not even so much as sigh. At first I thought he was being pigheaded stubborn, refusing to recognize the reality of the situation. Sometimes I thought he was just too distant from the world, not really grasping what was going on. But i
t wasn’t like that at all. He and Gran had gone through terrible things when they were young, during the war. Bravery — endurance, all that — was a deep part of him. In other words, he was being heroic. It took me a long time to see it.

  It’s a very private thing, losing your mind. And all sorts of people, complete strangers, get involved. It was that, the invasion of his privacy, that started Grandad crumbling. And the fact that all those people — the social workers, doctors, police, psychiatrists — were younger than him, and not as clever, but more powerful. He felt — he must have felt — control slipping away. And what he did was build the wall higher, work harder to dam the stream, fight even more fiercely to keep the world at arm’s length.

  Mum and I both knew that Gran would have to go away sooner or later. Mum was good; she treated me like a grown-up; we talked about it all. But with her it was the practical stuff. What if this happens? Do you think we should do this or that? What about the flat? And so on. Which was missing the point, really. It was a small thing that made me realize. I went to the flat after school one day and got out of the lift, and Grandad was standing there in his coat. He couldn’t hide the fact that he was hoping to see Gran, not me. She’d gone wandering. He looked straight past me at the empty lift, and his face just collapsed. I understood then that his walls had fallen at last. That while we’d all been focusing on Gran, he was the one desperate for support, for love. Standing there by the lift, looking up at his desolate face, I realized that there was only one person who could provide it. And it scared me. I didn’t think I was up to it.