For Fergus:
for so many things – and for
the day that was in it . . .
Contents
Sunday 20th September, 2009
Part One
Patrick
Rebecca
Patrick
Rebecca
Patrick
Frances
Patrick
Rebecca
Patrick
Rebecca
Patrick
Rebecca
Patrick
Rebecca
Daniel
Patrick
Rebecca
Patrick
Part Two
Maryam
Patrick
Maryam
Edward
Frances and Sophie
Rebecca
Patrick
Rebecca
Patrick
Daniel
Patrick and Ella
Daniel
Ella
Patrick
Edward
Part Three
Sylvia
Ella
Sylvia
Patrick
Sylvia
Patrick
Edward
Patrick
Ella
Edward
Ella
Part Four
Sylvia
Frances
Ella
Patrick and Ella
Sunday 20th September, 2009
‘TAKE ME HOME,’ Ella said. ‘I need to go home.’
At first, I thought that I might not have heard her properly. The wind was whipping at her words, tossing them over the side of the Aurora. ‘What is it?’ I called. ‘Are you not feeling well?’
We had just heeled over, at a good forty-five-degree angle. The spray soaked the two of us and small pools of water blistered across the deck. They glinted up at us, filled with late afternoon sunshine. We were in our element.
Always at such times, we’d grin at each other, winch in the sails, get ready to come about. Ella had been a fast learner: she took to the sea and the wind and my small sailing boat as though she’d been born to it. I felt proud of her, proud to be her teacher. And it delighted me, the way the salty exhilaration of it all never failed to thrill her. Until now.
She half-turned from me, pulling strands of wet hair away from her mouth. Suddenly, I saw that her fingers were shaking, her face pale despite the wind and our exertions on deck. Her cheekbones seemed even more prominent than usual, the spattering of freckles across her nose like dark exclamation points, startled question marks.
I couldn’t hide my alarm. ‘Darling, have you hurt yourself?’
She shook her head. ‘No. No, I’m okay. But – I keep thinking something’s wrong. I don’t know what it is – but I can feel it.’
‘Wrong? Wrong how?’ I didn’t know what else to ask.
I kept us on course as steadily as I could while I waited for her to say something – anything at all. But she held up both hands, as though pushing back the force of my unasked questions. ‘I don’t know, Patrick. I can’t explain. Just take me home.’
My wife is a very considered person. Competent, calming: the sort of person who is good in a crisis. The sort of person I have always been glad to have by my side. I had never seen her like this. Never seen her distraught – it was a word that came to me, unbidden, unexpected, like a freak wave over the side. It startled me because it didn’t fit her. I saw her press her fingers to her lips, trying to hide their down-turning. I saw her eyes fill. And I saw her turn away from me once more; all in an instant. I did not hesitate, not then.
I pulled the cord on the outboard, and the engine roared into life. ‘Take the tiller,’ I said. ‘Head for home, I’ll do the rest.’
She nodded, already far away. At that moment, I could feel her slipping out of my reach – as though she were falling and I couldn’t catch her. I busied myself taking down the sails, tying them securely into place, making sure everything was stowed and safe and locked down. I even packed the rucksack that we had earlier abandoned in the cabin. It contained what was to have been our lunch. A baguette, some Camembert and fruit, a couple of bottles of beer.
Weeks later – at least, I think it was weeks later – I came across that rucksack in the boot of the car, along with our oilskins. The smell had begun to puzzle me. The fruit and cheese had somehow melded together, rotting slowly, eating away at the fabric of the backpack. I didn’t even open it, just tossed it into the bin, my chest a tight fist of grief.
We arrived back at our familiar harbour in under thirty minutes. Michael was on the jetty, waiting to take the ropes. His ready smile faded towards uncertainty when he saw us. He looked from one to the other, but he didn’t speak. It was clear that something was amiss. By then, an electrical tension had ignited between the two of us – a force potent enough to be sensed by others. I felt that the least I could do was acknowledge it.
‘Something’s wrong, Mike. Tie her up for me, will you? Talk to you later.’
Ella was already running towards the car, yards in front of me, pulling impatiently at her oilskin, shrugging her way out of it as she ran. From that distance, she looked even smaller, her vulnerability emphasized by the oversized glare of the yellow jacket. Michael nodded, asked no questions, and I fled.
‘I’m cold,’ she said, as soon as I turned the key in the ignition. She tugged at the seat belt, clicked it home. I didn’t bother with mine. She stared at me, her eyes glassy, bright blue and far away. I wondered if she even saw me. I turned on the heater.
‘Can you tell me what you’re thinking?’ I asked. I kept my voice quiet, calm. I felt that I now needed to be the one who was good in a crisis.
‘Thinking?’ she turned to me, her whole face expressionless, as though it had suddenly frozen. ‘No, no: not thinking. Feeling.’ She stopped. Her hands were pressed together tightly. To stop them from shaking? This was my wife. I no longer recognized her.
‘Feeling what?’ I was tentative: part of me feared that she would snap if I pushed her. She seemed brittle, her eyes had darkened like seawater.
Then she looked at me, her expression no longer vacant. She was present again, and I felt a sigh of relief take grateful flight, somewhere deep inside me.
‘Fearful,’ she said. ‘Cold and fearful. That’s what I’m feeling.’
I pressed my foot harder on the accelerator. Sunday lunch-time, the dog days of September. The city was mercifully free of traffic. For once, I ignored the speed limits, broke all the rules. I felt that events were unravelling somewhere in a parallel universe, spooling ahead of me at the speed of light. I felt the growth of a momentum that would take my life beyond my control. The only thing I could do was try to outrun it, whatever it was.
For the next forty-five minutes, neither of us spoke.
Ella jumps from the passenger seat before I’ve even cut the engine. She stumbles on the porch step, but I don’t call out to her to be careful. She moves with the speed of one possessed. As I follow her, hurrying to keep up, I have the strangest sensation that I have been waiting for this moment, this day. It seemed to me then that sixteen – almost seventeen – years of the best kind of happiness, the uneventful kind, had finally started to slip away from me. It had begun to dissolve even earlier: in the grey, turbulent arms of the wide-sweeping bay. I don’t know how I knew that back then, but I did, at some visceral, animal level that does not possess the language to articulate it.
She flings open the kitchen door. ‘Anyone home?’ she calls – her standard greeting, one that always brings us to wherever she is, drawn by the cheer, the affection in her voice. But now she keeps moving, keeps calling, no longer waiting for us
to come to her.
‘Sweetheart, are you home?’ The emptiness of the living room, the dining room, the TV room is her only answer. They all have that still, uninterrupted, slightly quizzical air that settles around everything when no one has been there for some time.
She runs towards the back of the house and takes the stairs two at a time. I notice, again, her surprising agility for a woman of fifty. She has always been slender, fine-boned, always light on her feet. As I try to keep up, I become more keenly aware than ever of my twenty years’ head start on her. Some knowledge, some intuition tells me to recall all the details of this day, that I will need them later to help me untangle what is about to happen. That I will need memories in order to make sense of whatever it is I still don’t know.
I notice, for example, that the wallpaper at the top of the stairs is newly scuffed; that the umbrella-plant on the landing needs water; that the towels are folded neatly over the banisters. I notice all of these things. I want to crowd my mind as much as I can. I want to cram it full of irrelevancies as quickly as possible, to stop it from being gripped by the chill tentacles of dread that reach back to me from my wife’s hurrying form.
She opens a bedroom door: Daniel’s bedroom. At first, I cannot see what I am seeing. The door swings to the left and reveals a dimly lit interior. The curtains are still closed, which is odd. It’s lunchtime, and our son is an early riser. Besides, he left before we did this morning, rucksack swinging as he mounted his bike for the short journey to Edward’s. A wide grin, a backward glance, a wave. Then the crunch of gravel, and he was gone.
But now, as we watch, shapes begin to form themselves out of the shadows. At first, they have no familiar contours: I try to grasp at their meaning. We stand there, in that timeless space until pictures begin to emerge, one after the other. My mind becomes a camera, the shutter speeding and clicking as it captures the images before me.
I grapple at the switch on the wall to my left and light floods the room. We stand there: a mother, a father, blinking in the sudden glare.
Uncomprehending.
The boy is somehow suspended in mid-air. He sways slightly as our stumbling entrance disturbs the eerie stillness. And then I see it: the open trapdoor in the ceiling, staring down at us. The rope, creaking slightly under the boy’s weight. The expertly constructed noose. That is what I remember: that is what is burned forever onto the retina of my mind’s eye.
And the chair. The blue chair, now on its side, like a rebuke. My boy always loved blue.
And then Ella screams and screams and I wake. The stillness shatters around us, tossing shards of sound, slivers of light everywhere. My body is catapulted forwards, astonished into action by the force of her anguish. I rush for the boy’s legs, lift him up, try to release the murderous grip of the rope. My rope. The rope from the Aurora. But I know by the weight of him that he has already gone. My son, my Daniel, was weightless, gentle. He left no footprints; this boy is heavy, cold. A stranger.
I struggle with the noose, all the time lifting, lifting, trying to free the boy’s neck, to breathe life again into those blue lips. But he falls against me. I stagger under his sudden weight: I can feel my knees begin to buckle.
I cannot fall. The thought is made of ice: cold, clear, unforgiving. I must not fall. I finally gain control and pull my son into my embrace. His arms sigh by his sides, his head nestles onto my shoulder.
And now Ella has fallen, too. She kneels, rocking back and forth, keening a high-pitched cry. It is a sight I have seen often in the Middle East, in Asia, women tearing at their hair like that, their grief heedless, unearthly. But never here, never in an ordinary bedroom, not in my life. Not like this.
I hold my son close, whisper to him, soothe him from his mother’s cries. But there is another voice that I don’t recognize. A hoarse, choking sound that for a moment, I think comes from him. I stroke the hair back from his forehead – that unruly cow’s lick that he has inherited from me. I close his blue eyes. And then I know it is not his voice but mine. My grief, my sobs.
Even at that moment, I know that the best part of my life is over. One instant, and the present becomes the past. That is all it takes: one instant, and the future is born. We hurtle headlong into a life that is not ours, one that does not belong to us. And we cannot find a foothold, no matter how hard we try.
On that afternoon, the only question – an inchoate, insistent one – is why? What has made our lovely boy abandon us? What has made him leave all the joy, all the bright promise that was his?
I can still see the three of us. The suddenly stooped and elderly man; the lifeless boy; the keening woman. A pietà, of sorts.
But here there is no resurrection possible.
Part One: Stories
Patrick
TODAY, THURSDAY 21ST MARCH, 2013, is my seventy-fourth birthday. Three and a half years have passed since Daniel left us. Three years and six months, almost to the day.
Later on this evening, my wife and my daughters and my grandchildren will all gather together again in the living room and I shall pretend to be surprised by the cake, the candles, the champagne. The children enjoy that sort of thing. My wife enjoys the children. My role, I believe, is to stay out of the way until then.
This evening, however, is a significant one. It marks a kind of twin celebration – although I am not entirely comfortable with the notion of unrestrained joy that the word seems to imply. Acknowledging the passage of years is one thing; coming to grips with the past is another. And celebrating this . . . this new future that has suddenly presented itself to us: that is something else again. However, I have promised myself not to let my story run away with me.
I make no claim to be a writer. I am – or have been, at various times in my life – an engineer, a photographer, a sailor. But those active days are gone, and not just for reasons of physical limitation. Perversely, the less active I become physically, the more of my attention my mind demands. Memories have become particularly troublesome of late. It was Ella who suggested I write them down, untangling their threads with pen and paper. I agreed, partly because I believe that, recently, I have become too curmudgeonly even for my ever-patient wife, testing her endurance to the limit. And so I have taken myself away to the attic, to that place designated as mine many years ago.
This large space once housed my darkroom. I find that ironic now. It is, once again, a dark room; but for different reasons. Every morning, I sit in my old swivel chair – one of the few things I brought with me from my other life – and I write at the gleaming mahogany desk that once belonged to my father-in-law, Dan: a man who, sadly, I never met. As part of my new start-the-day ritual, I run my hand over the tooled green leather of the desk’s surface, and the more I sit here, the more I feel as though the old man and I are connected at some bizarre molecular level. To me, it feels that a connection exists between us apart from my wife, or from Daniel – my son, his grandson. Ella has always spoken of the likenesses shared by Daniel and her father. A likeness that depended not so much on their appearance, but on certain active similarities. The way they buttered bread, for example, or held a glass, or swifted a paintbrush over paper.
Around me are all my old cameras, lenses, framed photos and drawings – some of them by Daniel – and nautical bits and pieces: all the paraphernalia of a different, more emphatic life. A more youthful, less resigned life.
Lately, though, my memory draws me inexorably back to one particular day, more than twenty years ago. It seems to me now that so much had already been decided by then. My trajectory had already been mapped, the pathways signalled, just like the navigation lights around a harbour. Here, I imagine, is the light that illuminates the end of my old life: that horrific morning when Cecilia died, shattering my universe, scattering shrapnel across all the years of my future. My first wife; my wife for a full quarter of a century. My friend, my lover, my companion. I still mourn her.
And here, here is the brightly coloured beginning of that new and unexpec
ted life: that strange, hopeful evening when I met Ella for the first time. I have always regarded myself as particularly fortunate in that regard. I am one of the lucky few who are gifted a second chance. Spread out before me, I see so many bright moments of significance: this day, that night, this meeting, that coincidence.
The afternoon of which I now wish to write – that glorious August day in 1993 when my grown-up daughters met Ella for the first time – is perhaps the most significant moment of them all. I was nervous that afternoon, and had been for weeks beforehand. Sometimes, my eldest daughter, Rebecca, made me feel that I was the recalcitrant child, she the disapproving parent. She’d always been Cecilia’s daughter, first and foremost. I was just the also-ran. My daughter would see it differently now, I am sure; but then, let her tell her own story. As I’ve already said, this is mine.
About two years after I met Ella – or rather, two years after we began seeing each other outside her role as therapist – I felt it was time for my daughters to meet her. Ella was somewhat reluctant. She was acutely aware of the competing dynamics within a family when a parent has died, particularly the mother. Children, she said, can often feel abandoned – no matter what their age.
‘We need to take things slowly, Patrick,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to alienate them. Your daughters have a perfect right to feel ambivalent about me.’
We were standing in my kitchen, the buffet lunch spread out all around us. Chicken, poached salmon, salads – we had been working hard all morning. In just under an hour, Frances and Sophie and Rebecca and their respective menfolk would all be on my doorstep. Ella and I had had this conversation before: about my daughters, about their ambivalence, about their rights. Too many conversations; too many times.
‘It’s more than three years since Cecilia died,’ I said quietly. ‘Don’t I have the right, also, to pick up my life again? Don’t forget: my daughters were the ones who arranged counselling for me.’ I smiled at her. ‘None of us expected this happy result, but there you are.’ I kissed her on the forehead, lightly. But she would not be distracted. Instead, she sighed.
The Things We Know Now Page 1
