I laughed. ‘Rude?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Whatever you decide, you can’t just ignore this –’
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said. ‘He ignored me for eighteen years, didn’t he?’
She didn’t say anything to that. She looked away, as if giving me time to collect myself – though I wasn’t annoyed, and I didn’t think I’d sounded upset when I spoke. I might have done, but I hadn’t intended to because, as far as I could see, I had only stated an obvious fact. She put the cup down and sat back in her chair again. ‘He’s not the one who asked, from the sound of it,’ she said, after a moment’s pause. ‘It was this woman, this Kate Thompson, who asked.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But he’s the one who’s sick –’
‘Where is this hospital?’
‘In England.’
‘Is that where he lives now?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But –’
‘That surprises me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think he’d end up living there.’ She gave the matter a moment’s consideration, then she looked up. ‘It’s up to you,’ she said. ‘If you want to go to England, that’s fine –’
‘I don’t want to go –’
‘But it might be a good thing,’ she continued, not ignoring me, but talking around me, a little too gently, I thought – and I could see that she had already made up her mind, not that I should go, necessarily, but that she should do nothing to discourage me. It seemed not to have entered into her calculations that I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with this sick father. Having concealed everything about him, other than the merest facts of his existence and their brief time together, now she was almost telling me to fly off to have some supposedly meaningful encounter with a complete stranger, because she assumed that my lack of interest in such a proposition was feigned to protect her feelings.
‘How could it be a good thing?’ I said. I was upset now, and I couldn’t hide the fact. ‘I don’t even know him – and I don’t want to know him –’
‘He’s sick,’ she said.
‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘He’s nothing to me. Nothing at all.’
Mother put her hand on my arm. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Don’t be upset –’
‘I’m not. It’s just –’
‘Shh.’ She patted my wrist gently. ‘It’s all right. I was just …’ She thought for a moment, then she took her hand away. ‘If you don’t want to go, that’s fine,’ she said. ‘But I think you had better write to his friend and say so.’ She leaned back and away from me. ‘For your own sake,’ she said. ‘If not for hers.’
We drifted for the rest of that afternoon, avoiding our unfinished business – then Mother came and stood in my doorway, obviously intending just to make a single and quite passing point of order before moving on. I was looking through a book on the history of the Russian Revolution when she appeared, which struck her, no doubt, as incongruous – the book was open at a large, grainy photograph of ten or so dead Bolsheviks lying stiff and half upright in the snow – and she hovered a moment, possibly waiting for me to close the book and give her my full attention, before she spoke. ‘I wasn’t trying to say –’ She broke off and considered for a moment. ‘You don’t have to go, of course you don’t. It’s your business, after all. All I wanted to say was that, if you do want to, that would be fine with me.’
‘It’s not just my business,’ I said. ‘It concerns both of us, I’d have said.’
‘Well, yes. It concerns me that he wants to see you,’ she said quietly.
‘We don’t know that he does want to see me,’ I said. ‘It might be all her idea. After all, he wasn’t the one who wrote.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t matter whose idea it was. What I don’t want is for anybody to come here.’
I sighed. I was beginning to find it difficult to hide my exasperation with her. ‘She doesn’t want to bring him here,’ I said. ‘He’s in hospital. From the sound of it, he isn’t well enough to travel.’
‘Are you sure about that? Did she say so?’
I wasn’t sure, not completely, because Kate Thompson hadn’t given any details about this illness. But I didn’t want to tell Mother that, so I didn’t say anything. I just shrugged and turned back to my book of Russian photographs. Behind the row of dead, a group of eight or ten men, in similar clothes – leather coats, peaked caps, carbines slung over their shoulders – stood posing for the camera and I wondered whether these were the ones who did the killing, or if they were other Bolsheviks, who had come across their dead comrades after some massacre.
‘Are you really surprised that he wants to meet his daughter, after all this time?’
‘He didn’t want to see me before,’ I said. ‘So what’s different now?’
Mother shook her head, though whether she was disagreeing with what I had said about my father or not, I couldn’t tell. ‘He’s ill,’ she said. She glanced around the room as if searching for something. I could see it was nothing in particular, no single item of furniture, no single picture on the wall or book on the shelves, but an overall effect, an atmosphere. A sensation of home, of belonging. Mother loved our house – the house she had made – more than anything else in the world. It was as important to her as her work, it was an extension of her work, that part of her art which included everything her art excluded, her daughter, her friends, her possessions. In her studio she became a homeless solitary, she had said so often enough, and I knew it was true. All other concerns had to be set aside when she went to work, every connection with the outside world had to be broken. In a real sense, she became nobody when she was alone in that inner world. She turned towards the window and, as she did, the light from the Sound fell across her face and she seemed to have found what she was looking for. Then she turned back to me and gave me a look of quiet, immovable affection – and that look calmed me immediately. For a moment I didn’t care if I went to see my father or not. ‘You should go,’ Mother said, finally. ‘Get to know something about him. Not for his sake, but for yours.’
‘You said that already.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And it’s true.’
‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ I said – but I could see that she thought I was lying.
Mother shook her head. ‘You shouldn’t imagine that your father ran off and left us,’ she said.
I was offended by that – though it was exactly what I was imagining. ‘I don’t,’ I said.
‘Because he didn’t.’
‘Oh?’ I looked at her. ‘Then what did he do?’
She studied my face and I could see that she was trying to make out, once and for all, if I was as upset or confused by all this as she had first thought. I wasn’t, though. I couldn’t have cared less and I needed her to know that. I needed her to know that I didn’t require anybody else in my life, because I really was happy with us just as we were. I was happy on my own, and the last thing I wanted was a new-found father, least of all a bedridden one in a faraway hospital. She allowed herself a slight smile – not exactly wistful, but not quite matter-of-fact either. ‘At the time,’ she said, ‘I am quite sure, he was trying to avoid doing something much worse.’
‘Oh yes? And what was that?’
She only stayed long enough to say the words. ‘Staying put,’ she said. She lingered for just another moment, her face serious, so I would know that this wasn’t entirely a joke, then she turned away and I heard her steps retreating down the landing, towards the studio.
People used to believe that someone, or something, was watching them. Some thought it was the gods or angels, others pictured their dead ancestors, watching from beyond the grave and, in every case, they felt safer in the knowledge that they were seen. Perhaps they were being judged, but they were also being forgiven. It was a childish sensation, and some of the time they knew that, but they believed it anyway, because they wanted it to be true. They wanted to think of themselves as witnessed from some unknown vantage point: it made
them feel more real. That divine gaze was meant to stand in opposition to the looks they were subjected to every day, looks that made them feel less real. They knew that they were diminished by the way other people saw them, but that didn’t matter because, every day and moment by moment, they were magnified by heaven. They were wrong, of course. Nobody watches us. We are not witnessed – or not, at least, by anyone who might be inclined to forgiveness.
I don’t think Martin Crosbie believed he was being watched – but then, maybe that was his problem. He was too far from what he knew, in weather and light that made him strange to himself, and I think he was beginning to feel insubstantial. That can be a blessing too, as it happens, but it wasn’t for him – and I think that being so far from home made him careless with his secrets. Though, when I first started to suspect that he had a secret, I was expecting something that would allow me to understand him – and, after our strange encounter, I felt that I wanted to understand him. And maybe that was why I had started spying on him in the first place. I had wanted to understand him from the first, or at least to know the secret he concealed, for reasons that I couldn’t have explained, but must have had something to do with the fact that he seemed so lost.
On the other hand, it may be that I was only looking for a distraction. I didn’t want to have to think about the letters, and I was still putting off making a decision about what to do with my life, now that my schooling was over. I needed something to occupy me – and spying was what I was used to. I don’t think it was just that, though. Looking back, it strikes me that something had happened during our tea and Solo party. Something about that encounter made Martin Crosbie interesting in a way I hadn’t been able to imagine before. To begin with, I had avoided him because he seemed so lost, and so very open; now I was intrigued because, now, I thought he had a secret. It wasn’t the secret he turned out to have, as it happened, but I didn’t know that then. I’m not sure I even know it for sure now. After all, he could have been anything. A sad case, a sexual pervert, a hopeless romantic. Any one, or any combination of these, would have explained what I found, two days later, at the hytte.
I was on my way down our path to the lower meadows when I saw him go out in his car, turning at the top of the track and heading off in the direction of Straumsbukta. He didn’t see me, I was sure of that. If he had, he would have smiled, or waved, maybe even stopped the car and invited me to come along – because, no doubt, he thought we were friends now. We weren’t, though. I hadn’t gone out that day to find him, I hadn’t even been intending to go down to the hytte. I was just out for a walk to pass the time. But then, seeing him raised a possibility in my mind that I hadn’t considered before and, a few minutes later, feeling slightly guilty, I was standing at the door of the little summer house. I say only slightly guilty, because I’d assumed the door would be locked, and then that would have been that. Only, when I tried it, the door wasn’t locked – and that was unusual. Most of the summer visitors took the same security precautions they observed in the outside world, out of habit, I suppose, or an inability to imagine a place where security wasn’t necessary, so I hadn’t expected to be able to get in, but once the chance was there, and feeling quite certain that Martin Crosbie wouldn’t be back for a while, I opened the door and slipped inside. And though I had felt slightly guilty before I tried the lock, I wasn’t feeling guilty at all now, just curious to see what I would find. Which meant, I realise now, that I was expecting to find something interesting. A clue, a sign; not the whole story perhaps, but some hint as to Martin Crosbie’s secret.
Inside, the place was clean and tidy, just as it had been two days earlier. That had surprised me, then, and it surprised me again now, because I would have expected Martin Crosbie to be messy, even chaotic, in his domestic life. I couldn’t have said why I thought that, though, other than that he’d struck me as disorderly in some vague way, a man who didn’t quite know what he was doing, or even thinking – and that was odd, because all the evidence pointed in the other direction. He’d come well prepared on the first day, his car packed with everything he might need for a long stay in a place like this and, looking around now, what struck me immediately was that this hytte was inhabited by someone with a neat, simple, almost monastic approach to life. No dirty dishes in the sink, or spilled food around the cooker, no empty bottles and glasses rimmed with foam on the table, no piles of papers or unread newspapers on the floor. The only evidence of occupancy, in fact, was the pot plant on the table and – something I hadn’t noticed on my last visit – a computer.
A computer. For no good reason that surprised me too, and I realised that I knew almost nothing about this man. What he did, where he came from, whether he was married or attached in some other way – I knew none of the basic facts that even the most casual conversationalist would pick up in the first five minutes at a party. There I was, a spy in his home from home, and I didn’t know the first thing about him, other than his taste in books and his bizarre approach to language learning. I walked over to the computer and switched it on. I supposed that it would be locked, that I wouldn’t be able to see anything without a password, but it was worth a try – and though it did come up with a password prompt, it simply let me in when I hit the return key. The wallpaper was an image of a woodland scene in autumn, leafy, red and gold, reassuring. The usual icons came up, along with a couple of work folders labelled ‘temp’ and ‘pics’. I sat down and clicked on temp, but it was empty; then I clicked on pics and a long list of filenames came up. When I double-clicked on the first of them, it went to full-screen.
It was a photograph of a girl in a white shirt or blouse and a pleated skirt, maybe my age, maybe a little younger. She wasn’t posing for the camera, it wasn’t a family snapshot or anything like that, and I knew, immediately, that it had been taken without her knowledge. It was a good-quality image – very sharp, with nothing to suggest it had been taken through a zoom lens from some great distance, but there was something about it that made me feel quite certain that she didn’t know what was going on. She just looked too natural, too preoccupied with something off to the right, just out of frame. She was very pretty, with dark brown hair cut in a bob to emphasise her slender, rather elegant neck. From the background, I would have guessed that she was in a park, or a public garden, and I was immediately convinced, not only that she didn’t know she was being photographed, but also that she was a complete stranger to Martin Crosbie, someone he’d seen and captured in passing. Which made him a spy, just like me.
Or did it? I closed the file and went to the next one, and there she was again, in a different place, in different clothes, and the shot after that was different again – and all of a sudden, I knew that he wasn’t like me at all. He wasn’t like me because this girl wasn’t an object of observation to him, she was an object of desire. I opened one file after another and found her in various places, various poses – and then, about a dozen files further down the list, a new girl appeared, someone a little younger, with light, almost blonde hair and a very pale, rather haunted-looking face. I looked at her for a while, then I stopped – there were over two hundred pictures in the folder and I was quite sure they were all of girls like the ones I had seen, girls between the ages of fourteen and twenty who had been caught unawares by Martin Crosbie’s camera while they were walking in the park, or going home from school, girls in sports clothes and uniforms, blondes, brunettes, redheads, girls who were thinking of someone or something else when Martin Crosbie captured a single moment of their existence and added it to his library of secret pictures. They weren’t indecent, they weren’t criminal, but they were a form of theft nonetheless. This was theft, not spying, because these innocent-looking photographs were intended to steal something from those girls and, even if they didn’t succeed – and to Martin Crosbie, success must have been out of the question, because to succeed would have meant bringing this pursuit to an end – their intent was clear.
And then it came to me how foolish I was being.
How innocent. For, though I had never seen Martin Crosbie with a camera, I had felt watched, sometimes, and I had seen the way he looked at me. The way he joked, the way he tried to charm. The way he insinuated. This computer contained hundreds of images, labelled only with strings of digits and letters, but I assumed the most recent would be at the end of the list and I scrolled down to there, to the very last image, and opened it. Then I opened the next-to-last file, and the one before that, and then onwards, backtracking through until I saw a face other than my own. There were eight images of me, most of them apparently taken on the same, slightly overcast day. In each of them I was wearing my grey sweater, and I had my hair up in a ponytail. The pictures had been taken with obvious care and attention and – there was no mistaking it – with that same longing, that same desire to capture some intimate detail that would make me his, just as he had made those other girls his, for a second or two, or maybe longer, when he looked at them again, later, in private. In private. That thought was unbearable – and almost before I knew what I was doing, for my own sake and for all those other girls in Martin Crosbie’s secret folder, I deleted, first one file, then the next, and then the one before that until the folder was empty. I deleted them one by one, slowly and calmly, like someone doing a routine job that they didn’t mind but didn’t much like either, then I emptied the Trash, so he wouldn’t be able to recover anything. Or not easily, anyhow. I knew, even then, that nothing can ever be completely erased from a computer hard disk, and I had to assume that he’d created backups, but I wasn’t deleting the files for deletion’s sake, I was sending their owner a message. All the time, I felt quite calm, quite in control of myself, and it wasn’t until I was finished that I realised that I was crying, big, unseemly tears rolling down my face and dripping on to the keyboard, where they rested a moment, glistening, before bleeding away between the letters. I stood up, then I mopped my eyes and stood a moment, gazing out over Malangen. There was no sound, no movement out upon the water – not at first. Then I saw the terns, first one, then another, hovering over the tide, watching for signs of life. I closed my eyes. I tried to tell myself that nothing I had seen was criminal, or even sexual, and that it really wasn’t personal to me. He hadn’t touched me physically, it was just pictures. He hadn’t betrayed me, because I barely knew him, and his sad little secret didn’t matter to me one way or the other. That was what I told myself and what I tried to make myself believe before I turned round and ran out of the hytte, leaving the door wide open, so Martin Crosbie would know someone had been there while he was out, and that his secret wasn’t a secret any more.
A Summer of Drowning Page 13
