What the Eye Doesn't See

by Alice Jolly

  In memory of Verity Sylvia Pease

  of Hook Park Farm

  1927–1997

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to: Stephen Kinsella, Amanda Holmes, Kathryne Andrews, Lucy Hodgson, Clare Andrews, Simon Pettifar, John Lash, Ian and Fran Twinn, Max Hill, Tom Walker, Xandra Bingley, Sibyl Ruth of The Open College of the Arts, Susannah Rickards of Real Writers, Victoria Hobbs of A. M. Heath, Kate Lyall Grant of Simon & Schuster, The Arvon Foundation and The Brussels Writers’ Group.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  February

  Maggie

  Max

  Nanda

  Maggie

  MARCH

  Max

  Maggie

  Nanda

  Maggie

  JUNE

  Max

  Maggie

  Nanda

  Maggie

  Max

  Maggie

  Max

  AUGUST

  Nanda

  Maggie

  Nanda

  Maggie

  Max

  Maggie

  SEPTEMBER

  Maggie

  Max

  Maggie

  Copyright

  FEBRUARY

  Maggie

  I don’t know why I lied for him.

  At the time so much else had gone wrong that I just thought – oh yes, this as well, and I didn’t take it seriously. Now I should be tortured by what I know, but six months have passed, and the world spins onwards, just as it ever did, and I get out of bed in the morning, and carry on the Normal Life Game. I’m shocked by my mind’s capacity for evasion. After all, Tiffany is dead. No matter how often I tell myself that, I never quite believe it. Perhaps I learnt that from Dad – the art of unseeing, of unknowing.

  The newspapers have been full of it, but don’t believe all you read, words hide as much as they reveal. Even I don’t know everything, although I was at the wedding with Dad when Geoffrey married Tiffany, and I was there four years later when she died. If only knowing was a process you could put into reverse. The irony is that I’ve always believed myself to be honest. Now I ask Nanda why honesty is so hard and she says it’s because all stories are lies. Once there’s an audience, then there’s a reason for the telling, and the facts are altered to fit the case.

  Things don’t happen in words, but words are the only way to explain them. And that’s what I’m left with now. Words. My treadmill mind goes round them again and again. Questions and answers, the case for and against, justifications and explanations. A court of law inside my head, the judge’s gavel pounding the back of my throat. Sometimes I just want to take my head and shut it up in a cupboard, lock the door, and enjoy the silence. It was such a small lie – in fact, it wasn’t really a lie at all. I just looked back at the wrong moment, then I failed to disagree with what had already been said. And the punishment is that I’m left with a power I don’t want. The power to protect or destroy all of our lives.

  To see him, to see him not. So many decisions, and no way of judging what’s right and wrong. For four months I’ve left his letters unanswered, his phone calls unreturned. But yesterday he called and said he wanted to meet, and I didn’t even try to resist, because he’s spent all his life in the persuasion professions – barrister, stock-market fiddler, politician – so he always gets his way. And anyway, what do I care, now that I’m going away?

  Which is how I come to be waiting for him at Embankment tube at four o’clock, on a February day which appears to be happening inside a parked cloud. There’s half-melted snow on the ground, and the light is already failing. For once he’s on time, my chameleon father. I see his car, torpedo-shaped, sliding along the road, with cigar-shaped headlights, and an oval grin. Not a car you’d be likely to forget. An E-type Jag, Series 1, made in 1964 – he likes to tell you all the details. He parks it askew in a disabled parking space. In the mist, the pinstripe height of him is blurred, and he walks crooked because of his foot, his overcoat toppling, one shoulder lower than the other.

  My stomach has switched onto spin cycle. I shouldn’t have come. I imagine him as a devil – his overcoat flicking around him like the cape of a pantomime villain, hiding perhaps a forked tail. His silver hair, parted in the middle, rising from his head like wings – or horns? Somehow those images don’t work. At the station entrance he looks around, but he can’t see me, because he’s short-sighted and too vain to wear his glasses.

  ‘Maggie,’ he says, ‘sorry, I didn’t see you there.’ His face is half in the light, half in the dark, and as he smiles his mouth reaches from ear to ear, revealing teeth which slope backwards. I offer my ear for him to kiss. He smells of laundered shirts and shoe polish. Nanda always says that he’s been corrupted by the ease with which he charms.

  Feet echo past us in the mist. My hands are pushed into my pockets, and water has seeped through the soles of my boots. I wear a beret but it doesn’t keep my ears warm, and the wind pulls at my hair, twisting it in spirals around me.

  He wants us to go for a drink but I won’t, so we walk along the Embankment. Usually he talks all the time – anecdotes, in-jokes, having a dig at anyone and everyone, the cabaret rolling on – but now he’s awkward. Our words tumble out in the wrong order, as we both talk at the same time, and then stop. He tells me that I look good, although he doesn’t think that. There’s a greyness to his skin, and a brightness in his eyes. Drink, I would think.

  As always he’s an extravagant display of good taste. A sleek Savile Row suit, a shirt in the same indigo as his eyes, a striped silk tie, long narrow shoes which squeak. His nose is large, and he looks sideways over it, and it’s hard to tell whether that look is humorous or forbidding. He’s watching me now with a glinting eye, which hasn’t got a monocle in it but should have.

  ‘Anyway, listen, Mags,’ he says. ‘I want to ask you a favour.’

  I say nothing. Our eyes meet obliquely.

  ‘You know there’s this book being written?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, I thought I might have mentioned it. Well, anyway, there’s this book being written. It’s not really about me, not as such. But it’s a biography, of a type, a biography of a group of us. You know – Geoffrey, Hugh, Buffy, Angus. All the boys. The Citadel Club. I mean, it’s just a political book, nothing more …’

  ‘And who’s writing this book?’

  ‘A journalist. Adam … Adam … Damn, can’t remember his name.’

  In the distance a barge hoots, and traffic rumbles past. We walk under a bridge and our feet make an underwater echo. A pigeon nods across our path, squawks and flies away across the river. My glasses have steamed up, so I have to clean them, and I don’t even need to wear them, except they’re useful to hide behind.

  ‘Dad, is it a good idea to encourage anyone to ask more questions?’

  ‘Well, the problem is, Mags, this was agreed two years ago, before …’

  A lorry speeds past, drowning the pavement and his sentence.

  ‘Anyway, as I say, two years ago it didn’t look like such a bad idea. In fact, I thought it was rather a good idea for someone to write a book about me … well, about us. Now, of course, I’d rather not be involved, but I don’t want to make a fuss, and I can’t let the others down.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I hope he detects a tinge of sarcasm in my voice.

  I’ve stopped walking and we stand by the side of the road. There’s a dead rat in the gutter. ‘So what’s this got to do with me?’

  ‘Well, actually, what I really need is for you to talk to him.’

  ‘Talk to this journalist?’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be much. Only a few questi
ons. Actually, I’ve given him your number.’

  ‘You’ve what?’

  ‘Your number, yes …’

  ‘And what shall I tell him, Dad? The truth?’

  For a moment his eyes turn to mine, and they’re hollow, and open into his head like long tunnels. He flicks at the cigarette he’s smoking, hot ash falls onto his hand, he winces, and brushes it away. Then he turns, shrugs, half-laughs. I should speak, accuse him, tell him what I know. Speak, speak – but I remain silent.

  So we walk on, listening to the rhythm of our feet crunching slowly along the pavement, on and on, until the streetlights come on and we stop at a stand where a man is cooking chestnuts over an open fire. Dad’s shadow on the pavement is as long and spiky as the branches above. He wants to buy me some chestnuts, and I say no, but he insists and I’m hungry. The chestnuts come in a paper bag and I hold them in my gloved hands, feeling their heat unfreezing my hands. They’re too hot to eat.

  ‘Maggie, it’s not just me who thinks it would be a good idea,’ he says. ‘Geoffrey was saying that you ought to talk to this journalist.’

  ‘Geoffrey?’ My teeth shiver and I look down at the chestnuts in my hands. ‘So how is he?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, he’s not too bad. Much the same as ever. In fact, things are working out rather well for him. You know he’s been recalled and promoted to Energy Minister?’

  I wasn’t asking about his career, but of course Dad thinks of that because that’s all that interests him – yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, it’s onwards and upwards just the same.

  ‘So you and Geoffrey …?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. Why ever not? We get on like a house on fire …’

  Dad looks at me, half-laughs, stops, knows that he shouldn’t have said that. My face smarts, outrage gathers in a lump in my throat, refusing to turn into words. I want to make some gesture of protest, but instead I stare at the chestnuts, their brown and shiny skins split open. There’s something pitiful about them. I feel they’ve been dragged into this unfairly. Dad never knows when a joke’s gone too far. Humour can be far more deadly than malice – that’s what Nanda would tell him, if he ever listened to her.

  I feel his hand on my arm and I start trying to peel one of the chestnuts, just for something to do, and because I don’t want him to touch me, but it’s hard to do that and hold on to the bag at the same time, so Dad takes hold of the bag, while I unpeel a chestnut. The chestnut has split open on the fire, but still I have to slide my fingernails under its hot, fibrous skin, and inside it’s pale and looks like a brain. I imagine it turning round and round. ‘Maggie,’ he says. ‘For God’s sake. It’s finished, you know that, don’t you?’

  Finished? Perhaps for him, but not for me. If only it had stopped, just as it was in those first newspaper articles. It sounded so simple then. I read those articles when I got back to England – that night confined in a box of black and white print, distant and stingless.

  The Junior Arts Minister, Max Priestley, described last night how he was driven back by a ferocious blaze at a Gloucestershire holiday cottage that killed the wife of the MP for Ealing, Geoffrey Drummond. Priestley, a neighbour and friend of the couple, said he fought to get into the cottage in Brickley after his daughter, Maggie, had called the fire services. Tiffany Drummond, 36, was the daughter of the American oil millionaire John Farrenden. The couple married at a lavish ceremony in Houston, Texas, four years ago. Geoffrey Drummond, who was told of the tragedy this morning, was at his London home during the blaze, which is under investigation.

  *

  Dad and I pass a pub, and he wants a drink. The pub is halfway underground with cramped windows, low beams and a smell of damp wool and melted snow, like skiing holidays. It’s stacked full of suits, dark grey and pinstripe. Chapped hands grip beer glasses and folded umbrellas drip onto the floor. We push through to the bar and Dad orders whisky. I feel eyes watching him. Roll up, roll up. Accused murderer on view. You’d think it was a day out at the zoo. I want to hide him from them, but perhaps it’s all just in my head. Dad doesn’t seem to notice.

  I look at his hands, resting on the bar. Oddly thin and white, they have no grip. Like something stored in formalin in a biology lab, they make me curl up inside. It’s not that I’m expecting to see blood. No, nothing as obvious as that, but I feel that somewhere Tiffany’s mark is there. Perhaps a speck of her pale and perfect face powder remains, caught in the grain of his skin, making a part of his fingerprint, black lines on white paper. It would help a lot if I had liked her but I never did.

  He’s got to go to a meeting at six, he tells me. It’s some committee, something to do with pedestrianisation. Can you believe it? Pedestrianisation, he says. Time was when pedestrians were simply people who parked the car too far away. I laugh because already I’m beginning to feel the whisky in my cheeks and fingertips. He burbles on, trying to tell me news about the family. Fiona my stepmother, James my half-brother, exiled to prep school, poor little devil. But Dad’s no good at family news, because he’s always been pretty detached from all that, and usually I deal with family stuff. Like all roads lead to Rome, and all trains go via Preston, all communication in our ramshackle family used to go through me. Before, before. 2 October. The night of the fire. Yes, everything divides there.

  After a while Dad’s more serious. ‘You know,’ he says. ‘Fiona has bought The Which? Book of Divorce.’ He turns his head to one side slightly and wrinkles up his nose. ‘Of course, I can hardly claim to be surprised. But buying a guide to divorce – I mean, really.’

  ‘Well, if you’re going to get a divorce, you’ve got to get the right one, haven’t you? You don’t want any old divorce.’ Our laughter is shallow and bounces back at us from the low ceiling. ‘Don’t worry, Dad, I don’t think Fiona would return you to the wild right now.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope not. I’m not sure I’d know how to feed myself.’

  He orders another whisky and one for me as well. The whisky tastes of ginger and cloves, and we find a table to sit down at, side by side. Suddenly Dad is gloomy. ‘Of course in the past I’d have been expected to do the honourable thing. Out into the barn, an accident with a gun, that was always the excuse, wasn’t it?’

  He shrugs and then tells me that he’s giving up his flat in London. The lease is up and he’s got to be out, that’s what he says. Probably the truth is that he’s got no money. He signed everything over to Fiona when things were looking bad. She, I think, has sweetly declined to give it back. She never did like him having a flat in London. Fiona, who has always been one of life’s defence players, suddenly on the attack.

  When I say I’ve got to go, he says, ‘Well, I’ll drink up and come as well.’ He won’t let me leave first. We step out into muffled air and cold which grips to the bone.

  ‘People used to run away and join the Foreign Legion, didn’t they?’ Dad says. ‘Do you think there’s a modern equivalent?’ He slips on black ice and steadies himself against a railing. I have to stop myself feeling sorry for him.

  ‘Couldn’t you go and live with Rosa?’ I ask.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Dad says. We don’t normally talk about Rosa because I’m not meant to know about her. Although I could hardly fail to know since I walked in on them having sex, when I was ten years old. Sitting upright, her naked back was shaped like a cello, Dad’s hand resting on the strings of her spine. The twisted sheets, his white knee, held in the light from the half-curtained window. Always I have known what must never be mentioned.

  He drives me home although I don’t want him to. Sunk low in the slippery leather seat of his car, the whisky makes me feel like I’m wearing a balaclava inside my head. The car growls over Westminster Bridge. Dad drives too fast, with the window open, blowing in sharp air, as he smokes, and then tries to flick ash out of the window, except it blows back in, and the wind makes his hair stand on end. As he spins around a corner his hand touches my leg and I hold on to the handle of the door.

&
nbsp; ‘And your job,’ he asks. ‘How’s that going?’

  I’d been hoping to avoid that subject.

  ‘Actually I’ve given it up. Just recently. A week ago.’

  ‘What?’

  He swerves and grinds the gears. ‘You must be mad,’ he says. ‘Two years of law school, then you get a good job, and now you’re chucking it in?’

  ‘Dad, I just didn’t want to do it any more. I don’t like the law. I don’t want to be involved in judging other people.’

  He gives me a laser-beam stare and wags his head. He’d have liked a beautiful daughter, but since he can’t have that, then I’m expected, at least, to be successful at something.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’

  ‘I’m going abroad.’

  He assumes his grumpy bigot act, which he uses so frequently that it’s almost become who he is. ‘I don’t hold with abroad,’ he says, pulling down his mouth and shaking his head. ‘All those babbling voices and sticky heat. Dreadful. I prefer places to be Northern, grey and guilt-ridden.’

  ‘Dad, I’m not going to Spain. I’m going to Brussels.’

  ‘I don’t see why you can’t stay here.’

  For him I don’t really exist unless I’m playing a role in one of the scenarios he creates. He likes to be able to go to his club and boast about me to his cronies, and use me in their endless games of one-upmanship, so it’s fine when I’m a success, and doing what a daughter should do, but when I don’t fit in, then I slide from his field of vision.

  ‘So when are you going?’ he says.

  ‘Three weeks’ time. I leave on the thirteenth of March.’

  I don’t know why he’s surprised about me going away, he knows I never wanted to be a family law barrister, I wanted to work on crime or human rights. But at the time when I finished law school jobs were hard to come by, particularly for a wild-haired woman, with the wrong clothes, a recognisable surname, and awkward opinions. I was always so determined not to be just a fucked-up little rich kid with a well-known father but now it seems that’s what I’ve come to, all the same.