by Abigail Dean
He found me thirty minutes later, and three drinks down. ‘Hello,’ he said, and kissed me on each cheek. ‘Well. How did you find it?’
‘It was very interesting,’ I said.
‘Did you like the suggestion,’ he said, ‘about the treehouses?’
‘Oh, yes. That was one of my favourite parts.’
‘You didn’t even come in, did you.’
I looked at him and laughed. He laughed, too.
‘I was at work,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure that you were wonderful. How are you? How’s Ana?’
‘She couldn’t make it. Sorry – I was hoping she would be somebody for you to talk to. She’s not well. I think it’s – that nineteenth-century affliction – the artistic one. Very upper-class. What’s the name of it?’
‘Hysteria?’
‘Less serious.’
‘The vapours?’
‘Yes. That’s the one. She’ll be fine.’ His eyes were struggling to stay on mine; he could hear more important conversations all around us. ‘Would you like me to introduce you to anyone? I’ll have to circulate.’
‘I still have some work to do,’ I said, although I didn’t. ‘Circulate. It seems like a big deal.’
‘There’ll be bigger ones. Let me see you outside.’
Piccadilly was still crowded. There were blue and white lights above the road, and shoppers wizened with paper bags. It was cold enough to snow. Couples wore dinner jackets and gowns, and ducked into hotel lobbies. Each shop window presented some new, warm fairy-tale. December in London. I intended to buy something expensive, and to walk back to my hotel through Mayfair. I liked to see the doormen’s outfits, and the glow of the apartments above the street. Ethan helped me into my jacket. I was still holding the flyer.
‘That,’ he said.
‘Did you choose the picture, too?’
‘Yes. Do you know it? Children in the Sea?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida?’
‘I still don’t know it, Ethan.’
‘It reminded me of you,’ he said. ‘You and Eve, perhaps.’
‘It’s an impressive biography,’ I said. ‘Even if you did write it yourself. I’m proud of you.’
He was already turning back for the Academy. Preparing a specific smile for his re-entrance. ‘It’s just storytelling,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’
The story of Ethan’s birth was part of our family folklore long before my own, and mine – ending with a girl born uneventfully in a hospital bed – was a disappointing sequel, which Father seldom told.
Mother was eight months’ pregnant, and working at the reception desk of a nothing company an hour outside Manchester, where Father mended the electronics. At this stage, she struggled to reach the typewriter; the secretaries ridiculed the way that she walked; Father had to travel up from his basement office three times each day, bearing Tupperware and massages. There was little indication that the baby was coming, just an odd discomfort, the anticipation of a pain. Then the water was in her knickers and on the cheap office chair.
For the fourth time that day, Father ascended the stairs. One of the directors of the company, Mr Bedford – the villain of the story, in case there’s any ambiguity – was already at Mother’s side, holding her phone. Mother was holding it, too, and asking Mr Bedford to please let go of the receiver; she and her husband had agreed that the baby would be born at home, and they would go there now. Mr Bedford, it transpired, had dialled for a taxi to the hospital twice already, but Mother had hit the cradle before he could finish the order.
Mr Bedford was insistent. The baby was early, and Mother should be in hospital. If he couldn’t call a taxi from the reception phone – which Father had now disconnected at the port, and whose cord he held aloft, well out of Mr Bedford’s reach – then he would call an ambulance from his own office. My parents, trailing the desk phone and amniotic fluid, hit the road. They hobbled out of the office through the slow sliding doors and across the car park, and Mother keeled over in the back seat of the Ford Escort which they drove together to and from work each day. Father turned the keys in the ignition. Just as they pulled out, onto the A road, they heard the siren, and an ambulance swung past them, lights flashing.
‘Mr Bedford,’ Father would say, ‘must have had a lot of explaining to do.’
At home, twenty minutes away, they laid out the soft, clean blankets which Father had bought with his Christmas bonus. They moved the cushions from the sofa onto the floor, and drew the curtains. Mother crouched in the makeshift bed. In the familiar gloom, her face glowed with tears and saliva.
Ethan was born forty hours later. At the end, Father said, Mother kept falling asleep; he had to tap her head to wake her. (And did she think, now and then, of the blue and white lights and a hospital room?) They weighed the baby on the bathroom scales. He was seven pounds, and healthy. A son. He had torn his way into the world, had fought to get there early. They huddled on the floor, bloody and naked, like the survivors of some terrible atrocity. Like the last people in the world, or else the first.
The part of Ethan’s birth that Father tended to omit was Mr Bedford’s vengeance, a few weeks later. The Gracies had stolen company property and disobeyed direct managerial instructions. Besides, the other members of the facilities team disliked Father. There had been complaints about his fondness for public ridicule, and about the hours he spent at Mother’s desk, kneading her body. Mr Bedford congratulated my parents on the birth of their son, and requested that they refrain from returning to the office. Their final pay cheques would be provided by post.
Mother didn’t work again. For the next seventeen years, she was full of children, and she approached the role as a martyr. She was doing God’s work, and she would do it well. We were never more precious than when we were inside of her; when she had us in the tight confines of her body, and we were quiet. In all of my early memories, Mother is pregnant. Outside, she wears thin dresses, with her belly button protruding like the start of a tumour, and at home, on the sofa, she reclines in knickers and a stained T-shirt, and feeds us. We clamour for her, sometimes two of us at a time, batting each other for the fuller breast. At my age, she had Ethan and me and Delilah, and Evie on the way. She smelt grisly, of insides. She leaked. The contents of her body were determined to reach the surface.
As a child, she had wanted to become a journalist. She lived with her parents and her little sister in a village surrounded by hills. Theirs was the last house on a terrace; there was a tilt to it, like the tower in Pisa. She committed to interviewing the whole village, and her father bought her a notepad from the newsagent to record her findings. On the first page, in her best handwriting, she wrote: Dispatches from Deborah. Each weekend, and sometimes after school, she trooped from house to house with her pad, investigating. She found that people were happy to tell her their quiet hopes – to win the lottery, perhaps, or to move closer to the ocean; to visit France or North America – and happy, too, to speculate about the relations of the new family in the next street along, who could be a couple, but could also, quite feasibly, be father and daughter. I’ve seen photographs of Mother at this time, and I don’t question her early successes. She had her white-blond hair, and empathetic, adult eyes. You would tell her your secrets.
She hadn’t counted on what she called The Parade. The first incident took place when she was ten years old, and about to take the exam for the grammar school in the next town along. It was the Harvest Festival in the village, and there really was a parade: each tenuous society decorated a float; mothers knitted scarecrows and slumped them throughout the streets; the children dressed up as miscellaneous crops and walked as one dawdling vegetable patch. That year, through a questionable democratic process, Mother had been elected Princess of the Harvest. She walked at the front of the procession, wearing a golden dress (a vast improvement, she concluded, on the potato outfit of the year before), and when the parade passed her house, the privates who were navigating the vet
eran float let off a round of celebratory gunfire.
From her position at the front of the crowd, Mother didn’t see the accident take place. The rope attaching the Countryside Christian Church to their Morris Marina snapped, just on the crest of Hilly Fields Road. She heard the screams when the float hit her father, but she assumed that the crowd had simply become overexcited, and she waved more enthusiastically. When an organizer tried to bring her to a halt, she smiled politely and walked around him.
For a few days, there were national press in the village. Mother’s father lost a leg in the accident, and a child – a pumpkin, home-stitched – had died. Mother was thrilled. She liked the slick, smart reporters, who had notebooks just like hers. She was royalty in the tragedy, both a victim and an unwilling participant. She offered a series of first-hand accounts, sitting solemnly in her living room beside her mother, with a tissue clutched in her fist. She concluded each interview by stating that – in light of the terrible events – she would very much like to become a journalist herself. She wanted to allow people to tell their own stories. In the back of her pad, she collected a series of names and phone numbers, with the title of each journalist’s publication noted in parentheses. She allocated stars to the national publications, based on their professionalism and the amount of time they had been willing to let her talk; she would know whom to contact, when her time came.
Her other visitors were representatives from the Countryside Christian Church. Three women knocked at the door one evening, so softly that Mother discounted it, and they knocked again. They waited in the rain, a tentative distance from the door, with scarves tied over their hair and their faces shrouded in shadow. The oldest woman was bearing a basket of warm bread covered by a tea towel, and when she held it out, Mother started. She thought, for an inexplicable moment, that the basket concealed a baby.
‘We pray for you every day,’ one of the women said, and another added: ‘And for your father.’
‘Yes – for your father, too. May we see him?’
‘He’s still in the hospital,’ Mother said. ‘My mum’s there now. And my sister.’
‘If you are ever lonely,’ said the oldest woman, ‘you mustn’t hesitate to join us.’
‘It’s important,’ said the next, ‘to welcome children with open arms.’
Her father returned home from the hospital a month later. The press were back in their cities, and the child’s funeral had taken place, following the same route as the Harvest Festival. Her father was quiet and static, propped in front of the television. The left leg of his trousers dangled behind him, like the ghost of a limb. He could no longer clean windows. For the first time, Mother wished that the accident had never happened.
‘And so The Parade began,’ Mother said. The parade of Mother’s misfortunes. ‘Well,’ she would say, when Father lost a job, or a teacher called, concerned, that one of us was not in school, or the first time that Father hit Ethan, ‘what can you do about The Parade?’
When she was no longer known as the Princess of the Harvest, Mother started to care for her father, while her own mother took up extra shifts in the village shop. She had to ensure that he ate breakfast – her mother suspected that he was trying to starve himself – and check the stump for signs of infection. Her father sat in his chair, and Mother knelt on the floor before him. She was proud of her disposition. She touched the smooth, sealed skin, and the purple seam where the wound had been stitched. She thought: perhaps I should become a doctor. They were silent during the inspections. Her father no longer asked her about her latest interviews, and she had nothing to report.
Her other responsibility was her sister, Peggy. Peggy was eight, and a great inconvenience. ‘She isn’t as clever as you,’ their mother said. ‘She needs you, Deb.’ When Mother finished her homework, she sat down to help Peggy with hers, and sighed at the juvenile nature of the tasks. She decided to get a number of questions wrong in order to avoid suspicion, but sometimes these were the simplest questions, and she hoped that Peggy would be called before the class, and asked to explain herself.
Mother failed the entrance examinations to the grammar school. Her family didn’t comment on it, as if there had never been any real prospect of success. The Parade continued. She went to the local comprehensive, which was occupied by farming oafs and their future wives, all of them reeking of cow shit. She had a single friend, Karen, whose family had recently moved to the area; Karen was painfully thin and perpetually bored, and when she lit a cigarette you could see the bleeding stumps of her fingernails. The teachers said that Mother was distracted and didn’t apply herself; but how could she, when she was so clearly meant to be elsewhere? She developed psoriasis on her elbows and underneath her eyes, and so became sensitive, which was how her mother explained it to the villagers who visited the shop, and asked what had become of her: Deborah is a very sensitive girl. To make matters worse, Peggy scraped into the grammar school, and began to speak to everyone in the family in a clipped, affected accent, which pierced each room of the tilting house – Peggy, for whom she had sacrificed everything.
Mother could sometimes be seen walking through the village to evening Mass at the Countryside Christian Church, still in her school uniform. She walked fast, with her arms tucked beneath her ribs and her stockings bunched at the ankles, and she was always alone. She liked to arrive just before the service began, and to depart before the rest of the congregation stood. She had heard that the village believed that she exemplified forgiveness, although for the most part she liked an evening away from her family, and the relieved smiles of the congregation, believing that she had pardoned them.
Mother left school at sixteen, with a few perfunctory qualifications, and a place on a secretarial course in the city. When she could afford to do so, she moved out of the house in the village and across the moors to the suburbs; that saved her from having to witness any more of Peggy’s ascent, or to care for her father, who was becoming confused. Over time, he had shrunk into the fabric of his chair, and when she kissed him goodbye, he flinched, as if she had hit him.
When Ethan and I were very young, and there was less competition, my parents would allow us to request bedtime stories. (Father saw books as inferior to his own tales; ‘They didn’t need paper in the days of Homer,’ he said, neglecting to elaborate on the history of the paper-making industry.) Ethan’s favourite story was that of his dramatic arrival into the world, which always culminated in Mother moving aside the living room rug to show the brown birthmark on the carpet. But my favourite story was that of the evening my parents met.
Karen had persuaded Mother to accompany her to the city on a Saturday night. ‘You’re getting boring,’ Karen said. ‘Even more boring than you used to be.’ (At the time of the telling, Mother believed that Karen still lived at home, unmarried, and with mental health issues; ‘Now who’s boring,’ Mother said.) They dressed in Mother’s flat, Mother always in black, with the white shroud of hair down to her waist, and a sad Elvis song on the stereo, whatever the occasion. They boarded the local bus with a bottle of Riesling to share en route.
The evening was a disaster. They ended up at a pub beyond the city centre – rickety tables; slot machines; a sticky carpet – where one of Karen’s old lovers was working behind the bar. They pretended to be surprised to see one another, although it was obvious to Mother that the whole evening had been contrived. She was the gooseberry, there to entertain Karen while the barman was serving. They drank free vodka and orange, and the barman winked at Mother when Karen visited the toilet. Just after eleven, somebody put on a vinyl – something heavy, which Mother had never heard before – and the barman and Karen started to dance. A toothless woman in sequins joined them, then one of the locals, barely able to stand, but gyrating his hips in Mother’s direction. After a short time of moving her weight from foot to foot, she snatched her jacket from the bar stool, and left.
She didn’t know where she was. She walked in the direction of the bus stop, tears in her e
yes. In another life, she was already asleep, warm and oblivious underneath her blankets. In this part of the city, the buildings were far apart, and between their lights were wastelands of shadow, so dark that she couldn’t see her shoes. She ran across the dead zones, stumbling at the puddles and potholes. She was quite sure that she had gone too far.
After half an hour, she came to the church.
It was set back from the road, at the end of a winding gravel path between graves. Its bricks were a warm, terracotta red, underlit through the night. It was after midnight, but the stained-glass windows were flickering: somebody had lit candles inside.
Thinking little, she parted the door. She could wait out the night inside, and leave long before the first Sunday service. At the threshold, she removed her shoes and tugged her dress down to her knees. She left damp footprints on the stone.
Five candles burned at the end of the aisle. She tiptoed towards them, glancing down each pew as she went. When she reached the pulpit, she turned back, as if addressing the congregation.
‘Hello?’ she called.
‘Hello,’ Father said.
Her heart jittered. He was standing on a balcony above her, his palms pressed against the railings.
‘Hi,’ Mother said.
‘Hello,’ he said again. ‘I wasn’t expecting anyone in.’
‘I feel very stupid,’ she said. ‘But I’m lost.’
‘That’s not so stupid.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘It’s a side project. I’m testing some new lighting. Join me, if you’d like.’
He beckoned. Mother was still shaking. She didn’t move, and Father laughed.
‘Don’t be frightened.’
‘I’m not frightened. How do I get up?’
‘Back by the entrance. Let me light the way.’
He disappeared, and bright light flooded the aisle. Relief rushed through her: foolish, to be afraid of the dark. She ascended the staircase as quickly as she could, hampered by her dress and holding onto the walls, navigating wires and banners and stacks of chairs. At the top, she looked for him, suspicious that it had been a prank, and that he would have hidden. Instead, he stood with his back to her, waiting.
