Your Fault, page 13
Days pass. Your mother’s absence continues, and one afternoon you return from school to find your father standing at the living room window, gazing out at your street, as though wondering when she will come back to him. Sunshine glints through the clouds. He is dressed in his new casual shirt and brown trousers, his comfortable shoes. The shirt is easy-care Acrilan, long-sleeved, brown-striped, and clings to the soft mound of his paunch. His shoes are slip-on, and suede. His hair has been dyed again: you thought he had stopped that. He squints through the smoke from his cigarette, then nods. This’ll be me, he says.
A car pulls up outside, a dark green Morris Marina. SHEILA GREGORY. SCHOOL of MOTORING. He looks for his ashtray, stubs out his cigarette. Okay, he says, I’m off.
The Venetian blinds ripple as he slams the front door, and you watch as Sheila Gregory climbs out of her car, exchanges seats with your father. She is younger than he is, and dressed all in blue, a polyester trouser suit. Polyester is fashion’s favourite fabric. She talks for a minute or so, then they strap themselves in: clunk, click. Your father adjusts his mirrors, starts the engine, puts the car into gear, indicates left, glances over his shoulder, and joltingly draws away from the kerb. Slowly the car proceeds down Bawdeswell Avenue, and slowly takes the curve at the end.
Your sister has gone to play with Deborah Clough. You are alone in the house.
With no purpose in mind you kick off your shoes and wander upstairs and glance in your bedroom, then Lorraine’s, and examine your face in the bathroom mirror, and stand for a while on the landing. You consider the attic, but the effort of clambering up would be too great, and you already know what you would find there: rolls of wallpaper, empty suitcases, nothing much older than you are, and nothing to answer the question of what you are looking for.
Instead you stretch out on your father’s slim bed. A flurry of rain pitters the window, and you feel a draught seeping in, which must be why he sleeps on this side; your mother would never put up with it. This is her bedroom. Satin-varnished, honey-coloured, the teak veneer furniture contains only her things; the pictures and ornaments are the ones that she likes, as are the colours and fabrics. She is everywhere here, and everywhere absent.
The house is empty. You could do whatever you like, but still you remain on your father’s bed, watching the sunlight as it blooms on the furniture, briefly scintillates in the vase on the window-ledge. Time passes, the sunlight recedes, the rain comes again. Each moment melts into the next, and you are comfortable here, your present becoming your past.
At the age of eleven years and six months you have now begun to acquire a sense of the shape and length of a life, and often you imagine looking back on yourself from some far off place in the future, when these days in your life will be gone. But though your older self will know what lies in store for you, and how far you have progressed in your story, you cannot know; how could you know? All things are yet possible. There is your present, and the past you recall, and the past that precedes you, which your mother has now returned to.
You ease round and stand up. The empty clothes-hangers jangle when you open her wardrobe, and you inhale the stale, enclosed smell of her perfume. Your mother loves colour, your father does not. But she has left all her swirly-patterned dresses behind, taking only her dark clothes, the ones that you like, since she is a daughter in mourning; she has gone to Malta to bury her father.
Idly you slide her dresses and tunics and skirts along the brass rail – Crimplene in cerise and buttercup yellow; linen-look rayon in orange and turquoise; stripes and dots and paisley prints in lime green and lemon, raspberry red, budgerigar blue – until you find a small leather case, embossed with her initials, her old ones: D.C. for Dolores Camilleri. It sits among the shoeboxes at the back. The single latch beneath the leather strap is locked, always locked.
You have been here before, felt around in her pockets and handbags, half-heartedly rummaged through the clothes in her drawers. Only now does it occur to you to look again in her jewellery box, which sits on her dressing table. You tip it onto her bed and find among the tangle of bracelets and beads a fine silver chain on which is clustered a crucifix, a medallion of St Christopher, a small silver key.
The suitcase opens with a report, like the noise of a cap-gun.
Still you could not say what you are looking for, if you are looking for anything. Kneeling, your heart oddly pounding, you place the suitcase on the strip of carpet between your parents’ two beds. At this age you are well-practised at prying, and methodical. Carefully you remove each item in turn to examine it, then replace it just as you found it, beginning with two thin bundles of greetings cards, each tied with woollen thread, one pink and one blue. It’s a Girl! Congratulations on your Baby Boy!
Lorraine’s pile is larger than yours, since your parents knew so few people when they first came to this town. This was to be their beginning, and yours.
You lift out a small pile of books, around which is wound a string of wooden beads, a rosary. The fattest of the books is a leather-bound bible, and there are two volumes of prayers, illustrated for children, and an old passport, an autograph book, and a tattered paperback called Every Woman’s Manual: A Practical Guide to Marital Relations. Dog-eared, its spine ripped, the cover says it is recommended by doctors and educators throughout North America. What few pictures it contains are black and white and illustrate the differences between a naked man and a naked woman, and how sexual intercourse is conducted, and the progression of a foetus in the womb, then of a child into adulthood.
But you already know these things. At one time, old enough to be your mother, it seems your mother did not.
The passport gives her married name, though the photograph shows a young woman, not yet your mother. It is stamped 1959 and expired in 1969. Tucked inside at the back is her birth certificate, and yours, and Lorraine’s. Your father is named as your father, and you pause for a moment. Inwardly you nod: how could it be otherwise? His occupation is given as Fitter in Steel Works. There isn’t a space for her occupation, since she is to be his wife and your mother.
You replace the books and take out a bundle of letters and postcards, the elastic band beginning to perish. On one of the envelopes you recognize your father’s careful calligraphy. You recognize your aunt Tereza’s too, and Manny’s, but most of this handwriting is strange to you: evidently there were other people who wanted to share their news with your mother, though not now, not for a long time.
The stamps are Maltese and show the Queen’s head, the prices in pennies. Malta was part of the Empire; it belonged to Great Britain. The dates are smudged, but you can make out 1959, 1963, 1964, 1960. . . .
From the fattest of the envelopes you remove a thick fold of thin paper, the pages densely written, the language peculiar, full of letters you rarely use, in combinations you could not pronounce: jr, hx, wd, ij, zr. The words might say anything, and you are glad you can’t read them, since you know you should not be here, touching these things. None of this is your business, including the envelope addressed to Miss D. Camilleri by your father, which is private.
It is personal, dated May 1958, and of course you cannot help glancing inside it.
He may have been on leave; he must have been missing her. The message at the end is spelled out in tiny red Xs, dozens of minuscule kisses, more than half a page of them, the words enclosed in a heart shape.
ALL OF MY LOVE
MY DARLING DOLORES
FOREVER AND
EVER
JOE
X
Your fingers are trembling. Clumsily you roll the rubber band over the bundle and try to imagine him, the grown man who composed this. He would have been forty years old. Forever and ever, he wrote then, before you were born, before the future contained you. All of my love, he declared to your mother, this girl of sixteen, and as you return the bundle to her suitcase you wonder if he still loves her, and if she ever loved him. You wonder if she ever intends to come back to him, his darling Dolores.
You kneel between their separate beds and consider the case, these relics preserved by your mother, and finally – it will have to be the last thing – you tip out a collection of photographs from a pink paper bag, which includes the pictures of your parents from before they were married, and several black and white snapshots of people who might be her siblings, and one that depicts an older man, small and tubby, bandy-legged, in loose high-waisted trousers, an open-necked shirt. This could be your grandfather. His expression is serious, his eyes darkly shadowed.
He is dead now.
The bag smells faintly of strawberry bonbons and also contains half a dozen pictures of your parents on their wedding day, and here again you find your grandfather, standing next to his daughter, a white flower in his lapel. Portly and cheerful, he stands to attention. Your mother’s dress is white, and she wears a gauzy white headdress, holds a spray of white flowers. Your father is flanked by another man in uniform, both of them grinning. Your mother alone does not appear to be happy. In each of these photographs, she alone is not smiling.
You stare at the shape of her, at her belly especially; you examine her closely, and confirm what you have always suspected.
The bride was married in a white dress, with her father beside her, and the groom was a soldier, a sergeant. But whatever else these images might wish to present of the time that precedes you, they cannot conceal that you were the cause of their marriage, and all their unhappiness since. Your parents were married because your mother was pregnant.
The lock on her little suitcase is stiff; you must force it to close. The gap between the shoeboxes shows you where it belongs, and how it should be aligned. You tidy the clothes on their rail, and return the key to the jewellery box, and the jewellery box to her dressing table. Then you smooth out the bedclothes, remove any trace of your being here, and as you turn for the door you are stalled by a sadness not simply for your mother and father, or for yourself, but for this moment, which contains their two beds and her honey-coloured furniture, the empty vase on the window-ledge and her lingering scent, the pittering rain and the design in the wallpaper and all the other times you have come into this room, never quite sure what you are searching for.
Perhaps now you have found it.
Quietly you close the door after you and pause at the top of the stairs. Soon you will be starting in Senior School, and this will be the last time that you pry into your mother’s belongings. At the age of eleven years and six months, you make this promise to yourself, and to your mother – as if she were still able listen to your thoughts, as if she were still privy to the secrets inside you.
But you are not the only one to be curious about your mother and father; nor are you the only one to be left in the house on your own. Your sister is insistent, tugging your sleeve. Come on, she says; I want to show you something.
Hold on, you say, and place your mug on the carpet, the syrupy dregs of your tea. You fold down the page of your book – You Only Live Twice – and allow your sister to lead you away from the settee, through the kitchen and into the shed, where everything smells of detergent.
Since she came back from Malta, your mother has not stopped cleaning. As if it has been decreed by the Corporation – a term of your tenancy – no part of your house has been spared. Everything here has been scoured, everything tidied. Your shoes are lined up in their pairs. Beneath the small, high window stands her Duo-matic twin-tub, on which sits a blue plastic ironing basket, and a packet of Ariel, which washes cleaner because it washes biologically. The sheets, towels and clothes in the basket have been folded, ready for the iron. Across in the corner is the coal cupboard, where no coal has ever been tipped. Instead it contains all the toys you’ve outgrown: your sister’s tricycle and pogo-stick, your red and blue scooter, deflated paddling pool, roller-skates. You are forever outgrowing yourself. So too is Lorraine.
Look, she whispers.
Hanging from the furthest coat-peg is your father’s tartan-lined donkey jacket. Your sister pushes the other coats and jackets aside to show you the right sleeve, which is tucked into the right pocket. She eases this out to reveal a magazine, rolled into a tube and concealed inside the forearm. The magazine is an issue of Knave, the world’s greatest gallery of glamour, priced at five shillings. The woman on the cover is lying on a bed of straw, displaying her bare back and bottom, and the surprise is not that your father should have brought this into your house, but that your sister should have found it before you.
Let me see, you say, and move aside the ironing basket. You spread open the magazine on top of the washing machine and slowly turn through the pages as your sister stands at your elbow, glancing at the women, looking up at your face. You adopt an interested, appreciative expression.
There are no men in this magazine, no pictures of penises. The women are dressed in corsets, black stockings, white stockings, camisoles, stilettos, cork-soled platform shoes, and they are posing on iron-framed beds, fur rugs, large wicker chairs. They are showing their bare breasts and privates, their sun-lit mounds of pubic hair, but more than these details, it is the faces that hold you. Audrey, Shelagh, Pia, Trudy and Eva. Especially Eva, who looks so much like your mother’s friend Nadia and is almost twenty-two and presently living with some other young folk in a spacious town house in London’s Muswell Hill. She works as a ‘glorified clerk’ (her words!) in a West End bookstore. You might want to swing by to browse there.
Will you tell Mum? asks Lorraine.
No, you say, for your mother must not know that you have studied these pictures, or suspect you of snooping elsewhere in the house. Will you?
No, says your sister uncertainly.
You’d better not, Lorraine. It’ll just make them argue. Seriously. Mum will go mental again.
Your sister nods, disconsolately stares at the magazine. Do you think he’s looking after it for someone else?
Yes, maybe, you say.
She scrunches one side of her face, rubs at her left eye, always her left eye. I’m going upstairs, she says then.
Okay, you say, and follow her through to the living room, where you flop onto the settee. You pick up your book. But the story is now lost to you; the words barely register, since you are so impatient to look again at the women in the magazine. You will go back to them as soon as you can, whenever you are next left alone in the house, drawn by an allure that you cannot yet name, that must belong to your future.
At this age your appetite is constant; it seems you cannot stop eating. Here you are in the kitchen, smelling of sweat and smeared grass, the hours you have spent playing cricket. It is the summer holidays. The breeze through the window is warm; your mother’s geraniums are luminous red on the window-ledge. You hear your sister’s soft voice. She is lying on her belly in the back garden, Nadia’s daughter beside her. They are blowing seeds from a dandelion. Ana is five now, your sister is nine.
You run the cold tap and pour some squash in a beaker, drink it down in one go. Momentarily you feel a chill in your belly, and belch. You kick off your trainers and take a tub of margarine from the fridge, a knife from the drawer. The loaf in the pantry is fresh. You tear open the packaging and take out the end-slice and coat it thickly with margarine.
The time is nearly three o’clock. Through the gap in the door to the living room you can see your mother and Nadia, sitting side by side on the settee, sipping martinis.
This is a new thing. In the weeks since she returned, your mother has rearranged all the furniture, every item in every room, including her bedroom. Many items have been thrown out or given away. Other things have replaced them, including a new sideboard bought on hire purchase from Sewell’s, the Largest Complete Home Furnishers in town. She is keeping up with the times. Scandinavian-styled, the sideboard is seven feet long and finished in teak, with soft subtle lines lending tranquility and grace. The sculptured wooden handles provide easy access to masses of hoarding space, which includes a cocktail cabinet whose door opens downwards on extendable arms. The catches are magnetic, and you will break them if you are not careful.
Inside the cabinet are bottles of Cinzano Bianco and Harvey’s Bristol Cream, Smirnoff Vodka and Teacher’s Scotch Whisky, Warnink’s Advocaat, Dubonnet wine, Schwepps bitter lemon. To celebrate the sideboard’s arrival, you have been allowed your first taste of alcohol, a yellow, frothy concoction called a snowball, which is sweeter than pop and burns in your chest. You could acquire a taste for it, as your father has acquired a taste for the Teacher’s Scotch Whisky. He has replaced the bottle three times already; three times that you’ve noticed.
Your mother and Nadia stop talking the instant you come through the door.
Hello Peter, says Nadia.
Hello, you say.
Have you been playing football?
Cricket, you say, and show her your palms, stained red from the ball. It’s our tea-break.
You are flushed in the face, she says.
You nod; you have no reply.
Nadia grins at your mother. Curvaceous, thick-thighed, she wears heavy mascara, pale lipstick, a short orange skirt, and as you chew on your bread you stare at her legs, the sheen of her nylons. Her hair is dyed blond and parted down the middle, curled up at her shoulders. She is as glamorous as anyone you have seen on the television, as disturbing as any of the women in Knave.
Peter, we were talking, your mother says then.
I’m not stopping you.
You are being cheeky, she says. Go and play with Ana and Lorraine.
I’m not a baby, you say; I don’t play.
Peter!
Okay, you say simply, and return to the kitchen. You open the back door as if to go out, then close it as if you have gone. You wait several moments, and when your mother and Nadia resume their conversation you slide in your socks across the kitchen linoleum and stand with your ear to the gap in the door. Methodically, quietly, you nibble around the edges of your soft bread as you listen to what they are saying.
