The Girl in the Red Coat

44

TWO YEARS, 301 DAYS

Fifteen years since I’d been to my parents’ house.

The path tiles shining black and white from the rain ten minutes before and not touched by my feet since I was a teenager. West Hampstead. A villa.

The hallway just the same. The same greenish submerged light, the small cross-legged gilt table under the mirror, the fat white lips of the silk orchid pursing down at the avocado-green telephone below. The phone I’d used to make my calls to Paul, tucking my hair behind my ear and smiling down the little black holes of the receiver and turning my back on the closed sitting-room door where I knew my mother’s ear would be cocked inside. I’d met him on a backpacking trip with girlfriends — ‘Oh, I knew we shouldn’t have let you go, I knew.’ It was university in Edinburgh or to the east coast to him, and in a passion it was him I flew to. Somehow it seemed it had to be one or the other and secretly I worried his passion wouldn’t survive me being in a cold Scottish town for four years.

The same smell lingering round the bottom of the stairs, never identified then, never even really registered, but now, after the years of not smelling it, so clear in its constituent parts — tinned fruit and spray polish.

In the living room I sat with my mother on the spotless grey velvet suite with the green fringing on the cushions. We both perched near the edge. Her eyes, blue, sweeping up and down on me as if she couldn’t quite believe it, that I was finally back here after so many years gone. Her eye colour so similar to my father’s that sometimes growing up, indecently, they’d seemed to me more like brother and sister rather than husband and wife. But the same blue colour as mine, after all. Packing cases were stacked up against the wall. They were selling up, splitting the money and buying a flat in London and a tiny cottage in Norfolk. I was so grateful for the support they’d shown me and had come to help.

‘How’s the packing going?’ I asked.

‘Oh, fine. You know how things gather over the years. So strange to get them out and look at them.’

Silence again. Being down in Norfolk was different; we’d come to be easy with each other down there. But me coming back to the family home after such an absence seemed to have ignited some half-buried spark. I sensed she felt embarrassed over what had happened; that families like ours didn’t have unseemly feuds. But of course they did — and missing daughters too. It can happen to anyone.

I noticed the drinks trolley and as a diversion said, ‘What about a drink? Let’s toast the move.’

The drinks trolley had only ever got stirred on its castors for visitors, the shining array of bottles and glasses shivering over the olive-coloured carpet at them. She hesitated and I said, ‘I’m not an alcoholic, you know, I only meant it might cheer us up.’ And I closed the lid on evenings spent in a whisky haze — even days sometimes — because they were past.

‘Oh, why not?’

She went to fetch ice and gave the trolley a nudge towards me, persuading its wheels out of the nests they’d made for themselves in the carpet. Behind it, pushing, she gave a little wiggle to her hips in parody of a hostess, and it was just to make me laugh. And I did, I laughed. ‘You have a great figure still,’ I said, because it had struck me that minute — her neat hips in tasteful grey wool trousers.

‘Thank you,’ she said, flushing slightly and her hand fluttering for a moment at her collarbone.

Then there was fizzing and caps being unscrewed and glasses tinkling and it seemed funny somehow, like she was conducting a chemistry experiment, so I laughed again. We sipped and breathed in juniper fumes, then glass in hand I started wandering the living room, exclaiming over the familiar, and — when did that crack in the huge Chinese plant pot happen? And the Persian rug with golds and salmon pinks; that was new — the boring London light falling over everything.

I moved to the packing cases, not yet crated up, and ran my fingers over cookery books, slightly silty from being in the kitchen; figurines — faces pressing against bubble wrap; the brass branch of a light fitting sticking out like an antler; and the thick fabric of a photo album. Afterwards, it felt as if my fingers had been searching it out all the time, feeling their way towards it. The brush of it against my skin, and flipping open the cover and the photograph of Carmel: black and white, pearlescent, close up.

I’d never seen this photograph before. Carmel’s eyes, soft and luminous in some studio light. She looked about eleven, twelve — so older than …

My mother appeared at the doorway and I realised she’d gone to fetch more ice but one look at my stricken face and she was by my side, cubes melting in her hands.

‘Beth, darling, that’s my mother. Don’t you remember me telling you how alike they looked?’

I shook my head.

‘Darling, you’ve had a shock. Go and sit down.’ I took the album with me.

She made another drink — without the flourishes this time — and put the wet glass in my hand.

‘I always thought, I thought she looked like her dad.’ The black-and-white face looked up at me from the sofa, not smiling, not severe, not even serene. I couldn’t describe what.

‘Superficially, at least.’ The little turn of her lip when talking about Paul had never quite gone. ‘But as soon as I saw the pictures in the paper, I couldn’t believe it.’

‘Tell me about her, about your mother.’ I wanted to know, urgently.

‘Oh, I don’t know what to tell.’

‘Anything, you hardly ever mentioned her when I was growing up.’ It had only just really occurred to me.

‘No. I suppose I didn’t.’

‘Well, why? Come on, I’m burning to know about her now — now I can see the resemblance.’

‘Oh, she was … she …’ I could see the shadows on her face, from the tunnel of memory she was entering. ‘She was … I can always remember, walking behind her, and the hairpins dropping from her hair and clattering on the ground. See,’ she smiled into the ice in her glass, ‘she was always different from the other mums.’

‘In what way different?’

‘Hectic, I don’t know, in her mind. She’d put on her beautiful purple coat, but not fix the collar on properly so it dangled by a button. She’d make cakes and forget to put the eggs in. Silly things, I suppose. But I was embarrassed by her — there, that’s the truth of it. I never liked talking about her because she was an embarrassment and that made me feel guilty because after all she was my mum so it was easier just to forget about it. I wanted her to be ordinary, you see.’

‘And she wasn’t?’

‘No. It got worse, as we grew up. Dad was in the navy so she carried on as she pleased. She’d got it into her head, well, she’d fallen in with these people. Some sort of spiritualists I think. We were carted about from pillar to post. People’s houses, some so poor and terrible you wouldn’t believe it. The war was long over but, you must remember, people were still living in filthy conditions and disease was rife in some parts of London. She had some sort of fantasy that she could help somehow. It was all in her mind of course. She’d go into bedrooms and the door would be shut and we’d be sitting there — me and my brother — staring at some dishevelled husband and trying not to breathe in the smell. Then after a while I refused, and she made me wait outside in the car, with the doors locked.’ She gulped at her drink. ‘Then when I was older and your dad came along and I saw he did things the way I liked them — shipshape, you know … What a relief.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She died, quite young. In pain — some kind of female cancer. I never quite found out what because people minced about things like that then. And her “friends”,’ she snorted, ‘nowhere to be seen that I knew of. Not that there was anything they could do, of course, where medical science had failed.’

We sat for a little, mulling the ice around our glasses, and I excused myself. I wanted to be with this knowledge, to put it in some kind of order, and make sense of it alone in the coolness of the bathroom. But along the corridor I got distracted, by the slightly open door, the orange flush to the light inside.

I pushed the door to my old bedroom and my heart turned over for the second time that day because not one thing had changed. The diaphanous sari I’d hung at the window still cast its tropical light, the photos of my girlfriends in a collage above the chest of drawers, all smiling, posing for the camera. The great gold canister of Elnett hairspray and my brush for backcombing. The jumble of junk-shop beads and cheap necklaces in a basket on the bedside table. I sank onto the bed, onto another sari — pink and gold, I’d been forever trying to sneak a bit of colour into that house — and tried to think. First Alice, now this. But however much I tried to stack my thoughts up they’d rattle down like pieces of a game collapsing.

I took a CD from the stack by the bed, the Pet Shop Boys, and brushed the plastic cover with my thumbs and I thought — it’s clean, perfectly clean. She must come in here and dust. Do we ever give up? I looked around the room, so preserved and spotless, and had the idea —

Maybe it’s not just me, perhaps many women keep shrines for their daughters.