The Illuminations

THE DARKROOM

They crossed the border and Luke spoke of the letters Harry had sent to Anne in their early years. He wanted to help her picture things and put her story together, for him and for her, in readiness for Blackpool. He wanted to establish her good times. She didn’t ask him how he had come to read them, as if their contents must have been known to him all along. ‘So,’ he said. ‘You came to Glasgow from America about 1955. You gave up your apartment. You came back to look after the aunts in Atholl Gardens.’

‘Is that my house?’

‘Theirs. Up the West End.’

‘Gardens.’

‘That’s right.’

‘A lot of bedrooms.’

‘You were looking after them. And after a few years you joined a photography club. Do you remember?’

‘My Auntie Anna died.’

‘You joined the Glasgow Camera Club.’

‘Was it in a long street?’

‘Sauchiehall Street.’

‘I used to go there.’

‘And in 1958 the club went to Blackpool. It was a trip. You all went down on a bus.’

‘That’s where Harry lived.’

‘No. Harry lived in Manchester. You saw him give a talk at the Masonic Hall.’

‘In Blackpool?’

‘Adelaide Street. You went with your friends to hear him talk about photography.’

‘Harry spoke.’

‘Yes. He sent you a cutting about it that was in the paper. The talk was called “The Ethics of Documentary Photography”. I think that’s what it was. He wrote to you about it once you were back in Glasgow.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘My voice is different. I have an accent.’

‘He spoke about Bert Hardy and the man who took the pictures of the children on the streets in London.’

‘I know Bert Hardy.’

Bert phoned and said there’s an editor from America who wants the youth of today.

Luke mentioned more dates and details he’d gleaned from the letters. He went carefully. Some made her nod while others silenced her. Harry’s letters spoke of these men, the Young Meteors he called them, who had a new approach to capturing life in Britain. ‘And you kept going back to Blackpool. Did you have other friends there?’

‘Harry lived near there, in Manchester.’

‘Right.’

‘We’d meet at Woolworth’s. Under the clock tower.’

It was obvious from the letters that Anne had started taking pictures again when she met Harry. She was looking after the aunts, but she went to the Camera Club to escape, then Blackpool

to escape, and the photographs she began taking were different from her previous ones. Luke couldn’t understand what would make someone who had taken pictures of random objects suddenly want to photograph poor people standing at factory gates. He’d seen examples of both. He remembered seeing prints when he was a child and drawing on the back of them and never knowing where they came from.

She fell in love and it changed her style. That much he’d gleaned before they set out, reading the letters, thinking her thoughts. But he didn’t know why she gave it all up again in 1963. He felt there must be an answer lurking quietly in her current confusions, but it lay deep down. When he was growing up he had questioned her about the photographs and she said it had become important to capture real lives. The conversations between them had made them close. It was like a kind of teaching. Yes, he thought: she gave him lessons in how to aim above himself. She made him unusual, and she helped him to believe that a readiness for art was equal to a capacity for life. ‘Art is a moral adventure,’ he said to her in his university days and she’d winked at him. He’d got it. He was hers. She had no suspicion that this kind of hope would lead him into the world in a different way, but she supported him when he joined up, feeling it was all part of some secret quest that both of them understood.

‘Harry liked the shipyards,’ she said as they drove along. ‘And they were lovely people.’

‘The workers?’

‘Harry and the men.’

‘And did you sell any pictures?’

‘Bert worked for the

Picture Post

.’

‘And Harry would help you?’

‘Harry was in the war. Same as you.’

The horizon was orange and the crowd at Blackpool was already on the promenade. He slowed the car and saw the dirty sea through the painted railings. He saw the North Pier, the new public art, the laughing men with their mates and their chips. A sudden feeling of excitement filled the air between them and Anne giggled before Luke turned right at a bookmaker’s shop. It was late afternoon and the greyness of the town was expiring before their eyes. Kids had glow-sticks and coloured windmills made of light. ‘In one hundred yards you have reached your destination,’ the sat nav said. Anne sat up and craned her neck to see above the buildings.

‘Tower,’ she said.

He parked in York Street and Sheila answered the door. ‘Ee, Mrs Blake!’ she said. ‘Lord Jesus, Mrs Blake, come in.’ The paint was peeling on the door and the hall was filled with orange light as Anne stepped inside. Luke wasn’t sure if she had any proper memory of Sheila, or her sister, who was standing in the hall with a tea towel and a glass of beer. But she certainly recognised the house and was beaming into the carpet and the stairs. It was as if they’d walked in on a family celebration. ‘You’ll see some changes, Mrs Blake,’ said Sheila. ‘Tony’s a builder. He’s renovated, God, a dozen times, since Mam died. Did you know Mam died, Mrs Blake?’

Anne just smiled. She saw the lady talking and then wiping her nose. ‘Don’t mind me, I get emotional,’ Sheila said.

‘I know your mum,’ Anne said.

‘Of course, you did. Of course. And she spoke fondly of you all her life, Mrs Blake.’ The woman looked at her sister and bit her lip and took the towel to dab her eyes. ‘Look, I’m away again!’

Anne stared contentedly down the hall, as if seeing a great deal there, her own life and the lives of other people, and when she turned to the old hall mirror she remembered Harry. She asked herself if the bed upstairs would still be the one they bought.

Luke went out to get the bags and stopped to look up. It seemed for a minute that everything around him was available, and he knew, just there, standing at the open boot of the car, that this was a night he would always remember. Years on, perhaps, when it happened he was sixty or seventy, he would remember York Street and the look of the promenade and would still see Anne in the lighted hall with those women. The house was tall and it looked like an old B&B with lace curtains. Before he went back in he thought about Harry’s letters. They were full of advice about how she could develop her photographs, about how to work with contrast not only to get at life but to enhance it. Luke saw their past with Harry’s voice in his head, and realised he could hear a conversation between them. When he brought the bags in to the hall he could see Anne standing apart from the women, contented but lost, and he returned Harry’s words to her without opening his mouth.

I love you darling for your promise and the things I never had. It takes courage to be a true artist and I don’t even have enough to catch the train.

Don’t talk to me about what’s true, Harry. No more, do you hear me? No more about the truth. Life isn’t a photograph.

Isn’t it, darling?

Anne reached over and touched some scarves that were hanging on the pegs, a few coloured scarves, one of them with mittens sewn in at each end. She took off her glove and gently put her hand into one of the mittens, and smiled.

‘Will she be okay with the stairs?’ Sheila asked.

‘No bother,’ Luke said. ‘Thank you.’ She reached up and kissed his cheek, then turned to Anne.

‘I’m leaving you to get settled in,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be here, Mrs Blake, if there’s anything you need. If there’s anything at all you want you just tell me, okay?’

Anne moved with surprising steadiness up the stairs and Luke came behind with the bags. At one point, on a high landing, she stopped and he waited a few steps behind. When he looked at her face he saw a trace of something young, as if the landing light knew and liked her. For a moment he imagined a young woman contemplating a fresh start, coming up the stairs with a vision of work and the man she loved. Did he ever come? Framed drawings of seabirds were hung around the landing.

It was warm inside, curiously warm, as if the heating had only recently been turned on again in the room. When they stepped inside Anne just walked to the middle and stopped. ‘Don’t put the light on,’ she said. He closed the door and stood with his back against it and watched her step around the bed and put her hands on the window. The sky outside seemed blue in the way time itself can be blue, a perfect dusk with Blackpool framed in the windows. Anne looked out as if the scene was something she had always known. She didn’t move. And after a moment she turned.

‘Is that you, Harry?’

A MIND OF WINTER

The truth would keep for another day. Anne was sitting by the window with a cup of tea in her lap and Luke was unpacking the bags and placing things in the bathroom. On the keyring there

were smaller keys which Sheila said were for cupboards above the sink. She said they were full of old things belonging to Anne. ‘Mostly papers, I think. My mother warned the whole family not to interfere with Mrs Blake’s privacy.’ Luke asked her why her mother was so strict about it. ‘I’ll tell you when we sit down and have a drink, love. Your grandmother was good to us. She was good to us and we don’t forget.’

He’d never seen one before, a bedsitter. That’s what it was, a fine old bedsitter in Blackpool. The bed was under the windows and was made up with a fresh white eiderdown. There was a table with two chairs and a vase of roses Sheila had placed there. Anne bent down to sniff the flowers and she said how nice and warm it was in the room. Along the wall on the other side was a bed settee that Sheila had made up for Luke. The light was dim and perfect, Anne thought: just enough to make you concentrate on the view, because that’s what you came for. ‘I’ll tell you,’ Anne said. ‘We got a lot of things wrong but we got a lot of things right.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Because we knew what to look for, just like you.’

‘Why do you say that, Gran? I’m not a photographer and I never did any of the things you did.’

‘Yes, but you’ve got the spirit.’

‘That’s nice to hear.’

‘Some of them said there was … that’s right … justice in it.’

‘Justice? That’s a big word.’

‘That’s what it was,’ she said. ‘Making it real.’

She rocked a little in the chair. She rocked and the movement gave something to her words and to the evening light that came from the window and made a pattern on the bed.

‘Are you all right, Gran?’

‘I could just sit here.’

Luke pulled a bottle of Talisker from his rucksack and poured himself a decent measure. Sometimes whisky is just right for finding and knowing the heart. Across from the bed, two large photographs hung in simple frames. One of them had a label, saying ‘

Winter, Fifth Avenue

Alfred Stieglitz’ and the second showed the old Wills cigarette factory in Glasgow, a flyover and a motorway in the foreground. He knew it from walks his gran took him on when he was a child.

Two full bottles of bleach stood in the sink. Luke didn’t know for sure that other people often stayed here, but the feeling was confirmed when he found some loose Argos bags in the wardrobe and a Zippo in a cereal bowl. It was a guesthouse and the landlady had said rooms could be scarce in Blackpool in the summer months. What Luke found harder to understand was why Sheila and her family would’ve kept faith with ‘Mrs Blake’ through twenty-odd years of her hardly ever being here. Did she phone them regularly when her mind was right? Had she come on trips without saying to anyone back home?

He bent down to see the books. Roger Mayne:

London Photographs.

Mark MacDonald:

The American Still Life. Darkroom Handbook and Formulary

by Morris Germain. On the bottom shelf, he found another series and he put down the glass. They were his university books. Here they were, all the stuff he had studied for his degree, the novels, the textbooks, set out next to each other. Good God.

The Trumpet Major

Seeing them together gave solidity to some part of himself that he’d never considered defined. Here it was: personal history. He had met the world with these books, and seeing them together made him nostalgic for a person who was once keen to be transformed. Long before he

became a soldier, the mystery of life was all in the mind, and now his books were physical evidence of what Anne once called ‘your itinerary’.

He looked over to where she sat. She had preserved what she could of his young mind’s entanglements. Up to a certain point she had kept pace with what he was learning and she must have known he would travel into other worlds, as she had, into fresh landscapes with their own souvenirs. She had taken steps to know him in the real time of his experience, not because she knew better but because she loved him.

‘You’re something else,’ he said. And when she turned it was as if the holiday spirit rested with her.

‘It’s a nice night. Can we go down?’

You could hear voices on the street. You could hear the crowd gathering and the car horns. He picked out one of the books and it fell open at a place held by a Glasgow train ticket. It was something he’d loved when he was eighteen, ‘The Snow Man’, a poem by Wallace Stevens that he’d never forgotten. ‘One must have a mind of winter,’ it said, ‘To regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow.’

THE ILLUMINATIONS

They weren’t in a hurry to cross the road. They let people pass in front of them, moving faster, girls with buggies, men with beer. Anne was actually laughing: she pointed to a cockles-and-mussels van as if wonders would never cease. She said the Tower Ballroom was once on fire and if you wanted to know a nice shop in Blackpool it was the Camera Corner. She moved in and out of

lucidity, in and out of herself. They strolled along the dark street and she appeared completely unbothered by the darting children and the girls in cowboy hats.

‘Mods and rockers,’ she said. He didn’t know why she said it but it didn’t matter. The tower soared above them. The crowd poured into the road and the kids were excited. Luke found a bench on the promenade with a good view of the bandstand, the compère and his teeth and the microphone up to his chin. ‘Quiet, everybody!’ he shouted and you could hear the bleeps of the coin machines behind the sudden hush. ‘Welcome to the world famous Blackpool Illuminations. With one switch, ladies and gentleman, we will light the city from Squires Gate to Redbank Road, over one million individual bulbs and strips of neon!’

Luke had once seen a lit-up Ferris wheel on the cover of a book, the yellow lights revealing a face in the dark blue magic of the sky, and he thought of it again on the prom at Blackpool. He was sure that the lights were made to reveal them all. Waiting for the switch-on, the crowd grew nostalgic and swayed as one, seeming to sense an unknown social purpose in the loveliness of the spectacle. The everyday street lamps of Blackpool appeared in those final minutes to concede their own dullness in the face of what was coming, and they dimmed. ‘Have a wee drink, missus,’ said a drunk young man behind them. Anne smiled up at him and took the cup and stared at it.

‘Is this mine?’ she said.

‘Pear cider. Top gear. Get it down ye, missus.’ Anne put the cup to her mouth and the man seemed pleased and Luke just shook his head and laughed. A blonde pop singer jumped up and down on the stage and blew a kiss to the cheering crowd. Luke put his hand down to take Anne’s when the countdown got low,

squeezing it gently. The crowd was familiar with this annual spectacle, the Illuminations, yet the sense of anticipation seemed palpable, as if it was happening for the very first time. The pop singer hit the button and light travelled up the tower and spread from there like a beautiful, endless halo over the whole city. Anne stood up. The bulbs going towards the sea were perfect dots of red and they swung above the crowd. Luke’s stomach lurched to see them, the red dots going into the dark, but when he looked in other directions he only saw people laughing and hoisting their kids. Gold light was falling from all the buildings and it fell on Anne, too: he could see it reflected in the wet surface of her eyes. Her face showed not only the happy time she was having but all the happy times she had ever had. He leaned over and put his arms around her. ‘I’m so glad you came with me. So glad.’

‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’

The sky was something else. As they walked on to see the illuminations beyond the North Pier, Luke thought of how the sky had looked above Kajaki the night they finished. He’d heard the last of the grenades and the fighting was over and when he looked up he felt there was nothing but cold stars.

They went through the crowd and Anne put both hands on his arm and they walked slowly. Children darted past them and around them and the movement seemed to please her, as if this was what children should do on a night like this. They came onto the North Pier and he felt the heat of the many bulbs. They walked among the old slot machines, peep shows, one-armed bandits. How to Choose a Sweetheart. What the Butler Saw. Ghost Story. She touched each of the booths as if she knew them. And the one called The Gypsy she especially liked: a lady with a headscarf of coins dispensing predictions from behind glass.

Look at the sunset, Harry. And she says, she says … You don’t need a camera for that.

Some things you just remember.

Life isn’t a photograph, Harry.

Isn’t it, darling?

They walked further down the pier and stopped to look back at the tower and the lights. Luke could see blue reflected light on the ridges of the sea. A man was playing a tin guitar next to one of the sweet kiosks and Anne pointed to him as they passed and squeezed Luke’s arm. ‘We used to go and see all the groups that played,’ she said. ‘Those four boys with the haircuts. The drummer was nothing to look at.’

‘Did you go to the pubs?’

‘Harry loved the bars,’ she said. ‘One of them used to put a monkey on the counter and you’d feed it nuts.’

They sat quietly watching the lights.

‘Do you want chips?’ Luke said.

She nodded.

He brought them back and they sat down on one of the white iron benches. Up on the promenade a tram was passing encased in neon and it was playing the kind of tune you used to hear on the radio. She didn’t look up and Luke could see she was all about the chips. With the colours around them and bulbs lit for miles up the coast, Luke wondered if Blackpool could be seen that night from the moon. A minute later the fireworks burst over the Irish Sea. She looked up, laughed again. Luke felt himself melting away, a snowman on the bench, sitting in for someone else. There was nothing beside her but the essence of Harry.

He breathed out. She would never know. But he’d learned from the letters that they weren’t married and that she had spent

many of her holidays waiting for him. Harry Blake was married to another woman and they had three children and he lived with them in a house in Manchester. All the stories she built around him came from a hope she had, a dream she made, but it was really an affair that proved impossible. He only came to the bedsit when it suited him. It then occurred to Luke, sitting on the bench amid the lights and the smell of vinegar, that the letters had stopped when Anne was pregnant with his mother. Harry Blake, his grandfather, the great Harry, had left her in the lurch, and that was the thing she could never say.

BOSSA NOVA

Anne wanted to remain in the bar downstairs with Sheila’s family. She wanted to ask Luke if that would be all right, but instead she just smiled at the mirror and walked down the hall while he was hanging up the coats. They were about to go upstairs when Sheila emerged and took Anne’s hand and said she was having none of it. ‘We’re a long time dead, aren’t we, Mrs Blake? Come into the lounge and have a glass with the girls.’

Anne sat with a vodka and tonic. The bubbles were nice and she liked the voices of the people. Sheila’s family were all good at laughing and they sat at a round table, balloons taped to the wallpaper, while a man played an electronic keyboard. Anne said: ‘Bossa Nova.’ Then she stared at the beer mats, wondering if Harry would know where to find her. Behind the bar was a popular print of a crying boy and Anne fixed her eyes on it and felt it was a cold winter painting like ones of New York. Luke asked Sheila whether she’d mind if he went out for a couple of hours.

‘Of course, love! Away you go and enjoy yourself.’ She gave him a shove and took a gulp from her glass. ‘A young man like you should be out causing a rumpus on a night like this.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Away!’ she said. ‘I’ll make up your bed in the darkroom and you can just climb in later. Away and do your thing. You don’t have to pass the evening with blob-mouths like us! We’ll look after Mrs Blake and get her up to bed.’ He looked at Anne and actually saw her contentment, her sweet attention, float in the air of the room without quite landing anywhere.

‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’ she said.

SPROGS

Flannigan was standing in the Washington. He’s one of those guys who knows how to be good-looking as he waits at a bar. It’s the stance, the confidence, the all-round readiness with the glad-eye and the lip. Luke stood at the door and shook his head at the whole performance. ‘Is that an AK-47 in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’

‘Hey, dickwad,’ Flannigan said, going for the shoulder hug. ‘You’re even uglier than you were in the sandpit, Captain. How’s it shakin’? And I thought you only went to the classy places.’

‘I do. This is old school.’

‘It might be old school but it’s full of losers. Look at the state of that fucken disaster over there.’ He pointed into the corner of the pub where Private Dooley stood grinning by the jukebox.

‘Of all the chairborne motherfuckers in the history of the British army, if it isn’t our own Captain Campbell.’

Luke walked up to him. ‘Fuck sake, Doosh,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’

‘No. We kept it on the down low. I only emerge from the chat-room when I know the real Neanderthals are coming out. So when he told me it was Blackpool, I said “What! Awesome. This boy’s getting on the first Ryanair out of here.” So what you drinking, you lightweight?’

He ordered three pints. Three whiskies.

‘I’m insisting on Irish,’ Dooley said at the bar. ‘None of your fucken sheep-shagging Highland cheeky water tonight.’

‘Listen, dude,’ Luke said. ‘I know you live on the other side of refinement, but everybody knows Scotch whisky is unsurpassed, so suck it up, bitch.’

Flannigan laughed and nodded to Dooley. ‘Oh, we’ve missed the old brain-box, haven’t we, Doosh?’

‘Fucken A,’ Dooley said. ‘You’ve left us with the fucken horror-pigs, man. I’m talking shite hawks.’

‘The other side of refinement!’ Flannigan said. ‘You crack me up, Jimmy-Jimmy. It’s all tossers in the platoon now. We left all the education in a pool of piss in Kajaki. Fucken lady-boys giving it Super Mario on their da’s old mobile. I’m telling you. Boys about thirteen they’re sending us. Miserable as fuck at the base since you and the major fucked off to join Destiny’s Child or wherever the fuck you’ve been.’

Luke noticed Flannigan was now wearing a fancy watch, the same as Dooley. They clinked pints. ‘Get your big fat gypsy lips around that, Dooley,’ Flannigan said. Dooley drank then rolled up his sleeve and revealed a new tattoo. He said he and Flannigan and Lennox got them in Dubai on the way back and it was the most painful one he ever got. Luke leaned in

and Flannigan also rolled up his sleeve. It wasn’t a very typical tattoo, but it was identical on each of them: a short ridge of mountains and a bird above the summit with extended wings, the bird showering down heavenly light and the words ‘Free Afghanistan’. Luke wondered if everything in life was about the image you were left with. Nothing might change on the ground but the movie could be made and the pics could whizz into cyberspace. The turbines at Kajaki would never leave their wrappings but these young men would carry these pictures to their graves.

‘Very nice,’ he said.

‘Here’s to it,’ Flannigan said, lifting his glass. ‘And good riddance to all the bullshit.’ They battered through several rounds, talking about the regiment and what they’d been doing since the tour. They all avoided it for a while and then the business of Scullion came up.

‘I think he was a mess going into it,’ Flannigan said. ‘Like, fucken totalled in the brain. He gave Rashid the baton and that guy was one turncoat motherfucker from the off. You could see it in his one good eye: ANA my arse, he was Terry, bitch, and riding hard for the biff, bang, pow. Remember? Remember his face all kissy to the major, but underneath, man, he was plotting the whole time to fuck us right up. Rashid, man: to him it was open mic night at the Hotel Taliban. It was, as well. And he threw the whole fucken section into the mosh-pit.’

‘Not just us,’ Dooley said.

‘He had them watching us for miles.’

‘The boy from the Caledonian …’

‘Miles, man.’

‘The boy he shot.’

‘Fucken radioed ahead, didn’t he, Rashid?’

‘It was a day out, man,’ Flannigan said. ‘The fucken white rovers and the heavy metal. It was a day out. You could never have known it was going to be an ambush.’

‘Stop,’ Luke said. He was still nodding after he said the word and put down his whisky. ‘It was a massive fucken error. A massive fucken error, do you hear? I knew the major wasn’t stable. And I knew I wasn’t fucken doing that well, either. And we were your superior officers. And the whole day and the whole fucken next day was bad shit from beginning to end. The boy’s dead and those kids in the orchard are fucken dead, too.’

‘Captain …’

‘We can’t fix it.’

Dooley waited a moment and then the all-nonsense version of his life kicked in and he smiled. ‘I just want to clean my gun, Captain,’ he said.

‘Good on you, Doosh.’

‘I’ll never forget it,’ Flannigan said. ‘Remember the way the major shot him through the eye?’

‘He was dead by then,’ Luke said.

Dooley spun his empty glass on the table with a finger. ‘Was it the good eye or the bad eye he shot?’

‘They were both bad,’ Flannigan said.

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Luke. ‘He saw plenty we couldn’t see.’

The privates were young enough to allow every military event to embolden their spirit. That was all. To them, the captain was a defeated man, but they wouldn’t show it: they loved Jimmy-Jimmy. More than any test at home, more than any big event in their own lives, the events on the way to Kajaki would define for them what it means to have your courage measured

and tested against other men. They had grown sure in their hearts that they knew more about real life. The captain was now adrift in the civvies’ lightweight world, so the night was about nostalgia, and that was fine. It was what the two soldiers had expected. ‘He’s never coming back,’ Flannigan said when Luke went off for a minute.

‘What, from the bogs?’ Dooley said.

‘No, you dickwad. To the army. He’s moved on, lad. He’s not coming back and that’s it.’

‘Wish it was me,’ Dooley said.

‘No, you don’t.’

Three pints. Three rums.

‘Christ on a bike, Jimmy-Jimmy. Rum! Have you gone and bought your sailor whites and joined the fucken Andrew?’

‘Bite my todger, Flannigan.’

‘They will, man,’ Dooley said. ‘The Andrew, the British navy. They’ll chomp off your birthday sausage and spit it into the English Channel.’ He leaned over to clink glasses again. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get debaucherous.’

‘Debauched,’ Luke said.

‘Whatever.’

They drank in silence for a moment and then Dooley stuck his hand in his pocket and produced a bag. ‘E, anyone?’

‘Shocking behaviour,’ Flannigan said. Then he poked his fingers into the bag and took out two pills. He swallowed one immediately with a mouthful of rum and the other he slid into the breast pocket of his jacket.

‘Later,’ said Luke.

THE METROPOLE

He wouldn’t have said no point blank. Easier, and less judgemental, to drink your share and subtly dodge the pills. Most of his years in uniform had been spent artificially high or falsely tranquil, states that appeared, with hindsight, to mirror the campaigns themselves. He was the old dog now and in his mind he was easing towards the door. People would say it was all part of the general disorder to have smoked pot with the privates but such people don’t know the British army.

Another few drinks, then up to the darkroom. That was his plan. He didn’t want to bail too early but he knew as he sat there that his compass was set for the off. Listening to himself banter about the army and its characters, its duties and compensations, he saw again how much he had once wished to live like a good, sensible machine. But he’d failed at that. He wanted them to know the failure was his. There was no such thing as an ordinary life. He’d learned that from Anne and he learned it from himself. You can only live a life proportionate to your nature. And he was calm. He was getting there. He could imagine a future less taken up with loss.

‘With a drink in you, Flannigan, you’re an absolute pest to all people of the female persuasion.’ Luke said it as they walked down the promenade and Dooley joined in.

‘He’s even worse on E.’

There was scarcely a group of girls on the prom that Flannigan didn’t stop and ask for a light or the way to another bar, allowing Dooley to bring up the rear with his shorter presence, ogling away. A posse of lip-glossed girls in dangerous heels told them to shut up a minute and listen. What they wanted was the Metropole

Hotel, down at the end of the prom, open late, where they had a great karaoke bar and a disco.

‘Are you the shy, sexy one?’ said a girl wearing something debatably more than a bikini, tottering up to walk next to Luke, offering him the dregs of a Bacardi Breezer.

‘I’m their dad,’ Luke said.

‘Hey, slappers!’ she shouted at the group in front. ‘Wait for me and Dumbledore. We going up the Metropole?’

‘Yo, bitch,’ a girl in front shouted. ‘Get your skinny arse in gear.’

‘Is the place still open?’ Luke asked.

‘The Metropole never shuts.’

‘But isn’t it old people there?’

‘Oh, aye. Like wheelchairs. You’ll love it.’

‘And why would you want to go there?’ he asked.

‘Three answers: cheap drink, cheap drink, and cheap drink. Plus the oldies go to bed and there’s a fuck-off dance floor.’

‘Can I ask you a question?’ he said.

‘Go for it, soldier.’

‘Are those eyelashes real?’

‘Definitely,’ she said. Luke saw the waves rolling up and flattening on the beach, reflecting the lights, the hotel. ‘You don’t seem like a squaddie,’ she said. ‘They do.’

It was foldaway tables in a smelly ballroom. It was a handful of pensioners and a compère with a microphone, a tanned man in a nylon suit that came from another era. He was Scottish and he seemed delighted that ‘the young team’ had arrived and that the girls were already dancing. Luke went to the bar and came back with a tray of drinks. The Scouser was complete. ‘All I want is a big juicy pint.’ We’re on a big night out, he thought, the music

inside him, and these girls are definitely with us. ‘Give it here,’ he said, taking the pint and tanking half of it down. ‘I love beer, me,’ he said, putting down the glass and wiping his mouth. ‘I love beer and I love Blackpool and I could drink a barrel.’

‘Check him out,’ Dooley said. ‘He’s having it.’

‘I’m having it large,’ he said.

The bass was loud and it filled the room. They settled round the table and the girls came back and forth to have swigs from their bottles and to open and close their handbags and fix their make-up. Other groups of young people arrived and the wallpaper began to gleam. ‘It’s just bollocks,’ Dooley said. ‘They have a trial and these three NCOs get off.’

‘Who?’ Flannigan said.

‘The two sergeants and the corporal. Budgies.’

‘What?’ Luke said.

‘The Royal Welsh. These three guys get acquitted the other month. They were beasting a young lad and he died.’

‘It was a normal beasting,’ Flannigan said. ‘The boy was a tit. He was undergoing a reprimand.’

‘Fuck off, Flange. The guy was twenty-three.’

‘So what?’

‘So everything, you twat. The guy was twenty-three and got a bit pissed at a party in the mess. He fucked about with some office equipment and he got smashed for it. But it was too much. They marched him out the next day, it was thirty degrees Centigrade, and they beasted the kid until he had a heart attack. That is totally fucked up, man.’

‘If you don’t want a good rifting, don’t be an arsehole,’ Flannigan said.

‘This was on the news?’ Luke asked.

‘Yeah,’ Dooley said. ‘On the news. The adjutant captain told the three fucking bears, these feather-heads, the NCOs, to melt the kid out on the parade ground.’

‘Where?’

‘Lucknow Barracks.’

‘Right.’

‘It was over the top.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ Flannigan said. ‘How many times have you been trashed up and down the mudflats, Sponge Bob?’

‘Not for hours in that heat. Not when it’s boiling outside and I’m still dehydrated from the night before.’

‘Dry your eyes.’

‘No, seriously, Flange. That’s fucked. The main guy who did it was the most hated dude in the battalion. A real fucken drill-pig with a hard-on for sprogs.’

‘He wasn’t a sprog.’

‘He was twenty-three.’

‘So what, our kid? That’s old. You do shit, you get beasted. My dad told me they once beasted him from arsehole to breakfast-time just for dropping his stick. So stop fucking moaning, and bring on the rums.’

‘The kid had traces of ecstasy in his bloodstream,’ Dooley said, turning to Luke. ‘He was off his tits when they were beasting him out there. Fucken animals. And the guys who did it get off because everybody thinks they’re a bunch of hard-asses who can do what they like.’

Flannigan was looking at the girls. ‘You can’t have a military without militarism,’ he said.

Luke put his drink down. ‘And you think they deserve the Victoria Cross for that, do you, Flange?’

The two just stopped in each other’s eyes, the younger man’s pupils so large and so ready for action, engulfed by the moment. Luke paused to see just how far he would go, but Flannigan was biting his cheek and he came back with nothing. ‘The boy was about the same age as the guy we lost,’ Luke said. ‘Remember him? The kid we lost in that stupid ambush? That’s a fucken life, mate. And when you don’t do the right thing and you rub out a life you’ve lost your decency.’

‘Captain.’

‘Just saying. That shit happens: you’ve lost your decency.’

‘All right, sir.’

‘Do you get me?’

They went quiet. ‘I’m just messing,’ Flannigan said. Then after a moment one of the girls came up to the table and pulled him by the arm. He looked up at the other men with a grin, and said, ‘I’m off my face.’

‘Go and dance, Flange,’ Luke said. Flannigan saluted and was never so much himself as then. It would be a long road for him, thought Luke. He was vulnerable, his friend, a veteran of bad dreams, made for toughness, inclined to ruin. ‘Away and dance, ya big daft bastard.’

‘We’re okay, aren’t we, Captain?’

Luke smiled. ‘Of course we are. Go and enjoy yourself.’ Flannigan shrugged and turned out his hands.

‘I get better-looking every day,’ he said. ‘I can’t wait for tomorrow.’

Ten minutes later, Dooley was dancing so much in his seat that it seemed he could just take off. He got some water and then high-fived the captain. ‘I miss my wife,’ he said. ‘You know she’s a registered nurse, Jimmy-Jimmy?’

‘A staff nurse, eh. She’s qualified.’

‘I’m going to make her proud, Captain. I want to become sergeant and then we’ll buy a wee house.’

‘That’s a goal, Doosh.’

‘Awesome.’

Luke sensed he wanted to say more. More perhaps about life in general and whether the captain had somebody special and would he like to settle down with her some day and buy a house? It was all on Dooley’s face but he was too shy of the captain’s privacy. Dooley wished he could summarise their friendship and his emotions were rushing into the moment. But he wasn’t easy like the Scouser when it came to feelings so he just put his arm around the captain and said it was a great night. ‘I feel fucken magic,’ he said as he got up and joined the others on the dance floor. Luke watched his comrades-in-arms and thought them the best young men in the world. He realised how young they were and put two twenties under Flange’s glass.

As he walked home, he looked out and saw a hill of deckchairs stacked at the end of the pier. He looked over the sea and wondered if it might be one long dream, his family, his friends, the lives they tried to live. It was strange, but the dark water seemed experienced and alive, as if conscious of the people on the shore, as if it could see to the heart of things. The Ferris wheel was still but the lights blinked as he walked down the Golden Mile. There was no sound but the sound of the waves. This was Blackpool. The lights were part of the town but the moon was simple and white up there, and he loved how it shone without frailty over the sea and the coast.

HARRY’S VERSION

Sheila stood on the second-floor landing with a mug of Lucozade in her hand and a cigarette going. You could smell bacon all the way up the stairs and it was a fine morning if you believed the sunlight. ‘Oops,’ Sheila said, spilling a drop, her hands busy as she spoke, wreathing the air with smoke and fizz. ‘This carpet needs doing. Happen it’s only three years old. Would you believe that? It’s these young ones coming up and down in their boots. My mother ran it old-fashioned, you know, kippers for breakfast, two to a bed but she’d want to see the wedding ring.’

‘She was strict, then?’

‘Always wore a pinny, me mam. But good to the guests. She put a wireless in every room.’

‘Who did the bird drawings?’ asked Luke.

‘That’s father. He loved birds. All his books are still in the cabinet down in the lounge. He was like Mrs Blake, an artist at heart, really. When she pointed a camera at something you really knew it was captured.’

Luke was pleased as he listened. According to Sheila’s mother, who didn’t have kids at the time, Mrs Blake was famous one summer for haunting the cafes of Blackpool. It must have been the summer of 1962, she said. ‘The town was full of teenagers, they were always fighting and some of them drove their scooters up and down the front, and Mrs Blake was making a study of them.’ Apparently, the darkroom was like an art gallery at the time, rows of photos pinned up around the walls and the smell of chemicals, good God, Sheila’s mother thought she might have to say something. ‘But Mam knew it was important for Mrs Blake to get on with her work,’ Sheila said. ‘She

photographed all these youngsters and their hair.’

You couldn’t resist Sheila. She said her mother spoke of all the places where Mrs Blake used to take pictures. Putting down the mug, she began to count them off on her fingers. ‘The Shangri La cafe on Central Drive. The Hawaiian Eye cafe on Topping Street. Redman’s Cafe in Bank Hey Street. The Regal Cafe on Lytham Road.’

‘Wow,’ Luke said. ‘You’ve some memory.’

‘And Jenks Cafe in Talbot Square.’

He took care to close the door. He put down the newspaper and the groceries and turned to see Anne sitting up. He made tea with lots of milk and he buttered the rolls and put ham inside them. Anne liked it, chewing quite happily, introducing sips of tea after every bite. She saw the day when she would run down to get the breakfast for Harry. And when she came back carrying the sausages or the bacon wrapped in paper, the bread, the brown sauce in a bottle, she would hesitate at the top, knowing he was inside the darkroom waiting for her. She could picture it: how she stood there, how she kissed the door before going in.

‘Did you black out the windows?’ she said to Luke.

‘To let you sleep?’

‘For processing. Harry and the blankets. Just like they did in the war. Harry was in the war, you know.’

‘So I gather.’

‘He flew planes.’

Luke tried to imagine the darkroom as it used to be, when it was invested with all the ambition in the world. He tried to see it: a studio, a love nest, a place of light music and waiting.

Anne had spent time with the women. You could tell. She seemed restored a little to her old self, less agitated after an

evening of vodkas and songs down in the lounge. She spoke more that morning. It was as if her spirit had been encouraged by like-minded souls, the sort of people who take the elderly at their own estimation. The women loved memories of every kind and they weren’t minded to frisk them for accuracy. ‘Harry had medals,’ she said to Luke. ‘Because of the war.’ She paused to have another sip of tea. ‘And you’re in the war, aren’t you?’

‘The war’s over now,’ Luke said. ‘For me, anyway.’

He took her cup and plate. She began to doze and before long she was snoring into the pillow. He stood in the room and felt odd to be at the centre of Anne’s lost horizons. The night before, on the way back to the guesthouse, he imagined the sea must be conscious, and now the room had memory. These thoughts were strange expansions of an old faith, like ghosts returning to their rightful place and living now with him, part of the person he’d become. He felt watched in the room as he cast his eyes up to the ceiling, just as he felt watched when he walked along the prom. Looking up, he saw the shape of dead moths in the frosted bowl of the ceiling light. They had flown too close and been there for years. His phone was buzzing in his pocket but he assumed it was the boys and didn’t answer. He felt he had said goodbye, so when he took out the phone and saw texts and missed calls, he just pressed the button and turned off the phone.

He opened the cupboards. The files were dusty, the labels peeling. One cupboard was full of glass beakers and chemicals, droppers, lengths of tubing and packs of Ilford paper. His gran once told him that Harry mixed chemicals the way people in films did cocktails. Sheila knocked on the door at one point and suggested he go downstairs and have a coffee. Her sister was with her and they carried fresh towels. It was another aspect of Sheila’s

character: the no-nonsense approach to difficult necessities. They wanted to wash Mrs Blake and take her into the toilet. ‘Go and have a cuppa,’ she said. His gran woke up and stared at them. ‘We’re due to throw a good old Pippa Dee Party in here, aren’t we, Mrs B?’

Anne slept again that evening with the bed freshly made and the radio turned up a little. He’d arranged with Sheila to stop down for a chat. When he turned up in the hall at seven o’clock she already had her coat on and announced that her sister would go up and sit with Anne. ‘I need a touch of fresh air,’ she said. ‘You don’t mind, love?’

‘No, let’s go,’ he said.

Walking along the prom, Sheila said Anne was still lagging from last night’s festivities. ‘The lounge got lively after you left,’ she said. ‘She’d a few drinks, Mrs Blake. A dark horse, that one. Confused, though, eh? Doesn’t really remember anything in order. Gets mixed up. She kept thinking I was my mother and in the end I just said fine.’

‘It’s got worse.’

‘Mind you. She still comes out wi’ things. And you’ll be like, “Lord Jesus, where did that come from?” Then she goes back into herself.’

‘That’s the pattern.’

‘Bless her.’

They walked to the Pleasure Beach. Sheila was telling him how a popular ride called the Derby Racer had been scrapped a few years back. ‘That was something in its day,’ she said. ‘You could hear the squeals for miles.’ The lights still amazed Luke but there was nothing harsh in them any more, no reminders of tracer fire. It was just life repeating itself in a northern town and

he was glad to be part of a million bulbs.

‘Sheila,’ he said. ‘Why does she have that room?’

‘It’s like I told you,’ she said. ‘Your grandmother actually owns that bit of the house.’

‘You didn’t say that.’

‘Well, she does. She rented it at first. Just a bedsit, you know, when she first started coming to Blackpool. But then my mother and father hit rough times. Mrs Blake’s aunts died one by one up in Glasgow and eventually she got some money and one of the things she did … she bought that part of the house. It wasn’t a lot of money. But my mother was in a lather at the time and your gran has always helped with the bills coming in. Off-season we used to sit and wait for Mrs Blake’s cheque. And it would always come until it stopped about a year ago.’

‘I always suspected something. My mother knew. She wouldn’t really talk about it.’

‘We’re going back forty-odd years,’ Sheila said. ‘I was only a baby when the arrangement started.’

They sat down on a bench. He could tell Sheila wasn’t sure how much he wanted to know. More revellers went past and she sent a smile after them, girls in pink safety helmets.

‘Tell me about Harry.’

‘Oh, Christ. Where do I start?’

‘I know he’s my grandfather. I know they were never married. It’s nice of you to call her Mrs Blake.’

‘My mother always insisted on that.’

‘I know he was married to somebody else. Before coming here, I read some letters she kept. Letters from him. He was married to somebody in Manchester. Not Anne. Did he let her down?’

‘It was awful.’

‘Maybe I shouldn’t have brought her here.’

‘Never think it was wrong,’ she said. ‘In spite of everything she always loved it here.’

‘That’s what I hoped.’

‘That man Harry,’ she said. ‘He were bloody deluded. That’s the word, isn’t it? Deluded. My mother always said so. She got the full story about that man, and, one time, she and my dad went over to Manchester to give him a piece of their mind. They went to his office.’

‘He made things up?’

‘All those stories about the war. My dad was a lot older than my mother and he did fight in the war, so he couldn’t stand all that stuff that came out of Harry Blake’s mouth.’

‘About flying spy planes?’

‘Oh. Spy planes. He’d worked in a chemist’s shop in London processing film. That was his war. A dodgy ear is what he had. The marvellous Harry with all the medals. And then, according to my dad, he got himself into Guildford College, didn’t he? A course in photography. The first, I think. I don’t know how he got in. Night school, I suppose. Guys who had flown in the war went there because it were near the base. That’s where Harry got all his stories — from those men.’

‘And Anne knew?’

‘She always knew. But she loved him. And when you love somebody that much, well, you need to believe them, don’t you? She wanted to protect him, or something like that.’

‘And he met Anne here? It said in the letters.’

‘That’s right. He was teaching photography at the college in Manchester. The end of the 1950s this was.’

‘She came to a lecture of his.’

‘I think that’s right. Dad had all the facts.’

Luke leaned back on the bench. He told her it looked like Anne’s life had been one long bid for freedom. From her own family in Canada to the career in New York. Then from the big house in Glasgow to Blackpool. She was always trying to rescue her youth from her family, trying to rescue her talent. ‘It sounds like he was her last chance,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ Sheila said.

She lit a cigarette and blew out the smoke, narrowing her eyes at the sea as if it helped her remember. ‘Three children he had,’ she repeated. ‘And my mother said he courted Anne, you know, here in Blackpool, taking her out and that, introducing her to people. And you can imagine what it must’ve been like for Anne to have someone just then. It was all domestic stuff in Glasgow. She couldn’t leave.’

‘But why not?’

‘The old dears were bedridden.’

‘But that wasn’t her problem.’

‘Apparently, it was. She’d promised her father. There was nobody else. Her family was all gone by then.’

‘So Harry was a godsend? He knew about photographs.’

‘Exactly. A godsend. He believed in her. My mother said she’d a lovely Canadian voice back then.’

‘You can still hear it faintly. It’s nearly seventy years since she lived in Ontario.’

‘The accent’s strong in Scotland. You’re going to lose your accent if you stay there too long.’

‘She still has traces.’

‘I can hear it.’

‘She got pregnant,’ Luke said.

‘She did, yeah. And you know what? I was telling you this morning about her haunting the cafes, taking pictures and doing work for a big magazine. My mother said she’d never seen her so happy as she was that summer. She’d got herself back. She was doing new things. It was looking great. Then she fell pregnant and he scarpered.’

‘He just left?’

‘He came back, but not much. There would be these long gaps. Me dad went looking for him. Harry was married, of course. He had the wife and the kids in Salford, as you say. I think my dad felt sorry for him, in a way. It happened to a lot of couples back then. Harry got Anne pregnant and then went back to his wife. I remember my dad saying that Harry was one of those people who live their lives through other people. All those lies about his war service and everything.’

‘But he got her back to photography,’ Luke said.

‘That’s true. He wasn’t all bad.’

‘And he loved her.’

‘He filled her head full of dreams. But I’ll tell you something: in all the years, she never spoke a word against him.’

‘She was faithful to him.’

‘Yes, she was.’

‘When you read his letters,’ Luke said. ‘You see he wanted great things for her, things he couldn’t get for himself. That’s love, isn’t it?’

‘She had the talent.’

‘He helped her become herself.’

‘If you say so. He’s your grandfather. And you’re bound to want to see the good in him, just like she did. It’s only natural.’

‘Your own father—’

‘He understood that people can get lost. To him, Harry was a smart fellow who just got lost in his own circumstances. He didn’t like what he did — or the lies he told — but he believed that Harry was a victim of everything that happened at the time, just as Anne was.’ She paused. ‘It’s not always the right people who take hold of your life. Half the women I know had men like that, but they got over them, and she didn’t.’

‘Well, she did,’ Luke said. ‘By turning him into something good.’

‘Something better. She was an artist, after all.’

Luke considered it. ‘The great Harry,’ he said. ‘She speaks about him with such reverence.’

‘Well, that’s the way she felt about him. He had a gift for making connections between people. People say he was a good teacher. He opened up something in her and if that happens, well—’

‘It can last for your whole life.’

‘In some cases, yes.’ Sheila sniffed and pushed back her hair. ‘Maybe Dad was right: you have to try to understand people like that, people who can’t have the life they want and are always making it up instead or running away.’

‘Yes,’ Luke said.

‘After a year or two, after she’d had the twins, they tried to make it work. They went on a few holidays together, him going up to Scotland in secret, you know, behind the wife’s back. The twins were very small. And it was on one of those holidays—’

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘You said “twins”. My mother had a twin?’

‘You didn’t know, love?’

‘What?’

‘Mrs Blake had twins.’

‘That can’t be true,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’ Sheila dropped her cigarette and leaned forward to step on it.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Mrs Blake had twins to Harry Blake. A boy and a girl. The girl was your mother and the boy died in an accident.’

Luke just stared into space. He felt he’d arrived at a familiar place of which he had no knowledge whatsoever. ‘Holy fuck,’ he said.

Sheila felt it was getting cold so they went for a drink in the bar of the Seabank Hotel. There was a screen on the wall which advertised the bus-runs coming from Scotland. Pick-ups in Partick, Airdrie, Motherwell, Dundee, Irvine and Ayr. The hotel was full of elderly people. ‘It leaves me not knowing who I am,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The information about the boy. About my mother having had a brother.’ He took a sip of his beer and looked up at the screen and then back at the table, and when he sighed it seemed to include everything. ‘When you think of it, Blackpool’s really a suburb of Scotland, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘It’s a suburb of a lot of places.’

He waited. ‘What happened after the boy died?’

Sheila’s mother and father had tried to help Anne because she couldn’t cope. The aunts weren’t fit enough to help her with the child and it was after they died that Anne bought the room. ‘Your mother was left with the neighbours in Glasgow half the time. Poor girl. I think Mrs Blake paid them to look after her. Lord Jesus. It’s all me mam and dad spoke about for years. Mrs Blake felt it was her fault, but it was nobody’s fault. Never really got over it. She stopped taking pictures.’

‘That was the cause?’

‘That was it. She turned away. And for years she would come down here. She was always by herself.’

‘In the darkroom?’

‘Stopping there for weeks at a time.’

‘And he didn’t come much, did he?’ Luke said. ‘That was plain from the letters, too.’

‘Once in a blue moon,’ she said. ‘And it always made her happy. And that’s why you can’t really judge: people come up with all kinds of arrangements to make sense of what happens to them. You can’t judge. I think the poor fellow didn’t know what to do. I can picture him then myself. The 1970s it was. I looked out one night and saw him chipping stones up at her window. His lies had gone all the way into her life, but he really made something of her and she wanted him. So she was Mrs Blake and he was a war hero and the boy was never mentioned.’

‘I see.’

‘And your mam was hardly mentioned either.’

‘But how did he die, the boy?’

She sat quiet for a moment. ‘Weird, isn’t it, how life turns out?’ she said. ‘My father died the same year as Harry, 1976. You find people are just people, after all. And we all have stories.’ She took out a balled-up napkin from her sleeve. ‘I remember Dad telling me the story about what happened to the boy. It was on one of those holidays up in Scotland. Harry was trying to spend some time with Anne and the twins. His second family. And he drove them out to some place. My dad said it had been snowing and they were on this particular road up there, this famous place, where, if you stop the car and take off the brake, you get the illusion of rolling uphill.’

‘The Electric Brae.’

‘That’s the one. An optical illusion; you’re supposed to see it in the daytime but it was dark by the time they arrived. Anne told my father they could see a bonny white rabbit on the road. Harry was driving or I think my dad said they were just rolling with the handbrake off. Harry told the children to look at how the rabbit’s eyes were shining. He turned the headlamps off, you know, so they could see it better. But then a car came out of nowhere and they were in the middle of the road with no lights on and the other car went straight into them. And that was that.’

‘Oh my God. That’s horrific.’

‘The boy died. His name was Thomas.’

Luke shook his head and stared at the table. ‘That was the end of it.’

‘For Mrs Blake, yes. And for your mum. My dad said Harry was like a bird, actually hollow inside, you know, hollow in his bones. He wasn’t a bad man. He just wasn’t there. Wasn’t solid. And she found a purpose in covering for him and was happy in her own way.’

‘It’s hard to imagine,’ Luke said. ‘I knew they had their own secrets, but …’

‘It’s what they’re made of.’

‘All of us,’ he said. ‘We were all made of it. They never said anything.’

‘Never once?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not in so many words. When she got ill, she started to talk about a rabbit, and … well, maybe that’s the rabbit in the story. For the last year, so much of her talk has been about Harry and her past.’

‘Happens his wife had known about it for years,’ Sheila said. ‘Knew about his affair. Put up with it. But when he died she

wouldn’t have Anne at the funeral. She just came down from Glasgow and sat in the room with all her things. I remember that week, seeing her on the front steps. She was on her way onto the prom and she tied her headscarf and tried to smile. Gave me fifty pence. Her eyes were so sad.’

Luke was sorry and was lost for a moment. He knew it was monumental, what Sheila had told him, he knew it explained the people he loved. All his life his family had been moving, perhaps invisibly, perhaps unknowingly, around this terrible event that happened years ago and that was never mentioned. His hand shook when he reached for his pint, as if this secret about Anne had suddenly recast the story of his childhood and his mother’s childhood too, changing everything.

‘In Canada they want to put her into a show,’ Luke said. ‘The best of her photographs.’

‘Do they?’

‘Aye. They’ve got some pictures she did when she was young and they say she’s one of the pioneers.’

‘Lord Jesus,’ Sheila said. ‘That was the life she wanted. My mam and dad would be so proud of her.’

IF

Life had been rearranged, and always is.

If Luke had opened the newspaper he bought that morning, if he had listened to Anne’s radio or turned his phone back on, he would have learned that Major Scullion had taken his own life the day before. When he did see the news, he was shocked, though it didn’t really surprise him. He believed that Scullion

knew he would never make it to India. If he hadn’t seen him on that hill above Kajaki, if he hadn’t seen how he rushed into the mortars in one last gasp of the old soldier, he might have been unable to believe it. Scullion loved poetry and he made others love that thing in themselves. Luke tried to calm down and salute him. He wrote a text and sent it to each of the boys:

Remember Charlie at his best. He wanted intelligence back in the game.

Flannigan texted back the regimental motto.

Veritas vos liberabit.

25 AUGUST 1962

In one of the locked cupboards, Luke found a stack of Airfix models of World War II planes. He opened one of them, a Lysander, that was half-built inside the box, a small tube of glue partly squeezed out and gummed around the cap. A betting slip from Ladbrokes was wrapped around the cockpit; it had something written on it in faded blue ink, a few notes about the closing of the Hawker factory at Squires Gate. Luke supposed it was Harry’s hand and the remains of Harry’s hobby.

The ladies had been in that morning. Anne was sitting up in the chair dressed and washed, listening to the radio, wearing a clasp in her hair and some carpet slippers Luke had found at the back of the wardrobe. Sheila was right: she looked beautiful and seemed content, just listening, occasionally looking over

and saying something odd. The girls wanted to take Anne to the Regal Cafe and soon they arrived carrying shoes and winter coats. Anne wanted the scarf with the gloves sewn in and soon they were off down the stairs. ‘Are you all right, Gran?’ Luke said from the door. And when she looked up she was smiling like a gala queen.

‘Shake a leg, Mrs Blake,’ Sheila said. ‘There’s nowt in the world between us and a peach Melba.’

He placed the folders and boxes on the sink unit and then he spread them on the floor. He first opened a green, cloth-coloured album labelled ‘Menier Camp, 1948’. He got lost there, a pier with boats at an angle,

Light through the trees, Clifton Falls

The album was filled halfway and ended with a group photograph, showing some young women lined up against a boathouse with linked arms.

Monica Eames, Reva Brooks, Ruth Silverstein, Diane Arbus, Anne Tully, Anne Quirk

Her teenage face was so bright and he stared at the picture and wondered about the others, those young women. He wondered if their lives had gone elsewhere, too.

He didn’t open any cans or the backs of any cameras. He didn’t know about photography but he understood that new light isn’t good for old film. The contact sheets were filed and so were many of the actual photos, some of them yellow or dark or only half-developed, with smears. One of the prints, labelled

Jane Street, New York City

, showed a box of soap powder sitting on top of an old washing machine. He’d never seen anything like it, so real and yet so imagined, in a realm of its own. He began to set some of her photos aside but he kept getting caught up in one of her new ventures, a make-up counter in Harlem, a row of prams in the Gorbals, a carpet factory in 1956, and, finally, what he’d been looking for, ‘Teenagers, 1962’. He also found an old copy of a

woman’s magazine, fresh as the morning. It had a knitting pattern attached, but on the cover, above the title, he read five words written in pencil. ‘I was his spiritual wife.’

‘Teenagers, 1962’ was thick with prints. There were contact sheets and in a number of round tins he imagined there must be negatives. The photos showed groups of young people with slick hair and cigarettes. A girl wearing lipstick was kissing a boy with lazy eyes. Luke noticed the slim ties on the boys and the way the girls laughed and he noticed their hands and the light coming off a vinegar bottle. Each print was described on the back and some of them had been taken in dark alleyways or out on the pier during the day. And then, towards the back of the folder there was a group of twenty-four colour prints, sharp and clear as anything, labelled ‘25 August 1962, The Beatles, Fleetwood Marine’.

‘These are edited. More on rolls. See contacts.’ This was the folded note acting as a clip. In one of the photographs the group was smoking as they leaned from the tower; in another they ate in a seedy canteen. Here they were, the four boys in the back of a van, huddled round a newspaper, as if the words really mattered. In the nicest of them all, John Lennon lay on a sofa writing a postcard. Anne had caught the mischief in his eyes as he glanced at the camera. Luke had to stand up, astonished at the scale and the mystery of what she’d done. He lifted them again. He wanted to race down the stairs or throw open the window and shout, but he just paced the room. He just stood in silence. For all her mistakes and her bad luck, she had managed this. She had taken these pictures and kept quiet.

The boy died and the gift was gone. Harry was away, and maybe her talent departed along with her belief in herself as a mother. Luke couldn’t say, and, for all he knew, Anne had simply

set out to preserve an ideal version of herself, someone the world couldn’t spoil, or recognise, or celebrate, or even know. She left herself behind in a room, and that way survived her own potential, until her mind began to fray. He cried into his hands and an hour passed when he had nothing to add. He just sat in the gloaming of these facts and wished he had known a way to rescue her from her secrets. When he returned the prints, he stood over the boxes, and he lifted a single photograph from the side of one of them. It showed the shadow of a woman and her camera against a grey pavement.

Self-portrait

, it said in Anne’s hand, the same hand, he knew, that once wrote the names of the talented girls at the Menier Camp.

On his way down the stairs, Luke phoned his mother and was glad to hear her voice. ‘At last,’ she said. ‘We were beginning to wonder what happened to you. Do you never answer your phone, Luke?’

‘I switched it off. Sorry.’

‘What’s the weather like?’

He looked out and felt time was nothing at all. They were all young. A feeling of optimism fell from the deep past. There was a way to work out how to pity his mother and not blame her for needing it. He felt the impulse to move on, to improve things, to put what strength he had at the service of his family, without pausing for explanations or statements or reckonings.

‘Clear today,’ he said, ‘but really windy.’

‘Did you see the lights?’

‘Aye. It was fantastic. All the way down the front. I think she’s having a nice time. No stress, you know? Just peaceful.’

‘Well,’ Alice said. ‘It’s her place.’ He waited. ‘You know she’s spent a fortune on it, don’t you?’

‘I suppose she must have, over the years.’

‘A fortune. And she didn’t have a fortune. But that’s what she wanted to do and she did it. You could buy a house for the money she’s spent on that flat. But she’s never wanted my opinion. The bills alone …’

He realised he was listening to her for the first time. She rattled on, and she would always rattle on but Luke wanted to listen, just as he wanted to think the best of Charles Scullion. It wasn’t justice and it wasn’t quite understanding, but Luke was glad he had come to Blackpool. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever mention what he’d found out. He could see her as a small girl with a dead brother, a boy she perhaps knew little about but who took up all the love, and Luke could see — even as Alice’s old defences rose to meet him — that her mother’s investment in her own life had left Alice out in the cold. It had shaped her life, and of course she couldn’t bear to think of Harry or to admire her mother’s talent, or to talk about the boy.

‘I never liked Blackpool,’ she said. ‘And those people down there never had anything to do with me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Luke said.

‘Don’t know what you’re sorry about. It’s her money to waste any way she wants. I’ve long since given up. And I bet you she’s not even getting a rebate on her council tax. I mean, it’s a second home, isn’t it? That means she should be getting something off and it’s always been a mystery, that flat. She’s helped that family out, you know.’

‘They’re nice people.’

‘They’re

lovely

people,’ she said.

‘And they kept her room together.’

‘She paid their bills.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Mum. They kept it together for her. Two generations of that family did that.’

‘They probably had lodgers in.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Honestly, it doesn’t. Her stuff was locked away. And they weren’t interested in it.’

‘What stuff? Her camera stuff?’

‘Everything she had.’

She went quiet and he could hear the years over the phone and all the dismay of her unspoken life. ‘Maybe sometime we can sit down and talk,’ he said. ‘Just you and me, Mum. It’s going to be just us when this is all over.’

‘I’d like that,’ she said.

‘And we’re going to be fine.’

She cried very quietly into the phone and he just let her cry and said there was all the time in the world. When she stopped crying some of the old hardness came back and he saw her as a person who had always been bullied by the powerful stories that surrounded her and diminished her. ‘I suppose you’ve been treated to my mother and father’s great love story,’ she said.

‘It’s not just about them,’ he said. ‘They’ve had their turn. And we’ll see my gran through this time, but we’ll do it together, okay?’

‘Did something happen to you in the army, Luke?’

‘We all have bad things to answer for. I’ve seen some evil and I might have done some, too. But you learn to forgive. You can even learn to forgive yourself. And I believe Gran would say that if she could.’

‘I’m no angel,’ she said. ‘None of us is.’

‘We’re a family,’ Luke said. ‘Just a family. Sheila’s people are a family but so are we. Let’s do what we can.’

They just breathed for a moment into their phones and then Alice sighed, as if the practical world called to her.

‘We put Mum’s furniture in storage,’ she said. ‘The boxes too and the suitcases from the bathroom. The lady next door’s been really great. She did it all with us.’

‘How is Maureen?’ he asked.

‘Oh, she’s fine,’ Alice said. ‘Has all her Christmas cards ready to post. Already! She said you can’t be too early with things like that. Christmas, would you credit it? The presents all wrapped and sitting in a bag by the front door. She loves it. She loves all the drama. “Families!” she says. “Families!” One minute she’s looking forward to seeing them at Christmas, getting the train, and the next minute she can’t wait until it’s all over. Oh, but she makes me laugh. I was just saying to Gordon: you can’t keep up with people. You may as well not even try because it’s different every day and you never know about people’s lives, do you?’

‘I’m glad she helped, though.’

‘Oh, she was brilliant.’

‘That’s good.’

‘The warden, too. They all pitched in.’

‘You could run a war, Mum.’

‘That’ll be the day. They wouldn’t want the likes of me running up and down the place.’

‘I’ve seen worse.’

Neither spoke for a moment and it was easy to wait and to think and let things settle. Alice sighed.

‘Do you think she senses what’s happening?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘but I’ll tell her eventually. I just want to give her this time. A bit of time down here. A day or two.’

‘Blackpool was always her favourite,’ Alice said, and Luke’s

heart went out to her. He could hear the hurt, the nervousness, fading into relief. It was somehow easier now for her to talk and he knew she wanted to say more. ‘She never really wanted children. Her life had been held back enough. She wanted him. And Blackpool was the place where she hoped it would all come together.’

‘I’m sorry, mum.’

‘Ah, well, Luke. It’s over now. And I’m glad you’re there with her.

‘You’re here.’

Luke drove to the Regal Cafe and found Anne sitting at a corner table with the women. He hadn’t known it before, but his gran obviously liked women’s company and had missed it — the girls at the Menier Camp, her aunts in Glasgow, the neighbour Maureen. She was laughing with Sheila and her sister when he came in and she touched the clip in her hair when she saw him and she looked up at the coffee machine. ‘We were just on about Woolworth’s,’ Sheila said. ‘Your gran mentioned it and we were just saying there was nothing left of Woolworth’s nowadays. Harriet used to have a Saturday job there, didn’t you, Hats?’

‘I got fat on the Pick ’n’ Mix,’ she said.

Luke paid the bill. He turned to smile at Anne and the two sisters. ‘I want you all to come in the car,’ he said.

‘Fab,’ said Sheila. ‘Are you taking us for a drive or something?’

‘I want to take you to the Fleetwood Marine.’

‘Is there something on?’

Luke said it was just a wee outing — nice for Anne and it wasn’t far. And so they drove up the coast and passed the factory for Fisherman’s Friends. ‘That’s very nice,’ Anne said. ‘The sweeties.’

‘I could never stomach them,’ Sheila said. Then she pointed

out the changes, new houses and spots where things had been demolished or done up. They came to a place close to the beach, an art deco building that seemed brilliant and white against the green hill behind. They got out and Anne took Luke’s arm as they walked over the car park.

‘I know it here,’ she said.

Luke smiled. ‘Do you now?’

They walked into the foyer. Luke didn’t know why he felt as if a season was over. There was something new about her, and he admired how confidently she walked on the blue carpet, the look on her face and the feeling of her arm inside his.

‘I danced here,’ she said.

The print gets perfect with dodging and burning. Conceal this part to make it lighter if you like, and this corner, this bright place in the picture, expose it for longer, my love, and after it goes dark we can go to bed. All will be well. Come here, Harry. I waited up. This is your home tonight.

The girls looked around. They didn’t know about Anne’s pictures taken here once upon a time. They just thought it was a treat to see the place in the daytime like this. ‘I could tell you a few stories,’ Sheila said with her give-all laugh. ‘We used to come here to raves in the 1980s and the building would be packed to the rafters. Don’t get me started.’ There were posters up for dance shows and comedians.

‘Palm trees,’ Anne said.

This is your home tonight.

She touched a pillar on their way along and was delighted with it and when her grandson leaned over and kissed her cheek she felt sure they’d spent years together. There was nothing left to be afraid of and the sky was blue as they came outside and put

down their bags by a signpost. The arrow pointed to Cleveleys and Blackpool, the sand was dark brown and the sun took them by surprise. Sheila lifted Anne’s hand and then her sister took the other one and they led her all the way down to the water. Luke hung back by the wall and looked down at Anne and the women together in the wind. Their scarves were billowing around them and they shouted out when Anne’s came off and blew into the air, the scarf going higher, the girls laughing as it stretched up and a hand reached out for the sun.