“Her hair was beautiful,” my father says. He turns toward the last of the afternoon light, casting the side of his face into shadow.
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I’ve lost him to the place he goes to more and more, where memory presses down on him like a heavy grey cat suffocating her kittens.
Dad chuckles. “Her hair. The colour of spun treacle.” He stares through the window, over the roof tops of houses to the diffused blue horizon of The English Channel.
“All the chaps were on fire for a touch of your mother’s hair. We were fine fellows in those days . . . the Glitterati! Though I don’t suppose that term had been invented then. We’d put on our whites and promenade, it was called. Up and down Cheltenham Beach. Auckland, New Zealand, that is.”
I want to tell him. I know. It’s my home town for heaven’s sake, but I don’t want to interrupt the flow. Not now, not after all the weekly visits and his hedging around the subject.
“If luck was with us we’d pick up a girl, a lass from a shop or a factory and drive them out to the country and poke them. Bad teeth and open legs. Ha! New Zealand women were renowned for both.”
I’m no longer shocked. I’ve got to know my father well since I tracked him down in Sussex. But after he moved into the Rest Home, it’s as if his mind has shifted track onto a once busy Branch Line and is controlled by an erratic timetable.
“Not your mother, though. She knew what she was about.” He pauses to give way to a ghostly freight train or has perhaps gone into a siding to reconfigure himself.
“She was too good a girl for any of that carry on. Or too canny. Had to have a ring on her finger or no jolly deal.”
Was it true about Mum’s hair? Or was this old man remembering some other girl he’d poked? There was no way I could tell from the restored photo I had brought from New Zealand. The young woman standing in a laundry outstaring the camera wears a large white cap. I remember so little about Mum.
She died and you went to the orphanage. That’s about the only knowledge I have been able to glean from aged aunts and uncles, eyeing me suspiciously as I stand on their doorsteps.
However, the evidence of my own unruly mop, tells me it must be true.
In the last weeks I’ve learnt so much about my mother’s life, his, theirs, than I believed possible when I first met my father. Especially from this sort of man – a buttoned up, suited gent. Who’d have thought he had such depths, such shallows, so many bright and glorious memories bouncing round in his once neatly ordered mind. But he hasn’t yet told me what I want desperately to know.
“Did you get married?” I ask once again.
He turns away from the window and looks straight at me as if he has reached a point from which there is no backing away. Or else he doesn’t care.
His small eyes are the blue of pressed forget-me-nots. “No fear. I already had a wife and child back Home. I wasn’t going to risk going to prison for bigamy. The papers would have got the story, believe me, mixing as I did with the Big Wigs. And Edie knew that. It was the ring she was after, that band of respectability, and release from that dreadful, steamy hell hole where she pounded away for years.”
My father smoothes the creases that have risen up on his woollen pants from where he has shifted in his armchair. His fingers are lean, loose skin bunching in wrinkles, his nails perfectly manicured. Hands that have caressed my mother, sought out her most secret places, pleasured her. The image makes me feel cold and I too shift into the sun.
He continues. “Mrs Evans in all but fact. And the wedding ring. That was enough for my Edie.”
I can no longer sit quietly like a fisherman toying with an eel, urging, tempting it to come to the surface so I can finally see what’s lurking in the deep hidden pool of my past, to get what I’ve come for. The answer.
I blurt out, expecting as the words pour, that the spell will be broken, that the truths about my father and mother will slink down again into the mud never to be seen again.
“But you didn’t stay. You left her. Went back. To that first family a million miles away from Us. You left us, Dad . . . Mum and me and Jessica.”
He jerks his head round, the shock in his eyes dilating fast. Water pools in his reddened sockets.
“I never meant to, Francie. Believe me. I was going to get a divorce. I told your mother I would. And come straight back. But then Emily got sick.” He pauses.
”My wife. My real wife.
“Then her father got wind of the New Zealand business and proposed a very lucrative opportunity if I’d stay. I’m ashamed to say I took it.” He drifts away again. “And the boy. My boy. He was a fine chap. And then the War.” The fight goes out of him.
I jump up in a sudden rush. My father flinches. I want to slap him. Make those vein-marked cheeks sting. Give him a taste once more of a woman’s passion. He sees the look in my eyes, shrinks back into his chair.
Shame flushes over me and I sit trembling.
Realising that he is safe he laughs.
I lean over, pinning his arms to the chair. Birdlike bones beneath. “We weren’t the New Zealand business, Dad. We were your family too, Have you any idea what it did to Mum? “
But he’s gone again. I release him and he begins toying with the wool fringe on his lap rug. “Your mother was a wonderful woman. And her hair.”
He reaches out to touch mine but I pull back.
“Ah, she had the most beautiful hair, did Edie.”