Astonishing Splashes of Colour (24 page)

“Did you know you were killing people—women and children?”

“Well, of course we did. That’s what bombs do. What did they expect us to do? Send a message that we were coming, so they could all get away?”

Does he feel guilty? Is that why he’s never talked about it before?

“The life expectancy of a bomber crew was very short. Some of them went out on their first operation and never came back. They either crashed or ditched into the sea.”

The Dambusters
—Richard Todd leading his men on a suicide mission.
Twelve O’Clock High
—Gregory Peck counting the returning planes. My father is seeing his life through a black and white lens.

I notice a baby on the edge of his picture. He’s crawling towards the side, as if he wants to escape. His family haven’t noticed. They’re all looking at the man selling ice creams. It reminds me of Brueghel—Icarus splashing into the sea, while everyone else is getting on with their lives.

“We came down in the end, just like everyone else, hit by shrapnel on the way out. We dropped our bombs short of the target and turned round. Only four of us were left alive—two badly wounded.” His voice is speeding up with the action. “There was petrol everywhere, washing round the floor—could have been blood too, I suppose. Anyway, something kept banging into my leg while I tried to control the plane. I put my hand down to see what it was, and it was wet and sticky and warm. I picked it up and it was a severed hand. The glove was still on it.” He holds his hand dramatically in front of his face and studies it gravely for several seconds, as if he is searching for the right words. “I didn’t even know who it belonged to.” He says this casually, like an afterthought, but I feel that none of this is spontaneous. It’s been worked on.

“Well,” I say, “can I assume it wasn’t yours?”

He ignores me. “We were obviously going down. I told everyone to get out, then I scrambled on to a wing and jumped. My parachute opened almost immediately, but it was too dark even
to see the plane hit the water. Just a loud bang, a roaring of water, and then nothing. I couldn’t see any other parachutes. I couldn’t see anything. I was the only one to get out.”

“What about the moon?” I say.

He looks confused. “What moon?”

“The moon in the sky. You can usually see something by the light of the moon.”

He stops as if he’s examining a picture inside his mind, then shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. “Maybe there was a new moon—or it was cloudy.”

“Was the sea rough?”

He stops again. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“So how were you rescued?”

“The navy fished me out at first light. There were no other survivors.”

He stops for a long time, still with his back to me.

“So why didn’t you tell me all this before?” I say. “It’s a good story.”

He turns and looks at me sharply. “Don’t mock, Kitty.”

Thousands of people died in the fire bombs of Berlin. An aeroplane crew fell into the sea, and my father couldn’t save them. Nobody would have noticed the bomber going down. There were too many other deaths to worry about.

“The sea is a very lonely place in the middle of the night. Huge and threatening and without horizons. I hate it.”

“But you spend all your time painting it.”

“Yes.” He sighs, a long, slow, exhausted sigh. “Well—I feel as if I lost something that night. I keep thinking, if I try again, paint the sea from a different angle, a different colour, a different mood, I’ll find what I’ve lost.” He sighs again. “It never works.”

He won’t look at me, and I suddenly know that this is the truth. Somewhere in amongst all that drama, he has told me
something private and true. “Did you go straight back to dropping bombs on Germany with another crew?” I ask.

“No. I had a leg wound. By the time it was patched up and functional, the war was all over. They gave me some medals and I took them, but I never wore them.” He seems to be saying, it’s not his fault. He wasn’t responsible for any of it: the war, the bombing, the death of his crew. I feel a rush of understanding for him.

I look at the back of my father’s head and see that he’s an old man. He must be nearly the same age as Miss Newman. Why have I never seen that before? His hair has gone grey without my noticing. His shoulders are more bent than I remember. As he turns back to the painting, I see that his paintbrush is trembling very slightly.

“I don’t paint hands,” he says.

I drink my coffee. He studies his picture carefully, as if looking for something to criticize.

“I like the crawling baby,” I say.

He doesn’t hear me. “That’s all,” he says. “Nothing really.”

He hasn’t told me much, I realize. Just a story that must have been heard in thousands of homes, dramatized in hundreds of films. A story he’s been telling for fifty years inside his head, over and over again, neatening it, tidying it up, making it concise.

“I must get back,” I say and wait to see if he’ll turn round.

He starts to mix colours together on his palette, squeezing and stirring angrily.

I pause at the door, but he’s painting again and acts as if I’ve already gone. He is hurling paint on to the canvas, swirling it around in the sea. I’m sure that the baby has crawled further out than before.

“Crabs,” he says. “Sand, tides, currents, rocks, jelly fish …”

As I walk down the stairs, I see that there is crimson paint on my skirt. I should have checked before sitting down.

I tell Dr. Cross about my conversation with my father.

“Does it worry you?” she says, knowing that it does.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have pressed him.”

“Does it matter?”

“Well, he may not want to look me in the eye again. That bit about the sea—I think he was being honest, which isn’t normal for him. He paints pictures when he’s talking—so you never really know what he thinks.”

“Ring him up in a few days’ time,” she says, “and have something casual ready to say.”

I nod. Maybe we can both pass it by.

“How do you feel about Jake and Suzy’s baby?” she says.

“I don’t know.” And this is the odd thing. I can’t think about it properly any more. It’s as if it never happened.

“Have you tried talking to them?”

I shake my head. I don’t want to talk to them now.

My father tells me something true, possibly for the first time in his life, and Miss Newman tells me her memories. I think I should be more honest, so I tell Dr. Cross about my yellow period. I hadn’t intended to when I came into her room. If I’d thought about it in advance, I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words.

She sits quietly and listens. “Thank you for telling me, Kitty,” she says.

I stand up to go, feeling clumsy and awkward, like a small child.

“Don’t forget to make an appointment for next week,” she says. She doesn’t smile as I go. She looks thoughtful.

I run home. All the way. I feel as if things have shifted
slightly, as if I’m not quite going down the same inevitable road. Something is different. I rush in because I want to go and talk to James, drag him away from his work.

The phone is ringing as I come into the flat. I pick it up.

“Kitty, this is Dad.”

That was quick, I think. I haven’t had time to think of something casual to say.

“Martin’s just phoned. Granny and Grandpa Harrison have died.”

6
locks

I
throw some clothes into a suitcase, and James carries it for me on the bus to New Street Station. He’d like to come with me, but I want to go on my own. The rest of the family will come later for the funeral. Granny and Grandpa knew me properly, whereas they were a bit muddled about my brothers.

Granny cooked proper meals, and we would all three sit round their dining-room table and eat lamb chops and mint sauce, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, pork and apple sauce, in an agreeable silence. They liked me to come. Granny would air the bed for me, putting hot water bottles between the sheets; there was always a vase of fresh flowers from the garden on my bedside table. Primroses and grape hyacinths, roses, marigolds, winter jasmine—something for every season. They would leave the window open a crack—”to blow away the cobwebs”—and put glossy magazines they’d bought for me on the window seat:
Cosmopolitan, Elle, She.
I hoped they didn’t read them after I’d gone. I didn’t want them to know about what was happening in the world.

I stopped going to see them after the baby. They didn’t write
or telephone. I knew they would just be waiting for me to come, happy to see me if I turned up unannounced. I imagined them airing the bed regularly, waiting, knowing I would come eventually.

Martin meets me at the station in a taxi. We climb in and I study his face, wanting to know how he was affected by finding them dead. He looks the same as always.

“I had to break the door down,” he says. “I thought they were out, so I went for a walk along the Cob. I had fish and chips and watched the sea.”

“They’re never out.” I say. “They can’t walk far enough.”

We drive along the narrow lanes and I strain to see the view over the hedgerows. When we meet a car coming the other way, it has to reverse to the nearest lay-by. Our taxi driver makes no concessions.

“I thought they might have gone shopping,” says Martin.

“They don’t go shopping,” I say. “A neighbour does it for them. Neither of them can walk properly.” That was three years ago. The neighbour might have moved away or died. A small hard knot of guilt settles in my stomach.

“I came back the next morning, and one of their neighbours turned up as I was ringing the bell. She said she hadn’t seen them for over a week.”

“Was that Betty?” I say anxiously.

“I don’t know,” he says. “She was upset.”

She usually goes in every day. What had gone wrong?

“I’ve never broken a door down before,” says Martin. I look at his huge hands in his lap, one white, one brown, and I’m glad that he’s a gentle man.

“Was it difficult?”

“Yes,” he says after a pause. “Not like on the telly. I had to go round the back.”

I think of their locks. A Yale lock, a mortise lock, two large
bolts and a chain on the front door. They were proud of their door chain, because a policeman had suggested it when he came round to advise them on security.

Grandpa had been delighted. “We don’t have to open the door to anyone now if we don’t want to,” he said and laughed, slapping his leg. He showed me how the chain was fixed. “Two-inch screws into the frame of the door. No one’s going to break that in a hurry.”

I admired the efficiency.

“Try it, Kitty. Look, I’ll go outside and you use the chain.”

So he went outside, leaning on the door frame to support his weakened legs, while I locked the door and put on the chain. He rang the doorbell. I opened the door and peered through the gap.

“Who is it?” I said in a doddery voice.

“Double glazing,” he said.

“No thank you,” I said and shut the door.

When I opened the door to let him in, he was almost bent double with laughing. I led him to his chair in the lounge.

“Mrs. Harrison,” he shouted between his wheezes of laughter. “We need a cup of tea.”

Granny brought in the tea and a plate of chocolate biscuits. She winked at me over Grandpa’s bald head. “Mr. Harrison loves his locks,” she said. “Always did.”

“That’s right,” he says. “I’ve always loved locks.”

So they had locks on their windows, the back door, the shed door and the back gate. Granny and Grandpa were frail and vulnerable, but they were never burgled. Even the burglars knew it wasn’t worth trying. Grandpa used to go round and check all the locks once a month. I think he would have liked a burglar to try—so he could congratulate himself on his locks.

“They were dead in bed together,” says Martin.

I try to imagine them side by side, dying together.

“There’s got to be a postmortem before we can arrange the funeral. Suspicious circumstances.”

I can’t see why it’s suspicious. They should be allowed to die together if that’s what they wanted.

We go in through the back door, which is secured with a padlock and chain because the original locks are too badly damaged. I’m impressed by Martin’s strength.

Nothing has changed. The house smells nearly the same as it always did—shoe polish, roast potatoes, ironing. It feels old and creaky. I can feel the slow movements of old people around me. There is a new, sickly smell coming from the kitchen, so I go to have a look. The yellow tops are bare, as clean as ever. On the table two places are laid for breakfast. The blue and white striped cups and saucers sit waiting for coffee. The matching milk jug is there in the middle, a hard yellow crust formed where the milk should be. The knives and forks and spoons gleam warmly. Granny always polished them after washing up.

“I like a good shine on my cutlery,” she used to say. “People don’t bother nowadays. But I do. I like to see my face in it.”

I remember picking up a spoon and trying to see my face in it. I couldn’t understand why it was upside down. “That’s a test to see if you’re a good girl,” said Grandpa. I soon discovered that I was the right way up on the other side and wondered why they hadn’t explained it in more detail. I worried if I was good or bad.