‘Sounds good to me.’
‘It doesn’t seem obvious that Gerry lives here. Upstairs is a bit of a mess.’
‘That was my mother, more than him. I expect Gerry will sell the house.’
‘How long were they married?’
Lawrie poured more cider into our glasses. ‘Let’s see. I was fourteen – so that’s sixteen years.’
‘How did she die?’
Lawrie visibly prickled. I saw his closed expression, and sensed his self--protection. I regretted the question immediately, feeling like a blunderer.
He placed the bottle down gently. ‘It’s hard to explain.’
‘You don’t have to. I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.’ Now I was interfering, just like Quick.
‘My mother killed herself,’ Lawrie said, and the words seemed to weigh down the air between us, the kitchen’s atmosphere thickening to a soup. Looking at Lawrie, I saw how a ghost could suck the air from your throat.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry—-’
‘It’s all right. No, really, it’s all right. I would have told you eventually. Don’t apologize. I mean, don’t feel bad about it. In all honesty, it wasn’t that much of a surprise.’
I tried desperately to think of something to fill the silence, but the admission seemed to open something in him: ‘We tried to help. We were always trying. And now I can’t even look at bloody Gerry, because every time we look at each other I know he’s thinking, What if you’d done more?, and I’m thinking exactly the same. But it’s not his fault. It’s just a horrible game of blame.’
‘I can’t imagine it.’
‘Well, neither can I, and I was her son.’
He was very still, his voice very quiet, and I wanted to get up and give him a hug. But in the soupy air I felt unable to move, and I wasn’t sure he wanted one anyway. I thought of the kitchen at Cynth’s wedding, how Lawrie must have been reeling from his past two weeks – and me, mocking my own mother, rude when he tried to be nice about my poem—-
‘Anyway, that’s that,’ he said. ‘But she was spirited, and she did a lot of things, and enjoyed herself a great deal, and that’s really why she reminds me of you. And now there’s her painting.’
‘Yes.’
‘So.’ He exhaled brusquely. ‘I’ve told you that. Jesus. I promise you that’s the worst. Now you tell me something.’
‘I don’t have anything.’
‘Everyone has at least one thing, Delly.’
I stayed quiet. He leaned back in his chair, fishing around in the dresser drawer behind him. ‘A--ha. Gerry always leaves a few lying around.’ He brandished a box of slim cigars. ‘Care to join?’
WE WENT TO THE BACK room and Lawrie pushed open the French windows. The night was still fragrant with the smell of damp grass and wood smoke, bats dipping in and out of the garden.
‘It’s like paradise,’ I said, even enjoying the smothering scent of Lawrie’s cigar. I sat on the sofa and watched him, propping himself against the window frame.
‘I don’t know about that,’ Lawrie replied. ‘But one thing is – you can’t hear the road. When I was little, my favourite book was Peter Pan. I used to pretend this garden was Neverland.’
‘And was Gerry Captain Hook?’
‘Ha, no, this was before Gerry. It was just me and Mum at that point.’
‘I was just with my mother too.’
He turned to me. ‘What happened to your dad in the war?’
Given what Lawrie had told me about his mother’s suicide, I felt I had to dredge it up, although I really didn’t want to. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘My dad sold his bicycle and trumpet to pay for his passage to England in ’41. He walked to the Air Ministry, passed the medical, and got himself twelve weeks’ basic training. He served as an air gunner in the RAF. Then three years later, my mother found his name chalked on the death board in Port of Spain.’
He came over, and put his hand on my shoulder; it was warm, and I focused on it with particular concentration. ‘I’m sorry, Odelle,’ he said.
‘Thank you. I don’t remember him, but I know what it was like not to have him. My mother took it bad.’
He sat beside me. ‘What was it like, on the island, in the war?’
‘-People were just terrified what would happen if Hitler won. We’ve got one of the largest oil refineries in Trinidad. U--boats were already torpedoing British ships off our coastline.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘We knew what Hitler wanted; his plan for a master race. We were always going to want to fight. My dad was no exception.’ I sipped on my cider. ‘England wasn’t too keen on the colonies helping out at first, but as things turned bad they wanted the help.’
‘Do you think you’ll go back?’
I hesitated. Most English -people I’d met would ask me questions about the island in a way that seemed limned with the expectation that I should fit the complexity of Trinidad into my single body for their benefit. None of them had ever been there, so to them we were specimens of curiosity, realities risen from a tropical petri dish that until very recently sat under a British flag. Most of the time, as with Pamela, the Englishers’ interest was not malicious (except when it was) – but their questioning always served to make me feel different, when I’d been brought up to feel perfectly understanding of British ways, because I was a child of empire too.