Flora flinched as if Nan had struck her. The kitchen window clouded with steam.
“You have no idea how difficult it was finishing my training,” Nan continued, “when I had to keep coming back here and worrying what you were doing—staying out all night, drinking, smoking, sleeping around. Don’t think I didn’t know. Like father, like daughter.”
Flora stood up, her chair tipping behind her and knocking over some books stacked against the wall. “I was only out all the time because being at home was so fucking awful I couldn’t bear to be here.”
“You can’t blame me for that,” Nan said. “That’ll be because of the man lying in the bedroom, who you think is so bloody amazing. The two things he was good for were providing the money and the house, and the first came from a sleazy book which makes me ashamed to be his daughter, and the second was inherited from his own terrible father.” As the kettle reached crisis point, Nan took hold of the bowl with both hands and hurled. Flora ducked as it flew over her head, shards of glass and sour cream spraying the kitchen wall, table, and floor. In the doorway Nan turned. “Actually,” she spat, “I wasn’t telling the complete truth earlier. Yes, I think Mum drowned, but it could easily have been suicide, and if it was, it’s your precious daddy who bears the responsibility.”
Chapter 40
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 30TH JUNE 1992, 4:35 AM
Gil,
I’ve been thinking about getting a job. (Although who’d have me—undereducated, inexperienced—with so many unemployed? Maybe I should learn to drive.)
In the suitcase under my bed there’s a photograph Jonathan took of you and Flora sitting on the steps of your writing room: you’re fifty and Flora’s nearly five—in a month she’ll start school. It’s late afternoon, the shadows are long, the light is golden. For once she’s wearing clothes—a bikini with a frill around the bottom. Her feet are crusted with sand, as if she’s just come up from the beach. You sit beside her in jeans and a T-shirt, leaning with your arms folded on your knees, your head angled towards her. The sun highlights your cheekbones and the fair hair on your forearms. Flora is looking up at you, an intense, concentrated stare, and it is clear that you’re deep in conversation. Studying the photograph brings back the childish sting of being left out. And the hardest thing to write is that Nan wasn’t enough compensation for your connection with Flora. Nan has always been complete, self-sufficient; she hasn’t needed anyone, least of all me. The one person in our family who I was meant to mother was my dead boy, George. Maybe I should have gone years ago.
It was less than a year ago (last September, in fact), when I saw the young man through the glass of the front door. I thought he was a junior reporter or an evangelist. He was holding a book with both hands as if it were ballast, a weight to keep him grounded on our doorstep, and if he were to let go he’d rise and bob in the rafters of the veranda roof. He tried to smile when he saw me approach, but it was strained.
“Who is it?” Flora called out from my bedroom, where she was lying on the four-poster, drawing. She was faking her headache, but that morning I hadn’t had the fight in me to get her out of the house and to school. Perhaps it was the delay of my answer or my tone of voice that made her get up and mouth “Who is it?” as I passed the open doorway.
“It’s OK,” I whispered, although I wasn’t sure it would be. A tabloid journalist had already stopped me outside the supermarket, asking if I wanted help carrying my bags before he began to ask questions about the book’s content and whether it was a true story. He grew aggressive when I wouldn’t answer. No one had dared come to the house before.
I opened the door a crack. “Can I help you?” I said.
He looked about Nan’s age, maybe a little older, fifteen or sixteen. (Still a boy, not even yet a young man.) He had blond down on his chin and a mouth and nose too big for his bony face. He was familiar but I couldn’t place him. The boy paused, as if he’d forgotten his rehearsed lines or wasn’t sure they were the right ones.
“Is Gil Coleman in?” he said.
I hesitated but told the truth. “No.”
He gripped the book tighter, and I looked at it. Inverted, I saw the image of the unmade bed from above, pillows hollowed by the shape of three heads, the crumpled sheet suggestive of a woman’s body. A Man of Pleasure, I read. I’d seen the cover—the jacket, you called it—even though, as you’d promised, we didn’t keep the finished book in the house. You’d shown me the picture, proud of the fact that your name was larger than the book’s title.
“Do you mind if I wait?” His voice was tremulous, still breaking.
“What do you want him for?”
“I just . . .” He held the book up. An autograph hunter, I thought. “Can I wait?” he repeated, nodding towards the table. “I won’t get in your way.”