“Shit,” Flora said. “I don’t suppose you do? What was the point of Jonathan giving it to us without matches? Do you think those boys might have a light?” One of them picked something up with two fingers, yelling with delight and disgust as he threw it at his friend.
“Here.” Gabriel took the cigarette and put it in his mouth. At the twisted end he formed his hand into a fist and flicked his thumb up. He inhaled and closed his eyes. He pushed his heels into the pebbles and took the joint out of his mouth. Still holding his breath, he said, “Strong stuff.” Flora smiled, and he passed it to her. She put the unlit joint between her lips and breathed in.
“I used to tell Nan stories about you after we’d gone to bed,” she said, holding the joint in her fingers. She bent to pick up a pebble, dull and brown. “What you looked like, what you were doing, stupid stuff, like maybe you were in a band and we had a pop-star brother. She was so jealous she never got to meet you.”
“I’m looking forwards to meeting her now.” He took the joint, let it hang from his mouth.
“I would pretend that you had visited us again and played your guitar on the veranda.” Flora licked the pebble and ran her thumb across it. The matt surface sprang to life, a rich brown threaded through with veins of red. “No one ever told us what happened,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. “To make Daddy behave like he did.”
“It’s a simple story,” Gabriel said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth. “He and my mum went out with each other for a few weeks. She got pregnant. He was really into it for a while, apparently, read all the books he could get hold of, but he wanted to get married and she didn’t, she didn’t buy into all that conventional settling-down stuff he wanted. And so he denied the baby—me—was his, said she must have slept with someone else, and then left.
“She hadn’t, of course. But she wasn’t bothered. We were happy, only the two of us. She wouldn’t tell me who my father was for years, but I wheedled it out of her in the end. And when A Man of Pleasure came out, she made me promise not to go and see him. I didn’t listen. But once was enough.”
“I’m sorry,” Flora said. “Here.” She took the joint from him.
“You don’t have to apologise.”
They were silent while the boys ran past them and up the chine.
“A week or so ago it rained fish,” Flora said. “When I was driving home from the ferry. There was a massive storm and loads of little mackerel fell onto the car and the road.”
“Fish?” Gabriel said, and was quiet for a moment. “Maybe it was a sign that something was going to happen—or,”—he touched her arm,—“maybe it was a sign that something had already happened—that your mother had come back.”
“I don’t know about that anymore,” she said. She nudged him with her shoulder and laughed. “But I think I’m going to like having a brother.”
Gabriel laughed, too, took the cigarette, and said, “I think this stuff is working.”
“It is,” Flora said. “I can almost smell it. And I can hear music.” She sat still, listening. On the wind there was the beat of a distant song.
“I can hear it, too,” Gabriel said.
It was then that Flora turned her head to glance up the steep bank beside the chine, where, if you knew what to look for, the outline of her mother’s zigzag path remained. The house was too near the lane to be glimpsed from sea level, and the writing room was out of sight, too. Only the nettles at the top were visible, and beyond them, in the grey sky, plumes of a darker grey billowing upwards. Smoke.
Chapter 44
THE NUDIST BEACH, 2ND JULY 1992, 2:17 PM
Gil,
I’m sitting on the beach. I’ve been delaying writing my final letter, and thinking about all the others already written and hidden in your books.
Remember your first class, with the jam jar and the daffodil? You asked for our darkest, most private truths. And so here at last, in all these words, have been mine.
When you find this letter, when you find the rest of them, don’t forget that you must destroy them all, tear them up, throw them away, burn them; don’t leave them for the girls to read.
I know you’re on your way home; Jonathan rang to tell me. I’m sorry, but this time I won’t be there.
This morning Nan promised to make sure her sister got on the bus and went to school. Flora has her packed lunch (two slices of bread buttered up to the edges and a piece of Red Leicester, but the cheese mustn’t be inside the bread or she won’t eat it). You need to keep an eye on her; she’s spirited and that’s a good thing. I think she’ll be OK—Flora has you, and you have her. Nan, too, will be fine, I’m sure. Just don’t let her become the carer, the do-er, the little mother, a role I know she could slip into so easily. Let her go off and be free.
Weed the garden for me now and again, mow the lawn. And don’t forget your other children, Gabriel and George, and the two others, unnamed and unknown. Six. You were right, in a way.
So, one last swim out, level with the buoy, or maybe a little farther.
I.
[Placed in Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, by Barbara Comyns, 1954.]
Chapter 45