Sorrow and Bliss(6)
Looking back, it is unlikely our mother knew them either – the object of her parties seemed to be filling the house with extraordinary strangers and being extraordinary in front of them, and not a person who used to live above a key-cutter. It was not enough to be extraordinary to the three of us.
*
For a while, when I lived in Oxford, my mother sent me short emails with nothing in the subject. The last one said, ‘I am being sniffed by the Tate lot.’ Ever since I left home, my father has posted me photocopies of things written by other people. Open and pressed down on the glass, the pages of the book look like grey butterfly wings, and the fat, dark shadow in the centre like its body. I have kept them all.
The last one he sent was something by Ralph Ellison. With a coloured pencil, he had highlighted a line that said, ‘The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.’ Next to it, his tiny handwriting in the margin: ‘Perhaps there is something in that for you, Martha.’ Patrick had just left. I wrote across the top of the page, ‘The end is now and I can’t remember the beginning, that is the whole point’ and posted it back.
It came back days later. His only addition, ‘Might you try?’
3
I WAS SIXTEEN the year I met Patrick. 1977 + 16 = 1993. It was Christmas Day. He was standing in the black and white chequered foyer of my uncle and aunt’s house with Oliver, their middle child, wearing full school uniform and holding a duffle bag. I had just had a shower and was coming down to help set the table before we left for church.
My family never spent Christmas anywhere other than Belgravia. Winsome required us to stay the night on Christmas Eve because she said it made things more festive. And, she didn’t say, it meant there would be no issues with lateness on the day – the four of us arriving at eleven-thirty for breakfast that was scheduled for eight a.m. BST, my mother would say, Belgravia Standard Time.
Ingrid and I slept on the floor in my cousin Jessamine’s room. She was Winsome’s late-in-life baby, five years younger than Oliver, who used to call her The Accident when adults weren’t around and The WS, Wonderful Surprise, when they were, until he grew up enough to realise he was also a surprise – his older brother Nicholas is adopted. Why four years of marriage to Rowland had not produced the baby my aunt longed for was never discussed, possibly unknown. Whatever the reason, my mother said, after that length of time, the legal rigmarole of adoption must have seemed preferable to both of them than any more toil in the bedroom.
Nicholas, who is the same age as me, was called something else when they got him and his origins were never discussed, beyond being referred to as his origins. But I have heard my uncle say, in his son’s earshot, that when it comes to adopting babies in Britain, you can have any colour you like as long as it’s brown. I have heard Nicholas say, to his father’s face, ‘If only you and Mum had ground away at it a bit longer you’d just have your two white ones.’ By Patrick’s first year with us, Nicholas was already going off the rails and has never got back on them.
Oliver and Patrick were both thirteen, at boarding school together in Scotland. Patrick had been there since he was seven. Oliver, who had been there a term, was meant to arrive on Christmas Eve but had missed his flight and been put on an overnight train. Rowland went to Paddington to pick him up in the black Daimler that my mother called the Twatmobile and came back with both of them.
As I was coming down the stairs, I saw my uncle, still in his coat, telling his son off for bringing a friend to bloody Christmas without bloody asking. I stopped halfway down and watched. Patrick was holding the hem of his jumper, rolling and unrolling it while Rowland was talking.
Oliver said, ‘I told you already. His dad forgot to book his ticket home. What was I meant to do, leave him at school with Master?’
Rowland said something sharp under his breath, then turned to Patrick. ‘What I want to know is what kind of father forgets to book his own son a flight home at Christmas. To bloody Singapore.’
Oliver said bloody Hong Kong.
Rowland ignored him. ‘What about your mother?’
‘He doesn’t have one.’ Oliver looked at Patrick who kept going on his jumper, unable to say anything.
Slowly, Rowland unwound his scarf and once he’d hung it up, told Oliver that his mother was in the kitchen. ‘I suggest you go and make yourself useful. And –’ turning to Patrick ‘– you, what did you say your name was?’
He said, ‘Patrick Friel, sir’ in a way that made it sound like a question.
‘Well you, Patrick Friel sir, can skip the waterworks since you are here now. And put your bloody bag down.’ He told Patrick he could call him and Oliver’s mother Mr and Mrs Gilhawley, then stalked off.
I started walking down the stairs again. They both looked up at me at the same time. Oliver said, ‘That’s my cousin Martha blah blah,’ grabbed Patrick’s sleeve and pulled him towards the staircase that went down to the kitchen.
*
Months earlier, Margaret Thatcher had moved into a townhouse on the other side of the square. Winsome worked it naturally and unnaturally into every conversation and on Christmas Day, it was mentioned twice at breakfast and again as we were getting ready to walk to the church at the top of the square, towards a corner that made it nearer my uncle and aunt’s house than the prime minister’s.
What people notice, then eventually stop noticing about my aunt, is that whenever she is addressing a topic of importance, she speaks with her chin lifted and her eyes closed. At her crux, they spring open and bulge enormously as if she has been shocked awake. Ending, she sucks air into flared nostrils and holds it for a period that becomes worrying, before slowly expelling it. In the instance of Margaret Thatcher, my aunt always opened her eyes at the point of saying our lady prime minister had chosen ‘the less good side’. It infuriated my mother, who wondered aloud on the way to church why it might be that, instead of walking straight there, Winsome was leading us around three sides of the square.