‘Listen, we can talk later. I’ve booked us a room in a little hotel in Bishop’s Castle, on the Welsh Borders. I’m taking you away for the weekend. Can you be ready by half past five? I’ll pick you up.’
I didn’t protest. ‘What would I do without you, Kim? Yes, I can.’
‘Right. Pack walking boots and lots of warm clothes. Bye.’
I ran upstairs and threw some long-sleeved T-shirts, jumpers and socks into a large hold-all; dug out my walking boots, still caked with mud from a year before; found my cagoule wrapped up in itself at the back of the cupboard. A quarter to five. I lit a cigarette, and turned on the small TV at the end of the bed. Alan’s face again stared at me, all beard and fierce eyes, before the camera switched to the earnest face of an absurdly young reporter. ‘Passing sentence, the judge described the murder of a daughter by her father as one of the worst, and most unnatural crimes that could be imagined…’ I leant forward, in a panic, and shoved Paul’s video into the player. The young reporter disappeared abruptly. Through a curl of smoke, the Stead appeared on the screen as the title and credits rolled.
Paul’s making of his film about the family had seemed so sporadic and arbitrary that in spite of having seen the final sequence I think I had expected something like a camcorder picture of a holiday. It wasn’t like that at all. Paul began by reading an extract from
The camera moved slowly over the Shropshire landscape around the Stead, skeletal in its winter garb, but still gorgeous. The sun glinted through the bare branches, and the old house sat rosy-stoned and welcoming. It was the house of my childhood and the land of my lost innocence.
I sat entranced while my cigarette burnt down to my fingertips and gazed as Paul spoke intimately to the camera. Memory, he was saying, is intangible, and die memories one has of childhood, which glow so vividly through all of our adult life, are seductive and nostalgic. And if one’s childhood is happy, then adulthood is like an exile from its joy. We can never return. More music, and the camera zoomed in on the door of the Stead. Alan walked out. My ash fell onto the duvet cover and I brushed it heedlessly away. He quoted something from Wordsworth, and spoke about love. He said, with all the old Alan bravado, that he had been a wild young man who had scorned the concept of family and kicked against its traces. But he had learnt that this – he gestured at the Stead – was where he could be himself. He talked about the family as the place where you could be most tormented, or most at peace. ‘For myself, I have found a kind of peace,’ he said. He looked, as he stood on the threshold, like a mass-produced wise patriarch that you might buy in a souvenir shop. I watched his broad hands as he gestured, and I shuddered. Martha, thin as a tree branch, came through the doorway carrying a broad basket and some secateurs, smiled strangely at the camera and walked off screen. The camera moved sideways, and came to rest on the site where Natalie’s body had been found. Paul stated the facts. Then came a series of stills of Natalie : as a baby, a toddler, a ten-year-old, a teenager; on her own, with her family. Then her tombstone.
Claud appeared and now that I was his audience I saw how handsome he was, how serious. I sat like a coiled spring while I waited for him to talk about me, and our marriage break-up, but all he said was that ‘some things had not turned out as he had hoped’. I was shocked by the spasm of pity and love that jolted me. Cut to Robert and Jerome playing frisbee on Hampstead Heath. So young and carefree. Then Jerome, affectionately derisive on how the older generation was obsessed with the past. Fred, at home with his family on their well- tended patio. Alan again, drinking brandy and being expansive on the power of forgiveness. Theo comparing a family to a computer program.
Me, that was me, red-faced in my kitchen. Oh God, Christmas – but the Christmas I watched as I waited for Kim to arrive was one of festive hilarity : laughter boomed out of the television; I smiled a lot and handed round wine (had I smiled a lot that evening? I couldn’t remember). Erica and Kim looked like two extravagant birds of paradise in their purple and yellow get-ups. Dad was distinguished Old Age, and my sons fresh Youth. The power of editing – to splice images so that collective trauma becomes a display of boozy unity.
I smoked the last cigarette in the packet. In spite of being revolted by the film’s message, smashed as it was into a thousand pieces by Alan’s confession, I was half seduced by its melancholy insistence upon the past as a place of innocence and joy, the lost Eden in everyone. The music, the winter greenness of Shropshire, the faces that came and went on the television screen, as familiar as the palm of my hand, the way that Paul, somehow, had made even his most resistant interviewees talk with a kind of inner concentration so that they seemed to be discovering truths about themselves for the first time – these things filled me with rich sorrow.
The film was nearing its end now. Paul was walking along the Col, hands in his pocket. The brown water was swollen with all the recent rain. He stopped and turned towards the camera, held out his hands in a gesture of offering. Oh, God, he was reciting poetry again :
I was getting confused. Was the point of this documentary that you
I switched off the television, resolving to sell it. Or maybe a crack addict would break in and steal it while I was away with Kim. It was nearly five thirty. I buckled up my suitcase, then on an impulse I opened it once more and threw in my childhood diary. I quickly punched in Paul’s number but was answered by a machine. After the bleep I said:
‘Paul, it’s me, Jane. I’ve just watched your film. It’s very impressive – honestly, in spite of everything, it holds its own ground. I’m going away for the weekend with Kim, but I’ll call you as soon as I get back. Well done.’ I was going to replace the receiver but a thought struck me. ‘Oh, and Paul – can you just tell me : which side of the river were you walking along at the end?’
As I put the phone down, I heard Kim’s horn. I put on my leather jacket, picked up my bag and walked into the weather.
River Arms was a small white inn with low beams and a huge open fire in the bar. We had a double room, with a bathroom. Kim said that when we woke in the morning we’d be able to see the river and the mountains from our window. Now it was dusk and damp. I sat on my bed, feeling too tired to move.
‘It’s nine o’clock,’ said Kim. ‘Why don’t you have a bath, and I’ll meet you in the bar in half an hour. They do wonderful meals here, but we’ll wait until tomorrow for that. Let’s just have a snack by the fire tonight.’
‘Fine.’ I yawned and stood up. ‘How do you know about this place?’
Kim giggled. ‘My romantic past. It comes in useful sometimes.’
I had a deep warm bath, breaking open all the bath gels and foams. I washed my hair and dressed in leggings and a thick baggy cotton shirt. Downstairs, Kim had ordered two large gin and tonics, and had managed to secure a place by the fire. She raised her glass and chinked it against mine.
‘Here’s to better times,’ she said.
My eyes filled with tears, and I took a long swallow of cold clean liquid.
‘I’ve ordered our meal, as well,’ Kim continued. ‘Cold roast beef sandwiches, and a bottle of red wine. Okay?’
