When we turned up she didn’t seem very pleased to see Mandy.
“And you’re keeping well?” she asked. “No problems?”
“Having babies is easy so far,” said Mandy. “I’m a text book case.” Mandy had already told me that she was having sleepless nights, not only because of the writing. And she had gory morning sickness. When she talked about the muscles of her stomach stretching apart to make room, I thought of butterfly wings being pulled off and it made me feel cold. As always, Mandy spared me no details. Aunty Anne was quizzing her about her plans, subtly making it clear that she wouldn’t be welcome to stay here forever.
“I’m looking for a place of my own to rent. I thought maybe I’d stay her. See what literary London has to offer.”
“You wont’ be doing much in literary London with a kiddie to see to. Why don’t you go back up home?”
Mandy didn’t answer that one. “I was sorry to hear about Uncle Pat.”
“He had a rough time at the end.” For weeks Aunty Anne had been silent on the subject of Pat.
“I remember him telling me how chickens drowned in the rain. He told me that years ago.”
“He was always telling you daft things,” smiled Anne.
“I wish I’d come up to Edinburgh.”
“You were busy,” said her aunty, and pursed her lips.
“It was a busy year,” said Mandy.
“I’ll help you put your things upstairs,” I said. Upstairs, the guest rooms were perfect, untouched.
“She’s going to live in a completely empty place,” said Mandy. “She’ll be all alone and go bitter.”
“She’s a funny woman,” I said.
“When she first came to Blackpool last summer, you thought she was marvellous.”
“Did I?”
“That’s just you. You get swept up into people’s atmospheres. Their auras. Who is it now, then?”
“Oh…” I said. “No one.”
Aunty Anne hadn’t said anything about Uncle Pat since she said to me, just after the Strange Matter show: “It was him, wasn’t it?”
“Who? When?”
“Tell me you saw him as well. On that stupid bit of film your friends had. I know they’re playing games. And I think it’s cruel. I feel got at, personally. I don’t know what they’re doing, but…”
“What are you talking about, Aunty Anne?”
“They’ve sliced and spliced their film up, haven’t they? To make that fake spaceship landing. They’ve got their publicity and everyone thinks they’ve very clever, but I’m hurt, Wendy. It was a horrible thing to do.”
I think I knew what she meant.
She went on, “Those people coming out of that… that thing they filmed. The spaceship. Your Uncle Pat was there, wasn’t he? They put him there, on that fake film.”
“I don’t know what it was, Aunty Anne. They believe in it. I don’t think it was a fake.” This was at the time that Timon and Belinda were making their rounds of the late night chat shows, magazine interviews, and we didn’t see much of them just then. They were living in a hotel, and planning to go to New York, taking their film with them. I had watched it repeatedly and really couldn’t believe it was faked. Aunty Anne said, “I wouldn’t put anything past them. That Belinda wants so much to believe in it all, and Timon is helping her out with her delusions. But I think it’s wicked and cruel, putting Pat on there. Didn’t they realise how it would make me feel?” She tried to drop the subject, and couldn’t. “And Captain Simon, for god’s sake! Large as life and coming out of a spaceship! Pushing Marlene Dietrich in a wheelchair!” She left the room then, to check on dinner.
What surprised me more that Aunty Anne’s grievances was that she had failed to see what I saw, the first time I watched that footage in the TV studio. Standing behind Marlene, with Uncle Pat and Captain Simon and the horse, almost a silhouette in the glare of the weird light, was Mam.
So we didn’t come back to the subject of Uncle Pat again until Timon and Belinda were about to return from New York. By then, Mandy had launched her writing career with BritLit Four in Charing Cross Road. I had been round Joshua’s house in Greenwich, and Colin had arrived, fresh from Paris.
It was only then that we heard that, en route to Heathrow, Belinda had completely vanished while in first class, leaving a half full glass of champagne, and Timon in the toilet.
THIRTY-FIVE
It was Serena’s joke that Josh was an aesthete and a dilettante collector of valuable odds and ends. She made him into a monster of unappealing material appetites. And it was true, he was a demon in a junk shop, scattering lesser items and rival browsers, spending his little cash on useless, often bizarre gee-gaws. He had an eye all right, but not one like anyone else. He had taste, but it was quite strange.
He wasn’t the snob Serena thought. She made him out to be someone who always had to have the best. What he really liked were things that drew the eye. So although he didn’t himself drink, he had a drinks cabinet stocked with every bottle you could think of, just because it was a funny old, red lacquered thing.
Serena came with me those first few times I went to the house in Greenwich. It was a curious, red-bricked house which stood alone, just a slice of air between it and the houses either side. When Serena was there she relaxed into the oddity of Joshua’s home, into the purple room, the orange room, the underwater dining room and she always made a point of extolling his taste. I used to think she was living out her own idea of her friend. When he met him, at Oxford, he was quite young and she took him up and started to mould that
