Isabel Wolff - The Very Picture of You

‘It’s not the frame, Ella.’ My mother seems helpless suddenly. ‘I meant that I wouldn’t want to have his photo on the sideboard – or anywhere else, for that matter.’

My heart is thudding. ‘Why not?’

‘Because…’ She throws up her hands. ‘He’s not part of our lives, Ella, as you very well know – and he hasn’t been for a long time, so it would be confusing, especially for Chloë – he wasn’t her father; and it wouldn’t be very nice for Roy. And Roy’s been so good to you,’ she hurries on. ‘He’s been a father to you, hasn’t he – a wonderful father.’

‘Yes – but he isn’t my real one.’ My face has gone hot. ‘I’ve got a “real” father, Mum, and his name is John I don’t know where he is, or why I don’t see him and I don’t know why you never ever talk about him.’ Her lips have become a thin line, but I’m not going to stop. ‘I haven’t seen him since I was… I don’t even know that. Was I three?’

My mother folds her slim arms and her gold bangle gently clinks against her watch. ‘You were almost five,’ she answers softly. ‘But you know, Ella, I’d say that the person who does the fathering is the father, and Roy does everything that any father could do, whereas… John… well…’ She lets the sentence drift.

‘But I’d still like a photo of him. I could keep it here, in my room, so that no one else would have to see it – it would just be for me. Good,’ I add quickly. ‘So that’s settled then.’

‘Ella… I’ve already told you, I don’t have any photos of him.’

‘Why… not?’

She heaves a painful sigh. ‘They got… lost…’ She glances out of the window. ‘…when we moved down here.’ She returns her gaze to me. ‘Not everything came with us.’

I stare at her. ‘But those photos should have come. It’s mean,’ I add angrily. ‘It’s mean that you didn’t keep just one of them for me!’ I am on my feet now, one hand on my chair to steady myself against the clamour in my ribcage. ‘And why don’t you talk about him? You never, ever talk about him!’

My mother’s pale cheeks are suddenly pink – as if I’d brushed a swirl of rose madder on to each one. ‘It’s… too… difficult, Ella.’

‘Why?’ I try to swallow, but there’s a knife in my throat. ‘All you ever say is that he’s out of our lives and that it’s better that way, so I don’t know what happened…’ Tears of frustration sting my eyes. ‘Or why he left us…’ My mother’s features have blurred. ‘Or if I’ll ever see him again.’ A tear spills on to my cheek. ‘So that’s why – that’s why I—’ In a flash I’m on the floor, reaching under the bed, and dragging out my box. It has Ravel printed on it and Mum’s best boots came in it. I get to my feet and place it on the bed. My mother looks at it, then, with an anxious glance at me she sits down next to it and lifts off the lid…

The first drawing is a recent one, in pen and ink with white pastel on his nose, hair and cheekbones. I was pleased with it because I’d only just learned how to highlight properly. Then she takes out three pencil sketches of him that I’d done in the spring, in which, with careful cross-hatching, I’d managed to get depth and expressiveness into the eyes. Beneath that are ten or twelve older drawings in which the proportions are all wrong – his mouth too small or his brow too wide or the curve of the ear set too high. Then come five sketches in which there is no hint of any contouring, his face as flat and round as a plate. Mum lifts out several felt-tip images of my dad standing with her and me in front of a red-brick house with a flight of black steps up to the dark green front door. Then come some bright poster-colour paintings in each of which he’s driving a big blue car. Now Mum lifts out a collage of him with pipe cleaners for limbs, mauve felt for his shirt and trousers and tufts of brown woollen hair that are crusted with glue. In the final few pictures Dad is barely more than a stick man. On these I have written, underneath, dad but on one of them the first ‘d’ is the wrong way round so that it says bad.

‘So many,’ my mother murmurs. She returns the pictures to the box, then she reaches for my hand and I sit down next to her. I hear her swallow. ‘I should have told you,’ she says quietly. ‘But I didn’t know how…’

‘But… why didn’t you? Tell me what?’

‘Because… it was… so awful.’ Her chin dimples with distress. ‘I was hoping to be able to leave it until you were older… but today… you’ve forced the issue.’ She presses her fingertips to her lips, blinks a few times then exhales with a sad, soughing sound. ‘All right,’ she whispers. Her hands drop to her lap and she takes a deep breath; and now, as the ‘Wedding March’ thunders out to us from Westminster Abbey she talks to me, at last, about my father. And, as she tells me what he did, I feel my world suddenly lurch, as though something big and heavy has just shunted into it…

We stay there for a while and I ask her some questions, which she answers. Then I ask her the same questions all over again. Then we go downstairs and I fetch Chloë in from the garden and we all sit in front of the TV and exclaim over Sarah Ferguson’s billowing silk dress with its seventeen-foot, bee-embroidered train. And the next day I take my box down to the kitchen and lift out the pictures. Then I thrust them all deep into the bin.

‘Sorry about this,’ the radio reporter, Clare, said to me early this evening as she fiddled with her small audio recorder. She tucked a hank of Titian red hair behind one ear. ‘I just need to check that the machine’s recorded everything… there seems to be a gremlin…’

‘Don’t worry…’ I stole an anxious glance at the clock. I’d need to leave soon.

‘I really appreciate your time.’ Clare lifted out the tiny batteries with perfectly manicured fingers. I glanced at my stained ones. ‘But with radio you need to record quite a lot.’

‘Of course.’ How old was she? I’d been unsure to start with, as she was very made up. Thirty-five I now decided – my age. ‘I’m glad to be included,’ I added as she slotted the batteries back in and snapped the machine shut.

‘Well, I’d already heard of you, and then I read that piece about you in The Times last month…’ I felt my stomach clench. ‘And I thought you’d be perfect for my programme – if I can just get this damn thing to work…’ Even through the foundation I could see Clare’s cheeks flush as she stabbed at the buttons. And when did you first realise that you were going to be a painter? ‘Phew…’ She clapped her hand to her chest. ‘It’s still there.’ I knew I wanted to be a painter from eight or nine… She smiled. ‘I was worried that I’d erased it.’ I simply drew and painted all the time … Now, as she pressed ‘fast forward’, my voice became a Minnie Mouse squeak then slowed again to normal. Painting’s always been, in a way, my… solace. ‘Great,’ she said as I scratched a blob of dried Prussian blue off my paint-stiffened apron. ‘We can carry on.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Can you spare another twenty minutes?’

My heart sank. She’d already been here for an hour and a half – most of which had been spent in idle chatter or in sorting out her tape recorder. But being in a Radio 4 documentary might lead to another commission, so I quelled my frustration. ‘That’s fine.’

She picked up her microphone then glanced around the studio. ‘This must be a nice place to work.’

‘It is… That’s why I bought the house, because of this big attic. Plus the light’s perfect – it faces north-east.’

‘And you have a glorious view!’ Clare laughed. Through the two large dormer windows loomed the massive rust-coloured rotunda of Fulham’s Imperial Gas Works. ‘Actually, I like industrial architecture,’ she added quickly, as if worried that she might have offended me.