Jon McGregor - So Many Ways to Begin

It was the Med, wasn't it? she asked, glancing across at him. I can never remember. Everyone turned to look, and he shrugged, smiling apologetically.

Don't look at me, he said, I'm not a historian, and they all laughed.

Albert Carter, their father, had been twenty-seven when the picture was taken, but he looked a lot younger; fresh-faced, smiling broadly, his skin so smooth that it was hard to believe he'd ever had to shave. His hair was slicked back, with the comb-lines as straight as a slide-rule, and his smile lifted the same creases around his eyes that David could remember seeing as a boy. The uniform looked a little too big for him, hanging loose around the shoulders, and there was none of the formal regalia which might have been expected in a portrait photograph, no spit-polished brass, or epaulettes, or braiding; it was a uniform which looked purely functional, ready for the serious business of crewing a ship into battle.

Of course, Susan said, I don't remember much about the war, I was too young. All I can remember, really, is this man arriving in the house, like the man in the picture but older and heavier, and not smiling. The others leant in towards the photograph as she spoke, looking at Albert Carter's fixed and frozen smile. He just appeared, she said, there was no discussion, he was just suddenly lurking about the place, making the house much smaller than it had been and taking up my mother's time. Smelling unfamiliar and damp, she said, laughing, as though she was unsure what she meant. But that's the thing I always remember, she said. His not being there and then being there, and nobody asking my opinion. The others smiled at this, as people usually did.

David was going to tell someone this story with the picture in his hand, holding on to it for a moment before passing it over, feeling the rough and crinkled texture of the greying card, turning it over to read the soft pencilled dates and numbers on the back, running his fingers again across the scratches scored into the photograph's dull surface. Dozens of scratches, mostly too faint to see unless the picture was turned into the light; mostly, except for three deep scars which had split and torn right through the skin of the paper, gouged across the young man's smiling face.

Susan explained that she'd made these marks, one afternoon when her father had been home for a few months. This was the part of the story where people always went quiet, and looked at the picture more closely, or turned to her and nodded, or smiled wryly because they could guess exactly what she was going to say. She'd been told to take a nap so that her mother and father could have a lie down while the new baby, David, was sleeping. Auntie Julia, whose house they were all staying in until they could find something of their own, was out doing some shopping. Restless and bored, Susan took a small metallic comb from her father's desk, grabbed the picture from the mantelpiece, and scoured frantically across its surface before making a tearful escape to the bedroom.

The most awful thing, she said, pointing out an ashtray on the hall table to a guest with a cigarette, is that nothing was ever said. The picture was replaced with another one, almost identical, and nobody ever mentioned it, she said.

Goodness, said a woman with a bright red scarf tied around her neck. Really? Susan nodded.

Not a word, she said. We found the damaged original in a box of his things after he died, and I insisted on keeping it. I've only recently put it up though, she added. The dinner guests peered closely at the picture for a few moments more, mentioning similar stories of their own before gradually moving back into the dining room.

My mother told me I used to try and drag my father out of their bed, the woman with the scarf said, laughing, and the man with the cigarette smiled at her, nodding.

Anyone want another coffee? Susan asked, as she followed them back to the table.

David stood in the hall for a moment longer, looking at the picture, tracing the scratches with his fingers, imagining the distress of the three-year-old girl which they recorded so well. He looked at the eyes, the smile, the face of the man who had brought him up so lovingly and was now gone, and he turned away.

You'll be careful with it though? Susan said, later, when he asked if he could borrow the picture for a while. She undipped it from its frame and handed it over to him, and he told her that yes, of course, he'd be careful. And, I mean, are you sure this is a good idea? she asked, the whole thing? and he told her that yes, thank you, it was.

When Dorothy Carter was twenty-seven she wrote a list, sitting at the kitchen table, tapping her pen against the side of her face while she thought of everything she wanted to include. When she'd finished she pinned it to the back of the utility-room door, where it stayed until the day she finally moved out, and as David was helping to pack away her things he took it down and slipped it quickly into his pocket, thinking that someone might be interested in having a look.

He imagined her sitting at the kitchen table that first day, with unopened suitcases and boxes all over the clean hardwearing linoleum floor, a trunk, a bundle of bedding tied up with string. Susan stamping and clattering around the hard bare rooms, testing the echo of her voice against the walls, or playing in the sand and rubble at the back of the house. Albert would have been on his way back to London already, returning the borrowed bread van in time for that night's deliveries, having stopped on the way out to take a photo of Dorothy by the front door with the new handbag he'd bought her. He imagined her looking out through the window at the unfinished road piled high with timber and roof tiles, the other houses still skeletal, scaffolded, half-built; or standing to open and close the spotless cupboard doors.

It was so much more than we were expecting, she told David once. It was so much more than I felt we deserved.

The new house had its own front garden, and a path leading up to the door. It had an indoor toilet and a bath. There were fitted cabinets in the kitchen, and an airing cupboard, and electric lighting throughout. There was a cupboard under the stairs instead of a damp cellar. He found it difficult to imagine, when she told him all this, that these things had once been enough to seem like a miracle, to stun someone into speechless tears, but they had. Later, when he watched her saying the same things to Kate, he could see that Kate didn't believe her at all, saying, and did you make your own entertainment in them days Nana? Glancing at him and biting back a smile, not noticing how quietly her grandmother said yes love, we did, you're right.

She'd never been inside a new house before. She'd grown up in a tiny soft-walled cottage in the Suffolk countryside, where the only new buildings were the Nissen huts and hangars of the new airfields, where a bathroom was a kitchen for six and a half days of the week and the cooking was done on the fire, and she had no way of picturing what a new house might be like. Theirs was one of the first houses in the development to be finished, and they'd had to drive carefully through acres of Coventry's bomb-flattened streets to reach it, waiting for them, perfect and untouched. We could still smell the paint when we went inside, she told him. She'd never seen rooms without furniture before, and the emptiness made the house feel so large that she was convinced they'd made a mistake until his father went outside and checked the number on the door.

And after he'd left with the van she sat at the table, steadying herself, trying to write the list. She was frightened, she told David once. She didn't think they were entitled to it. All that work, for them, when there were so many people in worse off positions. She was worried for a long time that someone was going to come knocking on the front door with a clipboard, asking for forms they didn't have, saying there'd been some kind of mistake.