Andrew O'Hagan - The Illuminations

‘But why not?’

‘The old dears were bedridden.’

‘But that wasn’t her problem.’

‘Apparently, it was. She’d promised her father. There was nobody else. Her family was all gone by then.’

‘So Harry was a godsend? He knew about photographs.’

‘Exactly. A godsend. He believed in her. My mother said she’d a lovely Canadian voice back then.’

‘You can still hear it faintly. It’s nearly seventy years since she lived in Ontario.’

‘The accent’s strong in Scotland. You’re going to lose your accent if you stay there too long.’

‘She still has traces.’

‘I can hear it.’

‘She got pregnant,’ Luke said.

‘She did, yeah. And you know what? I was telling you this morning about her haunting the cafes, taking pictures and doing work for a big magazine. My mother said she’d never seen her so happy as she was that summer. She’d got herself back. She was doing new things. It was looking great. Then she fell pregnant and he scarpered.’

‘He just left?’

‘He came back, but not much. There would be these long gaps. Me dad went looking for him. Harry was married, of course. He had the wife and the kids in Salford, as you say. I think my dad felt sorry for him, in a way. It happened to a lot of couples back then. Harry got Anne pregnant and then went back to his wife. I remember my dad saying that Harry was one of those people who live their lives through other people. All those lies about his war service and everything.’

‘But he got her back to photography,’ Luke said.

‘That’s true. He wasn’t all bad.’

‘And he loved her.’

‘He filled her head full of dreams. But I’ll tell you something: in all the years, she never spoke a word against him.’

‘She was faithful to him.’

‘Yes, she was.’

‘When you read his letters,’ Luke said. ‘You see he wanted great things for her, things he couldn’t get for himself. That’s love, isn’t it?’

‘She had the talent.’

‘He helped her become herself.’

‘If you say so. He’s your grandfather. And you’re bound to want to see the good in him, just like she did. It’s only natural.’

‘Your own father—’

‘He understood that people can get lost. To him, Harry was a smart fellow who just got lost in his own circumstances. He didn’t like what he did — or the lies he told — but he believed that Harry was a victim of everything that happened at the time, just as Anne was.’ She paused. ‘It’s not always the right people who take hold of your life. Half the women I know had men like that, but they got over them, and she didn’t.’

‘Well, she did,’ Luke said. ‘By turning him into something good.’

‘Something better. She was an artist, after all.’

Luke considered it. ‘The great Harry,’ he said. ‘She speaks about him with such reverence.’

‘Well, that’s the way she felt about him. He had a gift for making connections between people. People say he was a good teacher. He opened up something in her and if that happens, well—’

‘It can last for your whole life.’

‘In some cases, yes.’ Sheila sniffed and pushed back her hair. ‘Maybe Dad was right: you have to try to understand people like that, people who can’t have the life they want and are always making it up instead or running away.’

‘Yes,’ Luke said.

‘After a year or two, after she’d had the twins, they tried to make it work. They went on a few holidays together, him going up to Scotland in secret, you know, behind the wife’s back. The twins were very small. And it was on one of those holidays—’

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘You said “twins”. My mother had a twin?’

‘You didn’t know, love?’

‘What?’

‘Mrs Blake had twins.’

‘That can’t be true,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’ Sheila dropped her cigarette and leaned forward to step on it.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Mrs Blake had twins to Harry Blake. A boy and a girl. The girl was your mother and the boy died in an accident.’

Luke just stared into space. He felt he’d arrived at a familiar place of which he had no knowledge whatsoever. ‘Holy fuck,’ he said.

Sheila felt it was getting cold so they went for a drink in the bar of the Seabank Hotel. There was a screen on the wall which advertised the bus-runs coming from Scotland. Pick-ups in Partick, Airdrie, Motherwell, Dundee, Irvine and Ayr. The hotel was full of elderly people. ‘It leaves me not knowing who I am,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The information about the boy. About my mother having had a brother.’ He took a sip of his beer and looked up at the screen and then back at the table, and when he sighed it seemed to include everything. ‘When you think of it, Blackpool’s really a suburb of Scotland, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘It’s a suburb of a lot of places.’

He waited. ‘What happened after the boy died?’

Sheila’s mother and father had tried to help Anne because she couldn’t cope. The aunts weren’t fit enough to help her with the child and it was after they died that Anne bought the room. ‘Your mother was left with the neighbours in Glasgow half the time. Poor girl. I think Mrs Blake paid them to look after her. Lord Jesus. It’s all me mam and dad spoke about for years. Mrs Blake felt it was her fault, but it was nobody’s fault. Never really got over it. She stopped taking pictures.’

‘That was the cause?’

‘That was it. She turned away. And for years she would come down here. She was always by herself.’

‘In the darkroom?’

‘Stopping there for weeks at a time.’

‘And he didn’t come much, did he?’ Luke said. ‘That was plain from the letters, too.’

‘Once in a blue moon,’ she said. ‘And it always made her happy. And that’s why you can’t really judge: people come up with all kinds of arrangements to make sense of what happens to them. You can’t judge. I think the poor fellow didn’t know what to do. I can picture him then myself. The 1970s it was. I looked out one night and saw him chipping stones up at her window. His lies had gone all the way into her life, but he really made something of her and she wanted him. So she was Mrs Blake and he was a war hero and the boy was never mentioned.’

‘I see.’

‘And your mam was hardly mentioned either.’

‘But how did he die, the boy?’

She sat quiet for a moment. ‘Weird, isn’t it, how life turns out?’ she said. ‘My father died the same year as Harry, 1976. You find people are just people, after all. And we all have stories.’ She took out a balled-up napkin from her sleeve. ‘I remember Dad telling me the story about what happened to the boy. It was on one of those holidays up in Scotland. Harry was trying to spend some time with Anne and the twins. His second family. And he drove them out to some place. My dad said it had been snowing and they were on this particular road up there, this famous place, where, if you stop the car and take off the brake, you get the illusion of rolling uphill.’

‘The Electric Brae.’

‘That’s the one. An optical illusion; you’re supposed to see it in the daytime but it was dark by the time they arrived. Anne told my father they could see a bonny white rabbit on the road. Harry was driving or I think my dad said they were just rolling with the handbrake off. Harry told the children to look at how the rabbit’s eyes were shining. He turned the headlamps off, you know, so they could see it better. But then a car came out of nowhere and they were in the middle of the road with no lights on and the other car went straight into them. And that was that.’

‘Oh my God. That’s horrific.’

‘The boy died. His name was Thomas.’