Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

Mum took hers wordlessly, used an index finger to catch a drip as it rolled down the side. She held the warm cup between her hands but didn’t drink. I sat beside her and thought about nothing. Tried to think about nothing while my brain ticked ahead of me, wondering how it was I had so few memories of my dad. Real ones, not the sort stolen from photographs and family stories.

‘I was angry with him,’ Mum said finally. ‘I raised my voice. I’d finished the roast and laid it on the table for carving and even though it was getting cool sitting out, I decided that it would serve him right to eat a cold dinner. I thought about going to fetch him myself, but I was sick and tired of calling to no avail. I thought: see how you like a cold roast.’ She rolled her lips together the way people do when the threat of tears makes talking difficult and they’re hoping to cover the fact. ‘He’d been up in the roof again all afternoon, pulling down boxes, cluttering the hallway – God knows how they’ll get back up again, he’ll be in no fit state – ’ She looked, unseeing, into her tea. ‘He’d gone into the bathroom to wash before dinner and that’s where it happened. I found him lying beside the tub, right where you fainted that time, when you were small. He’d been washing his hands, there was soap all over them.’

Silence ensued and I itched to fill it. There’s something reassuring about conversation; its ordered pattern provides an anchor to the real world: nothing terrible or unexpected can happen, surely, when the rational exchange of dialogue is taking place. ‘And so you called the ambulance,’ I prompted, my tone that of a nursery-school teacher.

‘They came quickly; that was lucky. I sat with him and wiped the soap away, and then it seemed that they were there. Two of them, a man and a woman. They had to do CPR, and use one of those electric shock machines.’

‘A defibrillator,’ I said.

‘And they gave him something, some medicine to dissolve any clots.’ She studied her upturned hands. ‘He was still wearing his undershirt, and I remember thinking I should go and bring him a clean one.’ She shook her head and I wasn’t sure whether it was with regret that she hadn’t, or astonishment that such a thing had occurred to her while her husband lay unconscious on the floor, and I decided that it didn’t really matter right now and that I was in no position to judge anyway. Don’t think it had escaped my notice that I’d have been there to help if I hadn’t been probing Auntie Rita at the time, lifting stories from my mum’s past.

A doctor came down the corridor towards us and Mum knotted her fingers. I half stood, but he didn’t slow, striding across the waiting room to disappear through another door.

‘Won’t be long now, Mum.’ The weight of unspoken apology curled my words and I felt utterly helpless.

There’s only one photograph from my mum and dad’s wedding. I mean, presumably there are more, gathering dust somewhere in a forgotten white album, but there’s only one image I know of that’s survived the passage of years.

It’s just the two of them in it, not one of those typical wedding photos where the bride and groom’s families fan out in either direction providing wings to the couple in the centre; unbalanced wings so you suspect the creature would never be able to fly. In this photo their mismatched families have melted away and it’s just the two of them, and the way she’s staring at his face it’s like she’s enraptured. As if he glows, which he sort of does: an effect of the old lights photographers used back then, I suppose.

And he’s so impossibly young, they both are; he still has hair, right across the top of his head, and no idea that it’s not going to stick around. No idea that he will have a son, then lose him; that his future daughter will so bewilder him and that his wife will come to ignore him, that one day his heart will seize up and he’ll be taken to hospital in an ambulance and that same wife will sit in the waiting room with the daughter he can’t understand, waiting for him to wake up.

None of that is present in the photo, not even a hint. That photo is a frozen moment; their whole future lies unknown and ahead, just as it should. But at the same time, the future is in that photo, a version of it at any rate. It’s in their eyes, hers especially. For the photographer has captured more than two young people on their wedding day, he’s captured a threshold being crossed, an ocean wave at the precise moment before it turns to foam and begins its crash towards the ground. And the young woman, my mum, is seeing more than just the young man standing beside her, the fellow she’s in love with, she’s seeing their whole life together, stretching out ahead…

Then again, perhaps I’m romanticizing; perhaps she’s just admiring his hair, or looking forward to the reception, or the honeymoon… You create your own fiction around photos like that, images that become iconic within a family, and I realized as I sat there in the hospital that there was only one way of knowing for sure how she’d felt, what she’d hoped for when she looked at him that way; whether her life was more complicated, her past more complex, than her sweet expression suggests. And all I had to do was ask; strange that I’d never thought of it before. I suppose it’s the light on my father’s face that’s to blame. The way Mum’s looking at him draws the attention his way, so it’s easy to dismiss her as a young and innocent girl of unremarkable origins whose life is only just now beginning. It was a myth Mum had done her best to propagate, I realized; for whenever she spoke of their lives before they met it was always my dad’s stories she told.

But as I conjured the image to mind, fresh from my visit to Rita, it was Mum’s face I brought into focus; back in the shadows, a little smaller than his. Was it possible that the young woman with the wide eyes had a secret? That a decade before her wedding to the solid, glowing man beside her, she’d enjoyed a furtive love affair with her school teacher, a man engaged to her older friend? She’d have been fifteen or so at the time, and Meredith Burchill was certainly not the kind of woman to have a teenage love affair, but what about Meredith Baker? When I was growing up one of Mum’s favourite lectures was on the sorts of things good girls did not do: was it possible she’d been speaking from experience?

I was sunk then by the sense that I knew everything and nothing of the person sitting next to me. The woman in whose body I had grown and whose house I’d been raised was in some vital ways a stranger to me; I’d gone thirty years without ascribing her any more dimension than the paper dollies I’d played with as a girl, with the pasted-on smiles and the folding-tab dresses. What was more, I’d spent the past few months recklessly seeking to unlock her deepest secrets when I’d never really bothered to ask her much about the rest. Sitting there in the hospital, though, as Dad lay in an emergency bed somewhere, it suddenly seemed very important that I learn more about them. About her. The mysterious woman who made allusions to Shakespeare, who’d once sent articles to newspapers for publication.

‘Mum?’

‘Hmm?’

‘How did you and Dad meet?’

Her voice was brittle from lack of use and she cleared her throat before saying, ‘At the cinema. A screening of The Holly and the Ivy . You know that.’

A silence.

‘What I mean is, how did you meet? Did you see him? Did he see you? Who spoke first?’

‘Oh, Edie, I can’t remember. Him; no, me. I forget.’ She moved the fingers of one hand a little, like a puppeteer dangling stars on strings. ‘We were the only two there. Imagine that.’