Songs of Blue and Gold (4 page)

‘And all the meals I've cooked that she hasn't eaten.'

‘Best plan, I think.'

Melissa, feeling guilty again at her relief, concurred.

THE DOORBELL RANG,
echoing around the cold dead air of the hall. A chill rose from the flagstones.

An elderly man stood tall on the doorstep.

‘Bill Angell,' he reminded Melissa.

As soon as he said it, she recognised him. He was a widower, an old friend of her mother's. They went to the theatre together, Melissa seemed to remember, the occasional dinner out. He was good company, Elizabeth always said, but there was nothing more to it than that. Bill was a good man, a good decent man. Melissa had met him a couple of times over the years, and saw no reason to disagree.

‘I was passing,' he said. ‘I thought I'd drop in and see Elizabeth. Is she here?'

‘You'd better come in.'

He was tall enough to have to duck to get through the ancient door, and he did so automatically as if he was used to it. He was neatly turned out, immaculately so but for a moth hole in the sleeve of his green tweed coat. His grey hair was thin, but he had not gone bald. He held himself upright
as if he was ageing with dignity but no relish of the process.

He followed her into the sitting room, a slight stiffness in his walk. Melissa closed the book she had been reading and told him what had happened.

‘I had been a bit concerned – for a while now,' he admitted. ‘And then when she hadn't been in touch . . . I'm so sorry, I didn't realise it was all so serious . . .'

‘I don't think anyone realised . . .'

Neither of them really knew what to say.

‘Looks like you're busy. I hope I'm not disturbing you too much.'

Melissa shook her head. ‘You're not.'

‘If there's anything I can do,' said Bill. His lively grey eyes told her he meant it.

‘The thing is,' said Melissa, feeling her composure slip and having to recover, wanting to talk to someone who would understand. ‘It's as if I'm losing her – as the person she is, if that makes sense. The person I've always known. She can't remember anything properly, from what happened yesterday, to what she said five minutes ago.'

Bill nodded. The news had clearly upset him.

‘And now she's been showing me stuff that I never knew she had. The other day she came up with some photographs I'm sure I've never seen before. Pictures of the sea and a shore – taken somewhere Mediterranean, was my guess. Anyway, she suddenly said it was Corfu, but I don't think she's ever been there. Or if she has, she's certainly never mentioned it before. But she was more animated than she'd been for ages, so I went along with it.'

Bill frowned in a gesture of sympathy. There was much
that was quietly impressive about him: his height and bearing, the soft tweed jacket and tie; his well-chosen words and concern to put others at their ease.

‘It's not easy,' he said.

‘And who is Julian? She was saying the name Julian.'

‘I've no idea.' A pause. ‘Not being much help, am I?'

Melissa smiled. ‘It is a help actually, just to talk to someone who knows her well.'

‘Do you want to show me the photos?' asked Bill.

They examined them together over strong coffee in the kitchen where it was warm by the old black Rayburn.

‘These could well be of Corfu, couldn't they?' she said. ‘I've never been but I'm sure the landscape fits – the cypress trees and the shape of the buildings, the colour of the water.'

‘I'm sure you're right.'

‘But when were they taken? When was she there?'

Bill exhaled with a whistle. ‘I'd say these were taken in the nineteen . . . sixties,' he ventured.

‘How can you tell?'

‘From the development and the way the colour sits. I'm a professional photographer, or was.'

‘I didn't know that.'

‘Oh, yes. Not a news photographer, mind. The thought of having to take pictures of terrible accidents, people suffering, wars and unrest, anger . . . well, let's say that had no appeal. I wanted to make proper pictures of tiny things. Things that could not be seen by the human eye, like a drop of water falling into a puddle, a snowflake in flight . . .'

He paused, angling one of the pictures towards the
window and examining it minutely if dispassionately. ‘I started work at sixteen at C. and A. James, the camera and photographic equipment shop on the old High Street. Learned the trade. Saved up and bought my first professional camera. A Leica, it was, lovely to the touch. I bought books and I taught myself to be a proper photographer. When Cyril James retired, I bought him out. Mary – my wife – and I ran it together.'

‘I know it,' said Melissa. ‘It's a bookshop as well as a studio, isn't it?'

‘That was Mary's part. Art and photographic books. She ran that side – but then when she died, I had to keep on. We'd become known for that, and I didn't like to disappoint people.'

Bill stared critically at the photographs.

‘They're only snapshots,' said Melissa defensively.

But he did not seem to hear her. ‘Kodak paper . . . I'd say mid to late nineteen sixties . . .'

‘You can be that sure?'

‘Pretty much. Did you know, the world's oldest surviving photograph was taken by a man called Nicéphore Niépce, in France in 1827? It needed an exposure time of eight and a half hours, by the end of which the roofs he had captured were lit by two suns, one from the east and one from the west. He must have given up hope of producing a picture of a living person. No one could possibly have sat still for that long. But at least the print he produced was stable, as good today as it was then which is more than you can say for these.

‘The way things are, there will be better records of Victorians in their rigid black-and-white poses than there will be of the second half of the twentieth century. Modern
colour processing has not been all it was cracked up to be. It seemed wonderful at the time, but it's not permanent. It begins to fade after only about twenty years because the dyes break down, or rather the three colours of dye used break down at different rates so there's a noticeable shift in colour.'

They both looked back at the random mosaic of photographs on the table between them. There was a yellowing tinge to the rocks and the water on some of them that she had not noticed before.

The clock on the wall ticked loudly.

‘That's how I first met Elizabeth,' said Bill. ‘She came into the shop one day.'

Maybe Melissa did know that. The information was there but had to be teased out, having lain dormant for so long.

He told her how it had taken years to overcome their mutual shyness and to meet at a gallery for an exhibition. How that had progressed to a regular Thursday matinee at the repertory theatre. Their mutual dislike of stage musicals and secret passion for Ayckbourn and the sly intimacies of Alan Bennett.

All the while, Melissa was thinking how strange it was that she had never realised they were such good friends.

But then, how well did she know her mother as she had grown older? Understanding the wider story was going to be a matter of connecting disparate pieces of seemingly unrelated, almost forgotten knowledge. Just as, at the same time, an infinite number of her mother's thoughts and experiences and unconscious perceptions were fragmenting into a jumble of impressions.

They made an arrangement to visit Elizabeth at the home.
She was not sure of the rules regarding visitors, but was sure her mother would be pleased to see Bill.

Melissa was convinced she was doing the right thing, trying to stimulate Elizabeth's mind with the familiar, the friendly face, the happy memory.

Bill agreed readily.

‘You don't want to take that ivy down,' he said as he paused on the doorstep where she was seeing him off. Some long dark strands of it curled by the garden wall where she had made a few half-hearted attempts to chop into it, fresh from wielding the shears in vengeance against the rambling rose which had fallen so spectacularly.

‘It will only kill a tree if it's allowed to run riot all over it and reaches the crown. And over a wall a good thick mess of ivy like this gives food and shelter to all sorts of creatures . . . birds and bats and butterflies.'

‘I thought it was supposed to damage brickwork.'

‘Or maybe it protects the old walls from damage from wind and rain. You could be doing more harm by pulling it away. You might think about that.'

She did. It was nice to feel there was someone looking out for them, her mother and her.

Melissa did not like the idea of searching through her mother's private belongings. But she had to keep trying. She had it in her mind that if she could keep her mother talking it still might make a difference.

The photograph albums were easy to find. They were in the dining room cupboard where they had always been kept. The photographs of them as a family – such as it was –
were fading now, coming loose from the pages. Her father Edward, handsome, bulky, cigarette in hand. Melissa as a baby, as a child. And always her mother's character behind the lens: busy, no-nonsense, the practical balanced by the creative.

But the adhesive had browned and slackened its hold; the plastic film which held them flat was brittle now. Bill was right. Their colours had already begun to degenerate into strange olive greens and tan yellows, no longer a true reflection of life. The images were slipping silently away, pressed in books in the dark of cupboards and drawers. Ultimately they would be nothing but colourless compound and some ghostly outlines.

Searching for anything unfamiliar, she found nothing. Neither was there anything more in the cupboard on the landing.

She wandered into her mother's bedroom.

The book of poems was still where she had left it on the chest of drawers.
Collected Poems
by Julian Adie. A hardback copy in beautiful, almost unread condition.

Melissa read a few lines, then closed and turned it over. Why had her mother said that she needed this? Or was it just nonsense, like all the other sad peculiarities? There was so much Melissa did not know, and she was conscious that the time for explanations was running out.

Julian. It was an odd coincidence. She opened the book again at the title page, and this time the handwritten lines in black ink leapt off the page: ‘
To Elizabeth, always remembering Corfu, what could have been and what we must both
forget.
' The signature was clear and wellformed. ‘
Julian Adie
'. It physically startled her. Whatever did it mean, with its unmistakably intimate tone that was suddenly negated by the use of his surname?

She flipped to the biographical note on the inside of the dust jacket. Julian Adie was born in Darjeeling, India, in 1914 where his father was a railway engineer. He was educated at Sherborne School. In London, he worked variously as a photographer's runner, a publisher's proofreader and a jazz pianist, before publishing his first novel and spending five years in Corfu, from 1935 to 1939. He lived and worked subsequently in Egypt, Rhodes, Cyprus and France. He was married four times.

A bare outline that told her next to nothing about the man. What was Julian Adie like as a person? Did he have a run of marital bad luck – or would a tally of four wives tend to indicate that he was the one who created the problems?

‘
To Elizabeth, always remembering Corfu, what could have been and what we must both forget.
'

The cruel irony of the words struck her. At first glance they had seemed merely romantic and intriguing. And what, specifically, was Elizabeth supposed to forget?

Melissa took the book along with some photographs when she went to the nursing home that afternoon. Elizabeth smiled in her new enigmatic way but ignored the book and claimed she did not know anyone in the pictures. Her cough had improved, and so had her opinion of the nursing home. She was quite enjoying herself, she said, although the tigers in the garden could be fierce.

And Melissa was aware that she kept her own secrets. She still had not told her mother about Richard.

The next day, Bill Angell was waiting for her at reception. They went in together. Melissa led the way, confident she had brought a happy surprise, sure that an old friend would provide a welcome stimulus. But Elizabeth stared at Bill wide-eyed as if she was frightened, and Melissa felt guilty once again, this time for not considering her mother's need for privacy. While he was there, Elizabeth would say nothing, only shake her head. She was thinner, depleted by the chest infection as by her lack of interest in food.

‘I thought you might like this.' Bill handed her a postcard. ‘I've been keeping it to give you.'

Elizabeth hardly looked at the vibrant swirl of colour on the front. It slipped like water from her fingers.

After half an hour, Bill left them alone. ‘I'll wait in the car park,' he said.

She joined him twenty minutes later. Elizabeth had closed her eyes and gone to sleep, her breath whining and wheezing. Touched that he had cared enough to come, and wanting in some way to make up for her mother's reaction, Melissa asked Bill, ‘Shall we have a drink?'

Melissa remembered there was a cosy pub on the way back into town. She suggested it, but he said, ‘I'm not much for pubs these days. Too noisy and full of machines. But if you'll risk it I could make you a cup of coffee at mine if you want to follow me back.'

‘If it's no trouble, that would be nice.'

They made for their separate cars, Bill to a well-maintained
blue saloon of some Japanese design and Melissa to her mother's small white Fiat. Windscreen wipers flapping against the intermittent drizzle, they headed into a gusty wind towards Tunbridge Wells.

Skirting the common, maples were shedding bark in thin shavings of coppery curlicues. A witch hazel dangled flowers of orange sea creatures and spiders. Melissa followed Bill to a house hidden in an enclave of its northern side. Edwardian, spacious and detached, with a hotchpotch of timbering apparently designed to add a rustic touch, it was set on a lawn ringed with dense shrubs. They drew up on gravel, just enough space for two cars.