The Summer of Secrets (22 page)

‘Do you know how much that boat weighs, sonny?’ His voice was calm, gentle even.

Will shook his head.

‘Enough to flatten someone twice your size.’ Mick pushed himself back to his feet with a groan. ‘So
you
need to think twice about putting yourself in front of it, because the boat can’t do it for you, all right?’ He was studying Will’s face. ‘All right?’ he asked again, this time getting a small nod in return. ‘OK.’ Mick gave him a push. ‘You get up on the towpath with your sister.’

It was as if everyone else drew breath at the same moment. Will ran to join Pippa, and Piet started his engine again. Only Helen saw how her dad’s hand was trembling as he rested it against the side of the boat.

She was graceful, despite her bulk, as she slid down towards the water in slow motion, barely needing the restraining hands on the ropes. She hit the water with a gentle bounce. Helen felt emotion rise up in her throat, for the boat being in the right place, for her dad, for Piet making it happen. She focused on the water. The disturbed surface bobbed around the hull, fussing, checking, approving and, finally, subsiding. Then Piet was behind her, resting a hand on her shoulder.

‘We’d best get some ballast into her.’ He gave her shoulder a friendly shake. ‘All turned out OK in the end, eh?’

In the evening, Helen had a long bath, reading until it was almost too chilly to be sitting in the water. Downstairs, Mick was sitting in the dark. She hesitated by the door to the living room, picking out her dad’s shape on the sofa, not certain if he was awake or sleeping.

‘Dad?’ There was no immediate response, and she trod carefully backwards, heading for the stairs. His voice came as if from a far distance.

‘We did it,’ he began. There was a pause, and he tried again. ‘She’s on her way, isn’t she?’ His voice was sodden.

‘Yes.’ Helen held the door frame, feeling the edges press into her palms. ‘Yes, she’s afloat.’

His face was wet, gleaming in the light coming through the door.

‘He could have died.’

Helen gripped harder.

‘I know.’ She pictured again the moment, Will straining to hold the boat in place. One moment longer and—

‘He’s all right though.’ She felt strange to be the one doing the reassuring. ‘He was all right.’

‘I just …’ Mick’s voice slurred. ‘I didn’t …’

She waited a long time for him to finish, even after the rasping of his breath told her he was asleep.

The café is full of people milling around. Nobody seems to be going in to the exhibition. Have I got the time wrong? There is no sign of Victoria, none of the buzz that must surround the centre of the evening’s attention. I stand inside the door for a bit, sweaty and awkward, then go to the counter and order a coffee. I don’t really want one, but it might make me feel legitimate. As the girl grinds beans and fusses with milk, I use the time to gather information. There is a framed cutting by the till, a glowing review from the culture section of a national newspaper. I imagine a life where this would be exciting, where I would be tugging on someone’s sleeve to point it out,
Look, there, that’s someone I know
.

I take my cup, careful not to spill any coffee on the tiny macaroon balanced on the saucer’s edge, and search for an empty chair. The couple already sitting at the table give those false smiles and then ignore me. There are leaflets propped in a transparent plastic holder and I turn them around to face me. They have the same image as the poster, the one of calm water. I wonder if it was chosen because it truly reflects her memories of the time. I may be wrong, I remind myself. For a blissful second, I wonder if my memories have grown out of proportion, if that summer should be remembered as a time of tranquillity. Or the exhibition may have nothing to do with the canal, with me, at all. I am, I tell myself, going to be disappointed. It’s hardly the right word. Disappointment conjures mildness, a small measure of regret. It is a flimsy word, a shallow dip easily escaped. I go to drink my coffee but, before I even take a sip, sharp nausea burns up in my throat. I can’t wait any longer. My hand shakes as I put the cup back down in its saucer. A spill snakes across the table and pools under the plastic leaflet holder. I ignore the sideways glance of the woman across the table and go over to the stairs. Nobody stops me.

The sign on the first floor announces a permanent exhibition. I want to skip it and follow the arrows up towards the next level, but a gallery assistant is coming down from there. I wait for her to go past but she stops, and holds an arm out towards the doorway.

‘Upstairs is for the Dover launch only,’ she says. ‘It will be starting very soon.’ She smiles an air hostess smile. ‘In the meantime, please feel free to experience our permanent collection.’

She watches until I am safely out of the way.

I am in a narrow, long space, the opposite of the tall whiteness I was expecting. The walls and ceiling are hung with patterned fabric, but the light level is too low for me to make out the colour. Darkly glowing oils of still-life flowers are surrounded by an aura of light. They alternate with large glass backlit cases in which big, daisy-like flowers have been mounted and left to decay. Even though my consciousness is elsewhere, my mind fogged with apprehension, I am drawn to them. Are the oil paintings as old as they seem? I don’t trust my judgement. Is it an elaborate joke? They are labelled as being ‘in the style of …’ and the accompanying blurbs talk of statis and change, of what we keep and what we lose over time.

In the final oil painting, a worm emerges from a perfect apple. The apple is balanced against an open book, which in turn is half covered with a white cloth. The portion of the page that can be seen has writing on it, lightly scribbled, as if the owner jotted the phrase down to remember it for later:
media vita in morte sumus.
I know enough Latin to recognize life and death when I see it, but have to check the label for the translation.
In the midst of life we are in death
. I stand there for a long time, looking at the shine of the apple’s skin. It is only when voices tell me that other visitors are on their way that I carry on to the next room..

I pass straight through this time. I don’t want to stop again: I need to find the photographs, I need to find them now. There is another room, an unexpected corridor. I hear voices, but can’t tell where they are coming from. There is a door, but it won’t open. Finally, a right turn brings me back to the staircase.

The hostess is nowhere to be seen.

My legs drag, each foot an inert weight, and when I reach the top I am once again finding it hard to breathe. A tape has been stretched across the entrance, and a sign tells me the exhibition is not yet open. I duck under the frail barrier and take a step inside.

The corridor stretches ahead, lined with small frames. Each frame contains the image of a child, and each child is going somewhere. Some look back over their shoulders, some remain focused on their goal. They are going somewhere I know. With each step they take, I see myself disappearing around a corner. In amongst these captured moments, I know for certain that I do exist.

The corridor is as long as an optical illusion, and I imagine being trapped here forever, forever hearing the voices of children calling, always out of reach. I have to feel my way as the lighting dims, and as I grope along, there is the sound of a counting down, the ticking loud and clockless. It takes me a long time to arrive at the closed door. My first push is tentative, and I wonder if it is locked. I try again, and it whispers its way over a thick, bristling mat.

I am alone in near darkness. My eyes adjust and I see there is a seat, an armchair with winged sides, upholstered in fabric covered with tiny rubber spikes. Something is painted on the wooden arm-end, and I bend to read it.
Accept comfort, but stay alert
. Another sign hovers in mid-air, directing me to ‘Sit Here’. I can feel the spikes push into me as I lower myself down. A light flickers on, lighting up the wall in front of me. The wall is tiled with shining blocks of a uniform size. Each contains a black-and-white photograph. They show city and field; air, water; indoor scenes, skyscapes. Each one captures, in amidst the setting, a fragmentary piece of body. A toe. The lobe of an ear. The space behind a knee.

I am held in the chair. I feel a thousand fingers pushing into my body as I try to make sense of the display. Do the pictures show some kind of exploded configuration of the body? I try to map them, but there is no immediate sense that the hands make up the right and left, or that curves which must come from the buttock, the waist, the spine are distributed with more frequency in the centre of the space. So I allow them to remain separate, each disappearing flick of skin staying out of reach. Finally, I notice the inside edge of a foot. The skin is dirty and the camera angle is pointing towards the heel; right in the instep, there is a deeply angled, partly healed cut. It’s my foot, from the afternoon Will fell in. But who took the photograph? I press my hands to my eyes, trying to remember when the camera turned up. Victoria didn’t start carrying it around until later. And wouldn’t I remember her taking this picture? I seem to catch a fugitive coil of antiseptic in the air but it’s gone too fast to be real. I let my hands drop and concentrate on the photographs again. Where are you? Where am I?

Someone is shaking my shoulder. It’s the gallery assistant from the stairs. As I turn my head she steps back, as if wary of what I might do. Perhaps she thinks I might bite.

‘I’m sorry, madam, but this part of the gallery is closed to the public.’

Madam is a funny word. A term of respect: Madam Speaker, Madam Justice. It signals anonymity,
Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to complain
. I hear a voice telling me off:
You little madam, wait until your father gets home.
Except he never did.

‘If you’d like to—’ The assistant is only young. She is holding an arm out towards the doorway. She knows I have seen the tape keeping this floor closed off. She must also have seen the tear that now rolls down my cheek. She glances over her shoulder, hoping for backup. I wonder what she would do if I told her – if I said,
I am in these pictures. Look carefully and see if you can spot me
. Instead, I stand and go in the direction she indicates. I lift my leg and step over the tape.

As I go towards the stairs, I hear her voice again. ‘It won’t be long now. The artist should be here any minute.’

The canal was undisturbed in the dawn light, with a light mist lingering on the surface of the water. Helen didn’t know what had woken her, but she hadn’t been able to go back to sleep, and the desire had grown to be out by herself, to sit in the boat and sense the water beneath her. Under her feet, the ground was damp with dew and even though she kept to the trodden part of the tow path, the hems of her jeans soon became wet and uncomfortable against her bare ankles.

The cottages seemed closed in on themselves, standing in their compact row. It was odd to be standing on the outside, awake and looking in. The empty pair in the middle were desolate, the uncurtained windows revealing the peeling wallpaper, with lighter squares where pictures and cupboards once rested. Mrs Tyler’s cottage had a coldness to it, the front door there to keep you out, the rooms netted and unknown.

The Dovers’ house was different; she could see into it with her mind’s eye as if it were a doll’s house, the front taken off, leaving the interior open to view. There are the twins, curled into foetal balls on the bunk beds, covers pushed to the bottom of their mattresses. There is Alice, beautiful enough, even in sleep, to alter the clothes-strewn room from slovenly to picturesque. Seth’s room is bare: bed tidy, chair positioned in one corner, committing to nothing. Seth is lying straight under the covers, his face turned steadily to the ceiling. But where to place Piet? He had no definite space, no sense that he had imprinted himself on any one room. He could be sitting on the edge of Alice’s bed, watching the twitching of her eyelids, the slow rise and fall of her chest, or sprawled on the couch, or out in the back garden with the first coffee of the day. Or not there at all, an absence, a negative image. But surely he would be there for the evening, for the party?

As she reached the boat it started to rock, and she stopped where she was, heart in mouth, while a figure hauled its way on to the back deck.

‘You’re down early.’ Her smile was cautious. She hadn’t expected to find her dad here. He was rough, his shirt rumpled and his eyes bleary.

‘I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to come down and see how things were.’

‘You were pretty fast asleep when I went to bed.’ She couldn’t help the edge in her tone. She didn’t exactly mind him going out, leaving her to sleep in an empty house. It was more that she hadn’t noticed he wasn’t there. Surely she should have had a sense of emptiness, a subconscious knowledge of the lack of another person breathing, turning over in bed. Was why she had woken early? And the back door had been unlocked; anyone could have come in.

‘Dad, you could have told me.’

He rubbed both hands up and down his face, rasping against stubble more grey than it should have been, a symptom of decay rather than growth.

‘You were asleep, I thought it was better not to disturb you.’ He blinked up at the sky, as if surprised it was still there. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

In the end it felt right to be sitting there together, the two of them, her dad in his old office chair and her on an upturned box.

‘Is it how you thought it would be?’ Helen held the tea out to him.

He took the mug and sat back, putting one foot out to stop the chair rotating.

‘Well, you know.’ His chin sank down to his chest. ‘It’s funny.’

He lapsed into silence. Helen drank some of her tea. The cabin reminded her of a child’s toy, the plywood pieces cut to make walls and window spaces. The ply was pale, still marked with outlines and dirty fingerprints. There was a bench to one side, topped with a raw-edged piece of foam, in front of it a folding table. The kettle sat on the table next to a jam jar full of teabags and a camping gas burner.