Marianne was still feeling shaken from her morning fall, so she took one of the notebooks from her desk and sat down in her armchair, wondering what she might discover, but her eyes gradually lost focus as her mind went back to when she was first told about her father.
‘Il faut que tu saches que Papa n’est pas ton vrai père.’ ‘You need to know that Papa isn’t your real father.’ Maman always speaks to her in French. What does she mean?
‘You will understand it when you are older.’
‘Why is Papa not my father?’
‘Papa is your father, absolutely he’s your father – it’s just that… he’s not what people call your natural father. You might hear someone say that one day. It’s not important – don’t ever worry about it – but I felt you ought to know.’
But she doesn’t know. What isn’t real about him? She feels herself wanting to cry, but knowing that her mother would tell her off, she runs outside to her den behind the garden shed where, under a roof made from an old tarpaulin, she has stowed the stained pink blanket her mother had thrown out and her second-best doll, Sally. Curling up in a foetal position and clasping Sally to her chest, she asks her why her father isn’t real, but Sally has no answer. So, she cries for what she doesn’t understand, for her father who isn’t a natural father and for herself who by rights ought to have a real father like other children.
Later, she begins to wonder if she has misunderstood her mother. There doesn’t seem anything unreal about Papa, and anyway perhaps it doesn’t matter if Papa isn’t a real father, so long as he looks like a real father and behaves like a real father. She decides it was wrong to have cried and so she whispers half a Hail Mary to show God that she is sorry.
Callum and Helen were due to arrive at around twelve thirty. Marianne decided she needed to take a walk in the garden before they came. She put on her coat and scarf and with Anna taking her arm she hobbled out into the bright but chilly March morning. A sharp wind pulled at Marianne’s scarf: straight from the Urals, they had told her, when she first came to live in Cambridge. She looked towards the end of the garden where the forsythia swayed and danced as if it wanted to escape the wind’s whip while the daffodils bowed in unison, acknowledging a superior force. Yellow – the colour of spring, of sunshine; an optimistic colour, so why don’t I like it? she thought. Maybe it’s because I associate it with this freezing weather. Maybe I resent the relentless optimism of spring: yellow for cold – and cowards.
Callum and Helen arrived in a cheerful mood; Callum embraced his mother and then, unusually for him, kissed Anna on both cheeks. Even Helen seemed less brittle than usual. They were alarmed to see Marianne’s bruised face and bandaged wrist.
‘Why don’t you carpet the bathroom, Mum?’ said Callum. ‘That way at least you won’t be falling on hard tiles.’
‘I don’t think that’s the answer.’
‘You need one of those portable toilets by your bed,’ said Helen.
Marianne sighed. ‘A commode – yes, you’re probably right, but I intend to resist that for the time being. Anna and I have decided that I need a rail to hold onto along the bathroom wall, and that’s what we are going to do.’
While Anna laid the table for lunch Marianne observed her son. Streaks of grey were becoming more prominent now in his thick dark hair but he was still a good-looking man. A high, smooth forehead with sculpted eyebrows and an inconspicuous nose – a handsome face, no longer too fleshy as it had been in his youth, betrayed only by a slight weakness of the chin and a trace of anxiety which always seemed to hover around his eyes. There was a lot of Edward in Callum, a genuine altruism – not a cultivated show of do-goodery but an instinctive desire to do his best for others, to put his own interests second. An admirable quality, she thought, but it had made him a pushover for a determined woman like Helen.
Marianne suspected that Helen’s good humour was not unconnected to their plan to return to Australia for three weeks over Easter; a plan which involved Marianne having Leah to stay for two of those weeks. The trip to Australia was ostensibly to see their other daughter – though the logic of this escaped Marianne. ‘Why don’t you just fly the girl over?’ she said. ‘It would be cheaper than both of you going back, and I’d get a chance to see her.’
‘We can’t do that – she has important hockey matches,’ said Helen. ‘Anyway, there are things we need to do back home.’
Marianne noticed a small flicker of irritation pass across Callum’s face.
‘I’m thinking of inviting my great-nephew Jake here for Easter,’ said Marianne, changing the subject. ‘Some younger company for Leah.’
‘Jake? You mean Julie’s Jake,’ said Helen. ‘But he must be well into his twenties now.’
‘Twenty-three or twenty-four, I think. I know he’s working as a journalist.’
‘But, Marianne, I mean, Leah’s only sixteen – I’m not sure that’s really… well, you know – I mean, they’re not really in the same age bracket.’
‘I won’t let him run off with her,’ said Marianne, laughing. ‘Anyway, it’s just an idea – he’s probably got something else planned.’
‘I think it would be a good idea for Leah to get to know her cousin,’ said Callum. ‘She might also like to learn what a career in journalism is like.’
Helen shot Callum a look of frustration but said nothing.
After lunch Helen helped Anna wash up while Callum went through to the sitting room with Marianne. It was a comfortable room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases either side of the fireplace. On one wall hung two landscapes by Nita Spilhaus, a South African impressionist artist, which her grandfather had acquired in Cape Town in the nineteen thirties – all dappled sunlight pattering through exotic foliage – which Marianne liked to imagine gave the room an air of permanent summer. In the bay window sat the partners’ desk which she had picked up cheaply on account of its excessive size.
Marianne sat down in her chair close to the wood-burning stove. ‘Work going OK?’ she said.
‘It’s fine, but, you know – I enjoy designing individual houses and that work barely exists in England. Out-of-town shopping centres are less satisfying.’
‘And money?’
‘OK, but, well, just the same situation back in Melbourne – I was hoping I could keep things ticking over when I’m not there, but now I’m not so sure. And you? Money-wise, I mean? Anna must be costing a fair bit.’
‘I’m managing.’
Walking across to the desk by the window, Callum picked up one of the old notebooks. ‘So these are your mother’s wartime diaries you were telling me about.’
‘Yes.’
Callum peered inside. ‘I wouldn’t be able to make any sense of this even if I could read French.’
‘It’s not easy.’
‘But you can read it?’
‘It’s like any manuscript – if you spend time on it you learn to read the writing and work out the private shorthand all writers use.’
‘Well, you always were a scholar, Mum. Anything sensational?’
Marianne hesitated for a moment. ‘Not yet. I’m looking at the first book – my mother is only fourteen; it’s 1940 and they are fleeing from the invading Germans. If I ever complete the translation, you’ll be able to read a typescript in English.’
Callum did not seem especially interested in this prospect. He came and sat beside her and took her hand. ‘So everything OK, Mum? I mean, apart from the fall.’
‘Everything is fine, darling.’
‘And Anna?’
‘Wonderful as ever.’
‘I do hope you’ll be alright with Leah. I think she’ll behave. You know, she’s rather in awe of you. She’ll also have a lot of homework to do.’