The camera moved slowly over the Shropshire landscape around the Stead, skeletal in its winter garb, but still gorgeous. The sun glinted through the bare branches, and the old house sat rosy-stoned and welcoming. It was the house of my childhood and the land of my lost innocence.
I sat entranced while my cigarette burnt down to my fingertips and gazed as Paul spoke intimately to the camera. Memory, he was saying, is intangible, and die memories one has of childhood, which glow so vividly through all of our adult life, are seductive and nostalgic. And if one’s childhood is happy, then adulthood is like an exile from its joy. We can never return. More music, and the camera zoomed in on the door of the Stead. Alan walked out. My ash fell onto the duvet cover and I brushed it heedlessly away. He quoted something from Wordsworth, and spoke about love. He said, with all the old Alan bravado, that he had been a wild young man who had scorned the concept of family and kicked against its traces. But he had learnt that this – he gestured at the Stead – was where he could be himself. He talked about the family as the place where you could be most tormented, or most at peace. ‘For myself, I have found a kind of peace,’ he said. He looked, as he stood on the threshold, like a mass-produced wise patriarch that you might buy in a souvenir shop. I watched his broad hands as he gestured, and I shuddered. Martha, thin as a tree branch, came through the doorway carrying a broad basket and some secateurs, smiled strangely at the camera and walked off screen. The camera moved sideways, and came to rest on the site where Natalie’s body had been found. Paul stated the facts. Then came a series of stills of Natalie : as a baby, a toddler, a ten-year-old, a teenager; on her own, with her family. Then her tombstone.
Claud appeared and now that I was his audience I saw how handsome he was, how serious. I sat like a coiled spring while I waited for him to talk about me, and our marriage break-up, but all he said was that ‘some things had not turned out as he had hoped’. I was shocked by the spasm of pity and love that jolted me. Cut to Robert and Jerome playing frisbee on Hampstead Heath. So young and carefree. Then Jerome, affectionately derisive on how the older generation was obsessed with the past. Fred, at home with his family on their well-tended patio. Alan again, drinking brandy and being expansive on the power of forgiveness. Theo comparing a family to a computer program.
Me, that was me, red-faced in my kitchen. Oh God, Christmas – but the Christmas I watched as I waited for Kim to arrive was one of festive hilarity : laughter boomed out of the television; I smiled a lot and handed round wine (had I smiled a lot that evening? I couldn’t remember). Erica and Kim looked like two extravagant birds of paradise in their purple and yellow get-ups. Dad was distinguished Old Age, and my sons fresh Youth. The power of editing – to splice images so that collective trauma becomes a display of boozy unity.
I smoked the last cigarette in the packet. In spite of being revolted by the film’s message, smashed as it was into a thousand pieces by Alan’s confession, I was half seduced by its melancholy insistence upon the past as a place of innocence and joy, the lost Eden in everyone. The music, the winter greenness of Shropshire, the faces that came and went on the television screen, as familiar as the palm of my hand, the way that Paul, somehow, had made even his most resistant interviewees talk with a kind of inner concentration so that they seemed to be discovering truths about themselves for the first time – these things filled me with rich sorrow.
The film was nearing its end now. Paul was walking along the Col, hands in his pocket. The brown water was swollen with all the recent rain. He stopped and turned towards the camera, held out his hands in a gesture of offering. Oh, God, he was reciting poetry again :
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
I was getting confused. Was the point of this documentary that you could go home again or that you couldn’t But Paul was talking again. ‘The family,’ he said. ‘Alan Martello called it torment and peace. Jane Martello, my sister, said that it is where we are our best and our worst selves.’ [Oh, Christ.] ‘Erica, my wife, calls it a haven and a prison – we can always return to it, but no matter how far we go from it, we can never escape it.’ (Which Christmas cracker did she get that from?) Paul smiled with the wisdom of the ages and walked on, into the final sequence I had already witnessed, full circle back to the house and the site of the body.
I switched off the television, resolving to sell it. Or maybe a crack addict would break in and steal it while I was away with Kim. It was nearly five thirty. I buckled up my suitcase, then on an impulse I opened it once more and threw in my childhood diary. I quickly punched in Paul’s number but was answered by a machine. After the bleep I said:
‘Paul, it’s me, Jane. I’ve just watched your film. It’s very impressive – honestly, in spite of everything, it holds its own ground. I’m going away for the weekend with Kim, but I’ll call you as soon as I get back. Well done.’ I was going to replace the receiver but a thought struck me. ‘Oh, and Paul – can you just tell me : which side of the river were you walking along at the end?’
As I put the phone down, I heard Kim’s horn. I put on my leather jacket, picked up my bag and walked into the weather.
River Arms was a small white inn with low beams and a huge open fire in the bar. We had a double room, with a bathroom. Kim said that when we woke in the morning we’d be able to see the river and the mountains from our window. Now it was dusk and damp. I sat on my bed, feeling too tired to move.
‘It’s nine o’clock,’ said Kim. ‘Why don’t you have a bath, and I’ll meet you in the bar in half an hour. They do wonderful meals here, but we’ll wait until tomorrow for that. Let’s just have a snack by the fire tonight.’
‘Fine.’ I yawned and stood up. ‘How do you know about this place?’
Kim giggled. ‘My romantic past. It comes in useful sometimes.’
I had a deep warm bath, breaking open all the bath gels and foams. I washed my hair and dressed in leggings and a thick baggy cotton shirt. Downstairs, Kim had ordered two large gin and tonics, and had managed to secure a place by the fire. She raised her glass and chinked it against mine.
‘Here’s to better times,’ she said.
My eyes filled with tears, and I took a long swallow of cold clean liquid.
‘I’ve ordered our meal, as well,’ Kim continued. ‘Cold roast beef sandwiches, and a bottle of red wine. Okay?’ I nodded; I was glad, today, of someone to take decisions for me.
‘Tomorrow we can go for a long walk, somewhere high up, with thin air and fine views. If it doesn’t rain. I’ve got Ordnance Survey maps in my bag; we can look at them at breakfast.’
We sipped our drinks and said nothing for a bit. There aren’t many people you can be happily silent with. Then Kim said :
‘Was it worse than you expected?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I expected. Pretty bad, though.’
The sandwiches arrived : thin slices of rare beef, horseradish sauce on the side; a bottle of shiraz rich and smooth enough to befuddle me into a kind of peace.
‘Why did you and Andreas split up? You seemed so happy together.’
‘We were. I thought we were.’ Kim opened her bread and carefully spread a thin layer of horseradish over the beef. ‘One minute he was talking about where we would go on holiday in the summer and what kind of house we would live in together, and the next he was telling me he and his old girlfriend had decided to give it another go. Sorry and thank you and I’ll never forget you and you’re wonderful and all that crap.’ She topped up our wine glasses. ‘I was too old. I can’t have children. I’m past not future.’ She raised her glass once more : ‘Here’s to growing old disgracefully.’