I fumble with the door knob, trying and failing to suppress the welling inside my chest. I have to get out. I have to get out now. The door squeals against the frame, and I stumble out of the shack, into the shadow of the ketch.
Beneath the hull, on a shipping pallet and under clear shrink-wrap, there are sheets of marine ply. Next to them there’s a stack of tins and plastic gallon buckets – gelcoat varnish, stripper, paint. Unopened bags of chopped glass fibre ripple and crackle in the wind. This itself is a sort of garden, I suppose, its boundaries marked by shadows that develop even as I watch.
The evening sun is still strong enough to burn through the haze. I move out of the shadows, into the light. Still I am trapped. There are no lines for me to cross, no boundaries to leap. This garden goes on forever. I keep walking. The distant houses are black and soft, sculptures of burnt sugar, without doors, without windows, silhouetted against the setting sun. The upturned hulls of the fishing boats might have been sculpted from blocks by winds howling off the sea. Their shapes are natural, circumstantial – no need to infer a human agency at all. Even the road, what’s left of it, might have been scoured by rain, a line as contingent as any runnel in the stones.
‘Conrad?’
I half-expected Michel to come running out after me. Not Hanna. I am glad it is her, and embarrassed. What has Michel said about me, that she is so easy with me, so friendly, so concerned?
She falls into step beside me – her errant house guest, bolting off. She does not question me. I don’t know where I’m going; round here there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go. She isn’t bothered. She does not try to stop me. I am glad of that. After a minute’s pointless ambling, gently, she slips her small, hard arm through mine. After Mandy, the feel of Hanna’s arm against the edge of my ribcage, the heat of it, is deliciously cruel. I should never have come. I squeeze her arm hard against me as though staunching a wound.
Two lighthouses guard the point. Swirling round the modern, automatic one, a concrete ramp leads to a door half way up the tower. Why a ramp? As though the people who built this, for all their aptitude in cast concrete, never got around to inventing stairs.
The old lighthouse is taller, massier, painted black. A board painted with opening times is screwed to its only door. This has already been padlocked shut for the night. ‘Oh,’ says Hanna. ‘Bugger.’ As though this lonely tourist attraction had always been our quarry. It is impressive, how Hanna is nudging me, gently, gently, back into the ordinary. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s go see the keeper’s house.’
‘Going to see’ anything round here is really just a form of words. To see anything from anywhere here requires no more than a shift of one’s attention. The house is behind and a little to the left of us. It is the biggest structure on the shingle. It is perfectly circular – a mansion bent round upon itself to form a perfect ‘O’. In the centre, where the back gardens should be twisted round to nothing, there is a greenish glass cupola. To bring so much expensive stone to such an out-of-the-way place, never mind pile it up and dress it in this radical form, suggests a level of self-belief the present age could not muster. The building’s big blocks of dressed honey-coloured stone are fitted together with a neatness that reminds me of Mandy’s townhouse with its bridges and canals, its traffic of exotic hybrid bicycles and semi-electric executive cars.
I had better call her, after all.
When Mandy speaks, she instinctively tries to wave her hands. She has not yet become accustomed to their weight. Her white plastic hands carve the air, lugubrious and slow, a knife in one, a fork in the other. I have phoned her in the middle of her dinner.
She shrugs my sudden departure off, refusing to show the hit. She knows what my unannounced excursion signifies. She wants me to know that she is going to make this easy for me. She says, ‘You’re too young to commit, I suppose.’ Her formulation – that, being a few years her junior, I am too immature for her – is a generous one. It raises the kindly spectre of ‘irreconcilable differences’. She is, in fact, handing me an alibi.
Even over this stuttery video link, I can see how hard she is working to deal with our sudden break-up. Her scars are red with the effort, and her face has screwed itself up in that odd, lopsided way that it falls into so easily now. It looks as though it has been stitched together out of rags. Which, I suppose, it has been.
We discuss bills, forwarding arrangements, practicalities. (No mention of my mother’s table.) Already she is talking about when, not if, I should move out. That she despises me for running away is a given. Still, I expected this conversation to be much more difficult and, if I’m honest, to be a deal more flattering to my ego. Anyone would think that it was Mandy throwing me over.
Then – at the very end – she says, ‘I don’t suppose you have to make a final decision yet.’ Her face, glassed and reconfigured, trembles over a forked mouthful of celeriac salad, and for a second the illusion – that her face might simply slide off the bone – acquires a ghastly realism. It is all I can do not to reach out to hold it in place.
SEVEN
Mum’s depressions were more or less regular, and always straightforward. In some ghastly way I looked forward to them. They made life simple. Mum in a slump was a loved object, someone to be taken care of, fed, read to, made comfortable, encouraged to wash and dress. She became my doll, as I became hers – once she was free of her black dog and rushing about designing wedding dresses or cooking up new kinds of make-up.
‘Sit up, Mum.’ ‘Mum, do you want to watch a movie with me?’ ‘What do you fancy to eat tonight, Mum?’
She would take to her bed – not for long, a few days – and it was up to Dad and me to keep the house running. Life was rugged and clear – a set of operations to ensure our fitness and the hotel’s hygiene.
‘I’ll take the first shower.’ ‘Call and see if George can cover the bar tonight.’ ‘Bin bags. Tea. Eggs.’
Mum’s manias were much more difficult. It is one thing to be brought low by a warring world, and the assured mutuality of destruction. It’s another thing to think that you can do anything about it.
Mum’s political convictions, her financial ineptitude and her frequent mood-swings were mutually reinforcing. I remember how, in her euphoria, it would occur to her, as if for the first time, that she had never been ‘depressed’. She had been oppressed.
Patiently, she would explain to me exactly how I oppressed her. Dropping her guard, she would then expand upon her theme, describing all the many ways – some of them wincingly intimate – in which Bill, my dad, oppressed her. Her chief oppressor, however, was money. Among the aisles of the supermarket (‘Marmalade (big tins)/Bleach/Serviettes’) I remember how she once attempted to anatomise for me the structural iniquities of a market-led economy.
I was less entranced by her philosophy than by her shopping. Ignoring the list Dad had given her, she was gathering all manner of unfamiliar stuff: dried fruit, porridge, soya meals, packet soups. It took Dad and me a couple of days to decipher this. It turned out that Mum, in her escalating mania, was preparing to abandon us for a protest camp that had grown up around a nearby military airbase. She would make friends there, she told us. She would meet like-minded women. She believed that friendships struck up around late night tea-brewing sessions were the soil in which her full potential would bloom, after so many false starts and wrong turnings.
She explained all this to us with a strange mixture of assertiveness, enthusiasm and sullenness, drawing us in and locking us out in the same breath. The camp. Its emergent structure. Its spontaneous spirituality. Its rejection of paternalistic hierarchies.