Julia chapter 19 / 20

I have begun to sketch mother. I’ve decided my study will be called ‘Julia’s mother watching TV.’ Why not stick to the obvious? As agreed, I do not bring my ‘smelly oils’ into her room, I’m sketching her with pastels to begin with, just as I would in court. In my mind I’ve yet to decide whether she is the accused or victim, and to me this has become a very interesting question. Is this why I decided to paint her?  Was something deep down inside me leading me to do this for that very reason, to judge exactly who I see when I look at her?  I realize, in the months since Brian’s departure and his subsequent demise that I am looking at someone else, someone slightly withered. The words of condemnation still emanate from her mouth but they lack the power they once had.  Is that her, or is it me? I need to know this and I need to know it before she dies. If I do not understand this, then the possibility is I will go fishing again once she is dead, and I know I will eventually drown. Despite rumours put about by charlatans you cannot communicate with the dead.  She is the perfect subject.  She does not want to talk, she does not move except to cough or unwrap a sweet, and she does not even know I am there, as the mind sapping drivel of the TV set continues unabated.  What did Whistlers mother think about whilst she was sitting, or Rembrant when he painted himself as an old man, eyes watering, jowls dropped; something purposeful no doubt, something real, not faux flowers, escaping to the country, or baking competitions.            There is a point where life becomes pointless.  It goes on and things happen but its scope becomes so limited that it seems to me that it has no real purpose. If when turning off a million TV’s you also turned off those watching them, would the world be any the less? I wonder. All of this TV has warped my mind, I am becoming a mass murderer, I need to watch these thoughts!  My plaster has begun to itch interminably and I am using a paintbrush to delve into it to relieve the irritation when she turns and looks at me.  ‘You’ll only make it worse’ she says ‘leave it alone.’  ‘It itches.’ I reply.

‘You always were one to complain about the slightest thing.’ Under normal circumstances I would have dismissed the comment as her usual goading but I’ve resolved to find out who she is and how I feel about her so I ask what she means.

‘When you were a child you went on and on if you were ill. I remember when you had whooping cough you complained all the time.’  I have never had whooping cough, but Valerie did.  She is confusing us both. I could correct her but don’t.

‘Whooping cough is a serious disease, doesn’t a child have a right to complain?’   

‘I watched my sister die, and she never complained once. Not once.’

‘Who died? Auntie Pauline is still alive in Australia’ I reply.

‘Not Pauline, Emily my youngest sister, she died of tuberculosis.’ At first I think she has dementia coming on and is imagining things, then I am flabbergasted. I’ve never heard of Emily. ‘When?’ I ask.  ‘When she was six.’  ‘But I didn’t know about her?’ She turns to look at me. ‘There are lots of things you don’t know Julia.’ Her comment makes me feel an outsider in our own family. ‘Why didn’t anyone say anything about her? Did father know?’  ‘Of course he knew of her.  My mother, your grandmother was never the same after she died.  In those days they used to put their beds outside in the cold, they thought it would cure them.  The day before she died I saw her, blue as a bruise, on the balcony at the TB hospital, but she didn’t complain.  It was a different world then.’  I see a child as clear as day lying out on a metal framed bed on a chilly morning just as though mother has transferred a mental image to me and then the child disappears and with her so does mother. She has turned back to the TV and is staring at it as if she had never spoken.  

Mother’s revelation about her lost sister has shaken me.  She’s revealed a part of her life of which I was unaware and suddenly has become someone different, a mother with two sisters and not one.  Are there any more missing relatives?  Any further revelations that will change the woman I am sketching into someone else? As Valerie so aptly remarked about Geoffrey, you never really know anyone, even those close to you, but I feel I need to glean as much as I can in order to better understand this woman who has had such an impact on my life.  Perhaps I can find something that enables me to forgive and forget, but there’s also this mounting suspicion that I am looking at the wrong person. Perhaps I should be looking at myself.  All of my focus has been on mother’s contempt of me, but how much do I feel I deserve it?  Where do I fit into the scenario? And then this strange question comes to mind, every artist at some stage paints themselves, why have I never painted a self portrait?

My mobile tells me Valerie wants to talk to me.  Mother glances my way as if to say ‘you are disturbing me’ so I leave the room to answer the call. ‘Hi Valerie, what’s the news?’  ‘The news is Geoffrey is still missing and that bitch of a mother of ours has cut me out of her will.’ ‘What! How do you know that?’ ‘Because the Police told me.’  ‘The Police! How do they know?’ ‘She must’ve told them when they interviewed her.’  ‘Why would she tell them that?’ I ask.  ‘God knows.  It’s the sort of thing she does isn’t it?’ 

Valerie is right of course. That’s exactly the sort of thing mother would do.  She has always said things that set off trains of events that manage to damage other people. I used to believe she did it deliberately but now I begin to think there is something not quite right about the way she thinks.

‘The trouble is I can’t say anything to her, can I?  I may need to borrow money from her and anyway how can I say ‘I hear you have cut me out of your will?’

How do I tell Valerie, that I opened one of mother’s letters and Geoffrey has walked off with everything? How can I tell her that mother has nothing to lend? I can’t do that, not on the phone anyway.  When I do say anything it has to be face to face, so I say the only thing I can. ‘I see your problem Valerie. Well for the time being you will just have to live with it.  Did the Police say anything else? About Geoffrey?’

‘It was awful Julia, just terrible.  They grilled me as though I was guilty of something, they thought I was going to benefit from Geoffrey’s crimes.  That’s when they mentioned the Will.  They think Geoffrey’s firm bought mother out because I’d been cut out of the Will and it was a way for us to get the money! God knows what else they think. They probably imagine I played some part in Brian’s death. Did you know Geoffrey stayed at mother’s the night Brian died?’ I wonder why Valerie would think I would know anything about mother and Geoffrey at that time given I wasn’t even speaking to anyone.  ‘No I didn’t.  What was he doing on the Island?’ 

‘Killing Brian, I suppose.’  Her response shocks me because of its morbid honesty.

‘Did they say any more about how it happened?’

‘Only that the car seems to have been involved.  Geoffrey had it steam cleaned and some damage repaired and muggins here signed the bill.  Talk about implicated, I feel like his accomplice.’  I’d never seen my sister as an accomplice, in fact she is the least likely person to be involved in anything of a criminal nature, she wouldn’t even stand in the garden with me when I had a joint in case she was seen with her ‘druggy sister.’

‘So are you coming down?’ I ask. ‘When I can, there are still some things to be sorted here but I do want to get away, it’s not good being here at the moment.  Too many memories and too many revelations.’

‘Talking about revelations, did you know that mother had two sisters?’ ‘What?’

‘She had a younger sister called Emily who died from TB.’  ‘You’re joking aren’t you! How can she have had a sister that we didn’t know about?’ ‘That’s what I thought, but she told me about her this morning.’ ‘I’m beginning to feel like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. What is happening Julia?’ ‘Life is happening Valerie, and at the moment it’s not very comfortable for either of us.’ The call ends soon after my disclosure and Valerie promises she will call if she needs me. It’s strange that a few months ago we seemed like mortal enemies and now we’re talking to each other in an almost normal way.  I will be careful though, for trust as they say arrives on foot and leaves on horseback and I’m still not over Valerie’s deceit. I can still hear the horse’s hooves rattling in my head.

Chapter 20  

Mother is watching some American crime series and tells me that it hasn’t been the same since Daniel left.  I’ve no idea who Daniel is. I always find it strange when mother talks about characters in television programs as if they’re real people.  ‘He had to go to New York’ she says ‘to look after his dying mother.’ I imagine the actor at an interview with the casting team being told he’s been written out of the series.

‘So Harry unfortunately you are not in the next series, at the end of this series you are going to look after your dying mother….’   ‘Shit! Can’t I get shot or blown up or something?  Detective Daniel Vance wouldn’t give up the force to nurse his fucking mother!’

This is why I can’t watch TV shows, because I know they aren’t real and I see behind them to the actors, to the make up artists, to the set designs.  I find my mind wondering about the detailed workings of the program and can never suspend my disbelief enough to believe the story.  Mother on the other hand is there in Baltimore or Miami, she lets gets lost in someone else’s world perhaps because she cannot face her own.  I want to ask her about Emily, I want to know about her lost sister and why no one talks about her.  I’m interested in reality but she hides from it.  I’m coming to the conclusion she has avoided reality all her life.  Even her marriage to Brian was ‘staged.’ That huge portrait photograph of them both on the beach said so much.  She was in love with the image of being Mrs Spenser, of the beach wedding, of the holiday in Tenerife, of the fairy tale denied her by my academic father who, like me saw the structure behind everything.  I can see why their marriage faded as she tried to drag him to charity parties, to the Golf club, to Bridge nights and he delved further into his books like an animal escaping danger down a hole. She always wanted to dress up and be seen, to be somebody, whereas he wanted his worn jacket with leather patched arms and his battered Crombie hat.  What about me?  If father was a disappointment to her, I must have been a greater one.  For a start I was not a boy. In the days when I was born, the first child was meant to be a boy. The lineage of Kings remained embedded in the psyche of the middle class, someone to carry forward the name, someone who could inherit, someone heading for university in the days when a university education meant something.  So she got a girl, a bolshie girl, a tree climber and mud crawler who did the things the rightful heir should be doing and refused to dress in her pretty clothes so that mother could show her off.  I was the wrong species. She’d given birth to a mutant to whom she could not relate, and what made it worse was my father loved me in a way he could not love my mother.  How jealous must she have been? How confused by this creature that entered their already divided lives?                                                                        I am sketching her again.  I have a strange suspicion she has begun to like it, even though I’m not her chosen artist. She is being looked at, given attention, and perhaps in her own peculiar mindset, admired.  Why else would I paint her if not through some sense of admiration?  She doesn’t understand that true portraiture is the opposite.  It is not about the status of the sitter, it is about form and colour and that essential essence of being that disappears the moment someone dies. It is about the shape they make in time, capturing a moment of life and encapsulating something beyond the fleeting moment; and when finished it allows one human being to stare at another without fear of offence or embarrassment as only lovers do.  It gives them a right they cannot have in any other way, to get close to a famous person a friend or a stranger by examining their face.

‘Why didn’t anyone know about Emily?’ I ask.  She continues to stare at the screen. For a moment I don’t think she will respond to my question.  I try to capture her loose skinned neck.  She swallows as if downing an unwanted thought.

‘What do you mean?’ ‘Why has she been eradicated from the family history?’ Mother’s jaw juts forward in the way it always does when she is confronted by something unpleasant.  ‘She hasn’t’  ‘Well Valerie and I didn’t even know about her.  Isn’t that strange, that we are adults and don’t even know we had an aunt who died?’  Mother is clearly uncomfortable. I am pushing some button I might regret.  ‘She’s nothing to do with you.’ What she has just said is so peculiar I don’t care whether I’m on dangerous territory or not, I have a need to understand. ‘What do you mean?’                  

‘Why do you always have to know everything?’ she snaps. ‘Why have you always had to question things and bring things out that should be left to rest? You were always doing it as a child, poking and prodding, answering back, making it difficult in public!’  I am not going to give in.  Her description of me contains her truth but I do not believe it and this time I am not going to let it deter me.

‘It’s a sign of intelligence’ I reply boldly ‘didn’t you want a child who was bright?’

‘I didn’t want a child at all!’ she shouts.  I am stunned. She didn’t want a child? Not a girl, not an argumentative child, just plain and simply she ‘didn’t want a child.’ There is a second or two when I feel the words exploring my head to find a place to rest, somewhere they can fit.  They ricochet against the edges but fail to settle. She has managed to hit the sorest point with the accuracy of a drone strike.

‘Then why did you have me?’ I ask angrily.  She takes a deep breath. ‘Do you think I had a choice?  When do you think they invented proper contraception? Sex began in the sixties didn’t it, or don’t you know your Larkin?

When your father and I married there wasn’t all this family planning. It was denial or children.  Your father wasn’t good at denial.’  She says those words with a bitterness I find hard to take. All of a sudden I don’t want to know anymore, but it’s too late. I don’t want his memory tangled up in this conversation, this is between mother and I.

‘All my adult life I have craved a child, and you can lie there and say you didn’t want me!  Well at least you had the option, I had none.  You’ve no idea what it’s like to feel that ache inside, the need to be a mother and know you can never be one.  You are angry because you had me, well just try to think how I feel, knowing you gave birth to me unwillingly and that you gave birth to a daughter who was infertile.’ She has a snarl on her face but I am raging, and she can see it.

‘I might be difficult and too outspoken for your taste but you are just pitiful.  All you do is snipe and bitch about other people, bring them down because you don’t like yourself and you want them to feel as bad as you do.  Well congratulations you have succeeded.  Why do you think father left you? Well it was because you never gave him a moments peace’ she sneers at me. ‘And you did!? When you were a child he was always having to put right the things you did wrong. How do you think he felt when you were expelled from school and when you disappeared at sixteen to Morocco. Was that giving him peace?  When you were arrested at Greenham Common do you think that helped his career? You have no right to accuse me of anything!’  Suddenly she drains of colour and clutches her chest she begins to breathe heavily.  I shout out.

‘Lucy! Lucy! Bring mothers pills!’  Fortunately Lucy appears and knows what to do.

‘Take these Mrs.’ she says, holding mother’s head forward to the glass of water.  ‘She be alright when they work’.