Tamar (44 page)

“All the time she’d been talking, Trixie had kept the photo I’d given her on her lap. Now she’d picked it up again and was staring at it. She spoke to Rosa in a low voice. Rosa didn’t seem to understand. Trixie said it all again, very agitated, and her face did look as though she was hurting. She jabbed at the photo with her fingers. Rosa went quite pale and said
‘Nee nee’
several times. No, no. Then, in English, ‘Jesus Christ, are you sure?’ And then Trixie tore the picture in half. The two halves fell onto the floor on either side of her, and she clenched her fists on the arms of her chair.”

“None of us spoke for what seemed an age. I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Rosa wouldn’t look at me. Then she said, ‘My mother needs a rest, Jan. And in a little while the nurses will be coming with her medication. Let’s you and I get some fresh air.’

“It was an order, not an invitation. She walked so quickly that I had trouble keeping up. It was as if she was trying to leave me behind. We didn’t speak until we reached a little park called the Prince’s Garden.

“‘My mother likes to come here,’ Rosa said. ‘I have to bring her in a wheelchair these days.’

“We walked along a path a short way, and then she stopped. ‘I was born in 1943 on New Year’s Eve,’ she said. ‘I’m illegitimate. My mother has never told me who my father was. She says he was a hero, like your father.’

“‘Your mother thinks she knows what really happened in that barn, doesn’t she?’

“‘Jan,’ Rosa said, ‘my mother is very ill and pumped full of drugs. She is old. All those things took place a very long time ago, when a thousand terrible things happened in Holland every day. She wasn’t at that farm when those men died, she told us that. And she has never told me any of this before. Maybe she is —’

“‘Please. Just tell me what she said. Tell me what she told you about my . . . about the man in the photograph.’

“So she did. I felt sorry for her. It must have been awful, like being forced to put a sick puppy to death or something. And I knew it was the truth, that Trixie was right. Because it made sense of everything, and because, deep down, I already knew. In the end I sat down on a bench and died.”

We sat in silence. When Dad lifted his face, he looked dazed, almost surprised to see us there. Then he sniffed and cleared his throat and refocused. He managed a half-smile.

“Look,” he said, “can I offer you a drink? Are you hungry? There’s not much in the house, but I’m sure we can scrape something together. I’ve got a bottle of wine, if you fancy some. It ought to be champagne, I suppose, but I’m afraid it isn’t.”

So in a stunned and clumsy way we gathered up the things on the table and went inside. Dad made me a cup of coffee and poured wine for Yoyo and himself. The living room was filled with golden light from the lowering sun, which made it more welcoming than it might have been. Dad sat in an armchair, and Yoyo and I sat close to each other on the sofa.

Dad said, “All I remember about the return trip to London is that I thought I’d gone deaf. People were talking all around me, but I couldn’t hear them. The first thing I do remember hearing was someone saying my name. It was the announcer at the airport calling me for my flight. When I got home, I stood outside the house for a long time, looking at the windows, not daring to go in. I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly behave normally. But that’s what I tried to do. I kept it up for a couple of weeks, but then I started to go to pieces.

“It was unbearable, knowing what I knew. But what made it worse, much worse, was that I couldn’t do anything about it without wrecking everyone else’s lives. I couldn’t tell anyone. Tell my mother that the man she thought had rescued her, the man she’d married and lived with for forty years, had murdered my father? My God! How could I tell Sonia? How could I stop you spending time with the bastard and not tell you why? I couldn’t even tell
him
that I knew, because then what? Carry on the charade of normal family life? Sit at his table and eat Sunday bloody dinner? Besides, I didn’t want to see him, couldn’t bear the thought of it. I wanted to kill him. I seriously wanted to kill him. It was the only option, it seemed to me. I thought about it all the time. Worked out elaborate ways of doing it and getting away with it. It was like having a big black spider crawling around in my brain. And although I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I knew I’d never do it. Because then I’d have to live with that as well.”

Dad drank half his wine in one go and lit another cigarette. “I lost it completely, I’m ashamed to say. Couldn’t do my job. People at the office started talking, looking at me in funny ways. Some days I’d leave home — briefcase, suit, all of that — and not get off the tube. Or just walk and end up God knows where. I started drinking quite heavily. My boss called me in, very nice at first, just ‘concerned.’ Then the verbal warnings, then the written variety. It got impossible to be at home too. So I invented business trips and spent days in hotels doing nothing.

“And then one day I found myself in Paddington Station. I sat and stared at the departures board for a long time, watching the names change. When I saw that the train at platform one was going to Penzance, I bought a ticket and got on it. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was just that Penzance is a nice word, or because it seemed a long way away.

“I must have slept a long time, because when I woke up and looked out of the window, all I could see was water. The train was running along right next to the sea, and the light was dazzling. Then it was Plymouth, then the bridge into Cornwall. And there it was — a big sign with
TAMAR
on it. I don’t know if it was because it was your name, my real father’s name, but something sort of clicked in my head. The solution to the problem came to me. I couldn’t make William Hyde disappear, but I could make myself disappear. It was a terrifying idea, and cruel, but absolutely logical. It was that or go mad. And I realized I’d started doing it already. The drinking, the hiding — I’d been trying to vanish. So I got off at the next stop and took the next train back to Plymouth, figuring that it would be easier to be invisible in a city.”

I sat there in that unlived-in living room and understood that my dad had been insane. I wondered if he still was. I couldn’t imagine how he could have kept all that stuff dammed up inside him all this time without being at least three parts crazy.

He said, “It turned out to be much harder to disappear than I’d imagined. The practical problems are enormous, actually. After a couple of months, I was living pretty much hand to mouth. Then I had a stroke of luck. I was working in a pub down by the ferry terminal, and I got talking to a man who was waiting to meet some clients off a delayed boat. It turned out to be Colin, the guy who owns this place. One thing led to another, and he offered me a job. I’d been here almost a month before I found out that it was a stone’s throw from the head of the Tamar. It seemed such a beautiful coincidence. Or predestination, if you believe in that sort of thing.”

I didn’t know what I believed. I didn’t know if it was possible to believe in anything anymore.

I said, “I’m sorry, Dad. I can’t get my head round all this. I mean, why didn’t you just get in touch with us? Didn’t you want to? Didn’t you realize we were all off our heads with worry?”

“I couldn’t get in touch. How could I, without explaining why I’d gone? And that was the one thing I couldn’t do.”

“So what were you going to do? Stay here forever?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I was waiting for Hyde, Lubbers, Dart, whoever he is — was — to die.”

Hyde, Lubbers, Dart, whoever he was. Grandad.

“He is dead,” I said, very cold.

The word sat there between us like a toad. Dad didn’t meet my eyes. He poured more wine.

Yoyo said, “Jan, you say he came here. This is something I don’t understand. How did he find you?”

“I didn’t ask. It wasn’t that kind of . . . conversation.”

“What did he say?” I said. “What did he want?”

“Forgiveness.” Dad’s voice was so bitter. “Forgiveness. Can you imagine?”

I could. Very easily. And I thought Dad, of all people, ought to be able to.

Yoyo said, “Sorry, but I am a bit confused. You are saying that he knew you had found out these things about him?”

Dad didn’t answer for a second or two, and he didn’t look up at us.

“Yeah. I wrote to him. Not what you’d call a letter. A few words, several of them obscene. This was a couple of days after I got off the train in Plymouth. I’d been drinking. I was pretty dark, I suppose. I called him Lubbers, and a few other things besides. So yes, he knew.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “I suppose that’s how he tracked me down. The Plymouth postmark on the letter. He’d have started from there, and . . . I don’t know. He’s a clever bastard.
Was
a clever bastard.”

I thought, He came up the river. I must have said it aloud, because Dad looked at me. “What?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I want to know what he said. What did he say?”

“He admitted everything. Said he’d spent the rest of his life horrified by what he’d done, said it was like having cancer. I actually think he expected me to feel sorry for him. Christ! Then he started talking about love. How he’d always loved Mum, always loved me, loved you. Love, love, love. I wanted to strangle him. It was . . . appalling. Vile. And just so bloody untrue. You know how cold he was. He wouldn’t know what love was if it hit him in the face.”

I was tearful again and hated myself for it. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve, hard. “You’re wrong, Dad. I know you are. He did love Gran. I know because when she started going . . . getting ill, it broke his heart. I saw it. I was there, and you weren’t. He was so . . .”

“Guilty.”

“What?”

“Guilty. That’s the word you’re looking for. That’s what he meant by love. He’d spent the rest of his miserable life feeling guilty. Why do you think he killed himself?”

“No, Dad. No. It wasn’t like that. I know it wasn’t. And Gran loved him.”

“Did she?” There was a sneer in the question.

“Yes.
Yes
. I mean, she married him, didn’t she? And stayed with him.”

“Look, Tamar. It’s not hard to figure that out, is it? She didn’t know what he’d done. She believed he’d rescued her, saved her life, even, getting her out of Holland. She thought he was her lover’s best friend. They got to England, where she knew nobody. Didn’t even speak the language. She was pregnant. She depended on him, and he exploited that. Dependence can look like love, in a certain light.”

I got up. “I’m going for a walk,” I said. Yoyo looked at me. “By myself,” I said.

I went through into the kitchen and stopped to put on the sweatshirt I’d left there when we came in. I heard Yoyo say, “Jan, I must ask you this. Do you feel some pity at all for this man?”

And Dad said, “No, Johannes. I hope he rots in hell.”

I went back to the living-room doorway and said, “Remind me again, Dad — who was it who asked you to name me after your father?”

Then I walked out into what was left of the daylight.

I went a little way up the drive and then climbed the slope that rose away from Dad’s cottage. When I got to the top I could see the main house, a rambling white-faced building with lights on in several windows. Wisps of music. The big lawn had been mown in very precise light and darker green stripes: my father’s work, I supposed. The sunset was perfect. Soft streamers of peach-coloured cloud hung in a blue-washed sky above distant indigo hills. It all looked no more real than flimsy scenery for a school play.

Below me, off to the right, light glittered on water. I headed that way and came to an ornamental garden with, at its centre, a large pond. A weeping willow leaned over the water, its trailing branches touching their own reflections. The air was rich with the scent of jasmine. I heard voices speaking a strange language, a series of fast, broken sounds. Two men were squatting on their heels at the edge of the pond, one of them pointing at something I couldn’t see. When they stood up, I saw that they were Japanese, slim men in pale short-sleeved shirts. They stood silently for a time, then one looked at his watch and spoke. They turned and walked away along a path towards the school. Where the path emerged from the garden, a white marble statue stood on a pedestal: a naked goddess with an arm raised as if beckoning to the upstairs windows. As they passed her, one of the men reached up and patted her backside. When their laughter had faded, I went down to the pond.

Much of it was in deep shade, but where the last light fell on the water, it looked like golden oil. At first I couldn’t see what the Japanese men had been looking at. Then the willow whispered, and the same breath of wind brought the little boat out of the shadow. It was smaller than the palm of my hand and woven, like basketwork, from long slender leaves. The mast was a peeled twig, the sail a small blank sheet of paper. It carried a fragile cargo of jasmine blossom, and it drifted towards me, tilting but not toppling, trailing black ripples through the gold.

It’s time to put all this stuff away. The creased English maps, a tatty fragment of silk, a photo of two young men who might have been brothers, a still unfinished crossword puzzle: the surviving items from Grandad’s box. Yes, I still think of him as that, call him that. It’s as real as any of his other names. The one thing that’s missing — apart from the money, of course — is Christiaan Boogart’s fake identity. I let Dad keep that. Whether it eases or feeds his bitterness, I couldn’t really say.