The Deadly Space Between (2 page)

‘Get out. Get out. Get Out.’

And then the voices recede. For no reason that I can ever explain I am certain that this man is my father. But I never ask. I say nothing.

Years later there is another incident, which I never forget. It is summer. I am ten years old. We are having tea on the back lawn. My aunts are visiting. Liberty is making me a daisy chain. She slits each stem with a thumbnail and threads the flowers through. Aunt Luce already has two lots of fluttering daisies attached to her left ankle. My mother is wearing a necklace of flowers. Liberty has made me a white and gold crown. She sets it on my blonde straight crop. I look like an Aryan Cleopatra.

‘You’re all ready to worship Dionysus,’ Liberty exclaims.

‘Goodness,’ says my mother, ‘that’s the sort of thing his father would have said.’

‘Oh, that’s the sort of thing he said, is it?’ snaps Aunt Luce, her voice suddenly dangerous. My mother glares at her. Everyone is silent, embarrassed.

Aunt Luce knows something. But not enough. And she feels that she ought to have been told. Liberty doesn’t know. She hasn’t been told. I will never be told. My mother hasn’t refused to tell me. She has just never created the conditions within which it would be possible to ask. But I searched for Dionysus in her
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Myths
. He is the god of wine and ecstasy. Worship him, and you run mad, cannibal, murderous.

Aunt Luce made it clear, for reasons I could never quite grasp when I was small, that the existence of Liberty was one of the living imperatives that had transformed us into a family and in part, the cause of our continuing solidarity. She was fond of saying that we all had the honour to be family scandals. She described our lives, unrepentantly, as a sequence of delicious, deliberate disgraces. She urged me to keep up the family tradition of colourful infamy.

‘Put it all in the papers if you can,’ she said, ‘or better still, go on television. Two minutes of television is worth six columns of print.’

Aunt Luce helped out with donations for holidays, special projects, major repair works and colossal financial undertakings; like updating the bicycle and the computer, re-roofing the studio and purchasing the car, second-hand, but with very low mileage. She gave us money, gifts without interest and apparently without strings, for any adventure which required large sums. She never offered her opinions until she was asked, but always made it clear when she was desperate to hand out her views, like an oracle, blessed with an excess of prophecy. She had a pointed arresting face, like a whippet. When my mother talked she would sit, reflective and intent, on the edge of her chair, with her clothes settling around her, waiting for the right moment to intervene. If Liberty wanted to say something Aunt Luce would hold up her hand like a traffic policeman until the young woman’s blushes had subsided. Whenever Luce and Liberty came to visit I brought them everything I had invented or drawn and stood there expectant, craving their approval.

This triangle of women, Aunt Luce, Liberty and my mother, was like a companionable Greek chorus. They were all the family I had. But there was another, disapproving chorus, offstage, which dared to comment on our private acts. I followed the scandals and disputes at second hand, absorbing the fact that we were not independent, autonomous, a little Amazon republic with a son to inherit the kingdom. Everything we did was watched. Family quarrels, always, finally, boil down to arguments about money. I imagined that we were cut off without a penny. This seemed Victorian and final, yet new outrages were always taking place, elsewhere, at regular intervals. Here was a history of share certificates in my mother’s name, which nevertheless required my grandmother’s signature to release them from fiscal bondage. Permission was angrily withheld. Aunt Luce was the messenger. I saw the tall, peculiar form of Aunt Luce, smouldering in the doorway, holding a letter.

‘Outrageous! How dare she?’

It was my unseen grandmother who dared. Here stood Aunt Luce, elegant, intolerant and enraged, in the midst of an indiscreet waterfall of abuse, in which my name was mentioned, several times, while my mother brewed tea, murmuring replies to my aunt’s threats.

‘Why won’t they sign? Is it because they don’t like me?’ I asked, interrupting the kitchen discussion of my grandmother’s iniquity. They swivelled round in their seats to stare at me.

‘It isn’t because they don’t like you. They’ve only ever seen you once. They don’t know you.’ My mother tried to be reassuring.

‘I want to know why they never see us and why they write angry letters.’

Aunt Luce burst out laughing.

‘Your grandmother is my sister,’ she cried, ‘she loathes other people and she loves writing angry letters and making scenes. Listen, my dear, you may not have a grandmother, but you have been spared the discomfort of a dozen teatime scenes. My sister sits in a cloud of righteousness over her cheap Darjeeling and Mr Kipling’s fairy cakes, criticizing other people, that is, other righteous people. The lower classes are de facto not righteous, and therefore beneath contempt. We ought to be grateful for her persecution. At least she takes notice of us. She has never had the misfortune to be in the wrong and is therefore perpetually on the attack. She has the right, not only to judge other people, but also to comment, with great candour from her position of Olympian rectitude, on their morals and behaviour. She thinks that being rude, which is the same thing as being right, is one of the cardinal virtues. Her New Year’s resolution is to make more enemies.’

My mother sat grinning at Aunt Luce, who was now well into her stride, cigarette alight and aloft, clearing the harbour bar of restraint.

‘One step off the narrow path of lower-middle-class morality, which is all recycled paper napkins and malice, and, my dear, you are doomed. You can never be visited. You can only be vilified.’

She stared at me speculatively.

‘Thank God you don’t look like her – or indeed, him,’ said Aunt Luce, sighing. I wondered what would have happened if I had done. And concluded that I would not have been loved.

Everyone commented on the resemblance between my mother and myself. There’s no doubt whose son you are, Aunt Luce always exclaimed emphatically, when she had not seen me for several weeks. And we were strikingly alike: short, straight, blonde hair, like a couple of Nordic heroes, pale freckled skins which burned easily, and the same grey-blue eyes. I looked into her face and saw the reassuring mirror of my own. All the hair on her body and on mine was ash-blonde, almost white. Our hands were slightly square. But by the time I was sixteen I could enclose her hand in my own. I was already as tall as she was. Our hands were the same shape, the same wide nails, the same fair skin, the same frank grip. She had painter’s hands, stained, strong hands, working hands. I loved watching her cleaning her brushes. They were expensive and she took good care of them. But these were the only things she ever cleaned carefully. From time to time I saw her scraping the thick chunk of glass she used for a palette and leaving huge, caked slabs of colour. My hands were smooth and untouched. I had the hands of a rich, spoilt woman. She had a man’s hands. Neither of us ever wore any jewellery, any rings.

I never had any pets. I never asked for rabbits or hamsters. Pets teach children the lessons of love and loss. I didn’t need them. She was enough. The smell of her body, a sharp, florid, tacky perfume and the eternal whiff of linseed oil, dominated the house. Until I was fourteen, fifteen, sometimes even well after that, she came to my room every night, to kiss me goodnight. I saw the shadow of her hair, the curving line of her smile, still marking her cheek, felt the cold prod of her nose as she bent to kiss me. She kissed me on the forehead, the cheek, the mouth, she ran her lips gently down the curve of my neck. I felt our likeness in the dark. She tasted of paint. Her breasts brushed heavy against my chest. Sometimes she lay down beside me and held me in her arms until I was asleep. Once when I awoke in the morning she was still there, shivering, fully dressed, her eyes gummed together with exhaustion, fighting me for possession of the duvet. We squabbled crossly as if we were both children.

We were often mistaken for brother and sister. A man in the car park asked us whether our parents had paid. In giggling conspiracy we disclaimed all knowledge as to where our parents had gone. Then she went shopping. I sat in the car and we saved 80p for two hours. I found our likeness reassuring, a promise that she would give me the recognition and love which I feared would not always, as of right, be mine.

I inherited her concentration and discipline; we could both occupy ourselves peacefully for hours without speaking. But I did not have her gift for laughter and I minded the mess she made. I tidied up after her. I did all the washing-up she left. I scrubbed the sink with Vim. I scoured the kitchen floor. Without me the kitchen would probably have become a health hazard filled with rotting food and crawling beasts. Sometimes, despite all my efforts, this happened anyway. When I did clean up she always kissed me, thanked me, but never changed her ways. Her room was a cavern of old clothes, abandoned washing, painting materials, scraps of cloth purloined from Aunt Luce for a collage experiment which didn’t work, and several huge buckets of coloured sand. She never made the bed. She once told Aunt Luce, who was amused rather than disapproving, that she only changed the sheets when she stuck to them. I changed mine once a week. I did all the washing. I loathed hanging out her clothes. I did this even if it was frosty, just to air them. I was afraid of her underwear, which I stuffed into the machine, one load once a month, and avoided examining too closely. I even disliked touching her wet jeans and shirts, smart ones for work, shabby ones for painting. In those days I was prim, prurient, afraid of her zest for grime. She seemed to love matter, textures, odours, liquids, slime, in quite physical and visceral ways. I was a little afraid of all those things.

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In every way, the child of a gifted artist labours under a terrible disadvantage. You live under the shadow of a tidemark on the wall, an unobtainable level of excellence, which remains there, accusing, just out of reach. Everything you produce is derivative, worked in another’s colours. I never escaped the sensation that she was the original and I was the copy: second-hand, second-rate. I haunted her studio in order to be close to her. The room smelt of turpentine, linseed oil, glue, varnish and fixative. She had several huge chests, immovable, paint-spattered, which had been constructed to hold architectural drawings. These chests took up the entire wall backing onto the living room. They loomed out into the space. The handles of the drawers were often sticky with gum or wet paint mixed with sand. I was unable to open the drawers, which were too heavy for me when I was small. And when I was strong enough to peer into them I discovered that there was one which she kept locked.

She had a huge easel, but didn’t always use it; sometimes she just stuck paper up on the wall with masking tape and painted on that. Sometimes she leaned huge canvases against the structure and negotiated paint at knee-level. There was nothing mysterious about her methods. She spent a long time preparing her canvas in the traditional manner, with layers of rabbit’s foot glue, transparent substances, the texture of egg white. Then her ground wash, faint, light, pale, then her underpaint. Here she varied her colours. She never drew directly onto the canvas at all. She worked her designs in curtains of paint, each one falling over the canvas, layer after layer, deepening, changing. She soaked her brushes in plastic Vittel bottles with the tops chopped off. But these weren’t her only tools. The kitchen was next door to her studio. She used the kitchen knives, the fish slice, the pastry brushes, the rolling pin, sheets of tin, her bare hands and forearms, the tips of her fingers and her clenched fists. Once she unpicked her jeans and used the frayed bottoms to create a repeated, fan-shaped pattern. She worked with appalling, inflexible intensity, always on more than one canvas at once, the radio blaring on the window sill. She never worked in silence. She worked every day. Even when she came home, tired out from teaching. I admired her readiness to make herself filthy, but was alarmed by the fact that whatever she cooked tasted of acrylic, glue or turps. The paintings probably tasted of elderly food. I was never quite at ease with her carelessness. I could not resist eliminating the trails she left behind her.

Her style was described by sexist critics as masculine. Or at least, she said they were sexist. She worked on a grand scale; huge abstracts, dense, knotted surfaces, worked and reworked, the paint thick and edible. When I was small she sometimes allowed me to play with the paint on one corner of the canvas. Sometimes she integrated my ideas. I longed to become her apprentice, gazing up at the huge geometric masses, their shifting volumes and uncompromising, monolithic intensity. Whenever she sold a picture she took me out to dinner. Not to a local wine bar, tandoori or McDonald’s, but to an expensive restaurant in the city, with real white tablecloths and napkins, where the waiters spoke French and she ordered snails, sizzling in individual craters, like smoking bombs, the kind of restaurant where there was never any background music and everyone spent a long time gazing at huge ledgers with the wine list handwritten inside. No ordinary cheque card was ever sufficient to cover the bill and she paid with her American Express. Once there was a knife fight just outside. I remember the wail of police sirens and the manager losing his temper.

‘Shall we go and look?’ I demanded.