LITMIR.BIZ

       3

      THURSDAY, AUGUST 25TH. EARLY MORNING SUNLIGHT is best. I wasted it by oversleeping but awoke refreshed and filled with energy. Lying in bed like a hostess planning a dinner party, I decided my day’s activities. First a trip to the fishmonger in Aldeburgh. The sun streamed in through the cracks in the shutters; I knew that when I opened them, they would reveal a blue sky. A seagull called faintly. Today was for work, I decided, with sudden optimism. With a flash of certainty I saw how my collection of poems might shape out. Ideas that seemed to have been unanchored for most of my life floated towards me. Traces of my father’s presence nudged me. I had swum in apathy for years but now possibilities spread their wings. I would begin again. Getting out of bed, humming to myself, I went into the bathroom. From outside the window the green hinge of summer opened, wide and seductive, while beyond the river the fields were a smudge of blue flowers. I showered and went downstairs, drank a coffee swiftly and went to fetch the car.

      I drove fast with the smell of the sea threading my thoughts. The circus that had been in town a few days earlier had gone now, leaving a slight sense of unease. There were a couple of policeman walking on the beach which was otherwise empty of people. As yet no one had been charged with the attack on the circus woman. Aldeburgh is a sleepy town caught in a 1940s time warp; there is no pier, no seaside paraphernalia, no marina. Only the shingles, shelving steeply to the water’s edge, a few fishing boats and the seagulls. I stopped the car and walked the length of the beach.

      On what was to be the last summer of his life, my father had decided to make both Jack and me better swimmers. That summer he had brought us daily to this spot, to plunge us screaming into the water, laughing and shivering as the waves broke over us. Jack had protested and at one point started to cry, but my father had bribed him with the promise of hot chocolate afterwards at his favourite café. I remember hugging Jack as he clung to me but, thanks to Dad, he was now a much better swimmer than I was. On that last day of summer I remember the pebbles we found. I have them still, on the windowsill. Afterwards we visited the bookshop and Dad bought us each a book. Mine was The Mill on the Floss. I have it still, inscribed with his message: To my darling daughter who reminds me so much of Maggie Tulliver. Today the handwriting remains as fresh as it had looked on the day he wrote the words. In the lonely years that followed I don’t know how many times I stared at those words. Looking back, I see how my literary tastes were formed in that little bookshop. We used to always be laughing. Even when we returned home late and my mother was cross with us, Dad had the knack of jollying her out of her bad mood. Often, after his death, when my mother tried first to find another partner and, when that did not work, turned slowly to alcoholism, when Jack went his own way in silent grief, I used to wonder where that summer had vanished. I did not know then what I know now; that a way of life can disappear in an instant.

      On that terrible day, after she had broken the shocking news to us, Jack and I went to our respective bedrooms and stayed there in silence until the following morning. Neither knew what the other was thinking; neither cared. We were sealed in shock. It was the beginning of the end of our family, for by the time we emerged through the wall of silence we had changed, for ever. Jack and I would never hug each other again. From now on he was my little brother only in name. I blamed myself. I was the oldest, I should have taken care of him, should have comforted him on that first night, gone to him when I heard him crying. But I did not. A great, terrible tidal wave of grief had engulfed me. I was drowning in it and I had become mute. I wanted my father so desperately, so inarticulately, my heart was so broken, that I simply closed in on myself. I did not cry for years. Funerals are for crying but we had witnessed no funeral. Mother withdrew. She made matters worse by expecting us to act like adults from then on. She stopped shouting at us, stopped telling us what we should do, letting us go to bed whenever we wanted, quarrel as much as we liked. Suddenly there were no rules. It would be years before I recognised the guilt she felt. By the time we went back to school, a month later, the three of us had formulated a way of circling the empty void of our lives; dead planets around a sun lit by the memory of Dad. There was some money left in a trust fund and a year later, when Jack was seven, my mother used it to send him away to boarding school. Now there was one fewer pair of eyes to reproach her.

      It was in that year of living alone with her that I wrote my first poem. Filled with suppressed grief, but also a curious optimism that I now see was more to do with being young than anything else, it reduced my English teacher to tears. She printed it in the school magazine. The headmistress read it and entered it for a national competition where it won second prize. The story was about a fossil that had water poured on it, bringing it back to life to reveal a previous existence. During the writing of the poem I dreamt of my father every night. Mum knew nothing of any of this; even after I won the prize I kept it hidden from her. She had begun to drink and was often drowsy when I got back from school. It was a few more years before I found out that she had fallen out badly with Uncle Clifford, who disapproved of what she had

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