Astonished I did not place it sooner, I see it is a three-paneled screen: The Three Furies. The three goddesses of vengeance: Unceasing Anger, Vengeance, and Jealousy. But the triptych is beautiful, still, becalmed, with the pretty panels rendered in muted 1930s abstract geometric forms.
Odd subject matter for Bacon, and clearly well before his screaming-blurry-man period. This art is soothing more than anything.
Then my eye falls to a small ebony sculpture, a woman about to be engulfed by some unseen force, on the table beneath it. The figure’s posture is tensed and ready for a wave that will never come. The air-conditioning catches on something hidden beneath it. An edge of white paper, flapping every so often as the fan’s flow hits it.
I walk over, tilt the sculpture, and pull the paper out from beneath. I unfold its thin page. It appears to be some kind of invoice for electrical work undertaken. A small pencil-filled docket.
CHAPTER 10
NINA
A fter I haul my suitcase onto the bed in the largest of three generous bedrooms, I take in the room again now that James is gone. As the largest of the three bedrooms this must have been my father’s room—his bed, his sheets, his pillow.
I walk over to it and gently place a hand onto the soft give of it. I know the sheets will be long changed, fresh for my arrival, but I bend and inhale, hoping for his soapy citrus-and-cedar scent. A smell that has a direct line to my parasympathetic nervous system. But of course it is not there, just the scent of crisp, clean bed linen.
He is not here, not in that sense. But I know he will be somewhere.
I spot the large built-in closet lining one wall and head over. Inside is full: immaculately dry-cleaned shirts, trousers, cashmere jumpers folded. I run a hand over a tomato-red sweater, its texture telling me its quality, and I guess at its brand. The clothes in this closet are all expensive and new. I know they likely aren’t actually new, but in comparison with my father’s usual wardrobe of ancient Jermyn Street attire, this collection of garments looks rarely worn.
I look through each garment and imagine how he might have looked thirty years ago, how he might have looked before I was born. When he and my mother were together, back when she was still alive. For the first time in a while, I feel a different kind of heartache, perhaps a less selfish one—a heartache for him: for the life he could have had with my mother if she had lived. He raised me alone, a brilliant man forced to raise a child solo. Forced to hold his world and mine together after losing the woman he loved. He never married again after her death, never took off his ring, never so much as went on a date. Though I would have to take others’ words for that as I was only a few months old when she died from post-birth complications.
He raised me, he had time for little else, and yet look what he achieved. In spite of me, perhaps, or if I credit myself, for me? I cannot even begin to think what he might have accomplished without me. It’s funny, a thousand thousand days of selfless care and devotion to me, and my education, and my life, and the few times he was disappointed with me seem to lurch out at me from the past since he went.
I try to push a memory away but I can’t.
I was eleven, it was my birthday. It was after bedtime and I was sneaking back downstairs to get a chocolate bar I knew was unfinished in my bag of gifts. I passed his office and heard voices. A man and a woman. My father and someone else.
It’s funny to think that I didn’t know the sound of her voice until then. He never talked about her, not really. He told me she would have loved me, that she would have been proud, that she liked flowers and Earl Grey and marzipan. But who she was, in her heart, was his. She was his and she was gone.
I walked in thinking he had a visitor. But he did not, his voice was not coming from him but from the old tape player on his desk, the whir and clack of it now obvious. His voice from before I was born and hers too, just talking. A soft laugh. The sound of tea being drunk.
They must have recorded themselves for fun. She sounded a little self-conscious as he asked her what she made of the book they had just read.
My father looked up at me standing in the doorway and clicked off the tape, his eyes on me filled with a disappointment I still can’t quite fathom to this day. And all I could think was, He wishes she had just walked in, not me.
I know I didn’t kill her. She died from complications after birth. Medical failure. Oversight. A million tiny mistakes that meant her heart stopped working. But the truth seemed so clear in his look. The truth was that I was there and she was gone. That brilliant, beautiful woman, a woman bright enough to match the genius of my own father, had been exchanged for me. A moderately gifted, moderately attractive eleven-year-old albatross. He barked a “Get out.” And a core memory was formed.
I did not mention the tapes again. Or her. She was his. And he would mention her when he did and when he did, she was still his.
Maybe I should have asked more? Maybe he wanted me to? A new type of regret blossoms in me.
But my thoughts have gone down a cul-de-sac and I know it. I push them away and gently close his closet. And it occurs to me that this place might just be a holiday home: that my father might just have needed more of the world to himself. And after a lifetime of service to me, wasn’t he entitled to that? If he kept his wealth to himself, wasn’t that also his right?
No one owes all of themselves to anyone else. We are all individuals, and what we give of ourselves, we must choose to give freely.
I feel a wash of guilt at having assumed my father did anything nefarious to secure this house, at having grown jealous that he had kept something more for himself and not told me about it. He was a human first and foremost—he was my father too, but he had a life outside of that, a life he did not owe me.
This house must have been part of that life.
—
I SPOT THE SMALL NIGHTSTAND next to the bed and am drawn to it instinctively. The little drawer in the nightstand, beckoning me. I lower myself to sit on the thick carpet in front of it and tentatively pull it open, its contents rattling as I do.
Piece by piece, I lay the drawer’s contents out on the carpet in an arc around me. A set of keys, silver metal with a red float fob. I hold them up, turn them. It is unclear what their use is in a house with an integrated electrical locking system. I place them down and let my thumb find the grained black leather cover of a pocketbook. A small Moleskine notebook. Peeking inside, I see it is full, his handwriting bunched and scrawling through its pages as I flip.
I look across the room at my handbag, resting innocently on the low armchair by the door, and think of the letter of wishes that lies still unread inside it. Though the contents are purely functional, I know I will get more of his handwriting there too. I consider the other articles in front of me. A dog-eared Alexandre Dumas classic—not one of my father’s favorites, I note, but a topical one given our island location. Then my eyes move to a small sterling-silver pig figurine, no bigger than a fifty-pence piece.
Beside it, a red pencil, stubby and chewed at one end.
