But she is not listening. Instead she holds the child and moans: ‘You can see, can’t you, Emily, my darling? Can’t you?’
It must be a false memory. Emily was barely a year old; surely she could not have understood or remembered anything so well. And yet she seems to recall it so clearly: her bewildered tears, her mother’s cries, and her father’s mumbled counterpoint. The smell of the studio and the paint from her mother’s overalls sticking her fingertips together, and all the time that high F sharp tremor in her mother’s voice, the note of her thwarted expectations, like a persistent harmonic on an over-tightened string.
Daddy knew almost from the first. But he was a meek, reflective little man, a foil to her mother’s rages. Even as a small child Emily sensed that she thought him inferior; that he had disappointed her. Perhaps because of his lack of ambition; perhaps because it had taken him ten years to give her the child she longed for. He was a music teacher at St Oswald’s; he played several instruments, but the piano was the only one her mother tolerated in the house, and the rest were sold, one by one, to pay for her treatments and therapies.
It was no real sacrifice, Daddy said. After all, he had access to all his department’s resources. It was only fair; Emily’s mother suffered from headaches, and Emily was a restive infant, apt to wake at the slightest noise. As a result he transferred his records and his music to the school; he could always listen to them at lunchtimes or Break, and besides, school was where he spent most of his time.
You have to understand what it was like for her.
That’s Daddy speaking; always making excuses, always ready to stand in her defence, like a tired old knight in the service of a mad queen who has lost her empire. It took Emily a long time to understand the cause of Daddy’s subservience. Daddy had been unfaithful once, with a woman who meant nothing to him, but to whom he had given a child. And now he owed Catherine a debt — a debt that could never be repaid — which meant that for the rest of his life he would always accept second place, never complaining, never protesting, never seeming to hope for anything more than to serve her, to give her what she wanted, to redeem the irredeemable.
Babe, you have to understand.
They managed on his salary; she took it as her natural right to pursue her artistic ambitions while Daddy worked to keep them both. From time to time a little gallery sold one of her mother’s collages. Little by little her mother’s ambition shifted. She was born before her time, she said. Future generations would know her. What might have turned her inwards made her fiercely determined; she threw her heart into having a baby, long after Daddy’s small expectations had ceased.
Finally, Emily came. Oh, the plans we made — that’s Daddy talking, though I doubt whether he was allowed any part in the planning of Emily’s young life — The dreams we had for you, Emily. For seven and a half months Emily’s mother became almost domesticated: knitted bootees in pastel colours; played whale music for a stress-free delivery; wanted a natural birth but took gas at the final moment. So that it was Daddy who counted Emily’s fingers and toes, holding his breath at the squalling amazement at his fingertips; the hairless monkey with its eyes squinched shut and its tiny fists clenched.
Darling, she’s perfect.
Oh, my God —
But she was nearly two months premature. They gave her too much oxygen; the process detached her retinas. No one noticed straight away; in those days it was enough to know that Emily had all her limbs. When later her blindness became more apparent, Catherine denied it.
Emily was a special child, she said. Her gifts would take time to develop. Her mother’s friend Feather Dunne — an amateur astrologer — had already predicted a brilliant future: a mystical union between Saturn and the Moon confirmed that she was exceptional. When the doctor became impatient, Emily’s mother removed herself to an alternative therapist, who recommended eyebright, massage and colour therapy. For three months she lived in a haze of incense and candles; lost interest in her canvases; never even combed her hair.
Daddy suspected post-natal depression. Catherine denied it, but veered periodically from one extreme to the other: one day protective, refusing to allow him near; the next sitting unresponsive, heedless of the bundle at her side that squalled and squalled.
Sometimes it was worse than that, and Daddy had to turn to the neighbours for help. There had been a mistake, said Catherine; the hospital had mixed up the babies; had somehow given away her perfect baby for this damaged one.
Look at it, Patrick, she would say. It doesn’t even look like a baby. It’s hideous. Hideous.
She told Emily that when she was five. There could be no secrets between them, she said; they were part of each other. Besides, love is a kind of madness, isn’t it, darling? Love is a kind of possession.
Yes, that was her voice; that was Catherine White. She feels things more than the rest of us, so Emily’s father used to say, as if in apology for apparently feeling so much less. And yet it was Daddy who kept things going, during her breakdown and afterwards; Daddy who paid the bills, who cooked and cleaned; who changed and fed; who every day guided Catherine gently into her abandoned studio and showed her the brushes and paints and her baby crawling among the rolls of paper and the crunchy curls of wood.
One day she picked up a paintbrush, inspected it for a moment, then put it down again; but it was the first interest she had shown for months, and Daddy took it as a sign of improvement. It was: by the time Emily was two years old, her mother’s creative passion had returned; and although now it was channelled almost exclusively through the child, it was no less ardent than before.
It began with that head in blue clay. But clay, though interesting enough, did not retain her attention for long. Emily wanted new things; she wanted to touch, to smell, to feel. The studio had become too small to contain her; she learnt to follow walls into other rooms; to find the good place under the window where the sun shone; to use the tape-recorder to listen to stories; to open up the piano and to play the notes one-fingered. She loved to play with her mother’s tin of loose buttons; to push her hands deep inside; to slither them out on to the floor and arrange them by size, shape and texture.
In every way but one, you see, Emily was an ordinary child. She loved stories, which her father would record for her; she loved to walk in the park; she loved her parents; she loved her dolls. She had a small child’s small, infrequent tantrums; she enjoyed her visits to the farm in Pog Hill, and dreamed of getting a puppy.
By the time Emily learnt to walk, her mother had almost accepted her blindness. Specialists were expensive, and their conclusions were inevitably variations on the same theme. Her condition was irreversible; she responded only to the brightest of direct lights, and then only a very, very little. She could not distinguish shapes; could barely recognize movement, and had no awareness of colour.
But Catherine White was not to be defeated. She flung herself into Emily’s education with all the energy she had once given to her work. First, clay, to develop spatial awareness and encourage creativity. Next, numbers, on a large wooden abacus with beads that clicked and clacked. Then letters, using a Braille slate and an embossing machine. Then, on Feather’s advice, ‘colour therapy’, designed, so she said, to stimulate the visual parts of the cortex by image association.