‘If it can work for Gloria’s boy, then why can’t it work for Emily?’
This was the phrase she used every time Daddy tried to protest. It didn’t matter that Gloria’s boy was a different case entirely; all that mattered to Catherine White was that Ben — or Boy X, as Dr Peacock called him, with typical pretentiousness — had somehow acquired an extra sense; and if the son of a cleaner could do it, then why not little Emily?
Little Emily, of course, had no idea what they were talking about. But she wanted to please; she was eager to learn, and the rest just followed naturally.
The colour therapy worked, to a point. Although the words themselves held no more meaning for Emily than the names of the colours in her paintbox, green brings back the memory of summer lawns and cut grass. Red is the scent of Bonfire Night; the sound of crackling wood; the heat. Blue is water; silent; cool.
‘Your name is a colour, too, Emily,’ said Feather, who had long, tickly hair that smelt of patchouli and cigarette smoke. ‘Emily White. Isn’t that lovely?’
White. Snow white. So cold it is almost hot at the fingertips, freezing, burning.
‘Emily. Don’t you love the pretty snow?’
No, I don’t, Emily thinks. Fur is pretty. Silk is pretty. Buttons are pretty in the tin, or rice, or lentils slipping frrrrrrpp through the fingers. There’s nothing pretty about snow, which hurts your hands and makes the steps slippery. Anyway, white isn’t a colour. White is the ugly brrrrr you get between radio stations, when the sound breaks up and there’s nothing left but noise. White noise. White snow. Snow White, half-dead, half-sleeping under glass.
When she was four, Daddy suggested that Emily might go to school. Maybe in Kirby Edge, he said, where there was a facility. Catherine refused to discuss it, of course. With Feather’s help, she said, her teaching had already worked a near-miracle. She had always known Emily was an exceptional child; she was not to waste her gifts in a school for blind children where she would be taught rug-making and self-pity, nor in a mainstream school where she would always be second-rate. No, Emily was to continue to receive tuition from home, so that when she eventually regained her sight — and there was no doubt at all in Catherine’s mind that this would happen some day — she would be ready to face whatever the world chanced to offer her.
Daddy protested as strenuously as he could. It was not nearly enough; Feather and Catherine barely heard him. Feather believed in past lives, and thought that if the correct parts of Emily’s brain were stimulated, then she would regain her visual memory; and Catherine believed . . .
Well, you know what Catherine believed. She could have lived with an ugly child; even a deformed child. But a blind child? A child with no understanding of colours?
Colours, colours, colours. Green, pink, gold, orange, purple, scarlet, blue. Blue alone has a thousand variations: cerulean, sapphire, cobalt, azure; from sky-blue to deepest midnight, passing through indigo and navy, powder-blue to electric-blue, forget-me-not, turquoise and aqua and Saxe. You see, Emily could understand the notation of colours. She knew their terms and their cadences; she learnt to repeat the notes and arpeggios of their seven-tone scale. And yet the nature of colours still eluded her. She was like a tone-deaf person who has learnt to play the piano, knowing that what he hears is nothing like music. But she could perform; oh yes; she could.
‘See the daffodils, Emily.’
‘Pretty daffodils. Sunny yellow-golden daffodils.’ As a matter of fact, they felt ugly to the touch; cold and somehow meaty, like slices of ham. Emily much preferred the fat silky leaves of the lamb’s tongue, or the lavenders with their nubbly flower-heads and sleepy smell.
‘Shall we paint the daffodils, sweetheart? Would you like Cathy to help you?’
The easel was set up in the studio. There was a big paintbox on the left, with the colours labelled in Braille. Three pots of water stood to the right, and a selection of brushes. Emily liked the sable brushes best. They were the best quality, and soft as the end of a cat’s tail. She liked to run them along the place just underneath her lower lip, a place of such sensitivity that she could feel every hair on a paintbrush, and where the nap of a piece of velvet ribbon was the most exquisitely discerned. The paper — thick, glossy art paper with its new, clean-bedclothes smell — was fastened to the easel with bulldog clips, and was sectioned into squares like a chessboard, by means of wires stretched across the paper. That way, Emily could be sure of not straying outside the picture, or confusing sky with trees.
‘Now for the trees, Emily. Good. That’s good.’
Trees are tall, Emily thinks. Taller than my father. Catherine lets her touch them, puts her face to their rough sides, like hugging a beardy man. There’s a smell, too, and a hint of movement, far away but still connected, still touching somehow. ‘It’s windy,’ Emily suggests, trying hard. ‘The tree’s moving in the wind.’
‘Good, darling! Very good!’
Splosh, splash. Now the white, no-colour paper is green. She knows this because her mother hugs her. Emily feels her trembling. There is a note in her voice, too — not F sharp this time, but something less shrill and teary — and something in Emily swells with pride and happiness, because she loves her mother; she loves the smell of turpentine because it is the smell of her mother; she loves the painting lessons because they make her mother proud — although later, when it is over and she creeps back to the studio and tries in vain to understand why it makes her so happy, Emily can feel only the tiniest roughening and crinkling of the paper, like hands after washing-up. That’s all she can feel, even with her lower lip. She tries not to feel too disappointed. There must be something there, she thinks. Her mother says so.
Post comment:
blueeyedboy: That was beautiful, Albertine.
Albertine: Glad you liked it, blueeyedboy . . .
3
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:
Posted at: 04.16 on Friday, February 8
Status: public
Mood: creative
Listening to: The Moody Blues: ‘The Story In Your Eyes’
Poor Emily. Poor Mrs White. So close and yet so far apart. What had started with Mr White and our hero’s abortive quest for his father had broadened into a kind of obsession with the whole of the household: with Mrs White, her husband, and most of all, with Emily, the little sister he might have had if things had turned out differently.
And so, all through that summer, the summer of his eleventh year, blueeyedboy followed them in secret, ritually noting their comings and goings; their clothes; the things they liked to do; their haunts, in the cloth-backed Blue Book that served him as a journal.
He followed them to the sculpture park where little Emily liked to play; to the open farm with its piglets and lambs; to the pottery workshop café in town, where for the price of a cup of tea you could buy and shape a lump of clay, to be baked in the oven the same day, then painted and taken home to take pride of place on some mantelpiece, in some cabinet.
The Saturday of the blue clay, Emily was four years old. Blueeyedboy had spotted her with Mrs White, walking slowly down the hill into Malbry, Emily in a little red coat that made her look like an unseasonal Christmas bauble, her little dark head bobbing up and down, Mrs White in boots and a blue print dress, her long blonde hair trailing down her back. He followed them all the way into town, keeping close to the hedges that lined the road. Mrs White never noticed him, not even when he ventured close, shadowing her blue silhouette with the doggedness of a junior spy.