BLUE
Maureen said she wanted one of those sky-coloured radios and a light blue rug for the living room. Not exactly the same blue everywhere but very similar and kind of summery. ‘I’ve never been one for dark colours,’ she said. ‘People with black sofas and brown curtains, heaven help us, they want their heads examined. There are such nice things in the shops and our Ian’s handy with a screwdriver, so if you go to IKEA you can just get him round and he’ll hammer it together, because you don’t want those men coming, you know, the ones with the van. They make you smile. They charge you a fortune and leave a right mess in your hall.’
Maureen always said she had too much time to think.
‘I love them to death, but …’
Maybe her children had betrayed her by seeking happiness elsewhere. She’d think it mad if anyone said it, but her children saw how affronted she could be by their ambitions and their progress. ‘Nobody is prouder of their children’s success than I am,’ she’d whisper. And she did enjoy their achievements in a boast-to-the-neighbours kind of way. But she didn’t like what comes with success in one’s children: the independence, the sudden confidence, the distance, the self-sufficiency. That was all bad news from her point of view. More than bad news: it was selfish. They should be holding themselves responsible for the way she felt, as if only
their guilt could assuage her. And, because of this, it was impossible for her ever to let them see that she was happy. Maureen was a woman who kept her good times a secret from her children for fear they might stop pitying her.
The great secret was she liked her life. The routines at Lochranza Court suited her down to the ground and she loved her friends. But that didn’t stop her from leaving messages on the voicemails of her children, messages that ended with a few tears. She would sniff into the phone and slowly her bad feelings would become an aria of blame about them not doing enough. In all their adult lives — and Ian hadn’t been a teenager for twenty-five years — Maureen had never sat her children down together at a table for a meal. And it wasn’t because she couldn’t cook or couldn’t buy a chicken. It was something else: making a meal would have suggested a level of well-being that some part of her, some sad part of her, couldn’t bear them to witness at the same time. She resented their spouses as if they had cast a spell on her children and made them forget who they were.
She had put out a lovely spread for Alice. Cut sandwiches sat on plates, pieces of Victoria sponge, amid the mugs and spoons at the kitchen table. Good God, thought Alice: sugar in the tea and all this cake and it isn’t even lunch-time. ‘She measures out her life in sugar spoons,’ her mother cracked one time, when she was well. And it was true Alice always worried about her weight.
‘Oh, what the hell. Who cares?’ Maureen said. ‘It’s just us two. If we’re not good to ourselves, who’s going to be?’
Coming along the corridor that day, Alice had enjoyed an unexpected feeling of belonging. Some days she experienced a random turn for the better and it usually didn’t last. She suddenly admired the housing complex and saw it as a wonderful
cooperative. She said to herself she hoped that, when her time came, they would bring her to live in a place like this. With the Yamaha organ and the board games, the large-print books, the knitting patterns, it seemed made for tired wanderers, except that most of the people in there had lived all their lives in the town. She thought she probably deserved a place at Lochranza Court after all her upsets, before realising that was the sort of thing Maureen would say.
Each flat had a ledge by the front door, like a low concrete table, which the resident would crowd with ornaments. Flat 21 had a collection of porcelain dogs with sad eyes, jowly faces and hanging ears. Maureen’s daughter once said it was a black hole of empathy. Flat 20 had a host of fairies hopping about in eternity on gossamer wings. ‘Life is much more interesting if it scarcely exists,’ said their surprised little faces, their slender hands. Alice was heading to Maureen’s place, but passing her mother’s she saw again the photograph on her ledge of a shipyard and a red poppy stuck in the corner of the frame.
‘That photograph,’ Alice said, putting down her teacup, ‘the one outside my mother’s door. It’s one of hers, isn’t it? One of the ones she took years ago?’
‘Yes,’ Maureen said. She was washing the butter knife in the sink. ‘It was one of the pictures from those suitcases she keeps in her bathroom. But she says there’s a lot more of her stuff somewhere.’
‘And why get them out now?’
‘Well, your mum being the way she is, it’s good to get things out and try to remember, you know? The nurse in the Memory Club, she encourages that kind of thing. Get stuff out, she says. Get the old albums out and stir up the memories. So in the evenings your
mum and I have been pulling things out and I’ve been making piles of them. We thought we’d put that one outside the door for people to see.’
The late-night tasks. The letters to Luke. Alice couldn’t be sure she wasn’t envious of Maureen. It’s the sort of thing a daughter should be doing with her mother. And yet she was grateful to the neighbour because she knew that Anne would never have enjoyed doing those things with her. Anne trusted strangers, and so, quite clearly, did Maureen: they liked a new person’s willingness not to jump on the things you said, questioning everything and doubting you. Families did that but strangers didn’t. And so Alice swallowed another insult when she was told about the picture. The photographs were coming out of the suitcases and it was a good thing. And when she thought about it, well, it probably was a good thing if the past could emerge, at last, without her mother’s editing.
‘They’re fantastic pictures,’ Maureen said. ‘And I suppose they show you what Anne was like in her prime, you know, long before this started happening to her.’
‘I couldn’t tell you,’ Alice said. ‘Some people hide away in their prime. You can’t know them.’
‘And you only get to them later?’
‘That’s right. When they need you.’
‘You know I help her with her letters?’ Maureen said.
‘I do, yes,’ said Alice. ‘It’s been very kind. I appreciate it. Especially you helping her keep in touch with my son. We’re an odd family.’
‘I could show you odd. You should see mine. One minute you’re the best mammy in the world and the next minute you could be missing and they wouldn’t notice.’
‘I don’t think this tour’s been easy for Luke,’ Alice said. ‘The Ayrshire boy who died. You know about that? Well, Luke was there. He saw it.’
‘Aye. You and I spoke on the phone, remember? For a terrible moment we all thought …’
‘Yes.’
They sat in silence for a moment. Maureen felt Alice was a bit strange that day, a bit stressed or something, but frankly, it was hard enough trying to keep up with Anne without worrying about her daughter as well. ‘Anyway,’ Maureen said, ‘it’s not only the letters from Luke. Anne’s been getting other letters, too, and there’s one that seems quite important. It’s from Canada.’ Maureen brought it from the cutlery drawer and handed it to Alice. The envelope was marked with crayon and with various stamps and crossings out. The name of the place it came from was across the top of the letter. ‘The Art Gallery of Ontario,’ read Alice. And when her eye dropped to the foot of the page she read out the whole address: ‘317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T 1G4.’
‘That’s the address. It’s a woman, I think,’ Maureen said, twisting her head to get a better view of the letter she’d already looked at many times. Alice went on in silence and pressed her own lips with a finger when she noticed they were moving. The curator who wrote the letter said she was writing about ‘Mrs Quirk’s photographs’, and she used the words ‘honoured’ and ‘intrigued’, ‘visionary’ and ‘important’. It said the gallery was planning an exhibition of lost women photographers and that Anne Quirk was an artist with a connection to Ontario. The word ‘marginalised’ appeared in the third paragraph, and, further down, where Alice noticed a teacup stain, it spoke of ‘permission’. Alice felt a