‘It can last for your whole life.’
‘In some cases, yes.’ Sheila sniffed and pushed back her hair. ‘Maybe Dad was right: you have to try to understand people like that, people who can’t have the life they want and are always making it up instead or running away.’
‘Yes,’ Luke said.
‘After a year or two, after she’d had the twins, they tried to make it work. They went on a few holidays together, him going up to Scotland in secret, you know, behind the wife’s back. The twins were very small. And it was on one of those holidays—’
‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘You said “twins”. My mother had a twin?’
‘You didn’t know, love?’
‘What?’
‘Mrs Blake had twins.’
‘That can’t be true,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’ Sheila dropped her cigarette and leaned forward to step on it.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Mrs Blake had twins to Harry Blake. A boy and a girl. The girl was your mother and the boy died in an accident.’
Luke just stared into space. He felt he’d arrived at a familiar place of which he had no knowledge whatsoever. ‘Holy fuck,’ he said.
Sheila felt it was getting cold so they went for a drink in the bar of the Seabank Hotel. There was a screen on the wall which advertised the bus-runs coming from Scotland. Pick-ups in Partick, Airdrie, Motherwell, Dundee, Irvine and Ayr. The hotel was full of elderly people. ‘It leaves me not knowing who I am,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The information about the boy. About my mother having had a brother.’ He took a sip of his beer and looked up at the screen and then back at the table, and when he sighed it seemed to include everything. ‘When you think of it, Blackpool’s really a suburb of Scotland, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘It’s a suburb of a lot of places.’
He waited. ‘What happened after the boy died?’
Sheila’s mother and father had tried to help Anne because she couldn’t cope. The aunts weren’t fit enough to help her with the child and it was after they died that Anne bought the room. ‘Your mother was left with the neighbours in Glasgow half the time. Poor girl. I think Mrs Blake paid them to look after her. Lord Jesus. It’s all me mam and dad spoke about for years. Mrs Blake felt it was her fault, but it was nobody’s fault. Never really got over it. She stopped taking pictures.’
‘That was the cause?’
‘That was it. She turned away. And for years she would come down here. She was always by herself.’
‘In the darkroom?’
‘Stopping there for weeks at a time.’
‘And he didn’t come much, did he?’ Luke said. ‘That was plain from the letters, too.’
‘Once in a blue moon,’ she said. ‘And it always made her happy. And that’s why you can’t really judge: people come up with all kinds of arrangements to make sense of what happens to them. You can’t judge. I think the poor fellow didn’t know what to do. I can picture him then myself. The 1970s it was. I looked out one night and saw him chipping stones up at her window. His lies had gone all the way into her life, but he really made something of her and she wanted him. So she was Mrs Blake and he was a war hero and the boy was never mentioned.’
‘I see.’
‘And your mam was hardly mentioned either.’
‘But how did he die, the boy?’
She sat quiet for a moment. ‘Weird, isn’t it, how life turns out?’ she said. ‘My father died the same year as Harry, 1976. You find people are just people, after all. And we all have stories.’ She took out a balled-up napkin from her sleeve. ‘I remember Dad telling me the story about what happened to the boy. It was on one of those holidays up in Scotland. Harry was trying to spend some time with Anne and the twins. His second family. And he drove them out to some place. My dad said it had been snowing and they were on this particular road up there, this famous place, where, if you stop the car and take off the brake, you get the illusion of rolling uphill.’
‘The Electric Brae.’
‘That’s the one. An optical illusion; you’re supposed to see it in the daytime but it was dark by the time they arrived. Anne told my father they could see a bonny white rabbit on the road. Harry was driving or I think my dad said they were just rolling with the handbrake off. Harry told the children to look at how the rabbit’s eyes were shining. He turned the headlamps off, you know, so they could see it better. But then a car came out of nowhere and they were in the middle of the road with no lights on and the other car went straight into them. And that was that.’
‘Oh my God. That’s horrific.’
‘The boy died. His name was Thomas.’
Luke shook his head and stared at the table. ‘That was the end of it.’
‘For Mrs Blake, yes. And for your mum. My dad said Harry was like a bird, actually hollow inside, you know, hollow in his bones. He wasn’t a bad man. He just wasn’t there. Wasn’t solid. And she found a purpose in covering for him and was happy in her own way.’
‘It’s hard to imagine,’ Luke said. ‘I knew they had their own secrets, but …’
‘It’s what they’re made of.’
‘All of us,’ he said. ‘We were all made of it. They never said anything.’
‘Never once?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not in so many words. When she got ill, she started to talk about a rabbit, and … well, maybe that’s the rabbit in the story. For the last year, so much of her talk has been about Harry and her past.’
‘Happens his wife had known about it for years,’ Sheila said. ‘Knew about his affair. Put up with it. But when he died she
wouldn’t have Anne at the funeral. She just came down from Glasgow and sat in the room with all her things. I remember that week, seeing her on the front steps. She was on her way onto the prom and she tied her headscarf and tried to smile. Gave me fifty pence. Her eyes were so sad.’
Luke was sorry and was lost for a moment. He knew it was monumental, what Sheila had told him, he knew it explained the people he loved. All his life his family had been moving, perhaps invisibly, perhaps unknowingly, around this terrible event that happened years ago and that was never mentioned. His hand shook when he reached for his pint, as if this secret about Anne had suddenly recast the story of his childhood and his mother’s childhood too, changing everything.
‘In Canada they want to put her into a show,’ Luke said. ‘The best of her photographs.’
‘Do they?’
‘Aye. They’ve got some pictures she did when she was young and they say she’s one of the pioneers.’
‘Lord Jesus,’ Sheila said. ‘That was the life she wanted. My mam and dad would be so proud of her.’
IF
Life had been rearranged, and always is.
If Luke had opened the newspaper he bought that morning, if he had listened to Anne’s radio or turned his phone back on, he would have learned that Major Scullion had taken his own life the day before. When he did see the news, he was shocked, though it didn’t really surprise him. He believed that Scullion
knew he would never make it to India. If he hadn’t seen him on that hill above Kajaki, if he hadn’t seen how he rushed into the mortars in one last gasp of the old soldier, he might have been unable to believe it. Scullion loved poetry and he made others love that thing in themselves. Luke tried to calm down and salute him. He wrote a text and sent it to each of the boys:
Remember Charlie at his best. He wanted intelligence back in the game.
Flannigan texted back the regimental motto.
Veritas vos liberabit.
25 AUGUST 1962
In one of the locked cupboards, Luke found a stack of Airfix models of World War II planes. He opened one of them, a Lysander, that was half-built inside the box, a small tube of glue partly squeezed out and gummed around the cap. A betting slip from Ladbrokes was wrapped around the cockpit; it had something written on it in faded blue ink, a few notes about the closing of the Hawker factory at Squires Gate. Luke supposed it was Harry’s hand and the remains of Harry’s hobby.