17 Alma Road

The thirteenth section...

XIII

Given he made a point of having his room painted every few years, its colours ranging through some kind of muted rainbow, it is perhaps only to be expected that the tone which greets him — something just on the yellow side of magnolia — is surprising. He wants to recall liking his shades bold and vibrant, and so, standing in the centre of the room, tries to remember each of them in turn, hoping that in one corner or another traces of the walls’ previous lives might just show through. Yet there is nothing to disturb the pastel yellow; George was far too methodical a decorator to allow past shades to see the light of day. It is a colour — this yellow — which, along with his not really remembering it, also surprises him because it seems relatively bright after Maddie’s room. He cannot help but wonder whether the decor in the two rooms shouldn’t have been reversed to better fit with their divergent personalities — even if, in the end, his sister’s sombre wallpaper proved entirely appropriate. The again, perhaps the magnolia arrived after he had left.

Walking to the wall in which the dormant fireplace is inset, Owen runs his hand over its surface as if feeling for history, imagining his eyes catching feint tell-tale marks where the chemical residue of some sticky substance or other resisted over-painting. After they won the FC Cup in 1974, he had insisted on erecting a picture of Liverpool’s football team; and though he can’t remember how long it remained there, he is almost certain it was replaced by a Star Wars poster. Imagining himself a Jedi was probably as far as his imagination took him.

Apart from recalling this rudimentary decoration, he has bizarrely contextless memories of pieces of furniture, rugs, boxes of toys; then, just before he left for university, a desk, a half-filled bookcase. Such things represented the transition between one stage and the next. He thinks back to Maddie’s room and can only remember it as a single entity: a den of artistic chaos.

“A trifle harsh,” she observes, “but I’ll settle for that.”

And even though in his old room, he cannot escape thinking about her. He stares at the wall which separates the two bedrooms, tries to project himself through it.

“What?” There is a degree of impatience in her voice.

“I don’t know.” Stalling, Owen senses that she is fed-up being the point of focus. Her words — ‘your turn’ — come back to him. “I was just wondering, all those times when your work wasn’t selling…”

“You mean most of the time.”

“I suppose so… All the while you must still have been trying to sell things, submitting to exhibitions or contests, striving to get galleries interested.”

“And your point is?”

“What was that like? I mean, the hope, getting knocked back, trying again…”

To buy Maddie time, Owen walks to the window and looks out, the view from here only marginally different to that from her room. He wonders how it is possible that from remarkably similar yet shared views such different lives could develop. Perspective had much to answer for.

“It was brutal.” Her tone is flat, matter-of-fact. “Brutal. How could it be otherwise? How could it not gnaw away at your soul? I’d be so optimistic…” She allows her voice to fall away.

Owen turns back into the room, scanning his own space for clues, as if he might alight on something which would make Maddie’s statement concrete. Or make her real again. There is nothing but absence. He looks at the unshaded light hanging from the ceiling and then over to the switch. How often had his hands flicked that over the years?

“Not that rejection was something you had to worry about. Professionally, I mean.” She moves them on.

He weighs up the concept, tries to take a quick mental skip through his cv.

“Only once, I suppose. At the end.”

“And what was that like?”

“Nothing like your experience, I’m sure.”

“Why so certain?”

This time it is an easy enough question to answer.

“Because I knew it was coming. Because I’d lost my mojo. Because I didn’t care any more. You choose.” Yet in Owen’s mind this was not a valid example of multiple choice because all were true. He realises he is in danger of trivialising his experience, something which might inadvertently devalue his sister’s. “I mean, at the heart of it I wasn’t as invested in my work as much as you were in yours; it didn’t matter in the same kind of way. That’s why I asked about you I suppose, because I didn’t know what professional rejection felt like. I couldn’t know. Not until the end.”

Uncertain whether he has done enough — either to satisfy her enquiry or exercise his responsibility for having had ‘a turn’ — he is prepared to leave it at that. In comparison to Maddie’s life, his one rebuff didn’t even make the same scale; it was like comparing a single fragment of a peppercorn to an entire chilli.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she says, breaking the silence.

“Oh?”

“I was thinking about Grace, Lisa, Wendy.”

“Oh,” he says again, this time his emphasis very different, wondering if what she has executed was an entirely fair segue on Maddie’s part. There is enough of a link to their earlier conversation of course: her men friends, his women friends; a commonality of theme. And she is undoubtedly right that his most meaningful experiences of rejection was not professional but personal. “What was your word? Brutal? I don’t see why that shouldn’t apply.”

Sensing her settling down somewhere, he leans against a wall and scans the room, waiting.

“And all made worse in that you didn’t know those rejections were coming — after all you hadn’t stopped caring, and thought you still had your mojo.”

He laughs to himself. “I see what you did there.”

“Clever don’t you think?”

“I would expect nothing less.”

If she had been in the room with him, Owen imagines the obsequious little bow she might have been tempted to offer at such recognition. Having the picture in his mind is sufficient. It feels a little like a reward, proof that a link still exists.

“But you know the stories, Maddie, all of them. They have — don’t you think — a certain similarity about them; a symmetry almost.”

“Boy meets girl; boy and girl fall in love; girl leaves boy?”

“Nothing so superficial.”

“Sorry.”

Not that she is wrong, even if she didn’t bear witness to the minutiae of each unravelling. The house saw as much of that as any one person, himself excepted. There were evenings when they came to visit — he and Grace or Lisa or Wendy — and sat at opposite ends of one of the living room sofas, the chasm between them as evident as the nose on your face. Yet he had been the last to observe it, certainly well after Florence.

“How are things?” she said one evening as he helped her with the post-dinner washing-up. “Between you and Grace, I mean.”

“Things? Fine. Why?” Had he stopped drying the plates at that point, finally recognising the crevasse on whose edge he was standing? “Work’s been tough for her, that’s all. She’s tired.”

Yet it wasn’t work Grace proved weary of, but him. Three years’ togetherness evaporated in a single evening soon after, prompted by an argument over the political leanings of some newspaper or another; it was a crack which opened into a fissure and allowed the dam to burst. In what seemed like an instant he had drowned.

“Brutal,” he says again, hearing the real-time word reverberate around the room; a room in which he had grown up and always felt secure. And how about now, with Maddie there again, raking over old coals?

“I never really liked Grace,” she says out of the blue. “Nor Lisa, come to that.”

“Now you tell me!”

“Lisa was always going to be a mistake Glen; why couldn’t you see that?”

“Because I was blind?”

He wants to say ‘because I was in love’ but knows how hollow that would sound, how trite, like a get-out clause that never unpicks the lock. Even so, he still believes it to be the case; and that he loved Lisa too. How could he not? Perhaps if he were to admit she mattered less to him than he had thought at the time then the pain of her betrayal would be somehow lessened.

“Because you thought you were in love.” Maddie says it for him. “And make no mistake, Lisa was the kind of woman who could do that, make you fall in love with them. I came across lots of examples; fought some of them too. Women who exude something irresistible, something that would make you a fortune if you could bottle it. Men don’t stand a chance with women like that especially if…” She stops.

“If what?”

“If they’re on the rebound.” She hurries on. “And you were on the rebound, brother mine, even if you thought you weren’t. You hadn’t got over Grace when Lisa waltzed into your life.”

“Only to waltz right out of it a couple of years later. And with one of my best friends, just to twist the knife.”

The dénouement with Lisa had been similarly dramatic and catastrophic, which — given Owen didn’t go in for overt shows of emotion — only made it all the more painful.

“Brutal,” Maddie suggests again, re-emphasising the parallel she had known was there all along.

As Owen pushes himself away from the wall to stand by the window once again, he wonders whether Maddie had always wanted to perform some kind of emotional exorcism on him but ran out of road before she had been able to do so. Or perhaps it is the house trying to help him cleanse himself. Or itself.

“You’d think I would have learned my lesson,” he says as he watches two cars drive past outside. He wonders what prospective buyers might have thought of the house when they first encountered it, whether they had any sense of the history cocooned within it, or even the power of the place. But power to do what?

“I had high hopes for Wendy,” Maddie says — though if this is intended to soften the blow it can only achieve the opposite. “She seemed so right for you.”

“Tell me about it.”

She ignores the rhetorical directive.

“This doesn’t work like that.”

“What is ‘this’, exactly?” Owen, once more unsure whether he has voiced the question aloud, aims it more at the empty air than the spirit of a sister who has opened a chink from which confusion has blithely walked.

Never mind Grace or Lisa or Wendy, what is he doing here, standing in his old bedroom, haunting the house in which he grew up, examining the walls, the views from the windows, wondering about posters and paint colours? Did he know when he pulled the key from his coat pocket exactly what he would be stepping in to? Or even earlier than that with the estate agent? “I just want one last look around the place,” he had said, trying to strike a tone of farewell rather than one of reacquaintance. Had he done so for the benefit of the agent or himself? Had it been a lie unconsciously told? Whatever the motivation, he couldn’t deny that he was standing in his old bedroom — the one he had finally vacated some thirty-seven years previously — and was looking back on his eight-year relationship with Wendy. If he had felt a little like Peter Pan during those years it was never because he was the one endowed with magic but rather because Wendy was. It seemed she had the capability to whisk him away into grand adventures, almost as if she possessed a key which could unlock anything she chose, including his frozen heart. He used to fantasise about her finding him encased in a block of ice or a chunk of granite, and whether she thawed him out or chipped away at the superfluous rock, sooner or later there he was, living and breathing again, blood coursing through his veins. More than once during those first few years of the twenty-first century he felt as if he had been reborn.

“And then?” Maddie seems determined to have him walk her through the crisis. “I came back one weekend to find you here without her.”

“Because she had gone. And it was my own stupid fault. Gone because I didn’t have the imagination to conceive of fresh possibilities; because I was too comfortable with what I had.” Owen turns and leans back against the window cill. “And what made the whole episode even more incongruous was that I was so well travelled. I knew America; I liked the place. And yet when she said she’d got a posting to San Francisco and wanted us to go, I said no. For no good reason, I said no.”

“You were afraid.”

“Was I?”

“Because you’d found what you’d wanted — after Grace and Lisa, and after that that time — and you didn’t want to risk losing it.”

“You may be right.” He is unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. “But if so, in trying to protect that I achieved the complete opposite and threw it all away.”

“You didn’t think she’d go?”

“No, I didn’t. We’d talked about getting married, having children before it was too late. Talked about moving too - though just to somewhere more convenient, appropriate.” He looks around the room again. “I think I wanted a place like this; somewhere safe and secure; somewhere our children could grow up as happily as I had. As we had.”

As his eyes travel around the ceiling cornice he notices a small crack in the plaster in one corner, and he wonders how long it has been there and whether there were other cracks in other rooms, ones he had yet to notice.

“There are a few,” Maddie says, as if that will stop his fruitless search. “It’s an old house. We’re older people; we have our cracks too.” She allows a pause. “Or at least you do.”

“Thanks.”

A strange kind of silence settles on the room. Owen closes his eyes and breathes deeply.

“Are you sure? It’s probably not too late.” Florence was standing again at the front door, her hand on his arm, his body already part-turned and over the threshold, ready to make his escape.

“I think it is,” he had said. “How can you come back from that, when you’ve already stepped across an invisible line, stated your position? And even if Wendy took me back — took me with her to America — wouldn’t she always be wondering when I might go off-script again? How could she possibly trust me after this?”

Florence removed her hand to rest it against the frame of the door.

“Do you think you can trust yourself?” she said. It had been ambiguous perhaps, but the emphasis was sufficient to place responsibility back on his shoulders.

It was enough to root him where he stood. He had glanced up to where the window of his old room was inset in the brickwork.

“Who knows?” He had smiled at Florence, a sad resigned kind of smile. “Perhaps it will be best if in the future I avoid putting myself in situations where that will ever become a live question.”

“And now?” Maddie says, breaking into his memory as if she has been eavesdropping on history. “Is it a question now?”

Owen tries to reconcile those old words with a more general notion, parallels the situation fifteen years ago with where he is now. They are such very different realities. There is no Wendy to set him free; no job to tie him down. He has a past filled with memories and events, with incidents and accidents and a list of victories and humiliations. And a future yawning featureless before him.

“How can you know, Maddie? How can you tell if you’re in a place where self-trust is a consideration, or even an issue? I’m just an unemployed man walking around an empty house unsure what he’s going to do after he’s walked out through the front door for the last time.”

“I’d say that you’re absolutely where you need to be in order to decide whether or not you’re going to trust yourself — or anything or anyone else — again.”

“You sound certain.”

“I should do, because I know.”

Feeling unaccountably tired, Owen looks around the room as if the very act of doing so will magic a chair from thin air. When it doesn’t, his only option is to return to leaning against the window cill. He wonders about lifting the lower sash to allow some fresh air in; it would surely be good to breathe a little life into the place. But he is worried he will forget he has done so, and leave the house with the window open and therefore vulnerable. Not wanting that, it remains closed and he resigns himself to the gently swirling dust, the slightly musty smell. In any event, Maddie is requiring his attention.

“Because that’s what I had to do for the best part of thirty years.” She carries on as if there has been no break in the conversation. “Whether or not I had been lured into a false sense of security at least partly because of Florence’s constant encouragement, once I got to university I discovered that art was really competitive. I’d been so used to being told how clever I was, my paintings on every wall I looked at, that I took my ability all for granted.”

“You discovered you weren’t as talented as you thought?”

“I prefer to think that I found out everyone else was good too.” There is a momentary shortness in her tone. “It was quite a shock. Not only that, but also I’d naïvely assumed my three years there would gift me some kind of serene passage through to my graduation and all the triumphs that would inevitably follow on from that. I wasn’t expecting — setbacks.” As she pauses, Owen adjusts his stance slightly, crossing his legs at his ankles. The room remains unmoved. “My work suffered in the first term; I’m sure of that. All the other stuff that was new didn’t help: adjusting to student life, independence…”

“Men,” Owen suggests.

“Boys.” Maddie bats his interruption away contemptuously. “There were no men at uni — not among the students anyway.” Her statement is both all-encompassing and a little cryptic. “It soon felt as if I was slipping behind, and I didn’t know how to handle that. I started copying the work of some of my peers who I knew were doing well — which only made matters worse. Then one day my tutor asked me what had happened to the Madeleine who’d walked through the door on the first day. I didn’t think he meant me of course, but my work. Jarvis, his name was. He told me to go and reacquaint myself with her, and that I had to ‘trust myself’.”

“Ah.”

“So I did. Or at least I tried to, even if something in the foundations had already been put under pressure. I needed to remember where I was comfortable, where I thought I was at my best. My work started to get better. It was an important lesson. Ever since then, whenever I flagged, I always recalled what Jarvis had said to me. It became a kind of mantra, something constructive to hang on to. Or at least not destructive.” She pauses. “So when I tell you that you need to trust yourself, it’s because I know you have to; I’ve seen the power of that.”

He has no reason to doubt her, yet cannot help but acknowledge that at some point history has demonstrated Maddie’s self-reliance failed her; there would have been a moment when she had nothing more she could offer herself the well having been bled dry. What was left for her then? What did she have to fall back on? Under such circumstances how could she not seek solutions elsewhere? These are questions to which he knows most of the answers — and wishes he didn’t.

But what of him now? What did he have to cling to? There was no art, no special skill or talent; he was, as far as he could see, just a ‘normal’ man. On that basis — Jarvis notwithstanding — in what should he place his trust?

He looks around the room once again. In addition to the crack he has recently noticed, there is a piece of picture rail which might warrant repair, a floorboard in the far corner that could do with a couple of extra nails in to knock it back to level. Those are the sorts of things he believes he can do — though admittedly not as well as George — yet surely they are hardly skills in which to entrust his future.

“And there’s one more piece of advice.” Maddie breaks into the silence just as he assumes she has finished her tale.

“From Jarvis?” he asks, if only to prove he has been listening.

“No, from me.”

“Which is?”

“Never lie to yourself.” She waits a moment — he assumes to allow him to interject, which he does not — than carries on. “I tried to trust in myself again, yes; but when I didn’t get the results I wanted or thought were somehow owed me, I started to make up excuses as to why they hadn’t been forthcoming. Not getting into a gallery or being shortlisted for a competition wasn’t down to any flaw in my work but some other factor. I used to rewrite things or imagine rewriting things — reality, history, even letters I’d been sent — in order to make rejection more palatable. At times it was like being trapped in a crazy reality. But it proved enough of a salve to allow me to lurch from one failure to the next, do whatever I needed to do to pick myself up and dust myself off… But in the end there’s only so much of that you can take, a point where it ceases to be an effective strategy. Or even a viable one. So don’t do it, Glen.”

There is no way he can counter this, so he lets it go unmolested. How Maddie’s advice might relate to him he isn’t sure, yet he cannot deny how profound it is, nor how painful the lessons must have been which has now led her to a conclusion which has arrived too late. In pursuing a volatile cocktail of self-trust blended with self-deception, had she not realised she could only be storing up problems for the future? The pressure could only grow.

Yet surely his circumstance is vastly different? When it came to women — the topic which had started this particular round of cut-and-thrust — he had deliberately ceased to trust himself, taken himself out of the game in order to ensure further rejection was never a possibility. Isn’t this position diametrically opposed to that his sister had adopted in relation to her art? He withdrew, she threw herself in further. Irrespective of that, ‘now’ remains the unanswered question. Surely the future he faces doesn’t require any degree of self-trust beyond the everyday; surely there is no circumstance which is forcing him to lie to himself.

Walking out of his room, he takes a moment to lean on the balustrade and look down the stairs. Half-way up they double back on themselves such that from his present position he is faced with the large expanse of wall above the half-landing. Just out of sight on the ground floor are the entrances to both the kitchen and George’s study.

“Do you remember the piece that hung there the longest?” Maddie asks from somewhere nearby.

Owen looks straight ahead and tries to project back ten, twenty years. He recalls an unusually tall painting which, although the colours were vibrant, possessed a palette that seemed strangely dark, almost claustrophobic.

“It was tall and thin wasn’t it? Seemed to fit the space really well from what I recall. Did you paint it especially?”

“It was my attempt at something Pre-Raphaelite,” she says, knowing no further explanation should be necessary. “I was never entirely satisfied with it of course, but Florence seemed to like it.”

“Inevitably.” It is said without malice. Owen looks around the stairwell and then back to the wall opposite. “I think that was one of the things I missed most when I left the house,” he says after a moment’s further thought.

“What?”

“Your paintings. When I went to Uni, and then after that, I seemed to leave all kinds adornment behind. The first few places I lived in were rented and so they wouldn’t let tenants stick things on the walls. And then Grace was all white and clean lines; she hated to have anything clutter up the place, and that went for the walls too. Lisa was similar I suppose.”

“And Wendy?”

He casts his mind back to the two houses they had shared, tries to take a mental tour of them, identify their stand-out items of decoration. Mainly he remembers furniture, but there were splashes of other colour here and there.

“She was a little more ‘arty’ I suppose. We had the odd poster on the wall, prints, that kind of thing. I’m sure you could have swayed her, educated her, persuaded her to indulge a little more. She would have been open to that.”

“Didn’t she think I was a bit of a hippy?”

Owen laughs. “She never said that. Not to my face anyway. And even if she did, she still liked you.”

He is pleased Maddie lets it go.

“What else do you miss,” she asks.

“About Wendy?”

“No, about the house. In addition to my paintings of course. You’ve lived in numerous houses all over the place; surely Alma Road was always the reference point, the benchmark against which other dwellings were measured. What did you say about you and Wendy: that you imagined your children growing up in a place like this?”

Had he said that? He tries to remember.

“Perhaps not exactly like this, but certainly feeling like it. Or embodying what it stood for.” He lets the sentence settle before returning to her question. “So what else do I miss — other than your daubings?” Somewhere he hears her chuckle. “The solidity of the place, I suppose. The way it made you feel secure. And the rooms; all the right size, the right proportions. They seemed to work, to flow into each other really well. And — if we’re being romantic — I miss the views from the windows. And George’s garden. Partly for being the garden that it was, but also as a space that we could enjoy, inhabit, sit in, talk in.” More recollections of conversations and individual moments come back to him, and the house is always there in each and every one: a particular room, the garden. He tries to shake himself. “But isn’t that pretty much true for everyone? I mean, we all leave home, go away, build our new lives; and new lives mean new places, new houses, the start of other cycles, other chapters.”

“Some people don’t,” she suggests.

“Don’t what?”

“Leave home. Not many, I’ll admit; but some. A few more probably come back full circle rather than entertain new cycles.” She waits a second. “Is that how it feels, being here now?”

“‘Full circle’ you mean?” Owen imagines her nodding. “No. It’s meant to be a goodbye, before I go off to start another chapter. Probably the last chapter.”

It is the first time he has considered the future in such terms. For Owen, his life had been a series small leaps from one thing to the next. Sometimes these had been driven by the women coming into and then going out of his life; sometimes they had been engineered by work, location. He wonders how many times he had actually made a definitive choice himself — and now here was Maddie demanding to know ‘what next?’

“You might be getting closer,” she says cryptically.

“To what?”

His question is met with soft laughter. Owen had always hated it when she had the answer to a question but refused to tell him what it was.