17 Alma Road
The third section...
III
She always had faith in the house. Indeed, one of her defining characteristics had been how wholeheartedly she threw herself into things; not necessarily situations or anything concrete, but concepts with potentially nebulous but life-changing outcomes. Maddie was a person who ‘believed’. There was nothing half-hearted about her attachments. As he sees her walking beside him now, Owen can do nothing other than regard their present interaction as a perfectly natural extension of their interlocking lives, Maddie’s presence nothing less than proof of the veracity of her personal philosophy — and the fact that 17 Alma Road had been one of the few constant and reliable things in her turbulent and all too-short life. Not that forty-nine was short in comparison to many of course, but Maddie had always laid out goals for herself by the decade. To the detached observer these may well have appeared as frivolous and intangible aspirations, but for her they were the earnest and incontrovertible goals by which she navigated. Hers was a commitment which, on more than one occasion, had led her to taking a wrong turn.
“When I am fifty,” she had said to him as they sat on the patio drinking wine, for once their independent returns to visit Florence and George coinciding, “I will start being brilliant.” It had been eight years earlier.
He had laughed. “How so?”
“Because I will have made all my mistakes and learned all my lessons by then; the veil will have been lifted. I will be back on the straight-and-narrow. There will be no more secrets hidden from me.”
“You believe that?”
“I do.” She was definite. “Let’s face it, my twenties and thirties weren’t up to much — even if in one sense they were.”
“Again, how so?”
“Because of what I learned in that time. And for the last few years I’ve been putting those lessons to good use, sorting stuff out, mustering my troops.”
Although he might have chosen to challenge her assertion, circumstantial evidence suggesting otherwise, the vague military analogy made him laugh.
“What’s so funny?” She was momentarily serious.
“You are.” Owen swayed back on the seat as she feigned to hit him. “Your grand plans; always so certain.”
“You can be what you want to be and when you want to be it — even if you choose not to see it that way, brother mine. Pick a future, settle on an ambition, make it happen. Why not? Who’s to stop you, other than yourself?”
It was a conversation they’d had at regular intervals ever since her last year at University when, in response to his asking about what she was going to do next, she had laid out her ‘life plan’ for him. Revisiting that plan and taking soundings on progress was all part of their familial ritual — and a ritual almost always played out in Alma Road. It was safe and neutral territory, the heart of things, almost as if the house was a place where anything and everything became possible. More than once she defended her various transgressions, teased him that some of the machinations via which she steered her way through life were things only she could see: “you don’t have the imagination for it” she’d said without malice, as if it were indisputable fact.
“So I have to wait another three years before I see my sister being brilliant?”
“You do.” She ignored the playful tone in his voice.
“That’s hardly fair.”
“What’s hardly fair?” Prompted by the sound of laughter coming to her through the open kitchen window, Florence had emerged from the house and now stood at Maddie’s end of the bench, a quarter-full wine bottle in her hand. “I thought you might want to finish this off.”
Owen stood to cede his space to his aunt, walking the few paces necessary to retrieve a wicker seat from under the lean-to near the back door then returning to place it on the grass in front of them both.
“So, what’s hardly fair?” Florence held out the wine to Maddie as she repeated herself, the younger woman refilling her glass and then passing the bottle to Owen.
“That I have to wait for Maddie to be brilliant.”
“Isn’t she brilliant already?” It always amazed Owen that when Florence smiled the years seemed to slip from her face; she was suddenly in her early sixties rather than late seventies. It was a smile that sometimes took him all the way back to his childhood. “Hasn’t she always been brilliant?”
“Sis?”
Maddie had laughed at his invitation to justify herself and instead taken a sip of wine.
“Where’s uncle George?” She ducked Owen’s question.
“Oh, asleep in his study as usual. One glass of wine of a Sunday lunch and the man’s completely useless. I swear he’s getting worse. When he should be out here tending the beds or mowing the lawn he can’t help himself but retreat for a quiet snooze.”
“Isn’t he allowed?” Maddie asked.
“Only when he’s earned it. And as I keep telling him, being eight-three is an excuse for nothing. He always was inclined to malinger.”
Owen laughed. This was a familiar vaudeville routine, George the butt of Florence’s jokes, often in absentia. Even though he knew none of it was meant, there were times when Owen couldn’t help but wonder whether there were truths beneath the surface — hidden from he and Maddie — which may have provided some justification for Florence’s theatrical complaint.
What would brook no doubt was Florence’s unswerving faith in Maddie. In his own case, his aunt had treated him as he assumed her generation always considered men: they were the practical ones whose purpose was to earn the income, fight wars when wars needed fighting and, yes, mow lawns when the grass needed to be cut. Although born in 1938, Owen knew her memories of the Blitz (she had lived in London then) would have been virtually non-existent, her assessment of the war — and the men who fought in it — garnered from propaganda and popular culture. She had once confessed to a soft spot for Jack Hawkins, old black-and-white war films, and Ealing comedies. Based on such a philosophy, as a reasonable intelligent and logical man Owen would always be fine; he would do what needed to be done. She carried none of the reservations in relation to his dedication to his work about which Maddie occasionally confessed disquiet. He was simply doing what men did; in a way he was following in George’s footsteps, and if George had been good enough for her…
But Maddie was a different prospect altogether; she needed nurturing and encouraging. If Florence felt this was part of her mission, she did so in order that Maddie - like Owen - would turn out to be a prime specimen based upon her own templates for people. Perhaps this dedication was especially pertinent given the siblings had no-one else to whom they could reasonably turn. So, while Owen’s course was set on the practical and pragmatic, Maddie was destined to be artistic and gently temperamental; where he was good with numbers and mechanical things, she would be the creative one. It was this commitment which saw Florence harvest much of Maddie’s work during the two-and-a-half decades after she left university, hanging paintings first in the hall downstairs then up the stairs themselves and eventually beyond. And as if such a gallery were insufficient, the occasional small scale sculpture would find its way onto a bookshelf or mantlepiece.
“This house is like a private gallery,” he whispered to Maddie one day when Florence was out of earshot.
“Or a shrine,” Maddie suggested. She had been in her early thirties; a self-confessed ‘difficult period’.
That Sunday afternoon when the wine was being finished off much was as it had always been. In the intervening years Maddie had begged one or two pieces back from Florence in exchange for new ones claiming she had someone who was ‘interested’. From time-to-time there were sales, the odd contribution to a minor show. Through all of this, Maddie’s commitment to her plan — her upcoming brilliance — remained resolute, even if as a person she began to grow increasingly fragile. And Florence? As if to compensate for Maddie’s decline, her belief in her surrogate daughter increased in equal measure.
“What are you thinking about?”
Maddie’s voice drags him forward and deposits him back by the apple trees looking up at the disconsolate house.
“Oh, nothing. Just the past.”
“‘The past is another country’; isn’t that what they say?”
“Who?”
“No idea.” He hears the tell-tale tick in her voice which always suggested to him the suppression of a giggle. “Maybe you should look it up.”
He resumes his walk, circling the trees before heading back towards the house, examining the second border and trying to recall how resplendent it had been. And could be again; who was to say?
“Whatever happens,” he jumps back into the contemporary conversation which inexplicably has the feel of one broken from an age ago, "there will be some things to be rescued.”
“Rescued?”
“From storage. Florence had some lovely furniture, didn’t she? There are some pieces I’d like to give a new home to.”
“Or an old one…”
Owen ignores the comment, preferring to go on the offensive.
“I might even want to salvage some of those old daubings of yours.”
“You always were an ignorant bastard,” Maddie says, the joke bringing a new lightness to her voice.
“Or I could see if I could sell some. On eBay maybe. Might get a few quid; enough to buy a take-away.”
“Oh, my treat!”
The exaggeration in her response makes him stop. For a moment he closes his eyes as if doing so will allow him to call her work to mind, to reimagine the parade of paintings that graced the stairs. Yet at that moment he can only recall the large abstract which had hung above the dining room fireplace.
“What is it?” he asked her once.
“Not telling,” she had been a little belligerent that afternoon. “One day, when you’re old enough and wise enough, you might understand.”
He wondered if he might be wise enough now and, if so, how he would respond to seeing it again. It was contemplation accompanied by a query as to whether, if he did indeed try and rescue her paintings, the only way of truly doing so would be to re-hang them in the self-same locations. But that could only mean one thing. Looking back to the house, he imagines himself on its far side where the dining room window looked out onto a narrow strip of lawn and the large beech hedge which separated it from number nineteen. Everything was connected — the garden, the lawn, the bench, he, Maddie, George and Florence — and the spider at the centre of the web was the house itself, a large square Edwardian edifice into and around which they had all fitted. And, it seemed, continued to do so.