Chapter 9
Sunday 8 October
“So I didn’t tell Barbara specifically about my plans to photograph access ways,” Kay admitted to her father as they lay on the grass by the ornamental pond. “I called it architectural photography, which sounds way more impressive. Oh, and I also said people were paying me to use some of it, which is a total lie.
“But that’s not what I came here to talk about Dad. What I wanted to say is that I’m in a right quandary, and I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m changing inside but my real life hasn’t caught up yet, and now I’m like two different people: me, and the person I want to be, and they’re quite different. Me is the person you already know, Kay the librarian, the tiny little woman who was squeezed and crushed into that shape a long time ago by you-know-who because she didn’t want me to turn out like you. She thought I was vain. Was I vain? I don’t remember. You used to tell me to dream big but for as long as I can remember I’ve been under Barbara’s thumb .
“Maybe if you’d been stronger Dad, when I was young, you’d have stood up for me a little more. Maybe if you hadn’t slept with that patient and got struck off… But what’s the point of maybes right? Where do they get you? This is where my life is now, crushed into this tiny shape, which isn’t me but is how the rest of the world sees me. I could very easily go on being Kay the librarian for the rest of my life and no one would give a hoot. On my gravestone there’d be my name and my birth and death dates and nothing else because what else would there be to say about me?”
Kay stopped and caught her breath. The sun was September warm, but November was in the breeze and when it blew it raised the fine hairs on her arms. This place, the Hill Garden and Pergola, was a secret jewel hidden inside Hampstead Heath. When she was small, her father would often take her here. He called it his favourite place in all the world, and it quickly became hers, too. The Hill Garden was a sloping paradise of lawns, winding paths and flower beds. Towering above it was the Pergola, a raised stone walkway lined with pillars, around which climbed ivy, creepers and flowering vines. Wild bushes grew between the pillars and on the path, and yellow lichen coated the broad balustrades. It seemed half reclaimed by nature and made Kay think of the ruins of an ancient civilisation.
On summer evenings, she and her father would walk slowly through the pergola and she would dream that her father was a king and she was a princess. Sometimes they’d sit on the lawn in the Hill Garden below and watch as the rabbits came out to play. Her father always seemed happy and relaxed when they were here. They’d lie down and she’d chew on a grass stem and he’d smoke a Camel, and they would try to make sense of the shapes of the clouds. They’d lie right where she was lying now, near the ornamental pond. It looked different these days though, like an old painting where the colours are fading but are also somehow richer because of all the memories they contain.
“I always feel safe here, Poppy,” he once said to her while they were lying on the grass. Her father was a big man – gregarious and larger-than-life, with lots of friends. He was a surgeon who dealt with blood and all sorts of terrible stuff every day, and nothing seemed to faze him. She wondered why he would need somewhere to feel safe. What could he possibly fear?
But even back then she sensed he wasn’t completely well. There were times when he would spend whole days in his bedroom, and when he emerged he was pale and quiet and far from his usual self. Barbara would say he was sick, but never explained what kind of sickness it was. It didn’t seem like the cold or flu type of sickness. Later, her father admitted that he sometimes got what he called the glooms, when he got very sad and tired and didn’t feel like doing anything. But he swore that would never happen when they visited the Hill Garden and Pergola. The glooms could never catch him there.
“This is the place where I come to dream,” he told her once. “You can dream here, too, Poppy, about the future. You can be whatever you want. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I’m going to be a doctor,” Kay replied. “Mother says so.”
Her father nodded. “And is that what you want?”
“Yes,” she said, because she’d been very much under Barbara’s spell back then and she couldn’t imagine her mother being wrong about anything. Later, she wondered what her father thought of that reply, whether he was disappointed by it, and how the conversation might have gone if she’d told him what her heart said, which was that she wanted to be a performer on the stage. Would he have persuaded Barbara that she should take acting lessons?
When Kay was seven, her father did a bad thing at work and was struck off, which meant he could no longer be a doctor. Her mother’s anger with him was like a frozen sea that chilled the whole house. There seemed no end to it or no limit to its depths. He had to move into the spare bedroom. He gained weight, stopped shaving and got the glooms worse than ever. One morning, Kay said goodbye to her father as usual before leaving for school. He smiled at her, she remembered, and it was the saddest smile she’d ever seen, like a car pulling out of an empty car park. That was the last time she ever saw him. He left home later that day and no one could say where he went.
Most people assumed he took his own life, but they never found his body, and Kay was sure he was still out there somewhere, living under a different name. That was what she’d have done for sure, had she been in his position. She didn’t want to believe that her father had stopped loving her, only that he could no longer abide his life at home and had to run away. Her biggest disappointment was that he hadn’t thought to take her with him. His departure was like an interruption in the middle of a story, like a knife cutting one part of her life from the other. She was still herself, sort of, but she had this dead, withered part that she had to drag around wherever she went. For a very long time, she kept hoping he would return and make her a whole person again.
Six years after her father’s disappearance, Kay learned from one of his former friends the nature of the “bad thing” he’d done. Sleeping with one of his patients didn’t seem to her like such an appalling thing, not compared to all the misery it had left in its wake. The former friend had given her the name of the patient: Molly Wilder. She visited the hospital where her father had worked and feigned a sudden illness in the patient records office. While the clerk went to fetch a nurse, Kay quickly checked through the files and found Molly Wilder’s address. She took a bus to her house and rang the doorbell, certain she’d find her father living there. A woman answered the door, and Kay asked for a glass of water. By the time she had reached the kitchen, she knew for certain her father wasn’t living there. When she admitted who she was, the woman – it had to be Molly Wilder – became highly distressed and told her to go away and leave her alone.
That had been the end of Kay’s investigations into her father’s whereabouts, although she never doubted that he was still alive somewhere and even occasionally thought she saw him – a blurry figure coming out of a pub as she cycled past in the rain, or disappearing into the shadows beneath a bridge. The place she most often saw him, or almost did, was here at the Hill Garden and Pergola. As she wandered the pillared walkway or lay down on the grass, she would sometimes glimpse his shadow next to her, or catch a whiff of a Camel cigarette. Whether he was there physically or not, she felt his presence in this little garden, and she always talked to him. Not actually talk, as she didn’t wish to be mistaken for a weirdo by the other people in the park. The talking was in her head, which was okay – her father could hear her perfectly well.
“And then there’s this other person, the one I want to be,” she told him now as they lay next to each other on the grass. “I call her Elaine. She’s not crushed up or tiny at all. She’s got this big, wild, free spirit. She wants to be an actor. Did I ever tell you I wanted to be an actor Dad? I don’t think I did. But I was always acting when I was young, wasn’t I? Always pretending to be someone else. If I’d said I wanted to be an actor, would you have supported me? I hope so. I can feel Elaine growing inside of me and getting bigger and stronger each day. Elaine is the person I should have been. She’s the person Barbara tried to crush and never quite could. But I’m worried she may have come too late. If I’m going to be Elaine, I’ll need to quit being a librarian and become an actor like right now. I’m already twenty-four. Most actors are well into their careers by now.
“So that’s where I am, Dad – stuck between my present and my future with no clue how to get from one to the other. Scared of giving up the security of the day job for a leap into the unknown, but knowing I’ll have to make that leap or die. Not actually die, but die inside, like you did after you got struck off.”
Kay thought about that for a moment, and an idea struck her. Maybe her father had an alter ego just like she did, and the day he disappeared was the day he slipped into that new identity. If so, it must have taken lots of planning. A new passport and bank account, a new location, probably abroad. That would have required money – something she didn’t have. Her mother had money, but she held onto it with an iron fist, only occasionally sending a little Kay’s way, to help her buy her camera for example, and then it always came with strings attached.
Kay had to face it. She was stuck. This wasn’t a fairy tale with happy endings guaranteed. She had no wealthy uncle (or any uncle at all, as far as she knew) that was going to die in the next six months and leave her his fortune. Her mother – and she could see Sondra shaking her head that Kay was even thinking about such a thing – was hale and hearty and could easily live another forty years. If Kay was going to become Elaine, she’d have to get off her gluteus maximus and make it happen.