Goodbye Again Read Free Page A

remarked, quieter now, ‘which is why my father wanted to live here. I’ve not seen the bay of Naples, but I bet the light would be quite different, and the colours. You’d get that whitish Mediterranean blue inshore, off the shallow rocks. Ultramarine, then deep Prussian-blue farther out. The headland over there – that’d be washed umber, a touch of bright ochre.’
    ‘You’re obviously a painter,’ she said abruptly.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What sort?’
    ‘Just paintings.’ I continued to study the view. ‘It’s funny – your father and mine, if they were old friends – they might have stood here, right at this window, years ago, looking at exactly the same view. I wonder what they were talking about?’ I turned and looked at her, blinking after the glare of sunlight coming off the water. ‘Strange to think of one’s parents, all the vast amount of things we don’t know about them. What they did before we were born, and afterwards, when we weren’t with them? It’s the supreme egoism of children, isn’t it, to think their parents only had a life when they were physically with them, playing or reading to them or whatever, when of course that was only the tip of the iceberg of their lives.’
    ‘I suppose so.’
    We looked out to sea, yachts and dinghies sailing over the choppy water, whitecaps riding further out in the bay. I turned to her again. ‘So maybe there’s no simple answer about why your father told you to come to the funeral, what it was that I was to “explain” to you. But we could work on it.’
    ‘Yes, perhaps. We’ll see.’ She stalled. It was clear she didn’t want to work on it, wanted to cut her losses and get away from me.
    A big man, a building contractor, a client of my father, interrupted us then. ‘Your dear good mother, Benjamin …’ He grasped my hand for several minutes, maudlin, full of phoney commiseration and bonhomie.
    After I’d done with him I looked round for Elsa. She’d gone. Just upped and left. We hadn’t said goodbye, and there was still the mystery of our family connection to resolve. The way she resembled Katie – what did this mean? Was fate giving me a second chance? Did I want this? Katie had behaved appallingly and I surely didn’t want a repetition of that.
    I suddenly wanted this new woman Elsa – this Jekyll to Katie’s Hyde. I’d contact her later – if I felt like it. Bloody rude of her, disappearing like that without a word. Just like Katie, I thought, so often vanishing in the middle of a meal or during an interval at the theatre. Contrary. I went back to the big table, refilled my glass, and set about provoking the other guests.

TWO
    Later, with all the convivial mourners gone, I stumbled around, alone in the drawing room, a little drunk.
    Taking an opened bottle of the white Châteauneuf I moved about the house, from one overstuffed room to another. Mostly heavy Victorian furniture, but some fine Gothic revival pieces as well. My father had liked the style and collected it from various antique dealers. There were several original William Morris pieces: a dining table and chairs, an oak cupboard in the hall, a chest of drawers, cabinets and other pieces upstairs.
    I swayed up the wide polished oak staircase to the bedrooms on the first floor and looked into the rooms – the guest rooms, my father’s bedroom (in my memory my parents had always slept apart) where there was an extraordinary piece of furniture, a dressing-room toilet cabinet designed by William Burges, a splendidly quirky Victorian architect and furniture maker. The cabinet was delicately made, beautiful – largely done in pine, painted in red, yellow and black washes, with intricately worked brass fittings, cornerings and handles.
    I opened it, displaying the rows of little drawers inside, pigeonholes , a mirror, various clever places for toilet knick-knacks, a cupboard below containing a chamber-pot, washbowl and jug, all painted with garlands of bluebells and