‘I found a whole box of home movies like this up in the attic. Family Christmases at Seaglass, birthdays, summer holidays . . . I haven’t had time to watch them all yet, and thought it might be something nice for us to do together,’ says Nana. ‘The world we live in today is a little too careless with its memories. I hoped seeing ourselves as we were might remind us who we are.’
The wedding video doesn’t last any more than three or four minutes – I guess film was expensive in those days, and people had to be a bit more picky about which moments of their lives they wanted to remember. It ends with a shot of my parents on the church steps. I recognize Nana in the background, but none of the other smiling faces. The friends throwing confetti seem to have morphed into strangers too over the years, fading from their lives like their love. The screen stops on a freeze-frame of my parents smiling at each other over thirty years ago. I look at them now and wonder where the love went.
‘I’m going to go and unpack,’ Dad announces, standing up.
‘Where? There aren’t enough bedrooms,’ Nancy says, without looking at him.
‘I’ll sleep in the music room down here.’
‘Good.’
He leaves the lounge and none of us know what to say. My father has always held his feelings hostage. His inability – or unwillingness – to express himself seemed to make my mother voice her own feelings on any subject twice as loud and twice as often. It was as though Dad could only communicate through his music, which is why the soundtrack of our childhood was filled with endless angry and melancholy compositions being played on his piano.
‘You looked beautiful in the video, Nancy,’ says Trixie. Nobody would dare call my mother grandma. We weren’t even allowed to call her mum. Only Nancy. My niece meant it as a compliment, but the rest of us know my mother well enough to realize that the past tense will be taken as an insult.
‘I think I might get a little fresh air. Check on my garden,’ Nancy says.
None of us mention that it is technically Nana’s garden, or that the sky has already swallowed the last of the sun. It’s dark outside and has been for some time. But Nancy is like a black-and-white movie actress, making a dramatic exit from a scene she never wanted to star in as she leaves the room. The rest of us sit in an awkward silence we are well acquainted with for a little while longer. Rose looks the most uncomfortable. She can sense our parents are gearing up for a fight. She was old enough when they got divorced to remember how bad things can get between them. Pride rewrites the story of who left who in my parents’ heads, and blame is something they’ve always refused to share. It isn’t long before we all quietly retreat to our own corners of Seaglass. Not because the show is over, but because we fear it is about to begin, and maybe we all need to rehearse our lines.
I linger on the landing upstairs, peering out of the window that overlooks the back of the house, and the vast Atlantic Ocean. I see my mother walking between patches of moonlight and shadow. Nancy doesn’t have much of a garden in London, so she treats Nana’s as though it were her own. Her obsession with plants and flowers started when she was first living here at Seaglass, when she was pregnant with Rose. It was her choice to live with her new mother-in-law while Dad was away finishing his university degree. Nancy never talks about her own family. We knew she had one, but not much else about them. I’ve never met my grandparents on my mother’s side, none of us did; she wouldn’t even tell us their names. By all accounts, Nana was happy for my mother to stay here, but she was too busy creating children’s books to have time for company, or gardening, so that became Nancy’s hobby. Transforming the unloved land at the back of the house became a bit of an obsession over the years that followed. Sometimes I think it’s the garden she still comes to see, not Nana.
Dad gave Nancy a copy of The Observer’s Book of Wild Flowers when she was pregnant with Rose, and I suspect that might have inspired the names my mother gave us. It’s a tiny old green book which she still carries around wherever she goes, like a little Bible. We were never allowed to help Nancy when she disappeared outside for hours; the garden was her space. Rose said it was because our mother was secretly growing poisonous plants. Lily thought it might be because she was making marijuana. I always thought she just wanted to be left alone.
Nancy was very good at growing most things except for children. We never grew fast enough, or tall enough, or pretty enough in her opinion. So she planted seeds of fear as well as doubt all around this house and throughout our childhoods, little saplings rising up through the floorboards, creeping in through the cracks, to remind us what a disappointing crop we were.