Nothing has changed in the years I have known this place. The whitewashed walls and wooden floors look just as they did when my sisters and I were children – a little worn out maybe by the left-over love and loss they have housed. As I breathe it all in, I can still picture us as the people we used to be, before life changed us into the people we are now, just like the sea effortlessly reshapes the sand. I can understand why Nana never wanted to live anywhere else. If this place were mine, I’d never leave it behind either.
I wonder again why she has really invited the whole family here for her birthday, when I know she doesn’t love or even like them all. Tying up loose ends perhaps? Sometimes love and hate get tangled, and there is no way to unpick the knot of feelings we feel. Asking questions of others often makes me ask questions of myself. If I had the chance to iron out the creases in my life before it ended, which ones would I choose to smooth over? Which points and pleats would I most want to unfold, so they could no longer dent the picture of the person I wished to be remembered as? Personally, I think that some wrinkles and stains on the fabric of our lives are there for a reason. A blank canvas might sound appealing, but it isn’t very interesting to look at.
I head up the creaky stairs, leaving the ticking clocks behind me. Each room I pass contains the ghosts of memories from all the days and weeks and years I have walked along this hallway. Voices from my past trespass in my present, whispering through the cracks in the windows and floorboards, disguised as the sound of the sea. I can picture us running through here as children, giddy on ocean air, playing, hiding, hurting one another. That’s what my sisters and I were best at. We learned young. Childhood is a race to find out who you really are, before you become the person you are going to be. Not everybody wins.
I step inside the bedroom that was always mine – the smallest in the house. It is still decorated the way it was when I was a girl, with white bedroom furniture – more shabby than chic – and old, peeling wallpaper, covered in a fading pattern of daisies. Nana is a woman who only says and does things once, and she never replaces something unless it is broken. She always used to put flowers in our bedrooms when we came to stay as children, but I notice that the vase in my room is empty. There is a silver dish filled with potpourri instead, a pretty mix of pine cones, dried petals and tiny seashells. I spot a copy of Daisy Darker’s Little Secret on the bookshelf. Seeing it reminds me of my own secret. The one I never wanted to share. I lock it away again for now, back inside the box in my head where I have been keeping it.
The ocean continues to serenade my unsettled thoughts, as though trying to silence them with the relentless shh of the sea. I find the sound soothing. I can hear the waves crashing on the rocks below, and my bedroom window is stained with the resulting spray, droplets running down the glass like tears, as if the house itself were crying. I peer out and the sea stares back: cold, infinite and unforgiving. Darker than before.
Part of me still worries that I was wrong to come, but it didn’t feel right to stay away.
The rest of my family will be here soon. I’ll be able to watch them walk across the sandy causeway one by one as they arrive. It’s been such a long time since we’ve all been together. I wonder whether all families have as many secrets as we do? When the tide comes in, we’ll be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours. When the tide goes back out, I doubt we’ll ever all be together again.
Three
30 October 2004 – 5 p.m.
My father is the first to arrive.
Being punctual is his only way of saying, I love you. For as long as I can remember he has expressed emotions through timekeeping, unable to demonstrate affection in the ways most other fathers do. But when I think about him growing up here as an only child, in a house full of clocks, on a tiny tidal island, I suppose time was always going to be on his mind. As a boy, I suspect he was often counting down the minutes until he could leave. I watch him from my bedroom window as he trudges across the damp sand. The sun is still setting, melting the sky into a palette of pinks and purples that do not look real. Dad glances up in my direction, but if he sees me, he doesn’t smile or wave.
Frank Darker is a frustrated composer who mostly conducts. He still travels the world with his orchestra, but while that might sound glamorous, it isn’t. He works harder than anyone I know, but doesn’t earn as much as you might think. Once he has paid the salaries, hotel bills and expenses of an entire ensemble, he doesn’t have a lot of spare change. But he loves his job and the people he works with. Perhaps a little too much: his orchestra is more like family to him than we ever were.