‘Hello, pipsqueak!’ he says. ‘Gosh, you’ve grown!’ It’s been a long time since he saw her. Or any of us.
‘Pipsqueak’ used to be my dad’s pet nickname for me when I was a little girl. My eldest sister Rose was his ‘clever girl’ and Lily was his ‘princess’。 It feels like I’ve been replaced somehow, as though he has transferred the affection he once felt for me to my niece, but I know it is ridiculous to be jealous of a child.
Dad can’t seem to look at his ex-wife, but I catch her staring at the expensive tie around his neck as if it were a noose she’d like to tighten. Things were amicable enough between them in the first few years after my parents’ divorce, but then something caused their remaining bond to break. They haven’t been in the same room together since Rose’s wedding, and even then, they sat at opposite ends of the table and didn’t speak. My mother used to button up her resentment, but it has grown over the years, and no matter how much she tries to hide it, a little is always left on show. Life has sharpened her tongue and she is no longer afraid to use it.
‘The prodigal father and son returns. You’re looking well, Frank. How thoughtful of you to drag yourself away from the orchestra for your mother’s birthday.’
And so it begins. We always lose when we try to play happy families.
I stare out at the causeway one last time before the sea swallows it up completely and we are cut off from the outside world. The cast of my family have all arrived, and once the tide is fully in, it will be eight hours until anyone will be able to leave.
Four
30 October 2004 – 6 p.m.
Nana gathers us all together in the lounge – despite various protests – and the large room suddenly feels rather small. Without another word, we resume the seats we sat in when I was a child. I guess knowing your place in your family is like some sort of muscle memory, and not something you forget. It’s so quiet now that I can hear the clocks ticking in the hallway. All eighty of them. And it already feels as though this is going to be a very long night.
‘I know you all want to get unpacked and freshen up, and we have so much catching up to do,’ Nana says with an ironic smile, ‘but I found some old home movies that I wanted to share with you this weekend. I thought this one might help break the ice. Or perhaps just melt it a little? Rose, will you pop this in the player? You know I’m allergic to technology.’
Rose takes a battered-looking VHS tape from Nana’s hands. I think the two women wink at each other, but maybe I imagined it. I can see that there is a whole row of old videos on the shelf behind them, which I’m quite certain I’ve never seen before. It used to be filled with books like all the other shelves in this room. Each of the VHS tapes has a white sticky label, and dates written in swirly handwriting: 1975 to 1988.
When the TV set – which I suspect might be older than me – comes to life, the whole room stares at my mother, because it’s her face on the screen and she’s wearing a wedding dress. The footage must be over thirty years old. The picture is a little grainy and there’s no sound, but she is breathtakingly beautiful. I watch, transfixed like the others, as a grandfather I never met walks her down a church aisle I’ve never seen, to stand side by side with my dad. He’s wearing a flared suit and has 1970s hair. He looks so young and happy. They both do.
‘This was originally filmed on my old Super 8,’ Dad says, with a smile that is so unfamiliar he looks like a different man. ‘I remember transferring it to VHS and thinking that would be the last advance in home entertainment. I suppose nothing lasts forever,’ he says, leaning forward in his chair, and sounding whimsical. He glances at my mother, but she is too busy staring at herself on the screen to notice.
My parents, Frank and Nancy, met at university. She was in her first year, he was in his last. Their friends nicknamed them ‘The Sinatras’， and like their famous counterparts, they were doomed almost from the start. Frank and Nancy were both in the amateur dramatics society. My father arranged the music, and my mother arranged the rest of their lives by getting pregnant when she was nineteen. You’d never know it, but Rose is in this home movie too, disguised as a tiny bump and hidden by a cleverly designed wedding dress. Nancy never graduated. They got married as soon as they found out she was pregnant – because apparently that’s what people did back then – and moved in with Nana here at Seaglass, until Dad had saved enough money for a place of their own. I think my parents thought they were happy for a while. She stole his joy and he stole her sorrow, and they balanced each other’s emotional books that way for years. London dragged them away from the sea, music dragged him away from her, and by the time I arrived on the scene, they were strangers who just happened to be married.