On a cloudy day, you can see everything

I sat in the living room, in the chair I always sat in. My father did the same. His chair had an anti-macassar on the back of it, a footstool in front, and a table beside, toppling with papers and a pair of spectacles and a spectacle case. He was sitting in his chair, or, really, lying in it, with his right hand on his temple, and he was asleep.

My mother was in the kitchen, cleaning up after lunch. I couldn’t see her from where I sat, but I could hear cupboards closing and drawers being opened, the clink of cutlery, and swooshing of water in the sink.

I had a magazine in my hands, and was reading an article about a film star who had just had cosmetic surgery to her eyelids, and it had gone wrong, so that her eyes looked wide open, as if she had been shocked and couldn’t get over it. Her gaze was frozen.

My mother was very quiet in the kitchen, and I listened for any sounds. I kept my eyes on the pages, but I wasn’t reading any of the words anymore.

I heard what I thought was a sigh, then saw my mother’s apron in my peripheral vision. I looked up and saw her standing by my father’s chair, looking at him. She had a teatowel in her hand.

My father was still asleep in his chair. His head had fallen a little, but his hand was still on his temple, propping up his head. His hair had turned grey, what was left of it, and he combed it back over his head. Not across his skull, in that desperate way of some wispy-haired men, but just straight over the top towards the back, the way it grew when there was more of it.

He was still handsome, my father. My mother was pretty when she smiled, and kept her hair blonded and her lips red. But she still liked to wear crimplene and shapeless blouses and skirts. They did not flatter her. She used to be very thin when she was a young woman, with crystal clear skin and a sweet smile. Her clothes draped smartly from her shoulders. Her mother was the same, looking fabulous in the few sepia photos we still had of her. Head back, hat at a jaunty slant over her eyes, fox fur stole clasped around her shoulders, she knew she had good looks and smiled at the world.

My mother married my father just as the war started in 1939. I didn’t know what my father was like then. I did know he was in the air force, and he was darkly handsome, if somewhat inclined to put on weight. I remembered, when he was in his sixties, women commenting on his good looks, and my mother looking at them with a grim smile. Or a short laugh that died before it began.

I remembered my father throwing out an empty chocolate box, the one with the roses on it, and the red ribbon around the corner. My mother had kept that, and stored her buttons in it. It had been a gift from her mother. I had a memory of my father grabbing it from a plastic bag he was holding while at the local rubbish dump and throwing this box high into the air, so it would fall in amongst the pile of refuse that stretched out before us.

My mother watched him too. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. When he came back to the car, all the bags of rubbish gone, she said to him, Why did you throw that box away? My mother gave me that. Why did you throw it away? You didn’t ask me if you could.

He shrugged and said it was only a box, we didn’t have enough room to keep such things.

My mother turned her head away and looked out of the window, not speaking during the trip back to the caravan park.

As she got out of the car, she said to no one in particular, There’s nothing left, nothing at all. Then she slammed the door.

I tried not to remember these things most of the time, but memories came whether I wanted them to or not.

My mother stood there, next to my father in his chair, as he slumbered. She was wearing an apron, a frilly one she had made herself. She sewed most of her own clothes, and mine, and some of my father’s, before he took to making them himself. She didn’t cook much, if at all, because my father did that.

I wondered what meals would have been like if my mother had cooked instead. I wondered if it had always been this way, my father doing these things that men didn’t usually do, not then. Our meals tended to be bland, as my father’s stomach would rebel at the slightest provocation. Spices, garlic and onion were not on our menu. Meat consisted of tinned ham, chicken on Sundays with cold leftovers during the week, mince and lucheon meats in sandwiches. Vegetables came in a packet, frozen, from the supermarket. Mushrooms were a treat, and were fried in butter. I didn’t know peas came in a pod for a long time, and had not heard of such creatures as zucchinis or eggplants.

My mother stood by my father’s chair, a teatowel in her hand. I watched her. I still held the magazine with its salacious stories in my hands, but my eyes were on my mother. There was something going on in her face, but I didn’t know what it was. I could only see that she was about to say something important, something that had possibly been bothering her for some time. I waited.

My father didn’t wait, he was asleep. He seemed to sleep a lot then. But he went to bed very early, about half past eight or nine o’clock, and then would spend the night tossing and turning in his single bed, making it creak and groan like a ship. Maybe if he’d been on a boat he would have slept much better. He loved the sea and ships and sailing. It was the best time of his life when he had a boat and could go out in it. But that was a long time ago.

I watched my mother’s face. I tried to think what she was thinking. Her mouth was moving, but she was not saying anything. I wondered if she missed her family, her mother. I wondered if she wanted to be home, where she had been born. Where we lived was never home to her, and she said this often. Home was in England, in Gloucestershire. Home was the bluebells in the forest. Home was the daffodils. Home was the roses in her mother’s garden. Home was anywhere in that other country, and nowhere where we were.

I thought of this as I watched her. I wondered if my father missed these things, missed his boat, missed that other life he had, so long ago. He talked of them occasionally, but he didn’t say he missed them. The boat he had was not a dinghy to go out fishing in, but a large motorboat in which he used to cross the English Channel. He wrote stories about it, inventing dangerous situations for his heroes to negotiate and escape from, with raging seas and violent storms.

I was watching my mother and my father, my eyes switching from one to the other, when my mother raised her teatowel and began swiping my father’s head with it. She raised it once, twice, three times, and he woke up on the second swipe, suddenly, with a jolt.

What are you doing? What the hell are you doing? he said.

He scrambled a little, putting his feet on the carpet and his arms on the chair, as he swung around to face my mother.

She swiped him with the teatowel twice more before stopping, then stood with it and looked at him.

I was still in my chair, watching them, the magazine forgotten in my hands.

My mother straightened a little, put her head back, but she said nothing. My father had to swivel around in his chair and close one eye to focus on her shape, standing there, looking at him.

He said, again, What are you doing?

But his voice was quiet.