When my father finally came home, he spent a long time upstairs in bed and there was a differently strange smell in the bedroom. His left leg was marked with two shiny ovals, bigger than my mother’s hand. It looked as if someone had drawn on him with a stencil and then polished his skin like an albino dining table. First the oval was surrounded by ugly black threads with little knots on them. Then these disappeared, leaving a border of pale mauve marks and ridges.
He spent the weekends avoiding the inside of the house. Leaning on the hall windowsill, I could see his corduroy trousers sticking out from under the car, against a background of various greens – the sickly privet and spotted laurel over the road, the bitter green box hedge next door, and the grey-green lamp post rising behind him. The scene, as I looked out, was contained by the neat grid of lead, like a picture in a maths symmetry book. Our garden was filled with his temporary structures. A broken caravan. A homemade treehouse. A lean-to for the mower. Half a green Renault sat on the drive, plundered for parts. I keep this world in the few photographs I have, a dozen round-cornered prints of birthday teas and Christmas trees. I remember it too, in reverse, in the memory of negatives I used to find in boxes. I loved pulling them out of their little pockets in strips, wondering at the inverted world they gave me. The childhood face of my past is pale umber, my pupils translucent, my hair almost black. It is in this looking-glass memory that I get closer to the moment of the taking.
At teatime he came in, washing his hands with green Swarfega, before watching the wrestling and the Grand Prix. One of the wrestlers was called Big Daddy, which made me think he might be something to do with God and forgiving our trespasses as we forgive those, but my father told me that his real name was Shirley. Shirley wore an enormous pair of blue and white striped stretch dungarees. He bounced off the ropes and straight into Giant Haystacks. At some point Haystacks bounced up and down on Shirley’s stomach and the bell rang. Someone quietly turned the thermostat up.
All houses have their own climate, their own smell, their own temperature and particular ecosystem of air currents and creaks. They all have that specific combination of humid or fetid, of warm or cold that depends on the kind of central heating system you have or do not have, or whether or not the window in the bathroom is open. Smells and sounds can be put into words. Ours had a scent of McVitie’s digestive biscuits and furniture polish about it, with a sad hint of hamster in the back living room. A ticking sound as the central heating system turned on and clanged through the pipework. But atmospheres are speechless. When we say that a house has ‘an atmosphere’ it is as if the sentence has given up hope of explaining itself. Atmospheres exist somewhere between sound and silence, and in the pitch and cadences of voices. In a house with an atmosphere, it is as if someone has imperceptibly turned the volume down, and flattened every voice. When there is an atmosphere in a house, a question is answered with silence, or in the way a head is moved just an inch away from centre when someone speaks, so that there’s space for a roll of the eyes. The television, of course, is the friend of the atmosphere. In periods where the difficulties of shared space and time have felt too much, the television, eternullity in a box, gives the bodies within the family permission to stare forwards, like communicants at an altar.
My brother once told me that the Germans have a word for that feeling you get on a Sunday afternoon – they call it Sonntagangst. I thought he was joking, but held on to the joke nonetheless, as a good way of catching the mood of those suburban weekends. We were stuck in, or under, the grip of it – and I could feel that bored sadness drifting around the room, so strongly I felt that I could almost hold it. Monday sat on the front steps waiting for us, and we thought about its world of beginnings – polishing shoes and washing in the avocado green plastic bath, with its crack along the front panel. But Sunday afternoons seemed soaked in desolation, as limp as the toast and honey on the blanket-box coffee table. Alain Prost drove his nose around Brands Hatch again and again, the dust flying off the curves of the track, with a sound like someone screaming through the air.
Perhaps the most frightening thing about an atmosphere is that it’s contagious. It gets everywhere, like glitter. The atmosphere begins when two people refuse to understand each other. She, let us say, wishes to eat a bowl of cornflakes and do some work. He, perhaps, wants to hang out some laundry. She perceives his laundry hanging out to be a tacit criticism of her choice to work. He wonders why she needs four cups to be on the table simultaneously, rather than using the same one each time she makes a cup of tea. Everything about his actions of laundry-collection are perceived by her to be a kind of aural reproach. The way he is sighing quietly as he untangles a leg of her wet tights that is knotted, lumpily, around the leg of his wet jeans, and the way he hefts the lump of laundry into the basket – both are obviously directed towards her. He sees her gaze into the middle distance, not visibly working, as a sign that she has disconnected, too easily, from the family unit. He walks out of the room carrying the basket. A sock falls out of the silver drum, onto the floor, and she follows him, then feels obliged to join in. They put the smallest wet clothes on children’s hangers. He silently corrects the way she carelessly places the socks on the stand, smoothing out the creases that will delay drying time or cause mildew by doubling or tripling the damp factor. Both know they are right. The atmosphere settles in, like mist on an autumn evening. The terrifying thing about it is that atmospheres, like mist, get everywhere. There is no escape. So the two people who are trying to retain autonomy find themselves floating in the same emotional soup. They have seeped into each other. They are both pissed off. Somebody suggests a walk.
I am not a natural walker. I am not a nature person. When people tell me I’m missing out, I know they’re probably right and my mind stamps a petulant and defensive foot. My sympathies lie with another nature unlover. I don’t like mountains, W. H. Auden’s boyfriend told him, when offered a romantic minibreak in the Alps. I only like towns where there are shops. Poor Wystan. Poor Gerhart. Sometimes I meanly imagine that everybody else’s families dislike the whole walking thing as much as I do. That they’re just being dutiful. We should get some air, they say to each other. We ought to stretch our legs. It would be good to get out. I imagine that underneath it all is an unacknowledged desire to escape, if not from each other, then into a kind of fantasy involving wellington boots, Poohsticks and a sudden, uncharacteristic interest in wildlife.
Even now, I struggle with the first steps. Standing in the narrow hallway, desperately trying to find coats, hats, missing gloves. Someone complains that their wellingtons chafe around the lower calf. Someone else cannot do up their zip. Someone scratches their head, and you wonder if they might have nits again. Everybody is finally dressed. Then someone wants a snack, and someone else needs a glass of water. We stand on the flagstones, staring up at the light and the drizzle, and then we all set off.
The scenery is different, but the atmosphere persists. Nobody can go too far ahead. You can’t dive into a local pub and give up. To walk back home would be to cause a scene. Headphones are generally frowned upon, but you can possibly get away with earmuffs. In some senses, the walk offers family members a good deal less freedom. There is no shed to hide in. There are no curtains. You cannot claim exhaustion and take a nap. Everyone must exist in roughly the same geographical arena. Everyone must appear to enjoy the walk (at least moderately). There’s a reason one of the greatest novels in English begins with its heroine’s delight that there was no possibility of taking a walk that day. There’s a reason Jane Eyre appeals to teenagers. There are no window seats on family walks. And you can’t read a book while walking with your family.
Our regular weekend walk in West Finchley was always the same. Out of the front door to the road end where my brother rode his Chopper, and left through the mesh of gates with the notice that read NO HORSE RIDING. Then the muddy path with the tennis courts on our right, the wooden bridge beside the drainage pipe, turning right along the path of the river, and around the corner where the trees thinned out, leaning over the water, the smell of wild garlic overpowering. Then through the winners of the best-kept small allotment in Barnet, on the path lined with cow parsley behind netball wire. Sometimes we went across Fursby Avenue to the park with the big swings and the proper silver slide. But that park was far enough away that it never seemed to quite belong to us. Usually we turned around at the final gate and walked back down the river bend, kicking our way