Losing My Identity Page 8

  ‘I want to take up this job.’

  ‘I don’t see why that’s so important to you. More important than me.’

  He wanted a Ruth and Naomi set-up then. Where you go, I will go, etcetera etcetera ad infinitum.

  ‘I don’t see why your job is more important than mine. I’m sure you could get a lecturing job here.’

  And off he went. He didn’t say goodbye, merely left her a note. If you truly loved me, you’d follow me to a desert. As it is, you refuse to come with me to the most civilised city in the world. So it’s clear you never loved me enough.’ He didn’t return to attend Leila’s graduation, and by then she didn’t expect to see him again.

  By the time she was in that first job, and dealing with the inevitable rebound love affair, she hardly thought about Sam at all. Not more than a few times a day at any rate. But she knew the women of her family had never been strong on commitment to men. She guessed his was the same, since his parents had split up; dysfunctional families both.

  She forced herself to remember that when he’d buggered off and left her, the college authorities had accused her of lying about being engaged. She remembered also that when the food they’d prepared together was unequal in portion size or quality, or one item had got a little burnt, Sam would absent-mindedly take the best, without seeming to notice he did it…

  In any case, by the following year, civil war had broken out in Lebanon. The word ‘Beirut’ had become shorthand for a shattered, bombed-out wilderness. At first, Leila watched TV newsreels about the war with a horrified fascination. She knew very well that, although he had relatives on the safer, Eastern side of the Green Line, Sam would always have wanted to live on the West side. As the war intensified, and she heard nothing further from him, and all her letters went unanswered, Leila resigned herself to the idea that he was dead.

  She still read every newspaper report, and several paperback books, about the war. She often wondered what her life would have been like had she gone with him. Could she have persuaded him to leave, or would she have ended up as one of the women living alone there who, by the time of the Israeli siege in 1982, slept with an AK47 beside them in the bed instead of a man?

  Leila was unconscionably nervous about having Hari Gill as a guest for the first time; though she had no qualms about the standard of her cooking, she spent long hours that week trying to see the flat through a stranger’s eyes.

  At least Roseisle Drive was purely residential, unlike its parallel neighbour closer to Duke Street; that was marred by the presence of an ugly little flat-roofed building that had been run as a dairy when Leila was young. And Roseisle had a smart main door flat like hers at each corner, instead of the solid wall of tenements in most of the other Drives.

  Having seen Hari’s flat had given her some ideas, all the same. Getting the floors sanded and varnished, and buying some rugs, would make the place look so much more modern. Maybe she needed to bite the bullet and have that done…

  It had been ‘home’ all her life. Even when she worked away, from the 1970s until five years before, she had never thought of buying a house of her own.

  Her second New Year’s resolution that year had been to get the whole place ship-shape: replace the carpet in the spare bedroom, unpack the boxes of her mother’s clobber (and probably Flora’s too) that were still stuffed in the hall cupboard. Make sure that the place was in a fit state to sell quickly if anything happened to her (because, as Sam’s fate had demonstrated, ‘you never know the minute nor the hour’), so that the SSPCA – her sole legatees – could get a good price.

  She wanted no skeletons left in any cupboards. She was by nature a tidy person. It went with being a scientist.

  The contrast with Dowanhill troubled her most. Dennistoun had always been a touch bohemian, and the Drives particularly so. Nowadays, Roseisle Drive had a fair complement of actors. Even an opera singer, in the top flat of the close beside Leila’s flat.

  When Grannie and her mother first moved into the flat, the Drives were a smart address. The houses all had a row of bells in the kitchens, to show the maid what room she was wanted in. The kitchen had a bed recess for said maid to sleep in. The flats were built – even the smaller ones entered from a close – with tiny separate sculleries, and their own bathrooms. Tenements, but not ‘tenement living’. By the time Leila was at school, the whole area had gone downhill, to the extent that she was ashamed to let anyone know where she lived. She never had friends home to play. The handful of times she had a proper birthday party, she nagged Greer until she hired a function room in town. Someplace like the CaD’Oro. She seemed blithely unaware that Leila was the only girl at Hazelbank who lived in Dennistoun. It had been all right when she went there in the ’20s.

  Although the area caused Leila a few qualms, her flat didn’t. It was spacious, as these traditional Glasgow flats tended to be, with high ceilings and plenty of storage. They didn’t expect people to throw away much, in 1907. Since hers was a main door flat, it had more rooms than any of the ones entered from a close, because it spread across what would be the floor area of two of them, being on a corner.

  Her collection of Iittala glass birds lived in the sitting room. Leila had had two glass-fronted cabinets specially made to display them. Catherine, the bitch, observed that it made the place look like the Fitzwilliam Museum. The nerve! She’d designed the cabinets herself, and they were tasteful.

  She’d kept around a dozen of her mother’s paintings; she supposed she might sell them eventually, since there was no one to pass them on to. Three of her favourites were hung in the hallway. Another was in her bedroom, two more in the sitting room, and the rest were stored, carefully packaged, in the deep hall cupboard. She kept meaning to get round to rotating them, the way they did in art galleries.

  My mother, Greer Gibson, the artist. Most of the primary schools in England as well as Scotland still boasted framed copies of the prints of her best-known early paintings; she had made and distributed those at her own expense in 1975.

  She was called Greer long before Greer Garson, the film star (born five years earlier, in 1904), made the name popular. She always claimed it was a ‘traditional family name’. But Leila had never heard talk of any ancestor called Greer, either as a given name or surname. Greer had not taken her Egyptian husband’s surname, though she lumbered her daughter with it, as well as the exotic first name that got her teased at school (they called her Lilo; it was too early to glean any benefit from the Eric Clapton number – though that had provided ammunition for the more idiotic types at university…).

  Greer had married Youssri El-Ghazali in 1949; Leila could only imagine the raised eyebrows that caused in Dennistoun. She was certain they were married, because she had the marriage certificate. Kensington Register Office, September 9th, 1949.

  Presumably her parents had split soon afterwards. Leila was born in Glasgow in June 1950, and to the best of her knowledge, Greer had never set eyes on her husband since shortly after the conception. She divorced him (grounds: desertion) in 1956. Leila was told nothing about him. From what she had found out subsequently, he was – at one time – wealthy. His family was connected in some way to King Farouk.

  She had never visited Egypt. Going as a tourist had never appealed. Not on her own at any rate.

  ‘The last of the Glasgow Girls,’ the papers labelled Greer; they’d cottoned to the fact that Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh had attended her christening. Greer herself hated the term. She saw herself as part of the Modern Movement. The auction rooms and gallerists didn’t care; they were happy to cash in on the ‘Glasgow girl’ soubriquet, and the prices that went with it.

  But it was her grannie whose hand Leila had clutched on her first day at Hazelbank school’s kindergarten, and who nursed her through the usual collection of childhood illnesses.

  She had found nothing strange in the fact that there was never any mention of a grandfather. Men had been singularly redundant in her childhood world.

  Her
school mates pitied her. One-parent families weren’t nearly so common in the ’50s. Not among Hazelbank’s clientele anyway, progressive though it was. In fact, because of that progressiveness, most of her classmates came from homes where sex was discussed openly if not pruriently. So even at ten, Leila knew there was no such thing as parthenogenesis. (She hadn’t yet learned about hermaphrodite critters such as worms.) Grannie must have had a husband, in order to produce Greer. She herself must have had a daddy. But when she asked Greer if he was dead, she’d merely shrug and say, ‘Not to the best of my knowledge.’ She recalled asking Grannie one time where her husband was. ‘He died, years and years ago.’ ‘When Greer was a wee girl like me?’ (She wasn’t allowed to call Greer ‘Mummy’. ‘So ageing!’) ‘Much younger than you, pet. I don’t think she remembers him at all. What’s wrong, my kitten? Do the other girls at school tease you?’

  ‘They say they’re sorry for me because I don’t have a daddy.’

  ‘It’s a wise child that knows its father,’ Grannie had muttered. ‘We’re fine as we are, pet. Aren’t we? Just three women together. Three, strong, independent women. Three generations of one family.’

  Although it didn’t appear so to Leila at the time, Greer must have been moderately successful in financial terms (though it was only since her death that her work had become seriously valuable). She bought the Roseisle flat as soon as the owner started selling them off – she was the first person in the Drive to buy – and she spent a lot on modernising it. She paid Leila’s Hazelbank fees all these years – and although she’d won a scholarship to Cambridge, there were still expenses to cover. Greer had never left her short of money. She was certain that none of that had emanated from Youssri El-Ghazali.

  ‘She’s such a character, your mother,’ journalists would say to Leila, envy in their voices. Indeed she was. In a film she’d written the script for herself.

  She went on painting until the end – though as she passed her ninetieth year, the brush strokes wavered a little, and she produced nothing further that was saleable. But it seemed to keep her happy, and as far as Leila knew, she had no acute health concerns. That’s why she didn’t take it too seriously when Greer begged her to come home. She was almost one hundred, but she was still the same Greer Gibson. ‘Larger than life’, people would say. Until suddenly, she wasn’t.

  Leila had kept two canvases from that era; both still lifes, quite unlike her mother’s earlier output. Dozens more of the late paintings she had carried down to the cottage she owned in Argyll, and incinerated in the garden; she simply had no place to store them, and none was finished.

  Greer was like a flame in a sealed room; she sucked out all the oxygen. Leila had always known she’d been a disappointment to her mother. She wasn’t glamorous, or bohemian. She was a scientist, not an artist. If I’m truthful, I was relieved that she died before I was trapped at home looking after her. There. It’s said. After all, she’d never looked after me terribly well. I was glad to be free – completely free – at last from the curt voice asking me if I’d put on weight, or if I was going out with my hair like that. These questions – which weren’t really questions, of course – didn’t stop when I became an adult. They never would have stopped.

  Seven

  Hari announced that he thought Leila’s flat was better than his in several ways. He preferred the size of her kitchen, with its enormous pine table and dual aspect windows. He loved the fact that the flat had its own front door and front garden.

  He immediately homed in on the small watercolour hung in the hallway, beside the coat-stand.

  ‘Did you paint that?’

  ‘I can’t draw to save my life.’

  ‘It has a lot of pink in it. You said that’s your favourite colour. Your mother’s work then?’

  ‘I think it must have been done by a friend of my grandmother’s. It’s by someone called Eva Connor.’

  He prowled round the other rooms. ‘So many paintings!’

  ‘I am an artist’s daughter, after all.’

  ‘This is your mother’s work?’

  ‘Mostly. Apart from the portrait in the sitting room. The one that has a face with features. That’s my grandmother.’

  He immediately padded off to see the portrait. He studied it, head on one side, taking in the black, curly hair, the pert little retroussé nose, the heavy but shapely dark brows.

  ‘She was very attractive. That’s clearly where you get your looks from – the nose is quite different though. I guess your own very elegant nose is from your Arab ancestry, Leila? I see she was a tea-drinker.’

  In the portrait – a large work in oils – Flora, her face half in shadow, half illuminated by a single oil lamp, was raising a dainty cup to her lips.

  ‘Might have been coffee.’

  ‘In a beautiful cup like that? No chance. I like the way she’s not looking straight out at you. These portraits where the eyes follow you round give me the creeps. She looks beautifully calm and contemplative, gazing into the cup like that.’ He peered closely at the corners of the canvas. ‘I can’t see a signature – who is this by?’

  ‘I have no idea. One of her old art school cronies, I always assumed. She and my mother were both graduates of Glasgow School of Art – the Mack. Grannie was tremendously proud of that. The portrait’s very proficient, although it’s not signed.’

  On the mantelpiece, there was a photo of Greer, probably aged around forty, in her glamorous heyday. Harry picked it up, to study it better under the light. ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Indeed.’ Before she had me.

  ‘She’s very striking. But not beautiful like you.’

  Leila blushed to the roots of her hair. She fully expected him to be struck down by a thunderbolt at the suggestion that she was better-looking than Greer had been… And she could almost love him for that alone.

  ‘Hmmmm,’ he continued, ‘you know, I see a much stronger likeness to the woman in that wee watercolour in your hall. You say that wasn’t a relative?’

  Leila wavered.

  ‘Well – my grannie was called Flora, and that’s apparently a painting of someone called Flora, but it’s definitely not her. It was quite a common name early last century. You can see – the woman in the watercolour’s completely different from the one in Grannie’s portrait.’

  ‘I agree. I’m pretty good at spotting family resemblances. I’d swear those two women are not related. And you don’t look like either – though now I think about it, I think you do have your mother’s nose. But so does the woman in the watercolour. You’re sure the large portrait is your grandmother?’

  ‘Certain – she looked much the same even when she was old. I remember her quite well – I was ten when she died.’

  ‘Who was this Eva Connor then?’

  Leila shrugged. ‘Another of the arty Glasgow set, I suppose.’

  ‘Wow! You have a piano. Do you play much?’

  ‘Not for years. I don’t know why I kept it.’ Why indeed. It had been Sam’s…

  Hari spent a long time studying her favourite among Greer’s canvases: an almost abstract sunset over a seascape. It was one her mother had painted at their cottage on the shore of Loch Fyne.

  ‘You like that?’

  ‘I do. I don’t know much about art, but I like it very much.’

  ‘It’s my favourite too. She painted it at Ardvreckie, a cottage we owned in Argyll. I still own it, in fact. It’s a peaceful spot – the perfect antidote to Glasgow.’

  He moved on to what was probably the most valuable example of her mother’s work she owned. It was predominantly a landscape composition, a dense woodland, with two women sitting on the grass at the wood’s edge. One was black-haired, and wearing an emerald green dress. The other was a redhead, dressed in russet. The redhead had a hint of features. The face of the girl in green was a blank, perfect, olive-skinned oval.

  Hari studied it for a long time, a finger to his lips. ‘Is that you and your mother?’

  ‘I’v
e always assumed so. I hate it.’

  ‘Why? It’s absolutely stunning.’

  ‘I keep meaning to sell it. It’s worth a stack of money.’

  ‘Why on earth would you want to sell it – is it expensive to insure?’

  She shrugged. ‘No idea. It isn’t insured specifically.’

  He gave her a startled sideways look. ‘Why do you not like it?’

  ‘Because the black-haired girl has no face. My mother obviously found me so boring, such a disappointment, that she couldn’t be bothered giving me a face.’

  ‘You would have been what age when she painted it?’

  ‘Around nineteen, I suppose.’

  ‘Then that’s it – the features aren’t painted in because she knew you could be anything at all you wanted to make of yourself.’

  And there she was, living in the same house she’d always lived in, with a boring job, on her own most of the time. Anything at all!

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. He tipped her chin up to look into her eyes. ‘Tears? Leila, I didn’t mean to upset you. I know what it means to have lost a mother. I’m being insensitive. Here.’ He handed her a dazzlingly white hankie. Jesus, he must have a stack of these, for the use of blubbering women.

  He began admiring the glass bird collection. ‘I have one of these, somewhere,’ he said. ‘The stuff I collect is a bit of a mixture. When I have to travel for court business, I while away any spare time popping into antique shops.’

  ‘Which bird is it? I don’t remember seeing one?’ Usually her eye was drawn to Oiva Toikka’s birds like iron filings to a magnet.

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s not with the rest of my things, because it doesn’t match.’

  Leila glared accusingly.

  ‘I like glass,’ he added. ‘I’m not very knowledgeable about it. You obviously collect in a very organised way.’