Today's Reading
CHAPTER ONE
Hatherstall, West Riding of Yorkshire
November 1931
Josephine Baker had made him cry. Only, it wasn't really Josephine's fault. It was Stella who had made her father cry.
She had looked through the box of records and deliberately picked out a song that might lift the mood. As Josephine rhymed blue skies and bluebirds and the band played with brassy exuberance, Stella had found herself smiling. It brought back a memory of Paris, of dancing barefoot on a warm pavement, colliding with laughing strangers, and of the amusement in Michael's eyes. But when Stella turned away from the gramophone, she saw her father with his head in his hands.
'Daddy? What is it?'
She went to him and put her arms around him. Oh Lord, what had she done? This music made Stella think of stage lights in crowded cellar clubs and Rhum Saint-James cocktails in Montparnasse, but she was suddenly conscious of the minor key, and the lyrics were about being in love, weren't they? The song's sunny optimism now seemed garish and interminable as she felt her father's shoulders shake. It was too much, too soon, wasn't it? Should she be standing here, saying soothing words, or leaping to still the gramophone needle?
'I should stop it, shouldn't I?'
But then the trumpets had their last flare, the drummer hit his final beat, and the song was abruptly over. A door closed on Stella's memory of Paris, an over-bright light blinked out, and she felt both regret and relief at that. The record crackled as the turntable continued to rotate, a noise which seemed to emphasize the improbability of blue skies and underline the stillness of this room.
Stella squeezed her father's shoulder, walked to the gramophone and lifted the needle from the record. She looked out of the kitchen window at grey skies, at clouds heavy with rain slanting down on the horizon now (she imagined making the mark with a wet brush in watercolour), and the winter colours of the fields. She would paint this day in umber, sap green and Payne's grey. Hatherstall was blackthorn and hawthorn, bramble and bog-cotton, sooted brick and millstone grit. It was the Liberal Club and the Mechanics' Institute, chapel voices singing 'Jerusalem', and the wrong kind of brass bands. At this moment, Paris felt so distant that it might just have been an image projected onto a wall by a magic lantern.
When she turned back to him, her father had sat himself up and taken out his handkerchief. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'What a bloody fool. What must you think of me?'
Stella returned to her chair at his side. There were tears on his cheeks as his eyes met hers and she wanted to stretch her fingertips out and gently wipe them away. There were new lines and shadows on his face too, she saw now, as she looked at him closely.
'No, it's my fault. I should have thought. Was it that you remembered her playing that record?'
Her mother would often have her father carry the gramophone into the kitchen and she'd put on Al Bowlly or Paul Whiteman as she worked here at this table. She liked the big sound of the American bands and knew the lyrics to Cole Porter and Irving Berlin songs. Stella couldn't recall that she'd ever heard her mother playing Josephine Baker, but did that record have a particular significance for her father?
He seemed to be making an effort to compose himself now. She heard him take a deep breath. He straightened his knife and fork, reminding Stella that their dinner would probably be burning in the oven, but it didn't matter. She put a hand over his.
'It just reminded me of what she was like,' he said, looking down at the table. His fingers traced the grain of the wood and he shrugged his shoulders before he looked up. 'Of how we were, of how it used to be.'
Stella laced her fingers through her father's. She knew what he meant. They used to be a family who had music in the background, who practised their Charleston steps in the kitchen, checking their reflections in the window, and who laughed a lot. In her mother's day, this room had always been full of music and laughter. Now, in the spaces between their words, it was silent and the atmosphere was heavy with her mother's absence.
'I understand. I'm sorry,' Stella said.
Would they ever be a family who danced around the kitchen table again? At this moment, it seemed unlikely.
...
