I knew my brother Stanley only as an oil painting and some photographs. He hung on the wall of the living room, above the sideboard. I thought of it as Stanley’s wall. I can’t remember if the other walls had anything hanging on them or not. Oh—that’s not true; it’s much harder to cheat memory than some would have us think. There was, opposite Stanley, a framed print of that greenish oriental lady in a cheongsam, looking cheap and inviting: the one that hung in many an otherwise art-free home in the fifties. These days, I keep my walls white and blank. Nothing hangs on them, perhaps as an anti-mnemonic of the walls of my childhood.
On the gloomy mahogany sideboard which squatted massively beneath Stanley’s portrait was a cut-glass bowl which sometimes had fruit in it. It was the sort of thing people were given as a wedding present, but I thought of it as Stanley’s bowl. It had an air of importance and fruit—spotted bananas, pallid apples, we were not big on fruit in my family—never looked quite right in that bowl. It seemed to me more like a trophy, or a memorial object, only masquerading as a useful container.
The oil painting was just a head-and-shoulders portrait of my brother Stanley, his shoulders fading into a neutral greenish background. Stanley looked down from his wall, disembodied. Somehow, I felt the cut-glass fruit bowl was there to make up for the absent rest of him. I don’t suppose it was a good painting; in fact, I’m sure it wasn’t: there was too great a striving for documentary realism in it, I think, though I’m not much more of an art critic now than I was then. But that was the point, the realism, that was why it was painted; and, in any case, how could it have been other than dutifully realistic when the painter lacked a sitter, who might fidget and chatter his personality into the picture? No, like the bowl, the painting was an icon, and I suppose it was intended to be. Stanley looked down on us, from his ornate gilt frame, present and absent, and the look in his eyes never changed.
I had a way of looking at the painting in private. By manoeuvring two armchairs in a particular relation to each other across a corner facing Stanley’s wall, I created a dark triangular cave to huddle in. The arms of the chairs could be raised and lowered, and if I raised both arms I had complete seclusion, except for a carefully arranged crack between them. I spent hours staring at Stanley from my hideaway. Sometimes I just looked at him, but at other times allowed us to look at each other, imagining we each had an eye to either end of the same telescope. His was the end that made things seem more distant than they were, though sometimes, if I gazed long and hard enough, the perspective changed, and I found myself looking at my brother Stanley from an immense distance, a greater distance than any I had ever seen in any other circumstances. That was how I knew how I looked to him, since he had no choice but to stare long and hard and forever.
It was the look in my brother Stanley’s eyes that I remember best, though I searched the rest of his features thoroughly to find angles and aspects that reminded me of me. We were, after all, closely related; his father was my father.
The thing about Stanley’s eyes was that they seemed to know what was going to happen to him, and that he would be looking out on a future from which he would be absent. The eyes knew that. They were almond-shaped, just like mine—that much we had in common—but mine were very dark, almost black, so that people often said I seemed to have no pupils, or nothing but pupils, depending on how you looked at it. Stanley’s eyes were an astonishing cerulean blue, which must have belonged to his mother, or someone long gone in my father’s family, because our father’s were like mine—black.
Stanley’s eyes may have been a vivid blue, but they were not clear—they seemed misted with foreknowledge, occluded with sadness that was matched by two lines on either side of his young, full lips (again, like mine) which seemed to turn the corners of his mouth down slightly. It might have been that Stanley’s grave look was what we had in common, some gene that made us seem, in repose, unhappy. People have always told me to cheer up, even when I feel perfectly fine. There’s something about my features. “Do you have to look so miserable?” my mother would say when I sat lost and quite contented in a daydream. Or, “Cheer up, love, it may never happen,” was the version out in the streets from builders or bus conductors. So I could simply have taken Stanley’s gravity for proof of our relationship along with his almond-shaped eyes.
But knowing what I knew of how Stanley’s life was to be, it was impossible not to read loss into his eyes. Even so, I could have concluded that Stanley’s expression was the result of the knowledge the portraitist had of his subject. Such a look might have been imposed on those young, blue eyes by an adult’s hindsight. But I knew better, because in the right-hand cupboard of the looming sideboard was the very photograph the painter had used as his model. And however limited his artistic talents, the portrait painter knew how to make a good likeness.
In the left-hand cupboard of the sideboard were glasses, bottles of sherry and advocaat which only came out at Christmas. In the middle were cutlery and napkin drawers—all the clutter of respectable dining—waiting (still waiting in my unsociable family) for their time to come. In the right-hand cupboard were two—to me—gigantic books. I have one of them still.
Now, I realise, they were not gigantic, just the size of photograph albums. Each book was covered in grainy Moroccan leather and came from Aspreys, which, as my father told me, meant they were very expensive and very special. I knew how special they were just from the smell and the weight of them. I couldn’t carry both at the same time to my hideaway (equipped with a torch) but had to make two trips. They were identical except for their colour. One book was a strong air-force blue, the other a rich maroon, with matching stitching. The edges of the pages were gilded a dark gold, like the frame around Stanley’s portrait. The blue album was Stanley’s, the maroon mine; one for each of us.
Only twenty-four of the thirty-nine pages (not counting the marbled first and last page) in Stanley’s book had been used. The photograph that the painting was based on was alone on the twenty-third page. On the twenty-fourth page there were no photos, but there was a daffodil, flattened and dried, like tissue paper that had had its colour bleached by the sun—pale golden-yellow flower, straw stem and dull, dark green leaf—fearfully delicate. After that, the pages were blank.
It was a studio photograph, posed and with a mottled white backdrop, taken in the early 1940s. The painting was an exact replica, except that the photo showed Stanley to the waist, and the painting, as I said, stopped at his shoulders. He was sitting on a stool, probably, as he is rather hunched and round-shouldered the way that children naturally sit when there is no supporting back to their chair. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt with a striped tie knotted a little askew at the collar, and over it, a sleeveless ribbed woollen jumper, wrinkled around the waist because of his posture. He hadn’t been specially tidied up for the picture, though his side-parted, thick, light brown or dark blond hair looks as if it might have had a comb run hastily through it.
But it was the face that engaged my interest, and particularly the quality of his gaze towards the lens. The painter captured it exactly, but the photograph proved, as I checked from one to the other, that Stanley’s look was not a piece of retrospective sentimentality on the part of the artist. It was there in the living, breathing ten-year-old boy on the day he went to the photographer’s studio. Stanley’s stare is direct and unsmiling.
We never knew each other. Stanley was killed two years before I was born. He wasn’t even really my brother, but only my half-brother from our father’s previous marriage to a woman whose name I never knew. In the album there are some pictures of her with Stanley. She is elegant and beautiful in that way which women aren’t any more, broadfaced, the bone structure not angular, but softly rounded, and she wears delightfully frivolous hats over complex hairdos. She’s smiling in all the pictures, gently, lovingly, but it’s hard to tell if that was her nature or simply an expression for the camera. There is one photo of her and my brother which is signed, but it’s no help so far as her name goes. It says: To Darling Daddy from Mummy and Stanley, Sept. 9th, 1940. Of course, there are photos of Stanley and our father. On the beach, walking together along a promenade, in a suburban garden I’ve never seen, having tea with some old people who must be my paternal grandparents. In these photos also my father is smiling. But again, that’s what people do when a camera is pointed at them, and though I do remember his smile, I also remember when he was not smiling.
I was an only child and Stanley was my ghost brother, my friend, familiar, a “guarding angel” (as I thought they were called). It was to Stanley that I would tell all my troubles, wishes and hopes. I seemed always to have known about him. My father told me about him. How he’d sent Stanley and his mother to America to get away from the bombs and yet, having crossed the most dangerous strip of water twice in safety, Stanley had come back only to be knocked down by a bus outside the house. My father said that for some time he was distraught and wandered around London searching for the bus driver (though it wasn’t his fault) to kill him. My mother suggested she had come along soon after the accident and helped to heal my father’s hurt. The marriage with Stanley’s mother had long been as good as over. But once, when my parents’ marriage was as good as over too, my mother said, “Now I’ll tell you the truth. Stanley was killed because he ran out of the house to get away from their screaming and fighting.” I thought I was lucky to live on the third floor of a block of flats—when I ran out of the flat to get away from the rows, there was only a corridor outside.
I dream about those flats, even now, and in reality I pass them probably twice a week or so. In the dream I can only get as far as the lobby, and this is true in reality, too. I walked around there recently, and though the exterior is exactly the same—white stone steps up to glass entrance doors—there is now an entry-phone system which prevents you from going any further without a reason. I don’t have a reason, except that I used to live there thirty-five years ago and would dearly love to have a wander round the corridors where I played. There’s no real need for it. Just the fact that where my childhood took place is still there, rock-solid but impenetrable. Some people want to climb mountains; I’d like to walk around the corridors.
It was also where Stanley and I were last together. His album and mine parted company in those flats, after eleven years of sitting on top of each other in the sideboard. My father left and took one of the books with him. When my mother and I left the flats some months later, we had no room, in the small bedsitter we moved into, for any more than the essentials. She asked the man who stoked the boilers to take care of some things for her. Among them was the remaining photograph album. It seems odd now that there was not room enough for a photo album even, but things were very fraught and my mother could manage only what she could manage. She told the stoker—Bill, I think he was called—that she would collect the things when we were properly sorted out.
Of course, things never did get properly sorted out, and bigger problems arose which made retrieving a photo album irrelevant. Perhaps she just forgot. I didn’t, but it wasn’t wise to make demands on my mother at that time.
Several years later I was working in an office near to the old block of flats. One lunchtime I phoned the porter’s lodge and asked to speak to Bill the stoker. A porter told me he’d left. I explained who I was and that my mother had left some things with Bill. The porter remembered us—we had been rather memorably evicted from the flats—but said that he thought Bill had burned the things when no one came for them. Anyway, he didn’t have any idea where Bill was or how to get hold of him. I didn’t press him. I almost hadn’t believed that Bill the stoker existed, suspecting he might be no more than a fantasy belonging to a story I’d once heard. But Bill was real enough, and even the porter remembered that we’d left some things with him. As to what happened to them, perhaps it was best to leave that question lie.
In the end, I did get one of the books back. My father died in 1966, and the woman he had been living with gave me the air-force-blue album he had taken with him when he left my mother and me. Back at his house, after the funeral, she handed me Stanley’s book. The painting was on her wall. I said I wanted it, but she told me she was keeping it for herself because it had meant so much to my father. We’d never liked each other; I think she felt I was being greedy, asking for both the album and the picture.
I settled for the album, which I still have and look through from time to time. I love Stanley’s mother’s hats more with each passing decade. And the look in Stanley’s eyes reiterates his demand to be remembered. Which, of course, I do. I remember him very well, indeed.