The Many Colours of Us: The perfect heart-warming debut about love and family. Rachel Burton
the ceiling for a moment. Whatever he has to tell me, he really doesn’t want it to be his job. Finally, he looks at me, placing his hands on his knees. I realise I can’t look at him so I focus on his hands as he begins to tell me what can only be described as the story of me.
‘My father, Cedric Jones, dealt with your mother’s legal affairs when she arrived from New York in 1973,’ he tells me. ‘This firm worked closely with your mother’s agency so she wasn’t the only model on the books. It’s hard to believe that this stuffy old place was quite hip and bohemian in its time.’ He looks around at the endless wood panels, as though he would rather be anywhere else than here. He’s not the only one.
‘Here’s what I know,’ he says, as I keep looking at his hands. They are lovely hands, well looked after, big, slightly tanned. ‘Philadelphia Simmonds and Bruce Baldwin had an on-off relationship throughout the 70s and early 80s. You were born towards the end of that relationship and for whatever reason, shortly afterwards they went their separate ways. I know that your mother never told you about Mr Baldwin but I can tell you that they were certainly in contact throughout your life, although I don’t believe your father saw you very often.’
He pauses. His hands are going in and out of focus and I feel very hot again. I look up and use every ounce of energy to concentrate. I have a thousand questions but don’t have the energy to ask any of them.
‘As you may know, after you were born your mother lost some of her lucrative contracts…’
‘All of them apparently,’ I interrupt. ‘And don’t I know it.’
‘Yes, well…’ Edwin looks down at his own hands. Thank goodness they’re there or what would we have to focus on during these awkward moments. ‘In a nutshell, she ran out of money sometime in the early 90s. She remortgaged her house several times but by 1993 she was in serious financial difficulty. It was around that time that Mr Baldwin, your father, bought the house off her.’
I’m paying attention now. My mother hadn’t owned the house since I was ten? My father owned it? And she never thought to tell me? Because, of course, she’d ‘forgotten’ who my father was.
‘From that point on my father became Mr Baldwin’s lawyer too. Mr Baldwin set up his will not long after buying the house. In it he has left everything to you.’
‘Everything?’ I ask, not sure what everything entails.
‘A trust has been put to one side for your mother but otherwise, yes, everything. The house in Campden Hill Road, Bruce’s flat in Notting Hill, his studio in East London and, of course, his entire estate. Basically,’ he concludes, bringing the palms of his hands together, ‘you’re a very rich woman.’
I stand up and Edwin looks up at me. His eyes are very blue.
‘I think I need to go now,’ I say. I feel as though the wood panelling is going to close in on me if I don’t get out soon.
He stands up quickly, opening the door and ushering me through.
‘I completely understand this must come as a huge shock to you,’ he says as he leads me back down to reception. ‘There is still a lot we need to go through but perhaps you should go home and talk to your mother. We can meet tomorrow or later in the week if you prefer?’
‘Um…later in the week maybe,’ I reply.
‘Muriel will fix an appointment,’ he says, turning to the grey-haired woman at the reception desk. ‘How am I fixed for Friday?’ he asks her.
She books an appointment and Edwin Jones turns back to me, shakes my hand.
‘Until Friday,’ he says.
‘Mum, it’s me,’ I call as I let myself into my mother’s house on Campden Hill Road. Actually no. It’s my house now. I shake my head, unable to take it in.
No reply.
‘Mum,’ I shout up the stairs. Still nothing. I check the rooms of the ground floor and head down into the basement kitchen.
The note sits in the middle of the kitchen island. The island that is used for nothing other than making and drinking coffee or gin and tonic, depending on the time of day. I have never seen my mother cook.
Darling girl, had to pop to Manhattan for a few days. Enjoy yourself and see you another time, Love Mom xxx
Forty years in England and she still insists on spelling like an American. And who the hell ‘pops’ to Manhattan. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that she’s avoiding me now Edwin has told me everything he knows.
My relationship with my mother has been fractious for years, mainly due to her refusal to tell me who my father is. But despite this, every few months the umbilical pull back to West London is too strong to resist. I have long since lost count of the number of times I’ve made the journey from Cambridge to Kensington; train to Kings Cross, the fast one if I can get my times right and then the Circle line going west and south, looping through Baker Street and Bayswater, stations I’ve travelled through for half of my life but never got out at, until my stop, High Street Kensington.
There are probably quicker ways, but I love the Circle line. It was the first tube I ever remember travelling on and the first I ever travelled on alone. It’s as much my home as the streets of Kensington above and there’s something about its circuitous nature that appeals to me. There is no end of the line here, just a sensation of going around and around until you find what you are looking for. I’m probably the only person in London who has warm feelings about the Circle line. Most people find it as useful as a chocolate teapot.
I’ve never had a proper conversation with my mother about her life before I was born. When I was little, her past had been something that seemed glamorous and mysterious, that I was too young to understand. All her old headshots and magazine covers were kept in pink filing boxes at the bottom of the wardrobe in the smallest bedroom at the top of the house that my mother ostentatiously refers to as her office. As a child, I used to go through these boxes in secret, looking in awe at pictures of my mother advertising make-up, modelling on the catwalk, arriving at parties. I never heard any stories about those times, even when I pushed and pushed to be told. My mother just smiled sadly and changed the subject.
These days, of course, it only takes a simple internet search to realise how famous Philadelphia Simmonds was and how quickly she had fallen from grace. In the early 80s nobody was interested in a model with a child. If there wasn’t a husband, then there wasn’t a six-page magazine spread either.
My mother went from being one of the most famous faces on the planet to has-been in one fell swoop and all by the time she was my age.
No amount of internet searching or scouring old newspapers and library records has ever given anything away about who my father was. God knows I’ve searched enough over the years.
My earliest memory is from 1986, my third birthday. It’s summer, twilight, but still warm. I’m wearing a sundress with red dots and I’m barefoot. We are in the garden and there are dozens of people everywhere, inside and out. Philadelphia Simmonds’s parties were legendary, perhaps less so in the 80s than they had been in the 70s but infamous nonetheless.
The air is thick with smoke and laughter and music, so much wonderful music. There is a song playing that I really love and I ask for it to be played again and again while a man with long dark hair and a beard that tickles my cheek spins me round and round. Whenever I think about it I can still smell the faint aroma of spice and turps that surrounded him. He tells me the song is called Penny Lane and I tell him I like the bit about the fire engine best.
And then the memory disappears. I can’t work out what happened to the man with the beard or who he was. Whenever I’ve asked my mother about it she claims she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
Part of me has always liked to daydream that the Penny Lane