by Jenny Eclair
A few nights later, Annabel punched Lance in the face when she realised he’d left the lid off her Silly Putty and it had gone all dry and useless.
‘That’s another reason to get her out of the house,’ Hugo remarked grimly, inspecting the bruise on Lance’s cheek. ‘She’s running wild. Let’s face it, darling, we’ve done our best, but neither of us can be sure what sort of temperament might reveal itself if we don’t keep her on the straight and narrow. Boarding school is the only solution.’
Secretly, Natasha was relieved; there was a look in Annabel’s eyes sometimes that made her skin crawl – a look she recognised, if only for a fleeting second, a look of sudden hurt and surprise.
Hugo spoke to his mother about suitable schools and Heather Berrington suggested Downley Manor in Hampshire, where several minor members of the royal family had learnt how to sit nicely and sew.
After passing the requisite examinations (‘all pretty babyish stuff’, according to Annabel, who was near the top of the class at Lawn House), a letter eventually arrived informing Hugo and Natasha that ‘the applicant’ had been successful.
Enclosed in the letter was a ‘uniform and extras’ list. Downley Manor girls wore a grey skirt with a maroon cardigan and a white shirt, a combination which her mother insisted was ‘terribly chic, darling’, while the extras included items such as a hockey stick, tennis racket, tuck box and name-taped pyjamas.
It seemed odd to see pyjamas on a school uniform list and her mother told her that it would be exciting sleeping in a dorm with other girls her own age, but Annabel’s bottom lip kept wobbling and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
‘Go and splash your face with cold water,’ Natasha suggested.
During her last term at Lawn House, Annabel occasionally cried in the toilets over the ‘terrible situation’ that she found herself in and her supposed best friend, who had already started having sleepovers at Susan Meeks’s house, kept telling her that September was ages off, and she shouldn’t worry because things might change.
But September came and nothing had changed. She didn’t see Clare all summer and next thing she knew her trunk was on the roof-rack of her father’s car and the entire family were setting off for Downley Manor.
Hugo had to stop the car twice for Annabel to be sick – soggy cornflake-splatters all over the kerb – and they hadn’t even made it on to the motorway.
After it happened for the second time, Hugo said he wasn’t going to stop again and for the rest of the journey Annabel sat with the window open and a plastic bag on her knee.
When they arrived, Lance ran his toy car up and down the beige walls of her dormitory, exactly like at home; the windows were too high to see out of and because she was the last of her dorm to arrive, she got the bed by the door.
‘So if a murderer comes in, you’ll be first.’
This prospect hadn’t occurred to her – she actually thought being nearest the loo would be quite a good thing – but that’s what Belinda Gray told her on their first night, as soon as Matron put the lights out. ‘You first, then Carol, then Gillian, then me last – that’s if he’s got any strength left to strangle anyone else.’
Annabel went home for the half-term break with great big shadows under her eyes, which her parents mistakenly attributed to working hard.
‘Well done, good to see you’re knuckling down,’ Hugo told her.
‘Darling, go easy on the marmalade,’ Natasha interjected. All Annabel did that holiday was eat and sleep; she was exhausted and starving and when it was time to return to school she cried all the way back to Hampshire.
It wasn’t until Annabel was thirteen and found herself sitting next to an anorexic fifth-former that she knew what it was to leave the dining table at Downley Manor feeling full.
The girl was called Linda. They didn’t speak, Linda simply palmed food into Annabel’s waiting napkin. Potatoes and meat mostly – Linda was very good about eating her vegetables.
Puddings were messier, especially when custard was involved, but the system proved to be pretty efficient and as Linda got progressively thinner, Annabel positively bloomed.
Matron had to let her skirts out and her thighs began to chafe; the sports mistress called her ‘the hefty lump’ and put her in goal when they played hockey, a decision which resulted in Annabel cowering at the back of the net allowing in goal after goal.
She needed a bra but her mother hadn’t bought her one, so – much to Annabel’s shame – Matron wrote Natasha a letter instructing her to do so.
‘Poor you,’ Natasha said, ‘it must be very uncomfortable. I’ve never been particularly encumbered.’ She took Annabel to Peter Jones where she was fitted with something that looked rather surgical. Afterwards they went to the toy department and bought Lance an Action Man for ‘being so good while Mummy and Annabel did something so boring’.
Annabel’s new bras were the colour of Elastoplast and bore no resemblance to the flimsy satin and lace garments that her mother wore.
Every day Mrs Phelan would hand-wash Mrs Berrington’s ‘smalls’ in a froth of Lux flakes in a special plastic bowl that was kept under the kitchen sink.
Annabel’s were simply chucked in the washing machine and within a couple of weeks had turned a liverish grey.
She and Clare wrote to each other for a while, Sunday afternoon letter-writing being encouraged at Downley Manor. Once a polite note had been dispatched to her parents, usually ending with, ‘Oh and love to Lance xx’, she was free to write to her ‘best friend in all the world’. Eschewing her fountain pen for the special multicoloured biro that had been in her Christmas stocking, Annabel chose a different colour for each new paragraph. She tried to make her time at boarding school sound as exciting as she possibly could, but she obviously struggled because when Clare wrote back, she began her letter with ‘Boarding school sounds so boring, it should be called “boring school”, haha!!’
Clare’s notepaper was pink with a Love Is . . . cartoon in the left-hand corner featuring a nude couple cuddling and saying ‘Love is . . . wanting m-m-m-more’, which was quite rude. Clare gossiped on about how brilliant it was to be a day girl at St Paul’s and how she luvved Marc Bolan and David Bowie, proving this point by drawing hearts around both their names, and did Annabel watch Tiswas on Saturday mornings? Because ‘it’s ever so funny’.
No, thought Annabel sadly, at Downley Manor they had Saturday-morning school, when they played sport and did their homework. They weren’t allowed to watch Top of the Pops either, so she hadn’t seen the side of Clare’s sister’s head ‘on the telly’ the previous week. (Camilla had been asked to the studio by a cameraman and she was now doing modelling as well as acting.)
Clare enclosed a Photo-Me-booth snap of herself sticking her tongue out and crossing her eyes, which made Annabel laugh but feel sad at the same time. She couldn’t compete. Clare was living a life firmly rooted in London, a world of Tube trains and Top Shop, while Annabel’s world had shrunk to petty squabbles in the dorm over hair bobbles and being told ‘no’ all the time: No, you can’t wash your hair, it’s not Thursday; No, you can’t have posters on your walls, it will damage the paintwork . . .
Instead of being allowed to tape pictures directly to the wall, each pupil had a regulation-sized wall-mounted corkboard, ‘for postcards and memorabilia or maybe even a favourite poem, girls’. To be honest, even if she had been allowed posters, Annabel wouldn’t have known what to put up – she didn’t have a favourite pop star, she was so out of touch.
No wonder Clare moved on without her and eventually the letters petered out.
Eventually, desperate not to have an empty corkboard, Annabel, like many others at Downley Manor that term, pinned up a sepiatinted stanza of ‘Desiderata’ which began ‘You are a child of the universe’ – even though the last thing she felt like was ‘a child of the universe’; she mostly felt lonely and slightly bored.
For all the years that Annabel was at Downley Manor she never felt clos
e enough to anyone to confide that she was adopted.
At prep school, it had been a badge of honour, a whispered secret to tell her classmates at playtime. Being a foundling seemed like something out of fairy tale – who knew where she came from, she might even have been royalty. ‘My mother died in childbirth,’ she repeated over and over again into different ears, ‘and no one knew what happened to my father. He may well have been eaten by bears.’ From the moment Hugo first told Annabel about her ‘circumstances’, she’d begun to imagine the backdrop to her adoption, stitching together a scene that she went over and over so many times that it became impossible to unpick. It was like a dream which she could see in vivid detail every time she closed her eyes, and it always began in a room full of babies.
In the room a man and a woman were walking up and down between rows of cots and peering in at the contents. She could always see them quite clearly, they are Mr and Mrs Berrington, Natasha and Hugo. The lady who will become ‘Mummy’ and the man that one day she will call ‘Daddy’ – when she learns to talk, that is.
But for now, in the scenario, she was a helpless baby wrapped up like a sausage roll in a blanket that had been numbered for identification purposes. Every time Natasha looked in a cot she shook her head sorrowfully. The hat she was wearing lived on top of the wardrobe in the master bedroom, it was pink with a little stalk on the top that wobbled as she shook her head. As well as her best hat, Natasha was wearing her good cream mohair coat, and she carried a handkerchief with which she would dab at her eyes occasionally. Mummy’s hankies were kept in a silk pouch with Chinese embroidery all over it, they were lace-edged and mostly monogrammed – lots of things in the house had initials on, even Bel’s possessions would eventually be monogrammed AJB, Annabel Jane Berrington, but not yet. Because right now she was a tiny baby without a name, or maybe she did have a name but it was an old name and it got lost along the way. Sometimes she wondered if once upon a time she was called Mandy. Because there were entire days when she felt like a Mandy. But on that day she was nameless and numbered and swaddled like a baby-girl Jesus in a pink blanket because this was how the mummies and daddies could tell if the bundle was a girl or a boy.
A doctor checked the babies, colour-wrapped them accordingly, and placed them on a sort of conveyor belt that delivered the freshly wrapped bundles to the nursery. This was where the pink-and blue-blanketed babies waited in their cots to be chosen. At the end of the day, the ones who hadn’t been chosen were collected up, washed and fed ready to be put out again for inspection the next day. If the babies grew too big for their cots, then they had to go to a place called an orphanage, which was a ‘crying shame’ but ‘that’s the way the cookie crumbles’, and anyway Bel should ‘count her lucky stars’ because this was her special day, this was her day to be chosen.
Natasha and Hugo had reached the point where they were exhausted by looking into tiny faces. They didn’t mind whether they got a boy or a girl, what was important was that as soon as their eyes met, it was love at first sight.
As Bel got a little bit older and read stories in books about other orphans, she began to weave her own details around the facts that she had been told on her adoptive mother’s knee and decided that her mother must have sacrificed her own life so that she, Bel, could live.
By the time Bel was nine, she could picture the scene: the sorrowful doctor turning to a nurse and explaining, ‘It’s either the baby or the mother.’ And the mother, Bel’s birth mother, whispering, ‘The baby, the baby must live.’ Sometimes Bel acted it out in her bed, squirming in pretend agony with a doll between her legs, repeating, ‘The baby, the baby must live.’ Until she grew out of playing with dolls, hit adolescence, and began to find the whole thing embarrassing.
No one else at Downley Manor was adopted and she didn’t want to be the odd one out, ‘the weirdo’, because in a boarding school of around four hundred girls, anything that set you apart from the norm labelled you weird.
Too tall – weird; spotty – weird; fat – weird; short – weird; hairy – weird. Anyone who was spotty and tall was double-weird, and by the same principle anyone unfortunate enough to be short, fat and hairy was triple-weird.
Annabel was lucky that in her year there were at least three girls who were fatter than she was, so despite being on the heavy side of normal, she was just about acceptable. But she couldn’t afford to push herself over the edge of ‘normal’ by being a bit fat and adopted, so she kept her trap shut, grateful that her family, real or not, provided an alibi of extra-normal.
A lot of girls were envious of Annabel’s family – after all, her father drove a Jaguar, wore a good overcoat and sounded like Prince Philip, while her mother was attractive and beautifully dressed. ‘Gosh, Annabel, your mum looks like she buys all her clothes in Paris.’ What came as a surprise was the fact that her trump card was Lance: ‘Ah, he’s such a little cutie! You must love him so much, I bet you miss him when you’re here.’
‘Yes,’ she lied, but the truth was she didn’t. She missed the idea of him, but the reality was that he was a nuisance; for example, he didn’t have clue how to put the lid back on a felt-tip pen.
The five-year age gap between Lance and his sister never seemed to narrow. If anything, boarding school succeeded in creating an even bigger chasm between Annabel and her entire family. Not that she ever told anyone – she always pretended to be utterly delighted about going home and made a big show of not being able to stand the wait. But the truth was, the person who made the biggest fuss of her when she did go home was Mrs Phelan.
‘Darling, do remember Mrs Phelan is paid to help around the house, not sit and listen to you droning on in the kitchen,’ her mother had to remind her. When Annabel was older she would realise one day that her mother never knew Mrs Phelan’s Christian name. It was Caitlin.
35
School Days – Periods
At Downley Manor, when the girls were fourteen, they received ‘hygiene classes’ rather than sex education. Once a week, a middle-aged woman in a tweed suit cycled up the gravel drive to impart biological half-truths and religious nonsense to teenagers, some of whom were more gullible than others.
There was endless talk about becoming a woman and the sanctity of marriage and the union between a husband and a wife during which ‘a seed might be planted, ahem, between the woman’s legs’, but there was no actual scientific detail. What Annabel could have done with was some kind of map.
During these classes there was never any mention of sex and pleasure. They were, however, shown an oddly graphic film about the effects of syphilis, during which two girls fainted and three cried.
Oddly enough, despite being one of the heaviest, Annabel was almost the last in her class to begin menstruating, and was fifteen before she eventually started her first period while she was at home for the Christmas holidays. Even though the cramps were awful and the whole experience was dreadfully embarrassing, it was also a sort of relief, because at last she would be able to join in with the other girls who talked about the ‘curse’ and being ‘on’ and going to Matron for two paracetamol and a hot-water bottle.
She now understood what the little paper bags that hung on the back of the toilet door were used for, although why the lady pictured on the front of the bags wore a crinoline and a bonnet was something that would continue to puzzle her for the rest of her menstruating life.
Annabel didn’t tell her mother about starting her period, but one evening Natasha came into her room holding a glass of delicious-smelling amber-coloured liquid, which she proceeded to balance carefully on Annabel’s bedside table. The drink contained a maraschino cherry on a golden sword cocktail stick.
‘Poor you,’ she began, pulling a funny downturned mouth face. ‘Mrs Phelan told me, she said she’d bought you some pads – and there’s always a supply in the airing cupboard, although once you get more used to it, you might want to use tampons. A lot of young women do, and it makes going about your life so much easier.’
/> Annabel was mortified. Her mother had never spoken to her like this before and she suspected her lack of inhibition might have something to do with the sweet-smelling drink on the bedside table.
‘Thing is, darling, I have to tell you this stuff otherwise I wouldn’t be doing my job, but now you’ve started your monthlies, well – it means that technically you can have a baby.’
Annabel felt herself blush. She was starting to feel like she was running a very high temperature, but Natasha carried on, oblivious, gently hiccupping every now and then.
‘I mean, it won’t happen for years, not until you’re married and everything, because you’re not that kind of girl, hic, but what I’m saying is that you have to be careful. You have a bust and men, well, men can behave quite badly given the chance and, well, hic, don’t give them the chance, make sure you’re never alone with a man. I mean a strange man, I mean obviously you can go out for lunch with Benedict, hic.’
And then Natasha laughed so hard that for a second she almost lost her balance and fell off the edge of the bed. By the time she straightened up again, the hiccups had stopped.
‘Not that having periods automatically means that you’re going to get pregnant and have a baby . . . God knows, the pregnancy bit is the easy bit, your real mother could have told you that, but actually carrying a baby, that’s the hard bit, keeping it in, because sometimes they don’t . . . they don’t, what do they call it? Go full term, darling, babies die before they’re born and it’s all very sad.’
Natasha reached for her drink. Her eyes were glazed. She’d never mentioned Annabel’s real mother before and something about what she’d said made Annabel suspect they had known each other. For a few moments there was a roaring noise in Annabel’s ears. Stop! she wanted to insist. What do you know about my real mother? But the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth and she sat mutely while her mother carried on.