Aunt Enid beckoned Boyd over with a weak hand. And she whispered in his ear. He heard the name Ann Mitchison. Aunt Enid pointed to The Independent, the Saturday edition lying on the floor, opened at the Obituaries page. And she clasped his hand in hers.
Back at his flat that night, Boyd rushed off an email to Yvonne and got to work tracking down his past and his future, his suicidal plans firmly abandoned. If life was about beginning and end, he wanted very much to be part of this beginning. He would give it everything he possessed; make it a present to last. And he drank the wine that would have been his undoing, seeing in deep focus the face of the girl he already knew.
In a New York suburb, Yvonne opened her Friday morning emails. There was one there from Boyd. She opened that first, keeping a perceptive eye on her two small children from a second marriage playing Blind Man’s Bluff in the garden. Sixty-nine year old Mavis, her housekeeper, kept a sharp eye too from her place in the kitchen. Later that morning, the children’s aunt Babs, Barbara Brookes, the mezzo-soprano, would be visiting with presents and they were all a bit excited.
Boyd’s email shouted. Yvonne scrolled down quickly, reading fast, ending abruptly. The news about Aunt Enid was not unexpected. It was the other news.
Yvonne gazed out into the apple-green garden where her two children played and fancied that she saw them again, Boyd and Susan, in that faraway place, the garden of the pink house at Appleton. Amid the green leaves, the face of Susan Mitchison appeared in sun, young, still only a child of seven. Yvonne remembered the day she and Poppy were found, washed up on the banks of the river near Maggotty Falls. The Black River Gazette reported it in bold headlines: English girl and dog found. According to the paper, Poppy had dragged the unconscious Susan to safety and waited by her side until rescuers arrived. Susan would have been fifty-eight years old if she’d lived.
Ann Mitchison had been beside herself that day, tearing her hair out, weeping uncontrollably when she arrived at the hospital. But it was too late. In the end, they had to drag her away from the small, still body, prizing her cold white fingers one by one from where they were glued solid to the doorframe of the sombre room. When they finally tore her free, she slumped to the floor, helped up by a dozen nurses.
‘I’m her mother,’ she kept repeating, ‘her mother, her mother.’
Poppy became quite a hero. His picture appeared in several newspapers and puppies up and down the country were named after him. And when he died in 1972, run over by a fire engine, the same year that Michael Manley became Prime Minister of Jamaica, it made front-page news. But it was the last they’d seen of Ann Mitchison.
I’m sure it’s the same Ann Mitchison. There’s mention of her living in the West Indies and in Jamaica, during the 1950s. Last year she was made a Dame in the Queens’s Birthday Honours for public and voluntary service – “tireless campaigner for the rights of women and minority groups”. She died last week, aged 79, in Holgate, Shropshire. Yvonne, I hope you’re sitting down for this. She is survived by her daughter, Suzanna Brookes.
The Pink House at Appleton Page 38