They had been sitting out by the Old Pond, side by side on the concrete platform that people had once used to dive from into the lake. There was no water now, of course, just a foot or so sometimes in winter. In summer the lake was a dense mass of greenery, of hogweed and bramble and dead nettle mostly, but other things too, poppies and foxgloves, plants that didn’t grow much anywhere else. Her grandmother said it was because the soil under the Old Pond always stayed slightly damp. The concrete was burning hot beneath the soles of her feet. She squinted through her lashes at the three o’clock sun.
“My mother died in an air crash,” she said. It was what she had always been told.
“Oh,” said Rowland Parker. “Sorry. My brother must have got it wrong.” He glanced at her sideways then looked down at his hands. His feet were dangling over the rim of the dried up lake. She thought he had beautiful feet, long and narrow, like a gipsy boy’s. He had three large mosquito bites just above his ankle bone. They formed an almost-straight line, three pinky-red full stops.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Anita. “I never knew her. I was a baby when she died. I don’t remember anything about her.”
She didn’t know what to think, and this, at nine years old, was her first real experience of uncertainty. If what Rowland said was true then what she had been told before was not true, or at least not the whole truth. The world, previously a place of straight lines and lighted spaces, became suddenly darker and full of crooked shadows. When she got home that evening she found herself looking at her grandmother, studying her almost, and wondering who exactly she was. Meredith Sheener, a young woman still at only fifty, her thick hair piled high on top of her head. Was Meredith her grandmother at all, or some impostor sent to lie to her? The idea was frightening but Anita could not deny there was also an element of excitement to it. She ate her supper in silence, thinking hard. She wondered what would happen if she forgot how to speak, just as the dodo had forgotten how to fly. She wondered what it would be like to spend the rest of her life as a mute.
They had a mute at school, Leonie Coffin, though she was teased more for her name than for her silence.
It was her grandmother who spoke first.
“Are you all right, my darling? Did something bad happen today?”
She was briefly tempted to say nothing, because that would be more enigmatic and more in keeping with the seriousness of the situation but in the end the directness of her grandmother’s question made her unable to resist answering it.
“Rowland said mum died on a rocket. Is that true?”
Meredith Sheener had answered at once and without prevarication. It was that, more than anything else, that persuaded Anita that Meredith was telling the truth. She said that Anita’s mother Melanie had died on board a rocket called the Aurora One. The rocket had been sabotaged, and exploded on take-off. Everyone on board had been killed instantly, and several ground staff had died in the fire that destroyed the launch site. Anita’s father had been one of them.
“The papers wouldn’t leave us alone,” said Meredith. “It was terrible for everyone, of course, but it was Melanie they were most interested in because she was the only woman.”
“But who would want to blow up a rocket when they knew there were people inside?” In spite of her determination to be detached and grown up about it Anita could feel her heart clench in her chest.
“People who are no good at all,” said her grandmother. She sighed and bowed her head, rubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. “There were some people who thought it was bad to send human beings into space. They complained about the money it cost, and said it should be spent on feeding poor people and building schools and hospitals and churches here on Earth. But that wasn’t the main thing. Mostly they thought that human beings shouldn’t get above themselves, that if people were meant to fly they would have been born with wings. A blasphemy, they called it, flying in the face of God. They called themselves the Guardian Angels, but what they actually did was kill people.”
Anita fell silent again. The feelings inside her jostled for attention. It was exciting that her mother had been a space woman. It was also exciting, in a way that she would not have admitted to anyone except perhaps Rowland Parker, that her mother had been someone important enough for people to want to kill. It was exciting but it was also terrifying. She felt suddenly exposed, as if her life too might be in danger.
She wondered if it were possible to feel grief for someone she did not remember, who was connected to her by fact but not by actuality.
She asked her grandmother if she could have a photograph of her mother to keep in her room. She had seen photographs of course, plenty of them, images that had become so familiar they seemed to her now like film stills, pictures that made her mother common property, like an actress or a politician. She thought that owning one of these photographs might make her mother seem more real. Meredith Sheener went into her bedroom and a little while later came back with a red cardboard wallet. It contained two photographs, a duplicate of the one of her mother graduating from Oxford that her grandmother kept on her dressing table and another, previously unknown to her, showing Melanie in a checked shirt with a baby in her arms.
“That’s you at eight weeks old,” said her grandmother. “It’s the only picture I have of the two of you together.”
Anita’s throat felt tight and closed, as if a large weight was pressing down on her windpipe. When she asked tentatively if there were any photographs of her father her grandmother shook her head.
“I’m sorry dear, but I just don’t have any. I hardly knew Malcolm really. They had only been married six weeks.”
AS: Can you tell me something about how you got involved in the space program? You already had a good career as an industrial chemist, a lot of respect from your colleagues, plenty to look forward to. Some people would say you’ve sacrificed your humanity for the sake of the Aurora project. What made you want to do this in the first place?
RA: This is something I remember quite clearly. When I was eleven years old I saw a film called Voyage to the Sun, which wasn’t about space travel at all but about the first sea transits to America and the West Indies. I’d learned these things at school of course, but seeing the film made everything seem more real. I’d never been more excited by anything in my life. What excited me most was the idea that our world had once been dangerous, that huge areas of our planet were still unknown. The men who set off on those sea voyages didn’t know where they were going, much less if they would ever return. They risked their lives for the sake of an adventure and the idea of that just thrilled me to the bone. Later on I started to read about the early space pioneers and all those thoughts and feelings came back to me. I suppose they’d never really gone away.
Rachel Alvin had emailed Anita to say how much she had enjoyed Anita’s short film Moon Dogs, based around a greyhound track in Hackney. They had corresponded for a while and then arranged to meet for lunch at an Italian restaurant in Soho. Anita was bowled over by Rachel. She was small and quietly spoken, her features too angular to be conventionally beautiful but there was something fearless about her, an audacity in her way of thinking that made her compelling. They seemed to form an immediate bond. It was not until later, when Rachel asked her if she was related to Melanie Schleif, that Anita realised it had not been her film that had drawn Rachel to her in the first instance but the simple fact of her surname.
“She was my mother,” Anita said. “I was eight months old when she died.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Rachel. “She’s been a hero to me since I was small.” She had gone quite pale, and her blue eyes filled up with tears. Anita felt a surge of jealousy and then repressed it immediately. Her mother was dead, after all. The important thing was not how she had met Rachel, but that they had met at all.
“I have some things of hers,” she said. “I could show them to you, if you like.”
The following Sunday Rachel had come to Anita’s flat in Woo
lwich and Anita had shown her the photographs she had, as well as a painted tin piggy bank, a wooden globe, a biography of Tereshkova with Melanie Muriel Sheener written across the flyleaf in blue biro.
“My grandmother got rid of most of her stuff because she said it was too upsetting to keep it, that it was like having a ghost in the house,” said Anita. “These few things are all that’s left.” Later in the afternoon they took the bus up to Shooter’s Hill and Anita showed Rachel the house she had grown up in and where Melanie also had spent her childhood. It faced the main road, a large Victorian villa that had once been a school but had later been divided into flats. Anita had not been there since she and her grandmother had moved out eighteen months before. She saw that the outside had been repainted. It made the place seem different, newer, almost as if her time there had been erased.
“The house is enormous inside,” she said. “There’s a lane at the back that runs all the way to Oxleas Woods. There were foxgloves. I played there all the time when I was a child.”
She would have liked to have shown Rachel the garden, but the side gate had been padlocked shut. It made her feel chagrined, angry almost, to be treated as an intruder in a place that had been her home for so long, even though she knew such feelings were illogical. She suddenly found herself wishing she had made more of an effort to buy the flat.
“I loved it here,” she said. “It was somewhere I always felt safe.”
The flat had been sold, and the money invested to pay the fees for her grandmother’s retirement home. Because of its large size the apartment had been priced out of her range, although its tired condition meant that in the end it had gone to developers. Anita thought now that if she had fought harder she might have found a way to afford it. She looked at Rachel, taking pictures with her phone and gazing about herself like a tourist at a world heritage site. She touched the dodo pendant through her dress and thought how curious it was that Rachel’s presence had made it possible not only for her to return to the house but to feel nostalgia for it.
It was as if her growing feelings for Rachel had opened some special compartment in her mind. She wondered then why it was that she hadn’t told her the whole truth about her mother’s relics, that as well as the handful of harmless possessions she had shown her there were several cardboard boxes of letters, diaries and photographs, things she had found among her grandmother’s papers and taken with her to her new flat in Woolwich.
She had never been through them properly. When she was a child she supposed she had hero-worshipped her mother, much the way that Rachel did now. But by the time she went away to college she had begun to feel an increasing need not to be defined by her.
Her grandmother’s illness had changed that for a while but now what Anita wanted was to have her mother out of the way again. She wanted Rachel all to herself.
By the time the train reached Shoreham it was almost empty. Anita stepped down onto the platform, slamming the train door shut with a hollow bang. Sallow grass grew up between the paving slabs. The sun beat down. There was an acrid reek of seaweed and brine.
Rachel had loved this place. As a child she had rarely been out of London and so the idea of the seaside had never lost its enchantment. The first time Anita had taken Rachel to see Meredith, Rachel had been on her second course of injections and her hand to eye coordination was all over the place. She had spilled a cup of tea into her lap, scalding herself quite badly. Meredith had taken over, dabbing Savlon on Rachel’s burns and finding her a clean shirt to put on, an outlandish thing with a high lace collar and diamante buttons.
“I don’t understand it,” Anita said afterwards, when they were on the train back to London. “The clothes she wore at home were always so dull.”
“Perhaps she feels she’s free now,” said Rachel. “Free to be what she wants instead of what people expect.”
Anita had found this idea comforting. She felt humbled by Rachel’s generosity of spirit, her ability to accept people simply for who they were. She turned her back on the sea. The tide was far out, and there was nothing to see but mudflats. Southwater House was only half a mile from the station but it was a stiff uphill climb. She supposed the view from the top was part of what made the place appealing. The retirement home catered for about thirty full-time residents, and with its tiled hallways and sloping lawns it reminded her a little of one of the 1920s seaside hotels in the old-fashioned detective stories her grandmother had once enjoyed, novels by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. The staff seemed to connive in the illusion; Anita privately thought that some of them were more eccentric than most of the residents. There was something chaotic about the place, and it was precisely this that had convinced her that her grandmother would be happy there. The hallway smelled of pine detergent and fermenting grass clippings, a scent that invariably reminded her of the day Meredith had come here to live. The dismantling of the Shooter’s Hill flat had been very difficult for her and she had arrived at Southwater House tearful and disorientated. When Anita tried to kiss her goodbye she clung to her and called her Melanie. The next time Anita saw her grandmother she was different, but better. Anita wondered if Rachel was right, that Meredith was finally feeling the freedom to be herself.
The reception desk was unmanned. Anita hesitated, wondering if she should ring the bell or continue upstairs. Eventually someone appeared, a young woman with peroxide hair and glasses. She was wheeling a linen cart with one hand and clutching a sheaf of newspapers in the other. Anita thought she recognised her from a previous visit but couldn’t remember her name.
“Miss Sheener,” she said. “Your grandmother’s in her room. She hasn’t been feeling too bright today, I’m afraid.”
Anita felt the usual surprise at being addressed by her grandmother’s surname. It was as if in some sense she had become her grandmother. She didn’t know if the staff here were ignorant of her actual surname or whether the woman had simply forgotten.
“What do you mean?” she said. “Why didn’t you call me?”
The peroxide nurse took a step backwards. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “She isn’t ill or anything, just a bit down in the dumps.”
Anita took this as a euphemism, that the woman was trying to tell her that Meredith was going through one of her confused periods. It had been less than a week since she had seen her but in Meredith Sheener’s world Anita knew that time could be an unstable commodity. Five days might slip by without notice, or they might seem to pass as slowly as five years. She smiled vaguely at the nurse and then made her way quickly upstairs.
Meredith’s room was on the first floor overlooking the sea. It was large and bright and full of things. There were things Anita remembered from Shooter’s Hill of course, but there was also much that was new: china ornaments and embroidered cushion covers, brightly coloured alien objects that scrambled for possession of every surface. Like the ostentatious clothes, they seemed more a part of the new Meredith than the old one. Anita couldn’t help noticing a certain accumulation of dust. She supposed it was impossible for the staff to keep pace with her grandmother’s clutter.
Meredith was in the armchair beside the bed. Her eyes were open but there was a fixed, empty quality to her gaze that made her seem like a different person. Anita’s breath caught in her throat.
“Are you all right, Gran?” she said. She knelt beside her grandmother’s chair, taking both her hands in hers. Meredith’s fingers gripped back tightly like an anxious child’s.
“I want to talk to Rachel,” she said. “There’s something I need to tell her.”
She seemed suddenly fully aware, as if a switch had been thrown inside her. Her eyes blazed with a furious life. It was as if she had grown younger by twenty years.
“Rachel isn’t here, Gran,” said Anita. “Her leave is finished. She’ll be flying back to America next week. I told you this last night on the phone.”
She felt full of a cold and desperate pity. She wondered if this was how her grandmother
had felt when she had to explain to Anita that her mother was dead. In a small corner of her mind she envied Meredith for being able to exist in a world where Rachel was still retrievable, where the possibility existed of her imminent return. She felt tears start at the back of her eyes. She bowed her head, hoping that her grandmother was now beyond noticing such things. She had heard that a large part of the illness was self-absorption, an inability to process events in the outside world. But Meredith wrested a hand free and grabbed at her, tilting her face towards her as she had used to do when Anita was a child.
“You look sad,” she said. “Has something bad happened to Rachel?”
Anita gazed up at her, thinking as she had often thought how strange it was they looked so little alike. Anita’s mother had been blonde and robust, taking after the Dutch sea captain, Claes Sheener, who had been her father, and from what she could tell from the photographs Anita was exactly like her. Meredith Sheener was a small, Celtic-looking woman with fine bones and heavy-lidded deep-set eyes. Her hair, once black, had begun to go grey shortly after Melanie died.
Anita felt her heart crushed by tenderness for her. She had always shown such fortitude. Even now in her helplessness she was busy thinking of others.
“No, Gran. Rachel’s fine. If there’s anything you want to say to her just you tell me. I can pass your message along next time she phones.”
Meredith’s grip relaxed and the fierceness went out of her eyes.
“Not to worry, my darling. I wanted to tell her she’s just like Melanie, but it doesn’t matter now that she’s gone.” She caressed Anita’s hair, looking suddenly tired. Anita stared at her blankly. She thought of Rachel’s gangling limbs, her flat chest and copper hair and freckled face. Before the Kushnev drain was started Rachel had used to joke she was more than half-cockroach already. There was no way she could be compared with Melanie, who was as like Anita with her fair skin and apple cheeks as two panes of glass in a window frame. And yet she supposed after all that it was true. Rachel and Melanie were both courageous women of action, both prepared to die for what they believed in. Whereas Anita had always been content just to stand and watch.
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