‘That poor child won’t thank her mother when she ends up with clogged arteries and a permanent weight problem,’ Audrey would say as she pointed me in the direction of the fruit bowl. I tried to tell her that we could worry about my arteries and my weight in a year or so’s time and eat cake now, but she wouldn’t listen.
At least we did have a real tree this year. It had been a close-run thing. Audrey hated pine needles, or at least she hated them when they fell on her parquet floor and Trish, her friend who ran an interior design shop, stocked American artificial ones. ‘… Not those dreadful plasticky ones you get from Woollies, darling, I promise,’ she had said to Madox, but he had threatened to spend Christmas at his club so we got the real thing after all. ‘I warn you.’ Audrey had shot the tree a nasty glance. ‘Once it starts messing the place up it’s out.’ She had sounded as if she were talking of some untidy house guest. So to make sure the tree stayed, I went to the drawing-room every morning to top up the water and to check that it wasn’t getting too hot in there. And now it was Christmas Day. I spotted a green needle on the floor and bent down quickly to pick it up, secreting it in the breast pocket of my velvet dress. I straightened up and looked again at the tree. It was a murky morning and the room was in near darkness but the tiny golden Christmas lights twinkled like minute stars and cast a warm glow across the blue-and-gold baubles. Right at the back, on a low branch, I could glimpse my Father Christmas, put there by Madox and me the night before.
‘So, Linus, did you enjoy your Christmas?’ Olivia asked him at breakfast on Boxing Day.
Linus thought about the question and decided that he had not. ‘It wasn’t anyone’s fault,’ he assured Olivia. He had known this Christmas wouldn’t be right from the very start on the first of Advent when Bertil had said, ‘I assumed you wouldn’t want to bother with a calendar this year, now you’re almost fifteen.’ Age, Linus thought, seemed not to be absolute but relative, a convenience that shifted according to the whims of adults. All he could be sure of was that he was never the right age. The other day it had been: What are you thinking about? Of course you can’t go skiing on your own with your friends, you’re only fourteen. Now, all of a sudden, he was nearly fifteen and too old for an Advent calendar. He had to remind himself of this as he woke on the first Sunday of Advent. Not for him lying there, tingling with excitement at the thought of the beginning of Christmas. He was too old. He had got out of bed and gone into the kitchen to make coffee for them all as he had done every first of Advent for years. Then they would gather round the kitchen table and Bertil would read the nativity story as Linus lit the first of the four Advent candles. But as he stood there, barefoot in the kitchen, about to measure out the coffee, he thought suddenly that he was probably too old for all of that too. He had left the measuring spoon in the coffee jar and gone back to bed. And Christmas lost its tinsel-twinkle magic. To make matters worse, they had stayed at home on Christmas Eve itself instead of going to Aunt Lisa’s, as they had every Christmas that Linus could remember. It was no one’s fault, he thought again. After all, he was sure that Aunt Lisa had not meant to die the week before Christmas, but nevertheless she had. And because of it Uncle Gerald, who was Aunt Lisa’s brother and really Linus’s father’s uncle, and Aunt Marie, his wife, and their daughter Kerstin, who was exactly Linus’s age, had decided to go abroad for a change of scene. This meant that on Christmas Eve, Linus and his father and Olivia had been left with only Aunt Ulla. Now she was no one’s aunt, not really, but Linus’s mother’s cousin. Linus had been surprised at how much he had missed the others. Kerstin was just an annoying girl and he got quite cross with her for following him around in the summer holidays when they were all out on the island, but at Christmas he liked her there. She was part of the tradition, like the gold star they fixed on top of the tree. And Uncle Gerald told funny stories about Bertil as a child, which embarrassed Bertil but made Linus marvel at how normal his father had once been. They always played lots of games too. They never did much at other times of the year, but at Christmas it was as if everyone took on an extra shine, becoming more of everything. Uncle Gerald’s stories became funnier and Ulla too was funny when she struggled to know the answers to the trivia quiz. She still hadn’t worked out that Gerald and Bertil rigged it every year. Aunt Marie sang songs to go with the schnapps, although normally she was really quiet. But not this year. Instead, they were left with Ulla, whom he liked, but she wasn’t enough. It was like having the Christmas dinner with just the baked ham but no smoked eel or herring or red cabbage or boiled sausage or any of the other things that showed it could not possibly be any other day than Christmas Eve. Still, Ulla knew interesting stuff and this year she had told him that knowledge was the single most attractive quality a man could have. Linus felt very unattractive at that particular time so he set about reading his Christmas books with greater interest than ever, especially the one with Shakespeare’s sonnets. If Ulla was right Lotten, in the year below him at school, could be his by Easter. Linus sighed and helped himself to some soured milk to go on his cereal.
‘Audrey called while you were in the bathroom,’ Olivia told her husband. ‘Wishing us all a happy Christmas.’
‘Is she still angry?’ Linus wanted to know.
‘Audrey? Audrey isn’t angry.’
‘I meant Esther,’ Linus explained, his mouth full of cornflakes. He felt his father’s disapproving glance on him and hunched up as if ducking under a low-flying object.
‘What do you mean, is she still angry?’ Olivia asked.
Linus swallowed and wiped his chin before answering. ‘Every photo I’ve seen of her she looks angry. In that fairy one and the one from her last birthday when she’s holding the puppy and well, every one I’ve seen anyway.’
‘I haven’t really thought of it,’ Olivia said. ‘But now you mention it, she is rather a cross child.’
Three
I had been sent to Coventry by the whole upper school. It was all so unfair. I really liked Jenny Wilde in Upper Fifth and I had only been trying to help. We were all supposed to sew our own aprons for cookery. So last week we were told that those pupils who hadn’t finished making their aprons by Friday would have to bring them home and finish them off over the weekend. Jenny, who was no good at all at sewing and had lots left to do, got really upset because she had planned to go to a rock concert with her boyfriend. So I told her I’d finish hers for her. I had liked Jenny ever since the time she told the others to leave me alone when they called me an oddball. I can’t remember why they did, that time, but Jenny had been really nice and put her arms round me, and said she thought it was quite nice to be an oddball and that once her father had been told he was one, and now he was something really important in the Post Office and didn’t that show them? She was very pretty too, Jenny, the way I’d like to be pretty, all round with soft brown eyes and soft brown hair and soft brown skin.
I worked really hard at the weekend, finishing her apron, thinking how pleased she’d be. I didn’t even watch Dr Who on television as I usually did. But still, it all went wrong. I was walking down the school corridor on Monday morning when I heard someone yelling. It was Miss Jessop, the sewing teacher, and she was yelling at Jenny, saying how her apron was a disgrace and that only a spoilt little rich girl would waste nice material like that when people in Africa had nothing but rags to cover their poor starved bodies with. On and on she went, yelling at poor Jenny. I had to do something. I mean, it wasn’t Jenny’s fault that her apron was a mess. It was mine. It was my stitching that was to blame.
I walked up to Miss Jessop and I told her. I said she was not to blame Jenny as it was I who had made a mess of the apron. I felt quite proud of myself for owning up, but only for a second because then Miss Jessop started shouting at Jenny again, saying she was a lazy good-for-nothing girl who forced the younger girls to do her work for her.
I felt awful! I tried to explain, but no one would listen.
Later that afternoon a group of girls from U
pper Fifth told me that I had been put in Coventry for being a nasty sneak. It didn’t matter what I said, they just turned their backs on me. Even Arabella wouldn’t speak to me and Posy McKenzie looked all sad and droopy, and gave me back an eraser I had given her the day before. Worst, when I saw Jenny in the yard she just shook her head at me, really sadly, and turned away.
I ran all the way back home and when Janet asked me what was up I started to cry. I hated crying, but suddenly I couldn’t stop myself.
‘You’ve always told me that as long as you do what’s right everything will work out,’ I wept. ‘“Tell the truth,” you say. But sometimes the truth is just the worst thing you can tell. Then what are you supposed to do? Can no one be trusted?’ I looked at Janet, wiping my nose on the back of my hand.
Janet frowned and got me a paper tissue. ‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘There’s no one who can answer that kind of question but yourself. You must know here.’ She slapped her hand in its pink rubber glove across her bosom. ‘Inside, what’s right. And once you know, then you mustn’t let anyone persuade you different.’
‘But that’s what’s so difficult,’ I wailed. ‘To be sure.’
‘Life’s difficult,’ Janet said.
I tried to do what Janet had told me, to trust in myself, but it just got harder and harder. Mainly because my body had started saying one thing when my mind said another. Like the other day after school. I was supposed to be doing a Geography project with Arabella, but actually I was with this boy I’d met on a joint outing with his school. His name was Mike Hopkins and we were alone in his house. His parents were both working and not expected back until late. I looked at Mike. He was lovely, with his dark hair flopping across his forehead and those big brown eyes and really long eyelashes.
‘Why don’t we go to my room?’ Mike said. ‘I’ve got an ace stereo in there and some really good tapes. We’ll be much more comfortable.’
So my body said, Come on, get in there with him. You know you want him to be your boyfriend. He’s probably a really good kisser too. I just bet he doesn’t spit like Shaun. But my mind screamed, Stop! You can’t go into Mike Hopkins’s bedroom when no one’s in the house but the two of you because anything could happen.
My body said, Exactly.
So it was all very well for Janet to say one must trust in oneself. All very well if one was one self.
I went on having those kinds of arguments with myself over the next few months. Usually my body won, which is how I came to be sitting that night on top of the wicker laundry basket in the bathroom, my diary in my hand, scowling at my reflection in the mirror: dark hair, blue eyes, pale skin, lousy character. In fact, one could be justified in saying no character. I read again the latest entry in the diary, made only moments earlier. Party at Arabella’s. Lost my virginity. Then I burst into tears. How had this happened? After a while I stopped crying, raising my head and listening in to the silence as if I were expecting some comforting reply. Silly of me. Audrey and Madox were asleep. And had they heard my tears and found out the truth, Audrey would have been calling doctors and running hot baths and asking where it all went wrong, and blaming my father and saying that now she was almost a grandmother she’d look really silly in Valentino and then what would she wear? She most certainly would not be whispering words of comfort. Madox would feel sorry for me, but not enough to risk the status quo with my mother. I wiped my tears with the back of my hand and fished out a cigarette from a packet in my pocket, lighting it with an old Dunhill lighter of Madox’s. So that was it: at fifteen I was no longer an innocent child. Not that I had ever been that comfortable with being one. I had never been able to get away from the feeling that I was really a very short adult playing the part of a child in some interminable play, and counting the moments until I could take my bow, pull off my costume and get on with my real life.
Having a boyfriend (a proper boyfriend, not someone like Mike who said he liked you one day and went out with your friend the next) had been a step in the right direction. Billy and I had been going out for six months now and we loved each other, I think. Working love out defeated me. More than anything it reminded me of filleting a fish, something, Audrey often told me, at which every lady should be proficient. I was very bad at it, separating all those different little bones from the substance of the flesh, and it was the same with all the little bones of emotion: friendship, lust, expectation, fantasy, loneliness, trying to separate them out from the pure white flesh of love seemed beyond me. When I was done, more often than not there would just be an unrecognisable mess left on my plate.
Billy was tall and dark, but not very handsome, although his profile wasn’t bad and anyway, as my friend Arabella said, ‘It doesn’t matter, because when you really love someone they’ll look beautiful to you whatever.’ On the surface that sounded encouraging, but actually it was just as baffling. Why, I asked myself, if I loved Billy, did I think him plain to the point of ugliness? Was it a) that I didn’t actually love him, or b) I loved him but suffered from unusually clear eyesight? These were the kinds of things I thought about when I thought about love. Then this had happened. How? Of course I knew how. You kiss and you press yourself against each other and your breathing gets laboured and a funny ants’ nest kind of feeling develops in your general pelvic area, but how did it actually happen? And this was the time I chose to feel like a child, now, when it was too late and the door to childhood had slammed shut behind me, never again to be open.
I felt sick. No, not morning sickness already. I shot the cigarette in my hand – as much a symbol of my decline as a gin bottle to a ruined mother – a look of pure loathing and got up to extinguish it under the tap. I chucked the butt into the flowered sprigged cotton laundry bag hanging on a hook by the door, the one reserved for my father’s shirts, before trundling off to bed. I was too miserable even to cry any more.
I tossed and turned in the night gloom of my bedroom. I had broken every rule of decency and I was still barely fifteen. I had even broken the law! And what if I was pregnant? With wide-open eyes I stared at the window, and I imagined sitting on the window-sill and just tipping over, ever so gently. I craned my neck. Was that my broken body I saw out there on the street? My organs ruptured, bodily fluids seeping out on the paving stones. I held on to the sides of the bed, willing myself not to move. To die right now would be a release; then again, to die and only ever to have been a child, that was worse.
I began to wear black, only black. I felt it suited my character. Still, it didn’t stop some people from making fatuous comments like ‘Oh how lovely to be young, all that unspoilt innocence’ (Edith Brookenberry, friend of Granny Billings). Or ‘Make the most of these bright childhood days, they pass so quickly’ (sentimental old fool visiting school, whose name I can’t remember). But at least I wasn’t pregnant and my parents never did find out what had happened.
‘Life carries on as normal,’ I whispered to my reflection every morning, but it was cleverer than me and took no nonsense. ‘Now isn’t that a pretty lie I see before me,’ it whispered back in an Irish accent for some reason. It knew that nothing would be the same. I had trusted my body and now my mind had descended into chaos. Somewhere halfway down I had spotted Audrey drifting along like an autumn leaf on a breeze. (She was too insubstantial to plummet.)
The more I doubted myself, the louder the ding of chaos sounded in my head, the more I craved order around me. I drew up endless lists for every aspect of my life: schedules, What-to-Read lists, What-to-Achieve lists, What-to-Pack-and-Wash-and-Fold-Away lists. Lists of Likes and lists of Dislikes. And the more lists I made the more I seemed to need to make until every aspect of my life was written down somewhere on some piece of paper. I sought out rules and reasons as other teenagers searched for drugs and cigarettes. And I got increasingly interested in what made people fall.
‘How did you come to this?’ I asked the old drunk who spent his days slumped by the entrance to Kensington underground station. A filthy hand ap
peared from under the grey blanket, scrabbling round the pavement for an imaginary coin. ‘Thank you, little lady, and bless you.’
Impatiently I squatted down in front of him. ‘I didn’t give you anything, I’m sorry. I just asked you a question.’
‘Well, if it’s all the same to you,’ he sounded peeved, ‘I’d rather have a few pennies for something to eat.’
‘You know you’d only spend it on drink.’
The old tramp peered at me through bloodshot eyes that might once have been a good shade of blue. ‘And what makes you such a know-all, little missy?’
I had to think about that and my legs were beginning to ache from squatting. Passers-by were giving me odd looks, wondering, no doubt, what I was doing down there on the pavement. ‘Experience,’ I answered finally.
‘And does experience teach you to leave an old man to starve?’
I had to stand up, my thighs were killing me. I thought about all the times I had heard Madox and Audrey talk about heartless Tories and selfish acquaintances cocooned in their comfortable middle-class existence, and I made a decision. ‘I haven’t got much money on me, but if you come with me I’ll give you something to eat at home.’
I walked down Kensington High Street, the old tramp shuffling along by my side. I wished people wouldn’t stare so. Once a middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit of the kind that looks like a chalk-lined blackboard stopped and asked me if the man was troubling me. ‘He’s troubling my conscience,’ I replied. ‘But thank you for asking.’
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