Losing Nicola

by Susan Moody

  ‘You can’t chop us.’

  ‘I most certainly can, you little blighter.’

  ‘But this is our home.’

  ‘Doesn’t make a ha’porth of difference.’ And he retreated to his own room, pulling his loose dressing-gown around him, though not before I’d caught a disagreeable view of the darkly hairy dangly thing below his stomach.

  Whenever we could, Orlando and I spied on these people, gazing enraptured through keyholes at Ava strutting naked around her room, Miss Vane struggling into her ineffectual girdle, the Leaping Nun at her devotions, Gordon clearing his throat with a little flick of his head before letting go of his Handelian appeggios.

  But for me, the most fascinating member of the household was undoubtedly Fiona. As well as teaching history at the nearby convent school, she also wrote short stories for women’s magazines, making her unlike any of the other mothers we knew. She once told me that she could walk down the street and come back with ideas for ten stories. How she could be so successful on paper, writing about romance, children, domestic trivia, women, when her own femininity was so rudimentary, was another of her mysteries.

  I spent a great deal of my childhood trying to break her down into her constituent parts, in an effort to examine wherein her difference to others lay, and also to see how much of her I carried inside myself. What was she like before she had children? What had she dreamed of, hoped for? When I knew she would be out for a while, I would tiptoe into her bedroom, treading lightly as a spider across the carpet, breathing in the ghostly smells of her scent, a precious pre-war bottle of Molyneux No 5, used only for very special occasions, and her face powder, which came in round boxes patterned with art deco black and orange flowers.

  One afternoon I found a pile of journals hidden at the back of her wardrobe, each one exquisitely written in Indian ink, with an elegant calligraphic flourish at the end of every paragraph. They described journeys she had undertaken before the war in Germany and Spain and Norway, each page illustrated with witty little drawings of herself in various situations – trying not to fall off a bolting horse whose mane streamed behind it in the wind of its passing; swimming in a striped wool bathing costume with a crab pincered to her toe; rushing through a forest in a sleigh followed by slavering wolves – and with caricatures of people she had met along the way. Each volume was bound with fabric, the sheets of handmade paper sewn together with strong white thread. I was endlessly amused and intrigued by these journals, visualizing a younger, more carefree Fiona, who danced with five o’clock-shadowed men at village fiestas under swinging Japanese lanterns, or cycled boldly through the Schwarzwald in a pair of long baggy shorts and shoes with big laces. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I can see now how extraordinarily talented she was.

  I searched constantly for some point of contact between us. We were the only females in a family of men but I was never able to see what linked us, made us two different and separate from the rest. Nor did I ever find any evidence in her drawers and closets. She was nothing like Ava, who possessed underwear covered in lace, padded sateen bags stuffed with filmy stockings, bottles of face cream, jars of make-up, lipsticks, eyebrows tweezers, powder puffs, orange sticks, nail-polish, cut-glass bottles with rubber balls covered in gold netting which you squeezed to produce a cloud of eau de cologne, a blue silver-topped bottle of Soir de Paris by Bourjois. Ava’s wardrobe was packed with skirts made of shiny materials, with frilly blouses and little puff-sleeved jumpers, each hung on a hanger of padded white satin. Ava shaved her legs and under her arms.

  Fiona possessed none of these feminine articles. A couple of sagging woolen skirts, a few pilled sweaters, a moth-eaten evening dress dating from well before the war. Was it poverty or simply indifference? Much later in my life I would realize that Fiona, a born bluestocking, would have been far better suited to running a women’s college in Oxford or Cambridge than trying to run a home.

  I loved her, I think, despite the fact that when I was eight, she offered me to a Swedish couple for the summer. They found it odd that after my arrival in their home, they never heard from her again, but after several months, they sent a telegram and dispatched me back to England. Fiona seemed glad to have me home again.

  Most mornings, she inexpertly plaited my hair. The tiny tugs of pain as the silky hair was scraped back, braided, secured with rubber bands and ribbons tied over them, were as much part of my daily ritual as getting out of bed or putting on clothes. I loved those moments of intimacy, just the two of us, no noisy interfering boys, no lodgers wanting to know why their laundry hadn’t come back or to complain that the geyser had blown their eyebrows off.

  I was always eager to know about her childhood. ‘Were you like me?’ I asked.

  ‘Not nearly as pretty, darling.’

  ‘Did you like being a child?’

  ‘Hated it. I was always cold and Grandfather used to make me and your Aunt Brigid and Uncle William get up at six o’clock every morning, even in winter, to learn Latin irregular verbs and Chaucer and practise the viola. And the cook was absolutely hopeless at cooking, so we always ate horrible meals, and we weren’t allowed to talk at meals except in French or Hebrew.’

  ‘How on earth did you learn to speak in Hebrew?’

  ‘Grandfather was a famous Biblical scholar and when we weren’t learning the violin or doing Latin, we had to learn Hebrew.’

  ‘What’s cornflakes in Hebrew? Or marmalade?’

  ‘We didn’t learn that kind of Hebrew.’

  ‘But you could have talked to Moses if you’d ever met him. Or even Jesus!’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Gosh!’ To have a mother who might have been able to discuss leper-healing and money-changing with Our Blessed Saviour threw a new light on her.

  ‘But Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew. Besides, I don’t suppose he’d have had time to chat with the likes of me,’ said Fiona. ‘Too busy walking on water, or making two loaves and five fishes feed five thousand people. I do so know how he must have felt.’ She sighed. ‘Talking of which . . . I wish I had the slightest idea what we were going to have for supper tonight.’

  ‘Did you want to be a mother?’ I asked her once, and she answered with her usual hapless honesty, ‘Not really.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘An illustrator,’ she said, staring into space, my hair forgotten in her hand. ‘I always wanted to draw pictures – not great art, just illustrations. Magazines or books, frontispieces, endpapers, that kind of thing.’

  ‘And why didn’t you?’

  ‘My father didn’t consider it a proper occupation for a woman.’

  ‘But you like writing stories, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s an extra source of income, darling, but otherwise . . .’ She seized the hair on the left hand side of my head. ‘I swear to you, Alice,’ she said fiercely, ‘that whatever you want to be later in life, I shall support you in every way I possibly can.’

  My favourite story was about Fiona falling in love. ‘Tell me how you met Daddy,’ I’d say, though I already knew because I’d asked her a hundred times before, so much so that now it was me, not her, who cycled down the Banbury Road from North Oxford to meet the man who’d advertised in the Cherwell for someone willing to share the cost of buying a car with him. I was the undergraduate who leaned her heavy green Raleigh against the wall outside the Cadena Cafe in Cornmarket Street, and went into the teashop. It was me who fell instantly and forever in love with the stocky young man who rose, holding a newspaper in one hand, who spoke to me in the most beautiful voice I had ever heard, who asked me to sit down and ordered a cup of tea from the waitress in a black uniform with a little white apron tied around it.

  Fiona would insist she couldn’t remember what she was wearing, that first fateful time, ‘I might have been coming back from lacrosse,’ she said doubtfully, biting her lip, my hair lying flat across the blade of her hand. ‘Or was it after a lecture? No, I really can’t recall.’

  So I had
to supply the details myself. Sometimes I imagined her dashing in from her college playing field in the Woodstock Road, smelling sweaty (no deodorants back then), in a pleated gymslip and baggy blouse, perhaps still carrying the lacrosse stick, which she hadn’t liked to leave outside on the street in case someone stole it, her thin hair wisping around the fine skin of her temples where the blue veins beat. Or she’d be wearing a costume like the one still hanging in her wardrobe, a kind of reddish tweed thing made up for her by her mother’s Scottish dressmaker, a felt cloche on her head, her ink-smudged hands hidden inside leather gloves.

  In the bottom drawer of the chest in her room, there was a Ramsey & Muspratt portrait of her in an ivory satin evening dress, leaning towards the camera with a cigarette in a long ebony holder, her hair arranged in corrugated waves close to her skull. She looked, for the first and perhaps the only time, beautiful. But even I did not imagine she would have turned up at the Cadena Cafe in a satin evening dress, in order to discuss with a stranger the sharing of a motor car.

  I’ve often wondered what he expected, that young lecturer with the shock of wild black hair, madly in love with a pretty girl called Georgina he had met in Germany while a lektor at Heidelberg, a girl whose fair hair stood in massed curls around her face and accented her blue eyes. Georgina was English, the daughter of a rich man in Sussex and, since my father was so poorly paid, she was for him what he called a Quite Impossible She.

  So, rising from his seat, newspaper open perhaps at the crossword, perhaps even at the sports page (for he held a half-blue in hockey) did he see the curiously undisciplined inefficient life that marriage to this gawky young woman would provide him with? Did he foresee the wild children, the raffish household, young voices singing round the piano at Christmas time, while turkeys burned and plum puddings boiled dry in their muslin bags? Could he have foretold the unmade beds, the undarned socks, the whole unwifeliness of Fiona? Did he see cold winds blowing in from a grey sea on a winter’s evening, and Miss Prunella Vane, flushed and uncertain, Gordon the Barbarian, Attila the Nun, or any of the other assorted curios that Fiona gathered about her?

  Did he, above all, have the slightest inkling of Fiona’s complete unsuitability for the roles of wife and mother, her total lack of confidence, so much so that she could not even live in Oxford, in case she proved a disappointment to him, which meant that for the whole of his academic life he was forced to live in digs?

  What was it about her that made him marry her? The unattainability of Georgina? The intelligence and, yes, a certain pathos that gleamed in Fiona’s eyes? Or simply a feeling of pity for this awkward creature coming towards him between the tables, knocking over a cup of tea here, dislodging a piece of iced walnut cake there? Could it, unlikely as it seemed, have been love?

  And what had she, the woman who would become my mother, what had she hoped for? Gauche, uncertain, bullied by her scholarly father, ignored by her sister, usurped by her brother, already half in love with a gaunt man from Wycliffe Hall preparing to take Holy Orders, what had she expected from life after she had sat her final exams and graduated? Had she really believed she would become a vicar’s wife and live sedately the rest of her life in some country vicarage or inner city rectory, full of solid worth and good works? Had she expected an ordinary life? A cottage in the Cotswolds? A tall cold house in North Oxford, the gentle plod of academia, dry dons and their starchy wives to dinner, herself in a silk dress, her handsome husband in a suit and tie, inviting her husband’s awkward undergraduates to sherry once a term, while a docile ‘help’ passed round crustless sandwiches with the aid of a niece who’d caught the bus in from Cowley? Concerts at the Sheldonian, young academics giving clever parties, playing word-games and charades, discussing frivolously but with just a touch of earnestness whom they would throw off the sledge first to sate the ravening wolves following so closely behind. Had she fancied that there would be picnics and bathing parties, punting up the river with her hands trailing, leaving a tiny drift of artist’s ink in the thick green water of the Cherwell? Might she have thought there would be holidays in Scotland or Wales or Cornwall? Is that how she’d seen it, in those days of high expectation before the war? It seemed unlikely.

  Maybe she had hoped that, despite my grandfather, she might make it to Paris or to Rome, wear wild hand-painted smocks, meet some Gauloise-smoking artist who would seduce her on a bed of tiger skins and sweep her down to Nice in an open roadster.

  Because her father had refused her permission to attend art school, she went to Oxford and read History instead, eventually, when we moved to Shale, becoming a teacher at nearby St Ethelburga’s Convent, forcing the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution into the stolid minds of good Catholic girls who had no other thoughts in their heads except to marry boys of their own sort and perpetuate the race.

  At break, she sat in the convent staff room with young women in sensible skirts and blouses, who carried round with them the viscous ghosts of lost fiancés and husbands who’d baled out over Holland or dropped in a ball of flame into some German field, been torpedoed in the cold Atlantic or beaten to death by Japanese guards. They were mild-eyed, those bereaved and grieving women who occasionally visited our house for sedate cups of tea, Miss Thompson, Miss Jackson, Mrs Ffoliot, Miss Hargreaves, doomed by the war to be spinsters for the rest of their lives, the shades of the men who might have lent them some validity, might have fulfilled their femaleness, still lying like a bruise on their hearts.

  THREE

  The final summer that we lived at Glenfield, the steady, boring tempo of my life began to alter. At the time, the first change to our routines seemed the least important. It’s only with hindsight that I see how the events were set in motion during those long slow weeks that would discolour the rest of our lives.

  It was one of those long hot summers that linger on in the memory and stand as the paradigm of all the summers of one’s childhood. Day after day the sun blazed from an empty sky, turning our gray Kentish sea to an almost Mediterranean blue. We spent every day on the beach, swimming or sunbathing or endlessly competing against each other to see who could throw a stone the furthest, who could hit a floating piece of driftwood first, who could chuck a pebble into the air and hit it with another.

  It proved to be the rickety bridge between childhood and adolescence. Julian grew six inches and started to sprout hairs on his upper lip; David’s voice began to break. The old freedoms between us suddenly altered. Charles, Julian, even my Orlando, no longer struggled into their bathing suits on the beach, hidden behind an inadequate war-worn towel, but instead wore them beneath their clothes.

  And Nicola came.

  Nicola Stone had recently moved down from London, along with her mother, Louise, and a brother whom we seldom saw. Among other enticing attributes, she possessed a vocabulary of swearwords which even Julian, the oldest of us, hadn’t yet dared to use. Although she was tiny – ‘I was a premature baby.’ – she seemed to be afraid of nothing, especially not the grown-ups. She was two or three years older than I was and she effortlessly took over from Julian as the unacknowledged leader of our pack. She had slanting green eyes and small pointed teeth. Her red hair was cut short, like a boy’s, and curled thickly over her head. Freckles covered her nose and in her bathing costume you could see that she had breasts. Apart from Orlando, all of us fell completely under her spell.

  Her mother was something to do with fashion, and had bought a smuggler’s cottage in the oldest part of the town, long before it became chic. She painted the walls in bright colours, had a wooden upright beam supporting the low ceiling of her sitting-room, drank cocktails from V-shaped glasses of the kind we had only seen in films, smoked cigarettes in a long black holder. Nicola had many more clothes than I did, and boxes of jewellery that had me gaping. Dozens of earrings, long ropes of artificial pearls and blue glass beads, red stones set in gold, chunks of turquoise on silver chains. On top of that, the lobes of her ears were pierced, and she wore tiny gold studs in
them. I couldn’t imagine having my ears pierced, or even wanting to. Nicola said she’d done it herself with a hot darning needle and a cork. ‘Once I’d made the hole, Mum had to get the studs,’ she said. ‘I could do your ears if you like.’

  I could clearly imagine what my mother would say, how vulgar she would consider it, how incredibly unlikely she would be to buy gold studs for me if I let Nicola pierce my ears.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Thanks, but my mother would kill me.’ Nonetheless, I was thrilled that Nicola considered me ear-piercing-worthy, that she let me wear her clip-on earrings sometimes, or the feather boa she had hanging on the back of her bedroom door, or try the scent she had in a cut-glass bottle on her dressing-table, though I was only able to do that once as Fiona wrinkled her nose in disgust when she smelled me, and Bertram Yelland made some remark about pox-doctor’s clerks.

  Something else distinguished Louise Stone from the other mothers.

  ‘Apparently she’s a Bit Fast,’ whispered Ava, checking that the drawing-room door was firmly shut.

  ‘Do you mean speed-of-light sort of thing?’ asked Orlando.

  Ava bent closer. ‘She’s divorced,’ she mouthed.

  I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure what being divorced entailed, but it sounded exotic.

  Ava’s face twitched as she glanced again at the door. She motioned us towards her and we obediently bent our heads nearer until we could smell her face powder and the scent of Soir de Paris. ‘What’s more, her husband’s . . .’ She paused thrillingly.

  ‘What, Ava?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘. . . in jail!’

  Orlando and I stared at each other and then at Ava. ‘Jail? You mean . . . in prison?’

  Ava nodded.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Manslaughter!’ The word had an ominous pregnant sound.

  ‘Nicola’s father killed someone?’ Even the urbane Orlando was taken aback.

  ‘Isn’t that the same as . . . murder?’ I asked. My mouth felt dry, as the enormity of the concept of violent death settled inside me. This was way outside our experience. Murder was the stuff of the green Penguin paperbacks that filled my parents’ bookshelves, or occasional headlines in newspapers, not something that peoples’ fathers committed.