by Jane Bailey
I looked up at the moon, concealing half of itself in the blackness of the night, the other half glittering to the invisible sun, and I thought: I know there’s more to you than meets the eye.
The tree bark pressed into my shoulder blades, and I sensed the sap rising inside it. Up there in the tree-tops, with all the dark shivering leaves, I conjured up mothers: kind, self-giving mothers like Gracie, childless women bursting at the seams with mother-love like Miss Wallock, jealous mothers, efficient mothers, strict, ambitious mothers, mothers who controlled, chaotic mothers, bereaved mothers, possessive mothers, anxious mothers, inexperienced mothers, mothers worn-out and depressed, mothers overwhelmed with love, mothers who never wanted to be mothers, women longing for children and mothers-to-be. The moon sent down all these women and tossed them into the gently writhing branches. Each one of them with the power to change lives, and each one unaware of it. Because it wasn’t written in stone, what they did; it wasn’t even written in blood. It was printed in memories, little indelible keepsakes that would never rub off.
52
‘You fuck off out of here! Go on, fuck off!’
The voice told me I must have dozed at least once, for the green was bathed in orange light and the last birds of summer were chirruping softly above me. Vile It walked away after her warning, like a nesting bird: secure that she had delivered it but wanting no real battle.
When I opened my eyes again there was more commotion. I looked up at the glorious leaves, still mostly green against the pale morning blue, and smelt the cluster of colognes from close beneath me. The voices were lowered.
‘She always was … you know, a bit …’
‘Barking mad!’
‘Completely lost it this time …’
‘My sister always reckoned …’
‘Barking!’
I allowed myself a swift glance downwards, and saw the little herd of village women craning up to my perch, their morning shopping enhanced by a bit of insanity. I looked back up at the branches and closed my eyes.
The next thing I heard was a familiar voice but one which I did not at first recognize.
‘Haven’t you got homes to go to? She’s not mad, you daft bats. That’s just how she is. Now shoo!’ Then it was close to my ear, and it was clear that the owner had climbed the tree to sit beside me on the branch. ‘I was hoping to see you while I was home,’ said Mo, finding a neighbouring branch to lean into. Then she sat there, chatting to me about the games we used to play, remembering the oddest details, laughing and making me smile, until Howard and Gracie came to take me home.
Gracie stroked my face. To my astonishment, Howard took me in his arms, kissed me gently on the forehead, and carried me across the green through a crowd of onlookers, up the road and home.
He carried me tenderly up the stairs like his own errant child: a treasure lost and found. Gracie bathed me like she had when I was small, only in the grand bathroom rather than a tin tub. She squeezed warm water over me from the sponge and bid me not to try and speak. Then she wrapped me in a huge white towel and hugged me dry.
It was clear they both knew. What I hadn’t expected, though, was that Philip would still be there.
‘I think you should see him,’ said Gracie after breakfast. Her tone was gentle and encouraging. ‘He needs to go to his mother who may be dying, but he can’t go until he’s seen you.’
I closed my eyes tight shut. She put her arms around me as if I might fall down. ‘It’s not easy for him either. There must be things you want to know. It might help. Just a quick word.’
I went into the living room where he was waiting awkwardly by the fire. There were things I wanted to know. But then I wanted him to go, and not come back.
‘Daisy—–’
‘Joy.’
‘Joy. I’m sorry. It’s really hard to know how to put this …’ He frowned at the brass coal scuttle, ‘… but the thing is … I want you to know…. I’m so, so sorry. I … there’s not a day’s gone by I haven’t—’
‘Tell me about my family.’
‘Well … Dad died – as you know—’
‘TB?’
‘That’s right. He used to dote on you.’ He said this eagerly, as if to say there was at least one scrap of good news in my family album. ‘Thought the world of you, he did … And then – Mum – you know. Um … Then there’s Sidney – he’s not quite the full shilling, then Eddie – he’s a bit of a lad. You know – bit of a success with the girls, that sort of thing. Um … Then there was Ivy, of course, and you.’
‘How old was I when … Dad died?’
‘Four and a half.’
It was clipped, exact, like words he had repeated in his head for years.
‘And … how do you know … what makes you say he doted on me?’ I knew I was begging for crumbs of affection, but I had to know.
‘He was a gamekeeper – up at the big house near us – and he used to take you off with him, whole days at a time. Did the same with us when we were little, but he reckoned you were different. Said you had patience with birds. He never accepted that you were daft. Not ever.’ Then his face lit up as he pictured something else. ‘And you used to help him in the garden – followed him everywhere, you did.’
‘Was there lavender?’
‘Lavender? Oh, tons of the stuff. Herbs, vegetables, he had green fingers. All went a bit to pieces after him. And you.’
I felt my throat swell up inside. ‘And what about the rest of you? Did you get along with me?’
He chuckled. ‘I used to have to look after you. That was my job. I dressed you in the mornings, made sure you ate all your food, took you to school—’
‘So, did I sleep with you? I remember sharing a bed with someone.’
‘No. You slept with Sidney.’
‘Sidney?’
I felt suddenly nettled. Who was this wretched Sidney who was so much more important than me that he stayed in the bosom of the family whilst I – the entire shilling, all twelve pennies of it – was cast off to rot in a home full of sadistic nurses and embittered nuns?
‘Yes. You slept with him as soon as you’d been weaned, I think. He’s very affectionate, Sid. Always after someone to cuddle.’
There was an uncomfortable silence while I thought about this, and while he, no doubt, wondered what I was thinking about.
‘What’s he like?’
‘Sid? Like I said, he’s affectionate, a bit simple. But he can peel vegetables, clean his own shoes, feed the hens – you know, practical stuff. Used to sing you to sleep, though.’
‘Sang to me?’
‘You know …’
‘What did he sing?’
He looked up at the cornicing for help. ‘Um … “Now the day is over” and … “For the –”’
‘“—moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin”?’
‘Yes!’
We both smiled, and our eyes grew watery.
‘What exactly’s wrong with him, then?’
‘No one really knows.’ Then, as if reading my thoughts, he added: ‘Mum found him very difficult to bring up – he was a real handful. I think she was afraid you’d be like him.’
I stood up, because I was in such torment now I couldn’t sit still. I paced to the window and sighed. ‘So why didn’t she send him off?’
When I paced back I saw that Philip had his eyes closed. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know what she was thinking. You need to ask her that.’
‘No!’
He looked up at me, startled.
‘I don’t want to see her. This has been hard enough for me – can’t you see that? I don’t want to have to see her. Please, please don’t tell her about me—’
‘But—’
‘No! Never!’
He stood up and put his arms around me. We remained closed for some time, like two halves of a metal-sprung peg. I sensed the tears in his eyes, from the tenseness of his torso and the occasional quick intake of breath. But I did not cry. I felt like
an observer of human behaviour, still as stone and just as unimpressionable.
I pulled back suddenly.
‘What did you think had happened to me?’
Sensing my coldness, he let his arms drop to the sides. A cuckoo clock in the alcove by the fire chose this moment to cuckoo ten times. Each time his little door nearly closed, and the bird hovered before delivering his two cheerful notes again. We both glared at him, but he carried on doggedly chirping his full quota to the bitter end.
‘I thought about you all the time. I never stopped thinking about you. It was terrible.’ The silence was blaring after the cuckoo. ‘I went back to find you.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes. When I was fourteen. I started work then, you see. I knew if I went back before then, I wouldn’t be able to take you away and look after you.’
‘And they told you I’d run away.’
‘No. They told me you were dead.’
Something fell away inside me. ‘Dead?’
‘Said you’d been moved to a hospital somewhere far away and died of diphtheria.’
I tried to take this in. All the years I had assumed they were looking for me, a grand search with police or other dour men in black scouring the fields and woodlands. But in fact I had been natural wastage. They had eradicated me.
‘Who did you speak to?’
‘A nun. Sister Conceptua. I remember her.’ He clenched his jaw for a moment. ‘She didn’t know where you were buried. I couldn’t even visit your grave.’
His eyes were welling up again and I should have seen how much he needed me to embrace him, but I was filling up with my own new horror, and could only stand like a limp puppet as he threw his arms around me and begged me to forgive him.
I was glad when Howard came in and said the horse was ready.
53
The following day there was a phone call informing us that Philip’s mother – my mother – had died the previous evening, and inviting me to the funeral. Luckily, Howard had answered the telephone, and I had not had to make my excuses on the spot. Neither Gracie nor Howard commented on my indifference, but as the morning wore on, Gracie tried to broach the subject.
‘I could go with you, if you like. It’s only a thirty-minute bus ride.’
I didn’t want to keep on brushing it away, so I said, ‘She was happy to let me fester in a home all these years – as she saw it – so why should I let my world be turned upside down by a chance meeting?’
Gracie shook her head. ‘That poor boy who came here was suffering. His mother shouldn’t have put him through that. It’s not his fault. You can see that, surely. You ought to go and make your peace with him at least. You ought to, by rights.’
I knew she was right, but I was so angry with this wretched family that had hidden itself from me all these years I needed it, and now popped up when I didn’t want it. I tried to explain how I wanted everything to stay the same, but how the truth had appeared like an interloper. I tried to explain how I hadn’t known what truth to tell, and what to hold back, how I had never known about my past, but yet had always known.
We set off in good time because there was a change of bus involved. The little village was barely fifteen miles away in a north-easterly direction, and I couldn’t help wondering at how close I had been all these years.
We were invited to see the body in the front room of the house, but Gracie and I went directly to the church. As we walked, little memories began to flicker. Old gateposts, elderflower bushes and long-forgotten hedgerows ambushed me along the way. The church I remembered slightly, but not like this. The last time I’d been there the graves were a forest of standing stones, as tall as me.
The oak pews were cool after the bright September sun, and a monotonous organ tune whined away, meandering around each of the new arrivals like a wasp discovering a new bun.
Evidently Mrs Bird did not have many friends or relatives, for despite a valiant twenty minutes of organ playing, the organist turned round to see just a handful in the congregation. Having utterly exhausted his tune, and invented variants thereof, he rested his hands on his lap.
As the vicar spoke, I kept my gaze on the five men in the front row. There was a doddering old man with brilliant white hair, who had been helped to his place very slowly by the two middle-aged men now seated on each side of him. I didn’t recognize them, and assumed they must be uncles – brothers of my mother, perhaps, and the old man: could he be my grandfather? But the two who really held my interest were seated next to this trio: a young man in army uniform with a very straight back, and a young man with an extraordinarily small head.
‘… shall remember Elizabeth as a devoted mother of Sidney, Philip and Edward. But of course, we must not forget how hard she struggled to bring up these fine children alone, after the early death of her husband Edwin. She has given them what the very best mothers give their children: support, encouragement, and, of course, love. How easy it is, these days, to …’
I dropped my hymn book on the tiled floor with a very loud thlunk. It echoed around the high, wood-beamed ceiling, from Christ on the cross to Christ the Shepherd. No one turned round, except the man with the very small head, and I could see from his reddened eyes that he had been crying a good deal. He stretched his neck up tall (which was a strain, for he had virtually no neck to speak of) to see what was going on, like a child who doesn’t want to miss anything. Eventually he turned back round, when the young man with the straight back got up to the lectern. I dreaded him paying homage to her. Gracie put her hand over mine, and I realized I was digging my nails into my handbag. There followed just a simple reading from the Bible, of no particular relevance to anyone’s life, as far as I could see. But I got a better look at Eddie, who was not especially tall, but who had impressive confidence and teeth.
Standing by the grave, Sidney did not stop sobbing. He cocked his little head to one side and blubbered like a toddler. I felt my stomach lurch. I wanted him to stop. A part of me responded in exactly the same way as I had to Lil’s daughter, when she had wailed in her mother’s absence. Another part of me wanted to march over to him and shake him very hard. And this other part made me a very unpleasant person, and I wanted to be away from there as quickly as possible, because I wanted to be someone likeable.
Gracie insisted we went back to the house afterwards, whispering that I might always regret it if I didn’t. I was afraid of being recognized, even though there was simply no one there who possibly could after all these years.
The house made me tremble. All the way from our first sighting of it – when the bottom halves of the funeral guests disappeared into bushes of fading lavender – to the interior: the front room with its yellowed walls and smell of polish; the kitchen with its brown oily linoleum and reek of paraffin.
Gracie took my arm and placed her hand on top to steady me. We heard a woman next to us saying to her friend, ‘Well, she’s lucky she got a place in the churchyard, is all I can say.’
‘She is that,’ replied her friend. Then they moved towards the sandwiches and we lost the rest of it.
‘What does she mean by that?’ I asked.
Gracie, who looked a little troubled, adopted a sudden carefree tone: ‘Oh, I don’t know. I expect the graveyard’s getting full. They do, you know, in these village churches.’
And that was it. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t considered – like me – the possibility of suicide. Was it not possible that someone – maybe even Philip – had revealed the truth to my mother, and it had been too much to bear? But then, I thought, she would’ve wanted to meet me, surely? Wouldn’t it be easier to confront your own guilt and gain deliverance? Or perhaps not. Perhaps she was too afraid of what she might find – of what I might say … Hadn’t Gracie considered any of this?
We found ourselves standing next to a piano, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the photographs perched along its top. Gracie followed my darting eyes: family groups, portraits, brothers together. There was no sig
n of me. What had I expected? But it stung me, even so. And then Gracie nodded to the mantelpiece opposite. We edged our way over, moving through a group of chattering neighbours.
‘So how do you know my mother, then?’
I turned, and there was Eddie, showing us all of his very fine teeth.
‘Um … I met her at the hospital. I’m a friend of Philip’s.’
‘Oh!’ He said it in a tone of wicked innuendo. ‘Well, he’s a bit of a dark horse!’
‘No – a friend. We’re friends.’
‘That’s what they all say!’ He gave me a good-humoured wink, and carried on beaming. ‘I must say, I never thought old Phil would make a catch like you.’ And then, with the smoothness of a chat-up line, he asked: ‘Where exactly are you based?’
I lied, and said I was at the same base as Philip. Gracie started to correct me, but thought better of it. The small-headed man came up with two paste sandwiches, and put them both in his mouth together.
‘Oh, this is Sidney, by the way: Phil’s brother – and mine! Say hello, Sid. This is Phil’s girlfriend.’
‘No—’
Sidney smiled at me with white dough-filled teeth.
‘Sidney! Offer the ladies some sandwiches!’
Sidney turned round to the food-bedecked table behind him and, taking two sandwiches from the plates, gave us one each.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Eddie, not even bothering to lower his voice, ‘he’s a bit simple, I’m afraid.’
‘That’s so kind of you,’ Gracie said to Sidney (rather defiantly, I thought).
My eyes moved over to the mantelpiece, and the real object of my interest. There it was, in the most elaborate frame yet: a picture of a little girl. Gracie nudged me. ‘There you are!’ she whispered. ‘The spitting image!’
‘Beautiful picture, isn’t it?’ said Eddie, following our gaze. ‘That’s our sister.’
I noticed that Sidney had latched himself on to my other arm, and was stroking my sleeve.