The Lost Child

by Julie Myerson

  He says nothing.

  OK, but - so how are you managing? How are you eating?

  I'm not.

  His voice is bleak.

  Then please at least come home and let me cook you a meal. You can always come here for food, you know that.

  OK, he says. Thanks.

  We both know he won't come.

  There are apple trees in our father's orchard. Plum trees too and damsons. When we lived there properly, we used to pick them and eat them, even cook with the apples. Now, though, no one touches them, they lie rotting on the ground, wasps crawling in and out of the ragged brown holes.

  One weekend I think what a waste and how nice it would be to take some apples home and make a crumble. So I get a plastic bag and collect the best of the apples off the ground. I think about asking Daddy if it's OK to take them home - he doesn't want them, after all- but then I realise that it would be very hard to ask this question without using the word home: So I decide it's easier just to leave the bag of apples at the front of the house - outside the front door - and then, when our mother comes to collect us, I can pick it up at the last moment and take it without him knowing. It doesn't seem like a bad thing to do, more a diplomatic one.

  I leave the bag there and go and do some other things.

  But later, hours later, I see that the bag has gone and I flush. My knees go shaky and my ears feel hot. Has he found it and removed it? Is he angry? Does he think I was trying to steal from him?

  Inside, he's watching TV. I offer to make him a cup of tea and he accepts. I bring him the tea, strong but milky the way he likes it, and he thanks me but says nothing else. Carries on watching his programme, smoking his cigarette. What should I do? Should I say something? I decide not.

  An hour later, I check and the bag's still gone. may be it wasn't him after all. may be someone else took it. may be it was stolen. Whatever the explanation, I feel deep worry and another feeling too, a feeling I can't remember having felt before. It's shame. A strange and complicated sort of shame.

  In the British Library, I find two books. One, Two Suffolk Friends, Being Recollections of Robert Hindes Groome and Edward Fitzgerald, written by his son Francis Hindes Groome in 1895.

  The other, A Short Memoir of the Revd Robert Alfted Suckling by Isaac Williams, Fellow of Trinity College Oxford, published in 1859.

  I do have a copy of a portrait of Robert Suckling, from the National Portrait Gallery archives. It shows a weak-faced young man with annoying hair. An anxious little frown. Exactly my idea of a Victorian country parson.

  I got him wrong. He's nothing like that at all.

  He's born in 1818, eldest son of the Suckling family and heir to Woodton. He goes to sea at thirteen and remains a sailor till 1839 - the year he gets engaged to your sister. He then gives up a promising naval career (he is, after all, directly descended from Lord Nelson) because he feels so strongly called to the Church. His experiences in the Navy are tough. The ship is struck by yellow fever:

  20 Jan 1838

  I have had the fever and am now convalescent. What has not happened in the short time elapsed since I was taken ill? I have been at death's door and calmly said to my self, death is approaching. It has no horrors for me. I fear not that I could have no hope. It appears to me a dream, I cannot imagine how I could have been so indifferent, so hardened; but I find it is the nature of the disease; all are so. We are on our way to the Island of Ascension. The ship is a perfect pesthouse. Our decks are covered with the sick. We have only 5men as well. We are becalmed on the Line. It is horrible; nothing but the groans of the sick and the ravings of the dying are to be heard. I have been in this state. I do not feel thankful that I am preserved; I ought to do and I strive . .

  I do not feel thankful that I am preserved. It is in this state of mind that the twenty-one-year-old Robert Suckling returns to Woodton to visit his grandmother Mrs Fox. This is what he's just been going through when you meet him. He has only just left the pesthouse.

  And, judging by the dates, your walk in the woods together must take place just after the episodes described above. Terrible, life-changing episodes, experiences that cannot easily be let go.

  You are both so young, both just twenty-one. What do you talk about as you crunch over the bracken, the hardened ground? Does he tell you honestly about the things he's seen, the dangers he's faced? Does he know that you're ill? Does he return to sea, in love with you and engaged, only to return to find himself bound to an invalid who will not last the summer? The green shoots of spring are all around you. Love is good. Do you even ever see each other again?

  In 1839, months after your death, Robert retires from the Navy to study for the Church and that same year, because of the crisis brought on by his father's spending, he agrees to cut off the entail of the Woodton property. Woodton Hall is sold and falls into the hands of the Fellowes - who immediately pull it down. Brick by brick. The Suckling Curse.

  In fact, it's only thanks to your own father's calm clearthinking that the Sucklings retain any property at all. Once Robert is engaged to your sister, Dr Yelloly is so firm about the marriage settlements that he more or less rescues the family from ruin.

  Your sister and Robert are married on 22 April 1840 and live happily at Barsham - modest compared to the grandeur of Woodton - with their six children, who include Florence Suckling's future husband Thomas.

  Robert's death comes suddenly. He's just taken Holy Communion at church on All Saints' Day, when he suffers with some attack if internal inflammation. For two days he writhes in agony on the floor, and then he dies. He's just thirty-three. Your sister is a widow for the rest of her life.

  The book about your sister Sophy's fiance Robert Groome gives only the baldest details of his life.

  Born in Framlingham in 1810, second son of the Revd John Hindes Groome, ex-Fellow of Pembroke, Cambridge, Rector of Earl Soham and Monk Soham. He goes to Norwich School, where he meets your brothers John and Sam. Then up to Cambridge, before being ordained as a curate in 1833. He is friends with many writers and thinkers of his time. In 1845 he succeeds his father as Rector of Earl Soham and Monk Soham and later becomes Archdeacon of Suffolk.

  Yes, yes, I think, but come on, when are we going to get to the bit about Sophy? Instead we pass straight through the 1830s, before coming to this:

  On 1st February 1843 he married my mother, Mary Jackson (1815-93), the youngest daughter of Revd James Jackson, Rector of Swanage.

  I've been naive. Just like Florence Suckling, this biographer has an agenda of his own. What interest of his could it possibly serve to mention his father's youthful love affair with a girl who died? Why bring up any adventures, romantic or otherwise, that might threaten the smooth, uncluttered line that leads to his own birth?

  What about Robert, though? How do things really work out for him? Does he love Mary Jackson with a mature intensity that shows his earlier romance up for exactly what it was: a youthful passion, never really tested, always doomed to come to nothing?

  Or does he spend the rest of his life in the grip of a compromise, trapped in a perfectly adequate and fruitful marriage that nevertheless never rouses in him a tenth of the excitement and longing that he felt for your sister?

  A few pages later, I find the closest thing I'm likely to get to an answer: an old photograph of Robert - the first and only one I've ever seen.

  He's standing near a pond on the Grass Walk. A tall, lean, dark-faced man in late middle age, wearing a long black coat, bowler hat and tense, rather humourless expression. He could be an undertaker.

  Robert Groome. I scrutinise him - his face, his long feet in their shiny shoes, the long shadow that he casts - but what exactly am I looking for? Just a clue, I suppose. Just any flicker of something in that face that suggests he was the same eager young man who once wrote all those sweet love poems to a Yelloly girl.

  A woman, someone I was briefly quite good friends with a long time ago, has been killed in a car crash. Late at night, in Devon, her car
sped off the road and into a field. Because she used to be on TV, her death makes the papers. Otherwise I doubt I would even have known. I'm surprised, even a little embarrassed, at how upset I am. I haven't thought about her in years. What right do I have to cry?

  Our boy and her boy were best friends at primary school. They made friends in reception on the very first day, aged five. And it turned out she lived just around the corner from us, a single parent - her child's father had always refused to have anything to do with him, she said. So we started sharing the school walk, taking it in turns to take and collect the boys.

  I liked her. She wasn't someone I would necessarily have been best friends with, but she had the kind of energy that swept you in, lifted your spirits. When I went to that flat - a big sunny upstairs maisonette - she was always making pancakes or painting a wall or about to order a bed or a wardrobe and dying to show me the catalogue and hear what I thought.

  In the evening when she came by to collect her boy, she'd sometimes stop for a glass of wine, breathless with news of her day, and we'd sit in the warm chaos of our kitchen while the children - ecstatic at gaining an unasked-for reprieve - went on playing. One night she came round and, eyes shining, told me she was pregnant. The baby's father was married to someone else, she said, but it was fine. He was being so supportive, so generous. And she seemed to mean it. She kept her loneliness so tightly under wraps that at the time it never really occurred to me to wonder if she was just being brave.

  And when the baby - another boy - came, I visited her in her big white bed in the private hospital where, surrounded by flowers and cards, she asked if I'd be his godmother. I hesitated - I'd only known her a few months. But saying no felt difficult, so I said yes.

  I saw my friend and her baby several times in those newborn days. I know I took him presents and I think I tried hard to believe in my role as his godmother. I can still see his round blond head, can still remember his soft clean weight on my lap.

  And then we changed schools and she moved away where? To the West Country? I can't even remember - and I never saw her again. Just like that. I don't even remember how hard we tried to stay in touch, or If we tried at all. I know I felt a little guilty about the godmother thing, but I consoled myself with the indisputable fact that the promised christening had never taken place - or at least, not with me as godmother it hadn't.

  Her car skidded off the road at 10.20 p.m. I think it was a Friday. She was alone. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

  I try to remember what she was like. All I get are flashes of her energy. The bounce of her dark, shoulder-length hair. Some kind of puff a jacket she wore. And I think of her two boys, the big boy who must be our boy's age now, and the smaller one who was so very nearly my godson.

  Do you think he got another godmother? I ask the boy's father. Do you think I ought to try and make contact?

  He looks at me as if I'm mad.

  After all this time, that would be entirely the wrong thing to do, he says.

  He's right, Of course. And it takes me longer than maybe it should to see what this is really all about. That it's not about her at all, but about me. Me and my boy. Like just about everything else these days, every trail, every thought, every tangle of feeling leads straight back to him. My craving for what he was, for what we had.

  Because, when I think about my friend, what I see most clearly isn't us, but them. Not her, but him. Our two boys. And the sheer, uncomplicated happiness of those days when, yelling and bumping around together, they'd beg to be allowed just one more half-hour, pleeease! before we'd peel them apart and, laughing, take them home.

  I remember one time when our boy was a baby, about four or five months old, and he cried so much he made me cry too.

  It was hopeless. His father was away working abroad and so I was alone and he cried and cried. Nothing I could do would make him stop. And I was twenty-nine and a new mother and all alone and it was a hot, light May evening similar to the evening eighteen years in the future when he would turn around and hit me so hard. But right now he was tiny and he was crying and I just didn't know what to do.

  I fed him, I changed him, I burped him, I soothed him, and he screamed and screamed. I put him on the bed. He screamed. I picked him back up off the bed. He screamed on my shoulder, great gusty sobs that shuddered through his whole small body. I kissed his face and held him right out in front of me and tried to make him look at me, but only his mouth was open. Eyes tight shut, his whole face given over to screaming. I felt like shaking him but I didn't. Instead I began to sob.

  And at that moment, his grandmother, my mother-in-law, happened to ring. Hearing the screaming and also the tears in my voice, she took command.

  All right, she said, now listen to me. You're going to do exactly as I say.

  OK.

  First, you're going to put down the phone. Then, while I wait on the other end, you're going to pick up the baby and you're going to walk very calmly to his room and put him down in his cot. Then you're going to shut the door and come back here and sit on the bed and pick up the phone again. Do you think you can manage that?

  Still crying, I told her I thought I could.

  The screaming continued while I put down the phone and did as I was told. It continued and then it slowed down and almost stopped. Then it started up again, then it almost stopped again. I held the phone to my ear and used the other hand to grab a bunch of tissues and dab at my eyes.

  All right?

  Yes. Thanks.

  Has he stopped?

  Not quite.

  Now, when you say goodbye to me, you're going to go and run a nice deep bath and pour yourself a glass of wine. Then you're going to get in that bath and - even If he's still crying - you're going to try really hard to drink the wine and take some deep breaths and wait for him to stop. Because he will stop, you know. He'll fall asleep. He's exhausted, the little monkey. But you know something, so are you. You're shattered. And you need rest as much as he does. And I'll tell you something else that's worth remembering. No baby ever died of crying.

  The boy agrees to have lunch with me. Or, to be accurate, he agrees to let me buy him food.

  Having got that far, I call him throughout the day to try and arrange it but his phone's always off So I send him a text. Then another.

  Don't chase him too hard, his father warns.

  In the end, at about four-thirty, he calls me.

  Can you call me back? he says.

  I dial. It's an 0208 number. I think I recognise it as Brixton or Streatham.

  Where are you? I ask him.

  Oh, just somewhere.

  Are you OK? I've been trying to get you all day.

  Yeah. Sorry. Phone's not charged.

  You sound tired.

  I've only just woken up.

  But it's almost five.

  Yeah well. I didn't get to sleep till late.

  Why? What were you doing?

  I was all over the place. Look, Mum, I wondered if! could ask you a favour?

  Sure, I say a little cautiously. What is it?

  But I only want a yes-or-no answer. I don't want any of your negotiations, OK?

  What's the favour? I say again, as his father looks up from reading the paper and starts to shake his head.

  He explains that he's behind with his rent. Because the Benefit Office owe him such a backlog. He has literally no money.

  Are you managing to eat? I ask him straight away.

  Yeah yeah, but you see it's not very fair on my landlord. So I wondered whether as a gesture of good faith you and Dad could just give him a cheque for £500. He wouldn't cash it, of course. I just think it would make him feel more secure, that's all.

  I pause. I ask him whether the landlord knows he somehow managed to afford a £200 ticket for the Reading Festival only a few weeks ago.

  That's hardly relevant.

  I'm not sure your landlord would agree with that. I think it's actually very relevant indeed, since it's what you'v
e spent your Benefit on.

  Oh come on!

  And anyway there's really no such thing as a cheque that someone doesn't cash. What I mean is, he would almost certainly cash it and I wouldn't blame him, not if you owe him rent. And remember, I continue, that you already owe us more than £ 1,000 in rent from the flat you were evicted from. We're not even counting the cost of the termination -

  Oh for fuck's sake, Mum-

  No, don't you see - if you'd just try and start paying a little of that back - just £ I per week would do, as a gesture of good faith - then we'd be able to lend you more.

  I just can't believe you won't fucking well help me - You have no idea, I say softly, how much we want to help you.

  Well, I said I wanted a yes-or-no answer, he reminds me angrily.

  I'm afraid it's a no, then.

  I ask If we can arrange lunch tomorrow. He says he doesn't know what he's doing yet, that he'll have to see.

  Anyway, he adds, I'm not sure it's a good idea. I've been getting pretty wasted in the day.

  Wasted on what?

  You know on what.

  You mean cannabis?

  You know I do a lot of other drugs too. For God's sake, Mum. Don't pretend you don't know that.

  And he hangs up, leaving me bruised.

  When I tell his father about this, he smiles, a long sad smile.

  Oh darling, but don't you see what he was doing?

  What?

  Don't you realise he did it on purpose?

  He did?

  Of course he did. He knows how that would make you feel, to hear that about drugs. And you refused to give him money, and so he punished you. He knows exactly how to make you hurt.

  * * *

  We go out to dinner at the house of good friends, people we haven't seen in a while. Everyone stays too late, everyone drinks too much. It's past one o'clock and no one's even begun to call taxis and more wine is poured and I think, This is good. We hardly ever have fun like this any more. We've let ourselves get much too sad lately. We should say yes to things like this more often.