I believe that any child, from any background, however dissolute, however unpromising, can not only benefit from the upbringing I myself received, but actually flourish. I do not believe as others do that I am some sort of anomaly, a sport in the pack. I am the product of hard work, dedication and the will to succeed. And I intend, over the next twenty years, to prove this to be the case …
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Bitter Truth
‘Did you know about this?’ My fingers are aching from gripping the headset so tightly. The pain joins the ache in my eyes, my sinuses, the back of my neck, my brain, my back and my stomach muscles to form a generalised ache that just goes to emphasise the savagery of my emotions.
Carolyn doesn’t say anything apart from ‘Um, er—’
I scream down the telephone. ‘DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS?’
She continues to stumble over her words: Carolyn, the only person in my entire childhood whose vocabulary occasionally failed her.
‘You did, didn’t you?’
‘Oh, Anna,’ she says lamely.
‘You fucking knew, didn’t you?’ My voice rises again. I don’t seem to have any control over it at all; I’ve been going from rag doll to howling banshee over and over again all night, Harriet and Mel and Dom trying to feed me tranquillisers and tea and vodka, following me round the tower surreptitiously pocketing breakables and things I might hurt myself with. Now they’re sitting in a row on stools at the kitchen counter, drinking strong coffee and watching me with grey-edged eyes.
Even Henry, usually the kindest of friends when one of us is upset, usually the first one to come and put his paws round your neck and press his face against yours, has realised that there’s not a lot he can do given the circs, and has retired to the safety of the cushion on Harriet’s painting chair and curled up in a tight ball, one eye watching balefully over his chicken thighs to check that I’m not coming in his direction.
‘YOU KNEW, DIDN’T YOU, YOU BITCH! YOU KNEW AND YOU NEVER TOLD ME!’
I can hear Carolyn scrabbling around for her cigarettes. At nearly seventy, she has still never managed to give up, and cites the fact that she was never allowed to smoke at work as her justification for carrying on now. ‘It’s not as simple as that, Anna. You must know it’s not that straightforward. It wasn’t my—’
I interrupt. ‘I trusted you,’ I say, and another huge sob comes out as I say it. My intercostal muscles are aching from the stretching I’ve been subjecting my chest to. ‘You were the only person I trusted, and now look.’
The click of a lighter. I can imagine her now, still in her dressing gown as it’s only seven o’clock in the morning – I would have called her earlier but the others physically stopped me – face grey with no eyebrows as she’s had no time for make-up, hand trembling as she fumbles the cigarette from the packet and lights up. ‘Oh, Anna,’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh, yes. I bet you are. I bet you thought you’d never have to face me, didn’t you? I bet you’re sorry I found out and now I can see you for the lying fucking bitch you are.’
‘Please—’ she says. ‘Please don’t think so harshly of me. I tried, really I did. I tried to tell them that it was wrong, but what was I supposed to do? I was only a secretary. They could have got rid of me at any time. At least this way I got to stay and do what I could to help you.’
‘Oh, help me, is that what you call it? Help them, more like. Help them steal my name, help them steal my identity and my personality. Help them steal my fucking soul.’
‘I was frightened, all right?’ she cries back. ‘I’m not clever like all of you. I didn’t know what to do! You don’t understand. I knew what they were doing was illegal and I didn’t know what to do! It wasn’t like now when you can just go out and buy a child, it was illegal and I’d known Grace since she was only a kiddie herself, and she would have ended up in prison if anyone had found out. And once I’d let it happen, I would have ended up in prison myself. I didn’t know what to do!’
I’m so tired. ‘Tell me about my mother,’ I say.
‘Anna, it’s seven o’clock in the morning. I’ve only just woken up. Can’t we talk about this later?’
‘No. No. I don’t want you thinking up a cover story. You’ve already had twenty-seven years to think up a story. Tell me now. Who was she?’
‘She didn’t want you, if that’s what you want to know. You weren’t kidnapped. She handed you over in exchange for money and registered you in your mother’s name.’
‘My mother’s?’ I ask sharply. There’s no way I’m going to let that woman be called my mother now. The very suggestion makes me sick to my stomach.
‘Well, Grace’s. Your grandfather paid for her to fly out to Argentina and live there until you were born, then Grace put you on her passport and brought you home. And everyone thought she was some kind of feminist heroine having a child without a husband to support it. That was what the climate was like at the time; Germaine Greer, burning bras, a woman needs a man like—’
I cut through this monologue; the last thing I need right now is a lecture on social history. ‘So who was she?’
‘Just a girl,’ says Carolyn. ‘A tart. Catholic, so she couldn’t have an abortion, though her religious scruples didn’t seem to stop her selling herself in cars down by the canal. She was eighteen and had been working the streets of Doncaster since she was fifteen. I only met her once, just before they flew off to Argentina. Tiny, like you, and stick thin; little arms poking out of a tank top, bare legs, platforms, acne, lank hair. She drank. It’s a miracle you didn’t have foetal alcohol syndrome. And when Grace came along it was obviously an answer to a prayer. Didn’t have to dump you on the authorities, able to drink herself through the recovery period with some cash in her pocket.’
‘How did you find her?’
‘Your grandfather.’
‘Not my grandfather.’ I’m going hot, and cold, and hot again by turns.
‘Mr Waters.’ After twenty-five years in my grandfather’s employ, Carolyn had never progressed to first-name terms with him, even in the democratic seventies.
‘What?’
‘He went looking. Found her working a back street, her belly out to here, approached her. She didn’t take much persuading. I don’t think she’d ever even heard of him and your mother. Sorry, Grace. They were just punters, as far as she was concerned. Punters with ready cash.’
‘Approached her’. An image of my grandfather, with his big beard and his solemn, patronising expression, leaning out of the window of his Hillman Imp and striking up a conversation with this street child flashes across my vision. The sick old fuck. Wonder if he tried the goods before he paid for them.
‘And my father?’
Carolyn pauses. ‘Anna, she was a prostitute.’
‘And what would they have done if I’d been – black, or something, or there had been something wrong with me?’
She doesn’t answer. Stupid question, really. If a supplier sends you shoddy goods, you send them straight back.
After a while, she says again, ‘I’m sorry, Anna. I did what I could. I tried to make things better for you, but it wasn’t easy.’
To some extent, this is true. Carolyn was the one who used to slip me pieces of chocolate, loosened the floorboard in my bedroom so I could have at least some small place to hide things from prying eyes, would occasionally smuggle reading matter outside my grandfather’s prescribed curriculum in for me to hide there. I remember Carolyn for the warmth she brought with her: the smell of talcum powder, the smear of lipstick, the odd soft, fluffy hug in the bosom of her bright pink mohair sweater. Not a lot, but beggars don’t have a lot of choices.
‘Well, thanks for that,’ I respond eventually.
‘I am sorry.’
‘I know you are.’
‘Will you forgive me?’
What do you do? I shake my head.
I don’t know what she takes a silent response to mean. ‘Anna, I think I should
come and see you. I can get on a train this morning, be there at lunchtime.’
I can feel another rag-doll phase coming on. In a few minutes I will be lying full-length on the sofa, crying silently again. God, let me be angry. If I’m not angry, that means I’ve accepted it.
‘No,’ I say, though my voice sounds a long way away. ‘No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘Anna, please.’
‘No.’
Her voice, of all things, is wheedling. She sounds like a child begging forgiveness, asking for sweets.
‘It’s not up to me to forgive you,’ I say. ‘You’ll have to work out how to do that for yourself.’
‘Anna, won’t you—’
‘Goodbye,’ I say, and replace the receiver.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Haven
Screaming round the byways of East Anglia towards Belhaven, one hand on the wheel, Harriet shouts, ‘Okay, Mrs Humphreys, thanks. You’re a star. We’ll see you in an hour or so,’ into her phone, hangs up the phone and drops it into the drinks holder behind the gear stick. Says, ‘Oh, Christ. I hadn’t thought of that.’
I wriggle in my seat, sniff and say, ‘What?’
‘I should have realised this would happen. They always turn up when something happens. Any chance to blag a few nights’ freebie.’
‘What?’
She shakes her head, lights her twentieth red Marlboro since we left London and says, ‘Mrs H says that the Inbreeds have descended.’
We’ve reached the D roads that lead from the C roads that lead from the B roads ten miles from Belhaven, and Harriet is driving the whole thing on gears. I’m not sure if she’s ever actually been shown where the brake is on this car. Or if she has, she thinks it’s something you use only in case of small children on the road. Approaching the half-mile of hairpin bends after the Soldier’s Downfall, she momentarily takes her foot off the gas, changes down into third, then hits the accelerator again to get a grip on the road. I close my eyes, hold my breath, and, when there is no sound of rending metal and I don’t find myself showered with shattered glass, open them again and say, ‘Oh, bugger.’
‘Yes. Sorry. I’m really sorry, Annie. And there was me thinking we would get a few days’ peace and quiet. Are you going to be okay? We could always go somewhere else and book into a hotel or something.’
‘No, old dear. Don’t worry about it. I’m sure we can dodge them most of the time.’
‘I should have thought,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if Gerald asked them, or they’re just there, but Mrs H says we should be okay if we stay in the Kennels. You know they never stray more than fifty yards from the drinks cupboard. She says she had a feeling I might be down soon and she’s made up the beds already.’
We scream round Old Nick’s Kneecap at sixty miles an hour and Harriet says ‘Sorry’ again, though I’m not sure this time whether she’s referring to her driving or the fact that her cousins have come to stay.
‘Can’t be helped,’ I reply, a phrase that I think probably covers both eventualities. ‘Who’s come down?’
‘Cair and Vif and Roof,’ she says, which after years of knowing her I have learned refers to the Honourable Caroline Moresby, the Honourable Veronica Sewell and Lord Rufus Byng. A lot of the upper classes, I have discovered, go by these Teletubby diminutives, as they’re so much easier to pronounce with hare lips and cleft palates. Harriet herself seems to be referred to as something like ‘Hairier’ among her kin.
‘Ah,’ I say. I’ve met Cair and Vif and Roof several times over the years, because somehow whenever we’ve made a dash for the relative peace and quiet of Belhaven, at least one of them has been in residence.
‘I really am sorry,’ Harriet apologises again.
‘Stop it, Harriet.’
‘Well, this is hardly going to be the break I promised you. I wanted you to have a chance to think things out, and now we’re going to be relly-dodging all week.’
I actually manage to smile at this. ‘It’s still going to be better than London at the moment,’ I reply. ‘Honestly. Thank you.’
Harriet – and I sort of wish she wouldn’t, because I feel unsafe enough as it is – smiles and takes a hand off the wheel to pat my knee. ‘You’re family,’ she says. ‘More family than my real family.’
‘Well,’ I say gloomily, ‘looks like you’re my only family.’
‘Chin up, monkey,’ she says, ‘one day you’ll look back at all this and laugh.’
Yeah, right. The screaming laugh of one in Bedlam, probably.
One-handed, she swerves round another corner, and Belhaven comes into view. It’s hard for it not to, really. Like all the great houses, Belhaven’s architecture owes as much to the desire to dominate the landscape and let everyone know just who the local boss-family is as any need to provide anything by way of fortification. It was built, as Carolyn would say, more for show than blow. Coming in on the Ipswich road, you begin to catch glimpses of the chimneys as far away as Much Hadham, popping out from behind the grand parkland trees that – there are those who would ascribe this to another Godiva-driven miracle – emerged unscathed from the Dutch elm epidemic. Her brief period of residence, after all, coincided with their survival, and lots of things can be construed as miracles if you’re looking for one.
Harriet starts to hum. The William Tell overture, though the theme from The Lone Ranger is probably a bit closer to the truth. Girding her loins for the joy of Moresbys en masse. I pick the Marlboros up from the dashboard and light one. I’ve decided, as a figure touched by tragedy, to take up chainsmoking; Camel Lights in the blue box sit in my pocket as I huddle in the passenger seat and stare through the window with scratchy eyes. I’m dressed from head to toe in black: black workman’s boots up on the seat, black socks, black trousers, black vest and a black silk Mao jacket. My face hurts. I’ve been crying for two days solidly and my skin feels dermabraded. People will mistake me for a friend of Elizabeth Taylor.
Henry, after two hours of vocal protest, has finally fallen asleep in his wire box on the back seat and twitches as he chases dream mice round a dream factory. ‘Better go up the back drive,’ mutters Harriet, and accelerates past the front gates and the signs for the coach park. The phantom decorators have been back, tying ribbons and bunches of flowers to the bars of the gates. I notice that the old Minnie Mouse dolls have made a reappearance. I’ve never got the Minnie Mouse thing. I mean, you can understand it when it’s a child that’s died, but why on earth would anyone think that a piece of Disney tat was a suitable memorial for a full-grown woman?
We follow the wall for another couple of miles, then swing in to the left and follow a Roman-straight one-track road through the woods. It’s empty, as always: the back drive is hardly used, even by the people on the estate; it leads down to the Kennels and the stables and the kitchen door, and everyone – guests, staff, tourists, VAT inspectors – in this democratic age, likes to think that they are approaching a great house as a cherished equal. If it weren’t for family, the back drive would never get used at all. You could drive down here in a psychedelic bus with loudspeakers playing Sergeant Pepper, and nobody but a few squirrels would notice.
Harriet suddenly swings the car over into a passing place and croaks on the handbrake. Henry wakes briefly, stands up, stretches his back, tail forming a perfect question mark, yawns and lies down again. ‘Got your towel?’ asks Harriet, hauling him from his nest and dropping him on the verge, where he sits, blinking, dividing his time between sniffing the air and looking indignant.
‘Somewhere in the boot.’
‘Get it, then.’
Like many of the most effective pieces of nature, the Belhaven woods aren’t natural at all. They were transplanted here in the late eighteenth century, planted to shield the house from any risk that it might be infringed upon by the rest of the world. Over the years, they have adapted the landscape to themselves, great mounds of springy golden loam beneath swooping silver trunks, roots wrapping round t
he ice house and the grotto so that when the walls finally crumbled, the caves remained. Belhaven Great House groans with the guilt of generations, but their woods are a dappled kindness of muffled birdsong and ancient secrets.
Harriet would know them blindfold. Children of great houses are often ignorant of the workings of the formal gardens, careless of frescoes and statuary and the delicate stitching of commemorative tapestry. But show them an outhouse, and they’ll show you where the servants used to carve their names, show them an attic and they’ll show you a priest’s hole, show them a wood and they’ll show you the grave of a favourite foxhound.
Harriet leads the two of us – Henry starts out on my shoulder, but soon plops down and stalks along with us, tail in the air, ears wobbling – confidently through the undergrowth, skirting hollows where chanterelles grow and rot unpicked on fallen logs, ducking beneath branches, hopping over scattered stones. I know where we’re heading, but have never approached it from this direction before. Harriet marches forward confidently, as though she were following a path. Perhaps she is, but it’s one that only she can see.
The weather has finally turned to full summer: I’ve been surprised on our drive, as those of us long-pent in cities often are, to see that the wheat fields are already turning, green giving way to gold and earth turned hard and red beneath the sun. We stroll in silence under trees heavy with the rush of new growth, skirt patches of bracken that play host to midge raves. I take off my jacket and sling it over my shoulder, grateful for the kiss of warm air upon my chilled skin.
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