Just after seven, to the north of Uckfield, we surge over the crest of a hill. The speed is still working; my mind feels streamlined, customized. On our left is Nutley Heath and the western edge of Ashdown Forest, a landscape at once familiar and magical: pine trees with feathered dark green branches, patches of sandy soil in among the gorse.
As we start down the long descent, the heath on both sides now, I press the accelerator. Eighty, eighty-five. Speed and speed – and the desire for some sort of breakthrough, access to a new level. Ninety. To keep accelerating till you burst through an envelope, and suddenly all the noise and chaos falls away, and everything just floats.
‘How fast are we going?’ Robin shouts above the roar of the wind.
I check the speedometer. ‘Ninety-five.’
A smile on his lips, he leans his head against the back of the seat and shuts his eyes.
*
That week, I move into what we think of as the au pair’s room. Once it was Sonya’s, of course, during the year that she stayed in her room and my father stayed in his. Then, for the seven years their marriage lasted, it was Ralph’s room. Later, when Sonya had gone, it became the au pair’s again. Though small, it has two windows, one with a view of the back garden and the Downs, the other overlooking the white mock-Spanish house next door. I have a single bed and a chest of drawers. There is also a pink wardrobe, made of plywood, where the au pairs used to hang their dresses. I like the room for its simplicity, and because it has no history for me; I never slept here as a child.
A protocol emerges. Robin and I sleep late, allowing the Unit to have their breakfast uninterrupted. Ralph has talked the bank into transferring him to one of its smaller branches in Brighton, and he now spends far less time commuting. As soon as he has left for the station, Vivian shuts herself in Paradise with Greta, and Robin and I don’t see her after that. Sometimes we’re not even sure whether she’s in the house at all. If I happen to come across her – in the hall or on the landing – she just looks at me and doesn’t speak, and I think of the night I arrived, and how she reminded me of a cat staring at a pointing finger. Is she afraid of us, or actively hostile? Or is she merely shy? These aren’t the kind of questions you can ask.
I spend a morning in the garden, raking the flower beds. Some of the leaves have been lying on the mud for so many months that they have turned black. They give off a bitter, vinegary smell. I pick one up. It feels like a wet mirror; my fingers almost skid on it.
I fork the leaves into the deep metal wheelbarrow our gardener used to give us rides in when we were young. His name was Mr Moore, and his hair was rust-coloured, wiry as the springs in sofas. Even though he had no teeth, he could still eat apples; he used his gums to bite them up. Once I have filled the barrow, I push it into the kitchen garden and tip the leaves on to the compost heap, then I swing round to collect another load. I remember how Mr Moore’s arms were tattooed with anchors and serpents from his years in the merchant navy. Sometimes he would mention ports he had visited – Hong Kong, Mombasa, Veracruz – and his eyes would go as hazy as pieces of horizon.
Towards midday, I climb my favourite sycamore, its bark rumpling where the branches meet the trunk, like sweaters when you push the sleeves back to the elbow. I peer over the fence into Uncle Bert’s garden. Some years ago, they found him lying dead next to the machine he used for turning the soil. Still switched on, it was tearing frantically at the earth, as if it had got it into its head to dig a grave for him. A breeze picks up; the sycamore shifts. As a boy, I used to lower myself off the tree on to the top of the laurel hedge that grew next to the fence. I would float face-down, high above the ground. Swimming on that sea of leaves, exhilaration would fill my body like a colour or an ache. Dusk. A blackbird spilling notes into the air. The kitchen window glowing, the distant clatter of a saucepan lid. The shape the light from the house made on the lawn. I remember a feeling that was like nostalgia, but it was rooted in the present, a time I was still inhabiting, as though I somehow knew it was already passing, nearly gone. Perhaps it was a foretaste of how I would feel in the future, when I looked back, or perhaps I had an intimation of how fragile things were, and how they were about to change for ever.
I drop out of the tree, then push through the gap between the hedge and the side of the glasshouse, and find myself in a narrow, grassy passage, the wall of Uncle Bert’s garage to my right, our sitting-room to my left. I look up. Above me is the window of the dressing-room, where Greta sleeps. At night, when I was ten, I would lean on that sill and stare over the darkened gardens to the ghostly thumbprint of the chalk pit, and the black ridge of the Downs beyond. It was in that part of the house that I spent hours praying for my father to stay alive. It was in that part of the house, years later, that Tina and I first went to bed together. But now Ralph and Vivian have locked me out. They might almost be trying to tell me that there are areas of my life I have no access to.
As if I didn’t know.
I round the corner, cross the small front lawn. When I reach the drive I pause again. It was here, on a hot, still afternoon in 1965, that I heard my mother call my name, though she had died the year before. I look at the yew tree with its drab berries, then I turn my gaze on the upstairs windows, as blank now as they were then. I see myself on the day it happened, my face pushed deep into the counterpane, my grandmother standing over me. Beyond us, the callous beauty of the evening sunlight. Strange how the world could turn away from you, how it carried on regardless. You meant so little to it.
I lower my head, but feel nothing except a rapid, gentle oscillation, as though a humming-bird is trapped inside me. The tap of footsteps on the pavement. A car flashes past, and then another. Was the sound of my name a reverberation, an echo of the countless times my mother must have called me? Or was it a sign of my desperate, hidden need for contact? I don’t know. All I can be sure of is, I never heard her voice again. The air around me swirls. I have the sudden sense that I might levitate.
As I move towards the front gate, I swallow once or twice. I stand on the pavement, hands in pockets, looking up and down the road. It will be like this tomorrow, and next week, and in a hundred years. There’s nothing for me here.
I see our neighbour, Jenny Martin, leave her house and walk into the garage. As she unlocks her car, she glances sideways and notices me. I give her a small wave.
‘Do you need a lift somewhere?’ she calls out.
Under Uranus
In September 2005, I decided to visit Auntie Beth, my mother’s cousin. Beth and Wendy had been close friends, especially during their teenage years. Other people might have known my mother better, but no one had Beth’s recall or her way with words.
A few days before setting out, I called Beth for directions. I hadn’t seen her since the early nineties, and could no longer remember where she lived. The phone must have rung fifteen or twenty times before I heard her on the other end. She apologized for taking so long to answer. Her cat slept on top of the phone, she said. He didn’t react when it rang because he was deaf. She gave me detailed instructions on how to find her house – a pub, a cattle-grid, a wood of larch and beech trees – all of which I jotted down, then asked whether I would be staying the night. I told her I’d like to, if it wasn’t too much trouble. She’d have to move the ironing, she said. Perhaps I could bring a blanket, otherwise I might not be warm enough. ‘I’m not suggesting,’ she went on with a chuckle, ‘that you get in with me.’
I left London at one o’clock with a bunch of lilies on the back seat, and by half past three I was passing through the wood Beth had mentioned on the phone. She lived on her own in a three-storey property that was buried, like a Mayan pyramid, in a jungle of foliage and brambles; from the unpaved road, all I could make out was a triangle of grey roof in the tangled mass of green below. The name of the cottage was painted on a piece of cardboard that leaned against a hedge, but the latch-gate beyond the garage was stuck fast. I jumped over, then picked my way down a steeply sloping gard
en, only to emerge on to the drive of the house next door.
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ A blonde woman bustled towards me with flushed cheeks.
‘I’m looking for my Auntie Beth.’ I waved the bouquet, evidence of my good faith.
The woman’s indignation faded. ‘Sorry, but we get some odd characters round here.’ She told me it would be best if I returned to the road. The steps leading to my aunt’s house were just to one side of the garage door.
As I climbed back through the wild garden, it struck me as entirely fitting that Beth should be so elusive. Our family was full of relationships that had been neglected or overlooked and were now lost to view.
This time I found the steps. Starting down towards the house, I could see a cement porch ahead of me, its side window jammed with cardboard boxes and plastic bags. The muddy ground near the back door was littered with cooked spaghetti, carrot stumps and rashers of bacon, and I remembered what Miriam had said when I told her I was going to visit Beth. You know what it’s like, don’t you?
I paused on the threshold to the kitchen. Every available surface was heaped with cans, tins, packets and cartons. Near the stove, on the floor, stood a mound of fresh produce. It was three or four feet high, and most of it was good quality, from either Sainsbury’s or Waitrose. A column of tiny fruit flies spiralled in the air above, as if illustrating the structure of DNA. Against the wall were the deaf cat’s food bowls, four of them, none empty. There were two narrow passageways between the stacks of groceries: one led to a dresser and then turned right, into the living-room, while the other branched left, allowing access to the cooker and the sink. During my previous visit, Beth’s fridge had been so full that food had avalanched on top of me when I opened the door. Things seemed to have got a bit worse since then.
‘Beth?’ I called out.
‘Is that you?’
Beth appeared at the far end of the kitchen in a pink sweater and black slacks. Though her hair had whitened at the front, I recognized her wide eyes and her oddly permanent grin. She somehow managed to look startled and kindly, both at the same time.
We gave each other a hug.
‘You haven’t changed, Beth.’
‘Oh, I have.’
She put the kettle on, then arranged my lilies in a vase. I noticed that her hands shook violently, and asked whether she was all right. She told me that her nerves had been affected by her diabetes. If she drank anything, she had to use a straw, she said, still grinning, or it went everywhere. But you’ve seen a doctor, I said. Oh yes, she replied. She gave me the flowers to carry, and a lardy cake to go with my cup of tea, then showed me into the living-room.
‘I’ve cleared a space for you,’ she said.
Stopping behind her, I let out an involuntary gasp. Usually, when people say they have cleared a space for you, they mean they have tidied away a few magazines or plumped up a cushion, but Beth was being literal. The rubbish in the living-room was hip-high throughout. Since it was mostly paper, the predominant colour was white, but mingled in with it were items as various as hot-water bottles, shampoo, a cordless hedge-trimmer, some Christmas decorations, a Wellington boot, and a can of Guinness. In this room, as in the kitchen, there were pathways. One was L-shaped, and led to the wood-burning stove, while a second cut directly across the room to the bay window on the far side. Halfway along the second path was a kind of offshoot that veered to the left. This third path served no other purpose than to allow Beth to reach her chair, which was covered with crocheted blankets and pages from a tabloid newspaper. The chair’s position at the end of what amounted to an aisle gave it a stately air, not unlike the seat of an oracle, or a throne. Above the fireplace, and gazing impassively out over the scene, were several mounted kudu heads.
Once I had put the lilies on the windowsill, I sat down in the space Beth had cleared for me, which was one half of a green velour chaise-longue. I told her I couldn’t remember when I had last seen her. She asked if it was in the summer. I said I didn’t know. I thought Robin had been with me, though.
She surveyed the banks of paper that surrounded her. ‘I expect it wasn’t quite like this.’
‘Well, no,’ I said.
We both laughed.
‘The last time Robin came, he offered to take some of it to the dump, but I told him not to worry.’ Beth gripped the arms of her chair and stared out across the room as though piloting some unique and esoteric craft. ‘I like it.’
I sipped my tea.
‘It’s because I was born under Uranus,’ Beth said.
She began to reminisce about the years after the war, when Uncle Eric would invite her and Wendy to Dosthill Hall for a holiday. Dosthill was a Georgian mansion that stood on the banks of the River Tame, near Tamworth. Once the residence of Conservative prime minister and founder of the modern police force, Sir Robert Peel, it had a grass tennis court, a walled vegetable garden, and an ornamental lake with an island in the middle. The drive was sprinkled with pink marble chips from Italy. Eric had rented the place since the 1920s, and lived there with his older brother, Reg, and a gardener by the name of Shakespeare. In the family it was known as ‘Dirty Dosthill’ because no one ever did the dusting. By the fifties, most of the east wing had fallen into disrepair; chunks of ceiling plaster lay on the bare wooden floors, and the walls were mottled with damp. Beth recalled how she and Wendy would travel up by train.
‘Wendy was very motherly. She organized the food. We had omelettes made with dried egg and water. They were horrible, leathery things, but we loved them. We used to eat ravenously, like wolves. Wendy would call out, Come on, Pansy. She always called me Pansy. I was slower than her.’
At Dosthill, they slept in the same room, she said, and they saw the ghost. I had heard the house was haunted, but had never seen the ghost myself. I asked what it looked like. It was a woman in a poke bonnet, Beth said, and a green silk dress down to the ground. The woman glided clockwise round the room; she didn’t appear to have any feet. When she approached their beds, they froze.
‘Do you mean the temperature dropped?’ I said.
‘Oh, it dropped terribly,’ Beth said. ‘And I said to Wendy after a while, Has she g-g-gone yet, Wendy? Do you think you could light the gas fire?’
While I was still laughing at the stutter, Beth jumped forwards in time. Prompted by her memory of the ghost, perhaps, she began to describe the day of Wendy’s funeral. She had taken the train with Joe, she said. He had been in St Andrew’s a few years before, receiving insulin shot treatment, and she thought it had ‘sent him funny’.
‘From London to Eastbourne, he never stopped talking. That was something mentally wrong. The train was going der-der-der-der, der-der-der-der, and Joe was talking all the time, and I nearly said, Shut up, Joe, for goodness sake.’
‘Do you think he was upset by Wendy’s death?’
‘Not exactly, no. He said Wendy was where she always wanted to be – with God.’ Beth drew a hand across her forehead, as if to wipe away perspiration. ‘I don’t think they saw much of each other.’
She told me that on the day of the funeral I was sent to play with a friend. People felt it would be good for me, better than moping around. Robin was ill. He stayed in Wendy’s bed, next to my father’s. He was very pale, but smiling – wanly, she thought the word was. I asked about Ralph. Beth told me she had walked into the dining-room and seen my father, with Ralph beside him, standing on a chair. My father had his arm round Ralph, and they were looking through the window at all the wreaths laid on the drive. The image was so poignant that I didn’t know what to say, but Beth spoke for me:
‘Poor little fellow.’
‘But he didn’t go to the funeral?’ I said.
‘None of you did. I went, though. They had “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, and I could hear Wendy singing that. You know, she loved it. Lovely nature hymn. Little tiny wings and all that kind of thing. And then she was buried up at the cemetery.’ Beth lifted her mug, which shook
dramatically, and sucked some tea up through the straw. ‘Later on,’ she said, ‘your father asked me if I’d mind him being buried with Wendy – he had remarried, you see – and I said, I don’t mind at all, Rod, because Wendy was very much in love with you. I’d never seen Wendy so happy. When she got engaged, she was leaping round the room stark naked at Dosthill, and her boobs were going up and down, they were so large, she was giggling her head off, and I asked if I could touch one of them, because I had ping-pong balls, and she said, No, Pansy. We were listening to “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes”. She had brought the record up to the Hall, and she was leaping around to it–’
‘Do you know who sang it?’
‘No. But it was very catchy. And I said, Oh, go on, let me touch one – I wanted to know what it was like, having big ones – and Wendy said, All right then, but only for a second. So I poked one on the side, and it was like warm rubber, and Wendy said, That’s enough now. But we had a very personal relationship – not lesbian …’ Using both hands, Beth placed her mug of tea on the pile of paper to her right. ‘We got on really well. She was great fun.’
‘What was her voice like?’ I asked.
‘I thought it was –’ Beth hesitated – ‘childish, rather. Young. Very young and innocent.’
‘Even when she was in her twenties?’
‘Yes. But I liked it. She was very, very sincere as a person, and you could see and hear that sincerity.’
‘People often talk about her high spirits …’
‘Yes. Full of energy. Heart people are. She was always wanting us to go off and do something. I couldn’t keep up with her.’ Beth lifted her mug, which wobbled precariously. ‘She was strong – physically. She could bend everywhere. She didn’t have any injuries.’
‘Did she have any boyfriends before Dad?’
‘That was very interesting. I felt far more worldly in that way – more earthy.’
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