At home, my parents had started to dress differently. My mother had complied with the increasingly strict Brethren dress codes, wearing the compulsory headscarf or hat, and keeping her hemlines low and her necklines high. But she’d also dressed us and herself in the jewel colours that she loved, and that the older Brethren women disapproved of: reds and purples, cobalt blues, emerald greens and lemon yellows. She’d knitted me that red cardigan with shiny brass buttons.
Now she made herself new clothes in patterned silks and satins, with shorter skirts. She bought purple boots that laced up the front. My father bought her a white leather-and-fur coat. She wore her thick black hair just the same, piled on her head and pinned prettily into place, but she no longer covered it. I watched the way the sun lingered on its curls. She kept the Bible near her sewing pile, and still read it every day, quietly to herself. My father didn’t.
He began to wear well-cut suits and slacks, occasionally a cravat. He grew a beard – Brethren men were not allowed facial hair – and shaped and groomed it. He wore a musky cologne. He lost weight dramatically as I gained weight. He was handsome and dapper. He bought audiotapes of pop music, and played songs by the Seekers – ‘The Carnival is Over’, ‘Morningtown Ride’ – and Paul Simon – ‘Kodachrome’, ‘Mother and Child Reunion’ – in the car and in the house, very loudly.
Sometimes he’d play his favourite six or seven tracks over and over again. ‘Listen,’ he’d yell at us. ‘Shut up for a minute and listen.’ Sometimes he’d stop the car on the hard shoulder to make us listen. And I dreamed I was dying, sang Paul Simon, as the guitar moved to the crescendo, and my father turned the volume up as high as it would go, so the whole car shook, And I dreamed that my soul rose un-ex-pect-ed-ly. We’d sing too, as loud as we could, all together. Sometimes the lines and melodies seemed to have been set to repeat for days inside my head.
When my mother wasn’t in the car, my father would let me climb onto the armrest between the two front seats and push my head and shoulders up through the sunroof while he drove. I’d fling my arms out wide like the wings of a bird, and he’d press his foot down on the accelerator and turn the volume up high. And I dreamed I was flying, I’d sing, And I dreamed that my soul rose un-ex-pect-ed-ly … the wind would take my breath away, and make my plaits fly out behind me.
Go faster, I’d shout, go faster.
In the summer of 1972 my father joined the Wick Theatre Company, an amateur group based in Southwick. Three actor siblings in their twenties, Vincent, Monica and Peter Joyce, gave him lists of music to listen to.
‘He’d never heard the Beatles,’ Monica told me on the phone from Corsica a few months ago. ‘We couldn’t believe it. He’d actually never heard the Beatles! That’s how shut-off he’d been. How can anyone have lived through the sixties in Brighton and never heard the Beatles? I mean, he was like Rip van Winkle. He couldn’t believe how beautiful everything was … I made him tapes of all my favourite music, several every week.’
Wick players put on three plays a year in a barn that had been converted into a theatre in Southwick. Now my father would come home from the warehouse, eat the meal my mother had cooked for him alone in front of the television news, and disappear out again to a rehearsal. Sometimes he’d sweep into one of our bedrooms to play us a new song. Occasionally he’d weep in the half-darkness when he played ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, and that would make us cry too. The smell of his aftershave would linger in the air long after he was gone.
My mother was usually too busy to listen to music or watch television. If I came downstairs after bedtime for a glass of water, I’d often find her sitting over a pile of papers and accounts laid out on the kitchen table. She didn’t complain, but she didn’t want to be interrupted. She was doing the books, she said. That meant, I understood later, trying to work out where all the money was going.
When my father brought Vincent Joyce home to supper, I’d never seen my parents so animated. I’d never seen them laugh so much. My mother’s eyes shone. Vincent was twenty-three, straight out of film school, charming, funny and handsome. He had a moustache. When he asked me questions about the books I was reading, I’d blush violently and drop my head, but he’d carry on talking to me just the same. I was nine years old. I couldn’t stop looking at him. He agitated me. I was jealous when he talked to my brothers in the same way he talked to me. This made it all the more confusing when I spotted the crucifix he wore at his neck, which, I realised to my horror, almost certainly meant he was a Roman Catholic.
What was my father doing inviting papists into our house, and – worse still – eating with them? Had my mother seen the crucifix too?
In the Brethren we’d been told that all worldly people were dangerous, but some were worse than others. The Open Brethren, and the people who’d left the Exclusive Brethren, were the absolute worst, because they’d been shown the light but had turned their backs on it. Next came the Roman Catholics. They were idolators and fornicators, the people of whorish Babylon. They were spiritually corrupt and corrupting. I’d never seen a Roman Catholic up close before. That’s why Vincent was so handsome and charming, I realised – Satan, they’d always told us, made very good traps. I determined to stop talking to him. Someone had to take a stand.
As my father became more hedonistic, I became more puritan. My mother had finally settled on the Anglican church on Blatchington Road, and she took us with her most weeks. In the Sunday school there was colouring to be done, and quizzes about Baby Jesus. I’d never heard the Lord Jesus called Baby Jesus before. Once I asked a few questions about Satan’s dominion on the earth, and the kindly young teacher looked concerned and confused. I decided it was probably best not to ask questions here either.
Someone suggested that my mother move me to a new Sunday school, called The Crusaders. This was a much more serious puritan operation, much more in my line. Here we were crusaders, soldiers in some imaginary Holy Land. We wore shiny enamel badges in the shape of shields, with red crosses in the centre. There were oaths to be sworn, tests to pass, prizes to be won. I won a Bible in 1974, its thin pages interleaved with black-and-white photographs of the Holy Land.
I did not, however, take easily to the evangelising we were supposed to do in The Crusaders. Brethren had never been interested in recruiting heathens. When the old ladies who ran the Crusader classes told us we could only stop the Antichrist if we saved souls, I had to ask who the Antichrist was. I’d never heard Satan called that before. Ask me anything about the flight from Israel, or David and Goliath, and I could often quote chapter and verse. Ask me anything about Baby Jesus or the angel Gabriel or the Antichrist, and I’d be stumped.
I’d begun to have bad dreams. The voices I’d heard as a very small child had returned in different form. They’d turned into The Committee. The dreams were always the same: I’d be in a darkened room in some kind of semi-derelict warehouse, standing in front of a table behind which sat five men and one woman, in a sort of Last Judgement scenario. There was a heavy metal light on a stand behind them, like the ones I’d seen used in interrogations in films.
Why, one of them would ask me wearily, had I failed to achieve my mission again? Had I forgotten the reason I’d been sent to earth? Forgotten it again? Each time they asked, I’d tell them, ‘Yes, I’ve forgotten.’ I’d apologise. I’d stutter. I’d hang my head. They’d dismiss me, heads bent low, hands scratching out notes on forms. Then they would send me back to the waking world. This time, they’d say, this time, go and do what you’re supposed to do. You’re running out of time.
As I surfaced from those dreams, which looped like a song stuck on repeat in some forgotten anteroom of my brain, I’d resolve to remember – this time, this time, I would, I could, I will remember – but I’d wake, damp with sweat, to find that the crucial details of the mission had slipped through my fingers again, like sand.
6
Worldly families, I discovered, were different from ours. But the Marsdens were very different. I met Helen Marsden when
I was nine. She sat next to me at school. She was shy like me, but she knew how things worked, so soon I was asking her to explain what certain things meant, and helping her with fractions and the endless practice tests we had to do for the Eleven-plus. She told the teacher when one of the boys who sat behind me kept putting the ends of my long plaits in his inkpot. She asked me to tea. My mother, no doubt both relieved and nervous, agreed.
It was the summer of 1973. As we approached the house, my mother and I were surprised by the high wooden gates, one of them leaning off its hinges, and the long, gravelled drive that wound steeply up from the road through a dense wood, beech and ash trees hanging low and dark. The vast Edwardian house appeared to be barely holding its own against the tangle of overgrown trees and shrubs. A rusty caravan sat in the trees opposite the front door, and we could see a bashed-up pale-blue Triumph car and bicycles in the open garage at the top of the drive.
As my mother and I stood at the top of the front steps, trying to work out if the elaborate bell-pull actually worked, a young boy called out from one of the gullies in the roof somewhere high above us, warning us to get out of the way. Several tiny silk parachutes drifted slowly down past us onto the expanse of gravel and weeds, a kitten attached to each one. The kittens landed safely, unperturbed, as if they were used to it. Another child, in camouflage gear, his face blackened with mud or paint, appeared through the long undergrowth, saluted us, scooped up the mewling bundles, and disappeared back into the green.
Helen eventually poked her face through the dark crack of the door. Her mother, she said, was on the phone, otherwise she’d come and say hello. My mother excused herself, relieved not to have to talk or go in. She arranged to pick me up in two hours’ time at the bottom of the drive. At the bottom of the drive at six o’clock, she repeated. She didn’t want to have to risk being asked in. I understood that.
I stepped across the threshold into the unfamiliar faint smell of stale cigarette smoke and cats. Helen’s great-grandfather had been a mayor, she explained, when she saw my astonishment at the size of her home. Her parents had inherited the seven-bedroom, three-bathroom Edwardian mansion in its huge grounds. It had been built for a large family, in the days when people had servants. It wasn’t as tidy as it had once been, she added. Her parents were going to get some decorators in soon. I nodded. I’d already noticed the cracks in the ceiling, and the missing tiles in the hallway.
The vast Marsden house, with its east and west wings, butler’s pantry and butler’s lift, conservatory with broken stained-glass panels, rows of bell-pulls that no longer worked in every room, cellar, cobwebs and shadows, and wooded grounds with derelict summerhouses and swings, became my adopted home for almost two years. Though I loved my mother and father, I’d often pretend that Mr and Mrs Marsden were the real parents I’d once dreamed about. I fitted better there, I thought, than in my own home. I stayed more and more often, often for several days at a time.
My mother must have been glad to see my brothers and me making friends, but she was probably even more relieved to have us out from under her feet. She’d grown up in the country. Her houseproud mother had ushered all of her children out of their spick-and-span house whenever they were not needed to help turn the handle of the drying mangle or fold up the washing. When my mother wasn’t in Meeting she roamed the country lanes, climbed trees and played alone in the woods.
Now that we were old enough to play unsupervised, my mother would see my brothers and me across the road to the park opposite when the weather was fine, passing us a picnic bag filled with crisps and bottles of orange squash and foil parcels of sandwiches. ‘Off you go,’ she’d say. ‘I’ll have your tea on the table for five o’clock.’ Then she’d disappear back into the house with the twins.
My brothers would hammer their cricket stumps into the wide grassy spaces. Local boys we knew would drift over to take up their fielding positions. I’d take myself off into the hedges that ran along each side of the miniature railway line to look for birds’ nests, or nestle into the roots of my favourite oak tree to read my books.
I preferred reading in the Marsden woods. The Marsden boys had built a rickety treehouse. To reach it you had to climb a rope ladder and then cross a rope bridge. With the sun filtering through the cracks in the side of the treehouse, and Helen reading her book a few feet from me, I’d be back in the hold of the ark again, just as I had been in the warehouse, listening out for the sound of gulls that meant we were approaching land.
The four Marsden children – the eldest sixteen, the youngest eight – ran as wild as the family cats. Nothing was watched here, nothing tended. Nature had been left to do its own thing. Helen’s Irish mother smoked, gossiped, told stories about her life and about the elderly patients she tended in the old people’s home she ran. She would tell us anything that amused or interested her. She swore sometimes. Helen’s father, a solicitor, was quiet and shy. We didn’t see much of him.
Towards the end of my first visit, I thought I saw Helen’s mother cross herself. Then I began to notice the rosary beads and the statues of the Virgin Mary, the dusty paraphernalia of the Whore of Babylon on every mantelpiece. I tried not to look. I tried to turn my head away. The Marsdens, I realised, were Roman Catholics. Idolators, the Brethren would call them, Romanists. I’d already eaten with them. But how could they be Roman Catholics? They were so kind, and they didn’t talk about the Pope. But then, that was what Catholics were supposed to do, wasn’t it? They lured you into their traps slowly. They seduced you. Soon you’d be lost to the Lord. I determined to be vigilant. I would bring my Crusader badge and my Bible next time I came. But even though I knew they were Roman Catholic, when Helen asked if I’d come over again I said yes. One of the cats was due to have kittens any moment, she told me, and I wasn’t going to miss that.
There were at least six adult cats in the house. All summer long the children – Helen and her two brothers and older sister – discovered new litters of kittens in cavities beneath broken floorboards, in cupboards, or in the cellar. The cats were half feral, and climbed in and out of grilles in cellar walls or through broken windows, carrying their newborn kittens in their mouths. If their nests were disturbed by Helen’s little brother looking for recruits for his air assaults, the mother cats would find new hiding places for their kittens. Eventually Helen and I would track them down. Then we’d work hard to keep Helen’s brother from straying that way.
I slept in a spare bed in Helen’s room, beneath posters of Donny Osmond and David Cassidy. Helen’s mother referred to it as my bed. We played billiards with Helen’s brothers in the billiard room. Her older sister had a boyfriend and was rarely at home, so Helen and I would steal into her room in the west wing and pull out any one of the several drawers that were full of lacy underwear, half-used make-up and hair rollers, which we’d borrow to curl our hair.
Sometimes when Helen’s mother was reading a magazine in an armchair in the sitting room, scarcely visible, her hand would extend as I passed and she’d pull me onto her lap into a close and prolonged embrace. Helen would apologise, embarrassed. I didn’t mind at all, I told her. Nobody did that in our house. But I didn’t tell her that. Now that my father was often away at rehearsals, my mother was always busy running between cooking, shopping, sewing, cleaning, or doing paperwork. And we just weren’t that kind of family. Everyone in our house was usually too busy or too cross about something.
If I was visiting the Marsdens over a whole weekend, I’d stay behind when the family went to church, and read my book. But one Sunday Helen asked if I’d like to come to Mass.
‘You don’t have to actually take the sacrament,’ she said. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.
‘Church,’ Helen’s mother said in her matter-of-fact voice. ‘We can fit you in the car if you want to come.’
She said it quite casually, as if she were asking if I’d like to go bowling. She had no idea that to me being asked to go to a Catholic service was like being asked to
step into a witch’s oven.
‘You can ring your mother to ask if you like,’ she said, gesturing towards the phone.
‘I’d like to come,’ I said quickly, lowering my eyes, trying not to think of all those things the Lord had said to Satan when he’d tempted him in the wilderness. ‘I’m sure my mother won’t mind.’
After all, hadn’t my father brought a Roman Catholic home to dinner? My mother must have known. So that meant Roman Catholics were all right now. And if they were all right, then going to their church must be all right too. If God didn’t want me to go, he’d send me a sign before we got there, wouldn’t he? As we drove to the church I looked about carefully, watching out for significant arrangements of letters in passing registration plates, or crows flying in groups of five, but I didn’t notice anything.
The air in St Mary’s church was thick with candle-smoke and incense, the light dim compared to the brightness of the Anglican church or the Meeting Room. There were crucifixes everywhere. Statues of Mary holding the baby Jesus, bleeding saints, clusters of candle flames. It was beautiful and hushed. I was just looking, I told myself. Just looking. But when the chants began, and everyone spoke the words together,
Lord have Mercy
Christ have Mercy
Lord have Mercy
I began to cry, overwhelmed by the music, the hymns, the chanting, the smell of the sweet smoky incense and the flickering of the candlelight. This was not a conversion comparable to the shuddering epiphany my father had experienced when he read that last page of Mere Christianity, but it was important. I’d never been moved in a church or a Meeting Room before. For a moment I had stopped striving to understand. I felt I’d crept into the presence of something beautiful, dark and strange, something I recognised but could not name. My sobs shuddered up through me like an earthquake. Helen’s mother passed me a tissue and squeezed my hand. ‘Bless you,’ she said.
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