Later that month, Charlotte and Henry died in the freak train crash I told you about and after that, I decided that the only way to survive was to start again. If I wanted to succeed, I would have to be alone, untouchable. I could take no baggage. I could not afford to care.
Rebirth, rather than suicide, turned out to be my foolishness, to paraphrase that doctor. I did not have the single-minded strength necessary to kill myself. I was too selfish. Ultimately I did not want to die. I wanted to live. There it is. I knew that to live I had to go far away from St Albans and I had to go alone. If I stayed, I would die a slow death, eaten away from the inside by guilt and memories and regrets. Only by rejecting every element of my existence could I hope to survive. When I emerged from the spasm of grief caused by my parents’ deaths, I was cold and clear-eyed and very calculating. I had crossed a line.
The only person who knew about my decision to give you up was Evelyn, and she was furious. She came to stay again after my parents were killed. I wonder if you harbour any fleeting memories of her – she took care of you during those first weeks after the train crash. I wonder if sometimes you smell her perfume – always Chanel No 5 – and wonder why it comforts you. Do you gravitate towards redheads? Maybe you sometimes turn in the street as a throaty, saucy laugh cuts through the hubbub and wonder why it snags on your ears. Maybe the same thing happens with the elements of me that you had time to absorb. But you might have banished those.
“If you give up this child, you will never forgive yourself, Lina,” Evelyn said. She was sitting on the sofa, wound tight like a spring. I could tell she was trying to rein in her fury, to tamp it down because I was grieving. But her hands were shaking and her fingernails were buried in her palms.
“I will never forgive myself anyway,” I said.
“What are you talking about? What Robert did has nothing to do with you. You must know that. That was the war, Lina. How can you not see that after all we know? Robert was killed by the war. Don’t add to that tragedy by creating another one.”
“You don’t understand, Evelyn. How could you? Only I know the degree of my responsibility. I am guilty. I wasn’t faithful to Robert when he was away and so when he came back…”
“Stop right there,” she said, leaping to her feet. She grabbed her handbag from the table, took out her cigarettes and lit one. She breathed out deeply, closed her eyes and then walked over to sit beside me. She took my hands in hers.
“Lina, it doesn’t matter. Can’t you get that through your head? Whatever supposed treachery you are beating yourself up over, do you think it can stand against what Robert endured? Are you really that arrogant?”
She tried to smile but I knew what I knew.
“I didn’t listen to him, Evelyn. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to talk about the war at all. I was afraid of what I might say. I let him down and now everything is poisoned and I just can’t do it. I can’t be this person any more.”
“You don’t think Diane deserves her mother, however flawed?”
“I don’t think I can be her mother, Evelyn. Every time I look at her, I see him and I remember what I did and didn’t do and that is too much for a person to bear. I’m sorry but I’ve made up my mind. Please tell me you can understand. Please say you can forgive me.”
She got up and put her cigarette out in the ashtray over the mantelpiece. Slowly, deliberately she picked up a vase of lilies – flowers sent by some well-wisher to cheer me up after my parents’ deaths. She took the vase in both hands and then slowly and deliberately flung it across the room. It smashed against the wall, scattering pieces of porcelain onto the wooden floor and the cream rug. I heard you cry out in your cot upstairs.
“I’m sorry,” Evelyn whispered. ‘But you make me so angry, Lina. If you’re blind to what you have, I cannot make you see it. If you are too… selfish or scared or I don’t know what to take care of that child, that must be your decision. But don’t bloody expect me to forgive you. And no, I don’t understand you either.”
She walked out and I didn’t hear from her again for many years. I found out later that she left shortly afterwards for Asia. For all her wise words, she too wanted to run away, she too was seeking a rebirth. Was what I did that different?
Has any of this helped you understand why I gave you up, Diane? Does any of it make sense? What else can I say? I was 27. I had lived a lifetime already and I did not know what to do with all of that. I thought I was doing the right thing. I knew I could not be the mother you needed. I was crippled by grief and guilt and I might have survived one of those but I could not survive both. I had to eradicate them. I could only do that by eradicating everything that reminded me of who I had been, who I was.
After I handed you over to the lady from the adoption agency, I walked slowly up the stairs of our haunted house, sat on the bed, put a pillow over my face and screamed and screamed until I was breathless and exhausted and utterly, intoxicatingly empty. Lina Stirling was gone.
CHAPTER 19
Today, I am writing on the beach, Diane. I don’t usually like being around strangers but for some reason, I felt like stepping back in. At home, I have hardly any real friends left, but because of my daily walks through the woods around the golf course, I am on nodding terms with a number of other, mostly elderly, refugees from the world. Occasionally, we exchange a few words about the weather. These amuse-bouche conversations leave me feeling pathetically grateful. I wonder too much about these people on the periphery of my life. Where does the lady with the purple-tinted grey hair go after she finishes her energetic run around the links? What drives her to jog for hours each morning? Is she running away or running towards something? What is the young man in the dark hoodie thinking as he walks hunch-shouldered with his scowling pug? Why isn’t he in work? Where is his smile? I get enough material for a thousand books from one week of step-stepping carefully on my old lady’s feet through the muddy woods or around Verulamium Park and up to the Cathedral. It’s probably a good thing that my swollen and twisted fingers can no longer keep pace with my imagination. Who needs another book from me? Surely I have said enough.
The sand is warm under my outstretched legs. I am sitting beside the seawall, below the promenade where people are strolling loose-limbed and eating ice creams. I need the wall’s support for my back and I prefer to know there is no one behind me. Years of frontline journalism have given me an irrational fear of what cannot be seen. Behind you, in the dead zone, is where the fighter will be lining up his sights on your back. That is where the RPG will come from. That is where the rebel soldier will be unsheathing his knife ready to creep up on you. There is nothing I fear more than footsteps behind me. This fear is more acute than ever now as I realise I cannot outrun anyone. And so I have taken to regularly glancing over my shoulder as I walk. At my age, that’s not as easy as it sounds because I have to stop and turn my whole body. Even paranoia becomes trickier with age.
For Robert, the danger zone always seemed to be up ahead, over the hill, in the trees. I used to catch him scanning the horizon, any horizon, his eyes flitting from side-to-side, assessing the dangers concealed in the rolling hills of Hertfordshire, among the trees of Nomansland or on a busy high street. I once asked him what he was looking for. “Answers,” he said, with a sad smile. “But they are so well hidden.”
I’ve brought a thermos of white wine to the beach to keep me going. These wonderful contraptions work just as well on cold drinks as on hot ones and I threw in a few ice-cubes to be sure. It feels deliciously naughty to be drinking wine out of a shallow plastic cup in the middle of the day. Such little tricks please me. They salve my sense of indignity at being such a lonely-old-lady cliché.
In front of me, there is a French family. The parents are in their 40s, but French 40s so she has a trim waist, immaculately tanned legs and a bare face that lacks the laughter wrinkles that snare the features of other nationalities. She is wearing a bright yellow bikini and her toenails are also painted yellow. He has grey hair,
a firm stomach and strong legs. If anything lets him down, it is just the slight wobble of fat on his underarms. He is reading a paper. It looks like Le Monde. Heavy material for such a sunny, frivolous day. A blonde-haired teenage girl is stretched out gloriously on her own towel. She is with them but apart. She stares resolutely at the sea, I assume; I cannot see her eyes behind her oversized sunglasses. A much younger boy, maybe six or seven, is building sandcastles. They seem happy but it’s hard to tell. There is little interaction; each is enjoying the beach in their own way. Every now and then, the mother tilts her head towards the daughter. She looks as though she wants to say something but she doesn’t. Every now and then, the boy looks hopefully at his father. He looks as though he wants to say something but he doesn’t. There is nothing obviously wrong here but everything could be wrong. We are always on the fault line between the commonplace and catastrophe.
Once upon a time, I would have jotted down some notes about this family, describing their languid ease, their clothes, their features. I would’ve noted down snippets of dialogue – my French is quite up to the task. I might even have sketched them. I would have taken their essence and distilled it through my own and then I would have had a sentence, then two, then a paragraph. I would head home, put the pages in the black-and-white box I call my magpie emporium and a few months later, I would find that this unremarkable family had muscled their way into my mind, demanding a rebirth, insisting I bring to life the secret desires and yearnings that only I, the omniscient writer, had been able to see.
Today, though, this family is safe. I no longer play God with everyone’s lives. I will not create a tight-lipped conversation between the suspicious wife, the philandering husband and the truculent teenager, who has just found out she is pregnant. I will let them be, let them live their own private dramas, unexploited.
I published my last book six years ago in 1991. Technically, it was a novella. That had not been my intention but I was already finding it increasingly difficult to summon the faith and blind ambition needed to build new worlds in my head and recreate them on paper. My imagination was not at fault but my concentration was no longer up to the task. A chronic case of self-doubt, I suppose. As my physical relevance faded, I was starting to question the relevance of my work. Not what I had done, you understand, but whether there was any point in doing more.
I wonder if you read that novella, The Starfish and the Pearl? Critics were harsh: they said my pseudo fairy tale rang hollow, that it lacked depth and was – this hurt the most but it also made me laugh – ill-conceived. The book was a metaphor for my short relationship with you. I am the starfish because they too can survive when a part of their body is removed. You are the pearl. I wrote the book in a kind of frenzy over two months. It was certainly a work of indulgence. I gave it the ending we never had.
After I gave you up for adoption at the end of 1947, I threw myself into creating a new life. I had given up my past and lost my stake in the future and so I resolved to live exclusively in the present. I did what I wanted when I wanted. I had no fear of consequences because I had no fear of pain. I was utterly liberated.
I moved to London, took a room in a creaking, leaking boarding house in Kensington and dropped Robert’s surname. I partied too long, and drank too much and smoked too heavily and slept with sad men who had come home from the war to find they no longer loved their wives, with dangerous men who had never really come back and never would, and with suave men who had had a ‘good war’. I slept with any man who wanted me until, eventually, I realised that the money I had got from selling our house and my parents’ home was running out far too quickly even for someone with my limited interest in the long term.
One cold morning in February 1948, I woke early in a stranger’s apartment in the City. I had only the fuzziest idea of the identity of the man sprawled jelly-belly down on the bed beside me, and less interest in finding out. I dressed in the dark, picked up my shoes and tiptoed out, my head throbbing and my blood still pulsing with toxins.
I made my way around St Paul’s Cathedral, treading carefully on the wet cobblestones. The church rose above me but I did not care to raise my eyes. St Paul’s had become too iconic an image, representing what they were calling the spirit of the Blitz, a kind of fantasy stoicism I neither remembered nor wished to commemorate.
I wandered down Fleet Street, smoking a cigarette and wondering idly where I might go to begin the cycle anew in the evening. To be honest, I was exhausted, worn out trying to maintain the hedonism I had adopted as my new religion. A woman in a blue coat came towards me, pushing a wailing pram. The baby’s cries cut through the fug of booze and smoke and the shield of deliberate unfeeling that I carried with me everywhere. The woman stopped and leaned into the pram to adjust the covers and to stroke her keening child’s cheek. She was haggard in the way only new mothers can be, her face all pallid flesh, dark shadows and loose lines. Then she smiled down at the child and she was transformed. I remembered the superhuman energy it took to create that look of love when all you wanted to do was lie down, close your eyes and go to sleep. A vivid memory of your face creasing up as you began to cry ambushed me.
I stumbled off the kerb and onto the road. A car honked furiously as I dashed to the other side, my heels listing under the weight of my self-induced panic. I mustn’t allow myself to be caught unawares, I thought angrily. Usually, I steered clear of families, babies and especially mothers. I would see them coming from a distance and change course immediately. My London was the London of the childless – I avoided parks with playgrounds, streets with toy stores, doctors’ surgeries and churches. Part of my rebirth involved reshaping my world and deliberately Pied-Pipering the children away. You have to remember, Diane. I was engaged in a battle to survive and the biggest threat came from within.
As I stepped up onto the pavement, I turned to wave apologetically at the cars I had dodged and I clattered into a short man. As he pulled his face out of my chest, I realised I was looking down at Peterson and he was looking where he had always looked. A few seconds later, after he’d raised his eyes, he gasped, “Lina, Lina Rose. Fancy bumping into you here?”
For a few seconds, I just gawped like a tongue-tied teenager. I felt as though worlds were colliding around me, that I might fall down whatever magic portal had deposited this human anamnesis before me.
“Sorry, goodness this is so bizarre,” I said. “I’m afraid I wasn’t looking where I was going. Are you alright?”
He smiled broadly, those fleshy lips curling back from his teeth.
“Of course, of course. But how wonderful to see you. What a coincidence. What are you doing here? I thought you were in St Albans. I heard about your husband… and your parents. I’m so sorry.”
I stifled a gasp.
“How did you hear?”
I was genuinely perplexed. I had thought the tragedies of 1947 were mine alone. I had felt so isolated during those awful months that I could barely believe that others were aware of what had happened. It seemed somehow indecent. These were my traumas.
“I work for the Gazette,” he said, licking his lips as he used to do when he was particularly proud of something. “We hear a lot of things from our colleagues at local papers up and down the country. After it all stopped, I decided that I might as well use my wartime skills on civvy street and so when the Ministry shut down, I applied for a job and now I’m one of the home editors. I didn’t really know what else to do. No other skills to speak of. The money’s not great but I can’t complain, not with all the men looking for jobs.”
There was a new humility about him as though peace had punctured the mini-dictator syndrome that the Ministry had allowed to flourish. Peterson, like everyone else, had had to bounce back into shape. We were a nation of contractions and constrictions after the war.
“Can I buy you a cup of tea? Or coffee?” he said quickly. “Listen, I know we had our differences before but it’s so bloody nice to see someone who lived it too, someone who knew t
he others, who understands. I don’t feel like I can talk to anyone else about what we did. Sounds so trivial, you know, with everyone coming back with half their limbs, or horrible wounds, or worse. Can you spare half an hour? There’s a place just near the office, not too bad.”
I said yes. I said yes to everything then. My days were an endless search for oblivion through mindless interaction with people I didn’t care too much about. I didn’t care that he was already focusing on my chest again. I didn’t care that I had disliked him intensely when I worked at the Ministry. I was perfectly content to have a cup of tea with him. It was just another way to kill some more of my endless time.
When he asked me, surprisingly delicately, about Robert and my parents, I said: “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about those things.”
I was ever the deceiver, Diane, and grief is a great enabler. I could hide my sins under a cloak of stoic sorrow and no one would be any the wiser.
“Of course. I’m sorry. How insensitive of me,” he gabbled. “It’s just you find some people do want to talk about it all. They say it can help. But of course, that doesn’t hold true for everyone. Women are different too.”
He hadn’t changed entirely.
We talked a little about Sarah’s birthday and what happened that night.
“I always thought Penrose would make it,” he said, shaking his head. “He seemed somehow indestructible, having been through the Great War and all that. But I guess that’s the thing. There’s no accounting for luck.”
I stirred my tea, avoiding his eyes.
“I’m sorry. I know you were friends. And with Sarah.”
I looked up sharply but I saw no guile.
“You might be surprised to know that I was supposed to come along to the restaurant too that night. I know you all hated me but Sarah was always too kind. I decided to have a little nap before getting ready – couldn’t sleep with all the sirens the night before – and next thing I knew it was midnight. I didn’t find out what had happened until I got to the Ministry the next morning. I knew, of course, there’d been some hits across town but I never guessed. Makes you think, doesn’t it.”
The Reckoning Page 20