Vanessa and Helen, Helen and Vanessa … Vanessa was the elder by two years, born just after ten o’clock on the evening of July 30, 1966, the day England beat West Germany in the World Cup. The one and only time! You couldn’t forget that day: those jubilant hours, the black-and-white television bringing forth its frail, unlikely pictures, and Cathy walking stiffly around the sitting room, pressing her hand into her lower back, her groans mixed now in his memory with the roars from Wembley Stadium—and there, a little later, Vanessa was, jaundiced and moist, furrowed with folds, most loved because the first. “Only the best for her.” A lucky girl. But as she got older, she became harder to embrace, awkward, softly distant. She didn’t or wouldn’t fit—like Alice in Wonderland, either too tall or too short. It was the divorce that changed everything. After Cathy walked out, Vanessa withdrew. The girls dealt differently with that catastrophe. Always fierce, Helen sided with her father and accused her mother, who had, after all, left Alan for Another Man, of being “obsessed with sex.” (She was only thirteen, poor thing.) Vanessa was different. She took no sides, just went quiet; seemed to absorb all the consequences of the event, and disappeared from sight. She was always upstairs in that damn bedroom of hers, where she lay on her bed and read: massively, widely, seriously—novels, poetry, philosophy, feminism, even ecology. He had never heard of most of her authors; sometimes he thought she chose the most obscure people she could, just to spite him.
In happier times, Alan and Cathy had loved to observe the differences between their daughters. How often, in the evening, when other conversation faltered, the two parents talked about “the girls,” with the kind of fanatical wonderment—monotonous but somehow never boring!—that revolutionaries must lavish on their plans for the future. Helen was exuberant, playful, disobedient, physical; Vanessa was shy, gentle, slow to anger, studious, very private. For a while, these differences seemed provisional, part of the scramble of growing up; everything was potential. But eventually, so Alan discovered, the child’s feet stop growing, her trousers don’t need to be let out anymore, her handwriting has the form it will have for the rest of her life, her bedsheets bear the occasional but unmistakable bloodstains of new adolescence—and, as if suddenly, while you were not properly attending to the matter (or so it seemed to him now), while you were too busy with your own foolish crises, your daughter became an adult, and those qualities that had seemed malleable were now hardened and fixed. Both girls were full of will, but while Helen’s willfulness seemed to bring her pleasure, Vanessa’s brought her unhappiness. She seemed so keen to mess up her own chances. That was the phrase he kept on reciting to himself in those days. Why did she want to mess up her own chances? Why didn’t Van invite any school friends over to the house? Didn’t she have any friends? She said she wanted to put herself forward for the school debating society, but it never happened. It was the same with the school orchestra, the school play. All her pastimes were solitary: reading, playing the piano or the flute, listening to music, writing poems. (Poems mostly full of despair and lament: one of them was especially horrifying, it seemed to be about some unrequited crush on a boy, and it ended with a line he would never forget, about wanting to “jump from a high wall onto a hard pavement”; these poems greatly alarmed her parents when they discovered them in a notebook hidden under her mattress.) Later, a student at Oxford, Vanessa decided that she would give away all her possessions; a friend was so worried about her stability that she reported her to the university health services, who contacted Alan and Cathy. Helen spoke so easily to adults, confident in her ability to charm; Vanessa held back, in a gesture that seemed to combine—worst of all worlds—judgment and fear. Helen was naturally joyful; Van needed to be reminded of that category of human experience. And one day, you realize that your children’s differences are not only temperamental and biological, but also moral and political, that each has a very distinct worldview. One day—he remembered it well—you witness your elder daughter, now seventeen, firmly lecturing her younger sister about the misery of life and the cruelty of all human beings, of all life, holding up a book her father had no idea she possessed, George Ryley Scott’s History of Torture, waving it around, and saying: “Read this, read this, Helen, and you won’t have any doubts about it!”
Is that how it had been? Her childhood a torture?