My father’s desertion had left chaos behind, our misery compounded by the intrusions of strangers. Suddenly there were all these new people in our lives, like Miss Rader, the county welfare worker, with her buckteeth and her clipboard, and Mr. Coleman, her supervisor, who sometimes drove my mother to the office in Canton to fill out forms but just as often brought them to the house and questioned her in the living room: was anybody else contributing to the family finances—any relation, lodger, boyfriend she had not declared? Was she the expected beneficiary of any will or trust, had she at any time traded food stamps for alcohol, tobacco, or proscribed substances? What was her job history, how would she describe her marketable skills? What had she done with the Medicaid forms they’d sent her? Once, for no reason I could think of, Miss Rader yanked up my T-shirt to show Mr. Coleman how skinny I was; for weeks afterward I burned with shame at the memory.
Then the Methodists started coming around, with their casseroles of beans, or franks and beans, brown food in ugly brown Crock-Pots, but it gave them the right to ask my mother if there’d been trouble with other women, if my father had ever “messed around” with young girls. Meanwhile Adam was hiding behind the door in his underpants, listening in. I waited for my mother to tell those women to mind their own business, and anyway we were Catholics—my father’s religion—but she just looked around helplessly, as though searching for answers in the dustballs on the carpet. “Not so’s far as I know,” was all she said.
“He never did that, I know he didn’t,” I hissed to Adam, but his perfect trust in me had vanished along with our father, he didn’t believe in my omniscience anymore. My assurances that wherever Daddy was he would never stop loving us no longer sounded convincing even to me.
Mrs. Roy hoped to reclaim my mother for Protestantism. Adam and I were made to go to Bible class and sing “Jesus is my sunshine” with runny-nosed kids half our age. Mrs. Kinney was always squatting down to peer into our faces, her breath smelling of Luden’s cherry cough drops. Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam, she said, and was I doing enough to help poor Mommy with the housework? They said Adam was the man of the house now; they told him Mr. Eberhard, their pastor, had been the sole support of his widowed mother from the age of nine, rising at dawn to go from house to house lighting people’s boilers.
Instead of going home after school, I started haunting the squat concrete library on Main Street, where at least I’d be left alone. Under the indifferent gaze of the librarian, I’d head for the back section, where the grown-up books were, looking for kindly faces or pretty pictures on the jackets. That’s how I stumbled on the novels of Miss Read, their covers showing the hedgerows and damson trees and duck ponds my father used to conjure up. In that pastoral English idyll good always prevailed, and even the poor were devoid of malice. There were no sixteen-year-old boys driving around in pickup trucks looking for skunks or rabbits or even dogs to shoot. None of the women told stories of their husbands’ filthy sexual habits, or talked about the jigaboos and the crooked Jew lawyers down in the city. A comforting benevolence prevailed. That, I thought, was how it was in England.
A while later I graduated to Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice and the novels of Trollope, who filled up a whole metal shelf toward the back of the building. And past Leon Uris, just before you got to the Woodworking and Home Repairs section, was Brideshead Revisited, which seemed to me more tragic and exalted than anything. I had never heard of Anglophilia, I thought my worshipful fervor was unique to me, every banal revelation I came to was mine alone.
Of course Sidworth wasn’t Pemberley, it wasn’t Brideshead—there were no gazebos, no swans or private chapels, not even a long sweep of drive; it was not a castle but a large pale Jacobean manor house, with curved gables jutting upward from the roof—but still it was closer than anything I’d ever seen. I couldn’t look at Isabel directly, I heard myself talking to her in a falsely breezy voice, as though to show I wasn’t overawed…as though I was used to ancient-looking studded doors and mullioned windows, to paneled entry halls with vast fireplaces and carved oak staircases twisting upward. In fact it wasn’t thrilling to be there, to see her in that setting, but weirdly painful; I felt too agitated to take it in properly. Certainly it didn’t help that Helena, when Isabel brought me to her study, turned her head a bare few inches, nodded at me once, and went back to dictating into a tape recorder. We backed out in silence: only when we were out on the terraced lawn, heading toward what Isabel called her “patch,” did she refer to it. “I’m sorry she was so horrid, but she knows about Julian, you see. She thinks you might report back to him.”
“It’s okay…She reminds me of those pictures of Edith Sitwell.”
The “patch” turned out to be an enclosed precinct within the grounds, five minutes’ walk from the house; her mother had signed over to her what used to be the home of the gardener in her grandfather’s time, a cottage and garden and small orchard contained within faded red brick walls. We stepped through an oval door into the orchard, its rows of twisted apple trees just coming into blossom, with clumps of lavender fanning out around their roots. Along the far wall, past the trees, were scattered clumps of pink lilies; to the right was a high iron gate, painted white, between two brick pillars topped by chipped stone lions.
She led me through the overgrown grass down the rows of trees, touching them lightly as she named each one: Laxton’s Superb, Ribston Pippin: old varieties, she said, not disease-proof the way the newer strains were, but in the autumn she would pick the healthy fruit and make chutney and apple butter. She yanked, frowning, at the ivy that was growing up the nearest wall: “there’s nothing so destructive to brick as ivy, but I can’t seem to get it under control.” Then, when we passed through the gate into her garden, she took me from rose to rose. Blush Noisette was wonderfully reliable, she told me, it bloomed and bloomed and never gave any trouble. Glory John was prone to brown spot, but its scent was her favorite. Altissimo was blowsy, a little vulgar, but she loved its scarlet color. Madame Alfred Carrière was very accommodating, requiring less sun than the others. “If you ever need a rose for a north wall, do keep her in mind.”
Something violent flared in me then. Did she really not know there were people in the world who would never need a rose for a north wall, who might live in dreary bedsits forever, like Mr. Bleaney, and that I might be one of them? Was she so unaware that other people, most people, had to get through life without owning orchards, without the certainties that were her fucking birthright? For the past year, we’d been maintaining the polite fiction that we were equals; now I saw how false that was—and how conscious she must have been of its falseness, that was the worst part. All along she’d been humoring me.
“Thanks for the tip,” I said, heavily sarcastic. “Madame Alfred Carrière. Great for a north wall. I’ll make a note of it, I’m sure it’ll come in handy any day now.”
She stared at me, a tremor passed over her face. But all she said was, “Why don’t you sit down. I’ll go make the tea.” So I sat at the weathered table in the corner of the garden, under a flowering tree, consciously inhaling the smell as though it were part of a yoga ritual: breath in, breath out, calm down. In a few minutes she emerged again, with a wooden tray bearing a small flowered teapot and two brown mugs. “Maddy gave me this teapot,” she said, in a high brittle voice. “For my tenth birthday. Maddy was the woman I thought of as my real mother. She killed herself just before I turned twelve. Do you take sugar?”
Like Julian, her hands shook when she was angry; I had never had occasion to notice that before. For a second we bristled at each other, one step from outright rancor, but we stopped short.
“Okay,” I said. “I get it. You didn’t grow up in Paradise.”
“Not exactly.”
“It’s just that this place looks more like the Garden of Eden than anything I’ve ever seen.”
“And you know how that story ended.”
“Maddy was the one who died just before they took that photo you showed me.”
She nodded.
“But…but why?”
And so she told me. Later that night, when she’d opened the bottle of wine I’d brought, it was my turn to reminisce about my childhood. I wouldn’t be there, I said—in England, in Devon, at Sidworth—if it hadn’t been for my father. “So that’s something. We should drink to him for that.”
She was stirring tomatoes and basil and chicken breasts in a pot on the stove, the little radio next to the sink was playing Chopin nocturnes, when I asked, “What about your father? I asked Julian about him once, and he nearly bit my head off. But he took that picture of you, didn’t he, on your birthday?”
“He’s dead now,” she said. “Oh, damn, I forgot the garlic.” She went into the pantry and emerged with a few loose cloves.
“You never seem to talk about him.”
“I didn’t really see him much after he went to London. A few times a year.”
“What about Julian? Did he see him?”
She frowned down at the cookbook. “Not very often. I don’t think I have any stock cubes, I’ll have to make do with water.”
I went to sleep that night in Lucy’s sky-blue room, in a high iron bed covered in a faded quilt, surrounded by David Bowie posters and paintings of dogs and horses. The next morning we made a circuit of woods and lake and a meadow full of poppies; there were swaths of purple foxgloves in the woods and water birds skimming the surface of the lake, creating ripples of light. When we got back to the cottage, the phone was ringing in the living room.
“I can’t, Mother, that would be extremely rude…No, I can’t. Tell him I’ll see him next time…That’s not a very nice thing to say. I’m sure he won’t mind. I’m not the one he came to see, after all. But make my excuses, won’t you, and give him my love.”
“I gather that was your mother,” I said, when she came into the kitchen.
“That’s right. Who has just put the phone down on me.”
“What was it you were refusing to do?”
“Come to dinner tonight. Alone—that was the sticking point. Because Roger’s going to be there, he’s coming over from Oxford just for the night.”
“Who’s Roger?”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, with a grimace, “as a matter of fact he’s Julian’s father.” She marched to the sink and filled the kettle, the noise of water rushing into metal making speech impossible. Her mouth was pursed into a thin line; I thought she might be regretting having told me, so I left her there and went into the garden. But soon she brought out a tray with Maddy’s teapot and two mugs. As we sat among the roses, the wood pigeons moaning monotonously in the distance, I heard the next part of the story.
Helena claimed she’d meant to tell them all when they were old enough. It was Sasha going off the rails that forced her hand. Sasha, who had been her favorite—everyone’s favorite—and was now causing havoc in the household, climbing out windows at night to meet the local yobbos at the bottom of the drive, bringing them back to the house when everyone was asleep. In the morning there were sticky puddles of beer on the sitting room carpet, and a sweet heavy smell hung in the air. Small items went missing—a silver cigarette case, an Art Deco paper knife. Helena was ready to phone the police, but Sasha insisted she’d taken them herself: “I had to raise some money, din’t I, to help Sally out; her mum’s thrown her out the house and she had no money to doss down anywhere.” She had adopted the vernacular of her new friends, and their reproachful whine. Helena threatened her with boarding schools in Scotland, but she wouldn’t be cowed. “Go on then. I could run away easier from there than here, counnit I?”
Isabel was studying for her Cambridge entrance exams, but Alice kept summoning her to the lab for little briefings from Helena. She was supposed to relay certain urgent messages to Sasha on their mother’s behalf: “She must understand that she is jeopardizing not only her academic future but her entire mental development”…“You must make her see that so far from being her enemy, as she seems to imagine, I am trying to stop her from doing irrevocable damage to herself.” Instead, Isabel went and pleaded with Sasha to tell her what was wrong. “Poor Issy, doesn’t understand a fucking thing, does she,” Sasha said, her face stony with contempt.
On the day the headmistress phoned to say Sasha hadn’t shown up (though Mark had driven her to the school door as usual), Isabel was summoned yet again, but this time Helena began by reassuring her that she’d been a perfectly satisfactory infant, even quite advanced for her age. Then she got to the point. Marvelous though he’d been in the war, she said, she’d realized that Isabel’s father was not the ideal man to sire her children. Not an intellect of the first order, and she couldn’t count on being lucky a second time. “There were many men like that, they performed the most extraordinary feats of bravery, they really were transformed, but once it was over they sank back into ordinariness again. Rather sad really to have passed one’s peak so young. Not that there’s anything sad about your father. Such a cheerful person.”
Fortunately, she went on, she had some very remarkable friends. She hoped Isabel understood her meaning.
That was one of the times Isabel really hoped she was getting things wrong.
She had been perfectly honest with Roger, Helena went on, she’d assured him he’d have no obligation to the child, Teddy would assume it was his—here Isabel interrupted her; she’d rather not hear any more, she said, she couldn’t listen to this. But Helena swatted that away. “I was simply offering him a chance for his genes to survive him.” Roger was the object of the actress’s question, the time she’d asked Isabel if she thought that man over there was drunk or merely vile: a fellow of All Souls, a frequent panelist on The Brains Trust, universally described as brilliant. Isabel had always been a little afraid of him; she’d hated the mocking way he talked to her father when her father tried to engage him in conversation: “A very interesting article in the paper the other day, by a terribly clever chap who thinks we’ll be colonizing Mars in the not too distant future,” her father would say, and Roger would inquire loudly, so everyone could share the joke, just when this great event would occur, or how exactly the clever chap knew.
Now Helena’s voice changed, she became girlish and confiding. Did Isabel remember a man called Geoffrey Stonemarsh, she asked, and seemed annoyed that she didn’t. Isabel had adored him, she said, he used to put her on his shoulders and take her for walks in the garden. He’d been so strong, she remembered, smiling dreamily, and yet so sweet, and eager. There was something very innocent about him, she said meaningfully, from which Isabel deduced he’d been a virgin. Being a virgin herself, she told me wryly, and in a panic at having to hear all this, she stood and said she was leaving, but Helena blocked her way, gripping her arm hard. “Don’t be so childish,” she said, there was a good reason she was telling the story now.
She had sent Isabel’s father away, to see the solicitors in London; she had even given the servants the night off. They’d had a magical time together, she said; she’d given him tea in a glass, in the Russian style, and told him about her mother. And he had told her about his childhood on the Isle of Man, and about his younger sister, how clever she was, she was studying maths at Bristol. He still missed the sea, he said, so they went there the next morning, after their magical night, and made love again in her favorite spot on the sands. “Why do I have to know all this?” Isabel protested. She wanted her to understand, Helena said, that her decision was not untinged with sentiment.
Did Geoffrey Stonemarsh also know that his genes had been perpetuated, Isabel asked, and Helena said no, soon after that last visit to Sidworth, he’d left the country, to take up a post in Melbourne, and she hadn’t wanted to inform him in a letter. Now, however, having acquired a wife and two children while in Australia, he was back in England, in a professorship at Manchester.
In fact, she said, he was doing some very remarkable work in genetics, people said he was bound to get the Nobel one of these days. “It’s time Sasha understood what sort of genes she’s carrying. You have to speak to her.”
And why must Isabel do it?
Because, Helena said majestically, she would take it much better coming from Isabel, Sasha was too implacably hostile to her to listen to anything she had to say. (“Actually, I think she was a bit afraid of Sasha just then.”)
She wouldn’t do it, Isabel said hysterically, she couldn’t, it was a terrible thing to ask of her, and besides, who knew what the shock would do to Sasha, she was so fragile right then. Very well, Helena said, she’d have no choice but to send Sasha away. “I cannot have my work disrupted like this.” She picked up a brochure from her lab table, from a clinic for disturbed adolescents; she’d already spoken to a prominent expert, she said, who’d advised that electric shock therapy proved very effective in such cases. You can’t do that, Isabel said, her voice cracking, you’ll destroy her, but Helena said she most certainly could, it was precisely what she’d do if Isabel refused to cooperate. And was she supposed to tell Julian too, Isabel asked wildly, why not, maybe she could go to Harrow and break the news about Roger. “Don’t be tiresome,” Helena said.
In the end Isabel caved in, and the very next day went to Sasha to explain about her precious chromosomes. “I’d been up half the night rehearsing my little speech, trying to cast the story in the best possible light. I said how Mother had wanted a special child, and that’s what Sasha was, she’d always been special, but she just stared at me with her mad red eyes. ‘So Mum was putting it about, that’s what you’re telling me,’ she said. ‘And she calls me a slut.’ Then she started to laugh, she was rocking back and forth on the bed laughing.
“Later she came to my room to ask if he knew about her, and I had to tell her he didn’t, he’d been in Australia when she was born. ‘So where is he now?’ she asked, and when I told her she made a face. ‘If he’s such a genius, he ought to be at Oxbridge.’ It just shows, doesn’t it, that she was Mother’s daughter to the last. An intellectual snob. ‘Still,’ she said, ‘maybe I’ll go look him up. Scare the hell out of him.’ ”
Isabel was in her first month at Cambridge when Sasha phoned to announce that she’d seen him. “It was late at night, she told the college porter it was an emergency and made him fetch me to the phone. So there I was, in my nightgown, standing in the freezing hallway in my bare feet, talking in a whisper so I wouldn’t wake anyone up. She’d gone to his office at the university and confronted him. ‘I even took out a little notebook and pretended to take notes,’ she said. ‘I asked him how old his grandparents were when they died, all sorts of shit like that. Whether there was any cancer in the family, heart disease, the whole bit. I did everything but examine his teeth.’ ”
And then, it seemed, he told her about his sister, the one who had been studying maths at Bristol when she was conceived. “Her name is Sally, and guess what? She’s completely barking, she’s been in and out of the bin for years. What kind of balls-up was that? I ask you. Little bit negligent about her research, Mum was that time. One of these days I should really ferret out the auntie, take her for a stroll or a hit of acid or something. We’d probably have a fabulous time together.”
The next time Sasha phoned it was from a private clinic in Dorset: she had slit her wrists at the school for delinquents that Helena had sent her to, and been remanded there under court order. “But she’d phoned to reminisce. Even when she was four years old she used to be nostalgic for the snowdrops when they went. Or the snow when it melted. Or the nursery chair that had broken. That night she wanted to talk about Bax the donkey, how he grieved when Sam the mule died, because they’d always been pastured together.
“Then she said a girl at the clinic reminded her of Maddy—the same pale skin, she said, with a flush under it, and she wore her hair pulled back the same way. I’d forgotten that, about Maddy’s skin, but she always remembered everything. She’d been thinking how bad I must have felt when Maddy died, she said, she was sorry, and did I ever find out why she did it.”
“So did you tell her?”
She shook her head. “There didn’t seem much point in piling on more revelations about Mother’s love life. ‘I realized today she was the first person I ever knew who died,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ve been missing her ever since. Do you think that could be what’s wrong with me, I’m grieving for Maddy? Like Bax and Sam?’ It might not be Maddy she was grieving for, I said, maybe she was just grieving, and she got angry with me: people had to grieve for something, she said, nobody could just grieve, except maybe God. And then she said good night and hung up.
“For years she went back and forth to those clinics: two months out, three, once as long as six, but it never lasted. She’d have a bad trip on acid, she’d stay awake for days writing out equations or trying to decode the signals she was getting from weather reports or pop lyrics or railway timetables. It was as if her mind was being stretched farther and farther, she said, way outside her, right to where infinity started, she couldn’t pull it back. First they called her schizophrenic, but later the diagnosis changed; she was manic-depressive, they said, except that didn’t quite fit either, because of the delusions. The voices telling her she had to die. Schizoaffective disorder was the one that stuck, everyone could agree on that, it covered all her symptoms. But naming it didn’t cure her. They kept trying her on different pills, the latest drug, the miracle worker, only there were no miracles, so they’d revert to the old ones again, Thorazine, or lithium, in some new incarnation. They’d tweak her dosage, switch from Jungian to art therapy to Gestalt, give her rag dolls to stab, with photos of our faces on them. And for a day or a week or a month it seemed to work: she was all better now, she’d tell me, she’d finally found it, the peace that passeth understanding. But the voices always came back.”