If there is one incident which best captures the relationship between Grace and Hungry Paul, it was when he received a fiver in a birthday card for the first time as a young boy. He stuffed it into that strange pocket-within-a-pocket that denim jeans have: a narrow, impractical feature barely wide enough for a finger. Grace, who was three years older, took him off to the shops to spend it on E numbers and comics. On the way, Hungry Paul spotted one of the neighbourhood boys, probably one of the football-playing jocks who normally ignored him or worse, and called him over, excited to have something to show off for once. In fishing out the note from his ridiculous pocket he tore it in half. The other boy gave a short derisive snort then kicked the ball ahead of him and chased it down the hill, leaving Hungry Paul standing there, frozen with baffled disappointment. Before he had time to compute this latest failure, Grace handed him a new fiver and took the old torn one. He ran after the boy with the ball, delighted with himself and forgetting to thank Grace, who hurried after him in case he went onto the road without looking.
Like all eldest children, Grace had been an only child for a time, and thrived under the warm lamp of undivided parental attention; but when Hungry Paul was brought home from the hospital after some delays for tests, she welcomed him with open sisterly enthusiasm. By the time he was a toddler, she was old enough to help look after him in little unsupervised ways, which usually involved rescuing him from himself, as he was a boy who tended to lean with his fingers in the hinges of doors, stick his head into railings and swallow wine gums without chewing them first.
In primary school she was clever, hardworking and well behaved, all of the things a teacher’s child should be, though her natural charm and sense of fun largely protected her from the pitfalls of that role. It wasn’t all easy. In the early years at school her best friend was a gentle, imaginative boy called Frederick, who devised fantastical games and babbled with inspirational enthusiasm about dinosaurs and outer space. (He pointed out that we didn’t need to go to space as that’s where we live: ‘Where do you think the Earth is, dummy?’) After a couple of years Frederick changed school even though his parents weren’t moving house. Grace was bereft. Even worse, everyone else in the class had settled into little groups in the meantime, and Grace was left friendless. She dreaded lunchtimes, hoping to delay as long as possible eating her sandwich and fairy bun so that she had less time alone in the schoolyard. It is not hard to see how Grace became the family’s slow eater—every family has one.
Loneliness begets loneliness. As an unattached kid she was not an exciting prospect for other children and so, without anyone doing anything in particular, it became a ‘thing’ that she was just someone who had no friends. She contrasted herself with Hungry Paul who she could see in his junior yard, alone as usual and wandering around inside his own head, except that he seemed at peace with his situation, protected by his own obliviousness.
During that period, which lasted almost a year but felt as long as the Ottoman Empire, Grace wandered around the yard on her own and at times, out of sheer frustration, she would run around as if to create the illusion of being chased. Once she slipped and fell on the stony old tarmac and grazed the width of her palm, the cut becoming a mix of light blood and small stones that would be painful to clean. Too embarrassed to be asked why she was running by herself, she hid it from the teacher and cleaned it later on at home herself, inexpertly. Helen asked her about it at bedtime but was deflected with vagueness, a pattern that would play out more regularly later, during the teenage years.
Grace’s position turned on a tragic event. Gary Crowe, a nine-year-old wannabe fireman who sat at Grace’s table in school, died in an accident at home. His father was a mechanic and had been working on an engine on a hoist in his garage when he went off to buy some spare parts. Gary had swung from the chain on the hoist and pulled the engine down on top of himself. Gary’s death stunned the whole class. The shock of the story found resonance in the nightmares of the children who knew him, where it was all too readily reimagined at bedtime after lights out. Two dozen sets of parents spent the next month calmly explaining that there was nothing to worry about and that it was just an accident and that beds and houses and garages were perfectly safe places. For now, the kids were spared the true horror of imagining what Gary’s parents were going through.
The tragedy galvanised the class and reset its social structure. The playground rules and cliques were shattered, as everybody played with everybody else, barely conscious of the survival instincts that were driving them to disregard their differences. Grace, who felt socially thawed by this change, immersed herself in what she felt might be a short-lived opportunity and laughed at other people’s jokes, played their games and suppressed her own minor preferences in favour of her major preference for being included.
Those friends that Grace made at primary school were ‘survival friends’ rather than real friendships—none of them would be at the wedding—but they helped her to steady herself and begin to like herself again. They lasted her through secondary school during which time she started to individuate by immersing herself in student communism, Inspector Morse novels, Judee Sill albums, and by taking long, long, long walks that would have any conscientious parent checking news bulletins. Her teenage years were exploratory and, broadly speaking, mild tempered. While there were some mood swings and a bit of door slamming, it seemed she was just trying all that out of curiosity, sensing that she had some wild cards that it would be a shame to leave unplayed.
Her relationship with Helen was at its most difficult during those years. Grace and Helen had always been close and had an intuitive communication channel through which they shared jokes, looks, hints and understandings, like a vaudeville double act that had learned each other’s side of the routine to a transcendental level. During her teenage years, and without any identifiable starting point, Grace tuned out from Helen and instead turned inwards. She became hard to reach and connect with. Though not unhappy or sullen, she sought nourishment from within herself, in her nascent ideas and emerging preferences—it was simply not something Helen could share in. As the eldest child, everything new to Grace was new to her parents, and Helen perhaps suffered from the classic teacher’s mistake of thinking that, when it came to children, she had seen it all. The more she tried to reach Grace the more she compounded her lack of understanding of her.
As is so often the case, when one parent struggles the other steps forward, parenting being a team sport played by individuals. Peter, who could be deep and introspective himself, became closer to Grace during that period. He had always been a friendly and warm presence in her life—biting the bruises off her bananas or letting her pluck the hair in his ears—but at times he had been guilty of acting as a deputy parent, aping Helen’s approach rather than finding his own groove. He was naturally and happily introverted. Silences, solitary moments and stillness energised him. Loneliness was not something to overcome, but something to befriend and look into. And so, Grace switched her connection from Helen to Peter during those years, as they were happy to share long silent car journeys together or read books at the kitchen table without feeling the need to have or share views about what they were reading.
Though Grace wouldn’t necessarily have agreed, it was generally said of her that she had turned out well. It had something to do with her talents being offset by being down-to-earth, and her achievements being the result of hard work rather than advantage. The compliment was part of a mentality found in people who believed in praise only when it didn’t imply elevation. Had Grace been asked at the time, she probably would have said that she was neither happy nor unhappy, like everyone else, and that she was still trying to feel her way through life. One night at a friend’s birthday party, during the college years when they were all still getting used to drinking, she was asked, while being recorded on a camcorder, what she would wish for if she could have anything in the world. Without taking time to think or be funny, she gave an answer which her friends said was ‘pure Grace.’ She looked straight into the lens of the now-obsolete camcorder and said ‘I would like… whatever is good for me.’