As I lay there with my eyes closed, I tried to regain my sense of positive reality, but I couldn’t. I thought, My body goes on automatically, but myself is somewhere else. I could see myself only as one remembers an old photograph; there was no more connection than that. I thought, No one understands that the real me is standing, waiting on another path. Then I said to myself, But I am living. It is me. It’s no one else. The hard work and the mistakes are mine; the friendships, the laughter, the fear and the despair are mine and the exhaustion is mine. And yet it was unreal to me. I was insubstantial, standing and watching myself. I often thought that if I could have just one long, deep sleep, the blissful sleep of a child, I’d be OK.
When I was very little, someone took my hand and led me to see the baby lying in his crib. My brother, Duncan. He lay with his face on one side, eyes tight shut, far away, peaceful, and I loved him.
‘Shh,’ someone said. ‘You’ll wake the baby.’ And for days after that, so I’ve been told, I went around with my finger over my lips saying, ‘Shh! Baba cries.’ Instinctively, I knew then that by loving the baby, by caring for the baby, I could become part of the baby and then Mother would not forget me. Mother would love me too. Why did I always feel that I had to please to be loved? Because that way I would survive? By loving, by pleasing: then I became substantial. Had I not loved and pleased I would have faded into the outer edges of people’s consciousness and disappeared. I was always terrified of disappearing, of being unseen. Being unseen is worse than being alone.
Mother seemed to notice me when I was clever and pretty, loved me when I sang and danced, because I was more pretty and clever than the other children.
‘Ask me to dance, Mummy.’
Mother was proud of me then and arranged rather grand birthday parties, and I would have a new dress and dance and sing.
Once, I had a birthday party – perhaps I was six or seven – and Granny made me a very special taffeta dress, all orange and shiny. I loved it but hated being fitted for it; couldn’t keep still.
Lots of people I didn’t know were invited and Mother hired a hall, and an old lady, wearing a hat with a feather in it, played the piano and I danced, and sang in front of all the guests ‘I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time’. I wasn’t shy or afraid then but spun about the polished floor in black patent shoes and the orange taffeta dress, while solemn-faced mothers and their children watched. They seemed disapproving, somehow. Was I too precocious? But Mother looked proud.
At another party, still with children and mothers I didn’t know, for I only had two friends, Margaret Cousins and Pamela Riddle, I won a game of musical chairs. Then a thin, pale, bony girl with a mousy fringe, who continually hung on to her mother’s arm, whined and cried because she wanted to have my mystery present wrapped in red crepe paper with its suggestion of Christmas surprises. I couldn’t believe it when, without warning, Mother took the present out of my hands and gave it to the snivelling child instead. I can still remember my humiliation – the humiliation of the very public revelation that Mother did not stick up for me, was more bothered about the other girl, who was loved by her own mother, and my shame was followed by blind fury. How at that moment I hated the stupid, snivelling child whose mother so openly adored her; this stupid child’s mother loved her for all the world to see. I snatched back the present, the prize that was rightfully mine and then Mother took hold of me in front of all of them, saying, ‘You’re a very naughty girl,’ and dragged me off to my bedroom. Then, locking the door behind me, she left me to my fury and misery.
I knelt by the bed, sobbing and hating Mother because, although I could not have put words to it, I understood that her image as a gracious hostess was more important than justice for me. And I had to pay her back. I would not be outdone. I would make her sorry. And so I found a pack of playing cards and spread them all over the floor, all over my bed, the chair, on top of the chest of drawer. It seemed then a terrifyingly naughty thing to do. But that would teach Mother not to favour other children before me. I sat on the edge of the bed, swinging my legs defiantly.
Mother remembered me after a while and I was so happy to hear her footsteps that I forgot the cards.
‘Are you sorry?’ she called through the door.
No answer.
‘Are you going to be good now?’
No answer.
She opened the door, saw the cards spread over the room, slammed the door and shouted, ‘You can come out when you have picked all those up.’
Memories. I sat up suddenly, remembering, always remembering my life was only memories, and leaned against the iron bedstead and the room moved like water as the shadows from the trees outside swayed to and fro in front of the sun. There was no ashtray, of course, so I would have to use the top of my face-cream jar. Smoking was probably forbidden here; people in monasteries don’t need props like tobacco. These people have found their way to peace and fulfilment without treats. But if God wanted me, He would have to find me; He would have to take the trouble. It was up to Him. I thought, I’ve been naive to have so much faith. But not any more. Oh no! I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. If God was there, then He could find me. Nothing I could do.
There was that midday silence, the silence of loneliness. I was not used to silence and wished I had brought a radio with me. The cuckoo had stopped. His moment was short-lived. It was the same with butterflies who were born and then died in the same day. I had often noticed how active they were and then how suddenly still, how they fluttered quiveringly and frantically one minute and then rested so quietly the next. They never knew they were being watched, but I had watched them as in pairs they copulated on the wing, and I knew that, in a sense, their acts of loving were their death throes, for shortly afterwards they would die. Opposites. Love and hate, life and death, light and dark. Fleur had loved butterflies. We had spent hours together, butterfly-spotting, yet only once had she seen a blue butterfly. Strangely, I have seen them quite often since. They seemed to be returning to the gardens once again, but when Fleur was searching we had to go to the Dorset coast and the Sussex Downs. And just once we saw one! There it was, suddenly, a touch of pure blue as we followed it hovering through the long summer grasses. We had been so excited.
One of my childish obsessions had been wanting to fly like a butterfly or a bird. For hours at a time I would stand on the dining-room table, trying desperately hard to fly off it. I would work my arms frantically and, when I was dizzy with the effort, would leap into the air, arms flapping madly, but although the floor seemed such a long way down, I always hit it just too soon for lift-off. Only once, for an ecstatic moment, did I think I had succeeded, and it happened to be when I was demonstrating to Duncan. Then I really did, just for a moment, seem to hover, seemed to fly. ‘I flew! I flew! I really flew, Duncan! Did you see me? Did you see me fly?’
Duncan seemed unusually impressed and decided to fly himself, but he jumped too high and too far without any care, and fell onto a chair and broke his nose. There was blood everywhere and an awful rumpus. And I was blamed. Nobody actually said so, but I perceived their cold eyes and their concern for my bleeding brother.
The Angelus rang three or four times, as if calling. Was I supposed to do something? I didn’t mind staying where I was, provided I could sleep, but to be awake and do nothing, that was intolerable. What would Dan and Fleur have to say? I always thought: only Dan and Fleur can make it right. Fleur would say what she always said when things got tricky. For instance, if I was trying to unravel an impossibly knotted piece of her knitting or trying to nurture a throbbing baby bird, then Fleur would say, ‘Don’t give up, Mum. You won’t give up, will you?’
Once when I was in the kitchen crying over a TV news item about foster child who was literally dragged away from the only parents she knew, Fleur, all of five years old, stamped into the kitchen and, standing feet apart and hands on hips, as was her habit, shouted derogatively, ‘Well, don’t just stand there crying. Do something!’
And so I did. I wrote, like thousands of others, to the Home Office and got a reply, which assured me that there were going to be changes to the law that would prevent such a thing happening again. I wouldn’t have written that letter if it hadn’t been for Fleur. Daniel, in contrast, would say nothing, but would just be there watching, quiet and resolute. I could feel his support, although, like his dad, he didn’t say much. I didn’t need the photos to remember Dan with his pale, thoughtful face and Fleur, the green-eyed pixie, with soft brown freckles on her nose.
I didn’t cry. I sat up in the bed and wondered if I’d loved them enough. Whether I’d ever been capable of love, if I even knew what love was. What is love, actually? But I knew why I was in this place. In truth, I had died when they died. Only you couldn’t tell. Nobody knew, for the shell still hung on the tree and you couldn’t know it was split and that the kernel, the life force, had disappeared. Gone. Died. You couldn’t see the shell was empty.