On Burns Night when Gabriella was one, a fat cherub with eyes like china saucers and dimpled knees, her brother Archibald Robert was born. Patrick and Eleanor had returned from Italy to their damp Islington basement. They were broke. Whenever it rained, thick white slugs slouched their way up the glass of the french windows. Gabriella was sent to stay with Eleanor’s parents in Scotland; she learned to walk, tottering gnomish in a red hooded suit, and she forgot her mother.
Eleanor went to Harrods and bought a bearskin hat for Patrick to take to the icy plains of Buffalo. He had been offered a post as writer in residence at the university, and the fee was too large to refuse. Eleanor waved him off at the airport and went into hospital to give birth to her son. She knew no one in London; her only visitor was the ghost of Graham Kingsley who had died a week or two before. She and Graham’s spirit spent a merry afternoon recalling evenings wet with whisky and tears in the pubs of Soho, and then Eleanor and her baby caught the train to Scotland.
At Aberdeen her daughter, arms stretched out behind for balance, taxied down the platform towards her. Tearful, Eleanor ran to Gabriella and knelt to embrace her. Gabriella screamed as this tall woman bore down on her, terrifying and unidentifiable in a cavernous cloak. Her grandmother, a tiny smile playing on her lips, stepped forward and picked Gabriella up. ‘It’s all right, darling. This is Mummy. You remember Mummy, don’t you? She’s brought you a baby brother.’
Gabriella squatted in front of the moses basket and patted the baby’s soft head. ‘Brodie,’ she said, beaming round at her mother and grandmother standing behind her, tensed for her reaction.
Archibald Robert lay festooned in Cameron lace on the spindly sofa in his grandparents’ drawing-room. Gabriella had stumbled through her first two words (Va Va, her name for herself, and Boys, the other people she was interested in) when she met her brother. Eleanor tried to call her Gabriella, but she shook her head and would not answer. She was Va Va now, and her baby was Brodie. He was small and pink and crumpled; Va Va was delighted by his inability to do any of the things at which she excelled, like walking and talking, and she adored him because he was hers, everyone told her so. She looked upon him as something to care for, keenly embracing the role of Big Sister. He incurred her displeasure, though, when he learned to walk. As he forged his first moon-man steps towards the doorway of a room where Eleanor sat, fury welled in Va Va at her mother’s words of encouragement. Indignation pricked her skin like sunburn and, gathering all her crosspatch feelings, she rushed to slam the door, separating Brodie and his success from Eleanor’s proud smiling eyes.