Patrick gave Eleanor a barrel full of crooning white doves and she hung it in a tree in the Wilderness. The doves swooped and hovered over the children as they played on fallen trees and dug holes among the naked twists of roots. When the doves were settled happily in their new home, Patrick and Eleanor and baby Dan flew to Wisconsin, leaving the three older children on the drive, clutching their cats, trying not to cry. They had to go, said Eleanor, making tea automatically as she did at every crisis, every triumph, and to pass the days and hours when nothing else was happening.
‘Daddy and I have to go to America because Daddy has to earn some money so we can go on living here. Dan is a baby so he has to come with us, but we need you all to stay here and take care of the house and the animals and to keep it all safe for when we come home.’
Va Va saw an opportunity to reign supreme. ‘I’ll look after everything. I’m seven and a half, that’s old enough. I can buy food from Mr Cardew’s.’
‘Yes. But to help you and to drive you to school, Tarquin and Mary Lou are coming to stay here with you. And Louise is just up the road if you need her.’
Brodie flopped over Eleanor’s knee, pinning her down. ‘Why can’t they look after the animals so we can all go with you?’
Eleanor looked sad. ‘We haven’t got enough money to buy all those aeroplane tickets.’
Tarquin and Mary Lou cowered in the kitchen behind curtains of long hippy hair. They brought with them their pale baby, Lupin, thin like a parsnip with a snail trail of snot on his upper lip.
Young Canadian intellectuals, soft and fresh out of university, Tarquin and Mary Lou prepared to embark upon a rural idyll at Mildney. Mary Lou cooked brown rice, boiling it for hours on the sullen Aga, droning away about where rice came from and what a fabulous famine food it was. It didn’t make the rice any nicer. Mary Lou’s large eyes wobbled with tears as she dished out the fabulous famine food. Brodie spat out a mouthful, rubbing his fist in it so it slimed over the table. ‘Why don’t you send it to the starving babies then?’ Mary Lou pursed her lips and cleared it up. Brodie and Va Va glanced at one another, scorn in their eyes. Why hadn’t she made him wipe the table, or at least told him off?
Eleanor had left pages of instructions on the dresser about feeding the animals, paying the milkman, washing clothes. When Mary Lou went upstairs to change Lupin’s nappy, Va Va pushed a chair across to the dresser and wrote: THE CHILDREN LOVE ICECREAM AND STEAK AND KIDNEY PIE. THEY HATE BROWN RICE AND ALL HIPPY FOOD.
Tarquin looked like Jesus. He had long shiny hair and a wispy beard, he wore white flared trousers and a white shirt. Every morning he strode out to the Wilderness and stood in front of the doves, arms outstretched, eyes closed, in a state of near-beatification. He said he was feeding them, but the doves never flew down, as they did with the children, to take the grain from his hands. After a few weeks they departed in a gleaming cloud to join the wood-pigeons at Mosseymere.
Mary Lou’s hair was not as long or as lustrous as Tarquin’s and she stuttered and blinked when she spoke to the children. ‘Come on, honeys, brush your teeth for your Mom.’
Her orders and suggestions were met with scorn. ‘Mummy doesn’t mind if we don’t brush our hair or our teeth. Anyway, she’s not here.’ Flook buried his head in a towel after his bath. His fringe was long and tangled, it swung into his eyes so he crashed into walls and fell over. Mary Lou wanted to cut it. ‘My Mummy cuts my hair, not you.’ He flailed and fought and Mary Lou almost gave up, but not entirely. Each morning she brushed Flook’s hair, then scraped back his fringe and secured it with a kirby-grip. He looked like Shirley Temple, but it was better than allowing Mary Lou to cut his hair. Although he was only four, Flook started school while Patrick and Eleanor were away. Mary Lou begged the teachers to take him because she couldn’t cope. Flook was delighted; he was big now, like Va Va and Brodie.
Eleanor sent frequent letters to each of the children, with presents in them. Balloons, as big as faces before they were blown up, had unreadable squashed writing on them. The children lined up in front of poor thin Tarquin, begging him to inflate them. It took him all day, but finally at tea-time Tarquin lay limp on the lawn as the children charged over him, their balloons as big as Space Hoppers, chanting, ‘Madison Wisconsin, Madison Wisconsin,’ delighted to be able to read the words stamped across the balloons’ curves.
Patrick and Eleanor and Dan went to New Orleans one weekend, and the sweltering skies turned Dan’s wisps of hair into corkscrew curls. They returned to England where Va Va, Brodie and Flook waited, misting tiny patches of the vast glass windows at Heathrow as they watched the plane land.