AT THE END of January, I had to go down to Cornwall to clear out my parents’ cottage. I’d only been there once since my father died, to fetch things Charlotte had wanted, and not at all since she herself died. The cottage had never meant much to me, though it was pretty enough. It had only three rooms, perched one on top of the other in a slot of a building with a wooden deck at the back overlooking the Fowey estuary. This was where my father had come to sail and where he’d tried, and failed, to make a sailor of me. I only had to step on to a boat to be sick. He, of course, was a great sailor and so, I’d been told, was Susannah – genes on both sides which should have made me completely happy on water but which had failed to pass through to me.
There was the one good photograph of my father and Susannah on a boat. Most of those photos of them together in the early years of their relationship were small and blurry, unlike the studies taken of Susannah alone. Someone had used a cheap Brownie camera to snap them; but that one photograph which was clearly the work of a professional had hung framed in my father’s study for as long as I could remember. It was twelve by fifteen inches, black and white, glossy. Every detail was defined, the strands in the coiled rope lying on the deck of the boat they were on, the shine on the metal fittings, the grain of the wooden planks – all superbly visible. It had been taken for a yachting magazine for which my father had written an article, on the conversion of MFVs (Motor Fishing Vessels). He was in the forefront, beaming straight to camera, and Susannah was in the background, sitting with her back against the mast, legs drawn up, elbows on knees, head between her hands, looking very serious. All the time, even when that photograph was taken, her heart was clogging up and she was often breathless and tired. But my grandmother said she wouldn’t face facts, indeed simply denied them. She was a fighter. She was going to lead the life she wanted to lead. She was going to be normal.
She should never have had me, never have thought of having a baby. I’d heard that said as a child and had resented the insinuation that somehow I had caused her death. But they were fair enough, those words. Of course she should never have had me. She wasn’t fit enough. The pregnancy and then an agonisingly long-drawn-out birth (Isabella had once foisted the details on me until I’d walked out of the room) had weakened her when she was already weakening, or rather her heart was. She’d even breast-fed me for three months against all advice. She must have been mad. What did she think she was doing, risking her life, or at least her health, to have a baby? It can’t have been because my father persuaded her. He’d never have done that. I’m sure he would have wanted to avoid any risks.
He was never a risk-taker himself. But maybe, before he came into Susannah’s life, she was involved with someone who was, someone who encouraged her to be reckless. Going off to the Caribbean as she had done, sailing there, was, I had come to realise, incredibly reckless. My father would never have considered it. Sailing round the coast and islands of Scotland was about his limit, or later to the Scilly Isles. He didn’t even sail to the Mediterranean, never mind the Caribbean. But someone else did, and Susannah had leapt at the chance, responding to the idea of an adventure which was dangerous in itself but especially for her. I began to see this as a steel-like thread running through her and I wondered if it had frightened those around her. It was strange to think she might have been frightening. I found myself thinking about it a lot, and speculating about who she might have scared most. Not her mother. My grandmother was not a woman I could imagine frightened. But my father? Very possibly. I’d scared him myself sometimes, with my outbursts of temper, and he’d do anything to placate me. And maybe Isabella. I don’t know why that idea came into my head, considering I’ve always thought of my aunt as formidable. It was something my father once said, I think, which had never struck me as significant before, something to the effect that when he first met Isabella she had seemed so timid beside Susannah and he couldn’t believe they were sisters. ‘Of course, she’s changed since then,’ he’d added, and laughed.
At any rate, I’m sure it was Susannah herself who made the decision to have a baby, unless becoming pregnant was an accident. Possible, always possible, and abortions were against the law then (I think). Or if it was an accident, if I was a mistake, maybe she couldn’t contemplate abortion even if it had been obtainable. Who knows? Who wants to know? (But that was what was becoming so irritating – increasingly, I did, I wanted answers to questions I’d never asked and which no one could now answer.)
Whatever the history of my conception, I’d been wanted most passionately. Photos of Susannah pregnant showed a woman radiating joy and those taken with me in her arms have an ecstatic quality of an almost religious intensity. She looks as if she worshipped me. There is not a flicker of anxiety in her face, not a hint of concern that she might leave me motherless, yet in six short months all that changed. Life, her life, became so fragile that she assembled her memory box. It was so frustrating not to understand precisely what had happened. I was ignorant, muddled, and wished I had a doctor friend who could explain about Susannah’s type of heart disease. I could, I suppose, get her death certificate and see what was written on it, but I haven’t done so yet. I had once asked, though, where she was buried. It was one of the very few direct questions about her that I ever did ask, as a young and rather ghoulish teenager. The answer was that she wasn’t buried at all. She was cremated and her ashes scattered in the Firth of Forth.
My father had apparently said he’d like his scattered from the deck of their cottage on to the Fowey estuary. Charlotte and I had been going to make a pilgrimage together to do it, but then she fell ill and I had to go and do it on my own, at her insistence. I hated the task. Probably that was why I had taken against the cottage, or at least it was a strong contributory reason. I’d rather his ashes had been left in the Oxford garden, but Charlotte said no, he had wanted to be part of the sea just like Susannah. I didn’t argue, it didn’t matter. But going down there now to do a final clear-out took me back, of course, to that terrible period of time between the two deaths and I couldn’t wait to be away. Luckily, there wasn’t much clearing to be done. The cottage wasn’t like the Oxford house. My father hadn’t wanted two proper homes, just a place to sleep when he was not on his boat, so there was only the most basic furniture and none of that of much value. It didn’t take me more than a couple of hours to sort out the clothes and books and the one or two personal items, like the telescope mounted on a stand at the window, which I’d once bought him. The new owners were delighted I was leaving everything else behind.
I felt no regret as I left it and drove off into Devon and then on to Dorset, where I had a commission to photograph some churches for a magazine. I enjoyed doing rural winter scenes, when the landscape looks barren, but is full of the kind of unexpected detail I like. Winter suited my style best and I always felt confident. I was feeling pretty confident then anyway, happy to be working regularly and resolved to have a break from thinking about Susannah’s box. I hadn’t finished with it, but at least (or so I told myself) I’d finished being obsessed and distressed by my inability to understand the significance of its contents. It wasn’t going to rule my life. Whenever I went back to my flat, I was always surprised to see the shell on the bathroom shelf, the rucksack hanging on a hook behind the kitchen door, to find the necklace in my drawer – all these little bits of Susannah. It was like having the most self-effacing of guests, but one whose presence was nevertheless everywhere.
I stayed in small hotels or bed-and-breakfast places where there were few other guests at that time of year. Often, I had dining-rooms to myself and always I had the full attention of the proprietor or landlord. They had a certain curiosity about me entirely owing to my equipment – my cameras and other paraphernalia fascinated them and gave me some status, even if they weren’t sure what that was. I always had plenty of offers of help to load my car, and remarks would be made about the bags and boxes being too heavy for a young woman to lift on her own. ‘You’ll ruin your child-bearing organs,’ one hotelier joked, impertinently I thought, but he beamed as he insisted on helping me, though I’d told him no assistance was needed. I smiled politely and resisted the retort I’d like to have made, which was that these were organs which would never be used. Not the sort of response one can easily make, really, without causing embarrassment. I can’t have children, I’m pleased to say. That’s not quite true: it is unlikely that I will ever conceive a child, and I think of myself as unable to.
It is a long and, I suppose, sad story, but it can be reduced to a brief explanation and has never in fact been a matter for sadness so far as I am concerned. When I was eighteen, I became pregnant, through sheer carelessness. I don’t blame the boy, I blame myself. Anyway, having done such a stupid thing I didn’t want my parents to know. I wanted to protect them from the suffering my foolishness would cause. So I had an abortion without telling them – not so difficult in 1982. I had money, and I had friends who’d gone through the necessary system.
The abortion was perfectly straightforward, or so I thought, but then I got some sort of infection afterwards, again through my own carelessness, I expect (or at least it never occurred to me I might not be to blame). I had a horrible few days in hospital – luckily when my parents were on one of their very rare holidays abroad – and afterwards I was told that my Fallopian tubes had been damaged. At the time I didn’t care. So long as I wasn’t in pain, I didn’t care. The doctor who broke this news, which he obviously thought likely to upset me, said I might care a good deal later on, ‘when you want to have babies’. Conceiving, he said, would be difficult. I’d need my tubes blown and one of them was likely to be permanently blocked. He seemed offended instead of relieved by my calm acceptance of this information.
I have never yet wanted to have a baby. This is so hard to explain that I don’t try to. Most of the men I’ve had affairs with have never needed to know the whole truth. Tell a man he has no need to worry about contraception because you’ve taken care of it and he is delighted, merely assuming you are on the pill. But, of course, sometimes, only twice to be precise, I have had to explain. When an affair has become more than that, when there has seemed every possibility of it becoming more permanent, even a question of marriage, then it has been time to confess. And a confession was what it always felt like, something I dreaded because of the possible reaction to it. And it certainly caused a strong reaction – concern and caution in about equal measure. Men do want children, or the two I loved did, and wanted them more than they had realised up to that point. Forced to accept that, if they stayed with me, the chances would be slim, they discovered that children had been very much in the scheme of their lives, however little thought they had given the subject until required to. Once the significance of what I had to tell them sank in, they reacted with barely concealed dismay. Their professed love for me began to wither, especially when I said I didn’t want to have my tubes blown or anything like that.
I was shaken by their reaction. It seemed that I was no longer a proper woman to them once I’d said I couldn’t give them the fruit of their own loins – oh, wonderfully biblically put, but I fell into such flowery language when going over the matter. Tony would say I was being monstrously unfair. He always swore his love for me had nothing to do with any children we might, or might not, have and that it made no difference to our future together. And, of course, being Tony, he pointed out that nothing had yet been proved. I pushed him, though, I insisted that he should answer honestly this question: if it turned out that I really was barren, would he still have wanted children? He said yes, but that it was irrelevant to how things were. He wanted me, that was enough. But it wasn’t enough. He lied, I knew he did. He was very family-minded, coming as he did from the kind of family Charlotte had belonged to, large and close. Everything began to go wrong between us from the moment I told him about the state of my wretched tubes and my reluctance to have treatment. He was determined to think he could persuade me to test the truth of what I’d been told.
I was surprised how often I found myself thinking of Tony while I was working on that trip. Something similar had happened with another man, years before, when I’d got to the same point of telling him, but after we parted I’d hardly given him another thought. I forgot him, and couldn’t believe I’d felt about him as I must have done to tell him something so intimate. But I hadn’t forgotten Tony. I thought of him a lot, wishing we were at least friends. He’d said, very quietly, that being ‘just friends’ would make a mockery of what there had been between us, and could still be, if I had not been so pig-headed and stupid. The parting had been painful to him, and he had never understood why I’d broken things up, and the only way he could deal with it was by never seeing me again, so I shouldn’t talk to him about being ‘friends’. I’d told him not to be so melodramatic, that it didn’t suit him and wasn’t like him, it wasn’t reasonable and civilised, and he’d said that was how he felt, I could label his feelings how I liked. There were limits, he said, even to his tolerance.
I admired his attitude in a way. I like decisive people, and Tony was always that. He had a lot of other qualities, too, which I admired and I kept thinking of them on the long drives I was making. Tony had principles but he wasn’t self-righteous or dogmatic. He loved his work – he is a solicitor, in a practice handling mainly legal aid defence cases – and had a sense of purpose about it, something which I, of course, lacked. I worked only because I liked to. Pleasure and fun took the place of purpose, and any satisfaction was always merely personal – not for a moment do I ever think my photographs serve much purpose. We used to argue about what Tony called my aimlessness, the way I was never striving towards a goal but was apparently the complete hedonist. It irritated him that I didn’t, as he alleged, put my talents to better use. He thought that by choosing to photograph landscapes I was choosing the soft option. Photographs, he argued, should have more than beauty about them. They should make some moral point. I used to jeer at him, and tell him his high-mindedness was a pain, but I quite liked his efforts to direct me into raising my standards and thinking more carefully about what I was doing. He maintained that inside the I-only-do-what-I-like Catherine there was another person, one who would welcome being made to do more than that. He said I insisted on being superficial and that I needed something to anchor me, to stop me drifting about.
I thought more and more of what Tony would have made of Susannah’s box. He wouldn’t have scoffed, like Rory; he wouldn’t have said the contents were of no significance, just junk. He would have gone the other way and probably driven me mad with his theories and the intensity of his concentration. Puzzles appealed to him. He liked things to be complicated and even when they were not, had a habit of making them so. It used to infuriate me when he deliberately turned something simple and straightforward into a nightmare of possible hidden meanings. But apart from being intrigued with what was in the box the best thing about it, from his point of view, would have been that it forced me at last to think about Susannah. He had been fascinated (unnaturally so, in my opinion) by the fact that my ‘real’ mother had died when I was six months old. He said it could not have helped but affect me profoundly and would not accept that I hadn’t been affected at all, that Charlotte was my mother and the dead Susannah a blank.
He’d met Charlotte, of course. While we lived together, it was inevitable he would meet the parents who were so much part of my life. We went to stay with them in Oxford for the weekend before my father died and they were successful visits. Charlotte liked Tony and got on better with him than my father did; she was more drawn to his seriousness, whereas my father found it a bit daunting and was perhaps perplexed as to why it appealed to me (though he never said so). Charlotte thought he had ‘lovely manners’ and ‘listened properly’, not the most flattering reasons to give for liking someone but, since manners and paying attention to what others said counted for her, not trivial either. But Tony thought Charlotte dull. He said she was quite sweet but boring and that never in a million years could she have been my mother. Even if he hadn’t known she was not, he swore he would have guessed. I was annoyed and told him not to be so ridiculous, the world is full of daughters who resemble their mothers not one bit either in looks or character, and I immediately reeled off a list of those we both knew. But he was adamant. Somewhere, if you knew them well enough, you could always see at least a glimmer of the mother in any daughter. I denied this, and then I turned to asking what his point was anyway. He said that in my case it meant there was a missing link and always would be and it was of great importance to his understanding of so many things he didn’t understand about me.
He liked to look at photographs of Susannah and then study my face and compare them. I hadn’t, at that time, photograph albums in my possession, but he saw the photograph in my father’s study, the one with Susannah in the background on the boat, and that started him off; then he found a couple of others around the Oxford house (Charlotte had always made a point of having them displayed quite naturally with all the other family photographs). No one among all the people who had known her had ever seen any resemblance between Susannah and me, but Tony found one after his diligent study. Only he saw what he claimed to be identical shaped ears, pointing solemnly to our well-shaped, round lobes and then to my father’s lack of any lobes at all. It was nothing, but he acted as if it were something. Ear lobes, for heaven’s sake. But he did have to concede that in general I did not look at all like Susannah. Unfortunately, he chose to say this in front of my father and to go on to ask him how he thought, looks apart, I might all the same be like her. My father didn’t like this. He replied, quite curtly for him, that he had no idea. He said Susannah had died many years ago and he couldn’t remember enough about her now to be sure of comparing anything about me with her.
Tony didn’t believe him. He said my father must be reminded all the time of his dead wife and that it must be natural to look for a mother in a daughter. I defended my father vigorously and pointed out that since, apart from not looking in the least like Susannah, I had not grown up with her and had not automatically picked up her mannerisms, and had instead inevitably adopted many of Charlotte’s, how would he be reminded of her? I reminded him that Susannah had had a Scottish accent and that I did not, so my father couldn’t hear her in me either. Environment, in my case, had won the contest with heredity. But Tony wouldn’t accept this. Confronted with how disturbed I became over the memory box, I knew he would have felt vindicated. What was all my angst about if not a long-put-off search for my ‘real’ mother? And why, Tony would’ve asked, did I want to find her now, at this point in my life, when my other mother had just left me? In his opinion, it would all have been obvious and satisfyingly neat. I struggled, knowing this, hearing Tony in my head so irritatingly clearly, to articulate, if only to myself, what was coming out of dealing with the box. I was not looking for my ‘real’ mother, I absolutely rejected that, but I was looking for myself, that was true. He would have liked that. I was glad not to be saying this out loud, when I would certainly have stumbled over the words, but instead imagining the conversation I might have had with him. In my own head, I could try, and try again, to grasp what I meant. I had some kind of impression – I took this slowly – that something in me had never properly connected. With what? I didn’t know. An ugly simile came into my mind: I was like a plug looking for a socket and until I found it the current couldn’t flow. Tony would have really liked that.
On that headland in Whitehaven, beside the holly tree on Melbreak, putting on the red hat in the aeroplane, what had I felt? Plugged in? Nothing so plebeian. What, then? A frisson, an excitement, a sensation not unlike vertigo, of being shaken and turned upside down. I had shivered on all those occasions, I had felt disembodied for a few seconds, and when this inner upheaval had subsided there had been a sense of disappointment that some profound truth about myself had evaded me. I would never have said this aloud to Tony, but it struck me that for some strange reason I might have said it to Rory. He had always empathised with my restlessness and sense of disconnection from life. Tony had never known what I was talking about. Tony never felt restless or disconnected; he was never waiting for something to rescue him from waiting. And he had no missing link. He knew exactly who he was and where he came from. He’d been so eager to introduce me not only to his parents (his father, a solicitor, his mother a schoolteacher), but to his brother and his two sisters and even to various aunts and uncles – he belonged, like Charlotte, to one of those tribe-like families and he was proud of it. Such families seem to me smug. I couldn’t wait to get away from Tony’s clan and it offended him. He accused me of being standoffish and said I hadn’t tried to fit in. Quite right, I hadn’t. Why should I want to fit in to a group I found alien?
Tony’s mother never did like me. She would deny it, naturally, but I think she made her mind up about me before ever she met me. She had liked the woman with whom he had had a five-year relationship before he met me, someone who had gone to school with him and whose family lived in the same county. This woman had been ideal in his mother’s eyes, a teacher, like herself, an infant teacher in a local school. Then I came along and spoiled everything, including the conventional marriage everyone had anticipated for him. But I tried so hard, I know I did. I didn’t want to meet Tony’s mother, but he was so devoted to her it had to be done. I dressed up for the occasion. I got out of my jeans and jumper and wore a dress, just a simple summer dress, a plain cream-coloured thing. I wanted to look as innocent and unthreatening as possible. Demure, that’s how I thought I should try to look. His mother was trying hard too, I think, determined to smile and welcome me warmly, but I saw the doubt in her eyes. Afterwards, I found out that Sarah, the girl before, had been a Susannah-like creature – slight, blonde, very pretty – and there was I, as tall as Tony, and, in spite of my cream dress and well-brushed hair, not at all demure. She couldn’t bring herself to say how lovely it was to meet me. Instead, she said how much she’d heard about me and, to me, in my paranoid state, that sounded as though she had heard things she didn’t like. I wasn’t a nice, safe, worthy teacher like Sarah, but a freelance photographer which sounded arty and unstable. And I hadn’t known Tony at school and my family hadn’t mixed with his all their lives, with our mothers meeting at parents’ evenings. I didn’t have the kind of background Mrs Crowther was familiar with. She was probably as nervous as I was but it didn’t show. ‘How did you and Tony meet?’ was her first direct question and when I said in an aeroplane, that he’d picked me up somewhere over the Channel on the way back from Paris, I knew I’d said the wrong thing. The truth, but wrong. Her Tony did not pick people up. He was a gentleman, who wouldn’t do anything so vulgar. She didn’t, of course, say any of that, but she stopped smiling and raised her eyebrows and was visibly taken aback. ‘Not quite a pick-up, Mum,’ Tony said, carefully. ‘We just were sitting next to each other and got talking. All quite natural.’ If I had left it at that things might have been OK, but I didn’t, I had to jump in and say, ‘Of course it was a pick-up! You even accidentally-on-purpose knocked my bag over to give yourself an excuse to pick everything up and talk to me.’
Oh God. The tone was set and I had set it. My real awkward, prickly self broke through at once in spite of all my vows to be sweet and gentle. Who could blame Mrs Crowther for thinking her darling son had been ensnared by an ill-mannered, abrasive hussy? I tried desperately to make up for this unfortunate beginning, but it was no good. I failed to fit in. Maybe if, that first time, I had just had to cope with the parents I would have managed to redeem myself, but there were so many other relatives there, all invited to Sunday lunch to meet me. My only small success was playing football with Tony’s nieces and nephews in the garden – it was a relief to get outside and I dashed about energetically in spite of my too-tight dress and I think the children liked me, I think they did. It rained later in the afternoon and we played Scrabble and I did quite well, surprising Mrs Crowther with a wider vocabulary than I think she’d given me credit for. She queried my ‘shandrydan’ and when I said it was some sort of old, rickety carriage with a hood and that I’d come across it in a caption to a photograph she raised her eyebrows and picked up the dictionary. There was a rather tense silence while she looked it up and though she said, ‘Clever girl, you’re right,’ I felt I hadn’t been clever at all: I’d been a show-off.
I was exhausted by the time we left, and depressed. I couldn’t understand how quiet Tony could come from such a family, all so hearty and noisy, so jolly and extrovert. I never liked visiting them and it never got any easier. I sent Mrs Crowther flowers after that first time, and always wrote and thanked her after each visit, but I was only doing what Charlotte told me to do. I simply couldn’t connect with Tony’s mother and he could never understand why.
I was thinking as I drove into Hampshire what a relief it had been, once Tony and I had parted, when I’d realised that I need never see the Crowthers again. I expect they felt the same way about me. I didn’t stay long in Hampshire, only a day and a night, and I suspected the photographs wouldn’t be as good as the others I’d taken in Dorset. I hadn’t felt confident taking them and even began wondering, in a fanciful way, if it was because I didn’t like being on Tony’s patch. He always said he’d leave London in a few years’ time and go back to where his parents lived, or near there. I’d been appalled to hear it. Long before we had reason to split up I’d heard a warning signal: don’t get serious because you could never be a country solicitor’s wife. It would have driven me mad, that kind of settled, safe, cosy existence. I like to move on, move around, all the time.
Driving back finally to London, on a cold afternoon with a threat of snow behind the dull sky hanging over the bleak countryside, I found myself wondering if that was after all entirely true. Did I really, still, want to move on all the time? Surely I was more centred on my home, my flat, than a true wanderer would be? And once I found a house that attachment would increase. Then I had a fleeting new thought about the memory box: it wasn’t a box reflecting a woman focused on domesticity. Not exactly a startlingly original observation, but it made me consider for a moment what kind of daughter Susannah would have wanted me to be. I was beginning to think she would have wanted someone different from the daughter Charlotte wanted me to be, that she would not have brought me up in the same way. I had never let myself think before that Charlotte as a mother was anything less than perfect – she was so kind and gentle, so wrapped up in my welfare, so determined always to put me first and forgive me anything. Love had never been more unconditional than the love she had shown to me. I felt I was betraying her in some way when it entered my head that maybe Susannah would have treated me differently and that it might have been better for me. Was Charlotte what I had needed, however great her devotion to me?
My father had not always thought so. Sometimes he had criticised her for what he called ‘over-indulging’ me (carefully avoiding that unpleasant but more accurate word ‘spoiling’). I’d heard him say of me, ‘She needs to learn not to be so selfish’, and, ‘She needs to discipline herself.’ He accused Charlotte, too, of letting me flit from one thing to another without her insisting on any kind of continuity or stability, and told her this was bad for me. That phrase – ‘bad for her’ – was said quite a lot when I was a child and not only by my father. My grandmother used it frequently. She also suggested to Charlotte that I needed a tougher approach: ‘Catherine needs to finish what she starts sometimes,’ she said. So far as I can recall, Charlotte never made any reply to either of them. She didn’t argue with them, or tell them, as she well could have done, to deal with me themselves if they didn’t approve of how she treated me, but I always had the sense that she didn’t agree with them. She never made me carry on doing anything I said I was bored with. My boredom was enough. She would always try to find me something more interesting to do and was never angry. ‘You give that child her head,’ my grandmother would say, ‘she’ll get out of control if you’re not stricter, she’ll think she never has to settle to anything.’
Did I ever get out of control? Not while my grandmother was still alive, but perhaps I came near it for a while later. I was expelled from one school for a ridiculously silly reason. All I did was spray paint on a wall. True, it was a newly whitewashed wall and, true, what I sprayed along it was vulgar and maybe a bit cruel, but at the time I saw no harm in it: I thought it was funny, and the cartoon I did at the end of what I’d written I thought quite talented. We had this games teacher called Miss Henn and a science master called Mr E. G. Gannon. We all hated both of them. Miss Henn was a bully who forced girls who had no athletic ability at all to try to do backward flips off a high box and regularly reduced them to tears, which she seemed to enjoy. I was never one of her victims but I couldn’t bear her malicious attitude. And Mr E. G. Gannon – he always wrote his name like that, complete with initials – was a bully of another sort. He liked to sneer at pupils, using heavy sarcasm to humiliate them, and we all dreaded his lessons. Well, it was known that Miss Henn and Mr E. G. Gannon went out together – they’d been seen walking in the Botanical Gardens, holding hands (which of course made all of us thirteen-year-olds feel sick because he was fat and she was ugly). I sprayed on the new white wall the words ‘HENN LAYS E.G.G.’ and I did a cartoon of the two of them with Miss Henn lying on top of Mr Gannon. She had very bushy, red, coarse hair and a big, powerful bottom so that was simple enough to caricature and he was bald and wore enormous horn-rimmed spectacles and had a droopy moustache, so there was plenty there to identify him. A stranger couldn’t possibly have recognised that my crude outline was a representation of those two teachers, but the whole school did.
When the headmistress asked me why I did it I remember shrugging and being unable to answer and I suppose that made my little crime more heinous than ever. ‘It was a joke,’ I said, which maddened her further. She said she would like this ‘joke’ explained to her because she failed entirely to see any humour in my actions. I had ruined a newly painted wall, and would most certainly have to pay for it to be repainted, and I had hurt two innocent teachers very much. ‘They hurt people all the time,’ I blurted out. But the headmistress didn’t want to hear my excuses. She wanted me to apologise profusely to the two teachers and then she might consider allowing me to remain in her school. I refused. My parents were angry with me, but I presented myself so convincingly to them as the champion of the underdog that they were not as furious as perhaps they should have been. My father did say, rather wearily, that writing rude words on a wall was no way to register any kind of protest, but he was so annoyed with the school for expelling me that he didn’t go on about it.
So, as I said, it was fairly silly. I got into another school without too much difficulty and behaved myself. But I went off to London the moment I finished ‘A’ Levels, and lived in a squat for a bit (not long), took drugs (not many) – I suppose all that kind of pretty normal late-teenage behaviour could be called getting out of control. (And becoming pregnant, of course, but nobody knew about that at home.) The whole of that period was in any case short-lived and I was no more wild than a good many of my contemporaries, and unlike most of them I never broke off with my parents. They always knew where I was, if not exactly what being where I said I was amounted to – the address they had sounded perfectly respectable and they would never have envisaged a filthy, boarded-up basement. I never fell out with my father and mother, nor made enemies of them, and even then I never let a week go by without ringing them up. I call that quite remarkably exemplary behaviour, in the circumstances.
But it is true that though I deny I was ever out of control I felt no one was in control of me, especially not myself. It scared me. I remember feeling dangerous, as though I might do anything and not be able to stop myself even if I wanted to. My life up to then had been so neat and tidy, so safe and secure and predictable, thanks to my parents. I’d never had to look after myself, except in the most trivial of ways, and suddenly I was among a group of people my own age who didn’t care about me and who couldn’t look after themselves, never mind me. Most of the time they weren’t even interested in me, whereas I was used to being the focus of a most intense and loving interest. This absence of attention did odd things to me. It excited me at first, it felt thrilling, but then I began to fear the freedom I’d snatched and had to pretend I didn’t. A lot of energy went into this pretence and it changed me. I’d always said what I thought in the past, but now I had to struggle not to say I hated the way we lived and despised most of the people I was with. I’d only landed in the squat because of a friend at school whose brother lived there. We’d gone to visit him one Saturday just after ‘A’ levels, and I’m sure he spotted my potential as a source of money – probably his sister had filled him in on the fact that I had plenty of pocket money and never needed a holiday job. But I wasn’t stupid, it didn’t really take me long, once I’d moved in, to realise I was being used. We all shared everything but I was the one, sometimes the only one, who had anything to share.
At first, I was quite proud of this. I had the money, I hadn’t done a damned thing to earn it; I was lucky, therefore it was only fair I should subsidise those less fortunate. I approved; I believed that single-handed I was righting some kind of wrong. And, of course, it made me popular – how generous I was, how liberal. But doubt set in pretty soon. I remember lying on a dirty mattress, barely able to see because the electricity was cut off and the last candle had been used, my head aching from lack of air and from the noise of heavy metal music playing at full blast in the room above us, where a whole band squatted complete with Alsatian dog. It was like being in a prison, and yet I knew I’d put myself there and that I could get out. All it took was will power, which for the first time in my life I didn’t have – because of the drugs, I suppose (though I was a cautious user, compared to the others, and never took heroin or LSD, nothing more than cannabis really). But I was not well and that, too, was such a shock to my system it made it harder yet to leave. After two months had gone by I felt ghastly most of the time – I distinctly remember the terror of trying to haul myself up from that disgusting mattress and finding I couldn’t, that I had to flop back, I was so dizzy and weak. ‘Poor baby’, that was what the boy I was with said, and not kindly – ‘poor little baby, all on her own without her mummy.’ I think I cried, with humiliation as much as anything.
What kept me there, apart from feeling ill and determination to pretend I was liking it, were the good days. The bright, sunny summer days when we went into the garden (completely overgrown of course but still a garden and really more attractive because the grass was thick and the trees unpruned and heavy with fruit) and for once someone had bought proper food and was cooking it on an open fire and we all sat in a circle round it and the music was just one guitar and we all sang. Sweet. Then there were other good days, when we would go out as a gang, to a festival, and everything seemed wonderfully free and easy and fun. Life in a comfortable suburban home such as that of my parents seemed ludicrous then – this was much better, it was what I wanted. My fears evaporated and I didn’t worry so much about feeling strange and complicated and having to hide this from the others because they wouldn’t understand. How could they, when I didn’t understand myself? I began, on those happier days, to think I could train myself to tolerate dirt and disorder and the lack of privacy and all would be well. But I never succeeded. I got pregnant, I had the abortion, survived the infection, and went home, shocked out of my inertia. My mother was pleased to see me. She hadn’t the faintest idea how I’d been living or what had happened. She said only that I was very pale and too thin and needed looking after. She didn’t pry, to my relief. I think she was afraid to. Charlotte was basically a timid person and was always determined to think everything was fine.
Would Susannah have done? Would she have been able to look beyond my pallor, my loss of weight? Would she have been able to tell how near disaster I’d been and how greatly I was in need of a different kind of comfort than good food and rest? Charlotte did pretty well after all, just by being there, ready to take me back and restore me to health. Why suppose Susannah could have done any better? Why suppose it would have been a good thing to do any better? I don’t know, at this distance of time, what precisely I mean by ‘better’ either. Talking. I think I must mean that with Charlotte there was no possibility of real talk. I wanted, always, to protect her from the uglier aspects of my life. Would I have wanted to protect Susannah? What difference would it have made that she was my biological mother, she was me, in a way Charlotte couldn’t ever be? Kind, trusting Charlotte, around whom I ran rings, may have been dangerous for me in ways I never suspected. I bewildered her with my fierce love for her and yet by my erratic behaviour, so different from her own. She defended me when I had no defence.
I wondered where all this was going. In the direction Tony had always wanted it to go, that was where, the direction I had always refused to take. Slowly, as another person emerged, with the aid of her box, from behind the image I’d had of her, I was falling into the trap of believing I was going to solve a problem I couldn’t even describe.