Ferney (54 page)

Rosie enjoyed her breakfast, spending as much time playing with the wrapping paper as she did with the toys. Mike watched with a benevolent smile. Her vocabulary was expanding in leaps and
bounds, though it was often a struggle to work out what she meant. She unwrapped a giant rabbit from Mike’s sister and yelled with delight. ‘Connie, connie.’

‘It’s a rabbit,’ said Mike. ‘Bunny.’

‘No, connie. Like it. Coney, coney.’

‘It’s a bunny, you funny old thing.’

‘Funny, funny, funny,’ said Rosie insistently, turning to Gally for confirmation.

‘Very funny,’ said Mike, though Rosie wasn’t laughing.

‘You think
everything’s
funny, don’t you, Rosie?’ Gally exclaimed, as she turned towards her daughter, smiling. Her smile slipped.

‘Funny, furny, furny,’ her daughter maintained, waving her hand forcefully and it was quite clear she was pointing at herself.

If you can't wait to find out what happens next, read on for the first chapter of
The Lives She Left Behind
, which continues the story of Ferney
and Gally

Joanna’s father Toby had wanted to call her Melissa but he played no part in the final decision because he died more or less in childbirth. Her mother Fleur dismissed the
name out of hand and even Toby’s death did not change her mind.

So it was that Joanna Mary Driscoll was born at 8.15 in the morning on the last Wednesday in May of 1994, breathing in the air of the York Hospital Maternity Unit with a puzzled and anxious look
in her pale blue eyes. Toby would have picked her up and comforted her but he had been dead for over an hour by that time, driving straight into an oncoming petrol tanker as he left the hospital
car park in an unreasoning panic. He was racing home to collect Fleur’s bag of vital accessories – left behind by him, as she pointed out, when her waters broke.

They didn’t tell Fleur about the accident until after Jo had been delivered, and something began to go wrong between mother and daughter as soon as they did. Fleur, the few remaining soft
parts of her beginning to harden over, looked grimly at her baby with blame already hanging in the air between them.

Fleur had been the main wage earner in the marriage and she went back to work as soon as she could, so Jo was cared for by a succession of nannies mostly too young to show her more than an inept
sentimentality. Over the next few years, the ones who were old enough to understand rapidly fell foul of Fleur when they dared to imply she might do well to spend a bit more time with her daughter.
It was just after one of these had left, fired abruptly the previous evening as soon as she had finished the ironing, that Fleur found she had no alternative but to take Jo with her on her
day’s business.

That was why Jo, as a toddler, quite baffled by the world, found herself in the village of Stamford Bridge, a few miles outside York, tagging along as her mother strode round a ramshackle
Georgian mansion. Fleur was barking questions at the cowed girl from the estate agents, who was starting to understand why her more experienced colleagues had suddenly found pressing alternative
duties.

Jo started to cry when she looked out of the patio doors across the farmland behind the house. Irritated, Fleur asked her what was wrong, but she couldn’t explain because she didn’t
know. At four years and two months old, how do you decode a tide of adult grief without any protecting drainage channel of words or concepts? All Jo knew was that the bit that she was just starting
to understand as herself was shredded by a turmoil of utter sorrow bowling down at her from across that bleak field.

Fleur tried to reason with her but reason had nothing to do with this. Crying turned to howling and then into such an utter loss of control that the young estate agent found herself propelled
forward to bend down and clutch the tiny girl to stop her damaging herself while the mother’s mouth tightened in anger as she stood and watched.

After ten minutes, all the muscles Jo was using to cry and writhe were so worn out that she heaved to a halt, rolled over towards the window and stared out in a dull torpor. That was when Fleur
finally picked her up, taking care to keep the child’s tear-stained cheeks away from her silk blouse.

‘No more?’ she said. ‘You’ve finished then?’ and the little girl pointed with an unsteady finger out across the fields as if that explained everything.

Driving back home to York brought a change in Jo that her mother was too annoyed and too busy with her own thoughts to recognise. Sitting strapped in her child seat, Jo tried to turn her head to
look behind, then stared out of the window when a bend in the road allowed a brief glimpse of the receding village. She had a picture of a bridge in her head but it faded away so sharply that she
gave a little sniff of surprise. It left something behind. All at once, and for the first time, Jo felt her separateness, aware suddenly that she was one single person, different to this mother in
the front seat. Furrowing her brow, she began to explore herself, trying to test out where she stopped and started.

That night, Jo lay in her bed knowing she was alone, that beyond the tips of her fingers and her toes nobody else was there who knew what she was feeling in the exact way she felt it. She wanted
Francesca to read her the rest of
The Gruffalo
but Francesca had been sent away. She picked up the book from her bedside table, struggling with both hands, and opened it to look at the
pictures, trying to find the last one they had looked at together before Francesca had kissed her goodnight and gone to finish the ironing – before she had heard loud voices downstairs and
her mother shouting. She let the book fall on the bedcover and saw the bridge again, in shape after shape, all imagined, all wooden, all sad. Clutching the woollen doll another lost nanny had
bought her, she held it squashed against her chest, fearing that if she let it go someone might come and bury it in the earth by that bridge. Then she began to cry silently, keeping the sobs inside
for fear of footsteps on the stairs.

Lost in that misery, someone quietly spoke a name inside her head, touched her on the forehead – behind the forehead where it really hurt, kissing the tears away from the inside. In the
filtered evening gloom of the curtained room someone was there with her, giving her courage, telling her she was not alone after all and everything really would be all right. Something like a story
without words filled the room, sealed off the rest of the house and brought her safety. It was a story about friendship and love, a promise of the future – even better than
The
Gruffalo
, thought Jo as she fell asleep.

When she woke in the morning, she was so delighted by the visit that she told her mother about it at breakfast. A week later, her mother took her to a large, quiet house near the Minster where a
quiet man sat in a quiet room and asked her lots of questions with long, quiet silences in between.

‘Your mother tells me you have a new friend.’

She nodded.

‘She says your new friend is called “Girly”. Is that right?’

It was near enough, so she nodded again.

‘Is that Girly?’ he asked, and it took her a moment to realise that he was pointing at the woolly doll. She was so surprised at his mistake that she laughed out loud.

‘That’s a toy,’ she pointed out in a kind voice so he would not feel hurt. You would have thought a grown-up would know that.

Afterwards she sat in the waiting room, watching
Antiques Roadshow
on television while the quiet man talked to her mother.

‘It’s nothing to worry about, Mrs Driscoll,’ he said. ‘A high proportion, perhaps even a majority of children of Joanna’s age have imaginary friends. It can be a
reaction to all kinds of things – a bit of stress, a bit of loneliness, sometimes neither of those. It’s often the more intelligent children who need to have someone they can talk to.
It may be an animal or a fairy or another child.’

‘This one isn’t any of those,’ said Fleur. ‘She talks as if it’s a grown woman.’

The psychiatrist was about to suggest this might be a mother substitute but he looked at the jut of Fleur’s jaw and thought better of it.

‘There’s another thing. She keeps eating grass.’

‘Grass?’

‘Well, plants and leaves. Things from the garden and the hedges. I told her she would poison herself and she just said no, she wouldn’t, and it made her feel better.’

‘That’s probably harmless,’ said the psychiatrist uneasily. ‘Animals do it. Let’s look at the other side of all this. What is it you
like
about your
daughter?’

‘Like?’

‘Yes. Well, all right. What pleases you? What does she do right?’

All that came into Fleur’s head was that her daughter was surprisingly good at predicting the weather but that felt more like an irritation than an accomplishment, starting from the fine,
warm day when Jo had developed a wobbly bottom lip when she wasn’t allowed to bring her raincoat with her and they had both been soaked by a downpour that seemed to come from nowhere.

‘She’s very tidy,’ Fleur said, but it didn’t seem an adequate response.

Back home, Fleur often found herself wanting to shout ‘Don’t watch me like that’ when she saw her daughter’s eyes following her. What she meant was ‘Don’t
need me like that’, which you might say was not her fault, going straight back to her own mother and her mother’s father and grandfather, and on backwards veering between genders for
thirty, forty, fifty generations – all the way back to one who started the whole chain reaction without any parental influence whatsoever. Perhaps any one of them could have broken the chain
by deciding to do it differently. Could have done, but didn’t.

Jo became a very quiet little girl when she was at home. At school, she could talk to her secret friend in her head, but she learned to close that door when she knew her mother was around and
that meant that at home she was only half a person. At night, when her mother was downstairs, she could talk again, sometimes out loud, and her friend would be there to reassure her, to go over the
events of the day with her and show her how to smooth away the sharp parts. She didn’t know that Fleur could creep up the stairs, leaving the television turned up to cover her. She
didn’t know that from the other side of the thin plywood that had turned the old doorway between their rooms into a clothes cupboard, her mother could hear anything she said and write down
what she heard. That was why, once or twice a year for the next five years, Fleur would take her daughter to another quiet specialist and then another, always hoping they would take it more
seriously than they did. She wanted them to treat her daughter like you treat an old house for woodworm, as if a spray from some magic chemical might make her normal.

When Jo was nine, Fleur went to a parents’ evening at her school. It was an expensive private school and she went because she had recently bought the vicarage next door.
As a speculation it looked like being rapidly rendered unprofitable by unexpected problems in the roof and she thought perhaps the head might see it as a worthwhile investment to help the
school’s expansion. That meant serving her time by sitting down to listen to Mrs Hedges, Jo’s teacher, and it soon became apparent that Mrs Hedges had something to say.

‘I’m very interested in an expression Joanna used in class, Mrs Driscoll. It’s not one I’ve heard before.’

Fleur’s first thought was that her daughter had used a swear word because it would not have surprised her at all that Mrs Hedges hadn’t heard it. Mrs Hedges seemed to have only a
small fingerhold on the real world that Fleur inhabited, the world of business. She had no time for the whimsical and indulgent take on childhood that Mrs Hedges had displayed on the few occasions
they had met. She did not see it as a teacher’s function to show undue fondness for the children in her care nor to bring them up in the belief that the world was a benevolent place only
distinguished from fairy tales by the absence of talking rabbits.

‘What did she say?’

‘We were discussing proverbs, you see? It’s such a good way to get them to look at language and culture and history.’

The only proverb that immediately came to Fleur’s mind was ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’, a statement of which she thoroughly approved, so she simply raised her
eyebrows and Mrs Hedges, sensing a chill without understanding why, floundered on.

‘I asked them if they knew any proverbs and she put her hand up, you see? She doesn’t often do that so I went straight to her and she said this odd thing.’

‘Which was?’

‘She said, “The mist on the hill bringeth water to the mill.” Now, I wonder, is that something you say in your family?’

‘No. Why on earth would anyone say something like that?’

Mrs Hedges opened a folder and Fleur noted grimly that the cover was decorated with stuck-on pictures of roses. ‘Then she said, “Women’s jars bring men’s wars.” At
least I think that’s what it was and, um, yes, “The hasty hand catches frogs for fish.”’

‘And is that supposed to mean something? It sounds like nonsense.’ Fleur looked across the school hall to where Jo and a group of other children were being rehearsed in some
entertainment that she feared the parents would be expected to sit through at the end of the evening.

‘I was hoping you could tell me,’ said the teacher. ‘I took the one about mist and mills to mean that good things come out of bad and I looked up the frogs one on the internet.
It says it’s very old and Sir Walter Scott used it in
Ivanhoe
. I wondered if you’d been reading
Ivanhoe
to her or something like that?’

‘No.’ Fleur hadn’t been reading anything to Jo and wasn’t sure if
Ivanhoe
was a poem or a book.

‘And the women’s jars thing? I can’t find any trace of that.’

‘I have no idea. Does this matter?’

‘Well, yes, I think perhaps it does. Since then her writing has really taken off. She’s turning out to be very imaginative. She has been writing some lovely stories.’

Mrs Hedges delved into the rose-covered folder again and any other mother there would have smiled and reached for the papers she brought out and been thrilled that their daughter was showing
early literary talent but Fleur, who was not any other mother, had something more pressing on her mind. She looked across the room and saw Justin Reynolds, a member of the Council Planning
Committee, just getting to his feet from another session at another table. She left Mrs Hedges stunned by the speed of her departure, though somewhat relieved.