The Girl from Station X (4 page)

That night I go to bed in the narrow brown room that I’ve been put in at my grandmother’s. On the wall beside my bed, very close, are pictures of wild boars fighting. They look very
cruel. Someone has given me a rubber for my birthday and put one in for Raymond as well. Now it is
my
rubber. My mother does not come to say good night to me.

My grandmother told me years later that it was Katherine, who had come to work at Knowle on my mother’s eleventh birthday and who remained at Knowle for fifty years, who
eventually found Raymond in the dark. ‘Poor Katie, with her stick-thin legs; she couldn’t swim!’ said my grandmother. My grandmother threw off her winter coat and dived in to save
her grandson, but it was too late.

My aunt and her husband drove straight to Knowle from their Dorset home while my father drove through the dark from North Heath with my mother. He had sent his sister a telegram:
RAYMOND ACCIDENTALLY DROWNED
– as though he might have drowned on purpose! said my aunt, telling me the story years later. She added that, while my mother had
sat, completely frozen, unable to cry, my father drank a whole bottle of whisky and shouted at the vicar: ‘I don’t want my son in heaven, I want him down here!’

The vicar’s wife, Veronica, came with her husband from the village for several evenings after that, and up to my bedroom to kiss me good night. I relished her soft skin and her embraces.
She was much younger than my mother. I don’t remember seeing my mother for days, maybe weeks, after Raymond’s accident.

At last, Nicky and I were allowed to see her, and our baby brother was carried in. My mother was in bed, in the room which had been hers as a child. There were pink rosebuds on the wallpaper and
in the summer real roses pushed their way through the open windows. As I walked in I thought: ‘At least she’s got us.’

One morning on the staircase at Knowle, my father pointed to his dark tie. ‘I’m wearing this for Raymond’s funeral.’

I had not been invited. Raymond now belonged with the adults. He was more important to them than I was.

Each day now at Knowle, I played with Nicky in my mother’s old schoolroom. I played with Nicky in our grandmother’s garden, and in the rhododendron bushes at the corner of her wood,
the place I called ‘Our Village’. I busied myself with my infant brother, pretending that I was his guardian, the only person left in the world to look after him. Sometimes I romped
with my father’s black dog Raven, half retriever and half Chesapeake Bay, the latter breed accounting for his slightly curly coat. Raven was dignified, old beyond his years, and I loved it
when I managed to get him to run up and down with me. He would often smile at me, crinkling up his mouth.

We were sent to Ireland that Christmas to stay with Michael, the son of my grandmother’s sister Elisa, who had drowned in the sea in Italy; Michael, then an infant, and his father were
saved. Michael, a big bearded man, owned Raven’s brother, Drake, who was more lively than Raven. I played with him and he chewed a button off my duffel coat.

I don’t remember missing Raymond. I do remember wishing powerfully that he was alive again, because then everything could be back to normal and we – and most of all my mother –
could be happy.

S
ussex, 1957. It should be wonderful in our new home. We have a large garden, a farm, a playroom as well as a nursery, even a donkey. But now,
because of what happened to Raymond, my mother cannot attend to me and my younger brothers. In our new garden, I play with Nicky. Below our big lawn are dark rhododendron bushes, less welcoming
than the ones at Knowle in Our Village. Nevertheless, I take my little brother into their shelter and pretend as before that his parents are dead, and I am the only person left to look after him.
Nearer the house, the two fishponds have been covered with wire netting.

Doreen’s back is still bad, so she is not allowed to work with children ever again. We have a new nanny, who wears an odd stiff white turban, who loves my baby brother. For the first time
in my life, I’m left to do what I like. Without Doreen in charge, I can wear trousers every day. I spend most of my time outside. Nicky, just three, is not allowed with me beyond the garden.
On my own, I run up to our farm and play in the hay bales. I roam the fields, as far down as the river, where brown water pours very fast over the weir. I pick primroses, I smell the earth around
them, I put my face to their delicate pale yellow faces and breathe in their scent. I make a small bunch for Nah, my mother’s old nanny, who lives with us, and I put more primroses, with a
few mauve windflowers, protected by the primroses’ soft green leaves, in a small vase in my own bedroom. I am outside nearly all day. In the fields, where the celandines glitter yellow, I am
almost happy.

Out of my bedroom window I can glimpse the Sussex downs; beyond them is the sea. I can see the village church, St Margaret’s, across two fields. A long time ago a boy was taking bells
there on St Margaret’s Day, in a cart pulled by two white oxen. The fields by the church flooded, the river went on rising and the boy and the oxen were swept into the river and drowned. My
mother told me the story.

There is a curse on our family, to do with drowning, and on other families who lived at Battle Abbey, the property that my great-grandfather Michael rented after making money in South
America.

During the Dissolution of the Monasteries – we learn about this at school – the monks were turned out of the abbey, and King Henry VIII gave it to a Sir Anthony Browne. Sir Anthony,
I read in an old book, levelled the abbey’s church, and gave a banquet to celebrate. A dispossessed monk appeared and addressed the guests: ‘Mark ye, my masters, ye that take
God’s holy land and use it for your own purpose, God’s curse shall be upon ye and your name shall be wiped out of the land by fire and by water.’

Two hundred and fifty years later, the book continues, the house of Sir Anthony’s descendants, by then called Montagu, and living at Cowdray, burned to the ground, and other dramatic
deaths of Montagus followed; two young men perished in the Rhine, and two adults and three children drowned at Bognor Regis. A Sir Thomas Webster acquired Battle Abbey in 1719; in 1917, Lady
Webster and a governess drowned in the lake there. My grandmother’s oldest sister, Elisa, who, with her sisters, had lived at Battle Abbey when her father rented it from the Webster family,
was drowned in Italy. Aunt Dita’s granddaughter died in her parents’ swimming pool in America. And now there was Raymond.

At night I’m alone in my room. I line up six soft toy animals in my bed, three each side of me. I burrow down and pull the sheets right over my head, something I did not
do at North Heath. Our new Irish nanny is a long way downstairs, dealing with the baby. Nicky sleeps down there with them. The new nanny seems to prefer the baby.

In my child’s bedroom I have a shiny Dutch wooden clog, a miniature bookcase painted pink containing the works of Beatrix Potter, a wardrobe made of plywood (flimsy, as I discover while
sleepwalking – I nearly pull it over on top of me), a picture of
All Things Bright and Beautiful
and a cabinet full of small china horses of different colours. I have a bookcase full
of books, my favourite being
Black Beauty
, which, by the age of six, I had read seven times – my father is proud of this. I know by heart the ending where Black Beauty, now an old
horse, after many tribulations, reminisces: ‘Often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my old friends under the apple trees.’

My mother, like Black Beauty, has her memories, but doesn’t share them with me in the way my grandmother does hers. My mother tells her memories in the grand way that she announces her
likes and dislikes: ‘I hate the white of egg!’ I’m not required to answer. I have heard her tell more than once of how, when she was a little girl, she received the news that her
grandfather Michael had died. ‘I was singing a little song,’ she will say. ‘So I promised myself I would never sing that song again!’ When she talks like this it makes me
squirm.

I go to a new school up the road, where most of the other girls are boarders. On my first day an older girl comes up close to me and says menacingly: ‘We all know about your brother. The
head told the school on Friday.’ I don’t answer.

My mother buys me a dressing gown with flowers on it. My best school friend says it’s posh. When I invite her for the day, I ask my parents if we can have a picnic in the field by the
river, so she won’t see that my family has a cook. I also invite a girl from the class below us. I tell my mother that she reminds me of Raymond – she has a few freckles on the bridge
of her nose, like Raymond did. I want to please my mother. But after the girl has left, my mother says that she doesn’t look like Raymond.

I have been to the dentist. The whole inside of my mouth is numb from the injection. I bite into it and chew it – hard. My mother is asleep on the sofa.

‘My mouth’s bleeding!’

‘Of course the fish’s mouth bleeds when the bait’s in it,’ my mother mutters.

I stand hesitantly beside her.

She wakes up and starts moaning: ‘I want Raymond, I want my Raymond!’

Nah, who looked after my mother as a little girl and cares for her now, comes in and soothes her. I creep away.

I’m sitting on the staircase outside Nah’s room. My mother, Nah and Mrs C from the village, whose little girl died, are in there. I hear one of them saying: ‘He wasn’t
like the others.’

I begin to hate Raymond.

At North Heath, my mother had often played with me, joining in my imaginary world. She and I had danced together in the garden by the big copper beech tree, chanting, about one of my invented
characters: ‘Grey Lady dancing! Boop boop-a-doop!’

There is no merry meadow at our new home. My mother no longer plays with me. It is Raymond’s fault.

My mother’s mental decline from Alzheimer’s in the 1990s, although certainly distressing for her and for those around her, was at first, for me, in some ways a
relief. It meant that she could be contained and looked after, by kind Mr Mainwaring, by Mrs Anderson, her devoted housekeeper, and by temporary carers from an agency, all supervised by Molly.
There would be no more drunken falls, because she could not go out and buy alcohol. Friends, hers and mine, would express sympathy and Doreen, who, after she left us, had married a gardener like
her father, and been happy with him, wrote:
How can you bear to see her like this?
– but the brutal fact was that I preferred to have my mother senile and under control than wild,
unpredictable and drunk.

My mother’s drunkenness had been going on for years.

One night, she collected me from a teenage party in Sussex. As we set off along the dark lanes towards home she could hardly drive. She went forward in fits and starts, braking jerkily and
talking to herself in that slurred voice. Even then I didn’t consciously realise that she was drunk (a few weeks earlier, with me in the front seat, she had driven straight into the back of a
car at red lights on Clapham Common); or maybe she was drunk so often that I had got used to it.

One winter, when I was ten or eleven, as she was driving me from London to Sussex, she took a short cut. It had been snowing and, as we started down a steep hill, the car stalled. Leaning on the
steering wheel, then shaking her head slowly from side to side, as she often did while inebriated, my mother declared: ‘I can’t struggle any more!’

‘You must!’ I said grimly. I knew I had to be the sensible one, the one in control. That feeling of having to be in charge went on. I see from a letter I wrote to a friend in 1971,
as though I was my brother’s parent, that, the day that Nicky passed some important exams, I took him to a night of Roman Polanski films as a treat. By the time I was twenty-one, both my
younger brothers had been asked to leave their schools. My grandmother reported that my mother asked her: ‘Why can’t Elisa look after the boys?’ I wonder now whether my
grandmother pointed out to her daughter that it was her job, not mine, to look after her own sons.

My mother’s drinking did not make her happy, as it seemed to do some drunks – at least in the short term. It made her maudlin. One evening, in my twenties, I came
in and found her crawling upstairs. I went on past her. My mother later accused me of heartlessness. Another evening an American friend and I found her on her sofa, shaking her head from side to
side like a mad woman. When I thought about these incidents many years later, I felt a cold rage – and powerlessness. I felt rage towards my mother, but also towards those contemporaries of
hers who didn’t help. After my father died, a woman whom my mother had met on one of her many trips abroad summoned me and told me about my mother’s drinking, as though I didn’t
know already. Another woman spoke to me about it at a book launch. If they were so concerned, why didn’t they encourage her to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or a clinic?
Couldn’t they see that her children had had enough?

I met my future husband Andrew, a writer, in autumn 1978 – after more members of my immediate family, including my grandmother, had died. In April 1979, Andrew invited me to a party at his
artist brother’s studio on a Sunday night.

When I lived as a child in the country, April was my favourite month. Primroses and celandines opened, there was Easter with its chocolate eggs, the first warm sun and the promise of the long
light evenings. However, this April weekend, aged twenty-nine, I set off reluctantly to visit my mother in Sussex. My godmother Meg, who had just been to see her, had urged me to go; she was
concerned that my widowed mother, who had broken her hip that summer, might be lame for life.

When I got to Sussex I was appalled by the state of my former home. There were dog puddles in passages; elsewhere, antique rugs had been ruined by dogs’ messes and stains. My mother was
still in her dressing gown although it was the late afternoon. There seemed to be no discipline in her life; everything was done according to whim.