The Girl from Station X (7 page)

Soon after her eightieth birthday, before Camelot was found for her, my mother had stood at the top of her old staircase, afraid to come down, repeating: ‘I want to go home!’
Eventually she was persuaded to walk slowly downstairs, holding on to Mrs Anderson’s arm, a puzzled, slightly fearful expression on her face.

Later I asked Mr Mainwaring: ‘When she keeps saying, “I want to go home”, what does she mean? Does she mean Knowle?’

Mr Mainwaring replied: ‘Oh no, she means where she is now.’

But my mother was already in her own house.

After revisiting the Knowle woods, I thought again about what she had meant. Was she referring to her own confused state of mind, where ‘home’ was some imagined
place of safety where she’d no longer be disorientated, or did she really want to go back to Knowle, her childhood home, which I’d always thought she hated after Raymond’s
accident? Soon after that unsatisfactory visit to Madrid in 1992, Molly told me that my mother had gone with her to my Sussex house and photographed the garden ornaments that used to be at Knowle
– a lead urn with mice crawling up the sides, a little boy holding a duck, and a little girl kneeling, one arm stretched up, yawning. Then she went inside and photographed the Spy drawing of
her grandfather Michael. Perhaps she was trying to prompt memories with these images from her old home, before she forgot everything. Maybe she
had
been fond of Knowle as a child, even as a
young woman. I found myself hoping that she had.

T
he house went on the market in September 1997, a few days after Princess Diana’s death. Its contents had to be sorted out. Luckily I had
help from Molly and from Mrs Anderson, who had already moved with her husband into the converted upper floor in Camelot to help look after my mother.

I felt that again my life was taken over by my parent. I recalled all those years after my father’s death and later, including the whole period of my marriage, when I would come home and
find disturbing messages on my answerphone. One said: ‘Pamela’s husband has died!’ (Pamela was my father’s cousin, whom I had met once, at my father’s funeral; my
mother did not know her well either.)

My mother’s voice on the tape was usually so slurred that it was unrecognisable, though of course I knew it was her. There was often a tone of self-pity which made me recoil. Once, she
left a message saying that she had posted me a poem about old age. She must have hoped this would make me feel sorry for her but it had the opposite effect. Afraid of being dragged into her chaos
and despair, I hardened myself against her.

Now, I wished that she had sorted out her own affairs in advance, while she was still compos mentis, like other women did, women who acted like adults. I compared her to June, the former Wren
whom my father met when he was a young midshipman. June drove sailors round Liverpool at the beginning of the war and my father told me that he had proposed to her, years before meeting my mother.
June, widowed after her last husband died in a car crash, ended up living down the road from me, and we became friends. She told me that my father, after she’d turned him down (partly because
he was Catholic), had then given her bad advice on her future first husband: ‘You won’t get very far with
him
. He only fucks dukes’ daughters!’

When June became frail, she sold her house and went to live near her daughter, as did my aunt. These women tried to make it easier for their offspring.

At first, I found my mother’s acquisitiveness disgusting. In the cupboard outside her bedroom were over seventy pairs of shoes, most of them unworn, many of them
alpagatas
(cheap rope-soled shoes) from Spain. Then I found in the attic a box of beach clothes that Raymond and Nicky and I wore as children – Aunt Dita had bought us three matching
swimsuits, white with little blue flowers, when my mother took us to see her in Palm Beach in 1955 – and in a wardrobe outside my old bedroom was a brown leather Hungarian coat, waisted,
double-breasted, with a full skirt. There was a green tartan shirt that my mother wore on a ranch, a bookcase of her children’s books –
The Gold Thread and ‘Wee
Davie’
,
Greyfriars Bobby
,
Teddy Lester’s Schooldays
– all of which I remembered reading with pleasure, her bronze Red Indian, and, in a chest of drawers,
heaps and heaps of old postcards.

In a small cupboard on the landing was a pale grey cotton bag with a drawstring, like those bags my mother used for prawning. I opened it and found it full of what appeared to be German
passports. I looked through them and saw that many belonged to Luftwaffe pilots from the Second World War. I was shocked – and fascinated. My first thought was that my mother, whose wartime
experiences I knew little about, except that she was a WAAF and had worked at Bletchley Park, had stolen them. Should she not have handed them to someone higher up in the organisation?

These passports were the first real physical evidence of my mother’s working, adult life, before she met my father, a life that I knew almost nothing about.

I left the bag in the cupboard – a sweetmeat to be tasted later.

Next day, Mrs Anderson showed me some loose black-and-white photographs. They were of me and Raymond, with Nicky lying beside us in his christening robe. I stared at my darling
little brother. I recalled how, after visiting him in hospital just after he was born, on 22 December 1953, I stood by the lift in my grandmother’s London house and triumphantly recited my
newborn brother’s names: ‘NICHOLAS – JOHN – PAUL!’ I felt that he was mine.

I said: ‘I absolutely adored him.’

We both glanced at a little pile of books on drug abuse that Mrs Anderson had unearthed. My mother must have been reading them when Nicky was a teenager.

I said: ‘Both my parents were alcoholics. They should have been addressing
their
problems as well.’

In a disused flat above the old stables, I found portraits of various ancestors. My great-great grandfather, a barrister, came over from Ireland in the 1830s and bought a small
farmhouse, then called Knole, in East Sussex. (The ‘w’ was added later, by my grandmother, to distinguish the house from the larger Knole in Kent, owned by the Sackville-West family.)
Some of the portraits had hung less than twenty years ago in our Knowle dining room. Their faces had stared down at me when I looked in at my birthday tea, the day Raymond disappeared. The women
had high cheekbones like their descendants – like my mother’s Aunt K, like my mother and like me. Unlike me and my mother, they had receding chins and yellowish waxy skin, so that my
grandmother called them ‘The Banana Faces’.

When I was thirteen and my brother Nicky was nine, we were playing in this area above the stables. The thin floor broke under my brother and he crashed through. I remember shouting:
‘Darling Nicky, are you all right?’ I was terrified he was dead. Now on that repaired floor lay ornaments, stacked plates, a bowl of false fruit and two pictures, one of a hare under a
full moon and one of a shepherd boy lying on a hill in moonlight, which I recognised from the London house where my mother was born – 40 Belgrave Square, which my grandmother’s father
Michael took on a hundred-year lease after he became rich.

Back inside my mother’s house, outside her old nanny’s room, was a small box of Nah’s things. Nah died in 1963, but these must have remained there ever since.
In an envelope were receipts, neatly clipped together, of Nah’s copies of
Woman’s Own
, delivered every week, and illustrated Easter and Christmas cards drawn by me and by her
niece Rosemary, who called her ‘Auntie Lye’. I found the little box of her things touching in its modesty. Nah was almost the only person in our household who did not go off the rails.
As an adolescent, I spent almost every evening in her tiny bedroom. We watched
Emergency Ward 10
on TV and listened to her radio – Wilfred Pickles with his wife Mabel at the Table;
‘Have a Go, Joe! Come and Have a Go!’ I lay on Nah’s narrow bed reading her newspaper’s accounts of the Profumo case. The most sinister word to me was
‘osteopath’. What sort of perversion could this be? Nah didn’t know.

Nah never complained of having me in her room night after night. She used to offer me Callard & Bowser’s Cream Toffees from her tin, two per evening. I felt it was the only safe place
in the house.

Things were always going wrong at my parents’, going out of control. A few months after Raymond died, my mother bought two donkeys, and the female gave birth to a foal that I named
Shamrock. But the enchanting baby donkey died. Soon after that, my guinea pigs, which I’d had at North Heath, were torn to pieces by a fox. Years later, my pony got laminitis – she
ended up being shot by the farm manager – and, when I was a teenager, a cob that my parents had bought, which they hardly ever rode, attacked and killed an old horse belonging to my
mother’s friend Angela from Knowle. Another incident concerned a cook, whom I hardly knew, because I had left home by then, but which I nevertheless heard about and recorded in my diary as a
sort of narrative: the entry is undated.

The cook died on Thursday. Her bedroom was filled with bloody sheets that she had used to mop up her own blood. Towards the end she had been taking thirty aspirins
a day. She had not cashed a cheque for four years.

‘She looked really bitter. I always thought a corpse would look peaceful, but she didn’t,’ said the young man who sometimes drove my parents’
car.

‘I suppose she’d had a hard life,’ I said.

‘A refugee, wasn’t she? Turned out of East Germany – her dad had a farm there. She saw him drop dead in her path. They just marched on and left
him.’

Mrs N, it emerged, had led a solitary life in the kitchen and in her bedroom in my parents’ house. When she had her day off she would never go far, and refused to go away on holiday.
Instead she would walk on her own, carrying a staff, striding through the fields, humming softly. It seems terrible now to think of her sitting alone in her bedroom bleeding heavily. Surely someone
should have noticed if four years of cheques had not been cashed? Perhaps my father had died by then. And my mother certainly didn’t like to occupy herself with what didn’t interest
her.

The day I started clearing out her house, I was attacked by a violent stomach ache, which recurred each day. There appeared to be no physical cause and, after a visit to a
doctor, I decided that the pains were psychosomatic. Indeed, when I no longer had to go to the house regularly, they subsided. Even at forty-seven, I could not dispel the feelings of anxiety, of
danger, which I associated with my childhood home – and with my mother.

One afternoon, I found a box of things relating to Raymond; they appeared to be mostly his drawings and school books. My mother must have put them in the attic when we moved to Sussex soon after
he died. I wasn’t sure what to do with them. One idea, suggested by a friend, was to burn them in a ceremonial bonfire on top of the Sussex downs. But instead I took the box back to my
workroom in London. Only then did I look properly at the contents.

The first item I took out was my brother’s school satchel. It still looked very new. I had one exactly like it. I had the disconcerting feeling, passed on from early childhood, that we
were interchangeable in the minds of the adults who looked after us. I remembered the way they talked of us always together, in what sounded like one word – ElisaandRaymond. In a shoeshop
where my mother was buying us Start-Rite sandals, the assistant asked: ‘Are they twins?’ We both had light-brown hair and were almost the same height, although he was eighteen months
younger. My eyes are grey, while Raymond’s were blue like my mother’s – another reason to make her prefer him, I thought, even then.

Looking at his arithmetic book, I noted that my brother was doing sums right up to four days before he died.

He had a Hornby train. Here was a certificate from the Hornby Railway Company, dated 1954. This was the kind of boyish prop, like his Dinky cars, toy soldiers and little tractor, that sometimes
divided him from me, though, despite being a girl, I was bolder than he was. He was frightened of fireworks and always had to watch them from a window, and I also recalled that, at Comillas, he was
afraid of the sea.

I went on looking for something that would awaken a personal memory. Here was his writing exercise book, which also had illustrations: ‘I am Raymond, I am a tall boy.’ In the drawing
of himself, he was all in blue, his hands like bunches of bananas. Further on were other drawings, with his captions underneath: ‘I played with my trains’, ‘I went to a
circus’ and ‘We went to Hope’.

Then, with a shock, I saw some of my own drawings, which I remembered doing, and even a short story I wrote, about a farm. (I had longed to live on a farm, like the one at Knowle.) Here was an
illustration by me, of myself and my two younger brothers and a line of other children, all holding boxes tied with big bows. I had depicted myself as much the biggest. I was giant-sized and was
eating a box of chocolates. When I looked closer, I realised that the scene was meant to be my own future birthday party, and that those other, much smaller children were lined up to give me
presents. How different that birthday, and every one of my birthdays ever after, would turn out to be – my birthday would always be the day of Raymond’s death.

Why were my drawings shut away with his? I was torn between rage and pity – pity when I picked up a postcard he wrote to our mother in hospital, where she was having her last baby in June
1956.
Dear Mummy, I am doing 100s, 10s and units at school
.

Five months later he was dead. Now that I had had small children myself, this postcard, with its poignant message, reminded me that he was just a little boy who should have had a future like I
had.

Also in the box were some loose sheets of paper in my mother’s handwriting. When I looked closer, I saw that it was part of a diary, dated 1936, but none of the pages was
numbered. It must have been written at the time of the Abdication Crisis, as there were several references to Wallis Simpson and the King. Most of the diary was written in the USA – places
such as Maryland, Virginia and Shenandoah appeared. A few sheets were headed with a little painting of the
Queen Mary
, with her three red funnels, and the blue sea beneath her. My mother
must have travelled back to England on her that autumn.