‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I said, distractedly scrolling down the recruitment agency website on my screen. ‘I was planning to come at the weekend, anyway. I’m sure we can get it sorted together in a few hours.’
I heard her relieved sigh. ‘Oh could you, dearest girl? It would be such a weight off my mind.’
My Mini can virtually drive itself to Rowan Cottage, home for the first eighteen years of my life. My parents moved there in the 1960s, after they married and my father was recruited by the new university that had recently opened on the outskirts of Eastchester. He was already in his fifties and there was a twenty-year age difference between them – they met at University College, London, where he had been her doctorate tutor – but it was a very loving marriage. I was born five years later, to the great joy of both.
When I was three years old, he and my grandfather were killed in a terrible head-on collision on the A12 in heavy fog. All I can recall of that dreadful night is two large policemen at the door, and the woman officer who held me when my mother collapsed. She took my hand and walked me down the lane in my pyjamas and slippers, clutching my favourite teddy, to be looked after by our neighbours.
My grandfather was fairly senior in the local police, and my father by then a noted academic, so the accident was widely reported, but no cause ever explained. When I turned seventeen and began to take driving lessons, I asked Mum who’d been at the wheel that night, whether anyone else had been involved or whose fault it had been, but her eyes had clouded over.
‘We’ll never know, dear. It was a long time ago. Best let sleeping dogs lie,’ was all she would say.
Thanks to my father’s life insurance policy she managed to hang on to the house and kept his spirit alive by displaying photographs in every room and talking about him frequently. He looked like a typical sixties academic, with his gold-rimmed glasses and baggy olive green corduroy jacket, leather-patched at the elbows, often with his head in a book or a journal. Mum always says that she fell for his eyes, a kingfisher blue so brilliant that they seemed to hold her in a magic beam every time he looked at her.
There he is, frozen in time, lighting his pipe, playing cricket at a family picnic, sitting in the car with our small dog, Scottie, on his knee. In the photographs he seems to wear a perpetual smile, although apparently he could also be impatient and bossy – traits which, alas, he seems to have passed on to me. I have also inherited his slight stature, blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin, although the genes that gave him a brilliant academic brain seem to have passed me by. I’m more like my mother in temperament: always daydreaming and with a tendency to become distracted.
Money must have been tight. We had few luxuries but I always felt happy and loved, and never overly troubled by the lack of a father in my life. Mum never had any other relationships, not that she let me know about, at least. ‘You should join a dating agency,’ I suggested once – such things appearing to my teenage self as exotic and daring.
She brushed away the suggestion. ‘What a stupid idea,’ she said. ‘Why would I want a new beau? I’ve got my house and my health, my friends and my singing. And I’ve got you, my lovely girl. I don’t need to go out dating at my age.’
I took the slip road off the A12 and into the peace of the lanes. After the urban sprawl and unlovely highways of outer London, North Essex is surprisingly rural and beautiful. At this time of year, furrows in the bare fields collect rainwater and reflect silver stripes of sky against the brown soil; giant elms and oaks stand leafless and black against the wide sky, and rooks gather in their branches each evening, their fierce cawing echoing across the countryside.
Every village is dominated by an outsized flint church, each with its tower reaching robustly towards heaven, built in medieval times by a landed gentry grown fat on wool farming, who sought to secure their seats in paradise. These days the villages still attract fat cats: sleek City types drawn here by the newly-electrified line to Liverpool Street, who worship the great god of annual bonuses and whose vision of paradise is a new Aga in the kitchen, a hot tub on the patio and a sports car in the double garage.
At the end of the lane, in a shallow dip between two gentle hills, is a small green clustered around with a dozen cottages and farm buildings now converted into the price-inflated dream homes of weary commuters. At the edge of the green is Rowan Cottage, once a pair of farm labourers’ houses, with a pantiled roof and dormer windows. It’s the scruffiest property around but, unlike most of the others, seems to be fully at ease with the landscape, as if it has always been there.
As a teenager I hated the isolation, and the fact that the last bus left our local town at the ridiculously early hour of nine o’clock. But Mum still loves it here. After her shockingly early widowhood, she gave up her own academic ambitions and took a job as a school secretary so that she could be at home for me. Then, when I was about ten, she took a part-time job as a lecturer at the local polytechnic and, on those days, my grandmother would pick me up from school, take me back to her house and indulge me with chocolate biscuits.
Granny Jean, my father’s mother, was a feisty old woman with strong views, who read The Times from cover to cover, finished the crossword in a few hours and always had a book or a notebook and pen at her side, and sometimes a needle, darning, sewing up a hem or taking in a seam.
I loved going to stay with her, even though she refused to have a television. After tea, she would read to me all the children’s classics: Wind in the Willows, the Just So Stories and, my favourite, Alice in Wonderland. Of course I was too young to get Carroll’s surreal humour, but I loved the illustrations, especially the ones of Alice with long hair held back with that trademark hairband, her white apron, puffed sleeves and blue stockings. Oh how I wanted long hair and a pair of bright blue stockings!
When I grew old enough, Granny taught me how to sew: embroidery stitches and some very basic dressmaking. One memorable weekend, when I was about twelve and desperate for the latest fashions, we made a lurex mini-skirt – I cringe to recall it, but this was the 1980s after all – which I adored but never had the courage to wear. I’m sure it was Granny’s influence which led me, in the end, to study fashion.
But after she died and there were just the two of us left, it became ‘Mum and Caroline against the world’, a close, almost hermetic relationship which has left me with an overdeveloped sense of duty and a fear of letting her down. Her job was demanding, dealing with unruly students and warring staff, and I sometimes wonder whether the stress of being a single working parent, on top of the grief of losing her husband and father-in-law on a single day, caused changes in her brain that, many years later, have resulted in the tragic and insidious onset of her dementia.
Mum’s face lit up when, after a second’s hesitation, she recognised me.
‘Caroline, dearest girl, how lovely to see you,’ she said, reaching out with skeletal arms. She used to be tall, with dark curly hair and high colour to her cheekbones, but she’s shrinking now and her hair is now almost pure white, her skin pale grey. She seems, literally, to be fading away.
‘Come in, come in, I’ll get the coffee on,’ she said, leading the way to the kitchen, all stripped pine and eighties brown-and-orange decor. Little has changed at Rowan Cottage since I left home, and my interest in interior design must surely have been triggered by my parents’ lack of it. Their minds were focused on higher matters; what did anyone care what the inside of their house looked like, or how ragged the furnishings, so long as they were still serviceable and comfortable?
As a teenager I was so embarrassed by what I perceived as my parents’ lack of style that I refused to invite friends home. These days I’ve come to accept that Mum feels comfortable here, and will never change it. Colours and patterns clash with joyous abandon, chintz loose covers fight with geometric cushions, Persian carpets lie alongside rugs in swirly sixties designs – quite retro cool these days. Books jumble higgledy-piggledy on cheap pine bookshelves that sag under their weight of words. Some of the furniture, such as the Parker Knoll chairs and G-Plan coffee table, is so old-fashioned that it’s