I am very conscious of the patterns our lives make: of interconnecting cogs and wheels, of coincidence which is no coincidence but fate, of the quiet sources of our energy. All things connect. The lost wedding ring turns up on the day of the divorce; the person you happen to sit next to on the Tube happens to be your new boss. Destiny intervenes. We assume we are playing the lead, but turn out to be bit-part players in someone else’s drama. Nothing is without result.
Even the maiden aunts, Madge and Augusta, who helped Frank become a doctor, were major players in his story, for all the quiet seclusion of their lives. They lived in Newcastle, in a house in which almost nothing had changed since the beginning of the century. Antimacassars protected the armchairs: oil lamps provided the only lighting.
In my student days, when I would hitchhike down from St Andrews in Scotland to St Ives in Cornwall, their house made a useful stopping-off point. The Aunts, who by then were in their nineties, provided a fine refuge from the hunger and tribulations of the open road, especially in winter time. Their ancient maid May lived with them. Most social inequalities had been evened out by the passage of the years, but not all. They would share the warmth of the fire but if more coal were needed it would be May who went to fetch it, and she was the one who got up to make the tea, though she was even more doddery than they. There would be a candle to light you to the unheated spare room, where the bed was so high you had to climb up into it. A flowered china chamber pot was placed beneath it. Springs would creak if you moved: the mattress sagged. The sheets were linen and cold, and the pillow was stiff, but the weight of the many blankets was reassuring. After you had been a little while in the bed it would begin to steam with damp, which was oddly pleasant. In the morning ice crystals would have formed on the inside of the windows. You would put bare feet out onto cold lino, dress as fast as you could and make for the kitchen, where a purple-knuckled May would be making breakfast. The tea would be hot and sweet.
The aunts would give you some money to help you on your way, and wave goodbye from the door as you set out on the road, and you would worry that this was the last time you would ever see them. It seemed a miracle that they existed at all: this was the stuff of fairy-stories, as if they came into existence only to facilitate your journey. When you ceased to see them, they would cease to be.
It was when we left Amberley and moved to Christchurch that things fell apart. It could not have been expected. Christchurch was, and still is, a quiet, orderly town, the most English of all the New Zealand cities, the respectable face of the original New Zealand Company, which sold off land it did not own to the pioneers. The streets are laid out in rectangles around a central cathedral square, and rather grudging allowances made for the unreasonable curve of the green-banked River Avon. The flat Canterbury plains stretch off to the west to meet the white peaks of the Southern Alps: and to the north, neatly separated off by a soft ridge of hills, is the port of Lyttelton, in what was once a volcanic crater. But all that natural violence and upheaval was long, long ago.
In Amberley we were part of the old original land: the ground was soft beneath bare feet: in Christchurch people wore hats and gloves to go shopping. The sky felt too huge, arched over a city which did not take up enough room. The sense that we were perched at the end of the world, that real life went on somewhere else was very great. Even I felt it, and I was only four, nearly five. My father was to set up his practice in a good part of town. We had a house which was not a bungalow. It had a staircase, and you could look out onto the trams in the front of the house, and a garden with walnut trees and a washing-line at the back. I had a theory that I could fly like an angel and had to be stopped from jumping from the top windows. And I don’t know why it happened, or what exactly the move to the town precipitated, but I began to be conscious of a kind of trouble that ran through the house. I would wake in the night to sounds of discord. Jane frowned a lot. One day my mother put on her hat and gloves to go shopping and came back crying, with an empty basket. We owed money and it was my father’s fault. She’d had no idea.
The King (that was my father) was in his counting house, Counting out his money. (But there wasn’t enough of it) The Queen (that was my mother) was in the parlour Eating bread and honey. (If she was lucky) The maid was in the garden, Hanging out the clothes, Along came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.
The words haunted me. It seemed all too possible. Jane and I had a nursemaid who hung out the clothes and I beseeched her to be careful. Sudden and disagreeable things could happen. I knew that by now. Had we not moved from Amberley to Christchurch? And were there not blackbirds in the walnut tree? I had seen them. I met her fifty years on when I was visiting New Zealand, and I was glad to see she still had her nose. She remembered me more clearly than I remembered her. She said I’d say the oddest things. She’d offered to tell me a story and I said, ‘How can you? You haven’t got a book.’ She said she’d make the story up in her head, and I’d replied, ‘Then your head must be made of paper.’
The sudden and disagreeable things might have had something to do with Ina. Ina was the daughter of my mother’s friend Winifred. Winifred had come to New Zealand as an immigrant foundling at the age of sixteen and been apprenticed to a milliner. She’d met and married a man forty years older than herself, on the understanding that she would nurse him through his terminal illness. This she had done, conceiving Ina on the way. Now she was free, with her husband’s money in the bank. She was plain, practical and very kind. Her daughter Ina was always a trouble to her: beautiful, nervy, arty and spendthrift, running up debts her mother had to pay. She had a long neck and often wore a turban, and when my father read Aristophanes to us, and in one of the plays there was a bird called a Hoopoe, I thought he was probably describing Ina. She would turn up quite a lot at the house and when she did my mother would look baleful.
But nobody, surely, could compete with my beautiful mother? She was so special. She wrote a masque: I was not sure how that could be done, but whatever it was everyone dressed up in flowing robes and did what she told them to do. She spoke from the balcony of the Bishop’s Palace, which looked over green lawns and the River Avon, and everyone clapped. Then there was strawberries for tea. I was very proud of her. But I was proud of my father too. He took Jane and me to Hagley Park, to watch a man with a parachute drift out of the sky. The world was full of marvels. But the marvels and the nightmares had begun to run side by side, racing to see which would win.
There was a night of bangings and crashings, shrieks and slamming doors, during the course of which I was told to go back to bed. In the morning my mother was not there to get me up. My father did it instead and said she’d gone home, for a time. That was strange. Surely where someone lived was their home? On further enquiry home turned out to be another country, up at the top to the right on a page of the atlas. Home was England. We came from England which was why we were called homies.
But if the world was round like an orange, as people tried to tell me, why was it flat on the map? The orange theory did not make sense. Half the people in the world would be going round upside-down if it were true. I did not much like being tucked away at the bottom of the flat page, so far from anywhere else, tiny little lengths of red, set in a pale blue sea, so far from my mother on her way to the top of the page, but it was better than being on some huge orange. And at least now I had my father to myself.
But