It wasn’t enough, but she felt something final about writing it. She had sent her mother a postcard after she left home. ‘I will not be back for some time. Do not worry about me. Love, Mireille.’
She put the letter in an envelope and sealed it. She knew what she was saying. Leave me alone. It was something she had never said to him before. She started another letter.
Dear Stephen,
And this time I shall call you Sanclair, because that is your real name and I named you after the village. I know you remember nothing about this place but I remember it. I wish you did remember. When you swam in the Ferrou, you were never scared of the water, you would have crawled right in if I hadn’t stopped you. You were so fearless. Nothing scared you. Even a late summer thunderstorm that shook the hut and the rain beating like boots on the roof. You sat there on the floor with big wide eyes and your mouth open, not afraid, but awed. Gregor said, ‘It’s the sky gods having a party,’ and he took you outside to see the lightning flashing in great forks across the valley, and you both came back wet and shivering. I had to stoke the stove up and you were chattering with cold. You said, ‘So big!’ and stretched your arms out. ‘So big!’ For days after you looked up at the sky, waiting for another storm. I wish you could remember. We all slept up in the loft and took it in turns to tell stories. Can’t you remember Gregor’s, about the man with the lame donkey and the boat to the Scottish islands? The blind woman in the Sudan who could tell her family’s history for generations? My stories were Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, Peter Pan, and the tale of Avelard, the troubadour. When it was your turn you told such funny things, big monsters, sky gods and the old woman with a lump on her nose. Your world was so small. The hut, the village, the Ferrou, your red shirt, your floppy rabbit. Then I would see you playing and I could see your world was endless. A tree was a wizard, a stone was a lump of the sky. You played by the Ferrou, talking to nobody, talking to somebody, a muddled up French and English. Sanclair. You started off here and I wish you could remember because it must have affected you, to be a child in the woods. I will not send you this letter.
Sanclair, this is no longer a letter for you but I want to keep writing. I want to go back to the beginning. My beginning. These are the facts. I was born in Charing Cross Hospital in 1954, on a Thursday in early December. I was born a month early and this inconvenienced my mother because she missed out on the Christmas parties. I weighed a little over 5lbs. There was some concern for my health, but not enough. My parents lived in Kilburn in a first-floor flat. My father was an architect. My mother was very beautiful. I had a nurse called Pammy. The pram wouldn’t go up the stairs so I used to sleep in the hallway by the back door. Pammy told me this. My mother never said much about Kilburn except that it was a low-class sort of area and she was pleased to leave it. I was a quiet baby, said Pammy. I used to lie in my pram and watch the ceiling. When I was six months old we moved to Bath and Pammy came too. We lived in a large house up the Lansdown Road, overlooking the city. There was plenty of space to entertain and my parents did this frequently. If consciousness is the beginning, then this is where I begin …
I’m in the nursery and my parents are having a party. The nursery is right at the top of the house. A little bedroom for me, a room where I eat and play and a bedroom for Pammy. The wallpaper is stripy, blue and white, like a mattress. There is an old-fashioned rocking horse. The curtains have yellow roses on. I’m sitting on Pammy’s lap and my mother is there. This is unusual, she doesn’t come up to the nursery much. She is choosing a dress for me. I have lots of pretty dresses, smocked at the front with tiny flowers on. I’m sleepy. My mother is saying, ‘She looks best in blue, pale blue,’ and she’s wearing blue too, a sleeveless shiny blue dress. She has sparkling shoes and shiny blonde hair. ‘This one,’ and she gives it to Pammy, who dresses me and ties up the sash at the back. I stand on the floor and they both look at me. ‘Oh, poppet!’ says Pammy, but my mother is scowling. She tries to smooth down my hair with a brush. I have curly black hair and it won’t stay flat. She rubs my cheek with pink-nailed thumbs. ‘Why isn’t there a lotion to get rid of freckles?’
I think about my parents and I think of film stars. My father is Dirk Bogarde and my mother is Grace Kelly, but she’s not tall, she’s tiny and delicate. She has that same icy cool. She smiles and turns her head. She is always being looked at. There are so many parties I can’t remember which one, but I remember the smell of wine and cigar smoke, jazz music and the mix of voices like at a swimming bath, jumbled and distorted. I hold my mother’s hand and come downstairs. Pammy doesn’t, she never does. The guests stop talking and say, ahh. My mother says, ‘It’s the best I could do.’ She has rings on her fingers and they are biting into my hand. We stop at the bottom of the stairs and she smiles and turns her head. Then my father rushes up and hurls me up high. I squeal and laugh. He kisses me noisily. I’m all crumpled and my hair gets messy. My best girl, he whispers in my ear and carries me round to the table of puddings and I can have a taste of any one I want. The music’s louder. Daddy’s laughing with Alan Crawford. I put my head down because I’m sleepy. Alan’s cigar makes my eyes itch and Daddy twirls me round and round and I can still see, near the stairs, my sparkling mother.
Hugo is my hero. I’m his best girl, his darling. When he comes back from France he gives me a doll. I have a cupboard full of dolls with clothes as beautifully stitched as my own. He looks like me. He has dark hair, blue eyes and freckles which on him don’t offend my mother. When I think about him now I feel different. He could tell me about the history of France and how to put a drain in a house. How to play cricket and what was the best way to land a Spitfire on bumpy ground. But he never asked me what I wanted or if I was happy.
My parents went away on holiday and left me with Pammy. The house was quiet and we ate in the kitchen. It seemed huge compared to the nursery. There was a round wooden table with red chairs. The floor was black and white. The door led into the garden, a tiny town garden with a wall all round. A cherry tree with blossom like pink snow and red bark that peeled like paper. I watched the sparrows splash in the bird bath. I sat on the kitchen step. Pammy called, ‘Lunch!’ and we had sausages and mashed potato.
I can’t remember Pammy’s face, but she was pink and fat. She wasn’t a nanny but a nurse, and sometimes she wore a nurse’s apron with a little watch pinned to it. But that was when I was very little. I remember her in Bath wearing flowery dresses that squeezed across her stomach. Sandals with socks and a white cardigan with pearly buttons. Her bosom was enormous and her cardigan never fitted over it. She smelled of Coty’s L’aimant and Imperial Leather soap. She treated me with the briskness and matter-of-factness that nurses were supposed to treat their patients. I like to think that when I was a baby she sang to me and cradled me, because I’m sure my mother never did.
Pammy likes Elvis. When my parents are away we go into the lounge and play records on the stereogram. I’m not allowed in the lounge and neither is she, but we won’t tell. Pammy sings along and now I can see her face. Her face is round, her hair is short and mousy, she sings ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in a whisper, she knows all the words. My mother is beautiful and Pammy is not, but her lips tremble when she whispers, ‘They’ll make you so lonely you will die.’ Her eyes are closed. This is ecstasy. It looks curious and rather frightening but I want to feel it too. I close my eyes. The music stops and Pammy says, ‘Would you like some milk and biscuits?’ She looks embarrassed and pinker and smooths down the covers of the easy chairs. They are covered in yellow roses like the curtains in my room.
I remember these times, which in my memory stretch for months but were probably only weeks. We never visit anybody. She reads me stories in a flat voice. Cinderella. Little Red Riding Hood. Snow White. I try as hard as I can to see Cinderella’s glittering ball like one of my parents’ parties, the grinning wolf like Alan Crawford and Snow White singing as she makes sausages and mash for the seven dwarves.
Sometimes we go out,