In those days, Eliza’s father was absolutely self-absorbed and knew little about raising a child in the 1990s. When she went to bed, he assumed she would stay there. Sometimes, though, when it was still light, she would pull on some clothes over her pyjamas, put on her shoes, walk quietly out of the house, and jump on her bicycle. Legs pumping furiously, she would cross the dangerous roads – where trolls lurked under bridges – separating her father’s spacious Victorian dwelling from the modest terraced house where Billy lived with his family.
No threats of trolls, in fact, or the bogeyman, had ever been used to control her, and she had no fear of being kidnapped and murdered, an obvious oversight on her father’s part. Yet with the grace of some benevolent deity who regularly looks after small children, among others, she managed consistently to avoid all fast-moving vehicles, paedophiles and serial killers, and she got to see her Prince for a few minutes.
* * *
Eliza and Billy met when she was six and he was twelve. An unlikely match, at least for commoners in the twentieth century. He wandered past her front gate after school was out, late as usual and on his way home by a circuitous route that involved a park and an open-air theatre. She, already home, changed and ready for her make-believe world, was dressed in a pirate hat, with eye patch, and holding an overlarge cutlass. Despite his slouch and the sullen manifestation of youthful self-consciousness, she thought he was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen. He was tall and lanky, with a broad forehead, dark hair and hazel eyes which seemed too large for his pale face. He didn’t notice her at all, of course.
After that, she made sure she was in the garden at the same time every day, waiting to see her Prince. She made no attempt to engage him in conversation. Even at six, she knew that boys, especially boys so old and worldly, were not about to compromise their social standing by being seen talking to six year olds. So she just looked at him solemnly and invisibly.
One day he emerged from his thoughts for long enough to register that the garden gnome in the front yard of number thirty-one was actually a small girl. He looked at her with only as much curiosity as was seemly in one so above it all. She might have been the poster child for the Moppet Club. Her hair was almost black, and curly. She was quite pale, except for her pink cheeks and the cherry lips of a young child. Her eyes were almost too big, and almost too blue. She looked like everybody’s favourite dolly; she would probably, if tipped backwards, say “Ma-Ma”, and she was dressed incongruously in a pirate hat and eye patch.
“Arrrr,” she said, as befitted a pirate of her standing, as desperate and bloodthirsty a villain as one could hope to see in Primrose Hill on a sunny autumn afternoon. He looked back, and a smile started, reluctantly, at the left side of his mouth. Eventually, in spite of itself, the smile made it all the way across.
“Arrrr,” he returned, and continued on his way, still smiling.
* * *
Victoria Eliza Annie MacLean had rather an unusual childhood, although she had nothing with which to compare it, and therefore could find no fault. Katharine Adelaide Mary MacLean, younger by three years, was the second and last of Richard and Lisette MacLean’s daughters. British queenly names are quite thin on the ground and repetitive, so it’s perhaps as well they stopped at two. One feels that things would not have gone well in the schoolyard for little Boadicea MacLean.
On a day which rather stood out in Eliza’s memories, some months after her third birthday, her nursery-school teacher, Kirsten, drove her home as a favour to her father, and left her at the door after ringing the bell. Kirsten rushed back down the garden path and drove away at speed, as though pursued by a canine of menacing aspect and pointed teeth. The door was already open, so Eliza ran down the wide hallway and into the kitchen, whence the usual baby noise was coming, to find her baby sister, her father and her aunt hovering over a tin of formula and a bottle. Kathy, her face red from screaming, was being held and jiggled by Auntie Danni, a study in Stoicism, while Eliza’s daddy did an excellent job of Agitation, running his hands through his hair. This told Eliza he was not going to want to hear about how she had bitten little Rufus Jacobson, hard, on the elbow. Eliza considered it fair retribution for scribbling on her drawing, but realised this was not the time to present her case. She pulled her aunt’s sleeve, and whispered, “Auntie Danni, where’s Mummy?”
Her father became aware of her presence at that point, and picked her up, kissed her and tried to act all cheerful. He did a woeful job, for an actor. “Mummy’s had to go away for a rest, darling. She isn’t well.”
“Is she going to die?” asked Eliza, with interest, not really knowing what it meant to die, but then she suddenly remembered being told that Daddy’s grandfather had died. She knew he had gone away and she had not seen him again. Then Daddy had been hurt in an accident while he was out in the car. Daddy had come home from hospital after a couple of days, but she had not seen the car again, so it must have died. Suddenly Eliza felt terribly scared.
“Daddy,” she said, her mouth turning down and her eyes filling. “Is Mummy coming back?”
“Yes, poppet,” he told her, relaxing a little now because the baby, with her mouth full of milk, had stopped screaming. “Auntie Danni’s here to help us with Kathy.” He sat down with Eliza on his lap and cuddled her, possibly more for his comfort than hers.
Nobody really knew, for the moment, if Mummy was coming back. It seemed that after a few months of trying to manage her husband, her wilful elder daughter, and a baby, Lisette MacLean had a bit of a breakdown. By that, I mean she cried a lot, stayed in bed a lot, and generally sent out a distress call that was picked up by Her Majesty’s Coastguard, Thames, but nobody came to help. People probably told her to pull her socks up. She wasn’t wearing any because the washing hadn’t been done for two weeks. The only thing that occurred to her was to run away and leave both children with her husband, Richard.
That night, after a bath, another feed, and the singing of many lullabies by Auntie Danni, Kathy went to sleep, and thankfully slept right through the night. Eliza, however, did not. She kept getting up to check on the grownups in the lounge room, and on her sister. She eventually got into her aunt’s bed with her, and Danielle was too tired to argue.
At about three o’clock the next afternoon, Eliza, having refused to go to nursery school, announced loudly from her window seat sentry post, “It’s Mummy, she’s back. Daddy, she’s home.”
“Thank god,” muttered Richard, and rushed to the door to seize his wife in a crushing embrace, meant to convey that he could not do without her and please don’t go away again. Lisette kissed him and held him, telling him she was sorry. She kissed Eliza and the baby, then she and Richard went up to the bedroom for a while, to talk. Danielle shook her head, and sat at the kitchen table to write a list of instructions, entitled “How to look after a baby”. She had a feeling it was going to be needed in the near future.
A week later there was a lot of shouting coming from the study. Eliza sat with Kathy, shutting the door and singing some songs she had learned at nursery school. A great fear started to build in her tiny three-year-old body, and she could hardly sing for it, but being the eldest she had to look after her sister. Luckily she couldn’t hear what her parents were saying.
“I’ll take the downstairs bedroom and you can just move her in! It would save her phoning and hanging up all the time. It’ll be no trouble for her to take Eliza to school with her. We’ll all be winners!” Lisette was behaving in a way that always made Richard uncomfortable, since in his family peccadilloes were considered to be just that, and not mentioned at home. “And by the way, you’re shitting in Eliza’s nest,” she added.
“I’m sorry,” said Richard, automatically. “She’s just a fan. You know how these women get. I’ll talk to her and tell her to stop.”
“If