During the next few weeks, after Nanny had begun to snore in her room adjacent to his, Edward would creep as far down the stairs as he dared to watch what was going on below. There were often guests to dinner, big men in black suits and their pale grey-haired wives wearing floaty dresses, none of the women as young and pretty as his mother. After those long, late dinners, when the chokey smell of cigars came wafting up the staircase, he watched while everyone crossed the hall into the drawing room where his mother always finished the evening by playing the piano for the guests. The sound of her playing overwhelmed the boy with grief and longing for those days when his mother had played in Eaton’s College Street store and they’d been so happy together. These days Dolly had so many things to do that she and Edward hardly even saw each other at teatime as they had during their early days at Riverview. Now other ladies invited her out to tea practically every day, or she was at the shops, or getting her hair done, or having fittings on new dresses and coats. She seemed not even to notice how unhappy he was, how he yearned for things to be the way they’d been before they met Mr. Rak, how much he missed her. It was almost as though she didn’t want to understand how he felt, because she hardly seemed to listen when he tried to tell her.
As months passed Edward began to notice something else about his mother: her figure was becoming stouter and wider. On Sundays, the only day he was allowed to eat dinner downstairs, he watched her as she waded into helping after helping of the heavy food that was served at that table — the thick brown soup, the slabs of beef or roast pork, potatoes drowned in gravy, blistered wedges of yellow Yorkshire pudding running with fat. By the end of the first year his mother’s fine-boned face had filled out until it was all cheeky roundness, and her slender body was well on the way to becoming a shapeless bolster. Even Rak had begun to chide her.
“I don’t think it would be good for you to have another eclair, my darling,” he said one evening, raising a hand to dismiss the maid hovering beside Mummie’s chair with the tray of pastries. “I’ve heard eating too many sweets can lead to sugar diabetes.”
“Oh Harvey, just one more.” She reached up to stop the maid from taking away the tray, gripping its edge with one hand while she helped herself with the other. “I do love them so.” She swiftly took not one but two eclairs, and began shoving great forkfuls of the creamy pastry into her mouth as though she were starving.
Of course there was no question of Edward’s having eclairs. Even on those evenings when he was allowed to eat with them at that long table, under two massive crystal chandeliers that he decided in later years must have come from the lobby of some bankrupt hotel, his plain nursery food somehow followed his trail through the house and turned up triumphantly before him in the dining room. He was forbidden gravy, Yorkshire pudding, all dishes baked with cheese, fried foods, butter, cream, sausage, smoked bacon or ham, pastry, trifles, chocolate, tarts, flans, gateaux, and sweets of all kinds. While Mummie bloated herself with whipped cream, Edward ate blancmange with stewed blackberries and munched on detested arrowroot biscuits or cardboardy Social Teas.
When he turned seven Rak dismissed Nanny and arranged for Edward to attend a boarding school near Cheam. The thought of actually living entirely away from his mother seemed to him so absolutely unbearable he could hardly believe it was really going to happen. The worst of it was that Dolly didn’t even seem to be putting up a fight to keep him at home.
“It was the lesser of two evils, darling,” she explained. “Cheam’s quite close by, don’t you see? At first he was talking about a school in Scotland, hundreds of miles away. If you go to this school at Cheam I’m sure I’ll be able to visit during term sometimes, and if I can’t, why at least you’ll be home for holidays. Oh darling, it’s a little hard at first, but you’ll really love it, I know.”
In reply he threw himself across her lap, wailing.
“Edward dear,” she murmured, putting her arms around him and patting his head, “it’ll be all right. You’ll see. You’ll have lots of lovely new friends at school, and think of all the wonderful games you’ll be able to play.”
Why had she said that? She knew he hated games, kicking footballs and running races, all of it. Unless they absolutely made him do it he never joined in at school. He clung to his mother, inhaling the perfume she’d just dabbed on her wrists and throat from a small glass bottle. He couldn’t imagine how he was going to be able to live without her.
When the day came that he was to leave for Cheam, Edward went to his mother’s room while she was downstairs and took that tiny scent bottle from her dressing table. Even if it upset her when she couldn’t find it, he had to have it. There was hardly anything left in it, only a drop or two, and she’d have to buy a new bottle soon anyway, so it didn’t really feel like stealing. He pushed the glass stopper into the tiny neck as tightly as he could, wrapped the bottle in a handkerchief, and put it in the sponge bag he was taking with him to school.
The dormitories at the school were damp and frigid, and the blankets so thin his legs ached all night. Often he couldn’t sleep for the cold and the dreadful loneliness that all seemed to pile up in him after the lights went out. When the other boys had settled down he would open his sponge bag and take out the little handkerchief-wrapped bundle with the perfume bottle in it, press it to his cheek and inhale its delicate scent, and after a while he’d begin to feel a little better and be able to sleep.
The boys were obliged to run about the playground wearing short pants and thin shoes however cold and damp the weather; in those days painfully chilblained fingers and toes were dismissed as the price children paid for a healthy outdoor life. The food was so similar to what Nanny had always fed Edward that he took no notice of it at all, although the other boys never stopped complaining about it. Most of the masters were somber grey-haired men, strict, but never so grim as Rak. Sometimes the blond-haired housemother reminded him a little of Dolly. He neither hated that school nor enjoyed anything about it. It was a colourless, shapeless time for him, a sort of limbo, and later, when he looked back on it, he found he could remember almost nothing about it, could hardly distinguish any one of the five years he spent there from another.
During summer holidays in Richmond, Edward idled away the rainy days alone up in the nursery, reading or drawing or working at some puzzle. He could fill in hours just leaning on the windowsill, looking down at the comings and goings on the tow path and the river. His mother didn’t seem interested in taking walks or playing games with him anymore, and often stayed in her room all day, only getting dressed in time to come down to eat dinner with Harvey when he came home from the piano factory. If Edward asked her what was wrong, why she stayed in her room so much, she’d tell him she thought she must be a little bilious, and maybe he should just run along and play now because she needed to rest. If his stepfather noticed him at all it was to drive him out of doors “to get the stink blown off,” as he charmingly put it. Bleak unrelenting loneliness, no less painful because it was chronic, was Edward’s constant condition.
He took to walking around Richmond by himself, making his way up to the green where he’d sit on a bench reading or drawing, or he’d go drifting through the quiet residential streets to the centre of town where he’d visit the public library or browse around in the shops. Nobody seemed to pay any attention to him. He often