Mad Joy (21 page)

The following day there was a phone call informing us that Philip’s mother – my mother – had died the previous evening, and inviting me to the funeral. Luckily, Howard had answered the telephone, and I had not had to make my excuses on the spot. Neither Gracie nor Howard commented on my
indifference
, but as the morning wore on, Gracie tried to broach the subject.

‘I could go with you, if you like. It’s only a thirty-minute bus ride.’

I didn’t want to keep on brushing it away, so I said, ‘She was happy to let me fester in a home all these years – as she saw it – so why should I let my world be turned upside down by a chance meeting?’

Gracie shook her head. ‘That poor boy who came here was suffering. His mother shouldn’t have put him through that. It’s not his fault. You can see that, surely. You ought to go and make your peace with him at least. You ought to, by rights.’

I knew she was right, but I was so angry with this wretched family that had hidden itself from me all these years I needed it, and now popped up when I didn’t want it. I tried to explain how I wanted everything to stay the same, but how the truth had appeared like an interloper. I tried to explain how I hadn’t
known what truth to tell, and what to hold back, how I had never known about my past, but yet had always known.

We set off in good time because there was a change of bus involved. The little village was barely fifteen miles away in a north-easterly direction, and I couldn’t help wondering at how close I had been all these years.

We were invited to see the body in the front room of the house, but Gracie and I went directly to the church. As we walked, little memories began to flicker. Old gateposts,
elderflower
bushes and long-forgotten hedgerows ambushed me along the way. The church I remembered slightly, but not like this. The last time I’d been there the graves were a forest of standing stones, as tall as me.

The oak pews were cool after the bright September sun, and a monotonous organ tune whined away, meandering around each of the new arrivals like a wasp discovering a new bun.

Evidently Mrs Bird did not have many friends or relatives, for despite a valiant twenty minutes of organ playing, the organist turned round to see just a handful in the congregation. Having utterly exhausted his tune, and invented variants thereof, he rested his hands on his lap.

As the vicar spoke, I kept my gaze on the five men in the front row. There was a doddering old man with brilliant white hair, who had been helped to his place very slowly by the two middle-aged men now seated on each side of him. I didn’t recognize them, and assumed they must be uncles – brothers of my mother, perhaps, and the old man: could he be my grandfather? But the two who really held my interest were seated next to this trio: a young man in army uniform with a very straight back, and a young man with an extraordinarily small head.

‘… shall remember Elizabeth as a devoted mother of
Sidney
,
Philip and Edward. But of course, we must not forget how hard she struggled to bring up these fine children alone, after the early death of her husband Edwin. She has given them what the very best mothers give their children: support,
encouragement
, and, of course,
love
. How easy it is, these days, to …’

I dropped my hymn book on the tiled floor with a very loud thlunk. It echoed around the high, wood-beamed ceiling, from Christ on the cross to Christ the Shepherd. No one turned round, except the man with the very small head, and I could see from his reddened eyes that he had been crying a good deal. He stretched his neck up tall (which was a strain, for he had virtually no neck to speak of) to see what was going on, like a child who doesn’t want to miss anything. Eventually he turned back round, when the young man with the straight back got up to the lectern. I dreaded him paying homage to her. Gracie put her hand over mine, and I realized I was digging my nails into my handbag. There followed just a simple reading from the Bible, of no particular relevance to anyone’s life, as far as I could see. But I got a better look at Eddie, who was not especially tall, but who had impressive confidence and teeth.

Standing by the grave, Sidney did not stop sobbing. He cocked his little head to one side and blubbered like a toddler. I felt my stomach lurch. I wanted him to stop. A part of me responded in exactly the same way as I had to Lil’s daughter, when she had wailed in her mother’s absence. Another part of me wanted to march over to him and shake him very hard. And this other part made me a very unpleasant person, and I wanted to be away from there as quickly as possible, because I wanted to be someone likeable.

Gracie insisted we went back to the house afterwards, whispering that I might always regret it if I didn’t. I was afraid of being recognized, even though there was simply no one there who possibly could after all these years.

The house made me tremble. All the way from our first
sighting of it – when the bottom halves of the funeral guests disappeared into bushes of fading lavender – to the interior: the front room with its yellowed walls and smell of polish; the kitchen with its brown oily linoleum and reek of paraffin.

Gracie took my arm and placed her hand on top to steady me. We heard a woman next to us saying to her friend, ‘Well, she’s lucky she got a place in the churchyard, is all I can say.’

‘She is that,’ replied her friend. Then they moved towards the sandwiches and we lost the rest of it.

‘What does she mean by that?’ I asked.

Gracie, who looked a little troubled, adopted a sudden carefree tone: ‘Oh, I don’t know. I expect the graveyard’s getting full. They do, you know, in these village churches.’

And that was it. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t considered – like me – the possibility of suicide. Was it not possible that someone – maybe even Philip – had revealed the truth to my mother, and it had been too much to bear? But then, I thought, she would’ve wanted to meet me, surely? Wouldn’t it be easier to confront your own guilt and gain deliverance? Or perhaps not. Perhaps she was too afraid of what she might find – of what I might say … Hadn’t Gracie considered any of this?

We found ourselves standing next to a piano, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the photographs perched along its top. Gracie followed my darting eyes: family groups, portraits, brothers together. There was no sign of me. What had I expected? But it stung me, even so. And then Gracie nodded to the mantelpiece opposite. We edged our way over, moving through a group of chattering neighbours.

‘So how do you know my mother, then?’

I turned, and there was Eddie, showing us all of his very fine teeth.

‘Um … I met her at the hospital. I’m a friend of Philip’s.’

‘Oh!’ He said it in a tone of wicked innuendo. ‘Well, he’s a bit of a dark horse!’

‘No – a friend. We’re friends.’

‘That’s what they all say!’ He gave me a good-humoured wink, and carried on beaming. ‘I must say, I never thought old Phil would make a catch like you.’ And then, with the
smoothness
of a chat-up line, he asked: ‘Where exactly are you based?’

I lied, and said I was at the same base as Philip. Gracie started to correct me, but thought better of it. The small-headed man came up with two paste sandwiches, and put them both in his mouth together.

‘Oh, this is Sidney, by the way: Phil’s brother – and mine! Say hello, Sid. This is Phil’s girlfriend.’

‘No—’

Sidney smiled at me with white dough-filled teeth.

‘Sidney! Offer the ladies some sandwiches!’

Sidney turned round to the food-bedecked table behind him and, taking two sandwiches from the plates, gave us one each.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Eddie, not even bothering to lower his voice, ‘he’s a bit simple, I’m afraid.’

‘That’s so kind of you,’ Gracie said to Sidney (rather defiantly, I thought).

My eyes moved over to the mantelpiece, and the real object of my interest. There it was, in the most elaborate frame yet: a picture of a little girl. Gracie nudged me. ‘There you are!’ she whispered. ‘The spitting image!’

‘Beautiful picture, isn’t it?’ said Eddie, following our gaze. ‘That’s our sister.’

I noticed that Sidney had latched himself on to my other arm, and was stroking my sleeve.

‘Sister?’ I think I looked suitably surprised.

‘Yes, we had a sister once. Beautiful little thing. Died of diphtheria.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Eddie could do wistful as well: ‘Yes … broke my mother’s heart, did our Ivy. She was like a light going out in our family.’

Sidney had leant his head against my sleeve now, and was nuzzling up to me. He must have felt my pulse quicken. My instinct was to run, but Gracie was holding on to me on my right, and Sidney on my left. ‘So there were
four
children, in fact?’

‘Yes … four.’ I was watching him. He didn’t flinch.

‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do …’ sang Sidney in a faint voice. He, at least, remembered five.

‘Come on, Sid, I think you’re making a bit of a monkey of yourself …’ He looked at me again. ‘I’m sorry – he’s very emotional at the moment. What with Mum dying and
everything
. And he’s worried he might have to – you know—’ Then he lowered his voice to a whisper and exaggerated his mouth movements, ‘—
go in a home
.’

I practically yanked Gracie away with me, and Sidney remained clinging to my arm all the way out to the lavender.

‘I’m sorry, Gracie. I’ve got to get away from here. I’m sorry. I’m sorry …’

Gracie said it was all right, and she shouldn’t have made me come. I said, no really, it was my fault, and so on. We were halfway down the road when we realized there was someone behind us. Little grunting noises – like someone trying to speak through closed lips – made us turn. There was Sidney with a bunch of lavender and a penknife. Gracie must have seen that he had clearly used the knife to cut the lavender, but I felt more uneasy. He held the greying lavender out to me, his tiny head on one shoulder: ‘S’for you, that is,’ he said. ‘S’for you, that.’

‘Thank you,’ said Gracie, on my behalf.

‘Thank you,’ I was shamed into saying.

On the bus home, I gazed out of the window as the newly harvested fields drifted by. I thought of the hares and field mice cornered by the stubble and forced to flee. The brambles swept
past, covered in blackberries, many already dried into little brown scabs. Luscious clusters of elderberries appeared and dark sloes hung against yellowing blackthorn leaves. Orange woody nightshade made festive chains along the hedgerows, and there was a ripeness to everything.

‘Don’t judge her too harshly, my love. Extreme poverty can make monsters of the best of us.’

I closed my eyes as if it could shut out what Gracie had said. When I opened them I was looking at my own kid-leather gloved hands and my shiny buckled handbag.

‘Well, nothing –
nothing
– would make me do that to my own children … There’s
no
excuse for her cruelty. None.’

Although they seemed to have been generated by a warmth for my own children, the moment the words left my mouth they sounded bitterly cold and judgemental, and I felt cheated of my own right to utter them.

I looked down and saw that my hand was on my belly, and Gracie had placed her hand on mine.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘you’ll have plenty of room up at the house.’ I looked at her and smiled, not quite sure what she was saying. ‘I could look after him if you wanted.’

‘I’m not expecting!’ I laughed.

She looked across me out of my window, and then at my face. ‘I don’t mean a child.’

‘Who do you mean, then?’

‘I was just thinking …’

‘Who?’

‘Well, if you
wanted
him to come with us rather than in some dreadful home, we could take Sidney in … couldn’t we?’

‘
Sidney
?
’ I scowled out of the window. ‘Why on earth would I want to look after
Sidney
? They’ve never done anything for me, have they? Where were any of that lot when I needed
them
?’

‘I only thought—’

‘Well, don’t think.’ I could barely believe what Gracie had
just suggested. ‘
Sidney
?’ I drew myself up stiffly on the seat. ‘I’ve got my own family now. I don’t want anything to do with that family.’

Grade examined her gloved hand on the back of the seat in front and said thoughtfully, ‘I wasn’t thinking of them, I was thinking of you.’

I didn’t answer, because I didn’t want to discuss it any further, and she didn’t pursue it. But over the next year I often wondered what she had meant by that: thinking of me.

It was a miracle to be a parent, and I was constantly taking my bearings. It was only then, as I watched my son turn four, that I could see the true horror of what my mother had done. Of course I had felt it – all my life I had felt it. But even when I made the decision not to acknowledge her – even at her funeral – a small part of me had been willing to accept that there may have been circumstances I hadn’t understood. I had even felt guilty for my part in our estrangement. But now …

There was nothing, not poverty, not illness, not criticism, not wars or deluges, nothing could make me give up a child of four years old; and to condemn him to an institution, a madhouse … Everything was different now that I had children of my own: now I knew the full extent of her crime.

Despite its grandeur, Buckleigh House was a cold and draughty place outside the radar of the kitchen. I warmed the pyjamas by the range and wrapped the children in my arms under the stone-cold sheets of the beds. On winter nights I would join Jill in my double bed, enveloping her warm little figure. She was wrapped up to the neck in soft flannelette and as oblivious to the cold as a hibernating animal. At my back the freezing air would melt away, and I would wake cocooned in a warmth so perfect it seemed impossibly adjusted by some
angelic thermostat. Then the noise which had woken me would fling itself into the room and into the bed beside me. I would snuggle down, a child in each arm, like a great lucky sheep who’d been allowed to keep her lambs way past June. Then we would tell dozy stories to each other under the covers until we heard Mrs Bubb’s alarm clock upstairs. Moments of joy woven into the long hard winters of the war.

It isn’t true that absence makes the heart grow fonder. That was not my experience, at any rate. Absence just seemed to make the heart forget. As the months rolled on into years, James became a series of postcards, a focus for romantic thoughts, a bright but blurred vision of the future. He became so remote that I had to look at his photograph to find him again, and even then I didn’t always succeed. Sometimes it was hard to remember if I’d ever really known him at all. Half-forgotten nights under the stars, a few passionate kisses in the woods and at The Mill: did this constitute knowing a man? At times like this I felt fragile and guilty. It wasn’t that I didn’t long for James. I did. I just wasn’t certain any more if he was real.

I tried to explain everything that had happened in my letters to James. I told him how I had met my own mother face to face. I explained how I didn’t know what truth to tell, or what to hold back. I didn’t know how much others would get hurt, how much I would hurt. We wrote to each other two or three times a week. It had become almost like writing a diary. For sometimes a week would pass before I received a letter from him, and at other times three would arrive together. And when we read each other’s letters, they were in response to some letter written long before.

Nonetheless I looked forward to the letters, and came in from the animals each morning in the hope of finding one waiting on the door mat, or in the toast rack where Mrs Bubb put them if she came across them first.

One wet morning in September there was one for me in a different hand. I eyed it for several minutes before I found the courage to open it. I waited until I was alone, and went into the living room.

I dropped it into the fire and watched the flames curl round it, watched the paper take up the swiftly spreading scorch mark like blotting paper. And I did feel, as the little explosion of heat from it burned my cheeks, that I had blotted something out for good.

Some two weeks later another letter arrived in the same hand. I put it into the fire without opening it.

Eight, maybe nine days later, something odd happened.

It was mid-October, and the evacuees were practising for a harvest concert or play. We were all in the living room watching them when the telephone rang. Howard got up to answer it and the children plodded their way through ‘We plough the fields and scatter’ which, lovely though it was, seemed to go on for ever in their hands. They decided to use the tall velvet curtains as stage curtains – regardless of the few inches of stage it allowed them – and before long they were improvising an early nativity which went on so long it involved Jesus celebrating his first birthday and sheep singing ‘The Farmer’s in his Den’.

Howard had been gone some time, so I went to see if all was well. Closing the living-room door quietly behind me I heard him speaking with his back to me. Usually, Howard considered his own voice needed to travel the distance covered by the telephone line and barked insanely into the receiver, but even he had lowered his voice now: ‘Just don’t tell Joy. Whatever you do, don’t tell her. She mustn’t know. You must absolutely promise me.’

I froze for a moment behind one of the giant potted plants, but the conversation seemed to pass on to other things. I closed the door again behind me, more loudly, and made my way to the kitchen, smiling at him as I passed.

Not long after Apple Day I heard that Philip had been killed in a direct attack on his site office. My brother died, that’s what I should say. All I could think was that it wasn’t James. I was very sorry, of course, but there were people dying all around and there wasn’t time to be ground down by it all. Nonetheless I was shocked at my lack of grief. I even affected dark looks in front of Gracie and Howard but I felt a fraud. If I’m honest the greatest grief I felt was that with him died a lot of unanswered questions. There. My selfish homage to my own brother. What sort of person had I become?