My Animal Life (22 page)

But Nick and I were closer than ever. I remember the absurd thought that came, the night we came home from the hospital. Nick's face was beside me on the pillow again, and Rosa was at the foot of the bed, briefly asleep, in a Moses basket. ‘I love him because he is
so like Rosa
,' I thought as I gazed, amazed, at his face. It was a back-to-front thought; of course
she
was like
him
, so like that their young photos could easily be confused; but I was stunned by the way in which my world had come together, for Nick, to me, was the infinitely lovable image of the baby, my new love-object.

All her life Rosa has been fun, and funny. Left to have supper, aged five or six, with our friend Fatima and her family, she did not eat all her food. ‘Why aren't
you eating your meat?' said Fatima. ‘I don't want to be a fat bastard,' said Rosa. And the ‘stranger danger' lessons at school bore fruit the teacher may not have intended. Rosa told us what they had been learning that day. Nick asked her, ‘So what would you do if a man stopped his car and offered you sweeties?' ‘I would say “Bugger off!”‘ she said firmly.

She was thoughtful, as well, with her own point of view. Sometimes she helped me see how to be a mother. One day I picked her up from her nursery school—a Montessori school she loved. (Bizarrely, for the most part, and despite frank criticisms of their foibles, she ended up loving all her schools, which made me feel shifty when I discussed school with mothers who were discontented. They obviously thought I was in denial, or simply failing to play the game, the great mother-game of criticising. The bottom line was, I was grateful to the schools. Without them, I would be home educating.) In any case, that day I picked Rosa up with a pushchair, so she must have been small, not much more than three, for as soon as we could, I dispensed with it. That day I had not managed to switch off my worries about my work before I went to meet her. I was chattering away to her, on automatic pilot, about the dilemmas of my day. We were pushing down The Avenue, a long straight road. I suppose I might have wittered on for ever.

Suddenly a little voice piped up. At first I could not believe my ears.

‘Big people can't be friends with little people.'

‘What did you say?' I looked at her suspiciously, her round clever head, her golden curls, her wide-set green eyes like an alien's. Her cushiony lips had definitely moved.

‘BIG PEOPLE CAN'T BE FRIENDS WITH LITTLE PEOPLE.'

She was looking at me, not unkindly, but as if she had made a definite statement. Yes, she had said it. I had been told. I was ashamed, yet also delighted with her. Of course it was true, and I took note. Children don't need to know adults' worries.

I have already said that I lap up advice. One of the most useful things about motherhood was said to me by someone I didn't know well. She had a daughter, too, rather older than mine, and we were worrying aloud about their happiness. ‘One problem is over-identifying,' she said. ‘My daughter just got fed up with me worrying and said to me, “Mum, I'm fine, honestly, I'm
not like
you, remember that!”‘

I over-identified with Rosa. Of course, because although she looked like her father, with Nick's small nose and curly hair, parts of her brain were uncannily like mine. Music, for example. A marvellous surprise. It has proved to be a never-ending groundswell of pleasure that we like exactly the same music. By this I don't mean certain genres, certain composers, I mean we love the same notes and phrases. The same bar will trigger the same emotions. I can only believe this is coded, somehow, in deep folds of the emotional brain, because the response is so immediate and instinctive. Hearing something together, it speaks to us, and we often touch hands and look away, because a moment of such absolute intimacy has just come upon us. A flash of mirrors from far away, an unreasonable happiness hushing us like shyness (though at other times it makes us dance on the landing). When she sends me music, it is simple bliss.

And yet, in other ways we're totally different. Hurray for that! Hurray for difference! Hurray for the things that our children can do that we could never in a lifetime manage! The miracle of the dance of the genes, throwing up unlikeness as much as sameness.

She is sociable, very, and I am not, has always had a lot of friends, except for a brief puzzling period when she was in Year 2 of her primary school, the local school, one hundred yards down the road. Because my own junior school years had often been miserable and lonely, I had a special reason to be anxious about this.

One night she said, ‘I didn't have anyone to play with, today at break time,' and I said, trying not to show my heart was sinking, ‘I expect you will tomorrow.' But this refrain became more frequent, usually just as I was leaving her bedroom at night, after reading to her. ‘I didn't have anyone to play with at break time.' Of course it is possible that she knew this would halt me in my tracks and bring me back for another ten minutes, but still I know it was genuine. A little stone of misery from my own past arc-ed through the evening and landed in my chest.
Rosa would be lonely, as I had been
. My own fatal unpopularity, which I had felt deeply as unlikeability, must have somehow been transmitted to her. It was all my fault. I felt wretched, and helpless. My lovely, pretty, laughing girl would be unhappy. The curse had come upon her, she had not escaped.

In fact, it was just a phase, and soon over. Never before, or since, did Rosa lack friends. I was over-reacting, over-deducing, because I over-identified.

Recently we reminisced about that time. Perhaps it was that the children were at the age where they started to notice difference, and she was different, one of only three white girls in her class. She said, ‘I got something
good out of it, though, because I had to find something to do in the playground, and I worked out how to fly. If you did a leap, and then another leap, and a leap upon that leap, you would fly. And I used to go round the playground trying it out.' And I said, ‘But that's just like me! Because I didn't want anyone to know how lonely I was at the village school, when we moved to Watersfield, I used to walk about the playground very fast, on my own, from one side to another, looking business-like, pretending I was going somewhere.'

And she said, but laughing, ‘That is sad. Sorry, Mum, you're not like me.'

In ways that I don't, she believes she can fly. She can walk into a room without anxiety. She expects to be liked, and mostly people like her. For that she can thank Nick as well as herself, the luck of his sociable, confident genes.

Now she has a bewildering number of friends. Somehow she has kept some junior school friends, and all her big group of grammar school friends, and has made a new cast of university friends, and another lot from the time she spent in Paris, and another lot, when she was living in Granada …

I couldn't cope with Rosa's Bacchanalian procession, the constant flashing of electronic signals, texts and messages and flickering face-books, drinks and dances, travelling, feasting, for she's also become an imaginative cook after years of only eating white bread and pasta, using every kind of vegetable, meat and fish, always trying new dishes on people she loves. Which is sometimes us, so we are lucky. Her life is like a lake I once saw in Uganda, up in the hills, deep water spread with green leaves and pink flowers, entirely covered in water-lilies, a wondrous tangle of youthful faces, bright
and specific in the morning light, where one is always opening, another closing.

(And on them she smiles: but on us she scowls, for we are her parents, and now things have changed, for we are no longer the centre of her universe, the sun and moon of the adoring small child. Now she is big, and we are just the parents. We say boring things, like ‘Have you got any washing?' or ‘What time is your train?' or ‘Did you put my jacket back in the cupboard?' or ‘Stand up straight, darling. Then you're beautiful.' Thus do the old parents oppress their offspring, and she fights back, because she can. ‘Are you trying to be funny, Mum?' ‘BO-ring!!' or ‘Pressure, pressure, you always give me pressure,' or ‘It's none of your business.' ‘Leave me ALONE!' The same-sex pair have the harder time, for fathers tend to adore and offer lifts, whereas mothers afflict daughters, and daughters mothers, as they try to find two different ways of being women. Both members of the dyad know the link cannot be broken, but on bad days it feels, to her and to me, as if a heavy mini-me is jammed on our shoulders. Mine stares round into my face, kvetching and complaining. ‘Mum! Mu-u-m!' ‘Rosa! Rosa!' She is me, I am her, but we have to be other. And then suddenly my big girl says something funny, or I kiss her cheek, and we are in each other's arms, she is taller than me but we dance down the hall, and her kisses hit air because I have grown smaller; seconds later, she flies through the door and has vanished.)

‘Read a book,' I say. ‘Do you ever read a book?' or ‘Do you think you should stay in tonight and sort out your room?' But secretly I'm pleased that Rosa is so busy.

Nick and I have—do we?—(we have to say goodbye, because she has to go away into her adult life)—a lovely grownup daughter. She is twenty-two now, and has just been abroad for the third year of her languages degree at Durham. She is tall and strong and beautiful (when she stands up straight)—a
jeune fille en fleur
, full of jokes and ideas, writing songs and articles, road-running, cooking. But I haven't stopped worrying: that is the cost. I thought I had mysteriously escaped it, but love extends the surface area of your skin. You can soak up more light, you can be endlessly surprised, but you are also more vulnerable.

When she was abroad, if she was quiet, had she been abducted? My heart leaped when the Skype symbol flickered at the bottom of my computer screen and her dear, her pixillated face appeared, her laughing mouth and high, wide forehead, or just a Skype message, when the screen didn't work or she had just got up and didn't want me to know it, ‘are you there, madre?' brief, no capitals, but presaging a mutual helter-skelter of words, surreal jokes, gossip, confessions—or I open my email and see the capitals: R RANKIN-GEE. Hurray, hurray.

I only want her to be all right. If she is all right, and Nick is all right, my basic emotional tripod is steady.

I posted her parcels of porridge to Spain. ‘Mum don't worry, I'm
fine,'
she said. She throws back smiles, insults, garlands, but like life itself, she has come and gone, my beautiful girl, my heart, my Rosa. We stay where we are, and they go on.

‘If the meaning of an animal's life is movement …'

The illness passed also, the RSI, the visit of old age with which this chapter began. I was grateful when I could write again, longhand, slowly, and fetch a little shopping, though even one light plastic carrier could bring the pain in my shoulders back. The wonder is, the body tends to get better from everything that will not kill it, and very slowly, I did get better, and movement came back, the joy of movement. I started swimming. I was running again.

But something had happened to my work. I had taken it for granted, perhaps, my luck, and luck must never be taken for granted. Life was too busy. I grew too busy. Nick was successful, at the BBC, and the price of success was making many features, ambitious features involving travel, and other programmes which, his craftsmanship insisted, could not be made in the time allotted. He had to work evenings, and sometimes weekends. My agent had encouraged me to leave Heinemann in search of more money, and negotiated a sizeable advance, a £75,000 two-book contract, with Jonathan Warner, the young head of HarperCollins's literary fiction list, Flamingo.
Lost Children
came out in 1994. Now it was time to write the second. But Jonathan had committed suicide, leaving a wife and daughter, not long after
Lost Children
was published, a dreadful piece of news that hit everyone hard. The RSI had slowed my production, and Nick couldn't help with Rosa very often. I was left, in the end, with less than six months to write and deliver the second novel. I went too fast. I rushed it. I fluffed it. The book I delivered, called at that stage
The Keeper of the Gate
, but eventually
The White Family
, would one day bring me
great satisfaction, but unwisely, I submitted something less than perfect.

It was unlike me; I am a control freak, and I know that my work is not ordinary, not universally pleasing or lovable, and so needs the armour-plating of technique.
Do not let yourself be vulnerable
.

But it's hopeless advice. We're all vulnerable. Tread carefully, young writers in the literary jungle.

In retrospect, I can see that what happened was a motorway pile-up: too many causes. Two years earlier, researching
Lost Children
, I made some visits to a centre for the homeless in east London, and sat in on their group therapy sessions. Many of the stories stretched back to childhood; one man had been sexually abused in a Catholic children's home; one woman abandoned by schizophrenic parents. But more of them had foundered in middle age, when too many things went wrong at once. Within the same few months, a relationship ended, they were made redundant, illness struck, they were declared bankrupt. And they fell through the net. They were worryingly like all the people I knew; they had no special tragic flaw.

I saw it in theory, then I learned it in practice.

1995: a watershed. I was forty-six; Rosa was eight. My agent had moved to Canada; I was passed on to the excellent managing director of the same agency, who was known as a good agent, and a gentleman, but the truth was, he had not specifically
chosen
me,
and inheritance did not seem the safest route. (Yet my editor at HarperCollins, too, had inherited me, after the death of the editor who chose me. I should have seen the signs, I should have seen the danger, but I lived day to day,
writing, Rosa, Rosa, writing
, pell mell, myopic.) I was very ambitious, am ambitious still. It felt as though this was make or break. I was on my way to fifty. I had to get up there.