The Girl from Station X (6 page)

I don’t ever remember telling my mother about my son even before she got Alzheimer’s – protecting her peace of mind was paramount. In the car to visit her when Nicholas was
twelve I told him, perhaps unwisely, that I wished I could solve all my worries about my mother with my word processor:
SAVE: YES/NO.
I wished that I could simply press the
NO
key
and my mother would disappear. I wished it could be as simple as that.

On that occasion, in my mother’s double bedroom, where she’d slept alone, except for various dogs, since I was seven – my father was in a single room, divided from hers by a
bathroom – Nicholas sat on her bed beside her and gently touched her shoulder. My mother, with a violent gesture, shouted: ‘Get off me, boy!’

No one told her off. The excuse was that she was too far gone. She’d already had Alzheimer’s for nearly three years. But no one would have told my mother off
before
she got
it.

One of our cousins, Hamilton, a bachelor fifteen years older than her, said to me soon after my father’s death: ‘Your mother needed a firm hand. She didn’t get it.’

After my mother’s brutal rejection of her grandson, I went upstairs and looked at my old children’s books. My mother’s New Zealand carer, who’d taken my son with her to
the kitchen, was sleeping in my old bedroom. I found a book I used to love,
Seven Days Wonder
, about a Victorian child who falls off a swing and is transported into England in the 1950s,
to a family where the children are actually her own future great-grandchildren. I recalled how I had pictured the house where that cheerful 1950s family lived as being exactly like our house, North
Heath, the home of a happy family – in those days, my own.

I went to say goodbye to my mother, feeling resentful, as she had been nasty to my son. She was asleep. As I left, I couldn’t help noticing the two dark blue toy taxis on her mantelpiece.
She put them there – Raymond’s toys – after he died. They had been there forty years.

Two years later my mother’s Alzheimer’s was more advanced. But, instead of being put into a home, she was being moved into a smaller, modern house built in the
1950s: Camelot. It was being converted into two flats and Mrs Anderson and her husband would live in the one upstairs. They would not use the large family kitchen, which would only be for my mother
and the carer on duty at that time.

When I went to see this house in early spring 1997, I felt guilty that it was going to be taken over by one mad old woman. The wife who was selling it with her husband was giving a tea party for
her two little children and their friends. Surely another young family should have been moving into it. It seemed a waste of a good house. As usual, my mother’s money had allowed her to be in
an abnormal position.

Meanwhile my daughter and I visited her, still in her old house. A pleasant-looking black-haired girl let us in the back door. Whizzy, the little rescue dog that Molly had found for her, came
skittering to meet us. My mother had fallen asleep just before we arrived. She was wearing a dark red cardigan, dark red skirt and slippers, ordered from a catalogue by Molly. I suggested to Mr
Mainwaring that he wake her, as he had successfully on my last visit.

This time, though, my mother did not rally. She sat looking dazed, with her granddaughter on the bed beside her. Mr Mainwaring chatted in his usual friendly manner, then told me that my mother
had had a visitor from the village. Mrs M, who in my memory had always been very cheerful, burst into tears as she was sitting next to my mother on her bed. She looked at the two large oval
photographs of Raymond that my mother had had up on the wall since 1957, above a shelf containing his woolly toys, and sobbed uncontrollably. As Mr Mainwaring described this in a shocked voice, I
felt sympathy for Mrs M. At least she was acknowledging, through her spontaneous reaction, one of the several tragedies of my mother’s life. This once-happy mother of four young children was
now asleep with her mouth open, teeth broken, hair awry and brain rotted by alcohol.

My mother carried on sleeping. My daughter seemed depressed and sat in the car after we left the house. I went alone to what I used to call the Big Lawn, to pick some daffodils. The grass was
neglected, covered with molehills. I remembered how, long ago, every April, the ground under the big oak tree there was full of primroses. I recalled a black-and-white photograph of myself aged
nine standing among them, my back against the tree. Was my mother’s collection of photographs of us, her remaining three children, a valiant attempt to fill the void caused by Raymond’s
death? Was she trying to persuade herself that life went on?

I picked a few daffodils, stinging my hand on nettles. I remembered how I used to play here, often alone; how I’d had a rope hanging down from the big tree by the pond, how I had learned
to climb the rope on my own, right to the top, how it was much stiffer than the one in the gym at school. How I had played alone in the fields, roaming all over the place, how much I had loved the
country in the spring.

My brother had just died. I was only seven. Surely
I
could have fallen into the pond, or the fast-running weir in the water meadow, three long fields away from our house. Maybe I had not
been properly looked after.

That evening, I told my son about my mother in her bedroom, her mouth open in an oval shape, eyes shut.

Nicholas said seriously: ‘That must have hurt you very much. That must have hurt you in your heart like this –’ and he indicated a space in the middle of his chest.

The move to Camelot was imminent. I drove over to see my mother; again she was asleep. Another New Zealand girl was sleeping in my old room. I removed my photograph of my
mother and grandmother riding side-saddle together at a meet near Knowle, and a photograph of my Exmoor pony. I went through the small chest of drawers in my child’s bedroom and cleared it of
sweet papers. I took my picture of a dog and a cat off the wall.

Downstairs, my mother woke and seemed pleased to see me. She was making an odd noise – half-moaning, half-humming. I picked up her framed photograph of Nah, her beloved nanny.
‘Who’s that?’ This time, unlike a few months earlier when she’d got it right, my mother replied: ‘It’s “Gigy”’ – her pet name for Gig, my
grandmother’s Scottish lady’s maid, who, with Nah, had helped bring my mother up. I said no, it was Nah, and she seemed to register this and be pleased. I then showed her Gig, holding
Raymond’s hand on the deck of the
Queen Mary
as we’d all arrived at New York Harbour in 1955 on holiday to see our American cousins, he in a brown velvet pixie hat that Gig, a
trained dressmaker, had made for him. Then I handed my mother a picture of my father as a young man in naval uniform. ‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s Dad, isn’t it?’ she replied cautiously.

Mr Mainwaring indicated two objects with blue stickers on them, ready to take to the new house. These were the two large oval photographs of Raymond which hung on my mother’s bedroom wall,
one with him smiling, about to throw a ball. I longed to say: ‘Now’s the time to end this morbid obsession with a dead child! This has been your excuse for not facing anything, for not
dealing with day-to-day life, for neglecting the rest of us!’

Instead, I pointed out to Mr Mainwaring that my mother should also take the smaller framed photos of Nah, of Gig and of her American cousin Peggie, all of whom she loved. As I drove off, I felt
relieved that my childhood home was to be cleared at last.

I felt like smashing the photographs of Raymond, my dead brother, with a hammer.

On her eighty-third birthday, my mother moved into Camelot. Molly, who helped her move – I did not – reported that on her first afternoon there, although normally
she rarely uttered a coherent sentence, she remarked: ‘I like this place much better!’

At last I felt vindicated. She’d never been happy in her home, unlike my grandmother was at Knowle. I was her daughter and I knew her. I had to remind myself of that.

Soon after that I had a scare, another lump which had to be removed, in my left breast this time. I went to the hospital where I had all my other treatments, for one night. My daughter came the
next day – it was the school holidays – and I prepared to drive us to Sussex. The woman in the bed opposite asked suspiciously if I was driving, as I wasn’t meant to after an
anaesthetic. I pretended I was only going ten minutes up the road. However, when I was in the bathroom, my daughter innocently disclosed that we were going to Sussex. As we set off, I joked that
the patient had probably sent the police after us. I did feel light-headed, but I told myself that, with my daughter beside me, I could get there. And I did.

It occurred to me that my mother, who, apart from old age and Alzheimer’s, had not much physically wrong with her, was waited on and had no more duties, ever. I had had cancer, and now
might have it again. I was divorced with two children, one with difficulties, and was ultimately responsible for my mother’s legal and financial affairs, for which I had no training.

Ten days later, I am in Hope Cove, Devon, alone with Nicholas by the sea. It rains all the time but for some reason I don’t mind. I’m waiting to find out if
I’ve got cancer, this time in my left breast. Anticipating my death, Nicholas says he couldn’t bear for me to be ‘frozen then cut up and your bones ground’. This is what the
ancient Egyptians did, he says. (I thought they had mummies.) He doesn’t want me to be cremated either.

He asks about the afterlife. Would I be scared to meet my brother Raymond? He thinks that Raymond would still appear as a child, not as an adult. He asks if I am ‘ghost-scared,
child-scared’, of the crippled child in my recurring nightmare.

At Hope, I have a disturbing dream about my mother’s old house. I am clearing up there – as I will have to, in reality, when it goes up for sale. I am outside my mother’s
garden, in the old moat. I look up and see a row of half-grown children standing in a circle, very high up, on the threshold of a big spaceship or aeroplane. In my mind is the idea of how daring my
mother is to have produced, or be associated with, these children, who at any moment might jump off the rim into the sky. One teeters close to the brink, as though she is going to jump. I then
realise that, far from it being exciting, if she jumps off she’ll be killed. But, although she sways dangerously, she doesn’t do it.

Later in the dream I stand at the edge of my mother’s garden and look into the lanes around it. In my dream they’re wild and beautiful, more like the lanes here in Devon. I am
surprised to find that I associate such beauty with my childhood home. I even feel guilty, at first, for misjudging my mother’s environment, for finding it unpleasant when it isn’t.

Also in the dream is a tall glass jug and glasses in a cabinet, all very close together, and in my reaching for them, one of them breaks. I feel guilty then, as I see my mother appearing with
one of her carers. I am aware that my mother has more strength in her than I had realised and is angry that we are interfering with her things.

Nicholas’s interpretation of my dream next morning is that the circle of adolescent children represents me and my brothers. I am the only one who’s escaped. Even so, he says, I still
find it difficult. The other dream, about the beautiful lanes surrounding my old home, is even simpler to interpret. It refers to my mother’s money. It means that other people envy it and
think it a marvellous thing, but I know the truth, that it has helped destroy my mother.

At seven thirty, my doctor rings from his surgery in London. ‘Good news.’ I have nothing malignant. Nicholas looks very pleased. I thank him for being with me.

Some months after this, I started walking regularly again in the Knowle woods. One Monday morning I drove my daughter to school, then went on to Knowle. But of course I no
longer had the right to use the front gates. Instead of my grandmother, Katherine and Violet – Mr Tash’s widowed sister who cooked, and helped Katherine look after my grandmother
– three families were now living in the divided house. I drove past the Knowle main entrance and pulled in by a hidden gate. I liked this secret access. I drove in and parked beside a
woodshed – white doves flew out – then I started walking into the woods, keeping our dog Toby on a lead. A herd of small deer bounded away from me into the chestnut trees. On my right
was the Glebe, where I would go often with my grandmother to see the baby pigs, and where I had walked with her that day with Raymond.

Pushing my way through mud and brambles, I reached the edge of the large field that looked across to what had been my grandparents’ house, grey, perhaps a little forbidding. But it was
where I was taken first as a baby, then often as a small girl, then as a schoolgirl, to visit my grandmother. Then in my twenties I would go alone, often, to stay. I realised as I stood looking at
the house that I felt more territorial about it than I would ever feel about anywhere.

I was by a small clearing with a plantation of rhododendrons – ‘Our Village’ – where I played with Nicky just after Raymond died. I walked deeper into the wood,
cautiously keeping Toby on the lead. I turned along the upper woodland path, which ended below Knowle itself. I passed a large hollow called ‘Chow’s Pit’ after my mother’s
stepfather, whom she called ‘Chow’, that at various seasons was full of giant leaves, bright green and yellow, scarlet American maples, golden and coral azaleas and purple zinnias. A
camellia was blooming now in spring, a deep pink. Twice more I saw groups of small deer leaping away into the wood. Now I was very near Knowle. I climbed over some broken wire and walked into the
bottom of my grandmother’s garden, where I stared at the masses of daffodils, some like bright yellow trumpets, others pure white, then more delicate narcissi with pale yellow petals and
orange centres like fried eggs. My grandmother planted all of them. Some had spread and covered the grassy area where the swimming pool once was. The new owners had filled it in.

On my way back, I was about to skirt ‘Our Village’ when I saw a man and a woman enter the big field from Knowle and start striding across it towards me, with two large dogs. I ducked
back into the trees. I felt invaded, though I was the trespasser. Those strangers now owned the field where my grandmother used to go each day with her dogs, where she had once walked with my
grandfather, with my mother as a little girl, and, forty years later, with me. She and I saw a lamb being born there. Now, I was just a visitor.