There was a breeze that afternoon after the still heat of the morning, not ideal swimming weather. But once the pool had refilled Steph spent some time in it with Charlie while I sat out nearby and watched. I am sure that it helped us both, to see and hear Charlie just as happy and excited in the water as he had ever been. Something compelled us, I believe, to fill the garden and the pool with playful noise. It was necessary to exorcise any lingering spirit of ugliness. And it is certain that nothing sees off the looming atmosphere of strife that adults create around themselves faster than a delighted, shrieking child.
But Michael’s appearance when he returned brought back to us the awfulness of what was happening. He was starving, but he couldn’t eat until he had had a bath, he said. Steph went up to run it for him. We were all hungry by then, as Steph and I had not been able to eat until he was home safe. I had roasted a chicken, and we sat in the kitchen until quite late, eating with our fingers. It began as a performance that we all consented to appear in for the sake of the others, and slowly it mellowed into something else that was less of a charade, because our relief and happiness to be together again were real. Afterwards Michael needed another bath, he said.
That night we were all exhausted, but we hardly slept. I lay awake wondering if I should feel guilty. Or rather, wondering if I actually did feel guilty- wondering, really, if this sleepless going-over of my life was a sense of guilt. Michael, not me, had done the deed, of course. But was it his proximity to me that had turned him into the kind of person who could do it, I mean kill another person? I dwelled on this for a time. Does the mere presence of one person whose hands are not exactly clean make it inevitable that another person will sooner or later dirty theirs? I lay in bed getting quite depressed, because despite all my efforts, it seemed that all this might go back to me and Mother.
Mother’s own baby ‘wasn’t born right’ and died when she was three, eight years before I came along. I suppose they’d tried to have more babies of their own in that time. So I was meant to fill the space that was left, I suppose, which I now know to have been a doomed hope, because nobody can ever replace another. Charlie consoles us all but he does not, nor do we want him to, replace Miranda. Miranda’s tiny spot on this earth will always be precious and it lies in a place of its own, somewhere beyond a margin that Charlie cannot cross. All that Miranda meant to us remains with us and in us.
It didn’t work, me and Mother. Not that direct or cruel comparisons were made, for the first little girl was never mentioned, but I didn’t shape up. Perhaps Mother tried, at the beginning. I know I did, probably right up until the time that Father died. It was around then that she first told me the truth about my real mother. She wouldn’t have dared to while Father was alive. She told me only to hurt me or, as she put it, to get me off my high horse about going to university. Because my real mother hadn’t died, after all. She hadn’t been the frail, tragic heroine in an air raid I’d made her into. I was the natural daughter of a ‘common prostitute’, who’d had me and handed me over to a children’s home the minute she’d been able to. And hadn’t she (Mother) and Father done enough, bringing me up as their own, even handing over valuable property (the clock)? Did I not think, in the circumstances, that I should be a little more grateful, content with what I had (a secretarial course)? It was the theme whose many variations have played over and over in my life until I came here, that good things- opportunity, security, affection, happiness- should come to me, if at all, only second-hand, and in second rate scraps.
But I remember that I was not really listening to all that, for my mind had just stopped and could not go any further. It stopped, just like that, at the idea that my real mother had not died when I was five. Which meant that she was still alive. Inside I was rejoicing, and I decided there and then that I would hold on to this feeling. I did not recognise it for what it was. It was hope. That’s what hope is, isn’t it, something between a decision and a feeling; it is the giving of permission to oneself to be optimistic about things yet to be. I had not developed the knack, nor ever did. It has always taken effort. But then I was thinking, as soon as I can I’ll find her. I’ll track her down. Exactly how I had no idea, but it certainly would not be with Mother’s help. In fact I should probably have to be very patient and wait at least until I was twenty-one, when, it seemed to me, I would suddenly, magically know how to go about it. I could imagine the uproar it would cause. But I rejoiced also that Mother had just created a purpose for me and would never know it, because I was going to keep very quiet about it. I was intrigued by the prostitute part, and frankly unbelieving- I knew, because I could just sense it, that even if it were true there would be a reason for it. Something must have happened to her, something she couldn’t help. I would find her and make everything all right.
I’m getting to the guilt part of it. So, with my beautiful secret, the years went by. Twenty-one came and went, of course. Mother got worse and really did need looking after. I got sour, as I think I mentioned. So by the time I was forty-six, on that day eighteen years ago when the buddleia outside Mother’s window offended me so deeply, I am afraid there was a bit of a row. I am afraid my patience deserted me and I raged at Mother about the incontinence. At the heart of it was her notion that I was only worthy to clear up her mess, and yes, I admit that I shouted at her, and not for the first time. She of course screamed back, along the usual lines. But this time she added something. She said it wasn’t her fault I was still here. What’s that supposed to mean, I yelled at her. And then she said, in the way you would, the only way you could say it if you’d been saving it up for about thirty years, that if I hadn’t been so stupid and gullible over the clock, I could have left years ago.
I got it out of her, finally. She had spoken to Christie’s. They had told her that that series of numbered, unsigned Vulliamy clocks are the earliest and best. The records, the first surviving Vulliamy Clock Book, begin with Number 297, delivered in 1797. Mine was 169, predating the known records by at least ten years. It would have fetched about Ј1,700, possibly Ј2,000, in the early nineteen-fifties. The longcase clock had been worth at least ten times what I’d got for it. More than enough to go to university.
Mother herself had always had a shrewd idea that it was worth something, though Father would never spell out to her how much. That was why she had checked up and, of course, why she was furious that the clock was mentioned specifically in Father’s will as going to me. But why didn’t you tell me, I asked her, why? Of course I knew the answer: if I wanted to flounce off on my high horse and sell it to some two-bit shop, that was my own lookout. She loved it, telling me all this.
It explained Mr Hapgood’s three bedroom house in Rectory Fields. I think I’d realised something of the sort.
Anyway, since I’ve told this much, I might as well tell it all.
It wasn’t even Mother’s bombshell over the clock that day that did it, in the end, nor the way she kept quiet so that the money for university never came my way. No, it was what she went on to tell me about my real mother that really did it.
You see, I hadn’t quite realised until that day that I had been living all those years, all of my life to date, not with the hope that I would find her, but living on that hope. It had been feeding me. And with what Mother told me, the hope died. That day, I saw that I would never know how it felt to come first with somebody. I had been holding on to the chance that I might still come first with my real mother, once I found her. But what Mother told me, the information she tossed at me as if it didn’t matter, was that although my mother had not died when I was five, she had died since. She had been alive, all those years ago, when Mother first told me I was a prostitute’s bastard. But now she was dead.