Of course, I wanted to leave things in as orderly a state as possible, so that when my parents eventually called at the scene they would find nothing to displease them; no trace, in short, of myself. This process gave me a feeling, which increased as the hours laboured by, of being gradually but forcefully expelled, not just from my home but from all that had constituted my life up until that point, So unaccountable, in fact, did I begin to feel that had I not been so busy I would probably have committed some criminal or otherwise irresponsible act. Let me say that the most powerful part of the sensation by far lay in my feeling not of being pushed out, but rather of being drawn irresistibly towards something new. My pristine flat had the still-warm, thronging emptiness of a station after a train has departed elsewhere. I should add here, lest this seems too poetic, that my great clean-out went beyond the merely sanitary and involved what could without exaggeration be called the destruction of all evidence that I had ever existed. The purge was far from easy, for my mementoes — I suppose inevitably — reminded me of forgotten episodes, both good and bad. I had not thought my life to be so large, and occasionally, as I wrestled with it there on the sitting room floor, I felt myself to be engaged in mortal combat with a creature which writhed and bit as I sought to slay it. At other times I felt such a drowsy reluctance infuse my limbs that my resolution wavered in the very midst of its work. In these moments I felt quite outside myself, as if I didn’t care whether I stayed or went, nor indeed about anything that might happen to me. Once or twice I came upon something particularly sentimental and was almost drowned in a wave of self-pity and regret, wondering why it was that I felt so keen to give away every vestige of love I had ever earned. Minutes later some article of shame would provide a bitter chaser for my sickened palate, and I would come alive with purpose, working faster to free myself as if from beneath a fallen beam.
Towards evening I unearthed a packet of letters, addressed to me at school, which my father had written to me. They did not come, I should explain, directly from him — my father found emissions of feeling difficult, and any betrayal of fondness was always followed by a pantomime of disownment — but rather via the persona of Bounder, our dog.
Kennel House
Canine Close
Barking
Dear Stella
How are you? Is it raining ‘cats and dogs’ there like it is here? I’ve had to repair the woof of my kennel as it keeps leaking. Sometimes, when it’s raining, my master lets me come into the house, but my mistress usually finds some excuse to throw me out again. It’s a ‘dog’s life’.
I hope you are working hard. You don’t get a second chance with your education. And don’t get into trouble — you don’t want to in-cur any punishments!
Your faithful friend
Bounder
I was very unhappy at school at this time, and as you can imagine, such letters did little to comfort or cajole me. It might give you a fuller picture of my parents’ characters to know that the ‘here’ and ‘there’ referred to in Bounder’s letter were in fact barely a mile apart. The notion that it could rain in one place and not the other certainly betrays a deep delusion on the part of my parents, who never otherwise hinted that they were anything but convinced of their decision to send me to a boarding school within walking distance of their house. Lest you think that I would have preferred a more far-flung institution, and that they kept me close by them for the sake of affection, let me tell you that I saw no more of my parents than the other girls did of theirs; and further, that I detested every day that I spent in that hellish place and begged to be sent elsewhere.
My predicament was, I now see, the result of my parents’ own insecurities. Aspiring to a social position to which they had not been born, they believed it correct to expel their children from the family home and live amongst its empty, echoing bedrooms in miserable solitude. Being also, however, thoroughly provincial in nature, they believed it impossible that any school could be better than those found locally; and that the convenience with which they could visit us and attend school functions, not to mention savings in telephone calls and travel expenses, outweighed both the greater convenience and enormous financial benefit of having us at home.
My brothers were scarcely any better off, and indeed once the tide of my own injury had drawn back and the years neutered its memory somewhat, I was able to feel more aggrieved on their behalf than on my own. Like me, they were sent ‘away’. The elder thought himself happy enough within those high and privileged walls; but when finally he returned it became clear that he had left something vital and precious behind. It was probably for his own good that he himself never seemed to notice the loss; and how could he? For it was as if, while maintaining his outward appearance, everything in him had been minced into an undifferentiated mass and then reformed in a blander, more homogenous shape.
Not fitted to ran with the elite, the younger was doomed in one way or another to become its prey. The accident occurred on the school playing fields, which my brother was crossing on his way back from his violin lesson. These lessons were a torment to my brother, who, unbeknownst to his teachers or fellow pupils, suffered from deafness in one ear. It is difficult to comprehend how this disability could have gone unnoticed; and perhaps in a more confident pupil it wouldn’t have. My brother, however, scion of the brutal bourgeoisie, carrying the weight of my parents’ hopes on his small shoulders, was an accomplice in the matter of his own oppression. He struggled to keep up in the classroom, learned with admirable skill to participate in conversations half of which he did not hear, sawed weekly at his violin, and never once considered that he might be happier were he to free himself from this intolerable burden. Labouring under it, then, as he crossed the grass, he did not notice a javelin competition being held at the other end of the playing field. Witnesses claimed that they shouted at him to duck as the pole came hurtling through the air towards him; and there is no reason, I suppose, not to believe them, when you consider that at least three of them required ‘counselling’ after the event, which suggests at least that they were, as individuals, less callous than the forms their community took. My brother’s deafness, as you will have guessed, made any warning to little avail. The deadly instrument felled him where he stood, impaling his small body on the grass like a bird struck by an arrow. He was thirteen yean old, a year younger than me.
Many things came to pass as a result of this dreadful event. I will not go into them now. Of all the questions that were asked, however, of all the enquiries painfully made amidst expressions of regret and grief, one was never ventured: to wit, briefly, what arcane and pointless practice was this that deprived my brother of his life? That my parents never asked it was, to me, a measure of the unforgivable awe with which they still regarded the institution that had been so careless with their son. They didn’t dare; as if by questioning the sport they would have betrayed their inferiority, the public discovery of which they feared more than all the private sorrow in the world. It has haunted me through the years, even now that my brother is but a shadow, a ghost that flits, unrestful, about my thoughts.
To return to my clear-out, I disposed of Bounder’s correspondence with mingled grief and venom. A similarly sized bundle of letters from my mother — with whose contents, which bored me even at the time, I shall not now detain you — followed it; and so on, until all the messy spoils of the past, accumulated over such stretches of time, won in conflicts both arduous and joyful; the whole long, tiring campaign of my existence was parcelled up into three large bags and put downstairs for the proper authorities to dispose of.