Faustine (2 page)

I have been here before.

There’s a bump at the side of the road that looks as if someone, a child perhaps, had tried to build a mud hut, or make a fortification of some kind, and had then lost interest, leaving a rounded knoll, now covered with grass, that you had to swerve out into the road to avoid.

And there’s the yew hedge, as tall as once I knew it, though it must have grown as I have, and been much lower then; and a jagged hole, just two feet from the ground, gapes ready, as it did before, for an exploring hand.

There’s the chequered stone house, with the oak door that’s gone as grey as a seal’s coat from the wind and rain.

But I know I have to walk round the back, over yellow tiles two fingers wide and laid in neat late-Victorian patterns, which lie between the drive and the cobbles of the courtyard. When I am there, I will see the old coach-house, and the wing with a greenish thatch that looks as if the swans that live up-river had pecked at it for their nests.

And there I do see a couple – a man and a woman, neither old nor young, but cross, repelling – staring at me in a way that makes my feet drag and my eyes go to the intricate layout of stones on the ground. They make no motion, at my appearance, of either welcome or protest.

I stop, and we stand looking at each other. They have seen me here before.

I was in the kitchen of her house in Melbourne, when
Maureen
Fisher, scanning the newspaper over a cup of coffee, let out one of her exasperated sighs, laid the paper flat on the table, then swung to her feet and laughed.

‘Well, good luck to anyone who wants to go over there, Ella,’ she said. ‘One way of wasting time, if you ask me. Will there be a royal divorce? Will the police overcome the hippies at Stonehenge, or vice versa? Jesus H. Christ!’

 *

I must say here that Maureen Fisher has never been to
England
.

And I – what I remember may be as invented or as real as a dream. Did I live in this place or that? Did I really see the trees in a park 12,000 miles away, straining in a great wind, and see the fear on the face of the man who was pushing me in my pram?

He broke into a run, I do remember that. And he had a dark hat, down at a sharp angle over his face. But who the man was, I couldn’t say.

 *

Maureen Fisher is a distant relative of my family on my mother’s side, and, as she had with so many other children, she took me in.

Her husband, Bill, has a big sheep station to the north of
Melbourne, and Maureen and I – since I was old enough to help – have been running a children’s nursery in the town.

Many of the children are Malaysian or Chinese (families that come to Australia from Penang and Singapore to practise law or medicine); and I knew it would be a wrench to leave Chi-ren, my own favourite, with dark eyes and a haughty manner that makes even a disciplinarian like Maureen burst out laughing.

But, as I pointed out to her, it was time I went. Time I went to find out more about myself.

And, most of all, to find my beloved grandmother.

 *

It’s not Maureen Fisher’s fault that I can’t feel anything for her and never have. She’s been kindness itself in her
practical
, no-nonsense way. It’s just that she doesn’t know about real love – like Muriel did.

Maureen’s red hair is frizzy and looks as if it’s always affected by damp weather, standing up in a carroty halo that the small children love to try and copy with their crayons and chalks. Her kitchen smells of scones, and for all her robust contempt of the British way of life, Royal Family and the lot, the calendars with scenes of sheep trials in northern glens on the walls and the line of hand-knitted Fair Isle jumpers hanging over the range seem to personify an idea of England – even if it’s a vanished one – as if part of her had never really belonged to Australia at all.

Maureen never told me more about my family than it was absolutely necessary to know. My father had been killed in a car crash when I was six months old – she told me that when I was about five and had been living with her for two years. ‘And your mother comes to see you when she can. She’s very busy, Ella. You’ll understand, one day.’

I always said, what about my grandmother?

And Maureen always replied that she knew no more than I. I got the lovely presents at birthday and Christmas, didn’t I?

 *

Wherever my Grandma was, she couldn’t have forgotten me.

I walk across the cobbles, and because the couple in the doorway are looking both at me and away from me, because they are both hostile and deferential and I feel fear for the first time (what if the taxi, waiting on the road, out of sight at the top of the drive, decides not to wait and goes back to Salisbury without me?), I deflect my gaze from them too and stare out beyond the cobbles at the trunks of great beech trees, rooted in moss and with branches shivering in a light breeze under a canopy of summer green.

How beautiful it is here, I say to myself – but automatically, like a tourist: the grass mown down to a soft bed where a few leaves from last autumn still lie, inviting and ‘tasteful’, like the pictures Maureen has on the jigsaw puzzles in our nursery in Melbourne, pictures of a landscape none of the children has ever known; the half-ruined outhouses, dovecot and racket court, tiles russet with age, that are grouped around the lawn, stone walls overgrown with roses and ivy. How beautiful it is, I say, this time aloud. But I remember nothing now. The flash of memory has gone. It seems improbable – ludicrous, even – that I could have come here once. I must go back. There has been a mistake. I walk nearer to the couple in the doorway, to apologize for trespassing in this lovely neglected place.

A sound – a faint roar – which makes me think,
inappositely
, of a football stadium at home, comes into the sheltered
courtyard where we stand. And I turn again, looking upwards this time, past the abandoned village green and the little church with the squat tower to the line of bright, pale blue that marks the downlands from the deep valley where the old house and south-sloping garden lie. And something does come to me – a memory of a blanket, and blue-
and-white
-striped cups scattered in grass as short as the hair on a boy’s head, strong and tufty, and a nest of eggs, blue and speckled, lying just out of my reach beyond the confines of the rug. I’m crawling … a firm hand pulls me back … I cry, trying to reach the nest with the pale eggs that look like astonished eyes fallen down from the sky.

‘I’m sorry,’ I begin, as the roar dies away, and the couple, who have looked apprehensively up at the line of the downs above the road, look back at me again, more steadily this time.

‘I’m so sorry to come here,’ I say again, and I know I sound clumsy, even slightly unbalanced, in my sudden speech. ‘I’m looking for my grandmother, you see.’

And I wonder, as the man goes back into the kitchen down a couple of steep steps and his wife, looking over her shoulder at me, follows him, if they are used to strangers coming like this, barging in on their privacy, demanding answers to questions they are unable, or unwilling, to supply.

Something of the feeling that my pilgrimage isn’t the first and only one – that they expect someone every minute, and grudge that too – gives me the confidence to narrow the gap between us and arrive at the back door.

The kitchen of the manor lies below me, the bright green and cream of the paint dulled by the darkness the trees throw into it, the smell antiseptic and sharp, a hospital smell. Surely my grandmother can’t live here?

‘I’m looking for Muriel Twyman,’ I say.

I walk down the steps and the door closes behind me. I feel the stillness of the cobbles outside, and the closed face of the coach-house, and the serried ranks of trees between me and the outside world. The house lies round me, like the lair of a sleeping beast.

So why did it take me so long?

It was that day – the day in the kitchen, in the grey, rainy Melbourne winter, the day Maureen picked up the newspaper off the table and made her face of contempt for the triviality, the pettiness, the snobbery and insignificance of England – that I learned for the first time how I might find my grandmother, where to go.

It was ironic that Chi-ren came in at that moment crying; if I hadn’t asked Maureen again, over the sound of his sobs (he’d lost a little red train or the like), I’d never have gone, I believe. After all, I’d left it late enough. At twenty-six – ‘rising twenty-seven’, as Bill Fisher used to tease me when he said he was surprised there was no husband in the offing yet – I’d have become resigned to staying for the rest of my life in Australia, gradually losing the urge to see the place where I was born. As for trying to find Muriel – herself becoming more and more of a memory turned to dust, like one of the pieces of scrap paper the kids scribble on in the nursery, stuck in a drawer by someone too sentimental (me, most likely) to throw it in the bin straight away and quite lacking in significance when retrieved at the time of a
clear-out
– I would have had even less energy for the search. But that day, Maureen handed it to me on a plate. Only later did I realize she must have known all along where Muriel was likely to be.

‘They’re using tear-gas on all those dirty hippies,’ Maureen said. ‘I’m not surprised. They’re gypsies. They shouldn’t be allowed.’

‘What hippies?’ I spoke purely from politeness. Chi-ren had found the train and was climbing on my knee. He said he wanted a story, and I dug out the Beatrix Potter book Maureen always insisted on the children having read to them. I wondered, all the same, whether a child who had been on a Malaysian island for the first two years of his short life wouldn’t have preferred a book with creatures and characters more recognizable to him. But then – and here I would daydream, and be interrupted by a tart remark from Maureen and a burnt slice of toast or a pool of juice upset by a toddler and in need of clearing up – what
was
it possible to remember from so early an age? Did Chi-ren see the monkeys that run in the jungle in the hills of Penang? Did I really know the dusty flat, with its big rooms and the curtains always shrunk from the washing-machine, in the noisy town where I had lived with my mother and her mother, Muriel? Did I even have, apart from the windy day in a pram in the park, any memory of home at all?

 *

‘Battle of Stonehenge,’ Maureen read out. ‘Mob driven back by police invade boat-house in grounds belonging to
Woodford
Manor, at Woodford-cum-Slape.’ And Maureen, for the second time, threw down the paper with a snort and remarked that anyone foolish enough to want to go to the land of hippies, defaulting royalty and corrupt policemen, would need to have their heads examined. Then – I was used to these sentiments, which usually included a sincere hope that the undesirable elements in Australian society would be eliminated as soon as possible – Maureen said, ‘Woodford-cum-Slape. Typical poncy name for a village over
there, all dreamed-up with the thatched roofs and the quaint teapots, I dare say. But it rings a bell all right. Woodford Manor. That’s where your grandmother lives, I’m pretty sure.’

Then Maureen, unusually for her, clapped her hand over her mouth and walked out of the room. Little Chi-ren gave a shriek of surprise when I set him down and went for the newspaper. My heart was racing – but that wasn’t so odd, really, when you consider that love is a rare commodity and I knew enough about what it was like not to have it, to come over as faint as a heroine in a romantic novel when there seemed a chance of getting some of it back again. The
difference
, of course, was that my quest wasn’t for a dashing young man (and Bill Fisher and Maureen, I’d heard them, thought this pretty weird of me). It was for an old woman. But, as I say, you can no more dictate who you’re going to love than sit down and paint or write a masterpiece at the crack of a moneyman’s whip. Muriel was all I had. And now I had a clue, at least, as to where I could go to find her.

I learnt not to blame my mother. If it took me a long time – twenty years, maybe – to come to terms with her
abandonment
of me, it’s more a sign of my own immaturity than of Anna’s cruelty or selfishness. She couldn’t manage on her own – the mid-sixties was a time before the support of
feminism
, she had neither money nor proper training for a job after my father died – and when she brought me to Australia and handed me over to the Fishers, I think she genuinely believed it was only for a year or two. She came twice a year, ever after that, and she sent the books she published, by a women’s press started up on the kitchen table of the flat that was so hazy a memory to me – ‘doing it all on a shoestring,’ Maureen said with pride (Maureen is a great one for private enterprise). She sent the books, but I never opened them. I waited – and sometimes it was almost too painful to wait, the gap between Christmas and my birthday in June yawned like an abyss by the time the cold weather had set in, in May – I waited for the presents Muriel sent. And part of me could never understand why, if my mother hadn’t been able to manage on her own, my grandmother hadn’t stayed on at the flat and looked after me as she’d done before I was sent out here.

‘Things aren’t like that,’ Maureen had said in the cross voice she used when a child whined or demanded too much. ‘People have other things to do, you know.’

And I suppose it was that that I didn’t believe. If you’re loved as much by someone as I undoubtedly had been by Muriel, how can they just go away and leave you?

 *

The presents stopped twelve years ago, when I was fourteen. I think I was secretly relieved by then, for the dolls with impossibly flaxen hair and the party dresses and tutus just weren’t what I wanted any more. (I couldn’t say so, of course, even if I’d wanted to: the parcels came with a brief typed slip – All my love, Grandma – and a postal mark somewhere in the City of London.) But I sensed that what had seemed to be inspired by love had become automatic; and the awful thought that these items were even bought by someone else and posted off to me by a stranger became too painful to contemplate. If only she could get to know me again, I used to say, she’d love me like she used to. And nothing ever stopped me thinking that.

 *

Maureen was as sceptical of the success of my visit to
England
as she had been about the presents – as they stayed the same and I got older. ‘Anyone would think she didn’t know you were growing up,’ Maureen used to say (she was spiteful sometimes, but I suppose she and Bill both knew I couldn’t care for them and they’d done a lot to give me a reasonably happy childhood). And now, when, after failing to extract any further information on the whereabouts of Muriel, I informed her that I was leaving for England the very next day, she just told me, for the umpteenth time, to go and get my head examined, for goodness’ sake.

‘Don’t get mixed up with those hippies,’ were Maureen’s parting words. ‘I mean, they think nothing of helping
themselves
to people’s private property!’

Bill, before going back to the more pressing demands of
me a sunhat with a vulgar picture on it, ‘for the hot English summer,’ as he said with a wink and a nudge.

For Bill England was seaside postcards, bums and
landladies
; for Maureen, snooty dukes and potty druids,
cavorting
at the solstice and lunging at the forces of law and order.

For me it was Muriel. It seemed right that what was the old, dead time of year for us should be replaced by the young green leaves of England in June, that I should be going back to a summer which had never faded or gone stale. As I left for the plane that day, I felt as if I were going to reinvent my life all over again.