The Lost Child (15 page)

She sips her tea, thinks about it.

Not really. Because you see I'm just me really. I mean the past, it's interesting, I'm very interested in it, but at the end of the day, it's not what I am. It's just the past, isn't it?

It's amazing that you can still see them so clearly, says Julia.

Oh, they're very obvious when you know what you're looking for.

It's so much bigger than I'd pictured it, I say.

Oh yes, look - he indicates the sweep with his arms - you can tell, it was a vast pile.

And we all stop for a moment and take in everything that's around us. And just like before there's that sudden odd quality to the air - a strange skittering lightness and a sense of grandeur, or height? - that makes me feel I can almost sense the Hall still standing there around me.

It's a funny old place, says Steve, it's got this - atmosphere.

I nod because that's exactly what I'm thinking.

We walk on, the dog sniffing eagerly, then tearing off to chase a scent, while Julia lags slightly behind taking photos.

My Dad will want to see, she says.

Steve tells us that the road used to run right up here, between the Hall and the church. But the original owner, Alfred Inigo Suckling - the man who rented the Hall to the Yellolys - didn't like it being so close to his property.

So he had it moved – ha! - just like that, right down there, to where it is now. You could in those days, if you were rich. You could do anything if you had the money and the clout.

We walk through mud and leaves. In the middle of all these trees there's no wind whatsoever. Though the sun has gone, the sky's still smudged with brightness.

I ask Steve how they came to live here and he says they saw an ad in the
Eastern Daily Press.

And how long did it take to do it up? asks Julia.

Five years. Us living in a mobile home with the three kids. It's my life's work really. Not much fun sometimes in the mobile home either.

I bet it wasn't, says Julia.

Must be an amazing place for the kids to grow up, though, I say, reminded for a moment of Joanne Sandelson's kids and the mad white puppy in the earthworks at Narborough.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. Ah, now here's the well - look.

The original well?

Yup.

He pulls a cover off the side and we look down. I can see nothing, just a long drop into darkness. But Julia leans in and takes a photo and shows me - it shows up perfectly on her camera. Pale brickwork going round and round, down and down. A glimmer of something shining at the bottom.

It still has water in it?

Oh yes. The Yellolys would have used this well. Their servants would have, anyway.

We walk back up to the house past stagnant ponds, petrified trees. The air is so still.

I ask Steve what he does for a living.

Teacher, design and technology. In Bungay.

He asks Julia what she does.

Computer analyst, she says, making a face.

And she's a serious athlete as well, I tell him. She competes in triathlons.

And beyond the coach house is the walled garden - he tells us proudly how he's been repairing the walls gradually all by himself, a bit at a time - a painstaking process, exhausting at times, but quite satisfying all the same. Little piles of pink bricks waiting to be slotted back into a several-century-old wall.

Before we leave, we go back up to the house to say goodbye to Elaine. She gives me a phone number.

Monica Churchill, she says. She used to be the church warden. She might well know where your poor Yelloly girl was buried.

It's almost dark now - the kind of creeping gloom that turns black as soon as you go inside and turn on a light. In the kitchen, the table's empty except for a couple of place mats and the dishwasher's on. The corridor's dark and the TV flickers in the sitting room and two teenagers loll on the sofa. A girl, and a boy in a hoodie - half-watching TV, half-strumming a guitar.

Oh, my kids play the guitar, I say. My eldest's got one just like that, I think.

Electric? says Steve and the boy looks up, half-interested. Yeah, it's a bit of an earful, isn't it?

It is if you use an amp, I say.

And Steve folds his arms and lets out a big sigh and for the first time I think I detect a flicker of stress in his eyes.

Oh my God, he says. Just tell me about it!

The first time he came to pick us up - it must have been September - we hadn't seen him for about three weeks, not since our mother left. I was looking forward to seeing him and to seeing our old house again (I'd lain awake so many nights trying to remember every single square foot of it) but I was also terrified. It was like being picked up by a stranger.

But I knew this was silly because he was our daddy and we'd only been on holiday with him a few weeks ago. Swimming in the sea, eating sandwiches, watching the little portable black-and-white TV he always brought with him in the hotel bedroom.

He picked us up. His car. Clean beige upholstery and cigarettes. The full ashtray which always made me cough. I don't remember what we said to each other after all that time, but I know we stopped on the way home to get some frozen food.

There's nothing in the house any more, he said. You'll see how different it is.

In some ways this is a relief It means I don't have to go up there, trying to rouse him, seeing his pale face surrounded by half-eaten plates of food and mouldy glasses, crumpled Kleenex and old underpants. It also means we don't have to suffer his destructive and chaotic presence tipping everyone off balance at breakfast.

Most days we get an automated message from the school-attendance line, informing us that he isn't there and asking us to give a reason.

And I tell the truth.

We don't have a reason, I explain to the school answerphone. We think he ought to be there. We passionately feel he needs to be put on the spot, told what his options are. We've suggested his teachers threaten to expel him. But they haven't, so we really don't know what we can do.

I say these words - or something like them - several times a week. Some days I feel assertive and honest and resigned as I say them. Other days I just feel miserable.

He doesn't go to school because he knows he can get away with not going. He doesn't go to school because he's forgotten all about why he was going in the first place. He doesn't go to school, we are realising now with a sinking, tearing certainty, because he absolutely and definitely can't stop smoking cannabis.

When we challenge him about this, when we try to talk about skunk, he laughs at us.

I don't buy skunk any more, he says. Do you think I'm crazy or something? The guy I buy from, he's a really good guy. He goes out of his way to make sure it's not skunk.

But you used to smoke skunk?

Used to, yes. But this is mersh. Much weaker, OK?

But how do you know?

He rolls his eyes.

Because I trust the guy, OK? He doesn't want to fuck people's brains about with skunk, does he?

Doesn't he?

If he gets chucked out, says his father, he's out of here. I mean it. That's it. He's pushing eighteen and If he's not in education, well, I don't know if I can live like this much longer.

He says it partly to himself, to hear what it sounds like, and partly to me, to see what I'll say. I don't say anything.

Meanwhile our boy's routine doesn't waver. On days he goes to school, he gets up about ten and leaves after a shower and a bit of shouting. The relief in the house is palpable. The silence. The lack of tension. The quality of the air actually seems to change.

On days when he doesn't, he gets up at around two and maintains what feels to us like a steady and carefully judged campaign of aggression and belligerence. It's not that any of the individual things he does - stumbling around half-dressed, swearing and yawning and scratching himself, making a pot of coffee and enjoying it on the lawn, smoking a joint and playing his guitar wearing nothing but a pair of boxers - are so very extraordinary or intolerable in a teenager. More that he makes it quite clear that all of this is non-negotiable. That we have no say in how things will be in our home. The noise, the mess, the fury - we have no choice but to put up with it. In fact, if we complain, he seems to go out of his way to make sure the volume increases.

Sometimes, trying to work, I lean out of the window and beg him to stop singing. Just for a bit.

I just need half an hour, I tell him. Half an hour of peace so I can think.

He squints up at me as if he's forgotten who I am.

One more song, he says. And he turns straight back to his guitar because it's not a question. If! continue to object, or if! decide to go down there, he'll start one of his rants where he follows me round the house, shouting at me and asking for money. And If he does this, then I can say goodbye to work for a couple of hours or more.

I shut the window. I'm hot. I try to work. His voice continues. I push my fists in my eyes, hold back the tears.

If we ask him to clear up the mess he's made, he replies that he'll live as he sees fit.

As you see fit?

He grins.

Look, his father says as mildly as I've ever heard him talk to anyone, while you're standing there waiting for the kettle to boil, couldn't you just unload the dishwasher? Or wash up the pan you used for the sauce?

His son tells him to fuck off and stop being such a megalomaniac control freak.

That's a bit of a tautology, suggests his father. And all I'm asking is that you behave like a member of this family.

This isn't a fucking family, says his son, who loves to try and make out that we are - and always have been - supremely dysfunctional in all sorts of fundamental ways that do not relate to or involve him.

And some days I think he is right. Some days I wonder, What did we do to our child? What exactly was it? What toxic concoction of qualities did we two parents somehow bring to this young family of ours, to cause such a disastrous thing to happen?

And then I look at the photo I have on my desk of him fast asleep in his father's arms when he was just a few weeks old. A young, soft-faced man in an old brown jersey, eyes full of love. And a tiny baby boy, eyes tight shut, fists clenched, white shawl carefully folded around him by that same young man, who moved me so much when he asked the midwives to show him how to swaddle an infant properly.

They go to the Bazaar in Soho Square, where they probably buy hats, gloves, handkerchiefs, shawls and lace, as well as some drawing and painting materials. Then they go to a watercolour exhibition. They drive around Hyde Park, go out to dinner and to the theatre, and attend a fitting of a new gown that's being made up for your mother. They go to the opera in Covent Garden:

We were in Lady Holland's private Box which Mrs Marcet had for that even. Our party consisted of our 3 selves, Mr and Mrs Frank Marcet & Sophy Marcet and MrJ. Prevost joined us at the Play. Mrs M was not well enough to go. We saw some very pretty baby linen which they were going to send to Geneva for Mrs M's baby, and for Mrs de la Rive.

They go to Bond Street to admire statues of Tam O' Shanter and Souter John, done by a Scotch stonemason. And then on to the Spanish Bazaar in the Hanover Square rooms, which they find rather crowded:

Your sister's journal of this trip sits on my desk by my computer, among the other papers and journals lifted from the box. And I'm flicking through it for the fourth or fifth time when I notice what I never noticed before. Right at the very back of the book, hidden on the inside-back page long after the journal has ended, a note, scratched in the faintest pencil. It takes me a while to decipher: