The Lost Child (22 page)

Missing him badly, I call him.

Yes?

There's a lot of noise in the background.

Hi, darling. How are you? Are you OK?

Sorry, but this is not a good time.

He hangs up. I redial and get his voicemail.

Next day he calls me. Just the sound of his voice makes me go still inside.

Look, Mum, what you've got to understand is it's fucking difficult to talk to you when there are a couple of idiots hanging around me just waiting to steal my phone, OK?

Sorry, I say, I didn't realise. How are you?

(A little pause.)

I'm OK.

Are you still at Granny's?

Sometimes.

Are you going to school?

(Another pause.)

Mostly. Yeah. (His voice is softening by the second.)

And - well, how are things?

OK.

And - do you want to know how Kitty is?

(A little sigh.)

How's Kitty?

She's fine. She's OK. To be honest, I think she's missing you a bit.

Yeah, well.

Well, would you like to come over and have a meal sometime, see Kitty?

No thanks, I don't think so.

Then how about we meet up and I buy you a coffee or a meal?

He hesitates again.

We could go to Tootsie's. (He used to love Tootsie's. The vegetarian burger with extra goat's cheese and barbecue sauce on the fries.)

It's not a good time right now, Mum. Maybe some other time, OK?

And he hangs up, and I don't know whether I feel better or worse for having spoken to him. I don't tell his father I called him.

But after hours spent with the
Yellow Pages,
I finally tracked down a pet shop in Croydon that had a litter.

Mainly black, one or two black-and-white, said the man. And there's one that's got white paws and bib and a white tummy.

Is it a girl?

Yeah. That one's female.

I asked him if he could possibly hold on to her till I got there. I got in the car and hurried to Croydon.

I still remember the precise texture of that January day. The bright cold sunshine, the horrible old white Citroen we had back then, Michelle Shocked and k.d. lang on the stereo.

The pet shop was on the grey main road, between a party shop and a kebab shop. The kittens - six or seven of them were all squashed together in one big cage. The one I'd reserved happened to be the liveliest. She was the one who was playing the most, rolling over and over and smacking the one next to her. I knew from the books that this was a good sign. The man picked her up and put her in my hands and she mewed at me but didn't struggle.

I'll take her, I said.

All the way back to Clapham, she mewed and mewed. Every time we stopped at a traffic light, I poked my fingers in the box and tried to talk to her, but nothing would console her. But, once we got her in the spare room where we were hiding her for the night, she relaxed, had a drink and started washing.

That's good, said the boy's father, who knew about cats. That means she feels at home. Oh look at her - he's going to be over the moon, isn't he?

Over the moon didn't begin to describe it.

All that evening, the last evening ever of being only five, the boy had a frozen, terrified look on his face. A kind of fearful joy. I knew what he was feeling. I knew that he suspected that he might just be getting a kitten, but was afraid to let himself hope even for one tiny second. We'd told him not to get his hopes up. And back then, he was such a good boy, he always did as he was told. The effort of not hoping was almost unbearable.

In the morning we put the kitten in a cardboard box with a bright yellow ribbon tied around it. And when he opened it and saw her small black face looking up at him, he couldn't speak at all for a few moments.

And he couldn't decide whether to call her Hoover, or Fluffy, or Scrap. Because he had a shortlist of about ten names. But in the end he plumped for Kitty because he thought it suited her best.

But she began her life as Hoover and, though I thought that only lasted a day or two, may be it was longer. Because when, a few months after our boy has finally left us, I happen to be going through Clapham and stop at a vet's on Lavender Hill a vet we haven't been to in years and years - to buy some worming tablets for our dog, the assistant asks me if we're on their records.

Only from years ago, I tell her. We've moved house since.

She frowns and scrolls down on the computer.

1995? Would that be it? A cat called Hoover? First injections?

Goodness, yes, I say. That was a very long time ago.

And I pay for the tablets and leave the surgery and walk out into the sunshine. And as I walk, a long-ago memory of a small boy struggling along the pavement with the basket containing his kitten - determined to manage it because no one else is allowed to carry her - comes into my head. I make myself think about something else.

I still choke

on the liar's retort:

'I sip mine to keep

my spirits high.'

8

GRAND CENTRAL STATION, New York. A hot, damp summer's morning. People rushing, coffees and papers in their hands. I queue up and buy a return to New Haven in Connecticut.

On the commuter train, a large red-faced man in a string vest rolls around, taking up at least two seats, sighing, snoring, muttering. Now and then someone moves to get away from him.

As we pass through Hartford with its rows of pretty clapboard houses, more and more people get of fat each stop. The day gets hotter. I wonder if String Vest is going as far as New Haven. Might I even be left alone with him? But two stops later, he wakes and leaves the train, wobbling down the steps and sitting straight down on the platform with his head between his knees. We rattle off again. Relief

Outside the cosmopolitan comfort of Manhattan, America turns back into America: a raw, tired place, dusty and poor and fractious. At New Haven Station, I need the 100 but, as I hesitate at the entrance to the women's toilets, a young black woman with teary eyes grabs at my clothes and tries to follow me in, demanding $2.

Please leave me alone.

Just give me the $2!

I turn and walk quickly away and back into the station and she spits, calling me a cunt. The last person to call me that was my son. She's still standing there, cursing and crying, as I get in a cab to go to Yale.

The Yale Center for British Art is on a very long, tree-lined street, dotted with depressing and pointless shops selling expensive things that no one needs. Perfumed candles to make your eyes water. Bath bombs. Marbled paper. Flower-patterned garden forks and trowels for people who will never touch soil. On the other side of the street, men in vests slump in the park, drinking and dozing on the dying yellow grass.

I reach the building which houses the Paul Mellon Collection and check in and head straight for the uiber-smart stainless-steel loos. Washing my hands, my face in the mirror looks exactly as I feel: incredulous. It just seems so impossible that this cool, blond building in the middle of America could contain anything of Woodton - anything that you or your family ever touched.

For a moment, blinking at me, he almost seems unwilling to hand them over, and I want to laugh and ask him to explain his claim on them. Has he scrambled over the church wall at Woodton with your great-great-great-niece? Does he have your mother's crocheted purse at home in his study? Has he stood on the rooftops at Narborough and seen the whole of Norfolk spread out before him?

He shows me how to handle the books and gives me a special purpose-made rest, demonstrating how to lay them on it so as not to crack the spines. For a moment I think he's also going to ask to see if my hands are clean. I think of Tony and Bryony's dining table strewn with history, as well as crumbs and peas and glasses of apple juice.

As I open the first sketchbook - and am plunged straight back to the mauve and brown skies of Woodton, the familiar dark sweep of the Norfolk land - the librarian's still standing there.

Do you know how the books ended up at Yale? I ask, hoping he'll go away if I take the lead.

He licks his lips. I'm sorry. I have no knowledge of that.

Well, I say, I'd love to know.

He looks at me doubtfully. Then he gives me some slips of paper to mark the pages, telling me I can make a note of any pages I might like to have photographed and then I can place an order. Then he installs himself behind the nearby counter and, hands folded, watches me like an exam invigilator.

Another sketch shows
old Mrs Smith
in her dark bonnet with a pink ribbon, pink shawl, blue shoes, holding a basket. Another servant? And then the
Kingswood vegetable woman
in her brightly patterned clothes and
Miss Atkins,
who makes more than one appearance.

An interior of a lace maker's room shows a small girl gazing intently up at an elderly woman. The careful detail in this picture - the criss-cross leaded windowpanes, the pair of candlesticks on the mantelpiece, the warming pan on the wall - take me straight back to a scene in your album - the same people, the same room. The same potted geranium on the sill.

Two figures on a little filigree card are inscribed
to Harriet Jan 18th
1845
from her affectionate mother.
Another,
For Sam,
shows the back view of a young woman in a red cape and blue dress with a dark bonnet.

Finally, there's a picture of a pretty, blown-about young woman in a big green check coat and dark bonnet with white ruffles around the face. The scarf at her neck is daffodil yellow and her brown dress seems to be covered with a white apron or pinafore. Behind her, the sea is a watery pale blue. The picture's labelled
Harriet at Hastings
- by her mother. Harriet has dark hair and rosy cheeks, a sharp, thoughtful face. Your sister.

The last sketchbook is the most interesting. A bigger brown book with dull red comers, quite different in style and tone to any of your family's work I've seen so far. This is Jane's book. Your sister Jane Davison Yelloly who died of smallpox at the age of thirty. One day before you. Buried with you.

These paintings are far more abstract and careless and wild than anything you or your other sisters or mother ever did. They seem to indicate what I've somehow sensed all along: that Jane was different from the rest of you. Less placid, less pretty, more difficult to deal with, cleverer, perhaps.

Many pictures are copied from an artist called J.J. Burns Esq. And there are some competently executed waterfalls
after Turner.
But the best are recognisably straight from real Yelloly life.

The curious effect
of
snow seen at Carrow Abbey Nov I6th
1831 - is a startling scene of white ground against cold and heavy grey skies. In the foreground a large tree with a few coppery leaves still clinging to its dark branches. Could it be the weeping beech that Jeremy Howard showed me?

Effect at sunset March 15th
1833
as seen from the window at Woodton Hall, drawn March 16th
1833
from: recollection
shows a hot pink-jelly sun sliding behind the barest black trunks of winter trees. And next to it, someone - your mother? - has written
Excellent!
in pencil.

Yes, I think, it is.

Finally,
Twilight with Venus the evening star seen from Woodton Hall March
1833 shows that small moment between dusk and darkness when only the upper part of the sky is still washed with light. You're out walking through fields towards home and it's still just about light. But as soon as you get indoors and light the lamps, the windowpanes are black with night.

And
Bedingham and Woodton Halfway Oak after its fall July 10th
1837. An enormous tree lies on the ground by the hedge, a small wooden gate inviting us forward on the right. What happened? Was there a storm and did the tree fall and did you girls all rush out to sketch it? Did you go too? Standing there gazing solemnly on a dark yellow morning, the light sour and calm after the storm of the night before.

And then July 1837. A date it's impossible to ignore. Jane the painter - alert and energetic, physically robust, generous and intense with her brush - didn't know she had less than a year to live.

I look up. The young man has left his desk.

Outside, the Connecticut sun is baking the drunks in the park, but here in the library I suddenly feel myself right back where I started: driving into Woodton on that bleak, cold February day as the light died.

It's not that I don't want him here, it's just that, when I wake him in the morning, he doesn't even try to get up.

The weeks roll by. We have sporadic contact with him. Or at least, I call him and sometimes he answers and sometimes he doesn't. Then he calls round and asks to speak to us. He tells us he wants to get a flat. He's looked into it and he's eligible for Educational Maintenance Allowance because he's still at school, and Housing Benefit as well If he can just get someone to let him rent a flat. But he can't rent a flat without a deposit and a guarantor. Would we be prepared to lend him a deposit and guarantee him?

Would we?

His father actually seems to be thinking about it. I'm surprised.

How will he ever face up to his problems, I say, if we go and underwrite him in a nice cushy flat?

It's difficult, his father says, frowning as he attempts to sort out his thoughts. But if, as he says, he doesn't in fact have a problem with drugs - if there's even the tiniest chance that this is true - then we should probably try this.

But he does have a problem with drugs, I say. We know he does.

His father sighs. I understand the sigh: we both continually move back and forwards between the absolute sinking certainty that our son is addicted and a faint, glimmering hope that he may be is not.

I know, I know. But all the same, I just wonder - should we at least give him one chance to show us he can live normally?

So we can at least say we did?

Exactly. Though of course if, as we still suspect, he's smoking all the time, well then, it's absolutely the wrong thing to do.

It'll just delay his recovery.

Meanwhile the boy - who assumes he'll talk us into it in the end - gets on with hunting for a flat. He puts a lot of energy into this - so much energy that he barely goes to school for two weeks. When I confront him about this, he tells me it's OK. The teachers are sympathetic to his problem.

How the fuck am I meant to concentrate on schoolwork when I have nowhere to live?

And if you got this flat, you'd start working?

He looks at me as if I'm quite mad.

Of course I would! You think I don't want to get some fucking A levels?

We used to be sort of friends too, this mother and I. We often chatted while we waited to pick the boys up from one activity or other. Our boys both struggled, briefly, with learning to read (and we supported each other) and then, to our relief, they both took off, excelling at English. They did drama classes after school together, cricket practice on a Sunday. We shared lifts.

As they got older, the boys drifted apart and so did we. But I continued to run into her at parents' evenings and she was always friendly. Now our sons seem to be seeing each other again - her own boy is working hard at school, possibly planning a gap year in the US before university.

It's been years since she's had reason to ring me. I can hear the nerves in her voice as she apologises for cold-calling like this but, well, it's been keeping her awake at night. She has to ask: why are we allowing our boy to be homeless like this?

You're going to think I'm such an interfering old cow, she says.

I tell her nonsense, of course I don't. Then I take a breath and try to explain that we're struggling with the concept of tough love - so neat in theory, so hard to carry out in practice - but we have a feeling that for him, now, it's the only way. I hesitate for a moment as I consider telling her more about the ways in which our lives have unravelled over the past year. But I don't really know her any more and it doesn't feel right, so I decide not.

I hear her draw breath.

But he can't carry on living like this! she says, her voice a little tighter now as she senses that I'm not going to give way. You're his mother, Julie, for goodness' sake - I mean, we used to be friends and I know you care about him, but don't you want him to have a roof over his head?

Of course I do, I say.

He's told Luke he wants to get a flat share but that you're refusing to support him. Wouldn't you rather he was living in a flat than sleeping on people's floors?

I try to breathe, even though my heart is thumping in my chest. Why is it so stressful to have another mother, even a mother you used to like, tell you how to care for your child?

I want him to have a roof over his head, I say again. And I don't want him to live like this. In fact, I can hardly bear it. I love him so much -

Well, I have to say you have a strange way of showing it!

But no, since you ask, I don't think he should be living in a flat. He's still at school- in theory anyway, though he's barely attending. His father and I think he should be living at home.

I hear her thinking about this.

All right, but he doesn't get on with you, does he? Luke says you're always fighting. That's not exactly his fault. OK, I'm not saying it's easy. I'm sure he's not easy. But some teenagers go through rough patches. And I don't want to get into the rights and wrongs as it's none of my business, but don't you think, however he's behaved, he deserves at least one chance to live properly?

I take a breath.

I would give anything to have him live properly, I tell her, wishing my voice would stop trembling, but he's addicted to cannabis. I don't suppose he's told Luke that. We seriously believe he has a problem with the drug. He can't stop smoking. He can barely go a day without a joint. And he's chaotic. He's not in control of what he does. We don't believe he'd keep up the rent on a flat, because any money he gets just goes on drugs.