The Lost Child (3 page)

It's simple, my husband says, glad for once to talk of someone else's loss, another century, a calm, dry time, she left the album. The only reason you've heard of her is because of the album.

Yes, I say, but that's not what I mean.

What I mean is, what's really left? Is there any other trace or are they blown to dust? Are you blown to dust?

You die. You paint your album, and then you die. Eight years later, just as life is getting going for you, possibilities unfolding, that's it, you have to go. You have no idea you'll die. You walk through my home, room by room. You have no idea why you do it. You just do.

You're in my head and I don't know why. It seems I don't know anything any more.

I miss you so much.

I start waking at night. Sleeping easily at first, thudding down into dreamless sleep, then waking into blackness. Three 0'clock, four o'clock, five.

Thoughts jump up and down in my head. My boy aged about seven, sticky-up blond hair, licking Angel Delight off a spoon. Me standing on some high-up place as a child, some small mountain or other that we'd all been forced to climb, all of us complaining through the battering rain, only to get there and understand exactly why we came, see what it was all about: the world spread out miles below. The smell of wet anorak. Wind in your ears. Fingers mauve with cold. Perfection.

And, his baby body - pale smudges of nipples, the warm fatness of his arms on my bare shoulders, the smell of his baby skin against my face. My fragile, exhausted impatience waiting for bedtime, longing for sleep, waiting to see him feed, change, grow.

My baby, my child. Always galloping on to the next stage. Crazy. Why did I rush? I shouldn't have rushed. Thinking there would always be enough time to hold and touch him, that he would always be there.

On a dark and rainy Thursday afternoon, fuzzy and tired but propelled by another random burst of curiosity, I order up this book - a stout brown volume, published in 1898, complete with fold-out family trees. I order it up and take another step closer to you. Scanning the index. There are several chapters on the Yellolys and Tyssens (your mother's family) in here.

Your parents are distinguished. Dr John Yelloly is a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and physician to the Duke of Gloucester. Born on 20 April 1771 in Alnwick, Northumberland. His father was a merchant but he was orphaned and brought up by an uncle, Nathaniel Davison, Egyptian Consul and also an explorer. Davison discovered a previously unknown chamber in the pyramids - it was named after him. A famous explorer. Your father would have grown up knowing that. You'll have heard the story too.

Your mother Sarah is a Tyssen - born on 6 August 1784, the daughter of Sarah Boddicott and Samuel Tyssen, formerly of Hackney, and then living at Felix Hall in Essex. A wealthy family, landowners.

But your mother's an orphan too, in her way - her own mother died when she was only six and her father, inconsolable and unable to deal with a small girl, left her in Hackney with her grandmother while he moved to Narborough Hall in Norfolk with his son, your Uncle Samuel. When he died, your mother, just like your father, was brought up at cool arm's length, by guardians.

Your parents are married on 4 August 1806 at St Sepulchre's Church, Snow Hill in London. She is twenty-two and he thirty-two. It doesn't say how they met, but it strikes me that at the very least they have their parentless childhoods in common. They quickly set about making ten children. What a consolation it must be for them, to create this bursting, joyous family.

They live first in Finsbury Square in Hackney, where most of you are born. Then they move to a place called Carrow Abbey near Norwich, before moving again a few more miles across into Suffolk, to Woodton Hall near Bungay. Sarah is the eldest, then Jane, John, Harriet, Sophy, Sam, Nick, Anna, you and Ellen. You are the ninth, saved in the nick of time from being the youngest by the birth of baby Ellen. I wonder if that pleases you.

Ten children, running around in Suffolk. But, though you all survive childhood, only three of the ten live into ripe old age. Florence Suckling tells us that the family has a foe: consumption.

It begins at Woodton. Your brother Nick goes first at twenty-two. Followed, the next year, by Jane, thirty, and you, Mary, twenty-one, on consecutive summer days. I think your parents must really hope that Sophy, who has hung on this long, might pull through but no, a year or so later, she also succumbs. She is twenty-nine. Harriet, Sam and Ellen all hang on till middle age, but the foe gets them in the end. Sarah, John and Anna live to see them all buried.

When your mother Sarah Tyssen is twenty-two - already a whole year older than you will ever live to be - she knits a small brown purse
with two gilt tassels and rings attached.
With it, a letter:

The carefully preserved purse and letter were given back to her thirty-five years after her marriage, when she was fifty-seven years old Gust a year before her husband's death); so the little packet has a lifetime of romance between its leaves.

Does she know he likes poetry? Has he even perhaps expressed a particular fondness for Burns? Is that how they get to know each other, earnestly and passionately sharing the verses that they both love? Or may be it isn't like that at all. may be your father, poor man, is beginning to regret the depth of enthusiasm he originally, in that first flush, expressed, since science, not poetry, is really his thing. He's a medical man, after all. And he fears he may have overdone the poetry thing, anxious to appeal to this accomplished and creative young woman with the interesting eyes. The woman who will one day be your mother.

And what about your mother? Does she offer the gift shyly, cautiously, with the slight trepidation those words suggest?
Scarcely worth your acceptance. Trifling.
Or is that modesty all an act? Is she secretly confident that her touching, home-made gift will be very welcome since it's already quite clear that John Yelloly, the man who will one day be your father, likes or may be even loves her? Does she hope that he will not only accept, but treasure it too? That he'll take it out again and again in private, unfolding those poems, inspecting them for clues, a shy but certain happiness fizzing in his limbs?

I made this for you because I like you. I give it to you as a way of telling you that. I like you. I love you.

But then, thirty-five years later - when your father gives it back to her, what is it then but a dry and dusty thing, a relic? Half of their children already under the earth, DrJohn himself only months from his grave. A lifetime of romance. But is that really any consolation for what came next?

I have a relic, we have a relic. It's our son's Kangaroo - a soft toy given to his sister when she was a baby. A toy which (at not quite two, having no idea of why it should be hers not his) he straight away stole and slept with for the next fifteen (though he would deny it was that long) years. I keep Kangaroo on a shelf with my sweaters. His drooping, overwashed, overslept-with body can transport me straight back to warm, safe things: nights of tucking my boy up in his bed, making him safe. Nights when I knew exactly where he was. Nights when I knew where I was too.

I rescued Kangaroo. When our boy, evicted from his disastrous and briefly lived-in flat, absconded, leaving us to move his possessions out in a hurry, I rescued him from the chaos and filth. I remember how I stood there in the middle of a room full of rubbish - shrugged-off underpants and jeans and unopened bills, Rizla papers, sticky beer glasses rimmed with ash - and saw Kangaroo lying there, helpless, on an old stained mattress.

I snatched him up. An old friend.

If I hadn't snatched him up, that might have been the end of him. He might have ended up in a bin bag, in a dustbin, on a dump. I wouldn't have wanted that.

What happened, Mary, to your mother's little knitted purse? How long before it was finally forgotten, thrown away, or else left to disintegrate in someone's attic? may be it ended up in a house clearance. may be it was bombed in a war, destroyed in a fire.

And how long will Kangaroo last? How many times anyway can a thing be rescued before there's no one left alive to remember why it was so precious in the first place? Bones dissolve in the earth, love turns to dust, and even relics imbued with so much love and hope and memory - lose the meaning invested in them, once the investors are gone.

The Reading Room is very quiet now. Just the muted rattle of keyboards and the breathing that goes with so much concentration. Lamps illuminating each desk, each space, each bent head. Outside it will be dark already, spitting with rain. Feeling my mood drop, I yawn and decide I've had enough for one day.

I can't think about you any more. I can't think about anything. I give the book back in and get the 68 bus home.

A hard wind blowing. And Sam's lodgings quite cold and gritty and not very comfortable at all. Sparse furnishings, sour grey air, a meagre fire in the grate. No kind doctor to certify the death and offer reassurances.

Maybe the coach has to stand for a little longer than it should at Ipswich while they load you on, and may be the coachman gets soaked, struggling not to swear as the rain trickles down the back of his neck.

Taking you home. Would you even have had a coffin? How long to get one made? Sarah's face glimpsed through the grey sheet of the rain, raw with tears.

Mud on her boot and the hem of her skirt.

I'll do it, she says. I'll take her home.

I have this image of you, sitting on a stone wall in breezy, dappled sunshine, legs swinging, eating apples. I don't know why apples. Apples that have ripened in a hayloft somewhere. A barn full of straw and sunshine and you outside, striped skirts, a thin shawl flung around your shoulders, long fair hair falling into your eyes.

And it's a chilly day, a bright blue windy day, almost spring but not quite, the air not quite warm enough, goose-pimpling your arms. Children are shouting. Sam and John doing something with sticks. Baby Ellen crouching for a moment then plopping backwards to sit. And you pushing yourself off the wall with your hands, kicking your legs out to jump down, apple finished, pushing the core between the hard cracks of the wall, pushing your hair out of your eyes.

Pushing your hair out of your eyes.

I go back to the British Library. Stomp up to the main counter in Humanities r and ask if it's possible to get Florence Suckling's book about you photocopied so I can take it home.

No, they say, it isn't. I take it to a desk and carry on reading.

Just like me with my kids, just like so many mothers for years and years, she keeps almost every little thing you children do. Every little scrap you write or draw, every letter, every bit of needlework. She keeps it. I keep it. I have Manila boxes marked
Kids and Baby Stuff.
In
them, Mother's Day cards, yellow, poster-painted daffodils made from egg boxes. Tiny notebook stories, folded and stapled. All the little love notes they ever wrote me. Puppies and kittens, kisses and stars. The polythene hospital bracelets with their surnames on them, snipped off with scissors when we brought them home.

We keep these things because we have to. Because we want to. Because it would be impossible not to. Florence Suckling knew that your mother kept these things because, in 1898 when she wrote her family history, she clearly had access to them. She held them in her hands.

Your mother's system of education is strict - passionately felt and well organised, but strict. Each day's work is clearly written out, every single hour timetabled and accounted for. And when she can't be there with you, notebooks are given out and your older brothers and sisters are expected to keep daily journals which are then forwarded to her. This way she keeps an eye on your progress.

Around this time, you all get sick with whooping cough and Nick and Anna also have measles. Your parents, anxious about your health, decide to move you all from London to a place called Carrow Abbey in Norwich.

Sarah is fourteen, Jane thirteen, John twelve, Harriet eleven, Sophy ten, Sam nine, Nicholas eight, Anna six, you are five, Ellen not quite born. It is your first real taste of outdoors, of fresh sharp country air. But even in the country, education continues: