The Lost Child (4 page)

Sarah to teach Sophy to read. In the meantime Sam to write and sum, Sophy to do the same whilst Sam reads.

During this time Harriet to teach the little ones, and Jane to do two long division sums.

After this Harriet to do her French, writing and sums and hear Sam and Sophy parsing and geography. Sarah and Jane to do exercises and translation and a French verb.

If the weather is not fine, then business is to commence immediately after breakfast; and if, in an hour's time, the weather becomes fine, they may then walk for one hour, but all at the same time, and resume lessons immediately after coming in again, which they are to do upon nurse's ringing the school bell. If the weather does not permit of going out, then business is to be gone on with immediately after breakfast, and the children may run and play for an hour and a half before tea, in the dining parlour. John to be allowed one hour and a half and two hours from the time he comes in before reading begins.

Four children to breakfast, two dine in the dining parlour.

To be up and dressed at half past eight o'clock every morning, if later a black mark.

Lessons to be done in the schoolroom, except on those days that the rooms are cleaning, and on that day in the dining room.

Go to bed at nine o'clock.

No one to go up the best stairs whilst cleaning.

Another journal, kept by your sister Sarah during one of your mother's absences in July 1821, with answers scrawled in pencil, goes like this:

'Yes.'

'Have you got up in proper time?'

Sarah: 'Yes.'

Jane: 'Yes.'

Harriet: 'Yes.'

'Have you walked five times round the garden before breakfast?'

Sarah, Jane, Harriet, Sophy each signs: 'Yes.'

'Were you ready for breakfast?'

'Yes.'

'At what time did you begin your French and did you do it well?'

Sarah: 'About half past nine but I read before breakfast.'

Jane: 'Ditto. Ditto.'

'Have you taught Anna and Nick and Harriet their lessons?'

'Yes.'

'Did the little ones do good lessons?'

'Pretty well.'

'Have you been ready for dinner?'

All: 'Yes.'

'What time did you breakfast?'

'Nine precisely.'

'What time did you dine?'

'Half past three.'

'Have you been agreeable and polite to Mademoiselle and to each other?'

Sarah: 'Yes.'

Jane: 'Yes.'

John: 'Yes.'

Harriet: 'Yes.'

'Have you behaved well in every respect to nurse?'

Nicholas, Anna, Mary: 'Yes, very well, all.'

I read and he drinks his pink-brown chocolate from a big yellow cup and watches me over the rim. Serious and intent. The sun is hot on the metal table. He has a scratch on his hand. He wears an Aertex shirt. Birds are singing and the underneaths of the leaves are lit up, the lightest summeriest green, and bees are already crawling in and out of the roses.

It's going to be a boiling hot day.

I look at my watch.

When it's time, we go inside - the kitchen suddenly full of shadows, cool and dark - and I wipe his mouth with a flannel and we get his bag and we walk to school together, hand in hand.

He asks me questions about the world - questions he's asked before, and new ones too. I try to answer. When I don't know an answer, I tell him so and he squeezes my hand. He doesn't mind when I don't know things.

I squeeze his hand back.

And I am entirely happy. I think these days will probably go on for ever, that this is how life will be from now on, will always be. I think I will have this same experience with his brother and sister, that I will go on having it, that I have got it all to come.

But in fact that was it. I didn't do the same thing with them. And it was just that one summer when he was five. In fact, I say summer but it was probably just a few weeks of warm weather that particular term. It might not even have been weeks, it might have been days. How many days? How many days did we do this thing of French breakfast in the garden and reading aloud, and why is it so important to me, now, to know?

1837 - This prayer was answered in the following year for at least one of her children, for Nicholas passed from the night of clouds and sickness of this present world into the brightness of that land which has no need of the sun.

'In the spring John came home with the germs of smallpox, and Mary, to escape infection, was hurried off to Sam's bachelor quarters at Ipswich. John had long been consumptive but the fiercer microbe of the fever prevailed over its brother phthisis and, after his recovery from the smallpox, John was a hale man to the end of his days. Less fortunate was Jane, who succumbed to the infection on 21st June, and was buried at Woodton by night.

'Anna and Harriet were both ill of the disease at the same time and, to add the culminating blow to the poor, distressed mother, Mary died of the shock of her hurried removal, at Ipswich, on the very day of Jane's death, and was brought home to Woodton by Sarah (who had nursed her) within the week, and the funeral sermon was preached for both sisters on the same day.

'At the funeral sermon at Woodton, when Jane and Mary were buried, the preacher said: "Both were young and lovely; the one asked for, and had, the blessed sacrament on her deathbed, the other was delirious, but in her wanderings all her ravings were of singing hymns and pious words.'"

But you - you die of shock. It's not expected. Something in you just bends and snaps. One moment you're weak, you're ill, but still very much here. Next moment, you're gone. They can't think you are going to die or they would never send you off to Ipswich. Dying in Sam's bed, away from home. Breath stopped, goodbyes unsaid. Singing hymns and saying pious words - that seems unlikely. Are you delirious? Do you even know what's happening?

And what about your mother, the twenty-two-year-old who knitted the purse full of poetry and hope? How does she cope with all of this? Is that pocket almanac stuffed with prayers really any consolation? Does she honestly believe that this - the systematic and painful decimation of her cheerful and creative young family - is some all-powerful and benign God's will?

So dark on this earth tonight that no one's even bothered to draw the curtains. Who, after all, is going to look in and see what's there on that punched leather seat?

Two young women, one dead, one alive. The living one holding the dead one tight in her arms. The dead one's loose fair hair already wet with the living one's tears.

FLATLINE

2

AND IT'S ON that frozen afternoon in February, only a matter of days, or is it weeks, after I tell our eldest child to go from our house, that I find myself standing in that graveyard at All Saints, Woodton, where you must lie.

You wouldn't recognise Woodton now. If you drive from Bungay to Norwich, it's just off the BI233, a road that didn't exist in your time, a sharp left-hand turn and down into a mostly modem village with one pub. I do notice a road called Suckling Close. Along it, white-faced children with rucksacks straggling home from school. A woman in a beige anorak walking a dog. Pylons stretching on and on into nowhere.

To the left of the church - which is small and solid and pretty, covered in greyish-blue shingle, just the way you probably remember it - a kind of farmyard. Low spreading cedars, frozen mud, hens, a cockerel crowing, wooden huts, a dog barking. To the right, not much. A field, a rough little track leading who knows where.

The afternoon has turned dark again as I lift the latch on the gate. The small graveyard is a mix of very old lichen-covered stones and much newer ones - black polished marble with crisp lettering, yellow flowers slumped in little perforated metal pots. In some places the grass has been roughly mown, but a mole has been at work and even the longer grass is scattered with small, frozen mounds.

The church isn't locked. I tip the metal latch and push at the heavy wooden door and feel the hush of silence suck me in. Leaving the door slightly ajar, I tiptoe in, across the dull blue carpet towards the aisle. The very first thing I see is your name carved into the smooth, bloodless stone:

Many of the older stones are unreadable and the earliest ones that I can make out seem to be from the late nineteenth century - certainly nothing as early as the 1830s. There are so many stones where no trace of writing at all is left - faceless, nameless stones, scabbed with yellow lichen and slanting, slumping, tipping against the earth, nothing and no one to claim them. I can't see your family's name anywhere.

The wind drops for a moment and I turn back to look at the church, but already the light has slipped away and I'm standing here alone and in the dark.

For fourteen years, she was happy. They were happy. She made sure that they were happy.

Or, may be not exactly happy. But when I pushed my face between the gap in the car seats - him driving on the right, her pretty face on the left, dappled trees overhead - and said: You love each other and you'll never divorce, will you, Mummy and Daddy? they both laughed and said they wouldn't.

They didn't say of course they wouldn't. They just said they wouldn't.

By the time she left him, life had got so bad that I wouldn't have even thought of asking that question any more.

There was a night - a black night rolled tight, tearful and shaky - when she came up and cried and slept in my room and promised she would do something.

Don't worry. It'll be OK. I'll do something.

I could see the shape of her in the darkness. I went to sleep. I was eleven. She kept her promise. The following summer when I was twelve, she left.

My father was a funny man who smoked a lot and watched games shows on TV and was always in his workshop. But he could make jokes and he could make me laugh. When he drove us to school, I nearly wet myself sometimes with laughing.

On 24 June 1880 while visiting Sarah at Poslingford in the village of Clare in Suffolk, your sister Anna Suckling dies quite suddenly. She is sixty-five, not incredibly old, though a good age for your family, I suppose.

Her will, written in a plump, square, slightly backwardssloping hand, has a codicil crammed with objects, jewellery and drawings. Among the pearl bracelets and silver tablespoons and albums of watercolours of Woodton, daguerreotypes and silver coffee pots, she leaves to her third son, John Lionel:

You're not sitting on a stone wall any more. Instead it's night and you're looking into a dark mirror, candle flame flickering, your fair hair piled on your head, which is carefully inclined, fiddling with the screw clasp on an earring.

A long gold earring.

A quick gasp of annoyance, then a little movement of your fingers, a satisfied shake of your head. And for a second or two, with that sudden flash of gold, the shy satisfaction in your eyes, I can almost see your face, reflected there in that dark, candlelit glass.

Our friend looks more and more shocked. She's known our kids almost all their lives.

I love him dearly, she says. I remember how he was the sweetest, most responsive child. But I'm afraid he's abusing you.

We both look at her.

Emotional abuse, yes, I agree, I suppose that's how it does sometimes feel.

Not sometimes, corrects his father. Always.

You can't live like this, she says. You just can't. What about the other two children? What about your work? I can't imagine how you're keeping going.

With great difficulty, we say, trying to smile. But for the moment we have to. What else can we do?

She thinks for a moment, cuts a sliver of cheese.

Have you considered, she says slowly, that he may have a drugs problem?

We shrug and tell her he only smokes cannabis, as far as we know. She tells us that America is much more clued up about cannabis and its long- and short-term mental-health effects than we are over here. She tells us that everything we've told her makes her think of addiction. She says she'll put us in touch with someone in Manhattan - a kind of adolescents' psychiatrist who specialises in addiction. Even if she can't help you, says our friend, she'll know the people over here who will.

We feel- how do we feel on that evening with our friend? Grateful. Doubtful. Relieved.

A week later, back in New York, she calls to say she has arranged an hour's phone consultation for us with this woman, at her expense.

She says we are to call the psychiatrist at three o'clock on Saturday.

It's an unexpectedly hot, late-spring day and I'm weeding the garden, happy out there on my hands and knees with the sun on my head. I almost don't want to come inside and start talking about drug addiction.

But at ten to three, I throw off my gloves and shoes and run barefoot into the house. And the boy's father and I sit upstairs in the study with two phones plugged in. A conference call about our child. The window is open and you can smell the blossom outside. My nails are rimmed with soil. Manhattan is a place in another world.

We tell the psychiatrist about our concerns for our boy. We describe the straightforward, bright, happy and level child he used to be, and the aggressive and chaotic person he is now. We try hard to talk matter-of-factly and not emotionally. This is a clinical consultation, after all. We don't want to waste our friend's money.

The psychiatrist asks if we know exactly when our boy started smoking cannabis. We hesitate. We tell her we don't know exactly but we're pretty sure it was around the age of fourteen or fifteen.

She asks us If we understand about the difference between skunk and old-style cannabis.

We look at each other.

A bit, we say.

Well, for instance, a lot of people say: Oh skunk, that's just like the stuff we all used to smoke, only a little bit stronger, right? Wrong. This is a very different substance, genetically modified and between fifteen and thirty times stronger in the ingredient called THC that can induce psychosis. It can do untold and irreversible damage.

I take a breath.

And it used to be thought that a young person's brain matured around the age of eighteen, but these days we tend to believe it's more like twenty-one. And if a THC-rich drug like skunk is inflicted on immature frontal lobes, then a child's neural pathways can be badly distorted. And because research into the effects of this drug have only really just started, perhaps the most frightening thing of all is that no one yet knows how to treat brains that have been damaged in this way.

So - you're saying it's irreversible?

We just don't know. We literally don't know.

But, the boy's father says, neither for the first nor the last time, what can we do? Is there anything we can do?

She gives us the name and phone number of an expert in London whom she recommends we consult - a woman who has a phenomenal track record for getting young people clean. She also tells us we must get ourselves to Families Anonymous meetings as soon as possible.

Families Anonymous?

Support for people whose families and loved ones are addicted to drugs. Please look into it right away - you'll find it on the web. For people like you, it's a lifeline.

People like us.

When we've finally thanked her and said goodbye, I look down at my dirty gardening hands and I start to cry.

The boy's father touches my head.

Hey. Come on -

His frontal lobes, I whisper.

I know, he says, I know.

So I got in touch with St john's Ambulance and discovered that, if you were willing to get a large enough group of mothers together, say five or six, you could get a first aider to come over to your home and give you a morning's tuition in the basics. I can't remember exactly what it cost, but it wasn't much. It might even have been free.

We all gathered in my sitting room with coffee and biscuits. Mums with sleepy, laughing eyes and post-baby tummies and stains down our T-shirts. And I can't remember whether we had our children with us - my dim memory says probably not. But I do remember the calm, practical efficiency of the man in his uniform. I remember his little jokes but also his overriding respectful seriousness as he took us through all the things we needed to be able to do in case of scalding, falling, drowning, shock, suffocation, or any sudden damage to life and limb.

I remember that he demonstrated the recovery position. On your side, one leg higher than the other, checking the airways, checking the tongue was free. He showed us how to resuscitate a rubber baby doll - blowing into her mouth and pressing on her chest. The doll had a name, I can't remember what it was.

And I know he also explained that, however much you fear for your child, you should try never to panic. Stay calm and always first check the accident scene for signs of anything else that could go wrong. You wouldn't believe, he said, how often people cause a second accident while rushing to deal with the first one. We all laughed.

After he'd gone we all chatted some more over another cup of coffee. And there was a definite sense of lightness - a sense of relief and even self-congratulation that we'd done something practical to keep our children safe. Certainly, we all got the point about not causing a second accident. We doubted we would ever need to panic again, whatever dangers the future produced.

A freezing day in March. A light dusting of snow has fallen overnight -just enough to make the world look clean. Though it's started to thaw on the road, it's still thick and white in the hedgerows. The ground is hard, the sky an aching blue.

As I drive into the village, the bin men are there by Suckling Close, emptying the wheelie bins. I wait ages for the van with its flashing lights until the man in a woollen hat, his cheeks dark with cold, waves me on.

I pull in on the snow-frosted verge just in front of All Saints. Cold air hits my face and I can smell manure. That cockerel is crowing in the farmyard next door and every time he crows a hidden dog howls his reply. I've never yet seen a single person there. My own dog gives me a bleak look as I leave her in the car and crunch up the church path.

There are snowdrops everywhere - great drifts of them at the entrance to the churchyard, on the path in the field beyond.