The Lost Child (5 page)

This time I decide to be more methodical, looking at every single grave that I can possibly read, inspecting each in turn, all except for the very obviously shiny new ones with fresh flowers on them.

I crunch through the snow, making my way slowly backwards, away from the twenty-first and twentieth century and back, back into the dim shadows, where the early nineteenth century lies, sunken and undisturbed, under the shade of the conifers. Your century. I notice I'm holding my breath.

These stones are almost impossible to read. I can just about make out one or two names.
Leeder. Harvey. Edward
- or Edwin? Wind gusts suddenly and powdery snow falls out of the guttering of the church, hitting the ground and making me jump.

It gets harder to walk. Further back behind the church in the very oldest part of the graveyard, the ground has succumbed to a catacomb of molehills and my feet lurch and sink with every step. Each clod of earth is capped with snow, but soft underneath. Brambles and bracken. Crunch, snap, sink. The graves shift worryingly beneath my feet.

Some of the stones have crosses, others are coffin-shaped tombs of stone, low in the grass and cracked so they look as if they've been dropped from a height. When I was small, I was terrified of cracked graves. Afraid that the dead might come climbing out of them, intent on revenge. Why wouldn't they be furious that the rest of us were still alive?

I try to read names, a date here, a Christian name there, but so many are rubbed out by time and neglect.
Emily, Luke, Richard.
1754 is the oldest grave, two years the shortest life. No sign of a Yelloly. No sign of you.

And I'm standing in the farthest, coldest corner by the old ivy-covered wall when, for no particular reason, I look up and there it is in all its enormous splendour: Woodton Hall. Your home.

My blood stops. But - not your home. Of course not your home. It's a trick. And it takes a moment or two to work out exactly what I'm seeing. Not the Hall itself, but its ghostly imprint - the space it once inhabited somehow pulled into sharp focus by the icy winter air. Its imprint. The space between the trees, the foundations. Is it because the trees are bare and the air so cold that I can see exactly where it must have been?

Then, even though my eyes are still fixed on that spot, the sensation, the skeleton of a building, slips away. Just as quickly as it came, it dissolves again and there's nothing.

Just me and some forlorn old trees and the crumbling remnant of a wall.

But, when I get close up to what must have been the old garden wall, I stop because I realise there's a proper house - newish, or at least newly done-up - beyond and also a lawnmower of some kind propped by the wall. Someone must live here.

I stand and listen for a moment. Nothing. Complete silence. Now I'm closer I can see that someone's been rebuilding the wall. A painstaking operation. A pile of the original old orange-and-pink bricks stacked in a corner, ready to be inserted back into the old puzzle, the wall.

A noise behind me and I turn around sharply. I don't know what I'm expecting to see. A fifteen-year-old girl in a dark bonnet and paisley shawl, gathering snowdrops? But there's nothing there, no one. Just the drip of water - snow thawing in the trees. And the dog next door who's started barking again.

That afternoon, we get a locksmith round and change the locks. New keys for everyone. I stand and watch them being cut in the smoky shop full of beat-up shoes waiting to be reheeled.

Break-in? says the man, cigarette in mouth, turning the key.

I nod and try to smile.

Too bad. Still, you want to be safe, don't you?

The second time our child comes back, he comes in a haze of pure fury, discovering the door is locked to him, threatening to destroy the whole house if we don't let him in. He wants money. He goes away but says he'll be back. It's become quite normal for him to sleep all day and stay up all night, so it's all too easy for him to drop by exactly when we're vulnerable. Middle of the night, 4 a.m., dawn. Keeping his hand pressed hard on the bell and then, when we disable it, banging on the door, kicking it, shouting threats. When this doesn't work, he takes my large pots of geraniums and hurls them, one by one, at the door.

Three pots smashed. A grey light struggling into the dawn sky. We try to talk to him through the window.

When you'll accept help with drugs, we say softly, when you'll agree to behave like a member of this family, we'll let you in. But not until then. We love you very much, we'll always love you, but we just can't help you until you let us.

He tells us we're cunts. He says as far as he's concerned we can fuck right off Then he takes another pot in his hands.

He'll go in a minute, his father whispers, ashen-faced, give him one more minute. I'm sure he'll go. He knows this is pointless.

One more pot, I tell my boy through the letter box, and we call the police.

Smash.

His father stands there in his dressing gown and dials. I see that his hands are shaking. To have to call the police about his own son. Dismay all over his face.

They arrive impressively quickly and seem (to our surprise) completely unsurprised, as if it's entirely normal for seventeen-year-old boys to be locked out of their homes and threatening criminal damage at dawn.

We're so sorry to trouble you, we both say.

Not at all, sir, it's fine, not a problem. Hope we can help.

The police ask us what we want. Do we want to press any charges? Oh no, no, definitely not.

A warning then? Just to send him on his way?

Thanks so much, we say, a warning would be great. We're so sorry about all this.

It is about 7 a.m. All this time, I've been very calm. I haven't cried at all up to now. So it's funny that it's actually this moment - the very moment when the friendly and sensitive neighbourhood police are talking firmly to our boy, the moment when, standing there on the pavement next to our house, our home, his home, his shoulders crumple and he suddenly looks so very tired and starts at last to move off - when I start to weep.

Maybe it's those words.
Send him on his way.
What way? Where? Isn't his way our way? Ever since we brought him home from the hospital on that sleepy, newborn afternoon. Home. I blot my eyes with the edge of my dressing gown.

We watch through the window as the police say one more thing to our boy. He seems to listen and say something back and then he shrugs and - starts at last to walk away. My heart bursts.

The next moment unrolls fast.

Shall I run after him? I ask his father, assuming the answer will be no way, but eyeing my coat and getting ready to go all the same. I'm grabbing at kitchen roll to dry my tears, stuffing my feet into trainers.

He hesitates. Well, may be we could give him some breakfast or something?

And that's all I need. I love him for that. For his unsteadiness, his inconsistency. For giving in.

It's good that the police van has gone by the time I pull the coat on over my pyjamas and run down the street. Looking left and right, looking for my boy. The air is freezing. He's sitting alone at the bus stop, head bent.

Sweetheart -

Go away. (Bottom lip jutting.)

He regards me without anger. He blinks. His pupils are tiny.

You think calling the police on your own son is a calm thing to do?

A bus shudders past.

We won't tolerate you attacking and damaging the house, I tell him, you know that.

He says nothing. I try to smile.

Look at me - I'm sitting here on the Walworth Road in my pyjamas. Come on. Come and have some breakfast. Please?

The please is a mistake. His father would tell me not to beg.

I'm tired. I've been up all night. Got to go and find somewhere to crash out, he mutters.

Where? Where will you sleep? Where are you staying?

Dunno.

Then come and have some breakfast and let's at least talk about it. You can sleep at home, I add, knowing that this too is a mistake.

I don't know if! feel like eating, he says and I feel myself relax as a crack seems to open up.

I'll make you eggs. Any sort of eggs.

He says nothing. A bus draws up and my heart contracts. But it's not his bus.

French toast?

He stands up slowly.

My bus, he says.

No it isn't -

You don't know where I'm going.

He turns his solemn gaze on me - I can't imagine what my face looks like - and then he gets on the bus, turning back for a quick second to say: Thanks anyway, Mum.

And then he's gone.

I make my way back down the road. Holding my coat collar closed and treading very carefully, as If the ground could explode at any moment.

His father opens the door and I feel him check my face for tears.

He wouldn't come?

I shake my head.

Hey, well done. It was worth a try.

Like two extremely old people, we climb the stairs and go back to bed.

Ellen Margaret Yelloly, born four years after you, littlest sister of a
numerous and united family,
does not seem to have left any works of art behind her. Nothing of hers has been bought at auction and passed around Mayfair. But she has something you never had, something far more precious: almost twenty-two years more life.

Ellen. When you die in that room in Ipswich, Ellen is just seventeen years old, on the edge, about to tip from girl into woman. What's she like? Plump or slender? Funny or serious? Does she look up to you, or does she annoy you? Is she your confidante, or you hers? Does your death make her lonely? You die of shock. She never even gets to say goodbye to you. Does it break her heart, the way I think it would break mine?

You never see her again and, because you fall out of the story at this point, you have no idea what happens next. But I know. I'll tell you what happens.

In 1845, seven years after your death, Ellen catches measles and recovers - but slowly. Then, just as she's getting better, just as she's regaining her balance in life, the family foe strikes, knocking her back down. Consumption. It strikes just as it struck you and Sophy and Nick. Consumption. How your mother must have come to loathe that word.

But in January 1850, your mother thanks God in her pocket almanac for

Her prayers are answered, partly anyway, because that same
My
year Ellen recovers sufficiently to marry your cousin Captain John Tyssen, thirty-eight, son of your Uncle Samuel Tyssen of Narborough Hall. Your mother adores her brother Sam. That marriage must delight her.

There are other cousins too. Sophia, Charles, William, Henry, Honora and John. You must have played together. Gone on visits to Narborough Hall to see them. There's a painting of Narborough in your album, so you must have known it well.

Ellen and John are married at Cavendish in Suffolk and they have three sons, none of whom live. All die within days or weeks or a year of birth. But on 8 May 1856, she finally gives birth to a healthy daughter, Honora. Another daughter, Eleanor, follows in spring 1860.

But by then your sister is severely ill and she dies a week later. She is just forty. Your cousin Captain John is left alone to cope with two little girls. And, with Ellen's death, your mother has just lost yet another child, her baby. First Nick, then you and Jane, then Sophy and now Ellen. How does she bear it?