The Lost Child (6 page)

I'll hop in with you, if you don't mind, he says.

I apologise to him for the smell of dog.

Oh goodness, I'm used to it.

As we crunch up the drive to the Hall, he tells me that he was born right here, in the Gatehouse. His mother and father met at the Hall in the 1920S, when his father was the gardener and his mother was in service as a maid. Every summer the Critchley-Martins, who owned the place back then, went away and the Turners would move into the Hall for the whole six weeks and look after it.

We'd have the place entirely to ourselves - we kids would spend the whole summer running wild around the house and grounds.

I look at him.

That must have been amazing.

Oh, certainly it was, it was. But my sisters were much older, you know, so it was mostly just me on my own.

I ask him if he still lives there in the Gatehouse now.

Oh no, no, I live in the new part of the village. Sadly.

We walk round to the front of the house.

Ah, and there she is! says David and he points proudly to a small, dark-haired woman in a lilac fleece and wellingtons who's bent over the flowerbeds.

Joanne Sandelson pulls off one gardening glove and shakes my hand. Sun flashes across the garden and she shades her eyes with her other hand. The little white dog - who turns out to be a retriever puppy - is still jumping up and down at her feet. In front of her looms the house, elegant, ancient and enormous. Beyond, acres and acres of formal garden giving way to misty grey-green parkland, stretching away as far as I can see.

This is the most incredible place, I say, and she smiles.

Your grandmother is an heiress who, according to Florence Suckling, comes with a
handsome dot
and she and your grandfather are married with some pomp in Hackney in 1782. There were a couple of miniature paintings which Florence must have seen. She describes your grandmother as having frank and innocent blue eyes but a slightly peevish mouth. Your grandfather's face was refined and intelligent but his eyes were merry.

The refined and intelligent man and the girl with the frank blue eyes live at Felix Hall in Essex, where they quickly have five children. But only two of them, Sarah (your mother) and Samuel, survive. By the time the fifth baby dies, your grandmother is very ill indeed - yes, the family foe again - and all she wants in the world is to be back home with her mother. So her husband takes her back to Hackney, where she dies and is buried with her ancestors. She is thirty-five.

And your grandfather is so heartbroken at losing his wife that he can no longer bear the sight of Felix Hall. Too many memories. Too much loss. That's when he sells it and instead buys Narborough, where he lives with his son, your Uncle Sam, while five-year-old Sarah, your mother, remains with her grandmother in Hackney.

Ten years later, your grandfather dies without making a will, and the trustees sell of fall of the Narborough treasures at auction, letting out the old Hall itself Sam is away at school and your mother finds herself under the legal care of guardians but otherwise completely alone in the world. She is fifteen.

It is your cousin Charles Tyssen - older brother of Ellen's husband Captain John - who finally inherits Narborough in 1845. He extends the existing watermill and adds a small cottage at the back, but in 1850 he sells the whole estate to a wealthy linen draper from Norwich. It is sold on to at least two more owners before it becomes the property of the Critchley-Martins, who employ the yet-to-be-born David Turner's parents.

Really? You actually remember it as the gun room? Joanne asks him and he nods vigorously.

Oh yes, yes.

On the wall are striking black-and-white photos of beautiful dark-haired children, their faces daubed with mud. They look like warriors - ferocious and androgynous, huge dark timeless eyes.

Your kids?

Joanne nods.

Those pictures were taken in the earthworks over there. You should get David to tell you about it. It must have been there in your Yelloly girl's time.

David explains that there's an old Iron Age fort just across the garden beyond the lake. About an acre wide. Trees, mud, a clearing. He played there as a child and Joanne's kids now play there too.

I expect children have played there for centuries, he says.

It's ideal, Joanne agrees. The kids love it. Perfect for creeping up on people and shooting arrows, that sort of thing.

I mean, if you're wondering why the rooms are so bare, she laughs.

I ask her how she found the house.

Would you believe, it was just advertised in the back of a glossy magazine? We knew we couldn't afford it but we just had to see it anyway. It sounds crazy, I know. We wanted to live around here but we never set out to buy something like this. Some days I still can't quite believe we did it, that we really live here.

We cross a dim, wide stone-flagged hall, and go into a very grand drawing room, vast, high-ceilinged. Joanne tells me this was the Chinese room and that right up until the 1920S or '30S it had the most amazing mauve-and-green silk wallpaper, which was almost certainly original - dating from the first Samuel Tyssen's time, perhaps? The bay window looks straight down the drive and lawns. Joanne points out that the plaster ceiling rose is decorated with dragons. I tip my head back to look at it and, rather wonderfully, see about fifty yellow balloons also nestling up there.

My son just had a birthday party, she explains.

Must have been some party, running around this place, I say, and she laughs.

Do you have kids? she asks me.

I make a face. Horrible teenagers, I say.

Bet they're a handful, says David, and I don't answer as we walk into a room that's in darkness. Joanne goes across and flings open the shutters.

The billiard room. There used to be a conservatory joined on, built in Victorian times, but it's gone now.

And there was a little stage in here once, adds David.

I didn't know that, says Joanne, visibly surprised.

Oh yes. I don't know what it was for, but there definitely was, just here.

I look at David as he gestures with his arms. It's hard to decide who has a greater claim to this place. The new owner, whose party balloons cling to the ceiling. Or the boy, the servants' child, who spent whole summers haunting its vast spaces.

A very long corridor takes us down to the old kitchens where Joanne shows me the cold store - a room with marble surfaces, stone-flagged floor, fly screens on the window.

So useful, she says, running her finger along the marble. Things really stay cold in here.

Then she takes us through into a dining room with an enormous stone-and-marble fireplace, but no table.

We haven't really decided how to use this room, she says, but you can imagine the grand dinners they'd have had in here.

We go back into the grand dark hall and up the stairs. The broad stone staircase sweeps grandly upwards, the effect somehow enhanced by the fact that every single step has a soft toy sitting on it.

My kids! laughs Joanne.

David tells us that as a boy he used to slide down these banisters regularly with no hands.

Joanne shakes her head.

I wouldn't let my children do that.

Oh come on, goes David.

They'd crack their heads open, she says.

She's right, I say, partly because it's the truth and partly because it seems only polite to be on her side. This floor would be lethal.

We go up and David follows. At the top I glance back. It's a long way down. It must have been the biggest thrill, whizzing down with no one around to stop you, and I doubt that David was the first child to do it.

Upstairs, seemingly endless bedrooms open out on to one another - intricate panelling, tall sash windows giving breathtaking views of the distant grey lawns and trees, the acres of parkland, the fast-moving clouds.

I stand for a moment at one of these windows and am so effortlessly zoomed back to your grandfather's time that it's actually the plastic paraphernalia of a twenty-first-century female childhood - bright toothbrushes, pink-and-blond sparkly toys and the lurid splash of a duvet cover - that seem out of place.

On the landing she opens a small wooden door, a door so low you have to bend your head to go inside, and we climb a winding wooden staircase just like in a fairy tale. Dust and cobwebs and a strangely familiar smell, neither musty nor old.

We're standing in a long, low attic - or series of attics really. Dark, tattered remnants of ancient wallpaper on some of the walls. Ceilings that slope so you can only stand up in certain places. The remains of a white candle collapsed and spattered on the floor. You down there on hands and knees, skirts grey with dust. The swing of your hair.

The oldest bit of the house, says Joanne as we all three stand looking around.

A moment of silence. I can hear the wind moaning in the eaves.

How old?

Oh, sixteenth century at least. I know it was used as a hospital in the First World War, this room up here, wasn't it, David?

He says it was. And we all gaze at the stained walls, the peeling plaster, the greyish light.

I feel myself shiver.

Did you come up here? Did you and your cousins know about this space?

Hey, come out on the roof, says Joanne - and, after crouching down through a little doorway, suddenly we're out there on a small parapet in the bright March wind. An intricately red-tiled rooftop - right on top of Narborough Hall.

Hey, I say, holding my hair out of my eyes, it's amazing.

Isn't it? says Joanne.

And the wind lifts David's hair. David the man who was David the boy. Who says exactly what I know he'll say next.

We played up here as kids.

Did you? What an amazing place!

It was pretty good, yes.

We walk through the garden, across a lawn, past rows and rows of daffodils, to the lake. Passing an eccentric-looking wooden landing stage designed to look like a dragon - built in Victorian times, David says - and, skirting round the edge of the lake, we walk up into the earthworks. The mad white puppy, who has decided to join us, rushes backwards and forwards, catching the twirling leaves in her mouth.

It's a place full of gnarled trees and thick, low-lying branches. Perfect for climbing. Piles of leaves and sudden dips in the earth, an ideal place for a warrior to hide. It's easy to imagine boys and girls shouting and running here. John and Charles, Sophy, Sam, you and Ellen. Dirty nails, flying hair, stout boots coming unlaced, pinafores buttoned high up your backs.

Daffodils and narcissi bend in the wind.

So did you play here all on your own? I ask David.

He considers.

Well, sometimes I'd have friends over. There were plenty of kids in the village. But yes, I suppose I was often alone. I didn't really mind. They were good times. I lived for those summers.

My heart moves into my throat. Cheeks burning, mouth drying. Breath moving up too high in my chest. I'm suddenly aware - catastrophically aware - that there's nowhere to pull in, that I can't stop. I don't need to stop, but if! did need to, I couldn't. I could not stop.

Macy Gray is singing -loud and laid-back, unconcerned. I turn her off Nowhere to stop. I need to stop. There are lorries in front and behind. Speed is swallowing me up. I need to stop.

At last there's a metal farm gate slightly back from the road, a dried mud area, deep with tractor-tyre marks. Just enough space to slow down and swerve in.

I do it. I indicate, pull in, swerving slightly, braking fast. The car shudders to a halt. Relief As I turn off the engine, my limbs melt. I have no idea what has just happened.

Because we don't want to go out together and leave the children alone, we agree we should go on different days of the week, to different meetings. They take place all over London.

He comes back from his first meeting and doesn't tell me much about it except: that he cried. That most of the people there had children older than our boy. Mostly harder drugs too. That he's not sure yet how helpful it was, but he thinks he'll probably go again.