The Pink House at Appleton (38 page)

Fifty-nine year old Boyd left his flat, took the lift down to the ground floor and walked three hundred brisk yards up the King's Road in the autumn Chelsea sun. London was beautiful at that time of year and lovers and residents thronged the streets, sightseeing, popping in and out of restaurants and boutiques, the champagne sun on their glad faces. Boyd observed this with more than a touch of envy. Throughout his adult years he'd not known love or happiness. Three times married, three times divorced and without children, he knew only memories and regret. And guilt weighed upon his drooping shoulders like an unforgiving mountain. But it wouldn't be long now.
He was to blame. He had no right to life. The long years of torture would end, and it would end that night back at his flat.

Glancing at the tiny tables and chairs set out on the pavement outside Thierry's, the French bistro, he turned left into The Vale and, kicking at early yellow leaves on the pavement, turned right into Mallord Street. Aunt Enid's house was halfway down the road. She sat in the drawing room all day, every day, alone, surrounded by black and white family pictures in silver frames. Fenton Fitz-Henley was dead, now three years passed, and that on its own, had killed her too. She no longer wrote to Mama, at eighty years old weak and frail and living in a residential home in St Andrew; or to Barrington (partner at the Jamaican law firm Brookes, Babcock & Weston) to thank him for looking after her so well. And she no longer, with feigned indifference, asked about Papa. Severely disabled from Vincent's machete attack, he'd turned to God and was now a “brother” in the Open Bible church, married to a “sister” half his age. His persistent tracts exhorting her to take Jesus Christ as her personal saviour were summarily dispatched to the wastepaper basket. (Vincent, serving life in the Black River penitentiary, received his tracts too, every month). Aunt Enid was dying.

When Boyd visited, every single day, they communicated with their eyes. Her eyes, still young, reflecting bougainvillea and sunny days, widened and flashed in contrast to the dark, old face. Boyd did not want to be in the room with her, for he could not bear it, knowing that this was his last cowardly visit. This was, after all,
his
Aunt Enid, his second mother, the guiding hand throughout his English upbringing. Dr Hyslop-Elliott, at the Chelsea Westminster hospital, unacquainted with this glorious past, was only alarmed that she was still alive. He knew she would be dead by the end of the month. Maybe he wouldn't be so sure if he could see the sunlight still in her eyes, feel the music in her pulse.

Aunt Enid beckoned Boyd over with a weak hand. And she whispered in his ear. He heard the name
Ann Mitchison.
Aunt Enid pointed to
The Independent
, the Saturday edition lying on the floor, opened at the Obituaries page. And she clasped his hand in hers.

Back at his flat that night, Boyd rushed off an email to Yvonne and got to work tracking down his past and his future, his suicidal plans firmly abandoned. If life was about beginning and end, he wanted very much to be part of this beginning. He would give it everything he possessed; make it a present to last. And he drank the wine that would have been his undoing, seeing in deep focus the face of the girl he already knew.

In a New York suburb, Yvonne opened her Friday morning emails. There was one there from Boyd. She opened that first, keeping a perceptive eye on her two small children from a second marriage playing Blind Man's Bluff in the garden. Sixty-nine year old Mavis, her housekeeper, kept a sharp eye too from her place in the kitchen. Later that morning, the children's aunt Babs, Barbara Brookes, the mezzo-soprano, would be visiting with presents and they were all a bit excited.

Boyd's email shouted. Yvonne scrolled down quickly, reading fast, ending abruptly. The news about Aunt Enid was not unexpected. It was the other news.

Yvonne gazed out into the apple-green garden where her two children played and fancied that she saw them again, Boyd and Susan, in that faraway place, the garden of the pink house at Appleton. Amid the green leaves, the face of Susan Mitchison appeared in sun, young, still only a child of seven. Yvonne remembered the day she and Poppy were found, washed up on the banks of the river near Maggotty Falls. The
Black River Gazette
reported it in bold headlines:
English girl and dog found.
According to the paper, Poppy had dragged the unconscious Susan to safety and waited by her side until rescuers arrived. Susan would have been fifty-eight years old if she'd lived.

Ann Mitchison had been beside herself that day, tearing her hair out, weeping uncontrollably when she arrived at the hospital. But it was too late. In the end, they had to drag her away from the small, still body, prizing her cold white fingers one by one from where they were glued solid to the doorframe of the sombre room. When they finally tore her free, she slumped to the floor, helped up by a dozen nurses.

‘I'm her mother,' she kept repeating, ‘her mother, her mother.'

Poppy became quite a hero. His picture appeared in several newspapers and puppies up and down the country were named after him. And when he died in 1972, run over by a fire engine, the same year that Michael Manley became Prime Minister of Jamaica, it made front-page news. But it was the last they'd seen of Ann Mitchison.

I'm sure it's the same Ann Mitchison. There's mention of her living in the West Indies and in Jamaica, during the 1950s. Last year she was made a Dame in the Queens's Birthday Honours for public and voluntary service – “tireless campaigner for the rights of women and minority groups”. She died last week, aged 79, in Holgate, Shropshire. Yvonne, I hope you're sitting down for this. She is survived by her daughter, Suzanna Brookes.