Saskia's Journey

by Theresa Breslin

  ‘Perhaps the death of my grandfather – her brother – Rob affected her in some way?’ suggested Saskia.

  Neil sighed heavily. ‘It was a sore blow. And yes, she grieved deeply for him. But for all that I don’t think she should have sent the bairn and its mother away. They were her only living kin, and her brother had looked out for her for many years.’

  ‘When you say “the bairn”, you mean my father, don’t you?’ asked Saskia.

  Neil nodded.

  ‘He says he was about five years old the second time Alessandra sent them away.’

  ‘That would be about right,’ said Neil. ‘The first time he and his mother left he was only a small thing. They came back again a few years later. By that time old Mr Granton, Alessandra’s father, had died and she had gone a bit funny . . .Wouldn’t let anyone into the house.’ Neil paused. ‘Not even me.’

  At the hospital a doctor spoke to Saskia.

  ‘We will put the pin in Miss Granton’s leg tomorrow morning. I want to have it done as soon as possible. She’s eating very little and we are having to sedate her to contain her anxiety.’

  ‘How soon can she come home?’ asked Saskia. ‘I think being in hospital is upsetting her.’

  ‘I agree. Though the nurses say she is no trouble as a patient.’

  ‘I think she might be pining for her house,’ said Saskia. ‘She has lived there since she was born. It is right by the sea.’

  The doctor, a young woman, went to the window and looked towards the harbour. Her accent was Midlands. ‘I can appreciate that. I came here to do my internship five years ago and never left. It is the light, and the sound, and the smell, and when you look out to the east you see. . .’

  ‘The rim of the world,’ said Saskia.

  Silhouetted against the pillows Alessandra’s face was shadowed and vulnerable. Without considering her action, Saskia reached out and took her hand. Alessandra looked down at their hands lying one on top of the other on the bedcover. Saskia felt her great-aunt’s hand tremble within her own but Alessandra did not withdraw.

  ‘I am afraid . . . now . . . of what might happen.’

  It wrenched Saskia to watch Alessandra struggling to tell her something without using the actual words.

  ‘I know,’ said Saskia, and she did know, without fully understanding. She knew that there was some particular fear that worried her great-aunt, some other desperate unhappiness that was part of Alessandra’s life.

  ‘There are things that I thought I should never tell anyone,’ said Alessandra. ‘And although I did not want to trouble him, I need to make things right between myself and your father. There is a chasm between us.’

  ‘It is not just about you not lending him more money,’ said Saskia. ‘That’s not what really upsets him.’

  Alessandra lifted her head to look at Saskia.

  ‘When my father was very young, you twice sent him and his mother away from Cliff House. He thinks that . . . that you did not like them.’

  Alessandra stared at her. ‘Child, I adored your father.’

  ‘Was it your sister-in-law then?’ Saskia persisted. ‘Esther? Did you and she have an argument?’

  ‘I loved her,’ said Alessandra. ‘She was like my brother, gentle, kind and good, and your father was a beautiful boy with red-gold hair. When your father was very young Esther went off to stay with her own people.’

  ‘But my father says it was you who made her go. On two occasions you told them to leave. His mother told him this. The first time when he was small, and then again some years later, when they came back to visit you and you would not open the door. You did not even allow them to enter the house. He remembers his mother crying that time. You sent them both away.’

  ‘It was the time of my madness when your grandmother Esther brought your father to visit me as a small boy,’ said Alessandra. ‘That was why I would not let them in the house. At that time I could bear to have no one with me. Esther eventually understood that. She forgave me. I know that she forgave me because she came back a third time.’

  ‘A third time?’ said Saskia. ‘My father did not mention that.’

  ‘Your father knows nothing about that visit. Nor your mother. Esther came to see me not long after you were born. She brought you with her. I opened the door one morning and she was there. She stood upon my doorstep and placed you in my arms.’

  ‘“Alessandra,” she said, “I’ve brought Rob’s grand-bairn for you to see.”

  ‘And I loved you in that instant, although I could see no resemblance at all to my brother.

  ‘“There’s no likeness until you see her wakened,” said Esther.

  ‘And, at the sound of her voice, you opened your eyes and I saw what she meant. You were your own person but you had the look of Rob. And Esther and I both began to cry, and so did you, and we had to stop to comfort you, and then we laughed. We laughed a lot, and I began to heal a little. She had not told your mother or father that she was taking you north to see me. Perhaps it was wrong of her. Your parents had left you in her care and gone off for a weekend. Your mother was unwell for months after your birth and was glad of a break. Esther drove north in one day and then back down the next. She did it because she knew she was dying.

  ‘“My time has almost run out and I thought I’d do one last thing for you, Alessandra, after all you did for me,” Esther said.

  ‘“I did nothing for you,” I whispered.

  ‘“Oh, yes you did, my sister. It is only now as I look back and think about events in the past I begin to suspect that I may have been in great danger. Even I do not know how much you did. But I thank you. I thank you for welcoming me to your house and your heart, and keeping me safe,” she said.’

  Safe.

  ‘What did she mean?’ asked Saskia. ‘Was this when my father was not much more than a baby? When you were all so happy living together in Cliff House before your father died? You told me that my grandmother was frail, that Esther’s health was poor. That wasn’t true, was it? Why did you send them away then?’

  ‘You do things for the best of reasons and are misunderstood,’ said Alessandra.

  A tear like a fish scale glittered on her cheek.

  Alessandra lay back on the pillow with her eyes closed. Saskia wondered if she should leave quietly and allow her some rest. As she moved in her chair her great-aunt spoke again without opening her eyes.

  ‘I have never spoken of this to anyone.’

  ‘Perhaps now you should,’ said Saskia.

  Esther sleeps, her head thrown back, lips parted, the baby by her side. The baby’s face is flushed, breath milky-sweet.

  The shadows in the house move and then don’t move. The light from the sea, the moon on the water, the pull of the tide spreads across the windows. Silence, but not. My hand is on the wall of the house. Behind it is the cliff. Its weight will crush me.

  I cannot watch over them every single night.

  Golden child.

  If you love them, let them go. Before it is too late.

  ‘At first I did not see how my father looked at Esther.

  ‘We put the grief of my brother’s death behind us, and the baby, Sandy, thrived, sturdy and happy. Your father was a placid toddler, and as he grew out of the baby stage my father said that he should have a room of his own. My father could be so charming when he chose. Esther took his advice, and soon Sandy was in a separate room.

  ‘She did not know what was festering in my father’s mind. And neither did I. I would have considered it an unspeakable wickedness to even consider such an idea.’

  ‘One night I awoke and heard voices.

  ‘It was my father.

  ‘In Esther’s bedroom.

  ‘His room was on the ground floor. He said he’d been sleepwalking, not properly woken up, and had become confused. Esther was awake, although not frightened. She was too good to think what he might do. I heard their voices and came to see what was amiss. As he left her room he avoided my gaze. But I saw his
look and it made me uneasy.

  ‘It happened once more. He said he heard the child cry out.

  ‘But if he heard the child cry, why did he go into her room when the baby was in the other? Still Esther did not think ill of him. Then I began to notice things. How during the day he contrived to catch her alone. In the evenings I saw him watching her and his attention was not benign. There was hunger in his eyes. I was deeply shamed by my thoughts and could tell no one what I suspected. I persuaded Esther to put the child’s cot back in her room at night, thinking it might protect her. I was wrong. Again I heard him entering her bedroom, and this time I stopped him as he was at her bed, in the very act of drawing back the covers. For a moment I thought he would strike me and continue, but I managed to turn him away. She did not awaken.

  ‘I did not go to bed that night nor any other after.

  ‘By day I guarded her as best I could, but I knew that he would not give up. He was a man who took what he wanted, who had always had his own way in all things. At night I dared not sleep. I heard him prowl the house. I knew that if it continued I should go mad.

  ‘I suggested that she should take her child to visit her own folk in Yarmouth. At the train station, just as the train was leaving, I told her not to come back.’

  Saskia wondered how her father would react to Alessandra’s explanation of her treatment of his mother. He needed knowledge of this part of his own family history, but not just now, Saskia decided, and not from her. It would help him to know that his great hurt had been caused by his aunt protecting his mother. He would surely understand then that what Alessandra had done had been prompted by love, not hate or jealousy, and that she had been unable to tell Esther or anyone else about it at the time.

  And . . . there was more. Saskia was sure of this.

  Alessandra had been ready to fall asleep when Saskia left the hospital. And Saskia had not encouraged her great-aunt to talk for any longer than she had done. She would wait until Alessandra was home and rested and then see if she wanted to tell her anything else.

  Neil stood beside his taxi as Saskia came out of the hospital. He looked at her carefully as she walked towards him in the car park. He held the door open for her but said nothing, asked her nothing. She was glad of the silence. It meant that on the journey home she had the chance to rethink her attitudes. She saw that her own original perception of Alessandra was based on the opinion of others.

  Her mother had made an assumption about Alessandra when she had said, ‘She destroys things.’ No. Saskia thought more carefully, picking out in her mind what she was trying to deduce to herself. Her mother had not made the assumption. Her mother had joined in with what her father had assumed. They knew, or saw something, part of a truth, and came to conclusions. Why? Why did people do that? It wasn’t only her parents who did this. People assumed things. They heard what they wanted to hear, sometimes shaping the truth to fit in with their own needs of the moment. Alessandra, who had been ill, who had been mentally frail, became like many others, a victim of this type of thinking. And Alessandra, and people like her, didn’t help their own case by not conforming. By refusing, or being unable, to live within the tribe, their eccentric behaviour ostracized them. The night after the accident, when Alessandra had been detained in the cottage hospital, Saskia herself had almost succumbed to following that way of thinking. Alone in Cliff House, she’d been on the verge of imagining the worst possible things about her great-aunt. Had experienced panicky fear, because when her mother had said that Alessandra smashed things, her own thoughts had made a connection with the axe Alessandra kept by the kitchen door.

  Saskia saw Alessandra’s house as Neil drove the car down the last stretch of the coast road towards Fhindhaven. Cliff House. The fishermen of Buchan had used it to find their mark. Saskia’s own points of reference were dissolving as she experienced the remorseless unwinding of the blindfold of childhood. School was finished, and with it the guidance of teachers; friends were scattered, taking with them the support of her peer group; her parents revealed as fallible. Saskia stood in the hall. She looked at her hands. They were shaking.

  Something was happening within her mind. A thought was speeding towards her, and she was terrified of its arrival. Her body started to react, her breath coming in short gasps. She needed to eat or drink something. Drink something. Hot tea. Saskia put the kettle on, moving restlessly about the kitchen as she waited for it to boil. She was feeling this way because of the stressful hospital visit, she told herself.

  Taking a mug from the cupboard, a brown mug, carefully, she made herself some tea and added sugar. That was supposed to help with shock, and she could feel trauma beginning to mount.

  Saskia tried to make her mind slow down. But this thought was not to be denied access. She gripped the edge of the kitchen worktop, trying to analyse what was happening. What had triggered this reaction within her? She had been thinking about her father being rejected by Alessandra.

  And the thought was familiar. That was it. She recognized this particular panic: despair and hopelessness furring up inside her, rendering her arms and legs unable to function. And it was connected to another incident in her childhood. She had felt like this when she had been ill with meningitis.

  No. It had begun earlier. Before the meningitis.

  Like the fins of a fan concealing the picture hidden within, unseen until spread wide, the concertina of her memory unfolded.

  She is on a train. Going home to London after the last holiday at Cliff House.

  Her father has hurt his hand. Her parents are talking about how angry her father had been with Alessandra. They think her asleep. Then her mother goes to the toilet.

  ‘What were you saying about Great-aunt Alessandra?’ she asks her father.

  His face, petulant. ‘She’s not as nice as you think,’ he says. ‘I’ve just remembered something horrid about Great-aunt Alessandra.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a secret.’

  ‘What secret?’

  ‘You must never tell.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Not ever?’

  ‘Not ever.’

  He leans across the table in the train so that his face was close to hers. His green eyes, gloriously green, like wet dark seaweed in the rock pools.

  Saskia’s own eyes fly wide open in shock. Her father’s mouth. She can see the shape of his nose. His broad handsome face, golden skin, white teeth. His tongue inside his mouth as he whispers the words to her.

  ‘Great-aunt Alessandra is really a witch.’

  A witch!

  Surging sickness. The awful tipping of her mind as she waits, watching her father’s face, waiting for him to laugh, tell her it was a joke.

  His expression does not change. ‘I thought it was time you knew.’ He nods his head. ‘But it’s a secret. No one else must know.’

  Saskia cannot speak. A witch! Storybook characters leap alive in her head. The evil queen in ‘Snow White’. The witch in the forest capturing Hansel and Gretel.

  ‘You must never tell anyone.’

  Saskia gives her head a tiny shake.

  Her mother, returning from the toilet, looks from one to the other. ‘What is it?

  Her father winks. ‘Our secret.’

  And then she had been ill.

  Her illness had nothing to do with Alessandra’s house or the holiday. It had been months later, an outbreak of meningitis at school. She became desperately seriously ill. Her dreams, the nightmares of that terrible winter. Was Alessandra like the witch in Hansel and Gretel? Did she cook children in her oven?

  Saskia sees now the insides of fish, torn and bloody on the concrete floor of Peterhead Market. Alessandra at the kitchen table, filleting fish with a quick flick of her sharp knife.

  ‘Aunt Alessandra, why do we eat fish?’

  ‘It is the way of things, little quine.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘The very instance of life, the very tiniest creature in the sea is
here for a purpose. We are in a cycle, part of the earth and the sea. The land was once sea and the sea is part of the clouds and the sky, an endless rhythm of life.’

  Alessandra smiles at Saskia. ‘It’s where we come from and where we go to. They say the herring follow the ancient rivers, the course laid out on the sea bed. When they return here, they are coming home.’

  Home. Safe. But some mothers and fathers reject their offspring, conspire together to abandon them. Decide their own interests are supreme. ‘Babes in the Wood’, that most terrifying of fairy tales. What could you do if you were the child? How could you protect yourself? Gretel had her brother. Hansel, his sister. Who did she, Saskia, have? No one. She wakes screaming, night after night. Living a waking nightmare. Alessandra, whom she loved, cannot be trusted.

  Now Saskia is sobbing in her mother’s arms. ‘I don’t want to go back to Cliff House.’

  ‘We won’t go back.’ Her mother holds her close.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Not ever?’

  ‘Not ever.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone it was me who said I don’t want to go back.’

  ‘I’ll not tell.’

  ‘No one?’

  ‘No one. We’ll never talk about it again.’

  ‘WHY?’ She was almost screaming down the phone at her father. ‘Why did you say that awful horrible thing?’

  ‘Saskia, calm down. I can hardly even remember us being on the train. It must have been a joke.’

  ‘A joke! It terrified me. It made me not want to return as a child. Was it because she rejected you?

  ‘What?’

  ‘You told me how she rejected you and your mother. Sent you both away.’