4
THE MARSHES
WHEN ABIGAIL WAS ASKED ABOUT HER FIRST MEMORY, WHAT SHE most often recounted was the afternoon she and her grandfather had gone for a walk and found a Roman plate buried in the muddy foreshore of the River Medway. She would describe herself in her T-shirt and shorts, skipping along beside her grandfather. He was wearing a white shirt, faded gray trousers, and a straw hat that was almost the same color as his mustache. The tide was out, and he had said they should dig for Roman remains, or Saxon as a second best, but only for twenty minutes.
“We can’t excavate the entire shore,” he said, “so we depend on luck. Without it, we could dig all day and find nothing but stones and worms.”
“I like worms,” Abigail said, thrusting her trowel into the mud. What she did not like was her grandfather mentioning that mysterious phenomenon which played such a large and aggravating role in the lives of her parents. Great luck, her father would say at any piece of good news. This is my lucky day, her mother frequently announced, opening her blue eyes wide as if to trap every particle of good fortune. One reason Abigail loved spending the summers with her grandparents was that their household did not depend on such random interventions: they got up at seven-thirty every day, they went to the library on Thursday afternoon, and on Saturday, if it wasn’t pouring, they bicycled or took the bus to the nearby town of Rochester. When she went shopping with her grandmother, they met the same neighbors who made the same remarks: how much Abigail had grown, what beautiful hair she had.
Her grandfather marked out a square in the mud. “You start in this corner,” he said. “I’ll take that one.”
They had been digging for eighteen minutes; she had asked how much longer twice, when he held up a thin gray disc with one small shard missing. “Who do you think ate dinner off this?” he said.
“You,” said Abigail, coming to look. “Granny.”
“No.” He shook his head so that his straw hat rocked from side to side. “This is very old. You can tell by the kind of pottery. Julius Caesar could have used this plate, or Maximinus I. We’ll take it home to show Mama, then we’ll ask the museum if they want it.” One case at the local museum already contained several fragments labeled as the finds of Hans Taylor.
The memory grew less exact at this point, but probably they had done what they did most Sundays: headed to the large oak tree at the bend in the river. While they walked her grandfather would have talked about a writer called Charles Dickens who had lived in Chatham when he was a boy. The marshes of the Medway and the convict ships moored in the River Thames had inspired his novel Great Expectations, which Abigail would enjoy when she was older. Charles was the second of six children and sometimes, on afternoons like this, he had walked with his father in the woods near Higham. On one such outing they had come across a house known as Gad’s Hill Place; his father had told Charles that the name appeared in Shakespeare and added that if he, Charles, was persevering and worked very hard he might someday live in such a house.
“Thirty years later,” said her grandfather, “he discovered Gad’s Hill for sale and he bought it and came to live here with his children; he had nine or ten. But the happiest days of his life were when he was your age, before the boyslaughter.”
“Boyslaughter?” The strange word filled her mouth in a satisfying way.
“It’s a made-up expression. When a part of his childhood was destroyed, a place or a memory he loved, Charles called it boyslaughter.”
Her grandfather knew all this because, when he first arrived in England from Hamburg, he had started reading Dickens to improve his English; the great writer had been his guide to his new country. More than most people, he told Abigail, Dickens understood how suddenly life can change: one day you can be respectable, the next in debtors’ prison. And the next back again, in your top hat and gloves.
“I want a top hat,” said Abigail.
At the tree they turned and walked home to where her grandmother would have tea waiting. Later the three of them would play snap or pellmanism, and later still one of her grandparents might read a story by Hans Christian Andersen. The Danish writer had idolized Dickens and paid him an interminable visit. Abigail listened, enthralled, although the stories made her eyes water; the children had such hard lives.
Week followed blissful week. But in late August she would notice, at first doubtfully, soon with awful certainty, that the sun was no longer shining when she went to bed. She would attempt to bargain the calendar to a standstill, try to keep her eyes open all night to prevent the arrival of a new day. Please let me stay, she would say to her grandparents, over and over. I can go to school here. Over and over they would say that they would like nothing better but that she belonged with her parents.
“They don’t want me,” said Abigail. “Sometimes they don’t even have a bedroom for me.”
During that period her parents were moving among various towns north of London: Chigwell, Enfield, Watford, Barnet, Cheshunt, Potters Bar. When, at the end of the summer, her father came to collect her, she never knew where he would be taking her, what shabby dwelling she would be told to call home. You won’t believe the amazing place we’ve found, Abby, he would say. In one flat she slept in the living room on a mattress behind the sofa. A few months later her bedroom was all by itself in the attic of a large, dusty house. Her grandparents would listen to her father’s accounts of his latest venture and politely decline his invitations to visit.
Dickens had cherished his years in Chatham not just because he had been so happy there but because after he left everything was so terrible. His father, a navy clerk, lived constantly beyond his means, and when he was transferred back to London his finances rapidly unraveled. The twelve-year-old Charles was forced to leave school and work in a shoe-polish factory. As he pasted labels onto jars of black polish, he could hear the river rats scrabbling beneath the floor. And despite his small earnings his father was soon in debtors’ prison. The rest of the family joined him in jail, leaving poor Charles living alone, sticking on endless labels.
“Never forget,” said her grandfather, “school is the gateway to life.”
She didn’t, not least because he said it so often. And then, the winter she was ten, came the awful, singular events that were also unforgettable. Her grandmother fell, broke her hip, and caught pneumonia. A month later her grandfather had a heart attack. With their deaths, she lost her refuge and her parents lost their last constraint. Later she understood that they had also inherited some money, though not enough. Her father gave up his current job, in an estate agent’s, and they moved to the Channel Islands to start a daffodil farm and a guest house. Both failed. They returned to Cornwall and her father worked in a boatyard while her mother did the afternoon shift at a fish shop. That winter they moved to Exeter. With neither qualifications nor contacts, her mother decided to open a kindergarten: See your wee ones flourish in Mrs. Taylor’s Garden. When no pupils enrolled, she offered cookery classes instead. The two women who signed up soon became her friends and stopped paying. Meanwhile her father led walking tours and gave canoeing lessons. Then they went to Cardiff.
The year Abigail was fourteen they moved so often that she couldn’t go to school. She would find the library in whatever town they happened to be living and study as best she could, reading about the Corn Laws and the periodic table, but the prospect of missing crucial exams put her in a frenzy. The day after they unpacked their suitcases in a flat on the outskirts of Reading, she told her parents that they couldn’t move again for three years. “I need to go to school,” she explained. “The same school, every day.”
“Of course, darling,” they said. “No more moving, cross our hearts.”
And her mother, who had grown up in foster care and run away when she was sixteen, had said she would tutor Abigail. “I’ll get to learn the things I skipped the first time around. Amo, amas, amat.”
Stupidly, as if the tutorials were really going to happen, Abigail had said she wasn’t
studying Latin.
Six weeks later, in mid-October, they were evicted for not paying rent. Her parents moved to Blackpool and Abigail found herself, at fifteen, renting a room above a launderette, going to school, and working every evening at a supermarket. For two years all she did was study, work, and occasionally fuck one of the boys who stocked the shelves. An English teacher took her under her wing and helped her to apply to university. Abigail secretly dreamed of going to Oxford or Cambridge and ended up applying to Sheffield, York, and St. Andrews. She got into all three and chose the Scottish town where her parents were unlikely to set foot.
That summer she worked furiously. The teacher had said she shouldn’t have a job during term time; after all, this was her chance to explore ideas. So Abigail worked at the supermarket from eight until four, then changed into black trousers and a white shirt and waitressed at an Italian restaurant. She had not seen her parents since they’d passed through town in the spring, but they sent a postcard with each new address. Now she wrote to them, asking for money. Her father sent another postcard, announcing that he and her mother were getting divorced, and saying nothing about money. Her mother sent the news that she was remarrying—If you’re ever in Newcastle, do come and see us—and a check for a hundred pounds that, amazingly, cleared. Abigail spent it on clothes at the charity shop and secondhand copies of books she needed.
SHE ARRIVED IN ST. ANDREWS ON A SEPTEMBER DAY SO PERFECT that it was enough to make one believe in the pathetic fallacy; the iridescent sea, the wide beaches, the famous golf course, the ruined cathedral and castle. Abigail had never seen anything so beautiful, and the main buildings of the university were satisfyingly old, like Oxford and Cambridge. Her first weeks passed in a swirl of happiness; she adored her classes, she met such interesting people, she couldn’t get over how many hours there were in the day to study, or to drink coffee and talk. More often than she cared to acknowledge, however, there were these jolts, moments when she was suddenly aware of how different her childhood had been from those of her peers. She would miss a reference to a TV show and, just when she figured it out, the topic would change and she would fail to recognize the name of the home secretary. For three years she had seen almost no television, read no newspapers, and listened only to the radio station they played in the supermarket. It was almost as if she had grown up in a foreign country. At first she did her best to conceal her past; then she discovered that people were interested in her odd life story; her parents—her athletic, mercurial father, her charming, sylphlike mother—became characters whom she acted out for her friends, guyed and caricatured.
Only more gradually did she discover that she was different from the other students in ways that went far beyond culture and politics. In theory they were, like her, independent, living on their own, but in fact they still had rooms in their parents’ houses, endless “loans” available. By the middle of the term they were talking about going home for the holidays. For the last three years Abigail had worked in the supermarket on Christmas Eve and then spent Christmas Day with the English teacher’s family, showing up at noon with a box of chocolates. Now she realized she would be alone in St. Andrews for four weeks, and she needed to get a job; her savings were shrinking with alarming speed. She mentioned her holiday plans to one or two of her interesting new acquaintances. “Lucky you,” they said, “not having to deal with chores and curfews.” Abigail quickly grasped that this was a difference to which she shouldn’t draw attention. Then in late November she found a note in her mailbox. College rooms had to be vacated by noon on 10 December. The college would reopen on 12 January.
“What does this mean?” she asked the porter.
“The college closes for Christmas, love. We all go home.”
She went to see her supervisor, a stringy, disheveled man, who often brought his golden Labrador to his office and, sometimes, his infant son. He nodded as she talked and promised to see whether the university could provide alternative housing. But as she rose to leave he said, “Are you sure there isn’t anyone you can stay with? An aunt? A family friend?”
“I am absolutely positive,” said Abigail, and slammed out of the office. Did he think she’d ask this humiliating favor if it weren’t a last resort?
The next day in the laundry room a girl, whom Abigail recognized from her seminar on modernism, said hello. “I’m Dara MacLeod. I enjoyed hearing you read from Mrs. Dalloway.”
Abigail introduced herself and explained that she had had a teacher who thought reading aloud was one of the best ways to understand what an author was doing.
“I wish I’d had someone like that,” said Dara. As they loaded their clothes into adjacent machines, she admitted that she had been struggling with the novel. “I know that Woolf is a feminist hero but I didn’t understand how the war and the party fitted together. Then, after you read that page, suddenly it began to make sense.”
Abigail said that she didn’t see how Woolf could count as a hero when everything had been handed to her on a plate. Including being abused by her father and brother, said Dara. They debated, cordially, the effect of Woolf’s childhood difficulties, which Dara saw as mitigating, Abigail as irrelevant. “Look at Dickens,” she offered. “He went to work at the age of twelve and he still managed to write brilliant novels.”
When their laundry was finished, they went upstairs to leave their clothes in Abigail’s room. Dara remarked on the tidiness. Abigail said she liked to know where things were; her parents’ chaos had made her neat. In the cafeteria she told Dara first about her nonexistent family, and then—Dara had asked about Christmas—she confided her housing problem, and her money problem. Something about Dara’s steady gaze, the crease of her lower eyelid, suggested that she might understand.
“So,” said Dara, “you need a place to stay and a good job. I’m sure you could get a room in town, but I bet holiday jobs here are badly paid. Let me ask my mother if she has any ideas. She and my stepfather live in Edinburgh. There are lots of big shops and restaurants.”
Abigail started to say that she didn’t know Edinburgh and how could she look for a job there when she was here, but Dara told her not to worry. “I’ll let you know as soon as I hear from my mother,” she said. She leaned over and gently moved a strand of Abigail’s hair that was dangling perilously close to her coffee cup.
THREE DAYS LATER ABIGAIL WAS CIRCLING HELP WANTED ADVERTISEMENTS in the local newspaper when there came a knock at the door. “Here’s the deal,” Dara said, coming in and sitting down on the bed. Her mother, stepfather, and younger brother were going to South Africa for Christmas to visit her stepfather’s brother. “I asked them if you could stay in the house with me and they’ve said yes, subject to meeting you. They weren’t keen on leaving me on my own, especially over Christmas. You can have the spare room and the house is handy for the buses. Would that suit you?”
“That would be perfect.” Pleasure and relief propelled Abigail out of her chair; she stood there, beaming uselessly.
“I was going to ask you.” Dara paused, one hand smoothing the already smooth bedspread.
Abigail felt her heart drop. Here came the pound of flesh. “Yes,” she said, trying not to sound too grudging.
Still fidgeting with the spread, Dara confided that she too would like to get a holiday job: how would Abigail feel about them applying together? They could visit the city next weekend. That way her mother and Alastair could meet Abigail and they could fill out applications at some of the big stores. For a moment, she raised her eyes to Abigail’s as if she were asking an enormous favor. Hastily Abigail set about reassuring her—it would be great to work together; she was good at getting jobs—at the same time wondering why reassurance was necessary.
ON THE TRAIN THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, WHILE DARA MADE A LIST of stores, Abigail watched the dingy landscape and worried that Dara’s parents would take one look at her and change their minds. She had braided her hair and settled, after several changes, on a dark brown sweater and black trousers;
still the possible faux pas seemed endless. But as soon as she saw the tall woman at the station, wearing a red jacket and jeans, waving and walking toward them, her anxiety began to fade. Fiona’s fair hair stood up in little tufts and she wore bright blue earrings that Abigail might have chosen. She shook Abigail’s hand, hugged Dara, and turned back to compliment Abigail on her minimal luggage. In the car she asked if Dara had finished her essay on Woolf. Then she asked if Abigail knew Edinburgh and pointed out the Castle.
For the first time since her grandmother died Abigail was a guest in a well-run home. There was nice furniture, central heating, hot water, clean sheets, ample towels, a brimming refrigerator. It made her want to weep with self-pity as all her long hours in the supermarket never had. When Fiona showed her the spare room and asked if there was anything else she needed, Abigail almost hugged her. On the way downstairs she paused to look at various paintings: a landscape with sleek lions and fluffy sheep, a portrait of a girl who looked like Dara, a seaside scene.
“Who did the paintings?” she asked as she came into the kitchen.
“Mum or me,” said Dara. “She does the animals.”
“They’re beautiful. I didn’t know you could paint.”
“I can’t. Mum’s the painter in the family. She teaches art in a high school.”
“Nonsense. You’re very gifted,” said Fiona. “You just have more sense than to want to be a starving artist. Would you mind slicing the mushrooms?”
The three of them were in the kitchen, chatting and chopping vegetables, when Dara’s brother, Fergus, a lanky fifteen-year-old, came home. He hugged Dara, greeted Abigail, and went off to do his homework. He had barely left the room when the front door opened again and Dara’s stepfather, Alastair, appeared. All Abigail knew about him was that he was a barrister, and it was easy, she thought, taking in his long, bony face and thick gray hair, to picture him in a black robe, settling someone’s fate.
The House on Fortune Street Page 23
