by Gwyn GB
Cocooned in Jersey, Margaret’s family travel together through a succession of Bonfire nights and Christmases, first days at school, sports days and noisy children’s birthday parties. Her life is rich from loving them all. She never takes for granted their wide-eyed wonder as she reads them a bedtime story, or the squeals of happiness at the first warm spring day when they can walk on the beach without their boots and socks; allowing the return of sand between their toes. Most days she finds another ‘special moment’ to add to her family’s treasure store, just like the jar of seashells and sea glass which shine on her kitchen windowsill.
Of course not everything is perfect in their family life - what family ever is. Sara starts smoking at thirteen and there are terrible rows as they try to get her to stop. They bully her, grounding her for weeks, but it simply makes her more determined to rebel against their authority. They bribe her, but she’s sneaky and it’s months before they realise she’s kept up the habit using breath fresheners. There is no end of tears and tantrums. In the end it’s Sara herself who makes the decision to give up when her first proper boyfriend says she tastes awful, ‘Just like an ashtray.’
Then there are the current troubles with James, who at times makes unwise choices for friends. It means days when Margaret has questioned her mothering skills. She loves her children with every molecule of her body, but there have been occasions when she’s felt completely unappreciated; when she has questioned why she didn’t spend a little more time on herself. Perhaps had a career like Katherine’s, something to show she’s a separate entity to her family and their needs. The next day, when the storm of emotions created by their adolescent hormones has subsided, leaving a calm clear time, then she can see just how rich her life is for all its downs as well as ups. Guiding your children through the pitfalls of growing up and the struggles of containing hormonal surges, well that’s just all part and parcel of being a good parent - even if it is hard work at times. The little bubble of dissatisfaction pops and is gone.
There have been times when the fragility of motherhood has depressed her. The worrying beginning the second each child has left her body. A few years ago they’d lost James on a busy beach in France. It was the worst feeling in her life. He’d gone down to the water’s edge with Robert and Sara while Margaret stayed looking after the bags and reading a book. A few minutes later she’d looked up, but couldn’t see James. She stood up and waved at Robert asking through sign language where James was. He didn’t know. It was instant - a buzzing in her head and ears as her blood pressure shot up and she went into panic mode. Every possible scenario went through her mind. He could have been taken off the beach by somebody and be long gone. He could be drowned in the sea. There were hundreds of people scattered all over the beach, how on earth was she going to be able to find a little lost boy.
They started to shout at first, looking left and right, desperate to see his little brown head and Thomas the Tank Engine swimming trunks. Nothing. Margaret started walking to the left, Robert to the right. Searching… Calling… In the end it was Robert’s big voice that found him wandering lost, tears in his eyes. He’d been walking back to Margaret but been distracted by another child’s sandcastle and then become completely disorientated. At moments like that motherhood seemed like a curse, the realisation something so precious and fragile can be taken from her in seconds.
Margaret doesn’t judge people their life choices, a career versus having children. She’d like to think she’s never judged Katherine for her choice. It’s not the fact her sister chose not to create new life with a family of her own, it’s more that she’s turned her back on her existing family which annoys her. Katherine’s visits, when they come, are brief to the extreme. She usually says she can only stay a long weekend at maximum due to work commitments. It’s not even just her lack of contact with their mother and her own family that annoys Margaret, but there’s also John. He never talks about it. She tried to get him to open up in the early days when she had naively thought perhaps she could broker some kind of reconciliation, but John has always been tight lipped and loyal to his wife. Not once has she ever heard him say a bad word about her sister. Not once has he ever complained about his lot; and in Margaret’s knowledge not once has he strayed in his love for Katherine by finding sanctuary with another woman, saving himself from the solitary purgatory she has condemned him to.
Year in, year out, Margaret has watched him quietly getting on with his life - but he’s only half a jigsaw. He floats in formaldehyde asphyxiated by his love and loyalty, never moving on, unable to break free.
As the years go by Margaret’s feelings harden against Katherine, and John becomes more like a sibling than her own sister. She can’t forgive Katherine her treatment of her husband. If she doesn’t love him then why hasn’t she set him free? Filed for divorce? Allowed him some kind of closure instead of the film reel endlessly looping with no final scene to bring it to a conclusion. The way Katherine’s treated John has not just been selfish but downright cruel, as though she’s punishing him for something. Margaret wondered at first if perhaps she was. Maybe he’d had an affair, done something to hurt her deeply? As the years stretched on and John never wavered in his devotion, she’s long since discounted that theory. In Margaret’s eyes John has become a martyr and her sister the persecutor.
33
1988-2008, Jersey - John
It is December 21st when John returns home without his Katherine - the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. He keeps telling himself that it isn’t going to be forever, that she has to chase her dream, heal her pain, and then she’ll be back. Only he’s not sure he believes it. He knows she doesn’t understand why he’s gone, but he’s sure he’s done the right thing for them both. The problem is he worries that away in the big cosmopolitan city her life will change. She’ll change. She won’t want him - the farmer with the dirty hands from the tiny island.
The fact he flies home the same day as 270 people lose their lives in the Pan Am flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, gives him at least some sense of perspective; but it doesn’t help him feel any better about ‘abandoning’ Katherine in London. In fact, that makes it worse thinking of her watching the horrific news on TV, alone and vulnerable.
He is grateful Margaret doesn’t question him when he returns, just seems to accept that he is home and that is that. She can’t possibly understand what is going on because she knows nothing of the miscarriages, but he senses she empathises with his feelings about home and city life at least. He is tempted to tell all, to sit down with her and just let it all spill out; feel the huge burden he carries slip from his shoulders in the telling - but he doesn’t. He knows Katherine doesn’t want anyone else to know and it is more her secret than his. Hide it all away, don’t tell anybody, and then they can both pretend none of it has ever happened. With the potato planting season starting in the new year - work, thankfully, demands more than his full attention.
He and Katherine parted amicably. There were no more arguments. She accepted he was leaving and saw him off at the airport. He wasn’t quite sure why she made the journey to Gatwick to say goodbye instead of staying behind in London. Perhaps she was finding it harder than she let on. He hoped that was the reason. He hoped that seeing him go might make her change her mind. His hopes were never realised.
At first they call each other a couple of times a week but as the months move along it is usually him who tries to call. When they do talk, when she is in, she sounds bored with his stories of the farm and Jersey life. So eventually he decides to run a test - he doesn’t call her. He waits for her to ring. She doesn’t. He waits.
By the following December, a year after he’s returned, he hasn’t spoken to her for three weeks. Eventually the phone rings but it isn’t because she’s missed him. She calls to say she isn’t coming back home, they’re short staffed over the festive season and she’s volunteered to work - so those with children can be at home. When John puts the phone down he puts it down on their relati
onship. For the next few years they still visit each other but gradually the contact becomes more minimal and formal. She never forgets his birthday and every Christmas there is a little parcel and a card but they become penfriends: not a married couple. The visits dry up. Until now. Now she has returned home.
It’s so difficult to understand what it is he’s feeling. Seeing her again, hearing her voice. He had an urge to embrace her, to take in her scent like he used to, but he didn’t. He’d dreamed about this moment for years, but how much of his Katherine is left? The woman that just stood before him might only be a facsimile of the girl he once loved. All the memories that were theirs replaced with ones they don’t share. Does she still like the same things? Would they still laugh at the same jokes? Or is the Katherine he married gone? Was she so worn out when she left that she simply disappeared into the hypnotic fire of London life, reborn a stranger.
To him the fact she never asked for a divorce, and he’d never heard from Margaret of any other men, means there has always been some hope - however faint. People can live apart and still love each other. Not every marriage conforms to the accepted norm. All those years he’s clung onto a dream. Now though, now she’s back and as reality hits him he finds himself on the defensive. He can’t seriously think she might want him back, not after twenty years? They are like strangers. If she’d really loved him she would have come home before now. If anything she probably despises him, his small island ways. Perhaps she wants to meet up and talk so they can discuss a divorce. Draw a line through this long, sad affair.
Twenty years away have changed her. Her body and face aren’t just rounded from middle age, but from the wealth of experiences she’s gathered over that time. Him? He’s stayed in the same house, doing the same, albeit slightly altered, job and barely left this island of just nine by five miles - unless it was to visit her. No, he’s not fool enough to think she will find him attractive anymore. She outgrew the little corner of the world they’d created together decades ago - branching out over the wall; spreading her tendrils into new flowerbeds. He simply embedded his roots, pushing them deeper and deeper into the ground, burrowing them in the soil, establishing the corner as his own solitary patch.
34
March 5th 2008 – Margaret
An awkward truce settles over Katherine and Margaret following their trip to Fort Regent. They haven’t really had any more time on their own to carry on their conversation, or work through some of the issues Margaret raised on Monday, but they’ve learned to be civil to each other. Sophie seems to have decided that as she’s only just found this new aunty she’s not going to let her out of her sight, and wants to do absolutely everything with Aunty Kathy.
The two women have lunch in the kitchen served by a short but very serious waitress called Sophia. She reads out a beautiful long menu to them, that includes such delights as ‘lobster biscuit’ and ‘spaghetti bolog-knees’, only to discover that everything is ‘off’ or ‘all gone’, apart from the egg mayonnaise sandwiches Margaret made earlier.
After lunch they go to the Co-op for some supplies and are driving back into the yard when they see Margaret’s friend Carol chatting to John. She waves at them, peering into the car. Margaret knows why she’s here, not just for the coffee she’ll claim she’s after, but to check out the long lost sister. John disappears as quickly as a hermit crab.
‘I just can’t believe it,’ Carol plonks herself down at the kitchen table. She’s one of those women their mother might have called, “blousey”, a tad too much makeup for her age, clothes a little too provocative and a distinct lack of inhibition; but an honest and loyal friend. ‘I mean I know when we were kids we used to say we didn’t want to get sent to that place, it was known for being tough. Lots of children’s homes were in those days. But I never would have thought kids were being murdered there. Here on our island.’ She’s back on the major topic of island conversation, Haut de la Garenne, after warmly welcoming Katherine. ‘I told you about my sister didn’t I?’ she continues, not waiting for a reply, ‘Got a knock on the door yesterday, it was one of them newspaper reporters. Offered good money for stories too. She told him where to go.’ Carol shakes her head.
Katherine watches her quietly.
Margaret is busy with the kettle pouring water in the cafetiére. ‘Good for her,’ Margaret replies, not turning round.
‘Yeah but listen to this - this really annoys me,’ Carol has the day’s Jersey Evening Post spread out in front of her on the kitchen table. ‘It’s from an A. Sowman from Preston in Lancashire, right. He or she says that ‘as a regular visitor to the island of Jersey’, so a tourist, not somebody who lives or been brought up here, ‘it’s my recollection that rumours have abounded about the goings on at Haut de la Garenne for many years, with nothing being done about it.’ I mean how much crap is that? I’ve never heard anything, you never heard anything and we’ve lived here all our lives. Yet some bloody tourist who visits for a week or two a year now reckons there’s been some great open secret about the place.’ Carol shakes her head and carries on looking at the paper. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she adds, looking up at them both, ‘I’m not saying that nothing happened. God knows you’ve got to feel sorry for those poor sods who are coming forward now telling their stories n’all, but to make out as though we all knew something was happening, as though it was acceptable to us, well that’s just bloody ignorant, that is.’
Katherine and Margaret both nod in agreement.
‘You know the police have dismissed the rumours the body they found is Neolithic don’t you?’ Carol says to Margaret.
‘No I didn’t,’ Margaret replies walking over to look at the paper herself.
‘Yep, it’s in here today.’
‘So bang goes the theory that it was from one of the Dolmen burial chambers,’ Margaret adds.
‘Yes. It’s just terrible it is, terrible...those poor children,’ Carol shakes her head at the paper for the umpteenth time. ‘And they say there are still calls coming in from victims.’
Every time she thinks about it Margaret feels sick. Sick for the victims. Sick with the fear that somebody she knows might have realised it was going on. Sick for the fact the people who had done it must still be walking around, possibly in Jersey, and possibly still hurting children. It feels like having a plaster ripped off a gaping wound. The island has lain quietly for years and now suddenly the plaster has been pulled back and, underneath, the soft naivety of the community is in agony from the onslaught of outside scrutiny.
It’s made Margaret look at her world in a different way. ‘Something like this makes you think more carefully about the adults your children are in contact with, or have been in contact with,’ she says. More to Carol than to Katherine, but they both murmur in agreement.
She can remember the day the story first broke: the shock of it. Robert parked himself in front of the television, shouting updates to her from the sitting room to the kitchen. By the Monday the reality was starting to sink in. She’d been sitting reading the Jersey Evening Post when Robert called.
‘You seen the Post?’ He asked.
‘I’m reading it now,’ she sighed back.
‘Telegraph are reporting the bodies of at least seven children could be buried there. They’re quoting the copper in charge, Harper, as saying “There could be six or more, but it could be higher than that...” I just can’t believe this is happening. How could so many children have gone missing and nobody notice?’
Margaret sighed again, ‘I know, and the JEP says the police want to talk to decorators who discovered bones at the site in 2003. It says they’re seriously concerned about the way that discovery was handled. If that’s true, if they found remains of children then, that means it’s people in charge now who have been hushing it all up.’
‘Doesn’t bear thinking about does it?’ Robert’s depressed tone came back to her. Their world was changing colour, growing darker and there was nothing they could do about it.
After
ward, when Robert had rung off, Margaret carried on reading the JEP. On page two she found further information about the dogs being used in the search, ‘One of the dogs, a springer spaniel called Eddie, which was used in the hunt for missing toddler Madeleine McCann in Portugal, detected the remains found on Saturday through two inches of concrete.’ Finally, she read a quote from Lenny Harper the man in charge of the investigation, ‘We just do not know how many kids may have disappeared.’ That was enough for Margaret. She had to get out the house, get some fresh air. So she went for a drive, travelling around her island ‘looking’ at it with different eyes.
She saw the granite cliffs, the foundation of everything that Jersey is, standing firmly, unmoving, as the surrounding sea ebbs and flows bringing all manner of things to its shores. The beauty of the slightly wilder west side, the huge long sandy expanse of St Ouen’s beach stretching for miles; and then up away from the flat west to the north end of the island where beaches give way to cliff top walks and dark caves.
In the east is the low tide moonscape of rocky beach stretching out to sea for what seems like miles, to be replaced within hours by waves that leave at most a golden sandy fringe spattered with the green of seaweed. This eastern run of beaches is interspersed with pretty little harbours: La Rocque, Gorey, and the long arm of St Catherine’s breakwater; and dotted with solid grey Martello towers. Evidence of an island once in need of defence from more than just tabloid reporters.
