The Lost Child (12 page)

Three months after Sophy's death, on 22 April, your sister Anna marries Robert Suckling, and just three days after that, on the 25th, your father is thrown from his phaeton and suffers a head injury which causes a right-sided stroke. What a year. He recovers from this sufficiently to buy and move into Cavendish Hall, but dies there two years later in June 1842.

On 20 April 1843:

A last token of the affectionate remembrance of my beloved sister Jane.

And that's where this story gets harder to tell. Because If he did feel terrible - Oh, they say, but he must have! Come on, there's no way any boy could do that and not feel the most extraordinary remorse? - If he did feel terrible, then he did not show it. Even now. He has not showed it.

Ah yes, but even if he didn't show it, he felt it?

Well . . .

After we got back from the hospital that night, having given up on the theatre and sent an apologetic text to our friends, after we got back home and saw the tea towel which we'd briefly used to hold ice to my ear still damp and forlorn on the kitchen table, the knocked-over chair, the amp still scowling at us from the dining-room floor, we felt so sad and sorry for our fractured family. So we took all three children out for dinner down the road - the Italian again, the same cheap and cheerful family-run Italian we always go to when we need to be put back together again.

We sat at the table in the window, the one we've often sat at. Our boy had spaghetti carbonara. I probably had risotto. I don't know what the others had. We drank wine, the kids drank Coke. Someone might have had a pudding. We were careful and affectionate with each other. There was a strong, unspoken sense that we were being kind to ourselves because we'd all had a shock.

I'm not sure how I felt. Vulnerable, probably. But, in a way, also elated, euphoric even. As if some terrible thing I'd been vaguely dreading for a long time had finally happened. It was over now. It could not hurt me again.

if
you don't stop,
I
am going to have to hit you.

We didn't talk about what had happened - odd for a family like ours who always seem to talk too much about almost everything. We just told the children that my eardrum was perforated, but they needn't worry, that it wasn't as bad as it sounded. It would mend, it would be OK. After that, we talked about other things. Talked and laughed. The boy didn't tell me he was sorry and I didn't ask him to.

At the time this felt like the exact right thing to do, the only thing. If someone you love hurts you, how can you respond except with love? Every other possibility is just too painful to contemplate.

Looking back now though, I think I felt such pity for my boy that night - so sorry for what he had done to me, for what that meant, for the way it might somehow have altered the set of his heart for ever. It wasn't all that different from the time he cut Kitty's fur when he was seven. A part of me just wanted to protect him from what he'd done. The only difference was that he'd been able to express remorse about Kitty.

And later, months or weeks later, when things had escalated to a whole new undreamt-of level of despair, his father told me he thought, with hindsight, we'd been wrong to behave so normally that night, wrong to take him out for that cheerful dinner.

I should have told him to leave the house there and then, he said, I should have acted. I feel ashamed that I didn't protect you, express my outrage. I'm a little bit ashamed. May be then he'd at least have understood what he'd done.

And though this wasn't quite what I felt, by then it was hard for me to argue. Because when, in the intervening months, we'd tried - so many times - to speak to our boy about that terrible evening, to elicit some sort of an apology or suggestion of remorse from him, his response had been that I had driven him to it. It was all my fault. It was no more than I deserved. And by then I think he believed it. And so, almost, did I.

It could be anybody's hair. It could be Yelloly hair. It could be your hair, Mary.

Whoever's hair it is, on that evening in Suffolk, I gather up as many of the strands as I can - they're long and thick and straight and dark - and put them in a plastic Zip 'n' Seal freezer bag, squeezing it shut carefully. Whoever it belonged to - a king or a Yelloly - it's been loose in that trunk all these years. And though the sight of those long wiry strands through the clear plastic of the bag makes me shudder a bit, still gathering them into one clean, safe place seems the only respectful thing to do.

After that, I brush down my lap and hoover the tiny hairs and flecks and crumbs left on the table, as well as the floor underneath. If the hair really did belong to Charles I, it doesn't seem quite right that it should end up in a Henry Hoover bag. But I know I can't live a single moment longer than necessary with those sinister dark strands all over my floor.

A dozen little white cards, each with a delicate silhouette of a child's head on it. Sarah, Nick, Jane, Sophy, John, Anna, Sam, Harriet, you. None for Ellen - may be she wasn't born when they were done.

I turn each card over, trying to match the faces to the names. Each of you has the same close-cropped hair curling slightly in at the neck. The little girls have on dresses with frills at the sleeves and chest. Sam and John each seem to have some kind of a ruff around the neck, but Nick - bafflingly - is dressed like the girls. On the back of his card someone has begun to write
Sophy
in pencil, then crossed it out and put
Nick
instead. I turn it over and study the face again. It looks like a girl.

At first the faces all seem to be very similar to one another. But the longer I look, the more they separate into individuals. Sarah's nose, for instance, is definitely more adult, no longer even slightly retrousse - and her lashes curl upwards prettily. I like Jane. Something about the way she holds her lips together indicates curiosity and a touch of amusement.

Harriet looks just like a younger, fatter-faced version of Sarah, the same straightish nose and thick lashes. Sophy's is a young face, small features, pretty. But Anna's nose tilts upwards and there's something more genuinely babyish about her face. Sam's lips are small, he has a slight overbite, and his nose is quite long and sharp.

And you? I hold your card in my hand for a long time. A round face, babyish like Anna's, plump-chinned, your little button of a nose tilting up at the end. I don't know what I expect it to tell me, but nothing comes. It's just the silhouette of the face of a baby who turned into a little girl who painted a book of pictures then shot through adolescence and died before she could do anything else.

In a stiff white envelope, marked
Sarah and Jane,
four letters scrawled in childish writing:

I am, my dear dear Mama, and I hope I always shall be, Your affectionate and dutiful daughter, Sarah Yelloly

Your very dutiful daughter, Sarah Yelloly

I am my dearest Mama your affectionate daughter, Jane D. Yelloly

I am your very affectionate and dutiful daughter, Jane Jane Yelloly

Another note from a child comes folded over on a piece of yellowing paper, dated 1821. The lines have been ruled in pencil and even the letters - at least an inch high and done in thick black ink - have been traced once in pencil and then gone over:

My dear Sarah,

As it is your Birthday I have sent You some Spanish Liquorice [?] & I bought from nurse on part case [?] to give you some. But I would not be like the greedy children in Fanny and Mama's book.

Your dear sister Anna has sent you this.

Anna Yelloly

And now here on my kitchen table.

Running my fingers over the paper's rough surface, I can still, almost two centuries later, feel the deep grooves made by a six-year-old's pen as, frowning slightly, tongue hanging out, she presses just that little bit too hard.

Still attached. Two hundred years later, they're still attached, threaded, ready to be continued.

Someone starts making something, gripping the needles, a whisker of cotton pulled taut, slim hands moving briskly then she breaks off suddenly, never finishing it. Who? Why? Who is it who begins this piece of work, gets halfway through and stops? And why is the unfinished piece then kept so carefully afterwards? Do they hope one day to take it up again, finish it? Or is there a darker explanation? Does it memorialise something - a day, a moment, a loss?

I just can't face throwing it away, that's all. Stuff it in the back of a drawer. Don't think about it.

A hot late spring and summer. May and then June. Long days spent watching by the bedside, hands kept occupied as you move in and out of fit ful sleep. You open your eyes for a moment, just to check she's still there. Sarah. Eyes down, working the thread and needles, crocheting, tatting.

Sarah?

Mmm.

What is it you're making?

What's that, my love?

What is it? What's it going to be?

I don't know. I don't know what it is yet. I haven't thought.

What it is is something to do. What it is is something to carry you on through those long, dark and frightening days that end - as I know and you don't yet know - in this:

Lodgings in Ipswich. A dark and sweaty bed. The rough ride back to Woodton. The smell and taste of damp earth in the churchyard at dead of night.

Another scrap of fine white cotton, long and thin and sad, folded over, looks like a sleeve for a very thin arm. A child's arm, or were you all so very skinny? A frill has been carefully worked at its end. I lay it down on the table next to the needlework, my fingers getting drier with each dose of dust.