The Lost Child (17 page)

All of this makes total sense to me whilst I'm being shown around, but later, on the train home, those bleak and tidy rooms with their immaculate single beds make my heart speed up and I have to suck a mint to calm me down.

She shows me the room where people are waiting for a group therapy session. You can hardly see the faces for the fug of smoke.

Three addicts kindly agree to speak to me. We are put together in a sunny attic room at the top of the house. They face me, intent, serious-eyed, anxious to be truthful, anxious to help, to tell their stories. They are all so young. They all began with cannabis. With skunk. They ask me do I realise how incredibly, dangerously powerful it is? Yes, I say, I do. And as I tell my story, they nod their heads and look at their shoes.

It's all so fucking familiar, one of them says.

All of them stole from their families, all of them lied, all were in denial, some for years. None of them hit their mums, though, no way. There's a sharp, shocked intake of breath when I tell them that this is what my boy did.

All three are currently in recovery, but all of their faces are wan and spent, their eyes haunted. Hands and bitten fingers moving ceaselessly. As we shake hands and say goodbye, they deal the final blow. All three of them have been in rehab many times.

Many times?

You manage to stay clean for a while, sometimes even a year or so, and then you relapse.

But - you still come back?

You just have to start all over again and hope that this will be it, this will be the time, one of them says with a shrug.

UNTITLED

6

CARROW ABBEY IN Norwich, where you live before you come to Woodton - where, as well as painting your Picture History album, you squeeze lemons to make lemon sponge and listen to Ellen practise her music - well, that place no longer exists.

Or at least that's what the woman at the Norwich tourist office tells me. There are a few ruins left, yes, she thinks so, but nothing else. In fact, somewhat confusingly, she is pretty certain the Abbey itself was pulled down by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries. Which would actually make it rather impossible for my Yellolys to have lived there at all. And yet, there's a clear painting of Carrow Abbey in your album: two long, low houses joined together, with a roof and chimneys. More like a house than an abbey, certainly. But the caption, written in your wobbly, little girl's hand, says
Carrow Abbey near Norwich.
I'm baffled.

Then I discover an intriguing website - over three thousand photographs of old Norwich taken by a man called George Plunkett (1913-2006) during the 1930s and '40s. And typing Carrow into the search box straight away brings me a clutch of black-and-white pictures of the ruined Abbey. One of them, labelled
The Prioress's House,
is incredibly similar, if not identical to, the house you painted. It looks Tudor, possibly even older. Dark and intricate brickwork, mullioned windows, tall chimneys and elaborate stone lintels over the main door, where the thick, twisted trunk of a wisteria curls.

In front is a smooth area of grass and, on the path next to it, a couple of dark-suited men in trilby hats are frozen on the edge of that pre- or post-war lawn. It's an atmospheric photograph, somehow both glamorous and austere, taken more than a hundred years after your time at Carrow. Different people, different clothes, but the same house, surely? Is this where you lived? I try holding the photograph up against your painting, but the number of windows don't quite match up.

Desperate to solve this puzzle, I email Jonathan Plunkett, son of George and the one who runs the website now, to ask him if he knows anything at all about Carrow Abbey. He says he can tell me that the pictures were taken on 16 May 1940 when his father went around Carrow's ruins on an archaeological excursion. He's very happy to email some good copies of the pictures to me, but he's sorry to say he doesn't have any more information on the Abbey or what happened to the Prioress's House. Personally, he's never come across the place.

Meanwhile, among the paintings in the Yelloly box, I find something I'd only glanced at before. A tiny sketch done on a piece of white card with an embossed surround. A pencil sketch, very fine, very perfect:
Carrow Abbey near Norwich by S. B. Yelloly October 1828.
Done by Sarah, your sister.

It's a bit more accurate than yours. When I hold it up and compare it to the photo taken by George Plunkett in May 1940, I see that it's identical in every way. Every single door, window and chimney matches up. Only the men in their trilbies, absorbed by their archaeological excursion, are mlssmg.

This is the place, then. This is definitely the house you lived in. But it can't possibly still exist or else surely the lady at the tourist office would have known about it? Such a grand and striking old Tudor house is just not going to drop off the tourist map. I assume that most likely it was bombed and destroyed in the war.

Then, on the Internet, I discover an article from the
Eastern Daily Press
written just this summer:

He's been up there five minutes or so when I suddenly remember there was money in his father's trousers. At least two 20S, may be more, stuffed in the pocket of his old cords and flung down on the bedroom chair.

His father of ten has money in his trouser pockets but we never leave cash out these days when our boy's around. Not even pound coins for parking. Over the past year he has stolen so much from us, regularly dipping into my handbag or his father's wallet whenever he could. Now I always lock my bag away when I have to leave it for more than a few minutes. And if we go out for the evening, we lock both our studies and our bedroom. And yes we are appalled at being forced to do this. Even more appalled that it's so quickly become a way of life. When our boy was out of the house, the relief at being able to leave doors open was a strange kind of heaven.

The shower is running. I run up to our room to check the money. The trouser pockets are empty except for a scrunched handkerchief Both notes gone. Two 20S. Forty quid.

Hey, I call through the closed bathroom door. Have you taken some money from Dad's trousers?

What? he shouts through the heavy din of water.

I said, have you taken some money?

Of course I fucking haven't! he shouts. How dare you fucking well accuse me? Now fucking well leave me in peace, will you?

There's no lock on our bathroom door, never has been. So I do what I've never done to any of my children and would not dream of doing, not since they hit puberty anyway - I push open the door and walk right in there. I don't look at him, I don't look at the blur of his long body in the steam. Instead I just grab his clothes off the bathroom floor.

Hey, where the fuck're you going with those?

I shut the bathroom door again and sit down in the bedroom chair. In his jacket pocket, two £20 notes. He took the money first, pocketed it, then got on calmly with using our shower. Something about the order of that makes me feel sick.

It's a warm day and the air is noticeably still when I finally walk up the wide, hard drive to what must be the Carrow Works. Because the traffic is so slow, the taxi ends up dropping me off so I can walk the last bit, but I take a wrong turning and instead find myself at a place called Carrow House - confusing but clearly not right. A receptionist for Norfolk Social Services, Mars bar wrapper on desk, phone cradled between shoulder and ear, points me back up to the roundabout: left and left again, you can't miss it - and suddenly it's obvious I'm entering an industrial site, even if it is a leafy one. The air smells of the country but there are security barriers everywhere.

At the first barrier I tell the man behind the glass that I'm here to see Jeremy Howard.

He frowns at his clipboard.

What company do you work for?

None. I'm just - myself.

Aha, a lady who is herself!

He gives me a badge and hands me a large plastic-covered information sheet with full security instructions: no smoking, no drugs, no alcohol on site. And an emergency number to dial.

Emergency?

Yeah, so if Jeremy suddenly keels over or whatever, you dial this number, OK?

OK, I say, deciding not to mention that I don't have a mobile phone.

All right. He leans out of his kiosk to watch me clip on my badge. Now if you head towards the
No Entry
sign over there and go right across the road, you'll see a fifteenth-century building with a glass extension right in front of you. Walk straight towards it and Jeremy should be waiting for you at the entrance.

Fifteenth-century building, I think. This is it, then.

And I walk past trees and up a drive edged by lawn and, in a second or two, right there in front of me is the house you lived in when you were eight years old. This is where you were when you painted the album I looked at in the bookshop in Mayfair.

I stop and just look for a moment. It really looks no different at all from George Plunkett's 1940 photo, an effect only heightened by the fuzzy warmth of the air and the strange lack of people. There's no one at the entrance - in fact no human being in sight anywhere. But the main door is standing wide open, so I walk right in. And find myself in an old and creaky wooden hallway with a wide wooden staircase twisting up to the right.

No one to go up the best stairs whilst cleaning.

The air pulses with silence. Late-afternoon sun slants down through the stained-glass window at the top of the stairs. Arranged around the big fireplace are several glass cases containing photos and archives about Colman's Mustard. Opposite them, hilariously out of place, a few lone bottles of Robinson's squash.

I look around me. There's got to be somebody here. A reception area or something. Where am I supposed to go?

Hello?

Silence.

He asks if I'd like to see inside or do the grounds first. The grounds, I decide. But he says first he'll show me a little display they've got about the history of the place. I follow him through into a massive modem glass structure which has been somehow welded on to the side of the Abbey. An extension?

Yeah, he laughs when I comment on it. Stuck on to a Grade I listed building. You'd never be able to do it now. But you could get away with that sort of thing in the '60S.

The glass structure somehow turns a corner and becomes the staff canteen - which must be the one referred to in the article I found on the Internet. I ask him how many people Robinson's employs.

Five hundred staff, thirty-five acres the site is altogether. Some of it has river frontage which is quite nice.

And how long have you worked here?

Oh, only eighteen months or so.

And are you from around here? I say, hoping he won't think I'm interviewing him too much.

He laughs.

No! Can't you tell? I'm from the north-east.

I apologise to him for being so bad at accents.

I actually used to be at our Beckton plant in East London, he says.

It must be a lot nicer here.

Oh yes, it's a much slower pace of life. It's good. I've got a two-year-old child, you see.

Two is a lovely age, I say.

We're now standing in a rather featureless meeting room, which looks over the grounds. The same smooth lawns that I recognise from the photo, half in sun, half in shadow. Now and then a small, toppling mound of stones suggesting a ruin.

Jeremy shows me the meeting-room walls, where a well-meaning but sparse exhibition has been mounted. Yet more sepia Colman photographs and laboriously typed captions, curling at the edges. It has the dutiful tone of a display that no one ever looks at. Jeremy says that, when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the Priory itself was pulled down and only the Prioress's House survived.

Because a relative of Anne Boleyn's wanted it, he says.

Ah.

And it's supposed to be haunted, he adds, unable to stop himself checking my face for a reaction.

Seriously?

Well, there's one room, the Prioress's bedroom, we call it, which - well, I don't know, it depends what you believe really. Just, a lot of people have felt something in there, that's all.

Really? I say, trying not to look too interested. What kind of thing?

Well, only about a year ago, one of our sales people was last out of a meeting and a woman pushed past him to get into the room and he said: Oh, excuse me! and turned round, and there was no one there. Depends if you believe in ghosts really, he adds, checking my face again. I'm not sure if I do.

I tell him I'm not sure I do either.

But will you show me the room?

Sure. We'll go there in a minute. After we've done outside.

We wander across the lawn, past pale pink shrub roses and towards a wilder bit where paths have been mown between the nettles and trees. A squirrel dashes past and a blackbird lifts itself into the air.

I think of the journal your mother made you all keep when she was away.
Have you walked five times round the garden before breakfast? Sarah, Jane, Harriet, Sophy each signs: 'Yes.'

Five times would have been a lot of walking.

Jeremy points out a tree, bigger and wider and older than all the rest.

It's - I'll remember the name in a minute, he says. Anyway, whatever it's called, it's the second largest of its type in Britain, apparently. I suppose it would have been there in your girl's time, wouldn't it?

I suppose it would, I agree, gazing at the enormous fat trunk. Perfect for hiding behind. A pale wrist brushing the bark. Your slim shape almost hidden. One single curl of hair giving you away as you can't resist peeping round.

Weeping beech! Jeremy says. That's it. I knew it was weeping something.

It's beautiful, I say.

Yeah, it's quite something, isn't it?

And I glance back towards the Abbey for a moment and notice that, apart from the big glass 1960s-built box where the canteen is, the view I'm looking at is no different at all to the one your sister Sarah drew in her pencil sketch.