The Lost Child (25 page)

In the winter of 1838/1839, still mourning the loss of you and Jane in the summer, the family travels to Dawlish, where they are to watch poor Sophy slip away. A month or so later, in the spring, returning to Woodton, your sister is
sought in marriage by the eldest son of the owner
if
Woodton, Robert Alfred Suckling.

I see now that this bit of chronology - something I paid no attention to when I first read the book - is very important. In that spring, Suckling proposes and Anna says yes. But by then you have been nine months dead. A respectable amount of time has passed. What seems likely now is that he proposed to you the spring before, the spring of 1838, months before you died. Is this what really happened? Is it possible that, whatever Suckling eventually feels for your sister Anna, however happy their eventual marriage, does she - and everyone else - have to live with the knowledge that he loved you first?

So how are you doing? Are you OK in here? Hey, have you got enough light?

I lift my head and the room swims into view.

So how's it going? Is it any use? Are you finding anything?

I tell her I'm finding out a great deal.

She smiles.

Brilliant. I'll leave you to it, then. God, though, look at how dark it's got. You wouldn't know it was July, would you?

She flicks on the light for me and fuzzy electric light floods the page. I thank her. And am sucked straight back to Woodton.

Your sister Anna marries Robert Suckling, and they have a son called Thomas - Captain Thomas Suckling, Florence's future husband. But what if they don't marry, what then? What if Suckling marries someone else - you, for instance?

In the end, what it boils down to is this: you need to die in order for Thomas Suckling to be born. Life is like that, a series of domino knocks, a rattle of consequences. And why should Florence Suckling, family historian par excellence, bother admitting what a close call it was? How this so very nearly did not happen. How her long marriage to Captain Thomas Suckling owes its entire life and existence to the long-ago death of a twenty-one-year-old girl.

Actually, it's worse than that. It's bigger. Because, you know, if you hadn't died on that terrible summer night in Ipswich in 1838, if you had lived and married and had babies, then the whole Baron-Suckling history might have taken a different turn.

You, not Anna, would have been Mrs R.A.J. Suckling, mistress of Barsham. It would be your furniture, not Anna's, crowding Patrick Baron's Norwich apartment. Except, of course, there would never even have been a Norwich apartment at all. Because, if you had lived, Patrick Baron and his daughters would never have been born.

So there you are. It's easy. Florence only has to omit a dozen or so words - hardly a crime - in order to obliterate this inconvenient love affair. Your only love affair.

And who's it going to harm, after all, if the girl in question is long dead? If a person dies so young, so unrealised, then does it really matter what people write about her? Who's going to care about that person's right to an emotionally honest biography?

Did you love him, then?

And if so, who was this Mr Brown and what was the pique all about? I've only just got used to the possibility of your being engaged to Robert Suckling. How many lovers did you have?

The fair-haired girl sitting on the wall, swinging her legs and eating apples, has faded and a new one has taken her place: serious-eyed, delicious, ready for anything.

Ready to be loved. Or to love. Ready to be happy or sad, uncertain, excited, seduced, desired. Ready for the thrill of being wanted. Certainly nowhere near ready to die.

It's another Yelloly journal, or extracts from one anyway, dated May-December 1839. It doesn't say who wrote it, but because you, Jane and Nick are all dead and everyone else seems to get a mention, it has to be Harriet.

These are strange days, sunny and bleak by turn. Poor Sophy is often quite unwell, but her fiance the ever-devoted Robert Groome calls often to take her out for drives, or else to sit with her. Plenty of friends seem to call either to dine or play games.

There's battledore and shuttlecock outdoors, or in the big oak room on rainy days. Your mother takes painting lessons. It turns warm. A woman is killed in a thunderstorm at Bungay. And a second thunderstorm demolishes two sheep. Your sister makes a solemn note of this.

There's sadness too. Sadness about you:

Meanwhile, Miss Lucy Suckling and her brother Robert start calling. Yes, that's the same Robert - the Robert who may have loved you first. Does he still think of you like that, I wonder? Has he cried about you, does he still mourn? Or has he moved on?

I have to tell you that he and his sister seem to find all sorts of excuses to call at Woodton. First they stop by to varnish some pictures. Then Robert begins a drawing of the
curious picture
over the oak-room chimney piece. He begins, which of course means he must keep on returning, If he hopes to finish it, that is.

On another occasion he stops by to read
The Siege of Corinth.
Or, he and his sister come and walk in the woods and everyone sits down to tell stories. I assume that
everyone
includes your sister Anna.

One day, Lucy Suckling comes over alone and has a long and serious talk with your mother about her family's affairs. She and Robert have had a
blow-up
with their father at Barsham. This makes some sense because the Revd Alfred Inigo Fox Suckling was a notorious spendthrift who almost ruined his family. It's only your father's later sensible handling of Anna's marriage contract that saves the Sucklings from complete ruin.

The next day, though, Robert calls at Woodton to sit under a tree and finish reading
The Lady of the Lake.

After that, it all happens quite swiftly:

And what about your father? What does he really feel? Pride, excitement, or a touch of sadness? Is his joy for Anna eclipsed, however briefly, by his memories of your own all too brief love for this man, by the still raw fact of your young death?

The summer is full of joy, it must be. But November finds them all at Dawlish with the now severely ill Sophy. Meanwhile, Anna gets measles. Ellen also becomes unwell. And then there's a long break in the journal when Harriet herself succumbs to fever.

She gets better. So does Anna. So, for the moment, does Ellen. But on 10 December:

What's a
water bed?
Is it a normal thing in those days - used to prevent bed sores, perhaps? Or is it somehow associated with death? What's wrong with it, exactly? Why doesn't she like it?

She got into the water bed but did not like it.
Why is it that those words fill me with such particular dread? Why do they seem to bring home more vividly than almost anything I've read so far the panic and confusion and terror of a young woman's final illness, the terrible, yawning momentum of loss?

Mary and I order fish and a glass of wine and Paul has the pie (I always have the pie!). They tell me that their son Sam Tyssen Sanders-Hewett has just got engaged. And we talk about all the Yelloly and Tyssen treasures that have been lost.

I tell them how I read in the manuscripts that your sister Anna's jewels - the Yelloly-Tyssen family jewels - were in her handbag, on their way to the mender's, when it was stolen at Cheltenham Railway Station, never to be recovered.

And Mary laughs, and then Paul tells me how the manuscripts themselves were almost lost in a flood at her parents' house in Sussex ten or fifteen years ago.

Yes, Mary says. He drove down there to rescue everything and I said to Paul, whatever you do, for God's sake get the books!

They were in a cabinet in the sitting room, Paul says. Fortunately high enough up to be unharmed. But it was a close thing. A few more inches of water and that would have been that.

A few more inches
if
water.

Your romantic and emotional history was nearly obliterated by a bossy Victorian historian with an agenda of her own in 1898. And a hundred years or so later, a Sussex flood almost finished off the job.

ROMANCE

How brilliant this life is,

with all its ways to wander.

New people to meet,

new problems to ponder.

Do all the things I did,

when I was confused.

9

OUR BOY HAS finally dropped out of school. Or at least, he does not actually drop. It is more that one day the strings of absences just join up together and become an absence so long, so extended that the school informs him that, unless he turns up on a certain day just to speak to them, he will no longer have his place.

He's dropped out of school but he still has his phone. It's the only thing he does have. I call him about every four or five days. Sometimes he answers and sometimes not. Sometimes he says he's busy and hasn't got time to talk. Other times he seems never to want to hang up.

Every time his phone goes straight to voicemail, or else rings and rings and there's no answer, I worry. I see him lying in a dark alley somewhere, frightened and alone, unable to move or call for help.

His father says that's ridiculous. He says he's no more or less likely to come to harm than any other eighteen-year-old boy. Less, probably, because he's smart, streetwise, strong and actually incredibly healthy.

Yes, I think, but the trouble is, in the life that our boy now leads - not going to school, not living in any fixed place, not having anywhere, in fact, where he regularly has to be - it would just be so easy for him to slip from view. Who would notice If he didn't drop by? Who would think anything of it if they didn't see him for a week or two?

I can't keep this idea in my head for long without starting to feel sick.

Then he finds a room in a house in Brixton. A man from Sierra Leone has a room to let. And the rent is cheap and his Benefit should cover it. The only problem is that, when he was evicted from the last flat, he never bothered informing the Benefit Office, even though we begged him to.

Well, what the fuck am I meant to do?

Tell them!

But my phone's out of charge.

Then go round there. Go today.

I can't go today. I've only just got up.

He never went. And we stopped asking him to.

But now at least he has an address again. I ask if! can come and see his new place. I could bring him some bedding.

Not quite yet, Mum. Let me get settled first, OK?

A week passes. Then another week. I call him one evening around eight and feel relief when he answers. I can hear noises in the background.

I'm on a train, he says.

A train where?

Just, you know, back to Streatham.

Not Brixton?

On my way to Brixton, yeah.

Overground?

Yeah.

It's easier for him to fare-dodge on the overground trains, I think.

He sounds tired. I ask him what he's been doing and he launches into another long, muddled story about how the Housing Benefit people have lost all his details. How first they told him he was eligible for back payment of Benefit and how then
some stupid fucker
lost the piece of paper and said he wasn't. And now they're changing their minds all over again. But they still can't say when they'll pay him or how much.

Well, you did a really stupid thing, didn't you, I tell him. When you didn't let them know you'd been evicted from the flat.

The words are hard. The words are true. But I know that my voice is soft.

But, he says, the phone reception cutting in and out, what the fuck did they expect? Have you any idea how hard it is, trying to manage your life when you've got nowhere to live?

I decide to move on.

So how're you paying your rent?

Well, at the moment, to be precise, I'm not.

But - doesn't your landlord mind?

He says nothing.

OK, but - so how are you managing? How are you eating?

I'm not.

His voice is bleak.

Then please at least come home and let me cook you a meal. You can always come here for food, you know that.

OK, he says. Thanks.

We both know he won't come.

One weekend I think what a waste and how nice it would be to take some apples home and make a crumble. So I get a plastic bag and collect the best of the apples off the ground. I think about asking Daddy if it's OK to take them home - he doesn't want them, after all- but then I realise that it would be very hard to ask this question without using the word
home:
So I decide it's easier just to leave the bag of apples at the front of the house - outside the front door - and then, when our mother comes to collect us, I can pick it up at the last moment and take it without him knowing. It doesn't seem like a bad thing to do, more a diplomatic one.

I leave the bag there and go and do some other things.

But later, hours later, I see that the bag has gone and I flush. My knees go shaky and my ears feel hot. Has he found it and removed it? Is he angry? Does he think I was trying to steal from him?

Inside, he's watching TV. I offer to make him a cup of tea and he accepts. I bring him the tea, strong but milky the way he likes it, and he thanks me but says nothing else. Carries on watching his programme, smoking his cigarette. What should I do? Should I say something? I decide not.

An hour later, I check and the bag's still gone. may be it wasn't him after all. may be someone else took it. may be it was stolen. Whatever the explanation, I feel deep worry and another feeling too, a feeling I can't remember having felt before. It's shame. A strange and complicated sort of shame.

The other,
A Short Memoir of the Revd Robert Alfted Suckling
by Isaac Williams, Fellow of Trinity College Oxford, published in 1859.

I do have a copy of a portrait of Robert Suckling, from the National Portrait Gallery archives. It shows a weak-faced young man with annoying hair. An anxious little frown. Exactly my idea of a Victorian country parson.

I got him wrong. He's nothing like that at all.

He's born in 1818, eldest son of the Suckling family and heir to Woodton. He goes to sea at thirteen and remains a sailor till 1839 - the year he gets engaged to your sister. He then gives up a promising naval career (he is, after all, directly descended from Lord Nelson) because he feels so strongly called to the Church. His experiences in the Navy are tough. The ship is struck by yellow fever:

And, judging by the dates, your walk in the woods together must take place just after the episodes described above. Terrible, life-changing episodes, experiences that cannot easily be let go.

You are both so young, both just twenty-one. What do you talk about as you crunch over the bracken, the hardened ground? Does he tell you honestly about the things he's seen, the dangers he's faced? Does he know that you're ill? Does he return to sea, in love with you and engaged, only to return to find himself bound to an invalid who will not last the summer? The green shoots of spring are all around you. Love is good. Do you even ever see each other again?

In 1839, months after your death, Robert retires from the Navy to study for the Church and that same year, because of the crisis brought on by his father's spending, he agrees to
cut off the entail of the Woodton property.
Woodton Hall is sold and falls into the hands of the Fellowes - who immediately pull it down. Brick by brick. The Suckling Curse.

In fact, it's only thanks to your own father's calm clearthinking that the Sucklings retain any property at all. Once Robert is engaged to your sister, Dr Yelloly is so firm about the marriage settlements that he more or less rescues the family from ruin.

Your sister and Robert are married on 22 April 1840 and live happily at Barsham - modest compared to the grandeur of Woodton - with their six children, who include Florence Suckling's future husband Thomas.

Robert's death comes suddenly. He's just taken Holy Communion at church on All Saints' Day, when he suffers
with some attack
if
internal inflammation.
For two days he writhes in agony on the floor, and then he dies. He's just thirty-three. Your sister is a widow for the rest of her life.

Born in Framlingham in 1810, second son of the Revd John Hindes Groome, ex-Fellow of Pembroke, Cambridge, Rector of Earl Soham and Monk Soham. He goes to Norwich School, where he meets your brothers John and Sam. Then up to Cambridge, before being ordained as a curate in 1833. He is friends with many writers and thinkers of his time. In 1845 he succeeds his father as Rector of Earl Soham and Monk Soham and later becomes Archdeacon of Suffolk.

Yes, yes, I think, but come on, when are we going to get to the bit about Sophy? Instead we pass straight through the 1830s, before coming to this:

What about Robert, though? How do things really work out for him? Does he love Mary Jackson with a mature intensity that shows his earlier romance up for exactly what it was: a youthful passion, never really tested, always doomed to come to nothing?

Or does he spend the rest of his life in the grip of a compromise, trapped in a perfectly adequate and fruitful marriage that nevertheless never rouses in him a tenth of the excitement and longing that he felt for your sister?

A few pages later, I find the closest thing I'm likely to get to an answer: an old photograph of Robert - the first and only one I've ever seen.

He's standing near a pond on the Grass Walk. A tall, lean, dark-faced man in late middle age, wearing a long black coat, bowler hat and tense, rather humourless expression. He could be an undertaker.

Robert Groome. I scrutinise him - his face, his long feet in their shiny shoes, the long shadow that he casts - but what exactly am I looking for? Just a clue, I suppose. Just any flicker of something in that face that suggests he was the same eager young man who once wrote all those sweet love poems to a Yelloly girl.

Our boy and her boy were best friends at primary school. They made friends in reception on the very first day, aged five. And it turned out she lived just around the corner from us, a single parent - her child's father had always refused to have anything to do with him, she said. So we started sharing the school walk, taking it in turns to take and collect the boys.

I liked her. She wasn't someone I would necessarily have been best friends with, but she had the kind of energy that swept you in, lifted your spirits. When I went to that flat - a big sunny upstairs maisonette - she was always making pancakes or painting a wall or about to order a bed or a wardrobe and dying to show me the catalogue and hear what I thought.

In the evening when she came by to collect her boy, she'd sometimes stop for a glass of wine, breathless with news of her day, and we'd sit in the warm chaos of our kitchen while the children - ecstatic at gaining an unasked-for reprieve - went on playing. One night she came round and, eyes shining, told me she was pregnant. The baby's father was married to someone else, she said, but it was fine. He was being so supportive, so generous. And she seemed to mean it. She kept her loneliness so tightly under wraps that at the time it never really occurred to me to wonder if she was just being brave.

And when the baby - another boy - came, I visited her in her big white bed in the private hospital where, surrounded by flowers and cards, she asked if I'd be his godmother. I hesitated - I'd only known her a few months. But saying no felt difficult, so I said yes.

I saw my friend and her baby several times in those newborn days. I know I took him presents and I think I tried hard to believe in my role as his godmother. I can still see his round blond head, can still remember his soft clean weight on my lap.

And then we changed schools and she moved away where? To the West Country? I can't even remember - and I never saw her again. Just like that. I don't even remember how hard we tried to stay in touch, or If we tried at all. I know I felt a little guilty about the godmother thing, but I consoled myself with the indisputable fact that the promised christening had never taken place - or at least, not with me as godmother it hadn't.