From a Safe Distance Read online

  I first met Aunt Mary at Granny’s. Well, I didn’t meet her exactly, but I probably got to know more about her than if I’d spoken to her.

  Granny’s telephone was ringing. When I was ten, it was kept for best with the piano in her front room. Jim and I were not allowed to play in there on our own. We didn’t have a telephone or a piano at home, so Granny’s rules were different. And she didn’t want ink on the carpet.

  ‘Hello. Mrs Wheeler speaking.’

  That was the way you spoke to a telephone. When it rang, it usually had bad news, so it was as well to be polite. Granny beckoned to Mum, who had to step over our toys to get to the doorway. Through the glass door I could see Mum’s face change and Granny put her arm round her. Mum was upset. All this while Jim was making loud aerial bombing noises.

  The news that we were to stay longer with Granny had been an exciting prospect. But even though we focused on visits to the sweet shop, with a whole shilling each, we were glad to hear the car. The Morris Minor engine stopped outside with a relieved rasp.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy!’ We rushed to the front door.

  Good job she was back. We’d started to get bored and any day now we’d stop being good and let it show.

  ‘Where have you been, Mummy?’ asked Jim wearily. ‘Have you brought us any presents?’

  But Mum had brought us the first bad thing. I could tell that behind the control in her voice, something very bad was lurking. The words were like stilts wading precisely through deep, dark water. Jim was only six, too young to notice the significant looks which passed between the grown-ups; I never missed these looks, even though I knew I was meant to, because they came in little parcels of silence.

  ‘Vee, Jim, come here and sit down.’ She had to sound cold in order to keep talking, survive.

  Even Jim was quiet then, sitting on the floor next to Granny’s chair.

  ‘Daddy won’t be coming home.’

  ‘Why not, Mummy? Where’s he gone?’ Jim frowned and fidgeted.

  I could feel her suppressed sobs and wanted to cuddle her, make it stop. At the same time I knew that would be too dangerous for her.

  ‘He’s gone to … heaven.’

  Jim was mystified.

  ‘Now, you two,’ said Granny, ‘be good for your Mummy and go and pack up your things in the bedroom. Come on.’ She was calm, but she meant it. She closed the bedroom door, then the hall door behind us while we listened. Then we heard a terrible, wounded animal scream and Jim tried to get out of the room. I stopped him, and he went and curled up on the bed instead, pretending not to cry.

  This was the first bad thing.

  A hot, still, summer day picture. Playing in the sand. Dad holding me round my middle, trying to teach me to swim in the sea. The colours are bright. Egg sandwiches before we left home early in the morning. Dad picking up fossils, telling me their names. Wild flower and bird names too.

  I don’t know how long it was after we were told, but one day I ran to my mother and sobbed into her soft dress.

  ‘Hold the pen so the nib is at an angle – like this. Then do some up and down strokes like “n”s joined up.’

  The headmaster went to each of us in turn, picking up our special pens and showing us how to slant the nib. There were about six of us in the Writers’ Club, which met once a week in the front room of the headmaster’s house next to the school. Most of the time we wrote stories, but today we were learning a new skill, while the fire cracked in the grate and the afternoon grew dark.

  ‘That’s good, Vee,’ he said when he came back round to me. ‘Now see if you can write your name like that, all of you.’

  So “Vee Gates” was my first attempt at italic writing. I liked this school, but life so far had made sure I didn’t get too attached to places. Before I knew it, I would probably have to move on again. This was my fourth primary school and I had got used to leaving people and places behind. Dad changed jobs quite often, so we had to keep moving house and living in all sorts of different towns. His last job had been on an oil rig in the North Sea. His brother, Uncle Ron, had been there for a while too. He was in one of the first gangs to be employed there when oil and gas were found; grownups were always talking about that. Mum had wanted to move up there nearer to Dad, as he seemed to be doing well. But I was glad we hadn’t moved, or I would have missed the Writers’ Club.

  My new uniform for the grammar school made a bit of a dent in the finances, but Mum battled on, finding work while I faced my new challenge. It was OK. As I said before, I had grown used to change, even if secretly I wanted things to stay the same, so I adapted without too much trouble. But I felt so much older now than Jim. And I became aware that I was much taller than the other girls in my class.

  Uncle Ron had come round. He was two years younger than Dad, but Mum said they were like “peas in a pod”. Mum was hidden from view by the back of the settee. She stood up. ‘Uncle Ron’s popped round to fix that leaking tap. Isn’t he kind?’

  Uncle Ron had become a frequent visitor recently, helping out in various ways around the house. He was an electrician by trade, but could turn his hand to more or less anything.

  ‘When’s dinner?’ I asked.

  ‘It won’t be long. Could you get Jim in for me please?

  ‘I’ll be off now, Pam,’ said Uncle Ron. ‘You know where I am if you need me.’

  One day when Uncle Ron wasn’t there and Mum was dusting, I plucked up my courage. I thought Mum would be able to answer me now without getting upset, but I felt a surge of the black wave again all the same.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Yes dear?’

  ‘How did Daddy die?’

  Mum looked at me. ‘Come and sit down here and I’ll tell you,’ she said softly, patting the cushion next to her on the settee.

  ‘You know he was on the rig?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, it was his job to climb up high. He was the derrickman, and that day his safety harness broke, so he fell down … ’ She looked away. ‘That’s why I had to leave you at Granny’s. I went to Oxford, where they’d brought him. D’you know, it’s nearly a year ago … ’ She stared straight ahead at the fireplace, then stood up quickly, marched across the room and picked up the framed photograph of Dad on the mantelpiece. Without a word, she placed it in the top drawer of the unit. Then she began dusting again and I knew she didn’t want me there any more. So I slipped out of the room and went upstairs to start a new book. Beyond the sound of Jim playing cars, I heard Mum blow her nose. I felt sad that I was not enough for her, that she needed something I could not give.

  These things are black drops, collecting, dripping into my mind. Each drop added itself to the total; a stream changed into a river, which would become an unnatural black tide.

  ‘It’s all women in this house!’ said Jim, frustrated. ‘God, I wish Dad was here.’

  ‘Well he’s not, so tough. And anyway, you don’t remember him.’ I was almost a teenager, practising a new spite.

  ‘Yes I do!’ His light grey eyes shone with indignation, but there was a touch of anxiety too.

  Mum came out of the bathroom.

  ‘If you want to see a film and have a picnic on Saturday, you’d better be good!’

  Saturday was fun. When we got back home, Mum packed us off to bed. I thought it was unfair that I had to go to bed at the same time as Jim. I lay awake for a while, then realised that I couldn’t hear anything downstairs. Mum and Uncle Ron had been talking and laughing and I hadn’t heard the front door go to tell me he’d left. My curiosity got the better of me and I crept to the top of the stairs. Nothing, although lights were still on. Avoiding the creaky places, I went carefully down the stairs. If they heard me, I could say I wanted a drink of water.

  Strange, muffled noises were coming from the living room. It sounded as if someone was being suffocated. Then there were sighs. Just then I tripped over the mat in the hall. There was a gasp and Mum’s head appeared above the back of the settee. ‘Vee! What’re you
doing out of bed?’

  ‘I … came down to see if … I mean, for some water. Are you alright?’

  ‘Yes, fine. Uncle Ron was just leaving, weren’t you?’

  I couldn’t see or hear him, but I worked it out.

  ‘Back to bed, Vee.’

  The next day I managed to talk to Mum, while she was putting some washing out.

  ‘Mum, do you love Uncle Ron?’

  ‘He’s been a good friend.’ She would not be drawn.

  I had uncovered a new dimension to my mother. Until now, I had not seen her as attractive, or as a woman for that matter. Nor had it occurred to me before that day that Uncle Ron’s visits had any other purpose apart from helping out.

  ‘Are you going to marry him?’

  Mum moved the basket along and paused before picking up a shirt. ‘I don’t know. He hasn’t asked me yet.’

  ‘If you do get married, do we have to call him Dad?’

  ‘No, darling.’

  When Uncle Ron moved in with us six months later, I realised that if they did marry, at least we wouldn’t have to change our name.

  Grandpa had sold the butcher’s business at the back of his childhood home, The Elms, and the house was going to rack and ruin; just after my fourteenth birthday, Mum decided that the time had come to turn the place out. I was able to help her and Granny as we were now in the summer holidays.

  ‘This is what the house used to look like,’ Mum said, picking out a black and white photograph from the box Uncle Ron had brought down from the loft. I studied the picture.

  ‘And here’s my dad, Grandpa, when he was about four, with his mother – your great-grandmother.’ The young woman wore Edwardian dress which showed off her slim waist and both she and Grandpa stared seriously at the camera. I thought how much Jim looked like this boy in a sailor suit. ‘And here are the Wheelers, on chairs, with their servants sitting on the lawn; see their aprons and caps?’

  Grass was just the same and clouds were just the same, and these people once breathed just like us. I looked along the row of unsmiling Wheelers, recognising here and there some facial features.

  ‘So tell me who they all are, Mum.’

  ‘There’s James, your great grandfather, Sarah you’ve just seen with Grandpa – here he’s about ten – and that’s Aunt Mary.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘She was Grandpa’s older sister.’

  ‘I didn’t know he had a sister! What happened to her? Is she still alive?’

  ‘No, she died a long time ago.’

  ‘But he’s never said anything about her!’

  ‘Oh, well. People don’t always say everything about themselves. And anyway, she had a difficult life.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Mum pulled her lips tight. This expression meant she didn’t want to tell you something. ‘I expect you’ll find out one day.’

  ‘But I want to know now!’ I exclaimed.

  Over the next few days I tried several times to find out about Aunt Mary, but as each effort was met with a change of subject or an attempt to divert my attention, I gave up in the end. Adults always got their way, especially when they were balancing on the edge of a bad thing.

  Granny, Mum and I spent three or four days sorting things out at The Elms, while Jim had time with Uncle Ron, who had taken a week off. We found clothes, books, letters, postcards strewn about, ornaments, vases and all kinds of remnants of people’s lives, coated in dust and grit. Mum told me that when she first went there, she’d found the skeleton of a cat in a drawer: Grandpa’s mother was stone deaf. Most of the windows were broken, and weeds were beginning to colonise the downstairs rooms, among the remains of carpets. I remember sitting on a patch of bare floor, studying the old books with their elaborate covers, tissue paper and engravings, determined not to move from that spot when I was alone in case I came across another skeleton.

  Among other things, Mum brought some of the clothes home with us on the first day. She held up one item, a kind of smock, with an open back which tied at the neck. I could tell that she wished she hadn’t. When I insisted on knowing what it was, Mum had to say that it was the sort of thing Aunt Mary might have worn when they “took her away”. I didn’t understand what this expression meant, but all Mum would say was that I’d find out one day, and that I wasn’t to ask any more questions.

  That night I dreamt about Aunt Mary. She was being led away like a dog on a lead, on all fours, her tongue too far out and her white eyes rolling. She was panting and the white eyes just kept on rolling in their sockets. I was terrified, but it was babyish to call for Mum. But when this dream came three nights in a row, I knew I had to do something about Aunt Mary. I decided to shut her away behind a white door in my head. The door had to be secure. It was set in a whitewashed brick wall, the front of a building which was not visible. This was the second bad thing, even though I could not imagine what Aunt Mary could do to me. Unfortunately, though I hardly ever called it to mind deliberately, the white door had come into being and was now a feature in my private mental landscape. I thought I knew what it concealed.

  6

  Schools

  I was better off concentrating on schoolwork. We stayed put in Howcester for the next few years, long enough for me to take my ‘A’ levels.

  I met all kinds of girls, jealous ones, bullies, quiet kind ones, girls whose writing you wanted to copy, girls whose new things you envied, girls you just couldn’t stand, but there seemed to be three main categories in all this: the swots, most of whom wore glasses, the quiet drippy ones, some of whom had specs and the fashion squad, none of whom wore glasses, and wouldn’t have worn them on principle even if they’d needed to. Even though I didn’t misbehave, and I felt guilty and sorry for the poor student teacher, trying so hard at the front of our class, I wasn’t sure which category I fitted into until I was sixteen, just before ‘O’ levels, when my eyes decided they belonged to a swot.

  I was fed up with all the changes I’d been going through and to have swotness added to the list was the last straw. Officially a woman for a couple of years now, I still wanted to play football with the boys. Mum and Ron put a stop to that. I didn’t think much of this woman business – it spoilt everything. We learned about all sorts of embarrassing things in biology too; the teacher went into much more detail than Mum.

  While all around me girls were experimenting with make-up and going out with boys, I was still expected to get on with my work as I had always done. Mum said there would be plenty of time for “All That” later, although I did go to a few parties and listen to some pop music. But my glasses went before me, proclaiming my swotness, and I found it difficult to make friends. At school there were girls, mostly members of the fashion squad, who already had a sense of their own identity and a freedom in their behaviour which was alien to me; it enabled them to get away with almost anything without any very severe punishment. I felt sure that if I had done those things, all hell would have broken loose, especially if Mum were to find out. We’d had teenage rows at home of course, especially of the door-slamming variety, with my parting shot to Ron, “You’re not my dad!”

  By the time I reached the Sixth Form though, most of the colourful characters and the quiet drips had left. Those who remained from these groups seemed to have realised something serious: they had grown up. And now, of course, my glasses were a kind of badge. Aunt Mary was still there, but I had pushed some big boxes full of books against the white door. It was a very ordinary adolescence, but the black drops were still dripping, out of sight.

  I had all the usual childhood ailments, and Mum looked after me, but Ron always seemed to think I was doing it for attention, so that over time, being ill and feeling guilty became inseparable in my mind. It had to be my fault; I was letting everyone down. And I didn’t see any need to discuss this mindset because I thought everybody’s household worked the same way. Likewise, I had accepted the presence of Aunt Mary as part of ordinary life. Not something you talked a
bout every day, but there all the same.

  But I was not just a swot in the Sixth Form: I had to get everything right. Because to get things wrong was to invite the black wave. While I might have believed I was in a position of strength, in fact it was simple arrogance, which is the armour of the insecure. My disdain spread to people who had anything wrong with them, like my grandparents who had let themselves get old and deaf. I found it hard to conceal my impatience. But the worst offenders were those who showed any sign of being “mental”. Nothing was going to go wrong for me: I was in control. I knew exactly how the black wave could come, where Aunt Mary and the door were, and how to limit their influence. I had absolute faith in a state of eternal health, along with what I considered intellectual superiority – and oh yes, I sealed my contemptuous perfectionism with a determination never to get old. I wasn’t weak!

  I tried to read one of the course books on the train south to uni, but it was difficult. Fields passed and trees rushed by and I thought about Aunt Mary. I had really wanted to ask Granny about her, but I never seemed to find the right time.

  Why had she been “taken away”? Did it happen more than once? I recalled the old dream of her as a dog on a lead. Secretly I knew the answer, but it was hard to admit to having a relative who must have been mentally ill. I checked the white door: it was still closed, the boxes of books were still there and it was partially obscured by ivy.

  My routine was totally different now and I had very little money, but much more freedom than at school; it was up to each of us to structure our day. This took some getting used to, as did sharing a kitchen and bathroom with complete strangers.

  After graduating and getting a PGCE, I soon discovered that to teach was not simply to convey knowledge to a rapt audience. It was hard work. I could see so many different personalities and needs in each class. But I was still naïve enough to believe that my love of French would enable me to impart my knowledge without any trouble, a belief that was soon to be utterly destroyed.