* * *

When I was in Thurlestone the summer before I left for King’s College, the special school behind me, finished, a letter arrived for my mother. It was from Hyacinth, saying that she was suffering from variant angina pectoris. My mother called her and I remember walking through the hall while she was on the phone, watching her dented face move and smile. Years later I found out that she paid for Hyacinth to have surgery and then to go home, back to Tobago, to be with her family. My mother has a mute generosity which few people know about, including me. I often wonder what Hyacinth found when she went back after all those years, whether she still sang about rivers and Scottish cows. When my mother finished the phone call she came to find me in my room, packing away my shells and pebbles. She took my hand in hers and traced the letters: HYACINTH SAYSHELLO SPECIAL!

I spent years, first at Tommy’s and then at school, waiting for my father to arrive. I watched and I waited and as I did my heart hardened. I knew that he was out there, I knew he knew about the bomb and what happened to us. He was out there, like the wolf’s breath in the cave - something felt and not seen. And I always knew that I was twice-left because I was not special.

JOAN

16 November 1999

The hospital is depressing — I’d forgotten what days are like spent in such a place. The buildings have changed — they’re modern and sleek, pastel-painted and clean. There’s chrome everywhere and the floors shine, reflecting the simple white uniforms the nurses wear now. The buildings may have changed but the routines of hospital life haven’t. I see the same dim, ruined faces every day, smile at them and they raise a wrist, try to reply. The drugs arrive on cue, the same young women smile endlessly down their days, surrounded by death. Of course they’re not the same women — the nurses who looked after John will be old now. Yet these young women have the same resilient cheerfulness. But there’s no Hyacinth here, there’s no Harry.

Ellen’s in a room on her own, overlooking the bland parklands and roads around Oxford. She wears a gown and cotton cap, and tubes feed her what she needs. Christ, I don’t know what she needs. I read to her every day. She likes poetry and the tales of Updike’s Rabbit. It’s the only thing I can think of doing for her.

17 November 1999

It’s strange being up here in the Cotswolds, in Ellen’s house, alone. The house is so much a part of her, or vice versa.

I’ve always loved it, and if I hadn’t bought my house in Thurlestone looking out over the sea, I would have liked to come here. It has no comforting deck but it does have unexpected, drystone-walled enclosures in the gardens, covered in climbing roses, and a summer-house that looks over a rolling valley of ancient oaks. Each evening when I get back from the hospital, I walk round the house checking windows and doors, and I remember stumbling in my dressing-gown through the house, full of rancid whisky, Ellen shouting, as I realised just how spacious it was. I asked her once why she bought such a huge house — eight bedrooms, cellars, minstrel’s gallery, library and barn — and she shrugged and said she liked it. Which is no answer. Because when she first visited Thurlestone - having driven through the night to come to me because I was not all right — I saw her look around and smile. ‘I like it,’ I said, and she raised an eyebrow.