Cover Page

Title Page

Praise

Acclaim for Barbara Vine’s

GRASSHOPPER

“Grasshopper is as skillful as anything this wonderful writer has done.... Vine excels at peeling back the layers of her characters’ personalities and exploring her themes.” —The Seattle Times

“Vine writes strikingly about London as seen from the rooftops, about the pleasures of being an electrician, about people’s tics and vanities and foibles. . . . Confident, thrilling, and provocative, the way literature ought to be.” —J. Robert Lennon, The Bookpress

“Multiple meanings emerge as the layers move freely from forefront to background, crashing and receding like waves, building to a subtle yet powerful crescendo. . . . This is a coming-of-age novel but an intriguingly conflicted one; there is a touch of Lord of the Flies pointing us one way, but there’s also a dash of Jane Austen demanding equal time. How’s that for psychological suspense?” —Booklist

“A vertiginous, atmospheric story of youthful misdemeanor and misfortune. . . . Few writers are as good as Barbara Vine at describing the experience of innocents in a complex and sporadically evil world.” —Times Literary Supplement

Author’s Note

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Although I have done my best to render the appearance, atmosphere, and architecture of Maida Vale and its environs in this novel, I have also allowed my imagination some play. Paddington Basin, the canal, the main streets, the churches, parks, and gardens are much as they are in reality, but Russia Road does not exist and, though these are typical and characteristic names for the area, there are no such places as Torrington Gardens, Peterborough Avenue, or Castlemaine Road.

Chapter 1

1

THEY HAVE SENT ME here because of what happened on the pylon. Or perhaps so that I don’t have to see the pylon every time I go out or even look out of a window.

“We’ve thought of selling this house and moving,” my father said. “Don’t think it hasn’t been in our minds. Still you won’t . . .”

He left the sentence unfinished, but I knew how he would have ended it. You won’t always be here, he’d meant to say. A girl of your age, you won’t live at home much longer, you’ll be off to college or a job, a home of your own. And out of sight, out of mind, he meant too. Gradually people will stop thinking of us as the parents of that girl, they’ll stop asking what kind of parents we were to bring up a girl who would do that, and they’ll stop staring and pointing us out. Especially if you don’t come home very often. Maybe they’ll think you’re dead. Maybe we’ll tell them you are.

That last bit was in my imagination. I’m not saying they wish me dead. They have my welfare at heart, as my mother puts it. Which must be why they were so happy—happier than I’ve seen them since before the pylon day—when Max made his offer. The best they’d hoped for was a room in whatever accommodation the college had available or for me to be the fourth girl in a shared flat somewhere.

“A whole flat to yourself,” my mother said, “and in a lovely part of town.”

I had a picture in my mind then of rows and rows of mock-Tudor houses, striped black and white like zebras, with pampas grass in their front gardens and Audis outside their garages. Daniel and I had seen plenty of them, riding around the ring roads on his old Motoguzzi. Our London was the outer suburbs, Waltham Cross and Barnet, Colindale and Edgware, Uxbridge and Richmond and Purley. We counted the pylons and took photographs of the barbed-wire guards on their legs. We never penetrated as far as Maida Vale and we’d never heard of Little Venice. But still I thought “a nice part of town” must mean houses like our house. How Max could have a flat in it, I couldn’t imagine. Flats were in blocks, there had been plenty of those up along the North Circular Road too, great sprawling flat-roofed buildings painted custard color with their names in letters of black or silver: Ferndean Court and Summerhill and Brook House. So when I got here this afternoon I wasn’t prepared for what I found.

My father had been going to drive me. It’s what parents do when their child goes off to college and a new place to live in. I’ve seen enough of it to know. They pack up the trunk of the car and all the back of the car too, with clothes and sports gear and books and radio and CD player and maybe a computer and, of course, a hamper of food. It’s a joyful occasion, a turning point in someone’s life, and if it’s the dad driving and the mother left behind, she’s tearful but she’s smiling too, calling out “Good luck” and making the departing one promise to phone as soon as she’s settled in and not to forget the cold chicken in the hamper and the homemade cake. My leaving home wasn’t like that. I wouldn’t have expected it to be and I never had much faith in my father’s promise. As it happened, the car went in for service the day before and the garage phoned and said they’d like to keep it for another day to have a look at the electrics. Maybe Dad didn’t fix it that way. I expect it was just a piece of luck for him. Anyway, they said it couldn’t be helped, I’d just have to manage on the train.

So I left in much the same way as I’ve lived these past two years, under a cloud. After the pylon my parents had counseling, just as I did, and the counselor told them they had to be understanding and supportive. It was their responsibility to help me put all that behind me and make a fresh start, not blame myself and feel guilty all the time. But they couldn’t. I suppose they couldn’t help themselves. I think they really saw me as evil. One of the ways they dealt with it was to tell me they didn’t “know where I got it from,” as if every action you performed and every mistake you made had been made by a string of ancestors before you and passed on in a gene of thoughtlessness or daring—or evil. This morning and all through lunch they were giving me those looks that are a mix of wonderment and—well, resignation, I suppose. And I could see something else there too: relief, hope maybe, a fresh start for them as well.

I packed essentials into two suitcases and the rest into a trunk my father had had when he went off to university. My mother said she would send it on to 19 Russia Road, London W9. The whole journey would take less than two hours, with luck. She phoned for a taxi to take me to the station. In case I wouldn’t do it, I suppose, if it was left to me. She hovered and I could tell she was wondering whether to kiss me. Neither of them had kissed me or so much as touched me for two years. It was as if I had a contagious disease. My father appeared from the garage where he has a little sanctuary for himself with a TV set and an armchair and said he expected I wanted to be off.

My mother looked at her watch. “The taxi hasn’t come yet.”

“I did try to save him,” I said. “I held on till I couldn’t hold on anymore. I wasn’t strong enough, that’s all.”

“We don’t talk about that, Clodagh,” my mother said. “We’ve put that behind us.”

My father said, “We have to get on with our lives.”

The taxi came. The man rang the bell and walked back down the path. Mum kissed the air an inch from my face. Dad laughed in an indulgent kind of way, a how-sweet-look-what-a-happy-family-we-are way, and he snatched up my cases and carried them to the taxi. Before I got into the back I took a last look at the pylon, planted there in the middle of the field, a skeleton with steel bones. My father, watching me, shook his head and went back into the house. We got to Ipswich with ten minutes to spare before the train came in.

Warwick Avenue is the name of the tube stop. I’d been in the underground before but not often, not since I was a child, not since the car wash. The worst thing that ever happened to me was the pylon but the next worst was the car wash. I’ll write about that another time, not now. Now was the tube. I hated being down there. I clenched my fists and set my teeth, but there were plenty of people and that made it a bit better. A taxi would have taken me from Liverpool Street Station but I couldn’t really afford it and besides it was too late now. I was down there, in the tunnels, the roofs pressing down on me, the walls crowding in. I concentrated on my London A–Z all the way from Oxford Circus to Paddington and when I knew I’d know the way without looking at it again, there was just one more mile to go before I could climb up into the light and air.

The first thing I saw when I came up the steps was a strange ugly church, just about as old as me, with a sharp-edged spire like a knife pointing up into the pale gray sky. I leaned against its wall, breathing deeply, resolving never to go into that tube again. The church was the only new thing I could see. The houses, rows and rows of them, set at angles and in crescents and avenues and shorter streets, were all old. Victorian, I suppose, tall and pale and rather gracious with porticos over their doors and white pillars thick as tree trunks and steps leading up to them. And there were a great many real trees, tall and old, with yellow- and green- and brown-spotted trunks like the camouflage trousers Daniel used to wear. Max’s wife, Selina, whom I’d talked to on the phone, said something about a canal, that this was called Little Venice because of a canal, but I couldn’t see it, not the direction I was walking in, along Warwick Avenue itself, going northward.

I was glad I hadn’t filled those cases but left most of my stuff to be sent on in Dad’s trunk. They were quite heavy enough as it was. There wasn’t much traffic, not moving, that is. All the cars were parked in the street, nose to tail, lining the pavements. A few people passed me, all young, and all of them belonging to what newspapers call “ethnic minorities.” That must be hateful, if you’re black or Chinese or one of these beautiful people from East Africa, to be called an ethnic minority. I found Russia Road without any trouble, as it was exactly where the A–Z said it would be, turning out of Castlemaine Road at a right angle.

It dips down a hillside to a roundabout at the bottom with flowers and bushes in the middle of it and mansions like Italian palaces all around. Russia Road itself is about as far from the idea of a suburb I had as that suburb is from a country lane. I don’t know why the words came into my head because I’d never thought them before or even know what they really mean, but I said to myself: Gothic London. The buildings on the left side were very tall, almost like towers joined together in a solid redbrick unbroken row. I hadn’t known people could build so high all that time ago, I thought it had come in with modern tower blocks. These houses are so tall they must shut out the sun until it gets very high in the sky. The camouflage trees look quite small in front of them.

On the other side, the odd-numbered side, the buildings are nearly as tall, maybe about ten feet shorter. I’ve never seen anything like them before. They are in three blocks and all the blocks are different. All they have in common is that they are all four stories high and all have flights of stone steps climbing to their front doors. The first set I passed are painted a pale cream color and have windows with rounded tops except for the big bays on the ground floor and rounded porticos held up at the ends by lions’ faces resting on sharp-clawed paws. After them comes red brick as on the opposite side, with windows set in ivory-colored stone blocks and around the middle of the houses and the edge of the roof kind of friezes in the same ivory with tops like on a castle—castellated, is it called? Max’s house is the first one in the last block (or the last if you’re going the other way), No. 19, in a row built of silvery gray bricks and red bricks in a kind of mosaic design. All the paintwork is black and cream on his house and quite new and shiny, but some of the others need painting and some need a complete cleaning.

Instead of going straight up to the front door of 19, I walked along looking at the faces. Above every front door, above the balconies that run around at this level and look like black lace, is a window made of three arched panes, the center arch being the highest, its pointed top set amid plaster garlands of flowers and leaves, and among them, in a wreath of leaves, is a different face. I mean a different face on each house, an old man with a beard and drooping mustache, a young lady with her hair looped back and a mantilla set on it, a young man like a picture I once saw of Lord Byron, another in a turban. Some have been cleaned up and repainted and look fresh and new, while others are still grimed with soot, which covers the faces like a dark veil.

I dragged my cases back and looked up and up and up. Max’s house is very clean, as if someone regularly washes it. One of the teachers at school told me that in Holland the people wash the fronts of their houses but I have never heard of anyone doing it here. The face on his house is a girl’s and she wears a kind of cap on her long flowing curls. The leaves around her look like vine leaves and the flowers like lilies. Up above that are another three rows of windows, the first row with arched tops, the other two just ordinary squares. Then I saw what I’d missed before. There are more windows in the bit of roof that comes over the top like a pelmet of gray slates. So the house had five stories, not four.

Why didn’t I notice the basement? Maybe because I always lift up my eyes to the heights. I went up the path, set the cases down, and rang the bell. Selina came to the door. I knew who she was. I’d seen her on television, as everyone in the whole country must have, so perhaps she didn’t think she needed to say. Anyway, I think she’s a woman who never uses people’s names, her own or anyone else’s, she calls them “darling.”

“Why didn’t you have a taxi, darling?” she said. “It’s much too far to carry cases.”

In spite of that “darling” she said it as if I’d done something wrong. Or I think she did. The trouble is, as my counselor told me, I’m paranoid. I see and hear slights, snubs, rebukes. Maybe because I’ve had so many. Maybe Selina was just concerned for me. She looked behind her, as if she thought someone might appear who would carry the cases. No one did. She picked up one of them, winced at its weight, and left the other to me.

I expected to climb stairs. I even thought they might have a lift. We went down a long passage. There was a door at the end of it and, behind the door, stairs going down. I followed. She put the case down the moment she got to the bottom. I think there were eleven stairs. I’ll count them tomorrow. Not that it matters. We were below ground and although it was bright outside and would be for another three hours, we had to put the lights on.

“It’s all yours, darling,” Selina said. “Have a look round. When you’ve tidied yourself, come up to the first floor and we’ll have supper. Max should be back soon.”

“The first floor?” I said.

“One flight above the front door.”

Claustrophobia is what it is, I suppose. Although I’m not sure about that. I’m not afraid of being in small rooms or shut in cupboards or lifts. It’s tunnels and underground places I can’t stand. I had borne it in the train because that was the only way of getting to Russia Road that I knew, but it had half-killed me. As I looked around the place I was to live in, I vowed to myself that at least I would never go in the tube again, I would take buses or walk, I would never use underpasses, even if it meant going a mile out of my way to avoid them. But I couldn’t vow not to live here, I am living here, writing this diary here, trying to shrink myself very small and hard and invulnerable, so that the walls don’t move in more closely upon me and crush me to death. It isn’t that it’s small but that it’s below ground level . . .

Chapter 2

2

I WAS NINETEEN WHEN I wrote that.

Ever since I’d learned to write, I’d kept a diary. Maybe it was because I was an only child and had no one to tell things to or else I’m a natural diarist. Some people are. It hasn’t much to do with being a writer or good at it or anything. It’s more a need to record what you think worth recording. All my life I have written down things that happened to me when they were really important or just seemed important to me. The ordinary day-to-day stuff never got a mention until I met Silver and after that nothing was ordinary anymore.

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