All day in school there was an almost tangible sense of suppressed excitement. Everybody wants to get away. They were all talking about their plans for the week, showing off. Sharon got to leave this morning, lucky pup, because another thing Jews can’t do is travel on Friday nights or Saturdays. What happens if they do? It’s like having a pile of geasas.
A few girls got picked up straight from afternoon school. The others were watching out of the library windows to see what kind of cars they had and what their mothers—mostly mothers—were wearing. Deirdre got picked up by her older sister in a white mini. I don’t suppose she’ll ever live it down. The thing mothers are supposed to wear, it seems, is a burberry with a silk headscarf. A burberry is an upmarket brand of mackintosh.
Nobody asked me what my mother wears, because nobody is speaking to me. But it’s just as well. She wears every third thing in her wardrobe, and she cycles her clothes through it in some strange order only she understands. I don’t know if she does this because it’s magical or if she does it because she’s mad. It’s very hard to tell the difference. Sometimes she looks an absolute guy, and other times she looks perfectly normal. The normal times do usually seem to coincide with times when it would be useful—she looked demure and respectable in court, for instance, the last time I saw her. A long time ago when she kept the nursery school she always looked reasonable for a teacher—but Gramma was still alive then, and could keep her in check. But I’ve seen her wear her wedding dress to go shopping, and a winter coat in July, and be barely covered in January. Her hair is long and black and even combed and tamed it looks like a nest of snakes. If she wore a burberry and a silk scarf it would look like a disguise, a cloth dragged over an altar where something had been sacrificed.
My father arrived in a rush of parents, and nobody remarked about him to me. He looked like himself. I was back to glancing at him sideways I’m afraid. I don’t know why, it’s absurd really when we’ve been writing to each other like human beings all this time. He drove me back to the Old Hall.
“We’ll stay there tonight, then tomorrow I’ll take you to meet my father,” he said. The headlights lit the road far ahead. I could see rabbits bounding out of the way, and the skeleton tracery of branches illuminated for an instant and then dropping back into dark. “We’ll stay in a hotel. Have you done that before?”
“Every summer,” I said. “We’d go down to Pembrokeshire and stay in a hotel for two weeks. It was the same one every year.” I felt my voice thicken with a sob at the back of my throat thinking about it. It had been such fun. Grampar would drive us to different beaches, and to castles and standing stones. Gramma would tell us the history. She was a teacher, all my family were, though I was determined I wouldn’t be. She loved the holidays, when she didn’t have to cook, when she and Auntie Teg could relax and laugh together. Sometimes my mother came, and sat in cafes smoking and eating peculiar things. It was better on the years she didn’t come, obviously. But she was much more avoidable in Pembrokeshire, and smaller somehow. Mor and I had our own special games, and there would always be other children staying in the hotel who we’d organise into our games and into putting on an entertainment for the parents.
“Was the food good?” he asked.
“Wonderful,” I said. “We’d have special things like melon, and mackerel.” Delicious things we never had at home.
“Well, the food will be good where we’re going, too,” he said. “How’s the school food?”
“Appalling,” I said, and made him laugh with my description of it. “Is there any chance I could get down to South Wales?”
“I can’t take you down as you suggested. But if you want to go on the train for a couple of days, that would be all right.”
I wasn’t sure, because on the train I’d be trapped there and she was there, after all, and if she physically grabbed me I didn’t know what I’d do. But probably she wouldn’t come near me. She wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t do anything magic.
At the Old Hall, when we finally got there, the aunts were all sitting in the drawing room. It’s not a room where people draw, with easels, it’s short for “withdrawing room,” where people withdrew for quiet conversation. They were hardly talking though. I kissed them, then a stop at Daniel’s bookshelves, and retired to bed with The End of Eternity.
SATURDAY 27TH OCTOBER 1979
I had no idea London was so big. It goes on for ever. It sort of creeps up on you and before you know it, it’s everywhere. There are outlying bits, with gaps in between, and then it gets just more and more built up.