For one thing, it was the end of our trips to Greenwich.
For another, we saw a lot more of Jeremiah. He was my father’s friend, of sorts, the two of them having grown up in the same village. He had visited occasionally when my mother was alive, for my father had taken him along sometimes as an apprentice on large railway clock repair jobs; but I was aware, in the vague, instinctive manner of small children, that Jeremiah was a source of tension between them. I can remember my father offering placatory assurances like, ‘He does the best with what God gave him’ or ‘He means well’ and reminding her that although Jeremiah had been blessed with few of life’s gifts, he was ‘a good fellow, really, and certainly very enterprising’.
The latter was undeniably true: Jeremiah turned his hand to whatever opportunity came his way. He was by turns a rag-and-bone man, a tanner, and at one time became convinced his fortune lay in the door-to-door distribution of Steel’s Aromatic Lozenges, the professed benefits of which included ‘magnificent male stamina’.
After my mother’s death, when my father began his tumble into the dark crevasse of grief, Jeremiah started taking him out for long stretches in the afternoon, the pair of them stumbling back after dark, my father half-asleep and slumped across his friend’s shoulder. Jeremiah would then bed down for the night on the sofa in our drawing room, all the better to ‘help’ us out the following day.
And my father had longer days to fill by then. His hands had started to shake and he had lost the ability to concentrate. He received fewer offers of work, which in turn made him bitter. Jeremiah, though, was always there to prop him up. He convinced my father that he’d been wasting his time on repairs anyway; that his future lay in perfecting his Mystery Clock; that with Jeremiah as his agent they couldn’t help but make a fortune.
When the landlord finally reached the end of his patience, it was Jeremiah, through his contacts, who helped my father to find rooms in a building that huddled in the shadows of the steeple of St Anne’s. He seemed to know a lot of people and always had an opinion to venture and a ‘bit of business’ to transact. It was Jeremiah who oversaw the sale of my father’s patents and Jeremiah who told me not to worry when the bailiff started knocking on the door at all hours, complaining that my father owed him money; he knew a man who ran a gambling outfit in the Limehouse, he said. All my father needed was a little bit of luck to see him right.
And when my father took to spending every night down at the public house on Narrow Street, dragging himself back at first light smelling of tobacco and whisky to collapse at the empty table with his pipe – when he sold off the last of his brass and rivets in order to pay his gambling debts – it was Jeremiah who shook his head sadly and said, ‘Your old man’s just unlucky. I never did meet a man with an unluckier star.’
The bailiff continued to knock, but my father ignored him. He began, instead, to talk obsessively about America. In his battered state, the idea made perfect sense. We would leave behind the sorrow and unhappy memories and start afresh in a new place. ‘There’s land, little bird,’ he said, ‘and sunshine for the taking. And rivers that run clean and soil that can be turned over without fear of unearthing bones from the past.’ He sold the last of my mother’s dresses, pieces that he had been saving for me, and booked cheap passage for us both on the next ship to America. We packed our possessions, such as they were, in one small suitcase apiece.
The week that we were due to leave was cold, the first snow of the season, and my father was eager that we should have as much extra coin as possible for the journey. We spent each day down by the river, where a supply ship had recently overturned and there were prizes hidden in the mud for those that wanted most to find them. We laboured each hour, from dawn until dusk, through rain and sleet and snow.
Mud-larking was ever tiring work, but one evening I was more exhausted than usual. I fell upon my mattress, soaking wet, and was unable to rise. The dizziness came on suddenly, along with aches that made my bones feel cold and heavy. My teeth chattered even as my forehead burned, and the world began to darken as surely as if someone had pulled down its curtains.
I was adrift, my perception as unsteady as a small wooden boat in rough seas. I heard my father’s voice sometimes, and Jeremiah’s, but they were brief snatches followed by long stretches of surrender to the vivid stories in my mind’s eye, dreams most fruity and peculiar.
My fever raced, creating shadows and jagged monsters in the room; they lurched across the walls, widening their crazy eyes, reaching their taloned fingers to grab at my bedclothes. I turned and twisted away from them, my sheets wet from the exertion, my lips moving around incantations that seemed of vital importance.
Words pierced my delusions like hot needles, familiar words like doctor … fever … America … that had once held meaning and importance.
And then I heard Jeremiah say, ‘You must go. The bailiff will be back and he’s promised to put you in jail this time, or worse.’
‘But the child, my little bird – she is not well enough to travel.’
‘Leave her here. Send for her when you’re settled. There are people who’ll mind a child for a small fee.’
My lungs, my throat, my mind all burned with the effort to shout, ‘No!’; but whether the word passed my lips I could not tell.
‘She depends on me,’ said my father.
‘Worse, then, if the judge decides that you must pay for your debts with your life.’
I wanted to shout, to reach out and grab my father, to cleave him to me so that we could never be parted. But it was no use. The monsters pulled me under again and I heard no more. Day dissolved into night; my boat pushed out once more into stormy seas—
And that is the last I remember of that.
The next thing I knew, it was morning, bright, and the first sound to my ears was of birds calling outside the window. But these were not the birds that sing of morning’s arrival here at Birchwood Manor, or those that used to nest beneath the sill in our little house in Fulham. This was a great cacophony of birds, hundreds of them squawking and jeering in languages foreign to my ears.
A church bell pealed and I recognised it at once as the bell of St Anne’s, but it was different somehow from the sound that I knew so well.
I was a shipwrecked sailor, washed up on a foreign shore.
And then a voice, a woman’s voice I did not know; ‘She’s waking.’
‘Papa,’ I tried to say, but my throat was dry and a mere airy sound arrived.
‘Shhh … there, now,’ said the woman. ‘There, now. Mrs Mack is here. Everything’s going to be all right.’
I cracked open my eyes to find a large figure looming above me.
Beyond, I saw that my little suitcase was on a table by the window. Someone had opened the lid and my clothing was sitting now in a neat pile beside the case.
‘Who are you?’ I managed to say.
‘Why, I’m Mrs Mack, of course, and this lad here is Martin, and that over there’s the Captain.’ There was a note of cheery impatience in her voice.
I looked about, absorbing quickly the unfamiliar surrounds and the strange people to whom she was pointing. ‘Papa?’ I started to cry.
‘Shhh. Lordy, child, there’s no need to blubber. You know very well that your father’s gone on to America and will send for you when he’s ready. In the meantime, he’s asked that Mrs Mack look after you.’
‘Where am I?’
She laughed. ‘Why, child! You’re at home, of course. Now, stop that bawling or else the wind might change and spoil that pretty face of yours.’
And so I was born twice.