Meeting Lydia Page 2

  Or she was pregnant! God forbid. Did you get hot flushes with pregnancy? More surfing had proved inconclusive. She felt sick. Had she been feeling sick before? With Holly just beginning her degree and a husband who was umbilically attached to the pub these days – never mind her other suspicions – this was no time for a baby. She looked for signs of breast tenderness but there was none.

  Edward Harvey. Click Search, and wait … There were four of them. That’s one more since last week. She scanned the new entry, hoping to see some evidence of familiarity. Edward Harvey: Leeds Grammar School, leaving date 1989. Too young. In any case, Edward – her Edward – had gone from Brocklebank Hall to Waterside Grammar. She remembered that at least (again the heat).

  If she were pregnant it would be a disaster. A mega-disaster. Had any of her friends ever mentioned hot flushes when they were pregnant? She certainly didn’t get them with Holly.

  She scanned the rest of the Edward Harveys in case she had missed something, but they were all either too old or too young. She checked the Brocklebank page, but there were only about half a dozen names, mostly from before her time; her brother Louis’s era. Perhaps she would look at the Waterside page again.

  But what year did he leave? Was he older or younger than her? She knew he’d stayed on to Sixth Form because of the Science course in 1974 when she caught a fleeting glimpse that prompted a girlish swoon. She called up the lists for Waterside Grammar School and looked through those spanning the three most likely years. No Edwards and no Harveys. Perhaps there never would be; perhaps Friends Reunited wasn’t quite the thing for someone like Edward Harvey.

  She checked her watch.

  It was past ten and her husband was still not back. He used to phone if he was going to be late. How should she deal with this new development? Twenty years of tranquillity had not prepared her for conflict. The eel popped up from its ocean depths as if wrapped in air-filled polythene pillows. She shuddered. All the loneliness she felt as a young child was breaking through a casing where it had been stored away safely for decades. She could feel it rising through her body, disturbing her viscera, forming itself into an inward scream that reverberated and echoed with all the pains and anxieties of memories of a life tormented by bullies. She tried to suppress it, but was becoming increasingly weak against its insistent progression.

  She was nearly forty-six; more than likely past half way. How many more years would she have when it would matter? Didn’t she owe it to herself to try to mend the broken pieces of her youth while she still had time to benefit? The cooling of the summer marked yet another year of procrastination. Might the solution lie with a website called Friends Reunited? With a list of schools, a list of names, a search box and a promise of something special?

  Might the answer lie in finding Lydia?

  2

  February 1962

  Brocklebank Hall

  Mrs Swift is a scary woman with a tight brown perm and constantly pursed lips coloured with dark red lipstick. She has both orange and turquoise mohair cardigans which she wears alternately in the winter months, and she thumps on the old piano in the corner of the classroom in the way that teachers do.

  The tables and chairs have been moved against the walls for the first form’s music and movement lesson. A dozen prep-school five-year-olds, in tiny grey prep-school uniforms, skip and jig with no embarrassment and no self awareness, just like lambs frolicking on a sunny springtime evening.

  Mrs Swift, seated at the piano, claps her hands and the children rush to form a circle. They hold out their arms and shuffle sideways and outwards until they are not quite touching.

  “Er, Neville,” says Mrs Swift looking sternly over her shoulder. She says ‘Er’ a lot, usually with enough menace to keep the most recalcitrant child in line without any further elaboration. “Neville … you begin.”

  Then the thumping on the piano starts, Mrs Swift working the foot pedals with grape-treading vigour.

  “In and out the dancing bluebells; in and out the dancing bluebells; in and out the dancing bluebells, who will be my partner?” The children sing as Neville weaves in and out of the circle of classmates, stopping on the last word, behind the nearest child and tapping them with both hands on the shoulders. “Tippy tippy tapper on your shoulder; tippy tippy tapper on your shoulder, tippy tippy tapper on your shoulder, you will be my partner.” And now the child in front of Neville leads the weaving in and out and the verse is repeated until there are no dancing bluebells left in the circle, just a long line of children, skipping around the classroom; a conga for the kindergarten!

  Marianne likes these sessions, but not when Pete Glanville is the tapper and he stops behind her and almost batters her into the ground.

  Marianne aged five stood quaking fearfully by the breakfast table as her mother buttoned her into her navy-blue gabardine mac. She was aware of a checked tablecloth, of toast crumbs, a box of cornflakes and green-patterned dishes; of her father’s kipper bones hanging over the edge of a plate. Familiar things …

  She breathed quickly, finding it hard to hold back the tears. Her mother probably sensed the anguish and was especially gentle fastening the belt and running the end through the loops at the front and the side, but she said nothing. Marianne’s mother, who was half French and called Daphine, had an Emma Peel flip hairstyle and painted eyebrows. She feigned cheerfulness by smiling.

  Slender fingers were eased into grey woollen gloves one at a time and a tasselled blue beret was placed at a jaunty angle on her head. Marianne felt secure at her mother’s touch and wished this ritual dressing would go on forever.

  “Ready?” called her father, Roger, striding down the stairs and grabbing his worn, black briefcase from behind the door. He was a tall man with piercing dark eyes and a brisk manner. He was an architect by profession and precision was his watchword.

  She would never be ready to be taken from these cosy walls.

  “Pens, pencils, handkerchief?” He always asked this and she always said yes. It was one of the many routines that made her feel secure.

  Then it was out into the chilly winter, white-frost morning, into the car and off to school for another tortuous day.

  Brocklebank Hall was a forbidding, Munsterian house perched on the top of a hill on the edge of the small town of Derwentbridge in Cumbria. It was a place of woods and rhododendron bushes; of green playing fields and lawns. It might have been considered an ideal location for a child but for the psychological battles that were played out by some of its inhabitants every day.

  Marianne stepped from the car and onto the asphalt and waved to her father. Then she walked towards the heavy oak front door, dragging her feet, pausing before she turned the brass handle and then pushing hard with all her weight.

  Behind the door was a spacious hall with parquet flooring, a rag rug and a leather armchair. The Headmaster’s yellow Labrador, Alfie, rose from the rug and bounded towards her, wagging his tail. He had a huge, flat wedge-shaped head and a pink nose. She stopped to pat him, remembering that it was best to do so while standing up. Once when she’d been sitting in the armchair, he had wrapped his front paws around her leg and made peculiar jerking movements. He had seemed excited and wild-eyed. She liked dogs, but not when they acted like they were possessed.

  A large globe stood on an oval mahogany table by the window. Sometimes when she waited for her mother after school, she would spin the globe and gaze at the names of the countries and the vastness of the oceans. Great Britain seemed an insignificant pink speck tucked away on the edge of everywhere else.

  The shelves were stacked with books and piled high with well-read National Geographic and Look and Learn magazines. On the wall, school photographs hung in their elongated, horizontal black-rimmed frames, full of tidy schoolboys and the occasional girl, caught for a moment in time.

  The first form room was behind this wall, a large sunny room with a huge bay window and rows of tiny desks and tiny chairs. A nature table adorned with disused nests and th
e first spring flowers guarded the wall by a piano, and a model town was laid out on a trestle table in the window overlooking the tennis lawn. The walls were festooned with posters – ‘a is for apple’ and so on – and white cards on which were big red felt pen dots, set out like the numbers on dice. It was a cheerful room and Marianne felt safe in it.

  It was outside where the darkness lay. Outside where the big boys prowled; where the bullies lay in wait to taunt the weak.

  Mrs Swift was already there with three boys. She was in the corner where the hula hoops and balls were kept, and was showing them how to tie their shoelaces using wooden boards with two rows of holes in them and brightly coloured strings threaded through. Marianne went to her desk with a superior air. She had been able to tie her laces since she was four.

  She looked around for Alice, but Alice wasn’t there. Then she remembered. Today Alice was off having investigations on her eyes. She shuddered nervously at the thought of a day without Alice.

  Alice Waugh was the only other girl in the first form, but she might as well have been a boy for she loved to get involved in the rough and tumble of the typical five-year-old. She had blonde wavy hair and glasses with one lens covered with sticking plaster. She was Marianne’s only playmate and she lived in the country in a white manor house with so many staircases that Marianne had been frightened of getting lost when she went to visit.

  When break time came, Marianne hung back inside the classroom as the boys rushed out to get their milk from the dining room and then to play outside.

  Mrs Swift shooed her out in front of her. “Er … Run along Marianne. There’s a good girl. Fresh air will do you good.”

  Grownups are always saying this about fresh air, thought Marianne, wondering why Mrs Swift didn’t go out with them and instead tottered on small heels down the narrow corridor to the staffroom.

  Marianne avoided the bottled milk in the dining room because it made her feel sick, and instead slunk outside where older boys from other classes ran and pushed and yowled and yelped.

  The frost had thawed, but there was still a fearsome Cumbrian chill in the air against which bare knees didn’t stand a chance. Almost immediately the shivering began.

  Her mother always told her to put on her coat when she went outside, but the boys had called her a sissy and she didn’t like that. Yet even without her coat, they called her names. She tried to remain unseen and crept behind the enormous yew hedge that bordered most of the front of the school house, camouflaging the dustbins.

  “Oi, you!” yelled a boy of about six with a thick brown fringe and an entourage of minions close behind.

  Marianne froze.

  “Where’s yer little speccy-four-eyes friend? D’you wanna come an’ play with us?” The boy, a second former called Barnaby Sproat, put his hands on his hips and grinned at his friends, tossing his fringe.

  For an instant Marianne was grateful. Her face lost its worried frown and she moved towards them.

  But Barnaby Sproat was only joking – scoring points, leading the pack – and as soon as she came close he and his friends turned and ran shouting: “Get lost, girl! Who’d want to play with a weed like you?”

  Marianne looked bemused standing out in the open in the middle of the asphalt, a fragile scrap of a thing, hair in two little dark brown plaits. This time she sought cover through the rhododendron arch that led into the woods. There she stood among the trees and started to cry.

  She had never played with boys of her own age before and didn’t know how to start. Her brother Louis was seven years older. These little boys were an alien race, often noisy and rough, and they seemed always to be involved in games of chase that were anathema to her.

  The woods were a dangerous place for a small child to be alone. A gang of Teddy-boys sometimes lurked there, slicked-back hair, long checked jackets and pointy shoes, strangely incongruous among the shrubbery. Marianne didn’t understand the perilous nature of her escape route. For her the branches were comforting arms against the enemy without.

  Minutes passed, but to Marianne it seemed like an hour before the bell rang to signify the end of break. She rubbed her hand across her face, spreading the tears, but still she sobbed and sniffed; still she shivered.

  Thankfully lessons offered some respite from the traumatic world beyond the classroom and once back at her desk, she began to calm down. She loved to learn. In the few weeks since she had started school, she had developed a taste for all the basics and was racing through the Janet and John books as if she had been born being able to read. She devoured Mrs Swift’s work cards of mathematical calculations, and the exercises in Ronald Ridout’s English Workbooks. Perhaps it was being bright that caused all the problems. It made her different from the others. She thought too much and tried to intellectualise when merely being would have helped her to relate to other children.

  The only older girls in the school at that time inhabited the fourth form and were aged about ten. Almost adults in the eyes of Marianne.

  “Frightfully mature,” her mother had said with a touch of sarcasm when two of the girls had helped to show them round the school the previous year.

  They wore blue stretchy hairbands and had relinquished the top part of their pinafores.

  Fiona Pattinson was small, dark and serious-faced. Amanda Oglethorpe exuded composure and grace and had a ballerina walk. Marianne wished she was like Amanda and sometimes followed her around until the day when Amanda noticed and scowled with such ferocity that Marianne never followed her again. Caroline Farrow, or Carrie as her friends called her, always said hello to Marianne and clearly liked little children. She had a mane of hair in waves of red-brown curls and was Neville’s elder sister. Then there was Oriel Pimblott who was pretty, plump and giggly and had a crush on Jamie Russell, the Headmaster’s son. She had a perm that went wrong and sent her hair skywards in lopsided peaks like a fir tree blown by the wind.

  In the afternoon of the day that Alice was away, Marianne stayed in the dining room long after the nauseating lunch of spam fritters and semolina pudding was finished and everyone else had gone. She remained sitting alone on a pine bench in a trance-like state until one of the cooks came in to wipe down the tables and coaxed her from the room. She hung around in the hall, spinning the globe and patting Alfie until one of the fifth form prefects appeared from the passage.

  “Outside!” he commanded. “Or I’ll give you fifty lines!” The boy was known as Blockhead and had thick rimmed glasses and hair like the back of a scottie dog.

  Fifty lines of what? thought Marianne. She wasn’t sure what being given lines meant, but judging by his tone of voice, they didn’t sound very pleasant, so she fled through the front door and onto the asphalt, bare knees in the cold once again. A group of boys from her form were playing chase. When she approached them, Pete Glanville who was enormous, pointed to her and yelled, “You’re It,” and then ran off with his gang around the side of the house.

  She knew that being It meant she had to try to catch them so she ran as fast as she could, but with little success. For a while they seemed amused in trying to avoid her grasp and they slowed down until they were almost within reach before running away with whoops and mocking laughter. Marianne was unused to playing and had no idea of strategy. She kept running in circles as they weaved and dodged, eventually putting her foot in a pothole and falling on the asphalt.

  She felt the pain in her knee as if a knife had twisted into the flesh. At first she was too shocked to cry. She sat up and dusted her hands on her skirt, specks of gravel embedded in her palms. Blood was trickling from the cut in a bright red stream to the top of her grey sock. Only once before had she grazed her knee this badly. She looked around for help. All the boys had magically disappeared. She felt sick and dizzy but picked herself up and limped towards the back of the Hut where the bigger girls often gathered.

  She overheard Oriel speaking: “Mrs Swift is an old bag …”

  Marianne wondered why her teacher should be com
pared to such a receptacle and she visualised a creased brown shopping-bag with a tight brown perm.

  Fiona spotted her first. “Shhh!” she commanded. “It’s your shadow, Amanda.”

  “Uh-ho, let’s scram.”

  But Carrie recognised straight away that Marianne needed help. Carrie was kind; Carrie had a heart.

  “We better find Mrs Russell,” she said, taking Marianne by the hand and leading her back towards the school house. Oriel grabbed her other hand and the other two girls followed behind, now looking concerned and wanting to help.

  Mrs Russell was the Headmaster’s wife and also the school’s Matron and she roamed the upstairs dormitories with piles of sheets in her arms. She had grey-streaked black hair and in later years Marianne would think of her as looking like Virginia Wade.

  Marianne expected to be told off, but Mrs Russell was very understanding and bathed the wound. A bell rang in the background. Soon Marianne was sporting a large white dressing over her knee, held in place by pieces of plaster.

  Carrie took her back to the classroom where afternoon lessons had already begun.

  “Er, Marianne, what have you to say for yourself, coming in late like this?” Mrs Swift pounced, pursed her lips, took her by the elbow and marched her rather roughly to her seat. “Sit yourself down, and not a peep out of you till quarter to four. We will have words. We can’t have you running off like this.”

  Carrie began trying to explain what had happened, but Mrs Swift wasn’t listening.

  “We’ve been worried to death. We searched outside … Not a sign … And with those Teddy-boys about … She must learn she can’t just disappear like that. Do I make myself clear, Marianne? Do you understand?”

  Marianne felt the words stinging just like the pain in her knee and heat began burning her cheeks.

  “Shut up you old bag!” she said.

  This was to be a rare moment of courage in Marianne’s young life and she would always remember the look of stunned disbelief on Mrs Swift’s face and the smile of approval from Carrie. But for most of the time she kept quiet, a child alone and often scared, who could never tell anyone how she felt because she didn’t have the vocabulary. She hated coming to school because of what happened outside lesson time and she longed for the day when she would be old enough to do what she wanted, to make her own decisions and be free. But for now, she was in this dark and often joyless world, little knowing that before it got better, it would get a whole lot worse.