The Lost Child Read online

  And what about your mother, the twenty-two-year-old who knitted the purse full of poetry and hope? How does she cope with all of this? Is that pocket almanac stuffed with prayers really any consolation? Does she honestly believe that this - the systematic and painful decimation of her cheerful and creative young family - is some all-powerful and benign God's will?

  Suffolk, June 1838. The road to Woodton. Not day at all, but night - a hot, moonless, shapeless, starless June night. No shimmering hedgerows or blue skies, no poetry or hope - just a muddy old coach hurtling through the dry, dark lanes, kicking up the dust.

  So dark on this earth tonight that no one's even bothered to draw the curtains. Who, after all, is going to look in and see what's there on that punched leather seat?

  Two young women, one dead, one alive. The living one holding the dead one tight in her arms. The dead one's loose fair hair already wet with the living one's tears.

  FLATLINE

  The long-awaited relief,

  after so many a laboured breath,

  it's all over now. It's been

  long lost amongst for ever,

  replaced by the one whining sigh,

  that sings farewell over the empty form

  in the bed. So no one looks now,

  the eyes have been closed,

  the alarms have come and gone,

  and the line is left to bleed out,

  in the footsteps of the departed.

  2

  AND IT'S ON that frozen afternoon in February, only a matter of days, or is it weeks, after I tell our eldest child to go from our house, that I find myself standing in that graveyard at All Saints, Woodton, where you must lie.

  You wouldn't recognise Woodton now. If you drive from Bungay to Norwich, it's just off the BI233, a road that didn't exist in your time, a sharp left-hand turn and down into a mostly modem village with one pub. I do notice a road called Suckling Close. Along it, white-faced children with rucksacks straggling home from school. A woman in a beige anorak walking a dog. Pylons stretching on and on into nowhere.

  To the left of the church - which is small and solid and pretty, covered in greyish-blue shingle, just the way you probably remember it - a kind of farmyard. Low spreading cedars, frozen mud, hens, a cockerel crowing, wooden huts, a dog barking. To the right, not much. A field, a rough little track leading who knows where.

  The afternoon has turned dark again as I lift the latch on the gate. The small graveyard is a mix of very old lichen-covered stones and much newer ones - black polished marble with crisp lettering, yellow flowers slumped in little perforated metal pots. In some places the grass has been roughly mown, but a mole has been at work and even the longer grass is scattered with small, frozen mounds.

  The church isn't locked. I tip the metal latch and push at the heavy wooden door and feel the hush of silence suck me in. Leaving the door slightly ajar, I tiptoe in, across the dull blue carpet towards the aisle. The very first thing I see is your name carved into the smooth, bloodless stone:

  Sacred to the Memory of

  NICHOLAS NATHANIEL YELLOLY

  the amiable and beloved son of

  John Yelloly MD and Sarah his wife

  who died at Woodton Hall in this parish

  on the 11th day of November 1837

  aged 22 years.

  Near this place and in the same tomb

  with those of their brother

  are interred the remains of

  JANE DAVISON YELLOLY

  who was born on the 16th day of March 1808

  and died at Woodton Hall in this parish

  on the 21st day of June 1838

  and of

  MARY YELLOLY

  who was born on the 23rd day of December 1816 and died at Ipswich

  on the 22nd day of June 1838

  They were the 2nd and 6th daughters of John Yelloly and Sarah his wife and fonned a much loved portion of a numerous and united family

  The church is silent, very cold, very quiet, my breath visible even in here. Near this place and in the same tomb. But where? I go outside again to look for your grave.

  Many of the older stones are unreadable and the earliest ones that I can make out seem to be from the late nineteenth century - certainly nothing as early as the 1830s. There are so many stones where no trace of writing at all is left - faceless, nameless stones, scabbed with yellow lichen and slanting, slumping, tipping against the earth, nothing and no one to claim them. I can't see your family's name anywhere.

  The wind drops for a moment and I turn back to look at the church, but already the light has slipped away and I'm standing here alone and in the dark.

  When my mother married my father, she was twenty-one, too young to know what would happen, that you had to think about these things. She tried to leave quite early on, but didn't have the bus fare. After that, she used all her energy - all her bright, young, optimistic energy - to make a go of things.

  For fourteen years, she was happy. They were happy. She made sure that they were happy.

  Or, may be not exactly happy. But when I pushed my face between the gap in the car seats - him driving on the right, her pretty face on the left, dappled trees overhead - and said: You love each other and you'll never divorce, will you, Mummy and Daddy? they both laughed and said they wouldn't.

  They didn't say of course they wouldn't. They just said they wouldn't.

  By the time she left him, life had got so bad that I wouldn't have even thought of asking that question any more.

  There was a night - a black night rolled tight, tearful and shaky - when she came up and cried and slept in my room and promised she would do something.

  Don't worry. It'll be OK. I'll do something.

  I could see the shape of her in the darkness. I went to sleep. I was eleven. She kept her promise. The following summer when I was twelve, she left.

  My father was a funny man who smoked a lot and watched games shows on TV and was always in his workshop. But he could make jokes and he could make me laugh. When he drove us to school, I nearly wet myself sometimes with laughing.

  Back at home, two wills I ordered arrive in the post.

  On 24 June 1880 while visiting Sarah at Poslingford in the village of Clare in Suffolk, your sister Anna Suckling dies quite suddenly. She is sixty-five, not incredibly old, though a good age for your family, I suppose.

  Her will, written in a plump, square, slightly backwardssloping hand, has a codicil crammed with objects, jewellery and drawings. Among the pearl bracelets and silver tablespoons and albums of watercolours of Woodton, daguerreotypes and silver coffee pots, she leaves to her third son, John Lionel:

  the small diamond broach [sic] diamond and pearl ring I usually wear, gold broach [sic] with green centre, shawl pin with bird and pearl drop. Plain thick gold ring which belonged to his dearest father, gold chain which is on my eye glass, pearl half hoop ring, pair of long gold earrings which belonged to my dearest sister Mary . . .

  Mary. In a few words, a few seconds, the picture changes.

  You're not sitting on a stone wall any more. Instead it's night and you're looking into a dark mirror, candle flame flickering, your fair hair piled on your head, which is carefully inclined, fiddling with the screw clasp on an earring.

  A long gold earring.

  A quick gasp of annoyance, then a little movement of your fingers, a satisfied shake of your head. And for a second or two, with that sudden flash of gold, the shy satisfaction in your eyes, I can almost see your face, reflected there in that dark, candlelit glass.

  An old friend, who now lives in Manhattan, is in London for a few days and comes to spend a night with us. As we sit around the kitchen table late at night, talking and drinking, our story spills out. More, perhaps, than we'd intended to tell. The story of daily life as it is right now with our boy.

  Our friend looks more and more shocked. She's known our kids almost all their lives.

  I love him dearly, she says. I remember how he was the sweetest, m
ost responsive child. But I'm afraid he's abusing you.

  We both look at her.

  Emotional abuse, yes, I agree, I suppose that's how it does sometimes feel.

  Not sometimes, corrects his father. Always.

  You can't live like this, she says. You just can't. What about the other two children? What about your work? I can't imagine how you're keeping going.

  With great difficulty, we say, trying to smile. But for the moment we have to. What else can we do?

  She thinks for a moment, cuts a sliver of cheese.

  Have you considered, she says slowly, that he may have a drugs problem?

  We shrug and tell her he only smokes cannabis, as far as we know. She tells us that America is much more clued up about cannabis and its long- and short-term mental-health effects than we are over here. She tells us that everything we've told her makes her think of addiction. She says she'll put us in touch with someone in Manhattan - a kind of adolescents' psychiatrist who specialises in addiction. Even if she can't help you, says our friend, she'll know the people over here who will.

  We feel- how do we feel on that evening with our friend? Grateful. Doubtful. Relieved.

  A week later, back in New York, she calls to say she has arranged an hour's phone consultation for us with this woman, at her expense.

  She says we are to call the psychiatrist at three o'clock on Saturday.

  It's an unexpectedly hot, late-spring day and I'm weeding the garden, happy out there on my hands and knees with the sun on my head. I almost don't want to come inside and start talking about drug addiction.

  But at ten to three, I throw off my gloves and shoes and run barefoot into the house. And the boy's father and I sit upstairs in the study with two phones plugged in. A conference call about our child. The window is open and you can smell the blossom outside. My nails are rimmed with soil. Manhattan is a place in another world.

  We tell the psychiatrist about our concerns for our boy. We describe the straightforward, bright, happy and level child he used to be, and the aggressive and chaotic person he is now. We try hard to talk matter-of-factly and not emotionally. This is a clinical consultation, after all. We don't want to waste our friend's money.

  The psychiatrist asks if we know exactly when our boy started smoking cannabis. We hesitate. We tell her we don't know exactly but we're pretty sure it was around the age of fourteen or fifteen.

  She asks us If we understand about the difference between skunk and old-style cannabis.

  We look at each other.

  A bit, we say.

  Well, for instance, a lot of people say: Oh skunk, that's just like the stuff we all used to smoke, only a little bit stronger, right? Wrong. This is a very different substance, genetically modified and between fifteen and thirty times stronger in the ingredient called THC that can induce psychosis. It can do untold and irreversible damage.

  I take a breath.

  And it used to be thought that a young person's brain matured around the age of eighteen, but these days we tend to believe it's more like twenty-one. And if a THC-rich drug like skunk is inflicted on immature frontal lobes, then a child's neural pathways can be badly distorted. And because research into the effects of this drug have only really just started, perhaps the most frightening thing of all is that no one yet knows how to treat brains that have been damaged in this way.

  So - you're saying it's irreversible?

  We just don't know. We literally don't know.

  But, the boy's father says, neither for the first nor the last time, what can we do? Is there anything we can do?

  She gives us the name and phone number of an expert in London whom she recommends we consult - a woman who has a phenomenal track record for getting young people clean. She also tells us we must get ourselves to Families Anonymous meetings as soon as possible.

  Families Anonymous?

  Support for people whose families and loved ones are addicted to drugs. Please look into it right away - you'll find it on the web. For people like you, it's a lifeline.

  People like us.

  When we've finally thanked her and said goodbye, I look down at my dirty gardening hands and I start to cry.

  The boy's father touches my head.

  Hey. Come on -

  His frontal lobes, I whisper.

  I know, he says, I know.

  When our children were all very small- our boy may be three or four, the youngest just a baby - I decided that a mother of three should at the very least know how to do basic first aid.

  So I got in touch with St john's Ambulance and discovered that, if you were willing to get a large enough group of mothers together, say five or six, you could get a first aider to come over to your home and give you a morning's tuition in the basics. I can't remember exactly what it cost, but it wasn't much. It might even have been free.

  We all gathered in my sitting room with coffee and biscuits. Mums with sleepy, laughing eyes and post-baby tummies and stains down our T-shirts. And I can't remember whether we had our children with us - my dim memory says probably not. But I do remember the calm, practical efficiency of the man in his uniform. I remember his little jokes but also his overriding respectful seriousness as he took us through all the things we needed to be able to do in case of scalding, falling, drowning, shock, suffocation, or any sudden damage to life and limb.

  I remember that he demonstrated the recovery position. On your side, one leg higher than the other, checking the airways, checking the tongue was free. He showed us how to resuscitate a rubber baby doll - blowing into her mouth and pressing on her chest. The doll had a name, I can't remember what it was.

  And I know he also explained that, however much you fear for your child, you should try never to panic. Stay calm and always first check the accident scene for signs of anything else that could go wrong. You wouldn't believe, he said, how often people cause a second accident while rushing to deal with the first one. We all laughed.

  After he'd gone we all chatted some more over another cup of coffee. And there was a definite sense of lightness - a sense of relief and even self-congratulation that we'd done something practical to keep our children safe. Certainly, we all got the point about not causing a second accident. We doubted we would ever need to panic again, whatever dangers the future produced.

  Still trying to find you, intent on finding you now, I drive back to Woodton.

  A freezing day in March. A light dusting of snow has fallen overnight -just enough to make the world look clean. Though it's started to thaw on the road, it's still thick and white in the hedgerows. The ground is hard, the sky an aching blue.

  As I drive into the village, the bin men are there by Suckling Close, emptying the wheelie bins. I wait ages for the van with its flashing lights until the man in a woollen hat, his cheeks dark with cold, waves me on.

  I pull in on the snow-frosted verge just in front of All Saints. Cold air hits my face and I can smell manure. That cockerel is crowing in the farmyard next door and every time he crows a hidden dog howls his reply. I've never yet seen a single person there. My own dog gives me a bleak look as I leave her in the car and crunch up the church path.

  There are snowdrops everywhere - great drifts of them at the entrance to the churchyard, on the path in the field beyond.

  This time I decide to be more methodical, looking at every single grave that I can possibly read, inspecting each in turn, all except for the very obviously shiny new ones with fresh flowers on them.

  I crunch through the snow, making my way slowly backwards, away from the twenty-first and twentieth century and back, back into the dim shadows, where the early nineteenth century lies, sunken and undisturbed, under the shade of the conifers. Your century. I notice I'm holding my breath.

  These stones are almost impossible to read. I can just about make out one or two names. Leeder. Harvey. Edward - or Edwin? Wind gusts suddenly and powdery snow falls out of the guttering of the church, hitting the ground and making me jump.

/>   It gets harder to walk. Further back behind the church in the very oldest part of the graveyard, the ground has succumbed to a catacomb of molehills and my feet lurch and sink with every step. Each clod of earth is capped with snow, but soft underneath. Brambles and bracken. Crunch, snap, sink. The graves shift worryingly beneath my feet.

  Some of the stones have crosses, others are coffin-shaped tombs of stone, low in the grass and cracked so they look as if they've been dropped from a height. When I was small, I was terrified of cracked graves. Afraid that the dead might come climbing out of them, intent on revenge. Why wouldn't they be furious that the rest of us were still alive?

  I try to read names, a date here, a Christian name there, but so many are rubbed out by time and neglect. Emily, Luke, Richard. 1754 is the oldest grave, two years the shortest life. No sign of a Yelloly. No sign of you.

  And I'm standing in the farthest, coldest corner by the old ivy-covered wall when, for no particular reason, I look up and there it is in all its enormous splendour: Woodton Hall. Your home.

  My blood stops. But - not your home. Of course not your home. It's a trick. And it takes a moment or two to work out exactly what I'm seeing. Not the Hall itself, but its ghostly imprint - the space it once inhabited somehow pulled into sharp focus by the icy winter air. Its imprint. The space between the trees, the foundations. Is it because the trees are bare and the air so cold that I can see exactly where it must have been?

  Then, even though my eyes are still fixed on that spot, the sensation, the skeleton of a building, slips away. Just as quickly as it came, it dissolves again and there's nothing.

  Just me and some forlorn old trees and the crumbling remnant of a wall.