The Lives She Left Behind (2 page)

‘That’s probably harmless,’ said the psychiatrist uneasily. ‘Animals do it. Let’s look at the other side of all this. What is it you
like
about your
daughter?’

‘Like?’

‘Yes. Well, all right. What pleases you? What does she do right?’

All that came into Fleur’s head was that her daughter was surprisingly good at predicting the weather but that felt more like an irritation than an accomplishment, starting from the fine,
warm day when Jo had developed a wobbly bottom lip when she wasn’t allowed to bring her raincoat with her and they had both been soaked by a downpour that seemed to come from nowhere.

‘She’s very tidy,’ Fleur said, but it didn’t seem an adequate response.

Back home, Fleur often found herself wanting to shout ‘Don’t watch me like that’ when she saw her daughter’s eyes following her. What she meant was ‘Don’t
need me like that’, which you might say was not her fault, going straight back to her own mother and her mother’s father and grandfather, and on backwards veering between genders for
thirty, forty, fifty generations – all the way back to one who started the whole chain reaction without any parental influence whatsoever. Perhaps any one of them could have broken the chain
by deciding to do it differently. Could have done, but didn’t.

Jo became a very quiet little girl when she was at home. At school, she could talk to her secret friend in her head, but she learned to close that door when she knew her mother was around and
that meant that at home she was only half a person. At night, when her mother was downstairs, she could talk again, sometimes out loud, and her friend would be there to reassure her, to go over the
events of the day with her and show her how to smooth away the sharp parts. She didn’t know that Fleur could creep up the stairs, leaving the television turned up to cover her. She
didn’t know that from the other side of the thin plywood that had turned the old doorway between their rooms into a clothes cupboard, her mother could hear anything she said and write down
what she heard. That was why, once or twice a year for the next five years, Fleur would take her daughter to another quiet specialist and then another, always hoping they would take it more
seriously than they did. She wanted them to treat her daughter like you treat an old house for woodworm, as if a spray from some magic chemical might make her normal.

When Jo was nine, Fleur went to a parents’ evening at her school. It was an expensive private school and she went because she had recently bought the vicarage next door.
As a speculation it looked like being rapidly rendered unprofitable by unexpected problems in the roof and she thought perhaps the head might see it as a worthwhile investment to help the
school’s expansion. That meant serving her time by sitting down to listen to Mrs Hedges, Jo’s teacher, and it soon became apparent that Mrs Hedges had something to say.

‘I’m very interested in an expression Joanna used in class, Mrs Driscoll. It’s not one I’ve heard before.’

Fleur’s first thought was that her daughter had used a swear word because it would not have surprised her at all that Mrs Hedges hadn’t heard it. Mrs Hedges seemed to have only a
small fingerhold on the real world that Fleur inhabited, the world of business. She had no time for the whimsical and indulgent take on childhood that Mrs Hedges had displayed on the few occasions
they had met. She did not see it as a teacher’s function to show undue fondness for the children in her care nor to bring them up in the belief that the world was a benevolent place only
distinguished from fairy tales by the absence of talking rabbits.

‘What did she say?’

‘We were discussing proverbs, you see? It’s such a good way to get them to look at language and culture and history.’

The only proverb that immediately came to Fleur’s mind was ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’, a statement of which she thoroughly approved, so she simply raised her
eyebrows and Mrs Hedges, sensing a chill without understanding why, floundered on.

‘I asked them if they knew any proverbs and she put her hand up, you see? She doesn’t often do that so I went straight to her and she said this odd thing.’

‘Which was?’

‘She said, “The mist on the hill bringeth water to the mill.” Now, I wonder, is that something you say in your family?’

‘No. Why on earth would anyone say something like that?’

Mrs Hedges opened a folder and Fleur noted grimly that the cover was decorated with stuck-on pictures of roses. ‘Then she said, “Women’s jars bring men’s wars.” At
least I think that’s what it was and, um, yes, “The hasty hand catches frogs for fish.”’

‘And is that supposed to mean something? It sounds like nonsense.’ Fleur looked across the school hall to where Jo and a group of other children were being rehearsed in some
entertainment that she feared the parents would be expected to sit through at the end of the evening.

‘I was hoping you could tell me,’ said the teacher. ‘I took the one about mist and mills to mean that good things come out of bad and I looked up the frogs one on the internet.
It says it’s very old and Sir Walter Scott used it in
Ivanhoe
. I wondered if you’d been reading
Ivanhoe
to her or something like that?’

‘No.’ Fleur hadn’t been reading anything to Jo and wasn’t sure if
Ivanhoe
was a poem or a book.

‘And the women’s jars thing? I can’t find any trace of that.’

‘I have no idea. Does this matter?’

‘Well, yes, I think perhaps it does. Since then her writing has really taken off. She’s turning out to be very imaginative. She has been writing some lovely stories.’

Mrs Hedges delved into the rose-covered folder again and any other mother there would have smiled and reached for the papers she brought out and been thrilled that their daughter was showing
early literary talent but Fleur, who was not any other mother, had something more pressing on her mind. She looked across the room and saw Justin Reynolds, a member of the Council Planning
Committee, just getting to his feet from another session at another table. She left Mrs Hedges stunned by the speed of her departure, though somewhat relieved.

In the car on the way home, as Jo waited without success for any mention of the songs she had sung in her first ever public performance, her mother said, ‘I’ve arranged for Maria
Reynolds to come and play.’

‘With me?’ asked Jo, surprised.

‘Well, of course, with you. Who do you think she’s coming to play with? Me?’

To Jo that somehow seemed less unlikely. The closest she had ever come to Maria Reynolds was in the brief moment before Maria had pushed her over in the playground. She said nothing.

‘Where do you get all these sayings from?’ her mother asked. ‘All this stuff you’ve been spouting in class about mists and frogs and jars. Have you been reading
books?’ It sounded like an accusation.

‘Someone told me.’

‘What someone?’

But Jo had learned not to mention the friend she talked to every night when she went to bed – the friend who was there for comfort and for wisdom, who spoke to her from inside her
head.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘You’re getting very secretive. I don’t like it.’

That evening Jo sat in her room, getting ready to do her homework. Mrs Hedges had asked her to write another story.

She settled in her chair and opened her exercise book. ‘What shall we write about this time?’ she asked into the silence of her room and listened to the answer, smiling to
herself.

Fleur came in much later, noticing the light still on. She had been on the phone for most of the evening trying to sort out the problems at the Durston barn conversion where the highways
department were kicking up about access on to the lane. She tutted when she saw Jo lying asleep with most of her clothes still on, unbuttoned all she could and rolled her daughter under the duvet.
Then she saw the open exercise book.

‘My Cottage,’ she read. ‘My cottage stands where it has always stood, under the edge of the hill, and it is made out of the bones of the hill. All its stones came out of the
hill and its beams are made from the trees that grew on the hill. One day it will sink back into the hill but only if I am not there to save it.’

They lived in the heart of York, in a house made of good Victorian brick. Fleur tutted again. Mrs Hedges might like it, but imagination didn’t put bread on the table.

Jo wriggled away from the noise her mother made, burrowing miles down to the place where she really lived, in the cottage room under the eaves where the evening air, blown by birds’ wings,
carried in the scent of kindly thatch.

After school the next day Maria Reynolds came to play. She loomed over Jo, blotting out the light and hissing murderous and mysterious words of ill omen at her whenever they were by
themselves.

‘Have you been saved?’ she said. ‘You’re going to burn in the fire. Did you know that?’

For once Jo tried to stay as near her mother as possible to keep this fat malevolence under some sort of restraint, but Fleur shut herself away in her study, leaving her daughter to endure the
pinches and the mean taunts. Even when Maria’s father came to fetch her, the misery did not end because Fleur poured him a glass of sherry and shut him inside with her. Jo set up the skittles
just outside the window for safety and she could see them talking inside – saw her mother unfolding plans, laughing and smiling as she never normally did. They were at it for half an hour and
whenever they were both looking the other way, Maria would throw the hard wooden ball at Jo instead of at the skittles.

‘I’m going to heaven,’ she said. ‘I’ve been saved. You haven’t. You’re a sinner. You deserve what’s coming to you.’

At the weekend, Fleur announced that they were going out for a picnic, which was not something they had ever done before.

‘Where are we going?’ Jo asked.

‘It’s by a river. There’s a field I want to see.’

It was usually houses and old barns her mother wanted to see and Jo was very used by now to hanging around while Fleur talked to men with clipboards and tape measures who got out of battered
vans. ‘It’s what keeps us fed, my dear,’ was what Fleur always said if she thought she caught a look of boredom. ‘Your father didn’t provide for us, so I have
to.’

A field sounded good until she asked the next question, looking at the hamper her mother was loading. ‘Will we eat all this food?’

‘We will, and Mr Reynolds will, and Maria and her little brother.’

It took them nearly half an hour to drive there. ‘Now, what I want you to do is take Maria and her brother off and give me some time to talk to their father,’ said Fleur.

‘Isn’t their mother coming?’ Jo asked hopefully.

‘She’s coming a bit later,’ said Fleur, ‘when she’s finished doing something or other for their church. They’re very religious, you know. There’s no
need to make a face. There’s nothing wrong with believing in things.’

The picnic was indeed in a field on the edge of a river, but what Fleur hadn’t said was that the river flowed through a village that felt a bit like a small town because it had factories
and a big caravan site on that side. The field was a bit further down the river but it wasn’t the sort of field that promised fun even if Jo had been by herself. Maria’s brother was
called Simeon ‘With an “e”, he told her, ‘like in the Bible,’ and he joined in the game of bullying Jo with a zeal that showed how accustomed he was to being the usual
target.

‘You don’t go to church, do you?’ he asked as soon as they were by themselves.

‘I’ve been to church,’ Jo said. ‘I’ve been to a wedding and a christening.’

‘That’s not real church. That’s misusing the church’s solemn fabric for earthly ends. If you don’t go to real church, you’ll go to hell. You have to be
saved.’

‘She won’t be saved,’ said Maria with contempt. ‘Who would bother to save her?’

‘God the Father would,’ said Simeon. ‘He saves anyone who wants to be saved.’

‘Not her,’ said his sister. ‘Don’t talk about what you don’t know about.’

‘He’d save her.’

‘Who says so?’

‘I say so.’

Words came to Jo’s mouth. ‘ “They say so” is half a liar,’ she said quietly.

‘What does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything. Are you saying I’m a liar?’ Maria stepped up to her, inflating herself and butting Jo with her stomach so that she had
to step back.

‘I don’t think a real god would be like that,’ Jo answered bravely. ‘God tempers the wind to a shorn lamb.’

Simeon made a loopy sign with his hand. ‘You say stupid things,’ he said, and Maria pushed her so that she fell over backwards, then kicked her and walked off laughing. Jo felt tears
coming to her eyes with the pain of the kick and reached out in her mind to her private friend, the wise and gentle one who was always there for her, but instead of that comforting strength she
could only feel distant misery.

That was a shock. It was the first time there had been any distance at all between them. She could not remember the time before her friend. That calm, consoling voice had always been somewhere
just there. If she could have reached inside her skull, she could have put her finger on the exact spot, towards the back and a little to the right. Now she could feel someone still close by, but
not
with
her – and it was someone who was hurting even more than she was. Jo got to her feet and ran along the edge of the field, with the water flowing just beside her, past the
twisted shopping trolley wedged among the stones and the pool where dark fish flicked their tails, all the way to the far hedge where she knew her friend was, where she was needed.

She knelt close to the riverbank right by her friend but there was a wall between them and she knew this best of friends didn’t want to drag her into whatever was happening. She persisted,
opening herself up to the misery next to her until she broke through the barrier and found out, much too fast, what death and the sorrow of death felt like.

Fleur eventually found her there, curled up in a ball and weeping. The Reynoldses were close behind her, the father and the mother, with Maria and Simeon hanging back behind them, grinning.