Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Sally Bayley 2018

Cover photograph © Arcangel Images/Adam Bird

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Sally Bayley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008226893

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008226879

Version: 2018-11-23

Dedication

For Angela Christine Bayley,

Soul of a Rose

Epigraph

‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (English edition, 1952, translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface: The Reader’s Backstory

PART ONE

1 Miss Marple

2 Grandmothers

3 The Village

4 Jane Eyre and Verity

5 Di

6 Behind Closed Doors

7 Poor Sue

8 Rocks from the Sky

9 David Copperfield

10 Peggotty

11 Betsey Trotwood

12 Hand-Me-Down Histories

PART TWO

13 Aunt Jayne

14 The Silver Jubilee

15 The Beach Hotel

16 A Murder is Announced

17 Margaret Thatcher Moves In

18 The Estate

19 A Few Facts

20 Wedgwood in the Front Room

21 Learning to Speak Nicely

22 The Major and His Wife

23 The Body in the Library

24 Bertha

PART THREE

25 On Her Small Brown Wings

26 Expert Opinions

27 Social Workers and Souls

28 A Momentous Interview

29 The Inexorable

30 Colwood

31 An Angry Goblin’s Cell

32 The Story of Sue

33 Crossing the Meadow

34 A Winter’s Tale

35 The Great Gig in the Sky

36 The End

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Credits

Also by Sally Bayley

About the Author

About the Publisher

Preface

The Reader’s Backstory

All stories have backstories, at least all stories worth knowing about, and all readers want to pry into those unlit spaces. We read to get back to those dark and dusty corners, to scrape back to old patterns: the strange symbol beneath the damp plaster, the squiggles on the crumbling wall. Reading is a strong torch shining through the dark.

As a child I was terrified of the story of Sleeping Beauty and the jealous old fairy who stalks the palace grounds. The fairy is furious that someone so enchanting should live, so she casts a spell on Beauty. Soon after, Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle; the needle is so sharp, and cuts so deep, that everyone is sure Beauty will bleed to death.

But another, kinder, fairy turns back the spell so that Beauty will not die, but instead sleeps for a hundred years. Everyone agrees that this is better than nothing: sleeping is better than dying. But from that day on, the king and queen begin to watch their daughter and worry. Not a day goes by that they don’t think of that sharp needle cutting through their fair daughter’s skin.

——————————

Reading is a form of escape, and an avid reader is an escape artist. I began my escape the moment I started to read. Aged four, I already had sentences stored up; I knew some words and I could put them together in a line.

But Mum didn’t have enough time to help me. She was managing babies and nappies; she was turning dingy cotton nappies from grey to white. Back from grey to white, sparkling white.

But white is very hard to get back once it’s been ruined. Mum used that word a lot. To ruin something was to turn it from white to grey. Nappies were never completely ruined, because you could boil them and bring them back to life. Nappies could always start again, as long as you kept them on the boil for long enough and didn’t mind the steam.

Mum hated plastic on babies’ bottoms. She preferred cotton, and cotton needed cooking to make it clean.

Every day Mummy boiled the nappies inside a large grey saucepan that sat on the hob. I climbed on a stool and peered down into the grey water. I stirred the nappies with a wooden spoon, and I was the Nappy Witch.

Mummy took out the nappies and hung them on the backline. They flapped in the breeze. I ran underneath them, and when they touched my scalp I screamed. Nappies were hard and scratchy. I asked Mummy why nappies weren’t soft, and she said they had to be strong so they could take all that scalding hot water.

‘But why do you boil them so much, Mummy? You’re making them hard.’

‘You can’t have those nasty plastic things so close to a baby’s bottom. Cotton is what you should put next to a baby’s bottom, nice strong cotton.’

Strong cotton, strong cotton, strong cotton. Strong cotton. I sat beneath Strong Cotton and I felt my brother’s fingers and toes. Strong cotton kept out the sky, strong cotton kept the wind away. Strong cotton kept babies nice and safe.

I made a tent from strong cotton and put my baby brother David in it. David was Baby Jesus and I was Mary, which, by the way, is my middle name.

‘Where on earth have you put the baby?’ Mummy asked. ‘Stop playing silly devils.’ Her face was hot and red and the clouds were poking up from behind.

‘He’s here, Mummy. He’s asleep, beneath the strong cotton.’

‘I can see that, young lady, I’m not blind. Stop playing silly devils with the baby. Leave him there under the tree, near the roses, where I told you. I want him out where I can see him.’

Mummy stuck her nose in the air and went back into the kitchen.

Then one day David went missing. I couldn’t find him anywhere. He was no longer beneath the roses when I went out after lunch. I put my hand inside his cot and felt soft white cotton on my hands, bare white cotton, warm cotton, and I yelled,

‘Mummy, Mummy, David’s not here! Mummy, Mummy, David’s not here! Mummy, Mummy, where is David, Mummy, where is David?’

Sometime in the summer of 1976, the very hot summer, the summer we were all dripping-hot and cross, the Nappy Witch came and took David away, and Mummy went to bed for a very long time. She went for two hundred sleeps, maybe more. Soon after, the Lady Upstairs moved in and Mummy fell under a thick, dark spell. She didn’t wake for years.

PART ONE

1

Miss Marple

Miss Marple was at the back of her garden wrestling with her roses when Dolly Bantry called by. The greenfly had got to them again and she was determined to see them off. Dolly would just have to wait for her tea! Miss Marple gave a vigorous spray from her bottle of lemon-scented chemicals. She shook the pink petals ever so gently and untied her garden apron. She rubbed her hands and gave one of her small, barely noticeable smiles.

(Miss Marple by me, age eight)

When I was eight I wanted to be Miss Marple. I still do. Miss Marple knows everything about everyone, but nobody knows anything about her. She has no backstory. You can’t see behind her and you can never get around her. Miss Marple sits in her chair in the front of St Mary Mead and looks out upon the world. There is nothing behind that antique chair except china shepherdesses and fallen roses.

When I think of Miss Marple I always think of my mother and grandmother and their old English roses. That is Mum spraying off the greenfly at the back of the garden. That is my grandmother putting on the kettle for tea, my grandmother, Edna May, with her nose against the window, watching Mum snip the blooms. Tea roses, climbers, I don’t know which, but pale pink, baby pink, the pink of Mum’s pillowcases; the pink of Little Bo Peep’s cheeks when she blushes from the heat.

‘Sit in the shade,’ Mum says. ‘Always sit in the shade, never on the side of a hill. Wherever you are, find a nice bit of shade. English girls shouldn’t sit out in the sun. Cover yourself up and put on a nice hat with a wide brim.’ Pink, rose pink, the colour of my straw hat, after all these years.

——————————

I know the names of all the old English flowers because I had a grandmother and a mother who tended to them at the bottom of our scrubby patch of garden. I am the daughter of an English florist and I have been trained to smell flowers suspiciously. If the roses didn’t smell, they weren’t real.

‘Artificial!’ Mum declared. ‘Nothing at all. Not a single bit. Not even a tiny bit of pong!’

Roses that don’t pong weren’t roses at all. When you smelled a rose you had to make sure that what you were smelling was the real thing, the old English thing, the smell that sent you back. Ring-a-ring-of-roses, a pocket full of posies, we all fall down, and back, headlong back.

English flowers should always send you back, back to days when girls wore aprons to do their chores and nannies fussed over tea and scones in the nursery. Days that never existed, days that never were, days we dreamed up from storybooks and nursery rhymes. But we wanted them nonetheless: as much as my mother wanted her roses to grow up alongside the wall and behave nicely; as much as Miss Jane Marple wanted to defeat the greenfly so that she could tell Dolly Bantry before tea that she had won, and that her roses were now as bona fide and factual as the Bayeux Tapestry.

——————————

Miss Marple likes to deal with facts, because facts are concrete. Mum likes facts too. Facts are as square as her windowboxes filled with pansies.

‘You’ve got to get your facts straight, Sally. First ask, what are the facts? You’ve got to get your facts first before you can begin anything!’

But if you want facts you have to go looking for them. ‘They won’t come to you,’ Mum says. ‘You have to make an effort!’

Miss Marple finds most of her facts inside St Mary Mead, the quiet English village she has lived in all her life. She knows everything she needs lies inside that quaint, chocolate-box place. Open up the lid, and there she is: an old lady tucked inside a pretty village. St Mary Mead with its Norman church spire and neat borders, St Mary Mead with its pleasant-faced locals, St Mary Mead full of people who remind you of someone else.

‘It reminds me of Mr Hargreaves up at the Mount,’ Miss Marple tells her nephew, Raymond, when he comes looking for facts for his novel. But Raymond doesn’t follow, because between you and me, Raymond isn’t half as clever as he thinks he is.

He doesn’t know that you don’t have to go very far to find a fact. Miss Marple knows that facts can be found by looking just over there: in the face of your mother as she lifts her head from the hot pan; in the veins of your grandmother’s hands as she picks up the shopping from the stairs; in the pattern on the curtains you stared at as a child.

There were small gay papier-mache tables in the drawing room, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and painted with castles and roses … for curtains, Gwenda had chosen old fashioned chintz of pale egg-shell blue with prim urns of roses and yellow birds on them.

(Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder)

——————————

As a child I was terrified of curtains. Flapping curtains were big black birds out to get me. Curtains were black-winged creatures that came in the night and covered my face. Curtains hid spiders and flies. Curtains suffocated sleepless children.

People hide behind curtains. In English villages, women spy behind their net curtains. ‘Net curtains cover a multitude of sins,’ Mum used to say. ‘You can get away with murder if you hang your curtains well.’ You can watch the world go by and no one will ever know that you are snooping and sneaking.

My mother loved her net curtains. She hated it when they started to get dingy and dirty, when The Woman Upstairs moved in and brought her yellow clouds of smoke.

But this came later. Before then, there were no net curtains in our downstairs flat, only a scrappy back door that flapped open whenever the sea is blowing a sharp wind across the front, my grandmother said. My grandmother, Maisie – Maze; my grandmother, who had knobbly fingers from arthritis and who never owned a smart handbag like Miss Marple because she didn’t have the time to clutch it tight with two hands. My grandmother, who never had two hands spare because her hands were always in soapy water, in the sink, or under the grill; my grandmother pulling out rows of toasted cheese or dragging a bicycle basket full of bread up the stairs.

But sometimes my grandmother went into the garden and snapped the heads of peas. She rarely did the roses. Those were for Mum. No. Maisie did the vegetables and peas, the beans and potatoes, the cabbages and rhubarb. My grandmother was like Mr McGregor: she dug her spade deep down inside the soil until she made the worms scream.

2

Grandmothers

In 1976, when I was four, the water ran out. There were no more baths. Worse than that, Mum’s roses were wilting. She rushed back and forth through the back door with perfume bottles filled with water. Mum spent all summer spraying her roses back to life.

‘That way the police won’t know,’ she told Maze. ‘They won’t come snooping about. As long as I don’t get the hosepipe out, nothing will look amiss. A few drops of water here or there isn’t going to make much difference. I must keep them moist, I must keep the roots moist, Maze, twice a day, morning and night. They don’t stand a chance in this heat. They’ll be killed off. I don’t want my roses killed off after all this.’

After all this. Mum said this a lot. After all this was Mum’s effort to plant her roses against a crumbling brick wall, to turn a nasty bit of council turf into Miss Marple’s garden. After all this was something grown-ups said about things that happened before us, before my brothers or I were born, before we even arrived at our house by the sea. After all this was back then, back when things were different, quite different, Mum said.

After all this meant that I had a grandmother who lived with us. Maisie was Edna May, but we called her Maze and she was with us ever since I can remember. Maze was before and after all this; Maze was always and everything. Maisie, Maze, Edna May Turner, the old lady whose back bent like a turtle; the little old lady who rode her bike along the sea front in a gale-force wind. Maze, the lady who picked us up from school when Mum wasn’t well. Maze, Maisie, Mary, May, Mary Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Like this, just like this!

——————————

Maze, Maisie, Mary, May. Finding out adults’ real names is difficult. Everyone is in disguise. Miss Marple is usually ‘Miss Marple’ but sometimes she is ‘Jane Marple’, like Jane in the Peter and Jane books we read at school. I don’t know any other Janes, not J-A-N-E Janes anyway. But it’s hard to imagine Miss Marple as a little girl like Jane, with yellow hair and a white cardigan, who plays with her blue rubber ball in the garden.

Jane is a Christian name, which means it comes first. Adults call you by your Christian name and so do your friends. Jane has yellow hair and her skin is brown because she spends all her time outside. Jane is always throwing a ball into the air, or chasing her dog, or running after her brother, Peter. Jane doesn’t look as though she ever sits down and reads a book. Jane plays in the garden in her pretty pink dress and nice white cardigan. Jane looks happy doing this.

In the Peter and Jane books Jane isn’t reading, but I wasn’t reading before I went to school. Mummy didn’t have time. She said she was very sorry but she couldn’t sit down with me and read a book right now because she had to put the nappies on. School would do that for me and I would be all the better for waiting my dear.

When I first discovered words they were sitting with their arms folded nicely on small squares of white card: ‘pretty’, ‘nice’, ‘much’, ‘like’, ‘but’, ‘of’, ‘is’, ‘ball’, ‘play’, ‘jump’, ‘dog’, ‘outside’. The words were all about Peter and Jane and Peter and Jane only ever did one or two things. Peter and Jane played with their dog or they played with their ball in the garden. When Peter and Jane were outside playing the sun was always shining. Sometimes they got hot. Then Jane took off her white crochet cardigan (crow-sh-ay) and put it on the back steps. Her mum got cross when she did that because she’d only just washed it and dirt stains never came out of white. Not properly.

Peter and Jane are always playing and they are always happy. They are never at school and they are never reading. I don’t know why, because reading is the most important thing. Reading, my grandmother told me, was the stepping stone to better things. If you were a good reader you would never have to face all this. You would never have to crawl over the big grey rock at the bottom of the garden with the sharp edges that stubbed your toes. You would never have to make a garden from scratch. You would never have to borrow a drill from the council and pull up all the muck someone else had left behind. You would never have to work for the council. You would never ever have to take the bins out.

——————————

It was my grandmother who first helped me read, my grandmother, Edna May Turner. When she was young, Edna May was like one of Miss Marple’s girls. She was a girl who came to polish silver and serve tea on the lawn; a girl who came to shine up the oak banister; a girl to make gooseberry fool and collect the windfall apples in the autumn; a girl to answer the doorbell; a girl to run errands in the village.

In 1930 or thereabouts (what year was my grandmother born?) Edna May Turner was carrying out the tea; she was crossing a hot lawn in a pretty English village. Edna May, the maid who was coming on nicely; Edna, the maid Miss Marple had found through her friend Dolly Bantry, was carrying a silver teapot towards an old lady sitting in the shade. Edna was concentrating so hard on the tray in front of her that she couldn’t see that the woman in front of her was lifting a large pink bloom towards her companion.

——————————

Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner.

(The Murder at the Vicarage)

How old is Miss Marple? Nobody knows. My grandmother was in her sixties and then her seventies when she was living with us, but we never really thought about how old she was. Grandmothers are just there, always and forever. They never go away and they never get older. Grandmothers are like the stone lion that sits on the corner of our front steps. Maze sits on her kitchen stool and slowly grows green lichen around her ears. We pat her on the way in and on the way out and sometimes we sit down on the steps with her and cry.

——————————

What did I know about Maisie? Not much, just scraps. She had white hair and she was ‘five foot five and shrinking’. That’s what she told us anyway.

‘Then you’re five foot four, Maze,’ I said.

‘A little bit more than that dear, a little more … you’re always a bit more than you think you are.’

Maze weighed eight stone five, she told me. Eight of the boulders at the bottom of the garden, eight of those rocks that fall down the hill like Jack and Jill in the stories she read to us; eight of those pebbles I picked up from the beach and put on top of my book to keep it flat. At eight stone my grandmother was both heavy and light. One day, she might just roll away.

——————————

When are grandmothers born? Nobody knows that either. What year was Miss Marple born? Before or after Queen Victoria? Sometime after Queen Victoria was dead, I think, perhaps before the king of England abdicated. ‘Abdicated’ means he left the throne; got up and walked off and left that shiny polished throne right behind him.

‘Flounced out,’ Maisie said. ‘He flounced right out to that beaming woman with her handbag.’

The king of England flounced right out of his throne room. He ab-di-ca-ted. The king got his sums wrong on the abacus. He pulled too many red balls over when he was counting. Or he began a different sum and no one could make sense of it: not all the kings and queens of England added up together, and one white king with one red wife meant that the one in the middle, in between, wasn’t a queen. She wasn’t even a lady. Her name begins with W and it sounds like a man’s name.

‘What was he thinking, rushing off to that woman with her big red lipstick and smile … that woman with her pointy elbows? She has too much powder on her face! It isn’t decent! Too much powder and not enough sense! Powder should stay on babies’ bottoms!’

Maze spoke as though she had been there, in the crowds outside Buckingham Palace, standing at the front. Sometime in 1936 Edna May was pushing her way through thick arms and legs, she was pressing her small blue beret to her head. Maze was waving her flag and looking hard for a glimpse of that bad lady with the bright red lipstick and the big white forehead.

‘She looked like the moon,’ my grandmother said. ‘The moon wearing a large smile.’

‘Always put on your best smile,’ Mum said. ‘You never know who might be looking. Now wipe off that silly grin and go and wash your hands.’

History is remembered by a series of smiles.

3

The Village

She lives in a village, the kind of village where nothing ever happens, exactly like a stagnant pond.

(Sleeping Murder)

In the Miss Marple stories everything begins and ends in the village. Whatever happens in the village, Miss Marple knows about it. People tell her things, often without their knowing. Somehow she’s always there, just when someone’s spilling the beans. Usually she’s sitting in the corner somewhere, like my grandmother with her coffee in the morning, enjoying a nice bit of peace and quiet. Now shoo!

Most of the time St Mary Mead is lovely and quiet. Every day is like being on holiday. There are no chores, at least not for Miss Marple. In St Mary Mead, Miss Marple wakes up to breakfast served by a girl called Mavis or Edna or Mary, which by the way is my middle name; she walks to the village shop with a wicker basket; she stops at the greengrocer’s, the baker’s, the butcher’s; then she has tea at the Copper Kettle.

This is the kind of life I dreamed of; and when I closed my eyes and dreamed this is where I would be: in St Mary Mead at the Copper Kettle, having tea and cake in the corner.

——————————

Villages are full of secrets. If I want to know something, Greta will tell me what is going on. Greta is the vicar’s wife. She loves secrets; but above all, Greta likes to gossip.

When women gossip they usually sit in circles. Gossiping is going round and round in circles until you come back to the same thing. Usually that’s someone’s husband or wife, but sometimes it’s the maid. Gossiping women are witches making spells from other people’s names, women making spells and sipping their tea. Now that I think of it, ‘Greta’ sounds just like a witch, a good witch.

Greta asks Miss Marple to tea because she hopes she can make her spill the beans. Then something might actually happen in St Mary Mead. But Greta doesn’t realise how much Miss Marple already knows, how much she can tell about Greta just by looking.

Greta Clementine was the sort of girl who relished a piece of scandal. Miss Marple took a quick glance around the room. There was Miss Wetherby jabbering away, talking loudly about the rise in prices at Dentons.

‘Two shillings for a jar of marmalade. That isn’t right, Rosemary, surely? Disgraceful. Simply disgraceful. I think we should all boycott the place.’

Miss Marple looked back at Greta’s flushed face. She’s married someone far too old for her, and now she’s stuck inside this village with nothing to do except listen to idle gossip.

Miss Marple looks carefully at Greta. The poor man couldn’t help himself. She’s a very pretty little thing, very lively, dresses nicely, nice figure. Still, it was rather selfish of him, because she’ll get bored. She’s terribly bored already. Look at her fidgeting away. Poor thing, she won’t get much from us that isn’t commonplace. And she won’t get it from her sweet vicar. He’s only interested in learning his psalms!

Greta lifted the big brown teapot and turned to Miss Marple eagerly.

‘Do you think it’s ready, Miss Marple?’

‘Oh, I should think so, dear.’

What a sweet old lady, Greta thought. She looks as though she knows everything but she just won’t say. Oh, why won’t she say? Why won’t someone tell me something interesting about someone at last?

Greta picks up her teacup and sighs. She catches Miss Marple looking at her and smiles.

——————————

Let me tell you something about Mummy, because I’d like to spill the beans.

Mummy grew up in a village called Sompting. Sompting is a place in Sussex next to Lancing and Lancing is near Worthing and Worthing is a town by the sea.

Mummy went to school in Worthing. She walked to school with her sister Di. Mummy and Di walked to school holding hands.

Mummy and Di spent all their time together. Their favourite thing to do was to draw maps. They walked around Sompting village and made a map of all the places they knew. They put a cross where the church with the tower was, and an oblong for the school, and a square for the village shop. Mummy said she learned to draw maps from reading the Milly-Molly-Mandy books. They have those in the library. I’ve read all of them now. The librarian says she can’t get me any more because the person who wrote the books has run out of ideas. Or perhaps she’s having a baby. Or perhaps she’s found a better way to spend her time, gardening. In any case, there aren’t any more Milly-Molly-Mandy books so I will have to find something else to read.

Every Milly-Molly-Mandy book begins with a map. If you follow the map you can pretend you are walking around Milly-Molly-Mandy’s village. I follow the names of the roads with my finger until I get to the Nice White Cottage with the Thatched Roof where Milly-Molly-Mandy lives; then I go next door to Billy Blunt’s house and ask him to come and play.

Billy Blunt lives with Mr Blunt and Mr Blunt owns a shop in the village. Billy gives me sweets from his dad’s shop, but I think sometimes he steals them when his dad isn’t looking. Billy Blunt’s pockets are always stuffed with sweets.

I read the Milly-Molly-Mandy books before I read Agatha Christie. Those were my very first books, after Peter and Jane, which we had to read at school, so slowly I nearly died. There are no murders in Peter and Jane and there are no murders in Milly-Molly-Mandy’s village, but there are lots of cottages with roses round the door. There’s Mr Blunt’s sweet shop which Mummy says reminds her of the sweet shop in the village where she grew up.

In Milly-Molly-Mandy’s village there is a girl called Sue; everyone calls her Sweet Sue. Sweet Sue is Milly-Molly-Mandy’s best friend from school. Sweet Sue and Milly-Molly-Mandy spend a lot of time together. They put buttercups under their chins to see which of them likes butter best. ‘A little bit of butter and a slice of white bread,’ they sing.

Milly-Molly-Mandy and Sweet Sue make daisy chains; they put them on top of their heads and then they twirl around and around. ‘Now you are the May Queen,’ says Sue to Milly-Molly-Mandy. ‘We shall go dancing upon the green. Put your plimsolls on Milly-Molly-Mandy, you don’t want to ruin your nice new white socks.’

Sue and Milly-Molly-Mandy are very happy together. Sue is now Milly-Molly-Mandy’s best friend.

Sweet Sue and Milly-Molly-Mandy are always seen around the village together. Mrs Mount at the greengrocer’s says they are inseparable. Every day Milly-Molly-Mandy and Sweet Sue walk to school holding hands. Mr Blunt watches them through the sweet-shop window. He knows they will pass every weekday morning at half past eight and that either Sue or Milly-Molly-Mandy will stop and pull up one of their socks just outside his gate. Then he will see a flash of pale rose skin beneath a white cotton hem.

At a quarter past eight every morning, Mr Blunt is ready at the window; he’s waiting for the sweet girl with dark brown plaits and her fair-haired friend. Mr Blunt knows too that every afternoon at four o’clock they will come back past his shop. They will step inside and buy either a quarter ounce of sherbet bonbons or a quarter of licorice allsorts. The fair-haired girl prefers the sherbet and the dark-haired likes licorice. He always adds an extra one or two because he wants them to come back.

Mr Blunt closes the shop at six o’clock. He pulls down the strip blinds and looks out across the green. He sees Milly-Molly-Mandy and Sue playing with a hoop and ball. He watches and he watches. Beads of sweat begin to form across his brow. The corners of his mouth twist into a smile.

——————————

People say nothing ever happens in villages. But that isn’t true. A lot goes on. Miss Marple knows this. Peculiar things happen in English villages all the time. You only need think of Poor Sue Blunt.

One day over tea at the Copper Kettle Miss Marple tells Greta, the vicar’s wife, the story of Poor Sue. Greta tries to remember it so she can tell it to someone else.

‘As a child, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But she grew up into an odd woman … Poor Sue.’

Miss Marple paused and looked out the window.

‘Please do go on, Miss Marple.’ Greta looked anxious. She did so wish that Miss Marple would stop being so vague and distracted. Miss Marple turned back to Greta. The poor girl was looking worried.

‘Something went wrong with Sue. The village people blamed her husband. David Blunt was quiet as a church mouse and very serious. And of course he was far too old for Sue. Three times her age.’ Miss Marple paused again. ‘Then one day she disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’ Greta squeaked, stirring her tea more quickly. ‘Someone can’t just disappear.’

‘Of course they can, dear, if things are managed cleverly.’

‘Well she must be somewhere … unless she’s dead!’

‘Mysterious things happen all the time, dear. You can live alongside people for years and years and not know things about them. Sometimes you are none the wiser for living in such close proximity. Husbands and wives can do the most surprising things …’

Miss Marple suddenly looked serious. ‘You can have suspicions, of course. We all have our suspicions.’

‘What are your suspicions, Miss Marple?’ asked Greta, stirring her tea furiously.

‘Sue was tangled up in religion. But it was all too emotional for her. She was a very quiet, modest sort of woman. She wasn’t suited to all of that. Sue would have done better as a mother I think.’

‘All of what, Miss Marple. All of what? Do tell!’

Later, when Greta told Miss Cram over tea at the vicarage, she was disappointed to find that Miss Cram already knew all about it.

‘Old enough to be her father. Disgusting,’ said Miss Cram. ‘It shouldn’t have been allowed, a man of over sixty marrying a girl of twenty.’ Miss Cram sniffed hard. She opened her bag and pulled out a tissue. She patted her lips.

‘And they never had children. I don’t think they could. That’s the price of unnatural relations if you ask me!’

Greta nursed her hot coffee and looked thoughtful.

‘Perhaps. More a case of too much religion and not enough fun. What she needed was more parties instead of prayers. And you know, people say, well …’ Greta lowered her head to the table and leaned across towards Miss Cram. ‘Well … that they spent all their time, you know …’

‘No, I don’t know, dear,’ said Miss Cram sternly, raising her eyebrow.

Greta leaned in further. ‘Summoning spirits … shrieking at God – whatever it is you do when you’ve gone a bit demented.’ She paused and tried to look thoughtful again.

‘You’ve heard that from Jane Marple, I suppose,’ said Miss Cram, looking quite put out. ‘She oughtn’t to be gossiping like that. Doesn’t she know it’s one of the seven deadly sins?’

4

Jane Eyre and Verity

Every story has a backstory. Backstories are stories in disguise. Sleeping Beauty has a backstory, Jane Eyre too, but I should tell you about Sleeping Beauty, because she came first.

Beauty is born to a king and queen who can never have children. For years the royal cot in the palace hallway sits empty. Finally, after ten years, the queen loses hope. She pushes the cot behind the hallway curtains and tells her staff never to touch it again.

Then out of the blue, as if by magic, the queen produces a child, a child so beautiful that anyone who sees him can’t help exclaim, ‘What a beauty! What a delight! How lucky you are! May God bless you and your child! May he grow fair and tall!’

An old fairy living on the fringes of the palace hears news of the child and she is filled with jealousy. She cannot bear that a child so beautiful and so loved should live. Her heart begins to fill with wicked thoughts.

Every day at noon the child sleeps beneath a rosebush in the garden. One day, the fairy takes a stroll to the rosebush where the child is sleeping. She bends down towards the cot and lifts the white muslin veil that protects him from the sun. Her knobbly fingers are cold and bent and the child, feeling something, stirs. His eyes open and he screams. The fairy pinches the small rosebud mouth between her fingers.

After that, there is only the sound of tweeting.

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When people die before their time they turn into ghosts. Ghosts are what the people left behind have to puzzle over. When Miss Marple meets Miss Temple, the schoolteacher, she knows she must help her draw out her ghost. Luckily, ghosts can come out of hiding with the mere mention of a name.

‘We had been talking,’ said Miss Marple, ‘about a young girl called Verity.’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘I did not know her surname. Miss Temple, I think, mentioned her only as Verity.’

‘Verity Hunt disappeared years ago,’ said the Archdeacon.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Miss Temple and I were talking about her. Miss Temple told me something I did not know.’

Most ghosts are familiar; you know who they are when you see them. Mum looks like a ghost when she passes down the hallway in her nightie; she’s pale all over, grey as congealed porridge. The bottom of her nightie is ripped and torn as if a wild cat has got at it. Sometimes, when the hall light is off, I don’t see her coming and I scream. Then Mum gets cross and goes back into her room and slams the door. We don’t see her for hours.

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Women waft about in their nighties when things are going wrong. Clotilde Bradbury-Scott walks into Miss Marple’s room in a purple nightie in the middle of the night because she’s afraid. She’s had a bad dream about nasty secrets hidden beneath pink polygonum flowers.

‘Polygonum baldschuanicum. Very quick-growing, I think, isn’t it? Very useful really if one wants to hide any tumbledown building or anything ugly of that kind,’ says Clotilde.

‘Ah, yes, but it’s a menace if you want to grow anything else alongside it. Before you can say Jack Robinson your polygonum cover everything.’ Clotilde Bradbury-Scott takes a long look at this old woman. Clearly, she knows her plants. Before long she will be volunteering her services in the garden; she must be gone before that happens.

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People prefer to cover up ghosts, but no matter what you do, ghosts will always go wandering. I met with my first real ghost when I was ten. Her name was Jane Eyre and I found her sitting on the library shelves wearing a tatty brown dress. By then I had run out of Agatha Christie and I was looking for something else. I needed a new friend.

‘Adult Fiction,’ the librarian said. ‘Jane Eyre is Adult Fiction. Does your mum know you’re here?’

‘Yes, she knows. She sent me here!’

‘Mmm. Well …’ The librarian lifted her glasses and peered down her long, thin nose.

‘She says I can’t keep reading all that murder mystery rubbish. It’s high time I took on the classics! Agatha Christie isn’t literature and no one is going to take me seriously unless I start reading something more sophisticated.’

‘Mmm. Precocious … I see. Well, she’s in Adult Fiction. Over there. Now go quietly. You’re really too young to be in there messing about.’

So I crossed the wide, squeaky floor and there, on the other side of that broad wooden stretch I found her in an old brown dress: Jane Eyre, dusty and faded around the edges. Jane Eyre, who is looking for Verity.

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You won’t believe me, but one evening while I was reading something floated down from the glass panels above my head and landed on my page. Whoosh! I turned and there she was. I knew it was her immediately. Who else could it be?

I could see her from the corner of my eye, a small pale face staring right at me. She was wearing the same brown dress and a small velvet scarf around her head. Red velvet was blocking my view of the page; red velvet was speaking; red velvet was speaking the words I was reading:

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.

I heard the words enter my brain, and they felt strange. I’d never heard words like this before. Nobody I knew uses words like this. Nobody says drapery when they mean curtains. Drapery is something you hang over something in order to disguise it. Drapery hides things – bodies and knives. Drapery is Jane Eyre behind the red curtains hiding from John Reed (her nasty cousin), who would like to kill her, because John Reed is not a good reader. He’s jealous of curious Jane, his clever cousin. John Reed has no curiosity. He can’t think of anything but his own nasty self! ‘No imagination,’ Mum says. ‘Too caught up in himself. It’ll end badly!’

Jane Eyre is a big reader. She knows that when you read, time just passes. I read and read and time passed, but when I looked up from my book, the strange little person was still there. I wondered where she’d come from. Her face said nothing at all. Her body was thin and her face pale and her hair fell over her face.

‘Slides,’ said Mum. ‘What she needs is some nice tortoiseshell slides. Clip it back, for goodness’ sake, Maze. She looks like a wild thing running about with all that hair blowing about. For goodness’ sake, get it off her face!’

I hated my slides. They pulled my hair so tight I got a headache. But I couldn’t see slides anywhere on Jane Eyre’s forehead, only tiny, furrowed lines. Jane Eyre was too focused on reading to think about her hair.

‘You’re a very serious person, Jane Eyre,’ I said out loud. ‘Maze says it’s good to keep a sense of fun. You mustn’t be too serious before your time. I don’t know how old you are, but you can’t be much older than me, and I’m eleven at the end of the summer as a matter of fact. And Maze says you can’t afford to be too serious too soon. If you’re too serious then no one will want you around. For one thing, you won’t get invited to any parties and no one will want to dance with you at the school fête and you’ll never ever be chosen as the May Queen or get a part in the school play. You’re not tall enough for that. I wasn’t chosen because I’m not as tall as Melissa Marshall and I’m not as pretty as Rachel Green, but I’ve got a good speaking voice, so Miss Bellamy chose me as the school narrator, and I don’t mind that. What about you, Jane Eyre, what will you be?’

But the little person with the pale face just blinked and turned back to her book.

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She stayed for hours. I can’t tell how many. Sometimes I looked up and I saw her mouth moving. I heard her quiet whispers. But she ignored me. She didn’t want to talk. She just kept on reading. (I think I hurt her feelings about the play, but truthfully, she would never get a part.) Jane Eyre, I decided, was a serious sort of person, and serious people never quite relax.

‘Clever people can be very tiresome,’ Maze says. ‘Cousin Norman was an intellectual and he was very taxing. They just can’t switch off. Too much going on upstairs … Norman could never relax.’

But after a while I did. I relaxed right into my book and soon I forgot she was there. Hours passed. Before long it was dark and Maze was coming to bed.

And that is when things began to change. That night there were clear panes of glass running between everyone else and me and I was suddenly quite separate, stuck on a solitary rock, far out at sea.

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By the time I’d finished reading Jane Eyre I knew that you can find missing people inside books. Jane Eyre, who reads a lot of books, calls these natural sympathies. Sympathies are relatives you never knew you had, the ones you always wanted. Sympathies are family ghosts and fairies, and sympathies keep you up at night.

I decided that my sympathies were Jane Eyre and Miss Marple, and once upon a time, a long time before I was born, they had been walking together through an English village looking for Verity.

‘Verity! Verity! Verity!’

But Verity disappeared years ago! Because someone loved her too much.

You can kill people you love, you know. In mysteries, this happens all the time. Miss Marple knows this, and Jane Eyre too, because like Miss Marple, Jane Eyre sees and hears everything; and like Miss Marple, she is genteel.

‘She looks like a lady,’ says Bessie Lee when she finds Jane all grown up. Bessie, who used to help her wash and dress, but not kindly; Bessie, who was too afraid of Aunt Reed to be kind.

‘Just like a lady now, Miss Jane, very proper. Look at you!’

Bessie means that Jane Eyre is small and quiet and demure, so people don’t see her coming round the corner, or across the village green with a basket in her hand. They don’t see her coming in through the back door and climbing up the stairs. Jane Eyre is quiet as a mouse. But she wanders everywhere, swifter than the moon’s sphere. And what she sees, she doesn’t tell a soul.

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‘Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon’s sphere, And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon the green.’

That’s Mum’s favourite part of Shakespeare; she says it out loud sometimes. When I first heard those lines I thought she was speaking about Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, the master of Thornfield Hall; Mr Rochester, the man Jane loves and leaves in the lurch.

But Mum said it was Shakespeare. ‘Only Shakespeare can write lines like that.’

Mum loves her Shakespeare. I think she likes Jane Eyre too, but she knows some bits of Shakespeare off by heart. She had to learn them at school. If she got them wrong the teacher, who was very strict, rapped her on the knuckles with a ruler. Mum says school back then wasn’t exactly like Lowood School where Jane is sent by horrid Aunt Reed, but something not far off.

Now I think of it, I’m not sure Mum would like Jane Eyre. She has a nose for secrets. Jane Eyre is curious; she listens in. Mum would say she’s a nosey parker, but Jane Eyre knows that plenty of things go on behind closed doors if you listen carefully. Like Mr Rochester’s dog, Pilot, she can sniff out the sinister and strange. Beware all those who house Jane Eyre!

Mrs Fairfax stayed behind a moment to fasten the trapdoor. I, by dint of groping, found the outlet from the attic, and proceeded to descend the narrow garret staircase. I lingered in the long passage to which this led, separating the front and back rooms of the third story – narrow, low, and dim, with only one little window at the far end, and looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle.

‘Mrs Fairfax!’ I called out – for now I heard her descending the great stairs. ‘Did you hear that loud laugh? Who is it?’

(Jane Eyre)

When you read a book like Jane Eyre, you start to see things, small fragments of this and that that shoot across your eyes like stars. Tiny pictures appear in between the pages as you turn them. You begin to see and hear things: a woman’s smile, a woman’s laugh, a woman with her hands held high, a woman speaking gobbledygook. And then suddenly, without warning, you are in Lancing on Sea a long time ago and you don’t know how you got there. Some strange spirit has carried you away. Jane Eyre! Jane Eyre! Whither wander you?

5

Di

I remember Di. She was the woman who arrived one night when I was five. Di was the woman who came from behind the dark curtains and sat in spirals of smoke. Di was the woman with a baby who cried in the night. Di was the woman with the long, snaky smile. Di was the woman who spoke gobbledygook. Di was the woman in my dreams.

One day, Mum took me upstairs to say hello to Di, the woman with black bullet eyes.

‘She’s your aunt, darling, your Aunt Diane. She’s come to live with us. She’s had a baby. We’re going to look after her. Now say hello nicely.’

What was an aunt, I wondered. I had never heard of an aunt before. What did aunts come from?

‘From Lancing on Sea,’ Mum said. ‘From Lancing on Sea.’

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A few days later, my brother Peter and I found a body in the front room. We came home from school and there was a man lying on the floor. He was thin with a black moustache and black hair and his mouth hung wide open. My brother opened the door and tripped over him.

‘He’s dead! He’s dead! Peter, Peter, it’s a dead body! We’ve found a dead body! Call the police!’

The dead man looked like a large black ant. I felt sorry for him. We could easily squash him and no one would ever know. Here was a poor dead ant, stuck to our hard floor. A giant spider or fly must have come from behind the curtains and strangled him.

Mummy came in and told us off for making such a fuss. The man on the floor was a friend of Aunt Di. Think of him as your uncle, she said. Uncle David. Uncle David is sleeping now, so shhhhh! Now close the door quietly behind you! There’s a baby upstairs!

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When you start a murder investigation you have to have clear plans of the place where the murder happened. Detectives call this the ‘crime scene’. If the crime scene is in a house they draw up careful room plans. Everything that might have happened has to be kept inside closed lines. Nothing must straggle over the edges. Detectives don’t like mess.

But a detective would have found our house difficult to plan. In fact, Inspector Craddock would have hated our house. (Miss Marple thinks Inspector Craddock is hopeless, but she’s too polite to say so.) Still, the inspector has a point: you can’t be a good detective among muddle and mess.

‘Where is my nice pair of scissors?’ Mum yelled down the hallway. ‘Which of you little swines has got my sewing scissors? Can’t I leave anything out without you getting your filthy hands on it!’

Fortunately, Miss Marple has an excellent memory so she doesn’t need to draw up plans. She can draw her own lines around things. Miss Marple can remember what lamp was on when the gun went off. She can recall which door was open and which was closed. She can remember exactly who was there and who wasn’t, precisely how the curtains sat on the carpet, who sneezed just before the light went out.

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Everything I know comes from reading. Everything I’ve found out comes because of Miss Marple and then Jane Eyre.

After I found Jane Eyre nothing was the same again. She was always there, always looking and hearing the things no one else dared. Let me show you what I mean.

One night, in her small room at Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre hears a strange gurgling sound coming from the room above her. She stirs and opens her eyes, but she can’t see anything in front of her except smoke! Smoke is filling the hallway outside her room, smoke is pushing its way beneath her door, smoke is filling up her lungs.

Jane leaps out of bed and races down the hall; she flies towards Mr Rochester’s room and shouts through the door. ‘Master, Master, wake up! Wake up! Your room is on fire!’

Lucky for Mr Rochester, Jane is a quick thinker. Quick as a flash, says Maze, fast on her feet, that one. Doesn’t miss a trick. And Jane is practical, too. She drags Mr Rochester out of bed and takes him to safety, to the hallway (the gallery, the Victorians call it, where pictures of dead ancestors hang) outside her room. Mr Rochester knows that, without Jane, he would be dead.

‘Dead as a dormouse,’ Maze says about the brown furry thing the cat has brought in. Mr Rochester might not be dead as a dormouse exactly, but he’d be dead as something without Jane. That night he takes her into his confidence forever; that night Jane becomes his fairy-friend.

The next morning Jane starts asking some serious questions on behalf of her new friend.

‘I am certain I heard a laugh, and a strange one,’ she announces to Mr Rochester’s servant Grace Poole the following morning. ‘It can’t have been Pilot, because Pilot can’t laugh.’ Pilot is a dog.

Grace lifts her needle, takes a new ball of thread, waxes it, pokes the end through and carries on sewing. Her face doesn’t flinch, not even a bit. Jane is furious. Last night Mr Rochester told her that the strange laugh was Grace Poole. Grace Poole must have tried to burn Mr Rochester in bed. Jane is sure of it! She saw his bed: the curtains around it were burnt to a cinder. Mr Rochester is lucky to be alive! Grace Poole is a monster! She should be locked up!

‘I am certain I heard a laugh.’

‘Have you told Master that you heard a laugh?’ asks Grace quietly. ‘You did not think of opening your door and looking out into the gallery?’

‘On the contrary,’ says Jane Eyre, who is beginning to get huffy. ‘I bolted my door!’

‘And you are not in the habit of bolting your door every night?’

‘I have often omitted to fasten my door. I was not aware any danger or annoyance was to be dreaded at Thornfield Hall?’

‘I always think it is best to err on the safe side; a door is soon fastened, and it is as well to have a drawn bolt between one and any mischief that may be about. A deal of people, Miss, are for trusting all to Providence.’

Jane looks at the placid face of the woman in front of her. A Quaker woman couldn’t produce more serenity than this woman with her needle. Why has she not been taken into police custody for her criminal behaviour? Mr Rochester was nearly burned alive in his bed last night by this fiend with her uncanny laugh!

Jane pauses for a moment. Grace is hiding something. It was a woman’s laugh she heard, she is certain, the laugh of an angry witch. A woman burying bones at nightfall.

6

Behind Closed Doors

Some houses have no chance in hell of becoming homes. Thornfield Hall is one of these. It is home neither to Jane Eyre nor Mr Rochester; both come and go from it like fairies.

‘In what order you keep these rooms, Mrs. Fairfax!’ says Jane Eyre to the housekeeper soon after she arrives.

‘Why Miss Eyre, though Mr. Rochester’s visits here are rare, they are always sudden and unexpected; and as I observed that it put him out to find everything swathed up, and to have a bustle of arrangement on his arrival, I thought it best to keep the rooms in readiness.’

In our house, rooms were never ready. We didn’t have a Mrs Fairfax to dust and pull back the curtains, to hoover up the filth or scrub down the surfaces. We didn’t have a Mrs Fairfax to let in the light.

Mr Robinson was the only person we could ever imagine visiting. Mr Robinson who lived on the third floor, right at the top, with his wife, Mrs Robinson, who we never saw. Mr Robinson was the only person who would poke his head through our door if we left it open; Mr Robinson suddenly standing in our front room with boxes of farm eggs in his arms; Mr Robinson suddenly at the window with his long scraggy dark hair and cracked-tooth smile.

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But anyone can barge into your dreams.

One night, Jane sees a woman in her room, a woman with long dark hair. Birds circle around her head; wings cover her lips and eyes, her nose and mouth, her face.

Suddenly Jane sees a garish red face and startling black eyes bearing down on her. A dark cavern opens up, and at the back of the cavern is a red serpent lifting its head and hissing. The woman begins to scream. She drops to the floor and begins to writhe. She writhes and she writhes and then she opens her mouth wide.

Jet-black rocks tumble from her mouth. Black rocks spill across the room and hit Jane on the face. Before long there is nothing but the cold dark and black sea, the sound of waves against her ear.

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Mr Robinson had murdered Mrs Robinson. We knew this because we never ever saw her. Not once, not ever, not after all these years.

Maisie said she had seen her, just the once, early one morning when she was coming in with the milk. But we never had. We’d never seen Mrs Robinson and we were sure that Mr Robinson had killed Mrs Robinson. Mr Robinson was a big fat liar!

Mr Robinson, we decided, needed watching. So we climbed to the top of the house to listen for the sound of his breathing. We wanted to see if we could hear anyone breathing behind that dark door.

We pressed our ears to the door. But the door was thick. We strained and strained to hear something. My brother stuck a piece of string through the keyhole and wiggled it. He tugged and tugged at the key to try to make it fall. Then he stuck his fingers under the bottom of the door until he felt the silver key. The key was hard and cold. He squeezed and squeezed his fingers into the narrow crack until they were red and torn. Then he shone his torch on his fingers, and that’s when we saw the blood. Blood all over his fingers. We screamed and ran downstairs and Mum came out and said, Shhhhh! For Pete’s sake, I’m trying to sleep!

But after a while we went back up. We went back again and again. We peered through the keyhole until our eyes hurt because we were absolutely sure of this: Mrs Robinson had been lying on the kitchen floor with blood caked to her face for years. Mr Robinson was a big fat liar!

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I have at several times in my life recognized that there was evil in the neighbourhood, the surroundings, that the environment of someone who was evil was near me, connected with what was happening.

Miss Marple (Nemesis)

Where were you when it all happened, that’s what you need to know. Where were you, and where was everyone else? If Miss Marple wanted to find out what had happened she would start by asking some questions, some very particular questions.

‘What happened, dear? Can you remember where you were when it happened? Who were you standing next to? What were you wearing? Were you holding anything in your hands? What happened the moment, the very moment, when the man with the dazzling light and the gun said “Stick ’em up”?’

And I would say: ‘I remember the back door standing open and Mummy with a pale face and her hair lit up like a lamp. Mummy’s face wasn’t moving; she looked like a ghost. Mummy was a ghost come back from the dead and the man next to her was saying something in a language I couldn’t understand. He had a red face and no hair and Mummy wasn’t moving at all. Mummy was as still as a statue. The man with the red face was the only one talking, and all the time the light kept shining through Mummy’s hair, shining and shining and shining. And that is all I could look at, Mummy’s hair, which was as neat as a haystack.’

The only word I remember from that day is ‘hospital’. Mummy and the man with no hair said they were going to the hospital. And I thought, hospitals are for sick people or for children who have bashed their heads.

That day Mummy went into her bedroom and shut the door. She went into her room and closed the curtains. She got into bed with her clothes on. Mummy stayed in bed for years, until the day the lady in brown came round with her notepad and began to ask questions.

7

Poor Sue

They were whispering together for half-an-hour before they fell asleep. I caught scraps of their conversation, from which I was able only too distinctly to infer the main subject discussed.

(Jane Eyre)

If you listen carefully, you can work out things that adults don’t tell you. You can hear small scraps, words floating through windows on a hazy summer day. If you sit outside the kitchen window downstairs you can hear Mum and Maze whispering. You can hear bits and pieces of Poor Sue coming your way on the breeze.

Poor Sue was married to a man. His name was David, like my brother. Sue and David were married for a while and then something interrupted it, the being married I mean. I strain my ears but I can’t tell you any more than that because the wind keeps scooping up the words. The words never get any further than the washing line before the line strangles the words.

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Mum speaks Greek but she doesn’t like me listening because she says it’s personal and private. Greek is a special gift from God. But I don’t see how that can be in our house. Nothing is private here.

Private is for someone with a big house with a wooden gate and crunchy gravel stones. Private is for the people who live on Maltravers Drive. Private is for the girls who go to Rose Mead School in the middle of town. Private is a place with pretty flintstone walls around it to keep out the tramps and alcoholics. We could never ever live anywhere private.

Still, I know there are private things going on all around me, but I don’t know what they are. They aren’t the things people usually mean when they say something is private. ‘Private’ in my house means secrets. ‘Private’ means Poor Sue.

Of all the ghosts, Sue is the one who has survived. After she went missing, people still mentioned her name. Sue’s name never went away, not even after all these years.

‘Gone off the rails,’ said my aunt wearily. ‘She has only herself to blame for the way she went … Sue was a poor little thing … No real guidance, that was her trouble … Married the first man she met. She had nobody to show her a way through.’

Through what, I wondered? Back through the white door upstairs, back to that front room in 1969, the one I see in my dream.

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And the dream is always the same.

It is 1969 and a striking, dark-haired woman sits in the front room of a terraced house marrying herself off to Jesus. Her altarpiece is a brocade-covered television. Her nave is an orange and brown carpet. Across her face a white mantilla veil rises and falls. White lace touches the edge of her tongue. She kisses it softly. She is a young bride marrying her lover. Tonight she will dance with her Lord. Tonight her kingdom will come.

‘Lift your eyes unto the Lord, unto the Lord!’ And the cross-legged people look up towards the ceiling; the cross-legged people lift their hands in prayer.

‘Christ is near, oh Christ is near, Christ, He is near. Oh Christ we hear you, oh Christ you are near. Draw near!’

Her head rocks and her eyes close into tight black buds. Her mouth falls open. What comes out is neither English nor human. It is the sound of women in long-forgotten temples, women with their tongues cut out. It is the sound of madness, of the moon caught between the trees, howling.

The lights go out. A woman screams. Someone tears a nail.

The dark-haired woman begins to rise and fall. Her tongue flicks in and out; her head falls backwards.

Suddenly, hot rocks fly across the room. A window smashes.

‘Gooolagoooolagoooolagah. Gooolagooooolagooooolaha.’ Glass begins to fly.

My aunt has caught the sound of God in the back of her throat and is wailing with all her might.

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But I had started to tell you about Poor Sue. Sue wasn’t exactly real any more because she had disappeared, but once upon a time Sue really was there. She was there in the garden, by the back door; there in the blue and white kitchen drinking tea with the people wearing coloured clothes; the people who sang songs about Zion and Babylon; the people who came in and out through the back door with long hair; the people who lifted their faces up to the Lord. Sue was there too, lifting her hands to the Lord, and it is Sue who reminds me of Jane Eyre, or Jane Eyre who reminds me of Sue, who Charlotte Brontë says is a small brown bird.

Years later, someone told me that Sue had been an orphan too, like Jane. I think it was Someone’s Mother. Sue had no mother, she said, no people of her own, so the people of Babylon, the people I see in my dreams, scooped her up and took her to a tower where they gave her a room overlooking the sea.

Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,

Boils round the naked, melancholy isles

Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge

Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.

(Jane Eyre)

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The first thing I remember about Sue is that she was small and plain. If you say someone is small and plain it probably means you’re not very fond of them. If you say, instead, that someone is slight and shy then you are probably trying to redeem them. Maze says you should always focus on the redeeming features. I wouldn’t say that Sue was small and plain, but someone else might, someone who didn’t like her very much.

Sue wore brown, and brown is hard to hold on to. Brown blurs in with everything else: with the horse chestnut at the bottom of our garden; with the conkers on the ground we gathered up and baked in the oven; with the grass that very hot summer when the water ran out; with the shade of my brother’s skin; with the colour of the picnic blanket my grandmother put down to protect us from the heat; with the back of my grandmother’s hand after she’d been peeling potatoes and digging up the beans. Brown is the colour of small creatures that lie close to the ground. Brown is the colour of worms and small birds.

To say that Sue was small and brown is to say nothing at all. It is to say that she resembled a sparrow, and sparrows are very common.

‘In England, sparrows are the most common form of bird,’ says Maze, who knows everything about birds and beans. Jane Eyre is a sparrow. She is Jane who takes to the air, Jane with no perch, Jane with no family. But once upon a time, Jane Eyre did have family. Jane’s uncle was a nice man called Mr Reed, but unfortunately for Jane he is dead. Only his awful wife remains. Mrs Reed has adopted Jane, but Mrs Reed doesn’t really want her. Jane knows that her aunt hates her and her aunt knows that she knows this, and so it goes on: the hating and the concealing and then the seeing.

‘What would Uncle Reed say to you if he were alive?’ Jane screams at her aunt one morning. But once she’s begun, Jane can’t stop herself. Mrs Reed is furious and lashes out; she boxes Jane’s ears. She can’t believe her insolence!

‘They are not fit to associate with me!’ screams Jane Eyre.

Mrs Reed was rather a stout woman; but on hearing this strange and audacious declaration, she ran nimbly up the stairs, swept me like a whirlwind into the nursery, and crushing me on the edge of my crib, dared me in an emphatic voice to rise from that place, or utter one syllable during the remainder of the day … she boxed both my ears, and then left me without a word.

I’m not quite sure what ‘boxing ears’ means, but I think it means slapping someone very hard around the side of the head so that they are knocked unconscious. The white stars soon arrive. An ambulance has to be called.

Mrs Reed locks Jane in the Red Room and leaves her there for days. Her only wish now is to get her out of her sight; and so Jane is sent to Lowood School, where she is starved and beaten and frozen almost to death.

8

Rocks from the Sky

One day, not so long ago, someone called an ambulance to our house. That was the day God sent a plague of rocks down from the sky.

The day my brother Peter knocked his head hard on the paraffin heater; the heater that stands in the corner with sharp metal edges Mum is always telling us to stay away from. That day Peter banged his head and saw the stars. A few weeks later another ambulance came and carried Poor Sue away. We only saw her toes poking out from the back of the van. I caught a glimpse of a small pink hand and a tiny red beak, and I thought that Sue was done for. The black rocks had knocked her unconscious; the black rocks had boxed her ears. Sue had been crushed by the black rocks tumbling from the sky.

But I am mixing Poor Sue and Peter together. Was it Peter and then Sue, or Sue then Peter? There were two ambulances. When David went away we never heard the ambulance. We didn’t see the men in white rushing out. We never saw his body, only Mummy standing by the kitchen door looking like a ghost.

But once upon a time Sue was there and she was lying stretched out in an ambulance with her little toe poking through the gap in the door. Then there was my brother Peter; there was Peter with his broken head and Mummy speaking her Greek and me staring out the kitchen window waiting for the ambulance to come. I look up at the sky and I see dark clouds; I see Mrs Sturgess at the window next door looking down at me. I look up at Mrs Sturgess and I poke out my tongue. Then I feel bad.

So I turn back towards the kitchen table and there is Mummy with her mouth wide open and black rocks falling out.

‘Cummmmingleeeenghaawghulalghulaa, ghulala, ghulala, ghulala, cumingleeeehawghulaghulaghula, cummingleeeinghawwghulaghulaghula.’

Mummy is humming like a bee. Her mouth is writhing like a snake. I am six or seven and Mummy’s mouth is filling up with rocks and the rocks are tumbling onto the floor. I can hear the sharp bang.

‘Mummy, Mummy, are you hurt? Shut your mouth, Mummy, shut your mouth. Mummy, please shut your mouth.’

‘Ghuuullllllllllaaaparrrwarrrrrrbarralllungungungung.’

‘Mummy, Mummy, is he dead? Is he dead? Is Peter dead? Mummy, please bring him back. Bring him back, Mummy, please, please bring him back.’

It was Mrs Sturgess next door who heard the wailing through the walls and made the call. When the ambulance men came in through the back door Mummy was holding Peter tightly, rocking him back and forth and my brother was as still and quiet as a perfectly behaved baby Jesus.

‘Mummy, is Peter coming back to life now? Mummy, has God saved him? Mummy, can he breathe now? Can he breathe?’

‘Yes, darling. Peter has come back to us. We must thank God for his special words. We must remember this special occasion. AH-MEN.’ And then Mummy’s head fell forward and the dark rocks came spilling out.

——————————

One morning, a few months after the boxing of her ears, Jane Eyre is hiding away in the nursery, making shapes from the frost on the window. She sees a small robin, a hungry little robin that came and chirruped on the twigs of the leafless cherry-tree nailed against the wall near the casement. Suddenly Bessie the maid bursts into the room and demands that Jane get herself ready to come downstairs. She is wanted by Aunt Reed, this minute!

So Jane is scooped up by Bessie and taken down to the front parlour, where she meets a black pillar of a man standing with his legs wide apart. His name is Mr Brocklehurst and he is a servant of God.

‘Well Jane Eyre, and are you a good child?’ asks Mr Brocklehurst.

But before Jane can answer, Aunt Reed butts in: ‘Mr. Brocklehurst, I believe … that this little girl has not quite the character and disposition I could wish. We must send her away, I want this child out of my sight! Out of my sight! Far away!’

9

David Copperfield

By the time I was ten I had read all of Agatha Christie and I practically knew Jane Eyre off by heart. I was ready for something new. ‘Proper Literature!’ Mum said. ‘Now go and find some Dickens! None of this murder mystery nonsense!’

So I went to the library with a list of names. Oliver Twist … Barnaby Rudge … David Copperfield. I thought I’d try a book about a David. This was difficult, because the lady at the desk was watching me like a hawk.

‘Young lady, can I help you?’

‘I’m looking for a book by Charles Dickens,’ I said.

‘Dickens! What does a child like you want with Dickens? You can’t be more than nine.’

‘Actually, I’m ten and a bit. I’m an August birthday.’

‘Don’t be so silly,’ said the brown jumper and hair. ‘You aren’t ready for Dickens.’

‘Mum says I am!’

‘Does she now? Humph.’

‘Well, I can’t keep reading Jane Eyre, can I? Mum says I need to start something new.’

The brown glasses lifted and a pair of dark narrow eyes and wispy eyebrows flew towards me. Worms, bookworms, I thought. Urgh!

‘Well, I don’t mind you going to have a quick browse. But be sure that you don’t take any more than two books at a time. We have limited copies and I don’t want our adult readers left …’ The eyebrows were wriggling fast across the floor. Soon they would be on top of my toes and I would have to run. ‘… wanting.’

Wanting what, I wondered as I skittered into the large reading room. Wanting what exactly?

Charles Dickens was easy to find. He had rows and rows of old bound books with titles that were hard to read because they were written in gold lettering and the lettering had nearly come off. D—d Copp—f-eld. I picked up the book and opened the pages. The paper was so thin I thought it would tear. My hands were hot and sticky and stuck to the small print. I let go and the pages fell open. I peered at the words, which were small and narrow and pressed tight together. I started to read.

There comes out of the cloud, our house – not new to me, but quite familiar, in its earliest remembrance. On the ground-floor is Peggotty’s kitchen, opening into a back yard … Here is a long passage – what an enormous perspective I make of it! – leading from Peggotty’s kitchen to the front door.

——————————

What comes first when you begin to remember – the person or the place, or is it their face? What do you see first when you close your eyes and press upon their lids? When do those purple circles start to come, along with the white dancing stars? If you want to remember, you have to travel back through those dark purple pools, back to the stars.

Lie under the trees in the back garden and press your fingers tight over your eyes. Start dreaming back past the dark spaces, past the blur and the whirr of other people’s voices and faces, back to the child lying beneath the tree in the summer sun, back to the green and the blue and the shapes you know how to draw because they are easy: dark-brown tree trunk, blue sky, green prickly grass, legs in shorts, feet in sandals, a bucket hanging from the tree that someone has thrown up there – your brother. His shout. Then your mother’s face looming over the top of you and around her white stars, your mother shooting white stars from the top of her head and the clouds scudding quickly away.

‘Young lady, I think it’s about time you chose a book, don’t you?’ Peggotty?! I turned around. The brown lady is standing right behind me; her glasses have slipped down her nose and her face looks very hot.

‘We’re closing in fifteen minutes and I need to sort the shelves. So come along, young lady. Off you go. Hop, skip and jump!’

——————————

By the time I began reading David Copperfield I had become a full-blown detective, and I knew that the job of a detective is to explain things. Miss Marple always does this, right at the end of the story. She does it with everyone sitting around – with Dolly Bantry, Greta, the vicar, Inspector Flack (who always looks huffy), the Bradbury-Scott sisters, and whichever doctor has been called out to examine the body.

So let me explain a few things. David Copperfield is filled with people who aren’t family but behave as though they are. First of all there is Peggotty. Peggotty is a mix of my grandmother and Mary the maid from The Murder at the Vicarage, but with less banging about. This is Peggotty:

The first objects that assume a distinct presence before me, as I look far back into the blank of my infancy, are my mother with her pretty hair and youthful shape, and Peggotty with no shape at all, and eyes so dark that they seemed to darken their whole neighbourhood in her face, and cheeks and arms so hard and red that I wondered the birds didn’t peck her in preference to apples …

(David Copperfield)

Peggotty is David’s favourite thing. If she really were a thing she’d be a pillow, an old, raggedy pillow. Peggotty is the person who holds David’s hand when he’s falling asleep; Peggotty is the voice above his cot; Peggotty is the hand stroking his hair. Peggotty is the sudden explosion of laughter when he takes his first step and lands face-down in the vegetable patch. Peggotty is the crease on the side of her cheek. Peggotty can only be seen in small edges and outlines: the dip of her waist, the tightness of the string around her apron, the prick of her lip as she opens her mouth to say ‘Coo-chi-coo,’ the dent in her forehead when she frowns.

I can remember Peggotty by the smell of the kitchen, by the whiff of the cheese on toast she pulls from the grill when we come back from school, far too early to be called dinner and far too late to be lunch. ‘After-school food’, we say, food after school, food before bedtime, food before it gets dark, because we don’t ever really have a proper dinner. We just eat lots of cheese on toast and sardines on toast and scrambled egg on toast and pilchard sandwiches and boiled eggs because this is all protein and protein makes you grow as tall as Jack and the Beanstalk.

I remember Peggotty by what she did when: Peggotty who does all the chores, Peggotty with her hands deep in the kitchen sink, Peggotty with soap on her hands and in her hair, Peggotty who we make fun of because she counts the slices of cheese before she lays them out on the bread as though they were about to go missing.

‘Thieving hands, your naughty thieving hands.’

Peggotty who is never seen without an apron around her waist. Peggotty who stoops over slightly because she has been carrying so much shopping for years. Peggotty who spends a lot of time carrying things up and down stairs. Peggotty who complains about her creaking knees and at night asks us to fetch her slippers.

——————————

When David’s mother is tired, Peggotty puts out the washing. She waits for a fine day and then carries out the wicker basket with the peg bag tied to her waist. She stands outside pouring herself forwards and backwards like a milk jug over a cup of tea. I watch her tip and turn and swivel as she moves around the line, turning the clothes to face the wind, whispering her laundry prayers.

‘This way round, not that. Hang from the bottom, not the top. Keep the crease nice and straight. Don’t mix up the colours, keep the socks together. Hang the pullover from the middle. Don’t let things hang too close to the ground. Turn the line every hour or so. Bring the washing in as soon as you feel it’s dry.’

It is a fine summer’s day and Peggotty is pegging out the washing. The washing blows across her face. Then the wind picks up. The washing flaps and flaps, and covers her mouth and her eyes. For a moment, things go blank. She can no longer see the little boy sleeping beneath the roses. Her face begins to furrow and she frowns. All this damn washing in the way! I can’t see the child. Where is the boy?

Peggotty drags the damp washing away from her hands, from around her neck, from across her mouth. She screams. The grassy patch beneath the roses is dry and bare as a baby’s bottom.

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