Faustine Read Free

leave Chi-ren, my own favourite, with dark eyes and a haughty manner that makes even a disciplinarian like Maureen burst out laughing.
    But, as I pointed out to her, it was time I went. Time I went to find out more about myself.
    And, most of all, to find my beloved grandmother.
     *
    It’s not Maureen Fisher’s fault that I can’t feel anything for her and never have. She’s been kindness itself in her practical , no-nonsense way. It’s just that she doesn’t know about real love – like Muriel did.
    Maureen’s red hair is frizzy and looks as if it’s always affected by damp weather, standing up in a carroty halo that the small children love to try and copy with their crayons and chalks. Her kitchen smells of scones, and for all her robust contempt of the British way of life, Royal Family and the lot, the calendars with scenes of sheep trials in northern glens on the walls and the line of hand-knitted Fair Isle jumpers hanging over the range seem to personify an idea of England – even if it’s a vanished one – as if part of her had never really belonged to Australia at all.
    Maureen never told me more about my family than it was absolutely necessary to know. My father had been killed in a car crash when I was six months old – she told me that when I was about five and had been living with her for two years. ‘And your mother comes to see you when she can. She’s very busy, Ella. You’ll understand, one day.’
    I always said, what about my grandmother?
    And Maureen always replied that she knew no more than I. I got the lovely presents at birthday and Christmas, didn’t I?
     *
    Wherever my Grandma was, she couldn’t have forgotten me.

TWO
    I walk across the cobbles, and because the couple in the doorway are looking both at me and away from me, because they are both hostile and deferential and I feel fear for the first time (what if the taxi, waiting on the road, out of sight at the top of the drive, decides not to wait and goes back to Salisbury without me?), I deflect my gaze from them too and stare out beyond the cobbles at the trunks of great beech trees, rooted in moss and with branches shivering in a light breeze under a canopy of summer green.
    How beautiful it is here, I say to myself – but automatically, like a tourist: the grass mown down to a soft bed where a few leaves from last autumn still lie, inviting and ‘tasteful’, like the pictures Maureen has on the jigsaw puzzles in our nursery in Melbourne, pictures of a landscape none of the children has ever known; the half-ruined outhouses, dovecot and racket court, tiles russet with age, that are grouped around the lawn, stone walls overgrown with roses and ivy. How beautiful it is, I say, this time aloud. But I remember nothing now. The flash of memory has gone. It seems improbable – ludicrous, even – that I could have come here once. I must go back. There has been a mistake. I walk nearer to the couple in the doorway, to apologize for trespassing in this lovely neglected place.
    A sound – a faint roar – which makes me think, inappositely , of a football stadium at home, comes into the shelteredcourtyard where we stand. And I turn again, looking upwards this time, past the abandoned village green and the little church with the squat tower to the line of bright, pale blue that marks the downlands from the deep valley where the old house and south-sloping garden lie. And something does come to me – a memory of a blanket, and blue- and-white -striped cups scattered in grass as short as the hair on a boy’s head, strong and tufty, and a nest of eggs, blue and speckled, lying just out of my reach beyond the confines of the rug. I’m crawling … a firm hand pulls me back … I cry, trying to reach the nest with the pale eggs that look like astonished eyes fallen down from the sky.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I begin, as the roar dies away, and the couple, who have looked apprehensively up at the line of the downs above the road, look back