Faustine Read Free Page B

Manor, at Woodford-cum-Slape.’ And Maureen, for the second time, threw down the paper with a snort and remarked that anyone foolish enough to want to go to the land of hippies, defaulting royalty and corrupt policemen, would need to have their heads examined. Then – I was used to these sentiments, which usually included a sincere hope that the undesirable elements in Australian society would be eliminated as soon as possible – Maureen said, ‘Woodford-cum-Slape. Typical poncy name for a village overthere, all dreamed-up with the thatched roofs and the quaint teapots, I dare say. But it rings a bell all right. Woodford Manor. That’s where your grandmother lives, I’m pretty sure.’
    Then Maureen, unusually for her, clapped her hand over her mouth and walked out of the room. Little Chi-ren gave a shriek of surprise when I set him down and went for the newspaper. My heart was racing – but that wasn’t so odd, really, when you consider that love is a rare commodity and I knew enough about what it was like not to have it, to come over as faint as a heroine in a romantic novel when there seemed a chance of getting some of it back again. The difference , of course, was that my quest wasn’t for a dashing young man (and Bill Fisher and Maureen, I’d heard them, thought this pretty weird of me). It was for an old woman. But, as I say, you can no more dictate who you’re going to love than sit down and paint or write a masterpiece at the crack of a moneyman’s whip. Muriel was all I had. And now I had a clue, at least, as to where I could go to find her.

FOUR
    I learnt not to blame my mother. If it took me a long time – twenty years, maybe – to come to terms with her abandonment of me, it’s more a sign of my own immaturity than of Anna’s cruelty or selfishness. She couldn’t manage on her own – the mid-sixties was a time before the support of feminism , she had neither money nor proper training for a job after my father died – and when she brought me to Australia and handed me over to the Fishers, I think she genuinely believed it was only for a year or two. She came twice a year, ever after that, and she sent the books she published, by a women’s press started up on the kitchen table of the flat that was so hazy a memory to me – ‘doing it all on a shoestring,’ Maureen said with pride (Maureen is a great one for private enterprise). She sent the books, but I never opened them. I waited – and sometimes it was almost too painful to wait, the gap between Christmas and my birthday in June yawned like an abyss by the time the cold weather had set in, in May – I waited for the presents Muriel sent. And part of me could never understand why, if my mother hadn’t been able to manage on her own, my grandmother hadn’t stayed on at the flat and looked after me as she’d done before I was sent out here.
    ‘Things aren’t like that,’ Maureen had said in the cross voice she used when a child whined or demanded too much. ‘People have other things to do, you know.’
    And I suppose it was that that I didn’t believe. If you’re loved as much by someone as I undoubtedly had been by Muriel, how can they just go away and leave you?
     *
    The presents stopped twelve years ago, when I was fourteen. I think I was secretly relieved by then, for the dolls with impossibly flaxen hair and the party dresses and tutus just weren’t what I wanted any more. (I couldn’t say so, of course, even if I’d wanted to: the parcels came with a brief typed slip – All my love, Grandma – and a postal mark somewhere in the City of London.) But I sensed that what had seemed to be inspired by love had become automatic; and the awful thought that these items were even bought by someone else and posted off to me by a stranger became too painful to contemplate. If only she could get to know me again, I used to say, she’d love me like she used to. And nothing ever stopped me thinking that.
     *
    Maureen was as sceptical