THE DUMB HOUSE

Copyright © John Burnside 1997

The right of John Burnside to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

First published in Great Britain by
Jonathan Cape 1997

Vintage
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
www.randomhouse.co.uk/vintage

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

Published by Vintage 1998

6 8 10 9 7

Copyright © John Burnside 1997

The right of John Burnside to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain by
Jonathan Cape 1997

Vintage
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

Random House Australia (Pty) Limited
20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney
New South Wales 2061, Australia

Random House New Zealand Limited
18 Poland Road, Glenfield,
Auckland 10, New Zealand

Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited
Isle of Houghton, Corner of Boundary Road & Carse O’Gowrie,
Houghton 2198, South Africa

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
www.randomhouse.co.uk/vintage

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

ISBN 978-0-09-954652-8

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by John Burnside

Title Page

Part One: Karen

Part Two: Lillian

Part Three: The Twins

Acknowledgement

Copyright

 

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Authors’ Foundation in the completion of work on this book.

 

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instruments might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

Samuel Johnson

 

part one

karen

 

No one could say it was my choice to kill the twins, any more than it was my decision to bring them into the world. Each of these events was an inevitability, one thread in the fabric of what might be called destiny, for want of a better word – a thread that neither I nor anyone else could have removed without corrupting the whole design. I chose to perform the laryngotomies, if only to halt their constant singing – if singing is what you would call it – that ululation that permeated my waking hours, and entered my sleep through every crevice of my dreams. At the time, though, I would have said it was a logical act, another step in the research I had begun almost four years before – the single most important experiment that a human being can perform: to find the locus of the soul, the one gift that sets us apart from the animals; to find it, first by an act of deprivation and then, later, by a logical and necessary destruction. It surprised me how easy it was to operate on those two half-realised beings. They existed in a different world: the world of laboratory rats, or the shifting and functionless space of the truly autistic.

That experiment is over now. It was terminated, only in order that it might begin again, in a different form. If I know anything, I know this is the true pattern of our lives: a constant repetition, with small, yet significant variations, unfolding through the years. The experiment with the twins was just one variation on a lifelong theme. If it had been a conventional piece of work, I would be writing up the results; describing, in abstract language, an initial problem, a series of hypotheses and tests, a final outcome. Everything would be clearly stated, in scientific terms. But this was not a conventional piece of work. There is no way to describe this experiment without describing everything that has happened, from the morning I first learned to talk, thirty years ago, to the moment I locked the door of the basement room, leaving the twins inside, silenced now, gazing at one another with those expressions of grieved bewilderment that finally made it impossible for the experiment to continue. I switched on the music before I left, but I still had no way of knowing what it had meant to them during their years of isolation. Outside, I put my eye to the observation grille for a last look; they seemed not to have noticed my departure. Quietly, I left them to digest their poisoned meal, went upstairs to check on Karen, then made a pot of coffee and waited.

It seems odd now, this silence. Perhaps it was what I expected all along; perhaps it was what I wanted. This silence is more than the absence of sound. This is something I have earned: now I understand that, without it, I could not have contemplated this account. I had to know what the end was before I started. Now I can begin at the beginning, with Mother in her fine clothes, coming to my room in the evenings to read me stories, Mother in her pearls and beautiful dresses, one of those exquisite parasites which infect and inhabit their host, without ever going so far as to destroy it entirely – and even, in this case, creating the illusion of a natural symbiosis, a mutual nourishment. It is impossible not to admire such elegance.

Not that I would judge her harshly for that. I loved her as much as it is possible to love anyone. Looking back, I can see her faults. I can be detached, even clinical, in my analysis of our life together; yet, even now, I still love her. As a child, I was stunned by the presence of that marvellous being, that woman who had made of herself an object so beautiful that even she would stop sometimes and wonder at her own reflection in a mirror or a darkened pane of glass. As children, we love who we can. My father was shy with me, difficult, wrapped in a cocoon, always afraid that I would enter somehow, and touch him. I think he was more afraid of me than he was of Mother: he was haunted by a possible betrayal, by seeming to be the one who intruded between us, so he adopted the role Mother had prescribed for him, the role of invisible husband.

At some level, I probably always knew how distant Mother was, even from me. She was always working, like an architect, building a house of stories, treating her life and mine as a piece of fiction. I knew she was engaged in an exercise, an invention in the old sense of the word: everything she did was controlled, every story she told was a ritual. Nothing ever varied, and I admired that. Our relationship resembled that of the priest and the altar boy at Mass: she was the celebrant, I was the witness; our roles and offices were divinely appointed, therefore inevitable. Even now, I suspect she was right: because of her stratagems, our life was ordered. We could avoid intimacy without skulking in our rooms, as my father did; by the use of rituals and stories, she created a neutral ground where we could meet, where everything could be kept under control, and nothing would slip beyond the boundaries we set for ourselves.

When others were present, we were formal, perhaps even cold. It was my father who opened up to guests, telling them stories about his early years in the business, his time in Palestine, his clumsy courtship of my mother, inviting his listeners into a form of collaboration, while she regarded him with a remote, almost contemptuous expression. His favourite story was the one about their first meeting – how, walking a country road, in the summer twilight, he encountered a beautiful young woman with curly brown hair, lugging a parcel along Blackness Lane. He was in uniform at the time. He stopped and offered to help, and that was how they met: a man in uniform, home on leave, visiting a friend from a neighbouring village, and the pretty girl who let him carry her package, then hardly said a word to him all the way home. Mother would listen while he told this story, then interrupt, towards the end.

‘It was nothing like that,’ she would say to the guests. Then she would turn to my father and say, in seeming mock-annoyance, ‘I wish you wouldn’t tell such ridiculous stories.’

Mother insisted on my presence at these gatherings; she wanted a witness to my father’s folly and I fulfilled the office to the best of my ability, which only made my father more awkward with me later, after the guests had left. At the time, I suspected his stories were true – I even understood his bewilderment – but they failed to meet Mother’s standards, not of truth, but of correctness, a standard that might be applied to a piece of fiction, or a portrait. I see now how I resemble her. Sometimes, standing in the kitchen, I look out at the dark, and I see her face, gazing back at me from the shrubbery. It’s my own face, but it only takes a minor trick of the light and I see her in myself: the same eyes, the same mouth. It’s an easy resemblance to find, but it has taken me till now to see that I also resemble my father – how I am just as weak as he was, and how it was that weakness that caused the experiment with the twins to fail. Something in my spirit is irresolute. Everything should be taken seriously, in the spirit of a game; I should have carried out this experiment with the same unwavering attentiveness that is demanded by a puzzle, or a good story. That is the essence of scientific endeavour. My problem was that I failed to play; I was solemn, rather than serious. I didn’t think enough. I failed to translate the intention into the act.

Later, when I went down to the basement, the twins were dead. They lay on the floor near one of the speakers; they were huddled together, embracing one another in a way that reminded me of young monkeys, the way they cling to anything when they are frightened. I waited a long time before I opened the door. I think, even then, that I was afraid of them, afraid they were tricking me in some inexplicable fashion, afraid they were not really dead, but pretending, hoping to catch me unawares. Yet what harm could they have done me? They were small children, after all. I opened the door and crossed to where they lay: they were dead, of course, and it seemed they had died without too much suffering. Certainly their pain would have been minimal, compared to the agonies Lillian had endured, in those few days after they were born. I was glad of that. It seemed appropriate to bury them next to her, in the iris garden, and that was what I did, working all afternoon to prepare the grave, then carrying them out, one by one, in the evening twilight, and laying them out, side by side, face to face in the wet earth. Now it is midnight. Karen Olerud is upstairs, still asleep in her soft prison. I am, to all intents and purposes, alone. Now, at last, I can begin again.

From the moment I first learned to talk, I felt I was being tricked out of something. I remember it still – the memory is clear and indisputable: I am standing in the garden, and Mother is saying the word rose over and over, reciting it like a magic spell and pointing to the blossoms on the trellis, sugar-pink and slightly overblown – and I am listening, watching her lips move, still trying to disconnect the flower from the sound. I was already too old to be learning to talk – maybe two, or getting on for three. For a long time, I refused to speak – or so Mother told me. Though I appeared intelligent in other ways, I had problems with language. She had even gone to the doctor about it, but he had told her such things happened, it was quite normal, I would learn to talk sooner or later, in my own time, and I would quickly make up the ground I had lost. He was right. When I did begin speaking, it was a kind of capitulation, as if a tension in my body had broken, and I spoke my first word that afternoon, the word rose, meaning that pink, fleshy thing that suddenly flared out from the indescribable continuum of my world, and became an object.

The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony. But if words distance us from the present, so we never quite seize the reality of things, they make an absolute fiction of the past. Now, when I look back, I remember a different world: what must have seemed random and chaotic at the time appears perfectly logical as I tell it, invested with a clarity that even suggests a purpose, a meaning to life. I remember the country around our house as it was before they built the new estates: a dense, infinite darkness filled with sheltering birds and holly trees steeped in the Fifties. I remember the old village: children going from house to house in white sheets, singing and laughing in the dark, waving to us as our car glided by. I remember those months of being alone here, after Mother died. At night, when the land was quiet and still, I would take off my clothes and go naked from room to room, then out into the cool moonlight, wandering amongst the flower beds like an animal, or a changeling from one of Mother’s fairy stories. The garden is walled on all sides; no one could see me, and the house was so far from the village that I would hear nothing but the owls in the woods, and the occasional barking of foxes out on the meadow. Sometimes I wondered if I was real – my body would be different, clothed in its own sticky-sweet smell, a smell like sleep, laced with Chanel No. 19 from Mother’s dressing table.

When I was a child, Mother would come into the bedroom and tell me stories. It was a ritual she performed, without variation: I had to go up to bed, and she would follow five minutes later. I would hear the clock strike nine as she climbed the stairs. Sometimes she brought a book, but quite often she told me the stories out of her head. Whether she made them up, or had them by heart, I couldn’t say, but she never once hesitated or faltered. I had the impression, then, that she knew every story that had ever been told, and all she had to do was think of one for a moment, and every detail came flooding into her mind, instantly. It was Mother who told me the story of Akbar: how he built the Dumb House, not for profit, or even to prove a point, but from pure curiosity. Nobody knows how long it stood, or what happened to the children who were locked inside with their mute attendants. Nobody knows because the story of the Dumb House was only ever an episode in another, much longer story, an anecdote that had been folded in, told in passing to illustrate the personality of Akbar the Mughal, the dyslexic emperor whose collection of manuscripts was the richest in the known world. Later I realised that most of the details of the story were embellishments that Mother had added herself, to spin out this single episode that I liked so much. In fact, the original story of the Dumb House was simple and fleeting. In that version, the Mughal’s counsellors were debating whether a child is born with the innate, God-given ability to speak; they had agreed this gift is equivalent in some way to the soul, the one characteristic that marks out the human from the animal. But Akbar declared that speech is learned, for the very reason that the soul is innate, and the soul does not correspond to any single faculty, whether it be the ability to speak, or to dream, or to reason. Surely, he argued, if speech came from the soul, then there would be only one language, instead of many. But the counsellors disagreed. While it was true that there were many languages, these were simply the corruptions of the original gift, implanted in the soul by God. They knew of incidents in which children had been left in isolation for years, or raised by animals: in such circumstances they had created a language of their own, that nobody else understood, which they could not have learned from others.

Akbar listened. When the counsellors had finished speaking, he told them he would test their hypothesis. He had his craftsmen build a mansion, far from the city: a large, well-appointed house, with its own gardens and fountains. Here Akbar established a court of the mute, into which he introduced a number of new-born babies, gathered from the length and breadth of the Empire. The children were well cared for, and were provided with everything they could possibly need, but because their attendants were dumb, they never heard human speech, and they grew up unable to talk, as Akbar had predicted. People would travel from all over the kingdom to visit the house. They would stand for hours outside its walled gardens, listening to the silence, and for years to come the mansion was known as the Gang Mahal, or Dumb House.

Mother would come to the bedroom and tell me this story in the evenings. Naturally, her version was different; she barely touched upon the controversy over the innateness of language, or the nature of the soul. Instead she described the Gang Mahal in sumptuous detail: the orange trees in terracotta pots, the jewelled walls, the unearthly silence. I lay in bed listening, watching her lips move, intoxicated by her perfume. I used to wonder what had happened when those children grew up; how they thought, if thought was possible, if they ever remembered anything from one moment to the next. There are people who say speech is magical; for them, words have the power to create and destroy. Listening to Mother’s stories, I became enmeshed in a view of the world: an expectation, a secret fear. Even now, nothing seems more beautiful to me than language when it creates the impression of order: the naming of things after their true nature; the act of classification; the creation of kingdoms and genera, species and sub-species; the designation of animal, vegetable or mineral, of monocotyledonous plants, freshwater fishes, birds of prey, the periodic table. This is why the past seems perfect, a time of proportion and order, because it is immersed in speech. For animals, memory might reside as a sensation, a resonance in the nerves, or in the meat of the spine. But for humans, the past cannot be described except in words. It is nowhere else. What disturbs me now is the possibility that language might fail: after the experiment ended so inconclusively, I cannot help imagining that the order which seems inherent in things is only a construct, that everything might fall into chaos, somewhere in the long white reaches of forgetting. That is why it is imperative for me to begin again, and that is why Karen was sent here, after all this time, to fulfil her true purpose.

I lived entirely in the presence of my mother. Even when she wasn’t there, I was aware of her, somewhere, and I was always conscious of myself, I always behaved as if she were with me, watching and listening. My father, on the other hand, seemed barely present. Most of the time, I disregarded him, just as Mother did. He seemed peripheral to our existence, irrelevant to our enterprise and, at the time, I thought he preferred it that way. Often, he was away on business. When he was at home, he would make an effort to play the game of father and son, but we were always awkward together. He knew I belonged to Mother.

Not that I was ever disrespectful. When he asked me to take a walk with him, I always assented readily, and we would go out, pretending there was some purpose to our excursion. Usually, he would ask me to go fishing. He had no idea of how fishing was done, but he must have thought it was appropriate, the sort of thing fathers do with their sons. We would carry our rods and baskets to the river, then sit on the bank in silence, watching the water flow over the dark weeds. I was certain the place we usually chose was wholly unsuitable. I never saw a fish there, in all our visits.

We would spend a couple of hours like that, then we would gather up our equipment and turn for home. I think my father enjoyed being near the water. It set him at his ease and, on the way back, he would seem more relaxed; he would make efforts at conversation, asking me questions about school, or what books or music I liked. I would answer as well as I could; I think I wanted to be friendly, but the questions were too simple, too closed. Then, as the conversation petered out, he would fall back on his favourite stand-by, which was to ask if there was anything I wanted, anything I needed. To begin with, I must have thought these questions were nothing more than conversational gambits, and I told him I was fine, there was nothing I could think of. Eventually, when I saw how disappointed he was with this reply, I began naming things, just to keep him happy, and perhaps also to see what would happen. I was surprised to begin with, then later, slightly irritated by the fact that he always remembered what I had asked for. Inevitably, the requested item would arrive: without ceremony, it would appear in the hall, or on the table in the breakfast room. There would be no gift wrap, no tags or ribbons, nothing to say who had sent it. Most often, these gifts were delivered to the house, and usually when my father was away. Mother must have been aware of the parcels, but she made no comment. It was as if they had been delivered to us by accident.

In a spirit of loyalty, I tried to ignore them, too; but I have to admit there were times when I was pleased. My father’s interpretation of even my vaguest request would be uncanny. No matter what I asked him for – a bicycle, a new violin, a tennis racquet, a fountain pen – no matter what it was, it would always be the size, the style, the colour I would have chosen. Yet I never felt these objects were gifts as such, because I never felt they were entirely mine. I used them the way I would have used something borrowed, taking care of them the way you might care for something that, sooner or later, would have to be returned. Occasionally I asked for things I didn’t really want, to see what he would do. Yet still, no matter what it was, he only chose the best, and I would be embarrassed, as if I had been caught out in a mean practical joke. Sometimes I even forgot what I had asked for. I would just say the first thing that came to mind, to give him something to think about as we made our way home across the meadow. But he always remembered. Whatever I requested would appear, in its plain packaging, like a bundle of exotic flotsam, washed up on the doorstep. Most of the time, he wasn’t there for me to thank him. I think he arranged it that way, to avoid any difficulty. Looking back, in spite of his seeming collaboration with our regime, I see that he was secretly and perversely trying to find some way into the world I shared with Mother, and these gifts were his crude attempts to win my confidence. I feel sorry for him now, in retrospect. He must have been lonely; it must have pained him to know he was little more than a stranger to us, someone we treated with courtesy, but whom we regarded, essentially, as a guest in our house.

Nevertheless, I felt guilty sometimes, when the parcels arrived and I stripped them open to find some expensive object that I couldn’t use, glittering in the morning light. Occasionally I would go to the river alone and stay there all day, as if paying a forfeit, or enduring some kind of penance. The river seemed different when I was by myself: it was a mysterious place, whose strangeness I was interrupting. Sometimes I took my rod and pretended to fish, for my father’s sake. I wanted to tell him I had been out there while he was away, carrying on where we had left off. Sometimes I even convinced myself that I would catch a fish. It would have been good to have something to show him on his return. Most of the time, though, I just took off my shoes and socks and waded out into the cold, quick water, to feel the long streams of riverweed against my shins. My feet would be chilled to the bone, but I still felt the current on my skin, and I would stand for as long as I could, letting the cold sink in, trying to become another element of the river, as natural, as neutral, as the silt and the water. I looked for fish, but I never saw any. I remembered a story Mother had told me once, about an ancient water spirit who lived amongst the weeds in dark ponds and rivers. The spirit was called Jenny Greenteeth, and I suppose, in the book, it was meant to be a woman, but I imagined it as a near-hermaphrodite, part-woman, part-man, part-fish, something wired into the sway of the water, aware of the least flicker or ripple. In my mind, it possessed that special fish-sensitivity where even rainfall is a tapping at the spine; it knew the difference between ordinary disturbances of the surface, and the steps of a child, or the tug of a probing stick. In the book, it was shown as a wrinkled, bone-and-hair fiend, surging from the water, its long nails and jagged teeth coated with weed and moss. But on those visits to the river, I would imagine something subtle, almost invisible. Quick as a pike, it would rise to its prey, then disappear into the depths, but there would be no cries, no blood, no immediate horrors. A deceptive calm would return to the river: birds would sing again, the sun would break through the clouds. The victim would be unaware of what had happened. After a while, he would grow bored, and return home, where no one would notice any change. Yet the change would have happened under the surface, behind the appearance of normality. That child would never be the same again. He would grow into something dark and cold, something that belonged to the river. He would see possibilities that others missed, and he would act upon them. People would begin to see him as a monster, but as far as he was concerned, they were nothing more than phantoms. His world was different from theirs. In his world, their thoughts, their actions, their judgements were immaterial.

In the holidays, when I was home from school, Mother would take me out looking for corpses. To begin with, it was her idea: she wanted me to see how things looked when they were dead, and she got me to come by making a game of it, an odd form of hide and seek. She said every animal had a place of its own where it would go to die if it could; wild animals wanted to be alone when they were sick or dying, and they would crawl away into the undergrowth, to be out of the light and the wind. The only dead things I had seen until then were pheasants and hedgehogs on the road to the village, but Mother had a gift for knowing where to look: animals I had only ever encountered in books became real as corpses, life-size, as it were, with hard claws and tiny, blood-threaded teeth, flesh I could prod and turn, fur I could stroke, disturbing the flies, drawing the cold or the warmth of decay through the palm of my hand. As we searched for fresh bodies, we would revisit the sites of earlier finds. There was always something new to see, something strangely beautiful – not only in summer, when the bodies imploded slowly and the smell was dark and sickly, but also in autumn and winter, when they lay for weeks, cold and untarnished, frozen voles laid out on the grass, small birds lying under the hedges with their legs stretched, their eyes clenched and wrinkled. It was odd, but as I followed the process of decay, there seemed to be something curative in it all, as if the animal was being renewed, or purified, leaching away in the rain, drying in the sun, vanishing slowly, leaving behind only a faint yellowish aftermath in the grass, in which form was implicit, with a half-life of its own.

After a while, I started going out on these hunts alone. At some level, at the level of an undercurrent, I had begun to think it might be possible to be incorporated into this process in some way; or rather, I began to form a primitive, superstitious notion that I could make it work for my own purposes, propitiating it with small offerings, vague gestures of rehearsal and assent. At school we performed an experiment with moulds, sealing a piece of moistened bread in ajar and leaving it in a warm place to see the lime-green and ochre life-forms growing on the surface, and I repeated this experiment at home, unscrewing the lid of the jar each day for the sweet perfume of new life arising from decay, probing the black and silvery hairs, watching them blossom and collapse in their hundreds. I varied the contents of the jar: lemon rind, scraps of meat, cabbage leaves, egg-yolk – everything had its own way of becoming something new, and I made my own private catalogue of implosions and seepages, ergots and mildews, sickening odours, twitches, vanishings. One afternoon I loosened a tangle of hair from Mother’s brush, wrapped it in tissue paper and buried it out in the garden amongst her irises, so the freshening rain could wear it down and make it new, irresistibly, in the cold earth. That same year I began to collect the skulls and bones of the animals I found, laying them out on beds of sawdust in old shoe boxes, giving each its own label to show the date and place where it had been found. I think even then I knew what I was doing, but at the same time it had the quality of a game – as if I were preventing myself from fully understanding that these rituals, these clumsy flirtations with death and renewal, were really my childish attempts to prevent Mother from dying. I remember that there was an afternoon, around that time, when it first came home to me that she was mortal. Of course, I must have known before then that she would die, but there had never been real understanding, the idea of her death had always been vague, lacking in intimacy.

I think there are places in the mind where nothing changes: a garden shed, the space beneath a bridge, the urine-scented steps to an old air-raid shelter littered with rags and broken glass. It may be that what happened in those places are the moments you would choose to remember clearly if you could, the scenes you erase without knowing you have erased them, the events that populate your dreams in muted form, which you abandon in waking, a deliberate yet poignant loss. If only you could remember, something would be whole again; even if the memory was difficult to accept, it would be better than the not-knowing which has defined and limited you for years, making you weak and irresolute, a creature attuned to fear, incapable of fully assenting to your own life. This is a psychologist’s cliché, and yet I accept it, almost unconditionally. I have no clear idea of what happened to me, one summer’s day, out hunting in the grass. I picture a man in a grubby business suit, strangely out of place amongst the cow parsley and wild geraniums. I picture him taking hold of me, pressing me to a fence, and fumbling at my groin – but this is all there is for sure, an imagined act, no more convincing or immediate than a scene from a book or a film. I have one clear memory of an overwhelming powerlessness, of being unable to move, or struggle free. As far as I recall, he did not speak: whatever it was that happened, took place in silence. Then I remember running home across the meadow – and this memory is perfectly clear – I remember finding the door to our walled garden locked and thinking it was part of a conspiracy, thinking someone inside the walls was in league with the man who had caught me out there. I shouted and hammered desperately at the locked door until Mother came and opened it. She stood looking at me quizzically, with her secateurs in her hand, slightly mocking, as if she wanted me to understand, of my own accord, that I was making a fuss about nothing.

‘What is it?’ she said, after a moment. ‘You’re all dirty.’

‘The gate was locked.’

‘Well, there’s no need to get upset. You only had to knock.’

‘I was locked out,’ I repeated. I could hear how loud my voice was, how unacceptably vehement.

She shook her head.

‘Go and get cleaned up,’ she said. ‘You look like something the cat dragged in.’

She didn’t seriously enquire as to what had happened and I think, even then, I was already beginning to erase what it was from my mind, forgetting for her sake, as much as my own. She looked so clean, so untouchable, yet at the heart of that perfection there was something soft, something she preserved by an effort, as the shellfish preserves its soft white body, by continually renewing its shell. It was then that I first understood how vulnerable she was, and I felt sorry for her, as if I had caught her out, not so much in a lie as in a pitiful act of self-deception.

For months afterwards I was afraid she would become ill and die. I watched her carefully for symptoms: if she fell asleep in the evening, sitting in her chair, a book or a garden magazine sliding to the floor as she drifted away, I woke her immediately. At night I would stand outside her bedroom, to hear if she was still breathing. In the daytime, when I was at school, I carried a pair of her gloves in my coat pocket, taking them out from time to time to make sure I still had them. It was one of those games children play to cheat fate – if I lost the gloves, Mother would die, but as long as I kept them, she would be invulnerable. In addition to these rituals of deceit and propitiation, I gave myself the task of listing by name all the flowers in her garden: first the irises, which she prized more than the others, then the lilies, the pinks, the roses, the shrubs and climbers, the fruit trees trained against the walls. When that was finished I moved on to something else, compiling lists of scientific terms and place names in special notebooks that I kept hidden under my bed, alongside the shoe boxes full of animal skulls.