The Drying Rooms - Chapter Eleven
The Sunday Photograph
Audio version of Chapter Eleven
When the brother who diminished Cruel Matron died suddenly on a squash court aged 46, it felled her. The pain went straight to the scar left by her other brother’s death and ripped it open. The brother who died alone in his room, the first of the heart attacks in her family, was 40. She got the news of his death — her first big death— on a sunny day just after turning into the drive of a house in Ireland where she was happy, and she knew instantly something new and seismic had cracked inside her. Yet inside that crack there was the taste of something familiar, long buried. She remembers the thought, flashing in and out:
Oh. This is what it was.
Occasionally, there was a reprieve from homesickness. A reprieve from the nightly fear of Cruel Matron. A reprieve from living without love.
Apart from the holidays and half terms, there were weekends when they were allowed out. She thinks it was three designated weekends a term, or maybe it was only three a year, one per term.
She remembers the desperate agitation of the excitement as they waited for their parents to arrive and take them out. It was called that. Being ‘taken out’: when home was allowed to arrive at the school gates and scoop them up. Very occasionally, she got taken out by her own parents.
There is a photograph. It is contained within a collage her sister gave her for her 25th birthday. That collage has been with her for 43 years. It has travelled with her through different houses and countries, through marriage, childbirth, motherhood, divorce, through the deaths of her brothers and her parents – and now it sits propped up on a shelf, waiting to be reframed. Without that photograph in the centre, the collage would just be a memento of nostalgic loss. She can see the day when a busy but kind carer will pick it up with a smile and take the time to give her a brief conversation about it.
The photograph is of her and her oh-so-loved father. She is very little, probably eight. It was taken on one of the weekends they were allowed out.
Her father has his arm round her shoulder. He is looking down at her, smiling, and she is looking up at him. It is a photo of two people who love each other very much, looking straight into each other’s eyes. Looking at it, showing it to someone, invariably makes her lachrymose. It always triggers a feeling she doesn’t quite understand, a silent keening that is beyond sentimental, sideways to loss.
Little girl, you are with me now; I am holding your small, soft trusting hand, but that’s the only visceral thing about you – maybe because holding a trusting’s child’s hand is very familiar to me at the moment. Throughout this thing, you have held my hand with love and trust. You are completely open, completely true. I could step off the edge of a cliff with you.
It is a Sunday photograph. She has a strong deep knowing that it was a Sunday afternoon. She and her father are standing in monochrome countryside, by a little road. She knows there is a little road because there is an accompanying photo of the same place showing a road and a car. She has a cloth camera case in her hand. The photo must have been taken by her mother, but she knows it was with her camera. Her new Brownie camera.
They had parked the car and got out for a bit, maybe a little walk. Somewhere – deep in the layers – there is a smudge of dread. She knows that this photograph was taken at the end of a Sunday afternoon, on one of those rare weekends when she was taken out.
A precious, much anticipated weekend, now over.
Mum and dad. The bodily warmth of them. The safety of them. The way they instantly completed her. And in that liberated capsule of time, there was the thrill of sleeping in the local hotel; the luxury of good food and treats: orange ice-lollies, several slices of hot buttered toast by the warm golden flames of an open fire. Cake.
But where is that photograph taken? Is it up near the churchyard and the common where years later as a teenager at the senior school she used to go to smoke and write poetry? Or is it on the road up to the garlic-smelling woods?
She stares at the photograph. At her father’s lovely smiling face, looking down at hers. And suddenly, like the wordless truth at the heart of a dream, she is hit with a fuck-me bolt!
Oh God.
It’s a Sunday afternoon!
I know what I am feeling!
And my eight-year-old face doesn’t show it.
Mum and Dad were about to take me back!
Her smiling face looking into the eyes of her oh-so loved father must have been hiding the dread of being returned.
She suddenly understands. The curation of her split-self had begun.
And, she wonders for the first time, what was that man in the photo feeling? Her dad. That father in his forties. That rock. That young, funny, affectionate, diplomat on a trajectory to high profile ambassadorships. So miserable at boarding school himself. That man with the best big hug in the world.
My dad!
Soon to go back to his life, his evening, with her mum. Their evening. Their habitual whisky-soda for him, whisky-water for her. Or a cocktail party, followed by a dinner party? Or maybe just a Sunday evening together in London?
They were each other’s best friends.
And my life? My evening?
She has a lachrymose moment of self pity …
The re-entry into a grey Sunday evening at school after a lifetime away in one night
Back to the smell of disinfectant on the floorboards
Back to the gagging dining-room in time for supper
The disgusting food, the babble of voices
Back to G-Block
The washbasins
The manky duckboard
Nail and teeth inspection
Readjusting to the dorm
The fear
The fear of wetting her bed
The fear of Cruel Matron
And
—here it comes again
The homesickness
Crashing waves of it
Fortified by her brief contact
with the people she loved most
in the whole wide world
Something is happening,
it’s a really knotty thing
I can’t … I can’t …
I can’t undo the knot!
I want to undo it
and
lay it out to breathe.
If they had rescued me, they would have had to change their lives.
And that
obviously
would have been
out of the question.
So what is the question?
I was loved. They loved me. I know that.
So what is the question?
The question is: did they love me enough?
And the answer?
The answer, she suspects, lies somewhere in the life she went on to live.
Silence!
She sees the outline of Cruel Matron’s sturdy body in the doorway. Her short, curly hair silhouetted by the striplight.
Lights out. No talking!
Yes, and I think sometimes what is perceived to be the development of resilience in a child can actually be the development of dissemblance.
Finally I am catching up with the last few episodes of your achingly beautiful memoir Emma. It just keeps getting better even as it gets more painful to read. And it is so brave and vital to write it all down, stare it in the face (with laser precision, humanity and - blimey - humour). And to share it with us. And my goodness for those of us who came home from school every day .. well, we need to know.