fascination to our school friends—one day it might be red, another purple, another
a viscous green. And farther down the road there are other houses and gardens, most of them too with their lawns and lupines
and sometimes a loop of the stream; and the Freedom Hall, with its urgently evangelical posters, promising a different kind
of religion from the undemanding Anglicanism of the Norman church where we went every Sunday morning, where we’d kneel on
the tapestry hassocks in the gorgeous stained light, our mother in her pillbox hat, and mumble the stately words of the Anglican
prayer book, words that stay with you always: “We have done those things that we ought not to have done, and there is no health
in us.”
Our mother knew a lot about the people who lived in these houses. As her own circle grew ever more restricted because our
father didn’t like her going out, these neighbors, these glimpsed and hinted-at households, became her life, her world. Like
Mary Grayson next door, whose daughter had left her husband and gone to live with a woman, and the doctor had told Mary that
once a woman had gone that way there was no going back. Or the Barkers, who lived in the big mock Tudor house next to the
Freedom Hall. He was an executive at the Esso Refinery, and they used to hold swinging parties there, said my mother, all
the men putting their car keys into a salad bowl and being taken to bed by other people’s wives.
But did our neighbors ever gossip about us? Did they wonder what happened in our house, behind the Michaelmas daisies and
the little mossy lawn? Maybe the more astute women noticed the small things—an edge to his voice, or the way he always seemed
to walk a few paces in front of her. But our father was always so charming, a pillar of the community, handing out the prayer
books for the family service: And our mother had blouses that buttoned high at the collar.
They’re vivid even now, the bad times. Waking in the bedroom I shared with Ursula, with the night-light with the Enid Blyton
cutouts throwing intricate shadows, shivering, my taffeta eider-down slipping to the floor. Waking suddenly, pulses hammering
everywhere in my body, hearing his voice from downstairs, rising, hardening. There are voices that can hurt you, that can
seem to tear into you: that make you want to hide, to burrow under your blankets, clasping them to you, bunched tight inside
your fists.
“Don’t start.” He would always say that. “Don’t start.” But when he said that, his voice too loud for the house, it had already
begun. And then, “Bitch. You fucking stupid bitch. You fucking whore.” The torrent of insults, the things he called her. I’d
feel that everything was breaking up around us, that there was too much rage, too much hate, for the house to contain.
Ursula always stayed in bed, deep down under the bedcovers, her rapid breathing muffled by the blankets that she pressed to
her ears and her eyes. But sometimes I’d creep out onto the landing—frightened but needing to know. I’d kneel by the banister,
clasping my hands tight around the posts, gripping so hard that later I’d find the imprint of the carving on my palms. Knowing
I should go down—perhaps I could do something, perhaps I could stop it from happening. I remember the violets on the landing
wallpaper, and the tiles downstairs on the floor of the hall, and the stab of white light across the tiles from the half-open
kitchen door. Kneeling there on the landing among the ordinary things: the spider plant, the flowered walls, the gilt-framed
mirror. And then the click as my mother closed the door before he hit her. Knowing I was there, perhaps, and trying to protect
me: making sure at least that I couldn’t see.
Sometimes, the morning after, he’d be the one who woke us. He would be white, with a muffled, melancholy look, an air of being
sorry for himself: as though it was he who’d suffered.
a viscous green. And farther down the road there are other houses and gardens, most of them too with their lawns and lupines
and sometimes a loop of the stream; and the Freedom Hall, with its urgently evangelical posters, promising a different kind
of religion from the undemanding Anglicanism of the Norman church where we went every Sunday morning, where we’d kneel on
the tapestry hassocks in the gorgeous stained light, our mother in her pillbox hat, and mumble the stately words of the Anglican
prayer book, words that stay with you always: “We have done those things that we ought not to have done, and there is no health
in us.”
Our mother knew a lot about the people who lived in these houses. As her own circle grew ever more restricted because our
father didn’t like her going out, these neighbors, these glimpsed and hinted-at households, became her life, her world. Like
Mary Grayson next door, whose daughter had left her husband and gone to live with a woman, and the doctor had told Mary that
once a woman had gone that way there was no going back. Or the Barkers, who lived in the big mock Tudor house next to the
Freedom Hall. He was an executive at the Esso Refinery, and they used to hold swinging parties there, said my mother, all
the men putting their car keys into a salad bowl and being taken to bed by other people’s wives.
But did our neighbors ever gossip about us? Did they wonder what happened in our house, behind the Michaelmas daisies and
the little mossy lawn? Maybe the more astute women noticed the small things—an edge to his voice, or the way he always seemed
to walk a few paces in front of her. But our father was always so charming, a pillar of the community, handing out the prayer
books for the family service: And our mother had blouses that buttoned high at the collar.
They’re vivid even now, the bad times. Waking in the bedroom I shared with Ursula, with the night-light with the Enid Blyton
cutouts throwing intricate shadows, shivering, my taffeta eider-down slipping to the floor. Waking suddenly, pulses hammering
everywhere in my body, hearing his voice from downstairs, rising, hardening. There are voices that can hurt you, that can
seem to tear into you: that make you want to hide, to burrow under your blankets, clasping them to you, bunched tight inside
your fists.
“Don’t start.” He would always say that. “Don’t start.” But when he said that, his voice too loud for the house, it had already
begun. And then, “Bitch. You fucking stupid bitch. You fucking whore.” The torrent of insults, the things he called her. I’d
feel that everything was breaking up around us, that there was too much rage, too much hate, for the house to contain.
Ursula always stayed in bed, deep down under the bedcovers, her rapid breathing muffled by the blankets that she pressed to
her ears and her eyes. But sometimes I’d creep out onto the landing—frightened but needing to know. I’d kneel by the banister,
clasping my hands tight around the posts, gripping so hard that later I’d find the imprint of the carving on my palms. Knowing
I should go down—perhaps I could do something, perhaps I could stop it from happening. I remember the violets on the landing
wallpaper, and the tiles downstairs on the floor of the hall, and the stab of white light across the tiles from the half-open
kitchen door. Kneeling there on the landing among the ordinary things: the spider plant, the flowered walls, the gilt-framed
mirror. And then the click as my mother closed the door before he hit her. Knowing I was there, perhaps, and trying to protect
me: making sure at least that I couldn’t see.
Sometimes, the morning after, he’d be the one who woke us. He would be white, with a muffled, melancholy look, an air of being
sorry for himself: as though it was he who’d suffered.
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