A Private Reason

By Janet Warran

At the heart of this closely-woven tale of love and human frailty lies the quiet, enigmatic figure of Christina Mansfield. It is wartime London and no one’s future is secure. Little Christina has her family all around her but to her they seem as cruel and unpredictable as the rest of the world - her brother is a solitary figure, her sister is brash but priggish, her mother vague. As for her father... From the 1940s to the early years of the twenty-first century, from the West Indies to West Sussex, Christina’s story unfolds, partly in her own words, partly through the observations and perceptions of those about her – as an artist, she becomes a woman with an extraordinary passion for life. But has she really escaped from her family, from the secrets that have been kept, the picture they have painted of themselves? Now Christina’s illegitimate daughter Eleanor is here, struggling to find her place in the world. Is there still time for the greatest deception of all to be exposed?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mereo Books
• Release date: Mar 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781861512857

Book preview

CHRISTINA

I am drifting. I am ash on water. My edges crumple and curl. I am the woman in the burning photograph, flaking and floating away on the wind.

My vista is a canvas and all the paints have run. The colours are fading. Now a crimson darkness, as if a hand has reached across to shield my eyes from all of this. A reel of images slips onto a spool. The pictures start to flicker into a life. My life.

Look.

This is the playground at St Luke’s School. I’m sitting on a bench. It’s wood and the splinters have snagged my skirt. Claudia, my sister, is here, chanting something with the other children. My scarf is over my ears, so I can’t hear what they say. My mouth is full of fluff and tears. But there is Harriet, my grown-up daughter, standing on a sea wall. I don’t understand. She is waiting to confront me. Again. But she’s out of her time. She’s always been out of my reach.

That’s my mother standing in the garden of my childhood home, Hunter’s Lodge. Mother looks very glamorous in that fur coat and matching hat. She’s very beautiful, isn’t she? What thin calves and ankles she has. She must be smiling up at my father, she’s saying something but still I can’t hear.

Hunter’s Lodge is such an ugly Victorian house. Pointed arches and fussy brickwork. There are three broad semi-circular steps and a rockery right at the end of the garden. They are made of Welsh slate that has thick white veins running through it.

There’s the greenhouse, there behind the apple trees. I am ducking into it; there’s a strong, peppery, chemical smell that pricks my nose, not unpleasant, quite seductive, like petrol. And the heat, argh, it feels so thick and sticky. It’s claustrophobic in here, even though it’s glass and I can see all about. I am having trouble getting my breath. I must be still and stop fighting this.

There’s a better view of the house. It looks very imposing, all those steps sweeping up from the lawns. It’s perfectly symmetrical, I didn’t realise. That bay on the left is the drawing room and the windows on the right are the library.

Shh! I am in there. I am in the library. What am I doing here? It smells of my father – sandalwood and old cigars. So many books. All those words that people have laboured over for us to discard by a chair or drop as we drift to sleep. Boxes and papers and some chocolates in big glass jars, the tops too wide for my small hands to twist off. The chocolates are wrapped in coloured foil, all different colours, and I’m excited by the abundance of all that sticky sweetness. No. It’s dark in this corner and there are shadows here that frighten me. Daddy says if I’m a good girl, I can have some chocolates.

Father’s desk is a mess: rolls of paper, notebooks, rulers, a setsquare; pencils and pens and a bottle of Royal Blue Quink. In front of the hearth is a fireguard which has a tapestry Aunt Margaret stitched on the front, I know it’s a hunting scene but I can’t see it quite clearly enough. So many shadows in here and I must be very, very quiet. Daddy says so. There’s the set of brass fire tools, the poker and the grate brush we play soldiers with, and the toasting fork. All tarnished. Oh, I can taste tea-time toast and warm butter and sharp homemade marmalade with too-thick rind. The butter runs down my chin.

That’s Frederick, in that photograph. There, look, look, on the mantel. He’s my big brother. So handsome in his airline uniform, smiling and proud. Wait – this picture’s in the wrong time too. He dies. He died. I can’t remember. Oh, Freddie. That’s Jesse in the picture with him, Freddie’s spaniel, sitting to attention at his feet. The picture reminds me of something. Old tombs in a church where schoolchildren come in droves to make brass rubbings.

Listen! Freddie’s here somewhere, I’m sure of it. Yes, I can hear him in the drawing room and Jesse’s claws click-clicking on the parquet. Freddie? Oh, my beloved brother, how I have missed you.

Wait. This is me and my father. Somewhere. My hair is very long. I’m sure I could sit on it if I tried. Sometimes it gets tangled. My mother cuts the tangles out with kitchen scissors. Everything is tangled, muddled up. I don’t know if I am looking at pictures or if I am in them.

Father and I again. Me in my best frock. I’m outgrowing it. The elastic at the bottom of the sleeves is too tight and leaves marks on my upper arms. I hear Mother saying, Sometimes you just have to put up with things, Christina. The roses on the bodice of that dress are made of a piece of crimson silk that was once a slip of my mother’s. Everything is rationed, you see. My mother’s love is rationed. But Daddy says he loves me.

Father and I again. He’s holding my arm very tight, just above my elbow. He whispers in my ear; I feel his breath. There is perspiration running down my back. My scalp prickles. He won’t stop talking. It’s too close. He’s too close. Breath on my neck. My heart is racing. Go away, please go away Daddy. Go away!

Emmy? That’s better. This is Flint Cross, the garden at the back of Jim and Emmy Reed’s bakery shop. I am young again here. Look! I’m right there, sitting under the pear tree. I’m drawing. I draw with wax crayons. There’s that funny old flowerpot that says Dymchurch in tiny pearly shells. I can smell the wax from the crayons. The red crayon is really stumpy because red is my favourite colour. It’s an angry colour and I use it all the time. I keep my crayons in a tin from the bakery. The tin has a boy sitting on a fat horse, on the lid. It smells of stale cake and wax inside. I like horses.

See, there’s Emmy again, there, waving to me from the scullery window. Emmy is more of a mother to me than my own. For a minute there she suddenly looked old, she was suddenly a very old lady. Time keeps slipping.

Emmy is with me here, right here, beside me, walking up the lane to St Clare’s. It’s the convent school. I go there because I like drawing and my teacher at the other school said I’d be better off with the nuns. It’s better being away from my sister Claudia. There are older girls here; some of them board at the school. They don’t talk to me much.

Isn’t it misty in the woods behind us? The trees are so still they don’t look real. Their leaves are made of paper and crayon wax.

Winter. It’s damp and I think I can smell snow in the air. I can feel the damp and the cold in my bones. Claudia and I are buttoned up for the weather. I’ve got a long thick plait down my back, I feel the weight of it and it swings like a pendulum as I walk. Our mother is here with us, wearing that fur coat again, it reaches almost to her ankles. I can smell the cakes that Emmy has put in a box for my mother to take back to London. The cakes are wrapped in brown paper and inside the box I’ve put a drawing for my daddy, rolled up and tied with a piece of tapestry wool.

This is my parents’ holiday bungalow. It’s on the coast, near the marshes. I hate it here. This is after the war. There’s streaky pink lino in the passageways that makes me think of fatty ham. I can hear children shrieking. We are washing shells in the huge, Belfast sink in the kitchen. That’s Claudia and Fred on the beach, eating sherbet dip. Half a Crown for three canary yellow tubes with the liquorice stick poking out the top. I can feel the weight of the coin in my hand, I’m holding it up to the lady with the sweet cart. She doesn’t see me because she’s smiling at my father, saying something, and my father is touching her. I hate her. She has very red lips and big yellow teeth. I kick the side of the cart and father smacks me hard behind the legs. His hand is sandy and it stings. The marks of his fingers are there for the rest of the day.

Apple trees. Lopped off branches, crudely cut. I’m trying to duck beneath the broken bits to avoid the sharp ends of their severed limbs. Someone’s dragging me here, behind the old wooden garage at the bungalow. I can feel my face now, hard against the splintered slats of the garage. The smell of wet wood. And the musky smell of my fear.

What’s happening? No, don’t. I want to see, but something’s pulling me down. A roaring sound. I’m trying to keep my chin above the water. There’s Claudia, standing on the bank of the drainage canal that runs by the bungalow. I’m in the canal, its thick green water filling my mouth. I have to get out. Claudia has told me there are eels in here that will bite off my feet. She’s standing on the bank with her hands over her ears. Help me, Claudia! Why won’t you help me? Can’t you hear me? Claudia?

Arms under me, pulling me up. A man’s chest against my back, holding me tight to him. And now my father’s voice, all choked up saying, Chrissie, Chrissie, my little princess. What have I done, what have I done? Please breathe, please breathe. And his lips on mine, like dried-up worms.

CLAUDIA

I remember my sister Christina so clearly as a little girl, sitting on the school bench at St Luke’s. Just sitting there, watching us, tapping her feet because she said her toes were numb with the cold. God, she was always cold, always muffled up with scarves and extra socks and vests. Her hands were always blotchy in winter, purple and orange patches flaring up from under that pale skin of hers. She always had chilblains. Really and truly, she was such a bore about them.

Ooh, I loved school. That was the first school we went to, St Luke’s Primary. Funny that I only think of the playground being in the winter, mostly I just remember my childhood as sun and games and laughing, really and truly. It was a little school, just a main hall with four small rooms along each wall and a church across the courtyard. It was at the bottom of the hill, below Hunter’s Lodge, our house.

Oh, the school closed down years ago. There’s a new, modern primary school a mile further down into town. St Luke’s still stands empty and derelict. Until the council decides what to do. Such a waste. You’d think they’d use it for something. I don’t know, a youth club? Silly. There aren’t youth clubs any more, that’s old-fashioned, kids just hang about on corners now, don’t they? The ones who are better off just sit at computer screens all day. Or those awful computer games. That’s why they are so many social problems, now the kids don’t develop social skills. And no sense of family any more. Family is everything, don’t you think?

Yes. We once went back to visit, Christina and me. St Luke’s I mean. Harriet, Christina’s daughter, was with us, she must’ve been ten or eleven, unruly and wild as ever. She never stopped talking. Making up for lost time! She didn’t speak at all until she was about ten. She was an odd little girl, really and truly. After that you just couldn’t shut her up. Such a noisy child.

Of course, I wasn’t very happy about it, we were trespassing, going in there. There were signs up and lots of wire. She knew I didn’t approve but Christina had found a gap in the wire and the three of us sneaked through all the same. It was all Christina’s idea, of course. She had one of her notions that if we stood there, long enough and quietly enough, we would be able to hear all the children’s voices from all those years ago. Singing, chanting rhymes. I got fed up standing out in the cold and said I’d take Harriet for a cup of tea somewhere and come back later. Of course Harriet didn’t want to go but as soon as her mother said she didn’t have to, she changed her mind. Harriet has always been a contrary miss with her mother. But it isn’t really surprising, is it?

I pushed the boat out and took a black cab into the West End. We had tea at a cheap little place on the Strand. We sat at a table in the window watching the people in the street scuttling about in the wind. It was near Christmas, so even in the rain and the wind, the streets were very busy. We counted the number of umbrellas that turned inside out and watched their owners struggle with them. Harriet said that it was like the people were battling with a flock of scavenging blackbirds. Or some such thing. She was always an imaginative child. Sometimes she’d scare herself silly with the things she made up in that funny little noggin of hers. Poor Harriet.

We had to wait ages for a cab to take us back to Hunter’s Hill and the school. When we finally got there, Christina was still just sitting there, on one of the mossy benches, hugged into her coat, her hands pushed up into the sleeves, left into right, right into left, like she had one continuous loop of arm from shoulder to shoulder. She really did look as if she was listening to something. Hearing something. Oh, I don’t know. It was a bit of a funny day all round.

Hunter’s Lodge? It wasn’t a lodge, there wasn’t any other mansion or anything nearby. I don’t know why it was called that. It was the big house, set in a couple of acres. It had huge wooden gates at the entrance, set slightly back from the road and a gravel drive that curled round behind rhododendrons. You couldn’t see the house itself from the road, just the gates. It was really something, quite stately. Christina always said it made us seem very grand and that we weren’t, it was all one big lie. Rubbish. She always had to put the family down, put Dad down. Later on, when she had all her posh friends, she definitely thought we weren’t good enough for her.

Hunter’s Lodge. Well it had a drawing room, a library, five bedrooms, and grounds which included a walled vegetable garden with a greenhouse. There was a huge ornamental rockery with semi-circular steps in the middle which were made of Welsh slate and led down from the back of the house to the lawns. The house had mains gas, which was really something before the war. There were servants’ quarters, but we didn’t have anyone living in, although Mother did have a daily help, and a sort of cook-housekeeper called Mrs Rice. And we had Aunt Margaret who did the laundry on a Monday – in a wonderful old tub in the scullery. I loved washing day, the windows all misted up and the smell of washing soap. What would it have been? Oxydol, that was it! I loved helping Aunt Margaret to put the sheets through the mangle. That was my favourite bit.

Aunt Margaret was Dad’s older sister. She lived in a little terraced house down the road that she rented from Dad. Poor Aunt Margaret, it wasn’t much of a life. We were told she had lost her sweetheart in the first war. She’d trained as a milliner but her sight had deteriorated by the time we were born. Look, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but Aunt Margaret was a bit, well… sometimes she gave me the creeps. And sometimes she smelt. She mumbled. Nowadays we’d say dementia. Alzheimer’s or something like that. One minute smiley and happy and wanting to play with us, the next shouting at us to get indoors, not get our clothes dirty. Mind you, she never shouted at Christina. Never raised her voice around her. They were thick as thieves, Aunt Margaret and Christina. It says a lot, really and truly. Pair of loopy loos.

When she was growing up, Christina used to spend hours with Aunt Margaret. Now it makes more sense, of course; kindred spirits. Both quite bonkers. Though I can’t fathom what they can have talked about. But they’d sit together for hours on end, sewing together, mending something probably. Aunt Margaret made clothes, too, things for us. A pair of trousers for Frederick out of one of Dad’s coats. Or she’d unravel a sweater and knit it into something else. Real wartime type scrimping and saving. But clothes were still rationed, remember. People forget.

Sometimes she and Christina would be out in the garden, Christina sketching some still life she’d set up and Aunt Margaret doing one of her dreadful tapestries. I don’t know how she saw enough to stitch so intricately, you know. She used to hold the thing right up close to her face. Some of her tapestries were William Morris designs, which she copied from a book. Or she did shooting scenes with ridiculously clean spaniels with far too restful -looking pheasants in their mouths. Awful things. I gave the last one – a fireguard – to a church raffle. I pity the poor person who won it.

When I went to work for Dad – I worked for him from the age of sixteen, you know, after he’d sent me to Pitman’s to learn shorthand and typing – I found out that he’d actually bought Hunter’s Lodge for the land but our mother liked it and the war came, so he never did anything with it. Well, yes, I suppose it was a bit of a funny-looking house, but beautiful in its own way. Mother lived there for a while after Dad died but it was ridiculous having her rattle around in that great big place so I moved her nearer me, to a nice little bungalow. Eventually they demolished the whole place, the house, the outbuildings. They built fifty-odd homes – little execu-boxes – on the plot. I drove up a couple of times, watched them smashing the house to bits. My ex-husband said I was being morbid. Holding on to the past.

For a long time, the contractors left the gates at the entrance to the site. I had this fancy that I’d buy them, as a keepsake. They finally bulldozed them one Monday morning. This tiny chap in a monster machine gouging out the posts. The end of an era, really and truly.

Our father? Oh, that’s a real rags-to-riches tale. He became quite a local celebrity, you know. There were articles about him. When he died so tragically, his obituary was in all the papers. He had left school at twelve to apprentice as a bricklayer. It was only when he came back from the first war that he had his break. A foreman fired him for being cocky, told him go back to college to learn the building trade properly before he started answering back. So he did. He ended up running his own company. Mansfield Ltd. He taught at Woolwich Poly later in life. His name’s still up there on a plaque somewhere. He’d had a hard life. He used to tell us how he had to crawl under the stairs to study because his father drank and he would beat him if he found him with his face in a book. Aunt Margaret would sneak him something to eat. She was the woman of the house. Their mother had died, but I never found out when or of what. Dad never spoke of it. But he always said he pitied his own father. We didn’t ever know him, our grandfather, he died of cirrhosis of the liver, about the time our parents married. Of course, that was why Dad never drank; he said he had no difficulty signing the pledge with the memories of his childhood in that rotten house.

Dad was a brilliant draughtsman, drew wonderful plans, real works of art. I’ve got some of his original plans, for the first houses he built. I had them framed. They’re in my hall at home. They’re something a bit unusual, they often get remarked on. Anyway, when he finished his training, Dad went into business with a carpenter. And really and truly it went on from there. The business just grew and grew. He got a lot of local council work through his connections, on municipal buildings, repairs, alterations, that kind of thing. Then during the war, he was in charge of bomb damage. And afterwards he bought up a lot of land on the cheap – plots of rubble where rows of houses had been wiped out. Freddie, our brother, said our Dad always had his eye on the main chance, like it was something a bit immoral. As I see it, it was a business opportunity. Nowadays, of course, he’d be admired for his business acumen and foresight. He’d be one of those business troubleshooters you see on the box, going in to sort out little companies.

He was our hero, our father. Even to Freddie, though in a different way of course. But we all adored our Dad. None of us really got over him being killed. He died in a car accident when he was sixty-three. Things seemed to take a real turn for all of us then. Freddie went to France, my marriage started going downhill. And Christina, by then she’d taken up with all her fancy friends. Living the high life. She’d pretty much cut herself off from us all. Didn’t visit Mother, never came home. Now I look back, of course, I can see that it was the first sign that things were not as they seemed, really and truly.

You know, even after all this time and everything that has happened, I’m still quite cross with her. So she had her issues, but really, it was just so selfish.

Of course, Christina was always Dad’s favourite. I suppose the baby of the family usually is, usually the one who’s spoilt rotten. And then of course there was the fact that Christina had contracted pneumonia when she was little and everyone thought she’d die. We had a fever nurse in the house for three nights. We were going through what they called the Phoney War then and nurses were hard to get because they were being trained for war work. So I suppose Christina being so ill when she was little made her all the more special. Dad used to call her his princess. I didn’t have a nickname. Sometimes he called me Claude. Because I was a bit of a tomboy, really. I was quite tubby when I was young. I had freckles and my hair was cut short for a girl in those days. My daughter Sarah says that in pictures of me at that time I definitely look like a boy. She says I look like Mickey Rooney in that film with Elizabeth Taylor... about the racehorse and the girl jockey. Oh, you know. National Velvet, that’s the one.

Christina was born on my birthday; I can remember that extremely clearly. I wasn’t very pleased. It was meant to be my day. I was having a little birthday party; we hadn’t even got to the cake and the candle-blowing when all the other children’s mummies started running about whispering. Then Mother was being helped upstairs and my friends and I were sent out of the house to play in the garden. It started to rain, so Freddie took us off to play in the old greenhouse, where it was warm and muggy. Fred was our elder brother – did I say? He died young. So much sadness in our family, seems the men never made it. He was forty-nine. He had a heart attack on the golf course. Incredible really, because he’d just had a medical – he was a pilot for a French airline. Such a waste. He used to look so handsome in his uniform. Tall and dark. He had wonderful blue eyes, stunning, just like Dad’s, with lashes a girl would have died for. What an expression. Christina had very dark brown eyes you know, not a bit like either of our parents. When she was born, everyone remarked on them, they were so dark they were almost black.

So we were born on the same day, my sister Christina and I. But we were complete opposites. Always. That’s why I can’t believe any of this astrology,