Devotion. Louisa Young

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      Occasionally, through her childhood, Kitty had wanted to know about her mother. But as youngest children always are, she was born into a family already formed before her arrival. Even in a family as unorthodox as hers, there was an existent mood to which Kitty had not had the opportunity to contribute. The fact of her, of course, did – but it was beyond her influence. Julia and her death were not secret or denied, but nor were they much spoken of. As a result, Kitty’s first emotion was insecurity. These parents were not her real parents. They were not really hers. So she would have to work harder to make sure she was loved. She was a warm little girl; it came easily to her. But she never relaxed.

      Occasionally, she had asked. She asked Riley first, when she was seven or eight. (She hadn’t wanted to rock the boat by asking Nadine – of course Nadine knew she wasn’t Kitty’s actual mother, but mentioning it out loud seemed rude almost.) It was bedtime, and he had come up to kiss her goodnight. Kitty had dithered between asking what had happened to Julia, and what Julia was like, and decided on the latter. When she produced her enquiry, cautiously, Riley had fallen silent, rubbed at his chin, stroked her head, and finally said: ‘She was very pretty, and she loved your father very much, and she loved you.’ (Looking back on that as an adult, Kitty thought it sounded like the letters people had saying how their fathers had died in the war: bravely, and without suffering. Every one of them.)

      A year or so later she asked Mrs Joyce, the cook housekeeper at Locke Hill, what had happened. Mrs Joyce asked her what she wanted bringing that up again, it had been very sad but what’s done was done, now get out from under my feet there’s a good girl. So Kitty had plucked up an immense courage and asked Peter, one day when he was quiet in his little house in the woods. She remembered it clearly: he had been on his big old chair where he always was, and she had run in and said, ‘Tell me about Mummy.’ He had turned his head a little towards her, and without hesitation said, ‘She was too good for me.’ Kitty had pressed: ‘Tell me a story about her.’ And he had shaken his head, sucked his cheeks in, and fumbled for a cigarette. ‘No,’ he had said. ‘Oh no.’

      For a while that was all she had. Her mother was beautiful, she loved Peter, she was too good for him. It was sad, and nobody would talk about it. So after a decent interval she picked up her courage again and took this information to Tom, the beloved, the older, the all-knowing, the unreliable. He had smiled at the question, realising his power, and then sat her down with great seriousness, and sworn her to secrecy. He was always doing that. It added to the importance.

      ‘Kitty,’ he said, ‘I am sorry to have to tell you this. Our mother was no good. I remember her clearly. She was very beautiful with golden hair, but she was no good. She upset Father by never leaving him alone. She let her mother steal me when I was a baby. She ran away from home without telling anybody. She was always crying and being selfish. And then she did a very terrible thing which you must never mention.’ Kitty squirmed, and promised. ‘She did something terrible to her face,’ Tom said. ‘She sort of burned it off with chemicals, and after that she looked like a terrible frightening clown.’

      Kitty had trembled, she’d bitten her lips closed, she’d wept and denied, and then she had to run away. For years afterwards she had dreamt of the bad mother with a glaring white clownface, carrying a suitcase, running down a railway platform, waving from an airplane, coming into her bedroom at night. She never spoke of it to anybody.