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CRESSIDA CONNOLLY
My Former Heart
To Violet, Nell and Gabriel
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart …
From ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ by William Wordsworth
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Cressida Connolly
Credits
Copyright
Ruth always remembered the day that her mother decided to go away. She didn’t know the actual date, but she recalled the occasion: it was on a wet afternoon early in 1942, during a visit to the cinema. She thought she could even pinpoint the exact moment Iris had made up her mind to go, leaving her only child behind. Neither of them could have guessed then that they would never live together again.
Her mother used to give her a treat after each visit to the dentist. Because the dentist’s rooms were in Devonshire Place, near Regent’s Park, this was quite often a visit to the zoo. But the zoo had shut down by then. The animals had been sent to the country, partly to keep them safe, but partly to keep people safe from them. No one knew what might happen if the zoo got hit and some of the animals escaped. Ruth tried to imagine what it would be like to meet a lion ambling down Albany Street, or a rhinoceros thudding along the towpath of the canal, where she had walked with her mother and father the summer before. She thought it would be frightening, but not as frightening as the Egyptian mummies they’d been to see at the British Museum. She was glad the museum had closed and she didn’t have to go there again.
Once, they had met up with an old friend of her mother’s, a lady called Jocelyn who designed costumes for the theatre and who had eyes which stuck out like a pug’s. Iris said that her friend was fun, but their lunch together had not been a treat; or at least not for Ruth. Jocelyn had said that she didn’t want to be married, ever; and she certainly, absolutely, didn’t want a family of her own.
‘I dislike children intensely,’ she drawled, the corners of her mouth twitching upwards at her own wit. ‘They have no conversation.’
Ruth had been shocked that her mother had laughed. It had never occurred to her that anyone might choose not to have children, let alone not enjoy their company. Everyone wanted to get married and have bridesmaids and a lovely dress: that was what you did when you grew up. And when you got married you had children and a kidney-shaped dressing table all of your own, with little silver-lidded glass jars full of hairpins, and others packed with cotton wool. You had scent in a bottle with a cloth-covered rubber squisher on its side, and a swan’s-down powder puff which sat separated from its powder by a disc with holes in, like the ones on soap dishes, so that the feather filaments of the powder puff did not become clogged. That was how things worked.
But this time, after Ruth’s teeth had been looked at – she couldn’t later remember whether she’d had to have any drilled that day – her mother took her to Oxford Street, to the cinema. The cinema was the Studio One and it had a swirly carpet, with a pattern which was meant to look like spools of film unravelling. The feature was a new cartoon from America about a baby elephant, but first there was a newsreel. Whenever Mr Churchill appeared everyone in the cinema gave a cheer. There were pictures of men getting their trousers wet as they got off landing craft, and of people waving, and of tanks, and the voice which described it all was very cheerful and urgent. Iris was hardly watching the newsreel though, because she was looking in her bag for change so she could send Ruth to get some cigarettes from the usherette, and some sweets. Before the war there would have been ices, but you couldn’t get ices by then.
Iris was always rummaging in her bag, looking for a book match or a pencil, inclining her head, an escaping curl of dark hair, like a question mark, falling over one eye. Eight-year-old Ruth went and fetched the cigarettes for her mother and a small white paper bag of sweets for herself and came back to the seats with them. Now the newsreel was showing some pictures from the desert, and she could feel that her mother was concentrating on them, because there was a sort of tightness about her. When General Montgomery came onto the screen, he got an even louder cheer than the Prime Minister had had. The screen showed men in uniform marching about and then more of them, queuing with trays, outside a big tent, while others stood around a tall van in the background. Then suddenly Iris was on her feet and hissing in a loud whisper, ‘Stay here, Ruth. Don’t move. I’ll be back in a minute.’ Ruth supposed she must have needed to go to the lavatory. Lots of people all along the row had to stand up so Iris could get past. Ruth would have felt a little embarrassed about disturbing people, but Iris never minded about that sort of thing.
She seemed to be gone for a long time. The film started and Ruth was a bit frightened because the story began with a lot of thunder and lightning and she was afraid of storms. She consoled herself by trying to concentrate on not chewing her sweets, holding them against the roof of her mouth with her tongue until they dissolved and her mouth was flooded with their sugary flavour. On the screen big birds with long beaks brought baby animals down from the clouds, wrapped in what looked like towels. This troubled her. No one had ever mentioned to her the role of storks in bringing babies into the world, so she did not understand what these gawky birds had to do with the arrival of children. It was all very quick and muddling. Next there were animals going two by two, which made her think the film was going to be about Noah and the Flood. But the story turned out to be about a circus, travelling along in a little train. The train got puffed out when it went uphill. Ruth put another sweet into her mouth. Still Iris had not come back to her seat.
Now there was a baby elephant with big ears, who made friends with a mouse. The mouse was kind, but the other elephants were not. They were standoffish and then they ganged up. It wasn’t fair. The baby wasn’t allowed to see its mother because she’d turned fierce, but the kind mouse took the baby to where the mother was – in a sort of prison – and the mother reached her trunk between the bars and rocked her funny little baby. This was so sad that Ruth began to cry.
The one thing she could never remember was at what point her mother came back to her seat. ‘There was a funny – I mean funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha – bit in the film, when suddenly the proper story stopped and there were lots of pink elephants with empty eye sockets