When I was a child, I had a wigwam in our back garden: a circle of thin yellow cotton
draped over a bamboo pole and pegged to the lawn. Every time my parents argued, that was
where I went. I would lie on my stomach with my fi ngers in my ears and stare so hard at
the red animals printed on its bright decorative border that after a while they began to
dance and run, until I wasn’t in the garden any more but out on the plains, wearing a
fringed deerskin tunic and feathers in my hair, just like the braves in the fi lms I
watched every Saturday morning in the cinema down the road.
Even at an early age I found it preferable to be outside in my little tent rather than
inside the house. The tent was my space. It was as large as my imagination, which was infi
nite. But the house, for all its grandeur and Georgian spaciousness, felt small and
suffocating. It was stuff ed with things, as well as with my mother and father’s
bitterness. They were both archaeologists, my parents: lovers of the past, they had
surrounded themselves with boxes of yellowed papers, ancient artefacts, dusty objects; the
fragile, friable husks of lost civilizations. I never understood why they decided to have
me: even the quietest baby, the most house-trained toddler, the most studious child, would
have disrupted the artificial, museum-like calm they had wrapped around themselves. In
that house they lived separated from the rest of the world, in a bubble in which dust
motes fl oated silently like the fake snow in a snow-globe. I was not the child to
complement such a life, being a wild little creature, loud and messy and unbiddable. I
liked to play rough games with the boys instead of engaging in the sedate, codifi ed
exchanges of the other girls. I had dolls, but more often than not I beheaded or scalped
them, or buried them in the garden and forgot where they were. I had no interest in making
fashionable outfi ts for the oddly attenuated pink plastic mannequins with their insectile
torsos and brassy hair that the other girls so worshipped and adorned. I had little
interest even in my own clothes: I preferred making mud missiles and catapults and chasing
my playmates till my sides hurt from a combination of laughing and stitches, building
hides and running around half naked, even in the winter.
‘You little savage!’ my mother would admonish, accompanying the words with a sharp
smack on the backside. ‘For God’s sake put some clothes on, Isabelle.’ She would say this
with all the severity her clipped French accent could deliver, as if she thought she could
imprint civilized behaviour on me by the use of the full version of
my old-fashioned name. But it never really worked.
My friends called me Izzy: it fi tted the chaos of me, always buzzing, always noisy –
such a trial.
In the garden behind our house my friends and I played at being cowboys and Indians,
Zulus, King Arthur and Robin Hood, armed with swords and spears in the form of bamboo
canes robbed from the vegetable patch, and make-believe bows and arrows. When it came to
the Robin Hood game I always insisted on playing a merry man, or even the Sheriff of
Nottingham – anything other than Maid Marian. In all the versions of the legend I’d come
across Maid Marian didn’t do very much except get imprisoned and/or rescued, which didn’t
greatly appeal to me. I had no interest in being the swooning prisoner: I wanted to
wrestle and hit people with sticks, like the rough little tomboy I was. This was in the
late sixties and early seventies: girlpower hadn’t yet turned Maid Marian, Guinevere,
Arwen or any of the other complaisant heroines of legend into feisty, all-action go-
getters. Besides, in comparison with the pale, pretty girls who were my friends, I was too
ugly to play the heroine. I didn’t care: I liked being ugly. I had thick, black hair and
dirty skin and earth under my nails and calluses on my feet, and that was how I preferred
it. How I howled when my mother made me take a bath, when she attacked me with Wright’s
coal tar soap, or tried to untangle my hair. If guests were staying at the house, as they
occasionally did, she had to warn them, ‘Take no notice of the screaming: it’s only
Isabelle. She hates having her hair washed.’
You’d never have recognized me three decades later. The day I went to the solicitor’s
offi ce to take charge of the letter my father had left me in his will I wore a classic
Armani trouser suit and Prada heels. My unruly hair was cut and straightened into a neat
shoulder-length bob; my make-up was discreet and expertly applied.
The dirt under my nails had been replaced with a practical square-cut French manicure.
Ironic, really: I now presented myself in a manner of which my mother would have
thoroughly approved, had she still been alive. It was hard even for me, who had travelled
every step of the long path between the grubby little hooligan I had once been and the
carefully turned-out businesswoman I had become, to reconcile the two.
The letter he left for me was short and cryptic, which was apposite: my father was a
short and cryptic sort of man. It said:
My dear Isabelle
I know I have been a great disappointment to you, as a father and as a man. I do not ask
for forgiveness, or even understanding. What I did was wrong: I knew it then, and I know
it now. One bad decision leads to another and another and another; a chain of events
leading to catastrophe. There is a story behind this catastrophe to be told, but I am not
the one to tell it. It is something you need to piece together for yourself, for it
belongs to you and I do not want to reinterpret it for you, or to spoil it as I have
spoiled everything else. So I am leaving you the house: and something else besides. In the
attic you will fi nd a box with your name on it. Inside that box are what you might call
‘waymarkers’ for your life. I know you have always felt at odds with the world in which
you found yourself, and I must take at least half of the blame for that; but perhaps by
now you have come to terms with it. If that is indeed the case, forget this letter. Do not
open the box. Sell the house and everything in it. Let sleeping beasts lie. Go in peace,
Isabelle, and with my love. For the little it is worth.
Anthony Treslove-Fawcett
I read this in the lawyer’s offi ce in Holborn, a brisk ten-minute walk away from the
offi ce where I worked as a highly paid tax accountant, with the solicitor and his clerk
watching on curiously. Also in the envelope, a set of house keys on a battered leather
fob.
‘All well?’ the solicitor asked brightly. A strange question to ask someone whose father
has just died; though maybe he was not to know that I had not seen that father in the best
part of thirty years; not in person, at least. I was shaking so much I could hardly speak.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I replied, stowing the letter and keys clumsily into my handbag.
Summoning every ounce of resolve, I gave him a smile so bright it would have dazzled blind
Justice herself.
The senior partner tried not to show his disappointment at my failure to disclose the
contents. Then he passed me a folder of papers and started to talk very fast.
All I wanted was to be outside now. I needed sunlight on me; I needed outdoor space. I
could feel the walls of the office – its stacked shelves and massive filing cabinets –
closing in on me. The words ‘probate’ and ‘frozen accounts’ and ‘legal process’ came at me
thick and fast, a maddening buzz of fl ies in the back of my skull. While he was still in
mid-sentence, I wrenched open the door, stepped out into the corridor and fled down the
stairs.