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Staunch
STAUNCH
Eleanor Wood
Copyright
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020
Copyright © Eleanor Wood 2020
Eleanor Wood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008325688
Ebook Edition © March 2020 ISBN: 9780008325701
Version: 2020-01-31
Dedication
For Pansy, Rose and Thistle
Epigraph
‘But, you see, in dealing with me, the relatives didn’t know that they were dealing with a staunch character – and, I tell you, if there’s anything worse than a staunch woman …
S-T-A-U-N-C-H: there’s nothing worse, I’m telling you.’
Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale,
Grey Gardens
staunch
adjective
1. very loyal and committed in attitude synonyms: stalwart, loyal, faithful, trusty, committed, devoted, dedicated, dependable, reliable, steady, constant, hard-working, vigorous, stable, firm, steadfast, redoubtable, resolute, unswerving, unwavering, unhesitating, unfaltering
“a staunch supporter of the cause”
2. of strong or firm construction
“these staunch walls could withstand attack by cannon”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Present Day
January 2013
April 2003
December 2014
January 2015
January 2015
Present Day
March 2017
June 2017
Present Day
December 1947
December 2016
Present Day
Present Day
December 1947
Present Day
December 1947
Present Day
Present Day
Present Day
January 1948
Present Day
November 2017
Present Day
Present Day
Present Day
April 1948
Present Day
Present Day
Present Day
October 1948
Present Day
November 1948
Present Day
Present Day
Present Day
Present Day
October 1951
Present Day
Present Day
Present Day
August 2017
Present Day
Present Day
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
Present Day
‘Well, cheers, girls. We made it! Here’s to the Go-ers.’
The four of us clink glasses. My cocktail tastes of pure alcohol and sugar, it’s called a ‘Go-go Goa’ and it’s made with fenny, the local moonshine that – I think – comes from cashew nuts. We arrived in the early hours of the morning and this is our first early afternoon cocktail.
I’m on the beach, on the first day of a girls’ holiday. I’m wearing shorts and a bikini top, and successfully managing to skip cold and grey January back home. The sea is there, right in front of me – not only a picture-perfect sparkling bright blue, but warm and inviting. I’ve already been straight in for a swim. The sand is warm under our feet and the sun on our faces is heavenly. We are jetlagged and slightly frazzled after a long journey, but the excitement is palpable.
There are dogs and cows wandering around the beach and ladies in saris trying to sell us things on every corner. We are in India.
Specifically, we are in a beach shack strewn with fairy lights and residual Christmas decorations, sitting on picnic chairs. A sort of Indian-style mariachi duo wearing matching Hawaiian shirts and cowboy hats are playing in the beach shack we are sitting outside. I shit you not, they are doing a jaunty cover of Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. However, that’s not actually the most surreal thing about this girls’ holiday.
‘Rosie, do you think there’s enough gin in this?’ my grandmother asks her older sister, my auntie Rose. ‘It’s so disappointing when you can’t taste the gin properly. It’s really not on.’
Nan and Rose are both wearing brightly coloured sarongs that look incongruous against their white hair, sensible sandals and Rose’s walking stick.
‘I think it’s that local gin, Dot. It’s just not the same. I’d ask for an extra measure if I were you,’ Rose agrees. ‘It’s not very cold, either.’
‘But we mustn’t have ice, Rose!’ Nan cries. ‘Don’t forget, Ells’ – she looks at me sternly – ‘don’t ever have ice in your drink here.’
‘I won’t.’ I take a gigantic slug of my Go-go Goa.
My auntie Ann and I exchange a glance. Ann is Nan and Rose’s younger half-sister, so she’s a youngster at seventy-two. She looks sophisticated with it, with her dark bob and sleek black swimsuit.
It’s my first day of a ‘girls’ holiday’ where I am the youngest by an average of forty-six years.
While it may be somewhat unusual at my age to be on holiday with three old ladies, I guess the idea of going on an exotic holiday to ‘find myself’ and ‘discover my family history’ is less so. In fact, I fear it may be pretty basic.
As I sit on the beach with a cocktail in my hand, I find myself thinking about how I got here. It’s not exactly that I want to escape from my life – not any more. At this point, I think it’s just that I need a break. A lot has happened and I’ve just been trying to get through it. Now I need to recalibrate.
I’m not sure where to start. I try to think back to my rock-bottom moment and, depressingly, more than one springs to mind. In the tradition of my own generation, I make a list – ticking them off in my mind like a BuzzFeed article.
You won’t believe how this girl wrecked her life (#3 will blow your mind)!
Stepmum dying/stepdad leaving – family falling apart, subsequent psychotic break; both parents now on third marriage.
Breaking up with K after twelve years – breaking up a whole life, a whole fucking universe – for reasons that may have been … misguided?
Immediate new boyfriend, me insisting ‘it’s not a rebound!’ even after everyone had stopped listening, another traumatic break-up, more rebounds.
Going into therapy after dating a potentially violent, certainly threatening, narcissist (the most pertinent point of which should be noted: I did not break up with him – he ghosted me).
Of course, it was a combination of all of these things. One long rock-bottom moment over the course of a few years.
I turned thirty feeling smugly ahead of the curve, with a long-term boyfriend, a charming flat by the sea, a lovely job, and a potential promising book deal on the horizon. I’d given up smoking; I baked a lot of cakes. But I also still went to Glastonbury every year and wore great eyeliner. My boyfriend was in a band and I wore vintage dresses and went shopping in markets on a Saturday for records and ironic knick-knacks. I was the kind of cool, sorted thirty-year-old that teenage-me would have dreamed of being. I don’t know if I’m romanticizing in retrospect – it’s easy to do, after all – but I know I was happy. I really liked my life, my friends, my family. Especially my family.
Since then, there’s been death and divorce. There has been total and utter heartbreak that I wasn’t sure I’d survive. If it were possible for grief to kill you, I would be dead. I smoke again. I can’t remember the last time I made a cake, there’s nobody to impress and I’d only eat the lot myself, so what’s the point?
I was made redundant from my ideal job, then very unceremoniously sacked from the next one, for shagging my boss’ ex-husband. I now have to commute from Brighton to London every day to try to keep a roof over my head. I live in a place I cannot afford and I’m in debt from having to buy out my ex in order to keep it. I don’t sleep at night because I worry about the damp kitchen floor that I can’t afford to have fixed. When people come over, I have to ask them not to stand by the back door in case they fall through the gaps in the rotten floorboards. To be fair, I also don’t sleep at night because of Stupid Things I Said in 2004 (not to mention Clever Things I Should Have Said in 2009), so it’s a fairly crowded field.
I’ve had a string of sort-of relationships that have seemed promising and then gone nowhere. Each time, with every month I get older, it chips away just a little bit more at my poor battle-scarred heart. I haven’t had a dramatic break-up again – thank God, I genuinely don’t think I could take it – but I haven’t been in love for over two years now. I don’t think the musician in LA who I met via Instagram and do sexy FaceTiming with really counts. Love was something I used to take for granted, and I don’t have that luxury any more. Instead it’s been a series of small-to-medium disappointments that have made me feel terrible about myself.
The crisis is over, but I don’t feel better. I’m not completely in pieces any more, as I was a few years ago. I’m in therapy, which is helping a lot; there hasn’t been a major drama in ages. But I’m tired. There is some pleasure in my life – mostly when I’m drinking wine with my mum or with my clever, funny girlfriends and laughing at the sad state of it all. However, there is a sense of deep, lasting joy that I feel is lacking – no children, work feeling less fulfilling, no meaningful love. I am the favourite person of nobody. Sounds self-pitying, but it’s also true.
In fact, it’s now that things have settled down and supposedly ‘got better’ that I’ve started feeling worst of all. When you’re in the deep dark woods, fighting off wolves all over the place, you don’t have room to think about what’s happening. It’s only after they’ve receded and you are, technically, safe that the silence seems suddenly deafening. I was left standing in the middle of the woods, as the sun came up and the wolves were a distant howling memory, going ‘what the fuck just happened to me?’. Suddenly I had far too much space to think.
Now I’m here, on this crazy Indian beach – with wild dogs wandering around and cheesy dance music playing from the brightly decorated beach shacks, which all serve curry and lurid cocktails – I realize I’m happy to have a break from real life. My so-called strong independent life, where I live alone and go out a lot and have great friends. For some time now, I’ve felt like I am in the world very lightly – like I could disappear at any moment. I feel untethered, which should be exciting and freeing – but it’s not. I pretend I’m fine, but I’m not. Something – maybe more than one thing, I don’t even know – is missing.
If I’m honest, the silence is deafening. It’s everywhere. It’s in my kitchen while I scroll listlessly through Tinder, swiping left without really even looking, and drinking a bottle of red wine by myself without noticing until I realize that staggering to bed is harder than I thought. It’s on the train in the morning, with the silent commuters who never make eye contact, while I pretend to sleep or sometimes cry silently without being sure why behind my sunglasses. It’s definitely in bed at night, where I’m still not used to being alone, even after so long; I keep trying to learn to love it, to sleep starfished just because I can, but it doesn’t work. I still sleep motionless, scrunched on one mean sliver of my luxurious king-size mattress. It’s in my noisy workplace, where everyone wears headphones. It’s even in the pub after work, where I go most evenings with a grumpy, reticent university lecturer who is not my boyfriend and who I’m not even sure likes me very much. Since arriving in India approximately six hours ago, I’ve already texted him repeatedly and not heard anything back. He’s the latest in a line that is long-ish and getting longer.
I’ve lost sight of what constitutes a rock-bottom moment. Strolling into the reception of a Travelodge in my underwear to ask if they had a corkscrew because ‘I thought it would be funny’ (oh, and I was on a lot of cocaine at the time) was probably not my finest moment. But it wasn’t rock-bottom. Standing outside the closed door of my own spare room, quietly asking ‘Would you like a peppermint tea, maybe?’ – because the man in there ‘needed to be alone’, because he was feeling ‘aggressive’ towards me – was scary. Still not rock-bottom. Falling over drunk in front of everyone at my dear friend Emma’s wedding wasn’t great. Crying on late-night trains on the way home has just become normal, to be honest. It’s all been very kind of rock-not-quite-bottom.
Sitting here on the beach, it seems far enough away to give it a bit of thought now. Here in the sunshine with my nan and my aunties, with a long holiday stretching out before me, I feel like this might be a chance to finally get some perspective on it all.
So, if I had to pick one, like the one record you get to save on Desert Island Discs, I guess I do know the moment when it all began to fall apart.
January 2013
It is a freezing Monday morning and I have a dread feeling in my stomach. It follows me like a shadow or one of those horrible ‘hangxiety’ hangovers when you’re not sure where your phone is, but you have a half-drunk bottle of wine in your handbag and eyeliner on your chin.
It won’t go away and I have no idea why. I had a quiet weekend. I did some writing and I hung out with my boyfriend K. We went record shopping. I made a shepherd’s pie. He went out to band practice and I pottered about in our flat. When he got home we watched a rubbish horror film. We have been together for approximately a decade. We like the same things. We have a shorthand.
The only unusual thing is that I haven’t spoken to my mum and/or stepdad. I usually talk to at least one of them every day, sometimes multiple times. I tried to ring the house over the weekend, but there was no answer.
In the morning, I try to call again. The line rings and rings and rings. Only when I have pretty much given up does my mother answer. She sounds terrible.
‘Mum, are you OK?’
‘Not really. I’ve got this stupid flu and Stepdad’s had to go to California for work. I’m a bit miffed about it, actually.’
I don’t know why, it just doesn’t sound quite right. I have never heard her use the word miffed before. It doesn’t sound like something she would say. And Stepdad does go to California for work a lot, but it sounds a bit odd at such short notice, over a weekend.
I hang up the phone feeling like I’ve had a conversation with a cyborg that sounds a bit like a bunged-up version of my mother. My heroic mother who, it will turn out, didn’t want to ruin an important day for me.
I’m not going to work at my day job today because my agent and I are going to see editors who are interested in a novel I have written. We have been working towards this for a long time. She’s also taking me out for lunch, which is extra exciting, mostly because I really like saying things like ‘Oh, sorry, I can’t on Monday, my agent is taking me out for lunch’.
It’s a big week, in fact. K and I are moving on Friday – from the tiny top-floor flat that we call ‘The Garret’ into an actual house. It has a spare bedroom and a garden. This is less for reasons of sensible grown-up-ness, more due to our still-idealistic dreams of the artistic bohemian life. We will have space for K to have a music studio and for me to write. That tiny terraced house will probably have a blue plaque outside it one day. We will be exactly like Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, but also totally the opposite of them. Life will be dreamy. We might get a dog. Or at least a cat.
So, I put on a vintage dress and head into London and smile my way through the day of meetings. Afterwards, I have planned to go out for dinner in Soho with my friend Alice, who is great fun. I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks.
With promises from editors that they’ll be in touch, I say goodbye to my agent and walk towards Soho. I have time to kill so I try to call my stepdad. There is no answer, which is somehow unsurprising. What is surprising is that I get a UK ringtone. Not the weird long beeping-instead-of-ringing I’d hear if he were in California. Not only that, his work voicemail – which he maintains scrupulously with his whereabouts at all times – does not mention anything about being away.
I immediately call my mother. No answer. I keep calling until she picks up, which she does eventually. She sounds even worse than she did earlier.
‘Mum, what’s going on?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Please tell me.’
‘But … but I don’t want to.’
That’s when the bottom drops out of my stomach. Or world. I don’t even know.
‘Please, Mum. It’s OK. Just tell me.’
‘Are you sitting down? Where are you?’
‘Yes, I’m sitting down. I’m about to meet my friend Alice.’
I’m walking up and down Brewer Street and I can’t feel my legs.
‘I’m only telling you if you promise not to come here. I don’t want you to worry about me.’
‘OK …’
‘Stepdad’s left. He’s met someone else.’
She went to Waitrose on Saturday morning and life was still normal. She got home an hour later and he had packed up half the house into the back of his car. She was still standing in the hallway when he drove off and life as we knew it was over.
Stepdad has brought me up since the age of eleven. He and my mum have been together for over twenty years. Their wedding was in the top-five happiest days of my life, maybe even top-three. He taught me to drive. He helped me with my maths homework. He introduced me to Alfred Hitchcock films, and to doomy Eighties goth music like Joy Division and The Cure. He is my skiing and cycling partner and basically my favourite person to hang out with. He always refers to me as his daughter and we would both fight anyone who dared to question the logistics of this.
My mum is beautiful and wonderful, the most fun and generous person I know. She and I are very close but if anything, sometimes we are too similar; he is the buffer that makes our family work. If my mum is the person I love the most in the world, he is the one I idolise. He and I are best friends, always have been; my mum would jokingly accuse us of ganging up on her, and I secretly enjoyed it.
It’s not like I needed a dad when he came along – I have a dad and he’s lovely. But my stepdad and I had a relationship outside of that – he was always a reliable and loving parent to me, but also we had loads in common and just got on really well. I suppose because he was slightly outside of being my actual parent, I found him easier to talk to and he came along at an age when I really needed that.
‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ my mum says. ‘I’m hoping he’ll change his mind and I won’t have to tell anyone. It’ll be fine. I’m glad you’re with your friend, you need someone to look after you.’
Have I mentioned my mum is a fucking hero? I’m still repeatedly telling her I love her when she hangs up the phone. I keep saying it, even after the line has gone dead.
I walk to Café Boheme very slowly, like my bones are made of glass. I’m early but I don’t know where else to go. I don’t cry, I don’t react. I feel nothing. I guess the pins and needles numbness might be what they call ‘shock’ but who knows or actually cares?
I need a fucking drink. I get a cosy table for two and ask the handsome French waiter for a massive glass of white wine. I then sit there for an hour and don’t touch it. I sit very, very still and stare at the wall for an hour, while that full massive glass of wine gathers condensation in front of me.
Alice walks in wearing a faux fur coat, enormous heels and bright, bright lipstick. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
‘Ells!’
She hugs me into a cloud of fake fur and I could collapse into her arms but I do not. It occurs to me this might be the last normal night I can have for a long time, maybe forever. I don’t want to make this real.
‘How did your book meetings go?’
‘Great. Brilliant. I think someone might actually buy my book! We should hear soon …’
‘Well, that definitely calls for champagne!’
We have a lovely evening. We eat French food and flirt with the waiter and chat about boys. We smoke cigarettes sitting out on the pavement like we are actually in Paris (and not just a French restaurant), snuggled together arm-in-arm against the cold, blankets over our knees. We drink two bottles of champagne, joyously.
As soon as I leave and Alice goes out of sight, my bones stiffen up with sadness. I’m not sure this night is real but I suspect it might be. I sit on the train home and stare dead ahead at the seat in front of me.
I drag myself home, up the flights of stairs to our third-floor garret, which is already half packed up for the big move on Friday. I’m not sure if I’m relieved or disappointed that K is out. Mostly relieved, I suppose.
I don’t switch on the lights. That would make it real. I don’t take off my coat. That would make it real. I sit down on the nasty rental flat carpet in our mostly empty bedroom. I call Stepdad. He answers this time.
‘Ells … Hang on, the reception here is terrible. I’ll call you back from a landline.’
The reception where is terrible? I don’t even know where he is. My phone starts ringing and the screen flashes up ‘number withheld’ and the sight of that makes me truly wish I were dead.
He made me mixtapes and took me to Camden Market for the first time. We would have horror film marathons just the two of us because my mum and my sister didn’t like them. When I was older we would get drunk together and smoke cigars and do air drums to Aerosmith. He’s not my real dad. If he’s not married to my mum then what are we to each other?
That’s when, for the first time, it really hits me. I start crying. I won’t stop for about four months.
This should be an important, deep conversation – but nobody is talking. We are both crying so hard that neither of us can speak. We stay like that on the phone for, if not hours, what feels like it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says eventually. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ I reply, even though I have no idea what that means.
‘I love you,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be OK.’
As he hangs up the phone and I wonder where he even is, I’m not sure if it will be.
K gets home at 2 a.m. to find me hunched in a corner in the dark, like the girl from The Ring. I still have my coat and my winter boots on. I refuse to go to bed, so we both lie down on the sitting room floor until it begins to get light.
