Chapter 19: Harriet - The Golden Hours

When her mother had refused to talk about her own mother, Harriet had taken it as an instruction and a shutdown. Apparently Clary felt Harriet knew all she needed to know about Isobel. It wasn’t satisfactory to Harriet, but what could she do? Could she ask her Grandad Rupert? Five was so young to lose your mother. They all knew that. Poor, poor Mummy. Harriet’s middle name was Isobel. This gave her a feeling of responsibility, but it wasn’t much to go on. She’d try again one day.

When Harriet had started her periods, she knew what to expect – she read magazines – and was pleased. She had already decided she was never going to call it ‘the curse’, a term she found disgustingly womanly. Luckily she’d been at a schoolfriend’s house. She’d called out insouciantly from behind the loo door: Oh Julia, I’ve come on early, do you have anything? And Julia had passed a Tampax in, dangling it from her fingers in its paper packaging. Harriet had no idea what to do with it. She unwrapped it. A cardboard tube? A little cotton-wool thing with a string? She laid it in the gusset of her knickers, knowing that couldn’t be right. The diagram didn’t help. In the end she had padded her pants out with loo paper, and stolen Mum and Nanny’s STs, and bathed twice a day. In the end Juliet, languorous with a cigarette and full of sophistication, explained it to her. She never told her mother; Clary never asked. Harriet wasn’t sure if this was normal. She wondered who had told Clary about it all. Aunt Louise maybe? Or Zoë? Not Isobel. There wouldn’t have been time.

So Mum wasn’t like other mums. Not having had a mother herself, how could she know how to be one? Harriet didn’t want to say her mum was ‘not as good as other mums’ but she knew deep down that that was part of what she meant. Sort of. Though obviously everybody’s own mother was the best. That has to be a given, doesn’t it? And Clary was wonderful. She was a writer and had plays put on and was funny and clever having hardly been to school and Harriet was so proud of her. Can you love your mother, and sympathise with her, and resent her, all at the same time? She just wished Mum had a bit more time for her. Writers are meant to be curious about human nature – well, I’m human! I’m here!

When they threw her out of the kitchen, Harriet had been hoping for eleven minutes alone at the kitchen table looking at the Daily Mirror (she was not too strict to enjoy the horoscope, or Keith Waterhouse and the Marjorie Proops problem page) while her scones baked and the delicious smell started to emerge. She had been momentarily sad, but didn’t think the point worth fighting, so glided away. She liked to eat scones while they were hot, so the butter would melt on the sweet softness. She always offered one to Mum and Zoë too. Mum would say yes and eat it in a gulp; Zoë would say no. Or, they could include her in a conversation for once. She was almost old enough to get married, so she should be old enough for them to talk to. And, she was in love. Only with the brother of a girl at school, as obviously being at a girls’ school made it very hard to meet anyone, especially as brothers tended to be at boarding schools, and boys your own age were children, and older boys weren’t interested, even if you weren’t five foot ten, which she was. So basically she was only in love with Francis because he was six foot one, and they’d met. But she’d never be able to marry him anyway because their children would be giants. And he lived in Yorkshire. Hopeless.

Anyway, they had no idea. They never confided in her, so she didn’t know how to confide in them.

And now – word had percolated through the household – Grandpa was running away from home. It did look like that to her. When you leave and people don’t want you to, that’s running away, isn’t it? He might as well tie his things in a red-and-white handkerchief and put them on a stick over his shoulder like Dick Whittington. Mum and Zoë’s attempts to hide how much they minded were entirely ineffective. And there was something else, as well. Something else nobody was talking about.

She could hear the skeletons rattling from here.