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The Other Side

The Other Side

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Hillary Rohde

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The Other Side

Hillary Rohde

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Hillary Rohde

First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2013 10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa +2711 628 3200 www.jacana.co.za Š Hillary Rohde, 2013 All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-4314-0780-4 Also available as an ebook d-PDF ISBN 978-1-4314-0781-1 e-PUB ISBN 978-1-4314-0782-8 mobi ISBN 978-1-4314-0783-5 Cover design by publicide Set in Warnock 11/13.5pt Job No. 002024 See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za iv

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To Rick, Leif and ZoĂŤ

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Acknowledgements The names of some individuals have been changed to protect their privacy. Otherwise all is told truthfully as my memory and good manners allow.

Special thanks to Annari van der Merve without whose endless encouragement and help this book would not exist. Thanks too to Bridget, Thabiso and all members of the Jacana team.

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One The first scream was delicious. The sound rocketed up from the centre of the mansion block, penetrating all six floors. It was seven o’clock. Dinnertime. Within seconds of the first eruption, the flat dwellers poured out of their dining rooms, through their front doors and out into the corridors. Leaning over the balustrades down into the courtyard below, they saw a girl writhing around on the ground, still screaming. It was one of those lovely midsummer evenings in Cape Town.

I looked up from centre stage and saw an audience. It was ridiculous, and I knew then that I should stop: all those dinners getting cold on the plates and the maids having to reheat everything… but somehow I couldn’t stop screaming. A man’s face reared up before me, all soft and jowly like the boxer dog we’d once had, folds of skin rippling down his neck. From my lopsided angle his eyes looked skew, a deep furrow between the eyebrows squishing his features. He was talking to me, his thick lips moving, but I was submerged; I couldn’t hear anything he was saying. Drowning under the evening sky, I kicked out and hit him in the crotch, whap! I meant no harm, but he backed off, clutching 1

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his privates and whimpering. I was sorry but unable to do much about it. A crowd was gathering around me. I saw my mother pushing her way toward me. She looked enormous, fury and shame contorting her face. My father was there too, some distance from the inner circle, looking detached as if he just happened to be strolling by. I think I bit someone. Like writhing snakes, arms grabbed and pinioned my arms behind my back, half-dragging, half-carrying me to the lift and up the three floors to our flat, where I sat shivering in a corner.

I saw the bruised light of day drain away. The picture window became dark. It must have been high tide because I heard the muffled sound of waves crashing against the sea wall below, or maybe it was just blood banging against my brain, but I was beginning to wonder how this whole drama could end.

It had started innocuously enough in the car on the way home from somewhere with my mother; the usual fight about a bad boyfriend, maybe, or coming home late, or the love question: how could I behave so badly if I loved her? How could I not love her when she loved me so much? Why when she loved me so much wouldn’t I do what she wanted… On and on it had gone until it escalated out of control. But now it was beginning to bore me.

Dr Jack arrived almost immediately. He’d been our friend and GP ever since I was born. He saw me huddling in the corner. He didn’t wink but I thought he might have – he liked me. My mother sat crying on the sofa, and Dr Jack went to sit alongside her. I didn’t know where my sister was, but Phyllis brought me chicken soup. She was, I saw, very cross with me. She was our cook and had also been with our family since I was born. By now I was eighteen.

‘You,’ she said, pointing her finger at me, ‘naughty girl.’ She shook her head, making a clucking sound. ‘You listen to me,’ she said. ‘You too old now for play this naughty game.’ I agreed completely, but once that first scream had escaped and I looked up and saw the supper crowd, I simply couldn’t stop. I looked at her sheepishly, unable as yet to talk. I saw her hesitate, then reach out her arms and cuddle me. She walked across and closed the curtains.

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Dr Jack more or less ignored me, but continued to sit on the sofa with my mother.

‘It’s not my fault,’ I heard her sob, over and over again. ‘It’s not my fault. She’s…’

My father poured drinks for Dr Jack and my mother, but kept his distance from us all. Dr Jack had been sitting there nodding, but then he started talking to my mother in what sounded like a serious tone. It looked like he was trying to broker a deal. He knew I was desperate to leave South Africa and that my mother was desperate that I stay. I could see we were all in for a hard time.

Over the next few days he came and went. I think he liked our food, the food Phyllis cooked. I heard him walking in and out of the kitchen opening and closing the fridge door. Whenever I saw him he was eating a snack. On about the third day he passed me in the passage and brushed his hand lightly over my head.

‘Okay, girlie?’ he asked, and I felt things might be drawing to some conclusion. But the talks with my mother continued in the sitting room. From my bedroom I could still hear my mother occasionally crying. She hadn’t set foot outside the front door since I’d been ignominiously dragged up in the lift. The shame of having to meet any of the witnesses would have been too unbearable for her. I knew, because on the few occasions I’d taken my mother’s French poodle for a walk, small boys had tugged at their mother’s hands when we passed in the foyer. ‘Look, Mom, look, it’s her,’ they said. Everyone in the block was aware of what had happened – a minor scandal. I myself felt it had happened to somebody else.

Apart from kicking a man in the crotch and possibly having bit another, it wasn’t such a big deal. My sister was noticeably absent and Phyllis was hedging her bets, being kind but not too kind. I was uncharacteristically quiet, holed up in my bedroom for most of the time, awaiting the endgame.

Six months prior to this showdown, I’d secretly sent in a portfolio of my artwork to the Central School of Art in London: a bundle of life drawings, some landscapes and watercolours, none of them showing much talent, but every mark imprinted with the yearning to escape, each drawing a prayer. I’d just completed my 3

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first year at Michaelis School of Art. I begged my current professor for a letter promising to take me back for the final year if I was accepted to do the second year in London, a proposition I’d planned to present to my parents as some sort of ‘finishing school’ opportunity.

I’d never been to London, but I felt I was born to be in Britain.

In fact, I felt I had been born in Britain, but had been kidnapped under mysterious circumstances and was being held hostage in a strange and troubled land by people who now called themselves my parents. I wanted to be in London, home to Nureyev, Margo Fonteyn, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Jean Shrimpton. It was 1964, London was swinging, and at eighteen I really needed to be there.

Dr Jack was a genius. He finally managed to persuade my mother that it was in all our best interests that she let me set sail. If she forced me to stay, ill health would plague her, my sister would suffer, my dad was already suffering and there was no knowing what I might do next.

In February that year, my second year at art school, I’d started a course in ethics, attending lectures at the main campus of the University of Cape Town. I loved it. Somebody from my course asked if I wanted to get more involved in politics. I didn’t really know what that meant, but was taken to meet a group of people who would, if they deemed me the right material, enlighten me further, perhaps initiate me into… I wasn’t sure what.

The people I met were at least five years older than I was. In a large, dark room off to the side of the Jameson steps, Adrian Leftwich, head of NUSAS, the National Union of South African Students, was delivering an informal talk, or maybe just holding court. The atmosphere was glum. Several students were wandering around. One of the men on the platform was tall and rather good-looking. Stop being so frivolous, I told myself. Adrian, by contrast, was shorter and not too attractive, but full of bravado and eloquence, although below the surface was something boyish.

I was used to the altogether cooler art-school and jazz crowd, 4

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whose thing was not to take oneself too seriously. This Adrian guy appeared to take himself very seriously. Oh dear, I thought.

To which camp did I really belong? Neither was a completely comfortable fit. I didn’t think I’d qualify to be part of the political crew. None of this was a game. The stakes were high and should anything bad happen, at the first hint of torture I’d crack. I didn’t trust myself, which confirmed my resolve to leave. As it was, the police were already phoning my parents.

‘Your daughter, you know, she’s associating with blacks. Ja, we picked her up in the street. She was with a black.’

‘A black man? No, not our daughter.’

‘Ja, your daughter. She’s looking for trouble. You want my advice? Keep her home.’

‘She’ll be the death of me,’ my mother cried. ‘Why can’t she pick a nice Jewish boy like everybody else?’

At the end of the week, Dr Jack came to my bedroom. He told me I was going to be allowed to go. ‘But girlie, no more bad behaviour, okay? A year in London and that’s it. Then you come home and settle down. Get yourself a nice husband and have some kids.’

On 4 June 1964, weeks after my sister Brenda’s wedding, my friends and family came to the docks to see me off. The day was sombre with heavy clouds overhead, but as I looked out toward Table Mountain, a flash of sunlight penetrated the gloom. I stood on the deck of the Stirling Castle among all the other passengers looking down at the waving, cheering crowds below. They seemed far away. All around me people were crying and throwing colourful streamers to those down below. I felt I should be crying too; I could see my sister and father supporting my mother. Crying was the least I could do; to them crying meant caring. But I really couldn’t wait for those bloody streamers to snap as the ship pulled away from the quay. The deafening noise of the engines and all the crowds screaming gradually diminished into a profound silence, and I was left dry-eyed, holding the tattered end of a red streamer.

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Two 1967 came and I was a London girl now, dressed in Biba, hanging out in discos and exploring the exploding possibilities of psychedelia.

I’d gone home after my first year away, where my parents agreed, not without considerable drama, that I could finish my art degree in London – the situation had deteriorated in South Africa and I was clearly still a high risk factor.

In Britain – or was it only London – life was changing fast, and I was changing with it. In South Africa I’d always felt like an oddity, but now I was part of a rising tide of young people who lived and loved as if they’d finally discovered a new meaning to life. I was euphoric.

I all but completed my three-year art training at Central, serving drinks a few nights a week at Ronnie Scott’s while listening to the best jazz in the world, often staggering bleary eyed straight from Soho to my school in Holborn, which sometimes served as my only address, the place where I kept my toothbrush. My work suffered, but I tried to persuade myself that it didn’t matter, because life, after all, was art. Then just a week before my final degree show, I was arrested for possessing opium, along with the 7

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friends I was with at the time.

From down in a basement in Notting Hill – more of a coal cellar, in fact – we heard the door above being smashed in. It could have been anybody; people constantly came and went. Number 26 Powys Terrace, known as the London Free School, attracted a particular kind of extreme person who found it difficult to live anywhere else. There was the axe-wielding Michael McCafferty, the hypersensitive poet Julian and the transvestite ex-ballet dancer Dominique, who indignantly claimed that the Taj Mahal looked like a cheap cigarette lighter. Also in the basement were my boyfriend Dave and me.

Dave and I had met a few months previously. I was living in Redcliffe Gardens between Fulham and Chelsea, renting an airy first-floor front room that must once have been the drawing room of an illustrious family. I’d transformed my king-size bed into a Bedouin boudoir, curtained off with richly embroidered and mirrored textiles and tumbling with profusions of blossom purloined from the street. There was music playing and incense burning when Dave appeared with some friends and sat crosslegged and upright amongst the bejewelled velvet cushions, a sparrow amongst the peacocks. He was dressed in a worn corduroy Levi jacket and jeans, the same tawny colour as his shoulder-length curls, and a white embroidered Indian shirt, all looking a little old.

He too was relatively old, about twelve years older than I was.

I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He affected a relaxed air, smoking endless roll-ups interspersed with joints, but I saw that he was a man who considered everything carefully, although I had no idea what exactly he was considering. Occasionally he burst into boyish laughter, his mercurial grey eyes crumpling into creases as if he’d just been told a hilarious joke. At other times he appeared inscrutable, a man of contradictions who was both very present and oddly absent.

I looked directly at him: he was Puck; he was my old ethics professor, an Aztec warrior, Peter Pan… He smiled and I felt faint.

The more I looked, the more impossible he was to define, in spite of knowing that he was a jazz musician. After the others had gone 8

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he was the last man left, having hardly budged an inch. Inscrutable or not, I knew precisely what I wanted. He didn’t refuse. Soon after that, I more or less decamped from Redcliffe Gardens to live with Dave at the Free School. Apart from his magnetism, I had a sense that something extraordinary was going on at the school, although I couldn’t quite say what it was.

The banging and smashing intensified. This time it was the police. Once inside, they were obliged to swing from the ground floor to the basement by a rope, as the original wooden stairs had long since been burnt as firewood; it was cold down here in the cellar. On that day just four of us were down below. McCafferty, his skeletal body buried beneath a dark, heavy overcoat, swaggered forward, swearing and muttering and taking menacing swipes, while Julian, meek and mild, sank inwards, his Byronic looks invisible to the police as they stumbled over one another in that sepulchral light.

I glanced at Dave and saw amusement in his soft, grey eyes. He looked less grubby in this light, almost jaunty, his dirty white shirt glowing in the dark. Although much shorter than the three burly policemen, he handled them with a politeness that was entirely lost on them as they searched about in dark corners, finally pouncing upon a little lump of opium, illuminated by the flickering flames of the dying fire. The risible absurdity of it all, the Cinderellishness, the Dickensian chimneysweepishness sent me into a fit of laughter.

‘Funny, is it, young lady? We’ll see who’s laughing when you lot are up against the judge.’ McCafferty let fly a contemptuous cackle.

Leaving the basement was awkward. One had to stand on a chair on a table, catch hold of the rope and somehow swing upward. We were all quite practised at this, but the policemen weren’t amused as they came flailing up behind us.

We all stood blinking for a moment as we emerged from the gloom. Then the policemen bundled us into the back of the van, released the brakes and screeched forward. After ten minutes or so, the van suddenly stopped, the door opened and Dave, Julian and McCafferty were dragged out. Oh Dave, I lamented as the doors 9

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clinked shut, leaving me all alone, why will they not lock me up in a cell with you? Instead I was taken to Holloway, fingerprinted and allowed one phone call. By now it was late.

‘Hello, Des?’ Des was my mother’s friend from Cape Town, now living in London. She was another who had known me since I was born, and the only person I could think of who could, if she would, pay my bail. ‘Sorry for waking you, but… there’s no other way of saying it: I’m in gaol.’

‘Who is this? Hillary, is that you? What? Gaol?’

‘I know, Des, it’s crazy. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you all about it, but could you come? Tomorrow would be fine, I just need someone to pay my bail.’

‘Hmm. Honestly. Where are you, what gaol?’

‘Holloway.’

‘For God’s sake, Hillary, what have you done?’

‘It’s nothing, Des. I’ll explain later. D’you think you could come?

They’re getting a bit pissed off here; I need to get off the phone.’

‘Do you want me to come now?’

‘No, really, tomorrow morning’s fine.’

I actually wanted to spend one night in a cell. It turned out to be with a prostitute, an old hand at a night inside. She was tall, skinny and a bit smudgy, with stringy hair and smeared lipstick, although it might just have been the low-wattage bulb hanging naked from the ceiling. She was kind and funny and slept like a log, while I, deluded by some romantic idea, stayed up all night trying to memorise a new poem that was floating in my head.

I wanted to recite it to Dave when next we met. How were the guys, I wondered. Were they together in the same cell, planning an escape?

The trial at Marylebone High Court turned into something of a happening. The courtroom filled up with friends and supporters wearing their wildest, brightest clothes; it could have been mistaken for a hippy wedding. Even the judge seemed infected by the gaiety of the occasion.

‘This is a serious matter,’ he boomed. ‘Drugs are dangerous and not to be tolerated. But I will accept your defence, given that 10

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you are all artists, and that the drugs, on this occasion, were taken specifically for inspiration. I hope, however, that in future you will find the inspiration you require without resorting to drugs. You may even find that your art improves. So, the men, given that you are all unemployed and without regular income, I will fine five shillings a week for the following six months. The lady in question I will dismiss. She has obviously come under the bad influence of these men. I strongly advise, young lady, that you find new friends who will not lead you astray. I don’t want to see you here ever again.’

Although the case was dismissed, I never did get my degree show together, and so failed to graduate.

A month or so after the court case, back in Powys Terrace where the summer was still dark, I asked Dave if he fancied an adventure.

‘We’re having an adventure,’ he said.

‘Yes, but a real adventure, travelling somewhere hot, near the sea.’

‘Naa, I’m busy here. You go. I got gigs and things.’

‘Oh Dave, please won’t you come? I can’t bear to go without you.’

‘All the more reason to go without me.’

‘But it would be good for you to leave London. You never leave London.’

‘And don’t want to.’

I’m not sure why he agreed to come in the end. Maybe it was just easier than resisting, or maybe he had an idea about something that might be waiting for him out there.

I’d saved some Ronnie Scott’s money for the journey. The original plan was to go to Peru on a BSA 750 cc motorbike. We left London with the intention of riding across France, Spain and Portugal to pick up a cargo ship in Lisbon. But we didn’t get far. Bursting with overstuffed bags and a tent, our pots and pans all clinking on a morning sparkling with promise, we jauntily approached the French customs in Calais.

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looked – what? Too happy, too poor, too subversive? No, De Gaul had put a veto on hippies. No hippies to enter France.

‘Vous sont hippies, non? Vous ne pouvez pas entre France.

Non, non, non.’ He shouted for some nearby assistants. Small, oily men with short legs made fast work of dismantling our bike, ripping our luggage apart, squeezing out the toothpaste, shredding my tampons and littering the ground with our flimsy clothes, convinced that they would find drugs. They could find nothing. But something about Dave’s eyes told them another story. ‘Mais ses yeux, ses yeux,’ shouted the garlicky one with the pockmarked face, pointing filthy fingers alarmingly close to Dave’s eyes. I was beginning to feel a little shaky. Dave, meanwhile, had managed to swallow all our holiday drugs – eleven foil-wrapped tabs of LSD, the remains of the opium and a sticky lump of Pakistani hash – before being marched down to the dungeons.

I don’t know what they did with Dave down there, but a flatfaced woman who looked like a KGB interrogator from a James Bond movie dragged me down to a square cement cell, demanding that I undress. Standing there naked, I could barely refrain from giving her a good, hard kick, except that my legs had turned to jelly and I was barely able to remain upright. Her internal search was so rough and humiliating that my legs were too wobbly to get back into my knickers. I sat for a long time on the cold cement floor, eventually shivering into my chiffon dress, which I now wished was a little more substantial.

‘Merde,’ the fascist stormed, furious that she’d emerged empty handed. ‘Merde.’

What, I wondered, did she do with her hands when she got home at night? Did her husband know when she caressed his body that they’d been inside strangers?

Back upstairs I was reunited with Dave, whose face had taken on the look of a Francis Bacon painting, or maybe it was the way I was seeing. We slowly reassembled the bike and our belongings. I was glad Dave couldn’t speak French. In fact, by now he couldn’t speak at all, but I translated whatever I thought he or Pockmarked 12

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might want to hear. I thought it might be expedient, but none of it made much difference.

‘You must leave,’ Pockmarked said. ‘Go back. Go. Go. France doesn’t want you.’

Two of his sidekicks hustled us back to the ferry, pushing the heavy bike, and then sat at some distance, watching our every move in case we made a sudden dash for it and threw ourselves overboard. Unlikely, although there remained the matter of my reentry into Britain. My student visa had expired and I had neither work permit, money, nor a return ticket to anywhere else. Arriving in the company of two gendarmes after having been refused entry into France was hardly going to do my case much good. But I obviously couldn’t spend the rest of my life travelling back and forth on the English Channel.

The customs officer at Dover looked at us suspiciously, unwilling at first to allow us re-entry. But recognising the absurdity of my position, he finally stamped my passport.

‘Under the extraordinary circumstance of your having nowhere else to go, we will allow you entry into Britain for one week. One week only. Please make arrangements to leave the country by then.’

I don’t know how Dave got on the bike and kick-started it into action. He could barely walk. Yet he managed to drive us in the face of oncoming juggernauts to the outskirts of Dover, where at last we found a field. Limping through the gate, we pitched our tent and lay down in the long grass. I could still feel the Gestapo fingers fiddling inside me. Would I ever get rid of this hideous sensation? I looked across at Dave.

He hadn’t told me what had happened to him down there in the dungeon, but he seemed to have risen far above it, a beatific smile hovering about his lips, his eyes closed, facing the sky. Some butterflies settled on his unthreatening body. I looked up and saw the white cliffs of Dover, remembering the first time I’d seen them three years ago when I arrived in Britain on the Stirling Castle.

Mandela had been sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island that same day, and Adrian Leftwich, rumbled by the Special Branch, had snitched on his friends. I wondered what Phyllis 13

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would have thought of me if she could see me now, but I didn’t want to think about the answer.

I felt a yearning to be in the sea, floating emptily in and out with the tide. But instead, here I was washed up on the shores of Dover. Dave shuddered, almost disappearing in the long grass. It was hot, hazy, lovely, the field splashed with bright white daisies and poppies scattered like daubs of red blood. The field hummed and buzzed. Not far away, an endless stream of cars and lorries were making their way toward the ferry. I got up and assembled the camping gas and made us a cup of tea. We stayed there more or less like that for three days, lying around looking up at the sky and the drift of the clouds, until Dave was finally able to walk and talk properly again. Then we slunk back to London.

We formulated a new plan. I was surprised Dave hadn’t given up on coming with me. We decided to try something a little less ambitious, milder, kinder and more achievable. We’d fly to Formentera, a small island not far from Ibiza, and simply stay there. The first travel agency we approached refused to sell us single tickets. So did the second, third and fourth. ‘Too much of a liability, single tickets. When you run out of money and want to come home, who’s responsible for you then?’

It was obviously something about the way we looked. It had been something about the way we looked all along, but I’d never figured out what precisely it was. ‘You need a suit, Dave, maybe that’s it. A nice smart suit.’

Dave liked the idea. Although he was thirty-three, he’d never worn a suit. A uniform, yes – as a very young man he’d served in the army and been dismissed – but he’d never worn a suit. We went to Carnaby Street and found a beautifully tailored Al Capone pin stripe. He looked wonderful, not at all like a gangster; his face framed by the tawny curls was too intelligent. I made sure not to wear chiffon, and we marched into Harrods.

‘Two plane tickets to Ibiza, singles, leaving tomorrow,’ I said authoritatively. Harrods was far too smart to argue. We flew the next afternoon.

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Three As we stepped from the plane we were wrapped in the heady perfume of the Mediterranean: thyme, rosemary, suntan oil and the freshly roasted crisp of burnt skin all conspiring to remind me of Cape Town. The waterfront cafés glistened with French, German, Swedish and Italian boys and girls, sprawled almost naked around tables, languidly drinking, eating langoustine and lobsters, and making plans for the night ahead.

‘Gawd,’ said Dave in his pin stripe, his violin strung across one shoulder. ‘We better get outta here fast.’

‘How about we have a glass of wine or something first. Why not?’

We walked toward a table, dragging our belongings. Dave, I noticed, looked small and sort of grey-white amongst ‘the beautiful people’; in fact the pair of us looked like creatures dredged up from the cellars. We sat down, and a handsome waiter came to take our order.

‘Cuppa tea please, milk and sugar,’ Dave said, taking out his packet of Old Holborn and cigarette papers. He carefully set about rolling a fag, jerking his head up and down, concentrating on the 15

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tobacco while stealing the odd glance at the scene before him.

‘I’ll have a glass of white wine,’ I said. The waiter glided away.

‘What d’you think? About tonight, I mean?’

‘Oh yes, tonight. Bloody mad it is here. Tomorrow we’ll take a ferry to that Formentera place. Someone told me it’s where the scruffier lot hang out.’

‘Yes, but tonight?’

‘We’ll just walk somewhere, roll out the sleeping bags and sleep.

Don’t even need a tent here. What’s that sort of maracas sound?’

‘Cicadas. I know them from Cape Town.’

‘You’ll be in your element here, you. All naked flesh and loungin’ about.’

‘Hope so.’

The next morning we climbed aboard the small ferry to Formentera.

The boat was full of exotic hippies speaking foreign languages.

‘We’ll watch and see where they’re goin’,’ said Dave, ‘then we’ll go the other way.’ We had stripped off most of our clothes by then and could feel the sea air and the sun soaking into our bare limbs.

‘It’s nice, this,’ Dave said tentatively, slowly getting into the spirit of things.

By the time we reached the small island I was completely acclimatised. It was as if all these sensations – the smell of the ocean, the gulls squawking and swooping, the soporific sun, breeze, sway and sparkle of waves, depths of oceans, naked limbs – all had been lying dormant just beneath my skin awaiting the right trigger before springing to the surface, and were now celebrating their release.

When the boat landed, the hippies moved as one toward Fonda Pepe, while Dave and I wandered off in the opposite direction.

We walked and walked along dusty paths until we came upon a grove of Mediterranean pines set back a little from the sea and the beach. But for a few solitary fincas scattered at some distance from the wood, this part of the island was quite deserted. We put down our bags and prepared to make tea. Geckoes scuttled by and stopped, standing motionless for some time with their slender 16

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necks extended toward us. I opened a tin of condensed milk, poured some onto a rock and stood back. Three geckoes inched tentatively forward, bodies juddering, tongues flicking. Within minutes, the geckoes had multiplied and were all sipping at the sweet white ambrosia, palpably shivering with pleasure.

We started to unpack our bags. From mine I took a flimsy sarong, two corners of which we attached to two pine branches.

Dave found two sticks, which he cut to height and attached to the other two corners. Behold, a four-poster bed. We swept the ground beneath it with branches, cleared the small stones and spread out our sleeping bags. I outlined the space with white pebbles to mark the perimeter of our bedroom. Dave hung his violin on an overhanging branch. My clothes fluttered from the trees like flags in the light breeze. The kitchen had been determined by the gecko gathering, its function established by placing the camping gas on the ground, marking the area with pebbles and making shelves and tables from stones and branches.

Once the house was built, we tore across the dunes and raced into the water. At least, I raced into the water. Dave stood at the water’s edge, dipping first one and then another cautious toe.

‘C’mon Dave, it’s wonderful, all warm and silky.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, ‘and wet.’

‘That’s the point.’

Looking back at the dunes from the water’s edge, the sky met the curvaceous outline of a reclining Henry Moore basking in the heat. We clambered across her sandy midriff and back to our base, from where she shape-shifted into a completely different figure.

Then we set off in the opposite direction, hoping to find a store.

Formentera was small, flat and stony, with mimosa trees and oleander.

We found a shop selling exactly what we needed – a cheap plastic bowl, a bucket, matches, candles, oil – the sorts of things for living simply. We bought vegetables from an old guy who was working in his garden, although he was insistent that we take them as a gift.

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the geckoes to a condensed milk jamboree and a solo violin performance, before slipping beneath our opened out and zipped together sleeping bags, and falling asleep under the intrusively starry sky.

‘Fuckin’ hell,’ Dave said, ‘it’s enough to blind a bleedin’ poet.’

We stayed there in Formentera for two months, living much as we had on that first day. We often swam at night amongst the phosphorescence, but for Dave our Eden was haunted by his terror of sharks. ‘Just below that beguilin’ sparkle they’re cruisin’ around patiently, waitin’.’ Occasionally we went to shop in San Fernando and joined the hippies at Fonda Pepe for a beach party. I’d never been as happy, but I nursed a secret suspicion that I’d hijacked Dave and was holding him hostage, not necessarily against his will, but hostage nonetheless.

‘Let’s go to Barcelona and see what happens,’ I said one morning. That same afternoon we packed and left.

I sat on the pier and wrote to my friend Ewalda. During my years away, she had become the witness to all my adventures, and remained consistently interested in the what-happened-next of my life. She was also the one who kept me informed about what was going on in South Africa. Her cryptic and seemingly apolitical anecdotes about her relationships with her gardener and ‘maid’ and all the dramas they endured provided a possibly more accurate view of what was happening there.

10 August 1967 Dear Ewalda, We’ve just arrived in Barcelona after a few idyllic months of living alongside a beach beneath some pine trees. One day I’ll tell you about it. But now we’re on the move again.

I don’t quite know the direction, but meanwhile, Barcelona looks great. It reminds me a little of Cape Town – a city running down to the harbour with a hill, if not exactly Table Mountain, in the distance. But the men here are weird. Their legs look too short for their bodies, and they harass me all 18

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the time, taking not a blind bit of notice of Dave, as if I were walking the streets alone. Woppa, woppa, they hiss behind me, or something that sounds like that.

Anyway, I’ve had lots of time to think about things, which sadly still means thinking about my mother – when I’m not thinking about Dave, which I admit is most of the time. Often, I wake up in a cold sweat, imagining I have to be home before the curfew. Remember those elaborate arrangements I had to set up when I wanted to go out with someone who wasn’t Jewish? Get the nice Jewish boy to pick me up from the house and then have to meet him again later so I could return with him? Lucky I had such obliging Jewish friends – thank you, Danny! And even then, if I was a minute late there’d be a major scene, my mother lashing out as I came in, having phoned every hospital in town. God, it exhausts me even thinking about it.

In the end what really got to me was how hideously DULL everything was. I know it’s not a crime being boring, but it was as if a deadly cloud hung over our house, squashing everything flat. I couldn’t stand the endless inertia. Why am I even thinking about it now, when life is so exciting? But it does come back to haunt me. You know how my mother likes to divide and rule, awarding Brenda to my dad and wanting to keep me for her very own – so suffocating. She once said my father had told her to choose between him and me – imagine anything so crazy. I don’t believe it, but she’s succeeded in alienating my father from me. It’s unforgivable, but for all that, I know she really loves me, over-loves me, which I suppose has to be better than not loving me at all.

So I can never walk away, much as I’d like to.

Okay, enough of that, but thank you for being my sounding board. It must be a bit scary for you, all this mother and daughter stuff just as you’re about to give birth. But you’ll never have to face these problems with your children.

When exactly are your twins due? It must be any minute now. Are you huge? With no address, I don’t know how I’m 19

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going to get the news, but GOOD LUCK for the birth.

I’m thinking of you, David and the twins.

Lots of love, Hillary

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Four 15 August 1967 Dear Mom and Dad, I know it’s ages since I last wrote, but all is well. In my last letter I said to address your next one to Santiago, but our route has changed. We’re on our way to a small island off the west coast of the Cameroons, not far from Douala on the Equator (Africa), called Fernando Po. It looks gorgeous from the small map I saw in the shipping office in Barcelona, which showed pictures of armadillos, palm trees, monkeys, parrots and grass huts, like the real Africa. They said if you write to me at Poste Restante, Fernando Po, West Africa, it should get to me.

It turned out a large cargo boat was leaving that very evening with an available ‘bridal suite’. Dave and I are the only passengers on board, and no one speaks a word of English. We have a deluxe suite, a lavish bedroom and a sitting room replete with chandeliers, as well as a frustrated chef who pours his talent into cooking us three gourmet meals a day, which we eat alone in a stately dining hall.

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The mad thing is, the trip only cost £15 each and takes about three weeks to get there, as we stop at lots of places on the way. There’s even a swimming pool on board – for the crew, the captain, who knows? I never see anyone using it, but we do every day. We also have lots of books and read aloud to one another at night.

Yesterday we stopped at Dakar in Senegal. We went ashore for a few hours and must have lost track of the time.

When we sauntered back to the harbour, no boat. Then I saw it, a distant speck disappearing toward the horizon with our passports, money and all our worldly possessions on board. I nearly fainted. No one in that bloody harbour spoke English, so I had to play charades, jumping up and down, pointing hysterically at our distant ship, screaming and throwing my arms in the air, I’m sure you know the kind of thing. Anyway, miracle of miracles, a captain of a tug appeared, looking more like a pirate, who bundled us into his boat and whizzed us out to the ship. I had to climb a very, very long rope ladder, which swayed wildly from side to side as the little tug crashed around in an alarmingly turbulent sea. I wasn’t appropriately dressed and it was really embarrassing. High above us the crew were leaning over hissing as Dave and I scrambled inelegantly from rung to rung.

Anyway, just thought I’d let you know where I am. More when we get there.

Hope you’re all well, especially Brenda. Has she had her baby yet and is everything okay? Send love.

Having a WONDERFUL time. Look forward to a letter.

Much love, Hillary God knows what my parents made of this; they had hardly ever left their little suburb of Sea Point. Who the hell was this Dave, they must have wondered. My letters didn’t really take them into account; I was writing more as a sort of diary. We were in our 22

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own bubble, circumscribed by the sea. Seduced perhaps by the sway of the waves and the somnambulant meals, Dave seemed a willing collaborator, but I was never completely sure. The days passed timelessly, until three weeks and several ports later, a break appeared in the blue: a slumbering green sea dragon rising from the ocean.

As the ship navigated into the small harbour, our new home loomed into focus. Before us lay the small, rackety town of Santa Isabella, all but pushed into the sea by the overwhelming jungle.

My silent reverie was shattered by the raucous sound of the crew now leaping into action and throwing out ropes. The definitive crack of the gangplank being lowered sent out the message of no return, and then the captain bade us a final farewell. There was nowhere to go but down into the town, this time carrying all our luggage.

‘My God, Dave, what have we done?’ I said, looking fondly back at our ship. Heavy grey clouds hovered just above our heads.

No sooner had we left the ship than an intense downpour drenched us to the bone. As the drops struck the ground with a sharp hiss, we became enveloped in an impenetrable mist.

Wandering around the harbour looking lost, we saw several torpid young men lounging on the quay or half-heartedly heaving goods around. Few women were to be seen. A stick-thin man in shorts and a torn T-shirt approached us. In spite of the etiolated body, his head was quite rotund and his eyes round and languid, suggesting a mild interest.

‘You stay here?’ he asked, a little incredulously. ‘Where you stay?’ To which, of course, we had no answer. ‘There.’ He pointed out a large, ugly building to the side of the harbour. ‘Big hotel for Americans.’ He explained in pidgin English that the Americans were drilling for oil offshore and spent one week in three on the mainland, in an expensive, purpose-built hotel. He expected us to go there.

‘Thank you, but we have very little money,’ I said slowly, finding it quite hard to breathe, the soupiness about to strangle me. ‘We are not Americans, English,’ I said, pointing to Dave and me. ‘You 23

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know of another place for us? Cheaper maybe?’

It seemed there was nowhere for us to live. Fernando Po wasn’t a tourist destination. We spotted a café with a few rickety tables perched outside on the cobbles and mangy dogs skulking around the chair legs. I assumed that the handful of men at the tables were Spanish. No women. Paint was peeling and rust running from the wrought-iron balconies of buildings that must once have looked elegant. As the map had promised, tall but unexpectedly shabbylooking palm trees lined an adjacent promenade. Dark, largeleaved plants crammed the cracks. It seemed just a matter of time before the jungle swallowed the thin strip of land at the shoreline.

I wondered what Dave was making of it so far.

‘You join us for coffee?’ asked Dave, getting into the spirit of pidgin English, unperturbed by our homeless status.

The boat journey had lulled us into a languor we couldn’t now afford. I tried to sharpen up. The three generous meals a day on board had been great, but now I was plumper and my flesh felt heavy, unable to act. Sweat ran between my shoulder blades like a river. I could see this was not a good place to be fat or torpid.

‘You know music?’ Dave asked. ‘Where we find people play music?’

Our new friend Siddikh smiled broadly. Now that he understood the situation, he applied himself to solving it.

‘Maybe we find music, house not so good, but you come. We see.

Somewhere there,’ he said, pointing into the solid green distance.

We followed him along a well-trodden path lined by palms and prehistoric-looking tree ferns, past some Spanish-style houses (haciendas?) which gave way to more basic dwellings and shanty towns, until we came upon a row of low cement rooms, each with a door opening onto a cracked cement path that linked them.

Opposite the rooms was a mountain of rubbish. Scruffy cats sat eyeing the squealing rats that looped up and around the mound, occasionally making a half-hearted attempt at a catch. Some scantily dressed young girls sat around one doorstep, plaiting each other’s hair, laughing and listening to the mellow sounds of a local singer on the radio. Siddikh explained our situation in a language 24

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we didn’t understand. After much raising of eyebrows and roars of laughter, an agreement seemed to have been struck.

‘Is okay, if you want,’ he said. Dave and I looked at each other and the giggling girls. So far, with music and the lovely girls, this was the liveliest spot in town. Everywhere else had seemed eerily empty. The Spanish houses we’d passed had looked somehow inaccessible, almost not there, not part of our vision. Without further ado, we paid the girls the paltry sum of money they asked and moved our few belongings into the cell, as we came to call it.

We were quite ignorant as to ownership and title, but I was happy for the girls to have the money and thrilled to be there almost alone with Dave – even though it turned out to be a brothel.

For a while, all was well. In the evenings we strolled along the promenade, listening to the screams of fruit bats as they swooped and looped among the palms. Fernando Po was smack on the equator. Day turned to night surprisingly fast. Like the turn of a kaleidoscope, the sky became flaming violet, mauve and brilliant orange at breakneck speed. At night in the cell, perched precariously on a single iron bedstead that threatened to collapse at any moment, we read Dostoyevsky aloud by the light of a candle stub.

Trapped under the mosquito net, bitten by bed bugs, we listened to the squealing rats pursuing each other across the rubbish dump and the more menacing sound of the Texans drunkenly pursuing the girls around the rooms.

Once we’d settled in and they had established that we were no threat, one of the brothel girls invited us to a dance in the jungle.

It sounded irresistible. We walked single file along a path leading from the harbour toward the interior, past the last scattering of shacks and into the jungle itself.

I had never been in an equatorial jungle. Maybe it was just a forest, but it bore out all my childhood fantasies of the real thing.

The tree canopy high above blocked out the last of the night light.

An occasional star flickered through the leaves. The darkness amplified the surround-sound of God knows what rustling and crashing in the branches above, screaming like children being 25

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strangled. I imagined pterodactyls, but the girls later told me they were monkeys swinging around disturbing the parrots. We saw three-foot-long lizards like dragons in fluorescent orange and turquoise. Bush rats and porcupines juddered across the path from the dense undergrowth on either side that threatened to ensnare and tear at us. Now and again, delicate and diminutive duikers, which I recognised from South Africa, leapt from nowhere like ballerinas.

After walking for half an hour or so, I heard the muffled but unmistakable sound of Elvis Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes filtering through the dense air. As the sound grew louder, we reached an opening in the trees, revealing a small village hall made of tin. The girls led us inside and sat us down at a table. Some guys in the corner were working a wind-up gramophone, playing the same ‘blue, blue, blue suede shoes…’ over and over ‘…I can do anything but give you my blue suede shoes…’

A few people were dancing and I couldn’t contain myself: I bounced up onto the dance floor and started to move around.

Everyone stopped and stared. I’m quite sure they’d never seen a white girl, never mind a white girl dancing to Elvis in the jungle.

I had to dance with everyone before returning, exhausted, to our table.

Then Dave got up and carried his violin ceremoniously to the centre of the room, slowly placing it on the ground before him.

Everyone watched. He proceeded to walk around and around the room. But for Elvis, there was dead silence. Whatever his intention, everyone was confused, including me. An air of bewilderment spread like a rumour around the hall.

Just then, four huge Texan rednecks lumbered into the hall, all bulging necks and tattooed arms. It was like a scene from a Western: the gun-toting baddies crash through the swing doors and everyone freezes. Not one of them was under six foot six. One swung drunkenly toward us, dug a hairy paw into his pocket and slammed a wad of dollars onto the table in front of Dave. Two others fingered knives as the locals gave a collective gasp.

‘How much for the girl?’

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Dave was speechless, maybe terrified. He lacked this sort of experience. I glanced up and saw in his eyes something potentially dangerous, something very lost in translation. I placed my hand on his knee below the table. The Texan, looking straight at Dave, must have seen something too.

‘Stop fucking with me, mister,’ the Texan threatened.

I leapt up and dragged Dave behind me toward the door. The locals silently cleared a path for us, regrouping to form a protective shield behind as we ran and ran through the throbbing jungle. By now, I was sure it was a jungle and Dave was Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness, so sure he would find something of great importance – ‘these people, they know things’. Not caring what anyone else knew or thought or felt, I trusted implicitly the message from my pounding heart: to flee just as fast as I could.

It was untenable to remain on the island, but impossible to leave. My student visa had expired and I could no longer return to Britain without a work permit or enough funds. My damned South African passport made me a pariah in Africa; I couldn’t enter any country north of South West Africa without putting myself at great risk. How stupid we’d been to jump onto that boat in Barcelona, seduced by a silly map in a cargo office. Instead of paradise, we were living in a brothel chased by rednecked Texans, and couldn’t drink the water or swim because of bilharzia, not to mention the threat of crocodiles, sharks and mosquitoes carrying malaria. We were trapped.

Dave applied for a job as a cook on one of the offshore rigs with the proviso that I too could live on the ship, it being too dangerous for me to remain on shore. Foolishly, we thought we’d be under management protection, but after a few days on the ship it became clear that Dave couldn’t cook (he’d served roast chickens still frozen in the centre) and I couldn’t survive on board. The crew and oilmen hissed, leered and once actually molested me, although I tried to keep a low-to-invisible profile.

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murder. I had to return to the cement cell until such time as Dave made enough money for us to think of a solution. Meanwhile, I would rely on the brothel girls to protect me. With time on my hands and unable to share my current preoccupations with my parents, I wrote to Ewalda.

12 Sept. 1967 Poste Restante, Fernando Po, West Africa Dear Ewalda, Have you had the twins? It’s absurd me not knowing whether they’re in or out. Write to me at the above address, please, and let me know. I often think how beautiful you must look; so tall and slender with a huge round belly. I wish I could see you.

I am not in Peru as planned, but almost on the same continent as you, voluntarily banished to a tropical island called Fernando Po, bang on the equator about 32 miles off the coast of the Cameroons. Maybe I’ll be marooned here forever living off leatherback turtles. It’s very strange.

Nothing is quite what I’d imagined. I have to push the wardrobe against my door at night so the huge, horrible Texan rednecks don’t... I refuse to even think about what they might do to me. I’m living in a brothel, God forgive me. Well, what was I thinking, you might say (you’d be right). But nothing here is quite what it seems. Who’d have thought I’d be hiding from white people in Africa? I’m here with Dave and there’s nowhere else for us to live, only I’m here alone now, as Dave’s gone off to work on an oil rig.

Fortunately, we brought plenty of books with us – we have hardly anything else – so I’m ploughing my way through The Magic Mountain.

Anyway, it’s not really me I’m worried about. It’s Dave.

In London he’s a cult figure, a talented musician everyone 28

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adores, but London loves eccentricity. Here people don’t get him – or me for that matter. I’m not sure if it’s really dangerous or whether I’m just being dramatic.

He doesn’t especially care for me, I know, he’s not that kind of person. In London everyone’s reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gurdjieff, Timothy Leary and Alan Watts, and all these spiritual self-help books are very down on attachment, jealousy and that kind of thing. You’re simply not allowed to feel negative emotions, and it’s frowned upon if you’re not quite up to scratch. Secretly, I think drugs might have something to do with it. You learn all these things intellectually, but your heart can’t quite catch up with the information. There’s this horrible no-man’s-land in between, maybe that’s what they call limbo? It’s odd – I thought being a hippy was all about freedom, but there are just as many rules, only different ones. I never feel quite up to it. Whether it’s my parents or the new gurus making the rules, following them is not my thing.

But Dave’s not playing at anything. He really IS detached.

So detached I don’t think it matters much to him whether I’m around or not. But to be honest, he is irresistibly sexy. Jesus, is he sexy! And a lapsed Catholic! I don’t know what this means really, but I think it might be the key to something.

From the SA perspective, drugs must sound shocking, but in London we’ve been living in a culture that positively encourages them… there are doctors who will prescribe a cannabis tincture (something like dagga) for all sorts of medicinal uses, but we just use it to get high. And then there’s LSD. Have you heard of it? It’s an indescribably fantastic hallucinogenic drug that’s literally mind-bending. Only now I’m thinking that it’s maybe bent our minds irrevocably out of shape.

SA is a different kettle of fish, I know, but it’s still Africa of sorts, so it does feel a bit familiar here... though not to Dave. He’s being most odd and I’m scared he’ll get into great trouble without knowing why or what. Anyway, I 29

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suppose I should be thinking of myself and how to turn this situation around. The mad thing is, I’m sort of having an extraordinary time and loving it. I wanted an adventure and now I’ve got one. And of course I don’t yet know the ending.

I should tell you about this island, but oddly I don’t know much – too focused on bloody Dave. It’s beautiful in a menacing sort of a way. The shore is steep and rocky, not really beaches as we know them, and high, almost impenetrable mountains covered in dense trees – mahogany maybe – and also pythons and green tree snakes, although I’ve not yet encountered those. It must be the unhealthiest climate in the world – everything’s always soggy although it’s boiling hot. Our diet consists of bananas, millet, rice and stuff called malanga that takes forever to cook, but the girls in the brothel sometimes prepare it for us. The locals are great and we get on brilliantly with them, but the Texans here (part of the offshore oil business) are like creatures from another planet.

Please do write. Maybe once the twins are born you’ll never have another free minute for the next ten years. But I’m longing to know what’s happening.

Much love, Hillary P.S. Have you heard from my mother? She might have had a heart attack after my last letter. I wrote to her from the boat.

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Five That evening, I went down to the harbour. The bats performed their mad shrieking and sweeping ritual as I sat drinking a coffee with just about the last of our money. I saw four men approaching through the mist. They weren’t the American redneck variety, though they looked tough as hell, but I guessed they were probably English. They asked if they could sit at my table.

‘So,’ the lean one said, ‘what’s a girl like you doing alone in a shithole like this?’

‘It was a mistake,’ I said.

‘And now what?’ said the quite handsome one.

‘Now I’m waiting for my boyfriend.’

‘And where’s he?’

‘Working on one of the rigs,’ I said, hoping he sounded tough.

‘Anyway, what are you guys doing here?’

‘Our ship was bombed in Port Harcourt,’ said the toughest looking of the four. ‘You do know there’s a war going on in Nigeria?’

‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘To tell the truth, I’m a bit out of touch.’

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now reduced to rags. ‘Too right,’ said Mr Tough. ‘So what you gonna do?’

I half-heartedly explained my visa and passport problems. I bored myself talking about it. They ordered more coffee and some food. They seemed familiar to me, but only because they were English. In any other context they’d have seemed scary, I knew, but my idea of scary had adjusted incrementally. Right now they were behaving okay. I even started to relax and join in their laughter.

‘I don’t yet know, but what about all of you?’ I asked.

‘We’ve just stopped in to get our boat sorted and pick up some supplies. Then we’re off. And guess what, we’re going to Cape Town.’

‘Really?’ I gasped. ‘Cape Town?’

‘Yeah,’ said Mr Lean. ‘Wanna come?’

‘God,’ I said, ‘I never even considered Cape Town, but there’s a thought.’

‘Start considering,’ said Mr Handsome. ‘We’re leaving at the crack of dawn tomorrow. You can come if you want. We’ll take about five days to get there.’

My mind raced. Dave wouldn’t have to bother with me; he’d only need to earn enough for one ticket. I could sort myself out in Cape Town and then return to him in London. It all made sense.

I should do it.

‘Only thing is,’ said the one who hadn’t yet spoken. ‘You’ll need to board in the dead of night. We don’t have papers for you. It’s illegal, so no one must know. That’s the deal.’

We discussed it some more, running through the details, until finally I decided it was the right thing to do. They pointed out their boat, moored innocently against the far quay, a little bigger than a tug. They were going to spend the night ashore at the Hilton.

They wanted to sleep on clean sheets, they said. With whom, I wondered. They wanted a big night out at the Hilton before joining the boat at dawn. I thought enviously of the clean sheets but declined to mention it.

I was to stow away in the hold around 2 a.m., where I’d find a bunk, and that was about it. Okay, I’d go back to the brothel, write 32

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a letter for the girls to give to Dave when he came back, gather my few things together and spend some time with the brothel girls if they were free. I was sorry to be saying goodbye to them.

‘Don’t forget,’ the fourth man said. There was a deep scar across his face I’d not noticed before. ‘Don’t tell anyone, it’s important.

We’re not really allowed to take you.’

‘Got it,’ I said, ‘see you at dawn.’ I left them there drinking, my rescuers.

I crossed the gangplank in the dead of early morning and made my way to where I imagined the hold would be. Unseeing in the dark, I stumbled around as quietly as I could, but managed to trigger a shrieking so terrifying that it almost catapulted me back out of the boat. I tried to steady myself and breathed deeply, counting: in, out, in, out, adjusting slowly to the dark. I saw then that the appalling sound was coming from at least fifty African Grey parrots stacked in small cages, one above the other, in a claustrophobic frenzy of noise and feathers.

My God! They hadn’t told me about the parrots; an odd oversight, I thought. But once the birds had adjusted to my company, they settled down into a silence of sorts. I lay swaying in my bunk. Who are these men, I wondered. Why were they bombed in Port Harcourt? What were they doing there in the first place?

The odd parrot still squawked disconsolately. They’re pirates, I thought, of course. Everything suggested it. Was it okay to travel with pirates? They seemed nice enough. It could be fun, and what a surprise to arrive unannounced in Cape Town with a bunch of pirates in tow! And then, clear as daylight, it came to me: they were mercenaries. Hired killers. That war, the Biafran War, of course. I must be completely stupid! The evidence for stupid was gathering fast, I had to admit. I mean, if they were willing to kill someone for money, what was to stop them raping and killing me? There would be plenty of time. They could all rape me and then throw me overboard to the sharks and no one would be any the wiser.

It was approaching dawn. I heard the men, their footsteps loud on the gangplank, the boat swaying under their weight. I grabbed my things and rushed past them.

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‘Hi. Good morning. Listen, thanks guys, but I’ve changed my mind,’ I panted. ‘Don’t want to hold you up, must go now. Bye.’ ‘Take care of yourself, then.’ Was I being paranoid? In the early morning light they didn’t look like they’d rape and kill me. But no, no, no. I mustn’t go, I mustn’t.

‘You go find that boyfriend of yours; you look like you need protection,’ Mr Tough called as I ran along the quay.

I left the harbour and found a bench where I sat down, shaking, waiting for the café to open. I needed some coffee. Should I have gone with them? Oh fuck it. I really was too tired to care. I looked up and saw the slight movement of their boat manoeuvring its way from the mooring and heading off toward Cape Town. Too late, too late.

I couldn’t stop laughing. Still shaking, I looked up and saw a familiar sign I hadn’t noticed before. It belonged to the shipping agency whose ship we had boarded in Barcelona. So they had an office here in Fernando Po. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? I decided I’d check it out as soon as it opened.

‘Hello,’ I said, stepping inside the dark, Dickensian office.

‘Please can I speak to someone about ships going back to Europe?’

The three men in the office were Spanish speakers and didn’t really understand what I was trying to say, but one of them gestured that I should follow him along an even darker corridor, up a spiral staircase and along another narrow corridor toward a large, panelled office from which I glimpsed a view over the harbour.

A short man in a lightweight three-piece suit was seated at a large, heavy desk. He sported a pocket watch on a gold chain. He was perhaps in his sixties, baldish with wisps of white hair and a sweet cherry face. He inspired instant confidence. It was so long since I’d seen such a Doctor Doolittle. The humidity was already at work. A large central fan whizzed the damp air around the room.

‘And what can I do for you, young lady?’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Mr Davenport.’

‘Mr Davenport, very pleased to meet you. I’m Hillary. I was wondering about your ships. You know we came in one, from Barcelona. Now I’m wondering when there might be another one 34

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going back to Barcelona.’ I sounded ridiculous, even to myself.

‘Aha. So you’re the girl causing all the trouble. I’ve heard about you and your boyfriend. But what on earth brought the two of you to Fernando Po? Visitors never come here.’

‘Yes, yes, I know now. But I saw a map in your office... perhaps you know the one? In Barcelona.’

‘The map in Barcelona?’

‘Yes, the one with armadillos and things. Are they armadillos?

Maybe they’re iguanas or anteaters.’

Mr Davenport looked confused.

‘I’m sorry. It was a bad mistake. My boyfriend is now working on one of the rigs offshore with all those huge men, so hopefully he’ll earn enough money for us both to get back to England, although in the meantime I don’t know what to do… and I can’t really go back there, anyway, because I don’t have enough money or a work permit, and there are men battering the door down where I’m staying… and I’m South African so I can’t go to Africa either; for some reason, no one seemed to notice here… but really, I can’t imagine what will happen to me.’

Throughout this outburst, Mr Davenport fiddled around with a pile of papers on his desk. Then he took out a large handkerchief, mopped his brow, stood up and walked around his desk toward me. He laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘how about I order some coffee and maybe some delicious cakes for us both?’

Whereupon he pressed a shrill bell and a man appeared almost immediately. ‘Thank you, Juan, perhaps you could bring this lady here and me two cups of steaming coffee and two of those nice cakes, you know, the ones I like. My guest here is in need of a bit of local hospitality.’

I didn’t ever want to leave that office. Mr Davenport looked like the much-loved teddy bear I’d owned long ago.

Juan returned with the coffee, cakes and a broad smile. For a while, Mr Davenport didn’t mention my predicament, talking instead about an almost unrecognisable England. But once we’d finished our coffee and cakes, he returned to considering what could be done with me.

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‘The problem, my dear, is that there won’t be another company boat arriving or leaving for another two months. Meanwhile, as you say, you’re a problem, and causing quite a stir, I’m told. Where are your parents? Do they know you’re here?’

‘Yes, maybe, I posted a letter to them from here a few weeks ago. They live in Cape Town. D’you think they’ll have got it?’

Mr Davenport was silent, considering the options.

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said. ‘I’m going to make some phone calls downstairs.’

He left me in the relatively airy office. I was exhausted, having not had much sleep the night before. I counted about five geckos running crazily around the wall.

Mr Davenport returned, all smiles.

‘First off, we’re going to find out where the next flight heading to South Africa will be stopping to refuel. Then we’ll telegram your parents and ask them to please send a ticket to wherever that may be, Accra, Lagos, we’ll see…’

‘Yes, but what about the South African passport?’

‘That, my dear, you will hide in your, you know, where no one is likely to look, and I’ll give you a piece of paper to say you’re British. I’m not a real ambassador, but since there isn’t one here, I’m an official stand-in. I have the relevant stamps.’ Mr Davenport took little steps around the office, ending up at the window. He looked out toward the bay and beyond. ‘I’ll write a document to say you’re British and your passport was blown up aboard ship in Port Harcourt. British ships have been blown up during the course of the war. Do you think your parents will oblige?’ He stroked the gold chain of his watch. I had a sense that he was beginning to enjoy himself. He looked quite mischievous.

My head was whirling. ‘Yes, they definitely will, but oh…’ I had no doubt that an emergency telegram would solicit a response, but not without all the fear, fury and exasperation I was used to from my parents. Although in this case, I had to concede, it would be justified.

‘You can’t afford any finer feelings, my dear.’

‘I suppose I can’t, but how will I get to wherever this plane’s going to land?’

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‘That’s what I just arranged. A young friend of mine who happens to have a small plane has agreed to collect and deliver you to the relevant country.’

‘This is beginning to sound like a Tarzan movie or something.’

‘Except,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t Tarzan or Jane’s fault.’

I hung my head.

‘Meanwhile, I think you’d better stay with my wife and me. I’ll send someone to tell her to expect you.’

I stayed with the Davenports for a few days while Mr Davenport finalised the details of his dashing plan and I received the money for a ticket back to South Africa, which I’d shamefacedly had to ask my mother to send.

From above, Fernando Po appeared as a densely green, bootshaped blob surrounded by endless ocean. I strained to see if I could spot Dave’s boat. Philip, my chivalrous pilot, was quietly amused by our little adventure, as he called it. Flying low in his flimsy two-seater plane felt like riding on the back of a dragonfly, a sensation I’d sometimes had in dreams. Then the Cameroon coast loomed into sharper focus and we were dropping down into Duala.

‘Perhaps you’ll be able to contact his ship. There will be sister ships from the company in the harbour there, but first we’ll check in. I’ve booked some rooms for us at the Hilton.’

‘Thank you, Philip, that’s great, but I have no money at all now, and I’m hardly dressed for the Hilton.’

‘One can wear anything at all in these places; they’re far too grand to bother with a dress code, and please don’t worry about the money. It’s my pleasure.’

Philip was of a type I’d not yet come across but knew from novels – he might have stepped straight from the pages of Out of Africa. That evening, immaculately dressed in a lightweight cream Savile Row suit, he escorted me like a prince into the magnificent dining room, as if I were in a ball gown. For a fleeting moment I felt like Cinderella, but seeing myself in a gilded mirror instantly dispelled any such fantasy.

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The Cameroons was a French colony, and the dining room might have been in Paris. The waiters, all dark black, tall and slim, glided around with cut-glass trolleys aflame with crêpes. I had never seen anything like it, and we were just an island hop from Fernando Po. The next day, Philip took me down to the harbour and together we boarded Dave’s sister ship. They allowed me to speak to Dave on the ship’s radio.

‘Hi Dave. How’s it going?’

‘Where the hell are you?’

‘I’m in Douala, the Cameroons. Are you okay?’

‘I got the whole crew here laughin’ at me, but otherwise, okay.’

‘Did you learn to cook yet?’

‘I’m gettin’ good.’

I tried as best I could, constrained by my audience, to explain my new plan. In spite of everything, I longed to be back in the cell reading with Dave at my side. ‘See you in London,’ I all but sobbed. ‘Look after yourself.’

I didn’t get to explore Douala, other than the interior of the Hilton hotel and the dockside, but the people looked beautiful, neither friendly nor unfriendly, just elegantly going about their business. The next day Philip flew me to Nigeria, smack bang into the midst of the Biafran War, my South African passport tucked tightly into my knickers. On the way, the little plane flew so low over the coastal rainforests that we could see the animals below reacting to the sound of the engine. We skirted the treetops around a lake that glimmered like a diamond dropped into the middle of a forest, and a herd of elephants looked up. Later we caused a colony of hippos to stampede through the rainforest, sending birds streaking through the branches.

After that thrilling journey, we landed at Lagos airport. Philip had arranged for me to stay with friends of his, a British family who had been moved to a sort of internment camp for the duration of the war. I was to live with them for a week until my plane from London to Johannesburg stopped in Lagos to refuel.

Mr Davenport’s piece of paper trembled as I handed it to the 38

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customs official, but he waved me through without incident. The family were there to meet us. The Fraynes were a married couple with two young children: Emily was three and Jane about eighteen months. The idea was that I would help look after the kids.

‘Welcome to the family,’ said Jennifer Frayne without a hint of disapproval. Why did all the British in Africa look so much more British than those in Britain? They spoke and dressed as if they were in a 1950s film. For someone living in Africa, Mrs Frayne – Jennifer, she said to call her – was remarkably pale with freckles and reddish hair. But like the other Brits I’d met in Africa, she was atypically warm and generous. She lived with her husband John and the two kids in a housing complex cordoned off with security gates and guards. Each house was surrounded by a neat garden. The air was soft and perfumed, the two little girls dressed in summer Liberty-print dresses.

Jennifer ordered tea to be brought out to the garden. We might have been in Surrey, with no hint of a war. I appreciated her openhearted hospitality, but at the same time I couldn’t help but think how bizarre it was to be here in Africa on an immaculately manicured lawn, drinking tea brought to me by the ‘boy’. But who was I to complain? I’d brought it all upon myself.

Longing to experience something of Nigeria, and needing by now to escape from this time-warp Britain, if only for a short time, I ventured out to the market carrying the Davenport passport. Cars screamed along the potholed streets, regardless of pedestrians.

Walking involved multiple hazards. Young boys and men roamed the streets in gangs, wielding sticks, machetes and guns. At any moment it was possible to be held up by a man or boy shoving a weapon in your face.

‘Papers. Show papers.’ I didn’t realise this was code for ‘give money’. Trying to disguise my fear, I waved the Davenport passport, smiled and asked the way to the market, which seemed to do the trick. It was a game of scare.

The women at the market were quite different. Bedlam raged around them, but somehow they managed to inhabit their turf as if nothing untoward was happening. They braided my hair and 39

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wrapped my head in fabulous fabric. I inched my way along the bustling passages teeming with people, more women than men, all shouting and laughing. There were young boys running around, trays of tea, mountains of strange-smelling herbs, and piles of lustrous fabric, beadwork and beautiful hand-thrown clay pots – all going for a song. Once again, there was no hint of a war.

I supposed they needed everyday life to continue as normally as possible. I had only to think of South Africa, where most whites behaved as if everything was reasonable.

One evening, Jennifer and I decided to leave the compound and go to the local cinema, but at the last minute one of her little girls wasn’t well, so we changed our minds and stayed home. That night the cinema was blown up, killing most of the patrons.

The day my plane was due to stop in Lagos, the superbly kind Fraynes took me to the airport. We said our goodbyes and they left. I waited with trepidation for the plane to touch down. I felt a deep sadness, knowing this was the end of my adventure and that I was leaving Dave, but I could see no other way out.

I saw the plane fly toward the airport, while an announcement came over the loudspeakers: ‘Due to the emergency, this airport is now officially closed. No planes will be allowed to land until further notice.’ That was it. I saw and heard my plane roaring overhead, the eyes of the other would-be passengers upturned, tilting sideways as we followed its uninterrupted flight southwards.

For the first time since I’d left South Africa some four years earlier, I lost it. I flung myself on the airport floor and started to scream. Although I didn’t plan it, I must have instinctively known it would bear results. It had worked back then and it worked again now.

Another of those gallant Englishmen, who I was beginning to take for granted, appeared and offered his services. ‘How can I help?’ he asked.

Hyperventilating, I pointed fruitlessly into the air at the now passed aeroplane.

‘Oh dear,’ he said, ‘what a nasty predicament.’ He scooped 40

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me gingerly off the floor and guided me toward the ticket desk where he tried, amidst the mayhem, to ascertain where and when the next plane would be landing en route to Johannesburg. The whole airport was in chaos. Everyone was scrabbling for places.

There were Brits, Germans, French and a few Americans – but no Africans, I noticed – wanting to fly. Douglas, my new saviour, obviously au fait with emergencies, was undaunted by the crush.

He made his way ever so politely but with total assurance to the front of the unruly crowd, all now pushing and shoving each other.

‘I need to get this lady here onto an aeroplane going to Johannesburg as soon as possible. It’s of the utmost urgency.

Assuming this airport remains closed, where else could she pick up a plane?’ It turned out that Accra in Ghana was the closest; a plane from Berlin was due to refuel there the following day.

God knows what everyone else was going to do, but Mr Gallant not only secured me a place on that plane, he also got my ticket changed and even offered to fly me to Accra in his twoseater. Who, I wondered, were all these men with two-seater planes ready at the drop of a hat to fly foolish women around the continent while Dave slogged away in the kitchen of an oil rig? Mr Gallant might have been a Philip clone – both were tall, handsome adventurers – except he was more a dark David Niven type while Philip was more Douglas Fairbanks. I had no idea why either of them bothered with me, apart from their Pavlovian reflex to rescue damsels in distress. But I accepted their generosity with a slightly careless gratitude.

Entering the plane from Berlin, still dressed in the last of my Ossie Clark rags, I shuffled along the aisle past a claustrophobic mass of bulging white flesh in heavy, dark clothing. The air felt stale.

This marked the end of Africa for me, as I didn’t quite view South Africa as part of the same continent. I felt a great sadness to be leaving, as if I were being pitched out of a dream.

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Six ‘My God, look at you!’ my mother screeched, ‘Your hair’s falling out; you look like you’ve come from a concentration camp. You’re never leaving Cape Town again.’

We’ll see about that, I thought, and promptly went to stay with Ewalda, David and their gorgeous new twins, Lachlan and Thalassa. It was astonishing to me that my old school friend was now a mother of two. Ewalda had always taken a great interest in the goings on between my mother and me. Being conservative herself, I think she saw me as a wild child, and took vicarious pleasure in my escapades while sympathising with my bewildered, hysteria-prone mother.

In spite of the condition of my hair, and perhaps helped by my new slenderness, I was able to blag my way into a job as the manager and sole salesperson at the most exclusive boutique in Cape Town, Elzbieta Rosenwerth, selling clothes to her illustrious clients. Somehow I was good at that. Meanwhile, my mother had persuaded me to see a shrink. She really did think I’d gone mad, in spite of my obvious skill at selling outrageously expensive dresses to rich, self-important women.

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‘So, you’ve been in London for the past three years, your mother tells me. What have you been doing?’

‘Well, I went to art school, but then I got involved in the whole London thing, you know, the counterculture. All sorts of incredible people came to our flat, like Andy Warhol – maybe you’ve heard of him? – and Ronnie Laing, you know, The Divided Self guy.

Anyway, we took lots of LSD. It’s an incredible drug; he uses it to treat most of his patients with fabulous results. If you haven’t tried it, you really should.’

After four months or so, Dr Abromsky wrote a report suggesting the possibility of having me sectioned. He told my mother I was quite mad. I suppose it was my own fault for behaving with such bravado, but it was simply irresistible in the face of the unimaginative Dr Abromsky, whose only device was his unresponsiveness – give them a rope, etc. I had duly hung myself.

Dave, meanwhile, had returned to Britain, and we arranged that I would marry my best friend Gini’s boyfriend in London. She had been living with him for years, but neither of them had any thoughts about getting married. Between the four of us, we set it up. My husband-to-be’s name was also Dave, Dave Macquaid.

He sent papers signed by a bona fide priest to say that we were engaged, that we would be married as soon as I got to England and that he would love, cherish and be responsible for me forever.

Elzbieta Rosenwerth was sorry to see me go, but I wasn’t. Six months, I deemed, was an admiral feat, and now I couldn’t wait to return.

It took a while to arrange, but eventually, bidding a happy farewell to South Africa once again, I flew back to London, confidently waving my new bona fide papers through British customs. The very next day, all four of us went to the magistrate’s court in Marylebone (close to the court where our opium case had been held) and my fiancé Dave and I were married. We then went our separate ways. Now that I was Mrs Macquaid, the nonhusband Dave and I, after a celebratory cup of tea in a corner café, went straight to the passport office where I claimed British citizenship. The law in those days was mercifully slack.

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Seven London in 1968 was on the brink of social revolution, culminating perhaps in the protest against the Vietnam War in Grosvenor Square, where ten thousand people, including me, gathered to demonstrate their anger and frustration against the establishment.

Bloody riots such as Britain had never before witnessed took place on the streets. It seemed to be happening everywhere, with the student rebellion in Paris, the unrest on the west and east coasts of America, as well as in Mexico, New Zealand and Chile. Young people were forming subcultures that ran counter to the status quo, demonstrating and dancing to the music of the Rolling Stones.

Even in uptight South Africa there were mass demonstrations against apartheid.

Few people I knew had real jobs, certainly not the kind of professional positions for which we’d been educated. The one doctor I knew dispensed marijuana tincture prescriptions to all his friends, and the few lawyers amongst us were kept in business defending drug cases. And then there were all the music industry people, a select few of whom were actual stars, but whose ranks were swelled by managers, roadies, sound men, recording people, 45

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designers who dressed them, people who designed their record covers, wives, mistresses, cooks, nannies, burgeoning legions of groupies and, of course, the people who sold them their drugs.

None of it looked much like work. Work that looked like work was uncool. So it didn’t occur to me to get a real job, but I worked part time as a waitress at The Ark, a restaurant near High Street Kensington, which paid just enough to sustain the ‘free’ life I’d chosen, as well as sometimes feeding the people still living in the basement of the Free School on leftovers from the restaurant kitchen. To supplement our meagre income, Dave often stood at the bottom of the escalator in Notting Hill tube station, collecting the butts of cigarettes that people discarded before ascending.

While I’d been selling couture dresses in Cape Town, he had met some aristocrats who were travelling around the south of England with horses and carts. They styled themselves, he said, on some idea of medieval gypsies, although I couldn’t quite get the picture.

‘There’s this geyser Mark,’ Dave said, ‘an Eton type I think.

Rides the Queen’s horses. Anyway, he’s cool; rides around with a bunch of merry men with horses and carts. Asked if I wanted to join ’em.’ I could imagine Dave wandering around country lanes with a horse or two, measuring out the odd tune, hunching happily over fires, and I could see why a bunch of aristos might want him to join them. He’d add a sort of authenticity. He not only looked and sounded like a gypsy, but behaved in a way non-gypsies might think a gypsy behaved. I hoped that if they wanted him, they’d have me too.

Soon after I married the other Dave, my Dave and I went down to meet the aristos at a horse fair in Exeter. Neither of us had been to Exeter or a horse sale before. The mood was festive and horsey.

Young girls wearing smart dun jodhpurs and black riding hats, ponytails swinging side to side, dashed amongst the horses led by agile young men in old-fashioned suits whose jackets were either too big or too small, red kerchiefs tied niftily around their nottoo-clean necks. There was a lot of noise. Everyone appeared to be having a good time. We met Mark and his pal Maldwyn around one enclosure, looking at horses and checking out their teeth.

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Dressed in dirty brocades, silks, soft velvets and suede, they really did look like medieval minstrels. Both were good-looking boys with light brown hair falling in soft curls around their shoulders.

A bit of a fairground with tombola stalls and food kiosks skirted the main marquee.

‘Okay, okay,’ said Dave, seeing my excitement, ‘time to hit the tent.’

The auctioneer stood on a platform as jaunty boys with crops ran alongside the horses, giving them little flicks on the rump to encourage them to trot. There was a lot of shouting and nodding going on. Then a sudden hush fell as a swarthy boy leapt onto the rump of a sturdy chestnut and rode him like an acrobat around and around the ring. I saw people raising and lowering their hands.

Caught up in the spirit of things, I too raised my hand and heard the irrevocable slam of a gavel.

‘Number 154, the chestnut, to the lady on the side there,’ the auctioneer nodded in my direction. ‘Yes you, lady. We’ll see you after the sale.’

‘Seems like you got yourself a horse there,’ said Mark. Dave and Maldwyn laughed. What fun, I thought. But after the sale, when I’d calmed down a bit, I thought I’d better go and see the auctioneer and explain that I didn’t really want a horse. How could I possibly own a horse?

‘Hi,’ I said, ‘listen, I know I bid for that horse, but I didn’t really understand how it all works. I live in London, see. I can’t possibly have a horse.’

‘Lady, the horse is yours. Please pay for it and arrange for it to be transported out of here. You have till the close of day.’

I paid for the horse with my hard-earned Elzbieta Rosenwerth money. Dave and I went back to London, packed the few things we owned and hitched down to Cornwall, where Mark had taken delivery of our horse, now named Babylon.

The aristos were camped on a grand estate near St Germans on the Cornish coast. There were about eight or so boys and girls slouching around the encampment, fixing bits of horse tackle, 47

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preparing food, tending a fire, mending clothes or just lying decoratively around. Carthorses the size of sofas and skinny greyhounds and lurchers wandered equally decoratively among them and the wagons, which ranged from cut-glass gypsy showwagons to more basic carts, all drawn by horses. It was a seductive sight, but it was also immediately obvious that, apart from our day out at the Exeter fair, neither Dave nor I had been near a horse.

‘How is it you don’t ride?’ the beautiful Sir Mark asked, as if not riding was tantamount to not breathing.

‘My mother was afraid of horses. She was scared they might kick me,’ I replied.

‘Scared? Afraid? Never heard such a thing. Jump on,’ he commanded, giving me a hand up onto the bare back of his Arab stallion, Sagittarius. I never quite knew what I was doing, but I learnt to feign courage and hang on for dear life.

During the time at the camp, tall, posh girls from London wearing fashionably flimsy clothes materialised and then disappeared. I was the only permanent girl. It fell to me to collect firewood from the surrounding woods and make simple suppers over the flames: brown rice and stir-fried vegetables, over and over again, night after night. Surprisingly, although the English countryside was a new experience for me, I took to this sort of living quite naturally, enjoying my days outside, moving amongst the horses, the dogs and the rather rarefied new breed of people amongst whom I found myself.

Rifling through an assortment of things in the communal box, I found some books by a guy called George Borrow, a 19thcentury gentleman who had written about his time living with the English and European Romanies. He had also written a Romany dictionary, some words of which I set about trying to learn, in the hope that sooner or later I’d have an opportunity to practise them.

The more I read, the more eager I was to get going. The camp bustled with preparations for the journey up to Glastonbury. It turned out, however, that Babylon was totally unbroken, unable to be ridden or even to pull a cart. Not that we had a cart; we slept in a tent. So Mark, beloved of the rural squires with whom he was 48

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well acquainted, magicked up a little old pony called Bilbo, who I’m sure had been destined for the knackers yard. He was small and almost bald with woeful sores on his back, but in spite of his truculent nature, he took to Dave. We weren’t in any position to be choosy. Dave set about putting a cart together from the scraps of an abandoned riding trap he’d found in one of the stables. Our cart looked like a Dadaesque object, painted bright yellow and held together with bits of string. The metal rims were attached to the wooden wheels with coils of wire that looked as if the whole thing would spring apart at the first hint of movement.

But the cart did go, with Bilbo trotting out in front between the shafts, wearing his makeshift harness. There was never any question of riding in the cart, but we walked alongside it, with all our possessions and a kitten, Snoo, piled on the platform, and Babylon attached by a rope nose-harness to the rear of the cart. We had endless practice runs around the field, Dave leading Bilbo in the makeshift harness attached to the dicey shafts of the fragile platform with Babylon tied on behind. I devised various tricks I thought might scare them into bolting, things I imagined might happen along the road. I’d make a sudden loud noise or rush at them head-on with three dogs, while Dave kept walking quietly alongside Bilbo, talking gently into his ear and encouraging Babylon with strokes and the odd treat. By the time we were confident enough to hit the road, the aristos had already left.

But the plan was to meet along the way and together enter the legendary town of Glastonbury.

Our first day out went well. The sun was sparkling and both horses were quietly excited, performing perfectly. That night we set up camp on a grass verge, tethering them to metal stakes where the horses would find lush grazing. Dave had devised a sort of canvas structure that he slung over the cart, making a space just large enough for us and the dogs to sleep uncomfortably. And I had the most luxurious sheepskin jacket in the world, salvaged from the communal clothes box, which reminded me of an Eskimo jacket I’d bought at a Sotheby’s auction in Cape Town when I was about fifteen, made from the softest suede and polar bear fur. I loved it so 49

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much that I wore it all through the winter. Now, together with my long, fake-karakul Biba coat slung over our sleeping bags, we were never cold. It was reminiscent of our Formentera camp, except this time it was Dave who set the tone and timbre of our lives. He was completely in his element. I saw now for the first time how essentially British he was, a different British certainly from the aristos, but absolutely part of the same tapestry, all of them living out some Arthurian legend that would always be alien to me.

We’d managed so far to keep to seldom-travelled lanes and old, neglected drove roads that criss-crossed the landscape, just wide enough to brush between hedgerows brimming with wild flowers, grasses, strawberry and bramble blossoms, the wired wheels of the cart releasing intoxicating perfumes as they crushed the herby undergrowth. Undaunted by our presence, birds swooped and landed on the cart, and the horses behaved impeccably, but for the occasional temptation to stop and nibble at a passing treat.

Constant birdsong filled the air.

We must have looked an odd couple as we left Saltash and approached the terrifyingly long Tamar Bridge connecting Cornwall to Devon. We were reluctant to enter the heavy stream of traffic, but there was no alternative route. We put eye shields on Bilbo and Babylon, just as Mark had instructed, and stepped onto what felt like a swaying suspension bridge. Cars whizzed by in both directions. All was going well until halfway across, when an enormous lorry coming in the opposite direction hooted loudly as it passed. Babylon bolted, tipping the cart, the kitten and all our possessions onto the highway. Dave made a dash for Babylon and managed eventually to calm her. I scooped up Snoo and stood by steadfast Bilbo, who proved himself a superior animal. The traffic came to a furious standstill while we struggled to gather ourselves together as best we could. After much adjusting of ropes and wires, most of the damage having been inflicted on the makeshift shafts, we were able, now more warily, to continue on our way.

We walked every day, quietly enough, passing through or camping on village greens, fields or grass verges between towns, stopping wherever the grazing was best. Babylon was already 50

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more approachable and tentatively allowed Dave to mount him.

He rode alongside while I held Bilbo’s halter tightly, preventing him from lurching off toward a tempting mouthful and toppling the entire outfit. In villages, local boys and girls came after school to hang out with us.

‘Look mister, me mum gave me some leftovers for them horses.’

A young feral-looking boy with scuffed knees edged closer to Bilbo.

‘An’ a few smokes for you,’ he said more sheepishly, offering them to Dave.

‘I’ll bet she didn’t give you the cigarettes,’ said Dave, accepting them graciously. The kids brought chocolates, scraps of food, and even once a bottle of wine. ‘No wonder the gypsies have a bad rep,’ Dave laughed, ‘your parents probably think it’s them gyppos creeping into your houses stealin’ their stuff, meanwhile it’s you kids.’ When we left a village they’d follow us for miles. Sometimes rheumy old men would wave and bid us stop, delighted by the sight of the horse-drawn cart. One such man, tears falling from his eyes, recounted dramatic stories from the First World War of his time in the trenches, and the soldier’s passionate relationship with the horses they lived with and depended upon.

We met up with Mark and the others in a well-hidden drove road near Chagford. It was Babylon who first got whiff of the other horses and had to be heavily reined in. We battered our way along the overgrown path and manoeuvred the cart to close the circle of wagons around the central fire, where Mark sat splendidly enthroned on a log, his dog Elph at his side. Suddenly reminded of history book pictures of the Voortrekkers and their laagers, I started to laugh.

‘What’s so funny?’ Dave said, stomping around, impatient to set up.

‘Nothing,’ I said. Why bother even trying to explain?

The others had been eagerly awaiting our arrival so that we could all push on to Glastonbury together. Coffee was passed around, our horses tethered and watered, and stories swapped.

We were invited to camp at the ancestral home of one of Mark’s friends in Chagford. Many such houses and castles dotted the 51

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length and breadth of the country, and all were owned by consorts of Mark. Should we be crossing their path, we were always invited to stop, set up camp, attend a lavish banquet and be shown off to the neighbouring squires. We comprised ten raggedy people, six rickety wagons drawn by shires, some thoroughbreds for riding, a few less impressive nags tied on behind, and at least ten greyhounds and lurchers racing around and yelping when they weren’t nestled amongst the down-feathered bedding. The shires were huge draught horses, at least seventeen hands, broad as sofas with sturdy legs, white socks and a charming waterfall of hair over each hoof. Although by far the largest of the horses, I felt safest around them.

We were the star attraction. My main concern on these occasions was whether or not I’d be invited in to take a bath. We all stank: the smell of wood smoke and animals was deep under our skin, but none of us noticed until we were indoors, and then it was overwhelming. But our hosts and hostesses were above comment.

The houses were of a piece, always big, stony and cold, with ancestral portraits, paintings of horses and landscapes and antlers mounted on the walls. Their inhabitants were either witty or dull, and dressed accordingly. It didn’t seem to matter which, as long as you weren’t middle-of-the-road.

‘So Mark,’ Lord so-and-so hollered across the crystal-laid table, ‘what’s all this vagabonding about then?’

‘It’s not about anything. It’s just the way we live. You should join us.’

‘Oh George, do let’s, for a while anyway,’ said the lady of the house.

‘Why yes, Maid Marian, off you go,’ her husband challenged.

‘I can see you snuggled under a feathered counterpane in a damp wagon or riding bareback across the downs. But I daresay you’ll be sick of this before long, Mark. What then? I do hope we’ll be seeing you suited in The City before the season’s past.’

Conversation bounced back and forth across the table like a Chinese ping-pong game, faster and faster, killer shots striking their targets. They engaged in a humour particular to themselves, 52

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sparing no one who wasn’t quite up to it, although what was required seemed no more than wit, beauty, wealth or status; all four if possible. Since I didn’t rate on any front, I was blissfully ignored and could enjoy myself as a voyeur.

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Eight Loosely following the direction in which the horse fairs were held, we passed through the small villages of Shobrooke, Cadbury, Bickleigh and up across the Blackdown Hills. Then on past Godney where we ran into a bunch of Romanies camped on a grass verge in the most deluxe, state-of-the-art wagons, compared with which we looked a poor outfit indeed.

‘What yers all doin’ drivin’ around in them old carts?’ they laughed. ‘Yer playin’ at Robin Hood or what?’

‘Knights of the Round Table, more like,’ said Dave.

‘Yers all look like girls,’ the gypsies said, ‘with them clothes and long curls.’ All our boys (except Dave) were dressed in their Granny Takes a Trip clothes from a shop on the King’s Road in London that specialised in crushed velvet, luscious brocades and fur – all filthy now from life on the road.

‘More like King Arthur,’ said Dave.

One young boy, skinny and sharp, drew from nowhere a canvas bundle and threw it provocatively before me.

‘Yer wanna tent?’ he quizzed. ‘Better ’n that there thing.’ He pointed in the direction of our cart, which looked in a sorry state, 55

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the wheels all but falling off. He proceeded to unfurl the canvas, and in no time had erected a substantial tent, high enough to stand in, big enough to throw a party. Sleeping another night atop the tarpaulined cart was suddenly impossible. Seeing my eager face, Maldwyn stepped forward, deeming me unequal to the bargaining.

‘So, what do you want then?’ he said, looking away and simulating a yawn. I went to my cart and pulled my old, tinny tape recorder from under the canvas. I slid in a tape, turned up the volume and sauntered back to where the boys were throwing numbers back and forth. I subtly danced around them.

‘What you think of this music?’ I interjected.

‘It’s good. What yer ’ave there?’

‘A tape recorder. Want it?’

‘I might,’ he said. By now he was really getting off on A Whiter Shade of Pale. ‘What about the song?’ he said.

‘I’ll throw in the song too,’ I said. He was a very springy boy.

He pranced around the camp for a while, poking his long nose into everything, becoming quite confused.

‘Why yers live like this?’ he asked at last.

‘Maybe the same as you.’ I said. ‘Anyway, what about the tape?’

‘Okay,’ he said. I quickly put out my hand, palm upward and he slapped it just as fast. It was a done deal. We exchanged goods and he went off, whistling on his way. ‘See yers again,’ he called back over his shoulder.

Maldwyn was unwillingly impressed, but that night, having moved my belongings to my new palace, I threw a little party and gained, I think, a little extra respect.

From then on in, whenever we crossed paths, I hung out as much as possible with the gypsies. It turned out that my dog May, a beautiful brindled lurcher and brilliant hunter, could knock the socks off any of the other dogs. I raced her against their favourites and she beat them all; a born winner and the envy of every gypsy.

‘Yer’ll have the fastest dog in the west,’ the skinny boy said, now humming A Whiter Shade of Pale. ‘Yer should race ’er with ours.’ The gypsies came to collect May and me in a Mercedes stuffed with dogs in the boot.

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‘You’ll not put my May in the boot. It’s cruel. The dogs can’t breathe. Let those dogs out.’

‘Don’t be daft. They’re dogs. But okay, we’ll let May sit wi’ yer in the back. We gonna put a lot of money on May today.’

And off we whizzed to meet up with other gypsies and their dogs spilling out of car boots – one was once dead on arrival – to some huge field somewhere, though I was never quite sure where.

We’d put the dogs on short slip-leads and edge our way quietly along the hedgerows until someone gave the word that a hare had been seen. Then we’d let the leads go and the dogs would fly like bullets. They ran so fast you could hardly keep track of what was happening. The hare too would be racing for dear life, turning and twisting on a thimble. It was an extraordinary thing to see. What the dogs had on speed, the hares had on changing direction so fast that they were evenly matched. It was anyone’s guess who would win, but if the dogs won out, it was hare stew for dinner.

The gypsies placed bets on the races, risking fortunes. I never knew the sums, but after the races they’d take me to pubs, usually in Plymouth, where they’d pay with wads of cash the size of bibles, buying and selling dogs en route, stealing chickens from their friends and generally having a good time.

‘Why yer wastin’ yer time with that bunch?’ they asked me.

‘Yer can marry Jimmy ’ere and stay with us. Yer’ll have Katie, Janie, May and Rose ’ere fer sisters.’ If I hadn’t been so in love with Dave, I might have considered it. I loved those girls, although I wasn’t too sure about Jimmy. ‘Yer’ll ’ave more fun with us,’ they cajoled. ‘Only difference is,’ they said, ‘when them police stop us, it’s trouble.’

20 June 1968 Dear Ewalda, How are you all doing? I was so happy to get your last letter. How are Lachlan and Thalassa? Are you coping? I can’t even begin to imagine having twins. I can’t even look after myself. Please send pics.

Otherwise, I don’t quite know where to begin. If I’d 57

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written to you a few days ago, everything would have been wonderful. Maybe it’s still wonderful, only a horrible thing just happened to me.

We were camped in a field twenty miles or more from Glastonbury, where King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are said to have hung out and where we were all heading. I’d been out riding with everyone, although I still can’t really ride, I just sort of fake it and cling on like crazy to the horse’s mane when he starts galloping. Anyway, I fell off. I’ve fallen off loads of times so it wasn’t a big deal, but back at the camp a few hours later, I got the most terrible cramps, really bad, and then I started to bleed. Honestly, I thought I was going to die.

I’d been thinking for a while I might be pregnant, and then I knew for sure I had been and that what was happening now was a miscarriage. Apart from the pain, blood started trickling down my legs, slowly at first, then gushing. None of the men in the camp but Mark seemed to notice, and I suspect he was either frightened or embarrassed, I couldn’t tell. But I knew instinctively that it was better not to waste time with any of them, including Dave; they’d all be worse than useless. So God knows how, but I managed to stumble out onto a road and put out my thumb. Needless to say, the first car that saw me stopped immediately. I must have been quite a sight, doubled over with blood pouring out between my legs.

Mark had given me the name of some people he knew in Glastonbury and told me to go straight there. He’d said they were very nice, ordinary people who lived in an ordinary house with their two young kids and that they’d help me.

I thrust the piece of paper with their address at the driver, who took me to the front door. I think he was quite shocked that I was alone, that no one had come with me.

Anyway, Brian and Jenny, the people who live in Glastonbury, are really ordinary (especially after being with Dave and the aristos for so long) and extraordinarily nice 58

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people. They were very shaken when they opened the door and saw me standing there, but I didn’t waste time with explanations. They took me straight to the hospital and visited later with their two kids. After a couple of days, they brought me back to their house where I am now. I feel like I never want to leave their unbelievably clean and tidy house.

It’s like having these wonderful parents. They’ve put their kids in one room for the moment and given me the other one. Honestly, I love them.

The boys have all arrived now and have been given a field close to the town centre, where they’re causing quite a stir.

It’s like the cosmic circus has come to town. I’m feeling fine now and ready to return to the carts, only Jenny won’t let me go just yet. I know what you’re thinking… Where was Dave in all this? I suppose the real question is where am I in all this? Maybe I’ll have an answer for you next time.

Meanwhile, I’m still in love with him and simply can’t leave.

But it’s such a relief to be able to write and tell you all this, only for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone else. You know what Cape Town’s like, the next thing I’ll have my parents here suing Dave or something equally ridiculous.

I’m reading the Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope. He lived around the same sort of time as George Borrow, except that Trollope was forced to hang out with posh people at Winchester College and then Harrow.

Everyone else was rich but he was poor with no friends.

He’d have done better to hang out with George and the gypsies, but instead he wrote some great books about the people and the land all around here. I’m also reading Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson. I’m sure you could find a copy there, you’d love it.

Lots of love. I miss you, Hillary P.S. When next you hear from me I’ll be back on the road.

P.P.S. I think my mother is going crazy at the idea of my travelling round the country like this. Has she said anything 59

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to you? Can you imagine if she decided to come here? I try to make everything sound very normal when I write, but maybe it’s a bit much for her. I wonder if she ever shows my letters to my father.

We spent a week or so in Glastonbury, climbing the Tor and hanging out with the other hippies who appeared mesmerised by the place as a source of mysterious power, where ley lines converged and pumped out sacred energy. How odd that I should be at the heart of goodness and yet sustain such injury. I longed now to travel alone with Dave, but we seemed caught up in some larger plan, moving on to Priddy where the long-awaited Priddy Fair was scheduled to take place.

We all wanted to escape the incessant Glastonbury buzz and be closer to the fair. Mark and Maldwyn galloped ahead in true equestrian style, looking for a suitable place to set up a camp where we and the horses could all rest and enjoy ourselves. They found and rented the perfect field at Wookey Hole, no more than an hour from Priddy.

On the day of the fair we all rode in on our horses, causing quite a commotion. The village green was awash with local farmers and their families, the ubiquitous pony-addicted young girls and their eager mothers. Gypsies were everywhere, standing bareback on their horses, strutting around and showing off as if competing with us. I’d say we were equally matched, a close thing. Dave took the opportunity to bring out his fiddle and play a piece he’d written especially for the fair. In other circumstances I might have danced with skirts flying and Indian bells strapped to my ankles. But I couldn’t quite rise to the occasion, and sauntered instead around the kiosks amongst the fairground people, some of whom we now knew from other fairs and sales. I visited the Bearded Lady and the Strong Man and then on to the knife-throwing couple who were in between sets.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Wow, you two are looking spectacularly spangly.’

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blonde with skin so white she looked permanently in shock. She had told me she was terrified of the knives that came flying at her body daily.

‘New costumes,’ José said, ‘you like? Is enough sequins?’ he inquired. ‘But you, you okay? No look so good. Maybe is time for you to go home, no?’

Janet came close and put her arms around me. ‘What do you know, José? She looks fine.’

Mark approached.

‘Hi,’ he said, ‘having fun? Listen, one of the gypsy boys, Alphie, just told me there’s a bunch of guys parked off not far from here and they might have the right horse for you. He’ll take us there now if you want.’ I had been thinking for some time of upgrading to a sturdier outfit; a more substantial wagon with a horse to match.

We squashed into the cab of Alphie’s flat-bed lorry and whizzed off at a lick down overgrown old lanes, coming soon to a wellhidden clearing where a bunch of guys were sitting around on logs, smoking. They were a rough-looking bunch that we’d not encountered before. Alphie, hoping, I’m sure, to pick up a bob or two, leapt from the lorry and whispered in the old man’s ear.

A flutter of activity ensued. A horse was trotted in by one of the other men, while Mark and I conversed quietly on the side. A deal was struck after Mark had test ridden ‘Danny’ and been assured that he was the perfect carriage horse.

‘Been pullin’ the gentry to an’ from church fer years,’ Alphie said. ‘An’ I’ll throw in the ol’ wagon. Might need a bit o’ fixin’, but yer’ll have a strong pullin’ ’ouse a’ the end o’ it.’

We paid cash and arranged for the wagon to be delivered to our field the following day. No need for directions; all the gypsies knew precisely where we were. Mark and I mounted Danny and rode back to Wookey Hole.

Over the next few days, Dave, Mark, Maldwyn – and whoever else thought they could help – set about building my house-onwheels. Dave was especially concerned and took the lead. It was a beauty. The front and back were made from wooden planks with 61

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a door at the front and a window to the rear. Four semi-circular steel rods, securely attached to the sides, and a huge canvas flung over the whole created a spacious and private place. It didn’t take me long to festoon it with my exotic fabrics, carpets and other soft things I’d collected to make the most inviting bed. Snoo and May were thrilled. Now that they had a comfortable home, they took up almost permanent residence. I couldn’t blame them.

Dave, May, Snoo and I set off on our own, stopping in a layby close to the house where Alphie lived with his mother and six sisters, all of whom sported the tallest beehive hairdos and brilliant full skirts, and never stopped talking and laughing. Watching them operate together was like a magic act. You didn’t quite see it being done, but suddenly there were the results. Presenting tea and cakes, cooking, chatting, cleaning, dancing and making music… everything happened with the same lightness of spirit as if all of life was a party. I loved being in their house. Mrs Penrose and her six daughters fancied me as a wife for Alphie, who was clearly overwhelmed by the women in his family and never got a word in edgeways. Whenever Dave wasn’t there they’d go on and on.

‘Hillary, Alphie’s a good enough lad. Quiet, yer know, shy, but yer’ll be ’ere with us, so it won’t matter. C’mon Hillary, stay ’ere with us.’

I knew it was just a game. They loved teasing Alphie and took every opportunity to drive him mad, but still, I wondered what it was that made gypsies think I was good wife material. I thought they stuck to their own, like the Jews, but perhaps it was because I wasn’t English, a minority like them and a little exotic maybe. I went selling pegs and collecting old clothes with the girls, knocking on suburban street doors and terrifying the housewives, subtly threatening them with curses unless they coughed up.

Mrs Penrose had an old barn piled high with rags from which it was possible to assemble the most sophisticated vintage wardrobe.

I sat rummaging for hours, the girls laughing at my taste and excitement. I wished Dave and I could stay there forever.

But we did leave, of course. A plan had been put in place to meet Mark at Cheddar Gorge and go on from there to Longleat.

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The journey through Cheddar Gorge was excruciating. We had to put stones in front and behind the cartwheels at almost every step to prevent the carts slipping down the steep sides of the aweinspiring gorge. We were exhausted and the horses done in too as we finally pulled in through the gates of Longleat, the largest stately home I’d ever seen.

We’d been invited to stay by a great friend of Mark, Alexander Thynn, whose father was the Marquess of Bath. The house was set amidst formal gardens and lakes on nine thousand acres of parkland. We were ushered into a large enclosure by the overjoyed Alexander, and told to make ourselves completely at home. He looked as scruffy and eccentric as we were.

‘Don’t get a fright,’ he said, ‘should you hear the roar of lions.

My father’s starting a safari park here. Early days still, but the lions have arrived and the llamas might bump into you while you’re out on a ride. They’re quite harmless, and the lions are in an enclosure over there,’ he said, pointing to a wooded area close by. ‘Oh, and do come in for baths and what have you, whenever convenient.

Say hello to Papa. Supper tonight, yes?’

We all had a marvellous time riding around the estate, bumping into llamas, swimming in the lakes, drifting in and out of the house and using the vast library. Alexander seemed to love having us there, and even came up with a plan to keep us.

‘Mark,’ he said one day, sitting on a log beside a smoky fire, velvet bellbottoms flapping in the soft breeze. ‘I think you should all stay. This safari park thing will one day attract a lot of visitors, and you’d all be a marvellous attraction, just marvellous. All you need do is carry on with your lives just as you’re now doing. We could put you somewhere else so you’d not be too bothered by lions, llamas or tourists.’ He couldn’t contain his glee. ‘Visitors would love it. Roll up, roll up, come and see how real gypsies live.’

He gave a great snort. ‘Well, sort of real gypsies. Could always slip across to the house for the odd bath or two. Keep that quiet. What do you think?’

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as a child. I thought at first they were real people, huddled around fires, engaged in their domestic lives. When I was older, I thought they were real stuffed people. Now the Marquess of Bath wanted to go one better: a diorama of real live people living not that differently from the Bushmen.

But after a month or so we headed off toward Salisbury Plain.

One evening while we were sitting around the fire just outside Frome, a car pulled up and a man got out from the back seat. He sniffed the air and looked around. Then the driver got out and the two men had a brief chat, after which the driver drove off and the other man walked toward us. He was short and thin, and seemed older than us, wearing a dark blue velvet smoking jacket with a scarf draped around his neck. As he got closer I saw his face was finely chiselled with piercing, almond-shaped eyes. In the firelight later I saw they were greenish blue. I was struck immediately by his intensity.

He came over and embraced Mark and Lucy, one of the London girls who’d been travelling with us since Glastonbury. They spoke together for a while. Everyone else said hello, but they didn’t bother to introduce him. He sat on a crate, polite, meticulous and restless. Lucy obviously knew him well and was very taken with him, as indeed I was. He and Mark gossiped about some friends they had in common, and he was heartlessly clever and amusing.

Not a sentimental man. Much later, toward midnight, the car came back to collect him.

‘Do you know who that was?’ Mark asked after he’d left.

‘No, are we supposed to?’ Dave answered.

‘Lucien Freud. You know, the painter. Lucy’s his muse.’

Lucy left for London soon afterwards. I think she was posing for one of his paintings.

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Nine 7 October 1968 Dear Mom and Dad, You won’t believe where I’ve ended up. I hardly do myself, although it’s nothing like as glamorous as it may seem. I’m trying hard to domesticate a three-sided outhouse that’s crawling with rats, while waiting for the rest of the gang to arrive. But the outhouse does belong to Mick Jagger. You’ve heard of him, I suppose, the lead singer of the Rolling Stones? He bought this place a few months ago, a gigantic house and God-knows-how-many acres of fields and rolling hills, all very beautiful, in a little village near Newbury. It’s falling apart really, and the plan is that he will eventually have it done up, but meanwhile, Mick has allowed Sir Mark, one of the aristos with whom we’re travelling, to use it as our winter base – the sheds, anyway.

We were all on our way here, travelling across Salisbury Plain, rather bleak, when my stupid horse went lame. I’m the only woman travelling with this group, all Eton educated, and believe me, they’re not too female friendly. Besides 65

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which, they’re brilliant horsemen and very spartan, except, of course, for me. Mark rides the Queen’s horses, and none of them ever ride with saddles, whereas I’m hopeless. In fact, I’m terrified of horses, and I’m sure the horses know.

Anyway, Mark suggested I hire a horsebox and come on ahead so that my lame horse can rest up in the fields here and I can... well, I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do. I don’t know how long they’re going to take.

In a nearby cottage is a gardener with his family, left over from the last regime. He continues to grow vegetables in a huge, walled garden, although there’s no one left to eat them.

There are enough vegetables here to feed three surrounding villages. I saw his wife in the village shop buying tinned carrots, and when I asked her why, she looked at me as if I was stupid.

‘They belong to the master,’ she said, ‘I’ll no’ be wantin’ to steal food from the master.’ Strange place, England. If the others don’t arrive soon, I may pack a big basket and hitch to London and deliver the vegetables to Mick’s house in Chelsea.

You can now write to me at this address, since we’ll be here for the whole winter. I made some money buying and selling horses at a few horse fairs on the way up. It seems all you have to do is attach them to the back of the wagon and walk with them to the next place (sometimes weeks).

By the time you get there, hey presto, they’re sort of broken in, and you can sell them for more than you paid for them.

Sometimes my boyfriend, who’s a brilliant fiddle player, plays jigs and I dance and people drop money into a hat… so all those years of ballet lessons haven’t gone to waste after all. Now I have enough money to last the winter. We need so little, living outside and cooking over an open fire.

But I’d better go now and start collecting wood. It’s bloody cold and I need to make fires at night. I do hope the others come soon.

Hope all is well with you. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.

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Love, Hillary Oh yes, and send love to Barbara and say I hope her wedding is great.

Dave and I stayed on at Stargroves, the Jagger place, long after the aristos returned to their London houses or country estates. We had nowhere else to go. Besides which, I liked it there, although Dave was growing restless. I suspected he was getting bored now that we were sedentary. We moved into the gardener’s cottage, which was close to the big house and now empty. Mick had started getting the place revamped and needed someone around to let decorators in and out of the premises. There was also the issue of a dog, a very fat basset hound that Marsha Hunt, an abandoned girlfriend from California, had given Mick as a present, which he unsurprisingly didn’t want. It came to live with us at Stargroves, unwanted again by the greyhounds and lurchers who were deeply disdainful of this slothful, low-slung animal.

During this time, Dave started visiting his London friends who were squatting in an empty croft house above Loch Ness in Scotland, anticipating a visit from extraterrestrials. Dave seemed very excited. I didn’t know what else was going on there, but I sensed that he was becoming more attracted to Scotland than staying at Stargroves with me, looking after a few odd dogs, some leftover horses and opening the door to the decorators. He seemed to be seeking some sort of cosmic event, and Scotland impressed him as a likelier venue.

Soon after the house became habitable, the Rolling Stones and their enormous entourage arrived to record what became Beggars Banquet. After standing empty for so long, the place erupted into a frenzy of wives, children, cooks, groupies, sound-recording people, hangers-on, nannies, girlfriends, photographers and, of course, the Rolling Stones. Dave and I were very put out. We’d gotten used to the house and grounds being our sole domain, except for the occasional visit from Mick, who never stayed long and was always interesting and fun to be around. Now there were people everywhere, although they confined themselves to the indoors.

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I don’t think I ever saw anyone strolling around the grounds. It had been so long since I’d lived in London, I’d forgotten what it was like, but now London had come to us, and although far from cosmic, it was irresistibly magnetic.

One morning, after feeding the dogs and cleaning out the stables, I drifted across to the big house and walked through the back door into the kitchen. Several willowy girls with long hair and beautiful doll faces glanced blankly at me. They were making coffee or lounging around in clothes so delicate and fine they made me want to weep. The girls chatted and laughed amongst themselves as if they belonged there and had always been there, in spite of a subtle tension that electrified the air. They grouped and regrouped around the room as if on a fashion shoot, a tableau straight out of Vogue. I felt like a clumsy little toad, but what the hell, since I was virtually invisible, I decided to hang around for a while and satisfy my curiosity.

Just then Dave appeared. Once again, we were the smallest people in the room; garden gnomes sprung to mind. I noticed Dave had that strange look I knew so well, but as nobody seemed to have paid either of us the slightest bit of attention, I partially relaxed. He looked around at each girl individually, then focused on a big aluminium bin in the corner, prised off the lid, hopped inside and started to howl like a dog – a high, sustained yeooowl.

Everyone stopped dead in their tracks. A crackling silence set in, except for Dave’s howling. You could have sliced the air with a knife. I thought I might explode with laughter. What, I wondered, could possibly follow this? Just then, Mick breezed into the kitchen, wearing tight pants and a billowing white shirt as if just returned from a successful joust in the forest; he looked radiant.

‘Hi girls, any chance of a coffee?’ He threw himself down on a sofa, his spindly legs and snakeskin boots splayed out before him.

The girls were galvanised by terror, but tried in vain to appear casual. I think they were as frightened of Mick as of Dave. ‘How’s tricks, Dave?’ Mick asked, unfazed by both the yowling and the dustbin. ‘A bit hectic here during the day, recording and all, but maybe later tonight, you doing anything? Both of you, come over, 68

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we’ll have a little singsong. Working on something... might be good to try it with the fiddle.’ Upon which, he leapt up and left the room.

Dave hefted himself out of the bin as if from an armchair and out we sauntered. ‘What was that all about?’ I asked, distinctly unnerved by this little episode of his.

‘What?’

‘You know, the bin thing.’

‘Oh that? Well, I have this theory that we’re actually all dogs, only we look like people. I’m not sure, but I think those people might have been sent here from somewhere else. I thought if I behaved like a dog, those girls would reveal what breeds they really are.’

‘Really, Dave, you actually mean that?’

‘Well yes, it’s possible. I don’t think they’re from this planet.’

Later that night, we walked across to the big house. It was strangely quiet; everyone but Mick had retired to their rooms. We entered the recently refurbished reception hall, now filled with instruments, wires and recording equipment. Mick sat down at the grand and started to play a lyrical refrain. Dave accompanied him on the fiddle, and recited some lines from Hamlet. It was dramatic.

Just as we were about to leave, Bianca, his new girlfriend, appeared at the top of the grand staircase in a flowing white gown.

A few weeks later, the whole lot disappeared as swiftly as they’d arrived. The Harrods vans, the sound-equipment trucks, the big fancy cars and the people were all gone.

Dave was increasingly restless, as if waiting for something extraordinary to happen. Finally, he decided he had to be in Scotland. Whatever he was awaiting wasn’t going to happen here.

His behaviour had been consistently inconsistent; he’d never for a second allowed me to believe I could rely on him for anything.

Yet his departure pained me deeply. I cried, screamed and threw a tantrum, begging him to stay, but I couldn’t compete with extraterrestrials. Still, against all the odds, I continued to hope he’d eventually love me and want to be with me.

‘I’ll see you,’ he said, one morning. ‘I think I’ll just start walkin’.

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Shouldn’t take too long.’

‘Where? To Scotland?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But Dave… it’s hundreds of miles.’

‘That’s okay. I’m not in a hurry.’

‘But why not take the train?’

‘No money.’

‘I’ll give you some.’

‘No, I’ll walk.’ He collected the minimum of things and set off.

A few hours later Mick arrived unexpectedly. I made tea and we went to look around the big house. Everything had been cleaned and cleared. It was as if Beggars Banquet had never existed.

‘Where’s Dave?’ he asked.

‘Walking to Scotland,’ I said.

‘Walking?’

‘Yeah, walking.’

‘Why?’ ‘He’s expecting something.’

‘But wouldn’t it be quicker by train?’

‘It would, but you know Dave...’

‘Dave’s fucking mad. Come, let’s go.’

‘Where?’

‘We’ll go find him, take him to the station.’

‘But he said he wanted to walk.’

‘Rubbish.’

We got into his huge, luxurious car and purred along the village lanes heading vaguely north. Suddenly I didn’t care about Dave anymore. I was too drained, too exhausted. I wanted to stay in that car forever, just driving along with Mick. After going back and forth negotiating various possibilities, we finally caught sight of a little figure tramping along in the distance. He looked like Charlie Chaplin.

Mick drove up alongside him and pulled to a halt. He leaned out of the car and called, ‘Hi mate.’

‘Oh, what you doin’ here?’ Dave said.

‘Thought I’d give you a ride to the station.’

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‘I’m walkin’.’

‘You crazy or what? Listen mate, hop in. It’s too fucking far walking to Scotland.’

So Dave jumped in the back of the car and we drove to the station. Mick bought him a ticket, we said goodbye again and Mick and I drove back to Stargroves. That evening he played me a sample track of Jumping Jack Flash in the small sitting room of the gardener’s cottage where we both stayed.

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Ten I stayed on at Stargroves for a long time, looking after the various dogs and horses. Mick and some of his friends came and went.

Then an old friend, Raoul, invited me to join him in Marrakesh.

As two of Mick’s friends happened to be driving to Morocco, they took me as far as Tangier, where I stayed a while with Tatiana, who I knew from London, in a marvellous house with a shabby little door crouched beneath a huge wall. Tatiana was Russian, and was, I think, much older than me. With her flaming red hair and powdery white skin she seemed simultaneously childlike and ancient. She didn’t speak much English, in fact she didn’t speak much at all, but communicated with a slow, mysterious smile. Her house was dark and smelt of wood smoke, the empty rooms all opening onto a disintegrating internal courtyard, echoing my state of mind. Take a room for as long as you like, she said.

I walked around Tangier for what felt like months, storing up information to tell Dave – Dave who wasn’t there. Eventually I took the bus to Marrakesh to stay with Raoul, who was living in a stylishly modern house in the New Town, attended by various young Arab boys he’d requisitioned to look after him.

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‘So, what do you think?’ he asked, rather too casually. ‘Yves said I could have the house for the summer. You know, Yves St Laurent.’ Raoul knew all sorts of people. When I first met him, he’d claimed to be the King of Ethiopia’s son. I believed him; he was very convincing.

I loved Marrakesh, hanging out on the Djaa El Fna with all the drummers, freaks, dancers and acrobats. I’d often see two small girls running around the square with their hippy mother, not knowing then that they were the Freud sisters, Bella and Esther, and that it was their dad, Lucien, who’d joined us around the campfire near Salisbury Plain. Their Moroccan childhood was later described in Esther’s autobiography Hideous Kinky. I was sad that Dave wasn’t with me; he’d have loved it. Even I, in my lovelorn state, was enjoying myself.

One day, having just been out with some friends, I returned to the house to find the usually languid Raoul in a crazy state.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘Could you pack all your belongings as fast as you can manage? We’re moving out.’

‘Now? Okay, but…’

‘No questions. It’s bad form, you know. You can take the bus to Tatiana for a night or two, and I’ll give you a ticket back to London. But we have to be gone in fifteen minutes.’

It dawned on me then that the loan of the house had been a con.

Raoul must have discovered that Yves was arriving any minute, and we needed to leave without a trace.

I was back at Stargroves when Dave phoned from Scotland to say that he’d gone off with a girl called Sapho. She had promised him that a visitation (extraterrestrials, presumably) would take place at any moment, and they had to be alert and ready.

‘I don’t believe that stuff,’ I said.

Until that moment, I’d gone along with everything Dave had said or stood for, believing in it all unquestioningly. Now I felt like a traitor, although I was the one who had been deserted.

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or possibly, God only knew, love? But he would not engage with so tedious a subject. Having never conceded that we even had a relationship, he refused to tell me categorically that it was over.

Either way, I seemed unable to escape his spell. So I stayed on at Stargroves for a while, still longing for him to return. But back in Britain I felt too sad to be anywhere. And, as if losing Dave hadn’t been bad enough, my beloved May was one day poisoned by the neighbouring gamekeeper for allegedly disturbing his pheasant nests. She died in my arms.

I had to leave. I abandoned my horse for a dealer to collect and visited friends up and down the country: Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, London… Everywhere I went, my friends seemed to have settled into domestic situations: babies, gardens, animals, husbands, boyfriends, endless cooking and food. I couldn’t stand it. I hitched a ride from London to Wales, but couldn’t bear to be there for more than three hours. So I hitched from Wales to Kent and back to London, but I couldn’t bear to be there either.

Eventually I hitched to Scotland, the same place that Dave had been visiting, but by then he and Sapho had left. Grotaig was probably the only place crazy enough to put up with me. I made the people there promise to tie me to a tree if I tried to leave.

15 July 1971 Dear Ewalda, When did I last write? I don’t remember. But whenever it was, everything has changed yet again. I can’t go back to Stargroves. I can’t bear to be anywhere, but I know I really need to stay put somewhere for a while. I’ve moved to the Highlands, living in a caravan on a commune high above Loch Ness with a bunch of people I used to know from London. There are about ten of us, but people come and go all the time. It’s very beautiful up here in the mountains, I know, but I can’t really feel it yet. I can’t feel anything. I’m still numb. I bought some ducks so that I have a reason to get up every morning and let them out for the day. Actually, they’re gorgeous, big, fat, white Aylesburys. A friend built 75

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a lovely little house for them attached to the caravan. Also, I’ve started a vegetable patch close to the stream and planted potatoes, peas, carrots, beans, spinach and lettuce. The plants have all come up and are growing fast, as are the weeds, but being in the garden feels like the only sane place to be. I had to put a fence around it so the bloody ducks don’t eat everything.

Someone has given us a spinning wheel and I’m learning to spin wool. I feel as if I’m on a rehabilitation programme for ex-junkies or mentally retarded people, but it’s about time I developed some skills. I don’t think I’ve really thought about anything but Dave for years. Jesus. Were you ever like that with your David? Anyway, I’ve promised myself not to go on about it anymore. I’m starting to bore even myself.

The people here are all nice, but Niall, the guy who thinks he owns the place (an old friend of Dave’s) isn’t too keen on me. Never thought I was worthy of Dave, too parochial or something, too earthbound. But you know what? I don’t care. My plan now is to learn more about the earth. I mean, I’m getting older and I have to learn to function properly… like a grown-up or something. I’ve been collecting wild flowers and pressing them in a book. I have over a hundred specimens and I’m learning all the Latin botanical names.

I suppose it’s pretty magical here really – wet, moss, ferns everywhere, very different from England. I might even get to like it.

How are the twins? Would you have been able to cope with them, do you think, if you’d stayed in Spain and not gone home? How is David enjoying fatherhood? You, I know, were born for motherhood.

Next time I write, you’ll hear from a whole new me… but meanwhile, thank God for the ducks and the Brontés.

Much love, Hillary Months passed. I looked after the ducks and worked in the 76

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vegetable garden. Slowly, I noticed, I’d started to thaw. My friend Rose had run away from a bad marriage and come to stay with me in my caravan. We went to Inverness and bought an ornately carved bed (Rose was rich and more than a little silly) and had it delivered and carried across the fields to a uniquely secluded spot in the woods. You could just see Loch Ness below, shimmering through the trees.

‘Who would have thought I’d end up here,’ Rose said, ‘on this lavish bed in a spellbinding glade?’ She wore a floral cotton dress with a sweetheart neckline. She looked born to be on that bed in that magical glade, her scarlet toenails glinting in the sunlight.

‘I wonder how long it’ll take to rot,’ I said.

‘What? The bed?’

‘Of course the bed, Rose, not us. We’re not going to rot... I hope.’

‘I wonder what Niall will have to say about it.’

‘Niall is not going to like it,’ I said, groping for blue wool in a large basket full of different coloured balls. ‘He’s furious with me as it is.’

‘Why?’ she asked. Rose was simple and kind. Her auburn hair tumbled luxuriantly around her perfectly oval face and shoulders.

Her legs were long and lithe, not built for working. She looked much cleaner and glossier than the rest of us.

‘Because he sees this place as a sort of spiritual boot camp.’

‘So?’ ‘So we’re having too much fun, Rose.’

‘Aren’t spiritual people supposed to have fun?’

‘No, we’re supposed to suffer and do Dervish dancing.’ I picked up the sock I was crocheting and started on a blue stripe. ‘And he doesn’t like you being here with me.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘He thinks I’m too irreverent and he’d rather you were with him.’

‘Ugh,’ she laughed. ‘Anyway, he already has a wife.’

‘Oh Rose, that wouldn’t matter.’

We both looked up at the same time and saw Niall approaching.

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He was shabbily dressed in faded black, a dark expression on his face. There was something sort of flabby about him. We both started to giggle uncontrollably. He was trying his very best to contain himself.

‘Why didn’t you come to the Dervish dancing?’ he demanded.

‘Because we came here instead. I have a deadline. I have to finish these socks before we go to Inverness. I have to deliver them to a shop I found. They want as many pairs as I can make.’

He was furious with me about so many things, I could see him struggling with where to start. ‘Why are you using the spun yarn to make these socks? You know this wool is sacred. To be used exclusively for the prayer mats.’

‘Yes, but I spun and dyed surplus to requirement, and now I’m crocheting these socks to sell so that I can contribute to our living here.’

‘Peter provides all the money we need.’

‘That’s very kind of Peter, but I don’t want to be supported by him.’

‘And this ridiculous bed,’ he fumed.

‘Oh I know,’ Rose purred, ‘but isn’t it wonderful, Niall? Why don’t you stay with us for a while? Here, sit down, and you’ll see …’

‘Thank you, Rose,’ he said softening. You could see he was dying to stay, but his glance brushed mine and he just managed to pull himself together. Looking directly at me, he said, ‘This isn’t a bloody Butlins holiday camp, you know.’

‘No Niall, I’m sorry. But I love the spinning and dying. This is why I’m here. I want to learn, but also I need to support myself.’

Niall had found the house and land empty a few years back, and squatted here with his wife and young daughter, Celeste. But the ownership of the place had always been in question. Several years later, Angus, the son of the original owner, returned with his wife and child to reclaim what he deemed his property. His father had disappeared under a dark cloud, owing money to all the businesses in the village below, after which the house had stood empty until Niall and his family rocked up. Now a torrid ownership battle was 78

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raging that had started with words but quickly degenerated.

We all became Niall’s recruits. ‘No one is to leave the house empty, ever! Never let Angus in.’ He ranted, raved and made plans. A gun appeared. Angus contacted his lawyer. A bucket of whitewash fell over Angus’s head as he tried to enter the house.

Another time he and Niall actually came to blows. Although Angus was undoubtedly stronger and won that round, Niall persuaded himself and even some of us that he was the victor. The extraordinary thing, in the midst of all this, was that he managed to seduce the poor man’s wife, who was quite prepared to leave Angus and become Mrs Top Guru. In the end, both she and Angus departed, unaccountably defeated and bewildered, thankful in the end to come out of it all alive. Having been so successful with the divide-and-rule strategy, Niall became increasingly autocratic, treating us all as his personal army.

Sometimes, when I needed a break from the relentless intensity of Niall and his entourage, I hitched across to stay with the people who’d started the Findhorn Foundation, situated in an ugly caravan park near Nairn in Morayshire. They were all older than our lot, and unlike us they were clean and appeared to be grown-ups. But they shared with our community an interest in a nondenominational spirituality.

They too believed they’d made telepathic contact with extraterrestrials, and they were preparing a landing strip for flying saucers at Findhorn. It was obviously through the visits between these two communities that Dave had picked up the idea. About ten or so like-minded people were living there permanently in caravans, with lots of visitors staying on for longer or shorter periods.

Eileen and Peter Caddy more or less ran the show. Eileen had originally received a message from God during a visit to Glastonbury. Now she and Peter, with no money to speak of, had landed up in the caravan site to manifest God’s message. It was an intriguing process. Every morning at the crack of dawn we’d meet in the purpose-built chapel, where Peter, through the guidance of 79

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Eileen, would deliver the message she’d received overnight. These messages were always highly specific: X amount of money was needed to build this or that, or so-and-so was interfering with the positive energy. Peter talked a lot about positive energy and manifestation. They were particularly good at manifestation.

After our meditation, a group of us would then go off with Peter to swim in the freezing cold sea not far from the park. Peter was fit and vigorous, a libidinous man, but I nearly died from the cold. After the swim, we’d all go into the communal dining hall where the most delicious fresh and wholesome breakfast I’d ever experienced would await us. They baked their own bread every morning and grew all the produce themselves – everything.

Their fame at the time rested on the enormous vegetables they produced. Everything looked as if it had won first prize at an agricultural show, the biggest and the best. Dorothy, a most lovely and gentle woman, my special favourite, was deemed responsible for the incredible size of the plants. She communed with nature spirits she called devas, and in some crucial way, I suppose, I communed with her.

My job there was to weed the paths, the beds and the pots. No garden had ever received such lavish attention. Experts from the Soil Association went back and forth, advising on compost. Local farmers delivered horse manure by the ton. It couldn’t really fail to flourish. But whatever the cause of the giant produce, I was happy to spend my days weeding, eating and hanging out with these eccentric and interesting people. Sometimes, say, a shoe salesman from Manchester would demonstrate his extraordinary psychic massaging skills on me, or another visitor would practise colour therapy, flooding screens with greens, purples or whatever colour was appropriate to achieve the desired effect. I had a marvellous time. Whenever the going got tough at Grotaig, I’d hitch over to Findhorn and stay for a week or two, always returning to Grotaig in a lighter humour.

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we’d spun with local ingredients. We went gathering baskets of particular lichens, flowers, berries and roots. It was an inspiring process. We built fires outside and filled big pots with stream water and dye material. When the broth started to bubble, we gently lowered the skeined wool into the water, stirring rhythmically with long sticks. ‘Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble,’ we chanted over and over, intermittently lifting the skeins to check the intensity of the colour.

Niall still insisted that the final product be used only to weave six-inch squares he called prayer mats. Using the wool for any other purpose, especially a commercial enterprise, was the ultimate blasphemy, and I was the commune heretic.

Then a young man who had been living in India for a few years turned up. Niall was very excited.

‘He’s a very pure soul,’ he said, and sent him to live in a garden shed way up in the woods on the slopes of the mountain, despite the fact that another visitor had hung himself there not long before.

But no doubt this pure soul would be safer there from the seedier elements below.

From the start I had a very different take on Golden Boy. He was only twenty-one, tall and emaciated, and apparently still recovering from typhoid. Despite his diffidence and reserve, his ocean-blue eyes struck like lightening. He’s a magician, said some; no an artist, said others, a messenger, even an angel. He did nothing to either encourage or dispel these assertions. I think he was oblivious.

The improbable thought came to me that he would be good father material, although on a rational level, anyone less likely would have been hard to find. I nearly killed myself riding down the steep mountain road on a bicycle after he assured me he’d fixed its brakes. Nonetheless, I was quite sure he was The One. I wanted a baby. Dozens of men had come and gone during the year I’d spent at the commune, but none had aroused my interest.

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accepted my loss. But now I took to hanging around Golden Boy’s hut as if I always just happened to pass that part of the woods on a mountain stroll. He took ages to invite me in, and then rather tentatively. I tried my best to be quiet and not rush things. I took my little watercolour set and sketch pad and made paintings of the mountain and wild flowers. He played his flute and did strange geometric drawings I didn’t understand. I risked crocheting socks in the hut, which he didn’t seem to mind.

Although Rick had been in India for two years and hadn’t, it turned out, been around women all that time, I didn’t for one minute think him the pure soul Niall imagined. Yet there was something about him, I wasn’t quite sure what.

Things weren’t going well down at the house. The last thing Niall could abide was couples. ‘Couples are bourgeois,’ he said, ‘a sociological construct aimed at keeping us all in our place.’ What he really wanted was all the women for himself, and over the time I’d been there, he’d successfully broken several couples apart, banishing the dispirited men and allowing the new sycophant to believe she was now his chosen one, until the next unsuspecting couple arrived. Now he wanted Golden Boy too, and was highly irritated by the growing relationship between ‘his’ boy and me.

Rick and I decided that, to lighten the mood, we’d go on a mission to the Outer Hebrides. Julia and I badly needed a natural blue dye, and rumour had it that an old woman on Uist had the recipe, but was very secretive about it. Maybe I would be redeemed if I returned with the magic formula.

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Eleven It was midsummer. The days had expanded to bursting point, shrinking the nights into a few dark hours.

‘Take the Land Rover,’ the rich guy Peter had offered. We drove toward Kyle and took the ferry across to Skye. A troupe of young Scottish dancers appeared and practised their dance formations on the deck above where the cars were parked. Tourists crammed the deck, spilling out of their cars. I felt as I supposed people felt when they set off on holiday: excited but nervous. We drove north across the island to the small village of Stein, where the pop singer Donovan had a lovely holiday house overlooking the cliffs and the sound beyond. It was deserted, looking as if no one had been there for years.

‘How about we stay the night here,’ I ventured, suddenly realising how shy and scared I was. ‘Look, we could sort of camp in that greenhouse.’ It was evening and the midges had started their vigil of torture. We lay tentatively, side by side, unsure of ourselves and each other. Nothing much had changed by the following morning. We packed up and made our way to Uig, only to discover that it would be too expensive to take the car across on 83

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the ferry. So we left it in the harbour and boarded on foot. As we pulled into Tarbet, I saw a bus about to depart.

‘Quick, let’s jump on it,’ I said, dragging at Rick.

‘Hang on, we’ve just got here.’

‘I know, but there’s nothing here and it’s probably the last bus leaving.’

‘What do you mean, nothing here?’ He lingered, looking around, reluctant to move.

‘Jesus, Rick, what’s wrong with you?’

‘Nothing... perhaps it might be you.’ The bus pulled off. Aha, I thought, so there are two of us wanting our own way.

Tarbet didn’t appear to offer much. We consulted the map and walked off in the direction of the Golden Road. It was a romantic evening. We tramped across fields full of wild flowers bending in the breeze, past scattered croft houses, smoke twisting above their thatched roofs. Small gardens were laid out in front with welltended vegetable patches to the side. No cars or buses passed. We didn’t see a shop. The breeze dropped. The silence was broken by a dog barking in the distance. The light was fading fast.

We looked for a little rise in the landscape that would catch as much breeze as possible to keep the growing swarms of midges at bay, then stopped for the night. We were tired and hungry, silent and hot in our sleeping bags. Rick seemed to fall asleep instantly while I lay awake for hours, wondering what sort of baby we might make together. When eventually I fell asleep, I dreamt that Rick had disappeared.

The morning was thick with midges. In the distance we saw a man and a boy working their sheep not far from a house. We approached, watching the collie herd sheep toward a small channel leading to a sheepfold. His eyes were two bright jewels, his head inclined to the side, awaiting further instruction.

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘fine dog you have there.’

‘Aye, no’ bad, no’ bad,’ the man said.

‘Do you know where we might find a shop or somewhere to buy food around here?’ Rick asked, swiping at the midges.

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we have two folk here needing ta eat.’ The boy ran off and the man indicated that we should follow. The wife was already waiting for us at the back door. Showing us into the wee, dark house, she bade us sit at a table and, without ceremony, piled our plates with bread, black pudding made from congealed sheep’s blood, and haggis made from sheep’s offal, both mixed with fat and oatmeal and stuffed into the sheep’s intestine to produce robust sausages. Rick ate with pleasure, but hungry as I was, I found it hard to swallow the haggis and black pudding. The tea was thick and Scottish.

‘An’ what brings you ta these shores?’ the wife asked.

‘We’re in search of a blue dye,’ said Rick, ‘and we heard there’s a woman here in Harris who knows the recipe. We’ve just come from near Inverness, a croft above Loch Ness, to find her and see if she’ll tell us the recipe.’

‘Loch Ness, aye, I went there once.’ She looked into the distance, obviously remembering some long past incident. ‘Aye, that’ll be Mistress MacDonald, lives no’ far from here. Famous, she is. The Queen went ta visit her, but I doot she’ll part with her secret. You can but try.’

Rick was looking more relaxed and at home than I’d ever seen him in company.

‘And perhaps you know of a loom we could buy? You know, one of those old Harris looms people used to use.’

A loom? When did a loom enter the picture, I wondered. A dark horse, Rick. What else might he have up his sleeve?

‘Aye, there are folk still using those looms. Not many, right enough. It’s all these new mechanical shenanigans now. There’ll no’ be many people wanting to part with their looms, but you can try.’ She gave us the addresses of one or two people she thought might have an old loom no longer in working order that they might be persuaded to sell. She refused to take a penny for the lavish breakfast and sent us on our way with a ‘piece’, buttered rolls for later, should we not find any food on our journey. ‘An’ mind yourselves now,’ she said when we thanked her.

The blue-dye lady was nothing like as pleasant as the breakfast lady.

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‘You’ll no’ be the first people to have come in search of the blue,’ she said, ushering us into her parlour, heavily hung with photos of the Queen’s visit. She was obviously the certified icon for Harris Tweed, and guarding her position jealously. Lots of spinning wheels stood around the house, and in the adjacent shed was an old Harris Tweed loom. We didn’t bother to ask if she’d sell it. I tried to share my own experience of dyeing wool but she was having none of it, and eventually fobbed us off with a hastily scribbled recipe on a scrap of old paper.

Having a mission gave us direction, but I was still unsure about the loom.

‘About this loom, Rick, what have you got in mind?’

‘Nothing much.’

‘But you must have something if we’re looking to buy one. Can you weave?’

‘No, but I can learn.’

‘Oh right.’ I’d looked at the loom in Mistress Blue’s shed and was horrified by the number of heddles, pedals and threads. The mere bulk of the thing was daunting. ‘Well then, let’s check the other places the breakfast lady gave us.’

We saw dismantled looms in chicken sheds, covered in shit, and parts of looms being used as gates and grids. Invariably, we were invited into the cottages and offered tea and oatcakes.

Finally we found a family with a more or less intact loom they were prepared to sell.

‘This loom,’ Rick said, ‘is there nobody in your family that will be using it now?’

‘No, no. Donald is on the new contract. It’s all mechanised machines nowadays, so there’ll be no going back to the old ways.

They’re wanting the wider widths now, them as is in London an’ such. We had a lady come an’ show us the clothes they’re making with the Harris Tweeds. We’ll no’ be wearing them of course, but we’re no’ bothered as long as they buy the cloth from us.’

‘That’s a bit of a shame,’ Rick said, a little awkward. ‘Well then, if you’re sure you’re happy to sell the loom, we’d be very happy to buy it, and use it well.’

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‘Aye, well, that’s a good thing, then.’

‘And the price? Have you thought about a fair price?’

The family members huddled together in a corner and spoke quietly amongst themselves for a few minutes. ‘We think £25 will be fair, an’ we’ll help you down to the pier with it an’ load it on the ferry.’

We all set to dismantling the loom piece by piece, and loaded it onto a trailer they’d attached to a tractor. Slowly we drove down to the harbour where the ferry was waiting, said our heartfelt thanks and farewells, and off they went. But as we were loading the thing onto the deck, a drunken man came lumbering up and literally threw himself on the shafts, as if defending them with his life.

‘Sassenachs!’ he shouted. ‘Think you can come here plundering, just like that, eh? Bloody English! Well, you cannae, see?’

Clearly he was in no position to do anything about it, and it seemed inappropriate to mention that we were actually a South African and an American, not the enemy English, although I did see his point. He heaved at the heavy frame to no effect, as some of the crew tactfully moved him out of the way, throwing their eyes heavenward. They were obviously used to his behaviour. The gangway lifted and the boat pulled off from the quay, the man still waving his fists and bellowing hoarsely from the shore.

‘We’d better bloody use it now,’ I said.

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Twelve My failure to produce the blue coupled with my continuing relationship with Rick meant that my days at the commune were numbered. Soon after we returned from Harris, Niall asked me to leave. I was relieved, apart from not knowing where in the world to go. I had a few pounds and a cat, but didn’t yet know whether I had Rick. I had to suppose not, since he’d made no clear move to suggest otherwise. I was sad, but dared not indulge my sorrow.

Instead, I needed to think seriously about my situation, although I hadn’t yet learnt how to. Life so far had just led from one thing to another in a haphazard sort of way. I had no desire to return to London or to visit any of my now settled friends spread across the English countryside. I felt stuck.

Then I remembered a friend from my art-school days who had moved to Skye. I phoned to ask if I might come and stay for a few days until I worked out my next move. She had recently gone up there to live with her boyfriend Michael, who I’d not yet met.

Without hesitation, she urged me to come. I left the cat with Rick and arranged for the ducks to be fed and let in and out of their hut. I stood on the side of the road with enough wool to complete 89

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a few pairs of socks, a few books and a bag of raggedy clothes, repeating a mantra I’d made up for myself. Within no time at all, a car stopped and whizzed me across the Skye Bridge and all the way to Prue’s front door. Since I had little else, I felt myself falling back on signs and omens, falling being the operative action. But a door-to-door lift, in spite of my apprehension, boded well.

Prue and Michael lived in a comfortable croft house close to the sea. They showed me to a room of my own. Crisp white sheets peeped out from beneath a tasteful eiderdown. I could see the sea from my bedroom window and hear the waves lapping the shore.

Gulls and fishing boats scudded along the lively surf as I stood watching the tide sweep in and out. Prue and Michael were pale and cultured, the embodiment of English eccentricity. Michael was obsessed by sharks.

‘They’re just below the surface, but we don’t see them…’ I didn’t need reminding.

I’d left the commune in a hurry, barely saying goodbye to Rick.

I’d scribbled the address in Skye and left some money for cat food.

I wondered what Rick might do. Would he come? Wouldn’t he?

The thought went around and around like a prayer wheel as I sat and crocheted stripe after stripe. A few days later, Michael received a phone call from a friend in London.

‘That was Anthony on the phone, wondering if we know anyone who’d look after his house this winter. He has that place in Applecross.’

Prue looked at me. I’d never heard of Applecross and had hardly spent a day alone in my life, but unhesitatingly, I heard myself say, ‘Me, Michael. Tell him, me.’

The house was on the north shore of the Applecross Peninsula, overlooking Loch Torridon, in a small, deserted township called Arrina. I felt I should go immediately to investigate the house before Anthony found someone else, or I got either too scared or too comfortable at Michael and Prue’s house. Shades of Brian and Jenny from Glastonbury beat at my door, reminding me that I should be making a new and independent start.

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Ling, the Tibetan Monastery in Eskdalemuir, close to the Scottish Borders. His twin brother Michael was married to Aung San Suu Kyi. Good credentials, I thought. The Arrina house was sometimes used as a summer retreat for people from the monastery, but was now vacant. It was known that to leave a west coast house empty through the unforgiving Scottish winter would lead to disaster. It didn’t take long for a house to disintegrate under the tyranny of wind, snow and ice.

‘Let’s take a run over there tomorrow and look at the house,’ Prue said. ‘D’you know if the road goes all the way?’

‘No,’ Michael said, ‘Anthony says it stops about a mile and a half from the house. Then there’s a track.’ Michael appeared to view the idea of me living alone there as a surrealist joke, and I privately agreed. The Applecross Peninsula at the time was one of the most inaccessible places in Britain. But I did feel compelled to at least give it a go. There wasn’t much choice.

Just before we set off, Rick appeared, carrying a small rucksack and looking handsome in that rangy sort of way I’d always liked.

I wondered why I hadn’t really noticed it in quite the same way before. Prue, I could see, was impressed. I tried not to look too excited. He didn’t say much, but when, with a beating heart, I explained our mission, he easily fell in with our plans as if it were the most natural next move in the world.

We took the ferry from Skye to Kyle and drove the forty or so miles north to Sheildaig. From there, the new road crunched its way along the peninsula, reaching a messy end just past Kenmore, where a few families still lived. For the next mile and a half, like ferocious beasts, diggers and tractors were devouring the old track, making way for the new road. We walked along the coastal path, which, once away from the machinery, had the air of virgin territory. I felt as if we were the first people ever to walk that land.

Finally we arrived at Arrina.

Several derelict crofts lay scattered around the township. We followed the grassy paths made by sheep and came upon our house, recognisable because it was the only one intact. A large and incongruous monkey-puzzle tree stood directly in front of the 91

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house. We found the key in the adjacent shed as promised, and entered. The downstairs had two rooms and a tiny scullery. In the smaller of the two upstairs rooms stood two boxes that reminded me of coffins. Otherwise the house was almost empty. Rick and I looked at each other, and it was decided.

‘Looks good,’ said Rick. ‘If this Anthony guy’s okay with it, we’ll stay.’

We walked around the deserted Arrina. It felt strange and yet very attractive. Rick had the same expression as when watching the sheepdog and later at the breakfast lady’s house in Harris, that sense of being at home. But now we were walking through ghost houses. I had no idea why or when these people had left or how they’d lived, but remnants of their lives lingered in the blackened kettles, skillets and pots standing on the crumbling hearths of disintegrating ruins. A path running through the village wandered away through a birch wood, which in turn led down a rocky path to a sheltered bay and boatshed. Inside the shed stood a twelvefoot clinker-built boat with wooden oars and a five-horsepower outboard engine.

‘Yes!’ Rick’s seafaring eyes sparkled. He’d been brought up on Rhode Island on the east coast of America, and had sailed as a boy with his father and two older brothers. I could see the sea in his eyes. ‘I think we can live here.’

He looked at me with such simple pleasure that I was speechless.

All I could think was that I’d probably die within a week if I had to live here alone. Living here with him, however, was quite a different proposition.

Prue drove us back to her house and we made the necessary plans. Anthony agreed that we should stay there for the winter, and soon afterwards, Prue drove us back to the end of the road, where we said our fond farewells.

‘You and Michael have saved my life, Prue. Thanks.’

‘Time will tell,’ she said. ‘Keep in touch and take care.’

We walked the last few miles with all our worldly possessions, except for the cat, the loom and the wheel, which our friend Peter from Grotaig later brought in his Land Rover, along with a 92

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hundredweight of flour, a hundredweight of rice, some porridge oats and paraffin for the Aladdin lamps. There was no electricity or running water.

30 October 1972 Dear Mom and Dad, Sorry I’ve not been in touch for a while, but my life has been in a bit of a muddle. I’ve left that commune... Maybe you’ll be pleased, I don’t know, but in retrospect, I’m delighted.

It wasn’t the place for me after all, but the one good thing is that I discovered what I like to do, and although it’s a long shot, I’m sure eventually I’ll be able to earn a living from it. Don’t yet know how… but I love everything to do with spinning fleece into wool that I can use for knitting, crocheting, weaving or whatever else. And there’s the dyeing of the wool too, which makes me feel like an alchemist, all very exciting, but… not yet sure how it’s all going to work.

Nothing in a hurry for sure, but it’s something to be getting on with.

Meanwhile I’ve moved to a cottage on the west coast, just north of the Isle of Skye. It’s right on the sea but you couldn’t imagine anywhere less like Cape Town, although we’re connected now by the Atlantic, and the view from my bedroom window reminds me of a painting in Desiree’s Bantry Bay house.

We’ll be here for the winter. We have a Harris Tweed loom that we bought on the Outer Hebrides and a spinning wheel someone gave me.

Meanwhile we’re earning a living picking winkles. If you’re very dedicated, and I am, I can pick one hundredweight in a low tide, although I must admit it’s hard going and bloody freezing. Sometimes I pick up more hailstones than winkles. When I close my eyes at night, millions of winkles lie behind my eyelids. Once a week a boat comes around and gives us £3 a hundredweight – so direct and simple.

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and even lobsters and have started our own vegetable patch.

We’re also looking for a goat and some ducks. We have a wonderful lurcher called Shadow, who’s quite tall with a rough brindled coat, and slim as a pin with a sharp, pointy nose. I’m crazy about him, and he’s extremely smart too. A friend got him from some gypsies in England and brought him up for me.

I hope everything is well. Do you think Brenda and family will really go and live in Israel? I wonder why they’d want to do that. Or is it that they want to leave SA? Will write again soon and look forward to hearing from you.

Love Hillary P.S. I’m living with an American boy who’s five years younger than me but somehow makes me feel much younger than him. Turns out to be a very handy type.

It was autumn. Summer’s lush green turned to burnished red, orange and copper. The light softened, and every day the night drew in that little bit sooner. There was more rain, and the stream below the house roared, as did the wind, the waves and the trees.

The very house trembled as winter swept across the uninterrupted landscape, leaving bare branches through which to view the world.

Sheep grazed unperturbed. Rick was very quiet. It turned out that what I had supposed were coffins upstairs were meditation boxes, but I hardly saw the point in climbing into those when my whole life was beginning to feel like a meditation box.

Rick chopped lots of wood and seemed to know what he was doing. Up until then I’d experienced him as rather dreamy and impractical, but no sooner had we arrived in Arrina than he sprang into manly action. I stared in awe at the ever-growing piles of wood.

Rick set up the loom in the downstairs room, assembling all the heddles and warp threads with no recourse to a handbook.

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of lanolin. When I ran out of fleece from the fences, two old crofters from Kenmore, Mary and Neil, gave us some fleeces after Rick helped shear their sheep. We found huge old cauldrons in the derelict crofts, which we filled with water and placed on a crackling fire. The place was awash with dyestuff. Several types of lichen attached to rocks and trees made the most brilliant colours, one of which, seeped in ammonia, produced a vivid cerise. The more traditional crottle made burnt umber, the very colour of the bracken in winter. We collected oak apples from a particular type of oak that grew in the woods to make a soft black, while onionskins produced a deep golden yellow and gorse blossom a buttery lemon. The different types of seaweed each yielded something quite surprising and different. Yet we were never able to produce the coveted blue.

Weaving, however, seemed at least ten times faster than spinning.

‘We’re going to need more of that yellow soon,’ Rick said – or brown or black or red – I was always lagging behind.

‘I’m beginning to feel like Rapunzel,’ I said, bent over the wheel, never on target. But we did eventually produce carpets which we were able to sell to a few kind benefactors, who I’m sure pitied our impoverished and labour-intensive lives.

Making carpets was, however, unsustainable. Attractive though they were, they were no match for Persian carpets and probably took us ten times longer to produce. But since time wasn’t a major consideration that winter, we carried on happily, Rick weaving and me spinning long into the candlelit night. The carpets grew and Rick and I slowly got to know one another. Although he was seventeen years younger than Dave, it was soon apparent that he was more mature than either Dave or I. On our arrival, we had found a note from Anthony.

To Whoever is staying in the House, Please visit the MacDonalds in Fearnamore, second village along the track or by boat, and help them with chores.

Thanks, Anthony 95

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We elected to go by sea. Rick moored the boat in their bay a few miles from our house. We scrambled unknowingly up the nearvertical cliff past several ruins until we approached the house with the billowing smoke. We knocked. A very large and grizzled old man opened the door. His face looked disproportionately large and reminded me of a Bhutanese mask.

‘Whoa,’ he roared, ‘what you doing here?’

‘There was a note from Anthony. We’re staying in his house.’

He started to laugh, but it wasn’t reassuring, this laugh, more of a warning. ‘So then, you’d better come in. Come on, come on, no’ be wasting time.’

We moved through the tiny porch into the dark sitting room.

Once my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I saw a female replica of the man, a huge woman with an enormous face just like his, and a tiny woman sitting demurely by the fire. They all looked well into their eighties.

‘You’ll take a piece then!’ boomed the large woman, Maggie.

She bustled out and from the porch we heard lots of clattering pots until she returned and placed a blackened kettle on the fire.

The small woman, meanwhile, was cutting slices of bread in the corner.

‘Did Anthony tell you what to do?’

‘Well, not exactly,’ I said, ‘he said to help you with the chores.’

‘You can start tomorrow!’ the man bellowed as the small woman, his wife Margaret, passed us two hunks of stale white bread spread with sheep’s fat and plastered with white sugar. ‘Now eat your piece, laddie, lassie!’

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t eat the piece but was too scared not to. I felt suddenly as if we were Hansel and Gretel being fattened up; they’d put us in a cage to eat us in the winter. Then I looked around the room and saw five clocks all registering different times, as if we’d slipped into Alice in Wonderland. I messed around with the piece and managed to stuff most of it in my pocket.

‘What would you like us to do for you?’ Rick asked.

‘Urrgh! Well, laddie, you can start with the peats.’

‘The peats? Good. Where’s your peat bank?’

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‘Never you mind. Come tomorrow and I’ll take you there.’

Throughout the winter, Rick cut and brought thousands of peats back from the bog for Alasdair, Maggie and Margaret. I carried pails of water from a spring about half a mile from their house.

Rick also helped Alasdair chop wood and carry their shopping, which arrived by boat each week, up the steep cliff to their cottage.

There were always more tasks. Alasdair and Maggie’s roaring ways continued, but my fear soon melted into affection, and I found myself and Shadow plodding the three-mile path to their house several times a week. They were my best and only friends.

I had never met people like these. Hair sprouted like grassy tufts from Alasdair’s enormous nose and ears. They had lived without electricity or mains water all their lives, rarely leaving their village, this king and his queens. They were earth encrusted, rude and unrestrained, but to my surprise I quickly adapted to their unfiltered ways. There wasn’t much holding back. They were easy and fun to be around until we unwittingly fell foul of them.

‘Well, laddie,’ Alasdair cornered Rick one day. ‘What you burning in that house o’ yours?’ he asked.

‘Wood, Alasdair.’

‘You’ll be getting me some, then?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Why don’t you cut yourself some peats, then?’

‘Well, I was wondering about those unused banks further up from your own. You know, the ones on the left. Maybe I could cut some for us?’

‘Why not, why not? But first you’ll bring me that wood.’

Rick took the MacDonalds the wood and continued to cut peats for them as well as some for us in the nearby bank. Peter, the benevolent funder of the Grotaig residents, came to visit us one day in his Land Rover. He and Rick drove along the precarious track and loaded up our peats. On the way home they encountered a wild and demonic figure waving and roaring in the road.

‘Where are you taking those peats?’ Alasdair screamed, waving a pitchfork. ‘Those are my peats. You can’t have those peats.’

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‘But Alasdair, you said…’

‘I don’t care what I said! You cannae have those peats, they’re all mine!’

Rick and Peter swept passed him in swashbuckling fashion, the Land Rover stacked high with treasure, while Maggie, Margaret and I watched from the side of the house, giggling. Rick and Alasdair’s friendship was never quite the same again, although Rick continued to do the odd thing for them. But I was unable to give them up. Hanging out and laughing with them was too high a priority.

We carried on picking and selling winkles, prepared our vegetable garden for the spring and planted, harvested and preserved an abundance of food. Rick did the odd fencing job and occasionally worked for the Forestry Commission planting trees.

We harvested mussels and caught herring by the ton as well as the odd wild salmon. The winter passed, followed by spring and summer, and still there was no sign of Anthony wanting his house back.

Pulling weeds in the vegetable patch one day, I stopped to stare at the neat rows of peas curling up and around their twiggy supports. How long was this all going to last? I realised with shock that I was happy here. The isolation, the extreme elements and a seemingly sane relationship were things I had never imagined I’d be able to manage. Yet even now, in spite of having lived a socalled primitive life for years, I still saw myself as someone who might one day live in a city like New York, perhaps, or Rome. I couldn’t stay here forever, it was too crazy. Or not crazy enough.

Being happy was weird. I looked up and saw Rick loping along toward the goats. He was twenty-two and I was nearly twentyseven. One would have thought it was the other way around.

Our postman, Jackie, delivered the mail every day, riding his bicycle twenty miles or more to the scant and scattered households that lived along the track, at the end of which sat Cuaig on the tip of the Applecross Peninsula. One day I decided to visit his wife and child.

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I walked along the track past the MacDonalds for another six miles until I reached Jackie’s almost deserted township. When I knocked on the door, a square, shy woman answered, obviously unused to visitors. She introduced herself as Effie, invited me in and bade me sit on a chair, the cushion of which perched unnaturally above the chair base. Wobbling precariously as I drank my tea, I looked around. Her elderly mother sat hunched by the fire, casting sly sideways glances, silent but for the whistling of her breath through puckered lips.

Effie watched me uncomfortably, and eventually plucked up the courage to ask me to stand, then lunged toward my chair.

‘Sorry about these,’ she said, clearly embarrassed, removing something from beneath the cushion.

I almost choked on my tea. There were some ten or so pairs of the most gorgeous Shetland wool socks in soft, heathery shades of mauve, purple, misty blues, lovat greens and browns, with intricate cables twisting and climbing to meet complicated Celtic patterns on the borders.

‘They’re lovely, Effie!’ I gasped. ‘Did you knit them?’

‘Aye,’ she said, ‘me an’ my mother, we knit them.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Then we knit them again.’

‘What do you mean, then you knit them again?’

‘Well,’ she said sheepishly, ‘everyone in this family has socks enough. But I have ta knit, have ta, an’ the yarn now, you’ll know, it’s too expensive for us. So then, I just knit the socks until there’s no yarn left, an’ then I unpick them all an’ knit them all over again.’

I was too shocked to say a word. Eventually I managed to speak because Effie’s discomfort was now palpable.

‘But Effie, they’re beautiful. Really, they are.’

‘Och well,’ she sighed, ‘you know, it just gives me something ta do, you’ll know yourself, the long nights…’

‘Aye,’ I said, ‘I know the long nights.’

All through the long walk home I was haunted by the thought of those ephemeral socks being unravelled and reknitted again and again. The image wouldn’t go away, even as I sat spinning, and 99

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one carpet after another slowly peeled off the loom.

9 June 1973 Dear Mom and Dad, Summer at last! Bliss. God, how we needed the light after that endless dark winter. But now we’re positively sparkling AND, breathe deeply, I’m pregnant.

The baby is due sometime in October, not sure when exactly, but hooray, hooray, we’re both so happy. Of course you don’t know Rick, but let me assure you he will be a great dad. Somehow I knew that immediately I met him.

So congratulations to you two as well. HAPPY, HAPPY, HAPPY! My plan is to hitch down to London sometime during the summer and work for a month or so on my friend Nicholas’s book. It’s called Alternative London and basically lists all the stuff that’s going on in the city for people like me, except – how’s this for irony – I’m here hanging out with the sheep.

I recently noticed some neighbours in a nearby township behaving oddly toward us and had no idea why. So I asked our postie, who knows all the gossip. ‘They’re very upset because you hang your washing out on a Sunday,’ he told me. In the Highlands, this is perceived to be a sin. Anyway, I went to them and apologised for causing offence but told them I’m Jewish and don’t really understand about Sunday and all that. I should know, of course, I’ve been living here long enough. But once they knew I was Jewish, all was forgiven, because as they see it, we’re all ‘Old Testament people’ and like them, I’m one of the Chosen Race, ‘the Elect’. They call themselves Wee Frees and are like Afrikaners in many ways.

So all is well. Who would have thought being Jewish would have served me so well?

Anyway, I’ll earn some money working for Nicholas, and I also want to source some shops with a view to selling the carpets or whatever else I can dream up to sell. You know, now that I’m going to be a mother and all...

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Anthony is coming to spend a few weeks of the summer with us in HIS house.

I’ll try to phone you when I’m in London. It’s impossible here, the phone box is a million miles away and then you need hundreds of shillings.

Don’t worry about me, we’re fine. Tell Brenda that her kids will soon have a little cousin.

Lots of love and congratulations, Hillary Being pregnant was brilliant. I swam in the bay, ate herring, gardened, spun wool, continued to pick winkles by the hundredweight and visited the MacDonalds. (They weren’t the neighbours who had disapproved of the washing, although had they known they might well have chopped off my hands.) I milked the three goats, collected duck eggs and forgot, almost completely, to think about anything else. Rick and I were happy together.

On a visit to the mobile dentist in Sheildaig, I came across a magazine with a picture of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust on the cover. I had never heard of David Bowie or Ziggy Stardust, but in the context of the mobile dentist in Sheildaig, he looked like a creature from another planet. (It turned out Ziggy was from another planet.) I was enraptured by the strange image of the slim boy with the asymmetrical eyes, one green, one blue, and flicked open the magazine. Before getting to the David Bowie article, I came across some knitting patterns. There stood a stodgy woman wearing an even stodgier sweater, all lumpy and shapeless. I stared at her, then flicked to Ziggy and back again. I looked at the pattern, which might have been written in cuneiform for all the sense it made to me (K2, psso, p1p2…) and Effie materialised before my eyes. There in the gloaming by the light of the Aladdin lamp, she sat knitting her dreams into one sock after another. It came to me in a flash. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I could carry on spinning and dying the fleece but instead of using it to weave, Effie could knit sweaters – beautiful sweaters that the person on the cover of the magazine would want to wear.

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‘Hillary Macquaid,’ the dental nurse called from an inch away.

I went into the little cubicle and had to persuade the dentist not to extract all my teeth, as was the local cultural norm. ‘Perhaps you could just give me a filling,’ I said. ‘And would you mind if I tore a page out of one of your magazines, you know, the knitting pattern?’ While I was at it, I took the Ziggy Stardust image as well.

I loved clothes. I’d loved clothes with a passion since my mother had once let me accompany her to her dressmaker, Mrs Baloukas, to have some clothing custom made. I had scoured the department stores for imported fabrics, arriving at Mrs Baloukas’ with armfuls of drawings.

‘Like this,’ I instructed, swooshing, pulling and tucking. ‘Tighter here, yes, yes, and then gathered, with pockets.’ I was twelve years old and I must have driven her mad. But in the end I had the perfect shirtwaister in the best Italian glazed cotton. Now, after years of Wellington boots and rags, thinking about clothes again filled me with joy. Clothes and a baby – bliss.

I scrutinised the knitting pattern, making a few superficial changes without altering the text. I didn’t know anything about knitting, but as soon as I’d spun enough wool I went to visit Effie and asked if she’d like to give it a go. ‘A little bit longer here,’ I said, ‘and perhaps a bit narrower on the sleeve.’

The resulting garment turned out to be her shape, as square and as wide as it was long. Of course, the hand-spun yarn was much thicker than the wool recommended in the pattern, but I was yet to learn the technicalities.

I learnt fast. I had to, as spinning enough yarn for a sweater took time, and paying to have it knitted represented a huge chunk of our budget. Rule number one: always give the knitter precise and technically accurate instructions. Leave nothing to anyone else’s imagination.

It took three or four attempts to get the details right, but once I had a presentable sweater, I hitched off to London to work and stay with my friend Nicholas, who lived in Chelsea. He’d transformed his small garden into a pond that extended beneath a glass wall into his sitting room. Ducks were forever swimming 102

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beneath the glass and waddling around the sitting room, shitting on all the low-slung velvet daybeds, without Nicholas or anyone else minding.

I’d brought my prototype Effie sweater with me. Most of my time I spent phoning around, finding out about all the exciting events going on in London: clubs, gigs, readings, art shows, crazy new shops… London was exploding with hundreds of activities I would never attend. During my free time I scoured Covent Garden, the Kings Road and various posh locations that might be interested in my sample. I still knew all those places as if I’d frequented them daily.

At last I came across the perfect shop in Covent Garden owned by a knowledgeable woman, Madeleine, who sold knitwear from Scotland. Creamy white Arans, navy Guernseys and heathery Fair Isles adorned the walls like French tapestries. The merchandise was traditional but stylish, with nothing frumpy in sight.

‘Could I please show you my sweater?’ I asked.

‘We only sell things made in Scotland,’ she answered.

‘It’s one-hundred-per-cent Scottish,’ I said, opening my bag.

As the natural dyes cast their spell, I saw her eyes light up with interest. She held it up against her.

‘Who made this?’ she asked.

‘Effie,’ I said, ‘but I spin and dye the yarn and tinker around with the patterns. All in the Highlands.’

I returned home with the money I’d earned working for Nicholas, and an order for as many sweaters as I could make at a price commensurate with the work involved. They were very expensive. I could probably only make three or four a month. But that would give us enough money to live on and release me from the tyranny of spinning for the loom, picking winkles or being dependent on the kindness of friends and relatives. I was now free to have my baby. The loom lay dormant, but Rick didn’t seem bothered.

‘She has to go to the hospital,’ the midwife said.

‘She’s fine here. Why can’t she have the baby here?’ Rick asked.

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‘Because, because, a million reasons…’

‘It’ll be better for her here.’

‘You don’t have any electricity...’

‘You don’t need electricity to have a baby.’

‘No, but what if something goes wrong? You’re eighty miles from the hospital, and there’s no road…’

I looked over my tummy at the two arguing away at the end of my bed. Neither was about to give way.

‘Will you two please just shut up?’ I said.

‘You…’ Rick started.

‘Please,’ I gasped, in between the searing pains. ‘Can I have some input here?’

The ambulance arrived and off we sped to Raigmore Hospital on the outskirts of Inverness. From the window I saw the leaves fluttering from the trees. I was hustled straight into the maternity ward, but Rick wasn’t allowed in until he’d showered. Under the stark electric light we were both filthy, but Leif didn’t seem to mind at all. Out he slipped, all slimy and lovely. We stayed the night in Raigmore, but the next day, Rick insisted on signing us out.

‘We can’t be responsible for you if you leave,’ some official said.

‘Of course you can’t be responsible; we’re responsible for ourselves.’

‘What if your wife and child die?’

‘Just get your stuff together, Hillary, we’re leaving.’

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Thirteen On 25 November 1973, three days after my 28th birthday and one month and three days after my son Leif was born, we got married.

That morning, Rick was out chopping wood. When we returned home later that evening, all we’d need to do was put a match to the fire; meanwhile, it was freezing. I bundled Leif up in just about all the clothes he owned. The previous day’s nappies were still frozen on the line, stiff as cardboard.

The house was full of activity. Our friend Peter and his new girlfriend Angie had spent a week with us, and were now returning home to Inverness. As they’d be passing through the small town of Gairloch where our marriage was to take place, they made expedient witnesses, in keeping with the spirit of the occasion or, more appropriately, the lack of occasion.

‘Have you fed the ducks and let them out?’ Rick asked. It was still early, but we were hurrying to get the morning’s tasks done.

‘Yes, have you milked the goats?’

‘Yes. What about Shadow?’

‘What d’you think? Should we take him?’

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‘I don’t see why not. Nothing I know of about not allowing dogs at weddings.’

It would probably be dusk by the time we returned. It got dark early in November. We packed torches and made sure the oil lamps were prepared and the matches readily accessible.

‘I parked as close as I could,’ said Peter, ‘probably still a good mile away.’

‘No satin slippers then,’ I said.

‘No, the track was incredibly muddy when we arrived. We sloshed around up to our ankles.’ Peter and Angie were hardy and practical, not bothered about appearance.

‘It’ll be frozen now,’ Rick said. ‘Take appropriate shoes.’ I didn’t have appropriate shoes, so my wellies would have to do.

Eventually we were all ready to leave. Rick strapped Leif to his back in a corduroy papoose, his snow-suited legs dangling down.

He looked adorable. Gairloch was about an hour and a half’s drive from our house, so it was going to be a long day with lots of walking. We trooped along the path in single file with Shadow leaping back and forth between us, his brindled coat sparkling in the morning light.

Leif bounced up and down on Rick’s back, his huge blue eyes open wide. His head was almost completely round, wisps of fine white hair escaping from beneath his quilted hood. He appeared to be looking around in wonder at the passing landscape. We passed old dog roses threatening to invade the path, honeysuckle and thorny holly trees, the virulent green of summer now sapped. I felt for a moment as if we were trapped in a fairy story; that any minute the path would close over and prevent the marriage. I looked again at Leif and for a moment I longed to be him, innocently attached to Rick’s back, safe, secure and free of conjecture. Would I be safe and secure attached to Rick?

We reached the Land Rover parked on a patch that looked like the scene of a bomb blast. The hillside had been gouged out, exposing jagged slabs of rock and tangled roots. Awaiting the day’s action were several oversized diggers, forklift trucks and a line-up of open-backed lorries that looked like an invading army. The road 106

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was being hacked brutally out of the mountain, thrashing its way inexorably around the Applecross Peninsula, about to mutilate that beautiful virgin landscape and transform our lives forever. We climbed into the vehicle, Peter revved and we lurched forward.

‘Have you got a ring?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Rick answered.

‘Don’t you need one?’

‘I don’t think so. It’s a civil marriage,’ said Rick.

‘Don’t you want one?’ Angie asked. ‘It is your wedding.’ I thought she had point, but I said nothing.

‘Not a wedding,’ said Rick, ‘a paper marriage.’

‘I know,’ she said, ‘but still...’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t think we need a ring.’

I thought back to my first marriage in 1968, similar in many ways to the one that was about to happen now, except then I was the one getting married for a passport. My best friend’s boyfriend was marrying me as a favour, but he was never going to be the father of my baby, nor was I going to live with him.

‘I’m sure we had a ring the first time I got married,’ I said, but no one appeared interested. ‘Oh well, we can always invent something if we need to.’

‘How long will it take to get a passport once you’re married?’

Peter asked.

‘Probably ages,’ said Rick, ‘but I’ll be able to stay in the country and not have to report to the police all the time. And I’ll be able to work legally.’

It felt good to be passing on my marriage-induced British status; there was something pleasantly circular about it, although, unlike my first husband, I couldn’t quite disclaim self-interest.

Driving through the West Highland landscape, I remembered the tube journey to Marylebone Magistrates’ Court in London, the dark tunnels, the people squashed close together, feeling invulnerable to mishap. Beautiful as the passing mountains were now, a tremor of anxiety passed through me. It had been simpler marrying someone with whom I wasn’t emotionally involved. I’d remained happily married to Dave for six years – never a cross 107

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word, never a misunderstanding. He had proved a most troublefree husband. I tried but couldn’t read Rick’s expression – he was never one to wear his heart on his sleeve – yet beneath that rational composure, I sensed deep passion.

When we found the magistrate’s house, it didn’t look promising; there was nothing celebratory about those grey cement walls.

We rang the bell and waited. At last a small, concave man the colour of his walls opened the door, wheezing horribly. His mouth was as tiny as a raisin, stuck onto a pinched face that managed to exude sizable horror at the sight of us.

‘Sorry about the dog,’ I said, ‘... and us.’ He didn’t smile.

‘Maybe I could find a place outside to tie Shadow while we’re getting married.’

Perhaps the smell of wood smoke made him think we were gypsies, who were most unpopular in these parts. Rick and Peter had long hair and stubble. Both had remarkable eyes: Rick’s a piercing turquoise and a little unnerving, and Peter’s dark, deep and kind, but I suspect these details were lost on the magistrate. Angie looked like a Land Girl in heavy denim dungarees and a handspun sweater, and was probably the most acceptable of the four of us. I was wearing a long, voluminous skirt I’d made from an old herringbone blanket, and Rick was sporting a pair of trousers I’d made from the same fabric. There wasn’t a lot besides the blanket connection to give us away as a couple. Having identified Rick as the groom-to-be as well as the father of the lovely child on his back, the magistrate looked at him disapprovingly, and even regarded Leif with loathing. This was, after all, the heart of Calvinist Scotland; in the eyes of the Wee Free Kirk we were sinners.

Just as some sort of order was about to be established, Leif started to scream. I apologised, whipped Leif out of his pouch and proceeded to undress myself so I could breastfeed him while Rick, Peter and Angie relaxed on the hard-back chairs placed around the room. The magistrate stormed out.

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it, no ring required. In spite of Rick’s insistence that this was a marriage of convenience, I was suddenly wild with joy. I loved Rick and was very happy to be marrying him. We had been living together for over a year, alone in our isolated house, getting to know one another, picking winkles off the shore to earn our meagre living, spinning and weaving fleece to make into carpets, digging gardens, producing food and keeping animals, topped finally by the arrival of Leif, whose marvellous presence spoke of all that was right between us. Everything seemed fine to me.

But I didn’t really know what Rick thought or felt, or even what he wanted, apart from the official papers. He was a devoted and reliable father, but I wasn’t yet sure if he loved me or would make a reliable husband. I’d come to learn that he took his time over things, thinking things through without jumping to conclusions, all of which was new to me. And I wasn’t sure I knew how to let anyone love me, or to even recognise love that didn’t suffocate; the only love I’d ever known was my mother’s. It was no accident that I had chosen Rick. But those were things for the future. Right now I wanted to do a little dance. I looked at Rick and he was smiling, showing no sign of running away. He said, ‘I do,’ at the appropriate moment without hesitation.

The ceremony lasted at most a few minutes, but when we left that ugly house we were married. It had started to rain while we became man and wife. Poor Shadow was soaked through. All of us were eager to be getting home before the already dark day descended further into murkiness. Rick, Leif, Shadow and I had no transport. Peter and Angie said goodbye, scuttled into Peter’s Land Rover and cruised off into the gloom, while we draped ourselves in rain capes, completely swamping Leif. I took Rick’s hand as we walked toward the main road out of town. The rain got heavier.

There wasn’t much traffic on the road, but I kept a thumb peeking out from under my cape in case some charitable person sped by and stopped to give us a lift.

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effortlessly and curled his elegant body around my feet, a welcome warmth against the encroaching cold. I lifted Leif from Rick’s back and dangled him on my knee, happy for now to be out of the rain and on our way home.

‘Look Leif,’ I said, pointing out of the window, ‘rain, rain, rain.’

It was nice being high up in the front cab, with hillbilly music blasting out of the tape recorder. It was quite a little party.

The driver dropped us close to Sheildaig where the road lorries would pass on the way to the end of our road. Scotland at this time of year was ravishing. The vigorous green of midsummer had faded into a subtle canvas of brown, gold and burnished russet, the remnants of lilac heather layered across the surface. A low mist hovered over Loch Torridon, while Ben Alligin was capped with snow like a cupcake. I glanced at Rick and saw that he too was radiant. The trees on the slopes running down to the water were glowing shades of orange and red as if the woods were on fire.

A roadwork lorry stopped to pick us up. The driver recognised us as the family who lived beyond the road.

‘Hello,’ he shouted down to us, ‘what’ll you be doing out on a day like this?’

‘Getting married,’ Rick shouted back as we heaved our way up and into the cab.

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘well, that’ll be a good reason, then,’ and off we trundled along the new road that skirted the loch, passing huddles of small houses whose lights flickered through the trees.

But soon we left the last of the electricity behind, by which time it was almost inky black, the silhouettes of the pines swaying dark against dark. We drove along the new bit of road until we got to the spot where Peter had left the Land Rover. It was almost impossible to believe it had been that same day. We could hear the roar of the JCB forklift diggers eating the ground.

‘Thanks for the ride,’ I said, as we climbed down from the cab.

‘You’ll be having a right ol’ time of it tonight, then,’ he said. I could hear him winking. ‘I’ll be thinking o’ the two o’ you.’ We all laughed.

Rick, Leif, Shadow and I started our long shuffle back to the 110

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house in the gloom, the moon starting to lift above the trees.

Walking along this path for the first time as Rick’s wife, I wondered what he was thinking. ‘What are you thinking?’ I shouted.

The track was so narrow that we were walking one behind the other, with Leif between us, now fast asleep on Rick’s back.

‘What?’ I just caught the word disintegrating in the dark.

‘What are you thinking?’ I repeated.

‘About the ghosts of the people who used to live here... and supper.’

Not about me? Our family? And yet in those spacious months we’d spent together, Rick had already shown that my constant need to check on his thoughts and feelings was unnecessary. Have more faith in me, he’d said. His was a positive silence. Hmm. I had much to learn.

My mind wandered back to my divorce from Dave Macquaid, which I’d needed so I could marry Rick. The procedure had been straightforward, since we had no shared children, neither of us were contestants and it was easy to prove we hadn’t cohabited for at least two years. It was no more than a formality, but I’d had to appear at the Marylebone Divorce Court in London. Eight months pregnant with Leif, I took the train to London, and just as I was approaching the courtroom I heard someone call out my maiden name.

‘Hillary Lipsig!’ I looked around and saw a familiar face in a black gown flapping toward me. ‘My God! What are you doing here?’ he said. ‘And about to have a baby.’

‘Oh, hello Gerald,’ I said. As a kid I used to hang out with his younger sister, Lorna, often sleeping over at their house. I hadn’t seen him for years. ‘How funny to see you here.’

‘Indeed... and how very nice,’ he said, peering intently at my tummy. ‘Is there anything I can do for you... you know, in my capacity as a barrister?’

‘Well, Gerald,’ I said, ‘maybe just hurry things along.’ I explained briefly that I needed to get unmarried so I’d be free to marry someone else.

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‘Quickly?’ he asked.

‘Well, quite quickly, yes. Not so much for this,’ I pointed to my tummy, ‘but so that the new husband will be able to stay in the country and work to look after us both. He’s American.’

‘Very good cause,’ he said, curly red wisps peeking out from beneath his wig. We started to laugh simultaneously, remembering our times together as children and feeling the absurdity of the present situation. He ushered me into the courtroom and went off to chat with some other bewigged person. Before I knew it my case was being heard, due, my barrister said, to the obvious urgency.

Everyone in the courtroom giggled. I looked across and smiled at Gerald, who at that moment looked about fourteen. My divorce was granted instantly.

As I left the court, I’d decided on the spur of the moment to visit my old boyfriend, Dave. Was this a good idea? Was there something I still needed to know about him… or about me? Our parting had never been amicably resolved, and he had a horrible habit of periodically invading my thoughts. I went to the Cambodian Embassy in St John’s Wood (defunct since the Cambodians had left and the ownership of the building fell into question), where he and a group of friends had been squatting for the past few years. It was a beautiful Georgian building that had obviously once hosted glittering diplomatic occasions. Now the velvet drapes hung in tatters and most of the furniture had been sold, although the grand piano still held centre stage in the ground floor reception hall.

I passed the kitchen, where several squatters huddled around a gas ring making tea, and walked up several flights to what must once have been the servant quarters of the embassy. The room Dave had chosen was more like a closet; empty but for a floor mat, his violin and a small camping stove on which he was brewing tea.

‘Hello,’ he said, as if he’d just seen me the day before. ‘Want some tea?’

‘Okay.’ I had some difficulty sitting down on the floor. He busied himself making the tea, scrabbled around for his Rizlas and made a roll-up.

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‘So, you alright then?’ he asked, and sat down close to me. He still smelt of wood smoke. Too familiar.

‘I just came to say hello,’ I said. ‘I was in court today, getting a divorce, you know, from Dave.’ He started to laugh and laugh.

We sat silently together in the small room while Dave smoked his roll-up.

‘I’m going now,’ I said, ‘I have to catch the train back to Scotland.’ As I made to leave the room he came toward me. There was a tiny moment of confusion. He wanted to kiss me, but I turned around and walked away.

I felt relief as I took the overnight train back to Inverness, speeding through the night toward Rick and my new life, distancing myself from the past. But I was glad I’d seen Dave and broken the lingering ghost of a spell forever.

I had the sleeper to myself that night, a narrow little cabin with bunk beds. In spite of being huge, I climbed onto the top and slid in between the crisp clean sheets, with the sure knowledge that the cabin steward would be bringing me tea and toast just before the train arrived at Inverness. The ta-taa, ta-taa, ta-taa of the wheels crunching the tracks had sent me instantly into a deep sleep. I dreamt that Rick and I were out on the loch in a small boat when the weather unexpectedly changed. A freak wave had overwhelmed the boat and tossed us out into the roaring sea. I felt like I was in an ice-cold washing machine being flung and tumbled in every direction at once; I was paralysed with terror and unable to breathe as the ocean swallowed me whole. Certain it was the end, I felt oddly okay. Then suddenly I was lying with Rick on the pebbled beach. My heart was racing, but he was maddeningly matter-of-fact about our near-death experience; I wanted to talk and scream but his silence discouraged communication. I knew he was the hero who had rescued me, which was what mattered, but felt miffed to be denied my moment of drama. Then I awoke, and saw that I’d already reached Inverness.

Rick, Leif and I arrived at last where the main track branched off onto a smaller path to our house. Rick opened the door – no 113

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carrying across the threshold – lit the lamps and put a match to the fire. I collapsed into a chair to feed Leif, who was all buttery and dozy. This was no comfortable cottage; everything about it was austere, but after the magistrate’s house it felt like paradise.

I heated some soup and boiled potatoes to go with the curried herring that had become our winter staple. A few months earlier we’d been out in the boat one evening, and seen a trawler in the bay with several men aboard. We approached just as they were hauling in a vast net, filled to capacity with herring.

‘Hi,’ Rick called, ‘any chance of a few fish?’

Just as it was being hauled over the hold, the rope attached to the boom broke, and the entire net of fish fell to the deck. I stood up to see better and they saw me. We didn’t yet know that seeing a woman while fishing was considered the worst luck imaginable.

They averted their gaze and urgently set about retying the rope.

Then they swung it hastily over our tiny boat, released the slipknot and dumped a few hundredweight of herring over us, almost sinking our boat. Suddenly up to our knees in fish, Rick and I were too shocked to respond. Before we could speak, the trawler made off at great speed. Stinking, we dragged copious bucket loads of herring up to the house and stored them in some wooden barrels we found lying around, obviously for just this purpose. I salted and prepared them in as many ways as possible, Scottish, Jewish and Danish, to last the long winter. Although I’d always loathed the Jewish pickled herring thing, I wrote hastily to my mother for as many pickled-herring recipes as possible. Now I rather liked it.

Rick went out to do stuff with the animals while I clattered around cooking and preparing Leif for bed, until at last it was time for us all to go upstairs.

Cocooned in tongue-and-groove pine, our bedroom was almost bare but for a mattress on the floor, Leif’s cot, a bookshelf and a small window that looked out into the dark. The room flickered with candlelight as we lay Leif down in his cot, kissed him goodnight and finally lay down ourselves. I didn’t suppose that being married would make much difference, but it didn’t need to. It was enough: Rick, Leif, our animals and our life at Arrina. I was happy.

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Fourteen When Leif was three months old, I wrapped him up and took him to Cape Town so my family could see I really had a baby. After my letter announcing my pregnancy, I’d eventually rung my mother from London, but she banged down the phone. But once Leif was born, of course, she wanted me to visit, and paid for my ticket. I could never have afforded it myself. She didn’t pay for Rick, who she hadn’t yet met. I’m not sure she believed he existed. A husband who couldn’t afford his own ticket, let alone mine, must have been unimaginable to her; maybe she thought I was only pretending.

But Rick couldn’t have come anyway – he had to look after the animals.

I had arranged to stay with Brenda and her family, the idea being that I’d get to know her children better – David aged eight, Gregory seven, and Susan four – and they’d get to meet their new cousin. They lived in the leafy suburb of Kenilworth in a spacious house I’d not yet seen. They’d moved from Sea Point because they needed more space, but perhaps also to create distance from my parents.

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children. Her husband Sonny was at work, her eldest son David was visiting a friend, and my parents, I was told, were waiting at Brenda’s house, probably too nervous to come to the airport. I was quite relieved. Brenda and the kids were enough for the moment.

Both beautifully blond, Gregory and Susan edged closer to peek at Leif, excitement bursting out beneath their shyness. But Brenda looked exhausted. There was something of the harassed housewife about her, an atmosphere of strain I’d not seen before.

After being out of South Africa for years, everything felt strange. Arriving from the freezing Scottish Highlands during a boiling February in Cape Town was a shock, but my interlude at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg really threw me. I’d started breastfeeding Leif while awaiting my connection, and within minutes a troop of officials descended.

‘Lady!’ a beefy man in khaki shorts hollered from a distance.

‘No man, sies! Not in public. These men working here mustn’t see a white lady like this. Cover yourself up.’

Oh God, it dawned on me, I’m back in South Africa. I suddenly felt very British as I assembled my stuff and made my way to the departure lounge. At Heathrow nobody had noticed, or if they had, they were too polite to stare or comment.

My parents were strangely shy when first they laid eyes on Leif, not quite knowing how to respond or what to do with him. Maybe they found it hard to believe he was really mine. Maybe they need time, I thought, to bond. They seemed to have a good enough relationship with their three other grandchildren.

Brenda gave me a tour of her house, furnished much like my parent’s flat with large comfy sofas, Persian rugs, highly polished antiques and, most impressive to me after years without electricity, excellent lighting. Everywhere there were table lights, freestanding lights and wall lights; it all looked huge and luxurious, though it was probably just a normal suburban house. What, I wondered, would they make of our upstairs coffins, last seen shrouded in cobwebs?

The kids took Leif and me into the back garden, where lemon, avocado and pomegranate trees cast dappled shade across an immaculate lawn. Back inside, Brenda ordered tea. The maid 116

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brought in a large tray bearing a dainty teapot, china teacups, biscuits and a cake. Once we’d had our fill, I went inside to change Leif’s nappy, and everyone crowded around. He cooed and kicked happily. When at last all was revealed, shockwaves rebounded around the room. ‘What?’ shrieked my mother. ‘He isn’t circumcised! Are you crazy, Hillary?’

‘No... I...’

‘Don’t worry, there’s still time. We can get it done right away.

Who’s that doctor you use for your kids, Brenda? Phone him now.’

I looked up at the assembled family. Bewilderment clouded the children’s faces; they had no idea what was going on. But nobody, it seemed, was on our side. Leif started to cry. I quickly finished changing his nappy and lifted him to my breast.

‘You’re not touching him,’ I said and walked out of the room.

I myself was not an impressive sight. I’d put on weight and was that British shade of February grey. And by any standards my clothes were a disaster; second-hand or badly homemade. I felt as if I’d embarrassed them. Once in my room, which Brenda had thoughtfully provided with a cot, I lay down on the bed and with Leif firmly attached to me, breathed deeply. It was quiet. A picture of our cold Highland bedroom, empty but for piles of books and the sound of music, floated by. I saw Rick reading by the light of the Aladdin lamp close to the fire.

My visit didn’t go too well. A few of my ‘disreputable’ friends came to see Leif and me, disrupting the sanitised running of Brenda’s home, although the cousins were curious about their strange aunt and her unbrissed baby who had rocked up from foreign shores.

After an uncomfortable week, I went to stay with Ewalda and David. Their twins, Lachlan and Thalassa, were now six years old, and they were renting an altogether smaller house in Oranjezicht on the slopes of Table Mountain, between Brenda in Kenilworth and my parents in Sea Point. Despite leading disciplined domestic lives, David, Ewalda and the twins seemed to enjoy having us there, despite the breastfeeding, nappy changing and visits from my ‘disreputable’ friends.

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It was nourishing to see old friends, but the visit to South Africa as a whole confirmed my worst feelings. Taking the bus one day with Leif attached to my back, I climbed upstairs and sat down in the front seat. As we shakily made our way forward, I noticed that everyone was staring and a strange hum of disapproval rose up behind us. The bus conductor appeared.

‘Lady,’ he said, ‘you must go downstairs. Only for blacks upstairs. Can’t you read the Nie-blankes sign?’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, we’re here now, okay?’

‘Nee man, asseblief,’ the conductor’s face reddened, clearly exasperated. ‘You must go down.’

By now I simply couldn’t go downstairs; it had become a point of principle. Foolish or not, I felt as if my life depended on it. The conductor pulled the bell and the bus stopped. Everyone on the top deck was hissing or starting to shout at me. I was making them late for work. God knows what was happening downstairs. Once again, with no one on my side, I gathered my belongings, crept downstairs and stepped off the bus altogether.

I visited my parents with Leif. They’d moved to a smaller flat since I’d last been there, but still on the beachfront. It looked much like the other one, with the same furniture in identical configurations. My mother slept in the larger bedroom with a view of the ocean; my father had a smaller room with no view. There was no more talk of circumcision; there wasn’t much talk about anything. The extraordinary thing was that none of my family showed the slightest interest in the life I’d been living in Britain.

Not one of them asked a single question or made any reference to Rick, our lives at Arrina, or our weaving and spinning which I’d written to them about. If not for Leif’s indisputable presence and Ewalda’s voracious interest in every detail of my life in Scotland, I could have been forgiven for thinking I’d never left Sea Point; that my life in Britain was pure fantasy. I wondered what Rick would have made of all this. I was relieved he’d had to stay at home.

When it was time to leave, my mother drove Leif and me to the airport. Not being a driver, I’d never paid much attention to the route, but I suddenly realised that she’d overshot the airport exit 118

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and was heading down the N2 into the beyond.

‘Hey, mom,’ I said, already having decided that the best tack was to remain calm. ‘I think you’ve passed the airport.’

‘No, I don’t think so. What do you know?’ A slight edge, something shrill, had entered her voice.

‘Well, I know we’re going the wrong way.’

‘So,’ she screamed, ‘what do you expect me to do? It’s not my fault!’ And she simply stopped the car in the middle of the freeway, almost causing a colossal accident. She sat there, white as a sheet, sobbing.

Time ticked away as the traffic hurtled past us, some hooting wildly. I held onto Leif and took a deep breath.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘breathe deeply and just do what I say, okay?

Everything’s going to be fine. We’ll get there. Now start the car slowly and drive on. We’ll turn off at the next exit and find our way back. I’ll tell you ahead when it’s time to pull off the motorway.’

‘I can’t, I can’t!’ she cried.

‘Yes, you can. Come, now. Start the car.’ It was like talking to a five-year-old.

We got to the airport with seconds to spare, and mercifully no time for another scene. But as I passed through emigration, I turned and saw her small, crumpled figure standing there, bereft.

A bolt of misery shot through me. I clasped Leif’s little legs that were wrapped around me.

In its own perverse way, the trip had been a success: it stopped me obsessing about my mother. Rick told me that ever since I’d met him I’d talked about nothing else. But now I was bored by the whole business. There really wasn’t much more to say or understand. I’d exhausted every angle. I couldn’t see what could make it any better, but I also couldn’t quite forgive her. I felt she’d forced me to become much tougher than I might otherwise have been.

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Fifteen One bright midsummer morning, a green Morris Minor drew up along the side of the road, which had more or less reached Arrina.

A young woman wearing a long skirt got out of the car. I could see her in the distance, taking a load of boxes and bags from the car, looking around and making her way along the path toward our house, dropping a few bags on the way. As she approached, I saw it was Sapho, the very one who had promised Dave another world.

My throat contracted. The skirt she was wearing was cut on the cross and intricately embroidered with flowers and rural scenes.

It fell in sophisticated folds around her ample hips. It might have passed as something she’d picked up in a jumble sale, torn and muddy as it was. But I knew otherwise. I knew it was a wildly expensive and beautiful thing. It reminded me of how much I missed seeing lovely clothes. I recalled the London girls who’d rock up like haute-couture gypsies to spend a few days with the horses and carts, looking fresh from South Moulton Street or Granny Takes A Trip on the Kings Road. I fought to keep my envy in check. But what was I thinking? Here was the woman who’d stolen my life, and all I could focus on was her bloody skirt.

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Then I noticed that she was wearing a hand-knitted designer cardigan. Dave had told me she was wealthy. The cardigan was unravelling at the throat and the elbows, and I felt the urge to darn it. I hated seeing beautiful clothes neglected. Strings of turquoise, amber and jade swung jauntily from her neck, glinting mockingly in the sunlight. By now she was alongside us. Leif put out his chubby little hand to grab for the beads, and Sapho took a little step to the side.

‘God, I’ve been driving for hours and hours,’ she said, looking past Leif and me into the distance. Her eyes were screwed up and of indeterminate colour, unnervingly at odds with her permanent, beatific grin. She’d put on weight since last I’d met her at Stargroves, where she’d stopped in to see Dave. She deposited the rest of her bags and boxes on the ground and made as if to walk toward our house. ‘I met a guy called Andrew or something,’ she said. ‘He told me you were here in a village with loads of empty houses, so I thought I’d come and live in one.’

Longing to march her to the cliff and push her over, I said, ‘Well, I suppose you’d better come in and have a cup of tea.’

After some time at the house, during which neither of us mentioned Dave, we walked around the village looking at the ruins. Wildflowers were growing in profusion between the tumbled boulders and the gorse was in blossom, filling the air with its vanilla mango tang. Tits and wagtails hopped from branch to branch, while gannets swept arcs overhead and lambs frisked and frolicked. I felt proprietorial about it all. The vegetable patch was at its most productive. No need at all to be buying the miserable lettuces and potatoes from the mobile shop that now stopped at Arrina once a week.

Within days, Sapho was partaking of it all. She was as welcome to share the food as any visitor would have been, but Rick and I soon noticed that she was always absent on a Tuesday, the day when the shop appeared and we bought the few supplies we couldn’t produce ourselves.

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dark, mossy and damp. She practised her rituals in a huddled sort of a way. Her steps were small and she often walked around in tight circles. She smoked roll-ups, a habit presumably borrowed from Dave, and talked obsessively. Her hands were stained with nicotine. She had picked up many of Dave’s mannerisms, which were attractive in him but not in her, although I might have been biased.

Initially she tried to ingratiate herself with Rick, offering to chop wood or whatever she thought might impress him, but she was hopeless. Fortunately, Rick wasn’t vulnerable to her particular brand of seduction in the way Dave had been. He wasn’t interested in extraterrestrials. Rick was a new dad with lots of practical projects on the go. I could see he was irritated by her and had no faith in her promises.

Inappropriate as it was, Sapho pierced my heart. I could see my old self in her sad eyes: the eternal visitor, fleeing from place to place, surrounded by the endless tedium of other people’s babies, gardens, husbands, animals and domestic chores, yet unable to identify with any of it. But fuck it, now that all these things were mine, I saw it quite differently, and I was determined not to waste my sympathy on her.

I must have been mad to allow her anywhere near me. That first night she nearly burnt down what was left of the ruin and ran to us for refuge at some ungodly hour. We should have known then. But no, unperturbed, she dug in further, although we insisted she return to the burnt-out ruin. She came with us one day to visit the MacDonalds. She’d never seen people like them, and I think she thought she’d discovered the Lost World of Atlantis until Alasdair pinned her against the hay shed with his pitchfork.

What he planned to do with her God alone knows, but I suppose it was dreadful enough, his huge warty face inches from hers in the rancid dark. I noticed the smile was gone from her face when she emerged into the light.

Having failed with Rick, she then tried to inveigle me into some sort of intimacy, but I resolutely refused her overtures. As a last resort, she turned up her nose.

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‘You’ve sold out, you know, Hillary: the baby, the house…’

‘Except unlike you, Sapho, I had nothing to sell in the first place.’

She tried to engage me in endless discussions about Dave, but I wasn’t having that either.

One night, long after we’d gone to bed, two policemen came knocking on what was left of the ruin door. The Kenmore people had become aware of her presence and didn’t like it. Had she lived during the village’s heyday, I supposed, she might have been burnt at the stake. Donnie, our neighbour in the preceding village, had seen smoke coming out of the chimney of the ruin and finally decided to inform the police, who wanted to prosecute her for trespassing. We were able to persuade them that she was our guest, but this meant she’d have to move into our small house. She hung around a while longer. I don’t recall whether we asked her to leave or she simply slunk off. But I was glad she’d come. It marked the end of an era for me. She had bored me silly.

In the autumn, Anthony came to stay. As always, he was the essence of generosity and good manners, but we knew we’d overstayed our welcome. We’d been there two years by now and, to my shame, we’d begun to think of the house as our own. Originally there had been Rick and me, a loom, a spinning wheel and a few sacks of food. Now we were more of an ark: baby, cat, dog, goats, chickens, ducks and barrels of salted herrings. We’d also colonised a good bit of the land, erecting fences and planting gardens. Anthony announced that he was about to get married and that he and his new wife might need the house back some time.

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Sixteen The search for a new house was on. I left it to Rick while I stayed home spinning wool, playing with Leif and instructing Effie’s knitting. I was straying further from the patterns I continued to find in odd places, still learning from expensive mistakes but stubbornly refusing to knit myself. The spinning had already caught me in a web, and I was determined that knitting shouldn’t ensnare me further. And anyway, it would take years to reach Effie’s level of expertise, if it were ever possible.

We heard of a shepherding job on the island of Eigg. When Rick occasionally helped the Kenmore men with their sheep, he liked it: the sheep, the men and the whisky afterwards. We’d seen Eigg from Skye, a long island lying out there in the Minch, with a plateau running down the centre like a miniature Table Mountain.

Rick went to speak to the owner about the job and fell in love with the island. We must all go, he said, and see what we think.

We took the ferry to Eigg and transferred into a smaller boat that rocked and pitched its way to the quay. I was weak with fear by the time we got ashore, although Leif was in his element. Should we end up living here, I couldn’t imagine much to-ing and fro-ing.

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A bunch of disgruntled estate workers drove us to the agricultural sheds, from where we set off on a narrow path heading south, overlooking the Minch. The path narrowed and the terrain grew increasingly wild until it became quite dangerous to negotiate our way.

‘I feel I might fall over the edge,’ I said, passing Leif to Rick. I stared as we approached the cottage Rick had discovered on his first visit. Perched a little way down a cliff, with hardly more than a foot of flat land between the house and a deathly plunge, lay the sweet ruins of what once must have been the summer dwelling of some crazy hermitic shepherd. By no stretch of the imagination was this a house.

‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ Rick said. ‘Look at this incredible view of the water. Nothing between us and it.’

‘Nothing between this and madness,’ I said, somewhat shaken.

I suggested we turn around and go back to the sheds. ‘Did you say there were two possibilities?’ I asked, trying to sound half-normal.

‘Yes, Howlin House. It’s at the north end of the island, looking out to Rhum. It’s also nice, but a bit further from the sea.’

‘Nowhere’s far from the sea here, Rick. It’s a small island.’

‘Well, we can go there.’ He looked a little disappointed.

When we returned to the sheds, one of the men asked me what I thought. All I could manage was a shake of my head. He rolled his eyes, which I took to be some sort of confirmation. Leif was a year old now and taking his first tentative steps. I think we both simultaneously saw Leif stumbling over the edge.

‘My son liked it,’ Rick said.

We had coffee and started off toward Howlin House. A wide gravel road went all the way, passing clusters of croft houses and ploughed fields. We made way for some tractors and a car. After three or four miles, a large double-storey grey stone house loomed into view, with a square of mature ash trees beside it. A bench sat invitingly under the trees. We opened the front door and walked in. The house felt like a palace, despite being empty and damp. I ran around marking out the spaces in my mind. We’ll sleep here, Leif there, we’ll put the loom in here, the wheel there. We’ll paint 126

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it all white and live happily ever after.

We went out to the square and ate the packed sandwiches we’d brought, while Leif tottered around the roots of the trees.

‘Happy?’ Rick asked.

‘Very,’ I said. I took off the ring Rick had given me a year after our marriage, and buried it under an ash tree. ‘We’ll leave it here till we return.’

On the way back we saw people working in their field. We waved to them and one of the women beckoned us across.

‘You’ll be new here,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Rick. ‘I’m thinking of taking that job as the estate shepherd.’

‘Oh, didn’t know there was a job going.’

‘I think so,’ said Rick. ‘Beautiful island you live on.’

‘Aye, it’s a beautiful place right enough. But you’d do well ta think twice before settling here, the bairn and all. The owner, the laird, he’s a strange man and things might turn out differently ta what you thought. I’d no’ trust him at all.’

We thanked them for their information. They seemed like genuine folk and had lived on Eigg for generations. We thought we’d better find out more. When we returned to the sheds, we asked a young guy busy fixing machinery if he could spare us some time.

‘Can do,’ he said, laying down his tools. He wasn’t Scottish and hadn’t been working long on the island.

‘What’s it like living and working here?’ Rick asked.

The young man looked at us inquisitively. ‘Really want to know?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’re thinking of coming to live here, and Rick would be working for the estate.’

‘I’ve not been here long and I’ll not be here long. The owner’s a fucking dictator, and a liar to boot.’

Talking to several islanders, it became clear that all was not well on the island of Eigg.

We left without returning, until years later when we came to retrieve the ring Rick had given me that I’d buried under the ash.

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The search for a house continued. Our friend Peter, then living on the east coast, decided he too wanted a house on the west coast.

By then he’d exchanged Angie for Frances and her two children, Anna and Aaron, who all needed somewhere to live. This changed the dynamic. Peter was rich. His dad owned a huge biscuit empire in London, and Peter appeared to have access to an endless stream of money. He was keen on buying somewhere that could possibly include us.

Peter and Rick set off in the Land Rover piled high with maps, food, sleeping bags and tents. They drove to Sutherland, Scoraig, Lochinver, Loch Sunart and Mallaig, always parking the car and striding off into the most uninhabited places. Two weeks later Rick returned, half-dead but exhilarated.

‘We found the most fantastic place.’

‘Oh yeah? Tell me about it.’

‘Well, we drove to Mallaig and left the car there. Shit day, never stopped pouring. Anyway, we walked along the shore of Loch Nevis. It’s a spectacular coast, but we hadn’t realised it was going to take so long, so we didn’t have enough food.’

‘I can’t imagine Peter without food.’

‘No, he had a couple of tins of condensed milk and we boiled up some nettles, but I’ve never seen Peter so weak. We had to cross one of the streams in full spate after all the rain, and there was a moment when I thought he’d be washed away.’ Coming from the master of understatement, I knew this must have been bad. ‘We came to this fantastic place. It must have been a shooting lodge, but it hasn’t been lived in for years. Peter immediately laid claim to it, but there’s a smaller ruin for us about a mile away.’

‘Oh?’ ‘Then we walked on around the Loch Hourn coast, and about four miles down is another ruin, in a worse state but a much nicer spot. It’s close to the shore, with two streams on either side and mature ash and alder trees.’

‘Hmm.’ ‘You’ll have to see it.’

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the laird of Knoydart Peninsula, asking whether we could buy or rent these properties. Major MacDonald immediately agreed to lease Peter the shooting lodge, Cnoc Gorm, presumably on the basis of Peter’s credentials, but turned us down. Rick wasn’t happy.

Donning a three-piece plus-fours suit, Rick went to pay Major MacDonald a visit at his headquarters in London. Tourists started photographing Rick in his outfit, mistaking him for a Highlander.

A lanky young man in an oversized tweed suit, so earnest and oddly authentic despite being American, managed to persuade Major MacDonald that we would make the ideal tenants, and our very presence would deter the boatloads of poachers who were recently shooting the deer on the north shore of his estate.

Major MacDonald, it turned out, was a fair and generous laird.

He offered us an excellent lease with an option to renew every five years, the option being ours. The rent was two hundred and fifty pounds a year, and he would have two thousand pounds worth of building material delivered to us in the estate boat in return for Rick building the house. We couldn’t believe our good fortune, except that Leif and I hadn’t yet seen the house.

It was January. Everything was covered in a dusting of snow and it was cold, very cold. I stood nervously on the pier in Mallaig waiting for the Spanish John to pick us up and take us to Inverie.

What if I didn’t like the house? What if there wasn’t really a house to like?

Peter and his family had already moved to Knoydart and started to rebuild their house. He picked us up in Inverie in a boat he’d recently bought, and whizzed us the ten miles around the coast to our spot, named Li on the Ordinance Survey map we’d brought.

The day was crisp and clear, shimmering in the bright winter light. We rode close to the shore and saw huge herds of deer moving in slow motion across the skeletal slopes of the mountain, the black of the rock traced in a light blanket of snow. I felt as if I were in an Eisenstein movie. I was wearing so many layers I could hardly move – and still I froze. Leif clung to my back like a koala bear. The water was dark beneath us. We saw some seals flop off the rocks and splash gracelessly into the water.

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I could hardly move by the time we got to Li. Rick yanked us out of the boat and we waded ankle deep through the icy water, across the slippery pebbles, through the tide line of thick seaweed into what appeared to be a field. A tiny stone ruin, measuring about twelve by eight feet, stood close to the shore with a stream running close by.

‘No, not this,’ Rick reassured me, ‘although it’ll make a good shed. It’s a bit further up.’

We stumbled along the banks of the stream, where tall, leafless ash trees stood etched by the snow. The journey so far had been remarkable for its lack of trees, a barren mountainous desert.

Wading across the stream with some difficulty, we came upon it suddenly. It was recognisably a house, but with a caved in roof and rowan trees growing from the gable ends. Clearly it had last been used to house animals. To the front was a sort of square surrounded by broken-down stone walls with two ancient and majestic Scots pines in the corner. Mounds of smashed bottles and old leather boots, bits of broken pottery and fragments of fabric looked as if they’d been flung from the front door of the house for generations.

The loch stretched out before us. On the far side, about two miles away, a small village lay glinting in the sunlight. A semicircle of high mountains rose up behind the dots of houses. I looked around. We were encircled by high peaks with the loch like a dark mirror at the centre. I put Leif down. He lurched around the uneven ground, chanting, ‘House, house’.

Okay, I thought, we can live here. Rick, meanwhile, was bounding all over the place. ‘So?’ he said.

‘So, do you know how to build a house?’

‘Oh, I’ll find out.’

We rented a house in Arnisdale, the village on the mainland opposite Li. Most of the houses were empty and rents were absurdly low.

With another new address, I wrote home.

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3 August 1975 Dear Mom and Dad, I must have told you we were looking for a new house.

Now at last we’ve found one. Well, sort of. Rick still has to build it, but we’ve been given a good lease and some money for materials. Meanwhile, we’ve rented a cottage on the mainland opposite where our house will be. You can only get there by a two-mile boat ride or a twenty-mile walk over high mountains. Technically it’s on a peninsula, but there are no roads or paths to our place, so it might as well be an island. We’ve bought a small wooden boat with a five-horsepower outboard engine, and Rick sets off from the mainland every morning to build. God knows how he knows how to build a house, but he’s very confident and it’s beginning to look real.

There’s no shop in the village where we’re staying, but there’s a post office with a wonderful postmistress called Reena who lives with her hundred-year-old mother. I’m such a regular customer, posting off yarn and getting back parcels, that I’ve got to know her quite well. I often have tea and oatcakes with her and her mother. A van comes every week from a shop ten miles away in a village called Glenelg, and delivers our groceries to a metal dustbin on the mainland. I have a standard list and get the same few things every week. There’s also a school in Glenelg where Leif can go when he’s old enough. What a thought!

I’m still spinning like crazy and have found a few more people to knit for me. Most of the locals are ancient and have been here all their lives. All are bloody good knitters.

Being at Arrina accustomed me to this sort of thing, but it’s a little more civilised here. People have electricity and running water – not that we will across the loch. But there’s enough water pouring down from the sky and the mountain to fill the loch.

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and we’re managing to live on the proceeds, thank God, as Rick will be building for quite some time to come. He won’t say how long.

How are you? Leif is getting more beautiful, clever and adorable every day. He has Rick’s startling blue eyes. We have such fun together.

And now for the bombshell. I’m almost sure I’m pregnant again!

Lots of love, Hillary As I grew in size, so did the house. On all but the very worst days, when crossing the loch was impossible, Rick went back and forth, returning home exhausted. Occasionally on a calm day, Leif and I went across to see what was going on, and sometimes we camped overnight in a dry corner of the house. Rick removed what remained of the roof, rebuilt the house and put on slate tiles.

He cleared the newspaper that had been slapped onto the bare stone walls for generations, and applied insulation and plaster instead. The floors were first stripped of saplings and tree roots, then levelled and cemented. He never expected me to help. I hated anything to do with building. Instead I sat outside with Leif and sketched obsessively, squaring off a few square inches of grass and drawing every blade.

I didn’t make it easy for him. But as I watched all this housebuilding activity, the silent fear lurked that I might be making a huge mistake. It wasn’t Rick – I loved him easily – but the parameters of our lives were slowly, and quite literally, becoming set in stone. Until now, I’d always felt free to run off if I got bored or the going got too tough. But here Rick was now, building this house with his own two hands for us. Or was it for us? I’d made it clear that this wasn’t my dream, although I was happy to go along with it. Only I hadn’t really understood what it was I was going along with, or that for Rick this dream was an elemental part of who he was. Now I could see him identifying more and more with the house and the landscape until they almost became inseparable.

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Meanwhile, the doctor from Glenelg drove the ten miles each morning to give me a daily iron injection, rather unnecessarily, I thought. My whole backside was soon black and blue, but she appeared to take pleasure in it, and would sit talking obsessively for hours. Her husband had recently left her, and I wondered whether perhaps she was having a nervous breakdown. Then she went off on holiday just before my baby was due, having informed the National Health authorities that she wouldn’t have us on her books unless they provided her with a motor launch and a crew ready at all times should we need emergency medical attention.

The authorities would have none of this, and in turn contacted the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who threatened to have our children taken into care if we persisted in moving across the water.

I, in turn, was furious. I had always thought of Li as the most perfect place to raise young children. Letters flew to and from the RSPCC, but once our doctor returned from holiday, faced with the wrath of a potentially homeless mother of two, she finally reneged and agreed to have us on her books, with or without a launch and crew.

One night I dreamt that I gave birth to a brightly striped sweater that never stopped coiling out of me. I knew then that it was time to take myself off to stay with Michael, close to the hospital in Skye, where I was to give birth. I said goodbye to Rick and Leif, took the school bus as far as the main road and then hitched. It didn’t take long to reach Michael’s house. Prue and her child had by then returned to London, leaving a saddened Michael, who was very solicitous of my welfare. But I wasn’t there long; my waters broke that night. Michael rushed me to the hospital and Zoë was born early the next morning, on 17 March, 1976. Rick managed to get a lift on a roadwork lorry at the crack of dawn and reached the hospital in time for the birth. Our baby Skye girl arrived easily.

When she opened her large, deep brown eyes, I recognised them as mine, but everything else, her tiny body, the curve of her mouth and her flat little nose, were uniquely her own. Rick lifted her up and took her to the window. I could hear the ocean rumbling.

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‘A kelpie,’ he said, her dark hair still wet. ‘You’re a sea baby.’

Two weeks later we moved across to Li. Rick had already built a high deer fence enclosing about seven acres of land. It contained us, and kept us apart from the animals outside.

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Seventeen The house was watertight. Major MacDonald had given us a Rayburn, a wood-burning stove so powerful, it felt like having an additional family member. Leif liked to feed it logs, and it belched out warmth, sizzling hot water piped from the adjacent stream, perfect roasts and flawless cakes. But it was a gobbler of fuel, devouring all the peat we dug on the mainland and brought over in sacks, along with fallen wood from the forest that Rick dragged up from the boat. The Rayburn required attention, but performed brilliantly when correctly managed.

We had one of those old, heavy claw-foot bathtubs delivered at the same time as the Rayburn. Rick had found it abandoned in a field nine miles over the mountain on the other side of our peninsula. Stained by years of peaty water, it would have horrified my mother, but we loved it. There was nothing nicer than lying in a hot bath, warmed by the Rayburn, with a cup of tea or even a glass of wine, while chatting with Rick and the kids. Rick added a hinged lid, and it doubled as the sitting room sofa.

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Rick nor the kids thought anything of it. Rick flatly refused to build a toilet. Rather like Niall and the ‘couples’ at Grotaig, he insisted that it was a bourgeois luxury we could do without.

The house was far from complete. We moved our beds from spot to spot as Rick built around us, with Zoë sleeping in a shifting drawer and Leif in a space that became the stairwell to an attic.

When Rick later built the attic, he inserted Perspex windows into the floor so that the kids, sleeping on mattresses on either side, could look down and see us below.

All the while I spun and spun, seated in a playpen like an overgrown baby to avoid two-year-old Leif getting his fingers caught in the wheel. He would rattle the bars from outside while Zoë cooed in her cot. The sweaters had to be knitted and sent to London every month. The money I earned paid for the few things we needed from the shop. Books and tapes were the main priority.

Being rated below the poverty line, we also received child benefit payments.

Rick and I then hacked out a vegetable garden from the flat piece of ground between the square and the shore, axing out enough rocks to build another house (or a toilet, maybe?) then layering the earth with barrow-loads of seaweed. Within two years we were swamped with more vegetables than we could eat, cook, bottle, pickle, chutney, swap or give away. There was milk enough to make goats cheese and elderflowers to make wine. In between gardening, building, gathering fuel, maintaining the boat, building more fences, milking the goats and a million other things, Rick hunted stags on the mountain behind the house, killing, dragging and then butchering them in the shed, which he’d rebuilt from the original pile of stones.

The shed was neatly arranged with workbenches, and his tools dangled from hooks in a specific order, as if the whole thing were an illustrated catalogue. The kids often played down there, returning to the house with little bits of wood they’d sail in the bath. We got an old deep freeze on the mainland, which we installed in a friend’s broken-down shed and connected to the mains electricity for a small monthly fee. Rick went out in his boat for hours on 136

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end, catching mackerel, crab and lobsters. Sometimes he just went out in his boat.

Peter, meanwhile, his house now more or less complete, began fishing for prawns. He’d bought what seemed to me a large fishing boat with a covered cabin to hide in when the weather got rough.

I tried hard not to envy his cabin, though I sometimes succumbed in a roaring squall.

The kids seemed to thrive; they didn’t care about cabins. Rick’s ecstasy was marred only by my not being quite so intoxicated.

3 July 1977 Dear Ewalda, It’s ages since I wrote. Lots going on here though I haven’t budged an inch, and I wonder whether I’ll ever go anywhere again. I think this time I’ve really done it. What is it with me and bloody islands? I seem to be good at marooning myself.

It’s not deliberate, honestly.

I should learn how to use the boat (escape!) but I’m too scared, perverse and stupid. The water here is as treacherous as a madman with a gun, and I don’t want to delude anyone into thinking they can rely on me in an emergency. When I get scared in the boat, I freeze. Once Rick put a black plastic bin bag right over me. He thought it might help if I couldn’t see the waves coming, he said, but it just intensified everything, with quadraphonic walls of water crashing against the plastic, me in the dark unable to breathe or get the bloody thing off. When we’re out on the water the weather can turn nasty SUDDENLY. Huge whirlpools of water spin across the waves at incredible speeds, as if we’re being chased by the devil himself. But Rick’s more at home on a boat than on land. Whatever the weather, he stands at the prow like a Viking, while I cling to the floorboards.

The kids think it’s all tremendous fun. I feel such a wimp.

I wasn’t made for this, while Mr Macho is master of all he surveys. And maddeningly, it’s more difficult because it’s so infuriatingly beautiful, awe inspiring, majestic and sublime.

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People who visit can’t understand why I’m not the happiest girl in the world. Him Tarzan, me Jane, larking around in primordial nature. Annoyingly, they find not having a toilet charming, though I notice they change their tune if they’re here longer than three days in bad weather. And needless to say, they’re only ever here in summer. Then they come in droves, while for the six dark months we see no one but ourselves.

The irony is that here I’m too middle class. Starting a business and being self-employed doesn’t go down well; even growing flowers is viewed as a little uppity. The emphasis is on utility; everything else is gratuitous, decadent. Crazy, when in Cape Town, my behaviour was deemed not middle class enough. But I can’t say all that bothers me much.

Anyway, it’s summer now (like a Cape Town winter) and everything is blindingly green, studded with wild orchids, carnivorous sundews and tiny snapdragons the colour of butter. The loch expands and retracts in the light. Sometimes the village on the other side looks quite near, but then the sky falls down and it disappears.

There are no paths. I stumble over the bog, occasionally sinking in over the tops of my wellies and getting stuck. By the end of summer, the bracken grows well over my head.

Scrambling up a steep rock the other day I met a stag on his way down. Our eyes locked and we stayed there unflinching, staring into each other’s eyes, too mesmerised to move. Then suddenly he leapt straight over my head and cantered off.

It’s impossible to really walk with the kids on the mountain, but we totter along the shore, collecting stones and driftwood. We have special places where we gather our treasure and build driftwood shack towns, making up all sorts of different people who live there. The shack dwellers have names and quite complicated lives. When we feel like company, we head off to this ‘township’ and engage with the phantom community.

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close to the shore, and although they’re shy, we’ve seen them gambolling about, tumbling in and out of the water. Have you read Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water about his life with the otters? He lived just across the loch, although the original house burnt down in 1968 and he died a year later. Maybe some of our otters are descendants of his.

I know I’m ridiculous, but I miss nice clothes. I’ve ordered a subscription to Vogue, and I page through it obsessively, feeling very inspired, although I wear nothing but the dreariest things, which Rick still finds highly inappropriate.

Practical clothes for arctic or sailing expeditions aren’t only ridiculously expensive, they’re UGLY. Ugh! Can’t wear them, which is why I’m wet and freezing most of the time.

And to cap it all, when visitors come I really look forward to seeing what they wear, but they always bring their worst stuff. It’s pathetic, I know.

The thing is, I’m really scared I’ll have to live here forever.

I can see Rick has no intention of leaving and, at this rate, we’ll never have the money to live anywhere else. Not that I have anything else in mind. This really is a brilliant place for the kids to grow up and part of me absolutely loves it, but I HATE not having any other options. And a time will come when the kids need more knowledge of the world and may resent being holed up here. I also hadn’t understood how much would have to go into making this place habitable, with Rick bearing the brunt of it and me being a drag.

On the plus side, this is paradise on earth for reading; I’m absolutely saved by books. I could read forever with nothing between me and the words I read or the thoughts that drift into my head.

What about you? The twins must be huge by now. Won’t you send photos of you all? I don’t know when we’re next coming. My parents have said they’ll send us tickets soon, us being the kids and I. No ticket for Rick.

Write to me.

Love, Hillary 139

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P.S. Sorry if I sound rather moany, it’s just one of those days!

One day when we were over in Arnisdale, we saw an elderly couple in a green Morris van on a grassy patch at the end of the road.

They were sitting under a homemade awning they’d strung from their car, pouring tea and eating sandwiches around a foldout table. A lovely black-and-white Border collie sat obediently beside them.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘This looks like a handy setup.’

‘Aye,’ said the lady with grey hair in a little bun at the nape of her neck, ‘fine part o’ the world, here.’

‘Have you come far?’

‘Yes, from the Borders.’

‘I’ve not been there,’ I said, ‘but I have a knitter from somewhere around there. Maybe you know her. She and her husband have a little cabin here; that’s how I know her.’

‘Aye, that’ll be Mrs Thompson.’

‘What a coincidence.’

‘Not really. She told me about you, so we thought we’d come an’ have a look at where you live.’

‘And here you are. Why didn’t you let us know you were coming? We could’ve collected you.’

‘Well, we can arrange it now,’ she said, casually picking up some knitting, her needles flying at a colossal speed.

‘You knit?’ Suddenly I recognised my own hand-spun yarn and natural dyes.

‘My name’s Jean an’ you’re Hillary,’ she laughed, ‘an’ this here is Harold.’ Harold was beaming, looking like he’d stepped out of The Canterbury Tales. ‘Got it?’ she asked.

‘Getting it,’ I said, ‘but help me out.’

‘Well, Mrs Thompson got ill, you see, an’ she was very worried about the deadline. She knows how important it is. So she sees me at a Women’s Institute meeting an’ she knows I knit, so she says ta me, would I like ta knit this jersey she has ta knit? She has ta go ta hospital, so would I knit it for her an’ post it back ta you?’

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‘So, you said yes.’

‘An’ then Harold an’ I thought, instead of posting it, we’d take a little spin an’ I could finish the knitting on the way an’ deliver it ourselves by hand. But as you see, I’m no’ quite finished yet.’

‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘Why not come over and finish it at our house?’

Once they’d packed up the car and parked it in a lay-by, they gathered up their collie and a few things and came across to the other side, our side. They seemed instantly at home, barely commenting on the uniqueness of the place. Most first-time visitors would gasp and expostulate, and more sophisticated friends could be quite unsettled by our primitive conditions. Jean responded to the kids as if she’d always been their granny, and then proceeded to take my business in hand.

‘Tell me what you’re doing an’ how it works,’ she asked, propping herself on the bathtub-sofa.

‘Okay. But the truth is, I don’t know too much about what I’m doing. I can’t knit.’

‘What? You cannae knit? What can you do?’

‘Not a lot really. I spin and I dye fleece and I try to write knitting patterns from the ones I find in those magazines like Women’s Own and stuff, but I’m not very good at it. Then I give the wool and patterns to the knitters and hope and pray that everything will turn out okay. If the sweaters come back wrong it takes forever to unpick them, and I can’t always work out what went wrong.’

I showed her a box of expensive mistakes, sweaters I’d not got around to unpicking.

Jean and Harold stayed ages. They were the easiest people to be around, completely unfazed by our primitive living conditions, which had upset some of our more sophisticated friends. Harold had been a shepherd since he was fourteen, while Jean looked after him and their three sons, never straying far from where either of them had been born. This trip to the Highlands had been a major adventure for them.

Soon Jean had completed her sweater and it was more than perfect. She’d managed somehow to give it something extra, a bit of her own magic. She sat on the bath for days, either unpicking, 141

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re-knitting or sorting out mistakes in a way I would never have known how to.

Meanwhile, Harold walked around the mountain with Rick, thinking all the time of sheep. It didn’t matter what we started talking about, Harold would weave the conversation back to sheep.

‘You cannae live here without sheep,’ he said. ‘I’ll start you off.

And you’ll need a good dog. No’ that silly skinny thing you’ve got, but a real sheepdog. I’ll bring one up in the van.’

Jean and Harold returned a few months later, with two stinking rams and a brown Border collie called Ben jammed into the back of their Morris. They continued to visit regularly, Jean to check on the progress of my business and Harold to advise on the trajectory of Rick’s flock. Within two years, Rick was driving the boat back and forth along the shore, sending strange signals to Ben, who, from miles away on the mountain, followed his instructions precisely. There were three hundred sheep by then, all mesmerised

by Ben, who was in turn mesmerised by Rick.

We had been living in the dark for five years when my friend Nicholas arrived from London one day with a van full of equipment to install a hydro scheme off our stream. He’d been to stay a couple of times, and had noticed that the gradient of the stream in relation to our house was perfect for generating electricity.

‘This is a dream location,’ he’d said. ‘What do you think about electricity?’

‘I’d kill for electricity. I’ve lived for so long without it, I think I may be going blind.’

It was midwinter. The sun, when it occasionally shone, never reached our side of the loch at that time of year, and our house with its two tiny windows and three-foot-thick walls was a dungeon without gas lamps, day and night. The stream was frozen, as were Rick’s trout ponds and the inlet pipes from the stream to the ponds. Rick had to disconnect the pipes and bring them into the warmth of the house, laying them down the stairs at an angle to thaw. The ice melted into little rivulets that we caught in ever changing buckets.

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Nicholas had no children, and Leif and Zoë drove him crazy. It was bitterly cold and pitch dark by four o’clock each day, but Rick and Nicholas struggled on. They first built a dam a thousand foot upstream, with an inlet tank that piped the water, when it wasn’t frozen, down the slope to the Pelton wheel Nicholas had brought, about a hundred yards from the house. They had then to wire the house and connect the current. The kids couldn’t imagine what all the excitement was about. Then at last the ice thawed, and after relatively few hiccups, hey presto, we had lights! It was a million times better than Christmas. Nicholas produced a toaster and we all had toast with butter and jam. Then we got a washing machine and I sat for hours with the kids, watching the clothes spin around.

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Eighteen ‘Here’s a trip to LA,’ I said, after tearing open the envelope Willie our postman had just brought in his boat. ‘It’s sponsored by The Highlands and Islands Development Board. They’ll pay the fare and living expenses.’

‘Why would you want to go to LA?’ Rick asked.

‘I don’t, but I thought you might. You can visit your old buddies in San Francisco.’

‘I don’t think that’s the point of the trip.’

‘No, but it’s called a scatter mission, so you can scatter. You only have to attend one meeting, more like a cocktail party or something at the British Embassy in Los Angeles. You could do that.’

The HIDB was desperate to encourage small businesses in the Highland region, particularly in the craft sector. I wasn’t keen on the craft association, because, ironically, the fashion industry demanded products that looked like they’d rolled off a machine.

Yet my business fitted perfectly into the remit of the scatter mission.

So off went Rick to San Francisco with about fifteen hand-spun sweaters, one or two spun with a mix of sheep fleece and gold 145

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lurex thread, looking zany but beautiful, perfect for Hollywood.

He returned with a Californian style agent who looked like Joan Rivers, and orders from the most exclusive boutiques on Rodeo Drive. I was astonished. And to cap it all, having got into the spirit of things, he’d stopped in London on a tip and contacted a woman called Sue, who turned out to be the hottest knitwear agent in Britain. Everything started to accelerate.

‘There’s a telegram for you,’ the postmistress told us as we collected and delivered parcels at her house, which doubled as the post office. ‘Says it’s from Natalie Wood.’

I was alarmed; telegrams usually heralded bad news, and it surely couldn’t be the film star Natalie Wood.

FOR NATALIE WOOD STOP ONE CABLE COAT SMALL STOP ONE MARL GRAY AND BLACK CARDIGAN HORN BUTTONS SMALL STOP ONE REINDEER SWEATER MULTI COL SMALL STOP ONE GOLD LUREX MIX ANGELO SWEATER SMALL STOP DELIVERY ASAP We all started to laugh. Every week, from then on, there were orders from Hollywood.

‘It’ll no’ be long before we have that Mrs Dallas pitch up in person,’ Reena said, a certain disdain in her voice.

It was work, work, work, spin, spin, spin, and endless bubbling cauldrons of stream water and seaweed, berries and blooms as I dyed skeins of wool into ochre, rust, cerise and seaweed greens.

Then my back started to crack up. The pain grew worse and worse. I went from one doctor to another, getting a different diagnosis from each one, but nothing alleviated the pain. I was sure I’d end up in a wheel chair until a friend recommended a chiropractor in London. I hitched down to see Dr Klugg.

‘Put your hands on your hips,’ he said. ‘Now tell me what you notice.’ I put my hands on my hips and stood silently for some moments.

‘One hip’s higher than the other.’

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‘What do you do?’ asked Dr Klugg.

‘I make sweaters,’ I said.

‘Hmm. How?’ ‘I spin the wool and…’

‘Well stop it right away. All the weight is going onto one side of your body, dislocating your pelvis and trapping your nerves.

No wonder you’re in agony.’ He lay me down on his table and with one dramatic jolt, levelled my hips. The pain, which had been gathering momentum for years, instantly drained away.

No more spinning. I couldn’t imagine life without it. No spinning, no sweaters, no livelihood. Horror. But within seconds I started to hate the very spinning wheel that I’d always loved so dearly. I knew I would never go near it again. But what would I do? I knew there were other designers hand-knitting sweaters with commercially bought wool, but they were talented; they knew what they were doing. My only edge, I’d always thought, was that I made something unique, a product that had no competition.

If there was one thing I hated, it was competition. I didn’t feel up to the mark. Stuck away in the Highlands with no inspiration but the heathery landscape and a subscription to Vogue to light my way, how could I possibly compete with the cutting edge? I loved clothes, yes, but as far as the business aspect went, my real inspiration had been to beat poverty.

What could I possibly do next? When the idea hit me, I was so excited, I wrote home. They were always asking about my business (rarely about anything else) although I suspected they didn’t actually believe it existed.

20 July 1981 Dear Mom and Dad, Glad to hear you had a good time in Durban. Sounds like fun, especially the bit about dad playing the drums with that band. It’s hard for me to imagine sun and warm sea. Sea here means jellyfish, sudden squalls and a wall between me and the rest of the world, although our lives go on as if we were the centre of the universe.

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Zoë is now going to school. Rick ferries the kids across the loch in the dark. He’s actually paid to do it by the Highland region, as it’s statutory that if the state can’t provide transport to get your child to school, they must pay you to do it. It’s crazy but they think nothing of it. Leif and Zoë are real country bumpkins, sturdy and far more intrepid than me. I anxiously watch their boat through binoculars.

I made them fleece-lined yellow waterproof trousers and jackets with hoods, so they’re not frozen and drenched when they reach school. They look like little yellow elves.

Rick has built me a beautiful warm workroom in what was once a cowshed (just another pile of stones really) close to the house. I’ve painted it shocking pink, which Rick hates but I love. I think it might have inspired me to think of something new. I’d sort of had it with all that spinning, and I’ve taught someone in the village to do it instead. She’s doing pretty well and is pleased to have a job. Meanwhile I’ve graduated to the Rolls Royce of yarns, cashmere. It isn’t produced commercially as a hand-knitting yarn, but I’m in the process of persuading one of the big factories to make me a yarn thick enough for my knitters. The factory manager is intrigued and even came to visit us, though he nearly had a heart attack getting here, inappropriately dressed and soaked on arrival. But he loves the idea and he’s as keen to experiment and get the project going as am I. As far as I’m aware, no one is hand-knitting with cashmere. The only things available are those twinset-and-pearl type sweaters that have been going for a million years. I think you have a couple. Anyway, I’ll keep you posted. Who knows, this could be my one trick pony.

Rick has given both the kids toolsets and they’re pottering around in the boatshed while Rick builds himself a new boat. He’s doing a boat-building correspondence course from Maine in the States. I suspect he and Leif have a secret deal to build him a small boat too. He’s wildly excited.

Meanwhile Zoë and I walk along the shore producing a 148

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radio programme. She’s the interviewer and I’m the guest.

‘So what do you think,’ she asks, ‘about the effect of isolation on small children?’ She’s heard people ask me this a million times.

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I think it’s absolutely wonderful.’

‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘I think so too.’

So you needn’t worry about your grandchildren being lonely. They have loads of animals: a rabbit, a cat, a dog, an ant farm and who knows how many guinea-pigs, mice and sheep, plus all the wild animals beyond the fence that find their way in, including otters, badgers, owls, pine martens and bats. I even saw a wild cat stroll nonchalantly down the path in the middle of the day.

A few weeks ago, I heard a colossal sound as I was walking on the mountain behind the house. I thought it was an explosion and ran stumbling down toward the house.

Peeking out from the head of our bay was the enormous prow of a ship. It was the anchor I’d heard, crashing through the water. I’ve never seen anything like it in our loch. Later that evening as it was getting dark, the ship appeared in front of our house, lit from bow to stern in fairy lights. It was the Royal Yacht Britannia, anchoring here for the night!

The kids were already in their pyjamas, but we rowed out to it in our tiny boat. We could see our reflection in the shiny blue paintwork, miniscule against the high ship, and just as we got close enough to touch sides, guess who should step out on deck with a man in a tuxedo? There was the Queen herself in a glittering tiara and full-length pink ball gown. They saw us way down below, and she glided toward the rails, bent forward a half inch and gave us the queenly wave. Leif thought she had a cheek being so queenly on our territory, but he didn’t want to be seen in his pyjamas. We rowed around to the stern of the ship where the crew were hanging over the side trying to catch fish. Rick shouted out some tips about the best spots to catch mackerel, and then we rowed ashore. Although we’re not royalists, it was quite 149

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some sight – archetypal, as if we were in a fairy story.

We now have a second-hand Morris Minor. Car owners!

I can hardly believe it. We’re talking of driving to London, but first we’re going to visit Rick’s family in the States.

His parents live on Cape Cod and his brother is in New Hampshire. We’re very excited. They call Leif and Zoë the ‘American kids’ at school, so they both want to know where and what America is, as do I. Funny that they don’t call them the ‘South African kids’. Perhaps they think it’s an insult. Sorry!

Much love, Hillary

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Nineteen We went to visit Rick’s older brother, Brian, in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. It was an arduous journey, involving a boat, taxi, bus, train and tube before we caught our flight, followed by two more train rides to reach New Hampshire.

Brian fetched us at the station. ‘We’ve prepared the log cabin for you,’ he said. ‘You’ll love it. It’s all alone in the woods, overlooking a lake. We’ll just swing by to pick up my kids, and I’ll drop you all off at the cabin. Rick can come with me; I’m just going to meet my buddy Jed.’ The more he said I’d love the cabin, the more I knew I’d hate it.

This was my first time in America, and I hadn’t come all this way to be dumped in a home from home with four small children.

‘I’m not staying here,’ I told Rick when he finally returned after hours with Brian.

Rick reluctantly spoke to Brian, and we all moved into their ranch-style house that looked like a movie set for a western. But it quickly began to appear that Brian and his wife Kathy didn’t like each other much, and the cousins didn’t appear to like each other or us, for that matter. I was soon keen to leave New Hampshire 151

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entirely. I phoned a friend in New York.

‘Hi Maggie,’ I stammered, ‘remember me, it’s Hillary. We met years ago in Scotland, at the Tibetan Monastery.’

‘Hillary? God, that was a long time ago.’

‘Yes, well actually, the last thing I expected was for you to answer the phone. No one I know has stayed this long in one place.’

‘No one in New York would give up a rent-subsidised apartment, so I’m still here.’

‘Er, Maggie, would it be okay if we came to stay for a few days?

I’m with my husband and two kids.’

‘Sure, call from the corner when you get to the apartment, so I know it’s you. New York’s dangerous.’

‘Thanks Maggie, you can’t imagine how grateful I am. We’ll take the bus tomorrow morning from Jaffrey, New Hampshire.’

‘No wonder you want to come to New York!’ she said. ‘See you tomorrow.’

Brian thought we were crazy. ‘You’ll get knifed walking down the street,’ he said. No worse, I thought, than staying here.

Maggie made us feel welcome in her long, narrow apartment.

The kids loved being free of the cousins and feeling like they were on a train. The next morning, I got up early and asked Rick to look after the kids while I went to Bloomingdales. To me, Bloomingdales was iconic of New York. It had featured in so many novels I’d read, I just knew it was the place to take my sweaters.

I walked into the department store, carrying my eight sweaters in a not-too-elegant bag. I found the knitwear department and approached a daunting saleswoman, suddenly feeling every bit the country bumpkin. Everyone in the store was immaculately turned out in layers of make-up, high heels and sharp, tailored suits. A glimpse in a mirror showed a bag lady staring back at me.

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘my name’s Hillary and I come from Scotland.’

I already sounded ridiculous. ‘I’d like to see the knitwear buyer, please.’

‘The knitwear buyer? I’m afraid she’s busy.’

‘When will she be free?’

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‘I’m afraid she’ll be busy all day.’

‘But I have to see her today. I’ve come all this way. I’m leaving tomorrow and I just have to see her before I leave.’

‘I’m sorry, but you can’t just walk in here and demand to see the buyer. She’s a very busy and important person. You should have made an appointment. Anyway, why do you need to see her so desperately?’

‘I have some sweaters I want to show her.’

‘Well, this isn’t the way it works, not at all. You have to have an appointment or exhibit at one of the shows, the New York Prêt would be the best.’

‘Thank you, I’ll bear that in mind for next time. But right now I have to see the buyer. I know she’ll be interested in what I have.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘why not just show me?’

‘Okay,’ I opened the bag and spilled the sweaters out onto the counter. ‘These four are hand spun and hand knitted. I dye the yarn using natural dyes. These four are hand knitted from onehundred-per-cent cashmere.’

She picked up each sweater, examining them carefully. ‘Wait here,’ she said, ‘I’ll go and see if I can find Miss Goldman.’

While she was gone I looked carefully at every sweater on display. There was a corner devoted to British hand-knit designers.

All the sweaters were colourful, complicated and beautifully knitted. I glanced at the prices and nearly fell over. They were hundreds of dollars, and a few cost over a thousand. I hadn’t quite recovered when Miss Goldman appeared.

‘Hello,’ she said. We looked at each other in alarm. She was stick thin, encased in lycra-hugging black, everything dark but for the vivid red mouth. ‘I’m told you have some interesting sweaters here. I hope so. This is against all my rules, you know.’

She moved toward the counter where my garments lay together expectantly, picked up a hand-spun cardigan with horn buttons and said nothing for a long time.

‘How did you make this?’ she eventually asked. I explained the whole procedure. ‘Very artisan,’ she said. Next she looked at the cashmere. ‘And this? I must say, I’ve never seen anything like it.’

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‘I have the cashmere specially plied for me. They’re knitted from modified 1940s patterns.’

‘Nice,’ she said, ‘very nice. How many can you make by Christmas?’

‘I can’t make any by Christmas. They take forever.’

‘Well then, when? How many?’

I picked a number at random. ‘Let’s say sixty by March.’ I hoped she wouldn’t notice I was sweating.

‘That’s not a seasonal norm; we’ll be moving into summer then.

But okay, what price are they?’

What price? Actually, they’re priceless, I longed to say. The cashmere is enormously expensive, the knitting takes ages because of the fine needles, and then every garment has to be hand washed in the sink, rinsed in the freezing stream, dragged by boat to Arnisdale for five minutes fluffing in the tumble dryer (not enough current at Li) and dragged back to Li to be dried on electric blankets in the loft, by which time it’s often picked up a speck of dirt and the whole procedure has to be repeated. Not to mention that the electricity stops whenever the stream freezes, and the loch is often impassable for days.

But what buyer cared a hoot about the problems of production; it wouldn’t have mattered to them if ten people had died in the manufacturing process. The product was either correctly priced and desirable or it wasn’t.

‘The hand-spun sweaters are £80 and the cashmere ones are £120.’

Miss Goldman did a quick calculation, trebling the prices and converting to dollars. ‘That should be okay,’ she said. ‘Come into my office and I’ll write out an order.’

I went with Miss Goldman to the forty-third floor. ‘Make sure you use the same buttons you used on these cardigans. I like the horn on the hand-spun and those dear little ivory hearts on the cashmere. Oh, and I don’t want to see these sweaters in any other store in New York.’

After Bloomingdales, I was almost incoherent. All I could think about were the sixty sweaters and the bloody buttons. How 154

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on earth was I going to duplicate those ‘dear little ivory hearts’ I’d found on an ancient cardigan in the gypsy yard in Inverness amongst a mountain of old rags where I’d also found Rick’s plusfour tweed suit? Brilliant as the source of all my favourite things, it was impossible to find another sixty identical cardigans. And how would I find a whole bunch of new knitters so quickly?

Back at home, Rick asked for a sample heart from the cardigan and disappeared into his boatshed for hours. ‘Making buttons,’ he said when I asked what he was doing in there for so long. And he was. Two days later he emerged with handfuls of the most perfect creamy ivory heart-shaped buttons made from an acrylic resin.

He’d taken a mould from the original and could now produce as many as I liked. The kids and I loved them and the delightful clickety-clack sound they made as we lifted handfuls and let them rain down into a lake of hearts.

It nearly killed us all, but by the end of March, all sixty sweaters were beautifully packed and ready for the shippers to collect from Arnisdale. A proud moment. If ever I got paid, it would constitute a great leap forward. I needed the money to buy more cashmere.

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Twenty Once again, I was getting sharp pains in my lower back, and I’d skipped a couple of periods. Yet I’d long since stopped spinning and had lent my wheel to the woman spinning for me in Arnisdale.

‘D’you know, I think I might be pregnant again,’ I told Rick.

‘You can’t be, what about that coil?’

‘Yeah, I know, but it feels like I’m pregnant.’ I went and had the test at the local doctor’s surgery, and it came back negative. Both the doctor and Rick thought that perhaps it really meant I wanted another child. But I didn’t want another child. And the pain in my back got worse.

One afternoon, the kids and I were baking gingerbread men and I’d just boiled a bunch of beetroots from the garden. Rick was up at the dam, checking to see if there was some obstruction to the inlet pipe. Occasionally small stones or even a fish blocked the system.

I reached out and picked up a beetroot, but before it reached my mouth, I felt and thought I heard an explosion. It took a moment for me to realise that it was inside my own body. It registered as a cartoon image SPLAT. Everything went into slow motion. The ceiling tilted. An old coffee stain on the wall, where Rick once long 157

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ago had thrown a cup and I’d always meant to repaint, loomed out at me accusingly as I fell backwards. What should I do with the beetroot that was in my hand on its way to my mouth? If I dropped it, it would make a huge mess on the carpet, and be there forever like another coffee stain, imprinted with horrible memories. I lifted my hand (in slow motion) and put the beetroot in my mouth. I looked at the kids and saw fear in their eyes.

‘Go and tell Rick,’ I only just managed to splutter, ‘that he must come quickly… my stomach…’

Leif took Zoë’s hand and directed her toward the door. I heard them slip into their wellies and bang the door shut before running off up the hill. The dam was quite a distance from the house, across difficult ground for short little legs. I lay dreading that they would return to find me dead. It had been raining heavily for days.

The burn was in full spate. I pictured their little bodies tumbling over the rocks, being carried downstream into the gaping loch, disappearing under its cruel surface. Quick, I have to rescue them.

But when I tried to move, I was paralysed.

When at last they returned, there I still was, breathing; their own little chests heaving from exertion and fright.

‘He says,’ Leif panted, ‘that he can’t do anything if you have a tummy ache.’ It was obvious that this was not the right response.

By this time I’d crushed the beetroot, but was unable to swallow; it dripped from my mouth in a coagulating red stream. I was no longer able to talk, but the tiniest gesture of my hand sent the kids scurrying back up the hill.

This time Rick returned immediately and we all knew there was no time to lose. Poor little Leif and Zoë. Poor Rick; he looked terrified. The kids gathered the waterproofs and held my hand as Rick carried me in his arms to the shore and lay me down on the seaweed while he went to get the boat off the mooring.

It started to rain, softly at first, and then heavily. Lying on the bottom of the boat, I looked up at the sky. It looked so beautiful, so big, the dark and the light all shifting around and mingling, and then suddenly it wasn’t there at all, nothing was there, and then it came back and I could see the children’s faces, huge and anxious, 158

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leaning over me, and the totem figure of Rick standing so tall, so straight. The boat pulled into the shore and he lifted me out and tried to make a little nest of the waterproofs at the back of the Morris Minor, parked on a siding on the mainland. He drove the ten miles to the doctor’s surgery in Glenelg.

When it was all over, I wrote to Ewalda.

3 March 1983 Dear Ewalda, You’d be justified in thinking that I make a habit of this sort of thing. This time it’s The Tale of an Ectopic Pregnancy.

It started at Li (poor kids saw it all) with a great eruption; an internal explosion. It was as if I’d been hit by a bullet.

By the time we got to the doctor’s surgery in Glenelg, I had lost so much internal blood; they told me about five pints.

The poor doctor himself looked ill when Rick carried me in. His wife immediately whisked Rick off somewhere and took the kids to the house of some school friends. Two local nurses arrived and between them all they tried to find a vein to transfuse me. But all my veins had collapsed. The atmosphere was tense. I felt like I could almost see it; little sparkly molecules all jostling around bumping into one another. To my astonishment, the two nurses retreated to a corner and started to cry. They tried to be quiet but I could hear their sobs.

‘Um,’ I said, by now feeling completely sharp and extremely articulate, as if I was experiencing everything with exaggerated clarity like a hyperrealist painting, ‘am I going to die?’

‘I think you might,’ the doctor replied shakily. I was touched by his honesty.

‘Then could you please call Rick?’ For some reason (this bit of it was rather dreamlike) I felt compelled to tell Rick that he should marry again soon. I wanted the kids to have a mother. God knows why this, particularly; Rick was always a wonderful father, but there it was!

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‘I will,’ the doctor whispered, ‘after I try one more thing.

But I need your co-operation.’ We looked at one another as if we were both naked, conspirators. Hard to explain, but it was extraordinary. ‘I’m going to cut your jugular vein.’ He glanced over at the two huddling nurses. ‘When I do this, a fountain of blood will spurt from the side of your neck.

I need you to put your finger over the cut while I insert the drip.’ There was a long silence. ‘It’s the last resort.’ He looked shaky. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to manage that?’

I think it was at this point that I left my body. But my consciousness was stronger than ever it had been. I experienced myself as if I were on the ceiling looking down at my body. It lay there, quite a separate thing, but a thing toward which I felt absolute responsibility and empathy.

Just before the cut, (I think it must’ve been before the cut, but it’s hard to be accurate; time was of another order) I felt myself flying through a tight, dark tunnel – a cinematic experience with sophisticated lighting and whooshy sound effects. At the end of it was a strong light. I couldn’t work out if it was the beginning or the end of something. I’d never heard anything about this tunnel stuff before, and I’d probably have been sceptical if I had. But anyway, I’d just got to that bit before the light and was drawn up sharp. I knew then with an absolute certainty that if I resisted, if I was afraid, I’d enter hell, but if I embraced it... well, I never found out. Not for now, anyway. Just then the doctor told me to put my finger on the spot and I was whisked away from... heaven? Whoosh… back to the here and now, all too graphic and REAL. Then I actually felt the saline solution entering my body, winding its way through my veins like a lovely, cool stream. I looked across at the crying nurses now smiling, and the doctor now trembling. I felt for a moment as if something precious had been snatched away from me, a sort of anticlimax, followed rapidly by a brief shame that evolved into wild hilarity.

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my blood type in a helicopter from Inverness. Now that the crisis had been averted and the blood was being fed into my veins, I saw him and my doctor engaging in a little squabble about whether I should be taken to Inverness by helicopter or ambulance. It seemed the surgeon was top dog now, but I was cross to see my doctor’s heroic moment eclipsed. To be honest, I’d always considered that doctor a pompous arse, but now I truly loved him.

In the end, Rick and I (the kids must have still been with the other family), went by ambulance to the hospital in Inverness, where I was hoovered out and my fallopian tube tidied up. They didn’t want to let me out of hospital, and in truth, I wasn’t that keen to leave (déjàs vu’s) but the hospital is miles from our house and far from the kids, so Rick has arranged that we borrow an empty holiday house in Arnisdale and stay on the mainland until I’m well enough to go back home.

So here we are now. And I have to tell you, it’s VERY strange indeed. I feel as if I got snatched back when I was halfway to heaven (no, I don’t actually believe in heaven or any of that stuff) except I can’t quite get back. I think those heaven and hell people call it limbo. I must say that as metaphors these images now make perfect sense to me.

Anyway, everyone keeps coming to tell me how sorry they are, but I don’t feel sorry at all. I’m delighted to have had such an amazing experience. I’m just sorry Rick and the kids had to go through all that, and actually they’re still having a hard time with me. I must be a nightmare.

The very thought of domesticity makes me feel sick. They seem to be hungry all the time and all I want is to go to Switzerland and live in Thomas Mann’s sanatorium in The Magic Mountain and breathe thin air. I’m sure it won’t last long, but for now it’s a bit weird, and irritating I imagine, for the people around me, especially Rick who’s been so wonderful. But I think it might be okay for the kids now, being on the mainland. I’m still here and they 161

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can ride their bikes along the flat road and visit the few kids in the village.

Please, please, don’t tell my parents. There’s not much point in them knowing. They’d only worry, and the last thing I need is my mother rushing over here. Anyway, I’m now on the road to getting well, and longing to be back home. I look across the loch and can see the wan sun slowly swallowing a bit more of the shadow every day.

And you? How is David’s business going? And the kids, and Cape Town and all? It all feels very far away from me just now. But not you.

Love, Hillary

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Twenty-one Later that year, Rick and the kids went to visit his family on Cape Cod. Since the ectopic pregnancy, life at Li had been good.

Nothing like a near-death experience to make one appreciate life.

While they were away, I was to hold the fort at the croft, milking the tin-eyed goats and feeding the rabbits, guinea-pigs, chickens, cat and a charmless new dog. Rick had loaned our trustworthy collie, Ben, to a crofter on the other side to sire some pups, in exchange for which I’d been left with the unattractive Sascha.

There were also cows, eight of them, who wandered off across the craggy mountains and needed to be herded in the evening and fed with hay, as well as one sick cow in the shed. It was early summer, my favourite time of year; the midges hadn’t really got going yet, but the bluebells were in their prime – the sky, the water, the fields all blue.

‘Don’t worry,’ Rick said with a farmer’s pragmatism, ‘the cow will either get better or die by the time we leave.’ Meanwhile, the poor animal was bedded down on a pile of sacks in the boatshed, dead heavy and unable to move. I’d been avoiding the situation; the cow looked too huge and sad when I squeezed past her on my 163

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way in and out of the shed. But as the days crept by and she made no progress – she neither died nor improved – it seemed sensible that I start taking an active interest in this cow whose fate was soon to be left in my sole charge.

I’d never been entirely on my own at Li and was suddenly overwhelmed by a mounting feeling of frightened exhilaration.

Two days before D-day, I went with Rick to the boatshed to meet my nemesis. The cow, I learnt, blew up to twice its size. Rick showed me how to straddle it as if riding a horse, then stab it with a huge needle and proceed to pump the rotten gas from her distended belly, using my legs as a sort of bellows. The stinking gas filled the shed, my legs shivered with exhaustion and I almost fainted as the charmless dog nipped at my heels. The cow rolled her eyes in misery. Once the poor thing had been deflated to something approaching normal size, she then had to be fed gallons of a sloppy oatmeal-and-water solution prepared in advance. Why didn’t Rick just put a bullet to her head? He must have thought there was a chance the cow might recover. For the next two days I practised under Rick’s amused supervision, bracing myself morning and evening for the ordeal from hell.

‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ the kids called, waving and blowing kisses as the boat shrank into the distance, my heart sinking as it disappeared into the troughs of the waves, only to crest again a little smaller each time, until the children were no longer to be seen, only Rick, a vertical blur at the prow. And then they were gone.

I took a deep breath and looked around at this landscape I knew so well. Now that I was alone, everything took on a shivering edge. The wind, which had been skidding about all day, suddenly picked up, throwing up water devils that darted helter-skelter in unpredictable directions across the loch’s surface. Behind me, it raced through the tops of the Scots pines, ash and elder, scattering branches and blossoms.

It was time now to take hold of Sascha, walk out to where the rest of the cows were grazing and bring them back for the night.

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I was still wearing my ballet pumps. I drifted back to the house for my wellies. The dog was pacing back and forth on the grass in front of the rabbit-run, echoing the rabbits’ every move. The garden spiralled out from the house, suggesting a certain domesticity, but beyond the fence was that wild place, that mountain rising three thousand feet directly behind the house, the ground lumpy, brackeny and filled with those boggy patches I always feared I’d disappear into. But whenever I remembered to look closely, the barren landscape transformed itself into a Persian carpet of wild orchids, berries, starry moss, strange lichens and campanulas.

Sundews, like the jewelled sea urchins and anemones in the rock pools of my childhood, reached out their sticky tentacles to lure and snare their prey.

That first day on my own with the cow was surreal. I felt so small against its huge haunches. I got to grips with the puncturing and bellowing, and steeled myself against fainting, imagining what it might have been like being gassed in the trenches. But I still needed to feed the poor creature with buckets of sloppy oatmeal, ramming bottlefuls down its throat as it looked back helpless and accusing, streams of goo oozing from its sad mouth.

By now I’d formed an attachment to the miserable creature, and apart from the practical measures, I began spending hours trying to coax her to recovery with words of love. I was determined to get her back on her feet. In between cow maintenance, I yelled at the goats who deliberately teased and tricked me, kicking over the buckets of freshly squeezed milk, their square yellow eyes laughing. I didn’t mind, I loved the goats. But when the demented dog bit me on one of our herding outings, I did mind, and resolved that he had to go. This ridiculous creature would stand on the rocks barking, hypnotised by the waves as the tide came in, until only his head was afloat on the surface like John the Baptist.

I worked in the garden, pushing wheelbarrow loads of seaweed up from the shore, squeezing again past the sickly cow on my way through the boatshed. The garden was slowly taking shape. I passed the irises, bluer than the bluebells, bending with the gusts.

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around the base of each plant, every gesture feeling singular and deliberate, heightened somehow by my being alone.

Before Rick left, we’d made a plan with our postman, Willie, that should an emergency arise, I would reach him through the mountain rescue radio system to which we were both connected.

On my fifth day alone, the cow died. I was devastated, but also somewhat relieved that the whole sorry business was over. It was the beginning of what promised to be a long hot spell, and Rick and the kids weren’t due back for another two weeks.

I contacted Willie on the radio. ‘Willie, it’s Hillary, over.’

‘Och, how are you doing lassie? Over.’

‘I’m just fine, Willie, but the cow she...’

‘The coo, is she better? Over.’

‘No, she’s over. Over.’ I couldn’t resist. ‘And Willie, if it’s okay, I’m going to be needing your help. Over.’

‘Och lassie, I’ll be coming over with the mail soon enough.

Over.’

Willie was a striking man, square and rugged with iron-grey hair. Born and bred in Arnisdale, he’d gone off soldiering during the Second World War, returned to marry Christine, and was now very much the village patriarch. He was full of stories about the old days, and I never quite knew when he was referring to his own lifetime or to two hundred years ago. It seemed to make little difference to him. Everything in the end was a story.

The word was that Willie had been wild in his youth, a fighter and drinker of epic proportions. His nose was large and squashed from his fighting days and his ears equally boxed, yet his body was alert, strong but very relaxed. He rarely bothered to put in his dentures, so in conjunction with his Gaelic west coast accent, it was hard to understand what he was saying. He’d been the postman for these parts for many decades, collecting the mail in Kyle and delivering it to all the scattered villages on his way back to Arnisdale, from where, three times a week, he’d get into his little clinker outboard dingy and deliver the mail to our lone house on the far side of the loch. On one such occasion he passed a family of killer whales, each one the size of an aeroplane, but 166

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failed to mention them although he’d been sitting drinking tea in our house for hours.

‘Willie,’ I said, having gone outside and seen them gliding, crashing and blowing close to the shoreline in front of the garden gate, ‘how could you not have mentioned these whales? You must have seen them on the way over.’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘they came close to my boat, but I didn’t want to mention it, lassie. I thought you’d get a fright and not want to go on the water again.’

Willie was quite sure there were monsters in the loch, relatives of the Loch Ness monster, so a mere bunch of whales evidently didn’t faze him. He then told me that at the height of his drinking days, the Arnisdale men used to come to our side of the loch to help gather the sheep for one of the crofters who grazed his flock here.

‘We’d finished with the gathering one day, and were sitting around eating our pieces,’ he told me. ‘It was summer and as you know, not going to get dark for ages, so I wandered up the mountain behind your house, and there, quite unexpectedly, I found God.’ ‘What? God spoke to you behind our very house, Willie? That’s fantastic.’ I was really moved by his experience, especially as legend had it that he’d suddenly changed from a hard-drinking man into this lovely sober man I now knew.

Willie came over in his boat and we looked at the cow in the boatshed. She was undeniably dead. We went up to the house and had tea. ‘This is what we’ll do,’ said Willy, ‘we’ll open the shed doors wide and I’ll tie a rope around the cow’s hooves. The other end I’ll tie to my boat and then I’ll start the engine and…’ He didn’t finish the sentence, but I got the picture.

After tea we walked around looking at this and that, and finally went back down to the boatshed, where the catastrophe of the cow remained unchanged, but for a few more flies buzzing around.

Willie got some rope from his boat, tied the cow’s hind feet together and then jumped back in the boat and started the engine.

The boat started to move forward, while I stood stricken by the side of the cow. Its body slowly creaked and twisted, jolting and lurching out of the shed, then scraped across the stony beach. The 167

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boat’s engine spluttered and nearly seized, the ropes straining and shivering as first the legs, then the distended belly and lastly the head hit the water, cutting a deep furrow through the waves. Willie motored further and further from the shore until he deemed it deep enough to cut the rope, and let the animal sink into the world below. I watched the water open its jaws wide and swallow the carcass whole, like a snake devouring a goat. Circles rippled out from the centre and then there was nothing. Willie gave a last wave and disappeared back to his side of the loch, leaving me to what suddenly felt like a vast, empty space.

I walked along the shore, looking at the seaweed and the stones. The sun was now out and there was nothing lovelier than the changing light sparkling and dancing across the water with the clouds unwinding like so many ribbons across the sky.

I returned to the house, passing the rabbit hutch on the way.

‘C’mon Bugsy,’ I said, scooping her up in my arms, ‘come inside and have some tea with me.’ We came in and I put the kettle on.

I found myself putting out two cups and started to laugh. Bugs dashed about the house for a while and then leapt onto my lap.

I thought of Willie going up the mountain, right here behind me, and coming down a changed man. I breathed deeply and took in the Highland air.

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Twenty-two The New York Prêt was the most important fashion fair, as Miss Bloomingdale had pointed out on my first trip to the States five years earlier. Since then I’d presented my collection there every year. It was attended by all but the most exclusive buyers (who you had to arrange to see privately), and sprawled over several floors of the Coliseum, a huge convention centre on Columbus Circle.

Clothing companies from all over the world came to hawk their wares, herded together before being led to the slaughter.

Most years, I shared a stand with my friend Valerie, another knitwear designer who lived in Cornwall. She was American, the daughter of an ex-New York cop, who had inherited her father’s street smarts and knew how to operate. But I was in trouble that year. I could barely open my mouth without bursting into tears.

‘Fucking pull yourself together,’ she said, as we met up at Heathrow Airport. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’

‘I think I’ve been in isolation too long. I’ve forgotten how you do all this,’ I snivelled.

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brother and he’s getting us some coke. That’ll sort you out. Okay?’

‘I’ve never taken cocaine before,’ I said. ‘I’ve been around people who take cocaine and they’re insufferable.’

‘Yeah, well you’re pretty insufferable right now.’

The thing was, life at Li was becoming untenable. Leif would soon be ready for high school and the nearest one to us was in Plockton; a small school with a terrible reputation that was too far away for him to get back and forth every day. He would have to board, and none of us wanted that. Besides which, I was falling apart.

‘You’re never content,’ Rick had said. ‘It would be the same wherever you were.’

‘Maybe, but Li’s extreme. It’s the most isolated place in Britain, or is it the whole of Europe? That might have a lot to do with it.’

‘Yeah? Well, it’s not Sea Point.’

‘No, thank God it’s not. I didn’t go to all the trouble of leaving Sea Point just to recreate it somewhere else. But wanting a toilet and friends is pretty universally accepted as reasonable. Having a toilet isn’t bourgeois, and having friends is... is... socially sane behaviour.’

We’d had this conversation over and over. Toilets became a symbol for all sorts of things that simply weren’t working. But short of leaving Li, I saw no solution, and leaving somehow didn’t feel like an option. I tried to talk some of this through with Valerie.

‘We’re here to sell knitwear,’ she said. ‘Let’s just go out there and sell. Believe me, the coke will work.’

It did, up to a point. For short bursts I was deluded into believing that all was well. But seeing my samples exposed to the public for the first time was always the moment of truth. Surrounded by mountains in my fuchsia workshop at Li, they had looked delicious, but now in the unforgiving New York marketplace, under the harsh Coliseum lighting, my doubts returned. Were the colours right for this season? Were they shapely enough or too shapely? Were they dowdy, splashy, sexy or not sexy enough? Or maybe just ugly?

‘Oh God, Valerie, I don’t even care if I don’t sell anything,’ I said, ‘I just want it to be over.’

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‘Well, I do care. I have to sell, and your hanging around here won’t help. So go and… oh, just go!’

The buyer from Saks Fifth Avenue was approaching. I knew Valerie was right.

‘Listen, I’m going... If they like any of my stuff, all the information’s on the label.’

I turned myself into the tea girl, going from stand to stand offering to fetch tea, coffee or food for the other vendors. Everyone was very busy selling their knitwear and pleased to have drinks delivered, while I was equally pleased to have something to occupy me during the show hours.

After the show, Valerie and I had private appointments with the important buyers from the most exclusive stores, who would never deign to show their faces at the Prêt. These appointments were like gold dust and usually took place at the tops of skyscrapers, but involved deeply compromising fawning and hundreds of phone calls on our part. By the time we arrived, lugging our heavy suitcases full of samples, I felt ready to throw myself from the building, while the buyer sat cool, immaculate and often indifferent. Sometimes, to my amazement, we’d be offered lines of coke. I wasn’t sure of the protocol. Was it rude to decline? Fortunately, I had a desirable product; the sweaters relied more on their innate qualities than my charm, which, if I even had any, quickly waned under these conditions. Valerie, however, glittered on these occasions.

After New York I’d arranged to stay with Rick’s mother on Cape Cod. His father had died and I thought it would be good to see her. She had always been the essence of discretion.

As soon as I arrived, she took one look at me and put me to bed. ‘Poor you,’ she said, ‘having to do all that. New York’s a wicked place.’ She herself looked pared down, a distillation of her former self.

I stayed in bed most of the three days I was there. She brought me food and didn’t ask anything but the most general questions, and then only about the kids. I kept thinking of my own mother and how much worse she’d always made everything when I arrived home in a questionable state. Since the death of Rick’s father, his 171

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mother’s life had taken on a new austerity, something I was sure had always been there, but that she’d put aside to indulge her husband. In the wifely stakes, I could see I didn’t measure up.

She unwittingly made me feel like overripe fruit. No wonder Rick thought I was spoilt.

Before leaving for New York, I phoned an old South African friend with whom I’d grown up, but hadn’t seen in years. She now lived in New York with a new husband, and had changed her name from Denise to Dunya.

‘Hi Dunya, it’s Hillary.’

‘Hillary Lipstick!’ she roared. ‘What are you doing in New York? Why are you not with me, here, now? It’s Rosh Hashanah tonight. You gotta come. Now.’ ‘I’m not in New York, I’m at my mother-in-law’s in Cape Cod.’ ‘You’re married? That’s crazy. Anyway, get here! We’re all gonna be at my parents’ tonight, everyone: Stanley, his wife, his daughter, the Russian relatives, Myra, Raymond, I don’t know, everyone. I know there’s a flight from Hyannis. I’ll collect you from the airport. Phone me back with the time.’

‘Wow, I didn’t know your parents had also moved to New York. When did they leave South Africa?’

‘Ja, they bought a fabulous apartment on Fifth Avenue. They’re very rich now. Remember Annie who used to work for us in Cape Town? She’s here, too.’

‘Thing is, my plane back to London’s tomorrow night. I was going to come in the morning. I thought I’d just phone and say hi.’

‘No, no, no. You gotta come now. Tell your mother-in-law you gotta go see your sister. I’m your sister, remember. God, remember the wonderful times we had in Avenue Le Sueur? In spite of all that weird shit, we had a great childhood!’

‘Okay Dunya, I’m going to try. I’ll phone and check the flights and ring you back.’

Rick’s mom took me to the airport. I felt miserable. I’d not been able to give her anything and now I was worried about when I’d next see her.

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open. She was flamboyantly dressed in chic clothes, her hair just as I remembered it, tumbling wildly but artfully around her beautifully shaped face. She whisked me straight off to her parents’ apartment where the entire extended family were gathered, well groomed and expensively clothed. On the walls of the apartment were the familiar paintings I’d found so compelling as a kid, including a huge portrait of her dad, Raymond, that hung in a prominent spot. I’d not seen the Sagovs in years, but they behaved as if we’d never left Sea Point, as if life had been carrying on as it always had before we all left.

We were shouted to the dinner table, which looked as it always had on Rosh Hashanah; I recognised the silver, the soup tureen and all that traditional food I’d hated as a child, symbolising the different meanings of the Jewish New Year: the challah, honey, apples, carrots, pomegranates and much, much more, all elegantly laid out on a shimmering white tablecloth.

There was lots of noise as everyone attacked the food, which to my surprise was delicious. Far from being a time of introspection and seeking forgiveness for transgressions, this bunch was celebrating their good fortune – clearly no one had transgressed. So here I was, Hillary Lipsig again, in a past I’d spent so much energy trying to avoid. It felt okay, even reassuring. Nobody asked me anything about where I was living, what I was doing, and whether I had a husband or even children. If they alluded to any of these things in passing, they were in far too much hurry to wait for an answer. Instead they overwhelmed me with the latest gossip about people we knew in Cape Town whose names I’d all but forgotten.

I stayed the night with Dunya in her stylish apartment on West End Avenue and 93rd, amid numerous paintings by the South African artist Norman Catherine, and some by Dunya’s new husband. I’d never met him. He wasn’t in New York that night, but I fell in love with his paintings.

‘You’ll love Evert,’ she said, ‘We’re going to come and stay with you in Scotland. Forever. But why are you living in Scotland?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t that an odd place to live?’

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Town as possible,’ I said. ‘But also, it’s beautiful.’

‘Beautiful, shmeutable! Come live here in New York.’ She piled my plate with warm bagels, cream cheese and smoked salmon. We drank steaming black coffee, New York style. We rushed in and out of lots of new galleries, talking more than looking, and then she drove me that same afternoon to JFK International Airport.

I settled into the narrow seat and took out my book, but I was too restless to read. The plane was full. I could still feel the Sagovs roaring around me, so different from the Scots. It had been years since I’d spent time with friends from my past in any context other than visiting South Africa. The Sagovs were at once intimately familiar and oddly alien, as if I myself had split into two. But what perfect timing it had been to run into them now. I laughed out loud. How confident they were, every member of the family so sure of themselves, their lives and their place in the universe. It probably wouldn’t have occurred to them for a second that I didn’t know who I was. To them I’d always be little Hillary from Cape Town. Good. I’d hold onto that.

I’d only been away for eight days but it felt like an eternity. Seeing the kids again made me realise just how deeply I’d missed them, and how crazy I must have been to forget that I was their mother above all else. They bounced around me as we piled into the boat.

I couldn’t get enough of them. The low, overcast sky pressed down on us as the boat crashed through the waves, drenching us all with spray. I looked across at Li. It seemed impossible that I lived here, that any of us lived here. It was autumn. Everything was brown and bleak and unforgiving. I tried to imagine the Sagovs shitting in the stream, Dunya’s raucous laugh echoing through the silence.

Rick was standing up in the boat steering, his eyes sharply focused on Li. ‘I think it’s time I went to live in Edinburgh,’ I said, ‘before I go really mad.’ I didn’t know exactly what I was facing with such a move, but suddenly my body went from dense to airily light. The inside of my head crawled with pins and needles. I was scared, but fear always filled me with a perverse excitement. It meant that something was going to change. I climbed out of the boat and 174

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dragged the suitcases of samples up the beach. The kids helped.

Rick went to put the boat on the mooring. He looked ashen. The Rayburn was lit and the house was gleaming and cosy.

‘Look,’ Zoë said, ‘we made you a cake. Rick helped.’

I didn’t have a clue how to go about buying a house in Edinburgh.

I hardly believed that we had the money. But with the knitwear business becoming more and more successful, and nothing much but books to spend it on, a pile of money had accumulated. Rick ordered the Edinburgh property pages and we ticked potential three-bedroom flats.

When it looked like there were enough places to view, I hitched to Edinburgh and stayed with some people who had a holiday house in Arnisdale. They’d always sung Edinburgh’s praises. It looked sombre, I thought, but rather beautiful with its grand, grey buildings. I couldn’t believe we could afford any of the places I looked at, flats with high-flying ceilings, spacious drawing rooms, floor-to-ceiling windows with extravagantly deep skirting boards and lavish plaster mouldings, not to mention more than one toilet.

I trailed around Edinburgh looking at one place after another, without much idea of how to assess either the location or even the architecture. The last time I’d lived in a city was as an irresponsible hippy fourteen years earlier. But by the end of my search I’d whittled the choice down to two possibilities.

Then I hitched home again. By then the kids, Rick and I had all decided that Edinburgh might be the best solution to the school dilemma, but it wasn’t yet clear whether Rick would be part of the move. Leaving Li completely was never going to be part of the equation. His identity was far too embedded in the place. But he drove down to Edinburgh soon after I returned, and chose what he thought was the better of the two flats, a two-storey Georgian flat in Carlton Street, the heart of the New Town (which actually turned out to be the old town, built toward the end of the 18th century), close to the Water of Leith.

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which throw the most delicate shadows from the filigreed iron railings that run along the balcony, across the opposite wall. It’s a pity we need furniture, the room’s so perfect as it is.

The flat is vast. I can’t believe we own such a place. We have four bedrooms, one of which I’ll use as a workroom.

There’s also a utility room next to the workroom for washing the sweaters, joy oh joy, plus another bathroom, two toilets, a kitchen, the ice-rink drawing room with all the electricity we need, and even a shamelessly monumental Georgian stairwell capped by a glass cupola. What luxury.

We’ve enrolled the kids in what looks like a great school just five minutes’ walk away, and already they appear to have made friends with the neighbourhood kids. At nine and eleven they seem a good age for this move. It’s quite sweet to watch them adjust to their new environment, though Zoë, I think, misses Rick a lot. She’s turning out to be very like him, thoughtful and a little mysterious, but apparently looks like me (same eyes), although she’ll be much taller – already her legs are miles high. Leif (Rick’s blue eyes) is probably more like me… make of that what you will! What’s Caellum like these days? Which of you is he most like? He must be nine by now.

Of course, city life is familiar to me, but it’s ten years we’ve been living at Li and so all sorts of odd things happen – I’m so used to peeing wherever and whenever I want that I have to catch myself from squatting in the street, and I’m forever locking myself out of the house. But I love being able to come and go without being dependent on Rick for everything. Part of me feels so liberated.

I think I was going mad at Li. One night, I found myself walking fully clothed into the loch (it was bloody freezing) and Rick had to come and drag me out – altogether humiliating, infuriating, and just too, too sad and horrible for both of us. Everything got wretchedly distorted. If I cursed the weather, he took it as a personal criticism; if I 178

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said I was lonely, he thought I was blaming him. Maybe I was, I don’t know anymore, but it all got too unbalanced.

I think I was just sad, and when I’m sad, I need to argue, especially when I’m not sure what’s happening. I got habituated to it as a kid, my family were always screaming and shouting at one another, but Rick hates all that DIY psychobabble, if that’s what I was doing, and I have to admit, it got us nowhere. So now we’re trying something new.

The kids and I will go back and forth on the bus (seven hours door to door, with guinea pigs and the rabbit) for long weekends and school holidays, and Rick will come down with the dogs whenever he can. I’m sure (mostly) we still love one another, so we’ll see if this works any better. So far it feels promising.

I don’t suppose we can live in an empty house forever, so I’ll have to start shopping soon. We don’t want to take anything from Li, but want it to remain exactly as it is. Now that I’m no longer an exile from the world, I know I’ll love being there.

Please write and tell me what’s happening. Sounds pretty hectic and horrible there, with one explosion after another.

Much love, Hillary It started to work well. Rick set up Li so that he was able to leave for short periods at a time and join us in the new Carlton Street flat. On holidays and long weekends the kids and I made the crazy journey, laden with plants, the rabbit, guinea pigs and food, first to Glasgow, where we changed buses, and then on to Sheil Bridge, where Rick met us off the bus. Ironically, Rick built a toilet in a greenhouse adjacent to the house at Li and I started in earnest to create a garden. Less intimidated by the grandeur of the landscape now that I was no longer its prisoner, I started to see it in a different light. I began planting further afield from the house with bold, long-distance vistas in mind, learning as I 179

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went along, scouring plant catalogues and obsessively visiting the botanical gardens in Edinburgh, which are close to our flat. I planted rhododendrons, azaleas and ornamental trees, shrubs and perennials, trying to imagine what it would all look like in the years to come. Rick enclosed a huge part of the mountain behind Li with a deer fence and embarked on a forestry project to plant and regenerate indigenous trees.

In Edinburgh, I set up my new workroom in an upstairs room and advertised for more knitters. They arrived in hoards, ranging fantastically in age, ability and shape. I would give them little samples to knit before doling out the expensive cashmere.

Occasionally I’d never see them again, but some were brilliant.

I kept all the old knitters, of course, with the daily parcels still sailing in and out by post.

Running a cashmere knitting business, I discovered, was deemed glamorous by a certain type of person, although it felt anything but. So I got invited to dinner parties, but never quite fulfilled the promise of my profession. I didn’t yet know how I was supposed to behave as a grown-up, and my ’60s experience in London didn’t help. Edinburgh appeared rather straight-laced, in the mould of Miss Jean Brodie, but I roamed the streets, knowing I’d soon find my new role. I thought nostalgically of the MacDonalds on the Applecross Peninsula and Willie the postman.

The kids integrated immediately, although I knew they missed both Rick and Li. Leif built a little cart and raced around the neighbourhood with Zoë, collecting wood for our fireplace, axing it on the front steps and trawling in other kids until there were great feral gangs of them. Zoë made a special friend at school, Ben, whose parents owned a café close to our house. Soon after meeting the family, she talked them into allowing her to work in their café, collecting and washing up the dishes. It was a curious sight, this industrious little nine-year-old, but she loved working there and soon became quite a part of the scene. Sometimes when Rick returned from Li we’d all pile into the van, the kids and their friends who were attracted by the wild spirit in our family, and head off for barbecues on the beach or camping weekends in the 180

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Pentlands, roasting the meat he’d brought down from Li on big bonfires we made from driftwood.

The house slowly filled up with furniture and artefacts from the new lives we were all making. Running a business was so much easier now; I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever managed at Li. Knitters and parcels came and went. I washed the sweaters in batches in the washing machine, fluffed them up in the tumble dryer for the requisite five minutes and hung them to dry on racks in the special room. Everything hummed and purred.

The kids walked to school and I was there when they got home.

Their friends visited and were amazed that Leif and Zoë were both so tidy, carefully laying out their school clothes the night before.

Zoë told me that Leif was considered very cool at school. He played the guitar and Zoë developed a passion for the drums; we bought her a set and she took lessons. They both had the air of children used to spending time on their own: they were self-contained and independent, but reliant upon one another. Paradoxically, they could switch accents instantly, depending on the occasion. At home they spoke with traces of American/South African English, but they could slip into West Coast Highland, posh Edinburgh or their favourite – working-class Edinburgh and Glasgow, which they spoke at school and with their friends.

Sometimes I went to visit Jean and Harold at their cottage in the Borders, and occasionally I took the train to London to see my agent, haunting Bond Street and South Molton Street in search of inspiration, looking at real sweaters instead of pictures in Vogue.

Sometimes I’d even see someone in the street wearing one of mine.

One day a young girl arrived at my front door and stood on the threshold, shaking. Through the curtain of her hair I glimpsed cat-green eyes.

‘Hello,’ I said, not knowing who she was or why she was here.

‘Knitting,’ she said, ‘I’ve come about the knitting.’

‘Oh, you look so young,’ I said. ‘But come in, I’ll show you what I’m doing. What’s your name?’

‘Fiona,’ she said. ‘I’m seventeen.’ She looked like a young girl on the brink of falling into the wrong company.

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‘Well, seventeen’s old enough to knit.’ We both laughed. Her skin was so extraordinarily white I could see her veins pulsing close to the surface. She looked feverish, her forehead slightly moist. I showed her the sweaters and asked if she thought she could knit anything as fine and as complicated.

‘Yes,’ she said, fidgeting slightly, ‘I can.’ She flicked her hair back from her face and gazed around the room, moving toward the piles of sweaters and the shelves bursting with cones of coloured cashmere.

‘Good,’ I said. I gave her some cashmere and one of the patterns.

‘Let’s go and have some tea. Have you got time?’

We went downstairs and sat in the kitchen. Her eyes were fixed on a large painting that hung above the fireplace. She intertwined her fingers in and out, in and out.

‘What are you doing, I mean, besides wanting to knit?’ I asked, surprising myself.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Do you want to work for me?’

‘Oh, doing what?’ she said.

‘Well, in my office, upstairs. I need help now, making up knitting packs for the knitters, washing the sweaters when they come back from the knitters and then getting them ready for delivery to the shops.’

I hadn’t actually formulated the idea of hiring help until that moment, but I knew instantly that it was an excellent idea and that this girl, in spite of a total lack of evidence, would be perfect for the job.

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘should I come tomorrow?’

‘Sure, let’s give it a go for a week and see how we both get on.’

Fiona started to work with me part time, and quickly became full time as we both started to recognise her remarkable potential.

She proved exemplary in every way and a marvel at bookkeeping.

Now I could get through twice as much work with twice as much fun. With more time on my hands now, I started to take driving lessons. I was hopeless but determined.

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One morning the phone rang early. I heard a woman’s voice, maybe German or Italian.

‘My name is Flavia,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen your sweaters in a shop in Basle. I like them very much and I feel they would do well in Europe, especially Germany and Italy.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ I said, ‘that’s nice.’

‘Do you have representation in Europe?’

‘I don’t. I have an agent in London and I used to have one in California, but sadly she’s ill now and no longer working.’

‘Well, I wonder if I may come to Edinburgh to meet with you.’

‘Why not?’ I said, although something in her voice made me nervous.

Flavia arrived soon after her phone call. I knew immediately that I’d met someone special, but felt wary. She was Swiss. Clichéd as it was, she instantly reminded me of a Swiss Army knife. She spoke five languages fluently, was compact, designed for purpose, and sharp as hell. She was tanned with short, well-cut iron-grey hair. She was a woman for whom golf was a serious passion.

Although this particular type of European chic was very different from either a British or American sense of style, I recognised it immediately as Jil Sander meets Armani. Everything about her was expensive, in the very best of taste, all clean uncluttered lines in subdued shades; taste in all things at all times was obviously of the utmost importance to her. She adored our house, the sweaters and Edinburgh. I should have been flattered by her approval; she had the air of a woman who didn’t bestow admiration readily, but a certain chill failed to charm me.

‘So,’ she said, ‘I have a contract I’ll give you to read. You can sign it and give it to me tomorrow.’

‘Oh, I’ve never signed this sort of contract. With my other agents, we…’

‘This is the best way.’

The next day she arrived precisely on time and I suggested I take her out for lunch somewhere local.

‘Any preferences?’ I asked.

‘No, no, I’m easy.’

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We wandered out into the neighbourhood. At the first restaurant I caught her wrinkling her nose and backing toward the door. We went to another. She asked to see the menu and shook her head, her mouth pursed.

‘Okay, let’s go to Le Chien Noir. I’ve not been there but I’m told it’s excellent. Cordon Blue chef or something.’

The service was irritatingly attentive, but she loved it. She smiled and smiled. She ordered three courses, some wine and a double espresso for later. She took one bite from each course, a sip of the wine, a gulp of the coffee and declared it all first rate. She was svelte as a rapier.

‘So Hillary, have you signed?’

‘No, I’m not sure, Flavia,’ I said.

‘I thought you were interested in business.’

‘I am sort of, but…’

‘Then sign. I’ll be good for you, you’ll see.’

And she was. If not for me personally, she was certainly good for my business. The orders she got were exciting and I got to work with some creative people, but both Flavia and her clients were exacting to a fault. Until then I’d not bothered too much with presentation, believing that the sweaters themselves should speak of their excellence. Now I had to raise my game in every area.

‘You have to be a brand,’ Flavia told me.

‘Really? I thought that’s what I didn’t want to be.’

‘No, branding is the thing now. Without branding, you’re nothing.’

The sweaters were all hand knitted, so of course there was a slight variation to each garment. Wasn’t that the whole point, the charm? Evidently not. Now every one of some thirty dimensions – width, overall length, shoulder to neck, neck to waist, circumference of cuff, etc. – had to conform to the prototype. But just as there are ten ways to kill a cat, there are ten ways to measure a soft and flexible sweater. A buyer who’d changed her mind by the time the consignment arrived could always find a discrepancy if she chose to, as grounds to send them all back. It was in the contract.

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familiarity began to surface. Both were eager to make me feel as bad as possible should I not meet their almost impossible demands.

My mother, abject and whiny, threatening illness, collapse, even playing with suicide, had always told me how bad I’d feel when she was dead; Flavia’s method was to smoulder with restrained pain, her thin little body quite trembling with disappointment, particularly when asked to pay a well-overdue invoice.

‘Why, Hillary, do you do this to me? Always on about money, so tedious, so upsetting.’

‘No, Flavia, only when an invoice is very overdue and I’ve phoned you twenty times and I absolutely do need it paid.’

‘I am so sad you treat me this way. You never phone me unless it’s about work, never just to say hello.’

You’re my bloody agent, I thought, I’d never have chosen you for a friend. But just like my mother, she was always hungry for more; I could never be or do enough for her, I could never love her enough.

Prior to one of my embarrassingly endless driving lessons one morning, I read in the property pages that a flat was for sale in a particularly beautiful building I knew. Rick and I had been looking for a property to buy for months, with the idea of letting it out. It had been fun looking in different parts of town, and now I knew a whole lot more than when we’d first moved to Edinburgh. The closing date for offers was at midday. The driving instructor came to collect me at 9 a.m.

‘Hi Jim,’ I said, ‘I have a rather odd request this morning.’

‘And what, I wonder, could that be?’

‘Well, I saw this flat advertised. Could we use the driving lesson to go there? I’ll drive. I’m in a hurry.’

‘In that case, maybe I should drive.’

The agent was reluctant to show us the flat. ‘It’s pointless,’ he said. ‘We already have eight offers.’ Nevertheless, he relented.

The flat was both grand and eccentric. Unlikely twists in the passage led to one light-filled room after another. Frayed curtains fluttered slightly in the draught from ill-fitting but monumental 185

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windows. Built in 1793, all the original features remained, although covered in multiple layers of peeling wallpaper and paint. The same man had lived there alone for the past eighty years. Had he danced solo across the great sweep of boards in the bow-windowed drawing room… pottered around the large kitchen… baked bread in the old cast-iron range?

‘This is the flat I want,’ I said. ‘What must I do?’ By now, even my driving instructor was excited. He wanted me to have the flat.

I ran around the rooms one more time. ‘Oh, oh, oh! How much?

How much?’ I looked at the agent.

The system in Scotland was peculiar. Properties were advertised as ‘offers over X amount’. If you wanted to buy one, you had to put in a closed bid through a lawyer for more than the suggested price. The trick was in knowing how much more. You could lose a property by a few pounds, but you could also end up paying thousands more than necessary. Once bidding was closed, the envelopes were opened and the property went to the highest bidder.

‘Okay, Jim, I still have some of my driving lesson left. Can we use it to drive to my lawyer? He’ll help me decide how much to offer.’

‘Where are your offices?’ I asked the agent.

Jim let me drive to the lawyer. He thought it would bring good luck. By now he had a vested interest in the outcome. I promised to let him know what happened, and ran into the building.

Fortunately I was able to see the lawyer immediately. Breathlessly I explained.

‘Is this not a bit hasty?’ he said.

‘Yes. But haste is it. We haven’t long.’ I tried to get in touch with Rick, but he was in a meeting. The receptionist apologised but couldn’t disturb the meeting.

‘Okay, please ask him to call his wife back. Tell him it’s important, I’m at our lawyer.’ The lawyer meanwhile drafted an offer and arranged for a surveyor to visit the flat immediately.

Once he got the go-ahead from the surveyor, he couriered the offer over to the agent’s offices.

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what to do with myself, I walked along the river. The sun glittered sharply through the trees. I wondered if this was the kind of thing that induced epileptic fits. I longed suddenly to be at Li, walking peacefully along the river. Why did I want this flat? Why the urgency? Part of it was purely aesthetic. Yes, the flat was unique, beautiful, but maybe it was a bit more complicated. I felt as if I were in love, my heart pounding, excited, frightened. I stopped to watch the water rippling the reeds downstream, like Ophelia’s outstretched hair.

A recurring dream I’d had soon after I got to London resurfaced now as I watched the water flow by. In my dream I’d be in the customs queue, returning to Britain from somewhere else. I’d be standing there terrified, with a gaping hole in my stomach. Would they let me through? Where would I go? No home to go to. Could I stay with a friend? With whom? Where? Whether it was a dream or just my reality I couldn’t quite remember, but it didn’t much matter. The feeling of homelessness was the same. But now the offer was in. I suppose I could have had therapy, but I was buying property instead, and with luck, at the end of it I’d have something real, something I could live in or rent out; an investment. Owning one house was obviously not enough to quell my insecurity.

But what would Rick think? I walked back home, and at half past twelve the lawyer phoned to say I’d got the flat, for just a fraction over the highest bid.

‘I just bought a flat,’ I told Rick when he got home. ‘Let’s go look. You’ll love it.’

And he did.

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Twenty-four Rick started a mussel farm at Li with our friend Mick (Simpson, not Jagger), who lived five miles away along the coast. They harvested about a ton of mussels a week and sold them to Marks & Spencer. It was a labour-intensive but sustainable enterprise, and it all happened in the loch just in front of our gate. There were all sorts of hazards, of course, like red tides, which I remembered from my Cape Town days, when the water went a strange maroon colour and we couldn’t eat any shellfish.

This meant that Rick could spend much more time in Edinburgh, as they only harvested for about six months in total, scattered throughout the year. When Rick was in Edinburgh he worked on restoring the ‘driving-lesson’ flat to its original 1793 magnificence, so that we could then let it out. In the heady moment of buying it, I hadn’t been clear about its final function.

Whenever Rick was at Li now, he worked on the mussels. They grew on miles of free-floating lengths of rope that dangled from a main line, and fed themselves on algae. The really hard work was the harvesting. The kids and I helped when we were there. We’d stand on the huge platform Rick had built close to the shore, which 189

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swayed either liltingly or fiendishly, depending on the weather. Rick or Mick hauled up the ropes and dragged them, choc-a-bloc with mussels, onto the platform. The ropes were then stripped and the mussels thrown onto a machine Rick had made with rolling metal bars, which graded them into different sizes. The small ones fell through the gaps in the bars and the regular-sized ones were bagged and dropped on the mainland, just below the high-tide mark. A shellfish truck collected the bags at low tide. The kids were brilliant at it, and I could see that they’d acquired a real work ethic. Zoë worked especially hard to keep up with her brother.

By now Leif was in full control of the dinghy, which had become second nature to him. Kitted out in their waterproofs, they’d both head out into the loch, baiting creels and catching lobsters, selling them to the odd anchored yacht that harboured in our bay overnight. I’d stand on the shore and watch through my binoculars as the children approached a boat, each with a jerking but irresistible lobster in their small hands.

One school holiday the kids were at Li with Rick, but I had to remain in Edinburgh to complete a large order that was due for collection.

The doorbell suddenly rang once, twice, three times, each ring more insistent than the last. I lay down the sweater I was working on, halfway through embroidering a bird, and walked down the two flights of stairs to open the front door. There, filling the full frame, was a Sikh, his elaborate turban blazing high above eye level so that I was obliged to look up into his huge, moustached face.

‘Hi,’ he said, ‘I’m Raj.’ With two large suitcases, I noticed.

Before I had time to respond, he thrust a beefy hand forward and began advancing through the front door, forcing me backwards.

‘Hi,’ I stammered, ‘Hillary.’

‘Hillary, ah yes of course, Hillary. Jon mentioned you. You sell stuff to Diana,’ he said. ‘The Cashmere Queen, a vast empire.’

‘Hardly, but…’

‘Did he not give you advance warning of my arrival?’

‘Who?’ ‘Jon. Rick is his name. Rick, or Richard. I can’t quite remember.

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Anyway, your husband, his brother Jon, we’re great chums you know, in Delhi. He gave me the introduction.’

Dimly I remembered my brother-in-law casually mentioning that an acquaintance with whom he’d once played polo at his club in Delhi might visit Scotland, and that he’d given him our address.

‘Jon, oh yeah. But he didn’t really…’

‘Oh dear. Well, never mind, don’t worry. Here I am.’

‘In that case, I suppose you’d better come in.’

He followed me up the stairs into the kitchen, dragging his suitcases. While I made tea, he strolled around the kitchen, examining everything closely, moving on to the adjoining drawing room where he collapsed on the sofa, swamping the entire thing.

‘Fine place you have here,’ he boomed. ‘Edwardian, Georgian, Victorian?’

‘Georgian,’ I said, passing him a cup of tea. ‘Sugar?’ I asked.

‘Actually, I’m not sure if we even have any.’

‘No sugar? Really?’

‘I’ll look.’ I scuttled back to the kitchen and found a rockhard packet at the back of the cupboard. I can’t have him here, I thought, handing him the packet. ‘Listen Raj,’ I said, trying to look imposing, ‘you’d better tell me your plans, I…’ ‘Plans?’ he said in a pukka English accent I’d not heard in years.

‘Ah, well… I thought I’d stay here with you in Edinburgh, and then later… by the way, where is that brother, Rick? I presume…’

‘Rick’s in the Highlands with our children.’

‘Yes, yes that’s right. Jon mentioned you have a place in the Highlands. He said it was wonderful, I shouldn’t miss it. So perhaps after here I’ll…’

I started to laugh. Raj spilling himself into our small boat, lumbering up the shore with his two suitcases, battering across the pebbles, filling the small sitting room, not to mention the outside toilet, and Rick, apoplectic with fury, not to mention the kids. I didn’t think they’d take to Raj. ‘No, no, I don’t think so. The thing is, Raj, I’m here alone in Edinburgh because I’ve got a huge order I’m working on, with a very strict deadline, I…’ 191

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‘Oh, but you won’t have to worry about me. Just show me to the room and I’ll…’

‘The room?’

‘Yes, you know, the room I should have. What time do you have dinner here?’

‘Whoa, stop, stop right there. No dinner, absolutely no dinner.

What’s more, no lunch and no breakfast. I’m on a diet, I don’t eat and I don’t cook, house rule, golden rule.’

For the first time since he’d arrived, Raj looked a little crestfallen.

He was clearly trying to compute the phenomenon of no food.

Was it perhaps a joke? ‘No joke,’ I added.

‘Mmm,’ he sighed, obviously upset. He patted his bulging belly, momentarily a little out of control, but he soon regained his bonhomie and guffawed, ‘We’ll see, we’ll see.’

‘Listen Raj, I don’t know what Jon said, but this isn’t going to work out, really, I’m very, very busy. I need uninterrupted time to complete my work; in fact, I have to go upstairs right now. I was working when you rang. I’ll show you the spare room, you can stay for a few days and then…’ I saw his mind moving on to Li. ‘No, I don’t think the Highlands is a good idea, either. I’m not sure of Rick’s plans. Anyway, if you have nowhere else to go, you can stay for a day or two until you sort yourself out.’

I went upstairs and put on some music, hoping to calm my fury.

My workroom was piled high with large cardboard boxes filled with sweaters neatly folded into plastic bags. I’d reluctantly taken on a large order from Ralph Lauren. The company had provided the pattern, a horrendously complex cardigan knitted in fifteen colours and, as if that wasn’t enough, it had to have flowers and birds embroidered after the knitting. It was hideous. There were five hundred of them. Our job was to wind off the fifteen colours into small balls and send each pack out individually to our knitters.

Once they’d been knitted and posted back, Fiona and I sewed on the buttons, did the embroidery, sewed in the Ralph Lauren labels and collated the whole order into sizes and colours. It was a huge and horrible job, but it paid brilliantly and we couldn’t afford to turn it down. The Ralph Lauren organisation was tyrannical, 192

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so it was important to honour all the details of the contract, particularly the delivery dates – a day late and the entire contract could be cancelled. The cardigans, not knitted in cashmere, sold for upwards of a thousand dollars per item.

The room was awash with colours and cardigans in various stages of completion. After the encounter with Raj, the bird-busy sweaters felt like old friends, a refuge from the stranger in my house, a stranger who assumed total legitimacy. I knew with certainty that he wouldn’t leave my house unless I devised a clever strategy.

I picked up the cardigan I had been working on and completed the bird, paying particular attention to detail, until heavy footsteps sounded across the squeaky floorboards. And there he was, filling the doorway to my workroom, with a bundle of what looked like washing in his hands.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘The heart of the empire, I see.’ He picked up one of the cardigans in a desultory fashion until he looked at the label.

‘Ralph Lauren,’ he exclaimed, suddenly very animated.

‘Yeah, we’re doing some work for him.’

‘Ralph Lauren, I am impressed. I know girls who would kill for one of these.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘I think they’re rather ugly.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ he said, ‘but they are Ralph Lauren.’

‘Oh,’ I shrugged, ‘so what?’

‘Do you think I could have some of these labels?’ ‘’Fraid not. The number of labels matches the number of sweaters we need to make. Anyway, why would you want these labels? To sew into your smalls, or what?’

Raj hadn’t properly gotten over the excitement of being in a room with so many Ralph Lauren sweaters, but I made it clear that I wasn’t prepared to engage in further conversation, so off he went.

I had a growing suspicion that he was a con man who flitted around the world exploiting flimsy connections. He had already sprayed me with the names of his international celebrity friends with whom he hobnobbed in Paris, Rome, Dubai or wherever the glitterati hung out. He seemed to have dabbled in everything. He 193

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was an art dealer, a diamond merchant, a stockbroker, a diplomat and a professional polo player.

Breakfast was a desultory affair for Raj. I offered tea and toast and even stretched it to some muesli, but none of it matched the English breakfast he so clearly longed for. He looked sad, and I felt a little bad.

‘What would you like to be doing in Edinburgh, Raj? Apart from not starving, that is? Obviously you’ll not be wanting to hang around here with no food and no servants,’ I laughed. ‘What’s it to be?’

‘I was thinking,’ said Raj, ‘I’d like to find a polo club. You know, play a bit of polo, meet the players. Take things from there.’

‘Polo, hmm? Can’t say I know of any polo clubs around here, but leave it with me. I’ll look into it. If there’s one in Scotland I’ll find it, believe me.’

Raj left to find a more substantial breakfast while I settled down with the Yellow Pages. No polo clubs as such, but I’d never expect them to advertise themselves in so pedestrian a way. I tried all the sports centres, sports shops, outdoor activity centres and gyms, hoping one would give a little lead, but nothing. No one seemed to know anything about polo. But I was determined to offload Raj before things turned messy.

I’d spoken to Rick about Raj but he hadn’t been helpful. ‘Don’t for God’s sake send him up here. We’re harvesting.’

‘But what should I do?’

‘The polo thing sounds promising,’ he said.

‘Yeah, but I can’t find it. D’you think I can just throw him out?’

‘Maybe not if he’s a friend of Jon’s.’

‘I don’t think he really is.’ Then I had an inspiration. ‘Okay.

Speak later. I’ll pursue the polo thing.’

Wasn’t Mark Philips, Princess Anne’s ex-husband, a polo player? He’d started some equestrian centre in St Andrews, and there had been talk of us selling sweaters in his shop. If I could just track down the equestrian centre, I’d surely find the heart of polo.

I was bounced from one person to another, each contact becoming increasingly clandestine, with whispered passwords and 194

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codes referring me to the next in line until I began to feel I was dealing with the Ku Klux Klan. Finally I found out the date and venue of the next polo meet, which happened to be close to the airport in Edinburgh, not quite the address I’d have expected after all the secrecy, but thankfully nearby. I was in luck. The game was to be held on Saturday, two days away – two excruciating days.

Saturday was sunny. The plan was that I’d deposit him at the meeting point and leave him to make his own introductions, about which he was confident and excited. After breakfast we climbed into my suddenly far-too-small French car, a clapped-out Deux Chevaux I’d rewarded myself with on finally passing my driving test. Following the directions I’d been given, I eventually found the hidden field tucked away in Gogarburn. Various smart cars lined the lanes: Bentleys, Daimlers and even a vintage Rolls. Loud, hee-hawing voices through the hedgerows directed us to the spot.

Raj hadn’t been happy in the Deux Chevaux, but was in clover when he heard the braying from the other side of the hedge. On entering the field he was surrounded by people of his own stature, a little slimmer, perhaps, but sounding and behaving just like him.

Groups of jodhpured people in riding hats stood around chatting while horses snorted and stamped, the whole parade ready to erupt into flashing battle. It was like a film set. I found the liaison person and handed Raj over. Poor Raj’s misplaced efforts to impress me over the past few days had foundered miserably, but now at last he’d hit bullseye. How happy they all were with each other. They bandied the names of international clubs and players with much laughter and slapping, as if born to one another. A pony was paraded before Raj. I thought he’d break the poor creature’s back, but on he jumped, heedless, and charged off down the field. I felt an urgent need to leave.

‘What time d’you think I should collect Raj?’ I asked the liaison man.

‘Hmm, staying with you is he?’

‘For the moment,’ I said, ‘but…’

‘Don’t worry about Raj, we’ll make a plan. He has your number?’

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Needing no more encouragement, I ran off along the hedgerows and slipped out of sight.

Later that evening I received a call from Raj. ‘Oh hi.’ His voice echoed as if in a stone hall. ‘I’m at Rushglen.

Know it? With the McCullochs.’

‘That’s great, Raj.’ ‘They’ve invited me to stay…’

‘Excellent.’ ‘… so if you’d be so kind as to gather my few belongings, we’ll pass by tomorrow and collect them. I think we’ll be coming to town to deliver a son back to school or some such.’

‘I’ll do that for you, Raj.’ ‘Evening, I’d say.’

‘That’s fine.’

I sat in my workroom counting and recounting the sweaters. Every one of the five hundred had been ticked off; returned from the knitter. The order was now complete and ready to be dispatched on Monday. All the paperwork was in order and most of the boxes sealed. I was proud we’d managed the full count. The knitters had knocked themselves out to get the sweaters back in time. But now there were two missing amongst the still open boxes. They’d all been there, but two had vanished, and no amount of recounting would bring them back.

I pictured Mrs McCulloch cosying up on the sofa before a roaring fire at Rushglen in her Ralph Lauren cardigan. Or perhaps Mrs McFarlane organising the refreshments at the next polo meet, the envy of all the ladies in her pre-launch Ralph Lauren Collection, ahead of the game. The sweater had been designed for exactly such a woman. It wasn’t called Ralph Lauren Polo for nothing. The connection had only just dawned on me. And Raj? Well, he would have paid for his supper and added a nice new list of connections to his portfolio.

I phoned Rick and the kids. ‘He’s gone. I’ll see you all in a couple of days.’

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Twenty-five Ladies snaked through the foyer of Le Parker Meridien New York, the last remnants of snow falling like fireflies from their furs. It was dark outside by the time I signed in. It hadn’t been a good idea to wear my ballet pumps, now hideously soaked from walking between the taxi and the hotel awning. Originally it had seemed a chic idea, but here I was in a forest of Gucci boots at New York Fashion Week.

Instead of the New York Prêt show at the Coliseum, this year I’d been contacted by a new American agent, Nancy, who’d invited me to show with her eleven other American designers at Le Parker Meridien. I thought I’d give it a try.

My seventh-floor room was shared with a designer from California who Nancy was sure would like me. But as Nancy had never met me, I could only suppose she meant that Americans liked everybody.

During Fashion Week, when all the out-of-town buyers were in New York, Nancy rented a suite on the thirty-fourth floor overlooking Central Park, with the idea that we would be there, waiting, with our collections beautifully displayed for the buyers to stop by on their hectic schedules and place lucrative orders. We relied on it.

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I knocked on the door, exhausted from dragging suitcases full of samples (God knows why I’d told the porter I could manage) and stumbled into the room. My roommate was already there.

‘Hi. I’m Hillary. Which bed?’ I said, collapsing into the nearest nest of feathers. ‘Sorry, jet lag and all.’

She hardly seemed to notice. ‘Hi, I’m Serena, make yourself at home,’ she drawled. ‘I’ll be back soon, give you time to sort yourself out.’ She looked like she’d stepped straight out of a movie, a sun-kissed Farrah Fawcett type. I knew Edinburgh wasn’t exactly the fashion capital of the world, but catching myself in one of the numerous mirrors, I was surprised by how wrong I could still get it. I threw all my clothes out onto my bed and rifled through them to find some sort of acceptable combination. This always happened when I arrived in America.

Serena returned all breezy. ‘Wanna hit the bar?’ she asked.

We passed noisy groups of large women clustered around billboards in the foyer that listed the simultaneous shows: Outer Wear, Inner Wear, Lingerie, Hosiery, Accessories, Daywear, Cocktail, Pre- and Post-Cocktail, Loungewear, as well as categories I’d never heard of.

‘So which part of the States are you from?’

‘Sausalito, ya know, north of San Fran.’

‘Yes, my husband’s American and lived in San Francisco for a bit in the ’60s, on a houseboat in the Bay.’ ‘Well, whaddaya know? So did mine!’ So here we were, sharing a room and finding a tenuous little bond.

At some point I tried to explain that Scotland and England were two different parts of Britain, but she kept referring to me as English, so I gave up. I could hardly take it personally as I wasn’t Scottish anyway.

‘So how d’ya know Nancy?’ she asked.

‘She got in touch with me and asked if I’d like to be part of her stable, as she called it. So I thought I’d give it a try. Although I wasn’t too taken with the stable idea. We’re not horses.’

‘She’s good,’ Serena said. ‘This show is hot.’

‘What sorts of buyers come?’ I asked.

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‘Oh, ya know, the outta-town brigade, those women we saw in the foyer, dripping fur an’ diamonds.’

These women made me nervous. I couldn’t understand why they were all so big. Maybe it was the ‘outta-town’ thing. They took up space and the hotel was crawling with them. I was used to needle-thin and sharp New York buyers wearing black and sporting severe haircuts. I began to think I’d made a big mistake.

Wrong agent, wrong show.

‘Do you know the other designers?’ I asked.

‘Oh yeah, we meet twice a year for the spring and autumn shows. Although we’re spread across the West Coast and the Midwest, some of us have got to be good friends. Anyway, what kinda knitwear d’you make?’

‘You’ll see,’ I said. ‘It’s very plain.’

‘Plain?’ It was the first time she’d responded with such vigour.

‘Well yes, I’d say plain and expensive. And you?’

‘Cheap an’ fancy.’

After dinner, we met the other designers at the hotel bar.

Everyone was a little edgy about the next day’s show, but friendly enough. Unable to dredge up a jot of social enthusiasm, I took a midnight swim in the glassed-in pool on the top floor, floating in the night sky. As I hit the water, the day drained away and all I could hear was the humming of my blood and the beating of my heart as I glided along underwater in the chlorinated turquoise zone, the water swishing in and out as I breathed. I could see I might be swimming a lot.

I’d planned to phone Rick and the kids when I returned to the room, but I found Serena amongst piles of sweaters all strewn across her bed and much of the floor. She was wide awake, sewing things on, taking them off and sewing them on again… and very talkative, quite unlike the Serena with whom I’d just spent the evening. But I was practically dead. She offered me some cocaine, which vaguely surprised me, but I was too tired to respond. I fell asleep as she jabbered away in the distance.

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that lasted about an hour, a striptease in reverse. I sprawled in bed until the last minute, and if you’d not seen Serena, I might have passed for plain but okay.

After breakfast, we took the lift up to the thirty-fourth floor.

The lift was full of Serenas, and I was instantly reduced to the status of bag lady, or maybe Rumpelstiltskin. Those who had just arrived were draped in snow-flecked fur, and the rest, like Serena, looked ready to go clubbing in their high heels. The smell of dead animal and perfume all but knocked me out by the time we emerged, where I finally saw a small window, my first glimpse of the outside since entering the hotel. I stopped to watch the snowflakes flutter softly in the pale light against the glass. Sensing that I might get waylaid, Serena marched me on. She had arranged that our samples be taken up ahead of us.

The showroom was über glamorous. Thick white pile carpets, silk-lined walls and champagne-coloured velvet drapes insulated against all unforeseen edges. Louis XIV perhaps? I didn’t really know, but plenty of brocade, scrolled wood and gilt glittered beneath the chandeliers. One side of the room was mirrored, with a camouflaged door leading into a bedroom with an en-suite bathroom. Ten rails were placed around the remaining three walls, one of which was all window, overlooking Central Park.

Some designers had already hung their samples and were pacing up and down the room. I found Nancy and introduced myself. There was something of the South African about her, healthy looking and straightforward, so unlike the Brits, and so completely unlike the Swiss Flavia.

‘So glad you’re here,’ she said, towering above me. ‘And I see you and Serena are already the best of friends. I just knew you’d love one another.’

Serena and I exchanged glances.

‘You take that rail over there, Hillary, and Serena, honey, you take that one closest to the door. They have your names attached.’

The showroom was filling up fast with designers and samples, everyone busy trying to display their work to best advantage.

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bears knitted, each in a different knitted outfit. There was Sailor Boy, Cowboy Kid, Huckleberry Finn, Highland Teddy, Wall Street Teddy in a three-piece suit, and Posh and Becks, amongst others. They were adorable and created an amusing ambience around the seriously expensive hand-knitted cashmere sweaters, which seemed to excite and frighten potential customers in equal proportions. I hung my twenty sweaters in shades of black, navy, grey and charcoal, the colourful teddies sitting on the rail amongst them. Everyone by then was ready and the showroom about to open to the outside world.

A hoard of women descended. Nancy took their coats through to the bedroom. I had a fleeting image of an abattoir. The pace became frenetic and noisy as the buyers pounced on their favourite rails. None of them knew me.

The designers were consummate saleswomen. They chatted and laughed, slipping things on and off. I might have done the same had anyone approached, but no one did. Perhaps I was just stuck in the most inaccessible corner of the room; just as well I’d brought a book. The Confederacy of Dunces seemed a perfectly appropriate choice. I looked across at the smiling Serena and saw a large lady approaching me.

‘Hi, are you Hillary? I’m Betsy. I have a store in Salt Lake City and I’m looking for Novelty Sweaters, you know, something a little different, a little fancy.’

‘Oh hi, yes, well here are my sweaters. They’re all on the rail.

Please do look at them and if there’s anything you’d like me to try on, I’d be only too glad. But as you see, they’re more classic than novelty.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they’re darling, really darling, but I don’t know, you know honey, I’m looking for something a little more decorative, a little more colour maybe.’

‘Well, that’s not me,’ I said, about to point her in the direction of Serena’s rainbow rail.

‘But what about the teddies?’ She grabbed a handful of them.

Posh slipped from her grasp, falling stylishly into the heavy pile.

‘The teddies aren’t for sale.’

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‘Really? I think you should sell the teddies.’

‘Perhaps. But as I said, they’re not for sale.’ I couldn’t bear the idea of any of the teddies having to live with her.

‘But everything’s for sale in America,’ she said.

I grabbed them from her, rescuing Posh. Betsy looked at me in total confusion and backed off toward another vendor.

I sold three sweaters that day while everyone else cleaned up.

Serena had just about filled her order book.

‘Let’s party,’ she said, once we were back in the room.

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘But you go with the others, I think I’ll take a swim.’

‘Don’t be blue. Here, have a line, tomorrow will be great for you.’

But day two was pretty much a repetition of day one. Sometime in the afternoon a friend of mine arrived. Although I’d specifically told him not to come during the day, in bounced Cosmos regardless, instantly silencing the showroom.

Cosmos was rather strange looking, very attractive if, like me, you liked that kind of thing, but I could see he’d be a minority taste, short and toreador slim with jet-black hair and piercing, hyacinthblue eyes. Cross as I was, he made me happy. He was a bipolar poet I’d met at Dunya’s, and that day he was obviously on the up, having fun. Within seconds, he’d read the script and decided to be the Women’s Sweater Buyer from Barney’s, the most exclusive, and forward department store in New York, as the fashionistas liked to say. He raked through my rail in rapture, having me try on every sweater, all the while scribbling things in notebooks. He consumed the room’s attention and was oddly plausible.

‘And now,’ he said, loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear, ‘you are to be rewarded for making the most lovely sweaters, which only the most discerning women would wear. Come. I’m taking you to lunch to that brilliant new restaurant in the Village.’

Upon which I gathered my stuff, nodded to the room, and left.

The morning of day three was successful. It was mostly the same buyers, but with a sudden new interest in my range. Nancy was pleased, yet somehow disturbed. But after the morning’s flurry, 202

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desolation descended once more on my corner.

I limped through Nancy’s luscious bedroom to the luxury bathroom. I photographed the hard marble, gold taps and soft towelling for the kids, and then sank comfortably onto the toilet.

I thought nostalgically of our own toilet in the greenhouse at Li. Then I flushed.

There was the usual rush of water but nothing seemed to happen. I tried again, whoosh… and waited. But instead of disappearing, the water, soiled toilet paper and shit all rose to beneath the rim. Breathe deeply, I advised myself, count to ten, distract yourself. I washed my hands with ylang ylang, moisturised with rose and geranium, then applied nasturtium and ginger to my body. But when I reinvestigated the water level, there was no change. I tentatively pulled the handle, then began jabbing with hysterical determination at the last moment. There was a rumble, and the water, along with its contents, rose like a tsunami. I stared in horror as the liquid mess began to spill over the seat, splashing in slow motion, sploosh, onto the marble, expanding from puddle to lake to sea. There was no stopping it. I cast wildly about the room, grabbing at the fluffy white bathrobes and flinging them into the cesspool. Then towels, one, two, three and four, but nothing staunched the flow.

I left the bathroom and picked up the phone next to Nancy’s bed. I dialled room service.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘This is room 534. There is a plumbing emergency in this suite, a serious one. Please will you send someone to deal with it immediately? And I mean immediately. Thank you.’

I walked to the window and waited until my breathing was normal. The light outside was a dull purple. Inside the lights had been switched on and the chandeliers glittered. As I left the room I saw, seeping through the mirrored partition wall, a brownish slush starting to stain the white pile of the carpet.

The show had been a commercial disaster, but my stopover in London to see one of my French clients in South Molton Street more than made up for it. And Browns, beloved of fashionistas, 203

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whose store was also in South Molton Street, ordered one hundred assorted teddies and hung them all up as their Christmas window display.

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Twenty-six 23 August 1986 Dear Ewalda, Life in Edinburgh is hectic, especially now that it’s the Festival. It’s the one time of year when Edinburgh turns into an international city, bustling with acrobats, magicians, theatre and well-dressed people from foreign parts speaking languages I can’t even identify. You should all try to come; you’d love it.

A few weeks ago, having just left Rick in Li harvesting mussels – I went with a friend to the Assembly Rooms to hear a South African percussion group called Amampondo.

Have you heard of them? Word got out that they were good, and the place was rocking. We didn’t know what to expect.

Well, I nearly fainted with excitement, as did most everyone else in the audience. Seven perfectly toned young black guys in traditional Xhosa costumes – mostly just feathers – sang, danced and played the most inspiring and impassioned traditional Pondo music.

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he must be a shaman with his deep, compelling voice and his total charge of both group and audience. His dancing makes Mick Jagger look like a slouch.

I was so sorry I’d not taken the kids, but we planned to all go when Rick got back. The next day I was in a shoe shop with the kids when I spotted some of the group. Zoë went straight up and told Dizu I’d been to his show the night before and couldn’t stop talking about it. Turns out they’re all from Langa. By now, laden with more shoes than I’d ever seen anyone carry, the rest of the group joined us.

When they discovered I was from Cape Town and knew Langa, they were almost as excited as we were. Of course, we invited them to visit.

The night Amampondo arrived, Rick had just returned from Li, dragging a huge side of venison he’d just shot there.

The guys went crazy. Apart from missing home, they’d been longing for red meat, really missing it. I hadn’t realised how much Africans love meat. But it’s so expensive here, they’d not been able to afford any. They took over the kitchen and cooked up a storm. Rick put on all sorts of African music – we have a major collection from different countries – but due to the cultural boycott in South Africa, the Amampondo guys hadn’t heard any of it. It was so beautiful watching them listen to the music, their faces wild with excitement and joy. South Africa must be so culturally isolated these days, it’s impossible for us to imagine, especially with the Festival rampaging all around us.

Zoë and Leif are ten and twelve now, at that perfect age when this kind of event makes the most memorable impression. They phoned all their friends and invited them to join the party, which turned into a marathon of music and dancing, with Simpiwe, the most acrobatic of the band, performing breathtaking gymnastics.

So they’ve been coming around most days, accompanied by lots of groupie girls. They’re such a hit, and of course Leif and Zoë are also a big hit, what with Amampondo hanging 206

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out at their house. Suddenly they’re ‘the African kids’ to their school friends, not ‘the Americans’ anymore, and I think they prefer it. When Amampondo are here during the day and I have to work, I just leave them all downstairs, with Leif and Zoë hosting the show. They couldn’t be having a better school holiday.

Because it’s the Festival, I have more personal clients coming to the house. I keep thinking I should write a book about them or hide a camera in my workshop. I’ve advertised in an upmarket shopping magazine, but people have to phone to get the address and then I discreetly let drop the price range, which eliminates a few. But most are Americans who know the label from the big department stores in New York, and get really excited at having discovered the source and a potential bargain. Cashmere to women is like catnip to cats. They get overwhelmed by lust, which is sometimes quite shocking and embarrassing to witness. I sometimes have to take a sweating husband downstairs for a cup of tea and then calm down the hysterical wife. Other times, the husbands think their wives look so fantastic, they encourage them to buy as many as they want, sometimes four or five thousand pounds’ worth. It would make a great little documentary.

Then there are the weird phobias women have about bits of their bodies, but it’s making me a better designer. I’m beginning to understand how best to flatter all the different shapes. Lots have been to colour therapists; it’s a big thing in the States. They’re told which colours suit them and which to avoid, and they believe it like the word of God. I also have a crazy Canadian client who takes a cab from the airport, chooses ten sweaters, has a cup of tea and then heads straight back to catch the next flight to London.

I don’t have a car anymore – the Deux Chevaux caught alight on the motorway on the way to Li one day. I got out just in time, while my driverless car somehow crossed the motorway, hit the curb and returned, before careering over 207

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a steep bank and bursting into a spectacular bonfire. I took photos of the whole thing, I’ll have to show you sometime.

The police said it was an electrical fault; happens all the time. So now I can’t even collect or return my client to the airport.

Then there was the Italian. She chose three styles, wanted each style in three colours (nine sweaters), then the whole order in triplicate (twenty-seven sweaters) so she has a complete set in each of her three houses.

I have a double-page spread in this month’s Vogue, a glamorous close-up of a woman wearing one of the sweaters, a fox-fur draped around her shoulders, not very PC, but somehow appropriate. The men around us at Li are always hunting down lamb-killer foxes, so why not sling one around a girl’s shoulders? What’s worse, do you think, men killing foxes or foxes killing lambs? I know how you LOVE lambs.

Plans are going ahead for our trip to South Africa in December. Amampondo have generated a major new impetus, with plans to visit Langa and get closer to them and the music. It’ll be the first time we can afford our own tickets and do what we like. I haven’t even told my parents we’re coming. We might just appear one day and save all the drama beforehand. I’ve not been writing home these days. I think my mother finds it easier talking to me on the phone; I suspect her eyesight isn’t all that great and she can’t be bothered to write herself. So don’t say a word if you see her.

The idea is to fly to Jo’burg, rent a car and meet you guys near Burgersdorp. Do you know yet who’s coming? I can’t wait to see what Rick makes of it all, and what you all make of Rick.

Much love to you all, Hillary

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Twenty-seven ‘Welcome to sunny South Africa,’ I laughed, as we drove into an electric storm fifty kilometres out of Johannesburg. The sky suddenly darkened, and a downpour was swiftly followed by crushing hailstones smashing onto the car roof. The ground, which minutes before had been a dusty earth red, was now white as snow.

Thunder shook the car and psychedelic streaks of lightning forked across the sky. We were all a little afraid but exhilarated.

I hadn’t managed not to tell my parents that we were all coming to Cape Town, paying our own tickets and driving down slowly from Johannesburg, travelling with friends. My mother insisted on paying for our car hire, and I didn’t resist.

The kids couldn’t believe their luck when we picked up the car and discovered that it was brand new with air conditioning. The idea was to meet up with Ewalda, her nine-year-old son Caellum (a year younger than Zoë) and my friend Mel from the days before I left South Africa twenty-six years ago.

We had the first night to ourselves. Driving in comfort toward the northern border of Lesotho, the kids fiddled with the car gadgets while Rick scanned the enormous sky, devouring the 209

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passing grasslands. No sea. I couldn’t imagine my parents in this landscape. Nothing but the Cape ever made sense to them: the beach, deckchairs and bridge. I was seeing aspects of South Africa for the first time, borrowing Rick’s untainted vision.

That night we stayed in a rondavel near Qua-Qua amongst rolling green hills, and drove on to Burgersdorp in the Eastern Cape the following morning. The first thing I noticed was the groups of women on street corners, knitting. My instinct was to approach and ask if they would knit for me. But the momentous meeting of my old friends with my mythical husband allowed no time for diversion. Ewalda, Mel and Caellum had met my kids on previous visits, so all eyes were now on Rick. I later heard that Mel had developed a very romantic idea of Rick, this man who had ‘dragged me off to a deserted island’ and kept me there for ten years. Perhaps she still thought of me as the wild teenager I’d once been, forgetting I was now a forty-one-year-old mother of two.

Leif had brought his skateboard with him and was stylishly practising his moves at every opportunity, while Zoë spent lots of time reading. We’d taken the kids out of school on the condition that they worked on their own, and to everyone’s amazement, they did their homework diligently. They were also neat and selfcontained, habits supposedly picked up from living in a tiny house in the wilds. Caellum looked perplexed as they folded their clothes and made their beds. Perhaps we were a little too domestic, failing to quite match up to expectations.

We made several stops along the way, sampling the surprisingly generous Afrikaans hospitality, as well as what seemed to us, especially the kids, the brutal way some of them treated their black workers. We drove on across the Sneeuberg Mountains in the Great Karoo to Nieu Bethesda, where we’d been lent a house for a few days. The sprawling, sun-baked settlement was sunk into a barren hillside, looking inhumanely dry as we approached. People could be seen scurrying around in little more than rags. In the valley below flourished an attractive arrangement of houses with fertile gardens; small furrows lined the dusty streets, carrying water from one place to another. One such house was the headquarters of 210

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the Buddhist Society – its relative luxury oddly juxtaposed against the impoverished township on the outskirts. I knew precious little South African history beyond the overriding nightmare of apartheid, but it appalled me to see a godforsaken township set on barren wasteland on the outskirts of each town we passed. God alone knew what it must be like living in one.

In sympathy with the weird spirit of Nieu Bethesda was the Owl House. Now a museum, it was once the home of the deceased artist Helen Martins, who had lived and worked there most of her life. From the outside the house looked ordinary enough, but inside we were struck by the glittering walls coated in ground glass. Mirrors, candles and lanterns, strategically placed, caught and reflected shards of light bouncing off the walls. We were escorted around by her ‘friend’, who we later learnt had been a lifelong enemy.

Miss Helen had had few friends, our guide told us gleefully, her eccentricity having alienated her from the conservative townsfolk. We entered the Camel Yard, crammed to screaming point with three hundred contorted concrete sculptures. By way of explanation, our guide informed us that Miss Helen had taken her life by swallowing a mixture of olive oil, caustic soda and ground glass. Most poignant of all, the story goes, she’d had to have her small toes amputated after wearing too-narrow shoes. I couldn’t stop wondering about the shoes. I felt a deep empathy with Miss Martins, for I too loved narrow shoes.

As we continued on to an ostrich farm in De Rust and then the Sea Farm near Wilderness, I began to wonder what Rick would make of my mother and father. We had been shown such warm hospitality by all our hosts along the way, it could only come as a slap in the face when Rick got to meet my parents. But at least we weren’t staying with them; we’d stay with Mel and her new partner, and make day visits to my parents in Sea Point.

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in the kitchen talking to the maid, which infuriated my mother.

Zoë sat on the garden wall holding hands and talking to the gardener. The neighbours saw and told my mother, who was very upset. She told Zoë to stop, but Zoë refused. Leif, noticing that my mother kept bribing him with gifts that never materialised, concentrated on bleaching his hair with lemon juice, working on his tan, skateboarding along the seafront and boogie boarding at the beach.

My mother tried in her way to make our holiday a success, but her attempts to snag Rick into discussing our finances and the kids’ professional futures fell on deaf ears. She might as well have been talking a foreign language. And although I did try to avoid drama and not regress, my mother and I both faltered at the slightest provocation. Much of the time was fraught.

1986 was not a good time in South Africa. A state of emergency had been declared, and massive protests were underway against the escalating violence. Rick and I were aware of what was going on, but our understanding was inevitably limited. Whenever we registered shock, we were told we just didn’t understand.

Simpiwe, the Amampondo dancer we’d met in Edinburgh, invited us to his initiation party in Langa on the outskirts of the city. He’d been living for several weeks on some scrub ground between the township and the N2 motorway. I didn’t understand much about initiation rituals, which were veiled in secrecy, but I knew that initiation in the Xhosa culture served to instruct young boys into the responsibilities of manhood and the world that awaited them as men. To my horror, it also involved circumcision.

Simpiwe, his body streaked with white clay, had been living alone in a tent for two weeks. Younger boys in the community left food outside his tent. In the old days, he would have lived in seclusion with his peer group on a mountain or in a forest, where they would have hunted for their food. Now a succession of cars whizzed by incessantly.

There was a party at Simpiwe’s mother’s house to celebrate his return to society as a man. Rick, Leif, Zoë and I were keen to attend.

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‘In Langa?’ my mother cried. ‘Are you mad?’

‘We’ll be looked after by our friends. They wouldn’t let us come if they thought we’d be in danger.’

‘What do they know?’ my mother said.

What do you know, I thought. What does anyone know? But to be fair, my mother wasn’t the only one with misgivings. Just about everybody we knew advised us not to go, suggesting we would be irresponsible parents if we did.

The party was both fun and fascinating. The kids were entranced. Simpiwe’s family and friends were gathered together in a small room, in which the blanketed and unrecognisable figure of Simpiwe, his head hidden from view, sat huddled in a corner.

Emerging from the blanket was a long stick. Each person in turn shook the stick, which was held in Simpiwe’s hidden hand. At the same time, the men were all drinking a potent and terrible tasting brew from a large pot. The room was dark, the fumes strong, the atmosphere of the occasion imbued with intensity and meaning.

The four of us had a wonderful time and felt honoured to have been invited.

I think my parents were surprised to see us again. Perhaps they thought we’d be cannibalised.

The trip, it turned out, had a profound effect on us all. Rick had fallen in love with South Africa in a way that surprised me. It also served to confirm that all the stories about my parents I’d bored him with for years were more or less true. That was somehow reassuring. And South Africa had been mysteriously revealed to me in a new way. I’d never before allowed myself to see its beauty, afraid that its power might seduce me. But now, through Rick, it was as though I’d been given permission to look.

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Twenty-eight Fiona, my assistant, had been attending an accountancy course at night school for the past few years. She came first in the whole of Scotland, and then moved on to bigger and better things. I missed her, but Lindy who took over was also good. She was my age, small and righteous, but not as much fun. Having been part of the old hippy culture that fundamentally disapproved of business, she made me feel morally inferior.

We had a big Japanese order due out the following morning, and were busy putting the last of two hundred and thirty-five sweaters together, all tagged with fibre content, country of origin and washing instructions. Lindy folded them in fine tissue paper and neatly bagged them, placing them in large cardboard packing cases, which I then wrapped in reams of brown paper and carefully addressed.

I was superstitious about this part of the process, ritually using the same black marker pen, the name of the store always underlined in a special red pen and then the whole address outlined in another red pen, folding the paper in a particular way and holding it fast with a particular tape, accompanied by a small prayer: please don’t get lost, please be beautiful, and please pay me. The cartons were 215

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piling up along the upstairs and downstairs corridors. I was busy with quintuple carbon copies of shipping documents and invoices when the phone rang.

‘Hi,’ said a man’s voice with a New York accent. ‘You Hillary?

I’m Barry. Listen, I’m nearby. I saw your sweaters in New York and I was looking for you. Then I picked up that magazine in the hotel and there you were. So I’m coming over. I’ll see you soon.

Oh, what’s the address? How come there’s no address?’

‘There’s no address so that I can vet people on the phone. This isn’t a shop.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s cool. What did you say the address was?’

‘Barry,’ I said, ‘could you possibly come tomorrow afternoon?

We have a big order that’s being shipped tomorrow and right now we’re busy.’

‘No. Gotta come now, but I won’t interfere with you guys. I just want to see what you’re up to.’

I gave him the address. I don’t know why, but I did.

Within fifteen minutes the doorbell rang. I was tempted to let it ring unanswered, but curiosity got the better of me. I opened the door.

He was in his forties with red curly hair and freckles, trying hard to look like a Ralph Lauren promotion, but a bit silly in his preppy clothes. Yet beneath the sleeveless cashmere V-neck and Viyella shirt, I saw an enthusiastic little boy with a bucket and spade.

‘Hillary, hi,’ he said, leaping up the stairs and into the workroom.

He took one look at Lindy and I thought I saw him dismiss her. He snatched at a sweater. ‘So, what you doing, Hillary?’

‘Getting a Japanese order ready to ship tomorrow. And you?’

‘I’m looking around. I saw your sweaters in Bergdorf’s and where else? Oh yes, Henri Bendel, Saks, Betsey Bunky. So show me something.’

The small workroom was overflowing with boxes and sweaters everywhere. Oblivious, or perhaps not, Barry marched around picking up one sweater after another, examining each carefully, inside and out, discarding some and making little piles of others.

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‘You didn’t say what you were doing here,’ I said, ‘and I told you on the phone that we’re busy.’

‘Yeah, let’s go for lunch.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Go away and come back later, if you must.’

I was a little intrigued, a little irritated. He obviously understood knitwear, but I couldn’t work out his angle. There was also something familiar about him. Perhaps just because he was American and they seemed to have that have-a-nice-day sort of manner, he treated me as casually as if I were an old friend, not bothering to consider too carefully. He did eventually go away, but came back later in the afternoon as Lindy was about to leave and I was about to prepare supper. The kids were back from school and Rick was also downstairs. Barry followed me to the kitchen, chatting about how cute he found Scotland, a sort of Disneyland.

Eventually he got around to telling me that he owned a cashmere store in Aspen, Colorado, and wanted to order some sweaters. By then dinner was ready and I had no choice but to invite him to stay.

‘Wow, this kitchen’s great,’ he said. ‘Did you design it?’

‘No. Rick built it,’ I said.

‘No kidding? You built it yourself?’

‘I found the doors in a skip,’ Rick sounded bored. ‘Came out of an old bakery. They were chucking them out so I took them. The rest I just made.’

‘Hey,’ Barry addressed the kids, ‘your parents, they old hippies, or what?’ He seemed to think it was all very quaint, but I was suddenly tired. We’d all had enough of him by now and I’d drunk too much over supper and needed some sleep.

‘Okay, you have to go now,’ I said.

‘See you tomorrow. Thanks for supper, guys.’

‘Absolutely not in the morning,’ I said, staggering with him to the door. I didn’t really expect to see him again.

‘What happened to you?’ Lindy asked the next morning. ‘You look terrible. You know there’s still a lot to do.’

‘Yes, I drank too much last night. That guy Barry stayed and stayed. I probably disgraced myself.’

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‘Good, hopefully you frightened him off.’

‘I don’t think he frightens easily. Maybe I should have some more coffee. You want some?’

I muddled through the morning, filling in paperwork and putting the last touches to the cartons as Lindy sealed them in time for the shippers. Minutes after the consignment was collected and I’d begun to relax, Barry reappeared. He picked up where he’d left off the day before, pacing around, picking things up, putting things down, examining, unfazed by my previous night’s performance.

Just as I was about to lose patience and throw him out, he sat down at my desk and wrote out a staggeringly large order.

He told me later he hadn’t really expected to receive it. I looked too flaky, he said, to get anything together. Not that he was exactly Mr Professional either. But I recognised him as the type of businessman I knew from South Africa. My parents had friends like that, men who were successful and used to getting their own way. Manufacturers, men with factories who ran them with a degree of what might pass as charm, but who you knew were ruthless and didn’t care much for the rules, or anything much but the money. It made me nervous. Lindy was indignant and bristled in his presence.

‘My father would never have dealings with a man like that,’ she said later. Her father was the yardstick for all that was correct in the world. I wasn’t sure I’d pass her father’s test. Rick couldn’t stand Barry either, but neither Rick nor Lindy were responsible for keeping the business or my family going. By then I had about three hundred knitters, all addicted to knitting and dependent on the money. And the market had hit a dip, as it did from time to time.

The exchange rate was bad for exporting, knitwear was seasonally out of fashion and buyers were scared. No one was buying in big quantities, except Barry. Barry didn’t do scared. Bad times for others meant good times for him, like war racketeers, I supposed.

His orders came rolling steadily in.

He visited Scotland often. He was having things made at factories in the Borders and would stop in Edinburgh en route, laden with samples.

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‘Check these,’ he’d say, pulling out armfuls of delicious-looking Italian cashmere from the most prestigious international brands – Malo, Loro Piana, Prada – each garment costing thousands of dollars. ‘My wife Barbara goes shopping, but never buys anything.

She takes things home ‘on approval’. We keep them long enough for me to do a quick trip here and have them copied at the factories, then she takes them back.’

He was so proud of their tactic, it clearly hadn’t dawned on either of them that there might be something shameful about it.

Shame wasn’t in their vocabulary.

He and Barbara were building a large house in Long Island, and what he loved most was to accompany me to the large salvage yards and buy things for his house – huge things like marble mantlepieces, doors and iron fire baskets weighing a ton – which he’d have shipped back to the States. On these occasions he was charmingly boyish and enthusiastic, and I have to confess we had fun. He was so familiar to me. Sometimes Barbara came with him, draped head to toe in layers of black designer cashmere, for which I silently hoped she’d paid.

Wide and short with puffy scarlet lips, she was as indolent as he was energetic. One day I had to leave them to go to a yoga class.

‘Oh, I just love yoga,’ she said. ‘I watch it on TV every morning while I eat breakfast in bed.’ When Madonna took up the Kabbalah, she later told me, she too became a Kabbalist. No doubt it made an excellent market for her cashmere sweaters.

They were an indomitable double act, the pair of them, when it came to paying me or any of their suppliers. Barry played good cop; Barbara, bad. They’d spin it out endlessly, making and breaking promises and driving us all to murderous intent.

‘You’re so cute, Hillary,’ Barry would laugh. ‘I love it when you get mad.’

I could bang the phone down, tell him to fuck off, or threaten him with legal action… it had no effect. He knew we were dependent on him, and I knew he’d eventually pay, but only when next he needed something. The risk, of course, was that he just might not need me again. In which case I’d never get paid.

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Desperate colleagues sometimes phoned to ask how things were going with them. Were they paying me? What did I know about them? How did I manage them? I could imagine that for normal Scots they were completely alien and frightening. They’d expanded rapidly by now and needed more and more merchandise for their stores in Los Angeles, New York and London, but there were people I knew that they weren’t paying. When I tried to intercede on their behalf, appealing to Barbara’s better Kabbalistic side, she only cackled, and Barry told me not to be so childish. Sooner or later, I knew, my turn would come and they’d rip me off without a second thought. They began to fill me with real dread; their very presence mocked and reminded me that I couldn’t escape my destiny. For all my efforts to escape, here I was now, somehow a collaborator. I had nightmares. It turned out that Barbara’s sister lived in the same town in Israel as my own sister, and Barry sought her out and made a favourable impression on both Brenda and her husband. I could imagine them in Israel fitting in quite perfectly.

There they’d be, along with everyone else, bashing their way to the front of every queue.

One night at Li, I dreamt that my true destiny lay with small children, and that I should train to be a kindergarten teacher. I wasn’t quite sure where this dream had come from, but I guessed it was linked to my last encounter with Barry and Barbara. No wonder I was dreaming of children, the beautiful, clean innocence of children. The dream lingered, the idea of it growing until I felt compelled to act. I knew someone who ran a small kindergarten two minutes from my house in Edinburgh, and asked if I might attend for a few mornings to get an idea of how it all worked. I slipped away, leaving Lindy and Jan, a new part-time girl in her final year of art school, to carry on.

I stood before the nursery-school building. The windows were plastered with cut-outs of cats, houses and witches on broomsticks.

Over the wrought-iron railings in the basement was a line of pushchairs, one attached to the other, made as if for triplets. As I entered, a row of colourful coats hung in the passage, some of them 220

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so tiny they melted my heart. I’d forgotten the joy of a world in miniature. Then there were the little bodies themselves, tumbling over one another, smudgy and small, some unable even to crawl.

It was sleep time. Ten or more milky cocoons, smelling of warmth, lay asleep in a capsule like beans in a pod. The staff bustled about, cleaning and straightening until someone announced it was story time. I was told to coax or drag the little bodies from their dream space into the world of words, awake or not. My first impulse was to kidnap the bleary-eyed and whip them across to my house where they could sleep for as long as they liked. Foolishly, I actually said so aloud as a little joke, which didn’t go down at all well. Henceforth, the staff treated me with suspicion, as if I might be one of those deranged women who snatched babies from prams, or worse.

The experience deteriorated. By the second day I realised that I had my favourite kids. Others reminded me of Barry and Barbara, the ones who grabbed toys from the smaller children and had tantrums when they didn’t get their own way. I found myself wondering what kind of children Barry and Barbara had been and what their own children were like. Barry had occasionally hinted that their sixteen-year-old daughter was a bundle of trouble with drug problems. I hated that they infiltrated my mind and were a source of so much anxiety.

By the third day at the kindergarten, I’d decided that the dream had been some kind of metaphor, and that whatever it had meant, I shouldn’t take it literally.

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Twenty-nine As if in answer to my continuous discomfort about certain aspects of my knitwear business, Geoff, the director of one of the big yarn mills I’d worked with for years, asked one day if I’d consider selling. He had it in mind for his son.

Wow. I hadn’t really thought of selling; I hadn’t imagined there was anything to sell. But Geoff knew my business and he was dead serious. I suddenly saw myself getting up late, swimming in oceans, drifting along the swell of the waves, practising yoga every day, trying my hand at writing, maybe, and creating a spectacular garden at Li. No more Barry and his hit-wife, Barbara, more time at Li, more time for everything.

Rick had by now left Li as his main residence. He had given his share in the mussel business to Mick, and started a full-time Master’s degree in African Studies with Edinburgh University. He wasn’t earning, but spending a lot of time in Namibia doing fieldwork.

Would we have enough to live on? It wasn’t as if I was going to get paid a fortune if I sold. But we had the rent from the other flat and some savings. We were no longer poor and I didn’t think I needed to be rich. Rick and I discussed it over and over again.

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‘Sell it,’ he said, ‘if it’s making you unhappy.’

‘God, I’m always the one who’s unhappy.’

‘Well, no, I guess you had a good reason last time. Leaving Li was the right thing for you and for the kids. And hey, it’s good for me too now.’

‘What about Lindy and Jan?’ ‘I’m sure Geoff will need them.’

I knew the knitters would be fine. They just wanted to knit, and the whole point of buying the business would be to inherit them.

I wasn’t sure about the designing, but since that was the smallest and best part of the operation, I imagined Geoff had someone in mind for that.

Of course, Flavia, the reigning agent in Switzerland, would have to agree. She had by now transcended both the London and American agents and was a central part of the business. I could see that with Geoff’s help, his son could probably be better than me in many ways, and Flavia would like them. They were canny but straightforward Yorkshire people. They’d not allow themselves to be bullied into accepting unobtainable delivery dates by Barry and Barbara, or technically insoluble design alterations from Flavia.

She wouldn’t dare try emotional blackmail on them, either.

I began to realise how badly I’d allowed these relationships to deteriorate, blurring boundaries and becoming too personal. Geoff and his son would have none of that. They’d run the operation in a more commercial way and develop the branding aspect, which Flavia was keen on, and I could now see was a necessary new ingredient if the business was to succeed in the future. Branding was the future, but it was what I resisted most. I knew it would eat up any money I made in the short term, and I could sense that I was unlikely to be around for the long term; twenty years had been long enough. Also, it went against the spirit of everything I’d built. Maybe it was a good time to sell.

Eventually Geoff and I flew to Switzerland to meet Flavia. I can’t remember why we agreed that the deal should take place there; maybe Flavia had insisted it take place on her territory. We all stayed in a hotel near the Italian border. The night before the 224

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meeting, Geoff and I found ourselves in a strange club with men dressed in studded dog collars and Nazi uniforms doing cabaret acts involving lots of audience participation. We hid in a corner.

Alsatians roamed between the tables and across the stage, barking occasionally. Maddest of all were the incongruous clientele: ordinary-looking families with small children, apparently out for some ‘light’ entertainment.

The following morning we met Flavia in the dining hall of the hotel. I wasn’t hungry, but Geoff and Flavia ate heartily. We chatted amiably. Then the contract came out and it was time to sign. I lifted the pen.

‘Oh,’ I said, completely surprising myself, ‘I’ve just this second decided not to sell. I’m terribly, terribly sorry, but not half as sorry as I will be if I go ahead.’

We all sat there perfectly bewildered, me just as much as them.

On the flight home Geoff was as sweet to me as ever. We laughed and joked as if returning from a delightful holiday. I suspected that, having spent time with Flavia, Geoff felt deeply relieved that the deal was off.

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Thirty On 13 March 1990, my son Leif was killed in a car accident in Edinburgh. He was sixteen years old.

Four days later, on 17 March, my daughter ZoĂŤ turned fourteen.

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Thirty-one We spent as much time as we could at Li that year. Then in late September, Zoë started at a new private school close to our house.

She hated it, but she’d not have been happy anywhere.

A plan was afoot for my parents to visit us in Edinburgh in late January, after spending time in Israel with Brenda and her family.

‘Hi Mom,’ I said, concentrating on keeping my voice even.

‘How are things?’

This was my fifth call in two days from my house in Edinburgh to my sister’s home in Israel. It was 14 January 1991. The news in Britain was choked with threats of an Iraqi attack on Israel. ‘I don’t know how to get you to listen to what I’m saying, but…’

‘I’m listening,’ my mother answered, not listening. ‘We can’t come to you now, I told you; our tickets are booked for next week.

Daddy has a bowls match tomorrow and I’m playing bridge on Friday.’

‘Bowls, bridge. Don’t you get any news there, for God’s sake?

Mommy, please, you and Dad have to get on the next plane out.’

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visit to my family and me in Edinburgh. News of the anti-Saddam coalition’s threat to invade Iraq unless they pulled out of Kuwait had been going on for months, but my parents remained undeterred.

War or no war, they were determined to follow their itinerary.

‘Darling, don’t be so melodramatic,’ she said, ‘always exaggerating.’

I had a sense of her applying her lipstick as she spoke. I was invaded by red.

‘No, I am not being melodramatic. This has nothing to do with me. The BBC is reporting on an hourly basis that at any minute a serious war is about to break out, starting with a bombardment of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Oh hell, just let me speak to Brenda.’

Brenda came to the phone. I’d called so often during the last few days, I could hear that they were all exasperated with me.

‘Hi, what’s new?’

‘Nothing new,’ I said, ‘just that same ol’ war. Doesn’t seem to be going away, Brenda. Listen, I understand it’s hopeless trying to persuade you lot to leave, but you’re going to end up sitting in a sealed room wearing gas masks, with wet towels stuffed around the doors and scud missiles flying past the windows, and you’re not going to know whether they’re packed with deadly chemicals or not. And Mommy and Daddy will be sitting in that stuffy, fearfilled room with Sonny, you and the kids, which may be worse than the missiles. So just phone the airport and see if there are still planes flying out. And get them onto one, now.’

My sister and I both had difficult relationships with my parents for different reasons. Having left South Africa to live in Britain when I was eighteen, I’d never really been forgiven, whereas my sister and parents still continued active family hostilities. I’d never really understood the intricacies of their on-going drama, but finally she, too, fled South Africa for Israel, where my parents had paid them many an abortive visit. On this occasion, however, my sister said their stay in Israel had been unexpectedly pleasant.

‘Hmm, you know they’re actually having a nice time here. They have all this bridge and bowls stuff. And everyone in Israel knows that the BBC’s very biased and anti-Semitic…’

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‘Bullshit. Phone the airport!’

An hour or so later, Brenda called back to say they’d just heard the airport was closing and anyone who wanted to leave had to do so immediately.

Fortunately, Israelis perceived themselves as one large family, and there was always someone who knew someone who had special powers to arrange whatever was necessary for one of their own.

‘Remember Greg’s girlfriend? She works part time at the airport and managed to get them on the last plane out, which leaves later today.’ I could picture my bewildered parents drifting around the apartment as my sister packed their belongings.

‘What’s happening?’ I imagined Susan asking. ‘Why are Granny and Grandpa going so suddenly?’ Susan, Brenda’s youngest daughter, was, I’m sure, particularly distressed. She liked to understand things. She needed harmony.

Rick and I collected my parents from the airport late that night. They were beginning to look like refugees, their eyes vacant and exhausted. My mother, normally well groomed, was now dishevelled, her hair and make-up unravelling. My father was trying his best to reign in his irritability. The following morning Zoë was up early, excited at the arrival of her grandparents, but they didn’t emerge until midday, their bewilderment now transformed into a poignant vulnerability. They suddenly seemed so small and shivering. After a hearty breakfast, they settled themselves on the sofa, wrapped in rugs with the central heating blasting away. I turned on the television.

We hadn’t seen them for a couple of years, but now they were transfixed by the screen and not remotely interested in any of us.

Bowls, bridge, gossip… it all meant nothing as they sat in stunned disbelief. A meeting on 9 January between the American Secretary of State and Iraq’s foreign minister had disintegrated, leaving in its wake threats of chemical weapons and missiles targeted at Tel Aviv and Haifa. My sister lived close to Tel Aviv in a densely populated town of badly built apartment blocks, one on top of the other, where olive groves had stood until recently.

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Bombing started at 3 a.m. on 15 January, while most people were asleep. The television screen was filled with missiles and the sound of sirens. There was footage of people scuttling for cover, traumatised by the sudden invasion.

My sister phoned the following morning, speaking from a sealed room. It was exactly as I’d predicted. Pow! Pow! We could hear them exploding. The worst was the threat of chemical warheads. How long did you sit there before you knew that bombs containing chemical warheads had landed? And how would you know until...?

My parents were colder than ever. Edinburgh in winter was an alienating experience for them. They were unused to the high ceilings and tall single-glazed windows, which saturated the rooms with a mournful grey light. Zoë tried to distract them.

‘Meet Bugsy,’ she enthused, dropping her rabbit on the sofa. He nibbled a hole in my mother’s cardigan.

‘Get that bloody animal out of here.’ My mother didn’t like pets or kids.

I tried to make wonderful meals. ‘What do you call this stuff?’ my father asked of my Thai green curry, a ghastly expression on his face. ‘Never had anything like this before!’

‘What? Do you expect her to make gefilte fish for you?’ my mother bit back. We phoned my sister at regular intervals throughout the day, as they remained imprisoned in the sealed room.

‘It’s altogether hellish, scary and claustrophobic. Susan’s not doing so well,’ she whispered. ‘Freaking out.’

My parents were becoming hysterical. Perhaps, I thought, I should try to arrange some bridge and bowls, but nothing could distract them from the images on the screen.

The following morning, while preparing chicken soup in the adjoining kitchen, I heard a colossal explosion. CRAASH! The floating acrid mortar invaded my every orifice. Retching and coughing, I ran into the sitting room, where my parents sat huddled in the corner of the sofa covered in grey dust, gasping for breath. The central rose, that elegant piece of Georgian moulding 232

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attached to the ceilings of posh drawing rooms, had come crashing down, missing my parents by inches. It looked as if nothing less than a bomb had landed through the roof. I rushed to hold their trembling hands, simultaneously brushing the worst of the debris from their sunken shoulders.

The war in Israel was averted; President Shamir and his ministerial defence committee were persuaded not to retaliate.

Iraq ceased fire. No one was killed, and life quickly resumed its normal pace of tension and drama. But my parents were all washed out. Insidiously invaded by the political fallout and the flagrant disintegration of my house, my dad approached me quite humbly.

‘We’ve decided,’ he said, ‘to leave earlier than planned. Could you phone the travel agent for us?’

I went back upstairs to catch up on all the work I had been neglecting.

My dad died in April 1993. He and my mom had been due to fly to Israel the following day, when he dropped dead from a very sudden heart attack.

Since his last trip to Edinburgh during the Iraq war, he and I had miraculously found a new relationship. It was as if he was meeting me for the first time and discovered that he actually liked me. And I liked him. From then on, we had spoken to each other regularly on the phone, finding lots to laugh and joke about. He was concerned about my mother’s deteriorating health and mind, and particularly anxious about their forthcoming trip to Israel, as their visits there had always been stressful. He wasn’t sure either of them would cope this time.

I went to Cape Town for the funeral. Chris Hani was assassinated the day after I arrived, 10 April, 1993, leaving people deeply shocked. The threat of civil war hung like a dark spectre over the whole country. He had been expected to be the next president, a pragmatic man, capable of bringing everyone together. Now chaos and violence seemed to have been unleashed on the streets, along with a deep sense of mourning. Fear reigned.

I returned to Edinburgh a few days later.

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Thirty-two Rick completed his MA in African Studies and embarked on a PhD. His research required another trip to Namibia, where he planned to spend a year gathering data. Zoë, now seventeen, had just finished school, and I was at a loss, still thinking of perhaps pursuing a new career, unable to apply myself to the one I already had. So Zoë and I decided that we, too, would go to Namibia.

It involved months of preparation. My idea was to return every three or four months to oversee what was going on in Edinburgh, leaving Lindy in charge. It was one of those times when the business was stable, not impossibly demanding but with enough work to keep everyone busy.

Zoë and I were very excited. Neither of us had been to Namibia before, but Rick had obviously fallen in love with the place while doing fieldwork there, and had repeatedly said how we would both love it, how the mood since it had gained independence was upbeat and optimistic, and how the desert was a sorcerer. We couldn’t wait.

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Toyota Hilux 4x4 for journeys we’d be making into the desert.

Zoë and I flew a few months later. By the time I got there, I was exhausted, having had so much to arrange in order to keep the knitwear running smoothly in my absence. I wondered if it was worth it.

As we emerged from the plane, we were hit by a hard, bright light that slammed down from a dazzling white sky. Everything was smeared with a patina of dust, the leaves a thirsty, pale grey-green.

Rick collected us from the airport and we drove into Windhoek along streets with German names.

The B & B where he had arranged for us all to stay belonged to a couple who appeared to resent guests. Mrs Brown was frumpy and unfriendly, her house dark and dingy, and her furniture heavy and claustrophobic with lots of claw feet.

Zoë and I couldn’t wait to escape. Although Mrs Brown insisted it was best to stay indoors, we dashed out in our shorts and cool cotton tops. The sun on our skin was delicious. Rick drove us into town in his Toyota along flowering jacaranda avenues.

We went to the German department store in Kaiser Strasse. Its delicatessen section came highly recommended by Mrs Brown.

Immediately we entered the store, I heard German lieder pouring forth from the loudspeaker system. All the staff were dressed in what I assumed was German national costume, liederhosen for the men and strange skirts with braces and blouses for the women.

The food comprised fat sausages, sauerkraut, pumpernickel and Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, all rather heavy and unappetising. It was disorientating, as if I’d walked into a time warp, Germany circa 1930, or so it seemed to me. Oh dear, stop this prejudicial behaviour immediately, I admonished myself; we’re in a new place.

Be open-minded.

We soon moved into a big house in the suburbs that friends of Rick were vacating to return to England. It had a large swimming pool that turned green and sickly within days. Rick disappeared each morning in the 4x4 and Zoë zoomed off to check out the townships, having decided almost immediately that she’d not come to Africa to hang out in a white suburb. She got herself 236

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a voluntary job as a teacher in Katatura, a sprawling township adjacent to the city centre, while I tried to figure out what to do with myself. There didn’t appear to be any transport into town, as all the white people who lived in our suburb drove cars, and the black people, mostly domestic workers (life hadn’t changed much in spite of Independence) walked. So I walked. And wherever I walked, snarling dogs went crazy at their front gates, a wire’s width away from ripping my throat out. I understood now why my black friends had always been so afraid of dogs.

A week after arriving in Windhoek, I left Rick and Zoë in the house and flew to Cape Town. Life in my mother’s Sea Point flat was rapidly deteriorating. Polly, my mother’s maid, had been frantically phoning me in Edinburgh before I’d left, with frightening stories of my mother’s imprudent behaviour. As long as my father had been there to protect her, the disease had remained hidden, but now Alzheimer’s had taken a rampant hold and she was deteriorating rapidly. Polly feared that she was no longer able to manage the situation.

I entered the flat with trepidation. My mother greeted me with bewilderment laced with suspicion. Polly, on the other hand, threw her arms around me with abandoned relief.

‘Miss Hillary, it’s not good here,’ she said. ‘Your mother, she tried to kill me. She said I stole her money. But she hid the money, in a box in a drawer in her cupboard. Now she’s hidden the key and forgotten where it is.’

I was shocked. My mother, usually so immaculately put together, was randomly dishevelled in a way that made her look exposed, the very thing she’d always taken great pains to avoid.

I went to see her doctor; not, sadly, the delightful Dr Jack, but a man I didn’t know.

‘I think I’ll need to make some new arrangements for my mother. She’s deteriorating and I’m unable to stay here with her.

What do you suggest?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with her. I saw her recently, and she was charming.’

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‘Yes, she’s good at being charming, but not for more than ten minutes. How long did you spend with her?’

‘How long have you spent with her? I thought you’d been away for years.’

‘I want you to arrange for her to have a brain scan.’

‘Oh, she’ll never agree to that, never.’

‘Well, you just organise the appointment, and I’ll make sure she’s there.’

The doctor rose abruptly and marched me toward the door, slamming it behind me. Perhaps he’d seen enough of absent children returning to their aged and ill parents, and suspected that all we wanted was to get our hands on their money. In my case, I knew there wasn’t much, and what there was I didn’t need, but it was important to secure what she had for her own future needs.

When I wandered down to the bank with her soon after I arrived, she’d withdrawn hundreds of rand and wanted to give it all to a fruit seller in exchange for an apple. And had I not been with her, she’d never have found her way home.

We took the bus into town. I don’t think my mother had ever been on a bus. I thought it might perhaps be an adventure for her, and it was, as if we were off on a little holiday, but once inside the hospital she became anxious. The scanning machine looked like a large oven; no wonder she felt wary of being slid inside, her body so small and shrunken under the heavy weight of the metal. Terror radiated from her eyes before she disappeared inside. The room felt cold and metallic, smelling of acid and fear. I felt like gathering her up and running away.

After the procedure, the technician took me aside and showed me the scans, pointing to a series of black holes, parts of the brain that had ceased to function; infarcts, I think she called them, caused by a series of small strokes and Alzheimer’s. It saddened me to have it so categorically confirmed, but at the same time, it provided the evidence I needed to act. I took my mother straight home in a taxi.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I don’t really know who you are, but I’ve had a wonderful day out. I do hope we can remain friends. We can have such fun together.’

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I assured her that from that moment we would indeed be the best of friends and have lots of fun. I think I’d been waiting for this moment all my life.

I phoned Brenda in Israel, and we discussed putting my mother’s house on the market and arranging a care home for her. On a previous visit, Brenda had identified what she thought would be a good one. Since neither of us were going to be in Cape Town, I had to arrange that her finances be administered by state curatorship.

But this required a psychiatrist to declare her of unsound mind.

On the day of the appointment, Ewalda was visiting. When the doorbell rang, my mother was sitting in her chair. She was neatly dressed and had applied make-up. I answered the door and Ewalda went to wait in my bedroom while the psychiatrist made his assessment.

‘My dear,’ he said to my mother, ‘how lovely you’re looking.’

She smiled and cocked her head. I’d never seen her flirt, but it was unmistakable now. The psychiatrist colluded. He and my mother had either been acquainted with one another a long time ago or he was behaving a little too familiarly, I thought. Whether it was part of his method or simply a part of his behaviour, I couldn’t tell.

‘So,’ he said, sitting close to her, ‘tell me all about your schooldays.

Where did you go to school, Edna, can you remember anything about it?’

‘Oh yes,’ my mother answered with a degree of coyness but absolute clarity, ‘yes, I remember Helen Suzman was in my class.

You know Helen, she was my friend.’ This much I think was true.

They chatted so convincingly about the past that it began to look like I’d misinterpreted everything and she was of sound mind after all, despite her threats to kill both Polly and me the day before.

Overwhelmed by panic, I went to see Ewalda. ‘She’s behaving normally! He’s going to think she’s perfectly okay. And then what?

When he’s gone and it all starts again, and I have to leave and…’

‘Tell him to ask her how many children she’s got,’ Ewalda said.

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chocolate biscuit, bending toward my mother looking very relaxed.

I’d never seen her so perky. It must be part of his method, the schmoozing, I thought. He softens them up, then goes for it. But I was starting to feel serious trepidation.

I didn’t want to take any chances. I caught his attention and mouthed the words, ‘Ask how many children she’s got.’ He looked irritated. I supposed I shouldn’t have interfered. Of course he must know what he’s doing.

‘How many children do you have?’ he suddenly asked.

Momentarily flustered, she looked wildly around the room, and then said, ‘Children, let’s see, er, I have... I have five. They’ve all gone. Maybe six.’

After that, everything unravelled. It was horrible. I was so sorry to have to put my mother through this, but I didn’t know what else to do. Perhaps I should have come to live with her and become her carer, but I wasn’t sure I could have managed. The sorry truth was that it hadn’t even occurred to me until then. I simply didn’t want to stay there with her.

The house was sold, and Ewalda helped me move my mother into the nursing home, which was not so much a nursing home as a sheltered hotel. I had sneaked her favourite things from the flat – some framed photographs, paintings and furniture – to make my mother’s private room cosy and comfortable in the nursing home.

Polly and I prepared her for the departure, and then Ewalda came to collect us in her car.

Ewalda and I coerced her into leaving the flat. She didn’t want to go, but we more or less pushed her forward, closing the front door, closing off every option but to move forward. She tottered along the garden path with the three of us forming a semicircle around her. Ewalda went ahead and opened the car door.

I don’t know quite how it happened, but just before we reached the car, she fell, or her legs just buckled beneath her. Suddenly she lay sprawled in the street with legs and arms splayed, like a body on the front cover of a detective novel. For a moment, we all froze, aghast, whereupon we heard a light, tinkly sound floating up from the gutter. My mother was laughing, almost giggling. This woman 240

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who had never been able to bear the slightest discomfort was now perfectly at ease, sprawled in the road.

We lifted her and checked for broken hips, abrasions or any other damage.

All was well. Except for me. By this time I felt like I was the one who should check into the nursing home.

My mother was almost sprightly as she entered the car. Polly waved us off in stalwart fashion, pleased, I’m sure, to see the back of us. During the phone calls to Edinburgh in the past few months, I had bribed her with my mother’s worldly goods – cookers, blankets, anything – just so that she would stay in the flat until I got to Cape Town.

Now as we approached the nursing home I was worried that my mother would accost the staff, run away or commit some other deeply antisocial act.

But immediately she arrived there, my mother turned into a new person, relaxed, funny; I could almost say happy. I’d been warned by many people that the trajectory of Alzheimer’s was horrific and played havoc with people’s personalities, but in my mother’s case, it seemed to have returned her to the person she might once have been before life had taken it’s horrible toll.

Over the following few weeks we had some lovely times together.

I was the strange but delightful person who came to collect her for outings along the seafront.

I sold the contents of her house before returning to Namibia, advised by Ewalda to keep the plastic spray bottle and a clip-on umbrella that my mother had always attached to the arm of her deckchair. Ewalda assured me that these were the only two of my mother’s worldly possessions I’d want in Namibia.

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Thirty-three I returned to Rick, Zoë and the house with the slimy swimming pool. Soon I looked for a place in town and found a flat in the city centre, on the ninth floor of the only residential high-rise block in Windhoek. It had wonderful views over the city and the sizzling desert that sprawled tantalisingly in every direction. The ninth floor intercepted the flight path of many birds, who whizzed or cruised inches from the windows, often settling on the sills. I was sure the same birds came each morning to say hello. We all liked it in the flat.

Rick and Andy – his cheerful young English colleague who was a gung-ho Adam Faith lookalike – had a contract with the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement to interview Bushmen, who I was told to refer to as San, about their lives. The idea was to spend a month or so in Bushmanland, camping close to their settlements and filling in the twenty-page questionnaires with the help of interpreters. I thought the idea of approaching people and assuming they’d want to talk to strangers about their lives was peculiar, but I desperately wanted to experience being around them. As a child I’d had ongoing dreams and fantasies of being captured and reared by ‘wild’ 243

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people, people who lived and hunted and wandered from place to place, probably not too dissimilar to Dave-the-boyfriend’s naïve fantasy about black people in Africa.

The trip northwards was ravishing in its emptiness. It bore a strange inverse connection to the Highlands, and I could see why Rick was so attracted to the landscape. The saturated green of the Scottish woodlands was here a mere whisper of colour, the subtlest hint of pink or drained terracotta floating across the surface of the stony flatland that went on and on, occasionally rising into a flattopped escarpment that made a craziness of distance; the air itself seemed to dematerialise space. By the time we reached eastern Bushmanland, through open, golden-grassed pans, the desert had given over to a scattering of mopani trees, mangetti groves and scraggy thickets of acacia. By contrast, this land looked lush and generous.

We set up camp at a settlement called Mangetti Dune, close to a group of about eighty people. For the first day or two I felt as if I’d been mugged or heavily drugged by the heat. I was on the verge of falling into a coma, rescued only by blasts from the plastic spray bottle Ewalda had so wisely advised me to bring. Small boys appeared, entranced by the cool, magic mist I squirted over their dry and dusty bodies.

Once the interviews started, I was surprised to discover that I could still speak a smattering of Afrikaans, in spite of having resisted it at school. The Bushmen had been trackers for the South African army during the war with Angola, and had picked up about as much Afrikaans as I now remembered. This meant I had a role.

I could conduct interviews without an interpreter. I loved it, this newly-found ability to speak a language I’d been sure I couldn’t speak, but which was so deeply imprinted from my school years that it arose like the words of a forgotten song, making it possible to communicate with people who would otherwise have remained a mystery to me.

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crouched on their haunches in the sand, some with babies strapped to their backs, themselves no more than children, while smaller children raced around playing with old car tyres in the dust.

One adult was chosen as the interviewee, and the questions dealt predominantly with income and survival. Although their age-old nomadic way of life was now restricted, they still acquired most of their food from the bush.

As dawn broke one morning, I walked single file with a group of about twenty women into the surrounding scrub, which to my inexperienced eye didn’t look like it could yield much in the way of nourishment. The women were so beautiful and tiny and colourfully dressed in hand-knitted woollen hats, absurd in the stifling heat, sporting intricate rows of beads around necks, arms and ankles, their babies wrapped in blankets tied to their backs.

They strode with purpose until, all at once, they descended upon a thorny bush and picked handfuls of berries with awe-inspiring speed, half of which they threw directly into their own mouths and those of each other’s babies. The rest they placed in finely woven baskets attached to their waists, before marching, singing, back to the settlement. The women took little notice of me, but were nonetheless inclusive, going about their business with a lightness of purpose. I felt as if I’d been initiated into a sacred dance.

From Bushmanland we drove north west into Etosha, a game park a third of the landmass of Scotland, which at this time of year was almost devoid of people but brimming with animal life. As we entered the park, our car was surrounded by giraffes, maybe fifty of them, ambling nonchalantly alongside us. We drove out across the saltpans and saw, not far from the car, a pride of lions, the magnificent male alert to our presence. Rick came to an abrupt halt, opened the car door and leapt onto the roof.

‘Get back in the car, Rick, now!’ I yelled, my body behaving in much the same way as it did on a stormy loch crossing. ‘Please… please,’ I begged, the last please no more than a whisper. Rick was gung-ho in the desert, flaunting the rules, yet somehow still managing to inspire confidence, except when it came to lions.

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bags and eaten whole, or Japanese tourists mauled to death while taking photographs.

After Etosha, we drove into seemingly impossible places, down rivers, across sand dunes and along non-existent tracks, camping on ground marked by rhino, elephant, hyena and lion spoor.

‘It’s okay if we stay in the tent,’ Rick said. I stayed in the tent.

We drove further north and then west along the Kunene River, where we met members of the Himba tribe, a people so beautiful that I’d have preferred to stay with them than head south to camp with the Damara.

‘Why did you choose the Damara, Rick? These people are so much more exotic.’

‘Stop this exoticism crap, Hillary, it’s pathetic.’

‘But the Himba are completely beguiling. Look at them.’ The bare-breasted women were coated in red-pigmented sheep’s fat, their hair woven with strange bits of leather into two tufts like horns on their heads, with metal bands (rather too tight) around their elongated necks. They glowed.

‘I’m not interested in what they look like.’

I had a lot to learn. I hadn’t realised there was anything wrong with being an exoticist, that this was unacceptable in the development world. We drove south and set up camp among the Damara in Sesfontein, Okombahe and then Spitzkoppe, stopping en route to clamber amongst huge rocky outcrops, which Rick suspected of housing cave paintings; he’d developed a sharp instinct for finding these images, which danced delicately across the rock while green parrots flew above our heads. Pretty exotic, I thought, and spent hours sitting almost tranced-out in front of the paintings, making accurate drawings of leaping eland, men hunting with spears, and what we understood to be rain-dancing ceremonies. I had hopes of transposing these images onto sweaters as the motif for my next spring collection that I’d be taking to New York. Probably not ethically correct either (‘unforgivably exploitative’ announced a development person when I mentioned it). But try as I may, the images refused to be appropriated and transformed into a commercial enterprise; the magic remained 246

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resolutely on the stone and my cave-painting spring collection failed to materialise.

After hours of driving south along hypnotically straight roads, we finally reached Okombahe on the banks of the Omaruru River, a wide, dry riverbed that yielded no water unless you dug deep into the sandy banks, the sand constantly imploding inwards.

This place in central Namibia and its dispossessed people, the Damara, were the subject of Rick’s main research. At first glance they looked raggedy, dirt poor and depressed, living in rusty corrugated shacks that were ovens in summer and presumably freezing in winter. Their problems were immeasurable, the least of which were marauding elephants trampling their precious wells and crops. They had every reason to be depressed, but I felt that certain simple measures could be taken to cheer them up, and mooted several ideas amongst the burgeoning NGO community.

Swarms of researchers, social scientists, film crews, PhD students and odd hangers-on like me drifted in and out of the communities.

‘What about I go to Cape Town and get the paint companies to sponsor some paint? There are always discontinued colours they can’t sell; I could persuade them in the name of social responsibility to donate some. Then these people can paint their huts in wonderful colours. It would not only conserve the tin, but cheer them up; it would certainly cheer me up. Think how much nicer everything would look.’

‘They need food, not coloured huts,’ said a development officer with contempt. She herself looked like she could do with a makeover.

‘Not instead of food,’ I said. ‘They’re not mutually exclusive.

Colour is uplifting and it’s easy and cost effective to achieve. It doesn’t need a million consultations and workshops. I can get paint on my next visit to Cape Town and who knows, the people might just like it.’ The idea was so badly received by the NGO community that I’m ashamed to say I didn’t do it.

My other idea was a dry-river donkey race. The young boys raced around the sandy tracks on their donkey-drawn carts, often reaching terrific speeds, having the hugest fun. I thought we could 247

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model something along the lines of British summer festivals, with music and food stalls and then the race. I’d have been glad to sponsor the prize. I put it casually to a few of the boys with donkey carts, who quite liked the idea, especially the prize aspect, but again it fell flat with the NGO people – poor people were not to have fun. I was beginning to fall flat with the whole Namibian enterprise.

My experiment was failing. I’d come to Namibia with the absurd idea of seeing if I could dispense with labels and be seen for myself without my cashmere business. I’d always hated being identified by my business.

‘Meet Hillary,’ someone would always say, ‘she has a cashmere business.’ ‘Cashmere?’ they’d inevitably respond, ‘oh, how chic/ glamorous/expensive.’ Whatever it was, I’d feel misrepresented, and of course it was difficult to re-address without sounding stupid. Now I wanted to see what my world would be like without the cashmere association. But in Namibia, people always asked what one was doing there. I came with Rick, I’d say, I’m his wife, just travelling around with him. It didn’t serve me well. Everyone who wasn’t native to the place was there for a worthy purpose, so without a role I became invisible. I’d considered this possibility beforehand and wanted to explore it, imagining that I’d quite like the invisibility. But something went wrong. Apparently, just being a wife wasn’t good enough.

Rick, meanwhile, had turned into someone I hardly recognised, the sort of South African man who hung around the braai drinking beer with his buddies and eating endless amounts of meat. If I hadn’t lost my sense of humour, I’d have found it funny. I should have been happy: it was good for him to mingle and be sociable; he’d always led such a solitary life and now he was getting acknowledgement from his peers, studying the things he was interested in and having new and rewarding experiences. Instead, I felt duped, as if that magical, skinny boy I’d met was slipping away from me. His confidence escalated as mine dissolved, and I was shocked at the speed of my downward spiral. As the weeks passed, it became apparent that he didn’t need me, not there and 248

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then, anyway. Perhaps my experiment hadn’t failed after all, but just produced unexpected results. How silly my expectations had been, thinking I could live in some sort of limbo without an identity.

‘I’m going home,’ I told Rick. ‘I’ve learnt to appreciate my business. It feels quite honest in relation to all this development stuff.’ At least business people acknowledged their greed, or whatever. There was lots of self-interest going on here in Namibia under the guise of doing good, just the same old same old – people protecting their jobs rather than the people they claimed to be protecting. I decided to go back to Cape Town and see my mother, then get back to Scotland. I had lots to do in both places. Being here felt destructive.

‘Okay,’ Rick said. Zoë was by now hitchhiking with a friend to Dar es Salaam.

So that’s what I did. I left Namibia, and went to visit my mother in the care-hotel. I found her calm and oddly adjusted. No more raging and rampaging. She had instead befriended the man in the room next door, a kind and intelligent Afrikaner who in her former life she’d never have given the time of day. Now he was her best friend.

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Thirty-four A few days before leaving Cape Town, I accompanied an estate agent friend, Dawn, to view some houses she was trying to sell. It was twelve days before the first democratic elections on 27 April 1994. People were leaving South Africa in droves, taking whatever they could and getting out.

I instantly fell in love with a house in Oranjezicht, an old neighbourhood nestled between the foot of Table Mountain and the heart of the city. It was a very old house, part of the original farm built in 1708 by Nicolaus Laubscher and then bought by Pieter van Breda in 1719. It had been built onto since then, but I was sure that the original atmosphere prevailed. A huge oak tree, planted at the same time as the oaks in the Company Gardens, stood at the centre of a large cobbled courtyard, bustling with Egyptian geese, hadedas, guinea fowl and feral cats, while squirrels raced through the branches above.

‘I have to buy this house,’ I said.

‘But you don’t live here, and it’s madness to bring money into the country now when everyone’s taking theirs out.’

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this insane feeling that I want to die in this house.’

‘Don’t be so morbid,’ she said.

‘It’s a good feeling, I promise.’

‘But what if everything falls apart?’

‘It’s a risk I’m happy to take.’ My heart was beating so wildly I thought I might faint.

‘You’re nuts.’

‘For this price I couldn’t even buy half a garage in Edinburgh, so even at worst it won’t be a catastrophe.’ It wasn’t lost on me that I was behaving a little like Barry, buying up the spoils of war.

Later, just after the Twin Towers came down, Rick and I visited New York. Everywhere the pain was still palpable, but Barry and Barbara were in their element. ‘Great time to make a killing,’ he’d said in glee. ‘All this real estate going for next to nothing!’

All the same, I just had to do it. My motive was love, not money. I had to buy that house, and it just so happened that the timing was good. It was probably safer than a love affair with a man, particularly as my love affair with Rick wasn’t all that secure just then.

The deed of sale went through the day Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first democratic president, two weeks after the ANC’s landslide victory and just over a year since Chris Hani’s assassination. Listening to Mandela’s inaugural speech delivered from Pretoria, I felt an intense joy, tinged with shame that I’d had so little participation in the transformation.

I returned to Edinburgh without telling the girls I was coming.

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Thirty-five The Edinburgh house was overrun with girls and boxes. Lindy had taken on another art-school graduate, Betty, to cope with a sudden explosion of orders, and now cartons packed tight with sweaters crept into the sitting room, spilling along the passage, down the stairs and into my bedroom. The one thing I badly needed just then was the house to myself.

After a fond reunion, aware nonetheless that everyone had been having a great time without the boss – and I did have to remind myself that I was the boss – I decided the next morning to look for new premises. I checked on a few commercial possibilities, communal studio space to rent in converted warehouses and that sort of thing, but quickly decided that I’d look for a flat close to my house. We were all used to working in a domestic space, and I wanted that atmosphere to prevail. The flat I’d bought during the driving lesson was too grand and too far away for us to work in, besides which, Rick had spent years restoring it to the most pristine condition, and now it was let out to a tenant.

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renting. I figured that if ever the business fell apart, I’d at least have a flat to let out. That same day I saw the perfect place: a two-bedroom flat at street level with a large kitchen and adequate sitting room in the perfect street, St Stephen Street, which was home to many small businesses. There was a long-established knitwear shop whose owners I knew, a small couture studio, antique shops, second-hand shops, a vintage store as well as pubs, cafés and lots of residential flats.

I put in a bid and got it. Everything went smoothly and we were able to take possession almost immediately. With a friend, I painted the walls in washed oranges reminiscent of African sunsets, and blues that looked like drifting clouds or the ocean, depending on the changing light. I lightly limed the wooden floors and moved some paintings across from the Carlton Street flat where we lived.

We moved into our new premises, leaving Carlton Street wonderfully stress free. St Stephen Street provided the perfect space for the sweaters, the yarn and the staff. We overlooked the ballet school where once I’d unsuccessfully tried to enrol Leif and Zoë. Lindy and Jan worked in what had once been the sitting room to the front of the building, from where they could see the aspirant dancers practising arabesques and pliés on the front steps opposite. I had my own office, awash with alternating blue sea or sky, in the smaller bedroom overlooking the back garden. Betty, in charge of liaison with the knitters, worked in the second small bedroom to the front, from where I could hear her talking, laughing and commiserating for hours with Mrs Sharp, Mrs Mackie, Mrs McDonald and over two hundred others. Every now and again I’d have to remind her that we were running a knitwear business, not a social work department.

‘Yes,’ she’d say, ‘but Mrs Mackie’s daughter just had a baby, and I had to ask her how they were, and then Mrs Murray’s mother’s very ill in hospital, she’s got lymph cancer, also her son has just lost his job, but don’t worry, she’ll finish that sweater in time.’

I was sure she would; she’d do it for Betty because they all loved her and she loved them, so screw the gigantic phone bill. But I did sometimes have to close my office door.

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Now that we were in a more commercial location, we were more accessible to people buying direct from the workshop, although we tried to limit this to a Christmas sale and a summer sale during the Edinburgh Festival. But the odd person did turn up in between. A lovely lady once strolled in with the deportment of a ballet dancer. Stephanie, it turned out, had been a star with the Royal Ballet, but was now a cashmere addict and an obsessive mother of two, who sat breastfeeding for hours on the floor of my office while sifting through mounds of sweaters, deciding which ones she would have. The workshop was a sort of funky, unintimidating place, rather unusual for the purchasing of luxury goods, so that ordinary people wanting to treat themselves felt comfortable to enter.

A man once phoned to ask if he and his wife could visit. I recognised the thick South African accent and thought it a bit odd.

The rand was so low at the time that South Africans were always complaining about how expensive Britain was. He duly arrived with his wife and another South African couple in tow. Both men turned out to be in the South African police force.

I turned to jelly. My body still remembered that fear. My first instinct was that they were there to arrest me, and my mind raced with possible misdemeanours. Was it to do with the new house I’d just bought in Cape Town? Were they bent on exercising their last bit of post-apartheid power before the new regime kicked in?

But once they discovered I was South African, all they wanted was to talk politics. Having got over my heebie-jeebies, I was most curious about what they might have to say.

‘No man,’ Japie said, ‘everything’s mos changed, so now we must just go with the flow. They tell us we must like black people now, so we do. Why not, hey? Mr Mandela, he’s an okay oke.’

All the same, they made me nervous. Why had they come?

Clearly not to buy sweaters; I don’t think they even liked them. I never did find out the reason.

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books while we stitched, labelled, buttoned, washed and measured – the lovely Juliet Stevenson reading Jane Eyre, or Branagh hypnotising us into The Heart of Darkness.

But I was edging toward my own darkness. I’d hardly had any communication with Rick since my return. Something between us had been broken. Loss, an ever-present presence, came hammering at my door.

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Thirty-six My friend Garlinda had invited me to visit her in her London flat. She and her husband Henry owned the Big House down the loch from Li, where they brought parties of friends to shoot and fish for a few weeks every year. They’d sailed in one summer soon after we’d arrived, a whole hee-hawing crowd in green wellies.

We initially tried to resist – too many, too noisy – but Garlinda and I soon became close friends. Her warmth, talent and vivacity were irresistible. Most of the time they lived on a large estate in Norfolk, but Garlinda also had a lovely flat in Notting Hill.

My old friend Nicholas, who’d installed the electricity at Li, came to visit me at Garlinda’s flat. They had met several times and liked each other.

‘I have something wonderful for the two of you,’ he said, eyes sparkling. ‘Something you can’t refuse.’

I was immediately suspicious. Nicholas had gone on to do many innovative things since writing his book Alternative London. After a friend accidentally set fire to his Chelsea home, he’d bought several warehouses surrounding a tiny square in Covent Garden called Neal’s Yard. He turned the upper floors of one warehouse 257

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into an eccentric apartment for himself, below which he started the first bulk wholefood shop in London, and with the help of friends, had since set up a bakery, an apothecary, a direct-import coffee shop, a restaurant and a specialist cheese shop, all novel ideas at the time. He was an entrepreneur par excellence, more interested in creating alternative ways of doing things in the spirit of the New Age than in accumulating wealth, although he succeeded magnificently at both.

But Nicholas was uncool, or rather felt he was. Despite joining endless spiritual enterprises, taking LSD and hanging out with the beautiful people, he still carried the air of an uptight Englishman unable to relax; he was intolerant of people less capable than himself, which included just about everyone. He’d gone through one girlfriend after another, who got progressively younger as he got older, yet he’d been unable to find love. I think he was close to despair. Then one day someone gave him an Ecstasy tablet, and his world changed forever.

At fifty-eight he quickly became a leading authority and apologist for Ecstasy, attending medical and police forums, appearing on television and even going to raves, dancing till dawn.

I don’t think I’d ever seen him dance before. He was keen that kids should know the dangers and guard against dehydration and contaminated drugs, but also keen that everyone in the world should share in his wonderful experience. I could see that he might be oddly convincing. His father had been dean of the London School of Economics, and he’d inherited the air of an academic without actually being one, his stiff English body adding gravitas to his words.

‘Thanks but no thanks,’ I said as he produced an innocentlooking pill from his pocket. I hadn’t taken drugs for years and had no interest in them now. Besides which, drugs had always intensified my feelings, and I didn’t think I could bear any more pain.

‘But we must, Hillary.’ To my complete surprise, Garlinda was dead keen. ‘This is a golden opportunity. We have the Ecstasy guru himself to guide us and we know the drugs are pure.’

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‘I don’t feel like it,’ I demurred.

‘Oh, come on, don’t be a spoil sport,’ said Garlinda. The two of them ganged up.

‘Honestly, I’m disappointed in you, Hillary,’ said Nicholas.

‘What’s happened to you? You know, it was Hillary who first turned me on to acid and the whole alternative culture thing a million years ago,’ he said, grinning at Garlinda.

They finally wore me down. ‘Okay,’ I relented, and held out my hand. ‘Let’s just take the bloody things.’

‘C’mon girls,’ said Nicholas, ‘I’m taking you out on a stroll.

I think we’ll head for Holland Park.’ It was one of those lovely summer days in London when all I wanted was to be outside.

We walked from the flat along Pembridge Villas, turned right at Chepstow Crescent and then left at Chepstow Villas, until the intersection with Portobello Road where the public toilets are. Spotting a homeless-looking man sitting on the pavement, Garlinda sat down next to him. There was no stopping her.

‘Hello, do you mind if I sit next to you?’ she boomed in her loud, very upper-class accent. The Rastas on the corner all looked up. I was beginning to feel strange and a little anxious. I’d kept hearing how dangerous London was these days and how street people were getting enraged by the growing wealth discrepancies.

‘Tell me,’ she continued, oblivious to any possible problem, ‘I’ve always wondered how someone like you lands up on the street. I mean, you look very nice. Where are you going after here?’

I thought he might lash out at her, or his mangy dog, although looking a bit torpid, might snap at her gesturing hands. I turned to Nicholas, who was watching at some distance with an amused smile. But when I looked back, Garlinda and the man were chatting away happily, deeply engaged with one another.

‘Okay,’ Nicholas declared at some point; I’d by then lost all sense of time. ‘Say goodbye to the man, Garlinda. We’re going to the park.’ We were like two children for whom Nicholas had taken on full responsibility, and we behaved accordingly, overjoyed to be free of accountability.

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leafy woodland, catching sight of a fox and then two peacocks screeching and fanning their marvellous tails as we passed. Then we were in a formal garden with clipped box hedges and a fountain.

Nicholas standing erect, always keeping his distance, looked like a Man Ray painting – was it Man Ray or Seurat, or some altogether other image? I wasn’t sure. A greenhouse-type building floated before us, all airy and light, but instead of plants inside, handsome young men in tuxedos were wafting around tables set with glittering silver and crystal. We sauntered in.

‘Hello,’ Garlinda said, her accent appropriate in this context.

‘How lovely! Is this a party?’

‘It’s going to be,’ a young man said. He appeared amused by our appearance. ‘Are you guests? You’re a bit early.’

‘Whose party?’ I asked, giving the game away.

‘Prince Charles,’ he said. By now some anxiety had crept into his voice.

‘Oh that’s nice,’ Garlinda said, ‘He’ll not mind if we stay. I’m great friends with his cousin.’

Nicholas appeared, took our arms and led us out.

‘I think we need to drink something now, girls,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late. Look, the sun’s starting to sink. Let’s go to a pub on the way back, Garlinda.’

We stopped at a place that appeared empty but for the staff laying tables. ‘Oh,’ said Garlinda, ‘let me help.’

When we returned to the flat, I felt I needed to be alone for a while and went to my room, leaving Nicholas and Garlinda rolling around with laughter in the sitting room. The Ecstasy was still coursing through my brain or my body, I wasn’t sure where, and my perspective on things felt radically altered. I’d thought Ecstasy was all about raving and dancing the night away, but here I was feeling deeply introspective. I decided to concentrate on what I felt about Rick, what had happened between us in Namibia, and what I should now do. Immediately I was overwhelmed by fear: fear that I would lose him and fear that I’d end up alone. But more than that, I felt I might simply die if I had to endure another loss.

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evocative photographs. On the wall in front of me was a large photo of Rick at Li, sitting on an old fish box he must have picked up while beachcombing. Attached to one end was the rope he used to pull the fish boxes over the pebbles as he transported shopping from car to beach, beach to boat and shore to house. I could hear the box scrunch as it slid along the pebbles, and taste the first cup of tea after a long day’s shopping in Skye.

In the photo, he was using the small knife he’d brought back from India before we met, gutting freshly caught mackerel that lay in a slippery mound at his feet. He was in his wellingtons, sitting half in and half out of the water, his waterproof trousers still dripping. He looked so beautiful, his hair catching the light like a halo around his head. To one side of the frame the sea sparkled, fronds of seaweed drifting in the current. To the right lay the beach, and spreading the full width of the background were the mountains, above which the sky was curling and uncurling with clouds.

There was another photo of Rick and me approaching Li in a storm, our small boat dwarfed by the vast turgid sea and chiaroscuro sky. I remembered Garlinda out there with her camera in the wildest weather, completely exhilarated while I cowered at the bottom of the boat. We’d often go out in our boats, the three of us together, sometimes sleeping in them overnight like runaway children stealing the starry night. Rick and Garlinda, much taller than me, would be squashed between the centreboard and the topsides, bent like spoons. Sailing the next day, I’d switch from boat to boat, always choosing to be with Rick when the going got scary.

The photographs filled me with such longing and loss that I had to turn my back. What was Rick doing right now? I lay on the bed and let the last of the drug drain through me as the word loss saturated my body. What was loss? A word, a feeling? Was it in my body, my heart, my head? More of it would kill me – the thought seemed to drift independently through me – more loss would kill me. I knew it would. No. That’s just a thought, I said to myself. I didn’t know where it came from, but it was just a thought – I could send it away.

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An image of Zoë flashed into view. It was almost as if she were in the room with me. I could hear my breath, shallow and rasping.

I found myself sitting up and adopting a yoga posture, breathing in, out, in, out, deeper each time, until I heard myself laughing. As if from some altogether other direction, another arbitrary thought came drifting along… that pain was infinite, but we were built to absorb it. You didn’t get your full quota and then you were off the hook. Nothing was that easy. The same, I supposed, went for joy.

I didn’t know what time it was, but when I eventually wandered into the sitting room, there was no sign of Nicholas, and Garlinda had gone to bed. I went to the kitchen and poured myself some water, which I drank in huge, delicious gulps as if I’d just returned from a long sojourn in the desert. A soft light filtered through the cracks between the shutters. I felt absolutely at peace, knowing that whatever happened between Rick and me, I would be okay.

The fact that I was now experiencing post-Ecstasy bliss wasn’t lost on me, but I’d always trusted my consciousness-expanding drug experiences. The tension in my body slowly began to dissolve; I felt lighter and lighter. I went back to bed, took off my clothes, and fell in to a deep sleep.

When Golden Boy returned all tanned and strong from his year in the sun, he seemed to have shucked off his macho persona and returned to his original delicacy. I, too, had undergone change.

‘You’ve been busy,’ he said, noticing the absence of staff and boxes.

‘Yes, but it’s not just the business premises that have changed.’

‘Sounds ominous.’

‘It needn’t be,’ I said. ‘But I’ve learnt a thing or two – about myself, about you and about us.’

‘Sounds good,’ he said, not really wanting to know exactly what I’d learnt.

‘I took some Ecstasy with Nicholas and Garlinda.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

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down and wrote a wonderful PhD thesis while I went off happily to work each morning. Since returning from Namibia, I’d developed a healthy respect for my work.

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Thirty-seven During one of the New York shows, a small Japanese man of about fifty approached my stand and introduced himself as Mr Suzuki. He was immediately charming and engaging. Would I be interested, he wanted to know, in producing sweaters in China? I was interested in Mr Suzuki, but I had no intention of taking work from my three hundred knitters in Scotland. So that was that.

Back in Edinburgh some months later, Mr Suzuki phoned and asked me again. I said I’d think about it. Together with my ingenious pattern writer, Rosella, we designed a pattern so fine and complex that not one of my Scottish knitters would have touched it. The pattern ran to twenty pages, a spider web of complex cables knitted on the thinnest needles in the finest one-ply yarn. It was devilish, but I had little to lose. The whole sweater would weigh no more than 75 grams. I sent the pattern and the cashmere, as advised by Mr Suzuki, to an address in Hong Kong.

Within weeks we received the most exquisite garment that appeared to defy gravity, as if fairies had breathed it into being. I phoned Mr Suzuki.

‘Mr Suzuki, I’m most impressed.’

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‘I am pleased. Chinese very skilled.’

‘They certainly are. Could we please have more?’

‘Yes. It goes like this. You send order to me, cashmere to factory in Shanghai, pattern and then payment to secretary Esa in Hong Kong.’

Altogether ignorant of the relationships and geography of these three places, I failed to grasp how the setup worked. Yet it did, with awe-inspiring efficiency. I continued to have these heirloom sweaters made in China, and Rosella and I continued to work on new patterns. Each one turned out to be a dream. My discerning European and American clients adored them. The sweaters were far from cheap to produce, but that wasn’t the point. They were works of art. Once I had fully accepted this as an established part of my business, I decided I’d better check on the conditions under which these garments were being produced.

I asked Mr Suzuki if I might visit. He was delighted, and immediately set up the whole trip. He himself would come from Tokyo to meet me in his Hong Kong office, which was run by his Mandarin-speaking secretary, Esa. We would visit factories in Hong Kong and then go on to Shanghai to visit more factories.

Did I want to make a tourist itinerary as well? No, just factories.

I was a bit nervous; we were going to be away for ten days, which could be a long time.

When Esa and Mr Suzuki met me at the airport in Hong Kong, I knew immediately that I was going to have fun. He crackled with playful energy, had a passion for tennis and a smile like a sparkler. In his twenties, he told me, he’d sailed around the African coast selling grand pianos for Yamaha, enjoying glittering parties aboard ship. I could picture him in his tuxedo captivating those musically deprived colonial ladies in Mogadishu, Dar es Salaam and Mombasa. Now he had a wife, three children and a large, successful knitwear company.

Esa, fortyish with one child, was the last word in efficiency, who anticipated my every need before I did. She settled us into our monstrously huge, modern hotel before we set out for the first factory. It too was huge. Although my garments weren’t being 266

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produced here, I was introduced all around as a ‘famous British knitwear designer’ and photographed with the factory director, who looked grim, and Mr Suzuki, who always smiled, while I looked a bit bewildered and Esa kept out of the frame.

The factory owner was obliged to take us to a banquet following the factory tour. The food was nothing like the Chinese food I knew. I didn’t much like it but I ate it to avoid being rude. Then we went on to another factory and another banquet. Both places were on a large, industrial scale, producing millions of garments.

I was taken to a showroom and shown samples of what could be produced. These were not the exquisite fairy sweaters I was having made, but industrially produced knitwear at embarrassingly low prices. I was told I could design anything I liked and they’d have it made up for me before I left in a few days. My head started to explode with ideas and it didn’t stop. I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up all night, designing a collection on the basis of what I’d now seen was possible. No longer confined to hand-knitting now, cashmere pyjamas, dressing gowns, floor-length skirts and dresses paraded before me.

In the evening, Esa returned to her family while Mr Suzuki and I went to buy a present for Rick at the late-night department store.

Idling through the store, we spotted a reclining massage chair. I decided to test it. Quivering and kneading in all the right places, it gave me a fantastic massage, while Mr Suzuki laughed and laughed. Having established that we both loved massage, whatever our itinerary thereafter, we made daily visits to the ubiquitous massage parlours for a thorough going over, either side by side or one after the other. No whale music, incense or personalised touch here. On the contrary, given that one was almost naked, the treatments were as impersonal as you could imagine; I felt like a slab of meat being tenderised. I much preferred the Chinese way.

Massage here wasn’t a luxury but a part of life: it was cheap and available to everyone.

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at the same time as the lowest of the low – a red western devil, a woman and a businesswoman to boot.

‘Why do you bother with me, Mr Suzuki?’ I asked. ‘My orders are so tiny and troublesome. Esa says all the patterns have to be translated into Mandarin and I know how impossible they are to knit.’

‘Very difficult, it is true. Only most skilled knitters for your orders. But prestige. If my customers see I am working with top British designer, they very impressed. Your sweaters too expensive for my market, but your sweaters sell my product.’

Not knowing the etiquette, and with Mr Suzuki at pains not to teach me, I misbehaved badly. When we were shown samples, for instance, I excitedly threw off my clothes to try things on – entirely unacceptable. But Mr Suzuki loved it, because my gestures insulted the Chinese, who he hated for historical reasons. On my departure he gave me a small book on Chinese etiquette for western businessmen to read on the plane. He had a great sense of humour.

Esa had asked which hotel I’d prefer in Shanghai. The old art deco Peace Hotel was the place, I’d heard. It was once a meeting point of the chic and decadent, and now simply shabby but with old-world charm. She thought it a poor choice but booked us in anyway. It was beautiful.

On the first day we visited ‘my’ factory, which turned out to be a simple two-story shed. Young women sat around knitting with needles so thin they reminded me of the invisible points of the swords in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. I was relieved it was no gulag. No one was manacled to the basement floor or being tortured. Whether just for my benefit, I didn’t know, but the knitters looked happy, chatting away like little birds as their needles flew.

Over the next days we visited many such factories, big and small, in Shanghai and beyond. One showroom we visited was filled to the brim with Donna Karan, Armani and Whistles prototypes, from which I was encouraged to order.

‘What colour you like? Quantity?’

‘But they’re Donna Karan’s designs,’ I said naïvely.

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‘No, no, choose what you like.’ Clearly the concept of intellectual property hadn’t yet reached these shores.

After each visit we were obliged to attend yet another banquet.

Once we walked through a huge aquarium with tanks of sharks and vast turtles, only to discover that this was the menu. On reaching our banqueting suite at the top of a tall building, a live but massacred lobster walked across the table. I might have been hallucinating. By then I’d long since stopped eating the food and merely shuffled it around on my plate. Fortunately, being a woman, I was more or less invisible. After this excruciating dinner, we went to the circus and saw little pigs, dogs and monkeys dressed in bright formal clothes performing impossible feats.

It was very cold and I’d not been sleeping much. The factory visits were so fascinating and inspiring that I was overstimulated, working away at new designs every night in my hotel room.

After the circus, I all but fainted. Esa and Mr Suzuki were worried that I might die. Even I felt I might die. They rushed me off to a hospital where a tall, elegant doctor who spoke no English prescribed something, which Esa administered before we returned to the hotel. My last word before falling into a thirty-six hour sleep was ‘banana’. When finally I awoke, a veritable mountain of fresh bananas were piled on a table at the foot of my bed. I felt reborn – revitalised, strong, vigorous and ready to go. What had that doctor given me? I wanted more.

By the time I left China, I’d introduced a whole new element into my business. Apart from the fairy sweaters, I started producing the most luxurious pyjamas, dressing gowns, dresses and skirts, and gossamer-thin T-shirts made from one-hundred-per-cent cashmere and fine cashmere-silk mixtures. I had also inadvertently become a yarn dealer, buying up end lots of yarn from the factories at a fraction of the price. Because they worked on such large scales, these leftovers of exquisite and subtle shades were of little use to them, but perfect for my featherweight T-shirts and the rest.

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own, not wanting to taint the brilliant time I’d had in China with Mr Suzuki and Esa. ‘China’s going to rule the world,’ I told Rick when I got home.

‘They’re all out there doing Tai Chi.’

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Thirty-eight ‘Are you okay?’ Jan asked. ‘You look exhausted.’

‘I haven’t been sleeping.’ We were in my office discussing the week’s work plan. Jan had blossomed into both a beauty and the most competent worker, more accomplished at most things than me. She was also the person who probably knew me best.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

‘It’s weird, I feel sort of fine, but I’ve got this horrible itch everywhere. There’s no rash or anything, but it’s so bloody itchy I’m awake all night scratching.’

‘Go to the doctor.’

‘You’ve got scabies,’ the doctor said. ‘You need to paint yourself with special stuff and boil all your clothes and bedding. That goes for your family and everyone in your office.’

‘It’s not scabies,’ I said. He looked at me with a touch of derision.

I returned his look. ‘I’ve had scabies, and it wasn’t anything like this.’ Nonetheless, I painted myself, as did Rick, Zoë and all the girls in the office, who at the mere suggestion of an itch were now all vigorously scratching. I also made an effort with the bedding and clothes.

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I went through this charade with the doctor three times, until one evening we went out for dinner and one of the guests caught me scratching.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘I’m itchy,’ I said.

‘Oh? My aunt was also itchy, and it turned out she had something wrong with her liver. You should have a test.’

The following morning I returned to the surgery and demanded a blood test, the results of which were radical enough for them to rush me off for a scan. Most likely liver cancer, they said at the hospital, a little too casually I thought. But it turned out to be a rare autoimmune disease called primary biliary cirrhosis, PBC, of unknown cause, which wasn’t ever going to go away. The prognosis was unpredictable. I might be able to live with it forever or need a liver transplant at some point in the future. So I settled into a life of scratching, deep exhaustion and quarterly visits to the Liver Unit at the Royal Infirmary on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

Rick, meanwhile, researched tirelessly online. He discussed my case with my knowledgeable and charming consultant in Edinburgh, and took me to an international PBC specialist in Boston, whose experimental drugs failed to limit the advance of my symptoms. Smoking a joint, I discovered, immediately alleviated the dreadful itch, although being stoned was often inconvenient and unwelcome. So now, apart from being either forcibly stoned or itchy and almost always profoundly exhausted, life continued more or less as normal.

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Thirty-nine I usually timed my South African visits to leave Edinburgh in autumn and reach Cape Town at the start of summer, ready to hit the beach and pick up a suntan. But in 1996 everything was in reverse. I arrived in Cape Town in August, the dead of winter. The air was heavy and moist. Funereal clouds hung low in a leaden sky.

I didn’t know Cape Town in this dull light, as I’d not been here in winter for thirty-five years. But I had come to bury my mother.

I’d arranged to stay with Ewalda and David in their house in Camps Bay. But I’d told them not to come to the airport, preferring to go straight to the crematorium first. I brought very little luggage with me so it would be easy to move around. Brenda would be arriving the next day, and this visit to the crematorium was something I preferred to do alone. My mother had been ill for a long time, and Brenda and I had spoken regularly on the phone, juggling our agendas. We’d known she was rapidly deteriorating, and had been discussing the appropriate time to go to Cape Town.

Now we had left it too late.

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or maybe tormented with guilt? I didn’t think I’d be sad. But now I didn’t exactly know how I felt, except that everything was shivering and shaking, and in spite of the dull light, I was seeing everything as if it were fluorescent. I passed through immigration and customs, watching families reunite: some were crying almost hysterically, some couldn’t stop hugging, kissing and laughing, while others greeted one another with restrained composure. I stood for a moment amongst them, aware of my own solitude, my non-family status. My mother had been the last one left in South Africa, and now I was orphaned. Rick’s mother had died soon after his return from Namibia – we were both orphans. I passed quickly through the airport and hailed a taxi.

The crematorium was in a part of town I didn’t know well.

My knowledge of Cape Town was centred around the Atlantic seaboard, more specifically Sea Point. My new house in Oranjezicht, currently let to tenants, remained in territory as yet unexplored.

Growing up, we had never strayed far. If we went anywhere, it was to the beach: Clifton, Camps Bay and Saunders Rocks. Visits to the northern suburbs and Muizenberg beach were deemed exotic adventures. Now my mother was resting in Maitland, a place she’d always said was ‘in the shadow of the mountain, too far from the beach’, not somewhere she’d want to be. But, as in life, she never got what she wanted.

The taxi dropped me off in front of the crematorium, an ugly square building, architecturally gloomy. Perhaps to counter the effect, an attractive, warm-looking woman with soft grey eyes and an approachable manner was seated behind the reception desk.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘you must be Mrs Rohde. I’m Charlotte Wolpe.

Have you come straight from the airport? Here, put your bag down, you must be tired. Have a seat and I’ll get you some coffee.’

I wanted to hug Mrs Wolpe. She was probably my age or younger, but there was something motherly about her. After coffee, she set me off in the right direction.

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room where my mother was laid out. I entered slowly, advancing toward her. I hesitated before finally looking down. The light in this room was bright. Everything felt as if it were in slow motion and amplified. Whether it was the light or the mystery of death, my mother looked more essentially herself than I’d ever seen her.

Was this what was meant by peaceful? I couldn’t imagine what I’d actually expected. I felt strangely relieved. For the first time since I’d heard of her death, I was filled with fluttery warmth and a sense of gravity that pulled at my stomach. Tears streamed down my face, but I was smiling too. I sat down on the chair alongside her corpse, and then lifted her cold hand in mine. We stayed there together for a long time. Time seemed to have disappeared or taken on another dimension. All my lifelong dread drained away.

She had made it possible for me to love her.

When I returned to the here and now, I decided to leave quickly; I did not want to spoil anything. I thanked Mrs Wolpe and left the building, not knowing exactly where I was, but walked for a long time in the general direction of Table Mountain, until I found the Main Road. It was reassuring to be walking amongst the diverse crowds of people on the street, so much livelier than Edinburgh. Mini buses whizzed by in a continuous stream, and I caught one into town. From there I caught a bus that would take me to Camps Bay. Before going to Ewalda’s house, I took a walk along the deserted winter beach; no beautiful people lying there now. It was drizzling and the wind was getting up, skidding across the tops of the waves, spraying me and my small travel bag with salty droplets as I traced the edge of the shore.

Eventually I arrived at David and Ewalda’s. She’d always known my complicated relationship with my mother, so there was little to explain. But seeing her tall, lithe body again was a great comfort.

She was a karate black belt whose life had been subsumed into looking after her husband and children.

I had stayed many times with them in this house, which had once belonged to her parents, and on a domestic level, I’d always felt included as part of her family. On every visit I’d ever made to my parents, I’d ended up taking refuge here, decamping alone in 275

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the early days and later with the kids, after some hideous blow-up had driven me from my parents’ house.

‘You’re soaked,’ she said, rushing off for a towel and taking my wet bag to dry in the bathroom. ‘What have you been doing?

Why didn’t you let us pick you up from the airport?’ Her voice and movements tumbled forth in staccato style.

‘I just needed to…’

‘Of course, come, there’s tea… what else do you need?’

David wasn’t yet home from work, and Ewalda wanted to know every detail of my life since last we met. Everything felt familiar, apart from the cold. It was freezing and I remembered now that Cape Town houses lacked central heating.

‘Go and put some other clothes on. I’ll lend you something till your suitcase dries out.’

‘No, I’ll be fine. I’ll just rub myself dry.’

We sat talking about the past. Ewalda had been fascinated by my relationship with my parents since we’d first met. Coming from a stable and civilised Presbyterian family, she found the turbulent dynamics of mine darkly intriguing.

‘Remember that time you arrived in the middle of the night?

The kids must have been no more than two and four?’

‘Yes. But I can’t remember why.’

‘You were wearing that see-through dress. Everyone was talking about it, and your mother was furious.’

‘Oh, that beautiful turquoise Mexican dress, with bands of hand-made lace? It wasn’t see-through at all; it wasn’t that kind of a dress, but anyway, why should that have been such a big deal?

Was that really what it was about?’

‘Probably not, but you were fizzing with rage.’

‘God, was I?’ ‘And remember when you took all those musicians to your mother’s house and the maid got so upset because there were black people sitting on the sofas and your mother was deranged?’

‘Yes...’

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happy to know you flew here right away…’ ‘… but cross that she had to wait till she was dead before she had such pulling power.’

Ewalda let slip a fleeting smile. ‘Oh, Hillary, your mother always had such pulling power over you, but you fought it like a wildcat. Shame, hey.’

‘No, it’s no shame. It’s good that I fought her. But, do you know, I can’t remember why it was all so terrible. It wasn’t like she beat me or anything. Okay, so she tried to overfeed me, didn’t like my dad, tried to separate him from me and got hysterical, but was it really that terrible? Maybe not, when I think of all the stuff some kids have to endure.’

‘No, your problem was that she loved you too much.’

My sleep that night was studded with turbulent dreams, one of which returned after a forty-five year absence, but was as familiar as the air I breathed. It had started when I was perhaps seven or so, and recurred week after week until I was about ten. I would be walking along Adderley Street with my family, wearing a lovely crisp white cotton dress with a border of bright red cherries at the hem and single sprigs of cherries dotted across the rest of the fabric.

I’d always been happy wearing this dress. I didn’t know where we were going but everything felt normal enough. And then suddenly we heard footsteps stealing up behind us. The atmosphere was filled with menace and fear. One of the men struck my father on the head and smacked my sister and mother away so they fell down on the pavement, while another man grabbed me and ran, dragging me ahead. The scary part of the dream was that I didn’t look back, and far from being afraid, I was illicitly excited. I remembered now that before going to bed each night I’d be terrified, yet hoping the dream would recur. Now it was back again with all the same charge.

The next day Brenda arrived, and we met for coffee at La Perla, an iconic Italian restaurant from our past on the Sea Point esplanade. It was still overcast and even colder. I felt shivery, damp and shaken by my dream. We hadn’t seen each other since 277

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her brief visit to Edinburgh two years earlier. Our busy lives and responsibilities made it difficult to meet up often, but here we were in Cape Town together because our mother had died. We embraced with a mixture of warmth and confusion, knowing that the next few days wouldn’t be simple. We were about to seat ourselves when we saw a group of my mother’s friends at a nearby table. In Jewish tradition they wished us a long life. My sister was tearful but I was a little circumspect. The last time I was in this restaurant with my mother, we’d bumped into these same immaculately groomed friends, who were so embarrassed they all but pretended we weren’t there. I’d collected my mother from the care home for an outing in her wheelchair. We’d been enjoying ourselves like untethered kites, the two of us, skittering about in the sea breeze, whizzing along the promenade and now dropping down for coffee at La Perla. My mother was laughing, and I couldn’t remember her having laughed for a long, long time. She had pink lipstick in her hair, which I thought hadn’t mattered; in fact, I’d encouraged her, saying it looked punky. But the friends obviously disapproved; we were clearly letting the side down.

‘What are you doing here?’ one had asked.

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m back for a short while and my mom and I are out for a walk.’

‘She’s not well, your mother. She shouldn’t be out.’ They seemed to take this meeting as a personal affront, although most had known my mother for fifty years or more. The unspoken word darted like a poisoned arrow between them. Alzheimer’s.

‘Well, it’s a lovely morning and we’re having a great time.’

They averted their frightened eyes, but fortunately my mother hadn’t recognised them (she hadn’t recognised me either), so she didn’t care.

After coffee, Brenda and I walked along to London Road to meet the rabbi. He was nothing like I expected from a rabbi. He was young, dark and smarmy, American and good-looking in an obvious kind of way, but lacking what I currently needed: wisdom and spirituality.

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all mad about him; I suspected he was mad about himself. I didn’t entirely understand why we were following the Reform procedure, since my parents had been members of the Orthodox congregation, but Brenda said my mother’s express wish to be cremated was against orthodox tradition. Having lived as a heathen myself, I remembered none of the intricacies of tradition, so I’d left all the arrangements to Brenda and the rabbi. They were both steeped in these things and appeared to share an amiability I couldn’t access.

The rabbi explained that my mother’s service would follow after that of an old family friend called Arnold, who had been a lawyer and a big deal in the community. I remembered him.

He was a nice man, wealthy, as far as I knew, and involved in horseracing. Everyone had loved Arnold, so lots of people were expected at his funeral.

The rabbi was laughing and joking with my sister. I got the distinct feeling that he was flirting with her. I felt a bit affronted by this; it seemed in bad taste. We were there, after all, to discuss my mother’s funeral arrangements, and we were both also ancient and married. I didn’t want to be my sister’s moral guardian, but I did feel decidedly uncomfortable. My prudishness surprised me.

Fortunately, the rabbi realised that attempting to flirt with me wasn’t a good idea; I’m sure I looked ready to throw up or assault him. I certainly didn’t want this man to be talking to the congregation about my mother. He didn’t even know her, and I was afraid everyone would laugh if he said what a wonderful woman she was. She wasn’t, and most of her friends would know this. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the need to speak about my mother myself, although the prospect of addressing a large group of people terrified me, especially as most of the people who went to Arnold’s funeral would probably stay on for my mother’s; it was a small community and they all knew one another.

‘I don’t know how these things work,’ I said, ‘but I’d like to speak about my mother at the service.’

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ said the rabbi, casting a quizzical eye at my sister for guidance. ‘Traditionally, the rabbi says a few words about the departed.’

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‘But you didn’t know my mother. What will you say?’

‘It’s customary to eulogise the person.’

‘But what if what you say isn’t true?’

‘Oh stop being ridiculous,’ Brenda said. She was in peremptory mode and I was starting to irritate her, but couldn’t stop myself.

Although we were edging toward familiar and dangerous ground, it became increasingly urgent that I speak about my mother. The rabbi sensed it was time to intervene.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘why not write something down? You can come with your sister early tomorrow morning and read us what you plan to say. There’ll still be time, and then we’ll see.’

‘Good idea,’ I said, to their relief. I suggested to Brenda that while I locked myself in a cupboard and contemplated what I would say about my mother, she could go to the crematorium, but she didn’t want to. I think she was still angry with me. I sensed that we were fast reverting to old sibling patterns of behaviour.

Before returning to Camps Bay, I decided to walk along the beachfront and visit all the spots that would remind me of my mother. Maybe I’d think of a few things to say in my speech. I started off at Saunders Rocks, a small beach on the periphery of Sea Point where we’d always hung out as a young family. It was empty that day, but for a couple of kids playing at the water’s edge in the drizzle. They ran shrieking with delight at the oncoming waves, pulling back at the last second. Their parents sat further back on the wet sand watching over them. The beach was so saturated with memories that it didn’t take much to project myself back to those days when bustling families sat sizzling shoulder to shoulder on their deck chairs, picnic hampers overflowing beside them on the hot sand. Dogs and kids roamed the rocks in gangs, diving dangerously into the freezing water below, a tangled mass of shrieking young bodies, while our parents swapped gossip with their friends until the sun went down.

Everyone but my mom seemed to have fun; she was always wanting to go home. My dad would have been up for fun if he hadn’t been so busy trying to cheer her up, but she was so intractably miserable that it was impossible for him to escape her 280

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gloom. I used to fantasise about going home with one of the other families. Dr Grossman, his wife and two kids were regulars, always perched decorously on a large boulder. He was a psychiatrist and had a suitably distinguished air of erudition and stodgy glamour, while his wife, a sculptress, appeared vivacious and fascinating.

They struck me as the essence of a happy and alluring family.

Once, when I was thirteen or fourteen and the usual state of crisis at home had become unbearable, what with my mother constantly threatening to kill herself for one absurd reason or another, I had rushed off to Groote Schuur Hospital where I knew Dr Grossman practised. I barged into his office, regardless of protocol, and lay in a heap, sobbing at the foot of his desk.

‘My God, Hillary, what on earth is the matter? How did you get in here?’ He looked a little peeved. I’d never seen him in anything but swimming trunks. His severely tailored suit intimidated me, but I tried to pull myself together.

‘Dr Grossman, I’m sorry for disturbing you, but I didn’t know what else to do. My mother keeps threatening to kill herself. I’m sure she won’t, but...’

‘Where is your father?’

‘I don’t know. He’s there, but I don’t know, he’s... not there.

She doesn’t threaten him, just me, and she says stuff like she only wants me, but I’m not her husband and... ’ ‘Aren’t you being a little dramatic? You know,’ he carried on in a nonchalant manner, ‘there’s not a lot I can help you with here.

Speak to your father; you seem like a perfectly nice family.’

I could see that from the outside we might look quite normal.

But was it normal to constantly threaten your daughter with suicide? I didn’t know about other families, but it didn’t feel quite right to me. Seeking help from Dr Grossman had seemed the adult thing to do, but I’d miscalculated. He no longer looked erudite or glamorous, just stodgy and a little stupid. I left his office feeling like I’d walked into a brick wall, and I realised then that I’d need to leave my family and the country and find a new life for myself.

But in the meantime I’d need a strategy.

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speech, nothing I could shape into words that would articulate... what? I realised I had set myself a hard task. If I didn’t know what I wanted to say, how would I find the words? I left Saunders Rocks and walked along the seafront, hoping for a revelation or at least some clarity.

The day continued to drag its heels. It refused to reveal that particularly lovely light that twinkled like diamonds on the dark seaweed floating in the turquoise water, an image I’d dreamt about in Scotland for years. As I walked on, past what used to be the aquarium and then the apartment block where my parents used to live after I’d left, the day only worsened. Once on a visit to South Africa I remembered getting stuck in the lift with the kids. They were still small then, it was killingly hot and we were holed up for hours in that metal cage. I thought we’d suffocate. First Zoë, who wasn’t yet a year old, fell floppily asleep, and then Leif, just three, sank drowsily to the floor. When we were finally rescued, all the inhabitants of the block were gathered in the foyer to greet us as the doors slid open. Amongst the clapping people I saw my mother, beside herself with rage. Whenever she was particularly upset, her anxiety turned into a scorching anger.

On that same trip my mother had cornered Leif and promised to rescue him and Zoë from a life of poverty inflicted by their irresponsible parents. She would pay for them to become lawyers or doctors, she’d told him. Since I’d betrayed my mother by not marrying one of these, she’d make bloody sure my son and daughter redeemed me.

‘Why does she want to rescue us?’ Leif asked. ‘What’s a lawyer?

I want to be a boat builder.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘you can be anything you like.’

I walked on to the Pavilion, regarded by many as the most breathtaking public swimming place in the world, and stood looking over the rails at the crystal-clear Olympic-size seawater pool. The smaller, darker diving pool was equipped with high diving boards that no longer seemed quite as high as when I was a child. Running parallel to the pools was the Atlantic Ocean, either 282

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sparkling benignly or crashing dramatically against the breakwater.

As I stood gazing, I suddenly remembered a good thing about my mother. When I was thirteen she’d made me a pair of black Capri pants. They were tight, and had silver studs down the side seams. I’d worn them in the evening whenever we went to the Pavilion to watch the water-polo players. Afterwards, I’d sneak off to the open-air dance floor nearby, where only ‘rubbishy types’ who were ‘not of our sort’ hung out, like ducktails and poor whites. Occasionally, I’d be spotted by one of her disapproving friends and there’d be hell to pay when I was rumbled; but she always defended the pants. I could mention this in my speech.

She made me clothes and allowed me to design whatever I liked.

She was a good needlewoman and encouraged me to love clothes, and loving clothes had encouraged me to develop my career, and having a career was the best thing… but maybe this was ridiculous, altogether too silly.

Okay. I moved on, walking past mothers idling along with their prams, past a group of kids flying kites and others kicking a ball around. But the black studded pants continued to walk along with me. I remembered my mother’s confused but almost illicit pleasure in seeing me wearing those pants. Crazy, I thought, that this image refused to leave.

I got to Chartleigh House, the big block of flats we had last lived in as a family before I left South Africa, where I’d staged the tantrum in the courtyard. By some strange quirk of fate, Brenda was now staying there with her sister-in-law Sybil and Sybil’s husband Monty. They had a large flat on the opposite side of the building, fronting the sea as ours had. I looked up at what used to be my bedroom window, then around to the front balcony adjacent to Brenda’s old room, and next to it the large picture windows of the sitting room. I hoped the current tenants weren’t infected by the toxic fallout from our past. Was I being ridiculous? It was just a building, bricks and mortar, but it aroused strong feelings of claustrophobia in me, yet also made me laugh at all the drama and hysteria that had gone on there.

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table one evening, ‘if I married someone who wasn’t Jewish?’ I must have been thirteen or fourteen. I’d had lots of boyfriends by then.

‘What are you saying!’ my mother cried, her blood pressure rising rapidly.

‘Just that it might happen.’ My mother had leapt from the table, sweeping cutlery and crockery in her wake as she rushed to her bedroom, screaming.

‘You’re driving me to my death,’ she yelled. ‘You’ll be sorry, you’ll see!’ Wham! The bedroom door slammed. Next, my father grabbed me by the hair. Maybe it wasn’t my hair, but that’s how I remembered it, and dragged me down the passage to my mother’s room (separate from my father’s), through it to the adjacent bathroom where she was yanking the cupboard door, grabbing a bottle of pills and emptying them into her mouth. I’m not sure now if she’d emptied all the pills or just a few, but she was certainly addicted to Valium.

‘You see?’ my father said. ‘This is what you’re doing. I hope you remember this all your life. You’re killing your mother.’

An icy cold had crept over me. As if in slow motion, I went up to my mother and slapped her hard. My father had disappeared, clearly not believing in her suicide. I don’t know where he’d gone, but this was now between my mother and me. The slap had shocked her, and her hysteria seemed to drain away. She looked at me with wide, imploring eyes. I knew she didn’t really want to die, but I was sure she imagined that if she made me feel guilty or awful enough, it would somehow tie me to her.

‘Okay, now stick your finger down your throat. Now, now!’ My mother was suddenly passive like a small child. ‘Harder,’ I said, the taste of panic threatening to overwhelm me. ‘Deeper. You have to vomit up those pills.’ She did. I left the flat soon afterwards, sad and disgusted. Her last words as I closed the door were that she couldn’t help it. But I felt she could if she tried a little harder.

I reeled over to the maid’s room next door where Phyllis lived, and sat sobbing on her bed to the sound of Zulu music on the radio. She had worked for my mother since before I was born, and 284

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I’d bounced around on her back as a baby while she swept and cleaned and cooked. As I grew older, she’d been my ally, witness and friend until I left South Africa. She didn’t need to say much.

Her presence alone was pure comfort.

I was slightly breathless remembering this scene. God, why was I so hard on my mother? Was I really so unforgiving, so crazy? Yes, I thought, I was. But I had always felt I was struggling to save my life; it was always me or her. I had felt in mortal danger of being swallowed alive.

It was getting late and I couldn’t deal with much more. My stroll along memory lane had gone far enough, and I was no nearer to solving the problem of what to say about my mother at her funeral. Perhaps in the end, I had nothing to say. I decided to walk the short distance to the nursing home nearby, where my mother had spent her last year. It had been her abiding terror that she’d end her days in an old people’s home, and that was precisely what had come to pass.

It now felt time to return to Camps Bay and relax, although it wasn’t going to be easy; my head had turned into a photograph album, teeming with images of my mother’s youth and us as a young family, all flashing vividly behind my eyelids. I took a mini taxi and headed for Ewalda and David’s.

‘What on earth have you been up to?’ Ewalda asked. ‘You look like you’ve been in a car crash.’

‘Feels like it,’ I said.

‘We’ll eat soon and get an early night. Big day tomorrow. Will you be okay? How’s Brenda? Have you finalised the plans?’

‘I think so.’

After dinner I retired to my room and prepared to write my speech. Nothing I wrote seemed to work. I was still stuck on the stupid pants theme, but I could see it lacked gravitas. Thank you, mother, for engendering an appreciation for clothes from an early age. You made us beautiful dresses, the details and fabric of which I remember to this day, and when I was older, you allowed me to design and have clothes made by your long-suffering dressmaker.

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I’m eternally grateful.

No. I could see this would be perceived as slight. On the other hand, I could hardly thank her for falling prey to Alzheimer’s and thus creating the relationship I’d always longed to have with her, true though this was.

Photographs continued to flicker before me. One in particular resonated, an image of my mother as a young woman in Johannesburg with her older, more beautiful sister Renee, who had married a richer man than my father. He had worked hard, my father, but never attained the status and wealth of her brotherin-law. The legend went that sister Renee was a sphinx, coolly elegant and sublimely detached, the sister men lavished with gifts and invited to prestigious events. In the photo my mother had a strange expression, which suddenly reminded me of a picture of me at my sister’s wedding just before I left South Africa. It wasn’t jealousy, as all the guests believed it was, but some inner mix of fury and disdain.

I gave a sudden gasp, amazed that I’d never made the connection.

Perhaps my mother had always seen the parallel between us as sisters, and identified with me as the younger, less charming, less attractive one. Just like Renee, Brenda was the one showered with chocolates and dates, the beautiful sister with the inscrutable icequeen air, whereas I, shorter, plumper and a little hostile, was an irascible, uncool gnome.

As a precocious thirteen-year-old I’d fallen passionately in love with a much older boy called Geoff, who returned my affection.

He took me to his home and introduced me to his grandfather, who was all for us marrying right away, but my mother, furious of course, banned us from seeing one another and threatened him with the law. One evening I was in the bath when I heard my sister answer the phone. I established that she was talking to Geoff and anticipated being called. But she went on laughing and talking and laughing some more. I was suddenly consumed by such jealousy that I leapt up, locked the bathroom door and jumped back into the water, smashing my head against the side of the bath trying to knock myself unconscious. I went crazy! I heard banging on the 286

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bathroom door but I couldn’t stop. Either my father or mother broke the door down and hauled me semi-conscious from the tub and into bed, where I lay shaking and inconsolable. My mother tried in vain to comfort me. As a last resort, she grabbed my shoulders and shook me, forcing eye contact.

‘Listen to me. Listen,’ she said. ‘I never meant to tell you this, and I’m only telling you now because I don’t know how else to tell you that you’ll be alright. But I want you to promise you’ll never speak of it again to anyone, ever.’ She took a deep breath and continued, ‘When I was eighteen, I married a very nice man. He was rich and handsome and from an illustrious family. When we were driving back from our honeymoon, we had an accident. My husband was killed and I was badly hurt. I had to stay in hospital for a long time – a long, long time. Then your father came. He kept coming to visit me, and in the end I think I was too exhausted to do anything else. I married him.’

That was all. The moral of the story: I would recover.

I was shocked, if not exactly chastened. Her words lived with me forever, words and feelings I was never able to share with anyone else. I felt at the time that she’d used them to manipulate me. If I succumbed to her ploy, I’d be buried alive. I was a fierce opponent.

The tragedy, of course, was that she never had recovered. The experience had ruined her life, and the damage was leaking into me.

I sat now and allowed the enormity of my mother’s loss to really hit me, acknowledging how it must have affected her whole life.

Thirty-nine years too late, I realised with shame that her intention in telling me had not been to manipulate, but to comfort me. But I had refused to be comforted.

I thought, too, of my father. As a young boy and an only child, his father had died, leaving him and his mother alone in the world.

He had loved and rescued my mother, but he would never be as rich, handsome or illustrious as the husband she had lost, and for that she never forgave him.

I stayed up all night writing my speech, and met Brenda at the rabbi’s place the following morning. There was no time for 287

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pleasantries. He had two funeral services that day, and I sensed that he was a bit fed up with me and wanted this over with as fast as possible. I read out my speech, but before I reached the end, he and Brenda had unanimously and unequivocally decided that I should shut up.

‘No, my dear,’ he said, ‘you really can’t say this.’

‘What are you thinking? Are you crazy?’ Brenda said.

I surrendered immediately. I suspected that they were right. It was better that the rabbi say his thing, and afterwards that Brenda and I merely stand at the exit and shake hands with those who’d come to honour my mother’s passing and wish us both a long life.

I no longer had the slightest desire to say anything. For me it had already all been said.

Hundreds of people came to the service, most of them leftovers from Arnold.

‘We were here anyway,’ said one, ‘so we thought we might as well stay.’

Everything went according to plan and custom. No one sniggered when the rabbi said what a wonderful woman my mother had been, and I didn’t mind at all; in fact, I was touched.

After the ceremony we went back to Chartleigh House where Brenda was staying with her in-laws. A few of our closer friends joined us for tea. But before joining them, I slipped across to the other side of the building and stood for a few minutes outside our old apartment, next to which was Phyllis’s old room. Where was Phyllis now, I wondered.

‘Phyllis?’ my mother had said when I’d asked years ago. ‘After you left she started to go all funny.’

‘What do you mean funny?’

‘I don’t remember. I think she stole things.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Phyllis would never steal. Where did she go? It’s important.’

‘Stop being so dramatic. I don’t know where she went, she just… disappeared.’

I stared at her door. She had worked for my mother for at 288

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least twenty-five years. I remembered all the hours I’d spent in her room; the countless times she’d saved me from trouble and despair, covering up for me, making me laugh, inspiring me to keep going.

Now that I was standing there again, I felt I was mourning the loss of two mothers.

I went back to the gathering, which was now in full swing. There were people there I’d not seen in years, and it was surprisingly good to reconnect to the threads of different parts of my life. One of Brenda’s friends I’d last seen when I was seventeen approached.

She was smiling and looking grave at the same time, an odd composite that distorted her face. Two or more years older than me, she was stick thin and dressed like a teenager, with a large head of fluffed-up hair, one of the lollipop girls one read about in fashion magazines.

‘Hello,’ she said and wished me a long life. ‘I just wanted to say that if you need any grief counselling, I’d be happy to give you some sessions. I think you’ll need it.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I’ve been practising all my life.’ She looked at me strangely and moved on. Then Brenda asked me why an old friend of mine had brought her maid with her. ‘That’s her girlfriend,’ I said. ‘Times have changed.’

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Forty It was hard to know whether the increasing exhaustion I was now feeling was part of my PBC diagnosis or simply life taking its customary toll. The itch continued inexorably. Rick and I both needed peace and quiet. We were spending as much time as we could at Li, travelling back and forth along the A9 on a regular basis.

Zoë was in her second year at Goldsmiths University in London, doing media studies and sociology, living in a flat in Brixton, and carrying out most of her research in the Brixton Brasserie where she worked part time. She appeared to be more attracted to the characters that hung around Brixton than to her on-campus peers, but every six weeks or so, the Brixton dynamic would get too intense for her and she’d retreat to either Edinburgh or Li, with hair-raising tales of brasserie life, featuring gangs and guns.

My business, meanwhile, was thriving. When I wasn’t in Edinburgh, I was contactable at Li, but the girls seemed capable of managing most things without me. I did the designing at Li, taking inspiration not from the garden or the heathery Highland colours, but from Fashion TV, which ran an endless channel of 291

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tall, impossibly skinny models traipsing down the runway, wearing sometimes impossibly beautiful clothes. Our TV reception there was surprisingly good. I filled notebooks with sketches of sweaters.

I dreamt of seas of soft, creamy cashmere, which, with the genius of Rosella, would be transformed into a part of someone’s wardrobe.

One day, Jan phoned.

‘Hi,’ she said, ‘how you doing up there?’

‘It’s good and quiet. What about there?’

‘Oh, busy, busy, but I need to ask you some questions.’

‘Fire away.’

‘What would you say is the driving force behind your business?’

‘That’s a funny question, coming from you.’

‘Okay, Betty found that questionnaire you chucked in the bin.

Remember that Small Scottish Business award thing? Well, we decided to enter. We know most of the answers, but need to ask you a few. Do you mind?’

I started to laugh. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I think that’s terribly funny and very sweet.’ I answered Jan’s questions and never gave it another thought.

A month or so later, I received a call from a man on the selection panel. I was one of six runners up, he said, and could he visit the workshop?

He looked surprised to see such a small, ‘funky’ domestic setup, knowing as he did the annual export figures.

‘An interesting business,’ he remarked. ‘You make it look as if it’s all happening by itself. You’re not following any of the rules, yet you seem to be doing everything according to a prescribed procedure. Did you do an MBA?’ I laughed. ‘I don’t mean to be disingenuous, but I also marvel that it works. I just follow what seems the most obvious and sensible route. It’s instinctive. I’ve been told that’s a talent, although it feels like second nature. But I do have a few rules.’

‘Oh? I’m interested.’

‘Well, it has to work as part of my life, without compromising my family or lifestyle. Also, my policy is never to borrow money, not for the business or personally – no mortgages, nothing. And I 292

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rarely pursue business; I believe it puts me in a stronger position if people approach me. But my golden rule is to follow every enquiry through to the end.’

‘Hmm.’ ‘And most importantly, I believe in my product, not the packaging, but also in the people who help me produce it. Maybe big business will get around to that one day. It makes sense, whatever the scale.’

I was invited to the presentation dinner, a rather flashy, lurid affair. I didn’t win, but it was an interesting exercise. The girls were very proud of themselves and I was proud of them.

But it was the garden that had begun to provide me with what I most needed. Soon after Leif died, Rick had spotted an enormous stone lying on the hillside. It was at least eighteen foot long and must have weighed about three tons. With the help of his friend Peter, employing the method believed to have built Stonehenge, they cantilevered the stone inch by inch from the hillside and across the field to a site overlooking the loch. It took weeks.

Once erected, twelve-foot of stone soared above the ground with another six feet buried below, looking as if it had been there for hundreds of years. Behind the stone, Rick planted a sweep of oak trees, which thrived and were now quite tall. The garden I’d planted for Leif had flourished too. The spot I chose turned out to have been the foundation of some ancient dwelling, and took months of hacking and axing out, rock after rock. Now it brimmed with lilies, aconitum, astilbes, campanulas, hostas, hellebores and filipendulas. Bordering the garden was a beautiful yellow tree peony, an Amelanchier lamarckii (its name as beautiful as the shrub itself), a deep purple lacecap hydrangea, and several perfumed old bourbon shrub roses. Sometimes I could hear them, Leif and Zoë, as small children, playing in their new ‘room’.

Every time we drove to Li, the car was filled with plants bought from nurseries in and around Edinburgh or given to me by friends.

It looked like a travelling forest, and then like a botanical Noah’s ark as they journeyed across on the boat. But no sooner were 293

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they planted than they all but disappeared against the vast and dramatic scale of the surrounding mountains and loch. At first, this grandeur of scale had been intimidating, and had prevented me from planting, but I was beginning now to get the measure of things, and was encouraged that the tiny slips I’d stuck into the ground years ago were now substantial features of the landscape.

Rick later converted one of the old trout tanks into an ornamental pond. The water ran from the stream into an underground pipe and then bubbled up in a little fountain at the centre of the pond, forming eternal concentric circles that radiated hypnotically outwards. The pond lay in a deep dip, unseen from the general perspective, but if you walked along the upper bank, a lush and secret sunken garden appeared, a surprising grotto with a watery ring at its heart. I cleared the wide area of invasive woodrush with its hairy tarantula roots that had buried the last traces of the trout tank, and planted instead swathes of water-loving plants.

The pond was designed so that some of the water spilled over the rim to moisten the surrounding earth, now brimming with hostas, fritillaries, water iris, apricot candelabra primulas, lysichitons with huge green-veined leaves illuminated in the light, and the most exquisite arisaemas with fat striped bellies and long black tongues, like poisonous snakes that had just swallowed an elephant. In the background were bamboo, gunneras with leaves spreading six feet or more, and a tall climbing rose that almost smothered the ash tree.

In the opposite field we planted rhododendrons and tree rhododendrons that might take fifty years to reach their height and flower, but for once I wasn’t in a hurry. And there were perfumed azaleas and lacecap hydrangeas, beautiful varieties in whites, creams and a strange greenish colour unrecognisable as hydrangeas, and, because the soil was so acid, the deepest cerulean and sapphire blues and royal, iridescent purples.

Rick had fenced in another thousand acres of the mountain in a joint regeneration venture with the Forestry Commission. The idea was that the few original indigenous trees that were inaccessible to deer would seed themselves. He also planted thousands more: 294

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oaks, alder, birch and rowan, which were all now making their mark on the landscape. The trees he’d planted when first we arrived were now big enough to thin, so we were completely selfsufficient in firewood.

I’d gone with Rick the previous spring to see a stand of gunneras that must originally have seeded themselves from our garden, and were now migrating and colonising a rough patch of hillside about a kilometre from the house. There were about fifty of them, some four times the height and spread of the family they’d left behind under the protection of me and the fence. In spite of the love and care I’d lavished on them – I’d even been known to put cashmere hats on the crowns of the garden gunneras to shelter them from winter frosts – they’d never thrived. But out there in the wild, so different from their native Brazil, they’d taken root in the poorest, scrubbiest ground and multiplied. It was good to get beyond the fence.

In many ways it felt as if we’d never left Li, and I began to imagine a day when we’d return for longer periods. Our lifestyle had not changed dramatically. We owned more houses, but the way we lived in them remained much the same. Ironically, many people we’d thought of as peasants when we first arrived in Arnisdale were now driving around in flashy cars and had smart new powerboats, extensions, new bathrooms and Ikea kitchens.

We were now probably perceived to be the peasants, with our toilet in the greenhouse and our battered old car and boat. But the big luxury for me was knowing that we didn’t have to be there all through the dark, freezing winter.

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Forty-one 1 October 2002 Dear Ewalda, The deed is done. I’ve sold my business, hooray, hooray, but the process nearly drove Rick and me to the brink of madness. It was bought by one of my former clients, the cashmere addict Steph who used to dance with the Royal Ballet. It took a year of negotiation with her husband and his lawyers and accountants, all of which was completely unnecessary, since I gave them ten years of healthy, wellkept books and told them everything there is to know about my business (it’s very simple really), including the price, within the first half hour. Until the very last moment, Rick and I still didn’t know whether the sale was going to happen – a whole year of meetings and misery. But, with loads and loads of help from Rick, the papers are finally signed – I’m FREE! This time I knew with absolute certainty that it was the right time to sell. From the very start I’d asked the question: When is enough enough? And it’s NOW. It’s enough of 297

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everything: money, responsibility, fashion, and bloody Vogue magazines crowding out the bookshelves. But I regret none of it. There was so much I loved – the wonderful girls who became my other family, the knitters who worked for up to thirty years and became my friends, the whole manufacturing thing, the total excitement of making an idea happen from start to finish, plus all the collaboration with others: the girls, the ingenious pattern writer Rosella, the yarn salesmen, knitters, agents and a few sympathetic shops.

I’ve learnt so much about the importance of detail, money, management, participation in the world, and discovering how things actually work. Not that I like how it all works, of course, but I feel in a better position to deal with it now that I understand at least a small part of it. And best of all, we’re no longer poor.

Of course I still have my strange disease, which I’ll have until I either die or have a liver transplant, but meanwhile I can manage the itch and the killer exhaustion. Whenever I feel like I’ve been hit over the head by an axe, I just go to bed and read, which suits me rather well.

And now, Ewalda, we can spend more time in Cape Town, more time at Li and more time doing yoga. I’m already expanding the garden, planting more flowering trees, rhododendrons, shrubs, more of everything. It’s slowly beginning to look like a real garden surrounded by a convincing forest, an oasis in an otherwise bleak landscape.

I can barely remember those inky winters with Zoë on my back and Leif ploughing bravely against the gales and the sepulchral gas-lit afternoons, baking gingerbread men for them in the Rayburn and forever reading. Oh dear, I’m beginning to feel... I don’t know really, it flickers and flies, changing all the time. I thought when I started this letter that I was feeling so strong, but...

I’ve been thinking, too, of Cape Town and my house in Oranjezicht that I never really believed I’d get to live in. When first I saw it, my immediate thought was that it would be the 298

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perfect house in which to die. I could imagine myself sitting beneath the huge oak watching squirrels, hadedas, guinea fowl and stray cats all chattering away in the courtyard.

Now I’ll have time to live in it. And Zoë’s planning to move there. She’s applied to do a second Masters in Human Rights Law at the University of Cape Town. Wouldn’t granny and grandpa have been proud, even if the jazz musician boyfriend who inspired the move might not have been so appreciated?

Even more extraordinary is that Rick is keen on the swallow plan. I never thought I’d extract him from Li for more than a few months at a time. But he’s also had enough of the dark winters now that he’s tasted the bright light of Africa, and he has an on-going love affair with both Namibia and South Africa. He has friends and colleagues and interesting work in Cape Town, but more importantly, he loves fynbos and can make a good braai, so he’s very happy to spend half the year there.

I’ve enrolled to do a creative writing course with the Open University. It’s over two and half years and all online, so I can take it wherever I go: Edinburgh, Li and Cape Town.

It’ll be important to have some continuity in my new life.

I’ve no idea where it will go, but writing has been my ongoing fantasy for the longest time. Stories are accumulating in my head.

Here’s the one about Vogue.

Once upon a time, a girl lived with her family on a distant island. They were very poor, but one day she had an idea.

She began to spin fleece into wool, and asked the local people to knit it into sweaters. Her only contact with fashion was her monthly Vogue magazine, and oh, how she pored over those pictures. As the years passed, her husband built her a workshop with rows and rows of shelves to house her Vogues.

But the endless spinning tilted her pelvis and soon she was forced to stop. Instead she began designing cashmere 299

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sweaters, and got even more ladies to knit. Over many long years she sold lots and lots of sweaters, until they were no longer poor. Then she sold her business.

The next day, she and her husband dragged all the Vogues to the beach. They were very, very heavy and made a great mountain, their pages flapping in the wind. Her husband then went to the boatshed and poured some paraffin into a tin. He threw the paraffin over the mountain of magazines.

He had to throw on a lot, as the pages were glossy and slow to ignite. But once the flames got going, they flew high into the sky. They went on burning long after the sun had set, while the girl and her husband danced into the night, and the mountains echoed with their laughter.

When at last the flames died down, they sat for a long while in their field at the foot of the great stone... remembering.

Much love always Hillary

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