Mum knew nothing of any of this; even after I won the prize I kept it hidden from her. She had begun to drink and was often drowsy when I got back from school. It was a few more years before I found out that she had fallen out badly with Uncle Clifford, who disapproved of what she had done to us children. She would never visit Eel House again. Meanwhile Jack did well at boarding school. He grew with startling rapidity and took up weightlifting. At the end of his first year he came home for the summer just as we had to have our cat Salt put to sleep. I remember he came with us to the vet. There were dogs being restrained by their owners and cats that howled. Jack and I sat on either side of our mother waiting our turn. The room smelt of disinfectant and damp dog. We did not speak. The vet came out and recognised us.
‘Hello, my dear,’ she said, and she put her arm around my mother.
I could see my mother beginning to cry. The vet took us into the back and took Salt out. Then the vet began stroking her. Hurry up, I thought. Get on with it. Our mother began a long story about Salt’s life and what a character he was and how she was going to miss him. When the vet gave him the injection, Mum stood stroking him and sobbing so loudly that I thought everyone in the waiting room would hear her.
‘Give your poor mum a hug,’ the vet told me.
I swear there was disapproval in her voice. Jack was examining a chart on the wall. Throughout the whole business he had whistled softly, under his breath. Later, I caught him in the garden pouring boiling water on to a line of ants.
‘Look,’ he said, when he saw me, ‘come and see how they’re struggling.’
And he laughed in a voice that was already beginning to deepen.
The changes in Jack were unnerving. He began to look more and more like Dad, but there the resemblance ended. He would fly into sudden, violent rages that erupted for no reason at all, which Mum ignored and which terrified the other children he played with. One day a neighbour called round. Jack, who knew the neighbour’s disabled son, had tampered with the brakes of the boy’s wheelchair. It had rolled on to the road with the boy still in it. Luckily, there had been no cars and someone had come to his rescue.
‘He might have been killed,’ the neighbour said.
‘You’ve no proof it was Jack,’ my mother said, feebly.
‘I know it was Jack,’ the woman insisted. ‘I don’t want him coming round again, Mrs Robinson. I’m sorry. I know your family has had a lot to deal with. I think you should get your children to see a counsellor, perhaps?’
Jack was hiding upstairs.
‘Did you?’ I hissed.
In answer he kicked me. Downstairs there were raised voices.
‘Just look at them,’ the woman was saying. ‘Can’t you see how disturbed they are?’
I remember I was far more shocked than Mum, but when I tried to talk to her she became vague and would not look at me. Something had gone terribly wrong with us all and there was nothing I could do about it. In hindsight, this was when I noticed how Jack loved to simultaneously bully and be kind to me. What I didn’t know was that everyone at school was frightened of him too and that my mother received letter after letter of complaint about his behaviour from the head teacher. This was something that came out much later.
We lived with our individual preoccupations in this way while all the time our collective skeleton languished in a hidden cupboard. In the end, the sea at Aldeburgh saved me. When I was fourteen I went back to Eel House, and my uncle’s farm. I went back without Jack. He was spending the summer with friends from school, living a different existence with a different family. Who could blame him? Secretly I was glad to have the place to myself. My life had not so much gone downhill as stagnated. When I arrived another shock awaited me. Both Aunt Elsa and Uncle Clifford seemed to have aged terribly. None of us mentioned Dad. It was as if my father had never existed. On one rare occasion, after a particular angry phone call to my mother, my uncle told me gruffly that although Mum had behaved disgracefully he believed I would find it in me to forgive her one day. I said nothing. I was already hating my mother in a way that was beyond speech.
It was Eric who eventually talked to me about what had happened. All through the summer when I was fourteen we would go out eeling while my uncle grumbled that he wanted to make me a farmer not a fisherman. Eels were Eric’s passion. We would go out in his boat on the hot summer nights, mooring up in places where the water curled around the base of a willow tree. Then, after we had eaten the delicious supper of fresh fish he had cooked on his little camping gas stove, Eric would tell me eel stories. It was he who introduced me to the Sargasso Sea.
‘Imagine, Ria,’ he would say, ‘a sea without shores, without waves, without currents. That’s the Sargasso for you!’
I listened mesmerised as he talked about a place of utter darkness, where starfish and sea cucumbers crept. My imagination was fired by a place full of weed-harbouring monsters.
‘The eels swim there, Ria,’ he told me. ‘They are programmed to swim three thousand miles in order to remain faithful to their ancestral life in the matter of reproduction!’
I had no idea what he was talking about, but the stories fascinated me, nonetheless.
‘And then,’ Eric said, getting into his stride, ‘after they finish reproducing, spent and exhausted, far away from home, the fire of life goes out of them and they die. That’s life, Ria.’
We would sit staring at the night sky with its Milky Way running in a silent ribbon above us. And it was on such a night as this, without fanfare or fuss, that he began to talk about my father’s death. The conversation slipped in easily like oars dipping into the water. All conversations with Eric were like that. He told me that death, whenever it came, was always sudden, always a shock. You could not prepare for it, he said, no matter how hard you tried.
‘Your Ma was only trying to protect you both,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t being wicked, just foolish, maybe. We’re all foolish at some point or other. Don’t listen to other folks.’
We sat in companionable silence. For the briefest of moments I felt a kind of peace.
‘How’s Jack been?’ he asked, finally.
I shrugged and Eric looked at me sharply.
‘You’re both out there in the dark, aren’t you? It’s too much for you to have to deal with on your own.’
Then he talked of other things too. He told me about the brother he had lost years before and he told me that having been born on the farm meant his roots were firmly buried in this little patch of land.
‘The land you are born on is so important, Ria,’ he said. ‘People take it for granted these days because travel is so easy. But it never was in my day and I have never wanted to be anywhere else.’
I had no idea how old he was.
‘You’ll come back, luv, when you’ve grown,’ he said, nodding his head, certain. ‘Your dad loved it here and this place belongs to you, you’ll see.’
I nearly began to cry but I took a deep breath and looked at my hands and then the tears went away again. Only the lump in my chest stayed where it was and I remember thinking I would have to learn to breathe with it always there.
One day Eric gave me a photograph that my father had
