Billy. “How do you like it?”
“It’s hard, but I like it,” she told him.
“Who will you be?” he asked her.
Eliza tried out roles in her imagination. “I should be a hobbit, because I’m a midget, or an orc would be fun.” She pulled an evil face and snarled at Billy. “But I’d really like to be Galadriel. Would you be Aragorn? Or Gandalf?”
“Saruman!” said Billy, without hesitation.
“Ooh, yes,” she said. Then, “Billy, Galadriel is pretty. Do you think I’ll be pretty when I’m older?”
“Nah,” he said. “Hideous!”
She looked at him with her deep blue eyes opened wide and head tilted in an enquiry, to see if he was serious, so he took pity on her. He ruffled her curls and smiled at her sweet little face, already pretty. “I think you’ll be very pretty, now go home!” He opened his book again and she was effectively dismissed.
Eliza was satisfied at that, and didn’t push her luck. Somehow she knew where the line was drawn. She disappeared out of the window, and went home the way she had come, without a thought about safety. Her father, had he known, would have been very angry with her.
And he was angry, some time later, when Billy’s concerned mother phoned him to report having apprehended a monkey, apparently belonging to him, in its attempt to gain access to the upper levels. It spent several minutes disputing with her the logic of coming down and entering the front door like a civilised human being, when it would be quicker, at this stage, to go in the window. More economical of energy, as it were. The little tree-dweller’s points were cogent and well-argued, but eventually it gave up and dropped to the pavement. Billy’s mother ushered the monkey, still chattering its protest, in the front door. Since she needed to maintain her authority, she turned her face away so it didn’t notice she was trying not to laugh.
In those days, Eliza’s father was absolutely self-absorbed and knew little about raising a child in the 1990s. When she went to bed, he assumed she would stay there. Sometimes, though, when it was still light, she would pull on some clothes over her pyjamas, put on her shoes, walk quietly out of the house, and jump on her bicycle. Legs pumping furiously, she would cross the dangerous roads – where trolls lurked under bridges – separating her father’s spacious Victorian dwelling from the modest terraced house where Billy lived with his family.
No threats of trolls, in fact, or the bogeyman, had ever been used to control her, and she had no fear of being kidnapped and murdered, an obvious oversight on her father’s part. Yet with the grace of some benevolent deity who regularly looks after small children, among others, she managed consistently to avoid all fast-moving vehicles, paedophiles and serial killers, and she got to see her Prince for a few minutes.
* * *
Eliza and Billy met when she was six and he was twelve. An unlikely match, at least for commoners in the twentieth century. He wandered past her front gate after school was out, late as usual and on his way home by a circuitous route that involved a park and an open-air theatre. She, already home, changed and ready for her make-believe world, was dressed in a pirate hat, with eye patch, and holding an overlarge cutlass. Despite his slouch and the sullen manifestation of youthful self-consciousness, she thought he was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen. He was tall and lanky, with a broad forehead, dark hair and hazel eyes which seemed too large for his pale face. He didn’t notice her at all, of course.
After that, she made sure she was in the garden at the same time every day, waiting to see her Prince. She made no attempt to engage him in conversation. Even at six, she knew that boys, especially boys so old and worldly, were not about to compromise their social standing by being seen talking to six year olds. So she just looked at him solemnly and invisibly.
One day he emerged from his thoughts for long enough to register that the garden gnome in the front yard of number thirty-one was actually a small girl. He looked at her with only as much curiosity as was seemly in one so above it all. She might have been the poster child for the Moppet Club. Her hair was almost black, and curly. She was quite pale, except for her pink cheeks and the cherry lips of a young child. Her eyes were almost too big, and almost too blue. She looked like everybody’s favourite dolly; she would probably, if tipped backwards, say “Ma-Ma”, and she was dressed incongruously in a pirate hat and eye patch.
“Arrrr,” she said, as befitted a pirate of her standing, as desperate and bloodthirsty a villain as one could hope to see in Primrose Hill on a sunny autumn afternoon. He looked back, and a smile started, reluctantly, at the left side of his mouth. Eventually, in spite of itself, the smile made it all the way across.
“Arrrr,” he returned, and continued on his way, still smiling.
* * *
Victoria Eliza Annie MacLean had rather an unusual childhood, although she had nothing with which to compare it, and therefore could find no fault. Katharine Adelaide Mary MacLean, younger by three years, was the second and last of Richard and Lisette MacLean’s daughters. British queenly names are quite thin on the ground and repetitive, so it’s perhaps as well they stopped at two. One feels that things would not have gone well in the schoolyard for little Boadicea MacLean.
On a day which rather stood out in Eliza’s memories, some months after her third birthday, her nursery-school teacher, Kirsten, drove her home as a favour to her father, and left her at the door after ringing the bell. Kirsten rushed back down the garden path and drove away at speed, as though pursued by a canine of menacing aspect and pointed teeth. The door was already open, so Eliza ran down the wide hallway and into the kitchen, whence the usual baby noise was coming, to find her baby sister, her father and her aunt hovering over a tin of formula and a bottle. Kathy, her face red from screaming, was being held and jiggled by Auntie Danni, a study in Stoicism, while Eliza’s daddy did an excellent job of Agitation, running his hands through his hair. This told Eliza he was not going to want to hear about how she had bitten little Rufus Jacobson, hard, on the elbow. Eliza considered it fair retribution for scribbling on her drawing, but realised this was not the time to present her case. She pulled her aunt’s sleeve, and whispered, “Auntie Danni, where’s Mummy?”
Her father became aware of her presence at that point, and picked her up, kissed her and tried to act all cheerful. He did a woeful job, for an actor. “Mummy’s had to go away for a rest, darling. She isn’t well.”
“Is she going to die?” asked Eliza, with interest, not really knowing what it meant to die, but then she suddenly remembered being told that Daddy’s grandfather had died. She knew he had gone away and she had not seen him again. Then Daddy had been hurt in an accident while he was out in the car. Daddy had come home from hospital after a couple of days, but she had not seen the car again, so it must have died. Suddenly Eliza felt terribly scared.
“Daddy,” she said, her mouth turning down and her eyes filling. “Is Mummy coming back?”
“Yes, poppet,” he told her, relaxing a little now because the baby, with her mouth full of milk, had stopped screaming. “Auntie Danni’s here to help us with Kathy.” He sat down with Eliza on his lap and cuddled her, possibly more for his comfort than hers.
Nobody really knew, for the moment, if Mummy was coming back. It seemed that after a few months of trying to manage her husband, her wilful elder daughter, and a baby, Lisette MacLean had a bit of a breakdown. By that, I mean she cried a lot, stayed in bed a lot, and generally sent out a distress call that was picked up by Her Majesty’s Coastguard, Thames, but nobody came to help. People probably told her to pull her socks up. She wasn’t wearing any
