“Yes,” I said, still staring out. “Mo, or Mor. Or Mori.” Mori Phelps is the name I will use when I am a famous poet. It’s what I write inside my books now. Ex libris Mori Phelps. And what has Mori Phelps to do with Morwenna Markova and what’s likely to happen to her in a new school? I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can’t imagine them properly now.
“And did they call your sister Mog?” he asked.
He hadn’t asked me about her before. I shook my head, then realised he was driving and not looking at me. “No,” I said. “Mo, or Mor, both of us.”
“But how could they tell you apart?” He wasn’t looking at all, he was lighting another cigarette.
“They couldn’t.” I smiled to myself.
“You won’t mind being Markova at school?”
“I don’t care. And anyway, you’re paying for it,” I said.
He turned his head and looked at me for a second, then back to the road. “My sisters are paying for it,” he said. “I don’t have any money except what they allow me. Do you know my family situation?”
What is there to know? I knew nothing about him apart from the fact that he was English, which has caused me no end of playground fights, and that he married my mother when he was nineteen and then ran off two years later when she was in hospital having another baby, a baby that died because of the shock. “No,” I said.
“My mother was married to a man named Charles Bartleby. He was quite wealthy. They had three daughters. Then the war came. He went off to fight in France in 1940 and was captured there and put in a prisoner of war camp. My mother left my three little sisters with their grandmother Bartleby, in the Old Hall, the house we’ve just left. She went to work in an RAF canteen, to do what she could for the war effort. There she met and fell in love with a Polish flying officer called Samuel Markova. He was a Jew. I was born in March 1944. In September 1944 Bartleby was liberated from the camp and came home to England, where he and my mother obtained a divorce. She married my father, who had just learned that his entire family in Poland had been killed.”
Had he had a wife and children too? I felt sure he had. A Polish Jew! I am part Polish. Part Jewish? All that I know about Judaism comes from A Canticle for Leibowitz and Dying Inside. Well, and the Bible, I suppose.
“My mother had some money of her own, but not very much. My father left the RAF after the war and worked in a factory in Ironbridge. Bartleby left his money, and his house, to my sisters. When I was thirteen my mother died in an accident. My sisters, who were grown up by then, came to her funeral. Anthea offered to pay to send me to school, and my father accepted. They’ve been subsidising me ever since. As you know, I married partway through university.”
“What happened to Bartleby?” I asked. He couldn’t have been much older than my grandfather.
“He shot himself when the girls turned twenty-one,” he said, in a tone of voice that closed off further questions.
“What do you … do?” I asked.
“They hold the purse-strings, but I manage the estate,” he said. He dropped the butt of a cigarette into the ash tray, which was overflowing. “They pay me a salary, and I live at the house. Very Victorian really.”
“Have you lived there ever since you ran off?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“But they said they didn’t know where you were. My grandfather went there and talked to them, all this way.” I was indignant.
“They lied.” He wasn’t looking at me at all. “Did it bother you so much that I ran away?”
“I’ve run away from her too,” I said, which didn’t answer his question but seemed to be enough.
“I knew your grandparents would look after you,” he said.
“They did,” I said. “You needn’t have worried about that.”
“Ah,” he said.
So then I realised guiltily how my very presence in his car was actually a huge reproach. For one thing, there is only one of me, when he abandoned twins. For another, I am crippled. Thirdly, I am there at all; I ran away. I had to ask for his help—and worse, I had to use the social services to ask for his help. Clearly, the arrangements he made for us were far from adequate. In fact, my existence there at that moment demonstrated to him that he is a rotten parent. And, truth be told, he is. My mother notwithstanding, running out on babies isn’t an acceptable thing to do—and in fact, as an abstraction, abandoning babies with her is particularly and unusually irresponsible. But I have run away from her too.
“I wouldn’t have grown up any other way,” I said. My grandparents. The Valleys. Home. “Truly. There was so much about it to love. I couldn’t have had a better childhood.”