10
A fortnight after Declan started at Corinium his younger daughter, Caitlin, went back to her new boarding school in Oxfordshire, and his elder daughter, Taggie, disgraced herself by being the only member of the family to cry.
Caitlin’s last week at home coincided with her mother Maud discovering the novels of P. D. James. As a result Maud spent her days curled up on the sitting-room sofa, holding P. D. James on top of a pile of games shirts, shorts and navy-blue knickers. When anyone came into the room, she would hastily whip the clothes over her book and pretend assiduously to be sewing on name tapes. The same week Grace, the housekeeper, discovered the local pub.
As well as getting the house straight, therefore, and feeding everyone, and coping with Grace grumbling about the incessant quiet and imagined ghosts and having to drag dustbins to the end of a long drive, the task of getting Caitlin ready for school fell on Taggie.
It was not just the gathering of tuck, the buying of lacrosse sticks, laundry bags, and the New English Bible (which Declan hurled out of the window, because it was a literary abomination, and which had to be retrieved from a rose bush) and the packing of trunks which got Taggie down. Worst of all was scurrying from shop to shop in Gloucester, Cheltenham, Cotchester, Stroud and finally Bath, trying to find casual shoes and a wool dress for chapel which Caitlin didn’t think gross and the school quite unsuitable.
Caitlin spent the morning of her departure peeling glow stars off her bedroom ceiling, and sticking large photographs of Gertrude the mongrel, Wandering Aengus the cat, Rupert Campbell-Black and smaller ones of her family into a photograph album, and dressing for school. On the first day back, girls were allowed to wear home clothes. By two o’clock she was ready.
‘Are you auditioning for
By two-thirty the car was loaded. Only then did Maud decide to wash her hair and glam herself up to impress the other parents. They finally left at four by which time Caitlin was in a frenzy they were going to be late.
‘Goodbye, my demon lover,’ she cried, blowing a kiss to Rupert Campbell-Black’s house as the rusty Mini staggered down the drive. ‘Keep yourself on ice until I come home again.’
No one spoke on the journey. Declan, with his first interview in a week’s time, could think of nothing but Johnny Friedlander. Maud was deep in P. D. James. Taggie and Caitlin sat on the back under a pile of lacrosse sticks, radios, records, teddy bears, with the trunk like a coffin behind them.
After three-quarters of an hour they reached the undulating leafy tunnels of Oxfordshire, and there, high on the hill surrounded by regiments of pine trees, rose the red-brick walls of Upland House, Caitlin’s new school.
‘My head ought to be filled with noble Enid Blyton thoughts about comradeship,’ grumbled Caitlin to herself, as they were overtaken by gleaming BMWs and Volvos bearing other girls and their belongings, but all she could think was how embarrassing it was to turn up with such famous parents in such a tatty car.
As they arrived so late, all the beds near the window in Caitlin’s dormitory had been bagged, and Caitlin had to be content with the one by the door, which meant she’d be the first to be caught reading with the huge torch that her mother had given her as a going-back present.
While Taggie, her fingers still sore from sewing on name-tapes, unpacked the trunk, Maud drifted about wafting scent and being admired by passing fathers. Declan sat on Caitlin’s bed gazing gloomily at all those glass cubes full of photographs of black labradors, ponies and double-barrelled mothers looking twenty years younger than those in the dormitory. He wondered if he’d been mad to let Maud persuade him to send Caitlin away.
He also thought how incredibly glamorous the other fourteen-year-olds looked, drifting about with their suntans and their shaggy blonde hair, and how excited they would have made Johnny Friedlander with his penchant for underage girls.
As they left, with all the girls surreptitiously gazing out of the window to catch a glimpse of Declan, Maud did nothing to endear herself to Caitlin’s housemistress by calling out, ‘Don’t worry, Caitlin darling, you can always leave if you don’t like it.’
‘’Bye Tag,’ said Caitlin cheerfully. ‘Don’t cry, Duckie. I’ll be OK. Keep your eyes skinned for Rupert. I won’t look while you drive away. It’s unlucky.’
‘She’ll be all right, sweetheart,’ said Declan, reaching back and patting Taggie’s heaving shoulders, until he had to put both hands on the wheel to negotiate the leafy tunnels once more and was soon deep in thought again.
‘Don’t be silly, Taggie,’ snapped Maud irritably. ‘I’m Caitlin’s mother. I’m the one who minds most about losing my darling baby, but I’m able to control myself,’ and she went back to P. D. James.
Going to bed that night, Taggie felt even worse. In Caitlin’s bedroom, she found a moth bashing against a window pane and the needle stuck in the middle of a
Up in her turret bedroom, which was like sleeping in a tree top, and which creaked and leaked and yielded in the high winds like an old ship, she looked across the valley and saw at long last a light on in Rupert’s house. Caitlin would have been so excited.
‘Oh please God,’ she prayed, ‘look after her, and don’t let boarding school curb her lovely merry nature.’
The O’Hara children, having been dragged up by a lot of housekeepers, and frequently neglected by their parents, were as a result absolutely devoted to one another.
Taggie, in particular, had never enjoyed an easy relationship with her mother, whom she adored but who intimidated her. Ten days late when she was born, Taggie had been a very large baby. Labour had been so long and agonizing, Maud had nearly died. Declan, insane with worry, thanked God he was a Protestant, and not faced with the painful Catholic preference for saving the baby rather than the mother. Both survived, but the doctors thought later that Taggie’s dyslexia might be due to slight brain damage sustained at birth.
Maud, shattered and weakened, never took to Taggie the same way as she had to Patrick who’d been born with such ease. As a child Taggie developed normally except that she walked and spoke very late, and even when she was four was only able to manage single syllables and might have been talking Japanese.
At school in Dublin, the staff, eagerly awaiting another dazzlingly bright pupil like Patrick, were disappointed to find that Taggie couldn’t read or write. She was also very clumsy and hopeless at dressing herself, putting shoes on the wrong foot, clothes back to front, doing up the wrong buttons and quite unable to tie her laces. Because she couldn’t tell the time, and had no sense of direction, she always ended in the wrong classroom, bringing the wrong books, and because she was so tall, people automatically assumed she was older than her age, and dismissed her as even more lazy and stupid.
Patrick, two and a half years older, was constantly fighting her battles, but he couldn’t help her in class, when the other children teased her and the teachers shouted at her, nor during those agonizing sessions at home when Maud lost her temper and screamed, but in the end got so bored that she sometimes ended up doing Taggie’s homework for her.
Patrick never forgot those pieces of homework, smudged with tears of frustration, sweaty from effort, and later peppered with red writing and crossings-out from the teachers.
Early detection of dyslexia and special teaching can quickly put a child within reach or even on a level with the rest of the class. Taggie was left to flounder, constantly losing confidence, until at eleven she came to England with the family and was about to be put in a school for backward children.
In the end it was Patrick, who got a scholarship to Westminster with ease and who, acquiring a friend there with a dyslexic older sister, persuaded his parents to have Taggie tested by an educational psychologist. He pronounced Taggie severely dyslexic and said she should be sent immediately to a special school.
Maud now felt even more ambiguous about Taggie. She never told anyone what the psychologist had said to her in that brief bitter exchange after he’d seen Taggie, nor would she ever admit that she felt desperately guilty for not seeking help for the child’s problems earlier.
