Chapter 1
Weāre supposed to begin as the apple of our motherās eye.
But I was more the maggot in the apple.
Speaking of my motherās eyes, they were always darting about, as if she was following a fly, and not seeing me properly.
My father (who veered between London and his familyās estate in Jerez de la Frontera) seemed to see me better. We liked to talk, he and I, and I often had the feeling that he was on the cusp of telling me something important and deciding against it.
Perhaps youād like to hear about the little girl I was.
I was full of the most unbearable longing.
The Portuguese have a word for it: saudade ā a yearning for a happiness that has passed, or perhaps never existed. My saudade was like travelling in a car on a dark road and seeing, for a second, a lit window, and then, very quickly, not seeing it.
I grew up in a smart part of London called Chelsea, like the football team, although I canāt imagine that any of our neighbours were interested in football. They were interested in expensive cars and chauffeurs and the shape of their bay trees, which sat on highly polished steps around our private lawned square, in which there was a golden-rain tree, a row of cherry blossoms and beds of tall tulips in spring.
Our big posh house, at the corner of the square, was four storeys high, with a shiny black front door. My fatherās domain within the house was painted white with splashes of multicolour made by his modern Spanish paintings. It included the tiled hall, his study, packed with books from floor to ceiling, and the garden room, which led onto a courtyard.
When we first arrived in Chelsea from Spain, my father asked Rory the gardener to turn our courtyard into an Andalusian patio, sending him off on an aeroplane to CĆ³rdoba because the patio-gardeners of CĆ³rdoba are the best of anywhere in the world. (And, although he was wrong about most things, my father was right about this.)
On the ground floor there was a large kitchen, for which my father had bought black chairs with chrome-tubed legs that didnāt meet my motherās approval. Next to the kitchen, there was a small apartment I never visited, where Mean Mary, our housekeeper-nanny, lived.
The rest of the house (except the roof terrace) was my motherās domain, and from the first floor to the fourth, it was rouge-pink, with ruched rose curtains and pink velvet sofas, my mother having rejected the teak and oatmeal fashionable in London circles at the time. There were thick carpets and fat cushions and triple-lined curtains, too heavy for my small hands to draw.
The school I went to was St Hildaās ā a smart little private school, where smart little girls wore olive-green and grey uniforms.
I started there on 5 September 1979, the same day as Lord Mountbattenās funeral, which was taking place down the road at Westminster Abbey.
āThe queen is extremely upset,ā said my mother.
āDid she phone you?ā said my father, not looking up from his enormous newspaper, which he held in his outstretched arms. The backs of his hands were covered in black hair. In fact, all of my father was covered in black hair. It burst out of his shirt collar and the tops of his socks, like those chimpanzees they used to dress up for tea adverts.
My mother stepped past him.
Her blond bob shimmered with Elnett hairspray.
She looked like my Barbie doll, which I never played with.
She took my hand, and I could feel her brittle fingernails against my skin.
In my palm, I felt the imprint of some softer hand.
A long time ago.
In some other place.
With some other feeling.
And here came the saudade longing, strong enough to break me in two.
Our hands fell apart as we walked, like they always did.
In the playground, you couldnāt move for mothersā legs: tan-stockinged; bare and stubbly; fat as hams; or covered by enormous bell-bottom jeans.
Above me, the mothers gesticulated and shrieked.
One tiny girl was completely enveloped in her motherās lion-mane of hair, sobbing. Her mother was saying, āI love you, darling,ā over and over again, as if one of them was about to be taken off to be shot.
The girlās grey socks and polished brown shoes were spattered by tears.
One girl was making her baby sisters laugh by pulling funny faces and crossing her eyes. She was laughing her head off. So was her mother.
I loved this girl immediately.
I felt a kind of fizzing sparking feeling inside me right there in the playground as I wondered what it would be like to be her.
To be happy.
I moved a little closer to her.
I wondered what it would be like to laugh and laugh and laugh.
I loved her dark curly hair.
I loved the way one of her socks had fallen down to her ankle.
The girl stopped making funny faces and turned around.
āIām called Bridget Blume,ā she said. āShall we go in together?ā
Chapter 2
I followed Bridget into the classroom, anxiously.
There was a balloon for each of us, cut out of coloured card, blu-tacked to the wall, high up, underneath the Victorian cornicing.
Eva MartĆnez-Green, it said on my lime-green balloon.
31 January 1975, written underneath my name.
My birthday.
Always a strange nervy day, my motherās eyes darting about worse than ever, my father over-cheerful and all of us nauseous with sugar-icing.
I could read by the time I arrived at St Hildaās, Spanish and English: my father had started me off, and Iād kept going ā there was nothing else to do. I had no brothers or sisters in my house to distract me. I asked my mother and father daily for a kitten. And daily they said no.
I was a bit disappointed that our teacher, Miss Feast, had chosen lime-green for my cardboard birthday balloon. I donāt think lime-green is anyoneās favourite colour, and it felt like a slight against me.
Miss Feast paused, opened a thin black hardback book and broke the silence with unfamiliar names, which would turn into girls, girls we would love and hate for seven years, who would run like ghosts through our memories.
āLily Betts?ā
āYes, Miss Feast.ā
With a little sob ā she was still convulsing from the separation from her mother ā like a newly dead fish.
āBridget Blume?ā
āYes, Miss Feast.ā
The happy girl from the playground, gorgeous as anything, all blue eyes, smiles and hope.
I smiled at her.
She smiled back.
Bridget Blume liked me.
My mother didnāt exactly seem to dislike me, but she skirted around me as one might an unpredictable horse. My father quite liked me and, when he was home, he hung me upside down from my ankles (as some men do) or else he read me storybooks, which I preferred.
Onwards we went through the alphabet.
āEva MartĆnez-Green?ā
āYes, Miss Feast. And also,ā I started, in a very quiet voice, because there were eyes everywhere looking at me.
Miss Feast raised a dark eyebrow.
I stammered: āI hope you donāt mind me saying, Miss Feast. But itās Eva as in ever. Not Eva as in evil.ā
Miss Feast smiled at me, and the mole above her lip quivered.
āI will remember that,ā she said. āForever Eva.ā
Forever Eva ā a name made especially for me, by Miss Feast, the actual teacher!
The syllables seeped through my skin and circulated in my bloodstream, making me warm inside. Nobody else ā at all at all at all ā had been given a special name in the course of our first registration!
Oh, the untold joy!
