‘I NO LONGER FEEL LIKE AN ONLY CHILD’
After their parents married, Sabine Durrant and her stepsister refused to play happy families. Thirty years later, they’ve finally found a connection through shared grief
Novelist Sabine Durrant on the surprising effects of grief
When my stepsister rang in the early morning last November to tell me her father had died, I got in the car straight away to go to her. She was weeping and alone and I recognised the rawness of her grief from the loss of my mother three years before. It was, you might say, the natural response – except that halfway to her home in southwest London, three miles from where I live, I had to pull over to call her back for her address. Until that morning, I had never been to her house.
I describe myself as an only child; most of the time, I believe it myself, but it is not completely true. It involves editing out half my childhood, the seven years that Lisa and I lived under the same roof. It was not a happy time.
I was 12 when our parents married, and she was 10. Neither of us adjusted easily to the merger of our two households.
I know we were both considered ‘difficult’. I recall terrible arguments between Lisa and my mother about food, and family friends telling me to be nicer, that my mother deserved happiness. These days, children are treated more carefully; there would be discussion and, maybe, at least for a little girl whose mother had only recently died, counselling. Both our parents were bereaved, and yet neither of us really understood what that meant. Our parents’ marriage was seen as such a happy ending that our refusal, or inability, to slot into it became a test we both failed.
Could we, should we, in the midst of shared trauma, have become friends? I wish we had. But each of us was, for the other, part of the problem. We were miserable, and at the same time, responsible for each other’s misery.
BURIED TRAUMA
I know it was worse for her, and it is testament to how much guilt I suppressed then, and continue to want to suppress, that even now I can hardly bear to think about it. I was giving up hope that my father would ever come back. She was moving to a different part of London, leaving behind not just a home filled with memories of her mother, but also her school, her neighbours and her friends and also, most painfully and unforgivably, in the tussle between two household felines, her cat.
I retreated from the downstairs battleground to my attic bedroom – to books and music and, after a few years, boys. I don’t know how Lisa spent that time. We were ‘very different’. That was the family narrative, a convenient phrase to excuse our lack of connection. My mother was a keen photographer and in the rows of albums she left behind, there are maybe 10 of Lisa and I together, including three from the wedding, and two from a photoshoot in which we were lent as a favour to the daughter of a family friend who was building a portfolio. Incidentally, in 45 years of holidays and birthdays and gatherings, there are only two ‘family’ photographs of the four of us. I want to say this is because we were extras in our parents’ love story, incidental to it, but looking at those pictures now, I’m horribly aware of the age gap between us – that in every shot she looks so young and hopeful, and that in each one, I am taller and older. In most of these pictures – the exception being the ones posed by the photographic student – I wasn’t even looking at her, let alone looking after her.
Once I had left home, I saw Lisa only a handful of times: we met at family parties – our parents’ 21st wedding anniversary, his 60th, her 80th; we probably exchanged a few words. I know there was a period of 15 years when I didn’t encounter her at all. I had my own family and my own narrative, which involved drawing a line behind my teenage years. I continued to see my mother, but my stepfather rarely and Lisa hardly at all. We had
Now our parents are no longer here, it feels as if battle lines have disappeared
daughters the same age and when my mother engineered a relationship between them, taking them on trips to the theatre or the park, I felt a combination of embarrassment and resentment. When Lisa cried at my mother’s funeral, I was taken aback as her dislike of my mother had been such a major feature of our lives, but we didn’t engage. And in subsequent visits to my stepfather as his health deteriorated, I suggested we didn’t coincide, in order to space out the care.
And then nine months ago, he died, and everything changed.
It started straight away that morning in her kitchen. It’s natural to put your arms around someone who is bereaved, and it felt odd; there was no physical contact growing up. I expected her to recoil but she didn’t, and that moment something hard melted. I took over the practicalities of the funeral, because they were fresh in my mind from my mother’s death and I knew they were the sort of administrative tasks she found hard. Again I anticipated resistance but her response was the opposite: gratitude mixed with shock that I was prepared to be helpful.
SHARED HISTORY
We spent more and more time together. On that first day, to our surprise, we started laughing: someone in the address book we wanted to inform turned out to be already dead – and in the acute emotion of the moment, it seemed hysterical.
When we embarked upon the gargantuan task of clearing the house, the differences between us, so drummed into us as children, started to feel not just complementary but funny, too. We laughed at both her careful parsimony (‘What about this knob of Blu Tack? Shall we keep?’), and my tendency to act at speed without thought. ‘Oh dear,’ she said once after I had cut through some wires and the lights fused. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have done that!’ And she made a droll face that contained none of the horror or reprimand that I’d been expecting. Another time, after a long day, I said self-pityingly: ‘I think we should get more recognition for all we’re doing.’
‘I know,’ she said, and then after a pause: ‘The thing is, no one else knows.’ We laughed about that for ages. I have friends who have fallen out with beloved siblings over the sorting of family houses, by perceived slights or the unfair allocation of objects. Not for us. She has surprised me again and again with her incredible fairness, and resilience, and generosity of spirit.
NEW BEGINNING
It’s made easier, of course, by the fact that we both seem to have a forensic knowledge of which piece of furniture came from which original house. But still we seem to vie over who can persuade the other to take most, as if deep down we are trying to compensate for the displacement we felt as children.
We have talked a bit, about the years we lived together, about the mother she lost, and I’ve said out loud several things I should have said long ago, including how sorry I am that she had to give away her cat. It shouldn’t matter all these years later, but it does. Now our parents are no longer here, it feels as if battle lines have disappeared. It’s hard to know why, but it’s as if our roles as difficult children that had pursued us into adulthood have dissolved.
Empathy has replaced resentment. Once when she was particularly sad, I said that the waves would begin to recede, and she looked anguished. ‘This is how you felt when your mother died?’ she said. ‘I had no idea. I wish I’d known.’
Lisa’s father had been dead only four months when we went into lockdown. The timing for her has been awful; and I hate not being able to see her and support her in her isolation and grief. We hadn’t yet finished the house; I am longing for the opportunity to get back at it. There is so much still to do, so much time to make up for. • Finders, Keepers by Sabine Durrant (Hodder & Stoughton) is out now