She was thoughtful, as well, with her own point of view. Sometimes she helped me see how to be a mother. One day I picked her up from her nursery school—a Montessori school she loved. (Bizarrely, for the most part, and despite frank criticisms of their foibles, she ended up loving all her schools, which made me feel shifty when I discussed school with mothers who were discontented. They obviously thought I was in denial, or simply failing to play the game, the great mother-game of criticising. The bottom line was, I was grateful to the schools. Without them, I would be home educating.) In any case, that day I picked Rosa up with a pushchair, so she must have been small, not much more than three, for as soon as we could, I dispensed with it. That day I had not managed to switch off my worries about my work before I went to meet her. I was chattering away to her, on automatic pilot, about the dilemmas of my day. We were pushing down The Avenue, a long straight road. I suppose I might have wittered on for ever.
Suddenly a little voice piped up. At first I could not believe my ears.
‘Big people can’t be friends with little people.’
‘What did you say?’ I looked at her suspiciously, her round clever head, her golden curls, her wide-set green eyes like an alien’s. Her cushiony lips had definitely moved.
‘BIG PEOPLE CAN’T BE FRIENDS WITH LITTLE PEOPLE.’
She was looking at me, not unkindly, but as if she had made a definite statement. Yes, she had said it. I had been told. I was ashamed, yet also delighted with her. Of course it was true, and I took note. Children don’t need to know adults’ worries.
I have already said that I lap up advice. One of the most useful things about motherhood was said to me by someone I didn’t know well. She had a daughter, too, rather older than mine, and we were worrying aloud about their happiness. ‘One problem is over-identifying,’ she said. ‘My daughter just got fed up with me worrying and said to me, “Mum, I’m fine, honestly, I’m not like you, remember that!”‘
I over-identified with Rosa. Of course, because although she looked like her father, with Nick’s small nose and curly hair, parts of her brain were uncannily like mine. Music, for example. A marvellous surprise. It has proved to be a never-ending groundswell of pleasure that we like exactly the same music. By this I don’t mean certain genres, certain composers, I mean we love the same notes and phrases. The same bar will trigger the same emotions. I can only believe this is coded, somehow, in deep folds of the emotional brain, because the response is so immediate and instinctive. Hearing something together, it speaks to us, and we often touch hands and look away, because a moment of such absolute intimacy has just come upon us. A flash of mirrors from far away, an unreasonable happiness hushing us like shyness (though at other times it makes us dance on the landing). When she sends me music, it is simple bliss.
And yet, in other ways we’re totally different. Hurray for that! Hurray for difference! Hurray for the things that our children can do that we could never in a lifetime manage! The miracle of the dance of the genes, throwing up unlikeness as much as sameness.
She is sociable, very, and I am not, has always had a lot of friends, except for a brief puzzling period when she was in Year 2 of her primary school, the local school, one hundred yards down the road. Because my own junior school years had often been miserable and lonely, I had a special reason to be anxious about this.
One night she said, ‘I didn’t have anyone to play with, today at break time,’ and I said, trying not to show my heart was sinking, ‘I expect you will tomorrow.’ But this refrain became more frequent, usually just as I was leaving her bedroom at night, after reading to her. ‘I didn’t have anyone to play with at break time.’ Of course it is possible that she knew this would halt me in my tracks and bring me back for another ten minutes, but still I know it was genuine. A little stone of misery from my own past arc-ed through the evening and landed in my chest. Rosa would be lonely, as I had been. My own fatal unpopularity, which I had felt deeply as unlikeability, must have somehow been transmitted to her. It was all my fault. I felt wretched, and helpless. My lovely, pretty, laughing girl would be unhappy. The curse had come upon her, she had not escaped.
In fact, it was just a phase, and soon over. Never before, or since, did Rosa lack friends. I was over-reacting, over-deducing, because I over-identified.
Recently we reminisced about that time. Perhaps it was that the children were at the age where they started to notice difference, and she was different, one of only three white girls in her class. She said, ‘I got something good out of it, though, because I had to find something to do in the playground, and I worked out how to fly. If you did a leap, and then another leap, and a leap upon that leap, you would fly. And I used to go round the playground trying it out.’ And I said, ‘But that’s just like me! Because I didn’t want anyone to know how lonely I was at the village school, when we moved to Watersfield, I used to walk about the playground very fast, on my own, from one side to another, looking business-like, pretending I was going somewhere.’