Iris Grace Read online

  For P-J, Iris & Chula xxx

  Text and photographs copyright © 2016, 2017 by Arabella Carter-Johnson

  Illustrations copyright © 2016, 2017 by Alice Tait

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Penguin Books Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Rain Saukas

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1978-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1980-4

  Printed in China

  Iris’s hand guided me back to the page of her book for the twentieth time. I repeated the words and she was content for a while. Her long dark eyelashes moved slowly down to rest upon her rosy cheeks … She was so close to falling asleep … but then she opened her eyes again, looking more awake than she had done for hours. My heart sank. It had been another long night of reading in bed. She didn’t want me to leave her side or to stop reading and we were stuck in a cycle. Obsessions were friends and foes working with us and against us. Her desire to hear words, to read and to understand was a gift in her previously silent world. She still communicated mostly through body language but now she was becoming linked to these words. Powerful connections were forming that I didn’t want to break. It was a driving force that needed to be balanced; her unique mind was busy, always busy and, while wonderful, that could be so destructive. As I stopped reading she was restless, fighting against her own tiredness and mine as I turned out the light once again. I hoped with everything I had that she would fall asleep. Days had merged into weeks then months and now years of sleep deprivation. How could we go on like this? Her beautiful face saddened me at times with those dark circles, and her behaviour was becoming more exaggerated and the intensity of her interests threatened to take over if she didn’t get enough sleep. We would spiral down until we managed to have a good night, a break, until it started over again. My tiredness had become a part of me that I didn’t like, slowing my mind as hers raced on and turning my thoughts to the darkness. I resented those who easily slipped into their dreams every night while we were still awake.

  As Iris’s frustrations mounted she started to cry, and her sobs filled the quiet room. I felt so hopeless as I held her close. Nothing seemed to comfort her apart from the book and I longed for some help, but she pushed away all who tried apart from me. The pressure of that was becoming too hard to bear. The highs and lows over the previous four years had been exhilarating but exhausting. Our minds were constantly trying to keep up and understand her world as she was learning to be in ours.

  Downstairs, the credits at the end of the film were rolling and the fire in the wood-burning stove was almost out.

  ‘What is it, Thula?’

  My husband P-J looked at our new kitten who had suddenly got up off his lap. Her eyes focused towards the door and she had one foot raised, perfectly poised in the air. She was alert: something had grabbed her attention – cries that were undetectable to his ears were like sirens to hers. Then her legs were moving fast. Scooting round the corner, she flew up the stairs into Iris’s bedroom and jumped on to the bed. She curled up next to Iris, ignored the crying and started grooming herself, licking her paws and rubbing them over her ears. Almost immediately, Iris’s mood changed. She giggled at Thula’s huge ears as they were folded down forward and then pinged back. The long tufts of black fur at the tips were backlit by the hallway, and her outline was adorable, with large ears set upon her tiny head. Fine longer hairs along her silhouette glowed in the darkness. The whiskers were next, and it was a performance like nothing I have seen before, combining comedy with beauty. Iris relaxed and put down her book. Seizing the opportunity, I slipped out of the room and waited at the bottom of the stairs, listening for the inevitable crying that would take me back to her side. There was silence: no bounces, no pages being turned, and no hums or cries.

  I waited till suspense got the better of me, then tiptoed to the door of her room and peeked in. Iris had fallen asleep with her kitten by her side and they were turned towards each other. Iris’s hand rested on Thula’s shoulders and I could hear a gentle purr. Their bodies mirrored one another with Thula’s paws up against Iris’s arm. Although still a tiny kitten and a new member of our family, Thula was already watching out for Iris, her faithful companion. She was a friend to me too, stepping in and helping when I needed it the most. I didn’t even need to ask, she knew instinctively what to do and how to help. This magical kitten was changing our lives and this was just the beginning. She filled me with hope and made me smile as I thought about tomorrow.

  A-Where-Wa, watercolour, October 2013

  Outlined against the glass I saw a perfect cat shape through the clouds of dust: Meoska’s silhouette. She was sitting neatly at the window with one paw up, trying to catch a butterfly on the other side. It was early summer in 2008 and my husband and I were making a start on our new project, restoring and redecorating a three-bedroomed house that we had bought in a village in the rolling hills of Leicestershire. Meoska and I had very different ideas about how to approach this project: like any Tonkinese she was letting me know what she thought of my DIY skills, regularly calling at me, nudging me and wrapping her small dark body and black tail round my legs to distract me. She abandoned the butterfly and pushed past my mug of half-drunk tea, almost knocking it over.

  ‘Meoska, come here!’ I whistled. She sat down and looked at me with her head on one side, her big blue eyes shining in the light and the cream fur on her chest puffed out and looking so beautiful. ‘Why do you always go to P-J when he whistles and not me?’

  She trotted over and brushed past my leg, making little meows. I could hear P-J laughing from the hallway. My mission was to rid our new home of brown. I never knew you could feel so strongly about a colour, but the floor-to-ceiling brown tiles in the kitchen were really starting to depress me. One by one I was knocking them off the walls. The brown wallpaper with swirls of green and the brown tiled carpet were like a heavy weight. I couldn’t think properly in these dim surroundings and every surface was grubby with years of dirt and grime. Green was next on my list: the green bath, sink and loo, and the green-wallpapered room with the green door all had to go. I craved light and wondered if our decision to buy this house was a big mistake and that I was to blame.

  ‘Look past all this,’ I had said to P-J while he took his first look around the house a few months earlier. ‘Imagine it once it’s done – it will be beautiful, a brilliant family home. We could convert the barns, take down this tree, add an extension here …’

  ‘Haven’t we done enough of all that? I’m not sure if I want to go through it all again,’ he had replied. He looked tired from his business trip and not in the right mood. He walked off around the garden, either to think alone or to shrug off his jet lag; I wasn’t sure which.

  We had returned that year from France, after a three-year adventure restoring an old farm in the Limousin, br
inging back with us our cat who had arrived in a post van a year earlier. She was a beautiful cat, slender with a silky coat and dark points. We think she had hitchhiked her way to our farm, and unable to find her owner we took her in. She was a curious little character, almost dog-like, following us everywhere even when we went out on walks or rides on the horses. She came to P-J’s whistle and entertained us as we worked on the farm. We would say she was our lucky mascot; whenever we felt low and tired by the physical work Meoska was there climbing up a tree or balancing on something with such a comical look on her face that it would make us laugh. She became a friend. It was at times a lonely life out in France. During the warmer months there was so much to do and we had visitors. But the winter was long and very hard: temperatures one year dropped to minus seventeen degrees Celsius and the snow was so deep that it made it almost impossible to work outside with the horses. Meoska comforted me in those more isolating times and there was no way I would leave France without her.

  While we were in France P-J was working in European sales for an American financial research company and so he was still busy with work when we returned to the UK. While I was hunting for a forever home he was taken up with business and had only just arrived back on a ‘red-eye flight’ from a trip to the US when I showed him the house. I had fallen in love with it and saw so much potential. Even the view, reminiscent of the Italian hills where we had once considered living, was hidden, waiting to be revealed. I felt at home and it was the first time I had felt that in a great many years.

  I couldn’t really blame P-J for not being as enthusiastic as me about the new house: we had done so much work on our previous property and the thought of more was tiring to say the least. I could tell I was getting carried away but I didn’t care; this was the one. When I had first walked around it on my own I had found a little nook behind the tall tree in the garden that gave me an idea of what the view could be like. There was so much to do within the house to make it a workable family home, but it was possible. It was totally rundown and pretty revolting in parts but that could all be remedied. We would have to complete the work over time and the prospect of that wasn’t exactly appealing but with the prices so high this was the only option. I could visualize it all in my mind; it would be perfect.

  From the moment I met P-J when I was just eighteen our travels abroad had begun. We’d been from Mexico to Venezuela, Italy and France, but now we were back, married and only a few miles from where I grew up. I knew this was where I wanted to start our family; we were home.

  Tumpty Tum, watercolour, July 2014

  I first met P-J at a twenty-first birthday party on Bastille Day. He had caught my attention as I drove up the tree-lined track to the party. Dressed as a musketeer, he had climbed over the post-and-rail fence and jumped off the other side. He looked confident as he brushed away his wavy dark brown hair from his face and placed a hat with a long feather on his head. My eyes followed him until he disappeared among the colourful crowd under the canvas marquee.

  Inside, after chatting to the hosts I looked at the seating plan and made my way over to the table where I could leave my bag. There it was: the hat balancing on the corner of a wooden chair. Then the musketeer sat down beside where I stood.

  ‘Hi, I’m P-J. I’m a good friend of Andy’s sister. What’s your name?’ He shook my hand, looking at me with his bright blue eyes and I sat down next to him.

  I wanted to know everything about this handsome musketeer and asked so many questions. He answered them all, looking at me intently with his kind eyes.

  ‘I grew up on a farm in north Lincolnshire, but after university I went to work as an equity trader in London.’

  ‘Is that what you do now?’

  ‘Not any more. I left so that I could go travelling … Asia, Mexico …’

  ‘My brother has been to Mexico. I would love to go.’

  P-J and I had had similar childhoods in the countryside – he had a brother and a sister while I had a brother – but there was a striking difference of age, he was eleven years older than me, and I was so young, just starting my gap year.

  ‘I’m meant to be doing a cookery course, but I’d love to travel afterwards,’ I told him. ‘I just don’t know where to start.’ He was so different from all the other men I had met: adventurous and exciting. We talked about the places I would like to see and my love of the arts, animals and cookery, and how I had wanted to be a sculptor but was also interested in photography. At first I didn’t think of him romantically because of the age gap; I thought he was just being kind as I didn’t know very many people at the party. But as we spent more time together that night I liked him more and wanted him to see me in that way. We danced together with a few interruptions from my protective brother. He spoke to P-J that night but I didn’t need him to; I felt safe. When I think back to that evening I now realize how much it meant, what changes were on the horizon. At the time of course I was just enjoying myself and caught up in the moment. He kissed me by the fence where I had first seen him and he invited me to go travelling with him to Mexico. I have no answers as to why I didn’t question it, why I was so calm about the idea of travelling with someone I had just met. My parents certainly weren’t as happy.

  ‘Darling, this isn’t like you,’ my mother said. ‘I thought you wanted to do your cookery. You haven’t mentioned wanting to go travelling before.’

  ‘I’ll still do the course and then go afterwards.’

  ‘You’ll be away for months. Can’t you go with some of your girlfriends from school?’

  I trust him; no we aren’t going out; we’re just friends … Even I could tell my answers weren’t very convincing. They could tell how much I liked him and although he was a friend of a family friend there was a great deal of uncertainty about me leaving, but at eighteen years old and yearning to see the world they could see there wasn’t much that would persuade me not to go.

  So we went to Mexico in November 2000 and I got to see another world. I loved learning about another culture: the colours, landscapes, people and animals. Travelling with P-J was easy and we got on well as we drove around the country. We got into a flow: we seemed to want to move on from each place at the same time, having seen all we needed to and we had the same eagerness to see more further along our journey. He learnt about me – my eccentricities and my problems with low blood sugar and how I loved to plan, so he let me plot our adventures on the map and lead the way. He taught me to snorkel, how to use my lungs to stay down long enough to watch the colourful underwater world, to be suspended in the water and have perfect control through my own breath. He was patient with my sometimes overly ambitious ideas and swimming expeditions along the coast. I practised my photography and knew when we came back that I wanted to travel more. I had fallen in love with it all, and as my parents probably predicted, that included P-J.

  In 2001 he was offered a job in Venezuela as a pensions and savings advisor to expats, so the year when I was just twenty years old we left on what was a much more challenging trip. A day after we arrived the country was on the brink of civil war and stayed unsettled for the entire year we were there. Our home was nestled into the foothills of the Andes, safely away from the unrest in Caracas. It was close to the university town of Merida and the countryside was breathtaking. We bought two stallions and rode them through the mountains, down into tropical valleys, through rivers, banana plantations and orange groves. We learnt so much out there, and had to do most things for ourselves; we even learnt how to shoe the horses. It showed me to be independent and strong, but like any incredible experience it didn’t last for ever and our time in Venezuela came to an end. It was after my family came out to visit for my twenty-first birthday. We celebrated up high on Mount Bolivar and with a safari trip to Los Llanos, but immediately afterwards the embassy demanded that we all fly back on one of the last available flights home.

  An idea had been forming in my mind for quite some time, inspired by my adventures in the Andes with our stallions
; it was to run a horse-riding-holiday business in Europe. So in 2003 we went to France in our blue camper van and we found a farmhouse complete with two beautiful stone barns, a bread oven and an agricultural barn that we turned into an indoor riding school. Sixteen acres of grassland surrounded us, with oak woodlands in the distance and our very own stream. There was a network of bridleways that stretched out from the house through undulating countryside for miles on end, passing through woodlands, farms, fields and rivers. For three years we were really happy there. In between all of the work on the farm I practised my photography and started up a family-portrait business. It was in that house that P-J proposed and I said yes. But out on a ride one quiet Sunday everything changed.

  ‘Isn’t this just the best?’ I said, turning round to speak to P-J. Tess, my thoroughbred mare, was striding ahead of Duo, a chestnut Arab gelding that P-J liked to ride.

  ‘Couldn’t be better!’ P-J was looking to his right at the magnificent displays of blossom in the hedges and trees that lined the track.

  We were deep in the countryside, miles away from anyone, when my horse, Tess, became spooked by something in the hedgeeow.

  She leapt up in the air so fast, and with such power, that I was catapulted off and fell hard on my head. As my body hit the ground I lay unable to move or breathe, a sense of terror running through me. I was winded and my lungs wouldn’t fill with the air I so badly needed and the pain in my chest was immense. My back felt like it was on fire and I could hardly move.

  P-J was at my side: ‘Can you get up?’

  I shook my head. P-J looked worried but kept his voice calm for my sake. The reality of what was happening was sinking in for both of us. I couldn’t move and we were in the middle of nowhere. It would take P-J hours to get help and I didn’t know what I had done to myself. The pain was so bad I felt sure that I might have broken my back, and the winding made my chest unbearably painful.