The Christmas Invitation

by Trisha Ashley

  When Teddy had been put to bed, all his presents were brought down to the drawing room and we had a mad wrapping session, before they were locked away in the large cupboard under the stairs, ready to put around the tree on Christmas Eve.

  My hoard of presents was still hidden away in my turret. but I gave Clara the bean-filled little dragon I’d picked up in Preciousss for Teddy’s Christmas stocking, and she said it could guard the gold coins at the bottom of it until Christmas Eve finally arrived.

  Clara

  Lady Leamington’s plan proved a good one, for though many people commented on how much weight Nessa was gaining, no one seemed to guess the truth.

  There seemed no point in telling Nessa that our suspicions were correct and George’s wife, Barbara, was expecting a baby not long after hers would be born.

  We had plans for that summer vacation. Henry intended wandering around the remoter parts of Greece, while I had wangled my way on to an archaeological dig in Turkey, after which we’d go travelling together until the start of the Michaelmas term.

  By now Nessa was turning quite militantly feminist, which made a pleasant change from her earlier romantic imbecility, and was looking forward to completing her degree in America. But first, Lady Leamington duly whisked her away at the end of term, and in the nick of time. The baby was born very early and by caesarean section soon afterwards.

  I visited Nessa in her swish private maternity hospital before I left for Turkey.

  I was glad to hear from the nurse who took me to her room that, despite being so early, the baby girl was a healthy five pounds and doing well. Nessa, who was looking pale and drawn, told me she hadn’t seen her and didn’t intend to.

  ‘I’m going to recuperate at Godmama’s house and we’re going to tell everyone that I’ve had my appendix out.’

  ‘A healthy, five-pound appendix,’ I said drily, but she’d never had much of a sense of humour and this passed her by.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever come back to England – and I’m going to focus on my career from now on,’ she told me, before rambling on about how men conned women into the idea of romance in order to dominate and control them, and a lot more like that. When I got up to leave, she tearfully begged me to keep in touch.

  On the way out I asked to see the baby, who was asleep in a clinical white room with a lot of other newborns, all looking much the same.

  A private adoption had been arranged by Lady Leamington with her chauffeur and his wife, who were childless, and I hoped that would work out well …

  Nessa wrote me several gushing letters, enthusing about her new life, but then slowly these missives dwindled, until at last they stopped. It took a lot longer, however, before Henry and I ceased to wonder how the baby was faring and where she was …

  The knowledge of George’s infamous behaviour (not to mention several other unsavoury episodes we heard about later) was to colour our relations with him for the rest of our lives. He, of course, had no idea we knew about Nessa, and he, in turn, had no idea about her pregnancy. There was no open breach: we were fond of his wife, Barbara, and their daughter, dear Sybil, but we had as little to do with him as possible.

  24

  Piked

  Den drove Tottie to church in Thorstane on Sunday morning and Teddy went with them – not to church, but to the pub with Den, for a playdate with Fred Golightly’s grandson.

  Clara was working and Henry and I retired to the studio for what I thought might be the final sitting. There were still a couple of days to go until River arrived, so I would have completed both portraits in plenty of time, had I still intended leaving with him.

  The house settled into quietness around us, apart from Lass’s reverberating snores when she fell asleep on Henry’s feet, and the ticking of the revived clock on the bookcase. Someone had reset the time and must be winding it up, but it wasn’t me.

  Clara was having a session on her memoirs and, since she was still writing about her Oxford days, she came in occasionally to ask Henry something.

  I’d just completed the last touches to Lass and was contemplating a few small background tweaks, when she returned for a third time and said that if we were finished with the sitting, she’d like us both to come to her study so she could show us something.

  I thought she must have switched to her work computer and had managed to piece another inscription together – a ‘join’ as she called it – or something like that, but when I’d cleaned up and followed Henry in there, only the laptop screen was glowing.

  ‘I’ve found a photograph of one of the girls from my first year at Oxford University that I’d like to show you, Meg,’ Clara said. ‘She’s called Nessa Cassidy.’

  She exchanged a glance with Henry that I couldn’t decipher and then brought up a picture of a plump woman in perhaps her late twenties, or early thirties, with very fair hair, a slightly tip-tilted nose, a babyishly short upper lip and a militant expression that sat oddly with all that cuteness.

  ‘Nessa Cassidy? I think I’ve heard of her,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t she a leading American gay feminist writer way back? There was a book …’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Clara, ‘long before your time, of course. She went back to the States to complete her studies after her first year at Oxford and had a big hit with her book, The Butterfly Kiss. But she died tragically young in a car accident.’

  I peered closer and frowned. ‘She looks … sort of familiar. But then, I expect I’ve seen her photograph before somewhere.’

  ‘It’s an old photo, but Henry and I remember her very well. In fact, the memories have all come flooding back since I started writing that part of my autobiography.’

  ‘Do you remember when you first arrived here and we said you reminded us of someone?’ asked Henry. ‘You hoped it might have been your mother.’

  I nodded, puzzled.

  ‘We hadn’t met your mother, but we came to realize later that it was Nessa Cassidy you resembled. It’s not so clear in the photo, but she had your unusual light greenish-blue eyes, silver-blond hair and creamy pale skin.’

  ‘Really?’ I looked again, with more interest. ‘It’s hard to tell from this, but other than her colouring, she doesn’t look like me at all, does she?’ I paused, then added slowly, ‘She does look a bit like Mum, though!’

  I turned to look at them both and Henry gave me an encouraging smile, as if I was a child trying to piece together a puzzle.

  ‘The thing is, darling,’ said Clara, ‘that we think there may be a link between your mother and Nessa.’

  ‘What kind of link?’ I asked, though already my mind had begun to shove the pieces together, much as Clara did with her computer joins.

  ‘Nessa had an illegitimate baby before she went back to the States, though it was all hushed up. We think that baby might have been your mother.’

  ‘But just because my colouring reminds you of her, it doesn’t necessarily mean there is a link,’ I protested.

  ‘There’s a bit more to it than that, and you’ve just said yourself that your mother looked like Nessa,’ Henry said. ‘But let’s go into the drawing room and discuss it more comfortably. The others won’t be back for ages yet, and there’s a lot to tell you.’

  Once we were established around the fire, Henry said, ‘I’m afraid this will all come as a shock to you, though we hope it’s a nice one. We’ve had time to get used to the idea, because we’ve suspected you were Nessa’s granddaughter for a few days, especially once you’d told us your mother was adopted and had the same unusual hair and eye colouring as yourself.’

  ‘But that can’t be unique to us, and Mum having been adopted could well be just a coincidence, too,’ I pointed out.

  ‘We’ve never met anyone who looked like Nessa until we set eyes on you,’ Henry said.

  ‘Let me tell you about Nessa, Meg,’ said Clara, and described her first term at Oxford and meeting the half-American girl whose room was next to hers.

  ‘Nessa was small – what they ca
lled then a Pocket Venus – and most people thought her very pretty. She took her studies seriously and had ambitions to work in journalism, but in other ways she could be very silly and talked a lot of romantic nonsense about men and love. But she had pashes on girls, including yours truly, so I suspected she was a lesbian long before she did.’

  ‘I expect deep down she knew and she just pushed the thought away because she wanted to conform to the norm. This was 1959, after all,’ said Henry.

  ‘Very true, dear,’ said Clara. ‘Nessa talked a lot of romantic twaddle about looking for her perfect Sir Galahad and then, unfortunately, she convinced herself she’d found him … and he took advantage of her.’

  ‘But he married someone else before she realized she was pregnant,’ finished Henry.

  ‘That’s all very sad,’ I said, still entirely unconvinced that there was a connection, ‘but I really don’t think—’

  Clara did her human steamroller impersonation and just carried on as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘We hadn’t even got to the swinging sixties by then, don’t forget, and the pregnancy was quite advanced before she realized what was happening. I just thought she’d put on a lot of weight. But anyway, she confided in me and then decided to tell her godmother, who lived in London, and she helped Nessa to hush it up.’

  ‘But surely she would have had to leave university when her bump showed?’ I said, interested now, though still disbelieving.

  ‘She did manage to conceal it till the end of term. Then the baby was born early by caesarean section and immediately adopted,’ said Henry.

  ‘How awful for her,’ I said, sympathetically. ‘To go through all that and then have to give up her baby.’

  They exchanged glances again, like twins sharing a thought.

  ‘She wanted to go back to America and put it all behind her,’ Clara said. ‘Which she did, and eventually we lost touch.’

  ‘I still don’t feel it has any connection to me,’ I said. ‘Anyone might have similar colouring to mine and Mum’s, and just because this Nessa had a baby and my mother was adopted …’

  ‘There’s a bit more to it than that, my dear,’ said Henry. ‘And it doesn’t reflect well on my family.’

  I wondered what on earth was coming next!

  ‘When Henry and I saw you and Mark sitting on the sofa together the other day, the similarity of your profiles was too striking to be dismissed. It confirmed what we already suspected.’

  I stared at them in astonishment. ‘But … I don’t look anything like Mark! And what has he to do with anything?’

  ‘In colouring, you’re totally unlike, but the high cheekbones, straight nose and pointed chin are just the same,’ explained Clara. ‘You look a little like Henry, too. It’s a Doome family resemblance.’

  ‘Which is hardly surprising, because we are all related,’ said Henry. ‘I’m afraid the man who seduced Nessa was my elder brother, George – Mark’s grandfather. He visited me soon after I went up to Oxford and unfortunately met Nessa then.’

  ‘She was really very pretty, if you liked the type,’ said Clara dispassionately.

  ‘She was certainly George’s type,’ Henry said drily, ‘and he always had to have what he wanted, no matter what the cost.’

  ‘We were settling in and enjoying university life and being together again,’ Clara said. ‘I was just happy Nessa wasn’t dogging our footsteps all the time, like she had at first.’

  She pondered the past, then shrugged. ‘We were very young and engrossed in ourselves, I suppose. Anyway, to continue this sorry tale, late in the autumn term, Nessa went off to London for the weekend, ostensibly to visit her godmother – but I’d glimpsed her getting into a car with George.’

  ‘Yes, that gave us a bit of a jolt,’ said Henry. ‘We’d suspected they’d stayed in touch, but hoped it would fizzle out, because he was engaged to an heiress. He always loved money, so long as he didn’t have to earn it.’

  ‘Nessa was an orphan and would come into money one day, too,’ Clara said, ‘but at that time her guardians gave her an allowance, a very generous one.’

  My brain was now reeling as it tried to come to terms with all this. ‘So … you seriously think George Doome was my grandfather?’

  Clara nodded. ‘Nessa told me she’d arranged to spend the day with him in London before going to her godmother’s house, but they went to a flat he’d borrowed from a friend first and that’s where he seduced her … though, from what she said, that was too mild a term for it. It certainly shattered any illusions she’d had about romance and I think finally made her acknowledge her real sexuality.’

  ‘Poor girl! I’m so ashamed of George,’ said Henry.

  ‘He knew Nessa was an heiress and told her afterwards that he didn’t know why she was so upset, because he was going to marry her,’ said Clara. ‘Of course, he assumed she’d come into her capital once she was married, not that she’d have to wait till she was thirty, so when that came out in the big scene afterwards he turned very nasty.’

  ‘He behaved very badly. We found it hard to forgive him, though of course he didn’t realize that we knew what had happened – and he never knew about the baby, either,’ Henry said.

  ‘Nessa was absolutely adamant he shouldn’t be told,’ agreed Clara. ‘And he’d got his fiancée pregnant soon after Nessa, so there didn’t seem a lot of point.’

  She sighed. ‘The most awful things did just get hushed up then. Nessa wanted only to leave and put it all behind her. She wasn’t interested in the baby at all and once the adoption was through and she’d gone off to America, that seemed to be the end of it.’

  ‘I’m glad George’s wife, Barbara, never knew about what happened,’ said Henry. ‘She was a sweet woman who put up with a lot from George over the years, but that would have really hurt her.’

  By now, I was feeling so stunned and confused by all this that I was unable to speak. Henry fetched me a glass of Tottie’s mead and a whisky and soda each for him and Clara.

  When I finally got my voice back, I said, ‘I still find it hard to believe that Mum could be Nessa’s baby. There’s no real proof, is there? Isn’t it just conjecture?’

  But even as I spoke I was examining Henry’s features in a new light and noting similarities with my own, though his face had a bonier and more intellectual aspect.

  ‘We’re quite certain, though a DNA test would give concrete proof, if anyone wanted it,’ Clara replied.

  ‘To us, you felt like part of the family the moment you stepped into the house,’ Henry said. ‘Didn’t you feel that, too?’

  ‘I suppose I did,’ I agreed, though I’d also been stunned by meeting Lex on the doorstep, so it hadn’t hit me with great force at the time.

  ‘We always wondered what had happened to the baby and hoped she was having a happy life,’ Henry said. Then he and Clara filled me in a bit about Nessa’s subsequent life and career, with the early success of her feminist book and the scandal of her having a female live-in lover when things like that were not openly talked about.

  ‘Although what happened to Nessa was a terrible experience, it did seem to insert a backbone of steel into all that blancmange,’ Clara said. ‘You could see from the picture I showed you that she looked like an overweight Sugar Plum Fairy with attitude.’

  ‘Mum looks like an overweight Sugar Plum Fairy without attitude,’ I said. ‘She drifts about like thistledown, though, wherever the current breeze takes her.’

  Though this time, it seemed to have blown her totally off course.

  ‘We must break it to Sybil that she has a half-sister and a niece,’ Clara suggested.

  ‘Must we tell anyone?’ I protested. ‘I mean, it’s lovely for me if it’s true, but I can’t see the point in stirring things up after all this time.’

  ‘Of course we must. We’re quite sure about it, and you must be made part of the family, however belatedly,’ declared Clara.

  ‘Yes, we’re very happy to have found you and we don’t want to let you
go again!’ agreed Henry. ‘But why don’t we order the DNA testing kits online, to put your mind at rest? It could show up other interesting relationships, too, so it would be quite fun.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Clara. ‘It might inspire you to write a little family history, Henry!’

  I’d been working possible relationships out in my head and it was complicated. ‘So … if it is true, then you, Henry, are my great-uncle? Sybil is my aunt and Mark … my cousin?’

  ‘That’s right, so you’ve acquired lots of relations in one fell swoop!’ Henry said.

  ‘But telling Sybil would surely upset her, and for no good reason?’

  ‘She must already know what her father was like. He and that old reprobate Piers Marten were like two peas in a pod, where women and gambling were concerned,’ said Henry. ‘There were lots of unsavoury stories circulating about them when they were younger.’

  ‘Sybil always managed to shut her eyes to anything she didn’t like,’ observed Clara. ‘And of course after she married – Edmund Whitcliffe, a very nice Methodist minister, much older than herself, Meg – she didn’t see a lot of her father because her husband disliked him.’

  I wasn’t surprised: I don’t think I’d have liked him either. I much preferred having River as my grandfather.

  ‘I think we should break the news to Sybil and Mark tomorrow,’ suggested Henry, to my horror.

  ‘And perhaps we should tell Lex at the same time,’ said Clara. ‘I know he’s not related to you except through my marriage, Meg, but he’ll have to know and it will save having to explain the whole thing over again.’

  Lex! Amid all these revelations, I hadn’t thought about how he was going to take the news! I hardly imagined he’d welcome me warmly into the family circle, especially since now there was a good chance he’d never ever quite get rid of me.

  ‘I think you’re being a bit hasty,’ I said. ‘We should at least wait till we know for certain.’