Little Wishes

by Michelle Adams

  Things would have perhaps remained that way if she hadn’t found him alone one night, crying in her father’s study. Surprised he didn’t try to conceal his tears, she took a seat on the desk alongside him. It was an unexpected comfort to witness his unabashed emotion, because it meant he was nothing like her father, whom since the day he’d left she never allowed to enter her thoughts.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked as she handed James a handkerchief. He blew his nose then wiped his eyes, reddened from tears and dark with grief.

  “I am wondering if it’s going to be like this forever,” James asked. Nervous fingers busied at a pot of pens. “If this is all we will ever have, or if you will ever find it in your heart to give me a chance to be your husband.”

  His efforts had been admirable: always a kind word; a gentle touch; home on time, and often with gifts. She spurned them at first, didn’t want to betray Tom, crediting James with little to offer other than materialistic tokens. Paints, brushes, baby clothes from trips to Truro. But in that dark office, which smelled faintly of cigars she didn’t know he smoked, she realized that she had given him little chance to offer her anything else. At least he was trying. Was she?

  “It hasn’t been easy, has it?” she said.

  His tears had pooled in the fine lines around his eyes, which she had never noticed before. Their union had aged him, made both of them tired. “You could say that.”

  “I haven’t been fair,” she said. “You deserve a lot better than this.”

  Tears struck the desk as he closed his eyes. “I’m not sure I do.”

  Turning his head with the flat of her hand, she pressed gently against the side of his face. Did she make him feel as Tom made her feel? Doubtful, she thought, but perhaps she could try. Would that be so bad, to give him a taste of what she had felt, once? After all, he was her husband, and he had promised to raise her baby as his own. Perhaps she would find something for herself too, a form of companionship and unity in their secrecy, or if she was lucky, some form of love. But if she never tried, she would surely never know.

  “You have stood by me as you said you would. You are the only person left who cares.” A deep breath shook her insides, hot as acid as she reneged on a promise they had made together. “And you’ve kept the worst secret I have ever known, that my father helped my mother die. I know we said that we would never talk of it again, but I think perhaps we must, if we are to stand a chance of making this work.”

  “I did it for you, Elizabeth. For us, and this little one,” he said, his hand warm against her stomach. “Sometimes people do terrible things for the person they love. Things of which they are not proud, that cause them great pain about who they are as a person.”

  It was a confession of sorts, but she would never have known it. She kissed him then, and for the first time in the months since Tom and her father left, she had wanted to. She didn’t want to live in a time that no longer existed, sucked into a vortex underneath the waves. If she stayed there for too long, she too would drown.

  Kate arrived six months later, a beautiful, perfect little baby. Nobody knew the secret of her parentage at first, but when Kate’s dark hair and pale skin began to mark her apart from her parents, the likeness to Tom became hard to ignore. He hadn’t been gone long enough to be forgotten. Nobody ever said anything, of course, not wishing to rake over old ground digging for secrets. But all Porthsennen knew the lie, nobody more so than Elizabeth as she watched her beautiful daughter grow throughout the years, into the ghost of a man whom she had never been able to forget.

  * * *

  Elizabeth never stopped painting during the earliest years of their marriage, but it wasn’t until the seventh year came that she felt ready to exhibit her work.

  “What do you think of the space?” James asked as they stood in the middle of the room, the ceilings high and walls wide and white. It was overwhelming, the whole experience of being in London and finally having her own exhibition, which would open that same evening.

  The exhibition was possible only because of James—aged since the day they married, flecks of white peppering his temples, his trousers growing ever tighter. She could still see that handsome chap that she had once agreed to marry, but the years of marriage and parenthood had worn harder on him than on Elizabeth.

  “I think it’s wonderful,” she said, taking his hand. “Thank you. The whole day has been wonderful.”

  Lunch had taken place in Sloane Square, consisting of the sweetest cupcakes, tea from bone china cups. They had walked hand in hand by the river, and she found joy in noticing how he watched her, glancing every few steps. Their love had grown, had been nurtured by the shared responsibility of parenthood, and through watching him raise Kate as his own.

  “What are you looking at?” she had asked him that afternoon as they walked past Buckingham Palace.

  “Just you,” he had said, causing her to blush. “Sometimes I still can’t believe you’re mine.”

  “Well, I am,” she had said, yet just as always, a little thought came to her, like a single candle flame in an empty church. Part of her wasn’t his. When she watched Kate see through a difficult task, she always thought of Tom. He came to mind when she observed the dwindling number of fishermen, and when Kate marveled at the stars. He was there in everything they did, never more so than on the anniversary of their love, when the little flowers and wishes started to arrive.

  The first year had taken her by surprise. Kate, only two months old, had been crying at the time, Elizabeth walking circles around the living room before first light, trying to bounce her to comfort. Through the window she saw the flash of a coat, the profile of his face unmistakable. Pausing to find a blanket, wrapping it around Kate as she ran, she rushed outside, calling his name.

  “Tom, wait,” she shouted, searching left and right. “Tom, I know you’re there.” Yet he didn’t show himself. And it was only as she returned home, defeated, that she found the little flower pot and the attached wish on the step. Scooping it up, she hurried inside, settled Kate to sleep, and then sat with the flower, reading the wish over and over. Why would he come and not say anything, creeping around in the dark? Angered, she threw both away, but before the rubbish was collected a few days later she retrieved that slip of paper, beginning a collection that would take another forty-nine years to complete.

  For several years she tried to forget, but on the same day each year those gifts would always arrive, dragging her back to their life unlived. Try as she might, she couldn’t erase him, imprinted as he was on her past and herself. Every year she thought about waking early, opening the door to ask why he hadn’t stayed, why he kept coming back. Yet she never found the courage to open the door again, unable to face the possibility that perhaps, deep down, she and Kate simply hadn’t been enough to make him stay.

  * * *

  After getting ready at the hotel, James and Elizabeth stepped into the gallery a little after seven. The room was filled with people she didn’t know, in clothes she had often dreamed of owning. Her black knee-length dress felt frumpy in comparison to the full skirts and neat jackets worn by the other women, sunglasses covering their eyes, even though it was the evening and they were inside. Frank, James’s friend and host of the exhibition, rushed toward her as she entered, taking her by the arm.

  “I’m going to have to steal your lovely lady wife for a while. So many people are just dying to meet her. The artist,” he said, waving one hand like a rainbow through the air. His mannerisms and affected voice would have been so out of place in Porthsennen, and she had never met anybody like him before. Outside, the light was fading, the ground wet from a late-afternoon shower, but Frank assured her that it suited the mood of her collection, entitled Enough for a Lifetime.

  “Feel free,” James said, nudging her on the chin with his fingers. “Go meet your public.”

  She kissed him on the cheek and waved as Frank whisked her away.

  “I have to tell you that people have respond
ed most exceptionally,” Frank began as they headed toward the crowd. “I have sold five of the ten pieces already, and there has been an inquiry regarding a future commission.” Stunned, she said nothing. “When you work for a buyer, to their brief,” he continued, as if she hadn’t understood. To comprehend such an idea, that somebody wanted to pay her for a piece she hadn’t yet painted, was a dream come true; where some failed unexpectedly, others flourished with unparalleled surprise. “The interested party is a young socialite who has broken her daddy’s heart by falling in love with an unsuitable young cad, and made my night by falling in love with your work in the same irrecoverable way.” The glint in his eye and devil’s smirk on his lips unnerved her a little. “She’s quite dreadful, if the truth be known, but she’ll pay handsomely. Come and meet her, and at least try to appear as if you like her. She’s a sensitive little thing, prone to spontaneous bouts of what some might call self-doubt, and what other, crueler types might label as outright madness.”

  Shelby Summerton, the daughter of a property developer in the business of building flats in the East End, was more extravagant than anything Elizabeth had ever seen before. Her wide-leg trousers were so baggy that Elizabeth had at first taken them for a skirt, and her blue satin blouse was cut so low you could see a tiny promise of what was beneath. Her hair was long and inexplicably voluminous at the crown, with half of it swept back away from her face.

  “You see, it’s about community living,” Shelby was telling Elizabeth regarding the flats her father was building, her cigarette wafting back and forth, creating little trails of smoke. The patterns reminded her of the Milky Way. “Not a community like this village you have painted here, but one that makes a splendid profit.” The snort rose from her gut as she laughed at what Elizabeth hadn’t taken for a joke. “I will be buying this one,” she said, pointing to the painting of the Porthsennen harbor, the boats with nets draped over the side. In the center of the composition stood a sole figure of a man on the end of the breakwater, staring out to sea. “And this one. It’s my favorite.”

  Shelby’s favorite was of Wolf Rock itself. It was painted in a storm, the waves crashing against the sides, swallowing the structure into the tempestuous mass. Although it was almost undetectable when you viewed the work from a distance, if you got up close your eye was unquestionably drawn to a small yellow brushstroke depicting a flashlight at an open front door. If you looked harder still you could just see a man, supine and injured on the surface of the rocks below. Elizabeth’s collection told a story she kept close to her heart, one she had told not a soul about but that was, if you looked hard enough, there for all to see.

  “And about the commission?” probed Frank.

  Shelby threw her cigarette to the floor, stamped it out with a platformed heel. “You worry too much, Frankie, and work as if you need the money. Don’t be so crass.” She looked to Elizabeth, winked. “We have all the time in the world for the details, don’t we . . .” She paused. “What’s your name?”

  “Elizabeth Warbeck.” It didn’t matter how many times she said it. Even seven years after her marriage it still sounded wrong.

  * * *

  “So, tonight was a success,” James said as he met her at the door. Most people had left by then, just a few lingering in a corner talking with Frank.

  Elizabeth gazed about the room, noticing the little tickets tucked alongside each painting. “It was. I sold everything.”

  “That’s great.” He nudged at the rubbish on the floor with the toe of his shoe. “What did that awful woman want?”

  “To pay me an equally awful sum of money to produce a painting of Porthsennen so that she might have it printed and hung in her father’s apartment blocks.” He nodded approvingly. “I will be paid for each print. And there will be one in each flat. All two hundred and fifty-six of them.”

  “A fine and charming lady,” James joked.

  “I’m sorry if you were bored,” she said. “You seemed it at one point.”

  He shook his head, reached in his pocket for his cigarettes. Cravings for the habit he’d picked up during his tour in Malaya had returned not long after their wedding, and he hadn’t been able to shake it since. “I wasn’t bored. I was proud of you.” He looked down to the floor. “Very proud of you, in fact.”

  “Shall we go back to the hotel? Maybe have a drink in the bar, make the most of a night away from being parents?”

  Any other time he would have taken her up on the idea. He loved her as much as he loved Kate, which was to say without limits. But after seeing her paintings all there together, proof of her thought processes for the last seven years, he had realized that she wasn’t really his, never had been, in fact. In some way he had achieved what he wanted; she did love him, he knew that. But she didn’t love him in the right way. The lies inside him had swollen, were taking over like cancer. They required excision if he was to survive, find himself again.

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that, Elizabeth.”

  “Why not?”

  Her heart quickened as he took a step forward toward the closest paintings. He stopped at the first, the old Mayon Lookout, Porthsennen just a dot in the background.

  “I used to follow you sometimes when you were younger, did you know that?” She shook her head. “I suspected as much. It amused me a great deal to be there without your knowledge, watching where you went. Remember, I was fresh back from this god-awful city and I thought a lot of myself back then. I felt quite untouchable because you were my fiancée. Quite entitled.

  “Then one day I saw you leaving the old Mayon Lookout with Tom. I couldn’t bring myself to follow you after that. I figured whatever it was that you had with him was a childish fancy. I doubted anything serious could occur to stand in my way. You see, when I first met you, you made me feel a thousand feet tall. I realize now it was this bloody city you were taken in by”— he raised his arms to the city of London—“but at the time I thought you were enamored by me.” He lit another cigarette, the first already finished. “These last two days you’ve had the same foolish look in your eye as you did back then.”

  “What does all that matter now? We’ve been married for seven years. We’ve built a life together.”

  “But not a lifetime, Elizabeth. And we never can, because you still love another man.” He swept his hand through the thick air, motioning to the paintings. “I have tried to be everything you need, but I am not. Do I appear in even one of these?” He gave her a moment to answer, hopeful that she could defend herself, prove he was wrong. But her silence spoke volumes. “I thought as much, yet he appears in every one, doesn’t he? All this time we have been together, and not once did you ever stop thinking about him.”

  “James . . .” she stammered, but he held up his hand, didn’t want her to finish.

  “Please don’t apologize, for God’s sake. You see, it’s all my own fault.”

  “No,” she protested, rushing to take his hands in hers. “It’s not your fault. Tom is the past, a memory.” It wasn’t entirely true, but it was what she wanted to believe. “I love you, James. And so does Kate.”

  “And I love you both. I will always be her father, Elizabeth. Even considering what I’m about to say, nothing can change these last seven years. But you don’t love me in the way you love him. He is a shadow over everything we have done together. A curse of my own creation.” He threw his cigarette down and stamped it out. “I want to make this easier for you, Elizabeth, which is why I must tell you the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “The truth about us.” It was necessary to turn away, because he couldn’t bear to see the disappointment on her face. “Also, about Tom and the letter you believe he wrote to you on the day he left.” He looked to the ceiling, and Elizabeth was sure she saw a tear streak down his cheek. “And the letter you wrote to him, telling him about Kate, that I never sent.”

  * * *

  Minutes became hours, hours without end spent alone in the Ritz suite that James h
ad splashed out on in celebration of her show. Up and out by seven the next morning and hours before her train, she sipped a tasteless cup of tea in the café in Hyde Park and sat quietly by the water. Boys fished from the pavement, others dived from the high board. The sound of traffic was as inescapable as it was alien. Why was everything in this city so overwhelming? Nothing familiar, everything different from what she recognized as life, and yet everything she thought she knew was a lie. James had confessed to writing the letter she’d received on the day Tom left for Truro Hospital, and to telling Tom that he and Elizabeth were already married when they weren’t. To destroying the letters to and from the lighthouse, which was the worst thing of all, as far as she could tell, because it was the birth of his deception. Kate plagued her thoughts, all the lies she had told her, a tight painful knot in her stomach. All she wanted to do was get home, but when she went to the train station later that day, she found James on the platform waiting for her.

  “I need to explain,” he said, taking her bag from her.

  He looked dreadful, as if he hadn’t slept. “I think you’ve said enough, don’t you?” But the soft pink eyes that spoke of shame and guilt forced her to listen as they shared the return journey. All the while he spoke, she thought about Tom’s little wishes left on her doorstep for years, wishes she had on occasion almost discarded.

  “Please let us try again,” he said as the train pulled into Penzance station. “If not for me, then for Kate.”

  All along she’d thought Tom had abandoned her, yet he had no idea about the baby and had left because of James’s lies. And the previous year’s wish had been for them to raise a family together. A horrible, painful coincidence. “I think you’d better move out when we get home,” she replied. “This charade has gone on quite long enough.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Clements danced around the subject of James’s departure for well over a week, hoping to ascertain what had happened. Elizabeth decided the best way forward was to focus her attentions on something that she could control, so she set about painting the commissioned piece for Shelby Summerton, and was rewarded with a handsome royalty a little over two months later. The sale earned her enough capital that she could leave the family home and move into one of her own. Mr. Bolitho was reluctant at first, but she convinced him to let her buy the still vacant cottage that had once been home to Tom and his family. James helped her with the move, said it was the least he could do, and Elizabeth let him, on account that she wanted Kate to see the only parents she had ever known working things through.