The Cottingley Secret

by Hazel Gaynor

  The rest of the month was given over to haymaking, an event I enjoyed immensely. I loved the musty smell of the freshly cut hay and the scent of the honeysuckle that threaded through the hedgerows beside the fields. I loved to hear the song of the mistle thrush that trilled until dusk as we worked, and I loved the jokes and laughter that took my mind off the knowing looks and snide comments from Mavis Clarke.

  It pleased me to see Mummy and Aunt Polly with their sleeves rolled up to the elbow, a flush of red to their cheeks as they pitched forkfuls of the dry hay onto the cart. Mr. Snowden almost disappeared under the great flurries of straw tumbling down on him as the women encouraged each other to pitch faster, giddy in their exertions. I loved the swish and rustle as they worked, and laughed when the prongs of Aunt Polly’s pitchfork reached the seat of Mr. Snowden’s trousers, sending him hopping about like a madman. These were the days I loved the most. Being outside, working hard, doing our bit while the men were away. And after the day’s work, we sang songs of thanks for a bountiful harvest and the generous weather, and I fell into bed at night, too exhausted to dream or to worry about Daddy in France, far away from haymaking and the simple pleasures of country life.

  By the time the last field was ploughed and the swallows had flown south, the two “fairy” photographs had been put away in a drawer, brought out only occasionally, when a relative came to visit. I was glad. I’d grown tired of talking about fairies and gnomes, tired of Uncle Arthur’s teasing, tired of pretending. With the changing seasons, my fairy friends had moved on, and although I sometimes overheard Mummy and Aunt Polly talking about the Theosophists and whether it might be possible that fairies did exist, for the most part, their interest faded and their talk returned to the more somber matters of war and the prospect of another Christmas without any sign of an end to it.

  Life moved on, and my summer of fairies had come to an end.

  Or so I thought.

  Part Two

  The Beginning of Fairies

  Dear Miss Elsie Wright, I have seen the wonderful pictures of the fairies which you and your cousin Frances have taken, and I have not been so interested for a long time.

  —LETTER FROM SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE TO ELSIE, JUNE 1920

  Nine

  Ireland. Present day.

  The wild winds of May dissolved into the peaceful balm of June as Howth village exhaled beneath a bright sun that brought pale-faced office workers for weekend strolls and lured café tables and parasols outside to decorate the pavements. While the rhododendrons flourished beneath the better weather and longer days, Olivia felt herself wilt. Better weather and longer days meant that time was slipping by, and still she was no closer to solving the bookshop’s financial struggles. Bluebell Cottage had yet to sell and provide the much-needed injection of cash to settle the bookshop’s debts, and despite launching a new website and adding Pappy’s handwritten catalog to the site, the shop remained empty of customers and the books lingered on their shelves, stuck there, like the barnacles that clung to the hulls of the boats in the harbor.

  As the fortunes of the bookshop hung in the balance, Olivia’s dreams intensified, taking her on curious nighttime meanderings toward woodland streams where a little girl offered her a white flower, and always, when she woke, she felt a strange sense of disquiet, a sense that something was unsettled. It left her restless and impatient.

  And then there was Jack, and the wedding that moved ever closer in time, while she moved further away from it in her heart.

  Twice now she had delayed her return to London. It wasn’t just a reluctance to abandon the bookshop and Nana. It was a reluctance to confront what was waiting for her there. Her thoughts swung daily from strident conviction that she couldn’t marry Jack to a reluctant acceptance that she had to. The plans had surely gone too far to back out now, and yet when she climbed to the top of Howth Head and looked out across the view, something told her that her plans hadn’t gone nearly far enough.

  They’d had a couple of difficult conversations. Jack was exasperated by Olivia’s loyalty to the bookshop. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just leave it to Henry Blake, or the solicitors, to sort out. He didn’t understand her emotional attachment to it at all. As far as he was concerned, she was reacting to her grandfather’s death and having perfectly normal pre-wedding jitters. He urged her to come home so they could talk about it like adults, but she flinched at the word home. London had never really felt like home. The poky little flat above the bookshop felt more like a home than any of the sleek west London apartments she’d lived in. She tried to explain herself in lengthy e-mails and frustrating conversations on the old rotary-dial phone in the shop but could never adequately express what she wanted to say. She deleted the latest attempt on her laptop and retreated to a rare edition of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. The words pricked at her conscience. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .”

  AFTER AN AWKWARD first week, Ross Bailey, Writer, was firmly established “In Residence” at Something Old. He’d arrived on a rainy Monday with his laptop, a bottle of wine, a guitar, and a smile that could flip even the most troubled of hearts upside down and made Olivia wonder things she shouldn’t have been wondering.

  “Okay,” she said. “I get the laptop and the wine, but . . . the guitar?”

  “Never write without it. Helps me think when I’m stuck. If it gets annoying, just say.”

  It wasn’t annoying at all. It turned out to be rather lovely.

  Their first day together was clumsy, peppered with overly polite apologies for disturbing each other and tentative questions about how they took their tea and where the sugar was and whether the guitar was too loud. The second day was a little more relaxed, the third even more so. Friday was actually pleasant.

  By the start of the second week, Ross had learned that Olivia only took a splash of milk, that she liked silent movies and Fleetwood Mac, and that she stuck her tongue out when she was concentrating. What he hadn’t discovered was that she had a fiancé in London and a wedding dress fitting to reschedule. It hadn’t come up in conversation, and wasn’t something Olivia especially wanted to talk about. The more she and Ross conversed, the greater the omission of her marital situation became. The elephant made itself firmly at home between Children’s Books and Irish Folklore, waiting for Olivia to acknowledge it, while she hoped it would eventually get bored and go away.

  For her part, Olivia discovered that Ross took his tea builder-strong with two sugars, that he liked fig rolls and Pink Floyd and was allergic to gooseberries. This Olivia found hilarious. “Who the hell is allergic to gooseberries? Who even eats gooseberries?” Ross conceded it was a fairly useless and bizarre thing to have an allergy to as far as allergies went, but still, he would appreciate it if she didn’t leave them lying around the place, just in case.

  As the days passed, an easy friendship began to develop between them, and Olivia looked forward to the jangle of the shop bell at nine and the occasional strumming of the guitar upstairs. She even found that five o’clock on Friday came around too soon. Only once, in a cheap-white-wine-fueled moment of self-pity, did she entertain any romantic notions about Ross. To her enormous relief, the notions left after breakfast the next morning. Romantic notions confused and complicated things. Olivia had quite enough confusion and complication in her life already.

  As much as she hadn’t been expecting to share the flat with anyone other than Hemingway, she grew fond of Ross being around. She liked that she could hear the scrape of chair legs and floorboards creaking, and the tap tap tap of his fingers against the laptop. She liked the sound of his guitar. She liked the serendipity of it all, that while he was writing a new book upstairs, she was selling old ones downstairs. However unexpectedly the arrangement had come about, there was something perfectly cyclical about it. It felt as natural as breathing in and out, and the coming and going of the tide.

  As the hours slipped harmoniously by each day, Olivia occasionally glanced
at the photograph of Frances and the fairies in the silver photo frame that now sat on the shop desk, and she smiled to herself. It was a reminder to her that impossible things could happen, that the narrative of our lives was constantly being rewritten, and none of us knew how our story would end until we turned the last page.

  ON TUESDAY AND Friday afternoons, Olivia took time away from the bookshop to visit Nana. One of the benefits of having Ross around was that he could mind the shop while she was out. Annoyingly, he always sold more books when she wasn’t there than she ever sold on her own. Ross had a natural ease with the customers that Olivia couldn’t match. It had become something of a competition between them, but as long as money was going in the till, Olivia was happy to let her pride take a fall.

  Tuesdays and Fridays were quieter days at St. Bridget’s, which meant Olivia could slip in and out without having to endure painful conversations with well-meaning relatives of other residents. She couldn’t bear the doleful expressions in their eyes, the endless discussion about treatments, and the sense of death and despair that clung to everyone like the support stockings that clung to the residents’ legs. There was still life left in Nana, and Olivia refused to become that relative, nibbling on custard creams, awaiting the inevitable.

  On days when Nana was in a more restful mood, Olivia read to her from Frances’s book. Sometimes she would nod off. Sometimes she would listen intently, stopping Olivia midsentence to ask her to repeat something, or to explain something she couldn’t understand or a word she couldn’t remember the meaning of.

  Today Nana was in her room, listening to the radio. She was dressed like a tiger in an orange-and-black-striped top and black trousers, so elegant and strong, and yet so fragile. Nana had difficulty swallowing and only ate very little as a result. She didn’t wear her clothes anymore. They wore her, the fabric folding in on itself in crumples and creases, trying to find a way to fit her better.

  They spent a difficult hour together, talking about a job Olivia didn’t do and the time when Nana won the lottery and the newspapers came to take her photo and the visitors who came and went when Olivia wasn’t there: old friends and neighbors and “that terribly nice man.” Nonsense conversations and half-remembered fragments of memories about things that had never happened. It frustrated Olivia so much that she wanted to scream by the time Barbara came around with the tea.

  A doctor had once explained Alzheimer’s to Olivia by telling her to think of the brain as an orange, the skin and pith peeled away first, and then the segments slowly being eaten, piece by piece, until there was nothing left. That, he told her, was when a patient would die, when the last segment of orange had gone. It was an inevitability now, a matter of time that neither Olivia nor Nana had any control over.

  Olivia nodded along to Nana’s stories, her thoughts drifting further away from the suffocating room, her conscience ever more guilty with each retelling as she wished precious minutes away. Minutes that brought Nana that bit closer to the last segment of the orange.

  In a brief moment of lucidity, Nana asked Olivia to fetch her memory book from the wardrobe, and they spent a pleasant half hour together looking at the photographs. Some of the faces Nana remembered immediately. Others were lost to her now. It was only when she saw her wedding photograph that she stopped turning the pages and started to cry.

  “I’m so sorry, Nana. Let me put that away. We’ll go for a walk. Or a trip out, maybe. It’s a lovely day. We can look at the bluebells.”

  Olivia started to take the book, but Nana shook her head and pushed Olivia’s hand gently away. She ran her fingertips across the photograph.

  “It’s all right, dear. I’m crying because I remember. I remember the church bells the most. They’d been silent during the war, you see.” Her eyes flickered shut and her head tilted to one side: listening, remembering. She looked wistfully out of the window then. “You never forget a feeling like I had that day. It becomes part of you. Like these bloody wrinkles and liver spots. Happiness like that leaves its mark forever.”

  As Nana spoke, it struck Olivia more than ever how little she knew about her family’s past. Like a sea mist warmed beneath the sun, she’d watched Nana Martha slowly fade away in recent years, but only now, as she looked at the frail old lady beside her, did she realize that she didn’t know her at all. Yes, she knew a gentle-hearted woman called Nana, but she didn’t know Martha Kavanagh, the wife and mother, or the Martha Hogan she’d been before she met Pappy. When she looked into Nana’s eyes, Olivia didn’t know what made her laugh or what frightened her. She didn’t know her favorite color or her favorite song. She didn’t know what she and Pappy had danced to on their wedding day. She didn’t even know where they were married, or who’d made Nana’s dress. She felt that part of her own story would always be missing without these precious fragments of the past.

  “What year were you married, Nana?”

  Nana told Olivia to take the photo from the page. Olivia removed it from the plastic slot and passed it to her. She turned it over and asked Olivia to read what it said on the back.

  “‘Cormac and Martha. St. Michael and All Angels Church, Cottingley. 16 March 1946.’ That wasn’t long after the war, was it?”

  “He’d been in France. Asked me to marry him before he’d even dropped his kit bag on the cottage floor.”

  “The cottage in Yorkshire?”

  “Yes. We met in a hospital in Leeds. I was nursing there. He was sent back to recover from a shell wound. I thought him funny with his Irish accent. When he got better he went back to fight, but we wrote as often as we could. When the war ended, he came to find me.”

  Olivia rested her head on Nana’s shoulder as they continued to look through the photographs together. Only briefly did her thoughts jump to her own wedding day. She’d always imagined an autumn wedding: russet leaves and black velvets and dancing to Fred Astaire. The wedding she would be part of in a matter of weeks had none of that. She could hardly remember how all those simple ideas had become so lost.

  “How did you know Pappy was the one, Nana?”

  Nana laughed and coughed. Olivia passed her a glass of water and rubbed her back until she recovered. “I didn’t! We fell in love through our letters, through our words. We’ve had our problems over the years, but we made it work.”

  “What sort of problems?” Olivia was aware she was being insensitive in asking, but something about her own relationship problems compelled her to hear about other people’s too.

  Nana shifted in her chair and asked Olivia to fetch her a blanket. She didn’t answer the question.

  They carried on turning the pages of the album until they came across a photograph of Pappy outside Something Old, his smile as broad as the flourish on the sign above his head.

  “He loved that shop, loved those books like his own children.”

  Olivia closed the book and took it back to the wardrobe. “He doted on Mammy, didn’t he? She loved him very much.” Nana looked at Olivia through narrowed, expressionless eyes. Olivia knew that look. Nana didn’t know whom she was talking about. “Katherine. Kitty. Your daughter? My mam?”

  Questions without answers. She didn’t remember.

  Reaching for her walking stick, Nana pulled herself up out of the chair. “I want to go to the bookshop.”

  Olivia was taken aback. Nana usually complained whenever Olivia suggested they go out somewhere for the day. She always said it was too far. Everywhere was too far these days. Too much of an ordeal.

  “We’ll go one day soon, Nana. When you’re feeling up to it.”

  Nana pushed Olivia’s hand away with a determined shove as she rummaged in the wardrobe for her coat. “I want to go today. Where’s my coat? Have you seen my blue coat?”

  She hadn’t worn her blue coat for decades. Olivia remembered seeing it in the wardrobe, musty with damp. She’d put it in a bag for the charity shop.

  Like a pan of water coming to the boil, Olivia could feel her grandmother’s frustration rising
as she rifled through the wardrobe.

  “Where the bloody hell is it?” Nana’s arms physically shook against her sides.

  “Let’s have a cup of tea, Nana, and I’ll find it for you. Listen. I can hear Barbara coming with the trolley.”

  It was too much. Nana’s frustration boiled over. She turned to Olivia. “I don’t want tea. I want to go to the bookshop, now, silly girl.”

  Olivia hated it when Nana got angry. It frightened and upset her. She wanted to say it wasn’t her fault. She wanted to shout back and say she wasn’t a silly girl. She wanted to say, “I’m your granddaughter, and I love you and I’m doing my best.” But she said nothing. With tears smarting in her eyes, she fetched the nurse, who spoke calmly to Nana and assured her she would go to the bookshop soon and why didn’t she sit down and have a rest for a minute.

  Like a child after a bad dream, Nana was exhausted and confused by her outburst. With the nurse comforting her, she fell asleep in minutes.

  The nurse assured Olivia she would be okay. “She won’t remember anything about it when she wakes up. If you want to take her out anytime, though, love, let us know and we’ll have her ready.”

  Olivia said thank you, she would. She kissed Nana’s cheek and told her she loved her before reluctantly picking up her bag and leaving the nurses to it. She loathed herself for being afraid; loathed this awful disease for stealing Nana away from her so cruelly.

  That night in the flat, Olivia dreamed that she was walking in a woodland glade lit by a bright moon that hung low in the sky. Her footsteps were soft upon the velvet moss beneath her feet as angelic voices whispered like a hundred distant bells, “Fairies, fairies, ah, come soon.” Flashes of green, blue, and purple whirled around her, leading her to a cottage with a white door, where a child with hair of flame red held a bunch of wildflowers in her hands. She offered them to Olivia, smiling. “For Mammy,” she said. “For my Mammy. Cinquefoil and harebell, for love.”