‘Teach it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you a teacher, then?’
‘Why do you sound so surprised?’
‘I just thought—’ He remembered now that Jonah had told him she’d been something distinguished in education. Yet he had thought of her always here, in this big old house.
‘You thought that I came from the dark ages when women didn’t work – that I never did anything but wear dresses and have children and tend the garden?’
‘No. I don’t know what I thought.’
‘I always had to earn my living. I was a teacher. And anyway, I couldn’t have supported a life of idleness. I did my Highers and my teacher training and I taught in a London school in the East End until the war came and then—’ She stopped abruptly. ‘Well, almost all the children I taught will be dead now. I think we’re done, aren’t we?’
‘Who’s the small elderly woman?’
‘Oh! Now isn’t that odd; I forgot she was there.’ She chuckled softly. ‘A Freudian lapse, you might say. That’s my sister Meredith. We always called her Merry. She used to suit the name. She was very pretty, with a soft round face and golden hair. Boys loved her. Men loved her. Everyone. She had a laugh like a bell tinkling, or one of those wind chimes my grand-daughter used to collect.’
‘Does she have family as well?’
‘She has a stepfamily. Her husband was older than her and is long gone. Well. You could say that she is long gone too. It has been many years since she remembered anything. She doesn’t usually know us; sometimes she thinks I am her stepmother – my mother, that is. She still laughs, though. It makes my hair stand on end to hear it.’ She grasped her cane and rose abruptly. ‘Shall we go and make our supper? I could eat a horse. Old people are supposed to lose their appetites, but I find I am perpetually hungry. It’s as if I’ve got a great hole inside me that I can’t ever fill.’
6
Days took on a certain shape. There was the early rising, though she was always up before him; the run round the lanes with Polly, always the same circuit that took him down to the sea, and always shouting out a ‘hello!’ to the dog walkers and the road sweepers, the old man collecting whelks; the steady work that took him through to lunchtime in the woods to clear his head and stretch his legs. In the afternoon, after he had finished for the day and before their evening meeting, there was the sea again. He would bike there and walk along the beach, above the ragged hem of the tide-line. The wind was sharp and salty, making his eyes water, and on these autumn days the sea was usually brown and grey, though sometimes when the sun broke through it sent up diamond sparks. He loved to watch long-legged, sharp-beaked sea-birds whose names he never discovered, and loved to hear them as well – their piercing, lonely cries sent a shiver down his spine. They made him feel lonely and glad.
He no longer listened to music through his headphones when he worked; somehow the music seemed too insistent, stopping his journey back into Eleanor’s past. And he had stopped checking his phone for emails or texts; recently, he hadn’t even bothered to charge it. He only called his mother to reassure her. He hadn’t bothered to shave for days, either – stubble was beginning to thicken into a beard that was darker than his hair. When he looked in the mirror he was taken aback by the face that stared back – the long hair and mismatched beard gave him a disreputable yet slightly dashing air. But no one could see him except himself, and strangers who didn’t matter, and the owner of the corner shop in the village where he bought his cigarettes and who glared at him and pursed her lips. Eleanor didn’t know that she sat by the fire opposite someone who looked like a pirate. She herself always took care over her appearance, wearing clothes that were soft and richly coloured, though often moth-eaten and shabby. She told him that even when she was alone, she would wear nice clothes and do her hair up. ‘I’m dressing up for myself,’ she said. ‘I’m impressing myself.’
The world receded. He felt that the house was like a boat, stalwart amid the autumn winds, and he and Eleanor were alone on it together, even though there were days when they barely saw each other. He heard her footsteps moving round the rooms; listened to her at the piano; noticed when cars arrived to collect her or drop her back again. Sometimes there were other people in the house, but Peter rarely met them. He didn’t really want to; they made him feel like a stranger in a place where, alone, he was starting to feel oddly at home, safely locked into a structure where each day had the same pattern.
He worked doggedly. Now he had moved on to the photographs. The medical ones had shocked him to begin with – in fact, made him feel nauseous and also ashamed of himself for his disgust. Gilbert Lee had specialised in facial reconstruction; Eleanor said it was because of what he had seen in the war. He had been an early pioneer, and they were invaluable documents, but when Peter picked up that first image of a face before surgery, he had felt such a jolt of horror that he had had to go outside and smoke a cigarette among the withered roses. It was like a face that was no longer a face at all but a caricature of humanity – the features rearranged, the mouth torn and displaying a shattered mouthful of teeth, a crater where the cheek should have been. How could anyone bear to be alive when they looked like that? He was disturbed by his repulsion – after all, he told himself, a suffering person looked out of that blasted face. When he talked to Eleanor about it later, she nodded at him. ‘You have to look into their eyes,’ she said. ‘See beyond.’
‘Beyond?’
‘Beyond superficial strangeness,’ she said. ‘Back to their humanity.’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s it.’
‘People are often scared,’ she said. ‘Gil used to say that children often wept or cried out when they saw some of his patients. Or ran away.’
‘It is the stuff of horror,’ said Peter.
‘What are we horrified by?’
‘I don’t know.’ He thought of the series of pictures he had leafed through. ‘A face seems to express who we are. So it’s like a disfigurement of the self or something.’
‘Dangerous, isn’t it, to moralize physical ugliness?’
‘Yes,’ said Peter. ‘I know.’
And gradually he became inured to the primitive terror of those images and started to dwell upon what had survived: the smile behind the twisted mouth, the pain in the eyes. He understood too the acts of redemption that Gil and his team had performed – for there were also the ‘after’ photographs, where noses were reconstructed, skin grafted, jaws rebuilt and a recognisable person emerged again from the wreckage caused by guns, bombs, fires, and in one case a maddened dog.
There were other photographs, of course, hundreds and thousands of them; many blurred, bleached, stuck together in wads of unrecognisable images, but some clear, bringing back moments in the past. Some figures made brief appearances and then disappeared, but of course there were the faces that repeated, until Peter felt he knew them. Gilbert Lee was there, at first young, but then thickening, greying, stooping into old age. Peter liked him from the outset for the kindliness of his face and the clarity of his gaze under those heavy lids. Eleanor’s children were there too – hundreds of them as babies and small children, then fewer as they grew up and left home; many seaside snaps and moments of significance such as birthdays, graduations, weddings.
Then there was Eleanor’s sister, Meredith. Peter looked at her with interest because of the way Eleanor talked about her. A whole history lay behind the way she said her name, giving a weary sigh. Merry didn’t look so complicated to Peter. As a young woman she was undeniably pretty: she was small and slight, with a heart-shaped, dimpling face and a delighted smile. She looked vivacious and expressive – the camera caught her gestures, her lifted head, her eloquent glance, her hand held out in greeting, her laughter. She grew plumper with age, but was still compact and pleasing. Her blonde hair turned a kind of primrose-grey and her pink sweetness weathered. She wore calf-length pleated skirts and good shoes and stood in family groups, her arm pushed through her husband’
s. She looked very unlike Eleanor, thought Peter.
For he was becoming fascinated by Eleanor – the old woman whom he met in the mornings and evenings, who talked to him so freely and yet so impersonally, and the woman of the photographs. He was half in love with her younger self, but intimidated by her as well, because she seemed tall and beautiful and free, quite beyond the adoration of someone like him. In the evenings, beside the fire, he would stare and stare at Eleanor’s blind and creviced face to see the face beneath: the dark-haired, smoky-eyed one, with creamy skin and smooth throat and pure profile. Even in photos, Merry seemed to move and flirt and charm, but Eleanor was still. Her husband watched her and she gazed out at the world as if she were seeing something nobody else could see.
There were a few photographs he returned to. The first was one of her standing with her class. He didn’t know the date but it must have been in the late thirties, shortly before the war. The picture belonged to a different world: dozens of peaky girls with scrubbed faces, about ten or eleven years old, all in neat pinafores with their hair tied back in pigtails or plaits, smiling hard and obediently at whoever was behind the camera. Under a cloth, thought Peter; that was how it was done – and everyone having to stand quite frozen for a while. Frozen in time, just before catastrophe rolled over the country. How many of them had died young? One girl near the end must have moved, for she was more out of focus than the rest. In the centre of the group, holding a pupil by each hand, stood Eleanor Wright, as she then was. Tall and slim in a plain, high-necked dress, with her lustrous hair pulled back, her face serious but a little smile just pulling at her mouth, and her eyes secret. Peter kept gazing at those eyes. He wanted to ask the old woman what she had been thinking about but didn’t dare.
Then there was a much smaller one, of her looking over her bare shoulder. She must have been wearing some kind of evening gown, he thought. Her round white neck and her smooth cheek, the look of recognition in her eyes, startled him. He wanted to be looked at like that: dreamy and deep and sensuous. He wondered who she was acknowledging – Gilbert, perhaps, or perhaps just a stranger who had caught her unawares.
Finally, there was a photograph of her when she was several years older, presumably a wife and a mother; her hair was short, brushed behind her ears and she wore trousers and a white shirt. She was outside this house, sitting on a step with an empty glass by her bare foot; in the distance you could just make out a child running. But Eleanor didn’t notice the child who would soon burst in on her consciousness; she was reading a book and Peter thought that she seemed utterly immersed in it, as if the world had fallen away from her and she was all alone. It was this quality of immersion, of removal from the busy, crowded life she lived in, that drew him.
He arranged all the photos into categories, neatly labelled files and boxes, but these three he took and put in his little attic room. At night-time, she gazed at him and she withdrew from him into her secret self.
He thought that she lay beyond him, a door to which he didn’t have a key – until he came across the letters.
7
Peter was three days into sorting through the papers. He didn’t know how he would ever get to the end of them: Eleanor seemed to have kept everything, and in no particular order. The metal cabinet’s drawers – apart of course from the one whose contents had been set alight – were stuffed with bank statements, bills, receipts, school reports, drawings done for her by her grandchildren, letters, old essays by various of her children on subjects ranging from fluctuating asymmetry in behavioural ecology to Ibsen’s treatment of social issues. There were postcards sent decades ago alongside birth certificates, surveyors’ reports, contracts for Gilbert Lee’s books, first drafts of articles in his carelessly elegant handwriting. Peter found a whole sheaf of recipes in spidery writing, the ink brown and the paper yellowing. It wasn’t Eleanor’s handwriting, which he’d come to know well, and could recognize even when she was using capital letters. Perhaps it was her mother’s. It gave him a shivery feeling to imagine Eleanor’s long-dead mother carefully copying down recipes to hand on, brown soup and jam roly-poly, which had been pushed into drawers and forgotten.
Eleanor had been gone since yesterday and wasn’t due back until the following day, and it was striking how much difference her absence made to being in the house. It was quiet and somehow blank. There were no audiobooks being played at full volume in her bedroom, and no piano music rippling out from the living room. When Peter had woken that morning, he had noticed at once the lack of the comforting smell of toast and coffee that usually greeted him. He continued with his routine – making piles of paper, deciding what should be given to her children (their reports, for instance; their birth certificates and old passports), what should be discussed with Eleanor, and what binned (the bank statements that were over twenty years old, certainly, or those numerous scraps of paper which simply had figures jotted on them, or even shopping lists). There wasn’t a great deal that he thought was worth giving to a university library, although it was amazing what some libraries would take.
At lunch he hurriedly ate a piece of bread and cheese and went down to the woods. It was a pale day, the grey clouds parting to show patches of opal-blue. There were several winter birds in the garden – robins, sparrows, a tiny plump wren. Peter liked small brown English birds that looked so plain and sung so sweetly. He had in his pocket a folded piece of paper that he’d lifted from the cabinet that morning. Now he took it out and unfolded it, re-reading the message on it, written in round letters: ‘Dear Miss Wright, thank you for being our teacher. You have taught us a lot. We will never forget you and we hope you will not forget us. We hope you are very happy and that you will visit us. We hope you like your present. It was Miss Forrest’s idea. She said green was your favourite colour. We hope the war will be over soon.’ There followed a cluster of signatures. Beside one of them, in miniature letters, was written: ‘I think you are very pretty.’ Peter liked the painstaking formality of the note and thought he must show it to Eleanor when she returned – for how could you throw away something like that? And yet he had learnt that she was ruthlessly unsentimental in what she discarded; he wondered what had made her like that. There were several bin bags in the corner of the room of letters and drawings and messages that she said would feed the great bonfire they would have, when Peter had finished.
He smoked a cigarette and then returned to the house, where he made himself a pot of coffee and took it back with him to the room where he worked, to stave off the afternoon drowsiness that always overtook him. He reached into the cabinet for the battered cardboard file at the back of the drawer. It was unmarked but when he opened it up contained loose letters, and then a brown A4 envelope in which, he saw when he peered inside, there were several more letters, all in tight, angular writing on semi-transparent paper, so that the words showed on the other side. Peter sat on the floor beside the rocking horse and poured himself a cup of coffee. The sun shone through the large window and lay across the floor in blocks of dusty yellow light. He really was sleepy; his eyes felt heavy. He picked up the first letter determinedly. It was in a different hand from those inside the envelope; when Peter turned to the end he saw it was from Gilbert. There had been other letters from Gilbert that Peter had read, most of them warm but practical and to the point. They had been kept in a plastic folder, all together. This one was undated and quite short, and from the smudged scrawl, seemed to have been written in a hurry. For a moment, Peter considered not reading it – it seemed illicit, a betrayal of Eleanor’s trust in him – and yet what else was he being hired for? Anyway, it was too late. Even as he was considering putting it aside unread, he had begun:
My dear Eleanor,
You’re wrong: I didn’t speak lightly or recklessly, and I am not particularly noble or even romantic, except perhaps where you are concerned. I loved you from the moment I set eyes on you and that has never changed, nor will it do so. I wouldn’t be taking you on, you’d be taking on me: my melancho
ly, my cautious and solitary nature, my lack of charisma and eloquence. I am, as you know, a dogged kind of fellow, not a star. I am a doctor, not a hero. I am a rationalist and not a poet. Anything I have achieved has been done through patience and determination but I have come to believe that these are not secondary virtues. Their roots go deep. I believe you can trust me. I think you know by now how much I care for you and how I will never cease to work for your happiness.
I will call on you when I return next week.
Yours in hope and love, Gilbert
Now he really did feel like a snoop. Nevertheless, he re-read the letter, slowly this time. He admired this Gilbert – the man who reconstructed shattered faces to give them back their shared humanity, the one he’d seen in the photographs looking with such adoration at Eleanor, and also the one who wrote this letter, in which he both deprecated himself and yet put himself boldly forward. Gil knew what he had to offer: his solid kindness, his enduring love. He knew his limitations. And Peter gathered that Eleanor had perhaps resisted him; he’d had to persuade her to marry him. He imagined Gil the following week, waiting to find out whether Eleanor would agree or not. She would emerge from a doorway, pale and slender in her high-necked dress with the solemn radiance that Peter was so drawn to in the photographs he had gazed at, and Gilbert would step forward to greet her, trying to see her answer in her eyes. And she said yes. Yes, Gilbert. Yes, I will. I do.
The Twilight Hour Page 6