He picked up the next letter, in different handwriting – the same writing, however, as in the recipes.
Dear Ellie, how nice to hear your happy news. We all like and admire Gilbert very much and you probably know how long we have hoped for this! He is all you could want in a husband – and all I could want in a son-in-law. It is a happy day, and we need some happy days, don’t we, with so much sadness and loss around? When will it be? Soon, I hope. I am already planning to wear my blue coat with the sable collar. Isn’t it strange and perhaps a little shameful how superficial things like a coat or a treacle pudding can lift the spirits?
Robert joins with me in sending our congratulations and love,
Mummy
This letter Peter added to Gilbert’s. He picked up the third, on thick cream card in a beautifully even sweep of italic writing, and scanned it.
Wednesday 21st
My Dear Eleanor,
Gilbert came to see me this morning. I would like to extend my congratulations and best wishes to you. As you know, I am a widow and Gilbert is my only child, and therefore it will not seem strange to you if I add the hope that you will make him as happy and fulfilled as he deserves.
Yours sincerely,
Mary Lee
Ouch! Peter gave a sympathetic wince at the coldness of the letter. So: Eleanor’s mother was delighted and Gilbert’s mother was sour and disapproving. Perhaps Eleanor was too independent-minded for Mrs Mary Lee – not submissive enough for her taste, not eager enough to please and placate. Or maybe she didn’t like the fact that she was a teacher in the East End. Or was it simply that no one could ever be good enough for her son?
The final letter before Peter looked at the contents of the envelope was on one side of a small piece of paper decorated with a row of flowers at the top and bottom. The few lines were in the exact middle of the page, in a large and looping hand.
Dear Eleanor, Your father would have been proud of the young woman his daughter has been turned into. With love from Winifred (Nan)
Now Peter took up the envelope and pulled out the thin wad of letters in different writing. But the first sentence made him lay them down again. ‘Nellie, my beloved,’ he read. ‘What have you done to me? What shall I do with myself now that I know you?’
He poured himself another cup of coffee, though it was tepid, and took it outside. He smoked a cigarette, sucking in the smoke urgently and tipping his head back to blow it above him in tendrils of ashy blue. His hands were trembling slightly. Nellie, my beloved. Who was it calling her that? Even Gilbert was slightly formal with her, addressing her respectfully as his dear Eleanor. But this person was intimate; his voice came fresh and urgent down the years. Peter smoked a second cigarette, putting off the moment when he would go back inside, feeling dizzy with the acrid rush he pulled into his lungs. He was glad Eleanor was absent; he felt he could not have continued reading those letters with her nearby.
Nellie, my beloved. What have you done to me? What shall I do with myself now that I know you? I feel quite wild, my darling. I cannot tell if it is wild with joy or with despair. How is it that no one can tell that my heart is bursting? I want to keep you secret and deep and I want to shout your name out loud (don’t worry: I won’t). I have to see you again and hold you again and feel the softness of your skin and smell your clean, beautiful hair and press you to me until I don’t hurt with this terrible desire. Tell me you feel the same, Nellie. You must. I know you must.
There. Peter pressed his fingertips against his temple. Who was it? He didn’t sign his name – or perhaps it was a she? No, he didn’t think so. And how could he dare call Eleanor Nellie? Nellie was a sweet and slangy name, girlish and innocent, but the Eleanor he knew was grave, watchful, to his eyes beautiful, and a bit scary. Even when she was young, in those pictures he had purloined and which were now on the chest in his room at the top of the house, she had a mystery about her.
He picked up the next letter, if you could call a hastily scrawled few words by such a name.
Tomorrow evening, by the quince tree. I’ll be there as soon after six as I can. I will wait for you until nine xxxx
And then a longer letter that he read slowly, hearing the words in his head.
My Darling, it began. I write this at three in the morning, when it seems that the whole world must be asleep apart from me. But I can’t sleep tonight. It feels that I will never be able to sleep again. I drink whisky and smoke and there is nothing that can calm me or dull the intensity of this moment, when all I can think of or see or hear is you …
Peter read the letter twice and then laid the paper carefully on top of the previous one. He felt slightly sick, very agitated. And finally, now that he was actually prying into the secrets that she had kept for so long, the last scrawled note.
You have my heart. Keep it safe. I will be home again; my only home is you.
This time, at the bottom of the note, there was not a signature, but a single letter. An ‘M’, made with a flourish.
Peter stared at the words for several minutes. Then he lifted his head, a thick pain in his throat and behind his eyes. He felt – absurdly he knew – abandoned, as if everyone in the world had forgotten about him. The house seemed very large and very empty. Silence pressed in on him, and outside, the light was just beginning to thicken towards dusk, the huge sky fading. He must have been sitting over the letters for longer than he’d realized, time slowing down around him. He stood up and turned on the standard lamp, feeling stiff and sore, as if he’d stayed too long in one position.
This mysterious ‘M’ had written about feeling strange to himself; Peter knew what that meant. Perhaps everyone knew but never articulated it: the sense of not belonging to your own self, of life being like a great river that swept everyone up in its currents – but not you. You had let it drift into a small backwater, a little crevice by the shore, muddy and shallow from where you twitched and bobbed, watching other people passing by. He knew that Eleanor, whatever had happened to her and whatever she had done, had been in the great and purposeful river of life. You could see it in her magnificent ancient face and in the way she still held herself, erect, head up, hands firmly clutching her cane, great blind eyes fixed on her purpose. Peter had only known her a few days, but he believed that however she had suffered, she would have done so actively. If she had ever loved, she would have immersed herself in that love. If she had grieved, she would have let grief course through her, filling up all the spaces and holes. If she had lost, she would have lost bravely.
In this last year, there had been times when Peter had let go of hope and let go of himself. This didn’t mean he had been in despair. Despair was too exact and cruel a word for the blankness of his mood. He had been absent, trying to empty himself of himself, until only a tiny flicker of vitality had remained buried in that torpid body. He had wanted only to breathe, in and out and in and out, lying in the warm darkness, life withdrawn to a great distance until it had no power to hurt or even touch him.
When he was at school, he had played rugby a few times, though never with the necessary conviction to stop him being slightly scared of the hurtling bodies, the massive shoulders, the hard boots and fixed grimaces of faces he had thought he knew. He could still clearly remember a day, in the middle of winter, when the ground was frozen and his breath smoked in the air. Rain had started falling steadily; he had lain with his cheek on the frozen, muddy grass; his fingers had been trampled on; someone had kicked his shin and a coagulating purple gash ran down it. Numb with cold, he felt nothing until he stood under the shower, when suddenly his whole body started to hurt. His face burned as though he had scrubbed at it violently with a wire brush; his cuts and bruises stung. And his hands – my God, how they had throbbed, pain pounding up his limbs and into his mangled fingertips. He almost screamed out loud, standing in the shower under needles of tepid water, waiting for the violence in his body to recede.
Returning to life was painful, of course, and exhilarating too. He h
ad loved his days spent here because they were like his gateway back into the busy, messy, vivid world. Yet he had not expected a few letters, written by people who must be long dead to a woman who was old and blind, to cause him such mysterious grief. He paced the room, his footfall stirring dust from the boards. All along the walls were piles of photographs, manuscripts, books: the fruits of his labours. A life was stacking up here. But these letters – how should he file them? Who was this ‘M’, anyway (Matthew? Mark? Michael? Marmaduke?), who dared call Eleanor ‘Nellie’ and talked about moonlight and love?
Maybe he was in one of the photographs. Peter picked up a pile and started rifling uselessly through them – this man with a stupid moustache? Or this blond buffoon? All these awful Englishmen, well-fed and complacent, putting their meaty hands on the rumps of their wives as if they owned them. He liked Gilbert Lee and was prepared to imagine Eleanor with him, two people going through the world together, constrained and dignified. But not someone whose letters groaned with desire. You could almost feel him touching her when he wrote. Sweetest love.
Sweetest love. He had called Kaitlin that once. The memory sluiced through him. Leaning up on one elbow and looking down at her as she lay with her face on his pillow and her hair – the colour of golden treacle – spread out. He had seen the freckles on her shoulder and the crease marks on her cheek and her long eyes had glinted up at him from under those thick lashes.
Sweetest love. He needed to find out about M. Where had he gone? Who had he been?
8
Peter left the junk room, followed by the dog that had become his faithful shadow, and walked outside to light a cigarette, looking across the garden and over the woods. He was smoking too much, but that didn’t matter. Things like that didn’t count here. So he lit another and then he decided he should have a drink to go with it – that was another thing that didn’t count. Not tonight, anyway, when he was all alone and the day was dying and he couldn’t see a single light except for the ones from the house, standing behind him like a ship on an endless sea. He went back inside and made his way to the cellar. Eleanor had told him he must help himself to anything he wanted, and he wanted something alcoholic. The cellar smelt dank and musty, of things that were growing in secret. The walls were cold and slightly damp to his touch. He fumbled around for the light switch, and for a moment was dazzled before his eyes adjusted. There were so many bottles in here, in racks and in boxes, far more than she’d ever be able to drink, even if she lived to be a hundred and drank a bottle a day. Anyway, she was leaving; presumably her children and grandchildren and all the great tribe of her descendants would come and plunder this space and leave it empty at last. It was clear that someone had already starting putting bottles into crates.
He pulled a red out of a rack; its label was peeling off, but he could read the date. Twenty-two years old! Almost as old as he was. It was probably undrinkable by now. He tucked it under his arm, and then caught sight of several different-shaped bottles on one of the shelves that all contained amber-coloured liquid. Whisky. He thought of M drinking whisky and thinking of Eleanor. Nellie. By the light of the moon. He picked one bottle up, squat and half-full, and unscrewed the cap to sniff at it. The rawness caught him in the back of his throat, and he took an experimental sip. Probably someone like Jonah drank whisky like a connoisseur, peaty liquid slipping down his throat, his eyes closed. Mm, he’d say. Iodine. Burnt sugar. It made Peter’s eyes sting. He felt that something was coming loose inside him, but in a good way. At least, he thought in a good way. He remembered reading about Keats dying of TB in Italy; coughing up blood; coughing up bits of his own body.
He took the whisky and the wine upstairs. He didn’t want to sit in the living room, with its closed piano and cold hearth and no Eleanor in her high-backed chair. First, he went into the kitchen and opened the wine; he was tempted to drink it straight from the bottle, glugging it back so that dizziness rose in him like a mist, but he was going to do this properly. He took a glass from the cupboard and poured himself half an inch, a deep crimson. The two cats twisted around his legs, trying to get his attention: what would happen to them once Eleanor was no longer here? Would they stay in the house? It didn’t seem right to take them away to a new home – and perhaps, he thought with alarm, they’d be separated. That would never do.
He swilled the wine round in the bottom of the glass the way he’d seen it done and took a sniff, then a delicate sip. If it was ruined, he couldn’t tell. It tasted deep and spicy, just the drink for a dark evening in November. He put the cork back in the bottle and set it by the hob to drink later. First, he was going to sit in the garden with his whisky and his cigarette. He found a tumbler and sloshed some of the beautiful tawny liquid into it, then a bit more. He added a few drops of water and carried it out into the garden with Polly. The first sip attacked his heart and his head simultaneously. Thoughts and feelings ran together. His eyes were swimming and his throat clogged. He felt acutely solitary, and wished that someone would creep up to him out of the darkness and take him in their arms, where he could forget himself. For a moment, he let himself remember the feel of Kaitlin’s slim fingers, such clever teasing fingers, the taste of her lipstick, the little hollow at the back of her neck and the blue veins in her wrists. That husky, sexy laugh. And Eleanor’s face – the one when she was young, looking over her bare shoulder at someone. Sweetest love.
Back in the kitchen, he rifled in the fridge for his supper. He cut a large wedge of the game pie he found there and warmed it in the microwave, then emptied a bag of salad leaves into a bowl and dressed it. It wasn’t much fun cooking alone in this big, empty house. He had to resist the urge to eat it with his fingers, standing by the window. This is what Eleanor did night after night. She would cook elaborate meals and eat at the table, with her tarnished silver cutlery, and her chipped patterned plates that had probably belonged to Mary Lee or her own mother, wearing her moth-eaten gowns. Structure is important, he heard her say. The smell of the past in every room and the future dwindling. How did old people bear it? He poured himself a large glass of red wine and sat down, took the first forkful of pie. The clock on the wall told him it was nearly eight o’clock, but it had been dark for so long that it could have been midnight. He should have brought his book down here to read as he ate. He took another mouthful of wine. His glass was only half full now so he topped it up.
‘That smells good,’ said a voice from the doorway, and Peter leapt to his feet, knocking his fork to the floor.
‘Eleanor! I didn’t hear a car. I thought you weren’t back till tomorrow.’
‘I changed my mind. Giselle wasn’t well and I was just in the way. I wanted to be at home. Is there any left? I haven’t eaten.’
‘Yes. Shall I put some on a plate? With salad?’
‘Thank you. I’m very hungry.’
‘Mustard?’
‘Yes please. And will you pour me some wine, please?’
‘Of course.’
‘How’s your day been?’ she asked, sitting across from him, tapping her fork on the plate until she found the food, expertly lifting it to her mouth. She ate with appetite. He watched as a chunk of pie fell on to her lap, but she didn’t notice.
‘My day? My day’s been – it’s been fine. Good. What about yours?’
‘I went to a lunchtime concert with my son.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Yes. Ravel piano music. He fidgeted. He wanted to be at work, I could tell. What’s wrong?’
‘Wrong?’
‘Something’s wrong with you this evening.’
‘No. Honestly. I’m fine.’ But he had to tell her sometime. That was his job. And after all, why was it so hard to say? ‘I’ve been reading letters today,’ he managed.
‘Have you? Is there anything you want to ask me?’
‘No. That is, maybe.’
‘I see.’
‘What?’
‘You found some letters that have surprised you and you don’
t know how to broach the subject with me.’
‘Kind of.’
‘Love letters,’ she said, ‘I presume.’
‘Yes.’
‘And why should love letters that were sent to me seventy years ago be distressing to you, Peter?’ Her tone was polite, distant, shrivelling him. ‘After all, you’re simply employed to sort out my affairs. Is it because I’m old and it’s unthinkable that an old woman should once have been a young woman, with sexual feelings?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Or because you wonder if I was unfaithful to my husband? Perhaps you disapprove?’
Peter forced himself to speak.
‘It’s hard to explain. I felt like a spy. And then – and I know it’s absurd – but I had this idea of you and your husband and family as pretty much perfect. Or at least, as good as. The kind I’ve only read about in books.’
‘The happy family, you mean.’
‘I guess.’
‘Even happy families are complicated, Peter. That is to say, they are myths.’
‘I know that really. It’s just that I had a story in my head and it’s been jolted.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’ Was she being sarcastic? He couldn’t tell.
‘What do you want me to do with those letters?’
‘First of all, I want you to read them to me.’
‘Now?’
‘If you would. Pour us both some more wine and we can go into the living room. You could light the fire. Afterwards, you can burn the letters.’ She pushed her plate away and rose to her feet, steadying herself with her cane. ‘This is why you are here, Peter,’ she said in a gentler tone. ‘So that my family – my happy family – never have to read them. Where were they?’
‘In the back of the smaller metal cabinet, in an old cardboard file.’
The Twilight Hour Page 7