The Twilight Hour

by Nicci Gerrard

  ‘I couldn’t find them. I don’t know why I waited until I was too blind to rescue them; it was stupid sentiment. Come along now. Bring the wine.’

  ‘There’s only a bit left.’

  ‘Bring another bottle then.’

  The fire was lit, more wine poured into their glasses. Eleanor took up her usual position in the armchair by the hearth. She was wearing a long velvet skirt that had rubbed thin in patches, giving it a fungal appearance. She folded her liver-spotted hands together in her lap and nodded.

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘There are just four of them; is that what you remember?’

  ‘So few,’ she said softly. ‘So long ago.’

  Peter picked up the first letter and cleared his throat, loudly and unnecessarily.

  ‘Nellie, my beloved,’ he said. His voice cracked. ‘What have you done to me? What shall I do with myself now that I know you?’

  He looked up to see a smile playing across Eleanor’s lips.

  ‘I feel quite wild, my darling,’ he continued. He heard the words fill the empty room, while the flames guttered and shadows deepened in the corners. He forced himself to read on until he reached the end of the first letter. Then looked up.

  ‘Thank you, Peter.’ Eleanor sounded quite steady. ‘Will you throw it on the fire for me?’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ she said. Her voice was tender. ‘I can’t read it myself, and I don’t want anyone else to read it, although perhaps it wouldn’t matter any more. So long ago. Anyway.’ She pressed one hand against her frail ribcage. ‘I think I can keep the words inside me. They will be quite safe there now.’

  For a moment, Peter considered keeping the note for himself. He could put it with the photographs that were still in his room; she would never know. Then he leant forward and placed the paper on the fire, watching it until it crumpled, blackened, turned into ashy petals.

  ‘It’s gone,’ he said at last.

  ‘Thank you. Will you read the next?’

  ‘It’s just a couple of lines. Tomorrow evening, by the quince tree. I’ll be there as soon after six as I can. I will wait for you until nine.’

  Eleanor nodded. ‘The quince tree.’ She spoke softly to herself. ‘I have always loved quince trees. They are very special. I planted them here when we came. They have floppy pale pink blossoms in the spring and their fruits are downy globes with a fragrance like honey.’ She sounded dispassionate, as though she were on a gardening programme and was answering a question that had been sent in. ‘And I met him by the quince tree. Yes, I did. Put it on the fire.’

  Peter obeyed and picked up the third sheet of paper. He cleared his throat and began. His words rang out in the dusky, fire-lit room. ‘My Darling, 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.’ He stopped for a moment to gaze at Eleanor’s face, but it was blank.

  ‘I can see the moon from my window,’ he continued, with an uncanny feeling of speaking with the voice of a dead man, pleading his case all these years later. ‘Moonlight makes everything familiar seem strange – I feel strange to myself. That’s why I am writing this now; I have to talk to you, say something; anything. As soon as I end this letter I’ll have to begin another. I used to mock all the clichés of love, Nell, the sentimental things that old fools say because they don’t have the wit to find their own words – but I realize now that they are true and I can’t find better ways to speak what I feel because I’m an old fool now as well. I’m sick with love.’

  He stopped. His mouth was parched so he took a deep mouthful of red wine. The flames guttered and crackled. Outside the wind strengthened.

  ‘My heart is breaking with love,’ he said into the flickering hush of the room. ‘I’m born again with love. Burning up with love. Deep in love – so deep there’s no way back. That’s what you said to me, that first time. There’s no way back.’ He stopped and waited.

  ‘Thank you,’ Eleanor said politely.

  ‘Do I burn it?’

  ‘Please.’

  He did so and picked up the final letter to read. ‘You have my heart. Keep it safe. I will be home again; my only home is you.’

  Eleanor put her hand up and touched her cheek with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Should I—?’

  ‘Please.’

  He crumpled the last sheet of paper into a ball and tossed it into the flames. ‘That’s the end,’ he said, when the last sheet had withered and burnt.

  ‘Yes.’ She lifted her head. ‘Perhaps I should sleep now, though I feel far from sleep. Or I can play the piano awhile. It won’t disturb you?’

  ‘No. It won’t disturb me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I am glad we have had this evening.’

  ‘I am too.’ He hesitated, trying to find the words. ‘Eleanor, won’t you tell me the story?’

  It was out. He didn’t know how he dared, but the thought of never knowing what had happened made him reckless. Bit by bit, Eleanor’s history, her youth and beauty, had come to haunt him. It was as if the present, with all its pressing anxieties, had slid away and he had stepped back into a different time. Beyond this house lay the insistent world; but inside its old and crumbling walls, amid the firelight, the piano music, the empty darkened rooms, the old woman’s footfall in the sleepless night, the photographs of faces long gone and barely remembered, and now these passionate letters, was layer upon layer of the past.

  ‘What?’ She lifted her head. He thought how her skin looked like damaged silk, so thin it could rip at any moment.

  ‘Your story. The one I’ve burnt. What happened? Who was he?’

  There was a silence. Peter couldn’t tell from her blank expression if she was angry with him.

  ‘What a very strange thing to ask,’ she said. He pressed his hands tightly together and waited. ‘Why should it matter to you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m your stranger. This is what you wanted me to find and destroy. I’ve done it. But I’d like to know.’ I need to know, he wanted to add.

  ‘It’s an everyday story, Peter, one that could be told by thousands of women. And it was more than seventy years ago. I was a young woman, just starting out, and now I’m very old, the only one left standing. Everyone else has gone; I’m the only one who knows anything of it now, and soon enough I’ll be gone too.’

  ‘So why not tell me? Pass it on.’

  ‘Pass it on? I’m curious why you should want my old, worn-out memories.’

  ‘I don’t know, but I do.’

  ‘That’s not enough.’

  ‘All right.’ He felt half-drunk and yet alert. ‘I feel somehow it might be helpful for both of us.’

  ‘You do, do you?’ Her tone was dry; he couldn’t tell if she was amused or angry.

  ‘Yes. For me, my time here is like a kind of—’ He hesitated but then forced himself forward. ‘Healing, I suppose,’ he said. ‘It’s as if I’m at a refuge or a halfway house, where I can ready myself for the next stage.’

  ‘I’m glad, of course. But why does knowing about something that happened many decades ago help with that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It feels like – this will sound mad – something I’ve been given to do. Like a task or a gift or something.’

  ‘Or like simple curiosity.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And for me? You implied it would be good for me.’

  ‘Well. I thought if you were leaving here, putting your past in order, you might want to tell your story to someone; speak it at last.’

  ‘If you say the word “closure”, I am going straight to bed.’

  Peter laughed.

  ‘I won’t say it then. In fact, it feels the opposite of that. More like
something opening than closing.’ An entrance to a hidden room, he thought; a gate in a high wall and beyond it some bright unfolding view.

  ‘Do I want that?’ she asked – although she wasn’t asking him. ‘I am old. Perhaps it’s too late to open doors long kept shut.’

  ‘You’re not old.’ Peter’s voice rang out in the room. ‘Or at least, not in the ways it matters. You are young.’

  ‘Young at heart, you mean?’ She was smiling at him, slightly mocking but affectionate.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The soul’s changes.’ Her voice was soft; she was no longer speaking to him. ‘The happy and tumultuous dream of youth. I’ve never told anyone.’

  ‘That’s why you should tell me.’

  ‘Your generation believes nothing should be hidden, that shame and grief are better spoken.’

  Peter waited. The fire crackled and outside the wind poured through the rippling autumn leaves. ‘Ah well, why not?’ Eleanor said at last. She put her empty wine-glass down on the small table at her side and leant back in her armchair. ‘Although with stories it is always very hard to know where to begin, where to set out from. When I was young, I thought my story would be tremendous. I wanted everything.’

  9

  Eleanor Wright had never known her father. He had died in the war when her mother was just three months pregnant. She had grown up with a photograph of him that was blurred enough to be generic: a young man in uniform, with a wide, unsteady smile and close-cropped hair. When Eleanor’s mother, Sally, was a bit tipsy or tearful, she called him Sammy, but to Eleanor he was always Samuel. Samuel Wright, twenty-two years old and a joiner by trade, who had died on 2 July 1916, on the second day of the Battle of the Somme, without even knowing he was going to be a father. She would have nightmares about his death for the rest of her life: a young man with a wide smile walking towards the yammering guns with his comrades. Bodies piled together, some wounded and some dead, churned up in the mud and blood. How long did it take and did he have time to know as he lay there that he would never make it back home to his wife and his little plot of land where he planned to grow potatoes and onions? Or did he cry out for his own mother, as Gil had once told her men do? It was his smile that upset her; it was so young and so unguarded.

  Every year, she and Sally would remember his birthday together, as if he were getting older alongside his wife and little daughter – but of course he was always twenty-two years old, and always unsteadily smiling. She wanted to know her father – as if by knowing him he was somehow also knowing her; as if she could make him proud – but she had precious little to go on. There were the few letters he had sent to Sally from France, which were kept in the little memory box in the front room like a kind of shrine, but they were short, almost dull. However often she read them, she couldn’t extract his personality. There was also a photograph of her mother in a tarnished oval frame, a red mug that he had apparently always drunk his tea from, his school certificates, a cloth cap, a Bible with pages so thin they were almost translucent, with his name written at the front in stiff, careful letters.

  Sally told her that he had played the upright piano in their parlour; jolly songs on a Sunday evening, carols at Christmas, everyone singing along and he leading them with his fine tenor voice. The music was still there in the piano bench, along with Sally’s sewing things. So Eleanor had taught herself to play the piano as well, with the aid of her grandmother’s friend who had given her the basics. She put her fingers on the stained ivory keys – a few of which were dud, making a dull clonk when she pressed them – and imagined her father’s fingers there instead. She played ‘Abide With Me’ and heard his voice singing the words. She used to rifle through the wardrobe where a few of his clothes still hung: his one good suit, his jacket with the darned elbow, his best white shirt with the stiff collar. She purloined his cuff-links from her mother’s pink jewellery box and put them under her pillow. They were her talisman. When she told Peter her story, she had them still, cheap and oversized, on her bedside table. She would take them with her into the home. One day she would die with them under her pillow.

  Her mother made dresses for her living. She would take orders for gowns from women in the big houses and make them up in her front room. Bolts of silk and Egyptian cotton stood in the corner; tins rattling with a satisfying variety of buttons and beads stood on every surface. Eleanor would often open them and run her fingers through their smooth brightness, like the water-rubbed shingle on a beach. Sally was tall and her slimness had become gaunt over the hard years of her widowhood; her hands were roughened and red. She cut her thick dark hair with her pinking shears once a month and sometimes went too far. Her close work had made her short-sighted, and Eleanor noticed that when she was tired she would blink repeatedly. But when she talked of her husband her face softened and became like that of a girl, almost coy with her memories. She talked of how they had loved each other. She even went to a séance where she tried to contact him, and came back agitated but unsatisfied. Made glamorous by his death, he became the perfect lover, the idolized husband with everything commonplace removed: he represented the tender companionable life she would not now have. She would recall incidents from their brief time together with a fond smile and moist eyes. She said that not a day went by when she didn’t miss him. But Eleanor missed someone she had never known. She mourned an absence and loved a ghost. Yet the ghost had never loved her. At most, she had been an unspecific hope. Sometimes she felt that she barely existed because he had not known of her.

  She used to wonder why her father had fallen in love with her mother, who had large hands and wide shoulders and a bump in her nose, and who would lose her temper easily. Panicky, lonely, she would lash out at Eleanor and then she would cry and Eleanor would comfort her. She would watch her mother blow her nose and wipe her eyes, tidy her hair with her clumsy hands, and she would wonder at how undependable adults were. She grew up knowing that she had only herself to lean on.

  Thirteen years after her father had died, Sally told her that she had met someone. A very nice man called Robert who lived in the neighbouring village and had a little haberdashery shop. She wanted Eleanor to get to know him, and so he would be coming to tea that Sunday. She hoped they would get on. Her expression as she said this was anxious and beseeching; Eleanor’s was blank. She was bewildered and also forlorn. She had never thought that Sally would ever look at another man again; she had not thought that another man would ever look at Sally. She had just thought of her as a perpetual widow and mother, her mother: just the two of them together in a world suffused with the tragedy of the mother’s past, but looking to the daughter’s future. Now she realized with a sense of sudden loneliness that Sally had her own separate future, and that she was still young, and perhaps she was even attractive. Eleanor examined Sally and saw that she had allowed her hair to grow longer, and it looked as though she had even put curlers in it the night before so that it fell in ringlets. She was wearing a navy-blue skirt with a cinched waist. She had polished her shoes. Her lips were redder than usual and her eyes brighter.

  ‘But—’ she said, and then stopped. But what? Her eyes slid to her father’s browning photograph on the mantelpiece. His smile looked brave and sad. Questions crowded to the front of her mind. (‘Why?’ ‘How?’ ‘What about me?’) ‘Robert?’ she asked instead.

  ‘Yes. He’s looking forward to meeting you. I’ve told him so much about you, how clever you are, and kind.’ This last word spoken as a covert instruction: be kind to me. ‘He likes reading too,’ she added rather pathetically. ‘You can talk about books.’

  ‘We can talk about books,’ repeated Eleanor slowly.

  Robert Forrester was a few inches shorter than Sally; a bright-eyed, bustling, organising kind of man with a receding hairline, a moustache like a caterpillar, and a pink, plump, mobile face. He was, Eleanor came to discover, full of plans and always optimistic in the face of misfortune or loss. His brown eyes moved from the mother to the daughter, att
entive and hopeful. He did everything quickly – whether it was taking off his coat, unwrapping the pound cake he had brought with him from its brown paper wrapping, or drinking his tea. His voice surprised Eleanor when she first heard it because it was low and rich, and seemed at odds with his jovial appearance. He struck her as plucky, and she was touched by him in spite of herself. He had an odd and sprightly charm.

  He also had a daughter. Sally hadn’t mentioned her; perhaps she hadn’t dared. But the girl accompanied him to the house on that first visit and was standing beside her father when Eleanor went to the door. She was hanging off his arm, buttoned up in a woollen coat against the March winds, with a hat pulled down over her forehead and a muffler round her throat, so that it was only possible to see that she was small, with a pink-and-white face and cornflower-blue eyes. Eleanor looked at her and then immediately glanced away. It was too much to take in. Her mother had met a man and that was startling enough; the fact that she had met a man with a daughter rendered Eleanor momentarily mute with refusal. She saw the new life ahead of her – no longer her and her mother eating boiled eggs for dinner or sitting by the inadequate fire while Sally stitched and Eleanor read with a knitted brow, but Robert and this wisp of a girl who would presumably be her sister. She looked cute; her cuteness made Eleanor shudder. She took off her hat and her hair was long and the colour of lemons; it was tied into a single plait, with a bow at the end. Her father unwrapped her scarf and unbuttoned her coat and she emerged, a delicate, neat figure who turned her face up to Sally to be kissed on her cheek and then moved towards Eleanor as if expecting the same.

  ‘This is Meredith. My little Merry,’ said Robert, as if to know her was to love her. ‘Merry by name and Merry by nature.’

  He and his daughter laughed, and Merry’s laugh was like a silver bell, tinkling and clear. Sally, after a pause, joined in. Eleanor tried to smile. She kissed the girl on her pink cheek, cool from the wind, feeling uncomfortable in her tallness and her darkness and her self-contained anger, and then held her hand out to Robert, who grasped it eagerly, holding it longer than she wanted while he told her that she looked just like Sally, while little Merry took after her mother, luckily for her.