‘There is something terrifying to me about your goodness,’ said Eleanor.
‘Please.’ He gazed at her, his face working. ‘Please don’t say that. I’m not good. I have been wretched and angry and jealous and torn by ugly emotions. But I can do this. We can do this. We can make it work.’
‘I loved him,’ Eleanor said softly. ‘I left you for him. You shouldn’t make do with being second best.’ He didn’t reply and she continued. ‘Then the baby would come and perhaps it would have Michael’s face, Michael’s ways. It wouldn’t be your child, Gil; it would be his. Whenever you looked at this child you would remember its father.’
‘Perhaps. But I would look after it and protect it and give it all my affection. If you would let me.’
‘Let you?’
‘If you would let me be the father. I would never say or feel anything but gratitude. I would consider myself the lucky one, the one who is saved from himself.’
Eleanor, looking at his impassioned face, thought of what this life would be. She and Gil and this child that was growing inside her, in a well-ordered house, with money enough, security, kindness, comfort. And behind her, the figure of Michael would stand, a lonely figure in the apocalyptic landscape of war. And behind that figure, those nights and days they had spent together, when she had given up her world for him, given up herself, let him inside her body and her soul in a rapture of loss.
‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘I think you are noble and reckless and I don’t—’
‘Don’t say anything just now,’ he urged. ‘Think about it. I’ve got to be away for a few days. Let me call on you when I return. Tell me then.’
‘All right.’
‘But say yes.’
‘You’re a romantic, Dr Lee.’ And she smiled at him.
He wrote to her, setting it out once more.
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 melancholy, 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
‘And so you said yes,’ said Peter after a long silence.
‘Not at once. You have to understand that I wasn’t so very terrified of being a single mother, although my mother would have been mortified with the shame of it. I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t mind that. I almost welcomed the thought of hardship – as if I needed to prove and punish myself. I think there was part of me that wanted to proclaim to the world that I was bearing Michael’s child. I liked Gil as much as anyone I’d ever met; indeed, I loved him. I respected and admired him, and trusted him implicitly. I knew that he would never go back on what he said to me during that meeting, take the moral high ground or remind me of what he had done for me. And he never did, not once, in all the years we had together. He was the most generous of men; one of his obituaries used my word “noble” to describe him and I think that’s not an exaggeration. What’s more, I believed that if I made up my mind to accept him, we could be happy together and have a good, equal, affectionate marriage. But—’
‘But?’
‘But I was, as he himself had said, in love with a dead man. As much if not more in love as I had been when he was alive. Put all of the many good and sensible reasons for marrying Gil in one side of the scale and that single fact in the other side, and the scale still tipped towards Michael. Even though Michael was no longer there.’
‘So what made you change your mind?’
‘I think it was my father. He had died before I was even born, and my life had in some ways been shaped around his absence. I didn’t want my own child to grow up like that. It was almost as if I was giving myself a second chance. Does that make sense to you?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Peter said. ‘Perhaps.’
‘I went for a long walk the night before I gave my answer. I walked down past the school that had become a centre for war efforts, down the street I had walked with Michael that first night we had spent together, past the house where he had taken me. I walked and I remembered and I thought. I had to face what I would be giving up if I became a wife to Gil: the Eleanor who had been so wildly in love, who had been reckless, lost and free. The Nellie whom Michael had adored. The independent spirit. The new woman.’
‘But then you said yes,’ said Peter softly and almost regretfully, watching the expression on the old woman’s face.
‘I said yes. Yes, I will. I do.’
25
The following day Samuel turned up. Peter didn’t hear him arrive and never found out quite how he’d got there – certainly not by car. But when he went into the junk room after his breakfast, he found him sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by photographs. His feet were bare and he was only wearing a thin shirt. He was in his sixties but he looked like a boy.
‘Peter!’ he said, rising to his feet in a single graceful motion. ‘Hello.’ As if he had known him always.
He held out a hand. Eleanor’s piano-playing hands, thought Peter, though Samuel didn’t resemble his mother in other ways. He was not tall, and was slender and light on his feet as a cat or a tightrope walker. Peter remembered Thea talking about her uncle jumping over the garden hedges with his coat flying out behind him. He had an androgynous air, a youthfulness in spite of the grey hair and the weathered face. Named Samuel after Eleanor’s father, whom she had never known. The one she always worried about. Michael’s child. Flesh of my flesh, she had said.
‘Hello.’ Peter took the hand.
‘I’m Samuel.’
‘I know.’
‘Of course you do. But look, it’s a beautiful day out there. Why don’t we have a walk in the woods and you can tell me.’
‘Tell you what?’
‘Whatever you want.’
It was a beautiful day, still and cold and clear, though Samuel, tipping his head back as though he were sniffing the air, said that it felt like snow must come soon. They went through the garden. Samuel had pulled on an old but lovely coat and a soft hat and pushed his naked feet into boots. He pointed out plants and birds as they went, exclaimed over the state of the fruit cage, plucked a withered yellow rose.
Peter was uneasy at first. He knew things about Samuel that Samuel didn’t know about himself. But gradually he relaxed. At first Samuel asked soothing questions about the work Peter had done. Then he talked himself, moving easily between subjects. Peter learnt that he lived in Cornwall at the moment, but he was always on the move. He felt he had no anchor but he didn’t mind that; it was what he had chosen. He didn’t own a house and hated the idea of having property or of settling in one place, one life. He was a musician of sorts – he played the violin, the accordion and the piano. Eleanor had been his piano teacher. Gil had taught him to love nature; he missed his father with a freshness that surprised him. He occasionally played in folk bands, but for many years he had given private lessons to make ends meet. He liked walking and would walk for many miles rather than taking a bus or a taxi. He liked being rootless and yet he dearly loved this house and sometimes he dreamt about it. The idea of Eleanor in a home made him feel almost ill; he had wanted her to live with him but she had refused.
Peter found that he was saying things as well, things he hadn’t meant to say – about books he loved, about his own mother, about playing the flute but never making the sound he heard in his imaginati
on, about the gap between what you strive for and what you achieve. Fragments of his life he lifted from his mind and laid before this son of Michael’s. Samuel listened, nodded, and once he laid a hand lightly on Peter’s arm. Was this what Michael had been like too, full of an elusive mystery and charm, both intimate and yet elusive?
Then the two of them returned to the house together and Samuel left later in the day without saying goodbye. Peter saw him go, walking into the afternoon darkness. Eleanor played the piano for longer than usual, the rippling notes of a Chopin étude, and at dinner she was quiet and softer than usual.
He said: ‘When you were married, Eleanor, did you—?’
But she held up her hand.
‘No, Peter,’ she said, not angry but severe. ‘There is nothing left to say. The story I’ve been telling you is over. I married Gil; I became Eleanor Lee. When Samuel was born I held him in my arms and I promised him that I would protect him from everything. Even the truth. Of course, it was impossible. You cannot protect people from life, or even wish them happiness. For what is happiness, after all? Everyone must suffer, in their own particular way. I lived through the war. So many people died. Robert died, swerving in his beloved car to avoid a cyclist. Emma died, in the Blitz, and I miss her still; sometimes I think about the things I want to tell her and how she’ll laugh mockingly at me. And Gladys died in the Blitz too. I never knew what happened to her beloved cat. Poor Clive Baines died, with a photograph of Merry in his breast pocket. All those eager young men. So many of my schoolchildren; I never knew how many. But here I am, full of years, four children, eight grandchildren. A begetter.’
She lay in bed between clean sheets. Her limbs felt frail, her bones brittle and her skin thin. Her heart was full. She thought that tonight she could just catch the sound of the sea, like a person breathing in a neighbouring room. The wind in the trees and the waves on the shore, the bats in the sky, the last leaves falling in the woods where her children used to play.
She could almost hear their voices now. Often as a mother she had to run away from their terrible, importunate love. Their needs. Their desire to have the whole of her. There were many times when she had escaped from them all, pretending she was at work, but in fact simply roaming the city. Such pleasure in sitting in cafés, or in empty cinemas, quite alone and unaccounted for, no one knowing where she was, no one wanting something from her. Or walking for hours by the sea, her footprints dissolving into the wet sand. Or simply sitting in the garden with a book, blocking out their voices and warding off their sticky, clutching hands, trying not to see Gil’s affectionate glances. The necessity of being just herself, briefly untrammelled by the ropes of duty and desire. Eleanor Lee. Eleanor Wright. Nellie. Nell.
There are days when the younger self accuses you. Is this who you wanted to be? Is this the life you wanted to live? What had happened to the books she had dreamt of writing, the journeys she had planned to take, the person she had thought to become? What had happened to that quiet, stubborn, fierce girl who promised herself freedom and adventure and who thought she could do anything? If eighteen-year-old Eleanor Wright had met forty-year-old or sixty-year-old or ninety-four-year-old Eleanor Lee, what would she have thought of her? She wouldn’t have even recognized her. If she had read about her life – the good marriage, the children whom she had cared for and worried over and loved, the steady, worthwhile work, the days filled with purpose, the secrets untold – would she have admired it or thought that something had been lost?
Of course something had been lost. There is always something lost. Hopes and dreams and possibilities. Shadow lives and shadow selves. Roads not followed, loves not taken, doors left closed. In the end you have to choose who you will become. You are your life’s work. Every moment of every day makes you. Only at the end, when your story is over, do you know what you have created.
She could have said no. No to Gil, to motherhood and serene family life, to safety and happiness and love. She could have said no to Eleanor Lee. She almost did, in spite of everything. But I do, she said in that little registrar office in Marylebone, a few weeks after Michael had died. I do, in her little cloche hat and her loose dress, with the stubborn life tickling her under the ribs and her mother crying with happiness and relief and old Mrs Lee’s mouth set in disapproval. I do, to the man whom she was to tend for the rest of his life, laying his blue scarf beside him in the coffin, kissing his high forehead. What is love, after all? Not just the cries of anguish in a small house by the sea, but the daily knowledge, the small kindnesses, the garnering of memories year by year, the endurance of it. They had done well, the two of them. They had had a fine journey together.
She knew, of course, that if Michael had lived, he would have become just a man, flesh and blood, thinning hair and dodgy joints and daily needs and habits that would come to irritate and entrap her. Instead he had been the flame inside her, the quick bright ghost in her unimpeachable life. Ghost of her other self. Ghost of her youth and her impossible dream of freedom.
Never spoken. She had never spoken of him to anyone. She had never said his name out loud, after her engagement to Gil. It had been an unspoken contract. Even when Merry had talked of him, increasingly garrulous and exaggerated – her great lost love, the man who would have returned from the war to marry her and become the father of her children – she hadn’t repeated his name, just fixed her face in meaningless sympathy, retreating into herself. Even when Samuel was born with Michael’s eyes and his melancholy and she had held his squashy sweetness against her and breathed in his sawdust smell, she had remained silent. She had tried not to think of him, and when he came to her in dreams and in solitude, she would push him away. No, not away; she would press him down into herself, into the deep dark room inside her that no one else knew of. We all have secret rooms.
Now she had opened the door. He was in the world again, on her tongue, in her mouth, in the air. The syllables reverberated. He had stepped out of the shadows, flaring with love, and the room was full of him, her life was radiant with him again; his soft brown hair and his wide-set eyes and his old suit and his quick limp and the way he said her name and found her out. An old woman foolish with passion. Him, Gil, her mother, her father whom she had never met. All dead and all living still. If she closed her blind eyes, she could see them.
‘It’s been such a long time,’ she said out loud. She reached out a hand towards the absence beside her. ‘I’ve waited for so long.’
26
Peter had intended to leave well before Eleanor’s ninety-fifth birthday party, but somehow he had lingered. There was always just a bit more to do – what had Jonah called it? The snagging. He didn’t want to be around when everyone arrived, the great pushy mass of family bursting in through the door and filling the house with noise and bustle and a rightful sense of belonging. But he didn’t want to go either. His little room in the roof, the woods at the end of the garden, the fire that he and Eleanor sat by in the evenings, held him.
Days speeded up. People came and went, bearing away carloads of things. Boxes of wine and of china, smaller pieces of furniture, rugs, cushions. He met Quentin, the one who had fallen out with Leon over religion. He didn’t seem fanatical to Peter, just distracted, slightly fraying round the edges. He met Tamsin, the grand-daughter whom Thea said would want Eleanor’s hats. She was in a friendly rush, dashing from room to room and talking too quickly. Giselle came, without Leon. She perched on the rocking horse and chatted to Peter about how he must go to St Petersburg, to the Hermitage. She couldn’t believe he’d never been. She gave him a slice of apple and cinnamon cake and kissed him goodbye when she went, leaving the red shape of her mouth on his cheek. Esther came with another young woman in tow. Her hair had been cut shorter and she wore glasses perched on the end of her nose. A man arrived in a large van and took away all the garden tools and the sit-on mower.
In the midst of all the movement, Eleanor seemed to become stiller, like a rock in a river. She sat for many hours at the
piano, while people edged sideboards and coffee tables past her. Or retreated to her room, where they could hear her audiobooks playing. They no longer had their evenings together – but perhaps there was nothing left to say. In this version of her story, she had disappeared into marriage and become invisible, the way that women do in Trollope’s novels. Or perhaps, he thought, she had become visible, had become her public self.
It was very cold now, a snap in the air and a crunch underfoot. The sky became blank and white. The house’s heating was inadequate. Peter sometimes wore his coat when he worked; he wished he had fingerless gloves and slippers. The cats had taken to sleeping on his bed and he welcomed their warm weight on him.
Two days before her birthday, he went to Eleanor where she sat in the kitchen at lunch, eating scrambled eggs on burnt toast. The room was full of smoke.
‘I will leave tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Nonsense. Stay for the party at least. The last hurrah,’ she added drily. ‘Stay for the bonfire. You can’t leave before the bonfire. My life going up in flames.’
‘It’s just your family.’
‘Gail and her little boy are coming. And Christy, the gardener. And Mrs Monroe up the road. Family means whatever I want it to mean. It’s as you wish, of course, but you’d be part of the family and I’d be glad of your company.’
‘Really?’
‘If I didn’t want you here, I wouldn’t ask you. Haven’t you understood that yet?’
So he remained, ringing his mother to tell her he’d be home after the weekend, in time for Christmas – though their Christmas was a paltry affair, like a threadbare imitation of festivity. At the start of the New Year, he was going to move out of her house, he told himself. He would start again and was ready.
He sorted the last papers, helped Leon pack books into boxes and write labels on to them and then put Gil’s medical photographs into cardboard folders. Then he was enlisted by Eleanor to collect grandchildren and their partners from the station he had arrived at himself just a few weeks ago. He took Rose to the shops in the nearest town for food and pushed the trolley down supermarket aisles while she tossed in food, consulting the list she’d made: aubergines and red peppers, couscous, walnuts, bags of salad, cream, paper napkins. Giselle was making a giant pavlova. Leon and Quentin were in charge of the wine and Marianne would bring the cheese. Samuel turned up with a sack of fireworks. Peter went round the garden with him, collecting fallen branches to make a bonfire. Thea smoked roll-ups in the woods.
The Twilight Hour Page 26