by John Harwood
I feel there's something wrong, your letters aren't as long as they used to be, and they seem-I don't know-a bit stilted?-anyway something's changed in the feeling of them. Please tell me. I'd hate it if you felt there was anything you couldn't say to me-even that you'd fallen out of love with me-I do mean that, truly. Trust me. I'll always adore you with my whole heart.
Your invisible lover,
Alice
I agonised over and destroyed one reply after another as the days slipped remorselessly by, and there was nothing left to do but tell the truth, at least as much of it as I could bear to confess. So I told her the dreams I'd been describing were really daydreams, though they still said how much I loved and adored her-I just hadn't been able to do the dreaming, hadn't dared tell her because I thought she'd think I didn't love her as much as she loved me, whereas I loved her truly, madly, desperately. And that I was unhappy because I really, really needed to be with her, couldn't go on living so far from her, and so-assuming she didn't decide to break it off right now, which I knew I deserved-if she did still love me would she please, please say that we could be together one day, I didn't care how long I had to wait. And so on, for several more scrawled, incoherent pages which I posted in utter despair, and dragged myself home in the spirit of a prisoner on his way to the condemned cell.
Over the next fortnight I learned the meaning of anguish. My face was numb and stiff with misery; I could scarcely speak. My appetite had vanished, my tongue sat in my mouth like some bloated alien substance, and yet the black gnawing hole in my stomach made me feel continuously sick. My mother pleaded with me to tell her what was wrong. My class teacher phoned my parents; the family doctor was summoned; I fended them all off with the adolescent's listless nothing', whilst wondering how I could find out how many aspirins you needed to swallow to die a painless death, and whether inhaling bottled gas would knock you out and kill you before the smell of it made you vomit. Alice's letters continued to arrive, even after she had answered the last of mine but one, wondering anxiously, tenderly, if I was sick or unhappy, telling me that she would always love me no matter what happened. Unable to write, I re-read all of her letters from the beginning several times over, waiting for the end.
When the letter finally arrived it took me an hour to summon the courage to open it.
Dearest Gerard,
I'm so, so sorry, I've been selfish and insensitive, too wrapped up in my own happiness-the happiness you give me-I should have realised. You're so brave to have told me, I would have done exactly the same if it had been the other way round. Can you ever forgive me?
And I haven't been completely honest, either, because I haven't always been asleep. When I've imagined making love with you, I mean. I was afraid you'd be shocked. I'm such a coward, I should have trusted you the way you've trusted me.
But now at least we know that neither of us needs to be shocked or embarrassed about wanting to make love. I really did mean what I said before, that nothing between us could ever be wrong, and to prove it to you… every day from now on, at half-past one, I'm going to lie down and close my eyes and imagine myself into my dream-body, and make love with you. And if you were to do the same, at ten o'clock at night, in your bed, then you can tell me exactly how you'd like to make love with me, on a special day, say in four weeks' time, so I can write back to you, and then we'll both know, on that day, that everything we've said is really happening.
And then… well how much can distance really matter, when I'll be as close to you as your dreams, your heartbeat?
Your invisible (but very passionate) lover
Alice
And so we became, in our strange and solitary way, lovers. She taught me not to be ashamed of what we were doing together-as she always insisted we were-but I lived in terror of my mother steaming open one of her letters until I discovered that for a few dollars a year I could have my own post office box with my own key. Gradually, subtly, tenderly, Alice taught me about her body-the body I had never seen-what she liked, what she loved, what she adored. Yet sometimes, afterwards, as I lay awake, staring at the side of Mr Drukowicz's shed, she seemed further away than ever. And no matter how eloquently I pleaded, she remained adamant that until she was healed-at least she had begun to say until'-we could not meet. I couldn't accept, or even understand, but I did come to see that my entreaties were only distressing her. I gave up pleading and kept my plan to myself. As soon as I had saved enough for my fare, I would be on the plane for England; I would search the length and breadth of Sussex until I found her. In my darkest imaginings, I would see myself being turned away with a stern 'Miss Jessell does not wish to see you.' But I went on saving every cent I could muster towards my airfare, and praying that I would not die without having seen Alice Jessell face to face.
TOWARDS THE END OF MY THIRD YEAR AT MAWSON UNIVERsity College, I set about applying for a passport. I was still living at home with my mother, banking the extra money I earned from shelving books in the college library, along with every cent I could save from my library studies scholarship, but still over a thousand dollars short of the sum that would take me to England and Alice.
For almost seven years now, my mother and I had maintained the pretence that Alice's letters were as invisible as Alice herself. At first, whenever I got home from school to find a letter waiting on the desk in my bedroom I used to examine the envelope closely for signs of tampering. (I had read about steaming open letters, though I'd never seen it done.) But I never found any. I knew that I was causing my mother pain, and if she had once broken her silence over Staplefield, I would have felt much worse about doing to her what she had previously done to me. Her 'nerves' had grown steadily worse, even before my father's sudden death. She hated being left alone after dark. Even now, if I got home more than half an hour late from my evening shift at the library, I would find her haunting the telephone table, wondering when to start ringing the hospitals.
Without Alice's letters, life at home would have been intolerable, but without Alice I wouldn't have been living there. Or in Mawson. My grades had been high enough to get me a place in one of the big eastern universities, but-apart from confronting my mother's pathological fears on my behalf-that would have made saving for England impossible. Whereas the Grace Levenson Memorial Library Studies Bursary paid all my fees and a living allowance, and would, I hoped, get me a job in England in just over a year's time.
And it pleased Alice to know that I hadn't abandoned my mother. Soon after we began writing, Alice and I had vowed that no matter what happened, we would never betray each other's secrets, or let anyone else read our letters: apart from the postman, no one outside our house even knew that Alice existed. She now had photographs of my parents, our house and its surroundings, and even, more recently, of me, to illustrate the day-to-day chronicle of my life in all its sameness and tedium; though Alice frequently assured me that nothing about me, however trivial, could possibly be boring to her. But she was troubled by the estrangement between my mother and me, and too perceptive not to see that she herself was partly the cause of it. At the same time, she understood my fear that if I broke the silence on my side, my mother would keep pushing and pushing until she had forced me into another confrontation. 'I know it's hard,' Alice had written recently, 'but you must cherish her, Gerard, you won't know how precious she is until she's gone. I only wish she could understand that I'm no threat: the last thing I want is to take you away from her.'
Alice was entirely sincere in this, because she still clung to her conviction that, short of a miraculous healing, we must never meet. But I had other plans.
UNTIL I ASSEMBLED MY PASSPORT APPLICATION, I HAD never seen a full copy of my own birth certificate. The short version I had used until then had told me nothing about my mother except that her maiden name had been Hatherley. Now I discovered that Phyllis May Hatherley had been born on 13 April 1929, in Portman Square, Marylebone, London Wl. Father George Rupert Hatherley, occupation Gentleman; mother Muriel Celia Hatherle
y, nee Wilson.
It ought not to have come as a shock. She had never actually said-at least I could not recall her ever saying-that she had been born at Staplefield, which after years of fruitless searching of atlases and reference books, I thought I might have found. Collins' Road Atlas of Britain showed a tiny village-the only Staplefield in the index-on the southern fringe of St Leonard's Forest in West Sussex. Just a minute black circle on a yellow byroad called the B2114, but it looked and felt right, though by no stretch of the imagination could anyone have expected to see ships at Portsmouth, fifty miles away to the south-west. Alice thought it would be quite common for a big country house to have the same name as the nearby village. Yet I still hadn't asked my mother about it-or anything else in her life before Mawson. Why had I always believed that her own parents had died when she was very young? Had she actually told me that, or had I simply imagined it? Why, above all, had I accepted her silence for so long? Didn't I have a right to my own history?
That evening, in our sitting room after dinner, I handed her the certificate. She took one look, and thrust it back at me.
'Why did you get this?' Her voice was ominously taut.
'I'm applying for a passport.'
'Why?'
'Because I'm going to England. As soon as I can afford to.'
My mother's attention was apparently fixed upon the unlit gas heater in our old fireplace. I could not see her face clearly because of the standard lamp between our armchairs, but its light fell upon her clasped hands, suddenly reminding me of old Mrs Noonan's, fingers clamped around swollen knuckles, blotched purple and livid white, the nails suffused with blood.
'You mean to stay,' she said at last.
'I don't know yet, Mother. If I did, I'd want you to come and live there too.'
'I can't afford it.'
'I could help.'
'I wouldn't let you. Anyway, I couldn't stand the winters.'
'But you hate the heat, Mother.'
'The cold would be worse.'
She was speaking mechanically, as if hardly aware of what she was saying.
'Mother, I didn't show you that to upset you. But it's time we talked-again. About your family. Because it's mine, too.'
The silence dragged out until I could bear it no longer.
'Mother did you hear what I-'
'I heard you.'
'Then tell me-' I broke off, not knowing what to ask. 'I-look, I still remember everything you used to tell me, when I was-before I-everything about Staplefield, and your grandmother, and I want to know-why you stopped talking about it, why I don't know anything-' I heard my voice beginning to quaver.
'There's nothing to tell,' she said after another long pause.
'But there must be. Your own parents. What happened to them?'
'They both died before-when I was a few months old. I don't remember anything about them.'
Her hands had dropped out of sight, below the arm of her chair.
'So-so did you live with your grandmother-Viola-was she your father's, or your mother's-'
'My father's. I told you everything I could remember, when you were a small boy.'
'But why did you stop after I-was it her picture I saw that day?'
'I don't remember any picture.'
Her voice sounded flatter and more disembodied with each reply.
'You must remember, Mother. You were so furious. The picture you caught me with, that afternoon in your bedroom-'
'You were always poking about in my bedroom, Gerard. You can't expect me to remember every single time I caught you in there.'
'But-but-' I could not quite believe this was happening. 'After that day you never mentioned Staplefield again-'
'All I remember, Gerard, is that as you grew older you stopped asking. And a good thing too. We can't live in the past.'
'No, but why won't you talk about it?'
'Because it's gone,' she snapped. 'There was-there was a fire. After we left. During the war. The house burned to the ground.'
'You never told me that!'
'No… I didn't want to disappoint you. That's-that's why I stopped talking about it.'
'Well I wish you had told me, Mother. All these years I've been hoping, hoping to…' I couldn't go on.
'Gerard, you didn't think it was ours?'
'No, of course not. I just wanted to see it.'
But of course I had thought of Staplefield as mine, without ever quite admitting it to myself. The long-lost heir, stranded in Mawson, waiting for the family solicitors to call him home. Ridiculous, absurd. My eyes were stinging.
'I'm sorry, Gerard. It was very wrong of me. I wish I'd never mentioned the place.'
'No, Mother. I wish you hadn't stopped. Why did you leave? What caused the fire?'
'It was-a bomb. We-I was away at school. In Devon. Away from the bombing.'
For a moment she had seemed genuinely contrite. Now she sounded evasive.
'And Viola?'
'She looked after me. Until she died. Just after the war. Then I had to go out to work.'
'But it was a big house, you had servants. Wasn't it insured? Didn't Viola leave you anything?'
Another long pause.
'It all went in death duties. There was just enough left to pay for my typing course. She did everything she could for me. That's all.'
'Mother it is not all and you know it. What about "Seraphina"?'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'Viola's story. In the drawer with the photograph.'
'I don't remember any story.'
I opened my mouth to object, and realised I couldn't push it any further.
'Why don't you want to talk about your, past?'
'For the same reason you never talk about your-friend, I suppose. It's no one else's business. Not even yours.'
For the first time in seven years, my mother had acknowledged Alice's existence.
'No, it's not the same. Alice isn't-she's nothing to do with you-'
'She's taken you away from me.'
'That's not fair! Anyway, I'm almost twenty-one, people leave home and get married-'
'So you're getting married? Well thank you for mentioning it-'
'I didn't say that!'
'Well are you or aren't you?'
'I don't know yet!'
We were both almost shouting.
'I don't want to talk about her, Mother,' I said more quietly.
'But you're going to see her.'
'I-I just don't want to talk about her.'
'Gerard,' she said heavily, after a long silence, 'I know you think I'm jealous. A jealous mother who won't let go. Nothing I say will make any difference. Just remember: I tried to keep you safe.'
'Safe from what, Mother?'
But all she said was, 'I'm going to bed now.'
'Tell me one thing, then,' I said, 'I won't ask you any more. Where exactly was Staplefield? The house, I mean. Was it in Staplefield village?'
Her chair creaked. She stood up and moved stiffly towards the door. I thought she would leave without speaking, but in the doorway she turned, light flashing from the lenses of her spectacles.
'Going to look for Staplefield would be a complete waste of money. There's nothing left. Nothing.'
She flung the last word over her shoulder. It hung in the air like the smell of charred paper as her footsteps receded along the hall.
I HAD ALWAYS IMAGINED THE DEAD HEART AS A FEATUREless, Saharan expanse of sand. From thirty-five thousand feet, I watched the patterns unrolling beneath the wing, fantastic whorls and cross-hatchings and striations, ochreous yellows and earth-browns and purples and deep rust-reds, until the hostess asked me if I would mind closing my blind so the other passengers could watch the movie. I did mind, never having been in a plane before, but I closed it anyway and sat holding my unopened book.
Twenty-two hours to Heathrow. I didn't seriously believe-did I?-that after eight years of undying adoration Alice would have me turned away at the door
? Her letters were as tenderly passionate as ever. I had written to tell her I would be at the Stanhope Hotel, Sussex Gardens, London W2, which sounded leafy and grand, despite being called 'budget' in the brochure. Admittedly it was January, so there might not be many leaves, but there was sure to be a letter waiting when I arrived. From the hotel I would ring Penfriends International, who were bound to be in the phone book, though I still had only their box number. Maybe I should have written ahead to Juliet Summers, but I'd been over and over that. Much better to plead my case in person.
Since I had stopped pleading with Alice to change her mind, neither of us had mentioned the possibility of our meeting. Her view of my coming to live in England was seemingly unchanged: she would love to feel that I was so much closer, but only if I could persuade my mother to join me. Alice and I were pretending to believe that, while it would be wonderful to be in the same country at last, the purpose of my trip was to look around for places where my mother might be persuaded to settle. And to see Staplefield, assuming my mother really had invented the fire. But how could Alice possibly, doubt that I'd come looking for her? And since she hadn't made me promise not to, she must-mustn't she?-be waiting for me to find her.
The businessman in the seat next to me had put away his papers and fallen asleep. I knew already that I wasn't afraid of flying. So why did I feel so numbly apprehensive, as if something cold and leaden had lodged in the pit of my stomach and refused to dissolve, not just since take-off but for days beforehand?
Perhaps I was more anxious about my mother than I was willing to admit. She had been behaving as if I had a terminal illness rather than a three-week excursion fare to London. Not to mention a job as an assistant librarian at Mawson University College, starting in February. I couldn't imagine how I would tear myself away from Alice, but three weeks was all I could afford; I would have to come back to save more money and apply for permanent residence. If my mother couldn't bear the thought of life without me, she would just have to overcome her pathological fear of return, or travel, or whatever it was. It didn't matter how often I repeated that I was a thousand times more likely to die in a car than a plane crash; she treated all of my attempts at reassurance as irrelevant interruptions. I noticed that she had grown even more intolerant of noise; she could not bear the radio on, and reacted to the ringing of the phone as if it were a fire alarm. She seemed to be listening to-or for-sounds inaudible to anyone else.