“But if the people there were mad,” Jake asked, “how could they look after themselves? Didn’t they need treatment, medicine?” His voice was breaking and he kept his face completely still when he spoke, as if by doing so he could control the cracked sounds that sometimes emerged from his throat.
“So many things he did were wrong, but equally, so many things he did were right. Rowan believed in treating all people as sane individuals, in talking to them,” Rob replied. “There’s a fine line between being mad and being eccentric. He wasn’t interested in drugging them like zombies with conventional pharmaceuticals.” He scooped up the photographs and put them back inside the folder.
From the table, Emma turned to me. “Anne, dinner was delicious. But we’ve kept you too long. I hope we haven’t interrupted your evening.”
“Of course not,” I said. The tune without words inside my head had stopped by now, and I’d been so caught up in Rob’s conversation that I hadn’t noticed the time. I looked at my watch. Not even nine o’clock.
“Good night,” I said, gathering my things. “Would you like me to put the folder back in the study on my way out?”
“Thanks,” replied Rob, refilling everyone’s glass. “That would be terrific.”
I picked up the folder and walked towards the study. Rob’s desk was piled with pages marked with bright yellow Post-its. Lily and Jake always teased him about his old-fashioned way of printing out everything to do with his work, instead of storing it on his computer. I put the folder on the lowest pile.
Rob had forgotten to turn off the computer, and the screen was frozen on a blurred YouTube image of a man playing a piano with his back to the audience. I was curious, and clicked the cursor to play the clip. It was McLeish, at a jazz recital in Edinburgh in 2010. When he turned and bowed to muted applause, a lick of white, greasy hair fell over his forehead. There was an air of apology about him. He slurred his words as he thanked the audience, and he stumbled as he walked off the stage. I couldn’t help thinking that Rob had chosen a difficult subject. Did anyone care what had happened back then?
An hour later, I was back home listening to the couple upstairs argue—“How could you lie to me like that?” the woman shouted. Oh, how I recognized the hurt and anger in her voice. But now I did so at something of a remove. Scar tissue, I supposed. There was an exasperated reply from the man. “It was nothing. Get over it.” I heard a door slam and then stamping on the staircase outside my door.
11
There is nothing more unreliable than memory and yet nothing more precious. Sometimes, even unconsciously, we perceive our memories as wounds that won’t or can’t heal. But the power to heal those wounds is within each one of us. Try considering a specific memory in a different way. What you see might surprise you.
—Emma Helmsley, “Taking the Moment,” May 10, 2016
It happens to everyone, music slipping in through the cracks. Jude once sang “Roar” by Katy Perry for at least a fortnight, and Anton used to get stuck on Coldplay songs for days at a time. Most of the time, when a song gets embedded in my head, I don’t mind. I’ve always looked upon it as some part of the brain having a rest, just playing something on a loop. But this tune, which came back into my head just before sleep, annoyed and agitated. I couldn’t retrieve the words, even though it wafted about my head like a long forgotten nursery rhyme.
The tune wouldn’t identify itself and it wouldn’t leave me. I couldn’t get it out of my head all the way to Petersham the next morning. At some stage on the bus, I must have started humming it again, because the man sitting next to me nudged me with his elbow. “Give it a rest, OK,” he said. I apologized and got off two stops early to walk the rest of the way to Wycombe Lodge. When I opened the front door, I nearly collided with Rob, smelling of toothpaste and shampoo, with a whiff of last night’s wine.
“I’m just off,” he said. “Emma has already gone. Oh, but I’ve got something for you. I almost forgot. Hang on a minute.” He dropped his bag on the floor and turned back towards the study. I stood under the columns, noting the weed-free gravel with some satisfaction. It hadn’t taken that long to clear. Then Rob was beside me, brandishing a battered paperback.
“What’s that tune you’re humming?” he asked.
“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t get rid of it and it’s becoming annoying. A man on the bus this morning told me to stop humming. I wasn’t even aware that I was.”
“Hmmm,” said Rob, his eyebrows wrinkling. “Sounds catchy.”
I shrugged. “I must have heard something like it somewhere. Lots of songs sound the same.” I peered at the cover of the book.
“Oh, yes, this is what I went back for,” said Rob. He handed me the book with a flourish. “I thought you might be interested. Take it home if you like. It’s about the battle for nutmeg. Did you know that the English and Dutch went to war in the seventeenth century over nutmeg? A man called Nathaniel Courthope was besieged by the Dutch on an island called Run in Indonesia for four years before he died, trying to protect the seed of a single spice. Amazing!”
“Thank you,” I said, irrationally flattered.
He checked his watch. “Why am I always so late when it’s my recording day?”
“Who is it this week?”
“An outgoing department head of Goldman Sachs. He’s leaving the corporate world to pursue a life of good works in Nepal. First world guilt to solve third world problems. Either that or he’s about to be fired and wants to get out quickly before the proverbial hits the fan.”
With that, he was gone. I closed the door behind me and began my day’s work. Upstairs, the bedroom was full of the usual morning mess. Pillows heaped everywhere, crumpled tissues scattered across the mattress, jeans and shirts littering the floor, and damp towels blocking the entrance to the bathroom. I picked everything up and put it in a pile for the laundry, folded back the duvet, bent to plump the pillows.
Then, something I hadn’t noticed before. The mingling of Emma’s special soap from Tuscany and Rob’s sharper perspiration, the unmistakable musky, sweet, and stale smell of two bodies lying together, warmth rising out of them, skin to skin. Such an ordinary thing. I didn’t expect to be undone by it, suddenly wanting to roll in the bed like an animal and claim it for myself. A ridiculous feeling and one I’d never had before. But I couldn’t rid myself of it. I went to the window and leaned my head against the glass, felt the cool ribbon of air eddying upwards between the gaps until I was breathing normally again.
There was a scratching noise behind me, and I whipped around, scared of an intruder. But it was only Siggy on his daily pilgrimage through the rooms looking for his absent mistress. Cairn terriers were meant to be cheerful and clever, but so far Siggy showed no sign of either quality.
He fixed me with mournful eyes, then sniffed the carpet before flattening his brindled ears and flopping down in front of my feet. It was his way of saying that I was a poor substitute for his proper love. I thought he was a poor substitute for a proper dog, but I’d learned there was no point in shooing him away. He would only trip you up again. Siggy was cunning like that. I scratched his back for a bit then finished my cleaning. Tidied, dusted. Remade the bed, cleaned the bathroom. I liked doing things in the right order. Towels changed twice a week, bed linen once.
When I began at Wycombe Lodge, all I saw from this window was bare branches stretching up to the sky. Every now and then there was a tang of cold earth, almost like the country. Later, I realized that if I looked sideways, I could see the Thames, with ferries and small boats and an occasional lone sculler drawing in his oars as he paused on the bend.
Now that I knew the house better, Rob and Emma’s series of rooms were not as opulent as I’d first thought. The backs of the curtains were water-stained and the lining was beginning to rot. The carpet was threadbare and the bedside tables warped and covered with ring marks from late night drinks and morning mugs of tea. In the bathroom, some of the old-fashioned black-and-white tiles were crac
ked and there was an ominous bulge in the wall next to the basins. They didn’t care. Yet another thing that I admired about them: the way they concentrated on more interesting things than plumbing and lime scale in the bathroom basins, things that would bother me until they were fixed and scrubbed clean. I’d always been a bit obsessive about that sort of thing. Anton called it my control fetish. Whatever, any kind of disorder unsettled me. As I tidied their room, I thought of my own neat line of clothes, everything brushed and hung up the minute I took it off, the small piles of precisely folded sweaters and tops. I knew where everything was and the last time I touched it.
This was my favorite time of day, the house to myself, wandering around the sitting room, picking up the books and straightening the cushions. Sometimes, more often than I cared to admit, I imagined that I was the chatelaine, with my husband by my side and two children upstairs, that it was me flinging open the front door, greeting guests, another riotous evening about to begin. “Do come in. Sorry the place is in a bit of a mess.” A smile, a small shrug. “Help yourself to a drink. Red. White. Anything you like. We’ll eat soon, promise.”
At other times, I just stood still and gazed through the French doors onto the walled garden. I liked to stand close to the windowpanes and tilt my head to see how the small distortions and tiny bubbles in the wavy glass changed my perspective. To the left, and the branches of the beech tree in the corner drooped. To the right, they grew strong and straight. In the wind they rippled and blurred into something completely different, a ballerina glittering in the sun, or hands outstretched for help in the rain.
Rob explained that these distortions were present in all glass made in the eighteenth century, because it was thicker in some parts than others. It was called drawn clear glass. The people who could afford windows hundreds of years ago didn’t care that what they saw through the glass wasn’t entirely real. They were happy enough to see a blurred version of the world, to have some light enter a room. Rob was thoughtful like that. He would see me looking at books or pictures and tell me about them, not in a condescending way, just as if he knew that I was interested.
I wandered into the study. Someone, maybe Jake or Lily, had been looking through the photograph albums. They were scattered all over the floor, their silver and black spines jumbled together. The photographs—Jake and Lily as babies, Emma and Rob proudly pushing prams—had been glued to the pages with neat captions celebrating childhood milestones. Emma must have been going through an organized phase, or it might have been Fiona. First steps. First solo bike rides. The early years at Wycombe Lodge. Emma with a frizz of crimped hair and Rob with a Western-style mustache. Everything neatly catalogued for easy reference. No chance of memories going astray here. Apart from that one photograph of the back of my head when I was a baby, I had no idea what I looked like before I went to live with Gran.
The front door opened and slammed shut. There were footsteps muffled by a dragging sound. I looked up to see Jake at the door, his backpack dangling from his hand.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m just tidying here. Can you give me a hand, just to make sure I don’t get everything in the wrong order?”
“Sure.” He dropped his backpack and squatted beside me. He smelled of orange juice, sweat, and socks that had been worn a day too long. He picked up the album nearest to him. “They’re all numbered, on the back page. It’s Dad’s thing. He’s not very digital. Everyone else has their albums on Facebook or Instagram.”
“But it’s nice to have something physical, don’t you think?” I asked. “A proper record of your life. No Photoshopping to make people’s smiles whiter or their legs thinner. The real thing.”
Jake made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a grunt. “Not so sure about that. There’s that thing that the camera never lies, but it does all the time.”
“I can’t believe it would be possible to lie about your dad’s mustache.” I pointed to the photograph and we both laughed.
“You’ve got a point,” he said.
“Let me get you something to eat—there’s cake and fruit.”
We stood up. “Thanks, but I can get it myself.”
“I know,” I said. “But I’m not so sure if you’ll clear up afterwards. When I first started here, I couldn’t work out how you and Lily could make so much mess so quickly. I mean, really. It was an Olympic gold medal effort.”
“I’m sorry.” He blushed.
“Don’t be,” I said. “You’re both so much better now. Besides, it’s my job.” A question about the Church of Eternal Truth formed in my mind. Just one, something mild and non-consequential to satisfy my curiosity. But he got up and walked out of the room. I put the albums back on the shelf, above the complete works of Jung and Freud and rows of hardbacks on behavioral psychology. John Dewey, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Donald Winnicott. How We Think. Childhood and Society. The Art of Loving. Home Is Where We Start From. A complete history of the modern Western family, neatly filed and dusted.
12
Everything that is edible and passes under the hands of the cook, is more or less changed, and assumes new forms. Hence the influence of that functionary is immense upon the happiness of a household.
—Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861
Good food, even plain good food, could create an inner calm, just the same as a well-kept house produced its own harmony. Some would say that people should find these things inside themselves rather than in a bag of groceries. But I thought cooking was more than science and the combination of heat and herbs. It had its own stardust.
I checked the refrigerator and the pantry for supper. There was going to be the usual weeknight fixture of Theo, and two others, Emma had told me the evening before.
“Rebecca and Christine,” she announced brightly before supper when we were alone in the kitchen. “Rebecca is Rob’s daughter, from before. I mean, from before we were married, but not that much before. And Christine is her mother. We were all at university together, and, well, now we’re all good friends.”
It was hard to know what to make of these bouncy announcements, particularly as a furrow appeared in Emma’s forehead when she spoke. “Christine is very much her own woman now, but Rob likes to keep in contact with Rebecca. It’s important for children, don’t you think?” She didn’t sound convinced.
“Rob and I, well there was a break for a bit, and . . .” She laughed. “Hey presto, Rebecca! She’s a bit older than Lily. So Lily and Jake have a half sister,” she said, removing one of her hoop earrings and pulling at the tiny hole in her lobe. With only one gold dancing circle, her face looked skewed. “Although we don’t like that term, half sister or half brother. We just say brother or sister. It’s really all the same. But don’t get the wrong impression,” she continued. “We’re not one of those let-it-all-hang-out kind of couples. Rob and I have an old-fashioned kind of marriage. I always say we’re the swans and the wolves of the human world. We’ve mated for life. All that social experimenting—the changing modern marriage, the blended family—it doesn’t come home with us. We’re old-fashioned.”
She twiddled with her earring and fixed me in a steady gaze.
“That’s good to hear,” I said. Was she warning me? Did she imagine I had my eye on Rob and that I waited for her to leave each morning so I could begin a carefully orchestrated flirting session with him? No, she was just vulnerable. Despite all her success, she had her insecurities, just like the rest of us. It made me like her even more, to know that she had confided in me about her marriage.
Emma opened the wine cooler and pulled out a bottle of Sancerre. She wrestled with the corkscrew. “Will you have a glass with me?” I shook my head and she poured herself a glass, filling it to the brim. “I forgot to say that Christine and Rebecca don’t eat red meat. And Rob says we should have supper early, so he can drive them home in good time. They live miles away, almost at Crystal Palace.” She drank in steady swallows. “Although I don’t see why they can’t get the bus o
r the Tube. Do you mind, Anne? I hope it’s no extra bother for you.”
“Not at all,” I said, about to add that it was no bother to be asked to finish work earlier than usual, when Lily and one of her friends walked into the kitchen. Unlike Jake, who seemed to have no friends, or none that came to Wycombe Lodge, Lily had an interchangeable group of sullen and spotty girls in a permanent simmering anger about pretty much everything.
“It’s unbelievable,” they muttered to each other, heads down and scowling as they gobbled fruit and cake in the kitchen after school before rushing upstairs. The focus of last week’s anger was the illegal slaughtering of rhinoceroses. Next week, it could be female genital mutilation. From what I could gather, it was all about maintaining the rage.
“Who’s coming to dinner?” asked Lily.
Emma reached for her glass. “Christine and Rebecca.”
Lily turned to her friend and rolled her eyes. Lily had a particularly droll eye roll, slow, with a full circumference of her pupils around the whites of her eyes, accompanied by a slight rotation of her head and an exaggerated eyebrow lift. I tried not to smile.
“Why do they have to come to our house?” Lily demanded.
Emma clutched her wine. “Because Rebecca is your sister and she is Daddy’s daughter,” Emma said. There was a slight stammer in her voice. Maybe she was trying to convince herself as well as Lily.
Lily snapped back. “She’s only a couple of years older than me, but she’s always going on as if she knows everything. And Christine is a big fat pain. You don’t like them either, I know you don’t. Dad finds them difficult, I’ve heard him say so. The only person who wants to see them is Jake, and that’s because Rebecca has always got her tits out on a plate.”
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