by Fiona Valpy
‘Cup of tea?’ I asked.
‘Lovely,’ she replied vaguely, deep in some old letters. She perched her glasses on top of her head and looked up with a smile. ‘You were out for the count.’
‘I know. Fresh air and good food are so exhausting. I seem to be making up for all the sleep I’ve lost of late. It’s bliss!’
I put the tea things on a tin tray and carried them through to the study, where Liz reached to clear a space on a small table, piling folders onto the floor.
‘You’re inspiring me to have a good spring clean when I get home,’ I said. ‘I still haven’t quite got round to carrying out my New Year’s resolution of decluttering both my wardrobe and the flat. Minimalist chic will be my new watchword.’ I handed Liz a pretty bone china cup and saucer. ‘Earl Grey, no milk—that right?’
‘Perfect,’ she smiled. ‘Minimalist chic, eh? Not sure that’s really your style. Chic yes, minimalist no. And anyway, that’s two watchwords.’
I turned to pour my own cup of tea, settling myself in a sagging armchair, and was distracted by a pile of Vogue magazines from the late sixties. Reaching for one I said, ‘Maybe I can find some inspiration here. That top you gave me could be the start of a whole new image. What do you think?’ I was leafing through the magazine, but there was no reply from Liz.
Glancing up, I noticed that my aunt was sitting with her gaze fixed on the air in front of her. ‘Liz?’ I said. And then again more sharply, ‘Liz!’ I jumped to my feet as, still with a fixed gaze, she’d tilted slightly to one side and the teacup and saucer fell clattering to the floor at her feet, splattering papers and photographs with hot tea. I grabbed her arm and knelt down in front of her, shaking her shoulder and looking up into the fixed, faraway mask of her face. Slowly her eyes focused on mine and expression returned, a flicker of fear mirroring the terror that must be written on my face, before she gave a little start and tried to draw herself up to sit straight again in her chair.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said faintly. ‘Don’t know what came over me there. Such a silly thing to do. Look what a mess I’ve made.’
‘Never mind that, I’ll clean it up. But are you okay? What happened? Did you feel faint?’
‘I just blacked out for a second I think. Must have got a bit too much sun earlier.’
She tried to stand and swayed dizzily. I helped her to her feet, an arm round her shoulders, which felt especially fragile and bony through the thin cotton of her blouse.
‘Come on, let’s get you upstairs. You’d better have a bit of a lie-down.’
In her room I settled her on her bed, slipping off her shoes and easing her feet, lumpy with bunions, onto the coverlet. I sat on the bed beside her, holding her hand.
‘Look at you,’ she smiled, a little shakily. ‘I’ve frightened the living daylights out of you. Don’t worry; it’s just one of my turns. Part of the joys of old age.’
I stayed with her, stroking the thin, age-spotted skin on the back of her hand as she drifted asleep.
Looking round her room, I took in the framed photos which had hung on these walls for as long as I could remember. They’re all of birds—the bright eye, curved beak and exotic crest of a hoopoe; a grey heron tiptoeing on stick-like legs through a reed bed in the river; a black-and-white print of a long ‘V’ of grey cranes flying north in the spring, looking and sounding like creaky barn doors with their vast wingspans and rusty, honking cries.
Listening to her faint but regular breathing, my eye fell on a picture in a heavy silver frame on her bedside cabinet. I couldn’t remember having seen this one before. It was another black-and-white photo and I recognised the outline of a cedar tree which stands beside the drive. On it, at the ends of six of its branches, were perched three pairs of magpies, their black and white plumage sitting within the symmetry of the tree, like neatly placed decorations on a Christmas tree. The rhyme popped into my head again. ‘Six for gold,’ I thought to myself with a smile. ‘In a frame of silver.’ Trust Liz to see the beauty in the moment and be able to catch it on camera. It must have appealed to her quirky sense of humour to have it sitting here beside her bed.
Lafite came through the door on silent paws and jumped smoothly onto a chair on the other side of the bed. He settled down to watch us, eyes narrowed, and I’d felt reassured by his presence.
Checking again that Liz’s breathing was quiet and regular, I left her under the watchful gaze of the black cat and crept out of the room to go and clear up the spilt tea in the study.
Later, I’d tapped on her bedroom door to ask if she’d like me to bring her supper up on a tray. She was awake, lying on her side and gazing at the photo of the magpies beside her. She turned and smiled. ‘Some soup would be lovely, thanks. I’m feeling fine now. I think I’ll come down. Give me a hand?’
As we sat over our supper at the kitchen table I said, ‘I’m worried about leaving you tomorrow. I really think you should go and see a doctor about these blackouts. Will you promise me you’ll phone first thing on Monday morning? You should see your GP and you might need to be referred to a specialist.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ said Liz. ‘I’ll call Mireille if I start feeling funny again. She’s a minute up the lane if I need her. In any case, she looks in every day to say hello when she knows I don’t have anyone here. So don’t worry; she’s keeping an eye on me. And I’m honestly feeling okay now.’
‘Yes, but promise me you’ll go and see the doctor,’ I insisted.
‘You young things are very bossy nowadays,’ she laughed, shaking her head, and I was relieved to hear a little of the usual spark back in her voice.
‘And you slightly less-young things are very stubborn,’ I retorted. ‘Promise me.’
‘Okay, okay,’ she’d held up her hands in mock surrender. ‘I promise.’
It was the last promise she ever made...
♦ ♦ ♦
That night I lie awake as usual. The moon isn’t helping my sleepless state either. It must be almost full. I’ve left the blinds open and its white light streams in through the windows in the roof, illuminating the room as clearly as one of Liz’s black-and-white prints. With a flicker of annoyance as I recall the estate agent’s damp hand on my bare arm, I turn restlessly onto my side, trying to find a more relaxing position, and hopefully one in which sleep may be possible. The hot, still air clings damply to my skin and I throw off the thin cotton sheet, trying to find a cooler part of the bed.
Reaching for my watch on the bedside table, my gaze falls on the photo in the heavy silver frame. Six magpies in a tree, their black tails outlined clearly against a white sky.
And then, my detached mind registering the fact almost dreamily, I realise there is one more. Sitting within the cross-hatch of the branches, its straight tail feathers look like just another twig. But there, above the tail, is the unmistakable rounded bulk of the bird’s body and head.
I sit bolt upright in the bed. I hear Liz’s voice again, clear as a bell, and remember how she’d turned away as she said, ‘Ah, seven. Seven for a secret never to be told.’
Even as I turn the frame over and ease back the clips that have rusted slightly into the velvet backing, I’m telling myself not to be silly. There won’t be anything here. It’s just a photo of a few birds, not some melodramatic message from beyond the grave.
In the moonlight, I prise a sheet of thick photographic paper from the frame.
And then suddenly I’m looking into my father’s eyes.
They are smiling with a loving, tender gaze, right into the camera, as he leans forward, lips parted, to say something to the person taking the picture. Across one corner of the print, in his handwriting which is as familiar to me as my own, is a message. It reads, ‘For Liz—my love, always, David.’
As if the look in his dark, moonlit eyes hadn’t already said it all.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Cathartic Cleaning Frenzy
and an Experiment in DIY
To-Do list:
•G
o through house and look for evidence of the torrid affair between my aunt and my father
•Find out if there’s a good therapist anywhere near here who can help me sort my head out after discovery of said torrid affair
•Find out if Celia knows anything
•Find out if Mireille knows anything
•Practise taking deep breaths and letting go—ongoing.
OMG, OMG, OMG!
As every insomniac knows, there’s a kind of madness that comes with the night. The connections in the brain, which in the light of day allow it to function quite rationally, somehow become scrambled. The normally unthinkable becomes perfectly possible, if not probable. The doubts and fears, banished in daylight to dark corners, come creeping out and push any sensible thoughts away into some unreachable chasm.
Tonight there’s plenty of food for thought, as any chance of sleep makes its escape out of the skylights above my head, the way lit by stark white moonbeams.
At first I try to come up with a sensible, rational explanation for the photo of my father. Perhaps it’s just someone who looks like him. (But it’s definitely him—and, anyway, it’s his writing and he’s signed his name.) Perhaps it was a photo meant for my mother. (But it’s inscribed to Liz.) Perhaps it’s just a token of friendship. (‘My love, always’? The look in his eyes?) Perhaps it’s a forgotten memento from an affair before he met my mother. (Still in a silver frame beside Liz’s bed?)
I rack my brains for snippets of family history which might help me date the picture. Liz wasn’t at my parents’ wedding; that I know from photos in a heavy old cream leather album, embossed at the corners with overlapping gold lines, which I used to love to pore over when I was little. I once asked Mum why Liz wasn’t amongst the small crowd of guests posing on the registry office steps and she said her sister had been working in New York at the time and that transatlantic travel wasn’t nearly as easy, nor as cheap, as it is nowadays. According to Mum, Dad had swept her off her feet and asked her to marry him just a couple of months after they’d met at a dance in London. ‘She was the most beautiful girl in the room,’ had chimed in my father with a fond smile. ‘I can still remember the dress she was wearing, and she had her hair pinned up in a most becoming style.’
I don’t think my father met his sister-in-law until after he and Mum were married.
I pick up the photo and look at it again, bracing myself for the pang of pain and betrayal I know I’ll feel. I turn on the bedside lamp to look at the image more clearly, the familiar, well-loved features seeming like those of a stranger in this bewildering new context.
His face is young and fresh, the photo taken years before lines etched themselves across his forehead and grey hairs eroded the dark sand of the hair at his temples. This same face gazes out from pages and pages of pictures in the cream leather album. Engagement photos. Wedding photos. Photos of him cradling his newborn baby daughter in his arms. Him and Mum. Him and me.
I put the picture back, face down, on the bedside table and reach over to turn off the light. On second thoughts, I think I’ll leave it on, so that the dark shadows that threaten to crowd in on me as the moon continues on its way across the starlit sky, will be kept pinned back against the walls where they belong. I turn over, trying to find a cooler patch of pillow to cushion my burning cheek and my overheated brain.
And then the crazily jumbled thoughts in my head say, ‘What if Liz is really my mother, but in some strange twist of events she gave me to her younger sister?’ I hear an echo of Ed’s voice saying, ‘You were just like a daughter to the old girl.’
But in my mind’s eye I can see, as clearly as if it were beside me on the bedside table too, another photo from the same old album. Mum lying back in a hospital bed, propped up against crisp white pillows, with a small bundle tightly wrapped in a pink honeycombed blanket, held carefully in her arms. Her hair, usually immaculately set, is dishevelled, and on her exhausted face are written pain and love in equal quantities. ‘It was such a difficult labour,’ she’d said. ‘In the end they had to do an emergency caesarean. So it was no more bikinis for me from then on.’
As the long night wears on and the pool of yellow light from the bedside lamp starts to dissolve into the paleness of dawn, the whirl of thoughts slows and then comes to a silent stop.
And then, all other possibilities exhausted, I’m left with the certain knowledge that my father and my aunt, two of the people I have trusted and loved most dearly in my life, have betrayed my mother and me with a secret love of their own.
♦ ♦ ♦
Now I’m angry. I’m angry at Dad and at Liz for obvious reasons. I’m angry, too, because they’ve both gone and left me alone with the fact of their affair but no way of getting the further explanation that they owe me. I’m angry at my mother, and I’m not quite sure why. If she’d been a bit warmer towards my father, maybe things would have been different. Did her coolness drive him into Liz’s arms? And, above all, I’m absolutely furious with myself for being so naive as to believe that anyone on this godforsaken planet could ever be faithful. I feel betrayed by everybody I’ve ever trusted, as though what seemed to be solid ground has turned into quicksand beneath my feet.
My anger—and the sudden horrific thought that maybe my father and my aunt used to lie together in this very bed, yikes, don’t even start to go there!—gives me a surge of energy and I get up and dress briskly. Then I clatter downstairs to Liz’s study, Lafite giving me a look of baleful reproach as he flees before me.
I pull open drawer after drawer in her desk and filing cabinets, searching for letters, diaries, anything that will expose what really happened between her and Dad. But she’s done a thorough job of clearing everything out—I think again, coldly this time, of those black bin bags—and there’s nothing much left. I race back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, to the bedroom and wrench open chests and cupboards. Again nothing, except for the neatly folded sheets of brown paper that line the shelves and drawers. I lift these up but beneath them is just dusty wood, scattered with a few dried grains of faintly scented lavender.
I turn to the photos lying on the bedside table. Picking them up, I go back downstairs, moving more calmly this time, and into the kitchen. Lafite is sitting patiently by his dish and looks up calmly as I enter. I put the photos carefully on the kitchen table and come over, chastened, to stroke his broad old head. ‘Sorry. Did I scare you earlier? None of this is your fault, you poor old boy. I wish you could tell me what you know, though.’ He slowly blinks his eyes in forgiveness, given that it looks as though breakfast is imminent, and I pour food into his chipped bowl.
As I drink my coffee and spread cherry jam on a hunk of slightly stale bread, I look at the two photos on the table beside my plate. The light of day brings new clarity, the irrational tumble of night-time thoughts banished, like vampires, at least until darkness falls again.
It strikes me that there are three alternatives here.
The first is that Liz meant to ‘clear away’ the photo before she died, as she had methodically tidied away the rest of her life, but had hung on to it and then been taken sooner than she’d expected. It’s a distinct possibility.
The second is that she never meant the photo to be discovered beneath the picture of the magpies, which seems unlikely and risky.
And the third, which dawns on me as clearly as the bright sunshine which is now streaming in through the window as I chew a mouthful of crust, almost unconsciously savouring the sweet tartness of the black cherries, is that she meant me to find it. That in fact it is a message to me from beyond the grave. But why not just put it in an envelope addressed with my name?
Because it’s still a secret never to be told. But perhaps Liz wants me to know, now that both she and Dad are gone.
And maybe the person she wants to protect by keeping the secret is not her niece, but her sister.
♦ ♦ ♦
When the going gets tough, the tough get cleaning. I suppose it’s a way o
f trying to impose some sense of control when every other area of my life has collapsed into uncertainty and disarray. I’m still awaiting the arrival of the France Télécom engineer to sort out my Internet connection and I need to do something to distract myself from the thoughts, threatening to verge on the unhealthily obsessive now, that go round and round in my head. Like a hamster running desperately on a wheel in its cage, I’m getting nowhere fast.
Cleaning is a good way of using up the angry energy that’s fizzing in my veins, refusing to allow me to settle down peacefully with a good book. And, if I’m honest, there’s always the possibility that I might uncover some more bits of the jigsaw and begin to piece together exactly what went on between Liz and Dad. So I set to work methodically, room by room, scrubbing, dusting, polishing. I even open up and clean the sitting room (scarcely used) and dining room (never used), moving the ancient, solid pieces of furniture to hoover beneath them and sending long-undisturbed spiders scuttling frantically for new cover. Other than dust and cobwebs, I find nothing.
When I’ve finished cleaning, I start washing. Perhaps I’m trying to wipe the slate clean so that I can live in a state of happy denial and transform my family history back into the neat storybook facsimile it used to be. I wash bedding and cushions and chair covers, hanging them to dry on the line stretched between two apple trees in the garden. The turnaround is gratifyingly fast in the hot sun so I work unremittingly, dragging load after load out of the machine, carrying armfuls of dry, sun-warmed fabric from the line back into the kitchen and sweating over the ironing board where clouds of hissing, angry steam from the iron create the perfect backing track to my mood.