by Лорен Уиллиг
Inside, all was accustomed and ceremonious. In honor of the hideous weather, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had a fire crackling in the drawing room, beneath the mantel where the picture of Colin that had first caught my interest three long months ago jostled with a beautiful studio portrait of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly in her debutante year, and a cheerful array of other family photos. As always, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly was impeccably dressed, even for a day at home. Her wool blazer was a deep navy, with pretty braiding on the cuff and lapels.
There was no tea tray on the drawing room table this time.
“I had thought you would want to get stuck in right away,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly knowingly, leading the way past the drawing room and down the long corridor that led to the back bedrooms. I knew that corridor well; I had blundered down it in the dead of night once when Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had kindly put me up.
“Thank you for helping me — again,” I said incoherently, as I followed her down the hall.
“It’s no bother,” she said, leading me into the bedroom in which I had stayed on my first visit. The squat African statue on the dresser beamed at me like an old acquaintance.
Flipping on the light switch, she made for the closet, moving aside a tufted spear that wobbled next to the frame. “It should be in here,” she murmured, as she shoved aside a molting mink coat and several dresses swathed in plastic.
I hurried to help her as she dragged out a battered cardboard box. Together, we set it down on the bed. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly tossed a faux leather-bound album onto the cream-colored counterpane. Sending a second album the way of the first, she dove down into the box, the way one does, muttering distractedly to herself.
“Not this one, then,” she said firmly, frowning down at the box. “It must be the other box. Oh, bother, that’s the phone. If you’ll excuse me . . .”
There was no extension in the spare bedroom. I could hear the slap of her flat-heeled shoes as she hurried down the hallway to her study and the click of the study door closing behind her. For a moment, I simply stood as I was, like a schoolgirl left in the headmistress’s office, hovering next to the bed, my hands clasped behind my back. The Dresden shepherdess on the dresser smirked at me scornfully.
I stuck out my tongue at her, then glanced guiltily over my shoulder at the open door. No, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly hadn’t seen.
Propping myself against the edge of the bed, I reached for one of the discarded albums. They looked like the sort I had delighted in looking through at my grandparents’ house, flatter and broader than the ones we use now, with the pictures held to the page by triangular stickies. The worn cover fell open easily, onto a picture of a slender woman in a full-skirted dress smiling from beneath the shade of an exotic-looking tree. It didn’t take much work to identify her as a much younger version of my hostess. It helped that the legend underneath read, “Self in Pindi, Fall ’45.”
I remembered what Serena had said — or had it been Colin? — about Mrs. Selwick-Alderly having been in India right before Indian Independence. It was one thing to hear about it, another to see it played out in pictures, all the day-to-day matters of someone’s life, mundane to them, no doubt, but terribly exotic to me. Most of the pictures were labeled with the names of British settlements I only vaguely recognized from M. M. Kaye novels. There was a picture of a very young Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, in a full-skirted frock patterned with roses, seated in front of the Taj Mahal, and another in heavy sweater and slacks, balanced on a pair of very odd-looking skis, labeled, “Self and Dodo, skiing in Kashmir, 1946.” Dodo had to be the shorter woman next to her, equally bundled up in scarf and ski cap, and looking like she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to push off down the slope just yet. There were polo matches and tennis parties, tea dances and picnics, “hops” and houseboats. It was all terribly exotic and very far away, the relics of a forgotten world.
Picking up another album, I opened it at random. Okay, I’ll admit it, I was looking for pictures of Colin. There was a man in the picture, a tall, broadly built man with a weather-beaten sort of face, but it was the woman you noticed first. She was dressed in clothes I wouldn’t have minded owning, tall black boots with a high-necked dress that came down to just below her thighs. Her long straight hair blew back behind her in the wind, reinforcing the impression of movement caused by the lively expression on her fashion-model pretty face. She reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t quite place who, unless it was the generic seventies-ness of the image I was responding to, the iconic look of dress, boots, and strong-boned face. The caption underneath read: “William and Caroline, November 1972.” The woman’s dark blond hair was almost the same color as Colin’s.
And then it clicked. I realized who the woman reminded me of. Serena. She had the same elegant cheekbones and long-boned build, but on her, it looked more fashionable than fragile. If Serena was sepia and autumn tones, this woman was primary colors, like watching the remastered version of an old film, suddenly in glowing color.
I examined the photo with new interest. If that was Colin’s mother, then the man with her had to be his father, the father who had died of cancer just a few years ago while Colin’s mother, from what I gathered, had absconded to Italy with husband number two. He looked considerably older than his wife, although part of that might have been the expression on his face as he looked down at her, all kindly indulgence and not a little bit of bemusement. She wasn’t looking at him at all, but at something away, beyond the edge of the photo frame.
“Eloise?”
The album slipped from my hands and I had to make a clumsy grab for it to keep it from falling.
“I’m sorry,” I babbled, grappling with the album. “I didn’t mean to pry. It was just that — ”
“They were there?” My hostess didn’t seem annoyed. Her eyes twinkled knowingly. “And I expect you were curious to see what Colin looked like as a little boy.”
Tugging at the neck of my turtleneck, I blushed a deep, telling red. “Pretty much,” I admitted.
So Colin had told her about us, then. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to mind.
Taking the album from me, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s long, elegant hands turned the pages with the ease of ownership. “Colin should be in this one somewhere. Ah, there we are.”
There was a tiny, red-faced bundle of baby in the blond girl’s arms, squalling at the camera. She was smiling over her shoulder at someone out of the range of the camera, as though entirely unconscious of the blue bundle in her arms, despite the fact that the baby was obviously screaming his lungs out. His face was all screwed up and his mouth wide-open.
“That’s Colin’s mother?” I said.
Some of what I was thinking must have leaked into my voice. Still turning the pages of the album, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly smiled wryly. “Yes,” she confirmed. “That is Caroline.”
There were more pictures of little Colin, almost always with his father: little Colin playing cricket; little Colin with his first pony; little Colin poking his fingers up the nose of a very unhappy statue of some Victorian dignitary (in Colin’s defense, whoever the guy was, he did have unusually deep nostrils); little Colin holding on with one hand to a much younger Mrs. Selwick-Alderly while dripping ice cream all down his shirt with the other. There were pictures of Colin’s mother, too, but hers were generally Colin-less, always in motion and always laughing. She looked flighty, I thought. Certainly not like the mother of a small child.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression, though. The Colin pictures were scattered unevenly through, the way one would expect with so peripheral a relative as a great-nephew, no matter how beloved. The bulk of the album was devoted to pictures of a forty- or fifty-something Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, incredibly polished and elegant in the high-waisted skirts and ruffled blouses of the mid-seventies. In the earlier pictures, she was sometimes accompanied by the tall, dissipated-looking man I recognized from the other album as her husband, but he gradually faded out as the pictures went on. Death or divorce? I didn’t want
to ask.
Many pictures featured a handsome boy in his early teens, with the same lanky build, shiny dark hair, and fifties’ movie-star features as Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s disappearing husband.
“My grandson Jeremy,” she said shortly, when I asked. “His father died while serving in Northern Ireland in 1969.”
So she did have children of her own. I had wondered about that. Colin’s family did seem to run heavily to the service of Crown and Country. There were more than a few uniforms on prominent display in the albums, including Colin’s father’s. Somewhere along the line, the family had made the switch from freelance espionage to the army. And then there was Colin, who didn’t fall under either. Or did he?
There were no pictures of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s soldier son — those must have been in a previous album — but there was a dark-haired woman with an impish grin who she identified proudly as “my daughter, Amy. She and her husband live in the UAE now,” she added regretfully. “David works for BP.”
“Do they have children?” I asked, remembering the family pictures on the mantelpiece.
“Three,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly promptly, flicking over another page. “Tommy started university this year, and the twins, Sally and Posy, are still at school.”
“Do you see them much?” I asked tentatively.
She smiled kindly, as though understanding what I was trying to ask. It made me feel very young and very naïve. “We manage,” she said gently. “And I send them sweets during term-time.”
“Tommy, too?” I asked.
“Especially Tommy.”
As the pages kept turning, Baby Serena showed up on the scene, but this time there were no pictures at all of baby and Mummy, not even the requisite hospital picture. I looked thoughtfully at a photo of an outing to Hyde Park — I knew it was Hyde Park because I recognized the statue of Peter Pan in the background — featuring a tiny Serena in a pram, a sturdy little five-year-old Colin standing to one side, offering the baby a grubby finger to hold, and their father behind, one hand on the handle of the pram, the other resting protectively on Colin’s head, in that way fathers have.
“There aren’t many pictures of the children with their mother,” I ventured, shamelessly fishing.
“Caroline liked to think of herself as a free spirit.” There was more than a hint of acid in Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s voice. Glancing up, I saw that her lips had compressed into a thin, tight line. “I’ve found that ‘free spirit’ is frequently nothing more than a creative synonym for ‘self-indulgence.’ ”
“Was Colin’s mother . . . ?” My voice trailed off. I was on very uncertain ground, dying to know, but afraid to ask for fear she would cease to tell me if I pushed too hard.
Fortunately, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s eyes were on the album, pulled back by the pictures to a world thirty years away. “Caroline was spoiled first by her parents, then by her husband,” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said crisply. “What Caroline wanted, Caroline got, or life was made very unpleasant.”
“What about her second husband — Colin’s stepfather?”
A peculiar expression settled across Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s face. “Unfortunately, he, too, was too much indulged,” she said slowly. With a quick, almost convulsive movement, she clamped the cover shut on the album, looking up at me with the bright, apologetic smile of the practiced hostess. “But I am making a terrible waste of your time, rambling on about strangers when it was the Penelope Staines papers you were wanting.”
Dropping the album back into the box, she moved with long-legged grace to the closet, excavating behind the hanging clothes for the next box down.
“She was something of a free spirit, too,” I volunteered, hoping I could work the conversation back around to Colin’s mother and whatever it was she had done to make her aunt by marriage hate her quite so much.
“Penelope?” Straightening, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly glanced over her shoulder at me. “Do you think so? I’ve always thought her much more of a troubled soul, acting out not so much because she wants to, but because others expect it of her. Very sad, I’ve always thought.”
She bent forward to tug at the box and I slid off the bed and scooted down next to her. “Please. Let me.”
The box looked heavy, and for all her ramrod-straight carriage, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly must have been at least eighty, judging from the dates on the pictures in the albums. Remembering the debutante picture on the mantel in the living room, I wondered what it must have been to be a debutante on the very eve of World War II, the last gasp of extravagant parties and great estates and prolonged country house weekends. I remembered her bitter comment about Colin’s mother, the free spirit. By the seventies, when Colin’s mother came into the picture, the world around her must have been all but unrecognizable.
She relinquished the box with good grace, saying cheerfully, “Better you than me,” as she straightened, brushing the palms of her hands against her cream wool trousers.
Clutching the box to my abdomen, I tottered with it to the bed, gratefully dropping it onto the counterpane.
“Ha!” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, rustling among the contents. “I knew I had it there.”
Inching closer, I tried to peer over her shoulder. Inside, instead of the folios or acid-proof boxes to which a researcher becomes accustomed, was notebook after notebook after notebook, all with metal ring binding and yellowed covers. An autocratic hand, which I recognized from the captions on the photos, had scrawled numbers on the covers.
“These,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly with great satisfaction, “should be precisely what you were looking for.”
Were they? I tried not to look too dubious.
Perching on the edge of the bed next to the box, she explained, “I spent a winter at the Residency at Karnatabad — oh, years and years ago. Karnatabad was a British construct,” she added briskly, “a district drawn up out of the Ceded Territories, the lands ceded by the Nizam after the second Mahratta War. Lady Frederick’s papers were kept in the archives there. Such a mess they were, too! Generation after generation had simply stuffed books and papers onto shelves without making the least effort to sort them.”
I nodded vigorously in sympathy. I had visited records offices like that in England, including one, which shall remain nameless, where the archivist plaintively asked me if I would mind making a record of whatever papers I came across as I sifted through them since he had never gotten around to doing it himself.
“These notebooks,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, peering down fondly into the box, “are my gleanings from that chaos.”
I couldn’t resist asking. “What made you decide to, er, glean?”
A flicker of a smile showed around Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s lips. “I used to think I wanted to write a novel,” she said, as though it were a great joke. “Mollie Kaye and I both had grand ideas of writing an Indian epic. She actually did it, though.”
Mollie Kaye . . . “You knew M. M. Kaye?” I yelped.
Mrs. Selwick-Alderly nodded, a gentle smile on her lips, as though she were hearing the echoes of conversations once spoken in places that no longer exist. “Yes. We all had a sense, in those days, that the world around us — British India as it had been — was vanishing, and that it was expedient to record as much as we could before it disappeared entirely. It lent a certain urgency to the exercise. And a good thing, too.” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly patted the side of the box fondly. “Not long after my stay in Karnatabad, the Residency was renovated for use as a school and the archives were lost. Someone told me that much of it was simply thrown out. They hadn’t the resources for keeping it,” she said with a sigh, before adding briskly, “Although, of course, primary education was a far more important concern.”
“Of course,” I agreed. And then, because I couldn’t resist, “What was your novel going to be about?”
“Dashing spies,” she said lightly, getting up off the bed. “What else?”
What else, indeed? I wondered if she knew that her great-nephew
was currently engaged in writing a spy novel. Or, at least, that was what he claimed. There were still times when I couldn’t help but wonder whether his interest in spies was more than literary. Pretending to write a spy novel could make a very clever cover for other sorts of activities.
“I’ll leave you to it, then. If you have any trouble with the handwriting, don’t hesitate to find me. I have no doubt that the ink is rather faded by now.”
Thanking her, I divested myself of my boots and scrambled up onto the high old bed, tucking my stockinged feet up beneath me. I tentatively lifted the first notebook out of the box. Number Fifteen. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly certainly had been methodical. On the front leaf, she had listed the date she had transcribed it, the translator she had hired to transpose the non-English documents, and the dates and authors of the historical records. If I were half that organized, I would have my dissertation long since done already.
Digging through for a notebook labeled “1,” I found one without any number on it at all. Opening it at random, I saw, in Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s slanted handwriting, “She waited, breathless, in the lee of Raymond’s Tomb as the dark line of conspirators rode past. To be found would be death.”
Hmm. She hadn’t been joking about that novel, then. I looked speculatively at the notebook. I wondered what would have happened if she had finished it. There were so many novels set around the Indian Mutiny of 1857, but it was hard to think of any set those fifty-odd years earlier, during the Mahratta Wars. It would make a good landscape for fiction.
It also made a good landscape for a dissertation chapter, I reminded myself, forcing myself to put aside the unfinished novel (working title: Shadow of the Tomb ). Clicking on the bedside lamp, which sent a pleasant pool of light across the counterpane, I curled up against the pillows with Notebook 1, a compilation of various letters and dispatches sent by Henry Russell, the exceedingly prolific Chief Secretary to the Resident of Hyderabad.