by D J Wiseman
By way of relief from failing to find the missing Dix-Myers, Lydia turned her attention to the last significant gaps in the family, Papa’s grandchildren Albert and Harriet, only known surviving children of Albert Joslin and Beatrice Pelham. Lydia already knew the fate of their older sister Beatrice who died as a baby just a few weeks old in the winter of 1903. Mentally tossing the coin, Lydia surprised herself by choosing Harriet before Albert. First, she searched for an entry in the death registrations, searched until her eyes were sore from fifty years of entries flickering before them. Another half hour extended her search to sixty years and then on again to seventy, and with sleep calling her, Lydia finally called it a day at eighty-five. Either Harriet had been missed, married or emigrated, or she was that rarity amongst Joslins, long-lived.
In the next few evenings Lydia carried the search for Harriet through the marriages, and found only one that might fit. Harriet M Jocelyn in 1937 in the district of Chelsea to a Mr Fuller. It was without much conviction that she ordered a certificate. The spelling of the name was not the problem so much as that middle initial. The Harriet that she sought was Harriet Pelham Joslin. Lydia began to consider if there could possibly be some common factor to these ‘missing’ Joslin women, Alice, Verity and now Harriet. But on reflection it seemed a fanciful notion, finding a pattern where none existed.
Drawing a blank with Harriet, Lydia turned her attention to Albert and starting her quest in 1922, found almost instant success with a marriage in 1928 to Hannah Brightside that looked promising. Another two in 1929 and 1932 might also fit the bill, but she put these aside until she had the details for Albert and Hannah. A couple of days before she was to visit Worthing and find what treasure Dorothy had for her, the certificate arrived and confirmed her hopes. From all that it told her, she was happy to accept that this was a marriage for Papa’s grandson. Finding any children of Albert and Hannah would wait until after she and Dorothy had shared a packed lunch.
From a bench below a chalky outcrop on Highdown, with the English Channel glittering in the distance, Dorothy and Lydia surveyed the landscape rolling away to the south, down to the sprawl of development that covers the coast in an almost unbroken band from Brighton to Littlehampton. The May sunshine bathed them in warmth and threatened to curl the corners of the ham sandwiches before they could be eaten. Dorothy’s mother Fanny had chosen a good spot to be one of her favourites.
‘It is lovely here, Dorothy. Did your mum get up here often?’
‘No, I don’t think so. We never had no car and there was no bus. When she was younger she’d cycle up here sometimes, I think. One of her friends used to come up with her, brought her up in the car in the last few years.’
‘Did you come along as well?’
‘Once or twice, but while mum was out it meant I could get a few things done.’
Lydia thought a moment about the cares of daughters for their mothers and, for all she knew, for their fathers too. She had been spared all that by her father’s premature and sudden death and her mother’s fierce independence, even to her last few months. True, she’d been the one who organised the home care, smoothed the transition and in secret had arranged her mother’s affairs. But she had done none of the caring, none of the really hard dirty work, the grinding, day-in day-out commitment to care. Whereas Dorothy clearly had, finding her mother’s absence a rare opportunity not for time for herself, but instead a chance to ‘get a few things done’.
‘Were you working then Dorothy, when your mother was ill?’
‘Yes, I kept the job going, it was a matter of needing to really. There wasn’t half the help in them days as there is now.’
‘She must have been proud of you.’
‘I don’t know about that, but we got along alright. We was quite a team really. Funny, I just thought, that’s what she used to say, ‘We’re a good team, you and I’. She’d say that a lot when I was young.’
‘And now we’re here in her spot. I expect she’d like that.’
‘Probably.’ Dorothy paused a moment, then leaning towards Lydia she said in a hushed tone, ‘I’ll tell you a little secret, if you like dear. I’ve never told anyone else before, but you’ll be right with it.’
Lydia wondered what she could possibly be about to say, what secret of her mother’s had she held all these years that Lydia could now be privileged to share.
‘She’s right here with us now.’
Lydia looked blankly, then around her, half expecting to see Fanny approaching them through the rose garden.
‘I scattered her ashes here.’
‘Oh’ said Lydia with breathless relief, uncertain as to the right response to this revelation.
‘I don’t know as if I was meant to, if you are allowed to, but I did it anyway. I couldn’t think what else to do and it didn’t seem right to just have them thrown away. I just came up one day and did it when there was no one about.’
It didn’t matter to Lydia one way or the other, it was the act of a loving daughter, probably the very last thing that she could have done for her mother, or at least for her mother’s memory.
‘I think you were right, Dorothy. And if you weren’t supposed to, then it certainly doesn’t matter now.’
They sat a while in silence, soaking up the sun and the soft murmurings of insects, the flittering of birds. Dorothy perhaps thought of her mother, while Lydia simply sank into tranquillity, glad for once to have her mind idling, untaxed by enquiry.
‘Oh, Lydia I have that little discovery to share with you. I brought it with me, here have a look.’ She withdrew a small envelope from her bag. ‘It’s not much, but it was in the kitchen drawer with some other bits and pieces.’
Lydia opened the envelope and examined the four photographs that it contained.
‘Those two are snaps of me, I don’t know why she kept them in particular.’
Lydia saw a young woman, in her twenties maybe, looking awkward and shy, her clothes both shapeless and ill-fitting. In each one Dorothy was half smiling and to Lydia’s mind, probably asking her mother not to take the picture.
‘Then there’s those other two. You remember I said that I thought mum had a cousin or something come over once? I can’t be sure but I think they was taken on that day, they were up here, I think. It’s all changed now so you can’t be sure.’
In the first, three women of varying ages sat on a bench in sunshine, at their feet two toddlers squatted, looking grimly at the camera. In the second there were only the younger and the older of the women, otherwise the scene was the same. The older woman, in her fifties perhaps, slim and poised in a dark coat and under a hat which might have been circa 1930; Fanny, Dorothy’s mum, a little younger in a lighter half-length coat, hatless; the youngest of the trio and therefore probably the children’s mother, still had the sparkle of youth about her, sitting in her floral print frock with its full skirt that shouted 1950’s spread out on the bench.
Dorothy leant across and pointed to the figure missing in the second photograph. ‘That’s mum. I think she must’ve taken the other photo.’
‘I wonder who took this one then?’
‘There’s nothing on them, but I thought they might be interesting.’
‘Oh yes, they are, thank you. They were in a drawer you say?’
‘Yes, you know how it is with kitchen drawers, they gets full of all kinds of stuff. I was looking for some drawing pins and see this envelope and as soon as I do, I knew what was in it right away, dear.’
Lydia wondered how long it had been since she had sorted out any of her own cupboards and drawers, how long it would yet be before she did. Forty years did not seem quite so long when looked at in this way. She held the photos beside each other and studied them. Something was familiar, but she was not sure what. She did not recognise the faces, the scene was foreign to her. Perhaps it was the period, perhaps it was the look which took her back to her own mother’s family albums.
‘Can I hang on to these for a while Dorothy?
I’ll let you have them back of course. I’ll get copies done.’
‘Yes dear, like I said, I was going to send them to you anyway.’
When they’d had their sit in the sunshine and the conversation began to flag, Lydia suggested they went down to the sea and walk along the promenade, just as generations of visitors had done. Dorothy was happy to do so, and show Lydia a little of the town that had been home all her life. She pointed out where she had worked all those years in the department store, and the landmark of the Dome cinema, where she and Frank, that had been his name, had done a little courting before he left for a new life ‘down under’. At mid-afternoon they took tea in a café, which Dorothy announced on leaving had ‘once been a nice place’. During their wanderings Lydia suggested to Dorothy that when she had done with the albums, found Dorothy’s family as best she could, then perhaps Dorothy might like to visit some of the places connected to them, maybe even go across the Channel and visit the war graves. She was non-committal, grateful for the offer, but Lydia could tell that she had no appetite for such a project, and in that moment guessed also she was less interested in the detail of her family than Lydia was herself. Seeing Lydia, helping her, writing to her, was not all about Dorothy’s family, it was also about pleasing this curiosity of a woman from Oxford who had popped so unexpectedly into her life.
In the following week Lydia did little with the Joslins, picking at this and that, but unable to settle to any concentrated effort. She had come so far, maybe to the point where all but the journal could be unravelled, and yet the urge had left her, temporarily at least. Behind it, she knew, was the knowledge that Dorothy did not really care about what she was doing. What had she expected, a bouquet and a fanfare? Dorothy was curious about her family and why would she not be, given her solitary upbringing? But the process was of only passing interest to her, she did not share in the pleasures of the chase, each new discovery was just another remote fact, connected in some way to her, but in what way was apparently immaterial.
This depression engulfed her until the Saturday after her lunch in the sunshine with Dorothy. Blazing June announced itself with a cold rain blowing down from the north, and the weekend held no attractions. None, that is, until a solitary letter plopped onto her doormat. The steady sloping handwriting was unfamiliar, the postmark smudged. It was typical of Lydia that she should try to work out who it might be from before taking the simple option of opening it, and she knew it. She slit the envelope neatly with a knife. As she read the single page her mouth opened a little more with every line.
The Old Rectory
Grantchester
Cambs
28th May
Dear Lydia
I hope you will not mind me writing to you, but I thought you would find it preferable to a phone call, or worse still, my turning up on your doorstep!
I shall be in Oxford on 16th June for a couple of nights and hope you will have a meal with me on that evening. And if you were interested I would be very pleased if you would be my guest at a conference on the 17th at Magdalen College. I think you would find it interesting, and if not the subject matter, then at least the occasion. I shall not be in any way offended if you are unable to accept. Please drop me a line or email me –[email protected].
How is the project going? Perhaps you have solved your puzzles, I know how deeply involved you were. I will be very interested to know how it all turned out.
Your friend from the Lakes
Stephen Kellaway
Lydia put the letter on her desk and sat staring out of the window for a few minutes, trying to gather her thoughts. Mixed up in them were the prospect of a meal with Stephen - someone she had already decided that she could never see or speak to again; going to a conference of all things; her limp lack of application with Joslins; and the energy she would need to dress herself up for the occasion. Her fingers twirled absentmindedly through her hair, grown longer than when she had last seen him, now tied back in a band for simple convenience. She would need to do something with her hair. She read the letter again, just to be sure exactly what it said, what additional meaning she might find hidden between the lines, but she found none that was anything but pure fancy. It was as straightforward as she would have expected from Stephen, had she expected anything at all. Her choices were abundantly clear. Either she could do nothing, pretend she’d not received the letter, or she could reply politely saying that she was busy or could not get the time off work. Or, just conceivably, she could accept, with all that would entail. Her instinct was to run and hide, but, in thinking about Stephen, their companionship as they walked round Loweswater came back to her, how they had paused a while here and there on their journey, taking in the landscape, each easy in the other’s company. This would be something quite different, an intention, a plan, a decision, not the coincidence of a casual meeting, each far from home. Neither would it be the ‘nearly’ meeting outside the Randolph. Never one to act in haste, Lydia chose to do nothing. She would let the whole idea evolve, and see how it seemed when she woke tomorrow. She was quite sure it would be the first thought to come to her mind.
Despite her intention to forget the invitation for twenty-four hours, it did have one immediate effect - when her few household tasks had been done, she sat down to the Joslins with a fresh determination. She told herself that this was simply a new surge of energy, nothing to do with Stephen’s letter, but a small part of her knew that if she should accept his offer, if she were to be asked how the project was going, then it would be satisfying to have something more than ham sandwiches with Dorothy to report. As usual at such points in her research, Lydia sifted through her notes, rearranging them, refreshing her mind and re-making her list of outstanding questions. Still at the head of the list was Bertie Dix-Myers. She had looked in every place she could think of to find some trace of his existence, but all she had was what she had started with, his photos in the RAF album. She examined them again, minutely, looking for some missed clue, but she found none. Her notes confirmed that she had found no birth entry for him under Joslin or Myers or Dix-Myers. She had looked for Albert, Herbert and Hubert, for Bertram and Bertie, each with the same result. Which meant either he was not registered, was missing from the index, or had been registered under another name. Unless of course he had been born abroad, in which case her search was certainly doomed to failure and she might as well not waste any more time on it. She had checked marriages until the end of the war and war graves too. Another possibility crept into her thoughts. She could have simply missed him, the depressing doubt that afflicts all such research. Had she really checked every page for every quarter for every year? Had she really thought to see if his name was added as an afterthought to the bottom of the typed lists? It was very easy to forget, and if she had, then there was no alternative but to start again, and while she was at it, she could see if Verity had fallen through the same crack. It was a daunting prospect. She thought of her little mistake in recording names from the graves around Cockermouth, how she might have not revisited them without Stephen’s encouragement. Here he was encouraging her again.
At the very moment Lydia typed in ‘1922’ to retrieve the first year’s list of births she stopped. All this time she had seen Bertie through his mother’s eyes, seen how she took care over his photographs, wrote the captions with the same love as for her twins. She had seen him as Alethia’s son, whether by James or some previous liaison. Suppose he were not her son at all, but had come to take that place through love or circumstance? What if he were James’ son but not hers? The fleeting pleasure of the insight was lost as she realised she’d never checked if James and Barbara Vaughan had a child. When had Barbara died? She looked it up in an instant. It was the June quarter of 1920, too soon after marriage for them to have had a child. A stupid assumption, of course they could have had a child, they could have had a child whose birth had led to Barbara’s death. And so it was that she finally found Bertram A D Myers, registered in the same place and in th
e same quarter of the same year as his mother’s death. Lydia took an educated guess that the ‘D’ in ‘A D’ would be Dix, and noted how the Dix and the Myers showed signs of separating again. The certificate would tell her if the ‘A’ was Albert, as she had a feeling it might be.
The first thoughts that entered Lydia’s head as she blinked into Sunday morning were not of Stephen, nor his letter or anything about it. Her first thoughts were to question the wisdom of having drunk nearly a whole bottle of white burgundy the previous evening. She had intended only a glass or two, settled back in her chair and let her thoughts roam where they would while resisting any consideration of Stephen’s letter. Resistance was futile and a third glass led to a fourth. Before she went to bed she already knew she would find an excuse to say yes to him, find some reason to justify such a course of action to herself. So later, as she sipped coffee propped up on her pillows, it was no surprise to find that the decision had been made, she would accept, and do her best to overcome the difficulties of time, of dress, and of confidence that would result.
9
The day they were to meet arrived far too quickly. It was on her before she had time to breathe. For two weeks, her life had seemed a whirlwind compared to its normal steady pace. With reluctance at first, then with a growing abandonment she’d shopped for clothes, renewed her supply of makeup, agonised over her hair, and finally selected some shoes. What she had spent on herself in the last two years she now splashed in a matter of days. While she was trying on a third dress in a shop that she felt far too old for, she noticed her underwear in the mirror. It was as grey and tired as her skin was pallid. In a couple of places the fabric was beginning to part company with the seams. It should be replaced. Not that she had even contemplated the notion that it might be seen be anyone else, seen by Stephen, no, it simply needed replacing. But to do so now, at this particular moment in her life, wasn’t it just asking for trouble? Supposing that some development occurred to lead in that direction, the direction of trouble, wouldn’t the quality of her bra provide the resolve that she might need? She sagged at the prospect. No, there would be no new bra to go with the new dress, what was hidden would stay hidden.