The Things We Don’t Say

by Ella Carey

  The colors in the garden—greens and flowers and the blue of the sky—had become merged into one beautiful swirl.

  Ewan ran a hand over her shoulder.

  After they’d wandered awhile, they came to a garden bench. “Shall we sit down?” he asked.

  Behind them was a dense hedge that protected a thick garden filled with low shrubs and trees. The sound of traffic along Kensington Road was the only background hum to break up the silence.

  “I could never be the person who took your music away, Laura,” he said.

  She sat down next to him, turning to face him. “And you must know that I can’t accept you paying out my loan in the same way that I can’t accept Emma’s offer to sell all her belongings,” she said. She searched his face. “You have to trust me with the truth. You have to tell me the things you don’t want to say. No holding it in,” she whispered. “Tell me everything. I want you to tell me everything. And I want you to know you can trust me.”

  But he hunched forward on the seat, staring at the gravel path. A squirrel appeared, a quick-witted little thing, darting between the legs of the bench before scurrying back into the bushes.

  “Do you understand that some things cannot be spoken of, no matter how much we may want to do so?”

  “Ewan.” She heard her voice coming out as some firm, new, and strong version of itself. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it, ultimately? Trust? Because I’m telling you, I could never do anything to hurt you. Whatever it is, we’ll work it out together. Because something’s shifted. I was angry with you at first, then . . . confused about my feelings.”

  He looked up at her sharply.

  She had to plow on. “I was confused about my feelings for you. They came on when I least expected them. It seemed all wrong, so I tried to push them away. But now, now, I think that they are right. That, perhaps, you are right . . . but I cannot sit by and let you just hold on to this, whatever reason you have for not talking to me. Ewan, I’ve seen what that did to my mother. And I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want that happening to you.”

  Laura frowned at the misty scene in front of her. “I think that not talking, not opening up to other people and the world, can cause more problems than taking a risk and dealing with things and, ultimately, living your life properly rather than getting stuck in some immovable place.”

  He sighed heavily. “Weren’t Emma and the Circle about avoiding confrontation, war, all those things, in order to allow others to live their lives in turn? They were intelligent people, Laura.”

  “Yes, but Em’s philosophies were also what she had to cling on to because her situation in love and in life was impossible. Her ideas gave her a blueprint, and they were good ideas, for her, but I’ve come to the conclusion that we all have to live in our own way, to do what we know deep down is best for us. I want to live from my heart when it comes to love, but I also want to live in that place where my heart and mind converge. That, ultimately, I think, is where the truth lies.”

  He reached out and stroked her cheek. “I want to talk about it.” His words held an urgency but also, right at their base note, there was sadness. “Don’t think I don’t. There are other people whom I’d hurt, whom I care about, so what then?”

  Laura took his hand. “I promise I will do everything to respect those people you don’t want to hurt. You can trust me, Ewan. You honestly can.”

  His face paled, and there was silence for a moment before he spoke. “My father painted the portrait at Summerfield.”

  Laura pressed the fingers of her free hand into the wooden bench.

  “I can’t tell you any more,” he muttered. “All I can do is offer to make financial amends for the entire ghastly mess.”

  “Ewan.”

  But he was up. He stood and moved right away from the bench.

  “Sorry,” he said, bringing his hand up to shield his face. “I should not have spoken. I don’t know what I was thinking.” And he disappeared into the park.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Summerfield, 1924

  Emma gave birth to her daughter on a relentless, blustering spring night. The trees whipped in the wind outside Emma’s bedroom—taking on a new life force of their own, the branches twisting into confounding, distorted shapes. She stood at the French doors during the quiet times in her long labor, looking helplessly at the hollyhocks that heaved on their spindly stalks, their delicate petals flurrying around the walled garden while the sky took on an enigmatic coral blush.

  Emma leaned on the doorframe when it was bad, pain rending her body, splitting it in two halves. After fourteen hours, the next morning, she sat up in her freshly made-up bed, Lydia next to her in a rocking chair, holding the tiny, perfect little girl in her arms. The midwife was making notes by the window, and the now thirteen-year-old Calum had already been in to visit his little sister, appearing delighted although, Emma suspected, struggling to hide his disappointment that the baby was not a boy.

  When Patrick appeared at the doorway, Emma turned her tired face to him, her heart opening at the sight of him. He walked toward her, eyes on her, before they moved toward his daughter.

  “She is adorable,” he whispered. “A miracle. You are a miracle, Em.”

  And she rested her hands, her exhausted, strained hands, on the sheets, and she sat back and closed her exhausted eyes.

  Summerfield, 1937

  If Emma could replay one time in her life, she would choose those years between the wars. But her mistake was thinking that the feeling of contentment that she’d felt during her thirties and forties was ever going to be a permanent state in her life. Her mistake was in thinking that finally, she had found what everyone sought in one way or another. She thought she’d found stability.

  Patrick spent most of his time at Summerfield during those years, keeping any lovers down in London tactfully separate from his relationship with Emma and their daughter, Clover, and from Calum as he grew into a young man. Patrick’s presence in the children’s lives was all Emma could have hoped for from any man. His delight in Clover as she grew up, the way he taught her to paint, encouraged her burgeoning interest in playing the violin, sat listening to her tentative concerts out on the lawns at Summerfield, and provided the gentle, sheltered upbringing for her, based on love and kindness that both he and Emma wished they had enjoyed, turned the years into a golden era, lacking any of the turbulence of her twenties and that awful time during the last war.

  What was more, she and Patrick settled into both a working partnership and a sensible friendship that was the touchstone of Emma’s life. Ambrose was on the nearest farm, and Lawrence still came by to stay during the summer, as did Oscar, who enjoyed a room of his own in the house.

  If falling wildly in love with Patrick in her twenties had been deliriously exciting, then loving him as a dear friend with a slow, steady burn had mellowed her into feeling she knew both herself and him inside out. The sense that her life was going to span out in some beautiful pattern based on kindness and friendship seemed certain. Nothing could have prepared her for the explosion that happened as they both slipped into middle age.

  It was in 1937 that Calum announced he wanted to contribute to the Spanish Civil War. He’d become passionate about politics as he grew up, and he’d worked for the government after he’d graduated from Cambridge. It had been Ambrose, Oscar, and Lawrence who further fueled and deepened Calum’s interest and understanding of the far left-right divide in Europe as the thirties wore on.

  Calum passionately supported the republicans in Spain and wanted to do something to stop conservative nationalistic politics taking control in that country. The long conversations Emma’s friends had enjoyed as young men did not falter or lessen in intensity as they moved into middle age, and Emma could only watch while the youthful Calum took his own slant on the older men’s ideas. With the rise of fascism in Germany, things were brewing to a head, but Emma was horrified when her only son announced that he wanted to go and help fig
ht the republican cause in Spain.

  She made desperate calls to Ambrose and Oscar, conflicted as to whether she should hide her panic or simply give it full rein; after all, there was nothing she could really do to try and stop Calum from following his own convictions. In the end, instead of trying to convince her adult son not to go, instead of trying to impose the Circle’s philosophy of pacifism onto a young man who already understood exactly what those philosophies were, Emma forced herself again to take the sensible, balanced view she believed in and to respect her son’s need to do something in the way she and her friends never could. Reluctantly, she did not try to hold Calum back in any way when he announced he wanted to go overseas to the Spanish Civil War, but there was a compromise. He agreed to go as an ambulance driver, thus avoiding any direct combat while helping look after the wounded.

  Calum had always been a heartbreaking mixture of sweetness, almost to the point of naiveté, and passionate intellectual intensity. He was going to seek adventure no matter what; Emma was wise enough to know that. She sent him off with a tiny miniature painting of Summerfield in his kit bag that she’d done for him especially. Oh, how that little painting would haunt her in later years.

  Calum was blown up three weeks after he arrived in Spain by a direct strike on his ambulance truck as he drove a wounded soldier through a lonely, isolated road in the south of that country.

  Emma took to her bed. She stayed there for months. She aged overnight, becoming a shadowed skeleton of herself, unable to paint, to move, almost to breathe. Her hair became gray in the month after the news was relayed to Summerfield—a telegram, that dreaded, awful envelope, came with the news. After the funeral, at which there was no body for her to weep over, because there was nothing of her adored son left, Emma remained unable to work for a year. She could only sit and stare out at her garden. It took a monumental effort to walk to the lake.

  It was Freya, in the end, who calmly stepped in and stayed by Em’s side through that dark, awful time. Freya bicycled over most days from the house she and Henry had taken on in a local village after their house in the woods had become too isolated for Freya’s disposition. Freya read aloud—poetry, Jane Austen, anything that was nothing to do with war and all to do with the beauty and wit of the human spirit and its ability to survive.

  Even though twice during Emma’s own peaceful years, Freya had descended into a great melancholy out of which Emma had helped her to escape, there remained a close understanding and bond between the sisters that nothing would ever tear apart. Sisters got each other through the hardest of times.

  But once the Second World War had settled over Europe again, by 1942 when the thirties turned into the new, terrifying forties, guilt at her own relative safety out at Summerfield and dark thoughts plagued Emma. She could not ignore that most people’s lives reverted once again into a raging torrent of terror as Hitler’s armies marched on and on in their relentless quest for power. But still, she stuck to her principles, avoiding newspapers and painting her grief onto the canvas.

  While Emma worked on steadily at her painting with little recognition, it was Freya who garnered huge attention for her literary brilliance. She’d turned novel writing on its head by writing about the minutiae of the inner world, where thoughts were random and scattered across the page. Although Freya was viewed as odd, singular, and buried deep in that elite group that was the Circle, Emma suspected her sister was going to be remembered as a great literary force.

  As another long war became inevitable, she stockpiled food, knowing from past experience that eventually they could be entirely self-sustaining with the vegetables they grew on the farm. This time, they had heating in the house, and the true sense of longevity they had built up at Summerfield rendered them ready for whatever might come during another period of darkness in the world. The old house and garden remained a stalwart haven. Its isolated location was once again a blessing, even with the guilt of its safety.

  But remaining still lost in the pale fog of her own grief for Calum, Emma did not recognize the signs of depression in her sister. And when Freya drowned herself in a local river as the war rolled on, Emma went under all over again, stunned at the brutal, random cruelty the world could inflict on all, no matter who or where.

  And all the while, Clover had been trying to grow up with a mother who’d become absent with grief for Calum and who seemed unable to connect with anything beyond her personal torment. Emma, in turn, failed to recognize that Clover needed her at this most crucial time, as she became a young woman.

  Emma knew she’d protected Clover as a child. She’d shaded her from society, from schools, and from the harsh structures of London’s upper classes. But when Clover, like Calum, wanted to dip her toes into the waters of that real world, Emma never suspected that her little girl would dive right into her own shark-infested lake.

  Emma had been gardening, one of her few recent happinesses, when the smart London car pulled up on Summerfield’s gravel driveway. She would never forget the sight of her daughter, the new eighteen-year-old and somewhat harder version of the Clover she’d watched grow with such joy, arriving back from a brief trip to London on her own, her dark hair bobbed like a young boy’s and her cream cashmere cardigan buttoned up to show off her newly formed figure. “Mother,” Clover said, appearing from the car and adopting a new scathing tone that cut Emma to the core.

  Emma drew her hands up to the neck of her blouse and made her way across the gravel to kiss her daughter, this oh-so-familiar stranger, on the cheek. Emma winced a little at the scent of Clover’s strong perfume. She couldn’t help staring at the way her fingernails were painted into a row of neat little orange orbs.

  “How was your journey, dear?”

  “Fine.” Clover’s eyes darted to the right. “I may as well tell you,” Clover said. “Not that you’re in the habit of talking about things—”

  The sting of her daughter’s barb pierced Em like some ill-fated needle. She’d become resigned to it, this stinging sensation. Pain.

  “We thought we’d give you a few moments to say hello to me first.” Clover giggled.

  Emma followed her daughter toward the metallic-blue-painted car. The circular headlights that shone in Emma’s eyes even though the sun had not yet gone down rendered it impossible to make out the features of the person who sat in the driver’s seat.

  Until he climbed out.

  Emma staggered back. For some reason, the sound of his footsteps on the gravel, the way they crunched in that particular uneven way, only served to take her back twenty years or so to that double-edged morning when she was supposed to be reveling in the fact that Patrick had taken his brush to canvas to start painting her portrait in France.

  She found herself focusing, for some reason, on his shoes, on his pointed, still-smart shoes. He still stood with one foot turned out wide. He walked toward her, Clover hopping along behind him like some schoolgirl following a pied piper whom she’d conjured up. Emma tried to gather herself and failed.

  Jerome strode forward and took off his hat. His eyes still held the allure of chocolate, and yet Emma burned against the deceit in them the moment he caught her gaze. He wore a clean, smart linen suit, and his tie was knotted just so. No longer did the smell of turpentine waft around him, nor were his fingers stained from any momentary dalliances with paint.

  “Emma,” he said, that voice rich with the whatever-it-was that had always gotten under her skin.

  Emma held out her paint-stained hand. Goodness knew, she’d managed to take up painting again only in the last year or so . . .

  She felt like either throwing her easel in the pond or running to the studio that she and Patrick had built onto the back of Summerfield. The temptation was to lock herself in there, just as she’d hidden herself away upstairs in her old studio when Patrick had traveled in London and Paris all those years ago with . . .

  “Jerome.” Patrick’s voice came somewhere into this nightmare scenario. He ran his hand over her arm
as he stopped next to her. She saw the way he took in Clover’s appearance and winced.

  Patrick reached out to shake Jerome’s outstretched hand.

  “Long time, no see,” Jerome said, as if he’d been there last week.

  “Indeed.” Patrick regarded Clover, who still held her chin aloft.

  Clover wasn’t going to budge; Emma could see that. Stunned at her daughter’s defiance—Clover knew very well who Jerome was—Emma fought between admiration for her daughter’s determination, something she recognized oh so well, and horror at her feeling of complete hopelessness. She couldn’t help but ask herself if this was things turning full circle in some torturous way . . .

  They all walked into the house—the four of them, an odd blend of past, present, and an uncertain future. It felt like a reckoning to Emma. As they stepped over the slate front step, Patrick took hold, suddenly, of Emma’s hand. When she felt him clinging on to it as if he, too, were lost, she squeezed his fingers, but she saw nothing in front of her now.

  Silence hung over the sitting room after dinner. Lydia cleared the table, her gaze focused downward. Goodness knew she must have seen enough during her time working for Emma to know when to remain quiet. Clover, on the other hand, chatted away as if she were the toast of a party.

  “Jerome will be sleeping in my room,” Clover announced the moment Lydia had gone back through the corridor to the kitchen.

  Jerome placed his napkin on the table, then reached out and took a sip of his wine. “Real McCoy red you’ve got here, Patrick. Did you source it back in France? At least Provence was keen for something, old boy.” He raised one long leg to cross it over the other.