by Lucy Foley
Oh, but I loved to watch people dance, especially her. One weekend, she took me to an exhibition by the photographer Barbara Morgan: black-and-white images of dancers, starkly lit and caught mid-step and mid-leap. To this day I am still in awe of her work: how the fixedness of the medium – the inevitable permanence of the snapshot – serves to enhance the sense of movement. When I saw them for the first time, saw how she had captured the power and the gravity-defying athleticism of those dancers – had achieved the impossible and frozen a moment in time – I was electrified.
On Christmas day of that year, I unwrapped a new Nikon for Christmas – my own camera, with a special wooden box Mum had found and packed full of film. An interest became an obsession, a whole new way of looking at the world. Some of those first photographs, even those Mum had let me take of her dancing barefoot about our kitchen, made their way into my application portfolio for the Slade.
*
When Mum died, Nick was great. He was very gentle with me: didn’t push me to speak about it, though he intimated that he’d be ready to talk if I wanted to. Which I didn’t especially – he was my boss, after all, and though at times he felt more like a friend there was always a certain degree of professional distance that I was wary of traversing. More than anything I wanted him to view me as a promising photographer, not someone who needed his pity.
Nick had suggested at first that I might want to take some sort of sabbatical, but I think he soon understood that to be away from work – free to think about everything – was the worst thing that could happen to me. It would have been the excuse I needed to seal myself off from the world completely.
And there was Evie too, of course. The nursing home was a few minutes’ cycle ride from the shop, down towards World’s End, and I’d go almost every day after work to have a cup of tea and some increasingly surreal conversation. She’d deteriorated quickly after the crash: grief, it seemed, had hastened the progress of the dementia. Sometimes she’d talk about Mum as though she were still alive. When she then learned otherwise it was as though she had suddenly discovered the fact. This was terrible for both of us.
On that spring afternoon the day went much as normal. I bought some cannelés de Bordeaux – Evie’s favourite – from the French patisserie opposite the shop and cycled down to the home. Miriam, one of the carers, was waiting in the entrance hall.
‘She’s been asking for you all day.’
‘Really?’ If Evie asked for anyone, it was usually Mum.
‘Yes. I kept telling her, “She’ll be coming later, dear, same as usual.” She’ll be pleased to see you.’
‘I brought her some new photographs.’
These were of my mother. I collected them for her – and there were quite a number to be discovered in old magazines and performance programmes … some of them I had even taken myself. Evie craved them, and they seemed to have a positive effect on her. I found the process of discovering them at once soothing and painful, a strange combination.
‘She’ll like that. I should warn you though … she does seem a bit agitated.’
‘Worse than normal?’
‘Well, that’s the thing. She’s much better, in a sense – she doesn’t seem nearly so confused as she has been of late. It isn’t that, no. It’s as if something’s troubling her.’
I knew that something was different as soon as I entered the room: I felt it. The air was as close and dry as ever but it was charged with some foreign element, a sharper savour. Evie was waiting for me in her armchair, white-faced. She looked up at me with an expression that I didn’t identify at first because it was so unexpected. It wasn’t benign ignorance, or wrenching grief – the two states between which she veered. It took me some long moments to recognize it for what it was: fear.
‘Evie,’ I said, ‘are you all right?’
She didn’t answer me at first, but she slumped down lower in the seat and her gaze dropped towards her clasped hands. I stood there impotently as the seconds of silence dragged on. And when I noticed she had begun to tremble slightly I panicked, thinking she might be having some kind of seizure. I went to hold her shoulders but she shrugged my hands away, shaking her head, and I stepped back, alarmed.
‘Evie, please, tell me what it is.’
‘I never told her.’ She spoke so quietly, almost to herself. I wasn’t sure if I’d heard correctly at first, and had to ask her to repeat it.
‘I don’t understand, Evie. Are you talking about Mum?’ I’d play along with this delusion, I thought – that was generally better than trying to set her right and only confuse things further. ‘What didn’t you tell her?’
‘I lied to her.’
I prickled with unease. There was, as Miriam had said, an odd clarity to her speech – a distinct lack of the usual confused rambling. Whatever it was she was trying to say, I suddenly wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it. I sat down next to her and tried to take her hand. She moved it away, drawing into herself.
‘Evie, you’re upset. I’m sure whatever it was, well, it can’t matter now.’
‘It matters more. I should have told her, and now she’s gone, and she never knew.’
‘But I think—’
‘No.’ Her tone was sharp, so different to her usual whisper, so alarmingly unlike the docile, childlike person I had become accustomed to. I wondered if this was some volatile new stage of the degeneration. But when she spoke next it was again with that unusual lucidity.
‘No. It needs to be said. I should have said something … a long time ago, but I loved her so much, I couldn’t do it.’ She looked at me, imploring, and I saw that her eyes had filled with tears. ‘It was a terrible, selfish thing.’
My unease had evolved into something more like dread. ‘Please, Evie, tell me: what are you talking about?’
‘Her mother. She came looking.’
I stared at her, stupidly. ‘Whose mother?’
‘June’s. She came looking for her, and June never knew.’
Mum’s birth parents had never had any presence – even as an absence – in our lives. We simply never spoke of them, with perhaps one exception. I can still remember, quite clearly, the one and only time I had asked Mum about her birth parents. It was my twenty-first birthday, and Mum had taken me for supper at the Café de Paris, just the two of us.
I’d felt very grown up, in a beautiful black crêpe de Chine dress Mum had lent me, and I’d had too much excitement, and far too much champagne. It seemed to me the right moment to ask, now that I had become an adult. Was she curious? I asked. Had she ever thought about looking for them? She didn’t seem affronted by the question – I think she must have been expecting me to ask one day. Her answer was unequivocal. ‘If they wanted me, they’d have come looking, so why should I go after them? I have you, and Evie. You’re all the family I need. I don’t need to know anything more about someone who chose to leave a baby on a doorstep.’
And that was it: there was clearly to be no further discussion of the issue. I supposed I had to be satisfied. I didn’t forget about them, these unknown grandparents who were – or at least had once been – out there in the world somewhere, but to me they were creatures of myth: several shades removed from reality, reserved for the realm of imagination and fantasy.
Evie had covered her face with her hands and as I reached forward to try to comfort her, she let out a terrifying sound, a sort of howl. She looked up at me through her spread fingers, and were it not for the awful circumstances she would have appeared comic – an octogenarian playing a child’s game of hide-and-seek. As it was, it frightened me. There was a long pause while I tried to think of something I could say, or do. Then she gave a great, rattling sigh, which seemed to steel her enough to speak. Quiet, and slow, but precise:
‘When June was twenty years old, I had a letter. The woman who wrote it, she claimed to be her mother. It was … so strange, coming out of the blue like that. She said that if we met she would explain everything.’
‘Did you meet
with her?’
Evie looked up at me, miserably, and I could already guess the answer. ‘Never. I couldn’t, do you understand? I was too afraid. I was too afraid that she might be telling the truth. I tried to convince myself then that there was no chance of it. Your mother was getting famous … we had mail from all sorts of strange people, people wanting to be a part of her life, wanting things from her.’
‘So, you thought it could have been from a crazed fan?’
‘That’s what I told myself, yes. But she sent me something else. It was then I knew she was telling the truth, only I couldn’t say anything. I was terrified – even more so than before. It has never gone away. It has been with me, every day … like … something crouched on my shoulder.’ She folded down into herself, as though feeling the weight of it there now.
‘Evie,’ I said, taking one of her knotted hands in mine. ‘You did the right thing, I’m sure.’ I was picking my words carefully. ‘This woman, she could have been anyone, a real psycho for all we know.’
She gave a frightened smile and shook her head. ‘When I saw the picture she sent a few days later I knew she was telling the truth.’
‘What picture?’
Evie heaved herself up and shuffled across to her bureau. It was a varnished Art Deco piece, the only thing she’d wanted to bring with her from the house. Atop it, as it had ever done, sat the framed photograph of a beautiful young man: her husband-to-be who never was.
She reached for the set of keys she still wore eccentrically at her waist on a rope belt – as though she were the chatelaine of some vast property – and bent stiffly to unlock the bottom drawer. It always made me sad to watch her move, she who would once have used her body with such grace: the awkward movements of the shoulder blades that jutted from the curved ridge of her back like small, mismatched wing-stumps, where once they would have framed a strong, straight spine.
The envelope she passed me was light and very old, the brown paper as dry and fragile as a leaf skeleton. The pressure of my thumb was enough to render a slight fissure in its surface. I looked down at it, bemused by the fact that something so insubstantial could be the cause of such crippling anxiety.
‘I want you to take it away, to look at it alone,’ Evie told me. ‘I want you to see what’s inside for yourself.’
I stared at her, and she gave a tiny nod. ‘Please, take it.’
Back at home, I went straight to my old den. The house was one of those old flights of fancy with squares of rainbow-coloured glass in the half-moon window above the front door, and a singular, rather lost-looking turret feature – the townhouse equivalent of the folly. I had been drawn to it as a child, this strange piece of magical realism, and for years the small round space inside the turret had been my reading place. Mum had even had a window seat installed for me. It was there that I decided to retreat with my envelope – the big empty house echoing around me.
I upended the delicate package with care, and let the contents slide out on to the seat-cushion. Two sheets of paper, tissue-thin as the envelope, faded with age. One, the letter, written in an interesting hand – calligraphic, with something of a flourish to it.
Dear Ms Darling,
I understand that this letter will come as something of a shock, for both yourself and June. I’m not quite sure, I’m afraid, of how to go on without coming straight to the point, so please accept my apologies for the lack of preamble. You see, I am June’s mother. I gave birth to her twenty years ago almost to this day.
I know how this will probably appear: that I abandoned my child in a moment of selfishness, and that, all this time later, I have had a change of heart. Yet that is not how it happened. If you would allow me a chance to explain myself to you both, I think you will understand that I had no choice in the matter.
It is difficult to explain everything in a letter, and I am aware that if I were to write the whole sad tale down it would hardly seem credible. As such, I beg you – and June – to meet with me. If you choose to do so, I will be waiting for you, in my rooms at Claridge’s Hotel, every afternoon next week. Please ask downstairs for Célia, and you will be directed to me. I do not make any demands – I know that I have no right to do so. I ask only that you give me this chance to meet with my daughter, and to have her understand that I never abandoned her.
Yours faithfully,
Célia
I sat back and looked out of the window, to where I could make out the embroidered arch of Albert Bridge. This Célia, this woman who claimed to be my grandmother, had languished in that hotel for a week, waiting, anxious, perhaps scanning the faces of those passing beneath her window for the one she sought: the face of her own daughter. Perhaps she had waited for longer than a week. If you were desperate it would be easy to convince yourself that the letter had been delayed, or that its recipient needed time to decide to come. She had said she would make no demands. Had Evie had the right to be so cruel? But that was not the way to think about this. I knew nothing of this person, and I had known Evie my entire life and she was good, and moral, and she had loved Mum more than anything. It was not my place to judge her.
I picked up the other piece of paper. It was stiffer, a fine card, one side blank. I turned it over, and forgot to breathe. A line drawing in pen and ink, exquisitely done. It was my mother. She was seated on what appeared to be a picnic rug, with the vague suggestion of a body of water – a river, or a lake perhaps – behind her. She gazed straight out at me, half smiling.
By a slow process of realization, I came to understand that it wasn’t my mother after all. It couldn’t be, even had the hair not been wrong, had the clothes not been strange and antique, not like anything I’d ever seen Mum wear. For the date, written above the signature, was 1929. Now I knew who she must be. Now I could understand Evie’s wretchedness, her terrible sense of guilt at what she’d done.
When I studied the piece again, later, I was able to view it with greater objectivity, to note the artist’s skill, the lightness of touch. It was a study in economy, the whole image described with a few fluid strokes of the pen. Yet it was also finely observed, the sitter’s expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace, as though she weren’t comfortable with finding herself the subject of a portrait.
I picked up my wallet and drew out the photograph of my mother – my favourite one of her, because it was exactly how I had always thought of her. In it she was perhaps around my own age and wore her ‘off-duty’ uniform of black Capri trousers and a white T-shirt. She was inimitably chic and beautiful to me in this image. Which journalist was it that had described her as ‘a combination of the two Hepburns in appearance’? Her black hair had an almost celluloid gleam to it – obediently straight, drawn back at the nape of her neck. How I had longed for that hair as a child.
I could see that the woman in the drawing had my mother’s innate, artless elegance: it was evident even in the slightly awkward, temporary nature of the pose. That smile, though, was absolutely her own. It was a da Vinci smile – a not-quite smile – enigmatic and complex.
This was a work of no common talent. I doubted that I could ever take a shot that so strongly evinced the character of the sitter. I looked at the signature that sat beneath the date. I could make out two characters, intertwined. An S and a T. Or a T and S. It meant nothing to me, but I stared at it, as though it were some hieroglyph that might reveal the drawing’s secret.
Evie died a couple of days later. It was a massive stroke, they told me. It shames me to say that I had not visited her since our meeting. I had not been able to face her guilt, or, indeed, my own confused feelings about what she had told me. I had convinced myself that it would be best for both of us to have a few days apart. I should have known by then that a life can be altered irrevocably in far less time than that. I had lost my chance to tell her that I understood.
The funeral confirmed how completely my mother and I had been her whole sphere of existence: the small church was less than half-full. That old secret feeling
that I had always harboured, that feeling that we weren’t as close as we could be, was nullified by the tide that surged over me and drew me down for several weeks into some dark, blind chamber of grief. Only when it was too late, only through the loss of her, was I able to understand how much I had loved her.
I went into the shop every morning, but my days had no shape and purpose to them now. Evie’s company, however unpredictable, had been so much more to me than I had realized. Above all, she had been my last link to Mum. This was a new loneliness, such as I had never known or imagined possible.
4
A few days after the funeral Evie’s things had been returned to the house in Battersea. For a time I could not bear to look at them. The sight filled me with a confused sense of grief and guilt: guilt that I perhaps had not been the granddaughter I could have been to her, busy as I was selfishly wanting Mum all for my own. So for several weeks everything sat in the drawing room, untouched. It was a space we had seldom used and, now that it was only me, I never entered.
Though Evie had not lived there for some time the house seemed even quieter with her gone. Sometimes now I began to wonder if I, too, was gradually becoming a ghost. My meagre presence in the place seemed to make no mark upon it. However much I cleaned – I gave up after a while – the dust seemed determined to settle. I avoided looking in mirrors … I did not like what they revealed to me of myself. But I was most afraid that one day I might not see anything at all.
*
Over the weeks, my curiosity about Evie’s things grew. I began to wonder whether that room might harbour something that would further illuminate the secret. Perhaps there was more, I started to think, more that she had not had time to show me.