by Kate Morton
Elodie’s phone rang as she was passing St Mary le Strand and Penelope’s name appeared onscreen. As a butterfly swooped in Elodie’s stomach, it occurred to her that her father might have had a point. That perhaps it was the wedding after all, and not the sketch of the house, that was stirring up these strange feelings. She ignored Penelope’s call, tucking the phone away in her pocket. She would log in with her formidable mother-in-law-to-be that afternoon, after she’d met with Pippa and had something concrete to report.
For the many thousandth time, Elodie wished that her own mother were still alive to create some balance in the force. She had it on good authority – and not just from her father – that Lauren Adler had been extraordinary. Elodie had gone on a research binge when she was seventeen, the internet first and then beyond that by applying for a Reader Pass at the British Library, collecting every article and interview that she could find relating to Lauren Adler’s glittering career. In her bedroom at night, she’d read all of the articles, forming a picture of an exuberant young woman with a stunning talent, a virtuoso whose mastery of her instrument was complete. But it was the interviews that Elodie had savoured, for there, between the inverted commas, she’d discovered her mother’s own words. Her thoughts, her voice, her very turns of phrase.
Elodie had read a book once, found beneath the bed in a hotel room in Greece, about a dying woman who wrote her children a series of letters about life and how to live it in order that she might continue to guide them from beyond the grave. But Elodie’s mother had had no warning as to her impending death and had thus left no such sage advice for her only daughter. The interviews, though, were the next best thing and seventeen-year-old Elodie had studied each one, learning them by heart and whispering certain choice phrases to the oval mirror above her dressing table. They had become like revered lines of poetry, her very own list of life commandments. Because, unlike Elodie, who’d been struggling with bad skin and a hopeless case of teenage insecurity, seventeen-year-old Lauren Adler had been radiant: as modest as she was talented, she’d already played solo at the Proms, cementing herself forever as the nation’s musical sweetheart.
Even Penelope, whose self-confidence was as old and established as the string of perfect pearls around her neck, spoke of Elodie’s mother in tones of nervous awe. She never referred to ‘your mother’; it was always ‘Lauren Adler’: ‘Did Lauren Adler have a favourite concert piece?’ ‘Was there a venue that Lauren Adler preferred above all others?’ Such questions Elodie answered to the best of her ability. She did not mention that much of her own knowledge had been acquired from interviews that were freely available if one knew where to look. Penelope’s interest was flattering and Elodie clung to it. In the face of Alastair’s grand estate, his tweed-and-twill parents, the weight of tradition in a family whose walls were covered with ancestral portraits, Elodie needed every advantage she could claim.
Alastair had mentioned in the early days of their relationship that his mother was a classical music buff. She used to play herself when she was a girl, but had given it all up when she became a debutante. He’d told stories that endeared him to Elodie, of the concerts his mother had taken him to when he was a boy, the excitement of the London Symphony Orchestra opening night at the Barbican or the conductor’s arrival on stage at the Royal Albert Hall. It had always been just the two of them, their special time. (‘My father finds it all a bit over the top, I’m afraid. His favourite cultural activity is rugby.’) They still had a long-standing ‘date night’ each month, a concert followed by dinner.
Pippa had arched her brows when she heard that, particularly when Elodie admitted that she hadn’t ever been invited to join them, but Elodie had brushed it off. She was sure she’d read somewhere that men who treated their mothers well made the best partners. Besides, it was nice for a change for people not to assume that she must be a classical music aficionado. Throughout her life she’d had the same conversation over and over: strangers asking what instrument she played, the look of confusion when she told them that she didn’t. ‘Not even a little?’
Alastair had understood, though. ‘I don’t blame you,’ he’d said, ‘no point competing with perfection.’ And although Pippa had bridled when she heard this (‘You’re perfect at being you’), Elodie had known that wasn’t what he’d meant – that he wasn’t being critical.
It had been Penelope’s idea to include a film recording of Lauren Adler in the wedding ceremony. When Elodie said that her father kept a full video set of Lauren Adler’s performances and that she could ask him to pull them out of storage if Penelope wished, the older woman had looked at her with what could only be described as genuine fondness. She’d reached out to touch Elodie’s hand, the first time she’d ever done so, and said, ‘I saw her play once. She was stunning, so focused. A technician of the highest order, but with that added quality that made her music soar above all others. It was terrible when it happened, just terrible. I was bereft.’
Elodie had been taken by surprise. Alastair’s family did not ‘reach out’ and they did not broach subjects like loss and bereavement in casual conversation. Sure enough, the moment was over as quickly as it had come, Penelope moving on to general musing about the early arrival of spring and its implications for the Chelsea Flower Show. Elodie, less adept in quicksilver changes of subject, had been left with a lingering sensation on her hand where the other woman’s touch had been, and the memory of her mother’s death had shadowed her for the rest of the weekend.
Lauren Adler had been the passenger in a car driven by the visiting American violinist, the two of them making their way back to London after a performance in Bath. The rest of the orchestra had returned the day before, straight after the show, but Elodie’s mother had stayed behind to take part in a workshop with local musicians. ‘She was very generous,’ Elodie’s father had said many times, practised lines that formed part of the adoring litany of the bereaved. ‘People didn’t expect it from her, someone so impressive, but she loved music and she went out of her way to spend time with other people who loved it, too. It didn’t matter to her if they were expert or amateur.’
The coroner’s report, accessed by Elodie from the local archives during her summer of research, said that the accident had been caused by a combination of loose gravel on the country lane and poor judgement. Elodie had wondered why they hadn’t been on the motorway, but coroners didn’t offer speculation as to travel arrangements. Thus: the driver had taken a hairpin bend too quickly and the car had lost traction, skidding across the verge; the impact had thrown Lauren Adler through the windscreen, breaking her body in countless places. She would never have played the cello again had she survived, a fact that Elodie had learned from a couple of her mother’s musician friends whose conversation she’d overheard from her hiding place behind the sofa at the wake. The implication seemed to be that death was the lesser of two ills.
Elodie had not seen it that way, and neither had her father, who’d made it through the immediate aftermath, the funeral, in the grip of a shock-induced composure that was more alarming for Elodie in some ways than his plunge into the grey depths of despair afterwards. He had thought he was concealing his grief by remaining behind the closed door of his bedroom, but the old brick walls were not as thick as all that. Mrs Smith from next door had smiled with grim knowing as she stepped into the breach, serving up soft-boiled eggs and toast for dinner each night and telling Elodie vivid stories about London in the war: her girlhood nights spent amidst the bombs and the Blitz, and the day the black-rimmed telegram came with news of her missing father.
Thus, the death of her mother was something Elodie could never quite untangle in her memory from the sound of explosives and the smell of brimstone and, on some deep sensory level, the fierce longing of a child in need of a story.
‘Morning.’ Margot was boiling the kettle when Elodie arrived at work. She pulled down Elodie’s favourite mug, sat it beside her own and dropped a teabag over the side. ‘A word to the wise: he
’s on the rampage this morn. The time management fellow has issued a list of “recommendations”.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘Quite.’
Elodie took the tea to her desk, careful not to catch Mr Pendleton’s eye as she passed his office. She felt a collegial affection for her crotchety old boss, but when the mood took him he could be punitive, and Elodie had enough to get done without the assignment of a gratuitous index revision.
She needn’t have worried: Mr Pendleton was well and truly distracted, glaring blackly at something on his monitor.
Elodie settled herself at her desk and without wasting a moment transferred the sketchbook from its towelling shroud within her handbag back to the box from the disused cloakroom. It had been a temporary madness and it was over. Best thing now was to catalogue the items and assign them a place in the archives once and for all.
She donned her gloves and then took out the hole punch, the ink well, the wooden desk insert and the spectacle case. Even the most cursory of glances revealed them as mid-twentieth-century office paraphernalia; the initials on the spectacle case meant that they were safely enough recorded as having belonged to Lesley Stratton-Wood; and Elodie was glad to relax into the ease of preparing a clear contents list. She fetched a new archive box and packed the items, carefully affixing the list of contents to one side.
The satchel was more interesting. Elodie began a meticulous inspection, noting the worn edges of the leather and a number of scuffs on the back, closer towards the right-hand side; the needlework in the joins was of a very high quality, and one of the buckles bore a set of five hallmarks suggesting that it was sterling and British-made. Elodie fitted the monocle magnifying glass to her left eye and took a closer look: yes, there was the lion for sterling; the leopard for London – uncrowned, which placed the item after 1822; a lower-case ‘g’ in old English font connoting the year (a quick consultation of her London Date Letters chart revealed it as 1862); the duty mark showing Queen Victoria’s head; and, finally, the maker’s mark, a set of initials that read ‘W. S.’
Elodie consulted the directory, running her finger down the list until she reached ‘William Simms’. She smiled in recognition. The satchel had been made by W. Simms & Son, a high-end manufacturer of silver and leather goods with a Royal Warrant and, if Elodie remembered correctly, a shop situated on Bond Street.
Satisfying, but not a complete story, for the other marks on the satchel, the scuffs and patterns of wear, were of equal importance in determining its past. They showed that the satchel, no matter how exclusive its provenance, had not been purely decorative. It had been used and used well, slung over its owner’s shoulder – the right shoulder, Elodie noted, as she ran her gloved fingers gently along the unevenly worn strap – and knocked habitually against the owner’s left thigh. Elodie mimed hanging a satchel over one of her shoulders and realised that her instinct would have been to drape it in the other direction. There was a strong chance then that the satchel’s owner had been left-handed.
That ruled out James Stratton, even though his document holder had been inside the satchel; but then, the gilt initials sealed to the leather flap of the satchel had done that already. ‘E. J. R.’ Elodie traced a gloved fingertip lightly over the cursive E. The same initials were on the sketchbook. It seemed safe to assume then that the person who had made the sketches was the same person to whom the initials belonged and that this was his (or her) satchel. An artist, then? James Stratton had liaised with a number of well-known artists of the day, but the initials were not immediately familiar. There was always Google, but Elodie had an even faster line to information about art. She pulled out her phone, quelled a heart flutter as she noticed that Penelope had left a second message, and then sent a text to Pippa:
Morning! Can you think of an artist, probably mid-Vic, with the initials EJR??
The response was immediate:
Edward Radcliffe. Still on for today? Can we make it 11 instead of 12? Will text address.
Edward Radcliffe. The name was vaguely familiar, though he was not one of the artists with whom James Stratton had kept up a regular correspondence. Now Elodie typed him into Google and clicked on the Wikipedia page. The entry was brief and she skimmed the first half, noting that Edward Radcliffe’s birth year of 1840 made him a close peer to James Stratton, and that he had been born in London but spent some of his childhood in Wiltshire. He’d been the eldest of three children, the only son of a man who sounded like something of a dilettante and a woman with artistic pretensions, and had been raised for a number of years by his grandparents, Lord and Lady Radcliffe, while his parents were away in the Far East collecting Japanese ceramics.
The next paragraph described a wild youth, a fierce temper and a precocious talent, discovered by chance when an elderly artist (unfamiliar to Elodie but evidently of some renown) stumbled upon his work and took the young man beneath his wing. There had been some promising early exhibitions, a patchy relationship with the Royal Academy, a brief but fiery public spat with Dickens after a poor review; and then, finally, vindication when the great John Ruskin commissioned a painting. By all accounts, Edward Radcliffe had been on track for a distinguished career, and Elodie was just starting to wonder why she wasn’t familiar with his work, when she reached the final paragraph:
Edward Radcliffe was engaged to be married to Miss Frances Brown, the daughter of a Sheffield factory owner; however, when she was killed tragically during a robbery, at the tender age of twenty, he withdrew from public life. Rumours abound that Radcliffe was working on a masterpiece at the time; but, if so, neither the painting, nor any bona fide preliminary work, has ever seen the light of day. Radcliffe drowned off the coast of southern Portugal in 1881, but his body was returned to England for burial. Although his artistic output was not as prodigious as it might have been, Radcliffe remains an important figure in mid-nineteenth-century art for his role as a founding member of the Magenta Brotherhood.
The Magenta Brotherhood. The name rang a distant work-related bell and Elodie made a note to cross-reference it with her Stratton correspondence database. She reread the paragraph, lingering this time over the violent, untimely death of Frances Brown; Radcliffe’s withdrawal from public life; his lonely death in Portugal. Her mind stitched links of cause and effect between these points, arriving at a picture of a man whose promising career had been cut short by a broken heart and whose constitution had been weakened ultimately to the point of physical exhaustion.
Elodie took up the sketchbook and turned over its pages until she found the loose sheet containing the scrawled love note. I love her, I love her, I love her, and if I cannot have her I shall surely go mad, for when I am not with her I fear—
Was it true that there was a love so powerful that its loss could drive a person mad? Did people really feel like that? Her mind went to Alastair and she blushed, because of course to lose him would be devastating. But to be driven mad? Could she honestly imagine herself sliding into irredeemable despair?
And what if she were the one to go? Elodie pictured her fiancé in one of the immaculate bespoke suits made by the same tailor his father used; the smooth, handsome face that drew admiring glances wherever they went; the voice warmed by inherited authority. He was so assured, so clean-cut and contained, that Elodie couldn’t imagine him being driven mad by anything. Indeed, it was sobering to reflect on how quickly and quietly the gap made by her absence might close over. Like the surface of a pond after a pebble is dropped.
Not like the turbulent aftermath of her mother’s death, the high emotion and public grieving, the newspaper columns that ran alluring black-and-white photographs of Lauren Adler and used words like ‘tragedy’ and ‘sparkling’ and ‘fallen star’.
Perhaps Frances Brown had also been a sparkling person?
A thought occurred to Elodie. The document holder that had once belonged to James Stratton was still inside the satchel and now she took the framed photograph from inside.
Was this Franc
es Brown? The age was about right, for this face could not belong to a person much older than twenty.
Elodie stared closely, captured by the young woman’s gaze, her direct expression. Self-possession, that’s what it was. This was someone who knew her own mind, her own worth. The sort of woman about whom a passionate young artist might write: … if I cannot have her I shall surely go mad …
She typed ‘Frances Brown’ into Google and an image search brought up multiple copies of the same portrait: a young woman in a green dress, also beautiful but predictably so – not the person whose likeness had been captured by the photograph.
Elodie felt a dull wash of disappointment. The feeling was not unfamiliar. It was the archivist’s lot, for they were treasure hunters, in a way, sifting through the everyday detritus of their subject’s life, sorting it methodically, constructing records, always hoping for that rare precious find.
It had been a long shot: the sketchbook and note had been found in the same satchel as the document holder containing the photograph, but there was no apparent connection beyond that. The satchel and sketchbook had belonged to Edward Radcliffe, the document holder to James Stratton. At this point, there was no evidence that the two men had even been acquainted.
Elodie took up the photograph once more. The frame itself was of a high quality: sterling silver, intricately patterned. James Stratton’s document holder was dated 1861 and it seemed reasonable to assume that the photograph inside it had belonged to him and that it had been acquired after that time. Also, that the woman in it had meant enough for him to keep it. But who was she? A secret romance? Elodie couldn’t think that she had ever come across any of the telltale references in his journals or letters.
She looked again at the beautiful face, searching it for clues. The longer she stared at the image, the stronger the pull it exerted. The photograph was over a hundred years old, more likely a hundred and fifty, and yet the woman in it was unmarked by time; her face was strangely contemporary, as if she might have been one of those girls outside now on the summery streets of London, laughing with her friends and enjoying the sun’s warmth on her bare skin. She was confident and amused, staring at the photographer with a familiarity that was almost uncomfortable to perceive. As if Elodie were trespassing on a private moment.