by Kate Morton
When the landlord finally reached the end of his patience, it was Jeremiah, through his contacts, who helped my father to find rooms in a building that huddled in the shadows of the steeple of St Anne’s. He seemed to know a lot of people and always had an opinion to venture and a ‘bit of business’ to transact. It was Jeremiah who oversaw the sale of my father’s patents and Jeremiah who told me not to worry when the bailiff started knocking on the door at all hours, complaining that my father owed him money; he knew a man who ran a gambling outfit in the Limehouse, he said. All my father needed was a little bit of luck to see him right.
And when my father took to spending every night down at the public house on Narrow Street, dragging himself back at first light smelling of tobacco and whisky to collapse at the empty table with his pipe – when he sold off the last of his brass and rivets in order to pay his gambling debts – it was Jeremiah who shook his head sadly and said, ‘Your old man’s just unlucky. I never did meet a man with an unluckier star.’
The bailiff continued to knock, but my father ignored him. He began, instead, to talk obsessively about America. In his battered state, the idea made perfect sense. We would leave behind the sorrow and unhappy memories and start afresh in a new place. ‘There’s land, little bird,’ he said, ‘and sunshine for the taking. And rivers that run clean and soil that can be turned over without fear of unearthing bones from the past.’ He sold the last of my mother’s dresses, pieces that he had been saving for me, and booked cheap passage for us both on the next ship to America. We packed our possessions, such as they were, in one small suitcase apiece.
The week that we were due to leave was cold, the first snow of the season, and my father was eager that we should have as much extra coin as possible for the journey. We spent each day down by the river, where a supply ship had recently overturned and there were prizes hidden in the mud for those that wanted most to find them. We laboured each hour, from dawn until dusk, through rain and sleet and snow.
Mud-larking was ever tiring work, but one evening I was more exhausted than usual. I fell upon my mattress, soaking wet, and was unable to rise. The dizziness came on suddenly, along with aches that made my bones feel cold and heavy. My teeth chattered even as my forehead burned, and the world began to darken as surely as if someone had pulled down its curtains.
I was adrift, my perception as unsteady as a small wooden boat in rough seas. I heard my father’s voice sometimes, and Jeremiah’s, but they were brief snatches followed by long stretches of surrender to the vivid stories in my mind’s eye, dreams most fruity and peculiar.
My fever raced, creating shadows and jagged monsters in the room; they lurched across the walls, widening their crazy eyes, reaching their taloned fingers to grab at my bedclothes. I turned and twisted away from them, my sheets wet from the exertion, my lips moving around incantations that seemed of vital importance.
Words pierced my delusions like hot needles, familiar words like doctor … fever … America … that had once held meaning and importance.
And then I heard Jeremiah say, ‘You must go. The bailiff will be back and he’s promised to put you in jail this time, or worse.’
‘But the child, my little bird – she is not well enough to travel.’
‘Leave her here. Send for her when you’re settled. There are people who’ll mind a child for a small fee.’
My lungs, my throat, my mind all burned with the effort to shout, ‘No!’; but whether the word passed my lips I could not tell.
‘She depends on me,’ said my father.
‘Worse, then, if the judge decides that you must pay for your debts with your life.’
I wanted to shout, to reach out and grab my father, to cleave him to me so that we could never be parted. But it was no use. The monsters pulled me under again and I heard no more. Day dissolved into night; my boat pushed out once more into stormy seas—
And that is the last I remember of that.
The next thing I knew, it was morning, bright, and the first sound to my ears was of birds calling outside the window. But these were not the birds that sing of morning’s arrival here at Birchwood Manor, or those that used to nest beneath the sill in our little house in Fulham. This was a great cacophony of birds, hundreds of them squawking and jeering in languages foreign to my ears.
A church bell pealed and I recognised it at once as the bell of St Anne’s, but it was different somehow from the sound that I knew so well.
I was a shipwrecked sailor, washed up on a foreign shore.
And then a voice, a woman’s voice I did not know; ‘She’s waking.’
‘Papa,’ I tried to say, but my throat was dry and a mere airy sound arrived.
‘Shhh … there, now,’ said the woman. ‘There, now. Mrs Mack is here. Everything’s going to be all right.’
I cracked open my eyes to find a large figure looming above me.
Beyond, I saw that my little suitcase was on a table by the window. Someone had opened the lid and my clothing was sitting now in a neat pile beside the case.
‘Who are you?’ I managed to say.
‘Why, I’m Mrs Mack, of course, and this lad here is Martin, and that over there’s the Captain.’ There was a note of cheery impatience in her voice.
I looked about, absorbing quickly the unfamiliar surrounds and the strange people to whom she was pointing. ‘Papa?’ I started to cry.
‘Shhh. Lordy, child, there’s no need to blubber. You know very well that your father’s gone on to America and will send for you when he’s ready. In the meantime, he’s asked that Mrs Mack look after you.’
‘Where am I?’
She laughed. ‘Why, child! You’re at home, of course. Now, stop that bawling or else the wind might change and spoil that pretty face of yours.’
And so I was born twice.
Once, to my mother and father, in a small room in our family home in Fulham, on a fresh summer’s night when the moon was full and the stars were bright and the river was a shimmery-skinned snake beneath the window.
And once again, to Mrs Mack, when I was seven years old, in her house tucked above the shop selling birds and cages, in the area of Covent Garden referred to as the Seven Dials.
CHAPTER SIX
Summer, 2017
Mrs Berry was out amongst the hollyhocks and larkspur when Elodie arrived home from work. The garden door at the back of the hall was wide open and Elodie could see her old landlady inspecting the blooms. It never failed to amaze her how someone who relied on Coke-bottle glasses to tell the difference between diamonds and hearts could remain such a sharpshooter when it came to the grubs on her flowers.
Rather than duck straight upstairs, Elodie went down the hall, past Mrs Berry’s grandfather clock – still softly, patiently, sweeping time aside – to stop at the doorway. ‘Are you winning?’
‘Scoundrels,’ Mrs Berry called back, plucking a fat green caterpillar from a leaf and holding it up for Elodie’s distant inspection. ‘Sneaky little devils, and greedy, too – frightfully greedy.’ She dropped the offender into an old jam jar with a smattering of others. ‘Fancy a drink?’
‘Love one.’ Elodie dropped her bag on the concrete step and headed out into the summery garden. A quick Friday catch-up and then she’d start on the recordings as she’d promised Penelope.
Mrs Berry set the jar of wrigglers on the elegant iron table beneath the apple tree and disappeared into her kitchen. At eighty-four she was exceptionally spry, a fact she credited to her refusal to earn a driving licence. ‘Terrible polluting machines. And the way people charge about in them! Dreadful. Much better to walk.’
She reappeared carrying a tray loaded with a jug fizzing orange. Mrs Berry had been on a trip to Tuscany with her watercolour group the previous year and had developed a penchant for Aperol Spritz. She filled a generous glass for each of them and passed one across the table. ‘Salute!’
‘Cheers.’
‘I sent that RSVP of yours off today.’
�
��Brilliant news. That’s one, at least, for my side of the church.’
‘And I’ve been giving more thought to my reading. There’s a lovely Rossetti – reads like a piece of Morris fabric, all peacocks and fruit and halcyon seas …’
‘Sounds divine.’
‘But trivial. Too trivial for you. I prefer the Tennyson. “If I were loved, as I desire to be, What is there in the great sphere of the earth, And range of evil between death and birth, That I should fear, – if I were loved by thee?”’ She was smiling beatifically, a small hand planted on her heart. ‘Oh, Elodie, what truth! What liberty! What joy, to be released from life’s fear by the simple knowledge of love.’
Elodie found herself nodding with equal enthusiasm. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘There’s the small matter of what Alastair’s mother will think of a wedding reading that describes life as a range of evil between death and birth …’
‘Pah! What business is it of hers?’
‘Well, none, I suppose.’
‘It’s not the point of the poem anyway. The point is that no matter what evil might come one’s way, to be loved is to be protected.’
‘Do you think that’s true?’
Mrs Berry smiled. ‘Did I ever tell you how I met my husband?’
Elodie shook her head. Mr Berry had died before she moved into the attic flat. She’d seen photos of him, though, lots of photos of a beaming man with glasses and a rim of white hair around an otherwise smooth pate; they were all over the walls and atop the sideboards in Mrs Berry’s flat.
‘We were children. His name was Bernstein back then. He came to England on one of the trains from Germany at the start of the Second War. The Kindertransport, you know? My mother and father had put their names down as foster parents and in June 1939 we were sent Tomas. I still remember the night he arrived: we opened the door and there he was, all alone, skinny legs and a battered suitcase in hand. Funny little thing, with his very dark hair and eyes, and not a word of English. Ever so polite. He sat at the dinner table and endured my mother’s attempt at sauerkraut and was then taken upstairs to the room they’d made up specially. I was fascinated, of course – I’d asked many times for a brother – and there was a fissure in the wall back then between my room and his, a mouse hole that my father had never got around to fixing. I used to spy through it, and that’s how I knew he lay down each night in the bed my mother had prepared, but when the house got dark and quiet he carried his blanket and pillow to the cupboard and climbed inside to sleep. I think it was this that made me love him.
‘He had a single photograph with him when he arrived, wrapped up with a letter from his parents. He told me later that his mother had sewn the little parcel inside the lining of his jacket so it couldn’t get lost along the way. He kept it all his life, that photograph. His two smartly dressed parents, and he a happy little lad between them with no idea of what was coming. They died at Auschwitz, both of them. We found that out later. We got married as soon as I turned sixteen and the two of us went off to Germany together. There was so much confusion after the war, still so much horror to be sorted through, even then. He was very brave. I kept waiting for it to hit him, all that he’d lost.
‘When we learned that we couldn’t have children, when his best friend and business partner swindled him and it looked like we might be bankrupted, when I discovered a lump in my breast … he was always so brave. So resilient, I suppose – that seems to be the word du jour. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things – many’s the time I saw him weep – but he dealt with his disappointment, with his hardship and grief; he picked himself up and went on, every time. And not like a mad person who refuses to recognise adversity, but like someone who accepts that life is inherently unfair. That the only truly fair thing about it is the randomness of its unfairness.’ She topped up their glasses. ‘I’m telling you all this, not because I feel like a stroll down memory lane or because I like to tell my young friends sad stories on sunny Friday evenings; I just – I wanted you to understand. I wanted you to see what a balm love is. What it is to share one’s life, to really share it, so that very little matters outside the certainty of its walls. Because the world is very noisy, Elodie, and although life is filled with joy and wonder, there’s evil and sorrow and injustice, too.’
There was little Elodie could think to say. To utter agreement in the face of such hard-won wisdom sounded glib, and really, what of life’s experience did she have to add to the thoughts of her eighty-four-year-old friend anyway? Mrs Berry didn’t appear to expect a response. She was sipping from her drink, her attention focused on something beyond Elodie’s shoulder, and so Elodie fell to her own musing. She realised that she hadn’t heard from Alastair all day. Penelope had mentioned on the phone that he’d had the meeting with the New York board and that it had all gone very well. Perhaps he was out with his colleagues celebrating the merger?
Elodie was still not entirely sure what it was that Alastair’s company did. Something to do with acquisitions. He had explained it more than once – it was all about consolidation, he said, the joining of two entities so that their combined value might be increased – but Elodie was always left with the sort of questions a child might think to ask. In her line of work, an acquisition referred to the delivery and possession of an object. Something solid and real that could be held in one’s hands and which told a story through its every mark.
‘When Tomas was dying,’ said Mrs Berry, picking up the thread of her story, ‘right towards the very end, I started to fret. I was so worried that he’d be frightened; I didn’t want him to have to go alone. At night, my dreams were filled with the image of that little boy, alone on our doorstep. I didn’t say anything, but we’d always been able to read each other’s thoughts, and one day he turned his head towards me, unprompted, and told me that he’d never been frightened of anything in life since the day we met.’ Her eyes glistened and her voice filled with wonder. ‘Do you hear that? Nothing in life had had the power to frighten him, because he knew how much I loved him.’
Elodie had a lump in her throat. ‘I wish I’d known him.’
‘I wish you had, too. He’d have liked you.’ Mrs Berry took a large sip of her drink. A starling swooped down to land on the table between them, eyeing the jar of grubs keenly before giving a loud call and removing himself to a bough of the apple tree for a further inspection. Elodie smiled and Mrs Berry laughed. ‘How about you stay for dinner,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you a happier story, about the time Tomas and I accidentally bought a farm. Then I’m planning to beat your socks off. I have my deck shuffled and ready to go.’
‘Oh, Mrs Berry, I’d really love to, but I can’t tonight.’
‘Not even cards?’
‘I’m afraid not. I’m on a deadline.’
‘More work? You work too hard, you know.’
‘Not this time; it’s wedding business.’
‘Wedding business! Honestly, people do complicate things these days. What more do you need than two people who love one another and someone to hear them say it? If you ask me, even the latter’s surplus to requirements. If I had my time again, I’d run away to Tuscany and speak my vows to my Tomas on the edge of one of those medieval hilltop villages, with the sun on my face and a wreath of honeysuckle in my hair. And then I’d enjoy a jolly good bottle of Chianti.’
‘Is there any other sort?’
‘That’s my girl!’
Upstairs, Elodie kicked off her shoes and opened the windows. The honeysuckle from Mrs Berry’s garden had grown voraciously over the summer, clinging to the brick back of the house, so that its fragrance drifted up on the warm afternoon breeze to infuse the flat.
She knelt on the floor and opened the suitcase of tapes her father had packed for her. Elodie recognised the suitcase as one he’d bought about twelve years earlier when she convinced him to go on a classical music tour in Vienna. It had seen better days and was an unprepossessing choice to hold such
precious cargo. No one would ever have guessed that it held his heart, which Elodie supposed was part of his thought process: all the better to keep it safe.
There were at least thirty video cassettes inside, all labelled meticulously in her father’s careful hand, by date, concert, location and piece of music. Thanks to Mrs Berry, Elodie was in possession of what was surely one of the last video players in London, and she connected it now to the back of her TV. She chose a tape at random and inserted it into the player. Sudden nerves swirled in her stomach.
The tape had not been rewound fully and the room filled immediately with music. Lauren Adler, celebrated cello soloist and Elodie’s mother, was in close-up on the screen. She hadn’t started yet, but was embracing the cello, its neck entwined with her own as the orchestra played behind her. She was very young in this video. Her chin was lifted, her eyes fixed on the conductor; long hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her back. She was waiting. The stage lights illuminated one side of her face, throwing the other into dramatic shadow. She was wearing a black satin dress with shoestring straps, and her fine arms – deceptively strong – were bare. She wore no jewellery except for her simple gold wedding band; her fingers, resting on the strings, were poised, ready.
The conductor was onscreen now, a man in a white bowtie and black jacket. He brought the orchestra to a pause and, after a few seconds of silence, nodded at Lauren Adler. She drew breath and then she and her cello began their dance.
Amongst the many articles Elodie had devoured about her mother, one adjective had appeared over and over: Adler’s talent was sublime. The critics all agreed. She had been put on Earth to play the cello and each piece of music, no matter how well known, was reborn in her hands.
Elodie’s father had kept all of the obituaries, but the one from The Times had pleased him especially and so it had been framed to hang on the wall amongst the stage photos. Elodie had read it many times and there was a passage that always stuck in her memory: ‘Lauren Adler’s talent opened a fissure in ordinary experience through which purity and clarity and truth could be glimpsed. That was her gift to her audience; through Lauren Adler’s music they experienced what religious people might call God.’